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How a crash created many moons for Mars

Image: Mars smash-up
Artwork shows the collision of Mars with another celestial object. The scenario could have given rise to a debris disk, and eventually to Mars’ two present-day moons. (Copyright 2016 Labex UnivEarthS)

Are Mars’ two moons asteroids that were captured by the Red Planet’s gravitational field, or are they the result of an ancient smash-up? Astronomers have now laid out a series of computer simulations to argue in favor of the smash-up hypothesis, and the modeling suggests that Mars should have had a giant moon early in its history.

In a study published today by Nature Geoscience, the researchers say the giant moon would have been created out of the debris from the collision between Mars and another celestial object about a third of Mars’ size. The crash would have occurred sometime between 100 million and 800 million years after Mars’ formation.

Within about 5 million years after the crash, the big moon and a bevy of smaller moons would have broken up and fallen to the surface. But the simulations show that Phobos and Deimos, the two moons we know about today, would have survived all the tumult and ended up in their present-day orbits.

“The proposed scenario can explain why Mars has two small satellites instead of one large moon,” the scientists, led by Pascal Rosenblatt of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, say in their paper. “Our model predicts that Phobos and Deimos are composed of a mixture of material from Mars and the impactor.”

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Sand ripples tell tales about Mars’ climate

Image: Mars sand ripples
Two sizes of ripples can be seen in this view of a Martian sand dune. The larger ripples are roughly 10 feet apart, and unlike any type seen in earthly sand fields. The smaller ripples, superimposed on the larger ripples, are similar to those seen on Earth. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS)

The sands of Mars move in mysterious ways – including one way that’s not seen on Earth’s surface, but only on the sandy bottom of bodies of water. And the scientists behind NASA’s Curiosity rover mission say those weird medium-sized ripples can reveal how Mars’ atmosphere has changed, or not, over the course of billions of years.

The alien ripples are the focus of a research paper published today by the journal Science.

“Earth and Mars both have big sand dunes and small sand ripples, but on Mars, there’s something in between that we don’t have on Earth,” Caltech researcher Mathieu Lapotre said in a NASA news release. Lapotre, who works with the Curiosity mission’s science team, is the lead author of the Science report.

The report is based on a close-up examination of the Bagnold Dunes, a stretch of Martian sand that Curiosity passed through as it made its way toward the foothills of 3-mile-high Mount Sharp (a.k.a. Aeolis Mons).

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Curiosity rover might scout for water on Mars

Image: Curiosity selfie
This selfie of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at a drilled sample site called “Okoruso,” on the Naukluft Plateau of lower Mount Sharp. The scene combines several images taken with the rover’s Mars Hand Lens Imager on May 11. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS)

NASA says one of the Curiosity rover’s future tasks could be to check out sites on Mars that may harbor trickles of salty water.

It’s been nearly four years since Curiosity was dropped into Gale Crater by a rocket-powered crane. Since that touchdown, the six-wheeled, 1-ton robot has foundample evidence that water once flowed through the territory it has explored.

Curiosity is now making its way up the side of Mount Sharp (a.k.a. Aeolis Mons), a 3-mile-high mountain in the middle of Gale Crater – and it’s making further discoveries along the way.

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Elon Musk teases SpaceX plan to colonize Mars

Image: Mars Colonial Transporter
An animation shows a lander separating from the rest of the Mars Colonial Transporter. Later concepts suggest that the entire MCT would land as a unit. (Credit: Michel Lamontagne / ESA via YouTube)

SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, is providing increasingly detailed previews of his plan to send colonists to Mars starting in 2024, more than a decade in advance of NASA’s Red Planet timetable. But there’s one part of the plan that’s not yet clear: how to bring people back.

“It’s dangerous and probably people will die – and they’ll know that,” Musk told The Washington Post this week. “And then they’ll pave the way, and ultimately it will be very safe to go to Mars, and it will be very comfortable. But that will be many years in the future.”

The journey starts getting real in September, when Musk is due to lay out his detailed Mars colonization plan at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico. “This is going to be mind-blowing,” he said. “Mind-blowing. It’s going to be really great.” (Careful, Elon … you’re starting to sound a little Trumpish there.)

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Stage set for private missions to moon, Mars

Moon Express lander
An artist’s conception shows Moon Express’ MX-1 lander extending its robotic arm to take a “selfie” of the spacecraft on the lunar surface with Earth in the background. (Credit: Moon Express)

After months of discussion, federal agencies are closing in on a process to approve commercial missions to other celestial bodies – including the moon, Mars and asteroids.

The groundwork for the process was laid in April, when the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told Congress that the Transportation Department was the most appropriate entity to approve new kinds of commercial space missions such as on-orbit satellite servicing and trips beyond Earth orbit.

Now the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies are “working through the interagency process to ensure a mechanism is in place that permits emerging commercial space operations,” FAA spokesman Hank Price said in a statement emailed to GeekWire.

The issue was brought to a head when Moon Express, one of the companies chasing the Google Lunar X Prize, asked the FAA to review its plans to put a lander on the moon next year. The FAA is part of the Transportation Department. Its Office of Commercial Space Transportation is currently in charge of approving commercial space launches and re-entries, but not activities in orbit or in deep space.

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NASA uses HoloLens to build virtual Mars rover

Image: Virtual rover
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory check the design of a rover assembly using Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented-reality system. (Credit: NASA)

We’ve already seen how Microsoft’s HoloLens mixed-reality headset is helping folksfight off aliens on the International Space Station and take a virtual walk on Mars. Now check out how it’s being used to tweak the design for NASA’s next Mars rover.

