Last Day For Registration on Mars One Mission!

The final day has come for Indians and people around the world to apply for a one-way trip to Mars and never return to Earth for the rest of their lives.

The Mars One Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation that will establish a permanent human settlement on Mars in 2023. Till now, more than 1,65,000 people across the world and over 8,000 Indians have applied to become the lucky few to live on the planet for the rest of their lives.

Vinod Kotiya of Bhopal is one of the 'wannabe astrounauts' to have applied for Mars One mission.

The 31-year-old says, "It is my childhood dream of becoming an astronaut. I even cleared the Pilot Aptitude Battery Test for Indian Air Force but could not make it. Mars One is a surprise opportunity for me to have another go at my dream."

However, Kotiya had not informed his wife about his plan to visit Mars on a one way trip and never return. He says, "While uploading my profile on the site, I did not tell anyone, not even my wife. Initially, she thought it was a joke but later when things got serious, she threatened to lay in front of the space craft at the time of launching."

Kotiya feels that it is destiny to go to Mars and would like the opportunity to conduct experiments and study the red planet for the sake of science and humanity but won't abandon his family and would like to return someday.

He says, "I want to tell them that I am going to live on other planet in a different way as I live here. I hope that technology will evolve someday to get me back to earth. I will do everything to take care of my family."

Amulya Nidhi Rastogi, a 20-year-old mechanical engineer from Gurgaon, is one of the 8,000 applicants, who wishes to travel to Mars on a one-way trip to Mars with a hope of fulfilling the purpose of his life. He says, "Every human comes into this world with a purpose. I feel living on Mars is mine."

The Delhi-born lad is confident that if selected, he won't have to prepare himself as he feels that he has the patience and the mental stability required for it.

However, Amulya won't stop chasing his dream if not selected in the programme. "I’m doing my Bachelor’s while preparing for Mars One. In 2015, if everything goes as planned, I’ll have a Bachelor’s degree and I’ll be a Mars One Astronaut. But in case, I fail to make it to Mars One, I’ll continue with my Masters and PhD. After completing those degrees, I will try to become an astronaut for NASA, ESA, ISRO or some other space agency and then travel to Mars. Mars is the goal."

In April 2013, the Astronaut Selection Programme was launched in New York and Shanghai. Round 1 is an online application open to all nationalities. The selection programme proceeds with three additional rounds over the course of two years.

At the end of it around six teams of four individuals are selected for training. A new batch of the Astronaut Selection Programme begins every year to replenish the training pool regularly.

An analogue of the Mars habitat is to be constructed on Earth for technology testing and training purposes.

With just hours left before the registration ends, people around the world are waiting for their names to be short listed for the first-of-its-kind expedition.

Anyone above 18 years can enter the programme at http://www.mars-one.com/en/

Shared From DNA India

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- Unknown Updated at: Monday, September 02, 2013

Science : Rover Completes 1 Year At Mars

On the first anniversary of its landing, halfway through its primary mission to Mars, NASA's Curiosity rover still has a long way to go.

On the first anniversary of its landing, halfway through its primary mission to Mars, NASA's Curiosity rover still has a long way to go.

To be exact, 4.4 miles. That is the distance to the foothills of Mount Sharp, an 18,000-foot mountain whose rocks could provide clues to a time on Mars when life could have thrived.

Because Curiosity is driving at a careful pace - up to 100 yards a day - the journey will take eight or nine months.

For now, science is secondary as Curiosity crawls across a barren, largely uninteresting landscape. "Pretty much pure driving, pedal to the metal," said John P. Grotzinger, the mission's project scientist.

An interactive feature at nytimes.com/science offers a chronology of where Curiosity has been and what it has done so far; new images and information will be added as the rover progresses.

According to NASA, Curiosity has already traveled more than a mile, taken more than 36,700 images and fired 75,000 laser shots to analyze rocks and soil.

The first day - or sol, the term for a Martian day, which is about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth - began in the early morning of Aug. 6, 2012. (At mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., it was late Aug. 5.) The spacecraft carrying Curiosity pierced the top of the Martian atmosphere at more than 13,000 miles per hour.

In precisely choreographed maneuvers so risky that NASA called them "seven minutes of terror," Curiosity was dropped to an undamaged standstill on the surface.

The rover, roughly the size of a car, ended up right where it had been aimed - within Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide scar from an asteroid impact at least 3.5 billion years ago. In that time layers of sediment filled much of the crater, which were then somehow carved away, leaving Mount Sharp at the center...

Read Full Story @ NDTV

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- Unknown Updated at: Wednesday, August 07, 2013

Science : UK Teams Design Human Mission To Mars!

Scientists at Imperial College London have designed a concept mission to land astronauts on Mars.

The plan envisages a three-person crew journeying to Mars aboard a small two-part craft.

The craft would rotate to generate artificial gravity and use a heat shield to protect itself against solar flares.

