NASA has just announced that a photo taken by the Phoenix lander of the ground under it may show patches of ice! You can see in the image below the shiny patches where the overlying soil was blown away when Phoenix landed. That shiny stuff may be rock, but it looks a lot like ice.

“We were expecting to find ice within two to six inches of the surface,” said Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, principal investigator for Phoenix. “The thrusters have excavated two to six inches and, sure enough, we see something that looks like ice. It’s not impossible that it’s something else, but our leading interpretation is ice.”

In the meantime, if you’ve got an LCD monitor with 1680 x 1050 resolution, check out this wallpaper I colorized of the image from Phoenix.

Back in 1978, JPL scientists were puzzling over some photos sent by the Mars Viking Lander:

Analysis of three component color pictures taken by the Viking lander camera on Mars has established color differences for the background material, the rocks and spots on the rocks. Changes in the location of greenish rock patches and ground patterns have been observed over time. A combination of wind movement of dust and dirt dropped by sampler arm operations could have produced the slight changes in pattern and position. However, the observed patches, patterns and changes could also be attributable to biological activity. Analysis of six component color data on the same scene confirms the observations including the greenish color of the rock patches. [My emphasis]

The report was unable to say for sure what the greenish patches were, but they tried in some ingenious ways to verify that what Viking was sending actually was the color green. Obviously they weren’t able to conclude that the patches were some form of life or we wouldn’t still be looking.

That said, take a look at this portion of an image from the Phoenix Mars Lander just released yesterday by NASA:

Looks green to me. Bear in mind that the images were taken using infrared and violet filters, the staff at JPL had to process images from Phoenix, inferring “from two color filters, a violet, 450-nanometer filter and an infrared, 750-nanometer filter,” to create the colors you see, so the green could still be a mistake.

But if it isn’t a mistake, what could it be? Debris kicked up by Phoenix’s landing should be reddish, not green, anyway you don’t see any green in a similar image from the Mars Spirit Rover.

Since NASA sent Phoenix to Vastitas Borealis, the arctic plains of the Martian North Pole, to investigate “whether the site could once have supported microbial life on Mars", they must hope to detect life in some form. I’m guessing they don’t expect it to be complex forms like lichen, but it could happen.

Stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you’ve got an LCD monitor with 1680 x 1050 resolution, check out this wallpaper I made of colorized images from Phoenix.

Update: I’m still looking into this. I found this article about Spirit Mars Rover having photographed some shiny green rocks that turned out to be Olivine, but the Phoenix pic doesn’t look much like the description of Olivine.

Update: Found this image taken by Mars Spirit when it explored Gusev Crater. The bluish-green rocks in Gusev may be similar to what Phoenix photographed, in which case it’s probably not some form of life. Still can’t say for sure though, as the Phoenix image shows the green arranged in clumps of very small somethings mixed in with the stones, unlike the Gusev Crater photo where the greenish stones are scattered about.

 

phoenix mars lander

 

Spacecraft Crashes Into Satellite It Was Designed to Connect With

A robotic NASA spacecraft designed to rendezvous with an orbiting satellite instead crashed into its target, according to a summary of the investigation released Monday.

Investigators blamed the collision on faulty navigational data that caused the DART spacecraft to believe that it was backing away from its target when it was actually bearing down on it.

“The inaccurate perception of its distance and speed … prevented DART from taking effective action to avoid a collision,” the summary said.

Ouch! Read the whole article.

 

Tags: news | blog | weblog | nasa | DART| science |

 

NASA has an interesting story on a new type of antimatter space drive that would use positrons instead of antiprotons. Positron reactions emit a tiny fraction of the killing gamma rays that are given off by antiproton collisions, so people could safely man such a spaceship without worrying that they’d be glowing in the dark before reaching their destination.

Most self-respecting starships in science fiction stories use antimatter as fuel for a good reason – it’s the most potent fuel known. While tons of chemical fuel are needed to propel a human mission to Mars, just tens of milligrams of antimatter will do (a milligram is about one-thousandth the weight of a piece of the original M&M candy).

