Credit:
Galileo Project, JPL, NASA

Explanation:

Like the downtown area of your favorite city, the roads you drive to work on, and any self-respecting web site ... Io's surface is constantly under construction. This moon of Jupiter holds the distinction of being the Solar System's most volcanically active body -- its bizarre looking surface continuously formed and reformed by lava flows. Generated using 1996 data from NASA's Galileo spacecraft, this high resolution composite image is centered on the side of Io that always faces away from Jupiter. It has been enhanced to emphasize Io's surface brightness and color variations, revealing features as small as 1.5 miles across. The notable absence of impact craters suggests that the entire surface is covered with new volcanic deposits much more rapidly than craters are created. What drives this volcanic powerhouse? A likely energy source is the changing gravitational tides caused by Jupiter and the other Galilean moons as Io orbits the massive gas giant planet. Heating Io's interior, the pumping tides would generate the sulfurous volcanic activity.

Credit:

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

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Description:

This image shows a part of the Cerberus Fossae, a system of aligned fissures east of Elysium. The fissures were probably the source of floods of both water and lava. The most recent event was a massive outpouring of basaltic lava (a fluid-type of lava like that commonly erupted by Kilauea in Hawaii), which produced a host of volcanic features in the region, as described by Jaeger et al. (2007).

Here, as at other locations, the fossae appear a striking blue in HiRISE false color. Blue tones are usually associated with basaltic rock. The blue ripples found on the trough floor could be wind-blown sand comprised of fine fragments of basalt. The upper plains are a relatively bland tone, perhaps due to a thin coating of dust; however, impact craters in the image also show bluish boulders and ripples, indicating that they have excavated the same basaltic rock layers cut by the fossae. This is typical of the region, as floods of lava coat much of the area.

The mesas of older rock just north of the fissures are remnants of a former surface, now eroded. The surrounding region has many knobs and larger protruding topography, which may be remnants of the same materials. The topmost layer in each mesa is very resistant to weathering, as in places it actually overhangs the lower rocks. This cap layer could be solidified lava, although it appears somewhat bland in color.

Although the mesa is clearly eroded and the cap rock breaks up into boulders, few rocks are visible at the bottom of the slope. The lava plains may have buried the former basal slope, or debris may have been swept away by lava or floodwater, that could also have contributed to eroding the mesa

Credit:

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

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Description:

The crater featured in this scene formed on top of ejecta from a nearby rampart crater, located to the north.

The crater’s distinct rim indicates it is relatively young. There is bright material on many of the crater walls that might be landslides of dust or another bright substance.

The mounds of material on the crater floor probably formed during late stages of crater’s own formation. The crater floor is speckled with even smaller craters.

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

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Description:

This image shows the floor of an unnamed impact crater in Arabia Terra that has layered deposits. There are many craters in this region where layering is observed.

These layers are often exposed along the sides of large isolated mounds, small knobs and mesas, and other positive relief features. In some cases, the layering is expressed as narrow sinuous ridge-like structures along crater floors.

The presence of layered deposits is of particular interest because these materials are not likely to be related to the impact event, but rather post-impact infill of the crater. Modification of the deposits has now revealed layers of material.

HiRISE and other instruments onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter may provide more clues to the origin of the these deposits.

Side note: From my experience, the Brits are the masters of Q-ing and the Indians are the masters of QJ-ing. Arabs (including Omanis) are very close runner-ups to the Indians. Other easterners are ahead in understand the Q. I am going to link the definition of Queuing here just in case.

The realization that this is really a comprehension problem among easterners came after 3 distinct QJ-ing experiences where i was the victim. These guys are so masterful at doing this that i cannot let the act go unquestioned. And every time i question these guys i get to learn a bit more about this phenomenon and about the logic that these Q Jumpers employ in justifying their actions.

Experience number 1: At the ATM machine.

I arrive at the ATM machine. There is a guy using it (he is Jordanian or Palestinian or Lebanese -JPL). He is having problems with his card and is struggling with the ATM. There is an Omani guy already waiting, and i come and add to the pressure. After struggling, he decides to move away from the ATM but he still hangs around. He is obviously not done yet. The Omani guy walks and withdraws hi cash and moves on. Our friend JPL now tries to move back to the ATM, so i stop him and say:

OM: Excuse me its my turn (dory ya 7abibi)

JPL: What do you mean? how did you come to that conclusion? (keef dowrak? keef 7asabt ha hay)

HE IS UPSET WITH ME ?!?!?! and asking ME to EXPLAIN WHY IT IS MY TURN ?!?!

OM: first it was you, then it was him, now it is me. Its very simple. The minute you leave the Q you go back to the back of the line.

