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Different Ice Cream Cake Recipes *Raspberry Ice Cream Cake

Different Ice Cream Cake Recipes *Raspberry Ice Cream Cake

Two Steps Forward in the Search for Life on Mars

We haven’t found aliens but we are a little further along in our search for life on Mars thanks to two recent discoveries from our Curiosity Rover.

We detected organic molecules at the harsh surface of Mars! And what’s important about this is we now have a lot more certainty that there’s organic molecules preserved at the surface of Mars. We didn’t know that before.

One of the discoveries is we found organic molecules just beneath the surface of Mars in 3 billion-year-old sedimentary rocks.

Second, we’ve found seasonal variations in methane levels in the atmosphere over 3 Mars years (nearly 6 Earth years). These two discoveries increase the chances that the record of habitability and potential life has been preserved on the Red Planet despite extremely harsh conditions on the surface.

Both discoveries were made by our chem lab that rides aboard the Curiosity rover on Mars.

Here’s an image from when we installed the SAM lab on the rover. SAM stands for “Sample Analysis at Mars” and SAM did two things on Mars for this discovery.

One - it tested Martian rocks. After the arm selects a sample of pulverized rock, it heats up that sample and sends that gas into the chamber, where the electron stream breaks up the chemicals so they can be analyzed.

What SAM found are fragments of large organic molecules preserved in ancient rocks which we think come from the bottom of an ancient Martian lake. These organic molecules are made up of carbon and hydrogen, and can include other elements like nitrogen and oxygen. That’s a possible indicator of ancient life…although non-biological processes can make organic molecules, too.

The other action SAM did was ‘sniff’ the air.

When it did that, it detected methane in the air. And for the first time, we saw a repeatable pattern of methane in the Martian atmosphere. The methane peaked in the warm, summer months, and then dropped in the cooler, winter months.

On Earth, 90 percent of methane is produced by biology, so we have to consider the possibility that Martian methane could be produced by life under the surface. But it also could be produced by non-biological sources. Right now, we don’t know, so we need to keep studying the Mars!

One of our upcoming Martian missions is the InSight lander. InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is a Mars lander designed to give the Red Planet its first thorough checkup since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. It is the first outer space robotic explorer to study in-depth the “inner space” of Mars: its crust, mantle, and core.

Finding methane in the atmosphere and ancient carbon preserved on the surface gives scientists confidence that our Mars 2020 rover and ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) ExoMars rover will find even more organics, both on the surface and in the shallow subsurface.

Read the full release on today’s announcement HERE. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.  

Drawing of the Year (Highly Commended) 2015

Naima Callenberg

naimacallenberg@gmail.com 

Big City Lights by Ivo van de Grift

Art, books, flowers

Kyz Kala, a 7th-century CE fortress outside of the city of Merv (in modern day Turkmenistan). Although now off the beaten path, Merv was a central trade city along the Silk Roads because it was near a key oasis in the dry central Asian environment. By the twelfth century, it was one of the largest cities in the world, containing perhaps 200,000 people. When the Mongols arrived in the 1220s, they supposedly slaughtered almost the entire population of the city, and Merv never regained its prominence.

Parker Solar Probe is Go for Launch

Tomorrow, Aug. 11, we’re launching a spacecraft to touch the Sun.

The first chance to launch Parker Solar Probe is 3:33 a.m. EDT on Aug. 11 from Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Launch coverage on NASA TV starts at 3 a.m. EDT at nasa.gov/live.

After launch, Parker Solar Probe begins its daring journey to the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona, going closer to the Sun than any spacecraft in history and facing brutal heat and radiation.

Though Parker Solar Probe weighs a mere 1,400 pounds — pretty light for a spacecraft — it’s launching aboard one of the world’s most powerful rockets, a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy with a third stage added.

Even though you might think the Sun’s massive means things would just fall into it, it’s surprisingly difficult to actually go there. Any object leaving Earth starts off traveling at about 67,000 miles per hour, same as Earth — and most of that is in a sideways direction, so you have to shed most of that sideways speed to make it to the Sun. All that means that it takes 55 times more launch energy to go to the Sun than it does to go to Mars. On top of its powerful launch vehicle, Parker Solar Probe will use seven Venus gravity assists to shed sideways speed.

Even though Parker Solar Probe will lose a lot of sideways speed, it’ll still be going incredibly fast as its orbit draws closer to the Sun throughout its seven-year mission. At its fastest, Parker Solar Probe will travel at 430,000 miles per hour — fast enough to get from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. in one second — setting the record for the fastest spacecraft in history.

But the real challenge was to keep the spacecraft from frying once it got there.

