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

 

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

 

In the ongoing debate over whether human beings are to blame for increasing temperatures, researchers are about to add a new (and far more likely) cause to the mix: the Sun has become brighter over the last twenty years.

From an article in The Australian:

The sun is getting brighter, increasing the pace of climate change and undermining claims that man alone is to blame.

A series of independent studies around the world show a significant rise in the amount of sunshine penetrating the atmosphere to be absorbed by the earth’s surface and turned into heat.
…
The research will concern climate researchers, who are already predicting a rapid rise in global temperatures due to man-made emissions of so-called greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

“The enhanced warming we have seen since the 1990s along with phenomena such as the widespread melting of glaciers could well be due to this increased intensity of sunlight compounding the effect of greenhouse gases,” said Martin Wild of the Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Science in Zurich, Switzerland.

Researchers will present their findings to the European Geophysical Union conference in Vienna next week.

They reverse a 30-year trend. Measurements of sunshine levels between 1960 and 1990 have shown a decrease in the amount of sunshine reaching the earth, a phenomenon known as global dimming.

This was thought to have been caused by dust, smog and other pollutants, mainly from industrialised Western countries.

The pollutants, known as aerosols, reduced sunshine levels by absorbing and scattering solar radiation and promoting the formation of clouds that reflected radiation back into space.

In the past two decades, however, there have been huge decreases in such pollutants, partly due to industry becoming cleaner but largely because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and much of its heavy industry.

“Sunshine levels had been decreasing by 2 per cent a decade between 1960 and 1980 - a total decline of about 6 per cent. Now they are going up again. Perhaps this is why our Swiss glaciers are melting,” Professor Wild said.

Such rises could be disastrous for agriculture, wildlife and human settlements in many regions, especially the tropics.

But scientists warn they may have to revise these calculations sharply upwards if the impact of “global brightening” has to be factored in.

Atsumu Ohmura, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, has collated measurements from 400 sites worldwide and found an increase in sunshine at 300 of the sites studied.

The areas under scrutiny were mainly in Eurasia and the polar regions.

Some of the areas studied showed a decline in sunshine since 1990, largely in fast-developing countries such as China and India.

“A widespread brightening has been observed since the 1980s. This may substantially affect surface climate, the water cycle, glaciers and ecosystems,” Professor Ohmura said.

So if we’d signed onto the Kyoto Protocol and had started messing with our economies to reduce CO2 emissions, how stupid would we feel about now as we learn that the Sun is probably to blame for rising temperatures? Pretty darn stupid – and about $500 billion poorer. Thank you, President Bush for bucking the “consensus.”

 

Recent related articles:

Global warming for skeptics

Global Warming, Frodo Baggins, and the Empire State Building

 

Tags: blog | weblog | global warming | science | climate change

 

According to a New Scientist SPACE article, the Cassini spacecraft has detected electrical storms in Saturn’s atmosphere that are a 1,000 stronger than those occurring on Earth:

The most powerful lightning storm ever detected on Saturn has been captured by the Cassini spacecraft – but scientists are still not sure what is causing it.

Cassini’s Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument captured the first radio noise from the storm on 23 January 2006. But the storm continued to rage and scientists have recorded at least 25 strong episodes of lightning activity since.

“It is clear that this is the strongest lightning activity that we’ve seen with Cassini since it arrived at Saturn,” says Donald Gurnett at the University of Iowa, US, and RPWS principal investigator. “In fact, the flash rate even exceeds the rate observed by Voyager 1 back in 1980 and the intensities are at least as large, if not larger.”

The lightning bolts are more than 1000 times stronger than those on Earth – listen to them here. The storm covers an area larger than the continental US, at a southern latitude around 36°. This region is known as “Storm Alley” because Cassini has observed so many storms there since it reached Saturn in July 2004.

Here is the JPL page on the lightning storms.

 

Tags: astronomy | cassini | saturn | news | blog | weblog

On Wednesday – 2 days, 17 hours, 13 minutes, and 20 seconds from now according to the countdown clock – if all goes as planned, the United States will launch the New Horizons spacecraft toward Pluto at a speed of 10 miles per second, the highest velocity any space mission has ever been rocketed from Earth.

An article in TCV news helps put that speed in perspective:

How fast is 10 miles per second? At that speed of 36,000 mph, the probe will pass the Moon in only 9 hours, and would be able to cross the entire U.S. in just 4 minutes.

The velocity is about 27 times faster than the Concorde supersonic transport and 10,000 mph faster than most previous spacecraft departing Earth for the Moon or planets. It will also be fast enough for New Horizons to pass by Jupiter within 13 months – a several year trip for most previous spacecraft.

Jupiter’s gravity will further accelerate New Horizons to 47,000 mph, fast enough for it to reach Pluto 3 billion miles from Earth as early as 2015, after a nearly ten year transit.

No previous space mission has ever studied up close the 1,470 mi. diameter Pluto and relatively nearby 50 mile wide Kuiper Belt objects. They are believed to be debris left over from formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

At its top speed, the New Horizons probe will be going nearly 20 times faster than a rifle bullet, but really, how fast is 47,000 mph in cosmic terms?

• Light travels 5,865,696,000,000 miles in a year

• Alpha Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, is 4.3 light years from Earth or 25,222,492,800,000 miles (that’s 25 trillion miles!)

• The New Horizons spacecraft, zipping along at 47,000 mph, will cover 411,720,000 miles per year (nearly the distance that Jupiter is from the Sun)

So if the New Horizons probe was aimed at Alpha Centauri, our fastest spacecraft ever would still take 61,261 years to get there. Hmmm, 60,000 years ago, our ancestors were hunting Wooly Mammoths in the last ice age, and the invention of writing was still some 55,000 years in the future.

We really need hyperdrive!

 

Tags: space travel | news | blog | weblog | science | new horizons | spaceflight | nasa

 

This article comes from NewScientistSpace:

Life’s ingredients circle Sun-like star

The first evidence that some of the basic organic building blocks of life can exist in an Earth-like orbit around a young Sun-like star has been provided by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

Spitzer took infrared spectrograms of 100 very young stars in a nearby stellar nursery, a huge cloud of dust and gas 375 light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. And one of those stars showed signs of the organic molecules, acetylene and hydrogen cyanide.

These gases, when combined with water, can form several different amino acids. These are needed to form proteins, as well as one of the four chemical letters, or bases, in DNA, called adenine.

The organic molecules were detected in a ring of dust and gas circling a young star called IRS 46. Such dust rings, found around all of the young stars that were examined by the Spitzer telescope, are believed to be the raw material for planetary systems.

Read the whole article.