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Good Morning,

It has been discovered that comets once held mass quantities
of water in their first million years of formation. Read all
about this new discovery in the first article.

Until Tomorrow,
Erin

Study: Comets once had watery interiors

CARDIFF, Wales - Comets held a vast ocean of water in their
interiors during the first million years after their for-
mation, a study by a Welsh university says. The liquid envi-
ronment of early comets, along with the large quantity of
organic matter already discovered, would have provided great
culture for primitive bacteria to grow and multiply, resear-
chers at Cardiff University said Thursday in a release. The
team calculated the thermal history of comets after they were
formed from interstellar and interplanetary dust about 4.5
billion years ago. A supernova injected radioactive material
into the Earth’s solar system in its infancy and some of the
radioactive material became incorporated in the comets, the
researchers theorized. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Janaki
Wickramasinghe and Max Wallis said heat emitted from radio-
activity warms initially frozen material of comets to produce
subsurface oceans that existed for 1 million years. “These
calculations, which are more exhaustive than any done before,
leave little doubt that a large fraction of the 100 billion
comets in our solar system did indeed have liquid interiors
in the past,” Wickramasinghe said. Their findings were in-
cluded in a paper published recently in the International
Journal of Astrobiology.

Study: Jellyfish help oceans mix it up

PASADENA, Calif. - Jellyfish and other small swimming marine
creatures can have a huge impact on ocean mixing, researchers
in California report. Increasingly, scientists have been
thinking about the possible role ocean animals may play in
larger-scale ocean mixing, the process by which layers of
water interact to distribute heat, nutrients and gases
throughout the oceans, California Institute of Technology
researchers said Thursday in a release. “The perspective we
usually take is how the ocean — by its currents, temper-
ature, and chemistry — is affecting animals,” says John
Dabiri, a Caltech bio-engineer who, along with Caltech grad-
uate student Kakani Katija, discovered the new mechanism.
“But there have been increasing suggestions that the inverse
is also important, how the animals themselves, via swimming,
might impact the ocean environment.” Dabiri’s and Katija’s
findings indicating the inverse to be true were published in
Thursday’s issue of Nature. Dabiri said oceanographers had
dismissed the idea that animals having a significant effect
on ocean mixing, believing that the viscosity of water would
balance out any turbulence created by small, drifting,
animals. “Results from this study will change some of our
long-held conceptions about mixing processes in the oceans,”
says David Garrison, director of the National Science
Foundation’s biological oceanography program, which funded
the research.

Space shuttle to return to Earth Friday

HOUSTON - NASA officials say they won’t know for certain
whether U.S.space shuttle Endeavour will land as scheduled
on Friday until about two hours before touchdown. Officials
will evaluate weather conditions at the Kennedy Space Center
in Florida about two hours before permitting Endeavour and
its seven-member crew to land shortly after noon EDT, NASA
said on its Web site. If weather bars a return to Kennedy on
Friday, the backup landing site at Edwards Air Force Base in
California will be activated Saturday for consideration as
well, officials said. After touching down, the astronauts
will undergo physical examinations and meet with their fam-
ilies, NASA said.