The Science Corner

A high-resolution camera aboard NASA's latest spacecraft to reach Mars sent back its first view of the Red Planet from orbit, the space agency said Friday. The crisp test image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was taken late Thursday at an altitude of 1,547 miles and shows a 30.9-mile-by-11.7-mile area of the planet's mid-latitude southern highlands. The mosaic of 10 side-by-side exposures shows a cratered surface with ravine- or canyon-like channels on both sides.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said the smallest discernible objects are about 25 feet across, but that the camera will be able to capture images of objects less than three feet across once it reaches its much lower "mapping orbit." The quality bodes well for future pictures, said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, principal investigator for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera.

Scientists have identified a new dinosaur species that had one of the longest necks relative to body length ever measured. A typical neck bone in this creature was about the size of two loaves of bread.

The species, Erketu ellisoni, belongs to the group of massive four-legged herbivorous dinosaurs called Sauropoda, the largest land animals ever to walk on Earth. This giant group also includes Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, and the largest of them all, the 120-foot long Argentinasaurus.

E. ellisoni had an extremely elongated neck. A single neck vertebra measures nearly two feet long, longer than the same vertebrae of the much larger Diplodocus carnegii.

"If you compare the index of elongation — how long vertebrae are compared to how long or tall the dinosaur is — to Diplodocus carnegii, [E. ellisoni's] vertebrae are longer, but even more stretched out from front to back," said study co-author Dan Ksepka, a graduate student at Columbia University who studies at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Based on the specimen's partial remains, researchers estimate the neck was more than 24 feet long all together. However, estimates of body size, based on limb bones and not including tail, indicate the body was probably about half as long as the neck. This gives E. ellisoni one of the longest necks relative to body size of all sauropods.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter passed the biggest test of its life by safely entering orbit around the Red Planet, joining a constellation of circling spacecraft. But other challenges lie ahead.
Next month, the two-ton orbiter will begin another critical phase in its $720 million mission. It will spend seven months dipping into Mars' upper atmosphere to shrink its current elliptical orbit to a circular one, which will take it as close as 200 miles above the surface.
The purpose is to get as close to Mars as possible to beam back detailed images.
"We got the capabilities that will knock your socks off," said project scientist Richard Zurek.
The Reconnaissance Orbiter joins NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey and the European Space Agency's Mars Express, which already fly around the planet. On the surface, the NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity continue rolling across the planet.
Unlike previous Mars missions, the Reconnaissance Orbiter is the most powerful spacecraft ever to arrive at Mars and is expected to send back more data about the Red Planet than ever before.
After adjusting its orbit, the spacecraft will begin its two-year examination of the planet in low orbit in the fall. It is expected to monitor the Martian climate and atmosphere, search for signs of ancient water on the surface and locate possible future landing sites to send the next generation of robotic rovers and possibly human explorers.
After that, it should serve as a communication relay between Earth and Mars until its primary mission ends in 2010.
Project manager Jim Graf predicted that the scientific results of the mission will be extensive.

"It will rewrite the science textbooks on Mars," Graf said.
Launched from Florida last August, the Reconnaissance Orbiter traveled 310 million miles over seven months for the risky orbit rendezvous.
It successfully circled Mars on Friday after a white-knuckle encounter in which it fired its main engines and briefly lost contact with mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena after flying behind the planet. Engineers applauded when the orbiter came back into view and signaled that it was in position.
Project managers had been nervous about the orbiter's insertion maneuver because of Mars' reputation of producing missing-in-action space probes. In the past 15 years, two of the four orbiters that NASA flew to Mars failed before or during orbit insertion.
But the Reconnaissance Orbiter did not suffer the same fate. "It happened right on the money," said Dan McCleese, chief scientist for the Mars program at JPL.
Later this month, engineers will send commands to the orbiter to begin the aerobraking process, in which the spacecraft will perform a series of dips into the upper atmosphere, using friction to brake and lower its altitude. Engineers estimate it will take more than 500 maneuvers to slip into a favorable orbit to collect data.
The newest orbiter is equipped with the most high-tech science instruments ever flown to another planet including a telescopic camera to photograph the surface in unprecedented detail and radar to probe underground for ice and possible evidence of liquid water.
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On the Net:
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro

Scientists have produced superheated gas exceeding temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin, or 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit.
This is hotter than the interior of our sun, which is about 15 million degrees Kelvin, and also hotter than any previous temperature ever achieved on Earth, they say.
They don't know how they did it.

The feat was accomplished in the Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories.
"At first, we were disbelieving," said project leader Chris Deeney. "We repeated the experiment many times to make sure we had a true result."
Thermonuclear explosions are estimated to reach only tens to hundreds of millions of degrees Kelvin; other nuclear fusion experiments have achieved temperatures of about 500 million degrees Kelvin, said a spokesperson at the lab.
The achievement was detailed in the Feb. 24 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
The Z machine is the largest X-ray generator in the world. It’s designed to test materials under extreme temperatures and pressures. It works by releasing 20 million amps of electricity into a vertical array of very fine tungsten wires. The wires dissolve into a cloud of charged particles, a superheated gas called plasma.
A very strong magnetic field compresses the plasma into the thickness of a pencil lead. This causes the plasma to release energy in the form of X-rays, but the X-rays are usually only several million degrees.
Sandia researchers still aren’t sure how the machine achieved the new record. Part of it is probably due to the replacement of the tungsten steel wires with slightly thicker steel wires, which allow the plasma ions to travel faster and thus achieve higher temperatures.
One thing that puzzles scientists is that the high temperature was achieved after the plasma’s ions should have been losing energy and cooling. Also, when the high temperature was achieved, the Z machine was releasing more energy than was originally put in, something that usually occurs only in nuclear reactions.
Sandia consultant Malcolm Haines theorizes that some unknown energy source is involved, which is providing the machine with an extra jolt of energy just as the plasma ions are beginning to slow down.
Sandia National Laboratories is located by Albuquerque New Mexico and is part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

A team of American-led divers has discovered a new crustacean in the South Pacific that resembles a lobster and is covered with what looks like silky, blond fur, French researchers said Tuesday. Scientists said the animal, which they named Kiwa hirsuta, was so distinct from other species that they created a new family and genus for it. The divers found the animal in waters 7,540 feet deep at a site 900 miles south of Easter Island last year, according to Michel Segonzac of the French Institure for Sea Exploration.

The new crustacean is described in the journal of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. The animal is white and just shy of 6 inches long — about the size of a salad plate. In what Segonzac described as a "surprising characteristic," the animal's pincers are covered with sinuous, hair-like strands. It is also blind. The researchers found it had only "the vestige of a membrane" in place of eyes, Segonzac said.

The researchers said that while legions of new ocean species are discovered each year, it is quite rare to find one that merits a new family. The family was named Kiwaida, from Kiwa, the goddess of crustaceans in Polynesian mythology. The diving expedition was organized by Robert Vrijenhoek of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California.

Scientists in energy-poor Japan said Friday they have found a new source of gasoline - cattle dung.

Sakae Shibusawa, an agriculture engineering professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, said his team has successfully extracted 1.4 milliliters (0.042 ounces) of gasoline from every 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of cow dung by applying high pressure and heat.
"The new technology will be a boon for livestock breeders" to reduce the burden of disposing of large amounts of waste, Shibusawa said. About 500,000 metric tons (551,155 U.S. tons) of cattle dung are produced each year in Japan, he said
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Gasoline extracted from cow dung is unheard of, said Tomiaki Tamura, an official of the Natural Resources and Energy Agency. Japan relies almost totally on imports for its oil and gasoline needs. The team, helped by staff from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology near Tokyo, produced gasoline by adding several unspecified metal catalysts to the dung inside a container and applying a 30-atmosphere pressure and heat of up to 300 degrees Celsius (572 Fahrenheit), Shibusawa said. Details of the catalysts could not be disclosed, he added.

The team hopes to improve the technology so that it can be used commercially within five years, Shibusawa said.

In a separate experiment revealing another unusual business potential for cow dung, another group of researchers has successfully extracted an aromatic ingredient of vanilla from cattle dung, said Miki Tsuruta, a Sekisui Chemical Co. spokeswoman. The extracted ingredient, vanillin, can be used as fragrance in shampoo and candles, she said.
Tsuruta said the vanillin was extracted from a dung solution in a pressurized cooker in a project co-organized by a Japanese medical research institute.