Good news for those interested in finding alien life, even if it maybe life that died out long ago. Its looking more and more like Mars may have been very Earth like in the distant past. It may never have been Earth like enough that we could survive there without some kind of special suit, but microbes can thrive in conditions that would kill just about every other creature we know of. George Dvorsky has more,

Data collected by the Curiosity Rover suggests Mars once featured a moderate climate capable of fostering lakes of liquid water and even a vast sea, and that this climate could have extended to many parts of the Red Planet.

Up top: A recent selfie taken by Curiosity. Image credit: ASA/JPL/CALTECH/MSSS.

NASA’s Curiosity Rover is currently investigating the lowest sedimentary layers of Mount Sharp, a section of rock 500 feet (150 meters) high known as the Murray formation. Observations taken by the robotic probe suggests the mountain was produced by sediments deposited in a large lake bed over tens of millions of years. The observation strongly suggests that ancient Mars maintained a long-lasting water-friendly climate.

According to NASA scientists, it’s an hypothesis that’s challenging the notion that warm and wet conditions were transient, local, or only underground. It now appears that Mars’ ancient, thicker atmosphere raised temperatures above freezing globally, but NASA scientists aren’t entirely sure how the atmosphere produced the required effects.

Read more at io9

Elizabeth Howell writes about the exciting world of Europa, a place where there could be extraterrestrial life in our own solar system! Don’t forget to watch the excellent video as well!

Youtube Video

An incredible, reprocessed picture of Jupiter’s moon Europa shows the mysterious natural satellite’s amazing colors as they have never been seen before.

The original photos of Europa were collected by the Galileo spacecraft, which explored Jupiter and its moons from orbit in the 1990s. NASA officials reprocessed Galileo’s data using modern imaging techniques that improved on an enhanced-color view of Europa the agency created in 2001. The new photo, released on Nov. 21, shows the largest proportion of Europa’s surface at the highest images resolution, NASA officials said.

NASA released the picture as the agency pushes forward with plans to explore Europa in the coming decades, based on the theory that there is water lurking underneath the moon’s icy shell. That water could host life, under the right conditions, scientists have said. [Europa: Jupiter’s Icy Moon Explained (Infographic)]

Read more at SPACE.com

Note: I used the youtube version of the video, since I was unable to embed the version on the space.com website, however it is the same video, just a different format.

I can’t add much to this, except that Buzz definitely knows whereof he speaks:

That first human landing on the moon—a small step for mankind—was about taking risks to reap great rewards. Today, more steps are needed

Pioneering the space frontier is a perilous business.

That was recently underscored by the catastrophic breakup of the commercial Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo and the loss of one of its two pilots in testing the vehicle.

My career as an aircraft pilot and astronaut has been punctuated by both risk-taking and the loss of several close colleagues. The Apollo 1 fire in January 1967 claimed my good friends Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee in a launch pad training exercise.

And it was Gus who had earlier voiced his view of the perils associated with pushing the boundaries of curiosity and exploration:

If we die, we want people to accept it. We’re in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.

More: Buzz Aldrin: Pioneers Will Always Pave the Way With Sacrifice

Official NASA publication.
Most Americans didn’t realize until the recent Mars mission that India even has a space program. In fact, the Indian Space Research Organization has been around for many years (since 1969) and recent achievements represent the maturation of several long running lines of research. It is very broad based program with major programs in space applications (communications, Earth observation etc.), planetary research, and launch vehicle development.

September 30, 2014

RELEASE 14-266

U.S., India to Collaborate on Mars Exploration, Earth-Observing Mission

In a meeting Tuesday in Toronto, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and K. Radhakrishnan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), signed two documents to launch a NASA-ISRO satellite mission to observe Earth and establish a pathway for future joint missions to explore Mars.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden (left) and Chairman K. Radhakrishnan of the Indian Space Research Organisation signing documents in Toronto on Sept. 30, 2014 to launch a joint Earth-observing satellite mission and establish a pathway for future joint missions to explore Mars.

While attending the International Astronautical Congress, the two space agency leaders met to discuss and sign a charter that establishes a NASA-ISRO Mars Working Group to investigate enhanced cooperation between the two countries in Mars exploration. They also signed an international agreement that defines how the two agencies will work together on the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission, targeted to launch in 2020.

