Miscellaneous

From the highest volcano to the deepest canyon, from impact craters to ancient river beds and lava flows, this showcase of images from ESA's Mars Express takes you on an unforgettable journey across the Red Planet.

Mars Express was launched on 2 June 2003 and arrived at Mars six-and-a-half months later. It has since orbited the planet nearly 12 500 times, providing scientists with unprecedented images and data collected by its suite of scientific instruments.

The data have been used to create an almost global digital topographic model of the surface, providing a unique visualisation and enabling researchers to acquire new and surprising information about the evolution of the Red Planet.

The images in this movie were taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera and the video was released by the DLR German Aerospace Center as part of the ten years of Mars Express celebrations in June 2013. The music has been created by Stephan Elgner of DLR's Mars Express planetary cartography team. DLR developed and is operating the stereo camera.

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NASA says that the first people who will visit Mars are already walking around here on Earth! What's it going to take to get humans to the red planet (and back) within a generation? From NASA missions to crowdsourcing colonies, we look at the challenges and rewards of visiting our neighbor planet.

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Within hours of arrival on Mars, NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) and India's Mangalyaan (Mars Orbiter Mission) snapped and sent back pictures of the red planet, helping us to begin to understand the atmosphere and what caused the dramatic change in it. Interestingly, India's MOM orbiter was successfully sent for a mere fraction of MAVEN's cost, and could have interesting implications for the nation. Kim Horcher discusses with special guest Christina Ochoa (Science educator, actress- Matador) discuss!

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NASA is setting its eyes on the exploration of Mars, an over two year-long journey that will make history. Today's children will be the first explorers of our neighboring planet with help from Boeing. The current development of Boeing's advanced module technology will make possible a safe excursion for astronauts to Mars to discover ground humans have yet to see. Learn more about the path to Mars at buildsomethingbetter.com.

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Mars is home to Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system, which covers an area the size of Arizona.

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What would it take to turn Mars into a planet hospitable for human life? Scientists have theorized a number of ideas, from large ice-melting space mirrors to landers that produce greenhouse gas.

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2015 marks 50 years of successful NASA missions to Mars starting with Mariner 4 in 1965. Since then, a total of 15 robotic missions led by various NASA centers have laid the groundwork for future human missions to the Red Planet. The journey to Mars continues with additional robotic missions planned for 2016 and 2020, and human missions in the 2030s.

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Would you be able to complete this test? Comment below!

A manned mission to Mars will happen some day, but can the first Martians survive each other? 6 NASA recruits-- 3 men and 3 women-- are in isolation in a Mars-like environment to help us understand how and if this will work.

Kim Horcher and Ivan Van Norman (Geek and Sundry Twitch host) discuss!

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Lecture Title: Entry, Descent and Landing Technology Investments Designed to Enable a New Era of Mars Exploration
Special Lecture Series: AE585 Seminar

In the past twenty years, significant advances have been made in our ability to land scientific payloads on the Mars surface. These advances have come largely from continued evolution and refinement of Viking-era spaceflight technology. Over the past five years, a suite of new EDL technologies has been matured and is rapidly approaching readiness for mission infusion. This presentation will provide an overview of present EDL capabilities and discuss the basis for the present set of EDL technology investments. Looking forward, the benefit of these technology investments will be characterized in terms of the potential future missions that may soon be possible. While Mars exploration will be the focus of this talk, the application of some of these same technologies to science missions to other planetary bodies and a variety of Earth-based applications will also be discussed.

Dr. Robert D. Braun leads an active research program focused on the design of advanced flight systems and technologies for planetary exploration and has contributed to numerous spaceflight projects. He has also served as a senior leader for several engineering and technology organizations at NASA, including service as the NASA Chief Technologist in 2010-2011. From 1989 to 2003, he was a member of the technical staff of the NASA Langley Research Center. Dr. Braun received a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Penn State in 1987, M.S. in Astronautics from the George Washington University in 1989, and Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in 1996. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Editor-in-Chief of the AIAA Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, Vice Chair of the NRC Space Studies Board, and the author or co-author of over 275 technical publications in the fields of atmospheric flight dynamics, planetary exploration, design optimization, and systems engineering. From January through June 2015, he served as a Moore Distinguished Scholar at Caltech.

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Bobak Ferdowsi, systems engineer at NASA JPL (AKA Mohawk Guy), was a guest at our recent live show to talk about the challenges of controlling a robot on Mars. To illustrate the communications delay of interplanetary remote-control, Will and Jeremy stage a demo using a reprogrammed RC toy with time-delay controls!

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This concept animation shows just one of many potential concepts for how the first human landing site on Mars might evolve throughout the course of multiple human expeditions to the Red Planet over a decade or more.

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Stellar astronomer and TED Senior Fellow Lucianne Walkowicz works on NASA's Kepler mission, searching for places in the universe that could support life. So it's worth a listen when she asks us to think carefully about Mars. In this short talk, she suggests that we stop dreaming of Mars as a place that we'll eventually move to when we've messed up Earth, and to start thinking of planetary exploration and preservation of the Earth as two sides of the same goal. As she says, "The more you look for planets like Earth, the more you appreciate our own planet."

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The innermost moon of Mars, Phobos, is seen here in full 360 degree glory. The images were taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on ESA's Mars Express at various times throughout the mission's 10 years.

The moon's parallel sets of grooves are perhaps the most striking feature, along with the giant 9 km-wide Stickney impact crater that dominates one face of the 27 x 22 x 18 km moon.

The origin of the moon's grooves is a subject of much debate. One idea assumes that the crater chains are associated with impact events on the moon itself.

Another idea suggests they result from Phobos moving through streams of debris thrown up from impacts 6000 km away on the surface of Mars, with each 'family' of grooves corresponding to a different impact event.

Mars Express has imaged Phobos from a wide range of distances, but will make its closest flyby yet on 29 December 2013, at just 45 km above the moon.

Although this is too close to take images, gravity experiments will give insight into the interior structure of Phobos.

Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

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Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captures the springtime thaw of seasonal carbon dioxide ice on Mars.

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From the highest volcano to the deepest canyon, from impact craters to ancient river beds and lava flows, this showcase of images from ESA's Mars Express takes you on an unforgettable journey across the Red Planet.

Mars Express was launched on 2 June 2003 and arrived at Mars six-and-a-half months later. It has since orbited the planet nearly 12 500 times, providing scientists with unprecedented images and data collected by its suite of scientific instruments.

The data have been used to create an almost global digital topographic model of the surface, providing a unique visualisation and enabling researchers to acquire new and surprising information about the evolution of the Red Planet.

The images in this movie were taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera and the video was released by the DLR German Aerospace Center as part of the ten years of Mars Express celebrations in June 2013. The music has been created by Stephan Elgner of DLR's Mars Express planetary cartography team. DLR developed and is operating the stereo camera.

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Once warm and wet, Mars is now cold and dry. NASA's MAVEN orbiter will look for clues to how the planet's atmosphere has developed, and how density fluctuations might affect future crewed missions

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The container is engineered to carry 11 receptacles, store them under 14?F (-10?C), and weigh less than 11lbs (5kg). It will land on Mars with a sample providing rover. When it is filled, it will launch and rendezvous with a return-trip spacecraft.

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Team members at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory share the challenges of the Curiosity Mars rover's final minutes to landing on the surface of Mars.

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NASA could get a crew of astronauts to orbit Mars by 2033 without increasing its budget beyond the rate of inflation, says Bill Nye the Science Guy. That's exciting news.

Transcript - NASA could put humans in orbit around Mars in the year 2033 – 2033 is not arbitrary. It’s when there’s a pretty good orbit - there’s pretty good orbits happening often enough - but 2033 is a real good orbit of the Earth and Mars. So you could get humans in orbit around Mars without raising the NASA budget beyond letting it increase with inflation, which is an increase but not an extraordinary one.

Furthermore, in order to pull this off without any increase in the NASA budget, everybody has to stick to these agreements that NASA will no longer be the lead funder or supporter of the International Space Station. They’re going to retire the space station or let commercial entities take it over.

But if you did that, really stuck to the agreements and you let the NASA budget increase with inflation you could have humans orbiting Mars in 2033. If the Mars 2020 rover is enabled to land in a place where there might be salty water - or ancient salty water - and were to discover evidence of life, perhaps we would accelerate that schedule.

And as we say if you really have a plan to really put humans orbiting Mars in 2033 which would enable them to land two, three or four years later to land on Mars. People would come out of everywhere to volunteer for that mission. We’d have astronauts. We’d have mission controllers. We’d have engineers. We’d have venture capitalists enabling new technologies to be sold to NASA or other space stations.

If you included other space agencies around the world – Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. Chinese space agency, even which is politically difficult but nevertheless possible. Any space research organization – JAXA, the Japanese aerospace exploration agency. If you included all those guys you could lower the price for NASA and then really enable humans to get there in new, cool ways.

The reason though, everybody, is not to go live on Mars. That’s just beyond – they just haven’t thought through how difficult that is. When there’s nothing to breathe, not just nothing to drink or eat but nothing to breathe it makes it complicated. But if you were to find evidence of life it would change the course of human history. Not overnight but over the course of months and years. Everybody would get to thinking about what it means to be a living thing in the cosmos and it would change us.

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