Life on Mars? NASA Wants Your Help Finding It

Life on Mars? NASA Wants Your Help Finding It
by Chris Taylor on Mashable

Right now, the Curiosity Rover is sailing through space en route to the Red Planet. The one-ton, car-sized beast should hopefully land intact on the surface of Mars in early August, and we can’t wait to see what it finds. Neither can NASA.

But after the robot rover has combed, poked at and rolled over the rocky surface: what then? What’s the next step in finding life on Mars, and putting human life on the Martian surface in the next few decades — especially given the space agency’s unfortunate budget constraints?

Well, NASA announced its plans to draw up a Red Planet road map Friday — and you’re invited to contribute.

“Receiving input from our community is vital to energize the planning process,” Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters, told reporters on a conference call.

“We’ll integrate inputs to ensure the next steps for the Mars Exploration Program will support science, as well as longer-term human exploration and technology goals.”

As McCuistion spoke, five-time astronaut and NASA associate administrator John Grunsfeld tweeted this:

John Grunsfeld@SciAstro

Have a good idea about Mars exploration? we'd like to hear about it: lpi.usra.edu/meetings/marsc…

13 Apr 12

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The input process isn’t yet as public-friendly as it could be. That link takes you to the homepage of the“Concepts and Approaches for Mars Exploration” conference, to take place at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston in July. You can sign up to attend and to submit a paper.

But McCuistion promises there will be more web tools for public input, and that the conference will be broadcast live online. The resulting Martian road map will be released in August — around the same time Curiosity lands.

Grunsfeld and the rest of the NASA team seem to be taking a lemons-to-lemonade approach to the Obama administration’s budget cuts. “We’re forced into different strategies,” he said, “but that can help you find different solutions.”

In any case, finding some kind of life on Mars may boost NASA’s bottom line. “Based on observations in the last six months, it’s reasonable to think there may be life on Mars today,” Grunsfeld added.

“If there’s life already there, we have to understand the effect on humans. It’s not just the question of are we alone, it’s a question of safety … we want to enable a path to putting more life on Mars, ie. us.”

How do you think we should approach the Red Planet? Tell us — and NASA — in the comments.

Source: http://mashable.com/2012/04/13/nasa-mars-mission/

NASA Extends Planet Hunting Kepler Mission Through 2016

NASA Extends Planet-Hunting Kepler Mission Through 2016
by Space.com on Mashable
Space.com is a Mashable publishing partner that is the world's No. 1 source for news of astronomy, skywatching, space exploration, commercial spaceflight and related technologies. This article is reprinted with the publisher's permission.

NASA’s prolific Kepler space observatory, which has found signs of thousands of alien planets, will keep hunting strange new worlds for at least four more years, the space agency announced Wednesday (April 4).

Funding for the Kepler mission, which has discovered more than 2,300 potential alien planets to date, was slated to run out this November. But a NASA review committee has recommended the telescope’s planet-hunting effort be extended through at least fiscal year 2016.

“Kepler mission extended through FY16!” Kepler scientists wrote in a Twitter post today. “We are grateful and ecstatic!”

Searching for alien worlds

The $600 milllion Kepler observatory launched in March 2009 on a mission to find Earth-size planets in the so-called habitable zones of their parent stars — a just-right range of distances that could support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it. [Gallery: A World of Kepler Planets]

The telescope finds alien planets using what scientists call the transit method: It detects the telltale dips in brightness caused when an alien world crosses in front of, or transits, its star from Kepler’s perspective. The Kepler spacecraft typically needs to witness three of these transits to firmly identify a planet candidate.

The instrument has been extremely productive, finding 61 confirmed alien planets to date, along with roughly 2,300 “candidate” worlds that still need to be vetted by follow-up observations. Kepler team members have estimated that the vast majority of these candidates — 80 percent or more — will likely end up being the real deal.

More time to look

Every two years, NASA conducts a peer-reviewed assessment of the missions in its astrophysics division, an activity called a Senior Review. This year’s committee gave Kepler high marks for both performance and potential.

“The Kepler mission is an outstanding success,” committee members wrote in their report. “Kepler is not only a unique source of exoplanet discoveries, but also an organizing and rallying point for exoplanet research.”

