Excerpt from cbsnews.com A Russian Progress cargo ship bound for the International Space Station spun out of control Tuesday. Engineers were unable to direct the wayward ship and soon gave up any hope that it would be able to dock t...
Tag: pieces (page 2 of 5)
Excerpt from techtimes.com Spacecraft are all shiny and new when they leave Earth but being up in space can do a number on them, resulting into bits and pieces of junk flying around. The European Space Agency's Clean Space initiative is looking to l...
Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comWhen the National Atomic Testing Museum of Las Vegas opened its "Area 51: Myth or Reality" exhibit two years ago, it became an instant hit. It wasn't just the only place that had a comprehensive knowledge of Area 51 -...
Excerpt from cnbc.com
By Susan Caminiti
Moon Express, a Mountain View, California-based company that's aiming to send the first commercial robotic spacecraft to the moon next year, just took another step closer toward that lofty goal.
Earlier this year, it became the first company to successfully test a prototype of a lunar lander at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The success of this test—and a series of others that will take place later this year—paves the way for Moon Express to send its lander to the moon in 2016, said company co-founder and chairman Naveen Jain.
Earlier this year, it became the first company to successfully test a prototype of a lunar lander at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The success of this test—and a series of others that will take place later this year—paves the way for Moon Express to send its lander to the moon in 2016, said company co-founder and chairman Naveen Jain.
Moon Express conducted its tests with the support of NASA engineers, who are sharing with the company their deep well of lunar know-how. The NASA lunar initiative—known as Catalyst—is designed to spur new commercial U.S. capabilities to reach the moon and tap into its considerable resources.In addition to Moon Express, NASA is also working with Astrobotic Technologies of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Masten Space Systems of Mojave, California, to develop commercial robotic spacecrafts.
Jain said Moon Express also recently signed an agreement to take over Space Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral. The historic launchpad will be used for Moon Express's lander development and flight-test operations. Before it was decommissioned, the launchpad was home to NASA's Atlas-Centaur rocket program and its Surveyor moon landers.
"Clearly, NASA has an amazing amount of expertise when it comes to getting to the moon, and it wants to pass that knowledge on to a company like ours that has the best chance of being successful," said Jain, a serial entrepreneur who also founded Internet companies Infospace and Intelius. He believes that the moon holds precious metals and rare minerals that can be brought back to help address Earth's energy, health and resource challenges.
Among the moon's vast riches: gold, cobalt, iron, palladium, platinum, tungsten and Helium-3, a gas that can be used in future fusion reactors to provide nuclear power without radioactive waste. "We went to the moon 50 years ago, yet today we have more computing power with our iPhones than the computers that sent men into space," Jain said. "That type of exponential technological growth is allowing things to happen that was never possible before."
Jain said Moon Express also recently signed an agreement to take over Space Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral. The historic launchpad will be used for Moon Express's lander development and flight-test operations. Before it was decommissioned, the launchpad was home to NASA's Atlas-Centaur rocket program and its Surveyor moon landers.
"Clearly, NASA has an amazing amount of expertise when it comes to getting to the moon, and it wants to pass that knowledge on to a company like ours that has the best chance of being successful," said Jain, a serial entrepreneur who also founded Internet companies Infospace and Intelius. He believes that the moon holds precious metals and rare minerals that can be brought back to help address Earth's energy, health and resource challenges.
Among the moon's vast riches: gold, cobalt, iron, palladium, platinum, tungsten and Helium-3, a gas that can be used in future fusion reactors to provide nuclear power without radioactive waste. "We went to the moon 50 years ago, yet today we have more computing power with our iPhones than the computers that sent men into space," Jain said. "That type of exponential technological growth is allowing things to happen that was never possible before."
An eye on the Google prize
Source: MoonExpress
Helping to drive this newfound interest in privately funded space exploration is the Google Lunar X Prize. It's a competition organized by the X Prize Foundation and sponsored by Google that will award $30 million to the first company that lands a commercial spacecraft on the moon, travels 500 meters across its surface and sends high-definition images and video back to Earth—all before the end of 2016.
Moon Express is already at the front of the pack. In January it was awarded a $1 million milestone prize from Google for being the only company in the competition so far to test a prototype of its lander. "Winning the X prize would be a great thing," said Jain. "But building a great company is the ultimate goal with us." When it comes to space exploration, he added, "it's clear that the baton has been passed from the government to the private sector."
Testing in stages
Jain said Moon Express has been putting its lunar lander through a series of tests at the space center. The successful outing earlier this year involved tethering the vehicle—which is the size of a coffee table—to a crane in order to safely test its control systems. "The reason we tethered it to the crane is because the last thing we wanted was the aircraft to go completely haywire and hurt someone," he said.At the end of March, the company will conduct a completely free flight test with no tethering. The lander will take off from the pad, go up and sideways, then land back at the launchpad. "This is to test that the vehicle knows where to go and how to get back to the launchpad safely," Jain explained.
Once all these tests are successfully completed, Jain said the lander—called MX-1—will be ready to travel to the moon. The most likely scenario is that it will be attached to a satellite that will take the lander into a low orbit over the Earth. From there the MX-1 will fire its own rocket, powered by hydrogen peroxide, and launch from that orbit to complete its travel to the moon's surface.
The lander's first mission is a one-way trip, meaning that it's not designed to travel back to the Earth, said Jain. "The purpose is to show that for the first time, a company has developed the technology to land softly on the moon," he said. "Landing on the moon is not the hard part. Landing softly is the hard part."
That's because even though the gravity of the moon is one-sixth that of the Earth's, the lander will still be traveling down to the surface of the moon "like a bullet," Jain explained. Without the right calculations to indicate when its rockets have to fire in order to slow it down, the lander would hit the surface of the moon and break into millions of pieces. "Unlike here on Earth, there's no GPS on the moon to tell us this, so we have to do all these calculations first," he said.
Looking ahead 15 or 20 years, Jain said he envisions a day when the moon is used as a sort of way station enabling easier travel for exploration to other planets. In the meantime, he said the lander's second and third missions could likely involve bringing precious metals, minerals and even moon rocks back to Earth. "Today, people look at diamonds as this rare thing on Earth," Jain said.
He added, "Imagine telling someone you love her by giving her the moon."
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| Artist's concept of a Defense Meteorological Satellite System (DMSP) military weather spacecraft. |
Excerpt from nbcnews.com
The military weather satellite that exploded in orbit last month apparently died of old age, U.S. Air Force officials say.
While investigators continue to study the dramatic Feb. 3 death of Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Flight 13 (DMSP-F13), the signs currently point not to a collision with a piece of space junk or other external cause but rather to an issue aboard the spacecraft, which launched in 1995.
"Basically, the spacecraft was 20 years old and experienced what appears to be a catastrophic event associated with a power system failure," Andy Roake, chief of the Current Operations Division at Air Force Space Command Public Affairs in Colorado Springs, told Space.com.
Investigators think that failure by itself probably blew apart DMSP-F13 — which occupied a sun-synchronous polar orbit about 500 miles (800 kilometers) above Earth — generating the cloud of debris that the Air Force's Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) has detected near the satellite. (To date, 43 pieces of debris have been identified.)
Indeed, Air Force officials have said that the military weather satellite explosion was preceded by a sudden spike in the power system's temperature, "followed by an unrecoverable loss of attitude control." It was first reported by SpaceNews, a Space.com partner, on Feb. 27.
DMSP-F13 launched in March 1995 and last year surpassed 100,000 orbits around Earth. The satellite contributed key data to a number of U.S. military operations overseas.
Excerpt from nbcnews.com
By Katie Linendoll
FOUNTAIN HILLS, Ariz. — If words like UFO, extraterrestrial, crops circles and abductee have ever piqued your paranormal interest, do yourself a favor and head to the International UFO Congress.
The annual conference—which holds the Guinness record for being the largest convention dedicated to unidentified flying objects—takes place in the picturesque desert town of Fountain Hills, and this year it ran from Feb. 18 to 22. It's worth noting that Arizona is known as a hotbed of activity when it comes to sightings. Thousands flock to the annual event, which is produced by Open Minds, a paranormal research organization.
Each attendee has his or her own reason for being there. My goal was to find out if modern science and technology have changed the game when it comes to UFO sightings and evidence gathering.
"A lot of people think, go to a UFO convention, it's going to be tinfoil hats, but that's not what this is. We have NASA astrobiologists speak, scientists, high-ranking military officials, the works. I mean, there's a lot of really credible people covering this subject," said UFO Congress co-organizer and paranormal journalist Maureen Elsberry.
Air Force UFO documents now available online
When attending a UFO conference, the best approach is to come in with an open mind, ask lots of questions and talk with people about why they are there. Everyone has a story, from the speakers to the attendees, and even the vendors (some of whom double as ufologists).
The highlight of this year's conference was undeniably the speaker series, and it was standing room only to see one man, Bob Lazar. Lazar first spoke out in 1989, claiming that he'd worked as a government scientist at a secret mountainside facility south of Area 51's main site, where he saw remarkably advanced UFO technology. Critics have sought to discredit Lazar, questioning his employment record and educational credentials.
During the conference, George Knapp, an investigative TV reporter in Las Vegas who broke the Lazar story in '89, led an onstage question-and-answer session with Lazar, who discussed the work he did at a place called S4. Lazar spoke in detail about the alien UFO hangars and UFO propulsion systems he was allegedly asked to reverse engineer, and even loosely sketched them out for the audience.
"All the science fiction had become reality," said Lazar, who was noticeably uncomfortable and clearly surprised by the fact that, decades later, he remains such a draw.
You never know whom you'll bump into at the Congress. In the vendor hall, I met sculptor Alan Groves, who traveled all the way from Australia to peddle his "true to scale" Zetan alien figurines. I wondered if his side gig was lucrative, only to realize he was selling the figures like hotcakes. Then we talked about his day job, and he told me he's worked on special and creature effects for films such as "Star Wars," "Alien," "Labyrinth" and "Jurassic Park."
Many of the attendees told me that hard evidence is a requirement for ufologists and paranormal field experts. Derrel Sims, also known as Alien Hunter, told me he spent two years in the CIA, and also has served as a police officer and licensed private investigator.
He said his first alien encounter happened at age 4, and others in his family have also seen aliens. In 38-plus years of alien research, Sims has learned this: "If you look, the evidence is there." To date, he said, more than 4,000 pieces of that evidence exist.
Sims is adamant about only working with evidence-based methods, using DNA tests and collecting samples as well as relying on ultraviolet, infrared and x-ray tools in his research. He said that, in 1992, he discovered aliens leave their own kind of fluorescent fingerprint, and he continues to test for these clues. He added that if you have had an alien encounter, it's important to react quickly to gather evidence: "fluorescence" stays on the skin for only 24 hours. He said that other marks aliens leave include "scoop" marks, which are an identifying thread some abductees have in common.
Another commonality he's discovered is heritage. He said that, in his research, he has found 45 percent of all abductions happen to Native Americans, Irish and Celtic people, and he said that women also have a higher chance of being abducted.
When it comes to filming hard-to-explain phenomena, Patty Greer, who makes documentaries about crop circles, said that quadcopters — a.k.a. drones — have added production value to her films. Lynne Kitei, who covered a mass UFO sighting in her book and in the documentary The Phoenix Lights, said that even low-tech tools, like the 35mm film she used, are still a reliable way to gather proof of inexplicable flying craft, especially because they offer something an iPhone doesn't: negatives.
White House responds to UFO request
Night vision also offers added opportunities for UFO researchers, according to Ben Hansen, who was the host and lead investigator of SyFy channel's "Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files." He's now the owner of Night Vision Ops, an online store that sells night-vision technology. Hansen said that the consumer accessibility of new military-grade technologies in thermal and light amplification scopes are upping the game for the everyday UFO enthusiast.
To close out an intense few days on site at the Congress, Hansen's team invited me to a night watch near Arizona's Superstition Mountains. It was fascinating to see the latest optics add incredible clarity to the night sky, amplifying available light up to 50,000 times beyond what the unaided eye can see. Using the right technology, we were also able to see that a certain flying object, which made everyone nearby jump, wasn't a UFO after all. It was a bat.
I was surrounded by some serious tech all weekend, and it was eye-opening to see the ways that UFO hunters are gathering scientific evidence to learn more about the paranormal world. But I have to say, the gadget that was the most useful to me at the conference was my iPhone, which I used to download a free nightlight app for kids. For the few hours I managed to sleep, it was with the soothing illumination provided by "Kiwi the Green Koala." In short, I was officially freaked out.
Scholz's star - shown in this artist's impression - is currently 20 light-years away. But it once came much closerExcerpt from bbc.comAn alien star passed through our Solar System just 70,000 years ago, astronomers have discovered. No othe...
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| The Hubble Space Telescope |
Excerpt from utahpeoplespost.com
Researchers from the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder are currently working on an improved version of space telescope that could provide space images nearly 1,000 times sharper than those provided by long-running Hubble.
The new space telescope, dubbed the Aragoscope, is named after a French astronomer called Francois Arago. The new telescope is exclusively designed by the CU- Boulder scientists and involves a brand new technology developed by the university. According to its designers, the space optical instrument would be lighter, slimmer, and sharper than Hubble.
Additionally, the Aragoscope will involve several independent pieces that can be later assembled in space. So, the launching costs of these smaller building blocks will be significantly reduced.
Traditionally, space telescopes have essentially been monolithic pieces of glass like the Hubble Space Telescope. But the heavier the space telescope, the more expensive the cost of the launch,”said Anthony Harness, one of the researchers involved in the project and doctoral student at the CU-Boulder.
However, the new instrument will not replace Hubble, which is scheduled to be shut down in 5 years time. Last year, Hubble had its fifth and final maintenance service, and it was still in a pretty good shape although one of its six gyroscopes couldn’t be stabilized. Despite Hubble has been operating since 1990, NASA engineers hope that it will make it to its 30th anniversary.
If Hubble remains operational, NASA plans to use it along with its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to be launched in October 2018. Astronomers hope that the two space telescopes, which use two different imaging methods, would help them better understand the origins and early evolution of the universe.
But the UC-Boulder team claim that their new space telescope would surpass Hubble with its enhanced capacity of spotting distant Earth-like planets in the depths of a remote universe...
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| Various features on a smooth part of the comet's surface in the region named Imhotep. |
Excerpt from wired.com
The Rosetta spacecraft has been studying comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko up close since August, collecting data of unprecedented detail and taking pictures of a starkly beautiful comet-scape. While the Philae lander has enjoyed much of the spotlight—partly thanks to its now-famous triple landing—Rosetta has been making plenty of its own discoveries.
One of the biggest came last month, when scientists found that the chemical signature of the comet’s water is nothing like that on Earth, contradicting the theory that crashing comets supplied our planet with water. Comet 67P belongs to the Jupiter family of comets, and the findings also imply that these kinds of comets were formed at a wider range of distances from the sun than previously thought, says Michael A’Hearn, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, and member of the Rosetta science team.
Today, scientists have published the first big set of results from Rosetta in a slew of papers in the journal Science. The results include measurements and analyses of the comet’s shape, structure, surface, and the surrounding dust and gas particles. Here are just a few of the amazing things they’ve discovered about Rosetta’s comet so far:
The surface is fantastically weird
The comet has quite the textured landscape, covered with steep cliffs, boulders, weird bumps, cracks, pits, and smooth terrain. There are fractures of all sizes, including one that’s several yards wide and stretches for more than half a mile along the comet’s neck. Researchers don’t yet know what caused these cracks. The pits have steep sides and flat bottoms, ranging in size from a few tens to hundreds of feet wide. Jets of dust shoot out from some of the pits, suggesting that the ejection of material formed these features. Another strange feature is what scientists are calling goosebumps—weird bumpy patches found particularly on steep slopes.
While other features such as pits and fractures range in sizes, all of the goosebumps are about 10 feet wide. No one knows what kind of process would make the bumps, but whatever it is could have played an important part in the comet’s formation. It may be breezy Rosetta spotted dune- and ripple-like patterns,wind tails behind rocks, and even moats surrounding rocks, suggesting that a light breeze may blow dust along the surface. Such a gentle wind would have to come from gases leaking from below.
Because of the extremely low gravity on the comet, it wouldn’t take a strong gust to blow things around. It may have formed from two separate pieces Or not. The most distinct feature of comet 67P is its odd, two-lobed shape, which resembles a duck. Although scientists have seen this lobed structure in other comets before, namely Borrelly and Hartley 2, none are as pronounced as comet 67P’s. Borrelly and Hartley 2 look more like elongated potatoes while 67P has a clearly defined head and body. The strange shape suggests the comet was once two separate pieces called cometesimals—what are now the duck’s head and body—that stuck together.
The other possibility is that erosion ate away the parts around the neck. Preliminary evidence points to the first hypothesis.
“Probably most of us on the OSIRIS team lean toward thinking it was two cometesimals,” A’Hearn said. (OSIRIS is one of Rosetta’s imaging instruments.) But the scientists won’t have conclusive evidence until they study the comet in more detail. For example, they now see layering along the neck—if erosion carved out the comet’s duck shape, they should find the same same layering pattern continuing onto the other side of the neck.
Black, with a tinge of red
Even Rosetta’s color pictures show a grayish comet, but if you were to see it in person, you would see a pitch-black chunk of dust and ice, as it reflects only six percent of incoming light. By comparison, the moon reflects 12 percent of incoming light and Earth reflects 31 percent. But comet 67P’s not completely black, as it has a hint of red. Water, water, nowhere? The comet’s covered in opaque, organic compounds. Although comet 67P is undoubtedly icy, it hardly shows any water ice on its surface at all.
Which isn’t too surprising, as comets Tempel 1 and Hartley 2 didn’t have much ice on their surfaces either, A’Hearn says. Rosetta has yet to see sunlight reach every side of the comet yet, so there may still be some icy patches hidden from view. But, researchers do see the comet spraying water vapor into space, which means water ice likely lies just beneath the surface. The ice doesn’t have to be more than a centimeter deep to be invisible from the infrared instruments that detect the ice. Indeed, the data from Philae’s first bounce suggested that there’s a hard layer of ice beneath 4 to 8 inches of dust.
This duck floats
If you could find a big enough pond, that is. Like other known comets, the density of comet 67P is about half that of water ice. Initial measurements reveal that it’s also very porous—as much as 80 percent of it may be empty space. Rosetta has found depressions, which may have formed when the surface collapsed over particularly porous material underneath.
Different from every angle
As the comet nears the sun, it heats up, and ices and other volatile chemicals sublimate, spraying gases into space. So far, the most prominent gases that have been ejected are water vapor, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide. They spew out in different amounts from different parts of the comet. In particular, a lot of the water has been observed gushing out from the neck.The comet will continue to get more active as it reaches its closest approach to the sun in mid-August. It will burst with stronger jets of gas and dust, and maybe even blast off chunks of itself. If the comet is this interesting now, A’Hearn says, just wait until it gets to its nearest point to the sun, when it’s just 1.29 times farther from the sun than Earth is.
Excerpt from cnn.com It's enough to make Mulder and Scully seethe with envy.Nearly 130,000 pages of declassified Air Force files on UFO investigations and sightings are now available in one place online.Declassified government records about UFOs ...
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| Mount Vesuvius today |
By Amina Khan
Excerpt from latimes.com
Talk about reading between the lines! Scientists wielding X-rays say they can, for the first time, read words inside the charred, rolled-up scrolls that survived the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius nearly two millenniums ago.
| Researchers Daniel Delattre, left, and Emmanuel Brun observe the scroll before X-ray phase contrast imaging begins. (J. Delattre) |
The findings, described in the journal Nature Communications, give hope to researchers who have until now been unable to read these delicate scrolls without serious risk of destroying them.
The scrolls come from a library in Herculaneum, one of several Roman towns that, along with Pompeii, was destroyed when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. This library, a small room in a large villa, held hundreds of handwritten papyrus scrolls that had been carbonized from a furnace-like blast of 608-degree-Fahrenheit gas produced by the volcano.
“This rich book collection, consisting principally of Epicurean philosophical texts, is a unique cultural treasure, as it is the only ancient library to survive together with its books,” the study authors wrote. “The texts preserved in these papyri, now mainly stored in the Officina dei Papiri in the National Library of Naples, had been unknown to scholars before the discovery of the Herculaneum library, since they had not been copied and recopied in late Antiquity, the middle ages and Renaissance.”
So researchers have tried every which way to read these rare and valuable scrolls, which could open a singular window into a lost literary past. The problem is, these scrolls are so delicate that it’s nearly impossible to unroll them without harming them. That hasn’t kept other researchers from trying, however – sometimes successfully, and sometimes not.
“Different opening techniques, all less effective, have been tried over the years until the so-called ‘Oslo method’ was applied in the 1980s on two Herculaneum scrolls now in Paris with problematic results, since the method required the rolls to be picked apart into small pieces,” the study authors wrote. (Yikes.)
Any further attempts to physically open these scrolls were called off since then, they said, “because an excessive percentage of these ancient texts was irretrievably lost by the application of such methods.”
This is where a technique like X-ray computed tomography, which could penetrate the rolled scrolls, would come in handy. The problem is, the ancient writers used ink made of carbon pulled from smoke residue. And because the papyrus had been carbonized from the blazing heat, both paper and ink are made of roughly the same stuff. Because the soot-based ink and baked paper have about the same density, until now it’s been practically impossible to tell ink and paper apart.
But a team led by Vito Mocella of the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems in Naples, Italy, realized they could use a different technique called X-ray phase-contrast tomography. Unlike the standard X-ray CT scans, X-ray phase-contrast tomography examines phase shifts in the X-ray light as it passes through different structures.
Using the technique, the scientists were able to make out a few words and letters from two scrolls, one of them still rolled.
Reading these scrolls is difficult; computer reconstructions of the rolled scroll reveal that the blast of volcanic material so damaged its once-perfect whorls that its cross section looks like a half-melted tree-ring pattern. The paper inside has been thoroughly warped, and some of the letters on the paper probably distorted almost beyond recognition.
Nonetheless, the researchers were able to read a number of words and letters, which were about 2 to 3 millimeters in size. On an unrolled fragment of a scroll called “PHerc.Paris. 1,” they were able to make up the words for “would fall” and “would say.” In the twisted, distorted layers of the rolled-up papyrus called “PHerc.Paris. 4,” they could pick out individual letters: alpha, nu, eta, epsilon and others.
The letters in “PHerc.Paris. 4” are also written in a distinctive style with certain decorative flourishes that seemed very similar to a scroll called “PHerc. 1471,” which holds a text written by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus. The researchers think they were written in the second quarter of the first century BC.
Ultimately, the researchers wrote, this work was a proofof concept to give other researchers a safe and reliable way to explore ancient philosophical works that were until now off-limits to them.
The scrolls come from a library in Herculaneum, one of several Roman towns that, along with Pompeii, was destroyed when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. This library, a small room in a large villa, held hundreds of handwritten papyrus scrolls that had been carbonized from a furnace-like blast of 608-degree-Fahrenheit gas produced by the volcano.
“This rich book collection, consisting principally of Epicurean philosophical texts, is a unique cultural treasure, as it is the only ancient library to survive together with its books,” the study authors wrote. “The texts preserved in these papyri, now mainly stored in the Officina dei Papiri in the National Library of Naples, had been unknown to scholars before the discovery of the Herculaneum library, since they had not been copied and recopied in late Antiquity, the middle ages and Renaissance.”
So researchers have tried every which way to read these rare and valuable scrolls, which could open a singular window into a lost literary past. The problem is, these scrolls are so delicate that it’s nearly impossible to unroll them without harming them. That hasn’t kept other researchers from trying, however – sometimes successfully, and sometimes not.
“Different opening techniques, all less effective, have been tried over the years until the so-called ‘Oslo method’ was applied in the 1980s on two Herculaneum scrolls now in Paris with problematic results, since the method required the rolls to be picked apart into small pieces,” the study authors wrote. (Yikes.)
Any further attempts to physically open these scrolls were called off since then, they said, “because an excessive percentage of these ancient texts was irretrievably lost by the application of such methods.”
This is where a technique like X-ray computed tomography, which could penetrate the rolled scrolls, would come in handy. The problem is, the ancient writers used ink made of carbon pulled from smoke residue. And because the papyrus had been carbonized from the blazing heat, both paper and ink are made of roughly the same stuff. Because the soot-based ink and baked paper have about the same density, until now it’s been practically impossible to tell ink and paper apart.
But a team led by Vito Mocella of the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems in Naples, Italy, realized they could use a different technique called X-ray phase-contrast tomography. Unlike the standard X-ray CT scans, X-ray phase-contrast tomography examines phase shifts in the X-ray light as it passes through different structures.
Using the technique, the scientists were able to make out a few words and letters from two scrolls, one of them still rolled.
Reading these scrolls is difficult; computer reconstructions of the rolled scroll reveal that the blast of volcanic material so damaged its once-perfect whorls that its cross section looks like a half-melted tree-ring pattern. The paper inside has been thoroughly warped, and some of the letters on the paper probably distorted almost beyond recognition.
Nonetheless, the researchers were able to read a number of words and letters, which were about 2 to 3 millimeters in size. On an unrolled fragment of a scroll called “PHerc.Paris. 1,” they were able to make up the words for “would fall” and “would say.” In the twisted, distorted layers of the rolled-up papyrus called “PHerc.Paris. 4,” they could pick out individual letters: alpha, nu, eta, epsilon and others.
The letters in “PHerc.Paris. 4” are also written in a distinctive style with certain decorative flourishes that seemed very similar to a scroll called “PHerc. 1471,” which holds a text written by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus. The researchers think they were written in the second quarter of the first century BC.
Ultimately, the researchers wrote, this work was a proofof concept to give other researchers a safe and reliable way to explore ancient philosophical works that were until now off-limits to them.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License.
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Meteorite is ‘hard drive’ from space ~ Researchers decode ancient recordings from asteroid ~ BBC
Like the data recorded on the surface of a computer hard drive, the magnetic signals written in the space rock reveal how Earth's own metallic core and magnetic field may one day die.
The work appears in Nature journal.
Using a giant X-ray microscope, called a synchrotron, the team was able to read the signals that formed more than four-and-a-half billion years ago, soon after the birth of the Solar System.
“Start Quote
Dr James Bryson University of CambridgeThe new picture of metallic core solidification in the asteroid provide clues about the magnetic field and iron-rich core of Earth.
Core values "Ideas about how the Earth's core evolved through [our planet's] history are really changing at the moment," lead researcher Dr Richard Harrison, from the University of Cambridge, told BBC News.
"We believe that Earth's magnetic field is linked to core solidification. Earth's solid inner core may have started to form at very interesting time in terms of the evolution of life on Earth.
"By studying an asteroid we get to see this in fast forward. We can see the start of core solidification in the magnetic records as well as its end, and start to think about how these processes work on Earth."
Tiny particles, smaller than one thousandth the width of a human hair, trapped within the metal have retained the magnetic signature of the parent asteroid from its birth in the early Solar System.
"We're taking ancient magnetic field measurements in nano-scale materials to the highest ever resolution in order to piece together the magnetic history of asteroids - it's like a cosmic archaeological mission," said Dr James Bryson, the paper's lead author.
"Since asteroids are much smaller than Earth, they cooled much more quickly, so these processes occur on a shorter timescales, enabling us to study the whole process of core solidification."
Prof Wyn William, from the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study, commented: "To be able to get a time stamp on these recordings, to get a cooling rate and the time of solidification, is fantastic. It's a very nice piece of work."
The key to the long-lived stability of the recording is the atomic-scale structure of the iron-nickel particles that grew slowly in the asteroid core and survived in the meteorites.
Making a final comment on the results, Dr Harrison said: "In our meteorites we've been able to capture both the beginning and end of core freezing, which will help us understand how these processes affected the Earth in the past and provide a possible glimpse of what might happen in the future."