To Mars and back - in just tank fill of fuel

Graphical illustration of how an ion thruster works by hurling particles backwards so that a spacecraft can be propelled forwards

A Ph D student at University of Sydney Australia has come up with an idea that may revolutionise space travel - specially man's quest to travel to distant planets like Mars.

Paddy Neumann has created a new type of ion space drive that could take humans to Mars and back on a single tank of fuel and believes his ion space drive Nasa's shatters current fuel efficiency record. 

The Neumann ion drive works by bombarding the fuel source with electric arcs, which causes ions be discarded. 

The innovative part of Neumann's drive is the type of fuel that was used. While HiPEP system runs on xenon gas, Neumann's ion drive can instead run on various metals many of which can be found in space junk.

Via | Source

If you like Imposing Headlines, please follow us on Facebook

Read more »

Men on Mars!!

The photograph may look as if this has come direct from Mars - well it looks like to be so.

But in reality, these are a group of scientists clad in spacesuits seen trudge across the bleak red terrain, occasionally pausing to take rock samples or map the landscape at the Mars Deseret Research Station in the deserts of Utah, in the Western United States. The site, near the town of Hanksville, was chosen because the terrain is similar to the surface of Mars.

These 'astronauts' are a group of volunteers who are helping to discover ways to investigate the feasibility of a human exploration of Mars and use the Utah desert's Mars-like terrain to simulate working conditions on the red planet.

The project is called the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), a simulated off-world habitat that serves as a test site for field operations in preparation for future human missions to Mars.

All outdoor exploration is done wearing simulated spacesuits and carrying air supply packs and crews live together in a small communication base with carefully rationed essentials - everything needed to survive must be produced, fixed and replaced on-site.

It is operated by The Mars Society, a non-profit organisation that advocates space travel, during the cooler winter months by rotating volunteer crews of six scientists (geologists, biologists, engineers and more) running simulations of how it would be to live on Mars and working together to develop field tactics and study the terrain.

These photos give rise to the conspiracy theories that already exist that weather men really went to moon - or was all of it was just an exercise like the one in this post?

Anyway watch the video below of these men while they are on earthly Mars:

Read more about it at: Mail Online
Follow us on Facebook

Read more »

Curiosity stirs excitement about life on Mars

Man is always wanted to know whether there is life on other planets like our earth or not - and Mars have always been of the planets of human speculations.

And this time, the analysts reviewing the feedback provided by the NASA's Rover 'Curiosity' have been stirred by the adventures of the hi-tech robot.

Although, the scientists have not disclosed as yet, but they seem to find something that could be exciting. “This data is going to be one for the history books,” Grotzinger told a National Public Radio reporter. “It’s looking really good.”

Like a paleontologist looking for fossilized dinosaur bones, the robot is sifting through the red dirt of the planet’s Gale Crater hunting for a substance that may indicate life once existed on Mars – methane. Methane is an organic compound, which means it’s a building block for life.

The rover has made some concrete findings. Earlier this month, NASA announced the Rover had confirmed human astronauts would be able to survive the radiation levels in Mars’s atmosphere. 

Read more about Curiosity's Mission: news

Read more »

Mystery Over Shiny Particles On Mars

NASA's Curiosity rover had been on Mars 61 days when she gathered her first scoop of soil.

Before the one-ton robot could finish sifting through her first small bucket of dust, however, all the excitement shifted to a shiny object found in the sand near the rover.

They saw that a light-toned particle was embedded in a clump of Martian soil, leading researchers to believe that the material could be native to Mars. This find completely overturned their original argument: These mystery particles are not something from the rover.

-->

Following the discovery, a third scoop of soil was collected. This sample will now be run through Curiosity's Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument to figure out what it's made of, and hopefully find out what's making the sand so shiny.   

Read more: Business Insider

Read more »

Curiosity ready to dig into Martian sand

Mars' rover 'Curiosity' is already breaking ground on Mars, and now it's breaking ground in the social media universe.

