Elon Musk took to Twitter Sunday evening to announce the "first firing of Starship Raptor flight engine." While SpaceX has fired individual components before and experimented with various designs, this is the first time the now-completed design has been assembled and fired in its intended spaceflight configuration. ExtremeTech reports: Raptor has gone through a number of design changes -- originally, SpaceX planned to mount it to the ITS launch vehicle back in 2016 (powered by 42 Raptor engines), before changing gears and unveiling its BFR rocket concept (officially known as "Super Heavy" for the first stage, and Starship for the second). The Super Heavy mounts 31 Raptor engines, while the Starship has seven. The engine has been designed with a priority on lowering overall wear and tear and removing failure points that could limit its reusability or increase long-term operating costs. Unlike SpaceX's Merlin engine, which runs on a mixture of RP-1 and LOX, the Raptor engine is fueled by cryogenic liquid methane and LOX. The Raptor uses subcooled methane (subcooling refers to keeping the temperature of the liquid well below its boiling point). Subcooling the methane allows SpaceX to increase the amount of propellant stored in the rocket. It increases specific impulse and reduces cavitation.

The actual test burn only goes on for a few seconds, but yields tremendously valuable information about the actual performance of the rocket and its ability to ignite in a controlled fashion. The green glow in the exhaust near the end of the firing indicates the copper liner in the engine chamber burned by accident. While this should not have happened, it's precisely to find these pain points that engineers conduct test firings in the first place. There is no substitute for this kind of test-firing and, as Ars Technica notes, "any 'first' test firing of a new, full-scale rocket engine that doesn't end in an uncontrolled explosion is a good thing." Ars also states that this specific engine may be deployed for "hopper" flights this year when SpaceX attempts to fly the Starship roughly 5km high, then land it again.

schwit1 quotes Behind the Black: A science paper released today and available for download [pdf] cites evidence from about two dozen deep impact craters located from the equator to 37 degrees north latitude that Mars has a ground ice table at an elevation that also corresponds to other shoreline features.
The paper calls this evidence of "planet-wide groundwater" with elevations that "notably coincide with the elevation of some ocean shorelines proposed by previous authors."

Science writer Robert Zimmerman adds that "The evidence suggests that this deep groundwater water table (as ice) almost certainly still exists at all latitudes, though almost entirely underground...

"All you will have to do is dig a well..."

NASA is making a new, and perhaps final, attempt to restore contact with the Mars rover Opportunity, which has not communicated with the Earth for more than six months. From a report: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced Jan. 25 that it was transmitting a new set of commands to address what it acknowledged are "low-likelihood" events that could have kept the rover from contacting Earth. These new efforts are in addition to the months-long "sweep and beep" campaign of transmitting other commands and listening for a reply from the rover.

The new commands address scenarios where the rover's primary X-band radio has failed or both the primary and backup X-band radios have failed, as well as cases where Opportunity's internal clock has an offset affecting its timing. The commands direct the rover to switch to the backup X-band radio or use its UHF transmitter to contact Earth, as well as resetting its clock. Those scenarios could explain why the rover has failed to contact Earth, but project officials acknowledge that those scenarios are unlikely. "A series of unlikely events would need to have transpired for any one of these faults to occur," JPL noted in the statement about the new campaign.

schwit1 quotes Popular Mechanics: A lot of the rocks we have on Earth are pretty old, but none of them were around when our planet was first formed. The Earth itself is around 4.5 billion years old, and the oldest rocks we've ever found are a little over half that age. That seems to have changed, however, because a group of scientists recently announced they've found a rock that formed only half a billion years after the Earth itself. The twist is that this particular rock wasn't discovered on Earth at all. It was found on the moon.

The rock itself was discovered decades ago by the Apollo 14 crew. The Apollo missions brought back a whole lot of rock samples, and scientists have been methodically analyzing them ever since. This one seems to have been somewhere near the end of the list, but it may be the most interesting one ever found.

According to the analysis, this rock formed somewhere between 4 and 4.1 billion years ago, about 12.4 miles beneath the Earth's crust. Researchers knew it came from the Earth based on the amount of various minerals like quartz and feldspar, which are common on Earth but rare on the Moon. They could tell how deep it was based on a molecular analysis of the rock, which can tell the researchers what temperature the rock was at when it formed.

Scientists are claiming the cosmic collision that made the moon left a host of elements behind on Earth that were crucial for life to emerge. The Guardian reports: The impact 4.4 billion years ago is thought to have occurred when an itinerant planet the size of Mars slammed into the fledgling Earth, scattering a shower of rocks into space. The debris later coalesced into the moon. Beyond an act that shaped the sky, the smash-up transferred essential elements to the Earth's surface, meaning that most of the carbon and nitrogen that makes up our bodies probably came from the passing planet, the researchers believe.

Petrologists at Rice University in Texas reached their conclusions after running experiments on geochemical reactions under the high temperatures and pressures found deep inside a planet. They wanted to understand whether Earth acquired key elements from meteorites that slammed into Earth or through some other ancient route. Lead author Damanveer Grewal found that a planet with a sulphur-rich core would have large fractions of carbon and nitrogen on its surface. Such a planet could transfer that volatile material to Earth in just the right proportions if it happened to clatter into it, the researchers found, after modeling a billion different cosmic scenarios in a computer and comparing them to conditions seen in the solar system today. The research is published in Science Advances.

From a report, based on a book by Cliff Sims, who worked as a communications official for Trump on his presidential campaign and in the West Wing: As the clock ticked down, Trump "suddenly turned toward the NASA administrator." He asked: "What's our plan for Mars?" Lightfoot explained to the president -- who, again, had recently signed a bill containing a plan for Mars -- that NASA planned to send a rover to Mars in 2020 and, by the 2030s, would attempt a manned spaceflight. "Trump bristled," according to Sims. He asked, "But is there any way we could do it by the end of my first term?"

Sims described the uncomfortable exchange that followed the question, with Lightfoot shifting and placing his hand on his chin, hesitating politely and attempting to let Trump down easily, emphasizing the logistical challenges involving "distance, fuel capacity, etc. Also the fact that we hadn't landed an American anywhere remotely close to Mars ever." Sims himself was "getting antsy" by this point. With a number of points left to go over with the president, "all I could think about was that we had to be on camera in three minutes .. And yet we're in here casually chatting about shaving a full decade off NASA's timetable for sending a manned flight to Mars. And seemingly out of nowhere."

Amazon's annual invitation-only event on machine learning, automation, robotics and space -- known as Mars -- has become a high-tech highlight for insiders, featuring billionaire founder and CEO Jeff Bezos riding a giant robot or walking a robot dog. From a report: Now a wider circle of tech leaders can get in on a spin-off experience called re:MARS, which is due to make its debut June 4-7 at the Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. The event will shine a spotlight on the leading lights and cutting-edge advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, Amazon said today in a blog posting.

"We're at the beginning of a golden age of AI. Recent advancements have already led to invention that previously lived in the realm of science fiction -- and we've only scratched the surface of what's possible," Bezos said. "AI is an enabling technology that can improve products and services across all industries. We're excited to create re:MARS, bringing together leaders and builders from diverse areas to share learnings and spark new ideas for future innovation."

A small green shoot is growing on the moon after a cotton seed germinated onboard a Chinese lunar lander, scientists said. From a report: The sprout has emerged from a lattice-like structure inside a canister after the Chang'e 4 lander touched down earlier this month, according to a series of photos released by the Advanced Technology Research Institute at Chongqing University. "This is the first time humans have done biological growth experiments on the lunar surface," said Xie Gengxin, who led the design of the experiment, on Tuesday. Plants have been grown previously on the International Space Station, but this is the first time a seed has sprouted on the moon. The ability to grow plants in space is seen as crucial for long-term space missions and establishing human outposts elsewhere in the solar system, such as Mars.

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: SpaceX is laying off 10% of its 6,000-person workforce as it tackles two hugely expensive projects. Elon Musk's rocket company said its finances are healthy, but that it needs to make cuts so its most ambitious plans can succeed. "To continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based Internet, SpaceX must become a leaner company," the company said in a statement....

The company earns tens of millions of dollars per launch. SpaceX was recently valued at $30.5 billion after initiating a $500 million equity sale in December. The company also took on about $250 million in debt last year in its first loan sale, according to the Wall Street Journal. But SpaceX's new products are expected to cost billions to develop. In September, Musk estimated SpaceX would spend between $2 billion and $10 billion developing an ultra-powerful spaceship and rocket system, recently renamed Starship and Super Heavy.

SpaceX plans to use the technology to fly tourists to space and, potentially, one day send humans to Mars... SpaceX is also developing a constellation of satellites that could one day beam high-speed internet down to the Earth. SpaceX Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said during a TED Talk last year that she expects the satellite constellation to cost about $10 billion to deploy. The company has already made headway on both projects.

NASA's asteroid-chasing Osiris-Rex spacecraft has been placed in an orbit around Bennu, an asteroid that drifts through the solar system's asteroid belt between Earth and Mars. "By inserting itself into orbit around Bennu, Osiris-Rex will survey the asteroid from a distance of only about 1 mile (1.75 kilometers) from its center," reports CNET. "Bennu's small size creates an incredibly tiny gravitational force, so maintaining that orbit will require lots of little adjustments, made by NASA and its collaborating organizations." From the report: "The gravity of Bennu is so small, forces like solar radiation and thermal pressure from Bennu's surface become much more relevant and can push the spacecraft around in its orbit much more than if it were orbiting around Earth or Mars, where gravity is by far the most dominant force," said Dan Wibben, maneuver and trajectory design lead. NASA also released a GIF of the various surveys Osiris-Rex carried out after arriving at Bennu in early December The series of images, captured between Nov. 30 and Dec. 31, helped the team more accurately determine Bennu's mass, which ensured that the orbital insertion would proceed smoothly.

The orbital period, lasting until mid-February, is expected to provide additional details about Bennu's gravity, orientation and spin, along with a better understanding of its mass. All those observations should lead to completing one of the chief objectives for Osiris-Rex: retrieve a sample from Bennu's surface and fly it back to Earth. In 2020, the spacecraft will extend a specially designed arm, called Tagsam, for a brief high-five with the asteroid. The arm will blow nitrogen gas onto the surface of Bennu, kicking up handfuls of dirt, which the spacecraft will fly back to Earth in 2023.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will visit a tiny and mysterious object in the Kuiper belt on Tuesday, seeking clues to the formation of our cosmic neighborhood. From a report: In June 1983, newspaper headlines declared that NASA's Pioneer 10 spacecraft had left the solar system, crossing beyond the orbit of Neptune. It was the common view of the time: All of the solar system's big, interesting things -- the sun and the nine planets -- were behind Pioneer 10. Thirty-five years later, the Kuiper belt -- the region Pioneer 10 was just entering -- and the spaces beyond are perhaps the most fascinating parts of the solar system. In their vast, icy reaches are clues about how the sun and planets, including ours, coalesced out of gas and dust 4.5 billion years ago. Even farther out might be bodies the size of Mars or Earth, or even a larger one some astronomers call Planet Nine, and technological advances could usher in a new age of planetary discovery.

On Tuesday, New Horizons, the NASA spacecraft that snapped spectacular photographs of Pluto in 2015, will provide humanity with a close-up of one of these mysterious, distant and tiny icy worlds. Its target of exploration is believed to be just 12 to 22 miles wide, known as 2014 MU69 -- its designation in the International Astronomical Union's catalog of worlds -- or Ultima Thule, the nickname bestowed upon it by the New Horizons team. This will be the farthest object ever visited by a spacecraft. New Horizons will speed past Ultima Thule at 31,500 miles per hour and pass within 2,200 miles of the surface. What the probe finds could reveal much about the earliest days of the solar system and what else lies in the Kuiper belt.

One of the first men to orbit the Moon has told BBC Radio 5 Live that it's "stupid" to plan human missions to Mars. Bill Anders, lunar module pilot of Apollo 8, the first human spaceflight to leave Earth's orbit, said sending crews to Mars was "almost ridiculous". From a report: NASA is currently planning new human missions to the Moon. It wants to learn the skills and develop the technology to enable a future human landing on Mars. NASA was approached for a response to Anders' comments, but hasn't responded.