“The signing of these two documents reflects the strong commitment NASA and ISRO have to advancing science and improving life on Earth,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “This partnership will yield tangible benefits to both our countries and the world.”

The joint Mars Working Group will seek to identify and implement scientific, programmatic and technological goals that NASA and ISRO have in common regarding Mars exploration. The group will meet once a year to plan cooperative activities, including potential NASA-ISRO cooperation on future missions to Mars.

Both agencies have newly arrived spacecraft in Mars orbit. NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft arrived at Mars Sept. 21. MAVEN is the first spacecraft dedicated to exploring the tenuous upper atmosphere of Mars. ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), India’s first spacecraft launched to Mars, arrived Sept. 23 to study the Martian surface and atmosphere and demonstrate technologies needed for interplanetary missions.

One of the working group’s objectives will be to explore potential coordinated observations and science analysis between MAVEN and MOM, as well as other current and future Mars missions.

“NASA and Indian scientists have a long history of collaboration in space science,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA associate administrator for science. “These new agreements between NASA and ISRO in Earth science and Mars exploration will significantly strengthen our ties and the science that we will be able to produce as a result.”

The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission, targeted to launch in 2020, will make global measurements of the causes and consequences of a variety of land surface changes on Earth.

The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission, targeted to launch in 2020, will make global measurements of the causes and consequences of a variety of land surface changes on Earth.

The joint NISAR Earth-observing mission will make global measurements of the causes and consequences of land surface changes. Potential areas of research include ecosystem disturbances, ice sheet collapse and natural hazards. The NISAR mission is optimized to measure subtle changes of the Earth’s surface associated with motions of the crust and ice surfaces. NISAR will improve our understanding of key impacts of climate change and advance our knowledge of natural hazards.

NISAR will be the first satellite mission to use two different radar frequencies (L-band and S-band) to measure changes in our planet’s surface less than a centimeter across. This allows the mission to observe a wide range of changes, from the flow rates of glaciers and ice sheets to the dynamics of earthquakes and volcanoes.

Under the terms of the new agreement, NASA will provide the mission’s L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR), a high-rate communication subsystem for science data, GPS receivers, a solid state recorder, and a payload data subsystem. ISRO will provide the spacecraft bus, an S-band SAR, and the launch vehicle and associated launch services.

NASA had been studying concepts for a SAR mission in response to the National Academy of Science’s decadal survey of the agency’s Earth science program in 2007. The agency developed a partnership with ISRO that led to this joint mission. The partnership with India has been key to enabling many of the mission’s science objectives.

NASA’s contribution to NISAR is being managed and implemented by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

NASA and ISRO have been cooperating under the terms of a framework agreement signed in 2008. This cooperation includes a variety of activities in space sciences such as two NASA payloads — the Mini-Synthetic Aperture Radar (Mini-SAR) and the Moon Mineralogy Mapper — on ISRO’s Chandrayaan-1 mission to the moon in 2008. During the operational phase of this mission, the Mini-SAR instrument detected ice deposits near the moon’s northern pole.

For more information on NASA’s Mars exploration program, visit:

nasa.gov

For more information on the NISAR mission, visit:

nisar.jpl.nasa.gov

Steve Cole

More: U.S., India to Collaborate on Mars Exploration, Earth-Observing Mission

David Edwards exposes more anti science stupidity from “Fox News.”

Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute speaks to Fox News (screen grab)

A Fox News on Wednesday brought on someone who had a “really long business card” to explain why scientists were living in a fantasy world if they thought the world was experiencing any negative impacts from climate change.

The morning after President Barack Obama likened climate change to global terrorism in a speech to the United Nations, host Steve Doocy announced that Fox News was having a “fair and balanced” debate between Bob Deans of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Myron Ebell of the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

Although 97 percent of climate scientists acknowledge man-made global warming, Doocy promised that including Ebell would provide for a “good debate.”

Deans began by pointing out that the science was now settled: Burning fossil fuels is causing the planet to warm.

Read more at Raw Story

John Timmer talks about the New Mars Rover over at Ars Technica

This is Curiosity, but physically, Mars 2020 will look quite similar.

When NASA announced its plans for future explorations of Mars, there was a sense of disappointment in some quarters, since it featured a rover much like Curiosity. But NASA made clear that it was only using the proven technology of the vehicle itself; the instruments it carried would be all new, and shaped by both the advancement of technology and the experience of past missions.

