NASA instrument on Chandrayaan finds minerals on moon

The moon mineralogy mapper (M3), a scientific instrument of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) onboard India's first lunar mission Chandrayaan-1, found iron-bearing minerals on the lunar surface, the US space agency said on Thursday.

"The mapper spectrometer has beamed images of the Orientale Basin region of the moon, indicating abundance of iron-bearing minerals such as pyroxene. Using different wavelengths of light, the instrument has also revealed for the first time changes in rock and mineral composition," M3 principal investigator Carle Pieters said in a statement hosted on NASA Website.

Data from the 7-kg mapper provides space scientists first opportunity to examine lunar mineralogy at high spatial and spectral resolution.

The Orientale Basin is located on the moon's western limb. M3 captured the data last week when Chandrayaan was orbiting the moon at an altitude of 100 km.

"The imaging spectrometer provides us with compositional information across the moon that we have never had access to before. Our ability to identify and map the composition of the surface in geologic context provides a new level of detail needed to explore and understand the earth's nearest celestial neighbour," affirmed Pieters, who teaches at Brown University in Rhode Island.

The mapper was selected as a mission of opportunity through the NASA discovery programme. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed and built the instrument at Pasadena in California.

"M3 will also help in characterising and mapping lunar minerals for knowing the moon's early geological evolution. Its compositional maps will improve our understanding of the early evolution of a differentiated planetary body and provide a high-resolution assessment of lunar resources," Chandrayaan project director M. Annadurai averred.

M3 is one of the 10 instruments onboard the unmanned Chandrayaan, conducting experiments while the spacecraft orbits over the moon next two years.

Five instruments were indigenously built by the state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), while the remaining six payloads are of foreign origin, including three from the European Space Agency, two from NASA and one from Bulgaria.

Chandrayaan was launched on October 22 onboard the 316-tonne polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV-C11) from ISRO's Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota spaceport, about 80 km north of Chennai.

After traversing 3,84,000 km through the deep space for 18 days, the spacecraft entered the lunar orbit on November 8 and its moon impact probe was lowered on the moon's surface on November 14.

Armageddon for real? Asteroid may hit earth

A football field sized asteroid hitting say New York will obliterate the city in a matter of seconds and all that moves within it.

The tidal waves of energy unleashed by the collision would be equivalent to several Hydrogen bombs going off at once, a scenario brought to life by 1998 hit movie Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis.

The chances of an asteroid hitting the Earth one day are very real and blowing up an asteroid in real life, says a Tel Aviv University (TAU) researcher, will be more complicated than in the movies.

Astrophysicists agree that the best method for avoiding a catastrophic collision would be to change the path of the asteroid heading toward our planet.

"For that to work, we need to be able to predict what would happen if we attempt an explosion," says TAU doctoral student David Polishook, who is studying asteroids with his supervisor Noah Brosch at the department of geophysics and planetary sciences.

Polishook and Brosch are among the few scientists in the world researching the structure and composition of asteroids a critical first step in learning how to destroy them before they reach the Earth's atmosphere, according to a TAU release.

Their research could prevent catastrophe: blowing up an asteroid may create many equally dangerous smaller asteroids of about 100 metres each in diameter twice the size of the asteroid that created the famous Arizona crater.

"The information we are investigating can have a tremendous impact on future plans to alter the course of asteroids on a collision course with Earth," says Polishook.

"Science needs to know whether asteroids are solid pieces of rock or piles of gravel, what forces are holding them together, and how they will break apart if bombed."

The latest results of their research were presented at the 2008 meeting of Asteroids, Comets and Meteors, sponsored by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore.