Tag: space.com

This May 2015 image from the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows part of a region on Mars called Acidalia Planitia, the landing site for the Ares 3 mission in the novel and movie “The Martian.” Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Newly released photos taken by a NASA spacecraft provide a real-world look at the Red Planet locales where much of the action takes place in the sci-fi epic “The Martian.”

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has photographed a plain called Acidalia Planitia and the southwest corner of the 285-mile-wide (460 kilometers) Schiaparelli Crater, the landing sites of the Ares 3 and Ares 4 missions, respectively, in the “The Martian.”

“The Martian,” which hit theaters across the United States on Friday (Oct. 2), stars Matt Damon as NASA astronaut Mark Watney, who gets stranded on the Red Planet after a powerful dust storm. Watney must use his engineering know-how to stay alive by himself on Mars and get in touch with mission control, which thinks he is dead.

This July 2015 image from the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows part of the southwest corner of Mars’ huge Schiaparelli Crater, the landing site for the Ares 4 mission in the novel and movie “The Martian.”
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

The Ares 3 crew consists of Watney and five other astronauts. They touch down in Acidalia Planitia, a vast expanse in the northern mid-latitudes of Mars.

“For the story’s central character [Watney], Acidalia Planitia is within driving distance from where NASA’s Mars Pathfinder, with its Sojourner rover, landed in 1997,” NASA officials wrote Monday (Oct. 5) in a description of the newly released image of the area.

Semi-spoiler alert: The proximity to Pathfinder is a key plot point in the movie, and in the novel by Andy Weir on which the film is based.

The image of Schiaparelli Crater, which lies near the Martian equator, reveals a landscape covered by a layer of dust that’s probably at least 3.3 feet (1 meter) deep, NASA officials said. While the future Ares 4 mission in “The Martian” is set to land there, NASA tends to avoid such dusty areas in real life because they exhibit significant temperature swings, and their geological potential is tough to discern (the bedrock is hidden), agency officials added.

The newly released Acidalia Planitia and Schiaparelli Crater images were captured by MRO’s HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on May 17, 2015 and July 14, 2015, respectively. You can see more HiRISE photos of “The Martian” locales here: http://www.uahirise.org/martian/

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Grace Potter, currently on tour in support of her first solo record, “Midnight,” manages to find time to post her thoughts about space and science via Instagram. 

Space.com sat down with Potter prior to her performance at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on Saturday (Oct. 3) to discuss her cosmic influences, which shined through not only in our interview but on stage as well.

For example, during the show, she hailed the recent announcement that liquid water flows on present-day Mars, asking the crowd if they’d heard about it. “That’s what it’s all about!” Potter told the audience.

Singer-songwriter Grace Potter discusses her cosmic influences in a video interview with Space.com.
Credit: Space.com/@SteveSpaleta

Her “Space_Potter” Instagram account is decorated with space and science images; a few posts relate her philosophical reflections. Potter digs deep into the NASA press conference on the Mars water discovery, writing, “Recurring Slope Lineae (referred to in the press conference as RSLs) are simply a fascinating body of evidence that has been documented & analyzed for years, and, on the merit of the empirical evidence alone, we now find Mars BACK WHERE IT BELONGS … at the center of public attention!”

Other Potter posts reference the recent 25th anniversary of the launch of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the Large Hadron Collider and more. She is also designing a “cosmic-themed” wardrobe, to complement her latest album cover, and stage visuals sporting night sky imagery.

During our interview, Potter spoke of the stunning cosmic pictures available to the public today, stating that they are “constant and beautiful reminders of just how lucky we are to live on this planet, where it’s not just livable, it’s ideal, in this moment in time.”

To find out more about Grace and her latest tour, visit Gracepotter.com.

Follow Steve Spaleta on Twitter @SteveSpaleta. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

An artist’s rendition of a pulsar, which radiates bright beams of light from its two magnetic poles. The pulsar doesn’t necessarily rotate around those poles, so the beams of light sweep across the sky and sometimes appear to “pulse” on and off. This image portrays the Jodrell Bank Observatory (silhouetted in the foreground), where scientists are studying pulsars, which are formed through exploding stars called supernovas. Credit: N. Andersson

Pulsars, the left-over remains of exploded stars, are considered some of the most accurate natural timekeepers in the universe, but even these excellent cosmic clocks aren’t perfect. A new study suggests that pulsars occasionally exhibit a “glitch” in their timing because they are filled with a “superfluid” that can flow over any surface without friction.

When massive stars grow old and die, they explode, sometimes leaving behind a neutron star — a small, incredibly dense nugget of collapsed, leftover star material. A pulsar is a special type of neutron star that spins at hundreds of revolutions per second. Pulsars also emit a steady beam of light, often as radio waves, which may sweep across the Earth, creating the illusion that the pulsar is blinking on and off. The timing of this blinking is so regular that pulsars are among the most accurate timekeepers in the universe.

But once in a while, pulsars exhibit a “glitch,” suddenly spinning faster for a short time and thus increasing the rate of their “pulsing” light. The new study gives more support to the theory that these glitches are created by an interaction between the pulsar’s outer shell and the “superfluid” inside it, which has zero viscosity. A zero-viscosity fluid can store momentum, and would explain where the extra energy to speed up the pulsar comes from. [The Top 10 Star Mysteries of All Time]

Like water in a cup

Pulsars form when a star with a mass anywhere from one and a half to three times that of the sun runs out of hydrogen fuel and collapses under its own weight. The collapse fuses the outer layers of the star’s core star and creates an explosion — a supernova. But much of the star’s mass remains. The atoms themselves are crushed, and the electrons (which typically orbit the atom’s central nucleus) either collide with protons (turning them into neutrons), or escape. What’s left is a ball of neutrons, surrounded by a crust of neutrons and protons. Neutron stars are less than 10 miles (16 kilometers) across but are so dense that a teaspoon of its substance would weigh hundreds of times as much as the Egyptian pyramids.

