life on Mars tagged posts

Co-author I. Altshuler sampling permafrost terrain near the McGill Arctic research station, Canadian high Arctic. Credit: Dr Jacqueline Goordial

Miniature instruments and new techniques can detect and analyze microorganisms in extreme environments resembling those on Mars. Researchers demonstrate for the first time the potential of existing technology to directly detect and characterize life on Mars and other planets. The study, published in Frontiers in Microbiology, used miniaturized scientific instruments and new microbiology techniques to identify and examine microorganisms in the Canadian high Arctic – one of the closest analogs to Mars on Earth...

SEAS researchers suggest that early Mars may have been warmed intermittently by a powerful greenhouse effect, possibly explaining water on the planet’s surface billions of years ago. Credit: NASA

Findings may help in search for life in the universe. The presence of water on ancient Mars is a paradox. There’s plenty of geographical evidence that rivers periodically flowed across the planet’s surface. Yet in the time period when these waters are supposed to have run – 3 to 4 billion years ago – Mars should have been too cold to support liquid water. Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) suggest that early Mars may have been warmed intermittently by a powerful greenhouse effect...

Images: This pair of drawings depicts the same location on Mars at two points in time: now and billions of years ago. The location is in Gale Crater, near the Red Planet’s equator. 1 shows a present-day snapshot of the northern half of Gale Crater. North is to the left. The underlying basement is the crust of Mars that forms the crater’s rim (left) and central peak (right). About 3.5 billion years ago, rivers brought sediment into the crater, depositing pebbles where the river was flowing more quickly, sand where the river entered a standing body of water in the center of the basin, and silt within this lake. Lake level rose over time as the sediments built up. Eventually they were buried by dry dust...

With its suite of high-tech instruments, the Trace Gas Orbiter or TGO, should arrive at the Red Planet on October 19 after a journey of 496 million kilometres (308 million miles)

Two robotic spacecraft on Monday began a 7-month journey to Mars as part of a European-Russian unmanned space mission to sniff out leads to life on the Red Planet. Russia’s Proton rocket carrying the spacecraft launched into an overcast sky at the Russian-operated Baikonur cosmodrome in the Kazakh steppe at 0931 GMT according to plan ExoMars 2016, a collaboration between ESA and Roscosmos, is the first part of a 2-phase exploration aiming to answer questions about the existence of life on Mars.

With its suite of high-tech instruments, the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), is expected to arrive at the Red Planet in October ...