Astro Blog

Source:   Andrew Fraknoi , Astronomical Society of the Pacific  A new annotated guide to written, web, and audio-visual resources for teaching or learning about planets orbiting other stars is now available.  Materials include video and audio files of lectures and interviews with leading scientists in the field, phone and tablet apps, a citizen-science web site, popular-level books and articles, and more. Published by the NASA Astrophysics Education and Outreach Forum and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. http://www.astrosociety.org/education/astronomy-resource-guides/the-search-for-planets-around-other-stars/

Source:  Daniel Clery, Science    Excerpt:  Where did the moon come from? For 3 decades, planetary scientists have agreed that ... a body the size of Mars struck Earth a glancing blow that reduced both to rubble. The cloud of debris reformed itself into the modern Earth and moon ..."giant impact" theory neatly explained why the rocks Apollo astronauts brought back from the moon closely resembled rocks on Earth—or so it seemed at first. ...recent computer models show, such a collision wouldn't have scrambled the two bodies together enough to explain the similarity. Meeting last month in London to discuss the problem, scientists agreed that the origin of the moon must have been messier and more complicated than anyone had assumed.... [Hear podcast interview at  http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6155/183/suppl/DC1 ] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6155/183

Source:   Jia-Rui C. Cook ,  NASA Press Rrelease 13-280  Excerpt: NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from our Sun. ...Traveling at the speed of light, a signal from Voyager 1 takes about 17 hours to travel to Earth. ...Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars.  ...A coronal mass ejection, or a massive burst of solar wind and magnetic fields, that erupted from the sun in March 2012 provided scientists the data they needed ...eventually arrived at Voyager 1's location 13 months later.... On April 9 [2013], Voyager 1's plasma wave instrument detected the movement. ...the spacecraft was bathed in plasma more than 40 times denser than what they had encountered in the outer layer of the heliosphere. Density of this sort is to be expected in interstella...

Source:  NASA  Press Release 13-267                 Excerpt: Using data from NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument aboard the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists remotely detected ... water that originates from deep within the moon's interior, on the surface of the moon. ..."NASA missions like Lunar Prospector and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite and instruments like M3 have gathered crucial data that fundamentally changed our understanding of whether water exists on the surface of the moon," said S. Pete Worden, center director at NASA's Ames Research Center.... http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/august/nasa-funded-scientists-detect-water-on-moons-surface-that-hints-at-water-below/

Source:   NASA RELEASE 13-164 Excerpt: ...NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission has uncovered the origin of massive invisible regions that make the moon's gravity uneven, a phenomenon that affects the operations of lunar-orbiting spacecraft. Because of GRAIL's findings, spacecraft on missions to other celestial bodies can navigate with greater precision in the future GRAIL's twin spacecraft ... pinpointed the locations of large, dense regions called mass concentrations, or mascons, which are characterized by strong gravitational pull. ...The origin of lunar mascons has been a mystery in planetary science since their discovery in 1968 by a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. Researchers generally agree mascons resulted from ancient impacts billions of years ago. It was not clear until now how much of the unseen excess mass resulted from lava filling the crater or iron-rich mantle upwelling to the crust. ...

Source:   NASA RELEASE 13-120 Excerpt: ...NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn's rings. These observations make Saturn's rings the only location besides Earth, the moon, and Jupiter where scientists and amateur astronomers have been able to observe impacts as they occur.  ... Saturn's rings act as very effective detectors of many kinds of surrounding phenomena, including the interior structure of the planet and the orbits of its moons.  ... http://www.nasa.gov/cassini  http:// www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/apr/HQ_13-120_Saturn_Meteors.html

Source:  Jonathan Corum, New York Times                  This is an interactive showing more than 100 Kepler planet discoveries with a known size and orbit, including five planets orbiting Kepler 62, announced on April 18.  http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/space/keplers-tally-of-planets.html