When rotating objects (like stars) collapse, they speed up (think of an ice-skater pulling in her arms to spin faster). That’s why pulsars spin so fast — stars have a lot of mass and start out millions of miles across.

Neutron stars, including pulsars, have intense magnetic fields that beam radio waves out into space along their two poles. Because these poles don’t always line up with the pulsar’s rotational axis, the radio waves are like the beams of a lighthouse, moving across the sky as the pulsar spins. When astronomers see the beam with a radio telescope, the signal appears to pulse on and off. Pulsars rotate at very regular intervals, only slowing down by about 1 second every million years, on average (hence why they are known as cosmic time keepers). They slow down because they lose energy through radio waves and particles emitted from the surface. So scientists can’t explain why pulsars occasionally “glitch” or speed up, but the angular momentum to make this happen must come from somewhere.

That’s where the idea of superfluids comes in. Most astronomers think the crust of a neutron star is like a rigid crystal lattice, but below the surface, the increasing pressure would make the material more and more malleable, until it becomes a fluid. In the new study, Wynn Ho, a lecturer in mathematical sciences at the University of Southampton in England, and his colleagues say the fluid is a superfluid, and can store angular momentum because it has zero viscosity. A fluid’s viscosity is similar to its thickness, so water has a much lower viscosity than honey.

“If you have a cup of water on a table and spin the cup, the water will spin up,” Ho told Space.com. “The cup will slow down because of friction from the table, but the water will keep going.” Ordinary water will eventually stop as it gives up energy to the cup via friction, but superfluid water wouldn’t, he added.

The cup, in this case, is like the surface of the neutron star. The surface will slow down, because it is radiating energy. But the superfluid made of neutrons keeps going. As the difference between the two speeds increases, the superfluid interacts with the crust, and gives it a jerk, spinning it faster for a short time. That’s the glitch — which, in turn, releases energy and changes the radio signal the pulsar emits. [Inside a Neutron Star (Infographic)]

Measuring pulsar mass

This image portrays the Jodrell Bank Observatory (silhouetted in the foreground), where scientists are studying pulsars, which are formed through exploding stars called supernovas. In the background of the image is the Vela supernova remnant.
Credit: N. Andersson

Although other scientists have proposed that superfluids might exist at the center of neutron stars, the new model adds the physics of vortices and the role of temperature, Ho said. The immense pressures inside neutron stars create temperatures of billions of degrees. However, those scorching temperatures still drop over time, and when they go below a critical point, it’s possible to have a superfluid, Ho said.

“We found that there’s a direct correlation between temperature, how much of the pulsar is superfluid and the strength of glitches,” he said.

Ho said his team’s model seems to match up with many years of observations of pulsars better than previous models do. But to be sure, he wants to observe a pulsar as it experiences a glitch, to see if the predictions match those observations. In fact, one pulsar is being observed just for that. “We want to watch it glitch a couple of more times,” Ho said.

Another twist is that this phenomenon can be used to measure the mass of the pulsar.

“The new ‘spin’ (no pun intended) of the paper is that, apparently, the authors have found a mechanism to measure neutron-star masses from the study of pulsar glitches,” Jorge Piekarewicz, a professor of physics at Florida State University who also studies the dynamics of neutron stars, said in an email to Space.com. Piekarewicz was not involved in the new study. “Although many techniques are in place to measure masses, the suggestion by the authors of using pulsar glitches is certainly interesting,” he said.

Usually, to determine the mass of a pulsar, astronomers look at a companion star and estimate the mass from how the two bodies influence each other’s motion (the more massive the object, the more it will pull on a nearby companion).  

“Because of the kind of model we have, we can determine [the] mass of the pulsar… determining the mass from the nuclear physics we know, and not measuring mass from gravity,” Ho said.

Coupling that with a more conventional mass measurement would be a boost, he added. “If the pulsar is in a binary,” he said, “[we] can determine its mass [from gravity], and see if the mass that we predict [with the new model] is the same.”

You can follow Space.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We’re also on Facebook & Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Artist’s illustration of World View’s balloon-borne capsule cruising through the stratosphere. Credit: World View Enterprises, Inc.

TUCSON, Arizona — A new type of space tourism is set to lift off two years from now, without the aid of a rocket.

Arizona-based World View Enterprises aims to start launching paying customers to the stratosphere in 2017 beneath a giant balloon, for $75,000 per seat. Passengers will spend two hours at an altitude of 100,000 feet (30,500 meters), where they’ll be able to see the blackness of space and the curvature of Earth, company representatives say.

“I hear a lot of people say this: ‘I don’t want to have lived my entire life on this planet and never really seen it,’” World View chief technology officer Taber MacCallum told Space.com late last month here at the company’s headquarters near Tucson International Airport. [World View’s Near-Space Balloon Rides in Pictures]

“There’s a really interesting psychology surrounding getting that perspective, which is why we called [the company] World View,” MacCallum added.

A different kind of experience

World View passengers will ride aboard a pressurized capsule that accommodates six paying customers and two crewmembers.

A huge, helium-filled balloon will loft the 10,000-lb. (4,535 kilograms) capsule to the stratosphereduring a gentle ascent that takes 90 minutes to 2 hours. The launch site for these flights is unclear at the moment; the company is currently deciding between Florida and Arizona, MacCallum said.

The gondola, which is classified as a spacecraft by the Federal Aviation Administration, will then cruise at 100,000 feet for another two hours or so. When it’s time to descend, the pilot will start venting helium from the balloon. After a while, the balloon and capsule will separate, with the latter eventually making a soft landing at a predetermined site with the aid of a steerable, parachute-like device called a parafoil. (The balloon will be recovered and recycled.)

