Tag: Mars

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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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