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OU prepares for first successful landing on Mars
Academics from the OU will be among those eagerly anticipating the first ever successful landing by European space scientists on Mars. The team of scientists from the OU are part of the European Space Agency (ESA) ExoMars Mission, which will discover if methane gas exists in the atmosphere and below the surface. This will help scientists […]
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From Neptune’s blue hue to Jupiter’s red spot: are the colours of the planets real?
These days, we’re used to seeing pictures of planets sent back by spacecraft. Some pictures look colourful, others less so. But do they show what each planet really looks like? The short answer to this is “sometimes”, because some planets are genuinely quite colourful. Others are surfaced by rock that is almost entirely grey, and […]
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Sniffing out life on Mars: mid-cruise check-out (and it’s 1-0 to England)
Data is currently being received and reviewed from the ExoMars Mission – the launch of a spacecraft in March to demonstrate Europe’s first ever landing on Mars later this year, and an attempt to sniff out signs of life on the Red Planet. The ExoMars Orbiter is carrying an instrument with significant OU involvement which […]
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Mars: Boiling water could be carving slopes into surface
Features on Mars which had been attributed to flowing salty water could be caused by an altogether more explosive reason, according to new research published this week in Nature Geoscience. Scientists at The Open University used a unique Mars simulation chamber to conduct experiments and found that the streaks and slopes on the planet’s surface […]
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How the ExoMars mission could sniff out life on Mars – and what to do next
“It (could be) life Jim, but (perhaps) not as we know it.” This is not just a sci-fi catchphrase, but also something some planetary scientists have uttered in response to the discovery of methane in Mars’ atmosphere. That’s right – scientists believe that some kind of past or present microbial lifeform on Mars could have […]
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Water on Mars: evidence of glaciers similar to Earth’s
Researchers at University College Dublin (UCD) and The OU have found new evidence that liquid water flowed beneath a glacier on Mars, suggesting it had glaciers more like Earth’s than currently thought . The finding fuels the debate concerning Mars’ habitability and the burning question of whether other planets can sustain life. Dr Colman Gallagher […]
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NASA: streaks of salt on Mars mean flowing water, and raise new hopes of finding life
Salty streaks have been discovered on Mars, which could be a sign that salt water seeps to the surface in the summers. Scientists have previously observed dark streaks (see image above) on the planet’s slopes which are thought to have resulted from seeps of water wetting surface dust. Evidence of salts left behind in these […]
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