Could we come back with another rover and get Opportunity working again after it runs out of juice?
Unlikely, Opportunity and its best buddy will most probably fail because of the extremes of temperature affecting things like electrical contacts.
Although placing a probe down next to something that's been sitting on the Martian surface would be fascinating, I doubt if the technology yet exists to be so precise.
It wouldn't be the first time that NASA has done it, Apollo 12 landed within a few hundred metres of Surveyor 3 and brought chunks of the probe back to Earth where they gave valuable insights into the effects of long-term exposure to the lunar environment.
If we brought back 10 tons of mars rocks, the chances of getting a fossil are still slim to none. Talk about needle in a haystack. Not to mention the fact that you have to land near some of it to begin with.
Joe Public probably wouldn't have a chance of finding a fossil even in quite a rich spot here on Earth, but take a geologist along and things look up a great deal.
I don't see the problem here, if you can send enough rovers to the sites that look interesting you can narrow down the places that look interesting for future investigation.
And you still spend less than spending a few fighter jocks to Mars.
Purely out of interest, what are the chances (in percentage) that the average sample of, say 1 kg of earth based sedinmentary rock would have fossils in it?
Depends on the type of rock and what scale you are looking at. For instance if you look at a wind-blown sandstone you'll be hard pushed to find a fossil on any scale, look at a marine sandstone and there is a good chance of finding something.
But then you have certain limestones which are almost pure fossil contents - fractured shells and the like - all the way through to materials like chalk or diatomaceous clay which are made entirely from microscopic fossil shells.
So the answer from a geologist is - it depends where you look and how hard.
Chemical signature would be more likely method of identification.
One good way that has been used here on Earth is to look for isotopic anomalies in the carbon 12/carbon 13 balance. Life preferentially selects the lighter carbon 12 isotope, so carbon minerals in rocks show carbon 12 enrichment.
Graphite found in 3.85 billion year old gneiss from Greenland is suspected of being organic in origin from isotopic evidence, even though the original rock has been distorted almost beyond recognition. Since these are the oldest rocks known on Earth, it seems reasonable to attempt similar techniques on Martian rocks when we have some decent samples.
in exchange, the USA has agreed to prevent the Brits from sending any more beagles.
Well you'll doubtless be thrilled to know that the British government is sounding very encouraging about contributing to ESA's Aurora programme which aims to put a lander on Mars later this decade.
For those of us on the right-hand side of the Pond, there is a Beagle 2 retrospective at the Royal Society next week.
Beagle2 - the next generation: In conversation with Colin Pillinger
Monday 8 March 2004 at 7pm at The Royal Society, London or via the RS
webcast.
Beagle 2 was the plucky little spaceship that people in Britain and across the world took to their hearts.
The dream of a successful Mars landing on Christmas Day 2003 may be over but project leader, Colin Pillinger remains undaunted.
Join him at the Royal Society as he discusses the scientific and
emotional legacy of Beagle 2 and Mars Express and his plans for a new voyage to the Red Planet. Admission is FREE and on a first come, first served basis - no ticket or advance booking required.
this repeated displacement causes the tiny stones to become spheroid in shape. The end.
Except the spherules don't look like the sand grains you find in Earth deserts. Those would be rounded (because as you say there is lots of abrasion), but rarely spherical, and they tend to show signs of impact and scratching from their fellow grains. So far the spherules appear to lack these features.
Even if it was discovered that an asteroid were bound for earth, I don't think we've got any better idea than shooting a ragtag band of oil drillers up to the meteor to blow it up.
Actually that could be a really bad idea, the majority of asteroids threatening Earth are probably not solid bodies - more like aggregations of rubble. A blast could smash such bodies to rubble (all of which would still be heading our way). Many bodies have a composition similar to foam - very fragile with lots of pores and spaces filled with volatiles. When hit by a blast, a small amount is vaporised, the remainder just soaks up the explosion - and keeps on coming.
