Editorial

Security

Politics

World

Letters

Sports

Obituaries

Archives

What moondust smells like...

Would you like to sniff moondust? Yes..you got it correct 'moondust'. Every Apollo astronaut did it. They couldn't keep their noses to the lunar surface, but, after every moonwalk (or "EVA"), they would tramp the stuff back inside the lander.

Moondust was incredibly clingy, sticking to boots, gloves and other exposed surfaces. No matter how hard they tried to brush their suits before re-entering the cabin, some dust (and sometimes a lot of dust) made its way inside. Once their helmets and gloves were off, the astronauts could feel, smell and even taste the moon!

The experience gave Apollo 17 astronaut Jack Schmitt history's first recorded case of extraterrestrial hay fever. Astronauts say that the moondust has a strong smell. They say that it smells like burnt gun powder.

What is moondust made of? Almost half is silicon dioxide glass created by meteoroits hitting the moon. These impacts, which have been going on for billions of years, fuse top soil into glass, and shatter the same into tiny pieces. Moondust is also rich in iron, calcium and magnesium, bound up in minerals such as olivine and pyroxene. It's nothing like gunpowder.

So why the smell? No one knows. International Space Station (ISS) astronaut Don Pettit, who has never been to the moon, but has an interest in the various smells of space, offers one possibility:

"Picture yourself in a desert on Earth," he says. "What do you smell? Nothing, until it rains. The air is suddenly filled with sweet, peaty odours." Water evaporating from the ground carries molecules to your nose, that have been trapped in dry soil for months.

Maybe something similar happens on the moon. "The moon is like a four-billion-year-old desert," he says. "It's incredibly dry. When moondust comes in contact with moist air in a lunar module, you get the 'desert rain' effect-and some lovely odours."

Inhale some moondust and what happens? The dangling bonds seek partners in the membranes of your nose. You get congested. You report strange odours. Later, when all the bonds are partnered-up, these sensations fade.Were the Apollo crews imagining things? Moondust on Earth has been "pacified."

All of the samples brought back by Apollo astronauts have been in contact with moist, oxygen-rich air. Any smelly chemical reactions (or evaporations) ended long ago.This wasn't supposed to happen. Astronauts took special "thermos" containers to the moon to hold the samples in vacuum. But the jagged edges of the dust unexpectedly cut the seals of the containers, allowing oxygen and water vapour to sneak in, during the three-day trip back to Earth. No one can say how much the dust was altered by that exposure.

NASA plans to send people back to the moon in 2018, and they'll stay much longer than Apollo astronauts did. The next generation will have more time and better tools to tackle the mystery. We've only just begun to smell the moondust.

- NASA.

New technique reveals Earth-like planet

The astronomers recently reported that a new planet-hunting technique has detected the most Earth-like planet yet, around a star other than our Sun. There is no doubt that the findings will raise hopes of discovering a space rock that might support life.

The team had more importantly, demonstrated the power of a new technique that is sensitive to detecting habitable planets. In the last decade, astronomers have detected more than 160 planets orbiting stars, outside our solar system.

The vast majority of these have been gas giant planets like Jupiter, which are hostile to life as it is known on Earth.But the international team has finally detected a cold planet about 5-1/2 times more massive than Earth still small enough to be considered Earth-like orbiting a star about 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius (the Archer), close to the centre of the Milky Way.

Reuters reported that to find this new planet named OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb the team used a technique called gravitational microlensing. This method uses a network of telescopes to watch for changes in light, coming from distant stars. If another star passes between a distant star and a telescope on Earth, the gravity of the intervening star acts like a lens and magnifies the incoming light.

When a planet is circling the closer star, the planet's gravity can add its own signature to the light, the scientists said, in research being published in the current edition of the journal Nature. This kind of light signature was observed on July 11, 2005, by a number of telescopes in a project known as OGLE, short for Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, which sees more than 500 microlensing events each year.

The OGLE observation alerted the planet-hunting telescopes of PLANET (Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork) and Robonet, which made further observations, and on August 10, detected the presence of a previously unknown planet.

The microlensing technique may hold promise for detecting more planets like our Earth, in the future.

Job Opportunity - Jarir Marketing Co.

| News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security | Politics |
| World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries | Magazine | Junior Observer |

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.