Pieces Of Planet Mars Landed In Africa Last Summer
Obviously, the best result from inspection would be (additional) evidence of Martian lifeforms. Via the Globe and Mail:
Scientists are confirming a recent and rare invasion from Mars: meteorite chunks from the red planet that fell in Morocco last July. The fireball was spotted in the sky six months ago, but the rocks weren’t discovered on the ground until December.
The last time a Martian meteorite fell and was found fresh was in 1962. All the known Martian rocks on Earth add up to less than 240 pounds. This is an important and unique opportunity for scientists trying to learn about Mars’ potential for life. So far, no NASA or Russian spacecraft has returned bits of Mars, so the only Martian samples scientists can examine are those that come here in a meteorite shower.
Scientists and collectors of meteorites are ecstatic, and already the rocks are fetching big bucks because they are among…
Alien Face Spotted On Mars?
Someone spotted what they describe as an image of an elongated alien head while using Google Mars to view the planet’s surface. Is it evidence of intelligent life in outer space? Or unintelligent life on Earth? Be the judge:
White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars
From Wired:
Forget Kenya. Never mind the secret madrassas. The sinister, shocking truth about Barack Obama’s past lies not in east Africa, but in outer space. As a young man in the early 1980s, Obama was part of a secret CIA project to explore Mars. The future president teleported there, along with the future head of Darpa.
That’s the assertion, at least, of a pair of self-proclaimed time-traveling, universe-exploring government agents. Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings insist that they once served as “chrononauts” at Darpa’s behest, traversing the boundaries of time and space. They swear: A youthful Barack Obama was one of them.
Perhaps this all sounds fantastical, absurd, and more than a little nuts. We couldn’t agree more. That’s one of the reasons we love conspiracy theories — the more awesomely insane, the better. Each week during 2012, when the Mayans tell us to expect the apocalypse, Danger Room will peel…
Amateur Astronomer Claims ‘Bio Station Alpha’ Is Proof Of Life, Or Past Life on Mars … (Video)
Via News.Au.com:
An American armchair astronomer claims he has found evidence of, well, something on Mars. David Martines’ YouTube video is heading for viral status after he uploaded a flyby of Google Earth’s Mars explorer zooming in on a white, cylindrical shaped object.
He’s calling it “Bio Station Alpha, because I’m just assuming that something lives in it or has lived in it”.
“It’s very unusual in that it’s quite large, it’s over 700 feet long and 150 feet wide, it looks like it’s a cylinder or made up of cylinders,” he says, “It could be a power station or it could be a biological containment or it could be a glorified garage — hope it’s not a weapon. Whoever put it up there had a purpose I’m sure. I couldn’t imagine what the purpose was. I couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to live on Mars.”
Private US Company Aims To Put A Man On Mars In 10-20 Years
One of these days, bang, zoom, straight to….Mars? SpaceX, a private company based in the California, is hoping to put a man on Mars within a decade or two. From Agence France-Presse via The Raw Story:
Private US company SpaceX hopes to put an astronaut on Mars within 10 to 20 years, the head of the firm said.
“We’ll probably put a first man in space in about three years,” Elon Musk told the Wall Street Journal Saturday. “We’re going all the way to Mars, I think… best case 10 years, worst case 15 to 20 years.”
SpaceX is one of the two leading private space companies in the United States and has won $75 million from the US space agency NASA to help its pursuit of developing a spacecraft to replace the space shuttle.
The California-based company last year completed its first successful test of an unmanned space capsule into orbit and back.
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Are We All Martians?
Ray Walston as "My Favorite Martian"
Sounds a bit like panspermia but occurring within our inner solar system. Interesting post from David L. Chandler of MIT News Office:
According to many planetary scientists, it’s conceivable that all life on Earth is descended from organisms that originated on Mars and were carried here aboard meteorites. If that’s the case, an instrument being developed by researchers at MIT and Harvard could provide the clinching evidence.
In order to detect signs of past or present life on Mars — if it is in fact true that we’re related — then a promising strategy would be to search for DNA or RNA, and specifically for particular sequences of these molecules that are nearly universal in all forms of terrestrial life.
That’s the strategy being pursued by MIT research scientist Christopher Carr and postdoctoral associate Clarissa Lui, working with Maria Zuber, head of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary…
‘Hundred Year Starship’ Readying For Sending Humans To Settle New Worlds
Artist concept of a Hundred Year Starship. Credit: NASA
It sounds totally sci-fi, but NASA appears to be serious about sending humans off into space to establish colonies without any hope of returning to Earth, per this report in the Daily Mail:
NASA is planning an audacious mission to send a manned spacecraft on a one-way trip to permanently settle on other planets. The ambitious idea is known as the Hundred Years Starship and would send astronauts to colonise planets like Mars, knowing they could never come home.
