Jupiter's active moon Io has a collapsible atmosphere: New views show the satellite's shroud of sulfur dioxide freezing when Io enters its planet's shadow each day and converting back to gas when the moon emerges.

Io, Jupiter's fifth moon, is the solar system's most volcanically active body; plumes of the sulfur dioxide gas bursts from multiple active volcanoes, reaching up to 300 miles (480 kilometers) above the moon's surface at a scalding 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 degrees Celsius). The Jupiter moon's surface, on the other hand, is frigidly cold, and gets even colder when Jupiter blocks out the sun — which prompts the atmospheric collapse. 

"This confirms that Io's atmosphere is in a constant state of collapse and repair, and shows that a large fraction of the atmosphere is supported by sublimation of sulfur dioxide ice [when it turns to gas]," John Spencer, a researcher at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado and co-author on the new work, said in a statement. "Though Io's hyperactive volcanoes are the ultimate source of the sulfur dioxide, sunlight controls the atmospheric pressure on a daily basis by controlling the temperature of the ice on the surface." [Amazing Photos: Jupiter's Volcanic Moon Io]

"We've long suspected this, but can finally watch it happen," Spencer added in the same statement.

The researchers used the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii and the Texas Echelon Cross Echelle Spectrograph (TEXES) to watch Io cross into and out of Jupiter's shadow on two different nights. At the time, Io was more than 420 million miles (675 million km) from Earth. Previous studies were unable to make out Io's atmosphere in the dark, but this new work relied on detecting the atmosphere radiating heat, researchers said in the statement.

In sunlight, Io's surface averages out to minus 235 degrees F (minus 150 degrees C), but once the moon passes into Jupiter's shadow, that temperature drops to minus 270 degrees F (minus168 degrees C). No longer warmed by the sun, the atmosphere of sulfur dioxide gas freezes and turns to frost on the moon's surface.

Io leaves Jupiter's shadow after 1.7 Earth days, which is 2 hours of Io's day, and the sulfur dioxide sublimates — goes straight from solid to gas — and pumps up the atmosphere once again when the moon re-enters sunlight. 

Understanding the volcanic, lava-covered Io is key to understanding the environment around Jupiter, where NASA's Juno spacecraft arrived July 4, researchers said in the statement. "Io spews out gases that eventually fill the Jupiter system, ultimately seeding some of the auroral features seen at Jupiter's poles," said Constantine Tsang, the study's lead author (also at SwRI). "Understanding how these emissions from Io are controlled will help paint a better picture of the Jupiter system."

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article onSpace.com.

Naveen jain first to Land space craft on Moon

https://youtu.be/MOMgjthboTo

Moon Express FAA

https://youtu.be/qDsr6irZD0c

The US Government May Soon Approve The First Private Moon Mission

https://youtu.be/M5Ak0dGT7fY

Moon Express 2017 - A Private Lunar Mission Enabling Science & Commerce - Bob Richards (SETI Talks)

https://youtu.be/m-uRVJOoSlw

For the first time ever, a private company has permission to land on the moon.

The U.S. government has officially approved the planned 2017 robotic lunar landing of Florida-based Moon Express, which aims to fly commercial missions to Earth's nearest neighbor and help exploit its resources, company representatives announced today (Aug. 3).

"This is not only a milestone, but really a threshold for the entire commercial space industry," Moon Express co-founder and CEO Bob Richards told Space.com. [Images: Moon Express' Private Lunar Lander]

Previously, companies had been able to operate only on or around Earth. The new approval, while exclusive to Moon Express, could therefore serve as an important regulatory guide for deep-space commercial activity in general, Richards said.

"Nobody's had a deep-sea voyage yet. We're still charting those waters," he said. "Somebody had to be first."

Moon Express submitted an application to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on April 8. The document then made its way through the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Federal Communications Commission, Richards said.

The interagency approval process "took some time, not because anybody was against or averse to this," he said. "It's just that we asked questions that had never been asked before, and that had to be addressed and worked out."

Moon Express can now focus exclusively on the financial and technical challenges of the 2017 moon mission, which will begin with the launch of the company's MX-1 lander atop a Rocket Lab Electron booster. (Moon Express signed a multilaunch deal with Rocket Lab last year.)

The main goal of the maiden launch is to test out the MX-1's performance and capability on the lunar surface. Moon Express representatives also hope to win the Google Lunar X-Prize, a $30 million competition to land a privately funded robotic vehicle on the moon by the end of 2017.

The first team to pull off this landing — and get the vehicle to move at least 1,640 feet (500 meters) on the lunar surface, and beam high-definition video and photos back to Earth — will win the $20 million grand prize. (The second team to achieve all of this gets $5 million, and another $5 million is available for meeting other milestones. At the moment, 16 teams remain in the running.)

