Opportunity Mars Rover reaches Endeavour Crater

After 3 years of slowly crawling across the bleak Martian surface, the NASA Mars rover Opportunity has reached the rim of the Endeavour crater.

West rim of the Endeavour crater photographed by the Opportunity rover.
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Opportunity has already visited Victoria Crater and studied the layers of rock that lie within. Endeavour is 25 times wider and much deeper than Victoria, which means that Opportunity will be able to study older Martian rocks during its time here. Scientists hope that studying rocks that were formed during an earlier era of Mars' history will answer questions about the presence of water on the Red Planet.

Just last week, strong evidence emerged for the existence of flowing water on Mars. The aim of the Martian rover's rock analysis is to determine whether liquid water has ever existed for long periods of time on the surface of Mars.

NASA press release

NASA's Jupiter-Bound "Juno" Mission Launches Successfully

Artist's Impression of Juno circling Jupiter.
Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Just a few minutes ago, NASA successfully launched the unmanned spacecraft Juno into Space. The solar-powered spacecraft will spend the next five years travelling to its destination, the gas giant Jupiter - the largest planet in our solar system.

Juno's aim is to study Jupiter's atmosphere and its gravitational and magnetic fields. The hope is that this data will give clues to Jupiter's origins. For example, if Juno detects a high concentration of water in Jupiter's atmosphere, that would suggest that Jupiter might have formed further out in the Solar System and gradually drifted to its current position.

Juno's year-long study will end in dramatic fashion, with the probe plunging deep into the depths of Jupiter and being destroyed.

See the Juno mission page from NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/main/index.html

The Code: Mathematics in Nature

The BBC seems to have an affinity for mathematics documentaries at the moment. As well as re-airing The Story of Maths, they are also currently running a three-part documentary, The Code.

The programme highlights of mathematics popping up in unlikely places in nature. For example, one particular species of cicadas emerges only once every 13 years, in order to minimise their chances of coinciding with another species. This works because 13 is prime and therefore shares few factors (only 1 and 13) with other numbers.

There's also a "treasure hunt" based on clues from the TV show, the online games and the blog: Treasure Hunt

Catch the final episode on Tuesday 10th at 9pm, or view the whole series on BBC iPlayer.

How to Bring Your Rocket Up to Speed

I just started writing for Brighthub, a site which provides information on science, technology and education.  I write in the Space Channel.

Check out my first article:  How is Calculus Used in Astronomy?

Space Shuttle Retirements: The End of an Era

The last of NASA's space shuttles, Atlantis, has gone into retirement. The shuttle touched down on July 21^st at the Kennedy Space Centre, delivering its four crew members safely back to Earth.

The space shuttle program has faithfully delivered astronauts, supplies and maintenance to the International Space Station since 1981. The space shuttle Discovery launched the Hubble Space Telescope and the shuttles have since made several missions to repair and install new instruments in the telescope.

The fleet of shuttles that operated in the program – Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour – were revolutionary in that they were reusable. Earlier spacecraft such as Apollo, which carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the Moon in 1969, returned to Earth by splashing down in the ocean, but the winged space shuttles could glide majestically down to land on a runway.

Atlantis lands for the final time.  Source: NASA

The decision to retire the fleet of shuttles was made in 2004, following the deaths of the crew on board the space shuttle Columbia, which broke apart on re-entry into the atmosphere. A previous accident, in which the Challenger shuttle broke apart just 73 seconds after take-off in 1986, had already claimed the lives of 7 NASA astronauts.

The average cost of launching a space shuttle into orbit is around $450 million. In 2005, NASA spent almost 30% of its total budget on the space shuttle program. The decision to close down the program will mean job losses for around 3,000 NASA employees.

Until plans for a replacement for the space shuttle program are drawn up, astronauts will be transported to and from the International Space Station by Russian spacecraft. There are reports that a private company - either Orbital Sciences, Lockheed Martin or Boeing - will step in to fill the gap of providing a reusable spacecraft to replace the retired shuttles.

For more information, don't miss this program airing tonight at 9 pm on BBC2.

Breaking News: First Hints of Higgs Boson?

On 22 July, results indicating the presence of a Higgs boson with a mass in the range 120-140 GeV were reported at the EPS-HEP11 conference in Grenoble, by two teams of researchers working independently at the LHC.

The first results to be reported were from the ATLAS experiment, followed by (weaker) results from CMS.  Matt Strassler's blog appears to have been one of the first places to break the news following the conference proceedings.  The ATLAS team state the significance of their result as being 2.8 sigma, although this is before the "look elsewhere" effect is taken into account.  Once that is included, the probability of the peak in ATLAS's data being due to random statistical fluctuation rises to around 8%.

For a discussion of uncertainties and significance in the results, see:
How Certain is Certain?

The CMS experiment also sees a signal in the 120-145 GeV, albeit a smaller one than ATLAS.

Click here for more information about how the Higgs search is carried out at LHC

The Higgs Boson (also known as the "God Particle") was proposed by Peter Higgs in 1964 as part of the Higgs mechanism, which attempts to explain why particles have mass.  Its discovery is one of the primary goals of the Large Hadron Collider, the 7.5 billion euro particle collider that lies in a 27 km circular tunnel underground near Geneva.

To find out more about the Higgs boson and the new results, please see:

Has the Higgs come out of Hiding?

These results are exciting because they both show evidence of a Higgs boson in the expected mass range.  However, more data is required before we can say for certain that we have seen the Higgs particle.

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Update:
CMS results available here: http://cms.web.cern.ch/cms/News/2011/EPS_2011/index.html (technical)

BBC series: The Story of Maths

The BBC is re-airing its 2008 series, "The Story of Maths", presented by Marcus du Sautoy.

Catch the first episode "The Language of the Universe" on iplayer here (UK only)
The second episode, "The Genius of the East" will air on BBC 4 on Tuesday 19th July at 8pm.

The first hour-long documentary traces the origins of mathematics, detailing the contributions made by the Egyptians, Babylonians and Greeks.  It tells the story of how numbers such as pi, zero, irrational numbers and the Golden Ratio came to play such an important role in mathematics.  Episode Two will move east to China, and the final two episodes will trace the story of maths up to the present day.

I often feel patronised by science documentaries, but I'm actually learning things from this series, which would seems like it would also be very accessible to non-mathematicians.  Even though I'm already familiar with the theorems, learning about their origins and how ancient people came to realise them gives fresh food for thought.  One of the things I love most about maths is how every problem can be approached using a range of different methods, so it's interesting to see how ancient cultures arrived at the same mathematical truths as modern mathematicians, often while seeking solutions to very different problems.

The Story of Math on DVD