Saturday, October 30, 2010
Exploration Rover Spirit got stuck in a pile of red planet mud... where there is mud there might be life...
Scientist believe that they have found new evidence of life on mars after the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit got stuck in a pile of red planet mud. Scientists believe that the discovery shows that water formed on the planet more recently than previously thought.
The Telegraph reports that scientists believed previously that water formed on mars more than a billion years ago. But the new Mars mud has changed that thought, and now it is believed that water may have formed as recently as a few thousand years ago.
The Nasa team, who are based at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said:
“On Earth … hydrothermal systems provide the environmental conditions, water, nutrients and energy sources
needed to sustain robust microbial communities. It seems likely the region (on Mars) … may have likewise supported a habitable environment.”
The Mars Exploration Rover Spirit got stuck last April. The rover broke through the surface crust of Mars, and got stuck in a soft sand below. The incident provided clues that Mars may still be wet.
Read The Full Story: Life on Mars? Rover Gets Stuck in Red Planet Mud
Researchers at the American space agency made the discovery after the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit became stuck in wet ground on the red planet earlier this year.
Astronomers have become excited by the latest discovery, which they say proves that water favourable for life formed on the red planet more recently than previously thought.
Nasa’s latest study, reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research, concluded the liquid likely formed from melting snow, which then trickled into the subsurface and dissolved.
It contained several minerals including hematite, silica and gypsum while ferric sulphates, which are more soluble, also were carried down by the water.
None of these minerals are exposed at the surface, which is covered by windblown sand and dust.
“On Earth … hydrothermal systems provide the environmental conditions, water, nutrients and energy sources needed to sustain robust microbial communities,” concluded the Nasa team, who are based at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
“It seems likely the region (on Mars) … may have likewise supported a habitable environment.”
According to Nasa, the Mars explorer became stuck in April last year when its left wheels broke through the surface’s crust called “Troy” and fell into soft sand below.
The soil exposed by Spirit’s spinning wheels carries clues that Mars may still be wet.
The seepage could have happened during cyclical climate changes in periods when Mars tilted farther on its axis.
"Liquid water and life kind of go together," said Ray Arvidson, of Washington University in St. Louis, who was involved in the project.
Nasa abandoned plans to extract the rover earlier this year
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Planetary travel "within few years" Funded by DARPA, NASA
A SENIOR NASA official has promised to deliver a spaceship that will travel between alien worlds "within a few years".
Speaking at a conference in San Francisco on Saturday, NASA Ames director Simon Worden said his division had started a project with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency called the "Hundred Year Starship”.
The project was kicked off recently with $1 million funding from DARPA and $100K from NASA and hopes to utilise new propulsion ideas being explored by NASA.
Star Trek fans, prepare to get excited - electric propulsion is here, according to Mr Worden.
“Anybody that watches the (Star Trek) Enterprise, you know you don’t see huge plumes of fire," he said.
"Within a few years we will see the first true prototype of a spaceship that will take us between worlds.”
“You heard it here,” he told the crowd at the “Long Conversation”.
“Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.”
Mr Worden said he hoped to "inveigle some billionaires" such as Google founder Larry Page to help with further funding for the project.
Another possible source of propulsion being funded by NASA was by using microwave power from a planetary base to heat hydrogen propellants on board an orbiting spaceship.
"You don’t have to carry all the fuel," he said. "You use that energy from a laser or microwave power to heat a propellant; it gets you a pretty big factor of improvement. I think that’s one way of getting off the world.”
Mr Worden had an interesting take on how we would settle other worlds when we found them, suggesting it would be easier to adapt humans to an alien planet than changing the planet to suit humans.
“How do you live in another world? I don’t have the slightest idea,” he said.
“If you’re a conservative, you worry about it killing us; if you’re a liberal, you worry about us killing it."
Despite his ambitious vision to push further out into the galaxy, Mr Worden said there was still plenty of work to do in our own backyard first.
First stop, he said, was the moons of Mars, from where the planet itself can be explored using telerobotics.
“I think we’ll be on the moons of Mars by 2030 or so," he said.
"Larry (Page) asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, ‘Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?’
"So now we’re starting to get a little argument over the price.”