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Mars Base

NASA May Put Tiny Greenhouse on Mars in 2021 | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/se-rover-plant-experiment.html

scibyte131 ViewerFeedback MarsPlantExperiment

shared by Mars Base on 11 May 14 - No Cached
  • Researchers have proposed putting a plant-growth experiment on NASA's next Mars rover
  • scheduled to launch in mid-2020 and land on the Red Planet in early 2021.
  • known as the Mars Plant Experiment (MPX),
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  • could help lay the foundation for the colonization of Mars,
  • its designers say
  • The MPX team
  • isn't suggesting that the 2020 Mars rover should
  • digging a hole with its robotic arm and planting seeds in the Red Planet's dirt.
  • the experiment would be entirely self-contained, eliminating the chance that Earth life could escape and perhaps get a foothold on Mars.
  • MPX would employ a clear "CubeSat" box
  • which would be affixed to the exterior of the 2020 rover
  • This box would hold Earth air and about 200 seeds of Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant that's commonly used in scientific research
  • The seeds would receive water when the rover touched down on Mars, and would then be allowed to grow for two weeks or so.
  • MPX would provide an organism-level test
  • how Earth life deals with the Red Planet's relatively high radiation levels and low gravity, which is about 40 percent as strong as that of Earth,
  • "It also would be the first multicellular organism to grow, live and die on another planet
Mars Base

Study probes why kids with autism are oversensitive to touch, noise - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...utism-oversensitive-noise.html

scibyte131 Autism

shared by Mars Base on 15 May 14 - No Cached
  • Certain areas in the brains of children with autism overreact to sensory stimuli, such as the touch of a scratchy sweater and loud traffic noises
  • a new small study shows
  • The finding helps to explain why autistic kids are five times more likely than other children to be overwhelmed by everyday sensations
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  • It's a condition called sensory over-responsivity, and it was recognized as one of the core features of autism spectrum disorder
  • "I think if anybody ever had a doubt that this was just some sort of odd pickiness or something like that in people with autism, this shows, no, there really is a brain basis for this," said Dr. Paul Wang
  • researchers recruited 32 children and teens. Half the group had been diagnosed with autism. The others were typically developing kids who were matched in age to the autistic kids.
  • scientists had them rest in a fMRI machine, a kind of scanner than can see brain activity in real time
  • they touched the kids with a scratchy wool sweater, played loud traffic noises or did both at the same time. Each condition was repeated four times for 15 seconds
  • The brains of children with autism reacted much more strongly to the sensory stimulation than did the brains of typically developing kids
  • The two areas that seemed to be the most hyperactive were the primary sensory cortex, which is responsible for initially processing sensory information, and the amygdala, which is involved in emotional regulation.
  • They are kind of initially interpreting these stimuli differently and, also, they're not able to regulate their response
  • Shula Green, a Ph.D. candidate
  • typical kids,
  • have an initial response almost immediately, then by the second time around, that response goes way down
  • In kids with autism, that response really stays high throughout the scan. They're not getting used to it
  • the hyperactivity the researchers saw on the brain scans became most intense when kids with autism experienced the two sensations at the same time
  • something is really going on when there's more than one stimulus the brain has to deal with
Mars Base

First diplodocid sauropod from South America found -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...140514182709.htm

scibyte131 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 15 May 14 - No Cached
  • The discovery of a new sauropod dinosaur species, Leinkupal laticauda, found in Argentina may be the first record of a diplodocid from South America and the youngest record of Diplodocidae in the world
  • Diplodocids are part of a group of sauropod dinosaurs known for their large bodies, as well as extremely long necks and tails
  • Scientists have identified a new diplodocid sauropod from the early Cretaceous period in Patagonia, Argentina -- the first diplodocid sauropod discovered in South America
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  • Though the bones are fragmentary, scientists found differences between this species and other diplodocid species from North American and Africa in the vertebrae where the tail connects to the body
  • These differences suggest to the authors that it may warrant a new species name, Leinkupal laticauda
  • apparently lived much later than its North American and African cousins
  • existence suggests that the supposed extinction of the Diplodocidae around the end of the Jurassic or beginning of the Cretaceous period didn't occur globally
  • the clade survived in South America at least during part of the Early Cretaceous.
Mars Base