The rover became "mayor" of Gale Crater on Friday by checking in through Foursquare, the location-based social network, just as it prepares to scoop up some Martian sand for testing. Curiosity had its own Twitter and Facebook accounts long before its momentous landing on the planet in August, and JPL plans to use Foursquare to keep track of the rover as it continues its two-year mission to search for signs of ancient microbial life.

-->

Foursquare names a user as mayor of a specific location for having more check-ins than anyone else. With its second check-in (the first was Wednesday), Curiosity has met the minimum requirement.

"We're all very excited," said Stephanie Smith, a social media manager for JPL "As the team names locations and the scientific team moves to new locations, the plan is for the rover to check in at each place."

Read more: sgv tribune

Read more »

Curiosity finds stream on Mars

NASA rover Curiosity has discovered gravel once carried by the waters of an ancient stream that 'ran vigorously' through the area, says the US space agency.

Evidence of water has been found before but this is the first time gravel from a stream bed has been discovered.

The rocky Hottah outcrop looks 'like someone jack-hammered up a slab of city sidewalk, but it's really a tilted block of an ancient stream bed,' project scientist John Grotzinger said in a statement. Curiosity, which has been exploring Mars since early August, also investigated a second outcrop known as Link.

-->

Curiosity is on a two-year mission to investigate whether it is possible to live on Mars and to learn whether conditions there might have been able to support life in the past.

Read more: Sky News

Read more »

Uncertainty lingers on NASA's Mars program

Photo NASA

This week’s arrival of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity set the stage for a potentially game-changing quest to learn whether the planet most like Earth ever had a shot at developing life, but follow-up missions exist only on drawing boards.

The United States had planned to team up with Europe on a trio of missions beginning in 2016 that would culminate in the return of Mars soil and rock samples to Earth, an endeavor the National Research Council considers its top priority in planetary science for the next decade.

Citing budget concerns, the Obama administration terminated NASA’s participation in Europe’s ExoMars program earlier this year, spurring the U.S. space agency to re-examine its options before another flight opportunity comes and goes. Earth and Mars favorably align for launches about every 26 months.

The situation is complicated by massive budget overruns in the $2.5-billion US Curiosity mission, intended to determine if Mars could now or ever have supported microbial life, and in the $8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, a successor to the Hubble observatory.

Read details: Toronto Sun

Read more »

NASA's latest Mars adventure provides spectacular glimpses of alien landscape

NASA's latest adventure to Mars has given the world more than just glimpses of a new alien landscape.

This photo provided by NASA shows a full-resolution version of one of the first images taken by a rear Hazard-Avoidance camera on NASA's Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars the Sunday evening, Aug. 5, 2012. The image was originally taken through a "fisheye" wide-angle lens, but has been "linearized" so that the horizon looks flat rather than curved. A Hazard-avoidance camera on the rear-left side of Curiosity obtained this image. Part of the rim of Gale Crater, which is a feature the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, stretches from the top middle to the top right of the image. One of the rover's wheels can be seen at bottom right. (AP Photo/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

It opened a window into the trip itself, from video footage of the landing to a photo of the rover hanging by a parachute to a shot of discarded spacecraft hardware strewn across the surface. And the best views — of Mars and the journey there — are yet to come.

"Spectacular," mission deputy project scientist Joy Crisp said of the footage. "We've not had that before."

Since parking itself inside an ancient crater Sunday night, the Curiosity rover has delighted scientists with views of its new surroundings, including the 3-mile(4.8-kilometer)-high mountain it will drive to. It beamed back the first color picture Tuesday revealing a tan-hued, pebbly landscape and the crater rim off in the distance.

Read details: Phil Star

Read more »

Evidence of Past Water found on Mars

[ Yahoo News ] 9 Dec

A NASA rover scouting for signs of past water on Mars has found the strongest evidence yet -- a vein of gypsum, a mineral deposited by water, protruding from an ancient rock. Gypsum -- commonly known as plaster of Paris -- typically forms from water flowing through rock.

