(Press-News.org) New maps produced by the Lyman Alpha Mapping Project aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal features at the Moon's northern and southern poles in regions that lie in perpetual darkness. LAMP, developed by Southwest Research Institute, uses a novel method to peer into these so-called permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), making visible the invisible. LAMP's principal investigator is Dr. Alan Stern, associate vice president of the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division.
The LAMP maps show that many PSRs are darker at far-ultraviolet wavelengths and redder than nearby surface areas that receive sunlight. The darker regions are consistent with large surface porosities — indicating "fluffy" soils — while the reddening is consistent with the presence of water frost on the surface.
"Our results suggest there could be as much as 1 to 2 percent water frost in some permanently shadowed soils," says author Dr. Randy Gladstone, an Institute scientist in the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division. "This is unexpected because naturally occurring interplanetary Lyman-alpha was thought to destroy any water frost before it could accumulate."
The LAMP team estimates that the loss of water frost is about 16 times slower than previously believed. In addition, the accumulation of water frost is also likely to be highly dependent on local conditions, such as temperature, thermal cycling and even geologically recent "impact gardening" in which micrometeoroid impacts redistribute the location and depth of volatile compounds.
Finding water frost at these new locations adds to a rapidly improving understanding of the Moon's water and related species, as discovered by three other space missions through near-infrared emissions observations and found buried within the Cabeus crater by the LCROSS impactor roughly two years ago. During LRO's nominal exploration mission, LAMP added to the LCROSS results by measuring hydrogen, mercury and other volatile gases ejected along with the water from the permanently shaded soils of the Moon's Cabeus crater.
"An even more unexpected finding is that LAMP's technique for measuring the lunar Lyman-alpha albedo indicates higher surface porosities within PSRs, and supports the long-postulated presence of tenuous 'fairy-castle' like arrangements of surface grains in the PSR soils," says co-author Dr. Kurt Retherford, a senior research scientist also in SwRI's Space Science and Engineering Division.
Comparisons with future LAMP maps created using data gathered from the Moon's day side will prove helpful for revealing more about the presence of water frost, as well as the surface porosities of the darker surface features observed. The LAMP team is also eager to apply the Lyman-alpha technique elsewhere on the Moon and on other solar system objects such as Mercury.
LRO's findings are expected to be valuable to the future consideration of a permanent Moon base. The permanently shadowed regions of the Moon are revealing themselves to be some of the most exotic places in the solar system, well worthy of future exploration, says Retherford. Any discovery of water frost and other resources in the area also could reduce the need to transport resources from Earth to a base at the pole.
The paper, "Far-Ultraviolet Reflectance Properties of the Moon's Permanently Shadowed Regions," by G.R. Gladstone, K.D. Retherford, A.F. Egan, D.E. Kaufmann, P.F. Miles, et al., was published in the Jan. 7 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., developed and manages the LRO mission. LRO's current Science Mission is implemented for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate sponsored LRO's initial one-year Exploration Mission that concluded in September 2010.
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Editors: Images to accompany this story are available at http://www.swri.org/press/2012/lamp.htm.
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (January 13, 2012) – The blood-brain barrier is essential for maintaining the brain's stable environment—preventing entry of harmful viruses and bacteria and isolating the brain's specific hormonal and neurotransmitter activity from that in the rest of the body.
In addition to nerve cells, the brain contains glia cells that support and protect the neurons. In the fruit fly, the blood-brain boundary is made by glia joined into an envelope sealed around the nerve cells. As the brain rapidly expands during development, the glial envelope must grow correspondingly ...
Don't be fooled by the company name, Golf Range Netting caters to more than just the sport of golf! With client needs ranging from tennis courts to baseball and soccer fields, there's no project too large or too complicated for Golf Range Netting to tackle.
With a portfolio that boasts accomplishments throughout the nation including the tallest sports netting in the United States and projects for major league baseball teams such as the Boston Red Sox, it's clear that Golf Range Netting is well-equipped to provide for any sports netting or lighting complexity. After ...
ATP is the major energy source for most organisms and ATPases are the machines, which utilize this fuel, for example to move muscles or cargo in our body. The very abundant chaperone protein Hsp90 has such an ATPase in each of its two monomers. During the last years experiments had suggested that the movement and conformational changes of ATPase proteins are in general strictly linked to ATP binding and hydrolysis (i.e. fuel consumption).
To probe this theory Thorsten Hugel, Professor at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and member of the Nanosystems Initiative ...
Digisonics, the #1 KLAS rated Cardiology PACS and Structured Reporting vendor for four consecutive years, announced that support contract renewals exceeded 90% once again in 2011. This marks the third consecutive year that support contract renewals have exceeded 90%, a testament to customer confidence in the quality of Digisonics support services.
Digisonics' focus on providing best-of-class image management and structured reporting systems combined with commitment to excellence in customer support services has led to consistent recognition by independent research groups ...
MAYWOOD, Ill. -- A Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine study includes some unexpected findings about the immune systems of smoke-inhalation patients.
Contrary to expectations, patients who died from their injuries had lower inflammatory responses in their lungs than patients who survived.
"Perhaps a better understanding of this early pulmonary immune dysfunction will allow for therapies that further improve outcomes in burn care," researchers reported.
The study is published in the January/February issue of the Journal of Burn Care & Research. First ...
Confidence in the Long Island economy is up compared to the national economy according to the 18th Annual Economic Survey and Opinion Poll conducted by Albrecht, Viggiano, Zureck & Company, P.C. (AVZ) in partnership with Long Island Business News and the Townsend School of Business at Dowling College. Nearly half of the survey respondents indicated that revenue had increased. A panel of Long Island business leaders will discuss the survey findings as HIA-LI, the recognized voice for business on Long Island, hosts the Long Island Economic Summit, Thursday, January 26, ...
"The overactive bladder syndrome has become an accepted way to simplify a complex array of symptoms and leads people to believe that an overactive bladder is an independent disease in itself. However, the truth is not as simple as this, as there are usually several factors at work explaining the symptoms. This is also one of the reasons why so called overactive bladder medications often do not bring the hoped result," says Kari Tikkinen, MD, PhD, from the HUCS Department of Urology.
The article on overactive bladder syndrome, which was co-written by Tikkinen, who currently ...
Are you someone who easily recognises everyone you've ever met? Or maybe you struggle, even with familiar faces? It is already known that we are better at recognising faces from our own race but researchers have only recently questioned how we assimilate the information we use to recognise people.
New research by the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus has shown that when it comes to recognising people the Malaysian Chinese have adapted their facial recognition techniques to cope with living in a multicultural environment.
The study 'You Look Familiar: How Malaysian ...
MAYWOOD, Ill. -- A study about how wearing contact lenses affects glaucoma measurements has been named the top presentation at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine's annual St. Albert's Day research symposium.
First author of the study is Marie Brenner, a fourth-year student at Stritch School of Medicine.
Brenner and colleagues studied the effects of contact lens wear on retinal nerve fiber layer measurements, which ophthalmologists use to diagnose and manage glaucoma. The researchers found that in patients with lower refractive errors, better quality ...
The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recently
published in Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans (JGR-C), Journal of
Geophysical Research-Planets (JGR-E), Journal of Geophysical Research-
Biogeosciences (JGR-G), and Geophysical Research Letters (GRL).
In this release:
Variability of North Atlantic heat transport observed from instrument data
Methane exceeds nitrous oxide in rivers' contribution to warming
Waste recycling primary source of energy in deep ocean
Record Arctic ozone depletion could occur again
Traveling supraglacial ...
