This week, NASA released a grim four-minute timelapse of the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, a mesmerizing display of last year’s record-breaking string of tropical commotion.
2020’s season “smashed records with an unprecedented 30 named storms, marking the fifth year in a row with above-average hurricane activity,” NASA said in a blog accompanying the video.
The agency’s Scientific Visualization Studio used a complex algorithm to process and merge hordes of data from an array of weather satellites in orbit, combining it with estimates and observations from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center and National Hurricane Center.
The product is a fascinating four-minute and 26-second look at last year’s hurricane activity, unfolding in a colorful display of wispy cyclone formations tumbling across the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.
“The bar has been raised,” Brian McNoldy, a senior researcher at the University of Miami’s Marine and Atmospheric Science school, tweeted last week. “When we mention the average number of named storms, hurricanes, & major hurricanes, we’re typically referring to a recent 30-year ‘climate normal’. We’ve been using 1981-2010, but now we have 1991-2020, and the counts have increased by 12-19%.”
The total cost of 2020’s climate events was $95 billion, according to data from NOAA, killing 262 people. There were 13 severe storms, seven tropical cyclones, one drought, and one wildfire event, according to NOAA. Last year’s Atlantic hurricane season was the fifth costliest on record, causing roughly $60 billion in economic damage, according to a report from AccuWeather. The most expensive season on record was in 2017, hitting $306.2 billion in costs.
“Climate normals are updated each decade to keep up with a changing climate,” McNoldy said. “What was normal 50 years ago isn’t normal now.”
The Atlantic hurricane season officially starts each year on June 1st and ends on November 30th, though storms can — and do — occur outside of the official season. June 1st, 2021, is less than 100 days away.
Blue Origin is delaying the debut launch of its massive, centerpiece rocket New Glenn to late 2022, the company announced Thursday, citing a key Pentagon contract it lost out on to rival firms SpaceX and United Launch Alliance as the reason for the delay.
New Glenn is a massive, partially reusable heavy-lift rocket designed to launch anything from national security payloads and commercial satellites. Its first flight was previously slated for sometime in 2021.
“The current target for New Glenn’s maiden flight is Q4 2022,” the company said in a statement on Thursday. “The Blue Origin team has been in contact with all of our customers to ensure this baseline meets their launch needs.”
Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin’s founder and currentlythe world’s richest man, has invested billions into the New Glenn program, which has involved the construction of sprawling rocket production facilities in Cape Canaveral, Florida and an extensive renovation to the Space Coast’s Launch Complex 36, which Blue Origin leased in 2015.
The company bid for hefty launch contracts under the Air Force’s next-generation national security launch program, which guaranteed two winning rocket companies multibillion-dollar contracts and a share of all Pentagon launches between 2022 to 2027. The Air Force announced its decision last year — Blue Origin lost out to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin).
That loss “was a big hit for us,” Jarrett Jones, Blue Origin’s senior vice president for New Glenn, told SpaceNews, claiming it cost Blue Origin up to $3 billion. The design of New Glenn was partially tailored to send Pentagon satellites to space, and Blue Origin executives “had to consider the economics” when the Air Force went with other companies instead, Jones said.
“We hope to launch [national security] payloads in the future, and remain committed to serving the U.S. national defense mission,” a Blue Origin statement said.
Blue Origin received $255 million of a $500 million award from the Air Force as part of a precursor program to aid New Glenn development. As planned, the company was cut off from the award’s full amount after losing in the subsequent program.
But Bezos, unshackled from Amazon after announcing his decision to step down as CEO, is now expected to ramp up his involvement in managing Blue Origin, which he founded as a passion project in 2000. He said in 2017 he was liquidating $1 billion a year in Amazon stock to help fund Blue Origin.
Though it has yet to reach orbit and has fallen well behind SpaceX, which Elon Musk founded in 2002, Blue Origin in recent years has stepped up its competitive footing in the space industry. It’s currently leading a team of established defense companies in a bid to provide NASA’s next ride to the moon with its human lunar lander Blue Moon. SpaceX is also vying for that award with its Starship rocket system.
