Humans to colonize mars by 2030

Sending humans to Mars by the 2030s is affordable, a group of experts finds, but some key changes are needed if it is going to happen.

A workshop group of more than 60 individuals representing more than 30 government, industry, academic and other organizations has found that a NASA-led manned mission to Mars is feasible if the space agency's budget is restored to pre-sequestration levels. Putting the first humans on the Red Planet would also require international cooperation and private industry support.

There is a growing consensus among the space community that a manned mission to Mars should be a priority worth working toward in the coming years, according to Chris Carberry the executive director of Explore Mars Inc., the organization that hosted the workshop with the American Astronautical Society. [5 Manned Mission to Mars Ideas]

"To be able to make it feasible and affordable, you need a sustainable budget," Carberry told SPACE.com. "You need a budget that is consistent, that you can predict from year to year and that doesn't get canceled in the next administration."

Budget issues

While Carberry said that it is possible to launch a manned mission to Mars by the 2030s under pre-sequestration budget levels, a NASA-led human mission to Mars will probably never launch under current budgetary constraints, Carberry said.

"We're not far off from what we need," Carberry said. "We just need to get back into a reasonable budget, which we're not in right now."

President Barack Obama requested about $17.7 billion for NASA during his2013 budget proposal, $59 million less than what the space agency received in 2012.

"[NASA] funds are divided between various missions, directorates and centers," Carberry said via email. "Unless there was a MAJOR restructuring, it would be hard to accomplish a NASA-led Mars mission [under the current budget]. That said, major disruptive technology gains could always occur that could make it viable — we just can't count on that happening."

From now until the 2030s

The workshop group's plan hinges partially upon the availability of NASA's heavy-lifting rocket, the Space Launch System, and the space agency's deep space crew capsule, the Orion spacecraft. SLS and Orion are both in development now, with Orion's first unmanned test flight slated for later this year.

In December 2013, attendees affiliated with NASA, Boeing, Orbital Sciences Corp. and many others at the Affording Mars Workshop arrived at six agreements that could frame the way that space agencies work toward a manned mission to Mars. They are:

• The goal of sending humans to Mars is affordable with the right partnerships (international, commercial/industrial, intergovernmental, etc.), commitment to efficiency, constancy of purpose and policy/budget consistency.
• Human exploration of Mars is technologically feasible by the 2030s.
• Mars should be the priority for human spaceflight over the next two to three decades.
• Between now and 2030, investments and activities in the human exploration of space must be prioritized in a manner that advances the objective of initial human missions to Mars beginning in the 2030s.
• Utilizing the International Space Station, including international partnerships, is essential for human missions to deep space.
• Continuation of robotic precursor missions to Mars throughout the 2020s is essential for the success of human missions to Mars.

Carberry said that the experts are still not sure whether a long or short mission to the Red Planet would be best when launching the first manned mission to Mars.

Getting to Mars

As a model of international collaboration and a huge undertaking in space, the International Space Station (ISS) could provide vital lessons about getting humans to Mars, Carberry said. The space station mission, which has been newly extended through 2024, is the best example of a consistent budget set forth for a huge project in space, he added.

mars would look like this if life comes on mars

Spooky Physics that links two wormholes

Wormholes — shortcuts that in theory can connect distant points in the universe — might be linked with the spooky phenomenon of quantum entanglement, where the behavior of particles can be connected regardless of distance, researchers say.

These findings could help scientists explain the universe from its very smallest to its biggest scales.

Scientists have long sought to develop a theory that can describe how the cosmos works in its entirety. Currently, researchers have two disparate theories, quantum mechanics and general relativity, which can respectively mostly explain the universe on its tiniest scales and its largest scales. There are currently several competing theories seeking to reconcile the pair.

One prediction of the theory of general relativity devised by Einstein involves wormholes, formally known as Einstein-Rosen bridges. In principle, these warps in the fabric of space and time can behave like shortcuts connecting any black holes in the universe, making them a common staple of science fiction. [Science Fact or Fiction? The Plausibility of 10 Sci-Fi Concepts]

Intriguingly, quantum mechanics also has a phenomenon that can link objects such as electrons regardless of how far apart they are — quantum entanglement.