JPL: BUT I WAS HERE FIRST, and then my card didnt work so i let him use the machine, and now its my turn again.

OM: NO, it is not your turn. You obviously dont understand how this works (at this stage i am doubting my own understanding of the Q works, but i stand my ground. If i dont stop this guy now, he will continue to Jump Q forever)

JPL: I can believe this.

OM: YOU cant believe this?

At this stage the other Omani guy interferes as he thinks this might actually get out of hand and he tries to calm things down (salamat ya shabab, 7asal '7air, haddu haddu)

OM: (talking to Omani) This guy is waisting both of our times. If had just stayed in line i would be done by now and he would be trying to figure out how to work the ATM without anyone waiting behind him. (Talking to JPL) please go ahead, use the ATM ('7alsna ya a'7i, tfadhal)

This was the first point of realization. He moved up and took my turn (after i offered it to him) convinced that it was his. The funny part is "Allah doesnt beat with a stick" (Arabic saying). His ATM card still didnt work. and now he has me still waiting to use the machine. He looses it. He starts banging on the ATM and shouting: Finish i dont want to use this machine ('7alas ma badi, MA BADI). he storms to his car and zooms off.

Experience number 2: Subway @ city center

Ordering a sandwich at subway is always a confusing affair because the whole system is based upon the assumption that people know how to Q. I go through the process and i am so close to just paying and leaving but this Indian guy comes in and starts ordering:

OM: Excuse me i havnt finished. you can wait in line. over there..

IQJ: No, its ok. Thank you.

OM: I am sorry, I dont think you understand, BUT its my turn now. you have to wait for your turn.

IQJ: No, i understand that it is your turn and that there is a line, but i am just ordering a pepsi.

OM: Just by saying this you proving you dont understand. You cannot order anything now. you have to wait for your turn. Look behind you. people are waiting. you have to wait like them.

IQJ: I understand...

OM: IF you tell me your understand once more i will loose it. Just stop arguing and move to the end of the Q.

IQJ: but...

OM: not buts. just go.

He doesnt move the back of the Q. He just goes away and i get some claps from the people in the Q.

Experience number 3: At Alfair MQ

The lines at Al Fair MQ are miserable. I am done with my shopping and pushing the trolley towards the cashier. This little Indian guy comes running and squeezes himself between my trolley and the cashier desk. This guy is a PRO ! so i think about what i want to do this time. From past i have come to realize that this is a mental issue. So i decide to take a different approach. I slowly lean on my trolley and try to push him up against the cashier table. Squeeeeeze. i expected him to look back or tell me something. But nothing. he is ignoring me. So i squeeeze some more. Nothing. No reaction. He doesnt even look back.

This is when i realized i cannot fight this alone. These guys are sick and need help. This guy is willing to tolerate psychical abuse just to jump the Q.

I cannot compete with that.

Del.icio.us : , Electrochemistry, JPL, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Mars, Microscopy, NASA, Phoenix Lander, Snow White, Sorceress, Texas A&M University, University of Arizona, Wet Chemistry Laboratory, and Conductivity Analyzer (MECA)

PIA 10440

Credit:

NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Additional Images

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PNG 783 KB
TIFF 1.0 MB

Description:

Cassini observes wispy whorls and streams of clouds as they flow across the face of Saturn. A line of vortices churns across the top of the scene.

This image was taken just over an hour after PIA10437 and shows a region slightly to the southwest of the earlier view. The circular vortex seen at right in the earlier view appears in the top right corner here.

Contrast in this image was strongly enhanced.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 20, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (775,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.

Credit:

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Description:

This image shows layered sedimentary rocks that fill an impact crater in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars.

These layered rocks may have formed through the accumulation of sediment (sand and dust) that were transported into this crater by blowing wind or flowing water. These sediments formed an extensive deposit that once covered the floor of the surrounding impact crater.

This crater is so large that the HiRISE image is entirely within it, and the crater rim is not visible. These sedimentary rocks were then eroded, likely by the wind. The original sand and dust were deposited in distinct layers within the crater; these layers now give the mounds their distinctive stair-stepped appearance, and are all that remain from this once extensive deposit.

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Credit:

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Description:

Nili Fossae trough is a linear trough about 25 kilometers wide, formed in response to the creation of the Isidis basin.

Nili Fossae has diverse deposits, some containing phyllosilicates (clay deposits which typically form in the presence of water), and others with the minerals olivine and pyroxene.

This image is part of a series covering the 25 km landing ellipse; these images are used to determine the safest possible landing site for the Mars Science Laboratory rover. In this image, relatively smooth rock exposures is visible, as well as sand ripples and some small knobs. There are few large rocks in the area, while the surface seems to be mostly flat, fractured rock. This image is located in the southeastern part of the landing ellipse.

