Free Republic

JACINTA BOWLER 5 OCTOBER 2020 Mars, our second closest cosmic cousin, has been in our collective imagination for decades. Between fantasies of martian visits and the promise of water under its icy surface, Mars doesn't need to do much to be in our collective good books. But very soon, Mars is not just going to be close to our hearts, but also nearest to our actual planet - a mere 62.1 million kilometres (38.6 million miles) away from Earth. This is the closest it'll be for the next 15 years. And it means that stargazing is highly recommended as Mars...

Explanation: As telescopes around planet Earth watch, Mars is growing brighter in night skies, approaching its 2020 opposition on October 13. Mars looks like it's watching too in this view of the Red Planet from September 22. Mars' disk is already near its maximum apparent size for earthbound telescopes, less than 1/80th the apparent diameter of a Full Moon. The seasonally shrinking south polar cap is at the bottom and hazy northern clouds are at the top. A circular, dark albedo feature, Solis Lacus (Lake of the Sun), is just below and left of disk center. Surrounded by a light...

The bonus this particular October will be Mars at its most dazzling in 17 years. Then you have Jupiter and Saturn getting a little closer each night, Uranus at opposition in Aries, two full moons including a blue moon on Halloween, an asteroid named Flora at opposition, the usual close conjunctions of the moon with some of the planets, a very close conjunction of Venus and Regulus, and favorable conditions for not one, but two meteor showers – the Draconids on the Oct. 8 and the Orionids on Oct. 21. Mars will be the magnificent star on our celestial stage...

Three new underground lakes have been detected near the south pole of Mars. Scientists also confirmed the existence of a fourth lake - the presence of which was hinted at in 2018. Liquid water is vital for biology, so the finding will be of interest to researchers studying the potential for life elsewhere in the Solar System. But the lakes are also thought to be extremely salty, which could pose challenges to the survival of any microbial life forms. Billions of years ago, water flowed in rivers and pooled in lakes on the Martian surface. But Mars has since lost...

A network of salty ponds may be gurgling beneath Mars' South Pole alongside a large underground lake, raising the prospect of tiny, swimming Martian life. Italian scientists reported their findings Monday, two years after identifying what they believed to be a large buried lake. They widened their coverage area by a couple hundred miles, using even more data from a radar sounder on the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter. In the latest study appearing in the journal Nature Astronomy, the scientists provide further evidence of this salty underground lake, estimated to be 12 miles to 18 miles (20 kilometers...

Two years ago, planetary scientists reported the discovery of a large saltwater lake under the ice at Mars’s south pole, a finding that was met with excitement and some scepticism. Now, researchers say they’ve confirmed the presence of that lake — and found three more. The discovery, reported on 28 September in Nature Astronomy1, was made using radar data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) orbiting Mars Express spacecraft. It follows the detection of a single subsurface lake in the same region in 2018 — which, if confirmed, would be the first body of liquid water ever detected on the...

NASA currently expects to land the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars on February 18, 2021. Once the rover is on the surface and working, it will begin to search for traces of microscopic life that could be billions of years old. The rover is fitted with an instrument called PIXL, which is a lunchbox-sized device at the end of the seven-foot-long robotic arm fitted to the rover. . PIXL uses more than an x-ray beam alone, it also has a hexapod, which is a device featuring six mechanical legs connected to the robotic arm guided by...

The Uncle Ben’s rice brand is getting a new name: Ben’s Original. Parent firm Mars Inc. unveiled the change Wednesday for the 70-year-old brand, the latest company to drop a logo criticized as a racial stereotype. Packaging with the new name will hit stores next year. “We listened to our associates and our customers and the time is right to make meaningful changes across society,” said Fiona Dawson, global president for Mars Food, multisales and global customers. “When you are making these changes, you are not going to please everyone. But it’s about doing the right thing, not the easy...

A simple manufacturing technology based on chitin, one of the most ubiquitous organic polymers on Earth, could be used to build tools and shelters on Mars, according to a study published September 16 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Javier Fernandez of Singapore University of Technology and Design, and colleagues. With plans to revisit the lunar surface and eventually send a crewed mission to Mars, future space exploration missions are likely to involve an extended stay. For such missions, or perhaps even settlements, survival requires meeting basic human needs. One material that could be used to meet those needs...

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk says that while his plan to establish a self-sustaining Mars colony may have slipped behind schedule, he still hopes to see Starship’s first orbital flight test in 2021. However, he warned those going there might not make it back. He said: “I want to emphasise that this is a very hard and dangerous, difficult thing, not for the faint of heart,” he added. “Good chance you’ll die, it’s going to be tough going, but it will be pretty glorious if it works out.”

