Daily Archives: July 21, 2021

The Science Team

While the rover has significant autonomous capabilities, such as driving itself across the Martian landscape, hundreds of earthbound scientists are still involved in analyzing results and planning further investigations.

There are almost 500 people on the science team, Beegle said. The number of participants in any given action by the rover is on the order of 100. Its great to see these scientists come to agreement in analyzing the clues, prioritizing each step, and putting together the pieces of the Jezero science puzzle.

That will be critical when the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover collects its first samples for eventual return to Earth. Theyll be sealed in superclean metallic tubes on the Martian surface so that a future mission could collect them and send back to the home planet for further analysis.

Despite decades of investigation on the question of potential life, the Red Planet has stubbornly kept its secrets.

Mars 2020, in my view, is the best opportunity we will have in our lifetime to address that question, said Kenneth Williford, the deputy project scientist for Perseverance.

The geological details are critical, Allwood said, to place any indication of possible life in context, and to check scientists ideas about how a second example of lifes origin could come about.

Combined with other instruments on the rover, the detectors on the arm, including SHERLOC and WATSON, could make humanitys first discovery of life beyond Earth.

More About the Mission

A key objective for Perseverances mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planets geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASAs Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more about Perseverance:

mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

and

nasa.gov/perseverance

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Mars . Signs of Life on Mars? NASA's Perseverance Rover Begins the Hunt - Jet Propulsion Laboratory

More About the Mission

JPL manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the InSight spacecraft, including its cruise stage and lander, and supports spacecraft operations for the mission.

A number of European partners, including France's Centre National d'tudes Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), are supporting the InSight mission. CNES provided the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument to NASA, with the principal investigator at IPGP (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris). Significant contributions for SEIS came from IPGP; the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland; Imperial College London and Oxford University in the United Kingdom; and JPL. DLR provided the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument, with significant contributions from the Space Research Center (CBK) of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Astronika in Poland. Spain's Centro de Astrobiologa (CAB) supplied the temperature and wind sensors.

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News . Journey to the Center of Mars With the InSight Lander Team - Jet Propulsion Laboratory

On May 14th, 2021, the China National Space Agency (CNSA) achieved another major milestone when the Tianwen-1 lander successfully soft-landed on Mars, making China the second nation in the world to land a mission on Mars and establish communications from the surface. Shortly thereafter, China National Space Agency (CNSA) shared the first images taken by the Tianwen-1 lander.

By May 22nd, 2021, the Zhurong rover descended from its lander and drove on the Martian surface for the first time. Since then, the rover has spent 63 Earth days conducting science operations on the surface of Mars and has traveled over 450 meters (1475 feet). On Friday, July 9th, and again on July 15th, the CNSA released new images of the Red Planet that were taken by the rover as it made its way across the surface.

Since the rover deployed to the surface of Mars, it has been traveling southward to explore and inspect the terrain and has taken daily images of rocks, sand dunes, and other features using its Navigation and Topography Cameras (NaTeCam). Meanwhile, other instruments like the Mars Rover Penetrating Radar (RoPeR), Mars Rover Magnetometer (RoMAG), Mars Climate Station (MCS) have also been collecting data on Mars magnetic field, weather, and subsurface.

Whenever the rover came across notable landforms, it relied on its Mars Surface Compound Detector (MarSCoDe) and Multispectral Camera (MSCam) to carry out fixed-point scans to determine their composition. Among the new images are the two Martian rocks shown above (courtesy of CNSA via Xinhuanet) that revealed the rocks texture features, the thick layers of dust covering them, and impressions left by the ruts of the rover.

Other images (shown below, also from CNSA via Xinhuanet) include a landscape shot that was taken by Zhurong on June 26th, the rovers 42nd day on the Martian surface (Sol 42). On this day, the rover arrived in a sandy area and took images of a red dune located roughly 6 meters (~20 ft) away. As you can see (top gallery image), the dune has several rocks strewn about it, the one directly ahead of Zhurong measuring 34 cm (13.4 inches) wide.

