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

Mark Showalter and his research team at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, are on a roll. They’ve shown us yet again how much we have to learn about our closest planetary neighbors.

In 2011 and 2012, Showalter’s team discovered two additional moons orbiting Pluto. (The International Astronomical Union recently decided on the names Kerberos and Styx for these moons, despite an overwhelming public vote to name one of them Vulcan.) Using the Hubble Space Telescope, the same researchers recently discovered a new moon orbiting Neptune.

“I got nice pictures of the arcs [segments of the planet’s rings], which was my main purpose, but I also got this little extra dot that I was not expecting to see,” says Showalter.

At 65,400 miles from Neptune, the speedy, newly-discovered moon completes an orbit every 23 hours. This moon is hard to track, but more than 150 archived images from Hubble between 2004 and 2009 enabled Showalter to track down the orbit of the new moon.

“The moons and arcs orbit very quickly, so we had to devise a way to follow their motion in order to bring out the details of the system,” he says. “It’s the same reason a sports photographer tracks a running athlete—the athlete stays in focus, but the background blurs.” (Showalter compares capturing the new moon to Eadweard James Muybridge’s famous racehorse photographs in a blog post earlier this week.)

This 12-mile wide moon is the smallest of the Neptunian system (which currently includes 14 moons), and revolves around Neptune between the orbits of Larissa and Proteus. For now the tiny dot is called S/2004 N 1. The official name may not be put to vote this time (but Star Trek fans can get cracking on ideas).

S/2004 N 1’s discovery brings up additional questions besides its new name. A mini moon like this should have had trouble forming in the neighborhood of much larger moons.

“How you can have a 20-kilometre object around Neptune is a little bit of a puzzle,” says Showalter. “It’s far enough away that its orbit is stable. Once you put it there it will stay there. The question is, how did it get there?”

Triton is Neptune’s biggest moon, orbiting in the direction opposite Neptune’s spin. Astronomers originally thought that a moon of this type would have to be captured by Neptune’s gravity, destroying all smaller moons in the process.

Stay tuned to learn S/2004 N 1’s new name, and perhaps new theories about how it originated in the first place!

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

Image: NASA, ESA, M. Showalter

Every time an asteroid comes close to Earth, we learn something new about our Universe. With its closest approach last week, we learned that asteroid 1998 QE2 has its own moon.

Astronomers use close approaches by asteroids to take pictures and measurements that tell us more about space objects. On the scale of the solar system, apparently 3.6 million miles (about 15 times the distance between Earth and the Moon) is considered a “close approach.” Close-approach studies depend on the 70-meter Deep Space Network (DSN) antenna in Goldstone, California, with additional imagery supplied from other antennas in the DSN to maximize information content.

At this distance, the DSN was able to resolve a moon orbiting around asteroid 1998 QE2. As such, it is classified as a binary asteroid.  According to NASA, over 15% of asteroids travel in groups, where two or three objects orbit around one another.

The detailed study of asteroid 1998 QE2 marks a milestone in NASA’s Near Earth Object Program. “It’s one of the initial successes of our effort to find the big asteroids that could hit the Earth and cause global catastrophe,” said Paul Chodas, a scientist who is part of the Program.

The asteroid is not dangerous or threatening to earth, but astronomers can nonetheless use its close approach and that of others as valuable learning opportunities.

“Whenever an asteroid approaches this closely, it provides an important scientific opportunity to study it in detail to understand its size, shape, rotation, surface features, and what they can tell us about its origin. We will also use new radar measurements of the asteroid’s distance and velocity to improve our calculation of its orbit and compute its motion farther into the future than we could otherwise,” said Lance Benner, the principal investigator for the Goldstone radar observations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The more asteroids we catalog, the safer we are from a potentially dangerous impact. See our video on the B612’s Sentinel Mission for more information.