May 26 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on May 26th, died, and events - 0 views

www.todayinsci.com/...5_26.htm

scibyte131 LookingBackMay

shared by Mars Base on 15 May 14 - No Cached
  • Leeuwenhoek's animalcules
  • In 1676, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek applied his hobby of making microscopes from his own handmade lenses to observe some water running off a roof during a heavy rainstorm. He finds that it contains, in his words, “very little animalcules.” The life he has found in the runoff water is not present in pure rainwater. This was a fundamental discovery, for it showed that the bacteria and one-celled animals did not fall from the sky. When a ball of molten glass is inflated like a balloon, a small droplet of the hot fluid collects at the very bottom the bubble. Leeuwenhoek used these droplets as microscope lenses to view the animalcules. Despite their crude nature, those early lenses enabled Leeuwenhoek to describe an amazing world of microscopic life
Mars Base

May 23 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on May 23rd, died, and events - 0 views

www.todayinsci.com/...5_23.htm

scibyte131 LookingBackMay

shared by Mars Base on 15 May 14 - No Cached
  • Bifocal spectacles
  • In 1785, a letter from Benjamin Franklin referred to his bifocal glasses. Writing from France to George Whatley, a friend, Franklin described his “double glasses” solution to needing two pairs of glasses of different focussing power to see objects far or near He wrote, “I had the glasses cut and half of each kind associated in the same circle. ... I have only to move my eyes up and down as I want to see far or near, the proper glasses always being ready.” The wording the letter leaves it uncertain has long before Franklin had referrred to. Some historians have pointed to evidence of others making split-lens spectacles. So, it remains likely, but not definite, that Franklin actually invented the bifocal glasses, and it may have been in the early 1760s. He was certainly well-known for wearing and popularizing them
Mars Base

Direct Image of an Exoplanet 155 Light Years Away - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...exoplanet-155-light-years-away

scibyte131 exoplanet

shared by Mars Base on 15 May 14 - No Cached
  • This week, an international team of researchers
  • announced the discovery of an exoplanet
  • 155 light years
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  • world is estimated to be 11 times the mass of Jupiter — placing it just under the lower mass limit for brown dwarf status
  • orbits its host star 2,000x farther than the distance from Earth to the Sun once every 80,000 (!) years
  • The primary star, GU Psc A, is an M3 red dwarf weighing in at 35% the mass of our Sun and is just 100 million years old
  • researchers targeted GU Psc after it was determined to be a member of the AB Doradus moving group of relatively young stars, which are prime candidates for exoplanet detection
  • The fact that GU Psc B was captured by direct imaging at 155 light years distant is amazing
  • The team was able to discern this curious planet by utilizing observations from the W.M. Keck observatory, the joint Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, the Gemini Observatory and the Observatoire Mont-Mégantic in Québec.
  • there are not a lot of exoplanets that were detected ‘directly’ so far
  • The few planets for which we have an actual image are interesting because we can analyze their light directly, and thus learn much more about them
  • researcher Marie-Ève Naud and her co-advisor Étienne Artigau
  • also one of the “coolest” planets that have been directly imaged, showing methane absorption
  • it is certainly the most distant exoplanet to a main-sequence star that has been found so far
  • This distance makes GU Psc b very interesting from a theoretical point of view, because it’s hard to imagine how it could have formed in the protoplanetary disk of its star
  • current working definition of an exoplanet is based solely on mass (<13 Jupiter masses), so GU Psc b probably formed in a way that is more similar to how stars formed
  • how are astronomers certain that PU Psc b is related to its host and not a foreground or background object?
  • As the host star, GU Psc is relatively nearby; it displays a significant apparent proper motion
  • relative to distant background stars and galaxies.
  • On images taken one year apart with WIRCam on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, we observed that the companion displays the same big proper motion, i.e. they move together in the plane of the sky, while the rest of the stars in the field don’t
  • most planet hunting techniques using direct imaging involve state-of-the-art adaptive optics systems, but we used ‘standard’ imaging without any exotic techniques
  • To find this planet, we used very sensitive ‘standard’ imaging,
  • we chose carefully the wavelengths where planets display colors that are unlike most other astrophysical objects such as stars and galaxies
Mars Base

