Mars Yacht Club

On Saturday, June 5, in the remote southeast Utah desert, a team of engineering students from Oregon State University emerged as the champion of the fourth annual University Rover Challenge (URC). Competition events began on Friday morning, June 4, at two adjacent sites near the Mars Society's Mars Desert Research Station near Hanksville, Utah. The "sample return mission" involved investigating sites that might have microbial life and bringing back a sample. At the second site, the "equipment servicing task" required rovers to flip switches, push buttons, and insert plugs into outlets.

A vast ocean likely covered one-third of the surface of Mars some 3.5 billion years ago, according to a new study conducted by University of Colorado at Boulder scientists. The CU-Boulder study is the first to combine the analysis of water-related features including scores of delta deposits and thousands of river valleys to test for the occurrence of an ocean sustained by a global hydrosphere on early Mars. While the notion of a large, ancient ocean on Mars has been repeatedly proposed and challenged over the past two decades, the new study provides further support for the idea of a sustained sea on the Red Planet during the Noachian era more than 3 billion years ago, said CU-Boulder researcher Gaetano Di Achille, lead author on the study.

Fourteen students from Bellevue will participate in one of the four summer residency sessions this summer at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. Washington Aerospace Scholars (WAS) is a competitive educational program for high school juniors from across Washington State. The 14 are among the 160 students who qualified for the summer program from 247 students who applied in November. To qualify for the residency program, the students spent six months studying a NASA-designed, distance-learning curriculum via the Internet. During the residency experience, they will collaborate with the other student participants on the design of a human mission to Mars. WAS scholars are guided by professional engineers, scientists, university students and certified educators as they plan these missions.

NASA's next Mars rover just got a new set of wheels and an innovative suspension system in preparation for its journey to the red planet. The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity, a robot car is scheduled to launch in 2011 and reach Mars soil in August 2012. Each of its six new wheels is about 20 inches (about half a meter) in diameter. The ambitious rover is designed to collect samples and conduct tests on rocks across the Martian surface in order to dissect the planet's geological history.

The U.S. will aim to begin manned missions beyond the moon by 2025, with a planned round-trip to Mars the following decade, the WH announced Monday. "Our sights [are] set ultimately on Mars and beyond," said Jim Kohlenberger, chief of staff at the WH Office of Science and Technology Policy. What's more, Pres. Obama's new space policy lays out plans to extend the the life of the International Space Station for another decade and beyond, rather than sticking with plans to scrap the orbiting outpost in 5 years.

There used to be more water than anyone realized on Mars, data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter seems to show. Mars' southern highlands have considerable amounts of phyllosilicates, a type of hydrated minerals formed by extensive water exposure. However, no one knew if there were similar minerals on the northern third of the planet, because it is covered by lava plains up to a mile deep three billion years ago. Researchers have wondered if below that layer of lava there might be hydrated minerals, indicated that eons ago liquid water flowed over the surface there as well.

Mars rover team members have begun informally naming features around the rim of Endeavour Crater, as they develop plans to investigate that destination when NASA's Opportunity rover arrives there after many more months of driving. A new, super-resolution view of a portion of Endeavour's rim reveals details that were not discernible in earlier images from the rover. Several high points along the rim can be correlated with points discernible from orbit. Super-resolution is an imaging technique combining information from multiple pictures of the same target to generate an image with a higher resolution than any of the individual images.

While radiation has therapeutic uses, too much radiation is damaging to cells. The most important acute side effect of radiation poisoning is damage to the bone marrow. The bone marrow produces all the normal blood cells, and therefore a high dose of radiation can lead to low blood counts of red cells, platelets and white blood cells. Humans that receive a lethal dose of radiation as in the setting of an accidental exposure die of bone marrow failure. While there are a few drugs that will decrease toxicity when given before exposure to radiation (“radioprotectants”); currently, no effective therapy exists to mitigate bone marrow toxicity of radiation when given after radiation exposure (“radiomitigants”). The identification of successful human radiomitigants is a top research priority of the US Department of Homeland Security and National Institutes of Health.

Today, President Obama announced the administration’s new National Space Policy. The National Space Policy expresses the President’s direction for the Nation’s space activities. The policy articulates the President’s commitment to reinvigorating U.S. leadership in space for the purposes of maintaining space as a stable and productive environment for the peaceful use of all nations. The United States will advance a bold new approach to space exploration. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration will engage in a program of human and robotic exploration of the solar system, develop new and transformative technologies for more affordable human exploration beyond the Earth, seek partnerships with the private sector to enable commercial spaceflight capabilities for the transport of crew and cargo to and from the International Space Station, and begin human missions to new destinations by 2025.

Even in the company of other astronauts, Buzz Aldrin is still the hippest guy in the room. At the 2010 Astronaut Hall of Fame induction ceremony, which took place earlier this month at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Buzz was the Jack Nicholson to NASA’s Oscars. He exuded an effortless cool just by smiling at the crowd, and all eyes were on him even when he wasn’t meant to be the center of attention. The ceremony’s host, Jon Cryer (because when you think of astronauts, you think of the guy who played “Duckie“), perfectly summed up the feelings of pretty much everybody in the audience. “From the moment I arrived,” he said, “it has been all that I can do to keep from saying, ‘So Buzz, when you were like on the Moon and stuff, was it awesome’?”

