Five cities on Mars, home to one million people? That's the vision of architecture studio ABIBOO, which has drawn up designs based on the latest scientific research — and created an impressive three-and-a-half minute video to showcase it. "According to the architecture company's analysis, the construction can start by 2054," reports EuroNews, "and it could be built by 2100 — that is — when the first community could start living there..." "Water is one of the great advantages that Mars offers, it helps to be able to get the proper materials for the construction. Basically, with the water and the Co2, we can generate carbon and with the carbon, we can generate steel," says Alfredo Muñoz [founder of the architecture studio]. The architecture company plans to use exclusively Martian materials for the construction...

The Mars city project is part of scientific work organised by The Mars Society and developed by the SONet network, an international team of scientists and academics.
ABIBOO envisions "vertical cities" with large green spaces powered by solar panels, with inhabitants surviving on a plant-based diet from the greenhouse-grown crops (which also produce oxygen). The communities would be connected by elevators and tunnels, "all built into the side of a cliff to protect inhabitants from atmospheric pressure and radiation."

Muñoz argues that rather than repeating earth's mistakes of damaging the planet, careful planning can "try to minimize or ensure that new colonizations on other planets happen sustainably."

President Joe Biden is expected to nominate former Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida to lead NASA, settling on a longtime booster of the space program to lead the agency's return to the moon, POLITICO reported Thursday, citing sources. From the report: If confirmed by the Senate, Nelson would lead the space agency as it partners with the new crop of private space companies to establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface in preparation for sending astronauts to Mars. A Senate staffer and a second source familiar with the decision told POLITICO that the administration has picked Nelson, and that the announcement will come on Friday. Both sources spoke on background because they were not authorized to speak ahead of the formal announcement. Nelson, 78, who himself spent six days in orbit when he flew to space in 1986 aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia, served as the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee during his 18 years in Congress, where he was instrumental in establishing many of NASA's current priorities.

Oceans' worth of water may remain buried in the crust of Mars, and not lost to space as previously long thought, a new study finds. Space.com reports: Data from NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) mission and the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter revealed that at the rate water disappears from the Red Planet's atmosphere, Mars would have lost a global ocean of water only about 10 to 82 feet (3 to 25 m) deep over the course of 4.5 billion years. Now scientists find that much of the water Mars once had may remain hidden in the crust of the Red Planet, locked away in the crystal structures of rocks beneath the Martian surface. They detailed their findings online March 16 in the journal Science and at the Lunar Planetary Science Conference.

In the new study, the scientists found chemical reactions may have led between 30% to 99% of the water that Mars initially had to get locked into minerals and buried in the planet's crust. Any remaining water was then lost to space, explaining the hydrogen-to-deuterium ratios seen on Mars. All in all, the researchers suggested Mars lost 40% to 95% of its water during its Noachian period about 4.1 billion to 3.7 billion years ago. Their model suggested the amount of water on the Red Planet reached its current levels by about 3 billion years ago.

New submitter byennie writes: A new airless bicycle tire called "METL" was introduced today by The SMART Tire Company. The tire is made from shape memory alloys (SMAs) and was originally designed for Mars rover missions (it's headed to Mars in 2026 as part of the Fetch rover). The structural tire claims to be flat-free and high performance, leaning on the unique properties of SMAs developed at NASA for future heavy vehicles in space. According to the company, "the shape memory alloy tire is made from advanced, lightweight materials known as NiTinol+, creating a tire that is elastic like rubber yet strong like titanium, exhibiting perfect shape memory without ever going flat."

CBS News reports: Scientists are pulling inspiration from Noah's Ark in a new lunar proposal that they call a "global insurance policy." They hope to send an ark to the moon, filled with 335 million sperm and egg samples, in case a catastrophe happens on Earth. Instead of two of every animal, the solar-powered moon ark would cryogenically store frozen seed, spore, sperm and egg samples from some 6.7 million Earth species. University of Arizona researcher Jekan Thanga and a group of his students proposed the concept in a paper presented during the IEEE Aerospace Conference this week...

Establishing the ark would involve sending the 6.7 million samples to the moon in multiple payloads, then storing them in a vault beneath the surface, where they would be safe. The idea is to store the ark within a network of lava tubes — about 200 of which were discovered beneath the moon's surface in 2013... These tubes have remained untouched for three to four billion years, and scientists suggest they could provide much-needed protection from solar radiation, meteors or temperature changes on the surface. While the moon is not hospitable to humans, its harsh features "make it a great place to store samples that need to stay very cold and undisturbed for hundreds of years at a time," they said.

Based on some "quick, back-of-the-envelope calculations," Thanga said that transporting about 50 samples from each of 6.7 million species — totaling 335 million samples — would take about 250 rocket launches. That's over six times more than it took to build the International Space Station, which required 40 rocket launches. "It's not crazy big," Thanga said. "We were a little bit surprised about that."

The team's proposal for the ark includes solar panels on the moon's surface for electricity, elevator shafts down into the facility and Petri dishes housed in cryogenic preservation modules.
"What amazes me about projects like this is that they make me feel like we are getting closer to becoming a space civilization," said the University of Arizona doctoral student leading the thermal analysis for the project, "and to a not-very-distant future where humankind will have bases on the moon and Mars."

schwit1 shares an article from Entrepreneur: If anyone has the ability to surprise the world with his ambitious projects, it is Elon Musk . The billionaire announced that he is building a new city in Texas to be called Starbase, around the rocket launch site of his company SpaceX...

Later, he alluded to his project to colonize the red planet, hinting that Starbase would be just the beginning to go further. "From there to Mars. And hence the Stars," detailed the CEO of Tesla.

The tycoon, who is currently the second richest person in the world , said that his city will occupy an area "much larger" than Boca Chica , a place that houses a launch site for SpaceX and where the company is building its Starship rocket... Eddie Treviño, judge for Cameron County, Texas, confirmed that SpaceX informed the authorities of Elon Musk's intention: to incorporate Boca Chica into the city of Starbase . The official noted that the mogul and his company must comply with all state statutes of incorporation and clarified that the county will process any petition in accordance with the law.
Musk also tweeted that the leader of his new city "shall be The Doge," linking to a Wikipedia definition for the Venetian word doge (meaning either "military commander" or "spiritual leader".)

Musk made his remark in response to a Twitter user named Wootiez, who had asked him whether his new city would be dog friendly.

A SpaceX rocket prototype, known as SN10, soared over South Texas during test flight Wednesday before swooping down to a pinpoint landing near its launch site. Approximately three minutes after landing, however, multiple independent video feeds showed the rocket exploding on its landing pad. CNN reports: SpaceX's SN10, an early prototype of the company's Starship Mars rocket, took off around 5:15 pm CT and climbed about six miles over the coastal landscape, mimicking two previous test flights SpaceX has conducted that ended in an explosive crash. Wednesday marked the first successful landing for a Starship prototype. "We've had a successful soft touch down on the landing pad," SpaceX engineer John Insprucker said during a livestream of the event. "That's capping a beautiful test flight of Starship 10." It was unclear what caused the rocket to explode after landing, and the SpaceX livestream cut out before the conflagration.

He added that SpaceX has several other prototypes already in production and the next, SN11, will be ready to roll out for another test flight 'in the near future." SpaceX's first launch attempt on Wednesday, around 3 pm CT, was aborted at the last tenth of a second. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet that the abort was triggered by pre-set standards around the rocket's thrust, which Musk described as "slightly conservative." He added that the company would increase the rocket's thrust limit, giving the rocket more wiggle room for getting a go-ahead for liftoff. The company then recycled the SN10's fuel ahead of the second, successful attempt.

Since landing on Mars on February 18, NASA's Perseverance rover has sent back some amazing images from around its landing site, Jezero Crater, a 30-mile wide impact depression just north of the Red Planet's equator. BBC shares a selection of the pictures sent from the mission, "as Perseverance hunts for signs of past microbial life, seeks to characterize the planet's geology and past climate, and collects Martian rock." You can view the images here.

"Mars, Shmars; this voyager is looking forward to a submarine ride under the icebergs on Saturn's strange moon," says the New York Times, introducing a piece by cosmic affairs correspondent Dennis Overbye: What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturn's large, foggy moon Titan — plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs and exploring an ancient, frigid shoreline of organic goo a billion miles from the sun? Those are the visions that danced through my head recently...diverted to the farther reaches of the solar system by the news that Kraken Mare, an ocean of methane on Titan, had recently been gauged for depth and probably went at least 1,000 feet down. That is as deep as nuclear submarines will admit to going. The news rekindled my dreams of what I think would be the most romantic of space missions: a voyage on, and ultimately even under, the oceans of Titan...

NASA recently announced that it would launch a drone called Dragonfly to the Saturnian moon in 2026. Proposals have also circulated for an orbiter, a floating probe that could splash down in a lake, even a robotic submarine. "The Titan submarine is still going," said Dr. Valerio Poggiali, research associate at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, in an email — although it is unlikely to happen before Titan's next summer, around 2047. By then, he said, there will be more ambient light and the submarine conceivably could communicate on a direct line to Earth with no need of an orbiting radio relay.

Titan is the weirdest place in the solar system, in some regards, and also the world most like our own. Like Earth, it has a thick atmosphere of mostly nitrogen (the only moon that has much of an atmosphere at all), and like Earth, it has weather, rain, rivers and seas. But on this world, when it rains, it rains gasoline. Hydrocarbon material drifts down like snow and is shaped into dunes by nitrogen winds. Rivers have carved canyons through mountains of frozen soot, and layers of ice float on subsurface oceans of ammonia. The prevailing surface temperature is minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit. A chemical sludge that optimistic astronomers call "prebiotic" creeps along under an oppressive brown sky. Besides Earth, Titan is the only world in the universe that is known to harbor liquid on its surface — with everything that could imply.

An anonymous reader writes: NASA's Perseverence rover, which is currently exploring Mars, has as it's CPU a BAE Systems RAD 750 running at a 200 Mhz and featuring 256 Megabytes of RAM with 2 Gigabytes of storage. This is a radiation hardened version of the PowerPC G3, with specs roughly equivalent to the Clamshell Ibook that Reese Witherspoon used in Legally Blond back in 2001. This follows a tradition of old tech on space rovers — the Sojourner rover which explored Mars in 1997 used an Intel 80C85 running at 2 Mhz, similar to what could have been found in the classic Radio Shack TRS-80 model 100 portable from 1983.
In a comment on the original submission, long-time Slashdot reader Mal-2 argues "There's not as much distance between the actual capabilities of a CPU now and twenty years ago as there would be if you made the same comparison a decade ago." In the last 12 years or so, the CPUs have gotten more efficient and cooler-running (thus suitable for portable devices) to a much greater degree than they've actually gained new functionality. Retro computing is either going to stay stuck in the 1990s, or it's not going to be very interesting in the future.

"The huge parachute used by NASA's Perseverance rover to land on Mars contained a secret message," reports the Associated Press — thanks to the rover's puzzle-loving systems engineer Ian Clark.

"During a live stream discussing the landing, one Nasa commentator said: 'Sometimes we leave messages in our work for others to find. So we invite you all to give it a shot and show your work,'" reports the Guardian.

One Reddit user actually deciphered the message using Python code.

Long-time Slashdot reader rufey writes that "Decoded the slogan is 'Dare Mighty Things' — a line from President Theodore Roosevelt — which is a mantra at JPL and adorns many of the center's walls." The orange sections of the 70-foot (21-meter) parachute represented ones in binary code, while the yellow sections represented zeroes. (So the letter "A" becomes yellow-yellow-yellow-yellow-yellow-yellow-orange...) The Associated Press reports: Clark also included the GPS coordinates for the mission's headquarters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Clark, a crossword hobbyist, came up with the idea two years ago. Engineers wanted an unusual pattern in the nylon fabric to know how the parachute was oriented during descent. Turning it into a secret message was "super fun," he said Tuesday. Only about six people knew about the encoded message before Thursday's landing, according to Clark. They waited until the parachute images came back before putting out a teaser during a televised news conference Monday...

Another added touch not widely known until touchdown: Perseverance bears a plaque depicting all five of NASA's Mars rovers in increasing size over the years — similar to the family car decals seen on Earth.

Deputy project manager Matt Wallace promises more so-called hidden Easter eggs...
The official Twitter feed for the rover has already revealed that it's carrying another message hidden in a plaque with a logo of the sun — "Explore as One," written in Morse code.

Some other interesting facts about the rover:

• NASA points out that Perseverance carried a special placard with 10,932,295 names, "stenciled by electron beam onto three fingernail-sized silicon chips."

• Space.com notes that it also carried a small aluminum plate honoring the healthcare workers of the world.

• NASA is encouraging children to code their own version of the helicopter using the visual programming language Scratch.

New video from NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover chronicles major milestones during the final minutes of its entry, descent, and landing (EDL) on the Red Planet on Feb. 18 as the spacecraft plummeted, parachuted, and rocketed toward the surface of Mars. A microphone on the rover also has provided the first audio recording of sounds from Mars. From a report: From the moment of parachute inflation, the camera system covers the entirety of the descent process, showing some of the rover's intense ride to Mars' Jezero Crater. The footage from high-definition cameras aboard the spacecraft starts 7 miles (11 kilometers) above the surface, showing the supersonic deployment of the most massive parachute ever sent to another world, and ends with the rover's touchdown in the crater. A microphone attached to the rover did not collect usable data during the descent, but the commercial off-the-shelf device survived the highly dynamic descent to the surface and obtained sounds from Jezero Crater on Feb. 20. About 10 seconds into the 60-second recording, a Martian breeze is audible for a few seconds, as are mechanical sounds of the rover operating on the surface. "For those who wonder how you land on Mars -- or why it is so difficult -- or how cool it would be to do so -- you need look no further," said acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk. "Perseverance is just getting started, and already has provided some of the most iconic visuals in space exploration history. It reinforces the remarkable level of engineering and precision that is required to build and fly a vehicle to the Red Planet."

