Posted on by Jason Major

Nearby Exoplanet Could Be Covered With Diamond

Illustration of 55 Cancri e, a super-Earth that’s thought to have a thick layer of diamond (Yale News/Haven Giguere)

If diamonds are forever then this planet should be around for a very, very long time; it appears to be literally made of the stuff.

55 Cancri e — an exoplanet discovered in 2004 — is more than twice Earth’s diameter and over eight times more massive, making it a so-called “super Earth.” Earlier this year it made headlines by being the first Earth-sized exoplanet whose light was directly observed via the infrared capabilities of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

Using information about 55 Cancri e’s size, mass and orbital velocity, as well as the composition of its parent star 55 Cancri (located 40 light years away in the constellation Cancer) a research team led by scientists from Yale University created computer models to determine what the planet is most likely made of.

They determined that 55 Cancri e is composed primarily of carbon (as graphite and diamond), iron, silicon carbide, and possibly some silicates. The researchers estimate that at least a third of the planet’s mass — the equivalent of about three Earth masses — could be diamond.

“This is our first glimpse of a rocky world with a fundamentally different chemistry from Earth. The surface of this planet is likely covered in graphite and diamond rather than water and granite.”

– Nikku Madhusudhan, Yale postdoctoral researcher and lead author

So what would one expect to find on a world made of diamond?

“On this planet there would basically be a thin layer below the surface which will have both graphite and diamond,” Madhusudhan told Universe Today in an email. “But, below that there will be a thick layer (a third of the radius) with mostly diamond. For a large part the diamond will be like the diamond on Earth, except really, really pure.

“But at greater depths the diamond could also be in liquid form,” Madhusudhan added.

Scientists had previously thought that 55 Cancri e might have a lot of water — superheated water, due to the planet’s incredibly high 4,000-degree (F) temperatures — based on the assumption that its composition is similar to Earth’s. But this new research indicates that it doesn’t have much water at all.

“By contrast, Earth’s interior is rich in oxygen, but extremely poor in carbon — less than a part in thousand by mass,” said  Kanani Lee, Yale geophysicist and co-author of the paper.

This study shows that we can’t assume that planets in other systems are made of the same stuff that ours is, even if they are of similar size (and also that diamonds aren’t necessarily a valuable commodity on all worlds!)

The team’s paper “A Possible Carbon-rich Interior in Super-Earth 55 Cancri e” was accepted for publication in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. Read more on Yale News here.

Top image by Haven Giguere. Inset image shows visible location of 55 Cancri, by Nikku Madhusudhan using Sky Map Online. 

Posted on by Jenny Winder

BepiColombo – Mission to Mercury

Caption: BepiColombo’s components separating at Mercury. Image Credit: Astrium

BepiColombo, due to launch in 2015, will be only the third spacecraft to visit Mercury and the first to be sent by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Currently undergoing tests at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands. Here are the details and objectives of this joint mission to our innermost planet which hopes to give us the best understanding of Mercury to date

As the innermost of the terrestrial planets Mercury has an important role in showing us how planets form, yet it is the least explored planet in the inner Solar System. NASA sent Mariner 10 in 1974–5 and MESSENGER flew passed the planet 3 times in 2008 and 2009, before going into orbit around it last year. Being in close proximity, the Sun’s enormous gravity makes placing a spacecraft into a stable orbit, a challenge.

Professor Giuseppe (Bepi) Colombo (1920–1984) was the Italian mathematician and scientist who developed the gravity-assist maneuver and helped NASA to devise the trajectory of Mariner 10. The spacecraft that bears his name comprises three components: the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM) and the two probes: Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) It will take 6 years to make the journey from Earth to Mercury using solar-electric propulsion and gravity assists from the Earth and Venus, before eventual gravity capture at Mercury.

The transfer module will then separate and the orbiters will use rocket engines and a technique called ‘weak stability boundary capture’ to enter polar orbits around Mercury. MPO will enter a 2.3 hour period polar orbit and MMO a 9.3 hour period polar orbit. MPO is a 357 kg spacecraft in the shape of a flat prism will carry an imaging system consisting of a wide-angle and narrow angle camera, an infrared spectrometer, an ultraviolet spectrometer, gamma, X-ray, and neutron spectrometers, a laser altimeter, an ion and neutral spectrometer, a near-Earth object telescope and detection system, and radio science experiments. During the 1 year nominal mission it will map the entire surface in different wavelengths, and hopes to find water ice in polar craters permanently in shadow from the Sun’s rays.MMO is a flat cylinder with a mass of about 250 kg and will carry fluxgate magnetometers, charged particle detectors, a wave receiver, a positive ion emitter, and an imaging system.

