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InSight lander snaps Mars selfies galore

Mars InSight photo
A photo snapped by the camera on the InSight lander’s robotic arm shows instruments on the spacecraft’s deck with Martian terrain in the background. The pointer indicates the location of two chips bearing the microscopic etched names of 2.4 million fans. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Photo)

One week after landing on the Martian plain of Elysium Planitia, NASA’s InSight lander is on a selfie-snapping spree — and the photos could be used as a guide for 2.4 million Earthlings and their descendants to look for their names.

InSight’s selfies aren’t meant to be a vanity project for the lander or its creators. Rather, they signal the start of a picture-taking campaign that’s designed to identify the best spots to plunk down the mission’s seismometer and temperature-measuring “mole.”

Pictures from full-color Instrument Deployment Camera, which is mounted on the spacecraft’s 6-foot-long robotic arm, will help scientist ensure that the spots they pick will be sufficiently level and rock-free to accommodate the first instruments to be lifted up and placed down permanently on the surface of another planet.

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Climate change doom teaches lesson for today

Permian-Triassic extinction
An artist’s conception shows the desolation caused by the Permian-Triassic extinction more than 250 million years ago. (LPI / USRA Illustration)

Scientists say rapidly warming oceans played a key role in the world’s biggest mass extinction, 252 million years ago, and could point to the risks that lie ahead in an era of similarly rapid climate change.

The latest analysis, published in this week’s issue of the journal Science, puts together computer modeling of ancient ocean conditions and a close look at species characteristics to fit new pieces into a longstanding puzzle: What were the factors behind the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, also known as the Great Dying?

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SpaceX booster gets dunked after launch

SpaceX Falcon 9 launch
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, sending a Dragon cargo ship into orbit. (NASA Photo)

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket sent a robotic Dragon cargo capsule into orbit today from Florida to deliver 5,600 pounds of supplies and experiments to the International Space Station, just two days after a different Falcon 9 launched 64 satellites from a pad across the country.

The primary mission was an undeniable hit, but this time around, SpaceX’s attempt to have the Falcon 9’s first-stage booster touch down on a landing pad was a miss.

Today’s liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station might have come even sooner if it weren’t for some moldy mouse food.

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AI2 and Microsoft join forces on academic search

Microsoft Academic Graph
A chart generated by Microsoft Academic Graph shows the interconnections between a group of research authors associated with Microsoft, with Nathan Myhrvold and Bill Gates at the center and Satya Nadella, the company’s current CEO, highlighted on the periphery. (Microsoft via YouTube)

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI2, is partnering with Microsoft Research to widen the sphere of scientific search tools by connecting AI2’s Semantic Scholar academic search engine with the Microsoft Academic Graph.

Semantic Scholar is a free online tool makes use of artificial intelligence to maximize the relevance of search results for studies focusing on computer science and biomedicine. Its database takes in more than 40 million academic papers, plus associated blog items, news reports, videos and other resources.

Since its inception in 2015, Semantic Scholar’s user base has grown to more than 2 million monthly users.

Microsoft Academic Graph, meanwhile, charts the networks that knit together more than 200 million academic documents and citations on a wide variety of scientific subjects.

Doug Raymond, Semantic Scholar’s general manager, said the new collaboration is in line with his project’s goal of combating information overload in the scientific community. “This partnership with Microsoft Research relates to our shared interest in this problem,” Raymond told GeekWire.

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New crypto needed for quantum computing age

Quantum computing report
A new report from the National Academies says it’ll be at least a decade before quantum computing becomes powerful enough to crack today’s public-key cryptography, but it could also take that long to develop a new data-encoding system to protect against hacking. (National Academies Illustration)

A new report from computer scientists estimates that it’s likely to be at least a decade before quantum computing tools become powerful enough to compromise the current system of public-key cryptography that serves as the foundation for data security and financial transactions.

But it could also take a decade or more to replace current crypto tools with new protocols that would be resistant to quantum hacking, according to the report, published today by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

Therefore, the report’s authors say, it’s urgent to begin the transition toward such “post-quantum” protocols — which can range from increasing the size of encryption keys to developing new lattice-based systems such as NewHope and Frodo.

The study was sponsored by the federal Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and meshes with policy strategies laid out in September during a White House quantum information science summit. Like the White House strategy document, the National Academies study points out that the rise of quantum computing will have deep implications for national security.

