Tag: Mars

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER EVIDENCE OF THE FIRST LARGE BODY OF LIQUID WATER ON MARS

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FOR DECADES MARS has teased scientists with whispers of water’s presence. Valleys and basins and rivers long dry point to the planet’s hydrous past. The accumulation of condensation on surface landers and the detection of vast subterranean ice deposits suggest the stuff still lingers in gaseous and solid states. But liquid water has proved more elusive. Evidence to date suggests it flows seasonally, descending steep slopes in transient trickles every Martian summer. The search for a big, enduring reservoir of wet, potentially life-giving water has turned up nothing. Until now.

The Italian Space Agency announced Wednesday that researchers have detected signs of a large, stable body of liquid water locked away beneath a mile of ice near Mars’ south pole. The observations were recorded by the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding instrument—Marsis for short. “Marsis was born to make this kind of discovery, and now it has,” says Roberto Orosei, a radioastronomer at the National Institute for Astrophysics, who led the investigation. His team’s findings, which appear in this week’s issue of Science, raise tantalizing questions about the planet’s geology—and its potential for harboring life.

Marsis collected its evidence from orbit, flying aboard the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft. It works by transmitting pulses of low-frequency electromagnetic waves toward the red planet. Some of those waves interact with features at and below the Martian surface and reflect back toward the instrument, carrying clues about the planet’s geological composition. Conceptually, using the instrument to study Mars’ polar regions couldn’t be more straightforward: Just point it toward the ice and see what bounces back.

In practice, though, it’s a lot more complicated. Marsis spends relatively little time above Planum Australe, the southern polar plane of Mars and the focus of Orosei’s team’s investigation. That meant the researchers could only listen for echoes periodically. It would take many readings—and many years—to get a clear picture of what lies hidden beneath the planet’s southern ice cap. So in May of 2012, on the heels of a software upgrade that enabled Marsis to acquire more detailed data, the researchers began their survey.

Three and a half years and 29 observations later, they had a radiogrammatic map of Mars’ southern polar plane. When they cross-referenced all their measurements, something immediately seized their attention: Bright reflections in the radar signals, corresponding to what Orosei now calls “a well-defined anomaly” some 12 miles across and several feet deep, roughly one mile beneath the surface of the polar ice cap. The surface of an ice cap tends to reflect radar waves more strongly than the regions below it. But on multiple passes, Marsis had detected uncommonly strong echoes originating from beneath the southern pole.

Or rather: Uncommonly strong for a solid material.

Analyses of subglacial lakes on our own planet—like the ones beneath the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets—have shown that water reflects radar more strongly than rock and sediment. And in fact, the radar profile of this region of Mars’ southern pole resembles those of subglacial lakes here on Earth.

The researchers looked for other explanations for the bright signals. A layer of frozen carbon dioxide above or below the polar cap, for example, could conceivably produce readings like the ones they observed—though the researchers deemed this, and all other explanations that they considered, less likely than the presence of liquid water.

“I can’t absolutely prove it’s water, but I sure can’t think of anything else that looks like this thing does other than liquid water,” says Richard Zurek, chief scientist for the Mars Program Office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who was unaffiliated with the study. “Maybe that has to do with a shortage of imagination on my part,” he adds, “but it probably has to do with a shortage of data, too.” More radar observations, he says, could give rise to explanations scientists haven’t even thought of yet—and more questions, too.

Not that there’s a shortage of unanswered questions. Still unclear is how the water remains liquid at temperatures tens of degrees below 0° Celsius. Orosei and his team think the answer could be magnesium, calcium, and sodium salts, all of which are present in Martian rock, that have dissolved in the water, lowering its freezing point.

Another question is whether future observations by Marsis and other spacecraft will detect more reservoirs beneath Mars’ southern ice cap. “If this lake is a single occurrence, if there is no other liquid water anywhere else, then the implication would be that we are seeing a quirk of nature—an effect of residual decay, a hydrothermal vent, some thermal irregularity in the crust,” Orosei says. “But, if we were to find that Mars possesses not one subglacial lake, but several, that would change the game.”

More lakes would suggest that the conditions necessary for their existence aren’t so rare. And if those conditions have persisted throughout the planet’s history, then subsurface reservoirs of liquid water could serve as a bridge to the early environment of Mars—a time capsule of sorts from a period billions of years ago, when Mars was a warm, wet planet.

Which, of course, raises the biggest question of all: Could there be life in the waters beneath Mars’ southern ice caps?

It’s certainly possible, says Montana State University glaciologist John Priscu. An expert in the biogeochemistry and microbiology of subglacial environments here on Earth, Priscu led the first team to discover microbial life in a lake beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet. “You need three things for life: liquid water; an energy source, like leaching minerals, which we know Mars has; and a biological seed,” he says. It’s plausible that the lake beneath Mars’ southern pole possesses the first two. As for the whole spark-of-life thing, “I’m not sure we’ll ever know where the seed comes from,” he says. But if Earth got a seed, maybe Mars did, too.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. “It’s tempting to think that if life ever evolved on Mars, it would have to be present today,” Orosei says, a subglacial lake like the one his team discovered would be an excellent place to look. But first comes the search for more lakes. And after that, perhaps landers equipped with drills. “Going from zero bodies of water to one is a big change, for sure,” Orosei says, “but the full extent of this discovery depends on what we find next.”

https://www.wired.com/story/large-body-of-liquid-water-on-mars/

Human Hibernation Could Get Us to Mars

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Journeying to Mars is seldom out of the news these days. From Elon Musk releasing plans for his new rocket to allow SpaceX to colonize Mars, to NASA announcing another rover as part of the Mars 2020 mission, both private and public organizations are racing to the red planet.

But human spaceflight is an exponentially bigger task than sending robots and experiments beyond Earth. Not only do you have to get the engineering of the rocket, the calculations of the launch, the plans for zero-gravity travel and the remotely operated Martian landing perfect, but you’d also have to keep a crew of humans alive for six months without any outside help.

There are questions around how to pack enough food and water to sustain the crew without making the rocket too heavy and around how much physical space would be left for the crew to live in. There are questions about what happens if someone gets dangerously ill and about what a claustrophobic half-year in these circumstances would do to the mental health of the Martian explorers.

Enter John Bradford of Atlanta-based SpaceWorks Enterprises.

Using a $500,000 grant from NASA, Bradford’s team has been working on an adaptation of a promising medical procedure that could alleviate many of the human-related limitations of space travel.

Presenting at the annual Hello Tomorrow Summit in Paris, Bradford shared his team’s concept of placing the crew in what’s called a “low-metabolic torpor state” for select phases during space travel—in other words, hibernating the crew.

The idea stems from a current medical practice called therapeutic hypothermia, or targeted temperature management. It is used in cases of cardiac arrest and neonatal encephalopathy. Patients are cooled to around 33°C for 48 hours to prevent injury to tissue following lack of blood flow. Sedatives are then administered to induce sleep. Ex Formula 1 driver Michael Schumacher was famously held in this state following his ski accident in 2013.

Adapting the procedure for spaceflight, the crew would be fed and watered directly into the stomach using what’s called a percutaneous endoscopic gastronomy tube to remove the need for eating and standard digestion, and using whole-body electrical stimulation, their muscles would be activated to avoid atrophy.

Bradford’s team found that while in this torpor state, the body needs over a third less food and water to sustain itself, greatly reducing the payload weight estimates for Mars missions.

A large part of the concept is the rotational element of who is awake and who is in stasis. Current medical procedures only last two to three days, so the plan is to extend the time each person is in torpor state to around eight days. Adding in a two-day wake period, a schedule can be drawn up so that a different member of the crew acts as the caretaker for the others, each in cycles of eight days of torpor and two days awake.

This means humans won’t be asleep for the whole journey, but with these torpor periods making up the majority of their trip, the physical and mental pressure put on the crew and the weight of resources on board would be greatly reduced. The plan for the research, however, is to get these periods up from days to weeks.

It’s not just SpaceWorks who’s looking into the idea of human hibernation for space travel. The European Space Agency has part of their Advanced Concepts team dedicated to this research as well. But their last paper was published in 2004, which suggests Bradford and his crew have the most promising progress.

