This could be the end for our hero. NASA announced that the Spirit rover, which has been stuck in the sands of Mars since the spring, has lost operation in another wheel. If scientists can’t get it going again, that could finish off the agency’s attempt to get its plucky rover on the move once more.
Though Spirit came equipped as a six-wheeler, it lost function in one front wheel early on and has driven around the Red Planet backwards with its dead wheel in tow. But, NASA’s John Callas says, two dead wheels might be one too many. “It was questionable whether we could get a five-wheel-driving rover out,” he says. “If we have a four-wheel-driving rover [with] only one driving wheel on the right-hand side … then extracting the rover from its current embedded location is unlikely” [New Scientist].
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It’s back. ALH 84001, the meteorite of Martian origin that NASA scientists claimed in 1996 contained evidence of life on Mars, has returned to the scene. This time, the team published a paper in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (the journal of the Geochemical and Meteoritic Society). And the scientists say they’re more confident than ever that the meteorite shows signs of martian life.
The NASA team of David McKay, Everett Gibson and Kathie Thomas-Keprta garnered widespread attention and even an announcement by President Bill Clinton when the 1996 paper came out. The NASA claim focused on nano-sized evidence: magnetite crystals embedded in the meteorite, which arrived here on Earth 13,000 years ago. Because some Earth bacteria secrete magnetite, McKay and his team argued that the mineral in the meteorite could be of biological origin, and the ‘biomorphs” in this image (which is from the new study) could be a fossilized colony of tiny bacteria. But the research was widely panned, and the NASA team making claims for life on Mars subsequently retreated [Discovery News].
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Scientists have long suspected that Mars was once a wet place, and that water helped to shape the geography we see there today. Now, thanks to a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, we don’t have to simply imagine what a watery Mars might have looked like long ago—geographers have created this new map of the Red Planet covered in blue water.
This new research addresses the longstanding question of whether surface water carved features, or whether other processes like groundwater sapping could’ve been involved. The new map, created by a computerised analysis of satellite data, shows that some regions of Mars had valley networks almost as dense as those on Earth. ”It is now difficult to argue against runoff erosion as the major mechanism of Martian valley networks,” said Professor Wei Luo, from Northern Illinois University in the US, who led the research [The Telegraph]. Instead, he argues, there must have been rivers on Mars long ago to create such dense networks.
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With NASA’s manned space flight program in tumult, it’s an open question when/if human boots will tramp on Martian soil. But the space agency has provided a virtual way for humans to explore the red planet, with its new “Be a Martian” program.
The online project, a collaboration between NASA and Microsoft, enlists the power of crowdsourcing. Users are invited to sort through the hundreds of thousands of photos of Mars that have been sent back by rovers and orbiters. To convince people to spend hours pouring over pictures of dusty Martian landscapes, two tasks have been set up as games where participants can win points and badges. One game asks people to count craters in photos of Mars; the other asks people to match small, high-res photos of the Martian surface with their corresponding locations on a low-res photo taken from a higher altitude [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]. (You’ll need to have Microsoft’s Silverlight application for the games and videos on the site to work.)
By enlisting citizen scientists, NASA hopes to both interest students in space careers and to make real progress in Martian research. “We really need the next generation of explorers,” says Michelle Viotti, from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which oversees Mars missions. “And we’re also accomplishing something important for Nasa. There’s so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important” [BBC News].
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Image: JPL / Microsoft
It’s a terrible thing to have a spirit that is trapped, bogged down, unable to reach its true potential. Just ask NASA–the space agency knows all about it. The Mars rover Spirit has been stuck in the sand since April 23rd, when it drove backwards into a pit of soft sand and came to a dead halt. Since then, NASA engineers have been testing out escape strategies with a mock-up rover and a sandbox in California, and today they announced that they’re ready to begin a careful operation that they hope will extricate the rover. The name of the project: Free Spirit.
Spirit and its partner rover have been exploring Mars for more than five years now, but this sandy area, dubbed Troy, could be the end of the road for Spirit. “If it cannot make the great escape from this sand trap, it’s likely that this lonely spot straddling the edge of this crater might be where Spirit ends its adventures on Mars,” said Doug McCuistion, who heads the Mars exploration program [AP].
On Monday, Spirit’s handlers will send the first commands to the rover. Over days, weeks, and months they’ll order it to slowly rotate its five working wheels and inch back along the path it came in on. Efforts to extract Spirit will continue until at least February. If the rover is not free by then, a review panel may decide whether it’s worth it to keep on trying, McCuistion said [AP]. But even if Spirit is stuck for all time, it may still be able to contribute to our scientific understanding of the Red Planet by studying its soil and atmosphere.
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Image: JPL / NASA
If NASA ever wants to send astronauts on long-term space flights, it needs to know how radiation will affect the crew. Testing humans obviously isn’t going to happen, so NASA is funding a round of experiments to study how radiation effects monkeys, the first time monkeys have been used as test subjects by NASA in decades. The point of the experiments is to understand how the harsh radioactive environment of space affects human bodies and behavior and what countermeasures can be developed to make long-duration spaceflight safe for travelers beyond Earth’s protective magnetic shield [Discovery News]. The monkey studies will advance previous radiation experiments with rats and mice and will focus on how radiation affects the monkeys’ central nervous system.
