There was good-natured snark from SarcasticRover and from Matthew Inman, the Seattle cartoonist behind The Oatmeal (following up on his terrific preview of the landing). And there were heartfelt congratulations from the space community’s celebrities, including SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Bill Nye the Science Guy.
An artist’s conception shows NASA’s Mars InSight firing its thrusters for landing. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Illustration)
Today’s the day for the Mars InSight lander’s touchdown on the Red Planet, and NASA is pulling out all the stops to let us in on the action.
This is the first Mars landing to take place since the Curiosity rover was lowered onto the rocky terrain of Gusev Crater more than six years ago. And in the final hours of InSight’s nearly seven-month, 300 million-mile-cruise, the two robots are having quite a conversation on Twitter. (There’s even an in-joke over “sol,” which is NASA’s term for a Martian day.)
Axios’ Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen interview SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. (Axios / HBO via YouTube)
As NASA prepares for its next Mars landing, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is giving himself a 70 percent chance of moving to Mars. But in an Axios interview airing tonight on HBO, he emphasizes that it won’t be a billionaire joyride.
“Your probability of dying on Mars is much higher than Earth. Really, the ad for going to Mars would be like Shackleton’s ad for going to the Antarctic,” Musk said, referring to explorer Ernest Shackleton’s harrowing 1914-1917 expedition. (The apocryphal ad supposedly was headlined “Men Wanted for Hazardous Journey.”)
“It’s going to be hard,” Musk said. “There’s a good chance of death, going in a little can through deep space. You might land successfully. Once you land successfully, you’ll be working nonstop to build the base. … There’s a good chance you die there. We think you can come back, but we’re not sure. Now, does that sound like an escape hatch for rich people?”
An artist’s conception shows the Mars Insight lander on the Red Planet’s surface, with its seismometer deployed at left and its heat-measuring “mole” deployed at right. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Illustration)
After a 300 million-mile, six-month interplanetary cruise, NASA’s Mars InSight robotic lander is heading for a plain-vanilla arrival at the Red Planet on Monday — and the team behind the mission couldn’t be more pleased.
“We’re expecting to have a very plain day on Mars for the landing, and we’re very happy about that,” said Rob Grover, the engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who’s in charge of Mars InSight’s entry, descent and landing.
That’s not only because the weather is relatively clear, but also because Mars InSight is on track to land in a no-drama region of Mars known as Elysium Planitia, which is Latin for “Paradise Plain.”
“It may not look like paradise, but it is very flat. … It’s an excellent place for landing,” Grover said today. “As landing engineers, we really like this landing site.”
The name change comes just days after Musk tweeted that the design for the spaceship is being radically revised once again. “New design is very exciting! Delightfully counter-intuitive,” he wrote.
This color-coded image of the Jezero Crater delta combines information from two instruments on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars and the Context Camera. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / JHU-APL)
One week before the next Mars mission is due to land, NASA has chosen the landing site for its next next Mars mission. Jezero Crater will be where NASA’s yet-to-be-named rover will land on Feb. 18, 2021, the space agency announced today.
“It’s a Thursday,” said Allen Chen, who’s leading the entry, descent and landing team for what’s currently known as NASA’s Mars 2020 rover. That touchdown is due to come seven months after the mission’s launch in mid-July 2020.
Jezero Crater is thought to be the site of an ancient river delta on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator. Scientists say the 28-mile-wide crater’s rocks and soil may contain organic molecules and other traces of microbial life from the water and sediments that flowed into the crater billions of years ago.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk watches February’s ascent of the Falcon Heavy rocket in a scene from National Geographic’s “Mars: Inside SpaceX.” (National Geographic / RadicalMedia via YouTube)
Science fiction blends with fact in tonight’s double dose of Mars from National Geographic’s TV channel.
Truth to tell, there’s more fact than fiction: The first show in the double feature is “Mars: Inside SpaceX,” which wraps a tale of past and future space exploration around an inside look at SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy launch in February.
Then there’s the season premiere of “Mars,” the semi-scripted, semi-documentary series that’s serving up a second set of six episodes.
Mars Society President Robert Zubrin provides a guided tour of future space missions during a talk at the University of Washington. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
For decades, rocket scientist Robert Zubrin has been a voice crying in the Martian wilderness. But now the president of the Mars Society is pleading the case for a cause that’s much closer than the Red Planet: low-cost lunar exploration and settlement.
Zubrin’s lays out his latest plan, known as “Moon Direct,” this week in a tech journal called The New Atlantis, and he’s in Seattle today to talk about it in conjunction with the Museum of Flight’s SpaceExpo 2018.
The expo also features demonstrations of a virtual reality project highlighting one of Zubrin’s longest-running projects, the Mars Desert Research Station, a testing ground for space settlement that was built in Utah back in 2001.
If Zubrin gets his way, such outposts could be built on the moon and on Mars as well, on time scales far sooner and at costs far lower than NASA projects.
The problem is, Zubrin doesn’t always get his way. Since the 1990s, he’s advocated for a mission architecture known as Mars Direct that would first send uncrewed rockets to Mars and follow up with later crewed missions. Each mission would make use of on-site materials to produce the fuel for the return trips.
The Mars Direct plan didn’t get much traction, and Zubrin says that’s NASA’s fault. “The manned space science program has been adrift in this period,” he said during a Friday night presentation at the University of Washington.
Now NASA is turning its attention to missions to the moon — but Zubrin is worried that, once again, NASA is taking the wrong approach.
An artist’s conception shows SpaceX’s BFR rocket landing on Mars. (SpaceX via YouTube)
If sending humans to Mars is a race, which team is favored to win? Bookies give the nod to Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin venture, but it’ll be years before any bet pays off.
David Strauss, an analyst and oddsmaker at MyBookie, says NASA is the underdog and Musk is the favorite.
“Bezos may have the discipline, but Musk has the infrastructure and just the right amount of craziness to make a successful mission happen,” he said today in a news release. “The days of government organizations staging trips to another planet are behind us. I would be surprised if NASA truly makes it back to the moon.”
Mars shows up as a pale red dot on a picture taken by one of NASA’s twin MarCO spacecraft on Oct. 2. Click on the image for a larger version. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Photo)
Mars looks like nothing more than a reddish speck in a picture captured by one of NASA’s twin MarCO spacecraft, but it’s the start of something big for small satellites.
NASA says the image, released today, is the first view of Mars recorded by a class of nanosatellites known as CubeSats.
The briefcase-sized probes are part of a mission whose name is a contraction of “Mars Cube One,” and were launched from California along with NASA’s Mars InSight lander in May. They’re officially known as MarCO-A and MarCO-B — but they’ve been nicknamed WALL-E and EVE because they use propellant similar to the fire-extinguisher gas that the WALL-E robot used in the 2008 Pixar animated film.
Just a few days after liftoff, WALL-E’s wide-field color camera snapped a picture of Earth and the moon while checking on the deployment of its high-gain antenna. On Oct. 2, WALL-E did it again, this time looking 8 million miles ahead to Mars. The high-gain antenna can be seen to the right in the image, illuminated by sunlight.
