Cosmic Views

Earthlings going to Mars!

2009-07-12T13:35:00.008-04:00

I have written many times over 30-some years about why I'm quite convinced, based on the results of the Viking experiments in 1976 and supported by a lot of new evidence since then, that living organisms exist on Mars today. (Examples include my book, and articles in The Atlantic, Wired, New Scientist, etc.) We'll certainly have the proof within the next couple of decades, and we'll see if I've been right about this (along with a few others, including Viking scientist Gil Levin, and former NASA scientist Robert Jastrow).

I also think it's pretty likely, though by no means proven, that Terrestrial life may actually have originated on Mars, and that primitive microbes were first brought here by meteorites blasted off by asteroid impacts on Mars. We'll find that out eventually too. And it's also almost certain that living organisms from Earth have already contaminated the surface of Mars (see this story, for example).
But in the meantime, a new and very interesting experiment on a Russian spacecraft to be launched this October will be testing part of that hypothesis -- the ability of microbial life to survive the radiation, zero-g, the shock of blastoff and so on of an interplanetary trip. Four vials of organisms will be carried to Mars (actually, to the surface of its moon Phobos), and then brought back to Earth for analysis. The experiment is happening thanks to the Planetary Society.
There's a good story with some of the details here. It sounds like a good selection of organisms they're testing. The results should be very interesting.
I certainly hope it works -- unlike the last attempt to send a biologically-interesting experiment to Mars, a (fairly crude, simple) followup to the Viking labeled release life-detection test that was carried aboard the Russian Mars 96 probe (in guess what year?), which alas ended up somewhere in the Atacama desert of northern Chile after a launch failure and was never found.
They'll also be bringing back to Earth some soil from Phobos, which could be quite interesting -- and which is a much better idea than bringing back Mars soil, which I think would be premature at this point, given the danger of potential contamination (if, as I've just been ranting on about, there is life there now that's closely related to us).
I'm excited about this new mission, and I hope it all succeeds.

another day, another blog

2008-06-16T00:57:00.002-04:00

I haven't posted anything on this blog for quite a while, but don't give up on me yet, I still may from time to time.
But in the meantime, you might take a look at a new blog I've started, on the Discovery Channel's new space website. It's devoted to space and astronomy projects involving college students. It's called Next Generation. Please take a look at it HERE.

When I was your age ... A million Pluto fans!

2007-09-18T12:58:00.000-04:00

I've already ranted at length in this space on my feelings about the IAU's decision last year -- in my opinion, silly and misguided -- to demote Pluto from planetary status (For example, my postings here and here). And I knew that it was an issue that had attracted a lot of interest from the public, and especially students, far beyond the level of public interest in most astronomical subjects. I was struck at the time by how quickly it became fodder for cartoons and even songs written about the ex-planet.
But I hadn't realized just how powerful that level of interest was.
Last week, I joined the popular online social networking site Facebook, because I had read about some other journalists joining the site and finding it useful. Almost immediately, my page on Facebook began showing me the names of "groups" on the service that I might be interested in, based on the groups I had already signed up for. And the very cute name of one of those groups immediately caught my eye: "When I was your age, Pluto was a planet."
As soon as I went to that group's page, it blew my socks off. The other groups I had joined had a few dozen members, or a hundred or so. One of them even had a few thousand. But the Pluto group already had 950,000 members! In the days since then, it has now surged across the million-member mark.
Talk about striking a nerve!
I later read an article about the group (here ) that says within a few weeks of its founding last year, it had become the second-most-popular group on the whole Facebook site. Most of the top groups have more predictable subjects -- political or social causes -- but this one was a big surprise. Passions run very strong about poor little Pluto -- as I had predicted, but even more than I expected.
Alan Stern, lead scientist for the New Horizons mission that's on its way to Pluto and now a top NASA official, has been leading the charge to overturn the IAU's misguided decision, and I wish him well. I think nothing substantive is likely to happen until the IAU has its next general meeting in 2009, but maybe the movement will have gained enough steam by then to get the decision changed.

Google me to the moon

2007-09-13T17:58:00.000-04:00

A big new prize was announced today, which may help to spur further development of private space vehicles the way the $10-million Ansari X-Prize did three years ago. (See one of my stories here about the winning SpaceShipOne).
Coming from the same folks, the new $30-million Google Lunar X-Prize will be awarded to the first private company to send an unmanned rover vehicle to the moon, travel at least 500 meters on the surface, and send back lots of pictures of its activities to Earth. Alan Boyle has lots of details in his story today on MSNBC.
Among those who may try for the prize is Armadillo Aerospace, the odds-on favorite to win $2 million next month at the Lunar Lander Challenge in New Mexico. Armadillo's Pixel has already demonstrated that it's capable of winning the prize, as long as nothing goes disastrously wrong between now and then. (See my story on that today at Technology Review)
Things are really heating up in the private space arena, as I've been predicting for years. This could be the busiest year yet, and next year even more so.

Another step toward a new age

2007-03-20T22:40:00.000-04:00

Elon Musk's Falcon 1 rocket made a very impressive takeoff today, setting a series of records and making Space Exploration Technologies only the second company ever to send a privately-financed rocket into space (after Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, which flew SpaceShipOne to 100 km three times in 2004). In the process, it set a variety of records, including the highest flight of a private rocket, at 300 km.
The flight ultimately failed, as the second stage went into an oscillation that caused the engine to shut down prematurely. But Musk is confident that the most important objectives were achieved -- a successful first stage liftoff and flight, second-stage separation, fairing separation, second-stage ignition and initial stable flight.
The live webcast was very impressive, showing the whole flight from an onboard camera -- a trick even NASA only learned to do relatively recently. I hope they post a copy of it on their website ( www.spacex.com )

SpaceX will be trying again

2007-03-19T19:57:00.000-04:00

After their first launch of the Falcon 1 rocket went awry seconds after liftoff a year ago (March 24), Space Exploration is about to try again. This time, they've even got a live webcast covering the event. (It's at http://spacex.com/webcast.php )
Unfortunately, today's attempt was halted at T minus 1 minute 30 seconds, and it's not clear what the cause was. Such things are normal and expected in the rocket biz, especially with a brand new design. Nothing to worry about. They've scrubbed for today, but they've said they could reschedule for another try tomorrow or the day after.
Kimbal Musk, brother of SpaceX founder and president Elon Musk, keeps a nice firsthand blog on launch events, from right there on Kwajelein Atoll in the Pacific, where these intial tests are being carried out (see it here: http://kwajrockets.blogspot.com/ ). The operational launches will be from spaceports in the US.
Here's a view of the pad, from the live webcast:

Amazing photo of shuttle and ISS

2006-09-18T14:53:00.000-04:00

An amateur astronomer in France, Thierry Legault, took this amazing picture yesterday (full-size version here) of the International Space Station and the space shuttle Atlantis, which had just separated from it in preparation for its return to Earth. Legault managed to catch the pair just as they passed in front of the sun, providing a stunningly clear silhouette that shows the newly-installed solar panels on the ISS.
Legault has been taking amazing telescope pictures for years, and has previously taken several shots of airplanes passing in front of the sun, as well as of eclipses and other more usual astronomical subjects, and has written a book (in French) about astrophotography. He has a great collection of pictures on his own website.
Thanks to spaceweather.com, a wonderful website where I first saw this photo.

Pluto blues

2006-08-29T14:24:00.000-04:00

I just came across this new song about the IAU decision last week to downgrade Pluto from planet to dwarf planet. It's called "They Demoted Pluto," and I think it's a remarkably well-done and apt song. My kudos to Jimmy and the Keyz.
At least people are talking passionately about a scientific (sort of) issue! How often do you hear a catchy song with lines like this:
"God, I hate the IAU
They demoted Pluto
What's a guy like me to do?
They demoted Pluto..."

