• Tag Archives Mars

  • Nasa says Mars mystery rock that ‘appeared’ from nowhere is ‘like nothing we’ve seen before’

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Squyres said his team had two theories on how the rock got there – that there’s “a smoking hole in the ground somewhere nearby” and it was caused by a meteor, or that it was “somehow flicked out of the ground by a wheel” as the rover went by.

    “We had driven a metre or two away from here, and I think the idea that somehow we mysteriously flicked it with a wheel is the best explanation,” Squyres said.

    Yet the story got even stranger when Opportunity investigated further. Squyres explained: “We are as we speak situated with the rover’s instruments deployed making measurements of this rock.

    “We’ve taken pictures of both the doughnut and jelly parts, and the got the first data on the composition of the jelly yesterday.

    “It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” he said. “It’s very high in sulphur, it’s very high in magnesium, it’s got twice as much manganese as we’ve ever seen in anything on Mars.

    “I don’t know what any of this means. We’re completely confused, and everyone in the team is arguing and fighting (over what it means).

    “That’s the beauty of this mission… what I’ve realised is that we will never be finished. There will always be something tantalising, something wonderful just beyond our reach that we didn’t quite get to – and that’s the nature of exploration.”

    Squyres was speaking at an event marking the 10th anniversary of the arrival of Opportunity and Spirit on the surface of Mars.

    While Spirit lost contact with Earth and was later declared “dead” in 2010, Opportunity has now roamed the planet far in excess of what was originally planned as a three-month mission. Nasa said that with its maximum speed of just 0.05mph, as of “Sol 3547” (15 January 2014) Opportunity had covered just over 24 miles (38km).

    Full article: http://www.independe … -before-9070323.html


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  • Curiosity Rover Makes Big Water Discovery in Mars Dirt, a ‘Wow Moment’

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Future Mars explorers may be able to get all the water they need out of the red dirt beneath their boots, a new study suggests.

    NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has found that surface soil on the Red Planet contains about 2 percent water by weight. That means astronaut pioneers could extract roughly 2 pints (1 liter) of water out of every cubic foot (0.03 cubic meters) of Martian dirt they dig up, said study lead author Laurie Leshin, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

    “For me, that was a big ‘wow’ moment,” Leshin told SPACE.com. “I was really happy when we saw that there’s easily accessible water here in the dirt beneath your feet. And it’s probably true anywhere you go on Mars.”

    Curiosity touched down inside Mars’ huge Gale Crater in August 2012, kicking off a planned two-year surface mission to determine if the Red Planet could ever have supported microbial life. It achieved that goal in March, when it found that a spot near its landing site called Yellowknife Bay was indeed habitable billions of years ago.

    But Curiosity did quite a bit of science work before getting to Yellowknife Bay. Leshin and her colleagues looked at the results of Curiosity’s first extensive Mars soil analyses, which the 1-ton rover performed on dirt that it scooped up at a sandy site called Rocknest in November 2012.

    Using its Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, or SAM, Curiosity heated this dirt to a temperature of 1,535 degrees Fahrenheit (835 degrees Celsius), and then identified the gases that boiled off. SAM saw significant amounts of carbon dioxide, oxygen and sulfur compounds — and lots of water on Mars.

    SAM also determined that the soil water is rich in deuterium, a “heavy” isotope of hydrogen that contains one neutron and one proton (as opposed to “normal” hydrogen atoms, which have no neutrons). The water in Mars’ thin air sports a similar deuterium ratio, Leshin said.

    “That tells us that the dirt is acting like a bit of a sponge and absorbing water from the atmosphere,” she said.

    Full article: http://www.space.com … curiosity-rover.html


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  • For NASA, Mars Beyond Reach Without Budget Boost

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    If NASA continues to be funded at its current levels, a manned mission to Mars could be permanently beyond reach, space industry experts say.

    When asked how soon astronauts could potentially set foot on Mars under NASA’s current budget constraints, Thomas Young, the former executive vice president of Lockheed Martin, says the outlook is bleak.

    “With the current budget, bear with me, I would probably say never,” Young said during a meeting of the U.S. House of Representative’s space subcommittee today (June 19).

    Steven Squyres, the principal investigator for NASA’s Opportunity rover now exploring Mars, agreed. Squyres, an astronomy professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., also gave testimony before the House subcommittee.

    Young said that if the public and government officials treat a mission to Mars with the importance of the first mission to the moon, it is possible to put boots on the Red Planet in a little more than a decade from now.

    “Mars is harder; there are a lot of significant issues to resolve before going to Mars,” Young said. “But I think that if we had the same national commitment to it [as we did to going to the moon], I would say by 2025, we could land on Mars.”

    The current draft of NASA’s budget produced by the House asks the space agency to develop a roadmap that will define the technical capabilities needed to send humans to Mars sometime in the future.

    Full article: http://www.space.com … se.html?cmpid=514630


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