Tag: Mars

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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.

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Fiction Science Club

How startups could blaze a trail for cities on Mars

Illustration: 3D-printed Mars habitats
An artist's conception shows 3D-printed habitats in a Mars settlement. (Credit: Team SEArch+/Apis Cor via NASA)

If future explorers manage to set up communities on Mars, how will they pay their way? What’s likely to be the Red Planet’s primary export? Will it be Martian deuterium, sent back to Earth for fusion fuel? Raw materials harvested by Mars-based asteroid miners, as depicted in the “For All Mankind” TV series? Or will future Martians be totally dependent on earthly subsidies?

In a new book titled “The New World on Mars,” Robert Zubrin — the president of the Mars Society and a tireless advocate for space settlement — says Mars’ most valuable product will be inventions.

“We’re talking about creating a new and potentially extremely inventive branch of human civilization, which will benefit humanity as a whole enormously,” he says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “But moreover, we’ll play from that strength to make money.”

Zubrin isn’t waiting until humans step foot on Mars to get started.

“We are in the process of drawing up business plans for two major initiatives — one in the artificial intelligence area and the other in the synthetic food production area,” he says. “And the idea is, fairly soon we’re going to be presenting these business plans to investors, with the idea of starting companies devoted to these two different technological ideas that we have put together.”

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Cosmic Space

Probes put planets on parade, from Mars to Uranus

JWST infrared image of Uranus
An infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows Uranus and its rings. (NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / Andrea Luck CC BY)

Fresh imagery from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals the rings of Uranus in all their infrared glory.

The newly released view of the seventh rock from the sun is just one of the stunning shots of extraterrestrial scenes recently sent back by interplanetary probes. The past few days have also brought noteworthy images of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter lying dormant on Mars and volcanoes flaring up on a moon of Jupiter.

But wait … there’s more: Research based on readings from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is turning a spotlight on Mimas, a Saturnian moon that looks like the Death Star from the Star Wars movie. Could Mimas’ icy crust conceal a watery ocean? Stay tuned …

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Cosmic Space

Ingenuity helicopter breaks, ending historic Mars mission

Perseverance rover "selfie" with Ingenuity helicopter in the background
A "selfie" captured by NASA's Perseverance rover in 2021 shows the Ingenuity helicopter ion Mars. (NASA / JPL / MSSS)

Nearly three years after the first-ever takeoff from the surface of Mars, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has landed for the last time.

The innovative mini-copter was brought to the Red Planet in 2021 as an experimental piggyback payload tucked beneath the Perseverance rover, and conducted 72 reconnaissance flights that racked up 11 miles of total distance and two hours of total flight time.

Not bad for a 4-pound gadget that was designed to fly only five times during a 30-day primary mission.

In a video tribute released today, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson called Ingenuity “the little helicopter that could.”

“It kept saying, ‘I think I can, I think I can,'” Nelson said. “Well, it has now taken its last flight on Mars.”

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Fiction Science Club

Get a reality check on plans to build cities in space

A scene from "For All Mankind" shows a fictional Martian city from above. (Credit: Sony Pictures / Apple TV+)

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos may harbor multibillion-dollar dreams of sending millions of people to live on Mars, on the moon and inside free-flying space habitats — but a newly published book provides a prudent piece of advice: Don’t go too boldly.

It’s advice that Kelly and Zach Weinersmith didn’t expect they’d be giving when they began to work on their book, titled “A City on Mars.” They thought they’d be writing a guide to the golden age of space settlement that Musk and Bezos were promising.

“We ended up doing a ton of research on space settlements from just every angle you can imagine,” Zach Weinersmith says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “This was a four-year research project. And about two and a half years in, we went from being fairly optimistic about it as a desirable, near-term likely possibility [to] probably unlikely in the near term, and possibly undesirable in the near term. So it was quite a change. Slightly traumatic, I would say.”

The Weinersmiths found that there was precious little research into the potential long-term health effects of living on the moon or Mars — and zero research into the potential effects on human reproduction and development. Moreover, the legal uncertainties surrounding property rights in space seemed likely to lead to disputes that would tie diplomats and military planners in knots.

“In our effort to create Mars settlements to make a Plan B, to make ourselves safer as a species, are we actually lowering existential risk?” Zach says. “I think it’s absolutely unclear — and there’s a good argument that we might even increase it.”

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GeekWire

Mars Society unveils plan for Mars Technology Institute

Midjourney image of early Mars settlement
A computer-generated image shows an early Mars settlement. (Image via Midjourney, 2023)

The nonprofit Mars Society is getting set to take the next giant leap in its mission to support Red Planet exploration and settlement, by establishing a Mars Technology Institute to develop the tools and processes those settlers will need.

Robert Zubrin, the Mars Society’s founder and president, outlined the plan today during the advocacy group’s Red Planet Live podcast.

Many of the details in that plan still have to be fleshed out — including sources of funding, the precise structure of the organization, and where the institute will be headquartered. But the Pacific Northwest is one of the top prospects for the institute’s center, along with Colorado, the longtime home of the Mars Society.

