Space Geckos Die Due to Technical Glitch Two Days Before Landing

The five geckos onboard Russia's Foton-M4 satellite died simultaneously two days before landing because of a technical malfunction, the head of the experiment, Sergei Savelyev, told RIA Novosti Tuesday.

"The autopsy revealed that the deaths were caused by technical issues and are related to the malfunction of one of the biosatellite's systems," said Savelyev, researcher at the Institute of Human Morphology and head of the experiment.

"Autopsies of three of the five [geckos] have been conducted, and the remaining two will be examined today. We can already confidently conclude that the death of all geckos happened almost simultaneously.

"The poor guys died within a few hours. Their bodies were not mummified, as some have reported. Moreover, their organs show that the death occurred no more than two days ago," Savelyev explained.

Savelyev denied reports saying the geckos died from hypothermia, as the lizards were unlikely to have had a lengthy cool-down.

"There was apparently a quick and short synchronous effect on all animals... Some technical glitch in the life-support system," he said, stressing that it was necessary to collect and examine the satellite's data in order to determine the exact problem.

Russian Foton M4 spacecapsule after landing.

Reporters Witness NASA's Latest High Tech Exploration Tool Before Testing

NASA workers at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, wearing clean room "bunny suits," prepare the LDSD test article for shipment later this month to Hawaii. 

LDSD will help land bigger space payloads on Mars or return them back to Earth.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL

On April 9 reporters got a chance to don "bunny suits" (protective apparel that sometimes makes people look like large rabbits) and enter a NASA clean room at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

In the room is NASA's latest technology for landing large payloads on planets like Mars or Earth, being processed for shipping prior to testing next June.

NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project will be flying a rocket-powered, saucer-shaped test vehicle into near-space this June from the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, Hawaii.

The LDSD crosscutting demonstration mission will test breakthrough technologies that will enable large payloads to be safely landed on the surface of Mars, or other planetary bodies with atmospheres, including Earth.

These new technologies will not only enable landing of larger payloads on Mars, but also allow access to much more of the planet's surface by enabling landings at higher altitude sites.

The LDSD is one of several crosscutting technologies NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate is developing to create the new knowledge and capabilities necessary to enable our future missions to an asteroid, Mars and beyond.

The directorate is committed to developing the critical technologies required to enable future exploration missions beyond low Earth orbit.

NASA continues to solicit the help of the best and brightest minds in academia, industry, and government to drive innovation and enable solutions in a myriad of important technology thrust areas.

These planned investments are addressing high priority challenges for achieving safe and affordable deep-space exploration.

In fact, NASA's space tech team will launch seven major technology demonstrations in next 24 months.

ALMA: 'Death stars' in Orion blast planets before they even form - Video

This artist's concept shows two proplyds, or protostars, around a massive O-type star. 

The nearer proplyd is having its planet-forming dust and gas blasted away by the radiation from the star. 

The farther proplyd is able to retain its planet-making potential. 

Credit: NRAO /AUI /NSF, B. Saxton

The Orion Nebula is home to hundreds of young stars and even younger protostars known as proplyds.

Many of these nascent systems will go on to develop planets, while others will have their planet-forming dust and gas blasted away by the fierce ultraviolet radiation emitted by massive O-type stars that lurk nearby.

A team of astronomers from Canada and the United States has used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study the often deadly relationship between highly luminous O-type stars and nearby protostars in the Orion Nebula.

Their data reveal that protostars within 0.1 light-years (about 600 billion miles) of an O-type star are doomed to have their cocoons of dust and gas stripped away in just a few millions years, much faster than planets are able to form.

Rita Mann

"O-type stars, which are really monsters compared to our Sun, emit tremendous amounts of ultraviolet radiation and this can play havoc during the development of young planetary systems," remarked Rita Mann, an astronomer with the National Research Council of Canada in Victoria, and lead author on a paper in the Astrophysical Journal.

"Using ALMA, we looked at dozens of embryonic stars with planet-forming potential and, for the first time, found clear indications where protoplanetary disks simply vanished under the intense glow of a neighbouring massive star."

Many, if not all, Sun-like stars are born in crowded stellar nurseries similar to the Orion Nebula.

Over the course of just a few million years, grains of dust and reservoirs of gas combine into larger, denser bodies.

Left relatively undisturbed, these systems will eventually evolve into fully fledged star systems, with planets, large and small and ultimately drift away to become part of the galactic stellar population.

Astronomers believe that massive yet short-lived stars in and around large interstellar clouds are essential for this ongoing process of star formation.

At the end of their lives, massive stars explode as supernovas, seeding the surrounding area with dust and heavy elements that will get taken up in the next generation of stars.

These explosions also provide the kick necessary to initiate a new round of star and planet formation, but while they still shine bright, these larger stars can be downright deadly to planets if an embryonic solar systems strays too close.



"Massive stars are hot and hundreds of times more luminous than our Sun," said James Di Francesco, also with the National Research Council of Canada.

"Their energetic photons can quickly deplete a nearby protoplanetary disks by heating up its gas, breaking it up, and sweeping it away."

James Di Francesco

Earlier observations with the Hubble Space Telescope revealed striking images of proplyds in Orion.

Many had taken on tear-drop shapes, with their dust and gas trailing away from a nearby massive star.