Today NASA announced exactly what instruments the mission—currently called Mars 2020— will carry. They included hardware capable of making a more directed search for organic chemicals on the red planet, which could be evidence that life existed there in the past. And it will also carry an experiment designed to test our ability to produce oxygen for future manned explorations of Mars. The rover will also gather and cache samples to be picked up and returned to Earth by a future mission.

Read more at Ars Technica

Image from the ArsTechnica article

I know its a couple days off, but I really thought that people who were into science, history and space exploration would enjoy reading this piece by Lee Hutchinson.

On July 20, 1969, at about four minutes before 10:00pm Central Daylight Time, former naval aviator and test pilot Neil Armstrong became the first human being to stand on the surface of the Moon. About 20 minutes later, he was followed by Buzz Aldrin, an Air Force colonel with a PhD in astronautics from MIT (Aldrin had, quite literally, written the book on orbital rendezvous techniques). Armstrong and Aldrin’s landing was the culmination of almost a decade of scientific and engineering work by hundreds of thousands of people across the United States. Even though the lunar program’s goals were ultimately political, the Apollo project ranks as one of the greatest engineering achievements in human history.

The six successful Apollo landings between 1969 and 1972 still inspire awe today, almost half a century later. A big part of that awe comes from the fact that those voyages from the Earth to the Moon were accomplished with only the most basic of computing assistance. There were no supercomputers as we’d understand them today; although the computers that eventually powered the Apollo spacecraft were almost unbelievably advanced at the time, they are alarmingly primitive when viewed through the lens of 21st century computing.

Read more at ArsTechnica

NASA has released a spectacular new video depicting the collision of two neutron stars and resulting in the creation of a black hole. Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center created the animation using a supercomputer.

A super-dense neutron star is one of the leftover remnants of the death of a much larger star—up to 30 times the size of the sun—that has died in a supernova event. According to NASA, a neutron star has a mass equal to 1.5 times the mass of the sun compressed into a ball about 12 miles (20 kilometers) across. Incredibly, one cubic centimeter of a neutron star would outweigh Mount Everest.

More: Amazing NASA Video Shows Two Neutron Stars Colliding to Form a Black Hole

The video is not embed-able so here is the direct link - well worth a watch:

space.com

Neutron Stars Tear Each Other To Shreds, Black Hole Ensues | Visualization
In this simulation, 2 neutron stars weigh in at 1.4 and 1.7 solar masses and are separated by only 11 miles. Intense tidal forces pull the stars apart as they spiral towards each other and the black hole is formed amidst the chaos.

This could be potentaily the first world we have found besides Earth that actually has Life on it. Than again, we can’t be sure yet, so don’t get your hopes up. Adam Mann reports,

An artist conception of what the system around Kepler-186f could look like. Image: NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers are one step closer to discovering Earth Two. They have found an exoplanet slightly larger than our own, orbiting a star at a distance where it could have liquid water on its surface.

But before you hop on a spaceship looking for a change of scenery, keep in mind that scientists have fairly little information about this new exoplanet, including its mass and composition. From what they can tell, the place is similar to our own world, though not quite Earth’s twin.

“We consider it more of an Earth cousin,” said astronomer Elisa Quintana of NASA’s Ames Research Center, lead author of a paper about the finding appearing today in Science. “It’s got the same size and characteristics, but a very different parent star.”

The exoplanet, named Kepler-186f, is located nearly 500 light-years away, orbiting a red M dwarf star. The star is about half the size of our own yellow G-type sun, and is much cooler and dimmer. Kepler-186f is roughly 10 percent larger than Earth and travels around its parent star in 130 days. Four other planets, each slightly larger than the Earth, also orbit the star, all with periods less than 23 days.

Read more at Wired

NASA is suspending most of its cooperation with Russia as a result of the ongoing situation in Ukraine, agency officials announced Wednesday afternoon (April 2).

“Given Russia’s ongoing violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, NASA is suspending the majority of its ongoing engagements with the Russian Federation,” officials said in a statement. “NASA and Roscosmos will, however, continue to work together to maintain safe and continuous operation of the International Space Station.”

The news first broke Wednesday in the form of a leaked NASA memo posted online by spaceref.com.

Read more at Space.com