Extending Kepler’s mission could yield big dividends for several reasons, researchers have said. Because of the three-transit requirement, most of the worlds Kepler has found so far zip around their stars relatively quickly, in close-in orbits.

So granting Kepler at least four more years gives it a chance to look for planets in more distant orbits, allowing the telescope to survey the habitable zones of warmer stars. (It would take a hypothetical alien version of Kepler a minimum of three years, after all, to see Earth transit the sun three times.)

Seeing more transits will also increase the signal-to-noise ratio for closer-in planets, allowing more of them to be detected, researchers have said.

The review committee’s report did not explicitly lay out funding for Kepler’s extended operations, but Kepler team members have said that it costs about $20 million per year to operate the mission at its current level.

The review looked favorably on all nine astrophysics missions it examined — which also include the Hubble, Chandra, Fermi and Spitzer space telescopes — saying all had performed well and should continue operating through at least fiscal year 2014.

This article originally published at Space.com here.

Today’s Top Stories: HTC One X Looks Good in Benchmarks, NASA Launches 5 ATREX Rockets

Today’s Top Stories: HTC One X Looks Good in Benchmarks, NASA Launches 5 ATREX Rockets
March 27, 2012 by Stan Schroeder on Mashable

Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. Today, we’re looking at three particularly interesting stories.

New iPad Heats Up As Much as Android Tablets [REPORT]

The Heatgate – controversy around the alleged heating up of Apple’s new iPad – was probably never a real issue, and recent research adds more proof to that conclusion. PC World measured the heat levels of several Android tablets, including Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime and the LTE version of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, and they were comparable to Apple’s new iPad. It may run a little hotter than iPad 2, but it’s probably not too hot for most users.

Dual-Core Version of HTC One X Performs Strongly in Benchmarks

A series of benchmarks performed on AT&T’s version of HTC’s upcoming smartphone, the HTC One X, puts it far ahead of the competition in terms of speed. Unlike the European version of the device, which will be Tegra 3-based, the AT&T version sports a dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor.

NASA Launches 5 ATREX Rockets

NASA has announced it has successfully launched 5 ATREX rockets on a mission to better understand the high-altitude jet stream located 60 to 65 miles above the surface of the Earth. The Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment (ATREX) mission will create an artificial cloud, allowing scientists and the public to “see” the winds in space.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mattjeacock

Amazon CEO Bezos to Rescue Apollo 11 Rocket Engines From the Briny Deep

Amazon CEO Bezos to Rescue Apollo 11 Rocket Engines From the Briny Deep

By Sam Laird For Mashable

Minutes after the historic Apollo 11 mission launched in July 1969, its five F-1 engines were discharged and dropped safely into the Atlantic Ocean. For more than 40 years, no one knew exactly where they landed.

Until now. Until Jeff Bezos.

The Amazon CEO announced in a blog post that a team of “undersea pros” found the engines 14,000 below sea level on the floor of the Atlantic. Now, he says, “we’re making plans to raise one or more of them” back to dry land.

Bezos did not disclose how he and his team know for sure the engines are in fact from the Apollo 11 mission, nor did he say how exactly they were located. But he does hope to have the first one that gets raised made available for viewing in the Smithsonian, and a possible second placed on display at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered. The engines are still NASA property, but Bezos says no public funding will be used for the rescue mission.

Bezos is not the only incredibly rich guy to do some serious underwater exploring lately. Titanic director James Cameron recently returned from a history-making solo voyage to the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench, the deepest underwater location on Earth. Cameron has been discussing the trip on his Twitter account.

The Apollo 11 engine rescue mission is not the only manifestation of Bezos’s love for space exploration. He is a principle operator of the private — and somewhat mysterious — space exploration company Blue Origin. He says his love for space began as a young child watching NASA’s Apollo 11 mission unfold on TV.

“NASA is one of the few institutions I know that can inspire five-year-olds,” Bezos wrote in his blog post. “It sure inspired me, and with this endeavor, maybe we can inspire a few more youth to invent and explore.”

Photo courtesy NASA