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.
Penny wise pound foolish: The Obama administration budget proposal for NASA included shutting down Opportunity in 2015.
This is very stupid. It costs about a billion dollars to build a rover and get it to Mars. And that’s assuming everything works. Opportunity is already there and functioning flawlessly at a fraction of that cost. Rather than cutting Opportunity, NASA should consider cutting the new rover mission so that the money could be used for other planetary exploration, such as a mission to Titan.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter entered safe mode on Friday, caused by unexpected switch to a backup computer.
They expect to get the probe back into full operation in a couple of days.
My heart bleeds: The IAU has issued a press release condemning the public’s naming of Martian craters as initiated by the private company Uwingu.
This war over the right to name features on other planets is mostly a tempest in a teapot, as the actual names will finally be decided by the people who end up living there. Nonetheless, I really like how Uwingu is pushing the IAU’s buttons, as that organization’s self-righteous insistence that it has the power to name everything in space, from craters to the smallest boulders, has for years struck me as pompous and wrong.
Most Mars meteorites found on Earth may have been blasted here from a single impact on Mars around 3 million years ago.
This is a great scientific detective story. It has a lot of uncertainties, should definitely be taken with a grain of salt, but is nonetheless very convincing.
The war of space names continues: Despite the disapproval of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the space company Uwingu has announced another private commercial naming project for the craters of Mars.
Starting today (Feb. 26), anybody with an Internet connection and a few dollars to spare can give a moniker to one of the Red Planet’s 500,000 or so unnamed craters, as part of a mapping project run by the space-funding company Uwingu. “This is the first people’s map of Mars, where anybody can play,” said Uwingu CEO Alan Stern, a former NASA science chief who also heads the space agency’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. “It’s a very social thing.”
Sounds fun, and a clever way for this company to raise capital. Whether these names stick is an entirely different thing. Uwingu has as much right to assign names to objects as the IAU, but so far the IAU’s fake authority in this matter carries more weight.
A ruling by “a fatwa committee” in the United Arab Emirates now forbids Muslims from going on a one way mission to Mars.
“Such a one-way journey poses a real risk to life, and that can never be justified in Islam,” the committee said. “There is a possibility that an individual who travels to planet Mars may not be able to remain alive there, and is more vulnerable to death.” Whoever opts for this “hazardous trip”, the committee said, is likely to perish for no “righteous reason”, and thus will be liable to a “punishment similar to that of suicide in the Hereafter”.
Suicide and martyrdom in the name of Islam, however, is perfectly all right.
Orbital images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have confirmed that the mysterious rock that appeared near Opportunity was not ejecta from a nearby meteorite impact.
The scientists theorized that there was a very remote chance that a nearby impact has thrown the rock into place, but the images show nothing nearby. Moreover, if there had been an impact we probably would have seen more rocks raining down all around. The images are further confirmation that the rock was kicked up by the rover itself as it rolled along.
Opportunity heads uphill after engineers finally pinpoint the origin of the rock that appeared out of nowhere.
They have now confirmed that the rock was kicked off a larger piece when Opportunity traveled over it.
