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Wednesday, December 7, 2011

ScienceDaily: Top Technology News

ScienceDaily: Top Technology News

Solar storms could sandblast the moon

Posted: 06 Dec 2011 09:08 PM PST

Solar storms and associated Coronal Mass Ejections can significantly erode the lunar surface according to a new set of computer simulations by NASA scientists. In addition to removing a surprisingly large amount of material from the lunar surface, this could be a major method of atmospheric loss for planets like Mars that are unprotected by a global magnetic field.

New NASA Dawn visuals show Vesta's 'color palette'

Posted: 06 Dec 2011 05:27 AM PST

Vesta appears in a splendid rainbow-colored palette in new images obtained by NASA's Dawn spacecraft. The colors, assigned by scientists to show different rock or mineral types, reveal Vesta to be a world of many varied, well-separated layers and ingredients. Vesta is unique among asteroids visited by spacecraft to date in having such wide variation, supporting the notion that it is transitional between the terrestrial planets -- like Earth, Mercury, Mars and Venus -- and its asteroid siblings.

New all-sky map shows the magnetic fields of the Milky Way with the highest precision

Posted: 06 Dec 2011 05:25 AM PST

With a unique new all-sky map, scientists have made significant progress toward measuring the magnetic field structure of the Milky Way in unprecedented detail. Specifically, the map is of a quantity known as Faraday depth, which among other things, depends strongly on the magnetic fields along a particular line of sight. To produce the map, data were combined from more than 41,000 individual measurements using a novel image reconstruction technique. The new map not only reveals the structure of the galactic magnetic field on large scales, but also small-scale features that provide information about turbulence in the galactic gas.
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