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Nasa's seven minutes of terror as Mars probe hurtles to planet at 13,000mph

Robin McKie
The Guardian
Sat, 14 Jul 2012 11:35 UTC
Image
© Reuters
How Curiosity will investigate the composition of rocks on Mars.
A giant space probe is set to plunge into the atmosphere of Mars at a speed of more than 13,000mph in a few weeks' time. For the following seven minutes, its onboard computer will issue electronic instructions to direct the craft through manoeuvres of unprecedented complexity to guide it to the ground. Atmospheric friction and later a giant parachute will cut its speed to a few hundred miles per hour. Then rocket engines will fire and the probe will slow down until it hovers about 20 metres above the surface of the Red Planet.

The spaceship's hold will open and a one-tonne robot rover, Curiosity, will be lowered - on three nylon cables - on to the surface of the Gale Crater, near the Martian equator, the craft's target landing site.

After two seconds, explosive bolts will cut the cables and the probe will be instructed to give a final blast of its engines to lift itself clear of Curiosity and to crash land at a safe distance. The rover, the size of a small car, will then start its journey over the Martian landscape

It is an intensely delicate operation. Should any part of the landing sequence go wrong, $2.5bn worth of hardware, and a decade of effort by astronomers, will be splattered over the Martian landscape. "We will get seven minutes to descend from the top of the atmosphere to the surface, to go from 13,000mph to zero, in perfect sequence, perfect choreography, perfect timing, with the computer operating all by itself," said Nasa engineer Tom Rivellini. "If any one thing does not work out right, it is game over." Hence the Curiosity team's nickname for its descent: the seven-minutes of terror.
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Meteor

Comet 96P/Maccholz is Passing by the Sun Today


SpaceWeather
Sat, 14 Jul 2012 00:32 UTC
Periodic comet 96P/Maccholz is passing by the sun today deep inside the orbit of Mercury. At closest approach, the icy visitor from the outer solar system will be less than 12 million miles (0.13 AU) from the solar surface. Coronagraphs onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory are monitoring the encounter:


"Discovered in 1986, Comet 96P/Machholz is a fascinating comet that has passed through SOHO coronagraph images four times now," says Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab. "It's not a huge comet but it is very photogenic, and puts on quite a display with its beautiful dusty tail."
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Sun

Sunspot AR1520 unleashed an Earth-Facing X1.4-class solar flare on July 12th


SpaceWeather.com
Fri, 13 Jul 2012 09:01 UTC
Big sunspot AR1520 unleashed an X1.4-class solar flare on July 12th. Because the sunspot is directly facing Earth, everything about the blast was geoeffective. For one thing, it hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) directly toward our planet. According to a forecast track prepared by analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab, the CME will hit Earth on July 14th around 10:20 UT (+/- 7 hours) and could spark strong geomagnetic storms.


Sky watchers should be alert for auroras this weekend. Geomagnetic storm alerts: text, voice.

The explosion also strobed Earth with a pulse of extreme UV radiation, shown here in a movie recorded by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Image
© SOHO
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Meteor

NASA: Asteroids likely gave Earth its oceans


MSNBC.com
Fri, 13 Jul 2012 07:37 UTC
Image

The fan tail of Comet McNaught, passing in 2007
Space rocks from inner solar system credited, not outer system comets as believed

Asteroids from the inner solar system are the most likely source of the majority of Earth's water, a new study suggests.

The results contradict prevailing theories, which hold that most of our planet's water originated in the outer solar system and was delivered by comets or asteroids that coalesced beyond Jupiter's orbit, then migrated inward.

"Our results provide important new constraints for the origin of volatiles in the inner solar system, including the Earth," lead author Conel Alexander of the Carnegie Institution of Washington said in a statement. "And they have important implications for the current models of the formation and orbital evolution of the planets and smaller objects in our solar system."

Comment: And if they seeded the oceans, what about oil?

Bit by bit NASA continues to incorporate the work of others who have long since been saying such things:

Planet-X, Comets and Earth Changes by J.M. McCanney

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Cow

Hunting with fire appears to benefit Australia's small-mammal populations, researchers say


Phys.org
Fri, 13 Jul 2012 07:17 UTC
Hunting with fire
© Phys.org
Nyalangka Taylor, near Parnngurr Aboriginal Community in Australia's Western Desert, waits behind a burn to begin searching for monitor lizard in the 'nyurnma' - a freshly burned patch of land. Credit: Rebecca Bliege Bird

When species start disappearing, it usually makes sense to blame it on the arrival of humans. But in the case of Western Australia's declining small-mammal populations, the opposite may be true.

The Aboriginal Martu people of Western Australia have traditionally set small fires while foraging, leaving a patchwork landscape that proves a perfect environment for bilbies, wallabies, possums and other threatened mammals.

Stanford anthropologists have discovered that when these controlled burns cease, the desert rapidly becomes overgrown - and a single lightning strike can send wildfires tearing through hundreds of square miles of tinder-dry mammal habitat.

The paper, authored by Stanford anthropology Associate Professor Rebecca Bliege Bird, senior research scientist Douglas Bird, postdoctoral scholar Brian Codding and undergraduate Peter Kauhanen, appeared recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Chalkboard

Solar System Ice: Source of Earth's Water


ScienceDaily
Fri, 13 Jul 2012 07:18 UTC
Image
© Image courtesy of Carnegie Institution
This is a cross-section of a chondritic meteorite.
Scientists have long believed that comets and, or a type of very primitive meteorite called carbonaceous chondrites were the sources of early Earth's volatile elements -- which include hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon -- and possibly organic material, too. Understanding where these volatiles came from is crucial for determining the origins of both water and life on the planet. New research led by Carnegie's Conel Alexander focuses on frozen water that was distributed throughout much of the early Solar System, but probably not in the materials that aggregated to initially form Earth.

