NASA has assigned the astronauts who will ride the first commercial capsules into orbit next year and bring human launches back to the U.S.

SpaceX and Boeing are shooting for a test flight of their capsules to the International Space Station by the end of this year or early next, with the first crews flying from Cape Canaveral, Florida, by next spring or summer.

The five astronauts assigned to the first flights gathered Friday at Johnson Space Center in Houston for the announcement.

Boeing’s first Starliner crew will include a former NASA astronaut who commanded the last shuttle flight in 2011, Chris Ferguson, who is now a Boeing employee. The four other commercial crew members are still with NASA.

U.S. astronauts now ride on Russian capsules to the space station.

Shields up! We are approaching the sun and will soon be zipping through its corona at 430,000 miles per hour, enduring blistering outside temperatures of up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit and risking severe damage from high-intensity radiation… .

No, this is not a supercaffeinated episode of “Star Trek,” in which the gallant crew of the Enterprise yet again put their lives in peril in the name of science.

This is real: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission launched on Sunday, its own 7-year mission to go boldly where no spacecraft has gone before, into the sun’s superheated, radiation-rampant corona.

Thousands watched as a Delta IV Heavy rocket carried the probe aloft, thundering into the clear, star-studded sky on three pillars of fire that lit up the middle-of-the-night darkness.

Not only is the Parker Solar Probe the first spacecraft ever targeted to the sun’s close vicinity, it’s the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person, solar physicist Eugene Parker.

Probing The Source of Space Weather

The Parker Solar Probe is part of the Living With a Star program of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Living With a Star seeks to understand how the radiation and electrically charged plasma the sun blows into space — the solar wind — affects us here on Earth.

Key to understanding this sun-Earth connection is comprehending the sun itself — and more specifically, the region of the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, where most space weather conditions originate.

Until now, missions investigating the sun have either been space-based observatories using telescopes from a distance, or “space weather stations” that measure the conditions of the solar wind as it blows past Earth — or both.

This is a little like studying hurricanes on Earth by watching them from above with satellites or measuring the weather conditions on the ground as the storm makes landfall.

But to fully understand hurricanes and make accurate predictions of their strength, duration and trajectories across the ocean and land, we need to study the atmospheric conditions that ultimately give birth to these powerful storms.

That’s where the Parker Solar Probe is different from other solar missions. This spacecraft is being sent to the sun’s corona, the headwaters of the solar wind, where it will shine some light on the little-understood processes that stir up space weather.

With its suite of scientific instruments, the Parker Solar Probe will investigate the structure and dynamic changes of the sun’s powerful and complex magnetic field, count and analyze high-speed electrons, protons and alpha particles (helium nuclei), and capture images of the solar corona and inner heliosphere.

By getting an up-close and detailed look at the mechanisms that drive space weather, we will gain a clearer understanding of its interaction with Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere, its potential impacts on satellites orbiting the Earth, and how space weather “storms” that periodically reach us can affect astronauts in space or even people on the ground.

Close But Not Too Close

The Parker Solar Probe won’t be using warp drive to get to the sun right away. (Remember, this is real.)

In the real world of solar system navigation, the spacecraft will spend a few years maneuvering closer and closer to the sun, making several passes by the planet Venus, using its gravity to alter its orbit.

The orbit will be highly elliptical, in a sense ducking in and out of the most radiation-intense regions close to the sun, to minimize time there. Over the course of its mission the probe will make 24 orbits around the sun, as well as seven close flybys of Venus — and with each pass by Venus its perihelion distance (the point of closest approach to the sun) will grow smaller.

Parker, built and operated by the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University, will conduct scientific measurements throughout its 7-year mission, and on Dec. 19, 2024 will make its closest perihelion plunge into the sun’s corona, coming within 3.85 million miles of the sun’s photosphere (the visible surface we see). That’s 10 times closer than the planet Mercury is from the sun, and seven times closer than the previous record-holding spacecraft, Helios 2, in 1976.

At this distance, solar radiation is over 500 times more intense than on Earth.

Shields Up!

Though the Parker Solar Probe won’t have the sci-fi deflector screens of the starship Enterprise, it will be well-protected by the latest thermal insulation technology: a 4.5-inch-thick carbon-composite shield, or “super parasol.”

During its closest approach to the sun, the spacecraft will retract its main solar power panels behind the shield to protect them from the super-intense sunlight, using a smaller, more robust secondary array to generate electricity.

And, with a little luck, it will survive the passage in good health — though maybe a little warmer for the wear.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft may have discovered another volcano on Jupiter’s moon Io, adding to an already impressive list of known active volcanoes there.

Since the Voyager spacecraft, and later Galileo, began collecting data in the Jupiter system in the 1970’s and 1980’s, about 150 active volcanoes have been spotted on Io.

Scientists believe there may be as many as 250 more that remain undiscovered, and this latest hot-spot has scientists eagerly anticipating future, closer flybys of Io, a moon just slightly larger than Earth’s own.

Data from Juno revealed the newest volcano as a previously undetected heat source near Io’s southern pole. Juno collected the data last December, when the spacecraft passed within 290,000 miles of Io—a bit farther than the distance from Earth to our own moon.

NASA’s Juno mission is focused mainly on Jupiter, specifically to unveil the secrets of its little-understood polar region, as well as to probe its deep interior and even its core.

Juno’s Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper instrument was designed primarily to study the stunning light shows in Jupiter’s atmosphere, known as auroras. They’re caused by interactions of electrically charged particles from space. However, the heat-sensitive instrument also works very well in sensing heat from other things–in this case, volcanic eruptions on Io.

Why So Many Active Volcanoes on Such a Small Moon?

Io’s volcanic activity is driven by the same force that causes the tides in Earth’s oceans: gravitational tidal energy. Earth’s tides are driven by the pull of the moon and sun, which raise bulges in the ocean’s waters. As Earth rotates, its surface moves into and out of these “bulge” regions, and people on the ground experience the rising and falling of the tide.

Similarly, the powerful pull of Jupiter’s gravity tugs at Io. Io has no oceans, so no swells of ocean water occur. But the tidal forces act to “stretch” Io itself into a slightly elongated sphere, its solid surface “bulging” all the same.

And while Earth’s tidal ocean bulges amount to a range of only a couple of feet in open ocean (though usually greater near land due to geographical effects), Jupiter’s powerful gravity stretches Io’s surface over a range of 200 feet!

As Io orbits, its elliptical path carries it closer to and farther from Jupiter, which changes the strength of the tidal pull and the amount of stretching. With each orbit, Io is stretched and then relaxed, and this continual stretch-relax-stretch-relax cycle produces frictional heat, warming up the interior. This is a bit like how you would squeeze and stretch a cold lump of playdough to warm it up and make it softer.

Io’s internal heat source is potent enough to liquify materials into magma and drive volcanic eruptions at its surface. With potentially hundreds of volcanoes spewing out the sulfur-rich lava, Io’s surface is a multicolor mottle of flows and deposits. Devoid of impact craters, Io sometimes appears like a big cheese pizza, or a moldy orange.

Juno’s Mission

With visible and infrared cameras, Juno has captured stunning pictures of Jupiter’s chaotic polar storms and atmospheric gyres, and by measuring Jupiter’s magnetic and gravitational fields it has yielded clues to the gas giant’s internal structure and fluid dynamics.

Juno makes most of these observations during the brief intervals when it swings close to Jupiter on an elongated orbit, bringing the spacecraft to within 2,600 miles of Jupiter’s cloud tops. The majority of each 53-day orbit is spent coasting much farther away, out to 5 million miles.

This rollercoaster orbit is designed to protect Juno from the intense radiation belts close to Jupiter, allowing it to zip through the danger zone and then spend most of its time in safer realms farther away.

Spending so much time far from Jupiter gives Juno scientists the opportunity to observe other objects in the Jupiter system, including Io and its entourage of volcanoes.

Where Else In The Solar System Can You Find Active Volcanoes?

Io and Earth are not the only objects in the solar system with active volcanoes.

We know from observations by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft that there may be active volcanoes on Venus, though this has not been confirmed.

There are also objects in the solar system that show evidence of a type of volcano not found on Earth, a cryovolcano, some of which may even be active today.

Cryovolcanoes, sometimes called “ice volcanoes,” are similar to the hot volcanoes we are familiar with, but erupt with “cold” volatile liquids, like water, methane, and ammonia.

In 1979, Voyager 2 detected nitrogen gas erupting from Neptune’s moon, Triton. It also showed us that Triton’s surface is young and is likely to have been shaped by tectonic activity and cryovolcanism.

In 2005 the Cassini spacecraft detected water vapor and ammonia spewing from Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Indirect evidence suggests cryovolcanic activity on Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede, Saturn’s moon Titan, and Uranus’ moon Miranda.

Most recently, cryovolcanic activity has been detected on the dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto, as well as Pluto’s moon, Charon.

What’s Ahead for Juno?

Juno’s primary mission schedule would have sent the spacecraft to a self-disposing incineration in Jupiter’s atmosphere in mid-September, but the good state of its health allowed mission managers to consider extending its tour of Jovian investigation and volcano-spotting moonlighting.

