Daily Archives: June 4, 2021

(Photo : NASA)

NASA is curious about Mars -- and we can't blame them.

Mars is a somewhat monotonous place; it is not that colorful. Throughout the entire planet, the area's sky, land, and overall atmosphere have an ongoing color scheme of reds and browns.

But in the early parts of 2021, the planet suddenly had a surprising set of breathtaking iridescent clouds -- and NASA's Curiosity Rover captured it beautifully.

The curious robot snapped multiple photos of the breathtaking Mars clouds, and successfully sent them back to Earth. The images exemplify soft, shimmering wisps entangled with the grey Martian skies, completely illuminating warm, bright light with help from the sun's reflection.

In a NASA statement, Mark Lemmon, one of NASA's atmospheric scientists at the Space Science Institution found in Boulder, Colorado,saidthat he always marveled about the colors of the sky; reds, greens, blues, and purples. He added that it amazed him to see the rare, colorful, and bright clouds on Mars.

Marsrarely gets any clouds because the planet does not contain that much water in its atmosphere, and the planet's air only has 1% density compared to the Earth's atmosphere, which makes colonizing it all the more difficult.

Clouds on Mars only occur near the planet's equator during the coldest season of its year.

This happens whenever Mars' orbit takes it further away from the sun. It is a phenomenon known asAphelion, and it will happen next in July 2021.

Read Also:NASA Looking at Nuclear-Powered Rockets to Shorten Travel Time to Mars

Business Insiderstated that scientists now believe that the clouds on Mars are composed of frozen carbon dioxide, typically referred to as dry ice. Researchers came up with the conclusion soon after they successfully analyzed Curiosity Rover's images.

They were able to identify it with the help of how the sunset's light reflected off the crystals within the clouds, giving an excellent hint at how far from the ground the clouds were.

Curiosity also got the chance to capture several photos of"Mother of Pearl"clouds.

Curiosity Rover is a technological marvel exploring Mars' crater near the equator with about 96 miles in width. As a result, it gets to witness rare moments such as the appearance of clouds on Mars as the planet slowly approached Aphelion.

According toBusiness Insider, two Earth years ago, roughly equating to one Martian year, similar iridescent clouds showed up a few months earlier than scientists predicted.

With this lapse, NASA came more prepared this year. Starting in January 2021,NASA Curiosity Roverwas already ready to take photos as soon as the early clouds returned to Mars. The beautiful clouds on Mars continued to sway over Curiosity throughout March.

Whenever Curiosity is not running around looking for skies to take photos of, the tech marvel is mainly preoccupied with studying the ground of Mars. Curiosity first landed in Mars' Gale Crater back in 2012.

During Curiosity Rover's first two years on the planet, it found out the Gale Crater used to be a lake filled with various chemicals.

In no time, Curiosity Rover got a new order from NASA: to climb the 3-mile worth of mountain located at the crater's center known as Mount Sharp.

Related Article:Elon Musk' Mars City:' Humans to Fly Out Before 2030, Mars Base Alpha' Self-Sustaining'-What Is Missing?

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Written by Fran Sanders

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NASA Curiosity Rover Presents the Earth with Rare, Breathtaking Photos of Iridescent Clouds on Mars - Tech Times

As the podcast industry continues to boom and Hollywood comes calling, its looking more and more like the summer binge listen will join the blockbuster or beach read as a highly anticipated seasonal escape. With the season two premiere of Motherhacker, starring Carrie Coon (The Nest, Fargo), and the brand-new series Red Frontier, starring Betty Gilpin (The Hunt, GLOW), podcast giants Spotify and Gimlet are hoping that a combination of high-intensity plotlines and dazzling vocal talent will have have listeners glued to their earbuds as they ease into the hot, hazy days of summer.

Gimlet, which Spotify acquired in 2019, has been leaning hard on dramatic audio storytelling in recent years. Scripted shows have included Sandra, an eerie A.I. romp starring Ethan Hawke, Alia Shawkat, and Kristen Wiig, and Homecoming, another star-studded fiction podcast that was eventually adapted into an Amazon Prime Original television series starring Julia Roberts and Janelle Mone.