Another crucial business line for the company is its liquid BE-4 rocket engine that powers New Glenn. That engine will also power United Launch Alliance’s rocket, Vulcan— the same one that beat New Glenn to a lucrative Pentagon contract. Vulcan is on target for a late 2021 debut launch. And after some development hiccups last year, Blue Origin is expected to ship the flight-ready BE-4 engines to ULA in mid-2021 to keep Vulcan on schedule.
In the meantime, Blue Origin is taking its time with New Glenn (its motto, Gradatim Ferociter, is Latin for “Step by step, ferociously”). A test version of a New Glenn first stage briefly emerged from the company’s Florida facilities earlier this month, giving rocket enthusiasts one of the first major peaks at some New Glenn hardware.
And the company’s new Tank Cleaning and Testing facility, toured in a video it tweeted on Thursday, has become one of the only buildings tall enough to share the Cape Canaveral skyline with NASA’s behemoth Vehicle Assembly Building, which stands tall a few miles away.
Blue Origin said its expanse on Florida’s Space Coast has led to “more than 600 jobs” and represents an investment of $2.5 billion, which includes $1 billion to revamp Launch Complex 36, “which is nearing completion.”
The Parker Solar Probe, NASA’s closest eye on the Sun, was whizzing by Venus last summer for a gravity assist when it snapped a striking new image of the planet’s mysterious nightside, revealing a surprisingly clear view of the Venusian surface.
The spacecraft, launched in 2018, is in the midst of its seven-year journey to study the Sun from 4 million miles away, the closest any human-made object has gone before. To do this, Parker Solar Probe needs to use the gravity of Venus to help tighten its orbit around the Sun through a series of seven flybys, nudging itself closer to the star with each pass.
Those scenic passes are valuable opportunities to catch intriguing shots of Venus.
The image taken by Parker Solar Probe’s Wide-field Imager (WISPR) came during its third Venus flyby in July 2020, and scientists were shocked. They expected WISPR to capture Venus’ thick, carbon dioxide-rich clouds that usually obstruct views of the surface. But instead, the camera was able see through the clouds and reveal the dark-tinted shape of Aphrodite Terra, an elevated area of Venus near its equator that scientists say is about 85°F cooler than its surroundings.
“WISPR effectively captured the thermal emission of the Venusian surface,” Brian Wood, an astrophysicist and WISPR scientist at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, said in a NASA statement. Wood noted the image was similar to those taken by a Japanese Venus probe currently analyzing Venus that can capture light at near-infrared wavelengths.
The revelation could mean one of two things.
WISPR might’ve shown off an unexpected capability for sensing infrared light, which, if true, could unlock a new potential for scientists to study dust circling the Sun. “This surprising observation sent the WISPR team back to the lab to measure the instrument’s sensitivity to infrared light,” Michael Buckley, communications manager at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, wrote in a NASA blog post.
But if that’s not the case, then the appearance of Aphrodite Terra could mean WISPR discovered a previously unknown opening in the thick Venusian clouds, a “window” revealing portions of the planet’s surface.
To find out, mission teams scheduled more nightside shots of Venus in its latest flyby last weekend. They plan to release more images and an analysis by late April.
WISPR’s image revealed other fascinating traits of Venus. It detected a glowing rim in the planet’s upper atmosphere that scientists suspect could be “nightglow.” Exclusive to Venus’ nightside, the faint luminescence might be caused by a clash of oxygen and nitrogen atoms that come from the side of the planet exposed to the Sun.
Scientists are still studying the exact cause of the wispy streaks of light darting across the image’s frame, the NASA post said. They could be charged particles called cosmic rays, tiny grains of space dust reflecting sunlight or “particles of material expelled from the spacecraft’s structures after impact with those dust grains.”
The parachute that helped NASA’s Perseverance rover land on Mars last week unfurled to reveal a seemingly random pattern of colors in video clips of the rover’s landing. But there was more to the story: NASA officials later said it contained a hidden message written in binary computer code.
Internet sleuths cracked the message within hours. The red and white pattern spelled out “Dare Mighty Things” in concentric rings. The saying is the Perseverance team’s motto, and it is also emblazoned on the walls of Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the mission team’s Southern California headquarters.
The parachute’s outer ring appears to translate to coordinates for JPL: 34°11’58” N 118°10’31” W.
