NASA unveils 'Earth to the Solar System' web site

Image: NASA/Mars Global Surveyor

NASA has created a new online collection of images of our solar system and locations on Earth where astrobiology researchers travel to conduct field research.

Called “From Earth to the Solar System,” or FETTSS, the images showcase the excitement of planetary exploration and the journey to understand the origin and evolution of the solar system, and the search for life elsewhere.

Images may be downloaded and displayed with the proper photo credit.

The site is a collaboration between NASA Ames Research Center’s Astrobiology Institute in Moffett Field, California, and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The collection is being released to celebrate NASA’s Year of the Solar System -- a time of unprecedented planetary science mission activity. The celebration runs from October 2010 through August 2012.

Above is just one image from the collection of  Mars, a planet that has been the subject of intense study for the past two centuries. Its exploration has been wrought with success and failure, and has witnessed a dramatic evolution in knowledge. Speculations about the famous “irrigation canals” on Mars in the late 1800’s were finally put to rest by images returned from NASA’s Mariner 4 mission in 1965. Revealing impact craters and a barren landscape, they dispelled thoughts of thriving, agricultural civilizations.

In the 1970’s NASA’s Viking mission carried out life-detection experiments on the surface. The results, indicating a lifeless planet, raised more questions than answers. The next two decades were met with struggle as several spacecraft from the US, Japan, Europe, and former USSR were lost. Success resurfaced in the late 1990’s with the ESA orbiter Mars Express and NASA’s Pathfinder rover, and Global Surveyor and Odyssey orbiters — heralding the mantra “Follow the Water.”

In 2004, NASA’s twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity began their work, which is still ongoing today. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Phoenix lander followed. As data from these robotic explorers piled up, so did evidence that Mars preserves a record of surface liquid water and possibly habitable environments.

NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, launching in late 2011 and arriving in August 2012 will carry an unprecedented suite of instruments that will bring us one step closer to determining if life ever started on Mars.

The online collection will allow interested individuals, groups and organizations to plan their own solar system exhibits. A NASA-sponsored traveling version of the collection is planned for display at several U.S. locations. This summer, the exhibit will be featured at various locations around the world. These exhibitions are made possible through a partnership with the National Center for Earth and Space Science’s “Voyage National Program,” Capitol Heights, Md.


• For more information and to become involved with the new site, visit: http://fettss.arc.nasa.gov


• For more information on NASA’s Year of the Solar System, visit: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/yss

Blogging the Moon: new book on the future of spaceflight

Blogging the Moon, a new book from Griffin Media challenges readers to think hard about the future of human spaceflight - and how it could be developed.

NASA has been in the news lately for reasons beyond the exciting discoveries of various and vast quantities of water on the Moon. Unfortunately, the long, drawn out repositioning of the US national space program has brought the space community to loggerheads, leaving the future of the last superpower's manned space program in jeopardy. The upheaval caused by fights over rocket designs and suppliers and the "Eenie, meenie, minie, moe" formula being used to select a new space direction has placed the US space program in peril.

For over two decades Paul Spudis has had a front row seat to the U.S. national space program and has written extensively about space policy and space science. His opinions and insights recently found a home on the Air and Space Magazine blog, The Once and Future Moon.

Beginning with his reporting from India in October of 2008 (as the principal investigator of NASA's Mini-SAR, watching his radar being launched to the Moon aboard Chandrayaan-1), Paul's easy to read essays have followed and reported on the growing upheaval in the space community and the battle being waged for the ideological control of and funding for space exploration, and the resulting chaos.

In keeping with his call for a strong US human space program, Paul outlines and explains the importance of creating a sustainable space program through the use of the Moon's resources to create new capabilities to live and work in space and move humanity off planet. These essays and reader comments are compiled in the book.

"The reaction to the idea of humans living somewhere other than on Earth is interesting and reflects a basic division within humanity," Paul notes in a recent post titled Embrace the end of Human Spaceflight. "For any new frontier, there are always those who go and those who stay.  Those who stay cannot imagine the motivations of those who go, often attributing irrationality – if not insanity – to their actions.

"Space is a frontier not yet fully opened," he argues. "Although we understand how to do it in principle, we do not yet have the practical knowledge to make it feasible.  I have argued that if space is to become a future home for humanity, we must learn how to extract what we need in space from what we find there.  Unless we desire future human space missions to be forever consigned to the current template of bringing everything with us, learning to live off the land is a requirement regardless of where we go or what we do."



A bonus DVD tht comes with Blogging the Moon includes a slideshow of over 30 years of Dr Spudis' pictures researching our Moon, as well as his in-depth presentation about the Moon's resources.

• Blogging the Moon
Published by Griffin Media
ISBN10-13: 1926837177 : 9781926837178

• Buy it from amazon.co.uk



• Air and Space Magazine blog, The Once and Future Moon