Motherhacker follows the same formula, with the Emmy-nominated Coon starring as Bridget Landry, a frazzled mother turned hacker whose dabbling on the dark web forces her to confront the shadowy forces at play in her own life. Written by Sandi Farkas and executive produced and directed by Amanda Lipitz, the first season of Motherhacker was a zippy, fast-paced escapade buoyed by the performances of a stellar cast (and can be binged in its entirety, exclusively on Spotify). Coons performance as Bridget is a freewheeling delight; she careens between accents and occupations as her character methodically scams victims out of thousands of dollars, in a desperate effort to pay off her own debts.

Im eager for fans to enjoy the thrilling and comic perils that befall Bridget during a fictional pandemic, recorded in my apartment in a real-life quarantine, Coon said. Its moving to me that we were able to meet the challenge, even so far apart, and deliver Motherhacker season two to Spotify audiences around the world.

Season two will find Bridget trying to outrun a crisis, caught between her hacker life, the FBI, and her own family. She also happens to be navigating these multiple identitiesand motherhoodwhile attempting to survive a fictional pandemic. The new season will also feature a cast of stage and screen talent that includes Lucas Hedges (Lady Bird, Boy Erased), Tavi Gevinson (Gossip Girl), Quincy Tyler Bernstine (Manchester by the Sea), and Tony Award winners Celia Keenan-Bolger (To Kill a Mockingbird) and Katrina Lenk (The Bands Visit).

Listen to an exclusive trailer of Motherhackers second season below, ahead of its premiere on June 7.

In the new Spotify Original series Red Frontier, Gilpin (also an Emmy nominee) plays Commander Taylor Fullerton, an astronaut who is tasked with finishing a one-way mission to colonize Mars alone, after her crew is killed in a mysterious tragedy. Gilpin rose to fame as soap actor turned professional wrestler Debbie Liberty Belle Eagan on Netflixs GLOW, which she called the best job [shell] ever have in a moving eulogy for Vanity Fair after the show was canceled last year. Shes also proven herself to be an exceedingly winning presence on non-scripted podcastsher episode of Las Culturistas, hosted by Matt Rogers and SNLs Bowen Yang, is a standout thanks to Gilpins honesty and humor, and the palpable admiration of the hosts. Gilpin will be joined on Red Frontier by Finn Wittrock (American Horror Story), Ashley Park (Girls5Eva), Charlie Barnett (Russian Doll), Maria Dizzia (Orange Is the New Black) and off-Broadway star Kara Young to round out this nail-biting, interplanetary thriller.

Red Frontier was written, directed, and executive produced by Sarah Nolen, who has written for the Emmy Award-winning series The Americans, as well as the upcoming Apple TV+ series Foundation. Red Frontier was born years ago as I explored my personal independence acquired after the loss of my mother, says Nolen. As both a writer and director, its been a fulfilling experience to embrace the audio-only format, which offers an unparalleled experience for the listener that is immersive and intimate. I hope Red Frontier will touch anyone feeling the burden of loneliness and bring them some comfort while providing a compelling and subversive female-driven science fiction story. Red Frontier, which also features a haunting score by the French-Candadian singer-songwriter Ghostly Kisses, will premiere on June 14.

This article has been updated.

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Space tourism company Virgin Galactic, on June 3, announced that it will send researcher Kellie Gerardi into space to conduct experiments in weightlessness including the collection of biometric data during space journeys. Gerardi, a bioastronautics researcher is affiliated with the International Institute of Astronautical Sciences (IIAS) and is a popular figure on social media with over 400,000 TikTok followers. With the trip planned as early as next year, the California based company aims to commence the regular commercial flights to orbit.

Gerardi has been involved in the commercial space industry, including working for the Commercial Space Federation, for about a decade. Throughout her upcoming space trip, the 32-year-old will don an astroskin that would monitor and collect her biometric data. While the process of placing sensors beneath the spacesuit to collect vital data has been done on the International Space Station (ISS), it is the first time if would be done on a moving spacecraft.

Founded in 2004 by British billionaire Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic aims to start an era of commercial space trips. Following the experiment, the spaceflight company aims to send its employees in a passenger cabin before finally placing Branson in the orbit. Once the service opens for common people, each of the rides is expected to be priced at $200,000.

