Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Arizona State University/Carnegie Institute of Washington
A major research collaboration unmasked Mercury today, revealing more than people have ever known about the closest planet to the Sun.
NASA’s MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft flew by Mercury last fall, and researchers have been mining its data and images to fill in maps for nearly half the planet that were previously blank.
The new data also reveal a history of volcanoes that makes Mercury more like Mars than the Moon, and a modern surface that contains some very familiar materials — magnesium, for one, and possibly iron and titanium.
The findings were unveiled in a press conference today and appear in four separate papers in the journal Science.
This new image was compiled from the views of several cameras aboard the mission, in different wavelengths, as it departed Mercury.
Impact craters blasted recently by asteroids, such as the yellow crater called Kuiper near the center, have contrasting ejecta and rays because they excavated fresh material. Kuiper is 38 miles (62 km) across.
Other impact craters, such as those with ejecta that appear blue, have color contrasts because they excavated material from below the planet’s surface.
Lermontov crater, 94 miles or 152 km across, near the top left, appears orange and is thought to contain pyroclastic deposits from explosive past volcanic activity.
And then, there’s Rembrandt.
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Little brown bats in NY hibernation cave. Most of the bats exhibit fungal growth on their muzzles. Credit: Nancy Heaslip, NY DEC
Even though I’ll blog after the end of “100 Days of Science,” I’m sweating this last push of my daily effort, wanting to make sure I tackle some of the most pressing science stories I haven’t blogged about yet. A case in point: White-nose syndrome in bats.
The disease got a slow start in 2006, but has cropped up in the news several times in the past year. Last fall, a paper in the journal Science first traced the previously mysterious ailment to a fungus.
Then, in February, wildlife officials went public with their shock after encountering gruesome disease-killed colonies in abandoned Pennsylvania mines.
In March, Justin Boyles, a graduate student in biology at Indiana State University, and his colleagues, published a paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment proposing the use of heated bat boxes to create roosts where the fungus can’t live.
By now the disease has killed well over 100,000 bats, wiping out up to 90 percent of bats in infected caves.
Last week, the Interior Department allocated nearly $1 million for a multi-state effort to stem the spread of the disease, as part of $9 million that went to 12 state wildlife agencies to help imperiled fish and wildlife.
But today, the Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson, Arizona-based conservation group, decried inadequate funding and slow action on the issue, and beseeched the public and the government to do more.
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Large barrel sponge. Credit: John Burke
Out of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington — which happens to be my undergraduate alma mater — comes good news for coral reef restoration.
Study authors Steven McMurray and Joseph Pawlik report that sponges knocked off their reefs by human activities or storms can actually be re-attached with excellent success.
“The worldwide decline of coral reef ecosystems has prompted many local restoration efforts, which typically focus on reattachment of reef-building corals,” said Pawlik, a marine biologist at the university.
“Despite their dominance on coral reefs, large sponges are generally excluded from restoration efforts because of a lack of suitable methods for sponge reattachment.”
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The city of Bellflower, California had this on its flier announcing the availability of flu shots.
I’ve never gotten a flu shot. And even if a pandemic loomed, I doubt I would. I’m not opposed to most vaccines, and certainly I support time-tested, life-saving childhood vaccination programs. But I think it’s a little strange how people can be heard polling each other in late fall, asking, “Have you gotten your flu shot?” Your flu shot. Like it’s an annual responsibility or an entitlement.
Every once in a while — every other year, or maybe once a year — I get sick. I feel a little weak and dizzy, maybe my throat hurts, it’s hard to breathe and I cough a lot. And then it goes away. I rarely know where I am on the cold/flu boundary when it happens, but I’m usually glad that my body got a chance to fight something.
I guess I think of it as my own personal immunity protocol: I hope anything truly sinister that comes along will be a cousin to something I’ve fought before. And then I win.
That’s just my personal approach, and it might be bunk. But I can’t help noticing some overlap in my own rugged ideas and the findings in a paper that came out today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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I know; that type is way too small. Click anywhere on the image to go see the big version at the NASA site! Credit: NASA/Swift/Bodewits & Immler and Univ. of Leicester/Bodewits et al.
Wow! Almost at the end of “100 Days of Science.” People keep asking what I’ll do at the end, and I still don’t know. I do know that I’ll take a two-week reprieve, at least from daily posting, while I go visit some family members. I also know that I have a very exciting announcement to make soon, and it entails me being a little too busy for daily posting even after my travels. But I love blogging, and the project has been big fun.
Any suggestions for a new name for the blog? I didn’t actually plan beyond the end of the “100 Days” when I started …
As for today’s post, a little light reading (and comet ogling) for a Sunday. This is a montage of comets Lulin, Tuttle and SW3, released earlier this month. They’re pictured individually below.
NASA released the images as a trio – including a new image of Comet 8P/Tuttle — to illustrate just how different three comets can be, as part of a live, 24-hour video webcast called “Around the World in 80 Telescopes,” one of many events celebrating the ongoing International Year of Astronomy.
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