An anonymous reader shares a report: Back in March of 2017, this strange note first appeared at the end of a paper in the journal Nature: "Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations." I looked over the paper, and it didn't have any maps in it. None of the authors had unusual affiliations, just the normal university departments. Why the disclaimer? Before answering this question, let's dig a bit deeper. This notice first started appearing in mid-March of 2017, when it was attached to every single research paper in that issue. I cannot find any papers prior to that with the "Publisher's note." Ever since then, Nature has put this notice on every paper in all of their journals. For example, the current issue has a paper on mapping sound on the planet Mars, by an international team of astronomers and physicists. It does contain maps, but they don't describe any features on Earth. Nonetheless, it has the disclaimer at the end about "jurisdictional claims in published maps."

(Nature has done it to me too, for example in this 2018 paper led by a former Ph.D. student of mine. I didn't yet know about the weird disclaimer when that paper appeared, and I didn't catch it until later.) It's not just Nature, but apparently all of the many journals published by the Nature Publishing Group, which today number in excess of 100 publications. I looked at a few randomly chosen papers in Nature Biotechnology and Cancer Gene Therapy, as a test, and they all have exactly the same Publisher's Note. None of these papers, I should add, have any maps in them. I couldn't find anything odd about the institutional affiliations either. Nature is one of the oldest and most-respected journals in all of science, dating back to 1869. Just a few years ago, in 2015, Nature's publishing group merged with Springer, the second-largest for-profit scientific publisher in the world, and they changed their name to Springer Nature. We'll see why this is relevant in a minute.

I should also mention that the papers appearing in these journals, especially Nature itself, are rigorously peer-reviewed. Any map that appears undergoes the same peer review. The reviewers also see all the authors' institutional affiliations. Normally, the publisher has no say over any of this content: if it passes peer review, it's published. So what happened? Springer Nature, it seems, added this note because of pressure from the Chinese government. The Chinese government doesn't want any maps to show Taiwan, and it doesn't want any affiliations to from scientists in Taiwan unless they show (incorrectly) that Taiwan is part of China. I admit that I'm speculating, but we have very clear evidence that SpringerNature has succumbed to Chinese demands on related matters. In late 2017, the New York Times reported that Springer was "bowing to pressure from the Chinese government to block access to hundreds of articles on its Chinese website." [...]

New research explains how meteorites called aubrites may actually be shattered pieces of the planet closest to the sun from the early days of the solar system. From a report: Mercury does not make sense. It is a bizarre hunk of rock with a composition that is unlike its neighboring rocky planets. "It's way too dense," said David Rothery, a planetary scientist at the Open University in England. Most of the planet, the closest to the sun, is taken up by its core. It lacks a thick mantle like Earth has, and no one is quite sure why. One possibility is that the planet used to be much bigger -- perhaps twice its current bulk or more. Billions of years ago, this fledgling proto-Mercury, or super Mercury, could have been hit by a large object, stripping away its outer layers and leaving the remnant we see behind.

While a nice idea, there has never been direct evidence for it. But some researchers think they have found something. In work presented [PDF] at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston in March, Camille Cartier, a planetary scientist at the University of Lorraine in France, and colleagues said pieces of this proto-Mercury may be hiding in museums and other meteorite collections. Studying them could unlock the planet's mysteries. "We don't have any samples of Mercury" at the moment, said Dr. Cartier. Gaining such specimens "would be a small revolution" in understanding the natural history of the solar system's smallest planet. According to the Meteoritical Society, nearly 70,000 meteorites have been gathered around the world from places as remote as the Sahara and Antarctica, finding their way into museums and other collections. Most are from asteroids ejected from the belt between Mars and Jupiter, while more than 500 come from the moon. More than 300 are from Mars.

joshuark writes: NASA programmer/scientist, Ron Garret shares his experience debugging LISP code from 150-million miles away on the robotic Mars rover Sojourner. Garret describes his experience in a recent episode of Adam Gordon Bell's Corecursive podcast. Garret later explains, "And it didn't work..." for the next project NASA's New Millennium project using LISP.

Like a professor said in LISP programming class, LISP -- getting it done is half DEFUN. Garret had written an essay in 2006 , titled, "How knowing LISP destroyed my programming career." Available on the web archive. So much for LISPcraft, or the Little LISPer.

Boeing's Starliner successfully docked to the International Space Station Friday night for the first time.

