Scientists are appealing to space fans to help identify features on the Moon – and even to discover the wreckage of long-lost spacecraft. A new web project called Moon Zoo asks them to check out photos of the lunar surface as detailed as the views enjoyed by Apollo astronauts.

They can then contribute to a count of craters across as much of the Moon as possible to help reveal how the Moon has changed over billions of years.

The images, picked from the many thousands taken by three cameras aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter since it arrived around the Moon last year. These showed the lunar landscape in remarkable detail, including features as small as 50cm (a foot and a half) across.

Volunteers taking part use a computer-game type interface to pick out the larger craters in any one image and mark their size and anything unusual about them, such a boulders around the rim which can indicate the depth of the lunar soil, or regolith.

They will also pick out other odd features including evidence of recent impacts and even debris from probes that crashed in the early years of the space age.

Scientists from several UK universities and the USA are helping run Moon Zoo which is the latest “citizen science” challenge set up as part of the Zooniverse project led by Oxford scientist and co-presenter of the BBC’s The Sky at Night Chris Lintott.

The first, called Galaxy Zoo, which got the public to categorise thousands of previously unseen galaxies, was a remarkable success and even led to the discovery of new types of these collections of stars such as “green peas” and “red spirals”.

Since then the project has expanded to use people power to monitor the Sun for dangerous eruptions, to search for exploding stars called supernovae, and to analyse how some galaxies merge together.

Dr Lintott said yesterday: “It’s strange to think that there are new things to discover about the Moon after all this time, but NASA’s new probe LRO is sending back the most detailed pictures ever.

“The view is as good as that the Apollo astronauts had – and that means that there just aren’t enough scientists to take a close look. We hope to create a catalogue of craters, and have some surprises too.

“We hope to find several lost spacecraft, like some of the Russian Luna probes that must be there somewhere. Who knows what there is to be found up there?”

Unlike on Earth, which is contantly eroded by weathering, craters on the lunar surface stay almost until eternity. That means that counting the number of craters on a particular part of the surface tells scientists how old it is. The scientists believe Moon Zoo will reveal the finer details of the Moon’s history.

Picture: Some images of craters on the Moon from Lunar Reconnaissance  Orbiter. (Photo: NASA).

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Children are being given the chance to name their own minor planet in a competition to mark the 80th anniversary of the discovery of Pluto. Space scientists’ ruling body the International Astronomical Union has promised to consider the winning entries for real worlds now being discovered.

Pluto became the ninth planet when it was spotted in 1930. It was named after the god of the underworld by an 11-year-old English girl, Venetia Burney, after her grandfather read of its discovery in The Times.

Venetia died last year, aged 90, after seeing her distant world demoted to the status of a dwarf planet by the IAU in 2006 as other similar bodies to Pluto began to be discovered at the edge of the solar system.

The new competition called Naming X is being launched today, on the anniversary of Venetia’s death, to find names for the new second division of planets being discovered out in Pluto’s neighbourhood.

The global contest, launched by Space Renaissance Education Chapter, in collaboration with Father Films, is being promoted in the UK by Ginita Jimenez who made a short film, Naming Pluto, about how Venetia got to see “her” planet at last in the last years of her life.

Ginita said: “The idea is very simple, we’re asking children what name they’d give a minor planet and why. All submissions can only be made by email and our world class judging panel will select the winning names which will be presented to the official body responsible for giving minor planets names.”

Judges will be Canadian comet discoverer David Levy, Jodrell Bank astronomer Professor Ian Morison and NASA space scientist Marc Buie whose New Horizons probe is currently on its way to Pluto.

Winning names will be presented to the IAU’s Committee for Small Body Nomenclature (CSBN), the body responsible for the naming of minor planets and comets, which is supporting the contest. Individuals and school groups can enter and full details are available here.

Picture: An artist’s impression of a dwarf planet.

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Scientists believe they may have found fresh evidence of life on Mars in a meteorite that crashed to Earth. Microscopic strands were revealed inside the space rock, labelled NWA 998, when it was examined at the University of Toronto, Canada.

The slice examined was from inside the meteorite, lessening the chance that the mysterious filaments could be due to geological contamination.

Experts say this means they could be produced by microbes that lived on Mars millions of years ago before the stone was blasted out of the martian surface by an asteroid impact.

It fell to Earth after aeons circling the Sun and was found lying in the Sahara Desert by nomadic tribesmen who sold it on to American meteorite hunters.

A member of the university team said: “If our x-ray microprobe analysis shows the strong presence of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and other atoms commonly found in organic compounds that have a biological origin but are nearly absent in the material around the filament-like structures, then our case that these are indeed Martians would be strengthened.”