There are several proposals for deflecting asteroids - either attaching a mass driver to produce a small, almost constant thrust. Alternatively a huge solar mirror could be put on to a trjectory close to the asteroid. It would focus the light of the Sun on to one point on the asteroid - vaporising material into space and creating a thrust.
Sadly both approaches need us to have plenty of warning. The accelerations produced are so small (in the orders of cms^2) that you need plenty of time to get a sizeable deflection.
Such an observation system could be put in place for a tiny fraction of the cost of Star Wars or NMD and wouldn't cause any international uproar. Sadly it doesn't produce nice fat Pentagon contracts.
There's quite a nice summary of the various technologies here.
Most all missle defense proposals depend on punching a hole in an ICBM by heating it. For all their destructive potential, ICBMs are 90% thin skinned gas tank. You could take one out with a grenade, if you could somehow get it there.
Only the older American missiles which used their outer wall as the skin of the fuel tank. It saved on weight and gave them formidable acceleration. The Soviets always used separate tanks and a thick steel skin - largely because they never worked out how to build precision skins. Both of which gave their missiles a massive strength.
Both countries now use solid fuelled boosters which are much tougher.
And as for a grenade - why bother - you can use a wrench.
Its actually ridiculously easy to land on Venus. You don't even need a parachute. The Venera craft didn't use parachutes they just had a dish shaped structure at the top like an umbrella and in the enormously dense atmosphere that was enough to slow the craft to landing speed.
Slight correction, the Venera craft deployed a parachute after ballistic entry, but discarded it for the last - and I can't quite believe this - 50 KILOMETRES of the fall.
What amazes me about the images is that there's enough light on the surface to actually see ANYTHING! I mean, isn't the surface pressure on the order of hundreds of atmospheres? To me, that implied some sort of soupy and only partly transparent atmosphere.
The atmosphere is remarkably clear below the cloud deck, winds are light - so there is precious little dust (what little that could get airborne through such a thick atmosphere) and there are no droplets that would absorb light.
The Soviet landers recorded light levels on the planet, which IIRC the TASS press agency reported as being similar to a cloudy day in Moscow.
Although the air is clear, there is a pronounced Rayleigh scattering of blue light similar to the effect of the Sun setting at the horizon. Consequently only red and orange light reaches the surface - hence that bizarre golden red colour in all of the images returned from the surface.
What amazes me about the images is that there's enough light on the surface to actually see ANYTHING! I mean, isn't the surface pressure on the order of hundreds of atmospheres? To me, that implied some sort of soupy and only partly transparent atmosphere.
Possibly, active vulcanism on Venus hasn't been ruled out entirely. but the lack of cratering seems to be down to two things.
About 700 million years ago the entire surface of Venus was remodelled by some cataclysmic tectonism. We have no idea what happened, but all of the big craters left over from the late period of planet formation have been wiped out.
Since then impacts have been much rarer (Copernicus - the last big crater on the Moon was 900 million years ago), what's left over is much smaller pieces. When they plough into the incredibly dense Venusian atmosphere they either burn up more effectively than they would in Earth's own; disintegrate through the enormous aerodynamic deceleration imposed by the dense atmosphere, or are decelerated effectively and cause relatively small impacts.
One bit about Venus I find utterly fascinating is that some of the higher mountains have peaks covered in something extremely reflective to radar - something metallic which is condensing in the slightly cooler high altitudes. Which implies that on Venus, it occasionally snows metal.
Maybe since the surface conditions are so nasty, it would be better not to mess with landing. A balloon-type probe would avoid most of the pressure and some of the temperature.
Would it surprise you to know that the Soviets had just the same excellent idea? Their two Vega missions went to Venus in 1985 before flying on to intercept Comet Halley.
Each Vega dropped a two part descent craft into the Venusian atmosphere; one part performed a surface landing, the other deployed a helium balloon.
