Category Archives: Mars

KINGSTON, R.I. Jan. 3, 2022 Thirteen University of Rhode Island mechanical engineering students are working with NASA and other prestigious universities on a project that could cut in half the travel time for a human mission to Mars.

The project involves nuclear thermal propulsion, which scientists and engineers say can get astronauts to Mars more quickly and safely than they can with current chemical propulsion and technology. The students are enrolled in Professor Bahram Nassersharifs senior capstone mechanical engineering class, which spends a year working on problems or projects from industry and then delivers design and/or production recommendations, prototypes and more.

When Nassersharif, distinguished university professor, capstone design director and professor and Nuclear Engineering Program director, first set up the project, he envisioned a four-student team.

I introduced the project at the start of the class in September and there was so much interest, I decided to create three separate teams, Nassersharif said. Since the very beginning, they have been very dedicated to the project. The three teams all work well together and with their colleagues on the teams at other universities. I am very impressed with their communication and organizational skills.

According to Nassersharif, the project involves a proposed nuclear thermal propulsion system with 19 fuel tubes partially filled with uranium metal. The uranium melts at a temperature of 2,070 degrees Fahrenheit. The work of the URI students centers on getting the fuel tubes to spin fast enough to spin the uranium liquid metal at startup, during the bulk of the journey, and at completion so that the liquid uranium stays attached to the walls of the tubes and does not escape. In other words, the students are working on a system that generates centrifugal force. To produce the necessary spinning, hydrogen would run through the walls of the rocket, cooling the fuel tubes. And as the hydrogen heats up, it becomes the propellant that exits out of the rockets nozzle and sends the spacecraft on its way.

Advantages of thermal nuclear propulsion

So what are the advantages of nuclear thermal propulsion over the current and best chemical rockets in use today?

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University College of Engineering, University of Michigan College of Engineering and the University of Alabama, Huntsville, are the other academic collaborators.

The URI students are focused on three parts of the project, all of which are integrated with the work of the other collaborators.

The URI teams made two presentations in class during the fall semester and will deliver two major design presentations during the spring semester, a build-test report and final design showcase, which will include a working model. Michael Houts, the nuclear research manager at NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center, participated in the fall presentations by Zoom.

URI students are performing important research related to the Centrifugal Nuclear Thermal Rocket (CNTR), and we are extremely glad they are part of the research team, Houts said recently. Their work is excellent, and they continue to make significant contributions to the advancement of the CNTR high performance space propulsion concept.

Student Jacob Murphy of Coventry said, The goal of his team is to develop, by the end of the spring semester, a prototype 3D model of the engine. Our entire group is only focused on the mechanical portion of the rocket.

Basically a nuclear reaction heats the uranium, which then heats the hydrogen, which then becomes the rockets propellant, said Connor Venagro, also a member of the 3D model team from Cranston.

Seeds of the project

The seeds of the project were sown when Nassersharif met NASAs Houts, the nuclear research manager at NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center, at a conference of the American Nuclear Society. One of Nassersharifs masters degree students, Miguel Lopez, talked with the professor and Houts about the project, and then they decided to develop a proposal. It was submitted to NASAs Rhode Island Space Grant Consortium at Brown University, which provided funding for the project. Houts is the NASA mentor to the URI students.

One of the great things about this project is that our students meet (remotely) with students from the other schools and they talk about their projects, which are different from URIs. But being able to share ideas helps connect all of the students to the wide ranging work being done on this, Nassersharif said.

The buzz among students in the classroom in URIs Fascitelli Center for Advanced Engineering was palpable one afternoon as they discussed the project and what it means to them.

Part of the problem with a chemical rocket (traditional rocket) is the amount of time it would take to propel it to Mars, said Marco DeFruscio, a mechanical engineering major from Providence. Being able to get to Mars in an efficient manner is the goal of this project. There is lots of competition to prove that we can get humans to Mars.

In the 1960s, NASA worked on nuclear propulsion for its rockets, but fears around putting astronauts next to a nuclear fuel source, and public controversies around nuclear power over the decades, made it difficult to proceed with that option, according to Zachary Hermanson of Woonsocket.

But this technology is very similar to what we use already in our submarines and surface ships, Hermanson said.

All of us in Team 1 have worked in the nuclear submarine arena, said North Kingstowns Rachael Bjorn, another member of team one.

Nassersharif added that some of the 13 students have taken at least one of 10 nuclear engineering courses offered by the University and several are physics, mathematics, and nuclear engineering minors.

Working with NASA has been a dream of mine since 9th grade when I did a National History Day Project on Neil Armstrong, Hermanson said.

Bjorn, who is a mechanical engineering-German double major, said her mom told her when she was young that she wanted to be able to say, My daughter, the rocket scientist.

And when this actually does happen, I can say I had a hand in that, Bjorn said.

Working on this project is very cool, said Danny Kruzick of South Windsor, Connecticut. Like most kids, I wanted to be an astronaut. The science of space and the engineering to get to space are two demanding disciplines. Its not guesswork.

Collin Treacy of Ballston Spa, New York, an applied mathematics and mechanical engineering student, said the course incorporates everything he and his fellow students have learned during their first three years in the mechanical engineering program. This project brings together physics, chemistry, engineering and math.

Honghao Zhen of Westerly, Rhode Island, knows that such a course is important because it gives me a start in the space industry and it could lead to careers with NASA or aerospace firms. We have spent many late nights together in virtual and in-person meetings. We have even looked at old textbooks for background.

Murphy and Venagro said among the most enjoyable parts of the project are working with students at the other schools and interns at NASA.

This rocket is an entirely new concept, Venagro said.

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URI engineering students work with NASA on nuclear thermal propulsion for human mission to Mars - URI Today

Elon Musk will host a presentation on SpaceXs Mars-bound Starship next week.

It is the first time that Mr Musk has given such an update on the spacecraft since 2019.

SpaceX is expected to conduct a test that will see Starship go into orbit for the first time. Recent months have seen a range of high-altitude flights, but attempts to conduct that major orbital test have been delayed, in part because of regulatory problems.

Starship is SpaceXs big hope for the future of space travel, with chief executive Elon Musk saying it is key for his plans to head onto the Moon and Mars, and that its vast size is required to carry the cargo needed to go and live on other planets.

The update will take place on Thursday, 10 February at 8pm Texas time, Mr Musk said. (Texas is in two time zones, but Mr Musk is likely referring to the Central Time Zone, which would put the event at 9pm eastern time or 2am in the UK.)

The announcement came at the end of a run of tweets during which Mr Musk was asked about the future of Starship. Mr Musk had announced that SpaceXs other Falcon 9 vehicle is expected to launch about once a week in 2022, and a follower replied to ask how that would change when Starship came into use.

Starship is in a different league. Orders of magnitude more mass to orbit than Falcon. Necessary for creating a self-sustaining city on Mars, he wrote.

Starship aspires to be the first fully reusable orbital launch vehicle, the holy grail of rocketry. This is the critical breakthrough needed to make life multiplanetary.

He then announced the time for the new presentation, though did not give any clues to what it might contain or what was planned.

Mr Musk has given a number of such presentations through the life of Starship, which has been renamed and redesigned in a number of ways since it was first discussed in 2005. In the past, they have focused not only on new announcements but also on building excitement about the project.

At the last update, in 2019, Mr Musk said that SpaceX was hoping to put Starship into orbit within six months. He recognised then that the target was nuts, and the company is still yet to meet it.

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Elon Musk to host major presentation on SpaceXs Mars-bound Starship spacecraft - The Independent

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Mars Petcare has observed powerful results from the collaborative relationship between the brand and performance marketers working on its new direct-to-consumer (DTC) propositions, a top marketer in the company reveals.

Over the past 18 months, the FMCG giant has launched five DTC propositions in Europe across its natural and health brands category, following the onset of Covid-19 and national lockdowns around the world.

These have included three new brands biodegradable cat litter Natusan, sustainable cat food Lovebug and German personalised pet food Perfect Fit as well as a new DTC platform for major UK pet food brand James Wellbeloved and a subscription kit offering for Dentastix in France.

Chris Rodi, European marketing director of natural and health brands at Mars Petcare, has led the launch of these businesses. Along the way, one key lesson he has learned is the power of brand and performance marketers working together, he tells Marketing Week.How brands are overcoming the artificial division of brand and performance

The power of brand marketers working with the performance marketing team is greater than the sum of its parts. Theres really a mutuality in that relationship that I think were appreciating more and more, Rodi says.

It works because youre following the consumer all the way from awareness through to conversion, which is something we werent historically doing through reach-based penetration advertising, which we are now doing.

Advertising focused on building brand equity unsurprisingly drives up DTC searches, which is an additional advantage, benefiting the customer acquisition team. While the brand team have also gleaned valuable insight from the rapidly iterating performance advertising team on the messages and visuals driving the most conversation and lowest customer acquisition cost.

Instilled in that is useful insight that can help the equity team work out which messages and visuals might drive more cut through in their advertising, Rodi says.

For example, the brand team for James Wellbeloved worked together with the content manager and acquisition manager in the businesss DTC team to run a set of creative sprints testing different branding, images and claims to get a data-based understanding of what drives the best conversion rate.

They need to work together, and by working together thats where the magic happens.

Not only have these tests resulted in a reduction in cost per acquisition of 57%, they have also given the brand the DNA of the best performing ad, which the brand marketing team can use as inspiration to help sharpen some of its core equity content, Rodi explains.

So the insights from the performance marketing team in their content development is helping the brand equity team. Theres a real mutually beneficial relationship between working really collaboratively, sharing and working together on that, he says.

Rodi adds that any discussion around whether performance marketing or brand marketing is more important is redundant, as both are critical in reality.

They need to work together, and by working together thats where the magic happens, he says.The 2022 Agenda: Breaking down the wall between brand and performance

At the end of last year, breaking down the wall between brand and performance marketing was identified by Marketing Week as one of the key challenges and opportunities that will shape marketers roles in the year ahead.

Frustrated with the marketing world for creating this artificial division, Tom Roach, effectiveness expert and vice-president of brand planning at Jellyfish called for its end in July. Its not a split, its a balance, he said.

Indeed, last year offered signs of a rebalancing beginning to take effect.Discovery, Gousto, Rightmove and Airbnb were just some of the brands to have looked towards brand advertising to deliver performance results in 2021, while Marks & Spencer and Next are two businesses to have banked on digital media to build their brands as well as drive trade.

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Mars Petcare hails the 'power' of uniting brand and performance marketers - Marketing Week

Bob Balaram is the originator of the concept that became the Ingenuity helicopter, and Chief Engineer during its development, test and operations. Ingenuity is seen at Wright Brothers Field on Mars after its historic first flight on April 19, 2021. [courtesy NASA/JPL]

The first powered, controlled flight on another planet took place last year as the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter lifted off, and a relic of the historic first flights by the Wright Brothers on the Outer Banks was along for a ride.

A small piece of material that covered the wing of the aircraft, Flyer 1, that made four flights on Dec. 17, 1903 at Big Kill Devil Hill is onboard the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which took its first successful flight on April 19, 2021, and has flown a total of 18 times so far.

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Bob Balaram, Principal Member of Staff at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is the originator of the concept that became the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. He served as its Chief Engineer during its development, test and operations.

Balaram has also served as the Initiative Lead for a Strategic Research and Technology Development effort to develop science helicopters on Mars as a follow-up to the success of Ingenuity.

The connection with the Wright Brothers led Balaram to make a pilgrimage to the place where aviation began on our planet.

He joined us by phone on February 1 after making his first visit to the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kill Devil Hills, shared the story of Ingenuity, and more about his time here on the Outer Banks:

https://www.obxtoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Bob-Balaram-020122.mp3 This story originally appeared on OBXToday.com. Read More local stories here.

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PODCAST: Chief engineer of the first helicopter on Mars visits the Outer Banks - Beach 104

Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos - a blood-testing technology company - in 2003, when she was 19. On January 3, 2022, she was found guilty on four charges of fraud. (Illustration: Moneycontrol)

Recent allegations of fraud in celebrated Indian startups, coming on the heels of the conviction of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the US, prove that pedigree is no bar to white-collar crime.

Just as the best of companies have been caught cooking their books, the most credentialed of men and women have been discovered with a hand in the till or even worse.

The recent conviction of an ex-McKinsey partner Puneet Dikshitforsecurities fraud, shows that no company can consider itself insulated from the future actions of its employees.

Top companies like McKinsey try hard to foster a culture of honesty and integrity. Mostly they succeed. Yet the fact is both the institutions and the people are fallible.

For decades, US banks and financial institutions swore by ethical behaviour and had elaborate and very public codes of conduct in place. Yet, in 2008 when the financial crisis broke, they were found to have been systematically manipulating customers for their own gains.

And since none of them paid the price for their misdemeanors, you can bet your last dollar that very little has changed inside these gargantuan institutions, now conveniently dubbed too big to fail.

Also read:Conviction of Elizabeth Holmes is an indictment of a startup culture that rewards deceit

Sadly, many criminals seem to have been working away on their future plans and indeed used their stints within these companies to further their evil designs. Ruja Ignatova, the missing mastermind behind the $6 billion fake cryptocurrency scam, used her ex-McKinsey tag to grab prestigious speaking slots at global conferences. Ignatova is no slouch in terms of educational qualifications either - she has a doctorate in European private law from the University of Constance.

In India, too, the multi-million dollar scams at institutions like ILFS, Yes Bank and ICICI Bank were engineered by those from elite educational institutions. The disgraced ex-chairman of ILFS, Ravi Parthasarathy, is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad, while Yes Bank founder and destroyer Rana Kapoor graduated from Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi University, and then did his MBA from Rutgers University in the US.

Also read:Yes Bank's Rana Kapoor: How intelligence, impatience and greed made for corporate tyranny

Many of the infamous business leaders in the US graduated from Ivy League schools. Jeffrey Skilling, the former CEO of Enron who spent 12 years in jail for his role in the scam, was an alumnus of Harvard Business School.

Clearly, which educational institution a person attended or what company she worked for is no guide to how honest she will turn out to be. So, is there something different about the mind of the potential white collar criminal, something tangible that can be filtered at the outset?

In 1968, University of Chicago economist Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1992, examined the nature of white-collar criminals. In a paper titled Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach, he examined criminals as rational individuals, and concluded that like ordinary people, they too seek to maximize their own well-being. The difference is that they do so using means which we consider illegal.

Becker shocked people by advocating stringent fines rather than prison sentences as punishment for all but the most heinous of crimes. His rationale, which he explained to The Chicago Maroon, was that fining has a great advantage. If youre a criminal and you pay me (as the government) a fine, then Im getting compensated. On the other hand, say I send you to prison; then youre giving up something, but Im also giving up something since I have to have guards and money and so on to take care of you. So thats a really bad form of punishment."

Viewed from the perspective of an economic activity governed by its own dynamic of demand and supply, white-collar crime doesnt appear to be such an unusual thing. If we believe that it has become more common and prevalent, it may also be because many more companies today function on the borderline of ethics and downright criminal behaviour. In such an environment, it is possible to see that the top companies engineer an internal culture of aggressive behaviour and cut-throat competition which in turn nurtures such people.

From this vast pool of hundreds of machismo-spewing supermen, it isnt unlikely that a few dont know when or where to stop.

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Corporate fraud and other white collar crimes arent from Mars - Moneycontrol.com

When did water last flow on Mars?

It's one of the most intriguing, looming questions in planetary science. Previous estimates suggest Mars has been a bone-dry desert, devoid of any water for some 3 billion years. But new research from Mars scientists suggests water flowed on the red planet 2 billion years ago, or 1 billion years later than researchers supposed.

This means Martian life if any ever existed could have had significantly more time to dwell, or evolve, on Mars' surface.

"Mars had habitats for longer than we thought," Bethany Ehlmann, a planetary scientist and the associate director of the Keck Institute for Space Studies at the California Institute of Technology, told Mashable. Ehlmann was a coauthor of the research, published on Jan. 27 in the journal AGU Advances.

An excellent example of this evidence for water is shown in the image below, which was captured by NASA's satellite the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The researchers looked at images of dried-up channels and depressions that contained big deposits of salt. These are the patchy white clumps seen in the channel. (The conspicuous crater to the right of the ancient waterway is about a mile wide.)

