French photographer Thierry Legault has captured the moment just before space shuttle Atlantis docked with the ISS on May 16. The picture shows the two craft transiting the sun, and can be seen in full on Legault’s website.
These amazing images are part of a hobby that Legault has been pursuing from his back garden in Paris for many years.
Image: Thierry Legault
It’s been some time since the last update on the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Of course, we’re unlikely to hear from Spirit again but younger sibling Oppy is still going strong, and is in the midst of an impressive and ambitious voyage to the huge crater Endeavour.
I wholeheartedly approve of roving into the unknown, and would like to take this opportunity (no pun intended) to congratulate Opportunity on becoming the longest surviving working mission on Mars. The rover today overtakes NASA’s Viking 1 Lander’s record of six years and 116 days operating on Mars.
Endeavour is 22 kilometres in diameter, dwarfing Victoria crater, where Opportunity has already been, and which is 750 metres across. The crater is interesting because of the clay minerals there, spotted from orbit. Clays form under wet conditions, rather than the dry harsh conditions that form sulfates – the other kind of rock that Opportunity has seen.
You can read about the rover’s journey on the blog The Road to Endeavour and see some amazing pictures that the rover has been taking since it began this journey in 2008. The picture on the right here was taken in March, and you can just see the edge of Endeavour’s rim, looking like hills in the distance.
Well done Opportunity. Let’s hope you reach Endeavour before your tired old wheels pack up.
Image: NASA
The first science results from the ultra-cold telescope Herschel are being announced this week at a meeting organised by the European Space Agency.
Herschel, which was launched a year ago along with Planck, is looking in the infrared, places where cool objects, like young stars and molecular clouds, can be found. These processes will give astronomers a better inkling about how stars and galaxies were first formed billions of years ago.
This first swathe of results is a taste of what will come in the next 2 and a half years of Herschel’s operating lifetime.
In the picture on the right, you can see a galactic bubble showing in the edge of the white ring a massive star as it is just bursting into life. Stars more than 8 times the mass of our sun are rare, yet they control much of the physical and chemical processes within galaxies. Watching them form will give a better understanding of why and how these stars work says Annie Zavagno, from the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, France. This newly formed star is already about 10 times more massive than our sun, and it’s still only a wee ’un.
Other results include the identification of positive water ions in all parts of the galaxies, but especially in energetic regions.
The implications of all these results aren’t clear. But they do show that the instruments are working well, and over the rest of the mission the stars and galaxies in the oldest, coldest parts of the universe will be catalogued like never before.
If you want to see more, check out ESA’s interactive gallery.
Here’s a magnified image of what’s been causing international travel chaos for days. It’s an image of silica particles from the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, currently spewing out a huge ash cloud, which might now be abating. The picture was taken by Ian Russell, a public science promoter, using his home microscope. Russell scraped the ash from his car, which was parked on his drive in Derbyshire, UK.
As the airspace in northern Europe is slowly reopened, according to reports, airlines will be starting to breathe a short, shallow sigh of relief. They have been claiming that the grounding of flights for days now was unnecessary and it was safe to fly. Dutch airline KLM ran a test flight and KLM president & CEO, Peter Hartman declared “there is no reason to suspect that anything is amiss”.
But this is not a reason to start flying again says Fred Prata, Senior Scientist at the climate and atmosphere department of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research. Prata says that the grounding of flights is the right decision. The tests like that run by KLM, he says are “not very clever”. Prata says that to determine how damaging the ash is, the test must take place in the cloud, not just a random flight.
An artificial pancreas that can help control the havoc-wreaking diabetes causing hormones has been developed and successfully tested.
The system was developed at Boston University (BU), and consists of a blood glucose monitor and insulin pump hooked up to a laptop that runs a programme to control the levels of the important hormones insulin and glucagon. Administering insulin to a type 1 diabetes patient always carries a risk of hypoglycaemia with it. But by running an algorithm that monitors blood sugar levels and is capable of administering both blood-sugar raising and lowering hormones – glucagon and insulin respectively – this system seems to remove that risk.
Edward Damiano, from the BU department of biomedical engineering, who co-led the research team and whose son developed type-1 diabetes aged 1, explains why both hormones are important. “"Large doses of glucagon are used as a rescue drug for people with severely low blood sugar," he says. “Our system is designed to counteract moderate drops in blood sugar with minute doses of glucagon spread out throughout the day, just as the body does in people without diabetes."
The artificial pancreas was first tested in pigs in 2007, and has now being used in 11 type 1 diabetes patients for 24 hours, all given high carbohydrate meals. In six of the eleven the system controlled blood sugar successfully, while five of the patients needed a shot of orange juice to bring their blood sugar levels back to normal.
This mismatch in the first trial was adjusted by tinkering with the algorithms used in the software that control the release of the hormones and the second run was a success in all patients.
The device could one day be run on a small, wearable computer chip. The research was published in Science Translational Medicine and has received quite some pick up in the media. (Reuters, LA Times, Medical News Today).