The next image (bottom left) was taken on July 4th, Zhurongs 50th day on the Martian surface (Sol 50), after the rover drove to the south side of the dune which measures 40 m (~130 ft) long, 8 m (26.25 ft) wide and 0.6 m high (2 ft). The fifth and final landscape image (bottom right) was taken when the Zhurong rover was at a distance of 210 m (690 ft) from its landing site and 130 m (~425 ft) from the landers back cover and parachute.

These components were part of the Tianwen-1 missions Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) module. Whereas the back cover ensured that the rover and lander safely made it through deep-space and survived the turbulent ride through Mars atmosphere, the parachute was what allowed for their controlled descent through the atmosphere so they could make a soft landing.

These components are just visible in the upper right corner of the top image while a cluster of stones of various shapes is visible on the left. More recent images acquired by the rover were released on July 15th, 2021, which showed the rover inspecting the back cover and parachute more closely (see below). The first image (top left) was acquired three days prior and shows these two components on the rovers left side as it continued on its southbound patrol.

As the CNSA indicated in a press statement that was released along with the images:

The picture shows the full view of the parachute and the complete back after aerodynamic ablation. Cover structure, the attitude control engine diversion hole on the back cover is clearly identifiable, the rover is about 30 meters away from the back cover and about 350 meters away from the landing site during imaging.

The second and third images (black and white) were taken by the front and rear obstacle avoidance cameras as the rover made its approach and departure from the back cover and chute. The fourth image shows the parachute after it was deployed during the landers descent over Utopia Planitia (where it landed) on May 15th. Yet another image was released by the CNSA the following day, which shows Tianwen-1s landing site.

This image was taken by the orbiter element of the mission on June 2nd, days after the lander and rover element safely landed. The locations of the lander, the rover, the parachute, and back cover, and the heat shield are all indicated in white. The two white dots at the top right corner are the lander and rover, the parachute and back cover are almost directly beneath it (the elongated white mark being the chute) while the heat shield is at the bottom right.

The Tianwen-1 mission was quite the feather in the cap of the CNSA, and not just because it was Chinas first mission to Mars. By successfully deploying this mission, China became the first nation to reach Mars with a mission that included an orbiter, lander, and rover element. Prior to this, every space agency that successfully sent a robotic mission to Mars began with orbiters, followed by surface missions landers first, then landers with rovers.

On top of that, the Zhurong rover makes China the second nation in the world (after the US) to land and operate a rover on the Martian surface. This will be followed in the near future by the Rosalind Franklin rover (part of the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars program) which will launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome sometime this September and is expected to arrive at Mars on June 10th, 2023.

These missions will help pave the way for human exploration, which China is now hoping to do (alongside NASA) during the 2030s. Much like all the crewed lunar missions planned for the near future, the human exploration of Mars is expected to be a multinational affair!

Originally published on Universe Today.

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New Images of Mars From Chinas Zhurong Rover - SciTechDaily

"That's one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind," said Neil Armstrong on this date in 1969 in the gender biased language of the era. There is a new space race today. A Chinese rocket has landed on Mars and deposited a rover vehicle capable of doing all sorts of exciting science. This means that the Americans are no longer the only nation to have sent a vehicle to another planet. More significantly, the Chinese have announced their plan to send people to the Martian surface in the year 2033 and to eventually build a base there.

Meanwhile, NASA, in conjunction with Elon Musk and other contemporary space cowboys, have plans to build an inhabited base on the Moon and, eventually, on Mars. At stake in this new space race: space mining rights, being the first to discover new science, and just being first; one thing that has not changed since the 60s.

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WeatherTalk: There is a new space race to Mars and beyond - The Dickinson Press

NASA's Curiosity rover might be sitting near a wealth of information that might hint at signs of life on Mars. New Scientist and Space.com note that Caltech researchers have identified six locations for methane "burps" (that is, emissions blips) on the planet, including one just a few dozen miles west southwest from Curiosity. Ideally, the rover could investigate the emissions and determine their true nature.

