SpaceX envisions Starship as a 387-foot-tall (118 meters) spacecraft/booster that can carry up to 100 people to Mars. Pig Hogger (Slashdot reader #10,379) tipped us off to this progress report from Space.com: SpaceX's new Starship prototype appeared to burst during a pressure test late Friday (Feb. 28), rupturing under the glare of flood lights and mist at the company's south Texas facility. The Starship SN1 prototype, which SpaceX moved to a launchpad near its Boca Chica, Texas, assembly site earlier this week, blew apart during a liquid nitrogen pressure test according to a video captured by SPadre.com. A separate video posted by NASASpaceflight.com member BocaChicaGal clearly shows the Starship SN1's midsection buckle during the test, then shoot upward before crashing back to the ground...

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has hinted that many of these prototypes will be needed to perfect the Starship vehicle... Musk unveiled the first full-size Starship prototype, called the Starship Mk1, in September 2019. That vehicle blew its top during cryogenic testing.

A reader shares a report from Space.com: Ries Crater, or Nordlinger Ries, is located in western Bavaria, Germany, and formed roughly 15 million years ago, when a meteorite struck. This site has incredibly well-preserved rocks and minerals that bear similarities to the Martian surface. Therefore, samples from this impact site on Earth may shed light on Mars' past, according to a new study. Today, Mars is too cold to host liquid water on its surface, which is a requirement for life as we know it on Earth. However, 4 billion years ago, Mars may have been warm enough for surface oceans and, possibly, life, according to the study.

The researchers studied rock samples from Ries Crater, which was once a body of water. Their findings show that the samples have a high pH based on the ratio of nitrogen isotopes, as well as a high alkalinity, which indicates an imbalanced pH level, according to the study. NASA's Mars 2020 rover is planned to land in a similar, well-preserved ancient crater that is believed to have also contained liquid water in its past. The findings suggest that the Martian crater will have a chemical composition comparable to that of Ries Crater. Therefore, studying the alkalinity, pH and nitrogen content of samples from the Ries Crater could help the researchers better understand the properties of ancient water on Mars and, in turn, determine the amount of carbon dioxide that was in the planet's atmosphere billions of years ago. Although complex life is unlikely, simpler microorganisms could have survived if water on Mars had a neutral pH level and was highly alkaline, the researchers said in the statement. These conditions would indicate that the atmosphere had enough carbon dioxide to warm the planet and make liquid water possible, the scientists added.

The first results from NASA's quake-hunting InSight Mars lander just came out, and they reveal that Mars is a seismically active planet. Space.com reports: Martian seismicity falls between that of the moon and that of Earth, [says InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory]. "In fact, it's probably close to the kind of seismic activity you would expect to find away from the [tectonic] plate boundaries on Earth and away from highly deformed areas," he said. InSight's observations will help scientists better understand how rocky planets such as Mars, Earth and Venus form and evolve, mission team members have said. The mission's initial science returns, which were published today (Feb. 21) in six papers in the journals Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications, show that InSight is on track to meet that long-term goal, Banerdt said.

The new studies cover the first 10 months of InSight's tenure on Mars, during which the lander detected 174 seismic events. These quakes came in two flavors. One hundred and fifty of them were shallow, small-magnitude tremors whose vibrations propagated through the Martian crust. The other 24 were a bit stronger and deeper, with origins at various locales in the mantle, InSight team members said. (But even those bigger quakes weren't that powerful; they landed in the magnitude 3 to 4 range. Here on Earth, quakes generally must be at least magnitude 5.5 to damage buildings.) That was the tremor tally through September 2019. InSight has been busy since then as well; its total quake count now stands at about 450, Banerdt said. And all of this shaking does indeed originate from Mars itself, he added; as far as the team can tell, none of the vibrations were caused by meteorites hitting the Red Planet. So, there's a lot going on beneath the planet's surface. What's interesting to note is that unlike Earth, where most quakes are caused by tectonic plates sliding around, Mars' quakes are caused by the long-term cooling of the planet since its formation 4.5 billion years ago. "As the planet cools, it contracts, and then the brittle outer layers then have to fracture in order to sort of maintain themselves on the surface," Banerdt said. "That's kind of the long-term source of stresses."

