March 4, 2005 Socorro, New Mexico - Last week at the first European Space Agency Mars Express Orbiter conference in The Netherlands, the Italian physicist Vittorio Formisano presented data about not only methane and water vapor in the Martian atmosphere, but formaldehyde. Small amounts of formaldehyde had also been reported by NASA and attributed to the oxidation and break down of methane.
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The Andromeda Galaxy is a large spiral galaxy very similar to our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. It is over 65,000 light-years in diameter and approximately 2.2 million light-years away from Earth. From Earth to the center of our Milky Way Galaxy is 8,500 parsecs about 26,000 light years the densest region. Andromeda image by T.A.Rector and B.A.Wolpa/NOAO/AURA/NSF.
March 3, 2005 Sweet Briar, Virginia- The current British journal, Nature, features a report about a powerful and repeating burst of radio waves toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy that are unlike any other radio bursts ever monitored on Earth. The unique event took place the night of September 30 to October 1, 2002. It has taken three years for the data to be thoroughly analyzed, compared to archive data, and finally reported publicly as a unique and puzzling event in human study of our universe. The lead scientist on the Nature article is Scott Hyman, Professor of Physics at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, who for five years has been studying the Milky Way's galactic center for the Naval Research Laboratory.
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"The rocks in the Columbia Hills they've seen a lot of water! They've been soaked, they've been altered, there is all sort of evidence that it was a different Mars when those rocks were laid down."
- Larry Crumpler, Ph.D., Geologist
January 18, 2004, composite image by Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) and Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) daily global images acquired at Ls 145°. Produced by NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems.
February 25, 2005 Albuquerque, New Mexico - There was a discovery by the Spirit Rover on Mars which thrilled NASA scientists in the summer of 2004. Both rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have been looking for hard geological evidence that Mars had a watery past. Spirit's discovery would hold up in a "court room" as solid evidence of water, one geologist told me. And if there was once a lot of water on the Martian surface, was there life in that water? If organisms did live in Martian water, could they still be frozen in surface ice - or even living today underground and in caves on Mars? Could living organisms explain methane, formaldehyde and water vapor reported in the Martian atmosphere?
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"The most interesting thing is that we might find life there (in frozen sea) because if you look at the source of the water, which has filled a huge basin, it comes out of cracks in the ground. The indication that there are warm, wet places beneath the surface of Mars as recently as 5 million years ago to me is good evidence that life might have developed on Mars."
February 22, 2005 Noordwijk, The Netherlands - On Earth, pack ice is a floating mass of ice formed from seawater in the Earth's polar regions. Pack ice expands during winter to cover about 5 percent of the northern oceans and 8 percent of the southern oceans. When melting occurs in spring and summer, the margins of the pack ice retreat.
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"You could go so far as to call Iapetus pre-biotic. One of the reasons we are interested in the whole Saturnian system is the fact that it's kind of a laboratory for life. The molecules that lead to the origin of life on Earth, we think formed in the outer solar system, and we are seeing them in the Saturnian system. It's colder there and these complex molecules have persisted out there as kind of a laboratory for the origin of life."
- Bonnie Buratti, Ph.D., NASA/JPL Astronomer
Above: Black and white Iapetus (diameter 1,426 kilometers) with a bulging "weld" around its middle. Below: Enceladus (diameter 499 kilometers) is as bright as freshly fallen snow with a bizarre, wrinkled terrain. Below: Saturn and rings imaged by Cassini spacecraft in 2004. Images credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.
February 17, 2005 Pasadena, California - The current NASA Cassini mission to Saturn has produced the clearest pictures human eyes have ever seen of Saturn's rings, which are made out of ice and dust and iron. In addition to the rings, Saturn has 33 moons, including Titan Saturn's biggest moon and second largest moon in the Solar System after Jupiter's Ganymede. Beyond the mysterious Titan where methane apparently rains down into dark lakes, Cassini has also taken the clearest images of two other moons which baffle scientists. Those moons are Iapetus (eye-AP-uh-tus) and Enceladus (en-SELL-uh-dus) from Greek mythology. The entire Saturnian system is named from the Greek dramas about gods and the universe. Saturn was the Titan who ruled over the Olympian Gods, including Iapetus. Iapetus was the father of Atlas, who carried the Earth on his shoulders, and father of Prometheus who was mankind's savior. Saturn ended up killing his father, Uranus, to become lord of the Universe. After the murder, revenging giants sprang from the father's blood. One of those giants was called Enceladus.
