An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: NASA officials sounded an alarm Tuesday about the agency's Deep Space Network, a collection of antennas in California, Spain, and Australia used to maintain contact with missions scattered across the Solar System. Everything from NASA's Artemis missions to the Moon to the Voyager probes in interstellar space rely on the Deep Space Network (DSN) to receive commands and transmit data back to Earth. Suzanne Dodd, who oversees the DSN in her position at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, likes to highlight the network's importance by showing gorgeous images from missions like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Perseverance rover on Mars. "All these images, and all these great visuals for the public, and all the science for the scientists come down through the Deep Space Network," Dodd said Tuesday in a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council's Science Committee.

But Dodd doesn't take a starry-eyed view of the challenges operating the Deep Space Network. She said there are currently around 40 missions that rely on the DSN's antennas to stay in communication with controllers and scientists back on Earth. Another 40-plus missions will join the roster over the next decade or so, and many of the 40 missions currently using time on the network will likely still be operating over that time. "We have more missions coming than we currently are flying," Dodd said. "We're nearly doubling the load on the DSN. A lot of those are either lunar exploration or Artemis missions, and a lot of Artemis precursor missions with commercial vendors. So the load is increasing, and it's very stressful to us." "It's oversubscribed, yet it's vital to anything the agency wants to do," she said.

Vint Cerf, an Internet pioneer who is now an executive at Google, sits on the committee Dodd met with Tuesday. After hearing from Dodd and other NASA managers, Cerf said: "The deep space communications system is in deep -- well, let me use a better word, deficit. There's a four-letter word that occurs to me, too." Because astronauts are involved, the Artemis missions will come with unique requirements on the DSN. "We're not going to have bits of data. We're going to have gigabits of data," said Philip Baldwin, acting director of the network services division at JPL. "I don't want 1080p for video resolution. I want 8K video." Each of the three stations on the Deep Space Network has a 70-meter (230-foot) dish antenna, the largest antennas in the world for deep space communications. Each location also has at least three 112-foot (34-meter) antennas. The oldest of the large antennas in California entered service in 1966, then was enlarged to its 70-meter diameter in 1988. "We have reached a really critical point on the DSN's aging infrastructure," said Sandra Cauffman, deputy director of NASA's astrophysics division.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a new perspective on sunspots (those dark, cool areas where the sun's magnetic field is particularly strong, and which often launch solar flares).

"NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has given us a sneak peek of an intriguing patch of the sun that's not yet visible from Earth," reports Space.com: Perseverance photographs the sun daily with its Mastcam-Z camera system to gauge the amount of dust in the Martian atmosphere. Such an effort captured a big sunspot moving across the solar disk late last week and over the weekend, as SpaceWeather.com reported. "Because Mars is orbiting over the far side of the sun, Perseverance can see approaching sunspots more than a week before we do," SpaceWeather.com wrote in a post highlighting the sunspot photos. "Consider this your one-week warning: A big sunspot is coming...."

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections that hit Earth can affect satellite navigation and disrupt power grids, among other things, so tracking the movement of sunspots is more than just of academic interest.

LiveScience brings an update on China's Chang'e-4 — the first spacecraft to ever land on the far side of the moon.

Its Lunar Penetrating Radar has now mapped the lunar subsurface "in finer detail than ever before" by bouncing radio signals deep underground: Their results, which were published Aug. 7 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, reveal billions of years of previously hidden lunar history. These new data suggest the top 130 feet of the lunar surface are made up of multiple layers of dust, soil, and broken rocks, said lead study author Jianqing Feng, an astrogeological researcher at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona... Farther down, the scientists discovered five distinct layers of lunar lava that seeped across the landscape billions of years ago.

Scientists think our moon formed 4.51 billion years ago, not long after the solar system itself, when a Mars-size object slammed into Earth and broke off a chunk of our planet The moon then continued to be bombarded by objects from space for roughly 200 million years. Some impacts cracked the moon's surface. Like Earth, the moon's mantle at that time contained pockets of molten material called magma, which seeped out through the newly formed cracks in a series of volcanic eruptions, Feng said.

