India's CNN-News18 reports: [P]revious research has found that how cells pick a particular repair strategy can be influenced by the microgravity conditions in space. Scientists are concerned that DNA repairs influenced by microgravity conditions may not be adequate, and can lead to harmful consequences. To study the DNA repair process in space, scientists have developed a new technique that uses CRISPR/Cas9 — a gene-editing technology — to recreate precise damages so that cells can be observed repairing them. The team of researchers led by Sarah Stahl-Rommel has successfully demonstrated the technique and its viability aboard the International Space Station.
"CRISPR gene editing is no longer confined to Earth," reports Engadget: The new approach clears the way for other research around DNA repair in space. With enough work, the scientists hope they can replicate the genetic damage from ionizing radiation, not to mention other effects from long-term spaceflight. That, in turn, could help NASA and other agencies develop technology that shields astronauts and makes deep space exploration practical. There's a chance CRISPR might play an important role in getting humans to Mars and beyond.

A team of researchers from Spain, France and the U.S. has found evidence of a glauconitic-like clay on Mars that suggests the planet once had habitable conditions. Phys.Org reports: In their paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the group describes their study of clay minerals extracted from Gale Crater by Curiosity rover back in 2016 and what they found. Back in 2016, NASA's Curiosity rover drilled into the Martian surface inside of Gale Crater. The rover then extracted samples of the clay minerals and used its instruments to analyze the material. In this new effort, the researchers have taken a close look at the results of the analysis and found that it very closely resembles glauconitic clays here on Earth.

Glauconite is an iron potassium phyllosilicate mineral. It is almost always found as ovoid shapes in sediment beds, carbonates and sandstones -- formation requires stable conditions over a long period. This is what makes the discovery of a similar clay on Mars so exciting -- it suggests that it likely formed under stable conditions for a long time, perhaps millions of years. And that suggests that for at least one part of Mars, conditions were, to some extent, suitable for life over millions of years. [...] The researchers note that their findings are not evidence of life on Mars, but suggest that there was a time during which conditions on the surface were favorable for its presence.

"China has released landing process footage from its Zhurong rover as well as video and sounds of the vehicle roving on Mars," reports Space News: Footage of the entry, descent and landing shows deployment of a supersonic disk-gap-band parachute, separation of the backshell, followed by powered descent, a hazard-avoidance hover phase, and landing... Video of the descent of the Zhurong rover from its landing platform, including sounds made by the vehicle's egress, was included in the release. The sounds were created by the metal on metal interaction of a rack and pinion system and recorded by Zhurong's climate station, which intends to capture sounds of Martian winds... The 240-kilogram Zhurong rover successfully landed in Utopia Planitia on May 14.

The deployment took place late May 21 Eastern, following a week-long series of checks and analysis of the environment. The six-wheeled, solar-powered Zhurong has since covered 236 meters on the Martian surface. An undated panorama shows Zhurong and tracks leading back to the landing platform, along with surface and horizon features...

The rover is part of the Tianwen-1 mission, China's first independent interplanetary mission. Consisting of an orbiter, a lander, and a rover, Tianwen-1 launched in July 2020. It entered Mars orbit February 10. Zhurong is equipped with six science payloads, including a laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy instrument for analysing surface elements and minerals, panoramic and multispectral imagers, a climate station, magnetometer and a ground-penetrating radar. It aims to return data on potential water-ice deposits, weather, topography and geology, complementing science carried out by missions from other space agencies.

The Tianwen-1 orbiter is currently in an 8.2-hour orbit, allowing a pass over Utopia Planitia once per sol to perform a data relay role. Zhurong has a primary mission and design lifetime of 90 sols (92 Earth days). It is currently unknown if Zhurong's mission will be extended beyond this.
Engadget argues that this footage from Mars "is as much about bragging rights as anything. Zhurong is part of China's first truly independent mission to another planet, and the country no doubt wants to highlight its accomplishments in as much detail as possible."

NASA has released a new video explaining the complicated, hour-long process required for the Mars rover to take a selfie (which was actually a composite of 62 separate images stitched together).

