Excerpt from The Boy Who Reached for the Stars: A Memoir by Elio Morillo. Published by HarperOne. Copyright © 2022 HarperCollins.

On September 20, 2017, Category 5 Hurricane María hit my beloved Puerto Rico, hovering over the island for the next 48 hours, uprooting trees, causing power and phone outages, and inflicting catastrophic devastation throughout the land. It was a terrifying stretch of time when those of us with loved ones in the path of this

destruction could only hope and pray they were okay. As we waited to get any type of news, my fix-it mentality kicked in—I needed to do something to channel my helplessness into action. I joined forces with a Puerto Rican who worked in another team at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory to begin collecting donations, so we would be ready to ship them out as soon as it was possible. Relief washed over us both when the worry laden silence was finally broken and we heard from our respective families and friends. More than anything, they had suffered material damage to their homes and surrounding streets, but everyone within our circles was okay otherwise. Rosa and Sonia described the experience as a powered-on jet engine sucking everything up into the air.

As more news was released of the extent of the damage people had suffered, my friend and I continued to organize donation efforts in Los Angeles. It was all we could do at the time. I had to carry my worry while I continued to work. I was assigned to avionics and thermal functions testing. In simple terms, the rover has two brains: its main day-to-day brain and what I call its lizard brain. The lizard brain is always running in the background, ready for fight or flight. It checks to make sure that the main computer, or main brain, is working well. If something goes south with the main brain, then the lizard brain can go through particular states to keep the system at a basic level of safety, putting the rover in a partially autonomous configuration that allows us time to figure out what to input to safely reconfigure its hardware.

The rover’s thermal behaviors are what helps keep it alive overnight, when Mars temperatures can drop to −100°F or lower, depending on the season. There are particular instruments and mechanisms that can only operate within a specific range of temperatures.

If they become too cold, we must be able to heat them up. If they’re too warm, we have to stop using them or actively cool them down to the range we want them to operate in. As we gradually entered an all-hands-on-deck phase ahead of our July 2020 launch date, I knew that if I was going to be an effective and successful member of the team, I needed to make the conscious decision to put my work first, but not before making my all-important pit stop to spend Christmas with my family.

This time we met up in Florida. My grandparents, who didn’t travel often, joined us from New York. And I got to reunite with Sonia and Robert, who were temporarily living in the area while they sorted through Hurricane María’s damage back home. While my abuelo made sure the TV and music were set up and ready for our gathering, my abuela got busy in the kitchen, whipping up her famous casuela or caldo de bola together with extra sides to keep us all fed, full, and happy. My tías and tíos would give them a hand while making fun of each other and roasting my cousins. And a round of Telefunken (a game similar to rummy) was always in order, with bets of up to two dollars per person per round.

The highlight of this break wasn’t just spending quality time with my relatives and chosen family; it was also getting the chance to take my 91-year-old grandfather and my brother to the Kennedy Space Center—a first for the three of us. Walking into the center and suddenly being in the presence of all this antiquated hardware took my breath away. The exhibit featuring the Saturn V launch vehicle made me feel so small. I was mesmerized by how the 1950s team was able to design the stunning hardware displayed before me with the limited technology they had access to in comparison to what we have now. Sure, they had a relatively bigger budget and thousands of people working on one problem, which is not a luxury we enjoy, but they didn’t have our software and automated procedures, and they were doing it all for the first time. As if taking all of this in wasn’t enough, being there as a NASA engineer, walking the entire center by my grandfather’s side, with me as our tour guide, explaining each piece before us, was an unparalleled full-circle moment for me. I stopped several times, glanced at my grandfather, and quietly asked, “Abuelo, are you okay? Would you like us to sit down for a little while to rest?” but he outright refused any break, likely pushed forward by a sense of pride for his walking abilities as well as the sense of wonder that had taken hold of us all as we witnessed this history-making equipment. It was an unequivocal reminder of the legacy I was now helping build with the Mars 2020 mission.

Inspired by the history I had witnessed at the Kennedy Center, and with a renewed sense of purpose, I was more eager than ever to dive even deeper into the mission at stake. February 2018 found me interacting with the Ingenuity helicopter for the first time, more specifically its base station, a component of the helicopter system that would live on the rover. This is the piece of hardware that would communicate with the helicopter on Mars. We were developing the capabilities, the hardware, all of it, to fulfill a technology demonstration to test the first powered flight on Mars, but NASA HQ still hadn’t given the okay to add it to the Mars 2020 mission. So we were operating with the hope this green light would eventually be given, and we kept plowing ahead on the rover side, considering how we’d carry the helicopter, how we’d communicate with it, how we’d operate it from this base station. Initially, many of the people on the integration side of the rover were against the idea of integrating the helicopter as a separate system, because that meant it would also have its own separate battery. What if its battery caught fire while cruising through space or on the Mars surface? How would that damage the rover itself? “There’s no way the helicopter will work” was one line of thought. The other: “There’s no way you’ll be able to get all of this work done in time.” And the third: “This helicopter will be a distraction from the rest of the science the rover has to accomplish.” Was it a risk to do this tremendous amount of work for a helicopter that might never launch? Yes, but it was one some of us were willing to take.

As the summer neared, I set my mind on Puerto Rico and the risks and sacrifices they had been forced to take when Hurricane María hit their shores. The island had far from recovered from the damage sustained a little less than a year earlier, and my colleague (turned girlfriend) and I were still eager to help in any way we could. I decided to use my social media to reach out to teachers in Puerto Rico to see how we could help that summer. I quickly received a reply from a University of Michigan friend whose mom had a colleague, Marisa, in need of some help. With the community’s blessing, she and her husband had decided to take over an abandoned school in Los Naranjos, a neighborhood in Vega Baja, located near Dorado, and turn it into a community center. The local residents had lost so much during the hurricane that she was hell-bent on making a difference. Now they were looking for volunteer to get the center off the ground. My girlfriend and I created a three-day STEM program for kids between the ages of eight and 15, called Ingenieros del Futuro (Engineers of the Future). The activities we planned introduced the kids to basic engineering concepts and revolved around three themes: robotics, electricity, and rockets. I set up a GoFundMe to help pay for some of the materials, while we paid for everything else out of pocket.

When we arrived, seeing the devastation firsthand threw me off my orbit and momentarily pushed me into an impotent void. As I painstakingly drove through intersections where the traffic lights had gone dark due to the lack of power, I slowly took in the trees scattered around the area like giant twigs, displaced rooftops, cut-down electricity cables, and attempted to store this harrowing data in a corner of my mind so I could find my way back to our main focus: the kids. I’d give myself time to process this emotional oscillation later, when I returned home.

We immediately got the kids working and building several projects—a basic robot, an electric car that used a solar panel to power it, a satellite model, and a wind turbine—to illustrate robotics, sustainable energy, and space exploration. We also scheduled outdoor time to give their brains a break and burn some energy playing soccer with us. For the last project of their three-day journey, I taught them how to build a rocket with a two-liter plastic bottle and a few other readily available components. I had also purchased a bottle launch system that pumped up the rockets and had a trigger that allowed each kid to send their own rocket into the air.

Once it reached a certain height, a parachute they had built into their system with their own hands deployed, safely landing their creation. Their excitement during each launch, descent, and landing, about further engaging with technology and pursuing opportunities in STEM, gave me hope for the people of Puerto Rico. The island currently has to import most of its food, despite once being fully reliant on its own agriculture sector. With agritech becoming more accessible, combined with the development of hydroponics, vertical farming, and more, I see this as a potentially booming sector for Puerto Rico in the future. But they will need dedicated STEM workers to make it happen. The same goes for the ever-controversial power grid. As energy storage and solar, hydro, and wind power become more accessible, microgrids will thrive, and so will the jobs related to those renewable systems.

Sinergia Los Naranjos is still active in the community. Marisa successfully launched a kitchen for folks to run catering businesses, and her husband, Ricardo, runs a reef restoration effort where many of the kids participate and get scuba training. Workshops occur in partnership with local student groups from nearby universities, mostly through grassroots funding and efforts. These kids have the power to build a better future, and I hope to continue to be able to come alongside them and encourage these developments through outreach, philanthropy, and policy influence.

By the spring of 2019, I was working with a few team members to test the capability of our rover to charge the helicopter battery through its base station while traversing space. Batteries, including those in computers and cell phones, left uncharged for a long period of time lose their properties and can’t regain their full charging potential.

Similarly, overcharging a battery and leaving it stored for a long period of time will degrade its lifetime. We had to figure out the sweet spot for the helicopter battery, then find how to measure that charge and, based on that, how to charge it from the rover battery.

Once we figured this out through tests and failures and finally verified what worked, we had to come up with the sequence of steps that needed to be taken to charge the helicopter while flying through space. It was a complicated set of tests that took up a lot of our time but was essential to the helicopter’s functionality and safety.

That summer I began to write and execute integration procedures for the helicopter deployment system, which is the assembly at the bottom of the rover that would hold the helicopter and deploy it. The system consisted of a tiny robotic arm with a motor that would keep the helicopter upright so that it could be successfully dropped onto the Martian surface. After testing this capability and gathering the necessary parameters, we determined that we could indeed deploy it on Mars. A short while after this, JPL finally approved the addition of the helicopter to the Mars 2020 mission. We got the green light. Like most times in my life, the risk proved to be worth taking.

Buy The Boy Who Reached for the Stars by Elio Morillo here.

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Today, the European Space Agency (ESA) will livestream imagery from its Mars Express orbiter in near-real time. The live stream is scheduled to begin on June 2 at 12:00 PM EDT. You can watch the hour-long live stream on the ESA’s YouTube channel. 

Mars Express has been orbiting Mars for the past 20 years, sending back data on the vast landscape of the Red Planet along the way. Slight technical delays have hampered these views, and sometimes the images take hours and even days to transmit to Earth. 

[Related: The Mars Express just got up close and personal with Phobos.]

That changes with today’s historic livestream. If all goes according to plan, today’s images will get to Earth about 18 minutes after they are taken. It will take 17 minutes for light to travel from Mars to Earth and then about one minute to pass through the servers and wires on the ground.

According to the ESA, “This will be the closest you can get to a live view from the Red Planet.”

New images will be seen roughly every 50 seconds as they are beamed down directly from the orbiter’s Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC).

On June 2, 2003, Mars Express launched with a lander called Beagle 2. The pair arrived in orbit on December 25, 2003, and Beagle 2 touched ground the same day. However, Beagle 2 never made contact with Earth because at least one of its four solar panels failed to deploy properly, thus blacking the landers communications antenna. 

Mars Express still moved on as planned and began to study our celestial neighbor with seven different instruments. In two decades, the orbiter has already accomplished a great deal, including detecting methane in the Martian atmosphere, spotting a possible subsurface lake near the Red Planet’s south pole, and mapping the composition of ice near both of the planet’s poles. 

The VMC, or Mars Webcam, was not initially planned to break so many records. Its primary job was just to monitor the separation of the Beagle 2 lander from the Mars Express spacecraft. After completing that first mission, the camera was turned off. 

In 2007, the VMC was turned back on and used for science and educational outreach activities. It even took advantage of the social media boom of the aughts and got its own Flickr page and a Twitter account that has now moved to Mastodon. Scientists realized a little later that these images could be used for “proper” science.

[Related: The ill-fated Beagle 2 may have landed on Mars after all.]

“We developed new, more sophisticated methods of operations and image processing, to get better results from the camera, turning it into Mars Express’s 8th science instrument,” VMC team member Jorge Hernández Bernal said in a statement. “From these images, we discovered a great deal, including the evolution of a rare elongated cloud formation hovering above one of Mars’ most famous volcanoes – the 20 km-high [12 miles] Arsia Mons.”

To celebrate Mars Express’ 20th birthday, multiple ESA teams have spent months developing the tools that will allow for higher-quality, science-processed images to be streamed live for a full hour back on Earth. 

“This is an old camera, originally planned for engineering purposes, at a distance of almost three million kilometers [18 million miles] from Earth—this hasn’t been tried before and to be honest, we’re not 100 percent certain it’ll work,” Spacecraft Operations Manager at ESA’s mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany James Godfrey said in a statement. “But I’m pretty optimistic. Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before. I’m excited to see Mars as it is now – as close to a martian ‘now’ as we can possibly get!’

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Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are enjoying the longest daylight hours of the year ahead of the summer solstice, and across the world many may even be able to see a unique sunspot on the surface of our favorite star.  Summer stargazing season is quickly approaching, but summer skies can be hazy which makes  some celestial events difficult to see. But there is still plenty to see in the mild night skies this June. Here are some events to look out for and if you happen to get any stellar sky photos, tag us and include #PopSkyGazers.

[Related: The Strawberry Moon, explained.]

June 1 and 2- Mars passes through Beehive star cluster

To kick off the month, Mars will be passing through a star cluster called the Beehive cluster or M44. It’s located in the crabby constellation Cancer, and Mars will appear as a brilliant red ruby surrounded by sparkly diamonds.  

To find Mars, first look for the bright planet Venus in the western sky. The two bright stars that are strung out to one side of Venus are the constellation Gemini’s twin stars Castor and Pollux. Mars should be the reddish light just above Venus, Pollux, and Castor. Binoculars and a dark sky will help you see a smattering of stars just beside Mars. 

The Beehive cluster is about 557 light-years away from Earth and is home to at least two planets. 

June 3 and 4- Full Strawberry Moon

June’s full moon will reach peak illumination at 11:43 PM EDT on June 3. Just after sunset, look in the southeastern sky to watch the moon rise above the horizon. June’s full moon is typically the last full moon of the spring or the first of the summer. 

The name Strawberry Moon is not a description of its color, but instead a reference to the ripening of “June-bearing” strawberries that are ready to be gathered and gobbled. For thousands of years, the  Algonquian, Ojibwe, Dakota, and Lakota peoples used this term to describe a time of great abundance. Some tribal nations in the northeastern US, including the Wampanoag nation, celebrate Strawberry Thanksgiving to show appreciation for the spring and summer’s first fruits. 

Other names for June’s full moon include the Gardening Moon or Gitige-giizis in Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), the Moon of Birthing or Ignivik in Inupiat, and the River Moon or Iswa Nuti in the Catawba Language of the Catawba Indian Nation in South Carolina.

[Related: See hot plasma bubble on the sun’s surface in powerful closeup images.]

June 21- Summer Solstice

Summer officially begins in the Northern Hemisphere at 10:58 AM EDT on June 21 which marks the summer solstice. This is when the sun travels along its northernmost path in the sky. At the solstice, Earth’s North Pole is at its maximum tilt of roughly 23.5 degrees towards the sun. It is also the longest day of the year, and you can expect roughly 16 hours of daylight on June 21 in some spots in the Northeast.

After June 21, the sun appears to reverse course and head back in the opposite direction, towards the south, until the next solstice in December. 

June 27- Bootid Meteor Shower Maximum

June’s Bootid meteor shower begins on June 22, but it is expected to reach its peak rate of meteors around 7 PM EDT on June 27. The Bootid meteors should be visible when the constellation Bootes is just above the horizon. The moon will be in its first quarter phase at the shower’s peak, and will set at about 1:30 in the morning, making for minimal light interference later in the night. 

June’s Bootid meteor shower was created by the comet 7P/Pons-Winnecke and expected to last until July 2.

The same skygazing rules that apply to pretty much all space-watching activities are key this month: Go to a dark spot away from the lights of a city or town and let the eyes adjust to the darkness for about a half an hour. Then, just sit back and let the summer skies dazzle.

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In its two years and three months of exploring the Red Planet, NASA’s Perseverance Rover has been one busy moving Martian science lab. It has detected signs of past chemical reactions, begun building  a Martian rock depot, and recorded audio of a dust devil for the first time.

[Related: Mars’s barren Jezero crater had a wet and dramatic past.]

Here are a few of the “six-wheeled scientist’s” most recent highlights this month.

New Belva Crater images

Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z instrument collected 152 images while looking deep into Belva Crater. Belva is a large impact crater that lies within the far larger Jezero Crater, which is where Perseverance landed in 2021. The new images are dramatic to look at, but also provide the science team with new insights into Jezero crater’s interior. 

“Mars rover missions usually end up exploring bedrock in small, flat exposures in the immediate workspace of the rover,” deputy project scientist of Perseverance at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Katie Stack Morgan said in a statement. “That’s why our science team was so keen to image and study Belva. Impact craters can offer grand views and vertical cuts that provide important clues to the origin of these rocks with a perspective and at a scale that we don’t usually experience.”

According to NASA, it is similar to a geology professor on Earth taking their students to visit highway “roadcuts.” These are places where rock layers and other geological features are visible after construction crews have sliced vertically into the rock. Belva Crater represents a natural Martian roadcut. 

The rover took the images on April 22– the mission’s 772nd Martian day, or “sol”. It was parked just west of Belva Crater’s rim on a light-toned rocky outcrop that Perseverance’s science team calls “Echo Creek.” This 0.6-mile-wide crater was created by a meteorite impact eons ago, and shows multiple locations of exposed bedrock and a region where the sedimentary layers angle downward. 

These steep “dipping beds” potentially indicate the presence of a large Martian sandbar that was deposited by a river channel flowing into the ancient lake that Jezero Crater once held. The science team believes that the large boulders in the crater’s foreground are either chunks of bedrock that the meteorite impact exposed, or the rocks were potentially carried to the crater by a long gone river system.

NASA says the team will continue to search for answers by comparing the features found in the bedrock near the rover with the larger larger-scale rock layers that are visible in the distant crater walls.

Ancient and wild Martian river

Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z instrument also took some new images that possibly show signs of an ancient Martian river. Some evidence shows that this rocky river was possibly very deep and incredibly fast. This now-dry river was part of a network of waterways that flowed into Jezero Crater.

[Related: Name a better duo than NASA’s hard-working Mars rover and helicopter.]

Better understanding of these watery environments could help scientists find signs of ancient microbial life that may have been preserved in the reddish-hued rocks of Mars.

The rover is exploring the top of an 820 feet tall fan-shaped pile of sedimentary rock, with curving layers that suggest water once flowed there. Scientists want to answer whether the water flowed into relatively shallow streams like one that NASA’s Curiosity rover found evidence of in Gale Crater or if Jezero Crater’s was a more powerful river system.

When stitched together, the images come together like a patchwork quilt with evidence of a more raging river because of the coarse sediment grains and cobbles. 

“Those indicate a high-energy river that’s truckin’ and carrying a lot of debris. The more powerful the flow of water, the more easily it’s able to move larger pieces of material,” postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Libby Ives, said in a statement.

Ives has a background in studying Earth’s rivers, and spent the last six months analyzing images of Mars’ surface. “It’s been a delight to look at rocks on another planet and see processes that are so familiar,” Ives said.

Both of these discoveries will help Perseverance’s astrobiology mission that includes the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will continue to characterize and study Mars’ geology and past climate, while paving the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and will also be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.

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NASA officials have talked for years about using the moon as a stepping stone to explore Mars. But now the space agency is finally reorganizing its administration to crystallize that aim in its bureaucratic structure. At the end of March, NASA established the new Moon to Mars Program Office at its Washington, D.C., headquarters. 

This office will unify an array of programs already under way: This includes the goals of NASA’s Artemis Moon mission, such as creating spacesuits for lunar astronauts as well as the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which successfully flew the uncrewed Artemis I test flight in November. These projects will be more formally linked to developing technologies and operations for future human journeys to Mars. 

“This new office will help ensure that NASA successfully establishes a long-term lunar presence needed to prepare for humanity’s next giant leap to the Red Planet,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. 

In the 2022 NASA Authorization Act, Congress mandated that NASA create the Moon to Mars Program Office to ensure that each Artemis lunar mission “demonstrates or advances a technology or operational concept that will enable human missions to Mars.” Following the successful Artemis I test flight, NASA aims to launch four astronauts on a lunar flyby mission for Artemis II in late 2024, and return humans to the moon’s surface in 2025 with Artemis III. Subsequent Artemis missions, at a pace of every other year, should allow astronauts to build a lunar habitat on the moon’s South Pole—with plans to stay for a while. 

[Related: NASA finally got comfier spacesuits, but astronauts still have to poop in them]

“We are going to the moon, we are demonstrating and executing a more sustained presence than we did back on Apollo, historically,” Lakiesha Hawkins, deputy manager of the new office, tells Popular Science. “The demonstrations that we’re doing are setting us up so that we can stay for a long duration; we can, in essence, live off the land.”

NASA astronauts will run experiments to obtain water from ice in lunar craters and to melt lunar regolith, or rocky material, to extract oxygen. They’ll also practice operations and procedures as if they are on Mars, with intentionally prolonged delays in communications to Earth and help all but unavailable. On the moon, these explorers will test the reliability of life support and other systems with an eye toward the Red Planet. “The further we go, the less and less we’ll be able to look back to any capabilities of the home planet in order to help us,” Hawkins says. 

At the moment, the Moon to Mars Program Office is still getting set up and hiring for key roles, according to Hawkins, but some changes have already begun. 

[Related: Meet the first 4 astronauts of the ‘Artemis Generation’]

“One of the things that I think is an obvious change is, we used to have three different divisions,” she says, one division for SLS, Orion, and ground systems; another for a planned lunar space station called Gateway, a lunar lander spacecraft, spacesuits, and lunar surface technologies; and then a third division focused on Mars technologies and capabilities. Those are now merged under the Moon to Mars Program Office. Aligning these offices is “going to help set us up for future success,” Hawkins says.

And while the changes so far are largely administrative, Hawkins sees the Congressional mandate as vindication of NASA’s approach to our nearest extraterrestrial neighbors. “We seem to have a clear strategy that has survived and works. It worked its way through now multiple presidential administrations,” she says. “We are no kidding, returning to the moon.” And after that, eventually, on to Mars. 

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This article was original featured on MIT Press.This article is excerpted from Dario Floreano and Nicola Nosengo’s book “Tales From a Robotic World.”

In the early 2010s, a new trend in robotics began to emerge. Engineers started creating robotic versions of salamanders, dragonflies, octopuses, geckos, and clams — an ecosystem of biomimicry so diverse the Economist portrayed it as “Zoobotics.” And yet Italian biologist-turned-engineer Barbara Mazzolai raised eyebrows when she proposed looking beyond animals and building a robot inspired by a totally different biological kingdom: plants. As fluid as the definition of the word robot can be, most people would agree that a robot is a machine that moves. But movement is not what plants are famous for, and so a robotic plant might at first sound, well, boring.

But plants, it turns out, are not static and boring at all; you just have to look for action in the right place and at the right timescale. When looking at the lush vegetation of a tropical forest or marveling at the colors of an English garden, it’s easy to forget that you are actually looking at only half of the plants in front of you. The best-looking parts, maybe, but not necessarily the smartest ones. What we normally see are the reproductive and digestive systems of a plant: the flowers and fruits that spread pollen and seeds and the leaves that extract energy from sunlight. But the nervous system, so to speak, that explores the environment and makes decisions is in fact underground, in the roots.

Roots may be ugly and condemned to live in darkness, but they firmly anchor the plant and constantly collect information from the soil to decide in which direction to grow to find nutrients, avoid salty soil, and prevent interference with the roots of other plants. They may not be the fastest diggers, but they’re the most efficient ones, and they can pierce the ground using only a fraction of the energy that worms, moles, or manufactured drills require. Plant roots are, in other words, a fantastic system for underground exploration — which is what inspired Mazzolai to create a robotic version of them.

“It forced us to rethink everything, from materials to sensing and control of robots.”

Mazzolai’s intellectual path is a case study in interdisciplinarity. Born and raised in Tuscany, in the Pisa area that is one of Italy’s robotic hot spots, she was fascinated early on by the study of all things living, graduating in biology from the University of Pisa and focusing on marine biology. She then became interested in monitoring the health of ecosystems, an interest that led her to get her doctorate in microengineering and eventually to be offered by Paolo Dario, a biorobotics pioneer at Pisa’s Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, the possibility of opening a new research line on robotic technologies for environmental sensing.

It was there, in Paolo Dario’s group, that the first seeds of her plant-inspired robots were planted. Mazzolai got in touch with a group at the European Space Agency (ESA) in charge of exploring innovative technologies that looked interesting but were still far away from applications, she recalls. While brainstorming with them, she realized space engineers were struggling with a problem that plants brilliantly solved several hundred million years ago.

“In real plants, roots have two functions,” says Mazzolai. “They explore the soil in search of water and nutrients, but even more important, they anchor the plant, which would otherwise collapse and die.” Anchoring happens to be an unsolved problem when designing systems that have to sample and study distant planets or asteroids. In most cases, from the moon to Mars and distant comets and asteroids, the force of gravity is weak. Unlike on Earth, the weight of the spacecraft or rover is not always enough to keep it firmly on the ground, and the only available option is to endow the spacecraft with harpoons, extruding nails, and drills. But these systems become unreliable over time if the soil creeps, provided they work in the first place. They didn’t work for Philae, for example, the robotic lander that arrived at the 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko comet in 2014 after a 10-year trip only to fail to anchor at the end of its descent, bouncing away from the ground and collecting just a portion of the planned measurements.

In a brief feasibility study carried out between 2007 and 2008 for ESA, Mazzolai and her team let their imagination run free and described an anchoring system for spacecrafts inspired by plant roots. The research group also included Stefano Mancuso, a Florence-based botanist who would later gain fame for his idea that plants display “intelligent” behavior, although of a completely different sort from that of animals. Mazzolai and her team described an ideal system that would reproduce, and transfer to other planets, the ability of Earth plants to dig through the soil and anchor to it.

In the ESA study, Mazzolai imagined a spacecraft descending on a planet with a really hard landing: The impact would dig a small hole in the planetary surface, inserting a “seed” just deep enough in the soil, not too different from what happens to real seeds. From there, a robotic root would start to grow by pumping water into a series of modular small chambers that would expand and apply pressure on the soil. Even in the best-case scenario, such a system could only dig through loose and fine dust or soil. The root would have to be able to sense the underground environment and turn away from hard bedrock. Mazzolai suggested Mars as the most suitable place in the solar system to experiment with such a system — better than the moon or asteroids because of the Red Planet’s low gravity and atmospheric pressure at surface level (respectively, 1/3 and 1/10 of those found on Earth). Together with a mostly sandy soil, these conditions would make digging easier because the forces that keep soil particles together and compact them are weaker than on Earth.

At the time, ESA did not push forward with the idea of a plant-like planetary explorer. “It was too futuristic,” Mazzolai admits. “It required technology that was not yet there, and in fact still isn’t.” But she thought that others beyond the space sector would find the idea intriguing. After transitioning to the Italian Institute of Technology, in 2012, Mazzolai convinced the European Commission to fund a three-year study that would result in a plant-inspired robot, code-named Plantoid. “It was uncharted territory,” says Mazzolai. “It meant creating a robot without a predefined shape that could grow and move through soil — a robot made of independent units that would self-organize and make decisions collectively. It forced us to rethink everything, from materials to sensing and control of robots.”

The project had two big challenges: on the hardware side, how to create a growing robot, and on the software side, how to enable roots to collect and share information and use it to make collective decisions. Mazzolai and her team tackled hardware first and designed the robot’s roots as flexible, articulated, cylindrical structures with an actuation mechanism that can move their tip in different directions. Instead of the elongation mechanism devised for that initial ESA study, Mazzolai ended up designing an actual growth mechanism, essentially a miniature 3D printer that can continuously add material behind the root’s tip, thus pushing it into the soil.

It works like this. A plastic wire is wrapped around a reel stored in the robot’s central stem and is pulled toward the tip by an electric motor. Inside the tip, another motor forces the wire into a hole heated by a resistor, then pushes it out, heated and sticky, behind the tip, “the only part of the root that always remains itself,” Mazzolai explains. The tip, mounted on a ball bearing, rotates and tilts independent of the rest of the structure, and the filament is forced by metallic plates to coil around it, like the winding of a guitar string. At any given time, the new plastic layer pushes the older layer away from the tip and sticks to it. As it cools down, the plastic becomes solid and creates a rigid tubular structure that stays in place even when further depositions push it above the metallic plates. Imagine winding a rope around a stick and the rope becomes rigid a few seconds after you’ve wound it. You could then push the stick a bit further, wind more rope around it, and build a longer and longer tube with the same short stick as a temporary support. The tip is the only moving part of the robot; the rest of the root only extends downward, gently but relentlessly pushing the tip against the soil.

The upper trunk and branches of the plantoid robot are populated by soft, folding leaves that gently move toward light and humidity. Plantoid leaves cannot yet transform light into energy, but Michael Graetzel, a chemistry professor at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, and one of the world’s most cited scientists, has developed transparent and foldable films filled with synthetic chlorophyll capable of converting and storing electricity from light that one day could be formed into artificial leaves powering plantoid robots. “The fact that the root only applies pressure to the soil from the tip is what makes it fundamentally different from traditional drills, which are very destructive. Roots, on the contrary, look for existing soil fractures to grow into, and only if they find none, they apply just enough pressure to create a fracture themselves,” Mazzolai explains.

This new project may one day result in robot explorators that can work in dark environments with a lot of empty space, such as caves or wells.

The plantoid project has attracted a lot of attention in the robotics community because of the intriguing challenges that it combines — growth, shape shifting, collective intelligence — and because of possible new applications. Environmental monitoring is the most obvious one: The robotic roots could measure changing concentrations of chemicals in the soil, especially toxic ones, or they could prospect for water in arid soils, as well as for oil and gas — even though, by the time this technology is mature, we’d better have lost our dependence on them as energy sources on planet Earth. They could also inspire new medical devices, such as safer endoscopes that move in the body without damaging tissue. But space applications remain on Mazzolai’s radar.

Meanwhile, Mazzolai has started another plant-inspired project, called Growbot. This time the focus is on what happens over the ground, and the inspiration comes from climbing trees. “The invasiveness of climbing plants shows how successful they are from an evolutionary point of view,” she notes. “Instead of building a solid trunk, they use the extra energy for growing and moving faster than other plants. They are very efficient at using clues from the environment to find a place to anchor. They use light, chemical signals, tactile perception. They can sense if their anchoring in the soil is strong enough to support the part of the plant that is above the ground.” Here the idea is to build another growing robot, similar to the plantoid roots, that can overcome void spaces and attach to existing structures. “Whereas plantoids must face friction, grow-bots work against gravity,” she notes. This new project may one day result in robot explorators that can work in dark environments with a lot of empty space, such as caves or wells.

But for all her robots, Mazzolai is still keeping an eye on the visionary idea that started it all: planting and letting them grow on other planets. “It was too early when we first proposed it; we barely knew how to study the problem. Now I hope to start working with space agencies again.” Plant-inspired robots, she says, could not only sample the soil but also release chemicals to make it more fertile — whether on Earth or a terraformed Mars. And in addition to anchoring, she envisions a future where roboplants could be used to grow entire infrastructure from scratch. “As they grow, the roots of plantoids and the branches of a growbot would build a hollow structure that can be filled with cables or liquids,” she explains. This ability to autonomously grow the infrastructure for a functioning site would make a difference when colonizing hostile environments such as Mars, where a forest of plant-inspired robots could analyze the soil and search for water and other chemicals, creating a stable structure complete with water pipes, electrical wiring, and communication cables: the kind of structure astronauts would like to find after a year-long trip to Mars.

Dario Floreano is Director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). He is the co-author, with Nicola Nosengo, of “Tales From a Robotic World: How Intelligent Machines Will Shape Our Future,” from which this article is excerpted.

Nicola Nosengo is a science writer and science communicator at EPFL. His work has appeared in Nature, the Economist, Wired, and other publications. He is the Chief Editor of Nature Italy

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On April 19, 2021, a little more than a century after the Wright Brothers’ first test flight on Earth, humans managed to zoom a helicopter around on another planet. The four-pound aircraft, known as Ingenuity, is part of NASA’s Mars2020 exploration program, along with the Perseverance rover.

The dynamic duo made history again this month, as Ingenuity celebrated its landmark 50th flight. The small aircraft was built to fly only five times—as a demonstration of avionics customized for the thin Mars air, not a key part of the science mission—but it has surpassed that goal 10 times over with no signs of slowing down.

[Related: InSight says goodbye with what may be its last wistful image of Mars]

“Ingenuity has changed the way that we think about Mars exploration,” says Håvard Grip, NASA engineer and former chief pilot of Ingenuity. Although the helicopter started as a tech demo, proving that humans could make an aircraft capable of navigating the thin Martian atmosphere, it has become a useful partner to Percy. Ingenuity can zip up to 39 feet into the sky, scout the landscape, and inform the rover’s next moves through the Red Planet’s rocky terrain.

In the past months, Perseverance has been wrapping up its main science mission in Jezero Crater, a dried-up delta that could give astronomers insight on Mars’ possibly watery past and ancient microbial life. Ingenuity has been leap-frogging along with the rover, taking aerial shots of its robotic bestie and getting glimpses into the path ahead. This recon helps scientists determine their priorities for exploration, and helps NASA’s planning team prepare for unexpected hazards and terrain.

Unfortunately, the narrow channels in the delta are causing difficulties for the helicopter’s communications with the rover, forcing them to stay close together for fear of being irreparably separated. Ingenuity also can’t fall behind the rover, because its limited stamina (up to 3-minute-long flights at time) means it might not be able to catch up. Over the past month, the team shepherded the pair through a particularly treacherous stretch of the drive, though, and they’re still going strong—even setting flight speed and frequency records at the same time. Meanwhile, Percy has been investigating some crater walls and funky-colored rocks, of which scientists are trying to figure out the origins.

Ingenuity has certainly proven the value of helicopters in planetary exploration, and each flight adds to the pile of data engineers have at their disposal for planning the next generation of aerial robots. “When we look ahead to potential future missions, helicopters are an inevitable part of the equation,” says Grip.

What exactly comes next for Ingenuity itself, though, is anyone’s guess. “Every sol [Martian day] that Ingenuity survives on Mars is one step further into uncharted territory,” Grip adds. And while the team will certainly feel a loss when the helicopter finally goes out, they’ve already completed their main mission of demonstrating that the avionics can work. All the extra scouting and data collection is a reward for building something so sturdy. 

[Related: Two NASA missions combined forces to analyze a new kind of marsquake]

They’re now continuing to push the craft to its limits, testing out how far they can take this technology. For those at home who want to follow along, the mission actually provides flight previews on Ingenuity’s status updates page. 

“It may all be over tomorrow,” says Grip. “But one thing we’ve learned over the last two years is not to underestimate Ingenuity’s ability to hang on.” 

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I’ve always loved learning about the planets and stars, but it sure takes a lot to get me outside on a cold, dark night to see them with my own eyes. This week, though, there’s a celestial lineup I don’t want to miss—and you shouldn’t either!

What’s the big deal here?

Although there have been some wild theories about strange happenings during planetary alignments—like an increase in natural disasters—those have generally been debunked. Instead, the reason a planetary alignment is a big deal is that it’s simply cool to see. “You get to see pretty much the whole solar system in one night,” says Rory Bentley, UCLA astronomer and avid stargazer.

Usually, the planets are spread across the sky, visible at different times of the night (even into the early morning). They’re technically always in some version of a line—all our solar system’s planets appear on the ecliptic, an invisible arc across the sky tracing the plane where everything orbits the sun. If the planets are close enough together, though, they appear to be in an almost straight line. 

[Related: Astronomers just mapped the ‘bubble’ that envelopes our planet]

That’s precisely what’s happening on March 28. The five planets will come within 50 degrees of each other, a tight bunch compared to their usual spread, giving stargazers of all ages an opportunity to meet our planetary neighbors.

How to see the March 28 alignment

The time to spot this planetary parade is right after sunset on the March 28—no more than about 45 minutes after sundown, since Jupiter and Mercury will both disappear below the horizon fairly quickly. You’ll want to make sure you have a clear view of the western horizon, where the sun sets and Jupiter and Mercury will follow close behind. 

Jupiter will be closest to the horizon, easy to spot even in the lingering sunlight of dusk since it’s so bright. Mercury will be nearby—possibly visible to the naked eye, and definitely visible with binoculars. A bit higher up in the sky you’ll find Venus, shining intensely from its ultra-reflective thick clouds. It’s accompanied by Uranus, just a bit above—and for this one, you’ll definitely need those binoculars. Bringing up the tail end of the parade is Mars, up even higher in the sky near the crescent moon. (Bonus: you can see the moon, too, while you’re at it.)

If you’re not completely sure how to tell what’s a planet, know that the planets you see with your naked eye will generally be brighter than everything around them, and if you look really closely they won’t twinkle quite like stars.

You should be able to spot at least three of the parade participants (Jupiter, Venus, and Mars)—possibly even a fourth (Mercury)—with just your eyes if you’ve got good eyesight and/or a clear sky. Grab some binoculars or a telescope, and you can collect all five planets. Venus and Uranus will be visible until they dip below the horizon about three hours after sunset, and Mars stays out past midnight.

Another benefit to using a decently sized pair of binoculars or a telescope is that you’ll get to see a slew of neat planetary features as the alignment glides by. You should be able to spot Saturn’s famous rings, and possibly even some of the colorful cloud bands of Jupiter. Although you won’t notice any surface features on Venus, you will be able to determine what phase it’s in, since Venus has phases (crescent, full, etc.) similar to our moon. Keep in mind that it’s easier to see details when you have clear, still skies, and are looking overhead. The closer your target gets to the horizon, the more of Earth’s atmosphere you end up looking through, making viewing more difficult.

The Pleiades, a star cluster known across many cultures as the seven sisters, also shines between Venus and Mars. You may recognize this particular arrangement of stars from the logo on Subaru automobiles—it’s no coincidence, because Subaru is actually the Japanese name for this cluster. You’ll likely be able to see this one with just your eyes, even in a big city like Los Angeles.

[Related: Why we turn stars into constellations]

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Even if humans may not arrive on Mars for (at least) a decade or two, when they do get there, they’ll have to procure shelter of some kind. To help towards that end, researchers from the University of Manchester in England have developed a new building material for future visitors to Mars that is twice as strong as traditional concrete and primarily composed of just potato starch, a bit of salt, and Martian dirt. It’s even already got a solid name to boot: StarCrete.

Judging by what is known about the environment on the Red Planet, humans won’t have a whole lot to work with once they get to Mars. That’ll be a bit of a challenge, of course, since space for supplies will be limited on the rides over, so astronauts will need to be extremely resourceful to make things work. Building structures are key to that survival, and while there are a number of high-tech possibilities, one of the most promising and strongest could be comparatively one of the simplest to achieve.

[Related: With Artemis 1 launched, NASA is officially on its way back to the moon.]

As recently detailed in a paper published in the journal Open Engineering, a team at the University of Manchester capitalized on the fact that potato starches are a likely feature of any upcoming Mars excursions’ menus. According to the team’s estimates, a roughly 25 kg (55 pounds) sack of dehydrated potatoes include enough starch for half a metric ton of their StarCrete—enough to compile around 213 bricks for structures. By combining the starch with salt and magnesium chloride taken either from Martian soil or even astronauts’ own tears, StarCrete strength increased dramatically, and could even be baked at normal microwave- or home-oven temperatures.

In their own laboratory tests using simulated Martian regolith—aka dirt—scientists measured a compressive strength of 72 Megapascals (MPa), or roughly twice that of regular concrete’s 32 MPa rating. As an added bonus, creating a similar mixture using mock moon dust showed a compressive strength of over 91 MPa, meaning the StarCrete variant is also a possibility for humans’ upcoming return to the moon.

[Related: NASA’s Curiosity rover captures a moody Martian sunset for the first time.]

Aled Roberts, the project’s lead researcher and a fellow at the university’s Future Biomanufacturing Research Hub, explained StarCrete can step in as alternative options remain far off from practical implementation. “Current building technologies still need many years of development and require considerable energy and additional heavy processing equipment, which all adds cost and complexity to a mission,” Roberts said in a statement, adding, “StarCrete doesn’t need any of this and so it simplifies the mission and makes it cheaper and more feasible.”

Meanwhile, Roberts’ team isn’t waiting for StarCrete’s potential Martian benefits. Their startup, DeakinBio, is looking to see how similar material could be employed here on Earth as a cheap, greener, alternative to existing concrete materials. At least none of the new building options require Roberts’ suggestion from previous research—a mixture that required human urine and blood for solidification.

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NASA’s Curiosity rover snapped a sunset picture that would make any influencer jealous. The car-sized Martian explorer captured a dazzling sunset on the Red Planet at the start of its new cloud-imaging campaign that began in January.

The image, taken on February 2, shows rays of light illuminating a bank of clouds. These rays are called crepuscular rays, derived from the Latin word for “twilight.” According to NASA, it is the first time that the sun’s rays have been so clearly viewed on Mars. 

[Related: What is a ‘Martian flower’?]

Curiosity’s newest twilight cloud survey is building upon observations published in May 2021 that showed night-shining (aka noctilucent) clouds. Martian clouds are mostly made out of water and ice and hover no more than 37 miles above the ground, but the clouds in this new image appear to be higher where it is especially cold. NASA says that their position suggests that the noctilucent clouds are made of carbon dioxide ice, or dry ice.

The 2021 cloud survey also included some imaging made by Curiosity’s black-and-white navigation cameras, giving astronomers a detailed look at how the structure of clouds on Mars move. This new survey will wrap up in mid-March and relies on the color Mast Camera–or Mastcam– that will help scientists see how cloud particles grow.

Curiosity also captured a set of colorful clouds on January 27. These feather-shaped clouds create a rainbow-esque display called iridescence when the sun illuminates them. 

“Where we see iridescence, it means a cloud’s particle sizes are identical to their neighbors in each part of the cloud,” said Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in a statement. “By looking at color transitions, we’re seeing particle size changing across the cloud. That tells us about the way the cloud is evolving and how its particles are changing size over time.”

[Related: Curiosity found a new organic molecule on Mars.]

The iridescent clouds and sun rays were both captured as panoramas stitched together from 28 images sent back to Earth. The images have been processed to emphasize the highlights of the images.

Curiosity is the largest and most capable rover that NASA has ever sent to Mars. It launched on November 26, 2011 and landed on the Red Plant on August 5, 2012. Since then, it has snapped the first ever panoramic image of Mars, explored the planet’s Gale Crater and picked up samples of rock, soil, and air samples for onboard analysis. In 2022, the rover even found carbon that could have come from volcanoes or even past lifeforms.

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With over 144,370,000 square miles of surface terrain, Mars has a lot of places where signs of potential life could hide. Factor in the ultra-valuable time of current and future rovers, and it makes it even more challenging to scour for evidence of potential ancient microbes and organisms in an efficient way. To even the playing field a bit, SETI is turning again to artificial intelligence and machine learning in an effort to calculate the most likely and promising places for rovers—and, perhaps one day, astronauts—to look for clues of life. And as first detailed on Monday in Nature Astronomy, the team’s new AI machine learning modeling is already showing potential to speed up humanity’s search for alien life.

[Related: Want to travel to Mars? Here’s how long the trip could take.]

To build their AI, the interdisciplinary project led by SETI Institute Senior Research Scientist Kim Warren-Rhodes trained a program on datasets drawn from a region called Salar de Pajonales. Located at the border of Chile’s Atacama Desert and Altiplano, Pajonales served as a decent stand-in for Mars, with its high altitude, arid climate, dry salt lakebed, high amounts of ultraviolet light, and sparse, photosynthetic microbial life. The team amassed over 7,765 images and 1,154 samples of the area’s rocks, crystals, and salt domes, then used the information alongside other datasets to teach their program to understand and detect areas featuring small biosignatures. Upon turning the AI/ML program towards a new nearby area, the system managed to locate similar biosignatures nearly 88 percent of the time, versus less than 10 percent for previous random searches. The new method also decreased necessary search areas up to 97 percent.

In a statement, Rhodes explained that, “Our framework allows us to combine the power of statistical ecology with machine learning to discover and predict the patterns and rules by which nature survives and distributes itself in the harshest landscapes on Earth.” They went on to express their hope that other astrobiologists will adapt the approach to mapping other environments, as well as to detect additional biosignatures. “With these models, we can design tailor-made roadmaps and algorithms to guide rovers to places with the highest probability of harboring past or present life—no matter how hidden or rare,” she said.

[Related: Signs of past chemical reactions detected on Mars.]

“While the high-rate of biosignature detection is a central result of this study, no less important is that it successfully integrated datasets at vastly different resolutions from orbit to the ground, and finally tied regional orbital data with microbial habitats,” said another team member, Nathalie A. Cabrol. 
Over time, the team hopes they and other astrobiologist groups can continue to build collaborative datasets that could aid in the search for alien life via onboarding them to future planetary rovers.

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Despite what Star Trek’s warp-speed journeys would have us believe, interplanetary travel is quite the hike. Take getting to Mars. Probes sent to the Red Planet by NASA and other space agencies spend about seven months in space before they arrive at their destination. A trip for humans would probably be longer—likely on the timescale of a few years. 

There are a lot of things that a human crew needs to survive that robots don’t, such as food, water, oxygen, and enough supplies for a return—the weight of which can slow down a spacecraft. With current technology, NASA calculations estimate a crewed mission to Mars and back, plus time on the surface, could take somewhere between two and three years. “Three years we know for sure is feasible,” says Michelle Rucker, who leads NASA’s Mars Architecture Team in the agency’s ​​Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate.

But NASA aims to shorten that timeline, in part because it would make a Mars mission safer for humans—we still don’t know how well the human body can withstand the environment of space for an extended period. (The record for most consecutive days in space is 437.) The agency is investing in projects to develop new propulsion technologies that might enable more expeditious space travel. 

A crooked path to Mars

In a science-fictional world, a spacecraft would blast off Earth and head directly to Mars. That trajectory would certainly make for a speedier trip. But real space travel is a lot more complicated than going from point A to point B.

“If you had all the thrust you want, you could ignore the fact that there happens to be gravity in our universe and just plow all the way through the solar system,” says Mason Peck, a professor of astronautics at Cornell University who served as NASA’s chief technologist from 2011 to 2013. “But that’s not a scenario that’s possible right now.”

Such a direct trajectory has several challenges. As a spacecraft lifts off Earth, it needs to escape the planet’s gravitational pull, which requires quite a bit of thrust. Then, in space, the force of gravity from Earth, Mars, and the sun pulls the spacecraft in different directions. When it is far enough away, it will settle into orbit around the sun. Bucking that gravity requires fuel-intensive maneuvers.

[Related: Signs of past chemical reactions detected on Mars]

The second challenge is that the planets do not stay in a fixed place. They orbit the sun, each at its own rate: Mars will not be at the same distance from Earth when the spacecraft launches as the Red Planet will be, say, seven months later. 

As such, the most fuel-efficient route to Mars follows an elliptical orbit around the sun, Peck says. Just one-way, that route covers hundreds of millions of miles and takes over half a year, at best. 

But designing a crewed mission to the Red Planet isn’t just about figuring out how fast a spacecraft can get there and back. It’s about “balance,” says Patrick Chai, in-space propulsion lead for NASA’s Mars Architecture Team. “There are a whole bunch of decisions we have to make in terms of how we optimize for certain things. Where do we trade performance for time?” Chai says. “If you just look at one single metric, you can end up making decisions that are really great for that particular metric, but can be problematic in other areas.”

One major trade-off for speed has to do with how much stuff is on board. With current technology, every maneuver to shorten the trip to Mars requires more fuel. 

If you drive a car, you know that in order to accelerate the vehicle, you step on the gas. The same is true in a spacecraft, except that braking and turning also use fuel. To slow down, for instance, a spacecraft fires its thrusters in the opposite direction to its forward motion.

But there are no gas stations in space. More fuel means more mass on board. And more mass requires more fuel to propel that extra mass through the air… and so on. Trimming a round-trip mission down to two years is when this trade-off starts to become exponentially less efficient, Rucker says. At least, that’s with current technology.

New tech to speed up the trip

NASA would like to be able to significantly reduce that timeline. In 2018, the space agency requested proposals for technological systems that could enable small, uncrewed missions to fly from Earth to Mars in 45 days or less. 

At the time, the proposals didn’t gain much traction. But the challenge inspired engineers to design innovative propulsion systems that don’t yet exist. And now, NASA has begun to fund the development of leading contenders. In particular, the space agency has its eye on nuclear propulsion.

Spacecraft currently rely largely on chemical propulsion. “You basically take an oxidizer and a fuel, combine them, and they combust, and that generates heat. You accelerate that heated product through a nozzle to generate thrust,” explains NASA’s Chai. 

Engineers have known for decades that a nuclear-based system could generate more thrust using a significantly smaller amount of fuel than a chemical rocket. They just haven’t built one yet—though that might be about to change.

One of NASA’s nuclear investment projects aims to integrate a nuclear thermal engine into an experimental spacecraft. The Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations, or DRACO, program, is a collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and aims to demonstrate the resulting technology as soon as 2027 .

[Related: Microbes could help us make rocket fuel on Mars]

The speediest trip to Mars might come from another project, however. This concept, the brainchild of researchers at the University of Florida and supported by a NASA grant, seeks to achieve what Chai calls the “holy grail” of nuclear propulsion: a combination system that pairs nuclear thermal propulsion with an electric kind. 

“We did some preliminary analysis, and it seems like we can get pretty close to [45 days],” says the leader of that project, Ryan Gosse, a professor of practice in the University of Florida’s in-house applied research program, Florida Applied Research in Engineering (FLARE). One caveat: That timeline is for a light payload and no humans on board. However, if the project is successful, the technology could potentially be scaled up in the future to support a crewed mission.

There are two types of nuclear propulsion, and both have their merits. Nuclear thermal propulsion, which uses heat, can generate a lot of thrust quickly from a small amount of fuel. Nuclear electric propulsion, which uses charged particles, is even more fuel-efficient but generates thrust much more slowly.

“While you’re in deep space, the electric propulsion is really great because you have all the time in the world to thrust. The efficiency, the miles per gallon, is far, far superior than the high-thrust,” Chai says. “But when you’re around planets, you want that oomph to get you out of the gravity well.”

The challenge, however, is that both technologies currently require different types of nuclear reactors, says Gosse. And that means two separate systems, which reduces the efficiency of having a nuclear propulsion system. So Gosse and his team are working to develop technology that can use the one system to generate both types of propulsion.

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In 2016, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk outlined a plan to send human colonists to Mars. As of today, the human population of Mars stands at zero. (The rover population, meanwhile, has climbed to three.)

Can you do whatever you want in space?

Who’s in charge once there’s a human population on Mars?

Although Musk’s hypothetical colony wouldn’t legally be an American colony, it would still be subject to American laws. That’s because even if the Mars mission launches from Kazakhstan or French Guiana, SpaceX is an American company and the colonists would be traveling on an American ship.

Maritime laws provide a good example of the type of legal system we could expect on the Red Planet. Like international waters, nobody can own Mars, so instead each ship needs to follow the rules of the country whose flag it flies under. And, just like sailors, Mars explorers are still expected to abide by those rules even when they’re off the ship.

[Related: Inside NASA’s plan to use Martian dirt to build houses on Mars]

Things get a little more complicated once you start adding other countries and companies into the Martian mix. On the International Space Station, for example, if an American astronaut were to hit a Russian astronaut over the head, first the US would have the right to determine whether a criminal act was committed. If the US doesn’t take action, then he could be tried under Russian jurisdiction.

In addition, any sizable, long-term colony on Mars is also going to need a local governing system. What form of government might or should take shape there? We’ll leave that discussion up to the political scientists.

Does Musk need permission to colonize Mars?

Currently, if you want to launch a rocket into space, you have to ask the government for permission. Then, depending on your activities in space, you have to apply for a second license to do specific things. For example, if you’re launching a telecom satellite, you’ll want to talk to the Federal Communications Commission.

However, as of yet “there is no license specifically for dealing with the legal implications of space colonization,” says von der Dunk. In fact, it’s not even clear which office would be in charge of giving out those licenses. NASA? The Federal Aviation Administration? A whole new branch of the government?

[Related: SpaceX’s all-civilian moon trip has a crew]

As the number of companies wanting to carry tourists into space increases, the government is going to need to figure out a licensing procedure soon.

Why bother enforcing Earth laws on another planet?

We’re supposed to avoid contaminating the celestial bodies that we explore, according to the Outer Space Treaty. Not only does that mean “don’t spread trash all over the solar system,” but it’s generally interpreted to mean “keep your microbes to yourself,” too.

If Earth microbes take root on Mars or Europa, we may never have the chance to find out if those worlds ever hosted alien life. So the major space agencies have a sort of “gentleman’s agreement,” says von der Dunk, to decontaminate their spacecraft as much as possible before sending them to other worlds. But human bodies are much harder to decontaminate, since our health depends on our microbes.

There a few sites on Mars that are considered deserving of heavier protection than others—areas where liquid water is thought to exist, for instance. Only the most thoroughly decontaminated vessels are supposed to enter those areas.

Will Elon Musk and his followers be expected to follow those same planetary protection “gentleman’s agreements”? The licensing process, mentioned above, could determine whether potential colonizers will be legally bound to avoid spreading their germs all over Mars.

“The US licensing process should make sure that the activities of Elon Musk and others do not violate key principles of planetary protection,” says von der Dunk. “The US has the power to make those binding of Elon Musk and whoever flies under his flag.”

[Related: Your ancestors might have been Martians]

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Martian history was made yesterday when NASA’s Perseverance rover deposited its first rock sample on Mars. Throughout the next two months, the rover will leave 10 titanium tubes at a location called Three Forks. This is an early part of the Mars Sample Return campaign, where NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) will collect and return the first samples of Martian rock and regolith, or broken rock and dust.

This historic first sample drop contained a chalk-size core of igneous rock that is informally named Malay. The sample was collected on January 31, 2022 in a region of Mars’ Jezero Crater called South Séítah. According to NASA, it took Perseverance’s complex Sampling and Caching System almost an hour to retrieve the metal tube from inside the rover’s belly, take one last look with its internal CacheCam, and then drop the sample about 3 feet onto a carefully selected patch of Martian ground.

[Related: For the first time, humans can hear a dust devil roar across Mars.]

Once NASA engineers confirmed Malay was on the ground, the team positioned a camera at the end of Perseverance’s seven-foot long robotic arm called WATSON. The engineers moved WATSON so that it could look beneath the rover and make sure the rover’s wheels didn’t run over the tube.

The team also wanted to make sure that the tube landed correctly and is standing on its end. The tube has a flat end piece called a glove to make it easier for future missions to scoop it up. If the tube is not placed correctly, the mission has a series of written commands for Perseverance to carefully knock the tube over with a part of its robotic arm.

Over the next few weeks, the team will have more chances to see whether the rover needs to use its special technique, as the rover deposits more samples at Three Forks.

“Seeing our first sample on the ground is a great capstone to our prime mission period, which ends on January 6,” said Rick Welch, Perseverance’s deputy project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in a statement. “It’s a nice alignment that, just as we’re starting our cache, we’re also closing this first chapter of the mission.” JPL built Perseverance and is leading the mission.

Perseverance’s belly currently has 17 samples from the Red Planet, including one atmospheric sample. The Mars Sample Return campaign’s plan is for Perseverance to deliver samples to a future robotic lander. Then, the lander will use a robotic arm to place the samples inside a containment capsule that’s onboard a small rocket that will blast off to Mars orbit. Finally, another spacecraft will capture the sample container and return it back to Earth.

[Related: NASA’s Perseverance rover is on a hunt for microbes on Mars.]

The purpose of this sample depot is as a backup in case Perseverance can’t deliver its samples to a future lander. If that happens, a pair of Sample Recovery Helicopters will swoop in to get them.

One of the key objectives for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is studying astrobiology—including searching for signs of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet. Perseverance will look at Mars’ past climate, current geology, help pave the way for future human exploration, and will be the first mission to collect and store Martian rock and regolith.

Future missions in in cooperation with ESA will collect the sealed samples and bring them back to Earth for analysis.

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On one of the shortest and darkest days of the year, NASA’s InSight lander sent back what might be the rover’s final image. InSight is expected to lose contact with Earth any day now, as Martian dust builds up on the solar panels that power the 19-foot long planet explorer.

NASA reported that InSight did not respond to communications from Earth on December 18th and that the last time the mission was able to contact the spacecraft was on December 15. The lander may have officially reached its end of operations.

[Related: Saying goodbye to NASA’s InSight lander before it’s buried in Martian dust.]

Short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, InSight launched in May 2018 on a mission to be the first robotic lander to look deep into the interior of the Red Planet to study its crust, mantle, and core. In November 2018, it survived “seven minutes of terror” and landed on the plains of Elysium Planitia.

While on Mars, it’s listened for meteorites impacting the planet and used a seismometer to measure “marsquakes.” On that front, InSight has more than delivered, as it’s detected over 1,300 marsquakes since 2018. On December 14, scientists announced that InSight detected a 4.7 magnitude marsquake on May 4 (Sol 1222 on Mars). This quake is the largest ever recorded on the Red Planet.

“The energy released by this single marsquake is equivalent to the cumulative energy from all other Marsquakes we’ve seen so far,” John Clinton, a seismologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “Although the event was over 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) distant, the waves recorded at InSight were so large they almost saturated our seismometer.”

InSight also placed a heat probe called the “mole” into the Martian surface. Unfortunately, the heat probe was never able to get deep enough to achieve its ultimate goal.

[Related: 5 new insights about Mars from Perseverance’s rocky roving.]

Despite the mole not working as planned, InSight has sent back valuable data and crisp images back to Earth for over four years. Its powerful tools have helped scientists answer critical questions about how rocky planets both form and continue to evolve within our solar system and beyond.

The dust build up on InSight’s large, round solar arrays has limited the amount of power the rover can generate over time. It completed its primary two year mission in 2020 and NASA granted it an extension through December 2022. But only if it could make it that long, as it is generating only about 20 percent of the power it had when it landed.

“If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will — but I’ll be signing off here soon. Thanks for staying with me,” the rover wrote on Twitter.

InSight will be survived by NASA’s Perseverance and Curiosity rovers.

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It’s been a big month for Martian winds. Last week, audio recordings revealed the sounds of an actual dust devil traveling across the Red Planet’s surface. On Monday, a team of researchers released a study in Nature Astronomy detailing how some of these very same breezes could help provide energy to future human settlements at a rate far higher than previously believed.

As also reported in earlier rundowns courtesy of New Scientist and Motherboard, past assessments once deemed the winds of Mars too weak to provide a reliable, major source of power production, especially when measured against alternatives like solar and nuclear energy. This stems from the planet’s relatively thin atmosphere—just 1 percent of the density of Earth’s—which generally results in low force winds capable of moving flecks of dust and rock, but not much else. 

[Related: For the first time, humans can hear a dust devil roar across Mars.]

However, a team led by Victoria Hartwick, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, used a state-of-the-art Mars climate model adapted from a similar, Earth-focused program to factor in the planet’s landscape, dust levels, solar radiation, and heat energy. After simulating years’ worth of weather and storm patterns, the group found substantial evidence that multiple regions of Mars could provide reliable wind alongside other sources like solar panel arrays. Not only that, but certain areas could generate enough power from wind alone to keep a base up and running.

Particularly suitable locations include crater rims and volcanic highlands, while winds blowing off ice deposits during the northern hemisphere’s winter produce essentially a “sea breeze” effect on the surrounding areas that could also be harvested for energy. In certain locations, average wind power production even came in as much as 3.4 times higher than solar, according to the study. In their findings, Hartwick’s team propose the construction of 160-foot tall turbines in seasonally icy northern regions of places such as Deuteronilus Mensae and Protonilus Mensae, along with similar structures around crater edges and volcano slopes.

[Related: NASA could build a future lunar base from 3D-printed moon-dust bricks.]

Unfortunately, because of traditional turbines’ weight, the additional rocket storage bulk could pose logistical and financial barriers. As such, the group’s paper encourages additional explorations into new construction designs, such as low-volume, lightweight balloon turbines and building from materials harvested on Mars itself—a concept that is already being explored for NASA’s upcoming return to the Moon in anticipation of an eventual permanent lunar base.

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If a cloud of dust swoops through Mars and no astronaut (or Martian) is around to hear it, does it even make a sound?

The answer is yes, according to a study published today in the journal Nature Communications. An international team of scientists used a microphone on NASA’s Perseverance rover to pick up the first-ever audio recording of an extraterrestrial whirlwind.

“We can learn a lot more using sound than we can with some of the other tools,” said Roger Wiens, a professor of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences in Purdue University and co-author, in a statement. “They take readings at regular intervals. The microphone lets us sample, not quite at the speed of sound, but nearly 100,000 times a second. It helps us get a stronger sense of what Mars is like.”

[Related: Saying goodbye to NASA’s InSight lander before it’s buried in Martian dust.]

Weins is the principal investigator of Perseverance’s SuperCam, a suite of tools that make up the rover’s “head.” It includes advanced remote-sensing instruments, spectrometers, cameras, and the microphone. On this study, he worked with corresponding author and planetary scientist Naomi Murdoch, a team of researchers at the National Higher French Institute of Aeronautics and Space ,and NASA.

Perseverance’s microphone is not running continuously, but records roughly three minutes per day every few days. Getting the recording of the whirlwind was lucky, but not necessarily unexpected according to the team. They have observed evidence of about 100 dust devils in the Jezero Crater since February 2021, when Perseverance first landed in Jezero.

These dust devils are tiny tornadoes of dust and grit and are common on Mars. They are a sign of disturbances in the atmosphere and are an an important lifting mechanism for the Martian dust cycle. Impacts from dust grain build up is associated with degradation of the hardware on Martian rovers, so improving our understanding of how dust lifting works on the Red Planet will be helpful in future space exploration.

This recording happened because it was the first time the microphone was switched on when a dust devil passed over Perseverance. When recordings like this one are taken along side time-lapse photography and air pressure readings, it can help scientists better understand the weather and atmosphere on Mars. Analysis of the data from Perseverance’s multiple sensors and modeling suggests that the dust devil in the recording stood at over 387 feet tall.

“We could watch the pressure drop, listen to the wind, then have a little bit of silence that is the eye of the tiny storm, and then hear the wind again and watch the pressure rise,” said Wiens. “The wind is fast—about 25 miles per hour, but about what you would see in a dust devil on Earth. The difference is that the air pressure on Mars is so much lower that the winds, while just as fast, push with about 1 percent of the pressure the same speed of wind would have back on Earth. It’s not a powerful wind, but clearly enough to loft particles of grit into the air to make a dust devil.”

[Related: Happy Mars-iversary, Perseverance.]

Future astronauts exploring Mars necessarily won’t have to worry about gale-force winds taking down habitats or communications antennas and the Martian wind may even have some benefits. The team speculates that the breezes that blow dust and grit off the rover’s solar panels may help them last longer. Mars’ InSight lander is in its final days after over four years of exploration, since it is losing power in its solar panels due to dust build up.

“Those rover teams would see a slow decline in power over a number of days to weeks, then a jump. That was when wind cleared off the solar panels,” said Wiens.

Additionally, the lack of such wind and dust devils in the Elysium Planitia where InSight landed may help explain why that mission is winding down.

“Just like Earth, there is different weather in different areas on Mars,” said Wiens. “Using all of our instruments and tools, especially the microphone, helps us get a concrete sense of what it would be like to be on Mars.”

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In February 2021, the Perseverance rover reached a crater that was once a river delta on Mars. The 10 foot-long rover with seven instruments on board is currently exploring the Jezero crater, on a mission that partially includes gathering samples that may hold signs of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet. It is the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith, the loose unconsolidated rock, glass, and mineral fragments in the soil. It will also pave the way for human exploration of Mars, but first we need to more about Martian geology, its past climate, and the planet’s chemistry.

In a study published today in the journal Science, a team of scientists from around the world present evidence of past chemical reactions between liquid water and carbon-compounds on Mars.

“We believe we have found these kinds of liquid water environments and organic compounds together. That’s sort of the limit to how we can describe what we call habitability,” Eva Linghan Scheller, the study’s first author and a post-doctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), tells PopSci.

[Related: NASA’s Perseverance rover is on a hunt for microbes on Mars.]

The team used NASA’s Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument to conduct deep ultraviolet Raman and fluorescence spectroscopy of three rocks within the crater. The Raman spectrometer and is designed to look for the signs of liquid water and organic compounds. The testing detected evidence of these chemical reactions which in turn provides evidence of aquatic environments that used to exist on Mars. The sulfate-perchlorate mixture found in the rocks, likely formed by later changes to the rocks by brine.

“In the study, we talk a lot about the liquid water interaction with igneous rocks, which are basically crystallized magma,” Scheller adds. “What was most surprising about that was the really weird chemistry of some of the evidence that we have from these liquid water environments, which are sodium chloride sulfate mixtures.”

NASA first found carbon-based, or organic, matter on Mars in 2014, but this discovery explains the percholorate (a combination of chlorine and oxygen) that formed as a briny water that percolated through red Martian rock.

“What’s really interesting is that materials like these are extremely soluble. If they get into contact with any liquid water, they will basically dissolve,” Scheller explains. “So the last stage that the rock was in contact with liquid water was a last gasp of water on Mars.”

[Related: Happy Mars-iversary, Perseverance.]

To get an idea of when this last gasp of Water on Mars occurred, scientists will have to examine samples in the lab. Martian rock samples are due to arrive on Earth sometime in 2033 according to NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).

Perseverance is exploring the Jezero Crater because it is believed to have the best chance for providing solid samples. About 3.5 billion years ago, the Jezero Crater was home to an ancient delta, or a fan-shaped area once at the convergence of a Martian river and a lake. Perseverance is looking at the delta’s sedimentary rocks, which formed when particles of various sizes settled in the once-watery river. The rover explored the floor of the crater during its first science campaign, in 2021, and found igneous rock which form deep underground from magma or during volcanic activity at the planet’s surface.

Going forward, one thing is certrain. Studying the rocks for the secrets of Mars’ colorful past will be keeping scientists busy.

“All the different missions have actually found this extremely weird chemical chlorides all over the Martian surface,” says Scheller. “There’s going to be a big mystery that people are going to be digging into, in the next decade or so.”

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On a chilly February night in 2021, Winchcombe, a garden-girdled market town nestled in the gentle hills of southwest England, lit up with a fireball and a sonic boom as a meteorite streaked across the sky.

Astronomers knew, instantly, the value of the rock they had just been granted. They got the word out quickly. In the following days, locals and scientists alike combed through hedges, fields, and driveways, collecting more than a pound of extraterrestrial fragments in all.

[Related: Hunt for meteorites in your own yard]

Experts had good reason to be excited about this particular fireball, which, as it turns out, is far more ancient than Winchcombe’s 15th-century castle. This meteorite was a 4.5-billion-year-old relic from the very first days of the solar system. Studying debris like these can help researchers understand what was happening as the planets were still forming, including how much water might have once coated a world like Mars.

“The Winchcombe meteorite contains all the ingredients—water and organic molecules—that are needed to kickstart oceans and life on Earth,” says Ashley King, an earth scientist at the Natural History Museum in London. He was one of dozens of scientists to publish their findings on the Winchcombe meteorite in the journal Science Advances today.

The British rubble provides an example of what astronomers call a carbonaceous chondrite. These rocks really are old as time: They likely formed at the dawn of the solar system, in its outer reaches, before eventually falling closer to the inner planets.

Carbonaceous chondrites have a much higher carbon content than most of their fellow space rocks. They’re also spiced with a healthy pinch of what astronomers call volatiles: substances like methane, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and, yes, water, all of which are frozen in space but can readily turn into gas under the heat of the inner solar system.

Carbonaceous chondrites don’t often come to Earth; they account for a tiny fraction of the thousands of meteorites that are collected for study on our planet. One plummeted to the ground in Denmark in 2009; another crashed in California in 2012. Those two examples seem to have followed similar arcs as the Winchcombe rock, potentially hinting that they all may share an origin story.

To find material from rocks that old, astronomers often have to send couriers off-world. Hayabusa2, a spacecraft launched from Japan in 2014, returned to Earth six years later with samples from 162173 Ryugu, a near-Earth asteroid. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, launched in 2016, is set to return in 2023 with similar samples from another near-Earth asteroid, 101955 Bennu. Both asteroids are suspected chondrites.

The Winchcombe rock saved space agencies the trouble by coming to Earth instead. More than that, because locals caught the meteorite’s course with their doorbell cameras and dashcams, astronomers had no trouble reconstructing the rock’s arc through the atmosphere.

“Since we know the pre-atmospheric orbit of the original rock and the meteorite was recovered only hours after landing, it’s been a little bit like having our own ‘natural’ sample return mission from an asteroid,” says King.

Because the fragments came from a known environment, astronomers could also confidently determine which bits came from the meteorite and which came from, say, a driveway. The pieces were also retrieved within days, which meant any contamination was kept to a minimum. “The Winchcombe [rock] is pristine, unmodified by the terrestrial environment, and gives us a chance to look back through time,” says King.

“We were able to make a really exciting measurement of the composition of the water in Winchcombe and know it was 100 percent extraterrestrial,” says Luke Daly, an earth scientist at Glasgow University in Scotland and one of King’s co-authors.

The scientists did just find water in their time capsule—they also detected carbon- and oxygen-containing compounds, including amino acids, the building blocks of life on Earth.

[Related: Meteorites older than the solar system contain key ingredients for life]

Although Winchombe’s rock is a rarity on Earth, the early solar system would have been teeming with debris like this. In many ways, they’re the leftovers: material that didn’t get eaten by growing little planets. Back then, carbonaceous chondrite after carbonaceous chondrite would have encroached on the inner planets and battered their surfaces. So, it’s possible that rocks like Winchcombe might have helped deliver water and amino acids right to Earth, along with Mercury, Venus, and Mars. That raises another question: How much life-giving substance did they carry?

To answer that, a group of researchers from France and Denmark examined a very different sort of meteorite: fragments of Mars, broken off and cast away until they fell to Earth. There are about 200 known examples of such meteorites, which give scientists a glance into Martian history right from the comfort of their own home world. The resulting study was also published in Science Advances today.

There’s a particular red flag in those Mars-borne rocks: chromium. It’s not that this heavy metal is unknown to the Red Planet—but one specific isotope, chromium-54, isn’t naturally found in the crust. In fact, chromium-54’s most likely origin is, indeed, chondrites. From the levels of chromium in this sample of meteorites, experts can estimate the number of chondrites that crashed into Mars.

“This allows us to place a firm estimate on the minimum amount of water that must have been present on Mars,” says Martin Bizzarro, an astronomer at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. He and colleagues concluded that the chondrites that struck Mars, combined with water vapor rising from the planet’s churning interior, might have flooded it in an ocean nearly a thousand feet deep.

“This study looks really exciting and adds further support to the hypothesis that water-rich asteroids were the main source of volatiles to the terrestrial planets,” says King, who was not an author of the Martian rock study.

As for the Winchcombe meteorite, the scientists behind that paper have barely even scratched the surface of the rocks that have fallen from the sky and almost right into their lap. It’s a window into a cosmological period with limited hard clues—the oldest known Earth rocks, for instance, are only around 4 billion years old.

“There is so much more exciting science to come out of this stone,” says Daly. “It’s impossible to cover it all.”

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One of NASA’s finest Martian missions is giving up the ghost. After four years of captivating scientific exploration, NASA’s Insight Mars Lander is entering its final days of operation. Losing power as thick layers of Martian dust block the craft’s solar panels, it’s almost time to say goodbye.

Touching down on Mars in 2018, InSight has been the first robotic lander to peer deep within the planet’s interior in order to study its crust, mantle, and core. The lander has since delivered scores of valuable scientific data and crisp images of the Martian surface back to scientists on Earth. Using an assemblage of powerful tools, the mission has helped answer key questions about how rocky planets both form and evolve in our solar system and far beyond it. 

To date, one of the rover’s greatest achievements was detecting and recording more than 1,300 “Marsquakes,” the Martian equivalent of earthquakes, in a bid to determine the planet’s level of tectonic activity. During its tenure, the craft even listened for meteorites impacting the planet. Though the resilient craft is currently still active, NASA scientists predict that the mission will end sometime in the next few weeks. As heartbreaking as it is to see InSight fall silent, the lander’s demise doesn’t come as a surprise. By the agency’s standards, the craft has already exceeded its original two-year mission timeline. 

The mission will officially end when the lander misses two consecutive communication sessions with the Mars Relay Network, a constellation of five spacecraft that orbit the planet and transmit commands and data between Earth and Mars missions on the ground. Afterwards, another telecommunications system, NASA’s Deep Space Network, will tune in for a while, just to make sure the final curtain has truly fallen. Still, even though all missions come to an end sooner or later, Mark Panning, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the project scientist for the InSight Mission, says this one will forever hold a place in his heart. 

“InSight will always be the thing that introduced me to space,” he says. “Scientifically speaking, I am over the moon about what we’ve done over Mars.” But in getting a full account of InSight’s life, its expiration opens up new questions about what it takes to survive Martian dust, whether its robotic corpse could be rescued, and what will happen to all of its data. 

In preparation for the mission’s final farewell, here are some of those burning questions answered.

Dust dooms all 

Dealing with dust is an inevitable inconvenience if you want to conquer the Martian surface. Dust storms on Mars can be all-consuming, extremely powerful, and, at times, very problematic.

In 2018, one of these storms darkened the sky for so long, it eventually felled NASA’s Opportunity rover, one of the agency’s oldest and most successful Mars missions. “Oppy,” as the bot was fondly called, was pronounced dead after scientists who hoped to revive the craft could no longer get in contact with it. As for InSight, the mission has far exceeded expectations in dealing with its own fair share of challenges, says Emily Stough, a senior engineer at JPL and an uplink lead, someone who helps coordinate the team’s mission. 

In previous attempts to survive these storms, InSight once put itself in safe mode to conserve its battery after dust stopped the sunlight from reaching its solar panels. Additionally, in May of this year, the craft’s power was so low, the mission had to suspend all of InSight’s other science instruments just to ensure the rover had enough juice to keep running its seismometer—a round dome-shaped instrument that like a stethoscope, sits on the surface, sensing seismic vibrations. To combat the dust’s negative effect, NASA originally made InSight’s solar panels so large that they were generating several times the energy the craft needed at the beginning of its mission. 

[Related: NASA’s InSight lander is basically about to play an epic claw game on Mars]

But why aren’t Mars missions equipped with the ability to wipe away any potentially life-ending obstructions? 

The historical lack of any windshield wiper-esque device on a Martian vehicle comes down to cost, efficiency, and potential risk, says Stough, who notes that adding unnecessary technical components to a craft’s design could endanger a mission’s goals. “One of the things with spacecraft design that we’re always pushing for is to keep things simple,” she says. “The more complex something is, the more risky it is that it’s going to fail.”

Could InSight rise again?

After its passing, InSight will be survived by NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. Though the veteran craft Curiosity is puttering roughly 373 miles away from InSight, scientists say a rescue mission isn’t likely. Mainly, because the distance between them is even farther than the total distance Curiosity has traveled since the mission first touched down in 2012.

Besides current American efforts, another notable craft, China’s Zhurong rover, is also still in operation, exploring a region of the red planet called Utopia Planitia as it seeks to learn more about what Mars looked like in the past. 

When InSight’s solar panels are completely obscured, NASA currently has no plans to conduct what the agency calls “heroic measures” to find a way to reconnect and rescue the craft, save a lucky gust of wind that might sweep the offending particles off enough for InSight to begin charging again. But Panning says that the possibility for the craft to wake up does exist. 

[Related: Marsquakes reveal the red planet is way more radioactive than we thought]

“The lander itself was actually engineered so that it can come back,” Panning says. Like a computerized Frankenstein’s monster, there could come a day when enough dust is cleared for InSight to turn itself back on, but at the moment, such a scenario is as unlikely as a real zombie uprising. 

”We know what we need to listen for if that eventuality happens, but we’re of course not counting on that,” Panning says. 

Data dump

As long as mission scientists are able to communicate with InSight, the craft will certainly keep chugging along, continuing to take the last of its measurements and photos. All of its scientific data, which was already being periodically released to the public, will most likely later be collected in an event catalog with a summary of all the lander’s activities. Acting as a final memento mori, InSight’s data will be the scientific obituary that scientists today hope future generations access and use to conduct their own experiments and studies. 

“The spacecraft can die, but the science kind of keeps on giving,“ says Stough.

How it started, how it’s going.

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Mars is lucky enough to have two confirmed moons, and both have some scary names. Deimos, the smaller of the two moons, is named for the Roman god of dread. Phobos is larger, and its name comes from from the Greek words for “fear” or “panic.”

However, excitement and joy reigned supreme when the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft closely encountered the Red Planet’s larger moon. The flyby in September allowed the scientists to test one of the 19-year-old spacecraft’s newest tools.

[Related: Two NASA missions combined forces to analyze a new kind of marsquake.]

Aboard the Mars Express is the MARSIS instrument, which was originally designed to study Mars’ internal structure. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the University of Rome, and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) built it so that it would be used more than 155 miles away from the surface of Mars, or the typical distance between the Red Planet’s surface and the spacecraft. A major software upgrade allows the Mars Express to travel closer to a celestial body’s surface. This update could shed light on the moon Phobos’ mysterious origin by peering inside the moon.

“During this flyby, we used MARSIS to study Phobos from as close as [about 51 miles],” Andrea Cicchetti from the MARSIS team at INAF said in a statement. “Getting closer allows us to study its structure in more detail and identify important features we would never have been able to see from further away. In future, we are confident we could use MARSIS from closer than [about 24 miles]. The orbit of Mars Express has been fine-tuned to get us as close to Phobos as possible during a handful of flybys between 2023 and 2025, which will give us great opportunities to try.”

MARSIS is famous for its role in discovering signs of liquid water on Mars in 2005. It sends low-frequency radio waves to Phobos or Mars with a 131-foot-long antenna. Most of the waves are reflected off the surface, but some travel through, reflecting at the boundaries between layers of different materials below the moon’s surface.

[Related: What is a ‘Martian flower’?]

Studying the reflected signals can help scientists map the structure below the surface, revealing the thickness and composition of the material, among other features. The waves can also show evidence of different water, rock, ice, or soil layers. However, more mysteries lie in the internal structure of Phobos, and the MARSIS upgrade could help solve the puzzle.

“Whether Mars’ two small moons are captured asteroids or made of material ripped from Mars during a collision is an open question,” ESA Mars Express scientist Colin Wilson said in a statement. “Their appearance suggests they were asteroids, but the way they orbit Mars arguably suggests otherwise.”

“We are still at an early stage in our analysis,” Cicchetti added. “But we have already seen possible signs of previously unknown features below the moon’s surface. We are excited to see the role that MARSIS might play in finally solving the mystery surrounding Phobos’ origin.”

MARSIS is operated by the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) in Italy and is funded by the ASI. The ESA and its Member States are part of the upcoming Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission to land on Phobos and return a sample of its surface materials to Earth. The MMX mission is led by the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) and is scheduled to launch in 2024 and return its samples to Earth in 2029.

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Space agencies like NASA keep a close watch on our nearest neighbor, Mars. With almost a dozen active missions on or around the Red Planet, they can track its daily weather, just like our forecasts here on Earth, and notice even small changes on its surface. 

Today, though, astronomers revealed a much bigger change: two new large impact craters in the Martian crust, observed by both the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter (MRO) and the InSight lander. These are the largest impact craters discovered by MRO to date and the first detection of seismic surface waves, according to two new studies published in the journal Science.

“We never thought we’d see anything this big,” said Ingrid Daubar, planetary scientist at NASA’S Jet Propulsion Lab and MRO/InSight team member, in a NASA press conference on the new findings. Quakes on Mars, like those resulting from these meteor impacts, reveal more detailed information on its contents, and how rocky planets, including Earth, came to be.

Here at home, we’ve been measuring earthquakes for centuries—but marsquakes are newer territory. The InSight mission, which landed on Mars in 2018, recorded its first marsquake less than a year into its operations and has since recorded more than 1,300 of them. The lander provides NASA and other research teams a unique opportunity to understand what’s going on under the Martian surface, and study its core, mantle, and crust in detail. To fully understand how rocky planets like Mars and Earth form, we need more information on exactly how they’re structured—information that InSight aims to provide. MRO, which has been orbiting around Mars for 16 years, provides detailed images of the surface for birds-eye-view context for observations taken on the ground.

Mars has plenty of quakes caused by its own seismic activity, but without a thick atmosphere to protect it like Earth, astronomers also expect meteors to hit the surface and cause additional waves. The first of the newly detected impacts, known as S1000a, happened in September 2021, and created a cluster of craters in an area of rocky, craggy terrain to the North of Mars known as Tempe Terra. The second impact, called S1094b, hit in December 2021, and was much closer to InSight. It impacted a flat, dusty region on Amazonis Planitia, and formed a larger crater 150 meters in diameter—a distance comparable to the height of the Washington Monument. This created an approximately magnitude 4 quake, which is fairly small by Earth’s standards, but large for our less tectonically active neighbor.

Both of these detections were true displays of teamwork between the various missions. For S1000a, InSight noticed the seismic signatures, and scientists used that to direct MRO’s search to image the crater. For S1094b, on the other hand, the MRO team independently noticed the freshly formed crater, and collaborated with InSight researchers to confirm that the two spacecraft’s seismic signatures were, in fact, from the same event. The impact was large enough that it could even be seen in MRO’s daily weather camera, MARCI, allowing its team to pinpoint the timing of the impact to within a day. From these visuals, they estimated that the meteor that struck Mars was around 5 to 12 meters across, somewhere between the length of a giraffe and a telephone pole. 

[Related: Meteoroids make little ‘bloop’ noises when crashing into Mars]

When quakes happen on a rocky planet, the waves bounce around in different ways depending on the materials they encounter. So far, all the quakes observed by InSight have been characterized as body waves that travel deep within the planet’s mantle. Any major event—volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides, etc.—sends both body waves and shallower surface waves rippling through a planet. This left astronomers wondering about Mars’ crust. 

They finally got a clue with the meteor impact last December. S1094b created large waves that traveled through the crust, making it possible for InSight to measure them. Doyeon Kim, senior research scientist at ETH Zurich and lead author of one of the new studies, says that these kinds of detections, called surface waves, “were already a part of the mission goals of InSight from the beginning.” This marks the first unambiguous detection of surface waves on any planet other than Earth, and revealed that Mars’ crust may be a bit more uneven than previously thought. 

Images of S1094b from MRO’s HiRISE also show peculiar lighter patches on the Red Planet’s surface around the new crater, which the team identified as frozen water dredged up from below the crust upon impact. We’ve known Mars has ice caps for a while, but this is the lowest latitude that ice has been observed at so far. What’s more, the combination of imaging and seismic data gave the researchers particularly precise measurements of the location of the impact and the path the seismic waves took through Mars, providing information on the properties of the rocks along those paths.

This groundbreaking combination of observations opens the door for a much more detailed understanding of Mars and other rocky planets, from the physics of meteor impacts to the structure of planetary interiors and beyond. Unfortunately, this may be InSight’s last hurrah—dust has been slowly covering its solar panels for months, and in around four to eight weeks it will no longer have enough power to operate. The team sees this as a high note to end on: Their observations could pave the way for fresh discoveries on Mars.

[Related: 5 new insights about Mars from Perseverance’s rocky roving]

“The new results on crustal structure far from the InSight landing site will improve our overall understanding of the formation and evolution of the Martian crust,” says Martin Knapmeyer, planetary scientist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin. “In a cooperation kindled by a common goal, international science teams of two different Mars missions joined efforts to obtain the best possible results.”

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The Red Planet is home to some pretty nasty conditions: extreme cold temperatures of about –80 degrees Fahrenheit, an atmosphere that doesn’t provide much protection from the cold, and a very different definition of water. It likely won’t be harboring life anytime soon, but questions still remain about whether it once had lifeforms.

A new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy finds that roughly four billion years ago, Mars could have been home to an underground world of microscopic organisms. However, if simple life like microbes existed, they “might actually commonly cause its own demise,” the study’s lead author, Boris Sauterey, now a post-doctoral researcher at Sorbonne University, told the Associated Press. He added that the results, “are a bit gloomy, but I think they are also very stimulating. They challenge us to rethink the way a biosphere and its planet interact.”

[Related: 5 new insights about Mars from Perseverance’s rocky roving.]

Early on in its life, Mars likely had an atmosphere that was much denser than the one it has today, and the planet itself was possibly even filled with water. According to Regis Ferrière, a lead author on the study and an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, the carbon dioxide and hydrogen in this ancient atmosphere could have created a temperate climate that allowed water to flow and, possibly, microbial life to thrive.

For a hypothetical simulation of what Mars may have looked like billions of years ago, the team created a model of Mars’ crust, atmosphere, and climate and paired it with an ecological model of a group of microbes that we would find on Earth that metabolize hydrogen and carbon dioxide. “Our goal was to make a model of the Martian crust with its mix of rock and salty water, let gases from the atmosphere diffuse into the ground, and see whether methanogens could live with that,” Ferrière said in a press release. “And the answer is, generally speaking, yes, these microbes could have made a living in the planet’s crust.”

Methanogenic microbes live by converting chemical energy from their environment and releasing methane as a waste product, the same way that humans convert the oxygen they breathe into carbon dioxide. They thrive in the most extreme habitats on Earths like hydrothermal vents along fissures in the ocean floor and can support entire ecosystems that are adapted to living with crushing water pressures, near-freezing temperatures, and total darkness.

The team theorized that Mars’s methane-releasing microbes might been living just beneath the surface of the planet, with a few inches of dirt protecting them against radiation. According to Sauterey, any spot on Mars that was free of ice could have been swimming with these microbes, just like on Earth.

However, so much hydrogen being sucked out of the thin and carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere would have put the planet’s protective layer in jeopardy. As the amount of hydrogen in the atmosphere depleted, the temperature on the planet plummeted and any of the microbes at or near the Martian surface probably would have gone deeper in an attempt to survive.

[Related: NASA’s Perseverance rover is on a hunt for microbes on Mars.]

“We think Mars may have been a little cooler than Earth at the time, but not nearly as cold as it is now, with average temperatures hovering most likely above the freezing point of water,” Ferrière said. “While current Mars has been described as an ice cube covered in dust, we imagine early Mars as a rocky planet with a porous crust, soaked in liquid water that likely formed lakes and rivers, perhaps even seas or oceans.”

The team also applied models that predict the temperatures at the surface and crust to simulate the weather conditions faced by early Martian lifeforms. They combined that with a separate ecosystem model to predict whether or not life of this kind would have been able to survive in this environment over time.

“The problem these microbes would have then faced is that Mars’ atmosphere basically disappeared, completely thinned, so their energy source would have vanished and they would have had to find an alternate source of energy,” Sauterey said in a press release. “In addition to that, the temperature would have dropped significantly, and they would have had to go much deeper into the crust. For the moment, it is very difficult to say how long Mars would have remained habitable.”

The researchers suggest that the best places to look for evidence of this past life is Hellas Planitia (a still unexplored area) and the Jezero Crater. NASA’s Perseverance Rover is collecting rocks in the crater on the northwestern side of Isidis Planitia that will be returned to Earth within the next decade.

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

People have been exploring the surface of Mars for over 50 years. According to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, nations have sent 18 human-made objects to Mars over 14 separate missions. Many of these missions are still ongoing, but over the decades of Martian exploration, humankind has left behind many pieces of debris on the planet’s surface.

[ Related: “The FCC is finally pulling the reins on space junk” ]

I am a postdoctoral research fellow who studies ways to track Mars and Moon rovers. In mid-August 2022, NASA confirmed that the Mars rover Perseverance had spotted a piece of trash jettisoned during its landing, this time a tangled mess of netting. And this is not the first time scientists have found trash on Mars. That’s because there is a lot there.

Where does the debris come from?

Debris on Mars comes from three main sources: discarded hardware, inactive spacecraft and crashed spacecraft.

Every mission to the Martian surface requires a module that protects the spacecraft. This module includes a heat shield for when the craft passes through the planet’s atmosphere and a parachute and landing hardware so that it can land softly.

The craft discards pieces of the module as it descends, and these pieces can land in different locations on the planet’s surface – there may be a lower heat shield in one place and a parachute in another. When this debris crashes to the ground, it can break into smaller pieces, as happened during the Perseverance rover landing in 2021. These small pieces can then get blown around because of Martian winds.

A lot of small, windblown trash has been found over the years–like the netting material found recently. Earlier in the year, on June 13, 2022, Perseverance rover spotted a large, shiny thermal blanket wedged in some rocks 1.25 miles (2 km) from where the rover landed. Both Curiosity in 2012 and Opportunity in 2005 also came across debris from their landing vehicles.

Dead and crashed spacecraft

The nine inactive spacecraft on the surface of Mars make up the next type of debris. These craft are the Mars 3 lander, Mars 6 lander, Viking 1 lander, Viking 2 lander, the Sojourner rover, the formerly lost Beagle 2 lander, the Phoenix lander, the Spirit rover and the most recently deceased spacecraft, the Opportunity rover. Mostly intact, these might be better considered historical relics than trash.

Wear and tear take their toll on everything on the Martian surface. Some parts of Curiosity’s aluminum wheels have broken off and are presumably scattered along the rover’s track. Some of the litter is purposeful, with Perseverance having dropped a drill bit onto the surface in July 2021, allowing it to swap in a new, pristine bit so that it could keep collecting samples.

Crashed spacecraft and their pieces are another significant source of trash. At least two spacecraft have crashed, and an additional four have lost contact before or just after landing. Safely descending to the planet’s surface is the hardest part of any Mars landing mission–and it doesn’t always end well.

When you add up the mass of all spacecraft that have ever been sent to Mars, you get about 22,000 pounds (9979 kilograms). Subtract the weight of the currently operational craft on the surface–6,306 pounds (2,860 kilograms)–and you are left with 15,694 pounds (7,119 kilograms) of human debris on Mars.

Why does trash matter?

Today, the main concern scientists have about trash on Mars is the risk it poses to current and future missions. The Perseverance teams are documenting all debris they find and checking to see if any of it could contaminate the samples the rover is collecting. NASA engineers have also considered whether Perseverance could get tangled in debris from the landing but have concluded the risk is low.

The real reason debris on Mars is important is because of its place in history. The spacecraft and their pieces are the early milestones for human planetary exploration.

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If a meteoroid crashes into a planet, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Well, if NASA’s Mars InSight lander is near by, it just might pick it up. The spacecraft has detected the seismic waves from four space rocks that crashed on Mars in 2020 and 2021. These are the first impacts detected by InSight’s seismometer since it landed on Mars in November 2018 and marks the first time seismic and acoustic waves from an impact have been detected on the Red Planet.

A paper published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience details the Martian impacts, which ranged between 53 and 180 miles from InSight’s location. InSight is in a region of Mars called Elysium Planitia, a smooth flat land just north of the planet’s equator.

The first of the four confirmed meteoroids (a space rock before it hits the ground) made the most dramatic entrance, according to NASA. It entered Mars’ atmosphere just over a year ago on September 5, 2021 and exploded into at least three shards that each left a crater behind.

[Related: NASA’s new Mars lander is in for ‘seven minutes of terror’ on Monday.]

To confirm the location, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter flew over the estimated impact site and used its black-and-white Context Camera to reveal three darkened spots on the surface. After locating these points of impact, the orbiter’s team used the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE) to get a color close-up of the craters. While it is possible that the meteoroid could have left additional craters on the planet’s surface, they would be too small to see in the images taken by HiRISE.

NASA released a recording of the Martian meteoroid making impact, where Star Wars-esque “bloop” sounds are heard three times as the meteoroid enters the atmosphere, explodes into pieces, and slams into the surface.

“After three years of InSight waiting to detect an impact, those craters looked beautiful,” said Ingrid Daubar of Brown University, a co-author of the paper and a specialist in Mars impacts, in a press release. The team confirmed three other impacts had occurred. One on May 27, 2020 and two others on February 18 and August 31, 2021.

Mars is right next to our solar system’s main asteroid belt, which caused researchers to wonder why they haven’t detected more of these meteoroid impacts on the Red Planet. More meteoroids pass through Mars’ atmosphere without disintegrating since it is only about one percent as thick as Earth’s.

InSight’s seismometer, was provided by French space agency the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), has detected over 1,300 marsquakes. CNES is one of a number of European partners supporting on the InSight mission, including the and the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

The seismometer is so sensitive that it can detect seismic waves from thousands of miles away. The dramatic meteoroid that hit Mars in September 2021 marks the first time an impact was confirmed as the cause of the seismic waves. InSight’s team suspects that noise from wind or by seasonal changes in Mars’ atmosphere may have obscured the noise from other impacts. Scientists expect to find more hiding within InSight’s nearly four years of data, now that the seismic signature of an impact on the Red Planet has been discovered.

[Related: NASA has officially detected ‘marsquakes’ on the Red Planet.]

Scientists are looking at Martian seismic data for clues that will help them better understand the planet. Most marsquakes are caused by subsurface rocks cracking from heat and pressure, and studying how how the resulting seismic waves change as they move through different material will help scientist study Mars’ crust, mantle, and core. The four confirmed meteoroid impacts produced small quakes (no more than a magnitude of 2.0). Those smaller quakes provide scientists with a glimpse into the Martian crust. However, the seismic signals from larger quakes (a magnitude 5 event occurred in May 2022) can tell scientists more about Mars’ mantle and core.

These impact events will also be critical in refining Mars’ timeline and history. “Impacts are the clocks of the solar system,” said French lead author Raphael Garcia of from the Higher Institute of Aeronautics and Space in Toulouse, in a statement. “We need to know the impact rate today to estimate the age of different surfaces.”

InSight’s data will help researchers analyze the trajectory and size of the shock wave produced when the meteoroid enters the atmosphere and once it hits the ground. “We’re learning more about the impact process itself,” Garcia said. “We can match different sizes of craters to specific seismic and acoustic waves now.”

The lander’s mission is rapidly coming to an end, as dust buildup on its solar panels is reducing its power will eventually lead to the spacecraft shutting down. According to NASA, predicting precisely when it will shut down is difficult, but based on the latest power readings, engineers believe the InSight lander could shut down between October 2022 and January 2023.

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The word astrobiology might conjure up images of aliens like the squeaky, claw-fearing aliens from the Toy Story franchise, Star Trek’s logical Vulcan Spock, or the hungry Grogu from The Mandalorian. But the first real signs of life and evolution in the universe will most likely come from microbes and rocks.

Astrobiology is also a key objective for NASA’s Perseverance rover’s current mission. One of the key initiatives of the mission that began when the rover was launched in 2020 is capturing samples that may contain signs of ancient microbial life. The space car is into its second science campaign, collecting rock-core samples in Mars’ Jezero Crater. Scientists have long believed that this 28 mile-wide crater could be a top prospect for finding signs of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet. The rover has collected four samples from an ancient river delta within the crater since July 7, bringing the total number of “scientifically compelling” rock samples from the mission to 12.

“We picked the Jezero Crater for Perseverance to explore because we thought it had the best chance of providing scientifically excellent samples – and now we know we sent the rover to the right location,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science in Washington, in a press release. “These first two science campaigns have yielded an amazing diversity of samples to bring back to Earth by the Mars Sample Return campaign.”

[Related: Happy Mars-iversary, Perseverance.]

3.5 billion years ago, the Jezero Crater was home to an ancient delta, or a fan-shaped area once at the convergence of a Martian river and a lake. Perseverance is looking at the delta’s sedimentary rocks, which formed when particles of various sizes settled in the once-watery river. The rover explored the floor of the crater during its first science campaign, in 2021, and found igneous rock which form deep underground from magma or during volcanic activity at the planet’s surface.

“The delta, with its diverse sedimentary rocks, contrasts beautifully with the igneous rocks—formed from crystallization of magma—discovered on the crater floor,” Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley of Caltech in Pasadena, California said in a press release. “This juxtaposition provides us with a rich understanding of the geologic history after the crater formed and a diverse sample suite. For example, we found a sandstone that carries grains and rock fragments created far from Jezero Crater—and a mudstone that includes intriguing organic compounds.”

Within the crater, Wildcat Ridge is a rock about 3 feet wide that likely formed billions of years ago as mud and fine sand settled in an evaporating saltwater lake. The rover scraped some of the surface of Wildcat Ridge on July 20 to analyze the area with the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC).

SHERLOC’s analysis show that the Martian rock samples feature a “class of organic molecules that are spatially correlated with those of sulfate minerals.” These sulfate minerals found in layers of sedimentary rock can provide inside into the watery worlds in which they formed.

Organic molecules are made up of a wide variety of compounds, but they are primarily made of carbon and usually include hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Some organic compounds are the actual chemical building blocks of life, and the presence of these specific molecules is considered to be a potential biosignature. These biosignatures are a substance or structure that is possible evidence of past life, but may also have been produced without the presence of life.

[Related: Is there life on Mars? TBD. But scientists found ancient organic matter in the Red Planet’s rocks.]

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover found evidence of organic matter in rock-powder samples in 2013 and Perseverance detected organics in Jezero Crater in 2021.

“In the distant past, the sand, mud, and salts that now make up the Wildcat Ridge sample were deposited under conditions where life could potentially have thrived,” said Farley. “The fact the organic matter was found in such a sedimentary rock—known for preserving fossils of ancient life here on Earth—is important. However, as capable as our instruments aboard Perseverance are, further conclusions regarding what is contained in the Wildcat Ridge sample will have to wait until it’s returned to Earth for in-depth study as part of the agency’s Mars Sample Return campaign.”

In September 2021, the NASA-ESA (European Space Agency) Mars Sample Return campaign began when Perseverance cored its first rock sample. The rover has since collected one atmospheric sample and two witness tubes, all of which are stored in the rover’s belly.

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A trip to Mars will be difficult, to say the least. Although human spaceflight has become a regular occurrence in near-Earth space in recent decades, leaving our gravitational pull takes a lot of rocket power. And then leaving a planet like Mars to return to Earth will also take a lot of oomph. 

But NASA, other spaceflight agencies, and private companies have set their sights on putting humans on Mars—and returning them to Earth safely. So engineers and scientists are working to figure out how to make enough propellant to make such a trip possible. 

Oxygen, an essential component of rocket propulsion, is hard to come by on the Red Planet. But results from a prototype machine on Mars suggest the element can be yanked out of the air—hinting at future productions to power rocket launches, but not yet nearly enough for humans to breathe Martian air directly.

“It’s really difficult, if not impossible, to design a human Mars mission that doesn’t use in situ resources,” says Carol Stoker, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center who was not involved in the project, using the scientific term for “on site.”

Now, a lunch-box-sized device piggybacking on the Perseverance rover has opened the door to producing propellant from resources found on Mars. The Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), has successfully produced oxygen on the Red Planet.

From the time that Perseverance landed in February 2021 to the end of that year, MOXIE produced about 50 grams of oxygen over seven runs, according to a report published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. MOXIE has continued to run experiments under various conditions into 2022, says MOXIE deputy principal investigator Jeffrey Hoffman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

The device can produce 6 to 10 grams per hour, depending on atmospheric conditions. It set that production maximum rate at the end of August, Hoffman says, when the Martian atmosphere was densest.

The purpose of MOXIE, Hoffman says, “is to verify that the process actually works on Mars. And that, I would say, we are well on the road to doing.”

[Related: 5 new insights about Mars from Perseverance’s rocky roving]

MOXIE uses the molecules that make up Mars’s atmosphere to create oxygen. But it’s not a simple extraction. The Martian atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide (Earth’s atmosphere is mostly nitrogen with a large portion of oxygen as well). MOXIE has to split the CO2 molecules into carbon monoxide and oxygen. 

First, MOXIE draws in air through a HEPA filter, which keeps Martian dust out of the process. Then the Martian air goes through a compressor because, as Hoffman explains, it is not dense enough for the oxygen-producing process. The device compresses the Martian air, significantly increasing its density: from 100 times thinner than Earth’s atmosphere to about half as thin. 

Then, the carbon dioxide is heated up to about 1,500° F (800°C). Once heated, it’s time for the main event: A run through the electrolysis unit, which uses electricity to drive a chemical reaction. In there, the carbon dioxide encounters catalysts, like nickel, which cause the CO2 molecule to dissociate into carbon monoxide (CO) and an oxygen ion. Then electricity is used to pull oxygen ions through a filter into another chamber, where they combine into oxygen molecules. The result is pure oxygen that can be used for breathing or for rockets. 

“The nice thing about MOXIE is that, from the oxygen side of it, all you need is the atmosphere,” Hoffman says. “So it doesn’t matter where you are, you can go anywhere you want, and you’ve got atmosphere.”

[Related: This miniature rocket could be the first NASA craft launched from Mars]

MOXIE has produced oxygen throughout Mars’s nights, during the day, and in multiple seasons–even the winter. During the coldest months on Mars’s poles, the atmosphere’s density reduces because carbon dioxide deposits onto the polar surface as ice. That means there’s less CO2 available for MOXIE every six months, explains Margaret Landis, a research scientist in the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. Still, it produced about 6 grams per hour during those times that the atmosphere thinned. 

“MOXIE can run any time on Mars,” Hoffman says. “If we get some more runs, we’re going to try running it at dawn and dusk when the conditions are changing rapidly, and we can show that MOXIE can adapt to those changing conditions.”

A rate of 6 to 10 grams an hour, however, will not produce nearly enough oxygen to be useful for a human mission to Mars. The average human breathes a little less than 1 kilogram of oxygen each day, Hoffman says, and rockets are even hungrier for O2. It will take tens or even hundreds of tons of oxygen to power a rocket that can launch people off the surface of Mars. But that oxygen can be accumulated over time. A full-scale version of a MOXIE-like system would need to produce something like 2 to 3 kilograms an hour of oxygen, Hoffman says, to have any chance of amassing enough liquid oxygen to use in the rocket launch system. 

Engineers already have a prototype of such a larger device, he says. Because MOXIE had to hitchhike on the Perseverance rover, it was kept small, but a future mission could send a larger MOXIE-like device to Mars on its own. Hoffman says that such a device might also have more features, like perhaps the ability to make the carbon monoxide product into something useful as well.

The ability to produce oxygen doesn’t mean that Mars-launching rockets are ready to go. Oxygen is only one part of the rocket-launch equation, says NASA’s Stoker. It provides half of a combustion reaction–the oxidizer–but a rocket still needs other ingredients for fuel. But, she adds, oxygen could supply more than three-quarters of the mass needed to propel a rocket, and that greatly reduces the amount of stuff that has to be carried to the Red Planet from Earth.

As a MOXIE-like technology is scaled up, Landis says, it’s worth considering the environmental impact that this process might have on Mars. “It’s something to think about because CO2 is a major component of Mars’s atmosphere, and plays a really major role in its seasonal cycle,” she says. “There’s still a lot to learn about the exact implications of what’s going to happen if you start changing this equilibrium between surface and atmospheric CO2” and the types of gases. 

“It sometimes does feel like you’re living in a science fiction future,” Landis says. “This is a testament to how much we’ve been able to do on Mars.”

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NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars nearly two years ago, has released treasure troves of data, key observations, and much-anticipated geologic findings from its first few romps across the Martian surface. 

Four papers, published Thursday in the journal Science and Science Advances, report new details of the planet’s geologic history, gleaned from Mars’s Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient meteor impact where the rover touched down just north of the Martian equator. The planet was at one time home to an abundance of lava flows and rocks that, with the presence of water, could have sustained ancient life. 

Kathryn Stack Morgan, the deputy project scientist for the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission, says that while one Martian area doesn’t necessarily reflect the entire planet’s astrobiology, Perseverance’s discoveries provide evidence to connect what scientists have learned there to other regions. The new finds also challenge what humans know about habitable environments, because it’s possible any life that sprung from Mars’s primordial soup would look completely different from anything we’re familiar with. 

Here are five rock-solid takeaways from Perseverance’s escapades exploring what used to be an ancient Martian lake, as detailed in these papers. 

Mars’s surface is sprinkled with diverse rocks.

Rocks are some of the best recordkeepers of climate and habitability, but scientists weren’t sure that Mars had the range of rocks that exist on Earth. “Prior to landing, there was a lot of speculation about whether the rocks of the crater floor would be sedimentary,” says Stack Morgan, who was a co-author on the paper. “As much as we liked sedimentary rocks for their astrobiology potential, we were really hoping to find diversity.”

And they found it sooner rather than later: One of Perseverance’s most exciting discoveries revealed that the floor of the Jezero crater is home to a substantial amount of igneous rocks, stones that can only be formed by the cooling and solidification of molten liquid magma. In essence, volcanic activity may have been a more important process in that part of Mars than scientists previously thought. 

Was Mars a slow cooler? 

One study revealed that the igneous rocks Perseverance found are made up of coarse-grained olivine, a common rock-forming mineral that is also abundant on Earth. Olivine is one of the first minerals to crystallize out of magma, but on our planet, these grains are smaller and more glassy than the coarse Martian stuff. Researchers posit that this discovery could have meant that Mars cooled rather slowly, deep underground.

As the rover also found evidence of large amounts of olivine on the surface, its presence could signal that the mineral is just as widespread in other regions beyond Jezero crater. In such a case, researchers note that this olivine-enriched ground could be explained by lava flows on Mars being thicker than on Earth. 

Martian rocks have the right stuff for life.

Although NASA has yet to uncover living things on the Red Planet, researchers found evidence that the planet may have been more habitable during the late Noachian period, from about 4.1 billion to 3.5 billion years ago. Two of the four studies describe how magma-made rocks on Mars have been altered by water. But why is water running through rocks a big deal?

On Earth, when water and certain igneous rocks interact with each other, the reaction can yield an array of nutrients, including H2 or CH4, potential energy sources for life. This creates a diverse biome, a utopia ripe for microbial life. Because of Perseverance’s expedition, scientists found that rocks on the crater floor appear to contain salt minerals like sulfate, perchlorate, and carbonate, signs that liquid water flowed through these rocks. These rocks also contain simple organic molecules, which could have helped to sustain habitable environments.

[Related: Happy Mars-iversary, Perseverance]

Although the igneous rocks they found were discovered in a volcanically active area–not an environment humans would consider conducive to existence–the study notes that there is evidence the rocks experienced water at multiple points in its history, and might once have had all the ingredients to support ancient life. “It really opens the possibilities there in terms of the kinds of habitable environments that once existed on Mars,” says Stack Morgan.

Welcome to the underground layers.

While some researchers focused on the topmost crust of the crater, one team decided to examine the ground under the rover, using an instrument called the Radar Imager for Mars Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX). Their paper chronicles the first eight months of the mission, during which RIMFAX took a continuous radar image of the Martian subsurface. The radar revealed new properties of the bedrock about 50 feet under Jezero’s surface: The internal morphology of the crater could be categorized as either magmatic layering, formed by igneous rocks undergoing bulk chemical changes, or sedimentary layering, dirt commonly formed in aqueous environments on Earth. 

According to one of the studies, the presence of these buried structures is “compatible with a history of long-lived igneous activity and a history of multiple aqueous episodes,” effectively supporting the theory that water once flowed freely on Mars. 

Mars samples will arrive as soon as the early 2030s.

One of the most important aspects of the Perseverance mission is its capacity for Mars sample return. The rover was built to collect about 35 rock and soil samples to be transported to Earth for detailed laboratory analysis. This will be a complex, multi-year mission: It’s likely scientists won’t get their hands on the samples until the early 2030s. Besides being able to let us peer into Mars’ surface history, one study notes that the returned samples could also offer some insight into the role that Mars’ magnetic field had in its evolution.

On Earth, our geologic history is driven by dates and events in the past. But because scientists’ timescale of Mars is largely relative and can only be estimated in comparison to the age of rocks from the moon, geologists can have a hard time trying to use this method to date the surface. “We can look at the surface of Mars and say, well, we think this thing is older than that thing,” says Stack Morgan. “But we don’t actually know when these events happened.”

