Mars Yacht Club

The first joint U.S.-European mission to Mars now has a plan for its toolkit. Scheduled for launch in 2016, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter will study the chemical composition of Mars' atmosphere with a suite of instruments specially suited to the task. These instruments are expected to take measurements 1,000 times more sensitive than those by previous Mars orbiters. "To fully explore Mars, we want to marshal all the talents we can on Earth," said European Space Agency scientist David Southwood.

Mary Roach has made a career writing books that answer questions most people would never think to ask. Having already given readers more than they ever wanted to know about the science of cadavers ("Stiff"), souls ("Spook") and sex ("Bonk"), she turns her inquisitive mind to the cosmos. "Packing for Mars" is a book even the most casual space geek will enjoy. From the race to the moon in the '60s to the current goal of a manned mission to Mars by 2030, the book features chapters exploring everything from vomiting in zero gravity ("Throwing Up and Down") to sex in space ("The Three-Dolphin Club"). It's written in a very casual style, with Roach inserting herself into the story whenever her curiosity demands it. She takes a ride aboard NASA's tricked-out C-9 to experience weightlessness and drinks her own filtered urine — all in the name of research.

The SpaceX founder is convinced that humanity's survival rests on its ability to move to the red planet. He tells Paul Harris how his company is making the leap to the stars an affordable dream. The fresh-faced 39-year-old man, in a dark T-shirt and jeans, is talking about travelling to Mars. Not now, but when he's older and ready to swap life on Earth for one on the red planet. "It would be a good place to retire," he says in all seriousness. Normally, this would be the time to make one's excuses and leave the company of a lunatic. Or to smile politely and humour a space nerd's unlikely fantasies. But this man needs to be taken seriously for one compelling reason: he already has his own spaceship. This is Elon Musk, a brilliant entrepreneur who made a fortune from the internet and has invested vast amounts of it in building his own private space rocket company, SpaceX. Indeed, far from being crazy, Musk is the real-life inspiration for the movie character Tony Stark, the playboy scientist hero of the Iron Man franchise.

The new exhibit "Facing Mars" may be steeped in the deepest reaches of our solar system, but educators at Liberty Science Center are hoping to use the allure of the Red Planet to help bring the mysteries of outer space down to Earth in a very realistic fashion. "You see a lot of exhibits that focus on studying the stars and spaceflight, and the mysteries of Mars, but what we've tried to do is challenge visitors to consider what it would truly be like to take that huge leap," says Andrew Prasarn, one of the museum's exhibit developers. "From the moment you walk, in, we're putting you in the shoes of a person who might one day travel to Mars, confronting you at the very start with the question of whether or not you would actually want to take this journey, then showing you everything that's involved."

The 'face' on Mars, a popular landform in Cydonia Region on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona Here's a picture you probably won't see in the tabloid racks while waiting in line at the grocery store. This is the famous "Face on Mars," and is the closest image ever of this landform, taken by the best Mars camera ever, HiRISE on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. And it certainly looks like …. the top of mesa, which is exactly what it is. This feature in the Cydonia region of Mars is most likely a lava dome that has created an isolated mesa or butte-like structure, i.e., a hill. Compare this image to the original image from the Viking orbiter from 1976 image, below, which created such a furor, including a whole new culture of conspiracy theories, books, late-night radio talk show discussion and even a full-length feature film. Alas, its just a hill.

NASA's aging Spirit Mars rover, stuck in loose soil and forced to endure the harsh Martian winter with reduced solar power, has not phoned home since March 22. Officials warned Friday that "a miracle" may be needed to restore the rover to limited operation. No longer mobile, Spirit was unable to orient itself to maximize solar-power levels before the onset of its fourth winter on Mars. Engineers expected the rover to put itself into electronic hibernation, suspending communications and conserving power to warm and recharge its batteries and to run an internal clock.

Most people find the palatability of in-flight entrees an oxymoron. But even frequent fliers seldom encounter more than a few such meals per week. Astronauts, in contrast, may have to survive months in orbit dining on a really limited menu of processed foods and reconstituted beverages served from oh-so-glamorous plastic pouches. Luckily, even the International Space Station can restock its pantry several times a year because these foods are relatively perishable. Which explains the problem NASA faces in planning for really long missions -- like a trip to Mars. Astronaut foods may appear indestructible, but many crew favorites don't retain their nutrition or palatability for even a year, notes Michele Perchonok.

