Daily Archives: April 15, 2022

If you think sunrises on Earth are amazing, wait until you see one on Mars.

This stunning view comes from NASA's InSight Mars lander, which snapped images of the Martian sunrise on April 10.

"I'll never tire of sunrise on Mars," NASA officials wrote in the lander's "voice" in a Twitter post Wednesday (April 13). "Each morning, that distant dot climbs higher in the sky, giving me energy for another round of listening to the rumbles beneath my feet."

As if the image wasn't enough, the InSight mission team combined several of InSight's sunrise photos into a short timelapse of daybreak on the Red Planet and included it in the Twitter post.

Related: Photos of NASA's InSight mission to Mars

InSight (short for "Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport") is a stationary Mars lander designed to study marsquakes and the interior of the Red Planet. The lander touched down in the Elysium Planitia region of Mars in November 2018 and is currently in an extended phase after completing its primary mission of one full Martian year (about 687 Earth days) studying the Red Planet.

In January, a massive dust storm on Mars forced InSight to slip into a protective "safe mode" when its solar arrays were unable to generate enough power to perform its science mission. The lander recovered by Feb. 15, NASA officials said at the time.

Currently, InSight is expected to continue its science mission on Mars into the summer and end its mission for good in December, NASA officials have said.

Email Tariq Malik attmalik@space.comor follow him@tariqjmalik. Follow us@Spacedotcom,FacebookandInstagram.

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See a sunrise on Mars in this stunning view from NASA's InSight lander (photo) - Space.com

NASA's newest Mars rover and its trusty helicopter companion were spotted all the way from space in a new photo.

In 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover and the first-ever Mars helicopter Ingenuity landed in Jezero Crater on the surface of the Red Planet. Now, a high-resolution camera on a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars has captured the pair from orbit.

The new image, snapped on March 31, the HiRISE (high resolution imagine experiment) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows both the rover and helicopter together on the planet's surface. These images come just about 16 years after the camera delivered its first Mars photos.

Related: 1 year later, Ingenuity helicopter still going strong on Mars

The spacecraft might be a bit hard to spot in the black-and-white image, but annotated versions from the space agency show the pair from above.

In the image, "Percy" (as Perseverance is known) can be seen sitting on the cracked surface of a large rock formation called "Maz," the Navajo word for "Mars." About 656 feet (200 meters) to the left of the rover, Ingenuity sits on the bedrock. A number of Martian features have been given names in the Navajo language as part of a collaboration with the Navajo Nation Office of the President and Vice President.

Perseverance was sent to Mars with two main mission objectives: to collect samples for a future return to Earth and to investigate possible evidence of ancient life on the Red Planet. Ingenuity was sent to Mars within the rover.

While the helicopter was originally only slated to perform a few flights as part of a technology demonstration, its successful performance has now seen the craft perform 22 flights and helping Perseverance in scouting out exploration routes.

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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NASA photos show the Perseverance Mars rover and tiny Ingenuity helicopter from space - Space.com

The Hope probe has three main objectives, the first is to understand the lower Martian atmosphere and its weather and climate. Yousuf continues, The second objective is to correlate the lower atmosphere conditions with the upper atmosphere to explain how weather changes the escape of hydrogen and oxygen. And the final objective that we have is to understand the structure and variability of hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere and why Mars is losing them into space.

The focus on space for the UAE comes at an important time as mapping Mars will contribute to the work of not just the knowledge economy of the UAE, but advance science for the whole world. The UAE is basically investing in space, as investing in the space sector means investing in the human capital towards a better future for all, says Yousuf.

This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with the UAE Pavilion Expo 2020 Dubai.

Meet the Emirati engineers of Hope Probe Mars Mission, Gulf News, February 10, 2021

Laurel Ruma: From MIT Technology Review, I'm Laurel Ruma. And this is Business Lab. The show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab and into the marketplace.

Our topic today is the Emirates Mars Mission, also known as the Hope Probe. Hope aims to be the first probe to provide a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere and its layers. The data collected by Hope will help answer key questions about the global Martian atmosphere and the loss of hydrogen and oxygen gases into space over the span of one Martian year.

Two words for you, space data.

My guest today is Maryam Yousuf, who is a data analyst for the Emirates Mars Mission.

This podcast is produced in association with UAE Pavilion Expo 2020 Dubai.

Welcome, Maryam.

Maryam: Hi, Laurel. Thank you for having me.

Laurel: To begin with, I want to congratulate you and your team. The United Arab Emirates is the fifth country in history to reach Mars and only the seventh in the world to reach the orbit of another planet. And to top it all off, the performance of the spacecraft is exceeding expectations. What does this mean for the UAE? And what kind of impact is it having on the UAE's aspiring scientists?

Maryam: Thank you for the congratulations. And it's for everyone, I think, having this mission to go to Mars and get the unique data that we have. Hope Probe is the vision of the late founder of the Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, where he envisioned the UAE leading in the sector one day. One of the predominant project goals is developing the science and technology sectors within the UAE, in terms of capacity building and forging new pathways for the younger generations in research and development in the natural sciences domains, as they lay the foundation for any space exploration initiative in the future.

Laurel: That is very inspiring. The UAE's Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center with the international Mars science community is defining the objectives for the mission. What are those objectives and how will they further international goals to understand Mars?

Maryam: The Emirates Mars Mission will be the first mission to provide the full global picture of the Martian atmosphere. So three scientific objectives. The first objective is to characterize the Martian lower atmosphere to understand the climate dynamic and the global weather map. The second objective is to correlate the lower atmosphere conditions with the upper atmosphere to explain how weather changes the escape of hydrogen and oxygen. And the final objective that we have is to understand the structure and variability of hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere and why Mars is losing them into space.

Laurel: No small feats. These are big goals, for sure. Hope aims to provide the first comprehensive picture of Mars climate and atmosphere. Hopes unique 25-degree elliptical orbit enables it to collect data and high-resolution images of the planet's atmosphere every 225 hours or 9.5 days. What data is the Hope Probe collecting? How does it actually collect it?

Maryam: We have three instruments on board of Hope Probe. Two are studying the lower atmosphere and one is studying the upper atmosphere. If we speak about those that are studying the lower atmosphere, we have the Emirates Exploration Imager or EXI, which is a digital camera that is capable of taking 12-megapixel images while maintaining the radiometric calibration needed for the detailed scientific analysis. It will capture high resolution images of Mars, which is the RGB. And then it will measure optical depth of water ice at the range of 305 to 335 nanometers. And it will also measure the abundance of ozone at the range of 245 to 275 nanometers. All this is basically the ultraviolet bands.

The second instrument, which is the Emirates Mars Infrared Spectrometer or EMIRS, collects its data from the lower atmosphere. It is an interferometric thermal infrared spectrometer that will give a better understanding of the energy balance in the current Martian climate by characterizing the state of the lower atmosphere and the processes that are driving the global circulation. It'll measure both the surface and the atmospheric temperatures, as well as the optical depths of water ice, and dust, and the abundance of water vapor. All of this will be measured from 6 to 40 plus micrometers.

For the upper atmosphere, we have the final instrument, which is the Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer, which is EMUS. It is a far ultraviolet spectrometer that will measure oxygen and carbon monoxide and the thermosphere, and then it will measure the variability of the hydrogen and oxygen and the upper atmosphere.

Laurel: That absolutely is comprehensive. It will have a really good idea of a map of Mars from everything, from the surface to the atmosphere.

Maryam: Yeah.

Laurel: As a data analyst on the Mars Probe, what is your job like? How do you analyze so much data, and what are you looking for?

Maryam: For me personally, I only use EMIRS data for now. I basically study the impact of varying atmosphere conditions to the lower atmosphere on the out thermo-physical properties, on the Martian surface. And the thermo-physical properties are the properties that affect the energy budget itself.

All the instruments that we have on board of the Hope Probe are built on heritage data, which means we built the instruments based on the instruments used during previous Mars missions. When it comes to EMIRS specifically, we can use data from the Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES), which was on board of the Mars Global Surveyor and before the launch and so on, I used to build my code and models using TES data. Now I basically use EMIRS instead of TES.

Laurel: That's pretty exciting. You came to the mission itself as a recent graduate with a background in biomedical engineering and now you're exploring space data from Mars. How have you been able to use your own analytic skills to make that transition?

Maryam: It was very challenging, but I like to challenge myself, and I like to seize any opportunity that is presented to me. So when this opportunity was there, I was like, why not? Because everything that we need to know, we can learn it from experts or we can learn it online. I challenged myself by learning programming, which is Python language, through online courses and online sources available that we can get our hands on. And then when it comes to the science, the space science in particular, the Emirates Mars mission was built on a knowledge transfer program. So we have experts from the United States that monitor the project that we're working on. So, I have mentors that teach me about all this amazing space science that relates to Mars as well.

Laurel: That is amazing because this data will actually help the entire planet address climate change. Correct?

