Mars 'Icebreaker' mission - details released - Video

The Icebreaker drill in the laboratory at Honeybee Robotics. 

Credit: Honeybee Robotics

Scientists supported by the Astrobiology Technology for Exploring Planets (ASTEP) and Astrobiology Instrument Development Programs (ASTID) have outlined the proposed 'Icebreaker' mission to Mars in a recent paper in the Journal of Field Robotics.

Icebreaker would send a robotic lander to the same region of Mars visited by the Phoenix mission in 2007.

After landing at Mars' polar latitudes, Icebreaker would use its tools to penetrate the surface and excavate samples.

The goal is to see what is hiding beneath the ice caps, and whether or not Icebreaker could unlock a treasure trove of organics, and possibly signs of past or present life on Mars.

Getting Down on Mars
The surface of Mars is not only inhospitable to life as we know it, it's also a rough place for molecules themselves to survive.

Mars has a very thin atmosphere compared to Earth, and this means there is little to stand in the way of the harsh solar and space radiation that pummels the surface. This radiation can quickly cause molecules to decay.


However, ice on Mars could help shield molecules from radiation, and the deeper the molecules are buried beneath the ice, the longer they survive.

Because of this, the best places to search for organics and biosignatures on Mars could be at the poles or other areas where ice is present.

"Our goal is not the polar caps per se," said Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center and co-author on the study."Our goal is ice-cemented ground."

According to McKay, another location that the researches are considering is near the Viking 2 landing site, where a separate study by Bryne et al. (2009) revealed that the ground is cemented together by ice near the surface.

"The ice-cemented ground is of interest for two reasons," said McKay.

"Firstly, it's possible that during periods of recent high obliquity the ice was warmed and became as habitable as the soils in the Antarctic dry valleys. Second is the hypothesis that ice cement protects organics and biomarkers."

The difficultly of such a mission is in getting under the ice to collect samples. The Icebreaker team believes that drilling is the most realistic method to use for this purpose.

University Valley, Antarctica (approximate coordinates: -77.866427, 160.725585). 

Credit: Honeybee Robotics

More information: Glass, B. J., Dave, A., McKay, C. P. and Paulsen, G. (2014), "Robotics and Automation for 'Icebreaker'." J. Field Robotics, 31: 192–205. DOI: 10.1002/rob.21487

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NASA ESA Hubble Image: Details of Large Megellanic Cloud

Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Gouliermis /University of Heidelberg

This stunning new Hubble image shows a small part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the closest galaxies to our own.

This collection of small baby stars, most weighing less than the sun, form a young stellar cluster known as LH63.

This cluster is still half-embedded in the cloud from which it was born, in a bright star-forming region known as the emission nebula LHA 120-N 51, or N51.

This is just one of the hundreds of star-forming regions filled with young stars spread throughout the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The burning red intensity of the nebulae at the bottom of the picture illuminates wisps of gas and dark dust, each spanning many light-years.

Moving up and across, bright stars become visible as sparse specks of light, giving the impression of pin-pricks in a cosmic cloak.

Looking for and at low-mass stars can help us to understand how stars behave when they are in the early stages of formation, and can give us an idea of how the Sun might have looked billions of years ago.

ESA's Mars Express: Huge Martian Landforms Detail Revealed

ESA's Mars Express orbited the Red Planet nearly 12,500 times by October 2013. Its high resolution stereo camera images, assembled in this "fly-around," show riverbeds, volcanoes, canyons and craters.

Credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

Study details machinery of immune protection against colitis and inflammatory diseases

Study details machinery of immune protection against colitis and inflammatory diseases ScienceBlog.com

Scientists report a protein made by a gene already associated with a handful of human inflammatory immune diseases plays a pivotal role in protecting the intestinal tract from colitis.

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital investigators led the research, which points to possible new strategies for combating colitis. Colitis is a chronic inflammatory disease associated with colon damage, resulting in abdominal pain, bleeding and other symptoms.

