Interesting plans are afoot, to use the Moon’s surface as a mirror for observation:

This mottled landscape showing the impact crater Tycho is among the most violent-looking places on our Moon. Astronomers didn’t aim NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to study Tycho, however. The image was taken in preparation to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun’s face on June 5-6.

Hubble cannot look at the Sun directly, so astronomers are planning to point the telescope at the Earth’s moon, using it as a mirror to capture reflected sunlight and isolate the small fraction of the light that passes through Venus’s atmosphere. Imprinted on that small amount of light are the fingerprints of the planet’s atmospheric makeup.

These observations will mimic a technique that is already being used to sample the atmospheres of giant planets outside our solar system passing in front of their stars. In the case of the Venus transit observations, astronomers already know the chemical makeup of Venus’s atmosphere, and that it does not show signs of life on the planet. But the Venus transit will be used to test whether this technique will have a chance of detecting the very faint fingerprints of an Earth-like planet, even one that might be habitable for life, outside our solar system that similarly transits its own star. Venus is an excellent proxy because it is similar in size and mass to our planet.

The astronomers will use an arsenal of Hubble instruments, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, Wide Field Camera 3, and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, to view the transit in a range of wavelengths, from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. During the transit, Hubble will snap images and perform spectroscopy, dividing the sunlight into its constituent colors, which could yield information about the makeup of Venus’s atmosphere.

Pretty fascinating stuff!

Credit: NASA / GSFC / Arizona State Univ. / Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

I realize I can’t inundate you with Atlantis pictures all in a row, so this is me stringing them out a little. This image of Tycho Crater was taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter – exactly how I like the Moon, stark and lovely.

Tycho crater’s central peak complex casts a long, dark shadow near local sunrise in this spectacular lunarscape. The dramatic oblique view was recorded on June 10 by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Shown in amazing detail, boulder strewn slopes and jagged shadows appear in the highest resolution version at 1.5 meters per pixel. The rugged complex is about 15 kilometers wide, formed in uplift by the giant impact that created the well-known ray crater 100 million years ago. The summit of its central peak reaches 2 kilometers above the Tycho crater floor.

High Texture Hand Embroidery of the Moon, by Rachel Hobson

More amazing space crafts are up for voting in the NASA Etsy craft contest — I’m featuring several over the next two days because there’s some amazing stuff to see! The first two photos are of an amazing high-texture embroidery of the Moon. It’s really worth looking at the rest of the images on the listing, to get a feel for the range of texture and stitches involved!

High Texture Hand Embroidery of the Moon, by Rachel Hobson

Next, a fantastic moon crater ring! I’ve tagged this “for men” because it’s a size 11.5. If you’re a woman and you can wear it, by all means! (And wow, you have bigger fingers than me… and I have big hands!)

Moon Ring Sterling Silver, by MarcusBerknerJewelry

Last but not least, two of my favorite things combine in a beautiful art piece, a raku-fired ceramic lunar crater:

Moon Crater, by EsterLipscomb

Vote today for these and many other amazing things, as part of the NASA Etsy contest!

Artwork © Chris Foss, all rights reserved.

Found a couple of interesting, new-to-me works by Chris Foss — unfortunately I don’t know the titles. The above ship looks like it just had an oops had a hard landing; below, a spectacular concept of a meteor impact. (Or maybe that was the ship from the first picture?)

Artwork © Chris Foss, all rights reserved.

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

An unusual impact structure on Mars, as seen by HiRISE:

What caused the central pit within this impact crater: unusual subsurface layering or a lucky second impact?

Impacts into layers of alternately strong and weak material – for example, ice rich versus non-ice-rich – produce terracing such as that seen between the inner pit and the outer rim. Scientists have used terraced craters to estimate the thickness of lava flows on the Moon and elsewhere. Uneven sublimation and periglacial erosion of exposed ice-rich material in the interior of the crater may explain why the small central pit is slightly offset from center relative to the terrace and rim of the larger crater.

The pit in the center of the main feature could also be from a later impact crater striking inside and slightly off-center from the original. It has a raised rim, which is characteristic of impact craters and is difficult to explain with a layered target. While no ejecta from this later impact can be seen, the ejecta could have been removed by extensive periglacial modification. Additionally, the floor fill around the inner crater resembles impact ejects elsewhere at this latitude, and some of the “landslides” to the East could be flow-back of ejecta off the walls of the larger crater.

Written by: Sarah Milkovich

(Via Sky and Telescope.)

Been a while since I poked around Etsy — this time I found fantastic earrings. I love the patina, especially.

Handcrafted in sterling silver, these little moons will be great for everyday, casual wear. They were first cut from sterling silver sheet, then hand stamped, formed, and treated with a patina to highlight the detail. The patina has been sealed with lacquer to protect the finish.

The lunar south pole as it will appear on the night of impact. Photo Credit - NMSU / MSFC Tortugas Observatory.

Early Friday morning, the LCROSS probe will crash into the lunar south pole, looking for further evidence of water on the Moon. Above is a map showing approximately where LCROSS will strike; if you have a 10″ telescope (or larger), you should be able to view the impacts for yourself!

The actual impacts commence at 4:30 am PDT (11:30 UT). The Centaur rocket will strike first, transforming 2200 kg of mass and 10 billion joules of kinetic energy into a blinding flash of heat and light. Researchers expect the impact to throw up a plume of debris as high as 10 km.

Close behind, the LCROSS mothership will photograph the collision for NASA TV and then fly right through the debris plume. Onboard spectrometers will analyze the sunlit plume for signs of water (H2O), water fragments (OH), salts, clays, hydrated minerals and assorted organic molecules.

“If there’s water there, or anything else interesting, we’ll find it,” says Tony Colaprete of NASA Ames, the mission’s principal investigator.

This is an exciting opportunity for ordinary citizens to watch space exploration in action! There’s simply nothing like seeing the planets (or anything else) with your own eyeball; print and digital images just do not compare to the “real thing”.

EDIT, October 10, 2009: First images of the Centaur impact (as seen from LCROSS) are online!

LCROSS Centaur Impact Flash (Mid-Infrared)

This mid-infrared image was taken in the last minutes of the LCROSS flight mission to the Moon. The small white spot (enlarged in the insets) seen within the dark shadow of lunar crater walls is the initial flash created by the impact of a spent Centaur upper stage rocket. Traveling at 1.5 miles per second, the Centaur rocket hit the lunar surface yesterday at 4:31am UT, followed a few minutes later by the shepherding LCROSS spacecraft. Earthbound observatories have reported capturing both impacts. But before crashing into the lunar surface itself, the LCROSS spacecraft’s instrumentation successfully recorded close-up the details of the rocket stage impact, the resulting crater, and debris cloud. In the coming weeks, data from the challenging mission will be used to search for signs of water in the lunar material blasted from the surface.