Another Starship prototype exploded Tuesday morning during an attempt to nail a tricky landing technique at SpaceX’s test launch facilities in Texas. The landing attempt followed a clean liftoff and a demonstration of the rocket’s autonomous in-flight maneuvers, marking SpaceX’s fourth high-altitude flight since December.
The SN11 rocket launched at 9AM ET in foggy weather at SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas facilities, soaring roughly 6.2 miles to test the rocket’s three Raptor engines and a number of in-flight maneuvers that steer it back to land. As SN11 neared peak altitude, the engines gradually shut down to begin its free-fall back toward the ground before executing a “landing burn” — when one Raptor reignites to carry the rocket gently down to a landing pad not far from where it launched. At least, that’s the idea.
“Something significant happened shortly after landing burn start,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted shortly after the explosion. “Should know what it was once we can examine the bits later today.”
A live camera feed aboard SN11, streamed by SpaceX, froze moments before its landing attempt. Another feed, provided by the website NASA Spaceflight, showed large chunks of debris raining on SpaceX’s Boca Chica facilities, though the landing explosion itself was obscured by fog.
“Looks like we had another exciting test,” SpaceX’s John Insprucker said on SpaceX’s live stream, suggesting the vehicle was lost in another eventful landing attempt. “We do appear to have lost all the data from the vehicle, and the team of course is away from the landing pad.”
“At least the crater is in the right place!,” Musk tweeted. One of SN11’s engines “had issues” during ascent and didn’t fire strongly enough during the landing burn, he said.
While the fog ruined views of SN11’s landing attempt, a weather radar from the National Weather Service in Brownsville, Texas detected a plume of gas that indicated an explosion in mid-air.
If anyone on South Padre Island, or in the Boca Chica area, Port Isabel, Laguna Vista, etc received an abrupt and startling wakeup this morning, this was probably it. Our radar was able to see #SN11 unfortunately explode in mid-air. #RGVwx #txwx pic.twitter.com/Ohyyq3bIpf
— NWS Brownsville (@NWSBrownsville) March 30, 2021
NASA has locked in a location on Mars for the first demo flight of its mini helicopter named Ingenuity, engineers announced on Tuesday. The four-pound rotorcraft is gearing up to attempt the first powered flight on another planet, demonstrating a new capability that could unlock access to hard-to-reach areas of other celestial bodies in the future.
Ingenuity arrived on Mars in February, clinging to the belly of the Perseverance rover, surviving a seven-month trek through deep space and an intense seven-minute landing sequence through Mars’ atmosphere. Within a few hours of Perseverance’s landing, engineers started analyzing orbital imagery to find a prime flight zone to drop off Ingenuity for its first flight — “an area where it is safe for the helicopter to take off, and also safe for the helicopter to land again after flight,” the craft’s chief pilot, Håvard Grip, said.
The landing site, he said, needed to be flat and free of any large rocks that could threaten Ingenuity’s flight demos. But it also needed to have “texture” — distinct features on the ground that the helicopter’s AI-powered navigation camera can spot to track its whereabouts during flight. Soon after landing, “we began to realize that we might just have a really great airfield right in front of our noses,” Grip told reporters at a press briefing on Tuesday.
Perseverance is in the middle of a days-long drive to the flight zone, just 196 feet away from the landing site. When it arrives, the craft will be lowered to the ground. Then Perseverance will spend roughly 25 hours driving about 330 feet away to a location NASA named the Van Zyl Overlook as a tribute to Jakob Van Zyl, a senior Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist who died last year.
Dropping Ingenuity off in its flight zone is “a very prescribed and meticulous process,” said Farah Alibay, who leads Ingenuity’s integration with Perseverance. Ingenuity will need to be flipped from its current horizontal position on the rover to a vertical position before touching the ground, which will take “multiple days,” she said. “The most stressful day, at least for me, is gonna be that last day while we finally separate the helicopter and drop Ingenuity on the ground.”
Engineers test Ingenuity’s deployment from Perseverance using mock-ups.Image: NASA / JPL
Lockheed Martin designed the Mars Helicopter Delivery System that will help Ingenuity’s tiny landing legs set foot on the ground. Keeping that delivery system lightweight while secure was a huge challenge even for Lockheed, which has decades of experience designing space systems. “We had to toss all that heritage and knowledge aside and literally start from scratch with a new electrical connection design,” Jeremy Morrey, Lockheed’s top engineer for the deployment system, told The Verge in an interview.
Once on the ground, NASA engineers expect Ingenuity to conduct its first flight test no earlier than April 8th, give or take a few days depending on Mars’ weather. The helicopter’s flight zone is shaped like a mini running track, with a box-shaped takeoff and return area on one side of the zone. “The first flight is special — it’s by far the most important flight we plan to do,” Grip said, adding that a successful first flight will mean “complete mission success.”
For that debut flight, Ingenuity will climb nearly 10 feet (3 meters), hover in place for about 30 seconds, turn in midair, then descend for a landing. It will be fully autonomous, operating on commands sent by engineers back on Earth the day prior. A 0.5-megapixel navigation camera on Ingenuity’s underside will be snapping 30 photos per second of the ground to inform its movement.
Ingenuity has another, more powerful camera with 13 megapixels facing the horizon. That will snap pictures in midair, while cameras aboard Perseverance will aim to capture the helicopter in flight. All of those pictures will eventually be transmitted back to Earth.
The flight model of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter.Image: NASA / JPL
Four more flight tests are planned in a month-long window after Ingenuity’s first 10-foot takeoff. What the helicopter does during those flight tests will largely depend on the results of the first one. “It could, in principle, go higher currently as designed,” Grip said. “There may be cases where, if everything goes well during our nominal flights, we might stretch things a little bit beyond the nominal flight.”
After that, Ingenuity’s test campaign will likely come to an end. It’s a demo mission, and Perseverance has other objectives to focus on, like collecting Martian soil samples for a future Mars mission to bring back to Earth.
If successful, Ingenuity will mark the first powered flight on another world. A mission to Venus by the Soviet Union in the 1980s under its Vega program claimed the title for first off-world flight, with two balloon aerobots (not powered) flying into the clouds of Venus. Off-world helicopters like Ingenuity, if proven to be viable, could be used in future missions to trek places where wheeled rovers can’t reach, like caves, tunnels, or mountaintops.
Even before Ingenuity’s first flight, engineers are already celebrating making it this far. Having a tiny, four-pound helicopter survive a trip from Earth to Mars is no easy task, said Morrey, the Lockheed engineer. “You have to survive launch on a rocket while carrying a carbon fiber feather. It’s never been done before,” he said of a mission like this.
