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New evidence points towards water on Moon

September 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

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)

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Cyclists transform into mobile pollution sensors

June 30, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, June 30 (ANI): Pedestrians and cyclists in urban areas of the UK are being transformed into mobile pollution sensors, as part of a Government-backed scheme to monitor air quality.

According to a report by Sky News, researchers, led by a team at Imperial College London, will trial three new types of sensors on people, vehicles and traffic islands to measure traffic emissions and noise pollution.

The three-year Environmental Sensing System Across Grid Environments (MESSAGE) initiative will receive data from 100 sensors in South Kensington, Leicester, Gateshead and Cambridge to test how they operate in different types of location.

The new sensor technology will provide unprecedented detail about pollution hotspots.

“There is a lot that we do not know about air quality in our cities and towns because the current generation of large stationary sensors don’t provide enough information,” said professor John Polak.

“We envisage a future where hundreds and thousands of mobile sensors are deployed across the country, to improve the way we monitor, measure and manage pollution in our urban areas,” he added.

The sensors will measure up to five different traffic pollutants simultaneously, including harmful nitrogen oxides and sulphur dioxides.

The sensors, which are attached to pedestrians and cyclists, are small enough to fit into a pocket and can detect car pollutants and other contaminants including carbon monoxide from cigarette smoke.

They will transmit the data back via the wearer’s mobile phone.

The scientists will also model pollution clouds in 3-D, by attaching sensors to traffic lights and street lamps to try to work out whether poor traffic signalling, for example, is causing air quality to deteriorate.

The air quality measurements and the location of each mobile sensor will be tracked on Google maps. (ANI)

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NASA’s Moon mission successfully completes lunar maneuver

June 25, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 24 (ANI): NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, successfully completed its most significant early mission milestone on June 23 with a lunar swingby and calibration of its science instruments.

The satellite will search for water ice in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole.

With the assist of the moon’s gravity, LCROSS and its attached Centaur booster rocket successfully entered into polar Earth orbit at 6:20 a.m. PDT on June 23.

The maneuver puts the spacecraft and Centaur on course for a pair of impacts near the moon’s south pole on October 9.

“The successful completion of the LCROSS swingby proves the science instruments are functioning as expected. It is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the entire team,” said Dan Andrews, LCROSS project manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.

“We are elated at the results from the maneuver and eagerly anticipate the impacts in early October,” he added.

During its swing by the moon, the spacecraft’s instruments were turned on and calibrated by scanning three sites on the lunar surface.

These sites were the craters Mendeleev, Goddard C and Giordano Bruno. They were selected because they offer a variety of terrain types, compositions and illumination conditions.

The spacecraft also scanned the lunar horizon to confirm its instruments are aligned in preparation for observing the Centaur’s debris plume.

“Each instrument returned good data that the science team will spend the next few weeks analyzing,” said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist at Ames.

“These data will ensure we are as prepared as possible for monitoring and interpreting data we receive during impact,” he added.

LCROSS and its attached Centaur upper stage rocket are now in a long, looping polar orbit around Earth and the moon.

Each orbit will be roughly perpendicular to the moon’s orbit around Earth and take about 37 days to complete.

Before impact, the spacecraft and Centaur will make approximately three orbits.

LCROSS and the Centaur separately will collide with the moon at approximately 7:30 a.m. EDT on October 9, creating a pair of debris plumes that will be analyzed for the presence of water ice or water vapor, hydrocarbons and hydrated materials.

The spacecraft and Centaur are targeted to impact the moon’s south pole near the Cabeus region.

The exact target crater will be identified 30 days before impact, after considering information collected by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and observatories on Earth. (ANI)

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Satellites’ launch to give boost to NASA’s ‘return to Moon’ mission

May 22, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 22 (ANI): NASA’s return to the moon will get a boost in June with the launch of two satellites that will return a wealth of data about Earth’s nearest neighbor.

On May 21, the agency outlined the upcoming missions of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS.

The spacecraft will launch together June 17 aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Using a suite of seven instruments, LRO will help identify safe landing sites for future human explorers, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment and test new technology.

LCROSS will seek a definitive answer about the presence of water ice at the lunar poles.

It will use the spent second stage Atlas Centaur rocket in an unprecedented way that will culminate with two spectacular impacts on the moon’s surface.

“These two missions will provide exciting new information about the moon, our nearest neighbor,” said Doug Cooke, associate administrator of NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate in Washington.

“Imaging will show dramatic landscapes and areas of interest down to one-meter resolution. The data also will provide information about potential new uses of the moon. These teams have done a tremendous job designing and building these two spacecraft,” he added.

LRO’s instruments will help scientists compile high resolution, three-dimensional maps of the lunar surface and also survey it in the far ultraviolet spectrum.

The satellite’s instruments will help explain how the lunar radiation environment may affect humans and measure radiation absorption with a plastic that is like human tissue.

