London, September 19 (ANI): Two separate lunar missions have found evidence which indicates that the polar regions of the moon are chock full of water-altered minerals.
According to a report in Nature News, early results from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), launched on June 18, are offering a wide array of watery signals.
The Moon, in fact, has water in all sorts of places: not just locked up in minerals, but scattered throughout the broken-up surface, and, potentially, in blocks or sheets of ice at depth.
“We are on the verge of a renaissance in our thinking about the poles of the Moon, including how water ice gets there,” said Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which on October 9, will slam into a polar crater with the intention of ploughing up a plume of water ice for many telescopic eyes to see.
The initial LRO results confirm what was long suspected as a way for ice to stay trapped on the Moon for billions of years.
A thermal mapping instrument showed that permanently shadowed regions within deep polar craters are as cold as 35o Kelvin (-238o Celsius).
Project scientist Richard Vondrak said that they are the coldest spots in the Solar System – even colder than the surface of Pluto.
Variations in the flux of neutrons suggests variability in water content among craters.
But, the surprise comes from a different instrument on LRO, which counts slow-moving neutrons as a way of measuring hydrogen abundance in the top metre or so of the surface.
This hydrogen is often interpreted as a proxy for water ice, although it could also be molecular hydrogen or hydrogen trapped in other molecules.
The LRO instrument has already found a significant excess of hydrogen at the poles.
But, with added resolution, it is seeing surprising variability within the polar regions. Some of the craters appear enriched in hydrogen. Others are not.
Stranger still, some areas outside the crater walls, which were thought to get too hot for water to linger, show an excess of hydrogen.
Vondrak said this shows that the water could have arrived more recently, or that it can persist if buried as impacts till the lunar soil.
If the LCROSS impact spews up ice, it will eliminate the last vestiges of doubt about water on the Moon.
It could also start a new hunt: to find a record of impact events, such as water-rich comet strikes, that put the ice there in the first place. (ANI)
UK Madoff liquidators file U.S. bankruptcy petition
MIAMI (Reuters) – The British liquidators of convicted swindler Bernard Madoff’s London securities trading firm filed a petition in U.S. bankruptcy court on Tuesday and sued Madoff’s brother for the return of a rare Aston Martin car.
The liquidators, appointed by England’s High Court of Justice for Madoff Securities International Ltd (MSIL), filed the case in federal court in West Palm Beach, Florida, under Chapter 15 of U.S. bankruptcy laws, which deals with insolvency cases involving more than one country.
The petition will allow the liquidators, Stephen John Akers, Mark Richard Byers and Andrew Laurence Hosking, “to marshal assets that may have been fraudulently transferred from MSIL to individuals residing with the jurisdiction of the Court,” court documents said.
In a companion lawsuit, the liquidators sued to recover a 1964 Aston Martin bought through “the improper and unauthorized diversion of funds from MSIL’s accounts,” court papers said.
Madoff, the disgraced New York financier who once headed the NASDAQ stock market, pleaded guilty on March 12 to running the biggest investment fraud in Wall Street history, involving as much as $65 billion. He was immediately jailed and could be sent to prison for life when sentenced in June.
MSIL, his London company, employed 28 workers, including 14 traders, at its offices in London’s Mayfair District, the suit said.
The company traded for Madoff’s personal accounts and those of his relatives, and the accounts were used by Madoff to buy “valuable personal assets such as luxury yachts, automobiles and furnishings for himself and members of the Madoff family,” the petition said.
Two wire transfers, made from an MSIL account last year and totaling 135,000 pounds, were used to buy a 1964 Aston Martin delivered to Madoff’s brother Peter Madoff, a director and manager of MSIL, at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, the lawsuit said.
MSIL suffered losses in excess of $235,000 as a result. The petition seeks the return of the car and punitive damages.
The liquidators asked the U.S. federal bankruptcy court to recognize the British liquidation case and filed an ancillary case under Chapter 15, which helps resolve cases involving debtors, assets and claimants in multiple countries.
Neither Peter Madoff nor his lawyer were immediately available for comment.
(Reporting by Jim Loney; Editing by Pascal Fletcher; Editing by Andre Grenon)