The balloons flew at an altitude of about 50km (in the cloud layer) and measured pressure, temperature, atmospheric composition and light levels. Their motions were tracked from Earth. IIRC one balloon only lasted about an hour, the other survived for something like 45 hours.
Could the Soviet explorers have found primitive life there and for fear of starting widespread panic decided to keep the whole thing quiet. Just declare that Mars is the target for the future and keep Venus missions underwraps?
It's a little bit tin-foil inducing, but considering that Venus has water which we have 'decided' is one of the fundamental building blocks of life, could it be so far fetched that life spontaneously originated there on its own?
There is no water on the surface of Venus. Some has been discovered in the cloud deck up at 50km - but very little. The surface is completely dry.
In fact Venus is depleted in hydrogen over what we would expect. Theories have it that as Venus began to warm thanks to an increasingly powerful Sun, more water vapour entered the atmosphere. There it was broken up by solar radiation into hydrogen and oxygen. Venus' feeble gravity ensured that the hydrogen was blown away into space, the oxygen would have reacted with exposed rock.
Water vapour in the atmosphere raised the temperature, which forced carbon dioxide out of solution - further raising the temperature. Eventually, Venus' oceans would have boiled dry and a carbon dioxide greenhouse effect would have taken over.
Evidence for the lost oceans of Venus can be found in measuring the ration of hydrogen to deuterium in the Venusian atmosphere. The lighter hydrogen has been preferentially blown into space leaving the atmosphere relatively enriched in deuterium.
Now the fascinating question is - did life ever evolve on Venus in the brief period between the end of planetary formation and the boiling of its oceans?
I always thought the difficult problem with Venus was its caustic atmosphere. That's what destroyed the Soviet probes, not the atmospheric pressure.
The Venusian atmosphere is not itself caustic - there is a layer of cloud at about 50km made of sulphuric acid which is intensively corrosive. Below that the atmosphere is relatively inert.
What killed the Soviet and American landers was the temperature. The Soviets used various chemical processes to cool their probe - which is very simple and incredibly robust (no pumps or power supply needed). They used materials such lithium nitrate; as they melt they absorb enormous amounts of heat from the surrounding environment.
Pack the probe with cannisters of such a substance and as it melts it keeps the probe cool. When it has all melted, the temperature inside the probe keeps rising. When their refrigeration packed up, the electronics burned out.
Of course all of the early failures of Venera 3 to Venera 6 was because no one had expected such enormous pressures.
Napster is a great name. When people Hear the word "Napster" they think "Download Music".
Don't most people think "Download Stolen Music"? RIAA made sure that Napster's name was mud to the general public, which made Roxio's purchase of the trademark all the more surprising.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:If there is water on mars
on
Brine on Mars?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Good point, but we simply have no idea if the process is continuous (in which case we have to come up with a damn good theory for replenishment), or if it is intermittant and relies on slight changes in temperature to release water from the permafrost.
NASA already has some tangential evidence of permafrost on Mars, where it looks like molten rock has encountered subterranean ice and places where it looks like something is is seeping to the surface.
NASA did choose these landing sites for evidence of water in the recent past, so perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that something is going on.
But I guess our best hope is to wait for Mars Express to point its instruments at the landing site. So fingers crossed until then!
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:Resolving Power?
on
Brine on Mars?
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· Score: 4, Informative
I keep seeing references in the rover news about the microscopic imager, but is this really a microscope, or is it just magnifying as much as say a desktop macroscope for opaque objects (they let you see things around the size of a hair okay..?
It is definitely a microscope - going down to 30 microns per pixel. A hair is around about 100 microns in diameter.
Sorry I don't have a precise magnification.
If there were things the size of microorganisms in the briny reaches, could we see them?
The objects seen in the ALH84001 meteorite were only between 20 and 100 nanometres (0.02 to 0.1 micrometres) and needed a scanning electron microscope to be seen. So MER can't hope to see them. Terrestrial bacteria are 2 to 10 microns (generally) in size - so the majority of them would also be invisible. There are some much larger bacteria; the largest known Epulopiscium fishelsoni is a whopping 250 microns in diameter.
But it should be remembered that this is not a biological microscope - it was designed for petrological work which rarely requires such extreme magnification.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:hurrah, we found dirt!
on
Brine on Mars?
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· Score: 1
Re:If there is water on mars
on
Brine on Mars?
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· Score: 4, Informative
..why did it not evaporate?
Most of it probably has. One process could be groundwater carrying dissolved mineral salts being drawn to the surface by capillary action. The water evaporates into the very low pressure Martian atmosphere, leaving the salt as a deposit.
Similar processes take place on Earth where they deposit salt and iron oxides in deserts.
Evolution doesn't even follow the second law of thermodynamics.
Yes it does, unfortunately there is a fallacy regarding the second law of thermodynamics which is often used by creationists.
The second law of thermodynamics states that left to itself, the entropy (that is the amount of disorder) in a closed system can never decrease. Rooms get untidy, a cup of coffee cools down and heats the room and so on...
There are two important parts of the law that are forgotten by creationists:
That the system is left to itself, and;
That it is a closed system.
It means that you can tidy a disorganised house apparently in contravention of the second law of thermodynamics. All your shelves are neatly organised, the floor positively sparkles - order has been created from disorder. BUT to do that, you have had to use some energy and will have dumped unrecoverable heat into the wider environment.
Organisms are not closed systems, they are local pieces of order. They take in raw materials, use it to increase the amount of local order and dump heat energy into the wider environment.
The total amount of entropy in the Universe has increased, but locally it has decreased. The total amount of usable energy has decreased, the total amount of entropy has increased.
Back in the 1970's, there was a USSR scientist who had weird biological theories that really hindered work done in that country by real biologists..
You're thinking of Trofim Lysenko who wasn't a trained scientist, but his 'theories' seemed to fit in with Communist dogma - so he attracted the approval of Stalin. Lysenko got his ideas from a Russian form of Lamarckism known as Michurianism. Essentially it was the old falsehood that said such nonsense as the children of a giraffe have longer necks because their parents stretched to reach leaves on trees.
Lysenko came to prominence in 1948 when he declared Mendelist evolution to be reactionary, decadant and its proponents to be enemies of the Soviets. Other scientists knew what that meant and on whose behalf he was speaking (Uncle Joe) and quickly fell behind the Party line. He and his theories basically held sway in the Eastern Bloc until 1965 when Kruschev had Lysenko denounced and returned the Soviet Union to the orthodox view of evolution.
But of course Lysenko's theories were in sway during the pivotal discoveries of DNA and how it affected genetics. So the Soviet Union fell behind at a vital moment and never recovered.
It's an extreme form of the current situation in the US, where any old nonsense can be promoted by politicians to keep their vested interests (be they oil, lead or Christian fundamentalism) happy. Sadly the same is starting to happen over here in the UK, where our non-scientific Prime Minister refuses to condemn schools that teach creationism over evolution.
Yes, neither of them were 'real' shuttles, as they needed an expendable launcher.
But then the US Shuttle is only 'semi-real' too, needing an expendable tank and SFB's to be fished out of the drink and majorly refurbished every launch.
But the Soviets scored a cost advantage there. The most expensive parts of the US Shuttle are the main engines which were designed to be fired repeatedly. They need maintenance every few firings. The Soviets had engines that only needed to be used once then thrown away.
And they had a second advantage. Because the Shuttle's engines are attached to the orbiter, the vehicle has to haul them into orbit, reducing the payload. Energia threw away the main engines, Buran only needed small, light thrusters to achieve orbital velocity - so it could carry more.
IIRC, the four relatively small boosters attached to Energia were designed to be reusable. They would parachute back to Earth and be refurbished. They were liquid oxygen/kerosene engines and much simpler to refurbish than the Shuttle's main engines.
