Mars Yacht Club

During the week or so leading up to the start of SXSW 2010, I’ll be providing a glimpse into some of the films I am looking forward to at the festival. SXSW will feature many great films, many more than I can cover, ranging from narrative fiction to documentary, comedy to horror, foreign to animation, independent to studio films. SYNOPSIS: A new space race is born between NASA and the ESA when Charlie Brownsville, Hank Morrison, and Dr. Casey Cook compete against an artificially intelligent robot to find out what’s up there on the red planet. MARS follows these three astronauts on the first manned mission to our galactic neighbor. On the way they face adventure, self doubts, obnoxious reporters, and the boredom of extended space travel. This romantic comedy is told in the playful style of a graphic novel – using an animation process that director Geoff Marslett developed specifically for MARS. Underneath the silliness it is an exploration of exploration. Why do we want to know whatÕs out there? How do we react when we find it? Is it really that important? And where does love fit into the whole thing?

Despite NASA's manned space exploration being in a state of flux, there's still a lot of innovative ideas for future manned expeditions to Mars. From new concepts for interplanetary rockets to the next generation of unmanned reconnaissance robots, we are certainly well on our way to acquiring the technologies necessary to land an astronaut on Mars. But once we're there, how will we get around? Mars is a big place -- it has approximately the same amount of land to explore as Earth -- so it would be nice if we traveled in style. So why not travel in award-winning style? An Illinois-based design consulting firm decided to take on this challenge, designing a manned Mars rover, winning the "Good Design Award" in the transportation category from The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design last month. They were in good company; Good Design Awards also went to Mercedes for their SLR Coupe and Apple for the iPod touch.

It’s Libby from Lost as you (and Hurley) have never seen her before – animated! Cynthia Watros stars alongside musician/actor Kinky Friedman (he plays the President) in new indie film Mars, which premieres this weekend at SXSW. Mark Duplass (Humpday, The Puffy Chair) plays an astronaut who goes on the first manned mission to Mars, looking for “life and love.” The whole project is the brainchild of Austin, Texas-based animator Geoff Marslett, who has said he wanted the film to look like a cross between A Scanner Darkly and Sin City. But he also notes the film is more like an indie romantic comedy set in space.

NASA's newest Mars orbiter, completing its fourth year at the Red Planet next week, has just passed a data-volume milestone unimaginable a generation ago and still difficult to fathom: 100 terabits. That 100 trillion bits of information is more data than in 35 hours of uncompressed high-definition video. It's also more than three times the amount of data from all other deep-space missions combined — not just the ones to Mars, but every mission that has flown past the orbit of Earth's moon. "What is most impressive about all these data is not the sheer quantity, but the quality of what they tell us about our neighbor planet," said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Rich Zurek, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The data from the orbiter's six instruments have given us a much deeper understanding of the diversity of environments on Mars today and how they have changed over time." The spacecraft entered orbit around Mars on March 10, 2006, following an August 12, 2005, launch from Florida. It completed its primary science phase in 2008 and continues investigations of Mars' surface, subsurface and atmosphere.

Walt Disney Studios announced the date for another 3D movie ‘Mars Needs Moms!’. The Robert Zemeckis’ produced film will open March 11, 2011. The film is about a young boy named Milo (Seth Green) who gains a deeper appreciation for his mom (Joan Cusack) after Martians come to Earth to take her away. The movie is based on Berkley Breathed’s children story.

Scientists have ruled out the possibility that the presence of methane gas on Mars is due to meteorites or volcanic activity. Recent research in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters highlights the hope that the consistent levels of methane on the Red Planet could be the result of microorganisms in the Martian soil that are producing the gas as a “by-product of their metabolic processes.”

On April 15, President Barack Obama will visit Florida to host a White House Conference on the Administration’s new vision for America’s future in space, the White House today announced. The President, along with top officials and other space leaders, will discuss the new course the Administration is charting for NASA and the future of U.S. leadership in human space flight. Specifically, the conference will focus on the goals and strategies in this new vision, the next steps, and the new technologies, new jobs, and new industries it will create. Conference topics will include the implications of the new strategy for Florida, the nation, and our ultimate activities in space.

Fill in your information and your name will be included with others on a microchip on the Mars Science Laboratory rover heading to Mars in 2011!

What could have formed these unusual channels? Inside Newton Basin on Mars, numerous narrow channels run from the top down to the floor. The above picture covers a region spanning about 1500 meters across. These and other gullies have been found on Mars in recent high-resolution pictures taken by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor robot spacecraft. Similar channels on Earth are formed by flowing water, but on Mars the temperature is normally too cold and the atmosphere too thin to sustain liquid water. Nevertheless, many scientists hypothesize that liquid groundwater can sometimes surface on Mars, erode gullies and channels, and pool at the bottom before freezing and evaporating. If so, life-sustaining ice and water might exist even today below the Martian surface -- water that could potentially support a human mission to Mars. Research into this exciting possibility is sure to continue!

Arctic ice is melting, atmospheric temperatures are climbing – yet climate change science is under attack. Detractors claim that researchers are manipulating data and hoodwinking the public. And the public is increasingly skeptical about the science.

Find out what’s behind the surge of climate change skepticism – and what global warming deniers learned from big tobacco about how to spin scientific evidence.

It’s Skeptic Check… but don’t take our word for it!

Guests:

• Stephen Schneider – Climate scientist, Stanford University
• Phil Chapman – Apollo 14 Mission Scientist, now a geophysicist and consultant on energy and astronautics
• Simon Donner – Geographer at the University of British Columbia
• Naomi Oreskes – Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego and author of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

Descripción en español

Remember the people who said the moon landing was a hoax? A New Port Richey company hopes to create a simulated trip to Mars that everyone will know is fake but will appear as realistic as possible. "This is not Disney World or Universal Studios," said Mark Homnick, 52, one of the managers of NewSpace Center LLC. The company has submitted site plans for a 75-acre lot in Titusville on Florida's Space Coast to build Interspace, a space-themed entertainment and research facility that would include the simulated Martian environment. The men estimated the project will cost about $30-million and said their plans began in 2005. Homnick and his vice president, Joseph Palaia, run the company and its parent, 4Frontiers, out of Homnick's waterfront stilt home.

Vast glaciers of ice are common on Mars, but you have to dig below the surface to find them, new radar views from a NASA spacecraft show. These hidden deposits of buried Martian ice were first confirmed two years ago, but recent scans of the red planet by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are revealing new clues about how the ice may have gotten there. Scientists think the Mars glaciers may have been left as remnants when regional ice sheets retreated. "The hypothesis is the whole area was covered with an ice sheet during a different climate period, and when the climate dried out, these deposits remained only where they had been covered by a layer of debris protecting the ice from the atmosphere," said Jeffrey Plaut of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The ice extends for hundreds of miles, or kilometers, in a mid-latitude region of Mars called Deuteronilus Mensae.

The European Mars Express (Mex) probe has made its closest flyby of the Martian moon Phobos, passing just 67km (42 miles) from its surface. No manmade object has ever been so near to the natural satellite. The approach is one of a series being made by Mex as it seeks to understand the origin of the moon. Previous flybys have indicated that Phobos has an extremely low density, suggesting that its surface probably hides many large interior voids. Scientists suspect the moon is simply a collection of planetary rubble that coalesced around the Red Planet sometime after its formation.

New animation shows us that Saturn's moon Titan has more in common with Earth than we thought.

In his recent testimony before Congress, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden told lawmakers the goal of the U.S. space program under President Barack Obama was Mars. But he also warned that getting to Mars would require a step-by-step evolution, because NASA lacked the technology to safely send astronauts so deep into space. The Obama budget contained the down payment on a Mars mission, with billions set aside for research and testing of advanced, cutting-edge technologies that could be employed to make a mission to Mars a reality. I believe we can be well on our way to Mars by July 20, 2019 -- which just happens to be the 50th anniversary of my Apollo 11 flight to the moon. The plan I've designed, called a unified space vision, contains ideas for the development of a deep-space craft that I call the Exploration Module, and development of a true heavy lift space booster evolved from the existing space shuttle.

NASA scientists say they've identified thick masses of buried ice in the middle latitudes of Mars and radar mapping suggests the ice is commonplace. The radar images were provided by the space agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is charting the hidden glaciers and ice-filled valleys that were first confirmed by radar two years ago. NASA said the subsurface ice deposits extend for hundreds of miles in a region about halfway from the equator to the Martian north pole.

NASA is planning to investigate making inflatable space-station modules to make roomier, lighter, cheaper-to-launch spacecraft, it reveals in its budget proposal released on 22 February. The agency is considering connecting a Bigelow expandable craft to the ISS to verify their safety by testing life support, radiation shielding, thermal control and communications capabilities.

On this final segment of NOVA scienceNOW’s chat with awesome MIT engineer Dava Newman, she’s asked to pick between Star Wars and 2001, talks about what foods to eat while sailing around the world (that is, when food isn’t being used to steer the boat), and shares the highest complement she’s received for her form-fitting next generation space suit. Nope, it’s not about how much it makes astronauts look like Spider Man.

Like an astronaut of fake space, Vincent Fournier has spent the past decade and a half traveling the globe, documenting some of the government-run environments where space explorers train, and the lonesome, white-suited explorers themselves. The results — from the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, the Atacama Desert Observatories in Chile, and elsewhere — look less like massive science experiments on Earth than the landscapes of a futuristic sci-fi flick.

NASA's Spirit rover should be able to wriggle free of its sandy trap on Mars after all, says a scientist for the mission. But the plucky robotic explorer will need to survive the bitter Martian winter first. In April 2009, Spirit's wheels broke through a thin surface crust and got mired in the loose sand below. After months of trying unsuccessfully to free the rover, NASA declared on 26 January that Spirit would henceforth be a stationary lander mission rather than a rover. But the announcement was "a little bit premature", rover scientist Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, told researchers at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, on Monday. In nine drives between 15 January and 8 February, mission members coaxed the rover into driving backwards by 34 centimetres – "pretty good for a lander", Arvidson said. That far surpasses the mere millimetres of motion Spirit had managed in previous efforts.