"This is true even when the electrons are light years apart," said Kristan Jensen, a theoretical physicist at Stony Brook University in New York.

Einstein derisively called this seemingly impossible connection "spooky action at a distance." However, numerous experiments have proven quantum entanglement is real, and it may serve as the foundation of advanced future technologies, such as incredibly powerful quantum computers and nigh-unhackable quantum encryption.

"Entanglement is one of the most bizarre but important features of quantum mechanics," Jensen said. And if entanglement really is connected to wormholes, that could help reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity, the two examples of this phenomenon, on tiny and huge scales.

Entanglement and wormholes

Recently, theoretical physicists Juan Martín Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Leonard Susskind at Stanford University argued that wormholes are linked with entanglement. Specifically, they suggested that wormholes are each pairs of black holes that are entangled with one another.

Entangled black holes could be generated in a number of ways. For instance, a pair of black holes could in principle be made simultaneously, and these would automatically be entangled. Alternatively, radiation given off by a black hole could be captured and then collapsed into a black hole, and the resulting black hole would be entangled with the black hole that supplied the ingredients for it.

Maldacena and Susskind not only suggested that wormholes are entangled black holes, but they argued that entanglement in general was linked to wormholes. They conjectured that entangled particles such as electrons and photons were connected by extraordinarily tiny wormholes.

At first sight, such a claim might sound preposterous. For instance, entanglement works even when gravity is not known to play a role.

Now two independent groups of researchers suggest entanglement may indeed be linked to wormholes. If this connection is true, it could help bridge quantum mechanics with general relativity, potentially helping better understand both.

Holograms and wormholes

Jensen and his colleague theoretical physicist Andreas Karch at the University of Washington in Seattle investigated how entangled pairs of particles behave in a supersymmetric theory, which suggests that all known subatomic particles have "superpartner" particles not yet observed. The theory was one proposed to help unite quantum mechanics and general relativity.

An idea in this theory is that if one imagines certain quantum mechanical systems exist in only three dimensions, their behavior can be explained by objects behaving in the four dimensions that general relativity describes the universe as having — the three dimensions of space, and the fourth of time. This notion that actions in this universe may emerge from a reality with fewer dimensions is known as holography, akin to how two-dimensional holograms can give the illusion of three dimensions. [5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse]

Jensen and Karch found that if one imagined entangled pairs in a universe with four dimensions, they behaved in the same way as wormholes in a universe with an extra fifth dimension. Essentially, they discovered that entanglement and wormholes may be one and the same.

"Entangled pairs were the holographic images of a system with a wormhole," Jensen said. Independent research from theoretical physicist Julian Sonner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology supports this finding.

"There are certain things that get a scientist's heart beating faster, and I think this is one of them," Jensen told LiveScience. "One really exciting thing is that maybe, inspired by these results, we can better understand the relation between entanglement and space-time."

The scientists detailed their findings in two papers published Nov. 20 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Europa Mission for Development

A plan to launch a spacecraft to Jupiter's moon Europa in the 2020s passed a major hurdle, as NASA approved the mission concept and gave the go ahead to move forward into the formulation stage of development.
Sending a flyby mission to the icy moon of Jupiter is considered key in helping scientists determine how likely life is to exist there. If the probe shows that conditions on Europa would permit microbial life, other moons in the solar system, such as Saturn's moon Enceladus, might host life as well.
The current plan would see the spacecraft do 45 flybys of Europa while orbiting Jupiter every two weeks. Science goals include taking images of the icy surface, as well as remotely probing the moon's interior and composition.

"Today we're taking an exciting step from concept to mission in our quest to find signs of life beyond Earth," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, in a statement.
"Observations of Europa have provided us with tantalizing clues over the last two decades, and the time has come to seek answers to one of humanity's most profound questions," he said.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California will manage the Europa project. A suite of instruments chosen to fly aboard the proposed spacecraft was announced in May.
While the Voyager spacecraft did a quick flyby of Europa in the 1980s, it was NASA's Galileo probe in the 1990s that provided more evidence for a global ocean underneath this moon's thick icy surface.
Two years ago, researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope released images of a water plume at Europa, a find that has not been repeated.
The White House's 2016 federal budget request includes $18.5 million for the mission's development. The previous year, Congress provided $100 million after a request was made for just $15 million.

