The Night The Martians Took Broadway!

October 30, 2009

The Balloon Boy saga from a couple weeks ago will go down in mass media history as one of the great hoaxes. Network news was riveted on following the wayward balloon for over two hours because they were convinced there was a stowaway child onboard. Maybe we were primed for this sort of hoax (more later).

But 71 years ago today the mother of all media hoaxes took place. On the night before Halloween in 1938 CBS Radio presented an hour-long adaptation of H. G. Wells' classic science fiction story “The War of the Worlds.”

Forgotten Planet

October 18, 2009

There’s another dwarf planet to add to the list of solar system bodies that  share minor league status with Pluto.

Newly published Hubble Space Telescope pictures show that the large asteroid Pallas is nearly spherical. In other words the body has enough gravity to pull itself into ball where all surface features are essentially the same distance from the core.

This is one criterion for a planet according to the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Hubble’s sharp view can resolve the disk of Pallas and shows that it is slightly egg-shaped, and roughly the width of West Virginia.

Mars’ Snow Cone Scoop

September 24, 2009

Last year we watched intently as NASA’s Mars Polar Lander dug a small trench near the Red Planet's north pole to expose subsurface water ice. Over days the snow-white patch sublimated in the sunlight, demonstrating that is was indeed ice! We were mesmerized by at last looking at ice on another terrestrial planet.

It never dawned on me that nature had likely already done the heavy lifting – er heavy excavating in uncovering water. Today NASA released pictures of several fresh craters with icy-looking floors. Apparently meteorites have excavated surface material to expose the ice. It then sublimates away over weeks as revealed in time sequence photos. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO) spectrometers clinched the deal by taking spectroscopy of the ice and finding water’s signature.

Mars or Bust By 2035?

July 27, 2009

When I was a kid I loved those board games that let you take a shortcut to get to the “finish” square first. Everybody's favorite is: “Go directly to Go and collect $200,” from Monopoly.

An interplanetary shortcut was implied last week when NASA’s new administrator, astronaut Charles Bolden, said he would like to see humans venture beyond the moon and onto other destinations in the solar system. The 62 year-old administrator said that he’d like to see humans on Mars within his lifetime.

Could we get to the Red Planet in the next 25 years? I’d say only if we sidestep spending all the time and resources to set up a base on the moon, i.e. “go, past moon, go directly to Mars.”

Do the Mars Rovers See Martian Leprechauns?

June 22, 2009

What I love about NASA conspiracy theorists -- you know those folks who think we never went to the moon and the Air Force is  hiding alien bodies -- is that they want to have their cake and eat it too.

At a recent convention called, you guessed it, Conspiracy Con 2009, self-styled Mars sleuth, Andrew Basiago, accused NASA of hiding evidence of Martian life in photos taken from the rover Spirit.

But I will bet money that when NASA eventually releases images showing manmade artifacts at the Apollo landing sites, to be photographed from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO, which will enter lunar orbit tomorrow) conspiracy flakes will accuse NASA of faking the PR pictures.

Future Forecast for Solar System: Worlds in Collision?

June 13, 2009

Astronomy’s equivalent of the “Great Pumpkin” from the Peanuts comic strip is popping up again on Internet traffic. For the sixth year in a row, an Internet message gone viral predicts that the planet Mars will look as "big as the full moon" later this year. 

Nope, not happening. But in our capricious universe, never say never.

A new computer simulation of the dynamical evolution of the solar system over the next 5 billion years suggests that our distant descendents could witness such a sky spectacle, just before the world is destroyed in a catastrophe of Biblical proportions.

Are We Ready to Live on Other Planets?

June 08, 2009

The  International Space Station has a beefed up crew that has gone from three to six astronauts, now that the construction of the $100 billion space laboratory is nearly complete. We are told that the station crew will be able to spend more time doing medical and biological experiments in the station's microgravity environment to prepare humans for journeys to the moon and Mars.

We are “learning to live in space” is the shorthand justification for why we have a space station. But are the right questions behind the ISS experiments being asked? Exactly how salient is the research on the ISS when applied to human interplanetary travel?

A Mundane Spacecraft Name Game

May 29, 2009

I hope there are no martian cats at the landing site where the multi-billion dollar Mars Science Lab (MSL) will touchdown in 2011.

Why? Because the lander has been named Curiosity, in a NASA contest where 9,000 students across the country submitted essays for their favorite name.

And, we all know what curiosity did to the cat.

Potentially Habitable Worlds Are Wet & Wild

March 28, 2009

I recently had fun making a baking soda powered tabletop volcano to the delight of my grandson Leo, who just loves watching the thing explode. You know, that popular middle school science fair project where vinegar (acetic acid) neutralizes baking soda and causes it to give off carbon dioxide, creating pressure that blows the liquid up a toy volcano cone.

But on other planets there may really be volcanoes gushing out water rather than molten rock. And, mud volcanoes that belch out a slurry of organic-rich material, if not subterranean microbes.

The possible discovery of wet slushy volcanoes on Titan and Mars, and damp soils, is ratcheting up the possibility of finding extraterrestrial life. A number of papers were presented last week at the 40th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

Cryovolcano

In the frigid outer solar system, where daytime temperatures are at -300 degrees Fahrenheit or lower, a different type of geology may be taking place – cryovolcanos. These mountains are suspected of spewing out a Slurpee of ice, propane, butane and other liquid hydrocarbons.

The best candidate is an area known as Hotei Arcus, thought not everyone agrees it is really a volcano. Photos on different flybys taken by the NASA/ESA Cassini orbiter have been interpreted as cryo-lava outflows. 

The lobe-like fingers, each hundreds of feet high, have a shape and thickness consistent with highly viscous lava on Earth. Like an advancing flow of lava, the lobes also appear to cut off several small streams apparently carved by liquid methane.

You need a subterranean heat source close to liquid reservoirs to spew out this stuff. It’s sort of nature’s recreation of the famous 1952 Miller-Urey experiment that mixed pre-biotic compounds, such as water, methane and ammonia (an ideal antifreeze for Titan) to make amino acids – the building block of life.

Mud Volcanoes

Closer to home, Mars orbiting spacecraft have identified dozens of mounds in the northern plains that bear a striking resemblance to mud volcanoes on Earth. High-resolution images reveal small knobs or patches. They frequently have one or more craters and an irregular shape.

As on Earth, a mud volcano would form when pressurized gas and water from as much as several miles down, blows out the surface like a popped Champaign cork. This shoots out a gooey mess of water, mud, rocks, as well as methane.

 Mud volcanoes would accomplish what a martian drilling rig would have a tough time doing, transporting rocks from several miles beneath the martian surface, and placing them within reach of sample-return rovers.

Microbial life could be flourishing deep below the martian surface, perhaps driven there as surface conditions became hostile over geologic time. It may be warm enough miles below the surface for water to remain a liquid. The volcanoes, which may be as young as 10 million years, offered an elevator for microbes to reach the surface – in a martian twist on the closing chapter of Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Journey to the Center of The Earth.

 

Briny Droplets

A highly publicized surprise from NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander was the discovery of perchlorates in the planet’s arctic region. Perchlorate is the stuff used to make rocket fuel and explode fireworks. On Mars these salts could keep water in a liquid state at temperatures of -160 degrees Fahrenheit.

Pockets of brine might form when the perchlorate mixes with the water ice that Phoenix found near the north pole. In fact there has been a lively debate whether Phoenix photographed briny liquid water droplets on the lander legs, which would have been kicked up by its landing thrusters. Some scientists think they move like a liquid in successive exposures. Others say it’s just frost.

The perchlorates may explain why the mid 1970s Viking biology experiments did not find any organic compounds in the soil. The soil was heated in the Viking biology experiments. Heated perchlorates release their oxygen and burn up and organic material! So maybe the release of carbon dioxide seen in the Viking experiments was actually from the disintegration of trace organic material.

These findings show that the road to indentifying extraterrestrial life is long and arduous, with potential dead ends and misinterpretations. But the payoff of a positive detection is so staggering, the long haul and lively debate among scientists is well worth it.

 

Mars Volcanoes an Oasis for Life?

March 06, 2009

In the 1990 film, Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger explores a huge mountain on Mars that contains alien machinery for making oxygen.

Mars has a real mountain that may be more wondrous in real life. Its aliens would be microbes living in the martian equivalent of the Garden of Eden.

The titanic 15- mile high shield volcano Olympus Mons  might be soggy and warm, making it virtual sauna for a martian organisms.

Image analysis and computer modeling reported in a science paper published this week in the journal Geology suggests that ancient lava once flowed unevenly across a wet clay-like surface. This gives Olympus Mons a lopsided appearance with a gently sloping northwest flank and a much steeper southeastern wall.

This volcano behemoth may still be cooking. The last outflow is estimated to have happened as little as 20 million years ago.

The 340 mile wide base of the volcano, big enough to cover the northeastern United States, could contain a lot of warm water, making it a sauna for microbial life, say researchers.

Perhaps any martian microbes would be cousins to some of the earliest forms of life that appeared on the young volcanic Earth, the thermophiles, who are even found today in various geothermally heated regions of the Earth such as hot springs like those in Yellowstone National Park, and at ocean floor hydrothermal vents. The organisms thrive on heat and don’t need sunlight.

The problem is how do you explore the mammoth mountain in search for life?

Back in 2007 NASA first reported seeing football field sized cave entrances on the slope of a smaller volcano, Arsea Mons.  The caves are so big you could drop a football stadium into the entrance. The holes that we see could really be skylights onto big subterranean chambers. But they are so deep that almost none of the light that enters the caves reflects back out.

The caves were formed long ago by flowing rivers of molten lava gushing from fissures in the side of the volcano. As the flow progresses, the tops and sides solidify. If the flow source stops, the remaining lava may pour out, leaving a hollow "tube" of rock.

The northwest flank of Olympus Mons would be an ideal place to look for such features. A host of igneous flow features, including lava tubes, have been identified in this area. The northern flank of the volcano is very close to the plains that were once the floor of a possible northern ocean. This means the caves might contain water or ice.

Now this paints a picture that’s even creepier than anything I’ve seen in science fiction movies. Imagine a nimble robot climbing into a pitch-black cavern to look for evidence of biological activity. There could be a host of robotic "insects" communicating via their own self-deploying "cellular" communications  network.  A flying probe may also be used  to navigate at greater distances over a rockfall-strewn cave floor.

What would the robotic explorers find?

There could be bizarre structures that superficially look like mineralogical deposits. Deep cave explorers on Earth find stringy structures dubbed “snottites” (oh yuck!).

These are made from a slimy mix of  bacteria and mucilaginous products and a little bit of minerals. The microbes are too small to see, yet they can build up the “snottite” structures.

Similarly, martian caves warmed by geothermal activity could offer truly unearth fantasy landscapes sculpted by multi-billion-year old organisms that have never seen sunlight, until someday when they are hit by the penetrating beam of a cave exploring robot dispatched from Earth. So our first contact with extraterrestrial life may be by coming face-to-face with something that looks like it's dripping out of your home plumbing.