After ten months of trying to extricate the Mars rover Spirit from a sandy patch on the Red Planet, NASA has finally given up. The space agency said Tuesday that Spirit will no longer be a fully mobile robot, roving over an alien planet. It will instead be a stationary science platform–which means a sedentary life for the robot geologist [that] has taken thousands of images and found evidence in Mars’ rocks of a wetter, warmer past [BBC].

Ten months ago, as Spirit was driving south beside the western edge of a low plateau called Home Plate, its wheels broke through a crusty surface and churned into soft sand hidden underneath [NASA]. The rover has been stuck there ever since, and now only four of its six wheels are functioning. Since all the maneuvers that the NASA instructed the rover to try have failed to free it, the sandpit known as “Troy” will be Spirit’s final resting place.

Spirit may stop roving, but hopefully it won’t stop working. In the coming weeks, NASA will focus on tilting the rover to the north so that more sunlight will fall on its solar panels during the long, cold Martian winter. Even if the rover does settle into a better position, it is likely Spirit will maintain so little energy in its batteries that it will go into hibernation, perhaps as soon as April. It will not emerge from that state until August or September, when the Sun gets high enough in the Martian sky to power up the rover’s systems [BBC News].

If Spirit does make it through the winter (when temperatures are expected to reach -55 degrees Fahrenheit), it can resume studying the tiny wobbles in the rotation of Mars to gain insight about the planet’s core. This requires months of radio-tracking the motion of a point on the surface of Mars to calculate long-term motion with an accuracy of a few inches [NASA]. This would help determine if the core of Mars is liquid or solid. Tools on Spirit’s robotic arm are also expected to study variations in the composition of nearby soil and see how they’re affected by water. Stationary science also includes watching how wind moves soil particles and monitoring the Martian atmosphere [NASA].

Since landing on Mars in 2004, Spirit has trekked nearly five miles and climbed a mountain as tall as the Statue of Liberty. Its twin, Opportunity, continues to drive and explore [Associated Press]. So far, NASA has spent more than $900 million on its Mars exploration rover program and the data acquired by the vehicles has generated about 100 scholarly papers, including special editions of the leading international journals Science and Nature.

Related Content:
80beats: Spirit Rover’s 6th Anniversary on Mars is likely To Be Its Last
80beats: Future Looks Grim for Stuck Mars Rover
80beats: Mars Rover Will Try Daring Escape From Sand Trap of Doom
80beats: Will This Mars Rover Ever Rove Again? Spirit Get Stuck in the Sand
80beats: Mars Rover Spirit Shows Signs of Age, Including Senior Moments
DISCOVER: Mars Rover Delves Into Crater
DISCOVER: Those Mars Rovers Keep Going and Going…

Image: NASA/ JPL-Caltech

Scholars debate why opera doesn’t seem to hold much appeal for modern audiences, but they’ve overlooked a glaringly obvious answer: The Zeiss Universarium astronomical projector isn’t involved. Or at least, it wasn’t, until now.

The Gotham Chamber Opera has set out to give the genre some geek awesomeness with its presentation of Haydn’s Il Mondo Della Luna (The World on the Moon) at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium.

The opera follows the exploits of the love-stricken Ecclitico, who poses as an astronomer to impress Buonafede, the strict father of his beloved. Ecclitico and his two romance-minded accomplices, smitten with Buonafede’s other daughter and maidservant, use a sleeping potion to convince the gullible old man that he has been transported to the moon. There, Buonafede can no longer impede the young lovers’ relationships, and the lunar emperor (a servant in disguise, resplendent in imperial glowsticks) commands the three happy pairs to marry.

The acoustics of the planetarium don’t lend themselves to live performance, but the singers and orchestra give an impressive performance in spite of the dead space. The costumes and occasional choreography revel in a burlesque take on Haydn, complete with a bawdy French-maid character, the fake astronomer incarnated as a cross between an 18th century dandy and Dr. Horrible, and plenty of booty-shaking all around. Well-integrated projections on the planetarium’s domed screen contribute swirling nebulae and lunar landscapes that take the audience along for Buonafede’s boozy trip.

Performances continue nightly through this Thursday, January 28. Tickets here.

Bats and dolphins are two of the most celebrated users of echolocation, employing high-frequency sounds to locate prey, find their way, or to communicate. Now a new set of findings in Current Biology show that not only do the two different kinds of mammals use the same method, they also evolved nearly the exact same molecular means for hearing at high frequencies.

That second part was a surprise, study author Stephen Rossiter says: “It’s common on a morphological scale but it’s assumed not to occur at a DNA level because there are so many different ways to arrive at the same solution” [BBC News]. That is, while it’s quite common for different species to separately evolve similar features—like the tusks of elephants and walruses—it’s quite unlikely that natural selection working in separate species would settle an essentially identical gene and protein for growing tusks, hearing high-frequency sounds, or anything else. Or so the thinking went.

