An image of the Martian surface from NASA’s Viking 2
To eke out even the barest subsistence on Mars, a living thing would have to adapt to a formidable set of environmental challenges: an arid, often extremely cold landscape with miniscule amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere and no organic matter to eat. During a recent foray into a similarly inhospitable part of our own planet, scientists have discovered several species of bacteria that hint at what life on Mars, if it exists, might look like. These microbes survive on minerals in the surrounding rocks—minerals also found in the Martian surface.
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What’s the News: If you were to bring a glass of water to Mars, the liquid would instantly boil because the Red Planet’s carbon dioxide atmosphere is so thin: The vapor pressure of the water easily surpasses the weak atmospheric pressure, sending water molecules flying off quickly into the atmosphere. However, ancient shorelines and river-like features indicate that Mars had a watery past, leading researchers to wonder what happened to Mars’ once-thicker atmosphere. Now, data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has uncovered a massive deposit of solid CO2 at the south pole that could double the planet’s atmospheric pressure if it were released as gas. “If you double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it’s quite possible that you could have liquid water,” planetary scientist Philip James of the Space Science Institute in Boulder told Scientific American. “People have suggested that this could happen, and now it looks like it could be possible.”
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Humankind’s experience visiting worlds beyond our own begins and ends with the dozen Apollo astronauts who skipped about on tiny swaths of the moon. But that doesn’t mean we can’t experiment with how and where we might visit (or live) on the extreme surfaces of other worlds. A few studies out recently are doing just that.
Radiation? Big deal
Our planet provides a protective shield from the most damaging radiation produced by the sun—a shield not available on the moon or Mars. It’s a hazard for any human leaving the planet, and it’s a hazard for plants, too.
However, a new study of the Chernobyl area in the Ukraine, site of the famous nuclear accident, is actually raising hopes for space farming.
Even 25 years after the catastrophic nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the area around the site harbors radioactive soil. But researchers working there have found that oil-rich flax plants can adapt and flourish in that fouled environment with few problems. Exactly how the flax adapted remains unclear, but what is clear is that two generations of flax plants have taken root and thrived there, and that could have big implications for growing plants aboard spacecraft or on other planets at some point in the future. [Popular Science]
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Across the far northern regions of Mars, a sea of dunes dots the red landscape, continuing on for thousands of miles. At first glance they appear like fossils of geography—reminders of a time when Mars was vivacious and windswept that now find themselves encrusted and stationary.
Looks can be deceiving. A research team confirms in Science this week that Mars’ dunes are not static. Atmospheric processes forged by the turning of Mars‘ seasons cut into the dunes and send sand flying about. Scientists just couldn’t see it before.
“I was hoping for tiny little changes to be detectable,” planetary scientist Candice Hansen-Koharcheck with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., [said]. “This was more like knock-your-socks-off kind of stuff. It’s a very active part of the Mars landscape in today’s climate.” [Discovery News]
Hansen-Koharcheck turned the HiRISE camera of the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on the dunes, and recorded for two Martian years (four Earth years or so). Earlier HiRISE pictures suggested that the dunes were not unchanging. These new images show not only that the dunes of Mars are a dynamic place, but, according to the team, that the forces pushing their evolution are not seen on our planet.
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The plucky rovers Spirit and Opportunity and the ice-finding Phoenix Lander have perhaps drawn more attention, but it’s the craft that’s been in steady, silent orbiter that has them all beat for longevity. The Mars Odyssey mission just clicked off its 3,340th day in orbit of Mars yesterday, making it the longest-running human mission to the Red Planet. The Mars Global Surveyor, another orbiter, held the record previously.
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At this point, after finding microorganisms that don’t mind extreme temperatures, pressure, aridity and other hardships, we shouldn’t be surprised that bacteria‘s dominion over the Earth extends to just about anywhere we look. A new expedition to the Earth’s crust has reached unprecedented depths—down to the deepest layer of the crust—and found that even there, microorganisms are tough enough to survive.
On a hypothetical journey to the centre of the Earth starting at the sea floor, you would travel through sediment, a layer of basalt, and then hit the gabbroic layer, which lies directly above the mantle. Drilling expeditions have reached this layer before, but as the basalt is difficult to pierce it happens rarely. [New Scientist]
To circumvent the Herculean task of drilling through basalt, the expedition, called the Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme, headed out to sea to find an easier drilling location.
