Tag Archives: Mars

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Will the Phoenix rise again?

NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander - artist's impressionVia pretty much everywhere comes the news that NASA has pronounced the Phoenix Mars Lander “silent, presumed dead”. The Martian winter is settling in, and the resulting cold and darkness have put the plucky robot out of action, though there is a vague hope it might revive itself when the seasons change. [image courtesy NASA]

In addition to finally confirming the water-on-Mars matter, Phoenix has been a real (and much-needed) media success for NASA; they tapped into the right channels to keep the mission in the public consciousness, not just through a regular (but very sexy and content-laden) website, but through Twitter as well. It feels as if now, after two decades of disappointments, disasters and disillusionment, space is something to get excited about again. Let’s hope it stays that way, eh?

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I CAN HAZ MANNED MARTIAN EXPEDITIONZZ??!1

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Yes. As the title brilliantly puts it, there have been developments in the area of protecting astronauts from deadly solar radiation. This radiation has been seen as one of the big obstacles to transporting astronauts over interplanetary distances:

Large numbers of these energetic particles occur intermittently as “storms” with little warning and are already known to pose the greatest threat to man. Nature helps protect the Earth by having a giant “magnetic bubble” around the planet called the magnetosphere.

…

Space craft visiting the Moon or Mars could maintain some of this protection by taking along their very own portable “mini”-magnetosphere. The idea has been around since the 1960’s but it was thought impractical because it was believed that only a very large (more than 100km wide) magnetic bubble could possibly work.

…

Computer simulations done by a team in Lisbon with scientists at Rutherford Appleton last year showed that theoretically a very much smaller “magnetic bubble” of only several hundred meters across would be enough to protect a spacecraft.

Now this has been confirmed in the laboratory in the UK using apparatus originally built to work on fusion. By recreating in miniature a tiny piece of the Solar Wind, scientists working in the laboratory were able to confirm that a small “hole” in the Solar Wind is all that would be needed to keep the astronauts safe on their journey to our nearest neighbours.

All in all good news – and since our Glorious Leaders were able to drop five huge into our bust financial system at short notice I am no longer concerned over the cost of long range manned space exploration.

[image from the Physorg story]

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Snow over Mars

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lidar

The Phoenix lander aimed a laser at the clouds and found ice crystals about two miles above the surface. Mission scientists hope to see snow actually fall to the ground.  NASA says the snow is water-based. Mars is too warm to support frozen carbon dioxide. “Scientists are able to determine that the snow is water-based and not carbon-dioxide snow, since temperatures on Mars are currently too warm to support the latter,” NASA adds.–Setting-the-record-straight-Tom

There’s also geological evidence of past liquid water on the planet.

Bonus cool thing:

Peter Smith, the lead scientist for the mission from the University of Arizona, said the team is going to try something new in the last weeks of Phoenix’s life.

The lander carried a microphone, which was designed to listen to the roar of the descent engines as the craft settled onto the Martian surface. The microphone was not used then. Now, Smith said, the scientific team intends to turn on the microphone “and listen to Mars for the first time.”

[Lidar chart: NASA, JPL-Caltech, U of Arizona, Canadian Space Agency]

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Water on Mars? Yup. Life? Naaaaah… or, well, perhaps.

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NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander - artist's impressionOK, so we’re pretty positive about there being water on Mars now, but if you thought all was certainty in the realms of planetary exploration, you’d be wrong wrong wrong. [image courtesy NASA]

It’s all Aviation Week‘s fault, after they ran a story claiming that the White House had just been…

“… alerted by NASA about plans to make an announcement soon on major new Phoenix lander discoveries concerning the “potential for life” on Mars”.

As delightfully ambiguous as any pre-press-release announcement… and unsurprisingly (perhaps even as planned?) home-brew speculationists have been clogging the intertubes with theories about what NASA is (or was, or wasn’t) planning to announce.

So far, so unsurprising. Until you discover that the Phoenix lander itself* has announced that it definitely hasn’t discovered life and that there has been no such White House briefing. What gives?

Personally I suspect nothing more than the results of old-school media briefings and funky new methods (social-media-ZOMG!) getting a bit out of sync, but why spoil a potentially good conspiracy theory, eh? If you really want to burst that irrational bubble, Karl Schroeder has a pretty plausible explanation of what’s probably going on.

The recent discovery that the soil at the Phoenix lander site could support some earthly plants would appear to contradict the findings of the Viking landers from the 1970s. Those craft deployed sophisticated experiments to determine whether life is present on Mars, yet the instruments returned ambiguous results. There was a strong signal indicating life from some of the instruments, yet no evidence of biological material in the soil. The official interpretation that has become orthodoxy as a result, is that the Martian soil is highly oxidizing, ie. that it contains compounds such as hydrogen peroxide that destroy biological materials.

But if Phoenix has found that you could grow earthly plants in the soil at its site, doesn’t this cast serious doubt on that interpretation?

So, not so much “discovering life” as “possibly refuting a speculative negative interpretation of positive results gathered decades ago in support of the possibility of life”… but it doesn’t take a degree in journalism to see which of those two makes the better headline, AMIRITE?

[ * – Well, someone on the team, but you know what I mean. ]