To boldly grow! Mars Pipers maybe?

Martian soil sits in Phoenix's scoop Astronauts could boldly grow when they get to Mars because the soil may be ideal for planting crops, the Phoenix lander has discovered. Astonished scientists say the martian dirt is capable of supporting life and remarkably like that found in a back garden or allotment on Earth. The discovery comes just days after a NASA photo confirmed the discovery of water just beneath the surface at their probe's landing site near the martian north pole. Green-fingered spacemen would find it easy to grow plants such as asparagus on the Red Planet and the news must be a boost for plans to establish an Earth colony. It is also gives new hope that life might once have existed on Mars and even still be there in the form of simple microbes. The discovery follows the first detailed analysis of soil that was scooped up by Phoenix's robot arm. Scientists said the soil was far more alkaline than they expected and the wealth of information gathered was like winning the lottery. Sam Kounaves, lead investigator for the wet chemistry laboratory on Phoenix, said: "We basically have found what appears to be the requirements, the nutrients, to support life whether past present or future." "It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well. It is very exciting for us. "There is nothing about the soil that would preclude life. In fact, it seems very friendly. There is nothing about it that is toxic." Michael Hecht, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said: "We are awash in chemistry data. We're trying to understand what is the chemistry of wet soil on Mars, what's dissolved in it, how acidic or alkaline it is. "With the results we received from Phoenix yesterday, we could begin to tell what aspects of the soil might support life." Another Phoenix instrument, used an oven to bake its first soil sample to 1,000 degrees C (1,800 degrees F) - the highest temperature ever reached in an experiment on another world. The £210 million Phoenix probe landed on May 25 after a ten-month flight from Earth. • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. You can support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Mars crater holds planetary record

The biggest crater in the solar system has been discovered on Mars. Scientists believe it was blasted out of the Red Planet by another world around 1,200 miles wide - bigger than Pluto. They say the discovery explains why Mars has strikingly different terrain in its northern and southern hemispheres. There are smooth lowlands in the north but a rough, heavily cratered landscape up to five miles higher in the south. A relief map of Mars, using false colour, shows the dramatic difference in height between north and south (NASA/JPL) New research suggests that a giant area in the north, covering about 40 per cent of Mars' surface, was caused by a massive impact at least 3.9 billion years ago. Called the Borealis basin, it is 5,300 miles across and about four times wider than the next-biggest such feature on the planet, the Hellas basin. The cause of the impact site was decided following intensive study of information from two spacecraft, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Global Surveyor. Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna and co-authors Maria Zuber, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California, report the new findings in the journal Nature this week. The true nature of the impact basin was hidden by a line of giant volcanoes that formed along part of the crater's rim, creating a huge region of high, rough terrain that obscured its outlines. Astronomers believe that the Moon was formed when a similar impact by a body the size of Mars blasted material out of the Earth in the early days of the solar system. For more Mars news, including latest on Phoenix, check out Skymania Mars. • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. You can support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

At last ! White stuff on Mars is water

Excited space scientists believe they have finally found the water on Mars that they have been seeking for more than 30 years. It showed up as bright chunks of white ice in a trench scooped out of the martian soil by their latest lander, Phoenix. The NASA team were cautious at first, in case the deposits turned out to be a type of mineral salt. But four days after they were uncovered, they have vanished. For the Phoenix scientists, this is convincing evidence that they found ice which has since evaporated into the Red Planet's thin atmosphere - a process called sublimation. NASA has been pursuing a mantra of "Follow the water" to plan missions to Mars. Orbiting space probes have photographed what resemble dried up ancient river channels and lake beds. Radar instruments have pointed to huge deposits of ice buried beneath the martian South Pole. And two robot rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have discovered evidence that their own landing sites were awash with water billions of years ago. But the water all evaporated into space due to the thinness of Mars' atmosphere or was lost underground. Now the buried water has been directly observed. Phoenix's principal investigator Peter Smith, of the University of Arizona, said: "It is with great pride and a lot of joy that I announce today that we have found proof that this hard bright material is really water ice and not some other substance. "The truth we're looking for is not just looking at ice. It is in finding out the minerals, chemicals and hopefully the organic materials associated with these discoveries." He added: "It must be ice. These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it's ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can't do that." A UK Mars expert had told Skymania News last month that the landing site showed features much like in the permafrost regions of Earth's Arctic regions. NASA has previously prematurely announced the discovery of flowing water on Mars, only to backtrack on their sensational claims. The Phoenix team have been naming features in Phoenix's photos after characters in nursery rhymes and children's stories. The chunks were left at the bottom of a trench nicknamed Dodo-Goldilocks after it was dug by the probe's robotic arm on Sunday. They can be seen in our picture in the shadow inside the trench. In another exciting development for the NASA team, the robotic arm has connected with a hard surface while digging another trench, dubbed Snow White 2, in the martian permafrost, 68 degrees north. They believe this may be another layer of ice. Don't forget that you can read all about Mars in the Skymania Mars section of our website. • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. You can support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Three super-Earths orbit same star