Maryam: I wouldn't say there is a known correlation between earth and Mars. But Mars, billions of years ago, had a very similar atmosphere to earth. It had a warm, wet, and thick atmosphere that was capable of accommodating life. Now it's basically dry, cold, and it has a very thin atmosphere. When we understand the evolution and what's currently happening to Mars that might aid us in answering questions like, what happened and what could happen to our own planet. So yeah, I can't really pinpoint the correlation between both the planets, but exploring other planets might help us in understanding our own planet.

Laurel: That's a very good point for clarification. Thank you. The Emirates Mars Mission is unique, in that the troves of data collected by Hope are being released to the public. So that means anyone me, our listeners, and more importantly, scientists based in more than 200 universities and research institutes globally can go to the Mission's website and register to access the data. Why is this important to the Mission, that all of the data be available at this scale?

Maryam: As a team, we have our objectives and hypothesis that we want to achieve or confirm. And when we share the data with everyone, they add on their knowledge and perspective to our current understanding. This contributes to a more knowledge-based economy and fosters the science community's capabilities as a collective. This step was taken to encourage the science community to break the barriers and work together for the greater good.

Laurel: Releasing all of this data in an open way and sharing it is certainly going to be exciting to young scientists and engineers and people around the world who are perhaps looking for different kinds of data sets to experiment with. What do you think it means to do this in such a collaborative way?

Maryam: A lot of things come from this. If we talk about the UAE community itself, we do a lot of outreach activities here, and we get approached by the youth and even researchers within the UAE that have used the data itself for their own projects or research. So that's one of the program objectives is basically to encourage more people to be involved in the STEM fields and so on. Another thing is when we go to conferences and other people will come to us and they basically want to collaborate, and they want to make a connection between their own projects and our projects and basically the objectives or whatever we're seeing with the data. For example, maybe they had a hypothesis about it and they want to confirm it through our data because we have such unique data. So that's really exciting. And the more we see people are into using our data, we basically want to produce the data as soon as we can.

Laurel: To keep that excitement going. Yeah.

Maryam: Yep.

Laurel: Before Hope even arrived at Mars, the probe was gathering valuable data. In November 2020, the European spacecraft, BepiColombo, was headed to Mercury. Both BepiColombo and Hope instruments were facing each other, so scientists took the opportunity to measure the amount of hydrogen between the two probes. What other unexpected opportunities has the mission encountered?

Maryam: Another observation that we haven't put our mind into is basically with the EMUS instrument. The EMUS instrument is very sensitive when it comes to the EUV, the extreme ultraviolet bands. So this basically allows us to see the discrete Aurora and this is basically not from our objectives. From about 400 observations that we've seen, we saw discrete Aurora more than 60% of the time. And that wasn't an expectation that we had or something any other mission has seen before. So, yeah, that was exciting for us.

Laurel: Speaking of other observations, the Hope Probe has made a number of them, right? With the Martian atmospheric phenomenon, including discrete aurora on Mars' nightside, remarkable concentrations of oxygen and carbon monoxide, and never-before seen images of Martian dust storms. When you see this data and the images come in, which one of these, or perhaps there are other events, has caused everyone to sit up and say, Wow, that is from Mars. No one's ever seen that before. And we're the first ones.

Maryam: I'd have to speak about myself on this one. Personally, I find dust storms very fascinating. One, because I live in a country that has a tropical desert environment, which means dust storms are very common here. Every time it becomes very dusty here, I wonder if it's the same thing that's happening on Mars atmosphere or not. But if I speak about the team, I can tell you that we see all observations of value and impact.

Laurel: Oh, I'm sure. How is the success of Hope fueling other space exploration initiatives by the UAE? Because this has been successful, what else is possible?

Maryam: The Emirates Mars Mission is just the beginning of exploring the frontiers of space. Hope Probe is the gateway to space exploration in the UAE. So currently the UAE is working on multiple initiatives in the space sector, such as the UAE Astronaut program, which prepares Emirate astronauts for scientific space exploration missions. And the new Emirati interplanetary mission, which involves an expedition to the orbit of Venus followed by an exploration of the asteroid belt, which is beyond Mars. And then in addition, we have the Emirates Lunar Mission that is launching Rashid rover by the end of this year. So that's really exciting for us. The UAE is basically investing in space, as investing in the space sector means investing in the human capital towards a better future for all.

Laurel: Maryam, thank you very much for joining us today on Business Lab.

Maryam: Thank you for having me.

Laurel: That was Maryam Yousef, a data analyst for the Emirates Mars Mission, who I spoke with from Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of MIT and MIT Technology Review, overlooking the Charles River.

