Former astronaut Neil Armstrong has agreed to donate personal papers dating from the start of his flight career to his alma mater, Purdue University.
Armstrong's papers, boxes of which have already begun arriving at Purdue, will be an inspiration for students and invaluable for researchers, said Sammie Morris, assistant professor of library science and head of Purdue Libraries' Archives and Special Collections.
"For researchers, it's going to be a boon. No one has been able to research these papers or study them," Morris said.
Purdue President France A. Cordova, who became NASA's first female chief scientist, plans to announce Armstrong's donation Saturday before the Purdue-Michigan football game. She also plans to use that event to announce that James R. Hansen, author of the 2005 book "First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong," is donating 55 hours of one-on-one recorded interviews with Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon.
Armstrong's papers and Hansen's interviews will serve as the starting point for Purdue Libraries' effort to build a comprehensive flight collection. They'll be housed in a special collection that also holds papers and artifacts related to aviator Amelia Earhart, who vanished in 1937 while attempting to fly around the world.
Armstrong graduated from Purdue in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering, after a year and a half break from his studies to serve as a U.S. Navy pilot in the Korean War. He was named a NASA astronaut in 1962.
On July 20, 1969, Armstrong maneuvered the Apollo 11 landing module past a region of the moon littered with boulders to bring the lander to a safe touchdown with 30 seconds of fuel remaining. After climbing a ladder to the moon's surface, he uttered the now-famous phrase, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
Hubble Telescope Photographs Cosmic 'Perfect 10'
After overcoming a glitch that had forced science operations to cease, operators wasted no time in using the Hubble Space Telescope to photograph another stunning cosmic scene. The new image, released this week, shows an odd pair of galaxies called Arp 147.
In the image, a galaxy at left looks somewhat like the number "1" and is relatively undisturbed, but for a smooth ring of starlight. It appears nearly edge-on to our line of sight. A galaxy at right, looking like a "zero," exhibits a clumpy, blue ring of intense star formation.
Mission officials suggested the image is a perfect "10." It shows that the observatory's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) is working exactly as it did before going offline.
The blue ring was formed after the galaxy on the left passed through the galaxy on the right. Just as a pebble thrown into a pond creates an outwardly moving circular wave, or ripples, an outwardly propagating ring of higher density was generated at the point of impact of the two galaxies, astronomers explained.
As this excess density collided with outer material that was moving inwards due to the gravitational pull of the two galaxies, shocks and dense gas were produced, stimulating star formation. The dusty reddish knot at the lower left of the blue ring probably marks the location of the original nucleus of the galaxy that was hit.
Arp 147 appears in the Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, compiled by Halton Arp in the 1960s and published in 1966. Arp 147 lies in the constellation of Cetus, more than 400 million light-years from Earth.
Bouncing back
The Sept. 27 failure of a vital data relay channel left the 18-year-old Hubble telescope unable to transmit the bulk of its science data and imagery. The channel, the Side A relay of Hubble's Science Instrument Control and Data Handling system, had been working properly since the telescope launched in April 1990. Efforts to switch to a backup Side B channel last week met with challenges of their own , with two separate glitches thwarting the initial attempt. But a second try appears to have been successful, with Hubble engineers reactivating the telescope's main science instruments over the last week.
The remote control fix required engineers to power up and switch to backup systems that had been hibernating since Hubble launched into space. Hubble's September data relay channel failure prompted NASA to delay a planned Oct. 14 space shuttle launch to send seven astronauts to the orbital observatory on a fifth and final service call to the telescope.
That mission is now slated to fly no earlier than February, with Hubble engineers testing a spare data relay channel to see if it can be added to the shuttle's cargo bay and be installed during the flight.
The service call is expected to include five spacewalks to add a new camera, upgrade guidance equipment, replace aging batteries and gyroscopes, deliver a docking ring and include repairs for systems never designed to be repaired in space. The final Hubble overhaul is expected to extend the space telescope's mission lifetime through at least 2013, mission managers have said.
Earth's first nearly full look at Mercury reveals that the tiny lifeless planet took a far greater role in shaping itself than was thought, with volcanoes spewing "mysterious dark blue material." New images from NASA's Messenger space probe should help settle a decades-old debate about what caused parts of Mercury to be somewhat smoother than it should be.
NASA released photos Wednesday, from Messenger's fly-by earlier this month, that gave the answer: Lots of volcanic activity, far more than signs from an earlier probe. Astronomers used to dismiss Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, as mere "dead rock," little more than a target for cosmic collisions that shaped it, said MIT planetary scientist Maria Zuber.
"Now, it's looking a lot more interesting," said Zuber, who has experiments on the Messenger probe. "It's an awful lot of volcanic material."
New images of filled-in craters -- one the size of the Baltimore-Washington area and filled in with more than a mile deep of cooled lava -- show that 3.8 to 4 billion years ago, Mercury was more of a volcanic hotspot than the moon ever was, Zuber said. But it isn't just filled-in craters. Using special cameras, the probe showed what one scientist called "the mysterious dark blue material."
