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.

Scientists found evidence that a region of northern Mars called Arabia Terra experienced thousands of "super eruptions," the biggest volcanic eruptions known, over a 500-million-year period. NASA reports the findings in a post: Some volcanoes can produce eruptions so powerful they release oceans of dust and toxic gases into the air, blocking out sunlight and changing a planet's climate for decades. By studying the topography and mineral composition of a portion of the Arabia Terra region in northern Mars, scientists recently found evidence for thousands of such eruptions, or "super eruptions," which are the most violent volcanic explosions known. Spewing water vapor, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide into the air, these explosions tore through the Martian surface over a 500-million-year period about 4 billion years ago. Scientists reported this estimate in a paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in July 2021. "Each one of these eruptions would have had a significant climate impact -- maybe the released gas made the atmosphere thicker or blocked the Sun and made the atmosphere colder," said Patrick Whelley, a geologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who led the Arabia Terra analysis. "Modelers of the Martian climate will have some work to do to try to understand the impact of the volcanoes."
[...]
One remaining question is how a planet can have only one type of volcano littering a region. On Earth volcanoes capable of super eruptions -- the most recent erupted 76,000 years ago in Sumatra, Indonesia -- are dispersed around the globe and exist in the same areas as other volcano types. Mars, too, has many other types of volcanoes, including the biggest volcano in the solar system called Olympus Mons. Olympus Mons is 100 times larger by volume than Earth's largest volcano of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, and is known as a "shield volcano," which drains lava down a gently sloping mountain. Arabia Terra so far has the only evidence of explosive volcanoes on Mars. It's possible that super-eruptive volcanoes were concentrated in regions on Earth but have been eroded physically and chemically or moved around the globe as continents shifted due to plate tectonics. These types of explosive volcanoes also could exist in regions of Jupiter's moon Io or could have been clustered on Venus. Whatever the case may be, Richardson hopes Arabia Terra will teach scientists something new about geological processes that help shape planets and moons.

NASA's Mars rover Perseverance collected its second rock sample this week — and Friday Caltech's Ken Farley, a project scientist for the mission, announced that they've learned something.

"It's a big deal that the water was there a long time." The Perseverance science team already knew a lake once filled the crater; for how long has been more uncertain. The scientists couldn't dismiss the possibility that Jezero's lake was a "flash in the pan": floodwaters could have rapidly filled the impact crater and dried up in the space of 50 years, for example. But the level of alteration that scientists see in the rock that provided the core samples — as well as in the rock the team targeted on their first sample-acquisition attempt — suggests that groundwater was present for a long time.

This groundwater could have been related to the lake that was once in Jezero, or it could have traveled through the rocks long after the lake had dried up. Though scientists still can't say whether any of the water that altered these rocks was present for tens of thousands or for millions of years, they feel more certain that it was there for long enough to make the area more welcoming to microscopic life in the past.
And they discovered something interesting in the rock samples: salts. These salts may have formed when groundwater flowed through and altered the original minerals in the rock, or more likely when liquid water evaporated, leaving the salts. The salt minerals in these first two rock cores may also have trapped tiny bubbles of ancient Martian water. If present, they could serve as microscopic time capsules, offering clues about the ancient climate and habitability of Mars.

Salt minerals are also well-known on Earth for their ability to preserve signs of ancient life.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The Perseverance rover successfully drilled into a Martian rock on Thursday, creating an intact core sample that could one day be returned to Earth. But NASA wants better images to make sure the sample is safely in the tube before it's sealed up and stowed on the rover. So far, data sent back by the rover and initial images suggest an intact sample was inside the tube after Perseverance drilled into a rock selected by the mission's science team. After the initial images were taken, the rover vibrated the drill bit and tube for five one-second bursts to clear both of any residual material from outside of the tube. It's possible that this caused the sample to slide down further inside the tube.

The next images taken after this were "inconclusive due to poor sunlight conditions," according to the agency. Perseverance will use its cameras to take more images under better lighting conditions before conducting the next steps of the sampling process. The extra step of taking additional images before sealing and stowing the sample tube was added after Perseverance attempted to drill into another rock target on August 5. During that attempt, the rock crumbled and there was no sample present in the tube once it was stowed.