The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program sank its drill into the Atlantis Massif (seen above) in the central Atlantic Ocean where seismic forces have pushed the deep layer, known as the gabbroic layer, to within 230 feet of the ocean floor making it easier to reach. [UPI]
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Rovers that roll are so 2004. This year’s designers are bringing the heat with fashionable Mars hopper designs, dreaming of explorers that can go the distance one half-mile hop at a time.
The British team that described its design in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A isn’t the first to suggest a hopper. But unlike previous designs, this hopper wouldn’t rely on solar power for fuel, but would instead by powered by radioactive isotopes and the plentiful carbon dioxide in Mars’s atmosphere.
The ability to hop from place to place would enable the new explorers to cover more of the Martian landscape, and visit rough terrain that earlier rovers couldn’t handle. The 2004 rover Opportunity is just hitting 15 miles of surface driving after almost seven years on Mars.
Dr Richard Ambrosi [who worked on the project], at the Leicester Space Research Centre, commented: “The improved mobility and range of a hopping vehicle will tell us more about the evolution of Mars and of the Solar System and may answer questions as to whether there was life in the past, whether Mars was wetter in the past and if so where that water went.” [Press Release]
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The Martian rovers and orbiters have sent so much data back to Earth in the last few years that discoveries about Mars’ wet and active past come left and right. Yesterday we covered the story that the stuck Spirit rover may have found evidence of recent water right under its tracks. And another study this week, out in Nature Geoscience, pinpoints a spot by a Mars volcano that could contain evidence of a watery system more than 3 billion years old—and perhaps even life, too.
The finding came after the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter observed a mineral called hydrated silica sitting on the flank of the extinct Syrtis Major volcano.
The mineral is transported and then concentrated by hot water or steam, suggesting the deposits were laid down in what was once a hydrothermal environment. Groundwater may have been heated by magma from the erupting volcano and vented to the surface as steam, says John Mustard of Brown University in Rhode Island, a member of the team that identified the mineral. [New Scientist]
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Spirit just can’t help itself. Even stuck in a sand trap from which it will never escape, the Mars rover finds clues that reveal more about the nature of Mars and the water cycle on the Red Planet.
It was earlier this year that NASA gave up on freeing Spirit: With a broken wheel, the rover simply could not extricate itself from the loose terrain that ensnares it. But as the rover team drove Spirit back and forth, it dug deeper and deeper into the Martian ground. Says team member Ray Arvidson:
“We’re driving backwards, the right front wheel doesn’t work, so wherever we went we had to drag it along. It’s like pushing a shopping cart with a bad front wheel. You don’t push it, you pull it, but the wheel has torque.” [Discovery News]
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OK, Mars wins this contest for bragging rights. The photo above shows the Melas Chasma on Mars, which reaches a depth of 5.6 miles; it’s part of the staggering the Valles Marineris rift valley, which stretches almost 2,500 miles across the surface of the red planet. For comparison’s sake, our earthly Grand Canyon is 1.1 miles deep and 277 miles long.
This remarkable image was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter. In addition to giving us something neat to gawk at, the image also reveals evidence of Mars’s watery past.
Part of the canyon wall collapsed in multiple landslides in the distant past, with debris fanning out into the valley below. Scientists analyzing the texture of the rocks deposited by the landslides say they were transported by liquid water, water ice, or mud. [ScienceNOW]
Related Content:
80beats: NASA’s New Mars Mission: To Study the Mystery of the Missing Atmosphere
80beats: It’s Alive! NASA Test-Drives Its New Hulking Mars Rover, Curiosity
80beats: Vast Ocean May Have Covered One-Third of Primordial Mars
80beats: Mars Rover Sets Endurance Record: Photos From Opportunity’s 6 Years On-Planet
Image: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)
NASA’s next rendezvous with the Red Planet got the go-ahead this week. The space agency approved development of MAVEN, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, which is scheduled to launch in November 2013.
In the last decade, missions like the Phoenix Lander, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, and the Mars Express have reinforced the case that our neighbor was once watery, and far more hospitable to life than the planet we see today. The ancient evidence of liquid water suggests that the planet once had a dense atmosphere, which is now long gone. MAVEN’s mission is to investigate the interaction between Mars’s now-thin atmosphere and the solar wind, and to look for clues to how and when the sun stripped away the planet’s thick atmosphere.
Many researchers think that Mars’s loss of its magnetic field billions of years ago started the process.
