Posted on by Elizabeth Howell

Gallery: NASA Astronauts Spacewalk Boldly Into The Void, Finishing Vital Repairs

NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman (Expedition 41) captured during an Oct. 15 spacewalk by fellow astronaut Butch Wilmore. Credit: Reid Wiseman / Twitter

What a view! NASA’s Reid Wiseman and Butch Wilmore spacewalked successfully yesterday (Oct. 15) for more than 6.5 hours, replacing a faulty camera as well as a broken power regulator that was reducing the amount of power available on the International Space Station. The astronauts also shifted equipment to get ready for some bigger upgrades on station to prepare for commercial spacecraft arriving in 2017.

Check out the stunning pictures from the spacewalk below.

Posted on by Paul Patton

Moons of Confusion: Why Finding Extraterrestrial Life may be Harder than we Thought

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in Dec. 2021, will be capable of measuring the spectrum of the atmospheres of Earthlike exoplanets orbiting small stars. Credit: NASA, Northrop Grumman

Astronomers and planetary scientists thought they knew how to find evidence of life on planets beyond our Solar System. But, a new study indicates that the moons of extrasolar planets may produce “false positives” adding an inconvenient element of uncertainty to the search.

More than 1,800 exoplanets have been confirmed to exist so far, with the count rising rapidly. About 20 of these are deemed potentially habitable. This is because they are only somewhat more massive than Earth, and orbit their parent stars at distances that might allow liquid water to exist.

Astronomers soon hope to be able to determine the composition of the atmospheres of such promising alien worlds. They can do this by analyzing the spectrum of light absorbed by them. For Earth-like worlds circling small stars, this challenging feat can be accomplished using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018.

They thought they knew how to look for the signature of life. There are certain gases which shouldn’t exist together in an atmosphere that is in chemical equilibrium. Earth’s atmosphere contains lots of oxygen and trace amounts of methane. Oxygen shouldn’t exist in a stable atmosphere. As anyone with rust spots on their car knows, it has a strong tendency to combine chemically with many other substances. Methane shouldn’t exist in the presence of oxygen. When mixed, the two gases quickly react to form carbon dioxide and water. Without some process to replace it, methane would be gone from our air in a decade.

On Earth, both oxygen and methane remain present together because the supply is constantly replenished by living things. Bacteria and plants harvest the energy of sunlight in the process of photosynthesis. As part of this process water molecules are broken into hydrogen and oxygen, releasing free oxygen as a waste product. About half of the methane in Earth’s atmosphere comes from bacteria. The rest is from human activities, including the growing of rice, the burning of biomass, and the flatulence produced by the vast herds of cows and other ruminants maintained by our species.

By itself, finding methane in a planet’s atmosphere isn’t surprising. Many purely chemical processes can make it, and it is abundant in the atmospheres of the gas giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and on Saturn’s large moon Titan. Although oxygen alone is sometimes touted as a possible biomarker; its presence, by itself, isn’t rock solid evidence of life either. There are purely chemical processes that might make it on an alien planet, and we don’t yet know how to rule them out. Finding these two gases together, though, seems as close as one could get to “smoking gun” evidence for the activities of life.

A monkey wrench was thrown into this whole argument by an international team of investigators led by Dr. Hanno Rein of the Department of Environmental and Physical Sciences at the University of Toronto in Canada. Their results were published in the May, 2014 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Suppose, they posited, that oxygen is present in the atmosphere of a planet, and methane is present separately in the atmosphere of a moon orbiting the planet. The team used a mathematical model to predict the light spectrum that might be measured by a space telescope near Earth for plausible planet-moon pairs. They found that the resulting spectra closely mimicked that of a single object whose atmosphere contained both gasses.

Unless the planet orbits one of the very nearest stars, they showed it wasn’t possible to distinguish a planet-moon pair from a single object using technology that will be available anytime soon. The team termed their results “inconvenient, but unavoidable…It will be possible to obtain suggestive clues indicative of possible inhabitation, but ruling out alternative explanations of these clues will probably be impossible for the foreseeable future.”

References and further reading:

The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog, Planetary Habitability Laboratory, University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo

Kaltenegger L., Selsis F., Fridlund M. et al. (2010) Deciphering spectral fingerprints of habitable exoplanets. Astrobiology, 10(1) p. 89-102.

