In 2012, Bobak Ferdowsi (aka "NASA Mohawk Guy") went viral for his unusual hairdo during the Mars Curiosity Rover landing. Now he's working on a mission to find signs of habitability on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. We asked Ferdowsi about whether or not he thinks we are alone in the universe.
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Like Earth, planet Mars is a shooting gallery for rogue space rocks that zip around at tens of thousands of miles per hour.
But the red planet has barely 1% of the atmosphere of Earth's to slow down, vaporize, and break up any of these stray lumps of stone and metal.
It also lacks the flowing surface water and robust weather of our home planet to quickly erase signs of the impact craters these strays leave behind.
As a result, Mars is littered with celestial pockmarks and, occasionally, researchers spot fresh impact craters using orbiting satellites like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and its HiRISE camera.
Studying fresh impacts not only helps researchers peek at freshly exposed dirt on Mars, which may have once been habitable, but also helps assess how much risk Earth might face from small yet dangerous space rocks.
Below is a zoomed-out image of one asteroid strike that was photographed just a few months ago, and it shows the giant black stain the event left behind:
The large and circular dark stain is roughly 650 feet (200 meters) from top to bottom, or about the length of a 60-story skyscraper lying on its side, and the central impact crater is roughly a few feet or meters across. It formed sometime between January 2014 and August 2016, so it's pretty fresh.
"[B]ecause Mars is so dusty (and there is wind there), all of that darker subsurface material was excavated and then billowed around the impact and downwind," Ari Espinoza, a HiRISE media team member, told Business Insider in an email.
"Think of dropping a tennis ball onto a mound of very fine powder," Espinoza said: "you'll see the powder billow about and get everywhere, even though the tennis ball isn't very large by comparison."
The HiRISE camera is powerful enough to resolve objects just 31 inches (80 centimeters) across, so it's worth zooming in to see the detail of the impact crater.
Amid the billow and streaks of fresh dirt, you can see a cluster of small craters, which may indicate the space rock broke up a little bit on its way toward the Martian surface — striking it like buckshot:
Espinoza couldn't say exactly how big the asteroid or piece of comet that caused the crater might have been, but noted they're actually "pretty common."
"[W]e've catalogued several hundred over the past decade," he said.
Which shouldn't make any of us comfortable, since even small near-Earth objects can burst in our atmosphere and wreak havoc on the ground.
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There's nothing that puts your life into perspective quite like staring down on our little blue marble from the vast expanse of space.
This incredible new NASA image, captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, not only shows our planet in continental detail from Mars, but also displays the relative size of our tiny lunar satellite, the Moon.
The image was taken as part of a calibration exercise for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera, and shows Earth at a distance of around 205 million kilometres (127 million miles).
The view is so clear, you can even see the continents of Earth, with Australia visible as the reddish blob at the centre of the globe, and South East Asia visible to the top left. The bright spot at the bottom is Antarctica, and the other white patches are clouds.
You can see it in full below, and a high-res version here:
The image combines two separate exposures taken on 20 November 2016, with their brightness slightly adjusted so that the Moon would show up in comparison to the brightness of Earth.
But don't be deceived - although the Moon and Earth look incredibly close together in this image, that's because at the time the Moon was almost directly behind Earth from Mars's point of view, so it looks a lot closer than it really is.
In reality, the distance between our planet and the Moon is about 30 times the diameter of Earth, which is 384,400 km (238,855 miles).
That's just about enough to fit all the planets in between us and our satellite (although not as comfortably as Internet memes might have you believe - more on that here).
Here's what that looks like in perspective:
Despite how tiny our Moon might look in these images, it's actually the fifth largest moon in the Solar System, and it's the largest moon relative to its host planet. (Pluto's moon Charon is larger, but Pluto's no longer a planet.)
It's crazy to think that in the future we could have humans on Mars looking back on this view, as a stark reminder of how beautiful the water-laden planet we came from really is.
Neil Armstrong said it best: "It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."
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We know how long a human could survive on a summer day on Mars without a spacesuit. (Answer: not long at all.) But what about the other planets in our solar system? Neil deGrasse Tyson breaks it down.