"A wealth of information can be gleaned from InSight's quake measurements," reports Space.com. "For example, analyses of how the seismic waves move through the Martian crust suggest there are small amounts of water mixed in with the rock, mission team members said." They can't say one way or the other whether there are large underground reservoirs of water at this point, but the research is convincing.

The new papers also mention a variety of other discoveries as well. "For example, InSight is the first mission ever to tote a magnetometer to the Martian surface, and that instrument detected a local magnetic field about 10 times stronger than would be expected based on orbital measurements," the report says. "InSight is also taking a wealth of weather data, measuring pressure many times per second and temperature once every few seconds. This information helps the mission team better understand environmental noise that could complicate interpretations of the seismic observations, but it also has considerable stand-alone value."

"With a renewed interest in sending humans back to the Moon and then eventually to Mars, NASA needs all the able-bodied space explorers it can get..." writes BGR.

"The requirements are, well, pretty strict, but what else would you expect from a group that sends humans into space?"

Quoting NASA.gov: Since the 1960s, NASA has selected 350 people to train as astronaut candidates for its increasingly challenging missions to explore space. With 48 astronauts in the active astronaut corps, more will be needed to crew spacecraft bound for multiple destinations and propel exploration forward as part of Artemis missions and beyond...

The basic requirements to apply include United States citizenship and a master's degree in a STEM field, including engineering, biological science, physical science, computer science, or mathematics, from an accredited institution... Candidates also must have at least two years of related, progressively responsible professional experience, or at least 1,000 hours of pilot-in-command time in jet aircraft. Astronaut candidates must pass the NASA long-duration spaceflight physical... As part of the application process, applicants will, for the first time, be required to take an online assessment that will require up to two hours to complete...

After completing training, the new astronauts could launch on American rockets and spacecraft developed for NASA's Commercial Crew Program to live and work aboard the International Space Station, 250 miles above Earth, where they will take part in experiments that benefit life at home and prepare us for more distant exploration. They may also launch on NASA's powerful new Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, docking the spacecraft at the Gateway in lunar orbit before taking a new human landing system to the Moon's surface. After returning humans to the Moon in 2024, NASA plans to establish sustainable lunar exploration by 2028. Gaining new experiences on and around the Moon will prepare NASA to send the first humans to Mars in the mid-2030s.

NASA expects to select the new class of astronaut candidates in mid-2021 to begin training as the next class of Artemis Generation astronauts.
"We're celebrating our 20th year of continuous presence aboard the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit this year..." NASA said in its statement.

Applications will be accepted from March 2nd through March 31st.

Space.com has footage of Northrop Grumman's successful launch of a spacecraft that's bringing 7,500 pounds of supplies (as well as scientific equipment for experiments) to the astronauts on the International Space Station: Those experiments include studies into bone loss from prolonged exposure to weightlessness, bacteria-targeting viruses that could lead to new medications, as well as some cowpeas to be grown as part of a space food experiment. Heidi Parris, NASA's assistant program scientist for the International Space Station program's science office, said those experiments aim to use the weightless environment on the station to learn more about how to live off Earth, including on the moon and Mars.

One novel experiment is Mochii, a small scanning electron microscope about the size of a breadbox that can help astronauts quickly identify the composition of small particles, such as debris or contamination in spacesuits. "Currently the ISS has a blind spot, in that we can't perform this kind of analysis on orbit," James Martinez, a materials scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center participating in the experiment... Another key experiment on Cygnus is the Spacecraft Fire Experiment IV, or Saffire-IV. As its name suggests, Saffire-IV is the fourth experiment to study how fire behaves in space
Northrop Grumman's Cygnus is one of two private spacecraft (SpaceX's Dragon capsules are the other) that currently haul cargo to the International Space Station for NASA. NG-13 is the 13th Cygnus mission to reach space for NASA by Northrop Grumman as part of the agency's Commercial Resupply Services...

Northrop Grumman's Cygnus NG-13 spacecraft will arrive at the International Space Station and be captured by a robotic arm on Tuesday, Feb. 18, at 4 a.m. EST (0900 GMT). NASA's live webcast of the rendezvous will begin at 2:30 a.m. EST (0730 GMT) and run through spacecraft capture.
The spacecraft will also be bringing the astronauts candy, fresh fruit, and three different kinds of cheese wedge -- cheddar, Parmesan and Fontina.

Last June NASA announced plans to host visitors on the International Space Station for just $35,000 a day.

"And now we know where they'll be sleeping," reports the Motley Fool: Earlier this week, NASA announced that it has selected Axiom Space to build "at least one habitable commercial module to be attached to the International Space Station...." In this particular demonstration project, Axiom will deliver to the ISS an "element" which "will attach to the space station's Node 2 forward port," giving access to the rest of the space station, and also a place for weary private astronauts to lay their heads at night...

"Developing commercial destinations in low-Earth orbit" is a priority for NASA, explains the agency -- whether those destinations are attached to the ISS or not... The "habitable commercial module" that Axiom is building will facilitate onboarding private businesses to do work on the ISS, creating potential new revenue streams to subsidize NASA's more adventurous endeavors farther out from Low Earth Orbit. With NASA's budget today stuck below where it was in 1972 -- the year of America's last crewed mission to the moon -- the agency's going to need significant new funding to perform planned missions to Mars and beyond in future years. If Congress won't pony up additional cash, therefore, the agency may hope to raise cash from private industry...

NASA says it "also plans to issue a final opportunity to partner with the agency in the development of a free-flying, independent commercial destination" at some point in the future. This latter opportunity should be of particular interest to both Axiom and Bigelow -- which, like Axiom, has expressed interest in building its own space stations independent of the ISS.
"If Axiom succeeds in building and operating a commercial space station," writes Axios, "it will mark a turning point for how space is used and who has access to it..."

They also report that Axiom expects to procure flights to the ISS from both SpaceX and Boeing. And when the International Space Station reaches its end-of-life, "Axiom plans to remove its modules and become a free-standing station that can be accessed by the company's customers."

Thelasko shares a report from Bloomberg: Elon Musk's SpaceX plans to spin out and pursue a public offering of its budding space-internet business Starlink, giving investors a chance to buy into one of the most promising operations within the closely held company. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. has already launched more than 240 satellites to build out Starlink, which will start delivering internet services to customers from space this summer, President Gwynne Shotwell said Thursday at a private investor event hosted by JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Miami. "Right now, we are a private company, but Starlink is the right kind of business that we can go ahead and take public," said Shotwell, SpaceX's chief operating officer. "That particular piece is an element of the business that we are likely to spin out and go public."

Investors have to this point had limited ways to own a piece of SpaceX, which has become one of the most richly valued venture-backed companies in the U.S. by dominating the commercial rocket industry. It flies satellites into orbit for customers including the U.S. military, carries cargo to the International Space Station and aims to start flying NASA astronauts and high-paying tourists soon. But the rocket-launch business remains competitive and tough. Starlink and its ability to provide high-speed internet across the globe has helped private investors in SpaceX justify a roughly $33 billion valuation. Musk has long maintained that the parent is unlikely to go public until it is regularly ferrying people to Mars.

CNET shares "the latest, strangest news from the world of Elon Musk...electronic dance music?" It's the second song he's released on Emo G Records' Soundcloud page following 2019's RIP Harambe.

On Thursday, Musk posted a series of tweets suggesting he'd written a song he was calling "Don't doubt yer vibe" and was releasing it on Emo G Records. There was a hint that we should expect some EDM coming our way. Never one to shy away from a meme that will undoubtedly be plastered across the internet, it seems Musk has followed through. "Don't Doubt ur Vibe" was posted to his Twitter account at 10:20 p.m. PT on Jan. 30.

Musk later tweeted he both wrote the lyrics and performed the vocals. Those lyrics are:

"Don't doubt your vibe,
because it's true.
Don't doubt your vibe,
because it's you...."

The album art also ties into Musk's passions -- it depicts a Cybertruck soaring over Mars, the planet he wants to put a million people on by 2050.
According to a retweet on his Twitter feed, Musk has also been telling his life story in the "Third Row Tesla" podcast. Part 1, which aired last week, was two hours and 16 minutes long, and Part 2 -- aired Thursday -- was another 76 minutes.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: NASA will launch a new rover to Mars this July — and 28,000 American schoolchildren wrote essays with suggestions for what NASA should name it.

