Planets Align: Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars & Moon To Appear Sunday

Note to the blue watchers: Put on your coats. What you’re about to read might make you feel an unmanageable urge to dash outside.



The brightest planets in the solar system are lining up in the evening sky, and you can see the formation—some of it at least—tonight.

The planets Venus and Jupiter dominate the western evening sky at sunset on Sunday, with the crescent moon hovering nearby. The planet Mercury joins the cosmic trio briefly just after sunset before slipping below the horizon, according to Tariq Malik of space.com

The planet Mars is also making its own appearance in the evening sky, but rises in the east a few hours after sunset in its own solo celestial show.

The sky maps of Jupiter, Venus and the moon here show how the bright objects, as well as Mars later, will appear in the night sky.

"This is a great weekend to watch the sun go down. Venus, Jupiter and the slender crescent moon are lining up in the western sky, forming a bright triangle in the evening twilight," astronomer Tony Phillips of the skywatching website Spaceweather.com wrote in an alert. "These three objects are so bright, they shine through thin clouds and even city lights." [Skywatcher Photos: Jupiter, Venus & the Moon]

The Moon, Venus and Jupiter are the brightest objects in the night sky; together they can shine through urban lights, fog, and even some clouds.

After hopping from Venus to Jupiter in late February, the Moon exits stage left, but the show is far from over.

In March, Venus and Jupiter continue their relentless convergence until, on March 12 and 13, the duo lie only three degrees apart—a spectacular double beacon in the sunset sky (sky map).

There’s something mesmerizing about stars and planets bunched together in this way—and, no, you’re not imagining things when it happens to you. The phenomenon is based on the anatomy of the human eye.

Thanks:alisoviejo.patch.com

'Asteroid Next', 'Moon Next' to dominate future space programs, Mars much later: NASA

“Asteroid Next” and “Moon Next” will dominate NASA and ISEC group’s future space exploration efforts over the next 25 years while “Mars Next” will also follow soon.

NASA has released the Global Exploration Roadmap (GER) developed by the International Space Exploration Coordination Group with 12 space agencies, including NASA, during the past year to advance coordinated space exploration.

The GER begins with the International Space Station and expands human presence throughout the solar system, leading ultimately to crewed missions to explore the surface of Mars.

The roadmap identifies two potential pathways: “Asteroid Next” and “Moon Next.” Each pathway represents a mission scenario that covers a 25-year period with a logical sequence of robotic and human missions. Both pathways were deemed practical approaches to address common high-level exploration goals developed by the participating agencies, recognizing that individual preferences among them may vary.

The following space agencies participated in developing the GER (in alphabetical order): ASI (Italy), CNES (France), CSA (Canada), DLR (Germany), ESA (European Space Agency), ISRO (India), JAXA (Japan), (KARI (Republic of Korea), NASA (United States of America), NSAU (Ukraine), Roscosmos (Russia), UKSA (United Kingdom).

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Armstrong Urges Return to the Moon, then Mars

He has previously criticized US President Barack Obama for being "poorly advised" on space matters and said it was "well known to all that the American space program is in some chaos at the present time, some disarray".

"There are multiple opinions on which goals should be the most important and the most pressing," he told a function in Sydney late Wednesday.

The US shuttle program came to an end last month with Atlantis cruising home for a final time, 42 years after Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission.

Critics have assailed NASA for lacking focus, with no next-generation human space flight mission to replace the shuttle program.

Now 81, Armstrong said the agency had become a "shuttlecock" for the "war of words" between the executive, legislative and congressional arms of US government.

"It's my belief given time and careful thought and reasoning we will eventually reach the right goal, I just hope we do it fairly quickly," he said.

The normally private and reserved space veteran said Mars should be the next frontier for exploration but urged more missions to the moon as the vital next step.

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Alabama Space Camp shifts its focus to the moon, Mars and asteroids

NASA may be shutting down its space shuttle program, but that won’t stop a group of young astronauts from heading to the moon this summer, and Mars the next.