The entire flight will last for five or six hours. The distance between launch and landing sites could be as great as 300 miles (480 kilometers), depending on winds, World View representatives say.

The balloon experience will be very different from the suborbital spaceflights that Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace plan to offer with their in-development rocket planes, which are called SpaceShipTwo and Lynx, respectively.

For starters, World View is cheaper: tickets for the six-passenger SpaceShipTwo and the one-passenger Lynx are currently selling for $250,000 and $100,000, respectively (though Lynx rides will cost $150,000 starting on Jan. 1, 2016). 

In addition, World View’s balloons will float gently through the atmosphere, while SpaceShipTwo and Lynx will give customers a pulse-pounding rocket ride. The two space planes will also go much higher than World View — about 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth, the traditionally accepted boundary where outer space begins.

People aboard SpaceShipTwo and Lynx will experience about 5 minutes of weightlessness as well, unlike World View’s customers, who will never float around inside their sealed gondola. But the space planes won’t stay aloft as long as the balloons: SpaceShipTwo’s total flight time will be about 2.5 hours (with a chunk of it spent beneath the belly of a carrier aircraft called WhiteKnightTwo), while a typical Lynx mission will last about 30 minutes. [Now Boarding: The Top 10 Private Spaceships]

Making it happen

World View is not starting from scratch. The company is leveraging the technology developed for the StratEx (Stratospheric Exploration) program, which set the record for highest-ever skydive in October 2014 when Google executive Alan Eustace jumped from a balloon 135,908 feet (41,425 m) above the New Mexico desert.

Indeed, MacCallum was StratEx’s safety officer, and Arizona-based Paragon Space Development Corp., which McCallum co-founded and where he served as CEO for more than 20 years, was the program’s prime contractor. (World View CEO Jane Poynter is also a co-founder of Paragon, which is a subcontractor to World View and specializes in developing environmental-control and life-support systems.)

StratEx “was really a foundational project for World View, to run through essentially all the phases of flight that we would have with a capsule, only in a one-person version,” MacCallum said. “It was essentially a scale model.”

The basic pieces of World View’s flight system have therefore mostly been developed, and the work left to do before commercial operations can begin involves adapting, integrating and testing them.

Such efforts are already underway. In February, for example, World View flew a parafoil to an altitude of 102,200 feet (31,150 m), two times higher than the previous record for parafoil flight. The company plans to perform a test drop from 100,000 feet with a 10 percent scale model — that is, a payload that weighs 1,000 lbs. (454 kg) — in the next week or so. A full-scale test drop should follow by the end of the year or early 2016, MacCallum said.

If everything goes well, the first crewed test flights will take place in early to mid-2017, he added, with commercial operations beginning in late 2017.

World View also conducts uncrewed balloon flights for scientific purposes; the company has already lofted payloads for NASA and other customers. The experience gained via these efforts should help the company manage its crewed operations, MacCallum said.

It’s unclear when SpaceShipTwo and Lynx will be up and running. SpaceShipTwo has conducted four rocket-powered test flights, but the most recent one, in October 2014, ended in tragedy; the vehicle broke apart in mid-air, killing co-pilot Michael Alsbury and seriously injuring pilot Peter Siebold. The first Lynx test flights could come later this year, XCOR representatives have said. 

The ‘entry drug’ for space tourism?

World View hasn’t really begun trying to sell tickets for its stratospheric tours yet, MacCallum said. But he isn’t too worried about finding enough takers, citing Virgin Galactic’s success in garnering hundreds of deposits for future SpaceShipTwo flights.

“We really don’t think that tickets are going to be an issue at this point,” MacCallum said. “We think we’re going to be limited by the number of operations we safely feel like we can conduct for the first few years, not available people who want to fly.”

Indeed, MacCallum believes the space tourism market is big enough for World View, Virgin Galacitc and XCOR to co-exist peacefully and profitably, especially since World View is doing something so different.

“I actually think the balloon experience is probably like the entry drug,” MacCallum said. “What’s nice about that is, they [customers] have already had the time to contemplate the view, so then when you go do the Virgin Galactic or the XCOR experience, you can enjoy the rocket ride.”

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft obtained this high-resolution enhanced color view of Pluto’s moon Charon just before the closest approach on July 14, 2015. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

There’s water on Mars, a resupply spaceship at the International Space Station, a science-heavy survival novel on the big screen and something moving inside Saturn. These are our best space stories of the week.

Strong evidence found of water on Mars

A thick, briny water is confirmed as the source of strange dark streaks that appear running along Martian slopes during warm weather. Most water on Mars skips straight from solid to gas, but the highly salty solution has a lowered freezing point and can flow as a liquid. [Full Story: Salty Water Flows on Mars Today, Boosting Odds for Life]

Striking red ‘supermoon’ lunar eclipse spotted worldwide

The special lunar eclipse, at the same time the full moon was at its closest to the Earth, was a vivid presence in Sunday’s night sky, as captured in stunning stargazing photos. The celestial event won’t happen again until 2033. [Full Story: Rare ‘Supermoon’ Total Lunar Eclipse Thrills Skywatchers Around the World]

Tour the jagged, pockmarked canyons of Pluto’s moon Charon

A new video, made with images sent back from NASA’s New Horizons flyby of Pluto, shows the large moon Charon’s striking cracks and ridges. [Full Story: Fly Through Pluto Moon Charon’s Giant Canyon in Spectacular New Video]

India’s first astronomy satellite launches, begins five-year mission

The Indian Space Research Organization’s first astronomy satellite launched Sept. 28 on India’s PSLV rocket along with one satellite from Indonesia, one from Canada and four from the U.S. The new Indian satellite will investigate black holes and other phenomena by taking optical, ultraviolet and x-ray images. [Full Story: India Launches 1st Astronomy Satellite]

Saturn’s rings are making waves

Researchers are studying mysterious ripples in Saturn’s rings to track movement within the great gas giant, a process called kronoseismology. [Full Story: Something Strange Is Happening Inside Saturn]

Venus and asteroids are top picks for new exploratory missions

NASA has selected five finalists for the next launch opportunity in its Discovery program — three focusing in on asteroids, and two on Venus. The winning project will launch by the end of 2021. [Full Story: NASA Eyeing Venus, Asteroids for Next Low-Cost Robotic Mission

Food’s here! Progress 61 docks at International Space Station

The robotic Russian cargo ship brought more than 3 tons of food and supplies for the space station crew.  [Full Story: Russian Cargo Ship Arrives at Space Station]

First private company shoots for the moon in two years

California-based company Moon Express has signed a five-launch deal with Rocket Lab, and plans to send its first two unmanned craft in 2017. These first-ever commercial flights to the moon will test Moon Express’ lunar lander, which will retrieve samples on the second launch if all goes well. [Full Story: Private Moon Landing Set for 2017]

Super-ears listen for out-of-this-world movement

A new microphone technology can hear the tiny sounds caused by microbes in motion; a miniaturized version could listen for life on Mars or Europa. [Full Story: Listening for Alien Life: Could New Tech Detect Microbe Movements?]

Ridley Scott talks “The Martian”

Director of the new Mars survival movie starring Matt Damon, out Oct. 2, talks filmmaking challenges and harnessing the “geek factor” in an exclusive interview. [Full Story: Making ‘The Martian’: Exclusive Interview with Director Sir Ridley Scott]

I read the book, should I watch the movie?

“The Martian” book’s science-heavy storyline and goofy charm make it into the movie surprisingly well. An accidental movie review. [Does ‘The Martian’ Movie Do the Book Justice? Yes. Yes, It Does]

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is stranded on Mars, in the new Ridley Scott movie, “The Martian.” Credit: Twentieth Century Fox

Edward Belbruno is a mathematician and an artist. His paintings are in major collections and exhibited throughout the United States, and he regularly consults with NASA from his position as a cosmology researcher at Princeton University. He is also author of “Fly Me to the Moon” (Princeton University Press, 2007). Belbruno’s art is available exclusively in the Space.com store. Belbruno contributed this article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. 

Spoiler alert: This essay contains spoilers for the film “The Martian”!

As I read “The Martian” (Crown, 2014), I couldn’t put it down. Full of cliff-hangers, where you don’t know what’s going to happen from one moment to the next, the book depicts astronaut Mark Watney, mistakenly left for dead as his fellow crewmembers hastily escape a storm on Mars. Left stranded on the Red Planet, he’s totally alone, with little food or air. Everyone on Earth thinks he’s dead, including his former crewmates. And yet, using his incredible survival skills, takes care of his basic needs, just barely, and manages to communicate with NASA using an expired rover left on the Martian surface years before. How cool is that? 

The slow path to Mars

Unfortunately, NASA can’t just send a resupply mission right away to give Watney needed the food, water, air and other basic supplies he desperately needs for survival. Why? Well, that’s a problem of orbital mechanics. The orbit of Mars around the sun takes about 1.88 Earth years. The planets have to line up just right to send a spacecraft from Earth to Mars using the standard route, called a Hohmann transfer (named after the German Walter Hohmann, who described these transfers in the 1920s). That alignment only happens once every 26 months. The best alignment occurs when Mars and the Earth are at the closest distance to each other, in their respective locations relative to the sun, when the spacecraft arrives. [Will We Ever Colonize Mars? (Op-Ed)]

That happens when both the Earth and Mars are at their respective closest distances to the sun, called their periapsis locations. This configuration, paired with the spacecraft technology available today, would result in a flight time of about 234 days using a Hohmann transfer. The spacecraft must leave the Earth with just the right velocity and at just the right time. The transfer itself goes from Earth to Mars in a direct path, which looks like half of a big ellipse with respect to the sun, starting at the Earth and ending at Mars. 

However, when Watney finds himself stranded, Mars and the Earth are not in a good alignment, and it will take 414 days for supplies to get there! Poor Watney. 

The increased time is due to two factors: waiting for a desired planetary alignment and the required flight time itself. So, Watney needs to wait well over a year for any supplies to arrive. This delay in time is a major driver of the book’s nail-biting drama and compelling story. 

The shortcut

However, that delay could have been substantially reduced. In late 2014, my colleague Francesco Topputo and I published a new type of route to Mars. This route first appeared in the arXiv, then in Advances in the Astronautical Sciences, Volume 155, and then in Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy. One of the more interesting aspects of this new route is that it is not necessary to wait for Earth and Mars to be properly aligned to launch the spacecraft. It can launch at any time.

This is a major advantage. The transfer works in a substantially different way than the Hohmann version, in which the spacecraft travels directly to Mars. Here, the spacecraft is not sent to Mars. It is sent to a point along Mars’ orbit about the sun, which can be chosen from a wide variety of points along that orbit, millions of kilometers from the planet. These points are trailing Mars as it orbits the sun, so the spacecraft slowly catches up to Mars. 

The spacecraft can be launched from Earth at the right time, depending on where the desired orbital point is located, using a Hohmann transfer. But there are so many of these points, the spacecraft can leave the Earth whenever desired, or conversely arrive at a point when desired. 

Now, when the spacecraft arrives at the desired point on Mars’ orbit, it is trailing the planet in its orbit about the sun. The engines fire to do a maneuver that increases the speed of the spacecraft, relative to the sun, so the ship can follow a special trajectory from its location to Mars. This trajectory is called a ballistic capture transfer, or a weak stability boundary (WSB) transfer. 

