In new research published on Thursday in the journal Joule, Dr. Raman, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles, demonstrated a way to harness a dark night sky to power a light bulb. The New York Times reports: His prototype device employs radiative cooling, the phenomenon that makes buildings and parks feel cooler than the surrounding air after sunset. As Dr. Raman's device releases heat, it does so unevenly, the top side cooling more than the bottom. It then converts the difference in heat into electricity. In the paper, Dr. Raman described how the device, when connected to a voltage converter, was able to power a white LED. The prototype built by Dr. Raman resembles a hockey puck set inside a chafing dish. The puck is a polystyrene disk coated in black paint and covered with a wind shield. At its heart is an off-the shelf gadget called a thermoelectric generator, which uses the difference in temperature between opposite sides of the device to generate a current. A similar device powers NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars; its thermoelectric generator derives heat from plutonium radiation. Usually, the temperature difference in these generators is stark, and they are carefully engineered to separate hot and cold. Dr. Raman's device instead uses the atmosphere's ambient temperature as the heat source. The shift from warm to cool is very slight, meaning the device can't produce much power.

His puck-in-a-dish is elevated on aluminum legs, enabling air to flow around it. As the dark puck loses warmth to the night sky, the side facing the stars grows colder than the side facing the air-warmed tabletop. This slight difference in temperature generates a flow of electricity. When paired with a voltage converter, the prototype produced 25 milliwatts of power per square meter. That is about three orders of magnitude lower than what a typical solar panel produces, and well short of even the roughly 4-watt maximum efficiency for such devices. Still, several experts said the prototype was an important contribution to a new and relatively unusual space in the renewable energy sector.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Alibaba founder Jack Ma discussed Mars and artificial intelligence in their first joint appearance on Thursday. From a report: The duo chatted for over half an hour about their vision of how technology, especially artificial intelligence, will shape the future. "I'm always amazed by your vision of technology, I'm not a tech guy," Ma said in his first remarks to Musk, before going on to talk about how artificial intelligence was not a threat. Ma described himself as "optimistic" about AI's impact on humanity, adding that people who worry too much about it have what he calls "college smartness." "People like us that are street smart, we're not scared of that." They also went on to talk about space travel, with Ma complimenting Musk on his attempts to journey into Mars via SpaceX while Musk noted China's advancements in that area, as well as how "inadequate" humans were against computers. Ma, known for arguing in favor of a 12-hour workday, also said he sees a future in which people will have to work only 12 hours a week. He said technological advancements would enable people to live longer and work far fewer hours. He added: "Every technology revolution, people start to worry. In the last 200 years, we have worried [that] new technology is going to take away all the jobs," he said. Ma has previously courted controversy with his endorsement of the "996" work practices prevalent in China's tech industry, under which employees are expected to work 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.

An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider: A small community of people at the southern tip of Texas just received what some of its residents are calling a "shocking" and "concerning" warning about SpaceX's upcoming launch attempt of a Mars rocket ship prototype. Residents told Business Insider a county sheriff went door-to-door on Saturday night to hand-deliver printed notices to the community, where approximately 20 people own homes...

The notice says "action required" and warns of "potential risk to health and safety" during SpaceX's upcoming launch attempt of Starhopper: a stubby yet roughly 60-foot-tall (18-meter-tall) steel prototype with a single, truck-size Raptor rocket engine... The notice issued to residents says police will sound their sirens to warn residents about 10 minutes before liftoff. According to the notice, a roughly 15-minute flight window will open at 5 p.m. ET (4 p.m. CT) on Monday night. The notice then says:

"There is a risk that a malfunction of the SpaceX vehicle during flight will create an overpressure event that can break windows. Therefore, in order to protect Public Health and Safety, it is recommended that you consider temporarily vacating yourself, other occupants, and pets, from the area during the Space Flight Activities. At a minimum, you must exit your home or structure and be outside of any building on your property when you hear the police sirens which will be activated at the time of the Space Flight Activity to avoid or minimize the risk of injury."

An "overpressure event" is a blastwave that's often caused by a rapid explosion...

