The Great Lakes are under threat from an Asian carp invasion that could wipe out fishing stocks, and with it, the lakes’ billion dollar fishery. On Friday, officials from the Army Corps of Engineers reported that genetic material from the carp had been found for the first time in a nearby river beyond an elaborate barrier system, which has cost millions of dollars and was meant to block their passage [The New York Times]. There is concern that if carp make it into Lake Michigan, they will gobble up the plankton that native fish feed on.
Officials also say that recreational boating may be affected–the carp can grow up to 4 feet long and weigh up to 100 pounds, and the massive fish will occasionally leap up and strike boaters. Since they were found to be moving up the Mississippi River in 2002, agencies have been trying everything they can think of to slow them down, including erecting the expensive electric barriers that cost around $9 million. The barriers work by sending low-voltage electric current through steel cables that are strung across the canal; this creates an electric field that’s uncomfortable for the fish and that’s supposed to prevent them from swimming across it.
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With NASA’s manned space flight program in tumult, it’s an open question when/if human boots will tramp on Martian soil. But the space agency has provided a virtual way for humans to explore the red planet, with its new “Be a Martian” program.
The online project, a collaboration between NASA and Microsoft, enlists the power of crowdsourcing. Users are invited to sort through the hundreds of thousands of photos of Mars that have been sent back by rovers and orbiters. To convince people to spend hours pouring over pictures of dusty Martian landscapes, two tasks have been set up as games where participants can win points and badges. One game asks people to count craters in photos of Mars; the other asks people to match small, high-res photos of the Martian surface with their corresponding locations on a low-res photo taken from a higher altitude [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]. (You’ll need to have Microsoft’s Silverlight application for the games and videos on the site to work.)
By enlisting citizen scientists, NASA hopes to both interest students in space careers and to make real progress in Martian research. “We really need the next generation of explorers,” says Michelle Viotti, from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which oversees Mars missions. “And we’re also accomplishing something important for Nasa. There’s so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important” [BBC News].
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Image: JPL / Microsoft
Like humans, sea stars enjoy lounging on the shore during the hot summer months. But when they get too hot, they can’t run for shade, so they have a back-up plan—fattening themselves with cold ocean water before the tide recedes, according to new research published in the journal The American Naturalist. This finding shows that sea stars, or ochre starfish, aren’t as helpless as previously thought. The sea stars are likely cued during low tide that it’s a hot day, the researchers say, and that signals them to soak up more water during the next high tide. “It would be as if humans were able to look at a weather forecast, decide it was going to be hot tomorrow, and then in preparation suck up 15 or more pounds of water into our bodies,” said study researcher Brian Helmuth [LiveScience]. Talk about staying hydrated.
The researchers first studied starfish in an aquarium using heat lamps to simulate a scorching summer day, an infrared camera to measure their internal temperatures, and a scale to weigh the sea stars and determine how much water they had absorbed. The researchers say the amount of water a starfish absorbs can decrease its body temperature by almost 4 degrees Celsius. But researcher Sylvain Pincebourde is concerned that this novel strategy may have limitations in a rapidly changing world…. As oceans warm together with air temperature the thermoregulatory mechanism used by the starfish will cease to work, he warns. “The colder the sea water, the more it is able to lower its body temperature. The efficiency of this thermoregulation strategy therefore might be annihilated by ocean warming” [BBC News]. Yet another reason to get a handle on global carbon emissions.
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Image: flickr / laszio-photo
It was a twisted cycle: In the 1970s, Bangladeshis used surface ponds or rivers to collect rainwater for drinking. But thanks to garbage dumping and sewage, that water became a breeding ground for disease. So UNICEF sought to fix the problem—the agency helped residents drill simple wells that drew water from a shallow aquifer. But this remedy became a tragedy. Bangladesh’s groundwater was laced with arsenic. Now, in a study in Nature Geoscience, a team from MIT has answered one of the outstanding pieces of the Bangladesh puzzle: Just how all that arsenic got into the water in the first place.