And meanwhile, CNN reports that its Ingenuity helicopter completed its eighth flight this week, "and even got a software update to fix an annoying issue that impacted some of its previous outings." On its latest outing, Ingenuity flew 525 feet (160 meters) to the south and southeast to a new airfield. This was the copter's third flight of the operations demo phase, in which Ingenuity is proving its usefulness as an aerial scout without interfering with the Perseverance rover's science mission — searching for evidence of ancient life on Mars... Ingenuity continues to do well, and the team is planning for more flights that will push its capabilities. And the helicopter is doing even better now that its troublesome "watchdog" software issue has been fixed. That was deployed before the eighth flight...

Ingenuity is also due for a navigation computer software update that will fix the issue that occurred during the chopper's sixth flight. Images captured by the navigation camera, which feed into the helicopter's navigation computer, had timing delays. Those images help Ingenuity to track its location, among other critical factors during flight. When the incorrect times and images were associated, it caused the chopper to wobble in the air. Ingenuity was able to land safely, but the team wants to prevent the issue from happening again so the chopper doesn't spiral out of control. It's also why the helicopter didn't capture any color images during its last two flights.

Hmmmmmm writes: China aims to send its first crewed mission to Mars in 2033, with regular follow-up flights to follow, under a long-term plan to build a permanently inhabited base on the Red Planet and extract its resources. The ambitious plan, which will intensify a race with the United States to plant humans on Mars, was disclosed in detail for the first time after China landed a robotic rover on Mars in mid-May in its inaugural mission to the planet. Crewed launches to Mars are planned for 2033, 2035, 2037, 2041 and beyond, the head of China's main rocket maker, Wang Xiaojun, told a space exploration conference in Russia recently by video link. Before the crewed missions begin, China will send robots to Mars to study possible sites for the base and to build systems to extract resources there, the official China Space News reported on Wednesday, citing Wang, who is head of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology.

The BBC reports: China's Zhurong rover has sent back a batch of new images from Mars — including a "selfie". The robot, which landed in May, positioned a wireless camera on the ground and then rolled back a short distance to take the snap. To Zhurong's right is the rocket-powered platform that brought the six-wheeled vehicle to a soft touchdown. Both display prominent Chinese flags...

It weighs some 240kg. A tall mast carries cameras to take pictures and aid navigation; five additional instruments will investigate the mineralogy of local rocks and the general nature of the environment, including the weather. Like the current American rovers (Curiosity and Perseverance), Zhurong has a laser tool to zap rocks to assess their chemistry. It also has a radar to look for sub-surface water-ice - a capability it shares with Perseverance.
Slashdot reader InfiniteZero writes that the mission's "full resolution images including a 360 panoramic view of the landing site, can be found at the official CNSA website."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Venus can no longer wait. NASA will send two new robotic missions to Earth's hothouse twin, the agency's new administrator, Bill Nelson, announced this afternoon at his "State of NASA" speech here at the agency's headquarters. The missions, together costing up to $1 billion, mark NASA's first visit to the planet since the early 1990s, whereas nearby Mars has seen a host of robotic visitors. They're expected to launch by the decade's end.

The scientific case for exploring Venus has long been strong. No planet has more to say about how Earth came to be. Mars is tiny and frozen, its heat and atmosphere largely lost to space long ago. Venus could host active volcanoes, and it may have once featured oceans and continents, which are critical to the evolution of life. Plate tectonics roughly like Earth's might have held sway there, or might be starting today, hidden under the clouds. Venus also proves by example that orbiting within a star's "habitable zone" doesn't guarantee a planet is suitable for life. Understanding how Venus's atmosphere went bad and turned into a runaway greenhouse, boiling away any oceans and baking the surface, could help astronomers studying other solar systems distinguish truly Earth-like exoplanets from our evil twins.

A navigation timing error sent Nasa's Mars helicopter on a lurching ride, its first major problem since it took to the Martian skies last month. The Associated Press reports: The experimental helicopter, named Ingenuity, managed to land safely after the problem occurred, officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said on Thursday. The trouble cropped up about a minute into the helicopter's sixth test flight on Saturday at an altitude of 10 meters (33ft). One of the numerous pictures taken by an onboard navigation camera did not register in the system, confusing the craft about its location. Ingenuity began tilting back and forth by as much as 20 degrees and suffered power consumption spikes, according to Havard Grip, the helicopter's chief pilot.

A built-in system to provide extra margin for stability "came to the rescue," he wrote in an online status update. The helicopter landed within five meters (16ft) of its intended touchdown site. Grip wrote: "Ingenuity muscled through the situation, and while the flight uncovered a timing vulnerability that will now have to be addressed, it also confirmed the robustness of the system in multiple ways. While we did not intentionally plan such a stressful flight, Nasa now has flight data probing the outer reaches of the helicopter's performance envelope."

The space-news web site NASASpaceFlight writes: While organic compounds have been confirmed on the Martian surface and near-surface areas since 2018, new Earth-based experiments point to a potentially tantalizing series of signatures from Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument that could indicate the presence of organic salts at the rover's Gale Crater location. What's more, the new research from a team led by J. M. T. Lewis, an organic geochemist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, points to further potential evidence that organic salts might be prevalent across the Martian terrain. The hard part is conclusively detecting them.

For decades, scientists theorized that organic compounds were almost certainly to have been preserved to some detectable degree in the Martian surface environment. In 2018, Curiosity's instruments allowed Eigenbrode et al. to conclusively prove that they were in fact there. In turn, if organic compounds were present at one time, their by-products — organic salts — would still be around as well, even given the harsh radiation environment of Mars compared to Earth.

While organic compounds and organic salts can form from the presence of microbial life, they can also form from geologic processes. Though not confirmed, organic salts would be further evidence that organic matter once existed on Mars' surface, and, if they are still present, could support hypothetical microbial life on Mars today, as some life on Earth uses organic salt as food/energy.

China has released the first photographs taken by its Zhurong rover, which touched down on Mars late on May 14 as part of the country's Tianwen-1 mission. Space.com reports: The China National Space Administration (CNSA), which runs the mission, has released two Mars photographs taken by the rover: one in color and one in black and white. Both images show parts of the rover and its lander against a backdrop of Utopia Planitia, the expansive northern plain that Zhurong will explore during its mission.

The color image shows a view looking to the rear of Zhurong from a navigation camera above the rover's main deck. Solar arrays are visible, as are some surface rocks and features. The black and white image is from an obstacle avoidance camera at the front of the rover. It was captured with a wide-angle lens that also revealed a view of the Mars horizon in the distance, as well as two subsurface radar instruments on the rover itself. In addition to the photos from the surface, CNSA also released two short videos of the orbiter and Zhurong rover's landing capsule separating during Friday's maneuver. Both videos come from cameras on the orbiter and show the capsule pulling away.

China just successfully landed its first rover on Mars, becoming only the second nation to do so. Space.com reports: The Tianwen-1 mission, China's first interplanetary endeavor, reached the surface of the Red Planet Friday (May 14) at approximately 7:11 p.m. EDT (2311 GMT), though Chinese space officials have not yet confirmed the exact time and location of touchdown. Tianwen-1 (which translates to "Heavenly Questions") arrived in Mars' orbit in February after launching to the Red Planet on a Long March 5 rocket in July 2020. After circling the Red Planet for more than three months, the Tianwen-1 lander, with the rover attached, separated from the orbiter to begin its plunge toward the planet's surface. Once the lander and rover entered Mars' atmosphere, the spacecraft endured a similar procedure to the "seven minutes of terror" that NASA's Mars rovers have experienced when attempting soft landings on Mars.

A heat shield protected the spacecraft during the fiery descent, after which the mission safely parachuted down to the Utopia Planitia region, a plain inside of an enormous impact basin in the planet's northern hemisphere. Much like during NASA's Perseverance rover landing, Tianwen-1's landing platform fired some small, downward-facing rocket engines to slow down during the last few seconds of its descent. China's Mars rover, called Zhurong after an ancient fire god in Chinese mythology, will part ways with the lander by driving down a foldable ramp. Once it has deployed, the rover is expected to spend at least 90 Mars days (or about 93 Earth days; a day on Mars lasts about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth) roving around on Mars to study the planet's composition and look for signs of water ice. Utopia Planitia is believed to contain vast amounts of water ice beneath the surface. It's also where NASA's Viking 2 mission touched down in 1976.