NASA’s Perseverance rover is getting ready to deploy a mini-helicopter named Ingenuity on Mars. The four-pound, four-blade rotorcraft will attempt the first flight of its kind on another planet, and in the process, it will test a new mode of mobility that could transform the way we Earthlings remotely explore other worlds.
The craft is currently attached to the belly of Perseverance, which landed at Mars’ Jezero crater in February. One of the first steps toward setting the baby helicopter off on its debut flight came this weekend when Perseverance dropped a protective shell and exposed Ingenuity to the bright Martian sunlight for the first time. “Away goes the debris shield, and here’s our first look at the helicopter,” the rover’s Twitter account said on Sunday.
Away goes the debris shield, and here’s our first look at the helicopter. It’s stowed sideways, folded up and locked in place, so there’s some reverse origami to do before I can set it down. First though, I’ll be off to the designated “helipad,” a couple days’ drive from here. pic.twitter.com/E9zZGQk5jQ
— NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) March 21, 2021
After dropping the debris shield, Perseverance will spend a couple of days driving itself to Ingenuity’s flight zone, which NASA officials plan to unveil in a press conference on Tuesday. The helicopter will be lowered to the ground, and Perseverance will scoot away to a safe distance of about 330 feet, leaving Ingenuity to unlock its rotor blades and carry out a few spin tests. NASA expects the first test flights to come “no earlier than the first week of April,” a statement read.
The artificial boundaries of the flight zone, wherever it is, will be a 50-foot-long oval patch of land that Ingenuity will need to stay within during its flight tests. Perseverance will drop the helicopter off near one end of this flight zone, in a space engineers call the helipad.
Deploying the first helicopter on Mars is no easy task. Ingenuity’s team of engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had to account for a Martian atmosphere 100 times thinner than Earth’s, which means the craft needs to work much harder than Earth-bound helicopters to lift itself off the ground.
And it’s not just a more powerful toy drone: Ingenuity is an $85 million spacecraft built to withstand an extremely turbulent ride to Mars — from the violent rumbling during liftoff from Earth last summer to Perseverance’s seven-minute landing sequence through Mars’ atmosphere in February. Its design also has to comply with the international 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which requires signatories to ensure their spacecraft don’t contaminate environments on other planets.
“This was a design challenge that straddled both the aircraft and spacecraft boundaries,” says Bob Balaram, Ingenuity’s chief engineer. The team’s biggest challenge, he said, was creating a craft that can spin its blades fast enough to generate thrust, while keeping the overall design simple and lightweight — “otherwise whatever lift you generate doesn’t do any good if you’ve gotten too heavy in the process in the design.”
Packing all that power in the craft’s four-pound body is made possible by a rectangular solar panel installed above the craft’s four carbon fiber blades. That panel also holds a tiny telecommunications device that can communicate with a node on Perseverance’s body called the Mars Helicopter Base Station, even from as far as nine football fields away. The Base Station will help relay signals back to Earth.
Beneath the blades is a tissue box-sized fuselage that houses flight sensors, two cameras, batteries, and mini “survival heaters” that protect Ingenuity from freezing during nighttime on Mars, where temperatures drop as low as negative 130 degrees Fahrenheit. One of the two cameras has a 13-megapixel color camera facing the horizon that will snap and send images to Perseverance mid-flight (the other camera has a 0.5-megapixel black-and-white sensor used for navigation).
In all, Ingenuity will attempt to carry out five flight tests within a short, 30-day window. If the tests work, similar helicopter tech could be used in other missions, to trek places where wheeled rovers can’t reach, like caves, tunnels, or mountaintops. Ingenuity won’t fly again after its 30-day window, even if the tests are wildly successful. That’s because “we are being accommodated by a major flagship mission that’s got a huge, new astrobiology exploration ahead of it,” Balaram says. Perseverance’s primary mission is to explore Mars’ Jezero crater and pack soil samples into tiny, cigar-sized sample tubes that the rover will scatter around the surface for a future “fetch” rover to send back to Earth.
After that 30-day window, Ingenuity will lie on the Martian surface for eternity. If the craft’s first flight attempt doesn’t work out, Balaram said his team can still celebrate a number of achievements they’ve already made.
“I think the main thing is, we’ve already achieved a lot of milestones just by having a design that could do all of these things, and we have had a successful test program so far,” he said. “Every step is something to celebrate because nothing is a given. It’s a fairly high-risk, high-reward type of activity. And tech demos are inherently a quite risky venture, they’re not a slam dunk.”
In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the first Space Shuttle launch, Lego is releasing a new Space Shuttle Discovery set in collaboration with NASA. Discovery was not the first shuttle to take flight — that would be Columbia, which likely stirs up too many sad feelings for a Lego set — but it was the shuttle that launched the Hubble Space Telescope, which is also included in the set.
Available April 1st for $200, the set has 2,354 pieces, including three newly designed pieces for the windscreen and payload bay. It also includes 108 drum lacquered silver pieces, the most of any Lego set yet.
At 1:70 scale, the assembled shuttle comes in at around 8.5 inches high, 21 inches long, and 13.5 inches wide. The set comes with two stands so you can display the shuttle and telescope separately or together, as though the telescope is emerging from the payload bay.
Space friends!Image: Lego
This Discovery set is a big step up from previous Lego Space Shuttle sets like the Lego 10231 and 7470, not just in the number of pieces but in its overall sleekness and level of detail. The elevons on the wings can be tilted up and down by turning the middle engine, the leading edges of the wings have gray pieces representing the reinforced carbon-carbon of a real shuttle, and pulling up the flight deck reveals a mid-deck for tiny astronauts.
Look at those shiny doors.Image: Lego
Considering I derived great joy as a child from my (in retrospect) very dinky “Space Shuttle with Satellite” Hess truck, I am fully convinced this set will cure my ever-present existential dread. Please join me in appreciating these detail shots while I set a calendar reminder for April 1st.
Plenty of seating for my journey to happiness.Image: Lego
The Hubble’s aperture door, to block out the haters.Image: Lego
Landing gear, for running over my agonies.Image: Lego
Every Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast The Vergecast, where we discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering our biggest stories.
This week, co-hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn chat with Verge reporter Julia Alexander about the long-awaited release of the Zack Snyder version of Justice League on HBO Max. Why is the aspect ratio 4:3? Julia also explains what’s in store for the next phase for streaming services — like password sharing, advertisements, and competition for TikTok.
In the second half of the show, Verge senior reporter Andrew Hawkins joins in to represent the transportation section of The Verge.Andy discusses interviewing Sen. Chuck Schumer about a new bill in Congress focused on infrastructure and electric vehicles; the various EVs being announced by Kia, Canoo, and others; and the state of e-bikes in America.
