Space Exploration

Viking Experiment May Have Found Life’s Building Blocks on Mars After All

View of Mars from the Viking lander in 1976. Credit: NASA

A new look at data from the Mars Viking landers concludes that the two landers may have found the building blocks of life on the Red Planet after all way back in 1976. The surprise discovery of perchlorates by the Phoenix mission on Mars 32 years later could means the way the Viking experiment was set up actually would have destroyed any carbon-based chemical building blocks of life – what the experiment set about to try and find.
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NASA Satellites and Spacecraft Look Into the Eye of Hurricane Earl

Hurricane Earl on Sept. 2, 2010 as seen by NASA's Terra Satellite. NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team

NASA scientists, instruments and spacecraft are busy studying Hurricane Earl from both the air and space, and an unmanned aircraft actually flew inside the giant storm. Above is a satellite image from NASA’s Terra satellite, and below is an image taken by one of the astronauts on board the International Space Station, Doug Wheelock. Three NASA aircraft carrying 15 instruments have been flying above, below and into Earl as part the new Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes mission, or GRIP, which GRIP is designed to help improve our understanding of how hurricanes such as Earl form and intensify rapidly.

See below for a couple of NASA websites where you can see real-time data about Hurricane Earl.

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New Horizons Mission Practices Telescopic Imager on Pluto’s Twin

New Horizons image of Neptune and its largest moon, Triton. Credit: NASA

This summer, the New Horizons spacecraft was awoken for its annual systems checkout, and took the opportunity to exercise the long range camera by snapping pictures of Neptune, which at the time, was 3.5 billion km (2.15 billion miles) away. The Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) snapped several photos of the gas giant, but Neptune was not alone! The moon Triton made a cameo appearance. And the New Horizons team said that since Triton is often called Pluto’s “twin” it was perfect target practice for imaging its ultimate target, Pluto.

This image gets us excited for 2015 when New Horizons will approach and make the closest flyby ever of Pluto.
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Post tags: Missions, Neptune, New Horizons, Pluto, triton

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NASA to go diving into the sun

Somewhere around 2018 NASA will be carrying out 5 experiments to discover more about our sun via a small car-sized spacecraft as part of a project called Solar Probe Plus. The experiments are designed to answer two key questions about our sun – why is the sun’s outer atmosphere so much hotter than the sun’s visible surface and what propels the solar wind that effects Earth and our solar system?

From the press release we get

As the spacecraft approaches the sun, its revolutionary carbon-composite heat shield must withstand temperatures exceeding 2550 degrees Fahrenheit and blasts of intense radiation. The spacecraft will have an up close and personal view of the sun enabling scientists to better understand, characterize and forecast the radiation environment for future space explorers.

NASA invited researchers in 2009 to submit science proposals. Thirteen were reviewed by a panel of NASA and outside scientists. The total dollar amount for the five selected investigations is approximately $180 million for preliminary analysis, design, development and tests.

You can find out more about the project at its website: http://solarprobe.gsfc.nasa.gov/

There is also apparently a 30-second video for the project as well (via Fast Company).

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How to Crash Stars Together

A Hubble Space Telescope image of the typical globular cluster Messier 80, an object made up of hundreds of thousands of stars and located in the direction of the constellation of Scorpius. The Milky Way galaxy has an estimated 160 globular clusters of which one quarter are thought to be ‘alien’. Image: NASA / The Hubble Heritage Team / STScI / AURA. Click for hi-resolution version.

The math is simple: Star + Other star = Bigger star.

While conceptually this works well, it fails to take into account the extremely vast distances between stars. Even in clusters, where the density of stars is significantly higher than in the main disk, the number of stars per unit volume is so low that collisions are scarcely considered by astronomers. Of course, at some point the stellar density must reach a point at which the chance for a collision does become statistically significant. Where is that tipping point and are there any locations that might actually make the cut?(...)
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NASA Plans to Visit the Sun

If you’ve seen Danny Boyle’s movie Sunshine, you may be a little disappointed: NASA’s mission to visit the Earth’s Sun won’t include sending people up there. But it will be sending a spacecraft into the Sun’s atmosphere, approximately four million miles from its surface. The project, called Solar Probe Plus, is slated to launch sometime before 2018.

Four million miles doesn’t sound very close, but it’s still very exciting, since this is a region no other spacecraft (created by us) has ever encountered. NASA plans for the project to “unlock the sun’s biggest mysteries.”

Although the spacecraft will be relatively far from our star’s surface, its carbon-composite heat shield will have to withstand intense radiation, as well as temperatures exceeding 2550 degrees Fahrenheit.

“The experiments selected for Solar Probe Plus are specifically designed to solve two key questions of solar physics – why is the sun’s outer atmosphere so much hotter than the sun’s visible surface and what propels the solar wind that affects Earth and our solar system?” said Dick Fisher, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division in Washington.

“We’ve been struggling with these questions for decades and this mission should finally provide those answers,” said Fisher.

[Image credit: NASA]

More About: mission, NASA, space, spacecraft, sun, Sunshine

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