Wednesday, October 29, 2008

MESSENGER Reveals More “Hidden”Territory on Mercury

  “The region of Mercury’s surface that we viewed at close range for the first time this month is bigger than the land area of South America ,” says Sean Solomon, MESSENGER principal investigator and the director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution. “The first two Mercury flybys have returned a rich dividend of new observations.”
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PRAsnerMooreSpectronomicsGrantPicSmForWeb1-6-09.jpg Tuesday, January 6, 2009

New Rain Forest Mapping Technology Gets Huge Support

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded Gregory Asner, of Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology, a $5.2-million grant to advance rain forest monitoring using High-fidelity Imaging Spectroscopy (HiFIS). It determines chemical and structural properties and species diversity of rain forest vegetation in unprecedented detail. It is part of the Carnegie Spectranomics Project, which uses the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, a unique airborne mapping system that can probe some 40,000 acres of rain forest per day. more »

PRFreedmanSptizerTimeArtSmForWeb1-5-09.jpg Monday, January 5, 2009

Zeroing in on Hubble’s Constant

The rate at which the universe is expanding, a value known as the Hubble constant, has been hotly debated for the last 80 years. Now the director of the Carnegie Observatories, Wendy Freedman, will lead a team who will slash the uncertainty of this value to just 3% via the new Carnegie Hubble Program using NASA’s space-based Spitzer telescope.

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Thursday, December 11, 2008

Climate Change Alters Ocean Chemistry

Researchers have discovered that the ocean’s chemical makeup is less stable and more greatly affected by climate change than previously believed. A study in the December 12, 2008 issue of Science reports that during a time of climate change 13 million years ago the chemistry of the oceans changed dramatically. The researchers warn that the chemical composition of the ocean today could be similarly affected by climate changes now underway – with potentially far-reaching consequences for marine ecosystems.

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