Retreating from crazy, IAU proposal is now just bad

2006-08-23T14:51:00.000-04:00

I should point out that my diatribe below about the crazy IAU proposal being debated this week is already obsolete, since an amendment to the original definition was adopted earlier today that would trim the number of planets from the proposed 53 (masquerading as 12) down to just 8. This decimation of the population was accomplished by adding one simple phrase, that the object must dominate its region of space. That immediately knocks out Ceres (part of the asteroid belt), and Pluto, Charon and 2004 UB313 (parts of the Kuiper Belt). So instead of gaining 44 planets, the solar system loses one, namely Pluto, and everybody who cares at all about this is just going to be very ticked off (except Neil Tyson of New York's Hayden Planetarium, who had already made the decision to go to just 8 planets).
It's an improvement over having 53 planets, which obviously nobody was going to take seriously, and eliminates the craziness of including Charon, and the weirdness of including Ceres. But really, what's the point?
Defining the "region" that must be dominated by a planet is intrinsically arbitrary. So why bother? If we're going to have an arbitrary definition, on a matter that affects culture far more than it does science, why not use the arbitrary decision that fits harmoniously with what culture has overwhelmingly agreed on, and is simpler and easier to rememeber to boot? Accept anything bigger than Pluto, or (virtually the same thing) bigger than the nice round 1,000 km radius, and everybody's happy. Kill off Pluto as a planet, and no scientific purpose is served, but lots and lots of people will be very angry. That's the choice that the astronomers in Prague now seem to be heading toward, like lemmings streaming toward a cliff.
Clark Chapman, an asteroid and comet specialist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder and someone who has spent a lot of time researching and thinking about the way astronomy is communicated to the public, agrees with the size-cutoff idea, as does Michael Brown, the discoverer of the "tenth planet." But almost nobody else has spoken up publicly for this simple, commonsense solution. Here's what Clark said about it in a recent email he sent me:
"Because the public is interested and involved, and because historical precedent is important, the solution I preferred (and sent last week to some of those involved in the Prague discussions) would have been to accept the nine planets we have had for most of a century, and add anything as big or bigger than Pluto to the list of planets."
Too bad he's not in Prague. I'm not sure if Brown is or not. We'll see what happens.

pluto comix

2006-08-23T14:26:00.000-04:00

Cartoonists have been having a field day with the IAU planet debate. Many of them have used it as a foil for political satire about Bush being on another world. Here's a selection.
And here's one that's actually relevant to this discussion: http://www.cagle.com/news/Planets/images/matson.gif

Astronomical lunacy

2006-08-23T11:38:00.000-04:00

When is a moon not a moon? Well, apparently it's when a bunch of astronomers get together and get so far off in their little ivory tower that they lose all touch with common sense.
The proposal being considered this week at the International Astronomical Union's meeting in Prague has a lot of things wrong with it -- like the fact that it instantly expands the number of planets from 9 to about 53, and tries to conceal this fact from the public by claiming it's only an expansion to 12 (Michael Brown, discoverer of the "tenth planet" temporarily named Xena, explains this all very clearly HERE). This is a surefire way to guarantee that nobody will ever take this loony idea seriously. But the craziest part of the whole proposal is its attempt to reclassify Pluto's moon Charon as a planet.
The overall definition of a planet being offered, that it's anything round that orbits a star, is one of the four main proposals that have been out there, and which I have described elsewhere (HERE is my summary of the proposals, from an artucle I wrote in New Scientist last year. I think it's still about the clearest summary of the different ideas that I've seen anywhere, if I do say so.) The definition they chose is probably not the worst idea that's been floated, but it certainly isn't the best one.
But then, completely out of left field, unrelated to any of the discussion that's been going on relatively soberly for more than a year, the IAU committee just made up a whole new, incredibly esoteric and geeky criterion having to do with whether the center of mass of the system is inside or outside the planet's surface, and thus -- poof! A wave of the wand -- Charon is suddenly a planet, which nobody had ever suggested seriously before. There's simply no way a rational person in touch with the world could have made such an outrageous, nonsensical leap. Nobody wanted it, nobody understands it. There was no reason for it.
So, the upshot is that, as I said before, the whole fiasco is just going to end up being totally ignored by everybody, and rightly so. The astronomers can crawl back to their ivory towers, and the rest of us can go along as though nothing had happened -- except that millions of schoolkids around the world will be confused out of their minds, and many of them will figure out that astronomers are just fools.
What is a continent? It's not something geologists debate about. There is no rational definition. Why is Europe a continent? Because of history. Why is Australia the smallest continent, and Greenland the biggest island? Because we say so -- there is no pretense that there's a rational basis for putting the cutoff in size where we do, we just do. Nobody's going to try to change it, nor is anybody going to try to claim there's a rational basis for it. We just live with it.
The astronomers had a chance to provide a definition that would have made everybody happy -- and I do mean everybody, except perhaps the most pointy-headed of the astronomers themselves. Everybody understands that A) any definition is going to be at least somewhat arbitrary, and B) that astronomers themselves, in their actual work, don't give a hoot about such semantic distinctions, it's really only the public at large who are affected by any of this. So why not act accordingly, by adopting a basic philosophy of trying to screw things up as little as possible? And it turns out there's a very, very easy way to do that, provided as a gift by mother nature.
It so happens that Pluto is a bit more than 1,000 km. in radius (1,150), while the asteroid Ceres, Pluto's moon Charon, and most Kuiper Belt objects are well below this threshold (Ceres, which would be a planet under the IAU's silly scheme, is just 450). The new "tenth planet" discovered by Michael Brown last year, at about 1,500 km radius, is bigger than Pluto.
So since any definition is going to be arbitrary anyway, why not just accept the nice, convenient round number of 1,000 km radius, and declare that anything bigger is a planet, anything smaller is an asteroid or comet? Period, end of story. Simple definition, and very easy to remember, no confusion. And that means the solar system has just grown by one, from nine planets to ten. That's a result that anybody can accept -- we've added new planets several times before as new discoveries were made, most recently with the discovery of Pluto in 1930. It's a normal part of the process, and instead of turning people off about crazy astronomers, would actually make people excited and upbeat about astronomy. There's a new planet! There might be more still to be discovered! (Though not a huge number, at least not within our capacity to discover anytime soon.)
A rational answer, a simple definition that would make everybody happy. But nobody is even seriously considering it. I've loved astronomy all my life, I know and respect many, many astronomers and consider many of them my friends, including most of those involved in this stupid debate. But I think they've totally lost their minds, and if they go ahead with this nonsense they will lose public respect, big time. Too bad for them. I hope they come to their senses, but I think the chances of that are virtually nil.

And now it's gone

2006-05-03T23:53:00.000-04:00

As expected, the asteroid 2006 HZ51, discovered last Thursday, has already been removed from the potentially hazardous objects list. It was taken down just after noon today, after additional observations ruled out any possibility of impact.
That's the outcome everyone expected, of course, as I explained in my original posting (below). It has now been moved over to the "list of removed objects" page. All 165 of its possible impact dates have now been ruled out.
But, as I said then, what was interesting about this case, as with so many objects that come and go from the list, is that it helps to focus our thinking about the whole issue of possible impacts, and often a newly-discovered object has interesting, unique features that illustrate different aspects of how we might respond to a real threat. In this case, the fact that there was a potential impact so soon -- just over two years away -- highlighted just how unprepared the world still is today for such a threat. If there had been a real risk, there would have been almost nothing we could do about it, with so little lead time. That underscores the importance of thinking ahead, planning, and doing the necessary research and testing so that we might have a way to respond, even to a short-term hazard (although two years would be a tough one, even with much greater advance preparation).
Anyway, once again the planet is safe for now. Phew.

One in a million, but . . .

2006-04-29T13:48:00.000-04:00

The latest addition to NASA-JPL's list of objects that might strike the Earth someday is an interesting case, though not a particularly threatening one.
Odds of impact are less than one in a million, so nobody should get worried. What's more, the object was just discovered on Thursday and has just over one day of observations, which makes the impact-odds calculation just this side of meaningless, and the whole thing will probably go away (the impact risk, that is, not the asteroid) within the next few days.
But here's what makes this one interesting: The asteroid, called 2006 HZ51, is the biggest object currently on the list, and one of the biggest ever, at an estimated 800 meters across (these estimates are hugely uncertain, so it's really more like somewhere between a half-kilometer and 1.5 km.). And, it is the object that has the nearest-term possible Earth-impact date of anything on the list: just over two years away, on the first day of summer (June 21) 2008.
Nothing to be afraid of, but an interesting case to think about. An object that big would be capable of devastating a continent, and wreaking havoc with the Earth's climate for years. So, what would we do if something like this came along that had a higher probability of impact? This certainly underscores, I think, the importance of being prepared and doing our homework. For example, the efforts of people like the B612 Foundation, which aims to demonstrate the technology for deflecting a threatening asteroid sometime before 2015.
It also demonstrates the degree of uncertainty that still exists about how to deal with such hazards. There is still no formal protocol, as far as I know, as to just how high the odds would have to be, and how soon the potential impact would have to be, before it triggered an all-out alert to governments about the possible threat, and worldwide efforts to figure out what to do about it. It would probably be too short a time for any meanigful effort to deflect the object, so mitigation in this case would probably consist of things like stockpiling food, and perhaps even evacuating certain areas considered most at risk. One of the peculiar things about asteroid impacts is that even when the probability of impact is very fuzzy, the exact time and the range of locations where the impact would happen can be quite sharply defined. That's both a blessing and a curse, because it makes the decisions even harder for the astronomers involved, who have to tread a fine line between the risk of causing a panic and the risk of being seen as covering up a serious hazard. Tough issues, and still largely unresolved, but it's examples like 2006 HZ51 that help to focus people's thinking about what should be done.
Astronomers tend to get very upset when reporters like me call public attention to objects like this, fearing that the public will see it as "crying wolf" and will not pay attention when a real hazard comes along. I don't agree with that point of view, and I may or may not write a news item about this object. But they're safe for now because hardly anybody ever looks at this blog, so this is just between us, ok?