The salt deposits, Ehlmann explained, are downslope from higher elevations. It's strong evidence of water once melting from snow on slopes and hills (like it does on Earth) and then flowing down. "They had to come from snow and ice," Ehlmann said. The researchers found these salty mineral deposits in both shallow ponds and the winding channels that once fed these ponds.

An image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows salt deposits lying in a dried-out channel on Mars.Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

An artist's conception of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter above Mars.Credit: NASA

To date these salty deposits, the researchers used well-known understandings of how long ago craters and volcanic lands formed on Mars. For example, if volcanic terrain formed some 2 billion years ago, then the salts collected on top must have flowed through after, providing an age estimate.

An earlier Mars satellite actually discovered these salts nearly 15 years ago. But the old discoveries have led to new, exciting insights about water on Mars.

Planetary scientists are confident Mars was once a world with blue, sprawling oceans, somewhat like Earth. What remains unknown is whether any life flourished in Mars' watery places. NASA's Perseverance rover is currently sleuthing out potential signs of past life in the planet's Jezero Crater, a place the space agency says was "once flooded with water and was home to an ancient river delta."

The Jezero Crater, however, likely held water some 3.5 billion years ago. This latest research contends Mars hosted water much later, perhaps considerably later than 2 billion years ago. Stay tuned. Ehlmann and her colleagues are on the water trail.

"Mars may have had small amounts of liquid water much more recently than we think," Ehlmann said. "The question is how recently."

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NASA's Mars image shows Martian water flowed way more recently than we think - Mashable

There's a cool "close encounter" of worlds happening right against the horizon at sunrise Saturday (Jan. 29).

Provided you can see low enough between buildings and trees, you can spot the moon and Mars hovering close to each other in the sky, a little over two degrees apart.

They won't be alone in this close celestial encounter in the predawn sky; just a little bit to your left will be Venus, and if you want an observing challenge (and are equipped with binoculars) you may also spot (dim) Mercury and (bright) Saturn a little further to the left.

Related: The brightest planets in the night sky: How to see them (and when)

But you'll have to act quickly to see the worlds so close together: in New York City, Mars and the moon will be visible at 5:01 a.m. EST and disappear from view in the brightening sky at 6:48 a.m. EST, according to In-The-Sky.org.

See the moon passing by the planets?

If you take a photograph of the moon, Mars or Venus let us know! You can send images and comments in to spacephotos@space.com.

Conjunctions happen in our sky thanks to the sun, moon and planets sharing a path across the sky known as the ecliptic, otherwise called the plane of our solar system. Several times a year, you get to see various worlds lining up in the sky.Sometimes they even eclipse each other, which will happen next in May during the "blood moon" lunar eclipse, as the moon passes into Earth's shadow.

Happily, most of the worlds visible in the sky should be visible with the naked eye this weekend: Mars at roughly magnitude 1.5, Venus at an incredible -4.3, and somewhat dimmer Saturn at magnitude 0.7. The moon, of course, will be quite easy to spot. For perspective, typical eyes can view up to magnitude 6.0 in dark-sky conditions.

Make sure to go out before sunrise, at least 20 minutes earlier if you can, to let your eyes adjust to the sky. Shield yourself as best as possible from any stray lights nearby. If you must consult a star chart or your phone, use a red filter to preserve your night vision. Skywatchers in chillier regions will also need to bundle up for predawn observing.

More ambitious astronomers can bring out binoculars or a telescope to observe the conjunctions, although Mars and the moon will be too far apart to fit into a single telescope view.

If you're looking for binoculars or a telescope to see planets in the night sky, check our our guide for the best binoculars deals and the best telescope deals now. If you need equipment, consider our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography to make sure you're ready for the next planet sight.

If you miss this conjunction, NASA says not to fear: more are coming soon. "Mars will continue to brighten and climb higher over the next few months, where it'll have super-close conjunctions with Saturn and Jupiter," the agency said.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter@howellspace. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcomor onFacebook.

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See Mars shine very close to the crescent moon in the pre-dawn sky Saturday. Here's where to look. - Space.com

Our dating assumptions for the Red Planet might need a second look.

Fresh analysis of craters on Mars suggests that asteroids have been smashing into the surface at a consistent rate for at least 600 million years.

Scientists often use craters as a proxy to figure out how old a planetary surface is, since more impacts need more time to accrue. Analyzing crater formation is a complex process, however, and can rely on assumptions about how many asteroids burn up in the atmosphere and how many space rocks are in the region around the planet.

Related: NASA's Curiosity rover shares spectacular views of Mars

In new research, a team of scientists used a new crater detection algorithm to look at 521 impact craters on Mars that are more than 12 miles (20 kilometers) in diameter. Of that collection, only 49 craters formed in the last 600 million years and these were generated at a consistent rate, according to the new research.

The new work contradicts past research suggesting "spikes" in the number of craters during brief periods in the last 600 million years, study lead author Anthony Lagain, a research fellow and planetary scientist at Australia's Curtin University, said in a statement. Scientists presenting this theory thought that the impact spikes were caused by large asteroids breaking up and sending a cluster of fragments to hit the surface of Mars.

"When big bodies smash into each other, they break into pieces or debris, which is thought to have an effect on the creation of impact craters," Lagain said. "Our study shows it is unlikely that debris resulted in any changes to the formation of impact craters on planetary surfaces."

A particular era on Mars that might require a second look is the so-called "Ordovician spike," which occurred about 470 million years ago. The new research shows the spike on Mars may instead be "[crater] preservation bias rather than a real increase in the asteroid impact flux," the authors wrote.

For future research, the authors call for more research on the possible timing of a spike (if there was any at all) on the moon, another large rocky body in our neighborhood but with no substantial atmosphere.

A study based on the research was published in the Feb. 1 edition of Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcomand onFacebook.

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Mars 'asteroid showers' have stayed steady over 600 million years - Space.com

The Mars Wrigley company caught much of Chicago by surprise when it announced plans last week to close its historic plant in the citys Galewood neighborhood.

The Spanish Revival-designed complex at 2019 N. Oak Park Ave. will stop churning out M&Ms, Twix, Snickers, Milky Way and other candies in two years, according to its owner, Mars Wrigley Confectionery. About 280 people work there.

But what also caught our eye: A company spokesman said Mars Wrigley intends to partner with the surrounding community on a future vision for the site.

Frankly, we wish Mars Wrigley would continue making sweets and employing people in that handsome 1928 facility for another century.

But we are intrigued by what might happen to the Far West Side complex after production stops.

Confectioner Frank C. Mars, creator of the Milky Way chocolate bar, moved his company from Minneapolis to Chicago and built the Oak Park Avenue factory.

The complex was constructed next to rail lines that could ship his product across the continent a good thing by 1930 when the company introduced one of its best-known products: the Snickers bar.

Mars was part of a large cluster of candy makers and confectioners that made Chicago a candy capital of the world during the 20th century. The long list included Fannie May, Brachs, Frango mints, Ferrera Pan and Tootsie Rolls.

Curtiss Candy Company made its Baby Ruth bar in a factory at 337 E. Illinois St., while M.J. Holloway & Co., produced Milk Duds by the ton at 308 W. Ontario St.

And Cracker Jack, which was introduced during Chicagos 1893 Worlds Columbian Exposition, was made in a factory near 66th Street and Cicero Avenue in the Clearing neighborhood.

Consolidations and mergers would claim many of these original companies, but many of those candies are still being made.

Mars and Chicago chewing gum-maker Wrigley merged in 2016, creating the Mars Wrigley Confectionery. The companys global headquarters will remain on Goose Island. And plants in Burr Ridge and Yorkville will stay in business after the Galewood facility closes, the company said.

No ones saying much publicly about whats next for the Galewood location.

And for the neighborhood, the loss is especially deep. The company is a good neighbor that hands out candy for Halloween.

Theyve been our neighbors to the south forever, Mike Sullivan, director of facilities at Shriners Childrens Chicago, 2211 N. Oak Park Ave., told a Sun-Times reporter.

Weve always helped each other out. They are like a staple for the neighborhood, he said. It is sad to see them leave.

To us, all of this makes it important for the company to leave behind something of value.