Allen Chen, the entry, descent, and landing lead for Perseverance, dared the public to figure the message out during a press conference on Monday. “In addition to enabling incredible science, we hope our efforts in our engineering can inspire others,” he said.
“Sometimes we leave messages in our work for others to find for that purpose, so we invite you all to give it shot and show your work.”
Adam Steltzner, Perseverance’s chief engineer, confirmed the message late Monday night on Twitter.
The “Dare Mighty Things” message wasn’t the only quirk Perseverance brought to Mars. Zooming in on one of the several thousand images NASA released from the rover this week shows a tiny family portrait of past Mars rovers, Perseverance, and the Ingenuity helicopter, which accompanied Perseverance to Mars.
NASA has included hidden messages on its rovers in the past. The Curiosity rover, which landed on the Red Planet in 2012, had tiny holes dotted in its hollow aluminum wheels to allow Mars pebbles caught inside to escape.
Those holes read “JPL” in Morse code. So when Curiosity roved the surface, “JPL” was stamped in Morse code on the Martian soil (though it was erased shortly after by the Martian wind).
Chen told The Verge that Perseverance engineers might have put more hidden messages on the rover beyond the “Dare Mighty Things” code in its parachute.
“People can’t resist putting a little personal touch in their work,” Chen said. “But the vast majority of these will never be known — even by me.”
Interactive 360-degree video of the Perseverance landing site on Mars.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has posted an interactive 360-degree view of the Perseverance landing site on Mars in 4K resolution. It’s the latest jaw-dropping imagery to return from the mission, including that incredible video of the rover plunging through the Martian atmosphere before being “skycraned” down to the surface of the red planet.
The 60-second video was captured by Perseverance’s color Navcams perched atop a sensing mast above the rover. The 360-degree scene can be navigated in a browser or in the YouTube app on your phone. The images were captured on February 20th, two days after the Perseverance landed in the Jezero Crater.
Perseverance has a total of 23 cameras, the most of any Mars rover to date: 16 for engineering and science and another seven that recorded those dramatic images of entry, decent, and landing. Audio captured at the landing site by Perseverance’s microphones has also been posted to NASA’s Soundcloud account.
NASA’s Perseverance mission has already made public a total of 4,796 raw images to date. Perseverance is capable of transmitting data at rates up to 2Mbps to the orbiters overhead. The Mars orbiters then relay the data back to Earth using their much larger antennas and more powerful transmitters. The video of the vehicle descending down to the surface amounted to about 30GB of images stitched together.
The Perseverance rover is designed to seek signs of life and better understand the ancient geology of Mars. It will spend at least one Mars year (two Earth years) exploring the area around the landing site.
More that 4,300 SpaceX employees volunteered to be part of a COVID-19 antibody study co-authored by CEO Elon Musk in 2020.
The study, which was recently published in the journal Nature Communications, shows evidence that infected people who exhibited milder symptoms developed less of an immunity to COVID-19 than those who got sicker from the disease. The group behind the study found some evidence that suggests there’s a particular threshold of antibodies that could provide immunity, though they wrote that “the precise levels […] associated with protection from re-infection remain unclear.”
Vaccines also produce a much stronger immune response than cases with little to no symptoms, the authors note. They hope that this research, and other studies like it, could help policymakers figure out how to distribute limited vaccine supplies effectively.
SpaceX employees were asked by email in April 2020 to be a part of the study — right around the time that Musk was spreading dangerous misinformation about the virus in internal company emails and on Twitter. In March 2020, Musk told SpaceX employees in an email that he believed they were more likely to die in a car crash than of COVID-19, and that he didn’t see the virus being “within the top 100 health risks in the United States.” He also tweeted that same month that there would “probably close to zero new cases” in the US “by [the] end of April.”
Nearly 500,000 Americans have died since. Musk contracted COVID-19 in November 2020 and said he experienced mild symptoms.
The spaceflight company had its existing medical director — who oversees SpaceX’s budding human flight program — work with an infectious disease expert from Harvard and a doctor from the Ragon Institute to develop the antibody testing program, according to The Wall Street Journal. A group of 30 total co-authors from MIT, Harvard, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Howard Hughes Medical Center, SpaceX, and others collaborated on the study. The effort received funding from, among others, the National Institutes of Health, Musk’s own charitable foundation, the Gates Foundation’s COVID-19 vaccine accelerator, and NASA’s Translational Research Institute for Space Health.
The employees who signed up gave blood samples roughly every month. The paper’s authors note that 92 percent of the volunteers were male, and the median age was 31, which could skew the results. The full paper and dataset are available for free on Nature’s website.
NASA on Monday released a trove of video footage showing its Perseverance rover landing on Mars after plunging through the planet’s atmosphere, unveiling the most in-depth views of a Mars landing ever.
Mission teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California got back 30 gigabytes of data and over 23,000 images of the vehicle descending down to the surface. The videos were among 4,500 images NASA planned to release on Monday.
Perseverance entered Mars’ atmosphere last week bundled with a protective shell and a descent stage called the “Skycrane,” which fired rocket thrusters to slow its descent near the surface. The bundle sported four cameras to capture the landing sequence: one fixed on its protective backshell facing upward, one on the descent stage, and two on each side of the rover. Together, they captured some incredible views of the spacecraft’s descent.
“I can watch these videos for hours, and keep seeing new stuff every time,” Allen Chen, the mission’s entry, landing, and descent lead, said during a press conference.
Imaging company FLIR provided the four cameras, and NASA made little to no modifications to them. “You can purchase the same camera off the internet,” Dave Gruel, lead engineer for Mars 2020’s EDL Camera system said at the press conference.
A microphone onboard Perseverance also captured sounds once the rover was on the surface.
The data started coming through NASA’s Deep Space Network last Thursday and Friday as the team pored over data on the spacecraft’s health.
Fires in the Amazon reached devastating new levels in 2020, new NASA satellite imagery shows. The space agency developed a new tool to track fires from space after Brazil’s Amazon suffered a record-breaking year of fires in 2019.
Specialized sensors on satellites collect visible and infrared imagery, which NASA uses to detect thermal anomalies — basically hotspots caused by fire. Its satellites found 1.4 million of those anomalies in the Southern Amazon last year, compared to 1.1 million in 2019.
“Fire activity was up significantly in 2020,” Douglas Morton, chief of the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the announcement today. “All types of fires contributed to the increase, including deforestation fires and understory fires, the most environmentally destructive types.” The effects of these kinds of fires can last for decades.
Fires caused by deforestation were up 23 percent in 2020 compared to the year before. These blazes are started intentionally to clear parts of the rainforest to make room for cattle ranching and farming. This was the main culprit behind catastrophic fires in 2019, when deforestation in the country hit an 11-year high.
There was a steep 60 percent rise in the most destructive kind of fire: uncontrolled understory fires that spread from a blaze that might have been intentionally set. Large fires aren’t natural in the Amazon’s wet terrain. In a typical year, fires are primarily the result of people setting chopped-down, dried-out trees aflame. But this year, drier conditions in the southeastern Amazon made it easier for human-made blazes to escape into parts of the rainforest that hadn’t been cleared.
“As a result, the scale of the fires in this area was extraordinary and devastating,” Morton said.
The numbers are even more alarming considering how bad 2019 already was. That year, Brazil suffered a more than 80 percent jump in the number of fires compared to 2018, according to the country’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE). Since entering office in 2019, Brazil’s right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro has worked to open up the Amazon to more development and set aside less land for Indigenous tribes and conservation efforts. NASA found that Indigenous territories saw fewer fires compared to other lands without protections.
NASA just released a cache of tantalizing photos from its Perseverance rover after landing on Mars Thursday, with one showing the rover getting dropped off by the rocket-powered platform it used to gently descend on the Red Planet’s surface. Scientists are poring through hundreds of images and expect to release more — including videos and audio — in the coming days.
The SUV-sized Perseverance rover touched down at Mars’ Jezero crater at 3:55PM ET on Thursday, surviving a seven-month journey from Earth and a blazing hot, seven-minute plunge through the Martian atmosphere. A jetpack called Skycrane gently lowered Perseverance to the ground on a set of cables from 66 feet above the surface, and took a picture of the process. Once it landed, the rover then began snapping its own photos and beaming them back to Earth.
The number of photos from Perseverance so far is “more than I can count… a higher number than I can say on my hand,” Pauline Hwang, assistant strategic mission manager, said at a press conference on Friday.
