As the world prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing on July 20, 2019, UGA Today talked with Ben Davis, a professor of mechanical engineering at UGA, about the wide-ranging benefits of this technological triumph. Before coming to UGA, Davis was a propulsion vibrations analyst at NASA.
Texas A&M astronomer and physics expert Nick Suntzeff has been involved with space research for almost 30 years, and spent 20 years as an astronomer in Chile, where he helped co-discover dark energy. He offers his thoughts about the 50th anniversary of the moon landing and what’s ahead for the U.S. space program.
Reaction turns carbon dioxide into molecular oxygen
Wind has shaped the face of Mars for millennia, but its exact role in piling up sand dunes, carving out rocky escarpments or filling impact craters has eluded scientists until now.
Feature profiles four PPPL scientists who have received high honors.
In 2020, NASA and European-Russian missions will look for evidence of past life on Mars.
In cooperation with Empa, the Austrian Space Forum (ÖFW) is developing the "Serenity" space suit - a prototype for a Mars suit. The two partners have now signed a cooperation agreement to work even more closely together on the development of the prototype. The cooperation focuses on optimising the wearing comfort and heat regulation system of "Serenity" based on body models developed at Empa.
The Florida Tech Office of Research in collaboration with NASA will host Space Technology Day on the university’s Melbourne campus Thursday, May 23. This free, daylong event will bring together professors, students, engineers, technologists and business leaders from around Florida to engage on NASA’s current and future space technology activities and the agency’s plans for exploring the Moon, Mars and beyond.
A new intelligent hybrid SmartSuit design proposed by Dr. Ana Diaz Artiles from Texas A&M University has the potential to solve some of the current design and health risks associated with the current spacesuit worn by astronauts.
Researchers at the USC Arid Climate and Water Research Center (AWARE) have published a study that suggests deep groundwater could still be active on Mars and could originate surface streams in some near-equatorial areas on Mars. The researchers at USC have determined that groundwater likely exists in a broader geographical area than just the poles of Mars and that there is an active system, as deep as 750 meters, from which groundwater comes to the surface through cracks in the specific craters they analyzed.
A University of Adelaide researcher, alongside members of an international team, has won an AU$16 million ERC Synergy Grant to use plasma energy to produce fertilisers which provides the opportunity for new business models and could even lead to crops on Mars.
Researchers at the University of Warwick have been inspired by the unique movement of trembling aspen leaves, to devise an energy harvesting mechanism that could power weather sensors in hostile environments and could even be a back-up energy supply that could save and extend the life of future Mars rovers.
An international team of researchers, which includes scientists from McMaster’s School of Geography & Earth Sciences, NASA, and others, is tackling one of the biggest problems of space travel to Mars: what happens when we get there?
The 3.7-billion-year-old structures were considered the first evidence for life on the planet; new evidence suggests differently.
Beginning today, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will provide daily weather reports for Mars, courtesy of the red planet’s newest robotic resident, InSight.
Northern Arizona University planetary scientist Mark Salvatore eulogizes NASA's Opportunity rover after the mission was declared ended on Feb. 13, months after the rover went silent during a dust storm and 15 years after it landed on Mars.
The Weizmann Institute's Prof. Oded Aharonson, who is head of the SpaceIL international science team, has designed a project to measure and examine the Moon's magnetic field. The moon landing will make Israel the fourth country to reach the rocky outpost.
Catherine Trewhella, a recent graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and current intern at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, is taking a microscopic look at rocks at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a DOE Office of Science user facility. Her research will help prepare scientists for analyzing samples brought back from outer space, specifically Mars.
After cruising for 205 days over 301 million miles, NASA’s InSight spacecraft – a mission designed to probe beneath the surface of Mars – landed flawlessly Nov. 26 at Elysium Planitia. Cornell University’s Don Banfield felt earthly relief.
Two undergraduate researchers will join Geneseo planetary geologist Nick Warner at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Nov. 26 in Pasadena, Calif., for the scheduled 3 p.m. ET landing of InSight, NASA’s latest mission to Mars. The team will work for several weeks to characterize the area around the lander and make recommendations to NASA engineers on where to place the sensitive geological instruments that will explore the planet's crust, mantle and core.
Envision a yellow submarine on a rocket to Europa as a future culmination in the search for extraterrestrial life. A new $7 million NASA Astrobiology grant is fueling an alliance of oceanic astrobiology researchers who will unify their focus to probe oceans on our solar system neighbors for signs of life.
A natural “battery” of briny liquids and volcanic minerals may have produced Mars’ organic carbon, according to new analysis of three Martian meteorites by a team including researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Researchers will gather today to discuss the potential for hibernation and the related process, torpor, to aid human health in spaceflight at the American Physiological Society’s (APS) Comparative Physiology: Complexity and Integration conference in New Orleans.
The zip of electricity in Martian dust storms helps to form the huge amounts of perchlorate found in the planet's soils, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis. It's not lightning but another form of electrostatic discharge that packs the key punch in the planet-wide distribution of the reactive chemical, said Alian Wang, research professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences.
A new, super-insulating gel developed by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder could dramatically increase the energy efficiency of skyscrapers and other buildings, and might one day help scientists to build greenhouse-like habitats for colonists on Mars.
University of Delaware team involved in Parker Solar Probe, ambitious effort to study sun's atmosphere
Proponents of “terraforming” Mars to make it habitable propose releasing greenhouse gases from the planet’s surface such as carbon dioxide (CO2) to trap heat, warm the climate and ultimately increase the atmospheric pressure. The plausibility of achieving this with current technology is the focus of a new study sponsored by NASA just published in Nature Astronomy.
With new and compelling evidence for water existing beneath the south pole of Mars, a West Virginia University professor says this underground lake is likely to be extremely salty and more acidic than battery acid. Life forms that can survive in extreme physical and geochemical conditions are found in abundance in acid salt lakes such as those in Chile and western Australia, she said.
The dust that coats much of the surface of Mars originates largely from a single thousand-kilometer-long geological formation near the Red Planet’s equator,
Mars Petcare and Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt announced a collaboration to create the Mars Petcare Pet Therapy Fund to support a dedicated facility dog and staff position at Children’s Hospital with a goal of showing how pet visits improve the health of patients — thus getting them home faster.
Is there life on Mars? One WVU researcher is discovering ways to improve the search for life on the desert planet.
New research has uncovered the genetic details of microbes found in fracking wells. Not only do a wide array of bacteria and viruses thrive in these crevices created by hydraulic fracturing – they also have the power to produce methane, according to a study led by scientists at The Ohio State University and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Northern Arizona University assistant professor Christopher Edwards was recently awarded a $1.2 million grant from NASA to understand the habitability of Mars by studying extreme, Mars-like environments on Earth.
Christopher Edwards received a $1.2 million grant from the PSTAR program to explore extreme environments on Earth for habitability and biosignatures, which can allow scientists to predict what to look for in space missions.
Don Banfield, a senior research associate specializing in planetary sciences at Cornell University, monitors dust storms and atmospheric science on the red planet. He says it's important to consider the risks associated with dust storms, like the one that has silenced the Opportunity rover, when designing future missions to Mars.
Mark Salvatore, who studied the surface of the Red Planet, also is part of a team that collaborates with scientists, engineers and NASA's rover operations to guide the Curiosity around Mars.
The new MTSU Data Science Institute officially launched in mid-May with a mission to promote funded interdisciplinary research and develop public and private collaborations around the emerging field of “big data.”
If humanity hopes to make it to Mars anytime soon, we need to understand not just technology, but the psychological dynamic of a small group of astronauts trapped in a confined space for months with no escape, according to a paper published in American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association.
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