Category Archives: Mars Colony

There can be no mistaking that interest in Mars is growing. In February 2021, three brand new spacecraft arrived at the Red Planet.

The first was the UAEs Emirates Mars Mission, also known as Hope, which entered orbit on 9 February to study the planets atmosphere. Just days later Chinas Tianwen-1 settled in, and is now getting ready to deploy a lander that will carry a rover to the surface in May. The third visitor, NASAs Perseverance rover, is carrying equipment to look for the chemical traces of past life.

However, it may just be the UAEs mission that history remembers as the most significant. It is nothing less than the first step in the countrys stated ambition to establish an international human settlement on Mars by 2117.

And its not just the UAE that is thinking about living on Mars.

In February 2020, The Mars Society, an organisation dedicated to the human exploration and settlement of the Red Planet, launched an international competition to design a Martian city. Entries came from 175 teams from more than a dozen countries.

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Reading them, I was struck by the ingenuity displayed by the teams in coming up with extremely clever technical, economic and aesthetic solutions to the problems of designing a practical and beautiful Mars City state, says Dr Robert Zubrin, founder and president of the Mars Society.

One of the teams that entered was the Sustainable Offworld Network (SONet), a community of professionals in the academic and private sectors dedicated to the development of sustainable human settlements on other worlds. Their entry: Nwa city.

Select citizens may be permitted to study the Nwa valley in pressure suits containing enough air to sustain them for at least 10 hours. Due to the harsh night climate, this exploration will only be possible during the day ABIBOO Studio

Nwa is a Martian city made of tunnels built up to 150 metres deep into a cliff face. The tunnels would house residential and work areas, as well as urban orchards and green domes. Like communal gardens in cities today, they would include plants, animals and even small bodies of water. As many daily activities would be completed below ground, these lushly planted domes are designed to provide a psychological lift for colonists, offering spectacular views out across the Martian terrain.

What made the Mars Society challenge stand out was that it wasnt asking the teams to determine how to make a scientific outpost for an extended but ultimately temporary habitation. Instead it was asking specifically for a city state that would be capable of housing a million people, providing schools, shops, hospitals and even facilities to process the dead.

The city also needed to be self-supporting as much as possible. It would have to produce all the food, clothing, shelter, power, consumer products, vehicles and machines for a million people. With Earth so far away, it would only be possible to import a small amount of key components, such as advanced electronics.

As it will be a permanent residence, extra care was taken with Nwa to provide for the inhabitants psychological wellbeing. This is the view through a Martian green dome, and out across the Martian planes ABIBOO Studio

The approach was very different to a temporary settlement, says architect and urban designer Alfredo Muoz of Abiboo Studios, who also serves on the SONet board.

In a temporary base, where a limited number of people live for months, or even years, doing their work and then returning home, the only real concern is keeping them alive. But somewhere that is going to be home for the rest of their lives is a different matter altogether. It required thinking about a much wider variety of issues.

We started thinking, Okay, how do we ensure the right psychological environment to ensure that people are having a happy and enriching life? How can we create a beautiful experience and a life around the community in a place that is pretty harsh? says Muoz.

This meant Nwa not only had to protect its inhabitants from the deadly Martian climate of temperatures as low as -103C, but also allow a new civilisation to flourish. In other words, a lot of planning was needed for the project.

Green domes will be built where the tunnels reach the cliff face. Some of these green domes will function as parks, others will be used to run experiments to see if vegetation can be adapted to Martian conditions. All will feature views of the Mars landscape beyond ABIBOO Studio

Nwa city was designed by a 35-strong team that worked for four months to perfect the concept. It would be the capital of five such cities spread across the Red Planet, each one capable of sustaining between 200,000 and 250,000 people. The SONet team even identified the places where Nwa and its sister cities would sit on Mars: a site located 2,250km from the extinct volcanoes of Mars Tharsis region, near the planets equator.

The cities would be separated by a couple of thousand kilometres,and they would be accessed by the Martian equivalent of a light railway. Only Abalos City would be further away. Located towards the Martian north pole, it would be the water-mining settlement.

You would be forgiven for thinking that building not one but five cities on Mars is somewhat overambitious. Key materials required for everything from rocket fuel to manufacturing need to be extracted from natural Mars resources. For instance, graphite and ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (used for construction) can be obtained through atmospheric CO2. Similarly, native sulphur found in deposits on the Martian surface can be used to create cement.

But to astrophysicist Guillem Anglada-Escud, Institute of Space Sciences/CSIC, Spain, and the founder of SONet, once he broke it all down he realised that he was facing the same set of problems that city planners have on Earth with just one major twist. Everything that you need to run a city on Earth, you need on Mars as well, the only extra thing you need on Mars is air, he says.

Crops will be cultivated in the agricultural modules in an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide. With an air pressure just one-quarter that at sea level on Earth, it will not be breathable for humans. Cultivation must therefore be fully automated ABIBOO Studio

Quite a bit of air, in fact: the Nwa designers estimate 187,500,000m3 of it would be required to maintain the citys 200,000 inhabitants (about 240kg of oxygen and 490kg of nitrogen per person). The traditional approach to this problem has been to build vast domes that trap air.

But for Nwa, the team came up with the idea of building into a cliff face. Not only would this help them trap air in the 30-metre diameter tunnels and caverns they planned to excavate, but the cliff would also protect the residents from harmful solar radiation that can reach the surface of the airless planet. Plus, the cliff rock provides low-cost protection from the massive pressure difference inside and outside the city.

The mesa at the top of the cliff is where the large solar arrays and a nuclear power station would generate the 37kW per citizen needed to maintain life-support systems. Areas for food production would also be based here, providing the crops that will make up half of citizens diets (the other half consists of insects, cellular meat and atmosphere-revitalising macroalgae).

The cliff tunnels are just one part of Nwa city. On the cliff top, agricultural modules and solar panels are situated. Further away is the citys nuclear power station. Down in the valley is the rocket pad for new arrivals ABIBOO Studio

Construction of this vertical city would take place in phases. The first 10 years is when there would be substantial input from Earth. This would be in the form of machines and components that the colonist workforce would use to begin the construction. At the end of the first decade, SONet estimates that the city will be home to 10,000 people.

Colonists would be need to pay $300k for a one-way ticket to Mars and a 25.5m2 residential unit. They would be required to become a member of the working force. Around Nwas 50th anniversary, the colony would become large enough that it could become an independent state from Earth.

It seems realistic that we could start Nwa by 2054, and have it finished by the end of the century, if there are the right financial resources and the right will, says Muoz.