The public health and safety notice comes about a month after SpaceX's most recent launch of Starhopper. That flight inadvertently ignited a grass fire that burned through more than 100 acres of coastal wildlife refuge, thousands of acres of which surround the launch site and hamlet. SpaceX has responded to the incident by putting together a better fire-prevention and response plan, according to Bryan Winton, manager of the Lower Rio Grande Valley national wildlife refuge at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. SpaceX is now coordinating more closely with local agencies on its launch plans and fire safety, has installed five new remote-control water cannons on its launchpad to douse flames (there used to be only one), is helping perform controlled burns, and more, Winton told Business Insider on Thursday.

New submitter RhettLivingston writes: Real plans for the move of Starship Mk 2 from its current construction site in Cocoa to the Kennedy Space Center have finally emerged. A News 6 Orlando report identifies permit applications and observed preparations for the move,which will take a land and sea route. Barring some remarkably hasty road compaction and paving, the prototype will start its journey off-road, crossing a recently cleared path through vacant land to reach Grissom Parkway. It will then travel east in the westbound lanes of SR 528 for a short distance before loading to a barge in the Indian river via a makeshift dock. The rest of the route is relatively conventional, including offloading at KSC at the site previously used for delivery of the Space Shuttle's external fuel tanks. Given the recent construction of new facilities at the current construction site, it is likely that this will not be the last time this route is utilized. SpaceX declined to say how the company will transport the spacecraft or when the relocation will occur.

SpaceX's "Mk2" orbital Starship prototype is designed to test out the technologies and basic design of the final Starship vehicle -- a giant passenger spacecraft that SpaceX is making to take people to the Moon and Mars.

"Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday evening 'Nuke Mars.' A few hours later he followed it up with 'T-shirt soon'," writes Business Insider.

BGR reports: Musk's tweet is a reference to the theory that by dropping one or more large bombs on Mars' poles, the CO2 locked away in the ice there would be released, giving the Martian atmosphere a much-needed boost... Making the planet's atmosphere denser could help it retain heat and bring it a small step closer to being habitable by human settlers. However, past research has suggested that bombing the planet's poles wouldn't release nearly enough CO2 to be worth the trouble. Elon Musk has publicly disagreed.

It's unclear why the SpaceX boss decided to bring this all up again, but he does have a habit of saying whatever he thinks will get a big reaction on Twitter. Oh, and apparently he's hoping to sell some shirts as well.

In any case, no space agency is ready to even begin preliminary planning for a crewed Mars mission, much less any long-term efforts to change the climate of the Red Planet. If that ever does happen, bombs may or may not play a role.
The article adds that scientists "aren't fully on board" with Musk's line of thinking, but the t-shirts really are available in the online SpaceX store. Late Friday Musk began promoting them with an optimistic tweet.

"Nuking Mars one T-shirt at a time."

A nuclear power system that could one day provide juice to colonies on Mars is closer to being ready than previously expected. According to project team members, the Kilopower experiment fission reactor could be ready for its first in-space trial by 2022. Space.com reports: A flight test is the next big step for the Kilopower experimental fission reactor, which aced a series of critical ground tests from November 2017 through March 2018. No off-Earth demonstration is on the books yet, but Kilopower should be ready to go by 2022 or so if need be, said Patrick McClure, Kilopower project lead at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

"I think we could do this in three years and be ready for flight," McClure said late last month during a presentation with NASA's Future In-Space Operations working group. "I think three years is a very doable time frame," he added, stressing that this is his opinion, not necessarily that of NASA, which is developing the Kilopower project along with the DOE. As its name suggests, the Kilopower reactor is designed to generate at least 1 kilowatt of electrical power (1 kWe). Its output is scalable up to about 10 kWe, and it can operate for about 15 years, McClure said. So, four scaled-up Kilopower reactors could meet the energy needs of NASA explorers, with a fifth reactor likely landed to provide a spare.

As of Tuesday the Curiosity rover has been on Mars for over seven years, and this week NASA shared an interactive 360-degree panorama of the planet's Teal Ridge.

Digital Trends provides this update: Curiosity is halfway along its path through a region called the "clay-bearing unit" because the area has a high level of clay minerals. Clay minerals are of particular interest to scientists because they form in the presence of water, suggesting that there used to be water in this location thousands of years ago... The engineers estimate that the rover still has several years of power left in its nuclear power system, and will be able to continue operating beyond that with careful power budgeting.
"This nuclear power source, by the way, means that Curiosity is better equipped to handle monster Mars dust storms, such as the one that killed NASA's solar-powered Opportunity rover last year," reports Space.com, sharing more highlights from the years since Curiosity's touchdown: [T]he rover quickly determined that the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) crater had hosted a lake-and-stream system in the ancient past. And further observations suggested that this environment was habitable for long stretches, perhaps hundreds of millions of years at a time. Curiosity has also detected several surges of methane in Gale Crater's air...

Curiosity may well live to welcome two more rovers to the Red Planet: NASA's Mars 2020 rover, whose design is based heavily on that of Curiosity, and the European-Russian ExoMars rover are both scheduled to touch down in February 2021.
Tablizer (Slashdot reader #95,088) shares a recent triumph that one NASA official says "represents months and months of work by our team." When an electric motor stalled inside Curiosity's drill, it left the rover unable to reliably extend and retract its drill bit. With the drill feed mechanism no longer reliably working, managers decided to keep the drill bit in its extended position. That raised concerns over the stability of the drill while in use because the prong-like extensions on each side of the bit will no longer be in contact with the rock. "We had to do a big pivot in the mission thinking about how we could drill without the feed motor," said Ashwin Vasavada, the Curiosity mission's project scientist at JPL, in a presentation to the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group in April.

Controllers devised a way to use force applied by the robotic arm to null out forces generated by the drill, a role the arm was never designed to fill. Engineers used a replica of the Curiosity rover at JPL's "Mars Yard" to test out the new drilling techniques, and the rover drilled a test hole in a rock on Mars in February. That test did not produce a scientifically useful rock sample -- it used only the drill's rotary mechanism, not its hammer-like percussion capability -- but yielded important data for engineers to continue refining the updated drilling technique.
And thanks to this ongoing improvisation, the Curiosity mission's project scientist says, "We now have a key sample we might have never gotten."

"NASA's orbiting Lunar Gateway is either essential for a moon landing or a boondoggle in the making," writes IEEE Spectrum.

the_newsbeagle writes: NASA is under pressure to put humans back on the moon by 2024... NASA's plan for meeting that ambitious target relies on building a space station in lunar orbit, called the Gateway. NASA says it will use its (over budget and behind schedule) SLS rocket and Orion crew capsule to dock at this (yet unbuilt) Gateway, then send down a lunar lander. Critics say this is a stupid and over-complicated plan.

This article by veteran space reporter Jeff Foust explains how NASA got itself into this situation.
From the article: Critics of the Gateway argue that NASA shouldn't just scale back the space station -- it should cancel the project altogether. If you want to go to the surface of the moon, the refrain goes, go there directly, as the Apollo missions did a half century ago. Building an outpost in lunar orbit adds expense, delay, and complications to a task that is already hard enough....

Critics say that technological alternatives are emerging in the commercial space sector. They look to Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and based near Seattle. Blue Origin is building both a reusable heavy-lift rocket, called New Glenn, and a lunar lander known as Blue Moon. Another contender is Elon Musk's SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., which is also working on a fully reusable rocket. It will carry an upper stage called Starship, which the company says could land directly on the moon and carry heavy cargo. "Having that vehicle on the moon can basically serve as the core of a pretty significant lunar outpost, growing with time," said Paul Wooster, principal Mars development engineer at SpaceX.
The article ends by presenting two possibilities.

• "If NASA, heedful of sunk costs and political realities, continues to march toward the Gateway, we may indeed witness a triumphant return of NASA astronauts to the moon's surface in 2024..."
• "The determined billionaires behind SpaceX and Blue Origin might not wait around for NASA, and the next moon boots in the regolith might stamp a corporate logo in the dust."

It's exactly one half century from that moment in time when men first walked on the moon, writes NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.

"Today, on the golden anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, NASA looks back with heartfelt gratitude for the Apollo generation's trailblazing courage as we -- the Artemis generation -- prepare to take humanity's next giant leap to Mars." The lethargic lull of scientific fatalism afflicted portions of America then as it sometimes does today. There is nothing inevitable about scientific discovery nor is there a predetermined path of cutting-edge innovation. Long hours of arduous study and experimentation are required merely to glimpse a flicker of enlightenment that can lead to greater heights of human achievement...

The Apollo program hastened ground-breaking technological advancements that continue to bestow benefits to modern civilization today. Flame resistant textiles, water purification systems, cordless tools, more effective dialysis machines and improvements to food preservation and medicine are just some of the innovative wonders generated during that era. Furthermore, NASA's utilization of integrated circuits on silicon chips aboard the lunar module's computer unit helped jumpstart the budding computer industry into the massive enterprise it is today. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Apollo missions was their ability to inspire young Americans across the country to join science, technology, engineering and math related fields of study...

After more than 50 years, the benefits of human space exploration to humanity are clear. By proud example, the Apollo program taught us we cannot venture aimlessly into the uncharted territory of future discovery merely hoping to happen upon greater advancement. Technological progress is a deliberate choice made by investing in missions that will expand our limits of understanding and capability...

NASA is preparing to use the lunar surface as a proving ground to perfect our scientific and technological knowledge and utilize international partnerships, as well as the growing commercial space industry.

This time when we go back to the moon we are going to stay...

"Monday's Wall Street Journal includes a special Apollo 11 feature," writes Slashdot reader Outatime in honor of the 50th anniversary since Apollo 11's Saturn V launched from the Kennedy Space Center. "[O]f particular interest to many Slashdot nerds is the piece on the pioneering computer hardware and software that took three astronauts, and landed two, on the moon." Here's an excerpt from the report: The [MIT Instrumentation Laboratory or I-Lab] was housed in a former underwear factory overlooking the Charles River, now long since demolished. The Apollo engineers and programmers labored at scuffed metal desks in cubicles with code scribbled on the chalkboard, slide rules on the table, cigarette butts on the linoleum floor. Fanfold computer printouts were stacked up to 6 feet high, like termite mounds. The lab had pioneered inertial guidance systems for the nuclear-warhead-tipped missiles of the Cold War, such as the submarine-launched Polaris intercontinental ballistic missiles. Funded by the U.S. Air Force, it also developed a plan in the late 1950s to fly a computerized probe to Mars and back. MIT received the first major Apollo contract, the only one awarded to a university, and the only one given without competitive bidding.

In an era when a computer used fragile tubes, ran on punch cards and filled an entire room, the I-Lab engineers had invented a briefcase-size digital brain packed with cutting-edge integrated circuits and memory so robust it could withstand a lightning bolt -- a direct ancestor of almost all computers today. Unlike other machines of its era, it could juggle many tasks at once and make choices of which to prioritize as events unfolded. Apollo missions carried two of these computers, one aboard the command module and one in the lunar lander, running almost identical software. Only the lunar lander, though, required the extra code to set down safely on the moon.

Scientists believe aerogel sheets could transform the cold, arid surface of Mars into land fit for farming. The Guardian reports: The "aerogel" sheets work by mimicking Earth's greenhouse effect, where energy from the sun is trapped on the planet by carbon dioxide and other gases. Spread out in the right places on Mars, the sheets would warm the ground and melt enough subsurface ice to keep plants alive. Should humans ever decide to spread beyond Earth, as the late Stephen Hawking declared we must, then growing food on alien worlds will be a skill that has to be mastered. But on Mars the conditions are hardly conducive. The planet is frigid and dry and bombarded by radiation, the soil contains potentially toxic chemicals and the wispy atmosphere is low on nitrogen.

The aerogel sheets do not solve all of the problems but they could help future spacefarers create fertile oases on desolate planets where plants and other photosynthesizing organisms can take root. Because life would only grow beneath the sheets, the risk of contaminating the rest of Mars with foreign lifeforms would be minimal. The aerogel used to make the sheets is composed 97% of air, with the rest made up of a light silica network. The researchers, including scientists at Nasa and the University of Edinburgh, showed that 2cm- to 3cm-thick sheets of silica aerogel blocked harmful UV rays, allowed visible light through for photosynthesis and trapped enough heat to melt frozen water locked in Martian soil. The sheets could be laid directly on the ground to grow algae and aquatic plants, or suspended to provide room for land plants to grow beneath them. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature Astronomy.

We're reviving an old Slashdot tradition -- the review. Whenever there's something especially geeky -- or relevant to our present moment -- we'll share some thoughts. And I'd like to start with Jonathan Coulton's amazing 2017 album Solid State, and its trippy accompanying graphic novel adaptation by Matt Fraction. I even tracked down Jonathan Coulton on Friday for his thoughts on how it applies to our current moment in internet time...