The work also expands the link between the Nlrp3 protein and Crohn's disease, said Thirumala-Devi Kanneganti, Ph.D., assistant member of the St. Jude Department of Immunology and the paper's senior author.

Md. Hasan Zaki, Ph.D., a St. Jude postdoctoral fellow, is first author of the study, which appears in the March 18 online edition of the journal Immunity.

Researchers demonstrated that in a mouse model of colitis, Nlrp3 plays a pivotal role in keeping the intestinal tract intact, thus preventing further damage that occurs if intestinal bacteria leak into the body.

Nlrp3 works by anchoring a large, multi-protein complex known as the Nlrp3 inflammasome where the messenger protein interleukin 18 (IL-18) is made. IL-18 belongs to a family of molecules known as cytokines, which shape the body's immune response.

In this study, researchers showed IL-18 produced by the Nlrp3 inflammasome helped mice maintain healthy colon by triggering production of more epithelial cells to compensate for those damaged or destroyed by colitis.

"This paper provides the basis for more effective, potentially disease-modifying approaches to treatment," Kanneganti said. She added that in this study, scientists showed the specific pathway activated in the epithelial cells lining the colon for IL-18 production.

Previous studies linked changes in the NLRP3 gene to several auto-inflammatory problems in which a person's immune system mistakenly attacks healthy tissue. The gene is part of the body's innate immune response. That is the branch of the immune system programmed to act immediately against infectious diseases and other threats.

"I believe if we target molecules that are part of the innate immune response we can find cures for many diseases, including cancer," Kanneganti said. She and her colleagues focused on Nlrp3 in colitis after reports that patients with Crohn's disease, another disorder characterised by chronic intestinal inflammation, had low levels of the protein.

In a series of experiments, scientists demonstrated that the Nlrp3 inflammasome not only helps protect against chemically induced colitis in mice, but also showed how and where in the body the protection occurred.

The researchers demonstrated that in response to colitis, the Nlrp3 inflammasome is activated in the epithelial cells lining the colon, where IL-18 can be produced.

Investigators also established that IL-18 is crucial for protecting the colon from colitis. In fact, researchers reported that injecting IL-18 into mice that lacked the molecule eased colitis symptoms.

The other authors of this study are Kelli Boyd, Peter Vogel and Michael Kastan (all St. Jude) and Mohamed Lamkanfi (Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium).

This research was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute and ALSAC.

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NASA’s Newest Map of the World

In June 2009, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey put the finishing touches on a new collection of mapped images covering the entire land surface of the Earth and made them available to anyone, anywhere in the world, absolutely free.

The result of a collaboration between NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. National Geospatial Agency, the Global Land Survey 2005 features around 9,500 images from NASA’s Landsat satellites captured between 2004–2007.

The images are detailed enough to make out features as small as 30 meters (about one-third the length of an American football field), they have been carefully screened for clouds, and each one shows the landscape during its growing season.

Some of the images are as striking as a piece of artwork. Stitched together into a single mosaic, the collection paints the most detailed picture of Earth’s land surface a person can get for free.

Read the full article here ...........

Fear: What is it Good For? Fuzzy Logic!

FEAR changes how we see things, enhancing our ability to identify blurry shapes but impairing our perception of fine details. This may help us to escape threats.

Looking at a fearful face, which activates the brain in a similar way to feeling fear, enhances sensitivity to visual contrast, but whether it improves vision across the board wasn't clear. So Bruno Bocanegra and René Zeelenberg at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, showed people pictures of faces with either fearful or neutral expressions, followed by a "blob" covered in stripes of varying thicknesses.

Those shown a fearful face were better at identifying whether thick stripes were vertical or slightly tilted and worse at identifying the orientation of thin stripes than those shown neutral faces (Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02354.x).

This response may have evolved because coarse-grained features, which enable you to evaluate movement and distance, better aid survival in scary situations than fine details. "You don't care whether the object has wrinkles, you care whether its movement is threatening," Bocanegra says.