Last year, a NASA team claimed they had photographed Martian organisms inside another meteorite that is kept in London’s Natural History Museum.

Their electron microscope showed a bumpy surface resembling a fossilised colony of microbacteria – a simple form of martian life. That meteorite was part of a shower that fell from the sky in Nakhla, Egypt, in 1911, killing a dog.

The team from NASA’s Johnson Space Centre examined the space rock to support their claims in 2006 that Martian bugs had been found in a meteorite, ALH84001, found in Antarctica.

Picture: The ALH84001 meteorite being examined in the laboratory. Credit: NASA.

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European astronomers have named a site where they will build the world’s biggest telescope – and the one with possibly the dullest name. The best officials could come up with for their powerful new eye on the sky in Chile is the European Extremely Large Telescope, or E-ELT.

It follows their last major project – four instruments working together to which they gave the unimaginative monicker the Very Large Telescope.

And it will be built instead of an even bigger instrument that they planned to dub the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope. At least that had a rather nice nocturnal acronym – OWL.

Yesterday astronomers announced that the mighty new £875 million telescope, with a light-collecting mirror 42 metres (138ft ) wide, will be built on a mountain peak called Cerro Armazones in Chile’s Atacama Desert. It is due to be completed by 2018.

The Extremely Large Telescope will revolutionise our understanding of the universe by looking back in time towards the Big Bang. It will detect supermassive black holes and may spot Earth-like planets around other stars that could be home to alien life.

Yet its name seems to have been dreamed up by a committee that is typical of European bureaucracy, made up of reps from the UK, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Previous giant UK telescopes have been named after inspirational scientists including William Herschel, who first spotted Uranus, and Isaac Newton. NASA named their most famous space telescope after Edwin Hubble who recognise there were other galaxies beyond our Milky Way.

The new E-ELT, which will observe in visual and infrared light, will be part of the European Southern Observatory, whose desert HQ in the driest part of the Earth was considered exciting enough for Bond movie Quantum of Solace to be filmed there. It has not rained for 2,000 years.

E-ELT will begin operating in 2018 only 20km (12.5 miles) from other telescopes run by ESO. Chile was picked again over a rival bid from Spain to host the new observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands.

Many Jupiter-sized exoplanets have already been found by ESo from Chile. One may even have been photographed by the VLT. Other major discoveries have included pinpointing the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy.

ESO’s press officer himself rejoices under the splendidly appropriate name of Henri Boffin. I asked Henri why the names Europe gives its telescopes are so unimaginative. He told me: “I am afraid I do not have an easy answer to your pertinent question. My hope is that the E-ELT will get a nice name some day.”

Picture: The superb skies over the peak picked for E-ELT are photographed during site-testing. Credit: ESO.

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Astronomers have taken a striking new photo with the Hubble space telescope to mark the instrument’s 20th anniversary. They turned the powerful eye in the sky on to a cloud of gas and dust where new stars are being born.

But the startling result, which they dubbed the Mystic Mountain, looks like something dreamed up for a Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings movie. The totally alien starscape is certain to become as iconic an image as Hubble’s previous most famous image – the finger-like Pillars of Creation (below).

Hubble’s new space snapshot, taken by a team from NASA and the European Space Agency, highlights a small part of one of the largest observable regions of starbirth in our galaxy – 7,500 light-years away.

Previously known to amateur astronomers as the Eta Carinae Nebula, it has been simply rebranded the Carina Nebula by the Hubble team.

Towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula. The image captures the top of a pillar of gas and dust, three light-years tall, which is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars.

The pillar is also being pushed apart from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks like arrows sailing through the air.

Since it was launched in April 1990, Hubble has looked at more than 30,000 celestial targets and taken more than half a million photos. A risky visit by shuttle astronauts to service the telescope last May made Hubble 100 times more powerful than when it was launched.

Truly Hubble has been the greatest ambassador for astronomy, bringing the wonders of the universe to a wide public. It has overcome obstacles like a mis-shapen main mirror and equipment breakdowns to produce images of planets, stars and galaxies at the edge of the universe that just take your breath away, while carrying out vast amounts of real science too.

Picture credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI).

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Power grids could be devastated by a storm on the sun, astronomers warned today. Scientists have built a detailed model of the UK’s electricity network to check the effects of what they call space weather.

They found that the same storms that produce colourful northern lights produce electrical surges that can cause blackout and destroy transformers in power stations and the national grid.

The model, the most sophisticated ever produced, takes measurements of the Earth’s magnetic field from all over the UK and combines them with findings about how currents from space are conducted through different areas of the Earth’s crust.

