NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover: Organics Possibly Present

This image illustrates possible ways methane might be added to Mars' atmosphere (sources) and removed from the atmosphere (sinks). 

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has detected fluctuations in methane concentration in the atmosphere, implying both types of activity occur on modern Mars. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SAM-GSFC/Univ. of Michigan

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has measured a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical, in the atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a rock-powder sample collected by the robotic laboratory's drill.

"This temporary increase in methane, sharply up and then back down, tells us there must be some relatively localized source," said Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Curiosity rover science team.

"There are many possible sources, biological or non-biological, such as interaction of water and rock."

Researchers used Curiosity's onboard Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) laboratory a dozen times in a 20-month period to sniff methane in the atmosphere.

During two of those months, in late 2013 and early 2014, four measurements averaged seven parts per billion.

Before and after that, readings averaged only one-tenth that level.

Curiosity also detected different Martian organic chemicals in powder drilled from a rock dubbed 'Cumberland', the first definitive detection of organics in surface materials of Mars.

These Martian organics could either have formed on Mars or been delivered to Mars by meteorites.

Organic molecules, which contain carbon and usually hydrogen, are chemical building blocks of life, although they can exist without the presence of life.

Curiosity's findings from analyzing samples of atmosphere and rock powder do not reveal whether Mars has ever harboured living microbes, but the findings do shed light on a chemically active modern Mars and on favorable conditions for life on ancient Mars.

"We will keep working on the puzzles these findings present," said John Grotzinger, Curiosity project scientist of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (Caltech).

"Can we learn more about the active chemistry causing such fluctuations in the amount of methane in the atmosphere? Can we choose rock targets where identifiable organics have been preserved?"

Researchers worked many months to determine whether any of the organic material detected in the Cumberland sample was truly Martian.

Curiosity's SAM lab detected in several samples some organic carbon compounds that were, in fact, transported from Earth inside the rover.

However, extensive testing and analysis yielded confidence in the detection of Martian organics.

NASA Curiosity Rover: Water helped shape Mars

This evenly layered rock photographed by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover shows a pattern typical of a lake-floor sedimentary deposit not far from where flowing water entered a lake.

The scene combines multiple frames taken with Mastcam's right-eye camera on Aug. 7, 2014, during the 712th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars.

It shows an outcrop at the edge of "Hidden Valley," seen from the valley floor.

This view spans about 5 feet (1.5 meters) across in the foreground.

An annotated image of MastCam on Curiosity rover.

Credit: NASA JPL

The colour has been approximately white-balanced to resemble how the scene would appear under daytime lighting conditions on Earth.

The image at the top of the page has a superimposed scale bar of 50 centimeters (about 20 inches).

This is an example of a thick-laminated, evenly-stratified rock type that forms stratigraphically beneath cross-bedded sandstones regarded as ancient river deposits.

These rocks are interpreted to record sedimentation in a lake, as part of or in front of a delta, where plumes of river sediment settled out of the water column and onto the lake floor.

Comet Dust discovered for the first time on the Earth's surface

Credit: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 410, 15 January 2015, Pages 1–11.

A combined team of researchers from Japan and the U.S. has found particles of comet dust in ice extracted from the Antarctic, the first time comet dust particles have been found on the surface of the Earth.

In their paper published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the researchers describe how they found the dust particles and what they've learned by analyzing them.

Finding samples of material from a comet is no easy feat, sending probes to them and back is a rare occurrence.

Because of that, scientists have taken to collecting samples floating about high in the Earth's the atmosphere, an approach that has its limitations as it involves using a sticky sheet that nets few of the dust particles and which leaves oils on the samples which are further dirtied by solvents meant to clean them.

In this latest effort, the researchers drilled down approximately 58 feet into the Antarctic snow and ice at a place called Tottuki Point.

When the ice was melted back in their lab, the researchers found, among other things, extremely tiny (10 to just over 60 micrometers) dust particles which they initially believed to be meteorite dust.

Subsequent analysis however showed that the particles (known as chondritic porous interplanetary dust particles) were a near perfect match to comet samples collected by NASA with its Stardust probe project and samples found in the atmosphere.

Back in 2010 a team from France studying Antarctic snow reported finding what they believed to be comet particles, but this new finding is the first to report finding comet dust on the surface of the Earth.

Prior to the finding, scientists had believed that tiny dust particles would never survive the trip through the atmosphere, much less the harsh conditions once they landed.

The finding is exciting because it will mean scientists will be able to get their hands on more samples than they could with atmospheric collection.

The first ice chunks already have given up more than 40 of the dust particles.

Space scientists are eager to learn more about comets as they are believed to represent some of the oldest objects out in space, learning more about them should reveal more about the origins of our solar system, and perhaps whether they are the seeders of life on our planet, as some have come to believe.

More information: Cometary dust in Antarctic ice and snow: Past and present chondritic porous micrometeorites preserved on the Earth's surface, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 410, 15 January 2015, Pages 1–11. www.sciencedirect.com/science/… ii/S0012821X14007031

The possible existence of Earth-like Binary Planets

The possible existence of Earth-like binary planets is being described today at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Tucson, AZ. 