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Four black hole smashups added to LIGO’s list

Black hole merger
An artist’s conception shows two black holes merging. (LIGO / Caltech / MIT Illustration)

Four more mergers of black holes, including the biggest one recorded to date, have been added to a catalog generated by gravitational-wave detectors.

The additions were announced today by the teams in charge of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, and the European-based Virgo detector. The full list of stellar-mass binary black hole mergers now stands at 10, with a neutron-star merger thrown in for good measure.

“The release of four additional binary black hole mergers further informs us of the nature of the population of these binary systems in the universe, and better constrains the event rate for these types of events,” Caltech physicist Albert Lazzarini, deputy director of the LIGO Laboratory, said in a news release

The four previously unreported detections came to light during a re-analysis of data from LIGO’s first two observing runs. The third run, known as O3, is scheduled to begin next spring.

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Newly arrived space station trio is ‘having a blast’

Soyuz launch
A Russian Soyuz rocket rises from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, carrying three spacefliers into orbit. (NASA TV via YouTube)

A Russian Soyuz rocket sent three spacefliers to the International Space Station today, marking a return to normal operations after a hardware problem spoiled a similar flight in October.

NASA’s Anne McClain, Canada’s David Saint-Jacques and Russia’s Oleg Kononenko lifted off from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan into sunset skies as scheduled at 5:31 p.m. local time (3:31 a.m. PT). Gary Jordan, a launch commentator for NASA, hailed a “textbook launch and insertion into orbit.”

The station’s three current crew members could watch the launch from high above. “Looking forward to having a full crew of 6 up here again, at least for a few weeks,” German astronaut Alexander Gerst, the station’s current commander, said in a tweet.

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SpaceX launches 64 satellites for Spaceflight

SpaceX Falcon launch
SpaceX’s first triple-launched Falcon 9 booster lights up to send 64 satellites into space. (SpaceX Photo)

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched Seattle-based Spaceflight’s first-ever dedicated rideshare mission, a satellite extravaganza aimed at placing 64 spacecraft in low Earth orbit.

Today’s liftoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California came off at 10:34 a.m. PT, sending the scorch-marked rocket into clear skies. The mission had been delayed several times over the past couple of weeks, due to concerns about upper-level winds and the need for more pre-launch inspections.

This mission delivered a first for SpaceX as well as for Spaceflight: It marked the first time SpaceX sent the same first-stage booster into space and back three times.

The upgraded Block 5 booster had its previous liftoffs in May and August, and today SpaceX recovered the booster yet again. Minutes after launch, it touched down on a drone ship stationed out in the Pacific Ocean, christened “Just Read the Instructions.”

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OSIRIS-REx probe reaches asteroid Bennu

Asteroid Bennu
An image taken by the OSIRIS-REx probe last month shows the asteroid Bennu from a distance of about 40 miles. (NASA / Goddard / Univ. of Arizona Photo)

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx today made its official rendezvous with a promising and potentially perilous asteroid named Bennu, after two years of closing in on it.

“We have arrived,” telecommunications engineer Javi Cerna announced during a NASA webcast from mission control at Lockheed Martin Space in Colorado.

It’s a major step in OSIRIS-REx’s mission to study a near-Earth object at close range and snag samples for return to Earth in 2023.

The car-sized spacecraft has been creeping up on the 0.3-mile-wide (half-kilometer-wide), diamond-shaped space rock for weeks, but today a 28-second thruster firing stabilized its position at a point less than 12 miles (20 kilometers) away from the asteroid (and more than 75 million miles or 121 million kilometers from Earth).

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New Horizons probe zeroes in on Ultima Thule

Ultima Thule and New Horizons
An artist’s conception shows Ultima Thule with the New Horizons probe silhouetted by the sun. (NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI Illustration)

Act Two of the 12-year-old New Horizons mission to Pluto and the solar system’s icy Kuiper Belt is heating up, with less than a month to go before NASA’s piano-sized spacecraft makes history’s farthest-out close encounter with a celestial object.

The New Year’s flyby of a mysterious Kuiper Belt object (or objects) known as Ultima Thule (UL-ti-ma THOO-lee) follows up on the mission’s first act, which hit a climax three years ago with a history-making flyby of Pluto.

Launched in 2006, New Horizons was never meant to be a one-shot deal. Even before the Pluto flyby, mission managers used the Hubble Space Telescope to identify its next quarry, a billion miles farther out in the Kuiper Belt. Now it’s crunch time for New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern and his team.

Again.

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