China is all set to attempt its first landing on another planet. After months in orbit around Mars, the Tianwen-1 spacecraft will deposit a rover called Zhurong on the surface of Mars. If successful, China will become the second country in history to explore the Martian surface with a rover. From a report: Tianwen-1 arrived at Mars on February 10, marking the arrival of China's first independent interplanetary mission. Since then, Tianwen-1 has been making close approaches to Mars every 49 hours as it flies in an elliptical orbit around the planet, each time taking high-resolution images of the landing site in Utopia Planitia, a vast plain that may once have been covered by an ancient Martian ocean. Chinese officials have said the landing attempt would take place in mid-to-late May, and a report on Twitter quoted Ye Peijian of the China Association for Science and Technology saying the landing will take place on May 14 at 7:11 p.m. ET. This aligns with estimates from amateur radio astronomers tracking the spacecraft.

Mission scientists have been analyzing the topography and geology of Utopia Planitia to guide the spacecraft's landing attempt, and if they decide not to attempt a landing on May 14, they will have additional opportunities on May 16 and May 18. Named for an ancient Chinese fire god, the 529-pound Zhurong rover is similar in size to NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed on the red planet in 2004 and sent back exciting images and data about the planet's surface conditions. China's rover could make additional important discoveries concerning water and past habitability on the planet, paving the way for future human missions to Mars.

NBC News reports on what exactly happened during Elon Musk's appearance on Saturday Night Live — starting with a surprisingly personal monologue: "I don't always have a lot of intonation or variation in how I speak," Musk said, "which I'm told makes for great comedy." He admitted he's socially awkward and said he was the first person with Asperger syndrome to host the show — "or at least the first to admit it."

"I know I sometimes say or post strange things but that's just how my brain works," Musk, 49, said. "I reinvented electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?"
ET Canada notes that Twitter users later pointed out that former SNL castmember (and later episode host) Dan Aykroyd has also said he was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. But NBC notes that Saturday's show was focused on the interests and eccentricities of Elon Musk. His mother, Maye Musk, appeared as part of the show's pre-celebration of Mother's Day. "I'm excited for my Mother's Day gift," she said, before mentioning a form of cryptocurrency hyped by her son. "I just hope it's not Dogecoin."

"It is," said Musk, a big investor in the cryptocurrency...
And later in a skit with Michael Che, Musk had also played a fictional cryptocurrency expert who's asked repeatedly to explain Dogecoin. "It actually started as a joke based on an internet meme but now it's taken over in a very real way," Musk said. "It's the future of currency." Asked again by Che, he said, "I keep telling you, it's a cryptocurrency you can trade for conventional money."

"Oh," Che said. "So it's a hustle."

"Yeah," Musk said, "it's a hustle...."

Dogecoin tracker Darren Rovell tweeted that the cryptocurrency had, at one point, lost $30 billion in value during the show.
In fact, by early Sunday Dogecoin was down 40%, trading as low as 44 cents, reports CNN: It's unclear what was driving the dogecoin selloff. Perhaps investors wanted Musk to say something more supportive of the cryptocurrency. But more likely, there was some "buy the rumor / sell the news" strategy, trying to capitalize on investors' predictions coming true by selling high. Dogecoin traded so actively that Robinhood announced early Sunday morning it was having issues processing crypto trades and was working to resolve the problem.

Several science web sites are strongly disputing a China-based journal's claim that time-lapse photos of Mars show growing mushrooms.

TNW Neural headlined their story "Mushrooms on Mars is a hoax — stop believing hack 'scientists'" If you believe those images demonstrate fungus growing on Mars, I'm about to blow your frickin' mind. Check out this pic. You see that? To heck with fungus, that's an entire highway growing out of the sand in front of a moving bus. You can clearly see that the Earth's sandy crust is being broken apart as the expanding highway organism grows beneath it.

Or, if you're the "Occam's Razor" type: the wind is just blowing sand around. I've never been to Mars, but I'm led to believe there are rocks, dust, and wind. Do we really need to go any further in debunking this nonsense?
They also link to Retraction Watch's page about the story's lead author, Rhawn Gabriel Joseph. IFL Science picks up the story: Nicknamed the Space Tiger King — due to the photographs posted on his frankly ridiculous personal website — Joseph has spent decades erroneously claiming that life has already been discovered on other planets. Back in the 1970s, he began alleging that NASA's Viking lander had found biological matter, despite the agency stating the exact opposite of this.

After setting up his own journal in an attempt to air his unscientific assertions, he later filed a lawsuit against NASA in order to force them to investigate a structure which he claimed resembled a "putative biological organism", but which later turned out to be a rock.
CNET adds: "Claiming that mushrooms are sprouting all over Mars is an extraordinary claim that requires better evidence than an analysis of photographic morphology by a known crank who has claimed, on the basis of the same kind of analysis, that he has seen fields of skulls on Mars," says Paul Myers, a developmental biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, who has followed Joseph's work in the past...

After being alerted to the new paper on Wednesday, I sent emails to the associate editors-in-chief of Advances in Microbiology, asking for clarification around the peer review process. They have not responded to requests for comment. I also emailed members of the editorial board listed on SCIRP's website, including Jian Li, a microbiologist at Monash University in Australia. He says he has not been on the journal's editorial board "for at least five to six years" and has not handled any of the papers in the journal.
The "mushrooms" theory was also dismissed by several actual scientists, reports Futurism: "The conditions on Mars are so extreme that you're not going to see fungi or any kind of life growing at that sort of speed under conditions like coldness and low air pressure," Jonathan Clarke, president of Mars Society Australia, told the South China Morning Post. "Life can barely survive, let alone thrive."

Clarke also took issue with the paper claiming that mushrooms were actually growing on Mars. "It's just like if you go to a beach and there are shells," he told the newspaper. "If the wind blows, the sand moves and exposes more shells. But we won't say the shells are growing there, it's just that they become visible..."

"We have more than photos, records, instruments that tell us what these materials are made of," David Flannery, lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology who is a member of NASA's Mars 2020 mission science team, told SCMP. "And we have models for the features we see around us.... Robots are sending back huge amounts of data," he added. "We have plenty of information but it's just that no one is interpreting the features that we see as something like fungi. There's zero evidence for that."

"This paper, which is really not credible, will be ignored by the scientific community," Flannery said.

"A ghostly hum has been echoing across the plains of Mars' Jezero Crater," reports Business Insider.

Slashdot reader quonset writes: NASA has released a short video of Ingenuity's fourth flight on Mars. However, a bountiful side effect is they were able to hear the hum of its rotors.

Perseverance's microphone was turned on during the flight, and despite Ingenuity being over 260 feet away, it was able to capture both sight and sound of the historic event.

While the majority of sound is Martian wind rustling against the microphone, NASA enhanced the sound to make the rotor sounds more audible. They are most apparent when Ingenuity returns to its takeoff spot and the rotor hum dies down when the blades come to a halt.
"We had carried out tests and simulations that told us the microphone would barely pick up the sounds of the helicopter, as the Mars atmosphere damps the sound propagation strongly," said NASA's science lead for the Perseverance rover's microphone.

"We have been lucky to register the helicopter at such a distance. This recording will be a gold mine for our understanding of the Martian atmosphere."

NASA's Ingenuity helicopter completed its fourth and most ambitious test flight across Mars on Friday. CNET reports: NASA JPL tweeted "Success," saying Ingenuity went father and faster than ever before. NASA also shared a nifty image from one of the Perseverance rover's cameras showing the helicopter in flight in the distance. Ingenuity had originally been scheduled for a fourth flight on Thursday, but a known glitch prevented the rotorcraft from switching into flight mode. The chopper remained safe and healthy and ready for the redo.

The plan for the latest test was to fly the helicopter to an altitude of 16 feet (5 meters), collect images of the landscape below, hover and then head back to its takeoff spot. The flight path was set to take it 436 feet (133 meters) downrange and last 117 seconds. It takes time to send the data back from Mars, but NASA is expecting to receive a bounty of photos snapped by the helicopter during the flight. This will help prove the rotorcraft's potential for use as a scout that can assist surface vehicles like rovers as they explore from the ground. NASA said the plucky chopper already "has met or surpassed all of its technical objectives." That gave the helicopter team license to try the more daring fourth flight to push its capabilities in the thin atmosphere of Mars.