Two bodies, each of mass similar to Earth, can form a closely orbiting pair under certain conditions present during the formation of planetary systems.

This theoretical proposal is completely unlike the Earth-Moon system or Pluto-Charon, where the two bodies are very different in mass, and arises in some "kissing" collisions where two similar mass bodies encounter each other and become a bound system because of the energy lost in the strong tides raised on each other in the encounter.

The resulting binary can then persist for billions of years provided it forms well away from the central star, at half an astronomical unit (the distance between the Earth and Sun) or more.

This work was presented by undergraduate Keegan Ryan, graduate student Miki Nakajima, and Dr. David Stevenson of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA.

The result does not contradict existing data for planets around other stars but suggests that future data may uncover such systems.

This is the first such study to examine the possibility of terrestrial binary planets.

During the formation of terrestrial planets, large rocky bodies orbiting around a star occasionally get close enough to interact with one another.

If two bodies collide head on or obliquely, then this interaction typically results in accretion where the two bodies merge to form a larger one, perhaps leaving behind a disk of debris from which a moon can form.

This is the standard picture for how Earth got its moon and a possible explanation for Pluto's moon, Charon.

If the two bodies collide in a grazing manner but at high velocity, then the two bodies "hit and run" and separate from one another once again, failing to form a bound pair.

The research presented today searched for a middle ground, a scenario in which the interaction results in two large bodes that do not merge but still remain locked in orbit.

This configuration, termed a terrestrial binary planetary system, would necessarily evolve into a state where the two bodies are tidally locked and with the centers of the two planets being separated by only three or so planet radii.

NB: With orbital period being almost the same as day length for both planets.

There is a good reason to believe terrestrial binary planetary systems may be possible.

In a grazing collision the angular momentum is too high to be contained within a single rotating body (it would fission) and if the bodies barely touch then they could retain their identity.

However, it requires an encounter where the bodies are initially approaching each other at low enough velocity.

To test for this possibility, a simulation technique called Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) was utilized.

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics represents a body as a collection of tens of thousands of particles, and it has been used to study protoplanetary collisions as well as the giant impact hypothesis of the Moon's formation.

Using SPH, collisions between two rocky Earth-sized bodies were simulated, with impact velocity and impact parameter (a measure of how head-on a collision is) being varied and the output observed.

In the cases where the bodies underwent substantial collision, the scientists replicated previous results in which a binary system did not arise but a moon might form.

However, by including interactions where the bodies are close enough to undergo a large tidal distortion, initial conditions were found that led to a terrestrial binary planetary system.

Process converts human waste into rocket fuel

At NASA's request, University of Florida researchers have figured out how to turn human waste into rocket fuel.

Adolescent jokes aside, the process finally makes useful something that until now has been collected to burn up on re-entry.

What's more, like so many other things developed for the space program, the process could well turn up on Earth, said Pratap Pullammanappallil, a UF associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering.

"It could be used on campus or around town, or anywhere, to convert waste into fuel," Pullammanappallil said.

In 2006, NASA began making plans to build an inhabited facility on the moon's surface between 2019 and 2024.

As part of NASA's moon-base goal, the agency wanted to reduce the weight of spacecraft leaving Earth.

Historically, waste generated during spaceflight would not be used further.

NASA stores it in containers until it's loaded into space cargo vehicles that burn as they pass back through the Earth's atmosphere.

For future long-term missions, though, it would be impractical to bring all the stored waste back to Earth.

Dumping it on the moon's surface is not an option, so the space agency entered into an agreement with UF to develop test ideas.

Abhishek Dhoble

Pullammanappallil and then-graduate student Abhishek Dhoble accepted the challenge.

"We were trying to find out how much methane can be produced from uneaten food, food packaging and human waste," said Pullammanappallil, a UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences faculty member and Dhoble's adviser.

"The idea was to see whether we could make enough fuel to launch rockets and not carry all the fuel and its weight from Earth for the return journey."

"Methane can be used to fuel the rockets. Enough methane can be produced to come back from the moon."

NASA started by supplying the UF scientists with a packaged form of chemically produced human waste that also included simulated food waste, towels, wash cloths, clothing and packaging materials, Pullammanappallil said.

He and Dhoble, now a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, ran laboratory tests to find out how much methane could be produced from the waste and how quickly.

They found the process could produce 290 liters of methane per crew per day, all produced in a week, Pullammanappallil said.

A typical Anaerobic Digestor process using farmyard waste as a source of fuel.

Their results led to the creation of an anaerobic digester process, which kills pathogens from human waste, and produces biogas, a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide by breaking down organic matter in waste.

In earth-bound applications, that fuel could be used for heating, electricity generation or transportation.

The digestion process also would produce about 200 gallons of non-potable water annually from all the waste.

That is water held within the organic matter, which is released as organic matter decomposes.

