Month: July 2011

New Mars rover will look for signs of liquid water

Posted by

An enhanced-color image of the Gale crater (Credit: NASA/Steven Hobbs)

Scientists at NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory have selected the crater ‘Gale’ as the landing site of the rover, Curiosity, when it visits the Red Planet next year to search for signs of historical liquid water.

This will mark the 15th time the U.S. has visited Mars since it was first photographed by the Mariner 4 orbiter in 19651. Mars is of great interest to scientists, not only because of its proximity to Earth (it’s our second-closest planetary neighbor after Venus), but because the Red Planet has been the subject of intense speculation about the presence of alien life for over 200 years.

Speculation about Martian life started in the late 1700s with German-British astronomers and siblings, William and Caroline Herschel, who observed the Red Planet and noticed that it had some features in common with Earth, including axis tilt, length of day, and seasonal changes in its appearance. Moved by these similarities, William speculated that Mars had inhabitants. From his address to the Royal Society in 1784:

It appears that this planet is not without considerable atmosphere; for besides the permanent spots on the surface, I have often noticed occasional changes of partial bright belts; and also once a darkish one… These alterations we can hardly ascribe to any other cause than the variable disposition of clouds and vapors floating in the atmosphere of the planet… Mars has a considerable but modest atmosphere, so that its inhabitants probably enjoy a situation in many respects similar to our own.

In the late 1800s, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli added to this speculation when he observed what he thought were canals on the surface of Mars. Schiaparelli’s observations inspired the construction of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona to further study the phenomena. Astronomer Percival Lowell, who founded the observatory, became convinced that the canals were signs of advanced, intelligent life on Mars. From there, it wasn’t much of a leap to science fiction stories about Martian life, including H. G. Wells’ dark tale, The War of the Worlds, and C. S. Lewis’ Christian-themed Out of the Silent Planet.

Despite the fervor over possible Martian life, there were astronomers who questioned whether there was any credible visual evidence for the canals. These questions persisted until Mariner 4 was sent to Mars and failed to detect any signs of the infamous canals. Since then, the focus on the search for life on Mars has shifted to evidence for historical, probably much more primitive, forms of life. If such life ever existed on Mars, it would have required the presence of liquid water, which is why scientists are so eager to find signs of the stuff.

Continue reading →

Largest ever mass of cosmic water discovered

Posted by

1

Turns out water has been present in the universe for most of its history. Astronomers studying a distant quasar — a supermassive black hole actively feeding on gaseous material — detected the presence of water vapor in the cold material surrounding the quasar.

Water vapor has been discovered elsewhere/when in the universe, particularly in water masers emanating from objects as varied as the Saturn system to far-distant galaxies, but this latest observation pushes the earliest detection of water back to a mere 1.6 billion years after the big bang. It’s also the largest mass of water ever discovered — about “140 trillion times more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.”

Continue reading →

There it is! Wait … no … er, maybe?

Posted by

New results from the Large Hadron Collider have physicists wondering if they have actually, for reals now, detected the signal of a Higgs boson, aka the “God particle.” Earlier this year, scientists at Tevatron (an accelerator at Fermilab) thought they might have picked up the signal of a Higgs boson, but excitement turned to disappointment as it was revealed last month that the result could not be replicated with Tevatron’s other detector.

The Higgs boson is the lynchpin of the Standard Model of particle physics, explaining as it does why particles have mass, so physicists are trying like all get-out to find it. This latest hint at its existence is interesting, but nobody at LHC will be making any definitive statements about the result until they’ve analyzed the data and determined whether these fluctuations are statistically important.

Continue reading →

Fourth moon discovered around Pluto

Posted by

2

Ultraviolet images taken with the Hubble show the location of P4.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered another moon orbiting Pluto, joining the ranks of Pluto’s three other known moons. The largest, Charon, was discovered in 1978 at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Flagstaff. The existence of two other moons — Hydra and Nix — was confirmed using the Hubble telescope in 2005. The newly-discovered moon has been given the tentative name P4. (Presumably the discoverers or the IAU will come up with something more interesting once a little more is known about it. I offer ‘Zaphod’ as a candidate. It’s about time we started introducing ephemeral pop culture to outer space.)

Incidentally, Pluto is the only member of the original nine-planet system that has not been explored by an Earth probe; but that will change in 2015 when the New Horizons probe, launched in 2006, flies by to study the dwarf planet and its four (known) moons.

Continue reading →

The flying car is here!

Posted by

2

If you’ve got a driver’s license, a light-aircraft license, and about $230,000 in spare cash, you can put in an order for a Terrafugia Transition, which is supposed to be available by late 2012 (supply delays have pushed this date back from the planned 2011 roll-out date).

You won’t be able to use it to fly out of traffic (or back in time), but you can drive it to the airport and take off from there. A particularly nice feature is that it runs on plain old unleaded gasoline whether you’re driving it or flying it.

Final voyage of Atlantis marks the end of the shuttle program

Posted by

1

Space Shuttle Atlantis roared into space at 11:30 EDT this morning, marking the final launch in a program that started three decades ago.

This pretty well sums up my sentiments on this day:

“It’s kind of a letdown knowing we now have to rely on foreign interests” to launch American astronauts into space, said Terry Deguentz, a firefighter from St. Louis who said he was friends with one of Atlantis’s astronauts, mission specialist Sandy Magnus. “American ingenuity has been downplayed in the last decade. Once we let it go, I wonder if we can get it back.”

Continue reading →