United Arab Emirates Boldly Go Where No Arab Nation Has Gone Before: Space

breitbart

By Andre Walker 

The United Arab Emirates, which is known for its bold and ambitious projects, now plans to boldly go where no Arab state has gone before: space. It has announced it will send a probe to Mars, launching an ambitious new space programme. 

The unmanned space ship will travel 37 million miles to the Red Planet, according to the Times. The UAE want to land on Mars by 2021, an ambitious target for a country that has absolutely no experience in space.

Rulers of the country expressed their determination to make the project work, despite how ludicrous it sounds. But they do have a track record off pulling off wacky projects, some of which that have turned the country into a sort of alcohol and gambling free Las Vegas. 

There are also jokes locally that if they fail the sand dunes of the country will create the perfect backdrop for a fake landing. It is also so sparsely populated that any hoax rockets would be fairly easy to hide.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, said: "Despite all the tensions and the conflicts across the Middle East, we have proved today how positive a contribution the Arab people can make to humanity...Our region is a region of civilisation. Our destiny is, once again, to explore, to create, to build and to civilise."

The announcement was very broad and lacked any details, but the UAE are widely known to be keen to diversify their economy. Unlike many of their neighbours, the rulers of the country have spent billions trying to create a future for their population if oil runs out or ceases to be a popular fuel. Elsewhere in the Middle East, oil riches end up being spirited out of the country by rulers, creating tension and leading to the growth of extremists groups.

Whilst the UAE is considered moderate, and this announcement is being greeted with derision, any viable programme is likely to cause some concern in the West. Space programmes help develop technologies that can easy be used for military purposes, and given regional instability this could spell problems for Israel. Especially if the technology is shared with more hostile Arab nations.

Some years ago the UAE pushed for the formation of a Pan-Arab Space Agency, with countries in the region pooling their talent and resources. The plan was a non-starter because rivalries in the Arab world are often much more deep seated and vitriolic than in other regions.

An Arab country entering the space race is further evidence that humanity is increasingly turning to space exploration, and in the future perhaps colonisation of other planets. As reported on Breitbart London earlier this week, Britain is to build the first spaceport outside the US. The UK says they will use it to launch satellites, space tourists and supersonic passenger jets that will leave the earth’s atmosphere.

Moves into space could lead to a dash for new worlds in the same way as pioneers like Colombus sought to leave Europe in search of something new. At present we lack the technologies to achieve many of the ambitions of the futurists but new advances are now coming on a daily basis and as a result things that looked impossible 50 years ago are now common place.

NASA Timelapse: Building A Spaceship to Mars

TIME

'Mars rat' spied by NASA's Curiosity rover

Fox News

Is that a rat on Mars?
A photo from the mast camera on NASA’s Curiosity rover reveals the dusty orange, rock-strewn surface of the Red Planet -- and what starry-eyed enthusiasts claim is a dusty orange rodent hiding among the stones.
The photo, taken Sept. 28, 2012, depicts the “Rocknest” site, where NASA’s rover took a scoopful of sand, tasted it, and determined it was full of weathered basaltic materials -- not unlike Hawaii, the space agency’s scientists said last year.

'Note its lighter color upper and lower eyelids, its nose and cheek areas, its ear, its front leg and stomach.'

- ScottCWaring on the blog UFO Sightings Daily

No word on how the rodent tasted, however.
The “creature” was identified on the UFO Sightings Daily website, where its finder, ScottCWaring, held tight to his opinion: That’s one darn cute rodent on Mars.
“Note its lighter color upper and lower eyelids, its nose and cheek areas, its ear, its front leg and stomach. Looks similar to a squirrel camouflaged in the stones and sand by its colors," he wrote. "Hey, who doesn't love squirrels, right?”
Others pointed out that the similarity in coloring and position mean it was most likely just a rock, fingering the psychology phenomenon known as pareidolia, a propensity to pick out faces from everyday objects and structures.
To take advantage of this psychological phenomenon closer to home, designers at Berlin's Onformative studio developed an algorithm that scans the surface of the earth with Google Maps, picking out geographical structures that are likely to be construed as having face-like features, science blog iO9 recently pointed out.
Their algorithm found faces in fields, mustaches in mountains, hills with actual eyes.
Perhaps the algorithm should be turned loose on Mars?

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/05/29/mars-rat-spied-by-nasa-curiosity-rover/#ixzz2Ui1njuYs

3-D Printed Pizza to Feed Mars Colonists?