Getting them back, she said, “was exhilarating, the team went wild … The scientists immediately just started looking at all those rocks and zooming in.”
The photos already have scientists asking a slew of questions about Mars’ geology. One photo of the rover’s front right wheel shows in the background a few Martian rocks perforated with tiny holes.
“Depending on what the origins of these rocks is, the holes can mean different things,” Katie Morgan, the mission’s deputy project scientist, said. If the holes are of a volcanic origin, they could be tiny vessels left over from gases that escaped, called “vesicles.” If they’re sedimentary rocks, the holes could signal that they were shaped by a fluid.
“Really, we have to get our instruments out and look at these textures in fine detail to really help us make that determination,” Morgan said.
One of those instruments is called SuperCam, which sticks out of the top of the rover and looks like Perseverance’s robot head. SuperCam will target Martian rocks, zap them with a laser beam, and analyze the cloud of vapor it creates.
Another image NASA released on Friday was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a geology satellite circling Mars, showing Perseverance descending through the atmosphere under its parachute moments before touching down.
Adam Steltzner, Perseverance’s chief engineer, likened the trove of Martian images from the rover to the iconic first shots taken on the moon in the ’60s, and the first image of Saturn that “brought to life the experience of space exploration,” he said.
“How many people were brought into the act of exploring space by these fantastic, iconic images?” Steltzner said at the press conference. “Well, we can only hope in our efforts to engineer spacecraft and explore our solar system that we might be able to someday contribute yet another iconic image to this collection.”
Yesterday, NASA landed a rover named Perseverance on Mars. I, along with 2 million other people, watched the landing happen live on YouTube. It was beautiful. I mean, here’s this little robot dude that’s traveled millions and millions of miles through the barrenness of space, and now it’s just hanging out on Mars taking pics and scientific samples! (Perseverancejoins older sibling Curiosityon the surface of the Red Planet. Hope they have a nice time together!)
In any case, Perseverancedidn’t traverse the vastness of space alone. Ingenuity, a tiny helicopter, tagged along for the ride. As it’s primarily a technology demonstration, Ingenuity’s destiny is to attempt the first powered flight on any planet other than Earth and to hopefully be the blueprint for future Mars missions. It’s also running on Linux.
“This the first time we’ll be flying Linux on Mars,” NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) senior engineer Tim Canham said in an interview with the the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). “The software framework that we’re using is one that we developed at JPL for cubesats and instruments, and we open-sourced it a few years ago.” It’s called F’ (pronounced “F prime”). The fact that it’s open source means if you want to fly with Linux here on Earth using the same software JPL does, you absolutely can.
“It’s kind of an open-source victory, because we’re flying an open-source operating system and an open-source flight software framework and flying commercial parts that you can buy off the shelf if you wanted to do this yourself someday,” Canham said.
Great stuff. It’s cool that Perseverance, Curiosity, and Ingenuity have all found a new home on the surface Mars. Though I still think it’s cooler that space is pretty obviously inhospitable to human life, and yet we still put people up there anyway.
NASA’s Perseverance rover has successfully touched down on the surface of Mars after surviving a blazing seven-minute plunge through the Martian atmosphere. The rover’s clean landing sets the stage for a years-long journey to scour the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater for ancient signs of life.
Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California confirmed Perseverance hit Mars’ atmosphere on time at 3:48PM ET at speeds of about 12,100 miles per hour, diving toward the surface in an infamously challenging sequence engineers call the “seven minutes of terror.” With an 11-minute comms delay between Mars and Earth, the spacecraft had to carry out its seven-minute plunge at all by itself with a wickedly complex set of pre-programmed instructions.
Enduring blazing heat, the rover was shielded by a protective shell and parachute to help slow itself down. A descent stage with six rocket thrusters fired as it neared the surface, slowing Perseverance to a much calmer 2 mph. Clutching the rover, the descent stage hovered 66 feet above the surface to execute a “skycrane” maneuver, where it gently lowered Perseverance on a set of cables the rest of the way to the surface.
Once the rover planted its six wheels on the surface, it snipped the skycrane cables, prompting the rocket-powered descent stage to move itself far away from Perseverance.
