Space

The recent crash of the ExoMars Schiaperelli lander on Mars highlights how difficult it is to land there. So why is that? Why are landings on Mars so complex? And why do they fail so often? ESA is getting somewhat bad press for this. In my view it validates the foresight of their approach, to send a test lander first. It also highlights the risk for manned missions to Mars and the planetary protection issues with humans to the Mars surface, which I've written about many times. The basic problem is that Mars has double the gravitational field of the Moon. To fight against double the…

Since President Kennedy, the Pesident by tradition sets long term objectives for human spaceflight for NASA. President Bush's vision was a return to the Moon. President Obama's vision treats the Moon as of so little interest, that the next step on the way to their long term goal of Mars is to pluck a boulder from an asteroid to create a new moonlet orbiting the Moon for astronauts to visit. With a new President, there is often a change of human space flight policy. The Moon is far more scientifically interesting than we realized at the time of Apollo, not only more interesting than a boulder…

Mars' largest moon, Phobos, has captured public imagination because the dominant feature on its surface (22-kilometers across) is Stickney crater (9-km across), a mega crater that spans nearly half the moon.  The crater lends Phobos a physical resemblance to the planet-destroying Death Star in the film "Star Wars." But over the decades, understanding the formation of such a massive crater has proven elusive for researchers. For the first time, physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab have demonstrated how an asteroid or comet impact could have created Stickney crater without…

President Obama, if you love science, Please protect Mars life from contamination from EarthFor Future of Exobiology - MOON FIRST President Obama has just taken the unusual step of publishing an Op-Ed article for CNN "America will take the giant leap to Mars". It promotes his vision for humans on the Mars surface in the 2030s. The video at the head of the article highlights his love of science. But what would humans landing or crashing on Mars do to the science he so loves? Unlike a robotic lander, a human occupied spacecraft can't be sterilized of its trillions of Earth microbes, and a…

The nearby star Proxima Centauri hosts an Earth-sized planet (called Proxima b) in its habitable zone but the star seems nothing like our sun. It's a small, cool, red dwarf star only one-tenth as massive and one-thousandth as luminous as the sun. However, new research shows that it is sunlike in one surprising way: it has a regular cycle of starspots. Starspots (like sunspots) are dark blotches on a star's surface where the temperature is a little cooler than the surrounding area. They are driven by magnetic fields. A star is made of ionized gases called plasma. Magnetic fields can restrict…

Untitled Document You may have heard that the Moon is hopeless for gardening and for growing crops, and that Mars is the "go to" place for a prospective astronaut gardener. But is it? As it turns out, the Moon has some advantages over Mars, especially if you can plant your garden in a habitat or greenhouse on its summits of sunlight at the poles. Yes, it is rather chilly there, at -30° C (-22 °F), but there is no weather, good or bad, and the vacuum of space is a good insulator (like a thermos flask). The temperature at the poles is steady, varying by only 10 °C (18 °F) up or down. That's…

When I wrote my kindle and online book Case for Moon First, I was surprised to find that the Moon is resource rich, and often beats Mars in habitability comparisons.  Yet photos of Mars released to the press look so much more Earth-like than the Moon, because of the brightening of the landscape and boosting of blue in the scene (white balancing) done to help geologists read the rocks. Many of them even have blue skies instead of the grayish brown skies natural to Mars. So, what if we did the same with photos of the Moon, gave it blue skies too, like many of the Mars press…

This is a news story that broke recently, on the idea that Elon Musk's plans would violate the Outer Space Treaty. The articles I've read so far focus on property rights and the  provisions in the OST that rule out ownership of territory. But that can be fixed with future legislation, especially since it's not really the land but the habitats that are of most value, and ownership of those is already covered in the OST . So far none of them have mentioned by far the toughest legal and practical obstacle, which is planetary protection of Mars from Earth microbes to preserve its science…

I've just been listening to Elon Musk's much anticipated talk about his vision for colonization of our solar system. Many find this idea inspiring, that by technological means, we can become a multiplanetary species.  Here is the talk, in case any of you haven't seen it yet. For a summary of the technical details he revealed in the talk, see this article on Space.com Note, Robert Zubrin has suggested an improvement on the approach suggested by Elon Musk. See also Jason Torchinsky's Here's How To Fix The Big Problems With Elon Musk's Mars Spaceship It is great that he wants to use his…

So now we know what the news is, as expected, Hubble has found new evidence of possible plume activity on Europa. In a series of ten observations, they saw them on three occasions. Here are the images they created. The possible plumes are in the seven o'clock position, not far from the South pole - though the central image here has another possible plume that's close to the equator. Interestingly, they spotted them in the same position as the previous plume detection in 2012: Hubble Sees Evidence of Water Vapor at Jupiter Moon Note that in all these images, the photograph of Europa was not…