The latest Mars robot may be dead, but NASA scientists have plenty to keep them busy as they scout out four potential stomping grounds for an ambitious new rover pegged to be the next red planet explorer. NASA declared the Phoenix Mars lander – its youngest Mars probe – officially dead in late May after photos taken of it from orbit revealed substantial damage from its environment in the Martian arctic. Those photos came from the same powerful orbiter that has been searching for the ultimate drop zone for NASA's new Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) which is currently set for a November 2011 launch. The new roving robot lab, known as Curiosity, is expected to determine whether Mars is or was ever habitable to microbial life. The rover's combination of technical improvements should make any potential landing sites more scientifically rich than anywhere Mars landers have gone before.

California middle school students using the camera on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter have found lava tubes with one pit that appears to be a skylight to a cave. The students in science teacher Dennis Mitchell's class at Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, Calif., were examining Martian lava tubes as their project in the Mars Student Imaging Program offered by NASA and Arizona State University. Students in this program develop a geological question, then target a Mars-orbiting camera to take an image that helps answer the question. Mars Odyssey has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2001, returning data and images of the Martian surface and providing relay communications service for the twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

Feel a buzz in your pocket? That's Mars calling your iPhone. Thanks to a new — and free — iPhone app, users can have images of Mars delivered daily to their device. The images come from an Arizona State University-designed camera on-board NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, and they include every kind of feature there is on the Red Planet. The iPhone app is available through the iTunes website.

A team of University of Alberta engineering students has proven themselves other-worldly with their winning design for a machine meant to work on Mars. After sweeping the U of A’s mechanical engineering student design awards, the four-member team took the National Design Excellence title last week with a robotic drill for taking core samples of the red planet. “Winning the nationals in Victoria was our goal from the start,” said team member Nicolas Olmedo. “We asked our instructors for a very tough design assignment, and we got it.” Michael Lipsett, a U of A mechanical engineering professor and team advisor, says a Mars core sampler has every challenge imaginable. “The planet has very harsh conditions, and the design has to be light, low-power, and robust, because it’s a long way away for a service call if something goes wrong.”

Heidi Ahnert faced astronomical odds when she decided to enter a competition to design a Mars Rover for NASA. Ahnert, 47, a part-time student at Harrisburg Area Community College who works as a math and reading tutor at Landisville Middle School, had been a stay-at-home mom for the past 20 years. She didn't even know what she was getting into, because she had been given erroneous information about the contest and initially believed it was a robotics competition. As it turned out, it was much more than that: The challenge she faced was to design a model of a Rover suitable to land on Mars. Competitors also were required to work out a project timeline and budget. Ahnert, who last took science and math classes 30 years ago, was competing against astrophysics and aerospace engineer majors enrolled at community colleges across the country. She enlisted the help of her students, who were serving in-school suspensions for bad behavior.

Four members of the University of Arizona's Phoenix Mars Mission team on Tuesday were presented with NASA's most distinguished awards for their contributions to the mission. The awards, announced during a ceremony at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, went to:

Engineers with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., are running diverse trials with a test version of the radar system that will enable NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission to put the Curiosity rover onto the Martian surface in August 2012. One set of tests conducted over a desert lakebed at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif., in May 2010 used flights with a helicopter simulating specific descent paths anticipated for Martian sites. During the final stage of descent, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission will use a "sky crane" maneuver to lower Curiosity on a bridle from the mission's rocket-powered descent stage. The descent stage will carry Curiosity's flight radar.

A geological map, created using data from a plethora of orbiting spacecraft, presents new evidence that lakes persisted early in Mars' history. The map focuses on Hellas Planitia, an area located in the planet's southern hemisphere that is well known for its giant impact basin – the Hellas basin – which spans over 2,000 kilometres in diameter and plunges to a depth of eight kilometres.

A new discovery of bacterial life in a Martian-like environment on Earth suggests our neighboring red planet could also be hospitable to some form of microbial life. Researchers found methane-eating bacteria that appear to be thriving in a unique spring called Lost Hammer on Axel Heiberg Island in the extreme north of Canada. This spring is similar to possible past or present springs on Mars, the scientists say, so it hints that microbial life could potentially exist there, too. There is no firm evidence that Mars does or ever did host life, however.

“Game-changing” and “affordable” are perhaps the most repeated adjectives spoken by NASA officials in the last few months. The premise underlying President Obama’s proposed space policy is that development of new space technologies can speed space exploration at lower costs. But skeptics in Congress counter that NASA has provided too few details to convince them that they should largely throw away the $10 billion that has been spent so far in NASA’s Constellation moon program and spend billions more on something new. At a workshop last month in Galveston, members of NASA study teams looking at how to put in effect the Obama policy presented their current thinking to 450 attendees from industry and academia. The NASA presenters, in describing how the space agency could make it to Mars on a limited budget, said their ideas represented “a point of departure” that would be revised with feedback.