Colonies on moon can be built using Lunar rock--like material in future.

Dwellings in colonies on the moon one fine day may be built with a new, highly durable bricks developed by students from the College of engineering at Virginia Tech in the United States.

The building material is composed of a lunar rock--like material mixed with powdered aluminium that may be moulded into any shape,such as a dome. The invention recently won an award from the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES), which is dedicated to supporting life on the moon & beyond.

The early--development lunar bricks were based on previous work by the College of Engineering student team’s adviser Kathryn Logan,a professor of materials science & engineering at Virginia Tech.

Logan’s prior research entailed mixing powdered aluminium and ceramic materials to form armour plating for tanks.

“I theorised that if I could do this kind of reaction to make armour, then I could use a similar type of reaction to make construction materials for colonies on the moon,” Logan said.

Since actual lunar rock, known as regolith, is scarce, the students used volcanic ash from a deposit on Earth along with various minerals and basaltic glass, similar to rock on the lunar surface, according to Eric Faierson, a doctoral student who led the Virginia Tech team.

During initial experiments, the simulated regolith & aluminum powder were mixed & placed inside a shallow aluminium foil crucible. A wire was inserted into this mixture, which was then heated to 1,500 degrees Celsius triggering a reaction called Self--propagating High--temperature Synthesis(SHS), Mr Logan said.

The reaction caused the material to form a solid brick.

Once the students team had created a brick, they found it was almost as strong as concrete under
different pressure tests.

The team will now be studying how they can go about harnessing the very large quantities of heat derived from the SHS reaction to produce the electricity for the lunar colony, Mr Logan said.

Venus Possibly Had Continents and Oceans.

A look at data gathered by the Galileo spacecraft in year 1990 reveals that Venus at one time might have been habitable, with evidence of past continents & oceans. In a flyby of Venus on the spacecraft's journey to Jupiter, a near- infrared mapping instrument detected signatures which the researchers have interpreted as granite. An international team led by planetary scientist George Hashimoto, at Okayama University, Japan, found that Venus's highland regions emitted less infrared radiation than its lowlands. One interpretation of this dichotomy,says the team's new paper, is that the highlands are composed largely of ' felsic ' rocks, particularly granite. Granite, which on Earth is found in continental crust , requires water for its formation.

Alien World's First Glimpse.

A team of scientists working with the Hubble Space Telescope captured the 1st visible-light snap of a planet orbiting other star. last November 14, came the report of a related breakthrough using the ground-based Gemini & Keck observatories in Hawaii, with which astronomers captured the first infrared image of three planets orbiting a star. Later, one more exoplanet candidate was spotted in infrared — by the European Southern Observatory’s Big Telescope—orbiting the hot, bright star Beta Pictoris.
Astronomers’ new discovered success at imaging planets trillions of miles away comes with the use of more powerful telescopes, advanced optics techniques, & software that compares images to minimize background starlight. Bruce Macintosh, an astronomer with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, tells that changes in the kinds of stars astronomers are seeking out—stars 49 to 99 percent more massive than our sun— may also factor into the number of exo-planet sightings. Spotting an Earth - like planet around a sun like star remains beyond current technology, but it seems much closer .

Recent Chandrayaan-1 Photos

Few "new" images have been released from the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter mission. latest are the first images from NASA's radar instrument that's hitching a ride on board the Indian Space Research Organization's (ISRO) spacecraft. Called the Mini-SAR ,NASA's instrument recently passed initial in-flight tests and sent back its 1st data from Nov. 17, 2008, showing the first look inside one of the Moon's coldest, darkest craters. The image above shows a swath from the Mini-SAR overlaid on a ground-based telescope image of Haworth Crater. The swath shows the floor of this permanently-shadowed polar crater on the moon that isn't visible from Earth. The instrument will map both polar regions to search the insides of craters for water ice.

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Harrison Schmidt. Courtesy: NASA

Back in the 1960's, scientists claimed that the Moon rocks returned by the Apollo astronauts may keep researchers busy for years, they weren't just joking. Analysis on one of the rocks collected during the Apollo17 mission helped to solve a longstanding puzzle about the Moon. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of technology carried out the most detailed analysis ever of the oldest pristine rock from the Apollo collection.Magnetic traces recorded in the rock provide good evidence that 4.2 bn yrs ago the moon had a liquid core with a dynamo, like Earth's core today,that produced a massive magnetic field.

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2 colliding galaxies located 140 million light years from Our Planet, Earth.

The ice-blue eyes are the galaxies' cores, & the mask is their spiral arms.The galaxies, called NGC2207 & IC2163,began their gravitational tango around 40 million years ago & will eventually meld into One.

Photograph courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/Vassar

Galaxies!!

Space Telescope picture indicates unprecedented detail of Antennae galaxies; an intense star-forming region created when 2 galaxies began to collide 200 million to Three Hundred million years ago. The bright, blue---white areas show newly formed stars surrounded by clouds of hydrogen, which are colored pink. A similar collision is expected between our galaxy, the Milky Way,& also the Andromedaa galaxy in many billion yrs.


Photograph courtesy NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

The Most Viewed Top10 space photos of 2008

Amazing shots of Mars w/Clouds Drifting Over Volcanos..

Astronomers to fight for ‘planet’ Pluto in 2009

London: This 2009, a group of astronomers is planning to overturn the ruling, which says that Pluto is not the ninth planet of our solar systm.
In August 2006,the International
Astronomical Union (IAU), ruled that there are no longer nine planets in the Solar System, and downgraded Pluto to the lowly status of a “dwarf planet”.
But in 2009, Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in the US – along with like-minded colleagues – hope to get the ruling overturned at the next meeting of the IAU, to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in August.
“To me and others like me, Pluto
remains a planet and there are still nine planets in the Solar System,” Dr Sykes said. “The one thing that was particularly bad about the IAU’s decision is that it has tried to impose its view on the rest of us.”
The row over Pluto’s downgrading has been simmering since the astronomy organisation voted to relegate it in August 2006 in Prague.

It was agreed at the last vote of that conference – after many scientists had left.

“The IAU definition is so flawed on so many levels,” said Alan Stern, principal investigator on a NASA mission, New Horizons.

“It’s an awful definition; it’s sloppy science and it would never pass peer review,” he added.

The IAU coined the term ‘plutoid’ for objects like Pluto, which, while massive enough to form a near-spherical shape, do not have the gravitational influence to clear the neighbourhood around their orbit of other objects.

But,Dr Sykes disagrees.

“Pluto is far more like Earth than Earth is like Jupiter.Jupiter is a gas planet. It doesn’t even have a surface or topography, unlike Pluto,” he said.

“The argument over Pluto is a demonstration that scientists can disagree and that science is not some dictatorial project – it’s dynamic,” he added.