Google, as you may know, runs a search engine and sells ads. How odd then that Tiffany Montague works at the company. Ms. Montague is the manager of Google’s space initiatives –- overseeing things like sending robots to the moon and ogling Mars. It’s not exactly the stuff that keeps the lights on at the Googleplex, but this type of work seems to make Sergey Brin and Larry Page happy. Unlike many Google employees, Ms. Montague is not an engineer by trade. Rather, she arrived at Google about five years ago, after serving as an officer for the Air Force and working at the National Reconnaissance Office. Ms. Montague’s specialty centered on flying high altitude aircraft and snooping on stuff.

A trio of planets converging in the night sky this week and for several nights will give casual skywatchers the perfect chance to easily see and identify worlds they might not normally notice. The event, building up to a super celestial snuggle in early August, is also a chance to watch and grasp orbital mechanics in action. Venus, Mars and Saturn will gradually, night after night, move into a tight triangular grouping in the early evening sky. (This graphic shows where to look to spot the planetary triangle on Aug. 5.)

Space officials in the United States and Europe are planning an ambitious dual-rover mission that could start collecting Martian soil samples in 2018 to be picked up by a subsequent mission and returned to Earth in the 2020s. The costly mission would blast off on an Atlas 5 rocket in 2018 and land two rovers on Mars with a single "sky crane" descent system that will be tested for the first time at the Red Planet in August 2012. It would be the first time two rovers will be delivered to the same landing site on Mars. The European Space Agency's ExoMars rover and a $2 billion NASA Mars Astrobiology Explorer-Cacher mission are the leading candidates for the tandem project.

A downward-pointing camera on the front-left side of NASA's Curiosity rover will give adventure fans worldwide an unprecedented sense of riding a spacecraft to a landing on Mars. The Mars Descent Imager, or MARDI, will start recording high-resolution video about two minutes before landing in August 2012. Initial frames will glimpse the heat shield falling away from beneath the rover, revealing a swath of Martian terrain below illuminated in afternoon sunlight. The first scenes will cover ground several kilometers (a few miles) across. Successive images will close in and cover a smaller area each second. The full-color video will likely spin, then shake, as the Mars Science Laboratory mission's parachute, then its rocket-powered backpack, slow the rover's descent. The left-front wheel will pop into view when Curiosity extends its mobility and landing gear.

If a Japanese space capsule that recently returned to Earth is found to have collected particles from a billion-year-old space rock, it will join the short history of lucrative sample-return missions. Retrieving samples from space is considered more complicated, potentially more costly, and riskier than conducting remote or robotic expeditions, but successful retrievals can confirm or disprove theories more accurately and can fuel or accelerate decades of scientific research. As researchers and mission scientists await an analysis of what the plucky Hayabusa asteroid probe has brought back from space, they say previous sample-return missions have proven their usefulness. And, with improvements in technology and in methods of cleaning and sterilizing storage facilities, future missions to retrieve samples from Mars and beyond could provide even more valuable insights into the unknowns of our solar system.

NASA officials say the best chance to hear from the napping Spirit rover again will be in September or October, but the timing of the robot's revival from winter hibernation is an engineering guessing game. Spirit was forced to sleep by the cold winter in the Martian southern hemisphere, where low sun angles were not sufficient to power the rover through solar panels. The stranded rover last communicated with Earth on March 22. Spirit has been stuck in a sand pit known as Troy since April 2009, leaving the rover tilted away from the sun and limiting its ability to produce electricity. The winter solstice at Spirit's location was May 13, and conditions should now be improving. But the rover's batteries likely won't be collecting enough sunlight to begin communicating again until September or October.

The Mars Descent Imager for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory took this image inside the Malin Space Science Systems clean room in San Diego, Calif., during calibration testing of the camera in June 2008. It shows the instrument's deputy principal investigator, Ken Edgett, holding a six-foot metal ruler that was used as a depth-of-field test target. The camera is focused at 7 meters (23 feet) so that everything between about 2 meters (7 feet) and infinity is in focus. This image shows a slightly out-of-focus rock (a rounded cobble of Icelandic basalt with tiny crystals and vesicles) at a distance of about 70 centimeters (2.3 feet), equivalent to the distance the camera will be from the ground after the rover has landed.

