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NASA Considers Risking Rover on Dangerous Descent

NASA is currently making a difficult decision about whether to send its Opportunity rover down into Endurance Crater, which is 130 metres wide, and deep enough that the rover might not be able to climb back out. It’s clear that there’s some interesting science to be gathered in the crater, including more exposed rock surfaces. Opportunity will crawl around the rim of the crater and search for an ideal ramp that it could use to enter and exit safely.

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Are Jupiter’s Spots Disappearing?

Jupiter’s stormy surface could be settling down, according to calculations by UC Berkeley physicist Philip Marcus. According to Marcus, Jupiter’s temperature and the number of storms on its surface are directly connected. As the number of vortices decrease, its temperature should go up by about 10-degrees Celsius – warmer near the equator and cooler near the poles. This cycle seems to repeat itself about every 70 years. But don’t worry; the Great Red Spot isn’t going anywhere.

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A Movie of Titan’s Hazy Atmosphere

Astronomers have used the enormous Keck telescope to capture several images of the hydrocarbon haze of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, and piece them together into a short movie. These observations will help scientists make sense of the data that the Huygens probe sends back as it descends through Titan’s unusual atmosphere in early 2005 and hopefully survives to land on its surface. Titan is interesting because its atmosphere is very similar to conditions that probably existed early on Earth.

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Cassini Sees Merging Storms on Saturn

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft continues its approach to Saturn, and its latest images show incredible detail of two storms in the act of merging. The storms were both at least 1,000 km wide, and they were moving westward across the surface of the planet, relative to its rotation. After about a month of dancing, the storms actually merged on March 19-20, and the new storm now sits almost stationary on the surface of the planet. Saturn is the windiest planet in the Solar System, and the reason for these winds is one of the mysteries that scientists hope to solve with Cassini.

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Learning How to Live Off the Land

Researcher Dr. Mike Duke has been working for several years to create a rover that could use lunar dust to create propellant for use by future explorers. Over the course of four years, Duke and his team have created a robotic excavator that can scoop up soil. In the future, this excavator could deliver the soil to a Moon-based extraction system that would process the soil to draw out hydrogen. In a future scenario, propellant created on the Moon could be launched back into space to refill spacecraft relatively inexpensively.

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Adaptive Optics Reveal Massive Star Formation

Astronomers at UC Berkeley took advantage of the newly installed adaptive optics system at the Lick Observatory to get clear images of a massive star forming region. The system works by using a laser to create a false star in the sky. A computer tracks the atmospheric turbulence, and warps the telescope’s mirror to compensate. The young massive stars that the team observed are usually too blurry when seen from the ground, so they made the perfect target for the adaptive optics system.

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Cities on Fertile Land Affect Climate

New research from NASA shows that cities in the United States have been built on the most fertile soils of the nation – cities account for just 3% of its land area, but food grown there could out produce the 29% of the US which is currently used for agriculture. The researchers used data two NASA satellites to track plant growth and the locations of urban centres. They created a computer model for a potential pre-urban US landscape which they used to calculate how much the country’s vegetation growth is diminished because of cities.

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Mars Society Responds to Bush Announcement

When US President George W. Bush announced his government’s new space initiative, to return humans to the Moon and then on to Mars, many space advocacy groups saw this as an opportunity to advance the goals of space exploration. The Mars Society recently announced their analysis and recommendations about the initiative. Overall, the society welcomed the new policies, but felt there was room for improvement in several areas, including an emphasis on acquiring heavy lift boosters and developing methods for creating fuel, water, etc on the Moon or Mars.

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Distance to Pleiades Calculated

Image credit: NOAO Astronomers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have measured the distance to the Pleiades star cluster to greatest precision ever. After a decade’s worth of interferometric measurements, the team found that the star cluster is between 434 and 446 light years from Earth. This is important because the European Hipparcos satellite previously measured …

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Space Advocates Feel the Bush Plan Needs Work

Image credit: NASA Although they appreciated President Bush’s new space initiative, many space advocacy groups were a little disappointed that this return to the Moon will probably be fashioned in the same mold as previous NASA projects, such as the space shuttle and the International Space Station. The groups, such as the Space Frontier Foundation, …

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