We hear Mars Wrigley might work with the city to create a request-for-proposals for the site, using parameters that will be set by the community.

The complexs open spaces could be refashioned into a public park. And the reborn site could make better use of the nearby Mars stop what a great name at 6801 W. Shakespeare on the Metra Milwaukee District West transit line.

The factory isnt a protected city landmark, and the upcoming community engagement process might investigate if a designation is a possibility.

Its always a deep concern when any Chicago business decides to cut back operations or close its doors.

But its encouraging for now, at least that Mars Wrigley wants to help create a new life for the complex rather than cut and run and leave the city with 16 abandoned acres, or a demolished site that would be almost the size of Maggie Daley Park.

We hope the companys dialogue with the community and city officials goes well over the years to come and leaves Chicago with something that might be different, but just as sweet as whats there now.

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com.

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With some creative thinking, the Mars candy factory closing could have a sweet aftertaste - Chicago Sun-Times

Humanity has been wondering about whether life exists beyond our little backwater planet for so long that weve developed a kind of cultural bias as to how the answer to this central question will be revealed. Most of us probably imagine that NASA or some other space agency will schedule a press conference, an assembled panel of scientific luminaries will announce the findings, and newspapers around the world will blare WE ARE NOT ALONE! headlines. Weve all seen that movie before, so thats the way it has to be, right?

Probably not. Short of an improbable event like an alien spacecraft landing while a Google Street View car was driving by or receiving an unambiguously intelligent radio message from the stars, the conclusion that life exists now or once did outside our particular gravity well is likely to be reached in a piecewise process, an accretion of evidence built up over a long time until on balance, the only reasonable conclusion is that we are not alone. And thats exactly what the announcement at the end of last year that the Mars rover Perseverance had discovered evidence of organic molecules in the rocks of Jezero crater was another piece of the puzzle, and another step toward answering the fundamental question of the uniqueness of life.

Discovering organic molecules on Mars is far from proof that life once existed there. But its a step on the way, as well as a great excuse to look into the scientific principles and engineering of the instruments that made this discovery possible the whimsically named SHERLOC and WATSON.

Defining what exactly constitutes biological life is difficult, and there are plenty of philosophical arguments that muddy the waters even when you reduce life to characteristics such as the transformation of energy or the ability to reproduce. But at the end of the day, such macroscale characteristics dont help much when looking for microscopic life on other planets especially when you suspect that youre just looking for the remains of ancient microbial life, as is likely the case on Mars.

To explore the possibility that Mars once harbored life, the Mars 2020 missions Perseverance rover science payload includes a range of instruments designed to search for the smallest remains of past life. Chief among these instruments is SHERLOC, for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals a somewhat forced but impressively descriptive acronym.

At the heart of SHERLOC, which rides at the end of the rovers two-meter robotic arm, is an ultraviolet laser Raman spectrometer, designed to identify the specific signatures of the so-called CHNOPS elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. Something like 98% of the biomass on Earth is composed of these six elements; finding them on Mars will be pretty good evidence that life once existed there. But simply finding the CHNOPS elements doesnt make a sample biologically relevant. Its how those elements are organized and the structures they form that determine whether a sample might have the remains of ancient life, and figuring that out is what Raman spectroscopy is really good at.

Raman spectroscopy takes advantage of whats known as inelastic scattering, or Raman scattering. Normally, electromagnetic waves interact with particles of matter by elastic, or Rayleigh, scattering. When incoming photons interact with molecules, they excite them from the ground state to a higher-energy virtual state. In Rayleigh scattering, the excited state quickly collapses and the particle returns to the ground state without any loss of the kinetic energy the incident photon had. Its like a moving billiard ball that transfers all its kinetic energy into a motionless ball, which then goes on to move while the first ball stops dead.

But about one out of every 100 million scatterings results in dropping from the excited virtual state to a state different from where the molecule started. To stretch the earlier analogy, this would be like the moving billiard ball hitting a motionless ball with a crack in it. The cracked ball would still absorb the energy of the incoming ball, but the crack would attenuate some of it, sending the ball off at a different speed than the incoming ball, and perhaps even in a different direction than would occur in a purely elastic collision.

