Daily Archives: April 8, 2024

Enlarge / SpaceX will continue to iterate on Starship.

SpaceX

Elon Musk has been talking publicly about his sweeping vision for Mars settlement for nearly eight years now, dating to a speech in Guadalajara, Mexico, in September 2016.

This weekend, at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas, Musk once again took up the mantle of his "making life multiplanetary" cause. Addressing employees at the location of the company's Starship factory, Musk spoke about the "high urgency" needed to extend the "light of consciousness" beyond Earth. That is not because humanity's home planet is a lost cause or should not be preserved. Rather, Musk said, he does not want humanity to remain a one-planet civilization that will, inevitably, face some calamity that will end the species.

All of this is fairly familiar territory for spaceflight enthusiastsand observers of Musk. But during the last eight years he has become an increasingly controversial and polarizing figure. Based on his behavior, many people will dismiss Musk's Mars comments as those of a megalomaniac. At least in regard to spaceflight, however, that would be wrong. Musk's multiplanetary ambitions today are more credible because SpaceX has taken steps toward doing what he said the company would do.

SpaceX has real hardware today and has completed three test flights. A fourth is possible next month.

"Its surreal, but its real," Musk said this weekend, describing the audacious Mars vision.

As part of his 45-minute speech, Musk spoke about the booster for Starship, the upper stage, and the company's plans to ultimately deliver millions of tons of cargo to Mars for a self-sustaining civilization.

If thousands of launches seem impossible, Musk noted that SpaceX has now completed 327 successful Falcon launches and that 80 percent of those have involved used boosters. This year, he said, SpaceX will launch about 90 percent of the mass sent into orbit from the planet. China will launch about 6 percent, he added, with the remainder of the world accounting for the other 4 percent.

This kind of performance has given Musk confidence that reusability can be achieved with the Super Heavy booster that powers Starship. On the vehicle's next test flight, possibly in May, the company will attempt to land the booster on a virtual tower in the Gulf of Mexico. If that landing is precise enough, SpaceX will try to catch the booster on the fifth test flight with the chopstick-like mechanisms on Starship's massive launch tower.

SpaceX

"Thats very much a success-oriented schedule, but it is within the realm of possibility," Musk said. With multiple test flights occurring this year, Musk said the odds of catching the booster with the launch tower this year are 80 to 90 percent.

It will take longer to land and begin reusing Starship's upper stage, which must survive the fiery reentry through Earth's atmosphere. This vehicle broke apart and burned up during its attempt to return through the atmosphere during a flight test in March. On the next flight, Musk said, the goal for Starship's upper stage is to survive this heating and make a controlled landing in the ocean. At some point this year, he expects SpaceX to achieve this milestone and then begin landing Starships back in Texas next year.

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Elon Musk just gave another Mars speechthis time the vision seems tangible - Ars Technica

Featured Image Credit: Getty/Oscar Wong/NASA

Published Apr 6, 2024, 14:30:59 GMT+1Last updated Apr 6, 2024, 14:30:57 GMT+1

When it comes to humanity finding a new planet to live on then the most obvious candidate is our planetary neighbour, Mars.

If we're talking about our other prospects in the solar system, then Mars does seem the best of a bunch of bad options.

We could either burn to death on Venus, or die on Jupiter in one of the storms which wrack its surface, themselves many times the size of Earth.

There's also the issue of even getting there in the first place.

Mars is the most obvious option for us but NASA estimates it would still take us about seven months to get there.

Humanity might not face the challenges of other planets on Mars, but there are still a plethora of ways that any Mars settlers could snuff it.

Let's start with something we tend to take for granted here on Earth - a breathable atmosphere.

On Earth, the most common element in the atmosphere is Nitrogen at 78 percent, with 0.04 percent carbon dioxide.

On Mars, the CO2 levels are at a whopping 95 percent.

For context, an atmosphere with 10 percent CO2 is enough to render someone unconscious in around 10-15 minutes, and 15 percent is unsurvivable. So 95 percent could be a slight issue.

The next is temperature, with the lowest recorded temperature in Antarctica being -93.2C.

On Mars however, temperatures routinely drop to -125C.

One person has looked into how we could adapt to the inhospitable environment on the Red Planet.

Biologist Scott Solomon published Future Humans: Inside the Science of Our Continuing Evolution, which looks into this very thing.

Solomon suggested that humans could become subject to the 'founder effect'.

This is where a species has to adapt very quickly, in evolutionary terms, to having a small population in a new environment.

