Water found on Mars

Laboratory tests aboard NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander’s robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies water vapors produced by the heating of samples.

“We have water,” says William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA). “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time martian water has been touched and tasted.”

With enticing results so far and the spacecraft in good shape, NASA also announced operational funding for the mission will extend through September 30. The original prime mission of 3 months ends in late August. The mission extension adds 5 weeks to the 90 days of the prime mission.

“Phoenix is healthy and the projections for solar power look good, so we want to take full advantage of having this resource in one of the most interesting locations on Mars,” says Michael Meyer, chief scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The soil sample came from a trench approximately 2 inches deep. When the robotic arm first reached that depth, it hit a hard layer of frozen soil. Two attempts to deliver samples of icy soil on days when fresh material was exposed were foiled when the samples became stuck inside the scoop. Most of the material in Wednesday’s sample had been exposed to the air for 2 days, letting some of the water in the sample vaporize away and making the soil easier to handle.

“Mars is giving us some surprises,” says Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona. “We’re excited because surprises are where discoveries come from. One surprise is how the soil is behaving. The ice-rich layers stick to the scoop when poised in the Sun above the deck, different from what we expected from all the Mars simulation testing we’ve done. That has presented challenges for delivering samples, but we’re finding ways to work with it and we’re gathering lots of information to help us understand this soil.”

Since landing on May 25, Phoenix has been studying soil with a chemistry lab, TEGA, a microscope, a conductivity probe and cameras. Besides confirming the 2002 finding from orbit of water ice near the surface and deciphering the newly observed stickiness, the science team is trying to determine whether the water ice ever thaws enough to be available for biology and if carbon-containing chemicals and other raw materials for life are present.

The mission is examining the sky as well as the ground. A Canadian instrument is using a laser beam to study dust and clouds overhead.

“It’s a 30-watt light bulb giving us a laser show on Mars,” says Victoria Hipkin of the Canadian Space Agency.

A full-circle panorama of Phoenix’s surroundings has also been completed by the spacecraft.

“The details and patterns we see in the ground show an ice-dominated terrain as far as the eye can see,” says Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University, lead scientist for Phoenix’s Surface Stereo Imager camera. “They help us plan measurements we’re making within reach of the robotic arm and interpret those measurements on a wider scale.”

Astronomy Magazine

Lenovo IdeaPad S10 official

Lenovo today announced it is entering the netbook PC market with the new IdeaPad S10 netbook PC.
The Lenovo IdeaPad S10 allows users to perform simple activities such as surf the Internet, check and write emails, listen to music, and run basic applications. Lenovo also plans to introduce netbook models designed specifically for students and educators. You can choose between classic white, bold black as well as glossy ruby red S10 netbooks.

For a comfortable, more natural computing experience, Lenovo designed the keyboard to be 85% of the size of a full-function notebook PC’s keyboard.

Features of the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 include 10.2 inch screen with LED backlight, 512MB/1GB RAM, 80GB/160GB HDD, Webcam, Wifi, a 4-in-1 multicard reader, Express Card slot, and Windows XP.
The Lenovo IdeaPad S10 netbook PC will be available beginning in early October, and prices start at $399.
Via the Lenovo site.

Phoenix continues sample-collection tests

NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander’s science and engineering teams are testing methods to get an icy sample into the Robotic Arm scoop for delivery to the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer.

Provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

July 10, 2008
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander’s science and engineering teams are testing methods to get an icy sample into the Robotic Arm scoop for delivery to the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA).

Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, Phoenix’s “dig czar,” said the hard Martian surface that Phoenix has reached proved to be a difficult target, comparing the process to scraping a sidewalk.

“We have three tools on the scoop to help access ice and icy soil,” Arvidson said. “We can scoop material with the backhoe using the front titanium blade; we can scrape the surface with the tungsten carbide secondary blade on the bottom of the scoop; and we can use a high-speed rasp that comes out of a slot at the back of the scoop.”

“We expected ice and icy soil to be very strong because of the cold temperatures. It certainly looks like this is the case and we are getting ready to use the rasp to generate the fine icy soil and ice particles needed for delivery to TEGA,” he said.

Scraping action produced piles of scrapings at the bottom of a trench on Monday, but did not get the material into its scoop, information returned from Mars on Monday night confirmed. The piles of scrapings produced were smaller than previous piles dug by Phoenix, which made it difficult to collect the material into the Robotic Arm scoop.

“It’s like trying to pick up dust with a dustpan, but without a broom,” said Richard Volpe, an engineer from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, on Phoenix’s robotic arm team.

Images from the lander’s robotic arm camera showed that the scoop remained empty after two sets of 50 scrapes performed earlier Monday were collected into two piles in the trench informally named “Snow White.” These activities were a test of possible techniques for collecting a sample of ice or ice-rich soil for analysis.

The mission teams are now focusing on use of the motorized rasp within the robotic arm scoop to access the hard icy soil and ice deposits. They are conducting tests on Phoenix’s engineering model in the payload interoperability testbed at The University of Arizona in Tucson to determine the optimum ways to rasp the hard surfaces and acquire the particulate material produced during the rasping. The testbed work and tests on Mars will help the team determine the best way to collect a sample of Martian ice for delivery to TEGA.

Astronomy

Moms Eat Junk Food, Kids Get Fat

Study Shows Rats Fed Junk Food During Pregnancy Have Obesity-Prone Offspring

WebMD Health News

Mothers who eat junk food during pregnancy and while breastfeeding have obesity-prone children, rat studies suggest.

Once weaned, the offspring of junk-food-fed mothers prefer junk foods more than the offspring of rats fed a healthy diet during pregnancy.

But even when fed a healthy diet, the offspring of the junk-food-fed mothers are fatter than the offspring of rats fed healthy food. Moreover, obesity-linked genes are more active in the offspring of junk-food-fed mothers — especially female offspring.

“The maternal diet seems to influence and trigger events early in the life of their offspring,” study researcher Stephanie Bayol, PhD, tells WebMD. “We found that by the end of their adolescence, the offspring from the junk-food-fed animals had increased blood sugar, blood fat, and decreased insulin sensitivity — all of which are associated with overweight and diabetes.”

Bayol and colleagues at London’s Royal Veterinary College gave pregnant rats normal rat chow. But they also gave them free access to cookies, chocolate, doughnuts, muffins, potato chips, candy, and cheese.

In earlier studies, they showed that the offspring of these rats liked high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar foods better than other rats. But the new studies show that even when never fed junk food themselves, the rats whose mothers ate junk food during pregnancy grew up fatter than normal rats.

“Their fat cells were larger, which might make them more prone to obesity and might make it harder for them to lose weight,” Bayol says. “So there were lasting effects from their mother’s consumption of junk food, even if they were not fed junk food after weaning.”

Interestingly, the effects seem to be stronger for female offspring than for males.

“Males seem to use a different molecular machinery to regulate fat storage than do females,” Bayol says.

Does the same thing happen in humans? Of course, it would be unethical to feed junk food to pregnant women. But there’s evidence that women’s diets during pregnancy and breastfeeding affect their children’s food preferences, says pediatrician Stephen R. Cook, MD, MPH, of Golisano Children’s Hospital at the University of Rochester, N.Y.

“This gets to the concept of fetal programming. A lot of information suggests that in-utero exposures can lead to long-lasting effects in children,” Cook tells WebMD. “Women who smoke during pregnancy have children who are heavier, so maternal patterns can affect a child’s weight. Whether the cause is altered metabolism or something else, it is a very real concern.”

On the other hand, Cook says, junk food is made to have tastes and textures that appeal to children. And it’s heavily advertised, which also affects a child’s preferences.

(Pregnant and the baby’s craving junk food? Are you eating well? Come share your cravings at WebMD’s Pregnancy: Friends Talking.)

Kids’ Junk-Food Program Unplugged

Even if mothers’ bad diets really do predispose children to prefer junk food, Cook says, it’s still possible to teach them healthy eating habits.

“The more times a toddler tries a food, the more the child will come to accept it,” Cook says. “Most kids don’t like new foods, but after 12 to 15 tries, they start to accept things. So offer something 15 times before you decide they don’t like it.”

The key is to offer kids two or three food items at a meal. It does not help to pressure kids to eat things they don’t want. It also doesn’t help to overpraise them for trying a bite of something new.

“Parents should just offer options, and shift the decision-making to the child,” Cook says. “But if parents only put out chicken nuggets and a juice box and say, ‘That is all my child will eat,’ they aren’t working hard enough.”

Here’s another hint: Kids who are exclusively breastfed — with no solid foods until they’re 6 months old — tend to consume a lot more different foods than other children.

“That’s because through breast milk, they get exposed to the different foods their mothers eat,” Cook says.

Bayol and colleagues report their findings in the online issue of the Journal of Physiology.

Mercury, Up-Close Again

Planetary science is much about comparisons. Studying other bodies in our solar system with different sizes and compositions provides essential context for understanding Earth’s formation and evolution. Three planets–Mercury, Venus, and Mars–and the Moon, are most like Earth in their initial composition and relative size, but their differences are enlightening. The Moon, Venus, and especially Mars have all been visited and probed recently by spacecraft. Now it is Mercury’s turn. The MESSENGER^* spacecraft flew by the planet and observed it in January. The papers in this Special Issue feature these observations. After two more passes, it will settle into orbit around Mercury in 2011.

Mercury was visited by one earlier spacecraft, Mariner 10, in the mid-1970s. Its observations, and some difficult ground-based studies, provided most of our information on the planet, but raised many enigmatic questions. Despite being the smallest planet, Mercury has an actively generated magnetic field like that on Earth, but unlike that on the Moon, Mars, and Venus, and a huge iron-rich inner and molten outer core. Images of half of the surface revealed abundant scarps thought to indicate contractional faults, implying that Mercury was originally a bit larger early in its history. The extent to which its surface was shaped by impacts or volcanism was uncertain and debated. Its proximity to the Sun means that it has intense interactions with the solar wind, which, despite the magnetic field, impacts the surface of the planet, altering it and excavating some ions. Ground-based radar data hinted that ice may be present in shadowed regions of the poles.

The first MESSENGER observations provide some important early answers and a wealth of data for further study. Observations of the surface by several instruments reveal that Mercury does have a volcanic history. More contractional faults are seen in areas observed by Mariner and in an additional ~20% of the planet seen up close for the first time. A variety of impact craters help reveal relative ages of surface units and enrich the role of impact processes in shaping the planet. Impacts and solar bombardment have greatly weathered the surface; most of the iron is not in silicate minerals but apparently in nanoscale metal or oxide grains. In addition to sodium, MESSENGER detected ablation of calcium from the planet and in its magnetotail and measured in greater detail the magnetic field and its effect on its space environment.

This first pass did not cover the polar regions, so confirmation of the presence of ice will have to await future observations, which will also image other parts of the planet and come as the Sun’s activity increases. But already MESSENGER has helped fill in Mercury’s history and environment, allowing a better understanding of all the terrestrial planets, including Earth.

SCIENCE MAGAZINE