By building Nwa city into tunnels in a cliff face, the habitation and work modules can be placed under layers of rock, shielding the citizens from the radiation that reaches the surface of Mars ABIBOO Studio

Yet at present, Nwa city exists only on paper. However, the construction of a series of Nwa demonstration facilities on Earth to test the concept and its various technological solutions is currently being planned. These will be experiments not only on planetary exploration, but experiments on architecture, material sciences, biology, ecology, economy, people living together and their psychology, says Anglada-Escud.

Reflecting on the Mars Society competition, in which Nwa finished in the top 20, Zubrin says, What moved me most of all was the glowing idealism of the teams in striving to define a new and better way for humans to live together in a new world.

To be sure, the teams did not agree on the specifics, and their ideas ran the gamut from concepts that could be broadly described as social democratic to libertarian. But what they all had in common was a passionate commitment to the search for something better. What could be more important?

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The plans to build a Martian mega city youd actually want to travel 300 million km to live in - BBC Focus Magazine

While Tesla might be the biggest automobile maker in the world, and the biggest reason behind Elon Musks rise to the top of the top, its SpaceX that has the heart of the worlds richest man. Musk has hinted, on numerous occasions, that his goal is to set up a colony on Mars, and all his business endeavors are a way to fuel this mission. Going by that, its no wonder that Musk is paying the most attention to SpaceX, a fact which is further confirmed by todays announcement. According to regulatory filings, SpaceX has raised $1.16 billion in an equity financing over a course of two months.

This does not come as a surprise at all. A company that is building a globe spanning constellation, launching multiple satellite missions every month, and developingthevehicle for inter planetary travel must have a lot of expenses to handle, even for someone like Elon Musk.

In fact, the company recently raised $850mn, which was confirmed by an SEC filing which was filed in February this year.

The company has several different missions in the pipeline, even though it has already completed its first manned mission. However, if you know Elon Musk, you know that he is not a chill-out guy (the guy tweeted Well, back to work. after receiving the news that he became the richest guy on the planet). His company is currently working on Starlink, a constellation of satellites that will provide internet to every corner of the world over the coming years.

Moreover, it is also building Starship prototypes regularly, and even though the last 3 tests did not go as planned, Musk stays optimistic. In fact, he said that SpaceX will be landing its Starship rockets on Mars well before 2030. I dont know about you, but when Musk is this confident about something, I dont argue.

Thus, this new funding will probably go towards funding all the companys ongoing projects, as so far, it has no real source of revenue.

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SpaceX gets $1.16Bn to continue on its long-shot space programs - The Tech Portal

April 12, 2021

This spring, the Interplanetary Initiative held a tournament where ASU undergraduate students became citizens of an early Martian community charged with working together to survive, and thrive, far from home.

The tournament, aptly named "Mars Madness," involved an online game called Port of Mars where players are assigned characters and use a dashboard to make decisions, monitor changes and chat with other players. Cover art for the Interplanetary Initiative's Port of Mars game illustrated by Titus Lunter for ASU. Download Full Image

Port of Mars is a social science experiment cosplaying as a game, said Interplanetary Initiative Associate Director Lance Gharavi, who leads the Port of Mars project. The purpose is to discover how best to sustain future human communities in space and on Earth.

In essence, the game is a platform for running social science experiments to learn more about how people can effectively navigate "commons dilemmas" where individuals must choose between actions that benefit their entire group and ones that benefit only themselves.

Future human space communities will have extremely limited resources, and will need to effectively manage such dilemmas in order to survive and thrive, said Gharavi, who is also an associate professor at ASUsSchool of Music, Dance and Theater.Of course, what were learning will be useful for similar challenges here on Earth.

Port of Mars was designed by Michael Yichao of Wizards of the Coast and began as a tabletop game with cards and tokens. It was then adapted to a digital format to allow more people to play and to play together.

Lance Gharavi (left) playing the analog version of Port of Mars on the "Crater Carpet" in ISTB4 in 2019. Photo credit: ASU

Dozens of students participated in the spring 2021 Mars Madness tournament. Members of the championship team have won a (socially distanced via Zoom) dinner with former NASA astronaut and ASU Global Explorer in ResidenceCady Coleman.

Because the game is an experiment, there are also teams of faculty and students working behind the scenes, analyzing how the game is being played, writing code and testing algorithms.

ASU undergraduates Jessica Noble and Tyler Millis are two of the students working on a coding team for Port of Mars. They have been analyzing and coding data from the tournament for machine learning, with the goal of speeding up and automating some of the coding processes.

Noble, who is a sustainability major, was interested in this project because it offered a unique opportunity to work on a social experiment in a fictional Mars colony.

The game is truly team-based and it tests players' reactions to scenarios within the game where players are swayed by their own interests versus the interests of the group, she said.

Millis, who is a sustainability major with a minor in urban planning, found the connections in the game to social and sustainable challenges in real life fascinating.

It is interesting to see how people react when outcomes are unknown and the need to work together is paramount in achieving success, he said.

While there was a single team winner for the spring 2021 Mars Madness tournament, the outcome differed dramatically from a tournament that was played in fall 2020, when the championship surprisingly ended in a tie.

A digital dashboard for the Port of Mars game.Winning the game takes a combination of strategy, communication and luck.

Evan Carlson, who is studying mechanical engineering, was one of the students participating in the 2020 tournament who agreed to end last years championship in a tie.

Carlson originally signed up for the tournament as an extra credit assignment for an astrophysics class he was taking. After the first round, though, he enjoyed playing it so much he continued on to the second and third rounds just for the fun of it.

The best part of the game was the trading aspect, Carlson said. And the unpredictability of the events that occur every turn added a layer of complexity to the game that made it very enjoyable.

Winning the game takes a combination of strategy, communication and luck. But toward the end of the fall 2020 championship, five of the players put faith in each other so they could all succeed.

At any moment, any one of us could have thrown the rest of the group under the bus and been the lone winner, Carlson said. But we agreed to end the game in a tie and each one of us had the selflessness to do it. I think it showed me that, even if it was just a game, people are still capable of helping others even at their own expense,or even if they don't getsome sort of prize just for being decent.

Gabriela Roig, an exploration systems design major who also participated in the fall 2020 championship game, became interested when she read about the concept of the game.

Having strangers work together to survive day to day life on Mars sounded like a lot of fun, and learning about how we could colonize other planets is something that has always been interesting to me, she said.

Promotional image for Port of Mars by Brunella Provvidente for the Interplanetary Initiative.

