Next spring is going to be a busy time for Mars. In close succession, three spacecraft will arrive at the planet, joining the dozen or so craft already circling Mars. Two of the spacecraft were launched in the past couple of weeks by newcomers to martian exploration: the United Arab Emirates Al-Amal (meaning Hope) and Chinas Tianwen-1 (which means Question to Heaven).

The third vessel will be NASAs Mars 2020, containing the Perseverance rover, which just took off successfully from Florida. While this rover will be just one of many on the red planet, it is our best bet for finding life there for the time being.

The sudden flurry of activity is a result of planetary dynamics: every two or so years, the orbits of Earth and Mars align so that the two bodies are at their closest to each other. This results in a shorter interplanetary transit time, of just over six months. The next such launch window will not be until 2022 when it is expected that the European Space Agencys ExoMars 2022 will join the throng.

It is legitimate to question why we keep sending rockets to Mars. Surely we have acquired enough images of the surface and its landscapes to know that water used to be there, but has now vanished? True enough but there are still mysteries to solve: when did the water go, and why? And, of course, the biggest question of all: is (or was) there life on Mars?

The three missions have different objectives: Hope will orbit the planet for at least two Earth years (one Martian year), acquiring data on Mars weather just like the weather satellites orbiting Earth. Tianwen-1 will orbit Mars and is carrying a rover that will be parachuted down to the surface at Utopia Planitia, where it will analyze the soil and take images of the surface.

Perseverance will arrive almost at the same time but a couple of thousand kilometers away in Jezero Crater. It will be deposited on the surface by sky-crane technology (see the video below), the same method that delivered Curiosity so successfully in 2012.

Perseverance carries a full complement of scientific instruments that will measure all the usual things that get measured on Mars: the chemistry and mineralogy of the rocks and soil, the amount and type or organic material present at and just below the surface, and so on. But there are two other features of the mission that make it unique.

First of all is the helicopter/drone called Ingenuity that will be released from beneath the rover. This will fly from Perseverance and circle around before landing away from the rover. It is not certain what the range of the drone will be although the flight will only last a few minutes and Ingenuity will land only a few meters away from the rover.

The idea behind the flight is to test the concept of atmospheric flight on Mars. Eventually, it is anticipated, drones will be able to fly for much longer and for greater distances. This could help guide rovers, identifying features worth investigating and hazards to avoid.

The ingenuity drone. NASA/JPL-Caltech

The second unique feature is a drilling and caching system. Perseverance is the first rover to have the capability to drill a core, about ten centimeters long and one centimeter in diameter, and extract it intact from the drill hole. Perseverance will take samples from a range of different rock types as it traverses the crater floor. The drill cores will be left in a small pile a cache for collection, possibly in early 2027, and subsequent transport back to Earth (estimated arrival time is still not known, but maybe around spring 2032).

Why is it so important to bring samples back from Mars? The instruments carried by Perseverance will be able to undertake fairly sophisticated chemical analyses of the rocks and soil. But even though the instruments and measurements are a tremendous achievement, they do not have the full range of equipment that we employ on Earth to squeeze every drop of information from a rock.

Tests to check for organic compounds and whether they might have a biological origin require a chain of different analyses that are far too elaborate and complex to be undertaken on Mars. Boiling acids, alcohol rinses, addition of chemicals, subtraction of solids, are steps in the chemistry needed to extract and separate organic molecules from their rocky hosts. This just cannot (as yet) be done on Mars.

The rocks will be weighed and measured practically on a grain-by-grain basis and analyzed, in some cases down to the individual atoms from which the material is composed. This will be an international effort there is already a multi-national panel (called MSPG-2) which will draft the requirements for the first sets of analyses and how the samples will be stored, curated and subsequently distributed to the wider scientific community.

There is another set of reasons to bring samples back from Mars the future of human exploration of Mars. If we send humans to Mars, we have to know how to bring them back again. We have not returned anything directly from another planetary body since the Apollo 17 astronauts left the Moon in December 1972. Yes, we have captured bits from a comet and an asteroid and returned them to Earth but those missions did not land, collect and come back.

We have been investigating Mars for a long time: for over 150 years by telescope, 50 years from orbit and 20 years by rovers. Only another 12 years, then, before we can analyze Mars in our own laboratories.

Perseverance to get things done is a gift of humanity. Heres hoping that the rover will live up to its name.

This article is republished from The ConversationbyMonica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences, The Open Universityunder a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The Perseverance rover is our best bet for finding life on Mars - TNW

View larger. | The Mars Express orbiter, which has been studying Mars for the past 16 years, captured these images of a strange, very elongated cloud on Mars on July 17 and 19, 2020. The cloud can reach up to 1,100 miles (1,800 km) in length. Image via ESA.

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For the past couple of years, the Mars Express orbiter of the European Space Agency (ESA) has been keeping an eye on a mysteriously long, thin cloud that periodically shows up over Arsia Mons, the 12-mile-high (20-km-high) volcano on Mars.

In a July 29 statement, ESA said the cloud has appeared again, illustrated by the images above, acquired by the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) on Mars Express on July 17 and 19, 2020.

Mars Express first noticed and photographed the cloud in September 2018. A recurrent feature, the cloud is made up of water and ice and can stretch for over 1,100 miles (1,800 km). Despite its location and appearance, scientists say its not a plume linked to volcanic activity. Instead, the curious stream forms as airflow, influenced by the volcanos leeward slope (the side that does not face the wind).

Jorge Hernndez-Bernal, at the University of the Basque Country (Spain), is leader of a team studying the cloud. He said in a statement:

We have been investigating this intriguing phenomenon and were expecting to see such a cloud form around now. This elongated cloud forms every Martian year during this season around the southern solstice, and repeats for 80 days or even more, following a rapid daily cycle. However, we dont know yet if the clouds are always quite this impressive.

A Martian day, or sol, is slightly longer than an Earth day at 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds long. A Martian year consists of 668 sols approximately 687 days so the seasons last for twice as long. The southern solstice is the period of the year when the sun is in the southernmost position in the Martian skies, just like the December 21-22 solstice here on Earth. In the early mornings during this period, this fleeting cloud grows for about three hours, quickly disappearing again just a few hours later.

Most spacecraft in orbit around Mars tend to observe in the Martian afternoon. However, Mars Express is in a position to gather and provide crucial information on this unique effect. Mars Express mission team member Eleni Ravanis works specifically for the VMC instrument. She said:

The extent of this huge cloud cant be seen if your camera only has a narrow field of view, or if youre only observing in the afternoon. Luckily for Mars Express, the highly elliptical orbit of the spacecraft, coupled with the wide field of view of the VMC instrument, lets us take pictures covering a wide area of the planet in the early morning. That means we can catch it!

The Mars Express science team has named the cloud the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud, AMEC. So, how long has it been disappearing and reappearing? Why does it only form in the early morning? Scientists continue to investigate.

Bottom line: Images from the Mars Express spacecraft show that a mysteriously long, thin cloud has again appeared over the Arsia Mons volcano on Mars.

Via ESA

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Return of the extremely elongated cloud on Mars - EarthSky

Aug. 3 (UPI) -- The majority of Mars' valleys were carved by ice sheets, not flowing rivers, calling the Red Planet's supposed warm, watery past into question, according to new research published Monday in Nature Geoscience.

"Valley networks on Mars have historically been interpreted as surface water flows, either sourced by surface liquid water or by ground water," study lead author Anna Grau Galofre told UPI.

"The problem is that there are thousands of them and they all have very different morphologies," said Grau Galofre, former doctoral student in the department of earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences at the University of British Columbia.

Earth has similarly diverse valley networks, created by a range of processes. Grau Galofre and her colleagues wondered whether a diversity of processes might be responsible for Mars' varied valley networks, too.

Many of the valleys on Mars reminded Grau Galofre of the subglacial channels found beneath ice sheets on Earth.

"Their patterns, isolation from each other and the fact that some flow uphill, all these are consistent with what we know about subglacial channels on Earth," said Grau Galofre, now a post-doctoral researcher at Arizona State University.

"Introducing this hypothesis then turned out to be a useful perspective to address a longstanding question regarding the climate of early Mars: warm and wet versus cold and icy," she said.

First, Grau Galofre and her research partners performed statistical analysis to identify similarities and differences among valley structures on Mars. After identifying a group of similar-looking valleys not explained by river flows, researchers compared the valleys to subglacial channel patterns found on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic.

According to researchers, Devon Island -- a cold, dry polar desert -- is as close an approximation of Mars' climate as can be found on Earth.

In total, researchers surveyed more than 10,000 Martian valleys. Only a small percentage of the surveyed valleys featured patterns consistent with surface water erosion, suggesting rivers and lakes were less abundant on early Mars than previously hypothesized.

Though Mars is Earth's closest neighbor, it is considerably farther from the sun. At the time that Mars' valleys were forming, 3.8 billion years ago, the sun was dimmer than it is today. Models suggest Mars would have been quite frigid.

While researchers say evidence suggesting the Red Planet's features were mostly formed by glacial activity isn't surprising, the findings don't preclude freshwater environs, nor the possibility of ancient life.

