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.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot brings us news about the southern hemisphere of Mars: The University of Arizona HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) has posted a photo of curious chevron shapes in southeast Hellas Planitia that are the result of "a complex story of dunes, lava, and wind."

"Enterprising viewers will make the discovery that these features look conspicuously like a famous logo..."
RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) adds that "For those wanting to try to find it on a Mars map, it's at Latitude (centered) -49.325Â Longitude (East) 85.331Â."

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Saturday, June 22, SpaceX plans to launch its Falcon Heavy Rocket out of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The reusable craft is coming off two successful flights; its maiden launch in early 2018 and a satellite delivery trip in April 2019. For its third adventure, the Falcon Heavy will ferry a trove of precious cargo up into space. Around two dozen satellites are going along for the ride this time. But the rocket's most interesting passenger has to be the Orbital Test Bed satellite. Its main payload is an experimental, toaster-sized gizmo called the Deep Space Atomic Clock (DSAC). If the thing works properly, future missions to Mars, Jupiter and beyond could become a whole lot easier -- and less expensive.

The autonomous rotorcraft NASA is planning to integrate with the agency's Mars 2020 rover mission has successfully passed another round of important tests. The Verge reports: Earlier this year, JPL conducted tests of the helicopter in "a simulated Martian environment" that put the helicopter through temperatures as low as minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit and flew it in a vacuum chamber that simulated Martian air -- it was also attached to a "motorized lanyard" to help simulate Martian gravity. Some of the testing was to ensure that the Mars Helicopter could survive the conditions it would experience during an actual rocket launch. The Mars Helicopter is now back at JPL, where it will has already had a new solar panel installed. NASA says that it isn't putting any science instruments on the helicopter beyond a camera, but that instead it's a "technology demonstrator" to prove that it's possible to remotely fly a Martian drone from Earth.

Boston Dynamics is about to launch its first ever commercial product -- a quadrupedal robot named Spot. The Verge reports: Spot is currently being tested in a number of "proof-of-concept" environments, Boston Dynamics' CEO Marc Raibert told The Verge, including package delivery and surveying work. And although there's no firm launch date for the commercial version of Spot, it should be available within months, said Raibert, and certainly before the end of the year. "We're just doing some final tweaks to the design," said the CEO. "We've been testing them relentlessly."

Rather than selling the robot as a single-use tool, it's positioning it as a "mobility platform" that can be customized by users to complete a range of tasks. A Spot robot mounted with 3D cameras can map environments like construction sites, identifying hazards and work progress. When equipped with a robot arm, it has even greater flexibility, able to open doors and manipulate objects. At Re:MARS, a Spot with a robot arm used it to pick up items, including a cuddly toy that was then offered to a flesh-and-blood police dog. The dog was unimpressed with the robot, but happy, at least, to receive the toy. Raibert says it's this "athletic intelligence" that Boston Dynamics will be selling through its robots. Think of it like Amazon's AWS business, but instead of offering computing power on tap, its robotic mobility. How much will Spot cost? Raibert only said that the commercial version will be "much less expensive than prototypes [and] we think they'll be less expensive than other peoples' quadrupeds."

He did, however, reveal that the company had already found some paying customers, including construction companies in Japan who are testing Spot as a way to oversee the progress of work on sites.

Amazon's drone ambitions took another step forward on Wednesday as the tech giant revealed its latest delivery drone design. From a report: At Amazon's re:MARS Conference, Amazon executive Jeff Wilke showed off a fully-electric drone that can fly up to 15 miles and deliver packages under five pounds in less than 30 minutes. The new drone will start making deliveries to customers "within months," Wilke said, but did not provide further details. The new hexagonal design looks quite different than the experimental drones that made Amazon Prime Air's first aerial drop-offs in England in 2016 and in California in 2017. "Our newest drone design includes advances in efficiency, stability and, most importantly, in safety," Wilke wrote in a blog post. "It is also unique, and it advances the state of the art. How so? First, it's a hybrid design. It can do vertical takeoffs and landings -- like a helicopter. And it's efficient and aerodynamic -- like an airplane. It also easily transitions between these two modes -- from vertical-mode to airplane mode, and back to vertical mode." Amazon added that these drones are going to use "stereo vision in parallel with sophisticated AI algorithms" to detect people and animals from above. "A customer's yard may have clotheslines, telephone wires, or electrical wires. Wire detection is one of the hardest challenges for low-altitude flights. Through the use of computer-vision techniques we've invented, our drones can recognize and avoid wires as they descend into, and ascend out of, a customer's yard," the company added in a statement.

