Mars has water. This statement was in question 15 years ago, but now it’s an accepted idea backed up by proof obtained by the last three Mars rovers. Not only does Mars have water now, but it had significantly more water in the past, as evidenced by the geological features seen throughout the planet. Ancient lake and river beds, water erosion, sedimentary rocks, all things that highlight once wet areas. How much water did Mars have? Where did it all go? A team of astronomers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland has been searching for answers, by looking...
Today is the day that the Dawn Mission completes a long 7.5 year long journey that has taken it past the orbit of Mars and into the asteroid belt, studying the second largest asteroid Vesta before heading toward the dwarf planet Ceres, where it has now injected itself into orbit, as of 7:39 am EST. This marks the first time in history a spacecraft has seen a dwarf planet up close, and with New Horizons passing Pluto in July, Dawn won the race in an astronomical photo finish. The Story So Far Launching on September 27th, 2007, Dawn orbited the Sun and...
Even though the weather has been insanely cold in Canada the past few weeks, there is an upside for astronomers. Call me a perpetual optimist, but when it’s colder in Canada than it is on Mars, you have to find some kind of silver lining. The upside is that colder weather and clear skies are sometimes synonymous. I’m not a meteorologist so I don’t have any reason to go into detail as to why, but we have had a lot of cold, clear evenings. I’ve had a chance to go outside and test my new DSLR camera, at least for a...
With all the amazing Science coming from Mars in the last decade, its seems easy to conclude that humans have a good understanding of our rusty neighbour. And then something new and unexpected happens. To someone who thought we knew all there was to know, this may be a disappointment. But to a scientist who has a passion for discovery, new and unexpected results are where the biggest breakthroughs happen! Massive plumes have been spotted high in the atmosphere of Mars, at an altitude of over 250 Km, where the thin Martian atmosphere is nearly indistinguishable from the emptiness of...
If I told you that humanity was going to mine the Moon for rare elements and water ice, you might think it was the plot of a science fiction book I was writing. However, with the recent strides made by unmanned space missions, coupled with a discovery of water and rare elements near the lunar surface, that story could become fact sooner than you’d think. It’s been 40 years since the Apollo landings on the Moon, and for a long time we naively thought we had discovered everything there was to discover about the Moon. We assumed it was a big...
A few years ago, in a desert in Morocco, a very special meteorite was found. A rock unlike anything ever found on Earth, called NWA 7034, or colloquially ‘black beauty.’ Chemical analysis in 2011 found that it originated on Mars, but it was even unlike any other Martian meteorite discovered. The scientific community was extremely excited to determine its properties through a spectroscopic analysis, and today we have some answers that are as amazing as we expected. A new paper detailing spectroscopic results of the meteorite reveal that its composition is the same as the composition of the dark Martian...
The Opportunity rover has just about reached it’s 11 year anniversary of it’s 90 day mission puttering around Mars. The actual day is tomorrow since the rover landed on January 25th, 2004. To mark its incredible accomplishment, the imaging team produced a lovely panorama of what the rover would see from its current position on a high point along the rim of endeavour crater. The map below shows the path of Opportunity over its past 11 years, from the Eagle crater, to endurance crater, to Victoria crater, and finally on to the much more massive Endeavour crater, where it currently...
I couldn’t believe it when I read the story this morning. The Beagle 2 probe has been found, and partially intact even. It’s been more than eleven years since the 2003 Christmas day launch of Beagle 2 by the European Space Agency, presumed lost forever after months of attempts at establishing communication. Many scientists had assumed that Beagle 2 had smashed into Mars at high-velocity, destroying it completely, but photos from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) clearly show the lander made it to the ground safely. The issue seems to be that the Beagle’s deployable ‘petals’ did not unfurl completely. The...
Have you ever wondered how they differ? The Asteroid Belt, shown above, consists of hundreds of thousands of rocks, with all kinds of different shapes, ranging in size from the Dwarf Planet Ceres at 950 Km in Diameter, down to small bits the size of dust particles. It lies between Mars and Jupiter. The Kuiper Belt (pronounced Kai-per) consists of Icy rocks, and it a major source of short-period Comets in the Solar system. Extending beyond the planet Neptune, Pluto was discovered to be one of the largest objects in the belt. The mysterious Oort cloud is a collection of...
It’s been an amazing week for detection and study of water in our Solar system. Just last week we received the first results of the Rosetta mission’s analysis of water from comet 67P. Now we’ve received the latest breakthrough from the Curiosity Rover on Mars, results on Water, Methane, and even Organic material! The Sample Analysis at Mars instrument (SAM) took measurements of the Martian atmosphere over a period of 20 months, and for two of these months in late 2013 and early 2014, the Methane levels were 10 times as high as measurements before and after the spike. “This temporary...