Through electrolysis, the water can then be split into hydrogen and oxygen, and the astronauts can breathe oxygen as a back-up system.

The exhaled carbon dioxide and hydrogen can be converted to methane and water in the process, he said.

Earth's Water Existed 135 Million Years Earlier

An illustration of the early solar system shows proto-Earth, proto-Mars, Vesta within the asteroid belt, and proto-Jupiter. 

The dashed white line represents the "snow line" boundary for water ice in the solar system. 

Credit: Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

The water that supports life on Earth may have been on the planet much earlier than scientists previously thought, new research suggests.

While the environmental conditions in Earth's early years made it impossible for water to remain on the planet's surface, scientists have found evidence that the ingredients for water were protectively stored inside rocky bodies near our planet, and maybe inside Earth itself.

The new findings suggest that there was water in the inner solar system 135 million years earlier than previous evidence had shown.

"Our findings show the earliest evidence of water in the inner solar system," said Adam Sarafian, a Ph.D. student at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts and lead author of the new study.

This image of the giant asteroid Vesta was captured by NASA's Dawn spacecraft on Sept. 5, 2012.

Credit: NASA

Meteorites from an asteroid
The smoking gun appears inside meteorites that once belonged to the asteroid Vesta, one of the largest members of the asteroid belt that sits between Jupiter and Mars. Meteorites from Vesta, dark chunks of cooled magma often as big as grapefruits, continue to be found in Antarctica.

Previous analysis found no water or water-forming ingredients in those meteorites, but Sarafian and his colleagues zoomed in on the molecular contents of the meteorites, and found trace amounts of hydrogen-oxygen molecules.

More than 4.5 billion years ago, or about 15 million years after solid bodies began to form around the young sun, water existed in the outer, cooler parts of the solar system, previous studies have shown.

But in the inner solar system, where Vesta and a young Earth resided, temperatures were far too hot and solar winds would send any water vapor to the outer regions of the solar system.

While the Earth grew and changed over the next 4 billion years or so, Vesta remained frozen in time, according to Sarafian.

"Vesta gives us a snapshot of what Earth maybe looked like when it was first forming," Sarafian said.

Solar Photosphere: Hot explosions on the cool sun

Sizzling star: Hot explosions in an active region of the Sun. 

In this image of the photosphere that was obtained at the end of September 2013 with the help of IRIS, the explosions are the bright spots. 

The image shows a sector with a size of 50,000 kilometers by 25 000 kilometers. 

Credit: NASA

The Sun is more spirited than previously thought. Apart from the solar eruptions, huge bursts of particles and radiation from the outer atmosphere of our star, also the cooler layer right below can be the site of explosions: in some areas magnetic energy builds up and discharges within only a few minutes in temperature eruptions of up to 100000 degrees.

Researchers under the lead of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research have now for the first time found evidence of such short-lived heat pockets in data from NASA's space telescope IRIS (Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph).

The Sun is an incredibly hot place, but even though in all its layers the temperatures are daunting, some are hotter than others.

With a temperature of approximately 5000 degrees, the Sun's visible surface, the photosphere, for example, is comparatively cool.

Going outward from there, the temperatures within the Sun's atmosphere rise, first moderately and then sharply, until they reach one million degrees.

"Our analysis shows, that this temperature distribution is not the same everywhere, and is constantly in motion", says Prof. Dr. Hardi Peter from the MPS, the paper's first author.

Together with an international team of scientists, Peter analyzed data from the space telescope IRIS taken from active regions on the Sun.

These regions within the photosphere are characterized by high magnetic field strengths and are the "birth places" of the dark sunspots, which cover the Sun's surface, at some times more, at others less abundantly.

"In these regions we found heat pockets as big as half of Germany. They are up to 20 times as hot as their surroundings", the astrophysicist describes. The heat pockets flash up for only minutes and then return to their normal state.

The amount of energy released during these explosions would be sufficient to provide all of Germany with electrical power for 8000 years.

The massive photospheric explosions cannot be spotted in visible light, but leave traces in the ultraviolet radiation the Sun emits into space.

IRIS can split this ultraviolet radiation into its constituting wavelengths more precisely than any other solar observatory before. In addition, it offers an unprecedented spatial resolution.

When IRIS opened its eyes to the Sun for the first time in July of last year, it could discern structures with a size of only 250 kilometers and examine radiation from such small regions separately.

"To our great surprise, we found well-defined areas within the active regions emitting radiation quite unlike the radiation from their vicinity", says Peter.

The researchers discovered characteristic wavelengths that special highly ionized atoms within the solar plasma such as triply ionized silicon ions emit into space.

"The presence of these wavelengths within the spectra points to very high temperatures", says Peter.

Only under such conditions can silicon loose three of its electrons, but in which of the Sun's layers did this temperature arise? Truly within the cool photosphere? Or maybe, and this would be much less spectacular, farther outside in the much hotter atmosphere?

The spectral data from IRIS proved to be so detailed that the researchers could extract further decisive clues.

