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While we may have thoroughly conquered the moon in the last century, this century is going to be all about the red planet as far as space exploration goes. We know a good deal about our neighbor planet–enough to have mapped it plenty–but there are still plenty of mysteries within that red soil. We’ve seen traces of water–does that mean there must have been some kind of tiny life on Mars once? Are we really Martians, brought over as microbes to Earth via wayward rocks? We’re not sure, but NASA’s latest exploratory bot is on its way to find out.

The Curiosity rover is the biggest and most tricked-out tool ever to ship out of our atmosphere. It comes equipped with six wheels and one jackhammer-tipped arm, which also wields cameras and a laser probe. NASA will use the robot to measure radiation levels, record weather conditions, and examine rocks. Curiosity’s HD cameras will also allow it to take photos with a level of detail and quality never before seen from another planet. It’ll be sending back high resolution shots of a landscape that’s only been captured in grainy takes so far. 
The probe will be digging around the Gale Crater–the most likely spot for life on the planet. Scientists believe that no other location on Mars is richer in minerals. They expect the investigation of the area to reveal a good deal about Mars’s history and potentially the microbes that once lived there. 
Because Curiosity is so much bigger than any previous Mars rover–about the size of an earthbound vehicle–scientists had to come up with a way to ensure its safe landing on the red planet. Smaller robots had used air bags to cushion their landings, but Curiosity is too heavy for that strategy to work. Project members developed a jet pack and tether system that would allow Curiosity to slowly lower itself down onto Mars’s surface. 
Curiosity took off from the pale blue dot earlier today. It’s got about 354 million miles left in its journey–a distance estimated to take eight and a half months. If all goes according to plan, Curiosity will be roaming around the Martian landscape by the end of next summer. Getting out of Earth’s orbit isn’t easy, though, and plenty of probes have gotten lost in the journey to Mars. In fact, the US is the only nation that has successfully landed anything on our neighbor world. But Curiosity is the most advanced probe yet, and therefore the most likely to make it. 
Check out the awesome computer-generated video of Curiosity’s intended trajectory and landing below.

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Video of BudlaGh1A0o

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I felt that Carl Sagan’s Cosmos would be a great way to start familiarizing yourself with astronomy if you are a space enthusiast. This thirteen-part television series is really an enjoyable way to learn about space although it is three decades old. However, all of the episodes have an update at the end which shows developments that occurred in the early 1990s.

I watched all these episodes and it was a lot of fun. I must have also watched quite a few of them a couple of times over. The hour-long interview of Dr. Sagan by Ted Turner which was really the fourteenth episode spread a lot of light into the importance of mankind resisting the urge to destroy themselves and really move to the stars. Sagan pointed out the benefits of the space program such as the pictures of the Earth that were obtained and the famous Pale Blue Dot image that he wrote a book about.
In one of the episodes on Cosmos: A Personal Voyage called “Who Speaks for Earth?”, it shows how the Spanish Conquistadors were able to take advantage of the primitive knowledge of the Aztecs and take over their land. This showed how it was vital that the human species become aware of what was out there. I am sure if you are visiting this blog, you enjoy talk about space and I encourage you to go ahead and watch these episodes in your free time if you haven’t already done so. I wish I had more time to go and check out these episodes one more time with its special effects and reflections about how human beings have formerly believed in certain things like Mars having life and the episode “Heaven and Hell”.

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Overall, it was a great tribute to Carl Sagan who took a lot of criticism for daring to speculate about the universe and life as we know it! Even after 20 years of the most eventful period in human history with the invention of the world wide web, Cosmos requires just a few revisions.

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An unmanned Atlas V rocket launched towards Mars from Cape Canaveral, Florida on Saturday, carrying the Mars Science Laboratory rover. The rover, dubbed Curiosity, will explore Mars’s Gale Crater, looking for organic materials that might suggest life forms once existed on the planet.
It will take 8 1/2 months before Curiosity reaches the surface of Mars, more than 350 million miles away. It is scheduled to land on the planet’s surface in August 2012.

The rover is 10 feet long and 9 feet wide, and weighs about 1 ton. It is powered by 10.6 pounds of radioactive plutonium, enabling it to work faster and travel farther than previous Mars rovers. Curiosity contains a mobile laboratory that can sample Martian soil and rocks and analyze them at the scene. A drill with a jackhammer is attached to the rover’s 7 foot mechanical arm. The rover is also equipped with high-definition and laser cameras, as well as scientific instruments to help analyze the rocks and soil to determine if any life once existed on Mars.
The rover does not contain any life detectors. The purpose of the $2.5 million mission is to search for organic compound traces that would indicate previous life forms.  The rover will also measure radiation levels on the surface of Mars to see if it will be possible to send astronauts to the planet in the future.
Curiosity will land in Gale Crater, an area rich in minerals. Scientist say that if life did exist on Mars at one time, Gale Crater is a prime area. Unlike its predecessors, Curiosity will use a jet pack and a tether system to land on Mars. This method should provide for a more accurate landing than the air bag system used by rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Curiosity will spend at least two years exploring Gale Crater.

