These Countries celebrate NEW YEAR'S Before you do !!

Which country celebrates New Year first?
Fireworks exploding over Sydney harbour symbolises the start of global New Year’s festivities for most Brits.

But it may surprise you to hear that Australia is not the first country in the world to welcome the New Year.

The tiny Pacific island of Tonga will ring in 2018 at 10am GMT on December 31 – a full three hours before it reaches Down Under.



Where will 2018 arrive last?
After travelling all around the world, the New Year will eventually come full circle – or near enough.

The last place or places to receive 2018 will be the tiny outlying islands of the US.

Baker Island and Howland Island will greet the New Year at 12 Midday on January 1 – or at least they would if any people lived there.

Second last will be American Samoa at 11am – just 558 miles from Tonga, where locals and visitors were celebrating a full 25 hours before.

It's therefore possible to get a quick flight in between the two and count down to 2018 twice.


Using London time ( GMT) , this is when the world will welcome in 2018:

Sun 10:00              Tonga and two more
Sun 11:00              New Zealand
Sun 13:00-15:15  Australia
Sun 15:00              Japan & South Korea
Sun 15:30              North Korea
Sun 16:00              China, Philippines, Singapore
Sun 17:00              Most of Indonesia
Sun 17:30              Myanmar and Cocos Islands
Sun 18:00              Bangladesh
Sun 18:15              Nepal
Sun 18:30              India and Sri Lanka
Sun 19:00              Pakistan
Sun 19:30              Afghanistan
Sun 20:00              Azerbaijan
Sun 20:30              Iran
Sun 21:00              Moscow/Russia
Sun 22:00              Greece
Sun 23:00              Germany
Mon 00:00             United Kingdom
Mon 02-3:00         Brazil
Mon 03:00             Argentina, Paraguay
Mon 03:30-8:00   USA, Canada
Mon 09:00             Alaska
Mon 10:00             Hawaii
Mon 11:00             American Samoa
Mon 12:00             US outlying islands (Baker Island, Howland Island etc)

Watch New Zealand welcome 2018 !!!

Source :The Sun

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NASA Is Developing A Decelerator That Would Replace Parachutes In Space Vessels

Historically, NASA has used decelerators to slow down space vessels as they prepare to land on Earth. Housed within the vessels, these decelerators generate drag and limit acceleration, working like a parachute.

NASA wants to ensure that decelerators used in future space missions will work in extreme conditions and withstand packing and compression. In order to achieve this, the agency created a scaled-down version of its latest Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator, or HIAD, design to ensure that it will be able to tolerate the packing process.

Using a vacuum pump, NASA engineers were able to squeeze the 3-meter, donut-shaped inflatable into a vastly smaller space, an important quality considering the space premium in vessels. They then packed and unpacked it multiple times, checking for tears in its Zylon and Teflon materials at every step in the process. ALLOWING FOR A SLOW DESCENT

The HIAD being compressed by engineers. Credit: NASA

Engineers at NASA foresee the viability of this technology in delivery of heavy cargo, science instruments, and people to other worlds. It could even be used to recover cargo from the International Space Station and return it to Earth.

According to Langley test engineer, Sean Hancock, HIAD was packed the same way each time to see how the material would handle folding, packing, and compressing. In doing so engineers develop a better understanding of how it would perform after exposure to handling, storage, and deployment during a space flight mission. This development is also of great concern to NASA, as it anticipates future missions, especially manned ones, will require heavier vessels and ships. While a parachute has been used to bring down the Curiosity rover through the Martian atmosphere, a spacecraft containing astronauts and other materials could weigh 30 times more, necessitating better decelerators.

The HIAD would allow a slower descent of any vehicle through the atmosphere during future missions. In addition, the technology will protect the craft from the intense heat on the journey down. HIAD lead engineer, Keith Johnson, explained that the small test donut contained all the components for the latest design. This test should allow NASA to develop a bigger prototype and bring us one step  closer to settling the Red Planet.