Circumstances like this create a genetic bottleneck which means that mutations occur faster, which in evolutionary terms is a few hundred generations.

That could be as little as 6,000 years, so just more than all of recorded human history, no biggie.

Solomon writes in his book: "This happens routinely to animals and plants isolated on islands... but while speciation on islands can take thousands of years, the accelerated mutation rate on Mars and the stark contrasts between conditions on Mars and Earth would likely speed up the process."

For example, lower gravity on Mars could lead to a loss of bone density that could lead to bones breaking more easily.

Solomon says: "After many generations, Martian people could end up with naturally thicker bones... lending them a more robust appearance."

Fascinating!

Topics:News, World News, Space

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Scientist explains the weird stuff that would happen to the first humans who live on Mars - UNILAD

Mars is fairly attractive as a potential future home for humanity. Its solid, with firm land underfoot. Its able to hang on to a little atmosphere, which is more than you can say about the moon. Its even got a day/night cycle remarkably close to our own. The only problem is its too darn cold, and theres not a lot of oxygen to breathe, either.

Terraforming is the concept of fixing problems like these on a planet-wide scale. Forget living in domeslets just make the whole thing habitable!

Thats a huge task, so much current work involves exploring just what we could achieve with todays technology. In the case of Mars, [Casey Handmer] doesnt have a plan to terraform the whole planet. But he does suggest we could potentially achieve significant warming of the Red Planet for $10 billion in just 10 years.

Handmer doesnt hope to give Mars a comfortable climate and fully breathable atmosphere in one go. Instead, the idea is first to warm Mars up significantly and release additional carbon dioxide. The hope is that this would help create a warmer blanket around the planet as a starting point for further terraforming works. His plan involves no nuclear reactors, chemical seeding, or big mining operations. Instead, its about maximising the amount of heat pumped into Mars for the lowest cost.

The concept is simple. By increasing the amount of sunlight falling on to Mars, its temperature can be increased significantly. That additional warmth would ideally release CO2 from cold storage in carbonate deposits already on Mars. This would further accelerate warming just as it does on Earth via the Greenhouse effect. Ideally, pump enough heat in initially to get that CO2 into the atmosphere, and our favorite greenhouse gas might just do the rest.

To get more sunlight on Mars, Handmer proposes using solar sails. Not just one, or two, or a hundred, but solar sails in their billions. They would use light from the sun to travel from Earth to Mars on a timescale of months. When arriving at Mars, they would be stationed at the Sun-Mars L2 Lagrange point, where the required orbital corrections would be at a minimum. From that point, the solar cells would position themselves to reflect sunlight on to the Martian surface to provide heating.

The sun already provides energy on the level of roughly 600 watts per square meter on the Martian surface. That sums up to about 21,600 terawatts across the entire planet. Compare that to the 8 gigawatts or so put out by our largest nuclear reactor, and its easy to see the sun is providing a lot more energy than we could hope to achieve with any kind of operation on the Martian surface. Reflect more of that sun, and that number goes up nicely.

Handmer notes that a reflector covering 1,000 square meters would reflect 600 kW of sunlight towards Mars. 1,000 sails of this size would effectively add a square kilometer of surface to Marss existing cross-sectional area of 36,000,000 square kilometers. Thats not really a whole lot.

As mentioned above, the key is to scale into the billions. The idea is that these simple solar sails could be manufactured on the cheap. Handmer posits that a 1,000 gram sail craft could cover the aforementioned 1,000 square meters. He estimates a production cost on the order of $100, roughly equivalent to a modern cellphone. For electronics, the sail would need a processor, a telemetry radio, a small solar panel, and a camera to act as a star tracker for navigation. It would then use LCD panels to act as reflectively-variable elements to change its direction under the influence of the sun. At that weight, launch costs would be around $2000. Add that on to the manufacturing cost, and youve got 1,000 square meters of Mars reflector for just $2100. Advances could shave manufacturing costs and weight down further, slashing launch costs which are heavily weight dependent.

If these solar sails could be manufactured with the same efficiency we churn out smartphones, we could churn out hundreds of millions of these craft in a few years. Handmer suggests a decade of launches could net 1.5 billion sails in position around Mars, which would be good enough for increasing energy input to the planet by 4%. In turn, Mars thermal radiation would have to increase by 4% to balance this extra energy input, which suggests its basic temperature would rise from 210 K to 212 Kor roughly -61.15 Celsius. He costs all this out at around $10 billion, which sounds awfully cheap in the grand scheme of things.

Okay, so that still sounds terribly cold. And it is! But that rise of two degrees isnt to be sniffed at. As Handmer points out, thats more than weve achieved here on Earth in 250 years of rampant fossil fuel use. He also notes that the shining solar sails would make for a brilliant view from Marss surface, though its perhaps unlikely many humans would be there to see it, at such cold temperatures.

Further gains could be made with some strategy. If cold deposits of stored carbon dioxide were spotted on the surface, the sail network could ideally be aimed to some degree to prioritize warming of those areas first. Done right, this could speed temperature rises on Mars quite significantly.

Its a brilliant idea, and one wed like to see explored further. At the same time, its unlikely to get real legs any time soon. Theres little will to terraform Mars right now, given we havent even sent a human over for look just yet.

Furthermore, even if Mars was warmed significantly, theres still the question of whether the atmosphere and environment could be made livable. Humans need oxygen, and we like a certain atmospheric pressure and lots of water. Getting Mars into the right ball park on all these measures would be tough, and maintaining it would involve countering the effects of the solar wind, which has stripped the planets atmosphere in the past.

The plan also glosses over some finer points of the engineering required. Its one thing to build 1.5 billion solar sails, and another thing entirely to launch them all and get them to Mars. Once there, theyd need to be very well organized to avoid crashing into each other and turning into one big tangled blob in orbit.

Handmer has put together a very compelling plan to warm Mars, and to do it on the cheap. Whether it would work is an open question, but this is the kind of wide-ranged blue-sky thinking thats required to solve the space-based problems of tomorrow. Terraforming an entire planet isnt something you do on the small scale; its something that requires the massed industrial outputs of entire societies. Thats a lesson we must learn, not just on Mars, but on Earth.

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Heating Mars On The Cheap - Hackaday

Mars' rusty red surface may have given it its famous "Red Planet" status, but it would also appear that thousands of white rocks are strangely littered on the Martian ground. NASA's Perseverance rover, a robotic geologist that has been exploring the Jezero Crater since early 2021, puzzled scientists when it delivered images of over 4,000 light-toned, pebble-sized rocks scattered all over the crater floor.

"These are very unusual rocks and we're trying to figure out what's been going on," Candice Bedford, a planetary scientist at Purdue University in Indiana and a member of the Mars 2020 science team, said at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LSPC) last month.

The announcement comes as NASA wraps up an architectural review of returning Martian rocks to Earth as part of the agency's ambitious Mars Sample Return (MSR) program.

Related: NASA's Perseverance rover captures 360-degree view of Mars' Jezero Crater (video)

The imaged white rocks are what scientists refer to as "floats," meaning they have been removed and transported from their original habitats; some are smooth with pits while others appear to be an amalgamation of multiple layers. Initial analyses, conducted with Perseverance's onboard instruments, revealed the rocks are dehydrated not only in water content, but also in other minerals including iron, magnesium, calcium and sodium. "These are pretty depleted in a lot of things," Bedford said.

The team is particularly interested in the origins of these unusual rocks as their sources can reveal clues about the Red Planet's past, including precisely when water would've flooded the Jezero crater, which we see as an arid stretch of land today. Despite spotting more than 4,000 such rocks, Perseverance hasn't managed to see even a hint of what's known as an "outcrop" related to the rocks, which is essentially a bedrock of similar properties that'd jut out of the Martian surface.

The rocks' dehydrated nature suggests they were heated and metamorphosed by either lava flows or asteroid impacts elsewhere on Mars and later dumped onto the crater floor, said Bedford. Whatever the specific process may have been, she and her team suspect it would have occurred relatively recently in terms of Jezero Crater's geologic history.

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The Perseverance rover, which has driven more than 15 miles (24.8 kilometers) since its arrival on Mars, celebrated 1,000 days of science last December, which also marked the official completion of the mission it was originally designed to do. It has now filled 26 of its 43 Mars rock sample tubes, mission team members shared at LPSC. "Each sample has innumerable grains that we could potentially study for forever, essentially," said Benjamin Weiss, a professor of planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Mars 2020 team.

As part of a bonus mission that kicked off this spring, Bedford said Perseverance began inching its way toward the Jezero Crater rim, and its long-distance camera has already imaged more light-toned rocks scattered in that area as well.

All of these puzzling rocks, however, are not the only reason why scientists are eager to get Perseverance to the crater rim and possibly beyond. There, they believe a unique geology exists, one that hasn't yet been encountered within the crater floor. That includes pre-Jezero rocks that may have records of the formation of Mars' crust and early climate. It may even hold evidence of biosignatures.

