Category Archives: Mars Colony

ONCE upon a time, Nasa believed we would one day end up living in giant inflatable space doughnuts.

The U.S. space agency designed a wheel-shaped habitat almost five decades ago that would house up to 140,000 residents.

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In the early 1970s, Nasa was at a crossroads having shut the Apollo programme down and landed astronauts on the Moon.

Scientists were on the hunt for the next space exploration milestone, with some targeting Mars and others exploring space colonies.

In 1975, Nasa explored possible designs for a space city in the Summer Study, conducted at Stanford University.

Possibly the most bonkers scheme proposed was the Stanford Torus, a ring-shaped station that would sit between Earth and the Moon.

According to Nasa's designs, the Torus would be one mile in diameter and rotate once per minute to provide artificial gravity.

Between 10,000 and 140,000 people would live on the colony, mining the Moon and nearby asteroids for resources.

They would live on the inside of the outer ring, farming animals and livestock in fields like those back on Earth.

Energy would be collected from the Sun using huge solar panels, while gigantic mirrors would reflect dangerous radiation.

The Stanford Torus was one of three space colony designs proposed in Nasa's Summer Study.

Artist impressions of the concept were developed byNasa's Ames Research Center and illustrated by Don Davis and Rick Guidice.

Then-NASA Administrator James Fletcher said that the paper posed big questions for humankind.

He said that the purpose of the study was "to assess the human and economic implications as well as technical feasibility."

Fletcher added that "the participants in this effort have provided us with a vision that will engage our imagination and stretch our minds."

The three stations are icons of speculative design, but Nasa never got close to building them.

The enormous cost, transport of materials, potential radiation poisoning of residents, and more proved insurmountable challenges.

The idea was not even new. In 1952, pioneering Nasa engineer Wernher von Braun presented similar concepts for space stations.

Eventually, however, Nasa did build its space habitat the far-less-luxurious International Space Station.

The lab orbits 250 miles above Earth and is home to up to six astronauts at a time from space agencies across the globe.

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Inside Nasas vision of the future from 47 YEARS ago with humans living in bizarre space tube... - The Sun

Scientists are preparing to send a message to space to contact aliens but are doubtful of humanitys ability to survive long enough to receive a response.

A team of boffins working on the Beacon in the Galaxy (BITG) project will send information about our world and cultures to extraterrestrials who may be out there listening.

They plan to send the message to a cluster of stars in the Milky Way, which is between 6,500 and 19,500 light-years away.

The team hopes aliens who receive the new message will send a reply back to Earth and finally answer the question of whether humans are alone in the universe.

Jonathan Jiang, co-author of the study and a principal scientist at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explained that the state of the world could see humans destroyed before a response is ever received.

Speaking to Fox13 he said: "The tendency that humans try to destroy ourselves is the greatest danger.

"Currently, theres lots of problems with humanity, and Stephen Hawking worried about whether or not we can survive another thousand years.

Jiang explained that NASAs Pioneer missions in the 1970s about space exploration were also designed to make contact with potential alien civilisations.

The spacecraft used for these missions had a graphic message bolted to the mainframe on a six-by-nine-inch gold anodized plaque.

Other attempts at contacting alien life forms have been made using telescopes.

In 1974, a signal was sent to space from the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico aimed at a cluster of stars 25,000 light-years away.

Later in 1999 and 2003, the Evpatoria Transmission Messages were sent to space and included an invitation for other life forms to respond.

The next message could contain coded examples of great works of art, and images of nature and architecture on Earth.

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It may also have a map of our solar system, show where the Earth is located, and share information about our system of numbers.

A reply would take tens of thousands of years to reach Earth because of the massive distances between galaxies.

There could also be conflict over getting everyone to agree on the wording of the message sent out.

But the team at the BITG project is hopeful that future generations will be inspired by their work and put their differences aside in the search for alien life.

The brains behind the BITG project wrote in their study: Humanity has, we contend, a compelling story to share and the desire to know of others and now has the means to do so.

