The more NASA explores the neighboring planet, the more odd it gets. Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter (NASA’s Mars Exploration Program) since 2006 circles to provide the shiniest and maximum-resolution pics from the surface of the planet. Orbiter’s HIRISE camera (the cam can actually take photos of things about a meter wide on the ground) already resolved many interesting things over the years and recently unveiled another wonder that’s unknown to human brain.

HiRISE catches moments slightly different than our own eyes. Photo shows that new dunes were discovered, however there are actually no turquoise dunes on the planet Mars. This false color pictures do allow scientists to differentiate various textures and materials regarding the exploration program.

A group of Greek students have come up with a deployable greenhouse project named Popeye on Mars, that could feed Mars settlers. Capable of producing fresh spinach in just 45 days, the dome-shaped aeroponic growing system could be used for pre-deployment on a space mission to the Moon or Mars. The basic idea behind Popeye on Mars is to create a greenhouse growing unit that could be sent to an otherwise inhospitable planet or moon to begin growing fresh food autonomously before humans arrive. Designed to be deployed near the equator of Mars, Popeye would take advantage of solar energy and a relative lack of inclement weather to form a self-sufficient growing system.

“During the day, when the covers open and the PVPs [photovoltaic panels] are deployed, the greenhouse occupies a circle area of around 1.5 meters radius,” explain the designers.  “Without human intervention, the greenhouse operates for approximately 45 days (spinach life cycle). This period can vary up to 65 days depending on the planted plants. After this period, the stored oxygen (O2) and the produced seeds are ready to be collected. After elementary maintenance and seeds planting, the greenhouse is functional again and ready for the next harvest.”

The project has been named a winner in the NASA International Space Apps Challenge, a competition that seeks to engage thousands of people around the world in space exploration and is entirely open-source, and plans can be found on Git Hub.

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Each and every planet, and one dwarf planet, in our solar system, represented with the single best image ever taken of it. Say hello to our neighbors.

 Mercury

 Venus

 Mars

 Jupiter

 Saturn

 Uranus

 Neptune

 Pluto

The new comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) was discovered Jan. 3 by the Scottish-Australian astronomer Robert H. McNaught using the 0.5-meter Uppsala Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, New South Wales, Australia.

When it was discovered, Comet Siding Spring was 1.07 billion kilometers (669 million miles) from the sun.  It is expected to pass closest to the sun (called perihelion) on Oct. 25, 2014 at a distance of 209 million km (130 million miles).

But, less than a week earlier, on Oct. 19, 2014, the comet is projected to pass very close to Mars, within 101,000 km (63,000 miles).

However, because the comet is currently very far out in space and has been under observation for less than three months, its orbit will likely need to be refined in the coming months.  So the comet’s approach to Mars might ultimately end up being farther or closer than what current predictions suggest.  Last Wednesday observations made by Leonid Elenin, a reputable Russian astronomer who works at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, suggested that the comet could pass even closer — just 41,300 km (25,700 miles) from the center of Mars.

According to Elenin: “On the 19th October 2014, the comet might reach apparent magnitude of -8 to -8.5, as seen from Mars!”  (This would make the comet 15 to 25 times brighter than Venus).  “Perhaps it will be possible to acquire high-resolution images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO),” he added.

Then there is also the small possibility that the comet could collide with Mars.

Moving at 35 miles (56 km) per second, such a collision could create an impact crater on Mars up to ten times the diameter of the comet’s nucleus and up to 2 km (1.25 miles) deep, with an energy equivalent up to of 2 x 10^10 megatons!

You may recall Comet Shoemaker-Levy’s plunge into Jupiter in July 1994 which left dark telltale scars on Jupiter’s cloud tops for many months thereafter.

This will be the second close shave of Mars by a passing comet within a time span of just over a year… What are the odds?

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Now they are uncovering the complex geologic history of the area and have stumbled across many interesting features.

Here, some of the minerals are sedimentary, suggesting that flowing water moved small grains around and deposited them, and other evidence suggests water moved through the rocks after they had formed. Tiny spherical concretions scattered through the rock were likely formed when water percolated through rock pores and minerals precipitated out. Other samples are cracked and filled with veins of material such as calcium sulfate, that were also formed when water percolated through the cracks and deposited the mineral.

“The scientists have been let into the candy store,” said engineer Richard Cook, project manager for Curiosity, during a NASA teleconference on Jan. 15.

