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Mars Base

An Unexpected Ending for Deep Impact - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...xpected-ending-for-deep-impact

scibyte103 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 21 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • After almost 9 years in space
  • July 4th impact and subsequent flyby of a comet, an additional comet flyby, and the return of approximately 500,000 images of celestial objects
  • NASA’s Deep Impact/EPOXI mission has officially been brought to a close.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has reluctantly pronounced the mission at an end after being unable to communicate with the spacecraft for over a month
  • The last communication with the probe was Aug. 8
  • journeyed a total of about 4.7 billion miles (7.58 billion kilometers).
  • Launched in January 2005
  • the spacecraft first traveled about 268 million miles (431 million kilometers) to the vicinity of comet Tempel 1.
  • On July 3, 2005, the spacecraft deployed an impactor into the path of comet to essentially be run over by its nucleus on July 4
  • caused material from below the comet’s surface to be blasted out into space
  • examined by the telescopes and instrumentation of the flyby spacecraft
  • in late December 2007 to put it on course to encounter another comet, Hartley 2 in November 2010
  • Sixteen days after that comet encounter, the Deep Impact team placed the spacecraft on a trajectory to fly back past Eart
  • The spacecraft’s extended mission
  • the successful flyby of comet Hartley 2 on Nov. 4, 2010
  • Along the way, it also observed six different stars to confirm the motion of planets orbiting them
  • took images and data of the Earth, the Moon and Mars
  • data helped to confirm the existence of water on the Moon, and attempted to confirm the methane signature in the atmosphere of Mars
  • It took images of comet ISON this year and collected early images of comet ISON in June
  • After losing contact with the spacecraft last month, mission controllers spent several weeks trying to uplink commands to reactivate its onboard systems
  • Although the exact cause of the loss is not known
  • analysis has uncovered a potential problem with computer time tagging that could have led to loss of control for Deep Impact’s orientation.
  • That would then affect the positioning of its radio antennas, making communication difficult
  • its solar arrays, which would in turn prevent the spacecraft from getting power
  • allow cold temperatures to ruin onboard equipment, essentially freezing its battery and propulsion systems.
Mars Base

Curiosity Rover Finds No Methane On Mars. What's Happening? - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...ethane-on-mars-whats-happening

scibyte103 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 21 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover can’t find any sign of methane on the red planet, but the agency emphasized that methane would be only one indicator of possible life
  • reduces the probability of current methane-producing Martian microbes
  • this addresses only one type of microbial metabolism
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • here are many types of terrestrial microbes that don’t generate methane
  • Curiosity
  • sniffed the atmosphere six times for methane between October 2012 and June 2013
  • didn’t see any sign of the molecule
  • The instrument
  • would be able to detect minute concentrations
  • Scientists today estimate methane on Mars must be 1.3 parts per billion at the most, which is only one-sixth as much as earlier estimates
  • results are intriguing given that other teams have spotted methane on Mars as far back as 1999
  • Mars Global Surveyor, which was working for more than 10 years, charted the evolution of Martian methane over three years
  • NASA Earth-bound observations using spectroscopic measurements reported even greater amounts in the Martian atmosphere in 2009,
  • reports of the highest concentrations of Mars methane came from Earth-based observatories
  • imply that they think peering through Earth’s atmosphere may have distorted the measurements
  • Some Earthly measurements indicated local regions with methane as high as 45 parts per billion
  • s no known way for methane to disappear quickly from the atmosphere
Mars Base

How Robo-Bees Could Save America's Crops | Popular Science - 1 views

www.popsci.com/...true-bee-or-robot-be

scibyte103 Robo-Bees

shared by Mars Base on 22 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Something is killing off up to half of America's bees
  • Fewer bees not only means less honey, it means less food
  • Researchers at Harvard are working on
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • tiny drones the size of bees
  • flying robots designed to be small enough to pollinate a flower (they weigh just 80 milligrams
  • are also designed to hover, giving them plenty of time to transfer pollen
  • wings mimic those of a fly,
  • special ceramic that contracts when stimulated by electricity
  • The robo-bees aren't ready
  • time yet
  • they're so tiny, they can't fit a battery pack for power
  • will also need some sort of computer so they can guide themselves in flight
Mars Base

Leave the Driving to Autonav | NASA - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...curiosity20130919.html

scibyte103 Curiosity

shared by Mars Base on 22 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • For the past year, Curiosity has been driving on Mars following instructions from human rover planners
  • new capability that’s coming on line
  • that will let Curiosity drive herself on Mars
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • called “Autonomous navigation
  • Humans are still
  • going to tell her where to go.  Curiosity is going to decide how to get there
  • Curiosity takes pictures from the navigation cameras, with the hazard cameras, and it’s able to combine that information, put it all together to define a safe way to get to where we ask her to go
  • The drive lasted about 10 meters
  • she turned her camera this way and that to look at what’s ahead of her.
  • She actually curved a little bit to the right to avoid some of the small rocks that were directly in front of her.
  • the actual speed that Curiosity
  • only about 2 inches per second
  • Another part of the autonomous navigation capability is using visual odometry
  • Visual odometry uses images from the mast cameras to look at the terrain before and after a small drive step.
  • Curosity will see a few hundred features and see how they move across the step
  • by tracking those features she can know exactly how far she moved, whether she slipped or twisted a little bit during the drive
Mars Base

