DEEP IMPACT 27

THE MOONS OF MARS

Was there ever life on Mars? In fact, could there still be microbes living on Mars now? It's still a distinct possibility. But given the difficulties involved in sending people and specialized equipment to Mars to look for samples, we could be waiting decades to find out. So it's a good thing there's a ready alternative: according to scientists, any life that exists on Mars may well also exist on its moons, especially Phobos.

According to Jay Melosh, of Purdue University, "A sample from the moon Phobos, which is much easier to reach than the Red Planet itself, would almost surely contain Martian material blasted off from large asteroid impacts." Added Melosh, in a press release: "If life on Mars exists or existed within the last 10 million years, a mission to Phobos could yield our first evidence of life beyond Earth."

Melosh and a team from NASA's Planetary Protection Office tried to figure out if a sample from Phobos might contain enough recent material from Mars to include viable Martian organisms. The idea was that if asteroid impacts on Mars could launch material later found on earth, it would be even more likely that similar material would be found on the Martian moons... particularly Phobos, the one nearest the planet.

Melosh and his team concluded that a seven-ounce sample scooped from the surface of Phobos could contain, on average, about 0.1 milligrams of Mars surface material blasted from Mars over the past 10 million years and as much as 50 milligrams of material from the past 3.5 billion years. They presented their findings at a joint NASA-European Space Agency meeting in Austria.

"The time frames are important," Kathleen Howell, Hsu Lo Professor of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, emphasized, "because it is thought that after 10 million years of exposure to the high levels of radiation on Phobos, any biologically active material would be destroyed."

When an asteroid hits the surface of a planet it blasts a spray of material into space. The result of such a blast on Mars would be particles about one-thousandth of a millimeter in diameter, or 100 times smaller than a grain of sand — about the size of terrestrial bacteria.

By plotting more than 10 million possible paths such particles could take — including possible speeds, angles of departure and orbital forces — Melosh's team figured out which trajectories would be most likely to intercept Phobos, and where they might land on the moon during its eight-hour orbit around Mars.

The probability of a particle landing on Phobos depends primarily on the power of the blast that launched it from the surface. "It is estimated," said graduate student Loic Chappaz, "that during the past 10 million years there have been at least four large impact events powerful enough to launch material into space, and we focused on several large craters as possible points of origin. It turns out that no matter where Phobos is in its orbit, it would have captured material from these powerful impact events."

Shortly after Melosh and his team submitted their report, a 37-mile-diameter crater was found on Mars. Dubbed Mojave, it is estimated to be less than 5 million years old, which means there might be an even greater amount of Martian material on Phobos containing viable organisms than they'd estimated.

"

It is not outside the realm of possibility," Melosh suggested, "that a sample could contain a dormant organism that might wake up when exposed to more favorable conditions on Earth." Melosh added that there would be no reason to worry about an "Andromeda Strain"-style epidemic. "Approximately one ton of Martian material lands on Earth every year," he explained. "There is a lot more swapping back and forth of material within our solar system than people realize. In fact, we may owe our existence to life on Mars."

"It's difficult to believe there hasn't been life somewhere out there in the vast expanse of space," Howell added. "The question is if the timeline overlaps with ours enough for us to recognize it. Even if we found no evidence of life in a sample from Phobos, it would not be a definitive answer to the question of whether or not there was life on Mars. There still may have been life that existed too long ago for us to detect it."

[Purdue Univer

ROADSIDE PICNIC

A New Translation of The One Russian Science Fiction Novel You Absolutely Must Read

By Annalee Newitz

If you're going to read just one Soviet-era Russian science fiction novel, it should be Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's dark, ambiguous Roadside Picnic. Originally written in the early 1970s, it's back in print in English after 30 years, with a brand-new translation by Olena Bormashenko and a riveting afterword by Boris Strugatsky about how the book was butchered by Soviet censors. It's a seriously intense tale of a man who risks his life and freedom to smuggle artifacts out of mysterious "Zones" where aliens landed.

