Great News for a Mars Colony!

This seems like a giant boondoggle to me:

https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-utah-mars-station-20190623-htmlstory.html


Since 2001, the Mars Desert Research Station, a small complex that includes a laboratory, living quarters, observatories, a repair shop and a greenhouse, has served as a reliable stand-in for an actual base on Mars. The station is operated by the Mars Society, a collection of 10,000 space enthusiasts from more than 40 countries dedicated to exploring and settling the red planet.

Researchers here pretend they are 140 million miles from Earth rather than seven miles from Duke’s Slickrock Grill and the Whispering Sands Motel in Hanksville.

“We are the Martians,” said Hanksville Mayor Kim Wilson. “They are the aliens.”

Now with NASA’s plan to land humans on Mars by 2033 and the promise of commercial space travel, interest in the station has soared. Engineers, physicians, geologists, astronomers, biologists and others come to test ideas related to living on Mars.

Last month, more than 500 college students from 10 countries took part in the station’s annual University Rover Challenge, aimed at creating the best vehicle for use on Mars.

“I could run two of these programs side by side and there would still be a demand,” said station director Shannon Rupert. “You no longer have to work at NASA to go into space, and a lot of people want to go into space.”

Most of the crews are now international and pay up to $1,500 a person for a two-week stay. They are free to perform their own experiments as long as they observe protocol.
 
I think this article is 100% right about the limits of robotic exploration:

https://www.upi.com/Science_News/20...tting-answers-on-the-moon/9441560542324/?sl=1


Robotic spacecraft have collected and will continue to collect data vital to scientists' quest to unravel the moon's mysteries. But NASA's promise to return astronauts to the moon would certainly prove a boon to the agency's lunar science program.

"Well-trained astronauts exploring a complex geologic terrain can produce extraordinary results beyond the reach of any robotic asset," Kring said. "They have the capacity to observe, process those observations, and make decisions that ensure mission objectives are met in a time-efficient manner. Apollo demonstrated the intrinsic advantages of human explorers and, simultaneously, their inspirational value."
 
Here's another take on the threat of asteroids from TN Law Professor Glen Reynolds who runs the Instapundit Blog:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opin...s-than-sending-people-mars-column/1542956001/


In the space community, people have argued for years about the best place to settle: the moon, Earth orbit or Mars. But when you poll average Americans, they have a different priority. They want us to focus on stopping killer asteroids.

According to a recent Associated Press poll, more Americans want NASA to focus on protecting against dangerous asteroid impacts than favor going to the moon or Mars. Well, if I have to choose, I’d choose that, too — though I can remember when even talking about the danger of asteroid impacts seemed crazy and far out to most “sensible” people.

But now we’ve learned enough that even ordinary folks are aware of the danger. It was just a few years ago that an asteroid exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, damaging property and injuring 1,100 people. Thanks to the ubiquity of dashboard cameras in Russia, there was plenty of video to document the event.

Since then, there have been numerous near misses as asteroids have passed quite close to Earth, often discovered just a few days before — or sometimes after — their closest approach. Public safety officials are actually rehearsing what to do if an asteroid threatens major cities like New York. We get steady reports of new Earth-threatening asteroids being discovered. And Sunday is designated as Asteroid Day by the United Nations, a day to focus on the danger posed by killer asteroids and what to do about it.
 
This is almost becoming routine for SpaceX:

https://phys.org/news/2019-06-spacex-hefty-rocket-satellites.html


SpaceX launched its heftiest rocket with 24 research satellites Tuesday, a middle-of-the-night rideshare featuring a deep space atomic clock, solar sail, a clean and green rocket fuel testbed, and even human ashes.

It was the third flight of a Falcon Heavy rocket, but the first ordered by the military.


For me this is the most interesting part of the payload:

The Planetary Society's LightSail crowd-funded spacecraft will attempt to become the first orbiting spacecraft to be propelled solely by sunlight. It will be released next week from its temporary perch on a spacecraft and opened a week later.

"Our #LightSail2 is up and on its way," tweeted Bill Nye, the society's chief executive officer.

