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London, April 30 (ANI): NASA scientists are seeking director James Cameron’s help in creating a new 3D camera for use on Mars, it has emerged.
The technical experts, building a high-resolution 3D camera, have recruited the helmer as a consultant.
The gadget will be used in the next rover mission to Mars, which is set for launch in 2011, reports the Daily Express.
Cameron’s 3D film ‘Avatar’ is an all time biggest grossing film. (ANI)
Paris, March 24 (ANI): Reports indicate that a crew of six, including two Europeans, will soon begin a simulated mission to Mars in a mockup that includes an interplanetary spaceship, Mars Lander and Martian landscape.
The Mars500 experiment, as long as a real journey to Mars, is the ultimate test of human endurance.
Their mission is to mimic a full mission to Mars and back as accurately as possible without actually going there.
Mars500 will be the first full-duration simulated mission to Mars, starting in a special facility in Moscow next summer.
The mission would involve 250 days for the trip to Mars, 30 days on the surface and 240 days for the return journey, totalling 520 days.
“Mars is the ultimate goal of the global human exploration programme,” said Simonetta Di Pippo, ESA Director of Human Spaceflight.
The 520-day isolation test is the last and core part of the Mars500 experiment that began back in 2007.
The first phase in November 2007 was a 14-day simulation that mainly tested the facilities and operational procedures.
The second phase followed in 2009, when four Russian and two European crewmembers were shut into the facility for 105 days on March 31.
Mars500 is being conducted by Russia’s Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP), with extensive participation by ESA as part of its European Programme for Life and Physical Sciences (ELIPS) to prepare for future human missions to the Moon and Mars.
During the experiment, the crew will be hermetically isolated in confined space with limited consumables and communication only via the Internet, occasionally disrupted and with a 20-minute delay, as for a real Mars mission, due to the distance between the spacecraft and Earth.
The crew will be monitored and their psychological, medical and physical signs recorded throughout the mission.
During the ‘surface operations’ after 250 days, the crew will be divided in half, three will move to the martian surface simulator and three will remain in the ‘spacecraft’.
The crew will have all the food needed from the beginning of the experiment and they will have to ration out their supplies for the entire time.
The diet will be similar to that of the crews on the International Space Station (ISS).
Tasks performed by the crew will be comparable to those of the ISS astronauts, but for a much longer time: maintenance, scientific experiments and daily exercise.
They will follow a seven-day week with two days off, except when special and emergency situations are simulated. (ANI)
London, March 16 (ANI): New evidence indicates that signs of life on Mars might be all over the Red Planet in the form of sulphur, and the next Mars lander should be able to detect the proof.
No mission to Mars has ever found complex carbon-based molecules, from which life as we know it is built.
But sulphur is everywhere on Mars. In fact, it is more abundant there than on Earth, and it could contain one of the signatures of life.
On Earth, the activity of some microbes converts one class of sulphur-containing compounds, the sulphates, into another, the sulphides.
The microbes prefer to work with the lighter sulphur-32 isotope, so the sulphides they produce are relatively deficient in the heavier isotope, sulphur-34.
Planetary scientists have long wondered whether we could use this pattern to discern signs of life on Mars.
Now, the prospects for this technique look better than ever.
According to a report in New Scientist, John Parnell of the University of Aberdeen, UK, and his colleagues found sulphides, apparently formed through microbial activity, permeating the rocks of Haughton crater in the Canadian Arctic.
An analysis of the crater’s rocks indicates the sulphides were produced at temperatures above 70 degree Celsius.
That suggests they formed shortly after the crater itself was created by a meteorite impact 39 million years ago, when water warmed by the impact would have circulated through the crater rocks.
Despite the passage of time, the signature of life at Haughton crater remains clear, with sulphur-34 depleted by 7 per cent in the sulphides compared with the sulphates.
“This suggests that such a signature is not easily erased, bolstering the chances that Martian rocks that were moist enough to harbour life long ago could still carry a detectable signature of life,” said Parnell.
NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover will land on the Martian surface in 2012.
“It will carry a mass spectrometer that should be sensitive enough to see variations as small as 2 per cent in sulphur isotope abundances,” said John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, the lead scientist for the mission.
Sulphur is “definitely a promising candidate” to reveal signs of life on Mars, according to David Des Marais of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who is also involved in the mission.