LRO’s instruments also will allow scientists to explore the moon’s deepest craters, look beneath its surface for clues to the location of water ice, and identify and explore both permanently lit and permanently shadowed regions.

High-resolution imagery from its camera will help identify landing sites and characterize the moon’s topography and composition.

A miniaturized radar will image the poles and test the system’s communications capabilities.

“LRO is an amazingly sophisticated spacecraft,” said Craig Tooley, LRO project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“Its suite of instruments will work in concert to send us data in areas where we’ve been hungry for information for years,” he added. (ANI)

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Genesis of mass migration of fish observed for first time

March 29, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, March 27 (ANI): Engineers at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), for the first time, have observed the initiation of a mass gathering and subsequent migration of hundreds of millions of fish.

The work, conducted using a novel imaging technique, “provides information essential to the conservation of marine ecosystems that vast oceanic fish shoals inhabit,” according to the research team.

It also confirms theories about the behavior of large groups of animals in general, from bird flocks to locust swarms.

Until now, those theories had only been predicted through theoretical investigations, computer simulations and laboratory experiments.

For example, the team found that once a group of fish reaches a critical population density, it triggers a kind of chain reaction resulting in the synchronized movement of millions of individuals over a large area.

The phenomenon is akin to a human “wave” moving around a sports stadium.

“As far as we know, this is the first time we’ve quantified this behavior in nature and over such a huge ecosystem,” said Nicholas C. Makris, leader of the work and a professor of mechanical and ocean engineering.

The resulting shoals of migrating fish can extend some 40 kilometers or approximately 25 miles across the ocean.

The researchers focused on Atlantic herring off Georges Bank near Boston during the fall spawning season.

They found that the formation and movement of large shoals of the fish constituted a kind of daily evening commute to the shallower waters of the bank where they spawn under cover of darkness.

Come morning, the fish head back to deeper water and disband.

The work was conducted using Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing (OAWRS).

OAWRS allows the team to take images of an area some 100 kilometers (approximately 62 miles) in diameter every 75 seconds, which is a vast improvement over conventional techniques such as fish-finding echo-sounders.

Both OAWRS and conventional methods rely on acoustics to locate objects by bouncing sound waves off of them.

With conventional techniques, survey vessels send high-frequency sound beams into the ocean.

In contrast, the new system uses much lower frequency sound that can travel much greater distances and still return useful information with signals far less intense.

According to Ron O’Dor, co-senior scientist of the Census of Marine Life (CoML), “OAWRS allows us to gather information such as geographical distributions, abundance and behavior of fish shoals and to better understand what constitutes healthy fish populations, which can be implemented by policymakers to better monitor and improve conservation of fish stocks.” (ANI)

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NASA mission to seek water ice on Moon

February 18, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Feb 18 (ANI): NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which will seek water ice on Moon, is enroute from Northrop Grumman’s facility in Redondo Beach, California, to the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in preparation for a spring launch.

The satellite’s primary mission is to search for water ice on the moon in a permanently shadowed crater near one of the lunar poles.

LCROSS is a low-cost, accelerated-development, companion mission to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO.

At Kennedy, the two spacecraft will be integrated with an Atlas V launch vehicle and tested for final flight worthiness.

LCROSS and LRO are the first missions in NASA’s plan to return humans to the moon and begin establishing a lunar outpost by 2020.

After launch, the LCROSS spacecraft and the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage rocket will fly by the moon and enter into an elongated orbit to position the satellite for impact.

On final approach, the spacecraft and Centaur will separate.

The Centaur will strike the chosen lunar crater, creating a debris plume that will rise above the surface.

Four minutes later, LCROSS will fly through the debris plume, collecting and relaying data back to Earth before striking the moon’s surface and creating a second debris plume.

Scientists will use data from the debris clouds to determine the presence or absence of water ice.

To remain within budget and a short schedule of 26 months, the LCROSS project team developed a simple yet innovative spacecraft that uses existing NASA systems, commercial-off-the-shelf components modified to survive the harsh conditions of space, and the spacecraft design and development expertise of integration partner Northrop Grumman Space Technologies.

“LCROSS delivers a high science value per dollar,” said Steve Hixson, vice president for advanced concepts at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems in Redondo Beach.

“With its versatile, fast and cost efficient architecture, the LCROSS spacecraft serves as a pathfinder for future low-cost Earth and space science missions,” he added. (ANI)

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Clay pottery business of Kashmir gets a new lease of life

February 15, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Srinagar, Jan 14 (ANI): The declining business of clay pottery in Kashmir has got a new lease of life with the pottery makers coming up with innovative designs.

The craft development institute has helped in making the potters adopt innovative designs and colours.

“We try to understand the requirements of the local markets and meet their kind of demands, for example lighting items like candles, earthen lamps and candle holders, the local peoples needs and demands and it also comes under their lifestyle,” said Shariq Farooqi, Director, Craft Development Institute.

