Small, Fluffy Monkeys Caught Whispering

Humans aren’t the only whisperers in the world, according to a new study that reveals cotton-top tamarins whisper too.

The news is like a page out of Disney, as these monkeys are small (they weigh just over 1 pound), intelligent and secretive, very cute and fluffy, and have distinctive hairdos. One would imagine that — if any animal whispers — it would have to be them.

Researchers Rachel Morrison and Diana Reiss of The City University of New York made the discovery after recording cotton-top tamarins housed at New York City’s Central Park Zoo. The findings are published in the latest issue of the journal Zoo Biology.

“We exposed a family of captive cotton-top tamarins to a supervisor who previously elicited a strong mobbing response,” they wrote. “Simultaneous audio–video recordings documented the animals’ behavioral and vocal responses in the supervisor’s presence and absence.”

Initially, these very low amplitude vocalizations eluded the researchers’ detection. Careful analysis of the calls, when amplified, showed that the tamarins were whispering to each other.

You can listen to a bunch of different cotton-top tamarin calls at this page.

“Consistent with whisper-like behavior, the amplitude of the tamarins’ vocalizations was significantly reduced only in the presence of the supervisor,” Morrison and Reiss report.

It appears the monkeys were not happy to see this particular supervisor. They may have felt threatened by that individual’s presence and kept their voices down.

We don’t know what they were whispering, but it was probably something like, “Look over there. Be on your guard.” Most animals have alarm calls that communicate things like that, and can even be very specific, mentioning the type of threat, location and more.

Read more at Discovery News

Golden Eagle Attacks Deer in Camera Trap Footage

A rare death match between a golden eagle and a young deer was inadvertently captured by a camera trap set up to snap pictures of Russia's endangered Siberian tigers.

The sika deer (Cervus nippon) was found dead in December 2011 by a researcher tending to the camera trap, which was being used to monitor the habits and movements of tigers in Lazovsky State Nature Reserve in Russia's Far East.

Conservationist Linda Kerley, of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), recalled that something felt immediately wrong as she approached the carcass.

"There were no large carnivore tracks in the snow, and it looked like the deer had been running and then just stopped and died," Kerley, who runs the ZSL's camera trap project, said in a statement. "It was only after we got back to camp that I checked the images from the camera and pieced everything together. I couldn't believe what I was seeing."

The camera trap footage only captured two seconds of the attack in three photos, but it showed quite clearly an adult golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) clinging to the young deer's back.

"I've been assessing deer causes of death in Russia for 18 years," Kerley said in a statement. "This is the first time I've seen anything like this."

An adult golden eagle can weigh more than 12 lbs. (5.4 kilograms) and have a wingspan of about 7.5 feet (2.3 meters). Though they do not regularly prey on deer, the raptors are known for ambitious attacks on large animals, the researchers said. The birds, however, have not been known to attack people, despite what the "golden eagle" hoax video would have viewers believe.

"The scientific literature is full of references to golden eagle attacks on different animals from around the world, from things as small as rabbits — their regular prey — to coyote and deer, and even one record in 2004 of an eagle taking a brown bear cub," Jonathan Slaght, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, said in a statement. (ZSL and WCS have been partnering on tiger monitoring in the region.)

"In this case I think Linda just got really lucky and was able to document a very rare, opportunistic predation event," Slaght added.

Read more at Discovery News

Dog Mummy Infested with Bloodsucking Parasites

A dog mummy has revealed the first archaeological evidence of bloodsucking parasites plaguing Fido's ancestors in Egypt during the classical era of Roman rule.

The preserved parasites discovered in the mummified young dog's right ear and coat include the common brown tick and louse fly — tiny nuisances that may have carried diseases leading to the puppy's early demise. French archaeologists found the infested dog mummy while studying hundreds of mummified dogs at the excavation site of El Deir in Egypt, during expeditions in 2010 and 2011.

"Although the presence of parasites, as well as ectoparasite-borne diseases, in ancient times was already suspected from the writings of the major Greek and Latin scholars, these facts were not archaeologically proven until now," said Jean-Bernard Huchet, an archaeoentomologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

Mentions of dog pests appear in the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans such as Homer, Aristotle and Pliny the Elder, and a painting of a hyenalike animal in an ancient Egyptian tomb dated to the 15th century B.C. shows what is likely the oldest known depiction of ticks. But evidence of ticks, flies and other ectoparasites that infest the outside of the body has been scarce in the archaeological record -- until now. (The only other known archaeological evidence of ticks comes from fossilized human feces in Arizona.)