Curiosity has detected the methane spurts six times since landing on Mars in 2012, but scientists haven't had success locating their sources until now. Europe's Trace Gas Orbiter has also failed to spot methane at atmospheric levels. The Caltech team narrowed down the on-the-ground sources by modelling methane particles as packets and tracing their routes based on historical wind velocity.

The research hasn't yet been peer-reviewed, so we'd take it with a grain of caution. It's also entirely possible that the gas has non-organic origins. Even if that's the case, though, the burps could be tied to geological activity linked to liquid water. Early Mars reportedly held massive amounts of water even if there's no active water at these sources, a close-up study could help illustrate Mars' history.

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Curiosity rover might be sitting near microbe 'burps' on Mars - Engadget

We have a Rover driving around Mars sending us sights and sounds of an alien world that is truly a technical marvel. So why, with this level of technology,cant we devise a hi-tech voting system?

Instead of expanding a stone-age, paper mail-in voter system presently, asnowunder consideration, why not voter ID cards with multiple security features similar to credit cards thathave been protecting untold trillions of transactions securely for years? Voters could cast their ballots securely and then also be able to check their ballots integrity throughout the election process.

A secure, digital, and transparent voting system could eliminate our present-day, divisive suspicions of voter fraud and conspiracies born out of archaic, paper ballots. Or do we want to retain our ancient, stone-age, mail-in systems with their inherent risks of suspicious, smoke-and-mirrors, behind-the-curtain fraud and nefarious activities that can further inflame, weaken, and split our nation apart?

We are preparing to spend trillions on infrastructure and national security, but we are unable or unwilling to address and develop a more secure and transparent voting system that is absolutely vital to our precious democracy?!

John Weiglhofer

Hadlyme

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We can put a vehicle on Mars. Can't we fix voting integrity? - theday.com

VANCOUVER, Wash., July 20, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --Mars Veterinary Health North America, part of family-owned company Mars, Incorporated, today announced a $500 million multi-year commitment to create career advancement opportunities, increase workforce diversity, and offer differentiated pay and benefits by 2025. As the nation's largest provider of veterinary care, Mars Veterinary Health is committed to advancing the profession for the health and wellbeing of people, pets, and the planet.

Mars Veterinary Health is a family of more than 2,000 premier veterinary healthcare and diagnostic providers nationwide, including Banfield Pet Hospital, BluePearl Specialty and Emergency Hospitals, VCA Animal Hospitals and Antech Diagnostics in the United States.An employer of more than 55,000 Associates in the U.S. alone, Mars Veterinary Health North America is setting the industry standard for competitive and differentiated rewards and development designed to support Associate health & wellbeing, advance career growth, and promote workforce diversity.

"At Mars Veterinary Health, we recognize that to make A BETTER WORLD FOR PETS, we need to make a better world for the people who care for them," said Doug Drew, President of Mars Veterinary Health North America. "Recognizing the evolving needs of the veterinary profession and after considering feedback from more than 10,000 Associates, we are investing in programs that further enhance their health and wellbeing. While there is more work to do, we're optimistic about the meaningful impact these changes will have in our Associates' lives and look forward to collaborating with the veterinary profession for the health and wellbeing of people, pets, and the planet."

Key aspects of the investment and commitments by 2025 include:

"As a veterinarian who is deeply invested in advancing the profession and addressing key challenges such as diversity, mental health and wellbeing, and veterinary professional shortages it is facing we hope these commitments give Associates the support and peace of mind they need to advance their careers and provide high-quality care to pets," said Dr. Jennifer Welser, Chief Medical Officer, Mars Veterinary Health. "But more than that, we hope our actions communicate to veterinary professionals, and especially our Associates, that their voices are heard and valued as we continue to invest in programs and initiatives that are intended to directly impact their lives for the better."

These investments are part of a multi-year roadmap that aim to create thriving careers, workforce diversity, and sustainable change within the veterinary profession.