Discovery News

By Ian O'Neill

One of the biggest challenges facing humanity in space is: how to cultivate food. Coincidentally, one of the biggest challenges facing the entire planet in the near future will be: how to cultivate enough food to support an ever-swelling population. Wouldn’t it be delicious if both challenges could be solved, or at least partially solved, using the same, open-source technology?
Enter the 3-D printer: your all-in-one solution to lunar habitat-building, gun-making and space pizza preparation! Now, the latter has grabbed the attention of NASA, which has approved a $125,000 grant for a mechanical engineer to develop a prototype of his universal food synthesizer based on 3-D printing technology.
ANALYSIS: 3-D Printed Space Food For the Gourmet Astronaut
3-D printing certainly isn’t new to the space technology arena. It has been pegged as a potential answer to building habitats on the moon and Mars, for example. A 3-D printer could be landed onto a planetary body ahead of a human mission and it could automatically construct habitable structures out of locally-mined materials.
Also, there’s some hypothetical ideas for the future of 3-D printed satellites. It seems that once the technology matures, complex components for machines and other space equipment could be manufactured in situ.
But what about food?
Launching supplies into space is, of course, costly. So the ultimate aim for any long-duration interplanetary trip or long-term human presence on the surface of Mars would be to develop sustainable food cultivation techniques. A supply of fresh veggies would be the backbone of any healthy colony! But before we see a renewable supply of Mars mushrooms and cosmic cucumbers, we’d need to change the way we see food. The 3-D printer could just do that.
ANALYSIS: Print Me a Condo on the Moon!
To Anjan Contractor, of Systems and Materials Research Corporation (SMRC) in Austin, Texas, food is just a collection of compounds that can be isolated in the form of a powder. These different varieties of powder can then be mixed with oils and water, combined by his 3-D printer. Governed not by a paperback recipe book, the printer would be controlled by software recipes. Food can then be printed to order.
Interestingly, an individual’s dietary requirements can be tightly controlled — in the future of Mars colonization, this could prove to be very useful. Colonists’ food could be easily fortified with vitamins or minerals they are lacking. One could imagine medicines being added to foodstuffs via computer commands. Once you strip down food into its barest of components, our future Mars colonists could keep very close tabs on their calorie intake and general health.
In an interview with Quartz, Contractor outlined his vision of eliminating food waste — the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30-years. For long-duration spaceflight, this would be a huge advantage.
“Long distance space travel requires 15-plus years of shelf life,” he said. “The way we are working on it is, all the carbs, proteins and macro and micro nutrients are in powder form. We take moisture out, and in that form it will last maybe 30 years.”
ANALYSIS: Domino’s Pizza Moon Plan is All Topping, No Base
With his NASA Small Business Innovation Research program grant, Contractor will build a “pizza printer.” Although that may not sound very appetizing, pizza is an obvious choice for a first 3-D printed food as it can be layered with ingredients. The first layer, the dough, will be printed onto a hot plate that will immediately bake the base of the pizza. Then, powdered tomato puree will be mixed with oil and layered over the top. A layer of protein will also be added.
This isn’t the first 3-D printed food concept to make it into the limelight. As reported by Discovery News’ Markus Hammonds in February, the company Fab@Home is also developing a 3-D printer to create foodstuffs out of “edible hydrocolloidal suspensions” (gel-like mixtures of solids and liquids). In their research, they’ve stumbled into an “uncanny valley of food” where the 3-D foods don’t feel quite right when eaten. More work is obviously needed to understand how to mimic not only the flavors, but also the texture of food.
Contractor hopes, however, that by making his 3-D food synthesizer open-source, that once his technology is matured and released to the world, others will innovate and develop the technology, perhaps overcoming this unsavory uncanny valley.
Although the applications in space are obvious — and even Jean Luc Picard would be impressed by this modest attempt at a Star Trek replicator — Contractor is acutely aware that this idea may, one day, transform the way we conceive food here on Earth. This in-turn may help feed the planet.
“I think, and many economists think, that current food systems can’t supply 12 billion people sufficiently,” he said. “So we eventually have to change our perception of what we see as food.”
So will the first manufactured food on Mars be a 3-D printed pizza from a 3-D printed Pizza Hut? If so, may I suggest the first family-sized pizza be called the “Olympus Mons-ter.”
via SPACE.com

78,000 People Apply for One-Way Trip to Mars

By Time.com/ Ollie John

www.dailymail.co.uk

An ambitious project to establish a human colony on Mars has attracted applications from tens of thousands of would-be astronauts, just two weeks after applications opened.

