You should watch this animation of how Perseverance will land on Mars this week. Really.
image: NASA/JPL (screengrab from video)
Lots going on this month!
I’ve been working on the next book, and so haven’t mentioned all the cool stuff going on with Mars this month. Over the past week, two spacecraft successfully inserted themselves into orbit around the planet.
The Hope orbiter, from the United Arab Emirates, will be studying weather patterns.
The Tianwen-1 mission, from China, is composed of an orbiter, deployable camera, lander, and rover. The overall mission objective is to search for evidence of life and to assess the environment. The lander and its rover will attempt to land in May of this year.
And next week, on the afternoon of February 18, Perseverance will land in Jezero Crater. Perseverance will be looking for evidence of past and present life, testing oxygen production technology for future human missions, collecting rock and regolith samples for eventual return to Earth, and flying the first helicopter on Mars.
For more information on Perseverance, check out this in-depth article from The Smithsonian.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/06/69/0669ee57-941b-4c6c-830b-53cfc94dce96/09_touchdown_10k_social.jpg)
Smithsonian Magazine Mars time
How will we keep time on Mars? It’s complicated.
Lots of space stuff going on!
I’ve been a little caught up in day-to-day living and not posted anything about all the cool stuff going on in space right now.
Mars is getting new robots!
YouTube
And Endeavour is bringing Bob and Doug home this weekend!
Lava tubes
“This would be the first time any of the children saw the surface. The colonists had built underground, using existing caves and lava tubes where possible, building and burying structures where necessary. This was to protect themselves from solar and cosmic radiation. On Earth, the atmosphere and magnetic field serve this purpose. But Mars has little of either, so dirt and rock filled the role.”
– from Scratching the Surface: Generation Mars, Prelude
A new paper explores lava tubes in the Hellas Planitia as possible habitats for humans.
Thoughtful Mars lessons
This is a wonderful series of lessons on Mars and why/how humans will go there.
Mensa for Kids I see what they did there…
Ridiculous title, but the science behind it is quite interesting. Decades old data from Voyager 2 as it passed by Uranus suggests the planet is losing some of its atmosphere through an interesting mechanism. This could also hold clues to how Mars lost its atmosphere.
Futurism The perennial question: Moon or Mars?
We don’t need to go to the Moon in order to go to Mars. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go to the Moon. It’s just not a prerequisite.
I love this quote from John Grunsfeld, when asked about the radiation risk of a Mars trip: “How does that compare to the risk of blowing up on the launchpad or on ascent; getting hit by a meteor, asteroid, debris, some kind of space junk on the way there; burning up in the Mars atmosphere; burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere on the way back; or missing the Earth? You add up all those risks, and the [risk of radiation exposure] is kind of just another one.”
The Atlantic Climbing on Mars
Pacific Spaceflight is field testing ideas for Mars suits.
“We bet a lot of early Mars climbing will be like nineteenth-century mountaineering—scrambling/third class/5.0 stuff where robots can’t go, or aid climbing with some crazy rack of tools.”
Climbing 