Free Republic

DARPA Wants to Create Synthetic Organisms to Terraform and Change the Atmosphere of Mars Biotech, Space, Synthetic Biology June 25, 2015 by Giulio Prisco 435SHARES TwitterLinkedinFacebook The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) believes that it's on the way to creating synthetic organisms capable of terraforming Mars into a planet that looks more like Earth, Motherboard reports.Speaking at a recent biotech conference hosted by DARPA, Alicia Jackson, deputy director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) said: For the first time, we have the technological toolkit to transform not just hostile places here on Earth, but to go into space not...

n an op-ed published in Florida Today on Wednesday, Jeff Kottkamp, a former lieutenant governor of Florida, and Rich Ramos, a Florida businessman, proposed a new justification for sending humans to Mars. A Mars program would serve, in their view, as a means to foster national unity of the sort that is rarely achieved outside times of war. Some recent polling data suggests that they may be on to something.

Is this the ultimate evidence that ancient civilizations inhabited the red planet in the distant past? NASA’s curiosity rover has photographed on of the most interesting images of the surface of Mars ever since it touched down on the red planet in 2012. Curiosity was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2011, at 10:02 EST aboard the MSL spacecraft and landed on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars on August 6, 2012 You can check out the RAW image of the pyramid here. Ufologists and researchers have already started speculating what this artifact is and according to many...

It wasn’t the Martians’ fault their planet died. If they existed – once – Martians were likely microbes, living in a world much like our own, warmed by an atmosphere and crisscrossed by waterways. But Mars began to lose that atmosphere, perhaps because its gravity wasn’t strong enough to hold onto it after an asteroid impact, or perhaps it was gradually blown away by solar winds. The cause is still mysterious, but the ending is clear: Mars’s liquid water dried up or froze into ice caps, leaving life without its most precious resource. Any Martians would have been victims of...

Explanation: Shortly before Mars' June 2015 conjunction, the Curiosity Rover celebrated 1000 sols on the red planet. After its August 5, 2012 landing, Curiosity's 1000th sol or martian day on the surface corresponded to planet Earth's calendar date May 31, 2015. Because the line-of-sight to Mars is close to the Sun near the conjunction, radio communications are affected and the six-wheeled, car-sized robotic rover cautiously remains parked at this spot for now. The view looks back toward the stomping grounds for Curiosity's nearly 10.6 kilometer trek so far, with the hazy rim of Gale Crater in the distance. The mosaicked...

Six scientists who were living under a dome on the slopes of a dormant Hawaii volcano for eight months to simulate life on Mars have emerged from isolation. The crew stepped outside the dome that's 8,000 feet (2,400 metres) up the slopes of Mauna Loa to feel fresh air on their skin on Saturday. It was the first time they left without donning a space suit. The scientists are part of a human performance study funded by Nasa that tracked how they worked together as a team. They have been monitored by surveillance cameras, body movement trackers and electronic surveys....

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz supports NASA's human space exploration program as a national priority that deserves congressional support. USA Today reports if NASA's program goes as planned, astronauts could travel to Mars by the 2030s. Cruz, a Tea Party Republican, said developing a rocket and capsule that could cost tens of billions of dollars is "critical" to ensuring American's leadership in space. "It is imperative that America has the capability to get to the space station without the assistance of the Russians," Cruz said Tuesday while chairing a hearing before the Commerce, Science and Transportation Subcommittee on Science, Space and Competitiveness. "The Commercial...

It seems like Mars has just about everything: auroras, water, and now... glass? In a paper published recently in Geology researchers announced that NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) found deposits of glass in craters on the Martian surface. These are the first deposits ever found on Mars, and they could help us figure out if there was ever life on the red planet. On Mars, the glass was created when meteorites slammed into the Martian surface with enough force to melt some of the rocks, which then cooled quickly enough in the atmosphere, turning them into a type of glass...

India’s first ever robotic explorer to the Red Planet, the Mars Orbiter Mission, more affectionately known as MOM, has captured an absolutely dazzling array of images of the fourth rock from the Sun. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), India’s space agency, has recently published a beautiful gallery of images featuring a variety of picturesque Martian canyons, volcanoes, craters, moons and more. We’ve gathered a collection here of MOM’s newest imagery snapped by the probes Mars Color Camera (MCC) for the enjoyment of Martian fans worldwide. The spectacular 3D view of the Arsia Mons volcano, shown above, was “created by...