The new data from Chang'e-4 shows that process slowing down over time: Feng and his colleagues found that the layers of volcanic rock grew thinner the closer they were to the moon's surface. This suggests that less lava flowed in later eruptions compared with earlier ones. "[The moon] was slowly cooling down and running out of steam in its later volcanic stage," Feng said. "Its energy became weak over time...."

However, there could still be magma deep underneath the lunar surface, Feng said.

NASA's Curiosity rover has discovered signs of seasonal floods on Mars at a site called Gale Crater. Ars Technica reports: About 3,000 Martian days into its exploration, the rover was at a site that dates to roughly 3.6 billion years ago, during Mars' relatively wet Hesperian period. And it came across what would be familiar to gamers as a hex grid: hundreds of hexagonal shaped rock deposits in the area of a few centimeters across and at least 10 centimeters deep. These features are small enough that they'd be easy to overlook as simply another collection of wind-swept debris on the red planet. But up close, they're striking: large collections of hexagons that share sides, creating a regular grid. While there's some irregularity, the lines separating them largely form three-way intersections with equal angles between each line. And, in places where erosion has had different effects on nearby instances, it's clear that individual hexagons are at least 10 centimeters in height.

Similar shapes have been seen on Pluto, formed by convection of an icy surface. But these are far, far larger, able to be detected from a considerable distance from Pluto. The tiny size of the hexes on Mars is completely incompatible with convection. Instead, it has to be the product of mud drying out, creating cracks as the material contracts. The water itself could either come externally, in the form of a flood, or via groundwater that soaks up to the surface. But again, the tiny size of these features is decisive, indicating that only the top few centimeters got wet, which is incompatible with a groundwater source. To form the regular, hexagonal shapes also means repeated cycles -- experiments show that at least a dozen cycles are needed before you start to get the equal angles at the junction.

So, simply based on their shape, it appears that these hexagons are the product of repeated flooding. The chemistry backs this up. The rocks in the lines that separate individual hexagons are largely a mixture of calcium and magnesium sulfates, which will readily precipitate out of water as conditions get drier. These deposits will form harder rocks than the dried mud that comprises the bulk of the hexagons. The researchers behind the work note that the apparently regular, mild wet/dry cycling is incompatible with a lot of ideas about the source of water in Mars' past, such as volcanic melting of ice deposits. Instead, it's consistent with mild seasonal flooding, although there's no way to tell if the cadence was tied to Mars' orbit given what we currently know. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

Russia hopes to launch its first successful lunar landing mission for nearly 50 years, with a long-delayed takeoff from the far east of the country scheduled for early on Friday morning that the Kremlin aims to tout as a new achievement in space exploration. From a report: The Luna-25 mission will seek to land near the south pole of the moon, collecting geological samples from the area, and sending back data for signs of water or its building blocks, which could raise the possibility of a future human colony on the moon. But the more immediate goal is to prove that Russia still can launch a lunar landing mission after numerous failures in the past, generations of turnover among its scientific experts, delays due to sanctions and now isolation due to its war in Ukraine.

Post-Soviet Russia has launched two failed space landing missions, the Mars-96 in 1996 and Phobos-Grunt in 2011, both of which crash-landed into the Pacific Ocean. "The Russian Federation hasn't had much luck with launching unmanned interplanetary probes," said Vitaly Egorov, a blogger who writes extensively on space exploration. "Now 12 years later they're launching Luna-25 and the main intrigue is whether or not it will succeed in reaching [the moon] or not, and if it does, can it actually land there? "One of the main goals is to let modern specialists put down space probes softly on celestial objects. They haven't had that experience in 47 years. That knowledge needs to be restored for new specialists on a new technological level."

