Category Archives: Mars

Mars Food shared itslatest Purpose in Action Report, which showcases the company's work to provide betterfood today and a better world tomorrow, including the progress they have made towards their purpose commitments.

In 2021 Mars Food set out its new five-year ambition to provide 5.5 billion healthy meals per year by 2025 - an increase from its previous ambition to deliver 4 billion healthy meals per year, which was achieved in 2021. This new ambition is supported by a series of five-year commitments to drive continued action, which are focused on three key areas:

The report details the strong progress that Mars Food has made against these targets over the last year, including:

With food insecurity remaining an increasing issue for many people around the world, the company has also partnered with food banks and social aid charities to donate 23 million meals to those in need.

Mars Food's 2025 Purpose Commitments are the latest goals the company has set themselves as they strive to provide better food today and a better world tomorrow.

Mars Food's 2025 purpose target take action on:?

Better Food Today

Better World Tomorrow

Drive ?Brand Purpose??

Furthermore, Mars Food is also reflecting these commitments internally?by supporting its Associates in being able to?enjoy dinner at home with their families, whether that's?leaving the office on time or switching off at home.

Shaid Shah, Global President?of?Mars Food, Edge Multisales and Global Customers?said:??

At Mars Food we are dedicated to providing better food today and a better world tomorrow. We believe a better world tomorrow is one where more people have access to healthy meals; more people cook and sit down together to enjoy shared dinnertimes; and more food can be produced with less environmental impact. Over the last year we have delivered 4.3 billion healthy meals which have been shared on dinner tables around the world, donated more than 23 million meals to those most in need within our communities and progressed our sustainability agenda. I am incredibly proud the progress we have made over the last year. However, we know we are not perfect and we still have much more to do. Our Mars Food Purpose continues to guide us as we strive to make more progress so that we can continue to make big, meaningful differences to billions of lives around the world.

To see the full Mars Food Purpose?in Action Report, click?here.?

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ABOUT MARS, INCORPORATED?

For more than a century, Mars, Incorporated has been driven by the belief that the world we want tomorrow starts with how we do business today. This common purpose unites our 140,000+ Associates. It is at the center of who we are as a global, family-owned business, and it fuels how we are transforming, innovating, and evolving to make a positive impact on the world.?

Every year, our diverse and expanding portfolio of quality confectionery, food, and pet care products and services delight millions of people and supports millions of pets. With almost $45 billion in annual sales, we produce some of the world's best-loved brands including Ben's Original, CESAR, Cocoavia, DOVE, EXTRA, KIND, M&M's, SNICKERS, PEDIGREE, ROYAL CANIN, and WHISKAS.? We are creating a better world for pets? through nutrition, breakthrough programs in diagnostics, wearable health monitoring, DNA testing, pet welfare and comprehensive veterinary care with AniCura, BANFIELD,?BLUEPEARL, Linnaeus and VCA.??

We know we can only be truly successful if our partners and the communities in which we operate prosper. The Mars Five Principles Quality, Responsibility, Mutuality, Efficiency and Freedom inspire our Associates to act every day to help create a better world tomorrow in which the planet, its people and pets can thrive.??

For more information about Mars, please visitwww.mars.com.

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Mars Food delivers 4.3B healthy meals to families around the world and provides 23M meals to communities - Benzinga

With the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) giving the environmental clearances necessary for Starship to blast off from SpaceX's launch site, we are now a step closer to Elon Musk's long-cherished dream of making a human settlement on Mars.

For centuries, the Red Planet has been a part of human cultures and civilizations, and with the advances in modern technology, we are moving towards a future when humanity will step foot on the planet.

Missions sent to Mars have helped us understand this planet better over the years. While there is a lot more that we need to learn before we set up a human settlement, we already have some breathtaking images of the planet that will make any adventurer yearn to go there.

The Danielson Crater is an impact crater located in the southwest Arabia Terra region of the planet. The crater's diameter is about 42 miles (67 km) and this image captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) in 2019 shows sedimentary rock and sand in the crater.

According to NASA, the rock in the crater may have been formed millions of years ago when loose sediments settled into the crater, one layer at a time. Over the years, these layers were cemented in their places and now protrude out like steps on a staircase. Martian winds have scattered sands on these layers, giving it a zebra-stripes-like appearance.

Not all craters on Mars are millions of years old. In December 2019, the MRO captured this relatively new crater at the North Pole of the Red Planet. Low temperatures on the Martian surface have filled the crater with ice. Since we haven't found any traces of water on the planet so far, ice is made after carbon dioxide, the most abundant gas on the planet, has frozen due to low temperatures.

Special credit is also due to the HIRISE camera on the MRO that has managed to capture this crater that is barely 650 feet (200 m) in diameter in fine detail.

Around 2.5 billion years ago, Mars faced catastrophic outflows of groundwater that carved out flood channels very quickly in the planet's Southern Highlands. These flood channels are visible today as basaltic dunes amidst uplifted blocks in an ancient impact crater about 173 miles (280 km) in diameter.

The image above is of a site called Aram Chaos located within this impact crater which also has a large outflow channel named Ares Vallis, that runs for over a thousand miles (1,600 km) towards the northwest into the Northern Lowlands at Chryse Planitia, not very far from where the Mars Pathfinder landed.

Unlike the Earth, Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, and one can watch both of them rise when on the planet.

The larger of the two, Phobos can be seen primarily in the panel of images above while the smaller Deimos is also seen in the second panel, captured by the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera on NASA's Odyssey Orbiter.Unlike the spherical moon that the Earth has, Phobos has a bit of an odd shape and revolves around Mars thrice a day.

The larger moon also holds the unique distinction of orbiting closest to its planet but is also expected tocrash or break up into a ring around the planet in another 50 million years. Before it does that, a human settlement should be able to see it rise and set in the Martian sky.

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5 stunning images of the Red Planet that make you want to go there - Interesting Engineering

Never-before-seen microbes living deep beneath the permafrost at one of the coldest and saltiest water springs on Earth could provide a blueprint for life on Mars.

At Lost Hammer Spring, which lies above the Arctic Circle in Nunavut, Canada, briny water bubbles up through 2,000 feet (600 meters) of permafrost. The water has a salinity of about 24%, and the salt acts as an antifreeze to allow the water to remain liquid even at subzero temperatures. But it's the lack of free oxygen less than 1 part per million that makes the conditions there truly alien.

Indeed, the cold, salty and oxygen-free environment makes Lost Hammer Spring one of Earth's closest analogues to Mars, which has widespread salt deposits left by ancient water. And some researchers have argued that changes observed in gullies and dark streaks on the slopes of crater walls could have come from briny water welling up from underground, similar to the spring at Lost Hammer, although many scientists favor dry avalanches as perhaps a more likely explanation.

Related: How Martian microbes could survive in the salty puddles of the Red Planet

Now, a team of scientists has found microbial life in the extreme conditions of Lost Hammer Spring and has sequenced the genomes of about 110 organisms living there, revealing clues about how life could potentially survive in Mars' harsh environment.

Although microbes have been discovered in Mars-like conditions on Earth before, this is one of the first studies to find these "extremophiles" to be active in such an inhospitable environment.

"It took a couple of years of working with the sediment before we were able to successfully detect active microbial communities," Elisse Magnuson, a doctoral student at McGill University in Montreal and lead author of a new study describing the findings, said in a statement (opens in new tab).

To survive the harsh conditions of Lost Hammer Spring, the microbes are anaerobic, meaning they don't breathe oxygen. Instead, to power their metabolisms, they consume methane and other inorganic compounds, such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfate and sulfide, all of which are found on Mars.

In particular, the presence of methane on Mars is an unsolved mystery; scientists are divided on whether its origin is geological or biological. The sediment in the permafrost at Lost Hammer Spring continually emits gases incorporating methane and could provide a further clue as to the origin of the detected methane plumes on Mars.

"The microbes we found and described at Lost Hammer Spring are surprising because, unlike other organisms, they don't depend on organic material or oxygen to live," Lyle Whyte, who led the research team and is the Canada research chair in polar microbiology at McGill University, said in the statement. "They can also fix [i.e., convert into organic molecules] carbon dioxide and nitrogen gases from the atmosphere, all of which makes them highly adapted to both surviving and thriving in very extreme environments on Earth and beyond."

The results provide a genetic blueprint for how microbial life could survive today or in the past on Mars. The findings are so compelling that scientists working on the European Space Agency's delayed Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover are testing its life-detection capabilities on samples of the microbes found at Lost Hammer Spring.

The findings were published April 8 in The ISME Journa (opens in new tab)l.

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Extreme microbes in salty Arctic water could aid search for life on Mars - Space.com

Dust is an everyday feature on Mars and wreaks havoc on various pieces of equipment humans decide to send to it, such as Insights continual loss of power or the losses of Opportunity and Spirit. But weve never really understood what causes the dust to get up into the air in the first place. That equipment that is so affected by it usually isnt set up to monitor it, or if it is, it has been sent to a place where there isnt much dust, to begin with. Now, that has changed with new readings from Perseverance in Jerezo crater, and the answer shouldnt be much of a surprise dust devils seem to cause some of the dust in the atmosphere on Mars. But strong winds contribute a significant amount too.

A new paper in Science Advances by a team of over 45 scientists reports on data collected by Perseverances instrumentation that is designed to study the Martian environment. The Radiation and Dust Sensor (RDS) instrumentation is part of a broader package of instrumentation known as the Mars Environment Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA).

This instrument can detect changes in the environmental conditions that would occur around the rover about once a second. The most likely cause of those changes would be the presence of dust devils.

But it is not enough to detect those changes alone, as they could be caused by sources other than dust devils. So the RDS combines forces with another MEDA instrument, the Thermal InfraRed Sensor (TIRS), which can provide data on the tracking radiative flux around the rover. Combining these two data sets allow scientists to comprehensively say whether or not a dust devil has overtaken the rover.

They do so often. About four times a day, the rover is subjected to convective vortices, the technical term for updrafts that are strong enough to sense. About one of those four carries enough dust to be thought of as what we would conventionally call a dust devil. And their existence seems to be the source of most of the dust that reaches the air. But they arent the only source.

There was some evidence for strong wind gusts that dont actually form into a dust devil and might force a significant amount of dust into the air themselves. While these werent necessarily as strong as the dust devils, they covered a much larger area, with the largest being ten times larger than the largest dust devil. So even if they are much weaker, they were potentially able to lift smaller grains of dust high into the atmosphere.

The scientists think that a roughly equal amount of dust in the Martian atmosphere could be caused by both dust devils and these more concentrated wind gusts. But no matter what the dust is from, the existence of instruments on Mars that can finally collect data on the underlying cause of the dust is a breakthrough in understanding the Martian environment. It might also help us find a way to disrupt this potentially destructive process if it ever comes to that.

Learn More:Newman et al The dynamic atmospheric and aeolian environment of Jezero crater, MarsUT Dust Storms on Mars Happen When the Planet Cant Release its Heat Fast EnoughUT Amazing View of How Dust Storms Grow on MarsUT A Single Dust Devil on Mars

Lead Image:Massive dust devil on Mars.Credit HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA

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Dust Devils and Strong Winds Produce the Constant Haze on Mars - Universe Today

The Mars Volta recently returned the world after 10 years with a new single "Blacklight Shine" and a reunion tour. The band announced a reunion tour, expanded the reunion tour once due to demand, and is now expanding things even further to accommodate fans. The Mars Volta has added second shows in Dallas and Seattle, with a third show added in Los Angeles.

Get those dates below and check out "Blacklight Shine." It's a short one.