Saturn's Moon Titan Has Polar Winds, Just Like Earth

Saturn's moon Titan was already known to have similarities with Earth: a thick atmosphere, a rocky surface, lakes and rivers. Now, new data show that it also shares a peculiar effect that draws gases out of the atmosphere and into space. This photograph of Titan's atmosphere was taken by the Cassini space probe.


via space.com

Monster Black Hole

Super massive black holes lurk at the center of every large galaxy. These cosmic behemoths can be millions to billions of times more massive than the Sun. Determining just how massive, however, has been daunting, especially for spiral galaxies and their closely related cousins barred spirals.

via daily galaxy.com

Saturn awesome ring

On Saturn, the rings tell you the season. On Earth, today marks a solstice, the time when the Earth's spin axis tilts directly toward the Sun. On Earth's northern hemisphere, today is the Summer Solstice, the day of maximum daylight. Since Saturn's grand rings orbit along the planet's equator, these rings appear most prominent -- from the direction of the Sun -- when the Saturn's spin axis points toward the Sun. Conversely, when Saturn's spin axis points to the side, an equinox occurs and the edge-on rings are hard to see. In the featured montage, images of Saturn over the past 11 years have been superposed to show the giant planet passing from southern summer toward northern summer. Although Saturn will only reach its northern summer solstice in 2017 May, the image of Saturn most analogous to today's Earth solstice is the bottom most one.

bright spots on ceres

The new photos from NASA's Dawn spacecraft resolve Ceres' bright spots into numerous points of varying sizes. But researchers still don't know what the spots are.The $473 million Dawn mission launched in September 2007 to study Ceres and Vesta, the two largest objects in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres is about 590 miles (950 km) wide, while Vesta's diameter is 330 miles (530 km).

via space.com

About the Milky Way

The Milky Way Galaxy is an immense and very interesting place. Not only does it measure some 100,000–120,000 light-years in diameter, it is home to planet Earth, the birthplace of humanity. Our Solar System resides roughly 27,000 light-years away from the Galactic Center, on the inner edge of one of the spiral-shaped concentrations of gas and dust particles called the Orion Arm.

 To know more go to -http://www.universetoday.com/22285/facts-about-the-milky-way/

Bright Galaxy Reveals Signs of First Stars in the Universe

Astronomers have found what looks like a population of the very first stars ever formed in the universe, forged from hydrogen created in the Big Bang.

via-space.com

One Big Black Hole - 140 Million Times Our Sun’s Mass!

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile ‘weighed’ a a barred spiral galaxy (NGC 1097) about 45 million light years from Earth. The 'scale' measured the distribution of two molecules, hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and formylium (HCO+), and comparing them to mathematical models.


via-hthttp://www.space.com/29699-one-big-black-hole-140-million-times-our-suns-mass-video.html

Did Comet Crashes Help Spark Earth Life?

  Life as we know doesn't actually belong to earth 'cause there was only water on earth  and there was life.
It is said to have come to earth through comets. In fact even water was is said to have come on earth when the comets crashed the earth.

            Billions of years ago, comets may have ferried life-sustaining water to our planet's surface, but that may not be all that we should thank these dirty snowballs for. Researchers are simulating comet impacts to see if they might help proliferate the left-handedness in molecules that life on Earth depends upon.

There is evidence from meteorite studies that amino acids may have been delivered to Earthfrom space.

"There is interest in how these building blocks came to be on primordial Earth," says Jennifer Blank of the SETI Institute.

She and her colleagues study comets as a second avenue for depositing these biological compounds on Earth. Their current work, which is supported by NASA's Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program, is looking at how the fire and brimstone of a comet impact may benefit the formation of complex molecules of a particular handedness.

Primordial Lab

Life on Earth uses 20 amino acids to build up the thousands upon thousands of different proteins that perform a myriad of cell functions. Astrobiologists often focus on the origins of amino acids in order to understand where life may have come from.

One of the first experiments aimed at reproducing the primordial Earth and its chemistry was undertaken by Stanley Miller in 1953. He was able to synthesize amino acids using lightning-like discharges in a reducing atmosphere of methane, ammonia and water ? similar to what exists on Jupiter.

