Tag: Mars

Categories
Fiction Science Club

Occupy Mars? Or the moon? It’s time for a reality check

Illustrations: Moon Village and Mars habitat
Artist's concepts show a moon village at left and a Mars habitat at right. (Left image: ESA. Right image: Team SEArch+/Apis Cor via NASA)

It’s an age-old debate in space circles: Should humanity’s first city on another world be built on the moon, or on Mars?

As recently as last year, SpaceX founder Elon Musk saw missions to the moon as a “distraction.” In a post to his X social-media platform, he declared that “we’re going straight to Mars.”

But last week, Musk said he’s changed his mind: “For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years,” he wrote on X.

How realistic is either option, particularly on a 10- to 20-year time frame? In a new book titled “Becoming Martian,” Rice University evolutionary biologist Scott Solomon lays out the possibilities as well as the perils that could make Musk’s job more challenging than he thinks.

“The more research I did on this topic, and the more labs I visited, and papers I read, and experts I spoke with, what became clear to me is that we have some pretty big gaps in our knowledge, in our understanding of what the reality would be like,” Solomon says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

Continue reading “Occupy Mars? Or the moon? It’s time for a reality check”
Categories
GeekWire

Blue Origin sends probes to Mars and brings back booster

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket rises from its Florida launch pad
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket rises from its Florida launch pad. (Blue Origin Photo via Dave Limp / X)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture sent twin orbiters on the first leg of their journey to Mars today, marking a successful sequel to January’s first liftoff of the company’s heavy-lift New Glenn launch vehicle.

The trouble-free launch of NASA’s Escapade probes, plus today’s first-ever recovery of a New Glenn booster, bolstered Blue Origin’s status as a worthy competitor for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has come to dominate the space industry. SpaceX is the only other company to bring back an orbital-class booster successfully.

New Glenn — which is named after John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit — rose from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 3:55 p.m. ET (12:55 p.m. PT). Today’s liftoff followed earlier attempts that had to be scratched, initially due to cloudy weather on Earth, and then due to a solar storm in space.

Minutes after New Glenn rose into the sky, the mission plan called for the rocket’s first-stage booster to fly itself back to a touchdown on a floating platform in the Atlantic that was named Jacklyn after Bezos’ late mother. Blue Origin’s first attempt to recover a New Glenn booster failed in January — but this time, the maneuver was successful.

That achievement was greeted by wild cheers from Blue Origin team members watching the webcast, including Jeff Bezos at Mission Control and a crowd at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash. The uncertainty about recovering the booster was reflected in the nickname it was given: “Never Tell Me the Odds.”

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
Fiction Science Club

How science weighs the pluses and minuses of space sex

Illustration: Male and female astronaut floating in space and grasping for Valentine heart
The effects of the space environment on sexual intimacy have been debated for decades. (Credit: Catrin1309 / Bigstock)

You might think sex in space would be an out-of-this-world experience — but based on the scientific evidence so far, low-gravity intimacy isn’t likely to be as much of a high as it sounds. In fact, dwelling too deeply on the challenges of off-Earth sex and reproduction could be a real mood-killer.

“In one’s fantasies, or on a quick imaginary level, you think, ‘Wow, think of the possibilities,’” says Mary Roach, author of “Packing for Mars,” a book about the science of living in space. “But in fact, to stay coupled is a little tough, because … you know, you bounce apart. So, I said this to one of the astronauts at NASA, and he said, ‘Nothing a little duct tape won’t take care of.’”

Fortunately, Roach won’t be delving too deeply into the downside during her Valentine’s Day talk at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. At the 21-and-over event, she plans to focus on the lighter side of living in space — including zero-gravity sex. In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Roach provides an update on “Packing for Mars,” plus a preview of tonight’s “Mars Love Affair” presentation.

Continue reading “How science weighs the pluses and minuses of space sex”
Categories
Universe Today

NASA lays out two new options for Mars sample return

Montage of sample tube on Mars surface
This montage shows tubes containing Martian samples collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS)

Months after deciding that its previous plan for bringing samples back from Mars wasn’t going to work, NASA says it’s working out the details for two new sample return scenarios, with the aim of bringing 30 titanium tubes filled with Martian rocks and soil back to Earth in the 2030s.

One scenario calls for using a beefed-up version of NASA’s sky crane to drop the required hardware onto the Red Planet’s surface, while the other would use heavy-lift commercial capabilities provided by the likes of SpaceX or Blue Origin.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the space agency plans to flesh out the details for each option over the course of the next year and make its choice in 2026. But that all depends on what Congress and President-elect Donald Trump’s administration want to do.

Continue reading “NASA lays out two new options for Mars sample return”
Categories
GeekWire

Scientists identify a potential haven for Martian life

Dusty ice deposits in Martian gullies, as seen in orbital imagery
The white areas on the edges of these gullies in the Martian region of Terra Sirenium, shown in an image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, are thought to be areas of dusty ice similar to those identified as potential havens for microbes. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona)

Could microbes endure just beneath the surface of Mars, in layers of dusty ice exposed to just the right amount of sunlight? A newly published study suggests those might be among the most accessible places to search for signs of life on the Red Planet.

The study, published today in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, is based on models developed using impure ice from Greenland. “We did not find any direct evidence for any microbes on Mars,” study lead author Aditya Khuller told me in an email. “We do find that the depths where the radiation (solar and UV) conditions are favorable for photosynthesis within dusty Martian ice intersect with the depths where dusty ice can melt on Mars.”

Khuller is a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who’s due to join the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory at the end of the month. The paper’s co-authors include one of Khuller’s mentors, UW professor emeritus Steve Warren, whom Khuller says is “the world’s expert in how radiation interacts with snow and ice.”

Modern-day Mars is a cold, dry world, bombarded with life-killing levels of ultraviolet radiation. But scientists say that the planet would have been far more hospitable to life in ancient times. They suggest there’s a chance that hardy organisms could still be hanging on deep down in subsurface havens.

How deep? And how much of a chance? Those are questions that Khuller, Warren and their colleagues sought to answer by modeling the composition of Mars’ ice.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
GeekWire

Blue Origin and NASA shift New Glenn launch plans

Workers mate sections of New Glenn first stage
Elements of the New Glenn rocket’s first stage are mated at Blue Origin’s factory in Florida. (Blue Origin Photo)

NASA is delaying the launch of its ESCAPADE probes to Mars, which means plans for the debut of Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket will change as well.

New Glenn was previously due to send the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft to Mars as early as next month, but after a review of launch preparations, NASA rescheduled the launch for next spring at the earliest.

Planning for the mission is complicated because of the tight window for launch, necessitated by the alignment of Earth and Mars. Even a small schedule change can result in a months-long delay for liftoff.

After consulting with Blue Origin, the Federal Aviation Administration and range safety managers at the U.S. Space Force, NASA decided to hold off on fueling up the ESCAPADE probes. “The decision was made to avoid significant cost, schedule and technical challenges associated with potentially removing fuel from the spacecraft in the event of a launch delay, which could be caused by a number of factors,” the space agency said today in a mission update.

ESCAPADE — an acronym that stands for “Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers” — is a mission designed to study interactions between the solar wind and Mars’ magnetosphere.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
GeekWire

Mars Society is gaining a foothold in AI and biotech

NASA engineer working on construction robot
NASA engineer Christine Gregg inspects an experimental construction robot. (NASA Photo / Dominic Hart)

The Mars Society says it’s making progress on launching a startup incubator in the Seattle area, with artificial intelligence and biotech as its first targets. Its long-term goal? To make a profit, yes, but also to support the development of technologies needed to sustain settlements on the Red Planet.

“A successful Mars colony will need to be highly innovative, and it will have the chance to be highly innovative — and because of those facts, it will make inventions that will meet its own needs but also be licensable on Earth,” Mars Society President Robert Zubrin said last week at the nonprofit group’s annual conference at the University of Washington.

“Those inventions — as it were, IP as exports from Mars — will be one of the main economic supports of the Mars city-state,” Zubrin said. “So, people sometimes ask me, ‘Well, if you think that a Mars inventors colony could actually be profitable, why not create it here on Earth first?’”