For example, they were able to infer the density of the solar plasma where the radiation originated. In addition, they showed that the radiation had encountered singly-ionized iron ions on its way outward. These ions occur only in cooler regions.

"All in all, we found a coherent picture: the unusual radiation must originate in the cool outer photosphere" says Peter.

The researchers believe that the strong magnetic fields in the photosphere provide the necessary energy for the explosions.

In the area of the sun spots, the magnetic field lines protrude in a loop-like fashion from the Sun's surface; hot plasma flows there. When these flows are short-circuited, the explosions occur.

"The new results have fundamentally changed our understanding of the Sun's outer buildup", says Peter. "Instead of a stable temperature distribution, there are apparently dynamical processes within the cool photosphere that can turn everything topsy turvy."

Already in 1917, the American physicist Ferdinand Ellermann discovered areas with higher temperatures within the photosphere.

However, they differed from their surroundings only by a few thousand degrees and can therefore be considered rather minor temperature deviations. Whether the newly discovered explosions are linked to this phenomenon, is still unclear.

One of the other publications in Science magazine, to which scientists from the MPS have contributed, also paints a new picture of the processes on the Sun.

Researchers under the lead of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics found that the solar wind, the continuous stream of particles from the Sun, does not leave the Sun's surface uniformly, but locally in highly energetic jets. These observations, too, are based on data from IRIS.

More information: 
H. Peter et al. "Hot Explosions in the Cool Atmosphere of the Sun." Science, 17 October 2014 - DOI: 10.1126/science.1255726

H. Tian et al. "Prevalence of Small-scale Jets from the Networks of the Solar Transition Region and Chromosphere." Science, 17 October 2014 - DOI: 10.1126/science.1255732

NASA Lunar Flashlight and RPM: How to Mine the Moon for Water

Lunar Flashlight mission will map the lunar south pole for volatiles.

Credit: Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI)

There's a lot of water on the moon, and NASA wants to learn how to mine it.

Space agency scientists are developing two separate mission concepts to assess, and learn how to exploit, stores of water ice on the moon  and other lunar resources.

The projects, called Lunar Flashlight and the Resource Prospector Mission (RPM), are notionally targeted to blast off in 2017 and 2018, respectively, and aim to help humanity extend its footprint out into the solar system.

"If you're going to have humans on the moon and you need water for drinking, breathing, rocket fuel, anything you want, it's much, much cheaper to live off the land than it is to bring everything with you," said Lunar Flashlight principal investigator Barbara Cohen, of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

It's therefore important to "understand the inventory of volatiles across the whole moon and their purity, and their accessibility in particular,"

Cohen said in July during a presentation at the NASA Exploration Science Forum 2014, a conference organized by the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute at the agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

Solar sailing to the moon

Lunar Flashlight is working toward a possible launch date in December 2017, when it would blast off on the first test flight of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket, along with several other piggybacking payloads.

Lunar Flashlight is a CubeSat mission, meaning the body of the spacecraft is tiny, about the size of a cereal box, Cohen said, but after it's deployed in space, the probe would get much bigger by unfurling an 860-square-foot (80 square meters) solar sail.

The spacecraft would then cruise toward the moon on a circuitous route, propelled along by the photons streaming from the sun.

Lunar Flashlightwould start orbiting the moon about six months after its launch, then spend another year spiraling down to get about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the lunar surface.

The probe would then make about 80 passes around the moon at this low altitude, measuring and mapping deposits of water ice in permanently shadowed craters near the lunar poles. It would do this science work with the aid of its solar sail.

"We're going to use it as a mirror," Cohen said. "We're going to take the sunlight, bounce it off the solar sail into the permanently shadowed regions, and we're going to use a passive infrared spectrometer to collect the light from the permanently shadowed regions in wavelengths that are indicative of water frost."

Lunar Flashlight aims to find water ice that would be accessible to future explorers, be they human or robotic.

"What we're looking for is water right at the surface," Cohen said. "Could humans or their vehicles go into a permanently shadowed region and just scoop up the regolith and use what's at the surface to be able to extract water ice?"

Such deposits could provide drinking water for potential manned lunar outposts, and moon water could also be split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, prime components of rocket fuel, which could then spur and support exploration even farther afield, advocates of moon mining say.

Space mining advocates envision lunar extraction of minerals and ice as near-term objectives.

Credit: NASA

A water-mapping rover

While Lunar Flashlight would eye the moon from above, the Resource Prospector Mission (RPM) plans to send a rover onto the lunar surface to get an up-close look.

This rover would land at a yet-to-be-determined polar site and map surface and subsurface concentrations of hydrogen at two different locations, which would ideally be separated by at least 0.6 miles (1 km).

RPM would use a neutron spectrometer to measure water concentrations up to 3.3 feet (1 m) underground and a near-infrared spectrometer to make its surface measurements.

The solar-powered rover would roll into permananently shadowed regions, relying on batteries to keep working in the dark. It would likely have an operational lifetime of about one week on the lunar surface, mission officials have said.