And of course the show was able to fit in some gadget talk, too. The show dedicates some time to discuss Apple discontinuing the HomePod and what the future of Apple’s smart speaker business looks like with the HomePod mini.
Also, Samsung Unpacked 2021 was this week, with the announcement of new midrange Samsung phones with faster refresh rates, expandable storage, and stabilized cameras. Nilay and Dieter discuss what role “flagship” phones play when the midrange phones are getting more sophisticated.
You can listen to the full discussion here or in your preferred podcast player.
Stories discussed in this episode:
People aren’t missing their second COVID-19 vaccine dose, CDC data says
Some research has gotten a huge boost during the pandemic
Biden promises May 1st vaccine eligibility for all adults and a federal vaccine website
Disneyland will reopen on April 30th, for California residents only
Tinder is giving away free mail-in COVID-19 tests
Apple Maps now shows COVID-19 vaccination locations
Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine website builds on a swine flu tool
You will watch the Snyder Cut in 4:3 aspect ratio because HBO Max respects cinema
Zack Snyder’s Justice League remains overshadowed by its social media campaign
Netflix is trying to crack down on password sharing with new test
HBO Max will debut its cheaper, ad-supported tier in June
YouTube Shorts arrives in the US to take on TikTok, but the beta is still half-baked
Chuck Schumer wants to replace every gas car in America with an electric vehicle
E-bikes are expensive, but this congressman wants to make …
Canoo reveals a bubbly electric pickup truck
Kia shows off first full images of new EV6 electric car
Here are the biggest announcements from Volkswagen’s battery event
Elon Musk crowns himself ‘Technoking’ of Tesla
Foxconn says it might build EVs at empty Wisconsin site, or in Mexico
Samsung’s midrange phones now feature fast refresh rate screens, stabilized cameras
Samsung says it might skip the Galaxy Note this year
Apple discontinues the HomePod, but the HomePod mini will live on
New iPad Pros reportedly launching as soon as April, and the …
Intel puts Apple’s ‘I’m a Mac’ guy into new ads praising PCs
Biden to tap former Senator Bill Nelson as NASA chief
NASA test-fired the core stage of its massive Space Launch System rocket in Mississippi on Thursday. The team appeared to clinch its second attempt at a hot-fire run after cutting short an initial firing in January. Pending a review of the test’s data, engineers are aiming to ship the rocket stage to Florida ahead of its debut test flight to the Moon under NASA’s Artemis program.
Mounted in a behemoth test facility at NASA’s Stennis Space Center, the 212-foot-tall rocket stage’s four RS-25 engines ignited together for over eight minutes to test the conditions of a real liftoff. NASA and its prime contractor, Boeing, needed to reach at least four minutes of continuous test time to call it a success. With eight minutes, “they should have gotten what they need,” NASA spokeswoman Leigh D’Angelo said.
GIF by Nick Statt / The Verge
“They clearly got the full duration they were after, which is really great news,” NASA’s Green Run campaign manager Bill Wrobel said right after the engines shut down. “Clearly there’s a lot of data that has to be analyzed.”
The engine run was a crucial last step in the SLS program’s so-called Green Run test campaign. If the data checks out, it will make its way via boat to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for final assembly. The rocket’s first launch, Artemis I, will send an uncrewed Orion astronaut capsule on a trip around the Moon early next year.
A rover on the Moon has metal wheels that can flex around rocky obstacles, then reshape back to their original form. On Earth, surgeons install tiny mesh tubes that can dilate a heart patient’s blood vessels all on their own, without mechanical inputs or any wires to help.
These shape-shifting capabilities are all thanks to a bizarre kind of metal called nitinol, a so-called shape-metal alloy that can be trained to remember its own shape. The decades-old material has become increasingly common in a wide range of everyday applications. And in the next decade, the metal will face its most challenging application yet: a sample return mission on Mars.
Nitinol, made of nickel and titanium, works its magic through heat. To “train” a paper clip made of nitinol, for example, you heat it at 500 degrees Celsius in its desired shape, then splash it in cold water. Bend it out of shape, then return the same heat source, and the metal will eerily slink back into its original form.
The temperature that triggers nitinol’s transformation varies depending on the fine-tuned ratio of nickel to titanium. Engineers can tweak the metal to adapt to a wide array of conditions, making it a key tool in places where complex mechanics won’t fit, like the blood vessels surrounding a human heart or a hinge that positions a solar panel by responding to the sun’s heat.
The Verge spoke with engineers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center to see how nitinol will play a role in a mission to retrieve humanity’s first cache of pristine Martian soil samples — the second leg of a Mars mission campaign led by NASA and the European Space Agency. Check out the video above to see how and to see nitinol in action. (We promise, it’s not CGI.)
Vast amounts of ancient Martian water may have been buried beneath its surface instead of escaping into space, scientists report in the journal Science. The findings, published Tuesday, may help untangle a clash of theories seeking to explain the disappearance of Mars’ water, a resource that was abundant on the planet’s surface billions of years ago.
Through modeling and data from Mars probes, rovers, and meteorites, researchers at the California Institute of Technology found that a broad range — between 30 to 99 percent — of the Red Planet’s earliest amounts of water could have vanished from the surface through a geological process called crustal hydration, where water was locked away in the rocksof Mars.
Evidence of past water on Mars is written all over its rocky surface, where dried-out lake beds and rock formations illustrate a world shaped by liquids from more than 3 billion years ago. For years, scientists thought this water had mostly escaped outward into space, leaving the planet in its present — very dry — condition.
But that takes time. And the rate at which the water could have escaped the atmosphere, paired with the predicted amount of water that once existed on the Martian surface didn’t quite line up with modern observations of the planet. “If that persisted through the past 4 billion years, it can only account for a small fraction of water loss,” says Renyu Hu, one of the study’s co-authors. That left researchers with a key question: where exactly did the rest of the water on Mars go?
The study, led by Eva Scheller, a graduate student in geology at Caltech studying planetary surface processes, might offer an answer. The study finds that most of the water loss occurred during Mars’ Noachian period between 3.7 billion to 4.1 billion years ago. During that time, thewater on Mars could have interacted and fusedwith minerals in the planet’s crust — in addition to escaping the planet’s atmosphere — locking away as much water as roughly half of the Atlantic Ocean.
An image of the Mont Mercou cliff, captured by one of the navigation cameras aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover this month. Data and images from Curiosity informed the findings made by Scheller’s team.Image: NASA / JPL
“One of the things our team realized early in the study is that we needed to pay attention to the evidence from the last 10 to 15 years of Mars exploration in terms of what was going on with our discoveries about the Martian crust, and in particular the nature of water in the Martian crust,” says Bethany Ehlmann, a co-author on the study and professor of geological and planetary sciences at Caltech.