Source :Futurism


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Physicists Just Discovered a Way to Track Unobserved Quantum Particles

One of the underlying principles of quantum theory is that quantum objects can exist as waves or particles. But, they do not exist as either until they are measured, making it seemingly unachievable to identify or track quantum objects when they're not being observed.

But recently, physicists faced this issue and proved that it is not an impossibility to track unobserved quantum particles. David Arvidsson-Shukur, the study's first author and a Ph.D. student at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, became interested in a physics premise called "the wave function." While it seemed to contain a wealth of information, it had been used more as a mathematical tool than a representation of actual quantum particles, Arvidsson-Shukur explained in a press release. "That's why we took on the challenge of creating a way to track the secret movements of quantum particles." Within this new study, published in the journal Physical Review A, researchers from the University of Cambridge demonstrated that, by examining the way a quantum object interacts with its environment instead of measuring the object itself, you can track unobserved quantum particles. As particles move, they "tag" their environment.

Each "tag," or interaction with their environment encodes information within the particles. So Arvidsson-Shukur and his co-authors developed a method to map these "tagging" interactions without directly observing them. Also, in following these "tags," the researchers found that they could decode the information from the particles at the end of an experiment when the particles were observed. This will allow scientists to follow the movement of quantum particles, giving them much more insight into their behaviours.

The Forbidden Domain

This new way to track unobserved quantum particles could allow scientists to test old predictions in quantum mechanics. These include ideas like that a particle can exist in two places at the same time, or suggestions like telepathy in which information can be transmitted between two people without any particles traveling between them. So, not only does this research prove that what was once thought to be a physical impossibility is, in fact, possible — it also could potentially allow researchers to verify the potential reality of telepathy.

But, perhaps even more importantly, this experiment expanded physicists' understanding of wave particles. Previously, they had been thought to be abstract computational tools, used only to predict the outcome of quantum experiments. But the researchers in this study found that the information encoded into each quantum particle after each "tagging" interaction is directly related to the wave function. "Our result suggests that the wave function is closely related to the actual state of particles," Arvidsson-Shukur explained in the press release. "So, we have been able to explore the 'forbidden domain' of quantum mechanics: pinning down the path of quantum particles when no one is observing them."

This research could help to support continuing efforts to understand the movement and behavior of quantum particles and wave particles. The fundamental "truths" of quantum physics could be tested by a wealth of new information, and many exciting new discoveries could be down the road.

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Source : Science Alert/Futurism

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TICKS HAD A FEAST ON DINOSAUR BLOOD - RESEARCH

We now have some solid evidence that ticks really did suck the blood of dinosaurs – something scientists and sci-fi writers have previously suspected – thanks to the discovery of a 99 million-year-old piece of Burmese amber. Inside the amber, researchers found a hard tick grasping a feather, thought to be from one of the feathered dinosaurs of the Cretaceous period, 145 to 66 million years ago. It's very rare to find fossils of blood-sucking bugs preserved alongside whatever they fed on, and this is the oldest such sample to be discovered yet, putting ticks and feathered dinosaurs in the same time frame and confirming the feeding link between them. "Ticks are infamous blood-sucking, parasitic organisms, having a tremendous impact on the health of humans, livestock, pets, and even wildlife, but until now clear evidence of their role in deep time has been lacking," says lead researcher Enrique Peñalver, from the Spanish Geological Survey (IGME). If you've seen Jurassic Park, you'll know that the movie shows dinosaur DNA being recovered from a mosquito encased in amber. We know ticks, mosquitoes, and other blood suckers were around at the time of the dinosaurs, thanks to the way some of them have been preserved by getting trapped in tree sap, but the question has remained about what exactly they have fed on. Dinosaurs were probably included in their blood diet, based on what we know about the bugs of today, but up until now this was just a hypothesis. The new discovery puts feathered dino remains and a tick in the same block of amber, which means the link is now confirmed, even if Jurassic (or Cretaceous) Park remains an impossibility – amber just doesn't preserve DNA well enough for that. Studied tick pieces and extant 5mm hard tick for comparison. (Penalver et al., Nature Communications) Even if a dinosaur theme park is still out of the question though, the findings can teach us more about the mammals and insects living on Earth some 100 million years ago. "The fossil record tells us that feathers like the one we have studied were already present on a wide range of theropod dinosaurs, a group which included ground-running forms without flying ability, as well as bird-like dinosaurs capable of powered flight," says one of the researchers, Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in the UK. "So although we can't be sure what kind of dinosaur the tick was feeding on, the mid-Cretaceous age of the Burmese amber confirms that the feather certainly did not belong to a modern bird, as these appeared much later in theropod evolution according to current fossil and molecular evidence."