The institute is also in close touch with themselves artisans by guiding them how to sustain in the market.

“Basically, we have been given the task to lay more emphasis on the designs of these potteries. Because of this, the demand has started picking up,” said Noor Mohammad, a maker.

Earlier, the artisans used to make only utensils and other kitchenware out of the clay used for the daily household uses. Sensing the lessening demand of this craft, the artisans are nowadays concentrating more on the colorful and decorative products, which are attracting the customers.

As the trend of using ornamental clay items for the interior decoration of the houses are catching, the imagination of many in valley, the demand for these crafts has also gone up.

“The designs that were used earlier are now changing with the times. New designs are being introduced. Demands have started coming from various places. So I think the local artisans should use their skills for new innovative designs that can suit the current generation,” said Akhtar Hussain, a student.

The craftsman these days focus on clay table lamps, candleholders, designer tiles and other decorative items.

More than 200 families in Srinagar alone are engaged in clay potteries and crafts. By Parvez Butt (ANI)

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6th global vendor development programme in Mumbai

January 29, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Mumbai, Jan 29 (ANI/Business Wire India): The 6th Global Vendor Development Programme, an International Conference – cum- Exhibition for Micro Small and Medium Enterprise, has been scheduled on January 30 to February 1, 2009 at Mumbai.

It is supported by the All India Association of Industries, Bombay Small Scale Industries Association, Mumbai, Indo-Arab Chamber of Commerce and Industries and New Media, India’s Largest Bilateral Trade Magazine Publishing House with a sole mission of encouraging bilateral trade globally.

The 6th Global Vendor Development Programme has been designed to promote intra industry trade, healthy business relationships and outsourcing of products and components of MSMEs, adoption of best practices in order to avail of collective bargaining for common benefits from Governments, PSUs, Corporates and vendors.

The programme will be inaugurated by Madhav Lal, IAS, Additional Secretary and Development Commissioner, Government of India, MSME on January 30, 2009. On this occasion the National Awards to the Outstanding Entrepreneurs of Mahrashtra will also be presented.

In these times of global meltdown and business challenges, it is critical to seize opportunities that would add great impetus to growing business.

The current economic challenges has swept across major economies which has started affecting the MSME sector particularly visible impact on auto components manufacturing and exporting units.

Dinesh Rai, IAS, Secretary, Ministry of MSME, Government of India while responding to the economic crisis faced by the MSME of Pune region said that, “The Government of India is sensitive to the development and has taken initiatives to safe guard the interest of the MSMEs from the global melt down.” He added that, we need to build a new approach to spot emerging global competitive opportunities to encounter the challenges in the present scenario.

Sensing the heat of global recession, the MSME Development Institute, Mumbai, National Small Industries Corporation Ltd., and Vasai Industries have initiated a Conference-Cum- Exhibition.

This meet will facilitate collaboration and cooperation between Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises and multi national companies, large industrial units, public sector undertakings, Central Govt. department’s viz. Defense, Navy, and Railways etc. BHEI, ONGC, BSNL, BEL, NPCL, NTPC, BPCL, HPCL, IOC, MTNL.The business services provider and other stake holders etc.

In order to accelerate intra-industry trade for maintaining business continuity in the turbulent times. The concurrent technical session is also being organised simultaneously on the recent trends and challenges posed by global recession such as Business Continuity Management, cutting edge technologies, Lean Management, B2B, Buyers/Sellers meet for exchange of ideas.

K. R. Sharma, Director of the Institute said that, “As the Government department and PSU’s are the bulk buyers of the products of MSMEs; the programmes offer longer terms solutions. (ANI)

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Scientists take off on mission to measure climate impacting greenhouse gases

January 8, 2009 By Rajiv Gupta Leave a Comment

Washington, Jan 8 (ANI): A team of scientists has taken off on an advanced research aircraft on an historic mission spanning the globe from the Arctic to the Antarctic, to measure greenhouse gases that have an impact on climate.

Known as the HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations (HIPPO) mission, it will cover more than 24,000 miles as an international team of scientists makes a series of five flights over the next three years, sampling the atmosphere in some of the most inaccessible regions of the world.

The goal of the mission is the first-ever, global, real-time sampling of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses across a wide range of altitudes in the atmosphere, literally from pole-to-pole.

To date, much of our understanding of global atmospheric greenhouse gasses has been acquired from distant satellites, balloon launches, or highly sophisticated supercomputer models.

HIAPER’s pole-to-pole mission will, for the first time, give scientists real-time global observation data to correlate with those climate models.

HIAPER is short for the National Science Foundation’s High-performance Instrumented Airborne Platfrom for Environmental Research.

A modified Gulfstream V jet, it can fly at high altitudes for extended periods of time and can carry 5,600 pounds of sensing equipment, making it a premier aircraft for scientific discovery. (ANI)

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