That's it for this episode of Business Lab. I'm your host, Laurel Ruma. I'm the director of Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. We were founded in 1899 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And you can find us in print, on the web, and at events each year around the world. For more information about us and the show, please check out our website at technologyreview.com.

This show is available wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, we hope you'll take a moment to rate and review us. Business Lab is a production of MIT Technology Review. This episode was produced by Collective Next. Thanks for listening.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Reviews editorial staff.

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Mapping the atmosphere on Mars can help advance science on our own planet - MIT Technology Review

Earth and solar system planets, sun and star. Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, ... [+] Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. Sci-fi background. Elements of this image furnished by NASA. ______ Url(s): https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00271 https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA15160.jpg https://images.nasa.gov/details-PIA01492 https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/17549/saturn-mosaic-ian-regan https://images.nasa.gov/details-PIA21061 https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/6453/valles-marineris-hemisphere-enhanced/ https://images.nasa.gov/details-PIA23121 https://images.nasa.gov/details-PIA22946 https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/good-morning-from-the-international-space-station-1 Software: Adobe Photoshop CC 2015. Knoll light factory. Adobe After Effects CC 2017.

Where should NASA go next?

Next week, on April 19, 2022, the space agency will get a new to do list when the National Academy of Sciences finally publishes its Decadal Survey for Planetary Science and Astrobiology.

Compiled by scientists at the cutting edge of their fields and specifically designed to be fair and honest, it will set out the priorities for NASA for the next 10 years. Congress usually follows its recommendations. What will it say?

A decade ago it recommended NASA prepare as astrobiology mission to Mars as its top priority. The details changed, but the Perseverance rover is now on the red planet. The second priority was a mission to Jupiters icy moon Europa, one of the most promising environments in the solar system for supporting life. NASAs Europa Clipper is scheduled for launch in October 2024.

However, the third priority was deemed to be a Uranus Orbiter. Err ...

That last mission never got off the ground. Will Uranus or its ice giant companion in the Solar System, Neptune, get a second mention 10 years later? Or will mission concepts to visit the ice giants be consigned to history? There have been myriad other mission concepts for the Decadal Survey to peruse, from landing on Saturns ocean moon Enceladus to launching a planetary science telescope to replace Hubble.

However, theres a problem for all of those mission concepts. Mars. More specifically, our continued obsession with it.

With Perseverance now collecting samples of Martian rock and carefully placing them in boxes on the surface, a mission to go collect them and bring them homedubbed the Mars Sample Returnseems virtually self-selected as NASAs next flagship mission.

This illustration shows a concept for a set of future robots working together to ferry back samples ... [+] from the surface of Mars collected by NASA's Mars Perseverance rover.

Theres already a website for it and NASA has even been announcing contracts.

As is stands the exciting plan is for NASA to deliver a Mars lander close to Jezero Crater, where Perseverance will by then have collected and cached samples.

A Sample Retrieval Lander would carry a NASA Mars Ascent Vehicle rocket along with ESAs Sample Fetch Rover. The latter will gather the cached samples and put them on the ascent vehicle. If its close enough then Perseverance could help out. The samples would them launch a container into orbit to rendezvous with an ESA spacecraft to return to Earth.

Its a concept thats fleshed-out and, frankly, expecting to be green-lit.

This groundbreaking endeavor is destined to inspire the world when the first robotic round-trip mission retrieves a sample from another planet, said Bill Nelson, NASA Administrator. Americas investment in our Mars Sample Return program will fulfil a top priority planetary science goal and demonstrate our commitment to global partnerships, ensuring NASA remains a leader in exploration and discovery.

Could that mission possibly be delayed by the Decadal Survey to allow something ...new?

I would love to see the decadal survey discuss the pros and cons of sending the Mars Sample Return as the next flagship mission, said Abi Rymer, a Program Officer at NASA who acted as Principal Investigator for the Neptune Odyssey concept mission. Its almost like its already selected, but it really does require a flagship level effort in the next decade.

It is certainly possible that the Mars Sample Return missionwhich seems inevitable in the medium-termcould be paused. I'm hoping to see an open discussion about delaying that mission in order to get the Neptune mission, or any ice giant mission, stood up now so that we can get that window for the Jupiter gravity assist, said Rymer.

Some of the proposed missions do require a pause on Martian ambitions. Celestial mechanics dictate that if NASA is to send a spacecraft to Uranus or Neptune it needs to go by 2032 so it can sling-shot around Jupiter.

Illustration of Neptune, eighth and farthest known planet from the Sun, created on 27 August, 2019. ... [+] Also visible are several of Neptunes moons, as well the anti-cyclonic storms observed on the planets surface. (Illustration by Tobias Roetsch/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

The main reason to visit Neptune or Uranus is to figure out how the Solar System formed.