Naysayers tend to question the ability of the human body to effectively and safely “wake up” from these long periods of stasis, and have concerns around whether our bodies can truly adapt to running healthily at a lower temperature. We are evolved to run at a pretty precise measure, and long-term body temperature changes in humans have not yet been studied.

But the SpaceWorks team’s research has both short and long-term prospects. The advances being made in our understanding and implementation of the torpor state can likely be adapted for use in organ transplants and critical care in extreme environments.

Of course, it’s the long term that excites Bradford. He estimates they could possibly achieve this capability for manned missions as soon as the 2030s. And with Elon Musk aiming for the first manned flights of his new rocket in 2024, it seems this pair might have the ingredients for a Martian future for Earthlings sooner than we expect.

This Unbelievable Research on Human Hibernation Could Get Us to Mars

Budweiser is exploring how to brew beer on Mars

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By Jeffrey Kluger

If you’re traveling to Mars, you’re going to have to bring a lot of essentials along — water, air, fuel, food. And, let’s be honest, you probably wouldn’t mind packing some beer too. A two-year journey — the minimum length of a Mars mission — is an awfully long time to go without one of our home planet’s signature pleasures.

Now, Anheuser-Busch InBev, the manufacturer of Budweiser, has announced that it wants to bring cosmic bar service a little closer to reality: On Dec. 4, the company plans to launch 20 barley seeds to space, aboard a SpaceX rocket making a cargo run to the International Space Station (ISS). Studying how barley — one of the basic ingredients in beer — germinates in microgravity will, the company hopes, teach scientists a lot about the practicality of building an extraterrestrial brewery.

“We want to be part of the collective dream to get to Mars,” said Budweiser vice president Ricardo Marques in an email to TIME. “While this may not be in the near future, we are starting that journey now so that when the dream of colonizing Mars becomes a reality, Budweiser will be there.”

Nice idea. But apart from inevitable issues concerning Mars rovers with designated drivers and who exactly is going to check your ID when you’re 100 million miles from home, Budweiser faces an even bigger question: Is beer brewing even possible in space? The answer: Maybe, but it wouldn’t be easy.

Start with that first step Budweiser is investigating: the business of growing the barley. In the U.S. alone, farmers harvest about 2.5 million acres of barley per year. The majority of that is used for animal feed, but about 45% of it is converted to malt, most of which is used in beer. Even the thirstiest American astronauts don’t need quite so much on tap, so start with something modest — say a 20-liter batch. That’s about 42 pints, which should get a crew of five through at least two or three Friday nights. But even that won’t be easy to make in space.

“If you want to make 20-liters of beer on Earth you’re going to need 100 to 200 square feet of land to grow the barley,” wrote Tristan Stephenson, author of The Curious Bartender series, in an email to TIME. “No doubt they would use hydroponics and probably be a bit more efficient in terms of rate of growth, but that’s a fair bit of valuable space on a space station…just for some beer.”

Still, let’s assume you’re on the station, you’ve grown the crops, and now it’s time to brew your first batch. To start with, the barley grains will have to go through the malting process, which means soaking them in water for two or three days, allowing them to germinate partway and then effectively killing them with heat. For that you need specialized equipment, which has to be carried to space and stored onboard. Every pound of orbital cargo can currently cost about $10,000, according to NASA, though competition from private industry is driving the price down. Still, shipping costs to space are never going to be cheap and it’s hard to justify any beer that winds up costing a couple hundred bucks a swallow.

The brewing process itself would present an entirely different set of problems — most involving gravity. On Earth, Stephenson says, “Brewers measure fermentation progress by assessing the ‘gravity’ (density) of the beer. The measurement is taken using a floating hydrometer. You’re not going to be doing that in space.”

The carbonation in the beer would be all wrong too, making the overall drink both unsightly and too frothy. “The bubbles won’t rise in zero-g,” says Stephenson. “Instead they’ll flocculate together into frogspawn style clumps.”

Dispersed or froggy, once the bubbles go down your gullet, they do your body no favors in space. The burp you emit after a beer on Earth seems like a bad thing, but only compared to the alternative — which happens a lot in zero-g, as gasses don’t rise, but instead find their way deeper into your digestive tract.