It was all over the planet
That led Arizona State University geologist Mark Robinson to speculate that the mineral is important but still unknown stuff ejected from Mercury's large core in the volcanic eruptions. That material was seen with NASA's first partial view of Mercury by Mariner 10 in the 1970s. It was spotted again in Messenger's first images of Mercury's unseen side earlier this year.
The latest Messenger images, added to earlier photos show about 95 percent of the planet, and the blue stuff was in many places, more than astronomers had anticipated. Although Robinson described the material as "dark blue," it only looks that way to special infrared cameras.
In normal visible light, it would have "a soft blue tinge and it would be less red" than the rest of Mercury, he said. It's too early to tell what that material is, but it may have iron in it, Robinson said. That would be a surprise because Mariner 10 didn't find much iron, he said.
Moon Might Preserve Alien Life in Dark Craters
The moon fascinates us. The only world other than Earth upon which humans have set foot, we know a remarkable amount about it, yet countless mysteries remain.
One theory, presented at Europlanet's latest Planetary Science Congress by Joop Houtkooper from the University of Giessen, suggests that conditions in some lunar craters may be perfect for preserving samples of life from Earth and maybe even Mars. The moon rotates at such an angle that the sun is directly above its equator. Some craters near the lunar poles therefore exist in eternal darkness, never seeing the sun's light.
Houtkooper says the Shackleton crater (which is 19 kilometers in diameter) at the south pole of the moon may contain such shadowed spots.
"[Shackleton's] deep center is pitch black, except from some reflected sunlight from the crater edges," says Houtkooper. "But on the bottom of Shackleton there are no doubt other, smaller craters. In these there are spots where not even reflected sunlight reaches. So from these places we look straight into the cold universe."
Just how cold? These dark spots are 25 degrees Kelvin (-248.16 degrees Celsius), an excellent temperature for preservation. In fact, gases in these locations freeze and form ices. Houtkooper argues that this material in the craters is churned up by meteorite impacts -- rare occurrences, but over billions of years quite likely -- and anything present within the meteorites would be covered and protected against erosion by the solar wind.
Signs of life
Finding ancient meteorites on the moon would be exciting enough, but what they may contain really interests Houtkooper. Consider simple bacterial life on the early Earth, existing inside a rock which is then blasted off the surface of the planet by a large impact.
In theory, some of these samples could have landed in lunar craters like Shackleton. Once there, they would be perfectly preserved in a deep freeze for billions of years. Life carried to the moon in this way would almost certainly be dead, although it is possible that some hardy creatures could survive the journey in a dormant state.
As Houtkooper succinctly states, "there could be signs of life from early Earth on the moon." Things get particularly interesting when a large impact on the moon by an object around 10 km in diameter is considered. If that were to occur, enough material would be thrown up to create a very thin lunar atmosphere.
This tenuous atmosphere could last a few hundred years, just enough time to spark into action any dormant life that had been carried to the moon from other worlds. So it is possible that, dotted throughout the moon's colorful history, it may have hosted simple but live alien organisms.
Martians on the moon
Houtkooper claims that there is no reason why the transportation and preservation of microbes is limited to the Earth-moon system. If there was life on Mars, the same process could have occurred. Pristine Martian samples may well be awaiting discovery in the deep, dark depths of a lunar crater.
If ancient life were discovered on the moon, we could determine their world of origin. Organisms feature isotopic signatures, which are like biological passports that indicate their place of birth. If the preserved life originated on our own planet, we could determine this with good accuracy. The same can be said for Mars, as the many years of scientific missions to the Red Planet have furnished us with detailed information about conditions over its history.
If the isotopic signature could not be determined, one exciting possibility is that the organisms may herald from other, even more exotic worlds.
Long shot
Finding Earth-life on the moon could give us new information about ancient life on our planet, and finding extraterrestrial microbes would be a triumph for science. But just how likely is it that preserved creatures exist at the bottom of moon craters?
"It is a small chance," Houtkooper admits. "But it is still a chance."
Houtkooper says that because ice is a useful material for human investigation of the moon , our future exploration efforts will center on those cold spots anyway.
"There could be a huge bonus scientifically if we look at what the ice contains," he notes.
Some microbes on Earth have been found frozen for thousands of years, and then subsequently thawed and resurrected. If microbes are discovered at the bottom of craters like Shackleton, there is an exciting possibility that warming them up and exposing them to liquid water may provide the wake-up call that they are waiting for.
All these possibilities remain unproven theories until evidence is provided. Fortunately, with manned missions to the moon planned, and ice being a logical target, it is likely that tests will be carried out. As Houtkooper concludes, "It's a long shot, but if we are going there anyway then why not take it on the side?"
MICHELLE
Purdue University, Arizona State Univeristy, NASA, JPL
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