Artwork shows a Red Dragon capsule firing its thrusters for a Mars landing. (SpaceX Illustration)
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he expects to see astronauts flying to the International Space Station on his company’s Dragon capsules by mid-2018 – but is downplaying a technology that would have opened the way for robotic “Red Dragon” missions to Mars.
U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., asks about Mars’ ancient past. (House Science Committee via YouTube)
What game was U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., playing when he asked Caltech geochemist Kenneth Farley whether there was any evidence of an ancient civilization on Mars?
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk got a rock-star reception last September at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico when he unveiled his long-promised plan to send scads of settlers to Mars. Now he’s working on a reprise, and it just might be announced at this September’s IAC meeting in Australia. Musk dropped the hint overnight when a follower asked him on Twitter to say when he’d unveil Version 2.0 of the plan, which is supposed to explain in more detail how all those Mars missions be paid for. “Maybe the upcoming IAC in Adelaide,” he replied.
Vice President Mike Pence addresses a gathering at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with a prototype Orion spaceship as a backdrop. (NASA via YouTube)
Vice President Mike Pence, the newly minted chairman of a revived National Space Council, said today that President Donald Trump is committed to a return to the moon and a push onward to Mars.
Pence laid out the broad strokes of the Trump administration’s aspirations for space exploration during a visit to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“Here from this bridge to space, our nation will return to the moon, and we will put American boots on the face of Mars,” Pence declared.
He cast last week’s revitalization of the National Space Council, which was disbanded by the Clinton administration in 1993, as a signal that space policy would be given a higher profile.
NASA’s Opportunity rover snapped a picture of its own tread marks as it passed by Orion Crater on Mars. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / ASU)
Forty-five years after the astronauts of Apollo 16 rode out on a rover to look over a crater on the moon, NASA’s Opportunity rover looked over a crater on Mars – and sparked a chain of coincidences.
To mark the linkage, Opportunity’s science team named the feature on Mars “Orion Crater.” That pays tribute to the Apollo 16 astronauts, who named their lunar module Orion. It’s also the name of the future NASA spaceship that may help astronauts get to Mars someday.
Orion Crater is about 90 feet wide and thought to be no more than 10 million years old.
“It turns out that Orion Crater is almost exactly the same size as Plum Crater on the moon, which John Young and Charles Duke explored on their first of three moonwalks taken while investigating the lunar surface using their lunar rover,” the Planetary Science Institute’s Jim Rice, a member of Opportunity’s science team, said in a NASA image advisory issued today.
The newly published print version, appearing on the New Space website, recaps Musk’s 95-minute talk at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico last September – during which he laid out a decades-long plan to develop and launch fleets of giant spaceships to Mars, each carrying 100 passengers at a time.
The presentation has been online in video form for months, with accompanying slides, but the text-plus-graphics version is arguably easier to scan and digest.
This artist’s concept depicts NASA’s Mars 2020 rover on the surface of Mars. (NASA / JPL-Caltech)
The rover that NASA is getting ready to send to Mars in 2020 looks a lot like the Curiosity rover that’s been working on Mars for almost five years – except for that freakishly big robotic arm.
The arm is one of the keys to the rover’s more ambitious mission: to turn up potential traces left behind by ancient life on the Red Planet, and to tuck away samples for eventual return to Earth.
The six-wheeled robot, built on the same type of chassis used for Curiosity, is due for launch in the summer of 2020 toward one of three sites: Northeast Syrtis Major, Jezero Crater or Columbia Hills.
NASA probably won’t decide which site to target for another year or two, but in the meantime, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory put out a new artist’s concept showing the 2020 rover at a Martian work site. The site shown in the picture actually looks a lot like Curiosity’s stomping grounds in Gale Crater.
In a video tied to the 2016 movie “Star Trek Beyond,” Hewlett Packard Enterprise imagines a time when Starfleet trainees learn about the rise of The Machine. (HPE Discover via YouTube)
What does a prototype computer with 160 terabytes of memory have to do with missions to Mars? The way Kirk Bresniker sees it, a giant leap in computing is required for the giant leap to the Red Planet.
“That’s actually what we need to wrap around that crew,” Bresniker, chief architect at Hewlett Packard Labs, told GeekWire.
Bresniker said the latest prototype in a Hewlett Packard Enterprise research project known as The Machine, unveiled today, represents one not-so-small step toward the kind of computer that could be included on a Mars mission.
The “Mankind to Mars” panel presentation incorporates video clips from National Geographic Channel’s “Mars” miniseries. (NGC / Imagine / RadicalMedia)
If you want to maximize your chances of weathering Mars’ harsh radiation environment, get in the habit of eating broccoli.
That’s a bit of far-out diet advice from Ray Arvidson, a veteran of robotic Red Planet missions going back to the Viking landers in the 1970s.
Arvidson, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, was among a trio of space experts holding forth at “National Geographic Live: Mankind to Mars,” a multimedia panel presentation hosted by the Seattle Symphony at Benaroya Hall.
The traveling show is inspired by the National Geographic Channel’s hybrid docudrama TV series, “Mars,” which finished its first six-episode season last December and has gotten the green light for a second season.
Arvidson and his fellow panelists – “Night Sky Guy” commentator Andrew Fazekas and Vanderbilt astrophysicist Jedidah Isler – make liberal use of video clips and graphics from the TV show to make their points about the prospects for finding traces of life on Mars, and perhaps building settlements there.
President Donald Trump chats with astronauts on the International Space Station from his desk in the White House’s Oval Office, flanked by NASA astronaut Kate Rubins on the left and Ivanka Trump on the right. (White House via YouTube)
Humans on Mars by 2024? President Donald Trump set that time frame today, almost certainly in jest, during a congratulatory video call to the International Space Station and its record-setting commander, NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson.
The purpose of the orbital linkup from the Oval Office was to recognize Whitson’s new status as the U.S. record-holder for most cumulative time in space – “534 days and counting,” Trump noted.
But the topic soon turned to Mars, and how soon humans would be journeying to the Red Planet. When Trump asked Whitson what the time frame was, Whitson noted that the bill he signed into law last month called for the journeys to begin in the 2030s.
“Well, we want to try and do it during my first term, or at worst during my second term,” Trump replied. “So we’ll have to speed that up a little bit, OK?”
“We’ll do our best,” Whitson said, amid smiles and laughter.