Major J. (2013) Earthlike exoplanets are all around us. Universe Today

Rein H., Fujii Y., and Spiegel D. S. (2014) Some inconvenient truths about biosignatures involving two chemical species on Earth-like exoplanets. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(19) p. 6871-6875.

Sagan C., Thompson W. R., Carlson R., Gurnett, D., Hord, C. (1993) A search for life on Earth from the Galileo spacecraft. Nature, 365 p. 715-721.

Posted on by Elizabeth Howell

Pluto Planning: Hubble Spots 3 Objects NASA Spacecraft Could Visit Next

Two potential targets for the New Horizons mission emerge in these Hubble Space Telescope multiple-exposure images. Both are about four billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away. NASA, ESA, SwRI, JHU/APL, and the New Horizons KBO Search Team

Where could New Horizons visit after it flies by Pluto next year? NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is on the case. In a program that pushed the limits of the 24-year-old observatory, Hubble found three potential Kuiper Belt Objects for the spacecraft to visit.

The wrinkle is there is no money approved yet for New Horizons to do an extended mission yet, but team members (including Alex Parker from the Southwest Research Institute, who is quoted from Twitter below) are celebrating the milestone. To them, the most promising target (PT1) is the one on the left of the images you see above. Read more about it below the jump.

The Kuiper Belt is a zone of icy objects about four billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) from the Sun, considered to be leftovers of the building blocks that put together the Solar System billions of years ago. It’s an area that Pluto itself drifts through from time to time on its elliptical orbit around the Sun. Roughly 1,000 objects there have been cataloged, although many more are believed to exist.

The team used Hubble from June 16 to 26 in a test program to look at 20 sky zones for evidence of KBOs, finding two that had never been spotted before by ground-based telescopes. More searching between July and September revealed one object that is “definitely reachable”, NASA stated, and two others that require more scrutiny.

Each of the three candidates would take a while to reach, as they are all about one billion miles (1.6 billion km) beyond Pluto. They’re also tiny, with two estimated at 34 miles (55 kilometers) across and the third at 15 miles (25 kilometers). This makes them 10 times bigger than the average comet, but only 1-2% the size of small Pluto.

“This was a needle-in-haystack search for the New Horizons team because the elusive KBOs are extremely small, faint, and difficult to pick out against a myriad background of stars in the constellation Sagittarius, which is in the present direction of Pluto,” NASA wrote in a press release.

New Horizons’ team plans to ask for the extended mission in late 2016. Meanwhile, the spacecraft (which has been flying ever outwards since 2006) will finally zoom past its main target of Pluto in July 2015.

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Could A Planet Be as Big as a Star?

Could A Planet Be as Big as a Star?

How big do planets get? Can they get star sized?

Everybody wants the biggest stuff.

Soft drink sizes, SUV’s, baseball caps, hot dogs and truck nuts.

Astronomers mostly measure stars in terms of mass and use the Sun as a yard stick. This star is 3 solar masses, that star is 10 solar masses, and so on.

We’re pandering to those of you who want the most massive stuff as opposed to the most volumetric stuff. So if you want the biggest truck, but don’t care if it’s got the most truck atoms in one place, this might not be for you.

How massive can planets get, and where can I order a custom one more massive than a star?

It all depends on what your planet is made of. There are two flavors of planets, gas and rock.

Gas planets, like Saturn and Jupiter are pretty much made of the same stuff as our Sun.

Jupiter’s pretty big, but it’s actually only about 1/1000th the mass of our star. If you made it more massive. by crashing about 80 Jupiters together, you’d get the same amount of mass as the smallest possible red dwarf star.

And all that mass would compress and heat up the core and it would ignite as a star.

Artist's View of Extrasolar Planet HD 189733b
Artist’s View of Extrasolar Planet HD 189733b

Extrasolar planet astronomers have turned up some pretty massive gas planets. The most massive so far contains 28.7 times the mass of Jupiter.

That’s so massive it’s more like a brown dwarf.

But if you had a planet entirely made of rock, like the Earth. It would need to be much, much larger before its core would ignite in fusion.

It would need to be dozens of times the mass of our Sun.

Stars with 8-11 stellar masses can fuse silicon. So a rocky planet would need millions of times the mass of the Earth before it would have that kind of pressure and temperature.