Pete Worden to take the reins at Ames

2006-04-23T12:12:00.002-04:00

NASA has announced that Pete Worden will be taking over as director of Ames Research Center, replacing Scott Hubbard (who was one of the most outspoken and savvy members of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board) who stepped down a few months ago.
Worden's name may sound familiar, as he's been involved in some of the most interesting work the Air Force Space Command has done in recent years. I don't know him personally (though we've met briefly a couple of times), but I've been writing about his work for more than 15 years. He's been a pioneer and leading thinker in two areas that are of great interest to me: The creation of a new generation of inexpensive, fully-reusable launch vehicles (Worden was the visionary behind the DC-X vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing test rocket built under the auspices of the Strategic Defense Initiative, aka Star Wars, then taken over by NASA and killed off), and the issue of asteroid and comet impacts on Earth, including how to detect them and what to do if we find one with our name on it.
Worden retired from the Air Force a couple of years ago, briefly went to Washington to serve in the new dept. of Homeland Security, and then went out to pasture as a professor at U. of Az. I'm delighted to see him back in the saddle again in a position of importance, and can hardly wait to see what he manages to do there. Ames has always been one of NASA's most interesting places, especially for those interested in the possibilities of life elsewhere, and it's been somewhat under siege in the new belt-tightening at NASA. Worden will hopefully help to get Ames some of the respect it deserves from hq. He's a well-known guy in DC, and though he is a very pleasant and engaging person, it is my strong impression that he doesn't take shit from anyone.

Falcon 1 was felled by fire

2006-03-26T19:05:00.000-05:00

A fire on the outside of the main engine, which caused a pneumatic control system to shut down and thus aborted the mission, was the cause of Friday's launch failure.
The SpaceX site now has the full story on their website, by company founder Elon Musk, HERE.
They have good pictures of the actual fire in flight, beginning about 25 seconds in.
There's also some amazing details about the fallback, HERE, on a blog from Kwajelein Atoll. He describes the satellite as having come straight through the roof of a machine shop there.
Then again, the author of the site, Kimbal Musk (who is the brother of Elon Musk) also writes that "Please don't trust a word I say. Really. For all you know, I'm making it all up and I'm actually sitting in my basement somewhere in Boulder." (Kimbal owns a restaurant on Boulder's famed Pearl Street mall). But it doesn't sound like he's making it up, and Elon Musk confirmed in a private message that what Kimbal writes in his blog, "though unofficial, is largely correct."

Liftoff, total loss

2006-03-24T17:58:00.000-05:00

The Falcon 1 spacecraft made it off the launch pad, after numerous delays, only to be lost a few seconds later. No details yet on what went wrong, but apparently the two-stage rocket, carrying a satellite built by Air Force cadets, never made it to orbit. I'll report back when I know more.

just a boat in the way

2006-03-24T15:29:00.000-05:00

Falcon 1 looks like it will be ok to launch after all. It's still 26 minutes or so into the unplanned hold, but it turns out the cause was just the recovery ship, part of the launch support team, being in the wrong area for launch. It is being moved, and launch should be back on track.
This will be the first of what SpaceX plans to be a whole family of low-cost, mostly reusable launch vehicles. All will use the same rocket engine as this Falcon 1, in different configurations (either 5 or 9 of them), so this test is an important validation of the whole concept.

Falcon 1: Go, but holding

2006-03-24T15:09:00.000-05:00

Falcon 1, the first-generation new spacecraft from Elon Musk's Space Exploration company, (Space-X), is set for launch this afternoon from Kwajelein Atoll in the Pacific. The launch was set for 1 p.m. PST, but is currently on hold, reset, to T minus 1 hour and 15 minutes. Not sure what the glitch is, but you can watch the webcast live at SpaceX.

96 years to doomsday?

2006-03-02T02:54:00.000-05:00

An asteroid called 2004 VD17 has just been given the second-highest Torino-scale rating ever assigned, a 2 on the 10-point scale. The estimated 580-meter-diameter asteroid has a current probability of one in 1600 of slamming into the Earth on May 4, 2102.
The only other asteroid that ever got a rating higher than 1 on the supposedly Richter-like hazard scale, which combines the likelihood of impact and the extent of its devastation, was 2004 MN4, which was later renamed Apophis. That one briefly, in Dec. 2004, was given one chance in 300 of an impact in March 2029, giving it a Torino rating of 4, which was ruled out after just a few weeks. But Apophis continues to be a potential threat as well, because it will make such a close approach to Earth that year that its orbit might be altered enough to send it on a collision course in 2036.
The possible impact of 2004 VD17 will probably be ruled out quickly as well, as most of them are, as more observations allow the orbit to be pinned down more precisely. And the date is so far away that there would be plenty of time to plan and carry out a mission to nudge it aside long before then. But if it did hit, an object that size, though not a dinosaur killer or civilization destroyer, would produce a 15 gigaton blast, leave a crater 10 kilometers across and pretty much devastate a continent and cause global climatic effects.
There's a good story about it on NewScientistSpace, and the technical details are HERE on NASA-JPL's near Earth impact hazard pages.

Following a moon shadow

2006-02-23T16:30:00.000-05:00

An amateur astronomer using a conventional 10-inch reflecting telescope and CCD camera has captured the best images ever of the International Space Station crossing in front of the moon last week.
Eight frames of video from the electronic camera show a very clear silhouette of the ISS during a rare transit of the moon on Feb. 13. While this not the first time images of the ISS crossing the moon have been captured by telescopes on Earth, these are thought to be the best such images ever, according to a posting on spaceweather.com .
Ed Morana, the amateur astronomer who took the images after travelling 50 miles to the predicted transit site ouside Newman, California, has further technical details on how he did it on his own web page, which also includes earlier images he took of ISS transits of the moon and the sun.

Griffin under fire

2006-02-16T17:13:00.000-05:00

NASA chief Mike Griffin had to defend his agency's budget request before Congress today, and boy was he on the hotseat. Before he even started, the Planetary Society announced a major campaign opposing this budget's proposal's slashing of science in favor of a moribund space shuttle and a never-to-be-finished space station. PlanSoc prez Lou Friedman says "the Bush Administration's proposed 5-year budget for NASA, just submitted to Congress, is an attack on science."
The society's statement goes on "the Planetary Society supports space ventures. We have supported the shuttle: it has been a great technical achievement, unequalled on Earth. We have supported the International Space Station." However, it says, "we cannot support a proposal that hobbles, or eventually destroys, the NASA science program." Strong stuff.
The Congressmen came out loaded for bear at Thursday's hearing as well. "This budget is bad for space science, worse for earth science, even worse for aeronautics," said the committee's chairman, U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-New York. "It basically cuts or de-emphasizes every forward-looking truly futuristic program of the agency."

Just 22,239 miles to go

2006-02-14T12:58:00.000-05:00

An impressive demonstration and test of technologies needed for the construction of a space elevator has been successfully carried out by a company called Liftport.
They deployed a mile-long tether, carried up by three weather balloons, and had it in place for six hours while experimental crawlers tried to climb up it. One succeeded in climbing 1500 feet.
This is far more advanced that anything achieved at last October's Space Elevator competition. (More stories about that HERE and HERE). The technology is growing, and SpaceLift seems to think there may be interim market opportunities in tethers to platforms far short of orbit, such as balloons for aerial surveillance or for emergency communications, for example during a natural disaster.
There will apparently be another competition this year, in July or August in Mountain View, California. Details HERE.

Falcon 1 launch attempt: glass half full?

2006-02-13T19:22:00.000-05:00

Ok, once again the Falcon 1 launcher, developed by Elon Musk's SpaceX company, did not get off the ground in its launch attempt last Friday from Kwajelien Atoll in Pacific -- a frequent test site for Air Force missile tests. There have been several delays, as a result of a series of technical glitches. This time, the rocket engine actually did fire successfully for a few seconds, so at least it ended up being a successful engine test, even if not the expected first test launch.
But this does demostrate one of the virtues of this mixed-bag design. Unlike most traditional rockets, this one can be shut down, and then fired again, without a lot of fuss and kerfuffle. That's one of the very key aspects to bringing launch costs down by making launch and landing operations simple, routine and airplane-like.