Meanwhile, Space X CEO Elon Musk,blatantly claimed that it would just take another six years for SpaceX to land humans on Mars. "We dont want to be one of those single planet species, we want to be a multi-planet species, he told reporters.Many times in the past, the tech billionaire has expressed his desire to establish a permanent human presence on the red planet with starship rockets carrying humans to and from Mars. However, in recent weeks, he went a step ahead by asserting that not only do humans need to colonize Mars but also have a present base on the moon in order to become a spacefaring civilization.

Its been now almost half a century since humans were last on the moon. Thats too long, we need to get back there and have a permanent base on the moon again, like a big permanently occupied base on the moon. And then build a city on Mars to become a spacefaring civilization, a multi-planet species, Musk told reporters.

Image:kelliegerardi/Twitter

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Virgin Galactic to send researcher and TikTok star to space wearing astroskin - Republic World

When the first baby is born off-Earth, it will be a milestone as momentous as humanitys first steps out of Africa. Such a birth would mark the beginning of a multiplanet civilization for the human species.

For the first half-century of the space age, only governments launched satellites and people into Earth orbit. No longer. Hundreds of private space companies are building a new industry that already has US$300 billion in annual revenue.

Im a professor of astronomy who has written a book and a number of articles about humans future in space. Today, all activity in space is tethered to Earth. But I predict that in around 30 years people will start living in space; and soon after, the first off-Earth baby will be born.

Space started as a duopoly as the United States and the Soviet Union vied for supremacy in a geopolitical contest with loud military overtones. But while NASA achieved the moon landings in 1969, its budget has since shrunk by a factor of three. Russia is no longer an economic superpower, and its presence in space is a pale shadow of the program that launched the first satellite and the first person into orbit.

The new kid on the block is China. After a late start, the Chinese space program is surging, fueled by a budget that has recently grown faster than their economy. China is building a space station, the country has landed probes on the moon and Mars, and it is planning a moon base. On its current trajectory, China will soon be the dominant space power.

Governments will continue to launch rockets, but it would be safe to say that the future of private space flight arrived in 2016 when, for the first time, commercial launches outnumbered launches by all the worlds countries combined. But the most exciting progress is being made by private space companies that are marketing space for tourism and recreation. Elon Musks goal for SpaceX is to carry 100 people at a time to the moon, Mars, and beyond, although in public presentations he is coy about giving a timeline. Jeff Bezos company, Blue Origin, also aims to colonize the solar system. Such grandiose plans have skeptics, but remember that these are the two richest people in the world.

For a spacecraft, the trip to Mars is about 1,000 times farther than a trip to the moon, so the moon will be humanitys first home away from home.

China is partnering with Russia to build a long-term facility at the moons South Pole sometime between 2036 and 2045. NASA plans to put boots on the moon in 2024 and establish a a permanent settlement called the Artemis Base Camp within another decade. As part of the Artemis mission, NASA is also planning to launch a lunar space station in 2024 called Gateway. NASA is teaming up with SpaceX for this and future lunar projects, and the lunar station will make it easier for SpaceX to resupply the future lunar colony.

After the moon comes Mars, and the collaboration between SpaceX and NASA is accelerating the timeline for getting there. NASAs plans are purposeful, but the organization hasnt given a timeline. Elon Musk, on the other hand, has loudly proclaimed that he intends to have a colony on Mars by 2050. Humanitys attempt to colonize the moon will give us a good sense of the challenges we might face on Mars.

For a civilization to be really free from Earth, the population needs to grow, and that means babies. Living on the moon or Mars will be arduous and stressful, so the first inhabitants will probably spend only a few years there at a time and are unlikely to start a family.

But once people do take up permanent residency off-Earth, there are still many unknowns. First, little research has been done on the biology of pregnancy and reproductive health in a space or low-gravity environment like the moon or Mars. Its possible there will be unexpected hazards to the fetus or mother. Second, babies are fragile, and raising them is not easy. The infrastructure of these bases would have to be sophisticated to make some version of normal family life possible, a process that will take decades.