Researchers will expose 18 to 28 squirrel monkeys with a small dose of radiation, similar to what astronauts would receive on a round trip flight to Mars. The monkeys, previously trained to perform a variety of tasks, will be tested to see how the exposure affects their performance [Telegraph] at different times after exposure to gamma rays. The monkeys will not be killed during the experiments, and after testing staff and veterinarians will look after them for the rest of their lives at Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital in Boston.
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The Russian space agency has proposed a powerful new way to get a spacecraft to Mars or beyond: just put a big ole nuclear reactor on board.
The head of the agency, Anatoly Perminov, just proposed this new class of nuclear-powered spaceships for manned missions to explore our solar system. “The project is aimed at implementing large-scale space exploration programs, including a manned mission to Mars, interplanetary travel, the creation and operation of planetary outposts” [AP], Perminov wrote in an online statement. He suggested that preliminary designs could be completed by 2012, and said it would then take about nine years and $600 million to build the spacecraft. Some experts call these numbers utterly unrealistic, but Russian President Dmitry Medvedev insists that the government is very serious about the project.
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The European Space Agency is looking for six brave volunteers to sit in locked chamber for 520 days to simulate the isolation of a space flight to Mars, a trip that in real life would take around 900 days. The ‘mission’ is part of the Mars500 programme being conducted by ESA and Russia’s Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) to study human psychological, medical and physical capabilities and limitations in space [Physorg.com]. But what will scientists actually learn from locking these folks up for a year and a half on Earth, especially when the real mission is close to twice as long?
Although the volunteers will simulate a Mars mission as best they can, the most dangerous aspects of space travel won’t be replicated–like, for example, the radiation from cosmic rays. Volunteers will also be able to walk out at any time if they feel unsafe, which isn’t an option on a real space mission. At least one researcher argues that scientists could learn more by studying the historical diaries of long distance explorers to learn how people cope with stress while traveling through the unknown. Other scientists say studying people in Antarctic research stations, nuclear submarines, or astronauts aboard space stations orbiting Earth would be better strategies. Still, there are many things the Mars500 experiment will reveal that historical records cannot. Volunteers will undergo an array of tests that will monitor stress and hormone levels, immune response and sleep patterns, as well as group dynamics [New Scientist].
Space mission simulations have been conducted in the past—a similar 105-day study just ended in July—and they often have interesting results. In one event that made the news on a space mission simulation in 2000, a man twice tried to kiss a woman against her will. As a result, locks were installed between different crew compartments [New Scientist]. These simulations sound like a scientific version of the T.V. show Big Brother.
Better hurry if you want to sign up, the deadline is November 5th!
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Image: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems
Mars has quite a bit more water than previously thought, according to a new report in the journal Science. NASA said its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted ice at five new Martian craters, likely kicked up by meteor impacts [Reuters]. It’s no surprise that the NASA orbiter found water, it’s the size of the find—twice as much as in Greenland’s ice sheet—that surprised scientists. The ice is just under the surface, so it was only visible after the recent meteor impacts.
The ice was found half way between the north pole and the equator, which is the farthest south ice has been found on Mars. Scientists believe that water once flowed across the planet, but most thought the surface had been largely dry and parched, with planet-wide dust storms, for billions of years. They had long known that water ice and carbon dioxide ice accumulated at the poles in winter, but until now, they had no idea how far from the poles the underground ice sheet extended [Los Angeles Times].
This image shows two craters with blueish ice, which—when exposed to the Martian atmosphere—sublimates over the course of 15 weeks.
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Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems
The presidential panel that recently evaluated the U.S. plan for manned spaceflight declared that “Mars is the ultimate destination for human exploration,” but stressed the financial and technical difficulties that must be overcome before a boot can be planted on that red soil. Now, the New Scientist calls attention to the greatest technical hurdle: protecting astronauts from radiation during their trips to Mars.
The radiation comes in the form of cosmic rays, which are actually speeding protons and heavier atomic nuclei that rain onto our solar system from all directions. They can slice through DNA molecules when they pass through living cells and the resulting damage can lead to cancer [New Scientist]. The residents of Earth and the temporary lodgers at the International Space Station are protected from the rays by the Earth’s magnetic field, but astronauts heading to Mars would have no natural protection. Aluminum or plastic shielding on a spacecraft would have to be impractically thick to safeguard astronauts, and other solutions, like the creation of a miniature magnetic field around the spaceship, are still being developed.
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After months of meetings, the panel of space experts appointed by President Obama to evaluate NASA‘s manned spaceflight program has returned with a dire assessment: lack of financing has put the program on an “unsustainable trajectory.” The executive summary (pdf) of the report, released yesterday, puts forth a number of ideas for how the space agency can live within its means, but the final decisions on whether to act on the ideas rests with President Obama and Congress.