About Mars Veterinary HealthMars Veterinary Health is a global division within Mars Petcare more than 65,000 Associates strong dedicated to delivering high-quality pet healthcare to further its collective Purpose: A BETTER WORLD FOR PETS. Mars Veterinary Health's network operates more than 2,500 veterinary clinics around the world, putting pets, people, and the planet first. The Mars Veterinary Health network includes Associates at AniCura, Antech, Asia Veterinary Diagnostics, Banfield, BluePearl, Linnaeus, Mount Pleasant, VCA, VES, and VSH who demonstrate compassion and expertise by providing care to more than 25 million pets each year. Learn more at marsveterinary.com. Press seeking additional information are invited to contact [emailprotected].

SOURCE Mars Veterinary Health

https://www.marsveterinary.com

Originally posted here:

Mars Veterinary Health North America announces $500 million multi-year investment to promote thriving careers, workforce diversity, and sustainable...

Billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos aren't the only first-time astronauts who are thrilled to be going to space.

Millennial mom, TikTok star and citizen astronaut Kellie Gerardi is headed to space with Branson's Virgin Galactic, and she's "just beyond excited for astronaut training."

Gerardi got one step closer to fulfilling a "life-long dream" of heading to space when Virgin Galactic announced in June that the 32-year-old Palantir Technologies project manager and amateur bioastronautics researcher will be on an as yet un-named upcoming search mission aboard one of the private space company's spacecraft.

But perhaps the most exciting part of the trip is that Gerardi is not a professional scientist, and she hopes her trip of a lifetime will help pave the way for a wider range of amateur space enthusiasts, with diverse backgrounds, to reach space.

Gerard, who lives in Florida with her husband, Steven Baumruk, and their 3-year-old daughter, Delta, works on a customer support team at Peter Thiel's software company. She's also a popular science influencer who regularly posts space- and STEM-focused content on social media, including to her nearly half a million followers on TikTok.

Gerardi says she never really considered being an astronaut herself until she started participating in public science campaigns over the past decade.

In 2012, Gerardi started working as a media specialist with the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry association that lobbies on behalf of commercial spaceflight companies. From 2014 to 2020, Gerardi worked on business development for aerospace company Masten Space Systems.

During that time, Gerardi joined the Explorer's Club, which "promotes the scientific exploration of land, sea, air, and space," according to its website, in 2012. She decided to join after she met club president Richard Garriott, a millionaire video game developer who had previously paid $30 million to go to space for 12 days in 2008. Gerardi called that her "aha moment" in which she realized that the commercial spaceflight industry was opening the door for a wider range of people to go to space.

In 2014, Gerardi also got to spend two months as a crewmember at the Mars Desert Research Station, a prototype laboratory in Utah that simulates conditions on Mars, after she was accepted to the Mars One mission, a venture that had planned to send the first people to Mars by 2025 but was eventually shut down. (The mission had been criticized by scientists for not being feasible, and the venture filed for bankruptcy in 2019.)

In 2017, she joined the International Institute of Astronautical Sciences (IIAS) to study bioastronautics in her free time and be a part of an IIAS program that trains private citizens for spaceflight and space research. Gerardi completed an IIAS program called "Project PoSSUM," which offers courses (starting at $4,000 for a five-day in-person course, plus three weeks worth of webinars) that include lessons on topics such as bioastronautics and atmospheric studies, as well as training for space conditions in high altitude flights (where trainees experience weightlessness and even practice moving around in a spacesuit).

IIAS is now funding Gerardi's spaceflight and her training. The institute's overarching mission is in promoting the democratization of space by training private citizens to go to space and conduct research there. Through IIAS, Gerardi has already been on multiple parabolic, or gravity-free, research flights, which simulate weightless space conditions for mere seconds at a time by flying at high altitudes. She will conduct experiments on behalf of IIAS on the Virgin Galactic space flight, like donning the Astroskin Bio-monitor system, a "smart undergarment" that monitors astronauts' vital signs.

