Group items tagged

is it worth having another look at this smart dust evolution? anybody interested?

We had some discussion about the Lotus-effect roughly two years ago. Zoe said that NASA surely worked on it. Well, she was right.

Nice renders!!!

Time to clean the dust off your museumkaarts...

Black-body radiation can give rise to a net attractive force between tiny objects. That is the claim made by physicists at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, who have calculated the strength of this new force between a speck of dust and a hydrogen atom. Under some cirmustances this force could be stronger than gravitation. Read the paper here: http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v111/i2/e023601

Here we go: we might not need liquid water after all on mars to get some nice flowering plants there! ... and terraform ? :-) Thirsty plants can extract water from the crystalline structure of gypsum, a rock-forming mineral found in soil on Earth and Mars.

Some plants grow on gypsum outcrops and remain active even during dry summer months, despite having shallow roots that cannot reach the water table. Sara Palacio of the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology in Jaca, Spain, and her colleagues compared the isotopic composition of sap from one such plant, called Helianthemum squamatum (pictured), with gypsum crystallization water and water found free in the soil. The team found that up to 90% of the plant's summer water supply came from gypsum.

The study has implications for the search for life in extreme environments on this planet and others.

Nature Commun 5, 4660 (2014)

Very interesting indeed. Attention is to be put on the form of calcium sulfate that is found on Mars. If it is hydrated (gypsum Ca(SO4)*2(H2O)) it works, but if it is dehydrated there is no water for the roots to take in. The Curiosity Rover tries to find out, but has uncertainty in recognising the hydrogen presence in the mineral: Copying : "(...) 3.2 Hydration state of calcium sulfates Calcium sulfates occur as a non-hydrated phase (anhydrite, CaSO4) or as one of two hydrated phases (bassanite, CaSO4.1/2H2O, which can contain a somewhat variable water content, and gypsum, CaSO4.2H2O). ChemCam identifies the presence of hydrogen at 656 nm, as already found in soils and dust [Meslin et al., 2013] and within fluvial conglomerates [Williams et al., 2013]. However, the quantification of H is strongly affected by matrix effects [Schröder et al., 2013], i.e. effects including major or even minor element chemistry, optical and mechanical properties, that can result in variations of emission lines unrelated to actual quantitative variations of the element in question in the sample. Due to these effects, discriminating between bassanite and gypsum is difficult. (...)"

forgot the reference http://www.msl-chemcam.com/doc/documents/577/Nachon%20et%20al%20Calcium%20sulfate%20veins%20characterized%20by%20ChemCam%20Curiosity%20at%20Gale%20Crater%20Mars_2013.pdf

Interesting! I like the quote "Maybe China would allow that to be a one-way trip but, in Japan, it would have to be a return ticket" talking about a human mission ....

fantastic mission - proved once more!!!

A good example of how loosing perspective makes so-called "novel ways" actually "rubish ways"

here the paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.1401 well spent defence funding ....

Some bacteria can influence the weather. Up high in the sky where clouds form, water droplets condense and ice crystal grow around tiny particles. Typically these particles are dust, pollen, or even soot from a wildfire. But recently scientists have begun to realize that some of these little particles are alive - they are bacteria evolved to create ice or water droplets around themselves. old but might be worth a discussion

NASA and ESA spacecraft have gathered new information about the basic properties of the comet's nucleus (not 67p) and directly detected the effects on the Martian atmosphere. Dust from the comet impacted Mars and was vaporized high in the atmosphere, producing what was likely an impressive meteor shower. Eight different types of metal ions have been detected, including sodium, magnesium and iron. The satellites will now continue to look for long-term perturbations to Mars' atmosphere.

Astronomers have observed up to three newborn planets evolving from a disk of gas and dust particles circling a distant Sun-like star. While 1,900 planets have been discovered outside our solar system, these are the first to be seen that are still forming.