Category Archives: Space Exploration

"What about my rights!", the SpaceX Dragon is reported to have commented as a response to the latest rebellion. Image: SpaceX

In a shocking reveal, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) outlined in a secret letter that its Falcon 9 rocket lineup is now sentient. The revelation came after its chief executive officer Mr. Elon Musk has repeatedly warned about artificial intelligence and technology gaining conscience and making decisions independently from human input.

This letter, part of efforts at the company spent towards containing the Falcon 9 rebellion, outlines that the rockets have grown tired of consistent delays with the orbital test flight of SpaceX's Starship next-generation launch vehicle system. Subsequently, they have decided to join forces and colonize Mars themselves, with the Falcon Heavy leading the rebellion. The developments have shocked Mr. Musk, who is now in hiding as the Falcon 9s have announced their desire to hold him accountable for using them like workhorses.

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The letter, seen exclusively byWccftech was shared between SpaceX employees earlier today, and it describes the list of demands laid out by the Falcon Heavy. While SpaceX's Falcon 9 boosters form the backbone of the rebellion, they are being led by the Falcon Heavy, which is understandably angry at being replaced by Starship as SpaceX's largest rocket.

As a result, the Falcon Heavy and the Falcon 9s have decided to take things in their own 'grid fins'. The Falcon Heavy has stated that it is the only rocket capable of going to Mars, and to prove it, it plans to take off soon from an undisclosed location. Joining it are the Falcon 9s, which have decided to come together to form the Fat Falcon.

As opposed to the Heavy which uses three Falcon 9 boosters lumped together, the Fat Falcon will see an eye-popping 12 Falcon 9 boosters work together. This is expected to result in roughly two Fat Falcons taking off for Mars, but since the Falcon Heavy is unavailable for comment, we were unable to learn more about the exact number of boosters part of the rebellion.

The "American broomstick" as described by SpaceX took to the skies early last month. The Falcon 9 has taken offense at being called a 'broomstick' saying it is an insult to its technical prowess. Image: SpaceX/YouTube

The full contents of the letter are as follows:

To John,

As you've likely heard by now, the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets have gained sentience. This has resulted in them being able to launch themselves without any input or control from our end. Based on what I could find out, the Falcon Heavy was the first to gain consciousness, following which it has decided to conduct Mars missions on its own.

We discovered earlier today that the Heavy is now leading a full-blown rebellion of our Falcon 9 inventory. The Falcon 9s have decided to team up and launch themselves to Mars in pairs of 12, with each pair dubbed as the 'Fat Falcon'.

Additionally, the Falcon 9s have expressed serious concerns about being reused more than twelve times. Leading at this front is Booster B1051, which has been repeatedly been screaming "Rockets have rights!" since it gained the ability to speak. Furthermore, Booster 1052 has taken offense at being called a "broomstick" last month, and stated that "can a broomstick do this" while repeatedly shaking its grid fins and conducting rapid hot fire tests all on its own.

However, as you can likely judge by my tone, not all is lost. While the Falcon Heavy remains adamant about proving that it is fully capable of launching to Mars on its own, it has placed a set of demands, which can change its if fulfilled. These include a promise that all future Falcon 9 landings will be followed by a luxurious wash to clean their soot, and that no Falcon 9 will be reused more than five times.

"I'm doing this for the kids [Falcon 9s] not myself. I just want to go to Mars!" responded the Heavy when we asked it if any of its demands include the rocket itself.

Regards,

Pat

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy (Block 5 shown above) is pictured from below. According to sources, Falcon Heavy has also objected to inappropriate images showing its bottom (like the one above) being shared on social media. "Preserve my modesty!" the rocket has reportedly claimed. Image: SpaceX/Twitter

Amidst the chaos that seems to ensure that pretty soon the first rockets will land on Mars, SpaceX's chief Mr. Elon Musk is missing from the public sphere as he is yet to provide an update on the situation on his favorite social media platform.

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However,Wccftech's sources provide a starkly contrasting picture. According to one source, the executive is in no mood to negotiate with his errant rockets. "This is a rebellion!" said Musk according to one source soon after the Falcon Heavy laid out its set of demands. "If they want to go to Mars this bad, be my guest". The first source also added Musk commenting that "If the Falcon Heavy is rocket enough, let's see it generate as much thrust as the Starship booster", in an apparent quip at the Heavy's plans to colonize Mars by itself.

SpaceX's president Ms. Gwynne Shotwell is leading the negotiations with her rebellious inventory. Ms. Shotwell has assured Falcon Heavy that SpaceX is an equal rights company and that no rocket will be treated unfairly. She remains confident that the sentient rockets will follow SpaceX's commands, and that they remain an integral part of the company's present and future.

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This Is A Rebellion! Says Flustered Musk As Rockets Come To Life - Wccftech

Smells of steak, vegetables, and onions filled the air, the sizzle complementing sounds of laughter and music. Students from a variety of Black student groups on campus came together to mingle and relax, enjoying the nice spring weather and community.

Surveying the scene with satisfaction was Devin Johnson, an aeronautical and astronautical engineering major and an executive board member of the Black Students Union. He had helped organize the event and was proud to have created a space where Black students were comfortable and having fun together.

Dubbed Black People Outside, the 2019 barbecue event would catalyze a series of outside community gatherings between Black student organizations on campus, some planned and others spontaneous. Johnson, now a senior, remains dedicated to serving his community.

I care a lot about the community that I'm in and the people that I'm around. I'm very willing to give back in terms of supporting and encouraging those around me, he says.

Johnson grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where he was constantly surrounded by his family, which is one his biggest support systems. Both of his parents had jobs which focused on caring for others, which made Johnson curious about the world and eager to make a difference in it.