Global "Selfie" to Be Beamed to Outer Space - 0 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...fie-message-new-horizons-space

scibyte131 NewHorizons NewHorizonsMessage

shared by Mars Base on 18 May 14 - No Cached
  • This summer, you will get that chance to send a message to other worlds.
  • leaders of an initiative called New Horizons Message Initiative, announced
  • at the Smithsonian Future Is Here Festival in Washington, D.C., that NASA has agreed to upload a digital crowd-sourced message to the New Horizons spacecraft
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  • The content of the message will be determined by whomever wants to participate in the planet-wide project
  • The message itself will be transmitted sometime after New Horizons does a flyby of Pluto in 2015 and sends back the scientific data that it collects
  • If all goes according to plan, New Horizons will become the fifth man-made object to travel beyond the solar system—after Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2.
  • it's the only one of the five not to launch with a message for any alien travelers it might encounter along the way
  • The Pioneer spacecrafts bore plaques on their sides, and the Voyagers each carried golden records (and the means to play them).
  • When New Horizons' journey was being planned
  • other missions had been scrapped and the budget was extremely tight
  • didn't have the bandwidth for
  • the message
  • . "Now
  • It doesn't cost massive amounts because there's no hardware, just uplinking ones and zeroes
  • Lomberg, who worked closely with Carl Sagan on the Voyager golden record in 1977, had an epiphany last year about sending the message digitally
  • In September 2013, Lomberg launched a website with a petition to NASA. By February 2014, 10,000 people from over 140 countries had signed it.
  • Lomberg approached Stern, who advised him that NASA would need evidence of public support
  • This message will be very different from the one Lomberg designed with Sagan almost 40 years ago
  • The 21st-century version will be a global self-portrait, pieced together by many willing hands
  • Anyone on Earth will be able to upload potential content (images, sounds, software—the formats haven't been finalized)
  • Then everyone will be able to vote on what to include
  • "Our team is going to provide the overall architecture of the message," says Lomberg, "but we'll try to keep ourselves open to what we will send."
  • , a National Geographic emerging explorer
  • will have to figure out how to wrangle a planet's worth of opinions into the roughly 100 MB of memory New Horizons will have available on its computer.
  • the project will officially launch August 25, the final file may not be sent for several years
  • The New Horizons computer won't have any room in its memory until the data from Pluto are transmitted back to Earth, which could take more than a year
  • "The spacecraft is so far away," says Lomberg, "that download times are like dial-up Internet."
  • Pluto may not be the final mission target
  • hopes that the spacecraft will have a shot at a flyby of another object in the Kuiper Belt of the solar system
  • If that happens, the message upload will be delayed
  • As long as the spacecraft is healthy and the radio is working," he says, "there's no particular rush to send it
  • cosmic radiation may eventually corrupt the spacecraft's electronic memory
  • The New Horizons message won't last nearly as long as the metal missives attached to Pioneer and Voyager will
Mars Base

Images - Mars Science Laboratory - 0 views

mars.jpl.nasa.gov/...images

scibyte131 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 18 May 14 - No Cached
  • NASA's Curiosity Mars rover used the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) instrument on its robotic arm to illuminate and record this nighttime view of the sandstone rock target "Windjana."
  • The rover had previously drilled a hole to collect sample material from the interior of the rock and then zapped a series of target points inside the hole with the laser of the rover's Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument
  • The hole is 0.63 inch (1.6 centimeters) in diameter.
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  • That instrument provides information about the target's composition by analysis of the sparks of plasma generated by the energy of the laser beam striking the target
  • This view combines eight separate MAHLI exposures, taken at different focus settings to show the entire scene in focus
  • The exposures were taken after dark on the 628th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (May 13, 2014)
  • MAHLI includes light-emitting diodes as well as a color camera.
  • Using the instrument's own lighting yields an image of the hole's interior with less shadowing than would be seen in a sunlit image
  • The camera's inspection of the interior of the hole provides documentation about what the drill bit passed through as it penetrated the rock -- for example, to see if it cut through any mineral veins or visible layering
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