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Mars Base

Researchers estimate ice content of crater at Moon's south pole - 0 views

phys.org/...content-crater-moon-south.html

LunarWater

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has returned data that indicate ice may make up as much as 22 percent of the surface material in a crater located on the moon's south pole
  • using laser light from LRO's laser altimeter examined the floor of Shackleton crater
  • the crater's floor is brighter than those of other nearby craters, which is consistent with the presence of small amounts of
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • spacecraft mapped Shackleton crater
  • using a laser to illuminate the crater's interior and measure its albedo or natural reflectance
  • laser light measures to a depth comparable to its wavelength, or about a micron
  • represents a millionth of a meter, or less than one ten-thousandth of an inch
  • used the instrument to map the relief of the crater's terrain based on the time it took for laser light to bounce back from the moon's surface. The longer it took, the lower the terrain's elevation.
  • addition to the possible evidence of ice, the group's map of Shackleton revealed a remarkably preserved crater that has remained relatively unscathed since its formation more than three billion years ago
  • Like several craters at the moon's south pole, the small tilt of the lunar spin axis means Shackleton crater's interior is permanently dark and therefore extremely cold
  • The crater's interior is extremely rugged
  • "It would not be easy to crawl around in there
Mars Base

Australian police get hand-held 3D crime scene laser scanner - 0 views

phys.org/...police-hand-held-3d-crime.html

scibyte121 3D-Scanner

shared by Mars Base on 18 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Police in Queensland Australia have reported
  • that they now have and are using a device
  • hand held and can be used to laser scan a crime scene in just a matter of minutes for creation of a 3D image
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Zebedee scanner
  • The Zebedee is based on technology that has been put to a variety of uses over the past several years
  • LIDAR—a remote sensing technology that works by sending out a laser beam and then reading what is bounced back.
  • Zebedee extends LIDARs capabilities (which are 2D) by affixing it to the top of a spring
  • bouncing (and spinning) the laser around atop the spring, the beam strikes objects in every direction. A computer then connects all the 2D readings together to create a 3D image
  • The police have been using the device to faithfully recreate an entire crime scene in as little as 20 minutes
  • The data captured can be looked at later by investigators or even people sitting in a jury box to get a better sense of what occurred at a crime scene.
  • The Zebedee is not the first such scanner—police in New Mexico have recently begun using a scanner they call the Faro 3D scanner system—it's based on the same basic technology
  • Geologists use a similar scanner to map the insides of caves, and planet scientists have been using it to map the surface of the Earth from satellites.
  • A similar device was also used recently to map the interior of the leaning tower of Pisa to gain a better understanding of its structure or to help in repair should it start to topple.
  • the Zebedee has thus far been most useful for crime scenes that are difficult to access
  • that are having bad weather or at automobile accident scenes, which of course completely disappear once the cars are towed away
  • The next step, he said, is to put a Zebedee on a drone of some sort to allow for recreating scenes from above or from longer distances.
Mars Base

Memories 'geotagged' with spatial information - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...131128141405.htm

scibyte111 memories

shared by Mars Base on 01 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Using a video game in which people navigate through a virtual town delivering objects to specific locations, a team of neuroscientists
  • has discovered how brain cells that encode spatial information form "geotags" for specific memories and are activated immediately before those memories are recalled.
  • work shows how spatial information is incorporated into memories and why remembering an experience can quickly bring to mind other events that happened in the same place
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • findings provide the first direct neural evidence for the idea that the human memory system tags memories with information about where and when they were formed
  • this study involved playing a simple video game on a bedside computer
  • The game in this experiment involved making deliveries to stores in a virtual city
  • The participants were first given a period where they were allowed to freely explore the city and learn the stores' locations
  • When the game began, participants were only instructed where their next stop was, without being told what they were delivering
  • After they reached their destination, the game would reveal the item that had been delivered, and then give the participant their next stop
  • After 13 deliveries, the screen went blank and participants were asked to remember and name as many of the items they had delivered in the order they came to mind
  • This allowed the researchers to correlate the neural activation associated with the formation of spatial memories (the locations of the stores) and the recall of episodic memories: (the list of items that had been delivered).
  • "Having these patients play our games allows us to record every action they take in the game and to measure the responses of neurons both during spatial navigation and then later during verbal recall."
  • By asking participants to recall the items they delivered instead of the stores they visited, the researchers could test whether their spatial memory systems were being activated
  • map-like nature of the neurons associated with spatial memory made this comparison possible
  • During navigation, neurons in the hippocampus and neighboring regions can often represent the patient's virtual location within the town
  • Using the brain recordings generated while the participants navigated the city, the researchers were able to develop a neural map that corresponded to the city's layout
  • As participants passed by a particular store, the researchers correlated their spatial memory of that location with the pattern of place cell activation recorded
  • With maps of place cell activations in hand, the researchers were able to cross- reference each participant's spatial memories as they accessed their episodic memories of the delivered items
  • given just the place cell activations of a participant
  • could predict, with better than chance accuracy, the item he or she was recalling
  • cannot distinguish whether these spatial memories are actually helping the participants access their episodic memories
  • seeing that this place cell activation plays a role in the memory retrieval processes
  • Earlier neuroscience research
  • had suggested the hippocampus has two distinct roles
  • tracking location information for spatial memory, and
  • recording events for episodic memory
  • This experiment provides further evidence that these roles are intertwined
Mars Base