So you could get a situation where you have more mass than the Sun in a rock flavored world, and it wouldn’t ignite as a star. It would get pretty warm though.

No star can burn iron. In fact, when stars develop iron in their core, that’s when they shut down suddenly and you get a supernova.

Feel free to collect all the iron in the Universe together and lump it into a ridiculously huge pile and no matter how long you stare at for, it’ll never boil or turn into a star.

It might turn into a black hole, though.

Artist's impression of Kepler-10c (foreground planet)
Artist’s impression of Kepler-10c (foreground planet)

The largest rocky planet ever discovered is Kepler 10c, with 17 times the mass of Earth.

Massive, but nowhere near the smallest star.

There’s new research that says that heavier elements blasted out of supernovae might collect within huge star forming nebulae, like gold in the eddies of a river. This metal could collect into actual stars. Perhaps 1 in 10,000 stars might be made of heavier elements, and not hydrogen and helium.

Metal stars.

So, it’s theoretically possible. There might be corners of the Universe where enough metal has collected together that you could end up with a star that’s made up of planety stuff. And that’s pretty amazing.

What do you think? If we found one of these giant metal stars, what should we call it?

And if you like what you see, come check out our Patreon page and find out how you can get these videos early while helping us bring you more great content!

Posted on by Elizabeth Howell

Ice Alert! Mercury’s Deposits Could Tell Us More About How Water Came To Earth

A view of the crater Prokofiev on Mercury. The crater is the largest one on the planet's north pole area to have "radar-bright" material, a probable sign of ice. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington.

New pictures of water ice at Mercury’s north pole — the first such optical images ever — could help scientists better understand how water came to planets in the rest of the Solar System, including Earth. The image you see above came courtesy of NASA’s MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft.

Mercury is a hot planet (it’s the closest one to the Sun), so the only way the ice survives is in deep shadow. This makes it hard to spot unless scientists use some clever techniques. In this case, they examined some scattered light from Prokofiev, the biggest crater in Mercury’s north pole suspected to hold the deposits.

The pictures show that Prokofiev’s surface water ice likely arrived after the craters underneath. And in an intriguing find, there is probably other water ice sitting under dark materials believed to be “frozen organic-rich compounds,” stated the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

“This result was a little surprising, because sharp boundaries indicate that the volatile deposits at Mercury’s poles are geologically young, relative to the time scale for lateral mixing by impacts,” stated lead researcher Nancy Chabot, the Instrument Scientist for MESSENGER’s Mercury dual imaging system.

Illustration of MESSENGER in orbit around Mercury (NASA/JPL/APL)
Illustration of MESSENGER in orbit around Mercury (NASA/JPL/APL)

“One of the big questions we’ve been grappling with is ‘When did Mercury’s water ice deposits show up?’ Are they billions of years old, or were they emplaced only recently?”, added Chabot, who is a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. “Understanding the age of these deposits has implications for understanding the delivery of water to all the terrestrial planets, including Earth.”

Another intriguing property comes when scientists compare Mercury to the Moon: because the ice looks different on both relatively atmosphere-less bodies, scientists believe the water came more recently to the Moon. But more study is required.

Results were published recently in the journal Geology.

Source: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

Posted on by Shannon Hall

MAVEN Spacecraft’s First Look at Mars Hints at Promising Results

Three views of an escaping atmosphere, obtained by MAVEN’s Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph. By observing all of the products of water and carbon dioxide breakdown, MAVEN's remote sensing team can characterize the processes that drive atmospheric loss on Mars. Image Credit: University of Colorado/NASA

It’s been less than a month since NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft slipped into orbit. But it’s already provided mission scientists their first look at Mars’ tenuous atmosphere.

“Everything is performing well so far,” said Bruce Jakosky, the mission’s principle investigator, in a news release. “All the instruments are showing data quality that is better than anticipated at this early stage of the mission. The spacecraft is performing beautifully. It’s turning out to be an easy and straightforward spacecraft to fly, at least so far. It really looks as if we’re headed for an exciting science mission.”

Data collected by MAVEN will answer a longstanding puzzle among planetary scientists. There’s ample evidence that early in the Red Planet’s history it had a much denser atmosphere. Rain fell from the sky and water carved its surface. But then the atmosphere vanished, and scientists are unsure why.

One leading theory is that the gas escaped to space, stripped away by the solar wind rushing past. (Click here to see a cool animation of that process.) Here on Earth, our magnetosphere helps protect our atmosphere from the solar wind. But once Mars lost its own magnetosphere, billions of years ago, its atmosphere became vulnerable.

MAVEN’s spectrometers will attempt to determine if hydrogen atoms, torn from water molecules by ultraviolet sunlight, are escaping to space and at what rate. Already, the spacecraft has observed the edges of the Martian atmosphere using its Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) camera, which is sensitive to the sunlight reflected by the atoms.

“With these observations, MAVEN’s IUVS has obtained the most complete picture of the extended Martian upper atmosphere ever made,” said team member Mike Chaffin from Colorado University at Boulder.

So far scientists have used IUVS to create a map of Mars’ ozone. “With these maps we have the kind of complete and simultaneous coverage of Mars that is usually only possible for Earth,” said team member Justin Deighan, also from CU-Boulder.

There will be about two weeks of additional instrument calibration and testing before MAVEN starts its primary science mission in early to mid-November. It will then likely take a few additional months to build up enough measurements to have a clear sense of what’s going on. But the initial results are promising.

Posted on by Tim Reyes

Old Equations Shed New Light on Quasars

An artists illustration of the early Universe. Image Credit: NASA

There’s nothing more out of this world than quasi-stellar objects or more simply – quasars. These are the most powerful and among the most distant objects in the Universe. At their center is a black hole with the mass of a million or more Suns. And these powerhouses are fairly compact – about the size of our Solar System. Understanding how they came to be and how — or if — they evolve into the galaxies that surround us today are some of the big questions driving astronomers.

Now, a new paper by Yue Shen and Luis C. Ho – “The diversity of quasars unified by accretion and orientation” in the journal Nature confirms the importance of a mathematical derivation by the famous astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington during the first half of the 20th Century, in understanding not just stars but the properties of quasars, too. Ironically, Eddington did not believe black holes existed, but now his derivation, the Eddington Luminosity, can be used more reliably to determine important properties of quasars across vast stretches of space and time.

A quasar is recognized as an accreting (meaning- matter falling upon) super massive black hole at the center of an “active galaxy”. Most known quasars exist at distances that place them very early in the Universe; the most distant is at 13.9 billion light years, a mere 770 million years after the Big Bang. Somehow, quasars and the nascent galaxies surrounding them evolved into the galaxies present in the Universe today.  At their extreme distances, they are point-like, indistinguishable from a star except that the spectra of their light differ greatly from a star’s. Some would be as bright as our Sun if they were placed 33 light years away meaning that  they are over a trillion times more luminous than our star.

An artists illustration of the central engine of a Quasar. These "Quasi-stellar Objects" QSOs are now recognized as the super massive black holes at the center of emerging galaxies in the early Universe. (Photo Credit: NASA)
An artists illustration of the central engine of a quasar. These “Quasi-stellar Objects” QSOs are now recognized as the super massive black holes at the center of emerging galaxies in the early Universe. (Photo Credit: NASA)

The Eddington luminosity  defines the maximum luminosity that a star can exhibit that is in equilibrium; specifically, hydrostatic equilibrium. Extremely massive stars and black holes can exceed this limit but stars, to remain stable for long periods, are in hydrostatic equilibrium between their inward forces – gravity – and the outward electromagnetic forces. Such is the case of our star, the Sun, otherwise it would collapse or expand which in either case, would not have provided the stable source of light that has nourished life on Earth for billions of years.

Generally, scientific models often start simple, such as Bohr’s model of the hydrogen atom, and later observations can reveal intricacies that require more complex theory to explain, such as Quantum Mechanics for the atom. The Eddington luminosity and ratio could be compared to knowing the thermal efficiency and compression ratio of an internal combustion engine; by knowing such values, other properties follow.

Several other factors regarding the Eddington Luminosity are now known which are necessary to define the “modified Eddington luminosity” used today.

The new paper in Nature shows how the Eddington Luminosity helps understand the driving force behind the main sequence of quasars, and Shen and Ho call their work the missing definitive proof that quantifies the correlation of a quasar properties to a quasar’s Eddington ratio.

