Category: Space

Engineering Life for Mars

And we’re back with some more news of and about the Red Planet! Thanks to Curiosity’s ongoing efforts to discover potential life on Mars, scientists back at home have begun to seriously contemplate engineering life that will help in our own colonization efforts someday. The rational seems to be, “why search for life on Mars when you could create it?”

And the reasons for this seem pretty straightforward. Though Mars may have supported life at one time, it is not an especially hospitable environment right now. If in fact human beings settle there someday, survival won’t be easy. The average surface temperature of Mars is minus 60 degrees Celsius, and the almost-nonexistent atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide.

And although water exists in Mars’ ice caps and there’s some evidence that oceans once existed, today it’s essentially a deep-frozen desert. If the would-be settlers ever want to live beyond sealed domes, and eat something other than hydroponically grown food and melted ice that is constantly being recycled, efforts to be got underway to ecologically engineer the surface.

And one such group is a team of undergraduate students from Stanford and Brown Universities that are busy applying synthetic biology to space exploration, outfitting microbes to survive the extreme Martian conditions and produce resources needed to sustain a human colony. According to Ben Geilich, the team Captain, the benefits are obvious: “Obviously, bringing up heavy machinery or building materials is going to be really expensive. The benefit of having bacteria that can do this for you is they’re really small and very light. Once there, they could grow food, produce medicine, extract minerals, and build building material.”

The fruit of their labor is the Hell Cell, a genetically engineered assemblage that could enable a bacterium to withstand extreme cold, dryness and radiation. It includes genetic modules, or BioBricks, based on DNA from a variety of ultra-tough organisms, including a cold-resistant species of Siberian beetle that makes “antifreeze” proteins, a radiation-resistant bacterium that sequesters large amounts of the element manganese, and E. coli, which produces a nutrient that confers cold and drought resistance.

It’s part of a process that Andre Burnier, one of the team’s mentors and a lab technician at NASA’s Ames Research Center, described in the following way: “You go into nature and find genes, and then you can recombine them into circuits that you cannot find in nature.” After presenting their Hell Cell during the regional International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) challenge this month, the team has since moved on to developing bacteria that could extract minerals from Martian sediment or recycle rare metals from spacecraft electronics. In addition, they are also investigating heat and acid-tolerance mechanisms that could be useful in other planetary environments, particulary Venus, which as you may recall, is also a candidate for terraforming.

Needless to say, Geilich is excited by all the doors theirs and the research of others is opening. “In the coming years,” he says, “I think we’re going to see a huge boom in stuff done with bacteria, only limited by our imagination and creativity.” But of course, not all agree. As Burner indicates, there are ethical implications that are likely to upset some, should the concept ever be made viable. After all, if there is no life on planet to begin with, then there are no ethical implications about transforming it. But send in the bacteria to change up a world that already boasts life, and you are essentially committing eco-genocide.

All of this puts me in mind of the Genesis Project from Star Trek II and III. There, scientists created a device which could alter the configuration of any planet within minutes. With a name like “Genesis”, the purpose was pretty self-explanatory – to create life from lifelessness. But this made it absolutely necessary to find a lifeless planet, otherwise whatever was already there would find itself permanently altered.

Funny how science fiction predicts real science, up to and including the ethical implications. They were pretty good movies too, go heck them out. And follow the link below for more reading on the subject!

Source: Wired.com

Three-Man Soyuz Crew Headed for ISS

I just came across this news story on cnet.com, of how a Russian Soyuz rocket departed Earth to deposit a team of two rookies and one veteran cosmonaut on the International Space Station. Hmm, a three man crew is heading for the ISS aboard a Russian-built Soyuz rocket? That sound familiar to you? Provided you’re a fan of Big Bang Theory, it damn well ought to seeing as how this is exactly how the last season ended.

In any case, this mission has a somewhat unusual profile: to test the effect of zero-g on aquariums and aquatic life forms contained therein. I kind you not. The Soyuz craft, which lifted off at 4:51 p.m. (local time) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, was carrying with it a tank with 32 medaka fish that were bound for a zero-gravity research aquarium aboard the ISS’s lab complex.

