GeekwithEnvy

Mars

Possibly a Big Discovery on Mars

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We have been receiving a steady stream of updates from the Mars rover, Curiosity, ever since it left the Earth’s atmosphere and began it’s mission. However, one of the more recent updates, which is being called “earthshaking”, can not be shared at this time.  So what in the world is going on? or to be more precise, what in the Martian world is going on?

Mars
Mars (Source:NASA)

One of Curiosity’s instruments, known as SAM, is able to determine what’s inside a particular sample by analyzing it and then letting us know what it’s made up of. John Grotzinger, who is part of the rover team, has mentioned that they have recently gathered a bit of soil to test with SAM and it has yielded some “Earthshaking”, results.

Unfortunately, we won’t find out exactly what these earthshaking results are until they have confirmed them beyond a shadow of a doubt. After all they don’t want to deliver big news only to have to take it back later and say they were wrong.

The funny thing about scientific discovery is that everybody interprets these sort of things differently. We could very well hear news that a never before seen gas has been found trapped in the soil sample, which would be interesting but not necessarily “earthshaking” to those of us outside the scientific community, with the exception being some of our fellow geeks of course. Either way we remain in state of suspense until we can find out more about whats going on out there. I can’t even begin to speculate myself.

There’s no doubt in my mind that these scientists are basically freaking out about not being able to tell us, and to make things worse, it may be several weeks before we can know. For now we will just have to wait and see what these earthshaking results are and hopefully we are in for a big suprise.

Amazing New Photo From Mars

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One of the latest images from NASA is a self portrait of Curiosity and by far it is my favorite. Below I have featured a smaller version of the image, you can view the image in it’s full resolution, which I highly recommend, here.

You can see everything in amazing detail, including the logo for the Mars Science Laboratory. It’s hard to wrap your head around this picture. At first glance it’s just an awesome photo from Mars, but once you start to realize that this image is from a completely different planet, a planet which no human has ever set foot, you start to feel different about the martian image.

 

Curiosity Self Portrait
Curiosity Self Portrait (NASA)

 

When we seen landscapes like this we tend to look at it as if it were some random, desolate, place on Earth instead of a planet that at it’s closest known approach was 34.8 million miles (56 million km) miles away from us. Most of the time Mars is much further,  somewhere near 150 million miles (240 million km) away.

There are no cities beyond the mountains and no trees or animals to be found (unless NASA is keeping something from us). It’s not a picture of a volcanic land somewhere along the Pacific Ring of Fire, but rather the view we see photographed is a picture of alien world with human technology as it’s centerpiece. As desolate as it seems, it is still beautiful and inspiring as it stirs up our imagination.

As I look at the full resolution image, I can’t help but look at the ground below Curiosity and ponder the presence of life. It seems that one would only need to dig a hole or flip over a rock to find some type of martian worm or centipede. That red soil must contain some type of bacteria, right? How could it not?

This place looks familiar and in many ways it is. Mars has iron and sulfur core surrounded by molten rock, it also has an outer shell with a heavy coating of iron oxide and volcanic basalt. These are all properties and elements that that can be found on Earth. However, the differenses start to add up rather quickly and then were are reminded again that this is an alien planet, not one of science fiction but one that actually exists. Hopefully one day we will be able to explore this world in person but for now we can all continue to appreciate the efforts of NASA and the Curiosity mission.

Living on Another Planet

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Mars

Published on August 14, 2012, by admin in Science, Space. With the recent success of “Curiosity” at JPL I can’t help but ponder the possibility of living on another planet. How soon could this happen? Could it happen at all?

As I load up some of the latest imagery from Curiosity, I find my imagination wandering. I look at pictures of a dusty and red terrain littered with rocks and think to myself, this looks similar to some places on Earth and sometimes I almost forget these are images from another planet. It really is something amazing and for me it just throws my imagination into overdrive as I think about ways we could live, quite literally in another world.

There are many ideas that scientists have come up with that would make other planets like Mars a safe place for humans to live. Some suggest building a base camp that would be built much like a land based space station. Then, we find ourselves getting into deep conversations about how we could collect energy and how we would keep ourselves nourished. Other more extreme ideas suggest we terraform Mars. Terraforming is a hypothetical process that would involve humans changing the climate and other properties of Mars in order to make it suitable for life.

There are a few different ideas on how to terraform a planet like Mars and what makes this even more compelling is that many of the components necessary for life already exist in abundance on the red planet. One of the biggest issues with Mars is its lack of Oxygen, Nitrogen and Argon. The atmosphere of Mars is comprised of about 95% Carbon Dioxide. We would need to build up a stable thick atmosphere capable of protecting us from radiation and it must have a pressure and gas mixture that would allow us to breath. Changing a planet is a massive undertaking and leaves us to question, where would we gather the resources to accomplish such a feat?

Mars isn’t the only planet we have gazed upon with ambitious eyes. Why attempt to change an entire planet when there might be billions of other planets that have everything we need already set up for us? There have been many planets found to be be in what is called a “Habitable Zone”, which is a zone that isn’t too far or to close to the star that the observed planet is orbiting. What is even more exciting is that so many good candidates for possible habitation have been found, and in such a tiny fraction of the sky. This means there could be thousands and thousands of planets in this “Habitable Zone” with liquid water and other elements needed for life just waiting out there for us to explore.

Just imagine having all new continents to explore and new geological features never seen before. Perhaps there are multiple moons and mountains that reach miles into the sky, even higher than our own mount Everest. Who will move there first, and which country gets what land? It’s these kind of questions the we love to ask, and hopefully someday we can achieve what seems to be the impossible and live on another planet.

NASA Lands Rover on Mars

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NASA successfully lands its car sized rover “Curiosity” on the surface of Mars after a 36 week flight through space at 10:32 p.m Aug 5th PDT.

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) successfully carried the rover to the Red Planet and set it on the surface using bridle cords to make this the most complex landing ever attempted on Mars.

The rover landed near the foot of a mountain approximately three miles high and 96 miles in diameter inside Gale Crater.NASA

An extremely intense moment overcame the team at JPL in Pasadena, California when they entered what they called “The Seven Minutes of Terror” in which the the whole mission was on autopilot as curiosity entered the martian atmosphere.

Curiosity has already returned many images from the surface of Mars as the rover is successfully communicating with the team at JPL. Curiosity carries 10 science instruments that have a combined mass 15 times larger than the previous rover payloads of Spirit and Opportunity. Some of these tools are the first of their kind to be used on Mars including a laser firing instrument that checks the elemental composition of rocks.

This mission personally brought back a lot of good feelings about the space program which has felt pretty slow lately. I hope we continue to push towards more exploration and advance our knowledge of the cosmos. There is an unknown amount potential in the universe that has yet to be tapped and I don’t think many people realize how important it is to keep testing our abilities and expanding our knowledge of the universe around us.