Step right up and prove why you should get a one-way ticket to Mars! Well, wait -- you might want to know a little more about the venture first.
A Dutch company called Mars One began looking Monday for volunteer astronauts to fly to Mars. Departure for the Red Planet is scheduled for 2022, landing seven months later in 2023.
The space travelers will return ... never. They will finish out their lives on Mars, representatives from the nonprofit said.
"It's likely that there will be a crematorium," said CEO Bas Lansdorp. "It's up to the people on Mars to decide what to do with their dead."
Still, the company said it has received more than 10,000 e-mails from interested would-be spacefarers.
Read the entire article here:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/22/world/mars-one-way-ticket/index.html
Mars was capable of supporting microbial life in the distant past, scientists announced today.
They reached this conclusion after studying the latest observations from NASA's Curiosity rover, which just analyzed the first-ever sample collected from the interior of a Red Planet rock.
Here are answers to a few basic questions about Curiosity's discovery, and what it means about the Red Planet's past and the rover's future.
What exactly did Curiosity find?
Last month, Curiosity drilled 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) into a rock on a Martian outcrop that mission scientists have dubbed "John Klein." [The Search for Life on Mars (Photo Timeline)]
The rover's onboard Chemistry & Mineralogy (CheMin) and Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instruments found some of the chemical ingredients for life in the collected powder, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon. The mix of compounds also suggests that the area may have contained chemical energy sources for potential Red Planet microbes, researchers said.
In addition, the sample contains clay minerals, indicating that the rock was exposed to a benign aqueous environment — such as a neutral-pH lake, for example — billions of years ago.
To be clear, Curiosity found no evidence that life has ever existed on the Red Planet. But its results suggest that the John Klein site could have supported microbes long ago, if they ever evolved on Mars or were transported there.
So what? Didn't we already know that ancient Mars was wet?
Scientists have known for years that water flowed or pooled on the surface of Mars in the ancient past. But there's more to habitability than the mere existence of liquid water.
For primitive microbial life to survive, a site must also have the right chemical makeup and a potential energy source, researchers say. And all of these ingredients were apparently present at John Klein.
Doesn't the right chemical makeup include organic compounds? Did Curiosity find any of those?
The SAM instrument can detect complex organics — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it — and Curiosity is looking for these molecules on Mars, but it hasn't found anything conclusive yet.
Read the entire article:
http://en-maktoob.news.yahoo.com/mars-could-once-supported-life-know-030350124.html
A Dutch company aims to land humans on Mars by 2023 as the first step toward establishing a permanent colony on the Red Planet.
The project, called Mars One, plans to drop four astronauts on Mars in April 2023. New members of the nascent colony will arive every two years after that, and none of the Red Planet pioneers will ever return to Earth.
To pay for all of this, Mars One says it will stage a media spectacle the likes of which the world has never seen — a sort of interplanetary reality show a la "Big Brother."
Read the entire article:
http://www.space.com/16300-mars-one-reality-show-colony.html
They came from Mars, not in peace, but in pieces. Scientists are confirming that 15 pounds of rock collected recently in Morocco fell to Earth from Mars during a meteorite shower last July.
This is only the fifth time in history scientists have chemically confirmed Martian meteorites that people witnessed falling. The fireball was spotted in the sky six months ago, but the rocks weren't discovered on the ground in North Africa until the end of December.
This is an important and unique opportunity for scientists trying to learn about Mars' potential for life. So far, no NASA or Russian spacecraft has returned bits of Mars, so the only samples scientists can examine are those that come here in a meteorite shower.
Scientists and collectors are ecstatic, and already the rocks are fetching big bucks because they are among the rarest things on Earth -- rarer even than gold. The biggest rock weighs over 2 pounds.
"It's Christmas in January," said former NASA sciences chief Alan Stern, director of the Florida Space Institute at the University of Central Florida. "It's nice to have Mars sending samples to Earth, particularly when our pockets are too empty to go get them ourselves."
A special committee Tuesday of meteorite experts, including some NASA scientists, confirmed test results that showed the rocks came from Mars, based on their age and chemical signature.
Astronomers think millions of years ago something big smashed into Mars and sent rocks hurtling through the solar system. After a long journey through space, one of those rocks plunged through Earth's atmosphere, breaking into smaller pieces.
Read the entire article: http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2012/01/17/apnewsbreak_mars_rocks_fell_in_africa_last_july/
Foul play may be responsible for the failure of Russia's Mars probe Phobos-Grunt, as well as a string of other embarrassing setbacks that plagued the country's space agency last year, the agency's chief suggested.
