Join iPLEX and participate in the Downs Sydrome Association of Los Angeles’ (DSALA) annual event, TwentyWonder, a charity event that brings an incredible assortment of artists, scientists, designers, musicians, comedians, actors, athletes, and circus performers to the Derby Doll Factory for one unforgettable night! iPLEX will host an informational hands-on comet and asteroid booth where participants can interact with scientists from NASA and UCLA who study these objects on a daily basis. The event is hosted by the Los Angeles Derby Dolls, Southern California’s premiere all-female, banked track roller derby league, will host TwentyWonder 2013, DSALA’s fourth annual fundraising event, to take place June 28, 2014 at the Doll Factory. For tickets, please visit the official website. NOTE: This event is restricted to ages 21+.
All proceeds from TwentyWonder benefit Down Syndrome Association of Los Angeles (DSALA), an organization providing support services for individuals with Down syndrome and their families through the development and promotion of education, counseling, employment and recreational programs in the greater Los Angeles area.
The meteor impact that caused Russia’s Popigai crater located in Siberia may be the cause the Eocene mass extinction event that occurred just over 33 million years ago. By measuring certain isotopes within rock samples from the Eocene period, iPLEX graduate student Matt Wielicki able to tie a short-lived, rapid cooling period in global climate to around the same time that the Popigai crater, one of the ten largest impact craters on Earth, was formed. The rapid onset of colder temperatures could be explained by a large quantity of reflecting particulates being launched into Earth’s atmosphere during the impact that blocked out the Sun. During this period, many aquatic species went extinct including the earliest types of toothed whales and many types of sea urchins and snails.
To learn more about this discovery, visit Livescience.
The ELFIN satellite currently under construction at UCLA has been selected to receive funding by the NASA Low Cost Access to Space (LCAS) program. The LCAS website describes their mission as supporting “science investigations that may be completed through suborbital flight, as well as proof-testing new technologies that may ultimately find application in free-flying Heliophysics space missions.”
ELFIN is primarily being designed and built by a group of undergraduate students supervised by Prof. Vassilis Angelopoulos. The satellite is about the size of a loaf of bread, weighs 8 pounds, and will house a magnetometer and particle detector to take space weather measurements around Earth’s poles. Learn more about the mission from the ELFIN website.
By simulating hundreds of impacts in Mars’ equatorial region, a team of scientists have determined that the ancient Martian atmosphere was likely too thin to support flowing liquid water on the planet’s surface. The team, including iPLEX researcher Jean-Pierre Williams, identified and catalogued hundreds of large craters near the Martian equator. They then used a computer simulation to calculate what atmospheric density would have caused the range of craters observed. They concluded that the Martian atmosphere was 150 times thicker than today, a value that is only a fraction of the atmospheric pressure required to support liquid water. This presents a mystery, since many Martian geological features appear to have been carved by massive flooding. The paper’s authors suggest that the Martian atmosphere may have been temporarily thickened at times by severe volcanic activity or a large impacts that would spew large amounts of gases into the atmosphere, allowing the surface of the planet to warm up enough to allow liquid water to flow.
Read more about their Nature Geoscience paper, published on April 13, here.
The amount of water present in the moon may have been overestimated by scientists studying the mineral apatite, says a team of researchers led by Jeremy Boyce of the UCLA Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences.
Boyce and his colleagues created a computer model to accurately predict how apatite would have crystallized from cooling bodies of lunar magma early in the moon’s history. Their simulations revealed that the unusually hydrogen-rich apatite crystals observed in many lunar rock samples may not have formed within a water-rich environment, as was originally expected.
This discovery has overturned the long-held assumption that the hydrogen in apatite is a good indicator of overall lunar water content.
“The mineral apatite is the most widely used method for estimating the amount of water in lunar rocks, but it cannot be trusted,” said Boyce, who is an adjunct assistant professor in the UCLA College of Letters and Science. “Our new results show that there is not as much water in lunar magma as apatite would have us believe.”
The research was published online March 20 in the journal Science on and will be published in a future print edition.
