Mars

When the shuttle retires in 2010, as many as 8,000 NASA contractors could lose their jobs. After a request from lawmakers, NASA released these numbers yesterday, but added that this could be a worst case scenario. The Kennedy Space Center would suffer the biggest losses, with 80 percent of its contract workers losing their jobs by 2011.

It would have been pretty heartbreaking for space fans if Spirit and Opportunity, the twin Martian rovers, had survived on the Red Planet all these years, only to be shut down and lost for good due to budget cuts.

Apparently NASA sent a letter last week to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the lab that runs the rovers' program, specifying a $4 million cut. Scientists said this move would have forced them to put one rover into hibernation mode, and limit the duties of the other.

Yesterday, NASA released more than two thousand images from the high-resolution camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a spacecraft looping around the Red Planet. One of the highlight photos, taken February 19, shows the cloudy aftermath of an avalanche of ice and dust rushing down a steep slope. The image surprised scientists, and proved that Mars is not just some planet-sized museum, but a very active world.

I can say with fair confidence that if an astronaut died on a short mission to the moon, the craft would turn around and come back. But it gets thornier if the astronauts are on Mars, or even halfway there—any place where turning back would be inadvisable or even impossible.
There are really only two options for the body: Leave it there or bring it home.

Day 1,464 of the Mars rovers' 90-day mission to Mars (for those of you keeping track), and Steve Squires, the head of science operations for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers is getting us up to date on their latest findings. Most important: serendipity in action. The Spirit rover's right front wheel has broken, so engineers turn the rover around, drive it in reverse, and drag the wheel behind the rover. As it slogs across the planet, it carves a trench. And my, what a trench it carves.

When PopSci published Will Snyder's article on terraforming Mars, we opined that the Mars Society's colonial flag could use some sprucing up, so we asked readers to submit their own designs. The week the article appeared, 42 Martian-flag mockups turned up in our inbox. Some featured elaborate designs and detailed explanations (which we've printed in their entirety in the slideshow), while others simply included a name. A couple flags were even sent anonymously.

In a word: no. It would be impossible to destroy the Red Planet with any device scientists can build, let alone finance. Planets can survive enormous assaults; the Hellas Basin, a Martian crater about 1,300 miles wide, testifies to the planet having once collided with an asteroid so massive that the impact generated well over a hundred million megatons of energy. If a meteoroid that size were to hit Earth, it could wipe out life on an entire continent.

When we catch up with the robot, it is poking along in a herky-jerky and rather flummoxed fashion through the Atacama Desert, which covers much of far northern Chile. The Atacama is reputedly the driest place on Earth, with rainfall measured in millimeters per decade. It is a rough place for man or robot, a tawny maze of high plateaus and shaley foothills under constant sun and an enormous cobalt-blue sky.

The search for water on Mars will intensify next month

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the largest and most powerful spacecraft ever built, is bound for the Red Planet this August. Watch an animation of the craft as it speeds into martian orbit at 25,000 mph, uses atmospheric friction to slow itself down to 300 mph, and settles into its final orbit less than 200 miles from the planet's surface.

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Quick, small and innovative: That's the kind of mission NASA is seeking, and that's what the Mars Scout program is all about. NASA's past missions to MarsMariner, Viking, Pathfinderwere mostly large-scale exploratory ventures, with sometimes a decade or more separating launches. Mars Scout missions, scheduled to begin in 2007, can be launched much more frequently and cheaply. Best of all, the program allows small groups of scientists to propose very specific missions on subjects that address cutting-edge questions in their fields.

Martian Chess is played on an ordinary chessboard using a standard set of chess pieces, a standard deck of 52 playing cards, and a six-sided die. The pieces are set up in the usual fashion, and each player is dealt 13 cards. White goes first.