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

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.

“Great works and great folly may be indistinguishable from the outset.” Wisdom from NASA’s Adam Steltzner, lead engineer at the Mars Science Laboratory and mastermind of the Curiosity rover landing system, at The New Yorker’s Big Story event.

Or, as Bertrand Russell famously put it, “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”

(via explore-blog)

Current Achievement Trophy Award 2013: Mars Science Laboratory Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) Team

The Mars Science Laboratory Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) Team was awarded the National Air and Space Museum 2013 Current Achievement Trophy. This video with images from the mission and interviews with experts about how the landing system worked was played at the presentation of the award April 24, 2013.

Doug McCuiston is a pretty awesome guy. I met him during NASA’s Discovery Day at the Udvar-Hazy Air & Space Museum in Chantilly, VA. I discussed the MSL project with him and later during one of his solo educational presentations, I discussed astrobiology with him regarding Lake Vostok and life in the solar system.

You can check out all my photos from the day via the link here. Enjoy, and congratulations to the entire NASA/JPL team for a successful rendezvous with the martian planet!

alexob:

The details on the Curiosity Mars Rover creation, landing and aftermath you didn’t read about in the daily press. Excellent behind the scenes insight given by Burkhard Bilger in this week’s New Yorker. 

1.) This is my son. And these are pictures he showed me tonight out of his drawing book from school.
2.) Documenting their classroom potted plants, this is the day he planted a Lima bean seed. And drew a picture of the seed, and/or bong which looks like my Astroscan.
3.) Darth Maul fighting a Jedi.
4.) Giant Squid and a jelly fish.
5.) A “cartoony” giant squid.
6.) Spinosaurus attacking a Tyrannosaurus.
7.) Tyrannosaurus Rex attacking a Stegosaurus. (Not sure why T-Rex looks human)
8.) Curiosity….*tear (and a meteor apparently about to demolish it. You know it’s possible. He giggled so much when I began smiling, giggled with him as I told him how much I loved that he put a face on Curiosity…

…this kid.

2012 Highlights: MSL/Curiosity Rover “Landing Day” Celebration
[photo credit]

(and yes that was a very curious cake indeed*)

“Our time will be remembered, because this was when we first set sail for other worlds.”

Carl Sagan, 1987

In this latest video update from the Mars Science Laboratory team, Ashwin Vasavada, the mission’s Deputy Project Scientist, discusses the recent finding that the Red Planet doesn’t have the same atmosphere it used to. Curiosity’s microwave oven-sized Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument analyzed an atmosphere sample and the results provided the most precise measurements ever made of isotopes of argon in the Martian atmosphere.

via UniverseToday

NASA Budget Cutbacks Would Cripple Planetary Science, Critics Say

Proposed cuts included in NASA’s 2014 budget request would sabotage a mission to Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter that could support life, scientists say.

The Obama administration released its 2014 budget proposal Wednesday (April 10). While the budget would set aside $17.7 billion for NASA, it would cut the agency’s previous $1.5 billion budget for the planetary science division by $200 million, scientists said in a live webcast sponsored by the Planetary Society, an organization founded by scientist Carl Sagan to promote solar-system exploration.

“We’re a little disappointed that planetary science didn’t get a little better shake,” said Bill Nye, CEO of the society and popularly known as television’s “Bill Nye the Science Guy.”

The new budget does not follow the recommendations of the National Research Council’s Planetary Science Decadal Survey, a 410-page report that surveyed dozens of planetary scientists to identify the top priorities for the field over the next decade, Nye said.

“This very-well-thought-out, strongly supported list of suggestions has not really been embraced — or the better word would be ‘ignored,’” Nye said.

Europa, a mysterious moon of Jupiter, has a churning ocean locked beneath its icy surface, making it one of the best potential sources of extraterrestrial life in the solar system.

But the new budget doesn’t include any money to explore Europa’s ice-covered ocean.

The budget does set aside funds to identify asteroids that could threaten Earth and to bring back samples from an asteroid, said Bill Adkins, a consultant for the society.

The administration’s budget also includes funding to send a rover, much like the Curiosity rover, to Mars in 2020.

However, the budget does not set aside funds to take rocks back from the planet to study them on Earth, Adkins said.

“We want to bring back a piece of Mars,” Adkins said. “Here on Earth, we have physically much larger instruments — much higher-power instruments than we’re able to put on even our very best rovers.”

The budgetary picture could get better, as Congress still has the option to amend the 2014 budget request to include funding for Europa and other planetary priorities, Adkins noted.

But it could also get worse. The proposed budget assumes that Congress and the president will end the sequester prior to the start of the 2014 budget cycle. If that doesn’t happen, more cuts could be triggered, Adkins said.

distant-traveller:

Remaining Martian atmosphere still dynamic

Mars has lost much of its original atmosphere, but what’s left remains quite active, recent findings from NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity indicate. Rover team members reported diverse findings today at the European Geosciences Union 2013 General Assembly, in Vienna.

