Armchair Science: Bag and Tag Glowing Galactic Clouds

A new galactic game launching today lets citizen scientists identify the glowing clouds where future stars will be born. The online experience, called Clouds, is a new addition to the Milky Way Project, where everyone can help astronomers sort and measure our galaxy. Clouds features images and data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important participation from NASA.

In the rapid-fire game, players gauge whether a targeted section of a presented image is a cloud, a “hole” — an empty region of space — or something in between. The cataloging of these snapshots of the local cosmos will help astronomers learn more about the architecture and character of our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

The organizers of Clouds encourage astronomy enthusiasts to start playing now, because with enough participation, important insights into the Milky Way could come as soon as early next year.

NASA’s GRAIL Lunar Impact Site Named for Astronaut Sally Ride

NASA has named the site where twin agency spacecraft impacted the moon Monday in honor of the late astronaut Sally K. Ride, who was America’s first woman in space and a member of the probes’ mission team.

Last Friday, Ebb and Flow, the two spacecraft comprising NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, were commanded to descend into a lower orbit that would result in an impact Monday on a mountain near the moon’s north pole. The formation-flying duo hit the lunar surface as planned at 2:28:51 p.m. PST (5:28:51 p.m. EST) and 2:29:21 p.m. PST (5:29:21 p.m. EST) at a speed of 3,760 mph (1.7 kilometers per second). The location of the Sally K. Ride Impact Site is on the southern face of an approximately 1.5-mile-tall (2.5-kilometer) mountain near a crater named Goldschmidt.

“Sally was all about getting the job done, whether it be in exploring space, inspiring the next generation, or helping make the GRAIL mission the resounding success it is today,” said GRAIL principal investigator Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “As we complete our lunar mission, we are proud we can honor Sally Ride’s contributions by naming this corner of the moon after her.”

Researchers with the DOE’s Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory (Berkley Lab) and the University of California, Berkley, have developed an elegant and powerful new microscale actuator that can flex like a tiny beckoning finger. Based on an oxide material that expands and contracts dramatically in response to a small temperature variation, the actuators are smaller than the width of a human hair and are promising for microfluids, drug delivery, and artificial muscles.

“We believe our microactuator is more efficient and powerful than any current microscale actuation technology, including human muscle cells,” says Berkley Lab and USC Berkley scientist Junqiao Wu. “What’s more, it uses this very interesting material - vanadium oxide - and tells us more about the fundamental materials science of phase transitions.”

Wu is corresponding author of a paper appearing in Nano Letters this month that reports these findings, titled “Giant-Amplitude, High-Work Destiny Microactuators with Phase Transition activated Nanolayer Bimorphs.” As often happens in science, Wu and his colleagues arrived at the microactuator idea by accident, while studying a different problem.

A multi-spectrum view of our galaxy.