“Basically these rocks were saturated with water,” said geologist John Grotzinger of Caltech, Curiosity’s project scientist, who added that these rocks indicate the most complex history of water that researchers have yet seen on Mars.

Curiosity used its high-resolution Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on some of these rocks. They are sandstones containing larger grains up to 2 mm long surrounded by fine silt grains. Many of the grains are rounded, suggesting they were knocked about and worn down somehow. They were most likely transported by water flowing at least 1 meter per second (2.2 mph).

The next step for Curiosity is to drill 5 centimeter holes into some of these rocks and search for aqueous minerals, isotope ratios that could indicate the composition of Mars’ atmosphere in the past, and possibly organic material.

The drilling will probably take place within two weeks, though NASA engineers are still unsure of the exact date. The procedure will be “the most significant engineering thing we’ve done since landing,” said Cook.

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Via: Wired

Well, then I have really good news for you.

Mars One, a nonprofit organization based in the Netherlands, hopes to establish the first human settlement on Mars in 2023.

They need astronauts.

Anyone can apply if they meet the basic requirements. Unfortunately, the job isn’t for just anyone.

The project recently released its guidelines for potential applicants, and they’re pretty vague. So long as you’re over 18, resilient, adaptable, curious, creative and resourceful and “have a deep sense of purpose”, “willingness to build and maintain healthy relationships” and “the capacity for self-reflection,” you have a shot. You’ll also need to be willing to dedicate eight years of your life to training for the journey. Mars One plans to fund the mission by making it a reality TV show, in the “biggest media spectacle in history” with help from Mars One ambassador Paul Römer, co-creator of the globally successful Big Brother reality TV show. Everyone will get to watch the astronauts make their journey, and also choose which candidate gets to go (as in the Big Brother).

“Mars One is an extraordinarily daring initiative by people with vision and imagination,” says Mars One Ambassador and physics Nobel prize winner Gerard ‘t Hooft. “This project seems to me to be the only way to fulfill dreams of mankind’s expansion into space.”

The selection process will begin during the first half of 2013. Mars One experts and viewers of a “global, televised program”  will choose from among the applications. Those ultimately selected will be assembled into teams of four. At least six teams are supposed to be ready to launch in September 2022.

Only one team will make the first trip to the Red Planet.

The plan:

2013: Crowdsourced selection of first four astronauts; a replica of the Mars settlement built in the desert to help the astronauts prepare and train, and to test the equipment — all carried on TV.

2014: Production of the first Mars communication satellite.

2016:  Supply mission launched for Mars — to land October 2016 with its cargo: 2500 kilograms of food.

2018: Robotic exploration vehicle lands on Mars to pick best location for the settlement.

2021: Two living units, two life support units, a second supplies unit and another rover create a habitable settlement.

2022: Liftoff on the future SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy.

2023: Landing on a lander built by SpaceX, likely a special variant of the Dragon capsule.

2025: Second group of four astronauts lands.

At least eight years of training will be provided before launch, including simulated missions, practice in a restricted mobility environment, and lessons in electronics, equipment repair, basic and critical medical care. In 2016, the company plans to begin rocketing supplies to Mars, including spare parts, two rovers, and living units that can be assembled into a base once humans arrive.

But it’s a one-way trip for all involved: Once on Mars, there’s no coming back.

Well, it’s definitely tempting for me.

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Curiosity is up (down?) there for three months now, and the space agency have some good news about radiation levels on the Red Planet. Preliminary data collected using the rover’s Radiation Assessment Detector (or RAD) revealed that levels on the ground are similar to what astronauts encounter on the International Space Station. The findings mark the first time that cosmic rays have been measured on the surface of another planet, and come 100 years after Victor Hess discovered cosmic rays on Earth by using a hot-air balloon.

“The astronauts can live in this environment,” Don Hassler, principal investigator on Curiosity’s RAD hardware, said in a press conference.”Basically, we’re finding that the Mars atmosphere is acting as a shield for the radiation on the surface and as the atmosphere gets thicker, that provides more of a shield and therefore we see a dip in our radiation dose,”

However, humans would still experience higher levels (about double) of radiation on the way to and from the Mars, so the results are encouraging, but they’re just one good news among many details to think of.  For more details on the RAD’s findings, look below for the press release.

