Life on Mars

By Kate Lunau - Saturday, March 23, 2013 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Roman Cho/Getty Images

On March 12, John Grotzinger and a team of NASA scientists made a stunning announcement: Mars once had the right conditions for life, with flowing surface water so benign we might drink it. This finding comes courtesy of the Curiosity rover, which drilled and analyzed a rock sample from an ancient stream bed at Gale Crater on Mars. It’s the first habitable environment we know of, other than on Earth. As the first primitive forms of life were emerging here, it now seems possible life might have been taking hold on Mars, too. John Grotzinger is chief scientist on Curiosity, which has been exploring the Martian surface since Aug. 5, 2012.

Q: Scientists have found evidence of water on Mars before. What about this new finding tells you life could have existed there?

A: We’re excited because we’re getting a peek at what we call “grey Mars,” instead of red Mars. [Curiosity’s drill cuttings were green-grey in colour, not red like the surface of Mars, which is highly oxidized.] We’re seeing not just the presence of water, but water with a chemical composition that looks friendly toward microbial life. This is the kind of water that, if you drank a glass, you wouldn’t keel over and curl up, although I’m not sure I would want to plumb it into an urban district. We also see a diversity of minerals, which vary in their oxidation state. We think of these minerals at Gale Crater as though they were little batteries [which can give energy to microbes].

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Astronomers go planet hunting

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, January 22, 2013 at 7:00 PM - 0 Comments

Use your cursor to scroll over the planets above.

Just 20 years ago, astronomers didn’t know if there were any planets at all outside our own solar system—whether other places like Earth, which is brimming with life, are common, exceedingly rare or even non-existent. Two years ago, NASA scientists announced that, using the powerful Kepler space telescope, they’d found well over 1,000 new planets, more than doubling the number they’d previously known about. It was a stunning revelation, but few people realized, even then, that this was just the beginning.

Astronomers now believe our galaxy alone is filled with literally billions of planets—maybe even more planets than stars. There are at least 100 billion planets in the Milky Way, and some think that estimate is conservative. Some are more bizarre than anything dreamed up in science fiction: diamond worlds and double-sunned worlds, and worlds where another planet hangs in the sky like our moon. Others are eerily similar to Earth. A few of them, like a newly found planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, just 4.3 light years away, are tantalizingly close. That planet is nearer to its host star than Mercury is to our sun, and would be blisteringly hot—far too hot for life as we know it. But where there’s one planet, there are often several, and astronomers are scouring the skies around Alpha Centauri for more worlds in our own cosmic backyard. Continue…

Probably not the last blog entry I’ll ever write

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, December 20, 2012 at 11:39 AM - 0 Comments

When I hear of people panicking over tomorrow’s “Mayan apocalypse”, I like to imagine future archaeologists reassuring people that the quirks of the long-abandoned and poorly understood “Gregorian calendar” are nothing to be alarmed about.

“You see, the ancients had not yet realized the superiority of an octal base for numerals; they used base-10 counting because at that time the recognized ‘humans’ still had a total of ten fingers each. (Please, don’t laugh; you must remember that they had not yet admitted non-primates to the Circle of Sentience.) This naturally led them to ascribe special numerological significance to periods of 100 and 1,000 years. But their calendar doesn’t in any sense ‘end’ tomorrow, on what they would have called the first of January, 6000.” Continue…

December 21 is not the end of the world, says NASA Youtube video

By Emily Senger - Friday, December 14, 2012 at 11:39 AM - 0 Comments

Despite the Mayan calendar, and at least one doomsday action film, December 21, 2012 is NOT going to be the end of the world, says NASA in a Youtube video.

The Mayan long-count calendar doesn’t end on Dec. 21, 2012, according to research from Dr. John Carlson. Though, Dec. 21, 2012 is an important date where — much like an odometer on a car — the Mayan calendar just rolls over and repeats itself.

Also, no known asteroids or comets are on a collision course with Earth. There are no rogue planets on their way, either. (If there was, we would already be able to see it as the brightest object in the night sky.)

Phew. Here’s the video that debunks common end-of-world myths using proven science:

Astronaut Chris Hadfield readies for mission of a lifetime

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, December 11, 2012 at 5:28 PM - 0 Comments

Bill Stafford/NASA

What’s Christmas like on the International Space Station? Not entirely different from here on Earth, says Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who blasts off on Dec. 19, and will become the first Canadian to command the ISS in March. “It’s not like we can get a big roast turkey or a smoked ham,” but he and the others will be dining on turkey with gravy, mashed potatoes, cornbread, “and we might have peach ambrosia for dessert.” Hadfield, who’s famous for his guitar-playing skills, will lead a Christmas carol singalong on the ISS’s own Larivvée guitar (built in Vancouver). And they’ll be able to talk with family at home.

