Life on Mars Archives » Page 4 of 60

March 24th, 2017

‘Life’ horror movie sparks reality check on procedures for studying Mars samples

Rebecca Ferguson plays Miranda North, a planetary protection officer aboard the International Space Station, in the movie “Life.” (Sony Pictures Digital Productions)

Spoiler Alert! This article doesn’t reveal any major plot twists, but wait to read it if you’re trying to stay totally in the dark about the plot of the movie “Life.”

Let sleeping Martians lie, particularly if they have a strong grip: That’s one of the lessons you could take away from “Life,” the first monster movie set on the International Space Station.

The movie – which opens today and stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson and Ryan Reynolds – blends the gory horror of “Alien” with the harrowing suspense of “Gravity.” It’s a tour de force of simulated zero-G acrobatics (done mostly with ropes and wires). And it’s an orbital illustration of Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong with having an alien on board does go wrong.

Purists may have questions about just how wrong it goes. Could a minuscule life form brought back from Mars really get that big that quickly? Is it really possible to combine neural, muscular and sensory functions in one cell? And just how easy is it for things to come loose (or get loose) on the space station?

The deepest question may well be, does this nightmare have any chance of happening in real life?

[ Full Story ]

Posted by tourdemars to: Entertainment, Humans To Mars, Life on Mars, Sample Return

January 23rd, 2017

Microbes Could Survive Thin Air of Mars

An artist’s impression of what Mars might have looked like with water, when any potential Martian microbes would have evolved.
Image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser.

Microbes that rank among the simplest and most ancient organisms on Earth could survive the extremely thin air of Mars, a new study finds.

The martian surface is presently cold and dry, but there is plenty of evidence suggesting that rivers, lakes and seas covered the Red Planet billions of years ago. Since there is life virtually wherever there is liquid water on Earth, scientists have suggested that life might have evolved on Mars when it was wet, and life could be there even now.

“In all the environments we find here on Earth, there is some sort of microorganism in almost all of them,” said Rebecca Mickol, an astrobiologist at the Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and the lead author of the study. “It’s hard to believe there aren’t other organisms out there on other planets or moons as well.”

Mickol and her team detailed their findings in the paper, “Low Pressure Tolerance by Methanogens in an Aqueous Environment: Implications for Subsurface Life on Mars,” which was published in the journal Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres.

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Posted by tourdemars to: Life on Mars

March 14th, 2016

Mars TGO mission heads for Red Planet on methane quest

The satellite, called the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), lifted off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan at 09:31 GMT.

The probe will investigate whether the methane in the world’s atmosphere is coming from a geological source or is being produced by microbes.

If all goes well, the two space powers expect to follow up this venture with a rover, to be assembled in the UK, which will drill into the surface.

That could launch in 2018, or, as seems increasingly likely, in 2020.

[ Full Story ]

Posted by tourdemars to: ExoMars, Life on Mars, Trace Gas Orbiter

October 15th, 2015

Did Mars once have rivers? Pebbles say yes.

Researchers have used the shape of rounded Martian pebbles to extrapolate how far they must have traveled down an ancient riverbed on the Red Planet. The analysis suggests they moved approximately 30 miles (50 kilometers), indicating that Mars once had an extensive river system.

The shape of some Martian pebbles suggests these rocks once rolled dozens of miles down a river, hinting that ancient Martian waterways were stable and not merely ephemeral streams, researchers say.

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity discovered the small, round stones near its landing site in Gale Crater on the Red Planet in 2013. Researchers previously determined that these stones resemble those found in rivers on Earth, which become round as they slide, roll and hop down riverbeds and scrape other rocks.

Now, a new study suggests the Martian rocks rolled in the river for quite a while — a finding that should help scientists reconstruct what ancient Mars was like and shed light on the Red Planet’s past potential to support life, study team members said.

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Posted by tourdemars to: Life on Mars, Mars Science Laboratory, Planetology

October 8th, 2015

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Team Confirms Ancient Lakes on Mars

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/images/largesize/PIA19839_hires.jpg

Strata at Base of Mount Sharp

A new study from the team behind NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity has confirmed that Mars was once, billions of years ago, capable of storing water in lakes over an extended period of time.

