ESA Mars Express Image: Cappuccino swirls at Mars’ south pole

Swirls of chocolate, caramel and cream, this image is definitely one to trigger sweet-toothed cravings.

Smooth cream-coloured plateaus surrounded by cocoa-dusted ridges interspersed with caramel-hued streaks create a scene reminiscent of a cosmic cappuccino.

This picture is, perhaps surprisingly, from ESA’s Mars Express, which has been exploring and imaging the martian surface and atmosphere since 2003.

We may be used to seeing numerous images of red and brown-hued soil and ruddy landscapes peppered with craters, but the Red Planet isn’t always so red.

The bright white region of this image shows the icy cap that covers Mars’ south pole, composed of frozen water and carbon dioxide.

While it looks smooth in this image, at close quarters the cap is a layered mix of peaks, troughs and flat plains, and has been likened in appearance to swiss cheese.

The southern cap reaches some 3 km thick in places, and is around 350 km in diameter. This icy region is permanent; in the martian winter another, thinner ice cap forms over the top of it, stretching further out across the planet and disappearing again when the weather warms up.

The cap is around 150 km north of Mars’ geographical south pole and Mars Express has shed light on why this ice cap is displaced.

Perspective view of Hellespontus Montes

Credit: ESA

Deep impact craters,notably the Hellas Basin, the largest impact structure on the entire planet at 7 km deep and 2300 km across, funnel the strong winds that blow across Mars towards its southern pole, creating a mix of different low- and high-pressure systems.

The carbon dioxide in the polar cap sublimates at different rates in these regions with contrasting pressure, resulting in the cap’s lopsided structure.

Mars Express imaged this area of Mars on 17 December 2012, in infrared, green and blue light, using its High Resolution Stereo Camera.

This image was processed by Bill Dunford, using data available from the ESA Planetary Science Archive.

ESA SMART-1 Image: A peppering of craters at the Moon's south pole

Credit: ESA /SMART-1 /AMIE camera team; image mosaic: M. Ellouzi/B. Foing

The dark and shadowed regions of the Moon fascinate astronomers and Pink Floyd fans alike.

Our Moon's rotation axis has a tilt of 1.5º, meaning that some parts of its polar regions never see sunlight – the bottoms of certain craters, for example, are always in shadow.

Imaged during summertime in the Moon's southern hemisphere by the Advanced Moon Imaging Experiment (AMIE) on ESA's SMART-1 spacecraft, this mosaic shows a crater-riddled region spanning the lunar south pole.

It is made up of around 40 individual images taken between December 2005 and March 2006, and covers an area of about 500 x 150 km.

The craters visible here include (from right to left, starting with the largest round shape visible in the frame) the Amundsen, Faustini, Shoemaker, Shackleton and de Gerlache craters.

Amundsen is the largest of the bunch at 105 km across, followed by Shoemaker (50 km), Faustini (39 km), de Gerlache (32 km) and Shackleton (19 km).

This group of craters all look different, see varying levels of sunlight and display a range of interesting properties.

Shackleton crater, the small circle visible to the left of centre, contains the south pole within its rim.

By using SMART-1 images to explore the number of small impact craters scattered on the smooth, dark surface surrounding Shackleton, scientists have found this crater to be older than the Apollo 15 landing site (3.3 billion years), but younger than the Apollo 14 site (3.85 billion years).

Shoemaker crater, visible to the upper left of centre, is notable because of the 1999 Lunar Prospector mission, which deliberately crashed into the crater in an attempt to create a detectable plume of water vapour by heating any water ice that may have been present.

No vapour was spotted. However, all is not lost; some permanently shadowed regions have been in the dark for millions of years, and it is still possible that they may contain water ice deposited by comets and water-rich asteroids.

Studying the dark depths of these craters could tell us not just about the history of the Moon, but also about Earth, helping us to understand better how, and how much, water and organic material may have been transferred from the Moon to Earth over its history.

BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole

The BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole illuminated during a winter darkness, which lasts for nearly six months straight.

Credit: Robert Schwarz, University of Minnesota

The astrophysics community is abuzz about what may be the first definitive evidence that the very early universe underwent an almost unimaginably fast expansion (The Big Bang), doubling its size sixty times in a sliver of a second.

This sudden growth spurt was first theorized more than three decades ago, yet only last month did data from the U.S. National Science Foundation-funded Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP2) telescope reveal what appears to be "smoking gun" proof.

What is this result and what does it mean for our understanding of the universe?