In the event, they were the only successful part of the Energia programme. Energia itself was only launched twice, Buran only the once. The boosters were redesigned into the Zenit launcher which now powers Sealaunch. (It gives you some idea of how big Energia must have been when each of its four boosters can put a sizeable payload into geostationary orbit!)
I hope that ESA can work together with Russia on this one.
That's quite possible, ESA has been quietly deepening its links with the Russian space programme for some time now.
ESA has contracted Rosaviakosmos to supply Soyuz rockets for launch out of the Ariane site in French Guyana. Not only will it give Soyuz a new lease of life - allowing it to lift heavier loads into orbit, but that is lots of hard currency pouring back into Russia.
ESA is relying on the Russians to provide the launcher for Venus Express late next year and possibly for the next European Mars probe in 2007 (assuming funding can be agreed).
I just recently read somewhere (was it here?) that the Russian space budget is less than a billion dollars.
That's the civilian budget, I expect that a lot of spending is hidden in the military budget - in the finest tradition of aerospace industries.
Russia still sends payloads into orbit from Plesetsk, almost all of them military. It's currently extending the complex to handle the new Angara rocket to replace the Proton which can only be fired out of Baikanur in Kazakhstan.
Didn't the Russians report earlier that they wanted to send nuclear reactors to Mars? Now they want to develop a new space vehicle? Their economy is in a slum right now; how are they paying?
I know for a fact that DVD bootlegs do not produce that much capital.
Oil. Russia is rapidly becoming the West's favoured oil producer since its pipelines run straight into Europe and the Black Sea.
The Russian economy has been enjoying something of a boom in the last couple of years. Whilst it's still much smaller than during the Soviet era, it is growing fast.
And you have to remember, that a Soyuz replacement was on the cards in Soviet times (as well as their own shuttle). They have also done a lot of work in the last 30 years on nuclear power since a manned mission to Mars was always part of their space programme. To an extent, a lot of this is work already started, and the rest of it is down to having some of the very best engineers in the World.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlikely, Opportunity and its best buddy will most probably fail because of the extremes of temperature affecting things like electrical contacts.
Although placing a probe down next to something that's been sitting on the Martian surface would be fascinating, I doubt if the technology yet exists to be so precise.
It wouldn't be the first time that NASA has done it, Apollo 12 landed within a few hundred metres of Surveyor 3 and brought chunks of the probe back to Earth where they gave valuable insights into the effects of long-term exposure to the lunar environment.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Joe Public probably wouldn't have a chance of finding a fossil even in quite a rich spot here on Earth, but take a geologist along and things look up a great deal.
I don't see the problem here, if you can send enough rovers to the sites that look interesting you can narrow down the places that look interesting for future investigation.
And you still spend less than spending a few fighter jocks to Mars.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Depends on the type of rock and what scale you are looking at. For instance if you look at a wind-blown sandstone you'll be hard pushed to find a fossil on any scale, look at a marine sandstone and there is a good chance of finding something.
But then you have certain limestones which are almost pure fossil contents - fractured shells and the like - all the way through to materials like chalk or diatomaceous clay which are made entirely from microscopic fossil shells.
So the answer from a geologist is - it depends where you look and how hard.
Best wishes,
Mike.
One good way that has been used here on Earth is to look for isotopic anomalies in the carbon 12/carbon 13 balance. Life preferentially selects the lighter carbon 12 isotope, so carbon minerals in rocks show carbon 12 enrichment.
Graphite found in 3.85 billion year old gneiss from Greenland is suspected of being organic in origin from isotopic evidence, even though the original rock has been distorted almost beyond recognition. Since these are the oldest rocks known on Earth, it seems reasonable to attempt similar techniques on Martian rocks when we have some decent samples.
Best wishes,
Mike.
If they aren't aeolian (wind-blown) deposits. At the moment we don't know if they were formed in water, or elsewhere, but later altered by water.
Exciting stuff though.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Well you'll doubtless be thrilled to know that the British government is sounding very encouraging about contributing to ESA's Aurora programme which aims to put a lander on Mars later this decade.