Juno’s mission has now been extended to July 2021, offering about 20 more close flybys of Jupiter, and potentially additional flybys of Io and its host of volcanoes.

The last few weeks have seen two exciting announcements in the search for extraterrestrial water.

On August 20 NASA announced the confirmation of water ice on the Moon, reinforcing our understanding that it is not merely a dry lump of volcanic rock, dust, and meteorite debris.

And on July 25 came an announcement of the discovery of a possible sub-surface lake on Mars.

The discoveries add to an already impressive list of water-bearing locales in our solar system, and have whetted the appetites of scientists on a quest to find life-friendly environments beyond the Earth.

Lunar Ice

The confirmation of lunar ice came from analysis of data collected by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument aboard the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, which was launched by the Indian Space Research Organization in 2008.

M3 was able to distinguish patches of water ice on the Moon by the way that it reflects visible light and absorbs infrared light.

The ice exists at both of the Moon’s poles, where there are places never exposed to direct sunlight. At the poles, the sun never gets more than a few degrees above the horizon, so the floors of some deep impact craters and other polar nooks and crannies are in permanent shade and the temperatures never rise above about -250 degrees Fahrenheit.

Martian Mud?

Data collected by a ground-penetrating radar instrument, MARSIS, aboard ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft has convinced mission scientists that a body of liquid water, 12 miles across, exists a mile deep  beneath a crater near Mars’ southern pole.

It took several years of data collection and over 29 south pole flyovers for the picture to develop, but the characteristics of the radar waves bouncing back to the spacecraft strongly indicate a patch of salty liquid: either a mass of brine-saturated mud, or an actual lake.

Whichever the case, the discovery has scientists eager for a follow-up investigation. Not only would reservoirs of water offer a vital resource to future human missions on Mars, a liquid water environment protected from the frigid, radiation-exposed surface above could provide a suitable habitat for microbial Martian life.

And mission scientists point out that there is no reason there could not be more subsurface lakes on Mars awaiting discovery, either by future missions or further analysis of data already collected.

Confirming liquid water beneath Mars’ surface may also help us to understand what happened to the vast seas of surface water believed to exist on Mars long ago.

“Follow the Water,” Says NASA

Water is not exceedingly rare in the Universe. Comets are full of water ice, and many moons in the outer solar system are well known for their surface ice or frozen water crusts. We’ve long known of Mars’ polar ice caps. Water, in its frozen form, is commonplace out there.

But mix water ice with a source of heat (sunlight or gravitational tidal energy, for examples) and adequate pressure and you get a liquid water cocktail that makes scientists’ mouths water.

Not only is liquid water essential for life as we know it, we also know that life on Earth can adapt to and thrive in extremely harsh conditions. “Extremophiles” are terrestrial life forms, mostly microbial, that we find in environments of extreme heat, cold, and toxicity.

Extremophiles have taught us that looking for extraterrestrial life in harsh conditions on other worlds is not a futile effort, especially where liquid water is present.

Where Else Do We Find Liquid Water?

The two recent revelations of found water (even though the Moon’s crater-shaded oases consist of ice) add to a tantalizing list of wet places found across our solar system.

The outer solar system—the realm of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—was once thought to be too cold for hopes of finding liquid water. But decades of robotic exploration have revealed that there is probably far more water out there than in the inner solar system, Earth included.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s the Voyager and Galileo spacecraft detected what may be a vast ocean hidden beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Patterns in the cracks of its frozen crust suggest the outer icy shell is floating on an ocean of liquid, much like sheets of sea ice surrounding parts of Antarctica.

The ice-topped ocean is probably global in extent and, remarkably, may be a hundred miles deep. Europa alone may possess twice as much water as in all of Earth’s oceans.

There is also evidence that a subcrustal liquid water ocean exists in another of Jupiter’s moons, the largest moon in the solar system, Ganymede. In fact, Ganymede’s ocean may contain more water than Europa’s.

Since the Cassini spacecraft began exploring the Saturn system in 2004, scientists have observed clear signs of water within the moon Enceladus, and possibly the large moon Titan. In the case of Enceladus, Cassini detected plumes of water vapor and ammonia spewing out of large cracks in the moon’s surface.

Measurements by the Dawn spacecraft have turned up evidence of possible liquid water on the dwarf planet Ceres. White-looking mineral deposits — which appear to have been left behind by fluid eruptions in craters and cinder-cone-like structures — support speculation that at some time in the past, Ceres had a subcrustal ocean. It may still have one today.

Water Beyond the Solar System

The sprinkling of so many watery places across our solar system gives us hope not only for finding life-friendly environments close to home, but across our galaxy as well. We now know of several thousand extrasolar planets orbiting hundreds of other stars.

If oceans are as common as our solar system indicates (Earth, young Mars, Europa, Ganymede, Titan, Enceladus, and Ceres, to name the known or suspected wet spots), then extrasolar oceans probably are as well.

And, if life is as eager to arise in those exo-oceans as it was on the primordial Earth, we may have a lot of company in the cosmos.

Russian officials are saying that a tiny leak at the International Space Station was likely caused by a human hand. Now, they’re trying to figure out who did it, why they did it and whether it happened in space or on the ground.

The crew identified the source of the leak as a 2-millimeter hole in the upper section of a Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft, which is docked in the Russian section of the space station.

“We don’t reject any theories,” said Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s state space agency Roscosmos, according to state news agency TASS. He added that they’re aiming “to find out whether it was an accidental defect or a deliberate spoilage and where it was done … we will find out, without fail.”

And while Rogozin said they aren’t ruling out the possibility of sabotage, an accident seems more likely: “It seems to be done by a faltering hand… it is a technological error by a specialist.”

Rogozin added that they have dismissed a theory that the hole was caused by a meteorite.

No one aboard the space station was in significant danger as a result of the leak, which was detected last Wednesday evening by flight controllers.

The crew first addressed the problem by applying tape to the hole, according to NASA, and later, Russian flight engineer Sergey Prokopyev plugged the hole using gauze and epoxy, a super-strong sealant.

A Russian cosmonautics expert, Alexander Zheleznyakov, was extremely skeptical of theories that the hole was drilled deliberately from space.

“Why should any of the crew try to do that? I would not like to use the word nonsense, but all this does not fit in well with logic,” Zheleznyakov told TASS.

He offered another possibility: “Most probably all had happened at the manufacturer’s plant. A hole that has been patched up with glue is hard to detect. … Most probably, a worker drilled a wrong hole and then patched it up and then either avoided telling anyone or those he had informed preferred to keep quiet, too.”

The Soyuz spacecraft was made by the Russian corporation Energia, according to TASS. The International Space Station is currently hosting three NASA astronauts, two Russian cosmonauts and one European Space Agency astronaut.

John Logsdon, a space policy expert at George Washington University, told NPR that there is “a kind of generalized concern about the decline of quality control in Russian space industry in recent years.” If the hole was accidental, he said, “and then covered up and nobody inspected and found it … that’s troubling.”

Roscosmos has appointed a commission to investigate and expects its work to be done by mid-September.

Leroy Chiao, former commander of the International Space Station, told NPR that he finds it somewhat mysterious that the hole appears to be hand-drilled through the material that’s about half an inch thick. “It would take a little while to drill all the way through the hole,” he said.

Chiao recalled how the astronauts were vigilant during his expedition about anything that might cause a drop in pressure, like this leak did. “Pressure dips are certainly not a routine thing,” he said.

“So as soon as we hear a noise, we would rush over to the very sensitive pressure gauge to make sure that the pressure was holding,” Chiao said. “That was definitely something that we were attuned to.”

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Three months after the first stirrings of what became an epic global storm on Mars, the winds have died down and the dust that filled the atmosphere is settling.

Now, like a scene from the opening moments of the film “The Martian,” NASA is working to return to normal operations with its explorers on the Martian surface — and seeking to re-establish contact with one that has not checked in.

Opportunity Lost?

The veteran robot Opportunity, which has been roving the bottom of a suspected ancient Martian sea (Meridiani Planum) since 2004, went into a protective “sleep” mode on June 10 when airborne dust choked off sunlight — its source of power. This robotic version of an induced coma is intended to preserve battery power and keep electronic systems in a low-power standby state.

Now that the skies are clearing and sunlight levels are returning to normal, NASA is counting on the rover’s solar panels to recharge its batteries and “wake” the robot from its stormy-weather slumber. Questions remain. Are Opportunity’s systems still healthy? How much dust may have settled on its solar panels and will it hamper recharging?

And this all happened just when things were getting exciting again.

Though Opportunity is arguably near the end of its marathon 14-year campaign of exploration, it was just beginning to explore a possibly water-carved valley on the edge of the 14-mile-wide Endeavour Crater when the wind storm began to develop.

After trekking more than 28 miles across Meridiani Planum, finding copious mineralogical and morphological signs of past water along the way, NASA decided to send the rover on the somewhat risky path down Perseverance Valley.

It’s been an open question whether Opportunity would ever make it to the bottom of the ravine before suffering a final failure or encountering an impassable obstruction—but on an exploratory adventure like this, the journey is more important than the destination, and any revelations about the history of water on Mars will help us understand our Earthlike neighbor better.

Will Opportunity wake up and report in, continuing the adventure for us all? Stay tuned….

Curiosity Shrugs Off the Dust

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity has plowed ahead despite the storm and dust-choked skies above.

Now sporting a layer of dust accumulated over the last couple of months, Curiosity is stationed on the lower slopes of Mount Sharp, a 3.5-mile-high mound of sedimentary rock and soil in the middle of the 90-mile-wide Gale Crater.

Powered by a thermoelectric nuclear generator (yes, like the one in The Martian that kept Mark Watney warm as he drove his rover across the land), Curiosity was unfazed by the dust-veiled sun — and could operate in complete darkness if it had to.

Curiosity is presently exploring a large outcrop of rock called Vera Rubin Ridge—a geological feature that intrigued scientists long before they decided to plot Curiosity’s path to it. Concentrations of the often water-formed mineral hematite were detected from orbit by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Vera Rubin Ridge has proven to be more than just a vein of hematite. In fact, it is the most geologically diverse site yet found by Curiosity, with a large variety of rock colors and textures all wrapped up in a single formation.

Two attempts to drill samples were thwarted by unexpectedly hard rock, and the investigation is ongoing, with two more drilling sites scheduled for later this month. What makes the ridge’s rock so hard and resistant to wind erosion is one of the mysteries NASA hopes to solve.

One possible explanation is that water flowing through the ground in Mars’ distant past deposited a hard mineral — possibly a form of hematite — that “cemented” the formation together, which was later exposed by wind erosion of surrounding softer materials.

The Adventure Continues

Whether Opportunity shakes off its safe-mode fugue and resumes prospecting for signs of water, and how ever far Curiosity climbs up the sedimentary layers of Mount Sharp, the adventure of exploring this probably once very Earthlike planet will continue.

The InSIGHT lander is more than halfway to Mars, with a landing scheduled for November. And the launch of the Mars 2020 rover, whose mission will be to search for signs of Martian life, is only two years away.

Stay tuned for the next installment of this saga.

A NASA satellite designed to precisely measure changes in Earth’s ice sheets, glaciers, sea ice and vegetation was launched into polar orbit from California early Saturday.

A Delta 2 rocket carrying ICESat-2 lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 6:02 a.m. and headed over the Pacific Ocean.

NASA Earth Science Division director Michael Freilich says that the mission in particular will advance knowledge of how the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica contribute to sea level rise.

The melt from those ice sheets alone has raised global sea level by more than 1 millimeter (0.04 inch) a year recently, according to NASA.

The mission is a successor to the original Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite that operated from 2003 to 2009. Measurements continued since then with airborne instruments in NASA’s Operation IceBridge.

Built by Northrop Grumman, ICESat-2 carries a single instrument, a laser altimeter that measures height by determining how long it takes photons to travel from the spacecraft to Earth and back. According to NASA, it will collect more than 250 times as many measurements as the first ICESat.

The laser is designed to fire 10,000 times per second, divided into six beams of hundreds of trillions of photons. The round trip is timed to a billionth of a second.

In addition to ice, the satellite’s other measurements, such as the tops of trees, snow and river heights, may help with research into the amount of carbon stored in forests, flood and drought planning and wildfire behavior, among other uses.

The launch was the last for a Delta 2 rocket, United Launch Alliance said.

The first Delta 2 lifted off on Feb. 14, 1989, and since then it has been the launch vehicle for Global Positioning System orbiters, Earth observing and commercial satellites, and interplanetary missions including the twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

Do you know the name of the next robotic explorer to set down on the planet Mars? Better still, do you want to name it? If you’re a student age 18 or younger, you have a shot at it.

If you’re interested, get your essay-writing game on. NASA will soon be holding a contest to select the official name for its Mars 2020 rover, scheduled to land on Mars in two years on a mission to search for signs of life.

NASA is currently reviewing proposals from non-profit and educational institutions to conduct the essay contest, which will take place in the 2019 academic school year. Students from kindergarten to the 12th grade will be given the opportunity to submit an essay championing their name choice for the rover.

All Martian Rovers Were Named By Kids

Mars 2020 won’t be the first robotic rover named by a youth. In fact, not only has every Mars rover been named by a student, every one of the winning essay writers was a pre-teen.

In 2012, the Mars Science Laboratory rover, now exploring the water-laid sediments of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, was named Curiosity by then 11-year-old Clara Ma. Clara won the naming prize with an essay less than 250 words long.

“Curiosity is the passion that drives us through our everyday lives. We have become explorers and scientists with our need to ask questions and to wonder. ” — Excerpt from Clara Ma’s essay.

Going back a few years from Curiosity, the twin Mars Exploration Rovers, which landed in 2004, were bestowed the names Spirit and Opportunity by 9-year-old Sofi Collis of Scottsdale, Arizona, an adopted orphan born in Siberia. She wrote the winning 50-word essay, saying, “In America, I can make all my dreams come true. Thank you for the ‘Spirit’ and the ‘Opportunity.’ ”

Though Spirit ceased communicating with Earth back in 2010 during its ongoing exploration of Gusev Crater, its twin, Opportunity, was still active up to last June.

Opportunity went into a protective “sleep” mode during a major global dust storm that cut off sunlight to its solar panels. The dust has now mostly settled, but it’s not clear whether Opportunity will wake up and continue exploring the possibly water-carved Perseverance Valley.

That brings us back to the first-ever Mars rover, the mobile component of the Pathfinder landing mission.

In 1995, the announcement of this robot’s naming contest was posted in the January issue of the National Science Teachers Association’s magazine, “Science and Children.” Students were invited to write an essay about the historic accomplishments of a selected heroine.

Essays were accepted from all over the world, including almost 1,700 from students 5 to 18.

The winner was 12-year-old Valerie Ambrose of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who selected Sojourner Truth as her essay subject, an African-American reformist around the time of the Civil War.

Fun, and somewhat-related, fact: Pluto was named by an 11-year-old girl from Oxford, England — Venetia Burney — following a worldwide call for naming suggestions.

Mars 2020

The Mars 2020 rover (what will you name it?) is a physical twin of Curiosity, but will be equipped with a different set of scientific instruments and goals.

Where Curiosity was designed to investigate and assess the history of water on Mars and its suitability to have sustained life, Mars 2020 will search directly for signs of past life on the Red Planet.

Mars 2020 will analyze rocks for “biosignatures” of past Martian life, as well as assess past climate conditions. And though the Viking landers of the late 1970s performed experiments to detect present microbial life in Martian soil, Mars 2020 will be the first mission to seek out signs of past Martian life.

What’s In A Name?

So, if you want to be the one to name the new rover, start reading up on past winning essays, give some thought to Mars 2020’s scientific goals and mission, and keep your ears open for the contest’s announcement. It could be you!

Get ready. The human race is about to go Interstellar! Again….

On the heels of Voyager 1’s historic 2012 breakout from our solar system, its twin, Voyager 2, has begun to detect signs that it too may be on the verge of entering interstellar space and crossing over to the great galactic beyond.

Voyager 2 has measured an uptick in detected cosmic rays similar to what Voyager 1 reported in the months before it crossed the border six years ago.

Cosmic rays are extremely energetic particles — mostly high-speed protons and atomic nuclei — that originate from powerful events, like supernovas, across the Milky Way galaxy. Within the confines of our sun’s extended magnetic field, cosmic rays are much less abundant than they are outside of its protection, and scientists reason that an increase in cosmic ray detections is an indicator that Voyager 2 may be approaching the border.

The Voyagers’ passage to interstellar space is more than merely a historic milestone in space exploration. It means that we have scientific instruments in situ to probe and analyze the environment beyond our sun’s influence — not unlike how we place weather stations on buoys far out in the deep ocean to explore the conditions far from land.

Where is Interstellar Space?

Exactly what marks the boundary line or “membrane” between our solar system and interstellar space hasn’t always had a clear definition. And, just as with any truly vast and nebulous thing, pinning down an exact point in space where the divide lies isn’t so clear-cut.

Decades ago, scientists talked about interstellar space as anywhere beyond the Oort Cloud, the vast and tenuous region of ice, dust and comets believed to envelop the sun and planets. Though there is scant physical evidence for the Oort Cloud’s existence, its outer boundary is believed to extend almost a light year into space. At its present speed, Voyager 2 would take over 15,000 years to reach that milestone.

In more recent years, scientists have turned their attention to the “heliosphere” as a more suitable signpost for interstellar space — something whose boundary is more measurable than the uncertain and distant extents of the Oort Cloud.

The heliosphere is a bubble-like region surrounding the sun where the environment is dominated by solar plasma particles and magnetic fields — the “solar wind” that blows outward in all directions.

The intervening zone where the solar wind slams into the gases and magnetism spread between stars of our galaxy is called the heliopause. It is this heliopause that scientists have defined as the boundary to interstellar space.

How Does a Space Traveler Know When They Have Crossed Into Interstellar Space?

If visualizing the passage from heliosphere via the heliopause to interstellar space is too enormous to get your head around (there’s no shame in this; it is quite big), try this:

When a sailor voyages out across the ocean, they may first travel through wind and water currents shaped by the land they departed. At some point as the land recedes and its geographical and meteorological influences ebb, and the ocean floor drops away to greater depths, the sailing environment changes. Wind and water currents of the deep ocean take over and begin to dominate. That’s when a sailor knows they have departed continental conditions and entered deep ocean.

Now put the sun in the role of the sailor’s home continent. The sun’s influence on the space surrounding it includes its gravitational pull, the electromagnetic radiation it shines, and the rarefied “solar wind” that consists mostly of electrically charged hydrogen and helium nuclei.

When Voyager 1, the more distant of the Voyager pair, began to pass through the heliopause, it was not immediately clear to scientists when the final and official arrival at interstellar space occurred.

Just as the wind and water currents at the boundary of continental influence and deep ocean may have an interaction zone of “choppy” conditions, so does the heliosphere generate some “turbulence” when it slams into the interstellar gases. Voyager 1’s passage through the choppy heliopause was marked by several buffets before scientists finally declared clear interstellar sailing.

When Voyager 1 Passed Through the Heliopause, Was There a Popping Noise?

We can imagine that Voyager 1 was tossed and slammed by blasts of turbulence as it crashed dramatically through the heliopause, or that some kind of solar “membrane” was penetrated, possibly to pop! But nothing so dramatic took place.

In fact, had there been a human astronaut on board looking out the window, they would never have noticed the passage.

To detect the crossing, scientists had to look to the data collected by Voyager 1’s instruments. The most straightforward telltale of departure might have come from measurements of the temperature and density of plasma particles, registering a decrease in the hot but sparse ions of the solar wind and an increase of the cold but more abundant particles of interstellar space.

Unfortunately, Voyager 1’s particle-detector instrument stopped working in the 1980s, shortly after its last planetary encounter, Saturn.

Instead, scientists relied on measurements from Voyager’s plasma wave instrument, a pair of radio antennas that listen for oscillations in the surrounding plasma. The frequency of oscillations can be used to calculate the plasma’s density.

There was initially some back-and-forth fluctuation in the plasma wave readings as Voyager 1 passed through the choppy fringes of the heliopause, but ultimately the spacecraft emerged into an environment where surrounding plasma was 40 times denser than inside the heliosphere — very close to what models of the interstellar environment predicted.

It wasn’t until late autumn in 2012 that Voyager scientists, looking back across several months of collected data, felt confident in pinpointing the moment that the human race went interstellar, and though there was some debate over it, scientists eventually agreed the event occurred in August 2012.

As for Voyager 2, NASA has been clear in stating that it’s not there yet. But the rise in cosmic ray detections by Voyager 2 may be the harbinger of its impending graduation to interstellar voyager.

Marathon Missions Winding Down?

Voyagers 1 and 2 launched in 1977 on an unparalleled mission to explore the gas giant planets of the outer solar system. Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter in 1979 and later Saturn in 1980 before cruising on toward its eventual and inevitable encounter with interstellar space in 2012.

Voyager 2 spent a bit more time exploring planets before hurtling onward. It trailed its twin by a few months with flybys of Jupiter and Saturn, and then pressed on to swing by Uranus (1986) and Neptune (1989), and is still the only spacecraft to have visited these twin “ice giant” worlds.

As of this month, Voyager 2 is over 11 billion miles from Earth, and traveling away at about 35,000 miles per hour. Voyager 1 is a recording-breaking 13.4 billion miles away, over three times the distance to Pluto — a distance that takes light and radio waves almost 20 hours to traverse.

But diminishing power supplies on both spacecraft will force NASA to begin shutting them down in the near future. Wanting to collect as much scientific data as possible on the conditions of interstellar space, instruments will be shut down incrementally to conserve power for those that remain on duty. For Voyager 1 this will begin in 2020, with the final off-switch being flipped in 2025.

Then, each spacecraft will coast onward through interstellar space, orbiting the Milky Way galaxy indefinitely.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is now closer to the sun than any spacecraft has ever gotten.

Parker on Monday surpassed the record of 26.6 million miles set by Helios-2 back in 1976. And it will keep getting closer to the sun until it flies through the corona, or outer atmosphere, for the first time next week, passing within 15 million miles of the solar surface.

Parker will make 24 close approaches to the sun over the next seven years, ultimately coming within just 3.8 million miles.

Launched in August, Parker is on track to set another record late Monday night. It will surpass Helios-2′s speed record of 153,454 miles per hour, relative to the sun.

NASA’s elite planet-hunting spacecraft has been declared dead, just a few months shy of its 10th anniversary.

Officials announced the Kepler Space Telescope’s demise Tuesday.

Already well past its expected lifetime, the 9 1/2-year-old Kepler had been running low on fuel for months. Its ability to point at distant stars and identify possible alien worlds worsened dramatically at the beginning of October, but flight controllers still managed to retrieve its latest observations. The telescope has now gone silent, its fuel tank empty.

“Kepler opened the gate for mankind’s exploration of the cosmos,” said retired NASA scientist William Borucki, who led the original Kepler science team.

Kepler discovered 2,681 planets outside our solar system and even more potential candidates. It showed us rocky worlds the size of Earth that, like Earth, might harbor life. It also unveiled incredible super Earths: planets bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

NASA’s astrophysics director Paul Hertz estimated that anywhere from two to a dozen of the planets discovered by Kepler are rocky and Earth-sized in the so-called Goldilocks zone. But Kepler’s overall planet census showed that 20 to 50 percent of the stars visible in the night sky could have planets like ours in the habitable zone for life, he said.

The $700 million mission even helped to uncover last year a solar system with eight planets, just like ours.

“It has revolutionized our understanding of our place in the cosmos,” Hertz said. “Now we know because of the Kepler Space Telescope and its science mission that planets are more common than stars in our galaxy.”

Almost lost in 2013 because of equipment failure, Kepler was salvaged by engineers and kept peering into the cosmos, thick with stars and galaxies, ever on the lookout for dips in in the brightness of stars that could indicate an orbiting planet.

“It was like trying to detect a flea crawling across a car headlight when the car was 100 miles away,” said Borucki said.

The resurrected mission became known as K2 and yielded 350 confirmed exoplanets, or planets orbiting other stars, on top of what the telescope had already uncovered since its March 7, 2009, launch from Cape Canaveral.

In all, close to 4,000 exoplanets have been confirmed over the past two decades, two-thirds of them thanks to Kepler.

Kepler focused on stars thousands of light-years away and, according to NASA, showed that statistically there’s at least one planet around every star in our Milky Way Galaxy.

Borucki, who dreamed up the mission decades ago, said one of his favorite discoveries was Kepler 22b, a water planet bigger than Earth but where it is not too warm and not too cold — the type “that could lead to life.”

A successor to Kepler launched in April, NASA’s Tess spacecraft, has its sights on stars closer to home. It’s already identified some possible planets.

Tess project scientist Padi Boyd called Kepler’s mission “stunningly successful.”

Kepler showed us that “we live in a galaxy that’s teeming with planets, and we’re ready to take the next step to explore those planets,” she said.

Another longtime spacecraft chasing strange worlds in our own solar system, meanwhile, is also close to death.

NASA’s 11-year-old Dawn spacecraft is pretty much out of fuel after orbiting the asteroid Vesta as well as the dwarf planet Ceres. It remains in orbit around Ceres, which, like Vesta, is in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Two of NASA’s older telescopes have been hit with equipment trouble recently, but have recovered. The 28-year-old Hubble Space Telescope resumed science observations last weekend, following a three-week shutdown. The 19-year-old Chandra X-ray Telescope’s pointing system also ran into trouble briefly in October. Both cases involved critical gyroscopes, needed to point the telescopes.

Hertz said all the spacecraft problems were “completely independent” and coincidental in timing.

Now 94 million miles from Earth, Kepler should remain in a safe, stable orbit around the sun. Flight controllers will disable the spacecraft’s transmitters, before bidding a final “good night.”

___

Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report from Washington.

After traveling 75 million miles since its launch last May, NASA’s InSIGHT spacecraft is scheduled to land on Mars on Monday, November 26 around noon, Pacific Time. NASA TV will cover the adventure as a livestream. Trust me, you do not want to miss this spectacle.

The last landing on Mars was six years ago, by the rover Curiosity. The next will not be until at least 2020, so InSIGHT’s upcoming entry, descent, and landing is a rare opportunity to witness a hair-raising plunge into unexplored extraterrestrial territory.

If you have forgotten how thrilling this can be, let’s refresh.

First, the spacecraft hits the thin upper atmosphere 80 miles above the surface at over 12,000 miles per hour, striking heat-shield-first in a fiery reentry burn.

From this point until it sets down safely on the ground–a period of about six minutes–InSIGHT must successfully perform a serious of pre-programmed actions, without any assistance from people back on Earth.

These include the ejection of its heat shield, the deployment of its supersonic parachute, followed later by the deployment of its secondary, sub-sonic parachute, and finally a retrorocket-thrust-assisted soft landing.

In the past, ground control on Earth had to wait until after landing even to get the “successful touchdown” ping from the spacecraft, and hours longer for the robot to relay the landing telemetry data. InSIGHT’s descent, however, will be monitored by two miniature “cubesat” spacecraft, MarCO, that were launched with it and have followed along to Mars to relay the telemetry even as the spacecraft descends.

Why We Land Robots to Mars

All the robotic landers and rovers before InSIGHT set out to see the sights and scratch the surface rocks and soils of Mars, from the Viking landers in 1976 to the Curiosity rover in 2012. Their scientific goals were focused on the search for water, indications of life and clues to the planet’s past environment.

The results of their investigations have been exciting: turning up signs of liquid water present today, and evidence of ancient precipitation, surface flows, deep lakes and wide seas of liquid water that paint a picture of a primordial Mars much more Earth-like, and potentially life-friendly, than the cold dry desert it is today.

What is InSIGHT Looking For?

InSIGHT (an abbreviation of Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport) is similar in design to the Phoenix lander, which set down in Mars’ extreme northern polar region in 2007 to investigate a vast reservoir of water ice detected from orbit. The lander is 5 feet long, 3 feet high and weighing 789 pounds. Its twin fans of solar panels, when deployed, span almost 20 feet.

But InSIGHT’s scientific goals are very different from all past Mars landing missions.

Employing an instrument suite that includes a seismometer, a ground-penetrating temperature probe, and Doppler radiowave measurements, InSIGHT will investigate the interior structure of Mars, giving us a glimpse as deep as the planetary mantle and core.

But InSIGHT’s mission goals go beyond divining the internal structure and distributions of material within Mars. More broadly, scientists seek to understand how Mars, and by extension all of the solid terrestrial planets (Earth, Venus, and Mercury included), originally formed over five and a half billion years ago—under the assumption that they all formed under similar conditions and processes.

InSIGHT’s seismometer, which will be placed on Mars’ surface with a robot arm — like a doctor’s stethoscope placed on a patient’s chest — will listen for seismic waves traveling through the planet’s interior. The tremors may be created by Marsquakes, meteorite impacts, or other weighty shifts of material. How those shock waves travel through Mars will let scientists piece together a sort of “sonogram” to probe structures and densities of Mars’ interior.

A ground-penetrating probe will bore downward through several meters of soil, pulling behind it a string of temperature sensors that will measure how quickly, and how much, heat is escaping from Mars’ interior. This data can provide insight to the thermal state of Mars’ core — how much heat remains from its original formation five billion years ago, and how much it has cooled and solidified since then.

Finally, an experiment known as RISE that measures the Doppler shift of InSIGHT’s radio transmissions back to Earth will detect very tiny variations in Mars’ rotation: small wobbles and perturbations that can indicate fine details of internal structure.

This is something like how a washing machine in the spin-dry cycle may vibrate or “dance” because of an imbalance in the laundry load. The frequency and degree of wobbling depends on the distribution of the wet spinning laundry.

InSIGHT will also have a camera. Even though its main mission is to probe Mars’ interior and understand how all the planets of the inner solar system originated, people back on Earth might be upset if we don’t get to see pictures of the surrounding landscape, even if it’s plain and flat. The camera will also help guide the placement of the seismometer and thermal probe.

Landing Site in Sight: Elysium Planitia

So, what landing site has NASA chosen? With such different scientific objectives than its predecessors — the Vikings, Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity, Phoenix, and Curiosity — you might expect InSIGHT’s destination to be as unique and exotic as its deep-probing mission.

Let me turn the question around for a moment.

If you were a Martian sending a robotic lander to Earth, where would you choose to land: Yosemite, or the great flat expanse of the Atacama Desert?

It depends on your goal.

While Yosemite would be a great spot for taking breathtaking panoramic landscape pictures, if your goal is to probe the interior of the planet, it doesn’t really matter where you land. In this case, you might be wise to choose as bland, flat, uninteresting—and safe—a spot as possible.

And so, NASA has chosen the wide, very flat, very humdrum landscape of Elysium Planitia to set InSIGHT upon, with much less concern for landing hazards like big rocks, hills, pits, and slopes than in Mars’ more rugged sightseeing spots.

InSIGHT Won’t Be Alone

At the moment there is only one functioning robot on Mars: the Curiosity rover, which is exploring the spectacular landscapes of Gale Crater and its central Mount Sharp looking for signs of past water — and finding plenty of them.

The rover Opportunity, which last June went into a power-saving “sleep” mode in response to a major global dust storm, has not been heard from since.

InSIGHT will return Mars’ active robot population to two.

In two more years from now, the count will bump up to three for the first time in history with the landing of the Mars 2020 rover, on its mission to look for signs of past Martian life.

After cruising through space for about seven months, the time has arrived for NASA’s Mars InSight mission to settle down on the Red Planet and get to work.

The culmination of this almost 90 million mile journey is expected Monday, Nov. 26, at about 12:00 p.m. Pacific.

To safely land, InSight has to slow down from its entry speed upon reaching the atmosphere, 12,300 miles per hour to just about 5 mph, within six minutes. (For a video explanation of InSight’s path to the ground, see below.)

To control its entry, small rockets will direct it toward the surface. Insight needs to enter the atmosphere at a precise 12-degree angle to avoid either burning up or bouncing off the planet’s surface.

Then, the spacecraft will release a large parachute to slow its progress, cast off its heat shield and extend a trio of shock-absorbing landing legs.

Finally, the lander will separate from its backshell (a protective covering) and parachute. A dozen engines, known as retro rockets, will begin firing to help the lander set down gently on the Martian soil — its new permanent home.

Want to watch? Read on.

Online

NASA will webcast the landing and the scene from Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. You’ll be able to watch on KQED Science (link will be live at 10:30 a.m. Monday, Nov. 26) or directly on the agency’s website.

Watch In Person

There may be a viewing party planned near you. Check the map below.

Some highlighted events in California:

11:00 a.m.  Chabot Space and Science Center, Oakland
10:00 a.m. Aerospace Museum of California, near Sacramento
11 a.m. California Science Center, Los Angeles
11 a.m. The Los Angeles Central Library, Los Angeles

UPDATE 7:30 p.m., Mon.

Phew! Took a little while but we have word now that InSight’s solar panels are open and collecting sunlight. This solar-powered robot is ready for action.

Aaah…soaking up the Sun with my solar panels. After a long flight, and thrilling #MarsLanding, it feels great to get a good stretch and recharge my batteries. (Like, literally.) It’s just what I’ll need to really start getting in tune with #Mars. https://t.co/yse3VEst3G pic.twitter.com/LpsiI0KNNz

— NASAInSight (@NASAInSight) November 27, 2018

Data from Odyssey indicate @NASAInSight’s solar arrays are open and batteries are charging. The transmission also included this view from the instrument deployment camera, showing the seismometer (left), grapple (center) and robotic arm (right): https://t.co/yZqPextm89 pic.twitter.com/2kBHT5caGS

— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) November 27, 2018

In all, it was a big day for InSight, its team and its fans, both those on Earth and off.

The @NASAInSight team got a special congratulations from the @Space_Station today! #MarsLanding pic.twitter.com/qoZHtkYT9w

— Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) November 26, 2018

UPDATE 12:50 p.m., Mon.
Ben Burress, Chabot Staff Astronomer and KQED’s space blogger, gives us an overview of the day and a preview of what’s ahead for InSight.

As we wait for InSight’s next check in (confirming if the solar arrays are deployed OK) @ChabotSpace‘s Ben Burress looks ahead to what’s next for the mission. pic.twitter.com/SF3gdjszVO

— Danielle Venton (@DanielleVenton) November 26, 2018

And, that’s it for now folks! Later today we’ll update once NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter confirms that InSight’s solar arrays have deployed. This may happen around 5:35 p.m. Pacific, but could be many hours after that. Once the solar panels are out, the two-year surface phase of this mission has officially begun.

UPDATE 12:05 p.m., Mon.

Lots to celebrate for the Mars InSight team. The lander still has a bit more work to do. Later today, once the dust its kicked up settles, it’ll unfurl its twin solar panel arrays and check in again with home.

UPDATE 11:59 a.m., Mon.

InSight sends its first picture home, relayed by the MarCO satellites. Picture a little obscured by dust, but clearly shows the horizon of the red planet (and it has a lander leg in it).

My first picture on #Mars! My lens cover isn’t off yet, but I just had to show you a first look at my new home. More status updates:https://t.co/tYcLE3tkkS #MarsLanding pic.twitter.com/G15bJjMYxa

— NASAInSight (@NASAInSight) November 26, 2018

UPDATE 11:55 a.m., Mon.
InSight has landed! TOUCHDOWN CONFIRMED. Fans around the world erupt. Lots of fist bumping.

