These are heady days for the Chinese space program. On the heels of a successful 2019 mission to the dark side of the moon and the launch of the core of an ambitious low Earth orbit space station, the Chinese National Space Administration has done what only NASA has accomplished before -- landing a rover …
Continue reading "China’s Presence in Space Grows and So Do Its Accomplishments"
The helicopter Ingenuity has now flown three times on Mars and has proven itself to be a dependable (for now) and potentially ground-breaking addition to Mars science. Ingenuity, brought to Mars as part of the Perseverance rover landing, took off early Sunday morning on its third and most ambitious Martian mission yet. The 4-pound …
One of the fondest dreams and top priorities of space science for years has been to bring a piece of Mars back to Earth to study in the kind of depth possible only in a cutting-edge laboratory. While the instruments on Mars rovers can tell us a lot, returning a sample to study here on …
Once it became clear in the past decade that the surface of ancient Mars, the inevitable question arose regarding what happened to it all since the planet is today so very dry. And the widely-accepted answer has been that the water escaped into space, especially after the once thicker atmosphere of Mars was stripped away. …
Mars is receiving visitors these days. Quite a few of them. The most prominent visitor is NASA's Perseverance rover, which made a difficult but smooth precision landing at 3.55 ET this afternoon. The rover now sits in Jezero Crater, in an area that clearly once had lots of water flowing. The site was selected, in …
Continue reading "NASA’s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars — The Third Martian Arrival in a Week"
When our sun was young, it was significantly less luminous and sent out significantly less warming energy than it does now. Scientists estimate that 4 million years ago, when the sun and our solar system were 500 million years old, the energy that the sun produced and dispersed was about 75 percent of what it …
For space scientists of all stripes, few goals are as crucial as bringing pieces of Mars, of asteroids, of other planets and moons back to Earth for the kind of intensive study only possible here. Space missions can, and have, told us many truths about the solar system, but having a piece of Mars …
Change is the one constant in our world-- moving in ways tiny and enormous, constructive and destructive. We're living now in a time when a rampaging pandemic circles the globe and when the climate is changing in so many worrisome and potentially devastating ways. With these ominous changes as a backdrop, it is perhaps useful …
Continue reading "Everything Changes: The Rise and Fall of the Northern Ocean of Mars"
There is no doubt that early Mars had long period of warmer and much wetter climates before its atmosphere thinned too much to retain that liquid H20 on the surface. As we know from the Curiosity mission to Gale Crater and other orbital findings, regions of that warmer and wetter Mars had flowing water …
The search for life, or signs of past life beyond Earth is now a central issue in space science, is central to the mission of NASA, and is actually a potentially breakthrough discovery in the making for humanity. The scientific stakes could hardly be higher. But identifying evidence of ancient microbial life – and …
Continue reading "PIXL: A New NASA Instrument For Ferreting Out Clues of Ancient Life on Mars"
Many Worlds 