MarkWhittington writes: In the hit movie, "The Martian", NASA astronaut Mark Watney survives by planting potatoes in one of the modules of the Mars base who is stranded at. The plot device received a great deal of praise from space agriculture experts, according to a recent story in Popular Mechanics. Of course, future space farmers would be advised to grow a variety of crops in order to diversify their diet, not an option for Watney. In any case, according to a story in ZME Science, NASA is partnering with Peru's International Potato Center (CIP) to do what Watney did and grow potatoes on Mars.

MarkWhittington writes: Readers wondering where Andy Weir, whose book The Martian featured a NASA astronaut stranded on Mars, will take us next need wonder no longer. According to a story in the Huffington Post, Weir's next novel will feature a woman living in a city on the moon. The novel is due to be out in late 2016 or early 2017.

Weir, naturally, is cagey about plot details. But it's likely he will pay as strict attention to the science in his new story as he did in The Martian. There's no word yet about possible movie deal, but considering the success of The Martian, it's a safe bet someone will want to bring Weir's lunar adventure to the big screen.

MarkWhittington writes: While NASA remains fixated on its Journey to Mars, quietly, the FAA is positioning itself as the lead United States Government agency for a return to the moon. According to a story in Space News, "FAA's Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) unanimously approved a recommendation that the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation begin discussions with ESA on ways American companies could participate in what's known as 'Moon Village.'" The "Moon Village" is a European concept for an international moon base where various countries and private entities would collocate habitats for mutual support and benefit.

MarkWhittington writes: The 43rd anniversary of the mission of Apollo 17, the last time men walked on the moon, has elicited a strange kind of nostalgia, and no little melancholia in some parts of the media. These qualities are captured in a story in IO9 that purports to tell us why no one has been back to the moon in over four decades and why we might soon return at last. Deadline Hollywood informs us that "The Last Man on the Moon," a documentary on Apollo moonwalker Gene Cernan, is set for a release to both theaters and video on demand in February, having been shown at film festivals for the past year or so,

NormalVisual writes: After decades of mystery, the lunar impact site for the Apollo 16 S-IVB third stage has finally been found. These boosters were directed to impact on the Moon beginning with Apollo 13 in order to allow scientists to learn more about the Moon's inner structure by measuring the effects of the collisions with lunar seismographs. Five boosters were directed into the Moon during the lunar missions, and the other four impact sites had already been found shortly after the missions themselves. The Apollo 16 booster had been difficult to find because of a loss of radio contact with the booster before the impact, and the actual impact location was 30 km away from the original estimate.

MarkWhittington writes: With the Paris Climate Conference apparently ending in failure and experts such as Matt Ridley suggesting that, in any case, global warming is not a cause for immediate concern, the private sector is casting about to fund "green" energy solutions. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are starting a renewable energy research and development fund, for example. The Chicago Tribune pointed to a possible area of investment that Gates and Zuckerberg might look into if they would like to get out of the solar and wind box that many green energy enthusiasts find themselves in. The key to evolving from a fossil fuel energy economy, perhaps, is fusion energy powered by helium-3 from the moon.

MarkWhittington writes: Russia has made no secret of its desire to land cosmonauts on the lunar surface sometime in the late 2020s. As the United States, at least for the current administration, has decided to bypass the moon in favor of Mars, Russia could move to wipe out the humiliation it suffered at the hands of NASA when it lost the 1960s race to the moon with the landing of Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969. However, a story in TASS suggests that a Russian moon landing effort would be complex, requiring up to six launches of its Angara rocket.

MarkWhittington writes: As NASA has noted, the space agency and its contractors are working diligently on the first launch of the heavy-lift Space Launch System. The launch, officially called EM-1, or Exploration Mission 1, will loft an unpiloted version of the Orion spacecraft around the moon. NASASpaceFlight.com also noted that a number of secondary payloads, known as CubeSats, will be along for the ride as well. NASA considered EM-1, scheduled for 2018, a crucial step in its Journey to Mars which will, it is hoped, reach its ultimate destination sometime in the 2030s.

StartsWithABang writes: 4.5 billion years ago, a giant object collided with our proto-Earth, kicking up debris that eventually coalesced into the Moon. While the near side contains dark maria and lunar lowlands, the far side is almost exclusive heavily cratered, high-mountainous regions. This was a mystery for a long time, but it appears that heating from the hot, young Earth caused a chemical and crustal difference between the two faces.

An anonymous reader writes: Ars Technica details the political and engineering battles being waged to make it possible for NASA to land a probe on Jupiter's moon Europa. They have new information about mission plans; it sounds ambitious, to say the least. "First, the bad news. Adding a lander to the Clipper will require additional technical work and necessitate a launch delay until late 2023. At that time, the massive Space Launch System rocket NASA is developing could deliver it to Jupiter in 4.6 years. Once there, the lander would separate from the Clipper, parking in a low-radiation orbit.

The Clipper would then proceed to reconnoiter Europa, diving into the harsh radiation environment to observe the moon and then zipping back out into cleaner space to relay its data back to Earth. Over a three-year period, the Clipper would image 95 percent of the world at about 50 meters per pixel and three percent at a very high resolution of 0.5 meters per pixel. With this data, scientists could find a suitable landing site. ...The JPL engineers have concluded the best way to deliver the lander to Europa's jagged surface is by way of a sky crane mechanism, like the one successfully used in the last stage of Curiosity's descent to the surface of Mars. With four steerable engines and an autonomous system to avoid hazards, the lander would be lowered to the moon's surface by an umbilical cord."

