Mars - Planet, Space, Cosmo and Science

Mars Lander, Still for a Day, Stirs Again

Before coming back to life Thursday evening, NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander had put itself in “safe mode” after its power reserves dipped too low.

Succumbing to a swirling dust storm and the cold of an encroaching Martian winter, the Phoenix Mars lander fell quiet for a day, before coming back to life Thursday evening, albeit weakly.
The lander’s batteries appeared to have drained, mission managers said, with all systems, including its heaters, shut down. The mission managers had instructed the spacecraft to wake up and send word of its condition at 12:30 a.m. Thursday via the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was passing overhead. It did not.

But the spacecraft is programmed with a so-called Lazarus mode that enables it to resuscitate itself and recharge its batteries during the day.


Once restarted, the lander conserved its energy for 17 hours, then tried to communicate for two hours with any orbiter passing overhead, repeating the cycle until it received new instructions.

The lander successfully communicated with the Mars Odyssey orbiter Thursday evening.

A NASA statement said: “The communication reinforced a diagnosis that the spacecraft is in a precautionary mode triggered by low energy. Mission engineers are assessing the lander’s condition and steps necessary for returning to science operations.”

The Phoenix landed in May, during spring in the Martian northern polar region, to study a vast expanse of ice just below the surface. It has found signs that the ice may have melted in the past — the presence of carbonates, which form in the presence of liquid water — but its measurements also show current conditions to be very dry.

The lander’s last experiment, using a small oven to cook a sample of soil, was completed over the weekend. Data from the experiment was sent back before the shutdown and could answer whether the Martian soil contains organic compounds.

The Phoenix’s mission was scheduled to last three months but was extended to allow scientists to squeeze every bit of data from the spacecraft.


Now, with the dwindling sunlight of the Martian winter, the lander’s solar panels will produce less energy.

A dust storm on Monday further reduced the amount of power the panels could produce. Coupled with the energy drain from the last experiment and surface temperatures as low as minus-141 degrees Fahrenheit at night, the spacecraft put itself into its safe mode on Tuesday, shutting down nonessential activities.

The lander also shut down one of its two batteries and switched to backup electronics systems, and some energy-saving commands sent to the primary electronics were not performed.

Even though the lander revived, its demise is probably less than a month away. Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona, the mission’s principal investigator, said it would be nice to watch winter develop through the lander’s instruments. “But that’s gravy,” Mr. Smith said. “We got what we came for.”

After a weekend of rumors that the White House had been informed of a major discovery bearing on the possibility of life on Mars, NASA held a hasty telephone news conference on Tuesday to announce the tentative identification of a class of minerals that has nothing directly to do with the habitability of Mars

Scientists find that the soil on the northern arctic plains of Mars is full of mineral nutrients that plants would need to survive.
June 27, 2008

“We basically have found what appears to be the requirements, the nutrients, to support life whether past, present or future,” said Samuel P. Kounaves of Tufts University, who is leading the chemical analysis, during a telephone news conference on Thursday. “The sort of soil you have there is the type of soil you’d probably have in your backyard.”

Mars today is cold and dry, and the surface is bombarded by ultraviolet radiation, making life unlikely, but conditions could have made the planet more habitable in the past. Plants that like alkaline soil — like asparagus — might readily grow in the Martian soil, provided that other components of an Earth-like environment including air and water were also present.

The preliminary findings from Phoenix do not answer whether life ever existed on Mars (or might still exist somewhere underground), only that conditions, at least at this location, are not the harshest imaginable. The soil, taken close to the surface, was similar to what is found in parts of Antarctica, Dr. Kounaves said. The soil elsewhere on the planet could well be very different; even the soil farther down in the ground could turn out to be acidic or otherwise vary in composition.

Space , Galaxy & Milky Way

Despite being one of billions of galaxies in the universe, the Milky Way is special. Nestled in a corner of this gigantic galaxy sits Earth, a simple grain of sand tucked away among countless clusters of stars.