After years of gruelling preparation, Hadfield is spending this last week in quarantine at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, gearing up to go. “I just checked my countdown app on my iPad, and I have a little over a week until we launch,” he said over the phone on Monday night, around 10 p.m. Kazakhstan time, the excitement clear in his voice. “It’s a pretty amazing time.” Hadfield has a lot to look forward to, like all the scientific experiments he’ll be running on the ship—about 130 are planned for the time he’s up there, researching everything from how the human heart adapts to microgravity, to totally different topics like dark matter and dark energy—and the views of Earth he’ll see. Hadfield hopes to photograph Sarnia, Ont., where he was born, and other scenes of Canada and the world from space. The view, he says, is incredible. “It’s like a present unwrapping itself the whole time you look out the window,” but what he’s most looking forward is being weightless. “It’s magic. The ISS is huge,” about the size of a football field, “and you can fly from end to end.”

Hadfield and his crew, including Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko and American Tom Marshburn, will face plenty of challenges, both physical and psychological. If astronauts didn’t exercise and take other precautions, being up in space for a few months would do a lot of damage to the body, maybe the equivalent of 50 years of aging. To fend of bone and muscle loss, they spend two hours every day working out. Psychological challenges can be “harder to predict,” he says. The hardest difficulty the crew could face would be the illness or death of a family member back home, like what happened to American astronaut Daniel Tani, whose mother died in a car crash in 2007 while he was aboard the ISS. “That would be difficult to deal with psychologically, for the whole crew,” says Hadfield, who was the support astronaut for Tani’s family on Earth during that mission. The crew has talked through all these scenarios, and feels prepared for what comes their way. After all, the astronauts themselves are human experiments while they’re in space, as researchers track how they adapt to extreme physical and psychological challenges. It’s crucial information if we ever send humans to Mars or beyond; NASA recently announced plans to put a Russian and American on the ISS for an entire year.

Hadfield is spending his last week on Earth relaxing, taking a few refresher courses, and contemplating the incredible task before him. (Two days before the launch, he’ll also get a haircut.) His family—including his wife and three adult children—will come visit, although “a lot of it will be behind glass, so I don’t catch a cold before I launch,” he says. “We’ll share a traditional family Christmas in a very unusual set of circumstances.” When he flies, he’ll be taking small mementoes with him, including his wife’s wedding ring. Hadfield recalls nights in the old farmhouse in southern Ontario where he grew up. “When [my brother and I] were supposed to be sleeping, we’d pull our knees up like a control panel, and fly imaginary space missions all around the universe. For me it’s surreal that in just over a week, I’m going to climb into a Russian spaceship,” and not so long after that, he’ll be the one commanding the International Space Station.

For an inside look at how Hadfield trained at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, read Kate Lunau’s story.

Earth at Night: NASA shows off ‘big black marble’

By macleans.ca - Friday, December 7, 2012 at 7:10 AM - 0 Comments

NASA has just released “Earth at night,” an image that was 312 orbits and 22 days in the making. As the space agency explains, the data was gathered by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Patnership satellite. Lean in and marvel:

Black marble: Earth at night

NASA has just released "Earth at night," an image that was 312 orbits and 22 days in the making. As the space agency explains, the data was gathered by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Patnership satellite. Lean in and marvel:

Storified by Maclean’s Magazine · Fri, Dec 07 2012 03:54:31

NASA also used the date to create this animation:

To boldly go

By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, December 6, 2012 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

John Moore/Getty Images

A fine balance

More than restoring grandeur to the family name, Nik Wallenda established himself as the world’s pre-eminent daredevil on June 15 with his high-wire walk across Niagara Falls—a feat that summoned the attraction’s legacy of stunts and showmen even if the 33-year-old was not really at risk of falling.

Wallenda, a member of the centuries-old Flying Wallendas circus family, was forced by jittery U.S. network executives to wear a safety harness lest he fall to his death on live TV. But his 550-m journey was a success in every way, drawing 20 million North American viewers at its peak and launching Nik Wallenda as an international brand. “From here on,” he said before he left town, “Niagara Falls will be a huge part of who I am.” Three months later, he obtained the necessary permits to walk across the Grand Canyon. This time, there won’t be any harness.

Boundless Curiosity

What’s powered by plutonium, weighs one tonne, and can vaporize a rock from 10 m away? Curiosity, the most advanced robot ever built, landed on Mars Aug. 6 after blasting off from Earth almost nine months earlier. In a few short months, NASA’s minivan-sized explorer has changed our understanding of Mars, beaming back gorgeous, high-resolution, colour images to reveal an alien world that looks startlingly like our own. The robot has already found evidence that water once flowed on Mars, and where there’s water, there can be life. This rover’s mission has just begun, and Curiosity knows no bounds. Continue…

Last man to land on moon has, 40 years later, big dreams for old stomping ground

By The Canadian Press - Saturday, November 17, 2012 at 7:25 AM - 0 Comments

LONDON, Ont. – You may have to excuse Harrison (Jack) Schmitt if the former American astronaut gets itchy feet for the moon these days.