For those of us on the right-hand side of the Pond, there is a Beagle 2 retrospective at the Royal Society next week.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Except the spherules don't look like the sand grains you find in Earth deserts. Those would be rounded (because as you say there is lots of abrasion), but rarely spherical, and they tend to show signs of impact and scratching from their fellow grains. So far the spherules appear to lack these features.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Actually that could be a really bad idea, the majority of asteroids threatening Earth are probably not solid bodies - more like aggregations of rubble. A blast could smash such bodies to rubble (all of which would still be heading our way). Many bodies have a composition similar to foam - very fragile with lots of pores and spaces filled with volatiles. When hit by a blast, a small amount is vaporised, the remainder just soaks up the explosion - and keeps on coming.
There are several proposals for deflecting asteroids - either attaching a mass driver to produce a small, almost constant thrust. Alternatively a huge solar mirror could be put on to a trjectory close to the asteroid. It would focus the light of the Sun on to one point on the asteroid - vaporising material into space and creating a thrust.
Sadly both approaches need us to have plenty of warning. The accelerations produced are so small (in the orders of cms^2) that you need plenty of time to get a sizeable deflection.
Such an observation system could be put in place for a tiny fraction of the cost of Star Wars or NMD and wouldn't cause any international uproar. Sadly it doesn't produce nice fat Pentagon contracts.
There's quite a nice summary of the various technologies here.
Beat wishes,
Mike.
Only the older American missiles which used their outer wall as the skin of the fuel tank. It saved on weight and gave them formidable acceleration. The Soviets always used separate tanks and a thick steel skin - largely because they never worked out how to build precision skins. Both of which gave their missiles a massive strength.
Both countries now use solid fuelled boosters which are much tougher.
And as for a grenade - why bother - you can use a wrench.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Slight correction, the Venera craft deployed a parachute after ballistic entry, but discarded it for the last - and I can't quite believe this - 50 KILOMETRES of the fall.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The atmosphere is remarkably clear below the cloud deck, winds are light - so there is precious little dust (what little that could get airborne through such a thick atmosphere) and there are no droplets that would absorb light.
The Soviet landers recorded light levels on the planet, which IIRC the TASS press agency reported as being similar to a cloudy day in Moscow.
Although the air is clear, there is a pronounced Rayleigh scattering of blue light similar to the effect of the Sun setting at the horizon. Consequently only red and orange light reaches the surface - hence that bizarre golden red colour in all of the images returned from the surface.
What amazes me about the images is that there's enough light on the surface to actually see ANYTHING! I mean, isn't the surface pressure on the order of hundreds of atmospheres? To me, that implied some sort of soupy and only partly transparent atmosphere.
Possibly, active vulcanism on Venus hasn't been ruled out entirely. but the lack of cratering seems to be down to two things.
One bit about Venus I find utterly fascinating is that some of the higher mountains have peaks covered in something extremely reflective to radar - something metallic which is condensing in the slightly cooler high altitudes. Which implies that on Venus, it occasionally snows metal.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Would it surprise you to know that the Soviets had just the same excellent idea? Their two Vega missions went to Venus in 1985 before flying on to intercept Comet Halley.
Each Vega dropped a two part descent craft into the Venusian atmosphere; one part performed a surface landing, the other deployed a helium balloon.
The balloons flew at an altitude of about 50km (in the cloud layer) and measured pressure, temperature, atmospheric composition and light levels. Their motions were tracked from Earth. IIRC one balloon only lasted about an hour, the other survived for something like 45 hours.
Best wishes,
Mike.
It's a little bit tin-foil inducing, but considering that Venus has water which we have 'decided' is one of the fundamental building blocks of life, could it be so far fetched that life spontaneously originated there on its own?
There is no water on the surface of Venus. Some has been discovered in the cloud deck up at 50km - but very little. The surface is completely dry.