During its 54th flight on Mars, NASA's helicopter Ingenuity captured an image of the space agency's Perseverance rover. Space.com reports: Perseverance is nearly out of frame at the top of the photo, which Ingenuity took when it was about 16 feet (5 meters) above the red dirt. Unlike previous sorties, the Aug. 3 flight wasn't a scouting run to aid Perseverance's science activities. It lasted just 24 seconds, reached a maximum altitude of 16 feet and covered no ground laterally, according to Ingenuity's flight log. The mission team designed this short and simple hop in an attempt to help understand what happened during Ingenuity's previous flight, which was cut short unexpectedly.

The mission team designed this short and simple hop in an attempt to help understand what happened during Ingenuity's previous flight, which was cut short unexpectedly. That July 22 sortie was supposed to last 136 seconds and feature several complicated maneuvers. However, Ingenuity stayed aloft for just 74 seconds, touching down after something triggered its "flight-contingency program." [...] Imagery from Ingenuity's navigation camera likely got out of sync with its inertial measurement unit, which helps the little chopper determine its position, speed and orientation. This also happened near the end of Ingenuity's sixth flight, back in May 2021. The mission team soon uploaded a software patch to deal with the issue, but that patch apparently couldn't handle what happened on Flight 53, NASA officials said in the statement. "Since the very first flight, we have included a program called 'LAND_NOW' that was designed to put the helicopter on the surface as soon as possible if any one of a few dozen off-nominal scenarios was encountered," Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity team lead emeritus at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement.

"During Flight 53, we encountered one of these, and the helicopter worked as planned and executed an immediate landing," Tzanetos added.

Four years from now, if all goes well, a nuclear-powered rocket engine will launch into space for the first time. The rocket itself will be conventional, but the payload boosted into orbit will be a different matter. From a report: NASA announced Wednesday that it is partnering with the US Department of Defense to launch a nuclear-powered rocket engine into space as early as 2027. The US space agency will invest about $300 million in the project to develop a next-generation propulsion system for in-space transportation. "NASA is looking to go to Mars with this system," said Anthony Calomino, an engineer at NASA who is leading the agency's space nuclear propulsion technology program. "And this test is really going to give us that foundation."

Wikipedia notes that "Today, the Moon has no active volcanoes even though a significant amount of magma may persist under the lunar surface."

But this week the New York Times reports that "The rocks beneath an ancient volcano on the moon's far side remain surprisingly warm, scientists have revealed using data from orbiting Chinese spacecraft." The findings, which appeared last week in the journal Nature, help explain what happened long ago beneath an odd part of the moon. The study also highlights the scientific potential of data gathered by China's space program, and how researchers in the United States have to circumvent obstacles to use that data...

The Chinese orbiters both had microwave instruments, common on many Earth-orbiting weather satellites but rare on interplanetary spacecraft. The data from Chang'e-1 and Chang'e-2 thus provided a different view of the moon, measuring the flow of heat up to 15 feet below the surface — and proved ideal for investigating the oddity... At Compton-Belkovich, the heat flow was as high as 180 milliwatts per square meter, or about 20 times the average for the highlands of the moon's far side. That measure corresponds to a temperature of minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit about six feet below the surface, or about 90 degrees warmer than elsewhere. "This one stuck out, as it was just glowing hot compared to anywhere else on the moon," said Matthew Siegler, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, headquartered in Tucson, Ariz., and who led the research...

"Now we need the geologists to figure out how you can produce that kind of feature on the moon without water, without plate tectonics," Dr. Siegler said.
Universe Today believes this could help scientists better understand the moon's past. "What makes this finding unique is the source of the hotspot isn't active volcanism, such as molten lava, but from radioactive elements within the now-solidified rock that was once molten lava billions of years ago."

Thanks to Slashdot reader rolodexter for sharing the news.

Congress will pour billions more dollars into the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its associated architecture, even as NASA science missions remain vulnerable to cuts. TechCrunch reports: Both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees recommend earmarking around $25 billion for NASA for the next fiscal year (FY 24), which is in line with the amount of funding the agency received this year (FY 23). However, both branches of Congress recommend increasing the portion of that funding that would go toward the Artemis program and its transportation cornerstones, SLS and the Orion crew capsule. Those programs would receive $7.9 billion per the House bill or $7.74 billion per the Senate bill, an increase of about $440 million from FY 2023 levels. Meanwhile, science missions are looking at cuts of around that same amount, with the House recommending a budget of $7.38 billion versus $7.79 billion in FY 2023.

Overall, NASA received $25.4 billion in funding for FY '23, with $2.6 billion earmarked toward SLS, $1.34 billion to Orion, and $1.48 to the Human Landing System contract programs. Science programs -- which include the Mars Sample Return mission and Earth science missions -- received $7.8 billion overall.

The US Senate has slashed the budget for NASA's ambitious mission to return soil and rock samples from Mars' surface. From a report: NASA had asked for $949 million to support its Mars Sample Return mission, or MSR, in fiscal year 2024. In its proposed budget for the space agency, released Thursday, the Senate offered just $300 million and threatened to take that amount away. "The Committee has significant concerns about the technical challenges facing MSR and potential further impacts on confirmed missions, even before MSR has completed preliminary design review," stated the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee in its report on the budget.

The committee report, obtained by Ars, noted that Congress has spent $1.739 billion on the Mars Sample Return mission to date but that the public launch date -- currently 2028 -- is expected to slip, and cost overruns threaten other NASA science missions. Further, the report states that the $300 million allocated to the Mars mission will be rescinded if NASA cannot provide Congress with a guarantee that the mission's overall costs will not exceed $5.3 billion. In that case, most of the $300 million would be reallocated to the Artemis program to land humans on the Moon.

The Perseverance rover's Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument, designed to analyze organic chemicals on Mars, has provided valuable insights into the presence and distribution of potential organic materials on the surface of Mars. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. An anonymous reader shares a report from Ars Technica: SHERLOC comes with a deep-UV laser to excite molecules into fluorescing, and the wavelengths they fluoresce at can tell us something about the molecules present. It's also got the hardware to do Raman spectroscopy simultaneously. Collectively, these two capabilities indicate what kinds of molecules are present, though they can't typically identify specific chemicals. And, critically, SHERLOC provides spatial information, telling us where sample-specific signals come from. This allows the instrument to determine which chemicals are located in the same spot in a rock and thus were likely formed or deposited together.

SHERLOC can sample rocks simply by being held near them. The new results are based on a set of samples from two rock formations found on the floor of the Jezero crater. In some cases, the imaging was done by pointing it directly at a rock; in others, the rock surface, and any dust and contaminants it contained, was abraded away by Perseverance before the imaging was done. SHERLOC identified a variety of signatures of potential organic material in these samples. There were a few cases where it was technically possible that the signatures were produced by a very specific chemical that lacked carbon (primarily cerium salts). But, given the choice between a huge range of organic molecules or a very specific salt, the researchers favor organic materials as the source. One thing that was clear was that the level of organic material present changed over time. The deeper, older layer called Seitah only had a tenth of the material found in the Maaz rocks that formed above them. The reason for this difference isn't clear, but it indicates that either the production or deposition of organic material on Mars has changed over time.

Between the different samples and the ability to resolve different regions of the samples, the researchers were able to identify distinct signals that each occurred in many samples. While it wasn't possible to identify the specific molecule responsible, they were able to say a fair bit about them. One signal came from samples that contained a ringed organic compound, along with sulfates. The most common signal came from a two-ringed organic molecule, and was associated with various salts: phosphate, sulfate, silicates, and potentially a perchlorate. Another likely contained a benzene ring associated with iron oxides. A different ringed compound was found in two of the samples. Overall, the researchers conclude that these differences are significant. The fact that distinct organic chemicals are consistently associated with different salts suggests that there were either several distinct ways of synthesizing the organics or that they were deposited and preserved under distinct conditions. Many of the salts seen here are also associated with either water-based deposition or water-driven chemical alteration of the rock -- again, consistent with the processes involved changing over time. Collectively, the researchers say this argues against the organic chemicals simply having been delivered to Mars on a meteorite.

