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On Aug. 28, six scientists left the comforts of civilization, set to be gone for an entire year. Their mission will simulate what it might be like for astronauts journeying to Mars. In the confines of a 36-foot-wide and 20-foot-high solar-powered dome in a remote location on the island of Hawaii, the six team members will have to live together for 365 days. They will have no face-to-face contact with humans outside of the dome. This is the fourth and longest such mission carried out by the Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) program, and its goal is to find...

Uranus, which takes its name from the Greek God of the sky, is a gas giant and the seventh planet from our Sun. It is also the third largest planet in our Solar System, ranking behind Jupiter and Saturn. Like its fellow gas giants, it has many moons, a ring system, and is primarily composed of gases that are believed to surround a solid core. Though it can be seen with the naked eye, the realization that Uranus is a planet was a relatively recent one. Though there are indications that it was spotted several times over the course of...

Full Title: Buzz Aldrin developing 'master plan' to begin colonies on Mars by 2040 as he launches partnership with university Buzz Aldrin, 85, is partnering with Florida Institute of Technology. The Buzz Aldrin Space Institute will open in The Fall and focus on Mars Astronaut, the second man to walk on the Moon, has devised plan to get to the red planet using 'cycling pathways' and base on Mars's moon Phobos The second man to walk on the Moon is teaming up with Florida Institute of Technology to develop 'a master plan' for colonizing Mars within 25 years. Buzz Aldrin,...

According to a Tuesday piece in Motherboard, Noam Chomsky, a philosopher and political commentator, and Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and cosmologist, had a public dialogue about space exploration. Being both men of the far left, they concluded that space travel should be best left to robots and conducted by governments. The conclusions are the exact opposite of what the prevailing trends are in space policy.

Explanation: A curious robot almost completely straddles this rocky little planet. Of course, the planet is really Mars and the robot is the car-sized Curiosity Rover, posing over its recent drilling target in the Marias Pass area of lower Mount Sharp. The 92 images used to assemble the little planet projection, a digitally warped and stitched mosaic covering 360x180 degrees, were taken by the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) during the Curiosity mission sol (martian day) 1065. That corresponds to 2015 August 5, three Earth years since Curiosity landed on the surface of the Red Planet. The composite selfie...

Curiosity has left it's base deployment and afaik no external cameras exist. So does anyone know how this picture was taken? The original article is at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/20/curiosity_rolls_over_onto_martian_wet_patch_takes_happy_selfie/

Humans on Europa: A Plan for Colonies on the Icy Moon By Don Lipper Special to SPACE.com posted: 07:00 am ET 06 June 2001 Forewarned is forearmed in science fact and science fiction when it comes to Jupiter's icy moon Europa. Frigid and ice-covered, Europa is believed to harbor a giant liquid ocean beneath its crusty arctic surface, a primordial sea whose tidal motions are driven by Jovian gravity and warmed by intense radiation given off by the giant planet. Yet despite the planet's fearsome environment, members of the Artemis Society, a private venture dedicated establishing a permanent, self-supporting community...

Donald Trump, the mercurial real estate tycoon and media personality who, much to the surprise of one and all, has become the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president opened his mind just a little about his attitude toward space exploration, according to a Saturday story in Forbes. In an answer to a question put to him about sending humans to Mars, the current focus at NASA, Trump said, ““Honestly, I think it’s wonderful; I want to rebuild our infrastructure first, ok? I think it’s wonderful.” In other words, dreams of going to Mars must take a back seat to...

UFO Sightings Daily has brought attention to the picture, saying that the shape “looks like a woman partly cloaked.”

Explanation: By planet Earth's calendar, the Curiosity Mars Rover reached its 3rd anniversary on the surface of the Red Planet on August 6. To celebrate, gaze across this dramatic panoramic view of diverse terrain typical of the rover's journey to the layered slopes of Aeolis Mons, also known as Mount Sharp. Recorded with Curiosity's Mast Camera instrument, the scene looks south across gravel, sand ripples, and boulders toward rounded buttes. In the background, higher layers at left are toward the southeast, with southwest at panorama right. The individual images composing the view were taken on Curiosity's mission sols (martian days)...

