NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission has logged a lot of flight miles since being lofted skyward on July 30 -- 146.3 million miles (235.4 million kilometers) to be exact. Turns out that is exactly the same distance it has to go before the spacecraft hits the Red Planet's atmosphere like a 11,900 mph (19,000 kph) freight train on Feb. 18, 2021. From a report: "At 1:40 p.m. Pacific Time today, our spacecraft will have just as many miles in its metaphorical rearview mirror as it will out its metaphorical windshield," said Julie Kangas, a navigator working on the Perseverance rover mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "While I don't think there will be cake, especially since most of us are working from home, it's still a pretty neat milestone. Next stop, Jezero Crater." The Sun's gravitational influence plays a significant role in shaping not just spacecraft trajectories to Mars (as well as to everywhere else in the solar system), but also the relative movement of the two planets. So Perseverance's route to the Red Planet follows a curved trajectory rather than an arrow-straight path.

"Although we're halfway into the distance we need to travel to Mars, the rover is not halfway between the two worlds," Kangas explained. "In straight-line distance, Earth is 26.6 million miles [42.7 million kilometers] behind Perseverance and Mars is 17.9 million miles [28.8 million kilometers] in front." At the current distance, it takes 2 minutes, 22 seconds for a transmission to travel from mission controllers at JPL via the Deep Space Network to the spacecraft. By time of landing, Perseverance will have covered 292.5 million miles (470.8 million kilometers), and Mars will be about 130 million miles (209 million kilometers) away from Earth; at that point, a transmission will take about 11.5 minutes to reach the spacecraft.

Seattle-based Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies (USNC-Tech) has developed a concept for a new Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) engine that they claim is safer and more reliable than previous NTP designs and with far greater efficiency than a chemical rocket. The concept could reduce Earth-Mars travel time to just three months. New Atlas reports: According to Dr. Michael Eades, principal engineer at USNC-Tech, the new concept engine is more reliable than previous NTP designs and can produce twice the specific impulse of a chemical rocket. Specific impulse is a measure of a rocket's efficiency. To fuel the concept, UNSC-Tech uses a Fully Ceramic Micro-encapsulated (FCM) fuel to power the engine's reactor. This fuel is based on High-Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU), which is derived from reprocessed civilian nuclear fuel and is enriched to between 5 and 20 percent -- greater than that of civilian reactors and less than that of naval reactors. The fuel is then encapsulated into particles coated with zirconium carbide (ZrC).

The company claims that this fuel is much more rugged than conventional nuclear fuels and can operate at high temperatures. This produces safer reactor designs and a high thrust and specific impulse that could previously only be obtained with highly-enriched uranium. In addition, such fuel can be produced with current supply chains and manufacturing plants. It is hoped the new concept could lead to nuclear engines that reduce deep space mission times drastically, with a crewed mission to Mars arriving in as little as three months. Beyond that, the concept is aimed at a commercial market as well as with NASA and the US Department of Defense, allowing for more ambitious private missions.

"TCP/IP doesn't work at interplanetary distances," 77-year-old Vinton Cerf tells Quanta magazine. "So we designed a set of protocols that do." Specifically, bundle protocols: a disruption/delay-tolerant networking (DTN) protocol with nodes that can also store information: A data packet traveling from Earth to Jupiter might, for example, go through a relay on Mars, Cerf explained. However, when the packet arrives at the relay, some 40 million miles into the 400-million-mile journey, Mars may not be oriented properly to send the packet on to Jupiter. "Why throw the information away, instead of hanging on to it until Jupiter shows up?" Cerf said. This store-and-forward feature allows bundles to navigate toward their destinations one hop at a time, despite large disruptions and delays...

So, a couple decades after conceiving of bundle protocols, is the interplanetary internet up and running?

