SiFive is the first company to produce a chip implementing the RISC-V ISA.

They've now been selected to provide the core CPU for NASA's next generation High-Performance Spaceflight Computing processor (or HSPC), according to a SiFive announcement: HPSC is expected to be used in virtually every future space mission, from planetary exploration to lunar and Mars surface missions.

HPSC will utilize an 8-core, SiFive® Intelligence X280 RISC-V vector core, as well as four additional SiFive RISC-V cores, to deliver 100x the computational capability of today's space computers. This massive increase in computing performance will help usher in new possibilities for a variety of mission elements such as autonomous rovers, vision processing, space flight, guidance systems, communications, and other applications....

The SiFive X280 is a multi-core capable RISC-V processor with vector extensions and SiFive Intelligence Extensions and is optimized for AI/ML compute at the edge. The X280 is ideal for applications requiring high-throughput, single-thread performance while under significant power constraints. The X280 has demonstrated a 100x increase in compute capabilities compared to today's space computers..

In scientific and space workloads, the X280 provides several orders of magnitude improvement compared to competitive CPU solutions.
A business development executive at SiFive says their X280 core "demonstrates orders of magnitude performance gains over competing processor technology," adding that the company's IP "allows NASA to take advantage of the support, flexibility, and long-term viability of the fast-growing global RISC-V ecosystem.

"We've always said that with SiFive the future has no limits, and we're excited to see the impact of our innovations extend well beyond our planet."

And their announcement stresses that open hardware is a win for everybody: The open and collaborative nature of RISC-V will allow the broad academic and scientific software development community to contribute and develop scientific applications and algorithms, as well optimizing the many math functions, filters, transforms, neural net libraries, and other software libraries, as part of a robust and long-term software ecosystem.

America's Department of Agriculture and NASA recently announced the Artemis Moon Trees Program. After the first launch of its SLS super-heavy-lift launch vehicle, "the seeds carried on Artemis I will be grown into seedlings by the Forest Service and distributed to locations across the U.S."

But it's just part of a larger initiative. The U.S. government announced Friday that it's working with "a new coalition of space companies that will focus on increasing the space industry's capacity to meet the rising demand for the skilled technical workforce" — partly by inspiring and educating the next generation. This coalition includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Blue Origin, Jacobs, L3Harris, Planet Labs PBC, Rocket Lab, Sierra Space, Space X and Virgin Orbit.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Yesterday at the second convening of America's National Space Council, Vice President Kamala Harris announced "new commitments from the U.S. government, private sector companies, education and training providers, and philanthropic organizations to support space-related STEM initiatives to inspire, prepare, and employ the next generation of the space workforce..." according to a statement from the White House, "to address the challenges of today and prepare for the discoveries of tomorrow...."

Among those anchoring the Administration's efforts to increase the space industry's capacity to meet the rising demand for the skilled technical workforce is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' space tourism company Blue Origin, which will be joined by industry partner Amazon to inspire youth to pursue space STEM careers. "Blue Origin's Club for the Future," the White House explains, "is launching Space Days to engage millions of students, teachers and school administrators in the excitement of space and space careers." Club for the Future, as reported earlier on Slashdot, is the Blue Origin founded-and-funded tax-exempt foundation that received the $28 million proceeds of a single auctioned ticket to accompany Bezos on Blue Origin's maiden 11-minute space tourism flight in June 2021. The nonprofit's mission is "to inspire future generations to pursue careers in STEM and to help invent the future of life in space."

The White House also announced that Amazon and Bezos-funded nonprofit Code.org "will highlight connections between computer science and space exploration in the 2022 Hour of Code. Students will have the opportunity to explore and develop coding skills through engaging, space-themed tutorials and create shareable projects. Through a collaboration with NASA, the U.S. Space Force, America's Department of Energy, and the U.S. Geological Survey, students will also learn about different careers and pathways for space careers in these agencies. Code.org reaches approximately 15 million students annually." Amazon reported in 2018 on its efforts to accelerate K-12 CS education in the U.S. with Code.org to "support the much-needed pipeline for workers who are well versed in computer science."
The coalition's other efforts include three pilot programs collaborating with community colleges, unions and others "to demonstrate a replicable and scalable approach to attracting, training and creating employment opportunities." Federal agencies and the Smithsonian Institute also launched a new web site with free space-related resources for K-12 educators which also promotes career awareness.

