Massive clouds erupted into Mars’ atmosphere and no one knows why

Mars still has mysteries to investigate. Since we are still studying Earth’s atmosphere I’m not surprised we find strange clouds around Mars.

Earth’s Magnetosphere

It might sound like some super-power, and it is a super thing, because the Earth’s magnetosphere protects the organic life forms underneath from highly energized electrons and protons that arrive from the sun as a part of the solar wind. The particles are captured by the magnetic field lines around the planet and move around from the poles until the are absorbed or released. A new video from NASA shows what would happen if a large Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) happened like one in 1859. One big difference between today and then is the power grid of many countries would be affected by such an event. It might ruin some of the satellites around our planet as well. Watch this video to see the simulation.

New red giants found to be farthest stars in the Milky Way

When you look up at the night sky, in a reasonably dark area, you can see the line of stars that look a wide, white stripe that make up the Milky Way galaxy. These stars orbit the galactic center, full of black holes, similar to how the planets of our solar system orbit our sun. Two newly discovered red giants are much farther than any other star (considered to be in our galaxy) discovered from our galaxy and present a puzzle to astronomers as to how they got there. The stars also will provide another method for measuring the mass of the Milky Way galaxy as scientists study their orbits. To find these stars the team started with a list of 6 million candidates from public catalogs to look for distant red stars and found 404 that met their criteria. One challenge was to distinguish large red stars that are far away from small red stars that would be closer. They were able to take more observations and found two M-type red giant stars that are more than 750,000 light years from our planet. 

Read more at Scientific American.

Read more at Times of India.

Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer.

 

The farthest star in our galaxy is at the center of this picture.

Martian rock and roll

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has found a 1/3 of a mile trail left by a large rolling rock on Mars. On top of that the pattern it left behind is a strange shape, probably dues to its unusual shape. Even more strange, it seems to have ended the roll with its tip pointed up in the air. 

Read more here.

 

 

Martian boulder trail.

Volcanic Activity on Io

Io is about the size of our Moon, but has active volcanoes on its surface. Recently astronomers were able to capture some images of eruptions that cast lava into space. The cause of the volcanic activity is due to the gravitational forces that are pulling on Io because of Jupiter and the other moons. 

Read more about the images at Forbes: http://blogs-images.forbes.com/bridaineparnell/files/2014/08/Io-volanic-eruption.jpg

 

 

Lava erupting into space from Io.

Gaia launches to look at 1 billion stars

The European Space Agency successfully launched a new satellite that aims to capture images of 1 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy over 5 years. While that number sounds amazing that is only about 1% of the stars that are contained in our galaxy. The mission is focused on mapping the stars in our galaxy so we can understand how they move and what regions have what types of stars. Read more at the Guardian’s story.

 

How Apollo ended.

The goal of landing a man on the moon was clearly defined by Kennedy, but the details of how to do that and what to do with the technology discovered in the process were unclear.  An article on wired.com shows how the uncertainty in goals and poorly defined mission objectives led to an ambitious 20 mission plan, but were cut short by spending concerns amid the Vietnam War.

I think this will show up again with how to plan the next stage of moon landings or a trip to an asteroid or Mars.  What is the goal? To put a boot print there? To determine feasibility? To build a long-term structure for human habitation.  Resource gathering is one thing, even if it is not economically feasible, that can justify the large expenditure, but did Christopher Columbus know he would find the new world on his way to “India?” Can we know all the returns on a future exploration?

 

Apollo flag.

 

In the interest of science

What exactly does a space administration do? Is it all about sending people to the moon or an asteroid that has not been named? Should it do science. What is the top priority and how should it do that?
If you make the case that science matters, look at the return from the science missions. Do you want weather forecasting? Need satellites, communication, and analysis. You want to study X-ray emission from distant neutron stars? You need a detector, transmitter, and guidance system. If you send people, then you can build a station. Look at the research going on in Antarctica. It takes a substantial budget to create a living condition where useful science can be done.  When budgets are tight focus on scientific return for investment. Then turn that knowledge into better systems.

Amazing ATHLETE. Meet the workhorse of a future moon mission.

Moving cargo is a very necessary job when trying to build a moon base. Yet, you don’t want astronauts being lunar movers. So building a robot to do that job sounds like a great idea. So after building the robot the next step would be controlling it from a safe location. Gizmodo put up a good article on this.

Challenges of human space flight to Mars

A good article on human space flight that summarizes some of the challenges of going to Mars is available online. The author is a colleague of mine and has many years of experience in satellite systems and communications technology development.  I like the article because it points out some of the challenges of travelling to Mars without getting needlessly technical.