Thats important because as astronomers look at other star systems they see different kinds of planets to those in our own. The most abundant exoplanets that weve discovered are mini-Neptunes and super-Earths and we dont have either in the Solar Systemwe have Uranus and Neptune, said Dr. Jackie Faherty, Senior Scientist and Senior Education Manager jointly in the Department of Astrophysics and the Department of Education at the American Museum of Natural History. What exoplanet scientists need to know more about are the ice giantsMars isnt a world they talk about.

I definitely think there will be conversations about Uranus or Neptune, or both, said Erin Leonard at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead author of a proposal for a NASA New Frontiers mission to visit the Uranian System, which is now under review by the Decadal Survey.

Each Decadal Survey is always about yielding the most scientific benefit per dollar spent, and with the Mars Sample Return on everyones minds a lot of the mission concepts have been scaled-down.

After all, NASAs budget is tight.

The Mars Sample Return mission is one reason to be looking at lower costs, said Leonard, whose concept of a mission to Uranus would cost under the $1 billion cost-cap for a New Frontiers mission (flagship missions like Cassini and Juno tend to cost over $2 billion). Theres no guarantee that anything will be left after Mars Sample Returnand no guarantee of what the budget for the next decade will look like, said Leonard.

While flagship missions are often called Christmas Trees because they have every kind of science instrument on them and can study everything, the Uranus Orbiter would be more focused. The plan is to study the rings of Uranus, how the solar wind interacts with its magnetosphere (a kind of missing link in solar physics) and four the planets largest, innermost moons. Its suspected from Voyager 2 data that Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon are both geologically active and could host subsurface oceans.

I would love to see an ice giants mission, said Shannon M. MacKenzie, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and author of the Enceladus Orbilander Mission Concept. I think the success of Cassini at Saturn has really whetted everyones appetite for repeating Cassini at the other giant planets.

Illustration of vapour plumes erupting from the surface of Enceladus, Saturns sixth largest moon, ... [+] created on July 26, 2018. (Illustration by Tobias Roetsch/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

Her own plans to have a spacecraft visit Enceladus include a 200 days orbit to fly through the plumes of water known to be spewing into space from tiger stripe cracks on the tiny moons icy shell. The spacecraft would then follow so it can sample the material falling onto the surface. The search for life on ocean worlds is important and very different from what were doing at Mars, said MacKenzie.

After all, if life has taken hold on Enceladus then it will have had to happen completely independently from life on Earth. Thats not something anyone will be able to say for certain if traces of life are found on Mars.

With liquid water and a heat source, Enceladus is one of the most exciting places in the Solar Systems from an astrobiological point of view. If I had to put my money on something in the Solar System thats a slam-dunk for life it would be Enceladus, said Faherty. Meanwhile, while Uranus and Neptunevirtually unknown and analogs for the thousands of similarly exoplanets astronomers keep on finding in the Milky Waysurely deserve some kind of mission.

Its possible theyll get a mention, but it still seems likely that Mars Sample Return mission will get the lions share of attention in the Decadal Survey.

Mars seems to always win and part of why it wins is because we've gone there so many times, said Faherty, who thinks that its the ice giants that carry in them the secrets of how the Solar System formed. However, she knows how this works: When you go up against Mars, most of the time you lose.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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NASAs New To Do List Is Published Next Week. Will It Go To Mars, An Ice Giant Or Saturns Slam Dunk Ocean Moon? - Forbes

By Faith McKay| 9 seconds ago

Once upon a time, Tim Burton made a very daring, risky, and off-the-wall black comedy. Over 20 years later, Mars Attacks still stands out as the boldest movie in his filmography. The cast of respected high-profile actors all played terrible people who met unexpected fates. Instead of the evil and terrifying aliens of Independence Day, which also came out in 1996, Mars Attacks gave us aliens that were ridiculous jerks just kind of goofing off as they violently invaded Earth. While critics didnt get it at the time, and it was a box office flop, its still a movie audiences revisit to this day, if for no other reason than that its just an unexpected story. Now, were hearing that Tim Burton has decided to revisit it as well. A trusted and proven inside source for Giant Freakin Robot shares that Tim Burton is currently developing Mars Attacks 2.

Recently, Beetlejuice 2 was officially announced to be in development as well, which makes it sound like Tim Burton is feeling a little nostalgic these days. While our source shared that Mars Attacks 2 is in development, we dont have details on what his ideas will be this time around, but we are definitely curious.