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Scientists studying the surface of Mars believe they have found evidence of drying mud cracks that, if confirmed, would be a first for the Curiosity rover mission.
Curiosity, which has been crawling across the windswept Martian landscape for more than four years, previously found evidence of ancient lakes on the Red Planet.
The latest discovery, announced Tuesday by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), could serve as evidence that Mars used to experience wetter conditions followed by drying periods – perhaps shedding more light on how habitable the planet's conditions might have been, and how they became less and less friendly to life.
"The ancient lakes varied in depth and extent over time, and sometimes disappeared," Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. "We're seeing more evidence of dry intervals between what had been mostly a record of long-lived lakes."
The researchers said they believe the layer of cracked terrain formed more than 3 billion years ago. Sediment then buried the layer until erosion stripped it away, once again revealing the cracked pattern.
"It looks like what you'd see beside the road where muddy ground has dried and cracked," Nathan Stein, a Curiosity science team member and graduate student at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in the statement.
"Even from a distance, we could see a pattern of four- and five-sided polygons that don't look like fractures we've seen previously with Curiosity," Mr. Stein said.
The researchers are continuing to review the data collected at the site of the suspected mud cracks, but the rover has left that area to head further uphill, where scientists hope it can drill more rocks. That could prove difficult since the part of the rover's drill that moves it up and down began malfunctioning occasionally last month.
After landing in 2012 near a site dubbed Mount Sharp, the Curiosity rover reached the mountain's base in 2014. Now more than four years in, even as the rover's instruments show signs of wear, discoveries keep coming. Just last week, researchers spotted a dark rock they suspect is another meteorite, the mission's third.
"While not yet confirmed, the turkey-shaped object has a gray, metallic luster and a lightly-dimpled texture that hints of regmaglypts," Bob King wrote for Universe Today. "Regmaglypts, indentations that resemble thumbprints in Play-Doh, are commonly seen in meteorites and caused by softer materials stripped from the rock’s surface during the brief but intense heat and pressure of its plunge through the atmosphere."
New Scientist's Leah Crane noted that Curiosity's Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument would be used to verify the researchers' suspicions.
"If the ChemCam results show that it is mostly made of iron, that would confirm that this is a meteorite formed from the core of an asteroid," Ms. Crane wrote. "That would make it one of several discovered by rovers on Mars – five were found by the Opportunity rover, and the Spirit rover took pictures of two potential meteorites."
Horton Newsom, a researcher from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, said a similar object, known as Egg Rock, discovered last November, could carry within its core information that differs from asteroids currently being studied.
"Iron meteorites provide records of many different asteroids that broke up, with fragments of their cores ending up on Earth and on Mars," Dr. Newsom, a member of the ChemCam team, said in a statement at the time. "Mars may have sampled a different population of asteroids than Earth has."
Iron meteorites are rare on Earth, where about 95 percent are stony and only 4.4 percent are irons and 1 percent are stony-irons, Universe Today's Mr. King wrote.
"If this were Earth," he added, "the new meteorite’s smooth, shiny texture would indicate a relatively recent fall, but who's to say how long it’s been sitting on Mars. The planet’s not without erosion from wind and temperature changes, but it lacks the oxygen and water that would really eat into an iron-nickel specimen like this one."
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New images from NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars reveal what looks to be the first sign of mud cracks on the Martian surface, providing scientists with even more evidence that the red planet once hosted water— which potentially could have supported life.
If the space agency's hunch is correct, these rock formations were once mud cracks (also known as desiccation cracks) — an ancient relic of Mars's wetter past billions of years ago. When the soil dried out, it was preserved under layers of rock in a fractured, segmented state, like a time capsule for Curiosity to discover eons later.
Curiosity came across the formations in the foothills of Mount Sharp, at a site nicknamed 'Old Soaker', after scientists noticed distinctive patterns in the Martian soil that didn't resemble anything they'd observed before — at least, not on Mars.
"Even from a distance, we could see a pattern of four- and five-sided polygons that don't look like fractures we've seen previously with Curiosity,"says Curiosity researcher Nathan Stein from Caltech.
"It looks like what you'd see beside the road where muddy ground has dried and cracked."
The researchers think the mud layer took shape more than 3 billion years ago, after Mars's once bountiful ancient lakes dried up.
The cracks then became buried over time by layers of surface sediment, which hardened into stratified rock, before wind erosion once more revealed the fractured patterns we see today.
According to the team, as the formations were buried with sediment, the crack rivets became filled with material that better resisted the wind erosion than the mudstone around it, which is why the cracks now appear as raised ridges.
In mud drying on the surface, this crack-filling sediment would have been made up of windblown dust or sand. But once the layer became buried, fractures could have been filled with minerals circulated by Martian groundwater — which scientists recently detected evidence of.
Curiosity's analysis of Old Soaker reveals that the site contains signs of both kinds of crack sediment, which means we could be looking at a historical cycle of lake activity — as Mars's bodies of waters ebbed and flowed over billions of years.
"If these are indeed mud cracks, they fit well with the context of what we're seeing in the section of Mount Sharp Curiosity has been climbing for many months,"says Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"The ancient lakes varied in depth and extent over time, and sometimes disappeared. We're seeing more evidence of dry intervals between what had been mostly a record of long-lived lakes."
Curiosity landed on Mars in August 2012, not far from Mount Sharp, where it has explored the Martian terrain for almost 4.5 years.
The rover has now moved on from Old Soaker towards a rock-drilling location further uphill, but there are fears at NASA that Curiosity's instruments are showing signs of wear and tear.
Curiosity's drill experienced technical problems last month, so scientists are being cautious with its fieldwork while they figure out exactly how serious the problem is.
Let's hope NASA can fix whatever it is, because while we've found out so much in recent years about the existence of water in the red planet's past, we still haven't found signs of any microbial life that it could have supported.
Nor do we fully understand how and why conditions on Mars changed to turn it into the drier and potentially lifeless world it may be today — although of course we're always following every lead that could point to Martian organisms.
Curiosity's our best shot at getting those answers on the ground, so there's an awful lot riding on the continued success of this mission.
Good luck out there, little guy.
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Using the Age of Exploration as a basis, Neil deGrasse Tyson takes a close look at what life on Earth could look like in another 500 years. Spoiler Alert: It's going to get crowded. But he's got some solutions if we take action today.
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Astronomer and director of the multidisciplinary Columbia Astrobiology Center at Columbia University, Caleb Scharf, spoke to us about a interesting idea that has plagued scientists for decades: Did life on Earth actually originate on Mars? How is this possible? Scharf explains.
You can learn more from Scharf by reading his latest book "The Copernicus Complex."
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When liquid water was first discovered on Mars, experts thought the water was too salty to sustain life. But now a new study, published on the preprint archive server biorXiv, has shown that Earth microbes can survive in extremely salty waters, which suggests that alien microbes on Mars may have survived in them.
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LONDON — The stratospheric ambitions of the British space industry and its role in discovering life on Mars will not be blown off course by Brexit, according to the UK Space Agency boss.
Chief executive Katherine Courtney said she is confident that the growing sector, which now contributes more than £5 billion ($6.3 billion) to UK GDP, will continue to thrive once Britain leaves the European Union.
The British government is providing £47 million of funding to help send an unmanned rover to Mars in 2020. The first part of the mission, to send a satellite to study the atmosphere of the Red Planet, did not go to plan in October 2016 when the probe crash landed.
Europe is also the biggest export market for the British space industry. A London Economics review of the sector in December last year found that 18% of its £13.7 billion revenue came from Europe in 2014/15. This includes £351 million from the ESA and £65 million from the European Commission.
Speaking to Business Insider from the Airbus Defence and Space centre in Stevenage, Courtney said she is upbeat about the future. Far from raising fears about what a "Hard Brexit" might mean for British space trade in Europe, she was cheered by Prime Minister Theresa May's Lancaster House speech last week.
"Brexit obviously is an important change for the country. I'm quite confident that, actually, the close collaboration that we've always had in science and space will continue after Article 50 is triggered and beyond," Courtney said.
