Tag: curiosity

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World survives and NASA reports water on Mars

If you are reading this then it means that we all survived the Blood Moon phenomenon on Sunday and we got through 9-28-15 without being sucked into an artificial black hole or anything. Now NASA announces that they have found actual liquid water on Mars. Did you miss it? Here’s the announcement. Don’t worry. It’s short!

So, what does this mean? It means that we don’t always know what we know and we don’t know what we don’t know. Just a few years ago the article A Tale of Planetary Woe was published on NASA’s Science News web site. In it the author says :

“Mars today is bitter cold and bone dry. The rivers and seas are long gone. Its atmosphere is thin and wispy, and if Martian microbes still exist, they’re probably eking out a meager existence somewhere beneath the dusty Martian soil.”

While it’s true that we have not discovered a lush oasis on Mars, we’ve found that it’s a little less desolate. Does that translate into a Martian civilization? Probably not. However, it seems to be a moving target.

In 2009 scientists believed they had identified fossilized bacteria in a meteorite with Martian origins. This suggests that there was some sort of life, if only microscopic, long long ago. However, the idea of liquid water erodes the idea that life “could not exist” on Mars, making it “probably doesn’t exist.” That leap is huge.

This kind of exploration is literally not an exact science. It is finding information, making the best sense of that information with existing knowledge and then digging deeper. I’m very happy to move from “bone dry” to “under certain circumstances, liquid water has been found on Mars.” Now the idea of water can be part of the thinking about Martian exploration. As that thinking adapts the methods for exploring adapt and we’ll find new things because we begin to look for them.

The existence of water certainly changes the views of a manned expedition to Mars (actually considered by 2030). It’s all very exciting news.

Of course, we hope that none of this is disrupted by the actual martians! Remember this guy?

B&W photo showing a shadow of the Mars rover with what appears to be a shadow of a person doing maintenance.
Photo from Mars rover shows what appears to be a human doing something to the machine.

If the Martians do appear, we hope they are wise and wonderful like it Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.

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There is no spoon

The word pareidolia has been bandied about quite a bit as a result of the strange pictures coming from Mars that seem to depict everything from a jedi woman to machinery. Now we have a strange picture that appears to be a spoon floating on Mars.

floating-spoon

NASA’s response is predictable:

It seems that we are to believe that Mars is filled with nothing but rocks and dirt! Perhaps it’s true, but where is the fun in that? I didn’t spend all my time reading H. G. Wells and watching Devil Girl from Mars to have my hopes dashed. It’s…it’s just disappointing!

Actually, it’s fascinating how our minds are so geared to find meaningful patterns. It’s what allows us to appreciate art. It’s what makes emoticons work. 🙂

It seems that that our brains are wired to seek patterns, especially faces. In his book Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Carl Sagan wrote

“As soon as the infant can see, it recognizes faces, and we now know that this skill is hardwired in our brains. Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents, and less likely to prosper. These days, nearly every infant is quick to identify a human face, and to respond with a goony grin.”

Recognizing your parents is good, but it’s probably also helpful to see the potential for anything that might eat you. While we are less concerned about sabre tooth tigers today, haven’t we all had a moment where we saw something that looked like an intruder? The heart pounds, the body prepares to fight or fly. It ends up being a pile of clothes. From a defensive position, though, wouldn’t you rather that your body geared up for action and discovered it was a false alarm than to only activate as something was reaching out for you?

So, this fascinating ability of our brains causes us to recognize all sorts of thing, and keep the NASA public relations team up nights trying to fend it all off. Or…they really are out there and it’s all a big cover-up. Fortunately we still have pictures like this, which appears to show the silhouette of a man doing maintenance on the rover.

Mars-Conspiracy

Now, tell me what kind of rock that is! To help you keep the dreams alive, here is a trailer for Devil Girl from Mars. You might even be able to find a full version to watch!

Keep watching the skies!

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STRANGE ROCK FOUND ON MARS

The strangest thing about this rock is how alone it is. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Curiosity Rover missions are going extremely well, finding and discovering all sorts of new stuff but, here’s something a little unexpected. A strange, pyramid shaped rock out in the middle of nowhere.

NASA writes:

‘Jake Matijevic’ Contact Target for Curiosity

The drive by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity during the mission’s 43rd Martian day, or sol, (Sept. 19, 2012) ended with this rock about 8 feet (2.5 meters) in front of the rover. The rock is about 10 inches (25 centimeters) tall and 16 inches (40 centimeters) wide. The rover team has assessed it as a suitable target for the first use of Curiosity’s contact instruments on a rock. The image was taken by the left Navigation camera (Navcam) at the end of the drive.

The rock has been named “Jake Matijevic.” This commemorates Jacob Matijevic (1947-2012), who was the surface operations systems chief engineer for the Mars Science Laboratory Project and the project’s Curiosity rover. He was also a leading engineer for all of the previous NASA Mars rovers: Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity.