Perseverance is currently exploring the Citadelle location in Jezero Crater, which -- billions of years ago -- was once the site of an ancient lake. The rover's specific target was a rock called Rochette, which is about the size of a briefcase and is part of a half-mile ridgeline of rock outcrops and boulders. The mission team should receive more images of what's inside the sample tube by September 4. If images taken while the sun is at a better angle don't help the team determine whether a sample is present, the tube will be sealed and the rover will measure its volume. If Perseverance is able to successfully collect samples from Mars, they will be returned to Earth by future missions -- and they could reveal if microbial life ever existed on Mars.

The asteroid credited with the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago is likely to have originated from the outer half of the solar system's main asteroid belt, according to new research by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). Space.com reports: Known as the Chicxulub impactor, this large object has an estimated width of 6 miles (9.6 kilometers) and produced a crater in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula that spans 90 miles (145 kilometers). After its sudden contact with Earth, the asteroid wiped out not only the dinosaurs, but around 75 percent of the planet's animal species. It is widely accepted that this explosive force created was responsible for the mass extinction that ended the Mesozoic era. Researchers used computer models to analyse how asteroids are pulled from their orbit in different areas of the asteroid belt and drawn towards planets. The observations of 130,000 model asteroids, along with data and behaviour seen in other known impactors, found that objects are 10 times more likely to reach Earth from the outer asteroid belt than previously thought.

Prior to crashing into Earth, the extinction-causing asteroid orbited the sun with others, in the main asteroid belt. This concentrated band lies between planets Mars and Jupiter, with its contents usually kept in place by the forces of gravity. Before this study was released, scientists thought that very few of Earth's impactors escaped from the belt's outer half. But, researchers at SwRI discovered that "escape hatches" could be created by thermal forces, which pull more distant asteroids out of orbit and in the direction of Earth. The objects found in these outermost parts of the asteroid belt include many carbonaceous chondrite impactors. These are dark, porous and carbon-containing rocks which can also be found on Earth. Leading up to this research, other scientists have attempted to learn more about the object that doomed the dinosaurs. This included examinations of 66-million-year-old rocks. By doing this, geologists discovered that the Chicxulub asteroid had a similar composition to today's carbonaceous chondrites. By looking at wide timescales of the Chicxulub asteroid, the scientists could predict that a 6-mile asteroid is likely to come into contact with Earth once every 250 million years. Their model showed almost 50 percent of these significant impactors to be of the same carbonaceous chondrite composition. Details of the new study will be published in the November 2021 issue of the journal Icarus.

Friday the Perseverance rover on Mars made its first attempt to collect a rock sample and seal it in a tube, reports NASA. But unfortunately, the data "indicate that no rock was collected during the initial sampling activity..."

"The sampling process is autonomous from beginning to end," said Jessica Samuels, the surface mission manager for Perseverance at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "One of the steps that occurs after placing a probe into the collection tube is to measure the volume of the sample. The probe did not encounter the expected resistance that would be there if a sample were inside the tube."

The Perseverance mission is assembling a response team to analyze the data. One early step will be to use the WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) imager - located at the end of the robotic arm - to take close-up pictures of the borehole. Once the team has a better understanding of what happened, it will be able to ascertain when to schedule the next sample collection attempt. "The initial thinking is that the empty tube is more likely a result of the rock target not reacting the way we expected during coring, and less likely a hardware issue with the Sampling and Caching System," said Jennifer Trosper, project manager for Perseverance at JPL
"Mars keeps surprising us," adds the rover's Twitter feed. "We're working through this new challenge. More to come."

Space.com points out this wasn't a make-or-break moment for the rover, since it's still carrying 42 more sampling tubes. And the plan has always been to leave the sample tubes on the surface of Mars, where they'll be retrieved later by future Mars missions.

Elon Musk's SpaceX stacked a Starship prototype rocket on top of a Super Heavy rocket booster for the first time on Friday morning, giving a look at the scale of the combined nearly 400-foot-tall vehicle. From a report: Musk, asked by CNBC what he thought of witnessing the milestone at the company's facility in Boca Chica, Texas, responded simply. "Dream come true," Musk replied in a tweet.

SpaceX is developing Starship to launch cargo and people on missions to the moon and Mars. Starship prototypes stand at about 160 feet tall, or around the size of a 16-story building, and are built of stainless steel -- representing the early version of the rocket that Musk unveiled in 2019. The rocket lifts off on top of a Super Heavy booster, which makes up the bottom half of the rocket and stands about 230 feet tall. Together, Starship and Super Heavy are nearly 400 feet tall when stacked for launch.

Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot quotes the New York Times: Two red things are hiding in a part of the solar system where they shouldn't be. The space rocks may have come from beyond Neptune, and potentially offer hints at the chaos of the early solar system.