It was 40 years ago next month, on Dec. 6, 1972, that he and fellow astronaut Eugene Cernan became the last humans to set foot on the lunar surface.

If the former Apollo 17 astronaut had his way, the United States would head back to the moon first, before travelling to planets like Mars.

The 77-year-old geologist, who has his eye on lunar mining opportunities, says the commercial sector could be back on the moon within 15 to 20 years.

“I think it’s important to have the commercial sector of the Western world thinking about how do you not only get to the moon but what are the economic returns of doing so,” Schmitt said in an interview Friday.

He sees a role for Canada whose mining industry, he says, is very active and is an important player in the global economy. Schmitt also says humankind has the ability to put “permanent” settlements on the moon within 40 years.

Talking about his own experience, Schmitt recalled moon-walking or skiing on moon dust in December 1972.

“It was like being on a giant trampoline,” he told The Canadian Press.

“I used a cross-country skiing technique that many Canadians are familiar with and that I had learned in Norway as a student there.”

Schmitt, who was also a U.S. senator, was the last NASA astronaut to arrive on the moon. However, his colleague Cernan, who stepped off the module before him, was ultimately the last to leave the moon.

Now, 40 years later, Schmitt expressed disappointment that humans hadn’t returned to the moon: “I would have hoped we would have gotten back sooner.”

Schmitt answered in the affirmative when asked about potential life on other planets.

He said “the chances are very, very good that there are carbon-based life forms” on Earth-like planets that are now being discovered — but, he added, don’t expect to see any little green men.

Schmitt made his comments at London’s Western University where he also attended a panel discussion on where humans should go next in space.

U.S. President Barack Obama has suggested the next step in human space flight should be a trip to an asteroid and eventually one to Mars in 2033.

But Schmitt got support for his call for a return to the moon from a number of space experts.

Western University’s Phil Stooke, a planetary cartographer, and Bjarni Tryggvason, a former Canadian astronaut, told students that the moon, which is just a few days away, is the logical place to go.

“It’s not too far away in time, it’s within our technological grasp, and we can go there for long periods of time and really see how to do things in space, long-term,” Tryggvason said.

“But Mars is way, way beyond current reach.” He even predicted that “not a single student” listening to Friday’s discussion would see a person walk on Mars.

NASA’s Peter Worden sounded a more ambitious note.

The director of the Ames Research Center in California said that sometime this century, “in my opinion, sooner rather than later,” humans would leave the planet permanently and live on other worlds.

Schmitt agreed with Worden, saying that within the century, along with lunar settlements, “we at the very least will be moving towards such settlements on Mars and maybe even have them.”

Inside NASA with Chris Hadfield

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 at 10:51 AM - 0 Comments

Bill Stafford/NASA

From the outside, Building 9 at the NASA Johnson Space Center, a sprawling complex on the outskirts of Houston, is nondescript. Inside, it’s like Willy Wonka’s factory, if Willy were a rocket scientist. The hangar-like facility is filled with robots, moon buggies and spaceship mock-ups. Robonaut, a humanoid robot with a golden head, sits next to Spidernaut, a robot prototype with eight arched legs. There’s an Orion capsule, and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. But what dominates the vast room is a full-size mock-up of the International Space Station (ISS), an Earth-orbiting spaceship built by 15 countries, including Canada.

One recent Monday morning, astronaut trainer Gwenn Sandoz waited there for Chris Hadfield, who will blast off from Kazakhstan aboard the Soyuz in December, and soon after will become the first Canadian to take command of the ISS. Canada has invested heavily in the station, which has been inhabited by a rotating crew since 2000, but we only get to send so many astronauts there. For 20 years, Hadfield has worked tirelessly to prove himself in an astronaut corps dominated by the U.S. and Russia. Canada has paid its dues by contributing the robotics systems that built and maintain the ISS, finally earning a spot for one of its own at the controls of what Hadfield calls “the world’s spaceship.”

• See Kate Lunau’s photos with Hadfield and his colleagues from inside NASA

Sandoz knew her time with Hadfield was limited; this was his last week of training in Houston before the launch. At 10:15 a.m., right on time, he breezed in wearing a neatly tucked-in polo shirt—the unofficial uniform at Johnson—with the crew patch of Expedition 35, which portrays a moonlit view of Earth from the ISS as the sun peeks from behind it. Assigned to Expedition 34/35 in September 2010, he’s been training intensively in the U.S., Russia and elsewhere for the mission. It isn’t his first space flight, but it will be the longest he’s spent off the ground. Hadfield will be on the ISS until May, making him only the second Canadian (after Robert Thirsk) to do a long-duration mission.

