In between Mars and Jupiter, the spacecraft Rosetta buzzed by an asteroid on Friday and snapped photos of the chunk of rock as it hurtled through space. The European Space Agency’s spacecraft flew to within 500 miles of the Steins asteroid, getting a close-up view of the diamond-shaped Steins asteroid, a gray, 3-mile (5-km) wide rock that appears in images as a pock-marked [rock] with multiple craters that ultimately will help determine its age [SPACE.com].
Researchers hope that the Rosetta’s observations of the asteroid will shed light on the processes that shaped our solar system. The rocks are often referred to as “space rubble” because they represent the leftovers that were never incorporated into planets when the Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago. As with comets, they may contain very primitive materials that have not undergone the constant recycling experienced by, for example, Earth rocks. Rosetta data should therefore help researchers understand better how our local space environment has evolved over time [BBC News].
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Exploring Mars looks like so much fun, everyone want to get in on the act. Following the path blazed by the NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity and the NASA lander Phoenix, which are all currently active on the Red Planet, the European Space Agency (ESA) has designed a rover that is expected to take off for Mars in 2013 and land on the surface in 2015. The ESA’s ExoMars mission is designed to examine the planet’s geology and to search for signs of past life.
ESA officials boast that the two prototypes, nicknamed Brandon and Bruno, are more maneuverable and more independent than previous robots that have made the journey to Mars, and say that these advantages will allow their rover to see more of the planet. Says engineer Chris Draper: “Obviously, the American MER rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) that were put up by Nasa enjoyed an extreme amount of success. They were able to travel large distances, well beyond their planned lifetimes. But we’re hoping that with our baby, we’ll be able to go places that are actually much further” [BBC News].
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NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has discovered a liquid lake the size of Earth’s Lake Ontario on the south pole of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Researchers say that Cassini’s instruments reveal that the chilly reservoir … Titan, is composed of a key component of crude oil — liquid ethane [Science News].
The new find supports the common belief that Titan is a promising place to look for extraterrestrial life. Some astrobiologists have speculated that life could develop in the moon’s hydrocarbon lakes, although it would have to be substantially different from known life on Earth, which requires liquid water [Wired News].
The Cassini orbiter has racked up a number of accomplishments since it began investigating Saturn and its moons in 2004, but its most exciting missions have focused on Titan, where the thick nitrogen and methane atmosphere resembles the atmosphere that existed on primordial Earth.
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Yesterday, lunar enthusiasts and space buffs gathered to mark the 39th anniversary of the first human steps on the moon. At NASA’s new Lunar Science Institute, the assembled crowd was also preparing for a three-day conference devoted to planning the next phase of lunar exploration. NASA hopes to return humans to the moon by 2020, but they may have some competition in this space race do-over; both entrepreneurs and other space agencies are also stepping up their activities.
At the gathering at Ames, NASA researchers made clear that the goals for the next lunar expedition are ambitious. The United States, they said, needs to focus on creating a permanent presence on the moon, using it as a training platform for missions to Mars and beyond. “We’re going back, and this time we’re going to stay,” S. Pete Worden, director of NASA/Ames, said in remarks opening the lunar science conference. “This is the first step in settling the solar system” [San Jose Mercury News].
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It is considered by many engineers and scientists as the “Holy Grail” of robotic red planet exploration: a Mars Return Sample mission [SPACE.com]. Now, an international group of researchers from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have produced a report explaining how they could get a robotic explorer to scoop up rocks from the Martian surface, and then bring them back to Earth to let humans touch a piece of Mars.
Scientists say it would cost between $4.5 billion and $8 billion and would require the cooperation of several space agencies, but they also say there’s no reason not to do it.
The Soviet Union successfully returned rocks to Earth from the Moon during robotic missions in the 1970s. But since then, such complex sample-return missions have been regarded as prohibitively complicated and expensive [ABC News]. Now, space agencies say that bringing rocks back from Mars would serve as an intermediary step on the path to sending a manned expedition to our neighbor planet. Says researcher Monica Grady: “If you can’t bring a rock back you are not going to be able to bring people back” [The Guardian]. NASA and the ESA are expected to decide whether to pursue the mission in November.
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