At the same time, the crew will be shuttling supplies to the station and conducting routine maintenance on the station’s spacewalk while they are aboard. This will consist of fixing a leak in the coolant system of the station’s far left-side solar array, which is responsible for dissipating heat within the station. The mission is expected to last a total of 143 days, with the three man crew returning to Earth in March 2013. Personally, I can’t imagine being in space, or anywhere, for that long! I hope they packed plenty of digital devices, and at least have an internet hookup up there 😉

News From Alpha Centauri!

It seems another star system is making the news recently. And much like Gliese 581, the subject is the discovery of a planet that is said to be Earth-like in orientation. Located in Alpha Centauri, a star system just 4.3 light years from our Solar System, this exoplanet is the closest discovery yet to be made by scientists and astronomers.

Those with a penchant for science fiction will be immediately familiar with the name Alpha Centauri. As the closest star system to our own, it has been mentioned and used as the setting for countless science fiction franchises. Star Trek, Transformers, and most recently, Avatar have made use of this binary system and its system of planets. But up until now, speculations as to its ability to actually support life (at least as we know it) have been just that.

Officially, the planet is known as Alpha Centauri Bb, in that it is the second observable planet that orbits Alpha Centauri B, the larger of the stars in the binary system. It took a research team nearly four years to classify the planet and determine that it boasted a mass similar to that of Earth’s. According to Xavier Dumusque, the lead author of the planet-discovering study: “This result represents a major step towards the detection of a twin Earth in the immediate vicinity of the sun.”

But of course, there’s a snag, at least as far as colonization would be involved. According to the same research team, Alpha Centauri Bb is closer to its host star than Mercury is to our Sun, and they estimate that surface temperatures average around 1200 degrees Celsius (2192 Fahrenheit). Forget Pandora, can you say Crematoria? If humans were ever to set foot on this world, it would only be because of terraforming so radical that it completely altered the nature of the planet. Still, it is an exciting find, and is another step along the road to locating nearby exoplanets that humanity might someday call home.

In the meantime, check out this video from the European Southern Observatory. It’s like Google Earth meets the Milky Way Galaxy – Google Galaxy! I like that!

Source: news.cnet.com

More News From Gliese 581 g

And here we go again with another news story that comes to us from beyond our world, but curiously (no pun!), not from the Red Planet. It seems that the Earth-like exoplanet known as Gliese 581 g, aka. Zarmina (or Yuva to me and my writer’s group!) has been the subject of some interest as of late. In fact, two stories have emerged about this world, which ranks as number one on NASA’s list of Earth-like worlds beyond our system. And I think you’ll agree, these two stories couldn’t be farther apart.

The first sounds like something out of a novel by Carl Sagan: two years ago, while doing research for SETI, an Australian astrophysicist claimed  he picked up a “suspicious signal” from the vicinity of the Gliese 581 system. Since that time, a number have websites have come forward that claim to have traced the signal back to the Earth-like exoplanet itself. The second story comes from the International Astronomical Union, which chaired a meeting this week and raised doubts about the actual existence of Gliese 581 g.

For those who may not recall, the existence of Gliese 581 g has been featured in the news quite a bit of late, and not just on my site 😉 Discovered in 2010 astronomer Steven Vogt and a team of scientists working out of the Keck I facility in Hawaii. After locating the rocky world, they made two determinations based on their findings which set the astronomical community aflame.

On the one hand, the planet was roughly three time the mass of Earth but was believed to possess the same overall gravity. On the other, it was located within the system’s “habitable zone”, meaning it was warm enough to support life but cool enough to maintain water in a liquid state. Combined with its proximity to Earth, 20 light-years, this made Gliese 581 g the most likely candidate for eventual colonization.