Image: Punchstock
An erupting volcano, Eyjafjallajokull, in Iceland is causing havoc to air travel in Europe. The volcano, which began erupting last month, has just shifted its point of exit slightly and is spewing out huge quantities of ash high into the atmosphere. The ash is headed straight for the north of the UK, and northern Europe, as can be seen in the picture, and this has forced a number of airports to close.
It was thought that the eruption was slowing down last week, but what ahd actually happened was the eruption had found a new place to spring forth, from under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier. As well as the giant ash cloud, the volcano’s new outlet is melting huge amounts of glacier water, and triggering floods.
As always, great explanations can be found over at the blog Eruptions.
Experts are saying that the eruption was not unexpected, nor is it unusual. But that ash is causing havoc nonetheless. “Volcanic ash is silica-based material and highly abrasive. It is capable of causing major damage to aircraft through clogging engines and causing them to flame out, and by scouring windscreens so as to make them opaque,” explains Bill McGuire from University College London’s Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre.
The last time this volcano erupted, it went on for two years, beginning in 1821. Iceland is coping, though. “Iceland is extremely well prepared for all kinds of scenarios around this particular volcano,” says Dave McGarvie, a volcanologist, from the Open University, UK.
Image: From a video of the ash cloud captured by EUMETSAT
The British Chiropractic Association has today ended its libel claim against science writer Simon Singh. The news from Singh’s lawyers comes two weeks after a ruling that went in Singh’s favour, overturning a previous ruling by a different judge on Singh’s piece in the Guardian. The first ruling would have made it exceeding difficult for Singh to defend his piece but the recent ruling would have offered him a defence of ‘fair comment’ had the BCA continued with the case.
Since the ruling was overturned the BCA has been considering its position and today put out a statement saying:
The BCA takes seriously its duty and responsibilities to members and to chiropractic patients. The BCA has considered seeking leave to take this matter to the Supreme Court and has been advised there are strong grounds for appeal against the Court of Appeal judgment. However, while it was right to bring this claim at the outset, the BCA now feels that the time is right for the matter to draw to a close.
The case has prompted renewed interest in an appeal to overhaul UK libel law, and Nature opined on this subject last year in the midst of Singh’s troubles. Singh is intending to pursue the BCA for costs according to the Times .
Further evidence for water flowing on Mars today has turned up in a paper published recently in Geophysical Research Letters.
Dennis Reiss and his colleagues at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster used images from the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera, run by NASA and University of Arizona scientists, and currently onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Reiss noticed that over a two year period the shape of gullies in the Russell crater dune field (see image). The explanation for this, says Reiss and his team, is that small amounts of ice just under the surface are melting and triggering slurry slides down the dunes. The fact that the pictures, taken in 2006 and 2009 are different suggests that this process is not an ancient relic, but contemporary.
So far so exciting. And this is a great bit of news. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that in late 2006 Michael Malin from instrumentation company Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California, published a similar paper using data from the Mars Global Surveyor. Malin saw gullies that grew a few hundred metres over a 4 year period. He didn’t have an explanation other than these gullies were reminiscent of water-formed gullies on Earth.
Reiss speculates more about the processes at work. He suggests that carbon dioxide ice melts during summer months as temperatures rise, and this allows the water ice to melt and start the slurry rolling.
Reiss’s study seems to complement Malin’s work well, and it’s exciting news – water flowing on Mars’s surface today. Next we need to wake up Spirit and get her to rove over to a puddle and splash her wheels in it for undisputable evidence.
Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
The deepest underwater hydrothermal vents ever known have been discovered by a robot exploring waters off the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean.
The black smokers, as these vents are known, are 5 kilometres down in the Cayman Trough, half a mile deeper than previously found deep vents, and were discovered by scientists working on the Royal Research Ship James Cook, led by Doug Connelly of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton.
The robot showed spires protruding from the seafloor, made of copper and iron ores. These spires were spurting out super-heated water, hot enough to melt lead according to the expedition blog and press release.
“It was like wandering across the surface of another world,” says geologist Bramley Murton from the UK National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, who piloted the HyBIS underwater vehicle. “The rainbow hues of the mineral spires and the fluorescent blues of the microbial mats covering them were like nothing I had ever seen before.”
Hydrothermal vents harbour weird life, amazingly adapted to surviving the inhospitable, extreme environment that supports them. Next step is to compare the living things in these vents to those that exist in other deep sea vents around the world.
Coverage elsewhere: BBC, Daily Mail, Fox, AP.
Those nice people at NASA who run the HiRise camera on the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter have being doing a nice job of public outreach. NASA has just revealed the first lot of pics of Mars, snapped by HiRise, of locations selected by the members of the public.
The programme is called HiWish and began in January. Over 1000 suggestions were made. The eerie boulder-strewn plain (right) in an area called Northern Utopia Planitia is one of my favourites. This is typical of the landscape in Mars’s northern plains.
Other pictures include: the northern edge of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano not only on Mars but in the entire solar system; a layered ice sheet; dunes on the bottom of one of Mars’s longest ancient valley systems, and more.
You can see them all here.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona