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ISS

Russia Threatens Suspending Space Station Cooperation Over Sanctions (engadget.com) 95

"Russia's Roscosmos will stop working with NASA and other western space agencies on the International Space Station," reports Engadget: On early Saturday morning, Roscosmos director Dmitry Rogozin slammed international sanctions against Russia and said normal cooperation between the space agency and its western counterparts would only be possible after they were lifted.... Rogozin said Roscosmos would submit proposals on ending its work with NASA and other international space agencies to Russian authorities.

It's unclear how the decision would affect the space station. The ISS is not owned by any single country. The US, European Union, Russia, Canada and Japan operate the station through a cooperative agreement between the countries. Roscosmos, however, is critical to the ISS. The Russian Orbital Segment handles guidance control for the entire station....

The ISS isn't the first joint space program to see its future thrown into uncertainty due to rising tensions between the West and Russia. In March, Roscosmos said it would not ferry OneWeb's internet satellites to space until the UK government sold its stake in the company. That same month, the European Space Agency announced it was suspending its joint ExoMars mission with Roscosmos.

But in the middle of all this, "There are currently seven astronauts onboard the ISS — three Russian cosmonauts, three NASA astronauts and one German-born ESA astronaut, Matthias Maurer..." reports UPI: The three Russian cosmonauts are Sergey Korsakov, Oleg Artemyev and Denis Matveev. It was not immediately clear how the suspension of cooperation would impact the cosmonauts at the ISS.

Artemyev has expressed support for Russia and its decision to invade Ukraine in a statement made last month after he boarded the space station in a yellow and blue uniform, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. "There is no need to look for secret signs and symbols in our uniform. Color is just color," he said. "Despite the fact that we are in space, we are together with our president and people!"

Space

SpaceX Ending Production of Flagship Crew Capsule (reuters.com) 38

SpaceX has ended production of new Crew Dragon astronaut capsules, a company executive told Reuters, as Elon Musk's space transportation company heaps resources on its next-generation spaceship program. From the report: Capping the fleet at four Crew Dragons adds more urgency to the development of the astronaut capsule's eventual successor, Starship, SpaceX's moon and Mars rocket. Starship's debut launch has been delayed for months by engine development hurdles and regulatory reviews. It also poses new challenges as the company learns how to maintain a fleet and quickly fix unexpected problems without holding up a busy schedule of astronaut missions.

"We are finishing our final (capsule), but we still are manufacturing components, because we'll be refurbishing," SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told Reuters, confirming the plan to end Crew Dragon manufacturing. She added that SpaceX would retain the capability to build more capsules if a need arises in the future, but contended that "fleet management is key." Musk's business model is underpinned by reusable spacecraft, so it was inevitable the company would cease production at some point. But the timing was not known, nor was his strategy of using the existing fleet for its full backlog of missions.
"Crew Dragon has flown five crews of government and private astronauts to space since 2020, when it flew its first pair of NASA astronauts and became the U.S. space agency's primary ride for getting humans to and from the International Space Station," notes Reuters.
Mars

Perseverance Rover Reveals Speed of Sound On Mars (phys.org) 59

An international team of researchers analyzing the sounds captured by the Perseverance rover has determined the speed of sound on Mars. Phys.org reports: Baptiste Chide, with Los Alamos National Laboratory, gave a presentation (PDF) at this year's 53rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference outlining the findings by the team. [...] Chide reported that the team has used data from the microphone to measure the speed of sound on Mars. This was done by measuring the amount of time it took for sounds emanating from laser blasts from Perseverance to return to the rover's microphone. The laser blasts were used to vaporize nearby rocks to learn more about their composition. They found sound to be traveling on Mars at approximately 240 m/s. But they also found that different frequencies of sound travel at different speeds on Mars. The speed increases by approximately 10 m/s above 400 Hz. This finding suggests that communication would be extremely difficult on Mars with different parts of speech arriving to listeners at different times, making conversations sound garbled.

Chide says the microphone also allowed for measuring temperature on Mar's surface in and around the rover. This is because sound travels at different speeds depending on temperature. By measuring sound speed every time Perseverance fired its laser, the researchers were able to calculate rapid temperature changes. Chide also noted that the research team plans to continue monitoring and analyzing sounds from Mars over the course of a year to learn more about fluctuations during different events on the planet, such as during the winter months or when dust storms kick up.

Mars

ExoMars Rover Mission Officially Suspended As Europe Cuts Ties With Russia (gizmodo.com) 29

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Today, the European Space Agency leadership took steps toward suspending the ExoMars mission, a joint project with Russian space agency Roscosmos. It's the latest scientific fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has forced institutions collaborating with Russian entities to reevaluate their positions.

ExoMars a two-part mission: an orbiter, launched in 2016, that studies the chemistry of the Red Planet's atmosphere, and a Mars rover, named for scientist Rosalind Franklin and set to launch this year -- or at least, it was. The mission has been a long time coming; funding was granted 10 years ago this week, but technical delays and the covid-19 pandemic pushed the rover launch date back to fall 2022. That target was looking viable until the Russian invasion of Ukraine last month.

From the off, it was clear that ExoMars was in doubt. In a statement shortly after the invasion, the ESA said it was "fully implementing sanctions imposed on Russia by our Member States" and that "the sanctions and the wider context make a launch in 2022 very unlikely." The agency's most recent move codifies that unlikeliness. Meeting in Paris this week, the agency's ruling council unanimously mandated that the ESA Director General take steps to suspend cooperation with Roscosmos and authorized a study of how to get ExoMars off the ground without Roscosmos involvement. [...] In its newest statement, ESA announced that its director general would convene a meeting of the agency council in several weeks to submit proposals for how to proceed with ExoMars without Russian involvement.

Moon

Team Chosen To Extract Oxygen From the Surface of the Moon (digitaltrends.com) 15

"The European Space Agency has announced it has chosen a team to make oxygen on the moon," reports Digital Trends.

"The team, led by aerospace manufacturer Thales Alenia Space, will design and build a payload to create oxygen from lunar soil." [C]arrying oxygen into space using rockets is inefficient, so it would be better if astronauts could find ways to make what they need in the places they are exploring. This principle is called in-situ resource utilization and is a key idea for future missions to the moon and Mars.

The payload for the moon will be designed to create between 50 and 100 grams of oxygen from the dusty material which covers the moon, called regolith. The aim is to extract 70% of the available oxygen in the sample within a 10 day period. That time limit is because it will need to operate within the window of available solar power in a lunar day, which is around two weeks long.

Previous experiments and concepts have shown that it is possible to extract oxygen from lunar regolith, which is made up of around 40 — 45% oxygen by weight. Now, the challenge is to make a workable system within the constraints of size and materials.

A systems engineer from the space agency's design facility has high hopes for the project, according to a statement released Wednesday. "Being able to extract oxygen from moonrock, along with useable metals, will be a game-changer for lunar exploration, allowing the international explorers set to return to the Moon to 'live off the land' without being dependent on long and expensive terrestrial supply lines."
Space

Why Werner Herzog Thinks Human Space Colonization 'Will Inevitably Fail' (arstechnica.com) 179

Last Exit: Space is a new documentary on Discovery+ exploring the possibility of humans colonizing planets beyond Earth, reports Ars Technica.. "Since it is produced and narrated by Werner Herzog and written and directed by his son Rudolph, however, it goes in a different direction than your average space documentary. It's weird, beautiful, skeptical, and even a bit funny...."

Other times, Werner opts for dryly funny narration of how bleak certain space colonization efforts may turn out. "The reality of life on Mars would be sobering," he says. "Astronauts would hunker down in radiation-proof bunkers, enjoying drinks of recycled urine...."

For most of the film, Rudolph focuses on two options for where humans might travel, land, and establish space colonies: Mars or an exoplanet in the Alpha Centauri system. Along the way, Last Exit: Space follows a pattern. First, it lists a problem that might make a certain space travel proposition impossible. Then it briefly explains the most promising solution to that problem as developed by modern science and engineering. Finally, it brings the interstellar dream crashing back down to Earth with a grim recounting of why the solution won't work.... "We know the next planet outside of our solar system is at least 5,000 years away," Werner tells Ars. "It's very hard to do that, and [whatever is there is] probably uninhabitable. And we know that on Mars, there's permanent radiation that will force us underground in little bunkers...."

As Last Exit: Space explores the logistics of a possible 5,000-year journey to Alpha Centauri, the film asks wild questions that touch matters of the human spirit, each with a diverse pool of optimistic and pessimistic answers. Is hibernation feasible? Could a non-hibernating skeleton crew function in a sane way? And how would the human act of copulation play out — both mechanically, in terms of being a reduced-gravity exercise, and genetically, in terms of possible in-breeding if a ship can't hold at least 40,000 colonists to keep the gene pool diverse...? [Werner Herzog adds] "But as you hear it from Lucian Walkowicz, an astronomer in the film, it's very clear that we take her position: We shouldn't behave like locusts who are grazing everything empty here, then move on to the next planet. There's something not right to shift, to move our population to other planets, and it's a part of all these ethical questions....

[Space colonization] will fail. It is inevitable. You cannot travel to the next [Alpha Centauri exoplanet] that is 200,000 years away. Period. Good luck...."

The filmmakers make it clear that they admire and appreciate efforts to understand space and our universal neighbors. But in describing "space colonization" as "a dirty word," Rudolph paraphrases Walkowicz's film-ending pitch: "There is already a cross-generational spaceship operating right now — and we're already on it. Earth is a luxuriously furnished, wonderfully self-rejuvenating place, so we'd better treat it well...."

Werner admits that he does have some interest in space travel. "I would love to go out on Mars on a mission... if I had a camera with me," he says.

Rudolph immediately interrupts: "Yes, but I want to stop my dad. Don't encourage him on this, please. I want him to stay on Earth."

Mars

NASA Rover Spots Unreal Mars 'Flower' Formation (cnet.com) 13

Thelasko shares a report from CNET: NASA's Curiosity rover snapped a gorgeous, delicate formation on Mars that looks like it could be a branching piece of ocean coral. It's not coral, but it's worth contemplating how we see familiar Earth objects in random shapes on Mars. The miniscule Martian sculpture invites poetic comparisons. It resembles a water droplet captured at the moment of explosion against a surface, or the tendrils of an anemone in a tide pool.

The image comes from Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager (Mahli) instrument, which NASA describes as "the rover's version of the magnifying hand lens that geologists usually carry with them into the field." So the formation in the image is quite small. Abigail Fraeman, a deputy project scientist for Curiosity, tweeted a helpful visual guide that compares the object with a US penny to give an approximate sense of the scale. Fraeman writes that the image "shows teeny, tiny delicate structures that formed by mineral precipitating from water."

Space

Are We Prepared for Contamination Between Worlds? (gizmodo.com) 54

Slashdot reader Tangential shares what he describes as "an interesting article on Gizmodo discussing how we could easily contaminate other planets/moons as we explore them."

"Based on our recently demonstrated vulnerability to locally evolved bacteria and viruses, what will other worlds's pathogens do to us (and what will ours do to them?) What I also find interesting is what a small percentage of SciFi actually addresses this."

From Gizmodo's article: The year is 2034. Humans have sent a probe to Jupiter's moon Europa to drill through the icy surface and photograph the ocean beneath. In the few hours before it stops functioning, the probe returns images of shapes that could be some form of life. Scientists quickly organize a followup mission that will collect samples of that spot and bring them back to Earth. But, unknown to anyone, the first probe wasn't sterile — it carried a hardy bacteria that had survived even the mission's clean rooms. By the time the samples finally reach Earth years later, they're dominated by this bacteria, which has happily set up shop in Europa's dark, salty waters. Just like that, our first opportunity to study a truly alien ecosystem has been destroyed.

This is a nightmare scenario for NASA and other space agencies, and it's one they've worked intensely to avoid with every mission to another orb. But some researchers from a lesser-known branch of ecology argue that even the current strict standards aren't rigorous enough, and as more ambitious missions to other planets and moons get ready to launch, the risk of interplanetary contamination becomes more dire. They say we need to better plan for "forward contamination," in which our technology disseminates Earth microbes, as well as "back contamination," in which life from elsewhere hitches a ride to Earth.

In fact, we already have a playbook to lean on: the discipline of invasion science, the study of how species on our planet invade each other's ecosystems. "What I would say is that, given that there are now concrete plans in place to explore new areas that could have extant life — these pose a new set of risks that were not in play before," Anthony Ricciardi, a professor of invasion ecology and aquatic ecosystems at McGill University, told Gizmodo. "Invasion science has been applied to biosecurity at national and international levels. My colleagues and I believe that it could similarly guide biosecurity at the planetary or interplanetary scales."

Because of the groundbreaking technological advances of recent years, our ability to explore other worlds — from asteroids to planets to ocean moons — is expanding, and so are the risks that come with that. NASA plans to bring bits of Mars to Earth in the early 2030s, and missions to Titan and Europa, which could very well host life, are set to launch this decade.... Although the 2034 Europa tale is invented, there's plenty of precedent for it. We've likely accidentally brought drug-resistant bacteria into the Antarctic ecosystem already, infecting seabirds and seals.

Our lack of foresight and carelessness is driving mass extinctions on Earth — are we willing to do the same thing to the next inhabited world we touch?

Mars

NASA's Perseverance Rover Marks Its First Year Hunting for Past Life on Mars (npr.org) 6

It's been one year since a nuclear-powered, one-armed, six-wheeled robot punched through the Martian atmosphere at a blazing 12,000 miles per hour, and a supersonic parachute slowed it way down until a rocket-powered "jetpack" could fire its engines and then gently lower it onto the surface. NPR: NASA's Perseverance rover was too far away for engineers on Earth to control it in real time -- which meant that the spacecraft had to execute that daredevil maneuver all by itself. All that the robot's handlers on Earth could do was wait for confirmation that it had touched down safely. "It is a nail-biting experience," Rick Welch, Perseverance's deputy project manager. "There's no doubt about it." Dramatic as the Feb. 18, 2021 touchdown was, the milestones that the car-sized rover has hit in the year since then could one day prove far more momentous.

Perseverance is hunting for evidence of microbes that may have once lived on the red planet -- a first for a NASA robot. It begins a new chapter of Martian exploration: one that not only searches for ancient signs of microbial Martians, but that lays the groundwork to send samples of Mars rocks and dirt back to Earth. One of the mission's main objectives is to collect samples of rocks and dirt and stash them on the surface of Mars so that a future mission could pick them up and bring them back to Earth to study. The $2.7-billion rover is equipped with a suite of scientific instruments including a rock-blasting laser, cameras and spectrometers. But a robot geologist -- even one as advanced as Perseverance -- can only do so much. Scientists really hope to get pieces of the planet back to their labs.

Advertising

EV Start-up Polestar Takes Shots At Tesla, Musk and Volkswagen In Super Bowl Ad (cnbc.com) 55

omfglearntoplay shares a report from CNBC: Electric vehicle firm Polestar roasted Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Volkswagen in its Super Bowl ad, with references to "conquering Mars" and "Dieselgate." The electric vehicle startup's "No Compromises" advertisement, which lasted 30 seconds, featured close-up shots of the Polestar 2 with dramatic background music. The ad included phrases such as "no dirty secrets," "no empty promises," and "no greenwashing." Words following "No" during the ad range from general terms such as "epic voiceovers" and "dirty secrets" to "dieselgate" -- referring to a former diesel emissions scandal with Volkswagen -- and "conquering Mars" -- a critique on Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk, who has plans to land humans on Mars by 2026. The commercial ends at "No. 2" and then "Polestar 2," the company's all-electric performance car. Further reading: This Year's Super Bowl Broadcast May Seem 'Crypto-Happy'. But the NFL Isn't
AI

OpenAI Cofounder Mocked for Tweeting That Neural Networks Might Be Slightly Conscious (futurism.com) 175

"It may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious," OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever tweeted Wednesday.

Futurism says that after republishing that remark, "the responses came rolling in, with some representing the expected handwringing about sentient artificial intelligence, but many others calling bull." "Every time such speculative comments get an airing, it takes months of effort to get the conversation back to the more realistic opportunities and threats posed by AI," UNSW Sidney AI researcher Toby Walsh chimed in....

Independent sociotechnologist Jürgen Geuter, who goes by the pseudonym "tante" online, quipped in response to Sutskever's tweet that "it may also be that this take has no basis in reality and is just a sales pitch to claim magical tech capabilities for a startup that runs very simple statistics, just a lot of them...."

Leon Dercynski, an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, ran with the same idea. "It may be that there's a teapot orbiting the Sun somewhere between Earth and Mars," he bantered. "This seems more reasonable than Ilya's musing, in fact, because the apparatus for orbit exists, and we have good definitions of teapots...."