Red is a "stalker," a man who is one of the most successful players in the black market for alien technologies. He trades in the inexplicable objects left behind by mysterious visitors in now-contaminated Zones all over the Earth, where even the laws of physics have been warped by whatever the aliens were doing. The life of a stalker is almost always deadly, because the Zones are full of toxic gunk, gravitational anomalies, and other dangers. Plus, exposure to the Zones causes the stalkers' children to be born as inhuman mutants, and corpses buried in the Zones come back to life and shuffle aimlessly around their old homes. Still, Red thinks the whole deal is worth it — the artifacts fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars, mostly because they've allowed scientists to invent everything from infinite, self-replicating batteries to a perpetual motion machine.

Nobody has any idea why the aliens came, nor why they left. At one point, a Nobel prize winning physicist who works on the Zone technologies admits that the items may have been left behind as garbage. The aliens might have been the equivalent of humans on a picnic leaving behind foil wrap, batteries, motor oil, and other bizarre bits of junk that confuse the local animals.

The brilliance of this novel is that it doesn't matter whether you believe the Zones are garbage we animals are picking over, or a message the aliens want us to decode. The point is that you are forced to guess at the aliens' intentions, and deal with the discomfort of not ever getting a pat answer. It's the same discomfort that is wrecking Red's life, and warping everyone around him as they try to create value and meaning from what might, after all, be nothing but (literal) alien shit. Things only get worse when some of the stalkers decide to hunt down the "sphere," an artifact that supposedly grants wishes.

Fast-paced and exciting, Roadside Picnic is also a compelling character study of Red and his family as the stalker's life changes them. It's a novel of disturbing ideas about both extraterrestrial life and our own pathetically puny place in the universe. Gritty and realistic but also fantastical, this is a novel you won't easily put down — or forget.

It's also one of the Strugatskys' most popular books outside Russia, partly because it inspired Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker (as well as a series of videogames). But its publishing history, according to Boris, nearly drove the brothers insane. Apparently, it took eight years to get the book past the censors, and not for the reasons you'd think. Russian authorities had no problem with the ideology of the book, which can be interpreted as anti-capitalist and depicts Western life as a horror show. Instead, they were angered by the idea that kids might be harmed by reading a book that was so dark, full of violence, drinking, crime, and cursing. They gave the brothers a list of hundreds of scenes and phrases that had to be changed before the book would be published — including turning the zombies to cyborgs (less disturbing) and making the novel's ending decidedly unambiguous in a really cheesy way.

In the afterword, Boris Strugatsky explains that there are worse things than ideological censors — there are the literary gatekeepers who want every work of fiction to be banal and reassuring, never forcing the reader to go outside his or her comfort zone. But Roadside Picnic, now restored to the authors' original version, is all about going into the Zones that are far beyond the reaches of your safe little life. To venture into the Zone is to confront who we really are, and what our place is in the universe. And the answers will disturb the hell out of you. Which is as it should be.

THE WATERS OF TITAN

Using incredibly precise measurements from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, researchers have concluded that Saturn's biggest moon is likely hiding a global, sub-surface water ocean, 100 km beneath its surface.

One of the most enigmatic bodies in our solar system just got even more intriguing.

Cassini has flown by Titan more than 80 times since entering Saturn's orbit in 2004, and its observations have confirmed that, as moons go, Titan is a weird one. It's bigger than the planet Mercury. It's the only moon with a real atmosphere (an atmosphere denser than Earth's, in fact). It experiences Earthlike weather, such as rain and snow. It's home to familiar geological features like valleys, plains and deserts — and it's the only known object besides Earth with standing bodies of liquid.

And yet these observations, while numerous, have all been skin deep. "In contrast," writes planetary scientist Luciano Iess, in today's issue of Science, "information on the moon's deep interior is scarce."

One does not simply drill into Titan, and there are no geologists on the moon's surface to measure its seismic waves. The absence of a detectable internally generated magnetic field means that everything we know about the interior of Titan has come from careful analysis of its orbit, rotation, gravity and topography. Fortunately for clever scientists everywhere, careful analysis can reveal incredible things.