They used archival observational data to uncover the relationship between the strength of the optical Iron [Fe] and Oxygen[O III] emissions – strongly tied to the physical properties of the quasar’s central engine – a super-massive black hole, and the Eddington ratio. Their work provides the confidence and the correlations needed to move forward in our understanding of quasars and their relationship to the evolution of galaxies in the early Universe and up to our present epoch.

Astronomers have been studying quasars for a little over 50 years. Beginning in 1960, quasar discoveries began to accumulate but only through radio telescope observations. Then, a very accurate radio telescope measurement of Quasar 3C 273 was completed using a Lunar occultation. With this in hand, Dr. Maarten Schmidt of California Institute of Technology was able to identify the object in visible light using the 200 inch Palomar Telescope. Reviewing the strange spectral lines in its light, Schmidt reached the right conclusion that quasar spectra exhibit an extreme redshift and it was due to cosmological effects. The cosmological redshift of quasars meant that they are at a great distance from us in space and time. It also spelled the demise of the Steady-State theory of the Universe and gave further support to an expanding Universe that emanated from a singularity – the Big Bang.

Dr. Maarten Schmidt, Caltech University, with Donald Lynden-Bell, were the first recipients of the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, “for their seminal contributions to understanding the nature of quasars”. While in high school, this author had the privilege to meet Dr. Schmidt at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History after his presentation to a group of students. (Photo Credit: Caltech)
Dr. Maarten Schmidt, Caltech, with Donald Lynden-Bell, were the first recipients of the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, “for their seminal contributions to understanding the nature of quasars”. While in high school, this author had the privilege to meet Dr. Schmidt at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History after his presentation to a group of students. (Photo Credit: Caltech)

The researchers, Yue Shen and Luis C. Ho are from the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University working with the Carnegie Observatories, Pasadena, California.

References and further reading:

“The diversity of quasars unified by accretion and orientation”, Yue Shen, Luis C. Ho, Sept 11, 2014, Nature

“What is a Quasar?”, Universe Today, Fraser Cain, August 12, 2013

“Interview with Maarten Schmidt”, Caltech Oral Histories, 1999

“Fifty Years of Quasars, a Symposium in honor of Maarten Schmidt”, Caltech, Sept 9, 2013

Posted on by Jason Major

Here’s a High-Res Look at Philae’s Landing Spot

Mosaic of OSIRIS images of landing site "J" on Comet 67P/CG. Credits: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

The long-awaited deployment of the Philae lander, currently “piggybacked” aboard ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft orbiting the nucleus of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, will occur in less than a month and we now have our best look yet at the area now green-lighted for touchdown. The picture above, made from two images acquired by Rosetta’s OSIRIS imaging instrument, shows a 500-meter circle centered on “Site J,” a spot on the comet’s “head” carefully chosen by mission scientists as the best place in which Philae should land, explore, and ultimately travel around the Sun for the rest of its days. And as of today, it’s a GO!

Site J was selected from among five other possible sites and was chosen because of the relative safety of its surface, its accessibility to consistent solar illumination, and the scientific and observational data it can make available to Philae’s suite of onboard instruments.

“None of the candidate landing sites met all of the operational criteria at the 100% level, but Site J is clearly the best solution,” said Stephan Ulamec, Philae Lander Manager at the DLR German Aerospace Center.

Illustration of the Rosetta Missions Philae lander on final approach to a comet surface. The date is now set for landing, November 12. (Photo: ESA)
Illustration of the Rosetta Missions Philae lander on final approach to a comet surface. The date is now set for landing, November 12. (Photo: ESA)

Read more: Comet’s Head Selected as Landing Site for Rosetta’s Historic Philae Lander

The mosaic above comprises two images taken by Rosetta’s OSIRIS (Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System) narrow-angle camera on Sept. 14 from a distance of about 30 km (18.6 miles). Image scale is 0.5 m/pixel.

As Comet 67P/CG continues toward perihelion its outgassing and sublimation jetting will undoubtedly increase, and Philae will be getting a front-row seat to the action.

“Site J is just 500-600 meters away from some pits and an area of comet outgassing activity,” said Holger Sierks, principal investigator for Rosetta’s OSIRIS camera from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany. “They will become more active as we get closer to the Sun.”