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

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSSR

The conference gave the same opportunity to younger scientists, through the AGU’s Bright STaRS program. “The program began in 2003 to get schools kids to the AGU meeting,” according to Pranoti Asher, manager of education for the AGU. She also reports that the number of middle and high school students attending has grown from 31 in 2003 to 128 this year.

Two teams from the Academy’s Careers in Science (CiS) intern program were among the Bright STaRS participants. The CiS program serves youth from communities traditionally underrepresented in the sciences with opportunities to immerse themselves in the natural world, develop life and job skills, receive college and career mentorship, and learn science and sustainability concepts in an authentic, paid work environment.

In a poster session that included 2,500 posters from professional and young scientists, CiS interns presented two very diverse posters—one on volcanism on the Moon and the other on sand crabs that live on Ocean Beach.

The first team worked with a scientist at NASA/JPL, using data and images gathered by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The high schoolers decided to look at a volcanic structure on the far side of the Moon called the Compton-Belkovich Feature (CBF). Their question: How similar or different is CBF to volcanoes on the near side of the lunar surface?

The young researchers looked at albedo, elevation, radioactive thorium concentration and the surrounding geology. The youth found that Compton Belkovich is very different from other lunar volcanoes. Next, the team will attempt to identify potential sites that will yield the safest landing location and most scientific benefit.

A little closer to home, the second team looked at the influence of wastewater effluence on the population of sand crabs on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. The Oceanside Treatment Plant lies just south of the beach and deposits copper, zinc and ammonia into the ocean.

The interns wondered what effect these chemicals have on the native Pacific mole crabs (Emerita analoga), which are a big part of the local ecosystem. Looking at previous studies on marine invertebrates, the team hypothesized that all three chemicals would negatively affect the abundance of these sand crabs.

The CiS interns have been studying the Pacific mole crabs on Ocean Beach for the past ten years. Using the data they collected between 2007 and 2010 and studying EPA data for the same four years, these young scientists found that while copper and zinc were bad for the populations, ammonia actually increased the abundance of these crustaceans.

Both teams enjoyed presenting to other researchers and their own Bright STaRS peers. Professional scientists seemed to thoroughly enjoy the presentations and gave the youth advice on where to take their research next.

And the high schoolers?

“My favorite part of AGU was presenting our research,” says senior Mollie. “Just like when teaching a lesson on the public floor of the museum, Angel and I had to gauge our visitor’s level of interest, and previous scientific knowledge. By tailoring our presentations and focusing on clearly and succinctly communicating our research, I felt I became more familiar with our project and its subtleties. Additionally, visitor’s suggestions and critiques of our project invigorated my interest in taking our Pacific mole crab research further in future years.”

“It was my first time at AGU and I had a wonderful time meeting scientists and presenting the research on lunar volcanoes to all,” says senior Rabiya. “It was definitely an amazing experience to be in a place where everyone is excited and curious about the same thing—the sciences!”

Image: Careers in Science Interns (from left to right) Mollie, Angel, Joseph, Reina, and Rabiya

The third Thursday of every month, the Morrison Planetarium hosts “Universe Update” at the 6:30 planetarium show during NightLife. I select my favorite astronomy stories from the past month, and I give a brief run-down of current discoveries while taking audiences on a guided tour of the Universe. As you may or may not know, the planetarium sports a three-dimensional atlas of the Universe, so we can take you places virtually while talking about the latest astronomy news.

I always start at Earth and work my way out to cosmological distances, so I’ll list the news stories in the same order—from closest to farthest from home.

Fourth graders from the Emily Dickinson Elementary School in Bozeman, Montana, proved themselves more creative than NASA engineers! Crazy rocket scientists named their two lunar-orbiting spacecraft “GRAIL-A” and “GRAIL-B” (where, of course, “GRAIL” is an acronym, which stands for “Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory”). The elementary school students selected the names “Ebb” and “Flow,” which NASA selected as the winning contribution in a nationwide contest. The GRAIL mission measures the ebb and flow of gravity, in a sense, as the two spacecraft orbit the Moon and measure variations in its gravitational pull. From the GRAIL website:

As they fly over areas of greater and lesser gravity, caused both by visible features such as mountains and craters and by masses hidden beneath the lunar surface, they will move slightly toward and away from each other. An instrument aboard each spacecraft will measure the changes in their relative velocity very precisely, and scientists will translate this information into a high-resolution map of the Moon’s gravitational field.

