Tag archives for mars
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The top 10 stories on our radar today: The citizens of a small town in Alaska have become America’s first refugees displaced by climate change, a new species of pit viper has been discovered in Honduras, and…
Posted by How far would you go to push the bounds of discovery? What would you risk? From the top of Mount Everest to the surface of the Moon, astronaut Buzz Aldrin and mountaineer Conrad Anker have risked their lives to undertake humankind’s most stunning achievements.
Nearly 42 years after it landed and mysteriously died on the Red Planet, a Russian spacecraft’s final resting place may have been found thanks to the keen-eyes of an online Russian community of Mars fans, according to a NASA statement this week.. Poring over hi-resolution images of the landing region snapped by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance…
Mars may have a really bad day next year on October 19th. That’s when there is a very slight chance a newly discovered comet may impact our neighboring planet, says NASA. Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) was discovered by Australian Robert H. McNaught, a prolific comet and asteroid hunter just two months ago and NASA’s Near-Earth…
NASA’s Curiosity rover made history this week by boring its first hole into the Martian surface. The February 6 “mini-drill test” of a fine-grained sedimentary rock marks the first full operation of both the hammering and rotary action of Curiosity’s drill bit, which is located at the end of the one-ton rover’s 7-foot-long robotic arm.…
Heated Discussion about Energy in Second Presidential Debate, but No Mention of Climate
Posted by Tim Profeta of Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, Duke University on October 18, 2012 Next to jobs and the economy, the National Journal reports, no other issue has dominated this year’s election as much as energy because it’s a proxy for many other things (subscription). “Energy has not been this big an issue in a presidential campaign since the tumultuous years of the 1970s,” when the Arab oil embargo raised gasoline prices and had…
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From 120 million miles away, a team at “drivers” must tell the Mars rover Curiosity where to go as it approaches a steep, rocky slope. They work their computer screens with an arcade-like intensity—you almost expect them to reach for the joystick. But that’s not how you drive on Mars. It’s much more complicated than that, and the stakes could hardly be higher.
It has the feel of a crime scene shot—a grainy black-and-white photo with arrows pointing to where the salient evidence was found. But the absorbing image is instead a marvel of space science, an actual photo that shows where the five portions of the now celebrated Mars Science Lab/Curiosity descent capsule landed.
Breaking Orbit guest blogger Marc Kaufman describes the joyful atmosphere, relief and pride inside the NASA Jet Propulsion Jet Laboratory a few hours ago, when scientists, engineers and technicians got confirmation from Mars that after years of hard work and a nail-biting descent their roving science laboratory Curiosity had been placed on the Red Planet apparently exactly as planned.
By dropping the one-ton rover Curiosity into a Martian crater (with a three-mile high mountain nearby!), and equipping it to search over two years for the building blocks of possible extraterrestrial life; humans are once again at a great moment of adventure and exploration to savor.
Near midnight of August 5, the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft will enter the Martian atmosphere at some 13,200 miles per hour. It has at most seven minutes to lose all that speed or the Curiosity rover it’s carrying will face a very hard landing. Millions of people will be holding their collective breaths as the moment of entry arrives. Why all the sudden interest in Mars? Three basic reasons.
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For the lucky few get to travel to space, the food isn’t exactly, well, out of this world. Most space cuisine consists of a limited selection of pre-packaged food prepared by adding water—possibly leading to “menu fatigue” that could compromise the crew’s health. Enter the “gastronauts”—a team of scientists with the NASA-funded Hawaii Space Exploration Analogue and Simulation project (HI-SEAS) who are working to develop more appetizing and healthy foods for long-term space travel. Think shrimp paella, curry chicken crepes, and chocolate pudding with raspberries.
Posted by Disney’s movie John Carter is a wild interplanetary tale about a Civil War veteran who ends up on Mars. Robert Zubrin, President of the Mars Society and author of The Case for Mars, was inspired by stories of John Carter to become an astronomical engineer, so we asked him to assess the movie’s depiction of life on Mars…
Missing Martian Atmosphere: Clues In Earth’s Cold Plasma?
Posted by Dave Mosher on January 26, 2012 
“Invisible” veils of cold plasma discovered around Earth might tell us something about how Mars lost its atmosphere, experts say.
Martian “Bomb Sag” a Clue to Wetter Times
Posted by Jason Major on January 13, 2012 
Spirit may be settled in for its eternal sleep, but the data it’s returned is still helping researchers piece together clues to Mars’ watery past! The image above, a false-color view from the “Home Plate” region where Spirit now sits, points to a feature geologists call a “bomb sag”. Bombs are a term for rocks ejected…
Night Sky News: Planets Dazzle Holiday Skies
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on December 24, 2011 
This holiday season skywatchers get to witness five planets hanging like ornaments in the skies above. All throughout the end of the month you can catch the five classical naked-eye planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – all of which were first seen by astronomers in ancient Greek and Roman times. First up…
Night Sky News: Watch Moon meet Leo and Zodiacal Lights
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on September 23, 2011 
For skywatchers willing to get up early, the next few mornings will be greeted by the crescent Moon pairing up with Mars and a stellar giant. First up on Sept.24 at dawn -about half hour before your local sunrise - face the eastern sky and look for the crescent Moon, which will appear sandwiched between…
Night Sky News: Moon Joins Bright Stars and Planets
Posted by Andrew Fazekas on July 22, 2011 
For early bird skywatchers willing to look up before dawn the next few days, the Moon will be putting on a great show. On Saturday, July 23, about an hour before your local dawn face east to find the Quarter Moon. Joining our celestial neighbor will be what looks like a creamy colored, bright star which is…
Posted by by Rachel Kaufman “The story begins two months before the launch of the Phoenix Mars Lander. One year before the landing. It takes ten months to fly at 74,000 mph to arrive on Mars. It’s far. The subject of the story is a Martian photographer. “Don’t call me that,” Peter Smith, the world’s greatest Martian…
If you love the red planet, you’ve probably been following the exploits of the Mars500 crew, a team of European, Russian, and Chinese volunteers who are conducting a mock mission to Mars. Run by Russia’s Institute for Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency, the Mars500 project aims to simulate the psychological challenges involved in…
Since posting last week about volunteers for a one-way trip to Mars, several of you have written in asking where to sign up. Planetary scientist Pascal Lee at Haughton Crater, Devon Island, wearing the upper torso of an advanced space-exploration concept suit (color-enhanced image). —Photograph courtesy NASA Haughton-Mars Project/Pascal Lee Hearing your comments and suggested…
I have to admit, I hadn’t heard of the Journal of Cosmology until today, maybe because it only started in 2009. According to the “About” page, the Journal of Cosmology is a peer-reviewed, free, open-access, online publication that gets roughly 50,000 readers a month. The editorial board includes names from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,…
Forget naughty or nice–with December now in full force, news outlets across the country are busy compiling their lists of what were the most popular/spectacular/important stories of 2010. We here at NG are no exception, and we’ve even compiled everything into a handy-dandy “best of” hub page for easy perusing. Since you know you love…
One of the perks of coming to a scientific meeting is that, in addition to press briefings and poster sessions, you get to sit down and just chat with some of the bright minds working on solving the mysteries of the universe. In my case, I ran into planetary scientist James Wray of Cornell University…
Welcome, ladies and gents, to this week’s Carnival of Space, the 170th performance of a spectacular show filled with thrills, chills, and amazements! —Image by Victoria Jaggard This is my debut as host of the Carnival here at Breaking Orbit, but I’m no First of May when it comes to showcasing the wonders the cosmos…
