Muslims have been warned in a Fatwa not to go and live on Mars because it would pose "a real risk to life", according to a Dubai news organisation. The General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment (GAIAE) in the United Arab Emirates said that anyone making such a "hazardous trip" is likely to die for "no righteous reason". They would therefore be liable to a "punishment similar to that of suicide in the Hereafter", the Khaleej Times reported. The Fatwa was apparently issued in response to the proposal from the Dutch company Mars One last year to send four people on a one-way journey to the red planet in 2022.

"Such a one-way journey poses a real risk to life, and that can never be justified in Islam," the committee said. "There is a possibility that an individual who travels to planet Mars may not be able to remain alive there, and is more vulnerable to death." "Protecting life against all possible dangers and keeping it safe is an issue agreed upon by all religions and is clearly stipulated in verse 4/29 of the Holy Koran: Do not kill yourselves or one another. Indeed, Allah is to you ever Merciful," the committee, chaired by Professor Dr Farooq Hamada, said. Over 200,000 people have applied to be civilian-astronauts on the Mars One mission. Experts have questioned both the financial and practical viability of the mission. The Mars One website states: "It is Mars One's goal to establish a human settlement on Mars. Human settlement of Mars is the next giant leap for humankind. "Exploring the solar system as a united humanity will bring us all closer together. Mars is the stepping stone of the human race on its voyage into the universe."

Source: The Telegraph

No Meteorite Behind 'Jelly Doughnut' Mars Rock, Pictures Show.

New photos of the Martian landscape further rule out a meteorite impact as the culprit behind the "jelly doughnut" rock that mysteriously appeared in front of one of NASA's Mars rovers last month.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped pictures as it flew above the Opportunity rover on Feb. 14, and this week, the space agency released a photo from that flyover campaign. In a view that covers a patch about 0.25 miles (0.4 kilometers) wide, Opportunity looks like a speck and some of the rover's faint tracks are visible, but there are no new impact craters in sight, NASA officials say.

A fresh meteorite scar might have explained how a rock got tossed in front of Opportunity last month. The rock was dubbed "Pinnacle Island," and Steve Squyres, the rover's lead scientist at Cornell University, had noted its resemblance to a jelly doughnut. The strange feature materialized in Opportunity's field of view on Jan. 8, and it was absent in pictures of the same place just days before.

NASA scientists had already concluded that the rock was most likely kicked up by one of Opportunity's wheels. Using further observations from the rover, researchers said they could trace where the rock had been struck, cracked and moved.

But that conclusion hasn't stopped fringe theories from cropping up. One person has even filed a lawsuit against the space agency, alleging that NASA has failed to properly investigate what is likely a mushroom-like fungus growing on the Red Planet.

Opportunity, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary on Mars, is now exploring Murray Ridge, a spot on the western wall of Endeavour Crater, which spans about 14 miles (22 km) in diameter. With the Pinnacle Island enigma behind it, Opportunity is being steered uphill to check out exposed rock layers on the slope of the ridge.

Source: Space.com

(VIDEO) Uh, what the hell are these v-shaped formations doing on Mars?

These objects are startlingly reminiscent of Star Trek's Federation insignia — but they're geological features inside a large crater on Mars. It's a phenomenon, says NASA, that also explains why migratory birds fly in a v-shaped formation.

Believe it or not, but these are sand dunes, and they're on the surface of a crater near Mawrth Vallis.

It's the same "V" formation that significantly boosts the efficiency and range of flying birds. It happens because all the birds, except the lead bird, fly within the upward motion of air (called upwash) from the wingtip vortices of the bird ahead. But in the case of dune fields, the spacing of each individual dune is dependant on sand supply, wind speed, and topography.

Source: io9

Scientists ‘freeze’ light for an entire minute.

In what could prove to be a major breakthrough in quantum memory storage and information processing, German researchers have frozen the fastest thing in the universe: light. And they did so for a record-breaking one minute.

It sounds weird and it is. The reason for wanting to hold light in its place (aside from the sheer awesomeness of it) is to ensure that it retains its quantum coherence properties (i.e. its information state), thus making it possible to build light-based quantum memory. And the longer that light can be held, the better as far as computation is concerned. Accordingly, it could allow for more secure quantum communications over longer distances.

Needless to say, halting light is not easy — you can’t just put in the freezer. Light is electromagnetic radiation that moves at 300 million meters per second. Over the course of a one minute span, it can travel about 11 million miles (18 million km), or 20 round trips to the moon. So it’s a rather wily and slippery medium, to say the least.

But light can be slowed down and even halted altogether. And in fact, researchers once kept it still for 16 seconds by using cold atoms.

For this particular experiment, researcher Georg Heinze and his team converted light coherence into atomic coherences. They did so by using a quantum interference effect that makes an opaque medium — in this case a crystal — transparent over a narrow range of light spectra (a process called electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT)). The researchers shot a laser through this crystal (a source of light), which sent its atoms into a quantum superposition of two states. A second beam then switched off the first laser, and as a consequence, the transparency. Thus, the researchers collapsed the superposition — and trapped the second laser beam inside.

And they proved the accomplishment by storing — and then successfully retrieving — information in the form of a 100-micrometer-long picture with three horizontal stripes on it.

“The result outperforms earlier demonstrations in atomic gases by about six orders of magnitude and offers exciting possibilities of long-storage-time quantum memories that are spatially multiplexed, i.e., can store different quantum bits as different pixels,” notes physicist Hugues de Riedmatten in an associated Physics Review article.

In future, the researchers will try to use different substances to increase the duration of information storage even further.

Read the entire study at Physical Review Letters: “Stopped Light and Image Storage by Electromagnetically Induced Transparency up to the Regime of One Minute.”

The mammoth asteroid set to fly by Earth last night just disappeared.

Last night, a giant asteroid was supposed to streak by the Earth, close enough for us to catch a glimpse as it zipped by. Except it never showed, and now astronomers say they have no idea just where the 900-foot asteroid has gone.

So, just how does one misplace an asteroid the size of three football fields? The most likely explanation is that its orbit was miscalculated. Even with its current whereabouts unknown, the near earth asteroid poses no present danger to Earth — in fact, if anything, its loss indicates that 2000 EM26 is probably further out in space that was originally thought.

Still, the Slooh observatory is trying to track down the asteroid using robotic telescopes, and has also asked amateur astronomers to help out with the search. "We don't have the authority to name the asteroid after [its finders]," the observatory said, "but we would if we could."

Of course, if the incentive of not having an asteroid named after you fails to motivate, there's also the added plus of knowing just where the giant space rock that was set to hurtle by our atmosphere has gotten off to. I know I'd probably sleep better.

Source: io9

New evidence for ancient ocean on Mars

Did a vast ocean once cover Mars' northern plains? The idea has been hotly debated among scientists for the past 20 years, ever since Viking Orbiter images revealed possible ancient shorelines near the pole. Later findings even suggested that the primordial ocean—dubbed Oceanus Borealis—could have covered a third of the planet.

But even if the evidence has mounted steadily, fostering our hopes of finding signs of past life on the Red Planet, the case for an ancient Martian ocean remains unsettled.

Now a new study by Lorena Moscardelli, a geologist at the University of Texas, Austin, puts forward yet another line of evidence.

Today, large fields of boulder-size rocks blanket parts of Mars' northern plains. By pointing to analogue geological features on our Earth, Moscardelli suggests that the boulders were delivered to their current locations by catastrophic underwater landslides—bolstering evidence for an ancient Martian ocean.

The boulders were spotted by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter a while ago. So Moscardelli is not reporting their presence as something new, but rather a new interpretation of the processes behind their origin. The paper was published this month in a journal of the Geological Society of America.

Terrestrial Analogy

In the past, geoscientists thought of ocean sediments as mostly fine-grained, floating in the water column and settling like a slow "rain" on the sea floor, Moscardelli explained. But we now know it's not the only possible scenario.

"We know that 'submarine landslides' can transport big boulders—sometimes as big as a house—for hundreds of kilometers into the deep-water of the Earth oceans," she said. "Imagine a huge landslide affecting the entire state of Texas, but happening in the ocean."

In her new study, Moscardelli documents several sites where these events have occurred on Earth, such as the Pennsylvanian Jackfork Group of south-central Arkansas; the outcrops of the Guandacol Formation in the Pangazo Basin, Argentina; or in the Santos Basin, offshore Brazil.

She even shows that these underwater events can affect huge areas, as with a massive landslide that covered thousands of square kilometers in the Barents Sea, north of Russia, about a million years ago.

Some scientists have suggested that the boulders of Mars's northern plain could be the product of meteorite impacts. But to Moscardelli, that's not a fitting theory.

"That's possible for some of the boulders, especially those found close to craters," she says. "But how do you explain boulder fields that can cover thousands of square kilometers without any impact craters around? The submarine hypothesis provides a feasible alternative."

The Case for a Martian Ocean

In the 1980s, Viking spacecraft images revealed two possible ancient shorelines near the pole, much like those found in Earth's coastal regions. But further observations showed the coastlines varied in elevation, undulating like a wave, and thus casting much doubt on the Martian ocean hypothesis. However, later studies eventually showed that the deformation could be simply explained by the movement of Mars' spin axis.

What's more, the northern plains of Mars—also called the northern lowlands—lie at a lower elevation than the southern hemisphere, much like ocean basins found on Earth.

In addition to the boulders of the northern plains, Moscardelli had previously documented other geological features which can form underwater on Earth, including teardrop-shaped islands and polygon-shaped areas.

"There are many hypothesis out there and we still need to learn a whole lot before we can be confident about which one is right or wrong," she said. "I have an informed opinion based on my technical observations, but I am cautious and humble about it because I could be wrong! That said, I think my case is a strong one."

Some of the evidence for terrestrial analogues came from 3-D seismic surveys, a tool traditionally used by the oil and gas industry. So she hopes her approach will encourage more inter-disciplinary research.

"It is amazing to see how little the planetary science and the marine geoscience communities interacts," she said. "If anything, I hope my contributions can help improve that kind of cross-pollination and cooperation."

Source: PHYS.ORG

From India, Proof That a Trip to Mars Doesn’t Have to Break the Bank

 BANGALORE, India — While India’s recent launch of a spacecraft to Mars was a remarkable feat in its own right, it is the $75 million mission’s thrifty approach to time, money and materials that is getting attention.

Just days after the launch of India’s Mangalyaan satellite, NASA sent off its own Mars mission, five years in the making, named Maven. Its cost: $671 million. The budget of India’s Mars mission, by contrast, was just three-quarters of the $100 million that Hollywood spent on last year’s space-based hit, “Gravity.”

“The mission is a triumph of low-cost Indian engineering,” said Roddam Narasimha, an aerospace scientist and a professor at Bangalore’s Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research.

“By excelling in getting so much out of so little, we are establishing ourselves as the most cost-effective center globewide for a variety of advanced technologies,” said Mr. Narasimha.

India’s 3,000-pound Mars satellite carries five instruments that will measure methane gas, a marker of life on the planet. Maven (for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution), weighs nearly twice as much but carries eight heavy-duty instruments that will investigate what went wrong in the Martian climate, which could have once supported life.

“Ours is a contrasting, inexpensive and innovative approach to the very complex mission,” said K. Radhakrishnan, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO, in an interview at the space agency’s heavily guarded Bangalore headquarters. “Yet it is a technically well-conceived and designed mission,” he said. Wealthier countries may have little incentive to pursue technological advances on the cheap, but not a populous, resource-starved country. So jugaad, or building things creatively and inexpensively, has become a national strength. India built the world’s cheapest car ($2,500), the world’s cheapest tablet ($49), and even quirkier creations like flour mills powered by scooters.

“If necessity is the mother of invention, constraint is the mother of frugal innovation,” said Terri Bresenham, the chief executive of GE Healthcare, South Asia, who is based in Bangalore. GE Healthcare has the largest research and development operations in India and has produced low-cost innovations in infant health, cancer detection and heart disease treatment.

In India, even a priority sector like space research gets a meager 0.34 percent of the country’s total annual outlay. Its $1 billion space budget is only 5.5 percent of NASA’s budget.

ISRO has learned to make cost-effectiveness a daily mantra. Its inexpensive but reliable launch capabilities have become popular for the launches of small French, German and British satellites. Although the space agency had to build ground systems from scratch, its Chandrayaan moon mission in 2008 cost one-tenth what other nations’ moon shots cost, said Mylswamy Annadurai, mission director.

The most obvious way ISRO does it is low-cost engineering talent, the same reason so many software firms use Indian engineers. India’s abundant supply of young technical talent helped rein in personnel costs to less than 15 percent of the budget. “Rocket scientists in India cost very little,” said Ajey Lele, a researcher at a New Delhi think tank, the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, and author of “Mission Mars: India’s Quest for the Red Planet.”

The average age of India’s 2,500-person Mars team is 27. “At 50, I am the oldest member of my team; the next oldest is 32,” said Subbiah Arunan, the project’s director. Entry-level Indian space engineers make about $1,000 a month, less than a third of what their Western counterparts make.