Gerardi revealed her big space flight news on TikTok with a series of short videos, including one with Delta that notes fewer than 100 women have been in space, which has been viewed over 1.6 million times.

After Virgin Galactic and IIAS announced her flight in June, Gerardi spoke to CNBC Make It about her longtime dream of going to space and why her ultimate goal is to pave the way for more private citizens, like herself especially women to reach the stars.

CNBC Make It: As a woman and mom, how cool has it been to share this exciting news with your daughter, Delta?

Kellie Gerardi: The most rewarding part is definitely telling our 3 year old daughter, Delta.

I get emotional when I think about what it means for her to watch her mommy become an astronaut, because it's meaningful. And, in her little mind, she thinks flying to space is just another thing that moms do.

And that's just so cool.

How did the Virgin Galactic opportunity come about?

I've been working with IIAS on microgravity [the state of weightlessness in space] research, astronautics research.... And I've also been really heavily involved in outreach and engagement for the organization, especially towards young women.

Enabling access to space for this research community has been a long-time goal of IIAS. So, it really is an exciting honor to be entrusted with the opportunity to just show how all researchers can use the environment of space and these human-tended research fights on platforms like Virgin Galactic as a laboratory to benefit all of humanity.

When did you officially find out you were going to space and what was that like?

It formalized just a few weeks before the announcement. And, you know, it's euphoria, right?

And, I definitely don't want to downplay my excitement; I was and remain overwhelmed with excitement. But, I do feel like sometimes people expect me to say something like, 'I never could have dreamed of this.'

But, that would not be really true. The reality is, I have dreamed of this exact opportunity every single day in detail for a decade, or so. It's like this has always been living in the back of my head, rent-free.

The flight will be around 75 minutes, in total, and you'll have just a few minutes of weightlessness to conduct your experiments before returning to Earth's atmosphere. How do you plan to use that time?

I'm going to be choreographing every single second [of the flight] while I'm here on Earth. I'm going to make sure that every single second is accounted for to maximize the science returns, but also to account for the reality of this being the most exciting moment of my life.

I want to plan for the reality that I'm going to be overwhelmed in the best way. So, I really want to bookmark 30 seconds to a minute, specifically, to just look out the window and digest the fact that I'm in space and the profundity of that moment.

What sort of training or preparation do you need to complete before you can go on this spaceflight?

"I like to joke that I'm upping my dose of 'Vitamin G' [aka g-force].

So, I'll choreograph all of my movements in the cabin and I'll practice that choreography on a series of aerobatic, or High-G flights [where she'll be subjected to high levels of gravitational force] and parabolic [zero-gravity] flights in a test flight suit that is an exact replica of what I'll be wearing in space.

Back in 2014, you were training to potentially go to Mars, and you were a crewmember at the Mars Desert Research Station. Is going to Mars still a goal for you?

I think I'm location agnostic when it comes to space.

Going to Mars is one of those like, 'Oh, gosh, I just wanted to be involved in the societal conversation.' And I really wanted to, like, remove the giggle factor, of the fact that we can send humans to live and work on Mars. That is something within our engineering capability as a society right now.

For me, if I had the opportunity ever to go, yeah, in a heartbeat. But if I had to answer the interview question of where I see myself in five years, it's not necessarily on Mars.

How important do you think it is that you share your journey, and your love of science and space, with your many social media followers? And, did it bother you at all when some headlines about your spaceflight referred to you only as a "TikTok star"?

I think some people would expect that I would feel, I don't know, undermined by that or that it was reductionist somehow. But I feel the opposite.

I'm actually super humbled to have the attention shined on the fact that I have been able to harness some of these social media platforms to really help evangelize space exploration...That's exactly what I set out to do on social media.

I set out to influence the way that people think about space exploration and the type of people that they associate with space exploration.

Gerardi's June interview with CNBC Make It has been edited for length and clarity.

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How millennial mom and TikTok influencer Kellie Gerardi became a 'citizen astronaut' who's going to space with Virgin Galactic - CNBC