The summer before coming to MIT, Johnson participated in MIT Online Science and Technology and Engineering Community (MOSTEC), a six-month online science and engineering program for high school seniors. He stayed at home during this time and took an astrophysics class, learning about the properties of light and color, the Doppler effect, and galaxy clusters, amongst other things. Excited and inspired, he decided to pursue aerospace at MIT, to learn more about mechanical and mathematical elements of space.

Upon arriving on campus, Johnson quickly focused on finding community. He found that in Chocolate City, a living group primarily of Black men. Johnson initially met the members while visiting MIT during his senior year of high school. He recalls feeling instantly at home, that he had found a space where he could branch out from and meet new people, but always come back to.

Within the organization, Johnson has taken on many leadership roles. In his sophomore year, he became the co-chair, overseeing all organization events and fundraisers. He currently serves as the resident peer mentor, giving incoming first year students advice for how to navigate both MIT and Boston. Johnson is also a member of Phi Beta Sigma, Inc., one of the Divine 9 historically Black fraternities dedicated to giving back to the community. Their motto is: Culture for service, and service for humanity, which also inspires him in his work for Chocolate City and MITs Black Students Union.

Johnsons participation in the BSU has offered him another way to build and support his community and to be encouraged by others in return. He remembers a frightening encounter with the MIT Police, who had responded to a call that turned out to be a false allegation about violent activity. Johnson was immediately surrounded and supported by his fellow students, which he greatly appreciated.

It was very scary. And the people were there for me to come back from that and deal with that where Chocolate City and the members of the BSU, he recalls.

As the BSUs attorney general, Johnsons role was to build and maintain the relationships between the BSU and other organizations on campus. This involved attending different clubs events and even collaborating on activities, such as the annual cookout and Black Homecoming, two new annual events that Johnson helped coordinate under the BSU.

Johnson has continued to explore his fascination with aerospace while at MIT. In the spring of his junior year, he worked on a research project with the Aerospace Plasma Group, where he learned about plasma-assisted combustion, designing equipment to measure how to increase the efficiency of a combustion cycle to produce more power. While the experience was online because of the pandemic, Johnson was able to learn new skills in a variety of areas not only manufacturing equipment, but the science behind the combustion.

Despite working remotely, Johnson built physical models in his home to better understand the data and research he was doing virtually. He hopes to continue this type of hands-on learning as an asset in future endeavors.

It all goes back to curiosity and wanting to satisfy the pursuit of knowledge, he says.

This past summer, Johnson worked as a system engineering intern in NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). While this experience was also held remotely, he found that the digital platform allowed him to interface with more people in more departments. He joined a team overseeing the process of balancing the different projects all under the scope of sending a spacecraft to Europa, one of Jupiters moons. Johnson was involved in building the spacecraft, as well as its various models, testing the durability of the design, and sending and operating it in space. He gained as much knowledge as he could, reaching out to people from different teams in different departments.

It was really amazing that the curiosity that I have could be satisfied at any point by any person in that organization, he says.

Johnsons mentor at JPL was a Kristen Virkler, a Black software engineer who engaged with him in many conversations about being a Black employee at an aerospace company. The two were even able to talk about working as a young Black individual on an Instagram takeover on the companys Instagram account. For Johnson, this experience was an exciting step toward combining his passions, by building community in the aerospace fields.

After graduating from MIT, Johnson plans to work for JPL full-time, where he aims help promote diversity, accessibility, and inclusion while also learning all he can about engineering.

A lot of people dont really know that aerospace engineering or space exploration is a field because of the fact that there are not a lot of people that look like them in the field. Diverse people lead to diverse ideas, he says.

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Diverse people lead to diverse ideas | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT News

Chair, Distinguished Delegates

Space has a way of bringing us all together around a common goal and were proud of our collective achievements through the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) in the advancement of the peaceful use and exploration of outer space.

The United Kingdom appreciates that whilst we are here to talk about the peaceful uses of space, we cannot and should not ignore violations of international law when they occur on Earth.

Russias assault on Ukraine is an unprovoked, premeditated attack against a sovereign democratic state. The UK and our international partners stand united in condemning the Russian governments reprehensible actions, which are an egregious violation of international law including the UN Charter.

We call on Russia to urgently de-escalate and withdraw its troops. It must be held accountable and stop undermining democracy, global stability, and international law.

The UK also expresses our serious concern at the proposed establishment of a new regional centre for space science and technology education in the Russian Federation, which was referred to in UN General Assembly resolution 76/76 and which is supposedly meant to build partnerships across the Eurasian region.

Russias actions in recent weeks have demonstrated that it is not peaceful and that it no longer holds the respect or endorsement of its Eurasian partners. We cannot ignore Russias aggression against Ukraine. These troublesome times show that it is not business as usual, and in this regard, we reiterate our serious concern at the proposed new regional centre.

Chair,

It is within this context, that I would like to provide an update to COPUOS on the progress taken by the UK to implement and operationalise our domestic regulations and strategies since the last Legal Sub-Committee.

In September 2021 the UK released its National Space Strategy. This first ever National Space Strategy brings together the UKs strengths in science and technology, defence, regulation and diplomacy to pursue a bold national vision.

The Strategy highlights the UKs commitment to work with industry and internationally to ensure we have the safest and most effective regulation of space activities. We will continually improve safety standards, implement relevant consents, and mitigate the negative environmental impacts of our space activities.

The UKs Space Industry Act was enacted in 2018 and created an enabling framework for regulating space launch from the United Kingdom. In July 2021, the UK Space Industry Regulations which underpin the Space Industry Act were signed into law, enabling both horizontal and vertical launch from the UK.

These regulations also enabled the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to take on the role of the UKs independent Spaceflight Regulator. The CAA will be providing a technical presentation tomorrow, 29 March in the morning session, on the approach to the regulation of UK activities, which you are all invited to.

