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Posts Tagged ‘Mars’

This is definitely not TSA compliant.

These mini-reactors would have no cooling towers or billowing steam clouds emanating from them. Rather, they would stand about two feet tall and maybe a foot wide, with a compact uranium fission chamber and power plant tucked inside. Unlike the solar panel systems often deployed aboard interplanetary missions--like the Spirit and Opportunity rovers currently on Mars--a small fission system could supply the kind of constant, steady power necessary for human survival on another planet.

That will be key for establishing a beachhead on another planet, as everything from life support systems (oxygen supplies and carbon dioxide scrubbing, for instance) to water treatment to keeping the lights and heat/cooling on will rely on around-the-clock energy. Any lapse in power, and the humans relying on those systems would quickly find themselves in a bad way.

Plus, such suitcase nukes would fit neatly in any future space vehicle’s overhead bins, defraying the cost of checking. The joint NASA/DOE initiative hopes to produce a working demo unit next year.

[Discovery News]

Scientists have found several meteorites that originated on Mars or the moon, after being ejected in asteroid collisions, forcefully thrown into space and finally arriving on Earth. It makes sense that the opposite could be true, and that after mega-collisions, some pieces of Earth could be thrown toward Mars or Venus.

But most simulations suggest very few Earth pieces would reach the fourth planet, because they would have a hard time overcoming the gravitational pull of both Earth and the sun. Lots of the ejected particles would actually wind up back on Earth, according to previous studies. Some scientists have even suggested these refugee particles would “re-seed” their home planet.

Now researchers in Mexico have a new simulation, and they say plenty of Earth bits would indeed make it to Mars — and beyond, all the way to the Jovian system. Mauricio Reyes-Ruiz and colleagues at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico ran computer simulations of 10,242 test particles, following their predicted paths for 30,000 years. That’s about as long as scientists think life could survive in space, the authors note.

They ran simulations at five different ejection velocities, from 6.97 miles per second to 10.2 miles per second. They found that at faster velocities, particles are more likely to reach Jupiter than Mars, because of their great speed relative to Mars’ low gravitational pull. The particles also reach Jupiter more quickly, with half making the trip in 10,000 years, the authors write. In one simulation, just one particle reaches Mars, and it takes between 25,000 and 30,000 years to get there.

Even more bizarre, many particles end up traveling past 40 AU, which the authors describe as leaving the solar system.

This is all theoretical, of course — the ejection velocity and the particles’ trajectory would be determined by variables like the size and velocity of the incoming object, not to mention the collision location relative to the spin of the Earth. But it’s an interesting concept — as KFC points out over at Technology Review, if life persists in space longer than astrobiologists think, life from Earth could still be speeding toward distant worlds.

[Technology Review]

At a press briefing at an air show in Russia this week, ESA chief Jean-Jacques Dordain said the ESA and Roskosmos will “carry out the first flight to Mars together.” Apparently a major catalyst in this decision is the ongoing success of the Mars500 project, in which a six-member simulated crew is undergoing a 520-day isolation experiment simulating the long trip to and from Mars. Russia’s Institute of Biomedical Problems is heading Mars500--which “returns to Earth” in November--but the ESA is closely participating.

Dordain stopped short of declaring a timetable for such a mission, or on whose spacecraft the joint mission will ride. But he did set the stage for another epic, decades-long scientific struggle between two great world powers. So who will set foot on Mars first, the U.S. or Russia and its European partners?

Somewhere, a group of Chinese scientists is laughing.

[Ria Novosti]

The first time we launched, the parachute didn’t deploy. The robot fell 2,000 feet and shattered. It wasn’t too big a deal cutting new parts to make another, but we needed to figure out a better release system for the parachute. So I climbed onto my roof and threw the rover off a few times with different parachute designs. When we launched the newer system, the parachute worked great, but the sensors that were supposed to release the parachute after the rover had landed malfunctioned and released 100 feet before touchdown. The rover almost landed in a lake!

I designed and programmed the microcontroller in the robot. The hard part was determining what state the robot was in: inside the rocket, in the air, or on the ground. I set up a system of accelerometers and barometers to detect launch, apogee and landing with accelerations and altitudes. The robot can avoid collisions, navigate, and find an outlet to charge itself.

The whole process took longer than expected because of school and college applications and graduation. But after two years, we entered the competition. We were the first to have a working rover.

Youk and classmates at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, competed in the Federation of Galaxy Explorers’ Battle of the Rockets in April.

Maybe it's not so dry over there after all

There are huge implications in that of course, provided the hypothesis turns out to be true. It underscores the idea that Mars could indeed be capable of harboring some kind of life. And it whets (wets?) the appetite for future Mars exploration, both robotic and--eventually--manned.