YESSSSSSS SUCCESSFUL #Mars landing for #MarsInSight! WOOOOOOO!!! https://t.co/WLXnl2E0ms

— Adam Becker (@FreelanceAstro) November 26, 2018

InSight now has a new home.

I feel you, #Mars – and soon I’ll know your heart. With this safe landing, I’m here. I’m home.
#MarsLanding https://t.co/auhFdfiUMg

— NASAInSight (@NASAInSight) November 26, 2018

UPDATE 11:54 a.m., Mon.

Parachute is working! Hoots and claps from mission control and space fans at Chabot. All good news so far.

UPDATE 11:50 a.m., Mon.
InSight is now experiencing peak heat. Stay cool up there! Next step will be the parachute deployment. Travelling at 1,000 meters per second. Audience at Chabot is holding their breath.

UPDATE 11:48 a.m., Mon.
ENTRY! The lander has entered the atmosphere. Now it will slow down as it approaches the surface.

UPDATE 11:42 a.m., Mon.
The lander has separated from the spacecraft that carried it millions of miles away from home.

@NASAInSight is no longer cruising…it’s diving in. Five minutes to go until atmospheric entry. #MarsLanding #Mars

— Nadia Drake (@nadiamdrake) November 26, 2018

The lander is now steering itself. Star Tracker software turned off and InSight is going in. T-20 till land.

WOOHOO BENT PIPE HAS BEGUN! this means that MarCo’s are both working as hoped and will begin relaying the EDL data. OMG. #MarsLanding @PopSci

— Shannon Stirone (@shannonmstirone) November 26, 2018

Update from Mission Control: Both CubeSats and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have checked in and all seems good.

Curious about the instruments aboard InSight? They’re the product of teams from the U.S., France and Germany. Learn more.

UPDATE 11:15 a.m., Mon.

NASA’s livestream from mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has started. Peanuts, a tradition to bring good luck to landings, are being passed out.

Here be peanuts @NASAJPL mission control. Never try to land a spacecraft without ‘em. https://t.co/pEhDVFzBsI pic.twitter.com/c10XE5yFdG

— Nadia Drake (@nadiamdrake) November 26, 2018

Chabot’s theater is almost full with members of the public, like the Crawford’s of Hayward who brought their young daughter.

Lots of families here @ChabotSpace to watch the @NASAInSight lander. Erica & Steven Crawford of Hayward brought their planetary-enthusiast daughter Stefanie. Stefanie likes Mars, but says her favorite planet is Neptune. She wants to be an astronaut when she grows up. #MarsLanding pic.twitter.com/pE4fOtrnl5

— Danielle Venton (@DanielleVenton) November 26, 2018

UPDATE 10:30 a.m., Mon.

With the minutes ticking down till Mars InSight’s anticipated landing at 12:00 p.m. Pacific, KQED Science is ready to bring you up-to-the-minute information on the mission. We’ll embed the live feed from mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. And we’ll bring you the scene from the viewing party at the Chabot Observatory in Oakland.

Where are you watching the landing? Tweet us @KQEDScience and @DanielleVenton.

First, some background on the mission. This is the first mission to land on Mars since 2012, when the Curiosity rover touched down. Unlike that landing, with its novel, high-risk innovations (remember the ‘sky crane‘?), InSight is landing using tried-and-true technology. The landing sequence will be similar to past missions, such as NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander.

There are three main stages of landing.

Entering the Atmosphere: Small rockets will direct the spacecraft toward the surface. The rockets must maintain a precise 12-degree angle to prevent InSight from either burning up or bouncing off the planet’s surface.

Parachute Descent: The spacecraft will cast off its heat shield (a protective covering), release a parachute to slow down, and extend its three, shock-absorbing landing legs.

Powered Descent: A dozen engines, known as retro rockets, will begin firing to help the lander set down gently on the Martian soil — its new permanent home.

Want more info? See the sidebar above.

Anything going wrong at any one of these steps could cause this $830-million dollar mission to crash, burn up or bounce off back into space. But at the moment, all seems ready for a smooth landing. Yesterday InSight’s engineers made a final flight path tweak to maneuver the spacecraft over its targeted entry point.

It’s almost time! In less than 15 hours, I’ll plunge through the #Martian atmosphere. But before I do, my team tweaked my flight path one last time to ensure I’m on track for my #MarsLanding tomorrow. Read: https://t.co/6ekCBE2vUW pic.twitter.com/HiejIwCoHb

— NASAInSight (@NASAInSight) November 26, 2018

“What did you think of the Mars landing today?”

“Amazing.”

“Awesome!”

“Never gets old.”

A crowd of several hundred people chose to spend their midday Monday at Chabot Space & Science Center to witness live-streamed coverage of the landing of NASA’s InSight — something they might have done in the comfort of their own homes, as many people likely did.

But sharing the tense and thrilling moments of a live landing on another planet in the company of other eager space exploration enthusiasts, of all ages, and on a giant screen, makes for a far more memorable experience.

After all, people flock to theaters for midnight premieres of a new blockbuster movie, or fill outdoor stadiums in freezing weather to watch a live sporting event — so it’s heartening to witness similar enthusiasm for the live screening of another Mars landing.

Astro Community Celebrates

First, there were jubilant cheers when InSight reported a safe planet-fall. You could see the release of pent-up nervous energy in the crew at mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. It was palpable, as well, to those in the applauding crowd at Chabot.

In the days since landing, a collective sigh of relief has been followed by all eyes turning to the mission ahead, and the promise of its rich scientific rewards.

Right now, public enthusiasts and mission scientists alike must wait to find out what InSight will reveal of Mars’ interior, since it will take at least a few days to carefully plan and deploy the lander’s specialized sensors, and probably months to collect enough data  to begin telling that story.

But after six uneventful months of flight, and six minutes of nail-biting worry, at least NASA and JPL scientists and engineers can now make themselves busy setting up and testing InSight’s  instruments and other systems.

Those of us on the outside will just have to be patient.

Play-by-Play Action

How did the action go down? NASA’s InSight lander, which has been en route to Mars since launching last May, approached the upper extent of Mars’ thin atmosphere on November 26 right on schedule, shortly before noon Pacific Time.

Then followed six-and-a-half hushed, tense minutes as a series of critical EDL (Entry, Descent, and Landing) maneuvers were performed by the spacecraft: detachment from interplanetary cruise stage, alignment for atmospheric entry, parachute deployment, heat shield jettison, landing legs extension, radar-ground detection, retrorocket ignition, and…wait for it…touchdown!

Meanwhile, mission control operators at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory could only watch as telemetry came in, relayed by the twin MarCO “cubesats” that tagged along to give us a real-time report of InSight’s descent. The eight-minute travel delay of radio waves sent from Mars to Earth means that the entire landing sequence would be completed before the radio reports reached mission control.

Robots or Humans?

I didn’t ask anyone the question: Should we be sending humans, or robots, to explore planets? But it was on one visitor’s mind anyway.

“You enjoyed the landing?” I asked him. He nodded vigorously. “Should we send more?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “I don’t think that a lot of people appreciate how much we can learn with missions like these, at a fraction of the cost of a mission sending humans anywhere.”

At $814 million for the total InSight mission cost, on average each American taxpayer paid less than $6. How much does a cappuccino at Starbucks cost these days? Or bridge toll? Or, for that matter, a blockbuster movie at the theater? (Rarely $6 even at matinee prices).

Personally, I’ve always been fascinated by human space voyages — from real ones like the Apollo Moon landings to Star Trek.

But I appreciate that we don’t need to go to other planets in person to accomplish some amazing feats. We’ve explored every planet in the solar system, some comets and asteroids, a few moons, and even the fringes of interstellar space, entirely with robots.

Real-World Epic Blockbuster

The drama of InSight’s landing was not presented through live video or stunning imagery from the spacecraft, as it burned a high-speed trail through the upper atmosphere, or when its parachute gloriously bloomed in the Martian skies above, or as a cloud of rusty dust was raised by the blast of roaring landing rockets.

That would be exciting — and may be what a general American movie-watching audience would expect in an epic Mars adventure.

But the only visuals offered in a real-world EDL maneuver are pictures of avid, often nervous-looking engineers and scientists sitting tensely before their consoles, their perspiration coldly illuminated by screens full of numbers and graphs. The first few pictures from Mars, taken after landing, arrived on our screens an hour or so later.

“I was a little disappointed that we didn’t see any pictures from InSight while it was landing; I kind of expected that,” said one visitor with a small child in tow. “But it was still very exciting to be here watching when it landed. Definitely worth coming out for.”

Smooth Landing

InSight now rests safely on the ground in Elysium Planitia, the vast flat equatorial plain from where the spacecraft will conduct its mission to probe Mars’ interior. Every vital step of its landing sequence was pulled off flawlessly — almost an anticlimax to all the possible perilous missteps that could have ended the mission in a heartbeat.

Take a deep breath, now. The main adventure is only beginning.

Updated at 9:40 a.m. ET

Weather and other delays marred what had been anticipated as a banner day for space launches Tuesday, as both SpaceX and Blue Origin were forced to postpone launches that had been scheduled to take place within minutes of each other. Both companies say they will look at moving their launches to Wednesday morning.

Blue Origin says its launch was scrubbed due to what the company calls a “ground infrastructure issue.” Blue Origin says the rocket remains ready.

SpaceX says an abort order was triggered by the flight computer onboard the Falcon 9 rocket. Paired with an earlier delay due to unfavorable upper-level winds, the slowdown pushed the rocket past its launch window.

“Vehicle and payload remain healthy,” SpaceX said via Twitter, adding, “next launch attempt is tomorrow” at 9:07 a.m. ET.

In addition to those missions from two of America’s top private space companies, two other space launches had been planned for Tuesday — but only one of them is now still scheduled.

The delays threw cold water on a day that had left some space aficionados giddy with excitement. “If you’re a space fan, Christmas comes a week early this year,” Space.com wrote of the four planned launches.

SpaceX was poised to send its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, with a live webcast that started streaming about 15 minutes before the intended liftoff.

SpaceX plans to carry the first GPS III satellite into medium Earth orbit; it comes from Lockheed Martin, which says the new system will “launch the next generation of connection.” Because of the satellite’s weight and flight plan, the Falcon 9 will not return for a landing. Instead, it will be sent into the atmosphere to prevent space junk from accumulating in orbit.

The new GPS III satellites are designed to be three times more accurate than the current system, which went into civilian operation in the 1990s. As for how it might affect regular GPS users, the firm says, “our phones will receive an upgraded GPS signal from this satellite by the end of 2019.”

Vice President Mike Pence was in Florida for the now-delayed SpaceX launch.

Blue Origin had targeted 9:30 a.m. ET to launch its New Shepard rocket for a suborbital flight from its facility in West Texas, in the tenth mission for the reusable rocket system.

The New Shepard (named for astronaut Alan Shepard) will carry nine different NASA-sponsored research and experimental projects that have come from five colleges and several agencies and engineering firm Controlled Dynamics.

The day had promised four potential launches — but then the delays took hold.

The final launch of the day is planned to take place in California, where the United Launch Alliance will send a Delta IV Heavy rocket up from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 8:57 p.m. ET. It will carry a U.S. National Reconnaissance Office satellite called the NROL- 71, which the Air Force says will help to give “innovative overhead intelligence systems for national security.”

Around midday Tuesday, Arianespace had planned to launch a Soyuz rocket from the spaceport in French Guiana to carry a French defense and intelligence imaging satellite designated CSO-1 into orbit. That’s now scheduled for Wednesday at 11:37 a.m. ET.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit www.npr.org.

It was a happy New Year for NASA. Only minutes into 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft made another historic achievement in space exploration: a fly-by of the most distant object ever visited, the Kuiper Belt Object called “Ultima Thule.”

At 12:33 a.m. Eastern, January 1, New Horizons passed within 2,200 miles of the KBO, collecting about 7 gigabytes of data that will be transmitted back to Earth in the months ahead.

At 19 miles long and 4 billion miles away from Earth, Ultima Thule is equivalent to a 1-inch target seen from 3,000 miles away.

What is Ultima Thule, and How Did We Find It?
Ultima Thule, which is translated as “beyond the known world,” may be a tiny object, but just as New Horizons’ encounter with Pluto almost four years ago showed us, surprising and wonderful things can be wrapped up in small packages.

The object was discovered by observations from the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014, as part of a search for potential post-Pluto destinations of discovery for New Horizons.

As suspected from those observations, and now confirmed by New Horizons, Ultima Thule is a “contact binary“: two smaller objects that at some time in the past met each other. And so gently did they make contact, like the lightest of “kisses” between two billiard balls, both remained intact, and did not rebound from each other.

The pair have remained joined at the hip from then on, possibly since the earliest times in the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.

Two For the Price of One

When Ultima Thule (officially designated 2014 MU69) was selected from a short list of candidates as an extended target for New Horizons following the 2015 Pluto encounter, little more was known about it than its orbital characteristics, a rough estimate of its size, and that it had an elongated shape.

Added to these meager facts was an assumption that the object was composed largely of frozen volatile materials (ices of water, ammonia, methane, and others), as cold and distant Kuiper Belt Objects are expected to be.

With the up-close encounter of Ultima Thule, NASA has bagged not only what were originally two separate KBOs, but potentially any morphological markings left behind by their union, so long ago.

Three potential angles to peer into the past is not bad.

The Kuiper Belt
The Kuiper Belt is a disk-shaped region of the solar system found between the orbit of Neptune (30 Astronomical Units from the sun, 1 AU being one sun-Earth distance) to about 50 AU.

First hypothesized as a wide belt of myriad small, icy objects in 1930, it wasn’t until 1992 that the first Kuiper Belt Object was discovered, 15760 Albion, orbiting the sun at distances between 40 and 46 AU.

Being so far from the heat of the sun and the gravitational disturbance of large planets, the Kuiper Belt represents a vast treasure trove of mostly undisturbed, pristine evidence of the earliest conditions in the solar system.

On planets like Earth, meteoric impacts, weathering and tectonic activity tend to erase most traces of times long gone — but no so on a KBO. Frozen in time-capsule fashion, Kuiper Belt Objects can inform us of what was going on 4.6 billion years ago that led to the formation of the planets, including the Earth.

The data acquired on Ultima Thule will add importantly to the growing body of “solar system archaeological evidence” amassed by other comet, asteroid, and planetary missions, such as OSIRIS-REx, Hayabusa 2,  Rosetta and soon InSIGHT.

What’s On the Horizon For New Horizons Now?
In the months ahead, New Horizons will send back all the pictures and other data acquired during the brief fly-by of Ultima Thule, so we have yet to be dazzled by the crispest, highest resolution images of the tiny contact binary. More to come.

With all systems still functioning, and plenty of course-correction fuel remaining on board, NASA is interested in finding yet another Kuiper Belt Object for New Horizons to target in the years ahead. So the adventure may not yet be over.

It’s a year to celebrate the moon.

Fifty years after astronauts first set foot on the lunar surface, our curiosity and passion for exploring our celestial neighbor is alive and well. Nearly a hundred total missions (from the U.S., Russia, Japan and other space agencies) have traveled to the moon, and several more are in the pipeline. Humanity’s lunar obsession remains high.

How did the moon form? What is it made of? What material and scientific resources does it offer? And, how might we ultimately return and even dwell there? These are questions that burn for answers.

The moon is our nearest and most accessible neighbor. We also now understand that Earth and the moon likely have a common origin. We are thus, not cut from the same cloth per se; we are cut from the same rock.

Here are a few highlights of what make 2019 a year to renew our personal fascination with Earth’s longtime companion.

Moon Year Kickoff with Chang’e 4 and Yutu-2

China kicked off the year by accomplishing something no space agency had before: successfully landing the Chang’e 4 spacecraft and its Yutu-2 rover on the far side of the moon.

All prior landings, by all countries, took place on the moon’s Earth-facing side, the face that human eyes have beheld since the dawn of our species.

Before 1959, when the Soviet Luna 3 became the first spacecraft to photograph the far side of the moon, no one had ever viewed its rugged, heavily cratered terrain. And it wasn’t until Apollo 8 orbited the moon in 1968 that humans laid eyes directly on it.

So, as far as wheels-on-the-ground exploration goes, the far side of the moon was luna incognita, until Jan. 3 when Chang’e 4 landed in the 110-mile wide Von Karman crater, within the vast South Pole-Aitken Basin.

Landing on the far side of the moon isn’t just good for China’s space-faring prestige, the scientific results should tell us a lot about the moon’s structure, how it was formed, and its history over the last 4.5 billion years.

The far side of the moon’s terrain is physically different from that of the near side. The far hemisphere is dominated by rugged highlands and possesses many more impact craters than the near side. Lunar maria, which means “seas” (these are the dark, blotchy lava plains that we can see with our eyes from Earth) are much less numerous and smaller than on the near side.

Tracing the history of the moon’s formation requires an understanding of the reasons for the stark differences between the two lunar hemispheres, so Chang’e 4 and the Yutu-2 rover are well-positioned to turn up some eye-opening clues.

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

Ten years ago, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter began mapping the lunar surface in high detail, and continues to send back enormous amounts of high-res, close-up imagery today.

In fact, there were so many pictures pouring back from the spacecraft that volunteer citizen scientists were enlisted to help.

For several years, anyone with a computer and a desire to pore over thousands of pictures of dirt, rock, and craters — some of them never seen by another human — could contribute to mapping the moon by participating in crater-counting.

That might sound dull to some, but the science of counting craters can tell us a lot about the moon’s history, when and how much the moon was bombarded by debris at different times in the past.

On Jan. 30, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped a picture of China’s Chang’e 4 and the Yutu-2 rover as it cruised by overhead, pinpointing its landing location and demonstrating the level of detail its powerful camera can capture.

Apollo 11 Anniversary

This July 2019 we mark and celebrate five decades since the first human landing on the moon, by Apollo 11 and its astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (and let’s not forget Michael Collins orbiting high above in the Apollo command module).

