"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.

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."

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."

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.