In fact Venus is depleted in hydrogen over what we would expect. Theories have it that as Venus began to warm thanks to an increasingly powerful Sun, more water vapour entered the atmosphere. There it was broken up by solar radiation into hydrogen and oxygen. Venus' feeble gravity ensured that the hydrogen was blown away into space, the oxygen would have reacted with exposed rock.
Water vapour in the atmosphere raised the temperature, which forced carbon dioxide out of solution - further raising the temperature. Eventually, Venus' oceans would have boiled dry and a carbon dioxide greenhouse effect would have taken over.
Evidence for the lost oceans of Venus can be found in measuring the ration of hydrogen to deuterium in the Venusian atmosphere. The lighter hydrogen has been preferentially blown into space leaving the atmosphere relatively enriched in deuterium.
Now the fascinating question is - did life ever evolve on Venus in the brief period between the end of planetary formation and the boiling of its oceans?
Best wishes,
Mike.
What killed the Soviet and American landers was the temperature. The Soviets used various chemical processes to cool their probe - which is very simple and incredibly robust (no pumps or power supply needed). They used materials such lithium nitrate; as they melt they absorb enormous amounts of heat from the surrounding environment.
Pack the probe with cannisters of such a substance and as it melts it keeps the probe cool. When it has all melted, the temperature inside the probe keeps rising. When their refrigeration packed up, the electronics burned out.
Of course all of the early failures of Venera 3 to Venera 6 was because no one had expected such enormous pressures.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Don't most people think "Download Stolen Music"? RIAA made sure that Napster's name was mud to the general public, which made Roxio's purchase of the trademark all the more surprising.
Best wishes,
Mike.
NASA already has some tangential evidence of permafrost on Mars, where it looks like molten rock has encountered subterranean ice and places where it looks like something is is seeping to the surface.
NASA did choose these landing sites for evidence of water in the recent past, so perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that something is going on.
But I guess our best hope is to wait for Mars Express to point its instruments at the landing site. So fingers crossed until then!
Best wishes,
Mike.
It is definitely a microscope - going down to 30 microns per pixel. A hair is around about 100 microns in diameter.
Sorry I don't have a precise magnification.
If there were things the size of microorganisms in the briny reaches, could we see them?
The objects seen in the ALH84001 meteorite were only between 20 and 100 nanometres (0.02 to 0.1 micrometres) and needed a scanning electron microscope to be seen. So MER can't hope to see them. Terrestrial bacteria are 2 to 10 microns (generally) in size - so the majority of them would also be invisible. There are some much larger bacteria; the largest known Epulopiscium fishelsoni is a whopping 250 microns in diameter.
But it should be remembered that this is not a biological microscope - it was designed for petrological work which rarely requires such extreme magnification.
Best wishes,
Mike.
No, no, no don't go to the Pyramids of Mars - otherwise you will disturb Sutekh - last of the Osirans!
Best wishes,
Mike.
Most of it probably has. One process could be groundwater carrying dissolved mineral salts being drawn to the surface by capillary action. The water evaporates into the very low pressure Martian atmosphere, leaving the salt as a deposit.
Similar processes take place on Earth where they deposit salt and iron oxides in deserts.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Yes it does, unfortunately there is a fallacy regarding the second law of thermodynamics which is often used by creationists.
The second law of thermodynamics states that left to itself, the entropy (that is the amount of disorder) in a closed system can never decrease. Rooms get untidy, a cup of coffee cools down and heats the room and so on...
There are two important parts of the law that are forgotten by creationists:
It means that you can tidy a disorganised house apparently in contravention of the second law of thermodynamics. All your shelves are neatly organised, the floor positively sparkles - order has been created from disorder. BUT to do that, you have had to use some energy and will have dumped unrecoverable heat into the wider environment.
Organisms are not closed systems, they are local pieces of order. They take in raw materials, use it to increase the amount of local order and dump heat energy into the wider environment.