And right now, Boeing is beginning the official hatch-opening ceremon, in which the space station astronauts already on the ISS "open the hatch to the vehicle and retrieve some cargo that's packed inside," explains the Verge: NASA tasked Boeing with conducting an uncrewed flight demonstration of Starliner to show that the capsule can hit all of the major milestones it'll need to hit when it is carrying passengers... This mission is called OFT-2 since it's technically a do-over of a mission that Boeing attempted back in 2019, called OFT. During that flight, Starliner launched to space as planned, but a software glitch prevented the capsule from getting in the right orbit it needed to reach to rendezvous with the ISS. Boeing had to bring the vehicle home early, and the company never demonstrated Starliner's ability to dock with the ISS....

Using a series of sensors, the capsule autonomously guided itself onto an open docking port on the space station.... Docking occurred a little over an hour behind schedule, due to some issues with Starliner's graphics and docking ring, which were resolved ahead of the docking....

[Thursday] At 6:54PM ET, Starliner successfully launched to space on top of an Atlas V rocket, built and operated by the United Launch Alliance. Once Starliner separated from the Atlas V, it had to fire its own thrusters to insert itself into the proper orbit for reaching the space station. However, after that maneuver took place, Boeing and NASA revealed that two of the 12 thrusters Starliner uses for the procedure failed and cut off too early. The capsule's flight control system was able to kick in and rerouted to a working thruster, which helped get Starliner into a stable orbit.... Today, Boeing revealed that a drop in chamber pressure had caused the early cutoff of the thruster, but that system behaved normally during follow-up burns of the thrusters. And with redundancies on the spacecraft, the issue "does not pose a risk to the rest of the flight test," according to Boeing.

Boeing also noted today that the Starliner team is investigating some weird behavior of a "thermal cooling loop" but said that temperatures are stable on the spacecraft.
From the space station, NASA astronaut Bob Hines said the achievement "marks a great milestone towards providing additional commercial access to low Earth orbit, sustaining the ISS and enabling NASA's goal of returning humans to the Moon and eventually to Mars.

"Great accomplishments in human spaceflight are long remembered by history. Today will be no different."

A long-time Slashdot reader shares this schedule (EST): 5/20, 3:30 pm — Starliner docking with ISS.
5/21, 11:30 am — Safety checks completed. Hatches opened.
5/24, 12:00 pm — Starliner loading completed. Hatched closed.
5/25, 2:00 pm — Starliner undocking from ISS.
5/25, 5:45 pm — Coverage of Starliner landing begins.

Again, the streams will be broadcast at NASA Television. I don't know about any of you, but I know what I'm doing this weekend.

Vangelis, the Greek composer and musician whose synth-driven work brought huge drama to film soundtracks including Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire, has died aged 79. The Guardian reports: Born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou in 1943, Vangelis won an Oscar for his 1981 Chariots of Fire soundtrack. Its uplifting piano motif became world-renowned, and reached No 1 in the US charts, as did the accompanying soundtrack album. [...] Chariots of Fire became inextricable from Vangelis's timeless theme, and the music became synonymous with slow-motion sporting montages. "My music does not try to evoke emotions like joy, love, or pain from the audience. It just goes with the image, because I work in the moment," he later explained. His score to Blade Runner is equally celebrated for its evocation of a sinister future version of Los Angeles, where robots and humans live awkwardly alongside one another, through the use of long, malevolent synth notes; saxophones and lush ambient passages enhance the film's romantic and poignant moments. "It has turned out to be a very prophetic film -- we're living in a kind of Blade Runner world now," he said in 2005.

Later in the decade he scored the Palme d'Or-winning Costa-Gavras political drama Missing, starring Jack Lemmon; the Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins drama The Bounty; and the Mickey Rourke-starring Francesco. He worked again with the Blade Runner director, Ridley Scott, on 1992 film 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and elsewhere during the 1990s, soundtracked Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon and documentaries by Jacques Cousteau. [...] A fascination with outer space found voice in 2016's Rosetta, dedicated to the space probe of the same name, and Nasa appointed his 1993 piece Mythodea (which he claimed to have written in an hour) as the official music of the Mars Odyssey mission of 2001. His final album, 2021's Juno to Jupiter, was inspired by the Nasa probe Juno and featured recordings of its launch and the workings of the probe itself in outer space.

After traveling 300 miles on the underbelly of the Perseverance rover, the "Ingenuity" helicopter has made 28 different flights over the surface of Mars, reports the Washington Post, staying aloft for a total of nearly one hour, flying 4.3 miles with a maximum speed of 12.3 miles per hour and a top altitude of 39 feet. "It's traversed craters, taken photos of regions that would be hard to reach on the ground, and served as a surprisingly resilient scout that has adapted to the changing Martian atmosphere and survived its harsh dust storms and frigid nights.

"Now the engineers and scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are worried that their four-pound, solar-powered drone on Mars, may be nearing the end of its life." Winter is setting in on Mars. The dust is kicking up, coating Ingenuity's solar panels and preventing it from fully charging its six lithium-ion batteries. This month, for the first time since it landed on Mars more than a year ago, Ingenuity missed a planned communications session with Perseverance, the Mars rover that it relies on to send data and receive commands from Earth. Will a dust-coated Ingenuity survive a Martian winter where temperatures routinely plunge below minus-100 degrees Fahrenheit? And if it doesn't, how should the world remember the little helicopter that cost $80 million to develop and more than five years to design and build? Those closest to the project say that as time winds down for Ingenuity, it's hard to overstate its achievements....

"We built it as an experiment," Lori Glaze, the director of NASA's planetary science division, told The Washington Post. "So it didn't necessarily have the flight-qualified parts that we use on the big missions like Perseverance." Some, such as components from smartphones, were even bought off-the-shelf, so "there were chances that they might not perform in the environment as we expected. And so there was a risk that it wasn't going to work.... What happened was, and this is really key, after Ingenuity performed so well on those first five flights, the science team from Perseverance came to us and said, 'You know what, we want this helicopter to keep operating to help us in our exploration and achieving our science goals,' " Glaze said.

So NASA decided to keep flying....

On April 29, it took its last flight to date, No. 28, a quarter-of-a-mile jaunt that lasted two-and-a-half minutes. Now NASA wonders if that will be the last one. The space agency thinks the helicopter's inability to fully charge its batteries caused the helicopter to enter a low-power state. When it went dormant, the helicopter's onboard clock reset, the way household clocks do after a power outage. So the next day, as the sun rose and began to charge the batteries, the helicopter was out of sync with the rover: "Essentially, when Ingenuity thought it was time to contact Perseverance, the rover's base station wasn't listening," NASA wrote.

Then NASA did something extraordinary: Mission controllers commanded Perseverance to spend almost all of May 5 listening for the helicopter.

Finally, little Ingenuity phoned home.

The radio link, NASA said, "was stable," the helicopter was healthy, and the battery was charging at 41 percent.

But, as NASA warned, "one radio communications session does not mean Ingenuity is out of the woods. The increased (light-reducing) dust in the air means charging the helicopter's batteries to a level that would allow important components (like the clock and heaters) to remain energized through the night presents a significant challenge."

Maybe Ingenuity will fly again. Maybe not.

"At this point, I can't tell you what's going to happen next," Glaze said. "We're still working on trying to find a way to fly it again. But Perseverance is the primary mission, so that we need to start setting our expectations appropriately."
For Ingenuity's "Wright Brothers moment" — when it flew for the first time on another planet — it was actually carrying a postage-sized bit of fabric from the Wright Brothers original 1903 aircraft.

Iamthecheese writes: The Mars XR Operations Support System is a virtual environment making use of [Epic Games'] Unreal Engine 5. [NASA is seeking to gather contributions to "replicate the harsh conditions of Mars in order to better train the next generation of astronauts," reports VRScout.] There is a $70,000 prize to be split between 20 contestants. It will be awarded to those with the best assets and scenarios.

There are five (5) different categories to participate in, with particular scenarios to explore in each category:

-Set Up Camp
-Scientific Research
-Maintenance
-Exploration
-Blow Our Minds

I'm guessing little green men will feature heavily in submissions. In any case, it's not just a chance to earn money, but prove oneself to potential employers. Prize and contest information here.

New pictures from the Ingenuity helicopter offer a fresh perspective of the wreckage left behind when the Perseverance rover landed on Mars last year, NASA said on Wednesday. The Verge reports: Launched in 2020, the Perseverance rover successfully landed on the Red Planet in 2021, with the mission of finding ancient signs of life on Mars. The rover carried the Ingenuity helicopter onboard -- an experimental project that scientists on Earth hoped would be able to see sights that the rover couldn't. Perseverance went through a grueling process known as the seven minutes of terror to descend onto the Martian surface. As it entered the atmosphere, a heat shield helped protect the rover from the blistering heat of reentry and slowed it down dramatically. After that, the massive parachute deployed out of the backshell (a cone-shaped part of the descent vehicle), slowing it down even more. At that point, the backshell and parachute separated from Perseverance and let the descent stage take over, using rocket thrusters and a "sky crane" to gently lower the rover to a smooth landing.

On April 19th, Ingenuity took photographs that captured the remains of Perseverance's parachute and the rover's protective backshell, a cone-shaped part of the descent vehicle that carried the parachute and helped protect the rover on its way to the surface. Strewn around the site were debris from where the two crashed into the surface after separating from the rover. The backshell ended up hitting the ground at about 78 miles per hour, according to NASA. From the pictures, it appears that the parachute, the lines connecting the parachute to the spacecraft, and the coating on the outside of the backshell all survived the trip to the surface, NASA says, though more analysis of the pictures will happen in the coming weeks.

The seismometer placed on Mars by NASA's InSight lander has recorded its two largest seismic events to date: a magnitude 4.2 and a magnitude 4.1 marsquake. Phys.Org reports: The pair are the first recorded events to occur on the planet's far side from the lander and are five times stronger than the previous largest event recorded. Seismic wave data from the events could help researchers learn more about the interior layers of Mars, particularly its core-mantle boundary, researchers from InSight's Marsquake Service (MQS) report in The Seismic Record.

Anna Horleston of the University of Bristol and colleagues were able to identify reflected PP and SS waves from the magnitude 4.2 event, called S0976a, and locate its origin in the Valles Marineris, a massive canyon network that is one of Mars' most distinguishing geological features and one of the largest graben systems in the Solar System. Earlier orbital images of cross-cutting faults and landslides suggested the area would be seismically active, but the new event is the first confirmed seismic activity there.

S1000a, the magnitude 4.1 event recorded 24 days later, was characterized by reflected PP and SS waves as well as Pdiff waves, small amplitude waves that have traversed the core-mantle boundary. This is the first time Pdiff waves have been spotted by the InSight mission. The researchers could not definitively pinpoint S1000a's location, but like S0976a it originated on Mars' far side. The seismic energy from S1000a also holds the distinction of being the longest recorded on Mars, lasting 94 minutes.

Slashdot reader alaskana98 writes: In what has become a stubborn sibling to the 'Face on Mars' phenomenon, the legend of the Dark Knight alien satellite has persisted for years and is the fascinating story of a seemingly mundane NASA photo tied together with reports of seemingly mysterious radio waves captured in the early days of radio, all combining to make the ultimate space conspiracy theory.

It goes something like this — an ancient alien space probe, dubbed the 'Dark Knight, has been long orbiting Earth and covertly monitoring its blissfully unaware inhabitants for mysterious purposes for roughly 10,000 years. Flash forward to the 1899, where technological pioneer Nikola Tesla, while experimenting with radio technology in his Colorado laboratory supposedly captured mysterious emanations from an unearthly object. Later in the 1920's, Norwegian engineer Jørgen Hals found that radio signals he transmitted were being echoed back to him a few seconds later, something called 'long delayed echoes' — still unexplained to this day. It has been proposed that these echoes were signals being relayed back to earth by something called a 'Bracewell Probe', a hypothetical automated spacecraft sent out with the goal of making contact with other intelligent species.

Flash forward to 1998, an unassuming photo from the STS-88 mission in 1998 to attach the U.S. module to the Russian portion of the ISS captured a tantalizing glimpse of an unnaturally geometric shape menacingly loitering toward the bottom of the frame. To true believers, this was evidence of an ancient probe keeping tabs on the earthly locals. Combined, these disparate events swirl together to create the stuff of dreams for the ardent conspiracy theorist and even the causal sci-fi buff. Ultimately, the object in the STS photo was most likely a thermal cover. The radio waves Tesla heard? Likely natural radio emisions of a natural or terestial source.

Space.com took a deep dive into this myth and explored how it — and the - dark knight myth has taken a hold on the imaginations of those who find themselves peering out into the inky blackness of the night and wonder to themselves "are we being watched from above"?

"For 50 years, interplanetary probes have returned thousands of striking images of the surface of Mars, but never a single sound." So says the largest fundamental science agency in Europe, the French National Centre for Scientific Research (France's state research organisation).

Then they made a surprising discovery, reports CBS News: Researchers studying recordings made by microphones on NASA's Perseverance rover found that sound travels much slower on Mars than it does on Earth... In addition, the researchers realized that there are two speeds of sound on Mars — one for high-pitched sounds and one for low-pitched sounds. This would "make it difficult for two people standing only five meters apart to have a conversation," according to a press release on the findings.

The unique sound environment is due to the incredibly low atmospheric surface pressure. Mars' pressure is 170 times lower than Earth's pressure. For example, if a high-pitched sound travels 213 feet on Earth, it will travel just 26 feet on Mars.

While sounds on Mars can be heard by human ears, they are incredibly soft. "At some point, we thought the microphone was broken, it was so quiet," said Sylvestre Maurice, an astrophysicist at the University of Toulouse in France and lead author of the study, according to NASA. Besides the wind, "natural sound sources are rare," the press release said.

But NASA scientists think Mars may become more noisy in the autumn months, when there is higher atmospheric pressure. "We are entering a high-pressure season," co-author of the study Baptiste Chide said in the press release. "Maybe the acoustic environment on Mars will be less quiet than it was when we landed."

"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!"

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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."

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."

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?

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.