In another block of amber, the researchers identified a new species of tick they're calling Deinocroton draculi, or "Dracula's terrible tick", but here the link to dinosaur blood is indirect – while the bug is engorged on blood, it's impossible to determine from which animal it is. The fact that two of these ticks were preserved together with evidence of hair, however, suggests these were dinosaur blood-suckers as well – no mammal hairs have ever been found in Cretaceous amber, so we're probably looking at feathered dinosaurs again. It's an incredible find, all made possible because of the preserving qualities of amber, and showing dinosaurs really did have annoying blood-sucking parasites to worry about.

"The simultaneous entrapment of two external parasites – the ticks – is extraordinary, and can be best explained if they had a nest-inhabiting ecology as some modern ticks do, living in the host's nest or in their own nest nearby," says one of the team, David Grimaldi of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Source : Nature Communications

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2018 : 7 Space Events to watch out for

Life down here on Earth goes along like it always does, with all its messy, petty, awful squabbles, with rent and bills and chores and work - but up there in space, wonderful things are being seen and discovered all the time. Obviously there will be exciting occurrences we can't predict in the year ahead (hello colliding neutron stars), but to the best of our knowledge, here are seven of the most exciting things to keep your eyes on the sky for in 2018.

1. Eclipses

We won't have a total solar eclipse again this year, but there are a three partial solar eclipses and two total lunar eclipses that will be viewable in various places from around the world.

31 January - total lunar eclipse visible from Australia, North America, eastern Asia and the Pacific Ocean

15 February - partial solar eclipse visible from part of Antarctica, Chile and Argentina

13 July - partial solar eclipse visible from Antarctica and the southernmost tip of Australia

27 July - total lunar eclipse visible from most of Europe, Africa, western and central Asia, and western Australia

11 August - partial solar eclipse visible in northeast Canada, Greenland, northern Europe and northeast Asia

That's pretty much everyone, so mark the date of your eclipse in the calendar and get ready.

2. Meteor showers

Every year, there are a number of meteor showers, and if you get out there with a camera, you can grab some spectacular photos. Two of the best ones to look out for are the Perseids, which will be peaking 12-13 of August with up to 60 meteors per hour, and the Geminids, which will be peaking 13-14 December with up to 120 meteors per hour. If you want to try to see as many meteor showers as possible, you can find a very comprehensive calendar here, and a more simple calendar here. Luminet black hole The first image of a black hole, created in 1979. (Jean-Pierre Luminet)

3. We may finally see a black hole's event horizon

In April this year, a multi-telescope project called the Event Horizon Telescope made a no-holds-barred attempt to photograph the event horizon of a black hole - not the black hole itself, but the point of no return, where the pull of the object is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.

We're still waiting to see what they photographed over five nights of observation time of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, and hopefully that image will drop sometime in early 2018. We're so excited, for real.

4. Moon exploration forays

Friends, it is (maybe not quite) official: Earthlings are going back to the Moon. The last person to set foot on its surface was NASA astronaut Eugene Cernan in 1972, and next year, well, we may not get back there personally, but there's a whole bunch of nifty Moon stuff percolating.