We don't have to build the whole thing and then hope somebody uses it. We sought to get standards in place, as we have for the internet; offer those standards freely; and then achieve interoperability so that the various spacefaring nations could help each other. We're taking the next obvious step for multi-mission infrastructure: designing the capability for an interplanetary backbone network. You build what's needed for the next mission. As spacecraft get built and deployed, they carry the standard protocols that become part of the interplanetary backbone. Then, when they finish their primary scientific mission, they get repurposed as nodes in the backbone network. We accrete an interplanetary backbone over time.

In 2004, the Mars rovers were supposed to transmit data back to Earth directly through the deep space network — three big 70-meter antennas in Australia, Spain and California. However, the channel's available data rate was 28 kilobits per second, which isn't much. When they turned the radios on, they overheated. They had to back off, which meant less data would come back. That made the scientists grumpy. One of the JPL engineers used prototype software — this is so cool! — to reprogram the rovers and orbiters from hundreds of millions of miles away. We built a small store-and-forward interplanetary internet with essentially three nodes: the rovers on the surface of Mars, the orbiters and the deep space network on Earth. That's been running ever since.

We've been refining the design of those protocols, implementing and testing them. The latest protocols are running back-and-forth relays between Earth and the International Space Station... We did another test at the ISS where the astronauts were controlling a little robot vehicle in Germany.

NASA will announce an exciting new discovery about the Moon from the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) at a media teleconference at 12 p.m. EDT Monday, Oct. 26. Audio of the teleconference will stream live on the agency's website. From a press release: This new discovery contributes to NASA's efforts to learn about the Moon in support of deep space exploration. Under NASA's Artemis program, the agency will send the first woman and next man to the lunar surface in 2024 to prepare for our next giant leap -- human exploration of Mars as early as the 2030s. Understanding the science of the Moon also helps piece together the broader history of the inner solar system.

With competition among Earth's telecoms providers as fierce as ever, equipment maker Nokia has announced its expansion into a new market, winning a deal to install the first cellular network on the moon. From a report: The Finnish equipment manufacturer said it was selected by NASA to deploy an "ultra-compact, low-power, space-hardened" wireless 4G network on the lunar surface, as part of the US space agency's plan to establish a long-term human presence on the moon by 2030. The $14.1m contract, awarded to Nokia's US subsidiary, is part of Nasa's Artemis programme which aims to send the first woman, and next man, to the moon by 2024. The astronauts will begin carrying out detailed experiments and explorations which the agency hopes will help it develop its first human mission to Mars. Nokia's network equipment will be installed remotely on the moon's surface using a lunar hopper built by Intuitive Machines in late 2022, Nokia said. "The network will self-configure upon deployment," the firm said in a statement, adding that the wireless technology will allow for "vital command and control functions, remote control of lunar rovers, real-time navigation and streaming of high definition video."

The existence of liquid water on Mars -- one of the more hotly debated matters about our cold, red neighbor -- is looking increasingly likely. From a report: New research published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy indicates there really is a buried reservoir of super-salty water near the south pole of the planet. Scientists say such a lake would significantly improve the likelihood that the red planet just might harbor microscopic life of its own. Some scientists remain unconvinced that what's been seen is liquid water, but the latest study adds weight to a tentative 2018 finding from radar maps of the planet's crust made by the Mars Express robot orbiter. That research suggested an underground "lake" of liquid water had pooled beneath frozen layers of sediment near the Martian south pole -- akin to the subglacial lakes detected beneath the Antarctic and the Greenland ice sheets on Earth.

Earth's subglacial lakes are teeming with bacterial life, and similar life might survive in liquid reservoirs on Mars, scientists have speculated. "We are much more confident now," said Elena Pettinelli, a professor of geophysics at Italy's Roma Tre University, who led the latest research and the earlier study. "We did many more observations, and we processed the data completely differently." The planetary scientist and her team processed 134 observations of the region near the south pole with ground-penetrating radar from the Mars Express Orbiter between 2012 until 2019 -- more than four times as many as before, and covering a period of time more than twice as long. They then applied a new technique to the observation data that has been used to find lakes beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, as well as an older technique used in the 2018 study. Both methods indicate there is a "patchwork" of buried reservoirs of liquid in the region, Pettinelli said -- a large reservoir about 15 miles across, surrounded by several smaller patches up to 6 miles across.

