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TOPIC: The Moon
Blobrana


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Transient Lunar Phenomena
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Changes in the brightness and colour over small areas of the moon's surface, known as Transient Lunar Phenomena have been observed telescopically for hundreds of years.
The optical flashes have been seen by skywatchers but rarely photographed.

"People over the years have attributed TLPs to all sorts of effects: turbulence in Earth's atmosphere, visual physiological effects, atmospheric smearing of light like a prism, and even psychological effects like hysteria or planted suggestion" - Arlin Crotts, Columbia University researcher.

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Blobrana


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Hubble maps minerals on the moon
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Geologists have used the Hubble Space Telescope to study minerals on the moon. It might be one small step for them, but it's a giant leap towards building a lunar outpost.
Space scientists are keen to map the concentration of the titanium-dioxide-rich mineral ilmenite on the moon's surface, says Jim Garvin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Oxygen production from TiO2-enhanced lunar soils could potentially make breathable oxygen and even oxidiser for rocket fuel."

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Blobrana


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RE: The Moon
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Hubble maps minerals on the moon

Not for the first time, actually. We started shooting images of the moon with Hubble circa 1999, mostly to see if we could. Hubble was designed to look at stuff thats faint and far away and doesnt move much over time. The moon is really close, extremely bright (by Hubble standards), and moves very fast compared to Hubbles speed (17,000 mph, more or less) and the relative stillness of the more distant objects Hubble was designed to study. So a science team tried a quick experiment to see if it was possible to get a decent shot of the moon with Hubble, and it was.

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Blobrana


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Posts: 131433
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Transient Lunar Phenomena
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Columbia astronomy professor Arlin Crotts thinks he has solved a 400-year-old mystery: the origin of strange optical flashes often reported as appearing on the moons surface.
Transient Lunar Phenomena (TLPs), in which the lunar surface reportedly changes in brightness, blurriness or color, have been photographed and observed by thousands of astronomers over the centuries. Yet explanations of why they occur and even their reality as true lunar phenomena have been hotly debated. The TLPs typically cover a space of a few kilometres and last for several minutes.
Crotts has uncovered a strong statistical relationship between TLPs and so-called outgassing events on the lunar surface. Outgassing occurs when gases trapped beneath a moon or planet are released and, if only briefly, become part of the objects atmosphere. A key component of this gas is radon.
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Blobrana


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The Moons formation
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The Earth and Moon share a past etched in silicon, and it hints that the favoured theory of how the Moon formed isn't quite right.
Most astronomers believe that the Moon formed when a Mars-sized object struck Earth. If this is the case, the Moon should contain mainly rock from the impacting body. However, Alex Halliday of the University of Oxford and his colleagues have evidence suggesting that this isn't so.
The team studied the ratios of light to heavy isotopes of various elements in rock from the Earth, Moon and meteorites. For most elements, the composition was the same, but samples from the Earth and Moon showed a puzzling preference for the heavy forms of iron and silicon. The Moon's isotopic make-up was identical to Earth's, with no trace of an impacting object.

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Blobrana


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Lunar transients
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Strange, bright flashes observed on the moon for centuries and often dismissed as the lunar equivalent of UFOs may in fact be emissions of volcanic gas. A researcher says he has reviewed the evidence for so-called lunar transients and found them to occur only in areas of the moon that belch radon gas, suggesting that the flashes could be the result of dust stirred up by such emissionspossibly volcanic in origin.

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Blobrana


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RE: The Moon
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2007 Phases of the Moon

Universal Time

      NEW MOON    FIRST QUARTER        FULL MOON     LAST QUARTER

       d  h  m          d  h  m          d  h  m         d  h  m

                                  JAN.   3 13 57   JAN. 11 12 45    
JAN.  19  4 01   JAN.  25 23 01   FEB.   2  5 45   FEB. 10  9 51 
FEB.  17 16 14   FEB.  24  7 56   MAR.   3 23 17   MAR. 12  3 54
MAR.  19  2 43   MAR.  25 18 16   APR.   2 17 15   APR. 10 18 04
APR.  17 11 36   APR.  24  6 36   MAY    2 10 09   MAY  10  4 27
MAY   16 19 27   MAY   23 21 03   JUNE   1  1 04   JUNE  8 11 43
JUNE  15  3 13   JUNE  22 13 15   JUNE  30 13 49   JULY  7 16 54
JULY  14 12 04   JULY  22  6 29   JULY  30  0 48   AUG.  5 21 20
AUG.  12 23 03   AUG.  20 23 54   AUG.  28 10 35   SEPT. 4  2 32
SEPT. 11 12 44   SEPT. 19 16 48   SEPT. 26 19 45   OCT.  3 10 06
OCT.  11  5 01   OCT.  19  8 33   OCT.  26  4 52   NOV.  1 21 18
NOV.   9 23 03   NOV.  17 22 33   NOV.  24 14 30   DEC.  1 12 44
DEC.   9 17 40   DEC.  17 10 18   DEC.  24  1 16   DEC. 31  7 51
Source

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Blobrana


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South Pole-Aitken Basin
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Newly reprocessed images of the moon's far side taken by Soviet spacecraft more than 40 years ago may have confirmed that the moon's biggest impact scar was glimpsed far earlier than previously thought.
The images were acquired by the Luna 3 and Zond 3 spacecraft in October 1959 and July 1965 respectively and provided the first look at the moon's forever hidden far side.
The original murky and noisy images have now been re-processed by amateur astronomer Ricardo Nunes and add weight to a proposal by V.V. Shevchenko and V.I.Chikmachev of the Sternberg State Astronomical Institute in Moscow that a dark smudge visible on the moon's limb in Luna 3 images is part of the western edge of the enormous South Pole-Aitken Basin.

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Blobrana


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RE: The Moon
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Blobrana


L

Posts: 131433
Date:
South Pole-Aitken basin
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An enormous impact basin located near the lunar south pole may have caused the Moon to roll over early in its history, new research suggests.
The biggest, deepest impact crater in the solar system lies near the Moon's south pole. Called the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, it is 2500 kilometres wide and 12 kilometres deep and is thought to have been created about 4 billion years ago.
Francis Nimmo of the University of California in Santa Cruz, US, believes the impact probably occurred near the Moon's equator. That is because the equator lies in the plane of most other objects in the solar system and therefore would more likely be in a hurtling space rock's 'line of fire'.
But he thinks the giant hole destabilised the Moon, so that within 100,000 to 1 million years of forming, the basin a region of low mass had rolled over to the south pole. The phenomenon is similar to how spinning bowling balls tend to stabilise with their finger holes the area of least mass aligned vertically along the spin axis.

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