Russia May Land Probe on Jupiter's Moon Ganymede with Europe's JUICE Mission | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/sia-europe-jupiter-probes.html

scibyte99

shared by Mars Base on 20 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • A Russian probe being designed to land on Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, could launch toward the gas giant with a European spacecraft being developed to explore Jupiter's icy ocean-covered satellites, according to European space officials.
  • more Earthly concerns, such as government finances and the realities of technical developments, could thwart the proposal
  • JUICE is scheduled to launch in 2022 and arrive at Jupiter in 2030, entering orbit around the huge planet and making repeated flybys of three of its largest moons — Ganymede, Callisto and Europa
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • In September 2032, the European spacecraft will arrive at Ganymede, becoming the first probe to enter orbit around the moon of another planet
  • Equipped with radar, a mapping camera and other instruments, JUICE will measure the thickness of global ice sheets covering Jupiter's moons and produce terrain and mineral maps of Ganymede
  • Russia's plan is to implement a Ganymede Lander
  • Russian mission planners initially proposed the lander to target Europa, another of Jupiter's moons with a frozen crust thinner than the ice cap covering Ganymede
  • After a NASA mission to orbit Europa never materialized, Russia retooled the project to focus on Ganymede, falling in line with the goals of Europe's Jupiter mission
  • advantages of landing on Ganymede as opposed to Europa
  • The radiation environment at Ganymede is less severe than at Europa, which lies closer to Jupiter
  • this is one of the reasons ESA picked Ganymede as the destination for JUICE
  • Russian scientists say mapping and reconnaissance of Ganymede are required before any attempted landing
  • If Russia becomes a full partner in Europe's JUICE mission, the development of the lander will need to be accelerated to launch in 2022, if managers want the Russian craft to ride to Jupiter as a piggyback payload.
Mars Base

European Satellite, Out of Fuel, Will Plunge to Earth Next Month | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/goce-satellite-fall-earth.html

scibyte107

shared by Mars Base on 24 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • A European gravity-mapping satellite has run out of fuel and will likely die a fiery death in Earth's atmosphere
  • Oct. 21
  • The Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer, or GOCE for short, exhausted its supply of xenon fuel on
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • most of the satellite will disintegrate in the atmosphere, some smaller parts are expected to reach Earth’s surface
  • GOCE satellite launched in March 2009 on a planned two-year mission to map the variations in Earth's gravity field.
  • The spacecraft consumed fuel at a much lower rate than expected, however, allowing GOCE to continue gathering data far beyond its expected lifespan
  • the most accurate gravity data ever available to scientists
Mars Base

Planck's Cosmic Map Reveals Universe Older, Expanding More Slowly - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...se-older-expanding-more-slowly

scibyte87 PlanckConstant

shared by Mars Base on 22 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • show the same 10-square-degree patch of sky as seen by NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, and Planck.
  • Planck has a resolution about 2.5 times greater than WMAP
  • This graphic
Mars Base

Curiosity Demonstrates New Capability to Scan 360 Degrees for Life Giving Water - and i... - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...giving-water-and-is-widespread