Scientists are currently tagging a variety of interesting sampling locations while mapping the rim itself in more detail, said Lisa Mayhew, a research associate at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Of much interest to scientists is a terrain adjacent to Jezero crater called Nili Planum, whose rocks they think would have formed in warm conditions during a time when life most likely evolved if it ever existed on the now-barren world, that is. Sampling such rocks "would provide huge added scientific value to the cache that's already existing on Perseverance," said Mayhew.

That scientific value, however, can only be fully realized after those rocks are returned to Earth.

Scientists need to time-date them using equipment on Earth, without which they wouldn't have a precise timeline for when the Red Planet was habitable and when it became parched. "It doesn't overstate to say it will revolutionize our understanding of Mars," said Weiss.

Questions remain about the MSR program, which NASA is spearheading, including when and how the agency plans to return collected samples to Earth. Last October, NASA commissioned a response team (MIRT) to evaluate alternative approaches to MSR after an independent review board (IRB) found the current architecture would lead to overruns in cost and schedule.

"Much of the work is already complete," said Meenakshi Wadhwa, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and MSR's principal scientist. The MIRT's recommendation report for a new approach was expected by the end of March, followed by a revised plan and budget by NASA sometime in April, she said.

The agency's fiscal year 2025 budget proposal, made public March 11, allocated $2.7 billion for planetary science but the funding for MSR remained "TBD." NASA's budget this year and next will be announced in April after the MIRT review is completed, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters at the time.

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Thousands of strange white rocks found on Mars. Will they ever be brought to Earth? - Space.com

Mars has long captured the attention and imagination of scientists, writers, and stargazers alike. Scientists have observed Mars with telescopes and rovers to study major questions like how planets in our solar system formed and what is necessary for the development of life. However, scientists are limited in what they can observe without landing humans on the red planet itself. The need for better measurements and data has driven NASA plans to send astronauts to Mars as early as the 2030s. But before astronauts can make the trip to Mars, they must test and approve safety, mechanical, and logistical protocols, and decide what to pack on the spaceship.

When planning for space travel, engineers carefully balance how much fuel a rocket can carry with how much weight that fuel can move. If a rocket carries too much weight, it can run out of fuel before it reaches its final destination. Because of this weight budget, the engineers must consider how much different experimental and survival tools weigh. Scientists have proposed creating building materials and products on the planet itself, rather than carrying them from Earth. Theyve developed ways to create essential materials using human blood, sweat, and other products mixed with Martian dust, called regolith. Now scientists are looking to create even more materials by growing lightweight microbes.

A team of researchers at the University of Cagliari, Sassari, and the Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia, Italy, investigated whether the nutrients and minerals in astronaut pee and Martian regolith can be used to grow a group of microbes called cyanobacteria. These microbes use photosynthesis like plants and produce many chemicals and nutrients useful to humans and other life forms.

The team mixed synthetic regolith and synthetic pee that mimic actual Martian and astronaut materials to create a liquid called the Martian Medium, or MM. They added MM to a standard mixture of nutrients and minerals that are used to grow microbes at 20%, 40%, 60%, and 80% strength, and used it to grow cyanobacteria. They found the cyanobacterial cells could not grow well in 60% and 80% MM compared to the standard mixture and produced less chlorophyll, the green pigment that allows plants and cyanobacteria to perform photosynthesis. However, the scientists noticed that after 45 days in 40% MM, the cyanobacteria began to grow well and were more active than those grown in the standard mixture.

The scientists suspected that because the cells grew better in 40% MM they were producing more nutrients than normal and could be a good food source for astronauts. The team harvested cyanobacteria grown in 40% MM and used several chemical reactions to measure how much nutrients they contained. These reactions create a color change based on the amount of proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates in the harvested cells. The team measured the intensity of the color change during the reactions and found that cyanobacteria grown in 40% MM produced about 33% more carbohydrates but 15% less protein than cyanobacteria grown in the standard mixture. Despite the lower protein content, the cyanobacteria still contained healthy amounts of nutrients that could act as a food supplement for astronauts.

Next, the team investigated the specific molecules in the harvested cyanobacteria with a method that uses gas and liquids to force the cellular nutrients through a column packed with different chemical substances, called chromatography. As the molecules travel through the column, some move slower than others, depending on how strongly the molecule interacts with these substances. Molecules that do not interact with the substance move quickly through the column, while molecules that interact strongly with the substance move more slowly through the column, causing the molecules to separate into a pattern the scientists can identify.

