Cosmic Log
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Remember Mars One? Four years ago, a Dutch-based venture said it would take advantage of reality-show revenue to send crews on the Red Planet in 2023. Now the date is 2032 – but it remains to be seen whether Mars One will ever be able to follow through.
The revised schedule was laid out today in an online update that also touches upon Mars One’s biggest hurdle: finding the billions of dollars needed to fund a crewed mission to Mars.
“Mars One can only implement the mission to Mars if we can afford it – and we need investments to get going,” the venture’s co-founder and CEO, Bas Lansdorp, said in the update.
Scientists say there’s enough water in just one region of Mars to fill up Lake Superior – if only it could be extracted from subsurface ice.
So how can future Red Planet settlers take advantage of those deposits to produce the drinkable water, breathable oxygen and hydrogen-based rocket fuel they’ll need? Researchers at the University of Washington are working on a way.
Their research builds upon a technology that was pioneered almost two decades ago, known as the water vapor adsorption reactor, or WAVAR. Adam Bruckner, a professor in UW’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, worked with students to develop a device that could extract tiny amounts of water vapor from the Martian atmosphere.
The WAVAR device was successfully tested in Mars-type conditions, but there wasn’t any funding to move the technology beyond proof of concept.
“NASA has not really funded in-situ resource utilization for research work on that at all,” Bruckner told GeekWire. WAVAR does make a cameo, however, in the fictional tale of Red Planet settlement depicted in “Mars,” a miniseries airing on National Geographic Channel.
The Red Planet mission that’s depicted in National Geographic Channel’s “Mars” miniseries may be purely fictional, but it draws upon decades’ worth of technological development for real-life interplanetary odysseys.
One of the technologies was proposed by researchers at the University of Washington way back in the 1990s. It’s a device known as a Water Vapor Adsorption Reactor, or WAVAR, which could theoretically extract humidity from the thin Martian atmosphere.
“They actually built a device, they tested it, they showed it would work,” said Robert Braun, an engineering professor at the University of Colorado who was once NASA’s chief technologist and is now a technical adviser for the “Mars” TV show.
Braun worked with the show’s scriptwriters to put an array of WAVAR devices around the Mars crew’s living quarters. Such a setup could keep the astronauts hydrated until they can get a steady supply of water from melted-down Martian ice.
The “Mars” miniseries premiering on the National Geographic Channel is only the latest in a decades-long string of media projects laying out a vision for settling Mars – but this time, the creators say they’re sure the vision will actually come true.
“We’re in a zeitgeist moment right now,” producer Justin Wilkes told GeekWire. “There are enough people talking about Mars, thinking about Mars, dreaming about Mars, and now there are people who actually have the means to do something about it.”
The people leading the pack are at SpaceX, where billionaire founder Elon Musk has made the establishment of a sustainable city on Mars his lifetime goal. The 45-year-old Musk and other space luminaries lay out their case in “Mars,” in interviews that are interspersed with a fictional movie-style narrative about the first human mission to the Red Planet in 2033.
Musk sees the push to Mars as an evolutionary imperative, to ensure humanity’s survival in the event of a global catastrophe on Earth. Wilkes sees it the same way: “At its most basic level, it’s backing up the human species,” he said.