"When NASA's Perseverance rover landed on Mars this week, it also brought the Linux operating system to the Red Planet," reports PC Magazine: The tidbit was mentioned in an interview NASA software engineer Tim Canham gave to IEEE Spectrum. The helicopter-like drone on board the Perseverance rover uses a Linux-powered software framework the space agency open-sourced a few years ago. "This the first time we'll be flying Linux on Mars. We're actually running on a Linux operating system," Canham said.

It also might be the first time NASA has brought a Linux-based device to Mars. "There isn't a previous use of Linux that I'm aware of, definitely on the previous rovers," Canham told PCMag in an email.

Past Mars rovers have used proprietary OSes, largely from the software company Wind River Systems. The same is true for the Perseverance rover itself; the machine has been installed with Wind River's VxWorks, which was used on past Mars missions.
The article also notes that the helicopter-like drone Ingenuity "was built using off-the-shelf parts, including Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801 processor, a smartphone chip."

"Ingenuity is purely a technology demonstration," notes ZDNet. "It's not designed to support the Perseverance mission, which is searching for signs of ancient life and collecting rock and dirt samples for later missions to return to Earth. Its mission is to show that it's possible to fly on Mars using commercial off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software."

NASA's Perseverance rover has successfully touched down on the surface of Mars after surviving a blazing seven-minute plunge through the Martian atmosphere. The rover's clean landing sets the stage for a years-long journey to scour the Red Planet's Jezero Crater for ancient signs of life. From a report: "Touchdown confirmed," Swati Mohan, a member of NASA's entry, descent and landing team, said. "Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars ready to begin seeking the signs of past life." The landing team of roughly 30 engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California jumped from their seats and cheered at the confirmation. Moments after touching down, Perseverance beamed back its first image from one of its 19 cameras. Perseverance hit Mars' atmosphere on time at 3:48PM ET at speeds of about 12,100 miles per hour, diving toward the surface in an infamously challenging sequence engineers call the "seven minutes of terror." With an 11-minute comms delay between Mars and Earth, the spacecraft had to carry out its seven-minute plunge at all by itself with a wickedly complex set of pre-programmed instructions. The moment we learned Perseverance had successfully landed.

It took six and a half months for Perseverance to travel from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to the atmosphere of the red planet. It will now take about seven minutes to get from the atmosphere to the sandy ground. The highly-anticipated 293-million-mile journey of Perseverance is moments away from its conclusion. NASA's newest rover is set to touch down in Jerezo Crater at 12:55 p.m. Pacific. If all goes according to plan, Perseverance will begin its search for signs of ancient Martian life after conducting a series of system checks and making other preparations for its mission. You can watch the live feed right here -- or below.

When the Perseverance rover sets down on Mars on Thursday, another NASA spacecraft already there will be listening for the thump-thump that will result when the newcomer arrives. From a report: The hope is that these thumps will create enough shaking to be detected by InSight, a stationary NASA probe that arrived in 2018 to listen for marsquakes with an exquisitely sensitive seismometer. The InSight lander sits more than 2,000 miles to the east of where Perseverance is to land. "We have a reasonable chance of seeing it," said Benjamin Fernando, a graduate student at the University of Oxford in England and a member of the InSight science team. Perseverance will land on Mars at 3:55 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday. NASA Television will provide coverage of the event beginning at 2:15 p.m.

Unless something goes catastrophically wrong, the seismic signals that InSight might hear will not emanate from the rover itself. Perseverance is to be lowered to the surface from a hovering crane, bumping to the ground gently at slower than 2 miles per hour. Rather, scientists will be sifting through InSight's seismic data for signs of the impacts of two 170-pound blocks of tungsten metal that helped keep Perseverance in a stable, balanced spin during its 300-million-mile trip from Earth. At an altitude of 900 miles above Mars, they will be jettisoned as junk, and without parachutes or retrorockets to slow them down, they will then slam into the surface at some 9,000 m.p.h. "This enormous speed means that they'll make quite a substantial crater," Mr. Fernando said. In 2012, similar tungsten blocks from the Curiosity rover, which is almost the same design as Perseverance, left scars visible from orbit.