"I would like to highlight that the study finds both evidence for riverine erosion and subglacial erosion among the valley networks," said Grau Galofre. "Sometimes both origins are represented by channels that are close, implying that the climate on early Mars probably changed considerably through time."

Grau Galofre said she would like to see NASA's Martian rovers take a closer look at the geochemical signatures found in clay found on Mars.

"Clays and other hydrated rocks which have been found on Mars also appear in subglacial environments," she said.

If Mars' ancient climate was erratic, as some evidence suggests, subglacial environs might have offered a haven for microbial life.

"The subglacial environment could provide a stable setting, with readily available water, a temperature without large oscillations, and protection from solar energetic particles and radiation without need for a magnetic field," Grau Galofre said.

Researchers have previously identified microbial communities living in subglacial lakes on Earth.

Grau Galofre said she and her research partners hope further comparisons between valley patterns on Mars and Earth will help more precisely model the Red Planet's ancient climate.

See the rest here:

Ice sheets, not rivers, carved valleys on Mars, new study says - UPI News

Bringing Mars Rocks to Earth: Our Greatest Interplanetary Circus Act. With the latest Mars missions heading toward their destination, there is growing anticipation about what all this new robotic instrumentation might soon reveal of the Red Planet. Of course, planetary scientists and engineers have also long had the goal of bringing bits of Mars back to Earth for much closer, hands-on investigations. The complex plan taking shape to do that has a certain Are you kidding me? feel to it yet also sounds just plausible enough to inspire optimism (in this observer at least). Its reminiscent of the rescue effort in The Martian, but just replace Matt Damon with a soccer ball filled with rocks and dust.Timothy Oleson, Science Editor

The Seismic Hush of the Coronavirus.By now weve all seen photos of eerily empty streets and public spaces during regional shutdowns, and earlier this year the media covered the pandemics effect on air quality. But who would have thought that a decrease in human activity would register on seismometers around the world? Well, every seismologist and a lot of other scientists, Im sure, but it hadnt occurred to me. Of particular note, data collected during the pandemic could help scientists distinguish human-caused tremors from natural ones, and seismic monitoring could also be used to monitor human activity during this pandemic and in the future.Faith Ishii, Production Manager

Astro(wildlife)biology.

Just a fun thread of the various critters your everyday astronomer might encounter while studying the universe. My wildlife encounters include moths, spiders, roadrunners, cats and dogs, and *shudder* ladybugs.Kimberly Cartier, Staff Writer

Revealed: Oil Giants Help Fund Powerful Police Groups in Top U.S. Cities. In an investigation by the Public Accountability Initiative, researchers found that big oil and gas companies like Chevron and Shell are funding private police foundations in U.S. cities. The police foundations support local policing groups with training, weapons, equipment, and surveillance technology and face less oversight than publicly funded organizations. These companies have also been accused of producing toxic pollution that disproportionately hurts communities of color. As Black Lives Matter protests renounce state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism, it is important to look at the ties between environmental and racial justice.Jenessa Duncombe, Staff Writer

Trump Administration Says Massive Alaska Gold Mine Wont Cause Major Environmental Harm, Reversing Obama. Controversy about Alaskas proposed Pebble Mine has churned for decades. The site sits in the headwaters of the worlds most productive salmon fishery. There are concerns about faults under the site of a 500-foot (152-meter) earthen dam required to contain the billions of tons of rock expected to be removed during the mines operation. The mining company is angling for approval of a smaller footprint, with the option to expand (to where most of the gold is) later. Locals, who dont see the big payouts from mining that oil offers and are unlikely to be hired by the mining company, are lukewarm on the project. Opponents have complained that the Army Corps of Engineers environmental impact statement isnot scientifically rigorous. Lawsuits expected!Liza Lester, Staff Writer

Mars In 4K.

Mars never looked so good, but its the voice-over that makes this a classic. In a (red) world.Caryl-Sue, Managing Editor

Read more:

This Week: Mars in 4K and Silence on Earth - Eos

BURDUR, Turkey

Similarities between a lake in southwestern Turkey and the Jezero Crater on Mars has captured the interest of US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in its research on possible life on the Red Planet, according to a scientist.

The mineral makeup between the Martian crater and Lake Salda in Burdur province, Turkey, was established with morphological and remote sensing, Candan Gokceoglu, a professor of geological engineering at Hacettepe University in Turkey's capital Ankara, told Anadolu Agency.

The 28-mile wide Jezero Crater is the planned landing site for NASA's Perseverance rover in February when it will begin a mission set to last for one Mars year, the equivalent of 687 Earth days. The depression is thought to have been home to a large lake -- and perhaps microbial life -- according to the space agency.

Gokceoglu, who is also a member of Turkey's Environmental and Natural Assets Science Board, recalled a recent Twitter post by NASA on Friday, in which it pointed out the similarities between Jezero and Salda.

"Though located a world away, Lake Salda, #Turkey, has geological similarities to Jezero Crater on #Mars. In fact, researchers even did field work at Lake Salda to prepare for #CountdownToMars," it said, juxtaposing top-view images of Jezero and Salda.

"You may not be able to travel to Jezero Crater on Mars, but you can visit the next best thing: Lake Salda, Turkey," said NASA's Earth Observatory.

"Though it is located a world away, Lake Salda shares similar mineralogy and geology as the dry Martian lakebed."

Gokceoglu explained that scientists had found similarities between a kind of sediment found in Salda that is formed by algae -- microorganisms critical to the creation of suitable atmospheric conditions for life formation -- and minerals detected in Jezero.

NASA is now trying to understand if Mars is now similar to Earth the way was 3.5 billion years ago, he said.

"So, the samples that the spacecraft will bring to Earth about whether there is really activity of primitive lifeforms will provide a full understanding of this," he said.

Emphasizing that Lake Salda is unique both visually and scientifically, Gokceoglu stressed that it must be conserved for its scientific value as well.

He noted that Salda is under the highest conservation regime as a "Special Environmental Protection Area."

"We shouldn't just leave the protection activity to the state, we as individuals should do our part."

Salda may become more popular in the world in mid-2022, he said, after the research conducted by NASA's Perseverance rover.

"If it is truly mineralogically similar, then human beings will be able to say, 'Now, Mars is 3.5 billion years younger than the earth, it's on its way to become a planet like Earth.'"

He said the research on the Mars samples and Salda would be "the most important proof of this."

Also known as Turkey's Maldives, the lake in Turkey's central Burdur province has been a popular destination for tourists in recent years with its white beach and clear water.

View post:

Lake in Turkey may yield answers on life on Mars - Anadolu Agency

In the New York Times in January 2016, David Axelrod, former campaign strategist for Barack Obama, published The Obama Theory of Trump. Voters rarely seek the replica of what they have, he wrote. They almost always seek the remedy, the candidate who has the personal qualities the public finds lacking in the departing executive.

Ten months later, America elected Obamas polar opposite, Donald Trump: Moriarty to his Holmes, Joker to his Batman, antimatter to matter. According to Paul Begala, a doyen of Democratic politics, the theory bodes well for Joe Biden.

Too many Democrats were trying to be just as pugilistic in their way as Trump is, he says, by phone from a farm in Virginias Shenandoah Valley. Ive known Joe a very long time and I think his most dominant character feature is empathy. Hes bright and hes experienced but hes so empathetic. Weve seen him through tragedy. Hes been very good to me and my family.

If there were a time where we needed empathy, its now. He has experience, which used to be a bad thing, he has competence and empathy and thats exactly the opposite of Trump. So if we want the replica, were not going to vote for Joe. But if we want the remedy and I think we do hes very well positioned to win.

Now 59, Begala was a chief strategist for Bill Clintons 1992 campaign and served in the White House as counselor to the president, then advised a Super Pac that helped elect Barack Obama in 2012. He describes Lyndon Johnson, Clinton and Obama as the three Rushmore-worthy presidents of his lifetime. He is also a familiar face on CNN and has written six books, the latest of which is Youre Fired: The Perfect Guide to Beating Donald Trump.

Chapter one is entitled Mea Culpa, as Begala reflects on the catastrophe of Hillary Clintons utterly unexpected defeat in 2016.

I have some personal responsibility for failing to stop the worst man whos ever been president

Begala explains: I have some personal responsibility here for failing to stop the worst man whos ever been president and I think also the worst president weve ever had. Heres what I got wrong. I was so appalled by Trumps sewer-level character, I couldnt avert my eyes.

I didnt connect my attacks on Trumps character, on the racism, the misogyny, the Islamophobia, mocking the disabled, mocking a PoW, to the lives of the voters. When you dont close that loop, all youre doing is saying, Hes a bad guy. A lot of people said, Gee, hes a terrible guy, but Im going to take a chance on him because he looks like hes a wrecking ball we might need in Washington. So what I should have said is, When you deploy a wrecking ball he very often destroys your house, and this is what Im urging in the book for the Democrats to do.

The chaos, the cruelty, the outrages, the constant throwing of shiny objects for the media to chase: the reality TV presidency is the point.

