Water, water, everywhere! Radar results from a lunar probe have revealed that the moon’s north pole could be holding millions of tons of water in the form of thick ice, raising the possibility that human life could be sustained on Earth’s silvery satellite, NASA scientists said.

A NASA radar aboard India’s Chandrayaan-I lunar orbiter found 40 craters, ranging in size from 1 to 9 miles across, with pockets of ice. Scientists estimate at least 600 million tons of ice could be entombed in these craters [Wired].

Scientists estimate that this amount of water could easily sustain a moon base, or, if the oxygen in the ice was converted to fuel, could fire one space shuttle per day for 2,200 years. Last year, scientists found almost 26 gallons of water ice on the moon’s south pole, by crashing a rocket hull into a cold, dark crater. The crash produced a plume of material that provided evidence of water ice on the moon’s surface.

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Water, water everywhere. Another pass of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, made by the Cassini spacecraft last November, shows at least 30 geysers blasting water from the moon’s south pole. That’s 20 more than were previously known at that location. In addition, the most detailed infrared map of one of the south pole’s fissures, where jets emanate, indicates that the surface temperature there might be as high as 200 kelvins (-73º Celsius), or about 20 kelvins warmer than previously estimated [Discovery News]. Cassini drew to within about 1,000 miles of Enceladus to measure this geological feature, which is a fracture–one of the moon’s so-called “tiger stripes”–about a quarter-mile deep officially called Baghdad Sulcus.

While 200 kelvins is still a frigid temperature for we humans, research team member John Spencer said it could make a big difference on Enceladus. “The huge amount of heat pouring out of the tiger stripe fractures may be enough to melt the ice underground,” Spencer said. ”Results like this make Enceladus one of the most exciting places we’ve found in the solar system” [Wired.com].

For more info (and some spectacular photos), check out DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait’s post at Bad Astronomy. And see 80beats’ previous coverage of Enceladus below:

Bad Astronomy: Enceladus Is Erupting!
80beats: Cassini Probe Finds “Ingredients For Life” on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus
80beats: Antifreeze Might Allow For Oceans—And Life—On Enceladus
80beats: Does Enceladus, Saturn’s Geyser-Spouting Moon, Have Liquid Oceans?
80beats: New Evidence of Hospitable Conditions for Life on Saturn’s Moons
80beats: Geysers From Saturn’s Moon May Indicate Liquid Lakes, and a Chance for Life
80beats: Cassini Spacecraft Snaps Pictures of Saturn’s Geyser-Spouting Moon

Image: NASA/JPL/GSFC/SWRI/SSI

After more than six years of exploring the Red Planet, the Mars rover Spirit will rove no more. The robotic adventurer is mired in a sand bed, and NASA has officially given up on trying to extricate it.

While it will continue to operate as a “stationary research platform” for the time being, there’s no denying that the rover’s swashbuckling days are over. No longer will Spirit spot an interesting landmark in the distance and gamely trek towards it, with the possibility of a fresh scientific discovery around every corner and under every rock. This photo gallery is a well-deserved eulogy for Spirit, in which we’ll survey its travels and achievements.

In 2003, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, on a three-month mission to investigate Martian terrain and atmosphere on opposite sides of the planet. The solar-powered rovers surpassed NASA’s wildest dreams, extending their missions by nearly 25 times their anticipated lengths.

Since landing on Mars in January 2004, Spirit has snapped more than 127,000 pictures. The robot probed beneath the worn surface of Mars, analyzing the microstructure of rocks and soil with a sophisticated array of instruments: spectrometers, microscopic imagers, and other tools. Spirit has also gathered strong evidence that water once flowed on the Martian surface, which could have created a hospitable environment for microbial life.

Spirit and its twin rover (which is still traveling on) will be replaced by more advanced machines that will roll onto the Martian soil in the coming decades. But Spirit will be remembered long after its operating system flickers off for good. Like a robotic Neil Armstrong, the rover has earned its place in the space explorers’ hall of heroes.

