Moon fever is “staying alive” with hopes of turning lunar dust into concrete, and even mirrors for a possible 50-meter telescope on the moon, NASA announced at the 212th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

“We could make huge telescopes on the moon relatively easily, and avoid the large expense of transporting a large mirror from Earth,” says Peter Chen of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Catholic University of America, which is located in Washington, D.C.

Chen and his colleagues used crushed rock with similar composition and grain size to what’s abundant on the surface of the moon, and they mixed in cryogenic glue-like epoxies and carbon nanotubes for thermal stability to withstand the harsh temperature changes found on the moon.

“We made several tries in the laboratory,” said Chen to Earth & Sky, “and interestingly enough we found something that is very hard — it has the consistency of concrete, and it’s quite stable in the sense that we can heat it, and we drop it in liquid nitrogen and it comes out fine. ” Chen added,”so we said, hey, that makes a very good stable structure. Maybe we can use it in place of glass to make a telescope on the moon.” That’s done by topping a slab of the lunar concrete off with additional layers of epoxy and spinning the material to the smoothness needed for mirrors at room temperature.

Chen said that the moon is considered by many scientists as the best site for an astronomical observatory, mainly because of the clarity of images obtained from space in the absence of an atmosphere and the stable platform of the lunar surface compared to moving space-based observatories. “And this is especially true of the project for looking for other planets like Earth,” said Chen.

Chen used the analogy that attempting to look for an Earth-like planet around another star at 30 parsecs is equivalent to “looking for a speck of dust 100 micrometers across in Los Angeles, looking from New York.” “So you can see,” he added, “to resolve the object, you need a large area to collect the photons, and secondly you have to be extremely stable in your pointing. And the moon can let you do that.”

What’s more, Chen speculated on the enormous potential for mirror-building material, with the possibility of coating entire craters with telescopic mirrors, and in a sense, turning the moon into what might appear to be an enormous disco ball.

“You can actually daydream about putting a giant, shiny spot on the moon, or actually make the moon into a whole giant mirror ball with this technique, Chen said to Earth & Sky. “This kind of thing is what makes science fun, and that it is not actually that far-fetched.”

NASA plans a manned mission to the moon by 2020 as a precursor to missions to Mars, and the lunar concrete could also be used for housing and other structures needed for a long-term lunar base.

NOAA plans to develop a program of robotic aircraft that will carry automated sensors to do the dirty work of obtaining important scientific data on hard-to-measure phenomena such as hurricanes and storms over the Pacific ocean, sea ice, snow pack, and wildfires.

An investment of $3 M was announced today at the AMS meeting, and expectations are high for the aircraft. “The vision is that unmanned aircraft can be an incredible tool for NOAA,” said Sandy MacDonald, Director of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory. Sending science crews into hurricanes can be risky, “but an unmanned aircraft can go in so low that they get salt water on the wings,” said MacDonald.

For the next hurricane season, one test project will send unmanned aircraft into the eye of Atlantic and Caribbean hurricanes at low altitudes too risky for crewed aircraft. The robotic planes can hover over hurricanes and follow them for up to a week using solar power, gathering key data such as maximum wind speeds and storm physics to improve hurricane intensity forecasts.

“We really think that this technology can revolutionize how we monitor the Earth system,” said Marty Ralph, a research meteorologist at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., and manager of NOAA’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems program. Ralph talked of “profound” changes in the Arctic pack ice. “The last few years, it has reduced so dramatically as to be startling,” said Ralph. “And the fact is,” he added, “the best state-of-the-art computer models that we use to project climate forward, they’re not capturing that rate of decrease of the Arctic pack ice.”

There’s no need to panic though, as the gas cloud is predicted to strike a spiral arm of the Milky Way 40,000 light years from Earth and in about 20 million years. For now, this discovery marks the first time a three-dimensional view of the gas cloud has ever been made as it moves through space.

“This cloud that we’re seeing today is a remnant of the formation of the Milky Way,” said Jay Lockman, leader of the science team that studied the gas cloud. Lockman is the principal scientist of the Greenbank Telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia. He said that billions of years ago, the Milky Way galaxy was probably formed when a lot of objects like this gas cloud, or even bigger objects, clumped together.

“And so, this object, this cloud, is kind of left-over debris from the construction of the Milky Way, in the same way that the comets and asteroids are leftover debris from the building of the solar system,” said Lockman to Earth & Sky.

The Greenbank Telescope collected over 40,000 measurements of radio waves streaming from the object, called Smith’s Cloud, which was first discovered by Gail Beeger Smith in 1963.

It measures 11,000 light-years long and 2,500 light-years wide, and it’s moving towards the Milky Way at a supersonic speed of 150 miles every second. With it comes the equivalent of one million suns worth of hydrogen gas into a region of space ripe with the formation of new stars. “And so that gas is going to shock the local gas,” said Lockman to Earth & Sky. The shock might trigger formation of a whole cluster of new stars.