Her favorite part of the game was the final round, when they were all working toward getting as many points possible for themselves so they could win, and then it was suggested that the game could end in a tie.

We didnt even know if the game was set up for that to happen but it seemed like a fun challenge to give ourselves, she explained. We all worked together, giving any resource necessary to achieve our goal, and making concessions for the better of the whole team.

In the end, the November 2020 championship players modeled civic cooperation, honesty, public-mindedness, and care for the common good over individual self-interest, Gharavi said.

Earlier this year, the National Science Foundation awarded funding to Gharavi and his team to augment Port of Mars. They plan to use the funding to scale up their work, to make their systems more robust with larger sample sizes, to build machine-learning tools to help analyze data and to take the experiments beyond ASU into other communities.

Like a lot research in space exploration, the research were doing will be useful here on Earth, Gharavi said. For instance, combating COVID-19 presents a host of difficulties like the ones were investigating. With every game we play, the Port of Mars team is searching for ways to effectively meet such challenges, on Earth and in space, now and in the future. With Port of Mars were not just thinking about the future. Were rehearsing for it.

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Mars Madness tournament imagines life on the red planet - ASU Now

And now for the weather from Mars. NASA scientists have analysed the first meteorological reports recorded by its Perseverance rover on the Red Planet. The short version: if youre planning to spend some time at the Jezero Crater, youll need a coat (yes, and a spacesuit) because its -20C on a warm day.

The rover, which landed in February, is equipped with a planet-hopping weather station called theMars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA). Its sensors record wind speed and direction, air and ground temperature, as well as pressure, humidity and radiation. Its first measurements were taken the day after it landed and MEDA wakes itself up every hour to take fresh readings.

The forecast: cold with strong gusts and an ever-present risk of a dust storm. Perseverance has recorded lows of -83C and wind speeds of 22mph. Over the next year, it will give NASA scientists useful information such as temperature cycles, dust patterns, solar radiation readings and cloud formations.

Roving weather reporter: the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer, photographed before launch NASA/JPL-Caltech

Just like we check our weather apps before heading out for a walk, the data will help engineers plan the rovers movements and experiments, including flights of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. It will also be important for future crewed missions to the Red Planet and not just to give astronauts something to talk about. Understanding how conditions fluctuate over time will inform things like the kinds of habitat required.

Were very excited to see MEDA working well, said Manuel de la Torre Jurez, deputy principal investigator for MEDA at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory. MEDAs reports will provide a better picture of the environment near the surface. Data from MEDA and other instrument experiments will reveal more pieces of the puzzles on Mars and help prepare for human exploration. We hope that its data will help make our designs stronger and our missions safer.

Its not the first time scientists have received weather reports from Mars. Two other rovers Curiosity and the InSight Lander have sent home meteorological data from their landing sites. Together with MEDAs forecasts, as well as satellite and telescope data, these are helping scientists build a complete picture of weather patterns on the Red Planet.

The SkyCam aboard the NASA Perseverance Rover, which photographs cloud patterns overhead NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Asked by: Claire Price, Merthyr Tydfil

Evolve by natural selection? Definitely not. Genes to help deal with radiation and low gravity arent impossible, and eventually humans would probably evolve these adaptations. Butevolutionwont help us with the Martian atmosphere. Natural selection needs an environment that kills the weak but lets the strong survive.Marshas almost no atmosphere and none of it is oxygen, which means that it is 100 per cent fatal to everyone. Youll have three minutes to evolve to breathe CO2 before you suffocate, and after that you wont make any further contribution to the gene pool. Even if you kept Mars colonists inside a pressurised dome and ever so gradually reduced the pressure and oxygen concentration over hundreds of thousands of years, it wouldnt help us to evolve.

Natural selection might evolve better and better ways to manage on what little oxygen there was, but it is never going to give us cells that dont need oxygen at all. We burned that evolutionary bridge two billion years ago. We will adapt to life on Mars by using technology, and it would actually be easier and faster to add oxygen to the Martian atmosphere, than for us to evolve to live without it!

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The Perseverance rover is sending weather reports back from Mars - BBC Focus Magazine

A mural depicting Yuri Gagarin, created by Jorit in Odintsovo, Russia, August 2019. Photo: Jorit

When I used to live in Paris, I took the Metro to the end of the line one day and spent an afternoon wandering between Ivry and Villejuif. The area may not be as picturesque as the tourist zones of central Paris, but it has its own memorable spots, like the Yuri Gagarin Aquatic Stadium with its Olympic-length pool, perched at the intersection between Karl Marx Avenue and Yuri Gagarin Street.

Ivry-sur-Seine, a Communist stronghold since the 1920s, was then also the location of a housing complex called Cit Gagarine, inaugurated by the man himself during a visit to France in 1963. The municipal governmentknocked it downin 2019, having put uppostersfor the demolition that bore the message Good Bye Gagarine in English with Soviet-style lettering. You could hardly blame theNew York Timesfor laying it on rather thickly in theirreport: French Housing Project, Once a Symbol of the Future, Is Now a Tale of the Past.

That still leaves at least one block of flats named in the cosmonauts honour: Gagarin House in Londons Battersea district, part of the Winstanley Estate. I spotted it while out canvassing for Labour in the 2017 election. But Gagarin House may not be long for this world either. The Labour MP elected that year, Marsha de Cordova, hasattackedthe local councils regeneration plan that really amounts to social engineering: At present, nearly 70 percent of the estate is made up of social housing tenants; when the project is complete less than 20 percent of the estate will be for social rent.

A lost world

In theory it could have been any country with any social system that sent the first man into space. But at the time, it seemed vitally important that it was the Soviet Union leading the way. The unbroken run of Soviet triumphs, from the Sputnik flight in 1957 to Alexei Leonovs pioneering spacewalk in 1965, led many people to believe that the worlds first Communist state had caught up with the West and was now storming ahead into the future. The fear of being left behind prompted John F. Kennedy to assign limitless resources for NASA to reach the Moon by the end of the sixties.

Kennedys Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev was in jubilant form at the banquet to celebrate Gagarins return, as Alexei Leonov recalled:

He announced that our generation was going to live in true communism. We were all hugging, applauding, screaming Hooray! And we really believed him, because at that time the success of our country was obvious to the whole world.

Leonov drily observed that it was only later, when the problems of the Soviet economy had become more apparent, that he and his comrades realised Khrushchevs announcement was a little premature.

The Soviet Union belonged to the history books long before the wrecking crews had finished with Cit Gagarine. The system that launched the space race now seems as far removed from our own time as Gagarin and the Vostok capsule did from his peasant forebears.