Bangladesh occupies the flood-prone delta of the river Ganges [New Scientist], and that river brought the arsenic to the region’s sediments. But why doesn’t it just stay in the sediments once it’s there? Back in 2002, another MIT team began to answer the question by showing that microbes digest organic carbon in the soil in such a way that frees up the arsenic, but they couldn’t say where that carbon itself came from until Rebecca Neumann and colleagues figured it out this year: man-made ponds left behind by excavations.
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Bomb and you shall find.
NASA today claimed success in its quest to find water on the moon. “Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn’t find just a little bit, we found a significant amount,” said Anthony Colaprete, a principal project investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center [AP].
Scientists had been analyzing data for more than a month since NASA crashed the LCROSS craft into the moon on October 9, which created a tiny crater in the polar region and kicked up a plume of material that had been beneath the lunar surface. NASA worried when the original impact didn’t create the easily visible plume of material that they’d anticipated, but later images showed that the mystery plume had been created and scientists were free to analyze its composition.
The results are clear: both infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers indicated the presence of water, and those readings got stronger over time, which is what you’d expect if you bombed the moon and created a plume full of water.
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It’s a terrible thing to have a spirit that is trapped, bogged down, unable to reach its true potential. Just ask NASA–the space agency knows all about it. The Mars rover Spirit has been stuck in the sand since April 23rd, when it drove backwards into a pit of soft sand and came to a dead halt. Since then, NASA engineers have been testing out escape strategies with a mock-up rover and a sandbox in California, and today they announced that they’re ready to begin a careful operation that they hope will extricate the rover. The name of the project: Free Spirit.
Spirit and its partner rover have been exploring Mars for more than five years now, but this sandy area, dubbed Troy, could be the end of the road for Spirit. “If it cannot make the great escape from this sand trap, it’s likely that this lonely spot straddling the edge of this crater might be where Spirit ends its adventures on Mars,” said Doug McCuistion, who heads the Mars exploration program [AP].
On Monday, Spirit’s handlers will send the first commands to the rover. Over days, weeks, and months they’ll order it to slowly rotate its five working wheels and inch back along the path it came in on. Efforts to extract Spirit will continue until at least February. If the rover is not free by then, a review panel may decide whether it’s worth it to keep on trying, McCuistion said [AP]. But even if Spirit is stuck for all time, it may still be able to contribute to our scientific understanding of the Red Planet by studying its soil and atmosphere.
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Image: JPL / NASA
If NASA ever wants to send astronauts on long-term space flights, it needs to know how radiation will affect the crew. Testing humans obviously isn’t going to happen, so NASA is funding a round of experiments to study how radiation effects monkeys, the first time monkeys have been used as test subjects by NASA in decades. The point of the experiments is to understand how the harsh radioactive environment of space affects human bodies and behavior and what countermeasures can be developed to make long-duration spaceflight safe for travelers beyond Earth’s protective magnetic shield [Discovery News]. The monkey studies will advance previous radiation experiments with rats and mice and will focus on how radiation affects the monkeys’ central nervous system.
Researchers will expose 18 to 28 squirrel monkeys with a small dose of radiation, similar to what astronauts would receive on a round trip flight to Mars. The monkeys, previously trained to perform a variety of tasks, will be tested to see how the exposure affects their performance [Telegraph] at different times after exposure to gamma rays. The monkeys will not be killed during the experiments, and after testing staff and veterinarians will look after them for the rest of their lives at Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital in Boston.
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When NASA’s Messenger space probe swung past Mercury on September 29, it snapped this picture of the innermost planet’s barren and strange landscape. The $446 million probe’s third flyby brought it within 142 miles (228 km) of Mercury’s surface to cover more uncharted terrain, leaving 98 percent of the planet now mapped [SPACE.com].
The images taken and the data recorded during the flyby are the last that will be acquired until Messenger finally slips into orbit around Mercury in 2011. The probe has now completed about three-quarters of its swooping 4.9-billion-mile journey that will eventually bring it into orbit.