Begala continues: In addition to saying and doing racist things, there is a method to his madness. He uses those things to distract us from the fact that hes looting the treasury, wants to destroy social security and Medicare and Medicaid, has rained hell on farmers and working people, the very people who elected him.

What, then, would be his number one piece of advice to Biden as heads into an election that, against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, racial justice protests, online disinformation and Trumps countless falsehoods, is likely to be one of the most combustible and unpredictable in history?

It is to make it always about voters, not about Trump, and this is what coronavirus has done for Joe, Begala says. Trumps gift is to convince enough voters that politics is just spectacle, it is just show, it is just a Twitter war with Rosie ODonnell like when he was a TV star but now its a Twitter war with Colin Kaepernick or Nancy Pelosi.

Thats terribly wrong but a lot of people accepted that and agreed with it. But now voting for your president is a life-and-death matter and no matter how hard he tries to reignite these divisive social issues, I think it is not enough to divert people from the fact that their mother, their brother, their child could get sick and, God forbid, die.

His incompetence and his callousness and his corruption: these all now have a cost to me the voter, to you the voter. I think Joes done a very good job of keeping the focus on voters and not every day rising to the bait of every crazy thing that Trump says.

An old political saw holds that Democrats fall in love while Republicans fall in line. Some have blamed Hillary Clintons loss in 2016 on bitter infighting between moderates and progressives who voted for Bernie Sanders. There were fears of a repeat in 2020 but Biden won the primary with room to spare and now the party appears remarkably united behind him.

He is consolidating the base and thats for two reasons, Begala says. Hes doing his job but you know what? The left is doing theirs. I come from the Clinton wing, Im a more moderate guy, but I got to tell you, the left of my party has been terrific in rallying to Joe and people like me need to note that and salute that.

Its been really impressive. My hat is off to the left wing of my party. Theyre not taking their marbles and going home. Theyre mobilising, organising, registering. Its just been great. Now, will this last forever? Of course not. But for right now, nothing unites the people of Earth like a threat from Mars.

He adds: I am publicly urging Biden and the Democrats to spread the map, to run very hard in North Carolina, in Georgia, in Arizona and in my beloved Texas, where I grew up, because how long can the Democrats hold together a coalition which right now consists of four-star generals and Black Lives Matter? Thats not going to hold forever, but thats OK. Hell get static probably from the centre of his party and from the left of his party.

Democrats tend to embrace generational change. Their past four presidents were John F Kennedy (aged 43), Jimmy Carter (52), Clinton (46) and Obama (47), all with photogenic young families. Biden, by contrast, would be 78 on inauguration day, eclipsing Trumps record as the oldest person sworn in as US president. Is there a danger Biden belongs to a less charismatic group of Democratic nominees Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry all of whom lost?

Begala insists: I actually think Joes quite charismatic and Ive seen him give terrific speeches but we cant have stadiums full of people anyway. What we want is empathy and thats what he has. At another moment, we want something else. But I think the Democrats did a very wise thing in picking this man at this moment.

Indeed, Bidens empathy is anchored as deep as the ocean. His wife, Neilia, and baby daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car crash in 1972. His adult son, Beau, died from brain cancer in 2015. Jon Stewart, the satirist and film director, observed recently that we are fearful and we are angry and we are in pain. And when I see Biden, past the shtick, I see a guy who knows what loss is. Who knows grief. And I think that that kind of grief humbles him.

Seriously, if we had a fully functioning mental health system, Trump would be in a rubber room, not an Oval Office

His age, however, is bound to be a recurring theme. The Trump campaign is hammering away at Bidens mental and physical fitness.

Does Begala fear that will stick? No, because its compared to what? Joes not the guy telling people to drink bleach. Trump is batty. I dont know if its age-related maybe hes always been batty but Trump is completely unhinged. Hes not just unstable, hes unhinged. Seriously, if we had a fully functioning mental health system, hed be in a rubber room, not an Oval Office.

So the notion thats a valid critique on Biden is fatuous and I dont think its where the Republicans should want to go. If they had a [Mitt] Romney, a [George] Bush, somebody kind of stable and middle of the road for their party, that might be an effective attack. But this is always a comparison. Theres a great old comedian, Henny Youngman, who wouldve been a great political strategist because his famous one-liner was, Hows your wife? Compared to what? Thats all a presidential campaign is. Compared to what?

He adds: I think that the people who took a chance on Trump now are chastened. A whole lot of people voted for Obama and then Trump and I accept that but I think youre going to have an awful lot of people who go back, Trump to Biden.

I cant count the number of people, including friends of mine, who said, Look, I voted for Trump, I took a chance, I thought we could use a little business experience in shaking things up. But oh, my God, hes been a disaster and we must never have him again. Hundreds of people have told me that. I never had one say to me, I voted for Hillary but you know what, Trumps done a really good job and we need to keep him. So I think that tells us something.

Should Biden prevail, Begala fears it will be an uphill task to repair Americans reputation abroad.

Lets say that Biden wins and hes inaugurated, Im going to go see my friends in Europe and Im going to say, Everythings better, everythings better, and theyre going to say, Yeah, you guys could do it again. How do I argue that my country is incapable of electing a Trump? I will. Ill say once youve been through it, you dont want it again. But I think the damage is really devastating. Its incalculable.

Has Begala ever known America so divided? No, I was too young in the 60s. I love being partisan but its negative partisanship. So many of the people who were for Trump are for him because they hate me and thats no way to live a life.

I do think its asymmetrical. The crisis in America is not both sides. It is one side thats gone insane and seems to be consuming itself with hatred. My party has its problems, believe me, but it is not both sides. This negative partisanship from the right: they will do anything to own the libs.

Historians will perhaps invoke Caligula, King George III and assorted authoritarians of the 20th century. But they will surely also dwell on how the Republican party both produced Trump and succumbed to his will, and ponder what it says about human nature.

A drubbing in November, Begala argues, is just what Republicans need.

They are getting a shrinking percentage of a shrinking portion of the country. Most of the guys I grew up with were high-school-educated white men and didnt go to college and so I have a lot of friends that way. Theyre a smaller cohort every day and hes doing less well with them.

They have to reform and the best way to make that happen, paradoxically, is for the Democrats to have a crushing victory. If the Democrats win Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona states that we rarely carry the Republican party will have to reassess and it will actually pull the Republicans to the centre.

Im a great believer in revivification because I saw Reagan do it as a kid and I saw Clinton do it as an adult. I believe they can but they have got to find a way to communicate with this rising American electorate, to women especially unmarried women young people, people of colour. Theyre just haemorrhaging the folks.

A practising Catholic, Begala reflects: Theres two kind of churches. Those that seek out converts and those that hunt down heretics and right now Joe Bidens leading a party thats seeking out converts. Even George Conway and Bill Kristol are on the same side Im on. I love it.

But meanwhile, Trump is leading a hunt for heretics. When Jeff Sessions is not rightwing enough for you, you got a problem!

Here is the original post:

Paul Begala on Trump: 'Nothing unites the people of Earth like a threat from Mars' - The Guardian

Nasa's Mars spacecraft is experiencing technical problems and has sent itself into hibernation, the space agency has said.

The spacecraft was sent to space Thursday in a launch that had no technical problems even despite an earthquake that struck just before liftoff, and a preparation period that came during the coronavirus outbreak. Shortly after it was launched, Nasa announced that it had received its first signal from the spacecraft.

But soon after it was in space and headed towards Mars, it became apparent that something had gone wrong with the craft. After that initial signal, mission controllers received more detailed telemetry or spacecraft data that showed there had been a problem.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

The signal, which arrived on Thursday afternoon, showed that the spacecraft had entered a state known as "safe mode". That shuts down all but its essential systems, until it receives new messages from ission control.

The hibernation state is intended to allow the spacecraft to protect itself in the case of unexpected conditions, and will be triggered when the onboard computer receives data that shows something is not as expected.

Nasa's engineers think that the state was triggered because part of the spacecraft was colder than expected while it was still in Earth's shadow. The spacecraft has now left that shadow and temperatures are now normal, Nasa said in an update.

Mission controllers will now conduct a "full health assessment", the space agency said, and are "working to return the spacecraft to a nominal configuration for its journey to Mars".

The mission's deputy project manager, Matt Wallace, later announced that Nasa will probably switch the craft back to its normal cruise state after a day or so. "Everything is pointing toward a healthy spacecraft ready to go to Mars and do its mission," he said.

The craft had also had some trouble getting a proper connection to the deep-space tracking stations that will communicate with the spacecraft as it flies through space, Mr Wallace said. But that problem appears to have been overcome and a good communication link has been established, he said.

The US, the only country to safely put a spacecraft on Mars, is seeking its ninth successful landing on the planet, which has proved to be the Bermuda Triangle of space exploration, with more than half of the world's missions there burning up, crashing or otherwise ending in failure.

China is sending both a rover an orbiter. The UAE, a newcomer to outer space, has an orbiter en route.

It's the biggest stampede to Mars in spacefaring history. The opportunity to fly between Earth and Mars comes around only once every 26 months when the planets are on the same side of the sun and about as close as they can get.