Protein injection triggers vessel repair | Genes & Cells | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...jection_triggers_vessel_repair

scibyte103 eyes

shared by Mars Base on 23 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • retinopathy, a condition that causes tissue damage in the eye and can lead to blindness
  • In mice
  • a single injection of angiopoietin-1 in the blood vessels triggers the release of the growth factor fibronectin
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • which fuels the growth of blood vessels
  • Researchers hope the protein will one day work as a treatment for retinopathy in people.
Mars Base

First evidence that fear memories can be reduced during sleep - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...2013-09-evidence-memories.html

scibyte104 brain

shared by Mars Base on 23 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • A fear memory was reduced in people by exposing them to the memory over and over again while they slept
  • It's the first time that emotional memory has been manipulated in humans during sleep
  • potentially offers a new way to enhance the typical daytime treatment of phobias through exposure therapy by adding a nighttime component
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • showed a small but significant decrease in fear
  • If it can be extended to pre-existing fear, the bigger picture is that, perhaps, the treatment of phobias can be enhanced during sleep."
  • Previous projects have shown that spatial learning and motor sequence learning can be enhanced during sleep
  • wasn't previously known that emotions could be manipulated during sleep
  • 15 healthy human subjects received mild electric shocks while seeing two different faces
  • also smelled a specific odorant while viewing each face and being shocked
  • the face and the odorant both were associated with fear
  • Subjects received different odorants to smell with each face such as woody, clove, new sneaker, lemon or mint
  • when a subject was asleep, one of the two odorants was re-presented, but in the absence of the associated faces and shocks.
  • occurred during slow wave sleep when memory consolidation is thought to occur
  • Sleep is very important for strengthening new memories
  • particular odorant was being presented during sleep, it was reactivating the memory of that face over and over again
  • similar to the process of fear extinction during exposure therapy
  • When the subjects woke up, they were exposed to both faces
  • When they saw the face linked to the smell they had been exposed to during sleep, their fear reactions were lower than their fear reactions to the other face
  • Fear was measured in two ways
  • through small amounts of sweat in the skin, similar to a lie detector test
  • through neuroimaging with fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging).
  • fMRI results showed changes in regions associated with memory
  • and changes in patterns of brain activity in regions associated with emotion
  • These brain changes reflected a decrease in reactivity that was specific to the targeted face image associated with the odorant presented during sleep
Mars Base

The Moon Is 100 Million Years Younger Than Thought | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/100-million-years-younger.html

scibyte104 moon

shared by Mars Base on 24 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • new research suggests.
  • The moon is
  • younger than scientists had previously believed
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • leading theory of how the moon formed 
  • it was created when a mysterious planet — one the size of Mars or larger — slammed into Earth
  • about 4.56 billion years ago, just after the solar system came together
  • new analyses of lunar rocks suggest that the moon, which likely coalesced from the debris blasted into space by this monster impact, is actually between 4.4 billion and 4.45 billion years old
  • make the moon 100 million years younger than previously thought, could reshape scientists' understanding of the early Earth
  • several important implications of this late moon formation that have not yet been worked out
  • , if the Earth was already differentiated prior to the giant impact, would the impact have blown off the primordial atmosphere that formed from this earlier epoch of Earth history
  • Scientists know the solar system's age (4.568 billion years) quite well
  • they can pin down the formation times of relatively small bodies such as asteroids precisely
  • by noting when these objects underwent extensive melting
  • a consequence,
  • of the heat generated by the collision and fusion of these objects' building-block "planetesimals."
  • analysis of meteorites that came from the asteroid Vesta and eventually rained down on Earth reveals that the 330-mile-wide (530 kilometers) space rock is 4.565 billion years old
  • Vesta cooled relatively quickly and is too small to have retained enough internal heat to drive further melting or volcanism
  • tougher to nail down the age of larger solar-system bodies
  • Earth likely took longer to grow to full size compared to a small asteroid like Vesta
  • every step in its growth tends to erase, or at least cloud, the memory of earlier events
  • Scientists keep getting better and better estimates
  • as they refine their techniques and technology improves. And those estimates are pushing the moon's formation date farther forward in time.
  • The moon is thought to have harbored a global ocean of molten rock shortly after its dramatic formation
  • Currently, the most precisely determined age for the lunar rocks that arose from that ocean is 4.360 billion years
  • here on Earth, scientists have found signs in several locations of a major melting event that occurred around 4.45 billion years ago
  • evidence is building that the catastrophic collision that formed the moon and reshaped Earth occurred around that time, rather than 100 million years or so before
Mars Base