These optical images, however, couldn't reveal anything about the amount of dust that was present or how the dust and gas concentrations changed in relation to massive stars.

The new ALMA observations detected these and other never-before-imaged proplyds, essentially doubling the number of protoplanetary disks discovered in that region.

"Taken together, our investigations with ALMA suggest that extreme UV regions are not just inhospitable, but they're downright hazardous for planet formation. With enough distance, however, it's possible to find a much more congenial environment," said Mann.

"This work is really the tip of the iceberg of what will come out of ALMA; we hope to eventually learn how common solar systems like our own are."

Journal Reference: Rita K. Mann, James Di Francesco, Doug Johnstone, Sean M. Andrews, Jonathan P. Williams, John Bally, Luca Ricci, A. Meredith Hughes, Brenda C. Matthews. ALMA OBSERVATIONS OF THE ORION PROPLYDS. The Astrophysical Journal, 2014; 784 (1): 82 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/784/1/82

Moore's Law used to calculate that life began Before Earth existed

Richard Gordon

Geneticists Richard Gordon of the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida and Alexei Sharov of the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore have proposed, in a paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, that if the evolution of life follows Moore's Law, then it predates the existence of planet Earth.

Moore's Law, of course, famously suggests that the complexity of computers grows at a rate of double the transistors per circuit every two years, resulting in exponential growth.

Looking at the complexity of computers today and working Moore's Law backwards shows that the first microchips came about during the 1960s, which is when they were actually invented.

In their paper, Gordon and Sharov take the same approach, only they apply it to biological complexity.

Alexei Sharov

The two researchers acknowledge their ideas are more of a "thought exercise" than a theory proposal, but at the same time suggest their calculations ought to be taken seriously.

They start with the idea of genetic complexity doubling every 376 million years—working backwards, they say, means that life first came about almost 10 billion years ago, which of course predates the creation of Earth itself.

Most scientists agree the Earth formed just 4.5 billion years ago. Assuming that Moore's Law does apply to biological complexity, this would suggest that life began somewhere other than on Earth and migrated here.

Of course there are other possibilities to explain what happened, as the two acknowledge, life could have evolved following Moore's Law during certain periods but not at others, a deep freeze could have temporarily halted changes in complexity, for example, or cataclysmic events could have periodically killed off the more advanced biotic life forms.

There is also the possibility that the development of life had to reach a certain stage of development before it began to conform to Moore's Law.

Then of course, there is the very real possibility that the beginnings and evolution of life don't conform to Moore's Law at all.

Gordon and Sharov's paper is likely to set off multiple rounds of discussion regarding not just the origin of life on Earth, but in the galaxy as well.

If life truly predates our planet, and it can be proved, what impact might that have on religious thought and what might it mean to those looking for meaning in its very existence?

More information: Life Before Earth, arXiv:1304.3381 [physics.gen-ph] arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381

NASA Mars Curiosity Rover: Could Life Have Evolved on Mars Before Earth?

This set of images compares rocks seen by NASA's Opportunity rover and Curiosity rover at two different parts of Mars. 

On the left is " Wopmay" rock, in Endurance Crater, Meridiani Planum, as studied by the Opportunity rover. 

On the right are the rocks of the "Sheepbed" unit in Yellowknife Bay, in Gale Crater, as seen by Curiosity. Image released March 12, 2013.

CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/MSSS

The discovery that ancient Mars could have supported microbes raises the tantalizing possibility that life may have evolved on the Red Planet before it took root on Earth.

New observations by NASA's Curiosity rover suggest that microbial life could have survived on Mars in the distant past, when the Red Planet was a warmer and wetter place, scientists announced Tuesday (March 12).

It's unclear exactly how long ago Mars' habitability window opened up, researchers said. But the timing may be comparable to that of Earth, where life first appeared around 3.8 billion years ago.



"We're talking about older than 3 billion years ago, and we're probably looking at a situation where, plus or minus a couple hundred million years, it's about the time that we start seeing the first record of life preserved on Earth," Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, said during a press conference Tuesday.

The Curiosity team's conclusions are based on the rover's study of material collected from the interior of a Martian rock. Last month, Curiosity used its hammering drill to bore 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) into part of a Red Planet outcrop dubbed "John Klein" — deeper than any Mars robot had ever gone before.

The discovery that ancient Mars could have supported microbes raises the tantalizing possibility that life may have evolved on the Red Planet before it took root on Earth.

New observations by NASA's Curiosity rover suggest that microbial life could have survived on Mars in the distant past, when the Red Planet was a warmer and wetter place, scientists announced Tuesday (March 12).

Curiosity's analyses show that the John Klein area was once a benign aqueous environment, such as a neutral-pH lake, researchers said. Further, the rover's instruments detected many of the chemical ingredients necessary for life as we know it, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon.

Mission scientists aren't claiming that life has ever existed on the Red Planet. They have found no signs of Martian microbes, which is no surprise since the car-size Curiosity rover carries no life-detection instruments among its scientific gear.

But the advanced age of the John Klein deposits does open the door to some interesting speculation. If life ever flourished on Mars — a very big if — did it pre-date life on Earth? And if so, could Earth life trace its lineage back to Mars?