Is there life on Mars?
Why the question still eludes us after 40 years of NASA discovery on Mars?
NASA is slowly learning where to look for microbes on the Red Planet, but there are no answers yet
By Carl Franzen
"For NASA, nearly 40 years after it first landed on Mars, it remains too early to make that call. The agency right now is just concerned with proving habitability, which the Curiosity rover seems to have effectively done. NASA's next mission to Mars, an orbital craft called MAVEN, is due to launch later this year to study Mars's atmosphere. The mission after that, InSight, due to launch in 2016, will be another lander that will bore deeper into Mars than even Curiosity can, revealing yet more data on Mars' past. Still, it's doubtful either of these missions will settle the question of life once and for all."
READ all of the article at : http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/14/4100578/life-on-mars-still-elusive-after-curiosity-viking-other-discoveries
Showing posts with label RED PLANET. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RED PLANET. Show all posts
Monday, March 18, 2013
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Elon Musk doesn’t just want to send a person to Mars — he wants to send 80,000.
According to Space.com, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX gave details about his hopes for a future Mars colony during a talk at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London on Nov. 16.
Earlier this year, SpaceX became the first private U.S. company to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. Musk has never been shy about his ambitions to take human colonists to another planet, mentioning in the past that he wants to provide flights to Mars for about $500,000 a person. But now he’s talking about building a small-city-sized settlement on the Red Planet, starting with a 10-person crew in the coming decades to begin establishing and building infrastructure.
"That first flight would be expensive and risky but once there are regular Mars flights, you can get the cost down to half a million dollars for someone to move to Mars,” Musk told Space.com. "Then I think there are enough people who would pay that much to live on Mars to have it be a reasonable business case.”
Musk added that he sees the future 80,000-person colony as a public-private enterprise costing roughly $36 billion.
Science-fiction inspired plans are one thing. Musk still has many challenges ahead of him before such a scheme could become reality, including figuring out exactly how to deal with radiation on the way to Mars, how to land humans on the planet’s surface, and how to keep them alive once there. Wired Magazine Editor Chris Anderson interviewed Musk in the November issue, here he outlines a few ways that could help us get there:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/11/elon-musk-mars-colony/
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
NASA's Curiosity rover, carried by the Mars Science Laboratory
NASA's Curiosity rover, carried by the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft, will land near the Martian equator at approximately 10:31 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5, (1:31 a.m. EDT on Aug. 6).
When I was teaching , I imagined teaching two semesters of what was then called the Integration of Physics and Chemistry (IPC) to my students with a theme of Martian Exploration. Started a blog to capture information for that project: http://themissionismars.blogspot.com/ . You are reading that blog here.
Yes, I was hoping that one of the missions might find life on the Red Planet. That child hood dream is a bit faded now: the more we have learned with our actual Martian Exploration, the less likely it seems that we will find any signs of life on Mars in my waning life time.
We still might find a microbial life form in some relatively warm wet spot on Mars... or beneath the surface, but I have come to believe that we humans will become the Martians, as in Ray Bradbury's (http://www.raybradbury.com/about.html) THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES. We, humans will move out across the Solar System as in Ben Bova's (http://www.benbova.net/) Grand Tour books; and colonize and explot the Moon with Robert A. Heinlein's (http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/index.htm) private enterprise model... and we will reach and transform Mars itself as in Kim Stanley Robinson's MARS TRILOGY (http://kimstanleyrobinson.info/w/index.php5?title=Mars_trilogy).
But I getting ahead of the news... http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html
NASA has re-targeted the Rover from a large landing ellipse of 20 km x 25 km. That larger landing ellipse certainly gave a lot of room for error, but NASA has re-thought that landing zone.
NASA is now targeting a significantly smaller landing ellipse that will put the rover closer to the base of Mount Sharp on the Martian surface. The new landing ellipse on the surface is significantly smaller at 7 km x 20 km. NASA feels hitting the smaller landing area will be possible thanks to the high-precision landing system that the rover is using.
The rover has thrusters that will guide the high-velocity phase of entry into the atmosphere of Mars. This is the first rover to use this technology, which was unavailable on previous missions to Mars. The goal of the smaller landing ellipse is to reduce the time it takes for the rover to roll over to its primary science location. The smaller landing zone, and less distance the rover needs to travel also reduces the chance of any incidents during travel time. NASA scientists are hoping Curiosity will find layered rock deposits at the site to provide new insight into past environmental conditions on the surface of Mars.
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