“If there are big isotopic differences that would be very suspicious. The only way we know how to do that on Earth is with life,” he added. (ANI)
London, September 9 (ANI): In a new report, a panel of experts have suggested that humans could orbit Mars in the 2020s, provided NASA’s budget is boosted.
According to an article in the New Scientist, at its current funding level, the agency will be unable to leave low-Earth orbit for at least the next two decades, according to a summary of the panel’s report.
Under President George W Bush, NASA was ordered to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. But in May, the Obama administration set up a panel of space experts to review the space agency’s human spaceflight plans.
The panel is led by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine.
Though its final report is still being completed, the committee sent a summary of its findings to the White House and NASA.
The summary contains a list of five possible ways forward for NASA’s human spaceflight programme, without endorsing any particular one over the others.
One of those options, called the Flexible Path, would send astronauts to a series of increasingly distant destinations, starting with a mission to orbit the moon.
A mission to an asteroid would follow later, and the plan would culminate in a mission to Mars, which the panel says could be achieved by the mid- to late-2020s.
To avoid breaking the bank, this option would delay development of any landing craft and other hardware needed to actually put astronauts on the planet’s surface.
Instead, they would go into orbit around Mars, rendezvousing with one of its moons.
The report does not explain whether the spacecraft would touch down on the Martian moon’s surface or orbit around it.
The committee has discussed the Flexible Path idea previously in some of its public meetings, but its summary report is more specific about when the Mars mission would occur.
Such a mission would not see astronauts visit the Martian surface directly, but it would allow them to explore it using remotely controlled robots, which could potentially retrieve rock samples that could be brought back to Earth for more detailed study, according to one of the committee’s presentations.
But the committee warned that without more money, NASA would be stuck in low-Earth orbit until at least the 2030s.
“The Committee finds that no plan compatible with the Fiscal Year 2010 budget profile permits human exploration to continue in any meaningful way,” the summary report said.
Carrying out the Flexible Path programme or landing astronauts on the moon before the 2030s would require an extra 3 billion dollars per year beyond the 18.7 billion dollars planned for the agency, the report said. (ANI)
New Delhi, Aug 31 (ANI):Indian Space research Organisation (ISRO) chairman G. Madavan Nair said on Monday that India would launch a mission to Mars by 2013.
The ISRO has begun the preparations for sending a spacecraft to Mars.
Earlier on Aug 13 the Union Government sanctioned seed money of Rs 10 crore for Mars project, to carry out various studies on experiments to be conducted, route of the mission and other related details necessary to scale the new frontier.
On Sunday ISRO called off the maiden Lunar mission after Indian Deep Space Network at Byalalu near Bangalore lost control over the Chndrayaan -I spacecraft.
Though Chandrayaan- I was slated to be a two-year mission, Nair claimed that ISRO scientists have achieved nearly 95% of Chandrayaan’s scientific goals in less than a year. (ANI)
London, May 14 (ANI): A new report by the US National Research Council has said that if NASA aims to bring Mars samples back to Earth, it should prepare for the possibility that the samples could include organisms that might endanger humans and other terrestrial life.
According to a report in New Scientist, the report argues that to prevent potential contamination by any Martian life, NASA should begin building a secure facility on Earth to house the samples.
Within the next two decades, NASA hopes to launch a mission to Mars that could return the first pristine samples of Martian atmosphere, rocks and soil.
These samples could be used to perform tests that may be impossible with lightweight robotic explorers, such as definitively measuring rock ages and, potentially, finding the first evidence of Martian life.
But, the hazards such life might pose to terrestrial life are unknown.
If self-replicating organisms are brought back to Earth, there could be a slim but non-zero chance that they could infect Earth organisms or compete with them in a way that could affect Earth’s ecosystems.
The new report updates a long-standing recommendation that Mars samples be kept in isolation in a special facility while they are examined for life.
“I think the bottom line here is containment, containment, containment,” said Jack Farmer of Arizona State University in Tempe, who chaired the committee of 10 experts behind the report, which was commissioned by NASA.
“Such a facility would need to have stringent controls to contain agents that might be fatal to humans. It could take 7 to 10 years to build, so its design and construction should be considered at the earliest stages of Mars sample return mission planning,” the committee writes.
This report helps update the agency on the issue of contaminating Earth with extraterrestrial samples, or “back-contamination”, according to Cassie Conley, NASA’s planetary protection officer.
Conley said that it would be incorporated in future discussions at both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), which is also considering a sample return mission. (ANI)
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