The Indians also had a short development schedule that contributed heavily to the mission’s low cost, said Andrew Coates, planetary scientist at University College London and a leader of the European ExoMars expedition planned for 2018. The engineers had to compress their efforts into 18 months (other countries’ space vehicles have taken six years or more to build). It was either launch by November 2013 or wait another 26 months when the geometry of the sun, Mars and Earth would again be perfect for a launch.

“Since the time was so short, for the first time in the history of such a project, we scheduled tasks by the hour — not days, not weeks,” said Mr. Arunan. Mr. Radhakrishnan added: “Could we pull it off in less than two years’ time? Frankly, I doubted it.”

The modest budget did not allow for multiple iterations. So, instead of building many models (a qualification model, a flight model and a flight spare), as is the norm for American and European agencies, scientists built the final flight model right from the start. Expensive ground tests were also limited. “India’s ‘late beginner’ advantage was that it could learn from earlier mission failures,” said Mr. Lele.

“It is a question of philosophy, and each country has its own,” explained Mr. Radhakrishnan. “The Russians, for example, believe in putting large amounts of time and resources into testing so that the systems are robust.”

His agency curbed costs by another technique familiar to businesses in India: transforming old technology into new. The launch vehicle was first developed in the late 1970s and was augmented several times to become the solid propulsion system currently used in its latest Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehiclelauncher.

The G.S.L.V.’s engine also dates back to the early 1970s, when ISRO engineers used technology transferred from France’s Ariane program. The same approach, which the Indian scientists call modularity, extended to building spacecraft and communication systems. “We sometimes have to trade off an ideal configuration for cost-effectiveness, but the heritage is being improved constantly,” said Mr. Radhakrishnan.

Cost savings also came from using similar systems across a dozen concurrent projects. Many related technologies could be used in the Mars project; Astrosat, an astronomy mission to be launched in late 2014; the second moon mission, which is two years away; and even Aditya, a solar mission four years out.

Systems like the attitude control, which maintains the orientation of the spacecraft; the gyro, a sensor that measures the satellite’s deviation from its set path; or the star tracker, a sensor that orients the satellite to distant objects in the celestial sphere, are the same across several ISRO missions.

“The building blocks are kept the same so we don’t have to tailor-make for each mission,” said Mr. Annadurai of the moon mission. “Also, we have a ready backup if a system fails.”

Teams also did the kind of thing engineers working on missions do around the world. They worked through weekends with no overtime pay, putting in more hours to the dollar. Mr. Arunan slept on the couch in his office through the 18 months, rereading his favorite P. G. Wodehouse novels to relieve stress. "This is the Indian way of working,” said Mr. Annadurai.

Despite its cost-effectiveness, many have argued that India’s extraterrestrial excursions are profligate in a country starved of even basic necessities like clean drinking water and toilets. Millions sleep hungry at night, critics have emphasized. They condemn the Mars mission as nothing more than showing off.

But scientists have argued that early Indian satellites paved the way for today’s advanced disaster management systems and modern telecom infrastructure. In the 1970s, cyclones killed tens of thousands of people. Last year, when Cyclone Phailin struck India’s east coast, the casualties were in the single digits. In the 1980s, television broadcasts were available in only four Indian cities, but today they are found countrywide.

The Mars mission is also having a multiplier effect on Indian industry. Companies like Larsen & Toubro and Godrej & Boyce, which built vital parts for the satellite, will use this high-tech expertise to compete for global aerospace, military and nuclear contracts worth billions of dollars. Godrej, for example, has begun making engine parts for Boeing.

Scientists have also said that space exploration and the alleviation of poverty need not be mutually exclusive. “If the Mars mission’s $75 million was distributed equally to every Indian, they would be able to buy a cup of roadside chai once every three years,” said Mr. Narasimha, the aerospace scientist, referring to the tea that many Indians drink.

“My guess is that even the poorest Indians will happily forgo their chai to be able to see their country send a rocket all the way to Mars.”

Source: The New York Times

A 270m asteroid is to swing past Earth almost exactly a year after a meteor burst over Russia.

JUST days after the anniversary of the Chelyabinsk meteor that injured 1,000 when the spectacular fireball burst over Russia, a massive asteroid is set to flash past Earth.