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Scientists prepare message to beam into space but say humanity won't survive to hear it - Daily Star

Imagine a home on Mars. Is it filled with bacteria?

When we send humans to Mars, they'll need places to live. In a new study, a team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), in collaboration with India's space agency the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), suggest a new method to use bacteria to build these Martian habitats.

In this method, the team shows how "space bricks" for building a habitat on the Red Planet could be made with a combination of local Martian soil, bacteria and urea, a waste compound eliminated through urine by mammals.

Related: Newly discovered bacteria on space station could help astronauts grow plants on Mars

To make these Red Planet "space bricks," the team mixed together a "slurry" of simulated Martian soil made out of guar gum, which is a product of processed guar beans, combined with urea, the chemical nickel chloride and the bacterium Sporosarcina pasteurii. This mixture is blended together and can be poured into molds of any shape.

Previously, this team had tried to make "space bricks" with simulated lunar soil, but they were only able to make cylinder-shaped bricks, whereas, with their new Martian method in which they harden a "slurry" mix in a mold, they can make bricks of any shape, according to a statement.

After a few days in the mold, a chemical reaction transforms the "slurry" into a solid "space brick." Within the mixture, the bacteria and urea interact, causing the urea to crystallize and form crystals of calcium carbonate, a chemical compound that is often taken as a nutritional calcium supplement but which also makes up biological structures like shellfish skeletons and eggshells. The crystals come together with biopolymers, which are natural polymers produced by the bacteria, and the combination forms a sort of cement that holds the particles of the simulated Martian soil together.

The team added the nickel chloride to the mixture after determining that the compound made it easier for the bacteria to grow in the "soil" mixture.

"Martian soil contains a lot of iron, which causes toxicity to organisms," co-author Aloke Kumas, an associate professor in the department of mechanical engineering at IISc, said in a statement. "In the beginning, our bacteria did not grow at all. Adding nickel chloride was the key step in making the soil hospitable to the bacteria."

With the new method, the team was able to successfully make "space bricks," but the researchers still have a lot of testing to do before such a technique is used on the Red Planet. The scientists plan to study how the bricks would respond to the Martian environment, particularly the planet's very thin, primarily carbon dioxide atmosphere, as well as the much reduced gravity.

According to the statement, the team plans to test their bricks in a device called the Martian Atmosphere Simulator (MARS), that the researchers have said will recreate Martian atmospheric conditions in a controlled laboratory setting. The team has additionally developed a microchip device to measure and study bacterial activity in space, according to the same statement.

One concern that this study doesn't address is planetary protection, the concern of contaminating the Earth. Scientists have to ensure that spacecraft missions will not carry any unintended bacteria or other contaminants that could cloud scientific findings or damage the world itself. (Planetary protection likewise requires measures to prevent a spacecraft bringing anything unintended back home to Earth.)

It is yet to be seen how a method like the one described in this study might work within planetary protection guidelines, which are especially stringent on Mars, where spacecraft like NASA's Perseverance rover are actively looking for evidence of past microscopic life.

This work is described in a study published April 14 in the journal PLOS One.

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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Building a home on Mars with bacteria? - Space.com

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Paradox Interactive announced there's a new expansion coming to Surviving Mars soon as they want you all to hop aboard the Martian Express. This coming Thursday, April 28th, the team will be releasing three new packages of content for the game, with the biggest one being Martian Express ($7), in which you'll be able to construct and guide train lines anywhere on the Red Planet's surface. Which ideally will make travel between colonies quick and seamless. The other two will be the Future Contemporary Cosmetic Pack ($5) which will give you the ability to dress up your colonies so they look a little more futuristic, and the Revelation Radio pack ($4) which adds 16 songs from four different artists, giving you roughly 70 minutes of music that you can listen to in the game or just chill out to at home in your spare time. We have more info on the first pack below.

With the Surviving Mars: Martian Express pack, gamers will be able to move their colonists and resources between stations facilitating access to far away domes and remote resource deposits. Other outside manned buildings will also be buildable near stations without needing a dome.