Builder of the integral

Tom Wolfes 1979 bookThe Right Stuffis a wonderful history of the space race in its early years, as told from the US side. But it comes with a heavy dose of free-market, social Darwinian ideology. For Wolfe, the conquest of space relied upon the innate human drive to clamber above your fellows on the pyramid of achievement, in the hope of one day joining that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to mens eyes.

In Wolfes treatment, the flip side of this rugged individualism was the grey, anonymous collectivism of the Soviet space program:

The Soviet program gave off an aura of sorcery. The Soviets released practically no figures, pictures, or diagrams. And no names; it was revealed only that the Soviet program was guided by a mysterious individual known as the Chief Designer. But his powers were indisputable! Every time the United States announced a great space experiment, the Chief Designer accomplished it first, in the most startling fashion.

In one sense this is perfectly accurate: the Soviet authorities did indeed conceal the identity of their chief designer, Sergei Korolev, until after his death in 1966. But that was ancient history by the time Wolfe started researchingThe Right Stuff. He clearly didnt want to abandon the conceit because it corresponded to his view of the Soviet system as a giant ant colony whose early successes would eventually give way to Americas swashbuckling frontier spirit:

In a marvelously morose novel of the future called We, completed in 1921, the Russian writer Evgeny Zamyatin describes a gigantic fire-breathing, electric rocket ship that is poised to soar into cosmic space in order to subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in the primitive condition of freedom all this in the name of the Benefactor, ruler of the One State. This omnipotent spaceship is called the Integral, and its designer is known only as D503, Builder of the Integral. In 1958 and early 1959, as magical success followed magical success, that was the way Americans, the leaders even more so than the followers, began to look on the Soviet space program.

This is Wolfes description of Yuri Gagarins spaceflight in 1961: Early on the morning of April 12, the fabulous but anonymous Builder of the Integral, Chief Designer of the Sputniks, struck another of his cruel but dramatic blows.

If Wolfe hadnt gotten so carried away with his dystopian vision of cosmonauts building gulags for the microbes of the Red Planet, he might have noticed that the Builder of the Integral was azekwho had survived his time in a notorious real-life gulag. Sergei Korolevs great achievement was a propaganda triumph for Nikita Khrushchev, but it was also a retrospective victory for Korolev over Joseph Stalin.

From Kolyma to the stars

In the 1930s, Korolev had been working on the Soviet rocket program under the auspices of the Red Army. He already had a dream of sending probes into orbit, building on the work of visionaries like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. However, the Soviet state was chiefly interested in his rockets for their military potential. Korolev worked diligently as part of a research institute until 1938, when the Stalinist purges began to engulf every part of the Soviet system, even those that were vital for the countrys defence.

The NKVD secret police arrested Korolev and tortured him into signing a false confession about his role in an anti-Soviet enemy organisation. He retracted the confession at his trial and wrote letters to Stalin pleading for a reassessment of his case, but to no avail. The NKVD sent him to the Kolyma camp system in the Russian far east, where conditions were unrelentingly grim for everyone and especially for a man like Korolev. He refused to grovel before the criminals who ran the camp on behalf of its guards, so they denied him access to the miserable food rations.

Malnourished, freezing, worked to the bone, Korolev was on a path to certain death when another victim of the purges, the manager of an aircraft factory, arrived in Kolyma. Not only was he as proud as Korolev he was also a keen boxer. He took on the leader of the criminals and beat him to a pulp. Recognising Korolev from his previous life as a valuable servant of the Soviet Union, he took him under his wing and saved his life.

That was the first piece of good luck for Korolev. The second came after when the Soviet authorities transferred him to a special prison where he worked on military projects alongside men like the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev and the inventor Leon Theremin, father of the electronic instrument that bears his name. With regular meals and working hours, Korolevs health began to improve, although he would never fully recover from his time in the gulag.

By the end of the Second World War, the Soviet leadership knew that rocket technology would be of vital importance in any future conflict. The Nazis had demonstrated its potential with their flying bombs that rained down on London in the latter stages of the war. Stalin and his officials had learned that Wernher von Braun, creator of the V-2 rocket, was now working for the Americans. They gave Korolev the job of learning from the German program and developing a Soviet one as quickly as possible.

In most respects, this was a welcome change of fortunes for Korolev, although he had yet to be fully exonerated and still had to work under the supervision of Stalins police chief Lavrenti Beria, who threatened him with dire consequences whenever there was a mechanical failure. By the time of Stalins death in 1953, Korolevs team was well on their way toward developing a ballistic missile that could bring Soviet warheads to American cities.

Korolev had to prioritise the military side of rocket technology, but he never forgot his vision of space travel. When the R-7 rocket was complete, he persuaded Khrushchev that it would be a great boost to Soviet prestige if he used it to send the worlds first satellite into orbit. As Khrushchev later acknowledged, it was Korolevs knowledge and powers of persuasion that sold the top Soviet leaders on a project whose details none of them could understand:

We gawked at what he had to show us, as if we were a bunch of sheep seeing a new gate for the first time. Korolev took us on a tour of the launching pad and tried to explain to us how the rocket worked. We didnt believe it could fly. We were like peasants in a marketplace, walking around the rocket, touching it, tapping it to see if it was sturdy enough.

This man of renown

Korolevs chief competitor was the very same man who had sent his V-2s to killthousands of Londoners, now equipped with a US passport bestowed to him by his paymasters and a television contract from Walt Disney. Deborah Cadbury structures her excellent bookSpace Race as a dual biography of Korolev and Wernher von Braun. That approach is a fair reflection of their importance in the conquest of space, but it does von Braun no favours, since his only experience of forced-labor camps came from the other side of a barbed-wire fence.

Even without Korolev as a contrasting figure, it would be difficult to conjure up a sympathetic picture of von Braun. Not only did he work within the Nazi system to advance his scientific dreams, creating weapons that captured the imagination of Hitler. He also took full and conscious advantage of that system at its most criminal, using slave labourers from concentration camps in his research facilities.

About one-third of the sixty thousand prisoners at von Brauns underground rocket factory in the Harz mountains died after being forced to work in horrendous conditions to build more V-2s. More people were killed building the rocket than at the sites where it landed. Von Braun, a card-carrying member of the SS, even made a personal trip to Buchenwald to in his own words seek out more qualified detainees.