And NASA also released an educator resources hub that includes a LEGO Build to Launch Series — plus $4 million in educational grants.

When they examined decades-old blood samples from 14 NASA astronauts who flew Space Shuttle missions between 1998 and 2001, researchers found that samples from all 14 astronauts showed mutations in their DNA. Futurism reports: While these mutations are likely low enough not to represent a serious threat to the astronauts' long term health, the research underlines the importance of regular health screenings for astronauts, especially as they embark on longer missions to the Moon and beyond in coming years. The specific mutations, as identified in a new study published in the journal Nature Communications Biology, were marked by a high proportion of blood cells that came from a single clone, a phenomenon called clonal hematopoiesis. Mutations like this can be caused by exposure to excess ultraviolet radiation, and other forms of radiation including chemotherapy. In this case, researchers are suspicious that the mutations may have been the result of space radiation.

"Astronauts work in an extreme environment where many factors can result in somatic mutations, most importantly space radiation, which means there is a risk that these mutations could develop into clonal hematopoiesis," said lead author David Goukassian, professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in a statement. The blood samples for this latest study were collected from 12 male and two female astronauts ten days before their flight and on the day of their landing. The samples were then cryogenically stored at -112 degrees Fahrenheit for around two decades. The mutations observed in the blood samples resemble the kind of somatic mutations we see in older individuals -- which is interesting on its own, considering the median age of the astronauts was only 42.

"Although the clonal hematopoiesis we observed was of a relatively small size, the fact that we observed these mutations was surprising given the relatively young age and health of these astronauts," Goukassian said. "The presence of these mutations does not necessarily mean that the astronauts will develop cardiovascular disease or cancer," he added, "but there is the risk that, over time, this could happen through ongoing and prolonged exposure to the extreme environment of deep space." Therefore, Goukassian and his team are recommending that NASA should regularly screen astronauts for these kinds of mutations.

NASA said Thursday that it is working to fix the issues that delayed the launch of its Artemis I moon rocket last week, and that it hopes to make another attempt later this month. CNBC reports: The space agency on Sept. 3 called off the second attempt to launch the mission after detecting a hydrogen leak as the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket was being fueled. The Artemis I mission represents the debut of the SLS rocket and the uncrewed Orion capsule it is carrying, for what is expected to be a more than month-long journey around the moon. NASA made several unsuccessful attempts during the launch countdown on Saturday to fix the leak.

During a press conference on Thursday, NASA officials said work at the launchpad is ongoing, with the agency's team aiming to complete the replacement of seals on the fueling system by the end of the day. NASA then hopes to conduct a tanking demonstration on Sept. 17 to verify the replacement work was successful. Assuming the work and testing are completed by then, NASA has requested new launch dates from the U.S. Space Force's Eastern Range -- which reviews and approves all missions that liftoff from Cape Canaveral region. The agency has asked to make launch attempts on Sept. 23 and Sept. 27.

An international team of scientists says it has discovered two new "super-Earth" type planets about 100 light-years away, one of which may be suitable for life. NPR reports: Unlike any of the planets in our solar system, the nearly 1,600 known super-Earths are larger than Earth, but lighter than icy planets like Uranus and Neptune. Researchers at Belgium's University of Liege announced Wednesday that they found another one while using Earth-based telescopes to confirm the existence of a different planet initially discovered by a NASA satellite in the same solar system.

NASA's satellite found planet LP 890-9b, which is about 30% larger than Earth and orbits its sun in just 2.7 days. ULiege researchers used their SPECULOOS (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) telescopes in Chile and Spain to take a closer look at the planet with high-precision cameras. That's when the stargazers discovered another planet, LP 890-9c (renamed SPECULOOS-2c by the ULiege researchers), which is 40% larger than Earth and takes 8.5 days to orbit its sun. Francisco Pozuelos, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia and one of the main co-authors of the paper, said in a news release that the planet could be suitable to life despite being a mere 3.7 million miles from its sun. Earth, by comparison, is located over 93 million miles away from our sun. "Although this planet orbits very close to its star, at a distance about 10 times shorter than that of Mercury around our Sun, the amount of stellar irradiation it receives is still low, and could allow the presence of liquid water on the planet's surface, provided it has a sufficient atmosphere," Pozuelos said. "This is because the star LP 890-9 is about 6.5 times smaller than the Sun and has a surface temperature half that of our star."

