Category: Science

(Image Credit: NASA)

The good folks at NASA, ever managing to be on the leading edge, have just launched a competition encouraging teams to develop a system to convert carbon dioxide into glucose. Why is this important? Well, sugar-based biomaterials are plentiful on this planet thanks to our helpful plant life. That will not be the case as we set out among the stars! Developing bioengineering methods to create base materials that will be in short supply (such as easy to metabolize sugars like glucose) from materials that are in great abundance (carbon dioxide) will be a crucial step towards facilitating our successful advancement.

This competition is broken into two phases:

• Phase 1: Teams submit a design and description of a method to perform the stipulated conversion. Up to 5 teams will be awared $50,000 each, as will be announced in April 2019.
• Phase 2: Actually building a working system to perform the conversion. The successful team will walk away with $750,000.

This new contest is part of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program, which was initiated in 2005, intended to directly engage the public in advanced technology development. Basically, NASA is being very observant and starting to crowd-source ideas and research, which makes a great deal of sense in our current world.

To register for the competition, check out the official website!

References:

• NASA!
• CO2 Conversion Challenge

(Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.)

A planet-wide dust storm, which was first seen on May 30, 2018, is finally winding down on the windy red planet. NASA’s rover Opportunity, which is solar powered, has suffered a shutdown as a result of this storm – going into what amounts to hibernation to ride out the storm. However, that dormant period has been longer and more intense than originally designed to handle, so everyone is on edge waiting to see if we can get the rover back on line.

Signals are being sent to the 15 year old rover, which is tucked away in Perseverance Valley, in the hope that once the batteries are recharged even a little, the unit will initiate recovery procedures.

We’ll keep you posted on the status of this fan-favorite rover; and hopefully some readers of this site will one day visit it in a science museum with 38% the surface gravity of Earth.

References:

• NASA Mars

(Image Credit: Dr. Phil Metzger @DrPhiltill)

Last week, SpaceX hosted a closed-door. invitation only Mars workshop, intended to bring together an interdisciplinary team of industry leading experts to discuss the plan for the red planet. Details on this meeting are, as you would imagine, still pretty minimal, but it is encouraging that this sort of thing is starting to ramp up, and the right questions are being asked of the right people.

A recent criticism that has been lodged against SpaceX is that they are very focused and successful with solving the engineering problems required to improve rocket technology and build the pathway to Mars. However, the amount of time spent considering the human factor, and how difficult it will be to keep astronauts alive both on the journey as well as once they have arrived is far less. Challenges ranging from radiation exposure (in space and on the surface) to adequate supplies to the ‘dust problem’ to basic human interactions all need to be considered and seriously addressed. Since Musk’s companies all show a propensity for thinking of the edge cases and surprising us when we think they are missing an angle, I maintain great confidence that what needs to be considered, is well under way.

References:

• Next Big Future

(Image Credit: Hubble (NASA, ESA, and STScI))

NASA is reminding everyone that today, July 31st 2018, is the closest Mars will be to Earth for the next 269 years, at a distance of 35.8 million miles (57.6 million kilometers). That means, unless those of us alive now are very very lucky and some medical advances happen in the next 10-20 years, we probably won’t be around for the next one.

If it is cloudy where you are, don’t stress too much – the next close approach, while not prize winning, will still be fun to observe and will take place Oct. 6, 2020.

So – get out there and keep watching the skies!

References:

• NASA!

(Surface ice near the South Pole – liquid water underneath)
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/MALIN SPACE SCIENCE SYSTEMS

A team from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, using Marsis, a radar instrument on board the European Space Agency’s (Esa) Mars Express orbiter, believe they have discovered a nearly 20km (12 mile) underground liquid water lake on everyone’s favorite backup planet. This is significant for oh so many reasons, and we need to get a probe over there stat and see about what may be swimming around.

The technique for finding this new Mars feature utilized the radar capability of Marsis, and the team realized that reflections from the bottom of a subsurface feature were stronger than reflections from the surface which, in radar terms, is a good sign of liquid H2O.

References:

• bbc.com

(Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

Mars has a lot of interesting surface features, and a new study claims to have decent reason to believe that many of the structures which resemble fluvial stream networks on Earth were formed by the same processes on Mars. Namely, it speaks to the existence of a climate and atmosphere which was able to support frequent and heavy rainfall, on a planet that may have been much wetter than even we had thought.

This all goes to show that Mars continues to surprise us, the more we learn about it, and that the vast undertaking of coming to terms with an entirely new celestial body is more meaningful and challenging than we can imagine.

(Image Credit: Ron Miller / weather.com)

A new study from Boston University’s Center for Space Physics has determined that wind is an effective option for power generation on Mars! This is especially important to combat times of low solar activity such as we are seeing with the current dust storm, and to balance power needs when a piece of equipment may be in a limited sunlight environment for half the year. Additionally, radioisotope power (ie. nuclear) as powers the Curiosity rover would be counter-indicated in a polar region as it would impact any science experiments being conducted.

The original experiments for this paper were conducted in 2010. At the time it was determined that wind was a possible power source given climate conditions on the Red Planet, however there were concerns over the required size of the turbines given the state of technology at the time. Now with 8 more years of materials science and research behind us, the equipment that could be deployed for this purpose has sufficiently improved that it truly can be seen as a viable option. Another great step forward for Mars!

(Figure 1: (left) The wind turbine positioned in the wind tunnel, which is 2m in diameter. (right) Close-up of the wind turbine with the wind tunnel fan visible in the background.
Image Credit: Holstein-Rathlou of Boston University )

References:

• Scientific American
• Original paper by Christina Holstein-Rathlou of Boston University.