NASA rover reaches rim of big Martian crater

NASA's surviving Mars rover Opportunity has reached the rim of a 14-mile-wide crater where the robot geologist will examine rocks older than any it has seen in its seven years on the surface of the red planet, scientists said Wednesday.

The solar-powered, six-wheel rover arrived at Endeavour crater after driving 13 miles from a smaller crater named Victoria.

The drive, which took nearly three years, culminated Tuesday, when Opportunity signaled it had arrived at the location dubbed Spirit Point in honor of the rover's twin, which fell silent last year.

"We're there," said project manager John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Opportunity and Spirit landed on opposite sides of Mars in 2004 and used their instruments to discover geologic evidence that the cold and dusty planet was once wet.

Craters can provide windows into the planet's past because layers of material from long-ago eras are exposed. Endeavour crater is more than 25 times wider than Victoria.

Callas said the plan is to drive a bit closer to the rim to take pictures of the oldest rocks seen by Opportunity.

"This is a brand new mission," Callas said.

Since landing, Opportunity has studied sulfate sediments that pointed to an environment that was once wetter and warmer.

"Now we have rocks that predate that," Callas said.

The rover's work is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program strategy known as "follow the water," which looks for evidence that liquid water once existed or perhaps still exists on the planet. Liquid water is considered essential for the potential for some form of life to have developed.

Last week, research based on observations by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter theorized that dark, fingerlike features that appear spring through summer on some Martian slopes then fade in winter could be flows of briny water. Saltiness would be necessary to lower the freezing temperature of water.

A big, new NASA rover named Curiosity is awaiting launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on a $2.5 billion mission to explore a towering mountain inside a 96-mile-wide crater to determine if there were once conditions capable of supporting microbial life.

Curiosity, powered by a radioisotope instead of sunlight, is expected to land on Mars in August 2012.

Asian glacier on a speed run

A glacier in Tajikistan is on a speed kick, scientists say, moving more since June than it has at any time in the last 22 years.

The Medvezhiy glacier, located in the Pamir Mountains, has moved almost 3,300 feet since June 3, NewScientist.com reported Thursday.

Known for periodic bursts of speed, the glacier has reached the point where it is now blocking the Abdukagor River, prompting worries of flooding as a glacial lake 650 feet deep and 1,150 feet wide has formed behind it.

In its last major movements, in 1962 and 1973, the glacier advanced by as much 1.25 miles, later releasing 700 million cubic feet of water once the Abdukafor breached the glacier's ice dams.

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/08/04/Asian-glacier-on-a-speed-run/UPI-70821312507591/#ixzz1UBEx4diO

Asian glacier on a speed run

A glacier in Tajikistan is on a speed kick, scientists say, moving more since June than it has at any time in the last 22 years.

The Medvezhiy glacier, located in the Pamir Mountains, has moved almost 3,300 feet since June 3, NewScientist.com reported Thursday.

Known for periodic bursts of speed, the glacier has reached the point where it is now blocking the Abdukagor River, prompting worries of flooding as a glacial lake 650 feet deep and 1,150 feet wide has formed behind it.

In its last major movements, in 1962 and 1973, the glacier advanced by as much 1.25 miles, later releasing 700 million cubic feet of water once the Abdukafor breached the glacier's ice dams.

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/08/04/Asian-glacier-on-a-speed-run/UPI-70821312507591/#ixzz1UBEx4diO

Scientists seek multiple universes

British physicists say the theory that our universe is contained inside a bubble, just one of multiple bubble universes in a "multiverse," can now be tested.

Scientists at University College London, Imperial College London and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics say the search is on for disk-like patterns in the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang that could provide evidence of collisions between other universes and our own.

Efforts to identify an efficient way to search for signs of such collisions have been hampered by the possibility the disc-like patterns in the radiation could be located anywhere in the sky and could be difficult to separate out from random patterns in the noisy background radiation data.

"It's a very hard statistical and computational problem to search for all possible radii of the collision imprints at any possible place in the sky," researcher Hiranya Peiris said Wednesday in a UCL release.

A new computer algorithm will allow the researchers to analyze huge amounts of background radiation data from a NASA probe, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

"The work represents an opportunity to test a theory that is truly mind-blowing: that we exist within a vast multiverse, where other universes are constantly popping into existence," Stephen Feeney, who created the powerful algorithm, said.