For starters, India is putting a rover on the Moon for the first time in the country's history in 2018, and that's rad. SpaceX also said it's planning a trip to lunar orbit - with two private citizens on board (although it's been pretty quiet about it for a while). China's Chang'e 4 and Chang'e 5 are going to be conducting a dark side exploration and sample return mission respectively. There have also been rumblings of the US sending humans back to the Moon, and don't forget Google's Lunar XPrize - a competition for private entities to put a robotic rover on the Moon.

5. Asteroid science

Were you excited about Rosetta and Philae and their rendezvous with and subsequent research on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko? Well, boy, you're going to love 2018! We have not one, but two asteroid landers due to meet their targets this year. In June, JAXA's Hayabusa 2, which launched in 2014, is going to meet up with asteroid Ryugu, a near-Earth asteroid with a rare combination of both C-type and G-type qualities. And in August, NASA's OSIRIS-REx is going to meet up with near-Earth asteroid Bennu. It's no doubt going to be fascinating to watch, but there's also going to be years of science - both of these missions are returning a sample to Earth, Hayabusa in 2020 and OSIRIS-REx in 2023. Amazing!

6. Pulsar fireworks

Sometime early next year - it's hard to say exactly when - a pulsar is going to fly really, really closely past one of the brightest stars in our galaxy, through the disc of gas and dust surrounding an extremely luminous blue star 15 times the mass of the sun and 10,000 times brighter.

When that happens, there's going to be an explosion of astrophysical fireworks that will help researchers measure the mass, gravity, magnetic field, stellar wind and disc properties.

7. There's going to be a Mercury probe

This year we saw the end of Cassini's mission. Juno is out there studying Jupiter, but we definitely need more planetary probes. Luckily we're going to get 'em.

In 2018, the ESA and JAXA are launching their joint mission - BepiColombo, which is going to probe Mercury, our Solar System's closest planet to the Sun.

OK, granted it's not actually going to reach Mercury until 2025, but still, it gives us a lot to look forward to - and reminds us that, when it comes to space, there is always something out there to look forward to seeing.

Onwards and upwards!

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NASA and GOOGLE announce a major breakthrough

NASA and Google announced a "major discovery"on Thursday: another solar system with eight planets. That finding is due to the discovery of a new planet, Kepler-90i - a hot, rocky orb circling a sun-like star called Kepler-90, which is 2,545 light-years from Earth. The planet was found using a machine-learning system from Google, which was put to work sifting through data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft.

Kepler, a space telescope that trails Earth in orbit around the sun, has stared down 145,000 sun-like stars over the years to look for signs of distant planets. Astronomers knew about the Kepler-90 solar system, but had not previously detected this planet. It appears to be the third planet from the sun-like star, and orbits roughly every 14 days. The temperature on Kepler-90i surface is likely around 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius). "Kepler-90i is not a place I'd like to go visit," Andrew Vanderburg, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin who helped find the planet, said during a press briefing. Vanderburg was aided in the work by Google AI software engineer Christopher Shallue. "The way I see it, what we've developed here is a tool to help astronomers have more impact," Shallue said. Vanderburg and Shallue also found a second new planet, called Kepler 80g. To detect these two new worlds, Google's machine learning learned how to identify signals from exoplanets recorded in the Kepler data.

It processed 14 billion data points from four years' worth of Kepler images, using what's known as a convolutional neural network, which sort of mimics the way the human brain processes information. NASA and Google say this new technology will help scientists find many more such exoplanets in the future. In fact, Vanderburg believes the Kepler-90 solar system likely has more planets that we haven't yet detected. "It would almost be surprising to me if there weren't any more," he said. "Is an eight-planet solar system like our own really that extraordinary? Maybe there are systems out there with so many planets, they make our solar system seem ordinary."