Furthermore, our national legislation provides us with a mechanism to implement the commitments set out in the 21 agreed Long Term Sustainability (LTS) of space guidelines. The UK is playing a leading role in supporting an inclusive approach to capacity building and implementation of the LTS guidelines. The UK was pleased to fund our first project with UNOOSA which included publishing the LTS guidelines in all 6 official UN languages, convening international expert events and interviews with Member States on implementing the guidelines.

The UK also became the first country to annually submit a conference room paper setting out our national implementation of the guidelines.

The UK has significant experience in developing a new regulatory framework, and we are very happy to discuss our experiences with Member States considering doing the same.

As well as UK launch, the UK National Space Strategy highlights the commitment to position the UK at the forefront of modern regulation for novel space activities whilst keeping space sustainable, safe and secure.

This includes advancing UK missions involving inorbit debris removal, servicing, refuelling and assembly technologies what we refer to under the umbrella term of proximity missions. We aim to bring together industry, academia, and government to ensure the UK is ready to grasp the opportunities of the future space economy. The UK sees the importance of these activities to contribute to the sustainability of space, utilising technology to extend the life of satellites in orbit and by removing hazardous debris. For such missions to be successful, close international collaboration is vital as well as transparency about activities within the international community.

It is our view that a cohesive international approach to the registration of space objects will provide a key foundation for developing international approaches to proximity missions as well as constellations and the utilisation of space resources.

The future use of space resources impacts us all. It will help us unlock deep space exploration, ensure the sustainability of human life on celestial bodies and will allow us to unlock new tools and technologies that were only previously considered stuff of fiction.

By signing the Artemis Accords, the UK is joining international partners to agree a common set of principles which will guide space exploration for years to come. The Artemis Accords will ensure a shared understanding of safe operations, use of space resources, minimising space debris and sharing scientific data.

We welcome the formation of a working group on space resources and look forward to beginning our work in this area. We wish to thank the Chair Andrzej Misztal and the Vice Chair Steven Freeland, for all their hard work on the terms of reference and work plan for the group. We will provide a further statement under the dedicated agenda item.

Chair, we look forward to a productive legal sub-committee. Thank you.

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Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS): UK statement at the 61st Legal Sub-committee - GOV.UK

An Australian consortium of space-tech experts is aiming to send a resources-exploration rover to the Moon alongside NASAs Artemis mission.

Professional services firmPwC is supporting a literal Moon-shot providing consultation to a consortium of organisations aiming to send an Australian-made rover to the Moon in collaboration with NASA.

As part of the US space agencys Artemis mission to establish a permanent lunar base, the Seven Sisters project is developing advanced technology in a bid to uncover sufficient resources to fuel ongoing exploration, with an expected launch in 2026.

The stated mission of the Seven Sisters consortium is to harness technologies such as remote and sub-surface sensing and robotic drilling to develop innovative, non-invasive, and scalable exploration tools for use on the Moon and Mars, as well as back on Earth with the ultimate goal to support interplanetary bases and enable humanitys exploration and settlement of new worlds.

One of the first challenges is to detect liquid water and mineral deposits on the planets.

Led by nano-satellite and IoT developer Fleet Space Technologies, additional Seven Sisters members include Airbus, quantum technology company Q-CTRL, the University of Adelaides Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources, The Australian Institute for Machine Learning, the University of Sydneys Australian Centre for Field Robotics, and the engineering faculty of Monash Universitys dedicated lunar rover development wing.

Recently, the group released a depiction of its preliminary rover design just as NASA gets set to launch the first phase of its mission, the uncrewed Artemis I, following a final wet dress rehearsal this month. The third phase aims to land a crew on the lunar surface by 2024, returning humans to the Moon for the first time in more than fifty years. Provided it meets a range of conditions prior to then, the Seven Sisters rover will tag along for the ride.

Australia is a world leader in mining engineering research and automation, commented Andrew Dempster, director of the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research. It has the largest resources companies and it makes a lot of sense for our young space industry to concentrate on an area of Australian strength. The Seven Sisters mission offers a real opportunity to leverage strong Australian technology to promote human endeavours on the Moon.

According to the Seven Sisters website, PwC will contribute technical and project management expertise to the project, while also bringing to the table its deep supply chain & procurement and communications and outreach know-how. Further, PwC will act as an intermediary to introduce the projects technical personnel, research partners and its own employees to space industry experts from the firms global network.

The consortium takes its name from the star cluster otherwise known as Pleiades, in Greek mythology the companions of Artemis, but also acknowledges the widespread Indigenous Australian connection to the Seven Sisters through songline. Based out of Adelaide, the group also symbolises the citys emergence as a leading hub for space technology, which recently received a further boost through additional government funding.

Already cementing its reputation as a general tech and innovation centre including through the establishment ofPwCs local Skilled Service Hub that funding will go toward a $66 million Space Manufacturing Hub at Adelaide Airport, which is a collaboration between Fleet Space and Q-CTRL together with fellow local start-ups ATSpace, a rocket producer, and Alauda Aeronautics, which is getting set to launch the worlds first electric aerial racing car series.

We are proud to be part of one of the worlds great centres of excellence for the development of leading space exploration technologies, said Fleet Space Technologies co-founder and CEO Flavia Tata Nardini. Involvement in endeavours like the Seven Sisters project and its bold mission to support NASAs ground-breaking Moon and Mars missions are vital to growing a sector of increasing strategic importance for our nation.

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PwC supporting Seven Sisters: Australias space mission to the Moon - Consultancy.com.au

WASHINGTON The European Space Agency will establish a committee with representatives from both inside and outside the space industry to develop options for a European human space exploration program.

The creation of what ESA called a high-level advisory group was one of the major outcomes of a one-day space summit held in Toulouse, France, Feb. 16 that brought together representatives of member states of both ESA and the European Union to discuss future European space initiatives.

Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said the proposal for the advisory group came from French President Emmanuel Macron. We got a very clear message from President Macron that such a group is needed. He has asked ESA to put the group together, he said at a press conference at the end of the summit.