The 14.5-ton Phobos-Grunt spacecraft got stuck in Earth orbit shortly after its Nov. 8 launch, and Russian officials predict it will crash back into the atmosphere this Sunday (Jan. 15). Shadowy unnamed actors may have brought the probe down and caused four other Russian space failures in 2011, hinted Vladimir Popovkin, chief of Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos).
"It is unclear why our setbacks often occur when the vessels are travelling through what for Russia is the 'dark' side of the Earth — in areas where we do not see the craft and do not receive its telemetry readings," Popovkin told Russia's Izvestia newspaper, according to Agence-France Presse.
"I do not want to blame anyone, but today there are some very powerful countermeasures that can be used against spacecraft whose use we cannot exclude," he added.
Read the entire article: http://www.space.com/14193-russia-phobos-grunt-space-failures-foul-play.html
Researchers have long suspected that the Martian surface is packed full of oxidizing compounds, which could make it difficult for complex molecules like organic chemicals — the building blocks of life as we know it — to exist. But the new study, which analyzed data gathered by NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander, suggests that's not the case.
"Although there may be some small amounts of oxidants in the soil, the bulk material is actually quite benign," said lead study author Richard Quinn of NASA's Ames Research Center and the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif. "It's very similar to moderate soils that we find on Earth."
Astrobiologists have long been interested in characterizing soils on Mars, to help determine whether life could ever have gotten a foothold on the Red Planet. [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life ]
NASA's $420 million Phoenix mission has given them a lot to ponder in this regard. The Phoenix lander touched down near the Martian north pole in late May 2008, then gathered a variety of observations for the next five months.
Phoenix is most famous for confirming the existence of water ice on Mars, but it also made a lot of interesting soil measurements. One of those was the Mars dirt's acidity, or pH, level.
"People really didn't know what the pH was going to be," Quinn told SPACE.com. "A lot of people believed that the soils would be very acidic."
But just a month or so into its mission, Phoenix found that the dirt at its landing site was mildly basic, with a pH around 7.7. The lander also detected several chemicals that could serve as nutrients for life-forms, including magnesium, potassium and chloride.
These discoveries intrigued scientists, suggesting that Martian soil is perhaps more hospitable to microbial life than they had thought. And the new results provide further evidence along those lines.
Read the entire article:
http://www.space.com/12695-mars-soil-life-support-study.html
An interplanetary trip to Mars could take as little as 10 months, but returning would be virtually impossible -- making the voyage a form of self-imposed exile from Earth unlike anything else in human history.
What would inspire someone to volunteer? We've just found out.
A special edition of the Journal of Cosmology details exactly how a privately-funded, one-way mission to Mars could depart as soon as 20 years from now -- and it prompted more than 400 readers to volunteer as colonists.
"I've had a deep desire to explore the universe ever since I was a child and understood what a rocket was," Peter Greaves told FoxNews.com. Greaves is the father of three, and a jack-of-all-trades who started his own motorcycle dispatch company and fixes computers and engines on the side.
"I envision life on Mars to be stunning, frightening, lonely, quite cramped and busy," he told FoxNews.com. "Unlike Earth I wouldn't be able to sit by a stream or take in the view of nature's wonder, or hug a friend, or breath deeply the sweet smell of fresh air -- but my experience would be so different from all 6 to 7 billion human beings ... that in itself would make up for the things I left behind."
The psychological effect of space travel
Other volunteers include a 69-year old computer programmer, a college student at Texas A&M, and a 45-year-old nurse. Reverend Paul Gregersen, pastor of the Clarno Zion United Methodist Church, also said he would be willing to travel off-planet -- permanently.
"As the human race continues to expand, it only make sense to explore opportunities for human life out in the cosmos," Gregersen told FoxNews.com. "Also, I have the feeling that spiritual issues would come up among the crew. The early explorers on Earth always took clergy with them."
But more than spiritual issues will arise, warn psychologists who have worked with NASA.
"It's going to be a very long period of isolation and confinement," said Albert Harrison, who has studied astronaut psychology since the 1970s as a professor of psychology at UC Davis. He also warned that life on Mars wouldn't be as romantic as it sounded.
"After the excitement of blast-off, and after the initial landing on Mars, it will be very difficult to avoid depression. After all, one is breaking one’s connections with family, friends, and all things familiar," he told FoxNews.com.
Read the entire article: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/01/10/space-volunteer-way-mission-mars/
More than 30 years after NASA's Viking landers found no evidence for organic materials on Mars, scientists say a new experiment on Mars-like soil shows Viking did, in fact, hit pay dirt.
The new study was prompted by the August 2008 discovery of powerful oxygen-busting compounds known as perchlorates at the landing site of another Mars probe called Phoenix.