The trajectory of the 270m diameter near-Earth asteroid, named 2000 EM26, has been analysed and it will pose no threat to our planet as it whizzes past at 12.37km per second late today.
At its closest point, it will be about 8.8 times further from Earth than the Moon.
“We continue to discover these potentially hazardous asteroids — sometimes only days before they make their close approaches to Earth,” a spokesman for astronomical survey organisation Slooh said in a statement.
“We need to find them before they find us,” research director Paul Cos said.

A little more than a year ago scientists were watching a similar 30m asteroid skim close to the Earth’s atmosphere when they were “blindsided” by a meteor which came out of nowhere.

The unrelated rock exploded above the Russian region of Chelyabinsk, smashing windows and shaking buildings.
More than 1,000 people were injured by the debris.
“On a practical level, a previously-unknown, undiscovered asteroid seems to hit our planet and cause damage or injury once a century or so, as we witnessed on June 20, 1908 and February 15, 2013,” Slooh astronomer Bob Berman said.
“Every few centuries, an even more massive asteroid strikes us — fortunately usually impacting in an ocean or wasteland such an Antarctica.”
The Chelyabinsk meteor, later estimated to be about 20m wide, exploded about 29km above the ground with the force of 20 atomic bombs.
:: The passage of 2000 EM26 will be broadcast live on the Slooh website.

Saturn's Auroras Glow in 360-Degree Views from NASA Spacecraft (Photos, Video)

Saturn's auroras dance in a new video that shows the ringed planet's northern and southern lights shining in amazing, 360-degree detail.

Scientists combined observations from NASA's Cassini spacecraft with views from the Hubble Space Telescope to create the new video of auroras on Saturn unveiled today (Feb. 11). The video shows multiple views of Saturn's auroras as they appear in different wavelengths of light. 

The Cassini probe, which is currently orbiting Saturn, and the Hubble Space Telescope spotted Saturn's cosmic light shows in April and May 2013. By analyzing the data, scientists found that the aurora activity was caused by the solar wind. When charged particles carried away from the sun on the solar wind slam into Saturn's atmosphere, it can cause the celestial lights to glow at the planet's poles. [See amazing photos of Earth's auroras taken in 2014]

Saturn's auroras can be fickle — you may see fireworks, you may see nothing," leader of the work on the Hubble images Jonathan Nichols of the University of Leicester in England, said in a statement. "In 2013, we were treated to a veritable smorgasbord of dancing auroras, from steadily shining rings to super-fast bursts of light shooting across the pole."

Saturn's northern and southern lights glow in red on the bottom and purple on top in visible light, according to Cassini photos. Earth's auroras are green on the bottom and red on top. The difference in color is due to variation in the dominant molecules of each planet's atmospheres. Nitrogen and oxygen are prevalent in Earth's auroras, while Saturn's are composed of hydrogen, NASA officials said.

The Cassini and Hubble telescope photos give scientists a new look at how the sun affects the planet's auroras and how the lights move, NASA officials said in a statement.

"Scientists have wondered why the high atmospheres of Saturn and other gas giants are heated far beyond what might normally be expected by their distance from the sun," Sarah Badman, a Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team associate at Lancaster University, England, said in a statement. "By looking at these long sequences of images taken by different instruments, we can discover where the aurora heats the atmosphere as the particles dive into it and how long the cooking occurs."

By analyzing the new images, scientists have also found more evidence that auroras can be created through new connections in magnetic field lines. In one part of the new video, a bright part of the aurora moves in time with the position of Saturn's moon Mimas, NASA officials said. Earlier images have also shown that a bright aurora spot could be associated with the moon Enceladus, NASA officials added.

"This is our best look yet at the rapidly changing patterns of auroral emission," Wayne Pryor, a Cassini co-investigator at Central Arizona College in Arizona, said in a statement. "Some bright spots come and go from image to image. Other bright features persist and rotate around the pole, but at a rate slower than Saturn's rotation."

Scientists are still combing through data collected during the 2013 auroras. A group of scientists are analyzing ground-based data gathered at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility to piece together an even more comprehensive view of the aurora events on Saturnbetween April and May of 2013, NASA officials said.

"The auroras at Saturn are some of the planet's most glamorous features – and there was no escaping NASA's paparazzi-like attention”, said Marcia Burton, a Cassini fields and particles scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who is helping to coordinate these observations. "As we move into the part of the 11-year solar cycle where the sun is sending out more blobs of plasma, we hope to sort out the differences between the effects of solar activity and the internal dynamics of the Saturn system."

Source: Spacecom