With 8.8 million pounds of thrust, NASA's SLS would've been the most powerful rocket ever launched into space, notes the Orlando Sentinel.

But instead on Saturday morning, "NASA scrubbed its second attempt to launch the Artemis I mission into lunar orbit..." reports CNET. "During a press conference later in the day, Jim Free, an associate administrator at NASA Headquarters, said we shouldn't expect to see a third attempt within this launch period, which culminates Tuesday." (Though the mission manager the next launch attempt could be as late as mid-October.)

"This time, the culprit was a liquid hydrogen leak that showed up while the team was loading the rocket's core stage...." According to the space agency, the leak occurred "while loading the propellant into the core stage of the Space Launch System rocket" and that "multiple troubleshooting efforts to address the area of the leak, by reseating a seal in the quick disconnect where liquid hydrogen is fed into the rocket, did not fix the issue."

This is the second time the Artemis I mission has been delayed. Liftoff attempt No. 1 was scheduled for Monday, but launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson had to call a scrub then as well, because of an unyielding problem with what's known as an engine bleed test. (This process is meant to allow the engines to chill to the right temperature by releasing a small amount of the fuel).

"We were unable to get the engines within the thermal conditions required to commit to launch," Artemis mission manager Mike Sarafin said during a press conference on Tuesday. "In combination with that, we also had a bent valve issue on the core stage, and it was at that point that the team decided to knock off the launch attempt for that day."

Stefanie Waldek reports via Space.com: Led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) is a small instrument on the Perseverance rover that's designed to transform carbon dioxide, which comprises some 96% of the atmosphere on Mars, into breathable oxygen. Oxygen, of course, is crucial for a human mission to Mars. Since February 2021, the device has run seven times, each time producing about 0.2 ounces (6 grams) of oxygen per hour. That's on par with the abilities of small trees here on Earth.

MOXIE has now operated in a variety of conditions on Mars, both day and night, through all four seasons. The researchers expect that a version of the instrument approximately 100 times larger than MOXIE could potentially create breathable oxygen for future astronauts who visit the Red Planet. If explorers can't make their own oxygen on Mars, supplies from Earth would take up valuable mass on a spacecraft. Furthermore, MOXIE's products could also be used as an ingredient for rocket fuel -- pretty crucial to ensuring the mission isn't one-way. A rocket would need 33 to 50 tons (30 to 45 metric tons) of liquid oxygen propellant in order to launch humans off Mars. "This is the first demonstration of actually using resources on the surface of another planetary body, and transforming them chemically into something that would be useful for a human mission," MOXIE deputy principal investigator Jeffrey Hoffman, a professor of the practice in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a former NASA astronaut, said in a statement. "It's historic in that sense."

The research has been published in the journal Science Advances.

A critical system aboard the probe was sending garbled data about its status. Engineers have fixed the issue but are still seeking the root cause. NASA reports: Engineers have repaired an issue affecting data from NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft. Earlier this year, the probe's attitude articulation and control system (AACS), which keeps Voyager 1's antenna pointed at Earth, began sending garbled information about its health and activities to mission controllers, despite operating normally. The rest of the probe also appeared healthy as it continued to gather and return science data. The team has since located the source of the garbled information: The AACS had started sending the telemetry data through an onboard computer known to have stopped working years ago, and the computer corrupted the information.

Suzanne Dodd, Voyager's project manager, said that when they suspected this was the issue, they opted to try a low-risk solution: commanding the AACS to resume sending the data to the right computer. Engineers don't yet know why the AACS started routing telemetry data to the incorrect computer, but it likely received a faulty command generated by another onboard computer. If that's the case, it would indicate there is an issue somewhere else on the spacecraft. The team will continue to search for that underlying issue, but they don't think it is a threat to the long-term health of Voyager 1.

NASA delayed the debut launch of its new massive rocket due to an issue with one of its engines, dealing a temporary blow to the space agency's plan to return to the lunar surface. From a report: With Vice President Kamala Harris in attendance at Florida's Kennedy Space Center and a global audience watching online, the uncrewed Artemis I mission was called off at 8:34 a.m., one minute after its originally scheduled liftoff time. The launch missed its window after controllers were unable to resolve a temperature problem with one of the rocket's four main engines. The rocket and space capsule are in "a safe and stable configuration," NASA said Monday in a statement, adding that engineers were continuing to gather data.