MarkWhittington writes: Water ice believed by scientists to reside at the lunar poles is the key to opening up the solar system to human activity. The water could help sustain a lunar settlement. It could also be refined into rocket fuel, not only to sustain travel to and from the moon but to make it a refueling stop for spacecraft headed deeper into the solar system. A recent MIT study suggested that lunar fuel would simplify NASA's Journey to Mars. Lunar scientist Paul Spudis, writing in Air and Space Magazine, pondered the next step in determining the extent and composition of the lunar ice. Spudis' idea is to deploy several dozen impact probes across one of the lunar polar regions.

Meet Tom Moser. And here's another NASA oral history interview with him. And we interviewed him last week ourselves. Tom has been involved, one way or another, as engineer or manager, with every American manned space flight program since 1963. Now, among other things, he's thinking of ways multiple governments and private companies can share their resources to make future space exploration feasible, which may not be engineering -- but in many cases politics can be more important than designing and building the hardware, which is why it's worth learning about.

And thinking of hardware, do you remember the conspiracy people talking about how the U.S. flag on the moon was faked because there's no way it could wave in the breeze without an atmosphere? Moser gives us the inside scoop on that: it was an engineering screwup, and at least partly his fault. Whoops!

MarkWhittington writes: Observers of the current state of the space program like to maintain that a space race, such as occurred in the 1960s, will never happen again. They cannot be farther from the truth, since not just one, but two space races are going on. The Google Lunar X Prize is managing a race for the first private group to land a rover on the lunar surface and perform a number of tasks for glory and prize money. Eric Berger at Ars Technica pointed out that another prize space race, with the goal of performing the first private crewed space mission in low Earth orbit, is ongoing thanks to NASA's commercial crew program.

MarkWhittington writes: NASA made an announcement that Titan, a moon of Saturn and the largest moon in the solar system, has hydrocarbon dunes. The discovery has highlighted the entirely alien nature of Titan, which has seas, lakes and rains of liquid methane and ethane and a surface comprised on water ice. The fact that it has dunes made of frozen hydrocarbon that acts like sand, blown by the wind on Earth is yet another piece of data that has scientists interested in studying Titan further.

MarkWhittington writes: NASA released the first images from Cassini's dive two days earlier into the geyser that is erupting water and ice particles through fissures in the icy crust of Saturn's moon Enceladus from what is presumed to be a salty ocean underneath. The space probe, which has been orbiting Saturn for the past several years, survived the encounter. Scientists are eagerly awaiting the data that will be returned from the passage, which should be made available in a week or two.

An anonymous reader writes: On Tuesday, Slashdot users learned that a man in Alabama sold a lunar rover prototype for scrap metal. We now learn that the junkyard owner has saved this important piece of scientific history. The man claims that, upon receiving the prototype at his scrap facility, he set it aside because he knew exactly what it was.

An anonymous reader writes: NASA's Cassini probe has a daring mission tomorrow: dive through the water jets spraying from the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The probe will be a mere 30 miles above the surface, traveling at a relative speed of 19,000 mph. Researchers hope to gain insight into the chemical composition of the jets. "[T]he plumes are more than just gas and water: samples show that they also contain many of the building blocks essential to Earth-like life. This lends itself to the exciting possibility that organisms similar to those that thrive in our own deep oceans near volcanic vents exuding carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide might exist on Eceladus." The molecules suspended among the water may tell us whether Enceladus's oceans are capable of harboring life. "The spacecraft's sensors will pick up gases in the plume searching for the presence of molecular hydrogen (H2). The amount of H2 found could reveal how much hydrothermal activity is occurring in the ocean."

Jason Koebler writes: An Alabama man allowed an Apollo-era lunar rover prototype to rot in his backyard before ultimately selling it to a junkyard for scrap metal last year, according to documents acquired from NASA as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. NASA spent much of 2014 attempting to acquire the priceless artifact for display in a museum, but it was ultimately destroyed before the agency could recover it.

schwit1 writes: A new study has raised questions about the methods scientists have used to date the late heavy bombardment in the early solar system. According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison: "A study of zircons from a gigantic meteorite impact in South Africa, now online in the journal Geology, casts doubt on the methods used to date lunar impacts. The critical problem, says lead author Aaron Cavosie, a visiting professor of geoscience and member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the fact that lunar zircons are ex situ, meaning removed from the rock in which they formed, which deprives geoscientists of corroborating evidence of impact. 'While zircon is one of the best isotopic clocks for dating many geological processes,' Cavosie says, 'our results show that it is very challenging to use ex situ zircon to date a large impact of known age.'" The problem is that the removal of the zircon from lunar rocks changes the data enough to make the dating unreliable. The method might work on Earth, but the dating done on Apollo samples can be questioned. This means that much of the supposed history of the solar system, centered on what planetary scientists call the late heavy bombardment, a period 4 billion years ago when the planets were being hit by innumerable impacts as they cleared the solar system of its dusty debris disk, might not have happened as dated from lunar samples. If so, our understanding of when that bombardment ended and life began to form on Earth might be considerably incorrect.

MarkWhittington writes: Russia is turning its attention to the moon again for the first time in about 40 years. The first Russian mission to the moon since long before the end of the Cold War will be Luna 27, a robot lander that will touch down on the edge of the lunar South Pole as early as 2020. Russia is looking for international partners to help make Luna 27 a reality and may have found one in the European Space Agency, according to a story on the BBC. "The initial missions will be robotic. Luna 27 will land on the edge of the South Pole Aitken basin. The south polar region has areas which are always dark. These are some of the coldest places in the Solar System. As such, they are icy prisons for water and other chemicals that have been shielded from heating by the Sun. According to Dr. James Carpenter, ESA's lead scientist on the project, one of the main aims is to investigate the potential use of this water as a resource for the future, and to find out what it can tell us about the origins of life in the inner Solar System."