New Mars Forums

Two new exoplanets and an unknown celestial object are the latest findings of the COROT mission. These discoveries mean that the mission has now found a total of four new exoplanets.

These results were presented this week at the IAU symposium 253 in Massachusetts, USA.

COROT has now been operating for 510 days, and the mission started observations of its sixth star field at the beginning of May this year. During this observation phase, which will last 5 months, the spacecraft will simultaneously observe 12 000 stars.

The two new planets are gas giants of the hot Jupiter type, which orbit very close to their parent star and tend to have extensive atmospheres because heat from the nearby star gives them energy to expand. 

In addition, an oddity dubbed ‘COROT-exo-3b’ has raised particular interest among astronomers. It appears to be something between a brown dwarf, a sub-stellar object without nuclear fusion at its core but with some stellar characteristics, and a planet. Its radius is too small for it to be a super-planet.

If it is a star, it would be among the smallest ever detected. Follow-up observations from the ground have pinned it at 20 Jupiter massses. This makes it twice as dense as the metal Platinum.

Scientists suspect that with the detection of COROT-exo-3b, they might just have discovered the missing link between stars and planets.

COROT has also detected extremely faint signals that, if confirmed, could indicate the existence of another exoplanet, as small as 1.7 times Earth’s radius.

This is an encouraging sign in the delicate and difficult search for small, rocky exoplanets that COROT has been designed for.

The proof is in the price of gas and oil, it shouldn't go from $1.50 to $2 to $3 and then $4 per gallon all in a short period of time. If this was an efficient market with plenty of suppliers, there wouldn't be bottlenecks that can be manipulated by a few to produce vast gyrations in the price of gasoline and oil.

Since I was befuddled about what that meant about Phoenix' target location, I asked for help from Tim Parker at JPL, who is the acknowledged master of locating and mapping the landing sites of Mars missions, past and future. Tim graciously provided me with the map that he said he will be using on the day of the landing, which shows the current location of the 1, 2, and 3-sigma landing ellipses (for more on what that means, check out my entry with Rob Manning's explanations on that topic). And, for reference, he said that the target point is now 68.151 degrees north, 233.975 degrees east. I've updated my Phoenix landing site page accordingly.

“there's no substantial evidence that Israel possesses nuclear weapons”

In 1974, Israeli President Ephraim Katzir said that "it has always been our intention to develop a nuclear potential ... We now have that potential."

On September 22, 1979, an American "Vela" satellite detected a distinctive double flash off the southern coast of Africa indicative of a nuclear test.

In 1985 Los Angeles businessman Richard Smyth was indicted for smuggling to Israel 810 krytrons switches used as nuclear weapon detonators

In September 1986, Mordecai Vanunu, an Israeli arms technician who had worked at the secret Dimona site for eight years, provided the London Sunday Times with a detailed account of Israel's nuclear weapon progress. including almost 60 color photographs of what he said was Israel's underground bomb factory.

He said that Israel had produced 100 to 200 fission bombs by 1986, had mastered a thermonuclear design, and appeared to have a number of thermonuclear bombs ready for use.

In 1998, former Prime Minister Shimon Peres said that Israel "built a nuclear option, not in order to have a Hiroshima but an Oslo." Peres, as Director General of the Ministry of Defense in the early 1950s, was responsible for building Israel's nuclear capability

And on and on.  It's not helpful to maintain a delusion.

The Samson Option, to bring down the whole world on our heads.  Or, "Never again."

One thing I must admit that even if were not running out of oil, the World supply of it is quite unreliable, and its price girates quite a bit. I don't really care if Saudi Arabia has a 100 year supply of crude oil, the problem is, as Winston Churchill said, is its concentration. Oil is concentrated in all the wrong places across the globe and it grants boons of cash to the undeserving, lazy, and violent.

ESA's Mars Express mission control team are ready to monitor Phoenix's critical entry, descent and landing onto the Martian surface on 26 May 2008.

The Mars Express mission control team have completed major preparations for supporting the entry, descent and landing (EDL) phase of NASA's Phoenix mission to the Red Planet. On 25 May, Mars Express will point towards Phoenix's planned entry trajectory and record signals broadcast from the lander as it plunges through the Martian atmosphere.

The recorded data will serve as a useful and potentially crucial back-up to compare Phoenix's planned and actual descent profiles. Landing is planned for 23:38 UTC, 25 May, which is 01:38 CEST, 26 May. 

"We have tested a specially designed slew for our spacecraft, and scheduled a series of data downloads immediately after Phoenix's landing; NASA will receive our recorded data about one hour later," says Michel Denis, Spacecraft Operations Manager at ESOC, ESA's Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany.

The Mars Express team will monitor the event from the Dedicated Control Room at ESOC.

Effective reuse of on-board lander communications system

Mission controllers will use the MELACOM (Mars Express Lander Communications) system to point towards Phoenix during EDL; the radio instrument was originally intended for communications with the Beagle 2 lander.

Mars Express will perform a high-speed slew as MELACOM tracks Phoenix, rotating about one axis at a speed some two to three times faster than normal; this action has already been tested and confirmed. The orbit phasing of Mars Express was already adjusted at the end of 2007 to provide visibility to Phoenix.

Data recording is scheduled to begin at 23:21 UTC, and run for 26 minutes, until 23:47 UTC.

"Our MELACOM data will enable NASA to confirm the Phoenix lander's descent characteristics, including speed and acceleration through the Mars atmosphere," says Peter Schmitz, Deputy Spacecraft Operations Manager and project lead for Mars Express Phoenix support activities.

MELACOM data will be downloaded to Earth via NASA's Deep Space terminals DSS-15 and DSS-25. After a 15-minute, 20-second light-speed travel time, ESOC will receive the data transmitted from Mars Express, i.e. at 00:40 UTC ( 02:40 CEST). Recorded data will subsequently be downloaded two more times to ensure no loss of packets.

The ESA spacecraft will also fly over Phoenix's intended landing zone, beginning at 06:12 UTC (08:12 CEST) on 26 May and will again monitor signals transmitted up from the surface.

In the following week, Mars Express will monitor Phoenix using MELACOM 14 more times; at least one of these will be used to demonstrate and confirm that the ESA spacecraft can be used as a data relay station for NASA, receiving data from the surface and transmitting test commands to the lander.

[Question]
NASA is taking great care to explain and make clear this is NOT a mission that is “Looking for life”, although surely Phoenix is playing a vital part in the continuing quest to find life on Mars. All the mission literature makes it plain that Phoenix will not be sending back images of wriggly martian microbes, or fossils, but is that 1000% impossible? In an interview for Nature Network London in Aug 2007 you were asked: So if you hit jackpot, and there are micro-organisms in the samples, would you be able to distinguish between living and fossilized remains? And you said: “If life really is active in the samples we’re looking at, we would look for motion upwards or sideways on the substrates (not just settling under Martian gravity) by taking multiple exposures. We can do effectively time-lapse photography with the optical microscope and AFM. But it might be rather difficult to distinguish between microfossils and dormant spores. We’d be looking to have confirmation from the mass spectrometer of TEGA that there is organic material in the samples.” Does that mean there’s actually a chance Phoenix’s microscope might send us back pictures of something… amazing?

[Tom Pike]
Even if there ever was life on Mars the signature will take a great deal of work to recognise. Phoenix has some important tools to see how likely it might be that such a signature might even exist. But yes, we do have the capability of resolving down to the length scale of some microscopic organisms. Of course that’s no guarantee that we’ll see anything amongst the fine silt particles which actually set the resolution target of the microscope.

[Question]
On the STFC website you said “Nobody has looked at Mars at this type of resolution before. It is very difficult to predict what we might find, but if you wanted to look for signs of the earliest forms of past or present life we will be the first to look closely enough.” Does that mean you think that even if it doesn’t image wriggling martian beasties, the microscope could actually image micro-fossils or some other type of evidence for past life on Mars?

[Tom Pike]
Again, we have the possibility. Fossils are more likely than extant life – the best conditions for life there were several billion years ago. But even if the microfossils are there to be found, we may not be in the right place. On Earth the abundance of microfossils varies enormously - there is no guarantee of imaging them on a planet we know is teeming with life.