Scientists led by Sunao Hasegawa from JAXA, the Japanese space agency, reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 26, 2021 that two objects, called 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia, spotted in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter appear to have originated beyond Neptune. The discoveries could one day provide direct evidence of the chaos that existed in the early solar system.

"If true it would be a huge deal," says Hal Levison, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, who was not involved in the research...

"People have been talking about some fraction of asteroids coming from the Kuiper belt for quite a while now," said Josh Emery, a planetary scientist from Northern Arizona University who was not involved in the paper. He said the research "definitely takes a step" toward finding evidence to support that hypothesis. Not everyone is convinced just yet. Dr. Levison, who was also not involved in the paper, says objects should become less red as they approach the sun. "It seems to be inconsistent with our models," said Dr. Levison, who is the head of NASA's Lucy mission, which is scheduled to launch in October to study Jupiter's Trojans [asteroids captured in its orbit].

Michaël Marsset from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a co-author on the paper, agrees that it's not clear why they would be so red, but it is possibly related to how long it took them to become implanted into the asteroid belt. Some Trojans may also be as red, but haven't been found yet.

To truly confirm the origin of 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia, a spacecraft would likely need to visit them.

"A quake-measuring device on Mars is providing the first detailed look at the red planet's interior, revealing a surprisingly thin crust and a hot molten core beneath the frigid surface," reports the Associated Press: In a series of articles published this week, scientists reported that the Martian crust is within the thickness range of Earth's. The Martian mantle between the crust and core is roughly half as thick as Earth's. And the Martian core is on the high side of what scientists anticipated, although smaller than the core of our own nearly twice-as-big planet.

These new studies confirm that the Martian core is molten. But more research is needed to know whether Mars has a solid inner core like Earth's, surrounded by a molten outer core, according to the international research teams. Stronger marsquakes could help identify any multiple core layers, scientists said Friday. The findings are based on about 35 marsquakes registered by a French seismometer on NASA's InSight stationary lander, which arrived at Mars in 2018...

InSight has been hit with a power crunch in recent months. Dust covered its solar panels, just as Mars was approaching the farthest point in its orbit around the sun. Flight controllers have boosted power by using the lander's robot arm to release sand into the blowing wind to knock off some of the dust on the panels. The seismometer has continued working, but all other science instruments remain on hiatus because of the power situation — except for a German heat probe was declared dead in January after it failed to burrow more than a couple feet (half a meter) into the planet.

The three studies and a companion article appeared in Thursday's edition of the journal Science.

Comic-Con went virtual again in 2020. (San Diego businesses will miss the chance to profit from the 100,000 visitors the convention usually attracted.) And NPR reports the convention has gotten smaller in other ways: Both Marvel Studios and DC are staying away; as it did last year, DC is again directing its resources towards its own event, DC FanDome, set for mid-October. But fans of shows like Doctor Who, Dexter and Comic-Con stalwart The Walking Dead will have lots to look forward to.
Rotten Tomatoes and The Verge have gathered up the trailers that did premier. Some of the highlights:

• Blade Runner: Black Lotus , an upcoming anime television series set to premiere in late 2021 on Crunchyroll and Adult Swim (co-producing it with Alcon Television Group).
• The upcoming remake of Dune
• J.J. Abrams' new four-part Showtime documentary about UFOs.
• Season 2 of Star Trek: Lower Decks and the new Star Trek: Prodigy, a CGI-animated series about a group of aliens who escape captivity onboard the Enterprise.

But interestingly, one of the more visibile presenters was: NASA. Current and former NASA officials made appearances on several different panels, according to Space.com, including one on modern space law, U.N. treaty-making, and how it all stacks up against the portrayal we get in our various future-space franchises. And a former NASA astronaut was also part of a panel touting a virtual simulation platform, "where students can have access to the same tools that professionals use and in the case of space are given the opportunity to solve real problems related to missions to our Moon, Mars, and beyond... from piloting to terra-forming to creating habitats and spacecraft."

There was also a panel of four NASA engineers titled "No Tow Trucks Beyond Mars," on "how we go boldly where there's no one around to fix it. Hear stories from the trenches of the heartbreaks, close calls, and adventures of real-life landing (and flying!) on Mars and our round-table discussion of what Netflix got right in their movie Stowaway."

Sunday's panels will include an astronomer, an astrobiologist, and a geologist/paleontologist discussing "The Science of Star Wars" with the concept designer for Star Wars episodes 7-9, Rogue One, and Solo.