Explanation: Deep shadows create dramatic contrasts between light and dark in this high-resolution close-up of the martian surface. Recorded on January 24, 2014 by the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the scene spans about 1.5 kilometers. From 250 kilometers above the Red Planet the camera is looking down at a sand dune field in a southern highlands crater. Captured when the Sun was about 5 degrees above the local horizon, only the dune crests were caught in full sunlight. A long, cold winter was coming to the southern hemisphere and bright ridges of seasonal frost line the...

Explanation: Does the Moon ever block out Mars? Yes, the Moon occasionally moves in front of all of the Solar System's planets. Just this past Sunday, as visible from some locations in South America, a waning gibbous Moon eclipsed Mars. The featured image from Córdoba, Argentina captured this occultation well, showing a familiar cratered Moon in the foreground with the bright planet Mars unusually adjacent. Within a few seconds, Mars then disappeared behind the Moon, only to reappear a few minutes later across the Moon. Today the Moon moves close to, but not in front of, Venus. Because alignments will...

A large number of the valley networks scarring Mars’s surface were carved by water melting beneath glacial ice, not by free-flowing rivers as previously thought, according to new UBC research published today (August 3, 2020) in Nature Geoscience. The findings effectively throw cold water on the dominant “warm and wet ancient Mars” hypothesis, which postulates that rivers, rainfall, and oceans once existed on the red planet. To reach this conclusion, lead author Anna Grau Galofre, former PhD student in the department of earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences, developed and used new techniques to examine thousands of Martian valleys. She and...

NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover has launched on its epic mission to the Red Planet. The rover launched into space atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at 7:50 a.m. EDT from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Rover lifted off right at the start of the mission’s launch window, which had been planned for when Earth and Mars are in perfect alignment. Lifted by 2 million pounds of thrust, it took the rocket about 5 seconds to clear the launch tower at Cape Canaveral. "We're in touch with the spacecraft, everything is...

A mysterious origin and Arthur C. Clarke-level science-fiction speculation about the 17-mile-wide, deeply-grooved moon as an alien artifact captured in the ancient past by Mars gravitational field, may explain Russia’s almost mystical obsession with Phobos. First the Soviet Union, then more recently, Russia, made three attempts to reach the enigmatic object, but software errors and launch disasters have aborted each attempt. In 2016 the BBC reported that a mysterious monolith object was spotted several years ago by a NASA probe, and to this day nobody is quite sure what it is or how it got there. Japan is on deck,...

The views were captured by a program run by NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which scans huge swaths of the sky for space rocks in order to gather enough observations for astronomers to map each object's path in case one may come a little too close for comfort. The new animation of Tianwen-1 speeding away from Earth came from a facility at Mauna Loa on Hawaii Island that is one of a pair of Hawaiian observatories that make up the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS. The ATLAS observatories regularly identify new celestial objects, like the comet of the...

A world first. New footage from Mars rendered in 4K resolution. The cameras on board the rovers were the height of technology when the respective missions launched. — ‘Why don’t we actually have live video from Mars?’ Although the cameras are high quality, the rate at which the rovers can send data back to earth is the biggest challenge. Curiosity can only send data directly back to earth at 32 kilo-bits per second. Instead, when the rover can connect to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, we get more favourable speeds of 2 Megabytes per second. However, this link is only available...

SHANGHAI— China launched its first mission to Mars on Thursday, aiming to join the short list of nations that have landed a spacecraft on another planet. The Tianwen-1 blasted off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on the island of Hainan at 12:40 p.m. local time aboard the newly developed Long March 5 rocket. It is expected to make the 34-million-mile journey to Mars in seven months, after which it will attempt to slip into orbit around the planet and send a rover to the surface. If all goes as planned, China will join the U.S. and Russia as the...

The United Arab Emirates has succeeded with the initial stage of its first ever Mars mission, thanks to the launch of an H-IIA rocket built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan on Sunday. The rocket carried the Al Amal (Hope) Probe for the UAE, a Mars orbiter that is set to arrive at the red planet by February 2021, and spend a Martian year (687 days) on orbit around Mars collecting data about its atmosphere. This is the first of three separate planned missions to Mars that are scheduled to take place during July, including a...

WASHINGTON — A Japanese rocket launched the United Arab Emirates’ first mission to Mars July 19, an orbiter that will study the planet’s weather while demonstrating the country’s growing space capabilities. The H-2A rocket lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan at 5:58 p.m. Eastern. The launch was originally scheduled for July 14 but delayed five days by poor weather at the launch site. The rocket’s upper stage released the Emirates Mars Mission, or Hope, spacecraft, nearly an hour after liftoff. The spacecraft contracted controllers shortly after separation. Hope is a 1,350-kilogram satellite developed by the Mohammed bin...