Dusty Spirit Rover Seeks Shelter

The below picture shows the Mars Rover Spirit in a self portrait taken on Sol 568. In the picture, the rover is clean and in top condition.


However, dust storms hit the rover in the month of June and Spirit will now seek shelter for the winter. Below is a self-portrait of the rover on Sol 1,358.


The rover will now find shelter for the new winter and hope that it can continue exploring until the proposed end of the mission in 2009. More pictures of the rovers can be found at the following link: http://www.news.com/2300-11397_3-6222461-1.html?tag=ne.gall.pg

Phoenix Lander Team Practicing in Antarctica

Members of the team set to guide the Phoenix Polar lander around Mars are headed to Antarctica this week to practice controlling the robot remotely in preparation for the upcoming mission. A total of six scientists will be going and they also plan to do work surveying the elevated landscapes to get a sense of what the Martian pole will look like. The article can be found here.

The shuttle...(replace "u" with "i")

... and that's pretty much what you get when you talk about the consistancy of the shuttle's use. After having the latest launch of the Atlantis shuttle pushed back to sunday from thursday of last week after sensors were giving "false" readings. Then the same problem occured on the pushed back launch yesterday.

Atlantis will be grounded until at least the 2nd of January, and with the shuttles being phased out in there very near future this means that it might be one of its last few flights. This just emphasizes the fact that we need to move on from this failed attempt at space travel and go back to something that works more consistantly.

I personally am very excited for the new constellation program. It looks like NASA might be getting their butts back in gear. Which is good.

Full article at: Space Shuttle Grounded Till Next Year

HiRISE Pictures

NASA's Mar's Reconaisance Orbiter has sent back some more pictures of of the Martian surface. As we keep getting more images of the surface we'll soon be able to find the places that we want to explore when we finally make the jump off the little bit of dust that we've been on... since... well... we began.

Sinuous Pits on Flank of Ascraeus Mons

Crater Partially Exhumed by Sublimation in Amphitrites Patera

Unusual Depression Near Elysium Mons

Unconformity in the South Polar Layered Deposits

Layering in Upper Walls of Valles Marineris

Martian Clouds Have Less Water Than Previously Thought

Scientists have determined that while the Martian clouds do contain water, they are forming at temperatures so low that the amount of water previously estimated must be too high. The difficulties in forming clouds with such a high supersaturation have to do with the fact that they require larger cloud droplets, which fall out of the atmosphere faster, resulting in less cloud. The whole articles can be found here.

Dark Matter

The concept of dark matter was first introduced in the 1930s to explain why spinning gallaxies dont just spin apart. The study sumarized in this page was conducted along a concept of "gravitational lensing". Gravitational lensing is a phenomena which occurs when light from distant galaxies is bent around space as it travels toward us. Using this concept the scientists conducted a study using data from the Hubble Space Telescope's Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) which grouped the observations into 3 shells in order of distance from earth. Using "redshift" measurements the scientist were able to construct a map of the dark matter which distorted the light. "Massey likens this indirect technique, called "gravitational lensing," to peering at a page of text with a magnifying glass."The first thing you notice is that the text is bigger, but also, if you look around the edges of the magnifying glass, the text is slightly distorted," he said. "You can investigate the properties of the magnifying glass by observing these distortions and actually find out what shape the glass lens is." Essentially this is what the scientists did; they were able to construct a model of the dark matter which was distorting the light. Very Excellent. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070108_mm_darkmatter_map.html

Spirit Unstuck

The Mars Rover Spirit got unstuck and continued traveling to its wintering spot after nearly two weeks of being unable to move due to loose soil. The rover was freed by essentially switchbacking its course up the steep plateau. However, there still remains very tricky terrain before the rover will be safe for the winter on the Northern side of the so-called "home plate".

Advantages of using Balloons

Balloons can fly 100 times closer than orbiters to the surface of Mars and travel 1000 times faster than rovers. Due to the daily heating and cooling conventional stratospheric have a lifetime limit of a few days. Ultra Long Duration Balloons are currently under development which will fly for more then 100 days.

How to Bring Samples back to Earth

1. Currently instruments are being developed that can determine which rock and soil samples are the most scientifically interesting. These samples will probably be selected by using some sort of electronic imaging system (to look at rock features) and spectroscopy (to analyze the rock’s chemical composition).
2. Instruments have been designed to drill that are more preserved then the ones on the surface. The rock collected must be small enough to be brought back but large enough to display texture and structure.
3. To make sure that the sampling system does not contaminate the sample with anything brought from Earth the apparatus must be thoroughly cleaned before launched.
4. Developing a way to weld metal to form clean airtight seals are needed to protect the samples. The rover will seal the sample in a capsule to prevent contamination from the Earth’s atmosphere or biosphere upon landing on Earth.
5. A Mars Ascent Vehicle will launch the capsule off Mars.

WATER PAGE

“Water is the key to the most important scientific questions dealing with Mars.” This link is to the Mars Today “Water Page” which is really interesting. It shows the current and future water vapor predictions for the Martian Atmosphere. The page also has some fancy water facts about Mars such as “Note that the total amount of water in the atmosphere is very small (measured in precipitable micrometers). If all the water in the Martian atmosphere were to rain out at any given time, it would make a puddle less than a hundredth of a centimeter deep!” The page goes on however to note that, “Approximately 10 times the total atmospheric inventory of water can be found adsorbed in the top few centimeters of the Martian soil.”http://www.mgcm.arc.nasa.gov/MarsToday/MarsWater.html

Mars as it is Today

This is a site that contains a poster which is produced daily by Howard Houben of the Mars Global Circulation Model Group for the Center for Mars Exploration at NASA's Ames Research Center. The poster depicts current conditions on Mars and its relationship to Earth in six panels. The panels show predicted wind speeds for today, temperatures for today, water vapor distribution for today, etc. The poster also shows the relative scale of Mars as compared with Earth and the orbital positions of the Earth and Mars with respect to each other and the sun for today. Furthermore it has a high res image of Mars taken on that day as it would look to us on that day. This link is excellent. http://www.marsinstitute.info/epo/marstoday.html

Finding water on Mars

Collecting information about the crust of Mars it important if we ever want to get to the subsurface. It is suspected that Mar’s desert-like surface covers aquifer of liquid water deep underground. While we have no evidence for water at the surface of Mars, there is a lot of evidence of ancient surface water. It is not unreasonable to believe there is subsurface water if we apply what is known about Earth. Even in the desert regions water can be abundant in the subsurface.

Airplanes on Mars

Rovers are great, but what better way to cover more territory then by flying around the planet? Apparently scientists and engineers hope to design an airplane to be flown on Mars that could be navigated without a human pilot. This seems to be a difficult task because the Martian atmosphere is so thin, requiring huge wings or an extremely fast takeoff. Yet, if the plane is dropped off by the entering spacecraft and the wings unfolded it could have a short but very controlled flight.