The earliest available opportunity to try again is on Sept. 2, NASA said in a webcast while announcing the scrubbed launch. No decision has been made on rescheduling. Official confirmation of the delay came after the space agency spent the early morning hours investigating issues including a potential crack in material in the main body of the rocket as well as the temperature issue, officials said earlier Monday. Those came after engineers examined and resolved a suspected leak affecting the hydrogen tanking process.

United Launch Alliance has been developing a heavy-lift space vehicle since 2014 (with investment from the U.S. military) called the Vulcan Centaur.

So CNN reports that the ashes of the late Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols "will head to deep space on a Vulcan rocket." Nichols' cremated remains will be aboard the first Celestis Voyager Memorial Spaceflight, which will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Celestis, Inc., is a private company that conducts memorial spaceflights. Among the remains also aboard the flight will be the ashes of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry; his wife, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, who played various roles in the show and films; and James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in the films and TV series....

The spaceflight will travel beyond NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and into interplanetary deep space. In addition to cremated remains, capsules onboard will also carry complete human genome DNA samples from willing participants.

People can participate in the flight — by having DNA or loved ones' remains in a spaceflight container — for a price starting at $12,500, and reservations close August 31. (Celestis offers other voyages that don't travel as far, but can cost less than $5,000.) Ahead of the flight's liftoff, Celestis will host a three-day event with mission briefings, an astronaut-hosted dinner, launch site tours, an on-site memorial service and launch viewing. All events will be shown via webcast, according to Celestis.
An announcement on the flight's site invites fans of Nichelle Nichols to "share your own story about how she inspired you and it will be sent into deep space aboard the first Celestis Voyager Memorial Spaceflight — the Enterprise Flight, launching later in 2022."

"Over the past year, nuclear fusion has inched closer to reality," the Washington Post reported Friday.

"Scientists are mere years from getting more energy out of fusion reactions than the energy required to create them, they said. Venture capitalists are pumping billions into companies, racing to get a fusion power plant up and running by the early 2030s. The Biden administration, through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Department of Energy, is creating tax credits and grant programs to help companies figure out how to deploy this kind of energy." (One fusion company's CEO argues that "Once the technology is shown to work, it's less risky, and the next buyer of that technology could get a commercial loan.")

But even with all this new excitement, challenges still remain, nuclear scientists warn: The U.S. energy grid would need a significant redesign for fusion power plants to become common. The price of providing fusion power is still too high to be feasible. "We're at a very exciting place," said Dennis G. Whyte, director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. "But we also have to be realistic in the sense that it's still very hard...."

Phil Larochelle, a partner at the venture capital firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures, said private money is flowing into fusion at such high levels because scientific advancements, such as better magnets, have made cheap nuclear fusion a likelier possibility. Going forward, Larochelle noted that getting nuclear fusion to market probably will require formal cost-sharing programs with the government, which he said could be similar to how NASA is partnering with SpaceX for space travel innovation. "In both the U.S. and the U.K., there's now kind of new government programs and support for trying to get to a [fusion] pilot," he said. "It's a good kind of risk-sharing between public and private [sectors]."

Despite the growing government collaboration, Whyte said, a few challenges remain. The effects of climate change are increasingly irreversible, and the clock is ticking, he said, making fusion energy a crucial need. Companies will have to figure out how to deploy the technology widely. Doing it cheaply is most important, he said. "What I worry about is that we'll get to a system where we can't actually make it economically attractive fast enough," he added. Moreover, to create an electricity grid through which fusion technology provides large amounts of power, many things need to happen. Universities need to churn out scientists more capable of working on fusion technology. Fusion power companies need to build devices that create more energy than they consume. Scientific and manufacturing materials must be constructed in difficult ways if power plants want to scale.

"Can we get there?" Whyte asked. "I think we can if we get our act together in the right way. But there's no guarantee of that."

Space can be downright noisy in the right conditions, such as the hot gas surrounding the immense black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster, according to NASA. Motherboard reports: The agency recently tweeted an eerie audio clip that represents actual sound waves rippling through the gas and plasma in this cluster, which is 250 million light years from Earth. "The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a ~vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel," the agency tweeted. "A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we've picked up actual sound. Here it's amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole!"

