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SpaceX announced they are planning to send their Red Dragon capsule to Mars as soon as 2018

To send Red Dragon spacecraft to Mars, SpaceX is building a mega-rocket called Falcon Heavy. Based on the company’s successful Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy consists of three core rocket stages, each of which is equipped with landing legs for reusability. They would use the capsule’s thrusters to make a landing. 

This artist’s illustration shows how the capsule could enter Mars’ atmosphere. SpaceX has successfully returned their capsules to Earth during space station resupply missions for NASA.

The Dragon can carry seven astronauts to and from destinations like the International Space Station (not yet a manned mission to Mars I’d guess 😄). Here’s an illustration of the Dragon Version 1 (the new version has some differences), to get the idea:

credit: SpaceX, Karl Tate/Space.com

NASA’S MAVEN MISSION REVEALS MARS HAS METAL IN ITS ATMOSPHERE

Mars has electrically charged metal atoms (ions) high in its atmosphere, according to new results from NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. The metal ions can reveal previously invisible activity in the mysterious electrically charged upper atmosphere (ionosphere) of Mars.

“MAVEN has made the first direct detection of the permanent presence of metal ions in the ionosphere of a planet other than Earth,” said Joseph Grebowsky of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and lead author of a new study detailing MAVEN’s results.

“Because metallic ions have long lifetimes and are transported far from their region of origin by neutral winds and electric fields, they can be used to infer motion in the ionosphere, similar to the way we use a lofted leaf to reveal which way the wind is blowing,” Grebowsky said. The new study was published today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission) is exploring the Martian upper atmosphere to understand how the planet lost most of its air, transforming from a world that could have supported life billions of years ago into a cold desert planet today. Understanding ionospheric activity is shedding light on how the Martian atmosphere is being lost to space, according to the MAVEN team.

The metal comes from a constant rain of tiny meteoroids onto the red planet. When a high-speed meteoroid hits the Martian atmosphere, it vaporizes. Metal atoms in the vapor trail get some of their electrons torn away by other charged atoms and molecules in the ionosphere, transforming the metal atoms into electrically charged ions.

MAVEN has detected iron, magnesium, and sodium ions in the upper atmosphere of Mars over the last two years using its Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer instrument, giving the team confidence that the metal ions are a permanent feature. “We detected metal ions associated with the close passage of Comet Siding Spring in 2014, but that was a unique event and it didn’t tell us about the long-term presence of the ions,” Grebowsky said.

The interplanetary dust that causes the meteor showers is common throughout our solar system, so it’s likely that all solar system planets and moons with substantial atmospheres have metal ions, according to the team.

Sounding rockets, radar and satellite measurements have detected metal ion layers high in the atmosphere above Earth. There’s also been indirect evidence for metal ions above other planets in our solar system. When spacecraft are exploring these worlds from orbit, sometimes their radio signals pass through the planet’s atmosphere on the way to Earth, and sometimes portions of the signal have been blocked. This has been interpreted as interference from electrons in the ionosphere, some of which are thought to be associated with metal ions. However, long-term direct detection of the metal ions by MAVEN is the first conclusive evidence that these ions exist on another planet and that they are a permanent feature there.

The team found that the metal ions behaved differently on Mars than on Earth. Earth is surrounded by a global magnetic field generated in its interior, and this magnetic field together with ionospheric winds forces the metal ions into layers. However, Mars has only local magnetic fields fossilized in certain regions of its crust, and the team only saw the layers near these areas.

“Elsewhere, the metal ion distributions are totally unlike those observed at Earth,” Grebowsky said.

The research has other applications as well. For example, it is unclear if the metal ions can affect the formation or behavior of high-altitude clouds. Also, detailed understanding of the meteoritic ions in the totally different Earth and Mars environments will be useful for better predicting consequences of interplanetary dust impacts in other yet-unexplored solar system atmospheres.

“Observing metal ions on another planet gives us something to compare and contrast with Earth to understand the ionosphere and atmospheric chemistry better,” Grebowsky said.

1959 Radio Man

Tarantula Nebula

Lots of stuff like this at www.astrotidbits.com with explanations.

Our planet seen from Saturn, captured by the Cassini spacecraft

Image credit: NASA / Cassini

NASA’s MAVEN Discovers How Mars Lost Its Atmosphere

“The good news for us, mind you, is that the magnetic field here on Earth shows no sign of ceasing anytime soon. The dynamo in the core may do things like flip and reverse, swapping north-and-south magnetic poles, but we should continue to stay protected from the solar wind far into the foreseeable future: for billions of years (at least) to be sure. We could, conceivably, one day suffer the same fate as Mars, but our mass, our rotation and our active, dynamic core should keep the Earth’s magnetic field in business for at least as long as the Sun shines!”

If you had taken a trip to our Solar System four billion years ago, you would have found two worlds with liquid water oceans, temperate atmospheres and all the conditions we believe are needed for life. Earth would have been one of them, but Mars would have met all those criteria, too. It was long suspected that something happened to Mars around a billion years into the Solar System’s history that caused it to lose its atmosphere, something that should still be going on today. Thanks to NASA’s Maven mission, we’ve measured this atmospheric stripping by the Sun for the first time, and we’ve reached a few incredible conclusions, including that in about two billion years, Mars will be completely airless, and that if we were to terraform Mars today, it would hang onto this new atmosphere for millions of years.

Come get the full story of how Mars lost its atmosphere, and learn what NASA’s Maven mission has taught us so far!