The type of beer you could make in space is limited and pretty much excludes Lagers — or cold-fermented beer. “Lager takes longer to make compared to most beers, because the yeast works at a lower temperature,” says Stephenson. “This is also the reason for the notable clarity of lager: longer fermentation means more yeast falls out of the solution, resulting in a clearer, cleaner looking beer. Emphasis on ‘falls’ — and stuff doesn’t fall in space.”

Finally, if Budweiser’s stated goal is to grow beer crops on Mars, they’re going about the experiment all wrong. Germinating your seeds in what is effectively the zero-g environment of the ISS is very different from germinating them on Mars, where the gravity is 40% that of Earth’s — weak by our standards, but still considerable for a growing plant. Budweiser and its partners acknowledge this possibility and argue that the very purpose of the experiment is to try to address the problem.

http://time.com/5039091/budweiser-beer-mars-space-station/

Thanks to Pete Cuomo for bringing this to the It’s Interesting community.

Fungi in outer space

On By A.P.In Alien life, Mars, Nature, Space and TimeLeave a comment

By Jennifer Frazer

In addition to irritatingly lodging themselves everywhere from shower grout to the Russian space station Mir, fungi that live inside rocks in Antarctica have managed to survive a year and half in low-Earth orbit under punishing Mars-like conditions, scientists recently reported in the journal Astrobiology. A few of them even managed to cap their year in Mars-like space by reproducing.

Why were they subjected to such an ordeal? Scientists have concluded over the past decade that Mars (which like Earth is about four and a half billion years old) supported water for long periods during its first billion years, and they wonder if life that may have evolved during that time may remain on the planet in fossilized or even fresh condition. The climate back then was more temperate than today, featuring a thicker atmosphere and a more forgiving and moist climate.

But how do you search for that life? Using life that exists in what they believe is this planet’s closest analogue, a team of scientists from Europe and the United States hoped to identify the kind of biosignatures that might prove useful in such a search, while also seeing if the Earthly life forms might be capable of withstanding current Mars-like conditions.

Which is to say, not nice.

The temperature on Mars fluctuates wildly on a daily basis. The Mars Science Laboratory rover has measured daily swings of up to 80°C (that’s 144°F), veering from -70°C(-94°F) at night to 10°C(50°F) at Martian high noon. If you can survive that, you also have to get past the super-intense ultraviolet radiation, an atmosphere of 95% carbon dioxide (the effect of which on humans was vividly illustrated at the end of Total Recall), a pressure of 600 to 900 Pascals (Earth: 101,325 Pascals), and cosmic radiation at a dose of about .2mGy/day (Earth: .001 mGy/day). I don’t know about you, but Mars is not my first vacation choice.

And it’s probably not Cryomyces antarcticus’s either, in spite of the extreme place it calls home. Cryomyces antarcticus and its relative Cryomyces minteri – the two fungi tested independently in this study — are members of a group called black fungi or black yeast for their heavily pigmented hulls that allow them to withstand a wide variety environmental stresses. Members of the group somewhat notoriously turned up a few years ago in a study that found two species of the group commonly live inside dishwashers in people’s homes (they were opportunistic human pathogns, but most humans are immune to them). But most of these fungi live quietly in the most extreme environments on earth.

The particular black fungi used in this experiment, generally considered the toughest on the planet, live in tiny tunnels of their own creation inside Antarctic rocks. This is apparently the only place they can grow without being annihilated by the crushing climate and blistering ultraviolet radiation of Antarctica. Antarctica also happens to be the place on Earth most similar – although still not particularly similar, as you have seen — to our friendly neighborhood Red Planet. This endurance has made both black fungi and their neighbors the lichens popular test pilots for Mars-like conditions on the international space station.

For example, lichen-forming fungi that create the common and beautiful orange Xanthoria elegans and also Acarospora made the same trip to the ISS previously, in a European module of the International Space Station called EXPOSE-E. Both survived the experience, and Acarospora even managed to reproduce.

But this seems to be the first time a non-lichen forming fungus has received the ISS treatment.

These particular two fungi – Cryomyces antarcticus and Cryomyces minteri – were collected from the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica in Southern Victoria Land, supposedly the most Mars-like place on Earth. They were isolated from dry sandstone onto a plate of fungus food called malt extract agar. This gelatinous disc was then dried along with the fungus living on it inside a dessicator, and sent into space like that.