NASA Ames Director Pete Worden revealed that one of NASA’s main research centres, Ames Research Centre, has received £1million funding to start work on the project. The research team has also received an additional $100,000 from Nasa.
‘You heard it here,” Worden said at ‘Long Conversation,’ an event in San Francisco. ‘We also hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund.’ He…
The Rocket That Will Take Us To Mars
Franklin Chang Díaz. Photo: NASA
Meet Franklin Chang Díaz, the 60-year-old astronaut who has developed a nuclear rocket that could speed humans to Mars within a week, profiled in Popular Science:
You might expect to find our brightest hope for sending astronauts to other planets in Houston, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, inside a high-security multibillion-dollar facility. But it’s actually a few miles down the street, in a large warehouse behind a strip mall. This bland and uninviting building is the private aerospace start-up Ad Astra Rocket Company, and inside, founder Franklin Chang Díaz is building a rocket engine that’s faster and more powerful than anything NASA has ever flown before. Speed, Chang Díaz believes, is the key to getting to Mars alive. In fact, he tells me as we peer into a three-story test chamber, his engine will one day travel not just to the Red Planet, but to Jupiter and…
Buzz Aldrin Forging New Frontiers In Space, Again
Buzz Aldrin in 2009. Photo: Phil Konstantin
Not content with resting on the his laurels as the second man on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin has been shaking things up in the Space realm of late, what with his appeal to President Obama to push Space Solar as the leading alternative energy platform. Now he wants to go to Mars, per this profile in Vanity Fair:
President Obama gave a speech at the Kennedy Space Center in April, promising to increase NASA’s funding by six billion and send astronauts to Mars in the next two decades. Do you believe him?
I do. But what he’s describing is a very leisurely way. He’s talked about getting a bunch of things in the orbit of Mars by… what year did he say again?The mid-2030s.
Well that’s all well and good. But I want to land on the damn place! And I want to minimize the expense. I want…
Seventh Graders Find A Cave On Mars
Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
From PhysOrg.com:
California middle school students using the camera on NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter have found lava tubes with one pit that appears to be a skylight to a cave.
They went looking for lava tubes on Mars — and found what may be a hole in the roof of a Martian cave.
The 16 students in Dennis Mitchell’s 7th-grade science class at Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, California, chose to study lava tubes, a common volcanic feature on Earth and Mars. It was their class project for the Mars Student Imaging Program (MSIP), a component of ASU’s Mars Education Program, which is run out of the Mars Space Flight Facility on the Tempe campus.
The imaging program involves upper elementary to college students in Mars research by having them develop a geological question about Mars to answer. Then the students actually command a Mars-orbiting camera to take an image to answer their…
Manned Mission To Mars (Virtually) Underway
From Information Week:
An international team of researchers shuttered themselves inside a virtual spacecraft in Russia Thursday to begin a 520-day simulation of a manned mission to Mars.
The six-man team isn’t scheduled to exit their self-contained environment, which includes a mock up of the Red Planet’s surface, until November, 2011.
During their mission, the crewmembers will ‘fly to Mars’ during the first 250 days, land and explore terrain for a month, and then embark on a 230 day return flight.
Their enclosure is equipped with enough food, water, and other supplies to last through the duration of the period. It’s also armed with video games, books, and other materials designed to stave off boredom.
The project, called Mars500, is underwritten by the European, Russian, and Chinese space agencies, and operated by Moscow’s Institute for Medical and Biological Problems.
The goal is to gain a better understanding of the physical and psychological stresses astronauts would encounter…
Rover Is Now the Longest-Running Mission to the Red Planet, If It Still Lives…
After a some rocky times with the red planet in the late 1990’s, NASA finally succeeded with the Mars Rover. This cute little fellow may be near the end of its life, but it has survived years past its original 90-day mission. Popsci reports:
from Wikimedia Commons
A stuck robotic rover may have overtaken NASA’s Viking probe as the longest-surviving mission on Mars — so long as it’s still alive. But its robotic twin Opportunity could also still grab the record next month if the Spirit rover has slipped into its final winter slumber.
The golf-cart-sized Mars Exploration Rovers have long since outlived their 90-day missions; they both celebrated their six-year anniversaries on the red planet in January. Rather than sigh over the voided warranties, NASA’s rover handlers have celebrated their hardware’s persistence on a rugged and alien world.
Time and tough conditions finally caught up to the rover twins more recently. Spirit had already…
There IS Life On Mars
British tabloid newspaper The Sun (a Rupert Murdoch rag) says NASA has new evidence proving life exists on Mars. It’s wise to take any sensational headline in The Sun with a grain or three of salt, but here’s what they say:
NASA scientists last night unveiled compelling evidence of life on Mars. A special mission to the Red Planet has revealed the likely presence of a form of pond scum – the building blocks of life as we know it.
