http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/05_releases/press_030205.

html

Chandra Probes High-Voltage Auroras on Jupiter

March 2, 2005

Scientists have obtained new insight into the unique power source
for many of Jupiter's auroras, the most spectacular and active
auroras in the Solar System. Extended monitoring of the giant planet
with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory detected the presence of
highly charged particles crashing into the atmosphere above its
poles.

X-ray spectra measured by Chandra showed that the auroral activity

was produced by ions of oxygen and other elements that were stripped
of most of their electrons. This implies that these particles were
accelerated to high energies in a multimillion-volt environment
above the planet's poles. The presence of these energetic ions
indicates that the cause of many of Jupiter's auroras is different
from auroras produced on Earth or Saturn.

"Spacecraft have not explored the region above the poles of Jupiter,
so X-ray observations provide one of the few ways to probe that
environment," said Ron Elsner of the NASA Marshall Space Flight
Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and lead author on a recently
published paper describing these results in the Journal for
Geophysical Research. "These results will help scientists to
understand the mechanism for the power output from Jupiter's
auroras, which are a thousand times more powerful than those on
Earth."

...

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/press/pr0510.html

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Release No.: 05-10
For Release: April 5, 2005

High-resolution artwork to accompany this release is posted online

at: http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/pr0510image.html

Case of Sedna's Missing Moon Solved

Cambridge, MA--When the distant planetoid Sedna was discovered on

the outer edges of our solar system, it posed a puzzle to
scientists. Sedna appeared to be spinning very slowly compared to
most solar system objects, completing one rotation every 20 days.
Astronomers hypothesized that this world possessed an unseen moon
whose gravity was slowing Sedna's spin. Yet Hubble Space Telescope
images showed no sign of a moon large enough to affect Sedna.

New measurements by Scott Gaudi, Krzysztof (Kris) Stanek and

colleagues at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)
have cleared up this mystery by showing that a moon wasn't needed
after all. Sedna is rotating much more rapidly than originally
believed, spinning once on its axis every 10 hours. This shorter
rotation period is typical of planetoids in our solar system,
requiring no external influences to explain.
 "We've solved the case of Sedna's missing moon. The moon didn't
vanish because it was never there to begin with," said Gaudi.

...

SCIENTISTS SOLVE MYSTERY OF METEOR CRATER'S MISSING MELTED ROCKS

> From Lori Stiles, UA News Services, 520-621-1877

March 09, 2005

Scientists have discovered why there isn't much impact-melted rock

at Meteor Crater in northern Arizona.

The iron meteorite that blasted out Meteor Crater almost 50,000
years ago was traveling much slower than has been assumed,
University of Arizona Regents' Professor H. Jay Melosh and Gareth
Collins of the Imperial College London report in the cover article
of Nature (March 10).

--------------------------------------------------------
Contact Information

H. Jay Melosh 520-621-2806 jmelosh@lpl.arizona.edu

Gareth Collins g.collins@imperial.ac.uk

Related Web sites

Impact Effects Calculator
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects

SIC Meteor Crater Web page

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/SIC/impact_cratering/Enviropages/
Barringer/barringerstartpage.html
----------------------------------------------------------

"Meteor Crater was the first terrestrial crater identified as a

meteorite impact scar, and it's probably the most studied impact
crater on Earth," Melosh said. "We were astonished to discover
something entirely unexpected about how it formed."

The meteorite smashed into the Colorado Plateau 40 miles east of

where Flagstaff and 20 miles west of where Winslow have since been
built, excavating a pit 570 feet deep and 4,100 feet across ?
enough room for 20 football fields.

Previous research supposed that the meteorite hit the surface at a

velocity between about 34,000 mph and 44,000 mph (15 km/sec and 20
km/sec).

Melosh and Collins used their sophisticated mathematical models in

analyzing how the meteorite would have broken up and decelerated as
it plummeted down through the atmosphere.

About half of the original 300,000 ton, 130-foot-diameter

(40-meter-diameter) space rock would have fractured into pieces
before it hit the ground, Melosh said. The other half would have
remained intact and hit at about 26,800 mph (12 km/sec), he said.
That velocity is almost four times faster than NASA's experimental
X-43A scramjet -- the fastest aircraft flown -- and ten times
faster than a bullet fired from the highest-velocity rifle, a 0.220
Swift cartridge rifle.

But it's too slow to have melted much of the white Coconino
formation in northern Arizona, solving a mystery that's stumped
researchers for years.

Scientists have tried to explain why there's not more melted rock
at the crater by theorizing that water in the target rocks
vaporized on impact, dispersing the melted rock into tiny droplets
in the process. Or they've theorized that carbonates in the target
rock exploded, vaporizing into carbon dioxide.

"If the consequences of atmospheric entry are properly taken into

account, there is no melt discrepancy at all," the authors wrote in
Nature.

"Earth's atmosphere is an effective but selective screen that

prevents smaller meteoroids from hitting Earth's surface," Melosh
said.

When a meteorite hits the atmosphere, the pressure is like hitting

a wall. Even strong iron meteorites, not just weaker stony
meteorites, are affected.

"Even though iron is very strong, the meteorite had probably been
cracked from collisions in space," Melosh said. "The weakened
pieces began to come apart and shower down from about
eight-and-a-half miles (14 km) high. And as they came apart,
atmospheric drag slowed them down, increasing the forces that
crushed them so that they crumbled and slowed more."

