Daily Archives: March 21, 2021

The laws on Mars could be a little spacey.

Elon Musks planned colony on the Red Planet will not be ruled by any Earth-based government and will instead adhere to its own self-governing principles, according to a report Friday.

The billionaire tech moguls SpaceX Mars mission which will use constellations of satellites to provide an internet connection for the creation of a self-sustaining city on the planet wont be forced to recognize international law, according to terms of service of SpaceXs Starlink internet project, cited by the Independent.

For services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other colonization spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities, the governing law section states.

Instead, disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement, it notes.

The service terms, however, note that earthlings using the internet on the Earths Moon must follow the laws of California.

Earlier this week, SpaceX announced plans to charge $99 a month for a test version of the Starlink internet project on Earth but admitted that it will likely be spotty at first.

A date for when this out-of-this-world settlement will launch has yet to be set but Musk revealed some details about it at a conference last week.

This really might come down to: Are we going to create a self-sustaining city on Mars before or after World War 3, he said at the annual Mars Society meeting.

The probability of after is low, so we should try and make the city self-sustaining before any possible World War 3.

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Elon Musk's SpaceX colony on Mars won't follow Earth-based ...

As a commander of a space colony on Earth, Tarvin is one of the few people to have any experience of overseeing a Mars base. Its certainly not a Star Trek-style military environment, he says. Its a small group of highly motivated people and it really doesnt take much effort to manage them.

A government also needs all the structures that go with it. Any new society needs an economy as well as systems to maintain the habitat, provide employment, health, childcare, social care and education. In short: Mars needs bureaucrats.

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The first Mars settlers will be living in the capsules they arrive in, perhaps augmented by a few extra capsules sent ahead and maybe some inflatable domes. But just as settlers will be utilising local resources for water, food and energy, they will also hope to use local materials to build a larger colony or even spin-off colonies.

At the very least, it would make sense to use Martian rock to bury the habitats to help shield occupants from radiation. Later, the surface could be drilled to form caves or rock could be excavated for building materials just as we build houses from stone on Earth. It might also be possible to extract useful minerals for metals or glass.

Robert Zubin, the president of the Mars Society, is one of the leading exponents of terraforming Mars transforming the planet from an airless, barren world to an oxygen-rich green and pleasant realm with a fully functioning ecosystem.

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Five steps to colonising Mars - BBC Future

This means that Mars has been dry for quite a long time, said Eva Scheller, a Caltech graduate student who was the lead author of the Science paper.

Today, there is still water equivalent to a global ocean 65 to 130 feet deep, but that is mostly frozen in the polar ice caps.

Planetary scientists have long marveled at ancient evidence of flowing water carved in the Martian surface gigantic canyons, tendrils of winding river channels and deltas where the rivers disgorged sediments into lakes. NASAs latest robotic Mars explorer, Perseverance, which landed last month in the Jezero crater, will be headed to a river delta at its edge in hopes of finding signs of past life.

Without a time machine, there is no way to observe directly how much water was on a younger Mars more than three billion years ago. But the hydrogen atoms floating today in the atmosphere of Mars preserve a ghostly hint of the ancient ocean.

On Earth, about one in 5,000 hydrogen atoms is a version known as deuterium that is twice as heavy because its nucleus contains both a neutron and a proton. (The nucleus of a common-variety hydrogen atom has only a proton, no neutrons.)

But on Mars, the concentration of deuterium is markedly higher, about one in 700. Scientists at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center who reported this finding in 2015 said this could be used to calculate the amount of water Mars once had. Mars probably started with a similar ratio of deuterium to hydrogen as Earth, but the fraction of deuterium increased over time as the water evaporated and hydrogen was lost to space, because the heavier deuterium is less likely to escape the atmosphere.

The problem with that story, said Renyu Hu, a scientist at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory and another author of the current Science paper, is that Mars has not been losing hydrogen fast enough. Measurements by NASAs Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution orbiter, or MAVEN, have showed that the current rate, extrapolated over four billion years, can only account for a small fraction of the water loss, Dr. Hu said. This is not enough to explain the great drying of Mars.

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The Water on Mars Vanished. This Might Be Where It Went. - The New York Times

An oceans worth of water may be lurking in minerals below Mars surface, which could help explain why the Red Planet dried up.