It's the society's third crack at solar sailing: The first was lost in a Russian rocket failure in 2005, while the second had a successful test flight in 2015.
 
The distances involved here are almost inconceivable:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/27/world/fast-radio-burst-galaxy-scn-trnd/index.html


For the first time, a single burst of cosmic radio waves has been traced to its point of origin: in this case, a galaxy about 3.6 billion light-years from Earth.
These radio bursts are only millisecond-long radio flashes, and such rapid bursts themselves aren't rare in space. But finding out where they came from is incredibly difficult.

People love to believe that they're from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, and this hypothesis hasn't been ruled out entirely by researchers at Breakthrough Listen, a scientific research program dedicated to finding evidence of intelligent life in the universe.

Astronomers were able to pin down the source of a repeating fast radio burst in 2017. But single radio bursts are harder to pinpoint because they don't reoccur.


Hell it's not "almost" it is an inconceivable distance away!
 
^^^One light year is approximately 5.878625 trillion miles.

Therefore, 3.6 billion light years = 21,163,050,000,000,000,000,000 miles.

You can't get there from here.
 
Another near miss:

https://news.yahoo.com/moment-car-size-asteroid-exploded-141530506.html


The GOES-16 weather satellite is designed to detect flashes of lightning. On Saturday, it saw an asteroid.

At 4:25pm Saturday afternoon, meteorologists noticed an unusually bright flash signature over the Caribbean waters 170 miles south of Puerto Rico.

Its light was visible in an area as large as Rhode Island – far too big to be a lightning strike. Plus there were no clouds in the area.

It had to be something else. The answer turned out to be something out of this world.

A spattering of debris showed up on the National Weather Service in San Juan’s radar. That’s a telltale sign of a meteor or asteroid impact.

Just how large was it? About 13 to 16 feet in diameter or the size of car.

As the asteroid entered the atmosphere, Spaceweather.com reports that the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation’s infrasound station in Bermuda detected “airwaves” associated with the blast.
 
They want our input into how best to communicate to the public when we meet Aliens!

https://futurism.com/the-byte/survey-input-aliens-response-plan


Watch enough movies in which aliens contact humans, and you’ll notice a trend: the people deciding how Earth should respond to the extraterrestrial communications are usually politicians or scientists.

But the UK Seti Research Network (UKSRN) thinks the average person should have a say in how Earth responds if aliens ever decide to say “hello” to humanity.
 
And the beat goes on. Not only are we finding more planets beyond the Solar System we're learning more about them every day:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190627114113.htm

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a world between the sizes of Mars and Earth orbiting a bright, cool, nearby star. The planet, called L 98-59b, marks the tiniest discovered by TESS to date.


https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190702164603.htm

Two NASA space telescopes have teamed up to identify, for the first time, the detailed chemical "fingerprint" of a planet between the sizes of Earth and Neptune. No planets like this can be found in our own solar system, but they are common around other stars.
 
Well this is good news:

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...to-be-dying-from-exposure-to-space-radiation/


Space exploration is a risky business. As well as the physical dangers, radiation from the sun and cosmic rays is thought to put astronauts at a higher risk of cancer and heart disease in later life.

But a new study that looked at whether astronauts are dying early from these conditions found no sign. “We haven’t ruled it out, but we looked for a signal and we didn’t see it,” says Robert Reynolds of Mortality Research & Consulting, City of Industry in California.

So far, not enough of the space-goers have died from these conditions to just compare their age of death with that of others. Instead, Reynolds’ team used a statistical technique on survival figures for 301 US astronauts and 117 Soviet and Russian cosmonauts.

This data gives us reason for cautious optimism. However, we need a lot more subjects exposed for a much longer time to space radiation before we relax our guard.
 
Just a reminder of the PRACTICAL benefits derived from the space program:

https://www.upi.com/Science_News/20...ies-products-still-in-use/8451561000261/?sl=6


Here's just one example that most of us have used in the last month:

When scientists with NASA's Apollo Space Mission needed a drill to collect core samples from the lunar surface, they got in touch with engineers at Black and Decker. Researchers at the tool company developed a computer program to perfect the drill technology. The model helped engineers boost motor power while minimizing power use.