The SUV-sized rover has traveled 293 million miles since launching last summer in a slim window of time as Earth and Mars closely aligned in their orbits around the Sun. That alignment comes once every two years, and NASA launched its rover alongside China and UAE, whose Martian spacecraft reached the planet earlier this month.
Toward the end of its seven-month journey, Perseverance’s cruise stage carried out fewer orbital correction maneuvers than originally planned, in part due to an ultra-precise insertion on its Mars trajectory when it launched atop an Atlas V rocket from United Launch Alliance. “When we hit the bullseye, that means they had a ton more propellant” that NASA didn’t have to use on its journey to Mars, ULA CEO Tory Bruno told The Verge.
NASA is landing a rover on Mars today, February 18th, but if you’re looking for a different perspective than the traditional live stream, the space agency is currently streaming the scene from inside mission control — in an immersive 360 degrees. You can look around to watch people as they go about their work, but there are also big virtual screens displaying multiple other views, including NASA’s other live stream. It might be the best way to experience the landing because you’ll get it all simultaneously.
At the time of writing, the stream is broadcasting interviews with key mission staff, explaining the purpose of today’s landing, as well as some of the technical jargon that’ll start getting thrown around once Perseverance begins its descent.
NASA has offered a 360-degree stream inside Mission Control for other missions before, including its 2018 InSight Mars landing. But it’s still a really neat experience to see inside the control room, especially during such a historic mission.
If you want to see something akin to what a rover can see on the planet itself, NASA also has previously produced 360-degree views from the surface of Mars. And if you’d rather watch mission control from a more produced, less “choose your own” perspective, NASA has a “clean” live stream as well.
On February 18th, NASA will make a daring attempt to land a car-sized rover on Mars in its most complex mission yet to hunt for ancient extraterrestrial life. If it survives the plunge through the Red Planet’s atmosphere, the Perseverance rover will kick off the first leg of a grand relay race to capture humanity’s first cache of pristine Martian soil samples, among many other scientific objectives it hopes to score along the way.
What time will NASA’s Perseverance rover land on Mars?
Having traveled 293 million miles since its launch in July last year, the rover is now gearing up to execute the Solar System’s most grueling parking job ever. At around 3:48PM ET, Perseverance will begin its wicked seven-minute descent toward the Martian surface, hitting the planet’s atmosphere at speeds of roughly 12,100 miles per hour before being calmly deposited in a messy jungle of cliffs, massive boulders, and dangerously sandy pits at Mars’ Jezero Crater.
In that fully autonomous landing sequence, the spacecraft carrying Perseverance will endure blazing heat, ditch its protective shell, and deploy a set of parachutes. As it approaches the surface, the spacecraft’s descent stage will fire onboard thrusters to slow itself down to a sedate 2 mph and hover some 66 feet above the surface. Then comes the “skycrane” technique: the descent stage, still firing its six mini rocket thrusters, will gently lower Perseverance on cables the rest of the way to the surface. Once the rover touches down, it’ll snip its cables, prompting the descent stage to take off, eventually landing far away from Perseverance.
How to watch Perseverance’s “seven minutes of terror”
To virtually join engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as they track Perseverance’s plunge into Mars, the agency will have live streams of NASA coverage and video and audio of mission control beginning at 2:15PM ET. Actual footage of the spacecraft’s landing will take about a week to beam back to Earth, but it’ll be worth the wait. Perseverance has 19 on-board cameras, and its landing gear has four, promising views of parachute deployment and other steps of its rapid descent.
If the landing choreography goes as planned, NASA would become the third spacefaring power this month to reach Mars after the United Arab Emirates and China. NASA has said some of the rover’s onboard instruments, like a tool that will try to convert Martian carbon dioxide to oxygen, are being tested to inform future astronaut missions to Mars under the agency’s Artemis program.
A high-stakes landing
Dozens of mission engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California have spent years planning, troubleshooting, mapping, and stressing over the seven-minute landing sequence. “Everything’s come down to that,” Al Chen, NASA’s entry, descent, and landing lead, said in an interview with The Verge. He calls his team of about 30 engineers working this week “glorified delivery guys.” But with a $2.7 billion rover, the stakes are much higher than your average drone-delivered Amazon package.
