Amateur astronomers are puzzling over a seemingly anomalous cloud that has shown up on images of Mars taken over the past few days. Is it really a cloud, or a trick of the eye? Does it really extend 150 miles up from the surface, as some of the observers suggest? And what churned up all that stuff, anyway? The amateurs and the pros will be trying to resolve those questions before the phenomenon fades away.
“It’s not completely unexpected,” Jonathon Hill, a member of the team at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, told me today. “But it’s bigger than we would expect, and it’s definitely something that our atmosphere guys want to take a look at.”
March 23rd, 2012
Mysterious cloud spotted on Mars
January 12th, 2012
Failed Russian Mars probe may fall to Earth on Sunday
A doomed Russian Mars probe that’s been stuck in Earth orbit for two months may finally come crashing down Sunday over the Indian Ocean, Russian space officials say.
The 14.5-ton Phobos-Grunt spacecraft should fall back to Earth between Saturday and Monday (Jan. 14 to Jan. 16), Russia’s Federal Space Agency, known as Roscosmos, announced in a statement Wednesday.
If Phobos-Grunt comes down at the “central point” in that window — 5:18 a.m. EST on Sunday — it will fall over a stretch of empty ocean west of the Indonesian island of Java, according to a re-entry projection map Roscosmos published with the update.
November 30th, 2011
Skywatcher snaps photos of stranded Russian Mars probe
A skywatcher has photographed a troubled Russian Mars probe that remains stuck in Earth orbit three weeks after its launch.
Astrophotographer and veteran satellite spotter Ralf Vandebergh tracked Russia’s Phobos-Grunt spacecraft as it passed over the southern Netherlands on Tuesday. Using a 10-inch (25-centimeter) telescope and a video camera, he snapped a series of images at a range of about 170 miles (274 kilometers).
November 9th, 2011
Russian mission to Martian moon stuck in Earth orbit
Russia’s bid for its first interplanetary mission in 15 years went awry on Wednesday when an unmanned spacecraft failed to take the proper course toward Mars after its launch, space officials said.
Russian space agency chief Vladimir Popovkin said an engine failed to fire on the Phobos-Grunt probe after it reached Earth orbit, Interfax reported. The problem could doom the mission to bring back a soil sample from the Martian moon Phobos.
October 14th, 2011
Three years on Mars … in 3 minutes
It’s been a long, lonely three years for NASA’s Opportunity rover, which has just finished a 13-mile (21-kilometer) trek from Victoria Crater across the Martian wasteland of Meridiani Planum to Endeavour Crater. A newly released time-lapse video from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory condenses the odyssey down to just three minutes.
The video draws upon a series of 309 images, each taken when the rover stopped driving at the end of a Martian day. The pictures give you a sense of the loneliness that an astronaut might feel while following in Opportunity’s wheel tracks. Drifts of sand go on for miles and miles, interrupted only by craters or patches of bedrock.
The soundtrack for the video was created by taking low-frequency recordings from Opportunity’s accelerometers and speeding them up by a factor of 1,000. “The sound represents the vibrations of the rover while moving on the surface of Mars,” Paolo Bellutta, a roer planner at JPL in Pasadena, Calif., said in NASA’s video advisory. “When the sound is louder, the rover was moving on bedrock. When the sound is softer, the rover was moving on sand.”
June 20th, 2011
Heat is on: Huge shield must protect Mars rover
When NASA’s newest Mars rover dives into the Martian atmosphere next year, it will be cocooned in the largest “beat the heat” system ever sent to the Red Planet.
To ensure that the nuclear-powered rover — called the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), or “Curiosity” for short — survives its fiery entry and reaches a pinpointed landing spot, it will have a huge heat shield and back shell that together form a protective aeroshell.
January 28th, 2011
25 years after Challenger, hundreds share grief and hope
Hundreds gathered at NASA’s launch site on Friday to mark the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, receiving words of hope from the widow of the space shuttle’s commander. The accident on Jan. 28, 1986 — just 73 seconds into flight — killed all seven on board, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.
June Scobee Rodgers, the widow of Challenger’s commander, Dick Scobee, urged the crowd to “boldly look to the future” not only in space travel, but in space and science education. She was instrumental in establishing the Challenger Center for Space Science Education.
“The entire world knew how the Challenger crew died,” she said. “We wanted the world to know how they lived and for what they were risking their lives.”
October 27th, 2010
Billionaires wanted for starship plan
For some billionaires, space travel is a cause worth big bucks. The examples range from Virgin Group chairman Richard Branson, who’s putting together what’s likely to be the first suborbital spaceline, to Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who is backing the publicity-shy Blue Origin space venture (and benefiting from NASA funding).
But how far are deep-pocketed space fans willing to go? Pete Worden, the director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, recently hinted that billionaires are being recruited to kick in contributions for a deep-space mission known as “the Hundred Year Starship.” The idea builds on the long-discussed concept of sending people on one-way missions to space destinations, in hopes of jump-starting colonization of the final frontier.
September 24th, 2010
Space allies go after Martian methane
The scientific instruments have been selected for the first U.S.-European joint mission to Mars, and they’re going to be looking for methane. The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter will be loaded up with gadgets designed to sniff out whether the gas is being generated by geological or biological processes.
Unexpected levels of methane were detected by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter in 2003, and the find was confirmed by ground-based observations supported by NASA and the National Science Foundation. One of the places where plumes of methane are rising into the Martian atmosphere is Nili Fossae, which is considered a prime target in the search for traces of Martian life.
The ExoMars experiments will track down more precisely where Mars’ methane is coming from.
August 20th, 2010
Give the Wii credit if Russians make it to Mars
There are six men currently living in cramped isolation in Moscow, enjoying and suffering 520 days of isolation as the Russian Space Federation simulates the loneliness of a manned flight to Mars. Good thing these guys have a Wii.
Can they make it through 520 days? And what will happen to them in the process? The Russians are testing and you can read all about it at the fascinating Mars 500 site.
The site has lots of photos of the three Russians, the Italian, French and Chinese men who went into isolation in April and get out in October 2011.