The main mission objectives are: to investigate the origin and evolution of a planet close to the parent star; study Mercury’s form, interior structure, geology, composition and craters; examine the composition and dynamics of Mercury’s vestigial atmosphere (exosphere); probe the structure and dynamics of Mercury’s magnetized envelope (magnetosphere); determine the origin of Mercury’s magnetic field; investigate the composition and origin of polar deposits and perform a test of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

In 1845, Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier, noticed that at perihelion Mercury was moving around the Sun faster than predicted by Newton’s theory of gravity. It was not understood until 1915 when Albert Einstein overhauled the theory of gravity. BepiColombo will measure Mercury’s motion more accurately than ever before and so provide one of the most rigorous tests ever of Einstein’s theory.

Find out more about the mission at ESA

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Record Breaking Freefall Attempt Won’t Be Until October 14

A disappointed Felix Baumgartner exited his capsule on Oct. 9, 2012 after the flight was aborted due to high winds. Credit: Red Bull Stratos.

Windy weather in New Mexico likely won’t improve for a few days, and so the Red Bull Stratos team is targeting Sunday, October 14 for the next try for Felix Baumgartner to attempt a record-breaking freefall where he could break the sound barrier with his body. Meteoroligsts ruled out flights for today, Wednesday, and Thursday. The winds were the problem on Tuesday when the launch of the helium balloon that was to bring Baumarter to 36.5 km was aborted.

“As we inflated the balloon and got Felix into the capsule at about 11:42 a.m., we experienced a gust of wind that took us above 40 km/h at the peak of the balloon,” said Red Bull Stratos Project Director Art Thompson, adding the gust had dangerously twisted the balloon in a way that could have damaged the delicate polyethylene material. “The integrity of the balloon at that point is really unknown and unacceptable to use for manned flight because we were not sure what would happen as we launch. Our biggest problem was the wind at the 230 meters level.”

Wind speeds cannot exceed 5km/h or there is a chance the envelope could tear when the support team tries to release it. “We knew that we only had a small window today which we finally did not hit,” added Thompson.

The 43-year-old extreme jumper said he was surprised by the decision to abort the flight on Tuesday but optimistic he will still get his chance to break the 52-year-old record set by U.S. Air Force Colonel Joe Kittinger, who jumped from 31.3 km (102,800 ft). Kittinger is working as an adviser for Baumgartmer, and was the CAPCOM during the preparations for Tuesday’s attempt.

“I want this to happen this year,” Baumgartner said. “We’ve made it so far. There’s no turning back. We’re here, we’ve got the helium and we’re good to go. Whether that’s tomorrow or the first day next week, I don’t really care.”

The current schedule shows a 6:30 MDT (12:30 UTC) time for the launch attempt on Oct. 14. Universe Today will post a live feed of the jump on our website.

The partially inflated balloon during the Oct. 9 attempt was tossed around by the wind, forcing an abort to the launch. Credit: Red Bull Stratos

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Singer Sarah Brightman Will be Next Space Tourist

Singer Sarah Brightman at a press conference on October 10 to announce her upcoming space flight.

Roscosmos and Space Adventures are re- starting space tourism flights, and the next space tourist will be singer Sarah Brightman, who will head to the International Space Station on a Soyuz rocket. Brightman, 52, announced her trip at a press conference in Moscow on Wednesday, saying that she hopes her trip — which will likely take place in 2015 — will be a catalyst for the hopes and dreams of people around the world.

“I don’t think of myself as a dreamer. Rather, I am a dream chaser,” said Sarah Brightman. “I hope that I can encourage others to take inspiration from my journey both to chase down their own dreams and to help fulfill the important UNESCO mandate to promote peace and sustainable development on Earth and from space. I am determined that this journey can reach out to be a force for good, a catalyst for some of the dreams and aims of others that resonate with me.”