Slashing science at NASA

2006-02-13T15:08:00.000-05:00

People are beginning to absorb the consequences of the deep cuts in space science outlined in the new budget unveiled last monday and which NASA chief Mike Griffin defended before Congress last Thursday. In a nutshell, about $3.7 billion of science gets cut out or deffered indefinitely. Among the really important programs that are now in question are the Terrestrial Planet Finder, an important new space telescope aimed at studying nearby planetary systems, and the Sofia airborne infrared telescope, nearing completion now, and plans for a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa, with its frozen-over ocean, and the planned outrigger telescopes to allow the Keck Observatory to fulfill its high-resolution potential as an interferometer.
Sure, hard choices are going to need to be made. But it looks like some serious science is going to be closed down in favor of paying the escalating costs of a space shuttle that's going to be retired anyway, and a space station that's never really going to be finished.

Is there beer on Mars?

2006-02-12T18:17:00.000-05:00

Time for a little comic relief.
If you really want to know how thoroughly the Mars rover mission has sunk into the mainstream of public consciousness, check out this new Heineken ad (apparently from Holland, I guess):
Heineken on Mars

I think it's encouraging, really. People really love those rovers. And I kind of like the transformations the rover does in the ad -- is NASA picking up on this?

Safely on the ground, after last-minute scare

2006-02-11T13:37:00.000-05:00

Steve Fossett declared a Mayday emergency and diverted from his intended airport landing, ending up at Bournemouth airport instead of Kent after making a sudden right turn. It turns out he lost all power, apparently because a generator overheated and failed. He was given immediate clearance for an emergency landing at Bournemouth, while crowds of spectators waited for his arrival miles away at Kent International Airport.

The Landing itself was pretty dicey. The windshield was so iced-up that he could only see a few feet ahead, and he blew two tires on the landing. But all's well, both pilot and airplane survived the journey unscathed and racked up a whole series of new world's records, including the longest flight by any kind of aircraft. The unofficial distance travelled was 26,389.3 miles, after a voyage that lasted 76 hours and 45 minutes.
Steve will probably sleep pretty soundly tonight.

Virgin Atlantic chairman Richard Branson plants a big kiss on Steve Fossett moments after the landing of the world's longest nonstop flight.
(Photo taken from Florida Today's blog, the Flame Trench, which is HERE).

The record is set: longest flight ever!

2006-02-11T12:13:00.000-05:00

It's official! Crossing over Ireland, Fossett broke the absolute distance record for flight by any kind of aurcraft. He's approaching his landing at Kent airport at this moment. Congratulations to Steve Fossett and the team!

Past the Cape, on to distance records!

2006-02-10T20:09:00.000-05:00

He's over Florida now, past the cape, and around the world plus!
Interesting stuff happened along the way yesterday, it turns out: Fossett was ready to bail out, but pressed on.
While he was going through a patch of extreme turbulence over Bhopal, India, he said he "was afraid it was going to break up. It was a scary time and I had my parachute on and I was prepared to bail out in case a wing broke."
But Fossett didn't reveal the scary episode to mission controllers in England until several hours later, after the danger had passed and he had started across the Pacific Ocean. At the time of the incident, he was in radio contact, but only told mission managers that there had been turbulence and he was "uncomfortable."
During part of that turbulent episode, he was actually on the radio with Virgin chairman Richard Branson, who said afterward that it sounded like the plane was taking a real battering.
The jet-powered plane, build entirely of carbon-fiber composite by Scaled Composites of Mojave, California, US, is built for minimum weight to maximize its efficiency and range, but that makes it about four times more vulnerable to turbulence than a commercial jet, according to company statements. So there is real risk of structural damage in such situations.

The jet-powered plane, build entirely of carbon-fibre composite by Scaled Composites of Mojave, California, US, is built for minimum weight to maximize its efficiency and range, but that makes it about four times more vulnerable to turbulence than a commercial jet, according to company statements. So there is real risk of structural damage in such situations.

Almost around the world

2006-02-10T18:34:00.000-05:00

Steve Fossett is now over the Gulf of Mexico, having passed Houston and getting close to overflying his takeoff point at NASA's Kennedy Space center in Florida. So he's now just an hour or so from tying his own record last year for a solo circumnavigation.
Soon, he was supposed to be be veering northward, essentially following the US east coast, then flying over Newfoundland, Greenland and on to Ireland and England. That would provide opportunities for emergency landing most of the way. But now, running short on fuel, he's planning a more southerly route, riskier but requiring less fuel overall. He'll have to make a potentially life-or-death decision Friday night as to whether to attempt the Atlantic crossing, with no more landing opportunities until the British isles.
After KSC, every mile brings him closer to new world records -- every mile past KSC is automatically the new distance record for a solo flight. But the risks keep increasing.

Halfway to a world record

2006-02-10T01:08:00.000-05:00

Steve Fossett is now somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, after taking off from Kennedy Space Center Wednesday morning in an attempt to set the absolute distance record for any aircraft. But he lost 750 pounds of fuel on takeoff and winds have been weak, so it's a bit iffy as to whether he'll make it.
The official website of the mission giving a map of his present position is here.
And the local Florida paper has a very up-to-date blog by Todd Halvorson, keeping up with the mission here.
The website has received 24 million hits since the flight started, they say. Last year, when Fossett completed the world's first solo circumnavigation of the Earth, in the same plane, the website got 140 million hits the day he landed. They're expecting more this time, on landing day on Saturday. It'll be interesting to see -- they say there has been more press in England this time, and the landing is supposed to be there -- if all goes well.

SpacePlace update

2006-02-09T23:09:00.000-05:00

Continuing the shameless self-promotion, I've continued to expand and improve on SpacePlaces.net, and I think it's getting to the point where it starts to be a useful service. Once again, feedback, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Space Places

2006-01-27T18:10:00.000-05:00

I've just set up a new website, as a sort of experiment, to serve as a fairly thorough and slightly opinionated guide to what's out there in the world of blogs and websites related to space and astronomy. I was thinking there weren't all that many, but as I try to set up the lists I'm realizing it's a pretty crowded field. It's a little daunting, but I'm just going to whittle away at it bit by bit. It's very preliminary so far, but I'll keep adding to it. I aim to include fairly comprehensive listings, ultimately, but with an emphasis on selectivity in the top listings. I may relegate the more comprehensive lists to secondary pages, and just keep the top sites on the main page. We'll see. Comments and suggestions are very welcome, especially at this early stage.
I had hoped to be able to use SpacePlace.com as the easy-to-remember home for this service, but that was taken, so I ended up using SpacePlaces.net (and I also got spaceplaces.org, spaceplaces.biz, and spaceplaces.info, which are all just set to forward to the main website). Remember that name: www.SpacePlaces.net ).
So this new thing, whatever it is, is not a blog. It's not a provider of any real content, except the listings themselves and the brief descriptions. I think of it as a kind of portal. In a way, I'm creating it for my own convenience, as a way of organizing my links so I can find them from whatever computer I'm on. But maybe it will turn into something that's actually useful for lots of people. We'll see.

New moons! The solar system family just keeps on growing

2005-10-31T15:21:00.000-05:00

We just got a new planet, and a new moon for that planet, over the summer. Now, Pluto itself turns out to have two new moons, discovered in photos taken with the Hubble Space Telescope.

These are some of the actual Hubble images from which the discovery was made:

It's a pretty amazing find, just as the final preparations are underway for NASA's mission to explore Pluto and then head on to study one or more Kuiper Belt Objects. That outermost zone of the solar system is really booming -- that's where the new tenth planet and its moon also reside.
This is an artist's conception of what the view might be like from one of the newfound moons, looking out at Pluto itself (center) and its large moon Charon (to the right of it), with the other new moon the bright spot to the left:

Here is more information on the details of the discovery, from the website of the SouthWest Research Institute, in Boulder Colorado, where some of the discovery team (including Institute director Alan Stern) are based.