The launch went off on time at 7:50 a.m. despite a 4.2-magnitude earthquake 20 minutes before liftoff that shook NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which is overseeing the rover.

Launch controllers at Cape Canaveral wore masks and sat spaced apart because of the coronavirus outbreak, which kept hundreds of scientists and other team members away from Perseverance's liftoff.

"That was overwhelming. Overall, just wow!" said Alex Mather, the 13-year-old Virginia schoolboy who proposed the name Perseverance in a NASA competition and watched the launch in person with his parents.

About an hour into the flight, controllers applauded, pumped their fists, exchanged air hugs and pantomimed high-fives when the rocket left Earth's orbit and began hurtling toward Mars.

"We have left the building. We are on our way to Mars," Perseverance's chief engineer, Adam Steltzner, said from JPL.

If all goes well, the rover will descend to the Martian surface on Feb. 18, 2021, in what NASA calls seven minutes of terror, during which the craft will go from 12,000 mph (19,300 kph) to a complete stop. It is carrying 25 cameras and a pair of microphones that will enable Earthlings to vicariously tag along.

Perseverance will aim for Jezero Crater, a treacherous, unexplored expanse of boulders, cliffs, dunes and possibly rocks bearing the chemical signature of microbes from what was a lake more than 3 billion years ago. The rover will store half-ounce (15-gram) rock samples in dozens of super-sterilized titanium tubes.

It also will release a mini helicopter that will attempt the first powered flight on another planet, and test out other technology to prepare the way for future astronauts. That includes equipment for extracting oxygen from Mars' thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere.

The plan is for NASA and the European Space Agency to launch a dune buggy in 2026 to fetch the rock samples, plus a rocket ship that will put the specimens into orbit around Mars. Then another spacecraft will capture the orbiting samples and bring them home.

Samples taken straight from Mars, not drawn from meteorites discovered on Earth, have long been considered "the Holy Grail of Mars science," according to NASA's now-retired Mars czar, Scott Hubbard.

To definitively answer the life-beyond-Earth question, the samples must be analyzed by the best electron microscopes and other instruments, far too big to fit on a spacecraft, he said.

"I've wanted to know if there was life elsewhere in the universe since I was 9 years old. That was more than 60 years ago," Hubbard said from his Northern California cabin. "But just maybe, I'll live to see the fingerprints of life come back from Mars in one of those rock samples."

Additional reporting by agencies

More:

Nasa: Mars spacecraft is experiencing technical problems and has gone into hibernation, space agency says - The Independent

It's the site of an ancient lake bed and river delta that existed between 3 and 4 billion years ago -- when Mars was warmer, wetter and habitable for potential life.

The complicated route to the Mars Sample Return mission involves NASA collaborating with the European Space Agency and international partners. And given the difficulty of this multi-pronged return journey of the samples, they won't land on Earth until 2031, at the earliest.

"Perseverance is the first step in the first ever round trip mission to another planet in our solar system," said Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, during a press conference. "Scientists have wanted a sample of Mars to study for generations. Now, we're at a point to begin to attempt this amazing feat."

Roving back in time

Unlike Earth, Mars doesn't have a "young surface" because it's not active in the same way our planet is with moving plate tectonics, volcanic eruptions and other processes that tend to erase the history sitting on Earth's surface. So when Perseverance roves across Jezero Crater, it will be able to observe and sample the well-preserved past of Mars.

Scientists estimate that water filled the impact crater to form a lake about 3.8 billion years ago -- right when life was starting on Earth, according to Briony Horgan, member of the Perseverance science team and associate professor of planetary science at Purdue University. The lake was half the size of Lake Ontario (which is 53 miles wide and has an average depth of 283 feet) and almost as deep.

The river delta, which resembles the Mississippi River delta, once fed into the lake and signifies that the lake persisted for a long time. On the other side of the lake bed, a river channel can be seen where water carried away from the crater.

The delta may be the most intriguing area for Perseverance to explore because it preserves the bottom of the lake -- mud, organic materials, signs of ancient life and potentially even fossils of microbes could be preserved in the bottom of the delta, Horgan said.

Based on images provided by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was launched in 2005, scientists already know there are interesting minerals around the rim of the crater called carbonates. On Earth, carbonates preserve the fossils of ancient life. These carbonates mark what scientists believe was once an ancient shoreline for the lake. When water precipitated here, it could have helped fossilize life or organic molecules signifying it in the form of carbonates.

First, Perseverance will explore the river delta, followed by the crater rim, and eventually, "drive out of the crater and explore the wonderland of the earliest history of Mars," according to Benjamin Weiss, a professor of planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the Returned Sample scientists for Perseverance. Weiss is on a team that will make determinations of where and when to collect samples -- and hopes to analyze them once they return to Earth.

The first Martian samples

Perseverance has a sophisticated system to collect samples, cache them and stow them on the Martian surface. And in order to do this, its hardware had to be meticulously cleaned on Earth to prevent any potential contamination of the Martian site with microbes from Earth -- or provide a false positive for potential life on Mars.

"It's the cleanest system we've ever launched," said Matt Wallace, Perseverance deputy project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "The science community is looking for trace signatures from billions of years ago. We don't want to confuse that search."

While Perseverance has the ability to fill 43 sample tubes over the course of its two-year exploration of the 28-mile-wide crater and the surrounding area, there will only be space for 31 of the tubes to return to Earth.

So the science team, which includes hundreds of people, will have to work together on when and where to collect samples. The difference in the amount of samples the rover can collect versus the ones that will return provides the scientists with some wiggle room should they decide to abandon one sample for a better one.

But once filled, the tubes cannot be emptied.

"The key for this mission will be identifying samples so compelling that we can't afford to leave them, so it is imperative that missions have to go get them," Weiss said. "We are selecting these for humanity, so we need to make sure they are the most exciting."

The scientists will be looking for patterns or textures in rocks that act like records of life -- similar to some of the oldest known rocks on Earth in Western Australia from 3.48 billion years ago.

Over time, these form layered rocks called stromatolites.

"The best place to look for life is a place where you think life could have existed," said Ken Farley, project scientist for Perseverance at the California Institute of Technology. "The current surface of Mars is too cold and too dry for any life we know about to exist. Billions of years ago, it was much warmer with water on the surface. Rocks deposited at that time were in habitable environments and they record them."

Lunar samples returned to Earth by the Apollo missions have changed our understanding of the moon over the last 50 years, including how it may have formed.

Weiss has worked on research using the samples collected during the latter years of the Apollo program. Some have remained sealed for 50 years until new technology and instruments were developed to help better understand them.

Weiss wants the same approach to be taken regarding samples from Mars.

"We can't get trapped by selecting samples just based on what current instruments can measure," Weiss said. "We can't conceive what instruments can be like 100 years from now. But if we sample from places that may be habitable, that will keep them interesting for years to come."

Returning the samples to Earth

Collecting samples on the Mars surface is just the first step.

"It's a really complex concept to bring them back," Glaze said. "It will require multiple steps and multiple launches."

In 2026, NASA and ESA will launch the Mars Ascent Vehicle lander and rocket carrying the Sample Fetch Rover. Perseverance will witness and share images of the landing of this spacecraft on Mars when it occurs in 2028 -- a first.

The lander will release the fetch rover on the Martian surface. This small rover, similar to NASA's earlier rovers, will collect the samples and carry them back to the lander. It's possible that Perseverance could also deliver the samples itself.

The fetch rover will need to work quickly over the course of eight months during the Martian spring and summer before winter's dust obscures the atmosphere. This lightweight "Martian dune buggy" will be designed for speed to accomplish its goals, said David Parker, director of human and robotic exploration at the European Space Agency.

The samples will be transferred to the ascent vehicle and it will blast off from the surface of Mars -- another first that will be witnessed by Perseverance.

The ascent vehicle will rendezvous with an ESA spacecraft orbiting Mars and shoot out a football-size container holding the samples. The ESA orbiter will capture the container during this pass between spacecrafts and head back toward Earth.

Close to Earth, a NASA payload on the orbiter will put the container of samples in an entry vehicle that can be deployed from the orbiter and land the samples on Earth in 2031.

The samples will land in Utah and be transported to a type of facility usually associated with the handling of biohazards.

Then, scientists from around the world will be able to study and analyze the chemical and physical properties of these rock and soil samples for Mars, searching for signs of past life.

"This is the manifestation of a lot of dreams and aspirations by scientists," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "Samples from Mars have the potential to profoundly change our understanding of life."

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The long road to returning first-ever samples from Mars - CNN

This summer, three missions are setting out on a journey of millions of miles. Bound for Mars, the trio carry an array of state-of-the-art instruments to explore the red planet.

Hope was the first spacecraft to launch to Mars this summer, and the first Mars mission for the United Arab Emirates.

The orbiter will observe Mars from space, forming a detailed picture of the planets atmosphere and its weather with a suite of imaging devices. A camera will capture high-resolution images of the planet. An infrared spectrometer will study dust, ice clouds, water vapor and temperature in the lower atmosphere. And an ultraviolet spectrometer will investigate carbon monoxide, hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere.