Comic Vine received a press release from Dynamite today letting us know that they’re launching WARLORD OF MARS in October for a dollar-priced first issue. The series, spinning out of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic pulp series, will be written by Arvid Nelson, drawn by Stephen Sadowski & Lui Antonio and covered by the likes of Alex Ross and J. Scott Campbell. The famous John Carter of Mars will be joining the impressive roster of heroes Dynamite's steadily assembled from the long, crisscrossing tradition of comics, pulp and literature. I’m talking about characters like the Green Hornet, the Lone Ranger, Zorro, the Phantom, Buck Rogers and Sherlock Holmes.

The temperature's literally freezing, the air is poisonous and you'll die if you go outside without your space suit. Why would you put your hand up to be on the first space shuttle to Mars? Space tourism may not be a reality yet, but in preparation for the day that it is, Guy Murphy has written a book about living on the red planet, titled Mars: A Survival Guide. Murphy wouldn't say no to a seat on the shuttle but he accepts moving to a Martian neighbourhood would have its downsides. However those problems would pale in relation to what else the planet has to offer.

NASA has launched a summer contest for students to design the best inflatable loft for life in space or on another world. A cash reward and a field test of the winning design are up for grabs. Three awards of up to $48,000 each will be granted to the university student teams that produce the best loft-like inflatable space habitats that can be attached to a hard-shell NASA structure. The winner of a head-to-head competition of the modules' performance in the Arizona desert will earn another $10,000, NASA officials said in an announcement. The X-Hab contest, short for "eXploration Habitat," follows in the tradition of NASA's Lunabotics program and the space-related X Prize awards offered by the non-profit X Prize Foundation to spur interest in aerospace fields.

Today, Microsoft Research and NASA are providing an entirely new experience to users of the WorldWide Telescope, which will allow visitors to interact with and explore our solar system like never before. Viewers can now take exclusive interactive tours of the red planet, hear directly from NASA scientists, and view and explore the most complete, highest-resolution coverage of Mars available. To experience Mars up close, Microsoft and NASA encourage viewers to download the new WWT|Mars experience at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org. Dan Fay, director of Microsoft Research’s Earth, Energy and Environment effort, works with scientists around the world to see how technology can help solve their research challenges. Since early 2009, he’s been working with NASA to bring imagery from the agency’s Mars and Moon missions to life, and to make their valuable volumes of information more accessible to the masses.

While NASA is counting on an act of Congress or a renegotiated deal with Russia to acquire plutonium for its next robotic deep space missions, the European Space Agency is considering alternative nuclear fuels to power its own probes traveling into the sun-starved outer solar system. NASA's dwindling supply of plutonium-238 nuclear fuel will not be sufficient to power an orbiter to visit Jupiter's moon Europa, NASA's contribution to a planned $4.5 billion joint flagship mission between the U.S. space agency and Europe. That's unless the U.S. Department of Energy, which supplies nuclear fuel for NASA missions, receives funding to restart domestic production of plutonium or successfully resolves a contract dispute with the Russian government, said Jim Adams, the deputy director of NASA's planetary science division.

Europe, a leader in nuclear power, has announced that it intends to lend its American counterparts a hand by making Pu-238 for NASA. David Southwood, ESA's director of science and robotic exploration, in an interview with Spaceflight Now, states, "Our target is to have an independent capability, which may help our American friends." Since the Pioneer and Voyager missions of the 1970s, NASA has been using the radioactive plutonium-238 (or Pu-238) isotope to power its deep space missions. The radioactive source has a very long half-life of 87.7 years. Over that period it slowly decays, releasing a steady stream of thermal energy in the process. That thermal energy is harvested by radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) in the probes to make power. Unfortunately, NASA's plutonium stockpile has almost been exhausted, even as agency prepares its new Mars Space Laboratory which will require the isotope for power. There's really no alternative currently for NASA, as the operational range of many of its missions place it well outside the spatial volume where the sun's rays are strong enough to provide a decent level of solar power.