First, PetaPixel reminds us that Estee Lauder's products will be launching into space this week: The cosmetics giant Estee Lauder is paying NASA $128,000 for a product photography shoot onboard the International Space Station. Bloomberg reports that the company will be paying the space agency to fly 10 bottles of its Advanced Night Repair skin serum to the orbiting space station on a cargo run that will launch from Virginia on Tuesday and dock on Saturday. Once the product is on board, astronauts will be tasked with shooting product photos of the serum floating in the cupola module, which has sweeping panoramic views of Earth and space.

NASA charges a "professional fee" of $17,500 per hour for the astronauts' time.
In a possibly-related story, the same flight will also be carrying a new $23 million space toilet to the station as part of a routine resupply mission "to test it out before it's used on future missions to the moon or Mars."

A team of scientists from the Singapore University of Technology and Design discovered that, using simple chemistry, the organic polymer chitin -- contained in the exoskeletons of insects and crustaceans -- can easily be transformed into a viable building material for basic tools and habitats. The findings have been published in the journal PLOS ONE. Ars Technica reports: "The technology was originally developed to create circular ecosystems in urban environments," said co-author Javier Fernandez. "But due to its efficiency, it is also the most efficient and scalable method to produce materials in a closed artificial ecosystem in the extremely scarce environment of a lifeless planet or satellite." [T]he authors of the current paper point out that most terrestrial manufacturing strategies that could fit the bill typically require specialized equipment and a hefty amount of energy. However, "Nature presents successful strategies of life adapting to harsh environments," the authors wrote. "In biological organisms, rigid structures are formed by integrating inorganic filler proceed from the environment at a low energy cost (e.g., calcium carbonate) and incorporated into an organic matrix (e.g., chitin) produced at a relatively high metabolic cost."

Fernandez and his colleagues maintain that chitin is likely to be part of any planned artificial ecosystem because it is so plentiful in nature. It's the primary component of fish scales and fungal cell walls, for example, as well as the exoskeletons of crustaceans and insects. In fact, insects have already been targeted as a key source of protein for a possible Martian base. And since the chitin component of insects has limited nutritional value for humans, extracting it to make building materials "does not hamper or compete with the food supply," the authors wrote. "Rather, it is a byproduct of it."

"But is that such a bad thing?" asks Popular Mechanics: Earlier this week, Elon Musk said there's a "good chance" settlers in the first Mars missions will die. And while that's easy to imagine, he and others are working hard to plan and minimize the risk of death by hardship or accident. In fact, the goal is to have people comfortably die on Mars after a long life of work and play that, we hope, looks at least a little like life on Earth...

[T]he trip itself will take a year based on current estimates, and applicants to settlement programs are told to expect this trip to be one way. It follows, statistically, that there's an almost certain "chance" these settlers will die on Mars, because their lives will continue there until they naturally end. Musk is referring to accidental death in tough conditions, but people are likely to stay on Mars for the duration either way.

When Mars One opened applications in 2013, people flocked to audition to die on Mars after a one-way trip and a lifetime of settlement. As chemist and applicant Taylor Rose Nations said in a 2014 podcast episode: "If I can go to Mars and be a human guinea pig, I'm willing to sort of donate my body to science...."
Musks exact words: "I want to emphasize that this is a very hard and dangerous, difficult thing, not for the faint of heart. Good chance you'll die, it's going to be tough going, but it will be pretty glorious if it works out."

"SpaceX took another step forward Thursday in developing its next-generation Starship rocket, conducting the second short flight test of a prototype in the past month," reports CNBC: Starship prototype Serial Number 6, or SN6, took off from the launchpad at SpaceX's facility in Boca Chica, Texas. It gradually rose to about 500 feet above the ground before it returned back to land, touching down on a concrete area near the launchpad. The flight test appeared to be identical to the test SpaceX conducted of prototype SN5 on Aug. 5...

The company is developing Starship with the goal of launching cargo and as many as a 100 people at a time on missions to the Moon and Mars.

SpaceX has been steadily building multiple prototypes at a time at the company's growing facility in Boca Chica. While SpaceX's fleet of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets are partially reusable, Musk's goal is to make Starship fully reusable — envisioning a rocket that is more akin to a commercial airplane, with short turnaround times between flights where the only major cost is fuel. After SpaceX in May launched a pair of NASA astronauts in its first crewed mission, Musk pivoted the company's attention, declaring that the top SpaceX priority is now development of Starship. Musk said in an email obtained by CNBC that Starship's program must accelerate "dramatically and immediately..."

He expects Starship's first flight tests to orbit won't come until 2021, saying that SpaceX is in "uncharted territory."
Commenting on the test launch of the bulky spacecraft, Elon Musk tweeted "Turns out you can make anything fly haha."

The latest prototype of Elon Musk's Starship prototype has only flown about 500 feet (150 meters) in the air, but the SpaceX CEO said Monday his rocket company may begin construction of a booster prototype to pair with Starship as soon as this week. CNET reports: Starship is SpaceX's platform for taking humans to the moon, Mars and beyond, but to reach those deep-space destinations, the plan is to pair Starship with a powerful first-stage booster called Super Heavy. So far we've only seen early prototypes of Starship make short test flights or "hops." Musk added that Super Heavy may have fewer engines than originally planned -- possibly 28 Raptor engines rather than 31. "That's still a lot of engines. We'll up cranking up the thrust on those engines." He mused that it might be possible for Raptor to eventually be able to lift 200 times its own weight.

As for when we might see a Starship prototype fly higher than just a hop, Musk said "probably next year" and aimed to reduce expectations a bit. "The first ones might not work," he said. "This is uncharted territory. Nobody's ever made a fully reusable orbital rocket ... and then having something twice the size of a Saturn V (the rocket that astronauts to the moon) that's also fully reusable... that's really something else, that's profound. That's the gateway to the galaxy or at least the solar system."

AmiMoJo shares a report from CNN: A type of bacteria that is highly resistant to radiation and other environmental hazards survived outside of the International Space Station for three years, according to a new study. The Japanese Tanpopo mission involved including pellets of dried Deinococcus bacteria within aluminum plates that were placed in exposure panels outside of the space station. Deinococcus bacteria is found on Earth and has been nicknamed Conan the Bacterium by scientists for its ability to survive cold, dehydration and acid. It's known as the most radiant-resistant life form in the "Guinness Book of World Records." It can resist 3,000 times the amount of radiation that would kill a human and was first isolated in cans of meat subjected to sterilizing radiation. This mission was designed to test the "panspermia" theory, which suggests that microbes can pass from one planet to another and actually distribute life. Tanpopo means dandelion in Japanese. The study has been published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology.

"SpaceX, the Elon Musk-led company that recently became the first business in history to send astronauts into Earth's orbit, is parlaying its successes into big money," reports CNN Business: The company recently finished a $1.9 billion funding round, one of the largest single fundraising pushes by any privately held company, according to public filings and data aggregated by venture capital data firm Crunchbase. That brings SpaceX's overall valuation to $46 billion... SpaceX now ranks third on a list of so-called "unicorns," which are privately held startups with valuations topping $1 billion, according to data from the venture capital analysis firm CB Insights. The only two startups valued higher than SpaceX are two Chinese tech giants — rideshare company Didi Chuxing and TikTok parent company ByteDance...

But even at SpaceX's eye-popping valuation, some Wall Street analysts and investors argue the company is still undervalued. Morgan Stanley analysts, for example, wrote in a report last month that SpaceX could be worth as much as $200 billion if its experimental satellite-internet project, Starlink, works as intended. Morgan Stanley said its low-end estimate for SpaceX's value is about $50 billion. And SpaceX's other ventures — including launching astronauts and cargo for NASA, building massive prototypes for a would-be Mars rocket, and launching satellites for the US military — all give investors plenty of reason to clamor for a chance to own a piece of SpaceX, according to Chad Anderson, a SpaceX investor and the CEO of investment firm Space Angels...

Anderson added that SpaceX still isn't turning a profit, but that's mostly because it's still spending large sums of money investing in new arms of its business, including the Starlink internet business and its Mars rocket prototypes, dubbed Starship. And that does leave some room for debate when it comes to the question of whether SpaceX's valuation is too high. "I think there would probably be an argument both ways," he said. "I think there's definitely a lot of SpaceX haters or naysayers."

The Texas Advanced Computer Center talks to Masahiro (Hiro) Ono, who leads the Robotic Surface Mobility Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory which led all the Mars rover missions (also one of the researchers who developed the software that allows the current rover to operate): The Perseverance rover, which launched this summer, computes using RAD 750s — radiation-hardened single board computers manufactured by BAE Systems Electronics. Future missions, however, would potentially use new high-performance, multi-core radiation hardened processors designed through the High Performance Spaceflight Computing project. (Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor is also being tested for missions.) These chips will provide about one hundred times the computational capacity of current flight processors using the same amount of power. "All of the autonomy that you see on our latest Mars rover is largely human-in-the-loop" — meaning it requires human interaction to operate, according to Chris Mattmann, the deputy chief technology and innovation officer at JPL. "Part of the reason for that is the limits of the processors that are running on them. One of the core missions for these new chips is to do deep learning and machine learning, like we do terrestrially, on board. What are the killer apps given that new computing environment...?"

Training machine learning models on the Maverick2 supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), as well as on Amazon Web Services and JPL clusters, Ono, Mattmann and their team have been developing two novel capabilities for future Mars rovers, which they call Drive-By Science and Energy-Optimal Autonomous Navigation.... "We'd like future rovers to have a human-like ability to see and understand terrain," Ono said. "For rovers, energy is very important. There's no paved highway on Mars. The drivability varies substantially based on the terrain — for instance beach versus bedrock. That is not currently considered. Coming up with a path with all of these constraints is complicated, but that's the level of computation that we can handle with the HPSC or Snapdragon chips. But to do so we're going to need to change the paradigm a little bit."

Ono explains that new paradigm as commanding by policy, a middle ground between the human-dictated: "Go from A to B and do C," and the purely autonomous: "Go do science."

Commanding by policy involves pre-planning for a range of scenarios, and then allowing the rover to determine what conditions it is encountering and what it should do. "We use a supercomputer on the ground, where we have infinite computational resources like those at TACC, to develop a plan where a policy is: if X, then do this; if y, then do that," Ono explained. "We'll basically make a huge to-do list and send gigabytes of data to the rover, compressing it in huge tables. Then we'll use the increased power of the rover to de-compress the policy and execute it." The pre-planned list is generated using machine learning-derived optimizations. The on-board chip can then use those plans to perform inference: taking the inputs from its environment and plugging them into the pre-trained model. The inference tasks are computationally much easier and can be computed on a chip like those that may accompany future rovers to Mars.

"The rover has the flexibility of changing the plan on board instead of just sticking to a sequence of pre-planned options," Ono said. "This is important in case something bad happens or it finds something interesting...." The efforts to develop a new AI-based paradigm for future autonomous missions can be applied not just to rovers but to any autonomous space mission, from orbiters to fly-bys to interstellar probes, Ono says.

Voyager 2 has been traveling through space for 43 years, and is now more than 11 billion miles from Earth. But every so often, something goes wrong. From a report: At the end of January, for instance, the robotic probe executed a routine somersault to beam scientific data back to Earth when an error triggered a shutdown of some of its functions. "Everybody was extremely worried about recovering the spacecraft," said Suzanne Dodd, who is the Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The mission's managers on our planet know what to do when such a fault occurs. Although it takes about a day and a half to talk to Voyager 2 at its current distance, they sent commands to restore its normal operations.