scibyte87 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 19 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The science team guiding NASA’s Curiosity Mars Science Lab (MSL) rover have demonstrated a new capability that significantly enhances the robots capability to scan her surroundings for signs of life giving water
  • from a distance
  • the rover appears to have found that evidence for water at the Gale Crater landing site is also more widespread than prior indications.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Mastcam cameras
  • can now also be used as a mineral-detecting and hydration-detecting tool to search 360 degrees around every spot she explores for the ingredients required for habitability and precursors to life
  • Some iron-bearing rocks and minerals can be detected and mapped using the Mastcam’s near-infrared filters
  • scientists used the filter wheels on the Mastcam cameras to run an experiment by taking measurements in different wavelength’s
  • a rock target called ‘Knorr’ in the Yellowknife Bay area were Curiosity is now exploring
  • Researchers found that near-infrared wavelengths on Mastcam can be used as a new analytical technique to detect the presence of some but not all types of hydrated minerals
  • The first use of the Mastcam 34 mm camera to find water was at the rock target called “Knorr.”
  • see elevated hydration signals in the narrow veins that cut many of the rocks in this area
  • These bright veins contain hydrated minerals that are different from the clay minerals in the surrounding rock matrix
  • Mastcam thus serves as an early detective for water without having to drive up to every spot of interest, saving precious time and effort
  • But Mastcam has some limits
  • It is not sensitive to the hydrated phyllosilicates found in the drilling sample at John Klein
  • Mastcam can use the hydration mapping technique to look for targets related to water that correspond to hydrated minerals
  • Yellowknife Bay basin possesses a significant amount of phyllosilicate clay minerals; indicating an environment where Martian microbes could once have thrived in the distant past.
Mars Base

Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...son_Microwave_Anisotropy_Probe

scibyte88 WMAP

shared by Mars Base on 31 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • a spacecraft which measures differences in the temperature of the Big Bang's remnant radiant heat – the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation – across the full sky
  • The WMAP spacecraft was launched on June 30, 2001,
  • The WMAP mission succeeds the COBE space mission and was the second medium-class (MIDEX) spacecraft of the Explorer program.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • WMAP's measurements played the key role in establishing the current Standard Model of Cosmology
  • WMAP data are very well fit by a universe that is dominated by dark energy in the form of a cosmological constant
  • The anisotropies then are used to measure the universe's geometry, content, and evolution; and to test the Big Bang model, and the cosmic inflation theory
  • he map contains 3,145,728 pixels, and uses the HEALPix scheme to pixelize the sphere
  • The telescope's primary reflecting mirrors are a pair
  • that focus the signal onto a pair of
  • secondary reflecting mirrors.
  • shaped for optimal performance: a carbon fibre shell upon a Korex core, thinly-coated with aluminium and silicon oxide.
  • The secondary reflectors transmit the signals to the corrugated feedhorns that sit on a focal plane array box beneath the primary reflectors
  • The receivers are polarization-sensitive differential radiometers measuring the difference between two telescope beams.
  • To avoid collecting Milky Way galaxy foreground signals, the WMAP uses five discrete radio frequency bands
  • The WMAP's trajectory and orbit
  • The WMAP observes in five frequencies, permitting the measurement and subtraction of foreground contamination (from the Milky Way
  • Foreground contamination is removed in several ways
  • First, subtract extant emission maps from the WMAP's measurements; second, use the components' known, spectral values to identify them; third, simultaneously fit the position and spectra data of the foreground emission, using extra data sets
Mars Base

Twinkle, twinkle little star: New app measures sky brightness - 0 views

phys.org/...e-star-app-sky-brightness.html

scibyte93 LightPollution

shared by Mars Base on 04 May 13 - No Cached
  • Researchers from the German "Loss of the Night" project have developed an app for Android smart phones, which counts the number of visible stars in the sky
  • The data from the app will be used by scientists to understand light pollution on a world wide scale.
  • The smartphone app will evaluate sky brightness, also known as skyglow, on a worldwide scale
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • This data can be used to map the distribution and changes in sky brightness, and will eventually allow scientists to investigate correlations with health, biodiversity, energy waste and other factors
  • The app works by interactively asking users to say whether individual stars are visible. By determining what the faintest visible star is, the researchers learn how many stars are visible at that location, and by extension how bright the sky is
  • With this app, people from around the world can collect data on skyglow without needing expensive equipment
  • some of the testers found that without intending too they learned the names of several stars and constellations
  • is based on the widely used Google Sky Map application
  • development of the app was sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education,
  • satellites that observe Earth at night measure the light that is radiating into the sky, not the brightness that is experienced by people and other organisms on the ground
Mars Base

Local transit times | Venustransit - 0 views

transitofvenus.nl/...local-transit-times

scibyte48 venus transit

shared by Mars Base on 23 May 12 - No Cached
  • Your local circumstances are computed below. You can change the location by either dragging the marker on the map or searching for an address. From the menu on the top right you can specify the year of the transit (1639 to 2125). Clicking the icon at the top right corner of the map, you can switch the area of visibility on and off. Click on the icon on the lower right for more detailed information, including times of sunrise and sunset.
Mars Base

