(image from the Scientific American article about the launch)A year ago today the first Indian moon mission was launched, and so I thought today might be a good day to talk about some of the results of that mission. The Chandrayaan's job was to go to the moon, orbit it, and take measurements of it using a wide variety of instruments. I've found a couple of interesting things that came out of that mission.
First, some NASA instruments included on the Chandrayaan found water at the poles. They also took some pretty nifty pictures of the earth, including some showing the shadow of the moon during an eclipse. Check out the links section to see pictures and get the full story.
Second, there seems to be some interesting stuff going on with hydrogen and the moon. SARA was one of the instruments included on the mission. It originated from the European Science Agency and measured atoms reflected from the surface. It turns out that hydrogen protons traveling from the sun hit the moon and it was expected that they would all be absorbed by the surface, but for some reason one in every five of them bounce off. This is important because of the way hydrogen atoms move in straight lines without being moved around by magnetic fields. This could give scientists a new way to take pictures of the surface of the moon.
Links:
All about the SARA findings from the ESA
NASA's Mineralogy mapper
Proton: A hydrogen ion has a positive charge and is sometimes just called a proton. This is because it is just a proton, all by itself, but it is also the positively charged subatomic particle
found in the center of other kinds of atoms.
First, some NASA instruments included on the Chandrayaan found water at the poles. They also took some pretty nifty pictures of the earth, including some showing the shadow of the moon during an eclipse. Check out the links section to see pictures and get the full story.
Second, there seems to be some interesting stuff going on with hydrogen and the moon. SARA was one of the instruments included on the mission. It originated from the European Science Agency and measured atoms reflected from the surface. It turns out that hydrogen protons traveling from the sun hit the moon and it was expected that they would all be absorbed by the surface, but for some reason one in every five of them bounce off. This is important because of the way hydrogen atoms move in straight lines without being moved around by magnetic fields. This could give scientists a new way to take pictures of the surface of the moon.
Links:
All about the SARA findings from the ESA
NASA's Mineralogy mapper
Word of the Day
Proton: A hydrogen ion has a positive charge and is sometimes just called a proton. This is because it is just a proton, all by itself, but it is also the positively charged subatomic particle
found in the center of other kinds of atoms.
2 comments:
I guess there are still a lot of things we can learn from the moon.
Probably so... and it's so much closer than any of the other planets... There's something odd going on with water and it has to do with that hydrogen, even though the scientists said this mission didn't say anything definitive about water creation... I think interesting things will come out about the solar wind and water. I could be wrong though.
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