NASA’s Mars Rover to Zap Rocks With Laser

Posted on December 25, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

A rock-zapping laser instrument on NASA’s next Mars rover has roots in a demonstration that Roger Wiens saw 13 years ago in a colleague’s room at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.The Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument on the rover Curiosity can hit rocks with a laser powerful enough to excite a pinhead-size spot into a glowing, ionized gas. ChemCam then observes the flash through a telescope and analyzes the spectrum of light to identify the chemical elements in the target.

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Life May be Detected on Distant Planets because of a new Remote Sensing Technique

Posted on December 24, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

Thanks to a new remote sensing technique, astronomers may soon be able to detect the presence of multicellular life (like trees) on planets outside of the Solar System.Excitingly, we’ve been able to detect the composition of atmospheres on a handful of planets orbiting other stars. But if next-generation space observatories go online within the next couple of decades, some scientists propose using a new technique to determine details such as tree-like multicellular life on extrasolar planets.

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Posted in BIODIVERSITY, Remote Sensing 101 | Leave a comment

Oceans on Earth and Other Planets were made by Traces of Water

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

A recent study by an MIT planetary scientist suggests that the planetesimals themselves provided the water that created oceans. As Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the Mitsui Career Development Assistant Professor of Geology in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, reports in a recent paper in Astrophysics and Space Science, these planetesimals contained trace amounts of water — at least .01 to .001 percent of their total mass (scientists don’t know the precise size of planetesimals, but they estimate that those that created Earth were between hundreds and thousands of kilometers in diameter). In the paper, Elkins-Tanton says it is likely that even tiny amounts of water in the planetesimals could create steam atmospheres that later cooled and condensed into liquid oceans on terrestrial planets.

source:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208154442.htm

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Measurement of Magnetic Field in Earth’s Core

Posted on December 20, 2010 by Rashid Faridi

A University of California, Berkeley, geophysicist has made the first-ever measurement of the strength of the magnetic field inside Earth’s core, 1,800 miles underground.The magnetic field strength is 25 Gauss, or 50 times stronger than the magnetic field at the surface that makes compass needles align north-south. Though this number is in the middle of the range geophysicists predict, it puts constraints on the identity of the heat sources in the core that keep the internal dynamo running to maintain this magnetic field.

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