Popular Science describes how NASA's Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will use a pair of ramps to become the first rover to explore the Moon's south pole when it arrives in late 2024. From the report: "We all know how to work with ramps, and we just need to optimize it for the environment we're going to be in," says NASA's VIPER program manager Daniel Andrews. A VIPER test vehicle recently descended down a pair of metal ramps at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, as seen in the agency's recently published photos, with one beam for each set of the rover's wheels. Because the terrain where VIPER will land -- the edge of the massive Nobile Crater -- is expected to be rough, the engineering team has been testing VIPER's ability to descend the ramps at extreme angles. They have altered the steepness, as measured from the lander VIPER will descend from, and differences in elevation between the ramp for each wheel. "We have two ramps, not just for the left and right wheels, but a ramp set that goes out the back too," Andrews says. "So we actually get our pick of the litter, which one looks most safe and best to navigate as we're at that moment where we have to roll off the lander."

VIPER is a scientific successor to NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS mission, which in 2009 confirmed the presence of water ice on the lunar south pole. "It completely rewrote the books on the moon with respect to water," says Andrews, who also worked on the LCROSS mission. "That really started the moon rush, commercially, and by state actors like NASA and other space agencies." The ice, if abundant, could be mined to create rocket propellant. It could also provide water for other purposes at long-term lunar habitats, which NASA plans to construct in the late 2020s as part of the Artemis moon program.

But LCROSS only confirmed that ice was definitely present in a single crater at the moon's south pole. VIPER, a mobile rover, will probe the distribution of water ice in greater detail. Drilling beneath the lunar surface is one task. Another is to move into steep, permanently shadowed regions -- entering craters that, due to their sharp geometry, and the low angle of the sun at the lunar poles, have not seen sunlight in billions of years. The tests demonstrate the rover can navigate a 15-degree slope with ease -- enough to explore these hidden dark spots, avoiding the need to make a machine designed for trickier descents. "We think there's plenty of scientifically relevant opportunities, without having to make a superheroic rover that can do crazy things," Andrews says.

Developed by NASA Ames and Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic, VIPER is a square golf-cart-sized vehicle about 5 feet long and wide, and about 8 feet high. Unlike all of NASA's Mars rovers, VIPER has four wheels, not six. "A problem with six wheels is it creates kind of the equivalent of a track, and so you're forced to drive in a certain way," Andrews says. VIPER's four wheels are entirely independent from each other. Not only can they roll in any direction, they can be turned out, using the rover's shoulder-like joints to crawl out of the soft regolith of the kind scientists believe exists in permanently shadowed moon craters. The wheels themselves are very similar to those on the Mars rovers, but with more paddle-like treads, known as grousers, to carry the robot through fluffy regolith. [...] Together with Astrobotic, Andrews and his team have altered the ramps, and they now include specialized etchings down their lengths. The rover can detect this pattern along the rampway, using cameras in its wheel wells. "By just looking down there," the robot knows where it is, he says. "That's a new touch." Andrews is sure VIPER will be ready for deployment in 2024, however many tweaks are necessary. After all, this method is less complicated than a sky crane, he notes: "Ramps are pretty tried and true."

Stephen Clark writes via Ars Technica: When India's ambassador to the US signed up his country to the Artemis Accords last month, it signaled the world's most populous nation -- with a growing prowess in spaceflight -- could be turning toward the United States as a partner in space exploration. India became the 27th country to sign the Artemis Accords, a non-binding set of principles among like-minded nations guiding a vision for peaceful and transparent exploration of space. The accords cover the international registration of human-made space objects, the open release of scientific data, and an agreement for nations not to claim territory on the Moon or other planetary bodies, among other tenets.

Details about future cooperation between the US and India remain scarce. Nelson plans to travel to India later this year for meetings and discussions with Indian space officials. One objective of Nelson's trip will be to hammer out broad objectives for a "strategic framework" for human spaceflight cooperation. Despite the name of the Artemis Accords, there's no guarantee that India will play a significant role in NASA's Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon and eventually send humans to Mars. "There's no implication of a signatory to the Artemis accords also being part of the Artemis program," Nelson told Ars.

