Mars

Last week I briefly mentioned the methane burp on Mars.  This has reopened a general discussion of the implication of the presence of methane on Mars.  This is a really big deal, because there are only 2 possible sources of methane on Mars, volcanoes or microbes.  Both are very exciting possibilities, but it turns out that many Mars experts have concluded that a biological source seems to explain the data better.  That means life on Mars people.   This is a really big deal.  There was an interesting discussion last week on Science Friday, available in a podcast.

Also, Spirit has a scary glitch.  It failed to respond to commands to move, and then didn’t store any data in non volatile memory, so the whole day was lost.  The MER team isn’t panicking yet.  This may just be a one off failure, or it could be the beginning of the end for the aging spacecraft.

Saturn

Cassini captured new images of a region of lakes near the south pole on Titan. By comparing these images to earlier images, they have found seasonal changes, which include very strong evidence for lakes and cloud formations. 

Deep Space

The Planetary Society has sent their new “Beyond the Moon” roadmap for future plans to explore space to congress.  The plan focuses mostly on government funded exploration, with Mars as the eventual goal.  Of course the long term goal is to establish some kind of permanent human presence in space, but suffers from the perennial problem of lack of justification.  I think if we really want to go into space, we need to let private industry lead the way.  The justification, as always, is profit.  And there are vast riches out there to be won, we just need to enable private industry to go get it and then get out of the way.   Companies like Armadillo Aerospace and Virgin Galactic are already making a good start.

Also, new observations of a wild exoplanet, HD 80606b, that passes within .03 AU of it’s host star every 111 days have recorded a planet wide temperature increase of over a thousand degrees in just 6 hours.

DSR 2.1