Prior to this analysis, NASA's last examination of Kepler data confirmed 219 new worlds in the more than 4,000 candidates that Kepler had turned up. The space agency's current total of confirmed exoplanets is now 2,525 - and 10 of those may be rocky, Earth-size, and possibly habitable to alien life. For those wondering whether Google's AI system could make astronomers obsolete, NASA says not to worry. Jessie Dotson, a Kepler project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, explained that astronomers will always be needed to classify objects before feeding information into a neural network, so that the AI can learn how to look at new data. "This will absolutely work alongside astronomers," Dotson said. "You're never going to take that piece out."

SOURCE: Business Insider/Sciencealert

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JUNO'S ENCOUNTER WITH JUPITER

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a storm like nothing this world has ever seen. This crimson-hued anticyclone features winds three times as fast as the jet stream and is big enough to swallow Earth whole. It is almost surely older than any living human - 187 years at least - and could well still rage across the gas giant's surface after all of us are gone. Scientists don't know what makes the Great Red Spot so long-lasting. Nor can they explain the chemistry behind its brilliant colour. But thanks to NASA's Juno spacecraft, now on its second year of orbiting Jupiter, they know that the storm's roots go deep: The well of hot, swirling gas that powers the Great Red Spot extends some 217 miles (350 km) into Jupiter's interior. The finding was announced Monday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, along with other results from Juno's first eight flights past the solar system's largest planet. The spacecraft arrived in orbit around Jupiter in summer 2016 and has since performed looping orbits that take it skimming between Jupiter's cloud tops and radiation belts once every 53 days. On Earth, the Great Red Spot would almost graze the orbit of the International Space Station. The highest clouds of our planet's worst hurricanes top out at around 10 miles (16 km).

But understanding the behaviour of the Great Red Spot could improve scientists' understanding of weather on Earth, said California Institute of Technology planetary scientist Andy Ingersoll, a co-investigator for the Juno spacecraft.

He called Jupiter's giant storm a good "stress test" for Earth-based weather models.

It isn't clear what the new find means for the future of the storm - Ingersoll said the spot already has stretched traditional weather models to their limits.

But the spot has been shrinking steadily since the Voyager 2 spacecraft visited it in 1979; it used to be big enough to engulf two Earths.

High above the cloud tops, Jupiter is enveloped in radiation belts formed by charged particles that get trapped by the planet's magnetic field.

On Monday, scientists said that Juno had discovered a new area of radiation just above the planet's atmosphere at the equator.The high energy particles in this region are even more intense than those that make up the radiation belt. But none of the eight spacecraft that preceded Juno at Jupiter had spotted it. Juno's orbit meant "we literally flew through it," said Heidi Becker, a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who leads Juno's radiation investigation team. The radiation in this region is thought to stem from fast-moving atoms of hydrogen, oxygen and sulfur. These particles are produced in the gas clouds around Jupiter's moons, Io and Europa, but are stripped of electrons and become charged as they interact with Jupiter's atmosphere. The spacecraft found another area of high-energy particles in Jupiter's inner radiation belt, where electrons move at nearly the speed of light. Becker and her colleagues are still studying the exact nature of these particles. Juno's other discoveries at Jupiter include clusters of 600-mile-wide cyclones at the planet's poles and an uneven magnetic field that is weak in some places, but in others is 10 times as strong as anything found on Earth.The spacecraft's high resolution camera has also taken thousands of detailed images, revealing a planet that looks like a cross between a Van Gogh painting and the world's most elaborate latte foam art. In a lecture, project scientist Scott Bolton pulled up one of Juno's images of Jupiter's blue-tinged polar storms and burnt sienna gas clouds. "If you had shown us that five years ago, we couldn't have guessed what planet it was," he said.

