A manned mission to Mars could happen sometime in the coming decades, possibly by 2030. One of the safety issues, which was discussed by researchers and public health experts at the Humans 2 Mars Summit, is how to deal with dust on the Red Planet.

According to some of them, the martian dust’s high silicate mineral content could produce bad chemical effects by interacting with water in human lung tissue. While Richard Williams, NASA’s chief health and medical officer, was more concerned about perchlorates in the dust which can cause damage to the thyroid gland.

But of course human visitors would be wearing spacesuits on Mars as the planet’s oxygen content is insufficient and there are radiation issues as well. But the dust can stick to the suits and reach living spaces to result in health problems, damage to critical instruments and more troubles. Maybe they will find some way to clean their spacesuits perfectly before entering their accommodation.

The good news is that we can collect a lot of data from the robotic missions, and then gain as much necessary info as possible to ensure full safety for us to land and live on Mars. According to Grant Anderson, co-founder of Paragon Space Development, “The Apollo programme spent $17 million trying to solve their lunar dust problems, and I’m not sure they made much progress, because they had to do the tests on Earth. For Mars, the precursor robotic missions should all have some way to test how dust is going to kill you“.

All this is very exciting, right? But when are these guys going to plan a trip to the new Earth? Maybe it will happen after a few centuries?

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In 2009, winter ended at Saturn’s North Pole and began to let sunlight in to brighten up the place. It was then that scientists discovered that there was a massive hurricane in the region. Three years later, in November 2012, NASA’s unmanned Cassini spacecraft moved into position to capture images and video of the storm.

What you see above is a false color image of the hurricane, with the color red corresponding to low clouds and green to high ones. It has cloud speeds of up to 330 miles per hour and its eye is 1,250 miles wide, which is about 20 times the size of an average hurricane on our planet. But they do not know for how many years it’s been active.

Scientists are wondering how such a hurricane exists on Saturn with just small amounts of water vapor. Their study will certainly shed more light on how storms are formed here on Earth.

So, that’s a hurricane the size of Australia. You think that’s big? You clearly haven’t heard about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which is a storm two to three times the size of Earth.

What did you think of the videos above? Pretty fascinating stuff, wouldn’t you say?

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Astronomers love to look for liquid water on other planets. The reason for that is not the need to find a place to drop by to quench our thirst in between future space travel, but water is one of the essential ingredients of life on our planet. So, if an exoplanet is in the habitable zone (far enough from the host star to be cool enough for liquid water to exist, and not too far that there is only ice), life could exist on it.

Kepler has found two such planets in the new Kepler-62 exosolar system. These planets were not seen directly, but the astronomers came to the conclusion that they existed after noticing the dimming of their host star at regular intervals.

The astronomers are saying that these planets are most probably solid rather than molten and are at a correct distance from the host star to support liquid water.

Among these new planets Kepler 62-e (1.61 Earth radii) is in the “empirical habitable zone”, which means that it should be cooler than Venus. But Kepler 62-f, which is just a bit larger than Earth at 1.41 Earth radii, is inside both the calculated and empirical habitable zones. 62-f is at that distance from the Kepler 62 star, meaning that it could have splashing water at the surface.

But whether or not there is life out there is the question. That most probably won’t be answered any time soon. Do you find the thought about life on other planets exciting?

Source: ArsTechnica

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Our astronauts would love to get themselves into a more flexible suit while floating through space. Takahiko Hariyama and his team at Japan’s Hamamatsu University School of Medicine appear to have found a solution. Their so called nano-suit is currently just for insects but it could be developed for use in space.

If we try to take a nanometer-level resolution image of an insect using a scanning electron microscope, that creature won’t survive the process since it is required that the subject is kept in a vacuum.

But Hariyama and his colleagues noticed that when electrons were fired at a fruit fly larva polymerization caused its skin molecules to link together to form a barrier, and they named this barrier as the nano-suit. The nano-suit helped the larva to survive in a vacuum by preventing the escape of moisture from its body.

But the formation of a natural nano-suit did not happen with other larvae. So they developed a suit using a chemical called Tween 20 and water. This artificial nano-suit ensured the survival of the insects. And since it remains flexible without breaking, scientists can now try to capture nanometer-level videos of insects while they are in motion.

Hariyama is currently trying to develop an artificial nano-suit that can also protect an insect from electron radiation.

This certainly could find applications in spacesuit development for astronauts. You can imagine a very thin and flexible space shield capable of protecting humans from radiation and other issues.

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Apparently, the current project is to “lasso” an asteroid from outer space and bring it closer to Earth so they can study it. In “kidnapping” the space rock, NASA can then send astronauts to visit it and to perform various scientific experiments on it. If the asteroid were a living being, we’d almost say this was cruel, but I guess it’s just a rock.

The main goal of this project is to learn enough about asteroids such that we can avoid a catastrophic collision in the future. Many astrophysicists have already warned us about these potential collisions and the kind of impact (terrible pun intended) they could have on the planet as we know it. We need to know how to best deflect an incoming asteroid so that it will avoid crashing into the Earth.

So, NASA wants a pet rock so it can pluck off its wings, poking and prodding at its body for scientific curiosity. I guess we are all kids at heart, even if we have bolder goals and ambitions.

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This can severely hamper communications with the probes we have floating around on Mars. It’s not a huge deal for the data that they’re sending back to us if there are “pieces” of data broken off, since we can simply get those probes to re-transmit the data. However, this become a much bigger problem for commands being sent from Earth to NASA’s Mars spacecraft. If the probes receive only partial instructions, things can go pretty haywire. And that would be bad.