Though the acoustic signals generated by the black hole were first identified in 2003 in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, they have never been brought into the hearing range of the human ear -- until now. "In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before... because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory," NASA said in a statement. "In this new sonification of Perseus, the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time." "As it turns out, the sound waves in their natural environment are a whopping 57 octaves below the note middle C, making this black hole a real cosmic baritone," adds Motherboard. "To make these tremors audible to humans, scientists raised their frequencies quadrillions of times (one quadrillion is a million billions, for perspective)."

The James Webb Space Telescope has snapped a pair of near-infrared photos showing Jupiter's polar auroras. "You can also see the planet's extremely faint rings and two of its smaller moons, Amalthea (the bright spot to the far left) and Adrastea (the dot at the left edge of the central ring)," notes Engadget. From the report: The pictures were taken using NIRCam's widefield view on July 27th. As for the trippy visuals? Astronomers created composites using several images produced with filters mapped to multiple colors (particularly visible in the image below). The Great Red Spot and other cloud formations are white as they reflect large amounts of sunlight. The observations should provide more insights into Jupiter's "inner life," according to the European Space Agency. That, in turn, could help scientists understand the behavior of gas giants beyond the Solar System.

"The very first results from the James Webb Space Telescope seem to indicate that massive, luminous galaxies had already formed within the first 250 million years after the Big Bang," reports Sky and Telescope.

"If confirmed, this would seriously challenge current cosmological thinking." Shortly after NASA published Webb's first batch of scientific data, the astronomical preprint server arXiv was flooded with papers claiming the detection of galaxies that are so remote that their light took some 13.5 billion years to reach us. Many of these appear to be more massive than the standard cosmological model that describes the universe's composition and evolution. "It worries me slightly that we find these monsters in the first few images," says cosmologist Richard Ellis (University College London)....

Before the community accepts these claims, the reported redshifts have to be confirmed spectroscopically. Mark McCaughrean, the senior science adviser of the European Space Agency (a major partner on Webb) commented on Twitter: "I'm sure some of them will be [confirmed], but I'm equally sure they won't all be. [...] It does all feel a little like a sugar rush at the moment."

Ellis agrees: "It's one thing to put a paper on arXiv," he says, "but it's quite something else to turn it into a lasting article in a peer-reviewed journal."
Since 1991, science writer Eric Lerner has been arguing that the Big Bang never happened. Now 75 years old, he writes: In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones. One paper's title begins with the candid exclamation: "Panic!"

Why do the JWST's images inspire panic among cosmologists? And what theory's predictions are they contradicting? The papers don't actually say. The truth that these papers don't report is that the hypothesis that the JWST's images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since. Since that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. "Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning," says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, "and wondering if everything I've done is wrong...."

Even galaxies with greater luminosity and mass than our own Milky Way galaxy appear in these images to be two to three times smaller than in similar images observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the new galaxies have redshifts which are also two to three times greater.This is not at all what is expected with an expanding universe, but it is just exactly what I and my colleague Riccardo Scarpa predicted based on a non-expanding universe, with redshift proportional to distance.... [T]he galaxies that the JWST shows are just the same size as the galaxies near to us, if it is assumed that the universe is not expanding and redshift is proportional to distance.....

Big Bang theorists did expect to see badly mangled galaxies scrambled by many collisions or mergers. What the JWST actually showed was overwhelmingly smooth disks and neat spiral forms, just as we see in today's galaxies. The data in the "Panic!" article showed that smooth spiral galaxies were about "10 times" as numerous as what theory had predicted and that this "would challenge our ideas about mergers being a very common process". In plain language, this data utterly destroys the merger theory....

According to Big Bang theory, the most distant galaxies in the JWST images are seen as they were only 400-500 million years after the origin of the universe. Yet already some of the galaxies have shown stellar populations that are over a billion years old. Since nothing could have originated before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies demonstrates that the Big Bang did not occur....

While Big Bang theorists were shocked and panicked by these new results, Riccardo and I (and a few others) were not. In fact, a week before the JWST images were released we published online a paper that detailed accurately what the images would show. We could do this with confidence because more and more data of all kinds has been contradicting the Big Bang hypothesis for years....

Based on the published literature, right now the Big Bang makes 16 wrong predictions and only one right one — the abundance of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen.
UPDATE: Kirkpatrick says her quote was was taken out of context, in an article from Space.com that dismises Eric Lerner as "a serial denier of the Big Bang since the late 1980s, preferring his personal pseudoscientific alternative."