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Surviving Mars To Get New Expansion With Martian Express - Bleeding Cool News

Since 2000, when people first moved into the International Space Station, it has mostly managed to stay out of Earth-bound politics. However, the war in Ukraine might change that.

Lets put this whole colors of the Ukrainian flag thing to bed right off the bat. Do you really think that cosmonauts, at the beginning of a war, would show up on international television wearing the colors of the enemy to give the middle finger to the Kremlin? No, not if they wanted to be cosmonauts very long.

A more likely reason for this, in my opinion, is that they were wearing the colors of Bauman Moscow State Technical University. A school which all three of them attended. Keen-eyed observers quickly pointed out that cosmonauts had worn yellow suits like this in the past. So it could all be a red, erryellow herring. The real issues lie elsewhere. The Russian space agency disclaims any connection to Ukraine at all, saying they just had a lot of yellow fabric on the shelves they needed to do something with.

Were not concerned with fashion here today, however. Ill be looking at the future of the Russian space program and what, if any, effect the war in Ukraine will have on that.

The US and (what is today) Russia have collaborated in space for decades, but this recent military action by Russia raises questions about its potential effects in space.

The competition between opposing ideologies fueled the space race, which ultimately led to the US landing the first man on the moon in 1969, eight years after the Soviet Union sent the first human into space.

Before long, the competition became a collaboration, with the two superpowers working together. In 1975 the US and Soviet Union came together to work on the first international space partnership, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. This was a nine-day mission that saw an American Apollo spacecraft with NASA astronauts dock with a Soviet Soyuz craft carrying cosmonauts.

The brief coming together of our two nations opened the door for much larger collaborations, specifically in regards to the International Space Station (ISS) and eventual ride-sharing of US astronauts taxiing trips to the ISS on Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Those trips were by no means free. The Russians keep upping and upping the price to us, and NASA eventually paid $90 million to send astronaut Kate Rubins to the ISS in 2020.

NASAs reliance on Russian rockets ended in 2020 when SpaceX debuted its Crew Dragon Capsule, but talks are underway to allow Russians on future SpaceX flights. Whether that will actually happen or not remains to be seen.

David Burbach, a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, told space.com:

I think part of the intent of the ISS program was to have a program where the U.S. and Russian space sectors were so closely tied together that it became sort of unthinkable to have conflict.

Despite that feel-good philosophy, our two nations have seen their fair share of conflict. In 2021, the Russians conducted an unexpected anti-satellite missile test against an out-of-service satellite in orbit. The test targeted a satellite near the ISS and created thousands of pieces of space debris. The risk to astronauts and cosmonauts on the Space Station was so significant that they had to take immediate action to protect themselves in case of impact.

The ISS isnt going to be up there forever. It is set to retire as early as 2025, although the Biden administration has committed to American participation in the program until 2030.

The ISS is divided into two sections: the Russian Orbital Segment operated by Russia and the United States Orbital Segment run by the US. American and Russian astronauts were the first to step inside the ISS in 1998.

However, Russia has threatened to leave the ISS program over the current US sanctions we have placed on them in response to their invasion of Ukraine. NASA says that we will continue to work together and cooperate for the time being. But, as with any relationship, there are two sides. Its not all up to NASA.

Read Next: Will Russian Cosmonauts Get Kicked off the International Space Station?

As part of a White House address on the day Russia invaded Ukraine, President Biden noted, regarding the sanctions he was imposing:

Itll degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program.

This statement so enraged Dmitry Rogozin, head of Russias Space Agency (and close ally to Russian President Putin), that he publicly posted a video in Russian where he threatened to leave American astronaut Mark Vande Hei behind in space and detach Russias segment of the space station altogether.

NASA Watch, a space news blog, tweeted the video below, which shows the Russian part pulling away. @Rogozinis clearly threatening the ISS program, the outlet said.

He didnt go through with the threat, but even suggesting something so cold-hearted qualifies to me to call it a dick move.

Mr. Burbach believes that if one side stops working with the other, the entire ISS mission will fall apart. He says because the nations are so interconnected in their work on the space station, it wouldnt be possible for Russia to exit the partnership without the whole mission falling apart.

Russias invasion and subsequent war with Ukraine have space ramifications more far-reaching than just the ISS. It may mean the end, or long delay, of the European Space Agencys (ESA), plans to launch a $1.4 billion rover mission to Mars. The plan to send a rover mission to Mars is the second part of the joint ExoMars mission between ESA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos. It was scheduled to take off on a Russian rocket from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, in September. Following a meeting of ESAs member states, the organization said in late February that the economic sanctions imposed by Western nations on Russia and the broader context of the war have made a 2022 launch unlikely. The program has already been delayed three times. Each time this happens, the associated costs go up dramatically. It could spell the end of the program.

Were you aware that Russia and China have signed a memorandum agreeing to create an international lunar research station? I only learned that today. Russia, of course, has a long history of space exploration, and China is just now starting to get in the game. With the US posing sanctions against Russia, its not hard to foresee China and Russia becoming fast friends.

Dmitry Rogozin (there he is again) and his Chinese counterpart Zhang Kejian of the China National Space Administration signed what they call a bilateral memorandum of understanding of Lunar cooperation last year.

The document describes the proposed Moonbase as a:

Comprehensive scientific experiment base with the capability of long-term autonomous operation, built on the lunar surface and/or on the lunar orbit that will carry out multi-disciplinary and multi-objective scientific research activities such as the lunar exploration and utilization, lunar-based observation, basic scientific experiment and technical verification.

And the US hasnt been invited to the party. In fact, Russia and China are two of the nations yet to sign the Artemis Accords, a NASA-driven agreement on the civil exploration of the earths natural satellite.

I immediately envision space mining for trillions of dollars of minerals and armed guards in space suits guarding the Sino-Russian moonbase. It all sounds like something out of a late 70s James Bond movie. But its not.

And they are not going to stop with the moon. China plans to send their taikonauts (thats what they call their equivalent of our astronauts) to Mars by 2033 as the first step in establishing a permanent colony there. If things keep going the way they are, the Russians will be right there by their side, and Americans will be home watching all of this unfold just like we did with Sputnik.

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Russia May Ditch Space Station and Join Chinese to Set up a Permanent Manned Base on Mars - SOFREP

NASA is tracking what is expected to be one of the largest asteroids to visit the Earth this year and it's set to make a "Near Earth Approach" by the end of this month.

The massive space rock, dubbed 418135 (2008 AG33), is estimated to measure somewhere between 1,083 feet and 2,428 feet in diameter according to observations from CNEOS NASA's centre for computing asteroid and comet orbits.

At NASA's largest estimate the rock is over five times the size of the 443-foot London Eye, and even at the lower end of the scale it would be taller than the Eiffel Tower.

At that size it would cause widespread devastation if it hit the Earth, but luckily for humanity at its closest approach it will pass by us at a distance of some two million miles.

A close shave as far as astronomers are concerned but nothing to worry about for the rest of us.

Which is just as well because at present we have no means of defending ourselves against a "city killer" asteroid.

At the moment of its closest approach, 2008 AG33 is predicted to be travelling at an incredible 23,200 miles per hour - over ten times faster than a speeding bullet.

Even though the asteroid is expected to pass us by with out incident on this occasion its still on NASAs list of potentially hazardous objects because its more than 450 feet across and its orbit brings it within 4.6 million miles of the Earth.

CNEOS director Paul Chodas explained to Newsweek that while none of the known potentially hazardous objects are currently on a collision course with our planet, their paths come close enough to Earth's that it is possible over many centuries and millennia they might evolve into Earth-crossing orbits.

So it is prudent to keep tracking these asteroids for decades to come, he said, to study how their orbits might be evolving."

SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk has said that the danger of a colossal asteroid impact wiping out civilisation is one good reason why we should colonise Mars.

In an interview with TED talk boss Chris Anderson, Musk explained that hes deliberately keeping the price of the one-way trip low: We want to make it available for anyone who wants to go to Mars, he said.

Musk warns, though, that even after paying some 76,000 the first Mars colonists will have to rough it. It will not be luxurious, he says.

Building the first city on Mars will be dangerous, cramped, difficult, hard work.

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NASA tracking huge asteroid five times the size of London Eye speeding towards Earth - Daily Star

Hello friends, and welcome back to an Easter Monday edition of This Week In Games Australia. Unless youre into the MotoGP, its a very quiet week for AAA releases so were going to spotlight a selection of interesting, top-flight indies for you. Lets get into it.

The Iron Oath is a fantasy tactics RPG that owes a bit of a debt to Darkest Dungeon. There are town-building elements. Youll need to manage the physical and mental well-being of your party and people. Combat is turn-based and reliant on strong party dynamics and sound strategy. Whether it will be quite as hard as that particular game remains to be seen. Nevertheless, seems like the team at Curious Panda Games have created something special here.

The pitch on this one is fairly simple: Fallout Shelter meets the US Navy. You have an aircraft carrier and must crew her efficiently to withstand aerial bombardment from a hostile air force. Your side-on view of the ship will allow you to move crewmen around the ship quickly, particularly while under attack and repairs need to be made. This is an interesting spin on the bunker survival genre, and Im interested in seeing how it sets itself apart.

This just looks like a nice and cozy and perhaps also confronting time. Lilas Sky Ark is a pixel RPG about a young woman in a fantasy world that might be her imagination? Nothing quite makes sense, with hints of external war and a looming sense of danger.

Nyoom! Honestly though, if you like racing games, give the MotoGP series a try. Finding your line on two wheels instead of four is a wildly different racing experience, one that might tickle you if youve only ever raced cars before. Though many racing fundamentals still apply, you have to re-learn a lot to understand how the bikes handle compared to even the most nimble racing cars.

Terraformers is a rougelite colony builder about taming the wilds of Mars. I love this take on the roguelite formula, which feels more aspirational than confrontational. The loop is simple: strike out, build a strong and efficient colony, and see how long you can survive. I look forward to running the grand Martian experiment when it drops later this week.

This looks like everything I used to play on my Mega Drive as a kid and I must have it. A sidescrolling samurai beat-em-up strongly inspired by the story of the vagabond Takezo Musashi. Musashi is a Japanese folk hero whose story survives in a series of novels, most notably The Stone and the Sword.

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This Week In Games Australia - Kotaku Australia

Tesla CEO Elon Musk. - AFP Arif ALI

Space conquest: check. Disrupt the auto industry: check. Take over Twitter? Why not. From eccentric entrepreneur to the worlds richest man, Elon Musk likes to dream big and these days, he is everywhere you look.

Two decades after banking his first millions, the South-African born Musk last year became the worlds richest person wresting the title from Amazons Jeff Bezos following the meteoric rise of Tesla, his electric automaker founded in 2003.

The billionaires latest big splash: a bid announced Thursday to take over Twitter, capping a rollercoaster fortnight of announcements and counter-announcements which Musk punctuated, characteristically, by gleefully firing tweets at the platform.

Just a week earlier, the 50-year-old was making headlines as Tesla cut the ribbon on a gigafactory the size of 100 soccer fields in Texas, where the firm is now based and Musk himself has relocated from California.

At the same time, his space transport firm SpaceX was breaking yet another boundary as a partner in a three-way venture to send the first fully private mission to the International Space Station.

Musk also makes news of a less flattering kind: Tesla has faced a series of lawsuits alleging discrimination and harassment against Black workers as well as sexual harassment.

In parallel with the whiplash-inducing stream of business news, Musks controversy-courting persona with an unrestrained Twitter style and penchant for living by his own rules in the private sphere too keeps the gossip press busy.

It recently emerged Musk had had a second child with his on-again off-again partner, the musician Grimes: a girl they named Exa Dark Siderl Musk although the parents will mostly call her Y.

He is even expected to make an appearance in person or not at the celebrity defamation trial pitting Johnny Depp against his ex-wife Amber Heard, who formerly dated Musk.

But one way or another, Musk has become one of the most ubiquitous figures of the era. So how did he get where he is today?

To Mars and beyond?

Born in Pretoria, on June 28, 1971, the son of an engineer father and a Canadian-born model mother, Musk left South Africa in his late teens to attend Queens University in Ontario.

He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania after two years and earned bachelors degrees in physics and business.

After graduating from the prestigious Ivy League school, Musk abandoned plans to pursue further studies at Stanford University.

Instead, he dropped out and started Zip2, a company that made online publishing software for the media industry.

He banked his first millions before the age of 30 when he sold Zip2 to US computer maker Compaq for more than $300 million in 1999.

Musks next company, X.com, eventually merged with PayPal, the online payments firm bought by internet auction giant eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.

After leaving PayPal, Musk embarked on a series of ever more ambitious ventures.

He founded SpaceX in 2002 now serving as its chief executive officer and chief technology officer and became the chairman of electric carmaker Tesla in 2004.

After some early crashes and near-misses, SpaceX perfected the art of landing booster engines on solid ground and ocean platforms, rendering them reusable, and late last year sent four tourists into space, on the first ever orbital mission with no professional astronauts on board.

Musks jokingly-named The Boring Company is touting an ultra-fast Hyperloop rail transport system that would transport people at near supersonic speeds.

And Musk has said he wants to make humans an interplanetary species by establishing a colony of people living on the Mars.

To this end, SpaceX is developing a prototype rocket, Starship, which it envisages carrying crew and cargo to the Moon, Mars and beyond with Musk saying he feels confident of an orbital test this year.

Musk, who holds US, Canadian and South African citizenship, has been married and divorced three times once to the Canadian author Justine Wilson and twice to actress Talulah Riley. He has seven children. An eighth child died in infancy.

Forbes estimates Musks current net worth at $265 billion.

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Elon Musk, tech visionary in the spotlight - Digital Journal

Pete SaloutosGetty Images

Government sensors on the hunt for fireballs plunging toward Earth have so far logged about 1,000 meteors and asteroids. But only one of them can boast that it traveled through our atmosphere from outside our own Solar System.

This fireball, which shot through our atmosphere over Papua New Guinea in 2014, was no ordinary space rockit was actually an interstellar meteor, the first ever known to originate outside our system and arrive on Earth. Rocketing at a speed of over 130,000 miles per hour, the rock broke up during its descent, probably scattering interstellar debris into the South Pacific Ocean.

You love the cosmos. So do we. Lets nerd out over it together.

Confirmation of its distant origins arrived only recently, when the United States Space Command (USSC) released a memo on April 6, confirming that the meteor was indeed an interstellar object.

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Before USSC confirmed this meteor was a distant stranger, all previous rocky bodies that fell to Earth were thought to have originated in our own Solar System. Many of them do come from a colony of millions of other rocks in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, some 111.5 million miles from Earth.

Two Harvard University researchers were the first to study the 2014 meteors distant origin, posting their research on the preprint server arXiv back in 2019 (meaning it was not peer-reviewed at the time). The meteors unusually high speed implies a possible origin from the deep interior of a planetary system or a star in the thick disk of the Milky Way galaxy, the researchers state in the study, which will be resubmitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal in light of the recent confirmation. The researchers combed through records of all the fireballs that U.S. government sensors have detected since 1988.

One of the researchers, Amir Siraj, wants to find meteor debris scattered on the ocean floor. It may be impossible, given the speed of the disintegrating objectwhich was only a few feet wideand the minute pieces that probably resulted from the impact. We are currently investigating the possibility of embarking on an ocean expedition to recover the first interstellar meteorite. If found, extensive analysis will be conducted on the sample to understand its origin and the information it carries about its parent system, he tells Popular Mechanics by email.

At first, I could hardly believe the discovery, since astronomers had been searching for an interstellar meteor since 1950 or earlier, says Siraj, who is director of Interstellar Object Studies at Harvards Galileo Project, which aims to look for extraterrestrial technological artifacts.