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"It does look like the sun has been more active in the last 50 years than it has been for a long time. One estimate is that there has not been this long a time period of high activity in something like 8,000 years."
- David Hathaway, Ph.D., NASA
Above: Giant sunspot 720 erupted for seventh time on Jan. 20, 2005, unleashing a powerful X 7-class solar flare. The blast hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space and sparked the strongest radiation storm since October 1989. Jack Newton of Arizona photographed the sunspot rotating toward the sun's limb and other side on Jan. 19th. Below: Bright auroras spread across northern Europe on January 21st soon after 720's coronal mass ejection crashed into Earth's magnetic field. The result was a spectacular aurora display over Europe. Jim Henderson photographed the vivid red and yellow light near Aberdeen, Scotland.
February 11, 2005 Huntsville, Alabama - On Saturday, January 15, the Sun erupted with three strong solar flares. The next day, the Sun erupted again. The Space Weather office at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado, released warnings about intense radiation storms that could damage satellites and interrupt radio communications. By Monday, January 17th, the Sun erupted yet again with a strong solar flare and some of the brightest auroras in years were being photographed over the northern latitudes. The next day there was yet another strong solar flare, totaling six major eruptions in four days.'
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"On January 27th, seismometers around the world were recording a quake every 20 minutes. ... I don't think we have ever seen this many magnitude 5 earthquakes concentrated in one location on the surface of the Earth, at least not in modern times."
Goran Ekstrom, Harvard Geophysicist
February 4, 2005 Cambridge, Massachusetts - Intense swarms of earthquakes, generally between 5 and 6 on the Richter Scale, began shaking the Nicobar and Andaman Islands north of Sumatra on January 26th. The next day, January 27th, seismometers around the world were recording an earthquake every 20 minutes. Indian Ocean residents and geophysicists began to wonder if it all was leading up to another large seismic event even if the quakes were aftershocks of the huge 9.0 that occurred off the coast of Banda Aceh, Sumatra in Indonesia, on the morning of December 26, 2004.
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The Shroud of Turin: modern photo of the face, positive left and digitally processed image right.Left top is front negative image on Shroud of Turin; Right top is back negative image on Shroud. Left below is front positive image on Shroud of Turin; Right below is back positive image on Shroud.The Shroud is a linen cloth that for centuries has been purported to be the burial shroud of Jesus Christ. The linen measures 14 feet 3 inches long and 3 feet 7 inches wide . There are two faint brownish-yellow images, those of the back and front of a 5-foot 7-inch man. The Shroud has been preserved since 1694 in the royal chapel of the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista in Turin, Italy. Positive and negative photographs were taken in 1898 by Secondo Pia.
January 27, 2005 Los Alamos, New Mexico - The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth alleged to be the burial shroud of Christ. It has pale brownish-yellow stains front and back that form the image of a man as if the linen had been wrapped around the body from the feet up over the head and back down to the feet, leaving complete front and back images. There are also many reddish-colored bloodstains that indicate the man was repeatedly whipped and there are rivulets of blood on the face and back of the head. Many people believe the linen was used to wrap Christ's body after his crucifixion on the cross approximately 2,000 years ago.
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Satellite photo of 4-mile-high Cumbre Vieja, La Palma, Canary Islands, (Spain) volcano, west of La' Youn, Morocco, Africa. Three miles of the volcano are below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean; just over one mile is above the surface. Image courtesy of the Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center.
January 21, 2005 Santa Cruz, California - The seven Canary Islands owned by Spain rise above the Atlantic Ocean west of Morocco, Africa. One of them, La Palma, is not only the steepest island in the world, but has also been the most volcanically active of the Canaries in the past 500 years. On it is the 4-mile high volcano called Cumbre Vieja, which means "Old Summit." The volcano has been re-building itself for the past 15,000 years since it last blew apart and collapsed huge amounts of rock into the surrounding ocean, sending out a giant tsunami that has been detected in deposits as far away as the Bahamas and Bermuda. Over the past 15,000 years, the volcano kept erupting under water, building back up from the Atlantic sea bed three miles below the water surface to its present height, which is now more than a mile above the Atlantic. Its last two eruptions were 1971 and 1949.
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