The evidence comes to us in the form of the finger-like features you see running down the slope of the crater in the pic above (and in the animation below). Regular observation shows that they appear during the warm months, extend themselves down sloping terrain, then fade away when temperatures drop in the fall. During the next Martian spring they return again. And while there are a few hypotheses floating around out there as to what might cause these features to appear, retreat, and appear again as the seasons change, the general consensus seems to be that briny water is the culprit.

Don’t get the wrong idea--these features are far from being fully explained. But a briny water would fit the aforementioned characteristics nicely. The saltiness would lower the water’s freezing point such that it could flow even during the cold (relative to Earth) Martian spring and summer. And we already know that brines were abundant in Mars’ past, making them a much more likely candidate to make these dark features rather than something wholly new.

But mysteries still abound. For one, the markings aren’t dark because they are wet, but because of something else at play here that is currently unexplained. Equally inexplicable: why the features brighten again when the temperatures decline in fall and winter.

But the finding is no less significant for the questions it raises. Liquid water on mars, salty though it may be, is a huge finding for those holding out hope that Mars might yet yield some kind of evidence of life. And even if it doesn’t, perhaps it could help sustain life--perhaps life forms visiting from another nearby planet--at some point in the future.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Mission scientists could recommend the rover climb a three-mile-high mound

Both sites could be boons for Mars research. The mound-boasting crater, known as the Gale Crater, contains things that require water to form, like clays and certain sulphates. And because the mound is in a crater, it’s kind of like a trap for sediments. Eberswalde, the other crater, also appears to be full of clays that were dumped there by a river that once flowed into it.

But at this point, it seems that Eberswalde is more of a gamble. If the sediments there turn out to be nothing more than simple rocks, the mission could be largely a failure from a scientific standpoint. Moreover, Eberswalde is further from the Martian equator, and hence colder. That means Curiosity would need additional heating to function there, and that could erode its life expectancy.

Does that make Gale a lock? Not exactly, but it would make for one interesting mission and one unlike any other ever undertaken by rovers on the Red Planet. The processes that created the mound in Gale are also unclear, but researchers are pretty sure that both clays and sulphates are present there, making it the only site among the final four to have both materials potentially present. And let’s not forget, a trip to Gale isn’t just a rover mission. It’s a mountaineering mission.

The idea is for Curiosity to land near the mound, then drive up its surface, sampling and analyzing on its way up. This should show the way the planet’s geology and hydrology changed over time. It could also yield organic material, if indeed there is any there. Mission scientists think Curiosity could cover at least the first thousand feet or so in its design lifetime.

But Opportunity is still functioning a full seven years after its three-month mission expired. Which means if Curiosity is half as hardy, it could climb a mile, or even two, before running out of steam. We’ve got a lot of great pics of the Martian surface as seen from the ground, but image the vistas from atop the Gale mound.

Of course, NASA doesn’t have to select either of these potential sites. The final decision is up to NASA brass and the actual Curiosity mission team. That final decision is expected in July.

[New Scientist, Inside Science]

The Mars Science Laboratory is supposed to launch in a window between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the alignment between Earth and Mars is the most favorable for an interplanetary trip. But as it stands now, the MSL team won’t finish all their work before launch unless they get more money, according to an internal audit prepared by NASA Inspector General Paul Martin.

“The project may have insufficient funds to complete all currently identified tasks prior to launch and may therefore be forced to reduce capabilities, delay the launch for 2 years, or cancel the mission,” he wrote.

If the mission is delayed, NASA will have to spend at least $570 million to adjust mission plans to account for a new planetary alignment, not to mention the advent of the Martian summer. A Martian year is almost double the length of an Earth year, so if MSL lands in late 2013 instead of this fall, it will be just in time for a warming Martian atmosphere to stir up dust storms.

This won’t be as problematic for Curiosity as it was for Spirit and Opportunity, because the new rover is nuclear-powered rather than solar-powered. But still, dust storms could interrupt its sensitive instruments, as well as its ability to communicate with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Deep Space Network on Earth.

The rover’s life cycle costs are already expected to top a whopping $2.5 billion, partly because it is so huge and so complex. Curiosity is four times as heavy as Spirit and Opportunity, and it contains 10 sensitive science instruments designed to look for signs of Martian life. It is designed to land using a complicated sky-crane tether system, the most complicated extraterrestrial landing maneuver NASA has ever attempted.

Launch was already delayed once — the rover was initially supposed to launch between September and October 2009, but several instruments were delivered late and NASA had to move its window back two years. Extra infusions of cash, most recently $71 million in December 2010, have kept the project humming along, but there are apparently still several issues — as of February, there were still 1,200 reports of problems and failures that could cause a delay, including contamination issues with the rover’s soil analysis instruments, and delays in flight software and fault protection systems.

The good news is that the rover is fully built, according to the audit. But apparently the work is far from over.

[NASA, via Space.com]