Each colony was about 1mm in diameter, and each yeast cell in it was 10 micrometers in size. Like most black yeast/fungi, they have a dark outer wall.

The scientists also tested an entire community of “cryptoendolithic” organisms – those that live secretly inside rocks, including not just fungi but also rock-dwelling blue-green algae – by testing whole fragments of rocks collected on Battleship Promontory in Southern Victoria Land, Antarctica. The various organisms live in bands of varying color and depth within 1 centimeter of the rock surface.

The fungi were launched into space in February 2008 and returned to Earth on September 12, 2009. During that time they were placed in a bath of gasses as similar as possible to the atmosphere of Mars and exposed to simulated full Martian UV radiation, one-thousandth Martian UV, or kept in the dark. They also endured the cosmic background radiation of space and temperature swings between -21.7°C and 42.9°C – much warmer than Mars, but the best that could be done. Control samples remained in the dark on Earth.

Once back on Earth, the colonies and rock samples were rehydrated. Their appearance had not changed during their voyage. They were then tested for viability by diluting them in water and plating the resulting solution to see how many new colonies formed. They also estimated the percentage of cells with undamaged cell membranes by using a chemical that can only penetrate damaged cell membranes.

The scientists found that the black yeast’s ability to form new colonies was severely impaired by its time on “Mars”, but it was not zero. When kept in the dark on the ISS, about 1.5% of C. antarcticus was able to form colonies post-exposure, while only .08% of C. minteri could. Surprisingly, those exposed to .1% of Mars UV did better, with 4-5 times more surviving: just over 8% for C. antarcticus and 2% for C. minteri. Perhaps the weak radiation stimulated mutations or stress-response proteins that might have helped the fungi somehow.

With the full force of Martian radiation, the survival rates were about the same as for those samples kept in the dark, which is to say, nearly nil. By comparison, about 46% of control C. antarcticus samples kept in the dark back on Earth yielded colony forming units, while only about 17% of C. minteri did. Not super high rates, but still much higher than their space-faring comrades.

On the other hand, the percentage of cells with intact cell membranes was apparently much higher than the number that could reproduce. 65% of C. antarcticus cells remained intact regardless of UV exposure, while C. minteri’s survival rates fluctuated between 18 and 50%, again doing better with UV exposure than in the dark. Colonized rock communities yielded the highest percentage of intact cells of any samples when kept in the dark – around 75%, but some of the lowest when exposed to solar UV, with just 10-18 % surviving intact.

What explains this apparent survival discrepancy between being alive and being able to reproduce? It may be that the reproductive apparati of the fungi are more sensitive to cosmic radiation than their cell membranes and walls, the authors suggest.

The authors’ results also suggest to them that DNA is the biomolecule of choice to use to search for life on Mars, as it, like the cell membranes, survived largely intact even in cells that could no longer reproduce.

Although Mars-based life may not use DNA genetic material, then again, it just might. It certainly seems to have worked well for us here on Earth.

Even though few of the fungi exposed to Mars-like conditions survived well enough to reproduce, in all cases, at least a fraction did. Perhaps that is the material thing. A similar previous experiment showed one green alga, Stichococcus, and one fungus, Acarospora were able to reproduce after a very similar trip on the space station. Another experiment with the bacterium Bacillus subtilis found that up to 20% of their spores were able to germinate and grow after Mars-like exposure. Theoretically, it only takes one or two to hang on and adapt to these conditions to found a whole lineage of Mars-tolerant life (the major reason, by the way, for NASA’s Planetary Protection Program).

On the other hand, some have suggested that long-term survival of Earthly life is impossible on Mars. Given the extremely low reproductive ability after just 1.5 years, this study did nothing to undermine that idea either.

But all of our studies have tested life that evolved on Earth. What about life that evolved on Mars? There’s just no telling how similar or dissimilar such creatures — supposing they exist or ever existed – might be.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/fungi-in-space/

The Opportunity Rover Was Supposed To Last 90 Days. It Recently Celebrated Twelve Years On Mars

On By A.P.In Mars, Space and TimeLeave a comment

by Alfredo Carpineti

On Sunday, January 24, NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity reached 12 Earth years on the surface of Mars, having landed on the same day in 2004.