The above image is a map of calcium within a polished thin slice of a lunar rock. The high calcium content in apatite is indicated by the bright pinks and reds, while surrounding minerals with lower calcium content are shown in blues and black. Core to rim zoning of water in crystals such as this one demonstrates the presence of the apatite fractionation, an effect responsible for the high water content of lunar apatites on an otherwise dry moon.
For decades, scientists believed the moon was almost entirely devoid of water. However, the discovery of hydrogen-rich apatite within lunar rocks in 2010 seemed to hint at a more watery past. Scientists originally assumed that information obtained from a small sample of apatite could predict the original water content of a large body of magma, or even the entire moon, but Boyce’s study indicates that apatite may, in fact, be deceptive.
Boyce believes the high water content within lunar apatite results from a quirk in the crystallization process rather than a water-rich lunar environment. When water is present as molten rock cools, apatite can form by incorporating hydrogen atoms into its crystal structure. However, hydrogen will be included in the newly crystallizing mineral only if apatite’s preferred building blocks, fluorine and chlorine, have been mostly exhausted.
“Early-forming apatite is so fluorine-rich that it vacuums all the fluorine out of the magma, followed by chlorine,” Boyce said. “Apatite that forms later doesn’t see any fluorine or chlorine and becomes hydrogen-rich because it has no choice.”
Therefore, when fluorine and chlorine become depleted, a cooling body of magma will shift from forming hydrogen-poor apatite to forming hydrogen-rich apatite, with the latter not accurately reflecting the original water content in the magma.
Understanding the story of lunar apatite has implications beyond determining how much water is locked inside lunar rocks and soil. According to the predominant theory of how the moon originally formed, hydrogen and other volatile elements should not be present at all in lunar rocks.
Many scientists theorize that the moon formed when a giant impact tore free a large chunk of Earth more than 4 billion years ago. If this “giant impact” model is correct, the moon would have been completely molten, and lighter elements such as hydrogen should have bubbled to the surface and escaped into space. Since hydrogen is a key component of water, a moon formed by a giant impact should be dry.
The majority of lunar samples are in fact very dry and missing lighter elements. Yet hydrogen-rich apatite crystals are found in a whole host of lunar samples and have presented a paradox for scientists. Somehow, despite the moon’s fiery beginning, some water and other volatiles may have remained, though perhaps not as much as apatite initially implied.
“We had 40 years of believing in a dry moon, and now we have some evidence that the old dry model of the moon wasn’t perfect,” Boyce said. “However, we need to be cautious and look carefully at each piece of evidence before we decide that rocks on the moon are as wet as those on Earth.”
This study shows that scientists still have much to learn about the composition and environment of the early moon.
“We’re knocking out one of the most important pillars of evidence regarding the conditions of the formation and evolution of the moon,” Boyce said. “Next, we plan to determine how badly apatite has distorted our view of the moon and how we can best see past it to get at the moon’s origin.”
The research was supported by a NASA Cosmochemistry grant and a NASA Lunar Advanced Science for Exploration Research grant.
Co-authors of the study include undergraduate Steven Tomlinson from UCLA, assistant research professor Francis McCubbin from the University of New Mexico, professor James Greenwood from Wesleyan University and staff scientist Allan Treiman from the NASA-funded Lunar and Planetary Institute.
On March 26, the Dawn Mission team was awarded the 2014 Trophy for Current Achievement, the Smithsonian’s highest honor bestowed on groups. The Dawn probe is the first to explore asteroids within our solar system’s main belt up close. UCLA Professor Christopher T. Russell, an iPLEX member, is the principal investigator for the Dawn mission and traveled to Washington D.C. to receive the award.
Read more about the award at the UCLA Newsroom. Find out more about Dawn on their mission homepage.
