Life in the solar system could very well have originated on Mars:
Martian microbes could have been transferred to earth via meteorites derived from debris hurled into space from asteroid or comet impacts on Mars. See
The Deep Space Industries asteroid mining company has opened a retail store :
Find more NewSpace related shops here.
Moonandback has posted two parts of an interview with Dr. Doug Plata, who is an advocate of a Lunar COTS program. With Lunar COTS, NASA would encourage faster, less expensive lunar development by buying commercial hardware and services in a manner similar to the successful COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation System) program for cargo delivery to the International Space Station:
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In this PBS NewsHour interview, Washington Post science reporter Joel Achenbach talks about NASA’s proposed project to capture a small asteroid and about the budget and policy problems the agency is having: Facing Budget Battles, NASA Still Aims High With Asteroid Capture Mission – PBS NewsHour -Aug. 19, 2013
He is writing a series about the agency’s problems, e.g. on Sunday he had this long front page article:
Watch Still Aims High in Asteroid Capture Mission Despite Budget on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
Meteorite collecting appears to have a long, long tradition: Confirmed: Ancient Egyptian Jewelry Was Made From Meteorites – Popular Science
Barraging ancient beads with tests tells archaeologists that jewelry came from space-rocks–and that iron-working was an older job than we thought.
The “Ka-BOOM” NASA project is developing a way to use an array of small high-frequency Ka-band radar dishes to map “nearby asteroids, orbital space debris, water on the Moon and even rover-trapping sand pits on Mars” : NASA Developing Prototype Asteroid-mapping Radar at KSC – SpaceNews.com.
The project was unveiled during a recent visit by NASA Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot to KSC: NASA Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot Visits Space Coast and Meets With Media June 3-4 – NASA.
He briefed reporters
on the agency’s new asteroid initiative and NASA’s new Ka-Band Objects Observation and Monitoring (KaBOOM) system, a three-antenna test bed radar array at Kennedy.
NASA recently announced plans to find, study, capture and relocate an asteroid for exploration by astronauts. The asteroid initiative is a strategy to leverage human and robotic activities for a first human mission while accelerating efforts to improve detection and characterization of asteroids.
The goal of KaBOOM is to prove technologies that will allow future systems to characterize near-Earth objects in terms of size, shape, rotation/tumble rate and to determine the trajectory of those objects. Radar studies can determine the trajectory 100,000 times more precisely than can optical methods.
Current NASA radar systems are limited in both resolution and the distance at which they are effective. KaBOOM is the penultimate, low-cost step before proceeding with a high-power, high-resolution radar system. NASA expects this proof of concept to be completed in about two years.
Here is a local Florida TV news report about the project: NASA to launch KaBOOM system: new way to track asteroids – ClickOrlando.com – June.5.13