• Mark Kelly
• Mark Kelly gives his twin brother Scott a fist-bump through a glass quarantine window.

Retired astronaut Mark Kelly writes about his twin brother Scott's launch for a year-long stay aboard the International Space Station:

He's off the planet — and on his way to the International Space Station.

Earlier today, I watched as my brother, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, and two Russian cosmonauts launched to space aboard a Soyuz rocket. They left from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome, the oldest space launch facility in the world. They went from zero to 17,500 miles per hour in about 12 minutes.

After docking with the space station, opening the hatch, and floating out of their capsule and into the space station — which is about the size of a four-bedroom house — Scott will settle in for his yearlong mission.

• NASA

Gabby watched with the NASA team at Johnson Space Center's Mission Control.

The UA College of Science Lecture Series on Life in the Universe continues tonight with Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Associate Professor Anna R. Dornhaus speaking on "Complexity and Evolvability: What Makes Life So Interesting?"

Dornhaus gives a terrific lecture, so it's well worth your time to head on down to Centennial Hall on the UA campus. The talk starts at 7 p.m., but it was just about full when I attended last week's talk, so you should aim to get there early for this one. It's free and you can find more details here.

Here's a preview of what Dornhaus will be discussing:

Life is particularly fascinating in its ability to create complex and ever-changing forms out of simple building blocks. How does such complexity arise, and what are the conditions that allow never-ending evolution of new and more intricate forms of life? We now know that one of the main processes that allows this is that life consists of modules that interact with and feed back on one another. In the history of life on Earth, new levels of complexity have often arisen out of new types of such interactions, and continued evolution has been driven by life interacting with other life. We even find that man-made systems can develop a 'life' of their own when such feedback interactions among many modules occur. Life, it seems, is more about rules of interaction than special materials. We have only begun to understand the power of this algorithmic nature of life.

The UA Lunar and Planetary Lab yesterday unveiled a new mural on the side of the Michael J. Drake Building, where the work of developing the the OSIRIS-REx space probe is underway. The spacecraft is designed to spend more than a year orbiting an asteroid before getting close enough to grab a sample and shoot it back to earth. (More on the amazing mission here.)

Daniel Stolte of the UA News Service explains how the mural came together:

One of my favorite spring traditions, the UA College of Science Lecture Series, gets launched again on Monday, Jan. 26, on campus at Centennial Hall, 1020 E. University Blvd.

This year's theme is life in the universe:

For its 10th anniversary, the University of Arizona College of Science's popular spring lecture series will present seven free lectures exploring various aspects of life in the universe.

The first lecture will be on Monday, Jan. 26, at 7 p.m. in Centennial Hall on the UA campus.

Life as we know it produces complex order. Earth's many life forms are diverse and continually changing through birth, growth and evolution. The series will investigate questions including: What is life? How do we recognize it?

To understand life in the universe, we ask: What environments produce life and which attributes make something alive? How does life change? Is there life in our solar system or on one of countless exoplanets? Is there a connection between life on Earth and life elsewhere — or are we alone?

This first lecture tackles the topics of "What Is Life?" with Guy J. Consolmagno, a planetary scientist with the Vatican Observatory Research Group. The details on his talk:

As The Range teased yesterday, the UA's HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found the United Kingdom's Beagle, a spacecraft that landed on Mars but was never heard from again.

Daniel Stolte of the UA News Service has details:

On Christmas Day 2003, a kitchen table-size lander descended onto the surface of the red planet on a mission to study the Martian surface and potential clues for life. The probe never called home, and no one knew what happened to it. Until now. The UK-led Beagle 2 Mars Lander, thought lost on Mars since 2003, has been found partially deployed on the surface of the planet, ending the mystery of what happened to the mission more than a decade ago.

Images taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO, and initially searched by Michael Croon of Trier, Germany, a former member of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express operations team at the European Space Operations Centre, have identified clear evidence for the lander and convincing evidence for key entry and descent components on the surface of Mars within the expected landing area of Isidis Planitia, an impact basin close to the equator.

This finding shows that the Entry, Descent and Landing, or EDL, sequence for Beagle 2 worked and the lander did successfully touchdown on Mars on Christmas Day 2003.

"We've been looking for all the past landers with HiRISE, this is the first time we found one that didn't send a signal after it landed," said Alfred McEwen, principal investigator of the HiRISE mission and professor in the UA's Lunar and Planetary Lab. "If the landing sequence works correctly, the probe sends a radio signal, and you can use that to pinpoint where it is coming from, even if it broadcasts only very briefly. But in the case of Beagle 2, we didn't get anything. All we had to go by was the target landing area."

We'll know more tomorrow, but it looks like the UA's HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter may have spotted a British spacecraft that crashed during its attempt to land on Mars in 2003. The Guardian reports:

A British Mars lander that was lost on its way to the red planet more than a decade ago may have been spotted by an orbiting spacecraft.