Click to viewTo detect the tides of Titan, Iess and his colleagues had to get creative. Titan travels around Saturn in an elliptical orbit, experiencing the most gravitational pull as it approaches its closest point in orbit (pericenter), and the least at its farthest (epicenter). These variations give rise to tides, which squeeze at the moon's surface and cause it to flex. Tidal flexing leads to distortions in Titan's gravitational field that affect the speed at which Cassini approaches and recedes from the moon during flybys. It's this last bit — the effect of Titan's changing gravitational field on Cassini's velocity — that is ultimately measured by the spacecraft's onboard equipment.

The less dense the moon's interior, the more its surface flexes throughout its orbit, and the greater the distortions in the moon's gravitational field. Since Titan takes just 16 days to make a full trip around Saturn, Iess and his colleagues were able to use Cassini's velocity over the course of six different flybys to estimate the changes in Titan's shape throughout its orbit. The researchers calculated that if Titan were composed entirely of rock, the moon would experience bulges in its surface of up to one meter in high. Cassini's velocity measurements indicate the moon actually experiences bulges that are ten times that height.

When combined with data from previous research, including investigations into Titan's mysterious orbit, the researchers claim the most likely model of Titan's interior is one like the one pictured here, which depicts a global ocean located beneath an icy shell tens of kilometers thick. "Cassini's detection of large tides on Titan leads to the almost inescapable conclusion that there is a hidden ocean at depth," said Iess.

The fact that the ocean's waters are located beneath a sheet of ice does not bode well for life; most experts contend that life is most likely to spring from places where water comes into contact with rock. Having said that, the models used by Iess and his colleagues have no way of telling whether the floor of Titan's subsurface ocean is made up of rock or ice, so Titan aliens are not entirely out of the question.

For now, however, most planetary scientists are interested in the ocean's role in maintaining the moon's diminishing atmosphere.

"The presence of a liquid water layer in Titan is important because we want to understand how methane is stored in Titan's interior and how it may outgas to the surface," said Cassini team member Jonathan Lunine.

"This is important because everything that is unique about Titan derives from the presence of abundant methane, yet the methane in the atmosphere is unstable, and will be destroyed on geologically short timescales."

INFINITY SEVEN

DELTA QUADRANT

Space jump by wanbao

Space Marines by Radojavor

Space Cat by pekepeke0

Discovering Space by Matkraken

Suborganic Space by JoelBelessa

Dead Space by Farkwhad

Space book by Amuuna

Somewhere in Space by Krzyzowiec

Space core’s dream by MattShadowwing

Blue Space by Waterboy1992

Space Ranchers by StudioQube

Alien Space Fighter by Kuren

Dead Space Fan Art by Zeen84

Just Space by JoeJesus

Space Station by gypcg

Space tourism nice spot by Swaroop

Space Graveyard by Ortheza

Space Opera by Pierrick

Lost in Space by Ragebringer

The Journey to Space by roadioart

Lost in Space by Nicasus

Space Lighthouse by FISHBOT1337

Attacker From Space by Galanpang

Space – Black Hole by InertiaK

Space Cargo by MaxD-Art

Reach Nebula by Nameless-Designer

Wing Nebula by Ov3RMinD

Cave Nebula by Ov3RMinD

Nebula Magic by converse-kidd

The Great Nebula by CommanderEVE

Radioactive Asteroid Scene by PSDFAN

Dwarf Planets by Nameless-Designer

Planets by alwahdany

Epilogue by R3V4N

What Do You Think?

BRAVE NEW WORLDS

It takes one look at Neil Blevins 3D illustration to understand he’s a professional in this art. According to his mini auto-biography available online, he’s been an artist for as long as he can remember. The Canada-born-and-raised illustrator grew up on Sci-Fi and fantasy books, games, films and TV series, and this early influence is more than apparent in his current body of work. He first set out on his artistic journey through traditional media—painting and drawing, but then he discovered the computer. He never looked back and eventually became a professional animator for feature films, live action videos, video games, TV, ride films and has also produced album art. He is currently a Technical Director at Pixar.

Source: NeilBlevins.com