Water can break down rocks through a process called chemical weathering, which sometimes results in minerals becoming hydrated. Hydrated minerals take up and store water, locking it away. For example, gypsum, a water-soluble mineral found naturally on Mars, can keep its water trapped unless heated at temperatures higher than 212 degrees Fahrenheit.
For years, scientists have observed the distribution of water-bearing minerals across the Martian surface, thanks to spacecraft like NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been mapping the planet’s geology and climate since 2006. But those views alone are sometimes limited. “You have to wave your hands and extrapolate about how thick that layer is that you see at the surface,” says Michael Meyer, the lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.
“It’s only by having measurements in particular places on the surface with your rovers or landers, like Phoenix, or your occasional view of a fresh crater, that you get an idea of how thick the particular spot is on the planet for the hydrated minerals that you’re looking at,” he says. “So the answers are there, but they slowly build through time as you gain more data.”
That’s what led to the study’s findings that oceans’ worth of ancient water may have escaped inward, not outward. “We wanted to understand this at different scales,” says Scheller.
Crustal hydration happens on Earth, but our active plate tectonic system recycles rock deep inside our planet, heating rocks and releasing water in the process. That water gets sent back to the surface through volcanic activity, says Christopher Adcock, a planetary geochemist at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
Mars, on the other hand, is not as geologically active as Earth, which could explain why it only has limited water on its surface. The clearest evidence of water on Mars comes in the form of ice at the planet’s poles and in tiny quantities in the atmosphere. Scientists have studied hydrated rocks on the Moon, Mars, and on other planetary bodies as a potential source of drinkable water for future astronaut missions or fuel that could power habitats and rockets.
Adcock, whose studies include how humans can synthesize and use minerals on Mars for drinking water and rocket fuel, says the findings from Scheller’s team don’t totally change the game for resource utilization, “but it is certainly an encouraging reminder that the water we need for long term human missions to Mars might be right at our feet when we get there.”
Last month, NASA landed its Perseverance rover on Mars’ Jezero Crater, the site of a dried-out lake bed whose soil might hold the most pristine evidence of hydrated minerals — and fossilized microbial life. Perseverance will scoop up tiny soil samples and scatter them across the crater’s surface for a future “fetch” rover to retrieve. That presents a tantalizing opportunity for the researchers behind the Science study.
“Samples from Jezero will help us test this model,” Ehlmann says. “It amplifies the importance of bringing those samples back.”
When it showed off its 3D-printed homes at the South by Southwest festival back in 2018, Austin-based construction technology company ICON told The Verge its Vulcan printer could create an 800-square-foot structure for about $10,000. It seemed like only a matter of time before higher-end 3D-printed homes became a reality.
Now, a new development in East Austin is selling four houses built using ICON’s technology, starting at $450,000 (roughly the median home price in Austin at present). To be clear, ICON 3D-printed the first floor of each of the two- to four-bedroom homes in the new East 17th Street Residences development; the upper floors were built using conventional construction. They’ll be ready for move-in this summer.
Watching the gigantic printer spit out what turns into a house is pretty mesmerizing.
The houses were designed by Austin-based firm Logan Architecture, and the developer on the project is 3Strands of Kansas City. “We want to change the way we build, own and how we live in community together,” 3Strands CEO Gary O’Dell said in a statement. “This project represents a big step forward, pushing the boundaries of new technologies.”
Each of the houses took between five and seven days of printing time, and they’re between 1,000 and 2,000 square feet. The material used in the 3D-printing process is “a proprietary cementitious material called Lavacrete,” according to ICON, which it says is more durable than traditional construction materials.
So far, ICON has printed two dozen houses and structures across the US and Mexico, most of which are inhabited, including seven houses the company 3D-printed last year to house homeless people at Community First Village in Austin.
Although it’s touting the East 17th Street houses as the first 3D-printed homes for sale, The Architect’s Newspaper notes that ICON may not be the first to produce 3D-printed homes for the commercial real estate market. Long Island-based SQ4D claimed last month that it had the first “permitted” 3D-printed house in the US, a single-family residence in Riverhead, New York, listed at $300,000.
In addition to building its 3D-printed structures on planet Earth, ICON is working with NASA on research and development of a space-based construction system, with the ultimate goal of putting buildings on the Moon and Mars.
NASA has released an audio recording of its Perseverance rover firing lasers on the martian surface. The strikes, which sound like a series of small clicks, are designed to help scientists analyze the rocks around the rover. In this case the target was a rock called “Máaz,” which scientists were able to discover was basaltic, BBC News reports, meaning it contains a lot of magnesium and iron.
According to NASA’s site, the laser is fired by Perseverance’s “SuperCam,” and allows the rover to “zap and study areas on a rock as small as the period at the end of this sentence” from a distance of 20 feet (7 meters) away. Once the laser has fired at a rock, it uses its camera and spectrometer to analyze the hot gas the rock is vaporized into. The sound the laser creates offers additional data on the rock being studied.
You’re listening to the first audio recordings of laser strikes on Mars. These rhythmic tapping sounds heard by the microphone on my SuperCam instrument have different intensities that can help my team figure out the structure of the rocks around me. https://t.co/nfWyOyfhNy
— NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) March 10, 2021
Since its successful landing last month, Perseverance has sent back a variety of images and audio recordings from the surface of Mars. Although images from the planet are nothing new, this is the first time a Mars rover has actually used a microphone from the surface of Mars. NASA’s site notes that of two previous spacecraft that have carried microphones to Mars, one failed, and the other never turned its microphone on.
All of these data points are essential to help the SUV-sized rover as it goes about its mission seeking out signs of life and analyzing the geology of the red planet. It’s currently scheduled to spend one Mars year, or two Earth years, exploring the area around its landing site, which is suspected to have been a lake billions of years ago.
Supermicro’s 1023US-TR4 is a slim 1U dual-socket server designed for high-density compute environments in high-end cloud computing, virtualization, and enterprise applications. With support for AMD’s EPYC 7001 and 7002 processors, this high-end server packs up to two 64-core Eypc Rome processors, allowing it to cram 128 cores and 256 threads into one slim chassis.
We’re on the cusp of Intel’s Ice Lake and AMD’s EPYC Milan launches, which promise to reignite the fierce competition between the long-time x86 rivals. In preparation for the new launches, we’ve been working on a new set of benchmarks for our server testing, and that’s given us a pretty good look at the state of the server market as it stands today.
