Solar wind may have stripped off water from Venus

September 25th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Discovery of water on the moon by India's first lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 with a thin layer of surface 'dew' appearing to form and then dissipating each day has set the scientific community agog. "Finding water on the Moon in daylight is a huge surprise, even if it is only a small amount of water and only in the form of molecules stuck to soil," writes University of Maryland astronomer Jessica Sunshine.

September 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Observations by the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Venus Express mission have provided strong new evidence that the solar wind has stripped away significant quantities of water from Earth's twin planet Venus. The SPICAV and VIRTIS instruments carried by the spacecraft have been used to measure concentrations of water vapor in the Venusian atmosphere at altitudes ranging from the lowest 10 km up to 110 km, high above the cloud tops.

September 11th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Atmospheric scientists from the UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) have discovered a previously unknown basic mode of energy transfer from the solar wind to the Earth's magnetosphere, a finding that could improve the safety and reliability of spacecraft that operate in the upper atmosphere. "It's like something else is heating the atmosphere besides the sun.

September 2nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Researchers at the University of Warwick, UK, have found what could be the signal of ideal wave "surfing" conditions for individual particles within the massive turbulent ocean of the solar wind. The discovery could give a new insight into just how energy is dissipated in solar system sized plasmas such as the solar wind and could provide significant clues to scientists developing fusion power that relies on plasmas.

August 30th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Reports indicate that the slums of Cairo, Egypt's largest city, have got an energy makeover, with solar panels sprouting on apartment rooftops, providing residents with clean power and water and a chance to directly improve their lives. According to a report in National Geographic News, since 2003, the nonprofit Solar CITIES project has installed 34 solar-powered hot water systems and 5 biogas reactors in Cairo's poor Coptic Christian and Islamic neighborhoods.

July 30th, 2009 LONDON - Astronomers have detected a new mysterious bright spot on the planet Venus, which might have been caused by volcanic activity, turbulence in the planet's atmosphere, or charged particles from the sun. According to a report in New Scientist, amateur astronomer Frank Melillo of Holtsville, New York, first spotted the new feature, which is brighter than its surroundings at ultraviolet wavelengths, on the planet's southern hemisphere on July 19.

July 14th, 2009 PARIS - Venus Express has charted the first map of the planet's southern hemisphere at infrared wavelengths, which hints that Venus may once have been more Earth-like, with both, a plate tectonics system and an ocean of water. The map comprises over a thousand individual images, recorded between May 2006 and December 2007.

July 4th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of scientists has for the first time observed energetic neutral atoms scattered off the Moon from the incoming solar wind ion beam. When the solar wind, made up mostly of ionized hydrogen, hits the Moon, most of it is absorbed, but some is reemitted as energetic neutral atoms.

June 19th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft has made the first observations of very fast hydrogen atoms coming from the Moon, following decades of speculation and searching for their existence. During spacecraft commissioning, the IBEX team turned on the IBEX-Hi instrument, built primarily by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which measures atoms with speeds from about half a million to 2.5 million miles per hour.

June 11th, 2009 Sydney, June 11 (ANI: In a grim scenario put forward by scientists, the gravity of Jupiter could one day pull Mercury off course, triggering a chain reaction of collisions in the Solar System. But despite the threat, there's only a 1 percent chance of this happening in the next 5 billion years, said French researchers.

May 30th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new study has suggested that the Sun is slowly stealing Earth's atmosphere, with our planet's main solar defense acting as a double agent, aiding and abetting the thievery. According to a report in National Geographic News, typically hailed as a protective buffer from the sun's brute power, Earth's magnetosphere is actually helping the sun's energized particles strip away a tiny fraction of Earth's atmosphere.

May 12th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In a new research, scientists suggest that a "supergiant" asteroid several times larger than the one that likely killed the dinosaurs struck Mars with such force that it shut down the planet's magnetic field. Based on the number of large craters present, scientists think very early Mars suffered 15 or so giant impacts within a span of about a hundred million years.

March 31st, 2009 WASHINGTON - A tiny microbe that converts carbon dioxide and water to methane with a bit of solar or wind power, can be a new energy source, according to a team of Penn State engineers. Methane is preferred over hydrogen because a large portion of the US infrastructure is already set up to easily transport and deliver methane.

March 15th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of scientists is studying cyclones on Earth to help them better understand 'superrotating' vortices on the planet Venus. At cloud top level, the entire atmosphere of Venus circles the planet in just about four Earth days, much faster than the solid planet does.

March 12th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Indian scientists have developed a solar water heating system that will effectively pay for itself five times over, with an estimated working life of about twenty years. The solar hot water system used in the study is installed at the Jijau hostel, part of the Dr Panjabrao Deshmukh Agricultural University campus, in Akola, Maharashtra state, India.