New planet's new moon

2005-10-03T13:25:00.000-04:00

Close on the heels of the discovery of the solar system's tenth planet -- that's what it is, live with it, ongoing controversies notwithstanding -- its discoverers, Mike Brown and co., have now found that it has a moon of its own.
Brown has given the planet the temporary nickname of Xena, after the TV show, and the moon Gabrielle, apparently after Xena's friend or sidekick. A real, permanent name must await:
a) the tenth planet's acceptance as a planet, instead of just another Kuiper Belt Object, by the International Astronomical Union,
and
b) acceptance of the name itself, which should be no problem, since Brown understands the rules (has to be a name from classical mythology, etc.) and thinks he has a good one.
The discovery was made possible by the Keck II telescope's Laser Guide Star adaptive optics (LGS-AO) system to provide ground-based resolution in the infrared comparable to Hubble's in the visible.
Xena itself, at an estimated 2700 km diameter (larger than Pluto), is the most distant object ever detected in the solar system -- 97 Astronomical Units out, or about 9 billion miles or 14 billion km. The discovery will make it possible to determine the exact mass of the icy planet itself, says Brown, who is a professor at CalTech.
With the discovery of the moon of the planet now known as 2003 UB313, this means that three of the four largest KBO's known -- including Pluto, which is now generally regarded as a member of this class of small, icy bodies in the outer solar system -- have moons, Brown said. But this one "is a completely different type of satellite from anything we've seen before," Brown says, being relatively tiny and orbiting very far from its planet. It is 100 times fainter than the planet.
Brown says the new moon represents "essentially a new class of satellites to large Kuiper Belt Objects. It is tiny compared to the primary, and much fainter. We have never seen satellites like this before." A paper on the discovery is being submitted today to Atrophysical Journal Letters.
Marcos van Dam of the Keck Observatory, a co-author of the paper, says the unusual moon "suggests that these Kuiper Belt Objects may have formed differently than smaller objects in the same region."
Some have argued that rather than include newly discovered objects such as 2003 UB313 in the designation of planet, that Pluto itself should be demoted to simply another KBO, leaving just eight planets. The Rose Space Center at the American Museum of Natural Hustory in New York City has followed that approach in its displays.
The International Astronomical Union is debating the issue of how to define planets, and will not rule on a name for the new KBO or its moon until that decision is made.
The new planet 2003 UB313 takes 560 years to complete one orbit -- more than twice the length of Pluto's year. Brown will using observing time on the Hubble telescope in November and December to study the new moon's motion. "It is the only way we could ever determine the mass of Xena -- because it has a moon," he said.
Pluto and its moon Charon had been seen as the oddballs of the solar system. But now studying them along with Xena and its moon, as well as another moon recently discovered around the KBO called 2003 EL61, Brown said, "together will teach us much more about the solar system than any single oddball ever would."

What a week!

2005-07-30T02:55:00.000-04:00

The tenth planet of the solar system has been discovered, with the provisional name 2003 UB313 and a more elegant name to be unveiled at some point. It's been 75 years since the solar system added a planet to the family, and this may well not be the last. And no, I don't believe for a second that Pluto will ever be demoted -- it's a planet, with far more reasonable arguments for its status than, say, Europe's as a continent, and ever more shall be so. Brian Marsden tried that trial balloon of demoting Pluto a few years ago, and the backlash was clear. Once a planet, always a planet, I think is the way it's going to be, and I'm entirely comfortable with that.
One proposal that makes sense to me is that we set an arbitrary cutoff at 1,000 km radius. Nice round number. Pluto and the new planet qualify, nothing else yet discovered does. If we find more of these big objects, so be it, then the solar system grows.
And that's not the only big new object of the week. Another newfound Kuiper Belt Object, also bigger than any other found before, but less than Pluto, and this one has a moon as well, allowing its mass to be nailed: 1/4 Pluto's.
And there's a lovely new lake on Mars, from Mars Express, frozen (all the way down??) in the bottom of a crater, but shining blue and looking ready to dive into. The first naked ice on Mars, at least outside the polar caps.
And Enceladus, Saturn's tiny moon that Cassini just swept by twice as close as the space station's orbit above Earth. An extraordinarily active world, for its tiny size, emanating gases through tectonic cracks.
Wow. And all this as the shuttle's dramatic roller coaster unfolds, already quadrupling the Internet record set by NASA's website just three weeks ago with the Deep Impact mission. Quite a week in space news.

Last flight of the shuttle?

2005-07-28T00:16:00.000-04:00

This is a sad day for NASA. After what had looked like a perfect launch on Tuesday, inspection of the launch pictures on Wednesday showed a falling chunk of foam almost as big as the one that doomed Columbia. No, this one didn't hit, so the crew is presumably safe, despite a couple of what appear to be the commonplace (though not necessarily safe!) kind of dings on thermal protection tiles. But the fleet is once again indefinitely grounded until they figure it out.
Think about it: They just spent 2 1/2 years working specifically to solve this exact problem. They failed. How long will it take next time? Is it possible?
And if this ends up taking a long time once again -- and frankly, it's hard to imagine why it wouldn't -- we may have just seen the last launch of a shuttle.
The fleet is supposed to retire anyway in five years. If half that is eaten up with further redesign work, would it even make sense to continue? Would it still be able to carry out enough missions to justify its continuation? Or, I suppose more likely, would they retreat from the 2010 retirement date?
I'm sure no such decisions will be made for a long time, but NASA is in for perhaps its toughest year yet. And it has had some very tough years.

Scrubbed

2005-07-13T20:00:00.000-04:00

No, it wasn't the weather after all. It wasn't even the dinged tiles from yesterday, or anything to do with falling debris on the orbiter.
But no, it wasn't something completely new either. It was a gremlin from the recent past, a malfunctioning fuel gauge that had showed up back in April, and never really got figured out, but the engineers convinced themselves it was ok. It wasn't. Can't fly with a busted fuel gauge, even if it is one of four redundant units. Safety demands it.
So the earliest they could fly, if they find it and fix it very fast, is Saturday. If it's harder, they might have to roll back to the Vehicle Assembly Building. In that case, they almost certainly can't meet the July launch window, and would have to defer until Sept. 9 at the earliest. We'll probably know by tomorrow sometime.

T minus 1 and counting

2005-07-12T20:01:00.000-04:00

I've been betting against it for a while, but NASA might just surprise me and launch the shuttle Discovery, on the first post-Columbia mission, on tomorrow's opening of the launch window after all.
Not that there haven't been multiple slips along the way, including a real doozy today: a falling window-covering panel that dinged some of the thermal tiles. Echoes of the last, disastrous flight! But no, it turns out these particular tiles, on the top of the Orbital Maneuvering System pod, are easy to replace, they've switched them out, and all is still go for launch at 3:51 pm EDT tomorrow.
Not that the weather doesn't still threaten. Probability of meeting the weather criteria, for both wind and rain, was downgraded today from 70 to 60 percent. I had hoped to be at Cape Canaveral for the launch, but as it gets closer and the weather gets worse, I vividly remember so many long stays at the Cape waiting for shuttle missions to take off. I'll be sorry if this does take off on time and I'm not there, but I will feel some real relief, and real sympathy for my colleagues down there, if this ends up dragging on with multiple delays.
Registered media for this STS-114 launch: 2650. That's about the same as the first post-Challenger launch, which I did see, and the John Glenn flight, which I did not. And it's way, way more than the turnout for STS-1, on April 12 1981, the maiden voyage of Columbia and the world's first flight by a reusable rocket. Now that one was suspenseful -- ironically, mostly because of uncertainty about damaged tiles that were thought to pose a risk for the re-entry. John Young, the right-stuff Apollo-veteran astronaut who was commanding the mission, looked really surpised when they made it back OK.

Looking back at the collision scene

2005-07-04T16:53:00.000-04:00

Deep Impact took this dazzling image, so clear it looks like an artist's conception, of the plume caused by its impact, as seen from the back, shady side of the comet's nucleus. Details of the structure of the ejecta plume may help the science team figure out exactly what happened during the impact, including details of the structure of the nucleus itself. How solid or how porous is it? We may know in the next few days.

Hubble sees the hit

2005-07-04T15:42:00.000-04:00

These images from the Hubble Space Telescope show the huge plume kicked up by the Deep Impact strike, which continued to grow and expand for hours. The third image was taken more than an hour after impact.

It's a hit!

2005-07-04T01:59:00.000-04:00

PASADENA -- Wild applause and cheering in the control room, as they not only get confirmation of the impact, but an immediate and "awesome" image of a spray of debris from the impact, captured just 3.7 seconds after the hit.
"Geez, and we thought it was going to be subtle," exulted JPL scientist Don Yeomans, as pandemonium erupted in the mission control room.
"If this doesn't make the front page, something is really wrong," he added as the amazing first impact image appeared on the screen.