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Credit:

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Description:

This image was targeted because a previous MOC image (R1100035) showed an distinctive field of mounds on the floor of an ancient, large, filled-in crater.

The origin of the mounds was unclear, so we hoped that a HiRISE image with higher resolution and color would solve the mystery. The HiRISE image shows much more detail on the mounds and other rough textures, indicating that this is an eroded bedrock surface, perhaps exposed by removal of an overlying layer of fine-grained materials by the wind.

But how did the rocks form, and why did they erode onto mounds? It could have been lava or impact ejecta or fluvial sediments, perhaps altered and indurated by groundwater. The mounds could be due to how it was deposited—like hummocky impact ejecta—or how it was indurated. In other words, we haven't solved the mystery!

Yet we may get new clues from future images of similar terrains in places where the origin is more interpretable, or from other datasets such as the mineral content determined by CRISM.

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I've never heard of BigDog before. At first, I couldn't believe what I saw and, at one point, thought that it might have been operated somewhat like this. But it's an actual robot with legs and movement.

Oh, yes, and a whole bagful of awesome.

Boston Dynamics, the group behind BigDog, have other projects involving moving robots that are worth checking out. BigDog is funded by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and was created by Boston Dynamics with Foster-Miller, JPL (NASA/Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and Harvard's Concord Field Station.

we have identified an area [for landing] that is very flat and relatively free of large boulders

Soon after Phoenix's landing, news was published that NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE had captured a picture of Phoenix and its lander during descent.  Pretty cool, I thought - the chute, the cords, and the lander were clearly visible in that picture.  Still, nothing in that news article made me question the "flat" assumption.

But this morning, when I was browsing the Phoenix page on Wikipedia, I realized that the full chute picture showed that the landing region was anything but boring:

Phoenix didn't land in "Heimdall" crater - it landed 20km away.  But since this crater is 10km wide, I think NASA would've been justified in hyping the context of the parachute shot.

(via glass)

http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/

Clearly from this evidence, there was water on Mars. But does frozen water mean life?

Yo la entendí bastante bien, dentro de la dificultad que supone el idioma y lo avanzado de los temas que se trataron.

El investigador y sus colegas del grupo de procesado de la señal han realizado numerosos proyectos relacionados con el procesado de señal en comunicaciones en el espacio profundo recogiendo datos científicos de las numerosas misiones realizadas en el JPL con su red de satélites. Las técnicas de modulación y de codificación de canal así como la implementación de los transmisores y receptores, tanto en el segmento espacial (en las propias sondas de las misiones, por ejemplo) como en el terreno, han supuesto numerosos retos tanto desde el punto de vista de la teoría de procesado de señal como en la microelectrónica embarcada en el espacio (con sus previsibles restricciones en tamaño, peso y potencia consumida y las exigencias propias de la transmisión de señales por el espacio)

La conferencia comenzó hablando de la relación especial que existe entre el centro de investigación JPL y la NASA, habida cuenta que el JPL es una institución creada por una universidad privada estadounidense, el CalTech (que se encuentra clasificada en séptimo lugar según la clasificación THES QS), y al mismo tiempo está asociada como centro de investigación público a una agencia del gobierno, la NASA (es uno de los diez centros que posee la agencia a lo largo y ancho del país)

Es de destacar que desde su fundación en los años 30 hasta hoy el JPL ha expandido su ámbito de investigación mucho más allá de la investigación original en propulsión de cohetes, diseñando numerosas sondas espaciales y otros aparatos originales. En la conferencia se citaron: Explorer 1, Mariner 2, Voyager 1 y 2, Mars Explorer Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) y el muy reciente Phoenix Mars Lander.

El doctor Cheng indicó las principales áreas de investigación actual de su grupo con algunas destacables desde mi punto de vista por su interés: autonomous reception (en donde se trata de hacer más flexibles las interfaces radio de comunicaciones de los satélites que de comunican con las misiones en el espacio, de manera que se puedan configurar automáticamente para las características de cada comunicación, algo que se consigue con software-defined radio), channel coding (la introducción de redundancia en los datos a transmitir por un canal, en la que se extendió más adelante en la presentación), data compression (también bastante comentada) y modulation schemes (especialmente el diseño de esquemas de modulación eficientes para las comunicaciones en el espacio profundo)

En cuanto a la codificación de canal (channel coding) el trabajo del grupo de procesado de señal del JPL ha consistido en estudiar los códigos más avanzados, en especial los turbocódigos y los LDPC (Low-density parity-check), tanto desde el punto de vista teórico para acercarlos lo más posible al límite de shannon como desde el punto de vista de la implementación, ya que esos códigos han de ser implementados en hardware y embarcados en las sondas espaciales. El esfuerzo de co-diseño hardware/software de implementaciones eficientes en área y potencia ha sido importante. Las optimizaciones en dichos parámetros son fundamentales. El interés del JPL se ha centrado en obtener codificaciones sencillas (las embarcadas en el satélite con sus fuertes restricciones) y decodificaciones complejas (que se hacen en el segmento terreno donde en principio se puede disponer de más recursos) Entre los avances destacados está el protograph code design y los códigos especiales para enlaces ópticos en el espacio profundo.

