Become a Martian

The public can assist in analyzing the plethora of Mars data available from missions like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

NASA and Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash., have collaborated to create a Web site where Internet users can have fun while advancing their knowledge of Mars.

Drawing on observations from NASA’s Mars missions, the “Be a Martian” Web site will enable the public to participate as citizen scientists to improve Martian maps, take part in research tasks, and assist Mars science teams studying data about the Red Planet.

“We’re at a point in history where everyone can be an explorer,” said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “With so much data coming back from Mars missions that are accessible by all, exploring Mars has become a shared human endeavor. People worldwide can expand the specialized efforts of a few hundred Mars mission team members and make authentic contributions of their own.”

Participants will be able to explore details of the solar system’s grandest canyon, which resides on Mars. Users can call up images in the Valles Marineris canyon before moving on to chart the entire Red Planet. The collaboration of thousands of participants could assist scientists in producing far better maps, smoother zoom-in views, and make for easier interpretation of Martian surface changes.

By counting craters, the public also may help scientists determine the relative ages of small regions on Mars. In the past, counting Martian craters has posed a challenge because of the vast numbers involved. By contributing, Web site users will win game points assigned to a robotic animal avatar they select.

With a common goal of inspiring digital-age workforce development and life-long learning in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, NASA and Microsoft unveiled the Web site at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this week. The site also beckons software developers to win prizes for creating tools that provide access to and analysis of hundreds of thousands of Mars images for online, classroom and Mars mission team use.

“Industry leaders like NASA and Microsoft have a social responsibility as well as a vested interest in advancing science and technology education,” said Walid Abu-Hadba, corporate vice president of the Developer and Platform Evangelism Group at Microsoft. “We are excited to be working with NASA to provide new opportunities to engage with Mars mission data, and to help spark interest and excitement among the next generation of scientists and technologists.”

To encourage more public participation, the site also provides a virtual town hall forum where users can expand their knowledge by proposing Mars questions and voting on which are the most interesting to the community. Online talks by Mars experts will address some of the submitted questions. Other features include interactive tools for viewing Martian regions and movies about people who study Mars in diverse ways….

To enroll as a virtual Martian citizen and start exploring, visit: http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov

via Become a Martian.

Building a Better Alien-Calling Code

Alien-seeking researchers have designed a new, simple code for sending messages into space. To a reasonably clever alien with math skills and a bit of astronomical training, the messages should be easy to decipher.

As of now, Earthlings spend much more time searching for alien radio messages than broadcasting news of ourselves. We know how to do it, but relatively little attention has been paid to “ensuring that a transmitted message will be understandable to an alien listener,” wrote California Institute of Technology geoscientist Michael Busch and Rachel Reddick, a Stanford University physicist, in a study filed online Friday on arXiv.

According to Busch and Reddick, neither the Arecibo message, beamed at star cluster M13 in 1974, nor the Cosmic Calls sent in 1999 and 2003 were tested for decipherability. So the pair devised their own alien-friendly messaging system: Busch invented the code, and Reddick role-played the part of an alien trying to decode it.

Like the earlier codes, Busch’s used radio to send a string of ones and zeroes. But whereas those messages were meant to be translated into pictures, Busch’s code is supposed to be turned into mathematical equations.

Reddick received the code, minus a chunk at its beginning and fragments throughout its body, as if she’d tuned in late to a signal slightly distorted by its passage through space. Knowing nothing about the code, and using nothing but a pencil, paper and a computer’s search-and-replace function, she decoded its start: descriptions of gravity and atomic mass ratios, which are “dimensionless numbers that should be universally recognized.” Once Reddick worked those out, the rest of the message — descriptions of atoms, chemical formulas for the elements required for life on Earth, and details of our solar system — came quickly.

The code does presume that alien listeners have “at least an equivalent knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, and physics,” wrote Busch and Reddick. But even five undergraduate students needed only an hour to figure out a few of Busch’s mathematical and grammatical basics, so it can’t be that hard.

For now, it seems unlikely that the code will actually be sent into space. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence runs on a shoestring budget, and doesn’t directly receive national funding. But if it’s this cheap and easy to talk to aliens, perhaps humanity should try more often.

via Building a Better Alien-Calling Code | Wired Science | Wired.com.

New Space Telescope to Watch the Sun

A new solar telescope, scheduled to launch this winter, will probe the sun’s atmosphere and inner workings, helping scientists better understand how solar storms.

During its five-year mission, the Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) will seek to reveal how the sun’s magnetic field works, what governs the ups and downs of the solar cycle and how solar activity affects Earth.

“The sun is a magnetic variable star that fluctuates on times scales ranging from a fraction of a second to billions of years,” said Madhulika Guhathakurta, lead program scientist for the Living With a Star program (of which SDO is a part) at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. “SDO will show us how variable the sun really is and reveal the underlying physics of solar variability.”

Tracing magnetic fields

SDO will measure and observe the sun’s magnetic field, which powers all solar activity. Flow of hot, ionized gases in the sun’s convection zone — the region inside the sun where hot gas parcels rise and transport energy to the surface — act as electrical currents to generate the sun’s magnetic field.

The observatory will look at the fields at the surface of the sun and use those measurements to infer exactly where the fields originate inside the sun and where they are expressed as active regions, such as sunspots and coronal loops, to where they eject particles into space as coronal mass ejections and solar flares (both of which can impact the function of satellites and electrical grids on Earth).

The goal is to better understand how the sun’s magnetic field is generated and how its energy impacts solar radiation, which in turn affects the rest of the solar system, including Earth.

Ups and downs

SDO will also follow changes in the sun’s activity, which is known to rise and fall on a roughly 11-year cycle. A solar cycle is at its maximum when the greatest number of sunspots is counted in a year; the minimum occurs when the fewest are seen. Both of these markers can only be recognized after they have been passed.

And of course, the solar cycle doesn’t always follow that 11-year course. Between 1645 and 1715, for example, sunspots were rarely observed — a period called the Maunder Minimum — and Europe and North America both experienced bitterly cold winters — a time known as the “Little Ice Age.” (The sun is currently in a lull, with next maximum expected in 2013.)

- via Yahoo

Scientist expects fish-sized Aliens living under Ice on Jupiter Moon

In the oceans of a moon hundreds of millions of miles from the sun, something fishy may be alive—right now.

Below its icy crust Jupiter’s moon Europa is believed to host a global ocean up to a hundred miles (160 kilometers) deep, with no land to speak of at the surface. (See “Jupiter Moon Has Violent, Hidden Oceans, Study Suggests.“)

And the extraterrestrial ocean is currently being fed more than a hundred times more oxygen than previous models had suggested, according to provocative new research.

That amount of oxygen would be enough to support more than just microscopic life-forms: At least three million tons of fishlike creatures could theoretically live and breathe on Europa, said study author Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

“There’s nothing saying there is life there now,” said Greenberg, who presented his work last month at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences. “But we do know there are the physical conditions to support it.”

In fact, based on what we know about the Jovian moon, parts of Europa’s seafloor should greatly resemble the environments around Earth’s deep-ocean hydrothermal vents, said deep-sea molecular ecologist Timothy Shank.

“I’d be shocked if no life existed on Europa,” said Shank, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who was not involved in the new study.

via Could Jupiter Moon Harbor Fish-Size Life?.

I think I see them…

Shuttle Atlantis Arrives at Space Station

The space shuttle Atlantis and its crew of six arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) Wednesday to drop off some massive spare parts for the orbiting laboratory.

The two vehicles linked up on time at 11:53 a.m. EST as the two spacecraft flew 220 miles above Earth.

“We’re crashing the party,” Atlantis commander Charlie Hobaugh radioed to the waiting station crew when the shuttle was about a mile away. “We’re looking forward to seeing you guys,” station astronaut Jeff Williams replied.

