Mars Exploration Rovers Update: Spirit Celebrates 3 Martian Years, Opportunity Finds Blockbuster in Block Island By A.J.S. Rayl August 31, 2009 Click to enlarge > Three Mars years Sol 2008 — August 26, 2009 for Spirit and September 16, 2009 for Opportunity — marks three Martian years of explortation for the twin robot field geologists. A year on Mars is approximately 687 Earth days, making a Mars year almost twice as long as a year on Earth. The rovers will celebrate six Earth years on Mars in January 2010. Credit: Astro0 / rover art by Dan Maas / Mars by NASA / JPL-Caltech / Malin Space Science Systems The Mars Exploration Rovers hunkered down in place in August and delivered more mission “gold” as they achieved new milestones and uncovered more scientific gems, not the least of which was a blockbuster of a meteorite. But August proved to be a stormy month, uniquely challenging and one that many on the Mars Exploration Team will never forget. Firestorms burned in the foothills of southern California last weekend, causing the closure today of the rovers homebase, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena and cancellation of MER mission operations. Although there are probably employees and MER team members who have been evacuated from their homes in nearby communities in Pasadena, Altadena, and La Crescenta, JPL was only briefly threatened by what is called the Station Fire that burned out of control in the Sant Gabriel Mountains to the north. The Lab was closed because of all the heavy smoke in the area, to “ensure acceptable air quality for employee safety. Late this afternoon, JPL announced that it will reopen tomorrow. Up on Mars, dust storms picked up here and there and whisked around the planet throughout the month. Dust is the enemy. It can be life-threatening to solar-powered rovers like Spirit and Opportunity.

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NASA will host a teleconference Tuesday, Sept. 1, at 3 p.m. EDT to discuss the conclusion of the preliminary design review for the Orion crew exploration vehicle.

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Patience Really is a Virtue Monday August 31, 2009 Have you ever sent an email or text message to someone and got tired of waiting for a response? Sure you have, but you just have to be patient. Not easy, is it? What if you had to wait for over 40 years for an answer? That is exactly what Earthlings must do with their first mass message sent into deep space. 25,000 messages have been sent by the Tidbinbilla Deep Space Communication Complex outside Canberra, Australia, to Gliese 581d, which is the nearest earth-like planet out of our solar system. 195 countries have partipated in the messages, hopefully to be heard by extraterrestrial beings. Now, here comes the problem. If you are one of those who sent a message, don’t hold your breath for a response. It will take a staggering 20.3 years for the message to reach the planet, and assuming they answer promptly, another 20.3 years for a response to get back to Earth. I guess patience really is a virtue. Are you willing to wait that long? Some of us, present company included, won’t even be alive then. What do you think? Is it really worth the effort?

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Space shuttle Discovery, with its seven-member crew, launched at 11:59 p.m. EDT Friday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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Charged Triangle Saturday August 29, 2009 Here is a very interesting report from New London, Connecticut. On July 22, the witness was driving home from work, and noticed what he thought was lightning, yet it had a red glow to it. As he drove, he came much closer to the phenomena. He was shocked to see a huge triangle, which he estimated as being up to a mile long. Seeing it made him feel sick at this stomach. He could now see that the object was a dark, grey, metallic color. One more startling fact about the object was that there were electrical discharges coming from the rear, and the air was electromagnetic. The witness still felt the effects of the electric charge later that night. Here we go again – a large triangle. What do you think? Could this be extraterrestrial, or some top-secret military craft?

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Stardust Retrieves Life Building-Block from Comet By Amir Alexander August 25, 2009 Send this story to a friend or share it at: Slashdot – Digg this – Reddit – Del.icio.us – Newsvine – NowPublic Click to enlarge > Stardust An artist s depiction of Stardust closing on on comet Wild 2. Note the extended tennis-racket shaped collector at the rear of the spacecraft. Credit: NASA, JPL Scientists have identified a crucial building block of life in samples captured from a comet and returned to Earth by the spacecraft Stardust. The discovery lends support to the theory that key ingredients of life arrived on the early Earth from space, through a heavy bombardment of comets and asteroids. The samples were captured by Stardust on January 2, 2004, as the spacecraft passed by comet Wild-2, coming within 240 kilometers of its nucleus. For several hours as it flew through Wild-2 s coma, Stardust was subjected to a barrage of rocks and grains from the comet, which battered but did not damage the spacecraft. Along the way, particles from the bombardment became embedded in the spacecraft s collector, made of aerogel tiles framed in aluminum foil. Once the ordeal was over, the collector was tucked into Stardust s sample return capsule and sealed inside. Two years later, on January 15 2006 Stardust swooped by the Earth, and released the capsule into the atmosphere, where it parachuted gently to the ground in the Utah desert. The contents of this capsule, the first ever samples from a comet collected in space and brought to Earth, have been occupying scientists around the world ever since.

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Is NASA Wasting Money? Tuesday August 25, 2009 Robert Longley, who is the About Guide for US Government Info, got a surprise recently, when his blog NASA Says Cannot Afford to Track Asteroids , was commented on by US Astronaut Rusty Schweickart. Rusty made some excellent comments. Go over, read the blog, and see what the astronaut had to say. Now, the US Government wouldn’t waste taxpayer money, or would they? Let us know what you think about this and the astronaut’s comments.

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Scientists Detect “Wrong-Way” Planet By Amir Alexander August 12, 2009 Click to enlarge > Transit of a “Hot Jupiter.” Slight shifts in the radial velocity data from the star during the transit allow scientists to deduce whether the planet is moving in a normal or retrograde orbit. Credit: ESA, C. Carreau An international team of scientists has detected the first extrasolar planet orbiting in the “wrong” direction. This means that the planet, designated WASP-17, is circling its star in a direction opposite to the rotation of the star itself. Such a motion, known as a “retrograde orbit,” is very unusual since the motions of both star and planet were acquired from the swirling cloud of gas and dust that formed them both. As a result, the planets orbiting the same star almost always move in the same direction, which is the same as the rotation of the star itself. A retrograde orbit is almost certainly a legacy of a planet s violent past, most likely dating to the planetary system s early days. “Newly formed solar systems can be violent places” explained graduate student David Anderson of Keele University, who is a member of the team that made the discovery. “A near-collision during the early, violent stage of this planetary system could well have caused a gravitational slingshot, flinging WASP-17 into its backwards orbit.” WASP-17 was first detected through the transit photometry technique by the Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) consortium of British universities, using the WASP-South camera array in South Africa. But in order to detect its retrograde motion the WASP team needed an assist from planet hunters at the Geneva Observatory, who specialize in radial velocity measurements.

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Earth-Hunter Kepler Shines Light on “Hot Jupiter” By Amir Alexander August 7, 2009 Send this story to a friend or share it at: Slashdot – Digg this – Reddit – Del.icio.us – Newsvine – NowPublic Click to enlarge > Kepler Credit: NASA / ARC Five months into its mission the planet-hunting spacecraft Kepler is already proving its value to scientists. Even while its instruments were going through their calibration phases, Kepler detected and analyzed the atmosphere of a known “hot Jupiter” exoplanet orbiting a star 1000 light years away. In doing so Kepler proved that its camera is fully operational and equal to their main task: detecting Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars. Launched from Cape Canaveral on March 6, 2009, Kepler is equipped with a 95 megapixel camera, the largest ever launched into space. For the next three-and-a-half years this ultra-sensitive instruments will focus its sights continuously on a single batch of space near the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. This 100-square-degree region contains around 14 million stars, and 100,000 of these are the spacecraft s special focus, where it will search for orbiting exoplanets.

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