We used the Supermicro 1023US-TR4 server for EPYC Rome testing, and we’ll focus on examining the platform in this article. Naturally, we’ll add in Ice Lake and EPYC Milan testing as soon as those chips are available. In the meantime, here’s a look at some of our new benchmarks and the current state of the data center CPU performance hierarchy in several hotly-contested price ranges.
Inside the Supermicro 1023US-TR4 Server
Image 1 of 4
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 2 of 4
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 3 of 4
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 4 of 4
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
The Supermicro 1023US-TR4 server comes in the slim 1U form factor. And despite its slim stature, it can host an incredible amount of compute horsepower under the hood. The server supports AMD’s EPYC 7001 and 7002 series chips, with the latter series topping out at 64 cores apiece, which translates to 128 cores and 256 threads spread across the dual sockets.
Support for the 7002 series chips requires a 2.x board revision, and the server can accommodate CPU cTDP’s up to 280W. That means it can accommodate the beefiest of EPYC chips, which currently comes in the form of the 280W 64-core EPYC 7H12 with a 280W TDP.
The server has a tool-less rail mounting system that eases installation into server racks and the CSE-819UTS-R1K02P-T chassis measures 1.7 x 17.2 x 29 inches, ensuring broad compatibility with standard 19-inch server racks.
The front panel comes with standard indicator lights, like a unit identification (UID) light that helps with locating the server in a rack, along with drive activity, power, status light (to indicate fan failures or system overheating), and two LAN activity LEDs. Power and reset buttons are also present at the upper right of the front panel.
By default, the system comes with four tool-less 3.5-inch hot-swap SATA 3 drive bays, but you can configure the server to accept four NVMe drives on the front panel, and an additional two M.2 drives internally. You can also add an optional SAS card to enable support for SAS storage devices. The front of the system also houses a slide-out service/asset tag identifier card to the upper left.
Image 1 of 7
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 2 of 7
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 3 of 7
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 4 of 7
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 5 of 7
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 6 of 7
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 7 of 7
(Image credit: Supermicro)
Popping the top off the chassis reveals two shrouds that direct air from the two rows of hot-swappable fans. A total of eight fan housings feed air to the system, and each housing includes two counter-rotating 4cm fans for maximum static pressure and reduced vibration. As expected with servers intended for 24/7 operation, the system can continue to function in the event of a fan failure. However, the remainder of the fans will automatically run at full speed if the system detects a failure. Naturally, these fans are loud, but that’s not a concern for a server environment.
Two fan housings are assigned to cool each CPU, and a simple black plastic shroud directs air to the heatsinks underneath. Dual SP3 sockets house both processors, and they’re covered by standard heatsinks that are optimized for linear airflow.
A total of 16 memory slots flank each processor, for a total of 32 memory slots that support up to 4TB of registered ECC DDR4-2666 with EPYC 7001 processors, or an incredible 8TB of ECC DDR4-3200 memory (via 256GB DIMMs) with the 7002 models, easily outstripping the memory capacity available with competing Intel platforms.
We tested the EPYC processors with 16x 32GB DDR4-3200 Samsung modules for a total memory capacity of 512GB. In contrast, we loaded down the Xeon comparison platform with 12x 32GB Sk hynix DDR4-2933 modules, for a total capacity of 384GB of memory.
The H11DSU-iN motherboard’s expansion slots consist of two full-height 9.5-inch PCIe 3.0 slots and one low-profile PCIe 3.0 x8 slot, all mounted on riser cards. An additional internal PCIe 3.0 x8 slot is also available, but this slot only accepts proprietary Supermicro RAID cards. All told, the system exposes a total of 64 lanes (16 via NVMe storage devices) to the user.
As one would imagine, Supermicro has other server offerings that expose more of EPYCs available 128 lanes to the user and also come with the faster PCIe 4.0 interface.
Image 1 of 2
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 2 of 2
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
The rear I/O panel includes four gigabit RJ45 LAN ports powered by an Intel i350-AM4 controller, along with a dedicated IPMI port for management. Here we find the only USB ports on the machine, which come in the form of two USB 3.0 headers, along with a COM and VGA port.
Two 1000W Titanium-Level (96%+) redundant power supplies provide power to the server, with automatic failover in the event of a failure, as well as hot-swapability for easy servicing.
The BIOS is easy to access and use, while the IPMI web interface provides a wealth of monitoring capabilities and easy remote management that matches the type of functionality available with Xeon platforms. Among many options, you can update the BIOS, use the KVM-over-LAN remote console, monitor power consumption, access health event logs, monitor and adjust fan speeds, and monitor the CPU, DIMM, and chipset temperatures and voltages. Supermicro’s remote management suite is polished and easy to use, which stands in contrast to other platforms we’ve tested.
Test Setup
Cores/Threads
1K Unit Price
Base / Boost (GHz)
L3 Cache (MB)
TDP (W)
AMD EPYC 7742
64 / 128
$6,950
2.25 / 3.4
256
225W
Intel Xeon Platinum 8280
28 / 56
$10,009
2.7 / 4.0
38.5
205W
Intel Xeon Gold 6258R
28 / 56
$3,651
2.7 / 4.0
38.5
205W
AMD EPYC 7F72
24 / 48
$2,450
3.2 / ~3.7
192
240W
Intel Xeon Gold 5220R
24 / 48
$1,555
2.2 / 4.0
35.75
150W
AMD EPYC 7F52
16 / 32
$3,100
3.5 / ~3.9
256
240W
Intel Xeon Gold 6226R
16 / 32
$1,300
2.9 / 3.9
22
150W
Intel Xeon Gold 5218
16 / 32
$1,280
2.3 / 3.9
22
125W
AMD EPYC 7F32
8 / 16
$2,100
3.7 / ~3.9
128
180W
Intel Xeon Gold 6250
8 / 16
$3,400
3.9 / 4.5
35.75
185W
Here we can see the selection of processors we’ve tested for this review, though we use the Xeon Platinum Gold 8280 as a stand-in for the less expensive Xeon Gold 6258R. These two chips are identical and provide the same level of performance, with the difference boiling down to the more expensive 8280 coming with support for quad-socket servers, while the Xeon Gold 6258R tops out at dual-socket support.
Memory
Tested Processors
Supermicro AS-1023US-TR4
16x 32GB Samsung ECC DDR4-3200
EPYC 7742, 7F72, 7F52, 7F32
Dell/EMC PowerEdge R460
12x 32GB SK Hynix DDR4-2933
Intel Xeon 8280, 6258R, 5220R, 6226R, 6250
To assess performance with a range of different potential configurations, we used the Supermicro 1024US-TR4 server with four different EPYC Rome configurations. We outfitted this server with 16x 32GB Samsung ECC DDR4-3200 memory modules, ensuring that both chips had all eight memory channels populated.
