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NASA Announces Incredible Discovery on the Surface of Mars

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In a groundbreaking announcement Monday, NASA officials confirmed their discovery of liquid water on the surface of Mars.

“Today,” NASA Director of Planetary Science Jim Green said, “we’re revolutionizing our understanding of the planet.”

While scientists have largely agreed that the planet consists of ice, the discovery of salty, flowing water represents a new chapter in our understanding of Mars.

“Mars is not the dry, arid planet that we thought of in the past,” Green continued.

While he went on to qualify that the liquid water was observable “under certain circumstances,” Green described the discovery as “tremendously exciting” and “a great opportunity” to learn even more. (Read more from “NASA Announces Incredible Discovery on the Surface of Mars” HERE)

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“Situation Critical”: New Data From NASA Shows How the World Is Running out of Water

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The world’s largest underground aquifers – a source of fresh water for hundreds of millions of people — are being depleted at alarming rates, according to new NASA satellite data that provides the most detailed picture yet of vital water reserves hidden under the Earth’s surface.

Twenty-one of the world’s 37 largest aquifers — in locations from India and China to the United States and France — have passed their sustainability tipping points, meaning more water was removed than replaced during the decade-long study period, researchers announced Tuesday. Thirteen aquifers declined at rates that put them into the most troubled category. The researchers said this indicated a long-term problem that’s likely to worsen as reliance on aquifers grows.

Scientists had long suspected that humans were taxing the world’s underground water supply, but the NASA data was the first detailed assessment to demonstrate that major aquifers were indeed struggling to keep pace with demands from agriculture, growing populations, and industries such as mining.

“The situation is quite critical,” said Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and principal investigator of the University of California Irvine-led studies.

Underground aquifers supply 35 percent of the water used by humans worldwide. Demand is even greater in times of drought. Rain-starved California is currently tapping aquifers for 60 percent of its water use as its rivers and above-ground reservoirs dry up, a steep increase from the usual 40 percent. Some expect water from aquifers will account for virtually every drop of the state’s fresh water supply by year end. (Read more from “New Data From NASA Shows How the World Is Running out of Water” HERE)

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Exquisite Photo From Rocket Launching in Alaska

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Photo Credit: NASA When you think of NASA launches, you probably think of Florida and shuttle missions and massive rockets blasting into the sky. But NASA is busy launching all sorts of smaller projects that don’t attract as much of the space glory. On January 26, the space agency sent four suborbital sounding rockets up into the sky from the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska.

A time-lapse composite image shows all four rocket launches as bright trails leading up into misty green aurora-filled skies. The otherworldy image shows stars streaking in a circular pattern, a green Lidar streak and frost-covered ground and foliage. (Read more about the photo from the rocket launching in Alaska HERE)

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Space Station Astronauts Make First 3D Printed Spare Part in Space

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Photo Credit: NASA

Photo Credit: NASA

According to a Tuesday story in Cnet, the astronauts on the International Space Station have manufactured a spare part using a 3D printer. The feat has profound implications not only for space exploration, but also for the eventual settlement of the high frontier. The part in question was for the printer itself, “a faceplate for the extruder printhead, emblazoned with the logo for Made In Space, the company that designed and built the 3D printer for NASA, and the NASA logo.“

One of the limiting factors in space travel from the very first missions in the 1960s to the current era is that everything astronauts need have to be taken with them, including air, water, food, and spare parts. But, the new technology of 3D printing, or as some call it additive manufacturing, could change all of that. Now astronauts on deep space voyages or in future space settlements will be able to make their spare parts and tools to order.

Read more from this story HERE.

Russia to Ban US from Using Space Station

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Photo Credit: Camera Press / Ria Novosti

Photo Credit: Camera Press / Ria Novosti

Russia is to deny the US future use of the International Space Station beyond 2020 and will also bar its rocket engines from launching US military satellites as it hits back at American sanctions imposed over Ukraine crisis.

Russia’s deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin announced a series of punitive measures on Tuesday against the US in response to sanctions imposed after Russia annexed Crimea.

The two countries have long cooperated closely on space exploration despite their clashes in foreign policy.

The Space Station is manned by both American and Russian crew, but the only way to reach it is by using Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.

The US is keen to keep the $100 billion (£600) ISS flying until at least 2024, four years beyond its original target.

Read more from this story HERE.

US Scientists Boycott Nasa Conference Over China Ban

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Photo Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Photo Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Nasa is facing an extraordinary backlash from US researchers after it emerged that the space agency has banned Chinese scientists, including those working at US institutions, from a conference on grounds of national security.

Nasa officials rejected applications from Chinese nationals who hoped to attend the meeting at the agency’s Ames research centre in California next month citing a law, passed in March, which prohibits anyone from China setting foot in a Nasa building.

The law is part of a broad and aggressive move initiated by congressman Frank Wolf, chair of the House appropriations committee, which has jurisdiction over Nasa. It aims to restrict the foreign nationals’ access to Nasa facilities, ostensibly to counter espionage.

But the ban has angered many US scientists who say Chinese students and researchers in their labs are being discriminated against. A growing number of US scientists have now decided to boycott the meeting in protest, with senior academics withdrawing individually, or pulling out their entire research groups.

The conference is being held for US and international teams who work on Nasa’s Kepler space telescope programme, which has been searching the cosmos for signs of planets beyond our solar system. The meeting is the most important event in the academic calendar for scientists who specialise in the field.

Read more from this story HERE.

Multiple NASA Websites Hacked

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Photo Credit: NASA

Photo Credit: NASA

Nearly a dozen NASA websites run from the heart of Silicon Valley were hacked on Tuesday and remain offline days later, following a politically motivated digital broadside against the space agency.

“My understanding is the entire NASA Ames Center had a hack attack that took the website down,” spokesman JD Harrington told FoxNews.com. However, another NASA spokesman later denied that the entire center was taken down, instead saying that the attack was of a much smaller scope.

The Ames Center in Mountain View, Calif., where scientists once worked on the Viking and Pioneer spacecraft, currently houses high-tech facilities for NASA and others; Google leases 42.2 acres at Ames for a planned 1.2 million square foot of office and R&D space, for example.

A group calling itself BMPoC took credit for the hack, saying it had taken down the sites to protest U.S. cyberintelligence activities.

Read more from this story HERE.

NASA: Meteor Slams into Moon, Causes Explosion Visible to Naked Eye on Earth (+video)

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Photo Credit: NASAA MASSIVE explosion from a meteor which crashed into the Moon was visible to the naked eye on Earth, NASA says.

A boulder-sized meteor slammed into the moon in March, causing an explosion so bright anyone looking up at the right moment would have spotted it, NASA said.

NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office is reporting the discovery of the brightest impact seen on the Moon in the eight years the monitoring program has run, the National Geographic reports

About 300 lunar impacts have been logged over the years but this latest impact, from March 17, is considered much, much brighter than anything else observed.

Read more from this story HERE.

No Buzz: Aldrin Trashes Obama Asteroid Mission

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Photo Credit: US NewsThe second man to set foot on the moon wants to see NASA send people further into space than he ever traveled. Buzz Aldrin trashed NASA’s plan to bring an asteroid into lunar orbit in a speech, advocating for a Mars colony.

Aldrin, who recently published the book “Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration,” said at the Washington, D.C. Humans to Mars summit Wednesday that President Barack Obama’s asteroid mining plan is merely a distraction.

“Bringing an asteroid back to Earth? What’s that have to do with space exploration?” he asked. “If we were moving outward from there and an asteroid is a good stopping point, then fine. But now it’s turned into a whole planetary defense exercise at the cost of our outward exploration.”

The Apollo-era astronaut, now 83, has devised a plan to “cycle” spacecraft to Mars, continually launching humans to the red planet to expand on its colony. Aldrin advocates using Phobos, a moon of Mars, as a sort of home base for landing on the planet.

“Going to Mars means permanence, we’d become a two planet species. In Mars, we’ve been given a wonderful set of moons … where we can send continuous numbers of people,” he said. The trips would be one-way.

Read more from this story HERE.

NASA Chief Confident that Manned Mars Mission will Happen Soon

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Photo Credit: Reuters If the prospect of spending a thousand days up to 140 million miles away from the Earth was not enough of a deterrent, killer radiation levels and enforced radio silence would surely deter most volunteers from travelling to Mars. Nasa, however, has revealed that near-record numbers are applying for its astronaut training programme, as renewed enthusiasm for space travel is fueled by growing hopes of a manned Mars mission.

Since the successful landing of the Curiosity rover in August, the scientific community has begun to take more seriously a promise from President Obama, made in 2010, to land humans on the surface of Mars within 20 years or so. Some privately-backed rival ventures are even forecasting that they will get to Mars orbit as early as 2018; Nasa plans a deep-space practice mission, to rendezvous with a captured asteroid, by 2025.

“Interest in sending humans to Mars has never been higher,” Nasa’s chief administrator, the former astronaut Charles Bolden, told a conference in Washington on Monday. “‘We now stand on the precipice of a second opportunity to press forward with what I think is man’s destiny, and that is to go forward to another planet.”

Within the next few weeks, Nasa plans to announce which 20 trainee astronauts it has chosen from 6,300 recent candidates – its second-highest application total since the agency was established, in 1958. “These astronauts will be among the first trained specifically for long-duration space flights,” said Bolden.

Despite sweeping US budget cuts under the sequestration, Nasa still hopes for an annual budget of $17.7bn – which will be increasingly targeted on the Mars mission. The agency is seeking congressional approval to outsource to private contractors all future rocket missions to low earth orbit, so it can concentrate on deep space instead.

Read more from this story HERE.