It turns out that JavaScript had a hand in delivering the stunning images that the James Webb Space Telescope has been beaming back to Earth. From a report: I mean that the actual telescope, arguably one of humanity's finest scientific achievements, is largely controlled by JavaScript files. Oh, and it's based on a software development kit from 2002. According to a manuscript (PDF) for the JWST's Integrated Science Instrument Module (or ISIM), the software for the ISIM is controlled by "the Script Processor Task (SP), which runs scripts written in JavaScript upon receiving a command to do so." The actual code in charge of turning those JavaScripts (NASA's phrasing, not mine) into actions can run 10 of them at once.

The manuscript and the paper (PDF) "JWST: Maximizing efficiency and minimizing ground systems," written by the Space Telescope Science Institute's Ilana Dashevsky and Vicki Balzano, describe this process in great detail, but I'll oversimplify a bit to save you the pages of reading. The JWST has a bunch of these pre-written scripts for doing specific tasks, and scientists on the ground can tell it to run those tasks. When they do, those JavaScripts will be interpreted by a program called the script processor, which will then reach out to the other applications and systems that it needs to based on what the script calls for. The JWST isn't running a web browser where JavaScript directly controls the Mid-Infrared Instrument -- it's more like when a manager is given a list of tasks (in this example, the JavaScripts) to do and delegates them out to their team.

Redwire says it would launch the first commercial space greenhouse in Spring next year to boost crop production research outside Earth and support exploration missions. From a report: The space infrastructure company's project will help deliver critical insights for NASA's Artemis missions and beyond, said Dave Reed, Redwire's manager for the greenhouse project. The Artemis program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) aims at sending astronauts to the moon and establishing a long-term lunar colony as a precursor to the eventual human exploration of Mars.

The navigation strategy of NASA's Curiosity rover means it has to stop frequently to check its position, but soon a software update will allow it to move almost continuously. From a report: A new software update will soon give NASA's Curiosity Mars rover a 50 per cent speed boost, allowing it to cover a greater distance and complete more science. But the update very nearly didn't happen because of a mysterious bug in the software that eluded engineers for years. Curiosity, which landed on Mars 10 years ago this month, has already greatly outlived its planned two-year lifespan.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Last year, NASA achieved something science fiction writers have been dreaming about for decades: It created oxygen on Mars. A microwave-size device [called MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment] attached to the agency's Perseverance rover converted carbon dioxide into 10 minutes of breathable oxygen. Now, physicists say they've come up with a way to use electron beams in a plasma reactor to create far more oxygen, potentially in a smaller package. The technique might someday not just help astronauts breathe on the Red Planet, but could also serve as a way to create fuel and fertilizer, says Michael Hecht, an experimental scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But Hecht, who leads the oxygenmaking rover instrument, says the new approach still has a number of challenges to overcome before it can hitch a ride to our solar neighbor.
[...]
In the lab, he and his colleagues pumped air designed to match the pressure and composition of Mars into metal tubes. Unlike MOXIE, they didn't need to compress or heat the air. Yet, by firing an electron beam into the reaction chamber, they were able to convert about 30% of the air into oxygen. They estimate that the device could create about 14 grams of oxygen per hour: enough to support 28 minutes of breathing, the team reports today in the Journal of Applied Physics. Guerra's team still needs to solve some practical problems, Hecht notes. To work on Mars, the plasma device would need a portable power source and a place to store the oxygen it makes, all of which could make it just as -- if not more -- bulky than MOXIE, he says. If space agencies were willing to spend millions of dollars developing it -- as NASA did with MOXIE -- the plasma approach could mature, Hecht says. He especially likes how the electron beam could be tuned to split other atmospheric molecules, such as nitrogen, to create fertilizer. "There's nothing wrong with the plasma technique other than it's a lot less mature [than MOXIE]," he says.

Did Mars ever support life? One clue might be quantifying just how much ice (and other minerals) are lurking just below the planet's surface, a team of researchers argued this month. "If life exists on Mars, that is where it would be," they said in a news release this week. "There is no liquid water on the surface," but in a contrary scenario, "subsurface life would be protected from radiation."

Locating ice and minerals has another benefit too, they write in the journal Geophysical Research Letters: to "prepare for human exploration." And fortunately, there's a tool on the InSight lander (which touched down in 2018) that can help estimate the velocity of seismic waves inside the geological crust of Mars — velocities which change depending on which rock types are present, and which materials are filling pores within rocks (which could be ice, water, gas, or other mineral cements).

