Space and astronomy news
NASA has repeatedly imaged the Martian surface, and sometimes a feature appears that wasn’t there in prior images. That’s what happened when a meteorite survived the plunge through Mars’ thin atmosphere sometime between February and July, 2005. It created this impact crater north of Valles Marineris.
Continue reading “A Meteor Smashed Into Mars in 2005, Making this Crater”
Article updated at 3:40 pm CST, 1/24/20.
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover experienced a technical glitch last week, causing it to temporarily lose its sense of direction and freeze in its tracks. But the talented rover repair team back on Earth enabled a fix, and Curiosity is now back in action.
Continue reading “A Glitch Caused Curiosity to Freeze in Place. But It’s Better Now”
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been in orbit around Mars for almost 14 years. It carries a variety of instruments with it, including the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) instrument. That instrument has collected thousands of images of Mars.
Continue reading “This is Probably Sandstone Layers on Mars. Absolutely Beautiful”
For fans and enthusiasts of space exploration, the name Kevin Gill ought to be a familiar one. As a software engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who specializes in data visualization and analysis, he has a long history of bringing space exploration to life through imagery. Among his most recent offerings is a very interesting pic taken by the Curiosity rover early in its mission.
Continue reading “Curiosity Looked up and Saw Phobos During the Daytime”
Our eyes can’t see them, but Martian auroras are there, and more commonplace than we once thought. The Martian auroras were first discovered in 2016 by NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. Now some new results are expanding our knowledge of these unusual auroras.
Continue reading “Mars Has Auroras Too, We Just Can’t See Them”
Some landslides, both here on Earth and on Mars, behave in a puzzling way: They flow a lot further than friction should allow them too.
They can also be massive, including a well-preserved one in Valles Marineris that is the same size as the state of Rhode Island. Scientists have speculated that it might be so large because a layer of ice that existed in the past provided lubrication. But a new study suggests that no ice is needed to explain it.
Continue reading “Landslides Work Differently on Mars, and Now We Might Know Why”
When it comes to plans for future missions to space, one of the most important aspects will be the use of local resources and autonomous robots. This process is known as In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), which reduces the amount of equipment and resources that need to be sent ahead or brought along by a mission crew. Meanwhile, autonomous robots can be sent ahead of a crew and have everything prepared for them in advance.
But what about bacteria that can draw iron from extraterrestrial soil, which would then be used to 3D print metal components for a base? That is the idea that is being proposed by PhD candidate Benjamin Lehner of the Delft University of Technology. On Friday (Nov. 22nd), he defended his thesis, which calls for the deployment of an uncrewed mission to Mars that will convert regolith into useable metal using a bacteria-filled bioreactor.
Continue reading “Using Bacteria to Build a Base on Mars”
A surtseyan eruption is a volcanic eruption in shallow water. It’s named after the island Surtsey, off the coast of iceland. In 2015, a surtseyan eruption in the Tongan Archipelago created the island Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai. Despite the odds, that island is still there almost five years later.
Continue reading “A Brand New Island in the Pacific has Survived 5 Years”
NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover is heading to Mars soon to look for fossils. The ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars rover is heading to Mars in the same time-frame to carry out its own investigations into Martian habitability. To meet their mission objectives, the scientists working the missions will need to look at a lot of rocks and uncover and understand the clues those rocks hold.
To help those scientists prepare for the daunting task of analyzing and understanding Martian rocks from 160 million km (100 million miles) away, they’ve gone on a field trip to Australia to study stromatolites.
Continue reading “Scientists Search for Ancient Fossils in Australia, Practicing the Techniques They’ll Use on Mars”
An atmospheric drama has been playing out on Mars lately. Up until now, the main actor has been methane, and its unusual, spiking behaviour. But now Oxygen is taking the stage, and performing some theatrics of its own.
Continue reading “Molecular Oxygen on Mars is Behaving Unusually Through the Seasons. A Sign of Life?”