Earlier this month, The Kavli Foundation hosted a Google Hangout so that four preeminent astrophysicists could discuss this question.

One of many conversations about astrophysics the foundation has hosted and published on its website

A LC-130 aircraft passes the NSF South Pole station during take off. 

Telescopes visible in the background include (left to right) the South Pole Telescope (SPT), the BICEP2 telescope, and the Keck Array telescope.

Credit: Steffen Richter, Harvard University

The Ice Cube: Searching for Neutrinos at the South Pole - Video

Scientists like Ignacio Taboada, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics, are using a one cubic kilometer block of ice at the South Pole to help unravel one of the great scientific mysteries of our time.

A 250 TeV neutrino interaction in IceCube. 

At the neutrino interaction point (bottom), a large particle shower is visible, with a muon produced in the interaction leaving up and to the left. 

The direction of the muon indicates the direction of the original neutrino.

Image Credit: NSF

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole is a telescope like no other on Earth.

This giant structure buried deep beneath the Antarctic ice has done what no other telescope or space probe could, it has discovered the first neutrinos from outside our solar system.

IceCube’s discovery has created a whole new frontier for astronomers. One where scientists don’t just observe giant objects from distant galaxies, but the tiny particles that form them.

This discovery may help scientists explain supernovae, black holes, pulsars, active galactic nuclei and other extreme extra-galactic phenomena.

The IceCube Observatory at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, in Antarctica.

Image Credit: Sven Lidstrom, Intensive research

Neutrinos are tiny, near-massless particles created by “cosmic accelerators”.

These are violent astrophysical sources such as exploding stars, gamma ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars.

Neutrinos aren’t rare: our sun creates 65 billion neutrinos every second for every square centimetre of Earth, but neutrinos from outside the solar system are extremely hard to detect; partly because they are so incredibly small, but also because we are swamped with billions upon billions from inside our own solar system.

The IceCube Observatory has found 28 needles in this metaphorical haystack, 28 neutrinos that scientists are convinced are from outside our solar system.

The hot water drill manages to bore deep holes through the Antarctic ice.

Image Credit: NSF

Currently the IceCube can’t tell us the exact origins of the neutrinos but they have speculated on the direction and general area.

According to Science magazine: “the origin of this flux is unknown, the findings are consistent with expectations for a neutrino population with origins outside the solar system.”

The IceCube Observatory was designed for this very purpose. It is a unique structure consisting of 86 strings drilled deep into the Antarctic ice.

Attached to these strings are 5,160 digital optical modules, which are embedded between 1.4 and 2.4km below the Antarctic ice.

Vladimir Papitashvili

"IceCube is a wonderful and unique astrophysical telescope.” said Vladimir Papitashvili, Antarctic astrophysics and geospace science programme director with the National Science Foundation.

“It is deployed deep in the Antarctic ice, but looks over the entire universe."

The IceCube Observatory consists of 86 arrays dug almost two and a half kilometres into the ice. 

Image credit: Nasa-verve, Wikipedia

How it works
Neutrinos carry information about the workings of the most distant phenomena in the universe.

But it’s hard to capture /measure neutrinos because they are near massless, and carry no electrical charge.

Neutrinos are not affected by electromagnetic forces, and pass straight through matter, including the Earth.

They do, however, causes tiny flashes of blue light, called Cherenkov light, when they interact with the ice. It is these tiny blue flashes deep beneath the South Pole that IceCube has been built to monitor.

A Digital Optical Module (DOM) being attached to the final string just before the detector array was switched online 

Image Credit: Peter Rejcek, NSF

Rather than looking into the sky, the IceCube monitor has over five thousand Digital Optical Modules (DOMs).

Each one has a photomultiplier tube (PMT) and a data acquisition computer. A PMT is a vacuum tube that is extremely sensitive to light in the ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared range.

It can multiply the current produced by such light by as much as 100 million times.

Digital Optical Modules are suspended on strings in holes melted into the ice using a hot water drill, at depths ranging from 1,450 to 2,450 metres 

Image Credit: Amble, Wikipedia

Breaking the ice
These DOMs are attached to 86 different strings that have been buried deep beneath the ice.

Scientists used a hot water drill to bore holes with depths ranging from 1,450 to 2,450 metres and suspended the DOMs on the strings beneath the ice.

The photomultiplier tube inside the DOM scans for the Cherenkov effect, and the on-board computer sends any data back to the surface.

According to the National Science Foundation the observation of 28 very high-energy particle events constitutes the first solid evidence for astrophysical neutrinos from cosmic accelerators.

