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Showing posts with label mars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mars. Show all posts

Thursday 16 July 2015

After the Moon and Mars, ISRO eyes Venus for next exploration mission

earth-2
After the successful launch of its Mars orbiter, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is now viewing Venus as possibly the next planet it can study and explore.
“Besides the Mars-2 mission, we are looking at Venus and even an asteroid for exploration. A project has to be formulated for this before we chart out a proper roadmap for the explorations.  Venus is our neighbour and has many scientific challenges and aspects that need to be studied. Exploring an asteroid is also challenging task,” Dr Kiran Kumar, Isro chairman, told HT.
In 2014, India created history in space when its Mars orbiter slipped into the Red Planet’s orbit in its maiden attempt.
India became the first Asian country to reach Mars and the first in the world to enter the orbit of the planet in its first attempt.
isro-MOM-1200
Photo of Mars as taken by ISRO’s Mars Oriber Mission
Regarding the Saarc satellite, Dr Kumar said that it would be launched before December 2016. “The activities related to this project are in progress and we should begin building the satellite soon.”
Moving beyond satellite launches and planetary explorations, Isro is also aggressively working with many government departments on optimising the usage of space tools and data.
A national meet on space is likely to be held in Delhi next month, where ministries and departments of the government will give presentations on how they are using space tools in their workings. From civil aviation to railways, tribal affairs to health, postal to agriculture the number of government departments working with Isro has increased to more than 60 in the past few months.
Source : HindustanTimes

Sunday 29 March 2015

NASA is working with Russia on a new space station

STS-116_spacewalk_1

Astronauts Repairing Space Module

Russia is teaming up with the USA to build ISS 2.0 once the current one's funding runs out in 2024 -- at least according to Russia Today and state news agency TASS. The country's space agency, Roscosmos threatened in February to use the Russian ISS modules as a platform for a new base of its own after 2024, but now it looks like there will be a followup collaboration.

This time around, both parties are looking for participation from other countries, as well as private industry, and are apparently even eyeing a team-up for potential missions to Mars. Russian news outlets report the announcement came during a news conference Saturday following the launch of a year-long mission (video of the launch and subsequent ISS docking is embedded after the break) to the current International Space Station.

NASA Statement -
We are pleased Roscomos wants to continue full use of the International Space Station through 2024 -- a priority of ours -- and expressed interest in continuing international cooperation for human space exploration beyond that. The United States is planning to lead a human mission to Mars in the 2030s, and we have advanced that effort farther than at any point in NASA's history. We welcome international support for this ambitious undertaking. Today we remain focused on full use of our current science laboratory in orbit and research from the exciting one-year mission astronaut Scott Kelly just began, which will help prepare us for longer duration spaceflight.

Chief Komarov, who was there for the US-Russia year-long ISS mission launch, reportedly said: "We have agreed that Roscosmos and NASA will be working together on the program of a future space station." In addition to building a new ISS, sources say the agency's partnership also entail working on a joint Mars mission. In the same event, NASA chief Charles Bolden is quoted saying: "Our area of cooperation will be Mars. We are discussing how best to use the resources, the finance, we are setting time frames and distributing efforts in order to avoid duplication."

So far NASA hasn't announced or confirmed anything through its official channels. We've contacted the agency for comment and will update this post if we hear anything.

Source : engadget.com

Friday 13 February 2015

This woman wants to live and die on Mars—and 200,000 others would gladly take her place

Volker Maiwald, executive officer and habitat engineer of Crew 125 EuroMoonMars B mission, walks among the rock formations in the Utah desert

Ok, it's Utah - but we can dream. (Reuters/Jim Urquhart)

Dina was born in Iraq, lives in the US, and may end her life on Mars.

She’s one of 663 people who are still in the running for a place on the first four-person team that Mars One, a Dutch organization launched in 2011, wants to send to the red planet. Candidates have been whittled down from some 200,000 who applied.

In a video made for the Guardian by Stateless Media, Dina (whose last name isn’t given) and two other hopefuls—one from the UK, one from Mozambique—discuss love, sex, and death on Mars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8na3oQzcwCk

Dina is 29 now, but she’ll be nearing 40 by the time of the Mars mission’s planned launch in 2024. She could be almost a year older than that when they arrive on Mars, which is up to 300 days’ travel away .
Her days may then be numbered. A group of strategic engineering graduates estimated that the first of the travelers would die in 68 days—though the plan is to live there much longer .

Intimacy is not encouraged, because of the potential risks of childbirth—though in the long term the future of colony would rely on it .

No one will return from the mission. This led, last year, to a prohibition on Muslims joining the mission , issued by the General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment in the United Arab Emirates. It judged the mission to be so inevitably fatal that it is essentially suicide.

In the future, the mission plans to meet its costs, to a large extent, via broadcast rights . The first mission will cost $6 billion, according to estimates, though a subsequent mission—a plan is already in the pipeline—would be somewhat cheaper.