Once home to lakes and rivers, Mars is now a frigid desert (SN: 12/8/14). Scientists have typically blamed that on Mars water wafting out of the planets atmosphere into space (SN: 11/12/20). But measurements of atmospheric water loss made by spacecraft like NASAs MAVEN orbiter are not enough to account for all of Mars missing water which was once so abundant it could have covered the whole planet in a sea up to 1,500 meters deep. Thats more than half the volume of the Atlantic Ocean.

Computer simulations of water moving through Mars interior, surface and atmosphere now suggest that most of the Red Planets water molecules may have gotten lodged inside the crystal structures of minerals in the planets crust, researchers report online March 16 in Science.

The finding helps bring focus to a really important mechanism for water loss on Mars, says Kirsten Siebach, a planetary geologist at Rice University in Houston who was not involved in the work. Water getting locked up in crustal minerals may be equally important as water loss to space and could potentially be more important.

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Planetary scientist Eva Scheller of Caltech and colleagues simulated possible scenarios for water loss on Mars, based on observations of the Red Planet made by rovers and orbiting spacecraft, and lab analyses of Martian meteorites. These simulations accounted for possible water loss to space and into the planets crust through bodies of water or groundwater interacting with rock.

In order for the simulations to match how much water was on Mars 4 billion years ago, how much is left in polar ice caps today and the observed abundance of hydrogen in Mars atmosphere, 30 to 99 percent of Mars ancient water must be stashed away inside its crust. The rest was lost to space.

Water gets locked inside minerals on Earth, too, says Scheller, who presented the results March 16 in a news conference at the virtual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. But unlike on Mars, that underground water is eventually belched back out into the atmosphere by volcanoes. That difference is important for understanding why one rocky planet may be lush and wet and habitable, while another is an arid wasteland.

Mars underground water could be mined by future explorers, says Jack Mustard, a planetary geologist at Brown University in Providence, R.I., not involved in the work. The most easily accessible water on Mars may be at its polar ice caps (SN: 9/28/20). But to get the ice, youve got to go up to [high latitudes] kind of cold, harder to live there, Mustard says. If water can be extracted from minerals, it could support human colonies at warmer climes closer to the equator.

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Most of Mars missing water may lurk in its crust - Science News Magazine

Why do we explore Mars at all?

To search for life. Mars has long been considered the most hospitable place in the solar system beyond Earth, for both alien life and future human habitation. The second closest planet to ours after Venus, it is visible to the naked eye; its red-tinged terrain has been more closely observed via telescope since Galileos time. Over the centuries weve learnt that it is similar to Earth in many ways: it has clouds, winds, a roughly 24-hour day, seasons, polar ice caps, volcanoes and canyons. In the 19th century, scientists thought there were oceans and vegetation on its surface, even canals. We know now that it is a frozen desert (temperatures range from -140C to +30C in the equatorial summer), but in the past it seems to have had a warmer, denser atmosphere, with rainstorms, rivers and lakes. Even today it has all the ingredients necessary for life: water, organic carbon and energy.

The first successful fly-by mission to Mars, the Mariner 4 probe, was made by Nasa in 1965. For centuries, humans had speculated about life on Mars, but the 21 grainy black and white images beamed back to Earth by Mariner 4 the first photos humans had ever seen of another planet showed a cratered, lifeless surface, much like the Moons. These pictures, along with measurements of Marss thin atmosphere about 100 times thinner than Earths, therefore exposing it to the harshness of space prompted The New York Times to declare it a dead planet. Since then, humans have launched some 50 missions, about half of which failed. There were many disappointments. The first human-built object to reach Mars, the Soviet lander Mars 2 in 1971, failed seconds after landing. In 1976, Nasas Viking 1 and Viking 2 landed safely, but found no evidence of biological activity.

Later missions were more promising. Nasas rovers, starting with Spirit and Opportunity in 2004, have found evidence of ancient oceans and streams, and of ice beneath the surface. In 2018, the Curiosity rover found organic deposits trapped in mudstone formed 3.5 billion years ago. It gathered samples, heated them and analysed the results, proving they contained organic molecules: something like kerogen, the fossilised solid organic matter found in sedimentary rocks on Earth. This suggests that life could have existed in Marss ancient history, but it doesnt prove it: the molecules could have been formed by geological activity or meteorites. In 2004, the European Space Agencys Mars Express orbiter found the first evidence of methane on Mars also perhaps a sign of former life.