Brightman is a UNESCO Artist for Peace Ambassador, and is a classical soprano who also has topped the music charts with her pop music.

Coincidently, her new album is titled “Dream Chaser,” and she soon starts a world-wide tour to promote her new album. A trip to space would be the ultimate promotion tour. See a video below of her latest single, “Angel,” which includes footage from early space flight and recent views from the ISS. Brightman said space exploration has inspired her all her life.

Russia halted orbital space tourism in 2009 due to the increase in the International Space Station crew size, using the seats for expedition crews that would normally be sold to paying spaceflight participants.

Along with Brightman at the press conferece were Alexey Krasnov, Head of Roscosmos’ Piloted Programs Department and Eric Anderson, Chairman of Space Adventures, a space tourism company that has arranged all previous tourist flights to the Space Station.

The schedule for her flight “will be determined very shortly by Roscosmos and the ISS partners,” Brightman said, adding she had been approved medically and will do six months training in Russia.

“This past July, Ms. Brightman completed and passed all of the required medical and physical evaluations,” said Krasnov. “ She’s fit and mentally prepared for our spaceflight training program. We will work closely with Space Adventures in supporting Ms. Brightman’s spaceflight candidacy.”

During her estimated 10-day stay on board the space station, Brightman said she will advocate for UNESCO’s mandate to promote peace and sustainable development to safeguard our planet’s future. She will also try to advance education and empower the role of girls and women in science and technology in an effort to help close the gender gap in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields. The plans for achieving those goals are still in development.

“I have deep admiration for Sarah, not only for her well deserved title of being the world’s best-selling soprano, but for the young girl who was inspired by Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong to reach for her own star,” said Anderson. “We look forward to working with her to make her dream a reality.”

Previous ISS space tourists are Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Greg Olsen, Anousheh Ansari, Charles Simonyi, Richard Garriott and Guy Laliberté. Cumulatively, space tourists have spent almost three months in space.

Posted on by John Williams

Dying Star Blows Surprising Spiral Bubble

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, astronomers found an unexpected spiral structure surrounding the red giant star R Sculptoris shown here in this visualization. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

Sometimes what we can’t see is just as surprising as what lies directly in front of us. This especially holds true in a new finding from the astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/sumbillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile. A surprising and strange spiral structure surrounding the old star R Sculptoris is likely being created by an unseen companion, say astronomers.

The team using ALMA, the most powerful millimeter/submillimeter telescope in the world, mapped the spiral structure in three-dimensions. The astronomers say this is the first time a spiral of material, with a surrounding shell, has been observed. They report their findings in the journal Nature this week.

“We’ve seen shells around this kind of star before,” says lead author Matthias Maercker of the European Southern Observatory and Argelander Institute for Astronomy, University of Bonn, Germany in a press release. “But this is the first time we’ve ever seen a spiral of material coming out from a star, together with a surrounding shell.”

Scientists, using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope found a similar spiral, but without a surrounding shell, while observing the star LL Pegasi. Unlike the new ALMA observations, however, the astronomers could not create a three-dimensional map of the structure. Hubble observations saw the dust while ALMA detected the molecular emission.

ALMA detects the warm glow of carbon monoxide molecules in the far infrared through the multimeter wavelengths allowing astronomers to map the gas emissions surrounding the star in high-resolution. The team believes the strangely shaped bubble of material was probably created by an invisible companion star orbiting the red giant.

As stars like our Sun reach the ends of their lives, they become red giants. Swollen and cool, the stars begin a short-lived helium burning phase. During this time, the stars slough off large amounts of their mass in a dense stellar wind forming an expanding glowing shell around the stellar core. The pulses occur about every 10,000 to 50,000 years and last just a few hundred years. New observations of R Sculptoris show a pulse event rocked the star about 1,800 years ago and lasted for about 200 years. Computer simulations following the evolution of a binary system fit the new ALMA observations, according to the astronomers.

“It’s a real challenge to describe theoretically all the observed details coming from ALMA,” says co-author Shazrene Mohamed, of Argelander Institute for Astronomy in Bonn, Germany and South African Astronomical Observatory. “But our computer models show that we really are on the right track. ALMA is giving us new insight into what’s happening in these stars and what might happen to the Sun in a few billion years from now.”