This confirmed impact of an interstellar object with the Earths atmosphere implies that similar objects are very common throughout space.

Siraj and his Harvard colleague Avi Loeb, who leads the Galileo Project, originally submitted the discovery to The Astrophysical Journal Letters. However, the review process dragged on for years due to missing information that the U.S. government withheld from the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) database, which identifies objects like meteors and asteroids and calculates their odds of hitting Earth. The U.S. Department of Defense operates some of the sensors that detect fireballs in order to monitor the skies for nuclear detonations, so Siraj and Loeb couldnt directly confirm the margin of error on the fireballs velocity.

After moving through NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and several bureaucratic departments, the sensor data finally ended up with Joel Mozer, chief scientist of Space Operations Command at the U.S. Space Force. Mozer released the memo confirming that the velocity estimate reported to NASA is sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory.

Siraj learned the good news through a NASA scientists April 6 tweet. Now, he is in the process of revising the paper, taking into account the government confirmation. This confirmed impact of an interstellar object with the Earths atmosphere implies that similar objects are very common throughout space, which of course raises interesting questions about how they are ejected in such large quantities from their parent systems, he says. Even if the remnants of the rock are never found, data from the meteors fiery descent could hold clues to its composition, and maybe origins.

The chances of a rock from another star system coming close to Earth are rare, but astronomers knew of two other interstellar objects before this recently-confirmed discovery. Quarter-mile-long asteroid Oumuamua was the first confirmed interstellar object identified in the Solar System; Pan-STARRS, a wide-field astronomical imaging system in Hawaii, detected the massive rock in 2017. Amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov spotted Comet Borisov with his telescope in 2019. Its the first confirmed comet to enter our solar system from some unknown place beyond our suns influence, according to NASA. Neither of these distant visitors flew close to Earth, though.

Expanding our sensory capabilities with efforts like the new Vera C. Rubin Observatorys planned ten-year survey is critical to enhance our discovery rate of interstellar objects, Siraj writes in an arXiv post in November 2021. Who knows? We may even find extra-galactic objects, like the 2007 discovery of a particle that originated outside the Milky Way.

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The Pentagon Just Confirmed the First-Ever Interstellar Visitor to Earth - Popular Mechanics

The Small Press Spotlight is going to Mars this week thanks to Musk Factor Studios. The publisher has launched a Kickstarter campaign for its first epic comic Templars Code. Described as a comic book about an engineer in a Mars colony who finds the Holy Grail, which lets him travel back in time to help Nikola Tesla, the original title is action-packed with time travel, mystical elements, science fiction, and of course the Knights Templar.

Written by Rafael Tadevosyan, the comic is part of the Musk Factor Universe and a spinoff of the Musk Factor series, a satirical sci-fi comedy about a tech startup. Andranik Asatryan leads the art team, using his range of artistic styles to bring out the tale. Ani Avetisyan is the illustrator and inker, while Alex Mikaelyan takes on letters.

Deemed a Project We Love by Kickstarter, the comic is described as an explosive original comic book filled with mystical adventures, time-travel, and everyones favorite order of chivalry: The Knights Templar. Set in the Mars colonization era, it is a literal out-of-this-world adventure comic that follows Tom, a pioneering engineer employed by a Martian Colony. On Mars, Tom stumbles upon the Holy Grail and with it, travels back in time to help Nicola Tesla prevent many of the catastrophic events of the twentieth century.

Mars is a new world for humans; its a tantalizing place of mystery and intrigue. The masses believe that Mars is none but a barren wastelandan empty planet perpetuated by heat, violent winds, and infinite deserts. But Tom, ardent with faith, soon unmasks secrets hidden beneath the sandy dunes of Mars. In doing so, Tom may be able to prove that this seemingly lifeless planet, is in fact, the very core of paramount events that span across time itself.To back Templars Code, click here! Watch a trailer for the series below!

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Musk Factor Studios goes for the Holy Grail in TEMPLARS CODE - Verve Times