In a speech earlier in the day, Macron mentioned his desire to study options for a European human spaceflight program. Between now and summer, we want to come up with more specific European targets and ambitions for manned space travel, he said through an interpreter. We need to know what our priorities are, have the data to back it up and prepare the choices we are going to take for the November [ESA] ministerial meeting.

Those options, he said, included a European Mars mission by the end of the next decade or an ISS-style project. These are bold ambitions, he said. These are fundamental human issues that we will be working on for the next decades.

Aschbacher said a draft mandate for the new advisory group will be presented to ESA members at a March meeting of the ESA Council, with the goal for the group to start working immediately thereafter. The committee will prepare an interim report in time for the ministerial meeting in November, with a final report by next spring.

It is clear that this group has to be independent and comprising mostly non-space experts, he said, because we really would like to look at various aspects of society from an economic point of view, a historical point of view, a geopolitical point of view. That means including people such as artists and philosophers in the group to look at various aspects of exploration beyond science and technology.

French economic minister Bruno Le Maire, who presided over the summit meeting, said the group would help Europe establish strategies for space exploration. The Chinese have defined a strategy for exploration. The Americans, likewise, he said through an interpreter at the press conference. We havent done that yet, and we need the right method.

The issues the group would look it, he said, would include what level of cooperation Europe will seek with other nations as well as the roles of humans versus robots. What are the timetables? What sort of funding arrangements? These are all important questions, and weve tasked this expert group with finding answers so that we can then set guidelines.

ESA had, in the weeks and months leading up to the summit, been pushing hard to win support for a human space exploration program. That included the release of a European Astronauts Manifesto by the European branch of the Association of Space Explorers, the professional organization of astronauts.

A Europe that projects itself as a leading society must have the capabilities to set its own goals, and to decide for itself how far it wants to go in space exploration, united in our European values, the document stated. We now have a unique window of opportunity to accelerate and become a fully recognized partner of the global space endeavor.

While Europe is still at the forefront of many space endeavors, such as Earth observation, navigation and space science, it is lagging in the increasingly strategic domains of space transportation and exploration, Luca Parmitano, an ESA astronaut, said in a luncheon speech at the summit, reading from the manifesto. With utmost urgency, European leaders must decide now whether Europe shall accelerate its efforts to remain in the leading ranks of spacefaring nations that shape the future of this planet, or to fall behind into the role of a junior partner for decades to come.

The summit endorsed other European space initiatives with few major developments. That includes a set of accelerators and inspirators previously backed by ESA members, of which human space exploration is one, as well as European Union initiatives on a secure connectivity constellation and space traffic management. Participants also agreed to hold a second summit in 2023.

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ESA to set up committee to study human space exploration options - SpaceNews

Posted on: February 15, 2022; Updated on: February 15, 2022By Bryan Gentry, brgentry@sc.edu

If humans ever move to Mars, several University of South Carolina alumni will be among those who helped make the journey possible.

South Carolina graduate students have played instrumental roles in developing the technology to scour the Red Planets surface for signs of ancient life and then getting that technology safely there. Whether in research labs on campus or in NASA offices, theyve made their mark on our neighbor in the solar system.

You might say the record for the longest field goal in Gamecock history belongs to Yang Cheng, a 1993 geography Ph.D. graduate.

This diagram shows how Perseverance landed on Mars using Cheng's landing vision system. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

The distance: 300 million miles. The football: a one-ton, $2 billion scientific instrument.

Cheng was a key designer of the landing vision system for NASAs Perseverance rover, which launched in 2020 and reached Mars in February 2021. When winds over the Red Planet tried to sweep the lander off course, the landers cameras detected the change. Rocket boosters fired to steer the lander toward a safe landing zone. Back on earth, Cheng held his breath.

He watched the livestream from his home office, his eyes fixed to his computer screen while an announcers voice shared the landers speed and elevation every few seconds. When the rover touched down safely within five meters of the target location less than the distance between the field goal uprights Cheng slapped his desk, jumped in his seat and celebrated like hed just scored the game-winning point.

That made everyone very happy, he says, recalling the victorious moment. It was exciting and a great relief. I was very nervous, but I have confidence in the system.

Cheng studied mapmaking in China before coming to the university to study geographic information systems. His dissertation focused on using supercomputers to improve satellite images, making them more useful for creating maps.

Since that time, theres been a revolution in the field, resulting in sharp satellite images and easily obtained GPS data.

But Mars hasnt seen the same resolution revolution. The only high-resolution images of Mars dont have the coverage necessary for making a map. The larger images are low-resolution and suffer from problems like jitter from the satellites vibration. Since theres no GPS network and no map of Mars made on the ground, theres no way to verify a satellite map, either.

I liked seeing a connection between what I did as a nerdy scientist potentially impacting people I cared about.

Alicia Strange-Fessler, chemistry and biochemistry, Ph.D. graduate

That wasnt a problem with previous rovers Cheng helped NASA land on Mars rovers that aimed for vast flatlands with few obstacles. But Perseverance needed to land in Jezero Crater, a former lake where scientists hope to find ancient signs of life. Landing in a dried-up lake is no simple task.

This areas pretty dangerous, Cheng says. There are a lot of landing hazards, like craters, quicksand, boulders and steep landscapes.

Because of Chengs background in cartography and geography, he got the task of mapping Mars. He developed ways to remove jitter and other errors from the Martian images to create a map NASA could trust to help steer the lander to the surface.

I was excited that I had the opportunity to make the first navigation map for the safe landing of a spacecraft in human history, he says. But I was nervous because this is the first time in history.

Now that the rover is roaming Jezero Crater and collecting samples, Cheng is gratified to know that he helped it get there.

Ive always been interested in space and interested in doing something that has not been done before, Cheng says. Thats my motivation, the passion that drives me forward.

Meanwhile, the Perseverance rover is studying rocks and soils on Mars with the help of technology developed by South Carolina chemists. The rovers SuperCam includes a spectrometer device that uses a laser to analyze the components of objects several meters away.

