Weather has once again delayed the test flight of a new Mars-landing parachute system on a saucer shaped launch vehicle.
The next launch opportunity is Saturday, June 7.
A test flight of a new NASA parachute system for landing on Mars has been delayed until at least Thursday due to weather.
The saucer shaped test vehicle, if it successfully completes this test flight, will then be used repeatedly to test landing systems that can be used on Mars.
A place on Mars that was possibly habitable only 200 million years ago.
This article discusses the possibility of liquid water from the melting of the glaciers that scientists think once covered the western slopes of the giant volcano Arsia Mons. I have also written about this area in an article I wrote for Sky & Telescope last year on exploring caves in space. It is thought that there might be caves here in which some of that water from those glaciers might still be found.
As one scientist is quoted as saying in this article, “Arsia Mons would be the next place I would want to go.” Like the south pole of the Moon, it likely has all the ingredients for establishing a habitable colony.
Opportunity takes another spectacular image peering into Endeavour Crater.
The dark sand-covered floor of the crater is clearly visible.
The largest new impact crater ever found on Mars.
The impact was caused by an asteroid estimated to be less then 20 feet across, and occurred sometime between March 27 and March 28, 2012.
Construction has now begun on NASA’s next Mars lander, set for launch in 2016.
The first preliminary list of candidate landing sites for NASA’s next Mars rover have been proposed.
At the conclusion of the workshop, attendees voted informally on the nearly 30 candidate sites that researchers had presented—ranking the sites as being of high, medium, or low scientific interest. Floating to the top was a site called Northeast Syrtis Major, a terrain at the edge of the Isidis Basin, the remnant of one of Mars’s biggest and most ancient asteroid impacts. Jack Mustard, a planetary scientist at Brown University and an advocate for the site, says material from the impact could offer a precise date for that event. Scientists also want a piece of nearby lava flows, thought to have oozed out and cooled several hundred million years later.
Nothing is even close to being decided yet, however.
In related news, a new study suggests that dozens of microbes might have stowed away on Curiosity when it left for Mars.
Emphasis must be placed on the word “suggests” however.
Engineers commanded Curiosity to drill its third drill hole on Tuesday on what looks like an outcrop of sandstone in Gale Crater.
This hole is shallow and is merely a test to see if a deeper full bore would be worthwhile geological.
That Curiosity has only drilled three holes, and is now only doing a test bore first is partly because engineers fear that using the drill too much will cause a short circuit that will disable the rover entirely. This fear is because of a design flaw in the construction of the rover and the drill.
Protecting interplanetary travelers from radiation will not be easy according to a recent study.
The article is detailed and thorough, and outlines the engineering challenges quite accurately.
Penny wise, pound foolish: Budget issues continue to threaten a number of successfully functioning science spacecraft, including Opportunity on Mars and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter circling the Moon.
Don’t be surprised if NASA announces soon that they are shutting down these spacecraft so they can save some money. Or as the article notes, “Money not spent on these extended missions will probably slide into [the Science Mission Directorate’s] Black Hole of Funding (the James Webb Space Telescope) or be dissipated on new paperwork, committee meetings and concept studies.”
The uncertainty of science: New research suggests that, in general, Mars has always been too cold to harbor liquid water on its surface for long periods.
Mars’ atmosphere was probably never thick enough to keep temperatures on the planet’s surface above freezing for the long term, suggests research published today in Nature Geoscience1. Although the planet’s topography indicates that liquid water has flooded Mars in the distant past, evidence increasingly suggests that those episodes reflect occasional warm spells, not a consistently hospitable phase of the planet’s history.
The research does not say that liquid water never flowed on the Martian surface, only that such events were short-lived. They looked at craters and noted that the surface has impacts from meteorites that would not have survived to the surface had the atmosphere been thick enough for liquid water.
The research however did not address Mars’ relatively smooth northern hemisphere, where there are not a lot of craters and where some scientists think there might once have been a shallow ocean. If Mars never had liquid water for long periods, why does this area lack craters?
India’s Mangalyaan Mars orbiter is now halfway to Mars.
India, unlike Israel, wants to conquer the stars, so the success of their first interplanetary mission means a lot to them.
Curiosity catches a mysterious flash of light on the Martian horizon.
Be assured, despite what some reports are suggesting, it isn’t an alien flashing a mirror at us. The top theory now is that Curiosity caught a reflection off a “glinty” rock.
Scientists from the joint European/Russian ExoMars rover mission have narrowed their candidate landing sites to four.
Last week, 60 scientists met at ESA’s European Space Astronomy Centre near Madrid to discuss eight potential sites. On 27 March, they cast an informal vote, and four sites emerged as favourites: Mawrth Vallis, Oxia Planum, Hypanis Vallis and Oxia Palus. An expert working group tasked with recommending a final landing site will now consider the proposals, before announcing a formal shortlist of three or four sites in June. Following detailed studies of the shortlisted sites, the panel will make a single recommendation to ESA and Roscosmos in late 2016.
This is maybe the most risky mission to Mars in decades, as the landing design is coming from the Russians, who have not had a successful interplanetary mission since the era of the Soviet Union, and even then had a 100% failure rate for their missions to Mars. (On a more optimistic note, the European Mars Express mission used a Russian rocket to take off, making it the first Mars mission with Russians participation that actually succeeded.)
One of the factors that has made this mission more risky is the fact that the U.S. was once a participant and backed out very late in the game. The Russians are our replacement, and have had to scramble to catch up.
Hubble takes an image of Comet Siding Spring and finds two jets coming off the nucleus.
The comet will fly past Mars on October 19 by a distance of only 84,000 miles, which makes understanding its jets crucially important for protecting the various spacecraft that orbit the red planet.
Curiosity has reached another area of interesting terrain: rows of layered curvy rocks.
The science team has been hunting for tasty rock outcrops suitable for the first drilling campaign since she departed the dried out lakebed at Yellowknife Bay in July 2013 and began her epic trek across the floor of Gale Crater towards the base of Mount Sharp. With each passing Sol, or Martian day, Mount Sharp looms larger and larger and the historical layers with deposits of hydrated minerals potentially indicative of an alien habitable zone come ever clearer into focus.
The panoramas are quite spectacular as the rover continues its journey toward Mt Sharp.
Before and after images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have discovered the formation of a new gully on Mars sometime between November 2010 and May 2013.
The winding gully seems to have poured out from an existing ribbon channel in a crater in Mars’ Terra Sirenum region. The leading hypothesis on how the gully formed is that debris flowed downslope from an alcove and eroded a new channel. Though it looks water-carved, the gully is much more likely to have been formed when carbon dioxide frost accumulated on the slope and grew heavy enough to avalanche down and drag material down with it.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has now resumed full science operations after it went into safe mode late last week.