Source : qz.com

Friday 23 January 2015

Windows Holographic will let NASA explore what Curiosity sees on Mars

Mars Hololens

Microsoft announced the futuristic at-home augmented reality project Windows Holographic today, and one of the many different uses the company teased was a collaboration with NASA and the Curiosity rover team. Now, NASA has released more information on the software it built for Holographic, a program called OnSight.

By using Microsoft's HoloLens visor, NASA scientists will be able virtually explore the areas of Mars that Curiosity is studying in a fully immersive way. It will also allow them to plan new routes for the rover, examine Curiosity's worksite from a first-person view, and conduct science experiments using the rover's data.

The science teams at NASA that have worked with Curiosity's data before have had no problem learning plenty just by a computer screen, but Holographic and HoloLens will literally offer a new perspective on how to interpret the findings. Scientists will be able to virtually surround themselves with images from the rover and then explore the surface from different angles.

HERE is the video of Microsoft Hololens which makes Holographic Display near to reality :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aThCr0PsyuA

That's a big deal, according to OnSight's project manager, who's quoted in the release. "This tool gives them the ability to explore the rover's surroundings much as an Earth geologist would do field work here on our planet," he says.

We may still be decades away from landing humans on Mars, but it looks like Holographic and OnSight will help bridge the gap until then. The JPL team will start testing OnSight with Curiosity later this year. Deeper integration into future missions may have to wait until the next proposed Mars rover lands on the red planet in 2020.

Source : theverge

Tuesday 4 November 2014

ISRO plans second mission to Mars in 2018

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earth-space-hd-wallpaper-1920x1080-9805

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is planning to launch second mission to Mars with a lander and rover to carry out more experiments on the red planet.

The proposed plans come after the Indian space agency has successfully placed its unmanned Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft to the Martian orbit in September.

ISRO satellite centre director Shiva Kumar was quoted by IANS as saying: "We plan to launch a second mission to Mars in 2018, probably with a lander and rover, to conduct more experiments for which we have to develop new technologies.

"We will be able to take the Mars-2 mission after launching the second mission to the moon (Chandrayaan-2) in 2016 with our own lander and rover, which will help us develop a separate lander and rover for the red planet."

The agency is looking to launch the programme in 2018 as the missions to Mars can be launched at two year intervals.

ISRO intends to have fully operational heavy rockets ready by then to carry communication satellites weighing around 3t into the geo-stationary orbits around the earth.

In line with this plans, the agency has developed the geo-synchronous satellite launch vehicle (GSLV Mark I-III) to launch heavier communication satellites.

GSLV Mark-III is scheduled to take its first partial test flight in early December.

ISRO chairman Radhakrishnan was quoted by The Hindu as saying that the test flight will lead to a 'future workhorse vehicle that will stay with us for many years'.

Tests will be conducted on unmanned crew module of the three-stage launch vehicle, to evaluate heating during its re-entry and its behaviour in the crucial space phase.

Source : aerospace-technology

Tuesday 28 October 2014

Mars One Mission Could be end up with Big Failure

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Mars One is the ambitious, privately-funded plan to develop a colony on the Red Planet by 2025. But a new study led by a researcher at MIT found the current roadmap could be a deadly one.

Sydney Do, a PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), released a feasibility study that found the first humans on Mars would suffocate within 68 days of landing.

At the International Astronomical Union conference in Toronto, Do and his team presented their results: excess oxygen from crops produced in the artificial habitat would require ventilation and eventually cause asphyxiation.

marsoneastronaut__140312234636

According to CBC News, Do’s team ran a 26-month simulation to monitor conditions on the planned Mars One habitat; Twenty-six months is the time it would take backup spaceships to arrive from Earth according to the current Mars One plan.

Do told CBC News that a machine capable of solving the oxygen dilemma would be “so large that we couldn’t land it in one of the landers.” He said he actually contacted Mars One with his research, but has not heard back.

The Mars One team, which formed in 2011, is now two steps into its projected roadmap. According to the project’s website, the team produced a complete feasibility study during its first year with the help of experts from “space agencies and private corporations around the world.”

Mars One has already been collecting candidates for its 2024 launch. Candidates chosen by Mars One will begin training in 2015, and even when faced with the news that the mission could be deadly, several candidates remain undeterred.

Claude Gauthier, a 61-year-old Canadian mathematics professor, told CBC news that the problems laid out by Do and his team would be solved by food transports from Earth.

Fellow candidates and Canadians Paige Hunter and Tyler Reyno also told CBC News they weren’t worried by the study’s findings.

"Obviously, keeping humans alive on Mars is extremely difficult," Reyno said. "You just have to understand there's a lot of uncertainty and a lot of unknowns and those who are passionate and inspired will understand that and do it anyway."

Saturday 25 October 2014

Hubble captures stunning image of a comet's brush past Mars

comet_springs_0

NASA has just released this image of comet Siding Spring's close brush past Mars, and it is thrilling.

The image you see above -- a fuzzy white comet hovering above a glowing rust-colored planet -- is actually a composite of several images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on Saturday and Sunday.