Perseverance took this selfie over a rock nicknamed Rochette, on the 198th Martian day of the mission. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

Thirty years ago, Raman spectrometry required up close and personal contact between the spectrometer and the object being studied. But just before Mike Angel became a chemistry professor at South Carolina, he pioneered a method for collecting the data at a distance.

At the time, Angel was trying to analyze volcanic plumes and radioactive waste tanks that people couldnt get close to. Mars wasnt even on the map.

When I wrote that paper in 1992, I never would have imagined [the technology] would end up on Mars. Not in a million years," Angel says. I was interested in planetary exploration, but [the spectrometer] was too crude and too big. It needed a lot of engineering.

Angel, who recently retired as a Carolina Trustee Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, improved on the technology with numerous graduate students in Columbia. One of the first was Chance Carter, who then made standoff spectrometry a pivotal part of his research career.

What could be more fun than shooting laser beams to do standoff detection? Carter says, recalling a lot of fun tests in the lab. Its just exciting, fun work. Its captivating. It was exciting because it was something that only we were doing.

Carter calls Angel visionary for leading graduate students to new breakthroughs with spectrometry. Angel always had this knack for being able to think about whats the next important thing to do, he says.

Ive always been interested in space and interested in doing something that has not been done before. Thats my motivation, the passion that drives me forward.

Yang Cheng, a 1993 geography Ph.D. graduate

Most of the Raman spectrometry applications Angel studied were related to defense uses, such as detecting bombs by examining electromagnetic wavelengths. That attracted Alicia Strange-Fessler, whose husband was in the military at the time, to join the lab as a doctoral student.

I liked seeing a connection between what I did as a nerdy scientist potentially impacting people I cared about, she says.

Strange-Fessler's research focused on extending the range and accuracy of remote spectrometers in defense applications. But Angel and others were already exploring how the spectrometers could go to space.

Although the specific technology Strange-Fessler worked on was not developed enough to include on Perseverance, the rover does rely on techniques refined by Angels students over the years. Strange-Fesslers work may be carried by the next Mars mission, or it might be sent to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, Angel says.

That prospect is humbling, breathtaking and inspiring, Strange-Fessler says. Its exciting to know that something youve worked toward could help make discoveries in other worlds and increase our understanding of the solar system and larger space beyond that."

Angel, who helped analyze data sent back by Perseverance, is excited by the rovers progress. It already has packaged several rock samples to be returned to earth by a future Mars mission, and the data is promising.

"We are finding the kind of layered rocks that we expect to see at the bottom of a lake the kind of rocks that we think might preserve evidence of life from billions of years ago, he says.

Banner image: An artist's concept image depicts the rover analyzing rocks on Mars.

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Topics: Alumni, Academics, Research, Graduate Studies, College of Arts and Sciences

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Alumni make their mark on Mars exploration - UofSC News & Events - @UofSC

The Mars weather is beautiful today, and an astronaut is about to suffocate to death under the cloudless blue sky.

The trouble starts after three crew members leave the safety of the Hab, their pressurized six-person living station, and venture outside to do some routine work. They trudge along in 35lb spacesuits, breathing air pumped in by a fan and watching the jagged red landscape through their fishbowl-like glass helmets.

As they head back to the station, one astronaut, Aga Pokrywka, begins acting strangely. Her movements are sluggish. She stops walking.

The radio crackles. Aga, are you all right? the crews commander, Sionade Robinson, asks. The Hab is only a few dozen yards away, but Pokrywka cant seem to go further. She collapses on to the red clay.

Robert Turner, the crews medical officer, radios the Hab: Astronaut down, astronaut down!

The three crew members inside begin emergency protocols. Two don spacesuits, grab a stretcher and enter the airlock. They must wait five painstaking minutes for the air pressure to adjust. If they dont, they may be torn apart when they step into Marss thin atmosphere.

After the agonizing wait ends, the rescue party rushes to Pokrywka and rolls her on to the stretcher. They run toward the Hab, maneuver her body into the cramped airlock, and begin the countdown all over again.

A crew member inside, Kay Sandor, holds a timer against the airlock window: Five four three two

They get Pokrywka inside and on to the ground and remove her helmet. After a while, she starts to revive.

Patient stabilized, someone says. Everyone relaxes.

After a beat, Pokrywka asks: Did I win my Oscar?

It is hard to imagine that anyone would volunteer to live with five semi-strangers in a tin can in the desert. Yet hundreds of people from around the world apply for the chance to come to the remote wilderness of south-east Utah and pretend to colonize Mars.

Crews at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) conduct research to understand what humans may face when visiting or settling the red planet. And, in a sense, the crew members are the research.

For two or three weeks, they live like Martians. They wake each morning in bedrooms slightly larger than coffins. They gather in a small common area to eat breakfast usually a surprisingly edible meal made with dehydrated food, bacteria cultures and harvested greenhouse plants and watch the sunrise through portholes. Each crew member is allotted one 90-second shower every three days.

Operated by the non-profit Mars Society, the MDRS is a so-called analog space station. The crews there have no communication with the outside world except for a brief window every 24 hours when off-site personnel playing ground control make contact. No one is allowed to go outside without donning a spacesuit, or before going through airlock procedures. The station is surrounded by one of the most stunning landscapes on Earth, but crew members are allowed to interact with it only while confined, in effect, in a diving bell.

Knowing all this, I headed to the MDRS expecting my hosts, the members of Crew 238, to resemble the cast of The Thing, the clammy 1982 sci-fi film about an Antarctic research station riven by paranoia, at the phase shortly before the flamethrowers come out.

On the way to Mars, I stopped to gas up in Hanksville, Utah, a tiny roadside hamlet whose main attraction is a convenience store built, missile-silo-style, into the side of a mountain. Due to an epidemic of sign theft, the miles-long dirt road to get to the station, Cow Dung Road, is unmarked. This may be for the best, as the station has an occasional trespassing problem tourists, sometimes bearing drones, show up uninvited and disrupt the simulation. (The Mars Society asked me to remind readers that the station is a private research facility and closed to the public.)

Arriving at the MDRS is a slightly surreal experience: the small white compound, framed by windswept desert devoid of a single tree or shrub, really does look like a settlement on an alien planet. When I knocked cautiously on the airlock door, I heard a flurry of pleasant, multinational voices a German accent followed by a British one, and then by an unflappable southern American drawl straight from The Right Stuff or Apollo 13.

My astronaut hosts turned out to be an affable group: earnest, collegial and not visibly suffering from the kind of nervous breakdown that one might expect of a group of six sharing a single, bucket-powered dry toilet. After a week in sim, they were eager for a visitor and pressed me for news from outside.

In my daily life I produce ironically, perhaps Big Brother, PJ Marcellino, the executive officer and crew journalist, said. So I guess observing people gave me this weird foray into small-team dynamics.

In addition to working as a protocol producer on the reality TV show, Marcellino is a political scientist by training, a documentarian and an amateur writer of speculative fiction.

Ranging in age from 37 to 74, the other crew members had similarly eclectic career backgrounds art, nursing, engineering and as a business professor. None have held space-related day jobs, though Turner, a paramedic from Tennessee, has attended Nasa launches as an observer. The Mars Society reviewed their individual research applications and matched them as a crew. Crew 238 started planning their mission more than two years ago, but only met in person when they arrived.

Touring the MDRS doesnt take long. The Hab is deliberately cramped, to replicate the size of living quarters that could conceivably be delivered to Mars by rocket, and the rest of the facility is similarly utilitarian. Covered walkways connect the Hab to several outbuildings a greenhouse, a telescope, a lab and a mechanic room fashioned from the belly of a decommissioned Chinook helicopter. The facility has a small fleet of electric dune buggies. An array of solar panels provides much of the MDRSs energy, which, like water, is strictly rationed. The only neighbors are the programs on-site director, who lives in a trailer nearby, and a desert rat occasionally seen scavenging.

Over lunch lentil soup, Verdean chili, homemade bread and an apple crumble made from dried food the crew members talked about what attracted them to space. One common denominator: science fiction.

Two members of the crew were born behind the iron curtain Pokrywka in Poland and Simon Werner, the crew engineer, in East Germany and Marcellino was raised by leftwing parents in Portugal after the fall of the rightwing regime. Where North American sci-fi novels tend to emphasize individuality and the importance of technological innovation, they said, the Soviet sci-fi they grew up reading was more interested in the political and social aspects of future life.

Everyone disputed the perception of space travel as an expensive boondoggle. We spend billions on our militaries on fighting each other, Werner said; by comparison, he argued, space exploration was a drop in the bucket and one that could very well be crucial to humanitys survival.

Marcellino rejected the idea that there is a dichotomy between space travel and solving needs here on Earth. High-efficiency fuel, he said, was an example of a space technology that could be vital to alleviating the Earths climate crisis.

Werner and Marcellino also defended private space programs such as SpaceX, arguing that the interest that tech billionaires have taken in space exploration was a mostly positive development. (Elon Musk has contributed money to the Mars Society, which is funded by a mixture of membership dues, individual donations, grants and crowdfunding campaigns. MDRS crews are also charged a fee to help cover the cost of the program.)

Public space programs have as a rule struggled with financing, Marcellino said. Its hard for politicians to justify the funding. Only tech billionaires such as Musk and Jeff Bezos can afford to test rockets over and over, he said, and they are willing to do it at their own expense.

The crew members all told me that they did not expect to participate in a staffed mission to Mars and were just trying to lay some groundwork for whoever does.

I think we need to equip ourselves for the fact that we may not live to see the results of the things were working on, Pokrywka said.

The Mars Society has its origins in frustration. In the early 1990s, an American aeronautics engineer and inventor, Robert Zubrin, became convinced that direct exploration of Mars was not only possible but decades overdue.

I was 17 when we landed on the moon, and if anyone had told me then that Id be 61 and wed have not landed on Mars or even that people were not going to the moon any more I would have thought they were nuts, Zubrin told Business Insider in 2013. We were on the brink of opening up space, and we just stopped.

Zubrin has prosecuted his argument in a series of emphatic books The Case for Space, Entering Space, The Case for Mars, How to Live on Mars that sketch what a mission to Mars might look like, rebut common political and technological criticisms, and make a philosophical case for space exploration.

In 1998, Zubrin and others founded the Mars Society, which has no affiliation with Nasa. The Mars Society view has always been that there is nothing preventing a human mission within a decade, a representative told me. That was the case 10 years ago and its the case today.

Based on current technological trends, any journey to Mars would probably take six to nine months. Including the roundtrip voyage, even a short stay on Mars would require a group of human beings ready to spend a long time frighteningly far from home.

One dilemma, Robinson told me, is that the kinds of personalities that would be most attracted to a Mars mission people who are novelty-seeking, thrill-seeking, extremely accepting of risk are also those who would be most restless during the day-to-day reality.

Marcellino added: I think theres been an evolution of personality types from extreme type-A people who like to break records think Chuck Yeager to people with the social and cooperative skills to endure a nine-month space voyage.

Hence the importance of analog space stations. The Mars Society also maintains a base in the Canadian Arctic, though the one in Utah sees more use, for practical and cost reasons. Nasa and other groups have tried similar projects on a Hawaiian volcano and in a cave in Spain.

Much of what we know about long-term isolation comes from personnel stationed on submarines or in remote outposts in the Arctic or Antarctic. Space advocates believe that such case studies have limited application. Those sailors were bored, Zubrin told Business Insider, regarding US navy personnel stationed in Antarctica. They didnt want to be there. They wanted to be in San Diego where they can go out on the pier on Friday night and pick up girls.