To be clear, the astronomical panel did not dismiss the existence of Gliese 581 g out of hand, but did say that its existence cannot be confirmed as a scientific certainty. According to Francesco Pepe, an astronomer who works on HARPS data at the Geneva Observatory, “The reason for that is that, despite the extreme accuracy of the instrument and the many data points, the signal amplitude of this potential fifth planet is very low and basically at the level of the measurement noise.” So basically, the evidence put forth by Vogt and his team may have been nothing more than echoed signals. Bummer!

So what then are to we make of this news? Either Gliese 581 g does not exist, or it is home to an extra-terrestrial civilization that is sending out signals. In all likelihood, the doubts raised by the IAU are merely a setback, and it will be a few years before we are certain of the exoplanet’s existence. But then again, anything is possible. However unlikely it may be, we might be meeting “Zarminans” in a few generations time. Who knows? Maybe they’ll come find us, flying in tiny saucers and demanding we take them to our leader.

Personally, I hope it happens the way my group and I envisioned it, with colony ships going there within a century’s time and discovering alien life that does not resemble our own by any measure. Any other way is just plain crazy 😉

Chuck Yeager Breaks the Sound Barrier… Again!

A very interesting anniversary came to pass this past October 14th. It was exactly 65 years ago to the day that pilot and daredevil Chuck Yeager became the first man to break the sound barrier. Yeager was just 24 years old when he made history on that day, and his exploits went on to be  chronicled in the book (and film) “The Right Stuff”. And wouldn’t you know it; Yeager, now 89, chose to make the occasion by breaking the sound barrier again.

But before getting into that, I would like to provide a recap on the events surrounding Yeager’s historic accomplishment. The year was 1947, the Second World War had ended just two years before, and for those old enough to remember, the world was a pretty scary place as Russian and American scientists competed to be the first to break scientific and technological barriers. In this particular race, the US was the first, when from his Bell X-1 rocket craft, Yeager reached a speed of 1126 km/h (700 miles per hour), or Mach 1.06, at an altitude of 13100 meters (43,000 feet).

For many years, Yeager found himself being chased by younger pilots in newer craft as they sought to challenge him and break new records in speed. Never the one to shy away from a fight, Yeager continually outdid them, setting new records for supersonic speed until his eventual retirement, by which time the astronauts were making the big headlines by being the first human beings to make it into space and orbit the planet.

Yeager retired with honors, having earned himself the rank of Brigadier General in the Air Force. And just the other day, Yeager celebrated the anniversary of his historic flight by stepping into the back seat of a retired F-15 fighter that broke the sound barrier at 10:24 a.m. on Sunday.

Check out the video of Yeager’s latest flight below.

More News From Curiosity!

Last weekend, Curiosity began conducting the “scooping” portion of its mission; in essence, taking samples of Martian soil from the area known as the Rocknest, and examining them using it’s array of sensors. In the course of doing so, it came across another interesting find – a series of shiny objects, not unlike the small shard of plastic it had discovered ten days earlier.

However, NASA indicated after a preliminary examination that unlike that shard of plastic, these objects did not come from Curiosity itself. According to John Grotzinger, a project scientist with the Mars Science Laboratory, “As the science team thought about it more and more, the bright object is about the same size as the granules that it’s in and it is not uniformly bright. We went back and forth, and the majority of the science team thinks this is indigenous to Mars.”

One hypothesis is that the specks are natural geologic material that might have a broken-off from larger crystalline formations, known as a cleavage, and became dispersed through the soil. These crystalline minerals are more adept at reflecting sunlight than the soil that contains them, hence why they appeared after Curiosity’s scooping exposed them to Martian daylight.

According to Grotzinger, the next step is to examine them using the ChemCam, “a remote sensing tool that has spectacular spatial resolution, and aim it right on that fleck. Then we’ll aim it on another darker grain and try to decide if it is a different class of mineral.” And that’s just one of the fancy tools it will be employing. Another is the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument, which analyzes samples of dirt to determine what minerals the sample contains. The team announced at a press conference the rover successfully placed a small sample of soil inside this sensor, and expects results in short order.

Stay tuned for more new from Mars!

