Elon Musk predicted this week that SpaceX will be able to fly humans to Mars within the next 10 years. From a report: Musk made the bold prediction during an appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast. The Tesla founder reiterated his view that humanity should become a "multi-planet species" and detailed SpaceX's plans to develop the necessary technology for the trip. "Best case is about five years. Worst case, 10 years," Musk said. He noted that "engineering the vehicle" required for the trip remains a key factor in establishing a timeframe. "Starship is the most complex and advanced rocket that's ever been made by, I don't know, an order of magnitude or something like that," Musk added. "It's a lot. It's really next level." SpaceX has ramped up its operations in recent years as part of Musk's long-term goal to establish a colony on Mars. Earlier this month, Musk revealed SpaceX has begun building a launchpad in Florida that can accommodate Starship rockets. SpaceX has begun testing prototypes of the 400-foot rocket ahead of a planned orbital launch. During the podcast interview, Musk said his private aviation firm is still working to optimize its Starship design and cut down on the projected cost of a Mars trip.

Japan revised the schedule of its space exploration plans on Tuesday, aiming to put a Japanese person on the moon by the latter half of the 2020s. From a report: "Not only is space a frontier that gives people hopes and dreams but it also provides a crucial foundation to our economic society with respect to our economic security," Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told a meeting to finalise the plan. According to the draft schedule of the plan, Japan aims to put the first non-American on the moon as part of the Artemis programme, a U.S.-led initiative that aims to return astronauts to the moon. The plan also spells out Japan's aspirations to launch a probe to explore Mars in 2024, as well as to find ways to generate solar electricity in space.

$100 billion was spent building the International Space Station — including 42 different assembly flights, reports Recode. Yet "after two decades in orbit, the International Space Station will shut down," as NASA re-focuses on sending humans back to the moon. (UPDATE: NASA has extended ISS operation through 2030.)

While they plan to keep it functioning as long as possible, NASA "has only technically certified the station's hardware until 2028 and has awarded more than $400 million to fund private replacements." (Which they estimate will save them $1 billion a year.)

So then what happens? When these stations are ready, NASA will guide the ISS into the atmosphere, where it will burn up and disintegrate. At that point, anyone hoping to work in space will have to choose among several different outposts. That means countries won't just be using these new stations to strengthen their own national space programs, but as lucrative business ventures, too. "Commercial companies have the capability now to do this, and so we don't want to compete with that," Robyn Gatens, the director of the ISS, told Recode. "We want to transition lower-Earth orbit over to commercial companies so that the government and NASA can go use resources to do harder things in deep space."

Private companies currently backed by NASA, including Lockheed Martin and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, could launch as many as four space stations into Earth's orbit over the next decade. NASA is also building a space station called Gateway near the moon; a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the living quarters for the station is scheduled to launch in 2024.

Russia and India are planning to launch their own space stations to low-Earth orbit, too, and China's Tiangong station, which is currently under construction, already has astronauts living aboard... Russia may leave the ISS as soon as 2025, the same year its space agency, Roscosmos, plans to launch its new $5 billion space station. The European Space Agency, which represents 22 different European countries, is now training its astronauts for eventual missions to Tiangong...

[C]ompetition for customers could get even more intense as space stations launched by China, Russia, and India open for business.
Recode ultimately sees a future where private-sector customers choose from competing space stations — and even have to consider the political consequences of "favoring one nation's space station over another..."

"In the best of scenarios, these new stations will learn from each other and massively expand scientific knowledge. But they will also make global politics a much bigger part of space, which could impact what happens here on Earth and how humanity explores the moon and Mars."

"Apollo mission planners were really smart. Recognizing that future scientists will have better tools and richer scientific insights, they refrained from opening a portion of the lunar samples returned from the historic Apollo missions," writes Gizmodo.