"When I started work on Solid State, the only thing I could really think of that I wanted to say was something like, 'The internet sucks now'," Coulton said in 2017 in an epilogue to the graphic novel. "It's a little off-brand for me, so it was a scary place to start..."

So what does he think today? And what did we think of his album...?

"Starshot wants to build the world's most powerful laser and aim it at the closest star. What could go wrong?"

An anonymous reader quotes MIT's Technology Review: In 2015, Philip Lubin, a cosmologist from the University of California, Santa Barbara, took the stage at the 100-Year Starship Symposium in Santa Clara. He outlined his plan to build a laser so powerful that it could accelerate tiny spacecraft to 20% of the speed of light, getting them to Alpha Centauri in just 20 years. We could become interstellar explorers within a single generation. It was quite the hook.

Because Lubin is an excellent public speaker, and because the underlying technologies already existed, and because the science was sound, he was mobbed after the talk. He also met Pete Worden, a former research director of NASA's Ames Research Center, for the first time. Worden had recently taken over as head of the Breakthrough Initiatives, a nonprofit program funded by Russian technology billionaire Yuri Milner. Six months later, Lubin's project had $100 million in funding from Breakthrough and the endorsement of Stephen Hawking, who called it the "next great leap into the cosmos."

Starshot is straightforward, at least in theory. First, build an enormous array of moderately powerful lasers. Yoke them together—what's called "phase lock"—to create a single beam with up to 100 gigawatts of power. Direct the beam onto highly reflective light sails attached to spacecraft weighing less than a gram and already in orbit. Turn the beam on for a few minutes, and the photon pressure blasts the spacecraft to relativistic speeds.

Not only could such a technology be used to send sensors to another star system; it could dispatch larger craft to Earth's neighboring planets and moons. Imagine a package to Mars in a few days, or a crewed mission to Mars in a month. Starshot effectively shrinks the solar system, and ultimately the galaxy.

It's fantastic. And also a dream. Or a sales pitch. Or a long-term, far-out project that can't be sustained long enough for the nonexistent technologies it requires to be built.

Scientists from the University Hospital of Dresden Technical University in Germany have successfully bio-printed skin and bone samples upside down to help determine if the method could be used in a low-gravity environment. CNET reports: The skin sample was printed using human blood plasma as a "bio ink." The researchers added plant and algae-based materials to increase the viscosity so it wouldn't just fly everywhere in low gravity. "Producing the bone sample involved printing human stem cells with a similar bio-ink composition, with the addition of a calcium phosphate bone cement as a structure-supporting material, which is subsequently absorbed during the growth phase," said Nieves Cubo, a bioprinting specialist at the university. These samples are just the first steps for the ESA's ambitious 3D bio-printing project, which is investigating what it would take to equip astronauts with medical and surgical facilities to help them survive and treat injuries on long spaceflights and on Mars.

Mold spores commonly found aboard the International Space Station (ISS) turn out to be radiation resistant enough to survive 200 times the X-ray dose needed to kill a human being. Based on experiments by a team of researchers led by Marta Cortesao, a microbiologist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne, the new study indicates that sterilizing interplanetary spacecraft may be much more difficult than previously thought. New Atlas reports: The researchers exposed samples of Aspergillus and Pennicillium spores to X-rays, heavy ions, and high-frequency ultraviolet light of the kinds and intensities found in space. Such radiation damages DNA and breaks down cell structures, but the spores survived X-rays up to 1,000 gray, heavy ions at 500 gray, and UV rays up to 3,000 joules per meter squared. Gray is a measurement of radiation exposure based on the absorption of one joule of radiation energy per kilogram of matter. To place the results into perspective, five gray will kill a person and 0.7 gray is how much radiation the crew of a Mars mission would receive on a 180-day mission.

Since mold spores can already survive heat, cold, chemicals, and drying out, being able to take on radiation as well poses new challenges. It means that not only will manned missions have to put a lot of effort into keeping the ship clean and healthy, it also means that unmanned planetary missions, which must be free of terrestrial organisms to prevent contaminating other worlds, will be harder to sterilize. But according to Cortesao there is a positive side to this resiliency. Since fungal spores are hard to kill, they'd be easier to carry along and grow under controlled conditions in space, so they can be used as raw materials or act as biological factories.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: All-female astronaut crews could reproduce in space without the help of accompanying men, new research suggests. The study found that frozen samples of sperm exposed to microgravity retained similar characteristics to sperm samples kept on the ground, raising hopes that a sperm bank could one day be set up in space to help populate new worlds. This could prove interesting for female astronauts, amid reports that future missions to Mars may involve women-only space crews. Findings from the small preliminary study, involving sperm from 10 healthy donors, suggest that "the possibility of creating a human sperm bank outside of Earth" exists, according to the researchers.