A wide field view of the red giant variable star R Sculptoris. Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin

R Sculptoris is considered by astronomers to be an asymptotic giant branch, or AGB, star. With masses between 0.8 and 8 solar masses, they are cool red giants with a tiny central core of carbon and oxygen surrounded by a burning shell of helium and hydrogen burning. Eventually, our Sun will evolve into an AGB star. The glowing shell is made up of gas and dust, material that will be used for making future stars with their retinue of planets and moons and even the building blocks of life.

“In the near future, observations of stars like R Sculptoris with ALMA will help us to understand how the elements we are made up of reached places like the Earth. They also give us a hint of what our own star’s far future might be like,” says Maercker.

This new video shows a series of slices through the data, each taken at a slightly different frequency. These reveal the shell around the star, appearing as a circular ring, that seems to gets bigger and then smaller, as well as a clear spiral structure in the inner material that it best seen about half-way through the video sequence.

Source: European Southern Observatory

Small image caption: What appears to be a thin spiral pattern winding away from a star is shown in this remarkable picture from the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows one of the most perfect geometrical forms created in space. It captures the formation of an unusual pre-planetary nebula, known as IRAS 23166+1655, around the star LL Pegasi (also known as AFGL 3068) in the constellation of Pegasus (the Winged Horse). Credit: NASA/ESA Hubble

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Dragon Successfully Captured and Berthed at Space Station

Dragon captured by the ISS’s CanadArm2. Via NASA TV.

Running ahead of time, the International Space Station Expedition 33 crew successfully captured and installed the SpaceX Dragon capsule onto the Earth-facing port of the ISS’s Harmony module. Commander Suni Williams and astronaut Akihiko Hoshide captured the commercial spacecraft with the station’s CanadArm2 robotic arm at 6:56 a.m. EDT, and Dragon was officially berthed at 9:03 am EDT.

“Looks like we’ve tamed the Dragon,” radioed Williams. “We’re happy she’s on board with us. Thanks to everybody at SpaceX and NASA for bringing her here to us. And the ice cream.”

“This is a big moment in the course of this mission and for commercial spaceflight,” said SpaceX CEO and Chief Technical Officer Elon Musk. “We are pleased that Dragon is now ready to deliver its cargo to the International Space Station.”

The hatch will be opened tomorrow was opened earlier than expected, today at 1:40 pm EDT and Dragon will be unloaded over the next several days. Later, they will be re-packing it full of items that will be coming back to Earth, as this spacecraft has the ability to return intact, instead of burning up in the atmosphere like the other resupply ships that come to the station. Dragon will spend 18 days attached to the ISS.

More images below.

The Dragon capsule berthed to the ISS’s Harmony node. Credit: NASA/SpaceX

Dragon approaches the ISS. Via NASA TV.

Dragon is carrying nearly 400 kg (882 pounds) of supplies to the orbiting laboratory, including 117 kg (260 pounds) of crew supplies, 176 kg (390 pounds) of scientific research, 102 kg (225 pounds) of hardware and several kg/pounds of other supplies, such as food, water and Space Station parts. There are also 23 student experiments from the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) involving 7,420 pre-college students engaged in formal microgravity experiment design, according to SSEP director Dr. Jeff Goldstein.

The special treat that Williams mentioned is on board a new freezer called GLACIER (General Laboratory Active Cryogenic ISS Experiment Refrigerator): Blue Bell ice cream, a brand that is a favorite of astronauts training at the Johnson Space Center. The freezer will hold experiments that need to be returned to Earth for further examination.

Dragon will return a total of 758 kg (1,673 pounds), including 74 kg (163 pounds) of crew supplies, 392 kg (866 pounds) of scientific research, and 235 kg (518 pounds) of vehicle hardware and other hardware.

The Dragon capsule hovers near the International Space Station. Via NASA TV

A close-up view of the CanadArm2’s end effector grabbing the Dragon capsule. Via NASA TV

Dragon in the “Ready To Latch” (RTL) position. Via NASA TV.

A NASA graphic showing the position of the Dragon capsule on the ISS. Via NASA TV.

Posted on by Evan Gough

Book Review: The Half-Life of Facts; why everything we know has an expiration date

Review by Evan Gough

Knowledge is changing all the time. New facts replace old facts, more precise measurements supersede previous measurements. What was once considered true is overturned daily in our quickly changing times. In “The Half-Life of Facts: why everything we know has an expiration date,” Samuel Arbesman brings some clarity to our constantly changing factual landscape.