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After Stephen Hawkings rather alarmist announcement last night about colonizing space as being a “human imperative”, I began to wonder how close we actually are to being able to accomplish it. The answer, at least for now, is “not very”. Although NASA’s goal is to send a manned mission to Mars by 2032, most of the physicists that are associated with the present Mars rover missions say that they’ve very nearly maxed out the technology for delivering payload to the Martian surface. In other words, the rovers, which are in the neighborhood of a single ton, are the pinnacle of interplanetary delivery at the moment. A manned mission, that would need to be somewhere between 40 and 80 tons, is pretty unrealistic at this point. That’s not to say that it’s not in development.
The current delivery system for the Mars rovers was a combination of atmospheric entry heat shield, rigid parachute, and the last 5,000 retro-rockets kick in to provide the rover with a nice, gentle landing. Unfortunately, the single ton rovers are about the extent of this entry strategy’s payload. For a significantly heavier payload, other as-of-yet undeveloped technologies will be necessary. That’s not to say that NASA hasn’t developed some ideas.
The problem with parachutes is that Mars’ atmosphere is almost non-existent. A parachute needs to be incredibly large in order to create the necessary drag to slow an object in free-fall. Of course, the larger the parachute, the more weight and space it will take up en route. For a 40-ton payload the parachute would need to be, according to NASA’s co-chair of rover entry Michael Wright, the size of the Rose Bowl. Obviously, using parachutes to slow entry are not realistic. That in mind, NASA has been developing an Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator. The IAD would be a large saucer-shaped device that would inflate nearly instantaneously when the entry vehicle hit the upper Martian atmosphere. The IAD would be made of a rigid, hardy material like Kevlar, which would withstand the extreme heat of entering Mars’ atmosphere.
However, a spacecraft’s entry is 1,500 mph, and an IAD will only shave off a portion of that speed. There will need to be further steps in re-entry to avoid crushing landing gear and astronauts when they finally “land”. For that, NASA is looking at supersonic retrorockets. Because even with the IAD, the vehicle will be traveling faster than the speed of sound, it will be necessary to create propulsion that is stronger than the atmospheric blowback. Otherwise there’s a risk of shockwaves that could literally tear the vehicle apart. The rockets could be further calibrated to adjust propulsion to vehicle speed, allowing the vehicles to literally hover above the Martian surface and lower the actual payload to the ground safe and sound.
After developing all of this, and attempting to do it with time to launch an actual mission by 2032, we’ll assume they’re also considering a way to bring the crew back.

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Last year, physicist-extraordinaire Stephen Hawking warned the world that the arrival of an alien species might be more akin to Independence Day than Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He likened it to the European invasion of the New World. After all, when Europeans arrived to find a less-advanced group of people with comparably little technology or means of protecting their land standing between them an untapped wilderness full of resources, they started killing and displacing. Why would our situation be any different if a space-faring civilization came to our world? Last weekend, Hawking went a step further, making colonization in space a mandate for human survival.
Speaking in Waterloo, Ontario, Hawking told the public that it was really nice we’d become so technically proficient at making our environment a pleasant place to be, but iPhones, heated leather seats, and soy burgers are not going to do much to prevent alien colonization. Our solution? Spread out into the solar system. “Our only chance of long-term survival,” Hawking declared, “is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.” Selfishness and aggressiveness, he warned, will likely be our undoing.
In a very objective sense, it does seem a colossal waste the amount of time and resources we’ve poured into purely superficial pursuits. Our most creative minds tend to be absorbed with things like stock market trading algorithms and building a quieter luxury car than with some of those things central to our existence. How do we provide energy to a massively overpopulated world without destroying the environment that we depend on? How do we feed everyone without destroying ecosystems? How do we most efficiently use our quickly dwindling inhabitable spaces? How can we become smarter, happier, more efficient people without wasting what we’re given? If you’re Hawking, how do we begin to colonize the solar system, finding and creating healthy inhabitable environments?
Given the vastness of space, and the immense variety of possible variables involved in predicting a “first-contact” type of event, it doesn’t make any sense to “humanize” the nature of it. There’s no indication to think that we need to find another place to live in case this one is destroyed by an invading extra-terrestrial. There’s not point in assuming the celestial “Europeans” in this scenario would bare any resemblance to our human psychology, social structure, motives or tactics. Finally, it’s highly unlikely this will happen within the lifespan of our species anyway…we are talking about a relative nano-blink within the solar system’s billions of years of evolution. I know we like to think we’re going to be around for a very long time, but it’s an incredible stretch of egomania to think that something as simple as dropping our species off on another satellite around our little sun is going to stave off a mass extinction.
I still think we should colonize, but let’s not make it an imperative for human survival. More so, it’s an imperative for human curiosity and progress. That’s our mandate, and that’s our goal.