With these uncertainties in mind, it seems likely that the first off-Earth baby will be born much closer to home. A Dutch startup called SpaceLife Origin wants to send a heavily pregnant woman 250 miles up just long enough to give birth. They talk a good story, but the legal, medical and ethical obstacles are formidable. Another company, called Orbital Assembly Corporation, plans to open a luxury hotel in orbit in 2027 called the Voyager Station. Current plans show that it would hold 280 guests and 112 crew members, with its spinning-wheel design providing artificial gravity. But the breathless news reports omit any discussion of the difficulty and cost of such a project.

However, on April 12, 2021, NASA announced that it is considering allowing a reality TV show to send a civilian to the International Space Station and film them for 10 days. Its plausible that this idea could be extended, with a wealthy couple booking a long-term stay for the entire process from conception to birth in orbit.

At the moment, theres no evidence anyone has had sex in space. But with about 600 people having been in Earth orbit, including one NASA couple who kept their marriage a secret, one space historian was able to gather plenty of space age salacious moments.

My guess is that sometime around 2040, a unique individual will be born. They may carry the citizenship of their parents, or they may be born in a facility operated by a corporation and end up stateless. But I prefer to think of this future person as the first true citizen of the galaxy.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: NASA/Dennis Davidson/WikimediaCommons

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When Will the First Baby Be Born in Space? - Singularity Hub

Worcesters Budget Holds Steady Tax Rate, Grows Spending By 6%

SNOW HILL Worcester County officials adopted a $216 million budget for the coming fiscal year.The Worcester County Commissioners on Tuesday voted 5-2 to adopt a $216,509,211 operating budget for fiscal year 2022. The budget, a 6% increase over the current years spending plan, maintains the current property tax rate of 84.5 cents per $100 Read more

SNOW HILL Discussion of a library program and its possible link to a political movement dominated a meeting of the Worcester County Commissioners this week.The commissioners on Tuesday met with Worcester County Library Director Jennifer Ranck to discuss Read Woke, a teen reading program the library is offering. Despite concerns from some commissioners, Ranck Read more

OCEAN PINES Officials attributed juvenile fire play as the cause of a house fire that left nine Ocean Pines residents homeless this week.At around 10 p.m. on Tuesday, June 1, Worcester County Emergency Services received reports of a house fire in the 300 block of Ocean Parkway in Ocean Pines. When crews arrived at Read more

BERLIN Mayor Zack Tyndall vetoed the towns $6.8 million budget in response to amendments made to the spending plan by the town council.Tyndall on Friday vetoed Berlins fiscal year 2022 budget, citing the changes made by the Berlin Town Council last month. Hes hopeful that before any vote to override his veto, council members Read more

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06/03/2021 | Announcements | News Ocean City MD - The Dispatch - The Dispatch

In an image from video footage from 2015, an unexplained object is seen at center as it soars among the clouds, traveling against the wind. "There's a whole fleet of them," a naval aviator tells another, though only one indistinct object is shown. Department of Defense via AP hide caption

In an image from video footage from 2015, an unexplained object is seen at center as it soars among the clouds, traveling against the wind. "There's a whole fleet of them," a naval aviator tells another, though only one indistinct object is shown.

Are we alone? Have alien spacecraft been buzzing across Earth's skies? Those are the questions being asked in the U.S. government's new report on unexplained aerial phenomena its preferred term for what many of us call unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.

So far, it looks like the answers in the report will leave UFO spotters and conspiracy theorists unsatisfied. U.S. officials and analysts who examined video footage from U.S. Navy planes and other records say the evidence doesn't point to alien technology but they also say they can't explain the unusual phenomena.

The report's release is still pending; after The New York Times first reported news of its findings Thursday night, a senior U.S. official confirmed to NPR that details in the newspaper's story are accurate.

One of the report's only substantial conclusions is that the craft encountered by the military objects that showed unusual flight capabilities were not created by classified programs run by the U.S. government or the Pentagon.

That finding jibes with statements previously made by Luis Elizondo, the former leader of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. He spoke to NPR in 2017 after the release of a previously classified video taken by a camera aboard a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet.

In the footage, pilots struggled to explain what they were seeing as an object on their sensors maintained a high speed and then, for no apparent reason, rotated.

