Category: Mars

Are you interested in traveling to Mars? Okay, maybe not actually going to Mars, but what about a simulated voyage? If you’re interested, ESA is looking for a few volunteers to take part in a series of simulated missions to the Red Planet. Make sure you’ve got some spare time, since the longest trip is going to take 520 days.

ESA has teamed up with the Russian Institute of Biomedical Problems to send a crew of 6 on a 520-day simulated voyage to Mars. Apart from actually stepping foot on the surface of the Red Planet, the volunteers will eat like astronauts, perform the kinds of activities astronauts will do, and live in close quarters. They’ll even perform an exploration phase on a simulated planet Mars.

There will be one or two precursor studies, lasting 105 days, and then the full 520 mission gets going in 2008 or 2009.

If you’re interested, you can check out ESA’s call for candidates here.

Original Source: ESA News Release

Planetary geologists have been puzzled by a strange paradox on Mars. Images of the planet show several shorelines where there much have once been ancient oceans on the Red Planet. But these shorelines vary in elevation by kilometres in some cases. How could the height of these shores change by such an amount?

Researchers think they have the answer: the planet tumbled in the past.

Just like the Earth, Mars is wider around its equator than it is from pole to pole. At some point, several billion years ago, when the planet still had an ocean, it experienced a redistribution in its mass. Perhaps this came from a series of volcanic eruptions, such as the ones that created the Tharsis Bulge and Olympus Mons. This additional mass caused the planet to rebalance its spin, shifting its pole 50 degrees away from its position.

Parts of the planet which were once at the poles were moved closer to the equator, and vice versa. This could explain the dramatically shifting sea levels. And then when the oceans disappeared, absorbed into the Martian interior, or blown away by the solar wind, the poles shifted again to their current position.

The research, carried out by scientists from UC Berkeley is published in the most current edition of the journal Nature.

Original Source: UC Berkeley News Release

There are only two rovers operating on the surface of Mars right now, but over the next few years, the Red Planet is going to be crawling with robots from Earth. From NASA, we’ll see the Mars Phoenix Lander, and the Mars Science Laboratory, but one of the most interesting missions occurs in 2013 with the European ExoMars mission. This week, its funding agencies renewed their commitment to the mission, and amazingly, encouraged designers to think even bigger.

On the surface, the ExoMars rover looks similar to NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers, with a six-wheeled design and outstretched solar wings. It also has a set of cameras on a raised boom, giving it the ability to look around. It will be equipped with a suite of scientific instruments designed to search for life on the surface of Mars.

Project teams were recently given the authorization to design a version of the rover with a weight of 205 kg (450 pounds); so massive that it can only be launched on a heavy-lift vehicle like the Ariane 5 rocket. This is a larger, and much more expensive version than what was originally approved by the space agency’s members in 2005.

If all goes well, ExoMars will arrive on the surface of Mars in September, 2014, landing with a vented airbag system similar to what was used by Spirit and Opportunity. Unlike the Mars rovers, which were looking for past evidence of water, ExoMars is primarily looking for life, with a suite of instruments designed to detect the chemical traces of life in the Martian soil.

Here’s a link to the ExoMars homepage.

Original Source: STFC News Release

I know there are tens of thousands of photographs of Mars already available, but that number just jumped up by about 1,200. Photos taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have been returned back to Earth and processed so that anyone with an Internet connection can browse through them.

This new dataset, captured by the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) camera, fills a whopping 1.7 terabytes of hard drive space. But don’t worry, there’s a handy set of tools you can use on the HiRISE site to quickly browse through them, and zoom in for more details, without having to tie up your Internet connection.

HiRISE captures 6 km-wide (3.5 mile) swathes of the Martian surface from an altitude of 250 to 316 km (155 and 196 miles). These images can show details as small as 1 metre across (40 inches).

Original Source: UA News Release

With more advanced optics in orbit around Mars, we’re getting better and better pictures showing how the planet is more active than scientists ever imagined. Here’s a cool photograph of a recent landslide in a region of Mars called Zunil Crater. It was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Zunil Crater is a well-preserved impact crater approximately 10 km (6 miles) across. Because it’s so well preserved, scientists think the crater was carved out by a meteor impact less than 10 million years ago – that’s young, considering some of the craters on Mars are billions of years old.

The false colour on the image shows that the landslide occurred very recently. Unlike the surrounding terrain, it hasn’t be covered by the dust that coats everything on Mars. This makes the reflectiveness, or albedo, different from the regions around it. Scientists think a recent Marsquake or another tiny meteor impact could have triggered the slide.

Original Source: HiRISE News Release

When I first saw this image, I thought it was some kind of joke, or Photoshop trick. But nope, this is real. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance orbiter has returned images of strange cavern entrances on Mars.

See that dark spot in the middle of the picture? It seems to be a hole, in an otherwise smooth landscape of lava. It isn’t an impact crater because it lacks a raised rim or ejecta. Light from the Sun must be getting down there, but it’s so deep that none of it is bouncing back out. It’s just a dark hole.

So what is it? Scientists think it’s some kind of chamber with a collapsed roof, or pit with extremely vertical sides. Whatever the case, it’s quite surprising to see.

And just in case you think this is an anomaly, there are actually 7 of these features discovered on Mars so far.

The Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla has more details.

This amazing image was captured by ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, and shows the Deuteronilus Mensae on Mars, a region shaped by glaciers millions of years ago.

The large depression in the middle of the image is approximately 2 km (1.2 miles) deep, and measures 110 km (68 miles) across. Many deep valleys cut by intense flooding feed into the region. It’s believed that these valleys were caused by intense flooding from melted water ice. This water froze quickly, turning into glaciers that flowed downhill.

Although it’s cold and dead now, Mars was once geologically active. It’s believed that rising magma, or impact events could melt vast regions of ice, resulting in major flooding events.

Original Source: ESA News Release

Although they’re not so much in the news these days, the Martian rovers, Spirit and Opportunity are still hard at work on their primary mission: discovering evidence of past water on Mars. A new patch of soil uncovered by Spirit is so rich in silica, that scientists think that water must have helped concentrate it eons ago.

While it was exploring a region of hills inside Gusev crater, Spirit uncovered a patch of soil that was clearly different from the surrounding environment. Further examination by the rover’s alpha particle X-ray spectrometer calculated that it was more than 90% pure silica.

This concentration of silica would have required some process involving water. One theory is that the soil might have interacted with acid vapours produced by volcanic activity in the presence of water. Another possibility is that the region might have had many hot springs.

Scientists are celebrating the discovery as one of the most conclusive pieces of evidence for past water that the rovers have turned up so far.

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release