New Landscape Picture from Mars

A chapter of the layered geological history of Mars is laid bare in this postcard from NASA’s Curiosity rover. The image shows the base of Mount Sharp, the rover’s eventual science destination. This image is a portion of a larger image taken by Curiosity’s 100-millimeter Mast Camera on Aug. 23, 2012. Scientists enhanced the color in one version to show the Martian scene under the lighting conditions we have on Earth, which helps in analyzing the terrain. See the picture in larger dimension on my HD Photo Blog.

Pictures from Mars

Images of Mars – the 4th planet in our Solar system. Taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, 2001 Mars Odyssey, Viking Orbiter 1 & 2, Viking Lander 1 & 2. Watch in HD to get the best result.

The Size of our World

Check out this website to see how big our earth is in comparison to the other planets and the sun and how big (or small) our sun is in comparison to other stars…here is the link: www.rense.com.

Mars robots: 5 years of explorations

A solar-powered rover called Spirit is shaking off the cold and dust of a nearly fatal Martian winter. At the same time, its twin, Opportunity, is inching its way across a desolate 10-mile-wide plain toward a deep, richly layered crater. The golf-cart-size explorers were built to last at least 90 days, perhaps a year. Instead, they have lasted five years, and they have far exceeded their expected payoff in research. The rovers have roamed the surface of Mars examining its geology and have shed light on the role that water played in the planet’s history. Phil Christensen, a scientist at Arizona State University, built a key part of the rovers’ brains that allow them to evaluate the composition of rock. NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which manages the rover program, recently celebrated the fifth anniversary. The rovers have been a particular point of pride for NASA and JPL, drawing worldwide attention when they were launched in 2003 as part of NASA’s mission to “follow the water” on the Red Planet. Spirit and Opportunity, named by a Scottsdale girl in an essay contest, hurtled through space for seven months before landing on Mars on Jan. 3 and Jan. 24, 2004, respectively.

The rovers’ success represents 10 years of work for Christensen and the team who built the thermal-emissions spectrometers to identify minerals by examining light spectrum. “It’s great stuff, but in terms of understanding the history of Mars and discovering life on Mars, we’re really just beginning,” Christensen said. Engineers were confident that once the rovers landed safely, they would keep sending information back to Earth for as long as six months to a year. Instead, Spirit and Opportunity are still communicating. Martian winds occasionally have cleared Spirit and Opportunity of suffocating dust, which was expected to coat their solar panels eventually and make them useless. In the same year they landed, the rovers made headlines by finding unmistakable geological evidence that Mars had been drenched with water at some point in its history. The journal Science named that discovery the most important scientific achievement of 2004. It was luck that led to one of the rovers’ most exciting discoveries. Before it powered down in early 2008 to survive the Martian winter, Spirit was dragging a faulty wheel and accidentally dug a trench in the soil. The trench contained silica deposits and other minerals, which suggests Mars once bubbled with hot springs and possibly life. Spirit also took the highest-resolution and most detailed photos ever snapped at the planet’s surface. It turned its camera skyward, as well, and sent back photos of Earth, which appears on Mars as an evening star.

Opportunity is closer to the planet’s equator, where its solar panels get a bit more sun and a little less dust. It sent back photos and information about its own heat shield after it survived entry. It then rolled 21 months across the planet before pulling up to the edge of a crater called Victoria, sending back its spectacular views and geological history. It recently left Victoria and is headed toward a larger crater at a speed of about 100 yards a day. Although the yearlong journey is risky at Opportunity’s advanced age, the second crater promises to reveal more secrets of the planet’s past and possible signs of water and life. Christensen is a Mars celebrity. He is operating three instruments on four craft roving or orbiting the planet, the most of any scientist. He published a controversial theory in 2003 that water once flowed on Mars and could still flow today. Other discoveries support his theory. Images from his Mars-orbiting cameras are the building blocks for the Google Mars Internet site. One of his orbiting cameras helped determine the landing site for Opportunity. When Spirit landed on Jan. 3, 2004, Christensen heard cheering from the normally staid engineers around him. He thought about the hours they all had dedicated to the project. “The payoff: It’s a very emotional time,” he said. Christensen is working every day with scientists in this country and in Europe who determine how each rover will communicate and move. Some of Christensen’s graduate students, who talk with the rovers and move them along the surface of Mars, are the brightest in the country, he said. They were high-school students when the rovers landed.

Find more information about Spirit and Opportunity at marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html.

New carbonate findings on Mars

The possibility that life took hold on early Mars got a boost this week with the announcement of the discovery of a previously “missing” mineral on the red planet. New images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show areas fo Mars where magnesium carbonate is exposed in 3.6-billion-year-old bedrock in Mars’s Nili Fossae region. Carbonate minerals contain carbon and oxygen and need liquid water to form. Common carbonates on Earth include limestone and chalk. Previous missions had seen small percentages of carbonates in Martian dust. More recently the Mars Phoenix Lander found the minerals in the planet’s arctic soils. But until now, evidence for the source of these carbonates in Martian bedrock had been elusive, supporting theories that even if Mars once had bodies of water, they were too acidic to support life as we know it. “Carbonate, like the baking soda in your refrigerator, dissolves quickly when exposed to acid,” said study leader and Brown University professor Bethany Ehlmann  at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. “So the fact that … carbonate is still present means that the waters flowing through [Nili Fossae] must not have been acid” and could therefore have been conducive to life.

Signs of CO2

Scientists had long expected to find carbonates on Mars, because the planet’s carbon dioxide (CO2) atmosphere likely would have supported their formation. Mars currently has a thin atmosphere, leaving the planet dry and frigid. But some experts think that billions of years ago the atmosphere was thicker, capturing enough heat from the sun to support liquid water on the surface. Carbon dioxide gas should have reacted with Mars’s volcanic rock, and that reaction should have produce carbonate, said Richard Zurek, a project scientist for the Mars orbiter based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The newfound carbonate bedrock deposits are relatively small—some just under four square miles (ten square kilometers) – but large enough to hint at early Mars water sources. More… (Source: National Geographic News)

NASA discovers buried glaciers on Mars

After the excitement of scraping up slivers of what turned out to be ice on Mars this summer, NASA announced late Thursday that it has discovered vast glaciers hidden under rubble. One glacier is three times the size of the city of Los Angeles and up to a half-mile thick, according to an alert from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The glaciers were spotted by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which in late September also sent back information about fractures in the surface of the Red Planet that once directed water flows through underground sandstone. The Mars Lander recently lost power and died on the northern pole of Mars after spending five months searching for elements that could support life there. In June, the lander’s robotic arm successfully scooped up fragments of Martian ice — a major find, since water is an essential element to support life and the ice someday could be used to support manned missions to Mars.

Then in July, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that its scientists had concluded that Mars was once awash in water. The orbiter sent back information showing that water was on Mars as far back as 4.6 billion to 3.8 billion years ago. On Thursday, NASA reported that the glaciers were found under blankets of rocky debris at much lower latitudes than any other ice discovered so far. The orbiter’s ground-penetrator radar reportedly shows that the glaciers shoot out for dozens of miles, from the base of mountains or cliffs. It’s possible that the glaciers are remnants of a massive ice sheet that grew during an ice age on the planet. “Altogether, these glaciers almost certainly represent the largest reservoir of water ice on Mars that is not in the polar caps,” said John W. Holt of the University of Texas at Austin, the lead author of the report. “In addition to their scientific value, they could be a source of water to support future exploration of Mars.” Scientists likened the Martian glaciers to ones that have been found under rocky coverings in Antarctica, according to NASA. Jeffrey J. Plaut, a geologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement that the orbiter spotted what might be even larger glaciers in northern areas of the planet. “A key question is how did the ice get there in the first place?” said James W. Head, professor of geological sciences at Brown University, in a statement. “The buried glaciers make sense as preserved fragments from an ice age millions of years ago. On Earth, such buried glacial ice in Antarctica preserves the record of traces of ancient organisms and past climate history.”

Snow on Mars?

A Canadian university’s laser aboard a NASA Mars lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds about four kilometres above the landing site, and vaporizing before reaching the ground. “Nothing like this has ever been seen on Mars,” said Jim Whiteway, of York University in Toronto, the lead scientist for the Canadian weather station on the Mars Phoenix lander. “We’ll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground.” Mars Phoenix landed in May at the edge of the Martian Arctic to investigate the soil, and especially to dig for water, in the form of ice. Ice appears and disappears near the Martian North Pole as the seasons change. But how the moisture moves around is unclear, especially as Mars has very little atmosphere — less than one per cent of what Earth has. Canada’s share of Phoenix includes lidar, a cousin of radar that uses lasers to scan the sky. Until now, it had found clouds, fog and blowing sand. Now, as Martian winter approaches, “it’s condensing in the atmosphere … and we’ve started to see frost, ground fog and clouds.” Photos from the little robot show fluffy clouds drifting across the horizon each morning. And lidar’s beam shows that inside those clouds, cascades of the heaviest ice crystals are falling inside the cloud. “So that is snow, falling from the clouds, and we’re going to be watching very closely over the next month for evidence that the snow is actually landing on the surface.” The next month may be all the team gets. Phoenix runs on solar power, and the sun will soon set for about three months, leaving the robot to freeze in the dark. It probably won’t survive. Nevertheless, the chief scientist for Mars Phoenix, Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, is happy. “The atmosphere is a transport mechanism for water-ice and vapour,” he said Monday.