On the 91st Martian day, or sol, of NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter performed its sixth flight. The flight was designed to expand the flight envelope and demonstrate aerial-imaging capabilities by taking stereo images of a region of interest to the west. Ingenuity was commanded to climb to an altitude of 33 feet (10 meters) before translating 492 feet (150 meters) to the southwest at a ground speed of 9 mph (4 meters per second). At that point, it was to translate 49 feet (15 meters) to the south while taking images toward the west, then fly another 164 feet (50 meters) northeast and land.
Let me start off by answering “Angry Astronaut’s” last question (@22:00 in) first: “Does this look like living at the top of Mount Everest to you?” Yes Angry it does. It ALSO looks like living on Mars because that interior in both cases is where you’re going to spend a lot of time so what’s happening on the INSIDE isn’t very different at all. That’s a problem (and an opportunity) for a LOT of the so-called “easy” concepts for living on Mars here people: Why don’t you put some money where your mouths are and “PROVE it” at least a little bit. Think the “Marsha” design is so hot? (I don’t btw) Then how about we BUILD some actual working “prototypes” (which the company did an indigogo on and failed to either raise enough money nor have they gone any further with the effort) someplace LIKE the ‘basecamp’ area of Everest. It will be vastly less difficult and expensive than building on Mars or the Moon but you know what, it would go a long way towards shutting up the ‘detractors’ with all their (arguably and often unanswered) questions wouldn’t it? Build on as a B&B on some expensive vacation land? Nah, how about building one out at the Mars Desert Research Station or Devon Island?
A new study contradicts the origin story of the Milky Way, suggesting that it evolved gradually over time rather than being formed by a giant collision.
What is really going on with Virgin Galactic, Get the inside scoop from the initial developer of the engine technology who worked for Burt Rutan on SpaceShipOne and also worked SpaceShipTwo-Tim Pickens, See why he, and I are concerned about Virgin Galactic. Tim Pickens is an entrepreneur, inventor, innovator, engineer and educator. He specializes in commercial space, technical product development and solutions, and business consulting and strategy for space and technical companies. He is known for applying a lean philosophy to develop creative solutions and innovative partnerships to provide responsive, low-cost products and services for government and private industry. Pickens’ 25+ years of experience in the aerospace industry, specializing in the design, fabrication and testing of propulsion hardware systems, has earned him a reputation as one of the industry’s leaders in these areas. Early in his career, Pickens served as propulsion lead for Scaled Composites on SpaceShipOne, winner of the $10 million Ansari X Prize. He also worked for small hardware-rich aerospace companies in Huntsville, and later supported the Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo venture.
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Researchers have discovered a possible new species of bacteria that survives by producing and ‘breathing’ its own oxygen. The finding suggests that some microbes could have thrived without oxygen-producing plants on the early Earth — and on other planets — by using their own oxygen to garner energy from methane (CH4).
“The mechanism we have now discovered shows that, long ago, these organisms could have exploited the methane sources on Earth and possibly on other planets and moons by mechanisms that we didn’t know existed,” says Mike Jetten, a microbiologist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and part of the team that conducted the study, which is published in Nature today1.
The oxygen-producing bacterium, provisionally named Methylomirabilis oxyfera, grows in a layer of methane-rich but oxygen-poor mud at the bottom of rivers and lakes. The microbes live on a diet of methane and nitrogen oxides, such as nitrite and nitrate. These nitrogen-containing compounds are especially abundant in sediment contaminated by agricultural runoff.
The theory used to be that hydrocarbons were created in “shocks,” or violent stellar events that cause a lot of turbulence and, with the shock waves, make atoms into ions, which are more likely to combine.
The data from the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory has since proved that theory wrong. Scientists at Herschel studied the components in the Orion Nebula, mapping the amount, temperature and motions for the carbon-hydrogen molecule (CH), the carbon-hydrogen positive ion (CH+) and their parent molecule: the carbon ion (C+).
They found that in Orion, CH+ is emitting light instead of absorbing it, which means that it is warmer than the background gas. This was surprising to scientists because the CH+ molecule is incredibly reactive and needs a high amount of energy to form, so when it interacts with the background hydrogen in the cloud it gets destroyed.
You’re on the PRO Robotics channel and in this issue of High Tech News. The latest news from Mars, the first flight of Elon Musk’s starship around the Earth, artificial muscles, a desktop bioprinter and why IBM teaches artificial intelligence to code? All the most interesting technology news in one issue!
Nüwa’s geography will naturally shield residents from radiation; the idea is to excavate the tall, sheer cliffs there and build the Martian city inside.
Paradoxically, Jupiter’s ice-covered moon of Europa may have seafloor volcanoes capable of generating enough chemical energy and heat to support life, says new paper.