Three new super-Earths have been spotted around the same star in a remarkable new discovery by planet-hunters announced today. The new worlds - all less than ten times the Earth's mass - are orbiting a star 42 light-years away in the constellation of Pictor, the painter's easel. Most planets detected in alien solar systems have been so-called "hot Jupiters" because they are much more massive. The three new planets are 4.2, 6.7, and 9.4 times the mass of the Earth and orbit their parent sun in 4.3, 9.6, and 20.4 days, respectively. They were discovered using a starlight-analysing instrument called HARPS on a giant 3.6-metre telescope at Europe's La Silla Observatory in Chile. It is so powerful that it can detect the motion of a planet to a precision of one metre a second. The star, labelled HD 40307, is similar to the Sun but slightly smaller. It is only visible in the southern hemisphere and never rises above the UK's horizon. News of the discovery was broken today at an international conference of astronomers at Nantes, France. The international team of discoverers said their find implies that one Sun-like star in three harbours similar planets. If planets are so common, it boosts the chances that life is also widespread in the universe. The latest news comes hot on the heels of the discovery of the most Earthlike planet yet found around a brown or red dwarf. NASA's Spitzer space telescope revealed earlier this year that rocky planets like Earth should be common in the galaxy. Planet hunter Michel Mayor, of Geneva Observatory, said: "We have made very precise measurements of the velocity of the star HD 40307 over the last five years, which clearly reveal the presence of three planets. "Does every single star harbour planets and, if yes, how many? We may not yet know the answer but we are making huge progress towards it." At the same conference, the team of astronomers announced the discovery of two other planetary systems, also with the HARPS spectrograph. In one, a super-Earth 7.5 times the Earth's mass orbits a star called HD 181433 in 9.5 days. This star also hosts a Jupiter-like planet with a period close to 3 years. The second system contains a 22 Earth-mass planet that takes four days to orbit its star and a Saturn-like planet with a three-year period as well. "Clearly these planets are only the tip of the iceberg," says Mayor. They are among a total of 45 possible new planets with less than 30-times the mass or "size" of the Earth and years, or orbital periods, lasting less than 50 days. More than 270 planets have now been detected around other stars since the first was found orbiting 51 Pegasi in 1995. Picture: An artist's impression of the three super-Earths. (ESO). • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. You can support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Alien advert funds space centre

I am in one of the world's most remote places - Svalbard, deep in the Arctic Circle - where I may have witnessed the future of funding for UK science projects. Yesterday, a giant radar dish on the island spent six hours targeting an advertising message to another solar system for the first time ever. The wheeze was dreamed up by the marketing men for Doritos corn chips who ran a competition in the UK to make a 30-second commercial to send ET. It sounds a bit of frivolous fun. But Tony van Eyken, Director of the EISCAT radar facility, saw it as an opportunity to boost public outreach and pick up some funding for their scientific research at a time when the usual sources appear to be running short. It was also seen as a worthy challenge to find a way to digitize the video and broadcast it in segments. Each full transmission of it took one and a half hours. (You can see the winning advert here.) The dishes usually study activity above the Earth's atmosphere in in the ionosphere and magnetosphere due to solar activity. But one on Svalbard was switched to work for Doritos on 12 June. I recall expressing a sense of gloom when the contest was first announced in March, due to the science funding crisis, but it turned out to be great fun. Space scientists at Leicester University helped pick the target "audience" - a star called 47 UMa in the constellation of Ursa Major. It was chosen because it resembles our own Sun and is already known to have two giant gaseous planets. Astronomers believe there is likely to be a habitable zone containing smaller rocky worlds like Earth in its solar system too. Today it is winging its way across 250 million million miles of space and will take 42 years to get there at the speed of light. The target star can be seen with the naked eye on a clear dark night. Professor van Eyken, originally from Chelthenham, Gloucs, is Director of EISCAT. He told me yesterday: "Broadcasting extra-terrestrially is a big and exciting step. Until now we have only listened for incoming transmissions. "Our astronomers picked the star 47 UMa because it is so much like the Sun. We know it has two planets like our own Jupiter so it could easily have rocky worlds like Earth and so this message could reach millions of aliens." As the witty winning ad - which will be shown on ITV at 7.44 on Sunday night - was heading for the Great Bear, real polar bears were prowling the spectacular, icy wilderness on Svalbard (though the only ones I saw were stuffed). The winning ad was dreamed up by 25-year-old freelance picture researcher Matt Bowron, of Islington, North London, and his pal John Addison, of Shepherds Bush, West London, who works in the film business. They win a £20,000 prize from Doritos. Matt flew into Svalbard with me to see his ad sent with the giant 500MHz ultra high frequency radar dish. He said: "It's really cool to think that our ad is the first ever to be sent out into space." He is in the picture with me above, right, in front of the dish that was sending his ad. Doritos' "You make it, we play it" competition had a theme of life on Earth. Called Tribe, Matt's ad shows a tribe of Doritos escaping from a pack and sacrificing one of their own to the great god of Salsa. It won the most votes on the Doritos website. There is some debate over whether we should be broadcasting our presence to potentially hostile aliens. But radio and TV transmissions have been leaking into space already for several decades. Picture: My thanks to Svalbard's local news photographer Line Nagell Ylvisåker for the photo. • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. You can support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