We used a Dell/EMC PowerEdge R460 server to test the Xeon processors in our test group, giving us a good sense of performance with competing Intel systems. We equipped this server with 12x 32GB Sk hynix DDR4-2933 modules, again ensuring that each Xeon chip’s six memory channels were populated. These configurations give the AMD-powered platform a memory capacity advantage, but come as an unavoidable side effect of the capabilities of each platform. As such, bear in mind that memory capacity disparities may impact the results below.
We used the Phoronix Test Suite for testing. This automated test suite simplifies running complex benchmarks in the Linux environment. The test suite is maintained by Phoronix, and it installs all needed dependencies and the test library includes 450 benchmarks and 100 test suites (and counting). Phoronix also maintains openbenchmarking.org, which is an online repository for uploading test results into a centralized database. We used Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and the default Phoronix test configurations with the GCC compiler for all tests below. We also tested both platforms with all available security mitigations.
Linux Kernel and LLVM Compilation Benchmarks
Image 1 of 2
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 2 of 2
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
We used the 1023US-TR4 for testing with all of the EPYC processors in the chart, and here we see the expected scaling in the timed Linux kernel compile test with the AMD EPYC processors taking the lead over the Xeon chips at any given core count. The dual EPYC 7742 processors complete the benchmark, which builds the Linux kernel at default settings, in 21 seconds. The dual 24-core EPYC 7F72 configuration is impressive in its own right — it chewed through the test in 25 seconds, edging past the dual-processor Xeon 8280 platform.
AMD’s EPYC delivers even stronger performance in the timed LLVM compilation benchmark — the dual 16-core 7F72’s even beat the dual 28-core 8280’s. Performance scaling is somewhat muted between the flagship 64-core 7742 and the 24-core 7F72, largely due to the strength of the latter’s much higher base and boost frequencies. That impressive performance comes at the cost of a 240W TDP rating, but the Supermicro server handles the increased thermal output easily.
Molecular Dynamics and Parallel Compute Benchmarks
Image 1 of 6
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 2 of 6
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 3 of 6
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 4 of 6
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 5 of 6
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 6 of 6
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
NAMD is a parallel molecular dynamics code designed to scale well with additional compute resources; it scales up to 500,000 cores and is one of the premier benchmarks used to quantify performance with simulation code. The EPYC processors are obviously well-suited for these types of highly-parallelized workloads due to their prodigious core counts, with the dual 7742 configuration completing the workload 28% faster than the dual Xeon 8280 setup.
Stockfish is a chess engine designed for the utmost in scalability across increased core counts — it can scale up to 512 threads. Here we can see that this massively parallel code scales well with EPYC’s leading core counts. But, as evidenced by the dual 24-core 7F72’s effectively tying the 28-core Xeon 8280’s, the benchmark also generally responds well to the EPYC processors. The dual 16-core 7F52 configuration also beat out both of the 16-core Intel comparables. Intel does pull off a win as the eight-core 6250 processors beat the 7F32’s, though.
We see similarly impressive performance in other molecular dynamics workloads, like the Gromacs water benchmark that simulates Newtonian equations of motion with hundreds of millions of particles and the NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) suite. NPB characterizes Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications, and NASA designed it to measure performance from smaller CFD applications up to “embarrassingly parallel” operations. The BT.C test measures Block Tri-Diagonal solver performance, while the LU.C test measures performance with a lower-upper Gauss-Seidel solver.
Regardless of the workload, the EPYC processors deliver a brutal level of performance in highly-parallelized applications, and the Supermicro server handled the heat output without issue.
Rendering Benchmarks
Image 1 of 8
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 2 of 8
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 3 of 8
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 4 of 8
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 5 of 8
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 6 of 8
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 7 of 8
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 8 of 8
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Turning to more standard fare, provided you can keep the cores fed with data, most modern rendering applications also take full advantage of the compute resources. Given the well-known strengths of EPYC’s core-heavy approach, it isn’t surprising to see the 64-core EPYC 7742 processors carve out a commanding lead in the C-Ray and Blender benchmarks. Still, it is impressive to see the 7Fx2 models beat the competing Xeon processors with similar core counts nearly across the board.
The performance picture changes somewhat with the Embree benchmarks, which test high-performance ray tracing libraries developed at Intel Labs. Naturally, the Xeon processors take the lead in the Asian Dragon renders, but the crown renders show that AMD’s EPYC can offer leading performance even with code that is heavily optimized for Xeon processors.
Encoding Benchmarks
Image 1 of 3
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 2 of 3
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 3 of 3
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Encoders tend to present a different type of challenge: As we can see with the VP9 libvpx benchmark, they often don’t scale well with increased core counts. Instead, they often benefit from per-core performance and other factors, like cache capacity.
However, newer encoders, like Intel’s SVT-AV1, are designed to leverage multi-threading more fully to extract faster performance for live encoding/transcoding video applications. Again, we can see the impact of EPYC’s increased core counts paired with its strong per-core performance as the EPYC 7742 and 7F72 post impressive wins.
Python and Sysbench Benchmarks
Image 1 of 2
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 2 of 2
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
The Pybench and Numpy benchmarks are used as a general litmus test of Python performance, and as we can see, these tests don’t scale well with increased core counts. That allows the Xeon 6250, which has the highest boost frequency of the test pool at 4.5 GHz, to take the lead.
Compression and Security
Image 1 of 3
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 2 of 3
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 3 of 3
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Compression workloads also come in many flavors. The 7-Zip (p7zip) benchmark exposes the heights of theoretical compression performance because it runs directly from main memory, allowing both memory throughput and core counts to impact performance heavily. As we can see, this benefits the EPYC 7742 tremendously, but it is noteworthy that the 28-core Xeon 8280 offers far more performance than the 24-core 7F72 if we normalize throughput based on core counts. In contrast, the gzip benchmark, which compresses two copies of the Linux 4.13 kernel source tree, responds well to speedy clock rates, giving the eight-core Xeon 6250 the lead due to its 4.5 GHz boost clock.
The open-source OpenSSL toolkit uses SSL and TLS protocols to measure RSA 4096-bit performance. As we can see, this test favors the EPYC processors due to its parallelized nature, but offloading this type of workload to dedicated accelerators is becoming more common for environments with heavy requirements.
SPEC CPU 2017 Estimated Scores
Image 1 of 4
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 2 of 4
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 3 of 4
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 4 of 4
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
We used the GCC compiler and the default Phoronix test settings for these SPEC CPU 2017 test results. SPEC results are highly contested and can be impacted heavily with various compilers and flags, so we’re sticking with a bog-standard configuration to provide as level of a playing field as possible. It’s noteworthy that these results haven’t been submitted to the SPEC committee for verification, so they aren’t official. Instead, view the above tests as estimates, based on our testing.
The multi-threaded portion of the SPEC CPU 2107 suite is of most interest for the purpose of our tests, which is to gauge the ability of the Supermicro platform to handle heavy extended loads. As expected, the EPYC processors post commanding leads in both the intrate and fprate subtests. And close monitoring of the platform didn’t find any thermal throttling during these extended duration tests. The Xeon 6250 and 8280 processors take the lead in the single-threaded intrate tests, while the AMD EPYC processors post impressively-strong single-core measurements in the fprate tests.
Conclusion
AMD has enjoyed a slow but steadily-increasing portion of the data center market, and much of its continued growth hinges on increasing adoption beyond hyperscale cloud providers to more standard enterprise applications. That requires a dual-pronged approach of not only offering a tangible performance advantage, particularly in workloads that are sensitive to per-core performance, but also having an ecosystem of fully-validated OEM platforms readily available on the market.
The Supermicro 1023US-TR4 server slots into AMD’s expanding constellation of OEM EPYC systems and also allows discerning customers to upgrade from the standard 7002 series processors to the high-frequency H- and F-series models as well. It also supports up to 8TB of ECC memory, which is an incredible amount of available capacity for memory-intensive workloads. Notably, the system comes with the PCIe 3.0 interface while the second-gen EPYC processors support PCIe 4.0, but this arrangement allows customers that don’t plan to use PCIe 4.0 devices to procure systems at a lower price point. As one would imagine, Supermicro has other offerings that support the faster interface.
Overall we found the platform to be robust, and out-of-the-box installation was simple with a tool-less rail kit and an easily-accessible IPMI interface that offers a cornucopia of management and monitoring capabilities. Our only minor complaints are that the front panel could use a few USB ports for easier physical connectivity. The addition of a faster embedded networking interface would also free up an additional PCIe slot. Naturally, higher-end Supermicro platforms come with these features.
As seen throughout our testing, the Supermicro 1023US-TR4 server performed admirably and didn’t suffer from any thermal throttling issues regardless of the EPYC processors we used, which is an important consideration. Overall, the Supermicro 1023US-TR4 server packs quite the punch in a small form factor that enables incredibly powerful and dense compute deployments in cloud, virtualization, and enterprise applications.
Perseverance, the car-sized rover NASA landed on Mars last month, has taken its first spin on the rocky surface of Jezero Crater, NASA announced today. The rover’s six wheels drove about 21 feet to carry out a key mobility test on Thursday, as engineers back on Earth prepare to execute the mission’s core science objectives.
The rover’s six aluminum wheels left tracks on the Martian dirt — as captured by one of its on-board cameras — after driving straight for 13 feet, then turning around to back up 8 feet. Anais Zarifian, Perseverance’s mobility testbed engineer, told reporters it went “incredibly well” and performed better than it did during pre-launch tests on Earth.
An animation showing Perseverance’s first drive on Mars.Image: NASA/JPL
“I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see wheel tracks — and I’ve seen a lot of them,” she says. “This is just a huge milestone for the mission and the mobility team. We’ve driven on Earth, but driving on Mars is really the ultimate goal.”
Though short and slow, the drive demonstration gave engineers refreshing confidence that NASA’s $2.4 billion rover is ready to travel some 656 feet over the next two years to analyze rocks and scoop up coveted Martian soil samples for a future return mission. “This was just so amazing to see last night. We’re really happy about this,” says Robert Hogg, Perseverance deputy mission manager.
Like its sister rover Curiosity, Perseverance’s top speed is 0.1 miles per hour, “so not very fast,” Zarifian says. It uses a “bogie” suspension system that can climb over rocks as big as its own wheels, about 20 inches in diameter, while keeping its main body level.
But landing a wheeled robot on Mars isn’t about speed. With an improved computer for avoiding obstacles and sand pits, “we’ll have less time planning drives and down time, and more time to do science,” Zarifian says.
An elevated slab of land that Scientists say is a junction where ancient rivers once flowed into Jezero, a dried up lake bed.Image: NASA/JPL
Since landing on February 18th, Perseverance has beamed back thousands of images from most of its 19 on-board cameras, including a frame released Friday showing Jezero’s Delta, a target site for the rover to drive toward in the near future. Scientists say the elevated landform, seen surrounded by an obstacle course of rocks and sand pits, is a junction between an ancient dried-out river and the lake that Jezero used to be 3.5 billion years ago.
Mission teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California are mulling different paths for Perseverance’s trek to the delta, aiming to settle on one in the coming weeks that is “most efficient, safest, and most scientifically interesting,” says Katie Stack Morgan, the mission’s deputy project scientist.
NASA released Perseverance’s first high-resolution panorama this week captured by the rover’s Mastcam-Z camera. The mosaic’s 79 images were taken on the Martian afternoon of February 22nd, and one YouTube user edited it into a 4K video that slowly pans across Jezero’s horizon.
The rocks appearing in Perseverance’s new images “were likely deposited by rivers flowing into the ancient lake Jezero,” Morgan says, adding that scientists are working to understand the rock’s origin.
Perseverance launched from Florida last summer for a seven-month trek to the Red Planet, exploiting a two-month window of time when Earth and Mars align closely in their orbits around the Sun once every two years. 293 million miles later, it survived a blazing fast, seven-minute plunge through the Martian atmosphere last month and carried out an extremely complex landing at Jezero Crater, a dried up lake bed that scientists hope could hold signs of microbial life fossilized from billions of years ago.
The rover’s mission team memorialized the rover’s landing site at Jezero by naming it after Octavia E. Butler, the late science fiction author and the first Black woman to win a Hugo Award and Nebula Award.
SpaceX’s latest Starship prototype landed on Wednesday for the first time after carrying out a high-altitude test flight in Texas — but exploded minutes later on its landing pad. The rocket, an early test version called SN10, demonstrated a few complex dances in mid-air before clinching a soft touch down, aiming to nail a key milestone in Elon Musk’s campaign to build a fully reusable rocket system.
After aborting an initial launch attempt earlier in the day, the prototype lifted off at 6:14pm ET and soared 6 miles above SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas facilities. Unlike the last two tests with SN8 and SN9, which launched successfully but exploded on their landing attempts, SN10 stuck a lopsided landing on a slab of concrete not far from its launchpad, appearing to survive its daring landing maneuver for a few moments before being consumed in a fireball.