Fans have speculated that the movie was ripe for a reboot, but a sequel is more of a surprise. The first film ended with the world officially saved in a comedic manner when humans accidentally discover the Martians true weakness in the song Indian Love Call by Slim Whitman. The song played, and the Martians were violently taken care of once and for all. Or so it would seem. Perhaps when Mars Attacks 2 arrives, the Martians will have developed better protection against the fatal song. Like really strong earplugs.

Its going to be interesting to see if Tim Burton chooses to bring back any of the original cast. The list is long, and amazingly, many of them are still high-profile actors working in Hollywood. Will Tim Burton choose to bring back original cast for Mars Attacks 2, or approach the movie with younger actors more familiar to todays audiences? That second option feels more in line with a reboot than a sequel, but may be a better fit after all this time.

When making the first movie, Tim Burton ran into some issues. He wanted to make Mars Attacks using his signature stop-motion techniques, but budget restraints reportedly led him in a different direction. Will he use his original strategy for the special effects in Mars Attacks 2? Will he keep his original tone and hope that it hits better with todays audiences? The story for Mars Attacks is based on trading cards that are much more violent than the movie Tim Burton made. Will the sequel take a more gory direction this time around? Itll be interesting to see if Tim Burton tries to recreate the elements people liked from the original movie, or if his sequel will be more of an attempt to change what he did previously. Hopefully, with his current work on Wednesday for Netflix and Beetlejuice 2, hell find time to make Mars Attacks 2 a priority soon, so we can see how hell handle a sequel for one of his strangest movies.

Read the rest here:

Exclusive: Mars Attacks 2 In The Works With Tim Burton - Giant Freakin Robot

You may have seen the story about the Psyche mission, in which NASA is preparing to launch a spacecraft that will travel to an asteroid in search of information that might unlock some of the mysteries of the universe.

But Im going to tell you the story of a different journey. Its about how Luis Dominguez, the son of immigrants from Mexico and Honduras, traveled from South Los Angeles to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he helped build the Psyche spacecraft.

Dominguez, 34, is the eldest of three boys born to Luis and Cecilia Dominguez. His dad is an auto mechanic, and Luis tagged along to his dads shop when he could, pitching in at times. His mom was a housekeeper for a while, and as a boy, Dominguez went on jobs with her, too.

Luis Dominguez is staying at his familys home in Los Angeles before relocating to Florida in the summer for the launch of the spacecraft.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

His education began at Vermont Elementary in L.A. Unified, followed by Audubon Middle School, where, by his account, he wasnt the best student in the building. But when a seventh-grade classmate brought a book to class about flight, he knew what he wanted to do with his life.

I was fascinated, and I said, OK, I want to work on airplanes, Dominguez said. He went on to Westchester High School, which had an aerospace magnet.

Dominguez told me he was up at 5 in the morning, and the bus ride to school took about an hour. Knowing what he wanted to do with his life made him more focused, and his GPA shot up like a missile. On a campus career day, a visiting Cal State professor advised him to consider majoring in mechanical engineering in college rather than aerospace, because it would give him more work options.

Luis walked in the door and it was like, Hey, what can I do? Hey, let me help you with that.

David Gruel, JPL Engineer

And so he did at Cal Poly Pomona. Dominguez lived at home to save money. He commuted to college daily, put in some hours at a convenience store and a sandwich shop in his spare time, also worked as a gardener and helped out at his dads auto shop in Inglewood.

In my junior year we had a career fair and JPL was there, and honestly, I didnt even know what JPL was. I was just giving my resume to everybody, said Dominguez, who had a 3.98 GPA at the time, and was shopping for an internship. I got a call back pretty quickly and was like, whos JPL? I looked it up on the internet and thought, oh, thats the NASA space center. This is pretty cool.

In the fall of 2007, Dominguez was assigned as a part-time student intern to JPL engineer David Gruel, who led the team assembling the Mars Science Laboratory for the Curiosity mission. A lot of student interns are passive or introverted, Gruel said. Not Dominguez.

NASA systems engineer Luis Dominguez is reflected in foil covering the spacecraft that will probe the Psyche asteroid.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Luis walked in the door and it was like, Hey, what can I do? Hey, let me help you with that. You could tell he was excited to be where he was and wanted to contribute, and he was open and willing to doing whatever task we asked him to do, Gruel said. So his first JPL experience was seeing a rover being built, which was going to land on the surface of Mars.

When the internship was done, and Dominguez graduated from Cal Poly Pomona, he had his heart set on a career at JPL. He recalls telling Gruel, Just hire me. Ill mop the floors. Ill do anything.

Gruel had seen Dominguez evolve as an intern from small tasks to doing tech support for Curiosity engineers.