Anders, 85, said he's a "big supporter" of the "remarkable" unmanned programmes, "mainly because they're much cheaper". But he says the public support simply isn't there to fund vastly more expensive human missions. "What's the imperative? What's pushing us to go to Mars?" he said, adding "I don't think the public is that interested". Meanwhile, robotic probes are still exploring Mars. Last month, the InSight lander, which will sample the planet's interior, successfully touched down at Elysium Planitia. Further reading: Bill Nye: We Are Not Going To Live on Mars, Let Alone Turn It Into Earth.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The stunning Korolev crater in the northern lowlands of Mars is filled with ice all year round owing to a trapped layer of cold Martian air that keeps the water frozen. The 50-mile-wide crater contains 530 cubic miles of water ice, as much as Great Bear Lake in northern Canada, and in the centre of the crater the ice is more than a mile thick. Images beamed back from the red planet show that the lip around the impact crater rises high above the surrounding plain. When thin Martian air then passes over the crater, it becomes trapped and cools to form an insulating layer that prevents the ice from melting. The latest picture is a composite of five strip-like images taken from the European Space Agency's Mars Express probe, which swung into orbit around the planet on Christmas Day 2003. On the same day, the orbiter released the Beagle 2 lander, a British probe built on a shoestring budget, which touched down but failed to fully open on the surface. Mars Express photographed the Korolev crater with its high-resolution stereo camera, an instrument that can pick out features 10 metres wide, or as small as 2 metres when used in super-resolution mode.

NASA's InSight lander, which touched down on Mars less than two weeks ago, has recorded vibrations -- low-pitched, guttural rumblings -- caused by wind blowing across the science instruments on the spacecraft's deck. NBC News reports: Unaltered, these vibrations are barely audible, because they were recorded at a frequency of 50 hertz, at the low end of what the human ear can detect, according to Thomas Pike, the lead scientist for InSight's Short Period Seismometer, one of two instruments that picked up the subtle movements. NASA also released a sample of the same audio file that was shifted up about six octaves, to within a range audible to humans. That recording -- which at times sounds like a regular blustery day on Earth and other times has the muted, hollow quality reminiscent of being underwater -- would essentially be what a person would hear if they were sitting on the InSight lander on Mars, said Don Banfield, the science lead for InSight's air pressure sensor and a planetary scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. NASA believes the wind in the recordings was blowing at 10-15 miles per hour from northwest to southeast.

Trailrunner7 writes: Like real estate, we're not making any more IPv4 addresses. But instead of trying to colonize Mars or build cities under the sea, the Internet's architects developed a separate address scheme with an unfathomably large pool of addresses. IPv6 has an address space of 2^128, compared to IPv4's 2^32, and as the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space began to approach, registries started allocating IPv6 addresses and there now are billions of those addresses active at any given time. But no one really knows how many or where they are or what's behind them or how they're organized.

A pair of researchers decided to tackle the problem and developed a suite of tools that can find active IPv6 addresses both in the global address space and in smaller, targeted networks. Known as ipv666, the open source tool set can scan for live IPv6 hosts using a statistical model that the researchers built. The researchers, Chris Grayson and Marc Newlin, faced a number of challenges as they went about developing the ipv666 tools, including getting a large IPv6 address list, which they accumulated from several publicly available data sets. They then began the painful process of building the statistical model to predict other IPv6 addresses based on their existing list.

That may seem weird, but IPv6 addresses are nothing at all like their older cousins and come in a bizarre format that doesn't lend itself to simple analysis or prediction. Grayson and Newlin wanted to find as many live addresses as possible and ultimately try to figure out what the security differences are between devices on IPv4 and those on IPv6.

NASA's latest Mars lander, InSight, successfully touched down on the surface of the Red Planet moments ago, surviving an intense plunge through the Martian atmosphere. From a report: It marks the eighth picture-perfect landing on Mars for NASA, adding to the space agency's impressive track record of putting spacecraft on the planet. And now, InSight's two-year mission has begun, one that entails listening for Marsquakes to learn about the world's interior. After six and a half months of traveling through space, InSight hit the top of Mars' atmosphere a little before 3PM ET. It then made a daring descent to the surface, performing a complex multi-step routine that slowed the lander from more than 12,000 miles per hour to just 5 miles per hour before it hit the ground. To get to the surface safely, InSight had to autonomously deploy a supersonic parachute, gather radar measurements, and ignite its thrusters all at the right time. Altogether, the landing took just under seven minutes to complete, prompting the nickname "seven minutes of terror." "InSight's view is a flat, smooth expanse called Elysium Planitia, but its workspace is below the surface, where it will study Mars' deep interior," Nasa posted Monday, sharing the first photo after the landing.