SOURCE : The Washington Post

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HUMAN SIZED PENGUIN REMAINS UNEARTHED IN NEW ZEALAND

A new species of prehistoric penguin has been found in New Zealand, and it's so big that the researcher who found its bones initially couldn't figure out what kind of animal it was. Dating back to the late Paleocene 60-56 million years ago, the newly named Kumimanu biceae was so big it stood 1.65 metres tall (5'5") and measured 1.77 metres in length (5'10") when swimming. It weighed up to 100 kilograms (220 pounds). It's one of the biggest penguins that ever existed, coming in at just under the size of extinct Late Eocene Antarctic penguin Palaeeudyptes klekowskii, which was 2 metres long and weighed 115 kilograms. But although it's not breaking size records, K. biceae is the earliest giant penguin ever discovered, according to Te Papa Museum curator Alan Tennyson, who found the first piece of the skeleton in 2004. Other giant penguin fossils date back to around 42-35 million years ago, placing them in the Eocene epoch. And the two species of the earlier Waimanu genus of penguin that emerged not long after the Cretaceous-Paleocene extinction event are much smaller, and show signs of being closer to losing the ability to fly.

"That a penguin rivaling the largest previously known fossil species existed in the Paleocene may indicate that gigantism in penguins arose shortly after these birds became flightless divers," the researchers wrote in their paper."Gigantism therefore may be an inherent feature of Paleogene penguins, which may have evolved soon after aerodynamic constraints ceased to exist."Tennyson found the fossilised remains encased in a boulder on a beach in Otago, New Zealand. Initially, he didn't know what the bones were.

He found a rock that showed bone on the outside surface, so he took it back to his office - where it would remain on a shelf for a few years. Extraction on the boulder didn't start until 2015 - but once work began, the researchers realised they had found the bones of a bird. A really big bird."Painstaking extraction work slowly revealed that the rock contained a multitude of jumbled bones of a colossal penguin," Tennyson said. "We found flipper, body and leg bones and they are truly huge."

The penguin's humerus and a shoulder girdle bone entangled in clusters. (G Mayr/Senckenberg Research Institute) The new penguin was named Kumimanu, which means "monster bird" in Māori, and biceae in honour of Tennyson's mum, Bice Tennyson.It's difficult to know how similar K. biceae looked to modern day penguins, the tallest of which is the emperor penguin that stands at 1.1 metres. But it was probably a formidable creature. "it would have been very impressive, as tall as many people, and a very solid, muscly animal built to withstand frequent deep dives to catch its prey, It would not have been the kind of bird that someone could catch alive, it would have been considerably more powerful than a person."  Tennyson said. "

The decline of giant penguins around the world probably has something to do with the rise of marine mammals, with which it coincides. The expansion of seals, walruses, whales, and other ocean-faring mammals probably provided competition for both food resources and breeding grounds - and the giant penguins lost the battle.

Source :  Nature Communications

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NOW GET FUEL FROM CO2

A membrane developed by MIT researchers can isolate carbon monoxide from carbon dioxide, allowing polluting greenhouse gas emissions to be turned into useful alternate fuels(Credit:kodda/Depositphotos)

Researchers at MIT have developed a new membrane-based system that can convert carbon dioxide emissions into useful alternate fuels. The process has been effectively demonstrated on a small-scale and the researchers hope to ultimately adapt the system to conventional fossil fuel-based power plants.

Made of lanthanum, calcium, and iron oxide, the membrane is designed to separate out oxygen from carbon dioxide, leaving behind carbon monoxide that can then be turned into a variety of useful fuels.

The process requires a significant energy input to produce the up to 990° C (1,814° F) temperatures needed to separate the carbon dioxide input into oxygen and carbon monoxide. But the researchers suggest this heat energy could be provided by either, "solar energy or by waste heat, some of which could come from the power plant itself."

A pragmatic hypothetical outcome would be to incorporate the process into a natural gas power plant by adding an entirely new fuel output stream to the plant. The carbon dioxide produced by generating electricity from the burning gas would then be fed through the membrane system, which itself would be powered by a small stream of the original natural gas.