ANTENNA

A six-foot antenna will communicate with Earth

THERMAL BLANKET

A protective layer of insulation around the orbiter gives it a gold appearance

SOLAR PANELS

Will unfurl after launch and charge the onboard battery

Hope is about as tall as a person and weighs almost 3,000 pounds

CAMERA

Will capture high-resolution images of Mars

Infrared Spectrometer

Will study dust, ice clouds, water vapor and temperature in the lower atmosphere

ULTRAVIOLET SPECTROMETER

Will investigate carbon monoxide, hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere

ANTENNA

A six-foot antenna will communicate with Earth

THERMAL BLANKET

To protect from extreme temperatures

Hope is about as tall as a person and weighs almost 3,000 pounds

SOLAR PANELS

Will charge the onboard battery

Hope is about as tall as a person

Source: Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center

China is sending an orbiter, lander and rover to Mars the only mission this year to attempt a three-pronged exploration. After the spacecraft reaches Mars, the landing pod will detach from the orbiter and descend to the planets surface. The orbiter will remain in space and observe the planet using seven instruments.

A parachute attached to the landers protective shell will slow the descent. Next, a set of struts will deploy midair. A thruster attached to the bottom of the lander will also help guide the vehicle to a softer landing.

Once on the surface, a ramp will slide out so the rover can drive away. The rover has two sets of solar panel wings that will unfurl after landing.

Lander

A parachute attached to a protective SHELL will slow the landers descent. Next, a set of STRUTS will deploy midair. Once on the surface, a RAMP will slide out so the rover can drive off.

Orbiter

After the orbiter reaches Mars, the landing probe will detach and descend to the planets surface.

Rover

Four solar panel wings will unfurl after landing.

Orbiter

After the orbiter reaches Mars, the landing probe will detach and descend to the planets surface.

Lander

A parachute attached to a protective SHELL will slow the descent. Next, a set of STRUTS will deploy midair. After landing, a RAMP will slide out so the rover can drive off.

Rover

With four solar panels

Orbiter

After the orbiter reaches Mars, the landing probe will detach and descend to the planets surface.

Lander

A parachute attached to the SHELL will slow the descent. Next, four STRUTS will deploy midair. After landing, a RAMP will slide out so the rover can drive off.

Rover

Four solar panel wings will unfurl after landing.

Source: China National Space Administration and China Central Television

The NASA mission includes Perseverance, a 2,200-pound rover, and Ingenuity, an experimental Mars helicopter. The Ingenuity helicopter weighs about four pounds, and will be the first to attempt powered flight on another planet.

The Perseverance rovers design is based on Curiosity, a successful NASA mission that landed on Mars in 2012. The plutonium power supply is designed to last more than a decade. The rover carries 19 cameras and a drill to extract core samples from rocks.

Perseverance also uses a suspension system to drive over obstacles. The rover can turn a full 360 degrees in place, using six individually motorized aluminum wheels.

Ingenuity Helicopter

The four-pound aircraft will communicate wirelessly with the Perseverance rover.

Blades

Four carbon-fiber blades will spin at about 2,400 r.p.m.

Power

The plutonium-based power supply will charge the rovers batteries.

MAST

Instruments will take videos, panoramas and photographs. A laser will study the chemistry of Martian rocks.

PiXl

Will identify chemical elements to seek signs of past life on Mars.

Antenna

Will transmit data directly to Earth.

Robotic arm

A turret with many instruments is attached to a 7-foot robotic arm. A drill will extract samples from Martian rocks. The Sherloc device will identify molecules and minerals to detect potential biosignatures, with help from the Watson camera.

Perseverance Rover

The 2,200 pound rover will explore Jezero Crater. It has aluminum wheels and a suspension system to drive over obstacles.

Ingenuity Helicopter

The aircraft will communicate wirelessly with the rover.

Power

The plutonium-based power supply will charge the rovers batteries.

MAST

Instruments will take videos, panoramas and photographs. A laser will study the chemistry of Martian rocks.

PiXl

Will identify chemical elements to seek signs of past life on Mars.

Robotic arm

A turret with many instruments is attached to a 7-foot robotic arm. A drill will extract samples from Martian rocks. The Sherloc device will identify molecules and minerals to detect potential biosignatures, with help from the Watson camera.

Perseverance Rover

The 2,200 pound rover will explore Jezero Crater. It has aluminum wheels and a suspension system to drive over obstacles.

Robotic arm

A turret with many instruments is attached to a 7-foot robotic arm. A drill will extract samples from Martian rocks. The Sherloc device will identify molecules and minerals to detect potential biosignatures, with help from the Watson camera. PiXl will identify chemical elements to seek signs of past life on Mars.

Source: NASA

Once all of the missions have launched, their expected arrival at Mars is in February. The trio will join dozens of other spacecraft, past and present, already hurtling through our solar system.

See the article here:

Meet the 3 Spacecraft Heading to Mars This Summer - The New York Times

At Georgetown, Dr. Johnson runs her own lab, which studies old rocks for signs of ancient exotic life of the sort that might be found on Mars or some other extreme world.

The labs website is festooned with pictures of her and colleagues combing the rocks and sands in Antarctica, Australia and the Atacama Desert in Chile, for signs of ancient life. She is also a visiting scientist at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, where she is part of a team working with Curiosity, NASAs older rover now climbing a mountain in a crater on Mars. And she hopes one day to be analyzing rocks returned from Mars in her lab.

Reached over Zoom in Kentucky, where she was visiting family, Dr. Johnson radiated an easy, unflappable manner. She responded to questions with a wide smile, as if the light had just broken on her face, and a drawn-out Yeah as she mulled her answers.

In Sirens of Mars, Dr. Johnson chronicles the personalities, the surprises, the dashed expectations and the claims made and abandoned of the discovery of life on Mars. Its also a personal chronicle; the due date for her first pregnancy, in August 2012, coincided with the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars, temporarily derailing her chances of participating in what was the biggest Mars mission yet. She watched her colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on television, saddened that Mars might be slipping away.

Opportunities only come around so often, she writes. The planets aligned and then swung apart.

She had not set out to make herself a character in the book, she said. The project began with the habit of writing down poignant and evocative things that would never make it into scientific journals, and grew from there.

I guess at some point it just felt like Mars deserved a different kind of treatment, she said. You know, something that will capture a lot of the mystery and the wonder of the whole endeavor, the whole search for life..

See the original post here:

Coming of Age on Mars - The New York Times

On July 30, a two-week window of opportunity opens for Perseverance the newest Mars rover, forged in the spirit of human curiosity to begin its journey toward the Red Planet with a launch from the Cape Canaveral Space Launch Center on the eastern Florida coast. With MITs help, this latest NASA mission will build upon the legacy of its roving laboratory predecessors and dig deeper than ever before into questions about life on Mars.

In its current state, Mars is inhospitable; the surface is dusty, and the only available water is frozen near the poles, deep underground, or so tightly bound to the soil that it would have to be cooked in an oven to extract it. The air is unbreathable, and the thin atmosphere allows worrisome levels of radiation while maintaining an average temperature of -81 degrees Fahrenheit. At one time in the past, however, it may have looked a lot more like Earth, and may have been more sustainable for life.

The goals of Perseverance a signature component of the larger Mars 2020 mission are to explore questions of this former habitability, to characterize the environment, and to help pave the way for future human exploration. One of seven experiments traveling on the rover will specifically address future human missions to Mars: MOXIE, short for the Mars OXygen In situ resource utilization Experiment, will help us prepare for those first missions by demonstrating that we can make our own oxygen on Mars to use for rocket propellant and for the crew to breathe when astronaut explorers arrive there. MOXIE was proposed and developed through a collaboration between researchers at MITs Haystack Observatory and the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), along with engineers at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

MIT is well-represented in other aspects of the mission as well. Perseverance will carry a sophisticated system for selecting, coring, caching, and preserving rock and soil samples to someday bring back to Earth. Professor of geobiology and member of the mission's Project Science Group Tanja Bosak and professor of planetary sciences Ben Weiss, both from the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), are participating scientists on a 10-person Return Sample Selection team. With expertise in biogeochemical and sedimentological processes in microbial systems, and paleomagetism and planetary geophysics, they're tasked with helping to identify promising samples on the Martian surface to core, collect, and analyze for signs of previous life and evolution of the planet's habitability. And Ariel Ekblaw, a graduate student in media arts and sciences and the founder and lead of the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, contributed to a rover experiment during a summer at JPL that will search for evidence of past microbes.

The little mechanical tree

In the 2015 filmThe Martian, when astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) was left stranded on Mars, he managed to survive long enough to coordinate a rendezvous rescue mission with his crew by living off the land of the Red Planet. This is the basic principle behind in situ resource utilization, or ISRU, and MOXIE represents an important first step in realizing ISRU for future Mars explorers.

Not only do you need oxygen for people to breathe, but you need it for the rocket to breathe too. If you are burning fuel, you need oxygen to consume it, says Michael Hecht, MOXIE principal investigator and director of research at MIT Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts. There is a reason why oxygen tanks are the heaviest items on a spaceflight manifest.