Smashing spacecraft

2005-07-04T01:02:00.000-04:00

PASADENA -- The excitement is building here at NASA-JPL, less than two hours from the time of the Deep Impact mission's intentional collision with the nucleus of comet Tempel 1.
Nobody knows exactly what's going to happen, and that's both the fun and the real scientific import of the mission. No collision of anything into a comet has ever been observed before, though such collisions must happen often with pieces of random asteroidal debris in space.
This collision will literally open up a window into the birth of the solar system. Comets are made of leftover material from the formation of the planets 4.5 billion years ago, and that material has been preserved in the deep-freeze of space ever since, except for the bits that boil away every time a comet gets close to the sun. This will be the first opportunity to see fresh material ejected from below the possibly crusty surface, and determine details of its composition and structure.
What will happen when the one-meter slug of copper slams into the comet? The members of the science team don't know, but they have a betting pool going on it.
The mission's chief scientist, Mike A'Hearn, told me earlier today that nobody on the team really believes in the most extreme possibilities -- but they can't be ruled out: Nothing at all might happen, if the comet is so porous that the impactor just slams right through it and out the other side; or, if the comet is particularly unstable, it might actually fall apart spectacularly. As unlikely as it may be, that would certainly be the most appropriate outcome, producing really dramatic July 4 fireworks.

Digging out

2005-05-16T00:16:00.000-04:00

Opportunity's present view at Meridiani.

The rover Opportunity has been stuck for weeks now in some very strange fine powdery material, but after a lot of analysis and testing on Earth, its wheels started moving again on Friday and it made about an inch of progress in getting out of the low dune-like ripple where all six of its wheels had gotten stuck axle-deep or more.
Here is a nice animation of the wheel finally making its first successful rotation since getting stuck.

But what really intrigues me is the way the soil behaves. From earlier images, it's clearly very fine and powdery and sticks together in the wheel treads and so on, but the way things move on the surface as the wheel rotates looks more like a solid frozen mass. Is this really wet, frozen ground?

New vistas on Mars

2005-04-10T21:27:00.000-04:00

Spirit and Opportunity just keep chugging along. Spirit has just about reached the crest of Husband Hill, and the view is already amazing. The hoped-for layered formations? Looks like it. I'm sure we'll be seeing more and hearing something about it in the coming days.

Spirit's view ahead. (Images from JPL, processed by WhatonMars.com)
See full size original HERE.

And Opportunity is within a couple days drive of getting into the etched terrain -- a whole new kind of Martian landscape, perhaps, something the likes of which we've never seen before. The next few days could be very interesting.

beginnings of etched terrain?

There are a couple of nice new features in Astrobiology magazine online:
An interview with Nathalie Cabrol about her fieldwork with the rover Zoe in the Atacama desert; and excerts from a talk by Chris McKay, also of NASA-Ames, on how to recognize life if we see it. Both are worth a look.

Water on Mars!

2005-04-01T22:26:00.000-05:00

Here it is, at long last! An actual photo that clearly shows water on Mars!
water on Mars

More amazing Mars images

2005-03-29T17:10:00.000-05:00

The amazing new images from Mars just keep on coming. Here are a couple of the latest:
More dust devils! This link shows a sequence of 4 images taken on Spirit's Sol 438, showing a dust devil sweeping across the plain. This is continuing to be a very active dust devil season.

Spirit sees a strange rock in the Columbia Hills

And this is just a very weird rock. What is it? clearly some odd texture and maybe inclusions of a different mineral. Is the rover going in for a close-up look? No, I'm not going to suggest, as some have, that it's a sessile grog, which is apparently something from Larry Niven's Ringworld. If this were on Earth, I would assume it was an archeological artifact of some kind. Ain't Martian geology grand?
(HERE is a larger image that shows this rock in its context).

Another idea about Mars methane

2005-03-25T18:00:00.000-05:00

Yet another possible explanation has been suggested for the methane that three different groups say they have detected in the Martian atmosphere. And as a bonus, the new hypothesis also could explain some unusual formations seen in the Meridiani Planum region, which the rover Opportunity has been studying.
Dorothy Oehler, a geologist at NASA's Johnson Space Center, suggests that kerogen, the tarry, compressed and altered remains of ancient organisms that on Earth, compressed under miles of rock, is the source material of petroleum and natural gas, could also be present deep below the Martian surface and be producing a steady seepage of methane that may have been ongoing throughout Martian history.
Oehler, who presented the idea at the annual meeting of the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, was careful to emphasize that she is not suggesting that there is any strong evidence for the existence of kerogen on Mars, but is simply offering another alternative to add to the list of previously suggested mechanisms that might account for methane production: volcanism, meteoritic impacts, the decay of recently-living organisms, or the metabolism of microbial life on Mars today.
On Earth, about half of all the methane that is naturally in the atmosphere (not counting contributions from human activity) comes from the breakdown of kerogen deep below the surface, Oehler said. The other half comes from organisms, either through their metabolic activity or their decomposition.
In places where there are large kerogen formations, methane continually seeps upward, as a result of the breakdown of the kerogen through geothermal heating. In the process, the highly reactive methane alters many of the minerals that it percolates through, and often leaves a telltale signature at the surface in the form of large rings of lighter-colored altered rock.
Oehler, who formerly worked in the petroleum industry, has studied extensively one such formation, at Ashland Field, Oklahoma, a rich natural gas-producing region. There, bright rings of carbonates, known as "red bed bleaching," are produced by interaction of the methane with sands made mostly of reddish iron oxides such as hematite. In various places, methane seeps on Earth produce rings of pyrites, sulfur-rich evaporites, or jarosite, all of which have now been found at Meridiani.
The ring formations are very similar in appearance to some bright rings seen at the Meridiani site from orbital imagery. Although interpreted as heavily weathered craters, they differ in many ways from other craters in the area. For one thing, they appear to be perfectly flat, with no relief to cast shadows. Spectral analysis might help to confirm the theory, if the bright rings are found to be made of such minerals.
Oehler suggests that if her idea turns out to be right, such formations could be useful indicators of possible sources of methane as fuel for future Mars missions, and possibly a good place to look for fossilized remains of past Martian life, since kerogen on Earth is often rich in microfossils.

Mars was wetter earlier, drier later

2005-03-25T17:48:00.000-05:00

Among the reports at last week's Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference, dozens dealt with what we've been learning from this most intensive period ever of Mars exploration, with two active rovers and three orbiters hard at work.
Here is a summary of what the latest information seems to indicate about the planet's climatic history, based on interesting talks by Tim Parket and Matt Golombek of NASA-JPL.
The flood of images and data from the Mars rovers over the past 14 months suggests that Mars may have been even wetter in its infancy than most scientists had believed, but may have dried out faster and earlier than had been thought.
Prior to the landing of the twin NASA rovers in January, 2004, the prevailing view was that Mars had a wet phase early on, but that this may have been relatively brief, episodic, and that the largest bodies of water that ever accumulated might have been lakes that froze over quickly. And while everyone agreed that the planet had dried up early on, there were some signs of episodic changes in climate that might have returned more moisture to the planet at some brief periods.
But close-up examination of the soil and rocks suggests otherwise, indicating that Mars may have had very little moisture, or much activity at all, for most of its existence. But at the same time, the case has strengthened for the controversial view that in its early years Mars may have had a vast ocean covering its northern plains. The signs of an even wetter early wet period, followed by an even longer and drier dry period, were presented last week by some members of the rover science team in a series of reports at the annual Lunar and Planetary Sciences meeting in Houston.
In its early years, the chemical, mineralogical and imaging data strongly suggest "either playas [shallow seas] or a deep ocean," said rover scientist Matt Golombek of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "In either case, it was wet. There was a period of rapid erosion that produced layered sedimentary rocks."
But since then, there is little indication of any large-scale water action on the surface, and strong indications that the main thing that has been happening is just a very slow compacting of the desert into a hardpan surface, through the very slow removal of finer particles by the scouring action of the wind. "It's possible that nothing has happened in 3 billion years, except 12 centimeters of deflation," Golombek said.
That conclusion is based on analysis of the properties of the soil at both the Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum sites, where the soils seem to be very tightly compacted, with only a very shallow layer of loose material on top -- and at Meridiani hardly any. Any active process should have produced more physical and chemical disturbances of that top layer than can be seen, he said.
Meanwhile, although it remains controversial, the idea that the incredibly flat northern plains may have been the floor of an ancient ocean has gained stength as the rover Opportunity continues its long drive across Meridiani.
Tim Parker, another rover scientist at JPL, says the surprisingly flat and hard surface of that plain, adorned only with long, shallow parallel ripples, is hard to account for with a shallow intermittent sea, but is consistent with currents in a long-lasting ocean.
Parker said the ripples across the plains "suggest sustained currents and directions" over a long period. And, he said, the hematite "blueberries" form a uniform coating, a hard pavement across the surface so the wind no longer can pick up any fine material to alter the profiles, he said. Yet orbital images show that coating extends over a large area, even across wide variations in topography, and that topography is hard to explain through wind erosion and must mean the current profile is very close to the original topography.
But that relief does not include any boundary to the north to contain an ancient sea, but dips down into the basin that may have been an ocean. He suggests that the plateau of Meridiani could have been a kind of platform built up within the ocean, similar to the way carbonate platforms form in Earth's oceans. But the chemistry of such platforms on Mars would have to be quite different and remains unexplained, he said.