According to Interesting Engineering, the same computer program was later used by Black and Decker to develop a handheld, cordless vacuum cleaner, which became known as the Dustbuster. The creation of the lunar drill paved the way for the development of a variety of lightweight, cordless electric tools.
 
Here's the latest on that weirdly shaped Alien spaceship, er, asteroid:

https://www.sciencealert.com/astron...muamua-is-really-truly-not-an-alien-lightsail


Interstellar object 'Oumuamua - that strange, cigar-shaped chunk of rock from somewhere a vast distance beyond the Solar System - is, new research has concluded, absolutely, positively not an alien spaceship.

OK, well, probably not. We can't tell for sure without closely examining the thing, and it's passed beyond our reach now. But, after carefully reviewing all our observations of the object, the international team of 'Oumuamua scientists has concluded that everything we know about it is consistent with a natural origin.

We already mostly knew this. But a paper last year from Harvard astrophysics enfant terrible Avi Loeb briefly suggested the possibility that the rock was an alien probe. It was like a spark to dry tinder, honestly, and other scientists have been running around with buckets ever since.


Whether it turns out to be an alien mother ship or just a space rock the damn thing sure is cool looking.
 
It's great to see Buzz Aldrin going strong at 89! And he's still full of great ideas for NASA and America's future space program!

https://arstechnica.com/science/201...t-back-and-he-has-a-plan-to-bring-nasa-along/


Under Aldrin’s plan, NASA would then develop a reusable “tug” to travel between Earth orbit and lunar orbit. Such a cislunar tug could be sized for any mission, ferrying 25 tons or more of cargo—astronauts, landers, fuel, or supplies—per roundtrip. It could be refueled in low-Earth orbit (again, with fuel brought up on reusable rockets) for future journeys. The vehicle could also incorporate an aeroshell to use Earth’s atmosphere as a “brake” when coming back to the planet, thus saving more fuel.
 
Well done Japan, well done!

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48946603


A Japanese spacecraft has touched down on a faraway asteroid, where it will collect space rock that may hold clues to how the Solar System evolved.

The successful contact with the Ryugu asteroid was met with relief and cheering in the control room at Japan's space agency, JAXA.

It is the second touchdown for the robotic Hayabusa-2 craft, which grabbed rocks from the asteroid in February.

After blasting a crater into Ryugu, it has returned to pick up fresh rubble.

As the samples will come from within the asteroid, they will have had reduced exposure to the harsh environment of space.

 
The golden asteroid story never gets old for me!


https://fee.org/articles/what-that-giant-asteroid-of-gold-would-really-do-to-the-economy/


Psyche has a lot of gold—about $10,000 quadrillion worth at current prices. The eye-catching headlines that claim it’s enough gold to make “everyone on earth a billionaire” are, of course, complete fantasy. Selling that much gold would cut prices nearly to zero.


I think this scenario is plausible and the comparison to Aluminum, which was once very valuable & exotic, is spot on:

Gold, for example, is incredibly ductile and an excellent conductor of electricity; perhaps houses would be wired with gold instead of copper, freeing up copper that could be used in other ways. Or maybe there’s an industry that’s only possible with cheap gold, like aviation is for aluminum. We can’t look at how gold is used now, with its sky-high price, and assume it’ll be the same with a rock-bottom price. Cheap gold probably won’t give us an economic boom, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be an economic boon.


How about covering our houses in gold siding!
 
Try to spot the Mars rover in the image:

phys.org

Image: HiRISE spots Curiosity rover at Mars' Woodland Bay

A dramatic Martian landscape can be seen in a new image taken from space, showing NASA's Curiosity rover examining a location called "Woodland Bay." It's just one of many stops the rover has made in an area referred to as the "clay-bearing unit" on the side of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall...
phys.org phys.org

A dramatic Martian landscape can be seen in a new image taken from space, showing NASA's Curiosity rover examining a location called "Woodland Bay." It's just one of many stops the rover has made in an area referred to as the "clay-bearing unit" on the side of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain inside of Gale Crater.
 
3093

Pictures from Curiosity Show the Bottom of an Ancient Lake on Mars, the Perfect Place to Search for Evidence of Past Life

It’s all about the detail.

In a way, Mars looks like a dusty, dead, dry, boring planet. But science says otherwise. Science says that Mars used to be wet and warm, with an atmosphere. And science says that it was wet and warm for billions of years, easily long enough for life to appear and develop.

But we still don’t know for sure if any life did happen there.
Click to expand...

Read more:
www.universetoday.com

Pictures from Curiosity Show the Bottom of an Ancient Lake on Mars, the Perfect Place to Search for Evidence of Past Life

According to scientists, the ancient lake bed at Gale Crater on Mars is the perfect place to look for ancient habitability.
www.universetoday.com www.universetoday.com
 
Yappi said:
View attachment 3093
Pictures from Curiosity Show the Bottom of an Ancient Lake on Mars, the Perfect Place to Search for Evidence of Past Life



Read more:
www.universetoday.com

Pictures from Curiosity Show the Bottom of an Ancient Lake on Mars, the Perfect Place to Search for Evidence of Past Life

According to scientists, the ancient lake bed at Gale Crater on Mars is the perfect place to look for ancient habitability.
www.universetoday.com www.universetoday.com
Click to expand...

Wow, that is breathtakingly beautiful!

Oh and look at all those execellent paving stones just waiting to be on a Martain version of a patio!
 
MOLD on the Space Station is a problem. Yea, MOLD!

www.sciencedaily.com

Space station mold survives high doses of ionizing radiation

The International Space Station, like all human habitats in space, has a nagging mold problem. Astronauts on the ISS spend hours every week cleaning the inside of the station's walls to prevent mold from becoming a health problem. New research finds mold spores may also survive on the outside...
www.sciencedaily.com

The International Space Station, like all human habitats in space, has a nagging mold problem. Astronauts on the ISS spend hours every week cleaning the inside of the station's walls to prevent mold from becoming a health problem. New research finds mold spores may also survive on the outside walls of spacecraft.

Wait, did I read that right: New research finds mold spores may also survive on the outside walls of spacecraft. Seriously? NASA needs to pick themselves up some Tilex Mold & Mildew remover promptly.

This does beg the question if the spores can survive on the OUTSIDE of the station does that give the whole idea that life traveled here from out there a big boost?

 
On this day 50 years ago Humans first touched the surface of another world. Congratulations to Apollo 11 - first men on the moon.

www.moondaily.com

50 years ago, humanity's first steps on another world

Washington (AFP) July 20, 2019 - Fifty years ago on Saturday, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans in history to set foot on the Moon, an event watched on television by half a billion people.
www.moondaily.com

Fifty years ago on Saturday, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans in history to set foot on the Moon, an event watched on television by half a billion people. Their lunar module, named "Eagle," touched down at 2018 GMT (4:18pm ET) on July 20, 1969.


 
BlackHawk said:
Fake. Stanley Kubrick filmed it all in a studio.




(just kidding)
Click to expand...

I know you're kidding here but In a weird way Kubrick's ability to create a believable and shiny version of humans on the moon actually proves that the moon landings weren't faked. The real thing never looked as sharp & clear as Kubrick's version. It would have made for much better TV had it been faked!

Of course they still have to explain why the damn flag is waving. I mean we all know there's no wind on the moon.
 
Now that the 50th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing has come and gone it's only fair to link to an article critical of NASA written by Tom Wolfe on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing:

www.nytimes.com

Opinion | One Giant Leap to Nowhere (Published 2009)

Why the American space program died the moment the foot of Apollo 11’s Commander Neil Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon in 1969.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

I agree with Wolfe that NASA and America screwed up on the follow-up to the moon landings. What should have been the kickoff to a big push into the solar system became instead the start of a 40 year period where we thought small and did even less with the space program. Hopefully now that we've entered the age of private enterprise leading the way on space exploration the vision of the future we all had on July 20, 1969 can now be realized.
 
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