Launches consume a lot of fuel: Propelling a spacecraft to exit the Earths gravitational pull requires a great deal of energy, and returning back to Earth requires doing it all over again. What's more, the heavy tanks required to transport the oxygen needed for a given mission take up precious real estate in a carefully calibrated spacecraft. This is where the ISRU approach comes in.

Instead of taking it with us, why not just make it when we get there as we need it? Hecht says. Oxygen exists on Mars, just not in a form we can use it. So that is the problem we were trying to solve with MOXIE.

MOXIE will collect carbon dioxide (CO2) from the Martian atmosphere and electrochemically split the it into oxygen and carbon monoxide molecules. Animation: NASA/JPL

One potential source of oxygen is ice that exists under the Martian surface. But mining this ice would require complex machinery, and the physical act of digging and drilling would put significant wear and tear on equipment, which is a problem when a repair person is a planet away. Thankfully, there was another potential resource the team can tap to generate oxygen: the atmosphere.

With the mining approach, you have to mine the ice, refine and process it to release the oxygen, and bring it back, which is just not something we can do robotically, especially within our space constraints, says Hecht. I wanted to find a much simpler approach. The Martian atmosphere is about 96 percent carbon dioxide, so we built a little mechanical tree, because that is much easier than building a miniature, self-contained mining company.

MOXIEs objective: collect the carbon dioxide abundant in Martian air, convert it to oxygen, and measure the oxygens purity. After pulling in Martian air, the system filters out dust, compresses it, and then feeds it into the Solid OXide Electrolyzer (SOXE), the key element that takes pressurized carbon dioxide and uses a combination of electricity and chemistry to split the molecule into oxygen and carbon monoxide. The purity of the oxygen is analyzed, and then the oxygen is released back into the Martian atmosphere.

Currently, the plan is to perform at least 10 oxygen-producing runs throughout the mission under as many different seasonal and environmental conditions as possible. Due to the intense amount of energy required to run the MOXIE experiment, the team will coordinate with the other researchers, who will have to power down for the duration of MOXIEs several-hour run time, and then wait for most of a Martian day (called asol) for Perseverances batteries to recharge. The data will be sent back to a lab on MITs campus, where MOXIEs performance will be analyzed.

Assembling the team

In 2013, NASA put out a call for proposals for oxygen-generating experiments for the 2020 rover within specific parameters. Despite working on the Phoenix Mars Lander mission during his 30-year tenure at JPL, when Hecht moved to his current position at MIT Haystack Observatory in 2012, he didnt expect to be a Mars guy anymore he thought he was done with Mars for good. But his former JPL colleagues disagreed and asked him to lead the experiment as principal investigator. According to Hecht, even after he signed on, he believed the project proposal was a long shot, but inJuly 2014, he and his colleagues got word that they landed the project.

Researchers at other NASA labs had a huge head start and a lot of technology heritage. MOXIEs selection was a huge surprise to me, says Hecht. Since this mission has a human-centered focus, I knew we had to establish real credibility with the human exploration community, that we werent just looking for an excuse to do some interesting science. So, how do we convince them that we are for real and we want to help with human exploration? It took me about five minutes to think of Jeff Hoffman.

Hoffman, a professor of the practice in MIT AeroAstro, certainly knows a thing or two about human space exploration. He logged four spacewalks on his five space flights during his career as a NASA astronaut including the initial rescue/recovery mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993.

In addition to Hoffmans extensive experience with human spaceflight, he shared another connection with Hecht: Hecht was Hoffmans first graduate student advisee as a new MIT researcher before he was called up to enter the astronaut program in 1978 and pursue a career with NASA. He returned to the MIT faculty in 2001, and in addition to being deputy principal investigator on MOXIE, he directs the Human Systems Lab at MIT and teaches courses about human spaceflight systems.

Its a great experience to collaborate with a former graduate student as colleagues, especially on a project like MOXIE because it shows how important graduate students are to the research process in a story that comes full-circle, says Hoffman. Not only do graduate students carry out the day-to-day work on a project, but we are also developing the next generation of people who will carry on the exploration of not just Mars, but the entire solar system.

AeroAstro PhD students Eric Hinterman SM18 and Maya Nasr 18 have been on the MOXIE team since 2016, when Hinterman was working on his masters degree and Nasr was performing a MOXIE-related research project as a junior in aeronautics and astronautics.

For her masters thesis, Nasr focused on calibrating the sensors in the MOXIE unit by performing experiments under different pressures and temperatures and conditions that mimic the environment on Mars. The goal of her masters work was to understand how the sensors may behave differently in an environment like that of Mars, and to calibrate them accordingly so they would send back accurate data while on the mission. Her PhD work will focus on processing and analyzing both the MOXIE experimental laboratory data and telemetry data that will be sent back from Mars, which will help determine how well the unit functions at its task of extracting oxygen.

For me personally, it means a lot to work on this project and its amazing that the launch is already happening. I grew up in Lebanon and remember watching the Curiosity Rover landing, and at the time the NASA JPL director was Dr. Charles Elachi, who is originally Lebanese, says Nasr. Seeing him in mission control made me realize that it was possible to be part of a Mars mission, and its one of the reasons why I applied to MIT.

The newest member of the MOXIE team is AeroAstro masters student Justine Schultz, who joined in the late spring of 2020. Schultz, who also works full time at General Electric, will focus her graduate work on constructing a detailed thermal model of MOXIE.

Whats in a name?

Since Mars OXygen In situ resource utilization Experiment is a mouthful, Hecht wanted to get creative with the project name. The initial inspiration comes from Moxie soda, which was invented in Massachusetts in the 1800s as a nerve-calming tonic. When the company mixed it with soda water for added carbonation, it started flying off the shelves and became one of the first mass-produced sodas in the U.S.

In addition to the local connection and the important role of carbon dioxide in Moxie sodas success story, Hecht thought the meaning behind the word that has become part of our cultural lexicon was particularly fitting to the project.Merriam-Websterdefinesmoxieas energy, pep, courage, determination, and know-how. The deeper meaning became even more relevant as the world grappled with a dangerous global pandemic with the finish line in sight.

The situation with the coronavirus certainly caused some delays from where we thought we would be, but thankfully it never endangered the mission. Despite some setbacks, we were able to pivot and adapt to keep the launch on track, said Hecht. But Covid-19 be damned, we are launching this rover.

The launch window is an important factor because it marks the period of time where Earths orbit around the sun is aligned with that of Mars in such a way to allow a rocket to follow a flight trajectory like changing lanes in a highway to rendezvous with its target landing point on Mars Jezero Crater. The window closes on Aug. 15, and wont open again for another 26 months.

While it will be sad not to have that moment of celebration in person together, the critical thing is that we are going to get on the surface Mars and produce oxygen, which we will be doing online from home, says Hoffman. Looking at everything that has happened over the past few months and all the people who have worked hard to get Mars 2020 ready for launch despite the world around us closing down, Im happy we went with the name Perseverance because hanging in there and persevering with the mission has become the name of the game.

Excerpt from:

With Perseverance and a little MOXIE, MIT is going to Mars - MIT News

A small piece of rock will be hurled into space this week on one of the strangest interplanetary voyages ever attempted. A tiny piece of Martian basalt the size of a 10p coin will be launched on board a US robot probe on Thursday and propelled towards the red planet on a seven-month journey to its home world.

This extraordinary odyssey, the interplanetary equivalent of sending coals to Newcastle, will form a key part of Nasas forthcoming Mars 2020 expedition. Space engineers say the rock which has been donated by the Natural History Museum in London will be used to calibrate detectors on board the robot rover Perseverance after it lands and begins its search for signs of past life on the planet.

When you turn on instruments and begin to tune them up before using them for research, you calibrate them on materials that are going to be like the unknown substances you are about to study. So what better for studying rocks on Mars than a lump that originated there? said Professor Caroline Smith, the Natural History Museums principal curator of meteorites.

Scientists were confident that the rock they were returning to Mars originated on the planet, added Smith, who is also a member of the Mars 2020 science team. Tiny bubbles of gas trapped inside that meteorite have exactly the same composition as the atmosphere of Mars, so we know our rock came from there.

It is thought that the Martian meteorite was created when an asteroid or comet plunged into the planet about 600,000 to 700,000 years ago, spraying debris into space. One of those pieces of rubble swept across the solar system and eventually crashed on to Earth. That meteorite now known as SAU 008 was discovered in Oman in 1999 and has been in the care of the Natural History Museum since then.

Among the instruments fitted to the Perseverance rover is a high-precision laser called Sherloc, which will be used to decipher the chemical composition of rocks and determine if they might contain organic materials that indicate life once existed or still exists on Mars. The inclusion of a piece of SAU 008 is intended to ensure this is done with maximum accuracy.

The piece of rock we are sending was specifically chosen because it is the right material in terms of chemistry, but also it is a very tough rock, added Smith. Some of the Martian meteorites we have are very fragile. This meteorite is as tough as old boots.

Once Perseverance has selected the most promising rocks it can find, it will dump them in caches on the Martian surface. These will then be retrieved by subsequent robot missions and blasted into space towards Earth for analysis.