[Related: This miniature rocket could be the first NASA craft launched from Mars]

But by analyzing the returned samples, scientists could start to pin down exact ages and dates, and really revolutionize the geologic timescale of Mars, Stack Morgan says. But there’s still much to do before then. 

“It was an incredible first year of the mission,” she says. ”This is just the start for this whole effort, and [we] hope that everybody’s really excited about it the way that we are.”

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NASA’s Perseverance rover is currently collecting rock and soil samples in Mars’s Jezero Crater that will one day be returned to Earth. Under the current plan, in 2030 the rover itself will deliver the sample tubes to a Mars lander for transport back home. But, if something goes wrong, a pair of small helicopters will be poised to swoop in, as NASA’s Mars Sample Return team announced in late July.

If that occurs, the Sample Recovery Helicopters will be the second and third rotorcraft ever to take flight on another planet. And their inclusion in the Mars Sample Return mission, a joint effort by NASA and the European Space Agency, could signal the beginning of a new chapter in Mars exploration—one in which small, lightweight helicopters regularly zip around the Red Planet. 

The news of adding helicopters to the Mars Sample Return mission comes just over a year after the first aircraft in history took powered flight on another planet, when NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter ascended to the Martian skies in April 2021. Since then, the experimental rotorcraft has taken 28 more flights, far surpassing expectations. 

“The whole point of Ingenuity was to be that Wright Brothers moment that leads to some future down the road of additional aerial exploration of Mars,” says Teddy Tzanetos, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Team Lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Ingenuity’s goal was to make flying boring… Now we can just keep doing boring flights and doing exciting things with boring flights.”

Initially, the Mars Sample Return mission concept included a so-called fetch rover: A robot capable of collecting the samples already cached in tubes by the Perseverance rover. The fetch rover would have ferried them several hundred yards across the Martian surface to a lander near Jezero Crater, where the sample tubes would be transferred to the Mars Ascent Vehicle. The rocket-powered ascent vehicle would then launch the container with the sample tubes into orbit where a spacecraft with its sights set on returning to Earth would be waiting. 

But, says Ann Devereaux, who is the Mars Sample Return Deputy Program Manager, “getting a rover that was big enough and capable enough to go and do a reasonable job of collecting samples was problematic.” It would be costly to design and ship such a rover along with the Mars Ascent Vehicle.

The team was exploring other concepts right as Ingenuity took its first test flights. After the rotorcraft proved to be a success, the engineers began to study whether helicopters might be the best option for fetching the samples cached by Perseverance. 

[Related: This sailplane could cruise Mars for months on only wind]

Helicopters are smaller, lighter, and more nimble than rovers in many situations, Devereaux says. Although the aircraft need a secure place to land, they don’t have to worry about traversing dunes on weighty tires. 

Designs for the sample return helicopters won’t differ much from Ingenuity. “When you’re talking about robots in space, heritage is extremely important,” Tzanetos says. “We want to stick as close to Ingenuity design as we can because we know that it’s reliable, we know that it’s robust.”

Because Martian air is so thin—about 1 percent of the density of Earth’s—any aircraft on Mars has to be extremely lightweight and have large, fast-spinning rotor blades to provide sufficient lift, he explains. Ingenuity’s repeated flights confirmed NASA’s aerodynamic simulations were accurate–so much so the models will guide how engineers build the new pair of flying robots. 

The sample recovery helicopters won’t be an exact replica of Ingenuity, though. The team will have to make some tweaks, Tzanetos says, because these two rotorcraft will have to do more than just fly. They will need to travel about 2,300 feet from the lander to the cache depot site, pick up a tube, fly back to the lander, and drop it off in a designated drop-off site–and then repeat that cycle 15 times, he says. 

And that means the helicopters will have to support more weight than the 4-pound Ingenuity. The current concept design for the sample retrieval helicopters calls for additional tools, like arms to pick up samples and wheels to maneuver at the cache depot and drop sites, that could add another pound to the robots, according to Tzanetos.

“We’ve done the calculations, we figured out there’s certain changes we can make to the rotor system to get it to lift more mass,” he says. Now that the Mars Sample Return mission leaders have decided to go ahead with the fetch helicopter concept, Tzanetos and his team are focusing on making those tweaks. 

One of their first steps is to determine how much further they can push Ingenuity’s original rotor system. Just in case the Martian environment was more challenging than the team’s models predicted, the engineers designed the test helicopter to have more lift than thought necessary. 

“We’re starting to work on figuring out what is the optimal point where you trade off all of these different mass applications,” he says. “We can spin the blades slightly faster, we can demand more out of the rotor system, for example, and we can carry a heavier aircraft that allows us to accomplish the mission.”

The helicopters may not end up being needed at all, however. They will be flown to Mars just in case the Perseverance rover cannot deliver samples or the robot meets its demise before the retrieval is complete. 

But the future of helicopters on Mars may already be foretold by Ingenuity’s success. 

“This helicopter has been phenomenal,” Devereaux says, describing how Ingenuity proved it could fly in front of the Perseverance rover and scout ahead for the rover’s on-the-ground sleuthing. She adds that helicopters offer us an additional perspective of our neighboring planet. Perhaps one day a drone-like rotorcraft could swoop through canyons like those that make up Valles Marineris, revealing the geologic layers of the Red Planet up-close where rovers can’t go. 

“Rovers have now become common” for Martian exploration, Tzanetos says. “We understand how to build rovers, we understand how to operate rovers. I’m hoping that we will be saying the same thing about helicopters in the decades to come.” Perhaps fleets of aircraft, he says, with wings like planes or copter-like blades, will one day fill the Martian skies. 

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In the nearly 120 years since the birth of the airplane, humans have been able to design  aircraft that break the sound barrier and careen upside down through Earth’s skies. Flying high on another world, however, is another matter entirely. 

A team of aerospace engineers from the University of Arizona and NASA Ames Research Center were inspired to design a new concept for off-world aerial exploration: the Mars Sailplane. Their concept, detailed recently in the journal Aerospace, describes a plane that relies not on any motor or engine, but the power of the wind to soar above the clouds. 

Creating a vehicle capable of long-term flight on Mars has historically been a difficult task to get off the ground. There are numerous conditions on the Red Planet that make flying aircraft much different than on Earth—such as vast dust storms, less surface gravity, and an atmosphere 100 times thinner than our own. But in 2021, the Mars Helicopter, Ingenuity, proved that powered flight on another was possible. During its inaugural flight, the small rotor helicopter climbed to about 10 feet from the Martian surface, and was able to hover for about half a minute. 

[Related: There are no shortcuts when you build a drone destined for Mars]

Since then, Ingenuity has made 29 successful flights over the surface. Yet one of the vehicle’s most significant challenges is its constant need for solar power to operate. “Fixed-wing airplanes are limited by propulsion,” says Adrien Bouskela, lead author of the sailplane study and a mechanical engineering researcher at the University of Arizona. “So what can we do to extend flight paths, [or] the available fuel onboard?”

As it turns out, the solution to the problem was one already prevalent in nature. To expand a plane’s flight path, the team created a model that uses a technique called “dynamic soaring,” where a bird takes advantage of the wind’s energy to make complex aerial maneuvers The skill was originally observed in avifauna like the frigate bird and albatross. In fact, albatross wings are so specialized to soar, they can ride air currents for thousands of miles above the ocean without needing to land and rest. Intertwining dynamic soaring with aerospace technology  means that sailplanes would be able to fly for days or even months without fuel or an engine, venturing to places that previous NASA missions have never been able to explore.

The Mars Sailplane team also plans to engineer the craft to be completely autonomous, given that they will need to be able to monitor atmospheric changes and quickly adjust to stay adrift. Bouskela and his collaborators have already designed a computer algorithm to do this on Earth, but it will have to be modified to Mars if the sailplane is to survive there. 

“It’ll have to be a piece of code in there that monitors the wind, logs the wind, maps the wind, and then finds an optimal trajectory within it,” Bouskela says. 

The sailplanes are not only energy-saving, but cost-saving as well. These crafts are generally inexpensive to produce, lightweight, and because they are inflatable, small enough to fit in a shoebox. Jekan Thanga, an associate professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Arizona, says it’s possible that they could one day be deployed as a secondary payload on future Mars flagship missions—or even be packed inside a fleet of CubeSats. Such an easy development process certainly makes mass production an compelling idea.

[Related: This novel solar sail could make it easier for NASA to stare into the sun]

But the project does have some design and production obstacles to overcome before any space agency gives it the green light. One of the team’s biggest challenges is determining how the vehicle will accomplish its entry and descent into the Martian atmosphere. What’s more, Thanga says that the timeline of deploying such crafts is still up in the air. This is where a kind of carrier vehicle would come in handy; “It’ll take a little bit more time for deployment, and so that’s why we’re also considering secondary vehicles, such as hot air balloons or an airship,” Thanga explains.

Once the craft finally lands on the Red Planet’s surface, the sailplane’s flight time will unfortunately be over. But while grounded, it can still be put to use.

Right now, the team imagines the sailplane will have a “second life” as a weather station. As it is equipped with cameras and temperature, pressure and gas sensors, the craft will continue to observe and record atmospheric data from its remote location. Eventually, with enough perched sailplanes, the intel they send back could be used to create better numerical models of Mars’ enigmatic weather systems. 

“We have some data about the Martian atmosphere, but … not enough,” says Alexandre Kling, a NASA research scientist and co-author of the study. “So the purpose of the mission is to learn more about the environment.” 

Once the technology develops even further, Thanga notes that a “whole ecosystem of flying vehicles” could more closely explore places like Mars’ Grand Canyon, as well as the planet’s volcanic regions and highlands. Until then, the sailplane project is still in an early prototype phase, but could be ready for a space mission in two or three years with proper funding. In the meantime, the team plans to put the craft to the test here on Earth soon: Later this summer, the engineers will take the models to an airfield and fly them 15,000 feet up into the air, high enough where wind conditions resemble those on Mars. 

There’s still a lot to learn before these sailplane prototypes are ready to soar across the Martian sky, but as Kling stresses, a high risk reaps a high reward. 

“We can fly on Mars,” says Kling. “I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s just so, so promising.” 

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Early this year, the Curiosity rover revealed organic carbon, a key ingredient of life as we know it, on Mars. “We’re finding things on Mars that are tantalizingly interesting, but we would really need more evidence to say we’ve identified life,” said Paul Mahaffy, who served as the principal investigator for that analysis. This week, the Red Planet rover offered up yet-more tantalizing data about that key indicator of life—namely just how much of the stuff is actually there. 

The samples Curiosity’s instruments analyzed, gathered from the Gale crater at the site of an ancient lake, found organic carbon in the same density that it exists in barren places on Earth, such as the Atacama Desert. Knowing how much of the stuff there is on Mars gives planetary scientists a better idea of just how likely it was that life was ever on the planet. 

Carbon bound to a hydrogen atom is dubbed organic carbon, the compound that forms the basis of life—at least, as we define it here at home. But even though we know that Mars once had water (another key to the stew we call life), finding organic carbon doesn’t necessarily prove that the planet once had natives. Meteorites and volcanoes can also create deposits of the substance, for example. 

The location where Curiosity dug up its samples does have other indicators that it could have once hosted life, points out Jennifer Stern, the lead author on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper where the most recent findings were published, in a NASA blog post.  “Basically, this location would have offered a habitable environment for life, if it ever was present,” she states. Samples of mudstone from the area include nitrogen and oxygen, for instance, and have low levels of acidity. Finding any evidence that might prove there was life on Mars once and for all, researchers also note, requires digging deeper than rovers currently can. 

The instrument on Curiosity that completed the analysis, an oven-like contraption called the Sample Analysis at Mars, can also perform isotope analysis to determine the source of the carbon. In this case its results aren’t particularly helpful. That’s because, according to Stern, there’s too much overlap between carbon isotopes that could have been volcanic in origin with those that may have come from life. It’s clear that Mars has had high volcanic activity in recent history—and it might still be somewhat active today.

Curiosity continues to turn up new insights into Mars’s past at a steady clip. Earlier this week, scientists shared news of complex carbon chains similar to those in fossil fuels on Earth. The rover is currently drilling holes and taking mosaic images of “Deepdale,” a butte-like feature in the Gale Crater.

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If you’re up before dawn on a clear day this summer, check the skies first. Aside from the usual pinpricks of stars, you should find “a parade of planets” tracking the eastern horizon. Mercury, barely visible from the glare of the sun, leads out front, while a clearly ringed Saturn brings up the rear. The five-planet alignment first appeared in early June, and will slowly drift apart by September. It was last seen above Earth in December 2004.

Sky gazers got stellar views of the conjunction on the mornings of June 23 and 24 with the moon neatly positioned between Venus and Mars. The moon will remain near that spot until June 27, catching Mercury in its glow even as it wanes into a sliver. The procession is visible with the naked eye, but binoculars or a small scope can make it easier to identify the different planets and their features.

It’s important to remember that, while the planets do fall in order based on distance from the sun, they don’t actually form a queue as they complete their orbits. The solar system looks flat from the ground, so the patterns in the sky will always seem more linear than they are in space. 

In this event, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are visible together because their disparate orbits have matched up with Earth’s—something that only happens every 18 years. According to Live Science, Saturn materializes first in the predawn darkness, hemmed by its infamous icy rings. Next comes Jupiter, big, shiny, and unwavering. Mars, tinged in red, and Venus, the brightest object in the sky, soon follow. Finally, for a short window before sunrise, Mercury shows up on the lower left side of the horizon.

[Related: What comes after the James Webb Space Telescope?]

And while you’re rubbernecking the cosmos, NASA suggests hunting for a few star formations that are prominent in summer. That includes the Lyra constellation, M13 great globular cluster, and the summer triangle asterism, all of which can be spotted from the Northern Hemisphere. If you want to plan further out (and are willing to invest in a powerful telescope), save the date for Comet C/2017 K2’s flyby in mid-July.

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A one-of-a-kind meteorite from Mars has an unexpected chemistry that could refine scientists’ models of how terrestrial planets form, according to a new study of the old space rock. 

Chemical clues from this far-flung sample hint that Mars and Earth–often viewed as would-be twins because they are rocky worlds and solar system neighbors–were birthed in very different ways: Earth formed slowly, and Mars much faster.

Current hypotheses about the creation of a rocky planet, like Mars or Earth, suggest that some elements in the planet’s interior should have the same chemical characteristics as those in the planet’s atmosphere. That’s because, in the early days of our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago, the rocky planets were covered in a magma ocean. As the planets cooled and their molten mantles solidified, the process probably released the gasses that became atmospheres. 

Those gasses weren’t just any chemicals. They were volatiles, chemical elements and compounds that vaporize very easily. Volatiles include hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, as well as noble gasses, which are inert elements that don’t react with their environment. On Earth, those chemicals eventually allowed our world to develop and support life.

To look for signs of that process on Mars, Sandrine Péron, a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of Geochemistry and Petrology at ETH Zürich compared two Martian sources of the noble gas krypton. One source was a meteorite that originated in the Martian interior. The other was  krypton isotopes sampled from Mars’ atmosphere by NASA’s Curiosity Rover. Unexpectedly, the krypton signatures did not match. And that could change the sequence of events for how Mars got its volatiles and atmosphere in the first place.

“This is kind of the opposite to the standard model of volatile accretion,” Péron says. Her results are described in a paper published Thursday in the journal Science. “Our study shows that it’s a bit more complicated.”

The planets in our solar system formed from the debris of our sun’s birth. Clumps of material coalesced in the swirling disk of gas and dust, called a solar nebula, around the new star. Some clumps, which accumulated through gravity and collisions, grew large enough to become planets and develop complex geological processes. Others remained small and inactive as primitive asteroids and comets. 

[Related: Mysterious bright spots fuel debate over whether Mars holds liquid water]

Scientists think that volatiles were first incorporated into the new worlds directly from the solar nebula in the earlier stages of planetary development. Later, as the solar nebula dissipated, more volatiles were delivered from bombardments of chondritic meteorites, small chunks of stony asteroids that remain unchanged from the earliest days of the solar system. Those meteorites then melted into the magma oceans.

If the atmosphere was delivered by space rock, planetary scientists would expect the volatiles in a planet’s atmosphere to match those from chondritic meteorites, not the solar nebula. Instead, Péron found that the krypton from the Martian interior is nearly purely chondritic, while the atmosphere is solar. 

As such, perhaps Mars was bombarded by chondritic meteorites early on and then solidified while there was still enough solar nebula to form an atmosphere around the hardened Red Planet, Péron suggests. She explains that the nebula would have dissipated around 10 million years after the sun formed, so the accretion of Mars would have had to be completed well before then, perhaps in the first 4 million years. 

“It looks like Mars acquired its atmosphere from the primordial gas that permeated the solar system as it was forming,” says Matt Clement, a postdoctoral fellow studying terrestrial planet formation at the Carnegie Institution for Science who was not involved in the study. “This generally fits in with our picture. We think Mars formed much, much faster than the Earth did.”

Scientists often look to Mars to study the early solar system precisely because of how fast it is thought to have formed. Mars, which is a tenth of the mass of Earth, is also far less geologically active, which means the Red Planet probably preserves a lot of the conditions of our planetary neighborhood’s earliest days. 

However, to study the chemistry of Mars, scientists either have to send mechanical envoys like the Curiosity Rover to the planet or examine pieces of Mars that have broken off, hurtled through space, and landed on the surface of Earth. There are only a few hundred such meteorites.

The meteorite that Péron studied is unique. In 1815, it plummeted through Earth’s atmosphere, fracturing into pieces over Chassigny, France. Since then, scientists studying the fragments of the Chassigny meteorite determined that it likely came from the Martian interior—unlike all other Mars meteorites. 

This study highlights how much there is still to learn about planetary formation, Clement says. “We still don’t really understand fully where the volatiles on our own planets and the closest couple planets to us came from,” he says. “The further we dig into the formation of the planets we can measure the best, the more complicated that process seems to be.”

Each new distinction between Earth and Mars hints at even more diversity among planets elsewhere, Clement adds. “If it’s that easy to form planets that are that different so close to each other,” he says, what weird worlds might scientists find orbiting other stars?

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NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, a rotorcraft on Mars, briefly lost touch with the Perseverance rover last week. The helicopter has since regained its connection—but the Martian winter may pose more difficulties in the coming months.

Ingenuity, the first aircraft to achieve controlled and powered flight on another world, missed a scheduled communication session with Perseverance on May 3. The rover acts as Ingenuity’s base station, which sends the helicopter’s data back to Earth while receiving and relaying NASA commands. This is the first communication blackout since the two robots landed on the Red Planet in February 2021. 

A seasonal increase in atmospheric dust, a feature of the approaching Mars winter, caused the blackout by preventing Ingenuity’s solar arrays from being able to fully recharge its batteries. During Martian night, one of the helicopter’s instruments entered a low-power state and reset its clocks. “When the sun rose the next morning and the solar array began to charge the batteries, the helicopter’s clock was no longer in sync with the clock aboard the rover,” NASA wrote in a statement. “Essentially, when Ingenuity thought it was time to contact Perseverance, the rover’s base station wasn’t listening.”

[Related: Ingenuity flew on Mars. Now NASA will push it to the brink of destruction.]

Thankfully the communication drop was short-lived. Once NASA astronomers realized that Perseverance and Ingenuity were out of sync, they commanded the rover to be on continuous alert for Ingenuity’s transmissions. On May 5, NASA’s mission controllers confirmed that the two craft reestablished their connection. 

Ingenuity was originally designed to perform up to five experimental test flights over a span of 30 Martian days, or “sols,” but the helicopter has far exceeded NASA’s expectations. In the Earth year since it landed, Ingenuity has flown over 4.2 miles across the Red Planet, and NASA extended the rotorcraft’s mission in March. The agency has planned flight operations through September.

But Ingenuity wasn’t necessarily designed to withstand the Martian winter’s harshness. The helicopter may have reestablished transmissions with Perseverance, but it’s not fully in the clear. 

“We have always known that Martian winter and dust storm season would present new challenges for Ingenuity, specifically colder sols, an increase in atmospheric dust, and more frequent dust storms,” Ingenuity team lead Teddy Tzanetos of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California said in a statement. “Our top priority is to maintain communications with Ingenuity in the next few sols,” he added.

To preserve battery power and increase chances of retaining consistent signals, NASA engineers reprogrammed Ingenuity’s heaters. Over the next few days, when Mars reaches minus 40°F at night, Ingenuity will shut down quickly, rather than waste precious energy trying to keep the helicopter powered and warm. NASA hopes this will give the instrument a chance to soak up and store enough energy to return to normal operations soon. 

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To mark our 150th year, we’re revisiting the Popular Science stories (both hits and misses) that helped define scientific progress, understanding, and innovation—with an added hint of modern context. Explore the entire From the Archives series and check out all our anniversary coverage here.

Perhaps best known for his colorful depiction of life on Mars in Popular Science’s May 1930 feature, “Do Beavers Rule On Mars?”, science writer Thomas Elway was no stranger to conjecture. In addition to his  prediction of a ruling class of Red Planet beavers whose “eyes might be larger than those of the Earthly beaver because the sunlight is not so strong,” and whose “bodies might be larger because of lesser Martian gravity,” Elway also described a species of crab that might inhabit the Moon (“The Moon is Made of Cinders”, Popular Science, December 1929). These shellfish donned hard outer shells to “prevent loss of bodily fluids into airless space” and “eyes which could turn sunlight into food.” 

When it came to fantasizing about life among the cosmos, Elway was not alone at the turn of the last century. Advances in physics, telescope technology, and rocket science sparked the imaginations of more than just science journalists. Hugo Gernsback launched America’s first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926, which featured tales and images of alien life. Often blurring the lines between science fiction and science fact, the budding genre was known as scientifiction.

To be fair, not all Elway’s predictions flirted so openly with make-believe. In a 1924 story for Popular Radio, “Rapid Transit By Radio,” he predicted that the same electromagnetic forces used to propagate radio waves would soon be harnessed to levitate trains. Elway’s “Radio Express” would run through “air-tight tubes” that might travel at speeds of 10,000 mph, whisking Midwesterners “in a few minutes to the door of a Broadway theatre.” Nearly a century later, on November 8, 2020, passengers traveled 680 miles per hour through an airtight tube in a trial of Virgin’s Hyperloop. Elon Musk is chasing the “Radio Express” too. But even massive wealth can’t transform science fiction into science fact. Go ask Elway.

“Do beavers rule on Mars?” (Thomas Elway, May 1930)

No trace of human intelligence has been found on the red planet, and it is thought that evolution, through lack of the stress that helped on earth, may have halted with some animal adapted to a land and water life.

Mars is so like the Earth that men might live there. It has air, water, vegetation, a twenty-four-hour succession of day and night, and daily temperatures no hotter and nights not much colder than are known on Earth. But because Mars has no mountain ranges and probably never had an Ice Age, it is considered highly improbable that it is inhabited by manlike creatures or by any that possess what men call intelligence. The evolution of life on Mars must have been different from that on Earth.

One of the best signs of intelligence on Mars, Dr. Clyde Fisher, of the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, said recently, would be some indication of artificial light on the planet. Undoubtedly, lighted cities on Mars could be seen through the telescopes now in use. However, there is one condition that prevents satisfactory and conclusive observation. When Mars is closest to the Earth, both planets are on the same side of the sun. Then only the sunlit side of liars is seen. To see any part of the night side of Mars, observation must be made when it is part way around in its orbit toward the far side of the sun, so that a slice of both the dark and the lighted sides can be seen. When even a part of the night side is visible, Mars is relatively far away and difficult to see dearly. The Martians, if there are any, would not have equal difficulty in observing the dark side of the Earth, for when the two planets are nearest to each other, the Earth is showing Mars its dark side.

These consequences of the orbits in which the two planets move might make it difficult for the dim glow of lighted Martian villages, were any such in existence, to be detected from the Earth. Cities as bright as New York or Paris, on the other hand, undoubtedly would be visible. With the new 200-inch telescope which, it is planned, will be erected in California, it surely would be possible, Dr. Fisher predicted, to distinguish such brightly lighted cities, if any such Martian centers of civilization exist. If such artificial lights are never seen, he added, it might go a long way toward proving that Mars does not possess intelligent life. Other students of the subject, however, say it is possible that Martian civilization may correspond to that of an earlier. pre-artificial light era on Earth. In any case, astronomers agree that there is a practical certainty that Mars possesses kinds of life below human intelligence. 

Any deduction about the life forms on Mars or other planets, in the opinion of leading astronomers, must start, if it is to be at all reasonable, with the idea of the distinguished Swedish scientist, Dr. Svante Arrhenius, of one kind of life-germ pervading the entire solar system. There is no reasonable way even to guess the form of this life-germ. It may, perhaps, have drifted, as tiny living spores, from planet to planet, whirled through space by the pressure of light.

Whatever its form, the life-germ, biologists assume, probably developed on Mars, much as it did on Earth, in oceans which have evaporated in the course of ages. Early conditions on the two planets are supposed to have been very similar.

The theory that Martian life evolved along lines similar to those followed by evolution of life on Earth is supported by at least one definite fact. Careful spectroscopic studies at ML Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, Calif., and elsewhere have disclosed that gaseous oxygen exists in the Martian atmosphere. The presence of oxygen gas is highly significant, since the only known way in which any planet can obtain a supply of this gas is through the life activities of plants.

Following the lead of the great expert in Martian astronomy, the late Professor Percival Lowell, astronomers long have recognized on Mars dark-colored spots which are believed to be covered with vegetation. The oxygen which spectroscopes show in the Martian air is taken as another proof that this vegetation exists. 

Since the activity of plants is the only known process of cosmic chemistry by which free oxygen can be produced on the surface of a cooled planet, the presence of oxygen in the rarefied air of Mars indicates that vegetation there must have produced oxygen out of water and sunlight as it has done on earth. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance to Martian theorizing of the definite fact that Mars has oxygen and, therefore, vegetation.

A certain way along the path of evolution, Martian life shows evidence of having undergone a development like that on Earth. What happened after that is a matter of deduction. The known facts about Mars are the fruits of years of astronomical observation and study. The dark and light markings on its surface can be seen through a large telescope. The lighter ones are reddish or yellowish and usually are interpreted as being deserts. The darker areas are greenish or bluish in color and are universally ascribed to vegetation. Mars possesses two white polar caps. Recent measurements of Martian temperatures by Dr. W. W. Coblentz and Dr. C. O. Lampland, at the Flagstaff Observatory indicate that these are composed of snow and ice.

In the Martian autumn these caps increase and become whiter. In the planet’s spring they shrink and often seem to be surrounded by wide rings of bluish or blackish material, which may be sheets of water or vegetation. Still more significant are the springtime changes in the planet’s area of supposed vegetation. Many of these darken in color. Others widen or lengthen. Often new dark areas appear where none had been visible during the Martian winter. Few astronomers now doubt that these dark areas represent some kind of vegetation. 

So far, everything runs strikingly parallel with evolution on Earth. It is probable that it will be found to have run parallel farther still and that animal life on both planets, too, has been similar—for at least part of the evolutionary story. But during all the years of earnest and competent research not one clear sign of manlike life on Mars had been detected. Professor Lowell’s famous Martian “canals,” which for a long time were considered a probable sign of the intelligent direction of water, are now believed to be wide, shallow river valleys.

This lack of manlike life is precisely what a biologist would expect. Man and man’s active mind are believed to be products of the Great Ice Age, for that time of stress and competition on Earth is what is supposed to have turned mankind’s anthropoid ancestors into humans. The period of ice and cold over wide areas of the earth was caused, at least in part, but the elevation of continents and mountain ranges. On Mars, no mountain ranges exist, and it probably never had an Ice Age.

It is on these hypotheses that science bases its assumption that there is no human intelligence on Mars, and that animal life on the planet is still in the age of instinct. The thing to expect on Mars, then, is a fish life much like that on earth, the emergence of this fish life onto the land, and the evolution of these Martian land-fishes into reptile-like creatures. Finally, animals resembling Earth’s present rodents like rats, squirrels, and beavers would make their appearance.

The chief reason to expect this final change of Martian reptiles into primitive mammals lies in the fact that on Earth this evolution seems to have been forced by changeable weather. And Mars now possesses seasonal changes like those on Earth.

Pure biological reasoning makes it probable, therefore, that the evolution of warm-blooded animals may have occurred on Mars much as it did here. There seems no reason to believe that Martian life has gone farther than that. Mars is a relatively changeless planet. Biologists suppose that the rise and fall of mountains, the increase and decrease in volcanic activity, and the ebb and flow of climate forced life on earth along its upward path. Martian life of recent ages seems to have lacked these natural incentives to better things.

Now, there is one creature on Earth for the development of whose counterpart the supposed Martian conditions would be ideal. That animal is the beaver. It is either land-living or water-living. It has a fur coat to protect it from the 100 degrees below zero of the Martian night.

The Martian beavers, of course, would not be exactly like those on Earth. That they would be furred and water-loving is probable. Their eyes might be larger than those of the earthly beaver because the sunlight is not so strong, and their bodies might be larger because of lesser Martian gravity. Competent digging tools certainly would be provided on their claws. The chests of these Martian beavers would be larger and their breathing far more active, as there is less oxygen in the air on Mars.

Such beaver-Martians are nothing more than pure speculation, but the idea is based upon the known facts that there is plenty of water on Mars; that vegetation almost certainly exists there; that Mars has no mountains and could scarcely have had an Ice Age; and that evidences of Martian life are not accompanied by signs of intelligence.

Herds of beaver-creatures are at least a more reasonable idea than the familiar fictional one of humanlike Martians digging artificial water channels with vast machines or the still more fantastic notion of octopuslike Martians sufficiently intelligent to plan the conquest of the Earth.

Some text has been edited to match contemporary standards and style.

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As the Curiosity rover continues its decade-long journey across Mars’s Gale Crater, it’s finding a trove of curiosities on the planet’s igneous rock face.

In a image taken on February 24, Curiosity used “the equivalent of the geologist’s hand lens” to document what looks like a water lily, piece of coral, or sprig of broccolini. The “Martian flower,” as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory referred to it in a mission update, likely stemmed eons ago from a flow of mineralized water. Mars researchers think that the surface of Gale Crater has been dry for 3 billions years now—but that it might contain groundwater under several layers of sediment. 

A closer analysis of the botanic-seeming deposit could reveal the substances carried by that water. “Curiosity has in the past discovered a diverse assortment of similar small features that formed when mineralizing fluids traveled through conduits in the rock,” the NASA post reads. Previous samples taken by the rover have tested positive for complex carbon molecules like benzoic acid, nutrients like ammonia, and key earthly elements like phosphorus and sulfur. “Taken together, the evidence points to Gale Crater (and Mars in general) as a place where life—if it ever arose—might have survived for some time,” the Curiosity team wrote in a separate mission update.

[Related: Your ancestors might have been Martians]

When it’s not too busy capturing faux flora, Curiosity is snapping Ansel Adams-style portraits of the laminate Mars landscape. The rover is using two of its 17 cameras to take mosaics of the jagged skyline from the Greenheugh pediment (located near the center of the Gale Crater at the base of Mount Sharp). Those images aren’t just for scrapbooking: They’ll come in handy for gauging solar tau, which is the amount of sunlight that filters through the Red Planet’s atmosphere, and the levels of dust in the air.

Meanwhile, farther northwest in the Jezero Crater, the much newer Perseverance rover is about to set off on a dual voyage with its miniature helicopter companion, Ingenuity. The two robots will take alternative routes to reach the Octavia E. Butler Landing Site, where NASA completed a tricky touchdown last February. From there they will explore a barren river delta, and take wide-angle images and videos with a camera similar to Curiosity’s.

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The Perseverance rover has been exploring Mars for a year now, scoping out the planet and picking up pieces that might reveal whether life is, or was, ever there. While rovers have explored Mars before, the bits that Perseverance has been collecting would be the first samples of another planet brought back to Earth. If all goes well, pieces of Mars could be back on Earth by 2033. 

Getting a rover to Mars is one thing—but bringing samples of it back to Earth represents a new challenge altogether. A return mission will require multiple complex pieces working together to ferry the precious cargo back to Earth. 

Earlier this month, NASA announced that defense contractor Lockheed Martin would be building the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), the rocket that will someday take off from the surface of Mars to start the return journey with samples of the planet’s dirt, rocks, and atmosphere.

What is the MAV?

The MAV will be a small rocket designed to get from the surface of Mars up into the planet’s orbit. In some ways, it will be just like any other rocket, explains Philip Franklin, NASA’s chief engineer on MAV. It will run on solid propellant, just like other rockets that take off from Earth. 

NASA has already made most of the major design decisions, like the size and shape of the spacecraft and how it will be powered. Think of NASA as like the architect on the MAV project. The blueprints are basically done, says Dave Murrow, Lockheed Martin’s deep space exploration business development lead. Now, Lockheed Martin will take what NASA has planned to build the rocket, refining the design as needed to make sure everything works as intended, Murrow says. His team will work out details like how much the steering nozzle will be able to move around to efficiently steer the rocket, he says. 

Of course, the rocket has to get to Mars before it can take off from there. NASA will launch the MAV inside a larger spacecraft, which should take off from Earth around 2028. Since it’s being carried to Mars, the team is paying extra attention to keeping the vehicle small and light. “Mass is king,” Franklin says. The MAV will be somewhat diminutive. It will measure in at around 10 feet tall, and will weigh just under half a ton—so it’ll be shorter than a basketball hoop and weigh about the same as a grand piano, says NASA’s MAV project manager Angie Jackman. 

The rocket will have a compartment in the top for samples, as well as two engines that will power it up into orbit. The contract with Lockheed Martin could total up to $194 million.

How does the rocket get to Mars – and back?

The MAV will be launched inside a bigger spacecraft from Earth and carried to the surface of Mars by NASA’s Sample Retrieval Lander.

After the lander navigates to a location in or near the Jezero crater, the lander and rocket will remain on Mars until it’s time to bring samples back. The MAV will be contained in a protective shell, which the engineers sometimes refer to as the igloo, Murrow says. The igloo helps keep the equipment warm in the harsh Martian conditions—even though the mission is timed for the relatively balmy Martian spring, temperatures will likely dip below -90F.

Already, the Perseverance rover has been collecting samples of the Martian dirt (called regolith), as well as vials of the atmosphere. So far, it has collected seven samples, but by the time the mission is complete, there should be about 30 samples set to return to Earth, each in a small test tube-like container that’s about eight inches long and half an inch wide. Once all the samples have been collected, a fetch rover will pick them up and bring them to where MAV is on its lander. Then, a robotic arm will load the samples into the top of the MAV into a special compartment about the size of a basketball. 

The rocket will remain horizontal during its stay on Mars, laying flat on the lander. In order to get the rocket into the air, the lander will loft it—basically, tossing it up into the air. Because the front will be tossed a bit harder than the back, the rocket should wind up pointing at an angle, towards the Martian sky. Then, in midair, the solid propellant will ignite, and the rocket will take off. The process sounds chaotic, but all the mechanics of the deployment mechanism are carefully calibrated to Martian gravity—and a similar process is used for many missile launches today, Murrow adds.

The two-stage rocket will then deliver the cargo into Mars’s orbit. The second stage will employ what’s called spin stabilization to keep the rocket straight on its journey—the physics are similar to why footballs are thrown with a spiral to keep them straight. Eventually, the rocket’s two stages will fall away along this journey until just the sample compartment and its protective shell are all that’s left floating in orbit. That small section will then get picked up by a European Space Agency ship and brought back to Earth. (Watch an animation about the process, below.)

When is all this happening?

NASA and Lockheed will build and assess the MAV over the next few years. Environmental trials should start around 2026, when parts will be tested at low temperatures and in vacuum chambers to simulate Martian atmosphere. The sample retrieval craft will launch from Earth with the MAV inside it in 2028. If all goes according to plan, bits of Mars should get back to Earth around 2033.

The MAV, like all the other technology that’s part of the mission, is a feat in itself, but the engineers from NASA and Lockheed are especially excited about what the rocket will hopefully  enable scientists to do: look closely at bits of another planet. “I’m ecstatic to think that’s what the ultimate goal is,” NASA’s Franklin says, “to actually be able to bring samples of another planet back to Earth.”

“We get to build the coolest rocket ever,” NASA project manager Jackman says, “but it’s really about the science.”

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Perseverance has officially survived a year on Mars.

And what a year it’s been, filled with first flights, first digs, first “breaths,” and first meltdowns (don’t worry, it’s all good now). Living up to its name so far, Perseverance keeps zooming along to fulfill its scientific duty. The mission is still one giant experiment, as NASA engineers continue to test and calibrate the sedan-sized rover and its store of instruments. 

[Related: There are no shortcuts when you build a drone destined for Mars]

“It is what I call the ‘land-iversary,’” Jennifer Trosper, Mars 2020 project manager, said during NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s anniversary livestream mission recap on Thursday. “When we were getting ready to land Perseverance, we were four for four for rovers, and we just know that Mars can always hand us something challenging. So even though we were confident, we were humble.”

Percy—as many have come to call the robot—is not the first machine to freely roam the Red Planet. NASA has been sending rovers to Mars since 1997, and the Soviet Union landed two tethered probes there in the ‘70s. But as with any new space mission, the technology on Perseverance marked a drastic improvement, even compared to its most recent predecessor, Curiosity. The 11-year-old vehicle is still running down Mars rocks, though at a location thousands of miles north of Percy’s station at Jezero Crater. China also landed a rover, Zhurong, on the Red Planet in 2021: Its mission is to explore the plains in the planet’s northern hemisphere, while taking plenty of selfies and sound clips.  

As Perseverance hunts for microbial life around a billions-year-old lakebed, the Mars 2020 team is analyzing the raw data it transmits back to Earth. It will be several more years (at least 2030) until they can get a hard look at the soil and stone samples, which will be picked up during a future landing. But Percy is built for long-term science—its power reserves should last another 13 Earth years, or 6.9 Mars years. without refueling. That’s plenty of time for it to uncover the massive pockets of water allegedly hiding under the Red Planet’s surface.

To celebrate the rover’s milestones so far, NASA is hosting a livestream with Mars 2020 engineers this afternoon. But first, let’s reboot our Percy memories with some of PopSci’s top moments.

The big send off

Percy took off from Cape Canaveral on July 30, 2020, on an Atlas V-541 rocket. The launch date was set for when Earth and Mars’s orbits matched up to make the flight between the two planets shorter and easier. The rover was packed with a four-pound helicopter (more on that later) and seven imaging and measuring instruments, making the entire payload worth more than $3 billion. Thankfully, the departure from Earth was a success: Eight hours into the flight, the capsule holding the robot and its accessories broke off from the Atlas and sped toward Mars.

A photo-worthy touchdown

Nearly half a year later, Percy arrived in the Mars’s atmosphere, ready to join its fellow rover Curiosity on the ground. NASA engineers knew the landing would be a challenge, as the spacecraft had hit speeds of more than 12,000 miles per hour during its interplanetary trek. (They even nicknamed the process “the seven minutes of terror.” But the many months of simulated practice in the lab helped: The parachute-assisted descent went smoothly, and around 4:05 p.m. EST, Percy rolled out on the Red Planet’s surface and took its first high-res color images.

First helicopter flight off Earth

The Mars 2020 team had planned to take Ingenuity, the first-ever off-planet helicopter, on its inaugural flight on April 11. But perfecting the speed of its rotors proved a challenge. After all, no one had ever floated an aircraft through Mars’s thin, CO₂-filled atmosphere. On April 19, however, it finally happened: The four-pound, 18-inch-tall helicopter took to the skies for less than a minute. It climbed 10 feet straight up (equivalent to more than 100,000 feet in the Earth’s atmosphere) and came right back down. Ingenuity has since completed 18 flights at various altitudes and trajectories around Jezero Crater.

Creating Martian oxygen

The Red Planet’s atmosphere is thin and laden with carbon dioxide—perfectly fine for a robot like Percy, but not ideal for humans. If people ever attempt to visit Mars (and make the return trip back), they’ll need to make their own oxygen to breathe and help rockets lift off. That’s why Percy was equipped with a toaster-sized box that sucks in carbon dioxide and breaks it apart, spitting out carbon monoxide and keeping only the oxygen molecules. After the first extraction on April 20, the machine, called Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), sequestered about 5 grams of oxygen, which would give an astronaut about 10 minutes of breathable air. Even the modest amount of oxygen marks an important milestone for future Martian exploration.

Poking into the first of many Martian rocks 

Percy roams over a lot of red rock, but it’s looking for particularly interesting ones that might have once bore ancient microbial life. On September 6 and September 8, the six-wheeled pioneer unfurled its arm to drill its very first rock samples from an igneous, gray slab nicknamed “Rochette.” Leaving behind a small hole punch, the resulting rock cores could contain “little atomic clocks” of radioactive isotopes that the Mars 2020 scientists hope will reveal more details about Jezero Crater’s watery past—and if life was once present there.

The Martian rocks that scientists currently have to study are the ones that have fallen to Earth: meteorites. But Percy’s rock collection is the start of what will be a 30-year mission to collect and later send samples to Earth for study. The Mars Sample Return is a multi-mission project, with Percy at the helm. In September 2021, Percy kicked it off when it drilled into the Red Planet’s surface, placed the sample into a tube, and packed up that precious soil for a future pickup flight. So far, Jezero Crater has been a “slam dunk” for collecting samples for the return mission, Katie Stack Morgan, Mars 2020 deputy project scientist, said during the Thursday livestream. While rovers have gleaned plenty of data by studying rocks in the field, back on Earth, scientists have more tools to process and analyze Mars’s characteristics.  

Audio messages from another world

Percy is a selfie queen (in fact, the Mars rovers are notoriously photogenic), but the robot is also a great listener. Over the past year, Percy’s duo of microphones has been capturing the sound of pummeling Martian wind, the clink-clank of the rover’s metal wheels, and the low rumble of Ingenuity as it chops through the air. This symphony of sounds is actually audible data: the pitch, frequency, and way that sound travels informs scientists about the Red Planet’s temperature, density, and the composition of the atmosphere. In October, NASA released an audio diary of the sounds Percy listens to each passing Sol, or day on Mars, unveiling an ethereal soundscape of a world far from home.

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A tumultuous, meteor-heavy phase of Mars’s early life may have lasted longer than previously thought, according to the authors of a new study. Previous research had suggested that the rate of giant impacts into the planet had slowed 4.48 billion years ago, leading to a potentially habitable Mars 4.2 billion years ago. But if the new findings pan out, it could mean Mars stayed inhospitable for at least 30 million years longer.

The study identified grains of the mineral zircon in a Martian meteorite that appeared to be “shocked” by high pressures, indicating large impacts on the Martian surface.

These meteorite impacts hit rocks with unimaginable pressure, “essentially squeezing them like an accordion,” says Aaron J. Cavosie, a geologist at the Space Science and Technology Centre at Curtin University in Australia and an author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. “This process can cause crystals to bend and break, and even rearrange atoms, resulting in microscopic damage that remains over time,” he says.

Typically, Cavosie’s group uses electron microscopy to identify shock damage in zircon from Earth and the moon. “Shocked zircons are found at the largest impacts on Earth,”  he says, such as the Chicxulub crater from the dinosaur-killing asteroid impact in Mexico.

However, this time they applied this technique to zircon in a Martian meteorite called Northwest Africa 7034, or Black Beauty. The meteorite is a kind of “rubble pile” made from Martian soil, called regolith, which consists of fragments of material from across the planet, Cavosie says. The team studied 66 microscopic zircon grains on the fist-sized rock.

Zircon is “about the most resistant mineral in existence, maybe just the side of diamond,” says Allan Treiman, planetary geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute of the Universities Space Research Association who studies Martian meteorites and was not involved with the study.

Because it “sticks around pretty much forever,” the mineral is what scientists use to study the very early Earth, he says.

[Related: Mysterious bright spots fuel debate over whether Mars holds liquid water]

Most of the previous studies of zircon in Black Beauty focused on radioactively dating the formation of the crystals. This is only the second work to use a certain kind of electron microscopy to focus on signs of shock, Cavosie says, following a 2019 study by a different group of researchers. According to those radioactive measures, the zircon in Black Beauty crystallized about 4.45 billion years ago, “meaning it is among the oldest known zircons from Mars,” he says.

The group interprets the shock to mean that Mars was still being bombarded with large numbers of space rocks at this time, making it an unlikely time for life to evolve.

Treiman says the article was interesting and a sort of rebuttal to the 2019 study, which used similar evidence to arrive at very different conclusions. The 2019 study examined 121 similar zircon grains and found that only a handful showed signs of shock. Because the shocked grains were in such a stark minority, the authors took this as evidence that planet-wide meteor bombardment had already stopped by the time the rock formed 4.45 billion years ago.

By contrast, the new study found only one grain out of 66 with signs of shock, leading the study authors to the opposite conclusion: That because there was evidence of shock, there likely were active impacts still blasting Mars by that time. Both sources of evidence are from the same rock sample that could have been shocked by a local impact, Treiman says, so he’s wary of generalizing these effects to the whole of Martian history. “It all goes into how they interpret that small proportion,”  he says.

This debate does have implications for the habitability of Mars, Treiman says, but it’s also involved in a bigger debate about what’s called the Late Heavy Bombardment–the existence of which has been a controversy since early lunar studies. This is the idea that after the chaotic formation of the solar system, just when things began to quiet down, there was a secondary period of major collisions that blasted the Earth, moon, Mars and other bodies with meteors and asteroids. The answers to these questions will have to wait.

But, Cavosie says, this provides a window into Mars’s history and “a wealth of new questions to follow going forward.”

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Unexpected radio bright spots discovered around the South Pole of Mars could be caused by a layer of ice on volcanic rocks, according to a new study.

In 2018, a team of researchers spotted a region with unusually bright radio reflections at the ice cap of Mars’s South Pole, using data from a radio instrument called MARSIS on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Orbiter spacecraft. That detection launched a scientific debate that hasn’t slowed since.

Pockets of liquid water under the surface could have explained the readings, says Cyril Grima, a planetary scientist at the University of Texas and lead author of the study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. But that was a puzzle for the scientific community because water, underground but not too deep, would generally require a lot of salt and a source of heat to stay liquid on a world where surface temperatures hover around minus 80°F.

To study a problem such as this, researchers typically substitute a material on Earth for what they expect to exist on Mars. By testing the properties of this analog, they’ll see whether they can recreate the strong radio reflections that MARSIS recorded.

But that method has an important limitation. No matter how closely researchers study a material on Earth, they can’t know if and how the exact same thing exists on Mars. Instead, Grima and his team took a different approach, using years of radio data from MARSIS that cover the entire planet. 

Exploring that data allowed them to ask the question: Would it be possible to produce equivalently bright radio regions outside of the Martian South Pole, if the layer of polar ice extended across the entire surface of the planet?

The team modified the MARSIS data to simulate the way the radio signals would change passing through a global sheet of dirty ice. In their simulation, they found that this sheet of ice could, in fact, produce similar radio bright spots, providing another plausible explanation. That makes it less likely the readings were caused by liquid water, Grima says.

In contrast to relying on analog materials on Earth, researchers have a pretty good idea of the contents of Mars’s polar ice, he says. Grima’s team used the same estimate of its composition as the 2018 team.

[Related: Sorry, there’s probably no water under the South Pole of Mars]

It’s a good study, though like all hypotheses surrounding the bright spots, “it also requires its own assumptions in order to make it work,” says Gareth Morgan, a planetary geologist at the Planetary Science Institute who specializes in icy and volcanic planetary terrains and works with data from a similar radio instrument called SHARAD. He points out that what scientists know of the polar ice’s composition is limited to the same kind of measurements—radio—as the subsurface measurements. He hopes in coming years scientists will be able to more precisely determine the composition of the poles to answer these questions.

Only certain types of salt water might be able to stay, just barely, in liquid form at such low temperatures, Grima says. Researchers have explored other materials that could produce similar signals. Some clays could produce the radio signals, or possibly patches of volcanic basalt rock if it’s “really dense and really rich in iron,” Grima says. There could also be a combination of clay and basalt rock that explain this, he says.

It’s also possible that the Martian bedrock is covered in layers of frozen carbon dioxide plus frozen water. This would alter the way they reflect light, possibly causing a bright spot, sort of like how “when you have your glasses that are coated with a very thin film, you change the reflectivity properties of it,” Grima says.

Despite the myriad of possible explanations, the debate over what caused the polar bright spots is far from settled. 

“I think that the approach is interesting,” says Elena Pettinelli, of Grima’s study. Pettinelli is a geophysicist at the Roma Tre University in Italy who was part of the 2018 team that discovered the bright spots and proposed liquid water as the explanation. Pettinelli is an author on a new study that tried to show why clays and salty ices couldn’t explain the bright spots. The authors used a combination of in-depth material measurements in the lab and theoretical models to scrutinize these alternate explanations.

She’s also critical of the idea that basalt can generate such strong radar signals and thinks, based on her team’s previous work. Basalt rock “would explain only 25 percent of the strong reflections detected by MARSIS,” she says. Salty liquid water could explain all the bright spots, in her view.

Pettinelli’s paper will be part of a continued back and forth between research teams, Morgan says. “The paper is really important because what it shows is that this is going to take a lot of work to get to the bottom of.” But that debate is a good thing, he says, because of the “huge implications” of finding liquid water on Mars. 

In fact, the field of planetary science hasn’t seen this kind of rush of new Mars papers in decades, Morgan says. Perhaps only the Allan Hills 84001 meteorite, found in 1984 which some scientists believed contained evidence of Martian microbes, has caused such a stir. 

Grima’s study was based on three years’ worth of MARSIS data, which is now 10 years old. The instrument has been continuously collecting more in the meantime, Grima says, which means there’s about 15 years of data that hasn’t yet been used. He hopes to delve into it in future research to answer these questions.

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Last week, NASA announced that the Biden-Harris Administration intends to extend International Space Station (ISS) operations through 2030, extending the US’s previous funding deadline by a few years.

“As more and more nations are active in space, it’s more important than ever that the United States continues to lead the world in growing international alliances and modeling rules and norms for the peaceful and responsible use of space,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a NASA statement Friday. 

Funding for the ISS was previously set to expire in 2024, as per an act of Congress in 2014. But NASA anticipates that it will officially fund the ISS through 2030, says Robyn Gatens, director of the ISS for space operations.

The extension was unsurprising to Wendy Whitman Cobb, a professor of strategy and security studies at the US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. “I think the plan has always been sort of to extend it,” she says. “Obviously, NASA funding is always sort of this political battle of sorts, and so Congress has only been willing to fund it out a certain number of years.”

The International Space Station’s mission: a history

The first parts of the ISS were launched into orbit in 1998, and it was constructed in lower-Earth orbit over the years, piece by piece, like an outer space Lego set. The 356-foot-long lab has hosted more than 3,000 research investigations over the past 24 years; studies include how to grow peas in space and how space travel affects itty-bitty baby squid.

As a collaboration between five space agencies and 15 countries, the ISS has been continuously manned since November 2000. It’s been a “great symbol of international cooperation amongst countries even when countries disagree with one another,” Whitman Cobb says. Even Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, has been a significant contributor.

According to Gatens, the purpose of the ISS has greatly evolved over that timespan. 

“The first decade, we were really just assembling the space station … The second decade, we really started using the platform and expanding what we could do with it,” Gatens says. “Now that we’ve entered the third decade … we can really return a lot of value from this platform. So we’re calling it kind of the decade of results.”

The ISS extension to 2030 is vital to NASA’s plans to return to the moon with the Artemis mission in 2025 and to launch a manned mission to Mars further in the future. “It provides the perfect testbed and platform for technologies such as life support systems that will be required for long-duration missions,” Gatens says. “We need a long time to test these systems so that we can count on them and know they’re going to be reliable.” She also notes that the 2030 extension is necessary to continue researching the possible human health risks of extensive space travel and ways to counteract them. 

[Related: Alexa will tag along on an uncrewed mission to the moon]

The other important reason to keep the ISS afloat is to make sure there’s a continuous presence in low-Earth orbit (LEO) until commercial space stations can take over. In December, NASA funded three Space Act Agreements with Nanoracks LLC, Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. and Blue Origin (run by former Amazon CEO and space cowboy Jeff Bezos, who ironically sued NASA back in August) to build private space stations.

NASA seeks to avoid a gap in the US’s presence in LEO, especially with China planning to launch its own Tiangong space station by the end of 2022.

“We can’t allow the perception that we will cede our 20-plus years of humans working in LEO to others,” Jeffrey Manber, Nanoracks ​​Chairman of the Board, said in a House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee hearing last September.

“It became clear to us that it was going to take a little bit more time than the mid-2020s for us to enable a smooth transition and not have a gap,” Gatens says.

According to Gatens, NASA predicts there will be operational, commercial space stations by 2028, leaving a two-year overlap with the ISS. 

A microgravity lab built to last

But the question remains, can the ISS hold itself together until 2030? The station is already starting to show cracks in its surface and is vulnerable to space debris such as Russian satellites blown to smithereens. However, both NASA and Boeing, the primary contractor of the ISS, are confident in the viability of its infrastructure. 

“The International Space Station has shown in our assessment to be in terrific condition and is in great shape through 2030 and well beyond,” John Mulholland, Boeing vice president and program manager of the International Space Station program, writes in an email. 

Gatens echoes that, saying that NASA’s analysis showed “no red flags” but that, as always, they would continue to monitor the health of the station. 

But the biggest challenge to the ISS might not come from outer space after all. “I think the immediate problem is actually going to be getting Russia to join in with this, particularly given the other international geopolitical circumstances that we find ourselves confronting with them,” Whitman Cobb says. 

According to Gatens, every ISS space agency partner has to go through the same process with their own government to extend funding for the lab. However, she adds that “at the space agency level, [Russia is] committed to do the extension.”

The fate of the ISS after 2030

Even with all the space agencies on board, it seems that the ISS will finally meet its maker in 2030. Gatens says that the only reason she could see the station being used past this next decade would be because commercial space stations weren’t operational yet.

“​​I think this is probably the last leg,” Whitman Cobb says, noting that by 2030 it would have been almost 40 years since some of the technology was designed. “Space is a very harsh environment in terms of radiation, debris, and the difficulty of operating there, so I don’t think there’s much appetite to go beyond 2030.” 

Once all the partnering space agencies are ready to cease ISS operations, there’s still the matter of deorbiting the 925,335-pound hunk of metal, which is roughly the size of a football field.

“This is a large piece of machinery. You need to make sure that it comes down over unpopulated waters so that you’re not hurting and dangering or damaging anybody or any property,” Whitman Cobb says. “I think that will be the ultimate challenge.”

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The Mars Perseverance Rover has spent the past nine months drilling holes into the Red Planet’s rock and depositing what it finds into the lazy Susan stockroom it carries around at all times. These circles are part of the Perseverance’s effort to find out more about Mars’ past, and whether life ever existed there.

Recently, Perseverance has been surveying rocks in Jezero Crater, a place that scientists believe previously experienced violent flash floods. Since it’s believed that life on the Red Planet would have been at a time when water covered it, this crater might be a good spot for Perseverance to find evidence of ancient life. Jezero was chosen over around 60 other potential landing sites for the rover after five years of decision making and research. Scientists think that at one point, the rivers and floods that dropped into Jezero may have actually spilled clay material into the crater, a substance only made with water. 

Right now, Perseverance is surveying land southeast of where it first landed in the crater, in an area called the South Séítah region. This land, covered in dunes and ridges, can be treacherous territory for Perseverance to traverse, and it is occasionally aided by the Ingenuity helicopter to choose the best path. 

Perseverance heads to the western edge of the crater next, according to NASA, where an ancient river delta probably flowed into a lake in the crater. Scientists think that this is the best bet for signs of potential microbial life, because on Earth, microbes exist in a similar environment.

The rocks that Perseverance collects are expected to return to Earth around 2030, when scientists can take a closer look at their makeup and learn more about what secrets they may hold. In the meantime, Perseverance will keep drilling its neat circles and collecting rock specimens, all under the direction of its caring team at NASA. 

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The latest advance in astro-agriculture comes in the form of ketchup made from tomatoes cultivated in Mars-like conditions. Heinz “Marz” ketchup, a limited edition (not for sale) condiment, wasn’t imported from our neighboring planet. Rather, astrobiologists grew tomatoes on Earth in conditions that resemble the harsh environment on Mars. The sauce made from those tomatoes passed Heinz’s quality tests.

Researchers at Florida Institute of Technology’s Aldrin Space Institute planted Heinz tomato seeds in Earth soil that chemically simulates Mars’s regolith, loose rock and dust that covers solid rock. They grew the produce in water and weather conditions that mimic the Martian environment. On average, Mars temperatures hit -81°F, but they may vary between -220°F and 70°F depending on the season and region, though this experiment stuck with a controlled temperature. This experiment shows evidence for long-term food harvesting on the planet as opposed to short-term plant growth. While this milestone means tomatoes could grow on Mars, it also suggests they can grow in other remote, harsh parts of Earth.

[Related: Watering space plants is hard, but NASA has a plan]

Tomatoes thrive in slightly acidic soil, with a pH of 6.2 to 6.8. Martian soil, according to analysis of samples from the Phoenix lander, has a pH of 8.3, which makes it slightly alkaline. However, the soil does contain all the essential nutrients that plants need to grow, such as sodium, magnesium, potassium, and chlorine. In this experiment, the Florida researchers used about 7,800 pounds of soil from the Mojave Desert, which mimics Martian soil in many ways.

This ketchup joins an expanding pantry of food produced in extraterrestrial settings, both imitated and real: Astronauts have grown chile peppers and lettuce on the International Space Station. Now all we need to know is whether French fries will still be delicious on Mars — potatoes, an earlier experiment involving simulated Mars soil suggests, might be cultivated there too. 

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Packing enough fuel to get to Mars is difficult and expensive—packing fuel for the return journey is even harder, but microbes could eliminate the need for it.

The fuel required to return home from a human mission to Mars would cost 8 billion dollars alone. So, a team of scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology proposed a plan to carry microbes to the red planet to biologically produce fuel for astronauts’ return journey. Researchers have been looking into ways to chemically make fuel on Mars for some time. Though microbes would probably need heavier support equipment, they would theoretically consume less power than chemical methods, according to the team’s new study published in the journal Nature Communications.

“I think it’s immensely promising. It’s the first in-depth study of its kind,” says Amor Menezes, a space synthetic biology researcher at the University of Florida who was not involved in the research. Menezes is the Science Principal Investigator for NASA’s Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space (CUBES). This is the first convincing evidence that bio-producing fuels on Mars is viable, he says.

The team’s plan entails growing two types of microbes using Martian CO2, water, and sunlight so that they produce fuel. The first microbe is a type of cyanobacteria, the same kind of organism which 2.4 billion years ago kicked off the oxygen-rich atmosphere we have today. This microbe converts captured CO2—the main component of Mars’ sparse atmosphere—into sugars and oxygen. The second type of microbe, an engineered form of E. coli, converts these sugars into a fuel called 2,3-butanediol. Their plan would aim to process 105 kilograms (231 lbs) of microbial biomass per day throughout a 500 Martian day mission. Because the research is so preliminary, it’s hard to say how feasible that will be in practice. 

The excess oxygen from this process is vital because to burn, a flame needs both fuel and oxygen. On Earth, it’s easy to think only about fuel because oxygen makes up a fifth of our atmosphere, so there’s plenty to go around. But for rocket engines to operate in a void, they need to carry that oxygen with them. The microbes would actually produce an excess of oxygen which could be used for breathable air, too.

[Related: Mars may be too small to have ever been habitable]

“It’s a very far out concept” and sounds “science fictiony,” Menezes says, but after about five years of studying the question of whether Mars missions should use biofuels, looking at the potential cost and power savings, “the answer is an emphatic yes.”

Among the challenges to the plan are the fact that Mars is further from the Sun, meaning it gets less than half the solar radiation that Earth does, which will limit how fast microbes can grow. There’s also the feat of building microbe shelters—some kind of thin enclosed tank to feed and shelter the microbes and prevent them from freezing.

There is water ice on Mars which future explorers may be able to access, though that ice may contain salts that must be removed to make the water usable. In addition to light and water, microbes will need nitrogen, phosphorus, and a variety of trace elements which would be shipped from Earth, the study says.

Then there’s the intense ultraviolet radiation on the Martian surface. Cyanobacteria and E. coli are hardy microbes, but without Earth’s thick atmosphere, they would need shielding from the Sun’s harsh rays.

Beyond the technical hurdles, there’s the issue of NASA’s Planetary Protection protocols. At present, NASA prohibits bringing microbes to Mars. But “with all its benefits for cost and power,” Menezes says he could see it being approved down the road. At some point NASA’s Planetary Protection Office will “have to weigh in on whether or not synthetic biology” can be done on Mars, he says.

For all the technology’s future promise though, it’s still very new, so Menezes says it’s probably destined to aid a second or third mission to the red planet. “To be perfectly honest…on any real Mars mission, if you want to be absolutely confident that the astronauts are going to survive, you’re probably going to still pack almost everything that you might need on a first mission, just in case…”

Correction: 11/9/2021: A previous version of this story stated that the study done by Georgia Institute of Technology researchers was published in Nature when, in fact, it was published in Nature Communications. We regret the error.

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Back in 2017, as the Curiosity rover was collecting a dirt sample from Mars’ Bagnold Dune, the space vehicle experienced an unexpected malfunction: Its drill suddenly went out of service. Rather than scrap the mission, NASA scientists tweaked the sampling technique such that the rover placed the dirt sample into cups containing a chemical cocktail, rather than empty cups. Surprisingly, this type of sampling—known as a wet sampling experiment—helped scientists identify organic molecules that had not yet been seen on the red planet.   

The Curiosity rover has been searching for biosignatures, or indicators of previous life on Mars, since it landed on the planet in 2012. Today, Mars is mostly made up of dirt, dust, and gas, but long ago it may have been home to lakes, rivers, and microbial life. The sample Curiosity collected from the Bagnold Dune on Mars did not have biosignatures on it, which is evidence of past life, but it did identify two noteworthy compounds: ammonia and the organic compound, benzoic acid. Ammonia was notable because though not an organic compound, the researchers considered it a possible indicator of a biosignature.

Organic molecules, like benzoic acid, are particularly good indicators of biosignatures, which are chemicals that could have come from past life on Mars. These findings also indicate that this method of collecting samples is promising. The results of the wet chemistry experiment were published on Monday in a study by the NASA team behind it in the journal Nature Astronomy. 

[Related: Mars may be too small to have ever been habitable]

Organic materials, including thiophenes, benzene, toluene, and small carbon chains have previously been found on the Red Planet, coming from sedimentary samples. These past compounds were found using Curiosity’s specialized ovens that work to heat sediment and release these molecules. Ammonia and benzoic acid have never been found before with this method, though. In the wet experiment, Curiosity dumped the dirt into a mix of chemical reagents which triggered a chemical reaction that allowed researchers, back in the lab, to figure out what molecules were present.  

Researchers still need to figure out where and how exactly these molecules came about. The study indicates that the molecules could stem from geological processes on the planet, but could also potentially be indicators of past habitability. The dune where the sample was collected sits in Gale Crater, a spot on Mars suspected to have previously been filled with water, a good spot to look for signs of former life.  Researchers are awaiting the launch of the European Space Agency’s ExoMars expedition to have more samples to work with. 

In the meantime, this unexpected find helps put together a clearer understanding of the history of Mars, as bit by bit, scientists continue to uncover the Red Planet’s secrets.

Correction, 11/4/2021: A previous version of this story mistakenly noted that ammonia, one of the two compounds identified in the Mars’ dirt sample, was an organic molecule when, in fact, it is an inorganic compound. The ammonia discovery was still notable, though, because scientists considered it a possible indicator of a biosignature as it is produced in the breakdown of organic matter.

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These days, the Jezero crater on Mars is an arid, barren depression. But it was a very different place billions of years ago, images taken by NASA’s Perseverance rover have revealed. 

Scientists examined layers of sediments and rocks lodged in the sides of the crater, and determined that it was once a placid lake and river delta. That ultimately changed when powerful flash floods struck the crater, pummeling it with boulders swept in from the rim or beyond.

The geological history of the Jezero crater could help scientists understand how the Red Planet changed from being wet and possibly habitable into a harsh desert world. It  also provides a compelling target to search for traces of life, says Benjamin Weiss, a planetary scientist at MIT. “Definitely we hit the jackpot here,” says Weiss, whose team reported the findings on October 7 in Science.

The surface of Mars was once dotted with massive crater lakes. The 28-mile Jezero crater held one such lake around 3.7 billion years ago. Scientists have previously detected fan-shaped structures along the edges that resemble deltas on Earth, suggesting that ancient rivers carried water, sand, and mud into the crater. 

“We know that we’re dealing with a lake and river system; these tend to be very habitable on Earth,” says Amy Williams, an astrobiologist at the University of Florida and coauthor of the study. That made the Jezero crater an inviting site for the ​Mars 2020 mission, which deployed the Perseverance rover to explore environments that could have hosted microbial life. 

[Related: After a few hiccups, NASA’s Perseverance begins its main missions on Mars]

On February 18, Perseverance touched down on the floor of the crater, several kilometers from the relatively well-preserved westernmost delta. Over the next three months, the rover stayed put while researchers made sure its instruments and software were working. This gave Perseverance plenty of time to snap pictures of the main fan and an isolated hill the team called Kodiak butte about a half mile south. Leftover “islands” like Kodiak indicate that the delta was much larger in the past, before it was worn down and fragmented by billions of years of erosion, Weiss says.

When he and his team analyzed the images of both sites, they observed sloped layers of sediments.

“These delta deposits tell us that the lake levels within Jezero changed a lot through time, implying that the climate was warm enough (at least in this region) to allow large rivers to flow and fill a lake while forming a delta,” Stefano Nerozzi, a planetary geologist at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the research, told Popular Science in an email. 

When a river flows into a lake, heavier objects are the first to settle, Williams says. Lighter materials tend to travel farther from the mouth of the river. She and her colleagues were particularly excited by gently dipping beds of fine-grained sediments most visible on Kodiak butte. 

On Earth, such sediments are prime places to look for evidence of past life, says Tanja Bosak, a geobiologist at MIT and another coauthor of the findings. For one thing, they tend to be deposited under gentle conditions. “If there’s any life, nothing grinds it up; if you have boulders bouncing, that will not do good things to your life,” Bosak says. “Another reason is these sediments tend to be chocked full of clay minerals, and clay minerals act like natural sponges for organic matter.” Clays smother this precious cargo and preserve it from sunlight and other hazards for millions of years, she says. 

The team also noticed boulders several feet in diameter sitting atop the older sediment layers of the delta. “These rocks are not the kind of thing that are deposited in a quiescent, low-energy environment like a lake with a lazy river flowing into it,” Weiss says. “To carry such big rocks, you need really intense energetic flows like you’d expect from flooding events.”

[Related: Mars may be too small to have ever been habitable]

Many of the boulders have “nicely rounded” sides, Williams says. “This tells us that they actually have undergone long-distance travel from wherever they came from to be deposited here,” she says. The boulders might be pieces of crater rim that were dislodged and washed into the delta. Alternatively, the boulders might be even older rocks from outside the crater, carried from perhaps as far as 40 miles away, Weiss says.

It’s not clear yet what caused the small-scale flash floods that arrived late in the crater lake’s history. “Maybe we’re capturing the transitioning [of Mars] to the colder and drier conditions of today,” Weiss says. “Right now we don’t know whether this is a sign of the global climate change on Mars or not.”

This question could be answered over the next several years as Perseverance takes a closer look at the rocks and sediments strewn about the delta, and gathers samples that will hopefully be brought to Earth.

The samples could also be researchers’ best chance yet at identifying signs of past life on Mars. “Finding well preserved lower delta deposits means that we have sediments with the highest preservation potential for organic matter, at least by Earth’s standards,” Nerozzi says. “This is definitely the right place to be to look for traces of possible ancient life on Mars.”

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Billions of years ago, the surface of Mars was dotted with massive lakes created when impact craters slowly filled with water. Eventually, many of the lakes burst their bounds, leading to catastrophic floods that gouged canyons into the surrounding landscape. 

These short but deep channels may have played an unexpectedly important role in shaping the Red Planet’s topography, scientists reported this week in Nature. The researchers compared satellite imagery of valleys created by overflowing craters and more gradual river erosion across Mars, and found that canyons associated with crater lakes accounted for nearly a quarter of the total volume of the valleys. The findings highlight key differences in the processes that have influenced the landscapes of Earth and Mars, and have implications for understanding our neighbor’s past habitability. 

“They aren’t just one-offs that we can mostly ignore at a global scale,” Timothy Goudge, a planetary scientist at the University of Texas at Austin and coauthor of the study. “Recognizing that this is a global process helps inform the way we should think about how Mars’s surface evolved.”

During early, soggier chapters of Mars’s history, crater lakes could reach hundreds of kilometers across, comparable in size to small Earthly seas such as the Caspian. Many of these lakes ultimately became so full that water would spill over the rim of the crater, wearing it down and allowing still more water to escape. In other cases, the flooding began when the immense pressure from all the water stored in the crater ruptured the rim.

All this happened more than 3.5 billion years ago, so it’s difficult to know how rapidly these channels formed, Goudge says. However, he and his colleagues are using computer models to recreate past floods, and suspect they took place over days to weeks.

Mars is also home to branching valley networks that resemble those seen on Earth, which were etched into the ground over tens to hundreds of thousands of years by rivers fed with rainfall or snowmelt. Researchers have typically considered this slow process to be the main way that Martian valleys formed. 

[Related: After a few hiccups, NASA’s Perseverance begins its main missions on Mars]

“What we have done in our work is to sort of test that assumption and see, are the catastrophic floods isolated, one-off events, or are they globally important?” Goudge says. 

He and his team consulted a map of Martian valleys and determined which ones were created by gradual erosion and which had been fed by crater lakes. The researchers next drew upon elevation data collected by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft to determine the valleys’ depth. 

From this information, the team calculated that canyons associated with burst crater lakes added up to a mere 3 percent of the total length of Martian valleys, but accounted for 24 percent of their volume. These channels had been cut deeply into the landscape, with a middle value of 170.5 meters (559.4 feet), more than twice that of the river valleys that formed through gradual erosion. Goudge and his colleagues estimated that the ancient floods had carved out around 14,000 cubic kilometers (3,358.8 cubic miles) of sediment—enough to fill up Lake Superior and Lake Ontario with a little bit left over, he says.

On Earth, influxes of water from melting ice sheets have sometimes caused glacial lakes to overflow and unleash powerful floods, creating landforms like the Channeled Scablands in Washington State. However, Earth’s ever-busy plate tectonics have destroyed many of the impact craters that might otherwise have formed lakes. Mars doesn’t have plate tectonics, so its craters “just sit around,” Goudge says.

“On Earth, these lake breached floods are important during certain time periods, especially these periods of transition,” he says. “What we think for Mars is that they were always important.”

[Related: ‘Robot swarms’ could one day build underground shelters for humans on Mars]

Understanding the Red Planet’s water and climate history is key to figuring out whether it might once have harbored conditions suitable for life. In the future, Goudge and his colleagues plan to investigate which of the floods from breached crater lakes may have been powerful enough to alter the topography of neighboring river valley networks—something that wouldn’t happen much on Earth. 

“Comparing the average Martian valley system to the average terrestrial valley system might be more of an apples-to-oranges comparison than we previously thought,” he says. “We need to take into account the unique complexities of Martian topography in order to best understand past environments.”

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Plenty of planetary research suggests that Mars was once flowing with water, even if it has none today. But why Mars couldn’t hold on to its lakes and reservoirs, yielding its current dry and rocky terrain, is still an open question—though new research suggests it has to do with size. 

Mars is a pretty small planet. It’s diameter is just over half that of Earth, and it has only about one tenth of our planet’s mass. Because of its compact body, Mars may have never stood a chance at keeping its watery surface. New research shows that Mars’s small size and weak gravity made it easier for water to escape the planet’s thin atmosphere and run away into space. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Mars’ fate was decided from the beginning,” said Kun Wang, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis and the senior author of the paper, in a statement. “There is likely a threshold on the size requirements of rocky planets to retain enough water to enable habitability and plate tectonics, with mass exceeding that of Mars.”

The research team examined 20 Mars meteorites and looked at volatile potassium levels. That’s because potassium isotopes can act like a “tracer” to indicate how water likely reacted on the planetary surfaces. The meteorites they examined ranged from 200 million to 4 billion years old. Analyzing meteorites with these different ages allowed them to see how potassium levels, and water levels by proxy, changed over time. They found that when our solar system was forming, Mars lost its elements at a faster rate than Earth, but at a slower rate than our moon. 

[Related: After a few hiccups, NASA’s Perseverance begins its main missions on Mars]

Wang told NPR that the team’s data showed this trend even in the oldest of the meteorites, signaling that Martian water started depleting almost immediately. Some water on Mars did stay long enough to carve out canyons and river beds, he added. But that likely only lasted for as long as it did because of freezing, as the red planet’s atmosphere cooled. 

The new findings could assist future astronomers in their search for life. If planet size can reliably predict the presence of water, then that could help planetary scientists quickly and easily rule out unlikely candidates.

“The size of an exoplanet is one of the parameters that is easiest to determine,” Wang said in a statement. “Based on size and mass, we now know whether an exoplanet is a candidate for life, because a first-order determining factor for volatile retention is size.”

“This does probably indicate a lower limit on size for a planet to be truly habitable,” Bruce Macintosh, deputy director of Stanford University’s Kavli Institute for Particle Physics and Cosmology, told NPR. “Understanding that lower limit is important—there are lines of evidence that small planets are more common than big ones, so if the small ones are dry, then there are fewer potentially habitable worlds out there than we thought.”

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After an initial fumble, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is on a roll, having bagged two promising Martian rock samples this month.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory just announced some early findings from the rover’s first three attempts at drilling rock cores. After an unsuccessful first attempt due to crumbly rock, Perseverance drilled its first successful core sample, dubbed “Montdenier,” on Sept. 6, and took its second, “Montagnac,” from the same rock called “Rochette” on Sept 8.

The results from these samplings support what NASA already hoped and suspected, but needed more hard evidence to prove: the idea that Jezero Crater rocks had been exposed to water for a long time.

‘Little atomic clocks’

The samples were of crystalline igneous rock, meaning rock that solidified into crystals from hot lava or magma. The rocks also show signs that they were chemically changed: weathered and laced with added salt minerals, likely left when nearby water evaporated. When Perseverance ground away the surface of the rock, the team could tell that it had been oxidized, judging by the difference in color between the outer surface and the freshly exposed patch.

“That rock … in so many ways, is absolutely ideal and for it to be the first sample that we collected is really quite incredible,” says David Shuster, a geochemist at the University of California at Berkeley and a participating scientist with NASA’s sample return team.

[Related: 11 eye-opening images from NASA’s Mars missions]

He says the team has been hoping to sample this region—in the floor of Jezero Crater—for over a year.

The fact that these first samples appear to be igneous rock is helpful for dating the region, says Jack Mustard, a planetary geologist at Brown University and chair of the science definition team for Perseverance, which outlined what goals the mission should prioritize.

That’s because as rock cools from liquid lava or magma, it locks in “little atomic clocks” as Mustard calls them—or radioactive isotopes trapped inside Martian minerals. “If you can then open the mineral up and read the clock, you can tell how old it is,” he says. “Crystalline, igneous minerals are particularly good at that.”

Calibrating for Martian craters

It’s also possible that the salts in Perseverance’s cores will contain tiny bubbles of ancient Mars water, which would hint at Mars’ ancient climate, according to the announcement.

Studying the details of such “water bearing minerals” in the lab will give scientists a better understanding of how long water was present in Jezero Crater and reveal “whether it was rainfall, a standing body of water, [or] groundwater,” Mustard says.

Using core samples to date Martian features is critical, Shuster says, because currently, researchers don’t have a solid timeline.

Scientists estimate the age of the Martian surface by gauging the number of impact craters—the older the surface, the more craters pile up. But the estimate for how many craters appear in a given time is based on samples returned from the moon, which is much less massive and has a different orbit.

Getting that “calibration” done for Mars could drastically change all our current estimates for ages. Ideally, the rover will sample a wide range of rock ages to get the best baseline.

Delta deliberations

With this end in mind, choosing Perseverance’s landing site was a tough decision. It was a close choice between Jezero Crater and a highland, “upriver” region nearby called Nili Planum, Mustard says. 

On the one hand, if you’re looking for life, you should look where “it’s clearest that there was liquid water,” Shuster says. And for that, Jezero Crater’s delta seemed like the best pick around.

A delta is formed “when a river carrying lots of sediment comes into a big lake,” Mustard says, and “the sediment drops out because the current loses velocity and it can’t hold the sediment anymore.”

River water on Earth is full of living organisms, and when they die, they too sink to the bottom. But the signs of these once-living things “don’t last long unless you find some way to put them in a coffin,” Mustard says. If Martian organisms lived and died in rivers, delta sediments could land on top of their corpses and bury them—protecting them from decay, and perhaps letting them be found millennia later by a wandering rover.

But Jezero Crater does have a similar environment to other sites that have been explored, like Gale Crater, where NASA’s Curiosity rover landed, Mustard says. And outside of looking for life, the area is less scientifically interesting.

Upriver opportunities

But Mustard favored Nili Planum, which could give a glimpse at a “totally unexplored type of terrain”: a window to the subsurface of Mars. While Jezero may be the best bet for finding life that lived on Mars, Nili Planum is a better bet for finding life if it ever lived under the Martian surface, which Mustard thinks is a more likely place for life to survive given the brutal radiation, temperature swings, and other hassles that come with living on the exposed surface of a planet. 

The upriver Nili Planum has large chunks of rock called breccia blocks, some as big as houses, which were formed when powerful meteorite or asteroid impacts ejected chunks of the Martian subsurface.

[Related: ‘Robot swarms’ could one day build underground shelters for humans on Mars]

Even if there aren’t ancient remains of life, Nili Planum could tell scientists more about the subsurface in general, Mustard says.

The committee debated and debated, but eventually decided to land in Jezero Crater, because it made for a more straightforward and unique target in the mission’s limited time.

Red planet reconciliation

Even though Jezero won, there’s hope yet for peace between the Jezero junkies and Nili nuts. It’s possible that when Perseverance completes its mission in Jezero Crater, the rover will be able to explore a region closer to Nili Planum in an extended mission, Mustard says.

But that’s still a ways out, and for now the rover will next scout out the South Séítah region, a rough area of terrain covered in rocky sand dunes about 200 meters away. Perseverance will keep collecting samples and drop them in caches, to be picked up and returned by a future European Space Agency mission, hopefully in the early 2030s.

Shuster is excited to see the mission’s astrobiology focus, but not quite for the reasons most would expect. While some may presume that the mission is looking for signs of life, “I don’t actually think of it that way,” Shuster says. “I think we’re really looking for signs of conditions that could have supported life.”

The difference may seem subtle. But if scientists find habitable conditions, Shuster says, and even after looking thoroughly, find no signs of life, it will beg the question: Why not? Why didn’t life appear somewhere that could have supported it? Which raises bigger questions—like, how rare is life in the universe? 

To the question of whether or not there was life on a habitable Mars, Shuster says, “all the answers are interesting.”

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This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

Wade at night into the gently lapping surf at Boca Chica Beach, an undeveloped stretch of sand about 20 miles east of the Texas border town of Brownsville, and ahead you’ll see nothing but Gulf waters meeting sky—endless, dark but for the stars and languid whitecaps. A pensive, ancient view to make you feel small and the world enormous. 

Turn around and everything inverts. Beyond a smattering of working-class Latino families, gathered around bonfires and pickup trucks on the beach, looms something brimming with novelty, brightness, and ambition: the South Texas launch site for SpaceX, where one day a 400-foot rocket may leave Earth en route to Mars. 

Just 1,500 feet from the water’s edge, amid rolling sand dunes and acres of tidal mud flats, rises a launchpad of towering cranes and scaffolding lit up like a sports stadium. Two miles back down State Highway 4, the only road reaching this remote bit of Texas coastline, is a bustling command and production facility. Around 10 p.m. on a June evening, construction workers huddle together on a platform encircling a huge white tank, consulting in Spanish about the job at hand, their acetylene torches showering sparks into the night air. Out front, where the company has erected an illuminated sign reading “Starbase,” tourists arrive to take selfies. One man says he came all the way from Kentucky, hoping to get a job with SpaceX. He’s exultant. “It’s like 530 years ago,” he says, “the last time we settled a new world.”

There are those in Brownsville who call SpaceX—the California-based corporation founded by Elon Musk, the world’s second-richest man—a form of colonization. “Brownsville is an area that’s been colonized and recolonized and has done so much to benefit people who come from somewhere else but not the people from here,” says Michelle Serrano, a local activist with the progressive network Voces Unidas.

Musk’s company, a 19-year-old concern now worth $74 billion, is a trailblazer in the field of privatized space travel. Last year, SpaceX became the first private company to carry NASA astronauts from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, the traditional hub of U.S. space launches, to the International Space Station. Musk is presently feuding with fellow space entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest individual, over future NASA contracts. Ultimately, Musk’s dream is to establish human society on Mars, an enterprise for which Texas beachgoers and rare wildlife are paying the price.  

About a decade ago, Musk began scouting locations for a new launch site, looking for cheap land near a body of water to catch falling rockets and relatively near the equator for aeronautic reasons. The tip of South Texas seemed to fit the bill. SpaceX began gobbling up properties near Boca Chica Beach, which runs 7 miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande to the ship channel that separates it from South Padre Island. 

Musk met with county and state officials, who rushed to lure him to an area where poverty rates hover around 30 percent. The state kicked in $15 million in incentives, and Cameron County abated the company’s property taxes for 10 years. In 2013, then-state Representative René Oliveira passed a bill allowing the county to close the beach during SpaceX launch activities, a move otherwise forbidden by Texas’ 62-year-old Open Beaches Act, one of the nation’s strongest laws protecting public beach access. 

For years, Musk barely touched the site. Then, in 2018, a space complex began to emerge. By mid-2019, test rocket launches started. Soon, the explosions followed. At least eight times, experimental space rockets met fiery demises during testing or landing, spewing flames and metal debris into crucial shorebird habitat abutting the beach. The company bought out most residents, some under duress, of a tiny subdivision next to the new production facility. Musk’s public enthusiasm also helped spur gentrification in nearby Brownsville, where housing costs rose last year by 20 percent, outpacing most major Texas cities. Meanwhile, local families, who had for generations come to Boca Chica Beach whenever they pleased, found their path increasingly blocked.

Charlie Guillen, 39, has fished at Boca Chica his whole life, just like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Standing in the surf, anglers can reel in redfish, black drum, speckled trout, and whiting. Free of charge and open 24/7, Boca Chica has long been the beach for locals, Guillen says, while tourists pay for entry to the condo-riddled South Padre beach. Guillen, who runs a yearly fishing tournament at Boca Chica, used to come to the beach three or four times a week. But since SpaceX began closing the area every few days for everything from launches to equipment moving, he goes less and less. 

“Boca Chica is the poor man’s beach,” he says. “It’s kind of like the fajita: People used to throw that away, and when they found out the poor guy was eating something pretty good, they took it away and started charging a lot of money for it.” 

According to agreements with federal and state regulators, SpaceX should generally give 14 days’ notice before closing the road to Boca Chica and do so for only 300 hours a year. But advisories posted by the county, and monitoring by the state parks agency, show the company routinely provides only a day or two heads-up. The federal Fish and Wildlife Service and an independent environmental group have calculated that SpaceX closed the highway for more than 1,000 hours—around 42 days—in both 2019 and 2020 and is on a similar pace this year. The company also often changes plans last-minute and exceeds announced times. 

Musk seems to have imported the Silicon Valley mantra of “Move fast and break things” to South Texas, where federal and local officials have mostly stayed out of his way. SpaceX employees have used the shoulder of State Highway 4 as a parking lot, and the two-lane road has seen a surge in traffic, potholes, and roadkill. One family is suing the company over a fatal car accident. Musk’s company also told federal regulators it would block lighting from reaching the beach, where it might disturb nesting sea turtles. A beach visit dispels that notion. Federal documents further state SpaceX is avoiding launches during turtle and bird nesting season, roughly March through September, which is disproved by a glance at the feds’ own public data or Musk’s Twitter feed.

In fact, Musk’s entire Texas project has changed from what the Federal Aviation Administration approved in 2014. Back then, SpaceX said the site would be for launching proven Falcon rockets, the ones it’s used to carry astronauts. That never happened, and the company is instead testing much larger experimental “Starships” designed for Martian travel. Hence the fires and explosions.

Musk seems to see Boca Chica as terra nullius, no man’s land. “We’ve got a lot of land with nobody around, and so if [a rocket] blows up, it’s cool,” he said of the area in 2018.

On a Saturday morning in June, Mary Helen Flores, a 56-year-old Brownsville native who helps run volunteer beach cleanups, pulls up to Boca Chica in her white SUV. Parked vehicles extend to the horizon in both directions; mothers sit with children in the shallow tide; seagulls and brown pelicans swarm. “There was no other beach like Boca Chica on the entire Gulf Coast that you could drive on for free, stay as long as you wanted, and it was completely undeveloped,” Flores says.“There’s no replacing that, so I don’t understand how it was just pissed away.” 

Mars. Elon Musk wants to go to Mars, a planet at least 34 million miles away with no breathable air and temperatures about 80 below zero. Once there, he wants to colonize it, establishing an independent human civilization. Why? To save humanity, if you take his word for it.

“Either we’re going to become a multi-planet species and a space-faring civilization, or we’re going to be stuck on one planet until some eventual extinction event,” Musk has said. Elsewhere, he’s stated his only reason for amassing a $160 billion net worth is for this sort of astral charity: “I am accumulating resources to help make life multiplanetary and extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” 

There’s a certain logic to Musk’s claims. By burning fossil fuels and proliferating nuclear weapons, we humans have made our planet more catastrophe-prone. Plus, some hundreds of millions of years from now, the sun could grow too hot for life on Earth. Musk believes we need a fail-safe, a vision that’s earned him both fans and detractors.

“The advocates of Mars colonization are saying, ‘Earth has all these problems with regard to its potential habitability for humans,’ which is certainly true,” says Daniel Deudney, a professor of political science at John Hopkins University who wrote a recent book arguing against space colonization. “But their solution is to go to an utterly lifeless, vastly inhospitable space millions of miles away and start from scratch, as opposed to saving the rainforests or preventing acidification of the ocean.”

Deudney describes life on Mars as hellish: To breathe and avoid death by radiation, humans would shelter in heavily insulated domes or bunkers. We’d need to create contained, artificial ecosystems, something we’ve been unable to pull off on Earth. Musk says we should “terraform” Mars, or make it Earth-like, while NASA says that’s impossible in the foreseeable future. And if we did ever establish a self-sustaining population—a huge if—Deudney believes we’d come to regret it. 

As space colonies became independent, Deudney argues, war would overtake the final frontier just as it does on earthly frontiers, only deadlier. Think weaponized asteroids. “The space environment is intrinsically violent in ways that are completely alien to terrestrial existence,” he says. “Really, our future generations will curse us for having started this.” Better, Deudney says, to put our limited time and money toward directly addressing threats at home—the only place in the universe that we know is conducive to complex life.

Of course, there are other uses for Musk’s massive reusable rockets, even if Mars colonization never takes off. Take luxury tourism. SpaceX has plans to shuttle three tourists to the International Space Station, in a rocket launched from Florida, for a price of $55 million each. Another billionaire, Richard Branson, became the first person to self-fund a brief trip to suborbital space in July, and his company has sold seats on such flights for about $250,000. For reference, the median household income in Brownsville is $39,000 a year. 

Then, there’s satellite deployment. For its budding internet service, SpaceX has launched more than 1,000 satellites into orbit, with plans to send off about 40,000 more. This swarm of reflective objects, sometimes visible to the naked eye, has already polluted astronomers’ space images with trails of light, like a child drawing with a highlighter. Musk “is screwing astronomy with his satellites,” says Nicholas Suntzeff, professor of observational astronomy at Texas A&M. 

Suntzeff especially fears the potential use of satellites for corporate advertising. Next year, SpaceX plans to ferry a satellite into orbit for a company that will display images of a customer’s choice on the satellite in return for cryptocoin payments. The pictures will be visible only via livestream on electronic devices, but Suntzeff suspects ads will one day be seen from the ground. “When you look up at the sky and instead of seeing the moon, you see Chick-Fil-A, it’s gonna really piss people off,” he says. “The sky is the heritage of all humanity … and a few companies trying to make money will take that away from us.”

Last, there’s the long-standing overlap between space and military technologies. In the century behind us, the Nazi Wernher Von Braun invented the V-2 rocket, a long-range ballistic missile for use against the Allies that later propelled the first man-made object into space. In our current century, the American military already pays SpaceX to launch spy satellites, and the Air Force is interested in using the company’s Starship to deliver large payloads all over the world.

Musk is not the first to dream of developing Boca Chica Beach. In the 1800s, a settlement called Clarksville stood where the sand meets the mouth of the Rio Grande; in the 1930s, an Army colonel from Missouri erected a small seaside resort on the beach. Both projects were ravaged by hurricanes. Musk isn’t even the first rocket enthusiast to grace Boca Chica. In 1933, a skydiving exhibitionist put on a show billed as the Human Rocket, in which he leaped from a moving plane and planned to ignite fireworks with a cigar as he descended. With hundreds gathered on the beach to watch, the man vanished mid-stunt into the mist over the Gulf. Newspaper reports suggest he either drowned or fled to Mexico.

In 1954, a new bridge facilitated travel to South Padre Island, and from then on Padre became the hub for waterfront tourism and entertainment. Boca Chica was left alone to cement its identity as the poor people’s beach, free and a touch wild. 

Perhaps, though, Musk will be the man to stick the landing at Boca Chica. Maybe SpaceX will avoid a serious hurricane hit, a scenario that Texas’ parks department has said could cause “catastrophic damage.” Rather than vanish in the mist, Musk might write Boca Chica into the world history books. Already, he’s taken to calling the area Starbase, and—despite the fact that most of the surrounding land is owned by the state or federal government—he professes plans to settle a kind of company town. SpaceX has also hinted at schemes for a luxury resort.

Maybe, one day, Brownsvillians at Boca Chica will be able to stand in the shadow of a colossal Mars-bound rocket, bathed in the lights of a high-dollar hotel, watching countless satellites careen overhead like for-profit shooting stars, knowing that they were a part of history. Some locals will hold jobs at SpaceX, and a few may even be well-paid enough to buy a ride into murderous space itself. Perhaps, it will all be worth it.

Henry Garcia, a slight 55-year-old, stands in the Boca Chica surf holding his infant grandchild on a Friday evening. As the sun sets, a salty breeze erases the last of the day’s heat. “This is where you release the stress, man, forget about everything,” he says. Garcia has six more family members with him, spanning three generations, grilling chicken nearby and prepping a bonfire. He’s fed up with SpaceX disrupting the area. “We want ’em out of here,” he says. “They stop us from enjoying the beach. It’s all ambition.” 

Asked about the jobs the company brings, Garcia shrugs, then gestures across the yawning Gulf. “I prefer this.”  

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Six months after its touchdown in February, having completed a battery of preliminary tests, the Perseverance rover is finally diving into the mission’s science.

NASA announced on August 6 that the rover had tried to take its first rock sample—but as often happens in science, things didn’t quite go as planned. A week later, a chief engineer wrote that the sampling failed because the rover drilled some unexpectedly crumbly material. But Perseverance will, well … persevere; it still has 42 sampling tubes to go.

Getting up and flying

Over the months, Perseverance has had to complete an enormous number of system tests after the team released this “animal into its native habitat,” says Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who led the Mastcam-Z project, the zoomable camera on the front “mast” of the Perseverance rover. Bell has worked on all five of NASA’s Mars rover missions.

The Mastcam-Z team began by checking the rover’s cameras and vital systems. “The first thing you want to do is look around,” Bell says. These tests are difficult because “everything has got to come through this narrow little straw of data, getting it back to the Earth.”

Once up and running, the piggybacked, first-of-its kind Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, separated from Perseverance. Ingenuity made its successful first flight on April 19 and completed its twelfth flight just a few days ago. The tiny chopper has snagged aerial photos which include a selfie of Perseverance and shots of the same terrain from different angles, which allow 3D mapping of the Martian surface.

[Related: Marsquakes reveal the red planet is way more radioactive than we thought]

“We took a month out of our primary science mission to support the helicopter,” Bell says. That was a tradeoff for the amount of science the main mission can accomplish, but “I think the payoff is going to be great,” he says.

Ingenuity has been surveying the landscape from above, traveling alongside Perseverance, but recently peeled off toward the South Séítah region, cutting across some dunes that would be perilous for Perseverance’s wheels.

“The helicopter is really kind of a separate mission of its own now,” Bell says.

Finding (or making) water and air on Mars

In its first six months on Mars, Perseverance has also successfully produced oxygen with an instrument called MOXIE. The tree-like machine sucks up carbon dioxide from Mars’ very thin atmosphere and breaks it down into oxygen and carbon monoxide. The experiment serves as a kind of proof of concept for future human missions, which will need to produce oxygen for breathing and refueling rockets.

Currently, Perseverance is studying both the geology on the floor of Jezero Crater and an area called Séítah (meaning “amidst the sand” in Diné, the native Navajo language), which has geologically interesting features like ridges, layered rocks, and sand dunes.

It wasn’t by accident that the rover was sent to Jezero Crater: Scientists believe this region of Mars once had a liquid lake, which means there’s hope it contains evidence of ancient microbial life.

[Related: Sorry, there’s probably no water under the South Pole of Mars]

“We see clear evidence that there was indeed a lake [in Jezero Crater],” said Ken Farley, a project scientist for Perseverance, at a NASA press conference last month. The rover has spotted layered rocks which were probably built up as the composition of the water body changed, supporting the idea that the lake grew and shrank over time and could even have had flash floods. These rocks could hold evidence from multiple time periods trapped in the many layers of deposits, and have a better chance of showing signs of past life from any of those wet eras, compared to a rock sample that was formed all at once (like cooled lava, for example).

Later on, the rover will head toward an even more interesting site: the remains of a lake delta which lie just 2 to 3 kilometers away, Bell says. So far the rover has traveled just over two kilometers. After the primary mission, which lasts one Martian year (a little over two Earth years), NASA scientists have plans to explore further, possibly beyond the edge of the crater.

“We’ve spotted some really interesting rocks that aren’t too far away and that are scientifically interesting,” Bell says of Perseverance’s next sampling goals. He says the team is currently figuring out how to navigate the rover closer to figure out if, “in fact, these are the droids we’re looking for”—meaning rocks that are hard enough to extract a solid rock core sample from.

Perseverance has already taken pictures of at least one potential sampling spot with layered rock, possibly built up from successive layers of mud over millennia. A sample sliced from that Mars cake would give a cross section of millions of years of lake deposits, providing scientists with a window into how the lake changed over time—and whether life ever emerged there.

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Mars may have clay under its South Pole, not liquid water, as some researchers previously suspected. After years of scientific mystery, a new study is one of three recent works that give evidence for alternate explanations to the Martian lakes hypothesis.

In 2018, an Italian team of researchers noted that the unusual way radar bounced off a region of the Red Planet might be explained by an underground lake about twelve miles in width and one mile below the surface of the Planum Australe region, near Mars’ South Pole.

“Almost immediately, though, the skepticism in the science community started showing up,” says Isaac Smith, a planetary scientist at York University in Toronto, Canada, who led the new study, published in the Journal Geophysical Research Letters. Smith’s study doesn’t discount the possibility of liquid water anywhere under Mars, and good evidence confirms that frozen water likely exists on the red planet, but Smith says current models of Mars suggest that the temperature one mile below the planet’s south pole is too cold for liquid water.

The 2018 findings made a big splash, but they weren’t definitive, and follow up works by various groups have pointed out issues with the idea, suggesting it was indeed unlikely that an entire lake could remain liquid so far from the warmth of the core. A lake would require some pretty unlikely circumstances—namely a heat source or, if not, then a tremendous amount of salt to help lower the freezing point of underground water. But the amount of salt required would be gargantuan, Smith says.

One study, published in 2019, found that regardless of how salty the underground lake is, it would require a heat source—like nearby magma—to stay liquid. And a more recent study by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists showed that these radar spots show up in many other locations—making it less likely that each spot would have both a heat source and plentiful salt.

As enticing as it would be for there to be water under Mars’ South Pole, Smith acknowledges, he thinks clay is more plausible, largely because it requires “no caveats”, he says, like underground heat sources and dense salt pockets. 

In February, Smith was working on a different project, studying the clay found in Mars’ massive “Grand Canyon” called Valles Marineras. They measured electrical properties of wet and dry clays in the lab to see what kind of radar signal a spacecraft might see from them. Smith and his team realized that frozen, wet clay would reflect radar in a way similar to water. “That would answer the lake question right away,” he says.

[Related: ‘Robot swarms’ could one day build underground shelters for humans on Mars]

Smith’s study had three components. First, the lab measures which showed how clays would appear to radar, computer modeling, and a hunt for smectite minerals near the South Pole, which the team found using data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, an instrument onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. 

Smectites are a type of clays which are abundant on Mars and on much of Earth. They form when volcanic rock gets weathered in the presence of water. “One of the first things that forms is a smectite,” Smith says. “And then after that, it’ll continue breaking down and you’ll get different types of clays,” eventually becoming a clay similar to what you would use for pottery. 

On Earth, you can find smectites in places like Costa Rica and Alaska and the Curiosity rover has found them in thick deposits in Gale Crater on Mars, Smith says.

But Elena Pettinelli, a geophysicist at the Roma Tre University in Italy and one of the authors of the original 2018 study isn’t convinced clay is the answer and still sees water as a plausible reason. She thinks water with perchlorate salts could stay at very low temperatures in what’s called a metastable state. Pettinelli is also concerned that Smith didn’t account for temperature thoroughly enough. He measured the properties of clays at a temperature of 230 Kelvin and modeled them at 175 Kelvin; she says that these properties “are really strongly dependent on temperature” and a difference in temperature could completely change the type of radar reflection the clays are able to produce. 

She also says his laboratory measurements for clay disagree with previous studies that have found cold clays to have a weak radar reflection, which would mean they wouldn’t produce a signal like liquid water.

The last of the three studies to come out recently on Martian lakes was led by Carver Bierson, who used modeling to independently come to similar conclusions as Smith. Bierson’s team found that clays, metal-bearing minerals, or salty ice might create similar signals to underground liquid water on Mars.

If the underground lakes are indeed clay, there’s now “more evidence that it rained at the South Pole,” Smith says, because when you find clays, you know that there was liquid water there at some point because clays don’t form without it.

The research doesn’t prove anything definitive yet, but Smith isn’t surprised. “Science is always trying to get closer to the answer.” It isn’t infallible, and no one knows the precise answer yet, Smith says, but, “This is a step towards the right answer for Mars.”

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NASA’s InSight lander first touched down on Mars in 2018, armed with a bevy of instruments to help Earth-bound scientists run a full physical exam on the planet. One of InSight’s main sensors was the first seismometer to measure the red planet’s pulse since the Viking landers in the 1970s. 

It took about a year, but the detector began sniffing out so-called Marsquakes in early 2019. Now, three different studies based on InSight’s seismic data, all published yesterday in the journal Science, give us an unprecedented look inside our planetary neighbor.

Using measurements from around 10 Marsquakes, along with knowledge of Mars rocks acquired through Martian meteorites and other Mars data, the teams were able to divine new knowledge about the structure and evolution of the red planet. One study focused on finding the size and characteristics of the crust of Mars, one on the mantle (or middle layer), and one on the core of the planet.

The Marquakes were only a magnitude of 3 or 4, so they would hardly be felt if they occurred on Earth, says Amir Khan, the lead author on the study of the Martian mantle and a geophysicist at the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich.

“This stuff is just amazing,” says Gretchen Benedix, an astrogeologist at Curtin University in Australia and the Planetary Science Institute, who was not involved in the studies. She says it’s a good sign that though the three teams operated separately, they converged on a similar picture of Mars. Benedix has studied Martian meteorites and uses machine learning to study the evolutions of planetary surfaces.

One of the surprises unearthed (or un-Mars-ed?) is that Mars has an unexpectedly large core; its radius sits at the upper end of what scientists previously estimated. The planet’s heart of liquid metal actually starts about 1500 kilometers down from the surface, just halfway to the center of Mars, making the iron and nickel core bigger but also less dense than scientists thought when the mission began.

[Related: Life could be hiding deep under Mars]

Another of the studies got a handle on the thickness of the Martian lithosphere—the cool and brittle top portion of the planet that includes both the crust and the outer, colder parts of the mantle—which the authors now think is about 400 to 600 kilometers thick. For comparison, although Earth is much larger (two times the diameter of Mars, in fact), Earth’s lithosphere averages around just 100 kilometers from top to bottom.

Researchers figured this out with data from InSight’s seismometer, which mainly captured two different types of waves produced by earthquakes. Those are P waves, or primary waves, which occur first and travel the fastest, and S, or secondary waves, which travel slower but do the real damage we think of during a quake. 

P waves travel like a compressed Slinky—squeezing and stretching the ground in the direction they travel—while S waves travel perpendicular to the direction of travel, like ocean waves.

But these waves don’t all travel the same way through differing terrain, says J. Brian Balta, a petrologist (that’s a geologist who studies the origins of rocks and their composition) also affiliated with the Planetary Science Institute and not involved in the studies. Balta has studied Martian meteorites as a way of understanding Mars for the last decade.

“When your seismic instrument is sensitive enough,” Balta says, you can tell the difference between an S wave that came toward you directly and one that “bounced off” something else first, or even one that bounced off two things first. This helps construct an underground picture.

[Related: ‘Robot swarms’ could one day build underground shelters for humans on Mars]

Waves also pass more slowly through hotter underground areas, which can tell researchers about the abundance of radioactive materials underneath Mars. 

“Our results suggest that the crust of Mars is 13 to 20 times more enriched in heat-producing radioactive elements” than what researchers had previously determined with satellite data, Khan says.

The heat trapped inside a rocky planet comes from different sources. Some heat is left over from the planet’s formation, but a considerable percentage also gets produced by the slowly decaying radioactive isotopes inside, Balta says. 

The region where the Marsquakes originated appears to be Cerberus Fossae, a collection of cracks in the Martian surface where researchers found possible signs of geologically recent volcanic activity in May. Balta says both these facts tell us “that Cerberus Fossae could be a spot of some of the most recent activity on Mars, and both measurements fit together with that story.”

In the meantime, data continues to stream back to Earth, giving us more clues about the inner workings of Mars. “New Marsquakes are being detected every day,” Khan says.

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PASADENA, Calif. — We’ve seen a brief sample of the full-color environment at Gale Crater on Mars, but before the Mars rover Curiosity can beam back full-size versions, its cameras need a checkup. Scientists want to be sure they’re seeing Mars as it really looks, in real ochre — so the cameras have to be calibrated. To do it, Curiosity will call upon one of the most ancient tools of astronomy: A sundial.

Mars images are stunning to see, but they offer real science value, too, because Curiosity’s science team will use them as their eyes on Mars. Curiosity’s view of the rim of Gale Crater and Mt. Sharp at its center will help the team determine where the rover should drive first, and after that, which rocks will be most interesting to zap with its ChemCam laser or drill with its robotic arm. Determining a rock’s interestingness is largely accomplished by just looking at it, so the view must be accurate, explains Tyler Nordgren, associate professor of physics at the University of Redlands in California.

“[Images] allow you to figure out what the landscape is made of, and what the rock is made of. Part of how you figure out what rocks are made of is by figuring out what color they are,” he says. “It allows you to figure out the history of Mars.”

Curiosity will continue to calibrate its high-resolution, 3-D color cameras later today (or to-sol?) on Mars, NASA managers said at a news conference Tuesday morning.

Mars’ atmosphere is very different from Earth’s — it’s much thinner and it’s full of carbon dioxide, and it lacks the type of tiny aerosols that contribute to the Rayleigh scattering effect on Earth that turns our sky blue. The sun is also far fainter at an extra 50 million miles away. Dust kicked up by Mars’ howling winds fills the skies, much more so on windy days, and as a result Mars’ atmosphere looks slightly pink. This can cast a rosy hue on anything in Curiosity’s surroundings.

Every camera needs a color cue to be sure the images represent reality. If trees on Earth look blue in your image, you can easily tell the color balance is off. But Curiosity doesn’t have any natural color cues on Mars. Everything is pretty much red — “it’s all variations on a theme,” Nordgren says. “You need to determine, when you look at a rock wall or cliff face and it looks red, how much of that is due to the rock, and how much of that is due to the lighting.”

To do this, Curiosity is carrying a 4-inch square plaque mounted near its backside, which will be the first subject for the MastCam cameras. It has four slices of color, representing known shades of blue, red, green and yellow. A little post and ball at the middle act as a sundial that casts a shadow. This way, the rover can tell the right color in full light and in shadow.

Curiosity’s cameras will shoot the sundial with its set of filters. Then it will take science images, ones the team will use to determine likely targets for exploration. Afterward, the cameras might shoot the dial again just to be sure.

“That tells you, under the current lighting conditions that are going on, here’s how we tweak the different images as we put them together, to get the color balance just right,” Nordgren says.

Scientists can then make false-color images, heightening contrast or hue to highlight certain topographical or morphological features of the rocks. They could even take out the sky’s reddish glow, Nordgren says. “Imagine you could transport that section of Mars here to Earth, and have a nice yellow-white light shining on it, as if you were in the lab. Then you could see, ‘Ah, this rock is still red, but it’s not quite salmon-colored, it’s more of a brick color.'”

The image below shows the same calibration target on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit.

Spirit’s Sundial on Mars

Curiosity’s plaque is the same, except that Nordgren and mission scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory added updated plaques. Curiosity’s sundial is actually a leftover from the MER missions.

“That’s really all you need to be scientific,” Nordgren says. “But we thought, why not use this very dry boring technical piece of equipment, and turn it into something beautiful and evocative?”

On the target’s face, the name MARS appears in 16 different languages. In the center, the sundial itself represents the sun, and concentric circles surrounding it represent the orbits of Earth and Mars, which are themselves represented by a pale blue dot and a red dot. Each home-plate color slice has a phrase describing what the mission means for human exploration. It reads:

“For millennia, Mars has stimulated our imaginations. First we saw Mars as a wandering red star, a bringer of war from the abode of the gods.
In recent centuries, the planet’s changing appearance in telescopes caused us to think that Mars had a climate like the Earth’s.
Our first space age views revealed only a cratered, Moon-like world, but later missions showed that Mars once had abundant liquid water.
Through it all, we have wondered: Has there been life on Mars? To those taking the next steps to find out, we wish a safe journey and the joy of discovery.”

Every sundial also has to have a date — it’s sundial tradition, Nordgren explains — and a motto. Curiosity’s is stamped “Mars 2012” and “To Mars to explore.”

“It embodies the scientific process. Who knows what we’ll discover with this new spacecraft?” Nordgren says.

Nordgren started building the MER Mars sundials when he was a graduate student at Cornell, studying with Steve Squyres, the principal investigator on Spirit and Opportunity. He builds and collects sundials and is fascinated by them, he says.

“They’re beautiful, they’re precise, they’re amazing works of engineering and art that tie together astronomy and timekeeping,” he said. “People have been using sundials, in one form or another, for thousands of years. I think they’re lovely. It’s a wonderful intersection of 21st century technology and ancient technology, on the surface of Mars.”

Curiosity Raises Its Mast

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You might expect to find our brightest hope for sending astronauts to other planets in Houston, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, inside a high-security multibillion-dollar facility. But it’s actually a few miles down the street, in a large warehouse behind a strip mall. This bland and uninviting building is the private aerospace start-up Ad Astra Rocket Company, and inside, founder Franklin Chang Díaz is building a rocket engine that’s faster and more powerful than anything NASA has ever flown before. Speed, Chang Díaz believes, is the key to getting to Mars alive. In fact, he tells me as we peer into a three-story test chamber, his engine will one day travel not just to the Red Planet, but to Jupiter and beyond.

I look skeptical, and Chang Díaz smiles politely. He’s used to this reaction. He has been developing the concept of a plasma rocket since 1973, when he become a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His idea was this: Rocket fuel is a heavy and inefficient propellant. So instead he imagined building a spaceship engine that uses nuclear reactors to heat plasma to two million degrees. Magnetic fields would eject the hot gas out of the back of the engine. His calculations showed that a spaceship using such an engine could reach 123,000 miles per hour—New York to Los Angeles in about a minute.

Franklin Chang Diaz

Chang Díaz has spent nearly his entire career laboring to convince anyone who would listen that his idea will work, but that career has also taken several turns in the process. One day in 1980, he was pitching the unlimited potential of plasma rockets to yet another MIT professor. The professor listened patiently. “It sounds like borderline science fiction, I know,” Chang Díaz was saying. Then the telephone rang. The professor held up a finger. “Why, yes, he’s right here,” the surprised engineer said into the receiver, then handed it over. “Franklin, it’s for you.” NASA was on the line. The standout student from Costa Rica had been selected to become an astronaut, the first naturalized American ever chosen for NASA’s most elite corps. “I was so excited, I was practically dancing,” Chang Díaz recalls. “I almost accidentally strangled my professor with the telephone cord.”

All astronauts have big dreams, but Franklin Chang Díaz’s dreams are huge. As a college student, as a 25-year astronaut and as an entrepreneur, his single animating intention has always been to build—and fly—a rocketship to Mars. “Of course I wanted to be an astronaut, and of course I want to be able to fly in this,” he says of his plasma-thrust rocket. “I mean, I just can’t imagine not flying in a rocket I would build.” And now he’s close. In four years Chang Díaz will deploy his technology for the first time in space, when his company, aided by up to $100 million in private funding, plans to test a small rocket on the International Space Station. If this rocket, most commonly known by its loose acronym, Vasimr, for Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket, proves itself worthy, he has an aggressive timetable for constructing increasingly bigger plasma-thrust space vehicles.

Chang Díaz describes his dreams in relatively practical terms. He doesn’t intend to go straight to Mars. First he will develop rockets that perform the more quotidian aspects of space maintenance needed by private companies and by the government: fixing, repositioning, or reboosting wayward satellites; clearing out the ever-growing whirl of “space junk” up there; fetching the stuff that can be salvaged. “Absolutely, fine, I’m not too proud to say it. We’re basically running a trucking business here,” he says. “We’ll be sort of a Triple-A tow truck in space. We’re happy to be a local garbage collector in space. That’s a reliable, sustainable, affordable business, and that’s how you grow.”

Chang Diaz At Work In His Lab

Eventually, though, Chang Díaz intends to build more than an extraterrestrial trucking business, and his ambitions happen to coincide with Barack Obama’s call for a privatized space industry that supports exploration well beyond the moon. “We’ll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history,” Obama said in a major NASA-related address earlier this year at Kennedy Space Center. “By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth.”

Such a belief may seem overly ambitious, but the goals of aviation have always seemed that way. In October 1903, for instance, astronomer Simon Newcomb, the founding president of the American Astronomical Society, spelled out a series of reasons why the concept of powered flight was dubious. “May not our mechanicians,” he asked, “be ultimately forced to admit that aerial flight is one of the great class of problems with which man can never cope, and give up all attempts to grapple with it?” Less than two months later, the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. And in the 1920s a young man named Frank Whittle was coming up with drawings for a theoretical engine very different from the propeller-driven kind, one that might scoop in air through turbines and fire it through a series of “jet” nozzles. “Very interesting, Whittle, my boy,” said one of his professors of aeronautical engineering at the University of Cambridge. “But it will never work.”

Unearthly Glow

The Chase
Chang Díaz decided he wanted to be an astronaut at the age of seven, when his mother explained the U.S.-Soviet space race to him. He went out that night to stare at the stars and look for Sputnik. But he soon realized that he had a problem. He happened to be a citizen of Costa Rica, and Costa Rica had no space program. When he was a teenager, he sent a letter to NASA asking how to become an astronaut. He got a letter back saying that to fly with NASA, he must be an American citizen. Boldness runs in his family—his Chinese grandfather fought against the Qing dynasty and fled to Costa Rica during a crackdown on the Nationalist movement. So Chang Díaz was not about to let a thing like citizenship deter him.

After graduating high school, intent on joining NASA, Chang Díaz went to live with relatives in Connecticut. Despite his limited English, he won a University of Connecticut scholarship, one reserved for American citizens. Somebody somehow thought Costa Rica was Puerto Rico, he recalls with a laugh, and after the mistake was pointed out, he was told that the scholarship was being withdrawn. He appealed to university administrators, who agreed to take up his cause with the state, and part of the scholarship was restored, enough to make it possible for him to attend college.

His work was so outstanding there that he was accepted into MIT’s doctoral program for nuclear engineering. Then he applied to be an astronaut. NASA turned him down. (Chang Díaz says it was probably because his application for U.S. citizenship had yet to go through.) After he became naturalized—he now holds dual American–Costa Rican citizenship—he tried again, as one of nearly 4,000 applicants for 19 open positions. His plasma-physics doctorate, his singular focus on spaceship engines, his superb physical condition and his obvious drive combined to make him one of NASA’s select.

Being an astronaut, Chang Díaz says now, helped him to focus even more on his own vision, and it left him with a much stronger belief that speed was of the essence to get to Mars and beyond. “Believe me,” he says, “nobody will want to sit around in a spacecraft for six to eight months if you know you can get there faster.”

Power House

In many ways, Chang Díaz sees long-range space travel as the ultimate solution to the ultimate problem. The human race, he argues, will one day inevitably conclude that it has to live elsewhere in order to survive. It is also very possible, Chang Díaz concludes, that as resources dry up on Earth, other, potentially more profitable ones may be out there in the cosmos—something vastly more useful for batteries than lithium, perhaps, or for conductivity than copper.

“Whether we’ll find gold or riches or something we can’t even imagine,” he says, “we’ll never know until we arrive there to find out. I really don’t even see Mars as the end point; I see it as more of a waypoint. We’ll open up the entire solar system. Someday we’ll find life out there, and everything will change.”

Chang Díaz compares space exploration as it has been practiced thus far to exploration as it was practiced in the early years of the American frontier, when Lewis and Clark’s government-backed expedition brought back a trove of knowledge about the American West. The next phase, he believes, will be much more like the era of growth in the mid-1800s, when private railroads and mining outfits, helped along by land grants and other government aid, opened the West to epic expansion and settlement.

But, he says, space exploration isn’t simply a question of national achievement anymore. “We no longer have a big confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviets,” he says. “It’s totally different now. We all need each other to make this work.” He hopes U.S. citizens will be involved, but even that is by no means certain. “Countries like Brazil, India, China, some in Europe—there’s a lot of the same chemistry that the U.S. was feeling, say, 50 or 100 years ago. It’s a new club of developers.”

To hear Chang Díaz describe it, we’re on the verge of a shift from a nationalistic march toward dominance to a much more open and improvisational approach to innovation. If that’s true, it’s worth noting that he emerged from 25 years at NASA with his sense of improvisation intact.

Engine Simulator

In 2000, as part of a joint American-Russian survival-training program for crews visiting the ISS, Chang Díaz flew 60 miles west of Moscow for a round of practice drills. The instructors informed him and his two fellow crew members—Kalpana Chawla, killed in 2003 aboard the space shuttle Columbia, and a Russian cosmonaut that Chang Díaz describes as being physically much bigger than both of them—that they would need to simulate a mishap that had befallen an earlier mission in which the descent capsule had landed in the midst of a blizzard, and it took rescuers 48 hours to reach it. From now on, the Russians told him, all Soyuz crew must train for those conditions.

That’s a bit much, Chang Díaz remembers thinking. “Why wouldn’t I just delay the reentry by a moment and land in Fiji, or the Indian Ocean, or somewhere else warm and pleasant?” But that was the assignment, and so the trio sat in full flight gear inside a half-buried capsule as engineers heated up the exterior to reentry temperatures with a blowtorch. “It was a sauna,” he says.

The crew then had to remove their suits and don survival gear. The capsule was so tight that the process took the better part of a day, with each astronaut taking turns being helped out of one suit and into the other. Finally, they emerged into blinding snow and looked at their manual, which told them to build a shelter. Chang Díaz rolls his eyes at the memory.

Turning to his freezing teammates, he told them to gather up the capsule’s parachute silk. His father-in-law, during hunting trips in Montana, had taught him how to build a winter teepee. With the trunks of nearby birch trees and the silk, he improvised. Half an hour later, he had a fire burning inside, and the three were soon sitting in their socks, dry and comfortable.

Soon a face poked through the flap. The Russians, watching from a ridge through binoculars, wanted to know what was going on. A teepee was not in any manual. Was everyone all right? The crew smiled.

We’re fine, Chang Díaz told them. You look so cold. Come on in. So the observers joined them, sat down, doffed their jackets, and sipped tea.

Artistic Rendering of the Vasimr Engine

The Challenge
Chang Díaz, of all people, knows how hard it is to return safely to Earth. His career was bookended by death—death that could have been his own but for the routine tweaks of NASA’s scheduling log. The agency decided to pull him off his first scheduled mission on the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 and put him on the mission just before instead. Sixteen days later, newly returned to Earth, he watched his close friends and colleagues perish when Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff. He went on to fly a total of seven missions between 1986 and 2002—he’s tied for the all-time record among astronauts—and logged 1,601 hours beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Then, a few months after his final mission, Columbia broke apart during reentry, killing all seven people aboard.

Chang Díaz’s invention will do little to reduce the dangers of liftoff. Plasma engines depend on the vacuum of space and still require “venerable chemical rockets,” as Chang Díaz calls them, to reach Earth orbit. But outer space is where his work stands to vastly improve the safety of a crew. As he points out, a lot can go wrong en route to another planet. The limitation of space travel with a conventional rocket is that the rocket must use its entire fuel supply at once in a single, controlled explosion to reach Earth orbit. It then coasts along at a mostly uniform speed until it enters Mars’s gravity. NASA estimates that such a trip would take about seven months. During that time, Chang Díaz explains, there is no abort procedure. The ship cannot change course. If an accident occurs, Earth would be watching, in a 10-minute communications delay, the slow death of the crew. “Chemical rockets are not going to get us to Mars,” he says flatly. “It’s just too long a trip.”

A plasma rocket like Vasimr, on the other hand, sustains propulsion over the entire journey. It accelerates gradually, reaching a maximum speed of 34 miles per second over 23 days. That’s at least four times as fast as any chemical rocket could travel, shaving at least six months off a trip to Mars and minimize the risk of mechanical dangers, exposure to solar radiation (Chang Díaz’s design shields the crew behind hydrogen
tanks), bone loss, muscle atrophy or any of a thousand other liabilities along the way. And because propulsion is available throughout the trip, the ship could change course at any time.

But human spaceflight programs are currently built around old-fashioned rocketry. NASA has invested mostly in propulsion systems powered by chemical fuel, and for sensible reasons. Chang Díaz’s rocket presents many challenges. For one thing, a Vasimr-powered Mars craft would need several nuclear reactors on board to generate the large amount of electricity required to heat the plasma. NASA set to work on a nuclear reactor for space travel in 2003 but scrapped the project after only two years—the risk of radiation from an explosion or crash was likely too great— and redirected its resources to more conventional propulsion programs. For another, no one has yet determined how to make certain that plasma gas can be safely channeled through a magnetic field. Or just how the human body might respond to traveling at speeds of up to 34 miles per second. “The reality is, rockets don’t always work,” says Elon Musk, the driving force behind the rocket company SpaceX, one of the key players in the emerging private space industry. For Musk, who struggled for years to get his Falcon 1 rocket into orbit, the stakes seem particularly high in the case of rockets carrying nuclear material. “If something goes wrong, you have radioactive debris falling to Earth—you have a disaster,” he says.

It’s true that conventional rockets would be required to put a Mars-bound plasma ship into orbit, but Chang Díaz disputes the notion that launching Vasimr would pose extra risks. The reactors would remain inactivate until the ship was out of the danger zone for spreading radiation back to Earth, he notes. And NASA has already successfully launched several nuclear-electric probes. Nothing is impossible. “We can do this safely,” he says. “Our understanding is evolving all the time, but we know that in order to go far, we have to go fast. That’s what Vasimr is all about.”

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As the Curiosity rover slowly ascends Mount Sharp, it’s getting its first up-close look at Mars’s sand dunes — the first time we’ve investigated active dunes on another planet.

The “Bagnold Dunes” surround the mountain’s northwestern edge. Some are as tall as a two-story house, and they’re very active. Satellite imagery shows the Martian winds shift the dunes by as much as 3 feet per year.

Curiosity’s arrival at the dunes is not only a first for a Martian spacecraft, but for all of space exploration. “No active dunes have been visited anywhere in the solar system besides Earth,” says a NASA press release.

The rover will scoop up a sample of the dune material to analyze in its onboard laboratory. It’ll look for clues about the dunes’ composition and how the wind shapes the dunes. For example, “These dunes have a different texture from dunes on Earth,” says Nathan Bridges from the Curiosity team. “The ripples on them are much larger than ripples on top of dunes on Earth, and we don’t know why. We have models based on the lower air pressure. It takes a higher wind speed to get a particle moving. But now we’ll have the first opportunity to make detailed observations.”

Curiosity’s primary objective right now is to explore Mount Sharp, a layered, 18,000-foot mountain that rises up out of Gale Crater. The rover’s goal is to check out as many of those rock layers as possible. Just as layered sediments on Earth provide a window into the past, scientists are hoping the layers of Mount Sharp will provide some insight into Mars’ geological history.

Bagnold Dunes

A view of “High Dune” in Mars’ Bagnold dune field

Wheel track

Closeup on the wheel track

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When the first astronauts get to Mars sometime in the 2030s or 40s, they’re going to need more supplies than can fit in a backpack and rolling luggage. Their habitat, food, rovers, and return vehicle will all have to be pre-delivered. To do all that hauling, NASA is developing an ultra efficient spacecraft engine, and this week the agency announced that Aerojet Rocketdyne will be the company to manufacture it.

The cargo truck of the solar system will use solar power to charge up and expel xenon gas from its backside. The method is said to be up to 10 times more efficient than current chemical propulsion systems. Aerojet Rocketdyne has a 36-month contract to produce the engine, and after that the space agency plans to test fly it on a mission to an asteroid. Later it might deliver cargo and maybe even people to Mars.

The “solar electric propulsion” engines work somewhat like how the Dawn spacecraft’s engines work. The spacecraft’s solar panels will generate electricity. Those electrons will get trapped in a magnetic field and then used to ionize the xenon propellant. The magnetic field also generates an electric field, and together they’ll make those charged xenon particles shoot out of the spacecraft at high speeds, thrusting out a cloud of plasma that moves the spacecraft forward.

Whereas the Dawn spacecraft’s engines have 2.6kW thrusters, Aerojet Rocketdyne’s engines will have 13kW thrusters. If it works, it will provide a powerful yet efficient way to explore deep space.

Ion propulsion has a lower thrust than chemical means, but it’s a lot more fuel-efficient and can continuously accelerate the spacecraft. Whereas a chemically driven spacecraft could reach Mars in as little as 8 or 9 months, this method might take up to 36 months. But because the spacecraft won’t have to carry as much fuel to get there, that frees up space to carry more cargo.

ARM Illustration

Because solar electric propulsion is slower, it’s not likely to be used to carry humans into deep space, unless it’s used in combination with chemical propulsion to speed things up.

As a test drive for Mars, NASA is planning to launch the engines in the 2020s. During the Asteroid Redirect Mission, the engines will propel a spacecraft to an asteroid, where it’ll pick up a boulder and carry it into orbit around the moon. There, astronauts will rendezvous with it to test other equipment in development for the Journey to Mars (including the Space Launch System and the Orion capsule).

NASA says ARM could launch in 2021, and bring the asteroid boulder back into lunar orbit for astronauts to analyze in 2026.

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When humans finally set foot on the dusty terrain of Mars, they will not be travelling alone. Some of the astronauts on future missions will be too small to be seen with the naked eye. But that doesn’t mean they won’t have a vital role to play.

A manned mission to Mars will require shelter, breathable air, clothing, food, medicines, energy, and waste removal, among other services. Many of these needs can be met with living organisms.

“We have been using biology as technology for literally thousands of years, to make our clothing, to make our houses,” says Lynn Rothschild, an astrobiologist and synthetic biologist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “To think that we’re going to do this some other way on Mars is sort of crazy.”

Instead of relying solely of supplies imported from Earth, astronauts could produce some of them on site using microbes. Certain bacteria could take advantage of Mars’s limited resources and support simple ecosystems inside a colony, even helping small plants to grow. They could make oxygen or break down waste. They could be coaxed into producing useful materials, or helping to mine metals.

“We have to use what we find on Mars. I think that we need biology for that,” says Cyprien Verseux, a PhD candidate, supervised by Rothschild, at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.

Life on Mars?

Mars is borderline habitable. This means that bringing microbes is a cause for concern for scientists on the hunt for indigenous life. “It would be an enormous tragedy if it turns out there was a life form there and we contaminated or completely killed it off,” Rothschild says.

And terrestrial microbes could sow confusion if they are later “discovered” by astronauts. “There is a risk that you…are not able to say whether it’s Martian life or not,” Verseux says. “So we really need to make sure that we won’t contaminate Mars with the microbes we use for life support.”

Making sure we explore space responsibly is the preoccupation of NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection (motto: “all of the planets, all of the time”) and the international Committee on Space Research (COSPAR).

Regulations on Martian missions are stricter than those applied to lunar and asteroid-bound spacecraft. Those bodies are unlikely to harbor life. But “going to Mars, which may have habitable environments, you have to be very conservative until you know otherwise,” says Margaret Race, a senior scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, who works on planetary protection.

The policies that will govern manned missions to Mars have not yet been set. “There aren’t any firm answers,” Race says. “If somebody wanted to introduce [microbes] on purpose right now they would not be able to do it.”

Regardless, when astronauts reach Mars, they will be bringing microbes along for the ride. “We all have a human microbiome; if you send humans you can’t sterilize them first,” Race says.

One way to limit contamination would be to apply special protections to areas where indigenous life is most likely to thrive. Another would be to modify our microbes’ DNA so it could not be “read” and incorporated by Martian organisms.

The international community is still considering how best to plan missions that deliberately bring human and other life to Mars. “Nobody’s out to stop this stuff,” Race says. “But we’re saying, as we step forward into areas that are clearly unknown, how do we make sure we do it responsibly?”

Can Earth life survive on Mars?

Technically, we’ve already brought life to Mars. When we launch a probe, our best efforts to sterilize it before it leaves Earth’s orbit are still not 100 percent effective, says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at the Technical University of Berlin. “The question is just whether they would have a chance to survive there or not.”

Rothschild, however, notes that it’s unlikely those microbes have flourished and contaminated the red planet. That’s because Mars is an awful place to live, as University of Edinburgh astrobiologist Charles Cockell wrote in 2002.

The low gravity (about 38 percent of what we have on Earth) probably wouldn’t trouble these tiny organisms. And there’s certainly enough sunlight for photosynthesis. But Mars is frigid, with an average surface temperature of -80 degrees Fahrenheit. And the air is thin, with only about 1 percent of the atmospheric pressure found at Earth’s sea level. Our planet has a magnetic shield to help protect us from radiation; Mars does not. Plus, Mars is more desiccated than any Earth locale. “On most of the surface there’s no possibility of liquid water,” says Cockell. “It’s a dry…radiation-baked environment,” he says.

Many microbes can bunk down in a dormant state, and it’s possible that Earth microbes could be blown into a protected area or buried. If they could find their way under a rock, they might be sheltered from the worst cold and radiation. But they would have to pull moisture from the air, or find water in seasonal brine seeps. Martian caves, formed long ago by flowing lava, might also host water and a thicker atmosphere. Another possible sanctuary would be drops of liquid water in Mars’s polar ice.

“The generic thought is that this probably hasn’t happened, and the Earth microbes have been killed,” Schulze-Makuch says. “However, we cannot be certain about it—yes, the Martian surface is hostile but our Earth microbes, you shouldn’t underestimate them either.”

Rothschild agrees. Our microbes “are not likely to take over the planet,” she says, “but I bet they could live there, for short periods of time at least.”

A Martian menagerie

Billions of years ago, tiny organisms called cyanobacteria paved the way for life on Earth. Long before plants existed, cyanobacteria were pumping out oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis.

For Rothschild, our oxygen-rich atmosphere is the perfect example of how impressive life is as a technology—and how much potential it has to serve us beyond Earth.

Cement-like material made from microbes

Astronauts could also use cyanobacteria on Mars to make useful materials and to support other valuable microbes and plants. We already rely on microbes to provide us with delicacies such as wine, cheese and yogurt, as well as vital services. “They help us make food, make drugs, they help us recycle waste,” Cockell says. “All those useful benefits would be the case on Mars much as they would be on the Earth.”

Using microbes to manufacture goods on Mars would cut down on the amount of mass we’d need to cart over from our own planet. Escaping Earth’s gravity is tremendously expensive. Merely launching a can of Coke would cost $10,000. And that’s just in orbit, says Rothschild—“you haven’t even gotten to Mars.”

Microbes, however, weigh very little, making them easier to bring to Mars. “Then they would replicate, living off the land, using solar energy just like plants and algae do on the Earth,” Rothschild says. The microbes could use the water, minerals and atmospheric gases already on Mars. “From there you can take the materials that the cyanobacteria produce and start to make everything from plastics to habitats.”

Certain microbes could be put to work making food, oxygen, or fuel, or recycling waste to make nutrients for plants and people. Microbes could also help break down rocks and pull out useful metals (on Earth, “biomining” is already used to harvest gold and copper). When mixed with the right ingredients, other microbes could glue grains of Martian dust together to make bricks for homes.

Microbes would be especially useful if astronauts needed to keep Martian soil for gardening. Inside an enclosure, plants would have to be protected from radiation, and provided with water and a hydroponic solution or fertile soil. “Microbes could transform the elements that are available on Mars into a form that plants can use,” Verseux says.

Astronauts could grow plants for food and oxygen—and as a respite from the endless vistas of red. “It’s a huge psychological benefit to have plants on, for example, the International Space Station,” Cockell says. “It gives people something to look after.”

Animals hog a lot of space and resources, so astronauts would be unlikely to bring them on early missions. But small animals like silkworms, fish and shellfish might eventually be sent.

Building better microbes

Any plant or microbe we take with us won’t have to live on the punishing Martian surface. Astronauts will need shelter from Mars’ cold, dry, irradiated, low-pressure environment, and microbes and plants would be likewise protected.

But there would be advantages to genetically engineering the microbes that astronauts depend on to become hardier than they are on Earth. For one thing, it would be safer; if something goes wrong and the equipment housing them fails, microbes could end up facing extreme conditions after all. Plus, tough microbes are cheaper to house. “The more they are built to thrive in conditions which are close to Mars, the less you have to provide shelter and the less you have to recreate Earthlike conditions,” Verseux says.

Plus, microbes could be engineered to become more effective at their assigned tasks, or to play entirely new roles. “You can start to look at nature as this giant genetic hardware store, and you pull things off the shelf and you put it in your little production organism,” Rothschild says. She is exploring how engineered microbes could be used as “ink” for bioprinters on Mars. This would allow astronauts to produce bespoke tools, smart fabrics, or even replacement organs.

“You’re not going to take a field of cotton or trees or sheep to Mars,” she says. But you could take their capabilities and put them in a more portable organism, like a yeast or bacterium.

One Earthly example of this technique is the antimalarial drug artemisinin. Artemisinin is derived from the sweet wormwood plant, but can also be made with the help of engineered yeast. Tire manufacturers and biotech companies are also working on using yeasts to make rubber, rather than taking it from trees.

Currently, Rothschild has her eye on keratin, a protein found in feathers, nails, hair and skin. Microbes could be engineered to produce keratin, and printed in a pre-determined shape. “Imagine if you had a whole sheet of this material that’s really strong and lightweight and flexible,” she says.

All of our attempts to harness microbes to help astronauts survive might lead to advances for everyone back home. “There’s absolutely no reason you couldn’t use any of these things on the Earth,” Rothschild says.

Perhaps one day, microbes could even help us terraform the surface of Mars by producing oxygen and transforming the soil. What this would mean for life on its surface is an open question (particularly since Mars’s low gravity is likely to pose a problem for larger organisms like trees and people).

“I don’t want people to get the impression that we’re just going to send a Noah’s Ark to Mars,” Rothschild says. Not until we’ve engineered the atmosphere to be thick enough to maintain liquid water and higher temperatures could we even talk about sending animals out without protection, she says.

But all that would be many, many years away. Bringing microbes to serve as life support on Mars is the primary, and more attainable goal.

How are we making it happen?

To make it happen, the first step is to keep surveying the microbes we have here on Earth that thrive in extreme environments such as deserts, deep-sea vents, and Arctic ice.

Astrobiologists look for microbes among the Earth habitats that most resemble Mars, to explore how indigenous life might survive on the Red Planet. These expeditions can also reveal adaptations that could serve Earth microbes when we bring them to Mars.

“You would pick microbes that already exist and see what their limits are and how useful they can be,” Cockell says. “Once you know that you can get some better idea about what you have to try to do to make them better.”

Cockell and his colleagues launch rock-dwelling microbes into low Earth orbit to see how they fare outside of spacecraft. Back on Earth, special chambers can also be used to simulate Martian conditions, including temperature, pressure, dryness, and radiation.

Once a microbe’s hardiness has been confirmed (or enhanced), scientists must figure out how to put them to work using tools and enclosures that take up as little mass and power as possible. One ongoing project is the European Space Agency’s Micro Ecological Life Support System (MELiSSA), which will use communities of bacteria to break down and recycle human waste and the inedible parts of plants.

Scientists are also considering what it will be like for astronauts to actually use these tools on a Martian base. Verseux recently emerged from a dome perched on Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano after sequestering himself for a year alongside five other scientists. The HI-SEAS experiment provided him the perfect opportunity to work on using cyanobacteria to help grow plants. “What brought me most insight was dealing with…the very limited resources when it comes to power, water, space, time, energy, and all those things,” he says.

With NASA planning manned missions to Mars orbit in the 2030s, astrobiologists are on track to find and prepare our microbial companions for a future where there will be life on the Red Planet. We are understanding these microbes and how to use them better all the time, Cockell says. “I think they will be ready for human exploration when people finally go to Mars.”

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Europe’s Schiaparelli Mars lander did not have had the smooth landing its team had hoped for on October 19, but at least it didn’t stay missing for long. A high-resolution camera onboard a NASA satellite discovered the errant spacecraft’s parachute and other fragments within days of impact. But not all lost Mars landers have been found so quickly—another European spacecraft, Beagle-2, disappeared for more than a decade, from the time of its failed landing in 2003 all the way until 2015.

When it comes to misplaced landers, “The protocol [is] basically ‘find it as fast as we can,’ but how fast that is depends on what information is available to us,” says Alfred McEwen, a planetary geologist at the University of Arizona and the principal investigator for NASA’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), a camera on the satellite that spotted Schiaparelli.

These days, the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter, which HiRISE has hitched a ride on, lets scientists sniff out evidence of a missing lander before the trail goes cold. But other pieces of information—such as where a lander winds up, and how well scientists can track its likely landing site—turn out to be important too.

Disappearing acts

The Schiaparelli lander in the European Space Agency’s (ESA) ExoMars mission was intended to test out a new landing strategy and investigate the Red Planet’s atmosphere and surface. It almost made it to the ground unscathed. Schiaparelli detached from its mother ship, the Trace Gas Orbiter, shucked its heat shields as planned and deployed its parachute early but successfully. But its rockets, which were meant to fire for 30 seconds, only ignited for a few moments, meaning it came down way too fast. The European Space Agency lost contact with Schiaparelli shortly before it hit the dirt.

A day later, the low-resolution Context Camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted the remains of Schiaparelli’s troubled descent. And on October 25, the HiRISE camera captured a closer look at three sites associated with Schiaparelli’s impact: a shallow crater made when the lander plowed into the Martian surface, the front heat-shield, and the parachute and rear heat shield. “In this case, we see the three things we expect to see, they’re distinct, and it’s where we expect to find them,” McEwen says.

Safe on Mars

Beagle-2 wasn’t so lucky. ESA lost contact with Beagle-2 in 2003 after it detached from its mother ship, Mars Express. It wasn’t until 2015 that Beagle-2 resurfaced, spied just three miles or so from the center of its expected landing zone by the HiRISE camera. Pictures shot from different angles revealed reflections off its tilted solar panels. “We saw bright spots that changed from image to image, and that was a pretty strong clue that we were looking at something unnaturally flat,” McEwen says.

Why the holdup?

One reason Beagle-2 stayed out of sight for so long is that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter didn’t reach the red planet until 2006. So it couldn’t start to hunt until several years after Beagle-2 vanished. And the older a landing site is, the harder it is to distinguish. Over time, dust settles on the surfaces of a spacecraft, making it less reflective and harder to see in photos. “In the case of Schiaparelli we see this very bright parachute…because it’s so fresh it’s really bright, brighter than anything else you can see on Mars except for polar frost and ice,” McEwan says.

The other key difference between Beagle-2 and Schiaparelli is that the older spacecraft stopped relaying information long before it touched down, making it impossible to track. “Whereas for Schiaparelli, there was information transmitted from it, including its location, all the way down to a point still above the surface, but much closer to where it ended up,” McEwan says. “We knew pretty much exactly where it should have come down, so we were able to target right to that location.”

Beagle-2’s resting place was eventually discovered. Other Mars landers are still missing, such as NASA’s Mars Polar Lander, which was lost in 1999. Seasonal winds compound the dusty cloak worn by landers that disappear in Mars’s arctic regions. “This is a high latitude, and that’s especially hard because the seasonal polar cap deposits dust and just completely wipes out any albedo [reflective] markings every year,” McEwan says.

Even the landing site from NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft, which successfully touched down in Mars’s northern polar region in 2008, would have become unrecognizable if we didn’t know where to look, McEwen says. “Knowing where it is, we could say, ah that little bump is the lander, but we would never be able to distinguish that from a rock if we didn’t already know where it was.”

The new images from Schiaparelli’s collision may help ESA piece together what went wrong, and how to avoid a repeat on future missions. But Schiaparelli’s well-documented landing might also help us find other missing spacecraft. “Maybe seeing what happened here will provide some clues,” McEwen says. “Maybe we should be looking more for shallow craters.”

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Now/Then

We’ve been looking for life on Mars for centuries. Humans have parsed every geological feature that we can find for traces of living neighbors, or at the very least, evidence that some type of creature lived on the red planet in the past. So far, no luck.

In the absence of evidence of life, a not-so-new idea is gaining ground: If we can’t find life on Mars, maybe we could bring life to Mars. Not only that, but we might be able to change the nature of the red planet itself, and turn a dry and lifeless world into a mirror of our own blue and green marble.

It sounds like science fiction, but researchers in the public and private sector are already looking at how current technology can terraform Mars, in part because it would make permanent human settlements much more plausible.

Ancient Mars

Is it possible?

Yes, it is possible—but it probably won’t be a dramatic solution like Elon Musk’s plan to repeatedly detonate nuclear weapons in the now-thin Martian atmosphere.

“It’s a mistake to think that there is a lot of energy in nuclear weapons,” says Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA. “If you take all all the nuclear weapons on Earth, all the countries summed together, that adds up to about half an hour of Mars sunlight. You don’t change a planet by detonating nuclear weapons, you change a planet by harnessing sunlight.”

As McKay and other researchers have previously discussed, we already have the power to change Mars. We know we can heat up the frigid planet, because we’ve tested the concept here on Earth.

“Global warming is harnessing sunlight to warm up the Earth,” McKay says. “The Earth is warming, and it’s not warming because of nuclear weapons; it’s warming because of sunlight, which is huge energy flowing in and flowing out of the planet.”

“If you want Mars to be more Earth-like you’re going to need to make the atmosphere thicker,” says Michael Chaffin, a researcher working on NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission. “Looking at the history of Mars, we know that early on the atmosphere had to be thicker to support water.”

Currently, the atmosphere is so thin and cold that liquid water can only exist on the surface for brief flashes of time.

“If you took a glass of liquid water to Mars and poured it out, some of it would freeze, and some of it would boil away, but none of it would remain liquid for very long,” Chaffin says.

But theoretically, if we were able to pump greenhouse gases into Mars’ atmosphere, we could warm the surface of the planet enough for liquid water to be stable on the surface, as it was in the distant past (roughly 3.5 billion years ago). The thicker atmosphere would also provide enough pressure to help water remain stable.

One way this might be possible, McKay says, is to manufacture super-greenhouse gases or perfluorocarbons (PFCs) in automated factories. These compounds would trap the heat from sunlight on Mars, without disrupting the planet’s fragile ozone layer or posing a toxic threat to human settlers.

Once we got the planet nice and warm, something that McKay estimates could happen in about 100 years, we could then start adding plants. By gobbling up carbon dioxide and pumping out oxygen, greenery would gradually alter the chemistry of the atmosphere to make it breathable, a process that would likely take thousands of years.

That sounds like a long wait—but when you consider that Earth has been around for about 4.6 billion years, a century or even a few millennia becomes a more manageable timeline.

Practical Challenges

One thing that any future terraforming efforts will have to take into account is that Mars already has some greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. If researchers don’t account for these gases, they could boost the planet’s temperatures way too high.

“You’re starting at Mars. You want to end up somewhere close to Earth. How do you keep it from becoming Venus?” McKay says. Though both planets are the same size, Venus has a much thicker atmosphere than Earth—comprised of many greenhouse gases—and temperatures on its surface are hot enough to melt lead. Not only that, but the atmospheric pressure at the surface is the equivalent of pressures normally seen 3,000 feet deep in the ocean.

McKay is currently working on how to calculate the amount of carbon dioxide that is currently frozen in the ground on Mars near or under the polar ice caps. Current estimates put the amount of carbon dioxide at amounts far below the threshold needed to warm the planet, but the actual estimates remain unknown, and researchers want to be sure of how many other greenhouse gases are lurking in the ground before starting any kind of terraforming process.

So let’s move ahead and assume scientists calculate the correct quantity of greenhouse gases for a perfect terraforming process. Humans will be able to build up an atmosphere on Mars that will be warm and wet enough to support life. But what will happen to that carefully rebuilt atmosphere over time?

“People say, ‘Well, Mars lost its atmosphere. If you brought it back, won’t it just lose it again?’” McKay says. “And they’re right. It will just lose it again.”

The difference is timing. McKay notes that many estimates have Mars losing its atmosphere over the course of 100 million years. That might be a short time in the whole span of the solar system’s history, but on a human time scale, it’s long enough to make the effort worth it.

“There is no permanency in the Solar System anyways,” McKay says. “We’d change Mars on time scales that are very very long compared to human time scales. 100 million years is a long time to spread out the mortgage payments.”

MAVEN

Different Planets, Same Rules?

The differences between Venus, Mars, and Earth might seem obvious. One is too hot, the next is too cold, and the third is just right. But they’re all rocky, mid-size worlds. And to a large extent, the long-term climate models that we’ve developed for Earth can fit the other planets as well. We just need to account for differences in the thicknesses of the atmospheres, the sizes (Mars is smaller than the other two), and each planet’s relative proximity to the Sun.

“The same climate models that people use to study global warming on Earth are the climate models that we have used to study terraforming Mars,” McKay says.

But there are some aspects of Mars’ climate history that remain a mystery to researchers.

“All of the rovers we sent to the surface, and many of the orbiting missions, have given us evidence that water was present on Mars early on in solar system history,” Chaffin says. “If you go back 4 billion years, there had to be lakes and rivers on Mars, at least for short periods of time, to generate the features that we see.”

“So we have a mystery. We have a planet that can’t support liquid water today, but has supported large amounts of liquid water in the past. There had to be a change in the atmosphere of the planet,” he says.

That’s where MAVEN comes in. The NASA probe has been orbiting Mars—analyzing the atmosphere’s composition, measuring radiation and charged particles, and sending data back to Earth—since 2014. The researchers analyzing that data are trying to find out how Mars currently loses atmosphere into space, and how it might have lost so much of its atmosphere so dramatically in the past.

“The loss of charged particles from the Mars atmosphere is about a quarter pound per second,” Chaffin says. “That is enough to remove an entire present day atmosphere over Mars history. But that’s not enough to explain an early thick atmosphere being lost.”

There are still many questions about Mars’ atmosphere. Some of the biggest ones involve not current research, but our choices in the future.

Blue or Red?

But should we?

People are already dreaming of a permanent human base on Mars. If these plans go through, humans will have to live on a world with frigid temperatures and high levels of radiation. Under these conditions, the expenses and tradeoffs of terraforming might make a lot of sense to the new Martians. Why not make their new home more Earth-like, and thus friendlier to humans?

We know humans have the power to raise a planet’s average temperature—because that’s exactly what’s happening on Earth. With a Martian settlement, it may become even more appealing to take the lessons learned from global warming on Earth and apply them to another planet.

“If there are people that are living on Mars that think of Mars as their home, terraforming might be something they have an incentive to push for.” McKay says.

In our rush to make Mars more Earth-like, however, we could cause permanent damage. What if, on a future expedition to Mars, we discover microbes living on the un-terraformed Martian surface? That discovery would mean that changing the planet could wipe out alien life.

“The question of the ethics of life on Mars are not scientific questions,” McKay says. “They’re obviously questions of value. You can have reasonable people think the problem through carefully and reach different results.”

The dilemma would come down to the existence of a tiny alien smudge versus the well-being of Earth-based life. “We as a society would have to agree on what we’re going to do on other worlds,” says McKay. “We all know what we should do on Earth, whether we do it or not. We should preserve life and preserve nature, and on Earth they’re the same. You go to Mars, and they’re not the same, and we don’t have a consensus in principle, much less in practice, of what we should do.”

As plans to send humans to Mars gather steam, discussions like these will become more important. We need to start moving beyond the mere practicalities of terraforming Mars, and begin exploring what our principles are, and what actions we might actually put into practice.

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Murray Buttes

The Curiosity rover is saying goodbye to its most recent Martian home away from home, and it took a few snapshots to remember the gorgeous landscape before it hit the road.

Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012, and slowly made its way towards Mount Sharp, over the next two years, exploring the geology along the way looking for evidence that the red planet might have been habitable in the past.

Last winter, the rover became the first to explore dunes on another planet, and recently, it has been at a place called Murray Buttes, exploring formations that were formed from ancient dunes on the planet.

Curiosity has been examining the magnificent buttes since August, taking some gorgeous photos in the process.

The landscape is remarkably similar to rock formations seen here on Earth.

“Curiosity’s science team has been just thrilled to go on this road trip through a bit of the American desert Southwest on Mars,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity Project Scientist.

But it isn’t just a sightseeing trip. The images and data collected by the rover are providing valuable information about what the environment was like on Mars in the past. The thin, fine layers of sandstone show that the rock formations were created by wind-blown sediments piling up into formations like dunes, which were later buried, solidified into rocks, then eroded into the formations that the rover sees today.

Curiosity’s next mission will be to head further up Mount Sharp.

Murray Buttes

Murray Buttes

Murray Buttes

Murray Buttes

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It’s a constant cycle. NASA puts out a press release saying new Mars news is forthcoming in a press conference. Then, the ultimate announcement is tantalizing—but far from the discovery of actual life on actual Mars.

This played out recently, with the announcement last month of the discovery of ancient organics found on the surface, and fluctuations of methane in the atmosphere on Mars. Methane is often produced through biological processes, so seasonal releases on Mars could be a sign that something is constantly replenishing an underground supply of that hydrocarbon.

But yet again–life wasn’t found on Mars. And NASA won’t be announcing the discovery of life on Mars anytime soon. It’s not disinterest on the agency’s part, instead it’s because of a simple fact: none of these missions had the capabilities to directly detect life, past or present.

Curiosity Rover takes a self portrait

Life on Mars

It’s a bright, hot June day at the InterPlanetary Festival in Santa Fe. Los Alamos National Lab is out vaporizing rocks for passers-by. On the stage, Nina Lanza, a staff scientist at Los Alamos, is talking Mars.

“There is methane currently in the atmosphere on Mars,” she says, “and it’s not just there constantly, it’s little puffs that appear to be seasonal.” Methane on Earth, she says, comes from volcanoes and life. “Methane doesn’t last long, it lasts on the order of a hundred years … so when we see methane on Mars, we know that something is making it now.”

“Don’t say you heard it from me that there’s life on Mars, we’re still working that out, but it’s an important observation for us to track down because of its implications.” Lanza says.

Lanza is part of the team behind the ChemCam on the Curiosity rover, currently exploring the ancient lakebed of Gale Crater. There are two components to the system: a laser and a spectrometer. The laser vaporizes rock samples, while the spectrometer looks for tell-tale traces of certain elements in the vaporized remains.

“We can actually see the constituent atoms of the molecules, so we can see, is there carbon here, is there hydrogen, is there phosphorus? Is there nitrogen? We can see all these things,” she told Popular Science after her panel. She has a handy acronym for it: CHyN OPS (pronounced “chin ups”), or carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. Each of these elements have a hand in life on Earth, but ChemCam can’t see how each of these individual elements interact to form molecules. So it can see hydrogen and see carbon, but can’t tell if the two are paired together or not.

That also means that ChemCam can only look for the most basic ingredients of life. It can’t confirm whether life exists or existed on Mars, even though the environment surrounding Curiosity would have been perfect for life at one point in time.

“Gale Crater is an environment that was absolutely habitable, we just don’t know if it was inhabited,” Lanza says. It’s unlikely—though not impossible—that there’s anything today, but there might have been in the distant past.

Luckily, NASA’s capabilities on the planet are about to expand. The Mars 2020 rover will get an all-new, souped-up version of the ChemCam called SuperCam. While ChemCam can pick up elements, SuperCam will pick up the key traces of molecules in its ultimate landing site. This means that it will be able to identify more complex organics rather than individual elements. Using the Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS), it will be able to get cursory information about rocks it hasn’t even vaporized yet.

Oh, and it will have a microphone.

“Not only are we going to listen to the Martians,” Lanza jokes, ”but you can actually get information about the target by the sounds the LIBS shockwaves makes.”

“When you shoot the laser, it actually does make a version ‘pew pew.’ It makes a snapping sound, and that sound changes based on what the material is and if you’re penetrating through a rock coating. that’s actually going to allow us to interpret our data even better,” She says.

NASA isn’t alone in its pursuit of biology beyond our planet. ESA and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, have also teamed up on the ExoMars mission. Half of it has already arrived at Mars, though the Schiaparelli lander failed. The other half is set for a July 2020 launch. This rover will actually dig down into the Martian surface, scoop up samples, and test them for evidence of advanced organics—stopping just short of confirming past life, but taking bigger steps than ever before.

Mars 2020 will scoop up Martian surface samples, but it will store those onboard for future retrieval. NASA’s future past on Mars past the 2020 rover is unclear, but NASA has a target of putting humans on Mars by the 2030s. Once human boots are on the ground, confirmation of past or present life could come much more swiftly—as Lanza says, “I’m still a better geologist than Curiosity.” Humans could operate a microscope or a lab and complete more advanced experiments than the rovers—which are currently limited in scope by their a six-to-24-light-minute communications delay with Earth.

There is, of course, another component to Mars missions, though, beyond rovers, landers, and theoretical human explorers. That’s the orbiter.

Eye in the sky

While Curiosity may have dug into evidence of an ancient lake on the surface, much of the heavy lifting of finding water on Mars (over and over and over) has been up to a fleet of a few orbiters. A rover may be only able to explore a tiny fraction of Mars in their lifetime, but orbiters can give a comprehensive global view every day. Right now, there are a few Mars orbiters, but two of them do the most visual recon work: NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and ESA’s Mars Express.

“With something like MRO, we can’t see anything smaller than the rovers on the surface really with the resolution of the cameras we have,” Tanya Harrison, the director of research at Arizona State University’s NewSpace Initiative says in a Twitter DM. “So if there were alien cars or alien buildings on the surface of Mars, we definitely would’ve seen them by now.”

Both Mars Express and MRO are more than 15 years old. A new orbiter with better capabilities could be able to make out more details about the methane plumes, and maybe even see them directly. The HiRISE instrument—MRO’s eye in the sky—isn’t sensitive enough to pinpoint the methane’s origin. For that, there would have to be a lot more methane getting released into the Martian atmosphere.

“MRO isn’t equipped to detect methane, but Mars Express has an instrument that was able to detect it spectroscopically,” Harrison says. “To see it visually, it the methane would have to be venting out at a level akin to fumaroles here on Earth—think like the plumes you see at the geysers or hot springs in Yellowstone or Iceland.”

One idea for a mission treats Mars exploration like a game of catch. A lander or rover would scoop up samples and launch them to orbit on a tiny rocket. The orbiter will then retrieve and store those canisters of Mars for an eventual return to Earth. This theoretical orbiter could provide an interesting opportunity to confirm life on Mars as never before with direct sampling.

“Using [an electron microscope] you can actually see structures that look like microbes, but we don’t have that on Mars,” Lanza says. “We have microimagers, but they’re not as high resolution. We can say there’s mineralogy, there’s chemistry, there’s organic molecules, you can build a very good circumstantial story and I think it’s reasonable. But for an extraordinary claim you require extraordinary evidence.”

Until that happens—don’t believe the hype.

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Our most stalwart celestial explorers are hitch­hikers. Autonomous rovers such as ­Sojourner, the bouncing ­robots of ­Minerva II, and the crewed Apollo moon buggies might not log as much mileage as the rockets they ride, but the relatively wee lengths they travel cover the final legs of journeys into the unknown. On the surface of Mars, asteroids, and the moon, these intrepid travelers look for water, gather samples, and capture photos that showcase alien worlds to the Earth-​bound. These are the tracks of six off-world trotters.

SOJOURNER

Although Sojourner, the first rover on Mars, trundled only a short way, it managed to nab more than 500 pics while studying the composition of alien rocks and soil.

MINERVA II 1A AND 1B

These twin hexagonal rovers don’t roll; they hop in their asteroid’s weak gravity. Leaps last around 15 minutes and cover about 50 horizontal feet.

CURIOSITY

The nearly 2,000-​pound Curiosity hasn’t gotten too far. It was designed to vaporize rocks and snap X‑rays around the once-­watery Gale Crater—​​not to wander far afield.

RELATED: NASA’s 2020 rover will search Mars for signs of life

APOLLO 15 LRV

Three successive moon missions boasted versions of this buggy. In a three-hour tour during Apollo 15, it helped astronauts collect 170 pounds of samples from a trio of lunar regions.

LUNOKHOD 2

After landing the first-ever lunar rover in 1970, the USSR sent this sequel. The robot deduced that ambient light in the moon’s night sky is actually much brighter than it is on Earth.

OPPORTUNITY

Opportunity’s three-​month mission is in its 14th year. It fell silent in a 2018 dust storm, and as of publication, NASA was still attempting to contact the little rover that could.

UPDATE: NASA officially ends the Opportunity rover’s 15-year mission

This article was originally published in the Spring 2019 Transportation issue of Popular Science.

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It sounds like the stuff of science fiction. In one European team’s proposal for off-world construction, swarms of autonomous, cooperative robots would dig and reinforce underground ant-like colonies for human habitation on Mars.

The European Space Agency recently awarded a grant to a team of engineers at the Robotic Building lab at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, to study how robot swarms could build such structures. This month, the founder and current leader of the lab, engineer Henriette Bier, posted some preliminary details of her team’s concept, which would use Zebro robots to excavate underground housing networks on the red planet, fortified with Martian, 3D-printed concrete.

The project is very much in the conceptual phase, but the technologies to make it possible are coming along on Earth, says Jekan Thanga, a robotics researcher not involved with the Delft team who specializes in off-world technologies at the University of Arizona. But, he says, “doing it off-world is another challenge.”

Mars has a host of dangers for future human explorers looking to reside there. From high levels of ionizing radiation to drastic day-to-night temperature swings, long-term residents will need more than a sturdy tent to live comfortably. Living several meters underground would block out most of the radiation and provide for a more stable temperature.

[Related: Life could be hiding deep under Mars]

Amazon isn’t offering free shipping to Mars yet, so getting building supplies there is still highly pricey. That’s why researchers are looking at ways of using locally sourced materials as much as possible in construction of Martian habitats. 

The Zebro robots—also developed at Delft, with the footprint of just a sheet of paper—would excavate tunnels by spiraling downward and fortify the walls as they go with concrete. Tapping into what’s immediately abundant, the concrete could be made onsite by combining cement with some of the excavated dust and rock. Some robots would dig while others reinforce walls with autonomously generated 3D-printed structures.

Bier’s team consists of her students and other robotics faculty at Delft. She says using 3D-printing technologies, she and her team “have been developing material designs that are porous,” which allows for faster construction and more efficient use of materials. The empty pockets would also make for better insulation. On top of pure optimization, 3D printing allows for unconventional, versatile design shapes devised by artificial intelligence.

Digging and building on unknown Martian terrain will “definitely be a challenge” Bier says. The robots will have to adapt to a harsh and disordered terrain—but artificial intelligence could make this possible, she says. Swarms of robots are useful because they can communicate with each other, do multiple tasks simultaneously, and keep functioning if one member becomes inoperable.

This is similar to the way termites work together. “They work in teams, yet, if you kill one individual … the team continues no problem,” Thanga says.

This project isn’t for the first wave of Martian settlers, who will likely need something more temporary and modular. Because these underground colonies would  require concrete, the first order of business would be to build the infrastructure to produce concrete—and preferably more robots, too. 

[Related: Some of Earth’s tiniest living things could survive on Mars]

NASA and other groups have looked at different potential shelters on Mars, Thanga says, including ideas for houses made from sandbags or ice. But deep underground structures provide a more permanent option and require little water—a precious resource on such a dry planet. 

Bier says that the construction industry is generally conservative, so it hasn’t seriously invested in new technologies like robotics or 3D-printed homes, which a few startups are working on. She points to the company ICON, which has built inexpensive concrete homes in just a few days and is looking at 3D-printing structures on the Moon. In 2019, NASA also hosted a 3D-printed habitat challenge in which teams competed to design sustainable housing designs for off-world living.

She hopes that furthering these technologies on Earth will lead to advances in off-world technology, and that that off-world technology could in turn lead to further advances on Earth.

Adding in swarm technology could amplify these advances even further. Thanga says humans have been using the logic of swarm societies for thousands of years. A group of Roman soldiers could join together in a turtle-like formation, covered by shields on all sides to beat unorganized but similarly armed enemies. “They became invincible that way,” Thanga says. Perhaps robot swarms on Mars may one day be able to achieve similar feats.

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Somewhere along Mauna Loa in Hawaiʻi, there is what looks like an oversized golf ball housing the HI-SEAS facility. The dome sports six small rooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, a research lab, and relaxation area. It’s surrounded by solar panels on the ground outside and is attached to a shipping container for storage. All of this fits in a neat 1,200 square feet, just over a quarter of the size of a regulation basketball court. And within this dome, groups of six people live and train together for weeks or even months at a time—disconnected from the world outside the dome, they’re preparing to one day live on the moon and Mars. From the volcanic surfaces of Hawaiʻi to the arid deserts of the Atacama, humans are finding clever ways to prepare for life beyond our blue dot. 

That is what Michaela Musilova spends her days investigating. As the director of the HI-SEAS facility, the product of a research program funded by NASA, she organizes missions that simulate, to the best possible degree, what life could look like on non-terrestrial surfaces. Musilova and her teams are looking at answering several questions that will arise once we embark: What food will we eat when we don’t have soil to grow it in? Will it be safe for us to explore Mars outside of the bubble we hope to create? And how will we cope with living in close quarters with six other humans for years at a time?

Testing out these scenarios on Earth can be a challenge, so space exploration hopefuls travel to analog territories, the places that might most resemble what we find on Mars and the moon. Mauna Loa is an active volcano, and the surrounding landscape is littered with hollowed-out lava tubes that once carried cascading torrents of molten lava. Its volcanic terrain is made up of material similar to what is on the moon today and is suspected to be on Mars, at least in part. This allows geologists and astrobiologists to conduct research that will mimic the scenarios astronauts will encounter on Mars and help them practice the research they will eventually have to carry out.

As we prepare for extraterrestrial life, we need a better understanding of the environments that we are going to encounter. If Mars were covered in thick, green jungle, we would probably be in a bubble somewhere in the Amazon. Instead, for their Mars missions, the scientists living in the dome don extravehicular activity suits every time they leave the dome to explore the lava tubes, conduct research, and test out new equipment. 

They communicate with mission control every day, which on Mars requires a 20-minute delay for messages to travel each way, and subsist on a diet of freeze-dried food and limited water. But they’re not just playing house, the Mars-edition. The HI-SEAS missions are a part of efforts by the International MoonBase Alliance (IMA)—an association that seeks to unite space agencies, space companies and scientists—to emulate what life really could look like, to practice the standard procedures that may become our new normal, and to learn how to interact with whatever life might already exist.

“That’s why we study an environment similar to Mars on Earth, in Antarctica, and various other extreme environments around the world. And lava caves are one of those environments, because we know they’re very likely to be present on Mars,” says Musilova. “And so if there’s something that’s going to live in those environments of Mars, it’s likely to be similar to what lives in these caves on Earth. And so that’s why we try to understand what lives there, how it survives, what it needs for nutrition, how it interacts with its environment.”