“We know that the rest of the mission, the surface mission and everything that comes afterward and the rest of the campaign, is depending on us. So we wanna make sure we don’t let anybody down,” Chen said. Making it even more nerve-wracking, an 11-minute communications delay between Mars and Earth means Perseverance will have to carry out its descent and landing all by itself.
Comparatively, NASA’s past Mars rovers had it easy. They also had to endure the infamous “seven minutes of terror,” but they got easier landing zones. NASA’s Opportunity rover was greeted by a flat, wide-open desert of the Martian Eagle Crater when it touched down in 2004. The Spirit rover’s Gusev Crater landing site and Curiosity’s site at the Gale Crater were similarly flat, dotted only with small rocks. A wholly different extraterrestrial landscape awaits Perseverance at the Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient river delta believed to bear traces of past life.
“We have this big 200-foot cliff wall going right through the middle” of the crater, Chen said. “There are a bunch of craters around the site that are full of sand, that even if we landed there it wouldn’t be safe to drive out of. And there are rocks in a lot of different places that we definitely don’t want to come down on.”
What will Perseverance do on Mars?
Why would NASA pick such a difficult region to land in? It’s “because the geology on Jezero crater is so exceptionally well-preserved,” said Briony Horgan, a scientist at Purdue University working on Mars Perseverance. Jezero’s 28-mile-wide diameter could be a goldmine for fossilized microorganisms, and its mix of different rock formations offers researchers a smorgasbord of potential samples. What’s more, scientists believe Jezero hosted a river delta about 3.5 billion years ago, preserving organic matter in muds long after it dried out.
“We think, based on looking at orbital data of the delta, that those muds that could contain signs of organic materials and life are actually preserved at the base of the delta at the cliffs,” Horgan said.
This is key for Perseverance’s primary mission: packing about 43 soil samples in cigar-sized tubes and depositing them across 5–10 different sites at Jezero. Those tubes will sit on the surface for years until a future “fetch” mission planned jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency arrives for pickup. That mission’s turn in the relay race will come in the late 2020s, when a fleet of four spacecraft and robots will work in concert to land on Mars, gather the sample tubes, and shoot a soccer ball-sized sample canister back into space for a journey home to Earth.
Perseverance’s secondary objectives include a mini-helicopter named Ingenuity. Detaching from the rover’s belly, the $85 million craft will attempt to fly in Mars’ ultrathin atmosphere up to five times during a month-long window that will begin a month or two after Perseverance lands. Using helicopter blades to traverse a planet with a much thinner atmosphere than Earth’s requires extra power and speed for the craft’s four-foot-wide propellers. If the flight demo succeeds as engineers hope, it would mark the first demonstration of vertical rotorcraft on another world and could unlock access to more volatile extraterrestrial regions that are too rough or slippery for more traditional grounded rovers.
Ingenuity, while weighing about as much as a half-gallon of milk, will have solar panels for power, its own communications hardware, and two cameras (one to record Martian landscapes during flight and another to help with navigation). Perseverance is also decked out with 19 cameras plus a few microphones that promise high-def audio of Martian wind. For engineers, the audio-visuals provide a means to monitor the rover’s instruments and make sure everything looks and sounds normal. A so-called SuperCam sticking out of the top of the rover — basically looking like Perseverance’s robot head — will fixate on Martian rocks, zap them with a laser beam, and analyze the cloud of vapor produced as a result.
Locating “tiny parking lots” on Mars
All that wild science and engineering hinges on a successful landing on Thursday.
Perseverance has 4.8 miles of cushion for its landing zone. For a mission millions of miles away to Mars, 4.8 miles is a tiny bull’s-eye, one that’s 10 times smaller than the flat surface the Curiosity rover landed on in 2012, and 300 times smaller than that of NASA’s first Mars rover, Sojourner, in 1997. Such tactical precision is made possible by two pieces of tech the other rovers didn’t have: a “Range Trigger” that will accurately shoot out Perseverance’s parachutes when it decelerates to 940mph during its descent, and an enhanced navigation system that links up with a Mars orbiter to calculate exactly where in Jezero the rover will land.
“It’s kinda like what people used to use in the car, looking out the car window and seeing what you see and then trying to figure out where you are by looking at your map,” Chen said. “We no longer need the entire [landing zone] to be a flat and boring parking lot of a runway, we just need tiny little parking lots that are interspersed that we can reach.”