The mission, a private venture by the Dutch non-profit organization Mars One, aims to send a crew to the Red Planet in 2022 – and, due to the physiological change in the human body after a stay on Mars, there’d be no coming back. That hasn’t deterred people, though: so far, over 78,000 people have applied to become one of Mars’ first immigrants (the company is expecting 500,000 applicants by the time applications close on August 31). “This is turning out to be the most desired job in history,” says Bas Lansdorp, co-founder of Mars One.

(MORE: Asteroid in a Bag: NASA’s Long, Strange Trip) 

Day-to-day life on Mars will be no picnic: The organization says that the daily routine on the planet would involve construction work on the colony (installing greenhouses, for example), maintenance of the settlement’s systems and research into Mars’ climate and geological history–all in an inhospitable environment with unbreathable air and an average temperature in the planet’s mid-latitudes of around -58 degrees Farenheit.

But Mars One says it is not looking for applicants with specific skills, such as a science degree, that might be useful during an interplanetary posting. Instead, they are looking for people who “have a deep sense of purpose, willingness to build and maintain healthy relationships, the capacity for self-reflection and ability to trust.” They also want volunteers who are “resilient, adaptable, curious, creative and resourceful.” Candidates will receive a minimum of eight years training before leaving Earth, the company says.

(MORE: Dirt Found on Mars! Why the Red Planet Makes Us Crazy)

“Gone are the days when bravery and the number of hours flying a supersonic jet were the top criteria for selection. Now, we are more concerned with how well each astronaut works and lives with the others–and for a lifetime of challenges ahead,” said Norbert Kraft, a former Senior Research Associate at NASA and Chief Medical Director for Mars One in a statement published on Mars One’s website.

Candidates hailing from over 120 countries (although the vast majority are from the U.S.) uploaded a video to Mars One’s website explaining why they’re suitable for the mission. Kyle, a 21-year-old grocery store clerk from the U.S., says he wants to be “an explorer and pioneer at the forefront of history.” Steven, a 43-year-old American who works in electronics, has even higher hopes for the mission: “I would like to go to Mars… to discover new life,” he says.

In addition to people skills, successful applicants must be good fundraisers too: Mars One plans to raise much of the mission’s $6 billion estimated cost through a reality TV show following the applicants as they undergo preparations for the one-way trip to Mars. They’ve got a little way to go yet, though: as of April 29, the money raised through donations and merchandise stood at $84,121.

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/05/09/78000-people-apply-for-one-way-trip-to-mars/#ixzz2Soc185i8

Hundreds of Chinese sign up to travel to Mars

ITN

Giant Mars crater shows evidence of ancient lake

By Charles Q. Choi

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Ariz.

This false-color view of the floor of McLaughlin Crater shows sedimentary rocks that contain spectroscopic evidence for minerals formed through interaction with water. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recorded the image.

New photos of a huge crater on Mars suggest water may lurk in crevices under the planet's surface, hinting that life might have once lived there, and raising the possibility that it may live there still, researchers say. 

Future research looking into the chances of life on Mars could shed light on the origins of life on Earth, scientists added.

The discovery came from a study of images by NASA's powerful Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that revealed new evidence of a wet underground environment on the Red Planet. The images focused on the giant McLaughlin Crater, which is about 57 miles (92 kilometers) wide and so deep that underground water appears to have flowed into the crater at some point in the distant past.

Today, the crater is bone-dry but harbors clay minerals and other evidence that liquid water filled the area in the ancient past.

"Taken together, the observations in McLaughlin Crater provide the best evidence for carbonate forming within a lake environment instead of being washed into a crater from outside," study lead author Joseph Michalski, of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., and London's Natural History Museum, said in a statement. 

Keep reading on  Space >>

Curiosity rover finds organic compounds, but are they from Mars?

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

By Alan Boyle

Although NASA's Curiosity rover hasn't yet confirmed the detection of organic compounds on Mars, it's already seeing that the Red Planet's soil contains water and more complex chemicals — including signs of an intriguing compound called perchlorate.

The first soil sample analysis from Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars lab, or SAM, was the leadoff topic today at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in San Francisco. The findings were eagerly awaited because of rumors that the Curiosity team was on the verge of announcing major findings — and although NASA tamped down expectations, the scientists said they were overjoyed with the first round of analysis.

"We really consider this a terrific milestone," Paul Mahaffy, a NASA researcher who is SAM's lead scientist, said at the AGU briefing.