Last week, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory showed off its ProtoSpace application, which superimposes a computer-generated version of space hardware over your field of view in the headset.

The application lets JPL’s engineers size up how components fit together in the design of the 2020 Mars rover, which is currently under development at the lab in Pasadena, Calif. They can also take real-world hardware and compare it against the ghostly design that’s floating before their eyes.

The beauty of the system is that they can push through the virtual parts on the outside and get into the guts of the rover, in what appears to be real physical space.

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Mega-tsunamis left their mark on ancient Mars

Image: Ancient Mars
This artist’s impression shows Mars as it might have looked 4 billion years ago, with the complex shoreline of Chryse Planitia front and center. (Credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO)

Liquid water is almost non-existent on modern Mars, but scientists say sedimentary deposits show signs that tsunami waves as high as 400 feet washed over Martian shorelines billions of years ago.

The claim, laid out on Thursday in Nature Scientific Reports, may sound like the Red Planet equivalent of “The Day After Tomorrow,” the 2004 climate-scare movie that showed New York getting drowned. There is a climate angle to the newly published research, but a more apt comparison would be 1998’s “Deep Impact,” in which a crashing comet did something similar.

“The tsunamis could have been triggered by bolide impacts, which, about every 3 million years, generated marine impact craters approximately 30 kilometers in diameter,” study co-author Thomas Platz, a research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, said in a news release about the study.

As spectacular as it sounds, the findings are consistent with how mega-tsunamis happen on Earth, and what scientists expected on Mars as well. There’s lots of other geological evidence that Mars once harbored a large northern ocean. But if that’s the case, there should have been occasional asteroid or cosmic strikes that produced giant waves.

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Make the most of a super-sized Mars

This image of Mars was captured on May 12 by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and UVIS. Click on the image for an annotated view. (Credit: NASA, / ESA / STScI / AURA / J. Bell / ASU / M. Wolff / STScI)
This image of Mars was captured on May 12 by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and UVIS. (Credit: NASA, / ESA / STScI / AURA / J. Bell / ASU / M. Wolff / STScI)

For the next couple of weeks, Mars will look bigger than it’s looked in a decade! And no, this is not a hoax.

Every August, the Internet goes a little crazy over claims that the Red Planet is about to look twice as big as the moon in the night sky. That viral hoax got started in 2003, when some folks scrambled up reports about Mars’ historic close approach during that summer.

Mars isn’t coming quite as close as it did back then, and it certainly won’t be anywhere near as big as the moon. But by May 30, the distance between Earth and Mars will shrink to 46.8 million miles, which is closer than any other approach since 2005.

That closeness is due to the position of Earth and Mars in their elliptical orbits as they line up with each other and with the sun. On May 22, Mars will be directly opposite the sun, looming right in the center of the night sky at astronomical midnight. The occasion is known as opposition.

Because Mars’ full disk is illuminated, as seen from Earth, opposition is an especially good time to check out the Red Planet with your naked eye, with binoculars … or with the Hubble Space Telescope.

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First Mars crews will steer robots from orbit

Image: Mars orbital habitat
Is this how the first human missions to Mars will unfold? NASA’s chief favors doing extended operations from orbit, rather than starting out with a crew landing on the surface. (Credit: NASA)

The first humans to reach Mars almost certainly won’t go down to the surface, but will manage fleets of rovers from Martian orbit.

That’s the view of Andy Weir, the author behind a wildly popular space saga titled “The Martian.” But it’s also the view of NASA’s administrator, Charles Bolden, and lots of other mission planners. NASA’s current plan calls for the first crews to set up shop around Mars and its moons in the 2030s.

The landing vs. orbiting issue came up today during a space-themed session at Transformers, a daylong conference organized by The Washington Post in the nation’s capital. Weir’s novel (and the movie it inspired) focuses on an astronaut left behind on the Red Planet’s surface, but the engineer-turned-author said the initial flights to Mars would probably follow a safer storyline.

He noted that robotic missions to Mars, such as the ones involving NASA’s Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, require a long latency period between sending commands and getting back the results coming out of those commands. That’s due to the distance between the rovers and their controllers on Earth.

“The biggest benefit to having an astronaut on the surface, in terms of the science, is that that astronaut has a brain,” Weir said. “An astronaut doesn’t have a five- to 20-minute latency in communicating what he or she wants to do on the surface of Mars. So the very first humans-to-Mars-area mission, I suspect, will be a whole bunch of rovers on the surface of Mars, and humans in orbit controlling them. What do you think?”

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SpaceX plans to send ships to Mars in 2018

Image: Red Dragon
An artist’s conception shows SpaceX’s Red Dragon capsule on Mars. (Credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX is teasing plans to send robotic Red Dragon capsules to Mars atop its Falcon Heavy rocket, starting as soon as 2018.

The Red Dragon mission concept has been on the agenda for years: Researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center have talked about using a modified SpaceX Dragon capsule to grab samples from Mars and bring them back to Earth. Others see the Red Dragon as part of an advanced search for life on the Red Planet.

In the past, actually executing the concept was dependent on funding from NASA. But now it looks as if SpaceX may go ahead with a mission –and put up the money – under the terms of an unfunded Space Act Agreement with NASA. The space agency and SpaceX signed off on a Mars-centric amendment to that agreement just this week.

In a series of tweets sent out today, SpaceX and its billionaire founder, Elon Musk, said the Red Dragon flights would inform the company’s overall architecture for Mars missions. “Details to come,” SpaceX said.

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