done by my friend missy kobal ( https://www.facebook.com/missy.kobal ) who is currently in college in Alaska..
Carl Sagan Was On US Team To Nuke the Moon
“Apparently during the cold war, one fall-back position the U.S. was looking at to ensure mutual assured destruction was to put nukes on the moon. This would ensure that the U.S. could retaliate against even an effective first strike by the Russians. The first step, of course, would be to detonate a nuke on the moon. And yes, Carl Sagan was on the team (and apparently leaked the info!)”
Ice on the Moon
“Water ice on the Moon may be more widespread than previously thought. Permanent shadows have been spotted far from the lunar poles, expanding the number of sites that would be good candidates for exploration by robotic rovers — or even for the locations of lunar bases.”
National Geographic - Million Dollar Moon Rock Heist
t was a headline-grabbing heist of NASA proportions. Each year, hundreds of students apply to NASA’s prestigious Co-operative Education Program, but only a handful are accepted – allowing them to work alongside NASA’s top scientists and go on to careers at NASA and elsewhere. In 2000, one “Co-op” showed an inordinate interest in the cache of moon rocks kept at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, repeatedly visiting the lab to examine them. Then the moon rocks mysteriously disappeared. Moon Rock Heist follows the trail of international intrigue surrounding the recovery of the rocks and reveals how law enforcement finally tracked down the thieves.
Nasa had been warned off returning to the Moon
THE TRUE COLOR OF THE MOON :
For over 50 years we have been told and convinced the Moon is nothing more than a black and white desolate rock with moon dust and craters. The thousands of photos released to the public have always presented a black and white Moon. Even the most recent Hubble Photographs of the Moon are black and white. NASA continues to perpetuate the “lie” that the Moon is black and white. Moon Rising is the first film that presents Full Color Photography of the Moon.
http://moonrising-themovie.com/
10 Moons Every Person Should Know
Pretty much everyone can rattle off the names of our solar system’s eight (formerly nine) planets, but ask the average person to list some moons and you’ll be lucky if they can tell you more than two or three.
Now, you obviously can’t expect people to remember the name of every single satellite in the solar system (after all, they outnumber the planets by around 20 to 1), but if you have even the slightest interest in astronomy, it wouldn’t kill you to be familiar with at least an even ten. So with that in mind, we’ve assembled this reference guide to ten of the solar system’s most noteworthy moons.
(via starkimageries)
The Second Moons of Earth
“Despite a large body of work on satellite capture by the gas giants, mainly Jupiter and Saturn, there has been little published about the Earth’s natural satellites other than the moon. Now Scientific American reports that although the moon has been with us for billions of years, Earth has also had countless other satellite companions and probably has one right now. These ‘second moons’ are boulders from the large population of near-Earth asteroids that get snagged by our gravity, orbit the Earth for a few months, then escape and move on. Known as ‘Temporarily-Captured Orbiters’ (TCOs), the irregular natural satellites are hard to see but astronomers spotted one such transient satellite in 2006. Dubbed 2006 RH120, the asteroid was a few meters in diameter, was captured by Earth for about a year and made four Earth orbits before being ejected after its June 2007 perigee back to interplanetary space. But TCOs are not just of academic interest. ‘Once TCOs can be reliably and frequently identified early enough in a capture event they create an opportunity for a low-cost low-delta-v meteoroid return mission. The scientific potential of being able to first remotely characterize a meteoroid and then visit and bring it back to Earth would be unprecedented (PDF).’”
How 3D Printing Could Help Keep the ISS In Orbit
Despite all the best intentions and meticulous overengineering, some of the equipment on spacecraft like the ISS inevitably breaks. An anonymous reader poses the question “Why carry out a very expensive launch into space to resupply the ISS, when astronauts could just manufacture replacement parts themselves?” Startup Made in Space is working on a space-oriented 3D printing system to make it easy to transmit the information needed to pop out complex shapes (as might be in delicate mechanical systems), but the founders are also talking about using 3D printers to jump-start construction if humans extend their presence from the Earth to other planets (or revisit the moon).
Is the Earth Special?
“Planetary scientists say there are aspects to our planet and its evolution that are remarkably strange. In the first place there is Earth’s strong magnetic field. No one is exactly sure how it works, but it has something to do with the turbulent motion that occurs in the Earth’s liquid outer core and without it, we would be bombarded by harmful radiation from the Sun. Next there’s plate tectonics. We live on a planet that is constantly recycling its crust, limiting the amount of carbon dioxide escaping into the atmosphere — a natural way of controlling the greenhouse effect. Then there’s Jupiter-sized outer planets protecting the Earth from frequent large impacts. But the strangest thing of all is our big Moon. ‘As the Earth rotates, it wobbles on its axis like a child’s spinning top,’ says Professor Monica Grady. ‘What the Moon does is dampen down that wobble and that helps to prevent extreme climate fluctuations’ — which would be detrimental to life. The moon’s tides have also made long swaths of earth’s coastline into areas of that are regularly shifted between dry and wet, providing a proving ground for early sea life to test the land for its suitability as a habitat. The ‘Rare Earth Hypothesis’ is one solution to the Fermi Paradox (PDF) because, if Earth is uniquely special as an abode of life, ETI will necessarily be rare or even non-existent. And in the absence of verifiable alien contact, scientific opinion will forever remain split as to whether the Universe teems with life or we are alone in the inky blackness.”
NASA Missing Hundreds of Moon Rocks
“It seems NASA can’t keep track of its goodies. A recent audit discovered that moon rocks have been missing for 30 years, loaned displays have gone unreturned, and book-keeping has been generally poor. From the article: ‘In a report issued by the agency’s inspector general on Thursday, NASA concedes that more than 500 pieces of moon rocks, meteorites, comet chunks and other space material were stolen or have been missing since 1970. That includes 218 moon samples that were stolen and later returned and about two dozen moon rocks and chunks of lunar soil that were reported lost last year. NASA, which has lent more than 26,000 samples, needs to keep better track of what is sent to researchers and museums, the report said. The lack of sufficient controls “increases the risk that these unique resources may be lost,” the report concluded.’”
On December 10, the Last Lunar Eclipse Until 2014
“The action begins around 4:45 am Pacific Standard Time [on December 10th] when the red shadow of Earth first falls across the lunar disk. By 6:05 am Pacific Time, the Moon will be fully engulfed in red light. This event — the last total lunar eclipse until 2014 — is visible from the Pacific side of North America, across the entire Pacific Ocean to Asia and Eastern Europe. For people in the western United States the eclipse is deepest just before local dawn. Not only will the Moon be beautifully red, it will also be inflated by the Moon illusion.”
Voyager Probes Give Us ET’s View
“For the first time, scientists have been able to measure a type of radiation streaming out from the Milky Way that in other galaxies has been linked to the birthplaces of young, hot stars. There was no way to make our own galaxy’s measurement of the radiation, known as Lyman-alpha, until the Voyager probes were about 40 times as far away from the sun as Earth — any closer and the solar system’s own emissions drowned out the fainter glow from the galaxy.”