Just as the difference in speed and direction could reveal information about the characteristics of the cracked ball, so too can Raman scattering be used to probe the structure of a molecule. The difference in energy between the incident photons and the scattered photons depends on the vibrational and rotation states of the chemical bonds within the molecule. This results in a population of photons with different wavelengths that represent the different chemical bonds within a molecule. When spread out onto a detector with a diffraction grating, these photons create a fingerprint thats characteristic of the molecules in the sample.

While Raman has been used for decades on Earth to analyze all sorts of chemical samples, SHERLOC is the first time the technique has been used on another world. And as youd imagine, it takes some special engineering to package up all the optics and electronics and make it not only robust enough to survive the rigors of space travel, but also to operate autonomously.

To accomplish all this, SHERLOC is divided into two major assemblies: the SHERLOC Body Assembly (SBA) and the SHERLOC Turret Assembly (STA). The STB is where all the command and data handling circuits are located, and where the power supply lives. The STA is the business end of SHERLOC, and lives at the end of Perseverances robotic arm. The heart of the STA is the deep-UV (DUV) laser, a heavily modified off-the-shelf neon-copper metal-vapor laser. It provides a highly stable 248.60 nm pulse and is expected to last long enough to deliver 3 million spectra, which is about seven times the design life of the rover.

As with any Raman spectroscope, the optics of SHERLOC are a complicated set of lenses, mirrors, beam splitters, and filters. Unlike most of its Earth-bound cousins, though, SHERLOC has to handle the S in its name: scanning. Rather than rely on fine control of the robotic arm to position its beam, SHERLOC has a scanner subsystem thats quite similar to the galvanometers used for beam steering in laser shows. The scanner gives SHERLOC control of the beam over a 7 mm x 7 mm sample area with a step size of less than a micron in both dimensions, allowing it to gather data from the smallest of features without having to rely on robot arm moves.

Another way in which SHERLOC differs from other Raman instruments is in the need to correlate spectra with spatial information about a sample. Its not enough to get the spectral fingerprint of a particular section of a sample; rather, SHERLOC must also determine the context of what that exact spot on the sample looks like in visible light. To accomplish this, SHERLOC requires the help of two cameras: the Autofocus and Context Imager (ACI), a high-resolution grayscale camera that shares the optical path of the Raman spectroscope, and WATSON, the Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering camera. WATSON is a separate, full-color, high-resolution camera with a macro capability down to 1.78 cm focal length. WATSON and the ACI together are basically the equivalent of a geologists hand lens, allowing SHERLOC to overlay visible light images with Raman data over a wide range of operating distances.

Finally, SHERLOCs Raman spectroscope is designed to survive the long trip to Mars, the high-energy landing, and the harsh conditions of the cold, dusty world. While the SBA is nestled safely inside the hull of Perseverance, the STA has to be exposed to the elements to do its job. SHERLOC is mounted on a hexapod arrangement of spring-loaded struts that dampen vibrations encountered both during spaceflight and rover operations. The STA is also equipped with a complex thermal management system, including survival heating elements that keep the electronics and optics warm enough to survive the worst-case Martian cold.

While most of the publics attention to the Mars 2020 mission so far has understandably been drawn to the wildly successful Ingenuity helicopter, SHERLOC has been busily gathering data pretty much non-stop since Perseverance arrived on Mars back in March of 2021. The confirmation of organics in Jezero crater came from a series of samples analyzed back in September of 2021, and one rock in particular, which was dubbed Garde. The rovers arm-mounted tool assembly was used to grind away some of the weathered rock before SHERLOC was swung into place to analyze the sample.

Thanks to the power of SHERLOC and its ability to overlay visible light images with Raman data, planetary scientists were able to determine that Garde contains both olivine minerals, which indicate an igneous history, and carbonate minerals, which suggest a past period of water reacting with the rock. This is consistent with what we already know about the Jezero crater and the river delta that once flowed into it. Finding organic materials in a rock with that kind of geological history is a tantalizing bit of data, and may someday prove to be part of the evidence that life once teemed on Mars.

Read more from the original source:

SHERLOC And The Search For Life On Mars - Hackaday