Source: Universe Today

Watch Historic Skydive From Baumgartner’s POV

At this point in time, I’m sure everyone has heard about Baumgartner’s historic space jump which took him from the edge of space and deposited safely him into the record books for all time. However, amidst all the news and footage of Baumgartner’s 38,000 meter/126,000 foot jump, which involved 4 minute and 19 seconds freefall and the breaking of the sound barrier, one nagging question emerged. Where as the footage from Felix’s own chest camera?

Well, as luck would have it, the video was made available just a day later. Naturally, the crews had to access it from his suit, process it and upload it to the internet. With technology being what it is today, people expect things to be instantly available. Yet it seems that some things still have to be waited on. But I think you’ll agree once you watch this footage, a mere 24 hour wait was well worth it. Or in my case, a full four days. My apologies to my followers!

Space Shuttle Endeavour’s 2-Day Drive Through LA

Last week, amidst massive crowds and plenty of photo ops, the Space Shuttle Endeavour made a two day circuit of Los Angeles in order to mark its retirement. This was Endeavour’s 26th mission, the previous 25 having all taken place in orbit of the planet, a full 4671 orbits to be precise! During this time, Photographer/cinematographer Matthew Givot and his team followed the shuttle during the 2-day ‘endeavor’ – a drive that included photo-ops of the shuttle driving past several well-known L.A. landmarks – and compiled the footage into a nice 3-minute video (see below).

Showing the many twists and turns that were involved, not to mention stops for photo shoots and the crowds who showed up to pay their respects, the video concludes with Endeavour being brought into her new home, the California Science Center, where she will remain on display for years to come. Here, she joins such historic air and space craft as the A 12 Blackbird, the Apollo-Soyuz command module, Explorer 1, and the Viking Lander. Exhibitions for the Endeavour are reported to begin on October 30th, and are expected to draw some serious crowds!

On a side note, I have to admit that I feel bad for neglecting to mention Endeavour in any of my previous posts. For months now, news has been coming in about its final mission, but I was so caught up in my own story work and posts about cybernetics and other such stuff that I completely passed over it. I’m hoping this sets things to rights a little, as it would be a travesty if I didn’t acknowledge the retirement of this veteran spacecraft and all its accomplished over the years. Not to mention all the astronauts its delivered home, safe and sound. Good work, Endeavour! Enjoy the retirement, you’ve earned it!

Source: Universe Today, California Science Center

Also, if you want to see more of Endeavour’s cross-LA drive, Robert Pearlman has a gallery of over 150 images at collectSPACE.com, and NASA’s Flickr page has a huge collection, too.

Baumgartner Makes Historic Space Jump!

It happened! The extreme skydiving daredevil made his historic, record-setting jump, after only one false start. The first attempt took place on Tuesday, but unfortunately high wind conditions forced them to cancel the jump. Despite the high altitude and extremely daring nature of the entire enterprise, minor variations in atmospheric and wind conditions had to be taken into account

Luckily, today things went off without a hitch. Launching from their base camp in Roswell New Mexico, Baumgartner ascended via his high-altitude balloon to the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. Then, at an altitude of approx. 38.5 km above sea level, he jumped with the hopes of achieving supersonic free fall.

And that is precisely what he did, and then some. In fact, according to the  Red Bull Stratos team, Baumgartner’s achieved a top speed of 1,173 km/hour, or 729 mph. The team’s expectation was that 690 mph would be sufficient to get Baumgartner to Mach 1, considering the extreme elevation. The previous record, one of several he sought to beat was 614 mph, which was set back in 1960 and has stood ever since.

Naturally, there were a few technical glitches along the way. These included some issues with Baumgartner’s visor and the balloon’s power supply. After making the jump, he found himself spinning faster and faster, and almost lost consciousness at one point. This is apparently what prevented him from feeling the sonic boom that he eventually made. All in all, Baumgartner admitted it was a lot harder than he thought it would be. Hmm, jumping out a balloon on the edge of space and free falling towards the planet at speeds so fast you break the sound barrier? What’s hard about that?

