Posted on 12/25/2008 6:22:25 AM PST by MyTwoCopperCoins
Bangalore, Dec 25 (PTI) The Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), one of the 11 payloads on board India's Chandrayaan-I spacecraft, has taken composite image of the Orientale Basin region of the moon providing new information, officials said. Different wavelengths of light in the image captured by M3 during the commissioning phase of Chandrayaan-I as the spacecraft orbited the moon at an altitude of 100 km, provided new information about the region, located on the moon's western limb, they said.
M3 is from Brown University and Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the United States.
"The Moon Mineralogy Mapper provides us with compositional information across the moon that we have never had access to before", said Carle Pieters, the instrument's principal investigator, from Brown University, in a statement.
"Our ability to now identify and map the composition of the surface in geologic context provides a new level of detail needed to explore and understand Earth's nearest neighbour", he said.
The image revealed changes in rock and mineral composition, indicated the abundance of iron-bearing minerals such as pyroxene, and provided a new level of detail on the form and structure of the region's surface.
M3 is the first instrument to provide highly uniform imaging of the lunar surface. Along with the length and width dimensions across a typical image, the instrument analyses a third dimension - colour.
M3 provides scientists their first opportunity to examine lunar mineralogy at high spatial and spectral resolution. PTI
*sigh*
Iron? We’ve got lots of iron down here. Need to find something more valuable, something that will justify some large-scale missions.
Ultimately, conquering our solar system - and, by extension, space - will ensure the survival of mankind.
If you want an immediate economic justification, I won't be much help. He3 is the first thing that comes to mind.
That’s a Gouda Picture! Where’s the Cow?
This just in..”Green Cheese Fable debunked!” MSM
Dude. Iron on the moon is valuable. Do you know how much money it costs to put a pound of matter into space? If someday, we could get off our collective rear ends and put some colonies on the moon, the sunlight, unfiltered by atmosphere, would be quite useful in smelting iron, thus allowing for the production of tools, building materials, and other stuff.
Merry Christmas!
He3 for fusion reactors, a cheaper stable non-nuclear bomb material is highly abundant on the moon. One shuttle can power the whole US for a year. that is the goal of getting to the moon. The other minerals on the moon are building blocks that can get us to the rest of solar system. Moon iron (gotten from another post) becomes steel for ship and base construction and is less costly in transporting the materials than lifting them from earth to orbit. the moon is a great jumping off point for the next colonization to mars or the asteroids where there is more materials for expansion.
“If someday, we could get off our collective rear ends and put some colonies on the moon, the sunlight, unfiltered by atmosphere, would be quite useful in smelting iron, thus allowing for the production of tools, building materials, and other stuff.”
Don’t worry, as soon as the World Government is in place we’ll colonize space.
Good point. And Merry Christmas to you, too.
Maybe now the truth can be told about global warming we got a glimpse of over a decade ago:
[www.ci.alaska.edu]
[[More Than Moonglow
Article #1367 1997
by Carla Helfferich
This article is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Carla Helfferich is a science writer at the Institute.
Between El Nino and conferences on global warming, weather, climate, and the disagreements among scientists about weather and climate have been filling the news lately. Given the complexity of this dynamic planet, it would be astounding if researchers didn’t disagree. To me, the really amazing thing is that scientists are doing so well at making increasingly precise measurements and then building them into ever more accurate projections. The improving precision is well illustrated by the significantly larger quantity recently assigned to the amount by which the full moon heats the polar atmosphere.
Almost sneaked that one past you, didn’t I? Yes, the moon apparently does affect temperature at high latitude—though not so much that you should run out and moonbathe in the buff this weekend. Near the time of the full moon, the polar air is warmed by a bit more than half a degree centigrade over its temperature at the time of the new moon. That may not sound like much, but it’s about a quarter of the upward change predicted by some mathematical models for the polar regions over the next several decades.
The experts apparently have long accepted some lunar warming effect, which was news to me, but previous measurements showed the full moon adding only about two hundredths of a centigrade degree to the polar atmosphere’s temperature. The most recent study, performed by scientists at Arizona State University in Tempe (where, perhaps, people have more obvious reason to worry about additional heat than they do in Alaska), analyzed satellite-gathered data from about 200 lunar cycles. As well as refining the numbers, the work showed that the full moon had virtually no effect on temperatures in the tropics and only a slight effect on temperatures in the temperate zone. But poleward of the 70th parallel in both northern and southern hemispheres, the effect was 25 times greater than it was closer to the equator.
John Shaffer, a member of the Arizona research team reporting the polar heating effect, admits that it’s barely possible that radiation from the moon might be putting glitches in the satellite instrumentation, but the odds are much better that the high-latitude warming is a real effect.
Now, I admit that when I read the report and interview with Shaffer in a recent issue of the journal New Scientist, I quickly jumped to the conclusion that lunar radiation would be the heat source. Sure, I knew that the moon shines by reflecting sunlight; it doesn’t generate light (and heat) on its own as the sun does. But I’ve propped sheets of metal behind campfires to reflect radiant energy back toward chilly campers, and it works. I could extrapolate from campfire to sun, metal sheet to moon, and come up with a reasonable-sounding explanation for the additional warmth.
But, like a lot of my other reasonable-sounding explanations, it’s wrong. Shaffer and his colleagues think the cause is heat transfer within the earth’s atmosphere. They suspect that tidal pull from the full moon changes major wind patterns in the upper atmosphere—perhaps affecting the jet streams so loved by TV meteorologists, as they show these rivers of air snaking above the world from west to east, nudging high- and low-pressure systems around continental features, fencing warm air masses away from colder ones. The Arizonans are presently guessing that the moon’s gravitational tug alters waves within the wind systems, somehow either enhancing or suppressing their usual effects. But, whatever the exact mechanism, the researchers are pretty sure that the polar air mass is warmer under the full moon because somehow more equatorial warmth gets carried to the ends of the earth.
Nobody’s yet speculating on what this detail may mean to the overall problem of global warming, but it may alter a few northerners’ perceptions. Consider: if you’re in Barrow and hear sled dogs sing to the full moon, maybe they’re just complaining because they’re hot.]]
When’s the last time you’ve heard this argument?
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