MASS EXTINCTION EVENT
An extinction event (also known as: mass extinction; extinction-level event, ELE) is a sharp decrease in the number of species in a relatively short period of time. Mass extinctions affect most major taxonomic groups present at the time — birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, invertebrates and other simpler life forms. They may be caused by one or both of Over 99% of species that ever lived are now extinct, but extinction occurs at an uneven rate. Based on the fossil record, the background rate of extinctions on Earth is about two to five taxonomic families of marine invertebrates and vertebrates every million years. Marine fossils are mostly used to measure extinction rates because they are more plentiful and cover a longer time span than fossils of land organisms. Since life began on earth, several major mass extinctions have significantly exceeded the background extinction rate. The most recent, the Cretaceous--Tertiary extinction event, occurred 65 million years ago, and has attracted more attention than all others because it killed the dinosaurs. In the past 540 million years there have been five major events when over 50% of animal species died.



There probably were mass extinctions in the Archean and Proterozoic Eons, but before the Phanerozoic there were no animals with hard body parts to leave a significant fossil record. Estimates of the number of major mass extinctions in the last 540 million years range from as few as five to more than twenty. These differences stem from the threshold chosen for describing an extinction event as "major", and the data chosen to measure past diversitY.

India Chandrayaan-1 & Russian Soyuz spaceship

The Soyuz is to dock with the ISS at 12:33 p.m. Moscow time (2033 GMT) on Tuesday and the crew will move into the ISS in about one hour.

Garriott will stay in the ISS for ten days and return to the Earth together with Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kononeko and Sergei Volkov. Lonchakov and Fincke will continue their mission together with NASA's Gregory Chamitoff.


There have been so far six paid visitors to the ISS since California businessman Dennis Tito became the world's first space tourist in May 2001 at a price of 20 million U.S. dollars, or 1,800 dollars per minute, for an eight-day trip.


The sons of a Russian cosmonaut and a US astronaut met in space yesterday when spaceman Sergei Volkov welcomed American Richard Garriott on board the International Space Station.

Garriott, a computer game developer who paid $35 million for his trip to space, arrived with two crewmates on board a Soyuz capsule, which docked with the space station two days after blasting off from a launch-pad in Kazakhstan.

After the hatches were opened between the capsule and the station at 9:55 GMT, Volkov, whose cosmonaut father was orbiting the earth in 1991, welcomed Garriott with a hug.
US space agency NASA said they are first children of previous space adventurers to meet in orbit.


Russian television showed Garriott smiling after taking congratulations from friends and family, including his astronaut father Owen, who joked with Alexander Volkov at mission control in Moscow.

Space tourist Garriott, US astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the Kazakh steppe on Sunday.

Fincke will serve as commander of the six-month Expedition 18 mission which will focus on preparing the station to house six crew members on longer-duration missions.

Russian space officials brushed aside reports of problems with a toilet at the station, saying all problems had now been resolved and that there were several reserve systems.
After 10 days in space Garriott will return to Earth with the ISS's outgoing crew aboard a Soyuz re-entry vehicle, a three-person capsule which has malfunctioned on its last two flights.



The PSLV-C11 (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle), Chandrayaan-1 sits on the second launch pad of Satish Dhawan space centre at Sriharikota, about 100 km (62 miles) north of the southern Indian city of Chennai, October 11, 2008. Chandrayaan-1 is India’s first mission to moon. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

China Space Exploration & Travel To Moon

Divine Vessel [Shenzhou] 7
Riding a wave of pride and patriotism after hosting the Olympics, China's communist leaders face few of the public doubts or budgetary pressures constraining such programs elsewhere. That has allowed them to fuse political will and scientific gusto in a step-by-step process that could one day see Chinese astronauts landing on the moon.

Chinese space programs are methodically moving forward in a "very deliberate, graduated" manner, said Charles Vick, a space analyst for the Washington think tank GlobalSecurity.org. Beijing is accumulating the building blocks of a comprehensive program, demonstrating "caution but confidence" as it gains on the U.S. and other space powers, he said.