These critics, it should be noted, are not wrong to point out the outlandishness of Sutskever's claim — it was not only a departure for OpenAI and its chief scientist, but also a pretty unusual comment to make, given that up to this point, most who work in and study AI believe that we're many years away from creating conscious AI, if indeed we ever do.

Sutskever, for his part, seems unbothered by the controversy.

"Ego is (mostly) the enemy," he said Friday morning.

Mars

NASA Picks Lockheed Martin To Build Rocket To Carry Mars Samples Back To Earth (space.com) 70

NASA on Monday announced that it has selected the aerospace company Lockheed Martin to build the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), a small rocket that will launch pristine Red Planet samples back toward Earth a decade or so from now. Space.com reports: Mars Sample Return is a joint effort of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). The project is already well underway, thanks to NASA's Perseverance rover, which landed on the Red Planet in February 2021.The six-wheeled robot has collected a handful of samples thus far and will eventually snag several dozen more, if all goes according to plan. The next big steps are scheduled to come in the mid-2020s, with the launch of two additional missions -- the NASA-led Sample Retrieval Lander (SRL) and ESA's Earth Return Orbiter (ERO).

SRL will deliver an ESA "fetch rover" and the MAV to the Martian surface. The fetch rover will carry the collected samples from Perseverance -- or the spot(s) where Perseverance has cached them -- to the MAV, which will then launch them into orbit around the Red Planet. A container holding the samples will then meet up with the ERO, which will haul it home to Earth, perhaps as early as 2031. Once the samples are down on the ground, scientists in well-equipped labs around the world will study them for signs of ancient Mars life, clues about the planet's evolutionary history and other topics of interest, NASA officials have said. [...] The newly announced MAV contract has a potential value of $194 million, NASA officials said in today's statement. The contracted work will begin on Feb. 25 and run for six years. During this time, Lockheed Martin will build multiple MAV test units as well as the flight unit.
"Committing to the Mars Ascent Vehicle represents an early and concrete step to hammer out the details of this ambitious project not just to land on Mars, but to take off from it," Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement. "We are nearing the end of the conceptual phase for this Mars Sample Return mission, and the pieces are coming together to bring home the first samples from another planet," Zurbuchen added. "Once on Earth, they can be studied by state-of-the-art tools too complex to transport into space."
Bitcoin

Why Is Matt Damon Shilling For Crypto? (nytimes.com) 108

If you've been watching any TV over the past few months, chances are you've seen Crypto.com's ad featuring Matt Damon. It's an expensive advertisement, complete with top-notch CGI and heady phrases like "History is filled with almosts" and "Fortune favors the brave." Jody Rosen dissects Damon's crypto push in a New York Times piece titled, "Why Is Matt Damon Shilling for Crypto? An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: The burden of spreading that gospel has been placed on the beefy shoulders of Matt Damon, whom Crypto.com hired as its "brand ambassador" in advance of a $100 million global marketing push. Damon is just the latest A-list star who has taken to hawking crypto. Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen have appeared in commercials for the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, a Crypto.com competitor in which they have an equity stake. On Twitter, Reese Witherspoon is a vocal booster ("Crypto is here to stay"), and Snoop Dogg, an NFT aficionado, offers investing advice ("Buy low stay high!"). There is something unseemly, to put it mildly, about the famous and fabulously wealthy urging crypto on their fans. Cryptocurrencies, after all, are in many cases not so much currencies as speculative thingamabobs -- digital tokens whose value is predicated largely on the idea that someone will take them off your hands at a higher price than it cost you to acquire them. Entertainers and athletes have ample money to risk in speculative bubbles; their millions of admirers don't have that luxury and may be left holding the bag when a bubble bursts. [...]

The cryptocurrency industry's marketing efforts are focused on young people, especially young men. Surveys have shown that some 40 percent of all American men ages 18 to 29 have invested in, traded or used a form of cryptocurrency. [...] Damon offers a particular kind of appeal to that demographic. His star power is based on brains and brawn; he can recite magniloquent phrases while also giving the impression that he could fillet an enemy, Jason Bourne style, armed with only a Bic pen. In the ad, his words are high-flown -- all that stuff about history and bravery -- but they amount to a macho taunt: If you're a real man, you'll buy crypto.

The bleakness of that pitch is startling. In recent weeks, while watching televised sports -- where the Crypto.com spot airs repeatedly, alongside commercials for other crypto platforms and an onslaught of ads for sports-gambling apps -- I could not shake the feeling that culture has taken a sinister turn: that we've sanctioned an economy in which tech start-ups compete, in broad daylight, to lure the vulnerable with get-rich-quick schemes. Yet what's most unsettling about the commercial is the pitch it doesn't make. Traditionally, an advertisement offers an affirmative case for its product, a vision of the fulfillment that will come if you wear those jeans or drive that truck. This ad doesn't bother. It shows a brief glimpse of a young couple locking eyes in a nightclub -- an insinuation, I guess, that crypto has sex appeal. But the ad builds inexorably toward that final shot of Mars, where Matt Damon's astronaut was marooned in a hit film and where Elon Musk, the world's second-richest man and a crypto enthusiast, says he plans to build a colony to survive the end of civilization on Earth.
"We live in troubled times," writes Rosen in closing. "The young, in particular, may feel that they are peering over the edge, economically and existentially. This ad's message for them seems to be that the social compact is ruptured, that the old ideals of security and the good life no longer pertain."

"What's left are moonshots, big swings, high-stakes gambles. You might bet a long-shot parlay or take a flier on Dogecoin. Maybe someday you'll hitch a ride on Elon Musk's shuttle bus to the Red Planet. The ad holds out the promise of 'fortune,' but what it's really selling is danger, the dark and desperate thrills of precarity itself -- because, after all, what else have we got? You could call it truth in advertising."
Mars

Water On Mars May Have Flowed For a Billion Years Longer Than Thought (space.com) 27

Observations by a long-running Mars mission suggest that liquid water may have flowed on the Red Planet as little as 2 billion years ago, much later than scientists once thought. Space.com reports: Scientists charted the presence of chloride salt deposits left behind by flowing water using years of data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2006. By studying dozens of images of salt deposits taken by the spacecraft's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), the scientists interpreted a younger age for the salt deposits using a method "crater counting." The younger a region is, the fewer craters it should have, with adjustments for aspects such as a planet's atmosphere, allowing scientists to estimate its age. The new results push forward the existence of water on Mars from 3 billion years ago to as little as 2 billion years ago, based on the observations, which could have implications for life on Mars and more broadly, the planet's geological history. [...]

The scientists also created elevation maps using MRO's wide-angle context camera, and the zoomed-in views provided by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) that can spot craters as small as the Curiosity or Perseverance Mars rovers. The salt minerals were first spotted by a different spacecraft 14 years ago, called Mars Odyssey, but MRO's advantage is it has higher resolution instruments than its older (and still operational) companion in orbit.
The study based on the research was published in AGU American Geophysical Union Advances.
Mars

Researchers Find Evidence of Boulders Tumbling After Recent Earthquakes on Mars (yahoo.com) 19

"If a rock falls on Mars, and no one is there to see it, does it leave a trace?" jokes the New York Times, answering "Yes, and it's a beautiful herringbone-like pattern, new research reveals." Scientists have now spotted thousands of tracks on the red planet created by tumbling boulders. Delicate chevron-shaped piles of Martian dust and sand frame the tracks, the team showed, and most fade over the course of a few years.

Rockfalls have been spotted elsewhere in the solar system, including on the moon and even a comet. But a big open question is the timing of these processes on other worlds — are they ongoing or did they predominantly occur in the past?A study of these ephemeral features on Mars, published last month in Geophysical Research Letters, says that such boulder tracks can be used to pinpoint recent seismic activity on the red planet. This new evidence that Mars is a dynamic world runs contrary to the notion that all of the planet's exciting geology happened much earlier, s aid Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at Brown University who was not involved in the study...

To arrive at this finding, Vijayan, a planetary scientist at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmadabad, India, who uses a single name, and his colleagues pored over thousands of images of Mars' equatorial region. The imagery was captured from 2006 through 2020 by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and revealed details as small as 10 inches across. "We can discriminate individual boulders," Vijayan said. The team manually searched for chain-like features — a telltale signature of a rock careening down an incline — on the sloped walls of impact craters. Vijayan and his collaborators spotted more than 4,500 such boulder tracks, the longest of which stretched more than a mile and a half...

Roughly one-third of the tracks the researchers studied were absent in early images, meaning that they must have formed since 2006... The researchers suggest that winds continuously sweeping over the surface of Mars redistribute dust and sand and erase the ejecta. Because boulder fall ejecta fades so rapidly, seeing it implies that a boulder was dislodged recently, the team suggest. And a common cause of rockfalls, on Earth and elsewhere, is seismic activity.... Since 2019, hundreds of marsquakes have been detected by NASA's InSight lander, and two of the largest occurred last year in the Cerberus Fossae region.

Today the Mars lander InSight is back in operation after a two-week break to avoid dust storms, while dust storms also delayed the 19th flight of NASA's Ingenuity helicopter.

And elsewhere on Mars, the Perserverance rover successfully dislodged two pebbles stuck in its sample-collecting apparatus.
Mars

NASA's Curiosity Rover Measures Intriguing Carbon Signature On Mars (nasa.gov) 22

After analyzing powdered rock samples collected from the surface of Mars by NASA's Curiosity rover, scientists today announced that several of the samples are rich in a type of carbon that on Earth is associated with biological processes. From a report: While the finding is intriguing, it doesn't necessarily point to ancient life on Mars, as scientists have not yet found conclusive supporting evidence of ancient or current biology there, such as sedimentary rock formations produced by ancient bacteria, or a diversity of complex organic molecules formed by life. In a report of their findings to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal on January 18, Curiosity scientists offer several explanations for the unusual carbon signals they detected. Their hypotheses are drawn partly from carbon signatures on Earth, but scientists warn the two planets are so different they can't make definitive conclusions based on Earth examples.

The biological explanation Curiosity scientists present in their paper is inspired by Earth life. It involves ancient bacteria in the surface that would have produced a unique carbon signature as they released methane into the atmosphere where ultraviolet light would have converted that gas into larger, more complex molecules. These new molecules would have rained down to the surface and now could be preserved with their distinct carbon signature in Martian rocks.

Two other hypotheses offer nonbiological explanations. One suggests the carbon signature could have resulted from the interaction of ultraviolet light with carbon dioxide gas in the Martian atmosphere, producing new carbon-containing molecules that would have settled to the surface. And the other speculates that the carbon could have been left behind from a rare event hundreds of millions of years ago when the solar system passed through a giant molecular cloud rich in the type of carbon detected.

Mars

New Study of 1980s Mars Meteorite Debunks Proof of Ancient Life On Planet (theguardian.com) 32

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A four billion-year-old meteorite from Mars that caused a splash here on Earth decades ago contains no evidence of ancient, primitive Martian life after all, scientists have said. In 1996, a NASA-led team announced that organic compounds in the rock appeared to have been left by living creatures. Other scientists were skeptical and researchers chipped away at that premise over the decades, most recently by a team led by the Carnegie Institution for Science's Andrew Steele. Tiny samples from the meteorite show the carbon-rich compounds are actually the result of water -- most likely salty or briny water -- flowing over the rock for a prolonged period, Steele said. The findings appear in the Science journal.

During Mars' wet and early past, at least two impacts occurred near the rock, heating the planet's surrounding surface, before a third impact bounced it off the red planet and into space millions of years ago. The 4lb (2kg) rock was found in Antarctica in 1984. Groundwater moving through the cracks in the rock, while it was still on Mars, formed the tiny globs of carbon that are present, according to the researchers. The same thing can happen on Earth and could help explain the presence of methane in Mars' atmosphere, they said. But two scientists who took part in the original study took issue with these latest findings, calling them "disappointing." In a shared email, they said they stand by their 1996 observations.
"While the data presented incrementally adds to our knowledge of (the meteorite), the interpretation is hardly novel, nor is it supported by the research," wrote Kathie Thomas-Keprta and Simon Clemett, astromaterial researchers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "Unsupported speculation does nothing to resolve the conundrum surrounding the origin of organic matter" in the meteorite, they added.
Space

Space Anemia Is Tied To Being In the Void and Can Stick Around Awhile (arstechnica.com) 26

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Ars Technica: Space isn't easy on humans. Some aspects are avoidable -- the vacuum, of course, and the cold, as well as some of the radiation. Astronauts can also lose bone density, thanks to a lack of gravity. NASA has even created a fun acronym for the issues: RIDGE, which stands for space radiation, isolation and confinement, distance from Earth, gravity fields, and hostile and closed environments. New research adds to the worries by describing how being in space destroys your blood. Or rather, something about space -- and we don't know what just yet -- causes the human body to perform hemolysis at a higher rate than back on Earth.

This phenomenon, called space anemia, has been well-studied. It's part of a suite of problems that astronauts face when they come back to terra firma, which is how Guy Trudel -- one of the paper's authors and a specialist in physical medicine and rehabilitation at The Ottawa Hospital -- got involved. "[W]hen the astronauts return from space, they are very much like the patients we admit in rehab," he told Ars. Space anemia had been viewed as an adaptation to shifting fluids in the astronauts' upper bodies when they first arrive in space. They rapidly lose 10 percent of the liquid in their blood vessels, and it was expected that their bodies destroyed a matching 10 percent of red blood cells to get things back into balance. People also suspected that things went back to normal after 10 days. Trudel and his team found, however, that the hemolysis was a primary response to being in space. "Our results were a bit of a surprise," he said. [...]

Trudel's team isn't sure exactly why being in space would cause the human body to destroy blood cells at this faster rate. There are some potential culprits, however. Hemolysis can happen in four different parts of the body: the bone marrow (where red blood cells are made), the blood vessels, the liver, or the spleen. From this list, Trudel suspects that the bone marrow or the spleen are the most likely problem areas, and his team has plans to investigate the issue further in the future. "What causes the anemia is the hemolysis, but what causes the hemolysis is the next step," he said. It's also uncertain how long a person in space can continue to destroy 54 percent more red blood cells than their Earth-bound kin. "We don't have data beyond six months. There's a knowledge gap for longer missions, for one-year missions, or missions to the Moon or Mars or other bodies," he said.

Mars

China's Mars Orbiter Snaps Amazing Selfies Above Red Planet (livescience.com) 26

InfiniteZero shares a report from Live Science: China's Tianwen-1 spacecraft at Mars pulled a big New Year's surprise with stunning new images captured by a small camera that flew free of the orbiter to snap epic selfies above the Red Planet. The new images published by the China National Space Administration show Tianwen-1 above Mars' north pole, with its solar arrays and antennas on display, as well as a partial closeup of the orbiter and a view of the Red Planet's northern ice cap. The views give an unprecedented view of a spacecraft in orbit around another planet, showing the golden body of Tianwen-1, the silver high-gain antenna for communications, solar arrays and science antennae. A closeup shows the spacecraft's radar antenna parallel to the solar array.
Mars

NASA's Retiring Top Scientist Says We Can Terraform Mars, and Maybe Venus Too (nytimes.com) 159

"Since joining NASA in 1980, Jim Green has seen it all," writes the New York Times. He has helped the space agency understand Earth's magnetic field, explore the outer solar system and search for life on Mars. As the new year arrived on Saturday, he bade farewell to the agency.

Over the past four decades, which includes 12 years as the director of NASA's planetary science division and the last three years as its chief scientist, he has shaped much of NASA's scientific inquiry, overseeing missions across the solar system and contributing to more than 100 scientific papers across a range of topics... One of Dr. Green's most recent significant proposals has been a scale for verifying the detection of alien life, called the "confidence of life detection," or CoLD, scale. [Green says scientists have to "stop screwing around with just crying wolf."]

Green has also published research suggesting it's possible to terraform Mars with a giant magnetic shield blocking the sun (to stop it from stripping the Mars atmosphere and creating habitable temperatures).

"Yeah, it's doable," he explains to the Times:

"Stop the stripping, and the pressure is going to increase. Mars is going to start terraforming itself. That's what we want: the planet to participate in this any way it can. When the pressure goes up, the temperature goes up... If you didn't need a spacesuit, you could have much more flexibility and mobility. The higher temperature and pressure enable you to begin the process of growing plants in the soils.

"There are several scenarios on how to do the magnetic shield. I'm trying to get a paper out I've been working on for about two years. It's not going to be well received. The planetary community does not like the idea of terraforming anything.

"But you know. I think we can change Venus, too, with a physical shield that reflects light. We create a shield, and the whole temperature starts going down."

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