In simulation, at least.
For 29 years, Space Camp and its attendees have followed in NASA’s footsteps. This summer, the camp is taking the next giant leap for mankind largely on its own. The U.S. government may not want to fund space travel right now, but many children and adults have the money to pretend.

Space Camp was started in 1982, just a year after the first space shuttle launch, and is run by the nonprofit U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., which is funded by the state of Alabama and serves as the official visitor center for NASA’s nearby Marshall Space Flight Center.

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Is Settling Mars Inevitable, Or An Impossibility?

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. We're not going to the planet Mars anytime soon. President Obama suggested something like the mid-2030s as a target date, but for various reasons - the dangers of space travel, the price tag, more pressing problems on this planet - that trip to the Red Planet has been put on indefinite hold.

My next guest says that's a mistake. We can and should be able to make the trip by 2020, and he says that technology - technologically speaking, we're already closer to being able to send astronauts to Mars than we were to sending men to the moon back in 1961, when President Kennedy made his pronouncement.

But what about all the obstacles: radiation, length of the trip, the lack of gravity during the voyage and all the potential hazards to the astronauts? Robert Zubrin has solutions to every one of these problems, and he's not just thinking about exploratory scientific field trips, he envisions human colonies growing crops in Martian soil, making energy from the atmosphere, even evolving new cultures and dialects.

So what do you think? Would you volunteer as a colonist from Mars? Or are you happy to let NASA's Rovers, the robots, explore the Red Planet? Give us a call. Our number is 1-800-989-8255, 1-800-989-TALK. You can tweet us @scifri, @-S-C-I-F-R-I. Or you can go to our Facebook page or our website. Our home page is sciencefriday.com.

Robert Zubrin is the author of "The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must." He's also president of the Mars Society based in Golden, Colorado. He joins us from the studios of Colorado Public Radio. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Zubrin.

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Spirit's Mars mission comes to a close

It's been a year since the rover sent a signal. After Tuesday, NASA scientists will stop trying to send it commands. Its twin, Opportunity, continues to work 7 years into what was to be a 3-month mission.

After a year of fruitlessly trying to communicate with Spirit, one of two rovers on the surface of Mars, NASA scientists have finally decided to let it rest in peace. They plan to send their last commands to the rover a little after midnight Wednesday.

Spirit, which landed on Mars in January 2004, has been stuck in Martian sand for two years and has been silent for more than a year, despite regular attempts by NASA scientists to contact it.

Along with its twin rover Opportunity, which landed on the opposite side of the planet, it was sent to explore the Martian landscape for about three months. Yet although they were not built to survive the planet's harsh winters, the two have far outlived their life expectancies and their mission has proven wildly successful, sending back strong evidence, for example, that water once shaped Mars' surface.

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Sky spy: Watch the ongoing predawn show

The moon rises at 2:14 p.m. this afternoon and sets at 2:29 Friday morning. It is a gibbous (more than half lit) moon that is waxing (growing larger) toward full moon next Tuesday.

It is a good time to look at the moon with binoculars or a small telescope. The large dark areas on the moon are called maria (mare singular) which means sea in Latin.

The early telescopic observers of the moon in the 1600s thought the dark areas were large bodies of water. We now know they are cooled lava beds leftover from vast volcanic eruptions on the moon 3 to 4 billion years ago.

In contrast to the maria are white or gray regions, which are highlands containing mountains, plains, and valleys. Craters are scattered all over the moon, and the southern portion of the moon, the southern highlands, is heavily covered with crater- speckled mountains and hills.

Don't forget about the ongoing planetary show in the predawn morning sky. Sometimes the best sky shows happen at the most inconvenient times.

Sunrise is at 5:27 Friday morning. A good way to start off Friday the 13th is to rise early and look at the eastern sky starting at 4:50 a.m. Get a low, unobstructed horizon. Brilliant Venus will catch your eye. Just above Venus will be Jupiter and just below Venus will be Mercury. A little off to the left (north) will be Mars.

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NASA considers Mars and Titan probes

NASA said Friday it will choose its next mission from among studies of the inside of Mars, a sea on a moon of Saturn or a comet's nucleus.