NASA Rover Providing New Weather and Radiation Data About Mars

November 15, 2012

PASADENA, Calif. — Observations of wind patterns and natural radiation patterns on Mars by NASA’s Curiosity rover are helping scientists better understand the environment on the Red Planet’s surface.

Researchers using the car-sized mobile laboratory have identified transient whirlwinds, mapped winds in relation to slopes, tracked daily and seasonal changes in air pressure, and linked rhythmic changes in radiation to daily atmospheric changes. The knowledge being gained about these processes helps scientists interpret evidence about environmental changes on Mars that might have led to conditions favorable for life.

During the first 12 weeks after Curiosity landed in an area named Gale Crater, an international team of researchers analyzed data from more than 20 atmospheric events with at least one characteristic of a whirlwind recorded by the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) instrument. Those characteristics can include a brief dip in air pressure, a change in wind direction, a change in wind speed, a rise in air temperature or a dip in ultraviolet light reaching the rover. Two of the events included all five characteristics.

In many regions of Mars, dust-devil tracks and shadows have been seen from orbit, but those visual clues have not been seen in Gale Crater. One possibility is that vortex whirlwinds arise at Gale without lifting as much dust as they do elsewhere.

“Dust in the atmosphere has a major role in shaping the climate on Mars,” said Manuel de la Torre Juarez of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. He is the investigation scientist for REMS, which Spain provided for the mission. “The dust lifted by dust devils and dust storms warms the atmosphere.”

Dominant wind direction identified by REMS has surprised some researchers who expected slope effects to produce north-south winds. The rover is just north of a mountain called Mount Sharp. If air movement up and down the mountain’s slope governed wind direction, dominant winds generally would be north-south. However, east-west winds appear to predominate. The rim of Gale Crater may be a factor.

“With the crater rim slope to the north and Mount Sharp to the south, we may be seeing more of the wind blowing along the depression in between the two slopes, rather than up and down the slope of Mount Sharp,” said Claire Newman, a REMS investigator at Ashima Research in Pasadena. “If we don’t see a change in wind patterns as Curiosity heads up the slope of Mount Sharp — that would be a surprise.”

REMS monitoring of air pressure has tracked both a seasonal increase and a daily rhythm. Neither was unexpected, but the details improve understanding of atmospheric cycles on present-day Mars, which helps with estimating how the cycles may have operated in the past.

The seasonal increase results from tons of carbon dioxide, which had been frozen into a southern winter ice cap, returning into the atmosphere as southern spring turns to summer. The daily cycle of higher pressure in the morning and lower pressure in the evening results from daytime heating of the atmosphere by the sun. As morning works its way westward around the planet, so does a wave of heat-expanded atmosphere, known as a thermal tide.

Effects of that atmospheric tide show up in data from Curiosity’s Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD). This instrument monitors high-energy radiation considered to be a health risk to astronauts and a factor in whether microbes could survive on Mars’ surface.

“We see a definite pattern related to the daily thermal tides of the atmosphere,” said RAD Principal Investigator Don Hassler of the Southwest Research Institute’s Boulder, Colo., branch. “The atmosphere provides a level of shielding, and so charged-particle radiation is less when the atmosphere is thicker. Overall, Mars’ atmosphere reduces the radiation dose compared to what we saw during the flight to Mars.”

The overall goal of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission is to use 10 instruments on Curiosity to assess whether areas inside Gale Crater ever offered a habitable environment for microbes.

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Via: Cnet

Curiosity was in an area called Rocknest for several weeks now, where it was sampling the Martian soil, practicing using its scoop and analysis instruments. The plan was to take three scoops and send the sand through the Collection and Handling for In-Situ Martian Rock Analysis (CHIMRA) tool to clean it of any material that may have brought from Earth.

In the second scoop, “we began to see some bright flecks in the scoop areas,” said geologist John Grotzinger of Caltech, and after last week’s plastic encounter, Curiosity’s science team worried the new particles might be of earth origin. Since they turned up in scoop holes, however, the granules must have been buried in the subsurface. They likely came from larger minerals that broke down. They might also represent the product of some geological soil process that generates a bright but unknown mineral.

“The science team started calling them schmutz,” said Grotzinger. “We can’t rule out that they’re something man-made but we don’t think that they are.”

In coming weeks, Curiosity will position its high-resolution ChemCam to get a close-up look at the schmutz. In the meantime, the rover completed its three scoops and has delivered a sample of Martian soil to its internal CheMin instrument. It will determine what minerals occur in this area.