But starting on Monday for the next 11 months, they won't be able to get word to the spry spacecraft in case something again goes wrong (although the probe can still stream data back to Earth). Upgrades and repairs are prompting NASA to take offline a key piece of space age equipment used to beam messages all around the solar system. The downtime is necessary because of a flood of new missions to Mars scheduled to leave Earth this summer. But the temporary shutdown also highlights that the Deep Space Network, essential infrastructure relied upon by NASA and other space agencies, is aging and in need of expensive upgrades.

schwit1 writes: A new map shows what the red planet would look like if 71 percent of its surface area was covered with water -- around the same proportion as Earth. The results are spectacular: it shows two distinct landmasses forming, each of which would seem to form continents. While the left side shows a dramatic, mountainous terrain that includes Olympus Mons, the right side seems to offer more flatlands that include planes like Terra Sabaea.

The map was created by Aaditya Raj Bhattarai, a Nepal-based civil engineering student currently studying for his bachelor's degree at Tribhuwan University. "I am [a] big fan of Elon [Musk] and SpaceX and their plan to put man on Mars, and I hope I could help in his cause," Bhattarai says. "This is a part of my side project where I calculate the volume of water required to make life on Mars sustainable and the sources required for those water volumes from comets that will come nearby Mars in [the] next 100 years." [...] Bhattarai noted that in this map, Mars' sea level lies as low as 1,211 meters (0.75 miles) below the geoid level, a level that averages out the ocean surface by removing factors like tides and currents. The sea level also lies a staggering 20,076 meters (12.5 miles) below Olympus Mons, depicted in the image as the top-left-most black dot. Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the solar system and measures more than double the height of Mount Everest.

The dwarf planet Ceres -- long believed to be a barren space rock -- is an ocean world with reservoirs of sea water beneath its surface, the results of a major exploration mission showed on Monday. The Guardian reports: Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and has its own gravity, enabling the Nasa Dawn spacecraft to capture high-resolution images of its surface. Now a team of scientists from the United States and Europe have analyzed images relayed from the orbiter, captured about 35km (22 miles) from the asteroid. They focused on the 20-million-year-old Occator crater and determined that there is an "extensive reservoir" of brine beneath its surface.

Using infrared imaging, one team discovered the presence of the compound hydrohalite -- a material common in sea ice but which until now had never been observed off of Earth. Maria Cristina De Sanctis, from Rome's Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica said hydrohalite was a clear sign Ceres used to have sea water. "We can now say that Ceres is a sort of ocean world, as are some of Saturn's and Jupiter's moons," she told AFP. The team said the salt deposits looked like they had built up within the last 2 million years -- the blink of an eye in space time. This suggests that the brine may still be ascending from the planet's interior, something De Sanctis said could have profound implications in future studies.

Writing in an accompanying comment article, Julie Castillo-Rogez, from the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the discovery of hydrohalite was a "smoking gun" for ongoing water activity. "That material is unstable on Ceres' surface, and hence must have been emplaced very recently," she said. In a separate paper, US-based researchers analyzed images of the Occator crater and found that its mounds and hills may have formed when water ejected by the impact of a meteor froze on the surface.

NASA is heading back to the Red Planet. The agency launched a new rover, a car-size robotic explorer named Perseverance, to Mars on an ambitious mission to scour the planet for evidence of ancient life. From a report: The rover, which launched into orbit Thursday at 7:50 a.m. ET, is designed to study the geology and climate of Mars. NASA says the mission and its subsequent discoveries could lay the groundwork for eventual human exploration of the Red Planet. Perseverance is loaded with seven scientific instruments to explore the Martian landscape and assess whether the planet was ever able to sustain life. The six-wheel rover is also carrying a small helicopter, dubbed Ingenuity, to perform experimental test flights in Mars' thin atmosphere, which, if successful, would mark a milestone in powered flight.