Though the volcanoes on Mars appear to be much older and to have different rock compositions, Musilova says that there are enough similarities in the geological features that make it worthwhile for us to explore the lava tubes here at home.

“We’re still hoping to find life that could exist there today, but we’re more hopeful to find at least these biosignatures or fossils,” says Musilova. “But in order to even know what to look for, and then to design instruments that could detect these biosignatures, we first need to understand what kind of signatures life leaves behind in similar environments on Earth.”

The lava tubes on the moon are not as promising for astrobiology. Instead, they’re good news for space architects. After the rush of molten lava evaporates, an outer shell hardens and remains. Scientists like Musilova hope that these structures can be used as shelter from the harsh lunar environment.

Bernard Foing, doesn’t just dream of shelter within these lava tubes. He imagines houses and even cities. Foing is the director of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group, a public forum affiliated with the IMA but sponsored by space agencies dotted around the globe from France to South Africa. 

Since the gravitational force is lower on the moon, Foing suspects that lunar lava tubes will be even larger than the ones found on Earth. The lava tubes would also provide protection from the elements. They would be able to withstand cosmic rays and meteorites, but also provide a much more temperate environment than on the extremely volatile surface. Moon surface temperatures can range from 100 to 400 degrees Kelvin. Lava tubes, both on Earth and the moon have a much smaller temperature variation, since they exist below the surface and are insulated against the extreme temperatures above.

But this kind of space exploration is also tethered dangerously to space colonisation. Is Mars really ours to make habitable? Currently, there are scientific and legal guidelines that prevent us from contaminating existing life forms on the red planet. Rovers and spacecraft go through extensive sterilisation efforts to prevent us from accidentally wiping out extraterrestrial life with terrestrial bacteria or viruses.

[Related: Lunar caves are the next exploration front]

“We have to be careful that we will not contaminate the layers that could be liquid, and then propagate all our germs there. And at the moment, it’s forbidden to bring your Earth life to Mars,” says Foing.

Though we still have to reckon with questions of domain and rights, all this preparation is not being done in vain for some. The IMA believes that eventually we will be able to build a base on the moon and start a moon village.

“We are on the first step, we are testing a little moon base in the volcanic environment of Mauna Loa, which is very similar to the moon,” says Foing. “[In] the next phase, we will build a moon base using basalt from Hawaiʻi to build the base itself, like we would do on the moon. And then after that we will contribute to building the base on the moon.” That might sound outlandish, but this work is funded by the likes of NASA and the European Space Agency, both of whom plan to build some type of lunar colony.

Foing hopes that the IMA will be able to prepare 10 people to live on the moon permanently, before slowly growing its population into the very first lunar village. While leaving the planet will be far from easy, for believers and optimists like Foing, that future is imminent.

“It will be a destination for some humans to go and live there. I, myself, plan to retire on the moon. So maybe within 10 or 20 years, I’ll be there and retired!” he says. “And I’ll look at the beautiful Earth in the sky.”

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Living microbes could be hanging out beneath the Martian surface, according to a new study of Mars rocks from Brown University. The research shows that Mars could provide a stable, nourishing environment there for billions of years.

All life needs energy to survive. The life on Earth’s surface mostly gets that energy from the sun, but microbes can survive without light if they get their energy elsewhere. 

“To have sufficient chemical energy for life, you need both reducing compounds and oxidizing compounds,” says Jesse Tarnas, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. He led the study while completing his Ph.D. at Brown University. Reduction is just a chemical process that gives a molecule more electrons, and oxidation is one that takes them away. Microbes would need these basic chemical fuel types, along with liquid water, to survive.

The surface of Mars is barren, heavily radiated, and cold. But underground, deep enough down, scientists think the warmth of the planet’s core keeps water liquid.

Where this underground water touches Martian rocks, certain chemical reactions can take place, producing the reduction and oxidation chemicals essential for life. The chemicals form because Mars rocks, like those on Earth, typically have small amounts of radionuclides—atoms that are unstable and eventually release radiation—trapped inside them. But this radiation isn’t as overpowering as that on the surface, which kills pretty much everything. 

When these nuclides emit radiation, it breaks up nearby water molecules into hydrogen gas and oxides, both highly reactive chemicals which go on to create other chemicals that can sustain life.

Testing the ingredients for life on Mars

The team used data from Martian meteorites gathered across the globe—including the famous Allan Hills 84001 meteorite—to figure out how much of these crucial chemicals could form on the red planet. They looked at the composition of the Mars rocks and calculated the amount of reducing and oxidizing chemicals those rocks could produce over time, then compared this to the rates that Earth microbes would chomp them up. 

They found that some types of Mars rocks could support life’s requirements long-term. The researchers then estimated how many microbes could survive in different rocky areas under Mars, assuming that these microbes would be similar to those deep underground or on the seafloor on Earth, which feed off of sulfates instead of oxygen.

[Related: Was there ever life on Mars? Perseverance’s SHERLOC laser sniffs for microscopic clues]

This study addresses two really important factors in the habitability of another planet, says Allan Treiman, a planetary geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute of the Universities Space Research Association, who was not involved in the study. First, he says, “the source of energy, and second, the consistency of environments,” or how stable they are.

Though we haven’t found liquid water on Mars directly, he says, “it’s a pretty good guess that there is a lot of liquid water down there.”

This water most likely exists in pockets, Tarnas says. “Fresh” water would be several kilometers down—quite a long way to drill. But salt water pockets, like road salts here on Earth, freeze at lower temperatures, and could exist just a few hundred meters down.

This water, along with the small amount of radiation coming off Mars rocks, could supply a steady stream of the chemical energy life needs for billions of years, the researchers found. “If life did ever arise on Mars, and if groundwater is still present there,” Tarnas says—which he admits are two big ifs—“then it’s possible that habitable environment could have been a refuge for [life] from billions of years ago, all the way up to today.”

‘Nature’s drill’ on Mars could be another route to finding life

It may still be a while before rovers or astronauts dig that deep, but with technologies like transient electromagnetic sounding, Tarnas says, researchers can get an idea of where and how much water is hiding beneath the surface.

And there’s another way to glimpse the deep down of Mars.

“Nature gives us a pretty good drill, which are impact craters,” Treiman says. Large impacts on the surface of Mars have ejected rocks from deep down under the surface. “The bigger the crater, the further down you can get.”

Mars rovers like Perseverance could find and study these impact-ejected rocks to learn what Mars is like down below. Exposed on the surface, the rocks wouldn’t still have living microbes on them. But they could have microfossils, organic molecules, or signs of contact with water.

Treiman says his gut feeling all along has been that there isn’t life on Mars. “But I may have to reevaluate that,” he says. “Based on this paper, it was pretty convincing.”

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There have been 53 missions to Mars since the 1960s, from flybys to rovers, and 23 have accomplished their objectives. That means more than half either never left Earth or failed when they get to Mars.

Eighteen of those 23 successes were launched by the U.S.

Like the space race, the marathon to Mars has been dominated by Earth’s superpowers: the Soviet Union (later Russia) and the United States. A coalition of European countries called the European Space Agency entered the scene in the 1970s, but they focused on collaboration with other agencies and basic research. They’ve worked with NASA on multiple international projects and have only recently launched their own Mars missions. They were in it for the science, not the glory.

But the U.S. and Russia wanted the glory. And though Russia had a few years’ head start, NASA took the early lead. Russia had a series of flyby failures, and when in 1962 they launched their first lander—Sputnik 24—it barely made it to low Earth orbit and fell back down a day later. In the intervening 50+ years the U.S. has racked up the metaphorical gold by safely landing seven landers and rovers, while the rest of the world has yet to land one.

Two years after the Sputnik 24 failure, the U.S. made the first successful Mars flyby, despite a failed launch a few weeks before. Mariner 4 sent back the first pictures of the Martian landscape just two days before the competing Russian flyby mission lost communications.

Most Missions To Mars Don’t Survive

Russia has attempted nearly every Martian milestone before the U.S. The triumph of having the first flyby, orbiter, lander, and rover all went to NASA, always just after the Soviet attempt. The Russian missions Mars 2 and 3 left Earth before NASA’s Mariner 9, but the U.S. orbiter settled into its position above Mars on November 14, 1971, just two weeks before Mars 2 and 3 arrived.

Mariner 9

The Mars 2 lander was the first man-made object to reach the surface, but a malfunction during descent caused it to crash. And when Mars 3 dispatched its lander, it did so into a dust storm that caused its early demise 14.5 seconds after landing.

In 1974 the Soviets tried again with Mars 7, but as it approached Mars one of the rockets malfunctioned and instead of touching down it missed the entire planet by 810 miles.

No one landed on Mars with any real success until NASA launched Viking 1 and 2 in 1975, both of which put spacecraft into stable orbit and deployed landers to the surface. The U.S. has been responsible for every single successful Mars lander or rover since that time and has only had one failure.

Carl Sagan stands next to Viking 1 model

The Russians made one more attempt with their ambitious Mars 96, which included an orbiter, two stations destined for the surface, and two surface penetrators. Roger Bourke, who spent most of his career at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and worked on a series of Mars missions in the 1990s, called Mars 96 “probably the most ambitious planetary mission ever launched by any country.”

Mars 96 never even escaped orbit around Earth. The fourth rocket stage shut off too early, and the craft made three orbits before crashing near Chile.

This isn’t to say that the U.S. has a perfect track record. Let us always remember the Mars Climate Orbiter, which slammed into the Martian earth after they forgot to convert pound-seconds to newton-seconds. But on the whole? We dominate.

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On April 19, 2021, Ingenuity, the Mars Helicopter, made the first flight on another planet. 

Some 118 years had passed since Wilbur and Orville Wright achieved the first airplane flight on Earth. Still, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) properly hailed the event as a “Wright brothers moment.” Just like the Wrights, the Ingenuity team faced years of mishaps, milestones, and victories before they saw success. Since that day last month, the Mars chopper has flown five more times, with plans for another flight soon. 

One tiny detail physically links the Mars drone to the Wright brothers. Nestled under Ingenuity’s solar panel, cloaked around a cable, fastened with insulative tape, is a one-inch swatch of vintage fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer, the world’s first airplane. “Everything is hard on Mars, millions of miles away,” says Mackensie Wittmer, executive director of the National Aviation Heritage Area, which encompasses the Wright Brothers National Museum at Carillon Historical Park, the organization that gifted the Wright Flyer fabric to JPL. “Yet NASA chose to make their mission harder by adding this piece of fabric.” 

Mars is, indeed, a ruthless world. At night, temperatures plummet to minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit; aeronautical equipment can freeze and crack and falter. The Red Planet’s atmosphere is also 99% less dense than Earth’s atmosphere. Adding a tiny piece of fabric meant introducing a physically superfluous component to a helicopter that already had its work cut out for it.

[Related: Ingenuity flew on Mars. Now NASA will push it to the brink of destruction.]

According to Bob Balaram, Ingenuity’s chief engineer at JPL, before the Wright Flyer fabric could fly to Mars, NASA had to laboriously sterilize the artifact in an autoclave (which is like an oven) to prevent outgassing and kill any bugs or Earthen spores. Mars 2020 is an astrobiological mission, so mistaking Earthen spores for Martian life would be a blunder. 

“This was obviously significant to NASA,” says Wittmer. “I imagine they looked to the Wright brothers and said, ‘If the Wrights could do this 118 years ago, we can do this now.’” 

But this wasn’t the first time NASA had done something like this—the agency has a long tradition of sending Wright Flyer ephemera to space. These relics are, indeed, significant to NASA, and they’re significant to us. But why go through all the trouble of launching these items into space?

The answer was first posited by pioneering psychologist William James in his 1890 book, The Principles of Psychology. “A man’s Self is the sum total of all he can call his,” wrote James. If our possessions increase in number, James postulated, we feel victorious; if our possessions dwindle, the opposite is true. Essentially, for all its pitfalls, materialism can boost our sense of self.

According to Bruce Hood, a professor of developmental psychology in society at the University of Bristol, humans are unique in this regard. Other animals do not view possessions as an extension of the self. 

[Related: There are no shortcuts when you build a drone destined for Mars]

“Many animals recognize and fight over possessions in the forms of territory, food, and mates,” says Hood, the author of Possessed: Why We Want More Than We Need. “But we humans recognize the concept of ownership—that something can belong to another in perpetuity and that, in a sense, possessions still represent them when they are dead. Some of the earliest grave artifacts are personal possessions, presumably for the afterlife. We can also form emotional or sentimental attachment to objects that belonged to others.”

The Wright Flyer fabric aboard Ingenuity is hallowed because it belonged to the Wright brothers. Replace it with a replica, and it loses all significance. 

“Human touch seems to grant objects additional meaning,” says Adam Waytz, a professor and psychologist at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “Research shows that we value objects more, pay more for them, and see them as more authentic when they have had contact with humans.”

That’s key. Only when we can authenticate that an object belonged to a significant person—a loved one, a family member, a celebrity—are our emotions aroused. 

[Related: Why we’re still obsessed with the watches astronauts wore to the moon]

“This psychological bias is best explained by the concept of essentialism,” says Hood. “Things of psychological importance are often, but not always implicitly, perceived to be imbued with a metaphysical property that defines their identity. Their essence.” By this rationale, an item that is associated with the Wrights carries along their essence. 

In July 1969, Neil Armstrong pioneered the tradition of sending Wright Flyer ephemera to space. “NASA contacted my family before Apollo 11,” says Stephen Wright, the Wright brothers’ great-grandnephew. “Half of what Neil Armstrong took to the moon came back to our family. I’m looking at a piece right now.” 

[Related: Perseverance’s giant ‘hand lens’ will scour Mars for signs of ancient life]

Sending Wright brothers ephemera to space not only recognized NASA’s roots, but it also proved a great PR move, so in October 1998, the tradition continued when John Glenn carried a swatch of Wright Flyer fabric aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. Two years later, Discovery sent another Wright Flyer fabric swatch to the International Space Station.

“These artifacts are key to understanding our past,” says Wittmer. “They are our physical link to our own timeline. There were those who came before us. There will be those who come after us. And their emotional significance can inspire action.” 

By attaching meaning to artifacts, we transform humdrum objects into sacred relics. In a very authentic, emotional way, we bring the past to life to inspire the future. 

[Related: NASA’s Mars helicopter may soon be the first to fly on another planet]

“The fabric sent into space makes a tangible, essential connection to the Wright brothers,” says Hood. “Their possessions are regarded as sacred artifacts—part of who the Wright brothers were. By sending this fabric into space, we are continuing their legacy in a physically manifested way. We are literally enabling the Wright brothers to reach space.”

Of course, the brothers aren’t literally traveling to space. Still, the Wright family believes the gesture would have resonated with Wilbur and Orville. “I know they would be absolutely thrilled,” says Stephen Wright. “NASA still recognizes they did the pioneering work to make this happen. It’s so gratifying.” 

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The Mysterious Rock

You may recall, NASA recently announced that a strange rock had somehow “appeared” in front of its Mars Opportunity rover. The explanations for the mystery rock were straight-forward: maybe some kind of nearby impact sent a rock toward the rover, or, more likely, the rover knocked the rock out of the ground and no one noticed until later.

Not so, says self-described scientist Rhawn Joseph, an author of trade books on topics ranging from alien life to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. (Sample article: “Dreams and Hallucinations: Lifting the Veil to Multiple Perceptual Realities.”) The rock was a living thing, and he’s filed a lawsuit to compel NASA to examine the rock more closely. Joseph is involved with the Journal of Cosmology, online publisher of some very controversial papers. In fact, this isn’t the first report of alien life to come out of the journal.

For the record: NASA has identified it as a rock. A very special rock, with rare properties, even. But definitely a rock.

Okay? Good.

The lawsuit, filed yesterday in a California court, is aimed at NASA and its Administrator, Charles Bolden, requesting that the agency “perform a public, scientific, and statutory duty which is to closely photograph and thoroughly scientifically examine and investigate a putative biological organism.” Joseph is disputing the rock theory, since, “when examined by Petitioner the same structure in miniature was clearly visible upon magnification and appears to have just germinated from spores.” (Joseph is the Petitioner.) The “rock,” according to the lawsuit, was there the whole time, it just grew until it became visible. “The refusal to take close up photos from various angles, the refusal to take microscopicimages of the specimen, the refusal to release high resolution photos, is inexplicable, recklessly negligent, and bizarre,” according to the suit.

Joseph has contacted multiple NASA employees and provided them with said evidence, according to the lawsuit, but they have failed to respond. Outrage. Here are his requests of NASA:

Enjoy the full suit embedded below.

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Want to live and die on Mars? Mars One has officially begun its worldwide search for astronauts who will fly to Mars in 2023—and never come back.

The first humans on Mars may be reality TV stars.

The ultimate goal is to select 24 to 40 candidates who will travel to Mars in groups of four. Mars One wants to land the first group (two men and two women, ideally from four different continents, says CEO Bas Lansdorp) on the red planet in 2023, with the other groups following one at a time, every two years. Applications close August 31, 2013.

Mars One lander

The nonprofit organization plans to televise the final rounds of the search in 2014, which means the first humans on Mars may be reality TV stars. But first, Mars One is asking the public to rate the application videos to help narrow down the selection pool. According to Norbert Kraft, the chief medical officer and head of the astronaut selection program, aspiring Martians should have five qualities: resilience, adaptability, curiosity, empathy, and creativity.

Mars One habitat

To filter out spam and frivolous entries, Mars One is charging an application fee that varies by country (it’s $38 in the United States). Applicants must create a 30- to 70-second video that explains why they want to go to Mars, and why they’re the best candidate. The pool will be narrowed to 24 to 40 in 2015.

If you’re one of the (uh, lucky?) people chosen for the program, you’ll move to the United States to spend the next seven years as a full-time, salaried employee of Mars One. Nine months of each year will be spent learning dentistry, emergency medicine, general medicine, engineering, biology, mechanics—anything you might need to know on an inhospitable planet with a population of four. The other three months of each year will be spent in a Mars habitat mock-up, complete with a 40-minute communication delay to the outside world and simulated emergencies. The hardest thing they’ll face during the simulation? A broken toilet, Lansdorp says. “That’s when people get out of control.”

Mars farm

It will cost $6 billion to get the first group of four to their new home (the reality show is supposed to fund the mission). The company will use SpaceX spacecraft to send rovers and supplies ahead of the astronauts, and then the SpaceX Falcon Heavy will get the crew to Mars, where they will assemble their habitat and begin growing their own food. Once on the red planet, the crew can do what they want—they won’t be taking orders from Mars One or anyone else back on Earth. “They will make a new civilization,” Kraft says. “They will make their own holidays, their own laws. We need to send mature people, because we won’t be telling them what to do.”

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The Dark Streaks

The intrepid Mars rover Curiosity has already confirmed that water once flowed on Mars, but that it’s long since dried up. Still, that doesn’t mean there’s not flowing water now, too.

NASA data has long supported the idea that a seasonal, briny water may be flowing on the Red Planet. In 2011, scientists noted that landscape formations showing up in the planet’s warmer months were caused by flowing water–or, at least, that was the “best explanation for these observations so far.” Now, the Mars Reconnoissance Orbiter has spotted more of those “dark, finger-like features” near the Martian equator, offering tantalizing evidence of briny water–or some other liquid substance–that appears in the winter but evaporates in the warm season.

Flowing water on Mars, of course, hasn’t yet been confirmed, and there are competing theories on what, exactly, the formations could mean. (There’s even been some theories put forward that there’s no liquid at all, and the formations are caused by winds.) But finding water moving today could fundamentally change our understanding of the environment on Mars, and it’s our best bet at finding life still lurking under the surface.

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“Turn it just like this,” the uniformed instructor tells the alert crew of trainee astronauts gathered around the workspace. “And then this next piece twists in the other direction.” The first trainee approaches the table.

The instructor, Rupert Spies, is reassuring. “Or, if you don’t want épi de blé, you could just leave the dough as a regular baguette.”

We are at Cornell University, in a culinary classroom, where nine elite trainees are preparing for a simulated space mission. They are spending a week here learning how to cook on Mars. Today’s lesson is on baking bread and pizza from scratch.

The project, called HI-SEAS, is intended to help build a strategy for feeding a human Mars colony, analyzing energy and resource requirements and nutritional parameters, and exploring the hypothesis that giving astronauts a choice of tasty foods and allowing them to prepare their own space cuisine will significantly improve morale.

The study will culminate next year in a rigorous mission during which the astronauts — six final participants chosen from the nine here today — will spend 120 days isolated in a Martian habitat high on Mauna Loa, a volcanic mountain in Hawaii, with no vegetation in site, cooking and eating exclusively dehydrated and shelf-stable foods using skills and recipes they’re developing together this week. The kitchen here at Cornell is crammed with space-ready ingredients of all kinds: freeze-dried beef and chicken chunks, freeze-dried shredded cheeses of various kinds, dehydrated fruits and vegetables, powdered spices, seaweeds and agar, and a concentrated butter with all the moisture centrifuged out of it. From these building blocks, the crew will have to creatively feed themselves for four months.

One of the primary concerns about a human mission to Mars is: We simply don’t know how the human mind responds to spending months or years in an alien environment millions of miles from the other members of your species. “In space, you’re in a form of sensory deprivation,” says Kim Binsted, one of the HI-SEAS project leaders. “You don’t see the colors you’re used to. There’s no real-time communication.” So how can long-duration astronauts maintain a sanity-shielding link with humanity? Delicious, familiar food is crucial.

Rupert Spies Demonstrates Breadmaking to Astronauts

But it’s not easy. In order to survive a trip to Mars, Earth food has to be shelf-stable for at least a year — dehydrated if possible, canned if not. Making matters worse, the human sense of taste and smell diminishes dramatically in space. Crewmembers on the ISS and other missions get in the habit of drenching every meal in hot sauce to compensate.

“Deep frying is not compatible with life in a remote habitat on Mars.”To that end, Binsted and her collaborators, including Spies, a senior lecturer at Cornell’s hotel school, and Jean Hunter, a professor of biological engineering who helped develop the process for manufacturing Pop Rocks, are working with the carefully selected crew to explore ways of making dehydrated space food compelling. Teaching the crew to cook is essential, providing variety and choice in the diet, as well as a focused, pseudo-domestic communal activity for the team. The kitchen in the simulated habitat will include equipment chosen for energy efficiency and minimal space requirements: a convection oven, an induction cooktop, a pressure cooker, an immersion blender. They can cook whatever they want and are encouraged to experiment — within certain engineering limits.

“Deep frying is not compatible with life in a remote habitat on Mars,” says Hunter: with atmospheric pressure on Mars being about half of what it is on Earth, reduced air resistance to spattering oil would result in droplets throughout the confined crew quarters. In the Hawaiian simulation, the crew will be permitted 8 minutes of showering per week, and the habitat, while not completely sealed, will have very limited air exchange, so the atmosphere is expected to be far from fresh.

That, Binsted explains, is a possible explanation for astronauts’ reduced sense of smell, which is not fully understood. It could be simple saturation, that the nose’s sensitivity shuts down when it’s cooped up with strong odors. Binsted was a simulated astronaut herself in an FMARS mission in 2007, when, she recalls, “when the final bell rang, we all went outside and breathed the fresh air for an hour or so; and then, as soon as we got back into the habitat, we realized it stank!”

The leading explanation, though, is the physiological effects of microgravity. At the same time as the Hawaiian simulated mission, another group will undergo simulated microgravity in Texas, spending four months straight on mattresses inclined at 6 degrees so their heads are lower than their feet. Their muscles atrophy, their faces puff up, and — most important — their nasal tissues swell, reducing airflow and the ability to smell. Both groups will be regularly tested with acoustic scans and airflow meters to see how the shape and function of their nasal cavities change over time.

Many of the crew members here have little to no cooking experience, but they’re eager to learn. Simon Engler, a roboticist who developed a remote explosive-hunting robot called Prairie Dog when he was deployed in Afghanistan, has never made bread before. “I always felt, the only time you think about food during a mission is if the food’s not good.” But he’s excited and proud of his edible creations today.

“I think this is the best pizza I’ve ever tasted,” says Yvonne Cagle, an Air Force colonel, MD, and qualified NASA astronaut. “But maybe that’s just because of the feeling that we made it together.”

Personally I think it’s the latter. The hot, yeasty crust is excellent, but the toppings of reconstituted potato slices, reconstituted freeze-dried cheese, reconstituted garlic and such may take a little getting used to. And that’s what the mission is all about — practicing, developing, polishing a new kind of cuisine for outer space.

“I will never go to Mars,” says Jean Hunter, “but I hope they’ll be eating my recipes.”

Beefish Chunks

Dehydrated Beef

One (1) Shelf-Stabilized Pork Chop

Rupert Spies Demonstrates How to Make a Pizza

Space Pizza Emerges From the Oven

An Array of Space Pizzas

Crewmember Kate Greene Samples Freeze-Dried Beef

The FMARS 2007 Crew In Their Habitat

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We’re on our way to Mars. NASA has a plan to land astronauts on its surface by the 2030s. Private spaceflight companies like SpaceX have also expressed interest in starting their own colonies there, while the infamous Mars One project has already enlisted civilians for a one-way trip to our planetary neighbor in 2020.

While many may dream of living their remaining days on Mars, those days may be numbered. The Martian environment poses significant challenges to Earth life, and establishing a Mars habitat will require an extraordinary amount of engineering prowess and technological knowhow to ensure the safety of its residents.

The technology required to keep astronauts alive on Mars isn’t ready–and it may not be for many years.

Though we may soon have the launch vehicles needed to transport people to Mars, a lot of the technology required to keep astronauts alive on the planet just isn’t ready–and it may not be for many years. For those eager to get to Mars as soon as possible, take caution: A number of tragic outcomes await if you head that way too soon.

You’ll Crash

Let’s say you’ve spent many months on your deep space voyage, and you’ve finally made it into orbit around the red planet. Congratulations! Now you need to get down to the surface—and that’s going to be tricky.

The problem is Mars’ atmosphere. The air around Mars is quite thin–about 100 times less dense than the atmosphere around Earth. Spacecraft returning to our planet rely on a combination of parachutes and drag from the atmosphere to slow them down. The heavier the object, the more drag it needs to prevent it from slamming into the surface.

But with so little atmosphere surrounding Mars, gently landing a large amount of weight on the planet will be tough. Heavy objects will pick up too much speed during the descent, making for one deep impact.

Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator

“How we get down through the atmosphere to the surface is a critical challenge,” Bret Drake, deputy manager of the exploration missions planning office at NASA, tells Popular Science. “With current landing techniques, we can land only a metric ton on Mars. That’s not big enough to get a colony going; we’ll need much bigger capabilities.”

According to Drake, NASA will need to land between 20 to 30 metric tons in one trip to get all of the astronauts and supplies needed for a planetary habitat down to the surface safely. To do this, the space agency is coming up with unique lander designs—notably their inflatable Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator. Shaped like an iconic flying saucer, the LDSD’s disc shape and added inflatable balloon increase the surface area of the lander, allowing it to slow down in thinner atmospheres.

The LDSD is still undergoing tests here on planet Earth, with an upcoming test in Hawaii scheduled for June. Whether the lander will be able to land such a heavy payload on Mars’ surface has yet to be determined.

As for Mars One and SpaceX, no specific information has been given about how they plan to land on Mars just yet.

You’ll Freeze

Welcome to Mars! (That’s assuming you’ve made it down in one piece.) It’s time to get acquainted with your new home’s weather conditions.

Mars temperatures average around -81 degrees Fahrenheit, but swing wildly depending on the season, the time of day, and the location, ranging from 86 degrees Fahrenheit near the equator to -284 degrees Fahrenheit near the poles. That means astronauts will have to be equipped to battle harsh, bitter cold.

Mars Polar Ice Caps

NASA has learned a lot about sheltering astronauts from fluctuating temperatures, thanks to years of housing humans on the International Space Station. When exposed to the sun, the ISS endures heats exceeding 200 degrees, and then plunges into -200-degree temperatures on Earth’s night side. The ISS and astronauts’ space suits use specialized thermal control systems and processes like sublimation to both repel excess heat and to shield people from the cold.

Yet those control systems are designed to work well in vacuum. Entirely new methods will be needed for space suits and habitats in the atmosphere of Mars. Though it’s thin, it still contains gases which can convect heat to and from a suit (similar to how wind cools us down here on Earth). So astronauts will feel the rapid temperature changes much more harshly.

“We would need a solution that provides better insulation for the cold environments and a different way of rejecting heat for the hot environments,” says Drake. “A spacesuit in a vacuum is very similar to a thermos, but a space suit on Mars is much more like a coffee cup sitting on a kitchen counter – the coffee cools much faster in the plain cup on the counter top as compared to the coffee in the thermos.”

You’ll Starve

Mars Farming

Living in a habitat on the Martian surface will be somewhat similar to living in the remote research outposts of Antarctica. All the food and supplies needed for these stations must come from other continents, and cargo resupply missions aren’t frequent.

Mars is just a bit further away from mainstream civilization than Antarctica is, and any resupply missions to a Martian habitat would take months or years to complete. If any colony hopes to survive on the red planet, there must be some form of self-sustainability when it comes to food. That means you’ll need some interplanetary farming skills.

Mars One’s plan is to grow crops indoors under artificial lighting. According to the project’s website, 80 square meters of space will be dedicated to plant growth within the habitat; the vegetation will be sustained using suspected water in Mars’ soil, as well as carbon dioxide produced by the initial four-member crew.

“The amount of crops you could sustain just by using the CO₂ produced by people is only sufficient to feed half of the crew.”

However, analysis conducted by MIT researchers last year shows that those numbers just don’t add up.

“When you’re growing all the crops required to feed four people indefinitely, the carbon dioxide produced by the crew is insufficient to keep the crops alive,” says Sydney Do, an aerospace engineer at MIT and lead author of the report. “So essentially the crops die off very quickly, within 12 to 18 days.” Adding more people wouldn’t solve the issue, because then there wouldn’t be enough to eat. “The amount of crops you could sustain just by using the CO₂ produced by people is only sufficient to feed half of the crew’s dietary requirements,” said Do. Talk about a catch-22.

So what can be done to fix this problem? You can grow fewer crops, but that means the astronauts will eventually run out of an important food source. Or you can find a way of introducing extra carbon dioxide, perhaps through CO₂ scrubbing technology. Such innovation, which would involve absorbing gas from the thin Martian atmosphere, is only in its infancy here on Earth. But if such tech can be developed for a Martian habitat, using it to grow an increased supply of crops may have some consequences when it comes to the crew’s oxygen supply.

You’ll Suffocate (Or Maybe Explode)

Growing crops on Mars isn’t just for feeding hungry astronauts; plants will serve as a vital source of renewable oxygen for the habitat. It’s a much better option than consistently sending heavy oxygen tanks to the red planet, which will take up too much precious space on resupply missions and cost a lot of money to transport.

Studies have shown plants may be able to grow in Martian soil, however crops have never been grown in the Mars gravity environment, so further testing is required to see if vegetation can survive at all. But if that works, the plants required to feed a multi-person crew will be producing a lot of oxygen. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.

According to Do’s report, too much oxygen in a closed environment can lead to an increased risk of oxygen toxicity for the crew, and even worse, spontaneous explosions. So O₂ will have to be vented from the habitat. To do this, the astronauts would need a specialized method for separating oxygen from the gas stream. There are a number of methods for doing so here on Earth (cryogenic distillation and pressure swing adsorption) but none of these technologies have been tested for a Martian environment, and considerable research and development would be needed to make these techniques viable on another planet.

“Significant technology development is required, because the tech isn’t there right now,” says Do. “The technologies needed for this habitat can work here on Earth, but they need a lot of human tending and are very large. In terms of practical use in a space envrionment, it would require miniaturizing them, decreasing cost, and increasing their reliability.”

Recently NASA proposed “ecopoiesis” on Mars –- creating a functioning ecosystem that can support life. Their idea is to send select Earth organisms–like certain cyanobacteria–to Mars, which can then feed on the planet’s rocky terrain to produce oxygen. “Ultimately, biodomes on Mars that enclose ecopoiesis-provided oxygen through bacterial or algae-driven conversion systems might dot the red planet, housing expeditionary teams,” according to a NASA statement. However, the space agency didn’t provide word on how much carbon dioxide the organisms would need, and whether or not they could be sustained by air produced by crew members.

And then there’s MOXIE–the Mars Oxygen In situ resource utilization Experiment–which could negate the reliance on plant-based oxygen. Developed by MIT researchers, this machine works by taking carbon dioxide from the Mars atmosphere and splitting it into oxygen and carbon monoxide. A low-scale version of MOXIE will make its way to Mars on NASA’s next rover, planned for a 2020 launch. If it works, MOXIE could provide a renewable source of oxygen without the conundrum posed by growing crops.

Mars 2020 Rover

You May Not Even Make It There At All

All of these scenarios only become critical issues if you actually make it to Mars in the first place. But the sad truth is you might not even survive the trip. Barring any complications with the spacecraft’s hardware or any unintended run-ins with space debris, there’s still a big killer lurking out in space that can’t be easily avoided: radiation.

Beyond lower Earth orbit, the deep space environment is filled with cosmic rays—highly energized particles. This space radiation easily penetrates the walls of spacecraft, and it’s possible that long-term exposure can have weird effects on human health.

A recent study on mice revealed that long-term exposure to cosmic rays might lead to some abnormal changes in the brain. After subjecting mice to simulated cosmic rays, researchers noticed the mice had lost many important brain synapses. Subsequent behavioral studies on the mice showed they exhibited less curiosity and seemed confused—an eerie result, with upsetting implications for a future trip to Mars.

Beyond lower Earth orbit, the deep space environment is filled with cosmic rays.

But perhaps even more alarming is space radiation’s known ability to increase the likelihood of getting cancer. Currently, NASA monitors every astronaut’s lifetime exposure to space radiation over the course of his or her career. If ever an individual reaches a 3-percent increased risk of fatal cancer from space radiation, NASA grounds the astronaut for good.

On the space station, astronauts are partially protected from cosmic rays thanks to the Earth’s magnetic field, so it takes them some time before they reach that 3 percent limit. But on a years long, deep space voyage, there’s no magnetosphere to keep them safe. Plus some astronauts may be more susceptible to radiation exposure than others.

“Because women in general live longer than men, in the NASA prediction model, they’re much more likely to develop cancer in their lifetime with the same amount of exposure as a male,” says Dorit Donoviel, deputy chief scientist of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI), says. “Calculations have indicated a woman probably should not go to Mars, because the cumulative exposure over the duration of the mission would exceed the maximum allowable 3 percent lifetime cancer risk.”

Mars or Bust?

All of this may seem like a major bummer, but it highlights just how many obstacles we need to overcome before heading to Mars. NASA admits they’re not quite ready either, with the space agency currently soliciting ideas from the general public on how to keep Mars astronauts safe. The contest—dubbed the “Journey to Mars Challenge“—will award $5,000 to three winning participants who come up with ways to develop the elements necessary for sustaining a human presence on the red planet.

“This could include shelter, food, water, breathable air, communication, exercise, social interactions and medicine, but participants are encouraged to consider innovative and creative elements beyond these examples,” NASA said in a statement about the challenge.

Little is known about SpaceX’s plans for a Mars mission, but CEO Elon Musk says he hopes to unveil the details later this year. Yet NASA administrator Charles Bolden has a message for SpaceX, Mars One, and all other private companies with big dreams of visiting the fourth rock from the sun: You’re going to need help. Speaking at a U.S. House Committee Meeting in April focusing on space and technology, Bolden expressed his confidence in NASA’s efforts to get to Mars despite the challenges, though he holds less confidence for all private endeavors. “No commercial company without the support of NASA and government is going to get to Mars.”

The challenges of surviving long-term in a Mars habitat are also explored in The Martian, the debut novel of Andy Weir which will be getting the Hollywood treatment later this year. The book follows astronaut Mark Watney, who struggles to survive alone on Mars after his crew mistakes him for dead and leaves the planet without him. Watney must overcome significant obstacles, such as growing his own food and finding clever ways to procure water. Weir echoes a sentiment shared by NASA: Even if you have all the right technology, you can’t just prepare for a perfectly executed mission. “The main thing you have to do for a Mars trip is account for failures,” he says. “How do you make sure the mission plan accounts for this and that? For the book, I was using my imagination about ‘Hey, what could break?’ But there are several things, several problems we haven’t solved yet.”

Though Weir’s book focuses on the worst-case scenario, he’s confident that we will get to our neighbor someday; it’s just going to take a lot of time and a lot of money. “Getting to Mars is an enormous undertaking that I don’t think we have the technology to do currently,” says Weir. “But we could. It’s going to happen.”

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Editor’s note: Mars One recently narrowed its pool of candidates to 100 people–many of whom we featured in the November 2014 issue (part of which exists here). We’ve reposted this story for your convenience.

I.

Early on a Saturday morning, about 60 planetary malcontents gathered in a narrow auditorium on the campus of George Washington University. They’d come to hear about a plan to build a self-sustaining colony in space, and they hoped to be among its first settlers, leaving the rest of us to live and die on Earth.

“How many of you would like to take a one-way mission to Mars?” asked the balding engineer on stage. His face was a peachy monochrome, with sharp, craggy features set like a mini moonscape, and he had slightly pointed ears. On his lapel, a sticker read: “GREETINGS! MY NAME IS: Bas.”

When nearly everybody raised their hands, Bas Lansdorp’s lips curled into a grin. These were his constituents, the folks who had pledged to serve as guinea pigs for a bold and strange experiment. Just the day before, he had been on CBS This Morning, patiently explaining his idea. “I just want to make sure I understand that correctly,” the dumbfounded host had said. “If you go on this mission, you are going and not coming back.” But here at the first-ever Million Martian Meeting, in August 2013, Lansdorp saw only believers. “Wow, this is a really easy crowd!” he beamed.

Most of the armchair aliens shared a demographic, the young-man Marsophile: guys with tattoos across their necks and arms, goatees and mustaches, variations on the Weird Al look. But there were also older women in the room, and kids too young to drive. What brought them together was an abiding belief in Lansdorp’s central message, that humans should be expanding onto other planets, and they should do so now. A few years ago, President Obama announced that the U.S. would put astronauts in orbit around Mars by the mid-2030s, but budget cuts and sequestration have slowed the project down, if not killed it outright. Even if NASA gets the mission back on track, the agency has said it will only send humans to Mars if it can also bring them back—a maddening bit of bureaucratic circumspection for the crowd assembled in Washington, D.C. “The technology to get you back from Mars simply doesn’t exist,” Lansdorp said, stirring up his audience, and it may not exist even 20 years from now. “We need to do this with the stuff that we have today, and the only way we can do that is by going there to stay.”

“The technology to get you back from Mars simply doesn’t exist. We need to do this with the stuff that we have today, and the only way we can do that is by going there to stay.”

Until three years ago, Lansdorp had little to do with Mars. Trained as a mechanical engineer, he co-owned a wind-energy startup that aims to generate power using tethered gliders. But in 2011, the Dutch entrepreneur sold some of his stake in the business and started working on a grand idea: If governments are too stingy for a trip to Mars, or too risk-averse, then private business should take over. “I realized that if it’s going to happen, I’d have to do it myself,” he said to the crowd. Along with his Mars One co-founder, Arno Wielders, Lansdorp devised a plan to fund the trip primarily by selling it as entertainment. In studying the Olympics, Lansdorp found that the broadcast rights yield upward of a billion dollars. A reality television show about the first extraplanetary town in history, he figures, could be worth much more—at least the $6 or 7 billion necessary to build and launch the payloads.

The show would need a cast, of course, and that’s where the meeting’s would-be Martians sought to do their part. Since April 2013, Lansdorp’s team has been screening résumés sent in from around the world by anyone who cares to pay a modest application fee (the amount varied by country). The first phase of this stunt ended last December, when they narrowed down the pool to 1,058. These hopefuls will be interviewed and the group further whittled down this year. In the end, just four will be selected for the first mission—two men and two women, each from a different continent on Earth. Their trip to Mars is scheduled to land in 2025.

The people in the auditorium knew they faced long odds of being chosen, and that even if they were selected, the project might not make it off the ground. Still, Mars One has given hope to hordes of folks who have so far harbored their peculiar dreams in private. During the casting process, some 200,000 people checked in at the Mars One website, and a related interest group on Facebook accumulated 10,000 members. One tattooed young man in D.C. wore a T-shirt with a message that summed up the spirit of those assembled: “Bas is sending me to Mars,” it said across the front; on the back it read, “Thanks, Bas, you’re a good dude.”

For someone who doesn’t share the dream—an Earth-bound journalist, perhaps—that spirit seems quixotic at best and suicidal at worst. If Lansdorp sends four people to their living ends on a harsh and empty world, what will have been the point? Is Bas a good dude, or a dangerous megalomaniac? Lansdorp has a ready answer for any doubters: “People can’t imagine that there are people who would like to do this,” he said, as he wrapped up his presentation. “They say we’re going to Mars to die. But of course we’re not going to Mars to die. We’re going to Mars to live.”

II.

Meet The Mars One Candidates.

In January, NASA scientists announced they’d found a jelly doughnut on Mars. Or at least, a rock that looked a little like a pastry, with white around its edges and a strawberry-colored center. That such a find should have been the subject of global news reports says less about its own significance—it was just a rock, after all—than it does about the barren world on which it settled.

It’s been 10 years since Spirit and Opportunity, the twin rovers, landed on the Red Planet. In that time they’ve rolled around for almost 30 miles, taking stock of a terrain that reaches out in all directions as a pock-marked plain of dusty, murky brown. They’ve weathered temperatures that range from 70° in the summertime to -225° in Martian winter, frequent and ferocious dust storms, an unbreathable atmosphere consisting mainly of carbon dioxide, and enough radiation from cosmic rays and solar flares to riddle a person’s DNA with cancerous mutations. Who would choose to spend a life in such a nasty, brutish place?

At the conference lunch, I put this question to a young man named Max Fagin. Forget your likely death on the mission, I said. Pretend that there will be no computer glitch or landing failure, and that your ship won’t end up inside a giant fireball. Imagine that you won’t get sick or break a limb and have no doctor to help you. Let’s say that technically it all goes right. What, then, about the stuff that you’ll have left behind forever? What about the feel of falling snow, the gentle breeze, or swimming on a scorching day?

“I would feel incredibly sad about missing all those things,” said Fagin, a master’s student in aerospace engineering at Purdue University. “But the whole point of going to Mars is that you’d have better substitutes. Any human being can visit the ocean. Anyone can visit the forest. These are beautiful things, but they are commonplace. I will get the chance to experience a sunrise on Mars. I will get the chance to stand at the foot of Olympus Mons, one of the tallest mountains in the solar system. I will get the chance to see two moons in the sky. I just can’t imagine being nostalgic for a life that 6 or 7 billion people are experiencing right now.”

“Any human being can visit the ocean. Anyone can visit the forest. These are beautiful things, but they are commonplace. I will get the chance to experience a sunrise on Mars. I will get the chance to stand at the foot of Olympus Mons.”

There were a few more Martians at the table with us; we were eating sandwiches and sushi, foods an astronaut could only dream of. I asked Fagin, Won’t the novelty wear thin? What happens when you’ve seen that sun rise and set a hundred times, and when you’ve walked around Olympus Mons? What happens when you’re in your cramped habitat with nothing much to do except the grim work of staving off an early death? And what about the food? I jabbed my chopstick at a Whole Foods tuna maki. What happens when you’re forced to live on undressed mini lettuce from your agri-pod?

Fagin waited for me to finish my speech, his face a quiet picture of condescension. “You’re seeing things from a narrow point of view,” he said. “It only seems weird to you because of when and where you live. I mean, would you ask an Inuit how he can stand the boredom of all the snow and rock?”

I stuttered for a second and fell silent. Why indeed should I take my pampered life on Earth as a baseline? Maybe life on Mars wouldn’t be so different from the lives that humans led for thousands of generations. Later on I’ll find rebuttals to his argument: The Arctic teems with wild animals and plants, hardly like the lifeless wasteland one would find on Mars. And, as it happens, the Inuit do suffer dire rates of suicide and depression. But I’m sure these facts wouldn’t matter much to Fagin. In 2010, he spent two weeks crammed into a tiny research station in the empty Utah desert, where students tried to simulate a stay on Mars and put on space suits every time they went out for a walk. “I didn’t have as much time there as I wanted,” he told me.

But what about your family? I sounded desperate now, as if I needed to make him see that Mars One would only lead to misery and death. Yet Max Fagin would not be swayed. The colonists will be more in touch with home than soldiers were in Vietnam, he said, and certainly more so than the migrants who came to America before the first transatlantic cable. The first settlers on Mars will trade video-mail with their families. “My parents have been comfortable with the notion for quite a while now,” Fagin said. “They know that they’re going to lose me eventually, because the planet is going to lose me.”

Meet The Mars One Candidates.

III.

Late in the afternoon, once the presentations had wrapped up and the Martians were gathering for a postconference trip to the National Air and Space Museum, I found Lansdorp near the stage. He had just finished an interview and the camera crew was packing up. He seemed wearied by his publicity tour; his grins appeared forced when replying to questions that he had been asked again and again since the project was announced. “Saving humanity is not anywhere on my list of reasons to do this,” he told a small ring of reporters. “I started this because I wanted to go myself.”

Though he calls himself a lifelong Mars enthusiast, Lansdorp didn’t have the expertise to plan the mission alone. As a graduate student at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, he designed systems for a hypothetical space station, and that’s how he connected with Wielders, a payload study manager at the European Space Agency. “He knows about space, and I don’t,” Lansdorp said. Wielders told him that a one-way mission would be feasible, if they could raise a lot of money. That’s when the pair devised their plan to sell the broadcast rights and show the journey on TV.

Their concept has some flaws. Big-event programs make a lot of money, but they’re often brief and action-packed. (Lansdorp’s model, the Olympics, is a good example.) Mars One wants to run a show for decades, with most of the airtime in the next 10 years dedicated to the arduous process of crew training. What happens if networks aren’t interested in a multiyear commitment? What if no one likes the show? Or what if everything is going well, and then the colonists decide they want some privacy, and turn off the cameras?

“Saving humanity is not anywhere on my list of reasons to do this. I started this because I wanted to go myself.”

To work out the details, Lansdorp recruited the help of one of the biggest names in European reality TV: Paul Römer, the co-creator of the Netherlands’ Big Brother. He emailed the producer blind, and heard back right away. (“What are the odds?” Lansdorp says. “You contact some media expert and he turns out to be a science-fiction fan!”) In June, Mars One signed a contract with Darlow Smithson Productions, a subsidiary to a company where Römer once served as chief creative officer. The show will document the candidate-selection process and could potentially air in early 2015.

As for the space technology, Mars One says nothing will be built in-house; Lansdorp wants to purchase all equipment off the shelf or develop it with private vendors. He expects to use an upgraded version of the Falcon 9 rocket produced by SpaceX, and a landing capsule from SpaceX or Lockheed Martin. He’ll need a pair of rovers, too, not built for science like the NASA bots, but for moving Martian soil and laying sheets of thin-film solar panels, in preparation for the settlers’ arrival.

The Mars One timeline is ambitious—perhaps too ambitious. It’s not clear that Lansdorp’s contractors will be able to tweak their technologies (for rovers, life-support units, space suits, and so on) to fit the needs of the mission at the necessary pace. And given the expense of recent, much more modest missions to the Red Planet—Mars Science Laboratory, which involved landing only the Curiosity rover, cost $2.5 billion—Lansdorp’s projected price tag seems rather low. While Mars One won’t say how much money it has in the bank, the company does not appear to have raised more than a tiny fraction of what it needs. “At this moment, the weakest link is really the fund-raising,” Lansdorp said at the meeting. “If we had the $6 billion in the bank right now, I’m very convinced that we could pull this off. But to convince the people who have to give the money upfront to finance the hardware—that’s our biggest challenge.”

Even the attendees in D.C. had some doubts about Mars One. “We know this could fail. We know it’s a long shot,” one told me. But that’s not really the point. Lansdorp has shown that their path to Mars need not be blocked by budget-cutting bureaucrats. They don’t need to wait for guys like Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, or Dennis Tito, the millionaire who plans to mount a Mars flyby in 2021. Earlier this year, more than 8,000 people pledged $300,000 to Mars One on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo. A few years ago, all these dreamers would have been alone in their frustration. Now they’re meeting up online and organizing conferences. The Martians have a movement, and it’s growing.

IV.

When I describe Mars One to friends, many seem to take it personally; they call the Martians lunatics or worse. They’re not unusual. On the Aspiring Martians Facebook group, knee-jerk hostility has been the subject of many long discussions. As one user wrote in January, “I’m sure I’m not the first one to have noticed that anywhere anything Mars One–related is posted, we’re told (in the comments) that we are crazy, wannabes, psychologically deviant, on a suicide mission, in for a rude awakening, the mission is a hoax, technology needed doesn’t exist, and, in some cases, that we deserve to die for participating.”

Lansdorp sees this too. There are some people who want to go to Mars, he said during the conference, and lots who don’t. “These people will never really understand each other.” But a simple lack of understanding does not explain the anger that emerges when the Martians share their dream in public. It’s not just that their trip seems difficult or crazy. It’s that they seem to be running from Earth. What’s wrong with our planet?, we want to ask. Life here isn’t good enough for you? Or perhaps it’s something personal: I’m not good enough for you?

“It has nothing to do with anything rational,” Lansdorp told me, when explaining why anyone would want to go to Mars. “It’s almost the same as love. You want it for some reason you cannot really explain, and sometimes one love is more powerful than other loves that you have.” Lansdorp began his project because he wanted to go to Mars himself, but now that he and his girlfriend are expecting a child, he says he has given up the idea of going first. He doesn’t want to miss seeing his child grow up. “But I do understand there are people who would do that,” he said.

The desire to go to Mars is “almost the same as love. You want it for some reason you cannot really explain.”

I wouldn’t leave my girlfriend, either. When I look into the sky, I feel only wonder—a movement of the mind, not of the heart. But as we spoke, I thought back to a Q&A I’d once attended with the astronaut Michael J. Massimino. Someone asked him what it’s like to take a spacewalk and see the Earth from far away. He said it was the most amazing sight he’d ever seen, but that it also made him deeply sad. Why? Because he knew that he’d never have the chance to share the vision with the people he loved the most.

In that light, a one-way trip to Mars made a peculiar sort of sense. An astronaut doesn’t abandon his family, and choose another, greater love to take its place. Instead he ventures into outer space on their behalf, on behalf of everyone he leaves behind, no matter the physical or emotional cost. The would-be Martians talk of sleeping under double-moon-lit skies, but they also know that they’ll be as alone as any human beings in the history of time. And that’s precisely why their journey matters, for us as well as them: They’ll live on Mars, so the rest of us don’t have to.

Just before I left the conference, I met another Martian, Leila Zucker. She’s a physician in her 40s, happily married, yet inclined to set it all aside. “I can work to make things better on Earth while I’m here,” she told me, “but I could work to make things better on Earth while I’m on Mars. The idea that I’m running away or something . . . no, I’m not. People who think that are small-minded and scared. The whole idea is to expand the human race.”

Earlier she’d spoken on a panel, taking questions from the crowd. “None of us are planning to die, but all of us recognize that we could,” she said at one point. “You don’t get my life for nothing, but I will give it up because this is my dream.” Then, as the session drew to a close, she abruptly began to sing: “I wanted to go to the Red Planet Mars/but I didn’t get picked by Bas/I wanted to go to the Red Planet Mars/now I gaze longingly at the stars/But I don’t care I wasn’t picked for space/I’m cheering for the future of the human race/Someday we’ll all go to the Red Planet Mars/’Cause Mars One leads the way to the stars!”

When she sang the last two lines a second time, all the other Martians joined in.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of Popular Science under the title “Bas Lansdorp Has A Posse.”

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First discovered more than 20 years ago, “Mars spiders” are not freaky eight-legged aliens. Instead, the term refers to dramatic fractal contours carved into the surface of the red planet, with dark valleys radiating out like arachnid limbs. Now, scientists have demonstrated on Earth what may actually cause these unique martian features: the sublimation (or direct transformation from solid to gaseous states) of carbon dioxide-rich ice at the south pole.

In a new paper published in Scientific Reports, scientists in Ireland and the UK recreated miniature versions of Mars spiders in a Mars Simulation Chamber that recreates the planet’s atmospheric conditions. The team drilled holes into solid carbon dioxide—i.e., dry ice—to simulate the natural vent structures in Mars’s polar ice caps. Then they placed the dry ice over sediment that simulated martian terrain. When the solid ice touched the sediment, parts of it began to immediately turn to gas. 

When scientists later examined these blocks of dry ice, they found those same spidery, spindly cracks had formed where escaping carbon dioxide had tunneled through the ice.

“It is exciting because we are beginning to understand more about how the surface of Mars is changing seasonally today,” said planetary scientist and lead author Lauren McKeown in a statement.

At the dawn of the new century, shortly after the spiders were first observed, planetary scientist Hugh Kieffer posited that these dark Mars spiders were gas channels pushing their way through ice, visible as shadows because of just how transparent that ice was. In the “legs” of the spiders, Kieffer added, were probably streams of carbon dioxide heated straight to gas form after being warmed by the martian springtime sun.

[Related: Was there ever life on Mars? Perseverance’s SHERLOC laser sniffs for microscopic clues]

The spiders show up consistently near the red planet’s south pole during the spring, in an area called the “Cryptic Terrain.” “Kieffer’s hypothesis has been well-accepted for over a decade, but until now, it has been framed in a purely theoretical context,” McKeown added in her statement. 

At the moment there’s no way to say that this is definitely what is happening at the martian ice caps, but this experiment is the first to demonstrate that Kieffer’s theory can in fact yield these spider-like formations. And that’s a big step towards understanding how weather and climate impact the red planet’s landscape.