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Rocket Man: a photo tour of NASA’s Johnson Space Centre with Chris Hadfield

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 at 2:31 PM - 0 Comments

For the past three days, Kate Lunau has been at NASA’s Johnson Space Center shadowing astronaut Chris Hadfield, set to become the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station. Here are her behind-the-scenes photos:

• Read all of Kate’s posts from the JSC here.

of Photos

You know virtual reality helmets? I tried one on.

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 at 7:32 AM - 0 Comments

Kate Lunau is at NASA’s Johnson Space Center with astronaut Chris Hadfield, set to become the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station. Follow Kate on Twitter @katelunau and check out her photos on Tumblr for a behind-the-scenes look at how Canada’s most elite astronaut is preparing for the mission of a lifetime. Read all of Kate’s posts from the JSC here.

Kate Lunau with her VR helmet. (Photo: Kate Lunau)

In space, there’s no up or down—it’s a 360-degree world. And that can be extremely disorienting, as I learned shortly after getting suited up today at the NASA Johnson Space Center’s Virtual Reality lab, where I took a “spacewalk” with Jeremy Hansen, one of Canada’s newest astronauts. Despite feeling mildly seasick as I roamed the outside of the International Space Station, it was a thrill.

At Johnson’s VR lab, astronauts practice for all sorts of situations they might encounter in real life on the ISS. Canadian Chris Hadfield, who’ll assume command of the ISS in March, is working a lot in VR right now to master SAFER, a propulsive backpack that can save spacewalking astronauts should they drift away, one of the lab technicians told me. In the VR lab, there’s a console filled with monitors where astronauts can operate a virtual Canadarm; and there’s another area where astronauts donning VR helmets can practice climbing all over the ISS to do a repair. That second station was where Jeremy and I went.

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What happens to an astronaut’s heart during long space travel?

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, September 18, 2012 at 7:20 AM - 0 Comments

Kate Lunau is at NASA’s Johnson Space Center with astronaut Chris Hadfield, set to become the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station. Follow Kate on Twitter @katelunau and check out her photos on Tumblr for a behind-the-scenes look at how Canada’s most elite astronaut is preparing for the mission of a lifetime. Read all of Kate’s posts from the JSC here.

Photo: Kate Lunau

Microgravity is thought to cause muscle atrophy and the heart, of course, is a muscle; but we still don’t understand exactly how it’s affected. When Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield arrives on the International Space Station in December, he’ll be giving ultrasounds to his crewmates—and today I got to watch him practice how to do it, in a full-size mockup of the ISS.

The training session took place in Building 9 at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, a cavernous, well-lit space filled with ISS modules, where astronauts do their drills (It’s also known as the Vehicle Mock-up Facility). This area is generally restricted to the public; I gained access only after being fingerprinted and ID’ed, and after applying for entrance several weeks ago. As we explored the room today, a tour group walked by through a glass-paneled hallway above, peering down on us with curiosity.

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Coming up today at the Johnson Space Center: Why does the heart shrink in space?

By Kate Lunau - Monday, September 17, 2012 at 10:48 AM - 0 Comments

Photo: Kate Lunau

Kate Lunau is at NASA’s Johnson Space Center with astronaut Chris Hadfield, set to become the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station. Follow Kate on Twitter @katelunau and check out her photos on Tumblr for a behind-the-scenes look at how Canada’s most elite astronaut is preparing for the mission of a lifetime. Read all of Kate’s posts from the JSC here.

A few weeks ago, the Canadian Space Agency offered me the chance to visit NASA’s Johnson Space Center and shadow astronaut Chris Hadfield, who will be the first Canadian to assume command of the International Space Station. So yesterday morning I hopped on a plane to Houston.

After a few hours’ flight, I landed in hot, muggy Houston. As I skimmed around downtown, passing strip malls and palm trees, I knew I was headed in the right direction when I started seeing car dealerships with names like “Space City.” My hotel, just down the road from JSC, decorates its walls with framed photos of galaxies and star clusters.

The JSC, which is home to NASA’s astronaut corps, is the lead NASA center for the 16-nation ISS. By contributing robotics like the Canadarm2 to the Space Station, Canada earns a place for its astronauts to train here. Hadfield, a highly regarded member of the space community, is  also very musical guy: last time we met, he told me about how he liked to play his guitar in space. I was happy to see he plans to do so again on this mission.

Today and tomorrow I’ll be shadowing Hadfield and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Coming up today: We visit the Neutral Buoyancy Lab and the Human Research Facility, where scientists are studying why the heart muscle seems to shrink in long-duration spaceflight. Tomorrow I’ll be seeing the Virtual Reality lab.