The gene in question, and the protein it encodes, are both called prestin. It’s present in the short hairs of the inner ear, the researchers say. Prestin changes shape when exposed to high-frequency sound, and this in turn deforms the fine hair cells, setting off an electrical impulse to the brain. So the protein has the important jobs of detecting and selecting high-frequency sounds for amplification [New Scientist]. Prestin is common across mammals, although many different variants exist; mutations of the human version cause people to lose high-frequency hearing. But the prestin proteins that echolocating dolphins and bats evolved are almost identical, the study says. By contrast, bats that don’t use sonar don’t have that version of the protein, despite the fact that they’re much more closely related to their fellow bats than dolphins are.

For biologist David Pollock, who wasn’t involved in the study, this new could open a new window to understanding protein evolution. These findings, combined with a previously identified example of molecular convergence in snake and lizard mitochondrial genomes, suggest that molecular convergence may be more common than scientists realize — “it’s [just] not always easy to detect,” Pollock said [The Scientist].

Related Content:
80beats: Radar May Keep Bats Away From Wind Turbines’ Blades
80beats: Tiger Moths Jam Bats’ Sonar Like a Helicopter in Enemy Territory
The Loom: How to Be a Bat [with high-speed video]
DISCOVER: Killing Whales with Sound
DISCOVER: How To Weave a Dolphin-Friendly Net

Image: flickr / Ken Lund

Some people say the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was a joke made up to satirize creationism and the incursion of fundamentalist religion into politics. Other people seem to see their religious icons everywhere they look. Still others promote their beliefs through the military.

I think these folks ought to get together. Or maybe they already did:

People say there are no atheists in foxholes… but maybe there is a higher authority.

Tip o’ the noodly appendage to Jay Sinclair.

Credit: US Air Force and Tech. Sergeant Russell E. Cooley IV

Now we know what students do for fun over at Stanford University. If this video is to be believed, they wave their iPhones around while wearing speakers strapped to their hands. (Actually, the whole production seems kind of like using a weirding module, so maybe they’re onto something.) The speakers amplify the different sounds produced by various iPhone apps to create a glorious symphony, courtesy of the MoPho (Mobile Phone) Orchestra.

Some of the music apps are quite fun–like the one called the “Ocarina” that transforms your iPhone into a 12,000-year-old wind instrument (but with more apps). Check out the video below for a demonstration of both ancient music and modern compositions played on the iPhone, from Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.

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My friend Nancy Atkinson usually blogs over at Universe Today, but has started her own personal-type blog. To inaugurate it she’s hosting the 138th Carnival of Space. So why not go over there and read up on the latest astronomy and space happenings?

Until or unless we can create a Jurassic Park and build dinosaurs from DNA, the best way to study them may be to build dino models using materials like balsa wood, carbon fiber, and rubber bands.

That’s what a team did for a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. To figure out how the 120-million-year-old winged dinosaur Microraptor gui took to the skies, the researchers used a well-preserved fossil to build their own. “We went back and forth. We thought, maybe we’ll do 3-D graphics and it’ll look really cool. But it’s more accurate to do the modeling directly from the specimen,” said Dave Burnham, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas [Wired.com].

The micoraptor’s flight configuration has confounded scientists studying it, because no modern vertebrate flies with the hind legs “functioning as independent, fully developed wings,” so there’s no living analog for comparison. Previous studies suggested that the animal walked on the ground, but Burnham’s team argues that the feathered back legs would have prevented this. A 2007 study, also in PNAS, said the dino probably flew with its two sets of legs set parallel, like a biplane. But Burnham, whose team did glider tests with their model microraptor’s wings in three different positions, says the biplane formation would have put too much weight on the creature’s head.

Instead, he argues, the dinosaur would’ve taken off from the trees and glided like a flying squirrel. “The controversy was that these animals couldn’t spread their hind wings to glide,” Burnham says. “But we’ve been able to articulate the bones in their hip socket to show that they could fly” [LiveScience].

The study adds to the debate over how flight evolved in the earliest ancestors of birds–did flight begin when some ground-dwelling creatures hopped and leaped upwards, or when tree-dwelling creatures began to glide between branches? This new study of the microraptor, which is poised on the boundary between dinosaurs and birds, suggests that the arboreal, or tree-living, idea may be correct [LiveScience]. However, co-author David Alexander notes, the controversy probably won’t end here.

Related Content:
80beats: New Fossil Suggests Dinosaur World Domination Started in S. America
80beats: The Four Ways Raptors Use Their Talons to Smite Prey
80beats: Four-Winged Dino Clinches the Case For Bird Evolution
80beats: New Fossil Suggests That Fuzzy Dinosaurs Were Plentiful
DISCOVER: Plucking Apart the Dino-Birds

Image: University of Kansas