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Moon

Microwave Map of Entire Moon Revealed 82

Posted by samzenpus from the quickest-route-mode dept.
Zothecula writes "The first complete microwave image of the Moon taken by Chinese lunar satellite Chang'E-1 has been revealed. Chang'E-1 is China's first scientific mission to explore planetary bodies beyond Earth and the on-board Lunar Microwave Radiometer has made it possible for the first time to globally map the Moon in microwave frequencies. Radar observations of the Moon are unable to provide thermal information, and microwave observations taken from Earth cannot reach the far side of the moon. So Chang'E-1's (CE-1) orbit was conducted at an altitude of 200km (124 miles) and allowed it to observe every location of the moon with a nadir view and at high spatial resolution."

Comment Re:Needs a caption (Score 2, Informative) 154

by michaelwv (#33381728) Attached to: Video Showing Half a Million Asteroid Discoveries
Discoveries are observations. Most discoveries are near opposition. It's only for special reasons that some surveys have been looking in other directions: either things like WISE that are in the infrared and so have special restrictions about where they can point, or targeted searches for near-Earth objects. In you click on the video you can read all about it in the caption. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_d-gs0WoUw
Medicine

Rare Sharing of Data Led To Results In Alzheimer's Research 159

Posted by Soulskill from the never-forget dept.
jamie passes along a story in the NY Times about how an unprecedented level of openness and data-sharing among scientists involved in the study of Alzheimer's disease has yielded a wealth of new research papers and may become the template for making progress in dealing with other afflictions. Quoting: "The key to the Alzheimer's project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world. No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort. 'It was unbelievable,' said Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, an Alzheimer's researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. 'It's not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately.'"
Mars

SpaceX Unveils Heavy-Lift Rocket Designs 248

Posted by timothy from the now-comes-the-wedding-night dept.
FleaPlus writes "At the recent Joint Propulsion Conference, SpaceX's rocket development facility director Tom Markusic unveiled conceptual plans for how its current Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 commercial rockets can be evolved into heavy-lift rockets, ranging from a Falcon X capable of lifting 38,000kg to orbit, up to a 140,000kg Falcon XX (more than either the Saturn V or the 75,000kg shuttle-derived rocket Congress currently plans on having NASA spend >$13B building). SpaceX presentations also discuss a new Merlin 2 heavy-lift engine, solar-electric cargo tugs, adapting their current engines for descent/ascent vehicles fueled by Mars-derived methane, and a desire for the government to take the lead on in-space nuclear thermal propulsion while commercial focuses on launchers. In a recent interview, SpaceX CEO/CTO Elon Musk expressed his goal of lowering the price of Mars transportation enough to enable early colonization in 20 years, and his own plans for retiring to Mars."
Security

ReCAPTCHA.net Now Vulnerable to Algorithmic Attack 251

Posted by timothy from the bless-you! dept.
n3ond4x writes "reCAPTCHA.net algorithms have been developed to solve the current CAPTCHA at an efficacy of 30%. The algorithms were disclosed at DEFCON 18 over the weekend and have since been made available online. Also available is a video demonstration of random reCAPTCHA.net CAPTCHAs being subjected to the algorithms." There's probably an excellent Firefox plugin to render this page's color scheme more bearable. Note: the PowerPoint presentation linked opens fine in OpenOffice, and the video speaks for itself.
Space

Exoplanet Reports Exaggerated 55

Posted by timothy from the visit-the-off-world-colonies dept.
The Bad Astronomer writes "The reports of the first direct picture of an exoplanet are misleading. The real news is that an image of a probable exoplanet taken in 2008 using a telescope in Hawaii have been confirmed — it's a planet. In fact, exoplanets have been directly imaged before; the first was in 2005. More images of other planets were released in 2008. To be specific: this new planet is the first to be directly imaged orbiting a sun-like star using observations made from the ground. That's actually still quite a technological achievement, but don't be misled by hyperbolic headlines."

Comment Re:Adaptic optics FTW (Score 1) 189

by michaelwv (#32746754) Attached to: First Direct Photo of Exoplanet Confirmed
Telescopes on the moon only make sense if you can build them out of local lunar materials. Otherwise you're 0) Building telescope components on Earth 1) Launching telescope components into Earth orbit 2) Transfer to Lunar orbit and Landing them on the moon 3) Assembling them Skip step 2. It's easier to design a telescope to be in microgravity then something that has to contend with a significant gravitational field.

Comment Re:Adaptic optics FTW (Score 1) 189

by michaelwv (#32746658) Attached to: First Direct Photo of Exoplanet Confirmed
The atmosphere is not a friend to astronomers. Both emission from and absorption by the atmosphere are significant problems for ground-based astronomy. The background from just the brightness of the sky is the largest contaminate in ground-based images. From space Hubble enjoys a sky background that is at least 100 times fainter. So to get a given sensitivity, Hubble can observe things in one hour that might take a ground-based telescope 10-20 hours.
Moon

Decades-Old Soviet Reflector Spotted On the Moon 147

Posted by Soulskill from the always-in-the-last-place-you-look dept.
cremeglace writes "No one had seen a laser reflector that Soviet scientists had left on the moon almost 40 years ago, despite years of searching. Turns out searchers had been looking kilometers in the wrong direction. On 22 April, a team of physicists finally saw an incredibly faint flash from the reflector, which was ferried across the lunar surface by the Lunokhod 1 rover. The find comes thanks to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which last month imaged a large area where the rover was reported to have been left. Then the researchers, led by Tom Murphy of the University of California, San Diego, could search one football-field-size area at a time until they got a reflection."

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