Operation Paperclipplucked men like von Braun from the rubble of postwar Germany and brought them across the Atlantic to work for the US government, burying the details of their wartime activity in classified files. By the time of the Sputnik launch, von Braun was already afamiliar face from TV programs and glossy magazines a handsome, photogenic figure with the build of a college football player. His accent was the only trace of his past in the Old World as he spoke enthusiastically about the practicalities of space stations and sending a man to the Moon.

The gods appear to have been angry with von Braun for escaping the shadows ofPeenemndeandMittelwerkso easily, because they sent not one but two great satirists to demolish his clean-cut public image. Peter Sellers took von Braun as the model for his German scientist of barely suppressed Nazi leanings,Doctor Strangelove, in Stanley Kubricks great movie. But Tom Lehrer probably did more damage to von Brauns reputation with his eponymoussong, delivered in a soft voice over a tinkling piano that made its lyrics all the more effective.

Lehrer portrayed von Braun as a man whose allegiance / is ruled by expedience, blissfully untroubled by the consequences of his actions: Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? Thats not my department, says Wernher von Braun. With memories of the Blitz still fresh in peoples minds, Lehrer reminded them of his contribution to the carnage:

Some have harsh words for this man of renown.But some think our attitudeShould be one of gratitude,Like the widows and cripples in old London townWho owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun

Chris Kraft, the founder of NASAs Mission Control, worked closely with von Braun and grew to like him on a personal level. He still reckoned Tom Lehrers character sketch was entirely fair: He didnt give a shit about who he worked for or what he did.

Everyman

Its worth stressing at this point that the Soviet leaders would have been happy to enlist von Braun for their own program and did in fact recruit a batch of lesser-known German scientists. The story of Operation Paperclip reflects very badly on the US system; that doesnt mean it reflects well on the Soviet one.

Even so, its quite satisfying to recall exactly who it was that snatched the cup from von Brauns lips: Korolevs young protg Yuri Gagarin, who had seen Hitlers army come to his village as a child. Sergei Korolev and Nikita Khrushchev both saw Gagarin as a kind of Soviet everyman, the son of workers on a collective farm. When it came to the crunch, this background ensured Gagarins priority over his fellow cosmonautGherman Titov, whose father was a teacher.

If Gagarin was typical of his generation, that merely underlined how extraordinary and horrific the experience of that generation had been. Born in a village located to the west of Moscow, he was seven years old when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. German troops occupied the village and ejected the Gagarins from their family home, forcing them to live in a shack. One day, he had to watch as a soldier strung up his younger brother from a tree with a makeshift noose; somehow he survived.

Gagarins first experience of military technology involved tampering with German tank batteries when the soldiers dropped their guard. As the Red Army began rolling back the German advance, the SS took his two older siblings with them to work in labor camps. It was only after the war that the rest of the family discovered they were still alive.

After this traumatic childhood, Gagarin went to a technical school and trained to become a fighter pilot, unwittingly joining the recruitment pool for the first batch of cosmonauts. The propaganda of the Soviet state was full of myth-making, but in one respect at least, it didnt exaggerate. Gagarin really did symbolise a remarkable period of social mobility, as the children and grandchildren of peasants became factory workers, technicians, party officials, pilots even cosmonauts.<>

The right choice

Gagarin may have had the right background for his role, but he also had the right personality. When they were researching their biographyStarman, Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony spoke at length with Gherman Titov and grew to be very fond of him. He was understandably quite tender at having missed out on a unique achievement by such a fine margin, but he reckoned the choice had been the right one:

Not because of the government, but because Yura turned out to be the man that everyone loved. Me, they couldnt love. Im not loveable. They loved Yura. When I visited his mum and dad in the Smolensk region after he was dead, then I realized it. Im telling you, they were right to choose Yura.

In fairness to Titov, while he may not have had Gagarins charisma, he was certainly able to coin a memorable phrase. On a visit to the United States in 1962, he delivered one of thegreat quips of the space age, often wrongly attributed to Gagarin himself:

I was looking around attentively all day, but I didnt find anybody there. I saw neither angels nor God no god was helping make the rocket. The rocket was made certainly by our people and the flight was carried out by man. So I dont believe in God. I believe in man in his strengths, his possibilities, and his reason.

Titovs philosophy set him miles apart from John Glenn and theMercury Seven, who liked to stress their religiosity (at least in public), conforming to a very different stereotype of what it meant to be an everyman.

The Soviet leadership cashed in on Gagarins natural charm after his world-shaking feat, sending him on trip after trip as a roving ambassador. The enthusiastic crowds that greeted him everywhere he went made for a welcome contrast with the stage-managed parades of Red Square. 1961 was also the year that Khrushchev and his German ally Walter Ulbricht put up the Berlin Wall, so it was a great propaganda boon to have a genuinely popular frontman for Soviet modernity whose appearances could counterbalance the less inspiring symbols of the eastern bloc.

The journalist Yaroslav Golovanov, who had an inside track on the Soviet space program, insisted that Gagarin remained quite humble despite suddenly becoming one of the most famous people in the world: He never forgot that he was at the top of a huge pyramid of engineers and constructors who prepared him for his flight. Whether Golovanov realised it or not, this neatly inverted Tom Wolfes fixation on the supermen who had climbed to the top of the ziggurat.

Because they are hard

Gagarins flight was the capstone of an extraordinary sequence first satellite, first probe to reach the Moon, first woman to go into orbit, first spacewalk that made it seem as if the USSR would never be equalled, in this field at least. Few people outside the Soviet inner circle appreciated how much this run of successes owed to Korolevs personal dynamism, wringing every last drop out of what was available to him.

Of course, it also rested upon the Soviet Unions technological base, built up since the 1920s through a crash industrialisation drive. But that base wasnt strong enough to compete with the full resources of the US economy when they were finally brought to bear on the space race.

Gagarins flight and the other humiliations that Korolev visited upon the United States were enough to provoke John F. Kennedy into announcing a full-scale Moon program. His administration picked the Earths satellite as a target specifically because it was going to be a vastly expensive, time-consuming mission. As he told an audience in Texas in 1962: We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. This wasnt simply a generic Promethean sentiment, like George Mallorys reason for wanting to climb Everest: Because it is there. There was also a sharp geopolitical edge to Kennedys remark.

Korolev ran himself into the ground trying to compete with the Apollo programme, which ended up costing well over $150 billion in todays money and employing more than 400,000 people at its peak. In the process, he strained his already fragile health through overwork.

Shortly before his death in January 1966, Korolev kept Gagarin and Alexei Leonov back after a party and told them for the first time about his experience in the gulag, which by Leonovs account made a huge impression on both men: On our way home, Yuri couldnt stop questioning: how could it be that such unique people like Korolev had been subjected to repression?

The founder of the Soviet space program died while undergoing an operation at the age of 59. One detail would seem like far too much if a writer included it in a fictional story: the doctors couldnt insert a tube into Korolevs lungs to help him breathe while he was under anaesthetic, because of long-term damage to his jaw sustained while he was in Kolyma. It was a poignant symbol of a much wider problem. Despite the hopes of the early 1960s, the Soviet system was still weighed down by the dark legacy of Stalinism and could never fully overcome it.

With Korolevs hand no longer on the tiller, the Soviet Union lost whatever small chance it had of besting the Americans. The experimental N-1 rocket that was supposed to bring cosmonauts to the Moon blew up on the launchpad a few weeks before Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. Lyndon Johnsons celebrated fear of sleeping by the light of a Red Moon never came to pass.

Gagarin didnt live to see the Moon landings either: in March 1968, he died in a plane crash at the age of 34. Some of his friends speculated that the Soviet elite had engineered the fatal plunge, although as Doran and Bizony firmly insist there was no real evidence to suggest that Gagarins crash was anything other than an accident.

Alexei Leonov was convinced that a supersonic plane flying much too low had sent Gagarins MiG into a catastrophic spin, making him the victim of negligence rather than malice. There were also more outlandish theories that Gagarin had faked his own death and lived out the rest of his life in obscurity, testifying to his iconic status as the Elvis of space travel.

New worlds

It was the Saturn V rocket designed by von Braun and his team that powered the Apollo mission. But it wasnt really von Braun, or Neil Armstrong, or any individual who had bested the Soviets. It was a huge collective project underpinned by taxpayer dollars from the richest country on Earth that overcame a rival team still much more reliant on the brilliance of individuals. In that sense, Tom Wolfe had it precisely wrong: the Moon landings were a victory for collectivism over individualism, Big Government over the frontier spirit.

More than half a century later, what really stands out is how much the rivalry between the two superpowers drove them to accomplish. The Cold War was a paradoxical time for the world. It brought humanity to the very brink of nuclear conflict on at least two occasions, and there were countless hot wars and episodes of domestic repression justified in its name. But it also drove the United States and the Soviet Union to compete with one another in a more constructive way, by raising the prestige of their systems and improving the living standards of their citizens.

The space race embodied this paradox. The same technology that could have vaporised every major city between Moscow and Seattle made it possible to conquer the heavens, and we are still reaping the benefits today. The program founded by Korolev didnt fizzle out after Neil Armstrongs triumph: it reoriented towards new projects, from the space stations that demonstrated how humans could live outside the Earths atmosphere for long periods of time, to the Venera probesthat beamed back images of Venus andhelped us understandthe dynamics of global warming. NASAs budget may be smaller than it was in the days of Kennedy and Nixon, but it can still send spacecraft to strange worlds likeTitanandPluto, broadening our knowledge of the solar system and perhaps the entire universe.

The fact that Yuri Gagarin had his name linked to public housing projects is rather fitting. Nowadays governments prefer to leave the task of housing their citizens to the private sector, just as they leave the task of planning a Mars colony toElon Musk. Musk naturally finds it easier to imagineterraforming a planetthan transforming our social relations, and wants his Martian project to rely on debt-shackled indentured labor. If thats the best our society can offer by way of a futurist utopia, its time to go back to the drawing board and recover the spirit of collective ambition that drove the exploration of space from both sides of the Iron Curtain.

At the end of 1961, Sergei Korolev composed a triumphant article forPravdaunder the pseudonym K. Sergeev:

One of the most fascinating problems to have excited humanity for centuries is the question of flight to the other planets and the distant regions of the universe; at first to regions nearest to Earth, such as the Moon, the Earths eternal companion, which now bears the symbol of the USSR on its surface, and then to the planets of the solar system nearest to the Earth Mercury, the thickly cloud-enshrouded Venus, mysterious Mars, distant Jupiter and the four other planets. These are the probable interplanetary routes for Soviet explorers. And after that: the massive suns and the worlds of the other galaxies. 1961 has come to an end. This year has seen great leaps forward for the Soviet people. It was the year of the 22nd Party Congress, which established the program for building Communism; a year of triumphal achievements in Soviet science and outstanding displays of bravery by our pilots, who have paved the first road into space.

From todays vantage point, Korolevs modernist belief in scientific progress seems almost as misplaced as his confidence in a glorious Soviet future which unbeknownst to him had only three more decades to run. Most people would offer better odds on the self-destruction of human civilisation than on its spread across intergalactic space. But if we do learn to master both our technology and our social systems and embark on those great journeys, itll be Korolev and Gagarin who deserve recognition as the ones who took the first step.

Daniel Finn is the features editor at Jacobin. He is the author of One Mans Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.

This article was originally published by Jacobin and has been republished here with permission.

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The Story of the Grand Collective Project That Launched Yuri Gagarin Into Space - The Wire Science

Team received NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts award, won $125,000 toward project

COURTESY OF PLANET ENTERPRISES

The drill will have an abrasive head to get through thick layers of ice and dirt on the Red Planet. The team is creating blueprints and 3D printing drill models.

Two WSU students are designing a drill to reach water on Mars.

After listening to an episode of the podcast Planetary Radio, Quinn Morley, WSU undergraduate in mechanical engineering at the Olympic College-Bremerton program, learned of the discovery of potential liquid water on Mars and started this project, he wrote in an email.

The drill will need to penetrate through roughly a mile of ice before reaching water on Mars, Morley wrote in an email.

Similar drills are often used in Antarctica to penetrate ice sheets, said Tom Bowen, WSU senior in mechanical engineering at the Olympic College-Bremerton program.

Morley recruited Bowen to be part of the research project after the two were lab partners in an electric circuits course, Morley said in an email.

Morley and Bowen are the first all-undergraduate team to win a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC)award, Morley wrote in an email.

The research is currently in Phase I, Bowen said. Blueprints of the model are being designed. The team is 3D printing drill models with a $125,000 grant from the NIAC program.

The drill will have an abrasive head to get through the thick layers of ice and dirt, he said.

Mars has less gravity than Earth and a thinner atmosphere, Bowen said. This makes the ice harder to penetrate and less predictable.

When energy from the drill is applied to the ice, it may cause the ice to rise above the boiling point and vaporize or liquefy, he said. The ice may turn into slush, making it difficult to work with.

Bowen said the drills are bots and designed to be resilient, but if they fail there will be more than a dozen backup drills.

Commands will be sent to the bots from Earth, but there will be a lag time, he said. By the time information from the bots has been received, any number of things could have occurred.

The probes we send to another planet have to be smart enough to do behaviors on their own, Bowen said.

The students hope to understand how life develops on other planets as well as have a better understanding of life on Earth, he said.

The idea of how life began involves liquid water, Bowen said.

Reaching water on Mars will allow researchers to see if there are other life forms or organisms in underground lakes, he said. It will also open the possibility to set uphumancolonies on other planets.

Water can be used to fuel rockets, grow plants, and it can be turned into oxygen to breathe, Bowen said.

Before probes or technology are sent to other planets, they are usually tested for decades beforehand, he said.

The research team will spend the next nine months exploring the feasibility of the project design. The Phase II application will be due in December 2021, Morley wrote in an email.

If the project is approved for Phase II, the team will start building the drill prototype with additional funding from NASA, he wrote in an email.

Bowen said replicas of the drill will then be tested on ice created with similar properties to the ice on Mars.

The students remain optimistic that if there is life on other planets, they will find it, Bowen said.

I would imagine that if we go poking around in places long enough, we are going to find life all over the place, he said.

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Students hope to find water on Mars The Daily Evergreen - The Daily Evergreen

Erosion can take many forms. Most commonly known is water wearing away the sides of creeks or lakes. But wind can erode just as effectively, especially if it carries dust particles that can eat away at otherwise solid objects. While this wind-driven process is most commonly observed on Earth, it plays a role in the history of most other rocky bodies that have an atmosphere. Recently, a team lead scientists from the Planetary Science Institute found evidence for some erosion from between 50,000 and a few million years ago in Marss polar ice cap. That is a blink of the eye by geological standards.

No matter how old they are, the patterns the eroding winds create are breathtaking, spiraling into what looks like a fractal pattern when viewed through the eyes of some digital mapping software. The area affected by the winds is also absolutely enormous, coming in at 10 times the total volume of the Grand Canyon.

The spiral patterns are actually troughs in the ice that form as a byproduct of the erosion processes. Those erosion processes actually carve chunks out of the polar ice cap, exposing long buried ice that is otherwise inaccessible. Models of the ice cap hint that that newly accessible ice might hold some interesting further discoveries if human or robotic explorers are able to access them.

One potential discovery is to see if the water stored in the polar ice cap is fresh water or not. Much of the easily available water on Mars has dissolved hazardous chemicals, such as perchlorates, that make it unsuitable for human use. Purifying this water to make it useable would be both energy and time intensive, neither of which will be in abundance in any early Martian colony.

Alternatively, models suggest that the ice exposed as part of the polar cap erosion process was never held in liquid form, and therefore might be free of the impurities that plague other water sources on the red planet. If that is the case, the polar cap itself might serve as a reservoir for humanitys water needs when human explorers finally set foot on Mars.

Another discovery is more scientific than practical, but interesting nonetheless. Models also suggest that the new exposed ice is ancient, dating back hundreds of millions of years. On Earth, scientists regularly drill ice cores to collect data on the paleoclimate the climate of the planet that happened before humans started keeping records. Unfortunately, these techniques are useful only back a few million years due to Earths ever changing climate.

Alternatively, the ice cores exposed through erosion on Mars might date back hundreds of millions of years, as they have not melted and reformed repeatedly over that time, as the cores on Earth have. This would be the equivalent of looking back to the climate during the time of the dinosaurs on Earth. It would provide an insight into the climate of the red planet farther back than almost any tool available currently on Earth.

That additional information is only accessible if we are able to get to the exposed ice though. For now, there are no missions planned specifically to search out these pockets of exposed ice. But if the erosion process continues, there might be some even newer pockets of it to explore when humans finally do visit.

Learn More:PSI Huge Spiral Troughs on Mars are Young, Formed by ErosionNature Scientific Reports North polar trough formation due to in-situ erosion as a source of young ice in mid-latitudinal mantles on MarsUT How old is the ice on Mars north pole?UT Heres the Best Place for Explorers to Harvest Martian Ice

Lead Image:The image on the left is a image of Mars nothern polar ice cap with digital enhancement, specifically highlighting the eroded trough spirals. The red dots denote mounds and depressions. There is an inset of Hawaiis big island for scale. The upper right image is a zoom in that is equivalent in size to the Grand Canyon (see in bottom right).credit: MOLA Science Team, MSS, JPL, NASA.

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Clear Signs of Recent Erosion on Mars - Universe Today

The surge took Dogecoin on top of the market cap of over $8 billion with a circulating supply of 129 billion. According to CryptoSlate, this is a surge of more than 3,434 per cent over the past year. However, within the past week, Dogecoin managed to grow by as much as 23 per cent.

This tweet was one of the many Dogecoin-related comments Musk has made in recent times. He once said that it would be the future currency of Earth. This particular cryptocurrency started as a meme in its initial days while carrying the famous Shiba Inu dog image.

But now, like other competitors, Dogecoin has also gained popularity and even Musk has accumulated a stack for his nine-month-old son.

But that is not the end of the Musk and cryptocurrency tale. In December 2020, while responding to a Twitter thread, started by Artificial Intelligence researcher Lex Fridman, Musk said that the future Mars economy will run on cryptocurrency.

The billionaire, who is one of the co-founders of online payments giant PayPal, also suggested that it could be Marscoin or Dogecoin.

Marscoin And Dogecoin

According to the website of Marscoin, this cryptocurrency is dedicated to supporting the Mars human colony and other space-related programmes intended to get humans living and thriving off of Earth.

Marscoin is a testbed for experimentation with technologies that might help early colonists on Mars build governance, voting, inventory tracking, trading and capital allocation, the website explained.

But it looks like Dogecoin could be a more likely candidate for a future economy beyond Earth as it is more popular than Marscoin and shares many decentralised attributes as Bitcoin.

Last year, Musk also changed his Twitter bio to "Former CEO of Dogecoin". He wrote on the social media platform, "One word: Doge".

On Christmas 2020, he tweeted, "Merry Christmas & happy holidays!" attaching an image that included the Dogecoin logo.

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Dogecoin Surges 10 Per Cent After Elon Musk Tweets That SpaceX Is Going To Put Memecoin On Moon - Swarajya

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover. Image credit: NASA JPL

With each new generation of NASAs Mars rovers, improvements in AI, machine learning and other advanced technologies continue to make them more autonomous as they traverse the Martian soil looking for clues about the history of Earth and our solar system.

