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

That’s not aliens speaking to humans, but rather scientists speaking to worms, Caenorhabditis elegans, to be exact.

Poor C. elegans. It’s often researchers’ favorite choice because of its optical transparency and its well-defined nervous system of exactly 302 neurons. This time two different groups are using optogenetics, a way to control cell function with light, to manipulate the worms locomotion and behavior.

A group of scientists from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Massachusetts Medical School have come up with CoLBeRT (Controlling Locomotion and Behavior in Real Time) that uses colored lasers to control the worm while it’s moving.

“This optical instrument allows us to commandeer the nervous system of swimming or crawling nematodes [worms] using pulses of blue and green light—no wires, no electrodes,” says Aravinthan Samuel, a professor of physics and affiliate of Harvard’s Center for Brain Science. “We can activate or inactivate individual neurons or muscle cells, essentially turning the worm into a virtual biorobot.”

“If you shine blue light at a particular neuron near the front end of the worm, it perceives that as being touched and will back away,” says co-author Andrew M. Leifer, a PhD student also in Harvard’s Department of Physics and Center for Brain Science. “Similarly, blue light shined at the tail end of the modified worm will prompt it to move forward.”

(A video is of this mind-control is available here.)

By stimulating neurons associated with the worm’s reproductive system, they were even able to rouse the animal into secreting an egg.

A team from the Georgia Institute of Technology found that by using LCD projectors, they could also manipulate the worms’ movements. Apparently, according to Science News there are benefits to both technologies. CoLBeRT works as the worm is moving, and the Georgia Tech system has more precise targeting.

Both studies are published in the recent edition of Nature Methods. A subscription is needed to read the articles (Harvard et al and Georgia Tech), but an entire feature on optogenetics is available for free.

Image: Leifer et. al. / Nature Methods