The crew would then return to Martian orbit in a pre-sent craft fuelled using ice from beneath the planet's surface.

The concept, developed in conjunction with the BBC, is intended to spark further debate about the technical obstacles and risks that would have to be overcome in order to put humans on Mars.

"Every part of this mission scenario has been demonstrated one way or the other, including the in situ propellant production on the surface of Mars," said Prof Tom Pike, who led the Imperial design team.

"There are big, big jumps between a demonstration at one level and putting together the engineering systems for a mission, but they are engineering challenges. They are not fundamentally about making new discoveries."

The new Imperial concept comes amid renewed interest in the Red Planet with two private groups having proposed missions in recent months.

The Imperial team have designed a two-part craft, consisting of a Martian lander with a heat shield, inside which the crew would also ascend into Earth orbit....

Read Full Story @ BBC Science

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- Unknown Updated at: Thursday, July 25, 2013

Science : India's Mars Mission - not for pride, but business

As India prepares to launch its Rs. 450 crore mission to Mars this year, a top space official said the country’s first martian odyssey — that has attracted some criticism — is not just for pride but for undertaking “meaningful research”.

K. Radhakrishnan, Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), also debunked perception in some quarters that the Mars Orbiter mission around the red planet, that’s just three months away, is primarily a “feel-good” package to just pat ourselves on the back.

“It’s not for pride because the exploration of Mars has its own scientific value and possibly a future habitat which people are talking about...may be 20 years...30 years from now...it’s possible”, he said in an interview, referring to the colonisation angle.

India will be the sixth country to launch a mission to Mars after the U.S., Russia, Europe, Japan and China.

ISRO says the primary objectives are to demonstrate India’s technological capability to send a satellite to orbit around Mars and conduct meaningful experiments such as looking for signs of life, take pictures of the red planet and study Martian environment.

“What’s the most interesting question on Mars? Life. So, we talk about Methane...which is of biological origin or geological origin. So, we have a methane sensor plus a thermal infrared spectrometer. These two together should be able to give some information”, said Mr. Radhakrishnan, who is also Secretary in the Department of Space.

Critics of the Indian Mars mission wondered whether the country can afford huge costs for this space voyage.

The Mars satellite, which would be launched on board Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-XL), will carry compact science experiments, totalling a mass of 15 kg. There will be five instruments to study Martian surface, atmosphere and mineralogy.

After leaving earth orbit in November, the spacecraft will cruise in deep space for 10 months using its own propulsion system and will reach Mars (Martian transfer trajectory) in September 2014.

The 1350 kg spacecraft subsequently is planned to enter into a 372 km by 80,000 km elliptical orbit around Mars.

“We want to look at environment of Mars for various elements like Deuterium-Hydrogen ratio. We also want to look at other constituents — neutral constituents”, Mr. Radhakrishnan said.

“There are several things which Mars will tells us, this is what the scientific community thinks about the life on Mars”, he said, adding that scientists started taking interest on Mars from the 18th century onwards.

“Our (Mars mission) experiments are planned in such a way that you can decide when you want to put on each of these systems”, Mr. Radhakrishnan said.

“If we succeed (in the mission), it positions India into group of countries who will have the ability to look at Mars.

In future, certainly, there will be synergy between various countries in such exploration. That’s taking place. That time India will be a country to be counted”, he said...

Read Full Story @ The Hindu

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- Unknown Updated at: Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Science : Curiosity suspects a massive collision killed Mars

Dual tests by instruments on the Curiosity rover, combined with data from the first Viking probes and Mars meteorites that have fallen to Earth, suggests that the Red Planet lost its atmosphere within the first billion years of its history, according to two papers in the latest issue of Science.

Curiosity's tunable laser spectrometer and quadrupole mass spectrometer, which make up part of Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) laboratory, took separate readings of the Martian atmosphere to sort out the elements and measure the pattern of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen isotopes, the papers report.

"As atmosphere was lost, the signature of the process was embedded in the isotopic ratio," said Paul Mahaffy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the principal investigator for SAM and lead author of one of the two papers about Curiosity.

The results were compared with the very crude readings taken from the 1976 Viking probes and with analysis of the isotope variation found in meteorites that have been blasted off Mars by eruptions or impacts. The new data fits current climate models, and NASA says it's confident about the results.

"Getting the same result with two very different techniques increased our confidence that there's no unknown systematic error underlying the measurements," said Chris Webster of the lead investigator behind the tunable laser spectrometer. "The accuracy in these new measurements improves the basis for understanding the atmosphere's history."

Taken together, the data suggests that the atmosphere was lost from the top down, rather than by the interaction of the atmosphere with the Martian surface. This loss appears to have occurred before Mars made it to 10 figures-worth of birthdays, and has left it fairly barren place ever since...

Read More @ The Register

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- Unknown Updated at: Friday, July 19, 2013