The phenomenon is called solar conjunction and it basically means that the Earth and Mars will be precisely on opposite sides of the sun. This happens about every 26 months. To further exacerbate the issue, the sun will also be at the peak of its active phase around the same time. So, NASA figured it was best to just take that time off. The probes can keep doing their thing with some pre-scheduled tasks, but they’re not going to be quite as active with the whole transmission thing for those three weeks.

Odyssey, Curiosity, and the rest of the NASA gear over on Mars will be sending back daily beeps to Earth to let us know that they’re still doing okay.

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Voyager 1, which was launched 35 years ago, is now the most distant man-made object to leave our planet. But where is it now? According to W.R. Webber of the New Mexico State University Department of Astronomy and F.B. McDonald of the University of Maryland Institute of Physical Science and Technology, the probe left the Solar System on August last year. It seems that Nasa doesn’t agree though.

Launched on 5^th September 1977, Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter in 1979 before visiting Saturn in 1980. Helped by the giant planets, the probe was shot toward interstellar space.

Weber and McDonald say that Anomalous Cosmic Rays (ACR), cosmic ray particles trapped by the Sun’s magnetic field, used to dominate the radiation detected by the probe before August 25, 2012. But on that day, ACR intensity dropped to less than one percent within hours, and kept on decreasing over the days that followed. Meanwhile, they noted an increase in the intensity of Galactic Cosmic Rays, which are from outside the Solar System. They are saying that this data suggests that Voyager 1 has left the Solar System.

Webber says, “Within just a few days, the heliospheric intensity of trapped radiation decreased, and the cosmic ray intensity went up as you would expect if it exited the heliosphere“.

But NASA disagrees. Back in December 2012, the Voyager team announced that Voyager 1 is within ‘the magnetic highway’, a region where energetic particles changed dramatically. NASA says that an indicator of the probe reaching interstellar space will be a change in the direction of the magnetic field. That change is yet to happen.

[Source]

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Methuselah, according to the Hebrew Bible, was the oldest person to ever live. So it is certainly very appropriate giving that name to the oldest known star out there in the universe. Milky Way galaxy’s Methuselah star, formally known as HD 140283, was actually thought to be 16 billion years old. But that didn’t make sense as the Big Bang that created our universe happened about 13.8 billion years ago. But now, new research seems to have put things in order.

Howard Bond, of Pennsylvania State University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and his team used the Hubble Space Telescope to find the correct distance to the star. It was found to be 190.1 light-years. Then they worked out its intrinsic brightness, and also learned about the star’s burn rate, composition and internal structure.

The result of all these calculations is that they found Methuselah’s age to be 14.5 billion years, but there’s a margin of error of around 800 million years.

According to Bond, “Put all of those ingredients together, and you get an age of 14.5 billion years, with a residual uncertainty that makes the star’s age compatible with the age of the universe“.

So it is 13.7 billion years old, therefore younger than the universe, just barely though. But future calculations might bring down its age even further, but by that time they might find an even older star. What are your thoughts on this star and the age of the universe? 

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Last month, we read about how the European Space Agency was teaming up with architectural firm Foster and Partners. The idea is that they would use 3D printing technology to build a lunar base. This makes a lot of sense, since it utilizes existing resources on the moon to build those structures, rather than shuttling all those materials from Earth. It seems that NASA is working on a similar idea.

NASA is also considering the implementation of 3D printing tech for a lunar base near the moon’s south pole (where sunlight is nearly constant; good for solar energy), but they’re going about it in a slightly different way. The tech is called SinterHab and the spider robot would “sinter” the lunar dust. This means that it will heat it up to just below its melting point, allowing the super fine nanoparticles to fuse together into a solid block of ceramic-like material. The particles would reach temperatures of up to 1500 degrees Celsius during this process.

The main advantage that SinterHab has over the ESA proposition is that this doesn’t require the shuttling of binding agents from Earth. The resulting blocks of material could then be assembled into habitats and other structures that the astronauts could then use as a base.

Embedded above is a video of the Athlete rover, which is a half-scale model of what they would want to bring to the moon for this project. There are 48 3D cameras on board. All they’d have to do is attach the microwave 3D printer to one of its six legs and we’d have ourselves a lunar construction vehicle. Interestingly, Athlete can also split in half into two three-legged rovers for increased versatility.

More work is needed, to be sure, but projects like this clearly demonstrate that there’s more to 3D printers than just making awful-sounding records and 3D busts of Yoda.

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Not including a long 563,000,000 km (350,000,000 mi) journey, NASA’s Mars Rover Curiosity has been on Mars for nearly 7 month now. In this time, Curiosity has been gathering data about the “Red Planet”. Up until now, the journey has gone smoothly. However, corrupted memory could be putting Curiosity at risk.

Yesterday, NASA’s Curiosity’s Twitter feed read: ”Don’t flip out: I just flipped over to my B-side computer while the team looks into an A-side memory issue”.

The source of this hiccup is corrupted memory files on the A-side computer. In response to the rover failing to follow through with it’s normal daily tasks, Curiosity was put into a minimal activity state known as “Safe Mode”. This move, in addition to the switch to the B-side computer, will keep the rover on hold until it is properly updated.

Richard Cook of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. says that ”We’re still early on in the process. We have probably several days, maybe a week of activities to get everything back and reconfigured.”

The main goal of the switch to safe mode and the reconfiguration is to get both the A and B computers health. Although this issue will slightly delay the rover, Richard Cook also noted that it will have no affect on Curiosity’s overall long-term mission.

Have you been following the Curiosity rover? Do you think that we should be spending more time and effort in space exploration? Let us know in the comments below.

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