The rover, called Opportunity, and its twin, Spirit, arrived on opposite sides of Mars in January 2004. Over the years, the rovers, aided by several orbiting spacecraft, have returned a convincing body of evidence that Mars was not always as cold and dry as it is today.

Read more »

Europe ends search for Stranded Russian Mars Mission

[ BBC Science & Environment ] 2 Dec

Too bad for the stranded Russian Mars Mission Phobos-Grunt, as the European Space Agency announced on Friday that it was now ceasing any further attempts to get a signal.

The Russian craft has been stuck circling the Earth since its launch in early November. Apart from some brief radio contact with the wayward probe just over a week ago, there has been total silence from the spacecraft.

The Russian engineers have not lost hope and are still trying to recover the stranded spacecraft.

Read more »

NASA Launches Its Curiosity for Mars

Full Story / Photo: BBC Science and Environment 26 Nov

NASA has launched the most capable machine ever built to land on Mars, Saturday, Nov 26 at 10:02 a.m. EST. Nicknamed Curiosity, the one-tonne rover, tucked inside a capsule, left Florida on an Atlas 5 rocket at 10:02 local time (15:02 GMT), reports BBC News.

The spacecraft will take the rover will take eight and a half months to cross the vast distance to its destination.

Read more »

NASA's Mars Curiosity ready for Saturday Lift-Off

Full Story: Mashable 22 Nov

NASA’s $2.5 billion Mars rover dubbed “Curiosity” is set to liftoff on Saturday. 

NASA's Curiosity projected on Mars (Animation) 

The lift off will be start of a 350+ million mile journey to learn about the possibility of life on the red planet — either in the past or in the future. Check out the video above to learn more about the mission.

Watch video report

Read more »

Watch an interesting combination Early Saturday Morning: Two Planets and a Star

Full Story: Yahoo News 19 Nov

If you’re up after midnight early on Saturday morning (Nov. 19), you should be able to see a celestial gathering of a bright star, a bright planet and a rather wide waning crescent moon. Look out towards the east-northeast sky at around 1 a.m. local time, to find a triangle in the sky composed of the three cosmic bodies.

These three cosmic bodies are: 

The star is Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation of Leo, the Lion. The planet in the triangle is Mars, which comes up over the east-northeast horizon shortly before midnight. The moon, as noted, is now a crescent phase, having just passed its last quarter phase earlier this week.  

Once the trio climbs high into the eastern sky in the predawn hours on Saturday, you’ll see that they’ll seem to resemble an isosceles triangle, which has at least two equal sides.

Read more »

Russian Mars bound Phobos-Grunt may crash back to earth

Full Story: Huffington Post 13 November 2011

ITAR-Tass (Russian news agency) reported Sunday that Phobos-Grunt (Phobos-Ground), the unmanned Mars probe, may come crashing down to earth in a couple of weeks if engineers fail to fix the problem.

The Phobos-Grunt was launched Wednesday and reached preliminary orbit, but its engines never fired to send it off to the Red Planet. The efforts to communicate with the spacecraft have so far been unsuccessful. 

Read more »

Russian Mars bound Phobos-Grunt drifts minutes after launch

Full Story / Photo: BBC 9 November 2011

Phobos Grunt (Photo: BBC)

The Russian Mars probe "Phobos-Grunt" drifted from its course soon after take off. The 33-months long journey to a Martian moon now seems impossible. Although engineers have three days to correct the fault before its batteries run out.

The project is Russia's most ambitious space voyage in recent years. The venture is also significant because it is carrying China's first Mars satellite.

If its course can be corrected, and everything else goes well, Martian moon samples could be back on Earth in just under three years' time.

Read full story for more on Russian adventure into Mars

Read more »