Francis Halzen

"This is the first indication of high-energy neutrinos coming from outside our solar system," says Francis Halzen, principal investigator of IceCube and the Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"It is gratifying to finally see what we have been looking for. This is the dawn of a new age of astronomy."

NASA AIM: Electric Blue Noctilucent Clouds over Antarctica - Video

NASA AIM records Noctilucent clouds, Earth's highest clouds, appeared over the South Pole earlier than usual this year. Water molecules mixed with meteor smoke at the edge of space, creates this phenomenon.

Credit: NASA

South Pole telescope detector aids study of the universe

Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) users from Argonne's High Energy Physics and Materials Science divisions helped design and operate part of the South Pole Telescope, a project that aims a large telescope at the night sky to track radiation from the period just after the universe was born. 

Developing and designing the detectors for the camera required expertise from several Argonne facilities and research divisions, including the expertise and capabilities in CNM's Nanofabrication & Devices Group.

In the wake of the Big Bang, all matter was hot, dense particles and light. As the universe aged, it began to spread and cool, and the intense light from that period traveled across space.

The light is still traveling and has a very distinct radiation signature called the cosmic microwave background. 

Mapping the cosmic microwave background can reveal information about dark matter and dark energy, which are thought to make up 95% of the universe.

Dark energy affects the way galaxy clusters form. By comparing the distribution of distant galaxy clusters with the distribution observed nearby, scientists can decode the role dark energy plays in the universe.

The majority of cosmic microwave background radiation has wavelengths of 1-2 mm. These photons are absorbed by water, so a dry, flat and preferably cold space is needed to capture them.

The South Pole is one of only two ideal locations on Earth. The South Pole telescope is more than 30 feet across, and Argonne scientists helped build its camera.

Detectors for the camera were developed and designed with expertise from several Argonne facilities and research divisions.

At the core of the detector technology is a thin—at the nanoscale—superconducting film comprised of Mo/Au bilayer-based heterostructures modified with superconducting (niobium) and normal (gold) metal stripes.

Superconductors can carry an electrical charge perfectly and are highly sensitive to changes in temperature.

When thermal radiation from the cosmic microwave background hits the camera, it heats the material slightly, changing the conductivity of the film.

The energy coming from that particular part of the sky is then recorded.

More information: D. Hanson et al., "Detection of B-Mode Polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background with Data from the South Pole Telescope," Physical Review Letters, 111, 141301 (2013)

IceCube Detector under Antarctic ice may have seen first cosmic neutrinos

IceCube, the giant experiment buried beneath the South Pole's ice has recorded the first neutrinos ever detected originating outside our solar system, researchers say.

Neutrinos are produced in our atmosphere but the IceCube experiment -- a cubic kilometer of sensitive detectors sunk into the Antarctic ice -- has seen the first "cosmic neutrinos," they said.

IceCube consists of 86 strings, each with 60 sensitive light detectors strung along it like "fairy lights," sunk deep into the ice.

Rare collisions of neutrinos with the nuclei of atoms in the ice produce a brief flash that the detectors can catch.

With more than 5,000 detectors catching the flashes the direction of the neutrinos' arrival on Earth can be determined, the researchers said.

Neutrinos can be produced in the Earth's atmosphere -- IceCube picks up about 100,000 of that variety a year -- but previous attempts to isolate neutrinos created in far-flung cosmic processes had all failed.

However, in April the IceCube research team reported detecting two neutrinos -- nicknamed Bert and Ernie -- with energy levels high enough to suggest a cosmic rather than atmospheric origin.

The team has now reported 26 more events of similar energy that they expect will also be confirmed as cosmic in origin.

Francis Halzen

Detection is just a first step and "of course, there's much more to do," IceCube principle investigator Francis Halzen told reporters.

"It's after you find them that the work starts; these events are very difficult to analyze."

The study results were presented Wednesday at the IceCube Particle Astrophysics Symposium in Madison, Wis.

MESSENGER mission: A close “peak of eternal light” (PEL) near Mercury’s south pole

A close “peak of eternal light” (PEL) near Mercury’s south pole.

Mercury, traveling in its 88-day-long orbit around the Sun with basically zero axial tilt, has many craters at its poles whose insides literally never see the light of day.

These permanently-shadowed locations have been found by the JPL MESSENGER mission to harbour considerable deposits of ice.

This is a seemingly strange discovery on a planet two-and-a-half times closer to the Sun than we are!)