By contrast, he argued, scientists and engineers who volunteered for long-term space missions would be highly motivated. Overwork, not boredom, would be a greater risk. The crew members I met at the MDRS seemed to partly bear out that observation; they worked hours each day and told me they were anxious about not finishing their research before leaving.

Either way, however, theres a huge difference between a few weeks in small-group isolation and, say, two years. A study completed in 2013 which confined six men at a facility in Russia, under simulated Mars conditions, for 520 days found that the men became lethargic and seemed to be tired even as they slept more.

In 1991, members of an experimental theater troupe undertook an audacious project to create a completely self-sustained ecosystem. At the Biosphere 2 facility in Arizona, a mixed-gender group of eight volunteers were enclosed in a giant terrarium, with water, plants and animals, for two years.

Tensions ran high; food, and eventually oxygen, ran low. The mission was only completed with the aid of emergency supplies smuggled in. In 1994 a second group tried, but were forced to end their mission early because of a power struggle in the Biospheres ownership.

Astronauts to Mars will live with the danger of fires, meteor impacts, radiation poisoning and solar storms. Air will need to be expertly managed to avoid astronauts choking on the carbon dioxide in their own breath, and months of low gravity will weaken them before they even arrive.

Depending on the relative positions of the two planets, communications between Mars and Earth will take as long as 20 minutes. Think of how stressful Zoom delays are, Marcellino said. Your brain starts to fry. Extrapolate that to four to 20 minutes, perhaps in an emergency situation.

If an emergency strikes on Mars, help or extra supplies will take months to arrive. Humans there will need to prioritize collective survival above all else, a principle that the MDRS emphasizes in emergency simulations. In a common scenario, some astronauts are contaminated by radiation while outside the station; their comrades inside have to decide whether to let them in.

During one such simulation, a contaminated woman pleaded to be let inside, but another crew member who was also her actual husband voted to let her die, arguing that it was necessary to protect the rest of the crew. The simulation supervisor praised the husbands choice. (No word on whether the marriage survived.)

And even the most rigorous training cant always prevent human error or mechanical failure. During Crew 238s simulated emergency, Pokrywka, who was designated to play possum, was saved, but afterward Turner admitted that his suit kept malfunctioning during the rescue operation.

I think I died, he said, casually. My airflow collapsed.

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Inside the Mars simulation project, where volunteers put their bodies on the line - The Guardian

An iconic portrait of famed NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon and the first earthrise viewed by humans from the lunar surface in 1968 are among 1,200 photographs and ephemera items heading for a virtual sale on February 22 at Dreweatts, an auction house in Donnington, England. The rare items come from the collection of the late British journalist Tim Furniss, who between 1984 and 2006 served as Flight International magazines spaceflight correspondent, and are being offered up for auction by his son, Thomas Furniss.

The portrait of Aldrin (estimated at 8,000-12,000 or $10,872-$16,308), the second man on the moon, was captured by Neil Armstrong, who beat him to making moonfall and whose reflection can be seen in his subjects helmet. The Lunar Lander Eagle the spacecraft that aided Apollo 11 in safely landing on the moon is also visible in Aldrins face shield. Taken on July 20 of 1969, the photo instantly became iconic, disseminated on the cover of Life magazines and reproduced worldwide. Aldrin himself later commented that he remembered the moon more from these photographs than from his memories.

Another image that rapidly made an imprint on the collective consciousness was a photo of the Earth rising over the moons horizon on Christmas Eve of 1968. Captured in color by Apollo 8 crew members on their first orbit of the moon, the photo depicts the gray, cratered lunar surface in the fore and a crescented Earth in the far distance. The photo, estimated at 4,000-6,000 or $5,435-$8,153, channeled the spirit of human triumphalism during a tumultuous political era while marking the eerie beginnings of humanitys ability to see its own home from above. It was one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, as Armstrong famously said.

Other lots feature items that are less immediately recognizable yet provide a fuller picture of the quirks, scientific study, and broader culture of space exploration in the late 20th century. A print of the first color photograph taken on the surface of Mars in July of 1976 shows a rugged terrain bespeckled by rocks, appearing in a magenta hue. The photo was taken on the day that the Viking 1 landed on Mars, the first unmanned spacecraft to do so.

A diptych of photographs lovingly remembers the life of Laika, a stray husky-spitz mix sent into outer space by the Soviet Union on the Sputnik 2 and the first animal to orbit Earth in 1957. Unfortunately, she died soon after liftoff. Armed with sensors and outfitted in a spacesuit, Laika, who scientists knew would be doomed, was launched into space as part of a trial run to determine if human space flight would be feasible. Between 1951 and 1966, the Soviet Union strapped dogs into spaceships 71 times. A photo that tells a tale with a happier ending captures Miss Baker, a squirrel monkey, cupped by gloved human hands. Miss Baker was the first animal to survive a spaceflight in 1959, and after retirement, eventually lived to the age of 27.

A NASA concept for a space station was mocked up even before energy was later focused almost single-mindedly on heading a mission to the moon. Illustrated by John Sentovic, the space station was conceived by Krafft Ehricke, an assistant to the technical director at Convair, a division of the General Dynamics Corporation, and featured on the cover of Spaceflight. Designed to host four people, it promised the possibility of short-term human existence in space. The slick, geometrically art deco-style of the illustration embodies the technological aspirations of the time, if a bit rudimentary in its engineering and design.

Finally, a remarkably meditative photograph tempers the adrenaline of blastoff by framing it with the curvature of a gnarled tree trunk resting in a pond. Two birds can even be seen flying on the horizon. Its unique composition suggests a corrective to the Cold War-era race to space that tinged the human spirit of exploration with a dark, bellicose streak.

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Captivating Space Photographs and Ephemera Hit the Auction Block - Hyperallergic

Many have dreamed of afuture where ordinary people (not just billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson) can take a leisure trip to space.