It was budgeted to last 90 days, with a lifespan of a few months, before it was thought its solar panel would be covered in dust and stop working. But thanks to a number of factors, including wind on Mars, the tenacious rover has been able to endure the harsh Martian environment for much, much longer.

The rover has begun to show its age, becoming more difficult to maneuver and having memory storage problems. Also, two of its scientific instruments have now stopped functioning completely. Problems aside, though, Opportunity continues to produce an abundance of science.

Opportunity is currently exploring a region rich in clay minerals that would have formed in wet conditions. The area is called Marathon Valley, since it’s 42 kilometers (26 miles) – the Olympic marathon distance – from Opportunity’s landing site in Eagle Crater.

“With healthy power levels, we are looking forward to completing the work in Marathon Valley this year and continuing onward with Opportunity,” Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas said in a statement.

The rover is currently removing surface crust from rocks in the valley, and the texture and composition are being examined with the use of its robotic arm.

The Martian winter started in January, so the solar energy that the rover is currently receiving is significantly lower than usual. The team positioned the rover in a more favorable sun-facing orientation, which has increased the amount of power the solar panels are generating, allowing for power-consuming operations like drilling and rock-grinding.

“Opportunity has stayed very active this winter, in part because the solar arrays have been much cleaner than in the past few winters,” said Callas.

The rover is fully funded until the end of 2016, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is currently working on the next extension proposal. In the last review, Opportunity received the highest rating of any ongoing Mars mission.

http://www.iflscience.com/opportunity-s-twelve-years-red-planet

Antarctic Research Center Tries to Mimic Mars Conditions on Earth

On By A.P.In Mars, Mars colonyLeave a comment

Mars exists on Earth…well, at least the closest thing to Mars.

According to CNN, the Concordia research station in Antarctica sits on a plateau that is 3,200 meters above sea level and for about four months every year it is engulfed in complete darkness.

Those who live in the research station live in complete isolation. In fact, CNN reports that the nearest human beings from the station can be found about 372 miles away, making the place more remote than the International Space Station.

And yet, 16 dedicated scientists call the research center home for an entire year.

This is because long time confinement, abnormal day and light cycles, extremely dry air, low oxygen levels, and limited supplies make Mars-like training possible at the research center.

And it will help people get ready for the human race’s eventual voyage to Mars.

“By watching how the human body and mind adapts in Antarctica, we can plan and predict what would happen in space,” Alex Kumar, a doctor with the National Institute for Health Research, told CNN.

http://www.ryot.org/antarctic-research-center-tries-to-mimic-mars-conditions-on-earth/947267

NASA plans to give the moon a moon

On By A.P.In Space and TimeLeave a comment

IT SOUNDS ALMOST like a late ’90s sci-fi flick: NASA sends a spacecraft to an asteroid, plucks a boulder off its surface with a robotic claw, and brings it back in orbit around the moon. Then, brave astronaut heroes go and study the space rock up close—and bring samples back to Earth.

Except it’s not a movie: That’s the real-life idea for the Asteroid Redirect Mission, which NASA announced today. Other than simply being an awesome space version of the claw arcade game (you know you really wanted that stuffed Pikachu), the mission will let NASA test technology and practice techniques needed for going to Mars.

The mission, which will cost up to $1.25 billion, is slated to launch in December 2020. It will take about two years to reach the asteroid (the most likely candidate is a quarter-mile-wide rock called 2008 EV5). The spacecraft will spend up to 400 days there, looking for a good boulder. After picking one—maybe around 13 feet in diameter—it will bring the rock over to the moon. In 2025, astronauts will fly NASA’s still-to-be-built Orion to dock with the asteroid-carrying spacecraft and study the rock up close.

Although the mission would certainly give scientists an up-close opportunity to look at an asteroid, its main purpose is as a testing ground for a Mars mission. The spacecraft will test a solar electronic propulsion system, which uses the power from solar panels to pump out charged particles to provide thrust. It’s slower than conventional rockets, but a lot more efficient. You can’t lug a lot of rocket fuel to Mars.

