Mars Yacht Club

There will be no blast-off Thursday when six men set out on a record-breaking space mission. Why? Because they’ll never leave the parking lot. The ripped and ready crew of Mars500 will spend 520 days inside a sealed-up capsule in Moscow, outside the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Biomedical Problems. That’s where they’ll complete the first simulated human mission to Mars, a test drive that will be influential in planning future trips to the red planet. “There’s never been a simulation that has lasted so long, that took place in something very similar to the actual future space capsule in which people will be going to Mars, we hope,” says Peter Suedfeld, professor emeritus of psychology of the University of British Columbia, who has worked with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency. The historic experiment will test how the men operate in isolation, with limited company, a significant amount of stress and confinement.

Rocks examined by NASA's Spirit Mars Rover hold evidence of a wet, non-acidic ancient environment that may have been favorable for life. Confirming this mineral clue took four years of analysis by several scientists. An outcrop that Spirit examined in late 2005 revealed high concentrations of carbonate, which originates in wet, near-neutral conditions, but dissolves in acid. The ancient water indicated by this find was not acidic. NASA's rovers have found other evidence of formerly wet Martian environments. However the data for those environments indicate conditions that may have been acidic. In other cases, the conditions were definitely acidic, and therefore less favorable as habitats for life. Laboratory tests helped confirm the carbonate identification. The findings were published online Thursday, June 3 by the journal Science.

A team of planetary scientists has used radar and a high-resolution camera to reveal the subsurface geology of Mars' northern ice cap. The findings – based on data from SHARAD (the surface-penatrating radar) and HiRISE (the high-resolution camera) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – were published May 27 in two papers in the journal Nature. The group studying a canyon feature called Chasma Boreale included Shane Byrne from University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Jack Holt and Isaac Smith of The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics are the papers' lead authors. "The ice sheet on Mars' northern polar region is about the size and thickness of the Greenland ice sheet," said Byrne. "Just like Greenland, the layers of ice on Mars preserve a climate record that reaches back probably a few million years. Studying this ice sheet and its internal layers tells us about Martian climate and how it has varied in the past."

The life of a Mars rover is probably bit like that of Wall-E at the start of the Pixar movie: a lot of lonely treks in dutiful fulfillment of a mission through the remains of a planet's earlier days. The rovers Spirit and Opportunity may not be Hollywood icons, but they have done NASA proud. And in just the last day or so, Opportunity hit yet another milestone--it now holds the record for the longest active service on the surface of Mars, surpassing the mark of six years, 116 days (in Earth time) set by the Viking 1 lander, which arrived on the Red Planet in the summer of 1976.

The Phoenix is dead and this time it won’t rise again. On May 24, NASA released photos of the Mars Phoenix lander that finally ended even the faintest hope that the York-designed weather instruments on board the spacecraft would come to life again. The photos show that the lander’s solar panels appear to have collapsed due to the weight of a thick layer of frost, robbing it of power it needs to communicate – if its physical components were not already cracked and broken by the extreme cold.

Wired magazine’s iPad app isn’t just the magazine shoved into an e-reader. It has an interactive touchscreen-controlled fly-by of the planet Mars with text pop-outs that tell the story of every craft that’s landed somewhere on the Martian globe. It has videos. It has rich-media ads that aren’t corny. It eats half a gigabyte of memory.

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has ended operations after repeated attempts to contact the spacecraft were unsuccessful. A new image transmitted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows signs of severe ice damage to the lander's solar panels. "The Phoenix spacecraft succeeded in its investigations and exceeded its planned lifetime," said Fuk Li, manager of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Although its work is finished, analysis of information from Phoenix's science activities will continue for some time to come." Earth-based research continues on discoveries Phoenix made during summer conditions at the far-northern site where it landed May 25, 2008. The solar-powered lander completed its three-month mission and kept working until sunlight waned two months later.

Preparing for a trip to Mars...

Experts hold out slim hopes that hard-working NASA robot didn't freeze to death during Martian winter, but NASA is making one final effort to detect signs of life in the dormant Phoenix Mars Lander. This week marks NASA's fourth attempt to listen for signals showing that the Mars Lander did not perish during the frigid -- and long -- Martian winter. The Mars Odyssey made similar attempts in January, February and April of this year. NASA scientists received the last transmission from the Lander on Nov. 2, 2008. NASA's Mars Odyssey yesterday began sending out radio signals for a last time in the hopes that the robotic Lander will pick them up and respond. Through Friday, the orbiter will make 61 flights this week high over the Mars Lander's site on the Martian surface. "To be thorough, we decided to conduct this final session around the time of the summer solstice, during the best thermal and power conditions for Phoenix," said Chad Edwards, chief telecommunications engineer for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, in a statement.

NASA's long-lived twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have set a new endurance record on Mars, with Opportunity hot on the heels of its sister robot for the title of longest-running mission on the Martian surface. Opportunity today matched the Mars mission lifespan of NASA's iconic Viking 1 lander, which spent six years and 116 days (for a total of 2,245 days) working on the red planet in the mid 1970s and early 80s. If Opportunity survives three weeks longer than its older robotic twin Spirit, which has been silent for weeks but may actually be hibernating, the rover will take the all-time record for the longest mission on Mars. The two solar-powered rovers recently experienced their fourth Martian winter solstice – the day with the least amount of sunlight at their respective spots on Mars – on May 12.

