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.
Mars rover Curiosity lands on the Red Planet, and billionaire entrepreneur is already making plans
Somewhere, probably in the southern Pacific between New Zealand and South America, the failed Russian Phobos-Grunt Mars probe returned ignominiously to Earth today, said the Russian space agency Roscosmos and the U.S. Space Command.
The agencies said they believed the ship reentered the atmosphere shortly before 1 p.m. ET.
This year, a rocket will carry a boxcar-sized module into orbit, the first building block for a Chinese space station. Around 2013, China plans to launch a lunar probe that will set a rover loose on the moon. It wants to put a man on the moon, sometime after 2020.
While the United States is still working out its next move after the space shuttle program, China is forging ahead. Some experts worry the U.S. could slip behind China in human spaceflight — the realm of space science with the most prestige.
“Space leadership is highly symbolic of national capabilities and international influence, and a decline in space leadership will be seen as symbolic of a relative decline in U.S. power and influence,” said Scott Pace, an associate NASA administrator in the George W. Bush administration.
It’s what the show “Big Brother” would look like if a space agency produced it. An international crew is counting down the days until they enter a mock spacecraft in Moscow where they will live for more than a year -and-a-half to study the toll isolation and cramped spaces would take on the mind and body on a trip to Mars. The six-man crew — made up of volunteers from Russia, China, Italy and France — will enter their “ship” on June 3 for a 520-day stay during which they’ll conduct nearly 100 experiments. Their days will be strictly divided into three eight-hour segments for work, leisure (they recently bought a Wii) and sleep.
To get to the moon and then eventually go on to Mars will take much more money and technology than the U.S. space program has now, according to a report released today by an independent panel convened, at White House request, under former aerospace executive Norman Augustine. The Augustine Commission made several recommendations today for NASA:
It is spring at Gusev Crater on Mars, which would be good news for NASA’s Spirit Rover–except that Spirit, moving around after a long, hard winter, seems sporadically to have lost its mind.
Last Sunday, NASA says, the rover sent a signal confirming it had received its driving instructions for the day from earth, but when it next reported in, it had not moved.
That can happen for many reasons — it often has, in fact — but there was more going on. The rover had no recollection, if you will, of what it had been doing; it hadn’t recorded its main functions in its computer memory.
The idea, to say the least, was provocative. Back in March Nancy Atkinson wrote a piece for Universe Today about a retired NASA engineer named Jim McLane, who suggested a way to jump-start human settlement of Mars: go before we’re sure how to get back. “When we eliminate the need to launch off Mars, we remove the mission’s most daunting obstacle,” McLane told her. He said it would not be a suicide mission, but that risks are necessary when you do great things. “I don’t think there would be any shortage of people willing to volunteer for the mission. Lindbergh was someone who was willing to risk everything because it was worth it. I don’t think it will be hard to find another Lindbergh to go to Mars.”
For now, NASA openly says the prospect of sending astronauts to Mars is out of the question — too complicated and expensive.
But a retired NASA engineer named James C. McLane III says a Mars mission is doable, and would unify the world as never before.
Just a couple of details: McLane would send only one astronaut. And it would be a one-way flight.
Two new studies are challenging the notion that the desolate Martian plains once brimmed with salty pools of water that could have supported some form of life. Instead, the studies argue, the layered rock outcrops probed by NASA’s robot rover Opportunity and interpreted as signs of ancient water could have been left by explosive volcanic ash or a meteorite impact eons ago. That would suggest a far more violent and dry history than proposed by the scientists operating Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit, on the other side of the planet.
