While there is no officially acknowledged “man in the moon,” there is a LADEE (channel your inner Scot as you say it, “lad-ee”), or there will be soon. NASA’s upcoming Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is slated for launch today! This mission will give us a chance to revisit the lunar surface in great detail—and possibly determine the cause of some strange observations made decades ago during the Apollo missions.

When taking coronal photographs in 1971, the Apollo 15 astronauts found what they described as “excessive brightness” on the lunar surface. One objective of the LADEE mission is to determine the nature of this glow, thought to be a loose lunar atmosphere. (If an atmosphere exists, it’s much, MUCH less dense than ours.) The glow could also be caused by electrostatically charged dust that hovers around the lunar surface.

In order to get to the Moon, LADEE will take off on a Minotaur V launch vehicle, made from a converted peacekeeper missile—the first launch of its kind. It’s based on the Minotaur IV system, which has been used successfully many times.

After launch, LADEE will spend 30 days making its way to the Moon and establishing a stable orbit 156 kilometers above the surface; it will spend the next 30 days aligning, checking out, and tuning up its scientific instruments. The 100-day-long science portion of the mission will then allow NASA researchers to observe the lunar environment carefully and put to rest the 38-year-old mystery.

The tools onboard consist of an Ultraviolet and Visible Light Spectrometer (UVS), which will analyze chemical compounds and determine their elemental makeup; the Neutral Mass Spectrometer (NMS), which will help determine just how much atmosphere the moon has; and finally, the Lunar Dust Experiment (LDEX).

LADEE will also establish a higher bandwidth, more robust connection than any prior lunar mission, using laser-based communication instead of the traditional low-power radio-based system enabling more information to be sent faster. That’s right! NASA is deploying experimental space lasers to communicate with LADEE. How sci fi is that?

LADEE represents a synthesis of both new and well-tested technologies and a great chance for us to better understand our nearest neighbor in space.

Josh Roberts is a program presenter and astronomer at the California Academy of Sciences. He also contributes content to Morrison Planetarium productions.

Image: NASA EDGE

To date, we have discovered 865 confirmed exoplanets orbiting distant stars. But a great mystery remains: how do these planets form?

Theories on planet formation seem to fall apart when astronomers run simulations based on the laws of physics. Computer models show that clumps of dust orbiting around a star would either become large enough to smash into other clumps then break apart, or drift too close to their parent star then break apart. Either way, the clumps of matter do not survive long enough to form anything as large as a planet. When theories fail, observations often come in handy, to help scientists refine their theories with better data.

Enter the Atacama Large Millmeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), which only recently started making observations but has already sharpened our view of distant astronomical objects.

When it imaged a region around a particular young star in the constellation of Ophiuchus, ALMA observed a cashew-shaped dust cloud rather than the expected dust ring. This unusual structure could possibly trap large dust grains, keeping them safe during the beginning stages of their development. Scientists have affectionately described the formation as a “dust trap.”

Nienke van der Marel, a PhD student at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, explains, “It’s likely that we are looking at a kind of comet factory as the conditions are right for the particles to grow from millimeter to comet size. The dust is not likely to form full-sized planets at this distance from the star. But in the near future ALMA will be able to observe dust traps closer to their parent stars, where the same mechanisms are at work. Such dust traps really would be the cradles for new-born planets.”

The researchers think that larger dust particles could grow in the dust trap long enough to form a planet’s core. While growing within the dust trap, the planetary seed would be protected from factors that could inhibit its growth.

“Trapping the large dust particles prevents the radial inward drift and therefore allows the particles to grow to much larger sizes, up to rocks as wide as a kilometer or more,” Van der Marel adds. “The existence of dust traps in disks around young stars provides a crucial step in the start of planet formation by dust coagulation.”

This observation provides a crucial step in understanding how planets are formed, although it raises new questions about how dust traps are created in the first place. And so it goes: scientific mysteries often lead to more questions, followed by new theories and new observations.

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and interns for the Morrison Planetarium.

Image: NASA

As if Saturn wasn’t already considered drop-dead gorgeous. And as if Cassini wasn’t already the luckiest satellite in the skies. Using Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer instrument (VIMS), scientists gathered data to create beautiful images and even a video of auroras on the ringed planet. Released just today, these are truly a must see!

Also published today, in the journal Science, independent researchers have calculated the vastness of the BP oil spill by viewing videos of the underwater oil gushing. From Science News:

Crone and Tolstoy used an optical technique known as flow velocimetry. In this approach, the volume of a roiling plume is estimated by using video or a series of photos to measure the movements of a host of distinguishing features over a short period of time. Computers can then calculate likely flow volumes based on the plume’s size and density.

And their numbers exceed the government estimate by about 300,000 barrels (or 12.6 million gallons) of oil.

Earlier this week, scientists published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) describing the affect of dust on Colorado’s snowpack. According to Reuters and Yale Environment 360:

Dust created by intensifying human activities in the southwestern United States has caused snow in the Rocky Mountains to melt earlier over the last 150 years and has reduced runoff into the Colorado River basin by about 5 percent, according to a new study.

For a drought-prone area, this makes a potentially bad situation worse.

So, now for a bit of good news. A month ago, we reported on Conservation International’s launch of a worldwide search for 100 species or so of amphibians that were possibly extinct. This week, they announced three of those species were spotted—two in Africa and one in Mexico. You can read more at the 80beats blog on Discover.

Which science news items caught your eye this week? Let us know!