Curiosity’s contact instruments are on a turret at the end of the rover’s arm. They are the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer for reading a target’s elemental composition and the Mars Hand Lens Imager for close-up imaging.

See more pictures from the Mars Curiosity missions at nasa.gov/mission_pages

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FIRST MUSIC EVER PLAYED ON MARS

Pop music artist  Will.i.am’s newest song “Reach For The Stars” is the first man-made made music to be broadcasted on another planet.

The Telegraph writes:

The extraordinary feat was among several astonishing achievements by US space agency’s £1.6 billion Curiosity rover, which landed on the surface of the Red Planet earlier this month.

The Black Eyed Peas rapper’s song, titled Reach for the Stars, was beamed more than 300 million miles back to Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

The first music broadcast from another planet came after the planetary explorer beamed back incredible high-resolution, colour portrait images from Mars.

Nasa staff clapped their hands and held their arms in the air, smiling and swaying to the rhythm during the slightly less scientific use of the rover’s hi-tech equipment and communications ability.

The achievement also gave great delight to dozens of students who gathered at the laboratory to listen.

“It seems surreal,” said will.i.am, who is also an actor.

He explained how Charles Bolden, the Nasa administrator, had called him to suggest beaming a song back from Mars as part of educational outreach efforts by the US space agency.

The song, which includes lyrics “I know that Mars might be far, but baby it ain’t really that far”, involved a 40-piece orchestra including French horns, rather than a more modern electronically-generated sound.

The 37-year-old, whose real name William James Adams, told a student audience that he didn’t “want to do a song that was done on a computer,” given that it was going to be the first piece of music broadcast back to the Earth from Mars.

“I wanted to show human collaboration and have an orchestra there and something that would be timeless, and translated in different cultures, not have like a hip hop beat or a dance beat,” he said.

 

Read more at telegraph.co.uk/science

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FOOTAGE OF THE CURIOSITY ROVER LANDING ON MARS IN HI-DEFINITION

The original, but quite shaky and hard to view, footage has been re-done in beautiful HD.

You have got to watch this:

The LA Times writes:

You may have seen video of Curiosity’s descent before, but you haven’t seen it like this — with the craters on Mars rendered in high definition, the contrast amped up, and the whole thing set to a string score by Kevin Macleod that helps heighten the grandeur, and also the loneliness, of the rover’s descent to the red planet.

(Never underestimate the importance of a soundtrack!)

Consider it the Mars Curiosity descent post-production video. It’s like the original, but better.

The video was put together by Dominic Muller, known on Reddit as Godd2, reports iO9.

On the video’s YouTube page Muller explains that he used an editing technique called frame interpolation, which allowed him to take the original choppy video released by NASA and smooth it out. He writes that it took him four straight days to put it together.

You can find a thorough and technical explanation of how Muller made this video on Reddit.

Or you can just watch this over and over again and think about how awesome Mars looks.

As one commenter wrote, “It’s weird that we’re looking at another world.”

Read more at www.latimes.com

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1ST EVER PANORAMIC VIEW OF MARS, FROM MARS!

A panoramic view from the Curiosity Rover inside Gale Crater on mars.

No signs of life, yet.

Here’s a cool video NASA has released of Curiosty’s actual decent on the red planet:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UcGMDXy-Y1I

NASA writes:

PASADENA, Calif. – The first images from Curiosity’s color Mast Camera, or Mastcam, have been received by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The 130 low-resolution thumbnails, which were received Thursday morning, provide scientists and engineers of NASA’s newest Mars rover their first color, horizon-to-horizon glimpse of Gale Crater.

“After a year in cold storage, where it endured the rigors of launch, the deep space cruise to Mars and everything that went on during landing, it is great to see our camera is working as planned,” said Mike Malin, principal investigator of the Mastcam instrument from Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego. “As engaging as this color panorama is, it is important to note this is only one-eighth the potential resolution of images from this camera.”

The Curiosity team also continued to downlink high-resolution black-and-white images from its Navigation Camera, or Navcam. These individual images have been stitched together to provide a high-resolution Navcam panorama, including a glimpse of the rover’s deck. Evident on some portions of the deck are some small Martian pebbles.

“The latest Navcam images show us that the rocket engines on our descent stage kicked up some material from the surface of Mars, several pieces which ended up on our rover’s deck,” said Mike Watkins, mission manager for Curiosity from JPL. “These small pebbles we currently see are up to about 1 centimeter [0.4 inch] in size and should pose no problems for mission operations. It will be interesting to see how long our hitchhikers stick around.”

Curiosity’s color panorama of Gale Crater is online at: http://1.usa.gov/P7VsUw . Additional images from Curiosity are available at: http://1.usa.gov/MfiyD0 .

Read more at nasa.gov/mission_pages