Category Archives: Mars

The NASA-funded Subsurface Water Ice Mapping (SWIM) project released its fourth and most recent map of where on Mars we might find, as you might expect, subsurface water ice. NASA officials say this map will help mission planners decide where on Mars to actually send the first humans to traverse the planet.

Since 2017, SWIM led by the Planetary Science Institute and managed by NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory has collated data from multiple NASA Mars missions in order to stitch together a map of how likely it is that a given part of Mars overlays water.

For their latest map, the scientists relied on data from the Context Camera (CTX) and High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HIRISE), both of which are aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These instruments provide high-resolution imagery of the Martian terrain. For instance, they can identify tiny impact craters that are expected to have blown the Martian surface away to reveal "ice," or so-called polygon terrain, where ice melting and refreezing (and melting and freezing again) with the march of the seasons etches cracks in the ground.

Related: Mars ice deposits could pave the way for human exploration

Knowing where Martian ice can be found is crucial for crewed mission planning, which will involve careful balancing act. Astronauts want to find water ice, for one, which will give them a valuable source of water so they wont have to carry much of it from Earth. That might indicate the best landing zone falls near the Martian poles but planners also dont want to land astronauts where its too chilly. If it's too cold, the crew will need to use extra amounts of valuable energy to keep themselves warm.

"If you send humans to Mars, you want to get them as close to the equator as you can," Sydney Do, SWIMs project manager, said in a statement. An ideal spot, then, would be a patch with as low a latitude as possible that still contains accessible ice. That's where these Martian ice maps come in handy.

And even beyond mission planning, scientists believe they can use maps like SWIMs to better understand why, exactly, Mars looks the way it does.

"The amount of water ice found in locations across the Martian mid-latitudes isnt uniform; some regions seem to have more than others, and no one really knows why," Nathaniel Putzig, SWIMs co-lead at the Planetary Science Institute, said in the statement. "The newest SWIM map could lead to new hypotheses for why these variations happen."

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New map of ice on Mars could help NASA decide where to send future astronauts - Space.com

A new map of subsurface water on Mars just dropped, and it reveals regions on the Red Planet where ice may be buried beneath the surface for future astronauts to use.

The HP Spectre Fold: One Device, Three Modes, All Meh

This week, the NASA-funded Subsurface Water Ice Mapping project (SWIM) released its fourth set of maps, which the space agency is calling the most detailed since the project first began in 2017.

Using data from several NASA missions, including the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), Mars Odyssey, and the Mars Global Surveyor, SWIM identifies the possible locations of subsurface ice on Mars. For the latest SWIM map, scientists relied on two higher resolution cameras on board MRO, which has been orbiting Mars since 2006 in search of water. As a result, the new map has a much more detailed view of subsurface water than previous iterations which relied on lower-resolution imagers, radar, thermal mappers and spectrometers.

Data from MROs Context Camera data was used to further refine the northern hemisphere maps while data from HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) was incorporated for the first time to provide the most detailed perspective of the ices boundary line as close to the equator as possible, according to NASA. HiRISE even captured a 492-foot-wide (150-meter-wide) impact crater with a motherlode of ice that had been hiding beneath the surface, the space agency wrote.

The spacecraft detected what appears to be subsurface frozen water along Mars mid-latitudes. This region on Mars is ideal for the landing of future missions as it is characterized by a thicker atmosphere that makes it easier for spacecraft to slow down during their descent to the Martian surface. The real sweet spot for astronauts to land on Mars would be at the southernmost edge of the northern mid-latitudes region, where its close enough to the buried ice but also not too far from the equator so that astronauts can enjoy slightly warmer weather.

If you send humans to Mars, you want to get them as close to the equator as you can, Sydney Do, SWIM project manager at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. The less energy you have to expend on keeping astronauts and their supporting equipment warm, the more you have for other things theyll need.

The Martian poles have plenty of ice, but its way too cold over there for astronauts to survive for a long time.

The reason why NASA is more interested in ice found beneath the surface is that any liquid water found on Mars would be unstable. Mars atmosphere is so thin that water would immediately evaporate. Subsurface ice, on the other hand, is kept in a safe spot where astronauts can drill ice cores to extract it.

The buried ice will be a valuable resource for future astronauts on Mars who can use it for drinking water or to make rocket fuel. That, in turn, will allow them to carry a lot less to the surface of the Red Planet.