"One of these sample containers, after sitting untouched for 50 years, is now set to be opened." The sample in question was collected by Gene Cernan in 1972. The Apollo 17 astronaut was working in the Taurus-Littrow Valley when he hammered a 28-inch-long (70 cm) tube into the surface, which he did to collect samples of lunar soil and gas. The lower half of this canister was sealed while Cernan was still on the Moon. Back on Earth, the canister was placed in yet another vacuum chamber for good measure. Known as the 73001 Apollo sample container, it remains untouched to this very day.

But the time has come to open this vessel and investigate its precious cargo, according to a European Space Agency press release. The hope is that lunar gases might be present inside, specifically hydrogen, helium, and other light gases. Analysis of these gases could further our understanding of lunar geology and shed new light on how to best store future samples, whether they be gathered on asteroids, the Moon, or Mars.

Like I said, Apollo mission planners were really clever — but they didn't exactly explain how future scientists were supposed to extract the presumed gases from the vacuum-sealed container. That task is now the responsibility of the Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis Program (ANGSA), which manages these untouched treasures. In this case, ANGSA tasked the European Space Agency, among several other institutions, to figure out a way to safely release this trapped gas, marking the first time that ESA has been involved in the opening of samples returned from the Apollo program...

The ANGSA consortium spent the past 16 months working on the problem, and the solution, dubbed the "Apollo can opener," is now ready to rock.
Sometime in the next few weeks the gas will finally be decanted into multiple containers, and then sent to specialized labs around the world.

Scientists have discovered a world-historic discovery on Mars: "significant amounts of water" are hiding inside the Red Planet's Valles Marineris, its version of our grand canyon system, according to a recent press release from the European Space Agency (ESA). And up to 40% of material near the surface of the canyon could be water molecules. Interesting Engineering reports: The newly discovered volume of water is hiding under the surface of Mars, and was detected by the Trace Gas Orbiter, a mission in its first stage under the guidance of the ESA-Roscosmos project dubbed ExoMars. Signs of water were picked up by the orbiter's Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector (FREND) instrument, which is designed to survey the Red Planet's landscape and map the presence and concentration of hydrogen hiding in Mars' soil. It works like this: while high-energy cosmic rays plunge into the surface, the soil emits neutrons. And wet soil emits fewer neutrons than dry soil, which enables scientists to analyze and assess the water content of soil, hidden beneath its ancient surface. "FREND revealed an area with an unusually large amount of hydrogen in the colossal Valles Marineris canyon system: assuming the hydrogen we see is bound into water molecules, as much as 40% of the near-surface material in this region appears to be water," said Igor Mitrofanov, the Russian Academy of Science's lead investigator of the Space Research Institute, in the ESA press release.

"The reservoir is large, not too deep below ground, & could be easily exploitable for future explorers," read a tweet on the announcement from ExoMars. That sounds basically great! But it's too soon for Musk to pack up his bags and fly to the site, since much work is left to be done. A study accompanying the announcement, published in the journal Icarus, shows that neutron detection doesn't distinguish between ice and water molecules. This means geochemists need to enter the scientific fray to reveal more details. But several features of the canyon, including its topology, have led the researchers to speculate that the water is probably in solid form (ice). But it could also be a mixture of solid and liquid.

"We found a central part of Valles Marineris to be packed full of water -- far more water than we expected," said Alexey Malakhov, co-author of the study, in the ESA release. "This is very much like Earth's permafrost regions, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures." So while we don't yet know the specific form of water is lying under Mars' vast system of canyons, the first human mission to Mars may consider exploring this area a major priority.

Smithsonian magazine explores the many Mars simulation facilities around the world, including the Mars Desert Research Station — which is located in Utah, four hours south of Salt Lake City, "but everyone spoke and acted as though they were actually on Mars." A group of six people lived in a two-story cylindrical building. The commander, a former member of the Army National Guard, kept the participants on a strict schedule of fixing electrical systems, taking inventory, tidying up the facilities and sampling the soil. Everyone was assigned a special role: [photographer] Klos' was to prepare reports to share with the public. The health safety officer kept tabs on the crew's well-being, and the engineer monitored levels of carbon dioxide and solar power. Before stepping outside in a spacesuit, Klos and the others had to get permission from mission control back on "Earth" (actually a coordinator stationed in a nearby town). That person would send information about the winds and weather, and determine how long each person could stay outside the base. Sometimes dust storms rolled in, cutting off the solar power supply just as they would on Mars...

There are about a dozen such habitats around the globe, hosting simulations that run anywhere from two weeks to a full year. One of these is run by NASA's Human Research Program at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. But other facilities are funded by private organizations. The Mars Society, established by Brooklyn-born aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, operates the habitat in Utah, where Klos returned for another mission in 2017, and another in the Canadian Arctic. Klos also took part in a mission at the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS. The facility is run by the International MoonBase Alliance, a group founded by the Dutch entrepreneur Henk Rogers.

HI-SEAS is located on Hawaii's big island at 8,200 feet above sea level, on top of the active volcano Mauna Loa. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is collaborating with the facility to gather information about volcanic caves and the microbes that live in those Mars-like conditions. HI-SEAS is also studying the limitations of doing that kind of work while wearing heavy spacesuits. It's hard enough for astronauts to hold a screwdriver in a gloved hand while repairing the International Space Station, but if people are going to be clambering on Martian rocks looking for microbes, they'll need the right gear.
The article notes these missions "are open to people who have no background in science, engineering or astronaut training. After all, the goal is to send ordinary folks into space, so it's worth finding out whether ordinary folks can coexist in Mars-like conditions here on Earth." (Some are even recruited off the internet.) "Sometimes people make the critique that we're role-playing too much," the photographer tells the magazine. "But the goal is to really live the way people are going to live on Mars so scientists can figure out how to make it work when we get there."

And the article also points out that "The data we're gathering now about surviving on solar power, conserving water and growing plants in arid conditions could be useful here at home as our climate changes."

Just two days after officially (and quietly) confirming that it intends to replace the International Space Station with a commercial station by 2030, NASA has awarded over $400 million in agreements to three companies to further develop private station plans. TechCrunch reports: The three companies, which received the awards under the agency's Commercial low Earth orbit (LEO) Destinations program, are: Nanoracks for $160 million; Blue Origin for $130 million; and Northrop Grumman for $125.6 million. NASA received eleven proposals in total, director of commercial spaceflight Phil McAlister said Thursday. He added that of the three chosen proposals, there was a diversity of technical concepts and a variety of logistical and launch vehicle options offered. "This diversity not only enhances the likelihood of success of NASA strategy, but it also leads to a high degree of innovation, which is critical in most commercial space endeavors," he said.

The three companies have already released a handful of details about their proposals. Blue Origin is calling its station concept "Orbital Reef," and it is designing it with Boeing, Sierra Space and others. The team said it wants to launch the station in 2027. Meanwhile, Nanoracks is calling its station, which is being developed with its parent company Voyager Space and aerospace prime Lockheed Martin, "Starlab." While Northrop didn't give its station proposal a flashy name, it's working with Dynetics to deliver a modular design based around its Cygnus spacecraft.

These substantial awards mark the first phase of a two-phase process as NASA seeks to ensure that there will be no gap between the retirement of the ISS and the introduction of a new station. NASA has repeatedly stressed, both to Congress and more recently in a report by the Office of Inspector General, that the overall success of the development of a thriving economy in LEO is dependent upon avoiding this gap. "If there is no habitable commercial destination in low Earth orbit after the ISS is decommissioned, NASA will be unable to conduct microgravity health research and technology demonstrations needed for long-duration human exploration missions to the Moon and Mars, significantly increasing the risk of -- or delaying -- those missions," the agency said in the report.