Watch “Landing on a Comet: the Trailer”

After completing a series of “Go/No-go” decisions by Rosetta’s flight dynamics team, Philae’s separation from Rosetta will occur on Nov. 12 at 08:35 GMT. It will land about seven hours later at around 15:30 GMT. Because of the distance to the comet and spacecraft — about 509 million km — confirmation of a successful touchdown won’t be received on Earth until 28 minutes and 20 seconds later. (And you thought Curiosity’s “seven minutes of terror” was nerve-wracking!)

Read more here on ESA’s Rosetta blog.

Posted on by Shannon Hall

Retired Astronaut Chris Hadfield Releases Stunning Space Photos

On a clear day, astronauts aboard the ISS can see over 1,000 miles from Havana to Washington D.C. Image Credit: Chris Hadfield / NASA

Orbiting 200 miles above the Earth, Retired Astronaut Chris Hadfield could easily photograph the ridges of the Himalayan Mountains, the textures of the Sahara Desert and the shadows cast by the tallest buildings in Manhattan.

The Richat Structure in Mauritania, also known as the Eye of the Sahara, is a landmark for astronauts. It’s hard to know where you are, especially if you’re over a vast 3,600,000-square-mile desert, but this bull’s-eye orients you, instantly. Oddly, it appears not to be the scar of a meteorite but a deeply eroded dome, with a rainbow-inspired color scheme. Image Credit: Chris Hadfield / NASA
Mauritania, also known as the Eye of the Sahara, is a landmark in the vast 3,600,000-square-mile desert. Credit: Chris Hadfield / NASA

“The view of the world when you have it just right there through the visor of your helmet is overpoweringly gorgeous,” said Hadfield, speaking Oct. 14 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. “It is phenomenal. The world is pouring by with all its colors and textures so fast.”

Although Hadfield has already shared many of his photos via social media, he unveiled another 150 images in his latest book, “You Are Here: Around The World in 92 Minutes.” The photographs open a rare window onto the Earth, illuminating our planet’s beauty and the consequences of human settlement.

The book is designed to replicate a single 92-minute orbit aboard the International Space Station. “It’s as if you and I are sitting at the window of the space station, and I said, ‘let’s go around the world once. I want to show you the really cool stuff,’ ” said Hadfield.

The astronaut, famed for his zero-gravity rendition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” took approximately 45,000 photos during his 146-day stint on the space station in 2013. That’s roughly 300 photos per day every day. Since NASA does not set aside specific time slots for astronauts to take photos, Hadfield did so while he should have been asleep or serenading millions with his guitar.

The Himalayan mountain range in South Asia.
The Himalayan mountain range in South Asia. Credit: Chris Hadfield / NASA

Why? Beauty triggers an unexplained emotional reaction, explained Hadfield. It also provides the best means of communication. Although the space station is an incredible scientific laboratory, art is equally important, he added, because it’s a way to reach people who might not otherwise be interested in the scientific nitty-gritty.

Hadfield is often attributed for humanizing space travel in a way that others before him had not. His use of social media, videos designed to quench our curiosity about living in space, and music, demonstrate a sheer passion that has inspired millions.

Manhattan awake at 9:23 a.m. local time, and Manhattan at rest at 3:45 a.m. local time. Image Credit: Chris Hadfield / NASA
Manhattan awake at 9:23 a.m. local time, and Manhattan at rest at 3:45 a.m. local time. Credit: Chris Hadfield / NASA

His photos not only share the natural beauty of our home planet, but also many signs of humanity, from bright city lights to the devastations of climate change as lakes dry up and disappear. “There’s so much information in just one glimpse out the window of human decision making and geology,” said Hadfield.

Hadfield’s remote yet vivid photos stand as a reminder of both the magnificence and fragility of life on our planet. “To have the world on one side, like this huge kaleidoscope, and then the bottomlessness of the Universe right there beside you,” said Hadfield, trailing off in awe. “You’re not on the world looking at it. You’re in the Universe with the world.”

Posted on by Elizabeth Howell

Mars One Dustup: Founder Says Mission Won’t Fail As MIT Study Predicts

Artist's conception of Mars One human settlement. Credit: Mars One/Brian Versteeg

How possible is it to land humans on Mars? And can Mars One, the organization proposing to start with sending four astronauts one way, capable of doing it by 2025 as it promises?

A new study says that the Mars One concept could fail on several points: oxygen levels could skyrocket unsafely. Using the local resources to generate habitability is unproven. The technology is expensive. But the founder of Mars One says the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student study is based on the wrong assumptions.