But if there are places on Mercury where the Sun never shines then there may also be places where it always does.

That's what researchers are looking for in illumination maps made from MESSENGER data, and they're getting closer.

The image above shows a region near Mercury's south pole. The yellow arrow points to the closest thing to a true "peak of eternal light" found thus far on Mercury, a point that receives sunlight about 82% of the time i.e. almost constantly illuminated.

Studies of the illumination conditions near the north and south poles of Mercury are of interest because they can be used to determine locations of permanent shadow, extremely cold places where ice deposits lurk.

However, the illumination maps also reveal the locations that receive the maximum duration of sunlight during a Mercury solar day.

A "peak of eternal light" that is illuminated continuously for an entire solar day would be a favourable target for a lander, because solar power would be available all the time.

So far, no such peak of eternal light has been identified at Mercury's south pole.

The spot that get the most illumination (about 82%), is located at 89° S, 50.7° E.

Illumination map of Mercury’s south polar region (Pub. March 2012).

This image was acquired as part of Messenger's MDIS campaign to monitor the south polar region of Mercury.

By imaging the polar region approximately every four MESSENGER orbits as illumination conditions change, features that were in shadow on earlier orbits can be discerned and any permanently shadowed areas can be identified after repeated imaging over one solar day.

The top image above was acquired on Dec. 24, 2011. 

The large crater is Chao Meng-Fu, about 129 km (80 mi.) in diameter. 

Credit: NASA /Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory /Carnegie Institution of Washington.

ESA Weather Satellites: Antartica Ozone Holes Showing signs of closing

Time-series (1996 to 2012) of total polar ozone mean values over the months of September, October and November as measured by GOME, SCIAMACHY and GOME-2 flown on ERS-2, Envisat and MetOp-A, respectively. Smaller ozone holes are evident during 2002 and 2012. 

The maps were generated using total ozone columns derived with the GODFIT algorithm (BIRA/IASB, RT Solutions Inc.), which has been consistently applied to the three different satellite instruments. 

Credit BIRA/IASB.

Satellites show that the recent ozone hole over Antarctica was the smallest seen in the past decade. Long-term observations also reveal that Earth's ozone has been strengthening following international agreements to protect this vital layer of the atmosphere.

According to the ozone sensor on Europe's MetOp weather satellite, the hole over Antarctica in 2012 was the smallest in the last 10 years.

The instrument continues the long-term monitoring of atmospheric ozone started by its predecessors on the ERS-2 and Envisat satellites.

"The Ozone Layer, which protects the Earth from dangerous levels of uv-radiation, would be fatal to any animal that inhaled it, including humans. It is located approx 24 Kms above the earth's surface and smells faintly of geraniums."

Since the beginning of the 1980s, an ozone hole has developed over Antarctica during the southern spring - September to November - resulting in a decrease in ozone concentration of up to 70%.

Ozone depletion is more extreme in Antarctica than at the North Pole because high wind speeds cause a fast-rotating vortex of cold air, leading to extremely low temperatures. Under these conditions, human-made chlorofluorocarbons - CFCs - have a stronger effect on the ozone, depleting it and creating the infamous hole.

Over the Arctic, the effect is far less pronounced because the northern hemisphere's irregular landmasses and mountains normally prevent the build-up of strong circumpolar winds.

Reduced ozone over the southern hemisphere means that people living there are more exposed to cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation.

International agreements on protecting the ozone layer - particularly the Montreal Protocol - have stopped the increase of CFC concentrations, and a drastic fall has been observed since the mid-1990s.

However, the long lifetimes of CFCs in the atmosphere mean it may take until the middle of this century for the stratosphere's chlorine content to go back to values like those of the 1960s.

The evolution of the ozone layer is affected by the interplay between atmospheric chemistry and dynamics like wind and temperature.

If weather and atmospheric conditions show unusual behaviour, it can result in extreme ozone conditions - such as the record low observed in spring 2011 in the Arctic - or last year's unusually small Antarctic ozone hole.

To understand these complex processes better, scientists rely on a long time series of data derived from observations and on results from numerical simulations based on complex atmospheric models.

Although ozone has been observed over several decades with multiple instruments, combining the existing observations from many different sensors to produce consistent and homogeneous data suitable for scientific analysis is a difficult task.

Within the ESA Climate Change Initiative, harmonised ozone climate data records are generated to document the variability of ozone changes better at different scales in space and time.

With this information, scientists can better estimate the timing of the ozone layer recovery, and in particular the closure of the ozone hole.

