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 the rarest things on Earth — rarer even than gold.

A Martian meteorite that was buried in Antarctica made news in 1996. NASA scientists theorized that the rock, found in 1984, showed signs of traces of life from Mars, fossils of what seemed to be lifelong forms. Even the White House made an announcement about it as the first sign of life outside of Earth. Years of study since then have led much of the astronomy world to conclude that there was not enough evidence to support the claim.

Because known Martian meteorite falls happen only once every 50 years or so — 1815 in France, 1865 in India, 1911 in Egypt and 1962 in Nigeria — this is a once-in-a-career or even one-in-a-lifetime event.

“It’s incredibly fresh. It’s highly valuable for that reason,” said Carl Agee, director of the Institute of Meteoritics and curator at the University of New Mexico. “For someone who knows their Martian, this is a beauty. It’s gorgeous.”

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 back a new layer of crazy to expose those oh-so-cleverly hidden machinations powering this doomed plane of existence. Welcome — back — to Tinfoil Tuesday…

What a relief! (I wonder if this woman’s Pleiadian lover knew about this?)

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.”

Read More: News.Au.com

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.

[Continues at The Raw Story]

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 Sciences (EAPS), and Gary Ruvkun, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, who came up with the instrument concept and put together the initial team. Lui presented a summary of their proposed instrument, called the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Genomes (SETG), at the IEEE Aerospace Conference this month in Big Sky, Mont.

The idea is based on several facts that have now been well established. First, in the early days of the solar system, the climates on Mars and the Earth were much more similar than they are now, so life that took hold on one planet could presumably have survived on the other. Second, an estimated one billion tons of rock have traveled from Mars to Earth, blasted loose by asteroid impacts and then traveling through interplanetary space before striking Earth’s surface. Third, microbes have been shown to be capable of surviving the initial shock of such an impact, and there is some evidence they could also survive the thousands of years of transit through space before arriving at another planet.

Read More on MIT News Office

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 added: ‘The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds. Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.’

Worden said he has discussed the potential price tag for one-way trips to Mars with Google co-founder Larry Page, telling him such a mission could be done for $10 billion. He said said: ‘His response was, “Can you get it down to $1 [billion] or $2 billion?” So now we’re starting to get a little argument over the price.’

Worden also suggested that new technologies such as synthetic biology and alterations to the human genome could also be explored ahead of the mission. And he said that he believed the mission should visit Mars’ moons first, where scientists can do extensive telerobotics exploration of the planet. He claims that humans could be on Mars’ moons by 2030.

News of the Hundred Years Starship comes as new research found that a one-way human mission to Mars is technologically feasible and would be a cheaper option than bringing astronauts back. Writing in the Journal of Cosmology, scientists Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies, say that the envision sending four volunteer astronauts on the first mission to permanently colonise Mars…

[continues in the Daily Mail]

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 beyond.

I look skeptical, and Chang Díaz smiles politely. He’s used to this reaction. He has been developing the concept of a plasma rocket since 1973, when he become a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His idea was this: Rocket fuel is a heavy and inefficient propellant. So instead he imagined building a spaceship engine that uses nuclear reactors to heat plasma to two million degrees. Magnetic fields would eject the hot gas out of the back of the engine. His calculations showed that a spaceship using such an engine could reach 123,000 miles per hour—New York to Los Angeles in about a minute.

Chang Díaz has spent nearly his entire career laboring to convince anyone who would listen that his idea will work, but that career has also taken several turns in the process. One day in 1980, he was pitching the unlimited potential of plasma rockets to yet another MIT professor. The professor listened patiently. “It sounds like borderline science fiction, I know,” Chang Díaz was saying. Then the telephone rang. The professor held up a finger. “Why, yes, he’s right here,” the surprised engineer said into the receiver, then handed it over. “Franklin, it’s for you.” NASA was on the line. The standout student from Costa Rica had been selected to become an astronaut, the first naturalized American ever chosen for NASA’s most elite corps. “I was so excited, I was practically dancing,” Chang Díaz recalls. “I almost accidentally strangled my professor with the telephone cord.”

All astronauts have big dreams, but Franklin Chang Díaz’s dreams are huge. As a college student, as a 25-year astronaut and as an entrepreneur, his single animating intention has always been to build—and fly—a rocketship to Mars. “Of course I wanted to be an astronaut, and of course I want to be able to fly in this,” he says of his plasma-thrust rocket…

[continues in in Popular Science]

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 to make sure that when they land, they’ve got a support system. I’m convinced that sending people to Mars is so expensive that if you go once and bring the people back and then go again and bring the people back, we’re eventually going to run out of money. But what if we send people the first time and they don’t come back? What if they stay there?

