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Here’s how NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will look

Mars 2020 rover
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.

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HP Enterprise unveils computer made for Mars

Star Trek and The Machine
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.

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Five tips for future Mars explorers

Mars miniseries
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.

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Trump calls for speeding up trips to Mars

Trump in Oval Office
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.

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Elon Musk isn’t smiling over NASA legislation

Elon Musk
Elon Musk has his sights set on going to Mars. (SpaceX via YouTube)

President Donald Trump may be beaming over a newly signed law that calls on NASA to look into sending astronauts to Mars by 2033, but not Elon Musk.

SpaceX’s billionaire CEO is aiming to put his fortune behind a push to send up to a million settlers to Mars, starting as early as the mid-2020s.

In a back-and-forth series of tweets with Recode’s Kara Swisher, Musk made clear that he’s looking for much more than words from the federal government when it comes to Mars missions.

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SpaceX puts Arcadia on the map for Mars

Arcadia
This color-coded elevation map of Mars’ equatorial region shows Arcadia Planitia at upper left, northwest of Olympus Mons and the Tharsis shield volcanoes. (USGS)

SpaceX’s current favorite place to land on Mars is reportedly Arcadia Planitia, which combines flat terrain, potential deposits of water ice and an equatorial region well-suited for solar power. According to Space News, that’s the word from SpaceX’s Paul Wooster, who’s working with NASA to identify potential landing sites for the privately held company’s Red Dragon missions to Mars.

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NASA picks 3 top spots for a Mars landing

An artist’s conception shows the 2020 Mars rover with its robotic arm extended. (NASA / JPL Graphic)
An artist’s conception shows the 2020 Mars rover with its robotic arm extended. (NASA / JPL Graphic)

NASA has whittled down its choices for its next Mars landing site to three spots, including the hills where the space agency’s Spirit rover roamed a decade ago.

The Columbia Hills are among the three finalists because the silica deposits discovered there during Spirit’s mission suggest the site might have been part of an ancient hot springs.

That’s the sort of place that geologists say might hold evidence of past life, which is high on the scientific agenda for the rover that’s due to be launched in 2020.

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Make-believe mission to Mars begins in Hawaii

HI-SEAS habitat
The terrain surrounding the HI-SEAS habitat on Mauna Loa looks like Mars. (Univ. of Hawaii Photo)

Six volunteers – including two with connections to Washington state – have begun eight months of being cooped up in a Hawaii habitat that’s meant to simulate life on Mars.

The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation project, known as HI-SEAS, is one of several long-running experiments that use earthly environments as a training ground for future Red Planet expeditions. This is the fifth simulated mission to be staged on the slopes of Mauna Loa on Hawaii’s Big Island, 8,200 feet above sea level.

The University of Hawaii at Manoa has conducted the simulations since 2012, thanks to $1.2 million in NASA funding. The best-known simulation lasted for a year and ended last August, paralleling the “Year in Space” mission conducted by NASA astronaut Scott Kelly on the International Space Station.

NASA re-upped with a $1 million grant for Mission 5, plus Mission 6 in 2018.

During the simulation mission, the volunteer crew will be confined to a 36-foot-wide geodesic dome, except when they don bulky mock spacesuits for treks across Mauna Loa’s Mars-like terrain.

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Who would you go to Mars with? Here’s a list

Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence
Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence star in the movie “Passengers,” which tells the tale of a space journey far beyond Mars. (Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures)

A just-for-fun survey suggests that three out of every 10 Americans have thought about going to Mars, and almost half of them have thought about it more seriously after the presidential election.

The finding come from an online survey conducted by Kelton Global to mesh with National Geographic Channel’s six-part TV miniseries, “Mars,” which finishes up with an episode premiering tonight.

The breakdown suggests that men give more thought to Mars trips than women, and that Millennials are more on board with the idea than baby boomers. Overall, 44 percent of the 1,024 survey respondents said they’re more likely to want to travel to Mars in the wake of last month’s election.

So who would they want to leave behind? Actually, President-elect Donald Trump was the most popular candidate on the survey’s list: He was chosen by 46 percent of those surveyed, with Kanye West, Kim Kardashian and Hillary Clinton close behind. (To be fair, the respondents could select more than one celebrity to drop off.)

There was also a list of potential traveling companions. Actress Jennifer Lawrence, who stars as a space traveler in the newly released movie “Passengers,” scored the highest overall.

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Curiosity rover fleshes out picture of old Mars

Mars geology in Gale Crater
This schematic illustrates how the creation and disappearance of a Martian lake created different layers of rock in the region being explored by NASA’s Curiosity rover. (NASA / JPL Graphic)

Scientists say they’re putting together the puzzle pieces provided by NASA’s Curiosity rover to get a better picture of how the outlook for habitability on Mars brightened and dimmed over the course of billions of years.

“We see all the properties in place that we like to associate with habitability,” Caltech planetary scientist John Grotzinger said today during a session at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco.

As Curiosity makes its way up the layered slopes of a 3-mile-high peak known as Aeolis Mons or Mount Sharp, it’s encountering different layers of material that hint at how the region around the mountain was formed.

Grotzinger and his colleagues said that clay minerals, boron and an iron-bearing mineral known as hematite are more abundant in the higher layers. Their presence suggests that there was dynamic chemical interaction between the rocks and groundwater in ancient times.

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