Using data from the Curiosity rover, the team has determined that, long ago, water helped deposit sediment into Gale Crater, where the rover landed more than three years ago. The sediment deposited as layers that formed the foundation for Mount Sharp, the mountain found in the middle of the crater today.

“Observations from the rover suggest that a series of long-lived streams and lakes existed at some point between about 3.8 to 3.3 billion years ago, delivering sediment that slowly built up the lower layers of Mount Sharp,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Mars Science Laboratory project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and co-author of the new Science article to be published Friday, Oct. 9.

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Posted by tourdemars to: Life on Mars, Mars Science Laboratory, Planetology, Reconnaissance Orbiter

September 28th, 2015

NASA Confirms Evidence That Liquid Water Flows on Today’s Mars

New findings from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provide the strongest evidence yet that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars. Using an imaging spectrometer on MRO, researchers detected signatures of hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious streaks are seen on the Red Planet. These darkish streaks appear to ebb and flow over time. They darken and appear to flow down steep slopes during warm seasons, and then fade in cooler seasons. They appear in several locations on Mars when temperatures are above minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 Celsius), and disappear at colder times.
“Our quest on Mars has been to ‘follow the water,’ in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we’ve long suspected,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “This is a significant development, as it appears to confirm that water — albeit briny — is flowing today on the surface of Mars.”

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Posted by tourdemars to: Life on Mars, Planetology, Reconnaissance Orbiter

June 23rd, 2015

Nathalie Cabrol: How Mars might hold the secret to the origin of life TED Talks

While we like to imagine little green men, it’s far more likely that life on other planets will be microbial. Planetary scientist Nathalie Cabrol takes us inside the search for microbes on Mars, a hunt which counterintuitively leads us to the remote lakes of the Andes mountains. This extreme environment — with its thin atmosphere and scorched land — approximates the surface of Mars about 3.5 billion years ago. How microbes adapt to survive here may just show us where to look on Mars — and could help us understand why some microbial pathways lead to civilization while others are a dead end.

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Posted by tourdemars to: Life on Mars, Planetology

May 21st, 2015

Mars mystery: ExoMars mission to finally resolve question of life on red planet euronews

The ExoMars 2016 mission will try to answer one of the toughest and most intriguing questions of space exploration: is there or has there ever been life on Mars?

Getting to Mars, landing there safely, and then beginning the search for life is a huge scientific and technical challenge for the huge team behind ExoMars, a joint ESA and Roscosmos project to search for life on Mars. It is the world’s biggest ever mission to the red planet.

The first spacecraft is almost ready and Maurizio Capuano, the ExoMars 2016 Program Manager, accompanied Euronews’ on a privileged close encounter with the probe at Thales Alenia Space’s facility in Cannes, southern France.

“This is ExoMars 2016 which next year will land on the red planet. The lower part will go into orbit around Mars, putting out its solar panels to get energy from the sun, and the upper part is the lander which will land directly on the Martian surface completely autonomously,” he explained.

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Posted by tourdemars to: ExoMars, Life on Mars

March 26th, 2015

NASA Finds New Evidence of Life-Supporting Ingredient on Mars

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found new evidence of nitrogen on Mars, proving that the red planet has — or at least had — the right stuff to sustain life.

The rover drilled into Martian rocks and discovered evidence of nitrates, which are essential compounds to the building blocks of life.

“The discovery adds to the evidence that ancient Mars was habitable for life,” NASA said in a blog post.

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Posted by jburk to: Life on Mars, Mars Science Laboratory

January 25th, 2015

28 Months on Mars The New York Times

NASA’s Curiosity rover has explored Gale Crater for 833 Martian days, or Sols. And it has found evidence, written in red rocks and sand, of lakes and streams on a warmer, wetter, habitable Mars.

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Posted by tourdemars to: Life on Mars, Mars Science Laboratory, Planetology