Among other recommendations, the panel suggested that NASA shelve its goal of rapidly returning to the moon and instead focus on nurturing a robust commercial space industry that can handle short-term objectives of the nation’s space program, such as ferrying cargo and crew to the international space station [The Wall Street Journal]. By canceling a return to the moon (which had been scheduled for around 2020) and outsourcing routine resupply missions, the panel suggested that NASA would be able to work towards more ambitious, deep space missions like a trip to an asteroid or an expedition to Mars.
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Engines powered by chemical fuel? How passé. For the spacecraft with truly modern flair, an ion thruster is the only way to go. Such a system might not provide powerful and dramatic bursts of speed, but space agencies around the world are recognizing the benefits of its slow-and-steady approach, which is just what’s needed for cruising between planets.
Ion propulsion works by electrically charging, or ionizing, a gas and accelerating the resulting ions to propel a spacecraft. The concept was conceived more than 50 years ago, and the first spacecraft to use the technology was Deep Space 1 in 1998. Since then … there have only been a few other noncommercial spacecrafts that have used ion propulsion [Technology Review]. However, the technology has a clear advantage over chemical propulsion when it comes to long distance missions, because a very small amount of gas can carry a spacecraft a long way. Astronautics expert Alexander Bruccoleri explains that with chemical propulsion, “You are limited in what you can bring to space because you have to carry a rocket that is mostly fuel” [Technology Review].
Now, a European Space Agency (ESA) probe will use four ion thrusters to scoot all the way to Mercury, the planet nearest to the sun. That mission won’t launch until 2014, but ESA officials say the $37 million propulsion system will be the most efficient yet, and will also be the most ambitious test of the technology to date. The Mercury probe will be launched by a conventional rocket, and will continue to use chemical propulsion until it’s out of Earth orbit. When it begins its six-year cruise to Mercury, though, its ion thrusters will kick in. The system will draw electricity from solar panels; as the xenon ions pass through the electrified grids they accelerate to up to 50km a second (31 miles per second) and shoot from the rear in a parallel beam. On Earth, at sea level, the thrust would be just enough to lift a pound coin. In space, however, the same thrust will create a much much bigger lift [Telegraph].
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NASA has successfully tested an inflatable heat shield for the first time, which could offer an excellent alternative to the rigid heat-resistant tiles and carbon coatings used by current spacecraft. On Monday, NASA engineers lofted a vacuum-packed shroud atop a small sounding rocket from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va. Several minutes after liftoff, the shield inflated to a 10-foot-diameter mushroom shape [LiveScience]. The inflation system, which lead scientist Neil Cheatwood calls “a glorified scuba tank,” filled the shield in less than 90 seconds. The shield then fell back to Earth, surviving the fiery reentry into the atmosphere and splashing down in the Atlantic.
The experimental system offers several potential advantages. The fragile heat-resistant tiles that cover the space shuttle need frequent inspections and repairs to prevent another tragedy like the 2003 breakup of the Columbia, while the inflatable shield could be stowed safely away until its needed. The inflatable shield’s low mass also allows spacecraft to carry more or heavier payloads. “Right now the rigid ones are at the weight limit of what we’re trying to send to Mars,” [engineer Robert] Dillman says. “If you want to take larger payloads to Mars, they’ll have to either do something quite creative or switch to an inflatable” [New Scientist].
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A new study of the atmosphere of Mars casts doubt on the enticing possibility that methane plumes emanating from the planet are a signature of microbial life. The researchers found that the variations in methane concentration across Mars could only be explained if the methane produced was quickly broken down by unknown forces, before atmospheric currents could distribute the gas evenly around the planet. But methane is the simplest organic molecule, so if something is destroying it, then other, more complex organic molecules could suffer the same fate [New Scientist].
The mystery began in 2003, when scientists first detected plumes of methane coming from the Martian surface; further observations revealed that the hotspots varied with the Martian seasons. Researchers said the methane could come from volcanic activity, but said it could also, theoretically, be the gaseous excretions of bacteria buried deep underground. To probe the mystery, researchers used a model of the Martian climate that accounted for the chemistry of the atmosphere and its wind patterns, and studied whether the planet’s conditions would allow for the isolated bursts of methane that researchers had previously observed.
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The Mars rover Opportunity, an interloper on the Martian soil, has discovered another piece of metal that isn’t native to the planet: a boulder-sized iron meteorite that spun out of the sky and crashed into the planet sometime in the distant past. While the rock isn’t the first iron meteorite spotted on Mars (the two Mars rovers’ previous discoveries make this the fourth), it is the largest, measuring about 2 feet wide and 1 foot high. Researchers hope that studying the mega-meteorite will provide clues to the atmosphere and landscape that it encountered when it arrived on Mars.
Opportunity spotted the out-of-place object on July 18 and snapped a picture of it, but the rover was on its way towards a distant crater and didn’t stop. When NASA scientists saw the photographs, however, they ordered the rover to reverse course and head for the rock. “When you’re driving around on relatively smooth, flat, boring plains for a long time, anything that looks like a decent-sized rock says, ‘Come get me!’” says team member Albert Yen, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory [New Scientist].
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