NASA: best of times, worst of times

2005-03-19T21:22:00.000-05:00

There seem to be a lot of strong feelings in both directions right now about the way the space agency is heading.
On the plus side, I haven't found anyone yet who has a bad word to say about the choice of Mike Griffin as the new NASA administrator. For one thing, assuming he's confirmed (and nobody seems to doubt that), he'll be the first head of NASA who actuall is a rocket scientist. He knows the technology, has a lot of innovative ideas, and has worked long and hard in the past on long-term planning for the agency. Scientists I talked to this week at the LPSC in Houston seem very optimistic about the effect he could have on the nation's planning for the future of the space program, which despite grand words from this president, as there were from his dad, hasn't really had any strong sense of direction since the lunar landings were achieved with spectacular success. That's a long time.
The downside is that he may not have the power to turn things around, given some of the moves already underway. Scientists working at the agency's elite research centers are scared, holding their collective breath to see what happens next. Some have already been offered buyouts, and there are rumors of widespread cutbacks in staffing and of "reorganization" of some centers, notably Ames Research Center, the focus of much long-range basic research, that might amount to the beginning of the end for those institutions.
Or maybe not. Change is scary, and there are plenty of people who think the organization could use some shaking up -- but they may have different ideas in mind about just how. It will be very interesting to see what happens over the next few months.

A festival of wet worlds

2005-03-17T01:01:00.000-05:00

This year's version of the wonderful annual bazaar of new findings about the planets around us, the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference in Houston, has been an even richer banquet than usual. With two rovers and three orbiters having been busy probing the red planet for over a year now, not surprisingly Mars was Topic A at the crowded meeting, with two or three Mars sessions going on at once (out of a total of four parallel tracks) most of the time. But there has also been interesting new information about the Cassini mission's studies of Saturn and its moons (especially Titan), the Genesis mission that crash-landed last October, asteroids, comets, meteorites, and a lot of research on Earth aimed at helping us understand what's out there, and how to study it with future probes and roving robots.
Among the highlights so far:
* Most of the information has already come out a bit at a time, but seeing all the images and data Cassini has taken of Titan all together and in great detail has been quite dazzling. It's a place that, as one scientist said, superficially resembles Earth more than anyplace else we've seen, yet it remains profoundly alien and enigmatic. There are clearly-visible riverbeds, but even those differ in appearance: some may have formed through precipitation, while others may be spring-fed. And a puff of methane detected by the Huygens probe when it landed may mean the soil was saturated, perhaps suggesting there had been a very recent "rain" of liquid methane. While nobody has directly detected liquid there yet, all signs suggest that this may be the only place other than Earth where there are bodies of liquid and a whole precipitation/evaporation cycle.
* Although some people have long claimed that Mars may once have had a huge ocean -- a real one, made of water, not like Titan's petrochemical ones -- the evidence keeps getting better. Tim Parker of JPL gave a good talk on this Wednesday, and I expect I'll have a story with more details on that on a later entry here. I won't mention this then, but just between us, I believe I was the first person to make a case for the existence of such an ocean, including detailed maps (which hold up pretty well today) of its exact location and extent, in my 1979 book "Life on Mars". I don't expect any credit -- I'm just an amateur looking in from the sidelines -- but it was very gratifying to discover that at least one scientist who has done serious research on this, John Brandeburg of Florida Space Institute, was inspired by my work.

The rover Zoe, in the Atacama desert
* A lot of fascinating research on how life might be able to survive on Mars even today, and how to search for it if it does. One of the most promising of these is a robot built by engineers at Carnegie Mellen University, and tested in the Atacama desert for the last two years (and again next fall) under the direction of Nathalie Cabrol from NASA-Ames. I met Nathalie and her husband Edmond Grin, also of Ames, down at one of her research sites near the Atacama (at Licancabur, a 20,000-foot volcano on the Chile-Bolivia border), in the fall of '03, and have been following her work with great interest ever since. She was the one mostly responsible for the choice of Gusev Crater as one of the NASA rover landing sites. This new experimental rover, called Zoe, is equipped with a very cleverly designed fluorescent dye system, and succeeded in detecting life in one of the driest, most barren areas of the world's driest desert. My story about that work appeared HERE today.
I'll talk about some of the fascinating ideas about how life might survive under the harsh conditions of Mars today in a later posting.

Dust devil confirmed; NASA people did see it

2005-03-15T09:09:00.000-05:00

It turns out NASA scientists did see the dust devil images even before the eagle-eyed online people noticed it. Science team member Geoff Landis says they were on it right away, even before the images got out to the public via the Exploratorium website.
Still, I think amateur space enthusiast Lloyd Jacobs of Toronto deserves credit, as being apparently the first person to make the discovery public, having spotted it almost immediately last Thursday evening and posted his findings on an online forum less than 4 hours after the images went online.
My story on it is HERE on New Scientist today.

Dust Devil report

2005-03-12T21:49:00.000-05:00

Alan Boyle, who runs a very fine blog on MSNBC called Cosmic Log, has reported on these dust devil sightings, it turns out. He has a good story on it HERE, that was posted yesterday.

Dust devils to the rescue! Martian squeegee guys caught?

2005-03-12T15:44:00.000-05:00

This is an interesting development: In a story HERE today by ace space reporter Leonard David, he reports that Spirit saw a major, sudden power boost, restoring it to almost its original power level (from 60 percent to 93 percent, almost instantly), apparently as a result of a dust devil cleaning the dust off the solar panels. This is a terrific boon to the mission, giving them a lot more power to work with.
But, interestingly, there is no mention in the story of any visual sighting of the dust devils, just the inference that they must be responsible, and must be especially active now. I'm not sure exactly when the power surge was, but as far as I can tell it was yesterday (Thursday), same as the sightings.
The piece does quote one unnamed scientist saying that "Gusev was alive with dust devils," partly because the rover's tracks kept getting wiped clean. Nothing about seeing them.
There's a joking reference in the story to Martian squeegee men having cleaned off the solar panels. Well, now it turns out the surveillance cameras may have caught the Martian squeegee men in the act!

First rover views of Martian dust devils?

2005-03-11T15:34:00.000-05:00

Some keen-eyed observers, scanning the latest raw images coming back from the rover Spirit in Gusev Crater, have located several images that seem to be the first yet to show the long-awaited dust devils in action. Nobody from the rover teams has commented yet -- I'll ask them about it at the LPSC in Houston next week.
It's too soon to say, but this may turn out to be another case like the original discovery of Martian dust devils, during the Pathfinder mission. The discovery was made not by NASA scientists, but by someone downloading the fresh images online and analyzing them before the science team had noticed.
It'll be interesting to see how this story unfolds. We know there are dust devils in Gusev, their tracks are all over the place, but we should be able to learn a lot by seing them in action -- for one thing, get a better handle on their frequency, size and distribution. This could be very important.
For example, Sushil Atreya of the University of Maryland has done an analysis, presented at last fall's Division of Planetary Sciences meeting, that suggests dust devils could be producing prodigious amounts of peroxides in the atmosphere, which would immediately precipitate out as grains of peroxide ice to coat the surface -- perhaps accounting for the long-hypothesized, but never detected, peroxides that were assumed to explain the Viking results in 1976 without the need for living organisms.
Anyway, Atreya thinks the peroxide is destroying methane, which would mean there's really much more methane being produced on Mars than would be assumed based on the present levels in the atmosphere. This could make all the difference in trying to figure out whether the methane is a signature of life. And those calculations, in turn, depend crucially on exactly how large, how frequent and long-lasting and how fast-moving the dust devils are. All of this might eventually be easier to gauge once there's a real sampling of Spirit camera data.
One speculation is that the dust devils may have been around all along, but were only detected because Spirit has climbed high enough to give a better angle, with the dust devils profiled against the dark plain. Against the pale sky, they would not be noticeable, although now that they've been seen someone might go back and reprocess a lot of images and find earlier cases.
So far, I've seen at least four or five examples that show one thing that I believe is almost certainly a dust devil, very clearly silhouetted, and two or more other possible ones, all within minutes of each other. That certainly suggests a very active dust-devil season may be underway.
Someone has constructed a very good view, blinking back and forth between the view with and without the pale funnel of the dust devil. HERE is the link.

Meanwhile, here's the basic image. See if you can find it -- it's not easy.
It's right at the horizon, very small and pale.