Pictured here are the following members of the Dawn team (from left to right): Grant Faris, Carol Polanskey, Chris Russell, Steve Joy, Greg Whiffen, Marc Rayman, Robert Mase, Tim Weise, Brett Smith, Nick Mastrodemos, Paul Fieseler, Carol Raymond and Don Han. Image credit: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
A new dwarf planet has been discovered in the ‘interplanetary no man’s land’ found between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud that astronomers originally thought was just empty space. The new planet called 2012 VP113 is 280 miles across and orbits at a distance of 80 astronomical units (AU),where an AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun. This orbit takes the new planet far beyond the Kuiper Belt which stretches between 30 and 55 AU. Pluto, a Kuiper Belt Object, never orbits further than 49 AU from the Sun. The dwarf planet 2012 VP113 is not far enough away to be considered part of the Oort Cloud, a shell of icy objects orbiting thousands of AU from the Sun, but its discovery may indicate the existence of an ‘inner Oort Cloud’.
Read more about the story from the LA Times, including commentary from iPLEX Director Dave Jewitt.
A research team led by iPLEX Director Dave Jewitt has discovered an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter that appears to be slowly breaking apart. In the original lower-resolution images taken, asteroid P/2013 R3 appeared strangely fuzzy. A closer inspection with the W.M. Keck observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope revealed the asteroid was in fact composed of several fragments moving away from each other at a rate of 1 mile per hour. These fragments are surrounded by a cloud of dust the size of Earth, with the largest pieces about twice the size of a football field.
The slow disintegration of P/2013 R3 is unusual. When asteroids collide or experience a high velocity impact, they break up quickly rather than hovering in a slowly expanding cloud of debris. Likewise, the asteroid is not located near a large planet whose gravitational field could rip it apart and P/2013 R3 is positioned far from the Sun whose heat could cause gases to expand and crack the asteroid apart. The cause of the unlikely disintegration, according to Prof. Jewitt and his team, are low energy photons emitted from the surface of the asteroid. These photons are singly not very energetic, but over the course of millions of years they can spin the asteroid at faster and faster rates. If the asteroid is held together loosely, a type of asteroid known as a “rubble pile”, it can start spinning so fast that its component parts separate, creating a slow moving cloud of debris as observed with P/2013 R3.
The THEMIS and ELFIN spacecraft teams shared their research with students and parents at Nora Sterry Elementary School during their Science, Literacy, and Math event on Friday, February 14th. THEMIS outreach coordinator Emmanuel Masongsong delighted young students with magnetic demos and his recently constructed planeterrella, while ELFIN member Kyle Colton shared hands-on demos focused on electricity and satellite communication.
iPLEX is actively seeking K-12 educators who would be interested in astronomy or planetary science presentations at their schools or in their classrooms. For more information or to request a presentation, please contact iPLEX at iplex@ess.ucla.edu .
Prof. Aradhna Tripati has been honored by the National Science Foundation with an Early Career Development Award. This award is the most prestigious given to junior faculty by the NSF and honors professors who are both exemplary researchers and dedicated educators. You can read more about the award and about Prof. Tripati’s research accomplishments and future plans at UCLA Today.
Join iPLEX and participate in the Downs Sydrome Association of Los Angeles’ (DSALA) annual event, TwentyWonder, a charity event that brings an incredible assortment of artists, scientists, designers, musicians, comedians, actors, athletes, and circus performers to the Derby Doll Factory for one unforgettable night! iPLEX will host an informational hands-on comet and asteroid booth where participants can interact with scientists from NASA and UCLA who study these objects on a daily basis. The event is hosted by the Los Angeles Derby Dolls, Southern California’s premiere all-female, banked track roller derby league, will host TwentyWonder 2013, DSALA’s fourth annual fundraising event, to take place June 28, 2014 at the Doll Factory. For tickets, please visit the official website. NOTE: This event is restricted to ages 21+.
A new dwarf planet has been discovered in the ‘interplanetary no man’s land’ found between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud that astronomers originally thought was just empty space. The new planet called 2012 VP113 is 280 miles across and orbits at a distance of 80 astronomical units (AU),where an AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun. This orbit takes the new planet far beyond the Kuiper Belt which stretches between 30 and 55 AU. Pluto, a Kuiper Belt Object, never orbits further than 49 AU from the Sun. The dwarf planet 2012 VP113 is not far enough away to be considered part of the Oort Cloud, a shell of icy objects orbiting thousands of AU from the Sun, but its discovery may indicate the existence of an ‘inner Oort Cloud’.
