Firing Missiles at Mars – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a group trying to raise money to shoot missiles at Mars is from the U.S. No matter what the reason, is blasting holes in another planet a good idea? And what IS their reason anyway?

Explore Mars, a non-profit group in Beverly, Massachusetts, is appealing for funds for a project it calls Exolance, whose purpose would be to probe deeper into the surface of Mars than any previous missions by firing missiles into the planet’s crust. The missiles would contain instruments design to withstand the impact so they can radio subterranean data back to Earth – data that Exolance hopes will include evidence of life on Mars.

Curiosity’s drill can only dig about an inch. NASA’s upcoming InSight lander mission will dig down five meters but isn’t looking for life, while the European Space Agency’sExoMars rover will probe two meters for life but only in one spot.

Exolance uses archery metaphors to explain its plan. The Arrows are small, lightweight penetrating probes originally designed for the military (bunker-busting weapons technology) that will pierce the surface to a depth of five or more meters. The life-detection equipment will send data to a surface transmitter which relays it to an orbiter that sends it to Earth. Multiple Arrows will be shot by a Quiver dispenser as it descends to the surface, so that they are spread across a wide surface area.

Explore Mars will test Exolance in the Mojave Desert in 2014 to prove the instruments can withstand the impact. Then it needs to convince NASA, SpaceX or another private company to take the probes to Mars as part of another mission.

NASA sent two penetrating probes to Mars in 1999 but the shock of impact knocked out the instruments. It has fired probes into sand and ice for a possible mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa.

Missiles, bunker-busting, arrows, penetration … not exactly terminology that says peaceful space exploration. What could possibly go wrong?

Source: MU

Bus-Sized Asteroid Makes Close Pass by Earth…but That’s Not the Scariest Part

A bus-sized asteroid passed by the Earth at a distance closer than the moon Saturday — but the more disconcerting part is how little warning astronomers had of the event.

Scientists learned of the 25-foot asteroid named 2014 HL129 just three days before it came within 186,000 miles of Earth.

The asteroid was spotted by astronomers with the Mt. Lemmon Survey, located in the Catalina Mountains of Arizona.

Watch this animation of HL129′s trajectory: HERE

Though Saturday’s event was only a close shave, incidents like the 65-foot-wide meteor that crashed in Russia in February 2013 — which went undetected until it was too late — are why NASA and other government space agencies around the world are working to better predict these giant space rocks that can have catastrophic consequences.

NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program estimates that more than 90 percent of the near-Earth objects larger than one kilometer have already been discovered, but 90 percent of those 140 meters or larger are still being tracked down.

Last year, NASA announced the Asteroid Grand Challenge, which encouraged the general public to get involved in the various aspects of asteroid hunting. Watch NASA’s video about this project:

But what’s to be done if a threatening asteroid is found? NASA is working on ideas to take care of that problem, too. One option includes sending up a weighted robotic spacecraft to collide with the object to send it off course, but this would require years of prior warning. Other ideas involve nuclear explosions or a spacecraft that could serve as a “gravity tractor” and change an asteroid’s velocity just enough to avoid a collision with the planet.

NASA’s Near Object Program has more detailed information about HL129.

Source: The Blaze

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs): Natural Phenomena or ET Signal?

Astronomers have been scratching their heads over a series of mysterious radio bursts, so rare & intense, up until recently many of them even questioned their cosmic origin. First detected in 2007 through a telescope in Australia, the radio signals are known as fast radio bursts (FRBs) or Lorimer bursts, in honor of West Virginia University astrophysicistDuncan Lorimer, who was the first to discover & describe them on a scientific paper.

Since then, fewer than a dozen FRBs have been detected, the last one by the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico, on November 2, 2012 --as reported by National Geographic 2 weeks ago. By now we've only established 3 factors about the bursts: They are incredibly fast (lasting only a few milli-seconds), incredibly bright, and they seem to come from really, REALLY far away (as in billions of light years away).

But what causes them?

Because the signals are so brief and bright, they must be coming from a rather dense source, says astronomer Scott Ransom of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. “That means a compact object – i.e., a neutron star or a black hole – is likely somehow to blame,” he says.
Just what that compact object is has yet to be explained. One theory suggests that giant flares erupting from highly magnetic neutron stars, known as magnetars, cause the bursts. Others suggest the bursts result from colliding neutron stars or black holes, evaporating primordial black holes, large magnetic stars, or are the death spasms produced when massive, slowly spinning neutron stars collapse into black holes. That last object, proposed in 2013, is known as a blitzar.

Notice that all these hypotheses have 1 thing in common: they assume the bursts are caused by some natural, albeit exotic phenomena. But would it be so ludicrous to speculate that FRBs have an artificial origin? That's what I humbly proposed on my Mysterious Universe column last week; something that could be easily dismissed as the nonsensical delusions of a woo-woo schmuck...

Well, turns out I'm not the only schmuck wondering about FRBs: In a comment left at the NatGeo page, none other than SETI founder Frank Drake is also proposing these mysterious bursts might be good candidates for a signal sent by some advanced civilization:

Indeed, [...] it is a worthy speculation that the FRBs might be a “hailing” message from a distant altruistic civilization. For many years, SETI scientists have speculated about the possible design of a hailing signal — a signal which announces loudly the existence of another civilization, and possibly leads the receiving civilization to a radio channel bearing much information. Without knowing which stars might be the home of other intelligent civilizations, the sending civilization might well adopt a strategy of sending hailing signals to large numbers of potential ETI-supporting stars. To achieve maximum probability of discovery, the right strategy is to send a very narrow-beam, powerful signal. In this case, one can send to only one star at a time, and so the strategy leads to a paradigm in which the transmitting beam is steered to a large number of stars sequentially, leading to the signals being detected possibly as short bursts which may repeat after some long time period. So we should search for more FRBs!

The famous 'Wow!' signal, detected on August 15, 1977, which to this day is still considered the signal closest to filling the criteria of what intelligent ETs would be transmitting through outer space --or at least, the criteria of what modern science currently assumes intelligent ETs would be capable of doing…

There was also a time, when astronomers seriously considered the possibility that pulsars were actually alien beacons, perhaps built & used by some incredibly powerful space-faring civilization, to help them navigate through the stellar oceans. The fact that both pulsars are now largely considered a natural phenomenon --the same as FRBs-- IMO speak of the current paradigm incongruence we're stuck in: On the one hand, scientists assure us that intelligent life is more than likely widespread throughout the Cosmos; but on the other hand, to propose an observed astronomical event as a sign of these assumed extraterrestrial civilizations, is still largely regarded as a wild speculation --Martian face, anyone?

Source: Daily Grail