NASA engineers are making the biggest, lightweight rocket parts ever manufactured for space vehicles to deeper manned missions, such as Mars exploration. It is a robot established at Marshall Space Flight Centre of NASA in Alabama. According to the US space agency, it is among the largest composites manufacturing robots made in the US. According to Preston Jones, deputy director of Marshall's Engineering Directorate, "This addition to Marshall's Composites Technology Centre provides modern technology to develop low-cost and high-speed manufacturing processes for making large composite rocket structures. We will build and test these structures to determine if they are a...

The Sarcastic Rover parody Twitter account came into being on Aug. 6, 2012 (or Aug. 5, depending on the time zone), the night of the famous "seven minutes of terror" landing that brought Curiosity to the Martian surface. Sarcastic Rover's brand of science-minded wit was apparent from the moment it arrived on Twitter. ... The parody account resonated with people immediately. The account attracted about 7,000 followers during its first night online, according to Jason Filiatrault, a screenwriter and the mind behind the sarcastic robot. Sarcastic Rover now has about 134,000 followers, three years into Curiosity's mission. ... SarcasticRover ‎@SarcasticRover...

A Virginia man has opened up about what it's like having a wife who volunteered to be part of the controversial Mars One mission - and the fact that, in just a few years, he and his sons are expected to say goodbye to her forever. Jason Stanford refers to himself as an 'astronaut wife', because his actual wife and stepmother to his two sons, Sonia Van Meter, 36, was one of the people chosen for the Mars One Project, a privately-funded one-way mission which hopes to establish a permanent human colony on the red planet. The first Mars One...

Suddenly, space is getting interesting again. After decades of going boldly nowhere in low Earth orbit, Man, or rather his robotic emissaries, have made some startling discoveries in our Solar System. Cold, distant Pluto is – who would have thought it? – turning out to be one of the most interesting planets (yes, it is a planet) in the Solar System. Before the New Horizons probe turned up earlier this month, astronomers assumed it would be a dull, grey cratered rock. [SNIP] If we find life of any kind out there – whether it be Martian microbes (we have several...

Traveling to the Moon just got a whole lot cheaper. A NASA-funded study (PDF) has found that the cost of lunar missions could be reduced by a factor of 10 using a number of techniques – and it could also have implications for getting humans to Mars. The extensive NexGen Space study by the National Space Society (NSS) and the Space Frontier Foundation (SFF) said that partnerships with private companies could return humans to the Moon for $10 billion (£6.4 billion), rather than the previosuly estimated $100 billion (£64 billion) that had turned off potential suitors. Utilizing fuel sourced from...

In auto racing parlance, NASA engineers put the "pedal to the metal" during a July 17 test of its Space Launch System (SLS) RS-25 rocket engine at Stennis Space Center. During a 535-second test, operators ran the RS-25 through a series of power levels, including a period of firing at 109 percent of the engine's rated power. Data collected on performance of the engine at the various power levels will aid in adapting the former space shuttle engines to the new SLS vehicle mission requirements, including development of an all-new engine controller and software. Four RS-25 engines will use the...

WHEN can we declare the Red Planet a dead planet? Although most efforts so far have gone toward showing that other planets could support life, now is the time to think about the other side of the coin. Spacecraft going to other worlds must follow costly planetary protection protocols, such as sterilisation, to avoid contaminating their destination with Earth microbes, putting any native life at risk, or bringing potentially dangerous alien ones back. But if there’s nothing there, why bother? We haven’t found life on Mars yet, and if further missions also turn up nothing, at some point commercial space...

On Mars, iron oxide or rust colors the planet’s soil, while Pluto’s coloration is likely caused by hydrocarbon molecules called tholins that are formed when cosmic rays and solar ultraviolet light interact with methane in Pluto’s atmosphere and on its surface. Airborne tholins fall out of the atmosphere and coat the surface with a reddish gunk ... “Pluto’s reddish color has been known for decades, but New Horizons is now allowing us to correlate the color of different places on the surface with their geology and soon, with their compositions,” said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest...

The following is based on a translation of a report in Chinese media: According to xinhuanet.com’s report on June 19, through 3 years of research, Prof. Chen Yongsheng of the College of Chemistry and Prof. Tian Jianguo of the Institute of Physics, Nankai University have obtained a special graphene material for light-driven flight. Due to the special electronic characteristic of graphene and the macrostructure and form of the material, the material is able to get driving force from light 1,000 times greater than ordinary light pressure. The website’s reporter claimed to have seen with his own eyes a graphene sponge...

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...