Chandrayaan to help Nasa pick lunar base

This could be the Indian space programme's finest moment. India's moon craft Chandrayaan-I will guide Nasa scientists to the best spot on the moon to set up an international human station in 2020.

The Indian obiter has beamed home exhaustive data on the polar regions of the earth's nearest astral neighbour. Mini-SAR (mini-synthetic aperture radar), one of the instruments designed and built by American scientists, has provided a first-of-its-kind insight into the darkest, coldest regions of the moon's poles, contributing to a better grasp of the lunar environment. These details will be used as critical inputs to handpick the best place for the station and future landing missions.

"If we discover water ice, and it is close to the poles, it will be another reason for landing in that region," said Dr Ben Bussey, deputy principal investigator, MiniSAR.

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Mercury was alive with volcanoes

While it seems like a geologically dead planet today, early in its history tiny Mercury may have been a caldron of volcanic activity, Nasa scientists said on Wednesday.

Data from the US space agency’s car-sized Messenger probe’s latest close encounter with the planet nearest the sun on Oct. 6 is helping to settle a debate dating back to the 1970s over the role volcanoes played in Mercury’s history. Messenger sent back images showing extensive and deep lava flows on the surface, including hardened lava more than 2 km deep filling a crater 100 km in diameter.

The unmanned spacecraft also detected a so-called “wrinkle ridge,” a long geological feature on Mercury’s surface about 600 metres high apparently caused by contraction of the planet as it cooled, the scientists said.

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U.S. spacecraft lands safely at Mars north pole

A small science probe blazed through the salmon-colored skies of Mars on Sunday, touching down on a frozen desert at the planet's north pole to search for water and assess conditions for sustaining life, NASA officials said.

The spacecraft, known as Phoenix, landed at 4:53 p.m. PDT after a do-or-die plunge through the planet's thin atmosphere and thruster-jet landing to the Mars surface. It marked the first time that a spacecraft had successfully landed at one of the planet's polar regions.

"It was a hell of a lot scarier than the two Mars rovers," NASA's space sciences chief Ed Weiler said, referring to the cushioned landings of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. "I kept thinking, 'I wish I had airbags.'

" Pulled by Mars' gravity, Phoenix was tearing along at 12,700 mph before it entered the atmosphere, which slowed the craft so it could pop out a parachute and fire thruster rockets to gently float to the ground.

"It's down, baby, it's down!," yelled a NASA flight controller, looking at signals from Mars showing that Phoenix had landed.

Flight controllers and scientists battled nerves as Phoenix wrapped up its 10-month, 423 million-mile journey. In 14 minutes, the probe transformed from an interplanetary cruiser to a free-standing science station.

"People got really uncomfortable," said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which oversees the mission.

Scientists found in 2002 that Mars' polar regions have vast reservoirs of water frozen beneath a shallow layer of soil. Phoenix was launched August 4, 2007, to sample the water and determine if the right ingredients for life are present.

NASA attempted a landing on Mars' south pole in 1999, but a problem during the final minutes of descent ended the mission.

The U.S. space agency canceled its next Mars lander but successfully dispatched Spirit and Opportunity to the planet's equatorial region to search for signs of past surface water.

Phoenix was created out of spare parts from the failed Polar Lander mission and the mothballed probe. Unlike the rovers, Phoenix did not bounce to the planet's surface in airbags, which are not suitable for larger spacecraft.

Instead, like the 1970s-era Viking probes and the failed Polar Lander mission, it used a jet pack to lower itself to the ground and fold-out legs to land on. "We haven't landed successfully on legs and propulsive rockets in 32 years," Weiler said. "When we send humans there, women and men, they're going to be landing on rockets and legs, so it's important to show that we still know how to do this."

U.S. spacecraft lands safely at Mars north pole

A small science probe blazed through the salmon-colored skies of Mars on Sunday, touching down on a frozen desert at the planet's north pole to search for water and assess conditions for sustaining life, NASA officials said.

The spacecraft, known as Phoenix, landed at 4:53 p.m. PDT after a do-or-die plunge through the planet's thin atmosphere and thruster-jet landing to the Mars surface. It marked the first time that a spacecraft had successfully landed at one of the planet's polar regions.

"It was a hell of a lot scarier than the two Mars rovers," NASA's space sciences chief Ed Weiler said, referring to the cushioned landings of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. "I kept thinking, 'I wish I had airbags.'"

Pulled by Mars' gravity, Phoenix was tearing along at 12,700 mph before it entered the atmosphere, which slowed the craft so it could pop out a parachute and fire thruster rockets to gently float to the ground.

"It's down, baby, it's down!," yelled a NASA flight controller, looking at signals from Mars showing that Phoenix had landed.

Flight controllers and scientists battled nerves as Phoenix wrapped up its 10-month, 423 million-mile journey. In 14 minutes, the probe transformed from an interplanetary cruiser to a free-standing science station.

"People got really uncomfortable," said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which oversees the mission.

Scientists found in 2002 that Mars' polar regions have vast reservoirs of water frozen beneath a shallow layer of soil. Phoenix was launched August 4, 2007, to sample the water and determine if the right ingredients for life are present.

NASA attempted a landing on Mars' south pole in 1999, but a problem during the final minutes of descent ended the mission.

The U.S. space agency canceled its next Mars lander but successfully dispatched Spirit and Opportunity to the planet's equatorial region to search for signs of past surface water.

Phoenix was created out of spare parts from the failed Polar Lander mission and the mothballed probe. Unlike the rovers, Phoenix did not bounce to the planet's surface in airbags, which are not suitable for larger spacecraft.

Instead, like the 1970s-era Viking probes and the failed Polar Lander mission, it used a jet pack to lower itself to the ground and fold-out legs to land on.

"We haven't landed successfully on legs and propulsive rockets in 32 years," Weiler said. "When we send humans there, women and men, they're going to be landing on rockets and legs, so it's important to show that we still know how to do this."

Mini-black hole is smallest ever but still strong

NASA scientists have identified the smallest black hole ever found -- less than four times the mass of our sun and about the size of a large city.

But the mini-black hole, dubbed J1650, could still stretch a person into a "strand of spaghetti" with its pull, the researchers told a meeting in Los Angeles.

"This black hole is really pushing the limits. For many years astronomers have wanted to know the smallest possible size of a black hole, and this little guy is a big step toward answering that question," Nikolai Shaposhnikov of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement.

It would likely be stronger than bigger black holes found at the centers of galaxies. Shaposhnikov said if someone ventured too close to J1650, its gravity would "stretch your body into a strand of spaghetti."

Like other black holes, it was formed by a star that ran out of fuel and shut down, collapsing due to its own gravity.

Shaposhnikov and his Goddard colleague Lev Titarchuk used NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite and a new method to estimate the size of the black hole, found in a system in the southern constellation Ara, in our own Milky Way Galaxy.

It measures the oscillation of hot gas piling up near the black hole as it sucks in matter, they told a meeting in Los Angeles of the American Astronomical Society High-Energy Astrophysics Division.

The new black hole has a mass of 3.8 Suns and would be about 15 miles across, they estimate. "This makes the black hole one of the smallest objects ever discovered outside our solar system," Shaposhnikov said.

The smallest black hole previously identified was GRO 1655-40, with a mass of about 6.3 Suns.

"Amazingly, equations from Albert Einstein predict that a black hole with 3.8 times the mass of our Sun would be only 15 miles across -- the size of a city," NASA said in a statement.

A collapsing star that was much smaller than J1650 would likely form a neutron star and not a black hole, the researchers said.