We’ve always wanted to send a mission to the corona, but we literally haven’t had the technology that can protect a spacecraft and its instruments from its scorching heat. Only recent advances have enabled engineers to build a heat shield that will protect the spacecraft on this journey of extremes — a tricky feat that requires withstanding the Sun’s intense radiation on the front and staying cool at the back, so the spacecraft and instruments can work properly.

The 4.5-inches-thick heat shield is built like a sandwich. There’s a thin layer of carbon material like you might find in your golf clubs or tennis rackets, carbon foam, and then another thin piece of carbon-carbon on the back. Even while the Sun-facing side broils at 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, the back of the shield will remain a balmy 85 degrees — just above room temperature. There are so few particles in this region that it’s a vacuum, so blocking the Sun’s radiation goes a long way towards keeping the spacecraft cool.

Parker Solar Probe is also our first mission to be named after a living individual: Dr. Eugene Parker, famed solar physicist who in 1958 first predicted the existence of the solar wind.

“Solar wind” is what Dr. Parker dubbed the stream of charged particles that flows constantly from the Sun, bathing Earth and our entire solar system in the Sun’s magnetic fields. Parker Solar Probe’s flight right through the corona allows it to observe the birth of the very solar wind that Dr. Parker predicted, right as it speeds up and over the speed of sound.  

The corona is where solar material is heated to millions of degrees and where the most extreme eruptions on the Sun occur, like solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which fling particles out to space at incredible speeds near the speed of light. These explosions can also spark space weather storms near Earth that can endanger satellites and astronauts, disrupt radio communications and, at their most severe, trigger power outages.

Thanks to Parker Solar Probe’s landmark mission, solar scientists will be able to see the objects of their study up close and personal for the very first time.

Up until now, all of our studies of the corona have been remote — that is, taken from a distance, rather than at the mysterious region itself. Scientists have been very creative to glean as much as possible from their remote data, but there’s nothing like actually sending a probe to the corona to see what’s going on.

And scientists aren’t the only ones along for the adventure — Parker Solar Probe holds a microchip carrying the names of more than 1.1 million people who signed up to send their name to the Sun. This summer, these names and 1,400 pounds of science equipment begin their journey to the center of our solar system.

Three months later in November 2018, Parker Solar Probe makes its first close approach to the Sun, and in December, it will send back the data. The corona is one of the last places in the solar system where no spacecraft has visited before; each observation Parker Solar Probe makes is a potential discovery.

Stay tuned — Parker Solar Probe is about to take flight.

Keep up with the latest on the mission at nasa.gov/solarprobe or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com. 

Le Corbusier, Villa Jeanneret-Perret (Maison Blanche), La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1912 sources: Girard-Perregaux at Watchonista Association Maison Blanche

Social Housing

I have received a lot of follow up questions and comments to my post about social housing and my opinion that vertical social housing is a dying typology including:

What is Vertical Social Housing? Google didn’t return anything obviously useful.

Hi, different anon, but what impact are you referring to when it comes to vertical social housing?

A dying typology? You are wrong

What is Social Housing? Social housing is affordable housing. A key function of social housing is to provide accommodation that is affordable to people on low incomes. Limits to rent increases set by law mean that rents are kept affordable. 

Vertical Social Housing brings up images of identical towers like the Pruitt–Igoe complex which was composed of 33 buildings of 11 stories each, located on St. Louis. Its demolition was one of the first demolitions of modernist architecture; postmodern architectural historian Charles Jencks called its destruction “the day Modern architecture died." Its failure is often seen as a direct indictment of the society-changing aspirations of the International school of architecture. [via]

In the United States, policies included "urban renewal” and building of large scale vertical social housing projects. Urban renewal demolished entire neighborhoods in many inner cities to accommodate these projects as a solution to the lack of affordable housing; but in many ways, it was a cause of urban decay rather than a remedy.

This type of architecture segregated and isolated its residents from the cities around them. Effectively trapping them in buildings that quickly deteriorated because of poor maintenance and overcrowding. Like in every typology you find some successful examples but many of these projects have been demolished to be replaced by low rise urban infill projects. The idea is to thread social housing into the tapestry of the city instead of creating isolated pockets.

You can read more on how cities have tried to redirect their efforts to provide affordable housing in books like Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival and American Project.

Architecture should not reinforce the old stigma of living in social housing, and architects should find the joy in tight budgets, limited briefs, and seemingly mundane programs.

Here are some recent successful examples of low-rise social housing: 

Le Lorrain – Brussels, Belgium

Honeycomb Apartments – Izola, Slovenia

Monterrey Housing – Nuevo León, Mexico

Vivazz, Mieres Social Housing – Asturias, Spain

Tête en l’air Social Housing – Paris, France