All text by Aline Reynolds. Image: NASA/JPL/Cornell

Five years ago, the Cassini spacecraft first detected plumes of water ice emanating from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, making the moon one of the best hopes for finding life somewhere else in the solar system. Astronomers have argued over whether or not those jets come from a subsurface ocean of liquid water, but new findings by Cassini provide evidence that water could indeed be sloshing around beneath the frozen surface of this small moon.

During a 2008 pass through the plumes, the spacecraft found negatively charged water molecules. Back home this short-lived type of ion is produced where water is moving, such as in waterfalls or crashing ocean waves [Scientific American]. Researcher Andrew Coates led the study, which is coming out in the journal Icarus.

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Scientists are pushing back the date that the first land-walkers stepped foot on solid ground. Thanks to the discovery of prehistoric footprints from an 8-foot-long animal, scientists now say creatures strolled the Earth 20 million years earlier than previously thought. The prints were made by tetrapods—animals with backbones and four limbs—and could rewrite the history of when, where, and why fish evolved limbs and first walked onto land, the study says [National Geographic News]. The researchers published their results in the journal Nature.

Dozens of the fossilized footprints were found in an abandoned quarry in Poland, and the researchers say that the area was probably a lagoon or an intertidal flat when the tetrapod wandered across it about 395 million years ago. Researchers say the footprints in such old rock was a big surprise: They’re about 10 million years older than body fossils of creatures such as Tiktaalik and Panderichthys, … believed to represent the transition from lobe-finned fish to creatures fully adapted to life on land [Science News].

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NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has taken detailed pictures of what scientists are saying is evidence that large lakes of liquid water sat on the planet’s surface relatively recently–which is to say, about 3 billion years ago.

MRO imaged several deep depressions that scientists previously attributed to the sublimation of underground ice 4 billion years ago. However, the new images show that the depressions are connected by long channels, and researchers say these channels could only be formed by running water, and not by ice turning directly into gas. The scientists’ ageing of the region, which on bodies like Mars is done by counting craters, suggests the features formed during the so-called Hesperian Epoch on the Red Planet [BBC News]. Essentially, this means that there was water on Mars a billion years more recently than previously thought. The findings were published in the journal Geology.

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Last week, while the world gearing up to ring in a new year, China was quietly reeling from a new pollution scare. A pipeline operated by the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC)—the country’s number one oil producer—ruptured and spilled 40,000 gallons of diesel in the northern part of the country.

The spill occurred in the Wei River, a tributary of the Yellow River–which is the source of fresh water for millions of Chinese. Over the weekend, workers threw 17 floating dams across the Wei to block the toxic diesel and save the Yellow River. But scientists discovered diesel traces in a reservoir behind a dam in Sanmenxia, a city about 100 kilometers (62 miles) downstream from the point where the Wei meets the Yellow River, an official in the Henan provincial environmental protection bureau said on Monday [Wall Street Journal].

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Groundwater levels around the country have been sinking as wells for drinking water and irrigation pull water out of aquifers faster than they can naturally recharge. Now, using gravity-measuring satellites, NASA and California researchers have documented the extent of water loss in California’s Central Valley, and the results aren’t good.

The measurements show the amount of water lost in the two main Central Valley river basins within the past six years could almost fill the nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead in Nevada [AP]. The total is about 30 cubic kilometer; one cubic km contains more than 264 billion gallons of water.

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Scientists have long suspected that Mars was once a wet place, and that water helped to shape the geography we see there today. Now, thanks to a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, we don’t have to simply imagine what a watery Mars might have looked like long ago—geographers have created this new map of the Red Planet covered in blue water.

This new research addresses the longstanding question of whether surface water carved features, or whether other processes like groundwater sapping could’ve been involved. The new map, created by a computerised analysis of satellite data, shows that some regions of Mars had valley networks almost as dense as those on Earth. ”It is now difficult to argue against runoff erosion as the major mechanism of Martian valley networks,” said Professor Wei Luo, from Northern Illinois University in the US, who led the research [The Telegraph]. Instead, he argues, there must have been rivers on Mars long ago to create such dense networks.

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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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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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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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