Counting the bloodsuckers

The infested dog mummy was discovered in one of many tombs surrounding a Roman fortress built in the late third century A.D. Most of the main tombs were built during a period dating from the fourth century B.C. to the fourth century A.D. -- a treasure trove for archaeologists, despite the condition of many of the mummies. The French team detailed its findings in the August online issue of the International Journal of Paleopathology.

Huchet and his colleagues, led by Françoise Dunand and Roger Lichtenberg of the University of Strasbourg in France, found the remains of the parasite-ridden pup among more than 400 dog mummies.

"Among the hundreds of dog mummies studied, of them were either skeletonized or still wrapped with bandages," Huchet told LiveScience. "Moreover, most of the dog remains were seriously damaged by looters."

The infested young pup stood out with 61 preserved brown dog ticks still clinging to its coat and nestled in its left ear. Such ticks have spread worldwide by feeding on domesticated dogs. They can also infect their hosts with a variety of potentially fatal diseases.

Archaeologists also discovered a single bloodsucking louse fly clinging firmly to the dog's coat. But the team hypothesizes a tick-borne disease such as canine babesiosis -- a condition that destroys red blood cells -- likely caused the young dog's premature death.

Origins of dog mummies

Hardened skin remains of maturing fly larvae suggested the dying or dead dog had attracted two species of carrion flies before Egyptian handlers mummified the corpse.

Ancient Egyptians commonly mummified animals such as dogs, cats and long-legged wading birds called ibis. The dog mummies from the El Deir site almost certainly represented offerings to a jackal-headed Egyptian god such as Anubis or Wepwawet.

"Several reasons have led Egyptians to mummify animals: to eat in the afterlife, to be with pets, etc.," said Cecile Callou, an archaeozoologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. "But above all, animals were considered as living incarnations of divine principles and, therefore, associated with deities."

But many questions remain about the mummified dogs of El Deir. Researchers still want to know where the dogs came from, whether they were domestic dogs, whether they had owners and how they died. Callou pointed out that the ancient Egyptians had cat farms where cats were bred to be sacrificed and mummified -- could the same have been true for dogs?

Digging deeper into history

The French archaeologists hope to find answers to a different set of questions by searching for more preserved ticks and flies among the mummified dogs of El Deir. Such archaeological evidence could show how diseases originated throughout history, provide clues about the geographical spread of parasites, and reveal more about the relationship between parasites and both human and animal evolution.

Read more at Discovery News

Strange Failed Star Found Hiding Nearby

Stars form when giant clouds of interstellar dust and gas collapse under their own gravity. Steadily gathering into swirling spheres of raw elements, they grow denser and denser, hotter and hotter, until eventually they are hot and massive enough to begin fusing hydrogen into helium inside their cores and whoosh — a star is born.

But sometimes there’s not enough material to get to that point. The protostar, for whatever reason, doesn’t get massive enough to begin the hydrogen fusing process inside it. It’s collected all the dust and gas that was available but it still not enough to ignite. Falling short of full-blown stardom, it’s doomed to drift through the galaxy as a cool, dark brown dwarf… and there’s one right in our stellar neighborhood.

This image reveals such a failed star, located a mere 55 light-years from our own solar system (although that’s still about 323.1 trillion miles away.) At the very center of the picture lies a brown dwarf — unofficially named VVV BD001 — that was spotted with the European Southern Observatory’s 4.1-meter VISTA telescope during the VVV survey.

The VVV survey (which stands for VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea, i.e., “Milky Way”) searches the area of the sky near the central bulge of our galaxy in near-infrared wavelengths. It’s in these heat-generated emissions that hidden brown dwarfs are most easily found, as they are otherwise optically very dim.

Despite the name, brown dwarfs aren’t actually brown. But VVV BD001 is even less so (well, kinda sorta) — it’s one of a curious breed known as “unusually blue brown dwarfs.” These emit shorter-wavelength infrared light than most brown dwarfs for reasons not entirely understood (but then, wouldn’t necessarily look blue to our eyes either.) Regardless, it makes VVV BD001 an extra-special find! (Read more on this here.)

Read more at Discovery News

Synthetic Spider Silk Capsules Assemble Themselves

In addition to snaring dinner and protecting spider babies, spider silk makes a pretty good shield for bioreactive enzymes. Even when it’s not made by the spiders themselves. Turns out, self-assembling spider silk capsules, crafted by colonies of bacteria, are pretty good at keeping reactive molecules calm.