Elon Musk reckons there's a 70 percent chance he'll go to Mars, even as he knows there's a good chance he won't survive there. "I'm talking about moving there," the SpaceX and Tesla CEO said in a wide-ranging, but brief interview with Axios on HBO. "We've recently made a number of breakthroughs that I'm just really fired up about."

In the interview, he also spoke about Neuralink, the company he launched last year to build brain-enhancing implants. "The long-term aspiration of Neuralink would be to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence," he said. "If we have billions of people with a high-bandwidth link to an AI extension of themselves, it would actually make everyone hyper-smart."

Musk also revealed that Tesla had been "single-digit weeks" away from death with the company "bleeding" cash as it ramped up Model 3 production. He said he was worried about imploding and that the stress of working seven days a week and sleeping at the Tesla factory was very painful."It hurts my brain and my heart," said Musk, who recently publicly urged people to explore electric cars, even if they come from companies Tesla competes with.

On Monday, November 26th, NASA will attempt to land the InSight spacecraft on Elysium Planitia, a vast plain just north of the Martian equator. If NASA is successful, InSight (short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport) will be the first mission to investigate Mars' deep interior with thermal probes and seismometry, an approach scientists think will address questions about the red planet's formation and composition. But first, the spacecraft must land. From a report: Getting to Mars is hard, but NASA engineers consider entry, descent, and landing -- the seven-minute period in which mission planners are helpless to intervene, due to the tremendous distance between Mars and Earth -- the riskiest sequence in the entire mission. Here's how NASA plans to pull it off.

For InSight, the action will begin Monday, November 26th at around 11:47 am PT (2:47 pm ET). That's when the lander is slated to hit the top of Mars' atmosphere, at an altitude roughly 43 miles above the planet's surface. On contact, the spacecraft will be blazing along at a not-so-cool 5500 meters per second. That's 12,300 miles per hour. At those speeds, the primary concern for NASA's engineers is friction. Mars' atmosphere, which is roughly 100 times thinner than Earth's, plays a vitally important role in InSight's arrival: Bleeding the spacecraft of its kinetic energy. Yet the atmosphere poses a significant threat, as well. The resistance it exerts on InSight's heat shield, a 419-pound enclosure composed primarily of crushed cork, will drive the temperature of the protective barrier to temperatures greater than 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit -- hot enough to melt steel.

On Twitter, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that the transportation portion of the company's Big Falcon Spaceship (BFS), will now be called Starship, while the booster portion will be called Super Heavy. The Verge reports: Plans for the 387-foot Big Falcon Rocket were officially revealed back in September. Eventually, the company hopes that it will replace the company's existing Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon rockets. The craft is currently being developed at the Port of Los Angeles, at an expected cost of $5 billion and will be capable of taking up to 100 tons of cargo or 100 passengers as far as Mars.

SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said the company hopes to start doing uncrewed launch tests of the new rocket in late 2019. If all goes well, Musk believes that this could be followed by an initial uncrewed flight to Mars in 2022 with a crewed flight taking place as early as 2024. A mission to fly around the moon with a private passenger on board is planned for 2023. However, given that the Falcon Heavy took nearly twice as long to complete as expected, and that only five percent of SpaceX's resources are currently spent on the Starship, it's best to view these plans as an aspiration.

The dome where crew members practiced red-planet missions will now be converted to a simulated moon base. Excerpt from a report: For the last five years, a small Mars colony thrived in Hawaii, many miles away from civilization. The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS, was carried out in a small white dome nestled along the slope of a massive volcano called Mauna Loa. The habitat usually housed six people at a time, for as long as eight months. They prepared freeze-dried meals, took 30-second showers to conserve water, and wore space suits every time they left the dome. To replicate the communication gap between Earth and Mars, they waited 20 minutes for their emails to reach their family members, and another 20 to hear back. Sometimes, as they drifted off to sleep, with nothing but silence in their ears, they really believed they were on Mars.

In February of this year, something went wrong. The latest and sixth mission was just four days in when one of the crew members was carried out on a stretcher and taken to a hospital, an Atlantic investigation revealed in June. There had been a power outage in the habitat, and some troubleshooting ended with one of the residents sustaining an electric shock. The rest of the crew was evacuated, too. There was some discussion of returning -- the injured person was treated and released in the same day -- but another crew member felt the conditions weren't safe enough and decided to withdraw. The Mars simulation couldn't continue with a crew as small as three, and the entire program was put on hold. [...]