NASA will etch your name onto a silicon chip that will be carried to Mars by a rover in 2020:

An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: The rover's primary mission is to get us closer to answering that fundamental question: did Mars ever host alien life? The robot is equipped with tools and instruments that will help scientists figure out if the planet may have hosted life in the past. On top of that, the rover will also be drilling and collecting samples of Martian dirt. It'll then leave those samples on the ground, where they could potentially be picked up someday by another spacecraft and brought back to Earth. And while the Mars 2020 rover is doing all of this, your name could be along for the ride.

If you send in your name sometime before September 30th, NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will etch it onto a silicon chip with an electron beam, and then the rover will carry it on its journey. The names are going to be pretty teeny, though -- about one-thousandth the width of a human hair. That's small enough so that more than a million names can be included on a single chip as big as a dime -- but big enough for any Martian microbes to read (only kidding... Martians can't read).

A top NASA executive hired in April to guide strategy for returning astronauts to the moon by 2024 has resigned, the space agency said on Thursday, the culmination of internal strife and dwindling congressional support for the lunar initiative. From a report: Mark Sirangelo, named six weeks ago as special assistant to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, left the agency as NASA abandoned a reorganization plan due to a chilly reception on Capitol Hill, Bridenstine said in a statement. His departure came after lawmakers rejected NASA's proposal to create a separate directorate within the space agency to oversee future lunar missions and ultimately develop human exploration of Mars. [...] Last week, the Trump administration asked Congress to increase NASA's spending next year by $1.6 billion as a "down payment" on the accelerated goal of landing Americans back on the moon by 2024, more than half a century after the end of the U.S. Apollo lunar program.

SpaceX is planning to launch test flights of its Starhopper test vehicle to a height of up to 16,400 feet. "The short tests, which will take place out of SpaceX's launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, will send the rocket to just under 1,640 feet (500 meters) high for its low-altitude flights and up to 16,400 feet (5,000 meters) high for its high-altitude flights," reports The Verge, citing a modified application filed with the FCC. The heights match those that the company indicated in a similar filing last year. From the report: The Starhopper is a very basic version of Starship, the massive passenger rocket that SpaceX wants to build to send people to the Moon and Mars. In order to prepare for the first Starship's flight to space, SpaceX has been tinkering with the test Starhopper in Boca Chica. The vehicle boasts a similar structure to the final rocket, though it's slightly smaller in size. Starhopper's most important task is to test out the new, powerful Raptor engines that SpaceX has developed for the future deep-space rocket.

SpaceX fired up a Raptor engine on the bottom of the Starhopper for the first time in April. It only lifted a few inches since the vehicle was tethered to the ground. But now, SpaceX plans to perform what are known as "hop" tests with the vehicle (hence the nickname Starhopper), which will send the rocket to a low altitude above the Earth. The company will then attempt to touch the Starhopper back down on the ground with the vehicle's three landing legs. The idea is to test out the landing capabilities the rocket's going to use to touch down on Earth and other worlds. SpaceX performed similar tests with a vehicle known as Grasshopper back in 2012 and 2013 to try out the landing technique its Falcon 9 rockets now use.

Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from USA Today discussing a new book from famed astronautical engineer Bob Zubrin, who makes the case for why we should go to space -- not only for the knowledge and challenge, but to "ensure our survival and protect our freedom." Among the reasons why he thinks we need to spread out through the Solar System (and perhaps beyond): For the Knowledge: We know little about the universe, despite our conceit that we have things figured out. The farther we go, the more new things we will encounter, and the more our knowledge and understanding will expand.

For the Challenge: Zubrin looks at the way the Age of Exploration rejuvenated a stagnant Europe at the beginning of the 16th Century, and the way the American frontier imparted a dynamism to American culture that, since that frontier's closing, seems to have faded. New frontiers, with their array of opportunities and challenges, make an excellent antidote to stagnation, aristocracy and zero-sum thinking.

For Our Survival: Last week saw reports that an 1100-foot asteroid will pass within 13,000 miles of earth -- that's closer than many satellites -- in less than a decade. (The famous Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona was made by an asteroid a fraction that size, and exploded with the force of more than 100 Nagasaki-sized atomic bombs). These asteroid encounters turn out to be much more common than once thought, and the likelihood of a strike is high enough that authorities are rehearsing a response. With a strong space economy, deflecting dangerous asteroids will be easy. Without it, we're just sitting ducks in a cosmic shooting gallery.