Once the spacecraft is on this transfer, it takes an additional few months to catch up to Mars. Upon arrival at the planet, no more maneuvers are necessary, and the spacecraft is automatically captured into orbit (the ballistic capture). This is much safer than a Hohmann transfer, in which spacecraft need to substantially slow down using their engines, which can be dangerous (NASA’s Mars Observer was lost due to this). The ballistic capture transfer could also be designed to go directly to Mars’ surface.  

Using the ballistic capture transfer, the resupply spacecraft could have left as soon as NASA realized Watney was alive, with a flight time of about 294 days, taking 234 days to reach a point on Mars’ orbit. From there, it would need another two months to get to Mars itself using a ballistic capture transfer. The flight time would have been 294 days — a savings of 120 days, giving Watney a much better chance of survival. He would have been relieved. [‘The Martian’ Rescue Mission Simply Explained In Film Clip ]

It’s important to note that WSB transfers have been used several times before, in missions to the moon. The first was completed in 1991, by the Japanese spacecraft Hiten. James Miller and I designed this transfer, which is described in more detail in “Fly Me to the Moon” and the Space.com essay “Painting Our Way to the Moon.” Another was completed in 2004 by the European Space Agency (ESA)’s SMART-1 mission, which used a different type of lunar transfer, based on the first one I found in 1986. JPLs GRAIL mission in 2011 used the same transfer type as Hiten. (Read more in Belbruno’s key papers.)

But, alas

As it turned out in the book, the resupply craft never made it to Watney. However, if this type of transfer had been known, then the options to get a craft to Mars with supplies could have been executed on a different schedule, decreasing the chance of failure. 

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Credit: SPACE.com

With WSB transfer, a spacecraft with emergency supplies could have been put in Mars orbit about the sun in advance, before Watney and his crew arrived, ready to use in case of a mishap. It could have then been sent to Mars on a WSB transfer in a couple months. 

In the book, Watney’s crew redirects its ship, Hermes, to Mars since the resupply ship didn’t make it. The rescue spacecraft first had to perform a flyby of the Earth to gain the necessary speed to make it to Mars as fast as possible, using a Hohmann-like transfer. This resulted in non-desirable Mars arrival conditions, since the spacecraft was traveling much faster than normal. In this case, the transit time was 375 days. This is still 81 days in excess of the WSB transfer. 

Also, the WSB transfer would not have arrived with such a large overflight velocity as Hermes did in the book. As a result, it would not have been necessary to attempt the hair-raising, dangerous rescue for Watney depicted in the novel. 

The use of the WSB transfer would have clearly altered the course of this book, offering a number of different options for NASA and Watney. His life would have been much easier.

Note: Meet Belbruno on Oct. 22 in New York at a Space.com gallery showing highlighting his work. 

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Space.com.

A color-coded composition of a small portion of the largest known carbonate deposit on Mars, the Nili Fossae region. New research suggests there is not enough carbon locked into the surface of the planet to account for the thicker atmosphere thought to exist in the past. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHUAPL/University of Arizona

The mystery of Mars’ missing atmosphere is one big step closer to being solved.

A previous hypothesis had suggested that a significant part of the carbon from Mars’ atmosphere, which is dominated by carbon dioxide, could have been trapped within rocks via chemical processes. However, new research suggests that there’s not enough carbon in deposits on the Red Planet’s surface to account for the huge amounts lost from the air over time.

“The biggest carbonate deposit on Mars has, at most, twice as much carbon in it as the current Mars atmosphere,” study co-author Bethany Ehlmann, of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. [Photos: The Search for Water on Mars]

“Even if you combine all known carbon reservoirs together, it is still nowhere near enough to sequester the thick atmosphere that has been proposed for the time when there were rivers flowing on the Martian surface,” added Ehlmann, who worked with lead author Christopher Edwards, a former Caltech researcher currently with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Although Mars is dry today, scientists think the planet’s surface harbored large amounts of liquid water billions of years ago. Mars must have had a much thicker atmosphere back then, to keep the water from freezing or immediately evaporating, scientists say. (Mars’ atmosphere is now just 1 percent as thick as that of Earth at sea level.)

Carbon dioxide can be pulled from the atmosphere via chemical reactions with rocks, forming carbonate minerals. Previous research had suggested that the Red Planet might be covered with significant carbonate deposits, which could have locked up much of Mars’ lost atmosphere.

But Mars orbiters and rovers have found just a few concentrated carbonate deposits. The largest known carbonate-rich deposit on Mars is the Nili Fossae region, an area at least the size of Delaware and potentially as large as Arizona.

Edwards and Ehlmann used data captured by numerous Mars missions — including NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Mars Odyssey orbiter — to estimate how much carbon is locked into Nili Fossae. Then, they compared that amount to what would be needed to form a dense, carbon-rich atmosphere that could sustain running water on the surface at the time that flowing rivers are thought to have carved extensive valley networks into the planet’s surface.

The results? More than 35 carbonate deposits the size of Nili Fossae would be required to sequester as much carbon as the Martian atmosphere has probably lost.

The Martian surface has been probed extensively by orbiters and landers, revealing only limited and scattered deposits of carbonate. Therefore, Edwards and Ehlmann deem it unlikely that so many large deposits have been overlooked by past examinations. Although very early deposits could be hidden beneath the Martian crust, their existence wouldn’t solve the mystery behind the atmosphere that existed when the river-carved valleys formed.

So, if the thick atmosphere didn’t become locked in carbonate deposits, what happened to it? One possibility is that it might have been lost to space from the top of the atmosphere — a phenomenon that NASA’s Curiosity rover has found evidence of in the past. Still, scientists aren’t certain how much of that loss occurred before the valleys formed. NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) orbiter may help narrow down the mystery as it studies the Martian atmosphere.

