Nasa GRAIL Captures Moon's Far Side [VIDEO]

Nasa has captured its first unique view of the moon's far side with its lunar spacecraft Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL).

In the Nasa video, which runs for around 30 seconds, the north pole of the moon is clearly seen. Also visible is Mare Orientale, a vast impact basin which looks like a target ring in the bull's eye; it is believed to be over three billion years old and spans about 950 km.

The video also shows the Drygalski crater with a distinctive star-shaped formation in the middle. It is a central peak which was created many billions of years ago by a comet or asteroid impact and covers around 149 km.

According to Nasa scientists, the video was taken by Grail which comprises two identical spacecraft, recently named Ebb and Flow, each of which is equipped with a MoonKAM. The images were taken as part of a test of Ebb's Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students (MoonKAM). It will be used by students nationwide to select lunar images for study.

MoonKAM is a programme organised by Nasa which gives a chance to students to learn more about the moon. Tens of thousands from fifth to eighth grade students will select target areas on the lunar surface and send requests to the MoonKAM Mission Operations Center (MOC).

Photos of the target areas will be sent back by the GRAIL satellites and made available in the images section of the website. Students will use the images to study lunar features such as craters, highlands, and maria while also learning about future landing sites.

The programme is led by Dr. Sally Ride, America's first woman in space, and her team at Sally Ride Science in collaboration with undergraduate students at the University of California, San Diego.

The MoonKAM mission will begin in 2012 when Grail satellites are in orbit around the Moon and the dedicated MoonKAM cameras are activated. The mission will last approximately 80 days.

"The quality of the video is excellent and should energise our MoonKAM students as they prepare to explore the moon," said Maria Zuber, Grail principal investigator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

"We have had great response from schools around the country; more than 2,500 signed up to participate so far," said Sally Ride, astronaut from the Nasa.

"In mid-March, the first pictures of the moon will be taken by students using MoonKAM. I expect this will excite many students about possible careers in science and engineering."

NASA Lunar Rec Orbiter: LAMP sees water frost on dark side of Moon

New maps produced by the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal features at the Moon’s northern and southern poles in regions that lie in perpetual darkness.

LAMP, developed by Southwest Research Institute, uses a novel method to peer into these so-called permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), making visible the invisible.

LAMP’s principal investigator is Dr. Alan Stern, associate vice president of the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division

The LAMP maps show that many PSRs are darker at far-ultraviolet wavelengths and redder than nearby surface areas that receive sunlight.

The darker regions are consistent with large surface porosities — indicating “fluffy” soils — while the reddening is consistent with the presence of water frost on the surface.

“Our results suggest there could be as much as 1 to 2 percent water frost in some permanently shadowed soils,” says author Dr. Randy Gladstone, an Institute scientist in the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division.

“This is unexpected because naturally occurring interplanetary Lyman-alpha was thought to destroy any water frost before it could accumulate.”

The LAMP team estimates that the loss of water frost is about 16 times slower than previously believed.

In addition, the accumulation of water frost is also likely to be highly dependent on local conditions, such as temperature, thermal cycling and even geologically recent “impact gardening” in which micrometeoroid impacts redistribute the location and depth of volatile compounds.

Finding water frost at these new locations adds to a rapidly improving understanding of the Moon’s water and related species, as discovered by three other space missions through near-infrared emissions observations and found buried within the Cabeus crater by the LCROSS impactor roughly two years ago.

During LRO’s nominal exploration mission, LAMP added to the LCROSS results by measuring hydrogen, mercury and other volatile gases ejected along with the water from the permanently shaded soils of the Moon’s Cabeus crater.

“An even more unexpected finding is that LAMP’s technique for measuring the lunar Lyman-alpha albedo indicates higher surface porosities within PSRs, and supports the long-postulated presence of tenuous ‘fairy-castle’ like arrangements of surface grains in the PSR soils,” says co-author Dr. Kurt Retherford, a senior research scientist also in SwRI’s Space Science and Engineering Division.

Comparisons with future LAMP maps created using data gathered from the Moon’s day side will prove helpful for revealing more about the presence of water frost, as well as the surface porosities of the darker surface features observed.

The LAMP team is also eager to apply the Lyman-alpha technique elsewhere on the Moon and on other solar system objects such as Mercury.

LRO’s findings are expected to be valuable to the future consideration of a permanent Moon base. The permanently shadowed regions of the Moon are revealing themselves to be some of the most exotic places in the solar system, well worthy of future exploration, says Retherford.

Any discovery of water frost and other resources in the area also could reduce the need to transport resources from Earth to a base at the pole.

The paper, “Far-Ultraviolet Reflectance Properties of the Moon’s Permanently Shadowed Regions,” by G.R. Gladstone, K.D. Retherford, A.F. Egan, D.E. Kaufmann, P.F. Miles, et al., was published in the Jan. 7 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., developed and manages the LRO mission.

NASA STEREO Sees Complete Far Side on the Sun

The far side of the Sun unveiled!

This is the first complete image of the solar far side, the half of the sun invisible from Earth.

Captured on June 1, 2011, the composite image was assembled from NASA's two Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft.

STEREO-Ahead's data is shown on the left half of image and STEREO-Behind's data on the right.

The STEREO spacecraft reached opposition (180 degree separation) on February 6 but part of the sun was inaccessible to their combined view until June 1. This image represents the first day when the entire far side could be seen.

The image is aligned so that solar north is directly up. The seam between the two images is inclined because the plane of Earth's - and STEREO's - orbit, known as the "ecliptic", is inclined with respect to the sun's axis of rotation. The data was collected by STEREO's Extreme Ultraviolet Imagers in the SECCHI instrument suites.

STEREO was built and is operated for NASA by the Applied Physical Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University; the spacecraft were launched on October 25, 2006 aboard a Delta II.

The SECCHI instrument suite is a collaboration led by the Naval Research Laboratory, and the EUVI instruments were built by the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory.

NASA LRO Image: The Far Side of the Moon

The far side of the moon is shown in this image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The image shows the moon's topography, with the highest elevations in red and the lowest areas in blue

Picture: NASA / REUTERS