Future goals are believed to include an unmanned moon landing around 2012, a mission to return samples in 2015, and possibly a manned lunar mission by 2017 — three years ahead of the U.S. target date for returning to the moon

Chinese astronauts Zhai Zhigang, Liu Boming and Jing Haipeng at the space program headquarters in Beijing's north suburbs, China, on Sept. 29, 2008. The three Chinese astronauts who successfully completed a space journey Sunday came back to Beijing Monday morning. (Xinhua/Chen Jianli) Phot72

Three Chinese astronauts who successfully completed a space journey Sunday came back to Beijing Monday morning.

The China Central Television (CCTV) reported that the astronauts, Zhai Zhigang, Liu Boming and Jing Haipeng, are in good conditions.
After completing China's first human extravehicular activities in space and a few scientific experiments, the team landed Sunday afternoon in north China's Inner Mongolia.

After arriving at the space program headquarters in Beijing's north suburbs, or the space town, the trio spacemen separately rode on three roofless sedans in a miniature parade.

They are expected to undergo two-week preventive quarantine in the medical facilities in the space town.

Although they have passed brief physical checkup soon after their perfect landing, the astronauts are still vulnerable to viruses on the Earth, says medical experts.

Meanwhile, medical experts are going to thoroughly check their physical and mental health.

Since 2003, China has sent a total of six astronauts into space, including the country's first spaceman Yang Liwei, who is now a major general responsible for astronauts' training, and the first pair Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng. Photo73

Chinese taikonauts of Shenzhou-7 space module crew wave to local people who came to see them off in Hohhot, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Sept. 29, 2008. A red-carpet ceremony was held here at 6:30 Monday to send off the three astronauts Zhai Zhigang, Liu Boming and Jing Haipeng back to Beijing, capital of China. (Xinhua Photo74)



CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The seven astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery will deliver and install Japan’s massive lab, Kibo, or Hope, at the international space station.

The sons of a Russian cosmonaut and a US astronaut met in space yesterday when spaceman Sergei Volkov welcomed American Richard Garriott on board the International Space Station.

Garriott, a computer game developer who paid $35 million for his trip to space, arrived with two crewmates on board a Soyuz capsule, which docked with the space station two days after blasting off from a launch-pad in Kazakhstan.

After the hatches were opened between the capsule and the station at 9:55 GMT, Volkov, whose cosmonaut father was orbiting the earth in 1991, welcomed Garriott with a hug.
US space agency NASA said they are first children of previous space adventurers to meet in orbit.

Russian television showed Garriott smiling after taking congratulations from friends and family, including his astronaut father Owen, who joked with Alexander Volkov at mission control in Moscow.

Space tourist Garriott, US astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the Kazakh steppe on Sunday.

Fincke will serve as commander of the six-month Expedition 18 mission which will focus on preparing the station to house six crew members on longer-duration missions.

Russian space officials brushed aside reports of problems with a toilet at the station, saying all problems had now been resolved and that there were several reserve systems.

After 10 days in space Garriott will return to Earth with the ISS's outgoing crew aboard a Soyuz re-entry vehicle, a three-person capsule which has malfunctioned on its last two flights.

Here's a look at the six men and one woman who will tackle the job:
Commander Mark KellyKelly married U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., in November.


As for who’s the big shot in the family, Kelly quickly says, “She is.”
The two have invited a number of Washington bigwigs to the shuttle launch, as well as family and friends. Mark Kelly is probably best known for looking and sounding exactly like another astronaut — his identical twin brother, Scott, also a space shuttle skipper — and being married to a congresswoman.This will be the third spaceflight for Kelly, 44, a Navy commander and former test pilot, but his first as commander. NASA picked him as an astronaut in 1996. He flew 39 combat missions in the 1991 Gulf War. Kelly has two daughters, ages 10 and 13, from his previous marriage. He is from West Orange, N.J.