NASA fieldtrip with @Cmdr_Hadfield

By Kate Lunau - Sunday, September 16, 2012 at 11:03 AM - 0 Comments

Neil Armstrong? First and last, a pilot

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, August 30, 2012 at 5:40 PM - 0 Comments

NASA/Space Frontiers/Getty Images

Neil Armstrong, who died after heart surgery Aug. 25 at age 82, was known for the restraint with which he used his fame. Armstrong, one of only two civilians amongst the 12 men who walked on the moon, never tried to boost his NASA salary, or his later income from business and teaching, by appearing in vacuum-cleaner ads or peddling a tell-all book. His near-reclusiveness has been seen as a manifestation of old-school Midwestern virtue, and it certainly is that. But it also reflected his engineer’s soul. Armstrong was the ultimate in right-angled rationalists—an almost monastically mission-oriented person in a ’60s NASA environment full of short-fused fighter-jock egos.

It’s hard to get a straight answer to the question of why Neil Armstrong was picked to be first on the moon. It is clear that Buzz Aldrin originally expected to exit first, and that he lobbied behind the scenes for the distinction. That wasn’t Armstrong’s style. A few years ago he told biographer James Hansen: “In my mind the important thing was that we got four aluminum legs safely down on the surface of the moon while we were still inside the craft. To me, there wasn’t a lot of difference between having 10 feet of aluminum leg between the bottom of the spacecraft in which we were standing and the surface of the moon and having one inch of neoprene rubber or plastic on the bottom of our boots touching the lunar surface.”

No, Armstrong did not see himself as a 20th-century Columbus. He was, first and last, a pilot; once he set the lunar module down on the Sea of Tranquility, everything else was trivia. The fact is the lunar landing probably was not his most impressive achievement. Such a thing would dominate anyone’s obituary, but it has led the public to forget his earlier experience aboard Gemini 8—the first movement in a sonata of NASA crises, later to be overshadowed by the Apollo 1 fire of 1967 and the 1970 rescue of Apollo 13.

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Neil Armstrong and the myth of the moon landing

By David Newland - Monday, August 27, 2012 at 4:08 PM - 0 Comments

People love conspiracy theories. I mean, they are very attractive. But it was never a concern to me, because I know that one day, somebody’s going to go and fly back up there, and pick up that camera that I left.
-Neil Armstrong

For the record, and with deep respect to the late and thoroughly admirable Neil Armstrong, I don’t doubt he went to the moon. The evidence is overwhelming. But the death of the first man on the moon brings the moon landing itself one giant step closer to the realm of pure myth.

After all, Armstrong was the first of only twelve human beings to have walked the lunar surface. There are just eight astronauts alive today who have been to the moon, and they were all born in the 1930s. You do the math: the list of eyewitnesses to the thin sliver of history in which humans went to the moon is shrinking.

On the other hand, so are the claims the moon landings were hoaxed: recent photographs that clearly show astronaut tracks on the lunar surface along with landing modules ought to silence some of the remaining die-hard skeptics. For now, that is, and as long as our technology keeps pace with our collective doubts.

Still, as I’ve noted elsewhere, facts are limited; questions are endless. Who knows what our descendents will believe, sight unseen, on hand-me-down evidence about the exploits of legendary ancestors?

Thus the moon landing moves from fact, to memory, to myth; a myth being a story, which may or may not have its roots in fact, by which a given people lives.

Myth-making, of course, was what America’s political brain trust had in mind when President Kennedy announced the goal of going to the moon in the first place, saying “space is there, and we’re going to climb it.” Kennedy’s men wanted to create a greater story for the American people, one that would inspire them literally to greater heights—and put the lie to the great myth being promulgated by the Soviets, who at that point were well ahead in the space race.

Neil Armstrong’s small step made the point irrevocably; the mighty American myth was at its apex when Armstrong stepped off the lunar lander ladder into moon dust. The impression remains, though Armstrong’s trudge through history is complete.

So the moon landing has always been part news story, part myth. But now there’s little in the way of new news, in the moon myth department—aside from the deaths of the only men who have ever been there.

The mythic space race (featuring rockets named for Greek gods) between the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union has pretty much been run. The space shuttles are forever grounded; the International Space Station, for all its collectivist merits, orbits the Earth, barely at the edge of space. Astronauts of all nations hitch rides to the ISS on Russian Soyuz rockets. Mars is being explored by robot rovers; a human Mars mission is a dream at best.

Neil Armstrong, a practical, affable and humble man, personified such a dream for a generation. He was a truly great American, and now he’s gone. As for the moon, the eternal subject of the dreamer’s gaze… well, the moon is what it’s always been: empty, devoid of atmosphere, and very, very far away. Over 384,000 kilometres away, more than a thousand times the distance to the ISS.

Chances are pretty good that we’re not going back. The technology is there; the justification, not so much—let alone the financing. And the will? Imagine President Obama, or President Romney announcing a mission to the moon early into the new presidency? In a U.S.A. where millions of Americans still struggle with catastrophic debt, displacement, natural disasters, environmental catastrophe, an overstretched military and an increasingly polarized body politic? Without the Red Menace to spur the nation to action, it’s just hard to fathom now.