"European funding is important to our industry, but we have a very strong domestic industry in the UK space sector. We export outside of the EU as well. We have strong collaborations with other countries on space programmes. EU funding is one element of what is driving the sector's growth."
She was "particularly reassured" that May singled out space in her Brexit speech. The UK Space Agency is an executive arm of the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, and the prime minister said last week it will continue to be central to collaboration with Europe on "major science, research, and technology initiatives."
May said: "From space exploration to clean energy to medical technologies, Britain will remain at the forefront of collective endeavours to better understand, and make better, the world in which we live."
Courtney was speaking to BI at the opening of a new Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths centre at Airbus in Stevenage on Thursday. British astronaut Tim Peake was also at the opening, fresh from announcing that he is returning to the International Space Station with ESA.
Peake has previously made clear that the UK's involvement in ESA will not be affected by Brexit because the agency is a "separate entity" from the EU. But he did say the result of the 23 June 2016 referendum has created uncertainty. "What we do have to be careful of is science, which will be affected by the EU referendum, and I know that there are many people involved in science in the UK who're concerned about how that's going to be affected,"he told the BBC last year.
Courtney said Peake's work underlines the health of the British space sector, which aims to capture 10% of the global market for space by 2030. She explained: "The UK space industry is one of the fastest growing, it generates over £13 billion in revenue for the UK economy and employs 37,000 people. It's a very thriving industrial sector for us and having an ambassador [like Peake]... that continues to show the world that the UK is a leading space nation."
One of the UK Space Agency's top priorities is finding life on Mars through the ExoMars mission, Courtney said. The discovery rover is being assembled and tested in a giant sandpit "Mars yard" in Stevenage, with Peake playing with a prototype last year.
"That search for signs of life has long been a fascination for scientists and the general public alike. Understanding the history of the universe and that search for signs of life continues to be an interesting and stimulating bit of scientific work we do through the space agency," she said.
Courtney also provided hope for Elon Musk's vision to colonise the Red Planet. The SpaceX founder and billionaire wants to launch a million people to Mars in hopes of saving humanity from doom.
She said: "If you look at some of the entrepreneurs out in the US, like Elon Musk, there are lots of people who are absolutely convinced that’s not only feasible but they have plans to make it happen. It’s bold and ambitious to have a vision that says: 'I want to go to Mars and come back.' And actually at one time when I was born in 1963, taking humans to the moon and back safely was a bold an ambitious mission. Now it’s almost pedestrian."
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LONDON — The UK Space Agency CEO has a simple theory on why Elon Musk can realise his ambition of conquering Mars by 2022: Never underestimate human ambition.
Katherine Courtney — who has overseen Britain's civil space activity for nearly a year — told Business Insider that when she was born in 1963, sending a man to the moon seemed outrageously ambitious. Six years later, Neil Armstrong stepped foot on Earth's natural satellite.
She says the same logic can be applied to Musk's vision to colonise Mars. The SpaceX founder wants to establish a human settlement on the Red Planet starting in 2022. "We're figuring out how to take you to Mars and build a self-sustaining city to become a truly multi-planetary species,"Musk said last year.
On Musk's plans, Courtney said:
"If you look at some of the entrepreneurs out in the US, like Elon Musk, there are lots of people who are absolutely convinced that it's not only feasible [to put humans on Mars] but they have plans to make it happen. It’s bold and ambitious to have a vision that says: 'I want to go to Mars and come back.' And actually at one time when I was born in 1963, taking humans to the moon and back safely was a bold an ambitious mission. Now it’s almost pedestrian."
The UK Space Agency is itself involved in a Mars mission. The British government is providing £47 million of funding to help send an unmanned rover to Mars in 2020 in a bid to find life on the planet.
Courtney told BI: "That search for signs of life has long been a fascination for scientists and the general public alike. Understanding the history of the universe and that search for signs of life continues to be an interesting and stimulating bit of scientific work we do through the Space Agency."
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Just like our home planet, Mars hosts many volcanoes, and in fact is home to the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons.
Researchers have just found evidence that as well as being giant, Martian volcanoes differ from ones on Earth in the sheer length of time they erupt for.