En cuanto a la compresión de datos, el grupo del profesor Cheng fue pionero, con su sistema de compresión ICER para datos científicos, en la compresión progresiva y por bloques que permite dividir la imagen a transmitir en bloques no homogéneos y comprimirla de manera que la recuperación es progresiva en caso de pérdida de datos se obtiene la imagen con alguna pérdida de bloque y una resolución que depende de los datos que se han perdido. Esto contrasta con los sistemas tradicionales como el JPEG que quedaban con la imagen incompleta ya que la imagen se codificaba por líneas de forma secuencial y una pérdida de datos hacía que se perdiera el resto de la imagen a partir de la línea en que ocurría el error.

Finalmente se comentaron los trabajos punteros que se están llevando a cabo actualmente en el grupo, centrados en conceptos avanzados de codificación de canal con códigos LDPC que no entendí bien: (1) frame synchronization; (2) soft symbol LLRs calculations (log likelihood ratio); soft symbol scaling; rateless erasure (or fountain) codes; Luby-Transform (LT); ... en fin, no tomé muchas notas sobre estos temas, que por otra parte fueron tocados muy por encima. Se mostraron implementaciones de sistemas embebidos y se mostraron gráficas de rendimiento respecto al límite teórico de shannon.

El tema más ineteresante que tocó es el Network Coding. Es un concepto iniciado por el investigador Ahlswede y colegas. Se trata de una técnica que permite reducir las transmisiones en un sistema de comunicaciones por relay. Por ejemplo un sistema de relay de satélite en el que dos puntos se comunican a través de un satélite en órbita. En la situación normal cada punto realiza una transmisión hacia el satélite y recibe de este la respuesta, con toda la parafernalia de modulaciones y redundancia por codificación de canal. En el nuevo esquema el satélite recibe las transmisiones desde los puntos de tierra y realiza una sola transmisión hacia tierra con un mix de modulación y codificación de canal hacia los dos destinatarios. Cada uno extrae la información que le corresponde del mix.

What was interesting was that the Ranger satellites were, well... suicidal. They didn't orbit the moon like our current Mars Surveyor. No, these million dollar babies began taking images continuously from the moment the moon was within camera range, right the way down to the surface where they crashed. They're still up there you know.

I'll never, ever forget my Uncle bringing home something really rare. He'd been given an entire stack of lunar images from the Ranger moon-shot. It was absolutely breathtaking to sit in our house and pour over actual black & white 8x10 prints of the surface of the moon. And not just anybody has these babies, no sir. Just people from JPL and the scientists at NASA. I was so excited, that I asked to take them to school for show and tell time. The class was glued to each image.

As I write these words today there are no fewer than three active spacecraft on the surface of Mars, and two of them have gone way off the record for endurance. These two intrepid explorers, Opportunity, and Spirit are solar powered, remotely controlled, camera-toting robots. Both are part of the Mars Rover Program. These multi-million dollar babies were designed to last a mere six months exploring Mars close-up. They are however currently into their fourth year of daily Martian exploration, eight-times longer than originally thought possible. And they show little sign of quitting.

Here's the clincher; this fifty-four year old kid who still loves space can now get all the pictures he wants off the web, for free, in color, in black & white, and he can "go to Mars" on his own. This direct access to once rare images is a mind-blowing opportunity to personally share in the exploration of space and our nearest neighbors, the planets.

So... why not take your own stroll over the wind-blown dunes, or look at the sedimentary rocks deposited by what can only have been Martian water?

Explore. Enjoy. Grow. ;)

Chronicle Project, also intrigued by Steve's genius, recently made a short video on his skills. Take a look!

Credit:

NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Description:

From a highly inclined orbit, Cassini looks toward far northern latitudes on Tethys.

Here, the spacecraft was above a position about 45 degrees north of the moon's equator. This vantage point afforded a view of the moon's three most recognizable features: the Ithaca Chasma canyon system (at lower right), Odysseus crater (at upper left) and the equatorial band of darker terrain (at lower left).

Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemisphere of Tethys (1,062 kilometers, 660 miles across). North is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 29, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 991,000 kilometers (616,000 miles) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 73 degrees. Image scale is 6 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.