This article was amended on 27 July 2020 because the headline of an earlier version was incorrect to refer to the meteorite heading home to Mars after 600,000 years on Earth. That was the approximate length of its journey to Earth. It was also amended to note Caroline Smiths role as principal curator of meteorites at the Natural History Museum.

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Rock from Mars heads home after 600,000 year odyssey across space - The Guardian

NASA will this week go to Marsand you can see the "red planet" for yourself. Elements of this image ... [+] furnished by NASA.

Each Monday I pick out the northern hemispheres celestial highlights (mid-northern latitudes) for the week ahead, but be sure to check my main feed for more in-depth articles on stargazing, astronomy and eclipses.

Have you seen the comet? Comet NEOWISEone of the best comets for over 20 yearsis now fading, but still visible in the northwest sky when it gets dark.

As it fades, turn your attentions to for Mars. Its called the red planet for a reasonsee it rising this week in the east a few hours after dark and it will look a ruddy color as NASA launches its Mars 2020 mission,

Meanwhile, Jupiter and Saturn will shine brightly this week while the Delta Aquariid meteor shower peaks.

The Moon will be getting bigger and brighter all this week as its waxes towards full, so its worth concentrating on planets, not stars.

The gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, are shining brightly right after dark. You just cannot miss them in the southeastern sky, where theyre shining at their brightest of the year relatively close to each other.

Mars, on the other hand, you have to work a little harder for. It rises after midnight in the east. Even with the naked eye you should be able to make out its red color.

Happening from July 12 through August 23, the Delta Aquariid meteor shower peaks in the early hours of Wednesday, July 29.

Expect about 20 shooting stars per hour after midnight as Earth busts into debris from a comets tail. In reality, only a few will be visible, but its still a good excuse to get outside and look up.

The Delta Aquariids are known for being slow-moving, and having a not-so-important peak, so you can look out for them a few dayseven weekseither side of tonight, too.

Illustration of NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover studying a Mars rock outcrop (not to scale). ... [+] Mars 2020 is targeted for launch in July/August 2020 aboard an Atlas V-541 rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Today is the day that NASAs Mars 2020 mission to the red planetis scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force StationSpace Launch Complex 41. If successfully launched its Perseverance rover will land in Jezero crater on Mars on February 18, 2021.

It will leave Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket between 9:15-11:15 a.m. EDT.

Look east right before sunrise and you may be able to spot the red spot of tiny planet Mercury close to Pollux in Gemini. Super-bright planet Venus will be unmissable above.

Later in the day a 97% waxing gibbous Moonjust before its full phase on Mondaywill be close to, or even between, Saturn and Jupiter.

Today its the ringed planet that will be visited by a 99.5%-lit Moon, which will get to within 2.3 as it passes Saturn.

Next up is Augusts full Moon, the Sturgeon Moon or Corn Moon, on Monday, August 3, 2020.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

More here:

Fading Comet NEOWISE, Shooting Stars And NASA Goes To Mars: What To See In The Night Sky This Week - Forbes

(BOISE, Idaho) The U.S. wants to build nuclear power plants that will work on the moon and Mars, and on Friday put out a request for ideas from the private sector on how to do that.

The U.S. Department of Energy put out the formal request to build what it calls a fission surface power system that could allow humans to live for long periods in harsh space environments.

The Idaho National Laboratory, a nuclear research facility in eastern Idaho, the Energy Department and NASA will evaluate the ideas for developing the reactor.

Read more: America Really Does Have a Space Force. We Went Inside to See What It Does

The lab has been leading the way in the U.S. on advanced reactors, some of them micro reactors and others that can operate without water for cooling. Water-cooled nuclear reactors are the vast majority of reactors on Earth.

Small nuclear reactors can provide the power capability necessary for space exploration missions of interest to the Federal government, the Energy Department wrote in the notice published Friday.

The Energy Department, NASA and Battelle Energy Alliance, the U.S. contractor that manages the Idaho National Laboratory, plan to hold a government-industry webcast technical meeting in August concerning expectations for the program.

The plan has two phases. The first is developing a reactor design. The second is building a test reactor, a second reactor be sent to the moon, and developing a flight system and lander that can transport the reactor to the moon. The goal is to have a reactor, flight system and lander ready to go by the end of 2026.

The reactor must be able to generate an uninterrupted electricity output of at least 10 kilowatts. The average U.S. residential home, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, uses about 11,000 kilowatt-hours per year. The Energy Department said it would likely take multiple linked reactors to meet power needs on the moon or Mars.

Read more: HBOs Chernobyl Has Led to a Surge in Tourism for This Forgotten Nuclear Town. Now, Its Trying to Redefine Itself

In addition, the reactor cannot weigh more than 7,700 pounds (3,500 kilograms), be able to operate in space, operate mostly autonomously, and run for at least 10 years.

The Energy Department said the reactor is intended to support exploration in the south polar region of the moon. The agency said a specific region on the Martian surface for exploration has not yet been identified.

Edwin Lyman, director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit, said his organization is concerned the parameters of the design and timeline make the most likely reactors those that use highly enriched uranium, which can be made into weapons. Nations have generally been attempting to reduce the amount of enriched uranium being produced for that reason.

This may drive or start an international space race to build and deploy new types of reactors requiring highly enriched uranium, he said.

Earlier this week, the United Arab Emirates launched an orbiter to Mars and China launched an orbiter, lander and rover. The U.S. has already landed rovers on the red planet and is planning to send another next week.

Officials say operating a nuclear reactor on the moon would be a first step to building a modified version to operate in the different conditions found on Mars.

Idaho National Laboratory has a central role in emphasizing the United States global leadership in nuclear innovation, with the anticipated demonstration of advanced reactors on the INL site, John Wagner, associate laboratory director of INLs Nuclear Science & Technology Directorate, said in a statement. The prospect of deploying an advanced reactor to the lunar surface is as exciting as it is challenging.

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U.S. Eyes Building Nuclear Power Plants on Mars, the Moon - TIME

"The mission has 314 million miles of interplanetary space and seven minutes of terror to get safely onto the surface of Mars," said Lori Glaze, director of NASA's planetary science division, in a statement. "When we see the landscape at Jezero Crater for the first time and we truly begin to realize the scientific bounty before us, the fun really begins."

Perseverance and the Ingenuity helicopter are safely tucked inside a protective aeroshell capsule. The descent stage that will help land the rover is also located in this aeroshell, which is attached to the cruise stage, or the mission's spacecraft.

The cruise stage is shaped like a disk and solar powered. It will travel more than 300 million miles to reach Mars.

While it's cruising to Mars, engineers on Earth will tell the spacecraft when to execute correction maneuvers to keep it on the right path to Mars, as well as its landing target. The ground team will also perform checks on the instruments and subsystems in the spacecraft.

About 45 days before landing on Mars, the spacecraft will enter the approach phase, with more correction maneuvers to its trajectory.

During what is hopefully a quiet journey to Mars, Perseverance's teams will be preparing and training for when the rover lands on Mars. The science team will prepare the instructions it wants to send to the rover as it uses its instruments on Mars.

The rover's drivers will also work with a model of the rover on Earth to prepare for Perseverance's journey across the Martian surface.

This includes using a twin of Perseverance on Earth to test hardware, drive it through the Mars Yard at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and make sure the auto-navigation algorithms work, said Heather Justice, robotic operation downlink lead and one of the rover drivers at JPL.

'Seven minutes of terror'

The one-way light time it takes for radio signals to travel from Earth to Mars is about 10.5 minutes, which means the seven minutes it takes for the spacecraft to land on Mars will occur without any help or intervention from NASA teams on Earth.

NASA team members refer to this as the "seven minutes of terror." They tell the spacecraft when to begin EDL, (entry, descent and landing), and the spacecraft takes over from there.

The spacecraft hits the top of the Martian atmosphere moving at 12,000 miles per hour and has to slow down to zero miles per hour seven minutes later when the rover softly lands on the surface.

About 10 minutes before entering the thin Martian atmosphere, the cruise stage is shed and the spacecraft prepares for a guided entry, where small thrusters on the aeroshell help adjust its angle.

The spacecraft's heat shield will endure peak heating of 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit 75 seconds after entering the atmosphere.

Perseverance is targeting a 28-mile-wide ancient lake bed and river delta, the most challenging site yet for a NASA spacecraft landing on Mars. Rather than being flat and smooth, the small landing site is littered with sand dunes, steep cliffs, boulders and small craters.

The spacecraft has two upgrades -- called Range Trigger and Terrain-Relative Navigation -- to navigate this difficult and hazardous site.

Range Trigger will tell the 70.5-foot-wide parachute when to deploy based on the spacecraft's position 240 seconds after entering the atmosphere. After the parachute deploys, the heat shield will detach.

Terrain-Relative Navigation acts like a second brain for the rover, using cameras to take pictures of the ground as it rapidly approaches and determines the safest spot to land. It can shift the landing spot by up to 2,000 feet, according to NASA.

The back shell and parachute separate after the heat shield is discarded when the spacecraft is 1.3 miles above the Martian surface. The Mars landing engines, which include eight retrorockets, will fire to slow the descent from 190 miles per hour to about 1.7 miles per hour.