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Astronomers have long believes that Jupiter’s moons may be humanity’s best opportunity for colonization outside of the terrestrial planets. This belief was formed in the 1990’s, when NASA space probe Galileo arrived to take closer observations. What scientists found was a satellite, the moon Europa, possessing enormous oceans beneath huge sheets of ice. The young surface of the satellite is cracked and scored innumerably, which scientists say is evidence of the liquid water beneath it; water, they say, that may provide an ecosystem with its own life.
The surface of of Europa looks like a bocce ball was hit by a lawn mower. There are huge canyons in tens-of-miles-thick sheets of ice that cover the surface of the small celestial body. The ice, researchers say, is constantly being shifting, cracked, and heaved by the vast oceans of water beneath. However, there are areas of the moon that are darker, where the ice sheets seem to be even more disturbed, more uneven, and more given to fluctuations than the rest of the surface. NASA now believes that these may be vast lakes trapped within the ice sheets, well above the oceans that lie much deeper toward the moon’s rocky core. These lakes create greater instability for the ice above them, creating these “matrix” dark spots and disturbed sections of the icy surface.
This begs the question; how can liquid water exist on a planet hundreds of millions of miles away from the sun? The answer is in the immense gravitational pull of Jupiter and its other moons. As Europa revolves around its parent planet, the gravitational fields interact and Europa is actually flexed and pulled along its revolution. The flexing creates friction, which in turn heats the moon. The result is a moon where the surface, closest to the immense cold of space, is frozen, but the constantly moving and flexing underbelly remains warm enough to support liquid water.
This is perhaps the most exciting aspect of the new find, as a habitat warm enough to create liquid water, even encased as it may be in ice, may be able to support its own Europan life.  What the life would look like is hard to say, just as it would be difficult to determine the chemical makeup of the liquid water beneath, but it remains a possibility. The lakes that so disrupt the icy surface may provide the necessary route for hydrocarbons, delivered by the sporadic comets and asteroids that pummel planetary surfaces, to reach the vast oceans near the moon’s warm rocky core. Once in that environment, scientists predict, life would have the opportunity to evolve in a relatively closed ecosystem.

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I have a real interest in life that exists outside of the Earth and I guess you could have gleaned that from the articles that I have written on this blog. This post will continue on that trend.

Most of the planets that have been discovered outside of our Solar System have been gas giants. The technology that we have right now allows us only to be able to easily detect these extrasolar planets. Doppler spectroscopy is the method used and it works by observing Doppler shifts in the star’s spectrum which the planet orbits.
There have been a lot of Super-Earths found and especially more so this year. A list of 1235 extrasolar planet candidates of which 68 were roughly “Earth-size”  and 288 could be ”super-Earth-size” was released by the Kepler Space Observatory Mission Team.

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Kepler is a NASA spacecraft equipped with a space observatory designed to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. The famous astronomer and a true inspiration for me Seth Shostak believes that by looking at the latest Kepler findings there are “at least 30,000 of these habitable worlds within a thousand light-years of Earth.”[1] Furthermore, the Kepler Team has estimated “at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way” of which “at least 500 million” are in the habitable zone.[2]
Just recently this summer a possibly habitable Super-Earth called HD 85512 b was identified by utilizing the European Southern Observatory’s world-leading exoplanet hunter HARPS. This HARPS planet finder has also found 82 G. Eridani which is a three super-Earth system. It is speculated that HD 85512 b would be habitable if it shows cloud cover in excess of 50 percent. The summer was also full of new discoveries of exoplanets with 41 being announced with 10 of them being super-Earths.[3]
 

 

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The question of how the universe came to be has always been a hot topic for clerics and scientists alike. It’s pretty much the biggest unanswered ‘why?’ out there, yet there are loads of smaller mysteries about the origins of our more local astronomical surroundings. We think all things began as gas and space dust, but how did solar systems form out of the amorphous chaos? How did our revolving planet and its gravitational dance with its neighbors come about? 