I could tell that Luis was going to be a catch and that JPL would definitely benefit from bringing him on as a full-time engineer, Gruel said.

Dominguez went to JPL straight out of college and has been there since. He was deputy electrical integration and test lead on the Mars Perseverance rover that launched in 2020. Hes now the lead electrical engineer on the Psyche satellite, overseeing a team of five, and hell be in Florida when Psyche launches in August from Cape Canaveral.

Dozens of engineers and support staff are on the Psyche team. Essentially, Dominguez and his crew build the electronic guts of the craft. They take components manufactured at JPL and around the world, string everything together and put it to the test.

In a nutshell, we build the spacecraft, we take it into an environment where we shake it, we bake it, and then blow a bunch of highly pressurized air at it to create the acoustic environment you get during launch, said Dominguez.

Luis Dominguez encourages students to shoot high, take risks, be unafraid to fail, and to live life with courage, curiosity, tenacity and a healthy dose of altruism.

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

The craft will travel through space for years, scheduled to arrive at its destination an asteroid known as 16 Psyche in 2026. Asteroid mining is considered a future possibility, Dominguez said, but hes more curious about the primary aspect of the mission.

The cool thing about it is that its the biggest metallic asteroid we know about, and all data point to the fact that it is likely the core of a failed planet, said Dominguez. We can get a better understanding of what the core of Earth might look like, which is something weve never been able to do.

At JPL on Monday, Dominguez and others were putting the finishing touches on the spacecraft. At media day, I bumped into Brian Bone, manager of the assembly, test and launch operations unit.

Luis has been a key player, Bone said. Ive seen few people put in as much work whether you ask them to or not. Hes just all in, and hes always excited to be here.

Dominguez who is engaged to a woman he met years ago when they both worked at a McDonalds will soon move with the JPL team to Florida for the summer. He gave up the lease on his downtown L.A. apartment and moved temporarily into the brown stucco home where he spent much of his youth, in the neighborhood southwest of USC.

When I visited him there, his parents were away, visiting family in Mexico and Honduras, but I got to speak to them by phone.

He was always a smart kid, and he worked hard, said his mother, Cecilia.

I never had a doubt that he was going to make it, said his father, whos proud of all three sons. One of Luis younger brothers is a physician assistant, and the other is a legal assistant intent on becoming a lawyer.

Dominguez told me that during his time at JPL, hes developed another passion.

One of the things that most excites me is the opportunity to do community outreach and talk to kids about the stuff I do especially kids who come from where I came from, he said.

Last fall, Dominguez was the featured motivational speaker in an address broadcast to students, faculty and staff in the Cal State system. The Cal Poly alum told his story from the chancellors office in Long Beach, noting the focus it took for him to become a better student in high school. He credited his parents with showing him the value of sacrifice and hard work.

I never thought Id help put two 1-ton robots and a helicopter on Mars, he told his audience, calling himself a first-generation college student and a proud child of immigrants.

His advice to every student was to shoot high, take risks, be unafraid to fail, and to live life with courage, curiosity, tenacity and a healthy dose of altruism, because those are the tenets that got me where I am today.

Dominguez named in 2017 by CNET en Espaol as one of the 20 most influential Latinos in technology closed with this:

Just like the universe, every human being is filled with infinite capabilities and infinite possibilities, with genius, no matter their background, no matter their ZIP Code, no matter their financial circumstance. It is incumbent upon us as leaders to find that genius, to stoke it and let it shine, because at the end of the day, genius is everywhere.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Continued here:

Column: From LAUSD student all the way to JPL and to Mars - Los Angeles Times

Deliver Us Mars looks bleak. It looks daunting. In the most desperate, isolating and life-threatening sense, it looks terrifying. And these are just some of the compliments I could pay KeokeN Interactive and Frontier Foundry's upcoming sci-fi puzzle adventure at first glance.

That early glimpse of the developer's follow-up to Deliver Us the Moon came during last month's Future Games Show Spring Showcase, when a super moody reveal trailer set the tone. Speaking to GamesRadar+ in the wake of that world premiere, KeokeN's Koen Deetman said we should expect a similarly non-violent, story-driven odyssey this time set on the Red Planet but one that is a "radical step up in narrative and gameplay" terms over its 2018 forerunner.

As is alluded to towards the end of the above trailer, exploration underpins Deliver Us Mars, with the player having crash-landed on the as-yet uncolonized foreign planet. Environmental hazards punctuate the road to safety, which allow for puzzles that are "woven into the game's setting", and merged with action-adventure set-pieces, each of which demands quick-thinking and even faster reaction times.