“We called this ‘Spiderbag’,” said Thomas Scheibel, a protein-chemist-turned-engineer, and coauthor of a study describing the capsules published in Advanced Functional Materials. The tiny spheres, produced by Scheibel and his colleagues at the University of Bayreuth, are about as strong as glass — comparable to the ornamental globes that hang on Christmas trees, “just a few sizes smaller,” Scheibel says.

At once both tough and malleable, the silky containers can sheath proteins that would normally want to react with many things around them. The silk stops the enzymes from unfolding or becoming inactive before they’re needed. Soon, the team says, these capsules will be ready for use in medical diagnostics. Though tiny, the spheres are too large to be injectable. Instead, though he won’t go into details, Scheibel says the capsules could be used as a super-sensitive array capable of detecting performance-enhancing substances  in athletes, for example.

“They could be used as an analytical tool, to identify substances in the body, in the blood — like drugs,” Scheibel says.

The capsules aren’t hard to make. Scheibel and his team mix a solution of tiny water droplets into silicon oil, forming what’s called an emulsion. The water droplets carry the dissolved silk proteins, which spring out of solution and self-assemble into wispy, 50- to 70-nanometer thick capsules at the oil-water boundaries. Then, the filmy capsules trap the water-based solution inside. “That’s the trick,” Scheibel said. “You encapsulate anything that’s inside the water droplet.”

So, if you’ve included an enzyme in that original watery solution, it’s now locked up and waiting for the right time to step outside. The team tested the system with enzymes and proteins normally used in lab work, such as beta-galactosidase and serum albumins, but Scheibel says it could be used with just about anything that doesn’t react with spider silk itself.

Modifying the size of the initial droplets allows scientists to make the capsules larger or smaller, in effect customizing the silky spheres for various applications. “You could also do it the other way around, too, and make oil droplets in water,” Scheibel said. Such a reversal would be useful for systems needing oil-friendly enzymes.

“This concept of utilizing silk as a matrix to house or contain enzymes or other bioactive molecules is a fantastic direction to go in,” said David Kaplan, a biopolymer engineer at Tufts University who is working on something similar using silkworm silk. “It offers tremendous control over what you want those containers to do.”

Others would like a bit more evidence that silky capsules offer something that other engineered molecules don’t.

“I don’t see the obvious advantages over other synthetic polymers yet,” said Randy Lewis, a molecular biologist at Utah State University. Lewis’ group recently received funding from the U.S. Navy for a project involving spider silk adhesives – they’re hoping to make something resembling one-sided Velcro that will easily stick to anything, even wet or slimy surfaces.

It’s no surprise that different research groups are examining the potential offered by synthetic silks. Spider silk itself has earned a reputation as a wonder-material: As tough as steel, biocompatible, environmentally friendly, stretchy and antiseptic, the substance can seemingly do pretty much anything you want it to.

“For hundreds of years, there’s been a myth that spider silk is the best performing fiber. Which is actually true,” Scheibel says. “Mechanically, it outcompetes everything.”

Modifying spider silk, by attaching carbon nanotubes, for example, can give it additional properties – like conductivity – that aren’t normally found in nature. But most of its natural properties are more than useful. For centuries, people have even collected spider webs and used them as wound dressings; the webs stick to the skin, forming a barrier, and the silk’s tough surface prevents infiltration by bacteria and viruses.

It’s also kind of smart. “You can design it, and under the right conditions, it knows how to find its corresponding polymer partner and organize itself into a structure that becomes very robust and useful,” Kaplan said. And when you’re done with it, “You could eat it. Or put it in the water or soil — it’s not going to hurt anything,” he says.

But making enough spider silk to use commercially has been a challenge. Spiders, unlike other critters amenable to farming, tend to eat one another when sharing captive spaces. They also don’t produce much silk – it took a million spiders and four years to create a single, gleaming golden cloth.

So, scientists are coaxing other organisms to produce the spider silk. So far, goats, silkworms, E.coli, and alfalfa (yup), have made the strong, sticky substance – or at least, the proteins that go into making the actual fiber. Inside a spider, silk proteins live in a soupy, unstructured jumble that remains goopy until the spider pulls a trigger that snaps the proteins into steely, fiber form. Perhaps not surprisingly, different labs are experimenting with ways to replicate this part of the silk-crafting arachnid experience; so far, methods like pulling the proteins through a fine syringe, and electrospinning (where an electrical charge pulls fibers from a solution), have been the most used. Silky coatings, capsules, gels and foams form readily when other triggers, like salts, are pulled.