SpaceX has reportedly raised $850 million in a round of funding, in transactions that would value shares of the company at $419.99 each. According to CNBC, this would mean the company is worth around $74 billion. It would also mean that the company has money to continue on with its future projects.
As one could imagine, some of SpaceX’s projects are deeply unprofitable before they start making money — for instance, earlier this month Elon Musk said that there’s a “deep chasm of negative cash flow” between the company’s satellite-based internet service provider Starlink and profitability. The company’s plan to send enough satellites to create a global, high-speed internet network is expensive, and since the service is still in the beta and pre-order stage, it’s not going to be bringing in a ton of money.
The company is also working on a spaceship with a cargo capacity that rivals the Saturn V, the rocket that took us to the Moon. A project like that requires many failed test flights, which can sometimes crash and blow up. While SpaceX aims for Starship to eventually be reusable like some of its current rockets, recent crashes suggest the company will have to build a few more before it has a product that can be profitably sent into space.
With SpaceX being a private company, its financials can often be difficult to figure out, but it’s likely that investors (at least the ones who paid almost $420 a share) believe that the company will be successful, both with future endeavors and current ones like making deliveries to the International Space Station for NASA. While Musk has said Starlink alone might cost $10 billion to create, having $850 million more in the bank account certainly doesn’t hurt the company’s odds.
NASA chose SpaceX’s heavy-lift Falcon Heavy rocket to launch the first two elements of the agency’s Lunar Gateway, a planned outpost orbiting the moon. The two Gateway pieces, a propulsion module and astronaut living quarters, were originally designed to launch separately, but NASA picked SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy as a one-trip solution for $332 million.
Falcon Heavy, SpaceX’s strongest operational rocket, will send both Gateway’s Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) and its Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) to space as one integrated payload “no earlier than May 2024,” NASA said in a statement Tuesday night. NASA originally planned to have the PPE, built by Maxar, and HALO, built by Northrop Grumman, mate in space after launching atop two separate rockets, but the agency decided last year to launch them together in a single mission to cut costs.
Instead, it “contributed to cost increases due to the redesign of several components” for both Maxar’s PPE and Northrop’s HALO, NASA’s inspector general wrote in a report released last year. It added that launching the two elements together could be risky, because the payload “may be too heavy for commercially available rockets or too long for the rocket’s fairing.” The rocket ultimately met NASA’s performance requirements, NASA spokeswoman Monica Witt told The Verge.
That report also found that combining the Gateway elements would result in “a longer duration flight to lunar orbit,” which could add extra costs to the mission. Among the costs included in the recently-announced $332 million price tag are “payload processing facilities, support contractors, range support, spacecraft propellants, communications, and telemetry,” Witt said. She declined to say whether the cost will support any changes to Falcon Heavy’s payload shell to accommodate the hefty size and weight of launching two Gateway elements that were originally designed for separate rockets. SpaceX didn’t return a request for comment.
$332 million was three times more than what the agency has previously awarded for another upcoming Falcon Heavy launch — NASA will pay SpaceX $117 million to launch its Psyche asteroid mission on the rocket in 2022. But SpaceX has commanded steep prices for Falcon Heavy launches before. In late 2020 SpaceX got $316 million from the Air Force for a single Falcon Heavy launch, but that hefty price tag “reflects mostly the infrastructure,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell clarified. That infrastructure includes a new mobile service tower meant to satisfy requirements for processing national security-related payloads, according to an FAA filing.
Beyond price, NASA’s decision to combine the two elements meant some complicated juggling from each of the companies involved. It forced Maxar to cancel a contract it had already signed with SpaceX to launch the PPE and other satellites. The company paid SpaceX $27.5 million, including $6 million that came from NASA. To resolve this predicament, Witt said the agency “negotiated contractual modifications with Maxar to remove the previous launch service.”
And for Northrop, launching the HALO habitat together with the PPE forced the company to shave off cargo it originally planned to send packaged inside, according to the inspector general report. Now, “HALO will not be able to deliver additional cargo as originally envisioned which will result in an earlier than planned resupply in orbit,” which means an additional rocket launch might be necessary.
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