How Can You See a Satellite View of Your House? - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...ree-satellite-view-of-my-house

scibyte59 GrabBag

shared by Mars Base on 14 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • there are more than 8,000 satellites currently orbiting the Earth
  • The vast majority
  • are relaying data to and from the Earth
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • If you want to
  • see a satellite image of the entire planet, there are
  • weather satellites
  • NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) release images of an entire hemisphere of planet Earth every 3 hours
  • you can see major weather patterns affecting parts of the Earth. But you really can’t see any specific spot on Earth with any detail
  • these satellite views is that they’re live.
  • The weather systems
  • are happening on the planet right now
  • If you don’t want a live view
  • check out
  • images produced by NASA. Here’s a composite photograph that shows the Earth’s Western Hemisphere, and here’s a view of the Earth’s Eastern Hemisphere.
  • There were also some amazing new satellite images of the Earth released from the European Space Agency’s 3rd generation Meteosat spacecraft
  • zoom in, and see some pictures of houses from space
  • Google Maps and the other internet mapping services are really just customers for the satellite services that actually take these photographs from space
  • There are a few major services on the market, including GeoEye
  • DigitalGlobe and Spot Image.
  • Each company has a fleet of Earth observation satellites, with a capability of resolving features on the surface of the Earth as small as about 45 cm (18 inches). In other words, an object 45 centimeters across would appear as a single pixel in their photographs
  • GeoEye – 5 satellites: IKONOS, OrbView-2, OrbView-3, GeoEye-1, GeoEye-2 (in 2013).
  • DigitalGlobe – 4 satellites: Early Bird 1, Quickbird, WorldView-1, Worldview-2
  • Spot Image – 2 satellites: Spot 4, Spot 5
  • Each of these services allow customers to purchase satellite imagery directly
  • the prices are
  • hundreds or even thousands of dollars for satellite imagery
  • typically can’t buy directly from the satellite company itself
  • All of the free satellite images you’re accessing were captured by various spacecraft over the last couple of years
  • . A live satellite view of your house, is still a few years off.
  • you can access a live broadcast from NASA’s International Space Station. About 40% of the time, if you follow this link you can see a live view of Earth from the space station.
  • Another service called Urthecast will be attaching a high definition camera to the International Space Station in 2013 to broadcast a live view of Earth from space.
Mars Base

Discovery of historical photos sheds light on Greenland ice loss - 0 views

phys.org/...wledge-glaciers-greenland.html

scibyte49 GlobalWarming

shared by Mars Base on 30 May 12 - No Cached
  • Researchers at the National Survey and Cadastre of Denmark
  • had been storing the glass plates since explorer Knud Rasmussen's expedition to the southeast coast of Greenland in the early 1930s.
  • Ohio State University researchers and colleagues in Denmark describe how they analyzed ice loss in the region by comparing the images on the plates to aerial photographs and satellite images taken from World War II to today.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • imagery shows that glaciers in the region were melting even faster in the 1930s than they are today
  • A brief cooling period starting in the mid-20th century allowed new ice to form, and then the melting began to accelerate again in the 2000s.
  • we now have a detailed historical analogue for more recent glacier loss
  • confirmed that glaciers are very sensitive indicators of climate."
  • cleaning up in the basement and had found some old glass plates with glaciers on them
  • The reason the plates were forgotten was that they were recorded for mapping, and once the map was produced they didn't have much value."
  • They contained aerial photographs of land, sea and glaciers in the southeast region of the country, along with travel photos of Rasmussen's team.
  • researchers digitized all the old images and used software to look for differences in the shape of the southeast Greenland coastline where the ice meets the Atlantic Ocean
  • calculated the distance the ice front moved in each time period.
  • Over the 80 years, two events stand out: glacial retreats from 1933-1934 and 2000-2010
  • 1930s, fewer glaciers were melting than are today, and most of those that were melting were land-terminating glaciers, meaning that they did not contact the sea.
  • were melting retreated an average of 20 meters per year - the fastest retreating at 374 meters per year
  • Fifty-five percent of the glaciers in the study had similar or higher retreat rates during the 1930s than they do today.
  • more glaciers in southeast Greenland are retreating today, and the average ice loss is 50 meters per year. That's because a few glaciers with very fast melting rates - including one retreating at 887 meters per year - boost the overall average.
  • From 1943-1972, southeast Greenland cooled - probably due to sulfur pollution, which reflects sunlight away from the earth.
  • Sulfur dioxide is a poisonous gas produced by volcanoes and industrial processes. It has been tied to serious health problems and death, and is also the main ingredient in acid rain.
  • deadly pollution caused the climate to cool, but rather that the brief cooling allowed researchers to see how Greenland ice responded to the changing climate.
  • glaciers responded to the cooling more rapidly than researchers had seen in earlier studies
  • Sixty percent of the glaciers advanced during that time, while 12 percent were stationary
  • now that the warming has resumed, the glacial retreat is dominated by marine-terminating outlet glaciers, the melting of which contributes to sea level rise.
  • we see that the mid-century cooling stabilized the glaciers," Box said. "That suggests that if we want to stabilize today's accelerating ice loss, we need to see a little cooling of our own."
Mars Base

