Articles by "Mars"
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NASA's Peculiarity wanderer recently began autonomously choosing some of the targets for its ChemCam instrument. The car-size robotic rover exploring Gale Crater 'Curiosity' itinerant recently began autonomously choosing some of the targets for its ChemCam instrument which crack Martian rocks or soil with a laser and analyses the composition of the resulting vapor. NASA Scientists still selects most ChemCam targets after peruse over images captured by the drifter. And Curiosity's increased independence comes in useful. This autarchy is particularly useful at times when getting the science team in the kink is difficult or impossible in the middle of a long drive, perhaps or when the schedules of Earth, Mars and spacecraft activities lead to delays in sharing information between the planets, robotics engineer of NASA said in a statement.


To select a target autonomously the software's analysis of images uses variable basis specified by scientists, such as identifying rocks based on their brightness  or size, NASA officials said. The criteria can be changed depending on the rover's surroundings and the scientific goals of the measurements. ChemCam sits a top Curiosity's head-like mast. The instrument can investigate the composition of a target that is up to 23 feet (7 meters) away from the rover. Using a suite of different instruments the rover quickly found evidence that Gale was a potentially habitable lake and stream system billions of years ago. During the four years on Mars, Curiosity has used ChemCam to analyse more than 1,400 targets, firing off more than 350,000 laser blasts in the process, NASA officials said.

© Edited by Taaza Vaartha
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It's simply amazing - first they claimed that they found a helmet, then a rat and a woman, and now, well, the Buddha, himself, has been spotted on the Red Planet. 


UFO Sightings Daily, involved in researching on aliens, claimed to have seen a giant statue of Gautam Buddha on Mars. In the statue, as described by ufosightingsdaily.com, face and head are turned towards right and the chest and stomach are plump. The shoulders too are distinctly visible. According to the site, the red planet is full of relics and artifacts and signals that ‘intelligent life’ existed there. 

UFO Sightings Daily also claims that Martians knew all about religion and believed in life after death. Whether the statute is just a rock formation or real Buddha idol, it is definitely not clear by the pictures but yes, the news has surely excited many. This news about a Martian God statue on the Red Planet certainly tops the list of exciting space news this week.
  
"Due to the poor quality of this NASA image, we have to rebuild it, using colorization techniques and a little artistic license. It would appear ... that Mars did, indeed, have an advanced culture, a culture intelligent enough to create monuments of their kings or gods," according to Paranormal Crucible.


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For years, scientists have known that Mars has ice locked away within its rusty exterior. More elusive, though, is figuring out how much of that water is actually sloshing around in liquid form. Now, NASA scientists have found compelling evidence that liquid water—life-giving, gloriously wet H 20—exists on Mars.

We’re not talking gushing rivers or oceans here. These scientists have been investigating “recurring slope lineae,” patches of precipitated salt that appear to dribble down Mars’ steep slopes like tears rolling gently down a cheek. Planetary scientists hypothesized that the streaky formations were products of the flow of water, but they didn’t have concrete, mineralogical evidence for that idea until now, says Lujendra Ojha, a scientist at Georgia Tech who first spotted the lineae back in 2010. In a new Nature Geoscience paper, published online today, Ojha and his colleagues present “smoking gun validation” that it was liquid water flowing on Mars’ surface that formed these tear stains.

Ojha and his team have watched these lineae form every Martian summer, growing wider week after week until they slowly fade come winter—exactly the times and places where conditions are right for liquid water to exist on Mars. Plus, the surface is crusted with salt, which could help stabilize liquid water so it doesn’t boil or freeze.

Ojha notes that they haven’t actually observed water flowing on Mars. The team took their data from the CRISM instrument on the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter, which, frustratingly, only observes the surface every day at 3 pm. That’s when Mars is at its hottest and driest, so any liquid water oozing on the surface would have long since evaporated by the time MRO laid eyes on it.

Still, the water left a distinctive chemical trace. “Whatever is flowing on Mars is hydrating the salt,” Ojha says, “and we’re seeing that hydration in the spectral signature.” After extracting spectral information from pixels of the CRISM instrument’s data, Ojha and his team determined that the salts—magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate, and sodium perchlorate—had water molecules interspersed in their crystal structures. That’s pretty strong evidence that they were deposited by flowing water.

The team doesn’t know where the water is coming from, or how much of it there is yet. “That’s the big mystery right now,” Ojha says. They have ideas, though: Maybe the ice inside Mars is melting and percolating out, or maybe a subterranean network of aquifers is feeding water to the surface. Right now, NASA’s favorite explanation is deliquescence, in which the salts grab moisture from Mars’ atmosphere to create liquid water.

Either way, this is exciting evidence that Mars could potentially support life—including human life, if Earthlings ever figure out how to colonize the place. NASA is already thinking up potential uses for the water in a future settlement: Scientists could use the hydrogen and oxygen in H2O to make rocket fuel, or water plants in greenhouses, or keep colonists hydrated (important). “The resources are there,” says John Grunsfeld, a science mission administrator at NASA.

Plus, now that they know Mars has liquid water, scientists can narrow down the best places to look for life and direct their next rover, scheduled for 2020, to collect samples at those places. Which, in the long term, will get scientists closer to finally figuring out if life exists on other planets.

This story has been updated to include information from a NASA press conference.

Source @ wired
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