Sharpest image of the Whirlpool Galaxy ever taken was made by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in January 2005. The pink arms are "star-formation factories, compressing hydrogen gas and creating clusters of new stars." Each arm of stars moves forward through changing densities of gas and dust, as our solar system moves with its Sun in the rotating arms of our Milky Way Galaxy. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and Hubble Heritage Team.
May 7, 2005 Boulder, Colorado - In the Earth's 4.5 billion year history so far, there have been five major extinction events, plus the current sixth caused by the expansion of human civilization into animal and plant habitats and subsequent impact on global warming. The five previous major extinction events were based on the most complete study ever done of all the known world marine fossils. That was the life work of University of Chicago paleontologist, John (Jack) J. Sepkoski, Ph.D. He documented 36,380 genera of marine life over the past half a billion years. After his death, his work was published as Compendium of Fossil Marine Animal Genera and is the most complete reference available for the study of biodiversity and extinctions. [See040105 Earthfiles.]
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Dark "channels," perhaps draining down into dark "methane sea" at bottom, in image taken from about 8 kilometers altitude by Huygens probe with a resolution of about 20 meters per pixel. Boundary between high, lighter-colored terrain and and darker lowland area on Titan resembles a coast line. One of the many mysteries: what is the right angle structure beneath the white arrow? This composite was produced from images returned January 14, 2005, by ESA's Huygens probe. Image source: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.
May 6, 2005 Tucson, Arizona - This week planetary scientists at the University of Arizona in Tucson submitted their first paper about the Cassini/Huygens probe images of Saturn's huge moon, Titan, to the British journal, Nature. But the article, with many images and hypotheses about what the surface geology might be on the mysterious moon, won't be released until the end of 2005. One of the many surface features that have provoked scientists to wonder what they are seeing is what appears to be a straight-sided 90-degree angle at the left of a composite image released on January 14, 2005, soon after the Huygens probe had descended from the Cassini spacecraft to land on Titan. This week I asked one of the team members studying Titan's surface images to comment on the "structure."
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April 20, 2005 Dayton, Ohio - Around 11 a.m. Sunday, August 24, 2003, at the Brush Creek bridge in Peebles, Ohio, a family saw "an oddity in a nearby soybean field that was not natural." It turned out to be an extraordinary crop formation in soybeans only a half mile from the tail of the famous Serpent Mound mysteriously built a thousand years ago to be seen from the sky, but no one knows why.
Photograph of ancient Serpent Mound near Locust Grove and Peebles, Ohio. Mound is 800 meters long (.5 miles) and its construction is placed around 800 A.D. Soybean formation was 3,000 feet ( a little more than a half mile) to the east of the serpent's tail shown at left of photo. Image courtesy Wright State University.
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Apri1 1, 2005 Berkeley, California - Whatever humans do, or don't do, in this century to help sustain the Earth's ecosystem, it appears that our planet has endured some kind of assault every 62 million years which kills marine life all over the world. The last big global catastrophe is definitely linked to the impact of a large asteroid near the Yucatan Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago. About 75% of all living creatures in the oceans and on land were literally wiped out to extinction, including the dinosaurs. Could there be a 62-million-year cycle of asteroids, comets or other cosmic debris that affects our solar system and Earth? Or is it fluctuations in our Sun? Or the periodic volcanic violence of our own planet? Or something else?
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April 1, 2005 Raleigh, North Carolina - One of the most awesome creatures that ever walked on Earth was the 20-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus rex, or T-rex. It was a big meat eater with many sharp teeth as long as six inches in a head that could be five feet long. Sixty-five million years ago, the big dinosaurs were roaming what is now called the Hell Creek Formation in the state of Montana when an asteroid, maybe 6 miles in diameter, hit the Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula. That violent impact and its subsequent fires and dust blocked sunlight around the world for months and killed off more than 75% of all Earth life. Thirty-one dinosaur skeletons have been found at the Hell Creek Formation in the past four years by Montana State University paleontologist, Jack Horner. And one of those is the first dinosaur remains to have stretchy tissue and even what appears to be blood cells inside one of its leg bones. This astonishing discovery recently published in the March 2005 journal, Science, was made by biologist and paleontologist, Mary Higby Schweitzer, Ph.D., at North Carolina State University's Dept. of Marine Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
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March 26, 2005 Albuquerque, New Mexico - Earthfiles is staying in touch with Larry Crumpler, Ph. D., Mars Spirit Rover Mission and Research Curator, who receives data from Spirit and designs maps based on rover data. Dr. Crumpler is based in the Volcanology and Space Science Department at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the scientist after whom "Larry's Lookout" was named in the Gusev Crater's Columbia Hills.
This week he emailed me twice about Spirit's long trek across the Columbia Hills and included the stunning image of Martian soil rich in magnesium sulfate. No question that Mars was wetter when the Columbia Hills rocks were deposited before the Martian climate suddenly changed very early in the red planet's history to greater dryness. See more information in Earthfiles 022505.
"...we are on the verge of finding evidence for other Earth-like planets in the neighborhood of our galaxy. That is really an incredibly profound advance in science."
- Alan Ball, Ph.D., Carnegie Institution
Infrared detection not currently in image form, so this is artist's version of what the distant worlds might look like in infrared. Artwork courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt.
March 25, 2005 Washington, D. C - NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, launched in August 2003, is the largest infrared telescope ever placed in space to orbit the sun. Now, for the first time, the Spitzer Space Telescope has captured the light and heat from two planets orbiting very distant stars, one 150 light years away and the other 500 light-years. The findings mark the beginning of a new age for planetary science, in which "extrasolar" planets can be directly measured and compared. In order for the Spitzer telescope to see the heat from such distant planets, the telescope must be cooled to near absolute zero (-459 degrees Fahrenheit or -273 degrees Celsius) so that it can observe infrared signals from space without interference from the telescope's own heat. Also, the telescope must be protected from our Sun's heat and the infrared radiation put out by the Earth. To do this, Spitzer carries a solar shield and was launched into a special orbit which places Spitzer far enough away from the Earth to allow the telescope to stay cold without having to carry large amounts of cryogen coolant.
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"NASA is not about the 'Adventure of Human Space Exploration.' We are in the deadly serious business of saving the species. I think over this century if we industrialize the moon and use its resources, I think it can save civilization. I think over the long haul, going to Mars will extend civilization. But I think the moon has the capability to save us."
Astronaut John Young, Captain, Apollo 16 Flight to the Moon
North America land mass amid the Earth's oceans and clouds in image taken from Apollo 16 after launch on April 16, 1972. Commander was astronaut John W. Young with his crew, Thomas Mattingly and Charles Duke. Apollo 16 returned in ocean splashdown on April 27, 1972. Earth image courtesy NASA.NASA Apollo 16 crew, the tenth manned Apollo mission, April 16-27, 1972. L-R: Thomas K. Mattingly, II; Commander John W. Young; Charles M. Duke, Jr. -
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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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