MESSENGER: MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging - 0 views

messenger.jhuapl.edu/...image.php

scibyte103 mercury

shared by Mars Base on 24 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • , a portion of the terrain surrounding the northern margin of the Caloris basin
  • an elevated block in the shape of a certain carbonite-encased smuggler who can make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs
  • This block may be part of the original surface that pre-dates the formation of Caloris, which was shaped by material ejected during the basin-forming event
Mars Base

Dextrose rub helps newborns with low blood sugar | Body & Brain | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/..._newborns_with_low_blood_sugar

scibyte104

shared by Mars Base on 25 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Newborns with low blood sugar face the prospect of a trip to the intensive care unit and intravenous infusions of glucose
  • rubbing a sweet gel onto the insides of babies’ cheeks
  • Low blood sugar in newborns, or neonatal hypoglycemia, occurs when the tiny body needs more glucose to meet energy needs than is available in the bloodstream
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Prolonged hypoglycemia risks neurological injury.
  • Low blood glucose shows up in 5 to 15 percent of otherwise healthy newborns as measured by blood tests
  • Doctors typically don’t run the analysis on every newborn
  • If they spot low blood sugar symptoms such as poor color, seizures, irritability, lethargy, jittery behavior and a lack of interest in feeding, doctors are more likely to call for the blood test
  • many infants with low blood glucose don’t have such symptoms
  • report designates at-risk infants as those who are born preterm, have diabetic mothers, or are either large or small for their gestational age
  • new study, the researchers identified 237 apparently healthy newborns who had one of those risk factors or who were feeding poorly
  • Half of the babies were randomly assigned to get a gel made of dextrose, a form of glucose, rubbed on the inner cheeks up to six times over 48 hours; the rest received a placebo gel
  • During the following week, 30 babies getting the placebo gel were placed in intensive care for hypoglycemia while only 16 of those getting the dextrose gel needed such care for the condition
  • Dextrose had been tried in the 1990s as an oral rub for infants but wasn’t fully tested or put into widespread use
Mars Base

Want to Phone Aliens? Help Get Your Messages On NASA's Pluto-Bound Spacecraft | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/pluto-spacecraft-petition.html

scibyte104

shared by Mars Base on 27 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • New Horizons mission — launched toward Pluto in 2006
  • flies into interstellar space in about 30 years, according to SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
  • the diverse group of space fans have created a petition
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • New Horizons Message Initiative
  • asking NASA officials to upload a yet-to-be-determined crowdsourced message from humanity onto the New Horizons craft after its encounter with the Pluto system
  • This website is an opportunity for anyone who is interested to sign a petition that asks NASA to approve the future use of the spacecraft
  • need formal permission from the agency and sub-support to make this happen
  • using some of the spacecraft's memory to store messages from earthlings beamed up to the probe
  • it might be possible to just reprogram about 100 megabytes of its memory and upload a new sights and sounds of Earth
  • When New Horizons gets past Pluto, [and] has done all its data
  • Before New Horizons launched, NASA officials discussed including an onboard message, but decided against it
  • small team on a tight budget
  • didn't want to see us being distracted from the project
  • NASA funds will not be used for the project, but initiative officials are asking for support from private individuals.
Mars Base

Mars rover Curiosity finds water in first sample of planet surface - 0 views

phys.org/...r-curiosity-sample-planet.html

scibyte104

shared by Mars Base on 27 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • The first scoop of soil analyzed by
  • Curiosity rover reveals
  • several percent water by weight
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • very first solid sample ingested by Curiosity is the high percentage of water in the soil
  • About 2 percent of the soil on the surface of Mars is made up of water
  • The sample also released significant carbon dioxide, oxygen, and sulfur compounds when heated
  • organics are not likely preserved in surface soils, which are exposed to harsh radiation and oxidants
  • layer of surface soil that has been mixed and distributed by frequent dust storms. So a scoop of this stuff is basically a microscopic Mars rock collection
Mars Base

Curiosity Discovers Patch of Pebbles Formed by Flowing Martian Water on Mount Sharp Trek - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...tian-water-on-mount-sharp-trek

scibyte104

shared by Mars Base on 27 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Curiosity
  • has discovered a new patch of pebbles formed and rounded eons ago by flowing liquid water
  • the new finding at a sandstone outcrop called ‘Darwin’ during a brief science stopover spot called ‘Waypoint 1’.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The discovery at Darwin is significant because it significantly broadens the area here that was altered by flowing liquid water
  • The robot pulled into ‘Waypoint 1’ on Sept. 12 (Sol 392).
  • Did the water flow that deposited the pebbly sandstone at Waypoint 1 occur at about the same time as the water flow at Yellowknife Bay?
  • If the same fluid flow produced the veins here and the veins at Yellowknife Bay, you would expect the veins to have the same composition.’
  • the veins are different, so we know the history is complicated. We use these observations to piece together the long-term history
  • Darwin comes from a list of 100 names the team put together to designate rocks in the Mawson Quadrangle
  • on Sept. 22, the rover departed Darwin and Waypoint 1 on a westward heading to resume the many months long journey to Mount Sharp
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