Point and click identification courtesy of Raman Spectroscopy!

ABC Science Show – Mars Science Laboratory Saturday 4 March 2006

Bonner Denton has a demonstration he uses upstairs. He takes a bottle of Tylenol, a white plastic container and the pills are inside. You can shoot the Raman and a laser goes through that white plastic, it identifies the three parts of Tylenol and it tells you what the plastic is made out of. It works on leaves. I can identify the species of trees by shooting their leaves. I don’t think the biologists are aware of this yet.

Potentially very useful indeed..

It would appear that the last hope to contact Pioneer 10 has not succeeded according to this report from the Planetary Society.  This was the last possible chance to communicate with the spacecraft, so it’s goodnight from it I guess (unless their post-processing of the data throws up any miracles)..

Cryosat, the ESA’s Earth sensing mission to monitor the polar ice caps lost last year on launch due to a software problem will be rebuilt and another launch attempted according to the ESA and this BBC News report.

Just listening to a podcast of the Planetary Society where they were talking to John Anderson (Senior Research Scientist, JPL) about their research in to the Pioneer Anomaly and he mentioned that the last possible chance to communicate with Pioneer 10 will be coming up around the 4th March this year.

To give you an idea of the difficulties they face, they will be trying to detect a signal strength of around 8 watts coming from a craft 3 times as far away as Pluto is from us. Imagine having to first of all turn on a lightbulb 90 times as far away as the Sun by sending a signal, waiting over 12 hours for it to get there and (hopefully) start transmitting back and then waiting another 12 and a bit hours for that signal to come back to Earth and then try and catch it!

If the Deep Space Network does come onboard for this, and it works, then this will be the final icing on the cake for the Pioneer Anomaly team as that’ll be yet more red shift information to add to the the almost 40GB of data they’ve recovered from both the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions.

Here’s an interesting project I picked up from the Planetary Society’s Planetary Radio podcast – the Stardust team needs volunteers to scan images from microsope photographs of the Aerogel that has been recovered to spot the tracks made by interstellar dust grains.

I know, you’re thinking “why don’t they do it automatically?” – the reason is that the grains will only travel a very short distance into the aerogel, and make marks quite similar to natural cracks that will have appeared during the mission. It is, in fact possible – BUT:

In order for it to work, however, they would have to “train” the computer with real images of aerogel containing grains of interstellar dust. But here’s the rub: no such particles had ever been collected!

So it’s a classic chicken/egg situation – they could find them automatically but they need to find the grains to teach the program before it will work reliably.

So, now it’s time for the public! They will produce a lot (order of a million) images for people to go through one by one (after some online training) to try and spot these particles by eye. The article on the challenge at the Stardust@Home site likens it to:

…searching for 45 ants in an entire football field, one 5cm by 5cm (2 inch by 2 inch) square at a time!

At least in this case the ants won’t be moving.. 🙂

So, if you want to find out more read the Planetary Society page on the project, the Berkeley press release about the project and the Stardust@Home project page itself & think about registering to help them out. Who knows, you could be the first one to find a piece of cosmic space dust!

The Planetary Society has posted an interesting update on the Pioneer Anomaly especially about the fact that they’ve managed to recover almost all of the original telemetry data as well as the doppler shift information they were after.

The original tapes were to have been destroyed after 7 years, but as they say:

Fortunately, this is not what happened in the case of the Pioneer missions. Not only were the original magnetic tapes not destroyed but, in the early 1990s, before deterioration would have made the tapes unusable, they were copied to much more durable magneto-optical media. Since then, the files, about 40 gigabytes in total, have been copied to modern computers and we have now developed tools to extract information from them.

Congratulations to the New Horizon team on the launch of the probe to Pluto!  Only nine years to wait to see what it finds. 🙂

The Planetary Society has an update on the launch from John Spencer of the science team (and the Lowell Observatory).

The Planetary Society has a blog with more information on the thruster problem that’s plaguing Hayabusa at the moment, and why it’s so important to get this solved quickly!

Listening to the Planetary Radio podcast about the New Horizons mission from NASA to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt and heard the principle investigator, Alan Stern say that they were hoping to find that Pluto had a ring system!

This is likely because its three moons (Charon and the two unnamed ones discovered earlier this year) have such low gravity that there’s a good chance that meteorite impacts would throw up dust that would escape the moons could end up in orbit around Pluto.