An unusual meteorite was found in Algeria in 2012 which was small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and weighed just 0.2 kilograms. The scientists named it Northwest Africa (NWA) 7635, and although small, it revealed to them some intriguing mysteries about Martian volcanoes. The findings were published in the journal Science Advances.
Analysis of the rock led scientists to date it at about 2.4 billion years old. This was surprising because out of the 100 meteorites identified as originating from Mars, about 10 others are in the same group as NWA 7635, and scientists have dated all of them at about 500 million years old.
"We've never seen anything like that on Earth," said Dr Marc Caffee, professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue University and a member of the research team, in a statement.
The group of 11 meteorites, including NWA 7635, were all exposed to cosmic rays for about 1.1 million years. But the age gap between the other 10 and NWA 7635 means that there was a period of at least 2 billion years where one particular volcano was erupting.
"What this means is that for 2 billion years there's been sort of a steady plume of magma in one location on the surface of Mars," Caffee said. "We don't have anything like that on Earth, where something is that stable for 2 billion years at a specific location."
Volcanoes can grow so enormous on Mars because there are no plate tectonics like there are on Earth. According to NASA, Mars used to be a lot more similar to Earth than it is today, and it used to have early tectonic plates that ground past each other and formed craters and volcanoes.
However, at some point in its history, Mars cooled down. Thus the molten rock beneath the plates solidified and the tectonic plate formation ground to a halt. Now that there appears to be no geological movement, there's less chance of eruptions being interrupted by the crust shuffling around.
Astronauts have never walked on Mars, but thanks to these meteorites, they can still study the surface of the red planet. Plus, Mars has a low gravitational force and a thin atmosphere, which makes it easier for rock fragments released during impacts to fly off the planet's surface.
However, these fragments don't head straight for Earth. Instead, they can orbit in space for hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of years, until something else in space interrupts their journey. Then it can still take another thousand years or so for the fragments to collide with our planet. In other words, these little meteorites have been travelling a long time to get here — and they contain some fascinating insight.
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If humans ever successfully colonize Mars, how would their biology change? An evolutionary biologist at Rice University and author of book "Future Humans: Inside the Science of Our Continuing Evolution", Scott Solomon, explains how humans might evolve on Mars and what significance that could have for humans left on Earth.
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The race to the Red Planet is, indeed, on, and the United Arab Emirates wants to be a part of it. Yesterday, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and vice president of the UAE, announced the Mars 2117 Project. Its goal? To establish the first inhabitable human settlement on the Red Planet by 2117.
The project will expand on what Dubai sees as its role as a world leader in space science investments. “The new project is a seed that we plant today, and we expect future generations to reap the benefits, driven by its passion to learn to unveil a new knowledge,” Sheikh Mohammed said, reports Al Jazeera.
A statement released by the Dubai government media office said that the plan involves working with major international scientific institutions to accelerate research that would make traveling to and from Mars, as well as living on the planet, possible:
The first phase of the project will focus on preparing the human cadres able to achieve scientific breakthrough to facilitate the arrival of human to the Red Planet in the next decades. The Mars 2117 Project also aims to prepare an Emiratis scientists team and to develop an international scientific consortium to speed up the research project. The project will start with an Emiratis scientific team and will be extended to include international scientists and researchers, in addition to streamline the human efforts in term of exploring and settlement of the [Red Planet].
The Mars 2117 Project isn’t the first time the UAE has expressed its desires to probe Mars. Back in 2014, the government announced the creation of a space agency with a goal to send an unmanned explorer to Mars by 2021.
The UAE joins a number of international efforts already in motion to bring the first human settlement to Mars. At the top of the list is SpaceX’s plan, which Elon Musk shared in September. Also in the private sector is veteran aeronautics company Boeing, which is working on its own plans to get to Mars.
Through NASA, the US government has prioritized a mission to Mars, though recent announcements from the current administration could indicate a shift in focus. China has also announced an ambitious plan to get to the Red Planet by 2020. In the Netherlands, space tech organization Mars One is working on plans to establish a human settlement on Mars, and it recently received a sizable investment from a Swiss financial outfit.
Getting to Mars is a race, yes. But the daunting tasks involved — developing technology to travel fast enough, getting back from Mars, etc. — require a more collaborative approach. According to Sheikh Mohammad, this seems to be what UAE’s Mars 2117 Project brings to the table: “The landing of people on other planets has been a longtime dream for humans. Our aim is that the UAE will spearhead international efforts to make this dream a reality.”
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NASA's Curiosity rover snapped images of dust devils, small Tornados, on the surface of the red planet. The images paint a strange, eerie atmosphere.
Video courtesy of NASA.
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In August 2016, a team of researchers announced they'd found 3.7 billion-year-old fossils of bacteria called stromatolites.
The fossils were the oldest-known evidence of microbes on the planet at the time, prompting scientists to say the discovery had "staggering" implications for the history of life on Earth.
But now an international team of scientists may have them beat — by at least 300 million years, and possibly even half a billion.
In some of the oldest rocks on Earth, the researchers found collections of tiny tubes that resemble structures made by deep-sea microbes.
"These rocks have a minimum age of 3.77 billion years, but some scientists in the field consider them to be as old as 4.28 billion years," Dominic Papineau, an earth scientist at University College London (UCL), said in a video interview about the discovery. He added that this could mean "they are within a few hundred million years of the accretion of planet Earth and the sun and the moon."
Papineau led a study about the ancient, iron-rich fossils along with Matthew Dodd, a PhD student in earth science at UCL. Their findings were published March 1 in the journal Nature.
It's not 100% clear whether the newly discovered specimens are evidence of early life on Earth, since these kinds of ancient rocks suffer billions of years' worth of geologic damage and have features that look biological.
"Just because it looks like something, doesn't mean it is," Kurt Konhauser at the University of Alberta, a geomicrobiologist who wasn't involved in the research, told Tia Ghose at LiveScience.com.
But if the structures were indeed formed by early bacteria, they'd be the oldest evidence of life ever discovered. (Further chemical analysis and more samples would bolster the argument.)
What's more, Papineau said, the fossils might tell us what to seek on other worlds in the solar system if we're looking for signs of alien life.
The fossil in question came from a coastal region of Quebec, Canada called the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt.
During an expedition there, Papineau helped find an especially old-looking lump of rusty rock called jasper, or haematitic chert (haematite is an iron-containing mineral).
He knew such rocks are sometimes made by seafloor structures called hydrothermal vents, which spew out iron, silica, and other minerals. Today they serve as warm habitats and food sources for microbial and animal life in frigid, deep ocean waters.
"When I saw these structures in the field, I said, 'I have to sample this,'"Papineau said.
Working with several other researchers from Australia, Japan, Norway, Canada, and the US, the team broke off a piece of the rock.
Back at the lab, they cut it into thin slices, polished the rock, and slipped the samples under the microscope.
The images showed clusters of tubes that resembled those similar to structures formed by modern deep-sea microbes.
"We were able to identify the microfossils as the oldest-known microfossils on Earth," Dodd said in the video interview. "In diameter, the microfossils are half of a width of a human hair."
The carefully worded study didn't confirm the tubes were made by bacteria.
Instead, it stated that the objects are "best explained" as being hydrothermal vent microbes that may represent "the oldest life forms recognized on Earth."
Further analysis also showed the tubes contained carbon and other minerals in concentrations similar to those of deposits left by living organisms.
The ramifications of the discovery could extend well beyond Earth.
"If we are right with our new model […] then we might want to look for these things on other ancient planet surfaces, such as the surface of Mars," Papineau said.
NASA's nuclear-powered Mars 2020 rover mission, which is scheduled to launch in the summer of 2020, will carry a digging tool, high-power microscope, and chemical analysis equipment.
If the car-sized robot can't detect signs of ancient life on the red planet itself — it can't polish samples the way researchers did in the study, for example — it's possible that a future mission to return Mars 2020 samples to Earth just might.
The stakes are high.
"We know life managed to get a grip and start on Earth at such an early time in Earth's evolution," Dodd said. "If life happened so quickly on Earth, then could we expect it to be a simple process and start on other planets — or was Earth really just a special case?"