The evidence for this ice is now preserved in objects like comets and water-bearing carbonaceous chondrites. The team's findings contradict prevailing theories about the relationship between these two types of bodies and suggest that meteorites, and their parent asteroids, are the most-likely sources of Earth's water. Their work is published July 12 by Science Express.

Looking at the ratio of hydrogen to its heavy isotope deuterium in frozen water (H2O), scientists can get an idea of the relative distance from the Sun at which objects containing the water were formed. Objects that formed farther out should generally have higher deuterium content in their ice than objects that formed closer to the Sun, and objects that formed in the same regions should have similar hydrogen isotopic compositions. Therefore, by comparing the deuterium content of water in carbonaceous chondrites to the deuterium content of comets, it is possible to tell if they formed in similar reaches of the Solar System.
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Info

Human Ancestor Fossils Hidden in Plain Sight in Lab Rock

Wynne Parry
LiveScience
Thu, 12 Jul 2012 15:01 UTC
Fossil Tooth
© University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
The tooth of a hominid, Australopithecus sediba, embedded in a rock that contains significant parts of a skeleton of this early human ancestor.
Two years ago, scientists announced they had discovered partial skeletons from a new species of human ancestor in a South African cave.

Now, more remains have turned up - in a large rock about 3.3 feet (1 meter) in diameter hiding in plain sight in a laboratory at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, the university announced today (June 12).

The rock was found almost three years ago, but the true value of what it contained didn't become apparent until early last month, according to the university.

The rock has been scanned in CT scanner, a device typically used for medical purposes.

"We have discovered parts of a jaw and critical aspects of the body, including what appear to be a complete femur (thigh bone), ribs, vertebrae and other important limb elements," Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the university, said in a statement.

Berger lead the team that discovered this species of early human ancestor in the Malapa cave north of Johannesburg and named it Australopithecus sediba.
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Airplane

Lockheed Martin Stalker UAV Powered by Laser Light for 48 Hours

Shane McGlaun
DailyTech
Thu, 12 Jul 2012 09:26 UTC
It's not sharks with frickin' lasers, but it's a start
Image
© Unknown

Lockheed Martin has announced a very interesting achievement in cooperation with a company called LaserMotive. The two companies were able to power a Lockheed Martin Stalker Unmanned Aerial System during flight for over 48 hours using a laser. The duration of the flight was improved by 2400% compared to what the Stalker is capable of alone.

"We're pleased with the results of this test. Laser power holds real promise in extending the capabilities of Stalker," said Tom Koonce, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works® Stalker program manager. "A ground-to-air recharging system like this allows us to provide practically unlimited flight endurance to extend and expand the mission profiles that the Stalker vehicle can fulfill."
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No Entry

A Million-Year Hard Disk

Daniel Clery
ScienceNow
Thu, 12 Jul 2012 12:15 UTC
Radioactive Sites
© SKB
Keep out! Scientists are wondering how to warn people far into the future of radioactive sites such as this proposed repository in Sweden.
Dublin - It seems these days that no data storage medium lasts long before becoming obsolete - does anyone remember Sony's Memory Stick? So have pity for the builders of nuclear waste repositories, who are trying to preserve records of what they've buried and where, not for a few years but for tens of thousands of years.

Today, Patrick Charton of the French nuclear waste management agency ANDRA presented one possible solution to the problem: a sapphire disk inside which information is engraved using platinum. The prototype shown costs €25,000 to make, but Charton says it will survive for a million years. The aim, Charton told the Euroscience Open Forum here, is to provide "information for future archaeologists." But, he concedes: "We have no idea what language to write it in."

Most countries with nuclear power stations agree that the solution for dealing with long-lived nuclear waste is to store it deep inside the earth, about 500 meters below the surface. Finland, France, and Sweden are the furthest advanced in the complicated process of finding a geologically suitable site, persuading local communities to accept it, and getting regulatory approval. Sweden's waste management company, SKB, for example, spent 30 years finding the right site and is now waiting for the government's green light to begin excavation. It plans to start loading in waste a decade from now, and will be filling its underground pits for up to 50 years.
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Eye 1

The Eyes Don't Have It: New Research Into Lying and Eye Movements


ScienceDaily
Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:51 UTC
Different Expressions
© gemenacom / Fotolia
Twenty portrait of a woman with different expressions.
Widely held beliefs about Neuro-Linguistic Programming and lying are unfounded.

Proponents of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) have long claimed that it is possible to tell whether a person is lying from their eye movements. Research published July 11 in the journal PLoS ONE reveals that this claim is unfounded, with the authors calling on the public and organisations to abandon this approach to lie detection.

For decades many NLP practitioners have claimed that when a person looks up to their right they are likely to be lying, whilst a glance up to their left is indicative of telling the truth.

Professor Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire, UK) and Dr Caroline Watt (University of Edinburgh, UK) tested this idea by filming volunteers as they either lied or told the truth, and then carefully coded their eye movements. In a second study another group of participants was asked to watch the films and attempt to detect the lies on the basis of the volunteers' eye movements.

"The results of the first study revealed no relationship between lying and eye movements, and the second showed that telling people about the claims made by NLP practitioners did not improve their lie detection skills," noted Wiseman.
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