Overall, the mission gives NASA a chance at practicing precise navigation and maneuvering techniques that they’ll need to master for a Mars mission. Such a trip will also require a lot more cargo, so grabbing and maneuvering a big space rock is good practice. Entering lunar orbit and docking with another spacecraft would also be helpful, as the orbit might be a place for a deep-space habitat, a rendezvous point for astronauts to pick up cargo or stop on their way to Mars.

And—you knew this part was coming, Armageddon fans—the mission might teach NASA something about preventing an asteroid from striking Earth. After grabbing the boulder, the spacecraft will orbit the asteroid. With the added heft from the rock, the spacecraft’s extra gravity would nudge the asteroid, creating a slight change in trajectory that NASA could measure from Earth. “We’re not talking about a large deflection here,” says Robert Lightfoot, an associate administrator at NASA. But the idea is that a similar technique could push a threatening asteroid off a collision course with Earth.

NASA chose this mission concept over one that would’ve bagged an entire asteroid. In that plan, the spacecraft would’ve captured the space rock by enclosing it in a giant, flexible container. The claw concept won out because its rendezvous and soft-landing on the asteroid will allow NASA to test and practice more capabilities in preparation for a Mars mission, Lightfoot says. The claw would’ve also given more chances at grabbing a space rock, whereas it was all or nothing with the bag idea. “It’s a one-shot deal,” he says. “It is what it is when we get there.” But the claw concept offers some choices. “I’ve got three to five opportunities to pull one of the boulders off,” he says. Not bad odds. Better than winning that Pikachu.

NASA’s Plan to Give the Moon a Moon

100 finalists have been chosen for a one-way trip to Mars

On By A.P.In human mars settlement, Kebmodee, Mars, Space and TimeLeave a comment

mars 2

Dutch nonprofit Mars One has named 100 people who will remain in the running for a one-way trip to Mars, expected to leave Earth in 2024. Out of more than 200,000 people who applied, 24 will be trained for the mission and four will take the first trip, if all goes according to plan.

This round of eliminations was made after Norbert Kraft, Mars One’s chief medical officer, interviewed 660 candidates who said they were ready to leave everything behind to venture to Mars. The applications were open to anyone over age 18, because the organization believes its greatest need is not to find the smartest or most-skilled people, but rather the people most dedicated to the cause.

Even the astronauts on the International Space Station switch out every couple of months and go back home to family,” Kraft said. “In our case, the astronauts will live together in a group for the rest of their lives.”

Of the 50 men and 50 women selected for the next cut, 38 reside in the U.S. The next-most represented countries are Canada and Australia, both with seven. Two of the candidates were 18 when they applied in 2013; the oldest, Reginald George Foulds of Toronto, was 60.

By education, the group breaks down as: 19 with no degree, two with associates, 27 bachelors, 30 masters, one law degree, four medical degrees and seven PhDs. Thirteen of the candidates are currently in school, 81 are employed and six are not working.

Of the 16 candidates who live in D.C., Maryland and Virginia, 10 were eliminated, including a married couple. Those who remain are:

Daniel Max Carey, 52, a data architect who lives in Annandale, Va.

Oscar Mathews, 32, of Suffolk, Va., a nuclear engineer and Navy reservist.

Michael Joseph McDonnell, 50, of Fairfax, Va.

Laura Maxine Smith-Velazquez, 38, a human factors and systems engineer in Owings Mills, Md.

Sonia Nicole Van Meter, 36, a political consultant who recently moved from Austin, Tex., to Alexandria, Va.

Leila Rowland Zucker, 46, an emergency room doctor at Howard University Hospital in D.C.

Here’s how Mars One describes what comes next for these candidates:

“The following selection rounds will focus on composing teams that can endure all the hardships of a permanent settlement on Mars. The candidates will receive their first shot at training in the copy of the Mars Outpost on Earth and will demonstrate their suitability to perform well in a team.”

To fund the estimated $6 billion trip (for just the first four people), Mars One will be televising the remainder of the competition to narrow the group down to 24. Those 24 people will be divided into six teams of four that will compete to determine which group is most prepared to leave for Mars in 2024.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2015/02/16/100-finalists-have-been-chosen-for-a-one-way-trip-to-mars/?tid=trending_strip_6

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.