And if not now, when?

The lunar sands don’t shift, but a nation’s stories do. A generation after Apollo 11, the winds of change have drifted the moon landing myth all over the place. Even in its time the trip to the moon was far from universally appreciated: Gil Scott-Heron, in Whitey on the Moon, saw the effort as white America’s ultimate act of unconcern, and W.H. Auden, in Moon Landing lamented a “phallic triumph.” Still, for a time a consensus prevailed that putting a man on the moon was a heck of a great thing.

By the early eighties, Bob Dylan, in License to Kill, could construe the moon landing as the first step toward man’s doom. Today, that attitude is increasingly common, as social, political, economic and environmental challenges here on Earth draw our eyes away from the heavens again.

From triumph, to hubris, to today’s fading memory: we’re moving from “the Eagle has landed” to “the Eagle will never return.” A future moon mission isn’t even on NASA’s list.

Where once the Russians challenged America’s notion of its own supremacy, today it’s the Chinese. There is constant speculation that China may launch a moon mission at some point; if so, their reasons for doing this will be much like those that spurred the Space Race between the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

The practical value may be negligible; the cost will certainly be astronomical. But the symbolic significance will be incalculable. A Chinese mission to the moon would ensconce a new myth in the firmament, a story to propel another people’s progress. Whatever the practicalities, putting a person on the moon will always be a lofty achievement. And China may have an easier time funneling resources toward such a goal than America ever will again.

Perhaps they’ll succeed, in the next decade or two. But I’m willing to bet the next footsteps on the moon, just like first ones, will trail off pretty quickly. Perhaps a century from now, well into the era of Chinese ascendancy, the first of the Chinese moon explorers will pass away, as Neil Armstrong has now done, leaving another generation to ponder humankind’s heavenly potential—and its earthly limitations.

The moon will, of course, remain what it’s always been: empty, devoid of atmosphere, and very, very far away. But compelling, as ever, to the dreamer: the stuff of which myths are made.

Twitterverse winks at the moon as world remembers Neil Armstrong

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 27, 2012 at 7:20 AM - 0 Comments

Click here to read how astronauts are remembering their first space hero.

Photos from Mars are rolling in, courtesy of Curiosity

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 9, 2012 at 5:34 PM - 0 Comments

After landing on Mars earlier this week, NASA’s Curiosity rover—a one-ton robotic explorer searching for signs of life—is beaming back its first images. NASA’s now released several of them, including the first colour panorama of Mars. Curiosity now sits on a large flat plane at the bottom of Gale Crater, where it landed; Aolis Mons (also known as Mount Sharp) is in the distance. Seen through Curiosity’s eyes, Mars is a reddish, dusty landscape—one that fully comes to life in these stunning pictures.

The heat shield of Curiosity, obtained during its descent to the surface of Mars by the Mars Descent Imager instrument known as MARDI. (AP/NASA)

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One-ton rover gets to work on Mars

By Kate Lunau - Monday, August 6, 2012 at 9:45 AM - 0 Comments

The Mars Science Laboratory team celebrates (AP Photo/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

On Monday at 1:32 a.m. Eastern time, NASA’s Curiosity rover touched down on Mars to begin its two-year hunt for signs that the red planet once hosted life—or any indication that life could, one day, survive there. It’s the culmination of years of work by hundreds of scientists, finished off in a breathtaking landing. Curiosity’s safe arrival on the surface of Mars has scientists crying tears of joy, and everybody else wondering what this robotic explorer could find.

Already, Curiosity is beaming back images of the Martian surface.

The image is one-half of full resolution. The clear dust cover that protected the camera during landing has been sprung open. Part of the spring that released the dust cover can be seen at the bottom right, near the rover's wheel. (AP Photo/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Curiosity, which launched on Nov. 26, has been hurtling through space for eight months to reach its final destination:  the foot of Aeolis Mons, a mountain almost 5 km high, where layered rocks seem to suggest water might have once flowed, a sign it could have been hospitable to life.

Curiosity is the most advanced robot ever built. Plutonium-powered, roughly the size of a minivan, the one-ton rover was designed for rugged terrain: it has six-wheel drive, and can roll over obstacles up to 65 cm high.

Landing such a giant vehicle on the surface of Mars was, of course, no easy feat. After Curiosity came screeching through the Martian atmosphere, a humongous parachute (the largest ever used on another planet) popped open to slow it down. A “rocket backpack” was then deployed, lowering the robot from a cable in a highly risky maneuver. The cable was finally severed as the robot came safely to the ground, and the robot took off to crash itself elsewhere on Mars.