Scheibel’s team uses little bacterial factories – colonies of E.coli – to make silk. These bacteria carry the silk protein genes from orb-weaving spiders such as Nephila clavipes and Araneus diadematus. Normally, though, E.coli would look at the genetic sequence for spider proteins and hit the road; it’s tough for a single-celled organism to produce massive, repetitive proteins like the silk’s building blocks. So, Scheibel and his team removed some of the repetitive elements and translated the code into something the bacteria could understand – then let them get to work.

Read more at Wired Science

Head of Aphrodite Statue Unearthed in Turkey

A group of archaeologists has discovered a life-sized marble head of Aphrodite while uncovering an ancient pool-side mosaic in southern Turkey.

Buried under soil for hundreds of years, the goddess of love and beauty has some chipping on her nose and face. Researchers think her presence could shed light on the extent of the Roman Empire's wide cultural influence at the time of its peak.

Archaeologists found the sculpture while working at a site called Antiochia ad Cragum (Antioch on the cliffs), on the Mediterranean coast. The researchers believe the region, which is dotted with hidden inlets and coves, would have been a haven for Cilician pirates — the same group who kidnapped Julius Caesar and held him for ransom around 75 B.C.

But the pirates' reign ended when the Roman occupation of the area expanded. The city was officially established around the time of Emperor Nero and flourished during the height of the Roman Empire, researchers say.

The excavators had been looking for more parts of the largest Roman mosaic ever found in Turkey: a 1,600-square-foot (150 square meters) marble floor elaborately decorated with geometric designs, adorning a plaza outside a Roman bath. During fresh excavations this past summer, they found the statue head lying face-down. The researchers think the marble head was likely long separated from its body; traces of lime kilns have been found near the site, suggesting many statues and hunks of stone would have been burned to be reused in concrete.

Past scholars have argued that southern Turkey's culture was too insular to be greatly impacted by Rome's reach and that it was a peripheral part of the empire. But the presence of an Aphrodite sculpture suggests Greek and Roman influence had become mainstream in far-flung cities like Antiochia ad Cragum in the first and second centuries A.D., the excavation's director Michael Hoff, an art historian at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said in a statement.

Hoff said Aphrodite's head is the first fragment of a monumental statue they have found at Antiochia ad Cragum over eight years of digging.

"We have niches where statues once were. We just didn't have any statues," Hoff said in a statement. "Finally, we have the head of a statue. It suggests something of how mainstream these people were who were living here, how much they were a part of the overall Greek and Roman traditions."

Read more at Discovery News

Delicate Glass Life Found in Volcanic Hail

Slimy brown algae not only survived a wild ride into the stratosphere via a volcanic ash cloud, they landed on distant islands looking flawless, a new study finds.

"There's a crazy contrast between these delicate, glass-shelled organisms and one of the most powerful eruptions in Earth's history," said lead study author Alexa Van Eaton, a postdoctoral scholar at both the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Washington and Arizona State University.

The diatoms were launched by the Taupo super-eruption on New Zealand's North Island 25,000 years ago. More than 600 million cubic meters (20 billion cubic feet) of diatoms from a lake flew into the air, Van Eaton reported Sept. 6 in the journal Geology. Lumped together, the microscopic cells speckled throughout Taupo's ash layers would make a pile as big as Hawaii's famed Diamond Head volcanic cone.

Some diatoms drifted as far as the Chatham Islands, 525 miles (850 kilometers) east of New Zealand. "They just hitched a ride," Van Eaton said. The pristine shells in the Chatham Island ash suggest diatoms could infect new niches by coasting on atmospheric currents.

"If they made it there alive, this is one way microorganisms can travel and meet each other," Van Eaton told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. "We know that ash from smaller events easily travels around the world."

World domination, cell by cell

Diatoms, a golden brown algae, rule Earth's waterways. From Antarctica's glacial lakes to acidic hot springs to unkempt home aquariums, diatoms are everywhere. It's a good thing. The tiny creatures pump out up to 50 percent of the planet's oxygen, said Edward Theriot, a diatom expert and evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the study.

The algae look like little petri dishes or footballs, depending on the species, and spend most of their lives drifting on currents. How diatoms manage to colonize new homes remains a mystery: They can't swim.

Yet diatoms get around. When Wyoming's Yellowstone Lake emerged from its mile-thick ice cover 14,000 years ago, diatoms quickly arrived, Theriot said. "They had to be blown in by some mechanism or carried in by water birds," he added.