“Mars can’t protect itself from the solar wind because it no longer has a shield, the planet’s global magnetic field is dead,” said [lead investigator Bruce] Jakosky, describing how the magnetic field disappeared and the atmosphere then exposed to the punishing solar wind. [AFP]
For more details about MAVEN, check out our coverage from 2008, when NASA first announced the mission. The team’s critical design review will come next July, which could be the true make-or-break time for the mission.
Related Content:
80beats: NASA Announces Plan to Study Martian Climate Mystery
80beats: Was Mars’ Moon Phobos Born From a Violent Collision?
80beats: Mars Rover Followed Mineral “Blueberries” to a Watery Discovery
80beats: Early Mars: Cold and Wet, But Potentially Still Full of Life
Image: NASA
Our own moon, the thinking goes, formed when a huge rock slammed into the Earth billions of years ago. Is the same true of one of Mars’ dual moons?
The Martian moon Phobos hides an unknown history. One idea has been that the 12-mile by 17-mile rock came from the nearby asteroid belt, and Mars’ gravity captured it. However, new evidence from the European Space Agency’s explorer Mars Express suggests that the stuff of Phobos is more Mars-like than asteroid-like, and therefore its origin goes back to a violent collision that knocked material from Mars into its own orbit. That material would have eventually coalesced into Phobos.
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Breaking free of the the Earth’s gravity and floating in zero-G: It’s certainly a thrill for those who get to experience it, either through traveling to space or simulating the journey. All good things, though, must come in moderation. Too much time free from the grip of gravity and we turn into weak-muscled wimps, which is a huge hurdle for hopes to travel to Mars or deep into space.
Robert Fitts wanted to know just how quickly the lack of resistance on one’s muscles makes them out-of-shape and atrophied. So his team tested nine astronauts before and then just after their six-months stays aboard the International Space Station. The study appears this week in the Journal of Physiology.
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Listen, people of Earth: Everything’s going to be fine. All we have to do is survive another century or two without self-destructing as a species. Then we’ll get off this rock, spread throughout space, and everything will be all right.
If this is not your idea of “optimism,” then you are not Stephen Hawking. The esteemed physicist garnered headlines, and some eye-rolls, after telling Big Think last week that humanity needs to leave the Earth in the future or face extinction.
He’s not knocking climate scientists’ attempts to figure things out on Earth–he’s just thinking long term. “There have been a number of times in the past when our survival has been touch-and-go,” explains Hawking at Big Think, mentioning the Cuban Missile Crisis, and “the frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future…. Our population and our use of the finite resources of the planet earth are growing exponentially along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill,” while “our genetic code still caries our selfish and aggressive instincts” [The Atlantic].
Combined with Hawking’s statement earlier this year that it might be dangerous to contact aliens because they could come and wipe us out, the physicist’s latest warning makes it feel like he’s increasingly a member of the gloom-and-doom crowd. But not so. He’s just the kind of person who thinks on the long, long term.
Let’s jump back to another publicly engaged scientist: Carl Sagan’s message in Cosmos that the stars await… if we don’t destroy ourselves.
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Today DISCOVER blogger Ed Yong reports on a project called Foldit, in which citizen scientists playing a slick computer game helped to unravel the complex structure of proteins, and in doing so got the game into the prestigious journal Nature.
There are plenty of great ways for non-professional scientists to help out scientific projects. DISCOVER previously brought you the ways to donate your computer’s free time to projects like SETI@home and Stardust@home. But what if you want to use your own brainpower in the aid of science? That can be arranged, as there are plenty of more active ways to contribute to crowdsourced science.
1. Mapping the place where Genghis Khan was buried
This summer archaeologist Albert Yu-Min Lin led an expedition to Mongolia in search of the lost tomb of Genghis Khan—but not before putting out the call for a little help.
Lin’s team provided high-resolution satellite photography of the area they plan to survey. On the mission’s website, volunteers can sign up to scan the images for anything that could help the team on its quest: roads, rivers, or perhaps even the outlines of where long-gone structures once stood centuries ago.
2. Amateur Martians
As we noted yesterday with the Spirit rover’s apparent demise, the rovers and orbiters NASA has sent to Mars have been a smashing success. The only problem is, those robot explorers have sent home more data than NASA’s people can map on their own.
You can help: Play “Be a Martian,” a game set up through the Jet Propulsion Lab. Players earn points and badges by finding the most interesting martian craters for study, or by matching up high-resolution images of the red planet’s surfaces to wider photos taken from above—thereby improving maps of Mars.
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