President Obama may have nixed the idea of returning astronauts to the moon anytime soon due to budgetary constraints, but that hasn’t stopped NASA from doling out a gift to its lunar fans.

The space agency has released its first iPhone game, which is called the “NASA Lunar Electric Rover Simulator.” The free app, available on iTunes, puts you in the driver’s seat of a lunar rover. The release might serve as a kind of homage to Spirit, NASA’s real-life Mars rover that recently became immobilized. (Opportunity continues chugging along.)

Nasawatch.com describes the idea of the game:

“Drive your Lunar Electric Rover (LER) over the lunar surface to conduct missions. Rescue stranded crew members, transport crewmembers, and launch and recover other Landers. Avoid being caught on the surface unprotected during Solar Particle Events (SPEs).”

The game also shows the ascent and descent of the moon lander, and aims to give players a first-hand feel for what the lunar surface looks like and how a rover works. The game is based on NASA data and file footage of actual lunar rovers, and it mimics the approximate conditions of one of the lunar base sites.

The new game is part of the space agency’s efforts to gin up more interest in its activities via trendy technology like smart phones. And the moon was not its first stop. Earlier this month, NASA released a new iPhone app that allowed users to get live updates from the surface of the sun. NASA says that app lets users “fly around the star, zoom in on active regions, and monitor solar activity.”

Related Content:
80beats: Photo Gallery: The Best Views From Spirit’s 6 Years of Mars Roving
80beats: Obama’s NASA Budget: So Long, Moon Missions; Hello, Private Spaceflight
80beats: NASA Invites You to “Be a Martian” & Explore the Red Planet’s Terrain
Bad Astronomy: Give Space A Chance
Discoblog: Is Apple Taking Sexy Back? Raunchy Apps Vanish From the App Store
Discoblog: California Lays Claim to Astronaut Garbage Left Behind on the Moon

Image: Apple

When we last left the Lower Merion School District, its officials had circled the wagons and refused to openly discuss the lawsuit charging school administrators with remotely accessing the webcams in the laptops loaned out to students, and doing so without the students’ or their parents’ knowledge. The school stayed pretty quiet about it over the weekend, but spokesman Doug Young says that the district has suspended the practice amid the lawsuit and the accompanying protests by students, the community and privacy advocates [The New York Times].

That might not be enough to quell the swell of anger over Lower Merion’s policy. The district, which loans out Apple laptops to all it students, admits remotely activating the webcams 42 times over the course of the last 14 months, but says all of those instances were attempts to find missing or stolen computers. However, this whole fracas started after school administrators tried to use a photo taken of student Blake Robbins as evidence to corroborate charges that the young man had engaged in some sort of mischief. Robbins told CBS News that the school accused him of selling drugs and tried to back up the charge with images from the webcam.

Robbins’ parents filed suit in U.S. District Court, but that won’t be the end of Lower Merion’s legal troubles. The FBI has launched a query into the incident. Risa Vetri Ferman, the Montgomery County district attorney, said Friday that she might also investigate [ABC News].

Related Content:
80beats: Lawsuit: Webcams in School-Issued Laptops Used to Spy on Students at Home
80beats: Facebook CEO: People Don’t Really Want Privacy Nowadays, Anyway
80beats: Should Online Advertisers Be Allowed To Track Your Bedroom Habits?

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Andrew Plumb

Years ago, I visited the Grand Canyon with my family. The beauty of it was overwhelming, and everything they say about it is true. It’s magnificent.

That grandeur is only amplified by the obvious scientific significance of it. The layers of sedimentary rock, exposed by the eons-long patient erosion of the Colorado river, are a dramatic open textbook of the geological history of our planet, as if the Earth itself is saying "Look here, and learn of the past!"

Learn we have. And the Earth, as we have also learned, is not entirely unique. From millions of kilometers away, another canyon beckons us to uncover a planet’s past.

[Click to engrandcanyonate.]

What you’re seeing here is a topographical model of a small part of a crater floor on Mars: Gale Crater, to be precise, a monster 150 km (90 miles) wide impact located nearly on the equator of Mars. In its center rises a mountain, a central peak common in large impact craters. Surrounding this central peak is an enormous mound of material, rising kilometers above the crater’s floor (see the topographic image below; the ellipse represents an old potential landing site of the Spirit rover). It’s not entirely clear how this mound formed; however, it’s likely that the entire crater was once filled with material laid down as periodic deposits, and that most of it has eroded away, leaving just that lopsided mound.

If that sounds familiar, it may be because the Grand Canyon has a similar history (without the crater, of course).

And like its terrestrial counterpart, the exposed layers tell a history of Mars’s geologic past. Scientists studying those layers using images from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have uncovered a startling feature: while sulfates (deposited by salty water) are seen throughout the layers, clays are only seen lower down, deeper into the past. Clays are only seen where water is abundant, but sulfates alone indicate conditions where water evaporated away.

What the floor of Gale Crater appears to be telling us is that standing water, at least locally, existed long ago on Mars, but later evaporated away. This is consistent with what we have seen in other parts of Mars, of course. Ever since the rovers landed on Mars we’ve seen one piece of evidence after another of standing water in the Red Planet’s distant past.

But there’s something about this news that appeals to me, that touches more than the scientist part of my brain. If I hadn’t told you that first image was from Mars, you might very well think that it was from the Grand Canyon or some other Earthly feature. And it really is a canyon, as you can see from this HiRISE image of the same area:

This image shows the very lower left of the oblique view shown above. It’s upside-down, making features difficult to compare (check out the full HiRISE image of the area to see the whole thing), but the crater floor is at the top of this false-color image, and the mound begins to rise toward the bottom. You can see the canyon carved right into the floor, with sand dunes rippling across it.

Whatever carved this canyon, perhaps hundreds of millions of years ago, perhaps more, tore away the deposited material and revealed all those layers of rock. These layers can be read like a history book written in reverse chronological order, showing us the deep past of Mars, and telling the sad tale of how an entire planet lost its water.

Mars was once more like the Earth is now, though just how much is anyone’s guess at the moment. I doubt it was exactly like Earth; the evidence of water we see indicates it was incredibly salty, far saltier than we have here at home. But still, Mars is a brilliant ochre cautionary tale in our sky. There but for the grace of water go we…

Following this discussion thread at the CFI/Point of Inquiry forums, I’ve decided to announce my show’s guest a week early from now on, and call for audience questions for him/her. I’ll take a sampling from those questions that appear on the forums, and ask them on the air.

The guest for Friday is going to be Penn State University climatologist Michael Mann, and we’ll be talking about the unprecedented wave of recent attacks on climate research–and climate scientists. So I am sure there will be many, many questions that folks will come up with. Don’t leave them in comments here–although comments are open. Leave them on this CFI forum thread if you want me to consider them. (Note that I believe you’ll be required to register over there.)

Michael E. Mann is Director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State, and author of the famous “hockey stick” study, as well as dozens of other peer reviewed papers. He’s also a contributor to RealClimate.org, and is the author, with Lee R. Kump, of Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming:

So any questions for Michael Mann? If so, leave them here–and they may just make their way into the interview!

Also, compose your questions sooner rather than later, as we’ll be recording fairly early on this week…..