Ice on Mars

June 20 (Bloomberg) -- The existence of ice on Mars was confirmed today by NASA scientists, the first time frozen water has been sampled on another planet. Water in liquid form is an essential ingredient for life.

Whitish, dice-sized chunks, which were dug from the rocky red soil and warmed in the sun, vanished four days after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Phoenix probe dug them up June 15. They confirm what NASA satellites have suggested for years: Frozen water exists several centimeters beneath Mars's surface.

Scientists believe ice exists on planets including Pluto, though Phoenix is the first probe to confirm it on the ground. The survey is part of NASA's theme in Mars exploration: follow the water.

``We've hit what we're looking for,'' said Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University in College Station and co-investigator on the NASA project. ``The job now is to find out what's mixed in with the ice.'' He spoke at a press conference in Tucson, Arizona.

The Phoenix's robotic arm also hit a hard surface yesterday while digging in a different spot, raising scientists' hopes that they might uncover a larger ice layer to sample, NASA said.

``When I look over this flat plain of rock and dirt, it's amazing what we're looking at,'' said principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson, which is co- managing the project. ``If you got a giant broom and swept if off, it's a big ice sheet.''

Ice Below Surface?

NASA satellites suggest about a quarter of Mars has ice beneath the surface, primarily at the polar regions.

The agency's plan is to gather up ice and dirt, then deliver it to the Phoenix's airtight ovens. The matchbox-size ovens will then bake the sample.

On Mars, the boiling point of water is just 4 degrees Celsius. Under the planet's faint atmosphere, the water will quickly vaporize, Smith said.

Before it does, the probe will analyze the samples for any long-chain carbon molecules such as amino acids, the building blocks of life.

``That's what you need to have for a habitable zone on Mars,'' Smith said.

This is a big deal for three reasons. One, the presence of water on Mars means that there could have been some kind of life on the planet at some point in the past. It is even possible that some remnant of that life could remain say as spores waiting for a more hospitable climate to return.

Two, the presence of water ice means that at some point in the future it might be possible to teraform Mars and make it suitable for humans to live there.

Three, and by far the most important in the short term is that frozen water on Mars means that it is far easier for a manned expedition to go there. Due to the distance involved any Mars expedition would have to spend one year on the red planet if there is water there then they don't have to waste rocket fuel sending a year's supply of water to Mars and they don't have to waste space on the landing craft bringing any down to the surface with them. It means that they can manufacture a breathable atmosphere and that they can produce rocket fuel for the return trip right there on the planet's surface.

The chance that we'll see humans walking on Mars in our lifetimes just went up significantly.

NASA to probe the sun

June 10, 2008: For more than 400 years, astronomers have studied the sun from afar. Now NASA has decided to go there.

"We are going to visit a living, breathing star for the first time," says program scientist Lika Guhathakurta of NASA Headquarters. "This is an unexplored region of the solar system and the possibilities for discovery are off the charts."

The name of the mission is Solar Probe+ (pronounced "Solar Probe plus"). It's a heat-resistant spacecraft designed to plunge deep into the sun's atmosphere where it can sample solar wind and magnetism first hand. Launch could happen as early as 2015. By the time the mission ends 7 years later, planners believe Solar Probe+ will solve two great mysteries of astrophysics and make many new discoveries along the way.

[. . .]

The two mysteries prompting this mission are the high temperature of the sun's corona and the puzzling acceleration of the solar wind:

Mystery #1—the corona: If you stuck a thermometer in the surface of the sun, it would read about 6000^o C. Intuition says the temperature should drop as you back away; instead, it rises. The sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, registers more than a million degrees Celsius, hundreds of times hotter than the star below. This high temperature remains a mystery more than 60 years after it was first measured.

Mystery #2—the solar wind: The sun spews a hot, million mph wind of charged particles throughout the solar system. Planets, comets, asteroids—they all feel it. Curiously, there is no organized wind close to the sun's surface, yet out among the planets there blows a veritable gale. Somewhere in between, some unknown agent gives the solar wind its great velocity. The question is, what?

"To solve these mysteries, Solar Probe+ will actually enter the corona," says Guhathakurta. "That's where the action is."

All I can say is that I sure hope they're planning to go at night!

First pictures of the Martian far north

A Nasa spacecraft has sent back historic first pictures of an unexplored region of Mars.

The Mars Phoenix lander touched down in the far north of the Red Planet, after a 680 million-km (423 million-mile) journey from Earth.

The probe is equipped with a robotic arm to dig for water-ice thought to be buried beneath the surface.

It will begin examining the site for evidence of the building blocks of life in the next few days.

A signal confirming the lander had reached the surface was received at 2353 GMT on 25 May (1953 EDT; 0053 BST on 26 May).

Engineers and scientists at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California clapped and cheered when the landing signal came through.

"Phoenix has landed - welcome to the northern plain of Mars," a flight controller announced.

The Martian arctic looks pretty much like every other part of Mars that I've seen. But still it is what is below the surface that counts.

Stop and think for a minute about what a great achievement it is to launch something like this from Earth and have it land safely on another planet at the exact time and place that were planed.

I still doubt that the machine will find the firm evidence of life that it was sent to look for, however. That will take human boots on the Martin ground.

How about we take all the money we are wasting by subsidizing ethanol and other global warming fantasies and put it into space exploration. That way we will not only push back the frontiers of human knowledge we will get all kinds of technological spin-offs which just might do something like cure cancer or even give us that cheap and abundant source of pollution free energy the greens want.*

*Actually that's wrong. The greens don't want a cheap and clean source of abundant energy. They want the human population reduced from six billion to a few million who will live at the neolithic level.

Sputnik

From The Washington Post:

News flash, Oct. 4, 1957: The Russians have launched a tiny moon. It is an artificial satellite, 184 pounds, a pumpkin-size sphere polished to a shine. The Russians call it Sputnik. As it passes over the United States it transmits a signal -- surely the most ominous beep-beep-beep that any American has ever heard.

"The communists were going to rule," recalled Homer Hickam, who was 14 when he saw Sputnik in the sky above his home town of Coalwood, W.Va., and who would go on to become a spacecraft designer. "And the proof of this was this shiny little bauble that flew around the world every 90 minutes."

Rocket engineer Julian Davidson, dismayed at being beaten into space, remembers a radio commercial that night -- an ad for a new Gillette razor. "The Russians just launched a satellite," he said, "and I'm listening to an ad for a great technology the Americans had for making razor blades."

Ironically it was America's skill at making razor blades which would propel us into the lead in the space race and leave the soviets in the dust. In any contest of innovation a nation which embraces the free market will always leave a command economy in the dust.

We may not be alone, but we may wish we were

NEW YORK: A panel of scientists convened by America's leading scientific advisory group says the hunt for extraterrestrial life should be greatly expanded to include what they call "weird life": organisms that lack DNA or other molecules found in life as we know it.

"The committee's investigation makes clear that life is possible in forms different from those on Earth," the scientists conclude in their report, "The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems," published by the National Research Council.

An artist's rendering of what such "weird life" might look like.