But none of the other 26 signatories to the Artemis Accords -- a list that includes European space powers and Japan -- has their own human spaceflight program. India is developing a human-rated spacecraft called Gaganyaan that could be ready to fly people into low-Earth orbit in 2025, several years later than originally planned. "The fact that they are a nation that intends in the future to fly own their own astronauts, is that significant? The answer is yes," Nelson said. "I think it's of significance that a major country that's not considered aligned with the US (is) a signatory." "I've described India as a sleeping giant and one that is quickly awakening," Gold told Ars. "India is absolutely vital to global space development, and Artemis in particular, since the country is active with lunar programs, Martian programs, and now even human spaceflight." "Where India might fit into the Artemis program is still to be determined," writes Clark. "The partnership between the US and India in space could take a step forward next year with the flight of an Indian astronaut to the International Space Station. NASA has agreed to provide advanced training to Indian astronauts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston before a flight opportunity to the space station in low-Earth orbit."

India's space program has "held closer ties with Russia in the past," notes Clark. "Russia provided upper-stage engines for India's GSLV Mk.II rocket until India developed its own engine for the job. And four Indian astronauts slated for the Gaganyaan program completed more than a year of training at Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow in 2021, according to Indian media."

"Despite India's overture toward a closer relationship with NASA, the Asian power remains linked with Russia," adds Clark. "India still imports significant amounts of Russian oil and has not officially condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine."

JoeRobe writes: After 63 days of agonizing silence, NASA's Martian chopper finally phoned home. The Ingenuity helicopter reestablished communication with mission control on June 28, officially logging its 52nd flight as a success, NASA recently announced. The space agency lost contact with Ingenuity as the helicopter was descending towards the surface of the Red Planet following its most recent flight on April 26.

The reason behind the communication drop was that a hill was inconveniently positioned between Ingenuity and its rover pal Perseverance, preventing the Martian pair from communicating with one another. Ingenuity relies on Perseverance to deliver its messages to Earth, using shiny antennas to exchange data at about 100 kilobits per second. The data is routed from the Ingenuity-facing antenna to the rover's main computer before being transferred to Earth by way of an orbiting spacecraft.

One of the world's most common artificial sweeteners is set to be declared a possible carcinogen next month by a leading global health body, Reuters reported Thursday, citing two sources with knowledge of the process, pitting it against the food industry and regulators. From the report: Aspartame, used in products from Coca-Cola diet sodas to Mars' Extra chewing gum and some Snapple drinks, will be listed in July as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" for the first time by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the World Health Organization's (WHO) cancer research arm, the sources said. The IARC ruling, finalised earlier this month after a meeting of the group's external experts, is intended to assess whether something is a potential hazard or not, based on all the published evidence.

It does not take into account how much of a product a person can safely consume. This advice for individuals comes from a separate WHO expert committee on food additives, known as JECFA (the Joint WHO and Food and Agriculture Organization's Expert Committee on Food Additives), alongside determinations from national regulators. However, similar IARC rulings in the past for different substances have raised concerns among consumers about their use, led to lawsuits, and pressured manufacturers to recreate recipes and swap to alternatives. That has led to criticism that the IARC's assessments can be confusing to the public.

Four volunteers will spend the next 378 days in a simulation of Mars, facing harsh, realistic challenges in tight quarters under NASA's watchful eye in preparation for a real-life mission to the red planet. From a report: Research scientist Kelly Haston, structural engineer Ross Brockwell, emergency medicine physician Nathan Jones and US Navy microbiologist Anca Selariu were locked into the virtual planet at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on Sunday as part of the first of a three-year-long simulation study by the space agency. "The knowledge we gain here will help enable us to send humans to Mars and bring them home safely," Grace Douglas, the mission's principal investigator at NASA, said during a briefing.