Teams will get $3 million apiece to sketch out each mission, and one will be chosen for a 2016 launch, the space agency said.

The winning project is to cost no more than $425 million, not counting the cost of the launch vehicle.

One option, the Geophysical Monitoring Station, would study the structure and composition of the martian interior.

The Titan Mare Explorer would carry out the first direct exploration of an extraterrestrial ocean by landing in and floating on a methane-ethane sea on that moon of Saturn.

The Comet Hopper probe would study comet evolution by landing on a comet repeatedly and observing its changes during its course around the sun.

Meanwhile, the European Space Agency said Friday images from its Mars Express show a system of deep fractures in the crust around the Isidis impact basin. Some of the cracks are 1,600 feet deep

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WVU Students Builds Robot for the Moon

A group of WVU students is building a robot that can work on the moon.

A lunabotics team of 15 engineering students is competing in NASA's second annual Lunabotics Mining Competition. They're designing a remote controlled excavation robot capable of collecting and depositing simulated moon soil.

The students say technology like this will make sustainable human settlement on the moon and Mars a possibility.

"The idea being that we are going to put robot's in place of astronauts, and so we wanna create the first wave of that lunar colonization for their exploration. It's just a really neat thing," said lunabotics team member Ben Knabenshue.

The WVU/NASA space grant consortium is sponsoring the project.

Former astronaut and WVU alum Jon McBride is advising the team.

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Is our space vision still shortsighted?

Two years ago, retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine headed up a commission that led the White House to scrap NASA's "unexecutable" back-to-the-moon program and focus instead on a step-by-step path to send humans beyond Earth orbit, to an asteroid by 2025, and to the environs of Mars by the 2030s.

Now NASA is nearing the end of the shuttle program, gearing up to mark Thursday's 50th anniversary of U.S. human spaceflight ... and dealing with an uncertain future for human spaceflight. Augustine says NASA is mostly following the short-term prescription he and his colleagues have laid out, but he worries that NASA's long-term future could be a case of deja vu all over again.

In an interview, Augustine told me that NASA could once again face a situation where its budget doesn't match the task it's been given. The current year's $18.45 billion budget is a bit less than last year's, and includes $3 billion for work on a heavy-lift rocket and a spaceship that could eventually go beyond Earth orbit.

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Students illustrate their ideas of space travel

Space exploration may include a base on the moon or large airplane-like transporters, according to the artistic creations of Orangeville Christian School students.

A group of seven students — the gifted class — recently learned all three of their entries in a competition held by the International Academy of Astronautics finished high in the rankings. As such, their works were put on display for space travelers, scientists and others during the Humans in Space Symposium in Houston, Texas April 11 to 15.

“I’m super excited for them,” teacher Vicki Marcus said. “I’m very proud of them.”

Under the guidance of Marcus and Laurie Smith, owner of Z’Arts Studio in Hockley Valley, the students researched and drafted their ideas on computers last fall. They then printed them on canvas and finished them with acrylic paints.

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Dry ice hints at 'Dust Bowl' on Mars

Think Mars today is a hostile place? It was worse 600,000 years ago, according to new research that suggests the planet had a dustier, stormier atmosphere.

"It was an unpleasant place to hang out," said lead researcher Roger Phillips of the Southwest Research Institute in Texas. He said Mars' climate was probably something like the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s - but a lot worse.

The evidence comes from the discovery of a huge underground reservoir of dry ice, or frozen carbon dioxide, at its south pole - much more than scientists realized. They suspect some of that store of carbon dioxide was once in Mars' atmosphere, making it denser.

In the recent geologic past, when Mars' axis tilted, sunlight reached the southern polar cap and melted some of the frozen carbon dioxide. This release would have made the atmosphere thicker and caused more dust to loft into the air, creating severe storms. Other times, carbon dioxide cycled back into the ground as part of a seasonal cycle.

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China to send men to moon and Mars

Announced earlier in the week, the station will weigh 60 tons; about one seventh of the mass of today's International Space Station. Unmanned, its first module should be launched later this year, and then hooked up to two following manned modules. Participating in the briefing, astronaut Yang Liwei admitted the Center's engineers were finding the development of sophisticated docking technology, needed to create the country's first multi-module spaceship, to be a challenge.

