Tag: mars

Lockheed Martin offers to rescue Mars mission from budget death

NASA’s beleaguered Mars Sample Return mission may get a reprieve from an unexpected source. Lockheed Martin has proposed a streamlined, lower-cost alternative that could slash the mission’s price tag by more than half.

Facing significant funding cuts across multiple programs, NASA’s ambitious international effort to retrieve Martian samples and return them to Earth is under threat. Already jeopardized by Russia’s withdrawal from the program following its invasion of Ukraine, the mission now faces potential cancellation due to shifting priorities within the current US administration.

Under new agency guidelines, NASA has been ordered to focus more on deep-space crewed missions to the Moon and Mars, along with other endeavors involving cutting-edge technology, while axing projects that have been marked by massive spending without a proportionate scientific return.

One prime candidate for the chop is the Mars Sample Return mission, which is a staggeringly ambitious international program involving many nations that is tasked with using multiple spacecraft to collect samples from the surface of Mars and then return them to Earth for in-depth laboratory analysis.

The mission’s first phase is already underway, with NASA’s Perseverance rover exploring the surface of Mars. As it traverses the dunes and dead river beds that last saw water two billion years ago, it’s been collecting drilling samples that have been sealed in special container tubes left behind on the ground like a paper trail in a cosmic game of Hares & Hounds.

The idea is that a second lander will eventually set down in the vicinity of the first and deploy a second rover that will follow the path blazed by the nuclear-powered Perseverance and collect the tubes. These will be stored in a special sealed container, which will be placed in a small rocket that will be fired into orbit around Mars where it will rendezvous with yet another spacecraft for return to Earth.

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Did You Have ‘CIA Docs Say There Was Life on Mars’ on Your Bingo Card?

The possibility of water, whether frozen or liquid, on Mars is often hailed as groundbreaking — but it might be overshadowed by a far more astonishing claim from the CIA. According to a declassified document, the agency believed that giant beings once inhabited the red planet. The report, titled “Mars Exploration May 22, 1984,” details how the CIA used astral projection — the concept that a person’s spirit can traverse different planes of existence — to transport a ‘subject’ to Mars approximately one million years ago.

“The study was part of Project Stargate, a secret U.S. Army unit established in 1977 that focused on anomalous phenomena, including remote viewing, telepathy, and psychokinesis,” reports the Daily Mail. “Participants were exposed to sounds like binaural beats and hemi-sync audio to induce altered states of consciousness and promote psychic abilities.”

The experiment’s ‘subject’ was transported to the planet during the specified year, reporting an ‘oblique view of a pyramid’ and a ‘very large road’ with a monument similar to those known among ancient Egyptians on Earth, the report claims.

The vision then shifted to a population of ‘very large people’ searching for ‘a new place to live because their environment was corrupted.’

Project Stargate was the US government’s new weapon against the Soviet Union, aimed at creating mind-reading spies who could infiltrate the minds of its enemies.

The classified project was conducted at Fort Meade in Maryland, recruiting men and women who claimed to have extrasensory perception (ESP) to help uncover military and domestic intelligence secrets.

It shut down in 1995, but during its more than 10-year existence, psychics known as ‘remote viewers’ participated in a wide array of operations, from locating hostages kidnapped by Islamic terrorist groups to tracing the paths of fugitive criminals within the US.

The declassified document details a mysterious CIA experiment. The report begins with the mention of a sealed envelope containing geographic coordinates provided to the subject prior to an interview but opened afterward. Inside the envelope was a card reading: “The Planet Mars. Time of interest approximately one million BC.” The administrator relayed this information to the subject, who then focused on the specified coordinates (40.89° N, 9.55° W) at 10:09 a.m. ET. The subject described an “oblique view” of a pyramid or pyramid-like structure on Mars, as well as “very tall, thin” people wearing strange clothing.

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MARS ROVER SPOTS MYSTERIOUS POLYGONS HIDDEN BENEATH THE RED PLANET’S SURFACE

Researchers operating China’s Zhurong rover say they have spotted a series of mysterious polygons hidden beneath the planet’s surface, similar to polygons NASA spotted on the surface of Mars in 2012. The newly discovered features, however, were detected more than 35 kilometers beneath the planet’s surface.

While researchers believe that these polygon structures could have formed due to extreme environmental shifts in Mars’ ancient past, their exact nature and formation remain a mystery.

The discovery was initially made during the rover’s one-year mission, which lasted from May 2021 to May 2022, in the Utopia Planitia region. Described by researchers from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences as the largest impact crater in the entire solar system, the researchers behind this mysterious find say that Utopia Planitia “has both experienced and recorded variations of the Martian palaeoclimate.”