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A NASA science satellite orbiting Mars was forced to make a rare evasive maneuver to avoid a collision next week with one of the planet's two small moons, the US space agency said on Thursday.
Flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, commanded the MAVEN spacecraft, which is studying Mars' vanishing atmosphere, to fire up its engine on Tuesday to boost its speed by about 1.3 feet per second (0.4 meters per second).
The acceleration was necessary to slightly shift MAVEN's orbit and steer the satellite clear of the Martian moon Phobos, NASA said in a statement.
"With one week's advance notice, it looked like MAVEN and Phobos had a good chance of hitting each other," NASA said.
In its new orbit, MAVEN will miss Phobos by about 2-1/2 minutes, NASA said.
MAVEN is in an egg-shaped orbit that regularly crosses the paths of other science satellites and of Phobos, which circles just 6,000 miles (9,656 kilometers) above the Martian surface, closer than any other known moon to a planet in the solar system.
At that distance, Phobos whips around Mars three times a day.
Flight controllers regularly monitor MAVEN's path for potential collisions.
Tuesday's evasive action was the first time MAVEN had to dodge the potato-shaped Phobos, which measures about 10 by 14 miles by 11 miles (16 by 22.5 by 18 kilometers).
MAVEN, short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, reached the red planet in September 2014.
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NASA scientists have proposed a bold plan that could give Mars its atmosphere back and make the Red Planet habitable for future generations of human colonists.
By launching a giant magnetic shield into space to protect Mars from solar winds, the space agency says we could restore the Red Planet's atmosphere, and terraform the Martian environment so that liquid water flows on the surface once again.
Mars may seem like a cold, arid wasteland these days, but the Red Planet is thought to have once had a thick atmosphere that could have maintained deep oceans filled with liquid water, and a warmer, potentially habitable climate.
Scientists think Mars lost all of this when its protective magnetic field collapsed billions of years ago, and solar wind— high-energy particles projected from the Sun — has been stripping the Red Planet's atmosphere away ever since.
Now, new simulations by NASA suggest there could be a way to naturally give Mars its thick atmosphere back — and it doesn't require nuking the Red Planet into submission, as Elon Musk once proposed.
Instead, the space agency thinks a powerful-enough magnetic shield launched into space could serve as a replacement for Mars's own lost magnetosphere, giving the planet a chance to naturally restore its own atmosphere.
In new findings presented at the Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop last week, NASA's Planetary Science Division director, Jim Green, said launching an "artificial magnetosphere" into space between Mars and the Sun could hypothetically shield the Red Planet in the extended magnetotail that trails behind the protective field.
"This situation then eliminates many of the solar wind erosion processes that occur with the planet's ionosphere and upper atmosphere allowing the Martian atmosphere to grow in pressure and temperature over time," the researchers explain in an accompanying paper.
While the team acknowledges that the concept might sound "fanciful", they point to existing miniature magnetosphere research being conducted to protect astronauts and spacecraft from cosmic radiation, and think that the same technology on a larger scale could be used to shield Mars.
"It may be feasible that we can get up to these higher field strengths that are necessary to provide that shielding,"Green said in his presentation.
"We need to be able then to also modify that direction of the magnetic field so that it always pushes the solar wind away."
In the team's simulations, if the solar wind were counteracted by the magnetic shield, Mars's atmospheric losses would stop, and the atmosphere would regain as much as half the atmospheric pressure of Earth in a matter of years.
As the atmosphere becomes thicker, the team estimates Mars's climate would become around 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer, which would be enough to melt carbon dioxide ice over the Red Planet's northern polar cap.
If this happened, the carbon in the atmosphere would help to trap heat like it does on Earth, triggering a greenhouse effect that could melt Mars's water ice, giving the Red Planet back its liquid water in the form of flowing rivers and oceans.
If all of this were to occur as the team anticipates — and admittedly, that's a pretty fantastical if— it's possible that, within the space of a couple of generations, Mars could regain some of its lost Earth-like habitability.
"This is not terraforming as you may think of it where we actually artificially change the climate, but we let nature do it, and we do that based on the physics we know today,"Green said.