Diatoms particularly love volcanic lakes, because they are the only creatures that build shells of glass. (Glass sponges, for instance, produce a skeleton of glass spicules — tiny spike-like structures — but not a hard shell.) Silica-rich magma often causes the volcanic explosions that leave behind lake-filled craters, and silica is the key ingredient in diatom shells. Yellowstone Lake, which sits in a caldera created by a super-eruption, contains so many diatoms that the lake sediments are mostly shells (85 percent by weight), Theriot said.

Now scientists know what happens to diatoms when a massive volcano like Yellowstone blasts through a big lake.

Immaculate preservation

The Taupo Volcano super-eruption slammed through a deep lake that filled a rift valley, similar to the elongated lakes in East Africa. The combination of water and ash created a hellish dirty thunderstorm, with towering clouds and roaring winds. The detonation flung ash and algae upward at more than 250 mph (400 km/h), Van Eaton said. Volcanic hail (called accretionary lapilli) pelted the landscape for miles.

Van Eaton discovered the diatoms while examining the volcanic hail with a scanning electron microscope.

"The first time I ever saw them I was looking at these volcanic ash aggregates and, bam, these gorgeous little symmetrical shells were there," she said. "Their shells are immaculately preserved."

Van Eaton soon determined that one of the three diatom species entombed in the ash only lives on the North Island of New Zealand. This meant she could track the 25,000-year-old ash layers around the South Pacific with a unique biologic marker. The unique North Island diatoms turned up in a few inches of ash on the Chatham Islands. The diatoms' trip to the Chatham Islands took longer than it looks on a map. The prevailing winds blew west at the time, so the shells circled the Southern Hemisphere before landing on the islands, Van Eaton and her colleagues deduce.

Some of the diatoms even kept their color, both in ash close to the volcano and at the Chatham Islands. The color suggests they weren't cooked to extreme temperatures in the volcanic eruption, Van Eaton said.

Read more at Discovery News

The Moon Just Got 100 Million Years Younger

The moon is quite a bit younger than scientists had previously believed, new research suggests.

The leading theory of how the moon formed holds that it was created when a mysterious planet — one the size of Mars or larger — slammed into Earth about 4.56 billion years ago, just after the solar system came together. But new analyses of lunar rocks suggest that the moon, which likely coalesced from the debris blasted into space by this monster impact, is actually between 4.4 billion and 4.45 billion years old.

The finding, which would make the moon 100 million years younger than previously thought, could reshape scientists' understanding of the early Earth as well as its natural satellite, researchers said.

"There are several important implications of this late moon formation that have not yet been worked out," Richard Carlson, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., said in a statement.

"For example, if the Earth was already differentiated prior to the giant impact, would the impact have blown off the primordial atmosphere that formed from this earlier epoch of Earth history?" added Carlson, who is presenting the new results Monday (Sept. 23) in London at a meeting organized by the Royal Society called "Origin of the Moon."

Scientists know the solar system's age (4.568 billion years) quite well. And they can pin down the formation times of relatively small bodies such as asteroids precisely, too, by noting when these objects underwent extensive melting — a consequence, in part, of the heat generated by the collision and fusion of these objects' building-block "planetesimals."

For example, analysis of meteorites that came from the asteroid Vesta and eventually rained down on Earth reveals that the 330-mile-wide (530 kilometers) space rock is 4.565 billion years old. Vesta cooled relatively quickly and is too small to have retained enough internal heat to drive further melting or volcanism, Carlson explained.

But it's tougher to nail down the age of larger solar-system bodies, he said.

"Ask the same question of the Earth or moon, and you don't get a very precise answer," Carlson said. "Earth likely took longer to grow to full size compared to a small asteroid like Vesta, and every step in its growth tends to erase, or at least cloud, the memory of earlier events."

Scientists keep getting better and better estimates, however, as they refine their techniques and technology improves. And those estimates are pushing the moon's formation date farther forward in time.

The moon is thought to have harbored a global ocean of molten rock shortly after its dramatic formation. Currently, the most precisely determined age for the lunar rocks that arose from that ocean is 4.360 billion years, the researchers said.

Read more at Discovery News

Densest Array of Carbon Nanotubes Grown to Date

Scanning electron microscope images are of CNT forests with low and high density.

Carbon nanotubes' outstanding mechanical, electrical and thermal properties make them an alluring material to electronics manufacturers. However, until recently scientists believed that growing the high density of tiny graphene cylinders needed for many microelectronics applications would be difficult.