Hmmmmmm writes: China plans to launch its next robot lunar lander in 2024, and it will carry equipment manufactured by scientists from France, Sweden, Italy, and Russia, Hu Hao, the program's chief designer, told the Xinhua News Agency on Saturday. The country aims to position the lander, named Chang'e 6, near the lunar south pole where it will collect samples, per the official Xinhua News Agency.

The Chang'e 6 lander is part of China's ongoing mission to successfully return moon samples back home "for comprehensive analysis and research," Hu said at a conference, Associated Press reported.

For the 2024 mission, The China National Space Administration has invited scientists from around the world to take part in the program, offering to transport solicited payloads into space. So far, four payloads designed by the international scientists have been preliminarily chosen, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

"NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter continues to set records, flying faster and farther on Sunday, April 25, 2021 than in any tests it went through on Earth," reports NASA: The helicopter took off at 1:31 a.m. EDT (4:31 a.m. PDT), or 12:33 p.m. local Mars time, rising 16 feet (5 meters) — the same altitude as its second flight. Then it zipped downrange 164 feet (50 meters), almost half the length of a football field, reaching a top speed of 6.6 feet per second (2 meters per second). [Roughly 4.5 miles an hour.]

After data came back from Mars starting at 10:16 a.m. EDT (7:16 a.m. PDT), Ingenuity's team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California was ecstatic to see the helicopter soaring out of view. They're already digging through a trove of information gathered during this third flight that will inform not just additional Ingenuity flights but possible Mars rotorcraft in the future. "Today's flight was what we planned for, and yet it was nothing short of amazing," said Dave Lavery, the project's program executive for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "With this flight, we are demonstrating critical capabilities that will enable the addition of an aerial dimension to future Mars missions."
NASA's chief pilot for the Mars helicopter calls this flight a big step "in which Ingenuity will begin to experience freedom in the sky," according to CNN.

From the sky Ingenuity snapped a photo of its own shadow on Mars, and earlier sent back the very first aerial color image — taken 17 feet (5.2-metre) above the surface of Mars by Ingenuity's high-resolution color camera with a 4208-by-3120-pixel sensor.

NASA successfully carried out a second flight on Mars on Thursday of its mini helicopter Ingenuity, a 52-second sortie that saw it climb to a height of 16 feet. Phys.Org reports: "So far, the engineering telemetry we have received and analyzed tell us that the flight met expectations," said Bob Balaram, Ingenuity's chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California. "We have two flights of Mars under our belts, which means that there is still a lot to learn during this month of Ingenuity," Balaram said in a statement. The US space agency conducted the first flight of the four pound (1.8 kilogram) rotorcraft on Monday, the first powered flight ever on another planet. That time Ingenuity rose to a height of 10 feet and then touched down after 39.1 seconds.

For the second flight, which lasted 51.9 seconds, Ingenuity climbed to 16 feet, hovered briefly, tilted and then accelerated sideways for seven feet. "The helicopter came to a stop, hovered in place, and made turns to point its camera in different directions," said Havard Grip, Ingenuity's chief pilot. "Then it headed back to the center of the airfield to land. "It sounds simple, but there are many unknowns regarding how to fly a helicopter on Mars."

William Robinson shares a report: The growing list of "firsts" for Perseverance, NASA's newest six-wheeled robot on the Martian surface, includes converting some of the Red Planet's thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into oxygen. A toaster-size, experimental instrument aboard Perseverance called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) accomplished the task. The test took place April 20, the 60th Martian day, or sol, since the mission landed Feb. 18. While the technology demonstration is just getting started, it could pave the way for science fiction to become science fact -- isolating and storing oxygen on Mars to help power rockets that could lift astronauts off the planet's surface. Such devices also might one day provide breathable air for astronauts themselves. MOXIE is an exploration technology investigation -- as is the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) weather station -- and is sponsored by NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) and Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. "This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars," said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for STMD. "MOXIE has more work to do, but the results from this technology demonstration are full of promise as we move toward our goal of one day seeing humans on Mars. Oxygen isn't just the stuff we breathe. Rocket propellant depends on oxygen, and future explorers will depend on producing propellant on Mars to make the trip home." For rockets or astronauts, oxygen is key, said MOXIE's principal investigator, Michael Hecht of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory.