On this day in science history: the earliest recorded confirmed total solar eclipse occurred

In 709 BC, the earliest record of a confirmed total solar eclipse was written in China. From: Ch'un-ch'iu, book I: "Duke Huan, 3rd year, 7th month, day jen-ch'en, the first day (of the month). The Sun was eclipsed and it was total." This is the earliest direct allusion to a complete obscuration of the Sun in any civilisation. The recorded date, when reduced to the Julian calendar, agrees exactly with that of a computed solar eclipse. Reference to the same eclipse appears in the Han-shu ('History of the Former Han Dynasty') (Chinese, 1st century AD): "...the eclipse threaded centrally through the Sun; above and below it was yellow." Earlier Chinese writings that refer to an eclipse do so without noting totality.

Total Solar Eclipse. I, Luc Viatour [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Having fascinated mankind for years, the Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, with internal convective motion that generates a magnetic field via a dynamo process. It is by far the most important source of energy for life on Earth. Its diameter is about 109 times that of Earth, and its mass is about 330,000 times that of Earth, accounting for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. About three quarters of the Sun's mass consists of hydrogen (~73%); the rest is mostly helium (~25%), with much smaller quantities of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron.

The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star (G2V) based on its spectral class. As such, it is informally referred to as a yellow dwarf. It formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of matter within a region of a large molecular cloud. Most of this matter gathered in the center, whereas the rest flattened into an orbiting disk that became the Solar System. The central mass became so hot and dense that it eventually initiated nuclear fusion in its core. It is thought that almost all stars form by this process.

The Sun is roughly middle-aged; it has not changed dramatically for more than four billion years, and will remain fairly stable for more than another five billion years. After hydrogen fusion in its core has diminished to the point at which it is no longer in hydrostatic equilibrium, the core of the Sun will experience a marked increase in density and temperature while its outer layers expand to eventually become a red giant. It is calculated that the Sun will become sufficiently large to engulf the current orbits of Mercury and Venus, and render Earth uninhabitable.

The enormous effect of the Sun on Earth has been recognized since prehistoric times, and the Sun has been regarded by some cultures as a deity. The synodic rotation of Earth and its orbit around the Sun are the basis of the solar calendar, which is the predominant calendar in use today.

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On this day in science history: Pioneer 10 crossed the orbit of Pluto

In 1983, Pioneer 10, an American space probe, crossed the orbit of Pluto, the outermost planet, to continue its voyage into the universe beyond our solar system. This space exploration project was conducted by the NASA Ames Research Center in California, and the space probe was manufactured by TRW Inc.

Pioneer 10 was launched on March 2, 1972, by an Atlas-Centaur expendable vehicle from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Between July 15, 1972, and February 15, 1973, it became the first spacecraft to traverse the asteroid belt. Photography of Jupiter began on November 6, 1973, at a range of 25,000,000 kilometres (16,000,000 mi), and a total of about 500 images were transmitted. The closest approach to the planet was on December 4, 1973, at a range of 132,252 kilometres (82,178 mi). During the mission, the on-board instruments were used to study the asteroid belt, the environment around Jupiter, the solar wind, cosmic rays, and eventually the far reaches of the Solar System and heliosphere.

Artist's impression of Pioneer 10's flyby of Jupiter, by Rick Guidice [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

So, what do we know about Jupiter?

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System. It is a giant planet with a mass one-thousandth that of the Sun, but two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined. Jupiter and Saturn are gas giants; the other two giant planets, Uranus and Neptune are ice giants. Jupiter has been known to astronomers since antiquity. The Romans named it after their god Jupiter. When viewed from Earth, Jupiter can reach an apparent magnitude of −2.94, bright enough for its reflected light to cast shadows, and making it on average the third-brightest object in the night sky after the Moon and Venus.

Jupiter is primarily composed of hydrogen with a quarter of its mass being helium, though helium comprises only about a tenth of the number of molecules. It may also have a rocky core of heavier elements, but like the other giant planets, Jupiter lacks a well-defined solid surface. Because of its rapid rotation, the planet's shape is that of an oblate spheroid (it has a slight but noticeable bulge around the equator). The outer atmosphere is visibly segregated into several bands at different latitudes, resulting in turbulence and storms along their interacting boundaries. A prominent result is the Great Red Spot, a giant storm that is known to have existed since at least the 17th century when it was first seen by telescope. Surrounding Jupiter is a faint planetary ring system and a powerful magnetosphere. Jupiter has at least 67 moons, including the four large Galilean moons discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. Ganymede, the largest of these, has a diameter greater than that of the planet Mercury.

Radio communications were lost with Pioneer 10 on January 23, 2003, because of the loss of electric power for its radio transmitter, with the probe at a distance of 12 billion kilometers (80 AU) from Earth.

Jupiter has been explored on several other occasions by robotic spacecraft, such as the Voyager flyby missions and later, the Galileo orbiter. In late February 2007, Jupiter was visited by the New Horizons probe, which used Jupiter's gravity to increase its speed and bend its trajectory en route to Pluto. The latest probe to visit the planet is Juno, which entered into orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016. Future targets for exploration in the Jupiter system include the probable ice-covered liquid ocean of its moon Europa.

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Dwarf star 200 light years away contains life's building blocks

Many scientists believe the Earth was dry when it first formed, and that the building blocks for life on our planet - carbon, nitrogen and water - appeared only later as a result of collisions with other objects in our solar system that had those elements.

Today, a UCLA-led team of scientists reports that it has discovered the existence of a white dwarf star whose atmosphere is rich in carbon and nitrogen, as well as in oxygen and hydrogen, the components of water. The white dwarf is approximately 200 light years from Earth and is located in the constellation Boötes.

The Earth seen from Apollo 17. By NASA/Apollo 17 crew; taken by either Harrison Schmitt or Ron Evans [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Benjamin Zuckerman, a co-author of the research and a UCLA professor of astronomy, said the study presents evidence that the planetary system associated with the white dwarf contains materials that are the basic building blocks for life. And although the study focused on this particular star - known as WD 1425+540 - the fact that its planetary system shares characteristics with our solar system strongly suggests that other planetary systems would also.

"The findings indicate that some of life's important preconditions are common in the universe," Zuckerman said.

The scientists report that a minor planet in the planetary system was orbiting around the white dwarf, and its trajectory was somehow altered, perhaps by the gravitational pull of a planet in the same system. That change caused the minor planet to travel very close to the white dwarf, where the star's strong gravitational field ripped the minor planet apart into gas and dust. Those remnants went into orbit around the white dwarf - much like the rings around Saturn, Zuckerman said - before eventually spiraling onto the star itself, bringing with them the building blocks for life.

The researchers think these events occurred relatively recently, perhaps in the past 100,000 years or so, said Edward Young, another co-author of the study and a UCLA professor of geochemistry and cosmochemistry. They estimate that approximately 30 percent of the minor planet's mass was water and other ices, and approximately 70 percent was rocky material.

The research suggests that the minor planet is the first of what are likely many such analogs to objects in our solar system's Kuiper belt. The Kuiper belt is an enormous cluster of small bodies like comets and minor planets located in the outer reaches of our solar system, beyond Neptune. Astronomers have long wondered whether other planetary systems have bodies with properties similar to those in the Kuiper belt, and the new study appears to confirm for the first time that one such body exists.

White dwarf stars are dense, burned-out remnants of normal stars. Their strong gravitational pull causes elements like carbon, oxygen and nitrogen to sink out of their atmospheres and into their interiors, where they cannot be detected by telescopes.

The research, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, describes how WD 1425+540 came to obtain carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen. This is the first time a white dwarf with nitrogen has been discovered, and one of only a few known examples of white dwarfs that have been impacted by a rocky body that was rich in water ice.

"If there is water in Kuiper belt-like objects around other stars, as there now appears to be, then when rocky planets form they need not contain life's ingredients," said Siyi Xu, the study's lead author, a postdoctoral scholar at the European Southern Observatory in Germany who earned her doctorate at UCLA.

"Now we're seeing in a planetary system outside our solar system that there are minor planets where water, nitrogen and carbon are present in abundance, as in our solar system's Kuiper belt," Xu said. "If Earth obtained its water, nitrogen and carbon from the impact of such objects, then rocky planets in other planetary systems could also obtain their water, nitrogen and carbon this way."

A rocky planet that forms relatively close to its star would likely be dry, Young said.

"We would like to know whether in other planetary systems Kuiper belts exist with large quantities of water that could be added to otherwise dry planets," he said. "Our research suggests this is likely."

According to Zuckerman, the study doesn't settle the question of whether life in the universe is common.

"First you need an Earth-like world in its size, mass and at the proper distance from a star like our sun," he said, adding that astronomers still haven't found a planet that matches those criteria.

The researchers observed WD 1425+540 with the Keck Telescope in 2008 and 2014, and with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014. They analyzed the chemical composition of its atmosphere using an instrument called a spectrometer, which breaks light into wavelengths. Spectrometers can be tuned to the wavelengths at which scientists know a given element emits and absorbs light; scientists can then determine the element's presence by whether it emits or absorbs light of certain characteristic wavelengths. In the new study, the researchers saw the elements in the white dwarf's atmosphere because they absorbed some of the background light from the white dwarf.

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Mercury's journey across Sun under way

Skywatchers across the globe are observing Mercury transit the Sun, the little planet's third such pass of 14 it will make this century.

Mercury's sojourn between Earth and our star lasts from 11:12 until 18:42 GMT.

It will not make another transit until 2019 and then 2032.

The event is impossible - and dangerous - to view with the naked eye or binoculars, but astronomy groups worldwide are offering the chance view it through filtered telescopes.

Live views from space and ground telescopes are also available online.

They show Mercury as a tiny black circle, smaller but darker than many sunspots, slowly traversing the Sun's giant yellow disc.

Mercury in colour by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington. Edited version of Image:Mercury in color - Prockter07.jpg by jjron (cropped to square). (NASA/JPL [1]) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Mercury spins around the Sun every 88 days, but its orbit is tilted relative to the Earth's. It is that discrepancy which makes it relatively rare for the three bodies to line up in space.

From western Europe, north-western Africa and much of the Americas, Mercury's seven-and-a-half-hour glide across the Sun will be visible in its entirety. A further swathe of the planet will catch part of the transit, depending on local sunrise and sunset times.

The only land masses to miss out completely are Australasia, far eastern Asia and Antarctica.

Because Mercury is so small - just one-third as big as Earth and, from our perspective, 1/150th of the Sun's diameter - its transit can only be glimpsed under serious magnification; the "eclipse glasses" used by thousands of people to view last year's solar eclipse will be useless.

And to avoid permanent eye damage, any telescope must be fitted with a solar filter before being trained on the Sun. The British Astronomical Association explains on its website how amateur stargazers can enjoy the spectacle safely.

Open University's Prof David Rothery said the celestial event would not present any novel scientific opportunities - but was special nonetheless.

"From this transit, we're unlikely to learn anything we don't already know," he told BBC Inside Science. "But what a wonderful event for showing people Mercury. It's a hard planet to see.

"Historically, transits were of immense importance."

In the 1700s, for example, it was observations of Mercury and Venus slipping across the Sun that allowed astronomers, led by Edmund Halley, to pin down the dimensions of the known Solar System.

Prof Rothery is a Mercury expert and a leading scientist on the European Space Agency's BepiColombo mission to the diminutive planet, which will launch in 2017 or 2018.

Mercury has already been visited by two Nasa probes: Mariner 10 flew past in 1974 and 1975 and Messenger spent four years in orbit until its planned crash landing in 2015.

Messenger spent four years in orbit taking images and measurements of Mercury

"[Messenger] told us an awful lot. It really told us we don't understand Mercury - because there's a lot of things which just don't stack up," Prof Rothery said.

"It's an airless body, with lots of craters... But there's been a long history of volcanic activity, fault activity - and the composition, that began to be revealed by Messenger, is weird.

"There's very little iron at the surface but it must have a ginormous iron core, because it generates a magnetic field - which Venus, Mars and the Moon don't."

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Supernovae showered Earth with radioactive debris

An international team of scientists has found evidence of a series of massive supernova explosions near our solar system, which showered Earth with radioactive debris.

The scientists found radioactive iron-60 in sediment and crust samples taken from the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

The iron-60 was concentrated in a period between 3.2 and 1.7 million years ago, which is relatively recent in astronomical terms, said research leader Dr Anton Wallner from The Australian National University (ANU).

"We were very surprised that there was debris clearly spread across 1.5 million years," said Dr Wallner, a nuclear physicist in the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. "It suggests there were a series of supernovae, one after another.

"It's an interesting coincidence that they correspond with when the Earth cooled and moved from the Pliocene into the Pleistocene period."

A supernova. NASA/ESA [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The team from Australia, the University of Vienna in Austria, Hebrew University in Israel, Shimizu Corporation and University of Tokyo, Nihon University and University of Tsukuba in Japan, Senckenberg Collections of Natural History Dresden and Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) in Germany, also found evidence of iron-60 from an older supernova around eight million years ago, coinciding with global faunal changes in the late Miocene.

Some theories suggest cosmic rays from the supernovae could have increased cloud cover.

A supernova is a massive explosion of a star as it runs out of fuel and collapses.

The scientists believe the supernovae in this case were less than 300 light years away, close enough to be visible during the day and comparable to the brightness of the Moon.

Although Earth would have been exposed to an increased cosmic ray bombardment, the radiation would have been too weak to cause direct biological damage or trigger mass extinctions.

The supernova explosions create many heavy elements and radioactive isotopes which are strewn into the cosmic neighbourhood.

One of these isotopes is iron-60 which decays with a half-life of 2.6 million years, unlike its stable cousin iron-56. Any iron-60 dating from Earth's formation more than four billion years ago has long since disappeared.

The iron-60 atoms reached Earth in minuscule quantities and so the team needed extremely sensitive techniques to identify the interstellar iron atoms.

"Iron-60 from space is a million-billion times less abundant than the iron that exists naturally on Earth," said Dr Wallner.

Dr Wallner was intrigued by first hints of iron-60 in samples from the Pacific Ocean floor, found a decade ago by a group at TU Munich.

He assembled an international team to search for interstellar dust from 120 ocean-floor samples spanning the past 11 million years.

The first step was to extract all the iron from the ocean cores. This time-consuming task was performed by two groups, at HZDR and the University of Tokyo.

The team then separated the tiny traces of interstellar iron-60 from the other terrestrial isotopes using the Heavy-Ion Accelerator at ANU and found it occurred all over the globe.

The age of the cores was determined from the decay of other radioactive isotopes, beryllium-10 and aluminium-26, using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) facilities at DREsden AMS (DREAMS) of HZDR, Micro Analysis Laboratory (MALT) at the University of Tokyo and the Vienna Environmental Research Accelerator (VERA) at the University of Vienna.

The dating showed the fallout had only occurred in two time periods, 3.2 to 1.7 million years ago and eight million years ago. Current results from TU Munich are in line with these findings.

A possible source of the supernovae is an aging star cluster, which has since moved away from Earth, independent work led by TU Berlin has proposed in a parallel publication. The cluster has no large stars left, suggesting they have already exploded as supernovae, throwing out waves of debris.

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Iron meteorites 'buried in Antarctica' by the Sun

New research suggests there could be a layer of iron-rich meteorites hidden just under the Antarctic ice.

The churning of glaciers spews many space rocks out on to the surface in Antarctica, but compared to elsewhere on Earth, few of them are made of iron.

Based on modelling and lab experiments, scientists say the missing metallic rocks might be burying themselves, by melting the ice as sunlight heats them.

To prove their idea, the team now wants to look for the rocks themselves.

"The study is proposing a hypothesis - these samples should be there. We just have to go and locate them," said Dr Katherine Joy from the University of Manchester, a co-author of the paper published in Nature Communications.

Antarctica is known by meteorite specialists as a fruitful hunting ground, because the rocks are collected from their landing sites by glacial flows and transported to concentrated dumping-grounds.

"The great thing about Antarctica is they fall on the ice, and then the ice progressively moves away from the plateau. And where it hits these barriers, along the Transantarctic Mountains, the ice gets moved up," Dr Joy told the BBC.

"So this continuous conveyor belt has delivered meteorites from the interior fall sites to the 'meteorite stranding zones' for the past couple of million years or so."

Iron meteorites. By Waifer X (originally posted to Flickr as 090423-1080887) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Among this Antarctic haul, however, researchers have noticed that iron-rich meteorites - whether partly or wholly made of the metal - are surprisingly scarce, compared to the percentage collected in other places around the world.

Dr Joy and her colleagues think they may have discovered why.

They froze two small meteorites of similar size and shape, one made of iron and the other rocky and non-metallic, inside blocks of ice. A special lamp was trained on the ice from above, to mimic the rays of the Sun.

Both meteorites, on repeated trials, melted their way downward through the ice block. But because the metal conducts heat more efficiently, the iron meteorite sank further, faster.

The researchers then expanded that observation using a mathematical simulation. Their model showed that this Sun-driven burrowing would be enough to cause iron-rich rocks to sink so much during the long summer days that, over the course of the year, it would account fairly precisely for the lack of iron space rocks welling their way to the surface of the Antarctic "stranding zones".

"The idea is, they never make it to the surface. They're forever trapped, 50-100cm or so below the ice," Dr Joy explained.

That means, if the team's findings are to be believed, that the hunt is on.

As Dr Joy's Manchester colleague Geoffrey Evatt put it: "The challenge is now set - to be the first team to locate this reserve of meteorites and retrieve samples from it."

Of all the meteorites gathered from Antarctica, only a handful - so far - have been pulled out from beneath the ice. This is mostly for practical reasons, Dr Joy said.

"When it's very cold... picking up the sample in a controlled way is difficult enough with things sitting on the surface. To access ones that are subsurface - nobody's really tried to do that so far."

So it will not be easy, but the team hopes that radar and metal detectors might help target the search. And the potential rewards are high.

"Every meteorite we find tells us something new about the Solar System," Dr Joy said.

Some are carbon-rich or rocky remnants from long before any planet clumped together; others - like iron and rocky-iron meteorites - offer clues from a more intermediate stage, when baby planets with cores, mantles and crusts were trying to form.

"The iron group represents meteorites that were once the cores and the internal structures of different planetesimals.

"We think there were probably hundreds of these early planets, that formed in the solar system but never really got big enough and were broken up in collision events."

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Europe and Russia mission to assess Moon settlement

The European and Russian space agencies are to send a lander to an unexplored area at the Moon's south pole.

It will be one of a series of missions that prepares for the return of humans to the surface and a possible permanent settlement.

The spacecraft will assess whether there is water, and raw materials to make fuel and oxygen.

BBC News has obtained exclusive details of the mission, called Luna 27, which is set for launch in five years' time.

The mission is one of a series led by the Russian federal space agency, Roscosmos, to go back to the Moon.

These ventures will continue where the exploration programme that was halted by the Soviet Union in the mid 1970s left off, according to Prof Igor Mitrofanov, of the Space Research Institute in Moscow, who is one of the lead scientists.

"We have to go to the Moon. The 21st Century will be the century when it will be the permanent outpost of human civilisation, and our country has to participate in this process," he told BBC News.

But unlike efforts in the 1960s and 70s, when the Soviet Union was working in competition with the US and other nations, he added, "we have to work together with our international colleagues".

Full moon: Gregory H. Revera

Bérengère Houdou, who is the head of the lunar exploration group of at Esa's European Space Research and Technology Centre (Estec), just outside Amsterdam, has a similar strategy.

"We have an ambition to have European astronauts on the Moon. There are currently discussions at international level going on for broad cooperation on how to go back to the Moon."

One of the first acts of the new head of the European Space Agency, Johann-Dietrich Wörner, was to state that he wants international partners to build a base on the Moon's far side.

The initial missions will be robotic. Luna 27 will land on the edge of the South Pole Aitken (SPA) basin. The south polar region has areas which are always dark. These are some of the coldest places in the Solar System. As such, they are icy prisons for water and other chemicals that have been shielded from heating by the Sun.

According to Dr James Carpenter, Esa's lead scientist on the project, one of the main aims is to investigate the potential use of this water as a resource for the future, and to find out what it can tell us about the origins of life in the inner Solar System.

"The south pole of the Moon is unlike anywhere we have been before," he said.

"The environment is completely different, and due to the extreme cold there you could find large amounts of water-ice and other chemistry which is on the surface, and which we could access and use as rocket fuel or in life-support systems to support future human missions we think will go to these locations."

Back in the heady days of the Apollo missions, it seemed almost inevitable that those astounding but brief trips to the Moon would be followed by something more permanent. But the notion of colonies soon proved to be science fantasy. After the last of 12 astronauts left their boot prints in the lunar dust in 1972, the US government and taxpayers collectively declared, "been there, done that". America had scored a dazzling point over the Soviet Union but at eye-watering cost, so the final three planned Apollo missions were cancelled.

For a while, our nearest neighbour in space seemed rather unappealing. But then, over recent years, came a series of discoveries about the lunar dust itself, suggesting that the Moon holds water and minerals that could conceivably help support a settlement, if anyone has the appetite to pay for it. So a new batch of missions is under way. China seems to be particularly eager, launching increasingly capable robotic craft that could pave the way for human flights, sometime in the 2030s.