Researcher Brett Denevi explains that this enhanced color shot shows a bright area surrounding an irregular depression, with steep sides and an odd shape, “all of which are hallmarks of something like a volcanic vent,” Denevi said [SPACE.com]. The double-ring basin in the center of the photo measures about 180 miles in diameter. It appears to be a relatively young impact crater–researchers believe it formed about 1 billion years ago–and the smooth stuff on the crater floor may be even younger volcanic material.
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Image: NASA
This morning, NASA’s experimental Ares I-X rocket blasted off a Florida launch pad and roared through the atmosphere, successfully executing the first test flight of the rocket that may carry astronauts to the International Space Station and beyond once the space shuttle is retired. However, debate over the direction of NASA’s manned space flight program means that the rocket’s future is far from certain.
The prototype rocket took off through a few clouds from a former shuttle launch pad at 11:30 a.m., 3 1/2 hours late because of bad weather. Launch controllers had to retest the rocket systems after more than 150 lightning strikes were reported around the pad overnight. Then they had to wait out interfering rain clouds, the same kind that thwarted Tuesday’s try [AP].
Engineers had been concerned that if the rocket took off through rain clouds, the moisture might cause a phenomenon called triboelectrification. This occurs when the rocket encounters water or ice droplets in the clouds. As these collide with the rocket they cause a static charge to build up on its skin, creating interference with radio signals. This is a problem for the 1-X team, which needs clear signals to gather data from 700 sensors wired throughout the vehicle, which are designed to collect flight data [BBC News]. Luckily, the late morning provided a relatively cloud-free window for takeoff.
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Even as engineers prepare for the first test flight of NASA’s new Ares I-X rocket, a prototype of the launch vehicle that could replace the space shuttle, the experts who conducted a review of NASA’s space flight program are suggesting that this rocket project should be scrapped entirely.
The test flight of the $450 million Ares I-X is scheduled for 8 a.m. tomorrow, weather permitting. It’s a prototype of the planned Ares I rocket, designed to carry astronauts to the International Space Station once the shuttle fleet is retired. But the White House panel convened to evaluate NASA’s plan for space exploration issued its final report (pdf) on Thursday, and in a press conference committee chair Norman Augustine harshly critiqued the Ares I project. Though Augustine said the rocket’s technical problems were solvable, he said its first crewed flights would come too late to be much help in servicing the International Space Station (ISS). “The issue that comes up under Ares I is whether the programme is useful,” he said [New Scientist].
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A prototype of the rocket that may blast astronauts into space once the space shuttle is finally retired will get a high-profile test flight next week, and this morning the tall, skinny rocket was rolled onto the launch pad in Florida. While the experimental Ares I-X rocket certainly looked grand as it was rolled slowly from the assembly building to the launch pad (a four-mile trip that took seven hours), its future is far from certain. A White House panel has been considering cancelling Ares I in favour of a commercial launcher. Its final report is expected this week [New Scientist].
NASA’s new sky-scraping rocket measures 327 feet high; it dwarfs the space shuttles, which measure 184 feet high. “It’s a tall rocket; it’s been over three decades since anyone has built a rocket this tall. That was the Saturn V,” explained Trent Smith, the vehicle processing engineer for the Ares 1-X. “We have over 700 sensors on this rocket; and the whole point of Ares 1-X is to understand how does a rocket this shape, this weight, this tall actually fly” [BBC News].
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The lack of fireworks after a NASA probe struck a crater on the moon’s surface disappointed observers watching from Earth, and many initially questioned the mission’s success. However, new images show a mile-high plume of lunar debris from the Cabeus crater shortly after the space agency’s Centaur rocket struck Oct. 9 [AP]. This is almost exactly what the mission’s engineers had in mind when they proposed slinging an empty rocket hull into a crater at the moon’s south pole, so that the LCROSS probe that followed could analyze the dust plume for traces of water ice. Researchers had initially predicted a 6-mile-high plume that would be visible from Earth’s observatories, but they’re presumably thankful for what they got.