NASA Mars HiRise Image: Permanent Ice at South Pole

It stays cold enough to maintain permanent year-round ice near Mars' South Pole. 

The defrosting walls of flat-floored pits stand in stark contrast against the carbon dioxide ice. 

The smallest of the pits, at center, are stadium-size.

See more NASA Mars HiRise Images of Mar's North and South Poles.

NASA Cassini Image: Titan's South Pole

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Cassini spies Titan's south polar vortex from below the moon in this image.

Imaging scientists are monitoring the vortex to study its seasonal development.

North on Titan is up and rotated 36 degrees to the left. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 13, 2012 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 889 nanometers.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 73 degrees. Image scale is 6 miles (9 kilometers) per pixel.

This movie captured by NASA'S Cassini spacecraft shows the south polar vortex, a swirling mass of gas around the pole in the atmosphere of Saturn’s giant moon, Titan.

The swirling mass appears to execute one full rotation in about nine hours – much faster than the moon's 16-day rotation period. The images were taken before and after a distant flyby of Titan on June 27, 2012.

The south pole of Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers, across) is near the center of the view.

For more information about the Cassini Solstice Mission visit www.nasa.gov/cassini and saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Antartic Neutron Detectors Offer Predictions of Damaging Solar Radiation

Credit: Peter Rejcek, Antarctic Sun

One of the most frigid places on the planet appears to be an ideal location to help protect humans living and working in the cold of outer space against radiation bursts from the sun.

Scientists recently reported in the journal Space Weather and Space Climate that neutron detectors at the U.S. Antarctic Program's South Pole Station appear to offer a reasonably reliable early-warning system to detect damaging radiation associated with high-energy particles that sometimes accompany what's called coronal mass ejections (CMEs), a massive blast of low-energy plasma from the sun.

The high-energy protons and other subatomic particles ejected during such events blast through space near the speed of light. The particles that hit the Earth, called primary cosmic rays, are destroyed when they hit the atmosphere, producing a cascade of secondary subatomic particles.

Neutron detectors at the South Pole are particularly sensitive to the highest and rarest of the high-energy particles, which arrive before a slower but more intense "wave" of high-energy particles capable of delivering hazardous doses of radiation to humans in space.

The researchers used the measurements from a pair of ground-based detectors at the South Pole to predict the peak intensity at different particle energies.

"What we're predicting is a particle storm, which is a high-energy, high-intensity burst of particle radiation," explained Paul Evenson , a co-author on the study with the Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware .

"By using our comparatively simple technique -- measuring the energy spectrum of these particles -- we actually can make a prediction that's worth something for the lower-energy and more damaging particles."

The solar storm that produces such a blast of high-energy particles usually arrives about two days later, with the potential to disrupt satellites and the planet's energy grid.

Such an event crashed into Earth's magnetic field in mid-July, doing no damage but producing some of the most intense auroral displays seen in years, including at the South Pole.

These sorts of sun-generated storms are outside the scope of the South Pole early-warning system.

GOES GImager

The team validated its method against data collected from satellites that are part of the NOAA Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite System (GOES).

However, the instruments aboard the satellites aren't capable of detecting particles much higher in energy than those associated with the peak radiation dose, according to Evenson.

"The instruments on the spacecraft are just too small to detect the faster, high-energy particles. They are set up to detect the particles that are most damaging," he explained.

Read more at the Antartic Sun

US Amundsen-Scott Station: Supermoon Lights Up South Pole

Soon after the 24-hour darkness of Antarctic winter descended on the United States' Amundsen-Scott Station at the South Pole, the crew of scientists and staff overwintering there got a much-welcomed dose of very bright moonlight.

In early May, a gleaming supermoon appeared — this full moon coincides with the moon's perigee, or closest monthly pass of the Earth.

Thanks to that quirk of timing, a supermoon appears larger and brighter than a typical full moon, and crews at the South Pole station took full advantage of the extra light, completing as much outside maintenance as possible.

"After weeks of walking and working in the dark, or perhaps guided by the faint red light of a headlamp, we could all of a sudden see what we were doing and where we were going," wrote South Pole correspondent Sven Lidstrom in the Antarctic Sun, a publication of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

In Antarctica, the sun sets for the austral winter sometime in April, and doesn't reappear until sometime in August, plunging the continent into utter darkness.

Although the newly built Amundsen Scott Station, a gleaming, elevated building opened fully in 2008, offers far more comforts than earlier South Pole stations, no human construction can fully make up for the unending night of the frigid winter months.