Scientists are also interested to know where the subsurface ice is located on Mars to help them figure out the planets climate throughout its history. The amount of water ice found in locations across the Martian mid-latitudes isnt uniform; some regions seem to have more than others, and no one really knows why, Nathaniel Putzig, SWIMs other co-lead at the Planetary Science Institute, said in a statement. The newest SWIM map could lead to new hypotheses for why these variations happen.

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Detailed Mars Water Map Shows Where to Land Future Explorers - Gizmodo

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Marss liquid-metal core seems to be smaller than previous studies suggested (artists impression).Credit: Claus Lunau/Science Photo Library

In the interior of Mars, a layer of molten rock envelops the liquid-metal core, which is smaller than previously thought. Scientists discovered the unique layer by analysing the seismic energy that vibrated through the planet after a meteorite impact. The seismic waves speed depends on the types of material that they are travelling through. The molten-rock layer might be left over from a magma ocean that once covered the planet.

Nature | 5 min read

References: Nature paper 1 & paper 2

The prominent open-access science journal eLife has fired its editor-in-chief, Michael Eisen, after he retweeted a satirical article referencing the IsraelHamas war. The board of directors clearly view this as me having done one too many somethings, Eisen says. eLifes board issued a statement indicating that the biologist had been dismissed more broadly because of his approach to leadership, communication and social media. The decision has spurred an exodus of eLife editors, and a protest letter in support of Eisen has so far been signed by more than 2,000 people.

Nature | 6 min read

An artificial intelligence (AI) system mimics the human ability to quickly fold new words into an existing vocabulary and use them in fresh contexts. By being programmed to learn from its mistakes, the neural network outperformed the chatbot ChatGPT at making generalizations about language, scoring as well as and sometimes even better than human volunteers. This suggests that there are ways to reduce the gargantuan amount of necessary training data and make systems more efficient learners, says AI researcher Elia Bruni.

Nature | 5 min read

Reference: Nature paper

Two solar probes launched in 2018 and 2020 are giving scientists the most detailed views ever of the Sun. The two missions sometimes work together to capture events such as one of the largest solar eruptions ever recorded. The amount of details, the amount of complexity and also the violence of the event weve never seen it before and its just impressive, says solar physicist Nour Raouafi. The observations can help space-weather forecasters to better understand solar storms, which can disrupt communications and knock out power grids once they reach Earth.

Nature | 8 min read

Postdocs in some parts of the world are striking to highlight their struggles, such as low pay, job insecurity and worries about career progression. Some funders and employers around the world are taking steps to improve the postdoc experience. Others must follow, argues a Nature editorial, or risk losing the next generation of scientists.

Nature | 5 min read

Gordon Conway (19382023) was passionate about agriculture and sustainability long before they were fashionable topics. By paying close attention to local farming practices, Conway revolutionized rural-development approaches. I remember Gordon and Robert [Chambers, a development scholar] returning from a visit to Wollo in northern Ethiopia in 1988, full of excitement about the lessons they had learnt from farmers, writes researcher Ian Scoones about his former supervisor.

Nature | 5 min read

Philosopher Catarina Dutilh Novaes says that misinformation isnt a new problem and is often entangled with worries about changing information-sharing technologies. (Undark | 6 min read)

Today, Im gazing at 276 feline facial expressions, which cats have probably evolved over the course of their 10,000-year history with us.

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Daily briefing: A unique layer of molten rock envelops Mars's core - Nature.com

A CITY ON MARS: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

Face it, folks. Earth is finished. Its overheated, overcrowded, overregulated. Its the ultimate fixer-upper, a dump we inherited from our parents that wed be cruel to pass on to our children. Its time to pull up stakes. Its time for Mars.

Or maybe not.

Lighting out for the solar system is an appealing fantasy, but A City on Mars, an exceptional new piece of popular science by the Soonish authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, suggests we shouldnt be so quick to give up on Earth. Forceful, engaging and funny, it is an essential reality check for anyone who has ever looked for home in the night sky.

A City on Mars groups the arguments in favor of immediate colonization into two categories. The first is the high-minded idea that mankind must spread to other planets before civilization crumbles, as Elon Musk told Walter Isaacson. The second is the hot tub argument: Going to space is worth it because its cool.

The authors dismantle the first theory with tact. Self-described science geeks, the Weinersmiths embarked on this book expecting to write a sociological road map to building off-world colonies in the near future. But as they dived into their research, they found that the loudest advocates for space settlement are so dazzled by the beauty of their rockets that they wave away the stuff regular lives are made of, like food and birth, democracy and law. The main problem, the Weinersmiths write, is that Space is terrible. All of it. Terrible, adding:

The Moon isnt just a sort of gray Sahara without air. Its surface is made of jagged, electrically charged microscopic glass and stone, which clings to pressure suits and landing vehicles. Nor is Mars just an off-world Death Valley its soil is laden with toxic chemicals, and its thin carbonic atmosphere whips up worldwide dust storms that blot out the sun for weeks at a time. And those are the good places to land.

