Curiosity self-portrait. Reflection of arm is in the lens, the arm was edited out digitally.
I just can’t get enough of the Mars Curiosity.
In the words of Phil Plait, “Holy. Haleakala. The simple and sheer amazingness of this picture cannot be overstated. Here we have a picture taken by a camera on board a space probe that’s been orbiting Mars for six years, reset and re-aimed by programmers hundreds of millions of kilometers away using math and science pioneered centuries ago, so that it could catch the fleeting view of another machine we humans flung across space, traveling hundreds of million of kilometers to another world at mind-bending speeds, only to gently – and perfectly – touch down on the surface mere minutes later.
The news these days is filled with polarization, with hate, with fear, with ignorance. But while these feelings are a part of us, and always will be, they neither dominate nor define us. Not if we don’t let them. When we reach, when we explore, when we’re curious – that’s when we’re at our best. We can learn about the world around us, the Universe around us. It doesn’t divide us, or separate us, or create artificial and wholly made-up barriers between us. As we saw on Twitter, at New York Times Square where hundreds of people watched the landing live, and all over the world: science and exploration bind us together. Science makes the world a better place, and it makes us better people.”
Truth.
Mars Curiosity lander will break into the Martian atmosphere with a scheduled decent August 6th. NASA is using a parachute and then a crazy risky rocket propelled crane to lower the lander onto the surface. Stay tuned! It will be exciting.
I was stunned to find out that most/many people are unaware that Mars has polar ice caps. Here are three images; the first is the northern cap, Planum Boreum, from the Viking-1 mission, the second is Planum Boreum from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and the third is the southern ice cap (Planum Australe, which sublimates each year) taken from Earth through a small 8” telescope.
Keep looking up!
A dust devil on the Martian surface, taken by the MRO. 30m across and up to 800m high, not so much a dust devil as a massive tornado!
Check out this cool picture of the Noachis Terra on Mars. Sand dunes and ripples demonstrate the universality of physical processes. That is why, if you ever take a planetary science class, you will often find yourself studying the geology on Earth.
This frame is about 1km across and taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
This is the Russian craft Phobos-Grunt, and was headed for Phobos, one of the Martian moons (it has two). It ran into trouble soon after it was launched in November, when its rockets failed to lift it out of low Earth orbit. The Russian officials from Roscosmos (the Russian space agency) are blaming an antisatellite weapon!! Whose weapon? They haven’t said….
This marks a $160 million failure, and Russia has not succeeded in sending a spacecraft to Mars since the 1980s. Debris could rain down this weekend or early next week from the failed satellite onto populated areas, but will most likely hit an ocean somewhere. Stay inside!
This is Hillary Livingston, a model maker, and she is touching up a future lunar base featured in “Beyond Planet Earth”, a new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. NASA chemists have even recreated the smell of lunar dust for those interested in smelling it. The AMNH is pretty famous for its tiny dioramas, and I just love that they are finally doing space ones.
See a slideshow on the exhibit here: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/11/15/science/15Planet.html
It was affixed onto the spacecraft Phoenix and launched to Mars in 2007 and is addressed to future residents of Mars. He says, “I’m glad you’re there, and I wish I was with you.”
Move over Google Earth, hello Google Mars!
Not sure who heard this news over the din of another stock market collapse, but the Aug. 5, 2011 edition of Science is reporting liquid water on Mars. Hello? Why aren’t more people excited? Sure, it only happens on the hottest Martian days, so far they are just looking at this one canyon area, and sure it is super salty or whatever…but isn’t this what we were all waiting for? The water is liquid and flowing now, not eons ago.
Read more about it here: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/main/index.html
And here: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/08/is-mars-weeping-salty-tears.html
This is Opportunity’s heat shield in Meridiani Planum, taken by the Mars rover itself. What is totally cool is the heavy metal meteorite, made of nickel and iron, in the left foreground. Scientists think that finding something like that on Mars would be like finding one of a similar size in the vast empty plains of Antarctica.
This panoramic photo was taken by the Mars rover Spirit. It shows dust covering up the solar panels. After 6 years of collecting data on the red planet, scientists are abandoning efforts to contact it after the Martian winter. The mission was supposed to last only a few months and people thought that the Spirit wouldn’t even make it that far. After a fixed computer glitch, it was good to go! Later it began to show its age and busted a wheel. It has spent the last few years traveling mostly backwards and scraping its wheel through the dirt. It discovered stuff (amorphous silica) that would have gone unnoticed if it actually had a wheel, because they would have driven right over it. Two years ago, it fell through a thin crust and into a camouflaged sand trap. It has continued to gather info about the atmosphere and the wobble of the rotation, but after a long winter and silent spring, NASA has given up.
People always ask me about “aliens” (which they mean the bug-eyes greys that haunt book covers worldwide). Those are fictional. The stories of the grey aliens and stories of medieval demons are nearly identical; just a story passed down when people don’t understand science. However much I want those to be true, they aren’t. I absolutely think that it would be improbable for life to not exist outside of Earth. Since most of life on Earth is microbial, we can reasonably expect that when we search for life outside the biosphere, we are looking for bacteria or protists.
We used to think that liquid water in the solar system was rare, that only Earth had that special formula. It now appears that gravity, geology, radioactivity and antifreeze chemicals like salt and ammonia have given many “hostile” worlds the ability to muster the pressures and temperatures that allow liquid water to exist. And research on Earth has shown that if there is water, there could be life. And by life I mean microbial life.
This is a meteorite from Mars called Allan Hills 84001, found in 1996, that contains what appears fossilized bacterial life forms. After 20 years of analytical research with increasingly more advanced tools, the team decided that, “None of the original features supporting our hypothesis for ALH84001 has either been discredited or has been positively ascribed to non-biologic explanations.” In other words, they can’t disprove the claims, nor can they produce similar features using non-living compounds. There are so many more quirks to this Martian tale, but those are stories for a different day.