"For the first time ever, we're going to fly a helicopter on another planet," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Monday in a news briefing, adding that future missions to other worlds could use similar helicopters as airborne scouts. The Perseverance rover launched aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Typically, crowds gather along beaches near Cape Canaveral to witness NASA launches, but because of the coronavirus pandemic, the agency encouraged space fans to stay home and participate virtually, instead -- particularly as new infections continue to surge in Florida and across the country. Matt Wallace, the mission's deputy project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said the rover has already lived up to its name, as engineers persevered through the pandemic to ready the spacecraft for its much-anticipated launch. "Nothing prepared us for what we had to deal with in the middle of March as the pandemic struck -- not just our team, but communities across the country and the world," Wallace said. "At that point in the mission, we were in our final assembly activities."

Airbus-France will build the huge satellite that brings the first Martian rock samples back to Earth. The BBC reports: This material will be drilled on the Red Planet by the US space agency's next rover, Perseverance, before being blasted into orbit by a rocket. It'll be the Airbus satellite's job to grab the packaged samples and then ship them home. The joint American-European project is expected to cost billions and take just over a decade to implement. But scientists say it's probably the best way to confirm whether life has ever existed on the Red Planet. Any evidence is likely to be controversial and will need the powerful analytical tools only found in Earth laboratories to convince the doubters, the researchers argue.

The Airbus satellite will be a Goliath among spacecraft. The Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) will weigh 6.5 tonnes at launch in 2026 and use a mix of chemical and electric propulsion to get to Mars, orbit the planet and then return to Earth with its rock consignment. Thales Alenia Space of Italy will be a lead subcontractor working on this aspect of the design. The inclusion of a powerful ion engine will require a lot power, hence the use of immense solar arrays. These panels will give the satellite a "wingspan" of 39m, more than 120ft. But the really remarkable facet of the satellite's mission is the game of catch it will have to play high above Mars. Nasa will put a rocket on the planet later this decade to fire the rocks collected by Perseverance into orbit. The Airbus spacecraft will have to manoeuvre itself into a position to capture these samples that will be packaged inside a football-sized container. After ingesting this container, the satellite must then prepare it for return to Earth. "This is not just twice as difficult as any typical Mars mission; it's twice squared - when you think about the complexity involved," said Dr David Parker, the director of human and robotic exploration at the European Space Agency (Esa). "And this satellite that Airbus will build -- I like to call it 'the first interplanetary cargo ship,' because that's what it will be doing. It's designed to carry cargo between Mars and Earth," he told BBC News.

A tiny piece of Martian basalt the size of a 10p coin will be launched on board a U.S. robot probe on Thursday and propelled towards the red planet on a seven-month journey to its home world. The Guardian reports: This extraordinary odyssey, the interplanetary equivalent of sending coals to Newcastle, will form a key part of Nasa's forthcoming Mars 2020 expedition. Space engineers say the rock -- which has been donated by the Natural History Museum in London -- will be used to calibrate detectors on board the robot rover Perseverance after it lands and begins its search for signs of past life on the planet. "When you turn on instruments and begin to tune them up before using them for research, you calibrate them on materials that are going to be like the unknown substances you are about to study. So what better for studying rocks on Mars than a lump that originated there?" said Professor Caroline Smith, the Natural History Museum's principal curator of meteorites.

Scientists were confident that the rock they were returning to Mars originated on the planet, added Smith, who is also a member of the Mars 2020 science team. "Tiny bubbles of gas trapped inside that meteorite have exactly the same composition as the atmosphere of Mars, so we know our rock came from there." It is thought that the Martian meteorite was created when an asteroid or comet plunged into the planet about 600,000 to 700,000 years ago, spraying debris into space. One of those pieces of rubble swept across the solar system and eventually crashed on to Earth. That meteorite -- now known as SAU 008 -- was discovered in Oman in 1999 and has been in the care of the Natural History Museum since then.

Among the instruments fitted to the Perseverance rover is a high-precision laser called Sherloc, which will be used to decipher the chemical composition of rocks and determine if they might contain organic materials that indicate life once existed -- or still exists -- on Mars. The inclusion of a piece of SAU 008 is intended to ensure this is done with maximum accuracy. Once Perseverance has selected the most promising rocks it can find, it will dump them in caches on the Martian surface. These will then be retrieved by subsequent robot missions and blasted into space towards Earth for analysis.