Last month, Nasas Perseverance became the fifth rover to land on Mars (all four of the others were built by Nasa; it and Curiosity remain operational). But two other high-profile missions have also reached Mars in recent weeks: Chinas first independent mission, the Tianwen-1 (a spacecraft which is also due to land a rover this year); and the Emirates Mars Mission (the first Arab interplanetary space mission). Each of them set off in July last year, when Mars and Earth were aligned favourably.

Perseverance, an improved version of Curiosity, has landed in the Jezero crater, a former river delta. It will also look for signs of past life: seeking out biosignatures left by microbes. The rover is the first part of a sample return project: it will store rocks and samples which a later mission will return to Earth for further analysis, if all goes to plan, in 2031. Perseverance also aims to prepare for future human missions to Mars. It will attempt to synthesise a small amount of oxygen from the carbon dioxide that makes up 96% of the Martian atmosphere. In a few months it will fly a drone, the Ingenuity helicopter the first time humans will have launched powered flight on another planet. The idea is that it will act as a scout, helping to plan routes for future missions.

Nasa aims to send astronauts to Mars by 2030, an objective it describes as humanitys next giant leap. Elon Musk, founder of the space exploration company SpaceX is even more boosterish: he is highly confident SpaceX will send humans to Mars by 2026, and hopes to have sent a million people there by 2050. The obstacles are formidable. At its closest, Mars is 33.9 million miles from Earth; a journey that takes a spacecraft about seven months. The most difficult part of any mission is landing on its surface a process known as the seven minutes of terror. Slowing a spacecraft down from about 12,000mph to landing speeds in Marss thin atmosphere is vastly complex: Perseverance used a heat shield, then a parachute, then a sky crane an apparatus equipped with retro rockets which separates from the rover, and lowers it onto the planet floor. Landing one-tonne rovers is an amazing feat. Landing astronauts, plus their equipment and supplies, plus a spacecraft and fuel for return, is quite another question.

For Musk and others, the aim is to build colonies on Mars: we need to become a multi-planet species, he says, rather than hanging out on Earth until some eventual calamity claims us. Whether becoming a twoplanet species will do much for humanitys survival is a moot point, when the second planet is as brutally hostile as Mars. But at the very least, many envisage small but viable colonies and a space tourism industry there in the coming decades. For most space scientists, though, the real objective remains the discovery of life. Finding a second genesis of life besides the one on Earth and in our own backyard would have profound scientific and philosophical implications: it would suggest that life exists throughout the universe.

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Exploring the red planet - The Week UK

A recurring mystery cloud on Mars that has long since baffled scientists around the world finally has an explanation. Appearing over the Arsia Mons volcano in the southern hemisphere of Mars, the long plume-like mystery cloud on Mars had been in observations for a long time since as early as the 1970s. Now, after capturing its repeated reappearance in 2018 and 2020, scientists have an explanation for what may be causing this unusual cloud stretch. A lot of this explanation owes itself to a tiny Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) aboard the Mars Express mission that orbits the planet a camera that barely has the resolution of a decades-old webcam, but still offers a wide field of view. The latter, as it so happened, has proved crucial in unlocking this intriguing mystery cloud on Mars.

As reported by Science Alert, the study of the mystery cloud on Mars found that the origin of this plume began at the onset of Martian spring or summer. During this period, at dawn each day, dense, cold air from the base of the Arsia Mons volcano started rising upward from its western slope. With dropping temperatures, the air starts collecting dust along with its moisture, which then condenses to form what is known as an orographic cloud on Earth. Once this stretch of air reaches an altitude of about 45km, it is then confronted by fast winds of up to 600kmph, and is then detached from the volcano and moves westward.

At its most expansive stretch, this mystery cloud on Mars can reach a length of almost 1,800km longer than the distance between Delhi and Mumbai. At its widest, it grows up to 150km. Subsequent to reaching this elongated cloud state, the plume disappears due to evaporation, when the Sun reaches its peak on the region. The plume, as the study reports, can also form during the winter months on Mars, during which the nature of winds on the planet (owing partially due to the lack of an Earth-like atmosphere) can cause it to form a large spiral as well.

Researchers who observed the cloud found that it is actually a regular occurrence on the planet, and it is only our sporadic cameras and the lack of uniform, regular observations that led us to believe that it is irregular in nature. Given this revelation of the mystery cloud on Mars, it will be interesting to see if more such clouds exist on the planet, which can give mankind further dough to study the constituents of the Martian atmosphere, and understand the behaviour of winds on the planet in closer detail. This can then add to the possibility of mankind setting up a residential colony on the planet at some point of time in future.

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Mystery Cloud on Mars That's Like Nothing Ever Seen on Earth Finally Has an Explanation - News18

By Isobel Clark

The newest endeavour from NASA to discover more about our solar system hit headlines last month as their new Mars rover, Perseverance, successfully landed on the Red planet. Scientists and space fanatics all over the world have celebrated this historic opportunity to determine whether or not there was ever life on Mars.

While the possibility of one day inhabiting Mars is filling newspapers across the world, it really does beg the question: what about life on Earth? Why are we pouring money, time and resources into searching for signs of life on a different planet when, on our own overheating planet, we are losing millions of people every year to preventable causes?

According to NASA, Perseverance is currently searching for any signs of ancient microbial life and is aiming to test oxygen production on Mars atmosphere. This is in the hope that someday human life can be sustained on Mars. But human life cannot even be sustained on Earth. In the past hour approximately 700 children under the age of 15 have died of preventable causes.

While NASA has gathered some of the worlds best scientists to focus purely on the mission to Mars, their time could have been spent developing new and innovative solutions to current global issues. An invention for water conservation is essential right now and although NASA cant even put an approximate date on when humans might be able to inhabit Mars, the space mission is being prioritised, using up some of the best scientific brains in the world and a huge amount of money and resources.

This mission has received extensive, overwhelmingly positive news coverage while far more newsworthy stories are being ignored

And then we get to the exact figures. Since 1975 $16.1 billion has been spent on exploration on Mars. Two out of three child deaths are avoidable and approximately $2.3 billion dollars can save 2.3 million lives. If the money spent on the Mars missions alone had been redirected, millions of lives could have been saved. Natural disasters are occurring more frequently and more severely due to climate change.

The news generally only acknowledges deaths directly from the disaster and tends to ignore the millions who die of poverty-related issues much later. For example, the deaths caused directly by the 2010 Haiti earthquake were tragically inevitable, but the millions who died in the following years due to poverty were preventable, had funding been directed towards the problem.

To make matters worse, space investigation is becoming more and more privatised, aided by celebrities such as Elon Musk with SpaceX, the company which was founded with the hope of helping to create a human colony in space. By privatising space travel, even more money is pooled into it. Private firms tend to ignore social costs and are commonly self-serving. If space research is meant to be bettering public life through greater public knowledge then should it not be taking into account public interests? This is exactly what privatisation does not do. It favours only those who can pay to receive the benefits.

The environmental costs of space missions are equally immense. Rocket launches have a huge carbon footprint from the amount of fossil fuels needed to propel an object into space. The new phenomenon of space junk is similarly worrying. The new idea of space tourism, insisted on by private companies such as SpaceX, could have devastating a environmental impact purely for the pleasure of the global elite. The Mars mission is urging on those who are demanding space tourism. Furthermore, it already has its own massive carbon footprint to add to the overall environmental impacts.

Dont get me wrong, Im not here to expressly hate on NASA. I wholly recognise that the work they have done over the years has transformed lives for so many. Space travel has given us life-changing innovations such as GPS, accurate weather prediction and a greater understanding of how to prevent the damaging effects of UV light as just a few examples. However, this Mars mission is not aiming to change our lives with inventions such as these. NASA states that Perseverances mission is to search for signs that Mars could ever have been inhabited. It will also gather some samples of rock and soil and store them in Mars. These samples may never make it to Earth. Yet the environmental damage from this one mission alone is immense.

The new idea of space tourism could have a devastating environmental impact purely for the pleasure of the global elite

Every Mars mission since 1975 has essentially been looking into whether one day humans can inhabit the planet. Scientists call this having a back-up human colony who, in the event of us irrevocably destroying Earth, will be able to keep humanity going. By focusing so many of our resources on the back-up plan, we are able to conveniently ignore the fact we are rapidly destroying Earth through global warming. In fact, we have already so successfully destroyed this planet that we think it is okay to infect a different one once we have discarded Earth.

Space travel is certainly essential to our lives as we live them today. I do not deny that. Nonetheless, this particular mission has stuck in my throat for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps it is the extensive, overwhelmingly positive news coverage it has received while far more newsworthy stories are being ignored.

Or perhaps it is the billions upon billions of dollars that have been poured into the Mars missions, along with the brilliant scientists whose time has also been taken, all of which could have prevented millions of deaths here on our own planet due to poverty and climate change. The privatisation of space travel is furthering the problem as inevitably even more resources will be poured into further research.

I can see a future in which I will support space travel and explorations on Mars whole-heartedly. But I will only support them when the appropriate amount of money and time is spent on finding solutions to the millions of preventable deaths we face every year and once we have truly invested everything we have into the preservation of our Earth.

Illustration by Nicole Wu.

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Life on Mars? We can't even sustain it on Earth - Palatinate

NASA's newest Mars rover has sent back the first-ever recording of driving on the Red Planet and it features a mysterious "scratching" noise that's left scientists baffled.

The audio clip also includes the eerie sound of grinding, clanking and banging that by Earth standards would be pretty worrisome.

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The noises made by Perseverance's six metal wheels and suspension on the first test drive two weeks ago are part of a 16-minute raw audio feed released Wednesday by Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"If I heard these sounds driving my car, I'd pull over and call for a tow," Dave Gruel, an engineer on the rover team, said in a statement.

"But if you take a minute to consider what you're hearing and where it was recorded, it makes perfect sense."

The driving audio contains an unexpected high-pitched scratching noise, according to Nasa. Engineers are trying to figure out what the sound is.

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Perseverance the biggest, most advanced rover ever sent to Mars landed near an ancient river delta on February 18 to search for signs of past life.

Samples will be taken from the most promising rocks for eventual return to Earth.

The rover carries two microphones.

One already has captured the sounds of wind and rock-zapping lasers, the other was meant to record the descent and landing.

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This second mike didn't pick up any sounds of the rover's arrival at Mars, but managed to record the first test drive March 4.

Before it starts drilling into rocks for core samples, Perseverance will drop off an experimental tag-along helicopter, named Ingenuity.

The helicopter will attempt the first powered, controlled flight on another planet sometime next month.

Perseverance's microphones are stashed on its SuperCam instrument, which sits atop the rover's remote sensing mast.

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Over the course of the two-year mission, scientists hope to use the rover's audio recordings to analyse Martian rock and soil.

The six-wheeled machine is equipped with a laser that can hit targets up to 20ft (7m) away.

Some zaps sound slightly louder than others, providing information on the physical structure of the targets, such as its relative hardness.

SuperCam was developed jointly by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico and a consortium of French research laboratories.

Perseverance - What's on board?

Perseverance boasts a total of 19 cameras and two microphones, and carries seven scientific instruments.

An X-ray ray gun that will help scientists investigate the composition of Martian rock.

2. Radar Imager for Mars' subsurface experiment (RIMFAX)

A ground-penetrating radar that will image buried rocks, meteorites, and even possible underground water sources up to a depth of 10 metres (33ft).

3. Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA)

A bunch of sensors that will take readings of temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure, and other atmospheric conditions.

4. Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE)

An experiment that will convert Martian carbon dioxide into oxygen. A scaled-up version could be used in future to provide Martian colonists with breathable air.

5. SuperCam

A suite of instruments for measuring the makeup of rocks and regolith at a distance

6. Mastcam-Z

A camera system capable of taking 3D images by combining two or more photos into one.

7. Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC)

From Baker Street to Mars: Sherloc contains an ultraviolet laser that will investigate Martian rock for organic compounds.

The instrument delivers data to the French Space Agencys operations centre in Toulouse.

Speaking earlier this month following the recovery of Perseverance's first audio recordings, Naomi Murdoch, a researcher at the ISAE-SUPAERO aerospace engineering school in Toulouse, could barely contain her excitement.

"The sounds acquired are remarkable quality," she said.

"Its incredible to think that were going to do science with the first sounds ever recorded on the surface of Mars."

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RED DEVILNasa's Perseverance rover captures 'dust devil' on Mars in ultra-rare footage

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In other news, water that once flowed over the surface of Mars is now trapped within its crust, a Nasa-funded study revealed this week.

Nasahas announcedthat it is accepting applications for wannabe space explorers who wish to fire their names to theRed Planet.

And,Perseverance revealed stunningvideo and audio recordingsfrom the surface of the Red Planet last month.

What do you make of the rover video? Let us know in the comments!

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk

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Nasa releases first recording of rover DRIVING on Mars but mystery noise leaves them baffled... - The Sun