Very cool video. It is cool enough to watch the Shuttle launch from the ground, but this really shows how fast that thing is going. It really is quite amazing and yet we seem to take it for granted since it is such a common event.
Source: PointNiner
US scientists have found evidence that water was held in the Moon’s interior, challenging some elements of the theory of how Earth’s satellite formed.
The Moon is thought to have been created in a violent collision between Earth and another planet-sized object.
Scientists thought the heat from this impact had vaporised all the water.
But a new study in Nature magazine shows water was delivered to the lunar surface from the interior in volcanic eruptions three billion years ago.
This suggests that water has been a part of the Moon since its early existence.
The discovery came from lunar volcanic glasses, pebble-like beads collected and returned to Earth by the US Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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The team, from Brown University, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Case Western Reserve University, used secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) technology to detect extremely minute quantities of water in glasses and minerals.
“We developed a way to detect as little as five parts per million of water,” said Erik Hauri, from the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC.
Full Article: BBC News
Pretty interesting news on our newest planetary neighbor. What implications this may hold as to whether or not their may have been life on the moon remains to be unseen. The article even points out that the water may have drifted to the poles and may remain there as ice.
A third giant red storm has flared up on Jupiter, joining the Great Red Spot and the recently developed Red Spot Junior. The spot, along with new measurements of record-high wind speeds on Red Spot Junior, come at a time when the solar system’s largest planet is experiencing a time of global upheaval.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is an ancient, hurricane-like storm that may have been raging for 340 years or more, based on early observations with telescopes. At three times the width of Earth, it is the largest storm in the solar system.
It was recently joined by a similar, but smaller storm called Red Spot Junior. Red Spot Junior grew out of the merger of three smaller, white storms between 1998 and 2000 and turned red in 2006. It is about the size of Earth.
Now, a third red spot, about half the size of Red Spot Junior, has broken out on the giant gaseous planet. The spot, previously a white storm, now appears red in Hubble Space Telescope images taken on 9 and 10 May. The observations were led by Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley, US.
Full Article: NewScientist
I hadn’t even known about the Red Spot Jr. until I read this article. They look so small, but in reality they are enormous storms, it really is quite amazing what goes on in the universe. As for why they are red, it is suggested that when these storms get large enough they bring up materials such as phosphorus from further down on Jupiter’s atmosphere.