"We're still shooting for the end of 2017," Richards said of the maiden MX-1 moon mission. "A lot has to go right, but at least we have a shot at our moon shot, given this regulatory approval."

If all goes according to plan, future Moon Express missions will help assess, extract and exploit lunar resources such as water ice, helping to launch a new era in space exploration, company representatives have said.

"Space travel is our only path forward to ensure our survival and create a limitless future for our children," Moon Express co-founder and Chairman Naveen Jain said in a statement today. "In the immediate future, we envision bringing precious resources, metals and moon rocks back to Earth. In 15 years, the moon will be an important part of Earth’s economy, and potentially our second home."

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us@Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

"Have a look at that dark purple blob on the left, there."

With those words, scientists aboard the Exploration Vessel Nautilus uncovered a marine mystery: a small purple orb tucked halfway under a rock off the coast of California.

Researchers are so far stumped as to what the colorful, bumpy little ball might be. Their best guess is that it might be a gastropod (a mollusk such as a snail or slug that belongs to the class Gastropoda) called a pleurobranch — and possibly a new species.

"None of the known species of California pleurobranch are purple," said Susan Poulton, a spokeswoman for the E/V Nautilus expeditions. [Gallery: See Images of the Mysterious Purple Orb]

Oddball creature

The odd little creature, which unfurled into two lobes once it was brought onboard the ship, is about 2 inches (5 centimeters) across. It was found on July 18, during an E/V Nautilusexploration of Arguello Canyon, west of the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary.

A live video feed captured by cameras on the remotely operated vehicle Hercules shows the muddy ocean floor 5,301 feet (1,616 meters) down, as watching researchers remark on clams and crabs. Suddenly, the purple blob catches the scientists' attention.

"What isthat?" one asks.

"I'm stumped," says another.

The researchers decided to collect the creature with the ROV's suction, briefly fending off a nearby crab. They've since sent the organism to the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology for analysis. They also took samples for RNA analysis and plan to conduct a DNA analysis as well.

"Confirming it's a new species will take considerable months," Poulton said.

Expedition, live

It's relatively unusual for the E/V Nautilusteam to discover a completely new species, Poulton said, though they have found organisms that they suspect are unknown to science; it just takes time to confirm that fact. More often, she said, the Nautilus researchers find organisms in areas where no one previously knew the animals lived. It may be that the purple orb is a known gastropod that simply had never been seen in California waters before, Poulton said.

The E/V Nautilus is operated by the Ocean Exploration Trust, a nonprofit organization that was founded by oceanographer Robert Ballard. Since May, the vessel has been exploring the eastern Pacific Ocean, starting off Canada's Vancouver Island and working southward. Currently, the vessel is off the coast of Los Angeles investigating the Southern California continental margin. The research team broadcasts its activities athttp://www.nautiluslive.org/ and issues dive alerts on Twitter.

The live video feeds are a boon to the researchers on board, Poulton said, because scientists around the country tune in and often call their colleagues on the ship, asking them to go back to collect interesting specimens.

"We sort of sail with a science team of hundreds," Poulton said.

Original article on Live Science.

Biologists separate life into three phases: development, aging and late life. But a growing body of research now suggests that there is a fourth phase immediately preceding death that scientists have dubbed the "death spiral."

Although most of the "death spiral" research has focused on fruit flies, scientists think these studies can offer valuable insight into the last stage of human life as well.

"We believe this is part of the process of, basically, genetically programmed death," Laurence Mueller, chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine, said in an interview with Live Science. [What Are Your Odds of Dying From …]

Expiring fruit flies

Over the past decade, several studies of fruit flies have suggested this spiral toward death can be seen in the drop in reproductive rate (fecundity), according to a review of this research by Mueller and his colleagues, published earlier this year in the journal Biogerontology. For instance, researchers reporting in 2015 in The Journals of Gerontologyfound that the first day a female fly laid zero eggs was a significant predictor of death: Indicators of fecundity started to decline about 10 days before young female fruit flies laid zero eggs. The researchers think that whatever leads to the flies' deaths also affects their ability to reproduce in their final days.

In the new review, Mueller said that the timing of this decline matchesanother previous estimate of the death spiral's duration. Relative to the average life span of a fruit fly, 10 days could be as much as a third of a fly's life, Mueller said. Research from 2002 on Mediterranean fruit flies, called medflies, found that 97 percent of males began lying upside down about 16 days prior to death. In relative terms, this potential indicator of a death spiral is also approximately equal to the timing of the fecundity decline in the fruit flies. [The Science of Death: 10 Tales from the Crypt & Beyond]

In another study, scientists observed fruit flies, nematodes and zebrafish, to see if their intestines exhibited increased leakiness before death. The researchers tested this leakiness, called permeability, by feeding food dye to each animal. If permeability increased, that dye would leak out into the animal's body, and its body would change color — blue in the flies and fish, and fluorescent green in the nematodes. The research, published online March 22 in the journal Scientific Reports, concluded that this intestinal leakiness was a marker of death in all three species.