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Via: Wired

The evidence came in the form of an outcropping of rocks between the north rim of Gale Crater and the foot of Mount Sharp, that appears to have been heaved up and covered with streambed gravel. The rover drove by the outcropping, which had earlier been spotted by one of NASA’s Mars orbiters. NASA JPL scientists think that the small stones were previously moved because of their shape. Their size (grain-big to golf ball-size) are a telltale sign that water did the work instead of wind. Evidence of H2O on Mars has been spotted before, but this is the first direct look at the composition of riverbeds NASA has observed from above.

“We found interesting outcrops,” said John Grotzinger, a project scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a geology professor at the California Institute of Technology. “It looks like someone came along with a jackhammer and lifted up a sidewalk… This is a rock that was formed in the presence of water… a vigorous flow in the surface of Mars. We are really excited about this because this is the reason we came to this site.”

According to William Dietrich, Curiosity science co-investigator, it’s estimated that water flowed at the site anywhere from thousands to millions of years ago, moved at a clip of roughly 3 feet per second and was somewhere between ankle and hip deep.

“A long-flowing stream can be a habitable environment,” Mars Science Laboratory Project Scientist John Grotzinger said. “It is not our top choice as an environment for preservation of organics, though. We’re still going to Mount Sharp, but this is insurance that we have already found our first potentially habitable environment.”

Now that scientists have proof that water once flowed across Mars, they can begin to look for signs of other elements, such as carbon, that are also needed to support life.

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Via: CW

When searching for life on another world, the most fundamental precaution that any space agency needs to take with any probe or rover is to ensure it doesn’t carry Earth microbes. However, if reports are to be believed, Nasa may have screwed up — and is hoping that it doesn’t find any water when it drills into the Martian soil.

According to the Los Angeles Times, six months before the rover’s launch in November 2011, a possible contamination occurred. A Nasa engineer worried that a rough landing might make assembling Curiosity’s drill on Mars impossible (and thus rendering one of the rover’s most important tools impotent)  and opened one of the units – which were designed to be stored in a sealed box, separate from the drill mechanism - to install one drill bit as a kind of backup. Under the agency’s procedures, the box should not have been opened without knowledge of a NASA scientist who is responsible for guarding Mars against contamination from Earth. But Planetary Protection Officer Catharine Conley wasn’t consulted.

“They shouldn’t have done it without telling me,” she said. “It is not responsible for us not to follow our own rules.”

So, yeah, the rover’s drill bits may be tainted with Earth microbes that could survive upon touching water.

Worried scientists at Nasa now estimate that there may be as many as 250,000 bacterial spores that could have survived both the journey to Mars and the landing. If Curiosity drills into the ground and strikes water, the Nasa team will have to assess the risk of continuing knowing that they could have permanently seeded life onto Mars. That might even mean never knowing for sure whether life was ever indigenous to the Red Planet.

Fantastic, hm?

The Gale Crater (which Curiosity is currently trundling across) was chosen for its extreme dryness, and the engineers apparently opened the sealed box as part of a “calculated risk” — the worry being that a useless drill arm was a far bigger likelihood than finding water in Gale that could be contaminated.

Even if Curiosity has been contaminated, it might seem strange to think that anything alive could survive the solar radiation-suffused vacuum of space — except many things have managed to survive both space and Mars-like conditions. Famously, tardigrades (or “water bears”) have been able to survive up to ten days unprotected exposure to space, while lichen has survived in space for over a year and half in an experiment that leant some credence to the panspermia hypothesis. There are also several groups around the world investigating bacteria which could theoretically survive on Mars and, if necessary, help terraform the planet to make it habitable for humans.

Considering Curiosity’s mission is scheduled to last for two years, Nasa scientists will be hoping they don’t come across any Martian puddles — it would be a huge shame to have to carry around a useless drill for two years, knowing how much effort it took to get it to another world, and knowing what it could potentially teach us.

Conley’s predecessor at NASA, John D. Rummel, a professor of biology at East Carolina University, said, partly in jest: “It will be a sad day for NASA if they do detect ice or water. That’s because the Curiosity project will most likely be told, ‘Gee, that’s nice. Now turn around.’ “

If water is found, Curiosity could still conduct tests from a distance with instruments including a laser and spectrometers.

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Via: L.A. Times & Wired