It showed that there is a real threat from solar flares to Britain rather than just to countries closer to the Earth’s magnetic poles.

The new model was produced by a team from Lancaster University and the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh. Results were presented today at the National Astronomy Meeting in Glasgow, organised by the Royal Astronomical Society.

It follows similar warnings of doom last year soon after the 150th anniversary of the biggest flare ever seen on the sun which brought down the telegraph system and caused spectacular aurorae in 1859.

Dr Jim Wild, a Lancaster researcher in the team, told Skymania News: “We need to look at what the consequences of a similar event of a similar event would be today. What has changed is our vulnerability.

“If the world’s transformers are destroyed, you can’t just buy new ones off the shelf. Lose electricity and you can’t purify water, can’t treat sewage, can’t pump oil, you can’t refrigerate anything, communications, satnav and the internet go – it is Armageddon-type stuff.”

The US National Academies has estimated that a space storm hitting the USA could cost 1-2 trillion dollars in the first year and the country would take four to ten years to recover.

Meanwhile, UK scientists have devised a new technique to predict when blasts of space weather from the sun will batter the Earth, Venus and Mars, they revealed at the meeting today.

Using observations from NASA solar satellites they are producing more accurate forecasts for when streams of highly charged particles will hit the upper atmosphere.

Such events cause spectaular dispays of aurora but can threaten satelltes, power networks and communications systems.

The new forecasts are produced by space scientists at Leicester University examing data from a pair of satellites called STEREO and a third probe called ACE that constantly monitor the sun.

They combine this information about the speed and direction of the sun’s windy blasts with data from instruments aboard European spacecraft orbiting Venus and Mars to get a bigger picture of space wather across the solar system.

Editor’s note: For a thrilling read about the 1858 solar storm that had such an impact on Earth, check out The Sun Kings by Dr Stuart Clark. Click here to buy it from Amazon in the USA, or in the UK. It is available in hardback or paperback.

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A UK-led planet hunt using equipment sourced via eBay has found nine new worlds around other stars. They bring the total number of discoveries by the SuperWASP project since 2006 to 28.

Intriguingly, two of the new planets are going round their parent stars the wrong way – orbiting in the opposite direction to that in which the star is spinning.

The finds present a serious challenge to current theories of how planets form, Professor Andrew Collier Cameron told the National Astronomy Meeting at Glasgow.

Stars and their families of planets like our own solar system are thought to form when vast clouds of gas and dust rotate and condense.

But more than half of the giant planets in close orbits – so-called “hot Jupiters” – have peculiar orbits which are out of line. One planet orbiting the wrong way hit the headlines in August last year.

The team believe the hot Jupiters end up in their close orbits after bizarrely richocheting around over many aeons thanks to the gravitational pull of a second companion star in the system.

Professor Cameron, of St Andrew’s University, Scotland, said: “The new results really challenge the conventional wisdom that planets should always orbit in the same direction as their star’s spin. It is a gravitational tug-of-war – a complete game of cosmic pinball over many millions of years.”

The planet ends up parked in a near-circular but randomly tilted orbit close to its parent star. But its dramatic journey to get there is bad news for any worlds like Earth.

Astronomer Didier Queloz, of Geneva Observatory, who helped confirm the WASP planets, said: “A dramatic side-effect of this process is that it would wipe out any other smaller Earth-like planet in these systems.”

The SuperWASP project – short for Super Wide Angle Search for Planets – uses two banks of eight cameras, one in the Canary Islands and one in South Africa, to monitor millions of stars a night. It detects giant planets by spotting a small dip in light as they pass in front of the star.

Astronomers had to turn to auction site eBay to track down 13 lenses, costing £4,000 each, after they learned that Canon no longer made them.

Each observatory is kitted out with the specially-built digital cameras which cost £30,000 each and were made by Andor Technology in Belfast. Together they cover an area of sky 250 times the size of the Full Moon.

Smaller Earth-sized worlds will have to wait to be found by  other methods such as Europe’s Corot satellite and NASA’s Kepler space telescope.

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A European probe has discovered the first planet orbiting another star that resembles one in our own solar system. The distant world is a similar size to Jupiter and is cool enough to contain liquid water – an essential for life as we know it.

Most of the 400 alien worlds – or exoplanets – detected out in the galaxy have been searingly hot gas-balls zipping round their parent suns in just a few days.

But the new discovery, called Corot-9b, takes 95.274 days to orbit its star, 1,500 light-years away in the constellation of Serpens Cauda, a little longer than Mercury’s own year.