The terribleness of space might be worth overlooking, they concede, if civilization really were about to crumble. But it isnt. Life on Earth is hard. It always has been. But mankind has no problems that would be solved by relocating to a place without food, water or air. As the Weinersmiths write, An Earth with climate change and nuclear war and, like, zombies and werewolves is still a way better place than Mars.

And what about the hot tub? The Weinersmiths argue that the current state of space law means an unregulated scramble for the vanishingly few resources of the moon and Mars would make war on Earth more likely. The greater our off-world presence, the easier it would be for a terrorist or disgruntled billionaire to hurl an asteroid at Earth and wipe out the species we are theoretically trying to save.

The more capacity we have to do things in space, they write, the more capacity we have for self-annihilation.

Such grim thoughts are tempered by levity: A City on Mars is hilarious. The breezy prose is studded with charming cartoons that illustrate everything from a two-person zero gravity sex suit to the baffling urination device NASA engineers designed for women astronauts, apparently without consulting any women. There are sections on Getting Strange in the Lagrange, or, Can You Do It in Space? and How to Have Space Babies Without Marrying Your Space Cousin, a chapter on funny astronaut names, and a whole paragraph about lunarcrete a theoretical building material made by mixing Martian soil with human blood.

But most of the book is devoted to fascinating, practical questions of colonization. There are histories of rocketry, of space law, of celestial advertising. We learn how to build an orbital colony, why barren lava tubes are the choicest Martian real estate, and that company towns are a bad idea when management controls its workforces food, water, light and air.

Throughout, the Weinersmiths advocate for a colonization approach that they call wait and go big. Fund hundreds of biospherelike experiments on Earth to learn about human survival in a closed habitat. Do systematic studies of animal reproduction in orbit, so we can find out if its even safe for people to get pregnant away from Earth. Modernize space law and establish a regulatory agency to ensure that the cosmos is treasured like Antarctica, not savaged like the Amazon. Once the framework is in place, move hundreds of thousands of settlers all at once enough to establish a real civilization. Enough to thrive.

In the meantime, appreciate what we have. Earth isnt perfect, the Weinersmiths write, but as planets go its a pretty good one. This book will make you happy to live on this planet a good thing, because youre not leaving anytime soon.

A CITY ON MARS: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? | Kelly and Zach Weinersmith | Penguin Press | 430 pp. | $32

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Book review: A City on Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith - The New York Times

By: Tribune-Review Saturday, October 28, 2023 | 12:29 AM

Christopher Horner | Tribune-Review

Mars Evan Wright works out on Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2023, at Mars.

Luke Goodworth hit Aidan Alessio with a 20-yard touchdown pass with 10 seconds left in the game to give Mars a 17-14 victory over North Catholic in a Class 4A Greater Allegheny Conference game Friday night at J.C. Stone Field in North Park.

With the win, Mars claimed the Greater Allegheny Conference title. Goodworth threw for 106 yards while teammate Evan Wright ran for 172 yards for Mars (8-2, 5-0).

North Catholics Jack Fennell ran for 99 yards and a touchdown and caught a 71-yard scoring pass from Kaden Sarver, who tossed for 126 yards.

Connellsville 35, Laurel Highlands 13 Connellsville (5-5, 2-4) beat Laurel Highlands (2-8, 1-5) for the Big Seven Conference win.

Trinity 61, Ringgold 21 In the Big Seven Conference, Trinity (6-4, 4-2) returned three interceptions for touchdowns in its 47-point first quarter as the Hillers beat Ringgold (0-10, 0-6). Luke Lacock caught two touchdown passes from Jonah Williamson and returned a kickoff 93 yards for another score. Williamson threw for 93 yards and ran for a 44-yard touchdown.

Blackhawk 20, New Castle 14 Blackhawk (1-0, 1-6) beat New Castle (1-9, 1-6) in the Parkway Conference.

Chartiers Valley 41, Ambridge 31 Austin Efthimiades ran for 276 yards and four touchdowns to lead Chartiers Valley (3-7, 3-4) to a playoff spot with the Parkway Conference win against Ambridge (2-8, 1-6).

Plum 49, Indiana 7 Nick Odom rushed for 210 yards and a touchdown as Class 5A Plum (4-6) beat Class 4A Indiana (2-8). Sean Franzi threw for 174 yards and two touchdowns for Plum while Trevor Smith threw for 177 yards for Indiana.

Tags: Ambridge, Blackhawk, Chartiers Valley, Connellsville, Indiana, Laurel Highlands, Mars, New Castle, North Catholic, Plum, Ringgold, Trinity

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WPIAL Class 4A football roundup: Late TD lifts Mars to Greater Allegheny Conference title - TribLIVE.com

The map could help the agency decide where the first astronauts to the Red Planet should land. The more available water, the less missions will need to bring.

Buried ice will be a vital resource for the first people to set foot on Mars, serving as drinking water and a key ingredient for rocket fuel. But it would also be a major scientific target: Astronauts or robots could one day drill ice cores much as scientists do on Earth, uncovering the climate history of Mars and exploring potential habitats (past or present) for microbial life.

The need to look for subsurface ice arises because liquid water isnt stable on the Martian surface: The atmosphere is so thin that water immediately vaporizes. Theres plenty of ice at the Martian poles mostly made of water, although carbon dioxide, or dry ice, can be found as well but those regions are too cold for astronauts (or robots) to survive for long.

Thats where the NASA-funded Subsurface Water Ice Mapping project comes in. SWIM, as its known, recently released its fourth set of maps the most detailed since the project began in 2017.

Led by the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and managed by NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, SWIM pulls together data from several NASA missions, including the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), 2001 Mars Odyssey, and the now-inactive Mars Global Surveyor. Using a mix of data sets, scientists have identified the likeliest places to find Martian ice that could be accessed from the surface by future missions.

Instruments on these spacecraft have detected what look like masses of subsurface frozen water along Mars mid-latitudes. The northern mid-latitudes are especially attractive because they have a thicker atmosphere than most other regions on the planet, making it easier to slow a descending spacecraft. The ideal astronaut landing sites would be a sweet spot at the southernmost edge of this region far enough north for ice to be present but close enough to the equator to ensure the warmest possible temperatures for astronauts in an icy region.

If you send humans to Mars, you want to get them as close to the equator as you can, said Sydney Do, JPLs SWIM project manager. The less energy you have to expend on keeping astronauts and their supporting equipment warm, the more you have for other things theyll need.

Previous iterations of the map relied on lower-resolution imagers, radar, thermal mappers, and spectrometers, all of which can hint at buried ice but cant outright confirm its presence or quantity. For this latest SWIM map, scientists relied on two higher-resolution cameras aboard MRO. Context Camera data was used to further refine the northern hemisphere maps and, for the first time, HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) data was incorporated to provide the most detailed perspective of the ices boundary line as close to the equator as possible.

Scientists routinely use HiRISE to study fresh impact craters caused by meteoroids that may have excavated chunks of ice. Most of these craters are no more than 33 feet (10 meters) in diameter, although in 2022 HiRISE captured a 492-foot-wide (150-meter-wide) impact crater that revealed a motherlode of ice that had been hiding beneath the surface.

These ice-revealing impacts provide a valuable form of ground truth in that they show us locations where the presence of ground ice is unequivocal, said Gareth Morgan, SWIMs co-lead at the Planetary Science Institute. We can then use these locations to test that our mapping methods are sound.

In addition to ice-exposing impacts, the new map includes sightings by HiRISE of so-called polygon terrain, where the seasonal expansion and contraction of subsurface ice causes the ground to form polygonal cracks. Seeing these polygons extending around fresh, ice-filled impact craters is yet another indication that theres more ice hidden beneath the surface at these locations.

There are other mysteries that scientists can use the map to study, as well.

The amount of water ice found in locations across the Martian mid-latitudes isnt uniform; some regions seem to have more than others, and no one really knows why, said Nathaniel Putzig, SWIMs other co-lead at the Planetary Science Institute. The newest SWIM map could lead to new hypotheses for why these variations happen. He added that it could also help scientists tweak models of how the ancient Martian climate evolved over time, leaving larger amounts of ice deposited in some regions and lesser amounts in others.

SWIMs scientists hope the project will serve as a foundation for a proposed Mars Ice Mapper mission an orbiter that would be equipped with a powerful radar custom-designed to search for near-surface ice beyond where HiRISE has confirmed its presence.

Andrew Good Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-393-2433 andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Alana Johnson NASA Headquarters, Washington 301-286-6284 / 202-358-1501 karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov

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NASA Is Locating Ice on Mars With This New Map - NASA