Look Out! Mars Is (Not) Coming!

August 27, 2009

Q: What do you get when you combine astronomy, the internet and a ton of misleading gibberish?
A: A cyber-legend that refuses to budge...

Wide Angle: Welcoming Our Roving Mars Robot Overlords

June 22, 2009

If I had to choose what kind of robot I could be, I wouldn't hesitate. I'd be a Mars rover.

Why? Because planetary rovers are awesome!

Has Spirit Lost Her Spirit?

Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Spirit has gotten herself into a bit of a pickle, but it's not all bad news.

When trundling around a location called "Home Plate" (a plateau in Gusev Crater) in May, Spirit lost her footing and spun her wheels into the loose Martian regolith. Attempts to extricate the 408 lb robot failed and she's been beached ever since.

In an effort to work out how bad the situation was, mission controllers sent commands to Spirit to examine herself with the microscopic imager attached to the end of her robotic arm. As can be seen in the image above, it's very blurry (the imager is more familiar with examining small rocks up close rather than assembling an escape plan), but the panoramic scene reveals a lot about the problem the rover is facing...

We Need The Mars Hoax... The Universe Just Ain't Exciting Enough

June 10, 2009

I've never received the fabled Mars Hoax Email. Sad, but true.

I find this strange, as I regularly receive emotional pleads for banking information from Nigerian princes, why wouldn't the Mars Hoax Email (or MHE) make it to my inbox? I receive just about every other chain email, why would this one slip through the net? I feel cheated.

A Year Ago Today, Phoenix Spread its Wings

May 25, 2009

I can't believe a whole year has passed since the landing of Phoenix. This image epitomizes the mission for me. A small robot floating closer to the Martian surface, to begin its groundbreaking five month mission. I love the fact the scene was captured by another robotic camera: the HiRISE instrument on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) currently orbiting the planet. Stunning.

If you want to reminisce over the events of last year, follow @MarsPhoenix on Twitter, where the plucky robot's spirit lives on to retweet the same tweets it tweeted (twittered?) last year. What a great way to celebrate the anniversary of one of the greatest Mars missions ever...

Did Phoenix Burn Martian Life?

It sounds like a freshman biology laboratory error: "Too bad Joe, you burned the sample. Anything that was alive is now dead. Very, very dead. Clean up the broken glass and burn marks on the wall."

Down here on Earth, we're allowed to make experimental mistakes. If we damage a sample, we simply collect a new one and modify our technique. Unfortunately, when it's a robot, on the Martian surface that's doing the experiment, there's very little we can do if an experiment goes wrong. In fact, we'd probably have no clue if the experiment had gone wrong in the first place; robots only do what they are programmed to do.

Last year, when the Phoenix Mars Lander was scraping samples of regolith from the surface, it made the bitter-sweet discovery of perchlorate in the soil. Perchlorate can be found in rocket fuel, and as you may have guessed, rocket fuel isn't exactly a healthy addition to anyone's diet.

Although the discovery of perchlorate was a real downer for Mars life hunters (but caused a huge fuss online), there was still some hope. Perchlorate is a salt, and salts, when dissolved in water, can lower the freezing point, keeping it in a fluid state. Therefore, it is well within the realms of reality that there may be pools of salty water (brine) situated in the upper layers of regolith. Amazingly, it is known that some basic forms of life in harsh desert environments on Earth actually use perchlorate as an energy source.

Awesome! The search for Mars life is still on!

Not so fast. Everything from the Viking Mars landers in the 1970's to the Phoenix Mars lander last year have turned up blanks for the search for ET in the Martian dirt. Not only that, but there have been no discoveries of organic compounds. Organic compounds should have been discovered by now; cometary material is known to contain organic chemicals and we know that Mars has been peppered with this material in the past. So where are all the organics?

In an attempt to detect organic compounds and basic life forms, our robotic landers use small ovens to heat samples up and then analyze the gases given off. But therein lies the problem, there's a reason why perchlorate is used in rocket fuel. It burns.

Usually at low temperatures, perchlorate is harmless, but when heated to a few hundred degrees, it releases large quantities of oxygen. Oxygen fuels fire, burning any combustible material. Organics are combustible! It's therefore little wonder we haven't found and organic chemicals (or life) on Mars - each scoop of soil our 'bots collected got charbroiled! Rather than hunting for life, Phoenix was sanitizing the samples.

Oops.

Now scientists are trying to think up other ways to analyze Martian soil for organics. I'm thinking we might have to wait for the first manned missions to Mars before we can conclusively work out whether Mars has the potential to support life. Human ingenuity will beat a programmed robot every time...

Source: New Scientist

How Could the Chernobyl Disaster Help Us Grow Plants on Mars?

May 19, 2009

When mankind eventually travels to Mars, our settlers will need to eat. As it seems likely any Mars mission will last for 18 months to three years, food will need to be grown on the Martian surface. However, you can't simply dig into the Martian regolith and expect to vegetables, fruit and grain to grow.

For a start, there is no breathable air on Mars and the planets atmosphere is 100× less dense than the Earth's. Although the majority of Martian air is composed of carbon dioxide (generally a good thing for plants as CO₂ is used during photosynthesis to make sugars, which the plant uses for food), surface temperatures can get diabolically cold (the average recorded temperature on the Mars surface is -81°F, but it can plummet to -120°F in the arctic regions).