In a move that shows commercial space exploration is not just possible, but probable, the United States House of Representatives just passed the SPACE Act in order to lay down some general guidelines in case you want to, you know, start a mining operation in space. While private charters like Virgin Galactic, and colonization missions to Mars by the likes of SpaceX are all the rage these days, the bill would suggest that enough private organizations have an interest in mining valuable resources from space that the need for legislation is necessary. Bear in mind, not a single private company...

A scientist has raised questions about the latest detection of methane on Mars, suggesting that NASA’s rover could be responsible for the mysterious burp. Highly unlikely, but not impossible, says the Curiosity team.

Just saw these cool pics of opposite views of the same thing...sort of:

It’s no secret that uncurbed climate change and population growth are going to (and already have) put stress on the planet. But the situation is getting so bad that one prominent NASA scientist says we have to start thinking about terraforming Mars and that, in order for the human race to survive at current levels, we will eventually “need at least three planets.” “The entire ecosystem is crashing,” Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist of NASA’s Langley Research Center said Thursday. “Essentially, there’s too many of us. We’ve been far too successful as the human animal. People allege we’re short 40-50 percent...

The Indiana-based company has developed a "Mars room," which plays host to a test chamber capable of emulating the inhospitable conditions prevailing on the red planet. In the Mars room, Chief scientist Eugene Boland at Techshot Inc is exploring the potential of using ecosystem-building pioneer organisms such as bacteria or algae as oxygen factories. The organisms would use Mars' ample supply of regolith as fuel, and may even serve a dual purpose in removing nitrogen from the M ..

Explanation: This close-up from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera shows weathered craters and windblown deposits in southern Acidalia Planitia. A striking shade of blue in standard HiRISE image colors, to the human eye the area would probably look grey or a little reddish. But human eyes have not gazed across this terrain, unless you count the eyes of NASA astronauts in the scifi novel The Martian by Andy Weir. The novel chronicles the adventures of Mark Watney, an astronaut stranded at the fictional Mars mission Ares 3 landing site corresponding to the coordinates of this cropped HiRISE frame. For...

Explanation: How different does sunset appear from Mars than from Earth? For comparison, two images of our common star were taken at sunset, one from Earth and one from Mars. These images were scaled to have same angular width and featured here side-by-side. A quick inspection will reveal that the Sun appears slightly smaller from Mars than from Earth. This makes sense since Mars is 50% further from the Sun than Earth. More striking, perhaps, is that the Martian sunset is noticeably bluer near the Sun than the typically orange colors near the setting Sun from Earth. The reason for...

The "Journey to Mars Challenge" will give a $5,000 award to each of the three winning participants who describe an original idea that could assist the human exploration of Mars. The proposal must be "technically achievable, economically sustainable, and minimize reliance on support from Earth," NASA wrote in a statement about the challenge. "This could include shelter, food, water, breathable air, communication, exercise, social interactions and medicine, but participants are encouraged to consider innovative and creative elements beyond these examples," NASA added.Because launch costs are considered one of the key barriers to space exploration generally — and Mars exploration, especially...

Dr. Danielle N. Lee, who writes for the Scientific American blog network and calls herself "the Urban Scientist," believes that the push to visit Mars and eventually inhabit it is "white colonialism." Dr. Lee expressed her concerns in both the Scientific American blog and on Twitter. Writing in Scientific American in an article titled, "When discussing Humanity’s next move to space, the language we use matters," Dr. Lee discusses Elon Musk's push to inhabit Mars some day. She is very critical of Musk, saying that his language is not inclusive enough to either women and minorities. "Diversity, Inclusion, Access and...

At 8.45 on the morning of 15 April 136 BC, Babylon was plunged into darkness when the Moon passed in front of the Sun. An astrologer, who recorded the details in cuneiform characters on a clay tablet, wrote: "At 24 degrees after sunrise-a solar eclipse. When it began on the southwest side, Venus, Mercury and the normal stars were visible. Jupiter and Mars, which were in their period of disappearance, became visible. The Sun threw off the shadow from southwest to northeast." If present-day astronomers use a computer to run the movements of the Earth, Moon and Sun backwards...

Six years from now a machine that makes oxygen will be in operation on Mars. The small oxygen device will be sent to the Red Planet with the NASA Mars 2020 mission. "We're going to build a small instrument that will generate oxygen on Mars. It will be the prototype of a much larger 'factory' that will provide astronauts with oxygen at some point in the future," says Morten Bo Madsen, the head of the Mars group at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. The project is known at NASA as MOXIE (Mars OXygen In Situ resource...