Tag: Mars

The new Mars rover…

8:54 am

Tonight at 10:30 pm (Pacific), the new Martian rover Curiosity will hopefully touch down safely on the Martian surface to begin several years of research in the crater Gale.

What has been most amazing to me is the amount of interest in this landing by the press, especially the mainstream press. Normally these outlets don’t care that much for space exploration, a trend that began after the Apollo 11 landing in 1969 when it became trendy in liberal circles to down play space exploration so that “the money could instead be spent solving our problems here on Earth.”

Today, however, I count more than forty news articles on this upcoming landing, most of which come from mainstream sources. It seems that these outlets have finally discovered something that has been obvious from the beginning: the American public is fascinated with space exploration, and if you want to attract readers, it is better to provide coverage of what interests them rather than push a political agenda that few agree with.

Anyway, if you want to follow the landing live, go here for a full outline of options. Or go directly to NASA TV. Most of what you will see will the control room at JPL, with many engineers staring at computer screens waiting to find out if the landing was a success, about twenty minutes after it took place. This is because it will take that long for the communications signals to travel from Mars to the Earth. Essentially, Curiosity is on its own in this landing.

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Engineers have successfully tested a spare reaction wheel on Mars Odyssey in their effort to bring the spacecraft back into full operation.

6:31 pm

Engineers have successfully tested a spare reaction wheel on Mars Odyssey in their effort to bring the spacecraft back into full operation.

After more than 11 years of non-operational storage, the spare reaction wheel passed preliminary tests on Wednesday, June 12, spinning at up to 5,000 rotations per minute forward and backward. Odyssey engineers plan to substitute it for a reaction wheel they have assessed as no longer reliable. That wheel stuck for a few minutes last week, causing Odyssey to put itself into safe mode on June 8, Universal Time (June 7, Pacific Time).

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Mars Odyssey put itself into safe mode on Friday when it detected problems with one of the three reaction wheels used to orient the spacecraft.

3:21 pm

Mars Odyssey put itself into safe mode on Friday when it detected problems with one of the three reaction wheels used to orient the spacecraft.

If this space probe goes down, it will make it more difficult to rely data back from Opportunity, now on the Martian surface, and Curiosity, due to land in two months.

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Mars: dry with only periodic short bursts of wetness.

9:04 am

Mars: dry with only periodic short bursts of wetness.

Though this Science article outlines well the present “consensus” for Mars’s past climate, it also tries to make it sound like the planetary science community had once believed that Mars was once ocean-covered like the Earth and now has abandoned that consensus. To this I say bunk. Though many respected planetary scientists have looked for and found evidence for a past ocean on Mars, this possibility has always been controversial. From my readings most planetary scientists have always believed that Mars has generally been dry, interspersed with short periods when there is flowing liquid water on its surface. Even the advocates of the Martian ocean never proposed an Earthlike ocean, but a somewhat shallow and short-lived phenomenon.

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Scientists have found more evidence that the streaks on Martian hillsides that darken in warm weather are caused by melting groundwater flowing downhill.

8:36 am

Liquid water on Mars! Scientists have found more evidence that the streaks on Martian hillsides that darken in warm weather are caused by melting groundwater flowing downhill.

Last summer, the team pointing the HiRISE camera on the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) dropped that bombshell: it had identified 7 confirmed and 12 likely sites that contained hundreds of narrow streaks on steep slopes inside crater walls. During warmer seasons, as temperatures rose as high as 27 degrees Celsius, the streaks darkened, and then faded again. Salts could allow brines to be liquid at these temperatures. Today at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, the HiRISE team announced that it now has doubled it stash of streaks, with the identification of 15 confirmed and 23 likely sites, all in the mid-latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere.

Additional analysis of the spectrographic data also suggests that water could be the cause of the darkening.

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When a solar storm slammed into both the Earth and Mars in January 2008, scientists were able to directly measure the importance of the Earth’s magnetic field in protecting our atmosphere from oxygen loss.

9:22 am

When a solar storm slammed into both the Earth and Mars in January 2008, scientists were able to directly measure the importance of the Earth’s magnetic field in protecting our atmosphere from oxygen loss.

They found that while the pressure of the solar wind increased at each planet by similar amounts, the increase in the rate of loss of martian oxygen was ten times that of Earth’s increase. Such a difference would have a dramatic impact over billions of years, leading to large losses of the martian atmosphere, perhaps explaining or at least contributing to its current tenuous state. The result proves the efficacy of Earth’s magnetic field in deflecting the solar wind and protecting our atmosphere.

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