"Expanding on the narrative in Deliver Us Mars means that we really went the extra mile in getting actual live performances captured, not only voice but body and face, too," explains Deetman. "It deepens the believability of the characters you'll encounter in the game and this story is brought to life by a fantastic cast, who well be able to reveal and discuss at a later date."

"In the Deliver Us series, you don't commit any violent acts, so crafting a natural pressure/conflict resolve method wasn't easy for us. With the climbing ability weve added to this game, players will experience this type of 'hold on or fall' feel of danger plus it enhances the feeling of verticality in our game without us needing to use stairs or elevators."

"Compared to the previous game, the puzzles in Deliver Us Mars have evolved from one-offs to a more elevated connected system with mechanics that give you more engaging and challenging scenarios than before. Sometimes, too, these puzzles have more than just one solution."

Building on the real-world questions posed by its predecessor tied to climate change and preserving planet Earth Deliver Us Mars is set 10 years into the future. And while the climax of Deliver Us the Moon provided a temporary solution to the world's self-destructive ills, Deliver Us Mars aims to offer hope with its learn-by-doing approach and design. In doing so, Deliver Us Mars will adopt a strictly third-person perspective a distinguished step away from its forerunner's variety of fixed and tracking camera shots.

On this, Deetman says: "Both perspectives have their positives and negatives, but the third-person perspective gives the player the ability to see their astronaut in their full glory. Driving an expensive car is nice, but actually seeing it from the outside is where the real magic comes from, right? It's similar when you see our protagonist in her slick high-tech futuristic astronaut suit it's the Ferrari of our game, so to speak."

"Theres another reason we like this perspective, though: in Deliver Us The Moon, there was a sense that this silent astronaut could've been you as a player that is, until late in the game when we finally revealed who the astronaut in the suit was. You could imagine a wholly first-person perspective working well for a completely anonymous main character, but the identity of who youre playing as is important in this series. Players will be very clear from the start of Deliver Us Mars of who their protagonist is, and therefore playing as her from a third-person perspective makes more sense especially when elements like motion-capture come into play."

"Compared to our previous game, the puzzles here have evolved from one-offs to a more elevated connected system with mechanics that give you more engaging and challenging scenarios."

To its credit, the Deliver Us Mars reveal trailer is as atmospheric as they come but we're nevertheless left with more questions than answers. What caused our crash landing? Can our malfunctioning ship be repaired? What is that ominous monolith in the distance? And is that red-handled pick-axe from B&Q or Homebase? Deliver Us Mars is as yet without a concrete release window, but Deetman assures us all will be revealed in due course, and that everything the game proposes with regards to life on the barren Mars sprawl has been researched to the fullest possible degree.

"Youve no doubt noticed that humanity hasnt colonized Mars yet, so we have to make do with what the various Mars rovers and scientists are showing to the world when we try to stick to an authentic representation of this planet. We use that as a basis for our starting point," Deetman adds. "With Deliver Us The Moon, we had astronauts confirm some of the ways the game depicted its real-life setting. Thats obviously not possible to do with Mars, but we studied the behavior of its atmosphere, how the color of the landscape changes through the night, and how its gravity behaves in comparison to Earth and the Moon. This natural character of the planet was important for us to capture."

"Another question we asked was, how would human beings actually colonize a planet like this? Throughout the development of Deliver Us Mars, weve learned a lot about how challenging this would actually be, and it underlined to us just how precious planet Earth really is."

Other, less conceptual challenges faced by KeokeN pertain to new-gen hardware. Having first launched on PC in 2018, Deliver Us the Moon was re-released on desktops the following year, before debuting on PS4 and Xbox One in 2020. Now, two years on, Deliver Us the Moon is preparing for a PS5 and Xbox Series X launch on May 19 a process that Deetman believes has helped both the developer's first game and its forthcoming sequel. From 4K visuals to feeling genuine vertigo from peering over one of the Red Planet's knife-edge gullies, it sounds like Deliver Us Mars is shaping up nicely in its current state. Deetman can't say much more than that currently, but he does promise the wait will be worth it.

He adds: "We've been really fortunate to have had the next-gen hardware at our disposal for Deliver Us The Moon while also developing Deliver Us Mars. It has absolutely benefitted from the knowledge we've acquired getting our previous game to next gen. I've seen players ask what that 'next-gen feeling' is, but I can assure you Deliver Us Mars will bring players that sensation this game really looks and sounds the part."

Read more about Deliver Us Mars on the game's official website.

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Deliver Us Mars devs on going the extra mile to create a credible alien world - Gamesradar