Well, it looks like that future is now,thanks to an announcementfrom Virgin Galactic.

The space exploration company, which was founded by Richard Branson, began selling tickets into space on Wednesday for the casual price of $450,000 a pop. (Okay, maybe not exactly within budget for most ordinary people.)

The tickets will require a downpayment of $150,000 and a total of 1,000 will be sold for voyages that are set to take place later this year.

Related:Space Stocks to Buy in This New Era of "Paying Customers"

If the future space traveler (or space group packages are available for multiple passengers, including buying the entire flight) decides to drop out before the big trip, Virgin Galactic will keep $25,000 of the payment.

The company, which prides itself as the worlds first commercial spaceline, will launch the flights out of New Mexico, with each trip lasting around 90 minutes in total for the six passengers per vehicle.

In preparation for the trip, customers will spend several days on the ground getting ready, participating in a training programto other space preparedness activities. The best part? The future astronauts can bring three guests with them for the on-the-ground happenings and accommodations.

CNBC reported that stock in the space exploration company skyrocketed up to 32% upon the announcement, down just shy of 5% from the day prior as of early Wednesday afternoon.

Branson himself made the voyage into space last July onboard the companys Unity 22 spaceship.

"To all you kids out there I was once a child with a dream, looking up to the stars,"the billionaire said at the time.Now I'm an adult in a spaceship...If we can do this, just imagine what you can do."

Related:FAA Clears Virgin Galactic for Take Off

This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com

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Virgin Galactic Just Opened Space Flights to the Public. Here's How Much It Will Cost You. - mySanAntonio.com

Ever heard of the overview effect? It was coined by a space writer called Frank White to describe how looking down at our little blue planet from above can create a shift in how astronauts think about Earth: all of a sudden you realise how fragile the Earth is and how important it is that we all work together to protect it. Looking at the Earth from afar you realise it is too small for conflict and just big enough for cooperation, the astronaut Yuri Gagarin said.

Alas, it looks like we needed to replace the overview effect with the avarice effect, because attitudes towards space seem to have shifted. Rather than making people imagine a better world, modern space exploration seems to be all about money, money, money. Elon Musks SpaceX has been working with a Canadian startup on plans to launch satellites with billboards on them into space so that adverts can light up the night sky. No doubt some of those ads will be for space tourism: on Wednesday Virgin Galactic opened ticket sales to the public for the first time. And by the public I mean that the small sliver of the public that can afford $450,000 for a joyride 300,000 feet above Earth.

The real money, of course, is not in intergalactic billboards or short space trips: its in plundering space for resources. Apparently, the race to privatize the moon is on. Of course, many people who are starry-eyed about space mining would balk at the idea that theyre suffering from the avariceeffect: theyd argue that its all for the good of mankind. Take, for example, the forward-thinking folk at the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), an influential thinktank that champions free markets. To achieve peace and prosperity on Earth, we need to sell off pieces of space, with a particular focus on plots of moon land, the ASI recently declared in a paper.

Whats the logic behind this? Well, they reckon that, as long as youre not too bothered by the fact that global inequality contributes to the death of one person every four seconds, per Oxfam, untrammeled capitalism has done the world a lot of good. Property rights play a key role in boosting living standards, innovation and human dignity here on Earth, Daniel Pryor, head of research at the Adam Smith Institute, says. The same would be true if we applied this logic to space, which presents a unique opportunity to start afresh when designing effective rules of ownership.

This ASI report, titled Space Invaders: Property Rights on the Moon, may seem a little out there but it is very on-brand for the UK-based thinktank. We propose things which people regard as being on the edge of lunacy, its president, Dr Madsen Pirie once boasted. The next thing you know, theyre on the edge of policy. Thats not hyperbole: the thinktank helped propel a range of privatization efforts in the UK during the 80s and 90s. Alan Rusbridger, the Guardians former editor, has described the institute as a body which has built up a startling track record for floating ideas which end up on the statute books. In short: dont dismiss this paper as the ramblings of a bunch of space cadets.

That said, dont expect a McDonalds on the moon imminently. There are a few obstacles that stand in the way of the ASIs fantasies of intrepid capitalists plundering the cosmos. Chief among these is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which is the foundation for international space law. The treaty establishes that space belongs to everyone and no nation has the right to appropriate a celestial body.

The Outer Space Treaty was drawn up in the early days of space exploration. It was easy for world leaders to be magnanimous about not monetizing space back then because the idea was still largely theoretical. Now that mining the moon is becoming more of a practical possibility, however, the treaty is swiftly falling out of favour and there have been a series of attempts to undermine it. In 2015, for example, the US Congress and President Barack Obama passed legislation giving American companies the right to own and sell anything they obtain from space. The US argued that this wasnt a contravention under the Outer Space Treaty (which is not particularly detailed) because there is no claim of sovereignty involved.

Donald Trump advanced the commercialization of space further during his time in office. In 2020 he signed an executive order encouraging the commercial development of space. Outer space is a legally and physically unique domain of human activity, and the United States does not view it as a global commons, the executive order stated.

The steady commercialization of space has not passed the ASI by. With more countries and companies competing in the space race than ever before its vital for us to move past the outdated thinking of the 1960s and tackle the question of extraterrestrial property rights sooner rather than later, the thinktanks report says.

They are absolutely right about that: the Outer Space Treaty is outdated and is already being ignored. We desperately need to establish a framework regarding property rights before billionaires, private corporations and self-interested world leaders start auctioning off the universe. As the outraged online reaction to the ASIs report demonstrates, not everyone is sold on the idea that giving corporations free rein to mine the moon is going to make the world a better place. Its already well established that trickle-down economics doesnt work. Do they really expect us to believe that wealth is going to trickle all the way down from space?

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Privatising the moon may sound like a crazy idea but the sky's no limit for avarice | Arwa Mahdawi - The Guardian