NASA unveiled the results of the recent Opportunity and Spirit probes sent millions of miles through the solar system to discover signs of extraterrestrial life. The results are so promising boffins have already planned a host of other missions to discover whether there is extraterrestrial life in the universe.
The recent missions have gathered evidence of sulphates on Mars, a strong indication there is water on the planet and therefore life. Previous missions to Mars…
Stunning New Mars Ice Wall Photo
The Daily Mail has published an incredible photo from our sister planet Mars, but it raises questions regarding NASA’s manipulation of the image – if they are going to “enhance” this one, how about others like the infamous “face”?:
It looks like a filmmaker’s apocalyptic vision of Earth following a devastating natural disaster. But this colossal ice formation is actually a portion of the wall terraces of a huge crater on Mars.
Approximately 37 miles in diameter, a section of the Mojave Crater in the planet’s Xanthe Terra region has been digitally mapped by Nasa scientists. The result is this digital terrain model that was generated from a stereo pair of images and offers a synthesized, oblique view…
Wolf Moon, Largest of 2010, Appears Tonight With Support By Mars
For those of you not in a part of the world too cold (or too far) to go outside and take a look, today brings a rare appearance of the year’s largest full moon, with a bonus appearance by planet Mars, just to the left of the moon. This report from National Geographic:
The biggest full moon of 2010 will rise in the east tonight, and it’ll appear with a bright sidekick: Mars will cozy up just to the left of the supersize moon.
January’s full moon is also called the wolf moon, according to Native American tradition associating this month’s full moon with wolves howling in the cold midwinter.
The 2010 wolf moon will appear 30 percent brighter and 14 percent larger than any other full moon this year, because our cosmic neighbor will actually be closer to Earth than usual.
The moon will be at its closest perigee—the nearest it gets to…
Proof Of Martians ‘To Come This Year’
From Paul Sutherland on Scientific American:
Final proof that Mars has bred life will be confirmed this year, leading NASA experts believe. The historic discovery will come not on Mars itself but from chunks of the red planet here on Earth.
David McKay, chief of astrobiology at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, says powerful new microscopes and other instruments will establish whether features in martian meteorites are alien fossils.
He says evidence for life in the space rocks could have been claimed by the UK if British scientists had used readily-available electron microscopes. Instead, images of colonies of martian bacteria were collected by American scientists.
The NASA team is already convinced that colonies of micro-organisms are visible inside three martian rocks that landed on Earth. If so, this would have profound implications for our understanding of life in the universe.
Two of the meteorites – ALH84001 and Yamato 593 – were found in the Antarctic…
Mars Had Liquid Water in Recent Past, Rover Finds
From National Geographic:
Even while snared in a sand trap, NASA’s Mars rover Spirit has hit “wet” pay dirt: evidence of relatively recent groundwater activity on the red planet. For almost six months the rover has been precariously perched on the edge of a shallow crater in an equatorial region of Mars. The area is filled with cooled lava flows pitted by meteorite impacts.
While on a routine drive, Spirit broke through a thin crust of hard soil that capped a filled-in impact crater, and its wheels became half buried in the soft sand.
Since early November the rover team has been remotely spinning Spirit’s wheels to try and maneuver the rover out of its trap.
During one of these rescue attempts, Spirit churned up the soil and uncovered an intriguing layer of bright, fluffy soil. Mission managers had the rover take a closer look, and they discovered that the layer is in sulfates,…
New Map Suggests Mars Was Wet And Humid
A new detailed map of Mars shows what was likely a vast ocean in the north and valleys around the equator, suggesting that the planet once had a humid, rainy climate, according to research published Monday.
The computer-generated map, based on topographic data from NASA satellites, also shows that the network of valleys on the red planet is at least twice as extensive as previously estimated.
“The relatively high values over extended regions indicate the valleys originated by means of precipitation-fed runoff erosion — the same process that is responsible for formation of the bulk of valleys on our planet,” said Wei Luo, geography professor at Northern Illinois University who co-authored the report.
“A single ocean in the northern hemisphere would explain why there is a southern limit to the presence of valley networks,” Luo said.
“The southernmost regions of Mars, located farthest from the water reservoir, would get little rainfall and would…
Mission(s) to Mars, visualized
from FastCompany:
Maybe ever since the Moon landing, it’s been pretty easy to overestimate the success of our space programs–when we want to go somewhere or launch something, we just do it, right? In actuality, space exploration remains a high risk endeavor, as the various Space Shuttle disasters have proven. And going to Mars? Maybe it’s out closest planet, but going there isn’t as easy as it seems.
To prove it, here’s a clever graph of all the missions ever sent to Mars. As you can see, it’s basically a bar graph; missions to Mars as listed chronologically, and the mission result is coded by how close the corresponding bar reaches to Mars.
Illustration by Bryan Christie