Crews at Australia's Davis Station, the southernmost of that nation's Antarctic research stations, also noted the arrival of the supermoon, and said the extra light made it easier to move about the compound.
"It is amazing how small things like actually seeing what you are doing can make your day," Lidstrom wrote.

The IceCube Lab by Moonlight - Neutrino Watching

The IceCube lab is illuminated by moonlight. 

Scientists are using the world's biggest telescope, buried deep under the South Pole, to try to unravel the mysteries of tiny particles known as neutrinos, hoping to shed light on how the universe was made.

Picture: REUTERS/Emanuel Jacobi/NSF

NASA Cassini Image: Vortex at Titan's South Pole

A true colour image of Saturn's moon Titan, captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, shows a south polar vortex, or a mass of swirling gas, around the pole. 

The formation of the vortex at Titan's south pole may be related to the coming southern winter.

Picture: REUTERS/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

South Pole Station makes the most of liquid helium supply

Image: A 4,000-gallon helium dewar is unloaded from an LC-130 at the South Pole Station. Such shipments may soon cease as experiments move away from using liquid helium to cool telescope sensors. 

Photo Credit: Paul Sullivan

Helium, it's not just good for party balloons.

At one of the coldest places on the planet -- where the temperature bolts down to minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the winter months -- liquid helium has been used to super-cool special telescopes designed to peer into the mysteries of the early universe.

However, the use of bulk liquid helium may also become a thing of the past, as the astrophysical experiments at the South Pole Station complete a conversion to a Cryocooler technology that cools telescope sensors to a temperature just above that of outer space by using and recapturing helium gas.

Helium is a limited resource that promises to become even scarcer and more expensive in the future. A bipartisan bill being considered in the U.S.

Senate this year would help conserve the nation's helium reserves -- locked up underground in a natural geological formation near Amarillo, Texas -- and give priority to federally funded researchers in times of shortage.

The South Pole Station has done its part over the last decade or so to stretch out the nation's helium supply, which is used in everything from the manufacture of fiber optics and microchips to cooling the superconducting magnets used in MRI machines.

The zero boil-off system now at the South Pole ensures that almost no helium is lost to the atmosphere.

Water, of course, has a boiling point of 100 degrees Celsius, transitioning from a liquid to a gas. Helium also has a boiling point, but a wee bit lower -- minus 269C.

On the Kelvin scale, that's about 4.2 degrees above absolute zero, the temperature at which all molecular motion stops. The temperature of outer space is about 3 Kelvin.

The telescopes at the South Pole do not operate in the visible light spectrum, but instead measure microwave radiation.

The telescope sensors use superconductive materials that must be cooled down to 250 milliKelvin, just a quarter of a degree above absolute zero, to study the cosmic microwave background, often described as an afterglow of the Big Bang when the universe burst into existence.

Liquid helium has been an integral part of cryogenic techniques since astrophysical experiments began at the South Pole in the 1980s, according to Paul Sullivan, South Pole Station manager of science support.

Read the full article: Full of cold air

Excellent views of Mars in night sky

Interesting atmospherics on Mars last night from around midnight to three in the morning (earliest image on left, last image on right).

Credit: Peter Tickner

NASA Cassini Views Titan's South pole: Orange and Blue Hazes

This view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft looks toward the south polar region of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, and shows a depression within the moon's orange and blue haze layers near the south pole.

The moon's high altitude haze layer appears blue here; whereas, the main atmospheric haze is orange. 

The difference in colour could be due to particle size of the haze. The blue haze likely consists of smaller particles than the orange haze.

The depressed or attenuated layer appears in the transition area between the orange and blue hazes about a third of the way in from the left edge of the narrow-angle image. 

The moon's south pole is in the upper right of this image. This view suggests Titan's north polar vortex, or hood, is beginning to flip from north to south.

The southern pole of Titan is going into darkness as the sun advances towards the north with each passing day. The upper layer of Titan's hazes is still illuminated by sunlight.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural colour view. The images were obtained on Sept. 11, 2011 at a distance of approximately 83,000 miles (134,000 kilometers) from Titan. Image scale is 2,581 feet (787 meters) per pixel.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

NASA reveals the South Pole of the Moon

The highest-resolution topography map to date of the Moon’s south pole has been generated by scientists at Nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, Californina.

It uses data collected by the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone solar system radar located in the Mojave Desert and provides contiguous topographic detail over an areaof approximately 311 miles by 249 miles

NASA/AP