This grainy picture was taken on October 24, 1946, almost 14 months after the end of World War II and almost 11 years before the Sputnik launch. It was taken by American military engineers and scientists, using a Nazi rocket launched from the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico.
Yes, a Nazi rocket—the V-2.
At the time there was no NASA, and human space exploration wasn't a mainstream idea. The only people who were really thinking about spaceships at the time were the Nazis of a few years earlier and their spitzenreiter mad rocket science, a man by the name of Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun.
Von Braun dreamed about spaceships and wanted to build rockets at all cost, so he became a member of the Allgemeine SS and the Nazi Party. It was then that Hitler gave him the money, material and slave labor to built the V-2, the rocket bomb that terrorized London at the end of the WWII, morals be damned.
But by 1946, von Braun had become an American rocket scientist. And the Americans had a bunch of V-2s, having seized the ones that weren't launched or were under construction when the Allies captured their launch and factory sites at the end of the war. They were imported to the United States, along with Von Braun.
Von Braun and the Americans kept working on these and other missile designs while launching the existing V-2s into space for testing. One of the engineers, Clyde Holliday, had developed a 35mm camera that took a photo every second and a half. None of the other scientists and engineers cared much about photography. They only wanted information about cosmic rays and aerodynamic performance.
Holiday understood even then that images were going to be the most powerful application of space rockets. He was right. Not only did space photography become instrumental in our understanding of Earth, its surface and its weather systems—hello frankenstorm Sandy—but it did something even more important: make humanity realize where, and how small, we are.
In 1950, National Geographic showed these photos to the world for the first time, and Holliday wrote that this is "how our Earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a space ship."
I'm sure that everyone who saw them instantly had the impulse to jump in a rocket and go see it themselves first-hand. I know I still do.
Glass beads within moon rocks suggest that water seen on the lunar surface originates from the solar wind, researchers say.
These findings suggest that other airless bodies in the solar system may also possess water on their surfaces, investigators added.
Arguments raged for years as to whether the moon harbored frozen water or not. Recent findings confirmed that water does wet the moon, although its surface remains drier than any desert on Earth.
"With the cost of $25,000 for taking one pint of water to the moon, it is essential that we develop processes of producing water from the materials on the moon," said the study's lead author, Yang Liu, at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. "This is paramount to human settlement of the moon in the near future." [Gallery: Our Changing Moon]
"This water would be of most value as rocket fuel — liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen," Liu added. "Until the recent discovery of water in and on the moon, this was going to be a very energy-intensive endeavor to separate these elements from the lunar rocks and soil. Now we have ready sources of water that can be consumed by plants and humans, but also broken up into its constituent elements — oxygen and hydrogen. Thus, we could use the moon as a jump-board for missions to Mars and beyond."
It remained uncertain where all of this water might come from, although some apparently came from ice-rich comets. To find out more, scientists analyzed lunar surface dust, or regolith, that astronauts on the Apollo missions brought from the moon.Most samples actually come from an Apollo 11 soil collected by Neil Armstrong," Liu told SPACE.com.
Lunar regolith is created by meteoroids and charged particles constantly bombarding lunar rock. The researchers focused on grains of glass in the samples that were created in the heat of countless micrometeoroid impacts on the moon. They reasoned this glass might have captured any water in the regolith before it cooled and solidified.
The investigators found that a large percentage of this glass contained traces of wetness — between 200 and 300 parts per million of water and the molecule hydroxyl, which is much like water, save that each of its molecules possesses just one hydrogen atom, not two.
To figure out where this water and hydroxyl originated from, the scientists looked at their hydrogen components. Hydrogen atoms come in a variety of isotopes, each with a different number of neutrons in their nuclei — regular hydrogen has no neutrons, while the isotope known as deuterium has one in each atomic nucleus.
The sun is naturally low in deuterium because its nuclear activity rapidly consumes the isotope. All other objects in the solar system possess relatively high levels of it, remnants of deuterium that existed in the nebula of gas and dust that gave birth to the solar system.
The researchers found that the water and hydroxyl seen in the lunar glass were both low in deuterium. This suggests their hydrogen came from the sun, probably blasted onto the moon via winds of charged particles from the sun, which continuously streams from the sun at a rate of 2.2 billion pounds (1 billion kilograms) per second. The moon, lacking a significant atmosphere or magnetic field, slowly captures all the particles striking it. The hydrogen particles then bonded with oxygen bound in rocks on the lunar surface.
"The origin of surface water on the moon was unclear," Liu said. "We provide robust evidence for a solar wind origin. This finding emphasizes the potential in finding such water on the surface of other similar airless bodies, such as Eros, Deimos, Vesta."
A highly-elliptical crater chain on Mars was likely formed as an impacting space rock came down nearly parallel to the surface.
This image covers an impact crater on the northeast rim of Hellas basin, with excellent exposures of bedrock layers.
Here we see a portion of the steep inner slope where some of the bedrock has broken into angular pieces and slide partway down the slope.
Here we see a portion of the steep inner slope where some of the bedrock has broken into angular pieces and slide partway down the slope.
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