What’s more, Lockman said that this far-off region in the Perseus spiral arm of the Milky Way might have habitable planets. “So people who were living in the area would probably see the event as a series of shocks in interstellar gas and then subsequently a lot of new, big stars forming. It would really light up the sky.” To the local denizens, it might look something akin to an aurora, said Lockman’s collaborator and co-panelist Robert A. Benjamin, of the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater.

In a map of the largest area ever imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, dense pools of what’s described as dark matter pull together entire galaxies by the force of gravity. “And as they get pulled together, they get closer to each other, and sometimes we see these violent mergers where they crash into each other,” said astronomer Catherine Heymans of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Heymans and her colleague Meghan Gray of the University of Nottingham, U.K. presented findings on one of the largest structures in the universe, supercluster Abell 901/902, which is more than 16 million light-years across and 2.6 billion light-years from Earth. It took more than 80 Hubble images to survey the “rough and tumble” environment of the supercluster, a group of star clusters. A star cluster is a group of galaxies.

“What we’re finding with this survey,” said Heymans, “we can see galaxies changing as we go from the outskirts of the supercluster, like the suburbs of the city, into the center of the city, or the densest parts of the supercluster.”

Heymans added that the first particles of dark matter might be found by the Large Hardron Collider, a colossal atom smasher to be activated late 2008 by the European science group CERN.

Astronaut John Grunsfeld told Earth & Sky that repair work and upgrades to Hubble will “reinvent” the space telescope. “The detector technology and the wavelength coverage that we’ll have,” said Grunsfeld, “is going to allow us to have new views of the universe that are just going to astound and amaze everyone, scientists and amateur astronomers, everybody.” Grunsfeld is Lead Spacewalker and Payload Officer for the Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission 4, and this will be his third trip to the Hubble, which orbits 350 miles above Earth.

The mission will entail five spacewalks and aims to increase the telescope’s capabilities by a factor of 90, according to panelist Sandra Faber, an astronomer at UC Santa Cruz. After the repairs and upgrades, “it’ll have the capability of 100 Hubbles,” said panelist and NASA Chief Scientist Alan Stern.

When asked about the risks posed by the Hubble service mission, Astronaut Grunsfeld told Earth & Sky that, “I think the cause of science is something worth risking my life for. I’ve spent almost my entire adult life and most of my young life,” Grunsfeld added, “in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. And Hubble is almost an icon for the quest of scientific knowledge.”

An astronomers dream, the proposed ground-based telescope features three 8.4-meter mirrors to cover an unprecedented 10 square-degree field-of-view. A 3200 Megapixel camera will take in all the detail, producing a color “movie” of the universe with 30 Terabytes of data each night.

The LSST looks to answer, according to their spokespeople, some of the biggest questions of astronomy: “What is dark energy? What is dark matter? How did the Milky Way form?
What are the properties of small bodies in the solar system? Are there potentially hazardous asteroids that may impact the earth causing significant damage? What sort of new phenomena have yet to be discovered?”

The question of spotting a potentially hazardous asteroid in time to do anything about it is of real concern for NASA, with asteroid Apophis predicted to brush by close enough in 2029 to be seen anywhere on Earth with binoculars.

What you’ll do is look for the constellation Cygnus, the swan, if you live in the Northern Hemisphere or Sagittarius, the archer, if you live in the Southern Hemisphere. Match your sky conditions to ones provided by the Star Count, then race to your computer (at your leisure) and tell the good folks at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research via the Internet.

The Great World Wide Star Count is organized by the Windows to the Universe project at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), in conjunction with planetariums and scientific societies across the country and abroad. Funding is provided by the National Science Foundation.

In addition to the latest science research on the Arctic and Antarctic, this handy learning resource also covers the polar regions of the moon and Mars. Classroom materials include easy-to-use and searchable databases of video, images, posters, and fact sheets. Educators can also use lessons, educational tools and datasets, reading materials, podcasts and vodcasts, curriculum-based science games and a calendar of International Polar Year events. Or one can chill with the world’s foremost ice and climate scientists at the Polar Palooza section of the NASA IPY website.

The International Polar Year, initiated in March of 2007, consists of more than 63 cooperating countries working to improve scientific understanding of the polar regions of Earth, the moon and Mars.

“Using a giant telescope in the Canary Islands, May was able to show for the first time that dust clouds in the solar system are moving in the same direction as the planets. He will receive his PhD next May, provided that his thesis is approved by assessors,” the Times stated.

This is rekindling my interest in podcasting the interview that Earth & Sky did with Dr. May, where he shared his thoughts on those huge telescopes pointed to the vastness that surrounds us.

You can write Dr. May a note of congrats and check out the rock star in his cap and gown at his blog, Brian’s Soapbox. ROCK ON!

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