That's the good news. But after running computer models of applied rock physics thousands and thousands of times, the researchers believe it's unlikely that there's any layers saturated with water (or ice) in the top 300 meters (1,000 feet) of the crust of Mars. "Model results confirm that the upper 300 meters of Mars beneath InSight is most likely composed of sediments and fractured basalts."

The researchers reached a discouraging conclusion, reports Space.com "The chances of finding Martian life appear poor at in the vicinity of NASA's InSight lander." The subsurface around the landing zone — an equatorial site chosen especially for its flat terrain and good marsquake potential — appears loose and porous, with few ice grains in between gaps in the crust, researchers said.... The equatorial region where InSight is working, in theory, should be able to host subsurface water, as conditions are cold enough even there for water to freeze. But the new finding is challenging scientists' assumptions about possible ice or liquid water beneath the subsurface near InSight, whose job is to probe beneath the surface.

While images from the surface have suggested there might be sedimentary rock and lava flows beneath InSight, researchers' models have uncertainties about porosity and mineral content. InSight is helping to fill in some of those gaps, and its new data suggests that "uncemented material" largely fills in the region blow the lander. That suggests little water is present, although more data needs to be collected.

It's unclear how representative the InSight data is of the Martian subsurface in general, but more information may come courtesy of future missions. NASA is considering a Mars Life Explorer that would drill 6 feet (2 meters) below the surface to search for possible habitable conditions. Additionally, a proposed Mars Ice Mapper Mission could search for possible water reservoirs for human missions.
And of course, as the researchers point out in their announcement, "big ice sheets and frozen ground ice remain at the Martian poles."

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shared this thought-provoking anecdote from Science magazine: NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission was brutish and short. It began on 9 October 2009, when the hull of a spent Centaur rocket stage smashed into Cabeus crater, near the south pole of the Moon, with the force of about 2 tons of TNT. And it ended minutes later, when a trailing spacecraft flew through and analyzed the lofted plume of debris before it, too, crashed. About 6% of the plume was water, presumably from ice trapped in the shadowed depths of the crater, where the temperature never rises above -173ÂC. The Moon, it turned out, wasn't as bone dry as the Apollo astronauts believed. "That was our first ground truth that there is water ice," says Jennifer Heldmann, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center who worked on the mission.

Today, Heldmann wants to send another rocket to probe lunar ice — but not on a one-way trip. She has her eye on Starship, a behemoth under development by private rocket company SpaceX that would be the largest flying object the world has ever seen. With Starship, Heldmann could send 100 tons to the Moon, more than twice the lunar payload of the Saturn V, the workhorse of the Apollo missions. She dreams of delivering robotic excavators and drills and retrieving ice in freezers onboard Starship, which could return to Earth with tens of tons of cargo. By analyzing characteristics such as the ice's isotopic composition and its depth, she could learn about its origin: how much of it came from a bombardment of comets and asteroids billions of years ago versus slow, steady implantation by the solar wind. She could also find out where the ice is abundant and pure enough to support human outposts. "It's high-priority science, and it's also critical for exploration," Heldmann says.

When SpaceX CEO Elon Musk talks up Starship, it's mostly about human exploration: Set up bases on Mars and make humans a multiplanetary species! Save civilization from extinction! But Heldmann and many others believe the heavy lifter could also radically change the way space scientists work. They could fly bigger and heavier instruments more often — and much more cheaply, if SpaceX's projections of cargo launch costs as low as $10 per kilogram are to be believed. On Mars, they could deploy rovers not as one-offs, but in herds. Space telescopes could grow, and fleets of satellites in low-Earth orbit could become commonplace. Astronomy, planetary science, and Earth observation could all boldly go, better than they ever have before.

Of course, Starship isn't real yet. All eyes will be on a first orbital launch test, expected sometime in the coming months.
Starship would've made it easier to deploy the massive James Webb Space Telescope, the article points out, while in the future Starship's extra fuel capacity could make it easier to explore Mercury, earth's outermost planets, and even interstellar space. In fact, Heldmann and colleagues have now suggested that NASA create a dedicated funding line for missions relying on Starship. Heldmann argues that "We on the science side need to be ready to take advantage of those capabilities when they come online."

The article notes that at an event in February, Elon Musk "explained how a single Starship, launching three times per week, would loft more than 15,000 tons to orbit in a year — about as much as all the cargo that has been lifted in the entire history of spaceflight."