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
