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Artist’s concept of the AREE Venus rover. The rover would be wind-powered and able to last on Venus’ hellish surface much longer than previous landers. Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech.

There’ve been missions to Venus over the past decades, but Venus is a tough place to visit, with temperatures on its surface hot enough to melt lead. The last probe that landed on Venus’ hellish surface was part of the Vega 2 mission in 1985; it transmitted data from Venus’ surface for 57 minutes. Now NASA wants to visit Venus’ surface again, not with just another lander … but with a rover.

On February 21, 2020, NASA announced a public challenge to help design a future Venus rover called Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments (AREE). The challenge – Exploring Hell: Avoiding Obstacles on a Clockwork Rover – is specifically to develop an obstacle-avoidance sensor for the rover. The concept is being funded by a grant from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program.

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NASA has contracted SpaceX to carry out the launch for its upcoming Psyche mission to a strange metal asteroid in our solar system. The launch will use one of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rockets, for a cost of $117 million.

“The Psyche mission will journey to a unique metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche, which orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter,” NASA explained in a statement. “The asteroid is considered unique, as it appears to largely be made of the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet — one of the building blocks of our solar system.” Astronomers believe that studying this unusual asteroid could help us to understand how planets develop, including planets like Earth.

“Deep within rocky, terrestrial planets, including Earth, scientists infer the presence of metallic cores, but these lie unreachably far below the planet’s rocky mantles and crusts,” NASA said. “Because we cannot see or measure Earth’s core directly, the mission to Psyche offers a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created terrestrial planets.”

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Boeing is offering signing bonuses up to $30,000 for experienced satellite engineers and procurement specialists, saying Friday needs the staff “to help build assets for the U.S. Air Force and its allies.”

The company posted a notice about its hiring on LinkedIn, listing more than open 75 jobs for what Boeing said were its “rapidly growing” satellite program efforts.

“We have an urgent need for Security Cleared Satellite Engineers to help build assets for the U.S. Air Force and its Allies. We’re offering a potential $30k sign-on bonus,” the posting said.

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Scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis revealed on February 24 that they had successfully converted human stem cells into insulin-producing cells and demonstrated in mice infused with the converted cells that they can act as a rapid cure to diabetes.

The research transformed other types of cells into beta pancreatic cells which produce the insulin hormone needed by the body to break up blood sugar.

The findings were published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

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