NASA has now selected the top nine finalists, which they'll let the public vote on through Monday on a special web page where they're also displaying the schoolchildren's essays. "Scientists are tenacious," wrote one student who suggested the name Tenacity. "It is what keeps them thinking and experimenting... When scientists make mistakes they see what they did wrong and then try again.

"If they didn't have tenacity, Mars rovers wouldn't be a thing."
The new rover will also be carrying the names of 10,932,295 earthlings, etched onto a microchip.

Bloomberg points out that because Mars and Earth are unusually close in July and August -- a mere 39 million miles -- another rover will also be launched by the international ExoMars programme (led by the European Space Agency and the Russian Roscosmos State Corporation), while the United Arab Emirates will also try sending an orbiter to Mars, and China will deploy "an orbiter to circle the planet and a rover to land on it."

The director of astrobiology at Columbia University saw something this week that he just had to respond to: Elon Musk "talking about sending 1 million people to Mars by 2050, using no less than three Starship launches per day (with a stash of 1,000 of these massive spacecraft on call)."

A reader shared this article from Scientific American: The martian radiation environment is a problem for human explorers that cannot be overstated... For reasons unclear to me, this tends to get pushed aside compared to other questions to do with Mars's atmosphere (akin to sitting 30km [18.6 miles] above Earth with no oxygen), temperatures, natural resources (water), nasty surface chemistry (perchlorates), and lower surface gravitational acceleration (1/3rd that on Earth). But we actually have rather good data on the radiation situation on Mars (and in transit to Mars) from the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) that has been riding along with the Curiosity rover since its launch from Earth.

The bottom line is that the extremely thin atmosphere on Mars, and the absence of a strong global magnetic field, result in a complex and potent particle radiation environment. There are lower energy solar wind particles (like protons and helium nuclei) and much higher energy cosmic ray particles crashing into Mars all the time. The cosmic rays, for example, also generate substantial secondary radiation -- crunching into martian regolith to a depth of several meters before hitting an atomic nucleus in the soil and producing gamma-rays and neutron radation... [I]f we consider just the dose on Mars, the rate of exposure averaged over one Earth year is just over 20 times that of the maximum allowed for a Department of Energy radiation worker in the US (based off of annual exposure)....

[Y]ou'd need to put a few meters of regolith above you, or live in some deep caves and lava tubes to dodge the worst of the radiation. And then there are risks not to do with cancer that we're only just beginning to learn about. Specifically, there is evidence that neurological function is particularly sensitive to radiation exposure, and there is the question of our essential microbiome and how it copes with long-term, persistent radiation damage. Finally, as Hassler et al. discuss, the "flavor" (for want of a better word) of the radiation environment on Mars is simply unlike that on Earth, not just measured by extremes but by its make up, comprising different components than on Earth's surface.

To put all of this another way: in the worst case scenario (which may or may not be a realistic extrapolation) there's a chance you'd end up dead or stupid on Mars. Or both.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity "lost its orientation...partway through its last set of activities," reported a planetary geologist on the rover's team Monday.

Curiosity had lost track of its position in space and the position of its various parts like its robotic arm. "Thus, Curiosity stopped moving, freezing in place until its knowledge of its orientation can be recovered. Curiosity kept sending us information, so we know what happened and can develop a recovery plan...."

Space.com now shares the rest of the story:
"We learned this morning that plan was successful and Curiosity was ready for science once more!" mission team member Scott Guzewich, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, wrote in another update on Tuesday. This latest recovery shouldn't come as a shock; Curiosity has overcome numerous setbacks since landing inside Mars' 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater in August 2012. The rover has had issues with its memory and its wheels, for example, but has always bounced back...

Curiosity is now climbing the foothills of Mount Sharp, the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 km) mountain that rises from Gale Crater's center. The rover is reading the rocks for clues about Mars' long-ago climate transition, which turned the Red Planet from a relatively warm and wet place to the cold desert world it is today.
CNET notes that Curiosity is currently NASA's only working rover on Mars.

