Thursday, September 24, 2009

Cassini and Chandrayaan agree

This graph compares detailed spectra from the moon taken by the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) on Cassini spacecraft and NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (3M) on the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chandrayaan. The agreement between the two spacecraft is an excellent confirmation of the existence of water and hydroxyl (gray regions on the graph where wavelengths of infrared light range from 2.7 to 3.2 micrometers). The red dashed lines show thermal emission data which must be removed to better see the signature of water. The solid lines are the spectra after this thermal emission was removed. [NASA/ISRO/JPL-Caltech/USGS/Brown]

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