Now a team from Cambridge University in England has devised a simple technique to increase the density of nanotube forests grown on conductive supports about five times over previous methods. The high density nanotubes might one day replace some metal electronic components, leading to faster devices. The researchers report their finding in the journal Applied Physics Letters, which is produced by AIP Publishing.

"The high density aspect is often overlooked in many carbon nanotube growth processes, and is an unusual feature of our approach," says John Robertson, a professor in the electronic devices and materials group in the department of engineering at Cambridge. High-density forests are necessary for certain applications of carbon nanotubes, like electronic interconnects and thermal interface materials, he says.

Robertson and his colleagues grew carbon nanotubes on a conductive copper surface that was coated with co-catalysts cobalt and molybdenum. In a novel approach, the researchers grew at lower temperature than is typical which is applicable in the semiconductor industry. When the interaction of metals was analyzed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, it revealed the creation of a more supportive substrate for the forests to root in. The subsequent nanotube growth exhibited the highest mass density reported so far.

Read more at Science Daily

NASA's Deep Space Comet Hunter Mission Comes to an End

After almost 9 years in space that included an unprecedented July 4th impact and subsequent flyby of a comet, an additional comet flyby, and the return of approximately 500,000 images of celestial objects, NASA's Deep Impact mission has ended.

The project team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has reluctantly pronounced the mission at an end after being unable to communicate with the spacecraft for over a month. The last communication with the probe was Aug. 8. Deep Impact was history's most traveled comet research mission, going about 4.7 billion miles (7.58 billion kilometers).

"Deep Impact has been a fantastic, long-lasting spacecraft that has produced far more data than we had planned," said Mike A'Hearn, the Deep Impact principal investigator at the University of Maryland in College Park. "It has revolutionized our understanding of comets and their activity."

Deep Impact successfully completed its original bold mission of six months in 2005 to investigate both the surface and interior composition of a comet, and a subsequent extended mission of another comet flyby and observations of planets around other stars that lasted from July 2007 to December 2010. Since then, the spacecraft has been continually used as a space-borne planetary observatory to capture images and other scientific data on several targets of opportunity with its telescopes and instrumentation.

Launched in January 2005, the spacecraft first traveled about 268 million miles (431 million kilometers) to the vicinity of comet Tempel 1. On July 3, 2005, the spacecraft deployed an impactor into the path of comet to essentially be run over by its nucleus on July 4. This caused material from below the comet's surface to be blasted out into space where it could be examined by the telescopes and instrumentation of the flyby spacecraft. Sixteen days after that comet encounter, the Deep Impact team placed the spacecraft on a trajectory to fly back past Earth in late December 2007 to put it on course to encounter another comet, Hartley 2 in November 2010.

"Six months after launch, this spacecraft had already completed its planned mission to study comet Tempel 1," said Tim Larson, project manager of Deep Impact at JPL. "But the science team kept finding interesting things to do, and through the ingenuity of our mission team and navigators and support of NASA's Discovery Program, this spacecraft kept it up for more than eight years, producing amazing results all along the way."

The spacecraft's extended mission culminated in the successful flyby of comet Hartley 2 on Nov. 4, 2010. Along the way, it also observed six different stars to confirm the motion of planets orbiting them, and took images and data of Earth, the moon and Mars. These data helped to confirm the existence of water on the moon, and attempted to confirm the methane signature in the atmosphere of Mars. One sequence of images is a breathtaking view of the moon transiting across the face of Earth.

In January 2012, Deep Impact performed imaging and accessed the composition of distant comet C/2009 P1 (Garradd). It took images of comet ISON this year and collected early images of ISON in June.

After losing contact with the spacecraft last month, mission controllers spent several weeks trying to uplink commands to reactivate its onboard systems. Although the exact cause of the loss is not known, analysis has uncovered a potential problem with computer time tagging that could have led to loss of control for Deep Impact's orientation. That would then affect the positioning of its radio antennas, making communication difficult, as well as its solar arrays, which would in turn prevent the spacecraft from getting power and allow cold temperatures to ruin onboard equipment, essentially freezing its battery and propulsion systems.

"Despite this unexpected final curtain call, Deep Impact already achieved much more than ever was envisioned," said Lindley Johnson, the Discovery Program Executive at NASA Headquarters, and the Program Executive for the mission since a year before it launched. "Deep Impact has completely overturned what we thought we knew about comets and also provided a treasure trove of additional planetary science that will be the source data of research for years to come."

Read more at Science Daily