NASA's Hi Res camera aboard a Mars orbiter captured the first images of the nucleus of a comet
There are a few reasons that Hubble could not take a picture like this in a single shot. For one, Mars is 10,000 times brighter than its cometary visitor, making it impossible to see details of Siding Spring and Mars in one exposure.

Also, the two objects were racing past each other during their near-rendezvous on Sunday. At least one of the objects would have been blurry if Hubble tried to take an image of them simultaneously.

The starfield that the two bodies are set against was provided by the Palomar Digital Sky Survey.

Despite being a bit of a cut and paste job, NASA officials say the image accurately illustrates the distance between Siding Spring and Mars at the time of the comet's closest approach.

It also accurately represents the relative sizes of the two bodies.

Friday 24 October 2014

India reaches Mars, Prime Minister Narendra Modi showers praises on ISRO

mangal

India scripted history on Wednesday,24 September with the success of its Mars mission. As the Mangalyaan entered the Mars orbit, making India the first country in the world to make it to the Red Planet in the first attempt. Mangalyaan moved a step closer to home after the dormant main engine on the spacecraft was test-fired flawlessly, ISRO looked confident of giving one final nudge to put it in orbit around Mars that saw it make space history. - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/live-indias-mars-mission-mangalyan-red-planet-mars-orbiter/#sthash.240P3tKY.dpuf

Saturday 21 September 2013

No sign of life detected on martian surface

new-report-suggests-no-methane-mars_71848_600x450

The Curiosity rover used a laser to sample freshly drilled rock dust on Mars. It has not found methane.

NASA's Curiosity rover has failed to find significant signs of methane in the Martian atmosphere, mission scientists reported on Thursday. The new rover information suggests that earlier reports of Martian methane—once seen as a possible sign of microbial life on the planet—may have been off target.
If the Curiosity finding holds up, it would raise questions about one of the most intriguing discoveries made about Mars in recent years: that periodic and large-scale plumes of organic methane are released from beneath the planet's surface.
"We consider this to be a quite definitive conclusion, and we're very confident with it," Chris Webster, manager of the Planetary Science Instrument Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said of the new rover readings reported in the journal Science.
"It puts an upper limit on the background methane on Mars that is very constraining of any scenarios for its production on the planet."
The special interest in the gas comes from the fact that some 90 percent of the methane on Earth is the product of living microbes. Signs of methane plumes in the Martian atmosphere seen by Earth-based telescopes had earlier raised hopes of detecting similar microbial life hidden under the Martian surface.
Original Discovery Defended
The lead author of that 2009 methane plume discovery report, Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said that he stood by his finding that substantial and localized plumes of methane were released on Mars in 2003.
He suggests that the Martian atmosphere destroys methane much more quickly than Earth's does, and that within three years of the original measurements new observations showed that half of the methane was gone.
"These findings are actually consistent with our results," Mumma said of the findings from Curiosity. "We reported that the methane releases are likely to be sporadic and that the methane is quickly eliminated in the atmosphere.
"The good news here is that the rover instrument designed to detect methane is working, and we look forward to ongoing monitoring in the future."
Other American and European researchers have also detected elevated levels of methane in the atmosphere of Mars—for example, the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiting spacecraft found methane in 2004—but none with the specificity reported by Mumma's team.
Curiosity Counters Methane Reports
Webster said that he took the previous reports of methane on Mars "at face value," since they too were published in peer-reviewed journals. But he said the Curiosity observations were clearly different.
While methane can be produced through geological processes, on Earth it is overwhelmingly a byproduct of microbes called methanogens. Best known as denizens of the guts of creatures ranging from humans to cattle to termites, these organisms produce the marsh gas found in wetlands and landfills. But they can also live deep underground.
Because of the harsh environment on Mars—high levels of surface radiation; low temperatures; and dry, acidic conditions—scientists have generally agreed that any microbes now alive on the planet would likely inhabit the deep underground.
Mumma's team did not point to biology as the source of the methane plumes they identified, but they did raise it as a possibility along with geological processes.
Surface Measurements Will Continue
The new paper makes the case that the methane levels Curiosity detected on the ground are so low that the likelihood of a biological source is vanishingly small.
"Methane is a very well understood gas that is quite stable," Webster said. "We know how long it lasts and how it is destroyed over decades."
While it is conceivable that something exists in the Martian atmosphere that destroys methane at a much faster pace than on Earth, "we have no evidence, no observations of what it might be," he said.
Webster said the rover's instruments have not detected any methane so far, but the possibility of error put the upper limit of methane at 1.7 parts per billion. That means that the Martian atmosphere could hold at most about 10,000 tons (nine million kilograms) of methane, notes the University of Michigan's Sushil Atreya, a co-author on the new study. On Earth, the atmosphere holds about six billion tons (5.44 trillion kilograms) of methane.
The methane-detecting device is on the rover's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument panel and is called the tunable laser spectrometer. Webster said that efforts to detect methane will continue, but will likely be reduced if results continue to come back negative.
A European satellite is scheduled to arrive at Mars in 2016 with the specific goal of searching for gases such as methane. The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter was initially going to be a joint venture with NASA, but the agency pulled out for budgetary reasons.