ScienceCasts: Collision Course? A Comet Heads for Mars
A comet is heading for Mars, and there is a chance that it might hit the Red Planet in October 2014. An impact wouldn’t necessarily mean the end of NASA’s Mars program. But it would transform the program along with Mars itself.

via ScienceAtNASA

NASA Mars Film Featuring Carl Sagan

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NASA’s Planet-Hunting Kepler Telescope

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The surfaces of Asteroid Itokawa, the Moon, Venus, Mars, Titan, and Earth. All images show a view of nearby rocks to the distant horizon. The amount of surface modification evident of each of the bodies increases roughly from left to right.

From the the rubble pile asteroid of Itokawa, the cratered plains of the moon, the volcanic basalts of Venus, the basalt filled craters of Mars, the eroded icy cobbles of Titan to the great oceans of Earth, a variety of surfaces in our solar system is represented.

(Source: annesastronomynews.com)

We Need To Tackle Mars Dust Before Launching Manned Mission

Manned missions to Mars could be scuppered by the tiniest of annoyances — dust. A team of space safety experts repeatedly flagged up the issue at the Humans 2 Mars Summit (H2M) in Washington DC, according to a report by the New Scientist.

The conference is a highly reputable one, attended by the likes of Nasa chief Charles Bolden. Its focus is on debating the main obstacles we need to overcome in order to send humans to Mars by 2030. Now, with more than 20,000 people applying (and paying) for the chance to go to the Red Planet for Mars One’s reality TV show, the possibility of toxic dust is probably going to be one giant addition to any disclaimer the hopeful astronauts have to sign.

Dust, as we all know, gets everywhere. If you’ve ever been in a Khamsin — the hot, dry, dusty seasonal winds that blow in the Middle East — you’ll know it’s fairly unpleasant. It gets in your eyes, your clothes and your throat grows hoarse from swallowing it. Earthly dust we can deal with, but it turns out dust on the Red Planet has the potential to do far more than irritate.

Nasa chief medical officer Richard Williams, Paragon Space Development cofounder Grant Anderson, Curiosity Rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) principle investigator Paul Mahaffy and Boeing engineer and technical lead for the Environmental Control and Life Support System on the ISS Greg Gentry painted a picture of an inhospitable Mars where the dust is potentially inescapable. They pointed to serveral examples from Mars itself, and from Moon missions, that support this assumption.

Most recently Curiosity scooped up a robotic handful of Mars dust from Rocksnest that Mahaffy believes contains perchlorates. It’s something that was previously picked up by Nasa’a Phoenix lander on Mars in 2008 near the planet’s north pole. Perchlorates are salts that in large quantities can interrupt iodine uptake in the thyroid gland, and thus potentially interfere with the normal release of hormones.

Curiosity’s Chemcam also took samples from veins in the YellowKnife region and found high levels of calcium sulfate that it is predicted exist in the form of bassanite or gypsum. We have gypsum here on Earth, where it’s commonly used in plaster or fertilisers, but we don’t know how much there is on Mars’ surface.

“Gypsum is not really toxic per se, but if you breathe it in you do start to see a build-up in the lungs that’s equivalent to the coal-dust lung experienced by miners,” said Anderson. “That leads to breakdowns in lung capacity.”

Of course astronauts heading to Mars on a one-way trip will be in space suits any time they’re wandering round the planet’s surface, but our trips to the Moon show how impossible it is to keep dust off those suits. Reports from Apollo missions in the late 60s and early 70s revealed what a pain the dust was for explorers. It was so sharp it would wear through their outer gloves and would stick to everything, and it reportedly even caused “lunar hayfever”.

Part of it was down to the dust’s spiky surface, but a large part was also down to how static it was. UV rays and solar winds manipulate electron levels by day and night, powering up dust’s electrostatic charge. Wetting surfaces to wipe it off only made the dust stick more firmly. It’s like the silicate minerals all over Mars’ surface — if they mix with water in human lungs, they will become more damaging, combining to create dangerous chemicals.

Anderson predicts Mars dust will also be charged up, and that it will be nearly impossible to stop them entering a safe site through the airlocks where astronauts acclimatise back to normal conditions.

“The Apollo programme spent $17 million (£11 million) trying to solve their lunar dust problems, and I’m not sure they made much progress, because they had to do the tests on Earth,” said Anderson. “For Mars, the precursor robotic missions should all have some way to test how dust is going to kill you.”

According to a blog in the Washington Post Gentry commented that astronauts aboard the ISS spend most of their time making sure instruments, filters and surfaces are clean — “we are happy when we get 30 hours of science out of the crew a week,” he said.

So for now, it looks like Dyson needs to get to work on a spaceworthy air purifier.

Cosmos Will Get a Sequel Hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson

More than three decades after it aired, Carl Sagan’s groundbreaking, brilliant 13-part TV series Cosmos:A Personal Voyage will finally get a sequel.

Cosmos, which originally ran in 1980 and was rerun many times over the following decade, is widely regarded as one of the first, and best, TV shows to make science accessible to everyone. You can watch the show now on Hulu, but despite its brilliance it is still a show from more than 30 years ago, and you can tell — the special effects are primitive by today’s standards, but more importantly some of the content has been superseded by discoveries in the intervening years.

So, it’s high time someone made a sequel to it, and now someone is! In partnership with Sagan’s colleagues Ann Druyan (who is also his widow) and Steven Soter, Seth MacFarlane — yes, that Seth MacFarlane — is going to produce a new 13-part series to serve as a sequel and modern update to Sagan’s masterpiece.