Nasa 3D-printed the 1,700-square-foot facility, dubbed Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog -- or CHAPEA. It will be the longest analog mission in the agency's history. The habitat -- named Mars Dune Alpha -- will feature a kitchen, private crew quarters, and two bathrooms, with medical, work, and recreation areas. The crew will be expected to carry out "mission activities," like collecting geological samples, exercising, and practicing personal hygiene and health care, with minimal contact with their family and loved ones, according to NASA. To capture the true essence of life on our neighboring planet, the crew must work through "environmental stressors," including limits on resources, periods of isolation, and equipment failures.

A new study suggests that long missions and frequent voyages to space may have an impact on astronaut brains. Space.com reports: The most enduring spaceflight-related changes in the brain yet detected are the way cavities in the brain known as ventricles can enlarge by up to 25%. Ventricles are filled with cerebrospinal fluid, which helps protect, nourish and remove waste from the brain. The absence of a gravitational pull leads the brain to shift upward in the skull and causes the ventricles to expand. It remains uncertain what the long-term consequences of this ventricle expansion might be. "How this impacts performance and long-term health is an open question," study senior author Rachael Seidler, a space health researcher at the University of Florida in Gainesville, told Space.com.

One mystery regarding this ventricle expansion is whether it differs with factors such as varying mission length, the number of previous missions flown, or time between missions. To find out, Seidler and her colleagues scanned the brains of 30 astronauts using MRI before and after spaceflight. They looked at eight astronauts who went on two-week missions, 18 on six-month missions, and four who went on longer missions of up to one year. The scientists found that longer spaceflight missions resulted in greater ventricle swelling, most of which happened during the first six months in space. "The biggest jump comes when you go from two weeks to six months in space," Seidler said in a statement. "There is no measurable change in the ventricles' volume after only two weeks."

Given the rise in space tourism in recent years, these findings may prove welcome, as shorter space trips appear to cause little physical change to the brain. In addition, the rate of ventricle enlargement tapered off after six months in space, which may also be good news â" these changes don't continue to increase over time, Seidler said. "This is important to know for future longer duration missions, such as to Mars," she noted. The scientists also found that less than three years between spaceflights may not provide enough time to give the ventricles enough time to fully recover to how they were before spaceflight. "This is a surprisingly long time," Seidler said. The researchers plan to examine long-term health in astronauts, "including testing crewmembers out to five years post-flight," said Seidler. "This will help enormously in terms of understanding the potential implications of the current results. But the work is expected to take 10 years."

The research has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Artificial photosynthesis, inspired by the natural process that enables plants to convert sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into oxygen and energy, could be crucial for space exploration and colonization. By using semiconductor materials and metallic catalysts, these devices could efficiently produce oxygen and recycle carbon dioxide, reducing reliance on heavy and unreliable systems currently used on the International Space Station. ScienceAlert reports: As my colleagues and I have investigated in a new paper, published in Nature Communications, recent advances in making artificial photosynthesis may well be key to surviving and thriving away from Earth. [...] We produced a theoretical framework to analyze and predict the performance of such integrated "artificial photosynthesis" devices for applications on Moon and Mars. Instead of chlorophyll, which is responsible for light absorption in plants and algae, these devices use semiconductor materials which can be coated directly with simple metallic catalysts supporting the desired chemical reaction. Our analysis shows that these devices would indeed be viable to complement existing life support technologies, such as the oxygen generator assembly employed on the ISS. This is particularly the case when combined with devices which concentrate solar energy in order to power the reactions (essentially large mirrors which focus the incoming sunlight).

There are other approaches too. For example, we can produce oxygen directly from lunar soil (regolith). But this requires high temperatures to work. Artificial photosynthesis devices, on the other hand, could operate at room temperature at pressures found on Mars and the Moon. That means they could be used directly in habitats and using water as the main resource. This is particularly interesting given the stipulated presence of ice water in the lunar Shackleton crater, which is an anticipated landing site in future lunar missions.