“Maybe the atmosphere wasn’t so thick by the time of valley network formation,” Edwards said. “Instead of Mars that was wet and warm, maybe it was cold and wet with an atmosphere that had already thinned. How warm would it need to have been for the valleys to form? Not very.”

The result could have been a chillier Red Planet.

“In most locations, you could have had snow and ice instead of rain,” Edwards said. “You just have to nudge above the freezing point to get water to thaw and flow occasionally, and that doesn’t require very much atmosphere.”

The research was published online Aug. 21 in the journal Geology.

Follow Nola Taylor Redd on Twitter @NolaTRedd. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Credit: Space.com / Produced and Edited by @SteveSpaleta

The Huntsville, Alabama, brewing company Straight to Ale incorporates spaceflight into the names of many of its beers. Here, the Laika Russian Imperial Stout, after Laika the dog, who flew in space. Credit: Straight to Ale

In Huntsville, Alabama, home of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, space and rockets are a part of the local culture — even, as it turns out, the beer culture.

Dan Perry is a co-owner of the Straight to Ale brewery, based in Huntsville, where he has lived for most of his life. When naming his company’s line of beverages, Perry said it just made sense to incorporate NASA and spaceflight.

The company’s signature brew is named in honor of Miss Baker, the first monkey sent to space by NASA who successfully returned alive. Other space-based brews include Wernher von Brown Ale (after Wernher von Braun, an early rocket developer for NASA and former director of Marshall). There’s also the Laika Russian Imperial Stout, after the Soviet dog Laika, who became the first live animal to orbit the Earth. [Photos of Pioneering Animals in Space]

“It’s just the culture we grew up in. You just become comfortable with it,” Perry said. “My wife was a counsellor at Space Camp. My dad worked in related industries, and most of our other partners here in the business work with or for NASA. We’ve got a customer who is big into those model rockets that go like a mile, and once they’re done, he hangs them in the taproom. So we just try to embrace it.”

The Huntsville, Alabama, brewing company Straight to Ale incorporates spaceflight into the names of many of its beers. Here, the Monkeynaut IPA, named after Miss Baker, the first monkey that NASA launched into space who returned safely to Earth.
Credit: Straight to Ale

Straight to Ale also makes a series of space beers to honor the International Space Station; the most recent are the ISS Tequila, ISS Rum and the ISS Chard, which are bourbon-barrel-aged Belgian farmhouse ales. The brewery also makes an extended line of brews named after Laika the dog that are bourbon-barrel-aged stouts. Additionally, there’s the Dark Planet English strong ale, Rocket City Red Irish ale, Rocket Bock doppelbock and Gorillanaut imperial IPA.

From space-based fiction there is also the Illudium and Unobtanium bourbon-barrel-aged old ales (Illudium is an explosive fuel used by Marvin the Martian of “Looney Tunes,” and Unobtanium is the material being mined in the movie “Avatar”).

Perry grew up in Huntsville (which, in his casual Alabama drawl, he pronounces as “Huntsvll”). He said, as a kid, he visited Marshall’s U.S. Space and Rocket Center at least a few times a year, where Miss Baker the monkey lived before and after her flight to space. Perry said he remembers seeing her in an enclosed habitat at the center. (The beer is actually called Monkeynaut IPA.)

“We thought that if anybody deserved a beer named after them, it was poor Miss Baker,” Perry said. It seems that Perry isn’t the only person who remembers the squirrel monkey fondly. He recounts with a laugh a story about Miss Baker’s grave (she passed away in 1984), which is located near the Space and Rocket Center: ” “People will leave bananas on top of the tombstone out there, and now people have been leaving cans of Monkeynaut.”

Engineering a great brew

Perry has been brewing his own beer since the 1980s, and early on he joined a local brewer club called Rocket City Brewers. The group attracted lots of engineers who worked in the defense and space industries.

“Home brewing and craft brewing in general tend to draw in engineer-type people,” Perry said. “They like to get into the engineering of the brewing systems and all that kind of stuff, and creating things. So it always drew a lot of that crowd.”

Having those engineers critiquing his home brews made it possible to jump into professional brewing in 2009, Perry said.

“They were just people who home brewed beer, but they were really, really good at it,” he said. “They would dissect your beer at every meeting and tell you exactly what you were doing wrong. And you’d cry a little about it, but they’d tell you why something was wrong, and then you could fix it. And they really helped me out.”

The Huntsville, Alabama, brewing company Straight to Ale incorporates spaceflight into the names of many of its beers. Its taproom has started to accumulate space-themed décor, such as the model rocket shown here.
Credit: Straight to Ale

Straight to Ale has made an effort to support its local community by making its taproom available for community events, and Perry said even the Space and Rocket Center has hosted fund-raisers at the taproom.

The space-themed brews and other concoctions from Straight to Ale can be found in many parts of the southeast United States, including in most of Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee; the Florida Panhandle; and the Atlanta area of Georgia. Perry said there are plans to expand to the entire southeast region of the United States. 

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

The tight Oct. 8 arrangement of the moon, Venus and the star Regulus is one of the many intriguing planetary and star patterns you can find in October’s night sky. Credit: Starry Night Software

Here’s a guide for October skywatchers: First catch Saturn, then Jupiter, Mars and Venus, and finally Mercury in the night sky as this month’s planetary parade begins.

As October opens, we find only one bright evening planet — Saturn — and by month’s end, it will be gone, thanks to its lowering altitude and it’s setting progressively closer to sunset. Meanwhile, three —eventually four — bright planets put on a great show for those who manage to get up at the crack of dawn. During the first half of October, Jupiter, Mars and Venus will be readily evident in the eastern sky, 60 to 90 minutes before sunrise.