These aren't exactly prime plant-growing conditions. As the pressure is so low, it is hard to find water. Although some water ice exists near the surface of the Martian soil, if it becomes exposed it quickly sublimes into a vapor. So, our Mars astronauts will need to build greenhouses, to keep the plants warm and pressures high so water can exist in a liquid state.

However, there's another problem. Radiation.

As Mars lacks a magnetic field and any significant atmosphere, all kinds of ionizing high energy particles and solar X-rays hit the surface, damaging any terrestrial life form down to the genetic level. It would be useful if we have as much information about living things in radioactive environments as possible before we start dreaming about eating our first Martian apple.

Actually, we do have a rather unlikely Martian laboratory on Earth: Chernobyl, the site of the world's worst nuclear meltdown. The radioactive fallout from the 1986 incident at the Soviet Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine caused world-wide alarm, and the effects of which are still felt today.

For more information about how the meltdown is affecting wildlife, check out the Discovery News article, "Chernobyl Radiation Still Harming Animals"

Martin Hajduch from the Slovak Academy of Sciences is studying how life has adapted to the higher-than-usual radiation near the old nuclear facility, and his findings are rather intriguing. Humans, plants and animals have all been impacted by the elevated levels of radiation to varying degrees, but Hajduch's team chose to compare soya grown in radioactive areas near the facility to those grown over 60 miles away.

Remarkably, the soya grown in radioactive conditions contain more types of a protein known to protect cells from being damaged by radiation and heavy metals.

"One protein is known to actually protect human blood from radiation," Hajduch says.

Although it took the plants several generations to fully adapt to the otherwise toxic conditions, adapt they did, building up a natural defence against the sudden injection of radioactive fallout in the area.

I find this research fascinating. From a devastating and very sad event that cost many lives during and the years after the disaster, we are studying how terrestrial life may learn to adapt to the harsh conditions on another planet, possibly helping us grow radiation-resistant food for future Martian settlements...

Source: New Scientist

Methane on Mars, Penny for a Star, NASA's New Boss?

January 19, 2009

Rounding up last week's space news, and a sneak peek at Discovery Space this week:

A Martian Methane Bomb on Earth

January 16, 2009

We writer types sometimes use a very unwelcome term, and I'd like to use it now:

Pack journalism.

Other variations: Herd journalism, "me-too" journalism.

Today, I'm using it to refer to the recent news about methane plumes discovered on Mars.

Thing is, we knew about this in October 2008. Nearly 3 months ago. Not to toot the horn of our very own blogger Ray Villard, but read it for yourself.

But back to pack journalism: What's the harm?

I'm not certain its damage physically measurable, but consider this: Seeing the same story written 1,000 different ways, yet saying the same boring thing (we don't know if there's life on Mars), in every media outlet from here to Timbuktu. That's a perfect recipe to whack a few confidence points off of the media scorecard. Ouch.

Thankfully here at Discovery Space, we're somewhat insulated from "the pack." We are not a news site -- but we do get behind it, blow it up and expand on the most interesting pieces. Take, for instance, our Wide Angle about life on Mars -- which we threw together after tabloids started publishing stories such as this, this and this.

Speaking of which... Er, really? NASA did not say there was past or present life on Mars.

Too late to stop the misinformation train, though -- people across the planet began freaking out about and wondering why this story is not in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, etc. etc. etc.

...enter pack journalism.

Because a few media outlets incorrectly report that we've found life on Mars, the unfortunate party begins. Every journalist and their mother is ordered to have a story about Martians filed a.s.a.p., setting off a feverish race to address claims of alien microbes when, really, the news is really just one incremental step in the search for life beyond Earth.

That said, I'm not knocking on the scientific findings here. They are very interesting and exciting. And I'm not knocking my colleagues, either -- there are some great pieces about this out there.

Yet NASA knows better than anybody that "alien" and "life" in the same sentence is a touchstone of interest for any human being -- so they'll drum up as much publicity as they can, when they can. Talk about stealing the spotlight: the space agency held their own TV press conference for what was a report in Science magazine.

Ok, so NASA isn't innocent when it comes to such publicity stunts, but I understand why they do it. To them, any widely-publicized advancement in the search for life could be that straw that breaks the camel's back, so to speak, to get support -- public, political, financial and otherwise -- to explore the solar system *coughAllanHillsmeteoritecough*.

Is there a solution to these problems? I'm not sure there is, but I'm sure the planet would appreciate any ideas -- feel free to leave 'em in the comments section below.

P.S. Seeking a superior breakdown of how science news shapes up? Don't miss Charlie Petitt's blog, the Knight Science Journalism Tracker -- one of my personal favorites that deserves its spot in the "VIB" (Very Important Blogs) folder of my Google Reader account. Petitt has a great inventory of the "Martian methane bomb" in this post.

Photo: NASA/Wikimedia Commons/Dave Mosher

Freezing Phoenix, Columbia Report, IYA2009, Ice on the Moon(?)

January 05, 2009

Your official Disco Space Preview video awaits.

Note: When I say "April" in the video, I should have said "October" -- as in "we last heard from Phoenix in October." Oops.