Hey! Just Wondering, How Did A Solar Eclipse Prove The Theory Of Relativity?

China's colossal radio telescope begins testing - BBC News

The world's largest radio telescope has received its first signals from space and is now entering an intensive testing phase.

Fantastic success story for the astronomy community of China, congratulations!

The beautiful chaos of watching 12 frantic astrophysics students try to save a theoretical astronaut from falling into a black hole. I’ve never seen a group of people work so quickly and efficiently before.

@maevemauvaise

ALL HAIL THE SPACE SKULL OF HALLOWEEN

@laurathia I'VE BEEN WANTING THESE POSTERS FORVER

NASA Is Considering A Deep Sleep Option for Mars Mission Crew

A NASA-backed study is exploring an innovative way to dramatically cut the cost of a human expedition to Mars — put the crew in stasis.

The deep sleep, called torpor, would reduce astronauts’ metabolic functions with existing medical procedures. Torpor also can occur naturally in cases of hypothermia.

“Therapeutic torpor has been around in theory since the 1980s and really since 2003 has been a staple for critical care trauma patients in hospitals,” aerospace engineer Mark Schaffer, with SpaceWorks Enterprises in Atlanta, said at the International Astronomical Congress in Toronto this week. “Protocols exist in most major medical centers for inducing therapeutic hypothermia on patients to essentially keep them alive until they can get the kind of treatment that they need.”

Coupled with intravenous feeding, a crew could be put in hibernation for the transit time to Mars, which under the best-case scenario would take 180 days one-way.

So far, the duration of a patient’s time in torpor state has been limited to about one week.

“We haven’t had the need to keep someone in (therapeutic torpor) for longer than seven days,” Schaffer said. “For human Mars missions, we need to push that to 90 days, 180 days. Those are the types of mission flight times we’re talking about.”

Impressive Payoffs

Economically, the payoff looks impressive. Crews can live inside smaller ships with fewer amenities like galleys, exercise gear and of course water, food and clothing. One design includes a spinning habitat to provide a low-gravity environment to help offset bone and muscle loss.

SpaceWorks’ study, which was funded by NASA, shows a five-fold reduction in the amount of pressurized volume need for a hibernating crew and a three-fold reduction in the total amount of mass required, including consumables like food and water.

Overall, putting a crew in stasis cuts the baseline mission requirements from about 400 tons to about 220 tons.

“That’s more than one heavy-lift launch vehicle,” Schaffer said.

The Big Chill

The study looked at a two-part system for putting Mars-bound astronauts in stasis and bringing them out. The cooling would be done through an internasal system, which Schaffer admits is “not very comfortable,” but inhaling a coolant has several advantages over reducing body temperatures with external cooling pads. Cooled from the outside, the body is more susceptible to shivering and possible tissue damage, Schaffer notes.

The so-called RhinoChill System lowers body temperature about 1 degree Fahrenheit per hour. Reaching torpor state — between 89 degrees and 93 degrees Fahrenheit — takes about six hours.

Simply stopping the flow of coolant will bring a person out of stasis, though the SpaceWorks study included rewarming pads as a backup and to speed up the waking process in case of an emergency.

An alternative to having the whole crew in stasis is to have one person awake for two to three days, then hibernate for 14 days. By staggering the shifts, no one person would be in stasis for more than 14 days at a time and one crewmember would be awake to monitor the ship, conduct science experiments and handle maintenance chores.

Schaffer also points to a potential psychological advantage to stasis.

“Rather than being stuck in a can for 180 days, you go to sleep, you wake up and you’re there,” he said. More research is needed to assure prolonged stasis is safe, but initial results are promising, Schaffer added.

“We have not seen any show-stoppers on the medical side or on the engineering side,” he said.

POTENTIAL HABITATS FOR EARLY LIFE ON MARS

Recently discovered evidence of carbonates beneath the surface of Mars points to a warmer and wetter environment in that planet’s past. The presence of liquid water could have fostered the emergence of life.

A new study by James Wray at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Janice Bishop of the SETI Institute, as well as other collaborators, has found evidence for widespread buried deposits of iron- and calcium-rich Martian carbonates, which suggests a wetter past for the Red Planet.

“Identification of these ancient carbonates and clays on Mars represents a window into history when the climate on Mars was very different from the cold and dry desert of today,” notes Bishop.

The fate of water on Mars has been energetically debated by scientists because the planet is currently dry and cold, in contrast to the widespread fluvial features that etch much of its surface. Scientists believe that if water did once flow on the surface of Mars, the planet’s bedrock should be full of carbonates and clays, which would be evidence that Mars once hosted habitable environments with liquid water. Researchers have struggled to find physical evidence for carbonate-rich bedrock, which may have formed when carbon dioxide in the planet’s early atmosphere was trapped in ancient surface waters. They have focused their search on Mars’ Huygens basin.

This feature is an ideal site to investigate carbonates because multiple impact craters and troughs have exposed ancient, subsurface materials where carbonates can be detected across a broad region. And according to study led James Wray, “outcrops in the 450-km wide Huygens basin contain both clay minerals and iron- or calcium-rich carbonate-bearing rocks.”

The study has highlighted evidence of carbonate-bearing rocks in multiple sites across Mars, including Lucaya crater, where carbonates and clays 3.8 billion years old were buried by as much as 5 km of lava and caprock.

The researchers, supported by the SETI Institute’s NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) team, identified carbonates on the planet using data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), which is on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This instrument collects the spectral fingerprints of carbonates and other minerals through vibrational transitions of the molecules in their crystal structure that produce infrared emission. The team paired CRISM data with images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and Context Camera (CTX) on the orbiter, as well as the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on the Mars Global Surveyor, to gain insights into the geologic features associated with carbonate-bearing rocks.

The extent of the global distribution of martian carbonates is not yet fully resolved and the early climate on the Red Planet is still subject of debate. However, this study is a forward step in understanding the potential habitability of ancient Mars.

Preview of paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015JE004972/abstract

TOP IMAGE….Ancient layered clay-bearing bedrock (top left) and carbonate bedrock (bottom right) are exposed in the central uplift of an unnamed crater approximately 42 kilometers in diameter in eastern Hesperia Planum, Mars. The image was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) instrument aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

LOWER IMAGE….Aeolian bed forms overlie ancient layered, ridged carbonate-rich outcrop exposed in the central pit of Lucaya crater, northwest Huygens basin, Mars. The image was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) instrument aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

This is hands down one of the most beautiful images I’ve ever seen. This is a visible-light image of Jupiter’s clouds from a mere 5000 km away. 

What’s even more amazing is that this image was taken by JunoCam, NASA’s camera essentially being controlled by regular folks, not scientists. The public takes part in selecting targets to photograph, as well as having access to the raw data that comes back and you can even take the raw images that come back and process your own picture! Learn more about it all right here.

Thank you NASA!

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstaedt/John Rogers)

This is a picture from the Curiosity Rover on Mars showing Earth from the Perspective of Mars. You are literally looking at your home from the Perspective of another planet. Epic times indeed

Mars is finally emerging from an ice age that ended 400,000 years ago

Winter is ending.

Mars has many similarities to Earth. There are volcanoes, canyons, craters and - most importantly - water. Oh, and now NASA researchers have added another similarity to the list: ice ages.

Yup, thanks to radargrams taken from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), scientists now have physical measurements that suggest Mars is actually just now emerging from an ice age that ended some 400,000 years ago. That’s quite the cold spell!

According to the team, researchers have previously predicted that the Red Planet experienced ice ages in the past using complex computer models, but they lacked actual measurements to back them up.