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Not so long ago, most scientists thought of Mars as dead and cold. But, as we previously reported, microbial life could be hiding beneath the red planet’s surface, kept warm by its core and fed by radiation from rocks. Now, another study shows that Mars might have hosted volcanic explosions as recent as 50,000 years ago—practically last week in geologic time.

Such recent activity raises the possibility that, volcanically, Mars “may still be active, even today,” says David Horvath, a planetary scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, who led the study while at the University of Arizona.

What’s more, NASA’s InSight mission has picked up Marsquakes coming from the area Horvath studied. The quakes suggest there could still be molten magma below the surface, warming the frozen underground and making make liquid water possible around volcanic hotspots, Horvath says. That could create a subterranean haven for life under Mars.

The team, based out of the University of Arizona, looked at a single fissure, one of several splits in the ground known collectively as the Cerberus Fossae. They found it surrounded by a dark region which they think is ash and debris from a volcanic eruption. The fissures stretch across the Martian surface for miles, although they’re fairly shallow. The one in question is only about 20 meters deep, Horvath says.

[Related: Life could be hiding deep under Mars]

They focused on this particular fissure because it stands out. It’s surrounded by visibly dark material which retains heat well, according to thermal imaging, Horvath says. The researchers think lava flowed out of the fissure, creating the dark patch. The spot isn’t too far from the volcano Elysium Mons in the equatorial region of Mars known as the Elysium Planitia.

They dated the feature by counting the craters in the dark layer that coats it. With basically no weather on Mars, impact craters stick around on the surface for eons. By counting the number per area, you can estimate the age of the area—the older it is, the more craters you should find.

Some of the craters were dark—the same color as the surrounding zone—and some lighter craters peeked through. The team interpreted this as a sign that the old craters got filled in with the darker lava and ash and the new craters broke through that dark layer, revealing the rock underneath.

They estimated that the site formed between 50,000 and 200,000 years ago.

The crater counting technique they use to estimate the age is “pretty standard,” says Erika Rader, a volcanologist at the University of Idaho who wasn’t involved with the study. But their age estimate relies on the assumption that the feature is the result of volcanism, she says. It’s possible the features aren’t volcanic at all, though we’d need a closer look at them to be sure—ideally a microscopic look.

“There’s a ton of sediment and there’s a ton of wind on Mars,” she says. Seen from afar, these moving particles can create similar patterns to volcanic processes.

If Mars was volcanically active, though, it’s not impossible that life could be hanging out in little underground islands around the larger Martian volcanoes. If Mars volcanoes are similar to those on Earth, they could have been active for millions of years, preserving those habitable pockets, Rader says. But it’s still a very extreme environment. By contrast, one deep underground and fed by radiation would probably be more stable, she says.

As for the possibility of current volcanic activity on Mars? “I want it to be true,” Rader says. “But … this paper alone would not convince me of that.”

Between InSight’s findings of Marsquakes and heat measurements on Mars, Rader says there’s “clearly enough evidence” to warrant a Mars mission dedicated to finding out whether the red planet still has a molten core.

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Dr. Fred Calef’s official title is Geospatial Information Scientist for the Curiosity Rover, but at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory they call him the Keeper of the Maps. Dr. Calef’s job isn’t just to make maps of Mars, but to bring together all of the data that can range from types of rocks, slope angles and elevation changes, into one intelligible record for the team at the Mars Science Laboratory.

Before Mars, Calef worked for a transportation agency in Massachusetts and for small local governments mapping watersheds, then got a Ph.D. in geology. Now, after years of working on the Curiosity mission, Calef is gearing up for the launch of Insight in 2016, NASA’s next mission to Mars. He has already begun doing landing-site analysis for Insight.

Dr. Calef took some time out of his 831st Martian sol to talk to us about his job and where he plans to set up camp on Mars.

Dr. Fred Calef

Popular Science: How did you get the name “the Keeper of the Maps”?

Dr. Calef: That name was given to me by the principal scientist on the Curiosity mission, Dr. John Grotzinger, and I use the title any chance that I get.

How does one become the keeper of the maps?

Right place, right time, right skillset. I have my PhD in geology, and one of the tools I learned was mapmaking, specifically digital mapmaking. Eventually I applied at JPL to do landing site analysis for the Curiosity rover. A few months before the mission was scheduled to land, I was asked to join the team as the ‘Keeper of the Maps’.

We can figure out: Where do we want to go to do the science?

How do you create a map of another planet?

We start out just the same way you would make a map on Earth; we start by making a base map, specifically with photos from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The MRO has a camera on it called HIRISE, the High-Resolution Science Experiment. HIRISE takes pictures at roughly 25 centimeters square, about the size of a dinner plate. So if you put a dinner plate on Mars, it could take a picture of it, or at least it would show up as a bright dot. When we take pictures of the ground we can take them at different angles, and when we do we can create an elevation model. With that information we can see the shape of craters and rocky areas and figure out where it’s safe to land, where it’s safe to drive the rover and, just as important, where do we want to go to do the science?

How about images from Curiosity?

Every time the rover drives we take images all around us, 360 degrees, and then we take those images and match it up to the HIRISE base map and that helps identify where the rover is located. From there we can see the rocks that are in front of us and can decide to take a color picture of them, shoot them with the CHEMCAM laser to see what those rocks are made of, or take out the rover arm to investigate further.

How do you come up with the names for the locations on Mars. Have you named any?

It’s mostly formal, but we have a little bit of leeway to pick from interesting rock formations on Earth. MSL (Mars Science Laboratory) science team members who’ve mapped the geology in a specific landing site area could pick a name related to their favorite rock formation; for example, one region is named Kimberly after Kimberly, Australia. One of my rocks I’ve given a name is Coeymans, which is a limestone formation near Albany, New York. It’s a place I visited a lot with my family and while I was getting my PhD. It’s also really interesting geologically.

Would you say that know more about the terrain of Mars than Earth?

The joke I tell my friends whenever I get lost trying to get somewhere to meet them is: “Ask me where to go on Mars, fine; ask me on Earth, good luck!” It’s probably the case in some areas that, yeah, I know Mars a lot better than I do Earth, for better or for worse. That’s what GPS is made for.

What is it like to know more about another planet than your own?

It’s strange because when I’m here at JPL, I’m living in this Mars world. The viewpoint of the rover is like you’re standing on the surface and so I’m used to seeing that everyday, and I forget that other people don’t know what that’s like. It becomes casual, but I know it’s not.

If we ever start a colony on Mars, where is the sweet spot to live in your opinion?

Oh boy, that’s tough. This is where the engineer kicks in. I’d have to ask: what resources do we have there? What’s interesting? I do like Gale Crater, it has some benefits. It has some atmosphere over it, which means you don’t get as much radiation. It doesn’t have any water-ice though which is a bummer, but assuming you can solve that problem there are a lot of interesting things, geologically speaking. Gale Crater is probably my favorite because I already live there so to speak. That’s my pick.

Gale Crater is probably my favorite.

Has mapping Mars helped us learn more about Earth?

Earth is about 4 billion years old and Mars is about 4 billion years old. On Earth we can only see back about 3 billion years, and then when we talk about anything older than that, we’re taking about microscopic zircon crystals which you can barely hold with a pair of tweezers, so we don’t really know what the old Earth looked like. However, on Mars, a big part of its early development is preserved. If you want to know what ancient Earth looked like, look at Mars, because it’s probably pretty similar. When you combine what Mars was in the past with what Earth became you kind of get the full picture of planet development. So studying Mars can really provide insight into how Earth came to be the way it is.

What most surprised you about the surface of Mars?

I think that there was a lot more water than we thought. We saw outcrops from orbit and thought, oh that was probably a lava flow and now when the rover gets close up, we see that it was probably laid down by water. It’s making us go back and look at everything else on Mars and ask: do we really understand how those rocks got there? It’s been a huge shift in how we think about Mars. We used to look at images and say maybe there was a little water here, a little water there, but now it’s maybe there was just water everywhere; definitely a lot more than we thought.

With the help of orbiters like the MRO and rovers like Curiosity, you have plotted a large portion of Mars already. How much more do you have left before you consider the planet completely mapped?

We have imaging of the entire planet, some better, some worse, but in terms of maps and rock formations, I don’t know if we’ll ever have it mapped completely with enough detail. We’ve got a long way to go, and plenty more to explore, which is a good thing.

Mapping Mars

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It’s noon in Ocotillo Wells, California. A vast and empty patch of desert between San Diego and the Salton Sea, this part of California might as well be Mars. After just a few minutes, everything is covered with a fine white dust, soft to the touch, like powdered sugar. Kris Zacny, the vice president and director of exploration technology at Honeybee Robotics, grabs his hardhat and vest out of his car and walks over to a U-Haul that is serving as mission control. Today, Zacny and his team will begin testing the Planetary Deep Drill, designed to penetrate miles under the surface of places like Mars and Europa to search for one thing: evidence of life.

The Planetary Deep Drill isn’t an ordinary drill like you might have in your house for hanging photos or building Ikea furniture. To assist in arguably one of the most important searches in human history, the Planetary Deep Drill contains a microscope, camera, and LED and UV lights. The UV light will help identify microbes and minerals that fluoresce, not unlike a black light used to identify organics at a crime scene.

This is the first test of the Planetary Deep Drill in the field. Until now, its mechanical systems have only been tested in the lab. Honeybee Robotics is currently the only organization working on a drill like this. NASA worked on their own design in the past, but now they’re partnering with engineers at Honeybee Robotics to someday get it into space.

The drill stands about 16 feet tall

The drill is not yet scheduled to launch to another planet, and couldn’t do so for at least a decade. “There’s nothing on the books right now,” Jim Green, the director of planetary science at NASA, tells us, “but it’s almost a no-brainer that we will eventually have to develop something like this.”

The most likely location for the first off-Earth drill site is Mars. We know the poles of Mars have ice, but if anything’s surviving there, it’s most likely to be deep underground, away from the radiation that constantly bombards Mars’ surface. We know much less about Europa, but we do know that it’s covered in a thick ice crust that can be as deep as eleven miles in some places. The real mystery of Europa lies below the surface in a massive saltwater ocean that contains more water than all of Earth’s water sources combined–a potential hotbed for microbial life.

T-5 Minutes To Testing

A crew of five has a large television screen hooked up with data loading in real time as they get ready for their research to begin. The U-Haul overlooks a gypsum quarry, a mine owned and operated by a private company called USG (United States Gypsum) that has offered its prized rocks to Honeybee for the experiment. There are no people, no animals, and a few sparse shrubs. The crew have stocked mission control with plenty of snacks and water in preparation for a few long weeks of drilling.

Zacny and Gale Paulsen, deputy director of Honeybee Robotics, have driven down from their offices in Pasadena and despite the three-hour drive, are unabashedly excited to see their project break ground.

One of the project engineers grabs a lever at the back of the drill and manually lowers the tungsten carbide drill bit to the surface, signaling to the U-Haul mission control to turn on the motors.

Planetary Deep Drill

The specially designed drill bit is meant to cut through extremely hard layers of rock and ice. This gypsum quarry is not anywhere near cold (it was 80 degrees when we visited) and definitely not icy like the poles of Mars. But this particular location just happens to be the thickest gypsum deposit in the United States. Gypsum is a brittle rock, but when layered is very strong and serves as a close analog to ice that has been evaporated and re-condensed on planetary surfaces for millions of years. While you might be able to scrape the surface with your fingernail, drilling kilometers down requires a tool strong enough to break through the ice and rock.

On the base of the 16-foot-tall drill, stickers representing the partners are proudly displayed: Honeybee Robotics, The American Museum of Natural History, USG, NASA, and The Planetary Society. All of the drill’s supporters, Zacny says, “have the same goal: exploration.”

Developing something to explore another planet requires ingenuity. The team had to be very creative in designing a drill to work flawlessly billions of miles from any Home Depots or humans. The Planetary Deep Drill will have to function completely autonomously.

“It’s almost a no-brainer that we will eventually have to develop something like this.”

“Our biggest challenge, aside from autonomy, is geological uncertainty,” explains Zacny. “The water on Mars and Europa isn’t clean; it’s essentially a salty brine which can change freezing phases from -50C to -70C. Then there could be embedded rock, layers of rock or layers of fallen meteorites, and the drill has to be able to go through any of those variations.”

The drill also needs to fit onto a spacecraft.

Though the company aims for the drill to bore through hundreds of feet of the Martian underground (and in the case of Europa, up to 5 miles of ice), the drill itself is only 13 feet high with a bit at the very tip. To reduce the bulk of the cargo that would need to launch with the drill, Honeybee designed a cable to lower and raise the drill into the bore hole. The cable functions like fishing line that can roll into a small container and release or retract as needed. Paulsen points to the large pile of cable and says, “we are only limited by the amount of cable we can bring on board, because it can lower the drill as far as it needs to go.”

Drilling Begins

The drill falls into the small borehole. Mission control has fired up the motors and the field test has begun.

The sound of the tungsten carbide drill bit is surprisingly quiet as it grinds against the 6.3-million-year-old rock; only a faint clicking sound can be heard despite it only being centimeters below the surface. The team watches attentively, listening to the muffled sound of grinding gypsum and periodically glancing at the large TV screen displaying the data: drill depth, temperature, revolutions per minute. After 30 minutes, the first session is complete. They’ve drilled down 20 centimeters, and their goal is at least 10 feet by the end of the day.

Zacny and Paulsen walk over to the drill and watch as the team raises the winch, slowly revealing the drill as it comes out of the borehole. In each crevice of the spiral patterned auger are globs of white ground gypsum. Their engineers grab a brush, a small cardboard box and a Ziploc bag, and start to clean the drill, collecting the gypsum dust to study later at the lab. This is just one example of something the drill will eventually have to do on its own–clean the catchment and get back to work.

“We are doing this to prove that it works, to prove that it can be done.”

There are a lot of other factors to take into account aside from cleaning and taking samples. The drill has to actually work, and there’s one big challenge to think about when planning to drill outside of Earth’s cozy environment: gravity. Mars has one-third of the gravity of Earth. “We don’t have the same thrust on Mars because everything weighs three times less,” Zacny explains. “Normally we would rely on weight to force down the drill bit, but that wasn’t an option for a planetary drill like this.” So instead Paulsen and Zacny designed a drill that would push itself down by pressing on the side of the bore-hole, making the force of gravity, or lack thereof, irrelevant to its function.

The next generation drill that may eventually head to the poles of Mars will likely be half the size of this test drill and will replace the microscope with a UV/Raman spectrometer called SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals). This spectrometer has already been approved to fly on board the Mars 2020 rover to conduct a similar mission: detecting biosignatures in the Martian soil. But the rover’s soil samples will come from a much shallower bore hole–2 to 3 inches deep, at the most. Designed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, SHERLOC will be able to take readings as the drill goes deeper below the surface and should confirm whether or not life exists in that region of Mars.

Round 2

The team gathers around mission control as they begin round two of the test. They will operate the drill like this in 30-minute increments over the next few weeks until they have reached their goal depth of 30 meters (or about 100 feet). “We are doing this to prove that it works, to prove that it can be done,” says Zacny.

After this test in the desert, the Honeybee team will eventually take their drill to a more extreme environment, such as Greenland. There they will have the closest analog to places like the poles of Mars. Testing in well-below freezing temperatures will give them a better idea as to how the electronics might function in the freezing Martian environment.

Planetary Deep Drill bores through gypsum rock during its first field tests

Zacny and Paulsen aren’t rookies at working on Martian research. They have had their hands in several missions to Mars. Honeybee has worked on the sampling system for the Curiosity Rover, the drill on the Mars Exploration Rovers, as well as the sampling scoop and spectrometer for the Phoenix lander. The company is even working on a sampling system for the future Mars 2020 rover.

“This is a revolution in planetary exploration,”says Bruce Betts, the Planetary Society’s director of science and technology. “The farthest we’ve drilled autonomously with robots is centimeters, so to be able to do this, to drill down not just meters but tens and hundreds, it would be a revolutionary.”

Jim Green from NASA is also on board for digging deep. “This is an opportunity to see if life exists on Mars,” he says. “When you get into the extremes, life moves into the rocks. We know that there’s more life in the biosphere below our feet than all life in the ocean, and a drill that gets us down many meters will enable us to properly investigate.”

The crew decides to scope out the quarry from a more Martian-like vantage point as the drilling continues well into the day. The sun has lowered in the sky and hovers over a nearby mountain as the iron oxide on the hills pick up the sunlight, giving everything a warm reddish hue. One could fool oneself into thinking this really was Mars.

Today’s test is one of many, but at only 10 feet below ground, Zacny is not shy about hiding his enthusiasm. “I already consider this test a huge success,” he says. “Now we just have to go to Mars!”

The desert near the Salton sea serves as a great analog for Mars

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The Martian rock recently named N165 found itself thrust into the limelight this week as it received a new neighbor from Earth–the Mars rover Curiosity. Some genius made a Twitter account from the perspective of N165 as it meets Curiosity, attempts to make friends–and is ruthlessly attacked.

View the story “The Sad Tale of Martian Rock N165” on Storify

The Sad Tale of Martian Rock N165

A peaceful rock on Mars gets zapped by Earth lasers

Storified by Popular Science * Mon, Aug 20 2012 07:36:55

The story begins, like any other “sol,” or solar day, in Mars’s Gale Crater–with the addition of an unexpected new neighbor.

It’s a beautiful Sol here in Gale Crater!N165 aka Coronation

So much going on around here lately – the most excitement I’ve had in millions of years! But I’m glad it’s back to normal now.N165 aka Coronation

The big metal creature was scary at first, with the rockets and noise, but I’m sure it’s just curious. Maybe I should say hello!N165 aka Coronation

@MarsCuriosity Hi there! Welcome to the neighborhood! I see that you’re new here — would you like to be friends?N165 aka Coronation

@MarsCuriosity So, uh, is this your first time on Mars?N165 aka Coronation

The big metal creature is still just staring at me. I think maybe it’s a little shy.N165 aka Coronation

This is where things start to go wrong.

Oo, it’s making some kind of whirring sound now. Maybe it’s trying to communicate with me! Hello!N165 aka Coronation

Okay, the big metal creature has stopped whirring now but the staring is getting a little uncomfortable…N165 aka Coronation

@NiskyMom2Four @MarsCuriosity Wait, laser? What laser?N165 aka Coronation

Come on, guys, I know you’re just fooling. What are the chances? Out of all the rocks on Mars, a killer robot would pick me? Haha! :)N165 aka Coronation

My robot friend is still staring, and is making a strange clicking noise now. It’s kind of making me nervous. :/N165 aka Coronation

Hey @MarsCuriosity… um… what are you up to?N165 aka Coronation

< looks around nervously >N165 aka Coronation

Um, @MarsCuriosity, what are you…. hey! … HEY!N165 aka Coronation

OW OW OW! STOP IT!N165 aka Coronation

HELP!N165 aka Coronation

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NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter continues to break new frontiers in its remote-operated adventures across the surface of the Red Planet. After its third and longest-ever flight on Sunday, the four-pound helicopter sent back to Earth its second and third color photos of the surface of our solar neighbor. 

This 80-second jaunt surpassed even what Ingenuity was capable of during tests on Earth, flying farther, further, and faster than ever before. Setting off at 4:31 a.m. EDT, the sprightly helicopter rose 16 feet into the air, matching the height of its second flight. Under the watchful eye of the Perseverance rover, it then sped off downrange for 164 feet, or about half a football field, reaching a top speed of 6.6 feet per second—4.5 miles per hour.

[Related: Ingenuity flew on Mars. Now NASA will push it to the brink of destruction.]

“Today’s flight was what we planned for, and yet it was nothing short of amazing,” said Dave Lavery, the project’s program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a press briefing. “With this flight, we are demonstrating critical capabilities that will enable the addition of an aerial dimension to future Mars missions.”

Capturing these color photos took a true feat of engineering, given the difficulty of tracking the Martian surface at higher speeds. An algorithm must correctly and consistently track the planet’s ground features while maintaining the correct image exposure. Dust can also thwart an otherwise ideal photo opportunity.

The helicopter can capture black and white images, too, using its navigation camera. It uses the same computer that operates the craft, based on instructions sent up hours before updated data is received back on Earth. 

These latest color photos will provide crucial information to guide the future of exploration on Mars, both for Ingenuity itself and for potential future rotorcraft that might also visit the planet.  

Ingenuity touched down on Mars’ surface on April 4, after being deposited there by the Perseverance rover, which serves as a communication base for the copter. It faces a range of challenges in its flights, primarily the thin, wispy Martian air. The atmosphere of the Red Planet has just one percent of the density of our atmosphere here on Earth. 

NASA’s team hopes to set Ingenuity off on its fourth flight in a matter of a few days. 

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What might alien life look like, and what traces would it leave behind? If extraterrestrial plant and plankton analogs fill their planet’s atmosphere with oxygen, or an advanced civilization fills its skies with satellites, we might be able to spot such global upheavals from Earth. But if life elsewhere is small and limited in scale, its fingerprints may be subtle and hard to distinguish, even right in our own cosmic backyard.

Any extraterrestrial critters in our solar system, given the lack of obvious greenery and movement out there, are likely to be simple microbes. Perhaps they burrow deep under the Martian soil to hide from damaging ultraviolet rays. Or perhaps some lie dormant in asteroids, waiting to land in a friendlier environment. A team of researchers at the University of Vienna has tried to guess how such microbes could survive on their own, and what marks they might leave behind, by studying one of Earth’s hardiest bugs. Now, in a recent Nature publication, they detail exactly what happens when you feed meteorites to microbes.

“I want to squeeze out of this important information related to the search for life,” says Tetyana Milojevic, a coauthor and biophysical chemist at the University of Vienna.

Just don’t call this microbe a bacterium. Metallosphaera sedula is a member of an entirely separate kingdom of life known as archea, which were first discovered in hot and salty pools that would be lethal to most organisms. Even within this group of rugged specimens, M. sedula is an extreme survivalist. It prefers extra hot acid—around 160 degrees F and a solution with the astringency of stomach juices. In also tolerates high concentrations of toxic metals, making it a prime example of what Milojevic calls a polyextremophilic microbe—an organism that likes its home extreme in various senses. She also says that M. sedula can survive long periods of dehydration tardigrade style, and speculates that it might be able to handle the radiation of deep space, at least if entombed inside a meteorite.

But what really makes M. sedula a prime suspect for comparison to theoretical space microbes is its diet. Many organisms on Earth—such as plants—metabolize energy from sunbeams, and others even do it from heat sources like deep sea vents. M. sedula, however, feasts by ripping electrons from metals, making a metal-rich meteorite into something of a smorgasbord.

Milojevic and her colleagues weren’t sure which metals the microbe had a taste for, however, or how exactly it would process them, so they borrowed a stony meteorite from Vienna’s Natural History Museum (you just have to ask nicely, Milojevic says) and set up a microbe buffet. They cultured some microbes in a solution containing meteorite powder, and others directly on coin-sized flakes of intact meteorite.

Figuring out how to feed them was easy enough, but the group spent years developing techniques to slice up and analyze the odd bugs after their meals. Most microbes stay squishy, but the more metals M. sedula eats, the crustier and stonier it gets. “[The hardened microbes] damage tools with which you are going to cut” them up with, Milojevic says. After eventually devising methods to separate the stony parts of the microbes from their soft parts as much as possible, the team found three main ways in which M. sedula changes its environment—three potential fingerprints of life.

First, the microbe definitely thrived on meteorite chow. Milojevic jokes that she aimed “to please [her] microorganisms with the best-ever feeding substrate.” The extraterrestrial fragments contained many types of metals, but the group found that M. sedula ate only iron, and in a particular way that left two specific types of iron on the microbe’s surface while it lived. If future missions return samples of Martian rocks, this particular blend of irons could indicate living M. sedula relatives—alien life.

Second, after a hearty iron meal M. sedula poops out nickel sulfate as a byproduct. The presence of this byproduct marks ongoing microbial activity, which would signify an alien microbial hotbed. A Martian rover could be on the lookout for such compounds and use them to find Martian life. “Where there is a concentrated area of nickel,” Milojevic says, “it might be interesting to explore further.”

Finally, the researchers considered what kinds of microfossils the microbe would leave behind. Passively replacing bone with rock as with traditional fossils takes millions of years, but these mineral-munching microbes become what they eat in a matter of weeks. M. sedula accumulates metals in its cell membrane, and after it dies it leaves behind a crusty donut-shaped shell of particular metals and other elements. “They are eating stones and they become stones over the course of their lifetime,” Milojevic says. These hardened envelopes could represent a nearly sure sign of past life on a Mars rock or meteorite, if they can withstand the passage of time.

Now that she knows how the microbes can get by on only extraterrestrial materials, Milojevic would like to see whether they can survive in extraterrestrial environments, perhaps by exposing them to the ravages of space outside the International Space Station. But really, she’ll be biding her time until she can get her hands on some pristine Martian rocks for examination, ready to do some extraterrestrial micro-paleontology. “I think I know everything I need,” she says.

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Acousticians sometimes speculate about how conversations might carry on alien worlds. Of course, you’d have no time to chat if you stood in the open air on Mars: Your blood would boil you to death in seconds. But what about those final screams?

No matter where you are, your voice is a product of how swiftly pressure waves move through your larynx and the frequency at which your vocal cords vibrate. But when shouted into different gases of varying ­densities, the same noises take on new forms. Here’s how a few extraterrestrial atmospheres could change your tune.

Earth: Human ­vocal cords quiver at frequencies adapted to a Goldilocks ­atmosphere—not especially dense or light. Our air’s plentiful nitrogen and scant ­carbon-​dioxide molecules don’t absorb many vibrations, so sound also happens to carry well.

Mars: You’d struggle to be heard on the Red Planet: Its atmosphere is 95 percent carbon ­dioxide—​the molecular bonds of which absorb vibrations extremely well—​so even speakers blasting at full volume would barely be audible 30 feet away. The chilly air’s chemistry also makes audio move sluggishly, slowing down your croons to a husky bass.

Titan: Saturn’s moon is the most Earth-​like world we’ve studied, but its gas mix is about 50 percent denser than ours. Thick, cold air would slow the tremor of vocal cords and the speed of sound itself, deepening your voice and giving it a rasp. The ­sultry tones would travel far thanks to abundant nitrogen gas, which doesn’t do much dampening.

Venus: These thick, chowder-like climes would drop your pitch about half an octave because the heaviness slows your vocal folds’ wiggling. At the same time, though, waves move quickly through the fog, simultaneously giving you a sort of squawky quality—sometimes compared to Donald Duck.

Other worlds: The rest of the rocky bodies orbiting our sun are virtually silent, as is the case in open space. There isn’t enough gas in their thin or nonexistent atmospheres to carry sound waves at all. A few locales might manage to pro­ject the ruckus of, say, a sci-fi movie explosion, but squeaks on the scale of a human voice would falter.

This story originally published in the Noise, Winter 2019 issue of Popular Science.

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Like many seismologists, Bruce Banerdt checks his email every morning for the latest quake report. Unlike others, however, he fervently hopes that the “big one” has finally hit. That’s because the information in his daily briefing comes from an entirely different planet, where “marsquakes” pose no threat to human lives or infrastructure. If a big one does come along, traveling straight through the planet and shaking NASA’s InSight Lander on the surface, it will bring nothing but good news to the researchers seeking a window into Mars’s insides.

The InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) probe landed on Mars in November of 2018, and its suite of instruments, which includes an exquisitely sensitive seismometer as well as magnetic field and weather sensors, has been monitoring the Red Planet’s various rumbles and hums for more than a year. On Monday, the InSight team shared what they’ve learned from the probe’s first ten months of activity with five articles published in Nature Geoscience. The initial results support some expectations while raising new mysteries, and represent a step toward the ultimate goal of understanding why our neighbor looks so different from Earth.

“InSight’s understanding of how these two planets formed and evolved differently will help us understand the formation and evolution of our own planet, and ultimately even planets in other solar systems,” says Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at Brown University and InSight team member.

Red Rumbles

The mission highlight has been confirming that Mars, like the Earth and the moon, shakes.

“We finally, for the first time, have established that Mars is a seismically active planet,” said Banerdt, the InSight Principal Investigator, in a press briefing on February 21.

NASA first sought marsquakes with the Viking landers in the 1970s, but their seismometers remained on the decks of the probes where they measured only wind. InSight placed its instrument directly on the ground with a robotic arm, where it can pick up tremors finer than the width of a single hydrogen atom, according to Daubar. As of September 30, it had registered 174 seismic events, more than 20 of which reached magnitude 3 to 4—perhaps just strong enough for an astronaut to notice, depending on the quake’s depth, but not strong enough to damage any infrastructure.

Earthquakes originate mostly from friction as the tectonic plates that make up our planet’s crust catch and slip on one another as they float over molten rock below. The Martian surface, however, sits more or less still. Most of its quakes come from that surface’s slow contraction over time. Deep down the planet still harbors heat from its formation, and it shrinks as it cools, forcing the crust to crack and shrink with it.

The modest quakes InSight has recorded so far appear to have traveled through the crust, and their numbers more or less match what seismologists predicted based on the behavior of the Earth and moon. Bigger rumbles travel farther though, so the team hopes to infer the location and makeup of Mars’s mantle if they can record some stronger vibrations in the mission’s second year. The current dearth of large quakes is slightly surprising relative to their frequency on Earth and the moon, according to Banerdt, but that could change any day (the catalog of quakes has since reached 450 and counting).

But even the shallow shaking hints at new discoveries. The team tracked two large tremors back to Cerberus Fossae, a region showing visible signs of new faults and lava flows in the last 10 million years (which counts as recent in geologic terms). Simple models predict that this area should have settled down by now, but the quakes suggest that it could still be active today, perhaps even hiding molten magma underground.

Magnetic rocks

More surprises have arisen from InSight’s instrument for measuring magnetism. Earth’s magnetic field springs from its churning metal core, but Mars’s center congealed billions of years ago. Nevertheless, the lander measured an unwavering magnetic field at the surface ten times stronger than what orbiting spacecraft had measured from 100 miles in the sky.

The team interprets this field as evidence of an invisible layer of magnetized rocks buried perhaps a few miles beneath the lander. Back when Mars had a molten core, its field would have lined up the metals in the rocks, and they stayed that way even after the planet froze—a sign that the crust hasn’t experienced any dramatic heatwaves that could have disrupted the magnetization. By further studying the field and even surface rocks in the future, researchers hope to also determine exactly when the core solidified.

More mysterious are magnetic blips and spikes lasting just seconds to minutes long. Researchers say these measurements point to new phenomena high in the atmosphere, perhaps complex interplay between Mars and the solar wind’s electric and magnetic fields.

Missing dust devils

But what might be InSight’s most puzzling mystery is unfolding where the atmosphere meets the surface. The lander doubles as a weather station, measuring wind, temperature, and pressure in nearly real time (you can check out what the weather was doing this week, with a 12 to 24 hour time delay, here). It appears to have touched down in one of the windiest places yet explored, detecting whirling vortices approaching 60 miles per hour—although in the thin Martian air that would feel like a light breeze.

But dust devils—when a windy vortex visibly spins dust into the air—are nowhere to be seen. “The weird thing is,” says Don Banfield, a planetary scientist at Cornell and InSight team member, “we’ve looked several hundred times in the midafternoon timeframe and we have not yet imaged a single one.”

There’s plenty of dust though. InSight’s solar panels are slowly getting blocked by falling grains and satellite imagery confirms that the vortices leave visible tracks across the land surrounding the probe. But the two are barely interacting, and no one knows why. “We really don’t get it. It’s not like one of these things I’m throwing out like, ‘this is fascinating for science,’” Banfield says. “No, we really don’t understand this.”

That’s a problem for a desert planet, where dust shapes the climate much like water shapes that of Earth. What’s more, dust management will be a big part of the lives of any future explorers. Moon dust gave the Apollo astronauts endless trouble during their brief jaunt off world, from hay fever to jammed suit joints, and Mars dust will be no different. NASA will have to understand how the red sand gets into the air and where it goes quite well before it designs airlocks and spacesuits that have to operate for months to years in the gritty environment.

So far InSight may have raised more questions than it’s answered, but when you’re landing novel instruments on an alien planet, what else would you expect? “We’re still trying to get our arms around what Mars is telling us,” Banerdt said during the briefing. “We’re really in the same situation geophysicists were for the Earth in the early 1900s, seeing these wiggles and using the best analysis tools we have. But it’s still a very mysterious situation.”

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Methane is back in the news, but this time not in the dreadful harbinger-of-climate-doom kind of way. The New York Times reported over the weekend that NASA’s Curiosity rover had stumbled upon surprisingly high methane levels in the Martian atmosphere near the Gale Crater—at least three times higher than Curiosity measured in 2013. The announcement, confirmed by NASA, once again stokes hopes that we’ve picked up signs of extraterrestrial life on the red planet.

“It’s always interesting to see new data like this come in, because it gives us something more to think about and assess and analyze,” says Dorothy Oehler, a Houston-based planetary geologist and senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute. The big question on everyone’s mind is whether there’s something we can glean from this peak that explains the origins of Martian methane better than previous investigations. “It’s obviously a pulse of energy and interest. And we’re working to see how real this is.”

But that’s just it—the question of how real this methane spike is, and what it means for the search for life on Mars, is unanswered and complex. More likely than not, this latest observation will only inch us closer to answers, instead of handing them over outright.

Finding methane on another world is a big deal because it’s a gas some microbes on Earth produce. These organisms, methanogens, survive in conditions with very low or no available oxygen, and release methane as a waste product. They’re often found in wetlands, rocks residing deep underground, and even in the digestive tracts of some mammals. Yup, they’re why cow farts and burps are ruining the world.

Bovine flatulence notwithstanding, it’s not hard to see how something like these organisms might have evolved when Mars was warmer and wetter—and how they might even have found a way to survive underground as the red planet became a cold wasteland. Methane breaks down in just a few hundred years once it’s exposed to the atmosphere, so gas at levels detected on Mars must have been released recently.

We’ve detected these spikes before, but those repeated measurements haven’t produced much clarity. The Curiosity rover possesses an incredible onboard suite of scientific instruments, but it’s not optimized to measure these gases or run the sort of assays that could give us a hint of their origin. Oehler previously worked on an independent confirmation of Curiosity’s 2013 methane detection, made possible through observations from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter. It was encouraging evidence that these peaks were real.

And yet the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter—explicitly designed to look more sensitively for levels of methane in the Martian atmosphere down to parts per trillion—found nothing in its first batch of results. We’re certainly finding methane on Mars, but we’re not really any closer to understanding what that means.

The transient nature of these spikes only exacerbates the confusion. NASA confirmed Monday that Curiosity’s read on the methane spike, which peaked at 21 parts per billion, had dwindled back down to background levels below 1 part per billion. “That’s been our experience with methane peaks on Mars,” she says. “They don’t last very long,” vanishing after just one or two Martian days. And even 21 parts per billion is still two orders of magnitude lower than what we see here on Earth.

Perhaps none of Mars’s methane is actually fresh. Methane can get trapped in permafrost and ice on Earth, and Mars has plenty of ice old enough to contain methane produced billions of years ago. “All you have to do,” says Oehler, “is stress the planet or change local conditions in some way that could destabilize the ice” and release the gas out to the surface. These rumbles could be caused by seismic activity, latent volcanic activity, meteor impacts—anything that can open up faults and breach the permafrost seal. Håkan Svedhem, project scientist for the TGO mission at ESA, also adds that shifts in temperatures triggered by seasonal or diurnal effects could open up a path for discrete concentrations of gas to move to the surface.

And although methane is a strong sign of biological activity, it’s far from a definite indicator of past or present alien life. Oehler thinks it’s likely at least some of the gas came from geophysical processes. The most common abiotic generators of methane on Earth are Fischer–Tropsch reactions, where an oxidized form of carbon combines with hydrogen to produce methane and water. These are typically high-temperature reactions, but there are some versions of the phenomenon that can occur in Mars-like climates.

A second source of abiotic methane is thermogenesis—the heating up of buried organic matter. “That happens on Earth all the time. In fact, that’s how we get oil and gas from organic matter,” says Oehler. Meteorites could have delivered that organic matter to Mars. Impact heating could have broken it down into methane, and freezing conditions could have siphoned it into ice trappings underground.

The first major step is to figure out where the methane is coming from. It’s likely a subsurface source, but even that’s unconfirmed. Svedham points out that both TGO and Mars Express happened to collect observations remarkably close to the Gale Crater at the same time as Curiosity. That triumvirate of data, in conjunction with measurements in temperature and atmospheric winds, could give us a narrow target to explore.

This Martian methane mystery probably won’t be solved without some ground-based investigations on the surface and subsurface. “We have to consider the possibility that there are some processes on the planet that are poorly understood—some methods or mechanisms of rapid destruction or sequestering of methane that’s not measured in the atmosphere,” says Oehler. Some others might suggest our best bet for that sort of study is the Mars 2020 rover, which will be able to drill two meters into the ground. It doesn’t sound like a major feat, but it might be just enough to shine some light on what—or who—is passing all this gas.

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Martian clouds are certainly not as awe-inspiring as the ones we enjoy on Earth, but the fact that the planet is able to make them at all is quite remarkable. It’s a small, cold, hellishly dry red rock—a far cry from the warmer, wetter world it probably was billions of years ago. Its atmosphere is only 1 percent as thick as Earth’s. Scientists have always struggled to understand how Mars could continue to make clouds in spite of so much going against it.

It turns out the red planet as a little trick up its sleeve. In new findings published in Nature Geoscience this week, a group of scientists suggest that meteor impacts could be the key to Martian cloud formation.

“Clouds on Mars are extremely tenuous,” says Victoria Hartwick, a research assistant at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the lead author of the new study. They’re made of water ice like the ones hovering above Earth: droplets of water condense over a particle (often sea salt, smoke, or pollutants of some kind) and form a small nucleus of ice that continues to accrete more and more condensation. It’s been assumed for some time that mineral dust lofted up from the surface provided the only particles for seeding these clouds.

“That’s where the problem started,” says Hartwick. It’s easy to see how winds on Mars can lift dust up into the air by about a dozen miles. But clouds regularly form at stratas of up to 30 miles or so.

One clue as to how this might happen actually comes from Earth. The closest analog for Martian clouds that we have are the thin, wispy, high-altitude types, including noctilucent clouds. “Those clouds on Earth are very beautiful in the sky just after sunset, which is why they are called night-glowing,” says study co-author Brain Toon, also at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Victoria knew these clouds on Earth form on debris from meteorites burning up in the atmosphere as shooting stars.”

The formal name for that debris is actually quite metal: meteoric smoke, a.k.a. the burnt-up byproduct of interplanetary dust grains originating from a meteor that rips through the atmosphere. “The smoke particles are incredibly small, perhaps ten times as big as an atom,” says Toon. “But for every shooting star, there are a lot of them.”

Mars is no stranger to meteoric visitors. And NASA’s MAVEN orbiter, tasked with studying the planet’s atmosphere and responsible for figuring out why Mars’ atmosphere disappeared, has previously found that the resulting icy grains can end up Mars’ atmosphere. Approximately 2.2 to 3.3 tons of dust grains originating from meteoric smoke falls into the atmosphere every Martian day.

“We wanted to add this source of high altitude ice nuclei to our model, to see if we could reproduce the observed middle atmosphere water ice cloud fields,” says Hartwick.

Hartwick and her team ran a series of computer simulations for cloud formation on Mars, and found that factoring in meteoric smoke led to the sort of middle atmosphere cloud fields observed time and time again. Inject some more meteors into the equation, and the resulting particles help provide seeds that allow ice nuclei to form well above 18 miles in the air.

For now, it’s not clear whether there are any fluctuations caused by seasons or other changes. Hartwick and her team suspect that events like a comet’s flyby would probably help deliver more dust to the planet and encourage more cloud formation. Clouds in the red planet’s atmosphere have been observed above 60 miles (largely invisible to the naked eye), but it’s not quite clear if meteoric smoke is a driver for their formation at such a high altitude. All of this still requires much more investigation.

But overall, the findings help to illuminate how important external variables are in governing the Martian weather and climate system—a huge realm of interest as humans make more serious plans to visit the red planet and one day put a settlement there. High-altitude clouds, for instance, have been shown in some models to warm the early Martian climate. “Early in the solar system’s history, the flux of meteoric material would have been higher, so cloud formation by this method could be more prevalent and potentially important,” says Hartwick.

Toon suspects an abundance in high-altitude clouds in the past might explain how Mars’ river valleys were able to form several billion years ago, at a time Mars should have been colder than it is now (since the sun was actually dimmer). This theory is not without controversy, since high-altitude clouds would have had trouble forming, but this newest understanding of how clouds in the middle strata are seeded might still apply to higher layers in the atmosphere.

Future terraformers, take note: “It is possible,” says Hartwick, “that clouds forming in the middle atmosphere could warm the planet above freezing,” a very intriguing prospect for anyone interested in making Mars habitable again. It’s hard to believe something as transient as a cloud could be such a big deal, but as with most things in science, it’s never a good idea to count out the small things.

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NASA’s newest picture of Mars found some unlikely branding on the red planet’s southern hemisphere. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter—a satellite that laps the planet once every couple of hours—captured a formation that looks very similar to Star Trek’s Starfleet logo.

This is pure coincidence, but has trekkies everywhere weighing in (and has even fueled some Star Trek vs. Star Wars tension on Twitter).

The spontaneous logo is located in Hellas Planitia, a plain within the larger Hellas basin. Scientists think the area formed during an asteroid impact, and that crescent-shaped dunes (called barchan) slowly traveled across the area long ago.

Then, somewhere along the way, there was an eruption. Lava flowed across Hellas Planitia, encircling the dunes but not covering them. As the lava cooled, the dunes protruded up out of this new layer like small islands.

Eventually Martian winds carried the sand away. But that erosion left behind a mark: the dune’s shape, imprinted in long-cooled lava. Scientists call these ancient remnants dune casts.

“Enterprising viewers will make the discovery that these features look conspicuously like a famous logo: and you’d be right,” NASA scientists admitted in a statement, “but it’s only a coincidence.”

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched in 2005 to search for evidence of water on Mars. It’s now spent 13 years in orbit, and though its primary mission ended in 2010, it’s considered a critical communication link for facilitating future missions to Mars.

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When the Viking landers touched down on the Martian surface at the height of the Watergate scandal, they kicked up two clouds of rusty soil and a debate that would continue for more than four decades.

That mission, NASA’s first direct search for Martian microbes, resulted in an inconclusive shrug, finding both signs of lifelike activity as well as an absence of the ingredients that such life would presumably need. Most researchers concluded that an errant chemical reaction could explain the conflicting results, but some remain convinced that the Viking landers detected life on Mars in 1976. Gilbert Levin in particular, one of Viking’s principle investigators, has long advocated for a follow-up mission to carry out a more advanced version of the original experiment, as he recently argued in Scientific American. Yet, six landings later, no such instrument has made the cut, leaving Levin and his collaborators asking the obvious question—why have we stopped looking for life on Mars?

Levin’s convictions spring from decades of mulling over the aftermath of Viking’s so-called labeled release experiment. The lander took soil samples onboard and added a nutrient-rich soup with radioactive carbon atoms. The nutrients acted as a meal for any potential microbes, and the atoms as red flags for the researchers to spot. Equipment on the lander took regular whiffs to see if any Martian microbes were partaking in and excreting the labeled carbon atoms into the air. After finding that something did seem to be interacting with the radioactive carbon atoms, the next step for NASA was to see if they could alter that process as a control or confirmation. If there really were living microbes burping up those carbon atoms, researchers expected to see changes in how many carbon atoms were present if they cranked up the heat.

To do so, the Viking team remotely baked the chamber at 320 degrees Fahrenheit, and the reaction stopped. Keeping the soil in the dark for 10 days also halted the mystery process, while lightly roasting the soil at an intermediate 120 degrees merely slowed it.

On their own, the labeled release results hinted that the heat and darkness could be killing carbon-gobbling germs in the red soil, but Viking’s other instruments told a different story. One in particular found no traces of the chemical ingredients Earth life is made of, such as amino acids, suggesting that the dead soil was somehow releasing the gases through chemistry of its own. (Although this conclusion too, is debated.)

After recreating the experiments in arid places around the world such as Antarctica and Chile’s Atacama Desert, Levin published a peer-reviewed paper in 2016 in the journal Astrobiology arguing that that no alternative hypothesis can match the exact pattern of activity Viking found. He now supports an updated labeled release experiment that can distinguish between chemical and biological activity more precisely—but NASA has no plans to fly such an experiment in the foreseeable future.

“The idea that one can directly detect life with a single instrument is not reasonable at present,” a representative of NASA’s astrobiology program said in an email statement. “Results for the Viking landers and from the analysis of the Martian meteorite collected from Antarctica have demonstrated how hard it is to find undisputable evidence for life even with multiple measurements from different instruments.”

Interpreting even a straightforward experiment, it turns out, requires a lot of complex context—context that was completely lacking for the alien planet at the time of the Viking mission and remains incomplete today. “The whole point of [NASA’s off-Earth biology strategy since then] was to find the right environments first and then look for life. And we’re still in that process,” says John Rummel, a scientist at the SETI institute and previous planetary protection officer at NASA. “I would love to go back and do life detection studies, but only in the right place,” he says, such as a Martian locale that’s comparatively wet, warm, and well understood.

Although NASA has abandoned straight life-detecting experiments in favor of asking general questions about the Martian environment that are more likely to have conclusive answers, researchers have still been able to gather plenty of circumstantial biological evidence from landers, much of it painting Mars as a brutal place for life.

Without an Earth-like magnetic field and ozone layer, anything on the Red Planet’s soil must bear the full brunt of cosmic rays and the sun’s ultraviolet radiation—a force so lethal not even the formidable tardigrades can take it. To make matters worse, ten years ago the Phoenix lander discovered that Martian soil is about 1 percent perchlorates, a substance that breaks down into bleach-like chemicals toxic to life and its building blocks. (Incidentally, post-Viking experiments found that perchlorates could also participate in reactions that release carbon in a life-like way, although Levin argues they can’t explain the controls).

Falling meteorites should have littered Mars’s surface with amino acids and other organic molecules, but the Curiosity rover found almost none of those—evidence that even precursors to life have been thoroughly bleached and radiation-blasted away on the surface. The environment’s apparent lethality now makes revisiting the Viking result an even less compelling option to many.

“It’s like saying, ‘can you have life in a 400-degree oven,’” says Samuel Kounaves, a planetary chemist at Tufts University. “It doesn’t matter what you found in there.”

No one can guarantee that life hasn’t found a way to survive, Kounaves says, but between the complexity of interpreting results from a single experiment and the low chance of surface habitability, it’s no surprise that a Viking-style life detection experiment hasn’t passed the highly competitive selection process to fly on a mission. “NASA doesn’t want to send something there and spend lots of money and have it come back with a false positive because of some chemistry,” he says.

Kounaves’s research has instead pivoted toward designing direct detection missions for the watery gas-giant moons Enceladus and Europa, which conveniently shoot geysers of frozen seawater out into space for easier collection and on-the-spot analysis.

He still thinks life likely existed on Mars and may even continue to eke out a living today, just not where the surface-exploring rovers roam. “There could be life there,” Kounaves says, “but to find it we’ll have to dig deep.”

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Hallie Abarca is the Head of Image Processing for NASA’s Insight Mars Lander. Here’s her tale from the field as told to Stan Horaczek.

Snapshots from space don’t arrive looking anything like the ones we’re used to. They come to Earth as raw data packets, and someone must reassemble that info into all kinds of finished images: infrared shots, stereo maps, and mosaics. I processed the first picture for the InSight ­lander’s Mars touchdown in 2018. We had practiced before launch but hadn’t fully tested the process until we were on live TV.

Once the rover reached Mars, everyone in the control room gathered around me. That included the engineer who designed the camera. I couldn’t let him down.

The initial download converted into a blurry mess: The image was dark, and both the transparent lens protector and the lens itself were caked in dirt. I turned up the brightness and contrast until we could make out something: a flat plane. We celebrated—we had landed on a flat and workable Martian surface.

The photos we get now, sans dust cap, are much clearer. The rover routinely takes ­selfies for its own maintenance. That makes our work different from ­typical retouchers using Photoshop to create perfection. If we tried to make the shots flawless, we might obscure a problem with the craft—or a crucial discovery.

This story originally published in the Out There issue of Popular Science.

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Human bodies evolved to live on Earth, so it’s not surprising that space throws us for a loop. Without gravity, astronauts on the International Space Station lose muscle and bone (despite exercising hours each day), start to see poorly, and develop wacky immune systems. And the rogue particles that zip through deep space outside of Earth’s protective magnetic bubble threaten to upset the delicate functioning of the human mind as well.

Scientists have known for years that in addition to damaging DNA, the particles of radiation found in deep space also wreak havoc on brains. All of that research, however, came from using a particle accelerator to blast rodents with months- to years-worth of radiation in the span of a few minutes. The first study to test mice under realistic space-like conditions—with the help of a new facility capable of delivering radiation at a slow drip—confirms that neutron and photon particles significantly disrupt their nervous systems. If humans are similarly sensitive, the study claims, multiple members of a five-person crew would suffer neurological symptoms such as increased anxiety or impaired memory during a multi-year mission to Mars.

“There’s a plethora of literature in the radiobiology world that suggests that lowering the dose rate makes everything better,” says Charles Limoli, a professor of radiology at the University of California Irvine and co-author. “True, but not for the brain.”

One NASA-funded room at Colorado State University acts a lot like a spacecraft. A nugget of radioactive californium-252 bathes the area with neutrons and high-energy light rays, mimicking what the inside of a Mars-bound ship might be like. Any creature spending a full day inside the enclosure receives about as much radiation, albeit of different particle types, as it would after a day in deep space.

Forty mice spent six months in the radiation room—about as long as a one-way trip to Mars—while a control group of the same size enjoyed the full protective benefits of Earth’s magnetic field. Afterward, the researchers sent the mice to three labs and studied what had happened to their nervous systems on three levels.

At the cellular level, researchers found it harder to trigger activity in radiation-exposed brain cells in the hippocampus (a part of the brain associated with memory) than in the neurons of non-exposed counterparts. These findings meshed with results at the network level, which suggested that groups of neurons in the hippocampus became less able to cooperate, failing to fire together in a way associated with memory and learning. But Limoli suggests that radiation damage may extend to other areas of the brain as well.

“Remember that these animals were [completely] exposed. There’s no reason to suspect that there’s just one region of the brain affected,” he said. “In a nutshell, the circuit activity of the brain has been disrupted.”

The radiation disrupted the animals’ behavior too. Limoli and his team put the mice through a battery of tests meant to reveal various facets of their mental states. The scientists arranged playdates with other mice to test their extroversion, for instance, and swapped out Legos for rubber duckies in their cages to see if the mice would notice the newcomer. They also taught their subjects to fear electric shocks following a certain tone, only to cancel the shocks and see how long it took the rodents to realize that the danger was gone.

The radiation-exposed mice underperformed their counterparts across the board. On playdates, the space-mice spent twice as much time on average being antisocial. When a new toy appeared in their cage, they spent one third as much time inspecting it. After the electric shocks stopped, they were a third more likely to continue to fear them.

Altogether, the results, published recently in the journal eNeuro, paint a picture where space radiation makes astronauts—who need to operate at peak mental and physical condition—grow withdrawn, anxious, forgetful, and fearful. And these mental and emotional changes would come on top of the side-effects of six months stuck in a confined space with the same handful of people. No one knows to what degree the rodent results might translate to humans, but the researchers estimate that one in five astronauts would experience radiation-caused anxiety on the way to Mars, and one in three would have memory trouble.

What’s more, these tests all took place three to six months after the mice emerged from the radiation room, suggesting long-lasting effects. “That’s a big deal,” Limoli says. “This isn’t something that’s going up and down and back to normal.”

Vipan Parihar, a colleague of Limoli’s who was not involved in this study but has researched the effects of radiation on mice in the past, called the findings “fantastic” and said they’d have far-reaching consequences for future astronauts. In particular, he pointed to the irradiated mice’s difficulty forgetting their fear as suggestive that astronauts might have trouble switching from one task to another, and could become more prone to Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

Nevertheless, both researchers emphasize that while radiation may represent one of the biggest technical challenges to a Mars mission, it’s not necessarily a showstopper. Spacecrafts and spacesuits built from as yet unknown materials could stop particles in their tracks, and future medication could alleviate the worst effects of the radiation that makes it through. At this early stage, they say, what matters is to help the world’s space agencies know what to expect.

“The Apollo astronauts were out in space for two weeks. These [Mars-bound astronauts] are going to be out there for two and a half years,” Limoli says. “NASA doesn’t want to be catastrophically surprised.”

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Every day, the InSight lander’s suite of instruments sends back data proving that the Red Planet isn’t really dead. Marsquakes rumble the seismometer. Swirling vortices register on onboard pressure sensor. And temperature sensors help track the weather and changing of the seasons.

Despite the lander’s successes, however, one gauge has met with resistance from the Martian environment while trying to carry out its mission. Something has stopped InSight’s 15-inch digging probe, dubbed “the mole” for its burrowing prowess. Instead of diving deep into the Martian sand where it could take the planet’s temperature, it’s been stuck half-buried. An intercontinental team of MacGyvers has spent a year devising successively daring plans to get the mole digging again, but still it flounders on the surface. Now their final gambit—directly pushing the mole into the soil—has shown tentative signs of success, NASA announced Friday on Twitter.

The goal of the mole, which is the measurement probe of InSight’s Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (or HP3), is to track the temperature variations of Mars itself. This heat comes from Mars’s core, which, like Earth’s core, remains warm from the planet’s birth. By measuring it, researchers hope to learn about Mars’s formation—but from the rod-shaped mole’s current position they can get readings only of the surface temperature. Mission planners hope to ideally reach 15 feet underground to escape the warming and cooling from the Martian seasons that would interfere with reading the planet’s true temperature.

