Category Archives: Mars

By Tilly Berendt on May 10, 2024 7:37 am -

Want to get a feel for this years 70-strong MARS Badminton Horse Trials field of entrants, but dont quite have the time for a big, juicy form guide? Weve got your back heres the essential info you need to know!

MARS Badminton Horse Trials [Website] [Entries] [Timetable] [Tickets] [Radio Badminton] [Livestream] [Cross Country Course] [Form Guide] [Ultimate Guide] [ENs Coverage]

ENs coverage of MARS Badminton Horse Trials is brought to you by Kentucky Performance Products, your go-to source for science-backed nutritional support across all types of horses, disciplines, and needs. Click here to learn more about what KPP can do for your horse thank you for supporting our wonderful sponsors!

MARS Badminton Horse Trials [Website] [Entries] [Timetable] [Tickets] [Radio Badminton] [Livestream] [Cross Country Course] [Form Guide] [Ultimate Guide] [ENs Coverage]

ENs coverage of MARS Badminton Horse Trials is brought to you by Kentucky Performance Products, your go-to source for science-backed nutritional support across all types of horses, disciplines, and needs. Click here to learn more about what KPP can do for your horse thank you for supporting our wonderful sponsors!

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The 2024 MARS Badminton Field: At A Glance - Eventing Nation

A collection of rocks scattered on an ancient shoreline on Mars might indicate that the Red Planet was once far more Earth-like than scientists previously thought.

The rocks, discovered by NASA's Curiosity rover, are unusually rich in manganese oxide a chemical that adds to growing evidence that the once-habitable Mars may have sported Earth-like oxygen levels and life-friendly conditions early in its history, scientists say.

NASA calls manganese on Earth "an unsung hero in the evolution of life." Scientists know from our planet's geological history that manganese was abundant in rocks and in the oceans before the earliest life-forms emerged roughly 4 billion years ago and that it paved the way for oxygen that most life now relies on.

The only known ways to produce manganese oxide, however, involve either abundant oxygen or microbial life. But there isn't strong evidence for the former on Mars, and none for the latter, leaving scientists puzzled by how the chemical formed in the newfound rocks.

Related: Hundreds of black 'spiders' spotted in mysterious 'Inca City' on Mars in new satellite photos

Forming rocks rich in manganese oxide "is easy to do on Earth because of microbes and because of oxygen which [also forms] because of microbes so it all points back toward life," lead study author Patrick Gasda, a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, told Live Science. "We of course have no evidence of life on Mars, so if we're trying to form oxygen in a fully abiotic system, our current understanding of Mars doesn't explain that."

The Curiosity rover came across the heavily eroded rocks while trekking through the middle of Gale crater, a 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) ancient lake bed that the rover has been exploring since 2012. The rover's ChemCam instrument "sniffed" the manganese oxide within the rocks by vaporizing tiny bits with a laser and then analyzing the resulting cloud of plasma. The compound constitutes nearly half of the rocks' chemical makeup, according to the new study, which was published last week in the journal JGR Planets.

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At the site where Curiosity found the new rocks, the rover recorded 10 to 15 meters (33 to 49 feet) of elevation change. Although that's tiny when compared with the hundreds of meters Curiosity has climbed over the years, it is "pointing us toward something special going on in that place," Gasda told Live Science. The rock texture where the new sandstones were found appears to have transitioned from "curved" to "flat-lined" a change Gasda and his colleagues are interpreting as a river channel opening out into a lake.

"That means we're at the shore of the lake or near the shore of the lake," Gasda said. He noted that this interpretation is uncertain due to limited data, because Curiosity drove past the region just once. "That made the interpretation really challenging, but this is our best hypothesis," he added.

If the hypothesis is correct, the rocks may have been dumped in the region when the river water slowed down as it entered the lake, similar to manganese-oxide-rich rocks that have been found on the shores of shallow lakes on Earth.

The newfound rocks are "another line of evidence for liquid water on Mars in the past, which is beneficial for life," Manasvi Lingam, an astrobiologist at the Florida Institute of Technology who was not affiliated with the new research, told Live Science. "This work provides evidence in favor of habitability."