For Our Freedom: Earth is crowded, and governments (and corporations like Facebook) are getting ever more intrusive as privacy grows every more scarce. The danger of a global tyranny backed by modern technology of surveillance and control is growing. Getting a sizable chunk of humanity off the planet and far enough away -- the Moon, Mars, even the asteroid belt -- makes it less likely that such a tyranny could become all-encompassing.

There are earthquakes and moonquakes, and now a NASA spacecraft has detected what's believed to be a "marsquake" on the Red Planet. From a report: The spacecraft picked up the faint trembling of Mars's surface on 6 April, 128 days after landing on the planet last November. The quake is the first to be detected on a planetary body other than Earth or Moon. The shaking was relatively weak, the French space agency CNES said on 23 April. The seismic energy it produced was similar to that of the moonquakes that Apollo astronauts measured in the late 1960s and early 1970s. "We thought Mars was probably going to be somewhere between Earth and the Moon" in terms of seismic activity, says Renee Weber, a planetary scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. "It's still very early in the mission, but it's looking a bit more Moon-like than Earth-like," she says. It's not yet clear whether the shaking originated within Mars or was caused by a meteorite crashing into the planet's surface.

The final findings of the NASA Twins Study, which compared 50-year-old astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent a year aboard the International Space Station in 2015, and his identical twin brother, who stayed on Earth, were published in Science. Gizmodo reports: NASA found that Scott Kelly was about as mentally, physically, and genetically healthy as his brother during his trip to space, and that the vast majority of small changes spotted in Scott (relative to himself before the mission) went back to normal within six months time. But the differences seen in Scott while up in space and after his return home could provide NASA important leads on how to keep astronauts safe during longer missions to Mars and beyond.

Preliminary results from the study were released in 2017. But it was the second round of findings, released in January 2018, that really caught the attention of media outlets, some of which misrepresented what was found. In particular, outlets like Newsweek reported that a whopping "seven percent of [Scott Kelly's] genes did not return to normal after he landed." Others implied that Scott Kelly had become a different person from his twin brother. But the researchers were never talking about a seven percent difference between the twins' genes. They were saying that some of Scott Kelly's genes had changed in their expression -- the carrying out of instructions in a cell's genome -- during his time up in space. And that roughly 7 percent of this overall change in gene expression could still be seen six months after he returned home. The remaining change in gene expression six months out was actually closer to 10 percent, but NASA clarified that this was still a relatively tiny change in his epigenetics. "Given that the majority of the biological and human health variables remained stable, or returned to baseline, these data suggest that human health can be mostly sustained over this duration of spaceflight," said NASA in a statement.

SpaceX successfully ignited the onboard engine of its next-generation spacecraft, the Starship, for the first time today. "The ignition was a test known as a static fire, meant to try out the engine while the vehicle remained tethered to the Earth," reports The Verge. "However, today's test marked the first time this vehicle lit up its engine, and it could pave the way for short 'hop' flights in the near future." From the report: This particular vehicle, referred to as "Starhopper," is meant 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. The stainless steel Starship is supposed to launch into deep space on top of a massive booster called the Super Heavy, which will be capable of landing back on Earth after takeoff just like SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rocket fleet. And when complete, the Starship/Super Heavy combo should be capable of putting up to 220,000 pounds (100,000 kilograms) into low Earth orbit, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, making it one of the most powerful rockets ever made.

SpaceX is currently building the first Starship spacecraft at the company's launch site and test facility in Texas, Musk said on Twitter. But before that vehicle sees space, SpaceX first plans to conduct a few hover flights with the Starhopper. These tests involve igniting the engine (or engines) attached to the bottom of the vehicle. Though these flights won't take the ship to space, they will test out SpaceX's new powerful Raptor engine -- a critical piece of hardware that will be used to power the future Starship and Super Heavy booster. SpaceX fired up a full-scale version of the Raptor engine for the first time in February. And for the last four months, SpaceX has been building the Starhopper at its Boca Chica facility, an area that the company plans to turn into a commercial launch site. Workers transported the vehicle to a test launchpad at the beginning of March and then recently attached a Raptor engine to its bottom.