"In 2003 China became the third nation to put a man into space. The first Chinese space walk followed five years later in 2008."

Looking ahead, China wants to put a man on the moon by 2025 and then send a man to Mars before the year 2060. Of course the dream does not end there.

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What China's New Space Station Means For The World

China is launching its very own space station. Countries have achieved such a feat absent international cooperation only twice before--Russia's Salyut, in 1971, and the United States' Skylab, in 1973. After successful manned space flights and a robotic lunar lander, a space station would be a potent political symbol in an era when the U.S. has no means to get astronauts into space other than paying the Russians.

Because its space program is a subsidiary of the People's Liberation Army, some have concluded that China's designs on space are military, but thoughtful observers disagree: the association between the country's space exploration program and the PLA is about the past, not the future. Chinese lasers won't be raining down on us from space any time soon. The future of China's space program is not about weapons, it's about putting a Chinese man on the moon.

The thing about China--a nation led by engineers--is that through the vehicle of its 5-year plans, its government methodically pursues its stated goals. It's happened before in microchips, leading the Chinese government to develop a home-grown processor that may some day challenge Intel. And it's happening in space.

Human space exploration requires mastery of a succession of tasks: getting a human home from space safely. Spacewalks. Docking in orbit. Living in space for extended periods. The Chinese space program has accomplished all of these goals except the last; the space station completes the country's maturation as the world's current leading space power. The step beyond this program program would be the most public and visible demonstration imaginable of the country's ascendancy: it would mean reproducing the United States' most singular moment of scientific and military triumph, a boot-print on lunar soil.

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NASA’s Human Spaceflight Dying & Only Mars Can Save It

The greatest adventure in human history is ending in its infancy. NASA’s human spaceflight program, a signature achievement of American civilization, is dying. NASA succeeded, landing Neil Armstrong and Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin on the lunar surface only 98 months after Kennedy inspired the nation with his vision.

The program was conceived during the bleak days following Russia’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, and then was energized by President John F. Kennedy’s proposal in 1961 to put astronauts on the Moon by decade’s end.

If you grew up during that decade (as I did) and heard the bold rhetoric about new frontiers and carrying freedom’s message into the cosmos, you couldn’t help but be moved. America had a sense of mission back then that is largely missing from political discourse today, and the human spaceflight program epitomized the hopes of a new generation for the future.

It is unsettling to see how our confidence has shriveled during the intervening years, both at NASA and in the broader political culture. At NASA, the Space Shuttle program is about to shut down and the Constellation program conceived to replace it with manned missions to the Moon and Mars has been canceled by the Obama Administration.

What remains of the human spaceflight program looks unlikely to survive an era of budget cutting and cultural pessimism.

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Will humans make it to the moon and Mars in 10 years?

In just the past week, Congress has introduced a bill directing NASA to put a manned base on the moon by 2022, and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said that he'll be sending humans to Mars in a little as 10 years. But can it happen, and do we even want it to?

The "Reasserting American Leadership in Space Act" would tell NASA to "develop a sustained human presence on the moon in order to promote exploration, commerce, science and United States preeminence in space as a stepping stone for the future exploration of Mars and other destinations," all by 2022. That sounds good in theory, but the bill basically just says, "Hey, go do this," without recognizing that it may be both a technologically and fiscally impossible task for NASA to accomplish within that time frame.

Private industry is rapidly catching up to NASA. In the next ten years especially, the space agency seems likely to get eclipsed after the impending retirement of the space shuttle. SpaceX might have the credentials to back up its space exploration plans, which would put humans on Mars in a decade if everything goes well. That's a big if, though, since SpaceX still has a lot of work to do to get its Falcon heavy-lift rocket operational by 2012.

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Shooting for the moon amid cuts

For all the rhetoric about cutting government spending, NASA’s space mission remains sacred in Congress.

A handful of powerful lawmakers are so eager to see an American on the moon — or even Mars — that they effectively mandated NASA to spend “not less than” $3 billion for a new rocket project and space capsule in the 2011 budget bill signed by the president last week.
NASA has repeatedly raised concerns about the timeframe for building a smaller rocket — but the new law expresses Congress’s will for the space agency to make a massive “heavy-lift” rocket that can haul 130 metric tons, like the ones from the days of the Apollo.

Congressional approval of the plan — all while $38 billion is being cut elsewhere in the federal government — reflects not only the power of key lawmakers from NASA-friendly states, but the enduring influence of major contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing in those states.

For instance, a series of stop-gap spending laws had kept money flowing to the man-to-moon Constellation program because Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) initially tucked a provision into a 2010 budget bill — even though President Barack Obama and Congress agreed last fall to end that Bush-era initiative. An internal NASA audit pegged the cost of that move at $215 million over five months.

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One Possible Small Step Toward Mars Landing: A Martian Moon

This picture of Phobos shows two possible landing sites for the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission. The oval in red marks a spot that was previously being considered, while the blue oval denotes the currently favored landing site.
This picture of Phobos shows two possible landing sites for the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission. The oval in red marks a spot that was previously being considered, while the blue oval denotes the currently favored landing site.

The two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, are in the sights of planners of both human and robotic spaceflights.

Last year NASA began targeting a mission to Mars, as decreed by President Barack Obama. "By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow. And I expect to be around to see it," he said in April 2010 during an address at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

In response, one idea now percolating within the space engineering community has been scripted by Lockheed Martin Space Systems. The company near Denver has taken a longing look at its own Orion spacecraft under development and missions beyond low-Earth orbit. A result is a proposed mission called Project Red Rocks to explore the outermost moon of Mars, Deimos, as the penultimate step toward setting human foot on the Red Planet.

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Yuri Gagarin From the Earth to Mars Tribute

50 Years ago, the dream of human spaceflight opened with the courageous blastoff of Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin inside the Vostok 1 spacecraft on April 12, 1961. Gagarin was the first person to orbit the Earth. Less than a month later on May 5. 1961, Astronaut Alan Shepard bravely set forth on America’s first human spaceflight – Freedom 7.

Barely three weeks afterward on May 25, 1961, these momentous events of the early Space Age led directly to Project Apollo and the historic announcement by President Kennedy that the United States “would land a man on the moon” by the end of the 1960’s.

In honor of Yuri Gagarin, NASA’s Opportunity Mars Rover explored a small and highly eroded crater dubbed “Vostok Crater” in 2005 during its journey in the Meridian Planum region on the Martian surface. Along the edge of the crater, researchers commanded Opportunity to use the Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT), to drill into a rock dubbed “Gagarin” on Sols 401 and 402 in March 2005.

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50 years after Yuri, India still on its slow climb

At a time when the world is set to raise a toast to Yuri Gagarin on the 50th anniversary of his trail-blazing flight into space, Indian cosmonaut Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma has one lament: a holdup in the indigenous human spaceflight programme.

The cosmonaut, is disappointed with what he described as a “cooling off” of the programme after its launch in 2007. “The reverses must be addressed and the rocket should be man-rated (certified safe for humans) by Isro,” he told Deccan Chronicle.

His disappointment with the slow progress of the programme comes at a time when China is stepping up its space missions with an orbiting space lab, to be launched later this year. Weighing nearly 19,000 lbs, the unmanned Tiangong 1 module will be launched aboard a Long March 2F rocket from Jiuquan space centre in the Gobi desert.

As space buffs across the world celebrate the 50th year of Yuri Gagarin's trail-blazing flight into space, scientists and cosmonauts are set to chant the icon’s call “Poyekhali,” or “here we go” and advance from an era of voyages of discovery, to voyages of profit.

Their ambitions are soaring beyond the Moon and Mars — not merely for science, symbolism and glamour — but for the benefit of humankind. Energy from space, efficient methods of identification and management of water resources, and fail-safe security systems for every nation, will be within reach. For once, sci-fi writers could be proved right, albeit through a joint effort, circa 2030.

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