UPDATE (1/25/2018): NASA has successfully unfrozen Curiosity, which will now live to rove another day.

But here's the original report shared by a reader detailing what the concerns were: NASA reports that Curiosity has suffered a system failure that left the robot unaware of its position and attitude on the red planet. Until it recovers, Curiosity is frozen in place. Mars is far enough away that we can't directly control Curiosity in real-time -- the rover gets batches of commands and then carries them out. That means it needs to have precise awareness of the state of all its joints, as well as environmental details like the location of nearby obstacles and the slope of the ground. This vital information ensures the rover doesn't bump anything with its arm or clip large rocks as it rolls along.

Curiosity stores all this attitude data in memory, but something went wrong during operations several days ago. As the rover was carrying out its orders, it suddenly lost track of its orientation. The attitude data didn't add up, so Curiosity froze in place to avoid damaging itself. While the rover is physically stuck in place, it's still in communication with the team here on Earth. Since everything else is working on the rover, NASA was able to develop a set of instructions that should get the rover moving again. When transmitted, the data will inform Curiosity of its attitude and confirm its current state. This should allow the rover to recover and keep performing its safety checks. However, NASA also hopes to gather data on what caused the issue in the first place. The hope is they can avoid another freeze-up in the future.

"NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered its first Earth-size planet in its star's habitable zone, the range of distances where conditions may be just right to allow the presence of liquid water on the surface," reports NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center: Scientists confirmed the find, called TOI 700 d, using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and have modeled the planet's potential environments to help inform future observations.

TOI 700 is a small, cool M dwarf star located just over 100 light-years away in the southern constellation Dorado. It's roughly 40 of the Sun's mass and size and about half its surface temperature. The star appears in 11 of the 13 sectors TESS observed during the mission's first year, and scientists caught multiple transits by its three planets. The innermost planet, called TOI 700 b, is almost exactly Earth-size, is probably rocky and completes an orbit every 10 days. The middle planet, TOI 700 c, is 2.6 times larger than Earth -- between the sizes of Earth and Neptune -- orbits every 16 days and is likely a gas-dominated world. TOI 700 d, the outermost known planet in the system and the only one in the habitable zone, measures 20 larger than Earth, orbits every 37 days and receives from its star 86% of the energy that the Sun provides to Earth.

All of the planets are thought to be tidally locked to their star, which means they rotate once per orbit so that one side is constantly bathed in daylight... While the exact conditions on TOI 700 d are unknown, scientists used current information, like the planet's size and the type of star it orbits, and modeled 20 potential environments for TOI 700 d to gauge if any version would result in surface temperatures and pressures suitable for habitability.

One simulation included an ocean-covered TOI 700 d with a dense, carbon-dioxide-dominated atmosphere similar to what scientists suspect surrounded Mars when it was young. The model atmosphere contains a deep layer of clouds on the star-facing side. Another model depicts TOI 700 d as a cloudless, all-land version of modern Earth, where winds flow away from the night side of the planet and converge on the point directly facing the star.

"The gigabytes of data we're using -- although invisible -- come at a significant cost to the environment," argues the CBC's senior technology reporter. "Some experts say it rivals that of the airline industry." And as more smart devices rely on data to operate (think internet-connected refrigerators or self-driving cars), their electricity demands are set to skyrocket. "We are using an immense amount of energy to drive this data revolution," said Jane Kearns, an environment and technology expert at MaRS Discovery District, an innovation hub in Toronto. "It has real implications for our climate." [Kearns is also the co-founder of the CanadaCleantech Alliance....]

It's not the gadgets themselves that are drawing so much power, it's the far-flung servers that act as their electronic brains... The data centres, often bigger than a football field, house endless stacks of servers handling many terabytes (thousands of gigabytes) of digital traffic. Just as laptops tend to warm during heavy usage, servers must be cooled to avoid overheating. And cooling so many machines requires plenty of power. Anders Andrae, a researcher at Huawei Technologies Sweden whose estimates are often cited, told CBC News in an email he expects the world's data centres alone will devour up to 651 terawatt-hours of electricity in the next year. That's nearly as much electricity as Canada's entire energy sector produces. And it's just the beginning.