A new study suggests that Mars once had giant rivers larger than anything on Earth after the planet lost most of its atmosphere to space. "That great thinning, which was driven by air-stripping solar particles, was mostly complete by 3.7 billion years ago, leaving Mars with an atmosphere far wispier than Earth's," reports Space.com. "But Martian rivers likely didn't totally dry out until less than 1 billion years ago, the new study found." From the report: "We can start to see that Mars didn't just have one wet period early in its history and then dried out," study lead author Edwin Kite, an assistant professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, told Space.com. "It's more complicated than that; there were multiple wet periods." The team's work suggests that Martian rivers flowed intermittently but intensely over much of the planet's 4.5-billion-year history, driven by precipitation-fed runoff. The rivers' impressive width -- in many cases, more than twice that of comparable Earth catchments -- is a testament to that intensity.

It's unclear how much water Martian rivers carried, because their depth is hard to estimate. Determining depth generally requires up-close analysis of riverbed rocks and pebbles, Kite said, and such work has only been done in a few locations on Mars, such as Gale Crater, which NASA's Curiosity rover has been exploring since 2012. The ancient Mars rivers didn't flow in just a few favored spots; rather, they were distributed widely around the planet, Kite and his colleagues found.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from public news station KNPR about how close weare flying taxi services: The dream of flying cars is as at least as old as the automobile itself. Bell, which makes attack helicopters for the U.S. Navy, is working on this new project with another high-profile partner, Uber. The prototype, the Bell Nexus, was unveiled earlier this year. Boeing and Airbus also have prototypes of these flying cars in the works. Uber has become the face of the aerial mobility movement as it has the most public campaign touting its work so far. Elon Musk says he'll get us to Mars. Uber says it'll get a millennial from San Francisco to San Jose in 15 minutes flat (instead of the two-hour slog in morning traffic). And its timeline for this flying taxi that does not yet exist is 2023...

NASA is another Uber partner. While Jaiwon Shin, NASA's associate administrator for the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, thinks Uber is being a little bullish -- he'd put the timeline further out, to the mid-2020s -- Shin says it's close. "Convergence of many different technologies are maturing to the level that now aviation can benefit to put these things together," he said. The batteries that power electric cars can evolve further, to power flight. Companies can stockpile and pool data, and build artificial intelligence to take over air traffic control, managing the thousands of drones and taxis in the air.

And Uber, his partner, is really well-connected. While fighting the legacy taxi industry, Uber made so many government and lobbyist contacts, that that Rolodex can help grease the wheels -- or wings.
"While no flying taxi exists yet, Uber has dared to estimate the 'near-term' cost of that San Francisco to San Jose trip: $43," the article reports -- suggesting that could create a new division in society.

"With flying cars, the haves can escape to the air and leave the have-nots forgotten in their potholes."

pgmrdlm shares a report from CNN: Last May, Opportunity took a look around Perseverance Valley on the inner slope of Endurance Crater's western rim. The valley is about the length of two football fields and it's full of descending shallow troughs. Ironically, Perseverance Valley became Opportunity's final resting place when a planet-encircling dust storm took over Mars in June, blocking the sun from reaching the rover's solar panels. Engineers lost contact on June 10 and persistently sent more than a thousand signals and commands to the rover over eight months until they realized the mission was over on February 13. But before those dark days, Opportunity acted like a tourist, snapping 354 photos between May 13 and June 10 that would create one last beautiful panorama of the place it will forever call home. "This final panorama (embedded in the report) embodies what made our Opportunity rover such a remarkable mission of exploration and discovery," said Opportunity project manager John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "To the right of center you can see the rim of Endeavour Crater rising in the distance. Just to the left of that, rover tracks begin their descent from over the horizon and weave their way down to geologic features that our scientists wanted to examine up close. And to the far right and left are the bottom of Perseverance Valley and the floor of Endeavour crater, pristine and unexplored, waiting for visits from future explorers."

This week The Space Review published an essay by retired aerospace engineer Gerald Black, who worked in the aerospace industry for over 40 years and tested various rocket engines, including the ascent stage engine of the Apollo lunar module.

"The Moonrush is now on," he argues "fueled by entrepreneurs dreaming of profits from Earth's nearest neighbor." Leading the Moonrush are a bunch of private companies developing small lunar landers and rovers to explore the Moon. On February 21, the first mission of the Moonrush embarked aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.

The Beresheet lunar lander built by Israel's SpaceIL was launched as a secondary payload, sharing the ride with the Indonesian communications satellite PSN-6. After reaching geostationary transfer orbit, Beresheet and the communications satellite separated from the Falcon 9 launcher. The communications satellite will propel itself to geostationary Earth orbit. Meanwhile, Beresheet is slowly raising its orbit. In early April the spacecraft will enter lunar orbit, then land on the Moon. Israel Aerospace Industries, the company that built the lander for SpaceIL, announced plans in January to partner with the German company OHB to offer a commercial lunar payload delivery service to the European Space Agency.
Black also notes that while Google never awarded its $20 million Lunar X grand prize, many teams are still active, including Astrobotic Technology, Moon Express, ispace inc., TeamIndus and PTScientists -- and that NASA will be awarding $2.6 billion in commercial moon exploration contracts over the next decade under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The first mission under this program could be launched as soon as late this year... Blue Origin is developing a much larger lunar lander called Blue Moon that can land several metric tons of cargo on the Moon. And the German companies OHB and MT Aerospace have tapped Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket and Blue Moon lander to ferry a payload to the Moon in 2023.
Around-the-moon tourism could begin as soon as 2023, Black writes, while Bigelow Aerospace's CEO "is dreaming about establishing facilities on the lunar surface that could host tourists and others." And finally, landers and rovers will soon confirm whether there's accessible water hiding in the moon's perpetually dark craters -- and will hunt for other valuable resources. Rovers that include sample analysis laboratories like the one aboard the Curiosity rover on Mars will provide details about the constituents of the lunar rocks and soil. Deposits of gold, platinum group metals, and rare earth metals are likely to be found. Especially promising in this regard are the numerous impact craters on the Moon. High concentrations of precious metals have been found in craters where asteroids impacted the Earth.

Riches are there to be had, and mining may well become a major industry on the Moon.

"The 'mole' aboard NASA's InSight Mars lander has encountered stiff resistance on its first subsurface sojourn beneath the surface of the Red Planet," reports Space.com: In a major mission milestone, InSight's Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument burrowed underground for the first time on Feb. 28. After 400 hammer blows over the course of four hours, the instrument apparently got between 7 inches and 19.7 inches (18 to 50 centimeters) beneath the red dirt -- but obstacles slowed its progress, mission team members said...

The $850 million InSight lander -- whose name is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport -- touched down on Nov. 26. The spacecraft aims to map the Red Planet's interior in unprecedented detail. It will do this primarily by characterizing "marsquakes" and other vibrations with a suite of supersensitive seismometers, which was built by a consortium led by the French space agency CNES; and measuring subsurface heat flow with HP3, which DLR provided.
"I'm digging Mars!" announced NASA's official Twitter feed for the InSight robotic lander, adding "My self-hammering mole has started burrowing in, and my team is poring over the data..."

A pair of Hewlett Packard Enterprise servers sent up to the International Space Station in August 2017 as an experiment have still not come back to Earth, three months after their intended return. From a report: Together they make up the Spaceborne Computer, a Linux system that has supercomputer processing power. They were sent up to see how durable they would be in space with minimal specialist treatment. After 530 days, they are still working. Their return flight was postponed after a Russian rocket failed in October 2018. HPE senior content architect Adrian Kasbergen said they may return in June 2019 if there is space on a flight but "right now they haven't got a ticket." The company is working with Nasa to be "computer-ready" for the first manned Mars flight, estimated to take place in about 2030. The company is also working with Elon Musk's SpaceX.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: [R]esearchers have found that the success of a future mission to the red planet may depend on the ship having a class clown. "These are people that have the ability to pull everyone together, bridge gaps when tensions appear and really boost morale," said Jeffrey Johnson, an anthropologist at the University of Florida. "When you're living with others in a confined space for a long period of time, such as on a mission to Mars, tensions are likely to fray. It's vital you have somebody who can help everyone get along, so they can do their jobs and get there and back safely. It's mission critical." Johnson spent four years studying overwintering crews in Antarctica and identified the importance of clowns, leaders, buddies, storytellers, peacemakers and counsellors for bonding teams together and making them work smoothly. He found the same mixes worked in U.S., Russian, Polish, Chinese and Indian bases.

"These roles are informal, they emerge within the group. But the interesting thing is that if you have the right combination the group does very well. And if you don't, the group does very badly," he said. Johnson is now working with Nasa to explore whether clowns and other characters are crucial for the success of long space missions. So far he has monitored four groups of astronauts who spent 30 to 60 days in the agency's mock space habitat, the Human Exploration Research Analog, or Hera, in Houston, Texas. Johnson, who also studied isolated salmon fishers in Alaska, found that clowns were often willing to be the butt of jokes and pranks. In Antarctica, one clown he observed endured a mock funeral and burial in the tundra, but was crucial for building bridges between clusters of overwintering scientists and between contractors and researchers, or "beakers" as the contractors called them.