NASA’s attempt last year to drive a modified Humvee all the way to its simulated Mars base on Devon Island nearly ended in disaster. Thick snow concealed a lead of open water ahead of the vehicle, which narrowly avoided falling right into the ocean. At a presentation at the Nunatta Sunakkutaangit Museum in Iqaluit on May 3, Mars Institute director Pascal Lee showed a Power Point presentation of the trip from Kugluktuk to Cambridge Bay, 500 km across the ice of Coronation Gulf, made between April 17 and April 25, 2009. The journey was supposed to proceed on to Resolute and then to Haughton Crater on Devon Island, often called the most Mars-like environment on Earth. But days of whiteout conditions and the near-loss of the vehicle through the ice made NASA change its plans, instead bringing it by air from Cambridge Bay to Resolute for the final trek to Haughton Crater. The “Moon-1 experimental vehicle” is a customized Humvee equipped as if it were a manned vehicle on Mars.

It's what the show "Big Brother" would look like if a space agency produced it. An international crew is counting down the days until they enter a mock spacecraft in Moscow where they will live for more than a year -and-a-half to study the toll isolation and cramped spaces would take on the mind and body on a trip to Mars. The six-man crew -- made up of volunteers from Russia, China, Italy and France -- will enter their "ship" on June 3 for a 520-day stay during which they'll conduct nearly 100 experiments. Their days will be strictly divided into three eight-hour segments for work, leisure (they recently bought a Wii) and sleep.

We've landed the robots, puttered about on the planet's surface, and, at long last, found the water. Now, NASA is getting back to basics on Mars with a plan to once again search for signs of life on the Red Planet, a focus that's been on the back burner since the 1976 Viking missions. But this time, NASA doesn't want to analyze Mars from Mars. This time the space agency wants to bring samples back home, and has a cleverly orchestrated scheme to do it. NASA thinks the acquisition and return of Martian rock and soil samples is completely doable, but it's going to be a costly three-phase process, probably with a price tag totaling some $10 billion. And since the federal government isn't exactly showering NASA with cash, the agency recently teamed with its European counterpart to map out the details of such a complex mission.

There is a new champion on the red planet, in terms of longevity that is, the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has surpassed the endurance record of Viking 1. The lander held the record for decades, (the lander was accidentally turned off in 1982 and contact could not be reestablished) until this week when Opportunity surpassed it. The Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been on Mars since 2004 and have provided countless new discoveries about our next door, (celestially speaking) neighbor. The rovers were only expected to last 90 days – and have gone on to last some six years, (Spirit has not communicated with ground controllers and is thought to be in hibernation mode). Spirit may yet wake up and yank the duration-prize from her sister – but until then the prize goes to Opportunity. Much of the twin rovers’ missions successes have gone to this particular rover.

This stunning picture is the first image of Earth ever taken from another planet that shows our home as a planetary disc, with the Moon in the distance. Captured by Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as the spacecraft orbited the Red Planet, both the Earth and the Moon appear as crescents, engulfed in the vast darkness of space. Our planet is captured in a 'half-Earth' phase, while the image also shows the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Moon. Because the Earth and the Moon are closer to the Sun than Mars, they exhibit phases, just as the Moon, Venus, and Mercury do when viewed from Earth.

Romain Charles and Diego Urbina have been chosen to go into a set of steel containers on 3 June with two Russians and a Chinese national. The group's exile will test the physical and mental requirements of ultra-long duration spaceflight. Their Mars500 "spaceship", which is located in Russia's Institute of Biomedical Problems, has no windows. All the food and water needed for their "journey" will have to be loaded before "departure". The experiment's designers intend to make the exercise as realistic as possible by introducing a time delay in communications after two months. Because it can take about 20 minutes for a message to travel from Mars to Earth, it will take this amount of time in the simulation, also.

It looks like humanities hope of turning Mars into a second Earth may never translate into reality thanks in part to the red planet’s lack of a magnetic field. Scientists have discovered that our Sun’s solar radiation may thwart all attempts at increasing the atmospheric pressure of the crimson world, which means we may never get the chance of witnessing a green Mars, let alone a blue one. Although this means that Mars may never become a second eden (unless we can create a global magnetic field), it does not mean that humanity will never settle the planet en mass. Future colonists will have to adapt to living within specialized biospheres (with portable magnetic shields to protect them from radiation), although doing so is probably much cheaper than terraforming the entire planet.

Any proof that there’s life on Mars is still non-existent. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) agency of the U.S. government has made a statement to that effect in answer to the sensational article in the British tabloid newspaper “The Sun”, saying that the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have allegedly found a biological substance similar to a bog. It is really not very important whether purposefully or simply wrongly interpreting the NASA reports, the author of the publication in the daily tabloid newspaper “The Sun” deceived its readers. In any case, everybody, as before, is interested to know whether there is life on Mars. New arguments have appeared in the dispute over the presence of primitive life on Mars. Scientists have proved that there’re bacteria on the Earth, which can live under extreme conditions, similar to the conditions existing on Planet Mars. This provides us sufficient grounds to reconsider the results of the experiments, which denied the existence of life on Mars.

An 'astronaut' crew of two Europeans, three Russians and one Chinese citizen will walk into a fake spaceship and seal the hatch, but it's no joke. The team is ready for a record-breaking Mars mission simulation this summer and the European members are already set. Europeans Romain Charles and Diego Urbina have committed to spend almost a year and a half of their lives living like Mars-bound astronauts as part of the Mars500 experiment, the European Space Agency announced Monday. The two Europeans and their crewmates will seal themselves inside isolation modules set up at Russia's Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow. The mock spaceship also includes an interplanetary vehicle, a Mars lander and base, as well as an area carefully sculpted to simulate the red planet's landscape.