Starry Skies Network

In honor of science-fiction legend Ray Bradbury’s passing, here’s a totally non-fictional Martian chronicle: a picture of two craters on the Red Planet that record how the climate has changed over the course of billions of years.

Ice within lava tubes on Earth can host bacteria in cold, Mars-like conditions, hinting that life could dwell in similar lava tubes on Mars, researchers say.

Planetary scientists may soon get the dirt on a Martian moon—literally. A Russian spacecraft will soon depart for Phobos, the larger of Mars’s two tiny moons. It will attempt to land there, scoop up some soil and return it to Earth for analysis. The spacecraft, called Phobos-Grunt, launches as soon as November 8th.

Western Australian scientists, high school teachers and students have joined NASA researchers on a trip to the Pilbara region to learn more about the planet Mars.
The trip is part of NASA’s Spaceward Bound Program aimed at creating the next generation of space explorers.

NASA scientists are seeing new evidence that suggests traces of water on Mars are under a thin varnish of iron oxide, or rust, similar to conditions found on desert rocks in California’s Mojave Desert.

Mars developed in as little as two to four million years after the birth of the Solar System – far more quickly than the Earth – according to measurements of different isotopes in Martian meteorites.

A physicist and Medford graduate is drawing national attention over his controversial new theory that life on Mars was wiped out some 180 million years ago by a naturally occurring nuclear explosion.

NASA scientists and others think business corporations could bankroll a human mission to Mars. This raises the prospect that a spaceship named the Microsoft Explorer or the Google Search Engine could go down in history as the first spaceship to bring humans to the red planet.

WE HUMANS have a unique talent for contaminating pristine environments. We put millions of tonnes of pollutants into the atmosphere every year. We poison our soils, lakes, rivers and streams with chemical and radioactive waste. We spill oil into our seas. We fill the Pacific and Atlantic oceans with islands of plastic garbage visible from space. Is it any surprise that we are also contaminating pristine celestial bodies with bacterial spores?

Get out those 3-D glasses — the ones with red and blue lenses stuffed into the junk drawer — and check out this view of a Martian crater made by NASA’s Opportunity rover. The crater, informally named “Santa Maria,” is almost the length of a football field (295 feet) in diameter.

Instruments designed by a UT Dallas professor to measure atmospheric components on the surface of Mars have uncovered important clues about the planet’s atmosphere and climate history.

Mars was once rich in carbon dioxide – hinting that the Red Planet once harboured life. Widespread deposits of carbonate rock are buried a few miles beneath the surface, according to new research.

The strange disappearance of carbon dioxide ice in early martian spring followed by its sudden reappearance is explained by the planet’s very active water cycle, and strong winds, say scientists presenting their findings at the European Planetary Science Congress this week.

With the Space Age came the opportunity to see these objects at closer range, and a succession of spacecraft (beginning with Mariner 9 in 1971) has revealed Deimos and especially Phobos with ever-greater detail. Some particularly dramatic views have come from the HiRISE camera aboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Toss out that image of a Martian surface formed by spewing geysers and then encased in ice for a billion years.

Martian soil could contain the building blocks of carbon-based life after all, a new study suggests, despite the negative results of an analysis performed by the Viking missions 34 years ago.

Hundreds of stunning new close-ups of the surface of Mars reveal a vast array of volcanic cones and pock-marked plains — and a newly made crater with ice at its bottom.

Experiments prompted by a 2008 surprise from NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander suggest that soil examined by NASA’s Viking Mars landers in 1976 may have contained carbon-based chemical building blocks of life.