A little farther from home, new reports from a comet impact on the Sun that took place last July. We like to describe comets as “dirty snowballs,” and as you might imagine, a comet getting too close to the Sun stands a snow ball’s chance in… Well, a million-degree plasma irradiated by incident solar flux. The comet evaporated over a period of about 20 minutes, and as described in a paper that appears in today’s Science magazine, it probably measured between 150 and 300 feet across and had a mass equivalent to an aircraft carrier. According to Karel Schrijver, a solar scientist at Lockheed Martin in Palo Alto, the comet moved speedily to its demise: “It was moving along at almost 400 miles per second through the intense heat of the Sun—and was literally being evaporated away.”

A fair bit farther from the scorching heat of the Sun, the Dawn spacecraft is sending back gorgeous images of the asteroid Vesta, including this gorgeous snapshot of a crater on the asteroid’s surface. Dawn has entered a low-altitude orbit that gives it a close look at the potato-shaped planetoid. Learning more about such objects should help us better understand the formation of the solar system, and after its stay at Vesta, Dawn will move on to Ceres, the dwarf planet (like Pluto) that resides between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Beyond our own solar system, of course, we are rapidly discovering planets in orbit around other stars: these extrasolar planets (or exoplanets) now number in excess of 700, and astronomers find more all the time.

As I described in one of my updates from the American Astronomical Society meeting last week, astronomers have announced the discovery of the most compact extrasolar planetary system yet detected. Looking at the KOI 961 system side-by-side with Jupiter and its major satellites strikes me as a particularly illuminating comparison: only 70% larger than Jupiter, the host star (the smallest known to have planets) has at least three planets (the smallest yet found) in orbit around it, the smallest of which is about the size of Mars. John Johnson, an astronomer at Caltech, announced the superlative system last week, and on April 2nd, he will give a talk in the Morrison Planetarium as part of our Benjamin Dean Lecture Series, “The Quest for Habitable Planets Orbiting Red Dwarfs.”

And astronomers have help in their search. Just this week, we had a glimpse into the democratization of astronomy… Viewers of a British television program(me) may have discovered a new exoplanet! Evidence from the Kepler mission suggests the existence of a Neptune-sized planet around the star SPH10066540, orbiting every 90 days at a distance equivalent to Mercury from our Sun. The discovery awaits confirmation, but you don’t have to watch telly in the U.K. to join in the search for such objects. You can go to the PlanetHunters website and start sifting through Kepler data in hopes of finding a planet of your own…

In another of my posts last week, I mentioned the spectacular new Spitzer image of Cygnus X, a massive star-forming region in the constellation (you guessed it) Cygnus. Ten times the size of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, Cygnus X appears to host some 26,000 possible young stellar objects, according to an announcement last week.

Moving farther from home, I talked a bit about the new dark matter map that I previously described in a post from Austin. It turns out that analyzing the light from 10 million galaxies call tell you a lot about where dark matter resides, and since dark matter drives the formation of much of the structure in the Universe, that knowledge helps us understand more about the evolution of the cosmos…

The dark matter maps tell one part of the story, but we also rely on studies of the cosmic microwave background to tease out how the Universe has evolved over time. Since 2003, the gold standard of such measurements have come from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). But ESA’s Planck mission recently completed its survey of the cosmic microwave background: the sensor used to make the observations ran out of its coolant a little less than a week ago. It had collected more than two years’ worth of data, however, and the first new high-resolution maps will be released early next year. (Hey! It takes a while to process all that data.)