Andrae's calculations, published in the International Journal of Green Technology, suggest data centres could more than double their power demands over the next decade. He projects computing will gobble up 11 per cent of global energy by 2030 and cloud-based services will represent a sizeable proportion of that. "This will become completely unsustainable by 2040," Andrae wrote...

The information and communications technology sector as a whole is thought to be responsible for two to three per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions -- roughly on par with the often-criticized airline sector.
The article also notes that by 2018 Amazon had already switched to renewable energy for at least 50% of its cloud computing servers. And it also adds that tech companies "in Canada and abroad...are coming up with innovative solutions to curb the growing problem."

Solutions being investigated include recovering the low-level heat generated by servers and increasing the speed and capacity of data transfers (including one approach involving a quantum dot multi-wavelength laser).

The space agencies of the US, Europe, Russia, and China are all launching rovers to Mars this year. From a report: The 2010s saw Mars welcome NASA's Curiosity rover, which landed on the red planet in 2012, and bid farewell to the Opportunity rover, which was declared dead in February after 14 years on the Martian surface. Curiosity is now the only working rover on the planet, signaling the end of a decadal era in the exploration of Mars. But even as this older generation of Mars-cars winds down, a flurry of new rover missions is gearing up to redefine Martian road trips for a new decade. Three different rovers are scheduled to launch to Mars during the summer of 2020: NASA's Mars 2020 rover, Europe and Russia's Rosalind Franklin, and China's Huoxing-1. If this trio manages to successfully land on Mars in 2021, it would mark the first time that the planet has ever hosted three operational rovers (or even four, assuming that Curiosity is still rolling). The presence of two rovers from agencies other than NASA would also diversify Martian surface operations after decades of American dominance on the planet.

"The Mars 2020 rover, which sets off for the Red Planet next year, will not only search for traces of ancient life, but pave the way for future human missions, NASA scientists said Friday as they unveiled the vehicle."

An anonymous reader quotes Agence France-Presse: The rover has been constructed in a large, sterile room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, near Los Angeles, where its driving equipment was given its first successful test last week. Shown to invited journalists on Friday, it is scheduled to leave Earth in July 2020 from Florida's Cape Canaveral, becoming the fifth U.S. rover to land on Mars seven months later in February [of 2021].

"It's designed to seek the signs of life, so we're carrying a number of different instruments that will help us understand the geological and chemical context on the surface of Mars," deputy mission leader Matt Wallace told AFP. Among the devices on board the rover are 23 cameras, two "ears" that will allow it to listen to Martian winds, and lasers used for chemical analysis... Fuelled by a miniature nuclear reactor, Mars 2020 has seven-foot-long (two metre) articulated arms and a drill to crack open rock samples in locations scientists identify as potentially suitable for life. "What we're looking for is ancient microbial life -- we're talking about billions of years ago on Mars, when the planet was much more Earth-like," said Wallace...

The Mars 2020 mission also carries hopes for an even more ambitious target -- a human mission to Mars. "I think of it, really, as the first human precursor mission to Mars," said Wallace. Equipment on board "will allow us to make oxygen" that could one day be used both for humans to breathe, and to fuel the departure from Mars "for the return trip."
NASA has uploaded footage of the rover's first test drive.

schwit1 shares a report from Space.com: China's biggest rocket, the Long March 5, returned to flight for the first time since a 2017 failure Friday (Dec. 27) in a dazzling nighttime launch for the Chinese space program. The Long March 5 Y3 rocket lifted off at 8:45 p.m. Beijing Time carrying the experimental Shijian 20 communications satellite into a geosynchronous orbit. The satellite, which weighs a reported 8 metric tons, is China's heaviest and most advanced satellite to date, according to state media reports. The successful launch is the first Long March 5 since a first-stage booster failure in 2017 destroyed the Shijian 18 satellite. The failure prompted redesigns in the rocket's first-stage engines, which led to a two-year gap between missions. The first Long March 5 rocket lifted off in 2016.

