China to launch lunar space probe before year's end

China announced plans on Tuesday to launch a space probe to bring back samples from the moon before the end of the year, in what state media cast as competition to U.S. President Donald Trump's ambitions to revitalize U.S. space exploration.

The Chang'e-5 lunar probe is undergoing a final round of tests and is expected to be on standby for launch from August, the official People's Daily said, citing the China National Space Administration.

The launch will involve new challenges for China in sample collection, taking off from the moon and high-speed reentry to the Earth's atmosphere, making it "one of China's most complicated and difficult space missions", Hu Hao, an official from China's Lunar Exploration Programme, told the paper.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for China to become a global power in space exploration.

"Not long ago, the United States' Trump Administration revealed an ambition to return to the moon. Our country also announced a series of deep space exploration plans," said the official Science and Technology Daily.

"The moon is the first stop for humanity's march toward deep space," the paper said.

In February, the Trump administration asked the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to look into the possibility of manning a heavy-lift rocket mission, expected to be launched in 2018, perhaps setting the stage for a human return to the moon.

China's new probe is the latest step in its lunar exploration program. In 2013, it completed its first lunar "soft landing" since 1976 with the Chang'e-3 craft and its Jade Rabbit rover.

China is aiming to send a probe to the dark side of the moon by 2018, the first ever such trip, and hopes to put astronauts on the moon by 2036.

Source: Reuters

Dwarf planet Ceres boasts organic compounds, raising prospect of life

A NASA spacecraft has detected carbon-based materials, similar to what may have been the building blocks for life on Earth, on the Texas-sized dwarf planet Ceres that orbits between Mars and Jupiter in the main asteroid belt, scientists said on Thursday.

The finding puts Ceres, a rock-and-ice world about 590 miles (950 km) in diameter, on a growing list of places in the solar system of interest to scientists looking for life beyond Earth. The list includes Mars and several ocean-bearing moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

The discovery, published in the journal Science, was made by a team of researchers using NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which has been orbiting Ceres for nearly two years.

"I think these organic molecules are a long way from microbial life," Dawn lead scientist Christopher Russell of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) wrote in an email to Reuters. "However, this discovery tells us that we need to explore Ceres further." Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt and is located about three times farther from the sun than Earth. The composition of Ceres is thought to reflect the material present in parts of the solar system when it was forming some 4-1/2 billion years ago.

"The discovery indicates that the starting material in the solar system contained the essential elements, or the building blocks, for life," Russell said.

"Ceres may have been able to take this process only so far. Perhaps to move further along the path took a larger body with more complex structure and dynamics," like Earth, Russell added.

The organic material was found near a 31-mile-wide (50-km-wide) crater in Ceres' northern hemisphere. Although the exact molecular compounds in the organics could not be identified, they matched tar-like minerals, such as kerite or asphaltite, the scientists wrote.

"Because Ceres is a dwarf planet that may still preserve internal heat from its formation period and may even contain a subsurface ocean, this opens the possibility that primitive life could have developed on Ceres itself," planetary scientist Michael Kuppers of the European Space Astronomy Center in Madrid wrote in an related essay in the journal Science.

Based on the location and type of organics found on Ceres, scientists ruled out the possibility they were deposited by a crashing asteroid or comet.

Lead researcher Maria Cristina De Sanctis of Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics and colleagues suspect the material formed inside Ceres through hydrothermal activity, though how the organics reached the surface remains a mystery.

Source: Reuters

China plans to launch new lunar probe in November

China will launch its new lunar probe, Chang E-5, at the end of November, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) said, according to official media reports Monday.

This mission, which will be the first to collect samples from the Moon's surface automatically and the first that will return to Earth, will take place four years after the deployment of China's last mission to the Moon and a little more than a year after the cessation of operations of the robotic Moon rover, which was part of that mission.

Source: EFE

Moon used to spin 'on different axis'

Using data collected by Nasa's Lunar Prospector mission in the late 1990s, scientists spotted two hydrogen-rich regions near the Moon's poles, probably indicating the presence of water ice.

The icy patches are opposite each other - the line between them passes through the middle of the Moon - so it appears that this used to be its spin axis.

The work appears in the journal Nature.

It describes a gradual wobble, or "true polar wander", adding up to about a six-degree shift altogether.

A likely explanation for this shift, which the researchers suggest took place over several billion years, is volcanic activity in a region called the Procellarum.

This swathe of territory includes most of the Moon's dark patches that are visible from the Earth. Volcanoes and associated geological activity would have made it warmer and lighter than the rest of the Moon.

According to Matt Siegler, from the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, and his colleagues, that drop in density produced enough wobble to explain the two "palaeopoles" they detected in the Lunar Prospector data.

"The Procellarum region was most geologically active early in lunar history, which implies that polar wander initiated billions of years ago," they write.

Dr Siegler and his colleagues discovered the hydrogen-rich patches in data from the Lunar Prospector's neutron spectrometer: measuring the neutrons bounced off the Moon's surface by incoming cosmic rays.

That hydrogen signal is taken to indicate the presence of water ice, which can - and does - exist in permanently shaded craters at the Moon's poles.

Precisely why it has persisted in these regions, which have now drifted away from the poles and into sunlight, is a mystery.

The researchers suggest it may have been buried by asteroid impacts, but this will require further investigation.
Previous studies have suggested that the Moon may have wobbled around to an even greater extent - perhaps as much as 35 degrees.

The lead author of one of those earlier papers, Ian Garrick-Bethell from the University of California Santa Cruz, wrote in a comment piece for Nature: "A key goal will be to reconcile these many stories of the changing orientation of the Moon, and to determine what density changes drove it to wander."

Source:BBC