The star system is beautiful, but also dangerous — and likely doomed.
Category: futurism – Page 1,067
NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
JUST IN: Jezero Crater will be the landing site of NASA’s next rover being sent to Mars in 2020. This area, with a history of containing water, may have ancient organic molecules & other potential signs of microbial life from billions of years ago.
NASA has chosen Jezero Crater as the landing site for its upcoming Mars 2020 rover mission after a five year search, during which every available detail of more than 60 candidate locations on the Red Planet was scrutinized and debated by the mission team and the planetary science community.
The rover mission is scheduled to launch in July 2020 as NASA’s next step in exploration of the Red Planet. It will not only seek signs of ancient habitable conditions – and past microbial life — but the rover also will collect rock and soil samples and store them in a cache on the planet’s surface. NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) are studying future mission concepts to retrieve the samples and return them to Earth, so this landing site sets the stage for the next decade of Mars exploration.
“The landing site in Jezero Crater offers geologically rich terrain, with landforms reaching as far back as 3.6 billion years old, that could potentially answer important questions in planetary evolution and astrobiology,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Getting samples from this unique area will revolutionize how we think about Mars and its ability to harbor life.”
After the International Space Station
The future of the ISS is uncertain, so what does our future in space look like?
One of the fathers of AI is worried about its future
AI research by itself will tend to lead to concentrations of power, money, and researchers … this is not healthy. Even in a democracy, it’s dangerous to have too much power concentrated in a few hands.
Yoshua Bengio wants to stop talk of an AI arms race, and make the technology more accessible to the developing world.
Surprising Study: Orangutans Are Only Non-Human Primates Who Can ‘Talk’ About the Past
We already know that orangutans are some of the smartest land animals on Earth. Now, researchers have found evidence that these amazing apes can communicate about past events—the first time this trait has been observed in a non-human primate.
A new study published in the journal Science Advances revealed that when wild Sumatran orangutan mothers spotted a predator, they suppressed their alarm calls to others until the threat was no longer there.
How Europe Will Save Space Travel
Europe is leading one of the most important space travel efforts of this century.