In all probability, the next boots on the Moon will be Chinese. One of China's leading space scientists told me how he even envisages opening lunar mines to extract valuable resources such as Helium-3. Throughout history, humanity has gazed at the Moon through different eyes. In the 1960s, it was the scene for Cold War rivalry. Now it is seen as a potential staging-post for longer journeys and as a rock waiting to be dug up and exploited.

Prof Mitrofanov says that there are scientific and commercial benefits to be had by building a permanent human presence on the lunar surface.

"It will be for astronomical observation, for the utilisation of minerals and other lunar resources and to create an outpost that can be visited by cosmonauts working together as a test bed for their future flight to Mars."

Esa and its industrial collaborators are developing a new type of landing system able to target areas far more precisely than the missions in the 1960s and 70s. 

The so-called "Pilot" system uses on-board cameras to navigate and a laser guidance system which is able to sense the terrain while approaching the surface and be able to decide for itself whether the landing site is safe or not, and if necessary to re-target to a better location.

Europe is also providing the drill which is designed to go down to 2m and collect what might be hard, icy samples. According to Richard Fisackerly, the project's lead engineer, these samples might be harder than reinforced concrete and so the drill will need to be extremely strong.

"We are currently looking at the technologies we would need to penetrate that type of material and are looking at having both rotation and hammering functions. The final architecture has yet to be decided - but this combination of rotation, hammering and depth is a step beyond what we have already flown or is in development today," he told BBC News.

Esa will also provide the onboard miniaturised laboratory, called ProSPA. It will be similar to the instrument on the Philae lander, which touched down on the surface of Comet 67P last year. But ProSPA will be tuned to searching for the key ingredients with which to make water, oxygen, fuel and other materials that can be exploited by future astronauts.

The instrument will help scientists discover out how much of these critical resources are under the surface, and, crucially, whether they can be extracted easily.

Europe's participation in the mission is due to receive final approval at a meeting of ministers in late 2016. It has the strong support of Esa and Roscosmos hierarchy, and the scientists involved in Luna 27 are confident that it is not a question of if but when humans go back to the lunar surface.

"This whole series of missions feels like the beginning of the return to the Moon but it is also starting something new in terms of overall exploration of the Solar System," says Mr Fisackerly.

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Meteorite from birth of solar system to go on display

An extremely rare meteorite that has the same make-up as the primordial solar system goes on public display for the first time on Friday at the Natural History Museum in London.

The Ivuna meteorite landed in Tanzania in 1938 and has since been broken up into samples, the rest of which remain in the hands of private collectors. The Natural History Museum bought the largest lump in 2008 from a private enthusiast in the US.

The black, satsuma-sized space rock dates back to the birth of the solar system some 4.6bn years ago, before the Earth had formed. It is one of only five in the world with a ratio of chemical elements that, save for hydrogen and helium, almost exactly matches that of the sun.

The meteorite is a carbonaceous chondrite and has a lot of water locked up in its minerals. Up to a fifth of the rock’s weight is bound water, with other constituents being organic compounds that are considered the building blocks of life.

Meteorites like the Ivuna rock may have brought water and vital compounds for life on Earth when they slammed into the surface of the fledgling planet billions of years ago.

Ashley King, a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, said: “These meteorites are a unique record of conditions that existed at the time over 4.5 billion years ago, before the Earth had formed. They are the primordial building blocks of our Solar System.”

When carbonaceous chondrites reach the Earth, they start to react in the air. But the museum’s Ivuna sample has been stored in a case in pure nitrogen for most of its life to preserve the pristine material.

Researchers at the Natural History Museum believe that studying the meteorite might give them a more accurate record of the sun’s composition than measuring the sun’s surface itself.

“Ivuna is actively used in our research, and it is fantastic to be able to show visitors a unique specimen that is older than Earth itself,” said King. The speciment will go on display at the museum’s free after-hours event, Science Uncovered, on 25 September.

Sara Russell, head of mineral and planetary sciences at the museum, said the Ivuna meteorite had recently been used to cast doubt on claims that the orbiting XMM-Newton observatory had seen dark matter streaming from a distant cluster of galaxies.

“It highlights that we need to learn more about our own galactic back yard. By studying the solar system we can learn abut how matter behaves in distant galaxies. At the Natural History Museum, we are using meteorites such as Ivuna, which dates from a time before planets existed, to understand the composition of primordial material at that time,” she said.

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http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/22/meteorite-from-birth-of-solar-system-to-go-on-display

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