Regulus, the brightest star in Leo, the Lion, will hover near Venus when a waning crescent moon passes by on the mornings of Oct. 8 and 9. During the second week of October, Mercury begins to appear down low near the eastern horizon; it will become more favorably placed later in the month. And on the morning of Oct. 17, Jupiter and Mars draw close together, less than the apparent width of the moon. Last, but not least, Jupiter and Venus once again engage in an eye-catching conjunction on the morning of Oct. 25.

Remember, that you can use your clenched fist at arm’s length — equal to about 10 degrees of the night sky — to measure angular distances. The brightest stars are equal to first or zero magnitude, while the very brightest objects (Venus, the moon and the sun) are of negative magnitude. Here’s a look at when to see the brightest planets in the October night sky, if weather conditions cooperate. [Watch: Andromeda and More: October 2015 Skywatching Highlights]

Oct. 8 and 9 – It will be well worth your while to set your alarm clock for around 5:30 a.m. local daylight time, losing a little sleep and venturing outside to view a fascinating and changing array between three planets, a bright star and a waning crescent moon in the eastern sky.

On the morning of Oct. 8, you’ll see a slender crescent moon — and 5 or 6 degrees to its lower left you’ll see dazzling Venus, the queen of the dawn, and the much fainter Regulus, brightest star of Leo. On the morning of Oct. 9, a thinner lunar crescent will form an isosceles triangle; the vertex angle is at Mars, while Jupiter and the moon form the base angles — Jupiter to the lower left of the moon. The Mars-Jupiter and Mars-moon sides (the “legs”) measure 4 degrees long, while the base formed by Jupiter and the moon measure 6  degrees. Also on Oct. 9, Venus is in conjunction with Regulus, passing 2.5 degrees south of it, below and to the right, and appears nearly 230 times brighter than the bluish star.

Oct. 11 – At around 5:15 a.m. local daylight time, look low toward the horizon, slightly south of due east. Make sure there are no obstructions such as trees or buildings, and you might spy an exceedingly thin crescent moon, only 2 percent illuminated; resembling a “thin smile” on the sky. And less than 2 degrees to its upper left is the planet Mercury. See Oct. 15 for more details.

Oct. 15 – Mercury can be seen with the unaided eye for the last three weeks of October. Beginning around the Oct. 8, look for it three-quarters of an hour before sunup, close to the horizon, just south of due east. The planet triples in brightness over the next week. This morning Mercury attains its greatest elongation — its farthest distance from the sun as seen from Earth — 18 degrees west of the sun, and the planet stands almost directly above the sun from mid-northern latitudes. For this reason it is Mercury’s best morning apparition of the year in most parts of the United States — an almost paradoxical fact, since Mercury’s angular distance from the sun is greater during each of its other six apparitions over the course of this year.

After Oct. 15, Mercury begins a more leisurely slide back toward the sun. Even by month’s end, a by-then-brilliant Mercury (magnitude -1.0) might be still be glimpsed low in the east-southeast about 30 to 40 minutes before sunup. If you can still see the planet at the end of October, then use binoculars to search for another fainter object just emerging from solar conjunction. On the Oct. 29, Spica is 3.8 degrees to the south, below and to the right of Mercury. In the first week of November, Spica will become an easy naked-eye target, while Mercury will disappear.[How to Spot the Asteroid Vesta in October’s Night Sky]

Oct. 16 – Very soon, Saturn will be lost in the glare of the sun, probably by the end of this month. Before then, it shines through the glow of the western twilight each evening. Today it crosses over into the boundaries of Scorpius, having spent the late spring, summer and early fall in Libra. It currently is 9 degrees to the right of the red star Antares and about 1.5 times brighter. And hovering 5 degrees to its upper left this evening will be a four-day old crescent moon.  

Oct. 17 – Jupiter and Mars form a highly contrasting “double planet” in the eastern sky for more than 3 hours before sunup. This morning they are separated by less than the apparent width of the moon, only 0.4 degrees. Mars is positioned to Jupiter’s upper left and is now far from the Earth (213.5 million miles) while approaching the aphelion point in its orbit (on Nov. 20), when it’s farthest from the sun, so it’s nearly as faint as it ever gets at magnitude +1.7. Jupiter, on the other hand, is brilliant at magnitude -1.8 and appears 25 times brighter than the Red Planet.

Looking by telescope, Jupiter displays a relatively large disk roughly 1/2-arc minute in diameter; a wealth of detail in Jupiter’s clouds should be detectable by telescope on a night of excellent atmospheric viewing. Meanwhile Mars shows itself as nothing more than a featureless orange dot only an eighth as wide as Jupiter.

Oct. 25 – Venus has a close conjunction with Jupiter this morning. When rising together around this date they may seem doubly eerie. Earlier in the month Venus rose first; after this morning Jupiter will be the earliest up. Venus and Jupiter will be 1.1 degrees apart. This is a reprise of the evening Venus-Jupiter conjunction in June, but at that time the planets were separated by roughly one-third the distance.

Oct. 26 – Venus in October is the highest it ever gets in the dawn sky, about 30 degrees up in the southeast an hour before sunrise for watchers at mid-northern latitudes. It rises within several minutes of 3:25 a.m. local daylight time all month, its earliest rising time this year or next. It shines in the dark eastern sky for more than 2 hours before the first light of dawn. This lamplike planet attains greatest elongation (46 degrees west of the sun) this morning. Can you see Venus in the telescope exactly half-illuminated this morning, or a few days before or after?

Editor’s note: If you capture an amazing image of the night sky that you would like to share with Space.com and its news partners for a story or photo gallery, send photos and comments in to managing editor Tariq Malik at: spacephotos@space.com.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York’s Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmer’s Almanac and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, N.Y. Follow us@Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Monday, October 12–Thursday, October 24, before dawn. The best time in the year to see the dim glow of the zodiacal light in the pre-dawn eastern sky,…Read More » the light reflected from millions of interplanetary particles. It lies along the ecliptic (shown in green). Don’t confuse it with the Milky Way, further south.   Less «

Comet 67P’s “dark side,” its southern polar region, as imaged by Rosetta’s Optical, Spectroscopic and Infrared Remote Imaging System. This region, in shadow for 5.5 years, has only recently been touched by sunlight. Credit: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team

For a long five and a half years, Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko’s southern side has been shrouded by darkness. Now, it’s coming into the light, and new microwave images, taken before the big reveal, suggest that the comet’s “dark side” may have a very unusual composition.