Like Lunar Flashlight, RPM is geared to help enable future exploitation of water ice on the moon.

"How is the water ice distributed in the soil?" RPM project scientist Tony Colaprete of NASA Ames said at the Exploration Science Forum event.

"That's really what Resource Prospector is fundamentally about, is identifying, locating the 'ore' and understanding how to excavate it, how to get at it, and what does that cost in terms of energy."

The rover would also be equipped with a drill, allowing it to take samples from up to 3.3 feet (1 m) deep, Colaprete said.

Collected samples would be heated up in an oven, and the volatile materials such as water liberated by this process would be identified and quantified.

RPM also plans to extract oxygen from lunar dirt in a demonstration of in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). (This oxygen can be combined with hydrogen carried onboard to create water.)

"We need to take the first steps in demonstrating off of this world utilization of material," Colaprete said.

"There's a lot of technology demonstration in here that's not just applicable to the moon; it's applicable to any mission, to any surface where you want to manipulate materials."

Mars is one such place. Indeed, NASA is also planning to conduct an ISRU experiment on the Red Planet in the coming years.

In July, agency officials announced that its next Mars rover, slated to blast off in 2020, will carry an instrument that will generate oxygen from the carbon-dioxide-rich Martian atmosphere.

Most Water in Lunar Soil generated by Solar Wind

This is a composite image of the lunar nearside taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in June 2009, note the presence of dark areas of maria on this side of the moon. Credit: NASA

A pair of researchers with the Sorbonne Universités, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, has determined that most of the water in the soil on the surface of the moon was formed due to protons in the solar wind colliding with oxygen in lunar dust, rather than from comet or meteorite impacts.

In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Alice Stephant and François Robert describe their study and the results they found.

When NASA astronauts brought back soil and rock samples from the moon, it was assumed by most in the scientific community that everything they found was dry, that there was no water in any of it.

Subsequent analysis using newer techniques has revealed that not only is there water beneath the surface in some places, but the dust on the surface also has small amounts as well.

Once this became known, most scientists assumed the water got there due to comet or meteorite impacts, in this new effort, the research pair suggests that conventional thinking is wrong once again and that the water, at least in the surface dust, comes about due to the impact of solar wind on tiny dust particles.

In studying tiny grains of lunar soil samples, the researchers found that the reduction of oxygen from silicates in the soil by protons from the solar wind was almost certainly the means by which the water was generated.

They came to that conclusion through determining the lithium isotope ratio in the samples (plagioclase rock found on the surface of the moon) which gave the isotope ratio for the hydrogen, from that they were able to calculate the deuterium-hydrogen ratio which they compared to the amount of water actually in the granule sample.

They found that on average, the granules contained just 15 percent water from somewhere else (presumably comets or meteorites) leaving the rest to have been formed due to the solar wind interaction. They note also that for some samples, all of the water was due to solar wind interaction.

The duo is quick to point out that their conclusions only relate to water found on the surface of the moon, where the water below the surface came from is still up for conjecture.

More information: "The negligible chondritic contribution in the lunar soils water" - Alice Stephant, PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1408118111

NASA MODIS: The Shrinking of the Aral Sea 2001 - 2014

The Aral Sea in 2001

Although irrigation made the desert bloom, it devastated the Aral Sea.

This series of images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite documents the changes.

At the start of the series in 2000, the lake was already a fraction of its 1960 extent (black line).

The Northern Aral Sea (sometimes called the Small Aral Sea) had separated from the Southern (Large) Aral Sea.

The Southern Aral Sea had split into eastern and western lobes that remained tenuously connected at both ends.

The Aral Sea in 2014

Read the full story and view the full series of images taken by MODIS from 2001 to 2014, here.

New milestone in the search for water on distant planets - HAT-P-11b

An artist's concept of the silhouette of the extrasolar planet HAT-P-11b as it passes its parent star. 

The planet was observed as it crossed in front of its star in order to learn more about its atmosphere. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers have found water vapour in the atmosphere of a planet about four times bigger than Earth, in the constellation Cygnus about 124 light years, or nearly 729 trillion miles, from our home planet.

In the quest to learn about planets beyond our solar system, this discovery marks the smallest planet for which scientists have been able to identify some chemical components of its atmosphere.

The researchers' findings were published Sept. 25, 2014 in the journal Nature.

The team was led by University of Maryland Astronomy Professor Drake Deming, an expert in the study of exoplanets, or planets that orbit suns outside our own solar system.

The finding of water vapour and hydrogen in the atmosphere of the exoplanet HAT P-11b is not only an astonishing piece of long-distance detective work, based on analyses of observations by three different NASA telescopes.

It also suggests that astronomers' ideas about how the planets formed appear to hold true for other planetary systems, as they do in our own.

How do scientists detect water in distant exoplanets? They use a quirk of light that happens when a planet transits, or passes in front of, its host star.