It was detected by planet-hunting satellite Corot as it passed in front of the star – dubbed a transit – causing the star’s light to dip for a short time. Changes during the transit allow astronomers to measure the planet’s mass, size and temperature.

Because it orbits a star cooler than our Sun, calculations estimate that Corot-9b’s temperature could lie somewhere between –23°C and 157°C. The team of 60 astronomers credited with the discovery made follow-up observations to confirm its nature with giant telescopes in Tenerife and Chile.

One of them Dr Suzanne Aigrain of Oxford University, said: “Over the past decade, densities could be measured only for hot planets orbiting very close to their host stars. Their evolution is completely dominated by the huge amount of radiation they receive from their host stars.

“Corot-9b is much cooler, and provides us with a clean, isolated test of our theories of how giant planets evolve.”

French colleague Tristan Guillot said: “The planet is mostly made of hydrogen and helium, but it may contain up to 20 Earth-masses of high-pressure ices and rocks. It is thus very similar to the solar system’s giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn. Its density agrees well with theoretical expectations.”

Hans Deeg, chief author of a scientific paper reporting the discovery, said: “Corot-9b is the first exoplanet that is definitely similar to a planet in our Solar System.”

Picture: An artist’s impression of a planet in transit in front of a star. (Credit: NASA).

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A space holiday firm has become the first commercial company to advertise for professional astronauts. Bigelow Aerospace, founded by the head of a budget motel chain in the US, wants experienced spacemen working in orbit and on the ground.

Rookies need not apply. Applicants must have completed a training programme with a government or recognised space agency and to have flown a space mission.

Boss Bob Bigelow already has two test models of his inflatable space modules in orbit around the Earth, launched by Russian rockets.

He plans to build orbiting hotels to provide out-of-this-world holidays and has his sights set on the Moon and even Mars too.

Bigelow’s modules, which can be linked together sausage-style to form a space station, are launched in compact form and then expanded to full size.

Space duties spelled out in the job offer include:

Performing as a professional astronaut aboard the Bigelow Aerospace Station Complex; managing all onboard aspects of employee and customer astronaut personal safety; maintaining the space stations inside but with some spacewalks too; and helping clients with payloads or experiments.

On Earth the spacemen will train new astronauts and operate mission control.

Mr Bigelow, from Las Vegas, who made his fortune from Budget Suites of America, is aiming to bring the cost of a ticket to space down to £30,000-£60,000. His other big ideas include a cruise ship to carry 100 passengers and 50 crew on a trip around the moon.

As well as the unspecified number of astronauts’ positions the company has 44 other job offers on its website. They are likely to appeal to NASA staff uncertain about the future after President Obama cancelled any return to the Moon.

The other big leaders in the space tourism business at the moment are Virgin Galactic who are currently making test flights that will lead to sub-orbital trips to the edge of space.

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Astronomers have produced the first detailed weather-map of the biggest and longest-running storm in the solar system. They used the world’s biggest telescopes to peer into a famous feature on giant gas-ball planet Jupiter called the Great Red Spot.

The 25,000-mile wide spot, which is three times the width of the Earth, has been raging for centuries and is prominent enough to be seen in stargazers’ backyard telescopes.

New results from an international team using two telescopes in Chile and two in Hawaii show thermal images of the swirling mass of cloud in as fine detail as the Hubble space telescope achives in visible light. (Hubble itself looked at Jupiter last year to study a bruise left in the clouds by a likely asteroid or comet impact).

They found that the reddest part of the Great Red Spot marks a slightly warmer heart of an otherwise distinctly chilly storm system with an average temperature of -163 C. This temperature difference sends the centre turning clockwise, although the rest of the spot is swirling in the opposite direction. Dark lanes at the edge of the storm are where gases descend into deeper regions of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

Oxford University scientist Leigh Fletcher said: “This is the first time we can say that there’s an intimate link between environmental conditions – temperature, winds, pressure and composition – and the actual colour of the Great Red Spot.”

Dr Fletcher, lead author of a report in journal Icarus, added: “Although we can speculate, we still don’t know for sure which chemicals or processes are causing that deep red colour. But we do know now that it is related to changes in the environmental conditions right in the heart of the storm.”

Colleague Glenn Orton, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said: “This is our first detailed look inside the biggest storm of the solar system. We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated.”

Telescopes used in the study were the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, the Gemini Observatory telescope in Chile, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s Subaru telescope in Hawaii and the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii.

Picture: The photos show a thermal image of the Great Red Spot and its surroundings taken using the VLT in Chile on 18 May 2008 and a visible-light image from Hubble three days previously. (Credit: ESO/NASA/JPL/ESA/L. Fletcher).

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