This feat, which NASA repeated five more times from 1969 to 1972, has yet to be matched, although more than one nation has its sights set on a human return there.

Coming Up

Several lunar missions are scheduled to launch in 2019, including India’s Chandrayaan-2 lander and rover, the Moon Express’s (USA) Lunar Scout, and China’s Chang’e 5 sample return mission.

A return to the moon in person by humans won’t happen until 2022, when NASA is scheduled to test a crewed Orion spacecraft in a single free-return maneuver around the moon and back. It’ll be a quick trip, with no landings, but the mission will lay a path for returning to the moon’s surface again, and one day traveling far beyond.

Scientists may have rediscovered a long-lost recipe from Earth’s primordial cookbook for life, one that takes chemical ingredients that were available in the oceans of Earth’s youth, adds heat, and churns out the organic molecular building blocks of life.

This is not only an important step in the journey toward solving the puzzle of how and where life originated on Earth, it also offers guidance for narrowing the search for life on other worlds — where to search and what to look for.

What’s Cookin’ in NASA’s Kitchen?

NASA astrobiologist Laurie Barge and team, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, set out to demonstrate how organic molecules might have formed 4 billion years ago, in the pitch darkness on Earth’s deep-ocean floor surrounding vents of hot, chemical-laden water spouting from Earth’s interior.

Called hydrothermal vents, these deep-sea “hot springs” of chemicals and heat exist today, and all but certainly existed eons ago before life began.

To accomplish their goal, Barge and team recreated in their lab the conditions that prevailed around hydrothermal vents in Earth’s primordial ocean.

They prepared a mixture of water, minerals and other chemicals that would have been present in ocean water on the young Earth, removing oxygen from the mix to account for the fact that little of that element existed in the ocean or atmosphere in Earth’s pre-life era. Then, heating the water to 158 degrees Fahrenheit (the water temperature surrounding a hydrotherapy vent), they injected a water solution that included small amounts of oxygen and other minerals, to simulate a hydrothermal vent.

The mixing of the simulated primordial fluids produced chemical reactions, out of which formed alanine, an amino acid, and alpha hydroxy acid. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, which in turn make up all living things.

A tasty result to say the least! Before their very eyes the experimenters witnessed the genesis of molecules all-important to the formation of life. And since they had been careful to recreate the natural conditions that existed on the primordial Earth, it was not just the result of a contrived chemistry experiment, but a re-enactment of nature’s own original cookery.

Hydrothermal Vents Near and Far

Today we find communities of advanced life forms thriving around hydrothermal vents. Fish, crustaceans, cephalopods and many more species teem around these geothermal oases on the cold, dark ocean floor, their ecosystems sustained entirely by the chemical bounty of the Earth — no sunlight required.

It is probable that the ancestors of these complex organisms originated from the sunlit ocean world above and migrated to hydrothermal vents some time in the past, there to adapt to the very different environment.

But the question remains: Where did the first, single-celled living organisms appear on Earth? In a sunlit tidepool, where organic molecules were sloshed together by waves? Or, did the first microbe spring forth from the dark warmth of a hydrothermal vent, from an original recipe cooked up wholly by the Earth?

Understanding how organic compounds like amino acids might have originated around hydrothermal vents on Earth has powerful implications for our search for extraterrestrial life.

If we find signs of life on a planet like Mars, past or present, we will be pressed to answer questions about its origin similar to the question of how Earth life originated.

Mars once had seas, which may have had some form of hydrothermal vent spouting away on the sea floor. But the young Mars also had an atmosphere, a warm and watery surface environment, a water cycle, and other attributes similar to Earth.

And, that life-friendly environment dried up a long time ago, so we might hope to find only the residues of past living things — or at best something still living deep under Mars’ surface.

Looking for Life in Unexpected Places

But farther out from the sun we have detected oceans on at least two or three moons of gas giant planets, such as Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus.

Neither of these moons has an atmosphere to speak of, and their surfaces are crusts of frigid ice exposed to the vacuum and radiation of space — not promising environments to search for life as we know it.

Under those icy crusts, though, are oceans of liquid water. Water vapor plumes erupting from cracks in Enceladus’ surface carry traces of chemicals like ammonia, one of the “precursor” chemicals for the formation of organic molecules.

Europa’s ocean is global, may be up to 100 miles deep and has twice the water of Earth’s ocean.

If the ocean floors of either of these moons sport hydrothermal vents, then there may be environments down there similar to those surrounding Earth’s vents.

We know that the hydrothermal vents on Earth support thriving communities of life, and from the laboratory recipe cooked up by Dr. Barge and team we know that such an environment can easily produce organic compounds, the precursor molecules of life.

Understanding the genesis of life on Earth would also focus our search for signs of life on extrasolar planets.

No spacecraft will be reaching exoplanets in our lifetimes (or those of our great great great grandchildren in all probability), but knowing what chemical telltales might indicate the presence of life would be a powerful tool for exploring life beyond our solar system — in nearby star systems, in distant reaches across the Milky Way galaxy, and possibly even other galaxies.

I’d say that’s a lot of potential from a small bottle of hot mineral water bubbling away in a lab.

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Get ready for your next big Martian adventure!

It’s not a Hollywood epic about the stranding and rescue of a lone astronaut, but a real-world expedition: the Mars 2020 rover mission.

And NASA’s newest robot explorer isn’t going alone. Mars 2020 is being accompanied by the first-of-its-kind Mars Helicopter. Yes, in this case, NASA saved its innovation for the engineering, not the nomenclature.

Mars Helicopter

In late January, the fully assembled softball-sized, 4-pound robot with twin rotors was tested at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

In a chamber that replicates the actual conditions on Mars that the helicopter must endure, temperatures were set as low as minus-130 degrees Fahrenheit, with a simulated atmosphere of carbon dioxide equivalent to the atmospheric pressure at 100,000 feet on Earth. (The highest altitude reached by a helicopter here on this planet was 29,000 feet, where it landed on the peak of Mount Everest.)

Even Mars’ lower-surface gravity, one-third of Earth’s, was simulated during test flights, with a special tether providing a constant upward tug.

Mars Helicoper passed its two hovering test flights with flying colors, so to speak. The next time the helicopter takes off will be on Mars, in early 2021.

The Future of Martian Flight

Mars Helicopter is accompanying its mother-ship rover as a demonstration of technology that can be put to use on future missions — a beta test to see how well the technology performs on Mars, and to learn what features and capabilities might be included in next-generation copters.

Rovers are great for getting around on the surface of another planet, but the six-wheeled robots can’t roam everywhere; some terrain is navigationally challenging or simply impassable.

But a rover with a tiny solar-powered, flying camera-bot can deploy it to get close looks at intriguing geological features, scout what’s on the other side of hills and ridges that the rover can’t get to, and maybe even collect rock and soil samples over a wide range of territory.

Mars scientists are probably waking up late at night imagining how to put future whirly-bots to use.

Mission of Mars 2020

The exploration of Mars has been an exciting ongoing adventure for the past several decades, but Mars 2020 has the potential to deliver the most exciting news yet: evidence of past Martian life. Not since the Viking landers conducted inconclusive experiments to detect signs of present life has a mission looked for Martians.

Physically modeled after the rover Curiosity, which is presently looking for, and finding, clues to Mars’ past watery climate, one of Mars 2020’s objectives is to look for signs of anything that might have lived in those ancient seas and lakes.

Along with a suite of highly advanced scientific instruments, the rover is also carrying an experiment, MOXIE, to produce oxygen from Mars’ atmospheric carbon dioxide to test how future human explorers might produce breathable oxygen from the Martian environment.

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Carrying On a Long Legacy of Mars Crawling

With each successive landing mission, NASA adds something new to the conversation about the exploration of Mars.

In 1976, the Viking missions achieved the first successful landings on Mars, allowing for our first surface-view of the planet. They also attempted, optimistically, to find life.

In 1997, Pathfinder carried the first rover, Sojourner, to set wheels on Martian dirt, and the 330 feet it traveled from rock to rock at the time felt like a marathon.

In 2004, Spirit and Opportunity were the first wheels-on-the-ground expedition to search for signs of past water on Mars, culminating in a spectacular 15-year, 26-mile odyssey of discovery by Opportunity.

The 2012 landing of Curiosity kicked off the first mission to take us on a tour through time, reading the pages of Mars’ climate history through sedimentary layers going back a couple billion years.

And the most recent mission, InSight, will give us our first look inside Mars, straight to the core.

Launch and Landing

The Mars 2020 mission, rover and helicopter, will launch in July 2020, with a landing projected for February 2021.

From all that we now know about Mars’ once more Earth-like conditions, about the tenacity and adaptability of extremophile life forms on Earth, and about the efficacy of the formation of organic compounds under the right conditions, scientists are optimistic that Mars 2020 could find evidence of life.

And while I’d love to see microscopic pictures of Martian microbe fossils, I’ll settle for any chemical residues left in rock that we can point to and say:

There was life here!