Then, the famed sky crane maneuver that landed the Curiosity rover will occur. Nylon cords will lower the rover 25 feet below the descent stage. After the rover touches down on the Martian surface, the cords will detach and the descent stage will fly away and land at a safe distance.

On the surface of Mars

Once the rover has landed, Perseverance's two-year mission will begin and it will go through a "checkout" period to make sure it's ready.

The rover will deploy its mast and antenna, image its landing sight, conduct a "health check" for its instruments, test movement and "flex" its arm and conduct a short test drive. Perseverance will also release its belly pan, which provided a safe haven for the Ingenuity helicopter stowed there during cruising and landing.

The rover will also find a nice, flat surface to drop the Ingenuity helicopter so it has a place to use as a helipad for its potential five test flights during a 30-day period. This will occur within the first 50 to 90 sols, or Martian days, of the mission.

Once Ingenuity is settled on the surface, Perseverance will drive to a safe spot at a distance and use its cameras to watch Ingenuity's flight.

After those flights, Perseverance will begin searching for evidence of ancient life, study Mars' climate and geology and collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth via planned future missions.

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The Perseverance rover is on its way to Mars. What's next? - CNN

This summer, it seems like everyone wants to go to Mars.

With three missions launching to the Red Planet in 2020, we at Space.com thought it was time to take stock of humanity's drive to reach Mars. Join us for our "Summer of Mars" webinar today (July 29) as we look at the missions launching this year, how they'll advance the search for life and, possibly, help set the stage for astronauts on Mars.

Registration is closed to ask questions via chat (for the first 500 viewers), but we'll carry the event live on this page, as well as on YouTube and the Space.com homepage.

I'll moderate our discussion, which will begin at 12 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT) and last up to an hour. We'll start with NASA's Mars 2020 rover Perseverance, which is poised to launch July 30, and discuss the United Arab Emirates' Hope orbiter and China's ambitious Tianwen-1, a rover-lander-orbiter combo, both of which launched this week. And there's more missions headed to Mars, like the European-Russian ExoMars mission and Japan's Martian Moons eXploration project.

Our guests will be:

Jim Watzin: Director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program.NASA has invited the public to join its Perseverance Mars launch and "Be a Virtual Guest" of the launch here.

Jim Bell: President of The Planetary Society; principal investigator for Perseverance's MastCam-Z camera system. (For details on how to join the Planetary society, click here.)

I hope you'll join us as it looks to be an exciting discussion. If you miss our live webinar, we'll have a recording of the talk once it concludes.

Email Tariq Malik attmalik@space.comor follow him@tariqjmalik. Follow us@Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.

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Join Space.com in our 'Summer of Mars' webinar today! Watch it here. - Space.com

For the first time, the landscape of Mars has been captured in stunning 4K resolution.

That is the highest quality that has ever been recorded. And the results are simply breathtaking.

Watch the incredible video above.

The pictures were captured by NASAs three most successful Mars rovers: Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity.

The cameras onboard each of the rovers were the height of technology when they were launched.

The stunning video above was made by British YouTubers ElderFox Documentaries.

The group stitched thousands of pictures together, converting them into ultra-high-definition of the Red Planet.

The 10-minute video is described by the team as the most lifelike experience of being on M

And its hard to disagree.

If youre wondering why we dont see live video from Mars, theres a simple explanation.

Curiosity can - generally speaking - only send data it captures on Mars back to earth at a rate of 32 kbps, which is nowhere near fast enough for video. Its basically super slow dial-up speed.

But thanks to these amateur space fans, we dont need to worry, these images top them all.

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mars 4k images show surface of the red planet in space as you've never seen it before - 7NEWS.com.au

The heat this week wore me out! Good thing the weekend is around the corner and theres plenty to do inside with our selection of events offering up a mix of creative, delicious and easy-going ways to unwind. As we head into Friday, relax with some good food, good (minimal) company, a good drink and one of the events below before we head into yet another week of extremely warm, humid New England weather.

We all vowed to learn new skills once we realized that home is where we should be most of the time. Its not too late, yall. If you want to learn a cool, tactile skill, consider drawing. MassArt Art Museum is hosting a virtual drawing class with graduate assistant Tiffany Doggett via Zoom. You'll need paper, something to draw with and a personal item to create your own still life.

We all dream of going to space, right? Heres the closest a lot of us will probably get. If youre up for being outdoors on a warm, summer evening, head to Seaport Common to celebrate the launch of NASAs Mars Rover. Basically, its a socially distanced picnic with swag, astronaut ice cream and any space-themed food you want to bring.

Prepare your taste buds one of Bostons culinary hubs is officially back. Time Out Markets outdoor space has expanded, has extra cleaning crew and all staff use personal protective equipment. If youve been missing all the good sips, sweets and eats this place has to offer, the wait is now over because the first wave of businesses open includes 10 eateries and two full-service bars.

An art installation that makes people feel all good inside is exactly what the kids need right now. Roxbury artist Chanel Thervil created this exhibit to explore tenderness, care, joy and love between women from different backgrounds. Nothing sounds quite as warm as friendship, which is what the focus of this show is.

For the Boston Public Library's Concerts in the Courtyard series, the award-winning musical duo's live courtyard performance will be streamed on the BPL's YouTube channel. The pair have been together for almost a decade and mix tango, contemporary classical and jazz to create beautiful music. Flutist Bonnie Cochran and guitarist Bryan Wrenn are sure to put on a delightful Friday night virtual show.

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5 Things To Do This Weekend, Including A Picnic On Mars And A Virtual Drawing Class - WBUR

These two views from July 2020 show the elongated cloud extending from the Arsia Mons volcano on Mars.

The towering Arsia Mons volcano on Mars reaches over 12 miles (20 kilometers) high. It's impressive enough on its own, but it looks extra wild when a strange cloud forms above it.

The European Space Agency Mars Express spacecraft has been keeping an eye on a "a mysteriously long, thin cloud" that periodically appears over Arsia Mons. On Wednesday, ESA released a new look at this cloud from observations made in July.

From the lab to your inbox. Get the latest science stories from CNET every week.

"This elongated cloud forms every martian year during this season around the southern solstice, and repeats for 80 days or even more, following a rapid daily cycle," said Jorge Hernandez-Bernal, a doctoral candidate at the University of the Basque Country in Spain. "However, we don't know yet if the clouds are always quite this impressive."

The cloud can stretch for over 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers). The recent observations came around Mars' southern solstice. "In the early mornings during this period, this fleeting cloud grows for approximately three hours, quickly disappearing again just a few hours later," ESA said. Mars Express was in a prime spot to snap images of the cloud.

In 2018, when Earthlings eyed the cloud, there was someinternet speculation it indicated new volcanic activity on Mars, but that is not the case. According to NASA, Arsia Mons' last volcanic hurrah was around 50 million years ago.

The enigmatic cloud is made up of water ice. The Mars Express science team decided it needed its own name as they continue to investigate its appearances and disappearances. It's now known as the "Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud," or AMEC for short. That's catchy.

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Mysterious Mars cloud reappears to haunt a volcano on the red planet - CNET

On Thursday morning, NASA is scheduled to launch its next rover to Mars, the beginning of a years-long mission to figure out if the Red Planet ever hosted life. The rover, called Perseverance, is equipped with instruments to look for evidence of ancient Martian microbes, but its prime goal is to excavate samples and leave them on Mars so that one day they can be returned to Earth for study. Theres even a tiny helicopter aboard named Ingenuity.

Perseverances ride to Mars is the Atlas V rocket, made and operated by the United Launch Alliance. Atlas V rockets have previously flown four NASA missions to Mars, including the Curiosity rover, which landed on the Red Planet in 2012. For this flight, the rocket is equipped with four small boosters at its base to give the vehicle an extra boost during its initial climb and set Perseverance en route to Mars.

The vehicle will take off from ULAs launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida, with liftoff slated for 7:50AM ET. The company has a two-hour launch window, so the Atlas V can take off up until 9:50AM ET if necessary. Once the rocket lifts off, itll take a little less than an hour for the capsule carrying Perseverance to separate from the Atlas V and begin its journey. Itll take about six and a half months for the rover to travel to the Red Planet, reaching Mars sometime in February 2021.

So far, weather is looking good for launch, despite the fact that a hurricane is on track to make landfall in Florida this weekend. Theres an 80 percent chance conditions will be favorable for launch on Thursday, according to the Space Forces 45th Space Wing, which oversees missions out of the Cape. If Perseverance cant launch on Thursday morning, there are opportunities to launch every single day up until August 17th. But for NASA, its pretty crucial that Perseverance gets off the ground this summer. The window to launch to Mars is only open every two years, when Earth and the Red Planet come closest to one another on their orbits around the Sun. If NASA cant launch this year, the agency must wait until 2022 to try again.

For now, everything seems on track for launch. NASAs coverage will begin at 7AM ET, and the agency will do a post-launch press conference at 11:30AM ET if all goes well. Check back later to watch NASAs next rover embark on its journey to search for ancient life on Mars.

Read more:

How to watch NASA launch its next rover to Mars today - The Verge