Scientists may have a better idea now than ever before. It was previously known that suns and planets can arise when gas and dust swirl together in a huge disk, but something didn’t quite add up when that model was simulated with computers. Scientists had found aluminum-26 in asteroids within our solar system, an element which led to the discovery that our system is about 4.5 billion years old, but which also confounded the model of Sol’s creation. The aluminum-26 seemed to have enriched the system’s birth cloud within only 20,000 years–an alarmingly fast rate when compared with simulations of the development of our planetary surroundings.
Now, a new study conducted by Matthias Gritschneder of the University of California, Santa Cruz suggests that a supernova may be responsible for the formation of our solar system. A supernova exploding 15 light years from the cold cloud of gas that was our proto-solar-system would explain the sudden enrichment of the cloud with the radioactive element. The supernova’s shockwave would also trigger the collapsing of the cloud, meaning that the trajectory from cloud to solar system was almost definitely because of a nearby explosion. 
Other scientists agree with Gritschneder’s findings. Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC came to the same conclusion from a different starting point and with different math. The fact that there have been two independent studies with similar results strengthens the credibility of the supernova theory. Planetary scientist Fred Ciesla of the University of Chicago also agrees with the hypothesis, although he brings up the fact that there are still loose ends in the theory such as the presence of iron-60. But hey–we may not have the numbers down perfectly, but at least we’ve got a clearer picture of the birth of this here system of ours. 
It’s kind of poetic, when you think about it. An aging massive star dies, but sends out a shockwave that triggers the creation of our sun and, eventually, life as we know it. We were brought to being by an explosion bigger than we can imagine. Pretty awesome. 

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 The commander of the International Space Station sent a video greeting to honor American veterans on 11/11/11, Veteran’s Day in the United States. The commander, American astronaut Mike Fossum, leads a three-man crew on the Space Station. The Expedition 29 crew includes Fossom, a Japanese astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut. A new crew takes over for them later this month.
Fossum compared the crew of the space station to military personnel, stating that the two groups have many things in common. Both are away from home, working in a hostile environment for the good of their fellow human beings.

“On behalf of our entire crew and a grateful America, we’d like to pay tribute to the thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines for your service across the globe in support of the cause of freedom,” Fossum said. “Only through your defense of our great nation can we accomplish our worthy goals.”
NASA administrator Charles Bolden also offers a Veteran’s Day message to the men and women who have served or are currently serving in the United States military. 
The space agency and the United States military have worked together since the space agency’s founding. Many of the first astronauts came from the military, and still today, NASA astronauts and employees are often current or retired military. Bolden, a former space shuttle commmander, is a retired major general of the United States Marine Corp, and Fossum is a retired United States Air Force Reserves colonel.
 Click here to view the video messages from NASA.

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NASA’s Opportunity rover has been cruising the surface of Mars for almost eight years now, capturing images of a stark and often startling surface and logging new information about the Red Planet, which has never seen a human footprint. Eight years after first landing, the rover is still relevant, and to illustrate that fact it has recently found something completely new. The NASA astronomers are calling it “Homestake” or “The Vein”, and say it’s unlike anything they’ve ever seen.
The geological feature, a virtually linear stripe of light-colored rock in the ruddy Martian soil, may provide scientists with hard evidence of low-acidity liquid water at some point in Mars’ history. They believe that the formation may be phyllosilicates, minerals that are formed in the presence of a watery environment. Additionally, the water would need to be less acidic than that which formed the minerals found by the Spirit rover five years ago; water with acidity levels low enough to conceivably support life. To actually capture and examine phyllosilicates fromm the Martian surface would be an unprecedented achievement; something that Opportunity is capable of doing.
Steve Squyers, astronomer from Cornell University and lead investigator for the Mars rover missions, made this statement upon discovering The Vein.
We saw these veins as we crossed from the Meridiani plains into the Noachian terrain back in August. We’ve kept those in mind as a very important thing we wanted to look at, but we were so focused on getting into the Noachian and new terrain that we made that the highest priority, figuring that we would get the veins later.
The discovery is a completely new phenomenon that was, frankly, completely unexpected as well. After the silica mineral discovery by Spirit in 2006, scientists believed that although liquid water may have existed on mars surface eons ago, it probably was far to acidic to ever support life. Now, that may all have changed.
NASA is preparing another rover mission, that of Curiosity, on the 25th of this month. Curiosity is slated to land in the Gale Crater on Mars’ surface, a location that NASA chose because there was satellite imagery that seemed to indicate a high probability of phyllosilicates. However, Opportunity’s recent phyllosilicate find may upstage the new rover’s launch if the analysis of the minerals proves scientists theory of low-acidity liquid water. In either case, there seems to be overwhelming evidence that Mars landscape, at one time, may have been very hospitable to life, even if its atmosphere was not.