The Beagle 2 lander was supposed to touch down on Christmas day in 2003, but after it was released from its mothership, Mars Express, the dustbin-lid-sized craft was never heard from again.

But Beagle 2’s final resting place may finally have been discovered. Scientists operating the HiRise camera on Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) will take part in a press conference this Friday to announce “an update” on the ill-fated mission.

The HiRise camera is the only camera in Mars orbit that can image the surface in high enough detail to spot missing spacecraft. The HiRise team has already found the twin Viking landers which touched down on Mars in the 1970s and photographed Nasa’s Phoenix, Curiosity and Opportunity rovers. They have been actively hunting for Beagle 2 for several years.

“HiRise is the only camera at Mars that can see former spacecraft like Beagle 2. It’s definitely pretty close to its intended landing spot, no matter what. It entered the atmosphere at the right time and place,” said Shane Byrne, a scientist on the HiRise team at the University of Arizona. He said the team has been asked to keep more details of the announcement under wraps.

• NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Phil Plait at Slate's Bad Astronomy blog highlights a recent photo captured by the UA's HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter:

On Earth, you don’t usually get craters this size; our atmosphere slows and stops smaller rocks from space. The air on Mars is less than 1 percent the thickness of ours at the surface, so smaller rocks get through.

The impactor apparently came in from the west (left). It dug a hole big enough to excavate material under the surface, which appears much darker. You can see the characteristic splatter pattern of chunks thrown out, dripping debris down in long plumes, too. This is pretty amazing; we don’t usually see this so cleanly in new craters!

Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, who teaches at ASU, will be at the Loft Cinema tonight for a screening of The Unbelievers, a documentary about his travels with Richard Dawkins to promote science and reason.

The movie screens at 7 p.m. as part of the Loft's Science on Screen program. More info on the movie here.

Here are details from the Loft's website:

The Unbelievers follows evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss across the globe as they speak publicly to sold-out halls, advancing a thoughtful dialogue about the importance of science and reason in the modern world.

Dawkins, the world’s most famous atheist, and Krauss, director of the esteemed Origins Project, are dedicated to furthering the (r)evolutionary idea that science, above all else, should inform man’s understanding of the universe. Filmmaker Gus Holwerda follows these “rocks stars of reason” as they embark on a most modern crusade to encourage people to cast off antiquated ideologies and assume a purely rational approach to important current issues. Refusing to engage with those who advance divisive and extreme fundamentalist positions, Dawkins and Krauss show how sometimes sensitive and provocative ideas can be discusses respectfully and with intellectual rigor. Fans, including Ricky Gervais, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, Stephen Hawking, Woody Allen and Werner Herzog, share their impressions and support, while arenas full of admirers and the curious eagerly receive them. As engaging as the subjects themselves, The Unbelievers offers an exciting glimpse into two of the world’s most influential minds at work. (Dir. by Gus Holwerda, 2013, USA, 77 mins., Not Rated)

• NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Tucson wasn't the only place that had a nice, white frosting in recent days. The UA's HiRISE camera, aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, snapped this gorgeous photo of the frost melting in a Martian gully a few weeks ago. HiRISE researchers note: "At this time of year only south-facing slopes retain the frost, while the north-facing slopes have melted. Gullies are not the only active geologic process going on here. A small crater is visible at the bottom of the slope.

More from HiRISE here.

• NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

The UA's HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter got a great snapshot of comet Siding Spring as it passed by Mars over the weekend. HiRISE mastermind Alfred McEwen explains what you're seeing in the above image:

Oort Cloud comet Siding Spring made its closest pass to Mars and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on Sunday, 19 October 2014. The highest-resolution images were acquired by HiRISE at the minimum distance of 138,000 kilometers. The image has a scale of 138 meters per pixel.

Telescopic observers modeled the size of the nucleus as about 1 kilometer wide. However, the best HiRISE images show only 2-3 pixels across the brightest feature, suggesting a size smaller than 0.5 kilometers for this nucleus, the first ever imaged for a long-period comet.

This composite image shows two of the best HiRISE images of the comet. Shown at top are images with the full dynamic range, showing the nucleus and bright coma near the nucleus. Shown at bottom are versions where the fainter outer coma is brightened, saturating the inner region.

These closest-approach images were made possible due to very precise pointing and slewing of the MRO spacecraft by engineers at Lockheed-Martin in Denver, based on comet position calculations by engineers at JPL. HiRISE acquired three images 12 days before closest approach, when the comet was barely detectable above the “noise level” of the images. These early images showed the comet was not quite at its predicted location! This new viewing angle on the comet was used to update its predicted location and timing at closest approach. Without this update, the comet may have been outside the HiRISE image area in the best images.