Melosh noted that mining engineer Daniel M. Barringer (1860-1929),

for whom Meteor Crater is named, mapped chunks of the iron space
rock weighing between a pound and a thousand pounds in a
6-mile-diameter circle around the crater. Those treasures have long
since been hauled off and stashed in museums or private
collections. But Melosh has a copy of the obscure paper and map
that Barringer presented to the National Academy of Sciences in
1909.

At about 3 miles (5 km) altitude, most of the mass of the meteorite

was spread in a pancake shaped debris cloud roughly 650 feet (200
meters) across.

The fragments released a total 6.5 megatons of energy between 9

miles (15 km) altitude and the surface, Melosh said, most of it in
an airblast near the surface, much like the tree-flattening
airblast created by a meteorite at Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908.

The intact half of the Meteor Crater meteorite exploded with at

least 2.5 megatons of energy on impact, or the equivalent of 2.5
tons of TNT.

Elisabetta Pierazzo and Natasha Artemieva of the Planetary Science

Institute in Tucson, Ariz., have independently modeled the Meteor
Crater impact using Artemieva's Separated Fragment model. They find
 impact velocities similar to that which Melosh and Collins propose.

Melosh and Collins began analyzing the Meteor Crater impact after
running the numbers in their Web-based "impact effects" calculator,
an online program they developed for the general public. The
program tells users how an asteroid or comet collision will affect
a particular location on Earth by calculating several environmental
consequences of the impact. The program is online at
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects

GROUND-BASED TELESCOPES HAVE AN EXTREMELY LARGE FUTURE

The largest ground-based optical telescopes in use today use mirrors

that are 10 m (33 ft) across. But the prospects for future Extremely
Large Telescopes (ELTs) are looking up. According to recent studies
by international teams of astronomers and leading astronomical
organisations, the next generation of optical telescopes could be
50-100 metres (165--330 ft) in diameter - big enough to fill a
sports stadium.

This quantum leap in size has important implications, since

astronomers want to capture every photon of light that comes their
way, and a 100 m mirror has a collecting area up to 100 times
greater than existing instruments. Furthermore, a 100 m telescope
would have extremely sharp vision, with the ability to see objects
at up to 40 times the spatial resolution of the Hubble Space
Telescope.

On Friday 8 April, Dr. Isobel Hook of Oxford University told the RAS
National Astronomy Meeting in Birmingham about the compelling
scientific case for Extremely Large Telescopes which has been
developed at a series of meetings over the past four years. The
results of this evaluation process, which involved more than 100
astronomers, have recently been published, coinciding with the start
of the European Extremely Large Telescope Design Study. (See Web
details at the end of this release).

A team of over 100 European Astronomers has recently produced a

brochure summarising the science that could be done, said Dr. Hook.
This work is the result of a series of meetings held in Europe over
the last 4 years, sponsored by the EC network OPTICON. The new
report explains how an ELT will revolutionise all aspects of
astronomy, from studies of our own solar system - by producing
images of comparable detail to those from space probes - to the edge
of the observable Universe.

As the report states: The vast improvement in sensitivity and

precision allowed by the next step in technological capabilities,
from todays 6-10 m telescopes to the new generation of 50-100 m
telescopes with integrated adaptive optics capability, will be the
largest such enhancement in the history of telescopic astronomy. It
is likely that the major scientific impact of these new telescopes
will be discoveries we cannot predict, so that their scientific
legacy will also vastly exceed even that rich return which we can
predict today.

Astronomers believe that with an ELT it will not only be possible to

find planets orbiting other stars, but also to identify and study
habitable Earth-like planets by identifying the presence of liquid
water, oxygen and methane. Many of the mysteries about the
high-energy Universe will also be answered. An ELT would be able to
provide key insights into the nature of black holes, galaxy
formation, the mysterious dark matter pervading the Universe and the
even more mysterious dark energy that is pushing the Universe apart.
An ELT will also be sensitive enough to detect the first galaxies
that were born only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang,
as well as very early supernova explosions, whose light has
travelled for over 10 billion years to reach us.

Some of the most exciting discoveries cannot be predicted now, said

Dr. Hook. New astronomical instruments have always surprised us
with the unexpected. An ELT would make such advances possible for
two main reasons - the large collecting area enables it to detect
the faintest sources, and the telescopes huge diameter allows
extremely sharp images (provided the effects of atmospheric
turbulence are corrected by adaptive optics).

Would it be possible to build such a telescope?

Initial studies are very positive, suggesting that a 50-100 m

segmented telescope could be built within 10-15 years for a cost of
around 1 billion Euros, said Dr. Hook. A major design study is now
starting in Europe, aimed at developing the technology needed to
build Extremely Large Telescopes. The study has been awarded 8
million Euros from the EC Framework Programme 6 plus additional
funds from the participants (the European Southern Observatory,
together with universities, institutes and industry around Europe,
including the UK).

...

FURTHER INFORMATION AND IMAGES CAN BE FOUND ON THE WEB AT:

The brochure Extremely Large Telescopes: The Next Step In Mankinds

Quest For The Universe is on-line at:
http://www-astro.physics.ox.ac.uk/~imh/ELT/Glossy/ELT-Brochure.pdf

Images of the possible telescope designs and further information can

be found at: http://www.eso.org/projects/owl/ and
http://www.astro.lu.se/~torben/euro50