By using the rover’s ground penetrating radar, researchers scoured a 1.2-kilometer-wide area for various geological features. As a result, 16 mysterious polygons were spotted below a depth of 35 meters, meaning they were likely formed billions of years in the planet’s past.

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CHANCES THAT ODD SOIL SAMPLES COLLECTED AT MARS’ JEZERO CRATER CONTAIN SIGNS OF ANCIENT LIFE JUST INCREASED DRAMATICALLY

A new analysis of subsurface deposit and erosion patterns beneath the dry lakebed in Mars’ Jezero crater indicates the process took place over eons, dramatically improving the chances that soil samples collected at the site by NASA’s Perseverance could contain signs of ancient life.

Although the exact timeline for a joint European Space Agency/NASA mission to retrieve Perseverance’s soil samples has not yet been set, the fact that the lake in Jezero crater had existed across numerous geological phases significantly increases the odds of finding signs of ancient life within those samples.

RESEARCHERS HAVE LONG SUSPECTED DEEP SEDIMENTARY LAYERS LIE BENEATH JEZERO

Over the last few decades, images captured by satellites orbiting Mars have long hinted at the idea of eroded subsurface layers in the region. However, researchers knew that up close analysis by Perseverance’s ground penetrating radar was the only way to confirm those suspicions.

“From orbit, we can see a bunch of different deposits, but we can’t tell for sure if what we’re seeing is their original state or if we’re seeing the conclusion of a long geological story,” said David Paige, a UCLA professor of Earth, planetary and space sciences and first author of the paper detailing the findings. “To tell how these things formed, we need to see below the surface.”

Fortunately, Perseverance’s mission planners included the Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment, or RIMFAX, as one of the seven instruments on board the rover. Like ground penetrating radar used on Earth, the RIFMAX fires radar waves directly into the Mars surface, then reads their reflections as they bounce off different sedimentary layers.

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EUROPEAN SATELLITE SPOTS MYSTERIOUS GLOW COMING FROM MARS

A European Space Agency satellite has detected a mysterious glow coming from Mars. Measured in the visible spectrum with the NOMAD-UVIS instrument on board the European Space Agency (ESA) Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) satellite, the unexpected glow emanates from the night side of Mars and was observed in the planet’s upper atmosphere.

A similar glow was witnessed by the same research team using a satellite orbiting Venus. Like that visible light signal, the researchers believed the mysterious glow coming from Mars resulted from oxygen interacting with the planet’s upper atmosphere. That’s mainly because they also saw a similar mysterious glow coming from Mars, only in the daytime.

“Back in 2020, we were already able to detect the presence of a green emission between 40 and 150 km in altitude, present during the Martian day,” explained Jean-Claude Gérard, a planetologist at the Laboratory for Planetary and Atmospheric Physics (LPAP) at the University of Liège (BE), where the research team was headquartered. “This was due to the dissociation of the CO2 molecule, the main constituent of the atmosphere, by ultraviolet solar radiation”.

However, the researchers soon discovered that this unexpected mysterious glow coming from Mars was originating from the nighttime side. They also figured out it was caused by something else entirely.

“This emission is due to the recombination of oxygen atoms created in the summer atmosphere and carried by the winds towards the high winter latitudes,” explained Lauriane Soret, a researcher at LPAP.

Once at higher altitudes, the atoms recombine with CO2 molecules when they come in contact. This reaction, the researcher explains, produces an oxygen molecule “in an excited state” that relaxes, causing it to emit light “in the visible range.”

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We might have accidentally killed the only life we ever found on Mars nearly 50 years ago

Recently, I was invited to speak at a symposium organized by the Amsterdam Royal Palace Foundation, who, twice a year, brings in experts to discuss some big topic like the COVID pandemic or the future of work. This summer’s meeting was about the search for extraterrestrial life. While I focused on the search in our own Solar System, Sara Seager of MIT presented her ideas on how to look for life on planets circling other stars.

During our talks and the discussions that followed, I dropped a suggestion that some people surely will find provocative: that we already did find life on Mars nearly 50 years ago — but that we inadvertently killed it. 

The Viking lander experiments

In the mid-1970s, NASA sent two Viking landers to the surface of Mars equipped with instruments that conducted the only life detection experiments ever conducted on another planet. The results of those tests were very confusing at the time and remain so today. While some of them — particularly the labelled release experiment (which tested for microbial metabolism) and the pyrolytic release experiments (which tested for organic synthesis) — were initially positive for life, the gas exchange experiment was not.

