pure roon

I just saw this on the Mars Phoenix Lander’s Twitter page:

Are you ready to celebrate?  Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars!  w00t!!!  Best day ever!!

Followed by:

Whoohoo! Was keeping my eye on some chunks of bright stuff & they disappeared! Sublimated!  So it can’t be salt, it’s ice:

The Mars Lander was having a little dig when it discovered some ‘dice sized’ bright substance, over the few days that followed the the substance appeared to vaporise indicatiting that it couldn’t be salt.

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I don’t know what I am more excited about, Water on Mars or that Nasa Scientists shout Woot!

Toot!

There seems to be a never-ending flow of stunning images coming from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). In today’s high-resolution look at the Martian surface, large flat-topped hills (a.k.a. mesas) can be seen to be eroded by the Mars winds, stripping them of their material, creating sand dunes downwind. An incredible sight, it shows just how dynamic and powerful the Martian winds really are…

Original Post from Universe Today

I am continually being blown away by the images coming from the HiRISE project and Mars. These sand dunes and errosion patterns are quite spooky in a way, but well worth a look!

Original Post on Universe Today

This is an absolutely fantastic photo, the earth and moon are being viewed from Mars at an angle 90 degrees to the earth from the Sun. You can quite clearly see the Pacific coast of South America and the bulk of North America above it. The detail in the clouds is pretty good too!

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The image to the left shows the context of where these avalanches occurred, with white boxes indicating the locations of the more detailed image portions shown to the right (all images are false color). Material, likely including fine-grained ice and dust and possibly including large blocks, has detached from a towering cliff and cascaded to the gentler slopes below. The occurrence of the avalanches is spectacularly revealed by the accompanying clouds of fine material that continue to settle out of the air. The largest cloud (upper images) traces the path of the debris as it fell down the slope, hit the lower slope, and continues downhill, forming a billowing cloud front. This cloud is about 180 meters (590 feet) across and extends about 190 m (625 ft) from the base of the steep cliff. Shadows to the lower left of each cloud illustrate further that these are three dimensional features hanging in the air in front of the cliff face, and not markings on the ground (sun is from the upper right).

This is pretty impressive. Actually seeing an avalanche as it happens in such detail on another planet!

The white snow like substance on the left at the top of the enourmous 700m sheer cliff is actually carbon dioxide frost. HiRISE claim that either a mars-quake or a meterite triggered the avalanche.

This image is part of 9.9 Terabytes worth of imagery recently returned from Mars

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One of the biggest questions in astronomy today is, are there any other Earths out there, and if so, how many?

We know that there are over 100 billion stars in the galaxy, and that a lot of them have planets. But we’re still groping round trying to nail down the frequency of planets, and how many are rocky bodies like Earth (as opposed to gas giants like Saturn and Jupiter).

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A new study using the Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed that planets like Earth may be common! The procedure was actually rather simple. They looked at over 300 sun-like stars, and grouped them by ages (very young, young, middle aged, etc). They then used Spitzer to look for the presence of dust around the stars; dust glows in the infrared when warm, and the temperature (and thus the distance of the dust from the star) can be found.

Given the number of solar systems in our universe the probability of the existence of another earth like planet, has to be nearly 1. However until now this is just theory. This could be quite an exciting step forward to finding other sources of life in our universe.