A movie screen at the Ames Research Center in Northern California was set to show the impact from the vantage point of a camera on board LCROSS, but the crowd walked away disappointed when the impact produced no visible plume of dust and debris. At the time, NASA scientists said they hoped the problem was simply that cameras aboard the satellite were not properly adjusted to detect the plume. But some scientists feared the Centaur might have hit bedrock and failed to create a plume. The new images, lifted from a different camera aboard the spacecraft, show that a plume did, in fact, occur. That means the satellite should have been capable of detecting water, if it was present [Los Angeles Times]. Scientists said it’s still too early to say what was in the plume, but other clues, such as the heat generated at the impact sight, should help the scientists interpret the data over the next few weeks.
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Image: NASA
With much fanfare, NASA’s lunar probe smashed into the moon this past Friday in an attempt to excavate and study hypothetical traces of lunar water ice. As planned, the probe slung an empty rocket hull into a crater at the moon’s south pole. The LCROSS probe itself then followed behind the rocket hull, snapping photos and beaming them back to Earth before smashing into the very same crater. The impact appears to have gone off without a hitch, however the crash left many disappointed since the expected 6.2-mile-high cloud of dust, which was to be analyzed for traces of ice, never materialized. So far, astronomers using ground-based telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit have not reported seeing any ejecta plume, but have cautioned that more time is needed to be sure [SPACE.com].
At a post-impact briefing, many in the press expressed concern about the mission’s success. In response, LCROSS project scientist Anthony Colaprete outlined several reasons why the impacts may not have thrown up plumes immediately visible after the impacts, including the [impact] hitting the inner walls of the crater at an angle that ejected the impact pit dust sideways instead of straight up. “Luck plays a part in this,” he said, adding. “We have the data we need to address the questions we have and that’s the bottom line” [USA Today]. The researchers also say it’s possible that the rocket hull hit bedrock instead of loose, gravelly soil as expected, and therefore kicked up only a small debris cloud that wasn’t visible to LCROSS.
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NASA successfully crashed two objects into the moon early this morning, in an attempt to kick up the dust so it could be checked for traces of water ice. At 7:31 a.m. EST, an empty rocket hull plummeted towards the surface at 1.5 miles per second and plowed into a crater near the moon’s south pole, where it was expected to create a mini-crater half the size of an Olympic swimming pool. It was trailed by the LCROSS probe, which was supposed to take pictures of the first impact, fly through the dust plume, and then crash into the moon itself. According to early reports, the whole procedure went fine–except for one of the flashier details.
The live feed of images that LCROSS was supposed to beam back to Earth–and that earthlings were waiting for with baited breath–didn’t arrive on schedule. Screens got fuzz and no immediate pictures of the crash or the six-mile plume of lunar dust that the mission was all about. NASA officials said their instruments were working, but the planned live photos were missing…. People who got up before dawn to look for the crash at Los Angeles’ Griffith Observatory threw confused looks at each other instead. Telescope demonstrator Jim Mahon called the celestial show “anticlimactic” [AP].
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Astronomers have found an enormous and diffuse new ring of Saturn that lies far, far beyond the rest of the planet’s famous circlets. Researchers say the new ring is comprised of debris ejected from Saturn’s outlying moon Phoebe during impact. The new discovery also solves a puzzle regarding the curious two-faced appearance of Saturn’s moon Iapetus, whose leading hemisphere is much darker than its trailing side [New Scientist].
The ring, which has claimed the title of largest known ring in the solar system, starts about 3.7 million miles from Saturn and extends outward another 7.4 million miles. Its diameter is equivalent to 300 Saturns lined up side to side. And its entire volume can hold one billion Earths…. “This is one supersized ring” [CNN], says Anne Verbiscer, coauthor of the study published in Nature. The ring has the same orbital tilt as the moon Phoebe–both are tilted at a 27 degree angle from Saturn’s main ring plane–which supports the theory that Phoebe’s ejected dust feeds the ring.
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