Tomas Martin @ 22-04-2008
The Moon seems like a pretty static place. After all, there’s little atmosphere and apart from occasional meteorite impacts, nothing much happens. Or so we thought. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission found that every month when the moon is full, the moon crosses through the Earth’s magnetotail, bathing our satellite in high energy charged particles that may create dust storms and electrical static.
Astronauts have never been on the Moon during this period. Landings have never taken place when the moon is full. But as Roland Piquepaille on ZDNet’s Emerging Tech blog discusses, if astronauts return to the moon to establish a base, they will have to face the challenges of the magnetotail, which could clog up vents and even give astronauts electric shocks!
[via Science Daily, image by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab]
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Jeremy Eades @ 26-03-2008
The typical ending of our lovely planet will come in several billion years when the Sun swells up and engulfs all of the inner planets. But it’s never too early to start thinking of how to rescue our beloved cradle.
According to an article in the NYTimes, the Earth faces an unknown future because it will move further out in orbit as the Sun expends its mass and the gravitational forces become weaker.
One solution is to lasso comets and asteroids, swinging them near the Earth and using their slight gravity to boost the Earth to a higher orbit, where it could escape the Sun’s expansion. Because, y’know, what could go wrong with that?
(image from NASA website)
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Tomas Martin @ 19-10-2007
A lot of money has been pumped into Carbon Sequestration recently, to try and put some of the CO2 we produce back into the earth in the underground aquifers where we got the oil and gas that caused it in the first place. However, another way of storing carbon is in the soil, which benefits agriculture as well. Indigenous tribes in the Amazon basin have been using a technique of introducing charcoal to soil to produce darker ‘terra preta‘ soil for millenia. The low temperature charring of plants and trees introduces more carbon to the soil and encourages worms to break down the charcoal and soil to make a nutrient-rich loam.
A study into the method by MIT professor Amy Smith found that using agricultural char methods could be a great way of producing low-cost fuel for developing nation. You can view a speech on the subject she made at TED 2006 here. By burning waste materials in a gasifier, the methane, hydrogen and other burnable gases it produces can be used as fuels, leaving behind a charred solid that can be mixed into the soil as fertiliser, building back the soil content. Because the organic content has charred, it doesn’t decompose to be released into the atmosphere. WorldChanging has a great analysis that the process could actually provide power whilst potentially reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
[via WorldChanging, image via Papa Goiaba]
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Tomas Martin @ 12-10-2007
A big team of astronomers studying Venus’ atmosphere have found a new type of heavier carbon dioxide molecule that absorbs more heat than the one more commonly found on Mars or Earth. The molecule, which is believed to have two additional neutrons in one of its oxygen atoms, allows it to absorb an additional infrared wavelength of 3.3 microns, which is what tipped the teams off to the discovery. They believe this is part of the reason Venus has such a hot atmosphere - the bigger percentage of these molecules creates an even bigger Greenhouse Gas effect than normal CO2.
As soon as I read this article comparing Mars’ cold atmosphere to Venus’ hot one in relation to the quantities of this new molecule, I immediately thought of Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Red Mars’. If this gas contributes more global warming than normal CO2, in the future it may be a very valuable tool if we ever came to terraform our red neighbour.
[link and image via ScienceDaily]
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Stephen Years @ 17-09-2007
Photo Credit: NASA (via Wikimedia Commons)
DigitalGlobe, provider of imagery for Google Earth, will be launching a new satellite dubbed WorldView I next Tuesday, that will boost the accuracy of its satellite images to half-meter resolution. With that type of accuracy the satellite will now be able to pinpoint objects on the Earth at three to 7.5 meters, or 10 to 25 feet. Using known reference points on the ground, the accuracy could rise to about two meters. Additionally the satellite will be able to collect over 600,000 square kilometers of imagery each day, up from the current collection of that amount each week.
It seems that we are getting much closer to the CIC Earth application as envisioned by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash, which was able to present real time satellite imagery.
[Via C|Net]
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