The total amount of entropy in the Universe has increased, but locally it has decreased. The total amount of usable energy has decreased, the total amount of entropy has increased.
No contravention of the second law.
Best wishes,
Mike.
You're thinking of Trofim Lysenko who wasn't a trained scientist, but his 'theories' seemed to fit in with Communist dogma - so he attracted the approval of Stalin. Lysenko got his ideas from a Russian form of Lamarckism known as Michurianism. Essentially it was the old falsehood that said such nonsense as the children of a giraffe have longer necks because their parents stretched to reach leaves on trees.
Lysenko came to prominence in 1948 when he declared Mendelist evolution to be reactionary, decadant and its proponents to be enemies of the Soviets. Other scientists knew what that meant and on whose behalf he was speaking (Uncle Joe) and quickly fell behind the Party line. He and his theories basically held sway in the Eastern Bloc until 1965 when Kruschev had Lysenko denounced and returned the Soviet Union to the orthodox view of evolution.
But of course Lysenko's theories were in sway during the pivotal discoveries of DNA and how it affected genetics. So the Soviet Union fell behind at a vital moment and never recovered.
It's an extreme form of the current situation in the US, where any old nonsense can be promoted by politicians to keep their vested interests (be they oil, lead or Christian fundamentalism) happy. Sadly the same is starting to happen over here in the UK, where our non-scientific Prime Minister refuses to condemn schools that teach creationism over evolution.
Best wishes,
Mike.
But then the US Shuttle is only 'semi-real' too, needing an expendable tank and SFB's to be fished out of the drink and majorly refurbished every launch.
But the Soviets scored a cost advantage there. The most expensive parts of the US Shuttle are the main engines which were designed to be fired repeatedly. They need maintenance every few firings. The Soviets had engines that only needed to be used once then thrown away.
And they had a second advantage. Because the Shuttle's engines are attached to the orbiter, the vehicle has to haul them into orbit, reducing the payload. Energia threw away the main engines, Buran only needed small, light thrusters to achieve orbital velocity - so it could carry more.
IIRC, the four relatively small boosters attached to Energia were designed to be reusable. They would parachute back to Earth and be refurbished. They were liquid oxygen/kerosene engines and much simpler to refurbish than the Shuttle's main engines.
In the event, they were the only successful part of the Energia programme. Energia itself was only launched twice, Buran only the once. The boosters were redesigned into the Zenit launcher which now powers Sealaunch. (It gives you some idea of how big Energia must have been when each of its four boosters can put a sizeable payload into geostationary orbit!)
Best wishes,
Mike.
That's quite possible, ESA has been quietly deepening its links with the Russian space programme for some time now.
ESA has contracted Rosaviakosmos to supply Soyuz rockets for launch out of the Ariane site in French Guyana. Not only will it give Soyuz a new lease of life - allowing it to lift heavier loads into orbit, but that is lots of hard currency pouring back into Russia.
ESA is relying on the Russians to provide the launcher for Venus Express late next year and possibly for the next European Mars probe in 2007 (assuming funding can be agreed).
Best wishes,
Mike.
That's the civilian budget, I expect that a lot of spending is hidden in the military budget - in the finest tradition of aerospace industries.
Russia still sends payloads into orbit from Plesetsk, almost all of them military. It's currently extending the complex to handle the new Angara rocket to replace the Proton which can only be fired out of Baikanur in Kazakhstan.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Oil. Russia is rapidly becoming the West's favoured oil producer since its pipelines run straight into Europe and the Black Sea.
The Russian economy has been enjoying something of a boom in the last couple of years. Whilst it's still much smaller than during the Soviet era, it is growing fast.
And you have to remember, that a Soyuz replacement was on the cards in Soviet times (as well as their own shuttle). They have also done a lot of work in the last 30 years on nuclear power since a manned mission to Mars was always part of their space programme. To an extent, a lot of this is work already started, and the rest of it is down to having some of the very best engineers in the World.
Best wishes,
Mike.