- via http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,575605,00.html

Listen to incoming meteors (or UFOs) live

The Air Force Space Surveillance Radar is scanning the skies above Texas. When a meteor or satellite passes over the facility–ping!–there is an echo. Click on the button to listen to a live audio feed:

http://wowzaweb.streamguys.com/~spaceweather/

Ooh! I heard one!  Hmm, that one sounded while a space whale… Interesting.

Mystery ‘dark flow’ hints of another universe, a BIG one.

SOMETHING big is out there beyond the visible edge of our universe. That’s the conclusion of the largest analysis to date of over 1000 galaxy clusters streaming in one direction at blistering speeds. Some researchers say this so-called “dark flow” is a sign that other universes nestle next door.

Last year, Sasha Kashlinsky of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and colleagues identified an unusual pattern in the motion of around 800 galaxy clusters. They studied the clusters’ motion in the “afterglow” of the big bang, as measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). The photons of this afterglow collide with electrons in galaxy clusters as they travel across space to the Earth, and this subtly changes the afterglow’s temperature.

The team combined the WMAP data with X-ray observations and found the clusters were streaming at up to 1000 kilometres per second towards one particular part of the cosmos (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol 686, p L49).

Many researchers argued the dark flow would not turn up in later observations, but now the team claim to have confirmed its existence. Their latest analysis reveals 1400 clusters are part of the flow, and that it continues to around 3 billion light years from Earth, a sizeable fraction of the distance to the edge of the observable universe (arxiv.org/abs/0910.4958). This is twice as far as seen in the previous study.

The dark flow appears to have been caused shortly after the big bang by something no longer in the observable universe. It has no effect today because reaching across this horizon would involve travelling faster than light.

One explanation for the flow would be the gravity of a huge concentration of matter, but this is very unlikely. Within the standard big bang picture, massive cosmic structures were “seeded” by random quantum fluctuations, so overall, matter should be spread evenly.

There could be an exotic explanation. Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, thinks the flow is a sign of a neighbouring universe.

via Mystery ‘dark flow’ extends towards edge of universe – space – 16 November 2009 – New Scientist.

Splash! NASA moon crash struck lots of water

Suddenly, the moon looks exciting again. It has lots of water, scientists said Friday — a thrilling discovery that sent a ripple of hope for a future astronaut outpost in a place that has always seemed barren and inhospitable.

Experts have long suspected there was water on the moon. Confirmation came from data churned up by two NASA spacecraft that intentionally slammed into a lunar crater last month.

“Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit. We found a significant amount,” said Anthony Colaprete, lead scientist for the mission, holding up a white water bucket for emphasis.

The lunar crash kicked up at least 25 gallons and that’s only what scientists could see from the plumes of the impact, Colaprete said.

Some space policy experts say that makes the moon attractive for exploration again. Having an abundance of water would make it easier to set up a base camp for astronauts, supplying drinking water and a key ingredient for rocket fuel.

“Having definitive evidence that there is substantial water is a significant step forward in making the moon an interesting place to go,” said George Washington University space policy scholar John Logsdon.

Even so, members of the blue-ribbon panel reviewing NASA’s future plans said it doesn’t change their conclusion that the program needs more money to get beyond near-Earth orbit. The panel wants NASA to look at other potential destinations like asteroids and Mars.

“This new and terrific result reassures us about lunar resources, but … the challenges currently facing the human spaceflight program remain,” Chris Chyba, a Princeton astrophysicist who is on the panel, said in an e-mail.

President George W. Bush had proposed a more than $100 billion plan to return astronauts to the moon, then go on to Mars; a test flight of an early version of a new rocket was a success last month. President Barack Obama appointed the special panel to look at the entire moon exploration program. The decision is now up to the White House, and NASA’s lunar plans are somewhat on hold until then.

via The Associated Press: Splash! NASA moon crash struck lots of water.

The water is inside the rock, not in pools or lakes like this:

 

Are Earth’s Oceans Made Of Extraterrestrial Material?

