Radar glory from buried craters on icy moons

Three ice-covered moons of Jupiter, in comparison with rocky planets and Earth's moon, produce radar echoes of astounding strengths and bizarre polarizations. Scattering from buried craters can explain these and other anomalous properties of the echoes. The role of such craters is analogous to that of the water droplets that create the apparition known as "the glory," the optically bright region surrounding an observer's shadow on a cloud. Both situations involve the electromagnetic phenomenon of total internal reflection at a dielectric interface, operating in a geometry that strongly favors exact backscattering. Dim surface craters are transformed into bright glory holes by being buried under somewhat denser material, thereby increasing the intensity of their echoes by factors of hundreds. The dielectric interface thus formed at the crater walls nicely accounts for the unusual polarizations of the echoes.     

Entwined and parallel bundled orbits as alternative models for narrow planetary ringlets

Particle orbits can be bundled in two different ways to produce narrow, Uranus-type ringlets. The usual assumption is that they are packed in a parallel manner in a structure that is essentially only two-dimensional, but it is then difficult to explain the large numbers of particles per unit area of the ring plane that are inferred from the observations. The alternative of a bundle of entwined orbits produces a three-dimensional structure of potentially large projected areal density. A start has been made in identifying possible mechanisms for stabilizing these structures, but much remains to be done, particularly for the less-studied model of entwined orbits. The two models might be discriminated observationally by differences in the motion of the line of intersection of the orbital and equatorial planes, and by the predicted radial reversal (entwined) or nonreversal (parallel) of features in occultation signatures taken at certain longitudes.     

High-resolution holocene environmental changes in the thar desert, northwestern india

Sediments from Lunkaransar dry lake in northwestern India reveal regional water table and lake level fluctuations over decades to centuries during the Holocene that are attributed to changes in the southwestern Indian monsoon rains. The lake levels were very shallow and fluctuated often in the early Holocene and then rose abruptly around 6300 carbon-14 years before the present (14C yr B.P.). The lake completely desiccated around 4800 (14)C yr B.P. The end of this 1500-year wet period coincided with a period of intense dune destabilization. The major Harrapan-Indus civilization began and flourished in this region 1000 years after desiccation of the lake during arid climate and was not synchronous with the lacustral phase.     

Is titan wet or dry?

Titan's dense and cold nitrogen atmosphere contains a small amount of methane under conditions at least approaching those at which one or both constituents would condense. The possibility of methane and nitrogen rain clouds and global methane oceans has been discussed widely. From specific features of radio occultation and other Voyager results, however, it is concluded that nitrogen does not condense on Titan and that Titan has neither global methane oceans nor a global cloud of liquid methane droplets. Certain results indirectly support the conjecture that methane does not condense at any location. However, other considerations favor a methane ice haze high in the troposphere, and liquid and solid methane might exist on the surface and as low clouds at polar latitudes.     

Use of stable tracer studies to evaluate pesticide photolysis at elevated temperatures

New methods were developed to determine photolysis rates of medium-weight pesticides in the gas phase using elevated air temperatures and solid-phase microextraction (SPME). A 57-L glass chamber was constructed that utilized collimated xenon arc irradiation that could heat chamber air to increase the amount of pesticide in the gas phase. Gas-phase photolysis rates were determined at various air temperatures by comparing the rate of loss of each of the tested pesticides to a photochemically stable tracer, hexachlorobenzene. Interval sampling of gas-phase constituents was performed using SPME immediately followed by GC-ECD or GC-MSD analysis. The two pesticides under examination were the dinitroaniline herbicide trifluralin and the organophosphorus insecticide chlorpyrifos. The gas-phase photolysis for trifluralin was found to be rapid with half-lives of 22-24 min corrected for sunlight. These results were comparable to photochemical lifetime estimates from other investigators under sunlight conditions. Elevating temperatures from 60 to 80 degrees C did not affect photolysis rates, and these rates could be extrapolated to environmental temperatures. From 60 to 80 degrees C, gas-phase chlorpyrifos photolysis lifetimes were observed to range from 1.4 to 2.2 h corrected for sunlight and will thus be important together with hydroxyl radical reactions for removing this substance from the atmosphere. At these elevated temperatures, pesticides and tracer compounds were found to be substantially in the gas phase, and possible effects on reaction rates from wall interactions were minimized.