Microsoft will connect its cloud computing Azure Space platform to the Spaceborne Computer-2, a Hewlett-Packard Enterprise product promising to "deliver edge computing and [artificial intelligence] capabilities to the International Space Station (ISS)." Space.com reports: Spaceborne Computer-2 will launch to space Feb. 20 aboard a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo craft that will also deliver tons of other supplies, experiments and food for the station's Expedition 64 astronauts. An Antares rocket will launch the Cygnus NG-15 cargo mission from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. Spaceborne Computer-2's mission could last two or three years. Once the computer is up and running in orbit, researchers will be able to use the Azure cloud system to do intensive processing or to transmit results back to the device. The computer is based on HPE's Edgeline Converged Edge system designed to operate in harsh environments.

Growing plants in space, modeling dust storms on Earth to assist with Mars mission planning, and doing ultrasound medical imaging for astronaut health care are some of the many fields that the collaboration will address, the companies said in a press release. "The combined advancements of Spaceborne Computer-2 will enable astronauts to eliminate longer latency and wait times associated with sending data to-and-from Earth, to tackle research, and gain insights immediately for a range of projects," the release added.

The new project builds on the lessons learned from a predecessor proof-of-concept device, called Spaceborne Computer. This flew to the space station for a one-year mission in 2017 to investigate computer reliability in space, amid a harsh environment that includes high radiation and zero gravity. "The goal was to test if affordable, commercial off-the-shelf servers used on earth, but equipped with purposefully-designed software-based hardening features, can withstand the shake, rattle and roll of a rocket launch to space, and once there, seamlessly operate on the ISS," the press release said, adding the predecessor mission was a success. "Additionally, gaining more reliable computing on the ISS is just the first step in NASA's goals for supporting human space travel to the moon, Mars and beyond where reliable communications is a mission critical need," the release noted.

For the first time, the ExoMars orbiter detected traces of hydrogen chloride in Mars' atmosphere, presenting Mars scientists with a new mystery to solve: how it got there. ScienceAlert reports: Scientists have been keeping an eye out for gases that contain chlorine in the atmosphere of Mars, since they could confirm that the planet is volcanically active. However, if hydrogen chloride was produced by volcanic activity, it should only spike very regionally, and be accompanied by other volcanic gases. The hydrogen chloride detected by ExoMars did not, and was not. It was sniffed out in both the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars during the dust storm, and the absence of other volcanic gases was glaring.

This suggests that the gas was being produced by some other process; luckily, we have similar processes here on Earth that can help us understand what it could be. It's a several-step process that requires a few key ingredients. First, you need sodium chloride (that's regular salt), left over from evaporative processes. [...] Then there's the Martian polar ice caps which, when warmed during the summer, sublimate. When the resulting water vapor mingles with the salt, the resulting reaction releases chlorine, which then reacts further to form hydrogen chloride. The research has been published in the journal Science Advances.

A Chinese spacecraft went into orbit around Mars on Wednesday on an expedition to land a rover on the surface and scout for signs of ancient life, authorities announced in a landmark step in the country's most ambitious deep-space mission yet. From a report: The arrival of Tianwen-1 after a journey of seven months and nearly 300 million miles (475 million kilometers) is part of an unusual burst of activity at Mars: A spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates swung into orbit around the red planet on Tuesday, and a U.S. rover is set to arrive next week. China's space agency said the five-ton combination orbiter and rover fired its engine to reduce its speed, allowing it to be captured by Mars' gravity. "Entering orbit has been successful ... making it our country's first artificial Mars satellite," the agency announced. The mission is bold even for a space program that has racked up a steady stream of achievements and brought prestige to China's ruling Communist Party.

Launched in July, China's probe "Tianwen-1" is now approaching an orbit around Mars — and it's sent back its first picture. Slashdot reader AmiMoJo spotted this report in the Guardian: The photo released by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) shows geological features including the Schiaparelli crater and the Valles Marineris, a vast stretch of canyons on the Martian surface. The photo was taken from about 1.4m miles away (2.2m kilometres), said the CNSA, with the spacecraft since reaching 1.1 million kilometres from the planet...

The five-tonne Tianwen-1 includes a Mars orbiter, lander, and a rover that will study the planet's soil. China hopes to land the rover in May in Utopia, a massive impact basin...

China has poured billions of dollars into its military-led space programme and first sent a human into space in 2003. It is aiming to assemble a space station in Earth orbit by 2022.