However, not everyone agrees that the newfound rocks indicate an oxygen-rich Mars. According to Jeffrey Catalano, a professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the study, the presence of oxidized rocks could help scientists understand whether Mars, like Earth, went through "a punctuated transition" from a lower-oxygen period and a higher-oxygen period. "The impact of manganese oxides on our understanding of such a transition, however, have been overstated, here and in prior work," he told Live Science.

Catalano was part of a 2022 study that found manganese oxide could easily form under Mars-like conditions without atmospheric oxygen. That research, which was based on lab experiments, showed that elements such as chlorine and bromine, which were abundant on early Mars, converted manganese dissolved in water into manganese oxide minerals. This finding offered an alternative to oxygen that could explain rocks like the newfound ones on Mars.

"There are several life forms even on Earth that do not require oxygen to survive," Kaushik Mitra, a geochemist at the University of Texas at San Antonio who led that study, said in a statement in 2022. "I don't think of it as a 'setback' to habitability only that there were probably no oxygen-based lifeforms."

Read more:

Mars may have been more Earth-like than we thought, discovery of oxygen-rich rocks reveals - Livescience.com

ENs coverage of MARS Badminton Horse Trials is brought to you by Kentucky Performance Products, your go-to source for science-backed nutritional support across all types of horses, disciplines, and needs. Click here to learn more about what KPP can do for your horse thank you for supporting our wonderful sponsors!

The MARS Badminton Horse Trials:Website| Box Office | Entries | Timetable | Course Preview | Live Stream | ENs Coverage

THE COMPETITION:Welcome to the third CCI5* of the 2024 season, following on from a great week at the Defender Kentucky Three-Day Event two weeks ago and Australias Adelaide the week prior to that. This years a special year for Badminton: its the 75th anniversary of the event, a fact thatll be commemorated with a special pop-up museum featuring souvenirs of some of the greatest moments of the past eight decades. You can find it by the main scoreboard. This year, we also welcome a new title sponsor in MARS Equestrian so expect lots of chocolate for everyone, and also a bright and bold new fence in thearena in the MARS colour way. Oh, and for the more technically-minded among you, our competitors will be riding CCI5* Test B. Therell be 32 fences on the cross-country course, spanning 43-45 jumping efforts.

WHATS AT STAKE:The Badminton title,obviously, but also consider this:a major chance for some riders to prove to their team selectors that they really areall that. Oh, and the prize pots gone up this year too, to a juicy 425,000 making it the biggest prize fund in eventing. Theres no longer a Rolex Grand Slam on the line, though: we start again, following the eleventh-hour withdrawal of two-part leaderOliver Townend and Ballaghmor Class.

THE OFFICIALS:Sandy Phillips (GBR) will be President of the ground jury, and is joined this week by Jane Hamlin (USA) and Christian Steiner (AUT). Joanna Gillespie (GBR) will take on the role of jumping judge. The course is designed, once again, by Britains Eric Winter, advised by Mike Etherington-Smith, and Phillip Kelvin Bywater returns in his role as showjumping course designer. The events Technical Delegate is Andrew Temkin (USA), assisted by Stuart Buntine (GBR). Nicky Salmon is chief steward, and course building has once again been undertaken by the Willis Brothers.

THE ENTRIES:We head into Badminton week with a packed field of 71 entries spanning seven nations Great Britain, New Zealand, Ireland, France, the USA, Canada, Australia, and Switzerland are all represented here. Because its an Olympic year, theres a couple of notable absences: 2023 champion Lordships Graffalo wont line up for Ros Canter, though she does have an entry with last years Pau champion, Izilot DHI, and 2022 winner London 52 is staying home for Laura Collett, who instead rides debutant Hester. But dont rue their absence too much, because it opens the door for a seriously wide-open competition. As mentioned above,Oliver Townendand his five-star champion, warhorse, and perennial Badminton bridesmaid Ballaghmor Class will be fighting to try to win the Rolex Grand Slam, and they present a formidable threat to their opposition: Ballaghmor Class has won Burghley (twice) and Kentucky and has never been out of the top five in his nine five-star starts.

But theyre far from the only contenders for the win.Emily King makes her return to Gloucestershire on super form with her two-time Grantham Cup winnerValmy Biats, with whom shes owed some horsemanship good karma after pulling up in tough conditions while looking very competitive last year. The worlds most successful five-star rider,WilliamFox-Pitt, is also on very good form with the smart mare Grafennacht, who had a podium finish at Maryland last year, and, of course, theres Ros on a five-star winner to think about.Tim Price and Vitali might have been cursed by three fences down in each of their five-star starts so far, but theyve been hard at work jumping in Spain over the winter, and if we see them begin the week on a sub-20 as they did at Burghley last year, theyll put themselves in a serious position to try to shake off those demons. Weve also got a returning five-star winner in Chilli Knight, who took Bictons pop-up CCI5* in 2021 withGemma Stevens and has looked super since returning to the sport. Could this be the year for 2011 Burghley championCaroline Powellto return to the top of the podium, this time with her excellentGreenacres Special Cavalier? Or couldDavid Doel second at Burghley last year and extraordinarily consistent at this level become one of Badmintons most popular winners with Galileo Nieuwmoed? Or have we failed to name the winner at all in this entire section? Its a beautiful sort of Badminton, because truly, it could come from anywhere. Expect some great stories to unfold this week.

For the thirdyear running, the BBC wont be broadcasting Badminton well, not in its entirety, anyway. Youll be able to watch all the action, including trot-ups, by subscribing to Badminton TVfor a one-off price of 19.99. This gives you access to the livestream, wherever you are in the world, as well as nearly 100 hours of archive footage from prior events, peaks behind the scenes, course previews, and profiles. If youre in Britain, youll need to turn to BBC2 to watch the final competitors show jump live on Monday afternoon from 2.00 p.m.

We also recommend tuning in toBadminton Radio, which is broadcast live from the event all day, every day from 8.30 a.m. Helmed by a team of experts and riders alike, it features live commentary, interviews, insights into the competition, and much more. You can pick up a headset to tune in on site at the event, or tune into 87.7 FM locally or listen online here.Or, if you want to dive into previews, reviews, and reaction shows, head to the Eventing Podcast to get your fix.

Hashtags:

#badmintonhorsetrials, #badmintonbound, #rolexgrandslam

Accounts: Badminton Horse Trials,CrossCountry App, Horse&Hound, FEI Eventing, andEquestrian Team GBR. Dont forget to follow EN, too well be bringing you all the insanity in the middle you could possibly need! (And if youd like to see the real behind-the-scenes life of an EN journo on tour, you certainly can. #shamelessplug) Want to know the juiciest stats throughout the competition? Make sure you follow EquiRatings.

Tuesday,7 May:

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FORM GUIDE Check out and bookmark ENs exclusive Form Guide detailing the stories and stats of each horse and rider in this years field.

Meet the Horses and Riders of the 2024 Badminton Field

BADMINTON WEEK STORIES AND REPORTS

SUNDAY

I Never Thought It Was a Possibility: Caroline Powell Wins MARS Badminton 2024

It All Comes Down to This Let the Clenching Commence! Live Blog from the Finale of MARS Badminton Horse Trials

One Horse Spun and Three Withdrawals at MARS Badminton Final Horse Inspection

SATURDAY

An Emboldening Day for the Sport: Tim Price Takes the Lead on Vintage Badminton Cross-Country Day

Its Satur-yay! Butts On Seats and Buckle Up Live Blog from Cross Country Day at MARS Badminton Horse Trials

FRIDAY

A 5* With a 4*-S in the Middle Riders React to Cross Country at MARS Badminton Horse Trials

Friday Afternoon: Ros Retains Lead Amid Bum-Cam Reign of Terror

Reigning Champ Ros Canter Takes Friday Morning Badminton Lead

The 2024 MARS Badminton Field: At A Glance

Diamonds on the Soles of their Shoes Live Blog from Dressage Day Two at MARS Badminton Horse Trials

THURSDAY

Video Break: Badminton Goals and Memories with Laura Collett

Thursday Afternoon at Badminton: Tiana Coudray is Best of the Bunch; Bubby Retains Lead Overnight

Being Here is a Dream Come True: Comeback Queen Bubby Upton Takes Thursday Morning Lead at Badminton

Shine Bright Between the White Boards Live Blog from Dressage Day One at MARS Badminton Horse Trials

WEDNESDAY

Movers, Shakers, and Heart Horses: Team EN Makes Their Picks for Badminton

One Hold and an Eleventh-Hour Withdrawal, But All Accepted at MARS Badminton First Horse Inspection

Continental Influence, A Relocated Finish, and a Soggy Spring: Walk the 2024 Badminton Course with Eric Winter

PRE-EVENT COVERAGE: Back to Badminton: Bubby Upton Defies the Odds, Again

Rolex Grand Slam Contender Oliver Townend Withdraws from Badminton

Drawn Order for MARS Badminton Horse Trials: Tom Jackson to Lead Off

Top Contender Among Latest Badminton Withdrawals

MARS Badminton Entries Revealed: 87 Pairs Accepted for 2024 Event

A Happy Anniversary Indeed: Badminton Prize Money Increased to 425,000 for 2024

Badminton Box Office Opens for 2024 Priority Tickets

ENs coverage of MARS Badminton Horse Trials is brought to you by Kentucky Performance Products, your go-to source for science-backed nutritional support across all types of horses, disciplines, and needs. Click here to learn more about what KPP can do for your horse thank you for supporting our wonderful sponsors!

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ENs Ultimate Guide to the 2024 MARS Badminton Horse Trials - Eventing Nation

Abigail Allwood (second from left), principal investigator of the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) aboard NASAs Perseverance Mars rover, is seen here examining rocks at a site in Greenland. Allwood is a scientist based at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. (2021) NASA

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

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

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

Date Created:2021-06-14 NASA ID: PIA24668 Larger image

Astrobiology

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, NaVi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him)

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Abigail Allwood Doing Mars Rover Astrobiology Fieldwork in Greenland - Astrobiology - Astrobiology News

D.O. for the concept image for 'Mars.' Photo courtesy ofCompany SooSoo

D.O.s (Doh Kyung-soo) singing is at all times a special one for mea euphonious voice of sweeping sonorous melodies. Those melodies shine bright as he turns up the passion on Mars, the lead single off his third mini album Blossom, within a short film-esque music videolike an ode to love and longing over a vivid pop tune.

You and I live on different planets/I have never left Mars in my life/Venus is where I can see you. Mars opening verse nods to the boundaries and distinctions between a man and a woman. She is from Venus, the planet of love, while he is from Mars, the planet of passion. They complement each other, spicing a life whereby love prevails over differences. D.O. muses, Should I fly to that far-off place to reach out to you? and is striving to make the communication happen.

Mars appears lush and balmy; it breathes more life through D.O.s charming presence; his smooth vocals meander across a tranquil acoustic realm, accented by soft guitar sounds speaking to its essence. It suggests that the allure of a love song awash in desire, like Mars, is a major musical catalyst in and of itself. At the heart of the allure lies the universal human experience of love and an urge to connect with someone else. Thats exactly what Mars doesits beauty lies in its ability to take one there, where it creates a vivid portrayal of the desire that consumes the artist.

The pre-chorus details his restless nights and his racing heart, growing fonder by the minute for this person. While the chorus reiterates that hes still stuck on Mars, D.O. delivers the lines with a sense of unflinching passion, expressing how loves influence transcends space and time, rendering the moment valuable and fueling his desire to finally meet the one hes been waiting for.

The songs subsequent parts center on his potential feelingsof awkwardness when he suddenly sees her, the worries he has, the heart-pounding moments, and all the stuff that stirs his imagination about this amazing encounter, making him wish to get closer to her faster than feeling worried. As time goes on, the fear will be gone, for hell be by her side, with no spaces in between. The video draws to a close, featuring D.O.s efforts to establish contact with the beloved, eventually done through a correspondence of messages between the two. At this point, he sings, You know I fly from Mars, although hes still outlying, so far away.

Mars is a mellifluous number that everyone may relate toan engaging narrative through music. It relates to us in a very familiar sense in that it mirrors back to us the feelings and experiences of love and longing that we may have experienced in our lives. D.O. understands that and makes a pleasant pop song out of it.

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EXOs D.O. Turns Up the Passion on Mars: Song Review - Rolling Stone India

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Link:

Heating Mars On The Cheap - Hackaday

Featured Image Credit: Getty/Oscar Wong/NASA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fascinating!

Topics:News, World News, Space

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

Enlarge / SpaceX will continue to iterate on Starship.

SpaceX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SpaceX

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

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

Link:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Could microbes feed astronauts on Mars? - Sciworthy