NASA beams Mona Lisa to Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at the moon (w/ video) - 0 views

phys.org/...lisa-lunar-reconnaissance.html

scibyte78

shared by Mars Base on 18 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • To clean up transmission errors introduced by Earth's atmosphere (left), Goddard scientists applied Reed-Solomon error correction (right), which is commonly used in CDs and DVDs.
  • Typical errors include missing pixels (white) and false signals (black). The white stripe indicates a brief period when transmission was paused
  • As part of the first demonstration of laser communication with a satellite at the moon, scientists with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) beamed an image of the Mona Lisa to the spacecraft from Earth.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • he iconic image traveled nearly 240,000 miles in digital form from the Next Generation Satellite Laser Ranging (NGSLR) station at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., to the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) instrument on the spacecraft.
  • By transmitting the image piggyback on laser pulses that are routinely sent to track LOLA's position, the team achieved simultaneous laser communication and tracking.
  • This is the first time anyone has achieved one-way laser communication at planetary distances
  • "In the near future, this type of simple laser communication might serve as a backup for the radio communication that satellites use
  • In the more distant future, it may allow communication at higher data rates than present radio links can provide
  • Typically, satellites that go beyond Earth orbit use radio waves for tracking and communication
  • LRO is the only satellite in orbit around a body other than Earth to be tracked by laser as well.
  • Precise timing was the key to transmitting the image
  • divided the Mona Lisa image into an array of 152 pixels by 200 pixels
  • Every pixel was converted into a shade of gray, represented by a number between zero and 4,095.
  • Each pixel was transmitted by a laser pulse, with the pulse being fired in one of 4,096 possible time slots during a brief time window allotted for laser tracking
  • he complete image was transmitted at a data rate of about 300 bits per second.
  • The laser pulses were received by LRO's LOLA instrument, which reconstructed the image based on the arrival times of the laser pulses from Earth
  • This was accomplished without interfering with LOLA's primary task of mapping the moon's elevation and terrain and NGSLR's primary task of tracking LRO.
  • The success of the laser transmission was verified by returning the image to Earth using the spacecraft's radio telemetry system.
  • Turbulence in Earth's atmosphere introduced transmission errors even when the sky was clear.
  • To overcome these effects,
  • employed Reed-Solomon coding, which is the same type of error-correction code commonly used in CDs and DVDs.
  • The next step after LLCD is the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), NASA's first long-duration optical communications mission.
Mars Base

Universe is a teeny bit older than thought | Matter & Energy | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...a_teeny_bit_older_than_thought

scibyte87 PlanckConstant

shared by Mars Base on 22 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Launched by the European Space Agency in 2009, the Planck satellite scans the sky for the cosmic microwave background, radiation that dates back to about 380,000 years after the Big Bang
  • Planck is essentially a supersensitive thermometer that can probe the temperature of this radiation to millionths of a degree
  • The red spots in the map are about 1 part in 100,000 hotter than the average temperature, while the blue spots are slightly colder
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • the theory of inflation, which posits that, around 10-30 seconds after the Big Bang, the universe briefly expanded faster than the speed of light.
  • Researchers who analyzed the telescope’s data announced that the universe is about 13.81 billion years old, or 80 million years older than previously thought
  • The telescope is still making observations, and in about a year researchers will add
  • data t
Mars Base

Google Lat Long: Notes from the top of the world: A behind-the-scenes look at our lates... - 0 views

google-latlong.blogspot.com/...op-of-world-behind-scenes.html

scibyte87 GoogleMap

shared by Mars Base on 22 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • highest altitude
  • reached was 18,192 feet
  • higher than anywhere in the contiguous U.S
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • hiked more than 70 miles (or 50 hours) during the trip
  • captured a collection of panoramas at key camps and other interesting stops along the way
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