9/22 Dallas, TX The Factory in Deep Ellum9/23 Dallas, TX The Factory in Deep Ellum9/25 Atlanta, GA Tabernacle9/27 Philadelphia, PA The Metropolitan Opera House9/29 New York, NY Terminal 59/30 New York, NY Terminal 510/1 Boston, MA MGM Music Hall at Fenway10/3 Washington, DC The Anthem10/5 Toronto, ON Massey Hall10/6 Detroit, MI Royal Oak Music Theatre10/8 Chicago, IL Aragon Ballroom10/11 Denver, CO The Mission Ballroom10/14 Seattle, WA Moore Theatre10/15 Seattle, WA Moore Theatre10/18 San Francisco, CA The Warfield10/19 San Francisco, CA The Warfield10/21 Los Angeles, CA Hollywood Palladium10/22 Los Angeles, CA Hollywood Palladium10/23 Los Angeles, CA Hollywood Palladium

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THE MARS VOLTA Further Expands Their Reunion Tour - Metal Injection

The best candidate for a binary crater on Earth today is the Lockne crater in Sweden and a smaller crater nearby called Mlingen. We dated these structures very exactly and saw that they formed at exactly the same age, about 450 million years ago, says Jens Orm from the Astrobiology Center in Spain, who led analysis of the craters published in 2014. One other promising candidate pair is known, the Kamensk and Gusev craters, but their locationon the border between Russia and Ukrainemakes them difficult to study in the current global climate.

On Mars, craters can remain visible for billions of years. So using high-resolution images of the surface taken by Mars orbiters, Vavilov and his colleagues examined nearly 32,000 craters larger than 4 kilometers across to hunt for crater pairs.

Their results showed that 150 pairs appeared to be the result of binary impacts, totaling 300 individual craters. These estimates come from looking for pairs of crater shapes that would be expected following a binary asteroid collision. These include tear-drop craters, where the two craters overlap; peanut craters, where they are connected at their edges; and doublet craters, where there is a gap between the two. The orientation of the two craters depends on the position of the two asteroids at the time of impact.

We didnt know how many there were on Mars, says Katarina Milijkovic at Curtin University in Australia, who performed initial modeling in 2013 to show what crater shapes might be expected but was not involved in this latest work. Somebody had to do an exhaustive study to find all of them. I think its great.

As two asteroids simultaneously strike the surface, it could lead to some intriguing physics. Elliot Sefton-Nash, the deputy project scientist on ESAs delayed ExoMars program, says the shock waves from the impacts could collide, creating a raised ridge between the two craters or some high-pressure locations. Itd be like going the opposite way on a motorway, he says. You might be able to see differences in minerals that form only under very high pressure.

In total, the number of binary craters found on Mars accounts for only about 0.5 percent of the total craters wider than 4 kilometers on the planetfar below most estimates for how many binary asteroids should be in the solar system. That could be a result of natural weathering erasing some of the impacts, or it could be that smaller crater pairs exist below 4 kilometers across. There are more than 100 million impact craters bigger than 100 meters, says Anthony Lagain from Curtin University in Australia, a coauthor on the study. If you start doing smaller craters, you have to spend a lot of time to review all of them.

Many of the crater pairs are similar in size, which contradicts the leading theory for how binary asteroids are made. Its thought that such systems form as a result of light from the sun hitting an asteroid, which can push material off its surface and into its orbit. As the asteroid spins, this material builds up over millions of years into a small companion, evidenced by the makeup of most of the binaries observed to date.

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Behold the Weird Physics of Double-Impact Asteroids - WIRED

Striking rock formations documented by the rover provide evidence of a drying climate in the Red Planets ancient past.

For the past year, NASAs Curiosity Mars rover has been traveling through a transition zone from a clay-rich region to one filled with a salty mineral called sulfate. While the science team targeted the clay-rich region and the sulfate-laden one for evidence each can offer about Mars watery past, the transition zone is proving to be scientifically fascinating as well. In fact, this transition may provide the record of a major shift in Mars climate billions of years ago that scientists are just beginning to understand.

The clay minerals formed when lakes and streams once rippled across Gale Crater, depositing sediment at what is now the base of Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain whose foothills Curiosity has been ascending since 2014. Higher on the mountain in the transition zone, Curiositys observations show that the streams dried into trickles and sand dunes formed above the lake sediments.