Since that pioneering work, researchers have come to believe that Earth's early atmosphere was in fact more oxidative, containing mostly nitrogen and carbon dioxide.

"Without the reducing atmosphere, the Miller mechanism becomes much less efficient atproducing amino acids," Blank says.

One way to get around this is to make the amino acids in space and have them come crashing down on-board meteorites and comets. There is ample evidence that meteorites carry amino acids. And just recently, an amino acid was discovered in comet material brought back by NASA's Stardust spacecraft.

Blank and her colleagues were curious as to what happens to these biomolecules when the "space capsule" they are riding in smacks into the Earth.

The team has focused their work on comets, rather than meteors. Although comets are less prevalent in the inner solar system, they have a few possible advantages over their dry rocky counterparts when it comes to delivering biologically relevant material to a planet's surface.?

First of all, a comet impact is thought to be less harsh than that of a meteorite because comets are less dense, which means their impact generates lower temperatures and pressures. Blank says that the blow would be further softened on a comet arriving at an oblique angle.

The second advantage of comets is that they carry water, which is key for the chemical reactions that beget life. When the comet lands, its ice melts, forming a little puddle near the crash site.

"Comets give you all the ingredients, like a compact evolution kit," Blank says.

Of course, the primordial Earth was stocked with its own water, but "if a comet or meteor were to land in the ocean, any interesting chemistry would quickly be diluted away," says co-investigator George Cooper of NASA Ames. A comet impact on dry land would give the organic molecules on board the chance to amplify their numbers in the localized puddle.

Like Shooting Comets in a Barrel

To simulate a comet hitting pay dirt, Blank and her colleagues fire a bullet into a metal container the size of a can of beans. In this scenario, the container is the comet and the bullet is the hard ground. Inside the container is a small chamber about as big as a quarter, in which the scientists place a liquid sample of organic molecules.

"It's not super high-tech, but it is rather involved as far as the structural complexity is concerned," Blank explains.?

She and her colleagues take special care to ensure that the metal container doesn't leak from the impact. Afterwards, they carefully drill down to the chamber and draw out their "shocked" liquid sample.

In 2001, the team reported that amino acids placed in the comet simulator were still intact following the impact, which surprised other scientists.

"It's the coolest thing," Blank recounts. "People told us, 'Nothing is going to survive, so why should we fund you?'"

Normally, the 1,000-degree-temperatures inside the smashed "comet" would destroy any amino acids. But Blank believes the temperature rises and falls too fast for the molecules to react. There is also enormous pressure of 10,000 atmospheres that may be preventing the breakdown of compounds.

However, the amino acids did more than just survive the crash. They also started bonding together to form short chains up to 5-amino-acids long.

This comet-induced bonding may have played a role in the origin of life. Typically, there is an energy barrier that prevents amino acids from latching together. Indeed, organisms require enzymes to overcome this barrier when putting together their proteins. But enzymes themselves are proteins, so there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: how do you build up proteins before you have proteins to help build them up?

It is perhaps conceivable that a comet impact fused together the first rudimentary protein pieces (called "peptides") and thereby got the whole ball rolling.

Blank's group is now running simulations to see if they can model how the energy barrier to amino acid bonding changes under the high temperature and pressure of a comet impact.

Molecular Crash-Test Dummies

The scientists are also planning to do more comet crash tests. They will be looking at sugars, which play an important part in the structure of DNA and RNA. And they will be looking at amino acids again, this time studying whether the handedness of comet passengers might be affected by the impact.

In regard to the handedness, Blank thinks there might be a difference in how the amino acids hook up together during the impact. Left-handed amino acids may form chains more readily with other left-handed amino acids, rather than with right-handed ones.

Such a preference, if it exists, might be able to enhance a slight overabundance of one hand (a so-called enantiomeric excess) in the original comet material. This might explain why organisms only use left-handed amino acids to form proteins.

"It will be a great discovery if they can get definite evidence as to formation of sugars, peptides, or enantiomeric excess," says Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan, who was not involved with this work.