Hmmmmmm writes: China is developing a powerful nuclear reactor for its moon and Mars missions, according to researchers involved in the project. The reactor can generate one megawatt of electric power, 100 times more powerful than a similar device Nasa plans to put on the surface of the moon by 2030. The project was launched with funding from the central government in 2019. Although technical details and the launch date were not revealed, the engineering design of a prototype machine was completed recently and some critical components have been built, two scientists who took part in the project confirmed to the South China Morning Post this week.

To China, this is an ambitious project with unprecedented challenges. The only publicly known nuclear device it has sent into space is a tiny radioactive battery on Yutu 2, the first rover to land on the far side of the moon in 2019. That device could only generate a few watts of heat to help the rover during long lunar nights. Chemical fuel and solar panels will no longer be enough to meet the demands of human space exploration, which is expected to expand significantly with human settlements on the moon or Mars on the agenda, according to the Chinese researchers. "Nuclear power is the most hopeful solution. Other nations have launched some ambitious plans. China cannot afford the cost of losing this race," said one researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences who asked not to be named as they were not authorised to speak to the media.

National Geographic reports: About a million years ago, an asteroid smacked into the normally tranquil surface of Mars. The impact released a fountain of debris, and some of the rocky fragments pierced the sky, escaping the planet's gravity to journey through the dark. Some of the rocks eventually found their way to Earth and survived the plunge through our planet's atmosphere to thud into the surface-including a hefty 15-pound shard that crashed into Morocco in 2011.... Determining what part of Mars these meteorites came from is a critical part of piecing together the planet's history — but it's proven to be a major scientific challenge.

Now, with the assistance of a crater-counting machine learning program, a team of researchers studying the depleted shergottites may have finally cracked the case: They concluded that these geologic projectiles came from a single crater atop Tharsis, the largest volcanic feature in the solar system. This ancient volcanic behemoth on Mars is adorned with thousands of individual volcanoes and extends three times the area of the continental United States. It was built over billions of years by countless magma injections and lava flows. It is so heavy that, as it formed, it effectively tipped the planet over by 20 degrees. If these meteorites do come from Tharsis, as the analysis published in Nature Communications suggests, then scientists have their hands on meteorites that can help identify the infernal forces that fueled the construction of this world-tipping edifice. "This could really change the game about how we understand Mars," says Luke Daly, a meteorite expert at the University of Glasgow who was not involved with the study.
Debris from meteor impacts tend to also form smaller craters — so the scientists trained their machine learning tools to scan orbital images of Mars to find appropriately-sized crazers (less than two thirds of a mile long). "It quickly found about 90 million, says Kosta Servis, a data scientist at Curtin University and co-author of the study..."

But after sifting through the data, "the team identified 19 large craters in volcanic regions on Mars that were surrounded by multiple secondary craters — a sign that these planetary scars could be as young as the 1.1-million-year-old crater they sought..." Out of those 19 craters, just two were excavated from youthful volcanic deposits by an impact event 1.1 million years ago: crater 09-00015 and Tooting crater. The latter (named after a district in London) looks to have been formed by a powerful oblique impact — the kind of collision that would propel a lot of Martian meteorites into space..."

Buoyed by their discovery, Lagain's team is hoping to identify the source craters of other Martian meteorites — including some of the very oldest, which could reveal more about Mars's waterlogged past.... Machine learning "is a really inventive way of trying to tackle this problem," says Lauren Jozwiak, a planetary volcanologist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory not involved with the study. "Boy, I hope this method works," she says, because if it does, "it would be really cool to take this and apply it to other planets."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.org: NASA and the nation's top federal nuclear research lab on Friday put out a request for proposals for a fission surface power system. NASA is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory to establish a sun-independent power source for missions to the moon by the end of the decade. If successful in supporting a sustained human presence on the moon, the next objective would be Mars. NASA says fission surface power could provide sustained, abundant power no matter the environmental conditions on the moon or Mars. The reactor would be built on Earth and then sent to the moon.

Submitted plans for the fission surface power system should include a uranium-fueled reactor core, a system to convert the nuclear power into usable energy, a thermal management system to keep the reactor cool, and a distribution system providing no less than 40 kilowatts of continuous electric power for 10 years in the lunar environment. Some other requirements include that it be capable of turning itself off and on without human help, that it be able to operate from the deck of a lunar lander, and that it can be removed from the lander and run on a mobile system and be transported to a different lunar site for operation. Additionally, when launched from Earth to the moon, it should fit inside a 12-foot (4-meter) diameter cylinder that's 18 feet (6 meters) long. It should not weigh more than 13,200 pounds (6,000 kilograms). The proposal requests are for an initial system design and must be submitted by Feb. 19.

NASA has now released the most detailed footage yet of Ingenuity in flight. Gizmodo reports: The two videos were taken during the rotorcraft's 13th flight, which took place on September 4. The 16-second flight saw Ingenuity travel nearly 700 feet horizontally, at an altitude of 26 feet. The Perseverance rover recorded the rotorcraft's maneuvers using its two-camera Mastcam-Z, from a distance of about 1,000 feet away.

"The value of Mastcam-Z really shines through with these video clips," Justin Maki, deputy principal investigator for the Mastcam-Z instrument at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a NASA press release. "Even at 300 meters [984 feet] away, we get a magnificent closeup of takeoff and landing through Mastcam-Z's âright eye.' And while the helicopter is little more than a speck in the wide view taken through the 'left eye,' it gives viewers a good feel for the size of the environment that Ingenuity is exploring."

Recently, the scientists at NASA had to program Ingenuity to move a little faster, to compensate for the thinner atmosphere on Mars as the planet's seasons change. The helicopter's navigation system is automated and uses artificial intelligence to constantly measure and correct for environmental variables like wind speed and the level of the ground below it. "It's awesome to actually get to see this [automatic correction] occur," said Havard Grip, Ingenuity's chief pilot, in the same release. "It reinforces the accuracy of our modeling and our understanding of how to best operate Ingenuity."

Bitcoin's long-awaited Taproot update will occur in the coming days, with most sources suggesting Saturday as its activation date. Crypto Briefing reports: Taproot is an upgrade that will improve Bitcoin's capacity for scripting, bringing it in line with competing blockchains like Ethereum that already have programmable smart contracts. Taproot will also introduce MAST (Merkelized Abstract Syntax Tree), which will make it more difficult to trace and analyze Bitcoin transactions. It does so by making complex transactions -- such as multi-signature transactions and Lightning Network transactions -- indistinguishable from basic transactions. The upgrade will also include Schnorr signatures, which will create smaller transaction sizes through data aggregation.

Together, these features mean that developers will be able to create more extensive Bitcoin applications, while end-users will be able to benefit from cheaper, more private transactions. Taproot is Bitcoin's most significant upgrade since 2017, when the cryptocurrency introduced a controversial new feature called SegWit. The Taproot upgrade is much less likely to cause division.

Though Taproot already gained support from miners earlier this week, 800 blocks will need to be mined under those conditions before the feature is actually activated. NiceHash's countdown suggests that the upgrade will occur at 1:00 UTC on Saturday, Nov. 14. Another countdown website, Taproot.watch concurs with that estimate, suggesting that there are just 339 blocks left to mine at the time of writing.

"Another space agency, about one-tenth the size of NASA, is thinking outside of the planet-sized box in its search for Martian life," reports CNET: With its Martian Moons Exploration mission (or MMX), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, later this decade will touch down on a world no spacecraft has visited before: Phobos, one of Mars' mystifying moons. Scientists at JAXA, and other astronomers, hypothesize that on this curious moon they may find signs of ancient microbes that were catapulted off the surface of Mars and flung across the cosmos. The remains of these unwitting spacefaring organisms have been untouched for millions of years and, soon, could be plucked from Phobos' face and returned to Earth.