Taking over the hosting duties will be none other than well-known astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has served as host of NOVA ScienceNOW on PBS for the past five years, so he has plenty of experience making science accessible to the general public. It would be difficult to think of anyone who would be better able to succeed the late, great Carl Sagan.

The folks working on it will take their time and do it right — it’s not scheduled to air until sometime in 2013.

The producers of the show say the new series will tell “the story of how human beings began to comprehend the laws of nature and find our place in space and time.” They go on to boast: “It will take viewers to other worlds and travel across the universe for a vision of the cosmos on the grandest scale. The most profound scientific concepts will be presented with stunning clarity, uniting skepticism and wonder, and weaving rigorous science with the emotional and spiritual into a transcendent experience.”

That’s the good news. The bad — or at least, potentially bad — news is that, because of MacFarlane’s involvement, the series will air in prime time, and on Fox.

Now, in one way I’m all for showing it in prime time on a major network, because it’ll be that much more likely that people who routinely ignore the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel and, yes, PBS will actually see it.

I’m less thrilled, though, that it will have to compete with other, more mainstream prime-time shows — and it’ll be on Fox, which doesn’t have the greatest track record for giving shows a chance to pull their ratings up once they go down.

Now, maybe the fact that MacFarlane is involved — and Joss Whedon isn’t — will help. I certainly hope so.

You can find out more about the plans for the series.

(Source: spaceplasma, via applepiesfromscratch)

Stardust (by PostPanic)

From Dutch designer and director Mischa Rozema comes Stardust — a breathtaking short film based on a combination of real NASA footage and science fiction imagery, celebrating the legacy of the Voyager 1 and inspired by Dutch graphic designer Arjan Groot, who passed away from cancer at the age of 39.

[Brainpickings]

(Source: propagandery, via propagandery)

Wind, Not Water, Formed Mound On Mars, New Analysis Suggests

A roughly 3.5-mile high Martian mound that scientists suspect preserves evidence of a massive lake might actually have formed as a result of the Red Planet’s famously dusty atmosphere, an analysis of the mound’s features suggests. If correct, the research could dilute expectations that the mound holds evidence of a large body of water, which would have important implications for understanding Mars’ past habitability.

Read more here.

(Source: knowledgethroughscience)

Star systems great and small

Upper image: Comparison of blue hypergiant R66 with its disk of dusty material, and our Solar system.

Lower image: The sun-like star 55 Cancri A and 4 members of its planetary system, compared with the brown dwarf Cha 110913-773444 with a hypothetical planetary system (this brown dwarf is known to have a protoplanetary disk).

(Source: invaderxan)

A short sequence of photos showing some craters and linear features on Mars’s moon Phobos.  Photographed by the Viking 1 Orbiter.

(Source: pappubahry)

A Window Into the Sub Ice Ocean of Jupiter’s Moon, Europa

If you could lick the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, you would actually be sampling a bit of the ocean beneath. A new paper by Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and Kevin Hand from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also in Pasadena, details the strongest evidence yet that salty water from the vast liquid ocean beneath Europa’s frozen exterior actually makes its way to the surface. 

The finding, based on some of the best data of its kind since NASA’s Galileo mission (1989 to 2003) to study Jupiter and its moons, suggests there is a chemical exchange between the ocean and surface, making the ocean a richer chemical environment. The work is described in a paper that has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal. 

The exchange between the ocean and the surface, Brown said, “means that energy might be going into the ocean, which is important in terms of the possibilities for life there. It also means that if you’d like to know what’s in the ocean, you can just go to the surface and scrape some off.” …

(read more: Jet Propulsion Lab.)         (image: NASA/JPL-CalTech)

(Source: rhamphotheca)

Morning Star

Dawn on Saturn is greeted across the vastness of interplanetary space by the morning star, Venus, in this image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

Venus appears just off the edge of the planet, in the upper part of the image, directly above the white streak of Saturn’s G ring. Lower down, Saturn’s E ring makes an appearance, looking blue thanks to the scattering properties of the dust that comprises the ring. A bright spot near the E ring is a distant star.

(Source: ikenbot, via scinerds)

Night Sky Observing for May Brings Spring Constellations

Here’s the latest update on what’s up in the night sky from Jane Houston Jones at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Moon will be your guide on how to spot the spring constellations and other popular astronomical sights this month including nebulae, a galaxy trio and the site of a recent planetary discovery.

(Source: universetoday.com)

Mystery Martian Morphology of the Month

by Alfred McEwen

This image covers many shallow irregular pits with raised rims, concentrated along ridges and other topographic features. How did these odd features form?

One idea is that they could be from sublimation of shallow lenses of nearly pure ice, but why do the pits have raised rims? They can’t be impact craters with such fortuitous alignment and irregular margins. They aren’t wind-blown deposits because there are many boulders, too big to be moved by the wind. There are younger wind-blown drifts on top of the pits, and there’s no clear connection to volcanism.

Some speculate that there were ancient oceans over this region—could that somehow explain these features? Ancient glaciation is another possibility, perhaps depositing ice-rich debris next to topographic obstacles.Future images of this region may provide clues, but for now this is a mystery.

(via: HiRISE - University of Arizona)        (image: NASA/JPL/U of Az)

(Source: rhamphotheca)

[official media press release]

(Source: invaderxan)