The team acknowledges that the plan is largely hypothetical at this point, but it's a pretty amazing vision for what might be possible in the years ahead. The researchers intend to keep studying the possibilities to get a more accurate estimate of how long the climate-altering effects would take.
If the concept does prove workable, there's no telling just how much it would alter the prospects of colonising Mars in the future.
"Much like Earth, an enhanced atmosphere would: allow larger landed mass of equipment to the surface, shield against most cosmic and solar particle radiation, extend the ability for oxygen extraction, and provide 'open air' green-houses to exist for plant production, just to name a few,"the researchers explain.
"If this can be achieved in a lifetime, the colonisation of Mars would not be far away."
The findings were presented at the Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop.
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In the 2015 blockbuster movie "The Martian", a fictional botanist-turned-astronaut gets stranded on Mars, forcing him to "science the s--t" out of his dire situation.
Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) survives by fertilizing Martian soil with his feces, slicing up potatoes, and planting the cuttings in the soil. This eventually grows him enough food to last hundreds of days.
But farming on Mars may not remain sci-fi fantasy for very long: The NASA-backed "Potatoes on Mars" project just grew tubers in Mars-like conditions, suggesting that Watney's feat might actually be possible.
NASA has eyed a crewed mission to the red planet for decades, and Congress just passed a bill that implores the space agency to reach the red planet by 2033. The agency is also exploring ideas of a Martian colony.
To that end, scientists at NASA and the International Potato Center (CIP) in Lima, Peru, built a tuber-growing experiment that recreates the extreme conditions on the surface of Mars.
Everything happens inside a rocket-launchable box called a CubeSat. The CubeSat is rigged with pumps, water hoses, LED lights, and instruments to emulate Mars-like temperatures, night-and-day light cycles, gases, and air pressure.
In February 2017, researchers dumped practically lifeless soil from Peru's Pampas de la Joya desert inside, planted a tuber in it, sealed up the box, and began filming to see what happened.
"Preliminary results are positive," according to a CIP press release— which is to say a potato plant grew in inhospitable desert soil under Mars-like conditions.
"If the crops can tolerate the extreme conditions that we are exposing them to in our CubeSat, they have a good chance to grow on Mars," Julio Valdivia-Silva, a NASA researcher at the University of Engineering and Technology in Lima, said in the release.
The experiment doesn't provide the ironclad proof a would-be Martian potato farmer needs.
For one, the soil didn't actually come from Mars. Though it was arid and inhospitable, it probably still had microbes that may have helped the potato plant's growth.
The experiment also used potato cuttings instead of seeds. That's an issue because making potatoes last on a months- or years-long journey may require heating under pressure (called thermostabilization) or a blast of radiation. This damages the cells of a potato, "making it hard to grow plants from cuttings," Keith Cowing, the founder of NASAWatch, told Business Insider in a tweet.
However, several other experiments have shown it may be possible to grow food in Martian soil and in even-more-inhospitable moon dust, called regolith.
Bruce Bugbee, a botanist and NASA scientist at Utah State University, told Tech Insider in 2015 that there's no reason why growing potatoes or other food crops in Martian soil wouldn't work. (He did, however, take issue with Watney mixing his feces into the soil, which he said may be "toxic to the plants.")
The CIP, NASA, and other institutions are now looking to see how several varieties of potatoes perform in the Mars-like CubeSat box, including special varieties they've bred to withstand harsh conditions.
"We will do several rounds of experiments to find out which potato varieties do best,"Valdivia-Silva said. "We want to know what the minimum conditions are that a potato needs to survive."
Aside from helping astronaut farmers of the future, the work also stands to benefit humans on Earth.
"The results indicate that our efforts to breed varieties with high potential for strengthening food security in areas that are affected, or will be affected by climate change, are working," Walter Amoros, a potato breeder at CIP, said in the organization's release.
You can watch the experiment's potato sprout in the time-lapse video on YouTube or below.
SEE ALSO: 12 ways Matt Damon uses science to survive in 'The Martian'
DON'T MISS: The truth about growing potatoes on Mars
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