Material in the planet's atmosphere absorbs some of the star's light, and that makes the planet appear bigger. similar to the way our sun seems bigger at sunset, when we are looking to the horizon across a broad swath of Earth's atmosphere.

By plotting changes in the exoplanet's size, and relating them to the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation that the telescope observes, astronomers get a graph that shows how much of the star's radiation the planet's atmosphere is absorbing.

The shape of that graph, called a transmission spectrum, can reveal what chemicals are present in the atmosphere.

The bigger the planet, the more obvious are the changes in the planet's size during its transit across its host star.

Astronomers have used this technique to describe the atmospheres of several giant planets, the size of our solar system's Jupiter.

In this study, the team wanted to analyze the atmosphere of a significantly smaller planet. The team chose HAT P-11b, which was discovered by the Hungarian-made Automated Telescope (HAT) network.

It's about four times the radius of Earth and about 26 times Earth's mass. Compared to planets in our solar system,

HAT P-11b is closest in size to Neptune, but it is much closer to its host star and therefore much hotter, about 878 degrees Kelvin, or 1,120 degrees Fahrenheit.

It probably has a rocky core, wrapped in a thick, gaseous envelope of about 90 percent hydrogen. Its atmosphere is cloudless at high altitude, but as the team found, it contains the signature of water vapour.

UMD graduate student Jonathan Fraine, the paper's lead author, observed HAT P-11b using two NASA telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope, which measures visible and near-infrared light, and the Spitzer Space Telescope, which records only infrared light, between July 2011 and December 2012.

The team compared those data to observations by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, which was launched to look for exoplanets and continuously records images of the portion of the sky where HAT-P-11b is located.

Why do astronomers look for water on exoplanets? First, because water is a precondition for life – though the presence of water alone is not enough for life to arise. "The water molecule is widespread in the universe," says Deming.

"Wherever you have hydrogen and oxygen, it naturally forms. Even some sun spots are cool enough to contain water vapour, although obviously it's far too hot for life on the sun."

Astronomers also want to test the hypothesis that other planets formed the same way ours did. In the primordial solar system, particles of dust and ice carried native electrical charges that caused them to stick together, like household "dust bunnies" do, in a process called core accretion.

Early in this process the giant planets that formed far from the sun had enough gravitational pull to attract large amounts of hydrogen gas, the H in H2O.

But water freezes out of the atmospheres of our solar system's giant planets, where it occurs only at deep levels that are difficult to observe.

The closer-in, smaller planets, Mars, Venus and Earth, had water early in their evolution, though only Earth retains liquid water at the surface.

The smaller the planet, astronomers believe, the more likely it is that heavier molecules like water vapor will be abundant along with hydrogen.

"Our ideas about the formation of planets have been developed to match our solar system," explains Deming, "and we don't know whether other planetary systems behave the same way. We want to test the fundamental question of whether small planets are rich in heavy elements, like the oxygen in water vapour."

The finding of water vapor and hydrogen on HAT P-11b "is a key piece of the puzzle," Deming says, consistent with astronomers' main ideas on the formation of planets.

More information: "Water vapour absorption in the clear atmosphere of a Neptune-sized exoplanet," Jonathan Fraine, Drake Deming, Bjorn Benneke, Heather Knutson, Andrés Jordán, Néstor Espinoza, Nikku Madhusudhan, Ashlee Wilkins, and Kamen Todorov, was published in Nature on Sept. 25, 2014. dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature13785

Mg Box: Magnesium phone battery runs on water

A Japanese company said its water-powered emergency battery generates enough juice to charge a smartphone up to 30 times.

Furukawa Battery announced the Mg Box, pronounced Mug Box, generates electricity for about five days once about 2 quarts of water are poured in and react with the magnesium inside.

The company said the magnesium-air battery, designed as an emergency preparedness item, generates about 300Wh, enough electricity for up to five days.

The box will go on sale in mid-December for about $93, the company said.

Martian Nahkla meteorite yields more evidence of Life

The finding of a 'cell-like' structure, which investigators now know once held water, came about as a result of collaboration between scientists in the UK and Greece.

Their findings are published in the latest edition of the journal Astrobiology.

While investigating the Martian meteorite, known as Nakhla, Dr Elias Chatzitheodoridis of the National Technical University of Athens found an unusual feature embedded deep within the rock.

In a bid to understand what it might be, he teamed up with long-time friend and collaborator Professor Ian Lyon at the University of Manchester.

Professor Lyon, based in Manchester's School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences (SEAES) explains: "In many ways it resembled a fossilized biological cell from Earth but it was intriguing because it was undoubtedly from Mars.

Our research found that it probably wasn't a cell but that it did once hold water, water that had been heated, probably as a result of an asteroid impact."

Elias Chatzitheodoridis

These findings are significant because they add to increasing evidence that beneath the surface, Mars does provide all the conditions for life to have formed and evolved.

It also adds to a body of evidence suggesting that large asteroids hit Mars in the past and produce long-lasting hydrothermal fields that could sustain life on Mars, even in later epochs, if life ever emerged there.

Sarah Haigh

As part of the research, the feature was imaged in unprecedented detail by Dr Sarah Haigh of The University of Manchester whose work usually involves high resolution imaging for next generation electronic devices, which are made by stacking together single atomic layers of graphene and other materials with the aim of making faster, lighter and bendable mobile phones and tablets.

A similar imaging approach was able to reveal the atomic layers of materials inside the meteorite.

Together their combined experimental approach has revealed new insights into the geological origins of this fascinating structure.

Ian Lyon

Professor Lyon said: "We have been able to show the setting is there to provide life. It's not too cold, it's not too harsh. Life as we know it, in the form of bacteria, for example, could be there, although we haven't found it yet."

"It's about piecing together the case for life on Mars, it may have existed and in some form could exist still."

Now, the team is using these and other state-of-the-art techniques to investigate new secondary materials in this meteorite and search for possible bio signatures which provide scientific evidence of life, past or present.

Professor Lyon concluded: "Before we return samples from Mars, we must examine them further, but in more delicate ways. We must carefully search for further evidence."

More information: "A Conspicuous Clay Ovoid in Nakhla: Evidence for Subsurface Hydrothermal Alteration on Mars with Implications for Astrobiology." Elias Chatzitheodoridis, Sarah Haigh, Ian Lyon. Astrobiology. August 2014, 14(8): 651-693. online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdfp… 0.1089/ast.2013.1069

Evidence of water ice clouds found outside solar system

Credit: A. Fujii

A team of scientists led by Carnegie's Jacqueline Faherty has discovered the first evidence of water ice clouds on an object outside of our own Solar System.

Water ice clouds exist on our own gas giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, but have not been seen outside of the planets orbiting our Sun until now.

Their findings are published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

At the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, Faherty, along with a team including Carnegie's Andrew Monson, used the FourStar near infrared camera to detect the coldest brown dwarf ever characterised.

Their findings are the result of 151 images taken over three nights and combined.

The object, named WISE J085510.83-071442.5, or W0855, was first seen by NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Explorer mission and published earlier this year. But it was not known if it could be detected by Earth-based facilities.

"This was a battle at the telescope to get the detection," said Faherty.

Chris Tinney, an Astronomer at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology, UNSW Australia and co-author on the result stated: "This is a great result. This object is so faint and it's exciting to be the first people to detect it with a telescope on the ground."

Brown dwarfs aren't quite very small stars, but they aren't quite giant planets either.

They are too small to sustain the hydrogen fusion process that fuels stars.

Their temperatures can range from nearly as hot as a star to as cool as a planet, and their masses also range between star-like and giant planet-like.

They are of particular interest to scientists because they offer clues to star-formation processes. They also overlap with the temperatures of planets, but are much easier to study since they are commonly found in isolation.


A team of scientists led by Carnegie's Jacqueline Faherty has discovered the first evidence of water ice clouds on an object outside of our own Solar System. 

Water ice clouds exist on our own gas giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, but have not been seen outside of the planets orbiting our Sun until now.

Their findings are published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 

Credit: Produced and directed by Brian Patrick Abbott. Written by Jacqueline K. Faherty

W0855 is the fourth-closest system to our own Sun, practically a next-door neighbour in astronomical distances.

A comparison of the team's near-infrared images of W0855 with models for predicting the atmospheric content of brown dwarfs showed evidence of frozen clouds of sulphide and water.

"Ice clouds are predicted to be very important in the atmospheres of planets beyond our Solar System, but they've never been observed outside of it before now," Faherty said.

Evidence of 'oceans worth' of water in Earth's mantle detected

Schematic cross section of the Earth’s interior highlighting the transition zone layer (light blue, 410-660 km depth), which has an anomalously high water storage capacity. 

The study by Schmandt and Jacobsen used seismic waves to detect magma generated near the top of the lower mantle at about 700 km depth.

Dehydration melting at those conditions, also observed in the study’s high-pressure experiments, suggests the transition zone may be nearly saturated with H2O dissolved in high-pressure rock. 

Credit: Steve Jacobsen/Northwestern University

Researchers have found evidence of a potential "ocean's worth" of water deep beneath the United States.

Although not present in a familiar form, the building blocks of water are bound up in rock located deep in the Earth's mantle, and in quantities large enough to represent the largest water reservoir on the planet, according to the research.

For many years, scientists have attempted to establish exactly how much water may be cycling between the Earth's surface and interior reservoirs through the action of plate tectonics.

Northwestern University geophysicist Steve Jacobsen and University of New Mexico seismologist Brandon Schmandt have found deep pockets of magma around 400 miles beneath North America, a strong indicator of the presence of H₂O stored in the crystal structure of high-pressure minerals at these depths.

"The total H₂O content of the planet has long been among the most poorly constrained 'geochemical parameters' in Earth science. Our study has found evidence for widespread hydration of the mantle transition zone," says Jacobsen.

For at least 20 years geologists have known from laboratory experiments that the Earth's transition zone, a rocky layer of the Earth's mantle located between the lower mantle and upper mantle, at depths between 250 and 410 miles, can, in theory, hold about 1 percent of its total weight as H₂O, bound up in minerals called wadsleyite and ringwoodite.

However, as Schmandt explains, up until now it has been difficult to figure out whether that potential water reservoir is empty, as many have suggested, or not.

If there does turn out to be a substantial amount of H₂O in the transition zone, then recent laboratory experiments conducted by Jacobsen indicate there should be large quantities of what he calls "partial melt" in areas where mantle flows downward out of the zone.

This water-rich silicate melt is molten rock that occurs at grain boundaries between solid mineral crystals and may account for about 1 percent of the volume of rocks.

"Melting occurs because hydrated rocks are carried from the transition zone, where the rocks can hold lots of H₂O, downward into the lower mantle, where the rocks cannot hold as much H₂O."

"Melting is the way to get rid of the H₂O that won't fit in the crystal structure present in the lower mantle," says Jacobsen.

He adds:
"When a rock starts to melt, whatever H₂O is bound in the rock will go into the melt right away. So the melt would have much higher H₂O concentration than the remaining solid. We're not sure how it got there."

"Maybe it's been stuck there since early in Earth's history or maybe it's constantly being recycled by plate tectonics."

Seismic Waves
Melt strongly affects the speed of seismic waves, the acoustic-like waves of energy that travel through the Earth's layers as a result of an earthquake or explosion.

This is because stiff rocks, like the silicate-rich ones present in the mantle, propagate seismic waves very quickly.

According to Schmandt, if just a little melt, even 1 percent or less, is added between the crystal grains of such a rock it causes it to become less stiff, meaning that elastic waves propagate more slowly.

"We were able to analyse seismic waves from earthquakes to look for melt in the mantle just beneath the transition zone," says Schmandt.

Brandon Schmandt (University of New Mexico, left) and Steve Jacobsen (Northwestern University, right) combined seismic observations from the US-Array with laboratory experiments to detect dehydration melting of hydrous mantle material beneath North America at depths of 700-800 km. 

Credit: University of New Mexico/Northwestern University

"What we found beneath the U.S. is consistent with partial melt being present in areas of downward flow out of the transition zone."

"Without the presence of H₂O, it is very difficult to explain melting at these depths. This is a good hint that the transition zone H₂O reservoir is not empty, and even if it's only partially filled that could correspond to about the same mass of H₂O as in Earth's oceans," he adds.

Jacobsen and Schmandt hope that their findings, published in the June issue of the journal Science, will help other scientists to understand how the Earth formed and what its current composition and inner workings are, as well as establish how much water is trapped in mantle rock.

"I think we are finally seeing evidence for a whole-Earth water cycle, which may help explain the vast amount of liquid water on the surface of our habitable planet. Scientists have been looking for this missing deep water for decades," says Jacobsen

Schematic representation of seismometers placed in the US-Array between 2004 and 2014 and used in the study by Schmandt and Jacobsen to detect dehydration melting at the top of the lower mantle beneath North America. 

Credit: NSF-Earthscope

Crystals of laboratory-grown hydrous ringwoodite, a high-pressure polymorph of olivine that is stable from about 520-660 km depth in the Earth’s mantle. 

The ringwoodite pictured here contains around one weight percent of H2O, similar to what was inferred in the seismic observations made by Schmandt and Jacobsen. 

Credit: Steve Jacobsen/Northwestern University

Life on Mars? Nakhla Martian meteorite reveals mineral-rich structure

A new ovoid structure discovered in the Nakhla Martian meteorite is made of nanocrystalline iron-rich clay, contains a variety of minerals, and shows evidence of undergoing a past shock event from impact, with resulting melting of the permafrost and mixing of surface and subsurface fluids.

Based on the results of a broad range of analytical studies to determine the origin of this new structure, scientists present the competing hypotheses for how this ovoid formed, point to the most likely conclusion, and discuss how these findings impact the field of astrobiology in a fascinating article published in Astrobiology.

In the article, "A Conspicuous Clay Ovoid in Nakhla: Evidence for Subsurface Hydrothermal Alteration on Mars with Implications for Astrobiology," Elias Chatzitheodoridis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and Sarah Haigh and Ian Lyon, the University of Manchester, UK, describe the use of tools including electron microscopy, x-ray, and spectroscopy to analyze the ovoid structure.

While the authors do not believe the formation of this structure involved biological materials, that is a possible hypothesis, and they note that evidence exists supporting the presence of niche environments in the Martian subsurface that could support life.

"This study illustrates the importance of correlating different types of datasets when attempting to discern whether something in rock is a biosignature indicative of life," says Sherry L. Cady, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of Astrobiology and Chief Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

"Though the authors couldn't prove definitively that the object of focus was evidence of life, their research strategy revealed a significant amount of information about the potential for life to inhabit the subsurface of Mars."