It turns out that facts have a shelf-life, and that there is a mathematical predictability to that shelf-life. With an engaging style of storytelling, and just the right amount of graphs and tables, Arbesman walks us through the field of scientometrics, the scientific study of science itself. What do we learn?

We learn that scientific studies themselves have half-lives. For example, the half-life of a study on hepatitis and cirrhosis, both liver diseases, is about 45 years. After 45 years, half of that knowledge will be overturned or superseded. We also learn that differing sciences have different half-lives. The half-life of a physics paper is on average 13.07 years, in Math it’s 9.17 years, and in Psychology it’s 7.15.

“The Half-Life of Facts” is full of familiar examples of, and insights into, our changing knowledge. Universe Today readers will be familiar with the demotion of Pluto from planet to trans-Neptunian object. Other examples in Arbesman’s book will be unfamiliar. For instance, it may be surprising to find out that for many decades it was an established fact that humans had 48 chromosomes. (We have 46.) This was considered such an elementary truth, that other researchers who counted 46 sometimes shut down their research prematurely, thinking they were somehow in error. Eventually, however, the truth did win out.

How science gets us closer to the truth over time is the main thrust of this book. That, and the predictability of that progress towards greater accuracy. But there are chapters that cover how facts spread, how new knowledge is hidden in connections between previously published studies, and how improvements in technology can spur science on to more accurate truths.

Overall, “The Half-Life of Facts” is an engaging book. It moves along at a nice pace, and I think Universe Today readers will find it very interesting. My only beef with the book is its title. It’s about much more than the half-life of facts. It’s a vivid account of the surprising ways in which new facts are accumulated, and how old knowledge is overturned.

Find out more about this book and the author at this website.

Posted on by John Williams

Monster Black Holes Lurk at the Edge of Time

The reddish object in this infrared image is ULASJ1234+0907, located about 11 billion light-years from Earth. The red color comes from vast amounts of dust, which absorbs bluer light, and obscures the supermassive black hole from view in visible wavelengths. Credit: image created using data from UKIDSS and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) observatory.

As if staring toward the edge of the Universe weren’t fascinating enough, scientists at the University of Cambridge say they see enormous, rapidly growing supermassive black holes barely detectable near the edge of time.

Thick dust shrouds the monster black holes but they emit vast amounts of radiation through violent interactions and collisions with their host galaxies making them visible in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The team published their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The most remote object in the study lies at a whopping 11 billion light-years from Earth. Ancient light from the supermassive black hole, named ULASJ1234+0907 and located toward the constellation of Virgo, the Maiden, has traveled (at almost 10 trillion kilometers, or 6 million million miles, per year) across the cosmos for nearly the estimated age of the Universe. The monster black hole is more than 10 billion times the mass of our Sun and 10,000 times more massive than the black hole embedded in the Milky Way Galaxy; making it one of the most massive black holes ever seen. And it’s not alone. Researchers say that there may be as many as 400 giants black holes in the tiny sliver of the Universe that we can observe.

“These results could have a significant impact on studies of supermassive black holes” said Dr Manda Banerji, lead author of the paper, in a press release. “Most black holes of this kind are seen through the matter they drag in. As the neighbouring material spirals in towards the black holes, it heats up. Astronomers are able to see this radiation and observe these systems.”

The team from Cambridge used infrared surveys being carried out on the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) to peer through the dust and locate the giant black holes for the first time.

“These results are particularly exciting because they show that our new infrared surveys are finding super massive black holes that are invisible in optical surveys,” says Richard McMahon, co-author of the study. “These new quasars are important because we may be catching them as they are being fed through collisions with other galaxies. Observations with the new Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile will allow us to directly test this picture by detecting the microwave frequency radiation emitted by the vast amounts of gas in the colliding galaxies.”

Huge black holes are known to reside at the centers of all galaxies. Astronomers predict the most massive of these cosmic phenomena grow through violent collisions with other galaxies. Galactic interactions trigger star formation which provides more fuel for black holes to devour. And it’s during this process that thick layers of dust hide the munching black holes.