“It’s based on technology available on the ISS [International Space Station],” said Bas Landorp in an interview with Universe Today. “So you end up with a completely different Mars mission than Mars One. So their analysis has nothing to do with our mission.”

The mission has sparked a debate about sending humans on a trip with no promise for a return, but thousands of applicants vied for the chance to do it. After two cuts, the interim shortlist is now at 700 people. Those folks are awaiting interviews (more news is coming shortly, Landorp says) and no date has yet been announced for the next “cut.”

ISRO's Mars Orbiter Mission captures spectacular portrait of the Red Planet and swirling dust storms with the on-board Mars Color Camera from an altitude of 74500 km on Sept. 28, 2014. Credit: ISRO
ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission captures spectacular portrait of the Red Planet and swirling dust storms with the on-board Mars Color Camera from an altitude of 74500 km on Sept. 28, 2014. Credit: ISRO

A couple of weeks ago, MIT students presented a technical feasibility analysis of Mars One at the International Astronautical Congress in Toronto, Canada. The study is 35 pages long, so we recommend you read it to get the whole picture. The students’ main concerns are that crops (if they are responsible for 100% of the food) would send oxygen levels to unsafe margins, with no way to remove it. There are concerns with how well the in-situ resource utilization (using the resources on Mars to live off of) would perform. And the mission would cost $4.5 billion at a minimum — for the first crew only.

Cost: To get to Mars, the students say it will cost $4.5 billion and take 15 Falcon Heavy launches (a proposed next-generation rocket from SpaceX). Landorp says he can do it for $1.625 billion (since he doesn’t require constant Earth resupply) and as few as 13 launches (assuming $125 million per launch, a figure Landrop says is from SpaceX) by taking advantage of a few quirks of physics. If Mars One chooses a landing site that is four kilometers (2.5 miles) below the average Martian surface height, they will have both a thicker atmosphere and more time to land the payloads than, say, the Curiosity rover that landed about two kilometers (1.24 miles) above the average surface height. Mars One’s numbers show they could carry a payload of 2,500 kilograms (5,512 pounds) per mission, which they say is well within reach of what spacecraft can do today. The 13 launches would be divided into 11 robotic launches to send equipment to the surface, and two for humans (one to head to Earth orbit for assembly, and the other for the colonists to head to the in-orbit spacecraft and fly to Mars. The assembly crew would then fly back to Earth on the launch vehicle.)

Life support: While many of the technologies planned for use in life support are similar to those on the ISS — such as a trace gas system for air revitalization — Landorp says there will be some crucial differences. They are in talks with Paragon Space Systems Corp. (which describes itself as an environmental control firm for extreme environments, and whose customers include NASA and Bigelow.) As for the unsafe oxygen levels, Landorp points out there are plenty of oxygen removal systems available and that are used in hospitals and militaries. All that is needed is more testing in space. Landorp also points out these systems will be tested for two years robotically before humans land. “If that is not successful, then obviously we will not send humans,” he said.

The proposed Falcon Heavy rocket. Credit: SpaceX
The proposed Falcon Heavy rocket. Credit: SpaceX

In-situ resource utilization: Landorp acknowledges this requires more study, but says the robotic missions will be an important precursor for the human landings. Technologies needing to be developed will include nitrogen extraction from the Martian atmosphere. Oxygen production from water is well-studied in space, but water from the Martian surface (through vaporizing water in the soil) will require more work.

Another concern raised in media from time to time is where the money is coming from to fund Mars One. Landorp says right now funds are flowing from private investors. Mars One representatives are also in serious talks with a United Kingdom-based listed investment fund willing to finance the mission. In the long run, Landorp is confident money will come from broadcast deals similar to what partially fund the Olympics and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) competitions. Associated sponsorships would also help. But these won’t kick in until the colonists launch and land, since that’s when the world’s eyeballs will be on the mission.

Another stream of revenue, which may take five to seven years to kick in, will be intellectual property deals Mars One one representatives are working on closing now with potential suppliers, such as Lockheed Martin and Paragon. These agreements, should they go through as planned, would give Mars One a share of future revenue from any technologies flowing from the IP. “In the short term it’s not that interesting, it takes time to mature, but in the long term that will be interesting,” Landorp said.