Then you’ve got a bunch of astronauts on Mars going, “Hello? Can I get a little help here? What the fuck?”

But then we send six more people, and now we’ve got twelve. It’d be between three and four times cheaper to send people there and then leave them there.

Do we tell them that in advance? Or do we just wait and spring it on them after they’ve landed?

Did the Pilgrims on the Mayflower sit around Plymouth Rock waiting for a return trip? They came here to settle. And that’s what we should be doing on Mars. When you go to Mars, you need to have made the decision that you’re there permanently. The more people we have there, the more it can become a sustaining environment. Except for very rare exceptions, the people who go to Mars shouldn’t be coming back. Once you get on the surface, you’re there.

You’re talking about building a colony?

Exactly! Every twenty-six months, there’s a window of going to Mars that may last for about a month or so. It just so happens that there’s an opportunity to put a habitat on Mars in the fall of 2022. So we put a habitat there and you check it out for a year or so, and it’s unmanned. Then in the spring of 2025, I send a crew and they stay for a year and a half, and then I bring them back. I send another crew in ‘27 and then I bring them back. I send another crew there in ‘29, and they stay. And then in ‘31 I send six more people, three to one of the moons of Mars and three directly to Mars, and now I’ve got nine people there. I can add six every twenty-six months.

How long before you show up and declare yourself supreme ruler of Mars?

(Laughs.) No, no, no…

[continues in in Vanity Fair]

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 question. Since MSIP began in 2004, more than 50,000 students have participated to varying extents.

“The students developed a research project focused on finding the most common locations of lava tubes on Mars,” says Mitchell. “Do they occur most often near the summit of a volcano, on its flanks, or the plains surrounding it?”

To answer the question, the students examined more than 200 images of Mars taken with the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS), an instrument on NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter. Philip Christensen, a Regents’ Professor of geological sciences in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, is the instrument’s designer and principal investigator. The students chose for their targeted THEMIS image (plus a secondary backup image) areas on Pavonis Mons volcano that had yet to be photographed by THEMIS at highest resolution (18 meters, or 59 feet, per pixel)…

[continues at PhysOrg.com]

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 during a months-long trip to Mars…

[continues at Information Week]

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 lost control over one of its six wheels years ago, before becoming stuck in a Martian sand trap back in April 2009. It lost function in another wheel as NASA struggled to free the robotic explorer.

Rover handlers finally conceded defeat in January 2010, after ten months of trying to free Spirit. But they still took the optimistic approach by christening Spirit as an immobile science station. There was still a chance for Spirit to add to the thousands of images it had snapped on Mars, not to mention its scientific achievement of revealing how the planet’s rocks and soil showed signs of extensive water exposure.

[Read more at PopSci]

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 have concluded there is probably water on the planet. But the NASA boffins said the recent missions have gone further than any others in proving there is life on Mars.

They were particularly excited about the discovery of a sulphate called gypsum which, it has emerged recently, is found in large quantities among fossils in the Mediterranean…

[continues in The Sun]

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 of a 2.5-mile portion of the crater’s wall terraces.

[continues in the Daily Mail]

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 our planet during its egg-shaped orbit—for 2010 at 4:04 a.m. ET Saturday, reaching a distance of 221,577 miles (356,593 kilometers) from Earth.

At its farthest from Earth, the moon is said to be at apogee. Perigee and apogee each happen generally once a month, but the moon’s wobbly orbit means that the satellite’s exact distance at each of those events varies over the year. The moon’s phase can also be different during each apogee and perigee.

“This month has the largest full moon of 2010, because it coincides with the special moment when the full moon happens to occur on the same day as it is at perigee,” said Marc Jobin, an astronomer at the Montréal Planetarium.

And in a remarkable coincidence, Mars is at opposition tonight—directly opposite to the sun in the sky—so that as the sun sets in the southwest, Mars rises in the northeast.

Around opposition, the red planet gets closest to Earth. This year Mars swung by at just 61 million miles (98 million kilometers) on January 27, and it will still appear remarkably bright during tonight’s sky show…

[continues at National Geographic]

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 by American and Japanese scientists after they lay in the icy desert for thousands of years.

But of special interest is a meteorite that fell in many chunks at Nakhla, Egypt, in 1911. Most of the fragments ended up in London’s Natural History Museum.

The stones are known to be from Mars because gases trapped inside them match those in rocks examined by probes on the red planet. They were blasted out of its surface by asteroid impacts and then drifted around the solar system for millions of years before falling to earth…

[continues on Scientific American]

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, minerals known to form on Earth only in the presence of liquid water.

[Read more at National Geographic]

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 develop no valleys. This would also explain why the valleys become shallower as you go from north to south, which is the case.”

[continues at AP]

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