A human death spiral?

The hope is that death-spiral research in fruit flies and other organisms could someday tell scientists more about the decline of humans prior to death. [8 Tips for Healthy Aging]

In their review paper, Mueller and his colleagues cited a study from 2008 published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesas evidence that people may experience the death spiral as well. In that study, researchers analyzed data collected on the physical and cognitive abilities of 2,262 Danish people, ages 92 to 100, from 1998 to 2005. They found that the physical and cognitive scores of individuals who died within the first two years of the study were significantly lower than the scores of those who were still alive in 2005. The assessments included measures of grip strength, ability to complete daily activities (such as using the toilet and eating) and exams that helped evaluate cognitive impairment.

Basically, Mueller said, a death spiral in people could be the reason we often see a distinct increase in disability just before a person dies. Humans are challenging study subjects for both ethical and biological reasons, but looking at the death spiral in other organisms could give scientists a window into how this works in humans, the researchers said.

According to Mueller, the next step in this research might be to selectively breed the flies to create groups that experience death spirals of different durations.

"Once you create populations that are genetically different in that way, you can ask, 'What genes were changed in order to reduce the length of the death spiral?'" Mueller said. Using that knowledge, researchers could look at the human genome for similar genetic markers; humans are genetically similar to fruit flies, Mueller noted. According toyourgenome.com, a website of the Wellcome Genome Campus, 75 percent of disease-causing genes in humans are also present in fruit flies.

Mueller said the research isn't about stopping or even delaying death. Rather, he sees it as a way to improve people's quality of life when they are reaching the end and potentially save immense amounts of money in end-of-life health care.

"Even if we don't affect when you die, we'd like to make you fully functional up to the day you die," he said.

Original article on Live Science.

Someday, moviegoers may be able to watch 3D films from any seat in a theater without having to wear 3D glasses, thanks to a new kind of movie screen.

The new technology, named Cinema 3D, overcomes some of the barriers to implementingglasses-free 3D viewing on a larger scale, but it's not commercially viable yet, the researchers said when describing their findings.

Although 3D movies can offer unique perspectives and experiences, one major drawback is the cumbersome eyewear that moviegoers typically have to wear. Although glasses-free 3D strategies already exist, these technologies currently cannot be scaled up to movie theaters. [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

For example, glasses-free 3D methods for TV sets often use a series of slits known as a parallax barrier that is placed in front of the screen. These slits allow each eye to see a different set of pixels, creating the illusion of depth.

However, for parallax barriers to work, they must be placed at a set distance from viewers. This makes parallax barriers difficult to implement in larger spaces such as theaters, where people can sit at a variety of distances and angles from the screen.

In addition, glasses-free 3D displays have to account for the different positions from which people are watching. This means that they have to divide up the limited number of pixels they project so that each viewer sees an image from wherever he or she is located, the researchers said.

"Existing approaches to glasses-free 3D require screens whose resolution requirements are so enormous that they are completely impractical," study co-author Wojciech Matusik, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, said in a statement.

But in the new method, the researchers used a series of mirrors and lenses to essentially give viewers a parallax barrier tailored to each of their positions.

"By careful design of optical elements, we can achieve very-good-quality 3D content without using glasses," study co-author Piotr Didyk, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Saarland University, both in Germany, told Live Science.

"This is the first technical approach that allows for glasses-free 3D on a large scale," Matusik said in a statement.

In addition, the scientists reasoned that instead of displaying images to every position in a theater, they would need to display images only to a relatively tiny set of viewing positions at each theater seat.

"In our solution, we exploit the layout of the audience in a cinema," Didyk said.

The scientists developed a simple Cinema 3D prototype that could support a 200-pixel image. In experiments, volunteers could see 3D versions of pixelated figures from a number of different seats in a small theater.

The scientists cautioned that Cinema 3D is currently impractical to implement commercially. For instance, their prototype requires 50 sets ofmirrors and lenses, but the screen is just barely larger than a pad of paper. The researchers hope to build a larger version of their display and further boost the image resolution.

"It remains to be seen whether the approach is financially feasible enough to scale up to a full-blown theater," Matusik said in a statement. "But we are optimistic that this is an important next step in developing glasses-free 3D for large spaces like movie theaters and auditoriums."

The scientists detailed their findings July 26 at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Anaheim, California.

Original article on Live Science.