Curiosity searches for evidence of life

from NASA
Rover Finds Old Streambed on Martian Surface

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Curiosity rover mission has found evidence a stream once ran vigorously across the area on Mars where the rover is driving. There is earlier evidence for the presence of water on Mars, but this evidence -- images of rocks containing ancient streambed gravels -- is the first of its kind.
Scientists are studying the images of stones cemented into a layer of conglomerate rock. The sizes and shapes of stones offer clues to the speed and distance of a long-ago stream's flow.
"From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep," said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. "Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them. This is the first time we're actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it."

FIREBALL!

This text is taken from BAA e-bulletin 698 written by John Mason.

Hundreds of eyewitness reports are coming in of a brilliant fragmenting fireball, visible at about 22:55 BST (21:55 UT) on Friday, 21st September2012. This is clearly one of the most dramatic events reported to the BAA Meteor Section in recent years.

On Friday evening, there was scattered and more continuous cloud cover over much of South-East England, but the rest of the UK and Ireland were largely very clear, with transparent starry skies. This, coupled with the fact that many people were out on a Friday evening and the truly spectacular nature of the fireball itself, are clearly the main factors in it being reported by so many thousands of people over such a very wide area. This extends northwards and westwards from a line roughly linking Norfolk in the East to Devon in the South-West, with the majority of sightings so far received coming from Wales, the North-West, Central and North of England, Scotland and much of Ireland.

When first seen the fireball appeared as a single very brilliant object but it then fragmented into a very large number of bright secondary fireballs, all travelling along roughly parallel paths across the sky.

One highly unusual feature of this fireball is the length of time for which it was visible due to its apparent very slow speed of movement across the sky.  This has led some people to speculate that the fireball was due to the re-entry of a large fragment of space debris.  However, there are several aspects of the event, at this very early phase of the investigation, that do not appear to fit with this hypothesis and it would be unwise to rule out other possibilities at this stage.

More details here.

Visit NASA

Would you like to win a trip to NASA’s Lyndon. B. Johnson Space Center in America? The UK Space Design Competition gives you and your friends the opportunity to do just that! The UK Space Design Competition is an industry simulation experience open to all current secondary school students in the United Kingdom. We’re gearing up towards the 2013 competition which will take place at Imperial College London on the weekend of 23-24 March 2013.

Visit www.uksdc.org for more information.

Waning Cresent

Welcome back to school and hello new astronomy students. What a summer of astronomy. We were really sad to lose two pioneers. Firstly Sir Bernard Lovell, who died aged 98, was the leader of the team that built the Jodrell Bank telescope in Cheshire, at one time the largest steerable radiotelescope in the world.

Secondly we said goodbye to Neil Armstrong, the US astronaut secured his place in history on 20 July 1969, when, as commander of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, he was the first man to set foot on the moon, and made his famous statement: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

On a much brighter note the Mars Science Laboratory landed safely on Mars and the Curiosity Rover quickly sent back amazing HD images of the surface of Mars. The rover has ten different scientific instruments to analyse the surface of Mars and search for evidence of life.

We excitedly await further discoveries. At the distance of 56 million km (perigee) or 249 million km (apogee) away, these images and experiments are all the more extraordinary. I'm sure Sir Bernard and Neil would be astounded at the rapid pace of space exploration.

And don't forget - wink at Neil next time you look at the Moon!