NASA Spaceflight
The launch test’s main objective was to demonstrate the computer-controlled movements of the rocket’s four aerodynamic flaps that steer its descent before landing, SpaceX engineer and live stream host John Insprucker said during the company’s broadcast.
At the end of its climb to 6.2 miles, each of the the rocket’s three Raptor engines gradually shut down to prepare for a brief free-fall back to land, reorienting itself horizontally with its “belly” facing the ground.
Then came the “belly flop” maneuver. The rocket’s three engines reignited to swoop itself into a vertical position for landing.
SN10 slowly descended on its landing pad, softly touching down but leaning slightly to the side. Insprucker declared it a success on SpaceX’s live feed: “Third time’s a charm, as the saying goes. We’ve had a successful soft touchdown on the landing pad.”
“As a reminder, the key point of today’s test flight was to gather the data on controlling the vehicle while reentering, and we were successful in doing so,” he said.
The SpaceX live feed ended before SN10’s explosive demise. Another feed, provided by the website NASA Spaceflight, kept the cameras rolling and captured the fireball, which lofted the 16-story-tall rocket back into the air before crashing back down on its side.
Musk tweeted at 7:35PM ET to celebrate that SN10 landed “in one piece,” but jokingly noted two minutes after that the rocket had an “honorable discharge.”
RIP SN10, honorable discharge
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 4, 2021
Starship is SpaceX’s next-generation, fully reusable Mars rocket system designed to ferry crews of astronauts and 100 tons of cargo on future missions to Earth orbit, the moon and eventually Mars. The last three prototypes SpaceX has test-launched are early versions of the top half of the full Starship system, whose bottom half is a reusable super-heavy booster powered by an array of SpaceX’s new Raptor rocket engines.
Update March 3rd, 7:44PM ET: Added tweets from Elon Musk.
Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa invited the public on Tuesday to apply for a spot on SpaceX’s Starship in his private mission around the Moon, reaching out to a “wider, more diverse audience” two years after announcing he’d only ride with a select group of artists. The trip is slated for 2023, but that date might not hold.
“I want people from all kinds of backgrounds to join,” Maezawa said in a video posted Tuesday afternoon, when the contest’s application went live. “It will be 10 to 12 people in all, but I will be inviting 8 people to come along on the ride.”
Maezawa, the founder of Japan’s largest online fashion retailer, is worth about $2 billion. He was revealed as Starship’s first signed passenger back in 2018 during an event with CEO Elon Musk at SpaceX’s California headquarters. At the event, Maezawa, an avid art collector, announced his Dear Moon Project, which aimed to bring “six to eight artists from around the world” to join him in a roughly six-day lunar flyby mission sometime in 2023.
“These artists will be asked to create something after they return to Earth, and these masterpieces will inspire the dreamer within all of us,” Maezawa said at the time.
In a YouTube video posted on Tuesday, Maezawa said that plan “has since evolved,” adding that “maybe every single person is doing something creative could be called an artist.”
Now, anyone who meets two criteria could get picked for the ride: Those who “can push its envelope to help other people and greater society in some way” and are “willing to support other crew members who share similar aspirations.”
Updates on the project have been scant over the past two years. In January 2020, Maezawa launched a bizarre campaign to search for a “female partner” who would accompany him on his trip around the Moon. A website for the contest received 27,722 applications, and Japanese streaming service AbemaTV was set to document the mission in a reality TV show called “Full Moon Lovers.” Weeks later, the show was canceled, and Maezawa called off his search due to “personal reasons,” he tweeted, apologizing to the AbemaTV crew and all of the applicants.
Starship is SpaceX’s next-generation, fully reusable Mars rocket system designed to ferry humans and up to 100 tons of cargo on future missions into deep space. The company has been rapidly testing early iterations of the rocket in Boca Chica, Texas. Two recent high-altitude flight tests launched and flew successfully, but both ended in fiery explosions on landing attempts. Under a rigorous and sometimes bumpy development timeline, Musk and SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell have said Starship’s first orbital flight could come at the end of 2021.
SpaceX’s other crew vehicle, Crew Dragon, is already in its operational phase and is racking up future flights with private astronauts and tourists. The acorn-shaped capsule flew its first two crews of astronauts to the International Space Station last year under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The private astronaut missions lined up include a flight to the space station planned for early next year carrying real estate investors and philanthropists, and an “all-civilian” charity-focused mission announced last month that’s slated for launch by year’s end.
NASA’s brand-new Perseverance rover is the most advanced machine that’s ever landed on Mars. But when it comes to rovers, “state of the art” is a subjective term. Perseverance is running on none other than a PowerPC 750, a single-core, 233MHz processor with just 6 million transistors that’s most famous for powering the original “Bondi blue” iMac from 1998. It’s the same type of processor that NASA already uses in its Curiosity rover.
That may seem like a waste to some. After all, even with the difficulty of buying computer parts these days, surely NASAcould have found the budget for something like Intel’s $500 Core i9-10900K CPU (with 10 cores and a max clock speed of 5.3GHz) somewhere in the $2.7 billion cost of Perseverance. But as New Scientist explains, such an advanced chip is actually a detriment to the unique operating conditions of Mars.
Image: Apple
That’s largely because Mars’ atmosphere offers far less protection from harmful radiation and charged particles than Earth’s atmosphere. A bad burst of radiation can badly wreck the sensitive electronics of a modern processor — and the more complex the chip, the more can go wrong. Plus, at 138 million miles away, it’s not like NASA can just swap out the processor if things go sideways. Because of those conditions, Perseverance actually features two computing modules: one is a backup just in case something goes wrong. (A third copy of the module is also on board for image analysis.)
To make the system even more durable, the PowerPC 750 chip in Perseverance is a little different than the one in the old iMacs. It’s technically a RAD750 chip, a special variant that’s hardened against radiation and costs upwards of $200,000. The chip is popular for spacecraft, too: in addition to Perseverance and Curiosity, it also powers the Fermi Space Telescope, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Deep Impact comet-hunting spacecraft, and the Kepler telescope, among others.
While the processor may be weak compared to a modern smartphone or gaming PC, NASA’s spec sheet for Perseverance notes that it’s far more powerful than earlier rovers like Spirit or Opportunity: its 200MHz clock speed is 10 times faster than those older rovers, and with 2GB of flash memory, it offers eight times the storage. (Rounding things out, Perseverance also has 256MB of RAM in case you were looking to build your own rover.)
But while the chip itself has been to Mars before, Perseverance features some new computer technology that’s debuting on the planet for the first time: Linux, which powers the Ingenuity helicopter that will attempt to fly autonomously on Mars as part of Perseverance’s mission.
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