That’s all for now. Check back for next month’s update! Or come to NightLife on Thursday, 15 February, and check out “Universe Update” live in the Morrison Planetarium.

Ryan Wyatt is the director of the Morrison Planetarium and Science Visualization at the California Academy of Sciences.

Image: SOHO (ESA & NASA)

Britney Schmidt, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, and her team were perusing data from the Galileo spacecraft. From 1995-2003, the Galileo mission studied Jupiter and some of its 64 moons, sending back a wealth of data that scientists are still studying today.

Several images of the icy moon Europa caught the team’s attention—especially those of roughly circular, bumpy features on its surface called chaos terrains. These chaos terrains looked familiar to the researchers, much like ice fields in Greenland and Antarctica here on Earth.

On our planet, these features correspond to ice shelves that sit on oceans or glaciers that cover volcanoes. The scientists wondered if the chaos terrains could be formed in similar ways and developed a model to test their theory.

Data from Galileo already suggested the existence of a saltwater ocean well below the surface of Europa—an ocean that contains more liquid water than all of Earth’s oceans combined! However, being so far from the Sun, the ocean surface is completely frozen. Most scientists think this ice crust is tens of miles thick.
“One opinion in the scientific community has been if the ice shell is thick, that’s bad for biology. That might mean the surface isn’t communicating with the underlying ocean,” said Schmidt at a NASA press conference yesterday.

But the bumpy surface could be good for biology. Schmidt’s model shows the chaos features on Europa’s surface may be formed by mechanisms that involve significant exchange between the icy shell and underlying lakes, equal in volume to North America’s Great Lakes.

These mechanisms could transfer nutrients and energy between the surface of the planet and the vast global ocean already inferred to exist below the thick ice shell. Which could increase the potential for life there.

“Now, we see evidence that it’s a thick ice shell that can mix vigorously and new evidence for giant shallow lakes. That could make Europa and its ocean more habitable,” reported Schmidt.

Still, because the lakes (if they exist) would lie a few miles below the surface, the only true confirmation of their presence would come from a future spacecraft mission designed to probe the ice shell.

So we’ll have to wait to confirm life on Europa, according to Wired.

Unfortunately, NASA does not currently have missions to explore Europa on its schedule… A proposed Jupiter-Europa Orbiter has an estimated price tag of $4.6 billion, making it unlikely to launch during a time of budget squeezes.

The research appears in the current edition of Nature.

Image: Britney Schmidt and Dead Pixel FX, University of Texas at Austin

So imagine the surprise, forty years ago, when the Apollo astronauts brought back moon rocks with magnetic properties. How is that possible?

This week, two teams of scientists attempt to solve the mystery with separate papers in Nature.

Christina Dwyer, of UC Santa Cruz, and her team offer one theory. Early in its history, the Moon orbited Earth at a much closer distance than it does now, and it continues to gradually recede from Earth—even today! At close distances, tidal interactions between Earth and the Moon caused the Moon’s mantle to rotate slightly differently than the core. This differential motion of the mantle relative to the core stirred the liquid core, creating fluid motions that could give rise to a magnetic field.

Michael Le Bars, of Non-Equilibrium Phenomena Research Institute in Marseille, France, and his team have another theory. Large impact events like asteroids a few billion years ago could have caused sloshing within the lunar core for up to 10,000 years at a time.

So is it the asteroids’ fault or Earth’s? New Scientist doesn’t take sides:

Both models offer “a way out of a pretty major conundrum,” says Ben Weiss at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Both theories produce a magnetic field of the right strength—about one fiftieth of what we experience here on Earth’s surface—but how do we decide which one is correct?  Sky & Telescope explains:

Distinguishing between these theories will depend in part on figuring out which rocks were magnetized when. Big bull’s-eyes happened pretty rarely in lunar history. If an impact created a dynamo, any molten surface rock around the time of the crash—such as lava created by the hit itself—would record the magnetic field created. But lava that erupted on the surface between these infrequent events wouldn’t. If most lunar rocks everywhere were magnetized during a particular time period, including rocks not made by impacts, that would sway the balance toward the precession argument, Weiss says. If impact melts are always associated with a magnetic field, the balance swings the other way.