A rock could be in the way, but the more likely culprit appears to be the Martian soil. Previous observations had led the German Aerospace Center engineers who designed the probe to expect that it would be digging through loose sand. They built the mole to bounce up and down like a jackhammer, sinking with each stroke and threading its way around any modestly sized rocks it encountered. But the probe has found soil that seems more dirt-like than sand-like; It sticks together and doesn’t collapse around the mole to give it enough friction to dig. What the mole needs is a little nudge.

“I always thought, ‘let’s ask Mark Watney [the fictional protagonist of the book The Martian] to just go over there and just push a little bit on the mole,’” said Tilman Spohn, the HP3’s principle investigator.

But without any Martian explorers to lend a hand, Spohn and his colleagues on the “anomaly response team” have had to improvise with the only tool available—a small shovel-like “scoop” on the end of InSight’s robotic arm. Over the last year they’ve tried to punch down the walls of the hole around the mole, to fill in the hole with nearby sand, and to give the mole more purchase by pinning it against the side of the hole with the scoop. But to no avail.

In late February, the team moved on to what Spohn calls “plan C.” They positioned the scoop above the mole’s tail and pushed it straight down into the dirt. The move is risky, because a delicate tether that provides power and communications from the lander attaches to the back part of the mole, and a hard whack could damage it. “This is our last resort,” Spohn said in an interview last fall.

But all those earlier maneuvers weren’t in vain, because months of practice have given the team some serious scoop-operating skills, making plan C seem a bit safer than it once did. “We all became more confident that the risk of accidental damage to the tether (with its power and data lines) was small enough to be worth taking,” Spohn wrote on his blog in February.

And so far the move seems to be working. While pressing down with the arm, the operators instructed the mole to dig for 25 strokes, according to a Jet Propulsion Laboratory spokesperson. That’s enough make it to sink down a couple of inches under ideal conditions. Early images suggest that the mole has dug perhaps half an inch, although mission planners are anxiously awaiting more data before they declare the instrument saved.

If the mole really is digging again, the next move will be to push the mole all the way underground. Then the team will harness its hard won “gardening” skills, as Spohn puts it, to collapse the walls of the hole and scrape nearby sand inside, hopefully burying the mole for good. “Both techniques may eventually be used to fill the pit and then allow pressing on the surface of the filled section to provide friction to the Mole below,” Spohn wrote.

The teams expect to learn more about the mole’s position—and fate—over the next few weeks. “If that doesn’t help,” Spohn said, “then I guess we’ll have to conclude that probably there is a stone down there.”

Correction on March 18, 2020 at 2:13pm: The story has been updated with additional information from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory regarding how deeply the mole has dug.

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Jeffrey Montes stands high on a ladder in the middle of a dirt-floored arena, squinting at the oculus of what looks like the world’s largest vase. His khakis and black t-shirt are remarkably tidy for someone deploying red goo to build a one-third scale model of what might someday be a home on Mars. Cleanliness happens when you outsource the dirty work to a robot.

Montes and his colleagues at architecture firm AI SpaceFactory are in a ­cavernous exhibition hall near Peoria, Illinois, to show NASA how astronauts could use 3D printing and Martian materials to make houses on the Red Planet. After spending the better part of 30 hours watching their custom-built printer squirt out a chocolate-colored domicile called “Marsha,” they have just minutes before the agency calls time in its 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge. The ­company’s only competition for the $500,000 prize, a team from Penn State University, ­finished its gray concrete double igloo a few minutes before.

Think of housing on Mars, and that’s the kind of shape that might come to mind. But Montes, an architect who spent 17 months designing Marsha (for Mars ­habitat) and the equipment to print it, sees something that looks more like a jar. Or an urn. Or an egg. “It even has this hermaphroditic quality where on the outside it’s kind of phallic, and on the inside it’s…” He pauses. “Whatever the opposite of phallic is.” (Yonic.) Inside, Montes envisions several floors where residents of the Red Planet will live and work and play, and a skylight under which they will gaze at a starry sky or bask in sunlight refracted through the thin Martian atmosphere. But that means securing the round window atop a 15-foot structure that’s still squishy. The mixture sets quickly, but not quickly enough to meet NASA’s looming deadline. As the printer nozzle climbs higher, Marsha’s upper layers slump ever so slightly.

The robot finishes with three minutes to spare, then inches the polycarbonate skylight into position. With seconds remaining and dozens of people—including a film crew from NASA—watching, Montes gives the order to release it. Everyone holds their breath, hoping Marsha doesn’t cave in.

People settling on Mars will to some degree have to live off the land. At its closest, our neighboring planet lies 35 million miles away. Transporting supplies there will cost roughly $5,000 per pound and take at least six months using current technology. Better to enlist the natural resources of their new home when possible, an approach called in situ resource utilization. “It totally changes the logistics of a mission,” says Advenit Makaya, a materials engineer who develops processes like 3D printing at the European Space Agency. “You don’t have to bring everything with you.”

Humans on the Red Planet might draw power from the sun, mine water from buried ice, and harvest oxygen from the atmosphere. With NASA’s encouragement, architects, engineers, and scientists are exploring how early residents might use recycled waste and the planet’s loose rock and dust, called regolith, to craft tools, erect homes, pave launchpads and roads, and more.

Rovers and probes have revealed enough about Martian geology for us to start figuring out how that might work. The surface contains an abundance of iron, magnesium, aluminum, and other useful metals found here at home. Scientists also believe the crust consists largely of volcanic basalt much like the dried lava fields of Hawaii.

Here on Earth, researchers often employ crushed basalt as an analog for Martian regolith. They can heat and compress the sandy material, a process called sintering, to create paving tiles. NASA and aerospace agency Pacific International Space Center for ­Exploration Systems did exactly that in 2015, then had a robotic rover called Helelani use the pavers to build a launchpad 66 feet in diameter. Compacted regolith might even hold together without heat, according to a team led by Yu Qiao of the University of California at San Diego. Their 2017 study posits that iron oxide, which gives Mars its rusty tint, could serve as a binding agent.

Still, if you’re creating anything more complex than blocks, regolith can be a hassle. It lacks the plasticity that makes clay easy to manipulate. Working independently, Makaya’s team at the European Space Agency and researchers at Northwestern University printed tools and small objects, including gears and blocks. But their method requires mixing regolith with solvents and a sticky binder—all of which would have to be carried from Earth or made on Mars.

David Karl, a materials scientist and doctoral student at the Technical University of Berlin, thinks there’s an easier way. He works in a research laboratory that creates advanced ceramics for electronics, biomedical implants, and other applications. His background in art makes him prone to saying things like, “Cement looks beyond incredible under a microscope.” A few years ago, he and his academic adviser, Aleksander Gurlo (who also leads the lab), pondered how astronauts might use regolith without having to add anything hauled through space. It occurred to them that everyone trying to solve that riddle had overlooked an ancient solution: mixing the material with water, which humans around the world have done to make ­earthenware ceramics for at least 30,000 years.

They turned to a relatively simple method of pottery-making called slip casting. It calls for pouring a soupy mixture of clay and water, called slip, into a plaster mold and allowing it to set. Then you dump out the excess material and remove the object for firing in a kiln. Instead of using clay, Karl and Gurlo tried it with a simulated regolith called JSC-Mars-1A, which NASA developed in 1998, and a rotund mold from the Royal Porcelain Factory in Berlin. “You have no idea how hard it was to convince the engineering types I work with here to do some stupid vases as a big project,” Karl says.

The smooth, squat vases they created resemble terra cotta, and wouldn’t look out of place filled with flowers. Karl envisions greens sprouting from vessels like them in hydroponic gardens on another world. He also thinks refining the process could allow astronauts to slip-cast Red Planet mud into more-complex shapes with the help of a 3D printer.

Karl’s vases provide a glimpse of how Mars inhabitants might craft everyday objects, but NASA wants architects and engineers to consider where those pioneers might live. Four years ago, the agency invited them to enter the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge.

Contestants navigated three escalating phases of competition. The first, completed in 2015, called on teams to create architectural renderings of their habitats. Two years later, entrants had to develop the tools needed to 3D-print dwellings, and create the beams, domes, and other structural elements needed to erect them. Teams came and went as the contest progressed, until just two entered the final, and hardest, event this year.

The rules, which ran 76 pages, required each group to print a one-third scale model of a four-person habitat with at least three openings within 30 hours. Judges awarded points for using materials like simulated regolith, and, because the competition emphasized automated construction, deducted points for intervening to, say, fuss with printer software or clear a clogged nozzle.

NASA likes the idea of robot construction crews because the habitats could be ready before humans arrive. Architect Shadi Nazarian found her way to Martian home design through her work studying how 3D printers might build more-resilient housing here on Earth. She leads a laboratory at Penn State University that explores creating seamless transitions between disparate materials such as glass and concrete, a technique that would eliminate joints that require caulking or epoxy. Such a trick would be handy on the Red Planet, where structures must be strong enough to withstand intense pressurization and protect inhabitants from frigid temperatures and solar radiation. So she and her colleagues, ­architect José Duarte and electrical engineer Sven Bilén, entered the NASA contest two years ago. Their sturdy conical habitat looks like a home on Tatooine or a centuries-old stone trullo hut in the Italian countryside.

Montes, the chief space architect at Penn State’s rival, AI SpaceFactory, encouraged the firm to enter after he joined it in 2017. David Malott, whose résumé includes three of the world’s tallest buildings, founded the New York company in part as a response to what he considers waste within the construction industry. Designing for space emphasizes local materials and sustainability, and requires anticipating astronauts’ psychological needs. Malott wants to show how such principles might work on Earth.

You see those concerns reflected in ­Marsha. Montes favored a tower because it maximizes usable space. The shape also easily divides into floors, and building up instead of out lends itself to 3D printing. He thinks the skylight, curved walls, and a Swiss-cheese-like interior shell will add variety and idiosyncrasy to daily life on a distant world.

Creating the model of Marsha’s outer shell required first spending many months developing the 3D printer and the goop it spits out. Montes’ team built an enormous machine that features an off-the-shelf nozzle—called an extruder—modified with grippers and various sensors. They mounted all that hardware to a robotic arm similar to those you’d see welding bodies or painting cars on an automobile assembly line. The “ink” the contraption lays down, layer by layer as it follows instructions from a computer, is a mixture of recyclable plastic grown by bacteria and fine ­basalt fibers that could theoretically be gleaned from Martian rock. “Just getting the ­material to ooze out was a happy day,” Malott says.

Habitat construction got off to a rough start the first day of the May 2019 competitions. The teams worked in an enormous exhibition hall owned by heavy-equipment manufacturer Caterpillar, which typically uses the space to demonstrate earth-movers and other big machines. The arena briefly lost power, causing hiccups in the teams’ printer programs, and wonky extrusions required occasional troubleshooting. Judges discreetly warned NASA’s Monsi Roman, who oversaw each of the phases leading up to the final event, to prepare for disappointment. But within a day, both teams found their momentum, and the mesmerizing whir of the printers drew company employees and field-tripping students to watch the structures rise in fits and starts.

The Penn State crew used an industrial robotic arm rigged with an extruder, but ­scuttled its plan to build with something it calls MarsCrete because the material, ­designed for the frigid environment of Mars, set too quickly at room temperature. The team switched to concrete made with conventional cement, but the mixture would jam the apparatus if the machine stopped or paused too long. “Printing with concrete is very, very difficult,” says planetary geologist Jennifer Edmunson, who was among the judges. Still, the team finished its tallest structure 11 minutes early. Cheers erupted as the machine sealed a habitat some in the crowd had taken to calling Dairy Queen because its twin 13-foot peaks resembled great swirls of soft-serve ice cream.

Marsha’s texture looked like an old sweater, each lump and seam and loose strand indicating a pause or deviation in the layering process. Montes did his best to minimize deformities by running the robot more slowly, but lost that luxury as time passed. With seconds left and the uppermost section drooping, Montes gave the order to release the skylight. The walls held for a moment, then the rim sagged inward, and the window fell to the floor with a thud. ­Montes descended the ladder to hesitant applause. “If you want drama, there’s drama,” he said to the NASA film crew.

Some wondered if the tumble doomed AI SpaceFactory’s chance of winning, even though the team had earned high scores in several categories and intervened in its automated print less often than the Penn State crew. After letting the habitats cure overnight, the judges spent a few hours beating them mercilessly to ensure they were airtight, check their impact resistance, and assess their strength. Dairy Queen proved remarkably robust during a simulated meteorite strike, enduring a barrage of increasingly heavy balls until the last one, a 26-pounder, removed a small chunk of the roof. More impressive, the structure resisted the crushing vertical assault of a 96-ton excavator—at least for a couple of minutes, before collapsing with the percussive crack of a bowler throwing a strike.

Strictly speaking, Marsha was incomplete because it lacked a roof. It clearly wasn’t airtight: The habitat emitted great plumes of colorful smoke when a contest official tossed a test flare into it. The judges saw no point to dropping fake meteorites on it either. The model, however, surrendered just a few small pieces to the excavator, which placed its bucket on Marsha’s rim and pushed down with enough force to raise the front of the rumbling machine’s treads off the ground.

After spending a few hours reviewing notes and tallying points, the judges named AI SpaceFactory the winner. Montes, grinning with teammates as they held an oversize check for $500,000, seemed almost as pleased as NASA’s Roman, who considered the build a great success. Despite their scars, the habitats provided perhaps the most tangible evidence yet of what homes on another world could look like. “They’re not perfect,” she said, “but they’re beautiful.”

This story originally published in the Out There issue of Popular Science.

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A miniature jackhammer was supposed to be safely buried 15 feet below the Martian surface by now. Instead, it continues to languish near the surface, its nose nestled a foot underground while its tail pokes out two inches above the alien soil.

Many millions of miles away, an international team of engineers has spent the spring and summer analyzing what stopped the digging instrument, nicknamed the “mole,” and improvising solutions to get it burrowing again. This week marks their second major attempt to save the digger, this time by using a robotic arm from the instrument’s mothership—NASA’s InSight Lander—to physically support the mole. While the lander’s other instruments are working as intended, the fate of the mission’s ability to track the flow of heat inside the Red Planet rests on whether the team’s engineering ingenuity can overcome the unknowns of the Martian underground.

“I think the team probably feels that what we’re trying here has our greatest chance of success,” says Matthew Golombek, an InSight coinvestigator who helped select the landing site.

The mole is the business end of one of InSight’s instruments, the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (or HP3 for short). Designed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the HP3 can measure how much heat flows from Mars’s core to its surface. Much of a planet’s internal heat is left over from its formation, so taking the Red Planet’s internal temperature would help planetary scientists better understand its birth. But to do so accurately, it needs to reach at least nine feet underground, deep enough to escape the seasonal warming and cooling of the surface.

The 15-inch-long, one-inch-wide device is supposed to slip into the Martian soil, pushing aside small rocks with a jackhammer-like up-and-down motion. Communicating with the lander a couple of times per week, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was to send a series of commands instructing the mole to dig a couple of feet at a time, taking a few days off in between sessions to avoid overheating.

For the first dig, the team programmed the mole to tunnel for either two feet or 4,000 strokes, whichever came first. But when data came back showing that it had executed every stroke without coming close to its target depth, they knew something was wrong—either the mole had snagged on its housing, had encountered weird soil, or was hammering in vain against a giant rock.

DLR and JPL quickly convened an “anomaly response team,” and after months of analysis decided in June to lift the housing with InSight’s robotic arm and look directly at the mole. The lander’s cameras sent back a mixed report: most of the mole had made it into the ground, but it was in no condition to dig further. JPL describes the device as a “self-hammering nail,” and like a nail, it needs to stick firmly into the dirt to make progress. But pictures revealed that the mole had excavated a nearly three-inch wide hole around itself and was leaning against the side at a 15-degree angle. “I along with others from the team were a bit shocked when we saw how large the pit actually is,” wrote Tilman Spohn, the HP3’s principle investigator on a DLR blog.

Rovers have done little more than scratch the surface of Mars, but researchers can see what asteroids have dug up in impact craters. They can also intuit a bit about how the soil (officially, “regolith”) is put together by measuring how quickly it cools off. Decades of data from various missions had led engineers to expect the Martian dirt at this site to be rock-free, and sandy enough to flow and collapse behind the burrowing mole. But the hole around the mole indicates a surprisingly sticky regolith isn’t cooperating. “We have two competing bits of information that don’t exactly agree,” says Golombek.

While they haven’t conclusively ruled out an invisible underground rock, the engineers feel confident that a regolith layer called “duricrust” is troubling the mole. Duricrust forms slowly over time as moisture in the air deposits salts in the soil that glue dirt particles together. The mole can break the duricrust up, but then the soil sticks together like wet sand and keeps its distance rather than falling against the mole and giving it material to push against.

Further evidence for sticky soil came from the first major rescue strategy, which Spohn calls “gardening.” InSight’s recycled arm design inherited a small scoop from a previous mission, which the anomaly team realized they could use to punch down the walls of the hole and give the mole something to push against. Six gardening sessions proved the soil to be even stickier than expected, however. The arm failed to bust through the duricrust, leaving behind only scoop prints in a thin layer of surface sand.

I’ve pressed down next to the “mole” several times, and it’s hard to make this unusual soil collapse into the pit. Soon, I’ll be out of contact for a couple of weeks during solar conjunction, but my team on Earth will keep working it. Keep sending good vibes! ✨ pic.twitter.com/dbUcnXzYzm

— NASA InSight (@NASAInSight) August 16, 2019

DLR engineers considered using the scoop to push sand into the hole, but since the operation would have taken months, they settled on pressing the scoop against the mole directly—a riskier option because one piece of hardware could scuff up the other. “That’s something that JPL engineers get very nervous about,” Spohn says.

After practicing in a sandbox on Earth with full size versions of InSight and the mole, this week NASA commanded the scoop’s arm to sweep sideways, pinning the mole against the wall of the hole and hopefully giving it the pound or so or purchase it needs. Tests in the sandbox have generated between two and 10 pounds of force, according to Troy Hudson, an instrument system engineer at JPL, but how the unprecedented maneuver will play out on Mars is anyone’s guess. “The arm was not built to do this sort of thing,” Golombek says. “We’re totally beyond the playbook here.”

Once the arm has the mole pinned, the digger’s fate comes down to a goldilocks stroke number of 20. Any fewer and it might not burrow at all. Any more, and the mole could disappear underground, letting the scoop’s arm slip over above its tail and hit the fragile data cable connecting it to the lander on the other side. The dig took place on Tuesday, and JPL and DLR engineers will spend the rest of the week analyzing photos for signs of progress.

The anomaly team has a few more tricks up its sleeve if the mole refuses to budge, such as a risky downward press with the scoop directly on the mole’s tail, but there’s a sense that the current rescue attempt could be the defining moment in the mole’s mission. Accordingly, engineers have steeled themselves for either outcome.

“If it ultimately fails that’s going to be crushing,” says Hudson, “but I think I’ve processed a lot of that grief already. Ever since the anomaly happened, the specter has loomed that it’s not going to work.”

As the engineers repeatedly hit refresh while waiting for images to reach Earth, they hope for signs of modest burrowing, the mole’s exposed tail shrinking from two inches to one inch. But even in that best-case scenario, the mole wouldn’t quite be out of the woods. Next, the team would need to decide if the extra depth granted enough purchase to start digging, or whether they’ll need to do some more gardening and fill in the hole behind it.

“While it would be excellent that the mole made progress,” Spohn says, “it will not be the end of the story.”

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We may like to think of ourselves as independent agents, but our reliance on microbes to digest our food and fight off diseases makes us far from isolated. Foreign germs actually outnumber more familiar bits of our bodies like skin cells and neurons. So if astronauts ever visit Mars, we know they won’t go alone—and they’ll spew countless microbes into the alien environment as they eat, shower, and relieve themselves for however long they stay.

Scientists aren’t sure how these critters will fare on the Red Planet, however, and an essay published recently in Microbial Ecology says that’s a big problem. Most talk of microbes in space has previously focused on how we might avoid littering alien worlds with our stowaway species, but the authors of this new paper argue that contamination is inevitable. Instead of speculating on how to minimize an astronaut’s microbial footprint, they say, the space community will eventually need to focus on harnessing the critters to work for us.

“We could use the microbes, which have been around for billions of years, to help us in these future endeavors,” says Jose Lopez, a biologist at Nova Southeastern University in Florida and one of the essay’s co-authors. “Humans are just a blip on the evolutionary timescale. It’s the microbes that can tell us how to survive.”

The provocative proposal highlights the conflict between those who would have humans call Mars home and those who would keep it a pristine astrobiology laboratory.

Historically, space agencies have viewed microbes as enemies. More than 100 countries (including the major spacefaring nations) have voluntarily agreed to follow the recommendations of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR), an international organization for interpreting the Outer Space Treaty—the closest thing to international space law. One recommendation is that states (and companies launching missions inside those states) keep their spacecraft clean enough to avoid “harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies.”

To comply, space agencies have implemented so-called planetary protection guidelines that vary depending on a mission’s destination and goal. NASA, for instance, ensures that no more than 300,000 bacterial spores make the trek to Mars on a rover’s external surfaces. These cleanliness measures can inflate a mission’s budget by as much as 10 percent, and sometimes complicate its design. Engineers had to build the landers of the 1970s Viking mission—NASA’s only attempt to directly detect Martian life to date—to survive four days of sterilization in a 200-degree oven.

But the moment humans land on Mars, Lopez and his colleagues contend, the anti-germ battle will be lost. As walking skin-sacs stuffed and overflowing with microscopic bugs, we will spread life wherever we step. So before we go offering free rides to countless known and unknown organisms, Lopez proposes, we ought to thoroughly vet our travel companions, studying who they are, how they’ll survive, and whether they’ll make good roommates.

“Symbiosis research is relatively underappreciated,” he says. “More research is needed here [on Earth] in the context of survival and potential colonization of planets in the solar system, because [microbes] are going to be required.”

Lopez envisions a multi-decade research program dedicated to figuring out how to reject dangerous microbes and welcome friendly ones. Going even further, he speculates about selecting the hardiest of Earth’s microbes and engineering them to do useful tasks on Mars, such as creating oxygen for domed habitats. He praises COSPAR’s planetary protection work to date, but says that such stringent scientific requirements would someday conflict with attempts to live on Mars. “We might have to choose,” he says.

Some researchers applaud the essay’s message. Alberto Fairén, an astrobiologist at Cornell University, has long called for less stringent treatment of spacecraft and looks forward to possible updates from NASA’s new planetary protection officer. “Up until one year ago or so the protocols were just asphyxiating,” he says, “but the tide is changing now at a very interesting pace.”

Other scientists, however, lament that prioritizing settlements and deliberately introducing microbes willy nilly could damage, or end, the hunt for indigenous life on Mars. Viking’s life detection experiments came out inconclusive because researchers didn’t know enough about the Martian environment to fully interpret them, says John Rummel, an ex-planetary protection officer for NASA. Today’s rovers are figuring out exactly how local rocks and chemicals act so that some future robot will have a better shot at finding Martians. If that future rover finds an exotic microbe in an area where some astronaut once planted a Matt-Damon-inspired potato garden, certifying that critter as a native Martian will be a lot harder.

Rummel sees planetary protection as an important first step toward living on Mars, not necessarily an obstacle to it. Before future farmers enrich the soil for potato farming, they’d want to know how the soil might react. Waking up dormant local bugs that produce toxic gases, for instance, would come as an unwelcome surprise. “If you want to push the Martian environment using microbes etc.,” Rummel says, “are there Martian microbes there that will push back?”

Yet researchers have plenty of ideas for how they might have their hunt for life and live there too, and they’re not so different from how we balance the economic rewards of industry with the health risks of air and water contamination here on Earth. In short, we’re going to need some zoning laws.

COSPAR and NASA continue to discuss what might constitute a “special region” on Mars—places not too hot or dry for life as we know it. These areas could become the first Martian science preserves, home only to sterilized rovers. Rummel imagines a planet-wide wind and dust monitoring network that makes sure special regions stay special. “It’s a big planet,” he says, “and not everything has to be done the same way in all places.”

Margaret Race, a biologist at the SETI institute specializing in planetary protection, says that essays like Lopez’s are an essential step toward balancing the desires to use Mars as well as explore it. She points out that just as the Wright brothers couldn’t have foreseen the need to stow tray tables before landing, COSPAR’s current planetary protection guidelines are just the opening statements in a long conversation. While some see the 2030’s (when NASA and other organizations hope to land boots on the Martian ground) as a pressing deadline, Race says that the kind of settlement needed to seriously contaminate large areas of Mars remains more than a human lifetime away.

In fact, she says, humanity has already successfully found compromises while studying another science preserve: Antarctica. When Russian researchers attempted to drill deep through the ice into the buried Lake Vostok to search for (comparatively) alien microbes in the 2000s, other researchers raised concerns that the dirty drill bit would contaminate the pristine lake, which had remained isolated for millions of years. Working within the framework of the Antarctic Treaty, which the Outer Space Treaty is based on, the Russians paused to consider environmental effects. After determining that the pressurized lake water would squirt out of any breach in its icy encasement, they landed on a strategy of poking a small hole (with a cleaner drill bit) and analyzing what came out, without any need for direct contact with the lake.

When they announced the discovery of a new bacterium, the possibility of sample contamination made the result controversial. But the lake’s integrity is at least preserved for future research. On Mars too, perhaps future explorers and researchers will find strategies that can keep the peace. “If you stop and think ahead,” Race says, “maybe you can’t do everything you want, but it doesn’t mean you stop.”

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Elon Musk wants people to live on Mars, and now he has the “Starship” he’ll use to get them there—or at least a bare-bones prototype of it.

The SpaceX founder and CEO showed off a spotlight-illuminated spacecraft in Boca Chica, Texas on Saturday, celebrating the company’s progress and laying out his vision for its future. To Musk’s left stood a Falcon 1, the rocket that solidified the company’s place in the new space race when it first reached orbit 11 years ago. Looking forward, Musk insisted Starship’s complete reusability would be the key to opening up the final frontier.

“Which future do you want,” Musk asked the crowd. “The future where we are a spacefaring civilization, out there among the stars, or one where we are forever confined to Earth?”

The Starship “Mark 1” prototype stands 164 feet tall, measures 30 feet across, and looks like what a kid might sketch if you asked them to draw a spaceship. Although original designs from 2016 (back when the vehicle was called the “Interplanetary Transport System”) called for carbon fiber construction, on Saturday Musk touted the switch to steel for the old-school material’s strength in both the icy depths of space and the inferno of reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Coming in at just two percent the price of high-tech composite materials, steel is also easy to work with. SpaceX welded the Mark 1 outside in the elements (Musk was in too much of a hurry to erect buildings for fabrication), a flexibility that might come in handy elsewhere. “On Mars, you can cut that up. You can weld it. You can modify it no problem,” Musk said. “I’m in love with steel.”

The Mark 1 features three Raptor engines (future Starships will have six), which Musk says will provide enough juice to take off from the surface of the Moon or Mars. But the silver rocket will need a lot more help to fully escape Earth’s formidable gravitational pull. Just as the Crew Dragon capsule sits on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, and the Apollo lunar module perched atop a Saturn V, Starship could someday hitch a ride to orbit on a large booster, currently dubbed the Super Heavy. SpaceX hopes to start building the booster, which is about 60 feet taller than Starship itself, after flight testing a handful of Starship prototypes. The main challenge, Musk said, will be building the 24 to 31 Raptor engines needed to power each booster.

Both parts will be fully reusable, returning to Earth for soft landings as SpaceX has increasingly done with more of its Falcon 9 rocket parts in recent years. By keeping the machines as simple as possible, Musk hopes to keep maintenance low, letting launch costs stay close to the price of refueling the vehicles.

But first SpaceX will see how the Starship prototype flies, and Musk, often chided for his self-described “aspirational timelines,” wants to move quickly. The first hurdle will be a controlled hop, similar to recent test flights of the Raptor engine, but higher. Musk mentioned 65,000 feet as a target altitude to hit in the next few months. “It’s going to be pretty epic to watch that thing take off and come back,” he said.

SpaceX will continue to build additional prototypes at its Boca Chica and Cape Canaveral facilities. The fourth or fifth iteration will attempt the next major milestone: orbiting Earth and returning to the ground. Musk said he was targeting an orbital flight in the next six to nine months, though he admitted the timeline sounded a little wild. Building the Mark 1 took four or five months, he said, and future iterations could come even faster.

Musk went on to paint a picture of the full Starship system, which he says will be able to ship 150 tons of science experiments, people, building materials, food, and other necessities to orbit. After refueling there, it could then land the same payload on the surface of the moon or Mars. Doing some on-the-spot figuring, Musk ballparked the cargo capacity of a theoretical fleet of ten Starships, each launching at an optimistic three times per day, at around 1,000-times greater than what humanity can currently put in orbit. “You need that if you want to build a city on Mars,” he said.

Starship will provide affordable delivery of significant quantities of cargo and people, essential for building Moon bases and Mars cities pic.twitter.com/0BImZP1qmM

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 29, 2019

Given SpaceX’s track record, its capable scientists very well may build a launch system resembling the one they’re promising. But building a liveable Martian city—much less a thriving one—will take more than dumping millions of tons of cement and glass onto the Red Planet’s surface. Musk received two questions about SpaceX’s plans for life support, but gave little indication that the company is actively working on the question of how to keep a million mouths fed, watered, and breathing on a Mars settlement. “Relative to the spacecraft itself,” Musk said, “that’s not super hard.”

The International Space Station (ISS) does make and recycle what it can, but it still relies on regular supply shipments from Earth. A Martian settlement would have to go farther in recreating a mini-ecosystem, capable of producing its own food and water and purifying its own air, due to the vast distance. Experiments on Earth have revealed just how difficult it will be to find stability. Arizona is home to the Biosphere 2 facility, for instance, which hosted a number of high profile, closed-ecosystem experiments in the 1990s. One problem, researchers later realized, was that uncured cement conspired with a surprising abundance of soil microbes to throw off carbon dioxide and oxygen levels.

Even though the ISS doesn’t have nearly as much dirt or greenery as Biosphere 2, astronauts there also struggle to deal with fallout from unwanted hitchhikers. A tube for urine control, for instance, becomes so overgrown with bacteria that astronauts need to replace it every few weeks, according to John Rummel, a biologist with the SETI institute and past Planetary Protection Officer for NASA. “Earth microbes run the space station now,” he says, “and we just try to keep ahead of them.”

Getting off the planet may be rocket science, but living off the planet will require significant advances in biology and microbiology too. And SpaceX may already be getting a taste of how hard working in that intersection can be. While its rocket fleet racks up new flights, landings, and commercial contracts, its efforts to ferry humans to the ISS languish years behind schedule—a fact NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine lamented on Twitter before Saturday’s presentation.

My statement on @SpaceX's announcement tomorrow: pic.twitter.com/C67MhSeNsa

— Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) September 27, 2019

Musk attributed the delay to the challenges in optimizing production, commenting that despite the speed of the Starship prototyping, its development takes less than five percent of SpaceX’s resources. The fact that competitor Boeing has experienced nearly identical struggles meeting the same timeline further emphasizes the difficulties of crewed spaceflight.

Despite the challenges, Musk remains optimistic that humanity’s future lies in space and stresses that while getting to Mars won’t solve Earth’s numerous and immediate crises, he finds inspirational value in dreaming big. “There are so many things to be concerned about, so many troubles. These are important and we need to solve them. But we also need things that make us excited to wake up in the morning,” he said, “and space exploration is one of those things.”

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It was one giant leap for a silo-shaped prototype, one small hop for SpaceX’s Martian ambitions.

The 60-foot-tall “Starhopper,” a partial mockup of the vehicle Elon Musk hopes will one day land on other worlds, soared nearly 500 feet into the Texas sky on Tuesday afternoon. This second and final test flight represents the most significant trial yet of the company’s Raptor engine. While the trial frustrated residents in Boca Chica, many of whom evacuated their homes for safety concerns, it encouraged aerospace enthusiasts with its demonstration of a new type of rocket that runs on methane—an essential feature for a space program targeting the moon and beyond.

“People have talked about using methane engines for decades, and they’re finally here,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and spaceflight historian.

Tuesday’s flight was the latest run in a sequence of increasingly demanding experiments for the Raptor engine. After years of development, SpaceX began test firings with the contraption on its side and locked in place. It then followed with two more tests of the prototype nose up and tethered. The six-story, stainless steel cylinder finally flew freely for the first time in July, hovering a few dozen feet off the ground—although a cloud of billowing smoke obscured the vehicle for most of the time.

Tuesday’s round marked SpaceX’s second flight attempt this week—a day after an electrical issue stopped the Raptor’s igniter (like a spark plug for rockets) from setting off the controlled explosion just as the countdown hit zero. The more recent, successful test showcased the engine’s capabilities in a clearer light. It rose about 50 stories into the air, appearing to hover above the mottled brown and green landscape before touching down on a nearby pad. The full flight clocked in at 57 seconds.

In addition to tens of thousands of online viewers following various livestreams, a number of Boca Chica residents watched the hop too—although not necessarily out of interest. Fearing that a “malfunction” such as an explosion could shatter windows in nearby houses, the police department handed out fliers asking people to leave their homes (with their pets) when they heard the wail of a siren, ten minutes before flight.

Rocket scientists and aficionados, however, embraced the display of technology that will likely power the next generation of spacecraft. The single-engine Starhopper is a baby step toward the full vision: a 35-engine booster rocket (the Big Falcon Rocket) and a six-engine “Starship” spacecraft that Musk hopes will someday carry people to the moon and Mars.

“This is a key test of the Raptor in flight,” McDowell says.

The Raptor replaces the company’s Merlin family of engines, which ran on a refined form of kerosene, like most traditional rocket engines. The oil emerged as the industry favorite in the 1950s because it offered the most push per pound of fuel. Methane, however, has other advantages. In addition to producing fewer toxins, it’s the obvious choice for anyone who wants to leave this planet—and its abundant stockpiles of energy—behind.

Even if Mars were somehow hiding an unexpectedly rich fossil record, petroleum, the source of kerosene, needs a lot of processing to be turned into rocket fuel. Future astronauts could manufacture methane on Mars, though, by shuffling around the carbon and hydrogen atoms in the planet’s naturally occurring ice and CO2-rich atmosphere, McDowell explains. Leftover oxygen atoms could be turned into liquid to make up the other half of the explosive formula. Looking even farther out into the solar system, the compound appears to be everywhere. “In the lakes of Titan,” McDowell says, “you can put in a teacup and scoop up some methane.”

NASA has fired methane rockets on the ground and with small aerial craft before, but this week’s SpaceX flight cues their debut on a large-scale vehicle intended for orbit—putting the commercial company on track to be the first to use them for suborbital and orbital flights, possibly as soon as 2020.

But Musk and his team will have competition. Blue Origin, an aerospace company run by Jeff Bezos that’s also developing reusable rockets, has similarly chosen methane as the fuel for its BE-4 engine. The company carried out firing tests at full power in early August and hopes to use the model to push its upcoming New Glenn vehicle into orbit in the early 2020s.

Now that SpaceX has gotten its Raptor off the ground, the next technical hurdle will be turning what looks like a “flying water tower” into a proper spacecraft that can withstand the heat generated by hurtling through the atmosphere at multiple times the speed of sound. The engine will also have to prove itself under various air pressures at different altitudes, as well as in the vacuum of space.

These environments aren’t likely to foil SpaceX’s veteran engineers, McDowell says. Instead, he thinks the real test of the Raptor’s design will be whether unforeseen bugs like corrosion or clogged fuel lines crop up during the longer firing durations needed for it to actually travel somewhere.

Nevertheless, McDowell expects that between SpaceX and Blue Origin, a new era of rocket engines is on its way. “Methane engines are coming,” he says, “and this is the first real serious free flight.”

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NASA’s Mars InSight mission has only been in full swing for about a little over four months now, but it’s already poised to reveal some of the biggest mysteries inside the red planet. On Sol 128 (also known as April 6, or the lander’s 128th day on Mars,), the InSight lander recorded tremblings that most likely came from within the planet itself. If further analysis confirms what we’re already suspecting, we’ll have officially made the first-ever measurement and recording of an earthquake on Mars—a “marsquake”—demarcating the beginning of Martian seismology.

As explained by Philippe Lognonné, a planetary scientist from Paris Diderot University and the principal investigator of the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument on the InSight lander, the goal of the mission is to do on Mars what seismologists did on Earth at the turn of the 20th century. (Coincidentally, the first remote quake on Earth was measured 130 years ago this month.) When InSight landed on the red planet in late November and turned on SEIS a few weeks later, it began a two-year investigation that would reveal what the interior of Mars really looks like, and more importantly how active it still is.

“People frequently show cartoons of what the inside of Mars looks like, showing a metallic core, and a rocky mantle and crust,” says Mark Panning, a seismologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and a member of the InSight team. Much of our gravitational and geological observations made through other missions has added support to these models—yet there remain large uncertainties, such as the size and composition of the metallic core and the crust. “Seismology then lets us better understand the sizes and seismic velocities of the Martian interior, which then puts limits on the temperature and composition of Mars, which in turn helps us understand its evolution over solar system history.”

Although SEIS had picked up other seismic signals in previous weeks, they were smaller and shorter than the Sol 128 event, and their origins were even more ambiguous. But let’s not overemphasize the significance of the findings. The truth is, the SOL 128 seismic event is quite small. “It’s small enough that we wouldn’t have seen it [from] an Earth station because of the higher noise on Earth,” says Panning. Right now, the InSight team estimates it will be about a magnitude 3 event, and it’s currently difficult to be more accurate without knowing the distance to the actual quake. Based on the data so far, Panning says the recorded signal is “far below what a human can feel.”

While there’s not a whole lot to glean from the Sol 128 event itself, the detection of this event is a harbinger for what’s to come. “The larger the seismic energy is, the deeper we will get information,” says Lognonné. “With the dust devils we got at the beginning of the mission, we have been able to get the structure of the crust for the first five meters. With the quake of SOL 128, we likely get some information down to a depth of tens of kilometers. With future quakes, we will get this information for the mantle and for the largest parts for the core.”

Interestingly enough, the shape of the signal’s energy, on first analysis, looks a little more like quakes on the moon than quakes on Earth. Neither body has tectonic plates, but both still experience quakes, caused by stress in the crust as a result of the cooling and contraction of the planet.

Repeated measurements of more quakes will go a long way in helping us characterize Mars. And while it’s a bummer the red planet is no longer the wet world it once was, the energy produced from such seismic events will propagate and scatter more easily through the dry rock. “If marsquakes do indeed look more like moonquakes, that could have an impact [on] our estimation of the amount of water in the crust,” says Panning. “Although it’s way too early to make conclusions yet.”

At the very least, the new observations are a confirmation that SEIS is working as splendidly as hoped. When it’s not picking up on measurements of the wind, SEIS (a set of six axis sensors) is comparable to the best kind of terrestrial seismology instruments and works on the same basic physics principles. Seismometers in general measure movements through the masses on springs. When the ground moves, it also moves the frame of a seismometer; but the mass on the spring does not move because of inertia. Measuring the motion of the frame in relation to the mass gives us a reading of the movements in the ground itself.

SEIS specialized enough to measure readings on a much more broad level of frequencies, and it’s also meant to account for the much wider temperature variations felt on Mars than on Earth. It’s able to adjust its parameters autonomously, since there’s obviously no one on the planet to do so.

”SEIS is performing amazingly on Mars, and we’re seeing performances better than we could ever do on Earth by orders of magnitude,” says Panning. Much of this, to be fair, is simply due to how “quiet” Mars is, especially since it lacks oceans.

We’ve yet to learn anything radically new from InSight, but this latest milestone makes clear it’s just a matter of time.

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The solar system wasn’t always the set of calmly spinning orbs we see today. In its earliest epochs, mini-planets swarmed around the sun, mixing together in cataclysmic smash-ups. This game of cosmic billiards played out so violently that worlds like Earth and Mars started out their lives as largely liquid gobs of smoothly blended rock. Or so many researchers have thought.

Now, careful scrutiny of two ancient hunks of Martian crust has led a research team to conclude that the Red Planet may have formed somewhat differently. Their geochemical sleuthing, which appeared this week in Nature Geoscience, suggests that beneath the planet’s rocky shell sit two types of Martian material—unmixed relics of the baby planets that came together to form Mars. The researchers teased apart these twin substances based on traces of water, which also complicates the standard theory of how rocky planets like Earth and Mars got wet in the first place.

“We weren’t even planning to test that whole thing,” says Jessica Barnes, a cosmochemist at the University of Arizona. “But it was the results that we got from the crust that made us have to go back and kind of look at that hypothesis.”

The tale of the planet’s formation, the team unexpectedly discovered, can still be read in the distributions of its tiniest atoms: hydrogen. Most hydrogen atoms are light, containing just one proton. But occasionally they come double-stuffed with a proton and a neutron. These particles go by the name deuterium, but they’re basically just heavy hydrogen atoms. Researchers can study the history of various parts of a planet by measuring how rare the heavy variant is compared with its common lighter form.

Mars’s atmosphere, for instance, seems to have a relatively high concentration of the heavy stuff, because regular hydrogen is more likely to leak away into space over billions of years. Some researchers have suspected that surface rocks shed some light hydrogen in the same way, but the few Martian rocks that wound up on Earth haven’t given any clear answers. “Martian meteorites have been an enigma for a long time,” Barnes says, “because they plot all over the map.”

Initially, the team intended to study whether the crust had lost light hydrogen like the atmosphere did. To that end, they analyzed two unique, meteorites that got tossed into space by ancient impacts and crash-landed on Earth. One, nicknamed Black Beauty for its dark color, is an amalgamation of many crustal rocks, some dating back to 4.4 billion years ago (Mars is about 4.6 billion years old). The other meteorite is about four billion years old. Both show signs of having gotten wet at least once between their formation and modern day. Considering their ages and these wetting events, Barnes says, we have “a fairly large piece of Mars’s history right there just in two samples.”

And when they reconstructed that history, the team found something puzzling: the relative amounts of the two forms of hydrogen in the Martian crust appears to have remained unchanged over the eons, unlike the atmosphere.

But then they thought more carefully about the role of the alien crust. Where incessant grinding between Earth’s continents constantly sucks water (and hydrogen) out of the air and buries it, Mars’s (nearly dead) crust remains frozen in place—a crystallization of the planet’s interior. To figure out what its anomalous hydrogen content was trying to say, the team would have to dig deeper.

They dove into the scientific literature, seeking hydrogen measurements of samples of Martian rocks that originated beneath the crust in the mantle—a more lava-like layer making up the bulk of the planet. They focused on lava rocks falling into one of two categories, depending on their composition (in terms of elements), which was a sign that they came from two different locations in Mars’s mantle.

The two groups of deep-down rocks also differed in terms of how much of each hydrogen variant they contained. And when the researchers modeled how the two classes of rock might have fused to make the crust, they found an intermediate hydrogen ratio similar to the value they had measured in the two meteorites from earlier on.

In other words, these two lines of evidence suggest that deep within Mars lie two distinct types of rock left over from the small planets that formed it, like a poorly blended smoothie. Had young Mars been enough of a hothead to fully melt through to its core, as some theories suggested, these rock types would have thoroughly mixed and no traces of the different building blocks would remain today.

And because hydrogen mingles with oxygen to form water, the new result also hints that the Red Planet’s modest wetness has multiple origins. One common theory holds that rocky planets like Earth and Mars got much of their water from a particular type of meteorite known as carbonaceous chondrites. But water-rich carbonaceous chondrites tend to all have similar amounts of the two hydrogen types, which clashes with the dual nature of the Martian interior.

“Carbonaceous chondrites are definitely important [for water delivery],” Barnes says, “but maybe they’re not the whole story.”

Next, some of her colleagues will work on developing simulations of Mars’s early days to find out how deep the mixing melt might have gone. Such models could be useful for figuring out how all of the solar system’s rocky planets formed. In the meantime, Barnes plans to study a wider range of Martian rocks to put the new theory on even firmer ground.

“We’re going continue analyzing new samples and analyzing other meteorites,” she says. “There’s plenty of work to do.”

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In December 2018, a 33-foot-wide meteor exploded over the Bering Sea. In June 2018, a smaller meteor, about 9- to 12-feet wide, exploded over Botswana and rained meteorites onto the desert. In 2013, a 60-foot meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, with a shockwave strong enough to destroy buildings and injure more than a thousand people. This kind of airblast only occurs about once or twice per century. Even more rarely do asteroids make it to the ground in a large enough piece to leave a crater. But it’s hard to know for sure: 90% of meteorites impact Earth’s surface in an unpopulated area, according to Lindley Johnson, NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer.

Before the century is out, humanity hopes to travel to the Moon and Mars. Those future astronauts will face many risks, like radiation poisoning, isolation, communication delays, and cramped environments closed in by hostile conditions. But if and when we become extraterrestrials, will we have to prepare for alien asteroid strikes as well?

“Impacts are a natural part of the process in space,” says Johnson. “This is a hazard throughout the solar system that we’ll have to keep in mind as we do venture out.”

We’re already well seasoned in trying to spot things that might hit our home world, though it’s far from an exact science with our current technological abilities. There are millions of asteroids orbiting the Sun, and a relative handful of these sometimes pass by Earth. If one comes within 30 million miles, it’s known as a Near-Earth Object. Any NEOs larger than about 450 feet that happen to intersect with Earth’s orbit within about 20 Earth-to-Moon distances are upgraded to Potentially Hazardous Asteroid status. A global network of scientists, using telescopes both on the ground and in space, find and monitor NEOs and PHAs, calculating their orbits one hundred years into the future. For now, there are no known objects that pose a significant impact threat to Earth in that time. But how does that equation change when we head off world?

Because the Moon is, astronomically speaking, so close to Earth, Johnson says that any asteroid classified as an NEO or PHA could also strike a lunar base. And while our atmosphere burns up most of the dust and debris the cosmos hurls our way, the Moon lacks a protective bubble of its own. In a 2016 Nature paper, scientists described more than 200 new craters spotted using NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, suggesting the desolate satellite takes quite a beating.

But it’s important to consider just how small a target the Moon is—and how big space is. Our satellite is only a quarter the size of Earth, and orbits more than 200,000 miles away. In the context of our solar system, which stretches many billions of miles across, the Earth and the Moon are essentially in the same place, Johnson says. On Earth, the chances of an asteroid hitting a populated area are about 1 in a million. Those chances don’t change much when thinking about humans living in a base on the Moon.

Lunar meteorites do pose one unique challenge: Each impact sends several tons of material shooting upwards—and then raining back down to the ground. These bits of moon are called “secondaries.”

The lack of friction-y atmosphere means meteoroids can hit the moon as fast as 14 miles per second, and because of this high velocity, “a hit on the lunar surface can release one hundred times the mass of the projectile,” says Eric Christiansen, NASA’s head of Micrometeorite and Orbital Debris Protection. That material then comes screaming back to the surface at nearly the speed of a rifle bullet. The 2016 Nature paper noted 47,000 lunar “splotches” resulting from such fallout.

“They’re much slower than the meteors, but they’re still fast enough that we have to worry about them,” Christiansen says.

Then there’s the question of impacts on Mars. NASA hopes to use the moon as a proving ground for technology that’ll help us get to the Red Planet by the 2030s, and this distant world has its own set of orbit-crossing asteroids. With an atmosphere only 1% as thick as Earth’s, smaller rocks can come hurtling through.

“There is something like a new crater forming on Mars every one or two days,” says Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who studies impacts using the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These pits can be about 13 feet across, which suggests they’re formed by objects about the size of a soccer ball.

Still, the likelihood that any one base on Mars would get hit is slim. If humans settled in an area the size of a football field, Daubar says, a soccer-ball-sized object might hit every 100 million years. If that settlement were twice as big, that likelihood might go up to once every 57 million years. A settlement the size of the New York City metro area might see such an impact every 20 years, which does start to sound a little unpleasant for our alien urbanites.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Right now, there’s not much scientists can do beyond identifying and monitoring the asteroids in our vicinity. Space-based telescopes like the proposed Near Earth Object Surveillance Mission (previously named the Near-Earth Object Camera) would help scientists on Earth spot more, Johnson says, including those asteroids that cross Mars’s orbit. But that mission hasn’t yet been fully funded.

For now, understanding more immediate risks like radiation are a much higher priority for humans leaving Earth, Christian says. Asteroids won’t slow down our goals to explore the Moon and beyond. But they might make life a little more tricky once we’re up there.

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This post has been updated to reflect that SpaceX postponed the launch.

A little over a year ago, the world was struck with shock and awe when SpaceX finally held the inaugural launch of the Falcon Heavy, the biggest rock the company has ever built and currently the most powerful operational launch vehicle on the planet. Florida’s Space Coast that day was filled with tension and excitement, and as the clock finally ticked down to zero, it was clear there was no coming back from whatever happened next.

Thankfully, the launch was a success—mostly. The Falcon Heavy’s three cores of the successfully delivered its silly payload of Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster (and dummy driver, Starman) en route to an orbit around Mars. And the rocket’s three cores successfully separated from one another. The side pair, which were actually previously recovered Falcon 9 boosters, made smooth vertical landings on the ground in Cape Canaveral Air Force Station without issue The center core’s engines, however, failed to fire during a descent down to the company’s Of Course I Still Love You mid-ocean droneship, and the booster landed smack into the middle of the ocean.

History was made, but the company has only just gotten started with a new era of its goals for spaceflight. After multiple delays, the company is aimed to conduct its second Falcon Heavy launch on Wednesday evening from launchpad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. While the forecast was quite favorable, with an 80 percent chance weather conditions would be a “go” as of Wednesday afternoon, the launch was ultimately postponed for between 6:35 p.m. to 8:31 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday.

SpaceX aims to send up into space Saudi Arabia’s, 13,300-pound Arabsat-6A satellite, built by Lockheed Martin and designed to help facilitate commercial communications operations for a 15-year lifespan in geostationary orbit.

The launch is supposed to be largely the same as what we saw last year: the launch vehicle goes up, the two side boosters separate and aim for automated vertical landings on land at Cape Canaveral, while the center core attempts landing on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean—which would be a first for the company. The entire launch should feature 10 percent more thrust than last year’s demonstration flight.

The Falcon Heavy won’t be the rocket that lets SpaceX get to Mars; that will be the Super Heavy rocket, which will also be reusable. But there are big plans for the Falcon Heavy to play a pivotal role in the expansion of space operations through Earth’s orbit and humanity’s return to the moon. In fact, amidst large delays in the development of the Space Launch System, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has vocalized the possibility that the agency might partner with SpaceX and use the Falcon Heavy to launch its Orion missions to the moon through the early 2020s, and return American astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024.

SpaceX would undoubtedly jump at the opportunity to take part in these missions, and that means there’s a lot more riding on the success and failure of every Falcon Heavy launch hereafter. A single mishap could shake the agency’s confidence the Falcon Heavy is ready to take a NASA spacecraft to the moon.

Let’s see if the launch, now scheduled for Thursday, bolsters support for the Falcon Heavy or magnifies that there’s still some work to be done before we can trust it to take people all the way to the moon. The Arabsat-6A mission should be streamed over the SpaceX webcast.

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Earlier this year, we learned that the Mars Opportunity rover had officially ended its service. It traveled more than a marathon’s distance in its time on our neighboring planet, which far exceeded its original mission objective. During Opportunity’s tenure, it sent back some amazing images of Mars that provided useful scientific data as well as an opportunity to marvel at the majesty of the planet’s terrain.

The final image it took is a massive panorama that took 29 days to shoot. It gives us a view of the Perseverance Valley, where the rover now sits. The panorama itself contains image data from 354 individual photos that were “stitched” together using software.

If you look carefully at the final photo, you’ll notice that a small piece in bottom left of it is still in black-and-white, while the rest is in color. This isn’t an artistic choice, but rather a technical detail with a surprisingly sad explanation. Opportunity shot the final necessary photos to fill in that section in color, but never got the chance to transmit them.

The Charged Coupled Device camera sensors in the rover’s panoramic camera (referred to as Pancam only take black and white images. A pair of cameras set nearly a foot apart helped calculate distances for the rover’s travels and precisely locate objects in its field of view and so it could accurately position its robotic arm.

According to Jim Bell, the Pancam Payload Element Lead and Arizona State University professor, the color comes from a wheel of filters that rotates in front of the camera lenses. Once a filter is in place, the sensor captures an image that’s restricted to specific wavelengths of light. There are eight total color filters on each wheel, but one is dedicated specifically to taking pictures of the sun, so it severely cuts the amount of light that gets in.

So why, then is part of the Opportunity’s final panorama in monochrome? While the rover shot the necessary images to provide color information, it never had the required bandwidth to send them back to earth before the fateful storm arrived that eventually ended the rover’s mission. The color version of the image combines pictures shot through three of the filters centered around the following wavelengths: 753 nanometers (near-infrared), 535 nanometers (green) and 432 nanometers (blue). That’s similar to what you’d find in a regular digital camera.

Unfortunately, the final frames needed to figure out the last bits of color in the panorama never made it back to earth.

This method for capturing photos sounds complex, but this process is actually extremely similar to the way in which almost all modern digital cameras work. Each pixel on the sensor inside your smartphone camera, for instance, sits behind a filter that’s either red, green, or blue. Those filters are arranged in a pattern typically known as the Bayer pattern. When you snap a photo, the camera knows how much light each image received and what color filter it passed through and it uses that information to “debayer” the image and give it its colors. Rather than using pixels on one sensor, the Pancam takes multiple pictures representing different wavelengths of light and the combines them later in a similar fashion.

Unlike your digital camera, however, the Pancam captures wavelengths beyond what you’d want to record. According to Bell, the cameras go further into both the red and blue ends of the spectrum to gain access ultraviolet and infrared light that’s outside the scope of human vision.

While the image is amazing—and a little sad—it’s a truly amazing tribute to what the Pancam really accomplished. The cameras have a resolution of just one megapixel, but as Bell says, the device was designed back in 1999 and 2000 when “a megapixel meant something.”

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