SpaceX completes test flight of Mars rocket prototype

Houston (AFP)
Aug 5, 2020

SpaceX on Tuesday successfully completed a flight of less than a minute of the largest prototype ever tested of the future rocket Starship, which the company hopes to use one day to colonize Mars.

"Mars is looking real," SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted in response to a fan.

The current Starship prototype is fairly crude: it's a large metallic cylinder, built in a few weeks by SpaceX teams on the Texas coast, in Boca Chica -- but it's still smaller than the actual rocket will be.

Several previous prototypes exploded during ground tests, during a learning process of trial and error.

In images shared Tuesday by several space specialists, including the space news website NASASpaceFlight.com, the latest prototype -- dubbed SN5 -- reached an undetermined altitude before descending to land in a cloud of dust, demonstrating good trajectory control.

"And when the smoke cleared, she stood there majestically, after the 150 meter flight!" tweeted NASA's top scientist, Thomas Zurbuchen.

The so-called "hop test" was planned to reach a 150-meter (492-foot) altitude, but SpaceX has not confirmed any details about the test flight.

In 2019, an earlier prototype -- the smaller Starhopper -- flew to 150 meters in altitude and returned to land.

The Starship envisioned by Musk will be 120 meters tall and will be able to land vertically on Mars.

"We are going to the Moon, we are going to have a base on the Moon, we are going to send people to Mars and make life multi-planetary," Musk said Sunday, after welcoming two NASA astronauts back from the International Space Station.

The astronauts had traveled in the Dragon capsule developed by SpaceX.

Source: Space Daily.
Link: https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/SpaceX_completes_test_flight_of_Mars_rocket_prototype_999.html.

Rover mission follows centuries of fascination with Mars

JULY 29, 2020
By Brooks Hays

July 29 (UPI) -- During the last two decades, Mars has captured the imagination of the public and attention of NASA decision makers, just as the moon excited the nation and served as the north star for the agency during the '60s and '70s.

Thursday morning's planned launch of the Mars 2020 mission is the latest, and the most advanced step in exploring the Red Planet, built upon lessons from sending spacecraft to Mars at almost every launch opportunity since the 1990s.

Fascination with the planet, however, predates the first lunar landing or NASA's Mars Exploration Program.

For as long as humans have been looking at the sky and writing stories, Mars has been mythologized. The Romans named the god of war after Mars, and the Red Planet found its way into Greek, Norse, Hindu and Chinese literature.

The 1897 novel War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, which depicts an invasion of England by Martians, was adopted for radio in 1938 -- a broadcast said to have caused panic among some listeners who didn't know it was fictional.

The concept of "little green men" -- often used generically to refer to aliens from any other planet, often as an invading force -- overall started gaining popularity in the late 1800s, and grew exponentially from there.

Popular stories have ranged from Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars in 1912 to the 1996 film Mars Attacks, which was adapted from a trading card series.

"Mars is a special place," Casey Dreier, chief advocate and senior space policy adviser for the Planetary Society, told UPI. "It's deeply embedded in our popular culture, going back hundreds, even thousands, of years -- even before we knew anything about Mars."

As more-capable telescopes arrived, Mars became more than just a red dot that grows larger every two years as its orbit comes closer to that of Earth's.

"You begin to see features that look vaguely like Earth, you have polar caps and you have light and dark features that change over time, and that's what I think inspired people to start imagining an Earth-like world with Earth-like things happening on the surface," Bruce Betts, chief scientist at the Planetary Society, told UPI.

Exploring the Red Planet

As early as the 17th century, astronomers realized that Earth and Mars shared commonalities. But while humans imagined Mars as a kind of alien Earth for decades, it wasn't until the early 2000s that scientists became certain of Mars' Earth-like history.

It was the Mars Exploration Program that revealed the full extent of the Red Planet's Earth-like qualities -- that Mars did once have water, lots of it, and that Red Planet was once habitable.

"That's all stuff we've learned relatively recently," the Planetary Society's Dreier said.

With each new mission to Mars, NASA's landers, rovers and orbiters have made discoveries that raised new scientific questions, exciting researchers and titillating the public's imagination.

And while the long history of human fascination has played an important role in fueling Martian exploration, both Betts and Dreier said NASA's mission planning decisions have been driven largely by science and pragmatism.

Not only do Mars' geologic wonders -- a water world dried and frozen in time -- offer a window into Earth's primordial past, but they're also closer than the interesting features found on any of Earth's planetary neighbors.

Mars is hard to get to, but everywhere else besides the moon is even harder.

"[Because] Mars missions are so much faster than other planetary missions, it allows technology to develop and engineers to push those boundaries on much shorter time scales," Dreier said.

The planning and execution of space missions to more distant targets can stretch a quarter of a century before scientists have their hands on fresh data.

Scientists working on the Mars 2020 mission will have to wait a little more than six months for the Perseverance rover to start returning usable data. That data -- and the insights they provide planetary scientists -- is likely to raise new questions about Mars. Rocks collected on this mission will not be brought back to Earth for a decade.

Beyond Mars missions

For now, NASA is working on plans for more scientific missions to Mars, and hopes to send humans to the Red Planet in the 2030s. But there is nothing concrete. A host of other plans for exploring the solar system exist, as well.

"As NASA's planetary science budget has gone up, we've seen a huge burst of non-Mars missions happening," Dreier said. "That's a consequence of Mars getting a lot of attention for a lot of years, and the rest of the planetary science community making an effort to get greater support and more funds."

NASA is working to once again ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station, as well as finalizing plans for a human return to the moon.

The space agency also has several asteroid visitation missions in the pipeline, in addition to plans for a trip to Jupiter's moon Europa and the outer reaches of the solar system. Under NASA's Discovery program, tentative itineraries have been created for treks to Venus, Jupiter's moon Io and Neptune's moon Triton.

"There's kind of a joke that a human Mars landing has been 20 years away for the last 60 years, but it's not really a joke," the Planetary Society's Betts said.

"There is good science to be done all throughout the solar system, and there's a limited amount of money and resources," he said. "There is always division within the planetary science community about where you put your resources and where you send space missions."

Source: United Press International.
Link: https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2020/07/29/Rover-mission-follows-centuries-of-fascination-with-Mars/4881595987885/.

China eyes July 20-25 launch for Mars rover

Beijing (AFP)
July 1, 2020

China's first Mars rover should launch later this month, authorities said Wednesday, as the country races to catch up with the US dominance of space.

The Tianwen-1 Mars rover is scheduled to blast off from Hainan island, off China's south coast, between July 20 - 25, according to the Xichang Satellite Launch Center.

It will be China's first interplanetary mission, and takes place shortly before the next US Mars rover -- timed to launch no earlier than July 30.

Named after an ancient Chinese poem, the Tianwen-1 consists of an orbiter, rover and lander, and is expected to collect samples from the planet's surface, the launch center said.

The system will be carried into space on a Long March 5 rocket and is expected to reach Mars sometime in February 2021.

The dates have been chosen because the Earth and Mars are only aligned at an optimal position for spaceflight for a short period once every 26 months.

The US delayed the launch window of its own Perseverance probe -- its fifth Mars rover mission -- three times over the past month due to technical issues.

NASA initially said the launch must take place no later than August 15, but more recently suggested the window may be extended.

China has hugely expanded its space program in recent years to compete with the US and Russia, and has ambitions to put a man on the Moon.

In 2019, it sent the Yutu-2 rover to the far side of the lunar surface in a world first, and has also touted its cooperation with the European Space Agency.

A Chang'e 5 lunar probe is set to launch later this year, and a new space station is due for completion in 2022.

The US banned Chinese astronauts from using the International Space Station because of national security concerns.

Last week, China also launched the final satellite in its homegrown Beidou navigational system, which competes with the GPS system pioneered by the United States.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: https://www.marsdaily.com/reports/China_eyes_July_20-25_launch_for_Mars_rover_999.html.

First Arab mission to Mars designed to inspire youth

By Dana Moukhallati
Dubai (AFP)
June 9, 2020

The first Arab space mission to Mars, armed with probes to study the Red Planet's atmosphere, is designed to inspire the region's youth and pave the way for scientific breakthroughs, officials said Tuesday.

The unmanned probe Al-Amal -- Hope in Arabic -- is to blast off from a Japanese space centre on July 15, with preparations now in their final stages.

The project is the next giant step for the United Arab Emirates, whose colossal skyscrapers and mega-projects have put it on the world map.

The UAE sent its first astronaut into space last year and is also planning to build a "Science City" to replicate conditions on Mars, where it hopes to build a human settlement by 2117.

Omran Sharaf, the mission's project manager, said that apart from the ambitious scientific goals, the mission was designed to hark back to the region's golden age of cultural and scientific achievements.

"The UAE wanted to send a strong message to the Arab youth and to remind them of the past, that we used to be generators of knowledge," he told AFP.

"People of different backgrounds and religion coexisted and shared a similar identity," he said of the Arab world, where many countries are today wracked by sectarian conflicts and economic crises.

"Put your differences aside, focus on building the region, you have a rich history and you can do much more."

- Narrow window -

Sarah al-Amiri, the mission's deputy project manager, said it was imperative that the project have a long-term scientific impact.

"It is not a short-lived mission, but rather one that continues throughout the years and produces valuable scientific findings -- be it by researchers in the UAE or globally," she told AFP.

She said that the probe will provide a comprehensive image of the weather dynamics in Mars' atmosphere with the use of three scientific instruments.

The first is an infrared spectrometer to measure the planet's lower atmosphere and analyse the temperature structure.

The second, a high-resolution imager that will provide information about the ozone; and a third, an ultraviolet spectrometer to measure oxygen and hydrogen levels from a distance of up to 43,000 kilometers from the surface.

The three tools will allow researchers to observe the Red Planet "at all times of the day and observe all of Mars during those different times", Amiri said.

"Something we want to better understand, and that's important for planetary dynamics overall, is the reasons for the loss of the atmosphere and if the weather system on Mars actually has an impact on loss of hydrogen and oxygen," she said, referring to the two components that make up water.

Sharaf said that fueling of the probe is to begin next week.

It is scheduled to launch on July 15 from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center and return to Earth in February 2021, depending on many variables including the weather.

"If we miss the launch opportunity, which is between mid-July and early August, then we'd have to wait for two years for another window," Sharaf said.

But hopes are high that the mission will take place as scheduled, and not be derailed by the coronavirus pandemic.

In a new sign of warming ties between Israel and Gulf Arab nations, the Jewish state Tuesday wished the UAE success with the mission.

We "hope this step will contribute towards deeper cooperation between all countries in the region," its foreign ministry's "Israel in the Gulf" Twitter account wrote in Arabic.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: https://www.marsdaily.com/reports/First_Arab_mission_to_Mars_designed_to_inspire_youth_999.html.

First commercial space taxi a pit stop on Musk's Mars quest

May 24, 2020

(AP) It all started with the dream of growing a rose on Mars. That vision, Elon Musk’s vision, morphed into a shake-up of the old space industry, and a fleet of new private rockets. Now, those rockets will launch NASA astronauts from Florida to the International Space Station -- the first time a for-profit company will carry astronauts into the cosmos.

It’s a milestone in the effort to commercialize space. But for Musk’s company, SpaceX, it’s also the latest milestone in a wild ride that began with epic failures and the threat of bankruptcy. If the company’s eccentric founder and CEO has his way, this is just the beginning: He’s planning to build a city on the red planet, and live there.

“What I really want to achieve here is to make Mars seem possible, make it seem as though it’s something that we can do in our lifetimes and that you can go,” Musk told a cheering congress of space professionals in Mexico in 2016.

Musk “is a revolutionary change” in the space world, says Harvard University astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, whose Jonathan’s Space Report has tracked launches and failures for decades. Ex-astronaut and former Commercial Spaceflight Federation chief Michael Lopez-Alegria says, “I think history will look back at him like a da Vinci figure.”

Musk has become best known for Tesla, his audacious effort to build an electric vehicle company. But SpaceX predates it. At 30, Musk was already wildly rich from selling his internet financial company PayPal and its predecessor Zip2. He arranged a series of lunches in Silicon Valley in 2001 with G. Scott Hubbard, who had been NASA’s Mars czar and was then running the agency’s Ames Research Center.

Musk wanted to somehow grow a rose on the red planet, show it to the world and inspire school children, recalls Hubbard. “His real focus was having life on Mars,” says Hubbard, a Stanford University professor who now chairs SpaceX’s crew safety advisory panel.

The big problem, Hubbard told him, was building a rocket affordable enough to go to Mars. Less than a year later Space Exploration Technologies, called SpaceX, was born. There are many space companies and like all of them, SpaceX is designed for profit. But what’s different is that behind that profit motive is a goal, which is simply to “Get Elon to Mars,” McDowell says. “By having that longer-term vision, that’s pushed them to be more ambitious and really changed things.”

Everyone at SpaceX, from senior vice presidents to the barista who offers its in-house cappuccinos and FroYo, “will tell you they are working to make humans multi-planetary,” says former SpaceX Director of Space Operations Garrett Reisman, an ex-astronaut now at the University of Southern California.

Musk founded the company just before NASA ramped up the notion of commercial space. Traditionally, private firms built things or provided services for NASA, which remained the boss and owned the equipment. The idea of bigger roles for private companies has been around for more than 50 years, but the market and technology weren’t yet right.

NASA’s two deadly space shuttle accidents -- Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 -- were pivotal, says W. Henry Lambright, a professor of public policy at Syracuse University. When Columbia disintegrated, NASA had to contemplate a post-space shuttle world. That’s where private companies came in, Lambright says.

After Columbia, the agency focused on returning astronauts to the moon, but still had to get cargo and astronauts to the space station, says Sean O’Keefe, who was NASA’s administrator at the time. A 2005 pilot project helped private companies develop ships to bring cargo to the station.

SpaceX got some of that initial funding. The company’s first three launches failed. The company could have just as easily failed too, but NASA stuck by SpaceX and it started to pay off, Lambright says.

“You can’t explain SpaceX without really understanding how NASA really kind of nurtured it in the early days,” Lambright says. “In a way, SpaceX is kind of a child of NASA.” Since 2010, NASA has spent $6 billion to help private companies get people into orbit, with SpaceX and Boeing the biggest recipients, says Phil McAlister, NASA’s commercial spaceflight director.

NASA plans to spend another $2.5 billion to purchase 48 astronaut seats to the space station in 12 different flights, he says. At a little more than $50 million a ride, it’s much cheaper than what NASA has paid Russia for flights to the station.

Starting from scratch has given SpaceX an advantage over older firms and NASA that are stuck using legacy technology and infrastructure, O’Keefe says. And SpaceX tries to build everything itself, giving the firm more control, Reisman says. The company saves money by reusing rockets, and it has customers aside from NASA.

The California company now has 6,000 employees. Its workers are young, highly caffeinated and put in 60- to 90-hour weeks, Hubbard and Reisman say. They also embrace risk more than their NASA counterparts.

Decisions that can take a year at NASA can be made in one or two meetings at SpaceX, says Reisman, who still advises the firm. In 2010, a Falcon 9 rocket on the launch pad had a cracked nozzle extension on an engine. Normally that would mean rolling the rocket off the pad and a fix that would delay launch more than a month.

But with NASA’s permission, SpaceX engineer Florence Li was hoisted into the rocket nozzle with a crane and harness. Then, using what were essentially garden shears, she “cut the thing, we launched the next day and it worked,” Reisman says.

Musk is SpaceX’s public and unconventional face -- smoking marijuana on a popular podcast, feuding with local officials about opening his Tesla plant during the pandemic, naming his newborn child “X Æ A-12.” But insiders say aerospace industry veteran Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer, is also key to the company’s success.

“The SpaceX way is actually a combination of Musk’s imagination and creativity and drive and Shotwell’s sound management and responsible engineering,” McDowell says. But it all comes back to Musk’s dream. Former NASA chief O’Keefe says Musk has his eccentricities, huge doses of self-confidence and persistence, and that last part is key: “You have the capacity to get through a setback and look ... toward where you’re trying to go.”

For Musk, it’s Mars.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

A Rover for Phobos and Deimos

Le Bourget, France (SPX)
Jun 21, 2019

Mars has two small moons, Phobos and Deimos. These are the target of the Japanese Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission, which also involves international partners. Scheduled for launch in 2024. it will enter Mars orbit in 2025, and return samples to Earth in 2029. The spacecraft will carry a German-French rover that will land on either Phobos or Deimos and explore the surface in detail for several months.

The scientists hope to gain new insights into the formation and evolution of the solar system. At the International Paris Air Show in Le Bourget, the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum fuer Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR), the Japanese space agency JAXA and the French space agency CNES agreed to further collaborate on the world's first exploration of a minor solar system body with a rover.

"The world-first exploration of the Martian moons with a rover is a major technical challenge that we are tackling within the framework of our strong and proven partnership with Japan and France," says Pascale Ehrenfreund, Chair of the DLR Executive Board. "Together, we want to push the boundaries of what is technically feasible in robotic exploration and expand our knowledge about the origin of the solar system."

On 18 June 2019, Hansjorg Dittus, DLR Executive Board Member for Space Research and Technology, Walther Pelzer, the DLR Executive Board Member responsible for the Space Administration, and Hitoshi Kuninaka, Director General of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) at JAXA, signed a cooperation agreement outlining DLR's participation in the Japanese-led MMX mission. The contributions that the Franco-German rover will make to the mission are central to this agreement.

In addition, DLR is making scientific findings about Deimos and Phobos available in preparation for the mission and is enabling tests to be conducted at DLR's Landing and Mobility Test Facility (LAMA) and in the drop tower at the Centre of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) in Bremen.

On 19 June 2019, the Franco-German cooperation agreement for the development of the rover as part of the MMX mission was signed by Pascale Ehrenfreund, Hansjorg Dittus and CNES President Jean-Yves le Gall. The German-French rover will be designed and built as a joint effort.

DLR will, in particular, be responsible for developing the rover's casing and its robotic locomotion system, together with a spectrometer and a radiometer that will both be used to determine the characteristics and composition of the surface.

The French space agency CNES is making major contributions with camera systems for spatial orientation and exploration of the surface, as well as the rover's central service module. Upon landing, the rover will then be operated jointly by CNES and DLR.

The MMX mission follows in the footsteps of the successful predecessor mission Hayabusa2, which explored the asteroid Ryugu. As part of the mission, on 3 October 2018, the Mobile Asteroid and Surface Scout (MASCOT) lander 'hopped' across the asteroid's surface and sent spectacular images of a landscape strewn with boulders, stones and almost no dust back to Earth. On that same day, JAXA, DLR and CNES signed a first memorandum of understanding for cooperation within the MMX mission.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/A_Rover_for_Phobos_and_Deimos_999.html.

Small satellite concept finalists target Moon, Mars and beyond

Pasadena CA (JPL)
Jun 21, 2019

NASA has selected three finalists among a dozen concepts for future small satellites. The finalists include a 2022 robotic mission to study two asteroid systems, twin spacecraft to study the effects of energetic particles around Mars, and a lunar orbiter managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to study water on the Moon. At least one of these missions is expected to move to final selection and flight.

The missions will contribute to NASA's goal of understanding our solar system's content, origin and evolution. They will also support planetary defense, and help fill in knowledge gaps as NASA moves forward with its plans for human exploration of the Moon and Mars.

The selected finalists:

* Janus: Reconnaissance Missions to Binary Asteroids will study the formation and evolutionary implications for small "rubble pile" asteroids and build an accurate model of two binary asteroid bodies. A binary asteroid is a system of two asteroids orbiting their common center of mass. The principal investigator is Daniel Scheeres at the University of Colorado. Lockheed Martin will provide project management.

* Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (EscaPADE): This mission's objective is to characterize (on multiple scales) the acceleration processes driving escape from Mars' atmosphere, as well as how the atmosphere responds to the constant outflow of the solar wind flowing off the Sun. The principal investigator for this mission is Robert Lillis at the University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley will also provide project management.

* Lunar Trailblazer will directly detect and map water on the lunar surface to determine how its form, abundance and location relate to geology. The principal investigator is Bethany Ehlmann at Caltech. JPL will provide project management.

"Each of these concepts holds the promise to deliver big science in a small package," said Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate. "Their miniaturized size enables these systems to be developed at reduced overall costs while performing targeted science missions and testing brand new technologies that future missions can use."

The finalists were chosen from 12 proposals submitted in 2018 through an opportunity called the Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx).

Following an extensive and competitive peer review process, these concepts were selected based on their potential science value and feasibility of development plans. They will receive funding for up to one year to further develop and mature the concept designs, concluding with a preliminary design review (PDR). NASA will evaluate the PDR results, and after that expects to select one or more of the mission concepts to proceed into implementation and flight.

Using small spacecraft - less than 400 pounds, or 180 kilograms, in mass - SIMPLEx selections will conduct stand-alone planetary science missions. Each will share their ride to space with either another NASA mission or a commercial launch opportunity.

"The SIMPLEx program provides invaluable opportunities for increasingly innovative ways to conduct planetary science research," said Lori S. Glaze, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA.

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Small_satellite_concept_finalists_target_Moon_Mars_and_beyond_999.html.

ExoMars landing platform arrives in Europe with a name

Paris (ESA)
Mar 22, 2019

The platform destined to land on the Red Planet as part of the next ExoMars mission has arrived in Europe for final assembly and testing - and been given a name.

An announcement was made by the Russian State Space Corporation Roscosmos of its new name: 'Kazachok'.

The ExoMars program is a joint endeavor between ESA and Roscosmos and comprises two missions. The Trace Gas Orbiter is already circling Mars examining the planet's atmosphere, while the second mission - comprising a surface science platform and a rover - is foreseen for launch in 2020.

Last month, the rover was named 'Rosalind Franklin' after the prominent scientist behind the discovery of the structure of DNA. Now the surface platform also has a name. Kazachock literally means little Cossack, and it is a lively folk dance.

Once on the martian surface, Rosalind the rover will drive off the Kazachok platform to perform scientific investigations. Kazachok will remain stationary to investigate the climate, atmosphere, radiation and possible presence of subsurface water in the landing site.

Welcome to Europe

Kazachok left Russia after being carefully packed to meet planetary protection requirements, making sure to not bring terrestrial biological contamination to Mars. It was shipped to Turin, Italy, on an Antonov plane along with ground support equipment and other structural elements.

The Italian division of Thales Alenia Space will perform final assembly and testing of the mission in close cooperation with ESA.

There will be more components arriving to Italy throughout the year, including avionics equipment, the carrier and rover modules and thermal protection systems for the landing platform.

Several test campaigns with ExoMars models are running in parallel in preparation for launch and landing.

Recent shock tests in Russia have successfully proved the mechanical compatibility between the spacecraft and the adapter for the Proton-M rocket that will set ExoMars on its way to Mars.

The ExoMars teams have also just completed the egress and locomotion tests with a full-sized model of the rover in Zurich, Switzerland.

There the rover drove off ramps and through all the terrain conditions that it might encounter on Mars: different types of soil, various obstacle shapes and sizes and all kind of slopes.

"We have now a very challenging schedule of deliveries and tests both in Italy and France. The coordination between the Russian and European teams is key to timely reach the Baikonur cosmodrome in 2020," says Francois Spoto, ESA's ExoMars team leader.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/ExoMars_landing_platform_arrives_in_Europe_with_a_name_999.html.

NASA's Mars 2020 rover is put to the test

Pasadena CA (JPL)
Mar 20, 2019

In a little more than seven minutes in the early afternoon of Feb. 18, 2021, NASA's Mars 2020 rover will execute about 27,000 actions and calculations as it speeds through the hazardous transition from the edge of space to Mars' Jezero Crater. While that will be the first time the wheels of the 2,314-pound (1,050-kilogram) rover touch the Red Planet, the vehicle's network of processors, sensors and transmitters will, by then, have successfully simulated touchdown at Jezero many times before.

"We first landed on Jezero Crater on Jan. 23rd," said Heather Bottom, systems engineer for the Mars 2020 mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "And the rover successfully landed again on Mars two days later."

Bottom was the test lead for Systems Test 1, or ST1, the Mars 2020 engineering team's first opportunity to take the major components of the Mars 2020 mission for a test drive. Over two weeks in January, Bottom and 71 other engineers and technicians assigned to the 2020 mission took over the High Bay 1 cleanroom in JPL's Spacecraft Assembly Facility to put the software and electrical systems aboard the mission's cruise, entry capsule, descent stage and rover through their paces.

"ST1 was a massive undertaking," said Bottom. "It was our first chance to exercise the flight software we will fly on 2020 with the actual spacecraft components that will be heading to Mars - and make sure they not only operate as expected, but also interact with each other as expected."

The heritage for Mars 2020's software goes back to the Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) and the Curiosity rover that has been exploring Mars' Gale Crater since 2012. But 2020 is a different mission with a different rover, a different set of science instruments and a different destination on Mars. Its software has to be tailored accordingly.

Work began in earnest on the flight software in 2013. It was coded, recoded, analyzed and tested on computer workstations and laptops. Later, the flight software matriculated to spacecraft testbeds where it was exposed to computers, sensors and other electronic components customized to imitate the flight hardware that will launch with the mission in 2020.

"Virtual workstations and testbeds are an important part of the process," said Bottom. "But the tens of thousands of individual components that make up the electronics of this mission are not all going to act, or react, exactly like a testbed. Seeing the flight software and the actual flight hardware working together is the best way to build confidence in our processes. Test like you fly."

Making the Grade

On the day before ST1 began, the High Bay 1 cleanroom was hopping with "bunny suit"-clad engineers and technicians assembling, inspecting and testing the mission's hardware. The next day, Wednesday, Jan. 16, the room was eerily quiet. The majority of workers had been replaced by two technicians there to monitor the flight test hardware.

Lines of electrical cabling - "umbilicals" - were added to provide data and power to the spacecraft's cruise stage, back shell, descent stage and rover chassis, which have yet to be stacked together. The ground to in-flight spacecraft (and in-flight spacecraft to ground) communications were handled by X-band radio transmission, just like they would be during the trip to Mars.

ST1 began with commands to energize the spacecraft's electrical components and set up thermal, power and telecom configurations. While all the spacecraft components remained in the cleanroom, Bottom and her team had them thinking they were sitting on top of an Atlas 541 rocket 190 feet (58 meters) above Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral on July 17, 2020, waiting to be shot into space.

Next, they focused on another part of cruise before testing the landing sequence. Then they did it all over again.

After a successful launch, they time jumped 40 days ahead to simulate deep space cruise. How would the software and hardware interact when they had to perform navigation fixes and trajectory correction maneuvers? And how would they work when simulated events didn't go as planned? The team looked for answers on the operators' computer screens in the test operations room beside the cleanroom.

"From the test operations room, you could look out the windows onto the cleanroom floor and clearly see the flight hardware," said Bottom.

"Nothing was visibly moving, but underneath the outer structure, there were flight computers swapping sides, radios sending and receiving transmissions, fuel valves moving in and out, subsystems being energized and later turned off, and electrical signals being sent to nonexistent pyrotechnic devices. There was a lot going on in there."

On Jan. 30, the Mars 2020 test team was able to close their 1,000-plus page book of procedures for ST1. They went two-for-two on Mars landings. They also launched four times, performed deep space navigation, executed several trajectory correction maneuvers and even tested a few in-flight off-nominal situations.

This first evaluation of flight hardware and software, over a year in the making, had been a thorough success, demonstrating where things excelled and where they could be improved. When these new changes have been investigated on both a virtual workstation and in the testbed, they will have their chance to "fly" in one of the many other systems tests planned for Mars 2020.

"One of the future scenario tests will place the rover inside a thermal chamber and simulate being on the surface. It will step through mission critical activities at some very low Mars surface temperatures," said Bottom. "Both literally and figuratively it will be a very cool test."

The Mars 2020 Project at JPL manages rover development for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Launch Services Program, based at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is responsible for launch management. Mars 2020 will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/NASAs_Mars_2020_Rover_Is_Put_to_the_Test_999.html.

Opportunity's parting shot was a beautiful panorama

Pasadena CA (JPL)
Mar 13, 2019

Over 29 days last spring, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity documented this 360-degree panorama from multiple images taken at what would become its final resting spot in Perseverance Valley. Located on the inner slope of the western rim of Endurance Crater, Perseverance Valley is a system of shallow troughs descending eastward about the length of two football fields from the crest of Endeavor's rim to its floor.

"This final panorama embodies what made our Opportunity rover such a remarkable mission of exploration and discovery," said Opportunity project manager John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"To the right of center you can see the rim of Endeavor Crater rising in the distance. Just to the left of that, rover tracks begin their descent from over the horizon and weave their way down to geologic features that our scientists wanted to examine up close. And to the far right and left are the bottom of Perseverance Valley and the floor of Endeavour crater, pristine and unexplored, waiting for visits from future explorers."

The trailblazing mission ended after nearly 15 years of exploring the surface of Mars, but its legacy will live on. Opportunity's scientific discoveries contributed to our unprecedented understanding of the planet's geology and environment, laying the groundwork for future robotic and human missions to the Red Planet.

The panorama is composed of 354 individual images provided by the rover's Panoramic Camera (Pancam) from May 13 through June 10, or sols (Martian days) 5,084 through 5,111. This view combines images taken through three different Pancam filters. The filters admit light centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers (near-infrared), 535 nanometers (green) and 432 nanometers (violet).

A few frames (bottom left) remain black and white, as the solar-powered rover did not have the time to record those locations using the green and violet filters before a severe Mars-wide dust storm swept in on June 2018.

The gallery includes the last images Opportunity obtained during its mission (black-and-white thumbnail images from the Pancam that were used to determine how opaque the sky was on its last day) and also the last piece of data the rover transmitted (a "noisy," incomplete full-frame image of a darkened sky).

After eight months of effort and sending more than a thousand commands in an attempt to restore contact with the rover, NASA declared Opportunity's mission complete on Feb. 13, 2019.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/Opportunitys_Parting_Shot_Was_a_Beautiful_Panorama_999.html.

Northwestern study of analog crews in isolation reveals weak spots for Mission to Mars

Evanston IL (SPX)
Feb 19, 2019

Northwestern University researchers are developing a predictive model to help NASA anticipate conflicts and communication breakdowns among crew members and head off problems that could make or break the Mission to Mars.

NASA has formalized plans to send a crewed spacecraft to Mars, a journey that could involve 250 million miles of travel. Among the worldwide teams of researchers toiling over the journey's inherent physiological, engineering and social obstacles, Northwestern professors Noshir Contractor and Leslie DeChurch, and their collaborators, are charting a new course with a series of projects focused on the insights from the science of teams and networks.

In a multiphase study conducted in two analog environments - HERA in the Johnson Space Center in Houston and the SIRIUS mission in the NEK analog located in the Institute for Bio-Medical Problems (IBMP) in Russia - scientists are studying the behavior of analog astronaut crews on mock missions, complete with isolation, sleep deprivation, specially designed tasks and mission control, which mimics real space travel with delayed communication.

The goal is threefold: to establish the effects of isolation and confinement on team functioning, to identify methods to improve team performance, and to develop a predictive model that NASA could use to assemble the ideal team and identify potential issues with already composed teams before and during the mission.

Contractor and DeChurch discussed their latest findings and next steps at a 10 a.m. EST, Feb. 17 press briefing at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

"It's like astronaut Scott Kelly says, 'Teamwork makes the dream work,'" said Contractor, the Jane S. and William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management.

Even for an astronaut, the psychological demands of this Mars journey will be exceptional. The spacecraft will be small, roughly the size of a studio apartment, and the round-trip journey will take almost three years.

"Astronauts are super humans. They are people who are incredibly physically fit and extremely smart," said DeChurch, a professor of communication and psychology at Northwestern. "We're taking an already state-of-the-art crew selection system and making it even better by finding the values, traits and other characteristics that will allow NASA to compose crews that will get along."

Communication delays with worldwide mission controls will exceed the 20-minute mark. In that sense, the Mars mission will be like no mission that has come before.

"A lot of the past efforts to try to create models to simulate the future have run into criticism because people have said it's not really grounded in good data," Contractor said. "What we have here is unprecedented good data. We aren't talking about intuition and expert views, this model is based on real data."

The Northwestern researchers have been culling data from the Human Experimentation Research Analog (HERA) at Houston's Johnson Space Center. HERA's capsule simulator houses astronauts for up to 45 days; a mock mission control outside the capsule augments the realism with sound effects, vibrations and communication delays.

Those on the inside undergo sleep deprivation and try to perform tasks. The researchers collect moment-to-moment metrics about individual performance, moods, psychosocial adaptation and more.

The teams DeChurch and Contractor have studied experienced diminished abilities to think creatively and to solve problems, according to results from the first eight analog space crews, and are able to successfully complete tasks between 20 and 60 percent of the time.

"Creative thinking and problem solving are the very things that are really going to matter on a Mars mission," DeChurch said. "We need the crew to be getting the right answer 100 percent of the time."

The next phase of the research, just begun on Friday, Feb. 15, involves using the model to predict breakdowns and problems a new HERA crew will experience and making changes to "who works with whom, on what, when," Contractor said. "We are going to run our model to see how we can nudge the team into a more positive path and make them more successful."

The researchers are also expanding the experiment to the SIRIUS analog in Moscow, where, beginning on March 15, four Russians and two Americans, will undertake a 120-day fictional mission around the moon, and including a moon landing operation.

Contractor and DeChurch are in the midst of four NASA-funded projects exploring team dynamics and compatibility in preparation for the Mars journey.

Their NASA studies address different aspects of the crew's challenges:

+ The likelihood that the crew and its support teams on Earth will have good chemistry and coping mechanisms; how to predict possible crew-compatibility outcomes

+ Work design; structuring the workflow so that astronauts can better manage transitions from solo to team tasks

+ Identifying and building shared mental models, whereby a team of varied specialists can find enough common ground to effectively accomplish their tasks but not so much that they engage in "group think" or form alliances.

Contractor, a leading expert in network analysis and computational social science, leads Northwestern's Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) research group. DeChurch, a leading expert in teamwork and leadership who leads Northwestern's Advancing Teams, Leaders, and Systems (ATLAS) lab, focuses on team performance; psychology, social interactions, and how multiteam systems best function.

"Our complementary strengths have been a winning combination for tackling the big interdisciplinary questions," said DeChurch.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/Northwestern_study_of_analog_crews_in_isolation_reveals_weak_spots_for_Mission_to_Mars_999.html.

NASA announces demise of Opportunity rover

By Ivan Couronne
Washington (AFP)
Feb 14, 2019

During 14 years of intrepid exploration across Mars, it advanced human knowledge by confirming that water once flowed on the red planet -- but NASA's Opportunity rover has analyzed its last soil sample.

The robot has been missing since the US space agency lost contact during a dust storm in June last year and was declared officially dead Wednesday, ending one of the most fruitful missions in the history of space exploration.

Unable to recharge its batteries, Opportunity left hundreds of messages from Earth unanswered over the months, and NASA said it made its last attempt at contact Tuesday evening.

"I declare the Opportunity mission as complete," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate told a news conference at mission headquarters in Pasadena, California.

The community of researchers and engineers involved in the program were in mourning over the passing of the rover, known affectionately as Oppy.

"It is a hard day," said John Callas, manager of the Mars Exploration Rover project.

"Even though it is a machine and we're saying goodbye, it's very hard and it's very poignant."

"Don't be sad it's over, be proud it taught us so much," former president Barack Obama tweeted later on Thursday.

"Congrats to all the men and women of @NASA on a @MarsRovers mission that beat all expectations, inspired a new generation of Americans, and demands we keep investing in science that pushes the boundaries of human knowledge."

The nostalgia extended across the generations of scientists who have handled the plucky little adventurer.

"Godspeed, Opportunity," tweeted Keri Bean, who had the "privilege" of sending the final message to the robot.

"Hail to the Queen of Mars," added Mike Seibert, Opportunity's former flight director and rover driver in another tweet, while Frank Hartman, who piloted Oppy, told AFP he felt "greatly honored to have been a small part of it."

"Engulfed by a giant planet-encircling dust storm: Is there a more fitting end for a mission as perfect and courageous from start to finish as Opportunity?" he said.

The program has had an extraordinary record of success: 28.1 miles (45.2 kilometers) traversed, more than the Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 moon rover during the 1970s and more than the rover that US astronauts took to the moon on the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

"It is because of trailblazing missions such as Opportunity that there will come a day when our brave astronauts walk on the surface of Mars," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement.

Opportunity sent back 217,594 images from Mars, all of which were made available on the internet.

- Human-like perspective -

"For the public, the big change was that Mars became a dynamic place, and it was a place that you could explore every day," Emily Lakdawalla, an expert on space exploration and senior editor at The Planetary Society.

"The fact that this rover was so mobile, it seemed like an animate creature," she said. "Plus it has this perspective on the Martian surface that's very human-like."

"It really felt like an avatar for humanity traveling across the surface," she added.

Opportunity landed on an immense plain and spent half its life there, traversing flat expanses and once getting stuck in a sand dune for several weeks. It was there, using geological instruments, that it confirmed that liquid water was once present on Mars.

During the second part of its life on Mars, Opportunity climbed to the edge of the crater Endeavor, taking spectacular panoramic images -- and discovering veins of gypsum, additional proof that water once flowed among the Martian rocks.

Opportunity's twin, Spirit, landed three weeks ahead of it, and was active until it expired in 2010. The two far exceeded the goals of their creators: In theory, their missions were supposed to last 90 days.

Today, only a single rover is still active on Mars, Curiosity, which arrived in 2012. It is powered not by the sun, but by a small nuclear reactor.

In 2021, the recently named Rosalind Franklin robot, part of the European-Russian ExoMars mission, is slated to land on a different part of the planet, raising the population of active rovers to two.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/Mission_complete_NASA_announces_demise_of_Opportunity_rover_999.html.

Elon Musk plans to launch spacecraft for Mars in 2019

by Ray Downs
Washington (UPI)
Mar 11, 2018

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk said Sunday that he is on track to launch a spacecraft for Mars by next year.

"We are building the first ship, or interplanetary ship, right now," Musk said during a question and answer session at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. "And we'll probably be able to do short flights, short up and down flights, probably some time in the first half of next year."

Musk said that his ship -- the Big Falcon Rocket -- will be capable of greatly reducing the average cost of a spaceflight as far as Mars in large part because it will be reusable.

"This question of reusability is so fundamental to rocketry," Musk said. "It is the fundamental breakthrough that's needed."

After a series of short flights, Musk said he hopes to have a cargo mission land on Mars by 2022.

Musk said the goal is to begin a human colony on Mars and the first spaceflights there will begin to plant those seeds.

"Once you can get there, the opportunity is immense," Musk said. "We're going to do our best to get there and then make sure there's an environment in which entrepreneurs can flourish."

In September, Musk said the Big Falcon Rocket could also one day be used for travel to different points on earth, with the possibility of flights from New York City to Shanghai taking less then 40 minutes.

Space bases could preserve civilization in World War III: Elon Musk

Washington (AFP) March 12, 2018 - Bases on the moon and Mars could help preserve human civilization and hasten its regeneration on earth in the event of a third world war, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, said on Sunday.

Musk, the founder of rocket and spacecraft company SpaceX, said the company's interplanetary ship could begin test flights as soon as next year.

There is "some probability" that there will be another Dark Ages, "particularly if there is a third world war," Musk said at the SXSW conference.

"We want to make sure that there's enough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring civilization back, and perhaps shorten the length of the Dark Ages," he said.

"I think a moon base and a Mars base that could perhaps help regenerate life back here on earth would be really important."

Musk said he thinks that SpaceX's interplanetary ship will "be able to do short flights, short sort of up and down flights, probably sometime in the first half of next year."

SpaceX launched the world's most powerful rocket, the Falcon Heavy, last month, sending Musk's red Tesla Roadster car toward an orbit near Mars.

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Elon_Musk_plans_to_launch_spacecraft_for_Mars_in_2019_999.html.

Mars Express views moons set against Saturn's rings

Paris (ESA)
Mar 02, 2018

New images and video from ESA's Mars Express show Phobos and Deimos drifting in front of Saturn and background stars, revealing more about the positioning and surfaces of the Red Planet's mysterious moons.

Mars' two small moons are intriguing objects. While we know something of their size, appearance and position thanks to spacecraft such as ESA's Mars Express, much remains unknown. How and where did they form? What are they made of? What exactly is on their surfaces - and could we send a lander to find out?

Mars Express has been studying Mars and its moons for many years. The satellite recently observed both Phobos, Mars' innermost and largest moon at up to 26 km in diameter, and Deimos, Phobos' smaller sibling at 6.2 km in diameter, to produce this new video and series of images.

The video combines 30 images as individual frames and shows Phobos passing through the frame with the gas giant planet Saturn, which sits roughly a billion kilometers away, visible as a small ringed dot in the background.

Precise positioning

Mars Express has been working for more than 14 years at the Red Planet. While several other spacecraft are currently at Mars, including ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, Mars Express' near-polar elliptical orbit gives it some advantages for certain observations.

In particular, its path takes it closer to Phobos than any other spacecraft, and allows it to periodically observe the moon close up from within 150 km - in the summer of 2017, it came as close as 115 km.

The images of Phobos and Saturn comprising the video were taken on 26 November 2016 by the High Resolution Stereo Camera. Mars Express was travelling at about 3 km/s when it obtained these views, highlighting the importance of knowing Phobos' exact position: the spacecraft had just seconds to image the rocky body as it passed by.

Scientists repeatedly refine our knowledge of the moons' positioning in the sky and ensure it is up-to-date by observing each moon against background reference stars and other Solar System bodies. These calculated positions are incredibly precise, and can be accurate to just a couple of kilometers.

Studying the surface

These images are also key to understanding the surface and structure of the moons. Alongside the view of Phobos set against Saturn, Mars Express also obtained images of Phobos against a reference star on 8 January 2018 (star circled in red), close-up images of Phobos' pockmarked surface on 12 September 2017, and images of Deimos with Saturn on 15 January 2018.

The frames of Phobos' surface were taken during close flybys, and show the bumpy, irregular and dimpled surface in detail. Phobos has one of the largest impact craters relative to body size in the Solar System: Stickney crater's 9 km diameter is around a third of the moon's diameter. It is visible as the largest crater in these frames.

The same side of the moon always faces the planet, which means multiple flybys are needed to build up a full map of its surface.

Deimos is visible as an irregular and partially shadowed body in the foreground of one of the new Mars Express images, with the delicate rings of Saturn just about visible encircling the small dot in the background.

Deimos is significantly further away from Mars than its bigger sibling: while Phobos sits at just 6000 km from the surface, Deimos orbits at nearly 23 500 km. For comparison, our own satellite is around 16 times further from Earth than Deimos is from Mars.

Future missions to Mars

There is much we still wish to know about the Mars system. The moons remain particularly mysterious, with open questions about their origins, formation and composition. As a result, combined with their proximity to the Red Planet, the little moons have generated a lot of interest as a target for future missions.

Phobos in particular has been considered for a possible landing and sample-return mission. Owing to its nearness to Mars and one side always facing its parent, the moon could also be a possible location for a more permanent observation post. This would enable long-term monitoring and study of the martian surface and atmosphere, and communications relay for other spacecraft.

Understanding more about the positioning, surface, composition and terrain of both Phobos and Deimos from Mars Express observations is important for preparing for future missions.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/Mars_Express_views_moons_set_against_Saturns_rings_999.html.

Discovery of boron on Mars adds to evidence for habitability

Los Alamos NM (SPX)
Sep 07, 2017

The discovery of boron on Mars gives scientists more clues about whether life could have ever existed on the planet, according to a paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"Because borates may play an important role in making RNA - one of the building blocks of life - finding boron on Mars further opens the possibility that life could have once arisen on the planet," said Patrick Gasda, a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author on the paper. "Borates are one possible bridge from simple organic molecules to RNA. Without RNA, you have no life. The presence of boron tells us that, if organics were present on Mars, these chemical reactions could have occurred."

RNA (ribonucleic acid) is a nucleic acid present in all modern life, but scientists have long hypothesized an "RNA World," where the first proto-life was made of individual RNA strands that both contained genetic information and could copy itself. A key ingredient of RNA is a sugar called ribose. But sugars are notoriously unstable; they decompose quickly in water. The ribose would need another element there to stabilize it.

That's where boron comes in. When boron is dissolved in water - becoming borate - it will react with the ribose and stabilize it for long enough to make RNA.

"We detected borates in a crater on Mars that's 3.8 billion years old, younger than the likely formation of life on Earth," said Gasda. "Essentially, this tells us that the conditions from which life could have potentially grown may have existed on ancient Mars, independent from Earth."

The boron found on Mars was discovered in calcium sulfate mineral veins, meaning the boron was present in Mars groundwater, and provides another indication that some of the groundwater in Gale Cater was habitable, ranging between 0-60 degrees Celsius (32-140 degrees Fahrenheit) and with neutral-to-alkaline pH.

The boron was identified by the rover's laser-shooting ChemCam (Chemistry and Camera) instrument, which was developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in conjunction with the French space agency. Los Alamos' work on discovery-driven instruments like ChemCam stems from the Laboratory's experience building and operating more than 500 spacecraft instruments for national defense.

The discovery of boron is only one of several recent findings related to the composition of Martian rocks. Curiosity is climbing a layered Martian mountain and finding chemical evidence of how ancient lakes and wet underground environments changed, billions of years ago, in ways that affected their potential favorability for microbial life.

As the rover has progressed uphill, compositions trend toward more clay and more boron. These and other chemical variations can tell us about conditions under which sediments were initially deposited and about how later groundwater moving through the accumulated layers altered and transported dissolved elements, including boron.

Whether Martian life has ever existed is still unknown. No compelling evidence for it has been found. When Curiosity landed in Mars' Gale Crater in 2012 the mission's main goal was to determine whether the area ever offered a habitable environment, which has since been confirmed.

The Mars 2020 rover will be equipped with an instrument called "SuperCam," developed by Los Alamos and an instrument called SHERLOC, which was developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with significant participation by Los Alamos. Both of these will search for signs of past life on the planet.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/Discovery_of_boron_on_Mars_adds_to_evidence_for_habitability_999.html.

Life on Mars: Let's Try Oman Desert First for Space Mission

Moscow (Sputnik)
Sep 05, 2017

Life on Mars may still be light years away - but it clearly hasn't stopped us from thinking ahead. Next year six space-suited and booted astronauts will head to the Dhofar desert in Oman in an attempt to simulate what life will be like on Mars.

According to scientists, the Dhofar desert is possibly the most realistic place on Earth that is as harsh and uninviting as the landscape of Mars.

The astronauts will take part in a lavish dress rehearsal for the first manned voyage to another planet as they attempt to retrace the footsteps of Marco Polo and the English explorer Wilfred Thesiger.

It is not the first time such an elaborate adventure has been staged in readiness for the real mission in later years. Teams have simulated identical missions in an open cast mine in southern Spain, the Sahara desert in Africa, as well as a glacier in the Alps.

"Every time we try to get bigger and better and closer to the real thing. We need to understand the capabilities and limitations of our equipment and what people need to do when they get there. This is the biggest mission we have ever done," Gernot Gromer, president of the Austrian Space Forum, revealed.

When they head to Arabia next February the space crew will go armed with a drone, an inflatable hydroponic greenhouse, several robotic rovers as well as a host of other scientific equipment.

Although they will spend their time in complete isolation, their three week journey will be closely monitored by mission control, on this occasion, based in Austria. In order to make the event all the more realistic, any signal contact between them will be delayed by 10 minutes, just as there would be in real life.

"What we know about Mars has progressed massively in the past 15 years, and I strongly believe that the first human to walk on Mars is already born. We could see permanent human settlement on the Red Planet several generations from now, and they may not be happy eating canned food," said Mr. Gromer.

A 50-strong army of support personnel - including Squadron Leader Bonnie Posselt, an RAF doctor who became Britain's first trainee space medic last year - will be on hand throughout the mission. Some 60 researchers will also follow their every footsteps as they probe the 120 square mile test site looking for 'alien' DNA or, anything else they can find in the barren desert wastes.

In addition to the obvious inhospitable conditions beyond Earth, he explained, there are a number of less well known challenges to humans.

"The way our body processes food is different enough to matter a great deal. A person's sense of taste changes in zero gravity. There are medical implications to different gravity effects. In our work we're verifying whether the ideas and designs to survive on Mars work in practice, and the gaps between theory and practice that we observe range from trivial to serious matters."

The astronauts are guaranteed to be put to the test during their mission, most notably temperatures will vary from 16 degrees and 27 Celsius, a far cry from anything Mars has to offer.

In many respects, however, the landscape in Oman will be similar to those expected on the red planet, thanks to its salt domes, sedimentary rocks and dried up riverbeds.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/Life_on_Mars_Lets_Try_Oman_Desert_First_for_Space_Mission_999.html.

Space station receives oldest female astronaut, bit of Mars

November 20, 2016

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The International Space Station gained three new residents Saturday, including the oldest and most experienced woman to orbit the world. A bit of Mars also arrived, courtesy of a Frenchman who brought along a small piece of a Mars meteorite.

Launched Thursday from Kazakhstan, the Russian Soyuz capsule docked at the 250-mile-high outpost just an hour or two before NASA launched a weather satellite from Florida. The Soyuz delivered NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy. They joined three men already on board, one American and two Russians.

This is the third space station mission for Whitson, who at 56 is older than each of her crewmates. She already holds the record for most time in space for a woman: nearly 400 days during her various missions. By the time she returns next spring, she should break the record for any American, man or woman.

"We could not be more proud," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told Whitson once she entered the space station. He joined the new crew's family and friends at Russia's Mission Control outside Moscow to welcome the newcomers on board.

"I'm really happy to be here," Whitson replied. A biochemist by training, Whitson will celebrate her 57th birthday at the orbiting lab in February. Until Thursday, no woman older than 55 had flown in space.

Pesquet, meanwhile, is making his first spaceflight and Novitskiy his second. Before rocketing away, Pesquet told reporters he was taking up a piece of a Mars meteorite to illustrate the necessary union between human and robotic explorers. He intends to bring the stone back with him to Earth in six months. It then will launch aboard a Mars rover and return to its home planet.

"So it's going to be the most experienced space traveler there is in the world," Pesquet said Wednesday at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. "The idea is to show that space exploration is just the whole ... we're not competing against robotic exploration, we're all working together. What we do on the (space station) is just one step on that road to exploration."

Sunday marks the 18th anniversary of the launch of the first space station piece. It's now as big as a football field, with a mass of 1 million pounds and eight miles of electrical wiring. Whitson and company represent its 50th full-time expedition.

"So we can celebrate the station's birthday today," said Sergei Krikalev, a cosmonaut-turned-space official who spoke from the Russian control center. "Good luck."

NASA Scientists Discover Unexpected Mineral on Mars

Pasadena CA (JPL)
Jun 24, 2016

Scientists have discovered an unexpected mineral in a rock sample at Gale Crater on Mars, a finding that may alter our understanding of how the planet evolved.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, has been exploring sedimentary rocks within Gale Crater since landing in August 2012. In July 2015, on Sol 1060 (the number of Martian days since landing), the rover collected powder drilled from rock at a location named "Buckskin."

Analyzing data from an X-ray diffraction instrument on the rover that identifies minerals, scientists detected significant amounts of a silica mineral called tridymite.

This detection was a surprise to the scientists, because tridymite is generally associated with silicic volcanism, which is known on Earth but was not thought to be important or even present on Mars.

The discovery of tridymite might induce scientists to rethink the volcanic history of Mars, suggesting that the planet once had explosive volcanoes that led to the presence of the mineral.

Scientists in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) Division at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston led the study. A paper on the team's findings has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"On Earth, tridymite is formed at high temperatures in an explosive process called silicic volcanism. Mount St. Helens, the active volcano in Washington State, and the Satsuma-Iwojima volcano in Japan are examples of such volcanoes.

"The combination of high silica content and extremely high temperatures in the volcanoes creates tridymite," said Richard Morris, NASA planetary scientist at Johnson and lead author of the paper.

"The tridymite was incorporated into 'Lake Gale' mudstone at Buckskin as sediment from erosion of silicic volcanic rocks."

The paper also will stimulate scientists to re-examine the way tridymite forms. The authors examined terrestrial evidence that tridymite could form at low temperatures from geologically reasonable processes and not imply silicic volcanism. They found none. Researchers will need to look for ways that it could form at lower temperatures.

"I always tell fellow planetary scientists to expect the unexpected on Mars," said Doug Ming, ARES chief scientist at Johnson and co-author of the paper.

"The discovery of tridymite was completely unexpected. This discovery now begs the question of whether Mars experienced a much more violent and explosive volcanic history during the early evolution of the planet than previously thought."

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/NASA_Scientists_Discover_Unexpected_Mineral_on_Mars_999.html.

SpaceX could send people to Mars by 2024, Elon Musk says

by Shawn Price
Los Angeles (UPI)
Jun 3, 2016

SpaceX Chief Elon Musk is predicting his company will be able to launch humans to Mars by 2024.

Speaking at Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. on Wednesday, Musk said if there are no delays, there could be a human colony on Mars by 2025 and promised to give more details of his company's "architecture for Mars colonization" at a global space conference in September.

"What really matters is being able to transport large numbers of people and ultimately millions of tons of cargo to Mars," Musk said. "That's what's necessary in order to create a ... growing city on Mars."

SpaceX announced plans in April to send an unmanned Dragon Version 2 craft to the red planet possibly as soon as 2018, with the goal of landing large payloads there without parachutes or airbags or aerodynamic decelerators.

Musk acknowledged a schedule more ambitious than NASA's, that isn't intending to put a man on Mars until the at least the 2030s.

"When I cite a schedule, it is actually the schedule I think is true," said Musk. "It's not some fake schedule that I don't think is true. It may be delusional. That is entirely possible from time to time. But it's never some knowingly fake deadline ever."

He also implied he could one day move to Mars for good. "I think if you're going to choose a place to die, then Mars is probably not a bad choice," Musk said.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/SpaceX_could_send_people_to_Mars_by_2024_Elon_Musk_says_999.html.

Potential Habitats for Early Life on Mars

San Francisco CA (SPX)
May 25, 2016

San Francisco CA (SPX) May 25, 2016 Recently discovered evidence of carbonates beneath the surface of Mars points to a warmer and wetter environment in that planet's past. The presence of liquid water could have fostered the emergence of life.

A new study by James Wray at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Janice Bishop of the SETI Institute, as well as other collaborators, has found evidence for widespread buried deposits of iron- and calcium-rich Martian carbonates, which suggests a wetter past for the Red Planet.

"Identification of these ancient carbonates and clays on Mars represents a window into history when the climate on Mars was very different from the cold and dry desert of today," notes Bishop.

The fate of water on Mars has been energetically debated by scientists because the planet is currently dry and cold, in contrast to the widespread fluvial features that etch much of its surface. Scientists believe that if water did once flow on the surface of Mars, the planet's bedrock should be full of carbonates and clays, which would be evidence that Mars once hosted habitable environments with liquid water.

Researchers have struggled to find physical evidence for carbonate-rich bedrock, which may have formed when carbon dioxide in the planet's early atmosphere was trapped in ancient surface waters. They have focused their search on Mars' Huygens basin.

This feature is an ideal site to investigate carbonates because multiple impact craters and troughs have exposed ancient, subsurface materials where carbonates can be detected across a broad region. And according to study led James Wray, "outcrops in the 450-km wide Huygens basin contain both clay minerals and iron- or calcium-rich carbonate-bearing rocks."

The study has highlighted evidence of carbonate-bearing rocks in multiple sites across Mars, including Lucaya crater, where carbonates and clays 3.8 billion years old were buried by as much as 5 km of lava and caprock.

The researchers, supported by the SETI Institute's NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) team, identified carbonates on the planet using data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), which is on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This instrument collects the spectral fingerprints of carbonates and other minerals through vibrational transitions of the molecules in their crystal structure that produce infrared emission.

The team paired CRISM data with images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and Context Camera (CTX) on the orbiter, as well as the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on the Mars Global Surveyor, to gain insights into the geologic features associated with carbonate-bearing rocks.

The extent of the global distribution of Martian carbonates is not yet fully resolved and the early climate on the Red Planet is still subject of debate. However, this study is a forward step in understanding the potential habitability of ancient Mars.

Source: Mars Daily.
Link: http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/Potential_Habitats_for_Early_Life_on_Mars_999.html.