Or maybe a combination of both? Wired makes the point that the two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive:

Dwyer herself has suggested that both models could have some parts correct, with tidal forces pushing the mantle steadily for a time and giant impacts speeding up the motion occasionally.

Image: Luc Viatour / www.Lucnix.be

Earth

The Gulf oil spill—the number of gallons spilled and the controversy surrounding the damage seems to top many lists this year. Nature even named Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, its newsmaker of the year for how she handled the crisis.

Natural disasters often took the front page in 2010 with the Haitian earthquake and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull topping many lists. The hard-to-pronounce Icelandic volcano also made many of the best science images of the year lists.

DiscoveryNews ends the year on a positive note with “How Humans Helped the Earth in 2010,” a slide show with text concerning recent strides in alternative energy, species and habitat conservation efforts and individual efforts to go green (electric cars, white roofs and saving energy).

For more environmental news of the year, New Scientist’s Short Sharp Science has a great review and the Nature Conservancy has a best/worst list on its site.

Life

Teeny, modified life stole the spotlight this year—the J. Craig Venter Institute’s so-called “synthetic cell” and GFAJ-1—the bacteria that incorporates arsenic into its DNA—or so NASA scientists claimed.  Science writer Carl Zimmer discredited the arsenic bacteria paper on Slate; NASA author Felisa Wolfe-Simon defended herself in Science. Fun stuff!

The spread of pesky bedbugs was number six in Discover’s “Top 100 Science Stories of 2010.”

Nature’s great article this past summer on eradicating mosquitoes was among its readers’ top choices of the year.

Looking for something a little bigger and less controversial? New Scientist has “The coolest animals of 2010,” which includes a scorpion-eating bat and a fly thought to be extinct for over 160 years!

NPR found it was a very good year for Neanderthals—their genome was sequenced, brain examined and diet expanded.

Remarkably, the Census of Marine Life tops the BP oil spill in the Deep Type Flow blog’s biggest marine science stories of the year for its sheer numbers:

…over 500 research expeditions covering every ocean, over 2,500 scientists and the discovery of over 6,000 species new to science and published in over 2600 peer-reviewed papers.

Space

ScienceNow’s most popular story of all time, not just 2010, was “Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?” A wonderful theory that we also covered last spring.

Exoplanets, in part thanks to the Kepler mission, were all over the news this year—whether it had to do with size, atmosphere or number within a star system. Discover’s interview with local exoplanet hunter (and California Academy of Sciences Fellow) Geoff Marcy made number 11(!) on their 100 top stories list.

A little closer to home, Jupiter’s missing stripe and Neptune’s tale of cannibalism are included in New Scientist’s most popular space stories of 2010.

Our Moon and Saturn’s moons made news throughout the year and the top lists on Universe Today and Wired this week.

Universe Today also included SDO’s new views of the sun in their top stories list. Stunning!

Hubble celebrated its 20^th year in space this year by taking even more beautiful images. Several are included in Bad Astronomy’s “Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010.”

Technology

Electric cars and NASA’s new foray into commercial spacecraft are included in Scientific American’s top ten stories of the year.

The Large Hadron Collider was very busy this year, and topped many lists. Another machine at CERN made news (and also topped Nature’s readers’ choice list) when it was able to capture antimatter for a sixth of a second!

Graphene not only garnered a Nobel Prize this year, the material (and it’s potential) also made news and top science lists of the year.

DiscoveryNews put plastics on their 2010 list—whether its finding new ways of removing plastic from the oceans or engineering smarter plastics.

What was your favorite science story of the year? Share with us by adding it to the comment section below!

Image by Les Stone, International Bird Rescue Research Center/Wikipedia