Contrary to preconceived notions, the atmosphere and the oceans were perhaps not formed from vapors emitted during intense volcanism at the dawning of our planet. Francis Albarède of the Laboratoire des Sciences de la Terre (CNRS / ENS Lyon / Université Claude Bernard) suggests that water was not part of the Earth's initial inventory but stems from the turbulence caused in the outer Solar System by giant planets. Ice-covered asteroids thus reached the Earth around one hundred million years after the birth of the planets.The Earth's water could therefore be extraterrestrial, have arrived late in its accretion history, and its presence could have facilitated plate tectonics even before life appeared. The conclusions of the study carried out by Albarède feature in an article published on the 29 October 2009 in the journal Nature.

Space agencies have got the message: wherever there is life there has to be water. Around 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth was bequeathed with sufficient water for oceans to form and for life to find favorable niches in the seas and on the continents resulting from plate tectonics. In comparison, the Moon and Mercury are dry, mortally cold deserts, Mars dried up very quickly and the surface of Venus is a burning inferno.

According to books, the ocean and the atmosphere were formed from volcanic gases and the Earth’s interior is the source of volatile elements. However, the rocks of the Earth’s mantle are deficient in water (geochemists estimate its concentration at two hundredth percent). The same is true on Earth’s sister planets, Venus and Mars. The main reason proposed by Albarède is that, during the formation of the Solar System, the temperature never dropped sufficiently between the Sun and the orbit of Jupiter for volatile elements to be able to condense with planetary material. The arrival of water on Earth therefore corresponds to a late episode of planetary accretion.

It is widely accepted that terrestrial planets are formed over several million years by the agglomeration of asteroids (of kilometric size) then protoplanets (of the size of Mars). The arrival of the last of these large objects corresponds to the lunar impact, 30 million years after the formation of the Solar System. Initially, this hurly-burly took place between planetary objects located within the snow line, in other words between the Sun and the asteroid belt. This space, swept by the electromagnetic winds of the young Sun, was then too hot for water and volatile elements to condense within it.

The major delivery of volatile elements on our planet could have corresponded to a phenomenon that occurred some tens of millions of years after the lunar impact: this was the big clean up of the outer Solar System initiated by the giant planets. Due to their very strong gravity, they sent the final ice-rich planetary rubble in all directions, including in our own direction. Penetrating into the mantle through the surface, the water could then have softened the Earth and reduced the strain at which materials shatter. Plate tectonics then began and with it the emergence of continents, conditions probably necessary for the appearance of life. Mars dried out before water managed to penetrate in depth and, as regards Venus, the conditions that reigned before the violent remodeling of its surface, 800 million years ago, by intense volcanism are still not known.

At a time when the habitability of extraterrestrial planets is beginning to be explored seriously, understanding what made earth the only place that harbors life is a key question.

via Are Earth’s Oceans Made Of Extraterrestrial Material?.

Marvelous view … and a mystery

The OSIRIS camera on the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft captured

this view of Earth from 393,000 miles (633,000 kilometers) away on Thursday.

Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft is making its final flyby past Earth on its way to an asteroid and a comet – a close encounter that should yield beautiful pictures of our home planet, and perhaps the answer to a cosmic mystery as well.

Rosetta was launched five years ago and has already made two gravitational flybys past Earth, plus one past Mars. Friday's flyby represents the final boost, slingshotting the probe past the asteroid Lutetia for a quick look next year, and then pushing it along to the main event at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014.

When Rosetta arrives at its destination, it will send a small lander down to the comet's 2.4-mile-wide (4-kilometer-wide) icy nucleus and spend two years in orbit, studying Churyumov-Gerasimenko as it approaches the sun. Rosetta's 11 scientific instruments will record how the comet is transformed by the sun's warmth.

Time for more marvels

Rosetta has been snapping marvelous pictures of the sights it has encountered over the past five years, ranging from our round blue planet, the moon and a 3-D Mars to the asteroid Steins, a diamond-shaped space rock topped by a monster crater.

via Marvelous view … and a mystery – Cosmic Log – msnbc.com.