NASA photographs have revealed bright new deposits seen in two gullies on Mars that suggest water carried sediment through them sometime during the past seven years.
Again, another of these really exciting finds that are busting open a lot of the assumptions we have about our solar system… love it!
UPODATE 2: On a related Mars note… the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent back a bunch of images of other Mars landers:
New images have been released of past and present US landing craft on the surface of Mars taken by Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) probe.
The Spirit rover, which touched down in 2004, as well as both Viking landers, sent to explore the Red Planet in the 1970s, can be seen in the new images.
NASA Schedules Briefing to Announce Significant Find on Mars
WASHINGTON - NASA hosts a news briefing at 1 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Dec. 6, to present new science results from the Mars Global Surveyor. The briefing will take place in the NASA Headquarters auditorium located at 300 E Street, S.W. in Washington and carried live on NASA Television and www.nasa.gov.
Rumor is that it is big - like “running water on the surface” big.
Space.com has some discussion of the idea of doing a quick manned dash to an asteroid - using the same mission hardware that is being designed for the moon missions.
“… a very natural, early extension of the exploration capabilities of this new vehicle architecture would be a ‘quick dash’ near-Earth asteroid rendezvous mission,” said Dan Durda, a senior research scientist in the Department of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado.
“That kind of early demonstration mission might last no more than 60 or 90 days,” Durda said, “and take the crew no farther than a few lunar distances away from Earth.”
Durda said he could imagine that such a flight might be made before the first lunar landing even—perhaps after a lunar orbital mission or two—in order to try out spacecraft systems on an even longer-duration flight.
I was a little behind the ball on this one. Spirit has been on Mars for 1000+ days… what an absolutely amazing feat of engineering, science and exploration (remember, it was designed for a 90 day mission).
Oct. 26, 2006, marks Spirit’s 1,000th sol of what was planned as a 90-sol mission. (A sol is a Martian day, which lasts 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds). The rover has lived through the most challenging part of its second Martian winter. Its solar power levels are rising again. Spring in the southern hemisphere of Mars will begin in early 2007.
Jeff Bezos’ secretive space enterprise launched its first rocket early Monday morning from an expanse of West Texas scrubland.
The liftoff of the unmanned craft lasted about a minute, said Roland Herwig, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman based in Oklahoma City. “That’s all the information I have,” he added.
According to documents Blue Origin submitted to the FAA earlier this year, its New Shepard Resuable Launch Vehicle would be cone-shaped, about 50 feet tall and 22 feet in diameter at the base. It would consist of two stacked modules, one to provide propulsion, the other a crew capsule “capable of carrying three or more space flight participants,” according to the report to the agency.
…it’s hard to characterize how successful the test was. This test should have involved a prototype rocket vehicle designed to go up no higher than 2,000 feet (610 meters), on a flight lasting no more than a minute, according to the environmental assessment filed with the FAA
The Armadillo Aerospace team gave the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge a crack… and, unfortunately, failed. They used a new rocket called Pixel:
Pixel is comprised of four spherical fuel and oxidiser tanks that are each about 1 metre in diameter, while the entire rocket is a squat 2 metres tall. It cost a total of about $50,000, with about $40,000 going just for the computer.