“Although these black holes have been studied for some time,” says Banergi, “the new results indicate that some of the most massive ones may have so far been hidden from our view. The newly discovered black holes, devouring the equivalent of several hundred Suns every year, will shed light on the physical processes governing the growth of all supermassive black holes.”

Astronomers compare the extreme case of ULASJ1234+0907 with the relatively nearby and well-studied Markarian 231. Markarian 231, found just 600 million light-years away, appears to have recently undergone a violent collision with another galaxy producing an example of a dusty, growing black hole in the local Universe. By contrast, the more extreme example of ULASJ1234+0907, shows scientists that conditions in the early Universe were more turbulent and inhospitable than today.

Source: Royal Astronomical Society

Image Credit: Markarian 231, an example of a galaxy with a dusty rapidly growing supermassive black hole located 600 million light years from Earth. The bright source at the center of the galaxy marks the black hole while rings of gas and dust can be seen around it as well as “tidal tails” left over from a recent impact with another galaxy. Courtesy of NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Shiny Object on Mars Update: Likely ‘Benign’ Plastic

Curiosity sol 62 ChemCam image detail. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Image processing courtesy 2di7 & titanio44 on Flickr.

Lost earring? Cigarette butt? Those were just a couple of ideas tossed around loosely by the public about what this unusual object could be, found laying near the Mars Curiosity rover. The rover team is still looking closely at the shiny object, seen in images of the sandy regolith near the rover, and they issued a report today saying their initial assessment is that the bright object is something from the rover, and not Martian material. It appears to be a shred of plastic material, “likely benign,” they said, but it has not been definitively identified.

A loose piece of plastic or insulating tape may have jarred free during the rover’s shaking of the sample of Martian regolith it recently scooped up.

The team will proceed cautiously and will spend another day investigating new images before deciding whether to resume processing of the sample in the scoop. Plans include imaging of surroundings with the Mastcam, and perhaps looking at the rover itself, too, for any chips or loose parts.

One of the rover drivers, Scott Maxwell said on Twitter that the entire team was working hard to figure that out what could have possibly come loose from the rover and they are “crawling over rover model, tracking down testing records, etc. We simply don’t know yet.”

A sample of sand and dust scooped up on Sol 61 remains in the scoop, and plan to transfer it from the scoop into other chambers of the sample-processing device were postponed as a precaution during planning for Sol 62 after the small, bright object was detected.

Curiosity sol 62 ChemCam view of the bright object on the ground. Image: NASA/JPL -Caltech. Anaglyph processing courtesy 2di7 & titanio44 on Flickr.

The shaking being done by the rover is to clean it of any residual oils that may be left inside, which could skew any results from the two onboard chemical labs, known as Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), and the Chemical and Mineralogy experiment (CheMin.)

Daniel Limonadi, the Lead Systems Engineer for Curiosity’s Surface Sampling and science systems told reporters last week that the cleansing was required even though the hardware is “super-squeaky-clean when it’s delivered and assembled. By virtue of its just being on Earth, you get a kind of residual oily film that is impossible to avoid,” he said.

Once the soil has been shaken and stirred through the chambers, it’ll be ejected from the mechanism and ‘poop’ it back onto the Martian surface. “We effectively use it to rinse out our mouth three times and then kind of spit out,” Limonadi said.

The images here were sent in by Universe Today reader Elisabetta Bonora who zoomed in and created 3-D views of the images of the shiny piece. See more here.

Interesting to note, closeup views reveal more spherical “blueberries” similar to what the Opportunity rover found at its landing site in Meridiani Planum and at its current location near Endeavour Crater, too.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Searching for Life on Mars

Today, Mars is a barren desert. But millions of years ago could our planetary neighbor have been much more Earth-like – covered with rivers, oceans, and even life? A new video series called EPIPHANY, Dr. Ashwin Vasavada, NASA’s Deputy Project Scientist of the Mars Science Laboratory shares how the Mars Curiosity rover is going to shed new light on the ancient history of Mars and whether life could have ever existed there. While Curiosity is not equipped to look for life itself, it will look for “the ingredients of life,” the essential molecules and elements that go into living things. Already, at just 50 sols into the mission, the rover has found an ancient streambed and as Project Scientist John Grotzinger said, “We have already found our first potentially habitable environment.”

Continue reading “Searching for Life on Mars”