Birds eye view of Mars

NASA have an excellent website set up to promote the incredibly innovative ARES mission to Mars. Standing for "Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Survey", the ARES is an unmanned aircraft capable of travelling upward of 800 km once delivered to the planet. It's a beautiful looking aircraft, and while it is still only on the drawing board, one can only hope that the mission gets a chance to fly. The site has a wealth of material and some fantastic animations and mockups of the craft. Check it out at the ARES homepage.

Nanedi Valles valley raises questions

A new set of images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA's Mars Express spacecraft, show the 800-kilometre valley long Nanedi Valles valley system. This steep-sided feature may have been formed in part by free-flowing water, but this is open to debate. Some researchers suggest the impressive feature may have been caused by sapping (erosion caused by ground-water outflow), while others suggest that flow of liquid beneath an ice cover or collapse of the surface in association with liquid flow is responsible for the valley's formation.

Cartoon Mars

Colin Pillinger, the leader of the ill-fated Beagle II mission to Mars has helped to compile a collection of several hundred cartoons that feature the planet Mars. The cartoons cover a wide spectrum of subject, many of them political. "It's just amazing how many people have been sent to Mars by cartoonists, particularly political figures" says Pillinger on the BBC news site. Lots of the cartoons feature wry comments on the loss of Beagle II, but Pillinger is unfazed by the attention. ""If there's a picture of Beagle in a crater, it gives me the chance to tell people why that might have happened so it's just a vehicle to me" he says. The exhibition is running now at the London Cartoon Museum.

Russia eyes Mars

At a press conference last Tuesday, Energia Aerospace Corporation head Nikolai Sevastyanov announced that his company is planning a Martian expedition spacecraft, which may be launched in 2020-2030. The project will include a test mission to the Moon followed by a launch to Mars as soon as 2020. Soyuz FG AND proton rockets will deliver spacecraft elements to orbit and a modernized Soyuz 2 and new Angara rockets will be then take over. Soyuz manned spaceships and Progress freighters will be servicing the project until 2015, and then the new Klipper spacecraft (still on the drawing board) will be used afterwards. The full story can be found on the TASS website. Alas we get these stories quite frequently from Russia, and the best laid plans never seem to come to fruition. One suspects there is a constant battle in the Russian space program for funds and prestige amongst the various space design companies, and part of that requires a lot of blue sky thinking.

A new face on Mars

The European Mars Express orbiter has returned a great image that does a lot to dispel the nonsensical notions that ancient Martian inhabitants have been carving bizarre figures into the surface. The famous face on mars has been proposed for many years as proof of an extraterrestrial presence in the solar system. No way say the believers could the features first imaged by Viking be natural. So what do they make of this new image I wonder? It just shows you that on a planet with a surface area as big as Mars, just about any odd convergence of natural features is possible.

Williams nominated for 'Soundtrack Composer of the Year'

John Williams is going up against Harry Gregson-Williams for "Kingdom of Heaven" and Dario Marianelli for "Pride and Prejudice" for Soundtrack Composer of The Year
at The Classical Brit Awards. The ceremony will be held on Thursday, May 4 in London at the Royal Albert Hall.

Mars Orbiter returns first colour image

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter continues to sucessfully bed itself into orbit with the receipt at mission control of several new test images, including the first to be received in colour. The image is not natural colour as seen by human eyes, but infrared colour. It can be seen at the Mars Reconnaissance site.

Lockheed turns up the heat

Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Jefferson County have won a NASA contract to develop and build a heat-resistant space capsule for transporting the next-generation of robotic rover to the surface of Mars. The Mars science laboratory rover is planned to arrive on Mars in 2009 and will build on the success of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Both Spirit and Opportunity were provided with head shields built at the Lockheed Jefferson County facility. According to Lockheed, the heat shield for the new rover would be the largest ever built, spanning 15 feet in diameter. The heat shields for the two existing rovers measured just 8.5 feet and an Apollo capsule heat shields measured 12.8 feet.

Harvard Prof says life once on Mars

Andrew Knoll, professor of natural history and earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University delivered a lecture at Lehigh University last Monday in which he made very positive statements in favour of past life on Mars. Knoll and his team at Harvard were actively involved in the 2004 missions, which landed the Spirit and Opportunity rovers (now in their second year of exploration) on Mars. One attendee was less than overwhelmed by Knoll's conclusions, (see more at the Lehigh student newspaper) but I was personally struck by his evocative use of the word "canals". Obviously Knoll is not proposing anything like the canals made fashionable a hundred years ago by Percival Lowell, but it is kind of touching to see the word appear in a scientific discourse. Lowell would be delighted.

First postcard from Mars

The high-resolution camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has returned its first test image. The first test image is a 50km swathe of land in the planet's mid-latitude southern highlands. The resolution is about 7.6 metres, but this will get even better in months to come as the probe refines its orbit, with the result that we will be able to see unprecedented 1 metre resolution images.