The Viking landers also included an instrument to detect organic compounds. It saw trace amounts of chlorinated organics, which were interpreted at the time to be the result of contamination from Earth. This led Viking project scientist Gerald Soffen to utter his famous words, “No bodies, no life.” In other words, there couldn’t be Martian life without organic compounds. So Soffen concluded, as did most other scientists at the time, that the Viking project was negative as to the presence of life, or at best inconclusive.

In the half century since, the picture has changed a lot. Eight more landers and rovers have explored the Martian surface in greater detail. Thanks to the 2008 Phoenix lander, and to later confirmation by the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, we know that indigenous organic compounds do, in fact, exist on Mars. They’re in a chlorinated form, however — not what the Viking-era scientists expected — and we don’t know whether they derive from biological processes or from some abiotic chemical reactions that have nothing to do with life. Still, one might wonder how Soffen would react today: Would he still say categorically that the Viking results were negative?

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Price Tag of NASA’s Martian Rock Retrieval Mission Is Skyrocketing

As NASA’s chief of science programs, Thomas Zurbuchen oversaw missions like the James Webb telescope launch and the landing of the Mars Perseverance rover. When he stepped down from that post in 2022, he told The New York Times that the key to innovation was to take smart risks and not to panic when some of them don’t pay out. It appears NASA itself is struggling to apply that wisdom. 

Last week, according to reporting from Ars Technica, leaders at the space agency were told that the development cost for the Mars Sample Retrieval (MSR) program had doubled. Originally, the cost to collect rock samples from Mars was estimated at $4.4 billion; now, that number is north of $8 billion. And that’s just for development. The estimate does not include launch costs, construction, or operating costs. The final tab could be north of $10 billion. 

The plan is to send an unmanned sample retrieval lander to Mars in 2028. That vehicle would return to Earth with the rock and soil samples that the Perseverance rover has collected since it landed on Mars in 2021. However, there are concerns over whether Perseverance will still be operational in 2028, so NASA is creating backup plans that include sample recovery helicopters. If all of these steps go according to plan, the samples will return to Earth by 2033 at the earliest. 

Understanding the geological makeup of other planets is a noble scientific endeavor, but not when taxpayers are footing the colossal bill. This is not the first time (or even the second) that NASA has run a delayed project over budget. Their flagship Artemis program has ballooned in price and will now cost over $93 billion by the end of 2025. And it’s likely an astronaut won’t return to the moon by then. 

The news that this project had doubled really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Back in April, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee that the MSR program would need an additional $250 million to stay on track in fiscal year 2023. 

Even the science community has suggested that this price tag is simply not worth it. Planetary scientist Paul Byrne told Ars Technica that MSR risks becoming “the planetary community’s James Webb Telescope,” meaning that this project would eat up much of the budget allotted for planetary science, stifling other worthwhile projects in its wake.

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No signs of Martian life in meteorite found in Antarctica, study says

A spaced-out theory that claimed evidence of Martian life may have been debunked by scientists after a decades-long debate that alienated some skeptical researchers.

A 4-billion-year-old Martian meteorite found in Antarctica in the 1980s was said to contain evidence of ancient living things on the Red Planet but experts announced Thursday they had confirmed it showed no signs of extraterrestrial life.

A NASA-led team of researchers suggested in 1996 that the gray-green space rock appeared to have organic compounds left behind from living organisms, which was doubted by many scientists at the time and prompted decades of further research.

A team from the Carnegie Institution for Science, led by Andrew Steele, said in a study published in the journal Science that the compounds were not the result of living creatures, but by salty groundwater water flowing over the rocks for a long period of time.

The hunks of carbon compound on the rock were determined to have been from water while it was still on Mars’ surface. Researchers said that a similar process occurs with rocks on Earth, and could explain the presence of methane on Mars.

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‘Crashed Flying Saucer’ Spotted On Mars

A South African researcher discovered what appears to be an image of a crashed flying saucer on the surface of Mars, according to re-analyzed NASA footage from 2006.

Jean Ward, an anomaly hunter, was searching through NASA images for noteworthy aberrations when he discovered the image taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Despite the image being 15 years old, Ward’s discovery of what appears to be the flying saucer is not.

The image comes from the bottom of Candor Chasma, which is a large canyon in the Valles Marineris system on Mars. The canyon is referred to as “The Grand Canyon of Mars,” and spans the equivalent of the U.S. It is the largest known canyon in the solar system.

This footage from NASA captures the canyon’s many swirling patterns of layers, created by sand and dust-sized particles from the forces of either wind or water.

“We see a strange trench and at the end of it, a perfect disk,” Ward says of the anomaly amid the dune-filled landscape. “Mostly covered in sand and debris, and behind it, we have random dunes,” he continued.

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