During the podcast, Zubrin touted the Seattle area’s array of biotech and AI ventures, as well as its quality of life. “The Pacific Northwest is perhaps at the top of the list,” he said. “Colorado’s an alternative.”

He said the Mars Technology Institute will complement the efforts of NASA and other space agencies, and follow through on SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s vision to make humanity a multiplanet species.

“SpaceX and other entrepreneurial launch companies are already moving rapidly to develop the transportation systems that can get us to the planet Mars,” Zubrin said in a news release. “What is needed is an institution devoted to developing the technologies that will allow us to live once we are there.”

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GeekWire

Blue Origin wins a launch order for NASA Mars mission

Illustration: ESCAPADE probes orbiting Mars
An artist’s conception shows ESCAPADE probes at Mars. (Rocket Lab / UC-Berkeley Illustration)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has won its first NASA order for a New Glenn rocket launch, with Mars as the mission’s ultimate destination.

The task order calls on Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin to provide launch service for NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, or ESCAPADE, as part of the space agency’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare program, also known as VADR.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which is currently still under development, would be tasked with sending two robotic probes spaceward from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida in late 2024.

The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft would study how Mars’ weak magnetosphere interacts with the solar wind, and how energy and plasma enter and leave the magnetosphere. The cruise to Mars would take about 11 months, followed by several months of orbital adjustments in preparation for the science mission.

Learning about Mars’ magnetosphere would provide a new perspective on space weather, on strategies for protecting astronauts from space storms — and potentially on the evolution of the Red Planet’s climate. Scientists say Mars lost much of its atmosphere and became less hospitable for life because it didn’t have a strong magnetosphere to protect it from the stripping-away effect of the solar wind.

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GeekWire

NASA calls an end to Mars InSight lander’s mission

InSight spacecraft selfie from Mars
One of the InSight lander’s last selfies was sent back from Mars in April. (NASA Photo)

Four years after engineers cheered the landing of the robotic InSight spacecraft on Mars, NASA today declared an end to the $830 million quake-detecting mission.

In a mission update, NASA said the control team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory failed to contact the lander in two consecutive attempts — which had previously been set as the criterion for ending the mission. Dust had been building up on the probe’s solar panels, and mission planners concluded that the batteries finally ran out of power. The last time NASA heard from Mars InSight was on Dec. 15.

JPL’s Deep Space Network will continue to listen for signals from the spacecraft, but further contact is considered unlikely.

Those involved in the mission chose to concentrate on InSight’s achievements rather than its setbacks. InSight’s primary purpose was to record seismic readings emanating from the Red Planet’s interior. The mission detected 1,319 Marsquakes in all, including quakes caused by meteor impacts. In May, the spacecraft’s seismometer recorded the largest quake ever detected on a planet other than Earth.

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Fiction Science Club

‘Maurice on Mars’ brings black comedy to the Red Planet

Domed city on Mars
"Maurice on Mars" takes place in a domed city on the Red Planet. (Cartuna / Comedy Central)

The world’s richest human wants to build a city on Mars: Fifty years ago, Elon Musk’s vision of our future on the Red Planet might have sounded like science fiction — but today, Musk is actually serious about the idea of using billions of dollars from ventures like SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network to finance the move to Mars.

“In looking in the long term, and saying what’s needed to create a city on Mars, well, one thing’s for sure: a lot of money,” Musk said back in 2015. “So we need things that will generate a lot of money.”

What kind of city would Musk want to see on Mars? His vision calls for a place that offers “everything from iron foundries to pizza joints to nightclubs” while getting rid of “special interests and coercion of politicians.” But what if cities on Mars turn out like cities on Earth, complete with wealth disparity, racism — and ambitious billionaires?

That’s the premise for “Maurice on Mars,” a darkly funny series of animated shorts created and written by comedian and TV writer Tim Barnes for Comedy Central’s Animated YouTube channel.

“I truly think that people often jump to that aspirational part of living on Mars,” Barnes says in the latest episode of Fiction Science, a podcast focusing on the intersection of science and fiction. “But the practical thing is that you’re going to need people to build stuff once you get there. So the working class, the underclass, I believe will be the first people on Mars to actually build the White House there.”

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Cosmic Space

‘Martian Flower’ blooms in a Red Planet menagerie

Martian flower
A weirdly shaped mineral deposit has been dubbed the "Martian Flower." (NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / Kevin M. Gill)

A weird shape spotted on the surface of Mars may look like an agave plant, a starfish, fossilized coral or even an infant Demogorgon, but experts say there’s a perfectly natural explanation for the object that’s been dubbed a “Martian Flower.”

The tiny multi-branched shape was captured in images from the ChemCam and Mars Hand Lens Imager on NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has been operating for nearly 10 years in Gale Crater on Mars.

It’s the latest in a succession of weird bits of stuff that have turned up amid the thousands of pictures sent back to Earth by robotic Red Planet probes. Other examples include a skull-shaped rock, an alien footprint (actually, a wheelprint), the Mermaid on Mars, the Mars rat, Martian macaroni (a.k.a. rover rotini) Curiosity’s plastic shred, Phoenix’s sprung spring and Opportunity’s bunny ears.

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