Kudos to Baumgartner for the record-setting jump and making history. And be sure to check out the video of his jump, freefall and landing below:

The Case for Terraforming Venus

This weekend appears to be shaping up with a theme: news from space that isn’t about Mars. I swear that it’s entirely accidental. First there was the discovery of the diamond planet, 55 Cancri e, and now a story about the merits of terraforming another planetary neighbor. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s not Mars for a change.

Yes, it seems that there is a strong case for terraforming Venus instead of the Red Planet, and it comes from numerous scientists who claim that altering the climate on that planet could help us save our own. The reason being – and stop me if this sounds frightening – is because our planet could one day look just like our lifeless, acid ridden, cloud covered neighbor.

In short, Venus underwent a carbon-dioxide fueled cataclysm a long time ago, when it was still young and was believed to have oceans. In those early days, and as the sun got brighter, Venus’s oceans began to boil and evaporate into the atmosphere. As a result, carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere, due in part to the lack of carbon recycling which depends on the presence of oceans and seaborne algae. This is essentially a magnified version of the Greenhouse Effect, which scientists identify as the reason for rising temperatures and melting polar ice caps here at home.

Because of this, Venus became the hot, deadly planet that we are familiar with today, with surface temperatures that average 467°C (872°F), hot enough to melt lead. What’s more, its atmosphere consists of 96% carbon dioxide, which appear as thick layers of clouds that float 50-70 km above the surface. Above that, clouds and mist of concentrated sulfuric acid and gaseous sulfur dioxide lead to acid rains that could literally melt the flesh off your bones and the metal off a landing craft. Combined with the amount of sunlight it gets (twice that of Earth) and the lack of a magnetosphere, Venus is a pretty damn awful place to visit!

Of course, some would say that this makes terraforming the planet a pretty dangerous and poor prospect, at least compared to Mars. However, the benefits of terraforming Venus are far greater, certainly when we consider that the lessons gleamed from it could help us reverse the Greenhouse Effect here on Earth. In addition, it’s closer than Mars, making it easier and quicker to travel back and forth. And like the Earth, it resides within the solar system’s habitable zone and has its own atmosphere, not to mention it is nearly the same mass and size as Earth.

All of this, when taken together, would make Venus a far more suitable place to live once the terraforming process was complete. In short, its easier to convert an existing atmosphere than to create one from scratch. And, as noted, the process of converting the CO2 and sulfur-rich atmosphere into one that a breathable one that is rich with water and precipitation would go a long way to helping us device solutions to cleaning up our own atmosphere here at home.

This may sound like pure speculation, but in truth, many solutions have already been proposed. In fact, Carl Sagan began proposing that we introduce genetically-modified airborne algae into Venus atmosphere 50 years ago. Thought not 100 percent practical, it was a stepping stone to some more recent ideas which may prove doable. In 1981, NASA engineer James Oberg proposed that all the CO2 could be blown out into space. Again, not the most practical idea, but they were thinking and that’s what matters!

More recently, Paul Birch, a writer for the British Interplanetary Society, proposed flooding Venus with hydrogen. Once it interacting with the high concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, the end products would be graphite and plenty of water. Other plans involve carbon capture, nanotechnology, and other advanced forms of ecological engineering. These, alone or in combination, could prove to be the difference between thick glass clouds and sulfuric oceans and a lush green planet covered with water and vegetation.

A pretty interesting prospect; and if it all works out, humanity could end up with three habitable planets within the Solar System alone. Combined with pressure domes and sealed arcologies on the system’s various moons and larger asteroids, planet Earth could one day retire as the sole host of humanity and this thing we call “civilization”. In fact, I could foresee a time when our world goes on to become hallowed ground, hosting only a few hundred million people and free of heavy industry or urban sprawl. Hello idea for a story!

And, to mix up what I usually say at the end of every one of these posts, stay tuned for more news from Mars and other planets within our Solar System. There’s a lot of them out there, and someday, they might all places that our species calls “home”.

Source: IO9