Canada eyes Mars

The Canadian Space Agency has sent out a call to the countries scientists to start thinking about an all Canadian mission to Mars. Former space shuttle astronaut Marc Garneau broached the idea five years ago as president of the Canadian Space Agency but federal money was not forthcoming. With NASA scaling back on Mars mission as money is redirected toward a return to the Moon, other nations might well fill the gap. More on this story at canada.com

Raining on the Martian parade

It is a growing and popular belief in scientific cirles that the photographic and mineral evidence obtained by recent space probes points with a fair degree of certainty to the existence of running water in the distant Martian past. Gwendolyn Bart, a graduate student in planetary sciences at the University of Arizona has another idea, that perhaps the features can be explained by processes other than water. Bart and other scientists feel that Mars’ temperature and pressure are so low that liquid water could not have formed. Landslides and the flow of dust could just as easily explain the grooves and channels seen on the surface. More on this intriguing idea, (though personally I favour water) can be found at space.com.

Wheel trouble on Mars

The Spirit Rover, after having accrued an incredible number of days on the Martian surface looks to be in the trouble. Spirit's right front wheel, which has been stuck before, has ceased moving completely. The rover has plenty of redundancy with its remaining wheels, but the problem is not so much the wheel as power. Winter is approaching and the with it the available supply of solar energy drops fast. Spirit needs to get itself positioned in a favourable position on a nearby hill in order to get the best orientation for her solar panels. So the rover is now in a race against time to make the hill where it can safely sit out the winter.

ESA plans manned mission

The latest issue of Spaceflight Magazine (the magazine of the British Interplantery Society) showcases Mars on the front cover (April 2006 issue) and devotes a number of pages to an indepth breakdown of European plans to put a man on Mars. It should be stated that these "plans" are highly spectulative and no budgets are assigned, but it is interesting to see how a mission to Mars might be launched by a conglomorate of European nations. Frankly, it's pretty depressing reading because it seems that the plans require an incredible outlay in time and resource. No less than 21 Energia launches are called for! Those with an interest in spaceflight history may recall that the Energia flew the then Soviet Buran spaceshuttle on its maiden (and only) flight. It's a monster rocket (though not as big as an Apollo) but 21 flights and a 5 year building program in orbit strikes me as insane. Worse still, for all this outlay, the study paper assumes a manned stay on the planet of just 30 days, yet the crew will be stranded in Martian orbit for a year and a half. I desperately want to see humans on Mars, but this plan is not the way to do it and simply serves to strengthen the argument of those who favour unmanned missions. With NASA looking at a rover with a nuclear power plant for massively extended missions, one can hardly see the point of a mission that deposits humans for 30 days and allows them just 7 EVAs of no greater than 5km from the landing point.

Mike Trim art book features War Of The Worlds

Mike Trim is the versatile artist responsible for some of the iconic designs in Gerry Anderson's best-known television shows, such as Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet. Of interest to War Of The Worlds fans is of course his fantastic work on the Jeff Waynes' musical version of the story, for which he contributed a portfolio of images that are rightly considered definitive. Now fans of Mike's work can treat themselves to a new book recounting his amazing career. "The Future Was FAB: The Art of Mike Trim" features hundreds of full-colour and black-and-white drawings, and can be preordered now from Fabgearusa.com.

Google maps Mars

First there was the earth, then the moon, now Google has mapped Mars. Point your browser at google mars and you can work your way round the planet, switching between black and white photographs, infrared and elevation maps. You can even pinpoint the location of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on the surface.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter success

Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has successfully entered orbit around Mars.

At 2124 GMT (1334 PST), the spacecraft fired its engines as it approached the south side of the planet. 20 minutes later, the MRO switched from solar to battery power and entered into a period of radio silence behind the planet. The waiting team at the JPL lab in Pasadena were jubilant when the probe then broke radio silence. The probe is now in a 35-hour elliptical trajectory around the planet. At its furthest point it will swing out to about 44,000km (27,000 miles) above the planet's surface, but will spend the next six months adjusting the orbit by aerobreaking to enter a final circular 2 hour orbit. Only then will the science mission begin. The orbiter has 6 science instruments onboard, including the highest resolution camera ever sent to Mars.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter arrival

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is fast approaching orbital insertion, a point that has seen any number of previous missions come to grief. After a 27 minute burn today, the craft will enter into an extended aerobreaking sequence that will see the orbiter dip into the atmosphere some 500 times in order to further refine the orbit.

War of the woes at the Oscars

War Of The Worlds failed to take any Oscar awards last night, falling to the might of King Kong in the categories of Best Effects and Best Sound. Kong probably deserved to win for effects, at least from a technical standpoint (the film itself was overwhelmed by the use of endless effects) but sound should have gone to War Of The Worlds., if only for the haunting and terrifying voice given to the invaders.

Mars budget in peril

It is reported that the ambitious plans to put men back on the moon and to travel on to Mars are having a seriously bad knock-on effect on big unmanned missions. NASA is scrambling to find money to run the shuttle fleet and keep the International Space Station alive, but funds are seriously stretched, and despite promises from NASA that there would not be budget cuts, a number of highly important science missions are facing the chopping block. Included in the rosta of troubled missions, a Mars sample return mission. Time magazine has a full (and depressing) report.