One group of sperm samples used in the study had been exposed to microgravity with the help of a small aerobatic aircraft. The samples then underwent fertility screenings and were analyzed for concentration, motility and DNA fragmentation. No significant differences were detected between samples that had been given a ride and those that had stayed on the ground.

The Curiosity mission's scientists picked up the signal this week, and are seeking additional readings from the red planet. From a report: Mars, it appears, is belching a large amount of a gas that could be a sign of microbes living on the planet today. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source.] In a measurement taken on last Wednesday, NASA's Curiosity rover discovered startlingly high amounts of methane in the Martian air, a gas that on Earth is usually produced by living things. The data arrived back on Earth on last Thursday, and by Friday in the week, scientists working on the mission were excitedly discussing the news, which has not yet been announced by NASA. "Given this surprising result, we've reorganized the weekend to run a follow-up experiment," Ashwin R. Vasavada, the project scientist for the mission, wrote to the science team in an email that was obtained by The Times.

The mission's controllers on Earth sent new instructions to the rover on Friday to follow up on the readings, bumping previously planned science work. The results of these observations are expected back on the ground later today. People have long been fascinated by the possibility of aliens on Mars. But NASA's Viking landers in the 1970s photographed a desolate landscape. Two decades later, planetary scientists thought Mars might have been warmer, wetter and more habitable in its youth some 4 billion years ago. Now, they are entertaining the notion that if life ever did arise on Mars, its microbial descendants could have migrated underground and persisted.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A report published this week by the NASA Office of Inspector General reveals that in April 2018 hackers breached the agency's network and stole approximately 500 MB of data related to Mars missions. The point of entry was a Raspberry Pi device that was connected to the IT network of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) without authorization or going through the proper security review. NASA described the hackers as an "advanced persistent threat," a term generally used for nation-state hacking groups.

An anonymous reader writes: Americans are less interested in NASA sending humans to the moon or Mars than they are in the U.S. space agency focusing on potential asteroid impacts and using robots for space exploration. That's according to a poll by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released Thursday, one month before the 50th anniversary of the first walk on the moon. Two-thirds of respondents said monitoring asteroids, comets and "other events in space that could impact Earth" was "very or extremely important." According to NASA, which watches for objects falling from space, about once a year an "automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth's atmosphere," but it usually burns up before it hits the surface. And the instances of larger objects actually making it past Earth's atmosphere and causing any damage happen thousands of years apart, NASA says. The poll also found that Americans want NASA to focus on conducting space research to expand knowledge of the Earth, solar system and universe and they want "robots without astronauts" to do it. If you want to build capabilities for dealing with dangerous asteroids, asteroid mining should be the technology we prioritize, because there's a lot of crossover there.

Scientists have discovered that some clouds on Mars are created from the debris of meteors that burn up in the planet's atmosphere. "This 'meteoric smoke,' described in a paper published Monday in Nature Geoscience, stimulates cloud formation at altitudes between 30 and 60 kilometers," reports Motherboard. From the report: "Until now, meteoric smoke has been neglected in general circulation model studies of the formation of Martian water ice clouds," said the study's authors, who were led by Victoria Hartwick, a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder. "We conclude that Mars atmospheric simulations that neglect meteoric smoke do not reproduce the observed spatial distribution of water ice clouds." These meteoric smoke clouds are distinct from low-altitude clouds that form when dust particles are kicked up from the Martian surface by winds, and also differ from high altitude clouds that nucleate around carbon dioxide particles, the team said.

The team used data from NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter to show that about three or four tons of alien dust slams into Mars' atmosphere every sol, which is the Martian version of a day. Only a fraction of this interplanetary material sprinkles down to lower altitudes, but that is more than enough to encourage cloud formation. The new research not only explains how these enigmatic clouds form on Mars, it also suggests that meteors may play a larger role in the Martian climate than previously assumed. For instance, meteoric smoke could help explain cloud formation during Mars' early years, when the planet was warmer, wetter, and possibly conducive to life.