Scientists repeated a key Viking experiment using perchlorate-enhanced soil from Chile's Atacama Desert, which is considered one of the driest and most Mars-like places on Earth, and found telltale fingerprints of combusted organics -- the same chemicals Viking scientists dismissed as contaminants from Earth.
"Contrary to 30 years of perceived wisdom, Viking did detect organic materials on Mars," planetary scientist Christopher McKay, with NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News. "It's like a 30-year-old cold case suddenly solved with new facts."
"If the Viking team had said 'Well, maybe there's perchlorate in the soil,' everybody would have said they're crazy -- why would there be perchlorates in the soil? It was only by having it pushed on us by Phoenix where we had no alternative but to conclude that there was perchlorate in the soil … Once you realize it's there, then everything makes sense," McKay added.
Read the entire article: http://news.discovery.com/space/viking-mars-organics-experiment.html
If NASA ever gets a clear directive for interplanetary exploration, a new Hundred-Year Starship could be their version of the Mayflower. And like the first pilgrims, Martian explorers might set sail with the knowledge they would never return home.
NASA and DARPA have joined forces to build something called a Hundred-Year Starship, according to the director of NASA’s Ames Research Center. Simon “Pete” Worden said NASA contributed $100,000 to the project and DARPA kicked in $1 million.
“The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,” Worden said, according to a Singularity University blog that covered the event. “Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.” (Worden added that he was fired by President George W. Bush.)
Beyond that, there are no details. But the prospect of a DARPA-NASA spaceship collaboration for Star Trek-esque exploration sounds thrilling — even if by definition, a 100-year ship means leaving Earth and never coming back.
Incidentally, that’s exactly the proposal in a new paper in press in the Journal of Cosmology, a relatively new, peer-reviewed open access journal. Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies suggest sending astronauts to Mars with the intention of staying for the rest of their lives, as trailblazers for a permanent Mars colony.
Read the entire article: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-10/%E2%80%98hundred-year-starship%E2%80%99-could-bring-humans-other-worlds-and-leave-them-there-forever
Related reading: Is NASA Covering Up the 100-Year Starship? http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/10/29/nasa-cover-up-hundred-year-starship/
US scientists have found further evidence that huge seas existed long ago on Mars. A geological mapping project found sedimentary deposits in a region called Hellas Planitia which suggest a large sea once stood there. The 2,000 km-wide, 8km-deep Hellas basin is a giant impact crater - the largest such structure on Mars.
The researchers say their data support a lake between 4.5 and 3.5 billion years ago.
Some scientists believe that conditions on Mars were more favourable for the evolution of life at this time than they were on Earth.
"This mapping makes geologic interpretations consistent with previous studies, and constrains the timing of these putative lakes to the early-middle Noachian period on Mars," said Dr Leslie Bleamaster, research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson.
The researchers say that fine-layered outcrops around the eastern rim of Hellas are likely to be sedimentary deposits.
LEAGUE CITY, TEX. -- NASA's Mars Meteorite Research Team reopened a 14-year-old controversy on extraterrestrial life last week, reaffirming and offering support for its widely challenged assertion that a 4-billion-year-old meteorite that landed thousands of years ago on Antarctica shows evidence of microscopic life on Mars. In addition to presenting research that they said disproved some of their critics, the scientists reported that additional Martian meteorites appear to house distinct and identifiable microbial fossils that point even more strongly to the existence of life.
"We feel more confident than ever that Mars probably once was, and maybe still is, home to life," team leader David McKay said at a NASA-sponsored conference on astrobiology.
Space radiation between Earth and Mars poses a hazard to astronauts. How dangerous is it out there? NASA scientists are working to find out. "It's a question of radiation," says Frank Cucinotta of NASA's Space Radiation Health Project at the Johnson Space Center. "We know how much radiation is out there, waiting for us between Earth and Mars, but we're not sure how the human body is going to react to it."
LA CAÑADA FLINTRIDGE - Scientists have found ample evidence of one of the necessary elements for life on the Red Planet - water - but astrogeologists have discovered more evidence of another necessary element: shelter.
Astrogeologists from the U.S. Geological Survey recently found evidence of a cave system formed by lava flows just under Mars' surface. Caves like these that could hold clues to whether life existed on the planet and could shelter future human explorers on Mars, according to Glen Cushing, a USGS physicist.
"Caves pretty much have a pristine environment that's not affected by what goes on up on the surface," Cushing said. "Future explorers would be able to take advantage of this."
Washington, September 25 (ANI): NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has revealed sub-surface water ice that may be 99 percent pure, halfway between the North Pole and the equator on the Red Planet. “We knew there was ice below the surface at high latitudes of Mars, but we find that it extends far closer to the equator than you would think, based on Mars’ climate today,” said Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona, a member of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, which runs the high-resolution camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