On Mars, the atmosphere composes of nearly 96% carbon dioxide - seemingly ideal for an artificial photosynthesis device. But the light intensity on the red planet is weaker than on Earth due to the larger distance from the Sun. So would this pose a problem? We actually calculated the sunlight intensity available on Mars. We showed that we can indeed use these devices there, although solar mirrors become even more important. [...] The returns would be huge. For example, we could actually create artificial atmospheres in space and produce chemicals we require on long-term missions, such as fertilizers, polymers, or pharmaceuticals. Additionally, the insights we gain from designing and fabricating these devices could help us meet the green energy challenge on Earth.

quonset writes: In what is considered to be a first, the European Space Agency (ESA) will, if everything goes to plan, stream live images of Mars from ESA's Mars Express orbiter on Friday, June 2nd. The event is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the launch of the agency's Mars Express -- a mission to take three-dimensional images of the planet's surface to see it in more complete detail.

You can watch the stream on ESA's YouTube channel for an hour starting at 6 p.m. Central European Time, or noon ET Friday. While it won't be truly live, there will be a new image about every 50 seconds of that hour, the agency said. "Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before," said James Godfrey, spacecraft operations manager at ESA's mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, in a statement. "I'm excited to see Mars as it is now -- as close to a martian 'now' as we can possibly get!"

The Mars helicopter 'Ingenuity' recently completed its 47th, 48th, and 49th flight, NASA reports on the blog for its Mars rover 'Perseverance'. That rover is making a "long ascent" up the delta in Mars' Jezero crater, "an area where scientists surmise that, billions of years ago, a river once flowed into a lake.

On its 47th flight, Ingenuity attempted "tactical and scientific scouting" for the rover, but "just narrowly missing the main area of interest." But then... Ingenuity's 48th flight produced a treasure trove of aerial images showing the exact area of interest at a resolution several orders of magnitude better than anything prior. All of these images were downlinked to Earth and provided to rover planners and scientists a full two weeks before the rover would reach this area... [T]he team chose to send the helicopter farther up the delta rather than perform additional scouting flights in the region... The Guidance Navigation and Control team once again managed to push the flight envelope with a 16-meter vertical popup at the end of the flight. At the peak, Ingenuity snapped the highest suborbital picture taken of the Martian surface since landing...

That downlink was the last time the team would hear from the helicopter for an agonizingly long time. Eager to continue up the delta, the team tried and failed to uplink the instructions for Flight 50 several times. Sol after sol, the helicopter remained elusive. Each time, the downlinked telemetry from the Helicopter Base Station (HBS) on the rover would come back showing no radio sign of the helicopter... When the rover emerged from the communications shadow on its way to Foel Drygarn and the helicopter was still nowhere to be found, the situation began to generate some unease... In more than 700 sols operating the helicopter on Mars, not once had we ever experienced a total radio blackout. Even in the worst communications environments, we had always seen some indication of activity...

Finally, on Sol 761, nearly a week after our first missed check-in, our communications team observed a single, lonely radio ACK (radio acknowledgement) at 9:44 LMST (Local Mean Solar Time), exactly the time when we'd expect to see the helicopter wakeup. Another single ACK at the same time on Sol 762 confirmed that the helicopter was indeed alive, which came as a welcome relief for the team. Ultimately, this first-of-its-kind communications blackout was a result of two factors. First, the topology between the rover and the helicopter was very challenging for the radio used by Ingenuity. In addition to the aforementioned communications shadow, a moderate ridge located just to the southeast of the Flight 49 landing site separated the helicopter from the rover's operational area. The impact of this ridge would only abate once the rover had gotten uncomfortably close to the helicopter. Second, the HBS antenna is located on the right side of the rover, low enough to the deck to see significant occlusion effects from various part of the rover...

Relying on the helicopter's onboard preflight checks to ensure vehicle safety and banking on solid communications from the rover's imminent proximity, the team uplinked the flight plan. As commanded, Ingenuity woke up and executed its 50th flight on the red planet, covering over 300 meters and setting a new altitude record of 18 m.

The rover had closed to a mere 80 meters by the time the helicopter lifted off in the Martian afternoon Sun.
And Flight 51 happened 9 days later...