Using chromatography, the team found the cyanobacteria grown in 40% MM contained many saturated fats that could increase the astronauts risk of heart disease if they consumed too much. On the other hand, these cyanobacteria were enriched in fats known to fight infection and inflammation. They also found these cyanobacteria contained antioxidants that could help astronauts who experience oxidative stress from radiation and low gravity on Mars.

Lastly, the team grew human stem cells and fed them different amounts of harvested cyanobacteria to test if cyanobacteria grown in 40% MM were toxic. The scientists found that the human cells fed cyanobacteria grown in 40% MM or the standard mixture survived and grew. However, stem cells fed the cyanobacteria grown in 40% MM produced up to 30% more cells than those fed cyanobacteria grown in the standard mixture.

The research team considered these results a promising sign that cyanobacteria can be grown cheaply on Mars and used as a dietary supplement. They suggested future researchers should verify that eating cyanobacteria is safe for astronauts, not just human cells in a petri dish. The researchers concluded that these microbes contain enough nutrients and antioxidants to supplement a healthy Martian diet.

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Could microbes feed astronauts on Mars? - Sciworthy

By Alimat Aliyeva

SpaceX held a big presentation at which the head of the organization, Elon Musk, spoke. Azernews reports that the billionaire shared his vision of the future of SpaceX, as well as an approximate plan for the colonization of Mars.

According to the billionaire, the giant Starship 3 rocket will serve as the base for the colonization of Mars. It is equipped with a new generation Raptor engine, thanks to which the rocket will be able to carry up to 200 tons of cargo on board.

Musk did not specify when Starship 3 will be put into operation, but stressed that it will cost the company very cheaply. According to him, if the launch of Falcon 1 now costs $ 10 million, then Starship 3 will cost $ 2-3 million.

"These are almost inconceivable figures. No one ever thought that such a thing would be possible. At the same time, in order to achieve this goal, we will not have to violate the laws of physics at all," Musk said.

In addition, the head of SpaceX added that his company will take about 20 years to explore Mars. During this time, he said, about one million people could be sent to the red planet, which would be enough to create a self-sufficient colonial city.

Musk wants ships to go to Mars about every two years. This regularity will ensure that colonizers not only receive regular resources, but also the opportunity to return to Earth. At the same time, the billionaire believes that most newly minted Martians will still be unable to return to their home planet.

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Elon Musk to send a million people to Mars - AzerNews.Az

Currently in the twelfth year of its mission, NASA's Curiosity rover continues to press on while treading the world of Mars, delving into areas no rover has gone before. The latest phase of Curiosity's adventure has brought it to what some scientists believe is the desiccated bed of an ancient river.

As Curiosity prepares to follow Gediz Vallis, as scientists call this winding and boulder-choked channel, it will try to give scientists a look back through time so they can discover how the landform came to be in the first place

Originally slated for a two-year-mission, Curiosity continues to trawl the Martian surface in search of new insight into the Martian environment and life that might have once lived or still lives on the Red Planet. Since 2014, the rover has been ascending the foothills of Mount Sharp, which rises 3 miles (5 kilometers) above the rover's original landing site in Gale Crater.

Related: NASA's Perseverance rover confirms presence of ancient lake on Mars and it may hold clues to past life

Gediz Vallis snakes through Mount Sharp. Billions of years ago, the mountain as with the rest of Mars would have been significantly wetter than it is today. Over time, as Mars dried up, wind and remnant water eroded the mountain into the layers Curiosity can see today. Scientists believe some force of Martin nature carved the Gedis Vallis channel into Red Planet slopes during this drying time.

It's possible that wind created Gediz Vallis however, the channel's sides are steeper than scientists would expect from a wind-carved vale. Thus, it's possible the channel is the work of landslides stemming from further up the mountain, which might have deposited boulders and other rocky debris that Curiosity spotted filling Gediz Vallis' floor. Or, perhaps more enticingly, it's possible Gediz Vallis was formed by flowing liquid water.

"If the channel or the debris pile were formed by liquid water, that's really interesting. It would mean that fairly late in the story of Mount Sharp after a long dry period water came back, and in a big way," said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity's project scientist at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement.

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Curiosity will spend months exploring the channel, looking at more than just the Martian past. The rover doesn't have the capability to summit Mount Sharp, so looking up from the channel is the best way it can help scientists learn more about what lies up there.

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NASA's Curiosity Mars rover begins exploring possible dried-up Red Planet river - Space.com