The whole process took a breathtaking seven minutes, from entry to touchdown—dubbed “seven minutes of terror” by NASA officials. Rejoicing at Curiosity’s safe landing on Mars, NASA associate administrator for science John Grunsfeld said those seven minutes “turned into seven minutes of triumph.” NASA scientists and engineers whooped, high-fived, and even shed tears.

Now that it’s on the surface, Curiosity can begin to explore. It’s loaded with cameras and other instruments, including some of the most high-tech tools ever designed. Its ChemCam laser can vapourize rock from up to 30 feet away; Canada’s sent along an Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer, an instrument that analyzes rock and soil samples. Curiosity, which is controlled remotely from Earth, will be a slow and meticulous worker: it can only travel about 200 m per day. Its main mission is slated to last two years, but then again, Spirit and Opportunity—Curiosity’s predecessors—were designed for three months, and Opportunity is still going strong (Spirit lasted six years).

With the future of NASA’s Mars program in doubt, Curiosity’s mission to search for signs of life is more important than ever.  And although it’s impossible to predict what sorts of stuff this rover could find, getting a minivan to land on Mars is an incredible feat.

Here’s a video courtesy of NASA detailing how the landing works.

14 astronauts we know by name

By Blog of Lists - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 at 5:28 PM - 0 Comments

Chris Hadfield (Chris O'Meira/AP Photo)

In the early days of space travel, everyone who’d ever left the Earth was a legend. Today, with hundreds having made it into orbit, most Canadians can likely name but a few astronauts. Here’s our list.

1. Yuri Gagarin. Technically a cosmonaut, Gagarin, a Russian, was the first man in space, orbiting the Earth on April 12 of 1961. The achievement was highly symbolic at the height of the Cold War, in the early years of the space race. Gagarin became an international celebrity as a result. Despite his extraordinary achievements, it may have been his short stature (5′ 2″) that ultimately earned him a spot in the tiny cockpit of the first manned flight to space.

2. John Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth, aboard Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962. He later became the oldest person to fly in space, at age 77, aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1998.  Glenn was a Democratic senator for 25 years.

3. Neil Armstrong may be the most famous astronaut of all, as the first man to step foot on the moon, and the speaker of the phrases “The Eagle has landed” and “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. The latter sentence as rendered is a contradiction, leading to much discussion about whether Armstrong actually said “a man“‘.

4. Alan B. Sheppard became the second man in space—and the first American—aboard Mercury mission MR-3, on May 5, 1961. Later, he returned to space as commander of Apollo 14, the third U.S. mission to the moon. Shepard piloted the lunar module and famously hit two golf balls on the lunar surface.

5. Buzz Aldrin piloted the lunar module for the Apollo 11 mission and followed Neil Armstrong from the lander to the lunar surface, making him the second man to set foot on the moon. It was his second space flight, after Gemini 12.

6. Marc Garneau became Canada’s first man in space on mission STS 41-G, the first to carry an IMAX camera. Garneau flew a total of three space missions and was later the president of the Canadian Space Agency. He is currently a Liberal member of parliament for Westmount—Ville-Marie.

7. Roberta Bondar. Physician, scientist, photographer, author and educator Roberta Bondar became Canada’s first woman astronaut when she flew aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1992. Bondar was the Payload Specialist for that mission, which was the first to perform laboratory experiments in space. She has since published popular coffee table books of her landscape photographs.

8. Chris Hadfield. Garneau was the first Canadian to fly in space,  but Chris Hadfield (pictured above) was the first Canadian to walk in space, and likely the first to play and sing a Gordon Lightfoot song in space. He has been CAPCOM, or capsule communicator, for several space missions and will be the first Canadian to command the International Space Station in 2012-13.

9. Sally Ride, who died in July of 2012 of pancreatic cancer, became the first American woman in space when she flew aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1983. She flew to space again in 1984, on the same crew with Marc Garneau. She later was a member of the boards of inquiry into the loss of both the Challenger and the Columbia shuttles.

10. Christa McAuliffe. Technically considered a ‘spaceflight participant’ rather than an astronaut,  Christa McAuliffe was scheduled to travel aboard the space shuttle Challenger as a teacher. The shuttle disintegrated shortly after launch, and she was killed along with the rest of the crew.

11. Laika began her short life as a stray dog in Russia in 1954, and ended it as a canine cosmonaut in 1957. Laika went into orbit aboard Sputnik 2, proving a living creature could survive launch and weightlessness. But as no re-entry technology had yet been developed, she was doomed to die in space. A dog gone shame.

12. Ham, a chimpanzee, got off a little better than Laika. For one thing, Ham survived his flight aboard Project Mercury mission MR-2 and lived into the early ’80s. Ham was named No. 65 until he returned to earth successfully, reportedly because American officials didn’t want the bad press that might accompany the death of a ‘named’ chimp in case of an unsuccessful mission.

13. Buzz Lightyear. He never went to the moon, but the fictional character popularized by the Toy Story films was voted #1 among the Top 20 Greatest Pixar characters, and is probably the best-known ‘astronaut’ among children today. NASA even hosts a Buzz Lightyear game on its website.

14. Guy LaLiberte. The billionaire Cirque du Soleil founder and CEO is a former accordion player, stilt walker, and fire-eater who in 2009 became Canada’s first ‘space tourist.’ This may exclude him from the official designation ‘astronaut’ but his trip, dedicated to raising awareness of water issues on Earth, was the first ‘poetic social mission‘ in space.

Have you ever wondered which cities have the most bars, smokers, absentee workers and people searching for love? What about how Canada compares to the world in terms of the size of its military, the size of our houses and the number of cars we own? The nswers to all those questions, and many more, can be found in the first ever Maclean’s Book of Lists.

Buy your copy of the Maclean’s Book of Lists at the newsstand or order online now.

Has NASA found another Earth?

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 4:11 PM - 6 Comments

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler mission has found its most Earth-like planet yet, confirming its first planet in the “habitable zone,” where liquid water could exist on the surface. Called Kepler-22b, the planet is just over twice the size of Earth; if the greenhouse effect works there in a similar way to how it does here on Earth, NASA’s team predicts Kepler-22b’s surface temperature could be a comfortable 22 degrees Celsius (72 degrees Fahrenheit). While the team hasn’t yet confirmed whether the planet has a rocky surface, it orbits a star similar to our own sun. On top of this exciting find, NASA’s Kepler mission has also discovered more than 1,000 new planet candidates, which almost doubles its original count. Ten are close in size to Earth and in the habitable zone of their suns, although they still have to be confirmed as actual planets. “This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin,” says Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

NASA

Maclean’s reported on the Kepler mission in February, when NASA first announced Kepler had discovered 1,235 potential planets, including 54 in the habitable zone. Kepler-22b is one of these 54. As the mission continues, we’ll learn whether planets like Earth are relatively common, or rare.

Maclean’s

Good news, bad news: Sept. 22-29

By macleans.ca - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

No longer for scholars' eyes only, the Dead Sea Scrolls are posted online. (Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

Steps in the right direction

The king of Saudi Arabia has granted women the right to vote, acknowledging they can make “correct opinions.” This in a place where females can’t travel without a male’s permission, and where one woman who drove, despite a ban, was sentenced to 10 lashes. King Abdullah’s decision also permits females to run for Shura Council. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has approved draft regulations allowing women’s shelters to remain independent from government, and receive donations without state intermediation.

Weird science

It was an exciting week in space news: NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, deployed by the space shuttle in 1991, fell from orbit. A troublemaker on Twitter, armed with some Orson Welles quotes, managed to spread rumours worldwide that UARS had fallen near Okotoks, Alta. Fortunately, it appears the satellite crashed harmlessly somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. A few days earlier, space geeks were titillated with another report: physicists think they saw neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, which, if confirmed, would disprove Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Continue…

When the moon hits your eye

By Jen Cutts - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 0 Comments

Goh Chai Hin/AFP/Getty Images

Some might call it a pie-in-the-sky idea, but Domino’s says it plans to build a pizzeria on the moon. The company’s Japanese arm outlined its cosmic ambition on a website, moon.dominos.jp, with an artist’s renderings of a two-storey concrete dome containing a kitchen, eat-in space and plantation (staff living quarters and a “play room” with zero-gravity bowling lanes are below the surface). The project, envisioned with the help of well-known Japanese construction firm Maeda Corp., would cost roughly $21 billion—about 240 times Domino’s profits in 2010 (though costs would be offset by using the moon’s mineral deposits to mix the concrete).

In light of that shortfall, and NASA’s recent shutdown of the space shuttle program, the plan is likely nothing more than an elaborate publicity ploy. Domino’s Japan is known for cheeky stunts—last year, it had a flood of applicants for a one-hour pizza delivery job that paid $32,000. But, in a video on the website, Domino’s Japan president Scott K. Oelkers (in a space suit, naturally) assures “fellow earthlings” of his company’s sincerity, saying, “Perhaps you think we’re foolish to take on such a challenge, but we have a dream to deliver our pizza on the moon.”

Mars rover reaches massive crater after 3-year trek

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 10, 2011 at 1:56 PM - 0 Comments

NASA’s Opportunity rover has finally reached its most important target, a massive 20-km crater called Endeavour, after three years of traversing the planet’s surface, New Scientist reports. The crater rim is littered with rocks that are thought to be over 3.5 billion years old, dating from the wettest period of the planet’s history. Opportunity and its sister rover, Spirit, previously looked at rocks immersed in acidic and salty water, but this crater seems to have held water that could potentially have supported life. Opportunity is looking for clues as to whether Mars, now freeze-dried and barren, was once habitable.

New Scientist