He says the one concern will be contamination of the sample with the left-handed biology we are already familiar with. He suggests using amino acids made with carbon-13, so that any subsequent contamination with normal carbon-12-based amino acids will be easy to detect.

pluto time

Pluto orbits on the fringes of our solar system, billions of miles away. Sunlight is much weaker there than it is here on Earth, yet it isn't completely dark. In fact, for just a moment near dawn and dusk each day, the illumination on Earth matches that of noon on Pluto.
  Nobody knows exactly what it would look like--that's one reason the New Horizons mission to Pluto is so exciting. But there are a few things we do know. The sun would be about 1,000 times dimmer than it appears on Earth. Instead of a big yellow disc, the sun would look more like other stars, with one big difference: it would still be much, much brighter than anything else in the sky. Pluto has a thin atmosphere that would scatter the light, but probably not enough to make a bright sky like we see on Earth or Mars.
But it wouldn't be completely dark. In fact, if you stood on Pluto at noon you would have enough light to easily read a book. That's in part because your eyes are very good at automatically adjusting to different levels of light. If you had a camera, to get a clear picture of the landscape you'd want to adjust the settings for a longer exposure time or a wider aperture in order to capture as much light as possible. You'd have plenty of time to work on it: one full day on Pluto takes about 153 hours, and because of its axial tilt and very long seasons, parts of Pluto can remain lit for years at a time.
You can see for yourself how much light there is on Pluto. If you go outside on a clear day a few minutes after sunset or a few minutes before sunrise, that's about how much sunlight there is on Pluto at noon.
The New Horizons team has specifically designed and prepared the spacecraft's cameras for the light conditions at Pluto, so they'll be ready to capture whatever the mysterious dwarf planet and its moons have in store.
What else would affect the light on Pluto?
On Earth, the amount of light you see depends on the weather and other atmospheric conditions. We don't know much for sure yet about what kind of weather Pluto might have. One thing you'd definitely notice in Pluto's sky would be its moon Charon. Pluto has five moons (that we know of so far) but Charon is by far the biggest. It's so large compared to Pluto that instead of Charon going around Pluto like our moon goes around the Earth, Pluto and Charon orbit each other like a double planet. Charon is tidally locked in its orbit with Pluto in such a way that it can only be seen from one side of Pluto, similar to the way we can only see one side of our moon from Earth. If you were on that side of Pluto, Charon would sometimes be very bright in the skies overhead.
In fact, when New Horizons flies by in July it will photograph some areas on the night side of Pluto that will be illuminated only by Charon moonshine.

fireworks display in the 25th anniversary NASA Hubble Space Telescope image

The brilliant tapestry of young stars flaring to life resemble a glittering fireworks display in the 25th anniversary NASA Hubble Space Telescope image, released to commemorate a quarter century of exploring the solar system and beyond since its launch on April 24, 1990.

Mars once had life proved!!

             In a pioneering feat, researchers have discovered glass deposits on  mars,Providing  a delicate window into the possibility of past life on mars.
   Using data from NASA`a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the team from brown university detected glass deposits within impact craters on mars formed in the  searing heat of violent impact.
   Previous research has shown that ancient bio signatures can be preserved in the impact glass.
"knowing this' we wanted to go look for them on Mars and that is what we did here. Before this paper, no one has been able to definitively detect them on the Martian surface," said Kevin Cannon, PhD student at Brown University. Cannon and co-author professor Jack Mustard showed that large glass deposits are present in several ancient, yet well-preserved craters scattered across the surface of Mars.

Over the last few years, a number of studies have shown that, here on our planet, ancient bio signatures can be preserved in impact glass. One of those studies found organic molecules and even plant matter entombed in glass formed by an impact that occurred millions of years ago in Argentina.

Scientists suggested that similar processes might preserve signs of life on Mars, if indeed they were present at the time of an impact.

In a new study, Prof Jack Mustard and PhD student Kevin Cannon, both from Brown University, used orbital remotely sensed data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), which flies aboardNASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to investigate spectral signatures of Martian impact sites – geologic units that were formed during impacts.                                                                                 The glass-rich impactites the team has identified have been preserved on billion-year timescales, old enough to date back to more clement surface conditions on Mars.

Their preservation is likely due to the current cold and dry surface environment; therefore, fossilisation in glass, as proposed previously, seems to be a promising target to search for possible ancient Martian biological activity.

“The metastable glass has been preserved by the cold and dry Martian climate during the Amazonian period (2.9-3.3 billion years ago to present), and this preservation – as confirmed here across the planet – provides a means to trap signs of ancient life on the accessible Martian surface.”

   Knowing that impact glass can preserve ancient sign of life opens a potential new strategy in the search for martian life.

     "We think these could be interesting targets for future exploration. In fact, we have a particular spot in mind" the author from brown university said.
  The research was published online in the journal geology.

Deposits of impact glass have been preserved in Martian craters, including Alga Crater, shown here. In color coding based on analysis of data from the CRISM instrument on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, green indicates the presence of glass; blues are pyroxene; reds are olivine. This view shows Alga Crater’s central peak, which is about 3 miles (5 km) wide within the 12-mile (19-km) diameter of this southern-hemisphere crater. The information from CRISM is shown over a terrain model and image based on observations by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. The vertical dimension is exaggerated by a factor of two. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / JHUAPL / University of Arizona.

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Nasa tools to predict solar stroms

nasa scientist including one of indian origin has developed new model can help predicts solar geomagnetic - storms which can cause  telecommunication dusruption and power outraged 24 hours in advance.
    solar magnetic storms may be caused by a giant cloud of solar particles called coronal mass ejections in the opposite direction of earth's magnetic field.
  if a cme or  coronal mass ejection in the same direction and answers that is pointer pointing from south to north the  cme will slide by without much effect.
     Currently scientists don't have much advance notice of how a Cme`s magnetic field are arranged. They can only measure the field of CME`a passes over satellite close to earth.
      Ultimately, the model can describe how the CME will be configured as it approaches earth, and even which parts if the CME will have fields pointed in which direction.

NASA "flying saucers" deploys partially.

    NASA launched a giant ballon on Monday carrying a kind of "flying saucers"that will test technologies for landing on mars, but it's outsized parachute only partly deployed.
The aircraft fitted with the largest parachute ever constructed was launched from a military base in Hawaii. The massive helium ballon rose for about three hours,according to NASA, which broadcast the event live.
     The test vehicle was carried by balloon to about 120000 feet.
  This mission is designed to test entry and descent technology on the form of a donut-shaped airbag and a supersonic parachute that can be deployed while the vehicle is travelling several times the speed of sound.

galaxy NGC 7715

Is this galaxy jumping through a giant ring of stars? Probably not. Although the precise dynamics behind
 the featured image is yet unclear, what is clear is that the pictured galaxy, NGC 7714
, has been stretched and distorted by a recent collision with a neighboring galaxy. This smaller neighbor, NGC 7715
, situated off to the left of the featured frame, is thought to have charged right through NGC 7714
. Observations indicate that the golden ring pictured
 is composed of millions of older Sun-like stars that are likely co-moving with the interior bluer stars. In contrast, the bright center of NGC 7714
 appears to be undergoing a burst of new star formation. NGC 7714 is located about 100 million light years
 away toward the constellation of the Fish (Pisces
). The interactions
 between these galaxies likely started about 150 million years ago
 and should continue for several hundred million years more
, after which a single central galaxy
 may result.

Mangalyaan to black out for 15 days

From June 8 to 22, the sun will block mars  from earth mapping communication with the  satellite

   Starting Monday, the country's low cost mars mission that is in a rendezvous with the red planet for an extended period will enter the "black-out" phase snapping communication with the satellite.
     From June 8to 22, the sun will block out mars from the earth snapping communication with the satellite.

mars's mystery cloud baffles scientists

A mystery is brewing on Mars: Amateur astronomers spotted enormous plumes erupting off the Red Planet's surface, leaving scientists puzzled.

More than 155 miles (250 kilometers) high and hundreds of miles across, the baffling plumes were spotted by amateur astronomers in the spring of 2012. The plumes reflect sunlight, which means they could be made of water ice, carbon dioxide ice or dust. But clouds made of those materials would be hard to explain with current models of the Martian atmosphere, scientists say.

Images of Mars from the last 20 years reveal that shorter plumes, reaching heights of about 62 miles (100 km), occasionally flare up from the planet's surface. An image by the Hubble Space Telescope from 1997 revealed another abnormally high plume, similar to the one seen in 2012, according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA).