Tag: Mars

Homegrown NASA scientist wants Australia in the space race | SMH

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/homegrown-nasa-scientist-wants-australia-in-the-space-race-20150730-ginuom.html

The Brisbane astrobiologist at the forefront of NASA’s next mission to Mars has one regret in her stellar career – that she could not lead the charge to discover evidence of extraterrestrial life from her own country.

Abigail Allwood, the co-leader of the coming Mars 2020 rover mission, said Australia would continue to lose its best and brightest minds if it did not embrace one of the most awe-inspiring of scientific fields.

“It’s a little bit sad, for me, to see that when I finished my degree here in Australia, I couldn’t pursue the kind of things I wanted to do in Australia at all,” she said.

“There’s very little involvement in space exploration.

“We don’t have a formal space agency, which makes it very difficult for us to participate in opportunities like this and, to me, it belies our capability.

“We produce so many bright graduates. We have a fantastic education system producing engineering, science technology and mathematics graduates and the sorts of things that really inspire them, like space exploration, is not possible to do here in Australia.”

Dr Allwood, who was at the Queensland University of Technology on Thursday to accept an outstanding alumnus award from the science and engineering faculty, said Australia had the capability to be a leader in space exploration.

But the nation’s involvement in humanity’s great exploratory frontier was “less than it could be”.

“There are some incredible Australian scientists overseas who want to come back and work here, if they had the similar opportunities back here that they do overseas,” Dr Allwood said.

“I’d be one of them.”

Dr Allwood, who has been based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena since 2006, is the Mars 2020 mission’s principal investigator for the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry.

Beagle 2: Interplanetary Lost & Found

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/lost-beagle-2-mars-lander-found-11-years-after-launch/

Beagle 2The UK-made  Beagle 2 lander has been found on the surface of Mars more than a decade after it was thought to be lost forever.

The 2003 launch was the result of a collaboration of UK academics, whose nifty lander rode to the Red Planet aboard the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft. By December 19 it had reached its destination and was released from the spacecraft.

“It was due to enter the atmosphere at about 02.51 on the 25th December,” said Mark Sims, professor of astrobiology and space instrumentation at the University of Leicester. But nobody heard from Beagle 2 following its ejection from the Mars Express and it was presumed lost. Sims said he had “given up hope” of ever knowing what happened to the lander.

Now, thanks to images taken by Nasa’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), we have at last found the Beagle 2’s final resting place. Images show that it did indeed make it to the surface of Mars and even landed where it was expected to, at the Isidis Planitia basin. For 11 long years, the Beagle 2’s remaining team members have been scouring images captured by HiRISE for signs of their design. That work—and unbelievable patience—has paid off, because the images tell a story of how exactly the lander got to where it is today.