When an asteroid collides with a planet, the planet unleashes a mighty sneeze of dust and rock. The faster the asteroid smashes into the surface, the bigger the sneeze... [I]f the asteroid impact is powerful enough, the sneeze will fling dust and rock into space... Just like a human sneeze contains microbes, the material ejected by a planet may also contain microscopic life — or the remnants of it. If the asteroid death blast doesn't melt the rock and the microbes to mere atoms, there's a chance they can float into the cosmos... Mars is scarred by impacts from drifter asteroids that slammed into the surface over the planet's life. If these impacts were to hit in just the right spot, at just the right angle and just the right time, there's a chance the ejected material would make it to Phobos, Mars' curious, potato-shaped moon. Phobos has the closest orbit of any known moon to its parent body, circling the red planet at a distance of just 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles), about the same as the distance between Tokyo and Honolulu....

Phobos is practically hugging Mars, and moves around the planet so quickly that if you were to observe it from the surface, you'd be able to see it rise and set twice every Martian day. Its proximity to the red planet has led JAXA scientists and engineers to speculate about the potential for finding the remnants of Martian microbes on the moon's surface. "If Martian life once existed and was widespread elsewhere on Mars, the chance that its dead remains exist also on Phobos is, in my opinion, relatively high," says Ryuki Hyodo, a planetary scientist at JAXA's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science... It's possible, JAXA believes, that Phobos could be a satellite cemetery, unwittingly holding molecular evidence of long-dead microorganisms....

With a planned sample return date of 2029, MMX would be the first time samples have been returned from the Martian sphere. While the space agency estimates just 0.1% of Phobos' soil likely originated on Mars, there's a chance MMX could bring back the first samples of the red planet to Earth.

NASA is calling on any interested humans to contribute to the machine learning algorithms that help Perseverance get around. All you need to do is look at some images and label geological features. ExtremeTech reports: The project is known as AI4Mars, and it's a continuation of a project started last year using images from Curiosity. That particular rover arrived on Mars in 2012 and has been making history ever since. NASA used Curiosity as the starting point when designing Perseverance. The new rover has 23 cameras, which capture a ton of visual data from Mars, but the robot has to rely on human operators to interpret most of those images. The rover has enhanced AI to help it avoid obstacles, and it will get even better if you chip in.

The AI4Mars site lets you choose between Opportunity, Curiosity, and the new Perseverance images. After selecting the kind of images you want to scope out, the site will provide you with several different marker types and explanations of what each one is. For example, the NavCam asks you to ID sand, consolidated soil (where the wheels will get good traction), bedrock, and big rocks. There are examples of all these formations, so it's a snap to get started.

NASA's Perseverance rover has recorded up to five hours of sounds on the Mars, giving engineers a sense of how the Red Planet sounds different from Earth. Space.com reports: NASA now has a Perseverance rover website filling up with Martian audio, ranging from wind gusts to the sounds of rover driving as it seeks spots to hunt for the signs of life on the Red Planet. In March, we even heard its laser "snapping" (sadly, no pew-pew noise was evident.)

"It's like you're really standing there," Baptiste Chide, a planetary scientist who studies data from the Perseverance microphones, said in a statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "Martian sounds have strong bass vibrations, so when you put on headphones, you can really feel it. I think microphones will be an important asset to future Mars and solar system science," added Chide, who works at France's Institute of Research in Astrophysics and Planetology. The SuperCam mics have been especially helpful for JPL to learn more about the environment in Jezero Crater, where Perseverance has been roaming for about seven Earth months. In May, Perseverance was able to hear the sound of the Ingenuity drone's rotors buzzing from a distance of 262 feet away. "The audio has been useful for investigations ranging from how sound propagates on Mars, and keeping Perseverance well-maintained," the report adds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: California company Radiant has secured funding to develop a compact, portable, "low-cost" one-megawatt nuclear micro-reactor that fits in a shipping container, powers about 1,000 homes and uses a helium coolant instead of water. Founded by ex-SpaceX engineers, who decided the Mars colony power sources they were researching would make a bigger impact closer to home, Radiant has pulled in $1.2 million from angel investors to continue work on its reactors, which are specifically designed to be highly portable, quick to deploy and effective wherever they're deployed; remote communities and disaster areas are early targets.

The military is another key market here; a few of these could power an entire military base in a remote area for four to eight years before expending its "advanced particle fuel," eliminating not just the emissions of the current diesel generators, but also the need to constantly bring in trucks full of fuel for this purpose. Those trucks will still have to run -- up until the point where the military ditches diesel in all its vehicles -- but they'll be much less frequent, reducing a significant risk for transport personnel. Radiant says its fuel "does not melt down, and withstands higher temperatures when compared to traditional nuclear fuels." Using helium as the coolant "greatly reduces corrosion, boiling and contamination risks," and the company says it's received provisional patents for ideas it's developed around refueling the reactors and efficiently transporting heat out of the reactor core.

"China launched a three-person crew into space in the early hours of Saturday," reports CNN, calling it "a major step for the country's young space program, which is rapidly becoming one of the world's most advanced..." They will dock at China's new space station, Tiangong (which means Heavenly Palace), six and a half hours after launch. They will live and work at the station for 183 days, or just about six months... "This will certainly be their longest mission, which is quite impressive when you consider how early it is in their human spaceflight regimen," said Dean Cheng, senior research fellow at the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy.

This is the second crewed mission during the construction of the space station, which China plans to have fully crewed and operational by December 2022. The first crewed mission, a three-month stay by three other astronauts, was completed last month. Six more missions have been scheduled before the end of next year, including two crewed missions, two laboratory modules and two cargo missions. "For the Chinese, this is still early in their human spaceflight effort as they've been doing this for less than 20 years ... and for fewer than 10 missions," Cheng added. "In the past, the Chinese put up a crewed flight only once every two to three years. Now, they're sending them up every few months."

"If the Chinese maintain this pace ... it reflects a major shift in the mission tempo for their human spaceflight efforts...."

China successfully landed an exploratory rover on the moon last December and one on Mars in May. The first module of the Tiangong space station launched in April. Just last week, an international team of scientists released their findings from the moon rocks China brought back to Earth... "The European Space Agency, Russia, India, and Israel have suffered Moon or Mars probe failures in recent years; China succeeded with both on the first tries," David Burbach, associate professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College, told CNN via email. Though the US still has the world's leading space program, he said, "there's no doubt that China is the world's Number 2 space power today."

China's ambitions span years into the future, with grand plans for space exploration, research and commercialization. One of the biggest ventures will be building a joint China-Russia research station on the moon's south pole by 2035 — a facility that will be open to international participation... Chinese astronauts have long been locked out of the International Space Station due to US political objections and legislative restrictions — which is why it has been a long-standing goal of China's to build a station of its own...

One reason space research cannot be divorced from terrestrial politics, and why the issue is so complicated, is because "the Chinese space program is heavily influenced, and its human and lunar programs are overseen, by the Chinese military," Cheng said. "Cooperating with China in space means cooperating with the Chinese military."

"In our new paper, published in Nature, we report the discovery of the first known exoplanet to survive the death of its star without having its orbit altered by other planets moving around -- circling a distance comparable to those between the Sun and the Solar System planets," writes one of the study's authors, Dimitri Veras, in an article for The Conversation. From the report: This new exoplanet, which we discovered with the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, is particularly similar to Jupiter in both mass and orbital separation, and provides us with a crucial snapshot into planetary survivors around dying stars. A star's transformation into a white dwarf involves a violent phase in which it becomes a bloated "red giant," also known as a "giant branch" star, hundreds of times bigger than before. We believe that this exoplanet only just survived: if it was initially closer to its parent star, it would have been engulfed by the star's expansion. When the Sun eventually becomes a red giant, its radius will actually reach outwards to Earth's current orbit. That means the Sun will (probably) engulf Mercury and Venus, and possibly the Earth -- but we are not sure.

Jupiter, and its moons, have been expected to survive, although we previously didn't know for sure. But with our discovery of this new exoplanet, we can now be more certain that Jupiter really will make it. Moreover, the margin of error in the position of this exoplanet could mean that it is almost half as close to the white dwarf as Jupiter currently is to the Sun. If so, that is additional evidence for assuming that Jupiter, and Mars, will make it. So could any life survive this transformation? A white dwarf could power life on moons or planets that end up being very close to it (about one-tenth the distance between the Sun and Mercury) for the first few billion years. After that, there wouldn't be enough radiation to sustain anything. [...]

The new white dwarf exoplanet was found with what is known as the microlensing detection method. This looks at how light bends due to a strong gravitational field, which happens when a star momentarily aligns with a more distant star, as seen from Earth. The gravity from the foreground star magnifies the light from the star behind it. Any planets orbiting the star in the foreground will bend and warp this magnified light, which is how we can detect them. The white dwarf we investigated is one-quarter of the way towards the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, or about 6,500 light years away from our Solar System, and the more distant star is in the centre of the galaxy.

Artificial intelligence expert Peter Norvig is joining the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI this fall as a Distinguished Education Fellow, with the task of developing tools and materials to explain the key concepts of artificial intelligence. From a blog post: Norvig helped launch and build AI at organizations considered innovators in the field: As Google's director of research, he oversaw the tech giant's search algorithms and built the teams that focused on machine translation, speech recognition, and computer vision. At NASA Ames, his team created autonomous software that was the first to command a spacecraft, and served as a precursor to the current Mars rovers. Norvig is also a well-known name in AI education. He co-wrote Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, an introductory textbook used by some 1,500 universities worldwide, and he's taught hundreds of thousands of students through his courses on online education platform Udacity. In this interview, he discusses his move to Stanford, building a human-focused AI curriculum, and broadening access to education. When asked why he's leaving Google, Norvig said: "Throughout my career I've gone back and forth between the major top-level domains: .edu, .com, and .gov. After 20 years with one company and after 18 months stuck working from home, I thought it was a good time to try something new, and to concentrate on education."

Engineers at the University of Cincinnati are developing new ways to convert greenhouse gases to fuel to address climate change and get astronauts home from Mars. UC: UC College of Engineering and Applied Science assistant professor Jingjie Wu and his students used a carbon catalyst in a reactor to convert carbon dioxide into methane. Known as the "Sabatier reaction" from the late French chemist Paul Sabatier, it's a process the International Space Station uses to scrub the carbon dioxide from air the astronauts breathe and generate rocket fuel to keep the station in high orbit. But Wu is thinking much bigger.

The Martian atmosphere is composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide. Astronauts could save half the fuel they need for a return trip home by making what they need on the red planet once they arrive, Wu said. "It's like a gas station on Mars. You could easily pump carbon dioxide through this reactor and produce methane for a rocket," Wu said. UC's study was published in the journal Nature Communications with collaborators from Rice University, Shanghai University and East China University of Science and Technology. Wu began his career in chemical engineering by studying fuel cells for electric vehicles but began looking at carbon dioxide conversion in his chemical engineering lab about 10 years ago.

"I realized that greenhouse gases were going to be a big issue in society," Wu said. "A lot of countries realized that carbon dioxide is a big issue for the sustainable development of our society. That's why I think we need to achieve carbon neutrality." The Biden Administration has set a goal of achieving a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas pollutants by 2030 and an economy that relies on renewable energy by 2050. "That means we'll have to recycle carbon dioxide," Wu said. Wu and his students, including lead author and UC doctoral candidate Tianyu Zhang, are experimenting with different catalysts such as graphene quantum dots -- layers of carbon just nanometers big -- that can increase the yield of methane.