That’s the idea behind the Mars Technology Institute. James Burk, the Mars Society’s Seattle-based executive director, said the institute would be modeled on the tech industry’s Y Combinator, a California-based startup accelerator that provides seed money and guidance for promising ventures in return for a share of their equity.

Burk said he’s been talking government officials and representatives of other organizations in the Seattle area — including Bellevue College — about setting up a home base for the institute. Those talks could bear fruit in the months ahead.

In the meantime, the Mars Society is moving ahead with initiatives in AI, biotech for food production, and robotics. In addition to those target areas, Zubrin would also like to get involved in advanced nuclear fission and fusion technologies — another tech frontier that the Pacific Northwest is known for. “But the entry point for getting involved with those [technologies] is high, and so we chose to defer that,” he said.

Get a status report on the Mars Society’s startup efforts…

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
GeekWire

One way to get samples on Mars: Send in the Cybertrucks

Six AI-generated images of "Cybertruck on Mars" from Tesla AI Day presentation
These AI-generated images of a “Cybertruck on Mars” were shown during Tesla's AI Day 2022. (Tesla via YouTube)

Tesla’s Cybertruck may look ungainly on Earth, but a pressurized version of the vehicle might be just the thing for gathering up samples of Martian rock and soil for return to Earth. That’s one of the way-out concepts that was discussed in Seattle during the past week’s convention of the Mars Society, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Robotically controlled Cybertrucks could be part of a Mars exploration system that also includes SpaceX’s Starship super-rocket as well as spaceworthy versions of all-terrain vehicles and humanoid robots built by Tesla, according to mission plans suggested by Mars Society co-founder Robert Zubrin, retired NASA engineer Tony Muscatello and business analyst Kent Nebergall.

Zubrin said the Starship-based concept could even accelerate progress toward crewed missions to Mars.

“We use Starship to deliver a robotic expedition that has already examined thousands of samples on Mars, gathered from hundreds of kilometers away by helicopters, and tens of kilometers away gathered by rovers, and then we land the crew to do follow-up exploration, including drilling in well-characterized sites to bring up water and see what the life on Mars is,” he said during an Aug. 8 session.

How way out is that? It sounds like science fiction, but theoretically, at least some elements of the plan could show up in SpaceX’s proposal for reworking NASA’s Mars sample return strategy.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
GeekWire

Mars Society plots a high-tech course to the Red Planet

Two crew members at Mars Desert Research Station in Utah
Crew members conduct a simulated survey at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah. (Mars Society Photo)

What’s the best route to the Red Planet? Hundreds of people are converging on Seattle this week to consider that question at the annual convention of the Mars Society. And the answer may come, at least in part, from an array of tech startups.

“The route to get to Mars is commercial,” James Burk, the nonprofit advocacy group’s executive director, told me. “The new-space sector is critically important to Mars exploration, both robotic and human.”

Burk said the Mars Society’s 27th annual convention is expected to bring at least 250 to 300 people to the University of Washington starting Aug. 8. “We’ve offered it for free to students at U Dub,” he said. Dozens of sessions are planned, focusing on topics ranging from NASA’s Mars exploration strategy to private-sector concepts for Mars settlements.

There’ll also be an update on the society’s plans to establish a Mars Technology Institute, potentially in the Pacific Northwest. The institute’s objective would be to foster startups that could develop the technologies needed for a long-term campaign of Mars exploration and settlement — and make money in the process.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
Universe Today

Starlink on Mars? NASA is paying SpaceX to look into it

Illustration: Starlink satellites in orbit
An artist's conception shows Starlink satellites in orbit. Credit: SpaceX

NASA has given the go-ahead for SpaceX to work out a plan to adapt its Starlink broadband internet satellites for use in a Martian communication network.

The idea is one of a dozen proposals that have won NASA funding for concept studies that could end up supporting the space agency’s strategy for bringing samples from Mars back to Earth for lab analysis. The proposals were submitted by nine companies — also including Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, United Launch Alliance, Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, Impulse Space, Albedo Space and Redwire Space.

Awardees will be paid $200,000 to $300,000 for their reports, which are due in August. NASA says the studies could lead to future requests for proposals, but it’s not yet making any commitment to follow up.

Continue reading “Starlink on Mars? NASA is paying SpaceX to look into it”