Mapped moon, cracked moon, smacked Earth

2005-03-09T19:58:00.000-05:00

Spectacular new pictures today of two of Saturn's moons from the Cassini mission:
- A large-scale photomosaic of the surface of Titan, by far the sharpest image ever of that enigmatic and strangely Earthlike frozen world. It shows Titan's dramatic, sweeping arc of what appears to be a coastline between a light continent and a vast dark sea -- which may be slush or swamp rather than open liquid, since it doesn't seem to show the mirrorlike reflections expected from a liquid surface. Sure, it may be water-ice continents by the shores of a liquid-methane sea, but it's certainly visually the most tantalizingly Earthlike other place we've ever seen.
- Close-up views of the totally frozen moon Enceladus, showing icy cracks and striations, including one long, straight dark crack that looks like the whole moon is cracking in two -- not possible, I'm sure, but it's a striking visual image.

Hot off the press: This is one of a set of new raw images taken during yesterday's encounter, the closest it will have with Enceladus.

Meanwhile, a fascinating new paper is appearing today in Nature (described in this press release), clinching the last bit of the century-long puzzle of Arizona's Meteor Crater (or Barringer Crater). It took more than half a century before the site was proved to be a meteor impact crater, but the mystery of what happened to most of the iron impactor has remained. H. Jay Melosh of U. of Az. seems to have solved the enigma, showing that the material spread out in small fragments because the object was travelling much less rapidly than had been assumed (only about 12 km/sec., close to the slowest possible impact speed). Nice detective work, mystery solved, case closed. Somewhere, Gene Shoemaker is smiling.

Aerial view of Meteor Crater, Arizona.

Opportunity makes fast tracks

2005-03-09T02:34:00.000-05:00

Opportunity has been setting all kinds of speed records lately, using its onboard autonomous navigation capabilities to cover the smooth, undulating plain of Meridiani at an unprecedented clip. Over one three-day stretch it covered 390 meters, mostly on its own brainpower. (My New Scientist story is here).

The view ahead: a very shallow 90-meter diameter crater, with a white rim, is just ahead in this picture taken yesterday.

Opportunity looks back at the tracks of its rapid run.

Guess which planet

2005-03-08T01:02:00.000-05:00

The European Space Agency's Rosetta space probe hurtled past the Earth last Friday, on its way to a date with a comet. It took some unusual views of our home planet on the way by.

One of my favorite planets

A stellar mind leaves this planet

2005-03-07T22:30:00.000-05:00

My wife and I met Hans Bethe briefly about 12 years ago, at a two-day symposium at Cornell University celebrating Carl Sagan's 60th birthday. We were both struck by just what a sweet, quiet delightful and unassuming man he was -- a real mensch, as they say. I was greatly saddened to hear of his passing today at the age of 98. A nice obit from the New York Times is here.
Among other things, Bethe was one of the key people in figuring out the nuclear processes that power the stars.

Hans Bethe

Meanwhile, on the other side of Mars...

2005-03-06T19:39:00.000-05:00

Compare this view from the rover Spirit, up in the Columbia Hills in Gusev Crater, with the one below from Opportunity. Both, I believe, are in true color, though that one looks black and white.

The vast rippled plain of Meridiani

2005-03-06T16:58:00.000-05:00

Meridiani Planum

There are some lovely recent Mars images like this one at the What on Mars blog.
This one, a picture by the rover Opportunity of Meridiani Planum, sure looks like the continental shelf of an ancient vast ocean, which is what I suspect it is. There may be news about this in the next couple of weeks.

Idle US astronauts, Europeans to Mars

2005-03-06T16:18:00.001-05:00

A few tidbits of recent news:
An AP story today talks about the plight of NASA's current crop of astronauts, some of whom may wait a decade before flying and some may never get a chance, with the current grounding of the space shuttle and its planned retirement in five years.
Also, a story on Mars Today reports that the European Space Agency says it will beat all others in sending humans to all planets of the inner solar system, and especially to Mars. And apparently they are talking seriously about searching for signs of life on Mars, something NASA has pretty much refused to do for the last 29 years. I'll have more to say about that soon.
More details of the ESA plan are here.

Rhea eclipsed by Dione

2005-03-05T20:17:00.000-05:00

A rare event in the solar system, captured on Feb. 20 by Cassini: A partial eclipse of two of Saturn's moons, Rhea (rear) and Dione. As with the sun and the moon during eclipses on Earth, the two are of different sizes but their distances cancel out the difference, making them appear the same size. There's a nice story on it here on a blog by MSNBC's Alan Boyle.
You can watch the full eclipse as a Quicktime movie here.

Soon, everyone will be an astronaut for 15 minutes...

2005-03-05T01:14:00.000-05:00

Andy Warhol said that soon everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. It used to be that anyone who went into space would be famous, but that may not be true for long, with the coming era of private tourist jaunts into space -- ironically, flights that will actually spend a bit less than 15 minutes in space.
Anyway, this website I came across, for a guy who hopes to become the "Ireland's first astronaut", gives an interesting glimpse of how people see their hopes of coming fame and glory in the post-SpaceShipOne era. There may be quite a bit of this kind of thing in the next few years.

Space photo of the day: weird Mars rocks

2005-03-04T19:30:00.000-05:00

Latest view from the rover Opportunity

(See it bigger here)

Martian disappearing act

2005-03-04T14:40:00.000-05:00

I was just looking at a blog created by a fellow member of the National Association of Science Writers, Joel Shurkin, that deals with science journalism. He commented on the recent story that ran on the Space.com website, claiming an exclusive account that NASA scientists had submitted a scientific paper claiming there is life on Mars today. Most of the specifics of the story have been vigorously denied by all parties concerned, and NASA went so far as to take the unusual step of issuing a press release to rebut the story.
I do think the Space.com story crossed a few journalistic lines, including portraying a private dinner as a quasi-official meeting, and making clearly wrong claims about what the scientists said. One unfortunate consequence of that is that Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke's very interesting work at Rio Tinto, Spain, the subject of the dinner-party leak, has gotten an undeserved black eye.
Anyway, jogged by the mention in Shurkin's blog, I just went to check, and the story has now been removed from the space.com site altogether! Nothing shows up in a search at all. They also removed their story from the following day, a more legitimate story about Vittorio Formisano's claim to have identified formaldehyde in the Mars atmosphere, which he says is indicative of life. (New Scientist's story on that, which I think got it right, is still available). A subsequent story by space.com's Leonard David, a very good piece, appears to be the only thing on the subject still there.
Ah, but it's a bit trickier than that. It turns out the story really is still there, as is a followup by the original reporter, Brian Berger, that ran after NASA's denial came out. BUT, neither of these stories shows up if you do a search of Space.com for "Mars". That's strange.
It seems to me a little odd for a well-known website like space.com to remove two very high-profile stories, without comment or followup, from their searchable archive, as if they never happened. What do others think?

We have liftoff

2005-03-03T00:16:00.000-05:00

Three, two, one ... here I go into the blogosphere. I hope to use this space to post some of the interesting stuff that I come across as I go about my work of reporting on astronomy, the space program and so on for New Scientist magazine and occasional other venues. There are a lot of interesting websites I come across, tidbits of news that don't quite rise to the level of being actual news stories but that are worth a mention and that some people might find interesting.
This is my first foray into the world of blogs, and I've only read a few. I've been inspired by my friend Oliver Morton's very interesting blog Mainly Martian, which is a great place to keep abreast of the most interesting things going on in the latest Mars data, from the NASA twin rovers and the Mars Express mission. I've also recently looked at a few others that focus on science, but I haven't really found much yet. As I find interesting things, I may note them here.
Upcoming events that I hope to post information about here in this blog, as they unfold:
The Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference, an annual meeting that is the big festival of new information about the solar system around us. And this year's meeting promises to be one of the best ever, with lots of new stuff coming out about the latest Mars data (frozen seas! methane that is suggestive of the presence of living microbes on Mars today! the real story from the scientists whose dinnertime chat got exploded into a premature and overblown web story!) as well as great new stuff from Cassini on Saturn and its moons Titan and Enceladus, the latest on what was recovered from the crash-landed Genesis mission, more on Martian meteorites, and who knows what else.
And then, maybe, later this year, the return of the space shuttle to flight. NASA now says it'll happen on May 15. I'm betting it won't. We'll see. Frankly, I'll be surprised if it flies anytime this year, but I could be wrong ...
And as I always have, I will be following closely the activities of small rocket companies like X-Prize winning Burt Rutan and his Scaled Composites, as well as companies like Virgin Galactic and Space Adventures that hope to sell flights into space.
So stay tuned to this space, space fans. I hope you'll find things here that you won't have seen elsewhere.