Monster telescope planned for Moon

NASA scientists have found a way to make giant space telescopes out of moondust. They unveiled plans today to mix lunar soil with a chemical hardener to make a light-collecting mirror more than 50 metres wide. A thin aluminium coating would make it reflective. The technique means astronauts will be able to build a powerful telescope on the Moon that would dwarf those at observatories on Earth. It would collect and magnify light from distant objects in a similar way to a shaving mirror. But with the bonus of no atmosphere to cloud and distort the view, it will have unrivalled power. NASA's team say the monster scope could record rainbow-like spectra of planets around other stars and look for the ingredients for life in their atmospheres. Two or more telescopes working together on different parts of the Moon could even take direct pictures of Earth-like planets around other stars and look for brightness variations that mark oceans or continents. Scientists have previously proposed a giant telescope with a liquid mirror on the Moon. The lunar far side has also been recommended as an ideal site for a radio telescope array, shielded from radio interference found on Earth. The dust-epoxy mix would be spun at high speed to give it the necessary parabolic shape, then coated with a film of aluminium to make it reflective. The material would also be useful for constructing the astronauts' habitation and workshops. The telescope plans were unveiled at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Missouri today by scientists working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland. Peter Chen, of Goddard, said: "We could make huge telescopes on the Moon relatively easily, and avoid the large expense of transporting a large mirror from Earth. Since most of the materials are already there in the form of dust, you don't have to bring very much stuff with you, and that saves a ton of money." He added: "Constructing giant telescopes provides a strong rationale for doing astronomy from the Moon. We could also use this on-site composite material to build habitats for the astronauts, and mirrors to collect sunlight for solar-power farms." Picture: A NASA artist's impression of a lunar brickworks, first extracting oxygen from the regolith, leaving the remainder for building materials. • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. You can support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com

New planet 'is most like Earth'

Astronomers have discovered a planet only three times the mass of the Earth - the smallest yet found. It is thought to be a rocky world, like our own, and possibly covered by an ocean. The new planet is orbiting a tiny sun that shines very dimly and may be a failed star called a brown dwarf. The world's discovery is important because it means that similar planets might be circling small, faint stars much closer to the Earth - and life could be common in the universe. The new planet has no name. It is catalogued only as MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb and lies at a distance of 3,000 light years. Its discovery follows the finding of more than 290 extra solar planets but most of these have been gas giants like Jupiter. It was discovered using a technique called microlensing, where the stars's light is magnified by a massive object, such as another star, between it and the telescope. An international team of astronomers, led by David Bennett, of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, discovered the new planet. It was first detected using a camera on a telescope at New Zealand's Mt John Observatory, and confirmed with a bigger instrument, Europe's Very Large Telescope in Chile. The planet orbits its host star with an orbital radius similar to that of Venus. But the host is thought to be between three thousand and 1 million times fainter than the Sun, and either a red or a brown dwarf, so the top of the planet's atmosphere is probably colder than Pluto. However, the planet is likely to maintain a massive atmosphere that would allow warmer temperatures at lower altitudes. It is even possible that interior heating by radioactive decays would be sufficient to make the surface as warm as the Earth, but theory suggests that the surface may be completely covered by a very deep ocean. Professor Bennett said: "Our discovery indicates that that even the lowest mass stars can host planets. I'll hazard a prediction that the first extra-solar Earth-mass planet will be found by microlensing." The professor, whose work is partly funded by NASA, announced the discovery at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Missouri yesterday. It will be published in September in the Astrophysical Journal. UK planetary expert Professor John Zarnecki, of the Open University at Milton Keynes, said last night: "The holy grail is to find an planet just like Earth and we are getting closer and closer. "The environment on a planet like this seems within the limits under which we think life could exist. We don't have to imagine any fanciful situations - maybe life is more plentiful on worlds like this one than on Earth." Professor Zarnecki, who believes life could exist in underground oceans on Saturn's icy moons Titan and Enceladus, added: "Just a few years ago, planets around other stars were unknown. Now they are almost becoming ten-a-penny. This is where the action is. "It is a race to see whether we find life first on a remote planet like this or on a world in our own solar system." NASA's Spitzer space telescope revealed earlier this year that rocky planets like Earth should be common in the galaxy. And astronomers are building a veritable arsenal of instrument to find them, including SuperWASP, the Deep Impact space probe, and a satellite called Corot. NASA are also sponsoring research towards a new planet-hunting space telescope called the New Worlds Observer. Picture: The image is an artist's impression of the new planet that assumes the star is a red dwarf. (NASA). • What do you think? Skymania welcomes your comments and views. You can support this site by visiting Skymania's stores in the USA, the UK, Canada and France. They are powered by Amazon so you can buy with confidence. ©PAUL SUTHERLAND, Skymania.com