You don't spend $420-million on a Mars lander only to discover human dandruff, but that's what Nature is saying may happen once the TEGA instrument receives its first sample of Martian soil. If true, NASA scientists may want to incorporate liberal amounts of Head & Shoulders in their future bathing regimen.
The search for the organic building blocks of life has been a major selling point for Phoenix; many press accounts have eagerly, yet mistakenly, foreshortened the mission’s raison d’etre to ‘the search for life’. Yet some mission scientists say that it is the science goal least likely to succeed, partly because TEGA is so sensitive that it may end up sensing only contamination from Earth.
“We will see organics, for sure, because we’re bringing them,” says Aaron Zent, a mission scientist from NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. Likely contaminants include skin flakes, dead microbes and volatile lubricants. “The problem with an instrument so sensitive is all you detect is your own schmutz,” says Zent.
Once again a communications breakdown between the Mars Odyssey orbiter and the Phoenix Lander has occurred, delaying today's planned scientific dig until Thursday, at the earliest. If this sounds familiar it's because the same thing happened last week. NASA seems to believe that high-energy particles zipping through space have collided with Mars Odyssey, temporarily placing the communications device responsible for relaying commands to Phoenix into Safe Mode.
"The lander is fine," Edwards said.
Phoenix set down in Mars' northern latitudes to study whether the polar environment is capable of supporting primitive life. It communicates with Earth through Odyssey and the Reconnaissance Orbiter, which make daily passes over the lander to send commands and beam back images.
With Odyssey temporarily out of service, engineers told the Reconnaissance Orbiter to be the middleman between the lander and Earth.
Phoenix had planned to dig the first of three shallow pits north of where it landed and dump the dirt into a tiny oven, where it will be baked and studied this week. The earliest the lander can start the excavation will be Thursday, when new commands will be sent up.
The green light to scrape the Martian surface came after an extensive check of Phoenix's 8-foot robotic arm and other scientific instruments.
"It's absolutely an incredibly science-rich location," said chief scientist Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, who heads the three-month, $420 million mission.
On May 25th, the Phoenix spacecraft will hopefully land at the northern Martian ice cap and return some amazing science. Before that happens, Phoenix needs to arrive in one piece, something that has proven historically difficult on Mars. NASA's history in successfully planting a lander on Mars is not good, at least when using old-school rocket-based machines. When NASA uses the airbag method, all seems well. But these rocket landings.....oiy, much stress indeed. To better illustrate the challenge Phoenix faces, JPL has released a video that plays like a trailer for a summer blockbuster.
Our solar system may be headed for total chaos in 40-million years, according to new research by Jacques Laskar of the Observatoire in France. Jacques ran 1001 computer simulations of the solar system, each with slightly different starting positions for our planets, and in 1 to 2% of the situations, all hell broke loose.
"Once Mercury's eccentricity gets up above about 0.6, then it's getting close to crossing Venus's orbit," Laughlin told New Scientist. "Once you get orbit crossings, you sort of transition from the orderly yet chaotic configuration that the solar system is in currently to a much more violently chaotic situation. Then all bets are off – a lot of bad things can happen."
Mercury and Mars tend to get thrown around the most when the solar system destabilises, because at 6 and 11% of Earth's mass, respectively, they are relatively easy to move. It is harder to budge Venus, on the other hand, because it has 82% of Earth's mass.
In one of Batygin and Laughlin's simulations, Mercury was thrown into the Sun 1.3 billion years from now. In another, Mars was flung out of the solar system after 820 million years, then 40 million years later Mercury and Venus collided.
Hopefully, humanity will have long-since left our cradle by the time this happens, no doubt running around the universe in an attempt to escape the Cylons.
We haven't heard much about sending animals into space since the early days of exploration, most notably by Laika the dog, who perished shortly after launch. This could be changing in the near future, as the Russians are busy prepping monkeys for a possible trip to Mars in an attempt to pave the way for human exploration.
Experiments on the monkeys will be carried out at the same time as the Mars-500 project. That project - due to start early next year - is aimed at simulating the conditions of interplanetary flight. Volunteers will have to spend 17 months in a mock-up "spaceship" in Moscow.
As expected, animal rights activists are going to have a fit.
"Humanity sacrifices more than 100 million animals a year in the name of health and beauty. It's time to think of an alternative to experiments with animals," says Andrei Zbarsky of the international nature conservation group WWF.
"I'm sure scientists will repeat the story of Laika, the first dog in space. Today it's no secret that the dog died from the nervous stress immediately after the rocket launch and its dead body revolved in orbit for two weeks."
If monkeys are as smart as I think, they'll do the only rational thing, which is immediately sever contact with Earth upon reach Mars and set up their own government, ultimately refusing landing approval once the humans arrive.
The HiRISE camera hitching a ride aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken several stunning photographs of the Martian moon Phobos. At only 22 km in diameter, Phobos is a dinky object, which is good news for Mars, as Phobos will eventually slam into the planet. How Phobos, and its smaller brother Deimos, came into existence remains unclear. Each were either asteroids in their former life that were eventually captured by the gravity of Mars, or both moons formed from material that was shed from Mars during an ancient and mammoth impact.
The most prominent feature on Phobos is the Stickney crater, which has a diameter of 9 km. If whatever clobbered Phobos to form that crater had been just a hair larger, it would have shattered the moon into a zillion pieces.
That didn't take long. In less than 24-hours, NASA has reversed course on unplugging the Spirit rover on Mars due to budget cuts.
From Discovery News:
NASA is saying Tuesday that it has rescinded a letter that recommended budget cuts in the Mars Rover program to cover the cost of a next-generation rover on the Red Planet.
The move comes a day after scientists at the agency's robotics center said they would need to hibernate one of the twin Mars robots and limit the duties of the other because their budget was being cut by $4 million.
I guess we can scrap plans for that cookie-drive now.
NASA has ordered $4-million in funding for the Mars Exploration Rover program to be cut from its paltry $20-million annual budget, putting at least one of the rovers in serious jeopardy.
Steve Squyres, main man for the project, tells CNN that operations for Spirit will be the likely target, with Spirit entering a forced hibernation until more money is somehow found.
These poor rovers have managed to live well beyond their projected shelf life, returning amazing data that will aid humanity in the future, have faced perilous cliffs, dust-devils and wicked storms, yet good ole budget problems are going to do them in.
Sad. Sad. Sad.
$4-million is chump change when the advancement of human knowledge and understanding is involved, but for some reason, we can always find money if it involves killing people.
According to scientists at Lancaster University in the UK, new research has revealed that ancient geysers on Mars spewed forth towering jets of...carbonated water! This is huge news for Coca-Cola, assuming they have any interest in terraforming the Red Planet.
The evidence for this appears at two sites on Mars where cracks hundreds of kilometres long called Mangala Fossa and Cerberus Fossae stretch across the surface. Both cracks are the starting points for broad channels that appear to have carried huge quantities of water – between 10 and 100 times the flow of the Amazon River.
How was Mars able to generate enough power to send a jet of carbonated water 3-4 kilometers into the air? Answers...and more questions, on page 2.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter happened to be looking at the right place at the right time on February 19th, when its HiRISE camera accidentally spotted a Martian landslide in action. Amazing nature photography ensued.
"It really surprised me," says planetary scientist Ingrid Daubar Spitale of the University of Arizona who first noticed the avalanches in photos taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Feb. 19th. "It's great to see something so dynamic on Mars. A lot of what we see there hasn't changed for millions of years."