Curiosity's Mastcam Views Flaky, Streambed Rocks: NASAs Curiosity Mars rover captured this view of layered, flaky rocks believed to have formed in an ancient streambed or small pond. The six images that make up this mosaic were captured using Curiositys Mast Camera, or Mastcam, on June 2, 2022, the 3,492nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS. Download image

We no longer see the lake deposits that we saw for years lower on Mount Sharp, said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiositys project scientist at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Instead, we see lots of evidence of drier climates, like dry dunes that occasionally had streams running around them. Thats a big change from the lakes that persisted for perhaps millions of years before.

As the rover climbs higher through the transition zone, it is detecting less clay and more sulfate. Curiosity will soon drill the last rock sample it will take in this zone, providing a more detailed glimpse into the changing mineral composition of these rocks.

Mars Report - How Scientists Study Wind on Mars: NASA's spacecraft on Mars are all affected by the winds of the Red Planet, which can produce a tiny dust devil or a global dust storm. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Download video Unique geologic features also stand out in this zone. The hills in the area likely began in a dry environment of large, wind-swept sand dunes, hardening into rock over time. Interspersed in the remains of these dunes are other sediments carried by water, perhaps deposited in ponds or small streams that once wove among the dunes. These sediments now appear as erosion-resistant stacks of flaky layers, like one nicknamed The Prow.

Making the story richer yet more complicated is the knowledge that there were multiple periods in which groundwater ebbed and flowed over time, leaving a jumble of puzzle pieces for Curiositys scientists to assemble into an accurate timeline.

Curiosity's 360-degree Panorama Near 'Sierra Maigualida': NASAs Curiosity Mars rover captured this 360-degree panorama near a location nicknamed Sierra Maigualida on May 22, 2022, the 3,481st Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The panorama is made up of 133 individual images captured by Curiositys Mast Camera, or Mastcam. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS. Download image

Ten Years On, Going Strong

Curiosity will celebrate its 10th year on Mars Aug. 5. While the rover is showing its age after a full decade of exploring, nothing has prevented it from continuing its ascent.

On June 7, Curiosity went into safe mode after detecting a temperature reading on an instrument control box within the body of the rover that was warmer than expected. Safe mode occurs when a spacecraft senses an issue and automatically shuts down all but its most essential functions so that engineers can assess the situation.

Although Curiosity exited safe mode and returned to normal operations two days later, JPLs engineers are still analyzing the exact cause of the issue. They suspect safe mode was triggered after a temperature sensor provided an inaccurate measurement, and theres no sign it will significantly affect rover operations since backup temperature sensors can ensure the electronics within the rover body arent getting too hot.

The rovers aluminum wheels are also showing signs of wear. On June 4, the engineering team commanded Curiosity to take new pictures of its wheels something it had been doing every 3,281 feet (1,000 meters) to check their overall health.

The team discovered that the left middle wheel had damaged one of its grousers, the zig-zagging treads along Curiositys wheels. This particular wheel already had four broken grousers, so now five of its 19 grousers are broken.

The previously damaged grousers attracted attention online recently because some of the metal skin between them appears to have fallen out of the wheel in the past few months, leaving a gap.

The team has decided to increase its wheel imaging to every 1,640 feet (500 meters) a return to the original cadence. A traction control algorithm had slowed wheel wear enough to justify increasing the distance between imaging.

We have proven through ground testing that we can safely drive on the wheel rims if necessary, said Megan Lin, Curiositys project manager at JPL. If we ever reached the point that a single wheel had broken a majority of its grousers, we could do a controlled break to shed the pieces that are left. Due to recent trends, it seems unlikely that we would need to take such action. The wheels are holding up well, providing the traction we need to continue our climb.

For more information about Curiosity, visit:

mars.nasa.gov/msl/home/

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nasa.gov/curiosity

News Media Contacts

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

Karen Fox / Alana JohnsonNASA Headquarters, Washington301-286-6284 / 202-358-1501karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov

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NASA's Curiosity Captures Stunning Views of a Changing Mars Landscape

The European Space Agency (ESA) is upgrading software on its venerable Mars Express orbiter to enable it to see beneath the surface of Mars and its moon Phobos in greater detail than before.

Mars Express has been orbiting the Red Planet since December 2003, studying its atmosphere, imaging and mapping the planet and, notably, even peeking beneath the surface for signs of water. Now, the orbiter's Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS), which in 2018 announced evidence of a lake of salty water buried under a mile (1.5 kilometers) of ice in the southern polar region, will receive an upgrade to boost its resolution and water-seeking abilities.

"It really is like having a brand new instrument on board Mars Express almost 20 years after launch," ESA Mars Express scientist Colin Wilson, said in a statement.

Related: Mars crater complex shows layers of ice in stunning spacecraft photos

MARSIS is operated by Italy's Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF). It uses a 131-feet (40 meters) long antenna to bounce low-frequency radio waves off Mars and collect reflections from beneath the surface. Scientists can use those readings to try to differentiate between layers of materials such as ice, soil, rock and water.

The updates will improve signal reception and on-board data processing, which will mean the instrument's computer can discard unneeded data to free up memory. The new process will increase the amount and quality of science data sent to Earth from MARSIS and possibly allow greater insights into fascinating areas than before.

While the MARSIS team is convinced the upgrade work will be worthwhile, the instrument's software was a challenge to adapt to the new science goals.

"We faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS," Carlo Nenna, the MARSIS on-board software engineer who is implementing the upgrade, said in the statement. "Not least because the MARSIS software was originally designed over 20 years ago, using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!"

Now, scientists are eager to give the upgrade a test-drive. "There are many regions near the south pole on Mars in which we may have already seen signals indicating liquid water in lower-resolution data," Wilson said in the statement. "The new software will help us more quickly and extensively study these regions in high resolution and confirm whether they are home to new sources of water on Mars."

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Europe's veteran Mars orbiter gets upgrade to key instrument | Space

Less than a decade from now, a spacecraft from Mars may swing by Earth to drop off precious cargo: samples of the Red Planets rocks, soil and even air to be scoured for signs of alien life by a small army of researchers right here on our terra firma. Orchestrated by NASA and the European Space Agency, this fast-paced, multibillion-dollar enterprise, formally known as the Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign, is the closest thing to a holy grail that planetary scientists have ever pursued.

In many respects, MSR is already well underway: NASAs Perseverance rover is wheeling aroundan ancient river delta in Marss Jezero Crater, gathering choice specimens of potential astrobiological interest for future pick-up by a fetch rover. Then theres the design and testing of the Mars Ascent Vehicle for lifting those retrieved samples into orbit for subsequent ferrying to Earth that is proceeding apace. But one crucial aspect of the project remains troublingly unresolved: How exactly should the returned samples be handledand at what cost, given the potential risk of somehow contaminating Earths biosphere with imported Martian bugs?

So-far-elusive answers to these questions could profoundly shape not only MSR but also the hoped-for follow-on of sending humans to Marss surface. Can astronauts live and work there without inadvertently introducing earthly microbes to the Red Planet? And perhaps more importantly, can they eventually return home with the certainty that they carry no microscopic Martian hitchhikers? The protocols hammered out for MSR will be a crucial component in resolving those eventual quandaries.

NASAs present proposal for MSR calls for an as-yet-unbuilt interplanetary ferry to release a cone-shaped, sample-packed capsulecalled the Earth Entry Systemhigh above our planets atmosphere. The capsule will then endure a fiery plunge to Earth, sans parachute, ultimately landing in a dry lake bed within the Utah Test and Training Range. Despite impacting at roughly 150 kilometers per hour, the capsule will be designed to keep its samples intact and isolated. Once recovered, it will be placed in its own environmentally controlled protective container and then shipped to an off-site sample-receiving facility. Such a facility could resemble todays biolabs that study highly infectious pathogens, incorporating multilayered decontamination measures, air-filtration systems, negative-pressure ventilation and myriad other safeguards.

Citing the findings of multiple expert panels, NASA presently deems the ecological and public-safety risks of this proposal as extremely low. But not everyone agrees. Earlier this year the space agency solicited public commentary on an associated draft environmental impact statement, netting 170 remarks, most of which were negative regarding a direct-to-Earth, express mail concept of Mars collectibles.

Are you out of your minds? Not just no, but hell no, suggested one commenter. No nation should put the whole planet at risk, another said. And another third opined, Public opposition will surely rise drastically as the knowledge of [NASAs] intentions are spread beyond the smaller space community. Many of the respondents suggested that any shipment of specimens should somehow be first received and studied off-Earthan approach that, while certainly prudent, could easily become a logistic and budgetary nightmare.

Contrast this with the blunt opinion of Steven Benner, a prominent astrobiologist and founder of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Fla.: I do not see any need for long discussions about how samples from Mars should be stored once they reach our planet, he says. Thats because space rocks striking Mars routinely eject material that ultimately ends up on Earth. Current estimates hold that about 500 kilograms of Martian rocks land on our planet every year, Benner says. He even has a five-gram hunk of Mars decorating his desk that alludes to that fact.

In the over 3.5 billion years since life appeared on Earth, trillions of other rocks have made similar journeys, Benner says. If Mars microbiota exist and can wreak havoc on Earths biosphere, it has already happened, and a few more kilograms from NASA will not make any difference.

Noting his service on many of the very same expert panels NASA now cites for its extremely low assessment of MSRs risks, Benner says the space agency seems caught in a public relations trap of its own making, honor bound to endlessly debate the supposed complexities of what should really be considered simple, settled science. NASA now knows how to look for life on Mars, where to look for life on Mars and why the likelihood of finding life on Mars is high, he observes. But NASA committees, seeking consensus and conformity over the fundamentals of chemistry, biology and planetary science that must drive the search for Martian life, displace the science in favor of discussions of these nonissues, unnecessarily increasing the cost and delaying the launch of missions.

They end up ensuring that NASA never flies any life-detection missions, Benner says.

Such statements reflect a growing sense of urgency among U.S. planetary scientists about making MSR a reality. In April NASA received the latest Decadal Survey on planetary science and astrobiology, an influential report produced by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that las out near-future priorities for the field. One of the reports main recommendations calls for the agency to shore up its plans for handling MSRs samples, with an emphasis on readying a Mars Sample Receiving Facility in time to receive material from the Red Planet by 2031.

To meet that deadline, NASA must start designingand buildingsuch a facility immediately, says Philip Christensen, a professor at Arizona State University and co-chair of the new Decadal Surveys steering committee.

Our recommendation was to not go off and build a very fancy, very complicated, very instrument-rich receiving facility, Christensen says. Instead make it as simple as possible. The number-one job is to verify that the samples are safe, then let them go to labs around the world that already have very sophisticated instrumentation.

John Rummel, a now retired astrobiologist who previously helmed NASAs planetary protection efforts for its interplanetary missions, agrees that simplicity can save time but at uncertain costs. Nobody wants to spend all the money in the world on a Taj Mahal for [sample-return] science, he says. Building a bare-bones facility could backfire, however, by failing to allow scientists to properly investigate whether any returned samples harbor evidence of life.

More fundamentally, Rummel says, it simply isnt true that we know enough about Mars to quantify MSRs risks of interplanetary contagion. In the first place, we dont know everything we want to know about Mars. Thats why we want the samples, Rummel says. We keep finding Earth organisms doing new things that are quite interesting from the standpoint of potential life elsewhere. So why dont we think we need to be careful? The answer is that we do need to be careful, as repeatedly emphasized by the National [Academies].... People have to have some kind of respect for the unknown. If you have that respect, then you can do a credible job, and the public is well-served by your caution.

Although MSRs true risks for interplanetary ecological catastrophe may be unknown, the threat that negative public opinion poses for the mission is clear to most participating scientists. Even so, engagement with the public should be welcomed, says Penny Boston, an astrobiologist at NASAs Ames Research Center. What better way to push forward the research needed to fill in knowledge gaps about planetary protection, she reasons, than getting people interested in the topic and its weighty stakes? That will allow us to both optimally protect Earths biosphere and humans while still making the best full use of the analyses of the Mars samples to answer the science questions, Boston says.

Similarly, while a chilling effect from harsh handling restrictions for MSRs samples seems more probable than the eruption of some otherworldly pandemic from lax biosafety protocols, some argue that, in absolute budgetary terms, erring on the side of caution simply isnt very expensive.

According to astrobiologist Cassie Conley, who succeeded Rummel as NASAs planetary protection officer from 2006 to 2017, by the time MSRs capsule impacts in a dry lake bed in Utah, taxpayers will have invested at least $10 billion to bring these samples to Earth. So isnt it worthwhile to spend 1 percent more to construct the best possible facilities and instrumentation for studying these samples while also ensuring that MSR doesnt cause something bad to happen to the only planet we can live on?

There is, however, one additional concern complicating the debate: MSR is no longer alone in its quest for fresh Red Planet rocks, and other projects may not abide by its still-emerging rules. China recently announced its own independent plans to bring Martian material directly to Earth, perhaps earlier than the NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return campaign, and there is also the wild card of Elon Musks Mars-focused SpaceX efforts leading to human voyages to Mars and back far sooner than most experts anticipate.

Chinas entry in particular worries Barry DiGregorio, an astrobiologist and founding director of the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return (ICAMSR). Unless [returning samples from Mars] is done as a global effort in order to share the findings in real time with all spacefaring nations instead of as a national goal, no single country will know what the other has found or what problems they are having with containment, he says.

Thats why DiGregorio contends priority should be given to ruling out each and every samples prospects for harming Earths biosphere before it is brought back to our planetsomething best done in a dedicated space station or even an astrobiology research lab built as part of a lunar base. Of course, he adds, given increasingly high global geopolitical tensions, this concept will likely be a hard sellbut now is the critical time to consider it.

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Controversy Grows Over whether Mars Samples Endanger Earth

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June 22 (UPI) -- NASA's InSight Mars received a reprieve allowing it to conduct science for another several weeks before shutting down as it nears the end of its battery life.

The agency announced Tuesday that instead of automatically shutting down its last operational scientific instrument, the seismometer, at the end of June as planned, the device will continue operating until late August or early September.

Had it shut down the seismometer later this month, the InSight Mars lander would have been able to conserve energy and survive through til December. Running the seismometer longer, though, will cause the lander to discharge its batteries and run out of power when the seismometer dies.

Doing so allows the seismometer several more weeks to detect possible marsquakes, NASA said.

"InSight hasn't finished teaching us about Mars yet," said Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division in Washington, D.C. "We're going to get every last bit of science we can before the lander concludes operations."

In order to allow InSight's seismometer to run for as long as possible, NASA is shutting down the lander's fault protection system, which, if operating, allows ground controllers to react to sudden, unexpected events on Mars.

"The goal is to get scientific data all the way to the point where InSight can't operate at all, rather than conserve energy and operate the lander with no science benefit," said Chuck Scott, InSight's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

NASA announced in May that it expected InSight to run out of power sometime this summer because dust had covered its solar panels. Scientists hoped the lander might be hit by a Martian dust devil, which could clear dust off the panels and possibly allow it to properly charge up.

Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator for the InSight mission and a principal scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the possibility of this happening isn't likely, but it's not entirely out of the question.

InSight touched down on Mars' surface in 2018 with the primary goal of studying seismology, weather, soil and the planet's magnetic field. Since the beginning of its mission, it has detected more than 1,300 marsquakes.

NASAs Curiosity Mars rover used two different cameras to create this panoramic selfie, comprised of 60 images, in front of Mont Mercou, a rock outcrop that stands 20 feet tall on March 26, 2021, the 3,070th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. These were combined with 11 images taken by the Mastcam on the mast, or "head," of the rover on March 16. The hole visible to the left of the rover is where its robotic drill sampled a rock nicknamed "Nontron." The Curiosity team is nicknaming features in this part of Mars using names from the region around the village of Nontron in southwestern France. Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

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NASA to allow InSight Mars lander to conduct science for several more ...