The carbon monoxide output could then be mixed with hydrogen to produce syngas, which can be used to generate electricity, as a fuel in internal combustion engines, or fed into the existing gas distribution network. This process would create a new commercial output for the power plant while also reducing greenhouse emissions.

It is worth noting that this research is co-funded by Shell Oil, which hopefully points to the process finding a real, practical outcome. After all, if the big fossil fuel companies can find a way to turn their carbon dioxide emissions into a positive revenue source then its a real win-win scenario for everyone.

The research was published in the journal CHEMSUSCHEM

SOURCE : Newatlas

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WORMS THRIVE IN MARTIAN SOIL - NASA

In a time where space travel is catching the eyes of the private sector, NASA has yet again revealed the possibility of human life on MARS. According to the recent research and experiments consucted by NASA they have successfully hindered the reproduction of the eartly insect using stimulated Mars soil on earth.

The NASA researchers added rucola (also known as rocket or arugula) plants, manure fertilizer and earthworms to a pot - and found that the worms not only thrive, but they've now reproduced to get their first offspring.

"Clearly the manure stimulated growth, especially in the Mars soil simulant, and we saw that the worms were active," said lead researcher and biologist WEIGNER of Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands.

"However, the best surprise came at the end of the experiment when we found two young worms in the Mars soil simulant."

One of the worms born in the simulant. Martian soil simulant is a really important tool for researching Mars missions. It's been developed by NASA based on data obtained by Mars rovers and orbiters, and its composition is as close to the material on Mars as possible based on the information available.

Here on Earth, it would be technically incorrect to call it soil, since soil contains organic material; but planetary scientists use the word to distinguish the finer material in the regolith on Mars from rocks and gravel.

This soil simulant can be used to figure out how the soil and dust on Mars will affect things like robotic rovers, mining equipment, and space suits. For the last few years, researchers have also been looking into whether plants can be coaxed to live in the material.

We need to know this because once we send humans to Mars, as NASA plans to do it in 2030’s it may be the first step towards a colony - and a colony is unsustainable without a food supply they can grow themselves.

As Wamelink and his team demonstrated in 2016, vegetables can be grown in martan soil. Not as well as in Earth soil, but that's why the team is now trying new things - including adding pig manure and earthworms, which digest decaying plant matter and convert it into nutrients, and aerate the soil through which they tunnel.

Mars has limited weathering compared to Earth, though, which means the soil grains may have sharp edges that could harm the earthworms' digestive tracts.

(Wieger Wamelink/Wageningen University & Research)

To determine the efficacy of the additions, the team prepared a variety of pots planted with rucola. They compared the Martian soil to silver sand,  a quartz-based sand used in Earth gardening for soil aeration.

Pots were set up with rucola planted, then manure was added to all pots. Then worms were added.

"The positive effect of adding manure was not unexpected," Wamelink said. "but we were surprised that it makes Mars soil simulant outperform Earth silver sand."

There are, however, other significant barriers to growing plants on Mars. They'd need a climate-controlled environment to keep them from freezing in Mar’s harsh cold, and to allow them liquid water, and some sort of shielding to protect them from the radiation on Mars surface thanks to its lack of a global magnetic field.

Both of these could be accomplished with a greenhouse, but another big problem is light. Mars gets about 60 percent of the amount of light Earth does, which means that plants on Mars would grow at about 60 percent of the rate of Earth plants.

To solve this problem, researchers at Utah State University have been working with NASA to develop fibre optic systems to deliver light to growing plants.

Meanwhile, Wamelink's work with soil simulants continues. He has already determined that vegetable grown in the heavy metal-rich simulant is safe to eat.

In the future, he wishes to carry out tests to determine the effect of Mars' high levels of perchlorate on vegetables - a chlorine compound which, in its heavy Mars levels, could be toxic to humans. The team is yet to publish their research.

(SOURCE : SCIENCE ALERT)

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