Related papers: Echoes from the Moon
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft has been in orbit around Mars since March 2006. The Context Camera (CTX) on MRO has returned over 100,000 images of the planet at approximately 5-6 meters per pixel, providing nearly global…
The Earth slowly decelerates in its rotation due to the energy dissipation caused by the interaction to the Moon. This leads to the continuous increasing of the length of the mean solar day (aka, length-of-day, or, LOD) relatively to 86400…
The applicability of the linear theory of elasticity to the Moon has been studied. As a criterion was taken the smallness of the strain tensor. The elastic moduli are obtained from the data of the project "Apollo". The pressure was…
When the Moon was formed it was much closer to the Earth than it is today. It just needed about 20 days then to go around the Earth. Now it takes the Moon 29.5 days to make one revolution. In order to follow the conservation of angular…
With the rapid developments in the exoplanet field, more and more terrestrial exoplanets are being detected. Characterising their atmospheres using transit observations will become a key datum in the quest for detecting an Earth-like…
We present early results from a project to measure the sky-averaged (global), redshifted $21\,$cm signal from the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR), using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope. Because interferometers are not sensitive to…
An important goal within the quest for detecting an Earth-like extrasolar planet, will be to identify atmospheric gaseous bio-signatures. Observations of the light transmitted through the Earth's atmosphere, as for an extrasolar planet,…
We report a limit on the ultra-high-energy neutrino flux based on a non-detection of radio pulses from neutrino-initiated particle cascades in the Moon, in observations with the Parkes radio telescope undertaken as part of the LUNASKA…
The intense activity of cratering on the Moon and in the inner regions of the solar system was accomplished during the first 10^9 years [1]. Occasionally, some impact events occur even nowadays. In Section 1, we treat, from a historical…
Satellite formation is a natural by-product of planet formation. With the discovery of nu- merous extrasolar planets, it is likely that moons of extrasolar planets (exomoons) will soon be discovered. Some of the most promising techniques…
The importance of highly siderophile elements (HSEs) to track planetary late accretion has long been recognized. However, the precise nature of the Moon's accretional history remains enigmatic. There exists a significant mismatch of HSE…
Laser ranging measurements during the total lunar eclipse on 2010 December 21 verify previously suspected thermal lensing in the retroreflectors left on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts. Signal levels during the eclipse far…
Due to ionosphere absorption and the interference by natural and artificial radio emissions, astronomical observation from the ground becomes very difficult at the wavelengths of decametre or longer, which we shall refer as the ultralong…
Occultation light curves of exomoons may give information on their albedo and hence indicate the presence of ice cover on the surface. Icy moons might have subsurface oceans thus these may potentially be habitable. The objective of our…
Earth-based observations are complicated by the opacity of Earth's ionosphere at very low frequencies and strong man-made radio frequency interference. This explains long standing interest in building a low frequency radio telescope on the…
The lunar sodium tail extends long distances due to radiation pressure on sodium atoms in the lunar exosphere. Our earlier observations measured the average radial velocity of sodium atoms moving down the lunar tail beyond Earth (i.e., near…
We discuss the problem of how to calculate the distance between two cosmological objects given their redshifts and angular separation on the sky. Although of a fundamental nature, this problem and its solution seem to lack a detailed…
Detecting primordial fluctuations from the cosmic dark ages requires extremely large low-frequency radio telescope arrays deployed on the far side of the Moon. The antenna of such an array must be lightweight, easily storable and…
Analysis of the radio-metric tracking data from the Pioneer 10/11 spacecraft at distances between 20--70 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun has consistently indicated the presence of an anomalous, small, constant Doppler frequency drift.…
The Red Planet has fascinated humans for millennia, especially for the last few centuries, and particularly during the Space Age. The nagging suspicion of extant Martian life is both fed by, and drives the many space missions to Mars and…