"Look at that thing!" one pilot exclaimed.

Earlier, the same pilot remarked they might be seeing some type of drone.

"There's a whole fleet of them," the other pilot said.

"My gosh!" the first pilot replied.

Discussing that footage in an interview with NPR, Elizondo confessed he didn't know the origin of the craft.

"If you're asking my personal opinion from here, look, I've got to be honest with you, I don't know where it's from. But we're pretty sure it's not here," Elizondo said. "Now does that mean it's 'out there'? Whether or not it's Russian or Chinese inside or little green men from Mars or frankly your neighbor's dog, I wanted to purposely steer away from that because I wanted to focus on truly the raw science: What were we seeing, and did it pose a threat to national security?"

Interest in the idea that alien beings might be visiting Earth from off-planet has skyrocketed in recent years, particularly after the Pentagon verified that several videos showing what look to be objects moving at incredible speeds and with remarkable agility had indeed come from official U.S. Navy sources.

In 2017, news of the existence of a secretive Pentagon program that was established to examine sightings of unexplained aircraft and phenomena ignited public interest. It also brought new legitimacy and definition to an area of research that for decades was defined by speculation and stereotypes of UFO enthusiasts running around in tinfoil hats.

The Pentagon reportedly began its Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program in an early form in 2007. Congress then funded it, and Elizondo took it over in 2010. But the Defense Department halted it in 2012.

In April 2020, the Department of Defense officially released footage from the Navy fighter pilots' on-board cameras.

The department said it was releasing the videos to clear up misconceptions about whether footage that had already been circulating is real.

"The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as 'unidentified,' " the Defense Department said.

Americans, it seems, are ready to believe. A 2019 Gallup Poll found that a third of U.S. adults agreed with the idea that "some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies."

The new report on UFOs is poised to be released to Congress this month by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

U.S. intelligence agencies and the Defense Department are required to report on what they know about unusual aerial phenomena because of a stipulation in the massive COVID-19 relief and government funding bill that Congress approved last year.

In a section titled Advanced Aerial Threats, the spending bill calls for federal agencies to submit a report on "unidentified aerial phenomena (also known as 'anomalous aerial vehicles'), including observed airborne objects that have not been identified."

When former President Donald Trump signed the bill on Dec. 27, he also triggered the start of a 180-day deadline for the director of national intelligence to send the report to Congress.

The report will go to the Intelligence and Armed Services committees in each chamber of Congress.

Linda Looney wipes her face outside the Alien Research Center, a gift shop on the Extraterrestrial Highway, in Crystal Springs, Nev., in 2019. The tiny desert town is near Area 51, a secret government facility some believe is a research center devoted to studies of space aliens. John Locher/AP hide caption

Linda Looney wipes her face outside the Alien Research Center, a gift shop on the Extraterrestrial Highway, in Crystal Springs, Nev., in 2019. The tiny desert town is near Area 51, a secret government facility some believe is a research center devoted to studies of space aliens.

Speculation about extraterrestrial beings coming to Earth and potentially colonizing our planet, as humans have done to one another for millenniums has long been fuel for movies and pulp novels. But fiction or not, the military has also been intrigued by the idea.

Americans' fixation with UFOs has its roots in July 1947. According to UFO enthusiasts, that's when the U.S. Air Force allegedly recovered an alien spacecraft and its occupants near Roswell, N.M.

As with more recent efforts, the U.S. military worked to determine whether an alien force had arrived on our planet or whether the sightings potentially indicated unexpected gains in aeronautics and engineering by some rival power.

"The UFO craze began in the summer of 1947," journalist Annie Jacobsen told NPR in 2011 when she published a book about the mysterious Area 51 in New Mexico. As speculation about that incident grew, Jacobsen added, the Army intelligence corps went on a search for former Third Reich aerospace designers who were said to have created a flying disc.

That same year, the Air Force started a program to investigate UFO sightings, called Project BLUE BOOK. Over the next two decades, 12,618 strange sightings were reported to the project. When it was phased out in 1969, around 700 sightings were still categorized as "Unidentified," according to the National Archives.

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How UFO Sightings Went From Conspiracy Theory To A Serious Government Inquiry - NPR