Evidence has strengthened this month that Mars lost much of its original atmosphere by a process of gas escaping from the top of the atmosphere.

Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument analyzed an atmosphere sample last week using a process that concentrates selected gases. The results provided the most precise measurements ever made of isotopes of argon in the Martian atmosphere. Isotopes are variants of the same element with different atomic weights.

SAM found that the Martian atmosphere has about four times as much of a lighter stable isotope (argon-36) compared to a heavier one (argon-38). The ratio is much lower than the solar system’s original ratio, as estimated from argon-isotope measurements of the sun and Jupiter. This points to a process at Mars that favored preferential loss of the lighter isotope over the heavier one.

While daily air temperature has climbed steadily since the measurements began eight months ago and is not strongly tied to the rover’s location, humidity has differed significantly at different places along the rover’s route. These are the first systematic measurements of humidity on Mars.

Dust distributed by the wind has been examined by Curiosity’s laser-firing Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument. Initial laser pulses on each target hit dust. The laser’s energy removes the dust to expose underlying material, but those initial pulses also provide information about the dust. 

“We knew that Mars is red because of iron oxides in the dust,” said ChemCam Deputy Principal Investigator Sylvestre Maurice of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in Toulouse, France. “ChemCam reveals a complex chemical composition of the dust that includes hydrogen, which could be in the form of hydroxyl groups or water molecules.”

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

the-science-llama:

Which house do you belong to?

mothernaturenetwork:

Has NASA’s Curiosity rover found clues to life on Mars?

Curiosity may have discovered compound salt deposits in a Martian sand patch that many microbes can use to sustain their lives.

rhamphotheca:

Collision Course? A Comet Heads for Mars

by Dr. Tony Phillips

Over the years, the spacefaring nations of Earth have sent dozens of probes and rovers to explore Mars. Today there are three active satellites circling the red planet while two rovers, Opportunity and Curiosity, wheel across the red sands below.  Mars is dry, barren, and apparently lifeless.

Soon, those assets could find themselves exploring a very different kind of world.

“There is a small but non-negligible chance that Comet 2013 A1 will strike Mars next year in October of 2014,” says Don Yeomans of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program at JPL.  “Current solutions put the odds of impact at 1 in 2000.”

The nucleus of the comet is probably 1 to 3 km in diameter, and it is coming in fast, around 56 km/s (125,000 mph). “It if does hit Mars, it would deliver as much energy as 35 million megatons of TNT,” estimates Yeomans…

(read more: NASA)

NASA’s Mars Spacecraft Go Solo Next Month

An unfavorable planetary alignment will force NASA’s fleet of robotic Mars explorers to be a lot more self-sufficient next month.

Mission controllers won’t send any commands to the agency’s various Mars spacecraft for much of April, because the sun will lie between Earth and the Red Planet during that time. Our star can disrupt and degrade interplanetary communications in such an alignment, which is known as a Mars solar conjunction, so spacecraft handlers won’t take any chances.

“Receiving a partial command could confuse the spacecraft, putting them in grave danger,” NASA officials explain in a video posted Tuesday (March 19) by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

Transmissions from Earth to the Mars rover Curiosity are slated to be suspended from April 4 to May 1, officials said. No commands will be sent to Curiosity’s older rover cousin Opportunity or NASA’s Mars-orbiting craft — Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) — from April 9 to April 26.

Both rovers will continue to do stationary science work throughout the conjunction period, relying on commands sent up to them beforehand.

“We are doing extra science planning work this month to develop almost three weeks of activity sequences for Opportunity to execute throughout conjunction,” Opportunity mission manager Alfonso Herrera of JPL said in a statement.

MRO and Mars Odyssey will continue science observations as well, though on a more limited basis. The orbiters will also continue their role as rover communication links, receiving data from Opportunity and Curiosity.

Odyssey will send information — its own observations and the rovers’ data — Earthward throughout the conjunction period, though the mission team anticipates some dropouts, so Odyssey will send the data again later as needed.

MRO will take a different tack, storing everything from April 4 until after conjunction. The spacecraft’s operators estimate it will have about 52 gigabits of data onboard when it’s cleared to transmit to Earth again on May 1.

Mars solar conjunctions occur every 26 months, so all of the spacecraft have dealt with them except Curiosity, which landed on the Red Planet last August. Opportunity has been through five conjunctions since arriving on Mars in January 2004, but Odyssey is even more experienced.

“This is our sixth conjunction for Odyssey,” Chris Potts of JPL said in a statement. Potts is mission manager for Odyssey, which has been orbiting Mars since 2001. “We have plenty of useful experience dealing with them, though each conjunction is a little different.”