However, in reality this power comes with a price. Some antimatter reactions produce blasts of high energy gamma rays. Gamma rays are like X-rays on steroids. They penetrate matter and break apart molecules in cells, so they are not healthy to be around. High-energy gamma rays can also make the engines radioactive by fragmenting atoms of the engine material.

The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) is funding a team of researchers working on a new design for an antimatter-powered spaceship that avoids this nasty side effect by producing gamma rays with much lower energy.

Antimatter is sometimes called the mirror image of normal matter because while it looks just like ordinary matter, some properties are reversed. For example, normal electrons, the familiar particles that carry electric current in everything from cell phones to plasma TVs, have a negative electric charge. Anti-electrons have a positive charge, so scientists dubbed them “positrons".

When antimatter meets matter, both annihilate in a flash of energy. This complete conversion to energy is what makes antimatter so powerful. Even the nuclear reactions that power atomic bombs come in a distant second, with only about three percent of their mass converted to energy.

Previous antimatter-powered spaceship designs employed antiprotons, which produce high-energy gamma rays when they annihilate. The new design will use positrons, which make gamma rays with about 400 times less energy.

Read the whole article.

 

Tags: news | blog | weblog | antimatter | discoveries | breakthroughs | science | science | physics

 

From an article at Local6.com

As part of the plan to put robot explorers – and, later, people – on the moon, NASA will crash a spacecraft into the lunar surface in 2008. The explosion should be visible from Earth.

A team announced Monday that an additional mission, known as LCrOSS, has been added to the first planned flight of the long-term lunar project, which will send the Lunar Reconnaisannce Orbiter on a mapping project.

NASA said that the LRO launch vehicle had extra space, so proposals were sought for an extra mission. LCrOSS was chosen from 19 submissions.

In that project, the SUV-sized upper stage that will take the equipment from Earth orbit to the moon will then crash into a crater near the moon’s south pole. A follow-on craft will then be able to analyze the material as it flies through the debris.

Mission managers said they would look for water, water vapor and hydrogen, among other elements and minerals.

The crash should create a 17-foot-deep crater and a plume of debris that reaches more than 30 miles high.

Amateur astronomers should be able to watch the material rise, officials said.

The knowledge from the lunar project is expected to pave the way to a manned flight to Mars someday

Tags: blog | weblog | odd news | LCrOSS | nasa | space travel | science | space

 

CNN has an article comparing NASA’s new CEV with the Apollo series that took us to the Moon nearly 40 years ago:

Size: The four-person CEV will be 18 feet in diameter, compared with 12.8 feet for the cramped three-person Apollo capsule. Yet CEV will be only 10 to 15 percent heavier, because it will be made from newer materials such as carbon composites and aluminum alloys.

Launch: Apollo was launched by the massive Saturn V, the biggest rocket ever built; the CEV capsule will be launched by a smaller rocket. That’s because the CEV will not go directly to the moon. Instead the crew will meet up with heavier pieces of their moon-going spaceship – launched by a separate rocket – in Earth orbit.

Range: CEV will carry more fuel than Apollo, so astronauts will be able to go anywhere on the face of the moon. Apollo had only enough fuel to land on the lunar equator.

Controls: CEV’s computers will be much more powerful than Apollo’s, enabling all four astronauts to descend to the moon’s surface while their spaceship orbits in autopilot mode.

Landing: When CEV returns to Earth, it will most likely land on dry ground. Apollo capsules landed in the ocean, which exposed them to corrosive saltwater and required expensive recovery efforts involving boats and aircraft.

As for the ability to land on dry ground, this image shows the CEV with the proposed “air bags” on the bottom of the craft that will cushion touchdown. If it were me, however, I’d want a lot more cushion. This is how I’d do it.

[Hat tip: Larry in Colorado for the story.]

 

Tags: blog | weblog | science | nasa | space | cev