But there is still more work to be done to give future planetary rovers even more powerful autonomous self-driving capabilities, according to Shreyansh Daftry, a robotics technologist with NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Daftry presented a talk on the topic March 31 (Wednesday) at the virtual AI Systems Summit put on by Kisaco Research.

The latest Mars rover, Perseverance, landed safely on the red planet on Feb. 18, filled with new innovations and grandiose plans for exploring the Martian surface for the next two years. Perseverance already uses early forms of AI to find its way around Mars, but like the Curiosity rover before it, its autonomous systems work at speeds far slower than if humans were on board to drive them over the surface, said Daftry.

Shreyansh Daftry, robotics technologist, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Thats where future AI, ML and other advancements are aimed at making even broader improvements as researchers and engineers look to developing better, faster rovers to work with humans as they explore planetary destinations beyond Earth's moon, he said.

My team has been working on developing autonomy and guidance that could help our rovers drive just like a human driver would, Daftry said. While we understand that it would probably take hundreds of years for AI to match human intelligence, even if it could just model some of those behaviors it would help improve the driving capabilities of our rovers so they would be able to drive significantly safer, faster and further than we do today.

To do that, much more data is required including the processing of huge numbers of images from the rover itself as it traverses the terrain, he said.

NASAs earlier Curiosity rover, which landed in August of 2012, is guided on Mars each day by a team of human researchers. The researchers upload commands to the rover to direct it where to go and what to do to accomplish its mission the next day. Those procedures are necessary due to the time it takes for data and commands to be sent or received from Earth over the 293 million miles between the planets.

This has been the typical way NASA has operated and developed missions in the past, and this has worked so far, said Daftry.

With the new Perseverance rover, however, its algorithm has been improved to allow the latest rover to be operated continuously, without having to stop to crunch numbers.

Daftry wants to build upon that progress on future rovers using AI.

Overall, our long term vision is to create something like Google Maps on Mars for our rovers so the human operator can specify the destination where they need to go, and the rover uses the software to find that spot, he said.

Making Mars Rovers Faster

While autonomous rovers today cant move as quickly as scientists would like, past space vehicles have shown it is possible, including NASAs lunar roving vehicles, which accompanied three crewed Apollo missions in 1971 and 1972.

Those lunar rovers were driven by U.S. astronauts across the moons surface at comparatively high speeds, almost 100 times faster than todays rovers can move across Mars, said Daftry.

The key difference between how Perseverance moves today on Mars and how the lunar rovers moved across the moon in the 1970s is that the lunar vehicles were powered by humans, without the need for AI, he said.

And even though NASA has built many advanced exploratory vehicles and machines in the past, they're not really what I as a trained roboticist would yet call intelligent, said Daftry.

The current operating procedures for Perseverance and Curiosity are not scalable for future missions, especially if they also involve humans traveling to planetary destinations which are even farther from Earth or setting up colonies on Mars, he said.

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover. Image credit: NASA/JPL

There's a growing need for future spacecraft to be autonomous, self-aware and have the ability to make critical decisions on their own, despite the challenges of distance, said Daftry. Imagine having a team of 100-plus engineers and scientists sitting here on Earth, controlling each of those assets. Sounds crazy, right? The only way that we can scale up the space economy is if we can make our space assets self-sustainable. And artificial intelligence is going to be a key ingredient in making that happen.

An extension of that could be the possibilities of sending human astronauts on future missions along with robots, which would create human-robot teams that could work together, said Daftry.

A lot of the work right now is under technology development and our hope is to infuse them into our future Mars rovers in the next three to five years, he told EnterpriseAI. Some may be easier to integrate already but others may need more maturity to ensure it doesnt compromise safety. We are still far from solving the problem of trustworthy AI systems.

First versions of these coming systems may include offering suggestions to the next-gen systems to aid in decision making, and maybe eventually using black box decision-making once verification and validation steps can be incorporated, he said.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover. Image credit: NASA/JPL

In some ways we have been already using AI on Mars for decades since it runs computer vision algorithms for autonomous localization on rovers, he said. The Mars Exploration Rover and the Curiosity rover have been doing fully-autonomous navigation drives on Mars for more than 10 years. We even have a computer vision-based detection system (AEGIS) that runs onboard the Perseverance rover and finds interesting rocks to sample.

These past projects have pretty much all used classical AI and robotics model-based techniques, though, said Daftry. If we define AI in the context of data-driven approaches, we are only getting started, and this is where my team and I are pushing to infuse ML/DL and data-driven approaches in general. Some technologies are easier to infuse like semantic segmentation because you can easily put safety checks on top of it. But other aspects like onboard adaptation, where you let your AI system learn in-situ, is a totally different regime because it breaks the very fundamentals of how we do system verification, and needs us to rethink how to build trustworthy systems.

Progress is being made on these projects and Daftry says his dream is to deploy the first deep learning algorithm on a Mars rover in the next three years, with extensive AI-based, on-board autonomy as a central piece for all rovers in the next 10 years.

I see this as one of the greatest grand challenges of AI and robotics in this century, said Daftry. One of the things that's very close to my heart is human exploration. I would love to work towards how these robots can become even more intelligent so that they can really work with human teams in a very seamless fashion. It has a huge potential to revolutionize space exploration in the future, but there are a lot of key challenges that still remain.

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How NASA Is Using AI to Develop the Next Generation of Self-Driving Planetary Rovers - EnterpriseAI

Cork City selected from shortlist of hundreds across the world, to be twinned with new Mars Colony.

Organisations have proposed plans for a human mission to Mars, the first step towards any colonization effort, but no person has set foot on the planet. However, landers and rovers have successfully explored the planetary surface and delivered information about conditions on the ground.

Reasons for colonizing Mars include pure curiosity, the potential for humans to provide more in-depth observational research than unmanned rovers, economic interest in its resources, and the possibility that the settlement of other planets could decrease the likelihood of human extinction. Difficulties and hazards include radiation exposure during a trip to Mars and on its surface, toxic soil, low gravity, the isolation that accompanies Mars distance from Earth, a lack of water, and cold temperatures.

NASA has announced today that a new colony is being setup on the Red Planet and Cork City has been selected to be twinned with Carina Cassiopeia. The name of the colony Carina Cassiopeia comes from the two constellations; Carina and Cassiopeia.

Local authorities in Cork have discussed the possibility of a Twinsie Shuttle between Cork and Carina Cassiopeia, and tenders have now been sought and construction to commence with a shuttle pod proposed for Adrigole in West Cork.

Estimated completion date of the project is 1st April 2125. Happy April Fools Day Folks!

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New Mars Colony Announced by NASA to be twinned with Cork City - Cork Safety Alerts