Mahaffy said in a statement issued by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that "we have no definitive detection of Martian organics at this point, but we will keep looking in the diverse environments of Gale Crater."

Curiosity landed in Gale Crater on Aug. 5, and since then it's been studying Martian rocks, soil and atmosphere with a suite of 10 scientific instruments. Its two-year, $2.5 billion primary mission is aimed at determining whether conditions in the crater were ever conducive for microbial life.

SAM is a key tool for that mission, because it can cook Martian samples in a mini-oven and then analyze the gases that are given off to identify the compounds contained in the sample. Other instruments — including the Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument, or CheMin — were used as well to study the initial soil samples, collected over the past several weeks from a drift of windblown sand and dust called Rocknest.

This Oct. 31 view from Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI, shows two of the trenches made by the rover's 1.6-inch-wide (4-centimeter-wide) sampling scoop. The dust and sand from a dune known as Rocknest were fed into Curiosity's onboard labs for analysis.

NASA said CheMin found that the composition of the Rocknest samples was similar to that of soil analyzed by other Mars rovers such as Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity — about half common volcanic minerals, and half non-crystalline minerals such as glass. SAM identified other ingredients in much lower concentrations, including water molecules that were apparently bound to the grains of sand and dust. Although the water wouldn't be enough to support any sort of life, the concentration was higher than expected.

SAM also identified a type of perchlorate, a compound that includes oxygen and chlorine. Perchlorate, which was also found by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander in 2008, is considered a toxic substance and used as an ingredient in rocket fuel on Earth. But scientists say the compound could conceivably serve as an energy source for hardy microbes on Mars. Mahaffy said the particular type of compound detected by Curiosity appeared to be calcium perchlorate, but "we have to study that further."

Reactions with other chemicals in SAM's oven formed chlorinated methane compounds, which geologists consider organic chemicals because they contain carbon and hydrogen. Mahaffy said it was most likely that the chlorine came from a perchlorate-like compound in the soil. However, he said it wasn't yet clear whether the tiny amount of carbon in the compounds came from the Martian soil or was actually brought to Mars from Earth by Curiosity itself.

"We have to be very careful to make sure both the carbon and the chlorine are coming from Mars," he told reporters. More >>

2023: Pioneer wants 80,000 of us to colonize Mars

By Rob Coppinger

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip.

In Musk's vision, the ambitious Mars settlement program would start with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people, who would journey to the Red Planet aboard a huge reusable rocket powered by liquid oxygen and methane.

"At Mars, you can start a self-sustaining civilization and grow it into something really big," Musk told an audience at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London on Nov. 16. Musk was there to talk about his business plans, and to receive the society’s gold medal for his contribution to the commercialization of space.

Mars pioneers Accompanying the founders of the new Mars colony would be large amounts of equipment, including machines to produce fertilizer, methane and oxygen from Mars’ atmospheric nitrogen and carbon dioxide and the planet's subsurface water ice.

The Red Planet pioneers would also take construction materials to build transparent domes, which when pressurized with Mars’ atmospheric CO2 could grow Earth crops in Martian soil. As the Mars colony became more self sufficient, the big rocket would start to transport more people and fewer supplies and equipment. [Future Visions of Human Spaceflight]

Musk’s architecture for this human Mars exploration effort does not employ cyclers, reusable spacecraft that would travel back and forth constantly between the Red Planet and Earth — at least not at first

"Probably not a Mars cycler; the thing with the cyclers is, you need a lot of them," Musk told Space.com. "You have to have propellant to keep things aligned as (Mars and Earth’s) orbits aren’t (always) in the same plane. In the beginning you won’t have cyclers."

Musk also ruled out SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which the company is developing to ferry astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit, as the spacecraft that would land colonists on the Red Planet. When asked by Space.com what vehicle would be used, he said, "I think you just land the entire thing."

Asked if the "entire thing" is the huge new reusable rocket — which is rumored to bear the acronymic name MCT, short for Mass Cargo Transport or Mars Colony Transport — Musk said, "Maybe."

Musk has been thinking about what his colonist-carrying spacecraft would need, whatever it ends up being. He reckons the oxygen concentration inside should be 30 to 40 percent, and he envisions using the spacecraft’s liquid water store as a barrier between the Mars pioneers and the sun. More >>

Water on Mars? NASA finds evidence of once-flowing river

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Mars rover targets a rock called Jake

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NASA Launches Super-size Rover to Mars

Paisajes de Marte a través de los ojos de un robot