• Tag Archives Mars

  • Mysterious plumes erupt from Mars

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Amateur astronomers have spotted huge cloudlike plumes erupting from Mars – a phenomenon that scientists are at a loss to explain.

    The bright flares, which have now died away, towered higher than anything else observed in the Martian atmosphere. Their tops reached some 150 miles in altitude, more than twice as high as the highest Martian clouds, and they sprawled across 300 to 600 miles, researchers report in this week’s Nature, a science journal.

    The researchers initially were skeptical, but “we came to the conclusion that what we were seeing is actually real,” says study co-author Antonio García Muñoz, a planetary scientist at the European Space Agency. The plumes are “exceptional. … It’s difficult to come to terms with this.”

    This scientific brainteaser first came to light in early 2012, when amateur astronomer Wayne Jaeschke was poring over footage of Mars he had captured at his private observatory. He came across a puzzling image showing the Red Planet with a blob billowing off the planet’s rounded edge.

    In all his years of peering at Mars, “I’d never seen anything like that,” says Jaeschke, a West Chester, Pa., resident who spends about 100 nights a year training his gear on the heavens. He quietly ran the image by a few friends, then circulated it among a larger group of both amateur and professional astronomers.

    The image confounded the pros, too. Martian clouds, which are typically made of ice crystals, tend to be wispy, like the thin cirrus clouds seen high in Earth’s sky. But these were enormous wide plumes seen on 11 days in March 2012 and again in April 2012. Later, the scientists dug up 1997 images of Mars from the Hubble Space Telescope that show a similar plume.

    Full article: http://www.usatoday. … ing-plumes/23497289/


    📂This entry was posted in Space 📎and tagged

  • Private Mars One Colony Project Cuts Applicant Pool to 100 Volunteers

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    One hundred people are still in the running to become humanity’s first Mars explorers.

    The Netherlands-based nonprofit Mars One, which aims to land four pioneers on the Red Planet in 2025 as the vanguard of a permanent colony, has whittled its pool of astronaut candidates down to 100, organization representatives announced Monday (Feb. 16).

    More than 202,000 people applied to become Red Planet explorers after Mars One opened the selection process in April 2013. The latest cut came after Mars One medical director Norbert Kraft interviewed the 660 candidates who had survived several previous rounds of culling.

    “The large cut in candidates is an important step towards finding out who has the right stuff to go to Mars,” Mars One co-founder and CEO Bas Lansdorp said in a statement. “These aspiring Martians provide the world with a glimpse into who the modern day explorers will be.”

    The remaining pool consists of 50 men and 50 women who range in age from 19 to 60, Mars One representatives said. Thirty-nine come from the Americas (including 33 from the United States), 31 from Europe, 16 from Asia, seven from Africa and seven from Australia.

    The remaining candidates will next participate in group challenges, to demonstrate their ability and willingness to deal with the rigors of Mars life. After another round of cuts, the finalists will be divided into four-person teams, which will train in a simulated Red Planet outpost.

    Eventually, Mars One intends to select 24 astronauts (six four-person teams), who will become full-time employees of the organization and prepare for the Mars colonization mission.

    via Private Mars One Colony Project Cuts Applicant Pool to 100 Volunteers


    📂This entry was posted in Space 📎and tagged

  • Textbook launch for NASA’s Orion spacecraft

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Running a day late, a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket roared to life and vaulted into orbit Friday, boosting NASA’s first Orion deep space exploration craft into space for a long-awaited unmanned test of the vehicle the agency hopes will one day carry astronauts to an asteroid and, eventually, to Mars.

    Coming nearly three-and-a-half years after the final space shuttle launch, the maiden flight of Orion marked a major milestone for NASA, the first test of a new U.S. spacecraft designed to carry astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit since the final Apollo moon mission more than four decades ago.

    While NASA’s budget is constrained and flights to Mars are not expected before the mid-2030s (at the earliest), the launch Friday generated widespread interest and served as a major morale-booster for NASA and its contractor workforce.

    “Its biggest significance is symbolic,” space historian John Logsdon, founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, told CBS News. “This is the first time a piece of hardware intended to take humans beyond low-Earth orbit is being tested or used, for 42 years, since Apollo 17.

    “It’s a very small but real, tangible step towards eventually sending people out to the moon, beyond and eventually to Mars.”

    Speaking from orbit Thursday, Barry “Butch” Wilmore, commander of the International Space Station, said the Orion mission was “a thrilling prospect when you think about actually exploring the solar system.

    “Who knows where it will take us? Who knows where it will go?” he said of Orion. “We’ll find out as time goes forward. But this first step is a huge one on that road.”

    The heavy-lift Delta 4’s three hydrogen-fueled main engines ignited and throttled up at 7:05 a.m. EST (GMT-5). Generating nearly 2 million pounds of thrust and a fiery torrent of exhaust, the Delta 4’s three RS-68 engines quickly pushed the 1.6-million-pound launcher and spacecraft away from Pad 37 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

    …

    Making only its eighth flight, the Delta 4 “heavy,” the most powerful rocket in the current U.S. inventory, put on a thrilling sky show for thousands of space center workers, tourists and area residents as it arced away to the east over the Atlantic Ocean.

    Four minutes after liftoff, two of the three common booster cores making up the Delta 4’s first stage shut down and fell away, followed a minute-and-a-half later by shutdown and separation of the remaining first-stage core booster at an altitude of about 90 miles.

    The rocket’s hydrogen-fueled second-stage engine then took over, firing for another 11-and-a-half minutes to put Orion into an initial orbit with a high point around 550 miles and a low point of just 115 miles.

    Along the way, three large support panels were jettisoned as planned from the Orion’s service module, followed a few moments later by jettison of a dummy launch abort tower and spacecraft fairing, exposing the capsule to the space environment.

    A second 4:42-firing of the second stage RL10B-2 engine was planned at the end of the first orbit to raise the high point of the second orbit to 3,600 miles, higher than any spacecraft intended for piloted operations since the final Apollo moon mission.

    Falling back to Earth, the Orion capsule was expected to slam into the atmosphere 75 miles above the Pacific Ocean southwest of San Diego at nearly 20,000 mph, subjecting its heat shield to peak temperatures of some 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

    After slowing to a more sedate 300 mph, the spacecraft’s flight computer was programmed to jettison a protective cover over the top of the capsule, followed by two stabilizing drogue parachutes. If all goes well, three huge main parachutes will unfurl at an altitude of about 1.2 miles to slow the spacecraft to less than 20 mph before splashdown west of Baja California.

    Navy recovery forces were stationed nearby to recover the capsule and its parachutes and to carry out an initial assessment of the vehicle’s condition. The spacecraft will be hauled back to San Diego and then trucked to the Kennedy Space Center for detailed analysis.

    Full article: http://www.cbsnews.c … rocket-launch-again/


    📂This entry was posted in Space 📎and tagged