The Long March 5 is an essential booster for China's space ambitions. The heavy-lift booster will be the one to launch China's space station modules into orbit, as well as a Mars lander in 2020 and the Chang'e 5 moon sample-return mission. China is also expected to use a version of the Long March 5, called the Long March 5B, to launch a new crewed spacecraft -- the successor to its current Shenzhou crew capsule.

Rumbling quakes on the red planet have been traced back to Cerberus Fossae, suggesting this geologically young region is still alive and cracking. From a report: Millions of miles away, a robot geologist stands alone on the dusty surface of Mars, listening for faint seismic echoes in the ground below. Its finger on the red planet's pulse is sensitive enough to pick up the whoosh of wind, the drone of dust devils, the creak of tectonic cracks, and many other rumbles ricocheting though the planet's insides. While most of these signals have been indistinct murmurs, two have stood out loud and clear, allowing scientists to trace them back to their source: the first active fault zone yet found on the red planet. Known as marsquakes, the events clocked in between magnitude 3 and 4, according to data from NASA's InSight lander presented at a recent American Geophysical Union conference. While the two quakes are small by Earth standards, they're among the largest yet detected on Mars. Scientists were able to trace both quakes to an area known as Cerberus Fossae, a series of deep gashes that lingers some 994 miles to the east of InSight's landing zone.

The results from this work are pending publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and scientists associated with the InSight team declined to comment until after the study's release. But the announcement of this active fault zone millions of miles away already has earthbound scientists abuzz. "All the expectations we have and all the models we have to try to explain how active Mars might be can now be benchmarked against this measurement," says Paul Byrne, a planetary geologist at North Carolina State University who is not part of the InSight team. "Mars has just become a bit more alive to us with these data."

The Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission intended to achieve all this will require three launches from Earth over the course of a decade, and five separate machines. From a report: The organisations involved -- America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, and the European Space Agency, ESA -- are each responsible for specific craft in the chain of what David Parker, ESA's head of human and robotic exploration, calls "the most ambitious robotic pass-the-parcel you can think of." On December 11th, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, space scientists and astrobiologists outlined the details of the MSR. The project will begin with the launch, next July, of NASA's Mars 2020 mission. This will carry to the planet a successor to Curiosity, a rover that has been crawling productively over the Martian surface since 2012. The Mars 2020 rover, yet to be named, will land in a 45km-wide crater called Jezero, in February 2021. Its main purpose is to search for signs of ancient microbial life. Around 3.5bn years ago, Jezero contained a lake. Mars 2020 will drill for samples from the clay and carbonate minerals now exposed on the surface of what used to be a river delta flowing into this lake.

When the rover finds something that its masters want to bring back to Earth, it will hermetically seal a few tens of grams of the material in question into a 6cm-long titanium test tube, and then drop the tube on the ground. It can deal in this way with around 30 samples as it travels to different parts of the crater. Once it has dropped a tube it will broadcast that tube's location to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite already on station that is armed with a high-magnification camera. This camera will take photographs of the tube and its surroundings, so that the tube can be found at a later date. The tubes are intended to be able to survive for more than 50 years on the surface of Mars, at temperatures less than 20C. The next phase of the project will begin in 2028, when a "fetch rover" designed and built by ESA will be sent to Mars to find and collect the tubes.

Last weekend saw the death of Rene Auberjonois at age 79, writes Variety.

schwit1 quotes their report: Auberjonois was a prolific television actor, appearing as Paul Lewiston in 71 episodes of 'Boston Legal' and as Clayton Runnymede Endicott III in ABC's long-running sitcom 'Benson.' He played Odo in 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,' and carried that role into video games, voicing the same role in 'Harbinger' and 'The Fallen.' He appeared in the movie 'MASH' as Father Mulcahy in the first of several collaborations with Robert Altman. Other film credits include Roy Balgey in 1976's 'King Kong' and Reverend Oliver in 'The Patriot,' as well as parts in 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller,' 'Eyes of Laura Mars' and 'Walker.'
He also played the French chef in Disney's The Little Mermaid -- a role which Rene reenacted live at the end of this video where he discussed his friendship with William Shatner.

And this week ET shared footage of Rene thoughtfully reflecting after filming the last episode of Deep Space Nine.