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe has been orbiting and investigating Comet 67P since August 2014 with the help of its Philae comet lander. The probe pulled together the most detailed portrait ever of a comet, but had one particular blind spot: the comet’s southern side, which is dark for over 5.5 years before a brief, searing-hot year in the light during the comet’s closest approach to the sun. Until that time, only Rosetta’s microwave instrument, MIRO, could make any sense of the blackness.

“We observed the ‘dark side’ of the comet with MIRO on many occasions after Rosetta’s arrival at 67P/C-G, and these unique data are telling us something very intriguing about the material just below its surface,” Mathieu Choukroun, lead author of the new study and researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a statement. [Spectacular Comet Photos from Rosetta]

Temperature maps of Comet 67P taken by the Microwave Instrument for the Rosetta Orbiter (MIRO) at two different wavelengths between September and October 2014, millimeter on the left and submillimeter on the right, suggest a transparent layer of ice on or just below the surface.
Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NASA/JPL-Caltech

The group investigated data from that region from August to October 2014, and found evidence suggesting a large amount of ice had built up. MIRO’s measurements indicated that material very near the surface is transparent, probably consisting of water ice or carbon-dioxide ice. This is very different from the dusty surface elsewhere on the comet.

Potentially, the researchers said in the statement, the water and gases were released when the comet’s south pole last saw sunlight, while the comet was closest to the sun. That material then condensed and coated the surface when the area plunged back into darkness. But there’s no way to know exactly how that occurred until that region’s shape is understood better, the researchers said.

“We plan to revisit the MIRO data using an updated version of the shape model, to verify these early results and refine the interpretation of the measurements,” Choukroun said.

Luckily, there isn’t long to wait: Data collected from May 2015 to early 2016 will reveal the full dark side at last. Once all Rosetta’s instruments have been focused on that part of the comet, the whole story should be clearer.

Matt Taylor, Rosetta’s project scientist, said in the statement that the probe has flown over the southern region several times since the area’s summer began, especially around the time the comet was closest to the sun, Aug. 13 — which is when the comet shows the most activity.

“First, we observed these dark regions with MIRO, the only instrument able to do so at the time, and we tried to interpret these unique data,” Taylor said. “Now, as these regions became warmer and brighter around perihelion, we can observe them with other instruments, too.”

“We hope that by combining data from all these instruments, we will be able to confirm whether or not the [comet’s] south pole had a different composition and whether or not it is changing seasonally,” added Mark Hofstadter, MIRO’s principal investigator.

The new research was recently accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity captured this image, which looks toward the higher regions of the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) Mount Sharp, on Sept. 9, 2015. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has beamed home a gorgeous postcard of the mountainous Red Planet landscape it’s exploring.

The car-size Curiosity rover has been studying the foothills of the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) Mount Sharp since September 2014. Slowly but surely, the robot is making its way up the mountain, and the new photo — which was taken on Sept. 9 but just released Friday (Oct. 2) — shows some of the terrain Curiosity will investigate in the future.

“The only thing more stunning than these images is the thought that Curiosity will be driving through those lower hills one day,” Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement Friday (Oct. 2). “We couldn’t help but send a postcard back to all those following her journey.” [Latest Amazing Mars Photos by NASA’s Curiosity Rover]

In the foreground of the new image, about 2 miles (3.2 km) from Curiosity’s position, lies a ridge rich in hematite, a mineral form of iron oxide. Beyond the ridge lie ancient hills containing clay minerals, and behind those hills are buttes rich in sulfate minerals, NASA officials said.

“The changing mineralogy in these layers of Mount Sharp suggests a changing environment in early Mars, though all involve exposure to water billions of years ago,” NASA officials wrote in the same statement. “The Curiosity team hopes to be able to explore these diverse areas in the months and years ahead.”

The light-colored, heavily wind-eroded cliffs in the background of the new photo likely formed more recently, when Mars was drier, researchers said.

Curiosity is currently — and was on Sept. 9 as well — in a sandstone-dominated part of Mount Sharp’s lower reaches that mission team members call the Stimson Unit. On Sept. 29, the six-wheeled robot drilled a 2.6-inch-deep (6.5 centimeters) hole in a rock dubbed Big Sky, then collected some of the resulting powder for analysis.

That analysis — using the rover’s onboard Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) and Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instruments — will take place over the next week or so, team members said.

“With Big Sky, we found the ordinary sandstone rock we were looking for,” Vasavada said. “It also happens to be relatively near sandstone that looks as though it has been altered by fluids — likely groundwater with other dissolved chemicals. We are hoping to drill that rock next, compare the results, and understand what changes have taken place.”

Curiosity has now drilled eight such sample-collecting holes on Mars. Five of these drilling operations have occurred at the base of Mount Sharp.

Curiosity landed inside Mars’ 96-mile-wide (154 km) Gale Crater in August 2012, on a $2.5 billion mission to determine if the Red Planet has ever been capable of supporting microbial life. Curiosity’s observations near its landing site revealed that Gale Crater harbored a potentially habitable lake-and-stream system billions of years ago.

Mount Sharp has been the rover’s ultimate science destination since before its November 2011 launch. Mission scientists want Curiosity to climb up through the mountain’s lower reaches, reading the rocks for clues about Mars’ transition from a relatively warm and wet world long ago to the cold, dry planet we know today.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.