While prospecting the slopes of Mount Sharp for evidence of Mars’ past watery climates, NASA’s Curiosity rover struck clay.

If this doesn’t sound as worthy of a “Eureka!” as hitting the golden mother-lode, consider that, to scientists studying Mars’ past climates, clay is as good as gold.

Clay is a treasure to researchers because the minerals it contains are known to have formed in the presence of water.  So, analyzing Martian clays is a means of exploring what role water has played in Mars’ past climates. Mars’ once wetter, possibly more Earth-like, and maybe even life-friendly environment has long since dried up, but clues to it persist in the rocks.

Curiosity drilled the April 6 clay sample from a patch of exposed bedrock, nicknamed “Aberlady,” within a region of Mount Sharp called the “clay-bearing unit.”

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The Saga of Mars’ History Written in Stone

Mount Sharp is a 3-mile-high mound of sedimentary rock sitting in the middle of 90-mile-wide Gale Crater, which we know once contained deep lakes that repeatedly formed and dried up in cycles.

The sediments were laid down at different times in the past two billion years, and each layer represents a page in the climate history of Mars. Erosion by wind action has opened up these pages for Curiosity to read.

Curiosity’s Quest for Water

Mount Sharp’s “clay-bearing unit” was discovered from orbit by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in the years prior to Curiosity’s 2012 landing. That detection is one of the main reasons that Gale Crater, and particularly Mount Sharp, were chosen for Curiosity’s expedition.

Curiosity can bore into hard rock to get samples, with a hammering rock drill on its long robotic arm. The drill’s jack-hammer action was needed to penetrate earlier hard mudstones, but the April 6 clay tasting was of soft rock and required only rotary action.

The drilled rock samples are delivered by the robotic arm to Curiosity’s internal laboratory instruments for analysis.

Curiosity started detecting clay minerals in mudstone samples shortly after landing, discoveries that only continued along its uphill trail. These lower mudstones are believed to have formed when rivers carrying sediments flowed into ancient lakes, where the sediments settled out on the lake bottom near the inlet.

While scientists await results of Curiosity’s analysis of the Aberlady sample, they are surveying the unexplored territory surrounding the rover — maybe like kids in a candy shop. Several intriguing geological features beckon with promises of discovery. There’s a lot to look forward to.

Curiosity’s Progress and Future

With all the recent headlines grabbed by new and upcoming Mars missions — InSight and the Mars 2020 rover namely — plus 2018’s loss of the veteran Opportunity rover, Curiosity’s dogged and determined uphill progress may have been overshadowed by these robots of past, present, and future.

But, Curiosity weathered last year’s major global dust storm without a hitch — the same dust storm that ended Opportunity’s 15-year Martian marathon. Indeed, Curiosity has fed us regular reports of mineralogical paleo-water-sightings for many months now, making the truly remarkable findings almost a routine event.

But with this new rung of Mount Sharp’s sedimentary ladder now climbed, Curiosity’s progress up the 3-mile-high mountain can be appreciated. Though it has only climbed a vertical distance of about 1,000 feet in seven years, and in the bigger picture is still much closer to Mount Sharp’s foot than its summit, no other interplanetary rover in history can come close to boasting such a mountain-climbing record.

What will Curiosity encounter in this new phase of is exploration, and how much higher will it climb before it joins Opportunity in the history books?

More to come.

Asteroids are out there, even if you can’t always see them.

Want some naked-eye proof? It’s coming, in the form of a mountain of space rock named Apophis, for the Egyptian god of chaos; his task is to prevent the sun from rising.

Stretching three-and-a-half football fields long, Apophis will cruise within 19,000 miles of Earth—the closest this large an asteroid has come in recorded history. Apophis will swing inside our ring of geosynchronous satellites on April 13, 2029.

And yes, that is a Friday.

But don’t worry, NASA has it all figured. Any bad luck that may befall you on that day won’t come from Apophis—probably. An earlier worst-case prediction that gave a 2.7 percent chance of Apophis striking the Earth has since been downgraded to practically nil. Actually, that’s an upgrade.

Apophis is a Sparkle in NASA’s Eye

In fact, NASA scientists look forward to Apophis’ near miss. Given a decade to prepare, NASA might even send a robotic probe to rendezvous with the rock. At minimum, it’s an incredible opportunity to make close-up observations of a large asteroid. Apophis is large enough, and will be close enough, to see with our bare eyes, so Earth-based optical and radio telescopes will have an unprecedented view of the spectacle.

At the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference held in Maryland this April, scientists brainstormed all the possible ways to take advantage of a flyby that others might see only as a narrowly averted disaster.

NASA has used radio telescopes before to produce rudimentary images of some passing asteroids, though these were either smaller ones or much farther away. The last time any rock this size passed close to Earth was in 2001, the asteroid 2017 VW13. That one is estimated to have passed within 76,000 miles, a third of the distance to the moon. And, since it wasn’t discovered until 2017, no one even noticed it fly by!

God of Chaos

Apophis is classified today as a “Potentially Hazardous Asteroid” (PHA). This means that it periodically crosses Earth’s orbital path, and is large enough to do some major damage if it were to hit us.

Far from being an infrequent visitor from deep space as many comets are, coming around only every few decades or centuries, Apophis is a denizen of the inner solar system. Its 324-day orbit carries it from just outside Earth’s orbit at its farthest point from the sun, almost to the orbit of Venus at its closest.

You might think that because Apophis crosses Earth’s orbit more than once each year, the chance of collision is an ever-present threat.

However, most of the time when Apophis crosses our path, Earth is at a different point in its orbit. It’s only those times when our orbital positions sync up that there’s any chance of bumping into each other. Think of a carnival carousel and that brass ring you try to grab each time your horse passes by it. You only have a shot at getting that ring if it swings close when you pass—and even then there’s no guarantee.

April 13, 2029 is one of those match-ups, and scientists are keenly eyeing the brass ring of new discovery that will be briefly within their reach.

What Are the Chances?

While small objects pass close to Earth on a routine basis, and even collide with us more often than you might think, most go unnoticed. Three quarters of them fall over open ocean, most of the rest over sparsely populated land. And those that don’t break up in the atmosphere have limited effects when they hit the water or the ground anyway.

Larger, more dangerous rocks make appearances with far less frequency—and the bigger they are, the rarer the encounter.

Notable impacts in recent history include the Tunguska comet or meteorite impact in Siberia in 1908, and the Chelyabinsk event in Russia in 2013. Both were smaller than Apophis, but were relatively large objects: between 200 and 600 feet across in the case of Tunguska, and about 66 feet for Chelyabinsk. They exploded in Earth’s atmosphere, producing significant effects on the ground below, though no known fatalities.

Larger collisions with greater regional and even global effects can be found in prehistoric times, such as the impact that formed Barringer Crater (aka “Meteor Crater”) in Arizona 50,000 years ago.

To find a “dinosaur killer” impact event you’d have to look all the way back to, well, the dinosaur killer impact, 66 million years ago. The asteroid that contributed to ending the dinosaurs’s long reign on Earth, which struck the northern end of the Yucatan Peninsula near Chicxulub, Mexico, was probably six miles across.

Defending Against Near Earth Objects

Fortunately, we aren’t completely in the dark about the dangers posed by Near-Earth Objects. We’re also not completely helpless when it comes to defending our planet from them.

For years now, an international coalition of observers and researchers have collaborated to find, measure, and track Near-Earth Objects. The data they collect are used to calculate the probability of a collision, and to predict the level of damage in the event of a hit.

Ultimately, a major asteroid impact with Earth is a matter of when, not if. But the good news is that none are predicted in the foreseeable future.

The current approach to planetary defense hinges on the idea that the further in advance we can predict an impact, the more time we have to do something about it. If we know it’s coming years before the fact, a tiny “nudge” to the asteroid’s trajectory can make the difference between a catastrophic impact and a harmless near miss.

What About Apophis’ Next Flyby?

The probability of Apophis hitting the Earth in 2029 has been practically ruled out. Its close passage through Earth’s gravitational field, though, will result in a change in its orbital path, so careful observations of the flyby will yield more than scientific discovery, it will let us make more precise collision predictions for future encounters.

As things stand now, Apophis will make another close encounter with Earth in 2036, but will come no closer than 14 million miles. Beyond that, the chance of it hitting us anytime between 2060 and 2105 is 1 in 110,000.

Nothing I’m going to lose sleep over.

We have come a long way in our understanding of the planet Mars in the last few decades, and even the past several years.

Once visible only as a reddish spark in the night sky, when all that humans had to behold it with were bare eyes, Mars became more intriguing after the invention of the telescope 400 years ago. Mysterious surface markings and seasonal changes in color on Mars’ surface tantalized human scientific curiosity, and we had to know more.

Since we began sending robotic orbiters and, later, landers our understanding of our neighbor planet has skyrocketed to new heights.

But no single mission has revealed so much of Mars’ surface in such astounding fine detail, revealed its dynamic geologic and meteorological processes with such exquisite finesse, and laid groundwork for so many other missions, as NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

MRO

This month NASA marks MRO’s tremendous achievements by celebrating its 60,000th orbit since arriving at Mars in 2006. In that time, the high-tech orbiter has brought us many discoveries and — if the past is a guide to the future — will bring many more.

To date, MRO has captured over 378,000 high-resolution images of the Martian surface, returned over 360 terabits of scientific data to Earth, scouted out or mapped landing sites for seven missions, tracked the descent of three of them, and relayed one terabit of data from multiple surface missions.

No two ways about it, MRO is a high-flying achiever.

Biggest Camera in Deep Space

Loaded with a suite of scientific instruments, one of MRO’s most crowd-pleasing achievements is the fantastic set of hundreds of thousands of images of Mars’ surface captured with its HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera. With a half-meter wide aperture, HiRISE is the largest camera ever sent into deep space, beyond the Earth-Moon system.

Capable of spotting objects not much larger than a beach ball from 190 miles up, and retargeting any location as often as every two weeks, HiRISE has revealed details of Mars that can only be surpassed by a lander or rover’s on-the-ground point of view.

However, MRO has a high-ground advantage over its surface-based cousins: from its polar orbit that winds around the globe, MRO has a sweeping view of the entire planet.

Because MRO can capture images of the same regions repeatedly, it offers a sort of time-lapse perspective that reveals changes in Mars’ surface and atmosphere. This ability, more than for any other mission, has shown us that Mars is a highly dynamic planet, with seasonal cycles of carbon dioxide and water ice formation and decline, landslides, windstorms and dust devil activity, meteorite impacts, cloud formation and atmospheric circulation, and much more.

Red-Planet Relay

MRO is the best communications point, to date, on the Red Planet — one that can serve both space robots and any human explorers alike. You may recall how important orbital satellites were to ground operations on the film, “The Martian.” It was through repeated orbital surveillance, that mission control knew astronaut Mark Watney was still alive after his crew mates left him for dead. Then, when he managed to hot-wire the derelict Pathfinder lander, his attempts at communication with Earth were facilitated by orbital relaying.

Okay, so there hasn’t been any human drama like that in reality — yet — but MRO has already had a fine career as an orbital surveillance and communications relay station.

Rovers like Curiosity can communicate directly with Earth, via the giant radio receivers of NASA’s Deep Space Network, but when it comes to porting large amounts of scientific images and other data, using orbiters like MRO as go-betweens has some powerful advantages.

At close range — from surface to orbit — radio signals are stronger and the data bandwidth greater. Curiosity can upload to MRO a large amount of data relatively quickly. Then, MRO can send the batch to Earth through its large, high-gain antenna. And since MRO has a direct line of sight with Earth most of the time, there is far less interruption in communication than for surface robots, which spend half of each day blocked from Earth by Mars.

Robot Spotting

Because MRO’s HiRISE surveillance covers the entire surface of Mars, and can spot objects as small as a card table, it has been a wonderful tool not only for tracking spacecraft as they make their descent toward landing, but for locating them and providing context imagery and data of the areas around their landing sites.

Over time, MRO has spotted Vikings 1 and 2, Pathfinder, the rovers Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, the Phoenix lander near Mars’ north pole, the new Insight lander, and even the ill-fated European Beagle 2, with which contact was lost during landing.

Of greater importance to landing missions is the job that puts the R into MRO: Reconnaissance. Landing a robot on Mars is tricky, especially for larger and more complicated vehicles like Curiosity, and the upcoming Mars 2020 rover.

So, getting detailed pictures and other measurements of the terrain and surface conditions of prospective landing sites gives mission planners the vital information they need to choose where to land, and then to plan the final landing maneuvers with as much safety as possible.

MRO  has scouted and mapped the sites for seven landing missions, including pre-landing reconnaissance and post-landing surveillance.

Job Security For a Robot

With plenty of geologic and meteorological action continually taking place on Mars, and future missions to scout out possible landing sites for, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter should remain on the NASA payroll for years to come.

NASA can make the exploration of Mars look easy. Generations of robotic spacecraft sent to orbit, land upon, and rove about the Martian surface seem to do their jobs courageously without even working up a sweat.

But behind the scenes of the flashy news headlines of exploration successes, NASA scientists and engineers sweat plenty, bleed a bit at times, and even shed tears on occasion.

The mission currently on deck in the sweat shop of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the Mars 2020 Rover, the next robot that will set wheels on the dusty Martian landscape.

Shake and Bake Trials

It is a monumental feat to hurl a robot millions of miles through the cold, radiation-blasted vacuum of space and safely navigate through an alien atmosphere to land on hard rock and abrasive, wind-blown soil. It is only accomplished after months and years of planning, testing, retesting and ultimately crossing fingers in hope of success.

To lessen the risk of even a minor problem ending a mission prematurely — an electrical connector shaking loose, a bolt popping out, or a tiny but disastrous fuel leak — all space-bound equipment is subjected to rigorous testing, “trials of pain” designed to simulate the brutal conditions to be endured on the actual mission.

In April, scarcely a year from its scheduled launch, NASA’s Mars 2020 was put through such trials.

First were the vibration tests — a sort of trial by very loud noise.

A duplicate stand-in of the Mars 2020 rover was placed within the aeroshell cocoon the real one will ride in all the way into Mars’ atmosphere, assembled in the same configuration it will be for launch in July 2020.

This spacecraft “stack” was placed in a large chamber and blasted with over 150 decibels of random noise to simulate the vibrations of launch, the moment in any mission when spacecraft components are most likely to shake loose and come apart. Sound at the 150 decibels level is about what you’d experience standing 80 feet from a large jet engine at take-off — loud enough to rupture your eardrums.

The Mars 2020 test stack passed the tests, letting mission engineers worry a bit less.

Next, the spacecraft was placed in the 85-foot-tall Space Simulator Facility, a chamber that has tested robot hardiness as far back as the early 1960s with the Mariner missions, and many since.

The chamber simulates the harsh environment of space, which the spacecraft will have to endure over seven months of cruising between Earth and Mars.

After pumping the air out of the chamber to near vacuum, liquid nitrogen super-chilled its walls to -200 degrees F, a temperature cold enough to freeze a person solid in seconds.

Then, as a finishing touch, powerful xenon lamps bathed the spacecraft in simulated sunlight, approximating the raw solar radiation the equipment will need to survive.

The trial concluded successfully after a full eight days, assuring engineers that the spacecraft is as ready as it will ever be for the perils ahead.

Rehearsing a Mars Landing Here on Earth

The most intense, nail-biting, nerve-wracking part of the entire journey to Mars is not the thunderous rocket launch, or the seven months of interplanetary cruising to follow, but the brief moment of atmospheric entry, descent, and landing (EDL), which has earned the title “Seven Minutes of Terror” from NASA operators.

With so many things that could go wrong during EDL—a parachute failing to deploy, a rocket failing to fire, or a terminal crash-landing in unexpectedly rugged terrain—every iota of advanced disaster prevention that can be imagined is planned out and tested.

Accordingly, NASA has made use of the arguably most Mars-like landscapes on Earth, Death Valley National Park, to test Mars 2020’s special Lander Vision System. The LVS will guide Mars 2020 to a safe landing spot on the floor of its ultimate destination, Jezero Crater, in February 2021.

NASA mounted an engineering duplicate of the LVS on the nose of a helicopter and flew it through a series of maneuvers over the rugged mountainous desert terrain in Death Valley. During the flights the LVS collected and analyzed imagery of the surface below, testing its ability to identify landing hazards and safe havens on the ground.

Mars 2020 will be the first-ever robotic landing mission with the ability to retarget its precise landing site on the fly, based on real-time terrain imaging data — something that past missions left somewhat to chance.

Practice Makes Perfect?

The exploration of other worlds in our solar system has never been easy. If you think that exploring Mars is a cakewalk, consider that of the 45 Mars missions attempted since 1960, only 22 have been successful (or partially successful).

Some of the unsuccessful attempts didn’t even get as far as Earth orbit, some experienced a failure during their interplanetary voyage, and some ended up crashing spectacularly upon arrival.

NASA has taken all the precautions it can to ensure a safe trip for Mars 2020. Engineers have tested everything that can be tested, imagined and planned for most things that can go wrong, and will continue to do so up to the day of launch in July 2020.

Then, all that will be left to do is to cross fingers and hope.

When you hear the phrase space telescope, you probably think of NASA’s venerable Hubble, which has brought us decades of unique and breathtaking images of the most distant reaches of space, cosmic discoveries of universe-shaking magnitude, and a nice gallery of stunning computer wallpaper selections.

Quietly working in tandem, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has been making equally compelling cosmic discoveries through observations of the infrared light emitted by celestial objects.

If you haven’t heard about it, now may be a good time to take a look at its work. After over 15 years on the job, Spitzer is scheduled to retire next January, passing the torch to the next generation of eyes in the sky.

About Spitzer

Spitzer was launched in 2003 on a Delta II rocket and placed into an Earth-trailing solar orbit, following behind the Earth at an ever-growing distance instead of orbiting around it like Hubble does.

With each year of operation, Spitzer has moved over 9 million miles farther away. Today, though it still shares the same orbit around the sun with Earth, it is over 160 million miles from home.

Keeping Earth at a distance has advantages for an infrared telescope like Spitzer.

For one, Spitzer’s sensitive observations are not interfered with by Earth’s heat glow. Spitzer’s forte is sensing faint infrared emissions from distant celestial objects, so being located near an enormous glowing heat-ball like Earth would be like trying to see a landscape against the blinding glare of the sun.

With its 0.85-meter telescope and three infrared instruments, Spitzer helps us appreciate what we can learn about the universe by observing the heat radiation emitted by celestial objects, as opposed to their visible light.

Spitzer’s Greatest Hits

Spitzer’s list of accomplishments is long, but here are a few highlights of discoveries made possible by this space-based, infrared-only telescope.

Exoplanet Discoveries

Seeing the Light: In 2005 scientists using Spitzer announced the first detection of light from an extrasolar planet — a planet orbiting another star. Before this, exoplanets were detected indirectly, by the pull of their gravity on a star or their blocking of starlight. Visible light reflected by exoplanets is very faint compared to their stars, but Spitzer spotted two hot gas giant planets — dubbed “hot Jupiters” — orbiting so close to their stars that they glow brightly with infrared light.

Catching a Whiff of Hot Jupiters: In 2007 Spitzer’s infrared spectrometer was used to make the first identification of chemicals in the atmosphere of an exoplanet — two different exoplanets, a pair of gas giants.

First Extrasolar Weather Report: In 2009, Spitzer produced the first “weather map” of an extrasolar planet. A heat-map of the gas giant exoplanet HD 189733b revealed variations in temperature across its surface, as well as conditions for extreme atmosphere winds.

The Most Earth-sized Exoplanets Orbiting a Star: Spitzer revealed a whopping seven Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting the same tiny star, TRAPPIST-1, only 40 light years away. Though we don’t yet know much more about them than their sizes and distances from their star, we know that three of them orbit within the system’s “habitable zone,” where it is possible for liquid water to exist on their surfaces.

The Most Distant Exoplanet: While most exoplanets have been found orbiting stars within about a thousand light years of Earth (our local neighborhood in the Milky Way galaxy), Spitzer helped detect an exoplanet 13,000 light years away. The detection was made by a technique called “gravitational lensing,” where the exoplanet’s gravity bends and distorts the light of a more distant star.

Biggest, Farthest Black Holes

Spitzer detected two of the most distant supermassive black holes ever discovered, at the cores of a pair of young active galaxies located near the edge of the observable universe. These active galaxies, or quasars, are so far away that it took the light that Spitzer captured 13 billion years to reach us, showing us these objects as they were in the very early universe.

Map of the Hidden Reaches of the Milky Way

Much of the greater Milky Way galaxy is hidden from our eyes and telescopes by great clouds of interstellar dust. Infrared light, however, can penetrate clouds of dust that visible light cannot, affording Spitzer a view of objects and structures otherwise obscured, such as “baby” stars still enshrouded in the cocoons of gas and dust they were born from. Over two million infrared images captured by Spitzer were assembled in 2013 into the most extensive map of the Milky Way galaxy every created.

Early Retirement?

The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for almost 30 years — so why is Spitzer being retired after only half that time? The answer, in part, is that Spitzer is losing its cool, so to speak.

To function as a detector of distant infrared radiation, Spitzer’s sensitive instruments must be kept at very cold temperatures — close to absolute zero, in fact; almost -460 Fahrenheit. This is so the instrument’s own heat emissions won’t interfere with the detection of the faint infrared signals from distant celestial objects.

Imagine if you tried to find your way around a dark room with a spotlight shining in your eyes.

Liquid helium was used to supercool Spitzer’s infrared detectors — however the helium supply was depleted in 2009. Since then Spitzer has operated without cryogenic cooling, relying only on the passive cooling of its “sun shade” and its distance from Earth.

Two of Spitzer’s shorter wavelength instruments, however, can still be used, and in fact have made some of Spitzer’s more pivotal discoveries.

Passing of the Torch

As the Spitzer Space Telescope gets ready for its final shutdown, and the much older Hubble faces an eventual end of mission and de-orbiting sometime in the next decade or so, the successor to the great space telescope dynasty will be the James Webb Space Telescope, a much larger, solar-orbiting observatory geared to observe the universe at infrared wavelengths of light.

So, as one era of unique cosmic perspective ends, another begins.

Starting at 12:23 p.m. PDT on Tuesday, some lucky spectators  in parts of Chile and Argentina will get a chance to watch a total solar eclipse. It’s a rare event where the moon entirely obscures the disc of the sun (known as totality), leaving a glowing celestial crown.

Not in South America for the total solar eclipse? No worries, you can still watch it via the Exploratorium’s  feed, right here. The museum will pick up a live stream from the telescope at Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile from 12:23–2:46 p.m. PDT.

Locals can also attend the solar eclipse event in person at the Exploratorium, with commentary in English and Spanish. There’s an eclipse app, too.

The Great American Eclipse of 2017  was the last event that granted Americans (in certain parts of the country) a chance to witness a total solar eclipse.

What is a total solar eclipse?

A  total solar eclipse occurs when the moon moves directly between the sun and Earth,  preventing the sun’s light from reaching the planet. When the three celestial bodies line up, the moon casts a shadow on a narrow band of the earth’s surface, with a ring of light around the moon. The sky becomes dark, simulating the night sky. You can watch a simulated total solar eclipse in this animated view from space.

On July 20, 1969, the world watched, transfixed, as two American astronauts set foot on the moon. This year, the Bay Area will join the rest of the country in celebrating the 50th anniversary of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission on Saturday, July 20th.

Whether you would like to meet an astronaut and learn about what it’s like to be in space, enjoy a symphonic journey through the galaxy, or hike through redwoods in the moonlight, we’ve put together this chronological list of moon-themed events where you can go to celebrate all summer long.

Marin County Fair
Wednesday July 3 – Sunday July 7
San Rafael
Tickets start at $3 online

This year’s Marin County Fair is moon landing themed. The four-day event will feature carnival rides, free concerts, live culinary contests, and a Cheese of the Day stage — in homage to the moon made of cheese, of course.

Lunar First Friday
Friday July 5, 6 pm – 10 pm
Chabot Space & Science Center, Oakland
$5

Kick off a month of space-related activities at the Chabot Space & Science Center with a sneak peek of the new documentary film Chasing the Moon — and catch a conversation with Ben Burress, a staff astronomer, and Kat Snow, senior science editor at KQED.

Chasing the Moon
Monday July 8 – Wednesday July 10, 9 pm on KQED 9
Airs on PBS member stations, including KQED
Free

This long-anticipated film by Robert Stone will air across three nights, beginning on July 8th. Chasing the Moon features never-before seen archival footage of the drama surrounding the Apollo 11 mission and tells the story of the diverse array of characters involved in the space race.

Evening Under the Moon
Friday July 12, 7:30 pm – 10:30 pm
Chabot Space & Science Center, Oakland
Free

Walk through the Luminous Moon exhibit to see high resolution images of the moon and hear an astronomer talk about its geography and geology. Check out the moon through one of the center’s historic telescopes. Hot chocolate and snacks will be available for purchase.

Full Moon Hike and Sip (21+)
Friday July 19, 6 pm – 9 pm
Chabot Space & Science Center, Oakland
$30 non-members, $27 members

Go on a 4-5 mile hike through the redwoods, lit by the full moon. Learn about local history and ecology along the way. Conclude the evening with stargazing, planet hunting, and two complimentary glasses of beer or wine.

Out of This World: A Celebration on the 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing
Friday July 19, 7:30 pm
Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco
Ticket prices from $39; groups of 10 or more are eligible for 25% discount

Enjoy cosmic-themed music — everything from the Star Trek theme to Clair de Lune — by the SF Symphony, accompanied by visuals on the big screen. Hosted by retired astronaut Leland D. Melvin.

Splashdown 50 Stargazing Overnight
Friday July 19, 6 pm – Saturday July 20, 9:30 am
USS Hornet Museum, Alameda
Ticket prices from $65; pre-registration required by Friday, July 5

In this special 50th anniversary overnight, you can spend the night aboard the USS Hornet, which served as the historic recovery vessel at the conclusion of the Apollo 11 mission. Sleep in the original crew’s compartments with family, and eat breakfast and dinner inside the original Crew’s Mess. Enjoy stargazing from the vessel’s Flight Deck, and take a ride in the Flight Simulator.

Splashdown 50 Celebration
Saturday July 20, 10 am – 5 pm
USS Hornet Museum, Alameda
$25 adult, $20 youth

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing aboard the historic USS Hornet, where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first steps back on Earth after returning from the moon. Meet the veterans of the Recovery Team who retrieved the astronauts and their capsule. Afterwards, enjoy an inflatable planetarium, a VR arena, docent-led tours of the ship, and snacks from food trucks.

Splashdown 50 Anniversary Dinner
Saturday July 20, 6 pm – 10 pm
USS Hornet Museum, Alameda
$55 non-members, $50 members

Enjoy a buffet dinner (included), full cash bar, and music from the 1960s with the ex-crew of the USS Hornet. Cocktail attire is appreciated, but not required.

Apollo 50th Anniversary Celebration
Saturday July 20, 10 am – 5 pm
Chabot Space & Science Center, Oakland
Free with regular admission

Watch moon demos and a planetarium show, with screenings of Chasing the Moon and Apollo 11.

Apollo Party 21+
Saturday July 20, 6 pm – 10 pm
Chabot Space & Science Center, Oakland
$14

Break out your moon walk at an after-hours dance party, or entertain your friends with moon-themed karaoke. Enjoy Apollo cocktails, astronaut training, live music, and a comedy show, a simulated mission to the moon. Commemorate your experience with an airbrushed moon tattoo.

Apollo 11 50th Anniversary
Saturday July 20, 10 am – midnight
Exploratorium, San Francisco
Free for Daytime members and After Dark members; $29.95 adults; $24.95 seniors, students, youth; $19.95 children

Watch restored footage of the 1969 landing and marvel at a 16-foot sculpture of the moon! In the evening, enjoy drinks and music.

Apollo Retrospective: The Past, Present, and Future of Space Travel
Wednesday July 24, 10 am – 5 pm
USS Hornet Museum, Alameda
$20 adult, $15 student/senior/military, $10 youth

Come learn about the past, present, and future of space exploration from experts in the private aerospace industry. Later, learn about the geology of the moon from NASA scientists and astronauts.

Novato Space Festival
Sunday August 4, 10 am – 4 pm
The Space Station Museum, Novato
Free

Visit the 8th annual Novato Space Festival to meet astronauts and other aerospace VIPs, as well as Star Wars characters and non-space friends like Snoopy. The diverse collection of 30 exhibits includes a real moon rock, large-scale replicas of the Apollo Lunar Lander and Apollo Command Module, and a genuine Apollo spacesuit.

The Martian, Andy Weir
Friday August 16, 7 am – 8:30 am
Lafayette Park Hotel & Spa, Lafayette
$40

Come hear a talk by Andy Weir, lifelong space nerd and author of the bestselling novel The Martian.  Breakfast is included.

Apollo Mission Flight Controller Lawrence Kuznetz
Friday August 23, 7 am – 8:30 am
Lafayette Park Hotel & Spa, Lafayette
$35

Hear Dr. Lawrence Kuznetz, flight controller during the Apollo missions, relive his experiences throughout a 40-year career in the space program. Breakfast is included.

It’s true David Perlman is 100 years old, an impressive age for any human being.

But that’s not the most distinguishing thing about the man.

I met him eight years ago in the media room at a science conference. Even among the accomplished wordsmiths of the international press corps, he was a legend.

During a recent visit to his San Francisco home, I renewed our acquaintance.

“What’s all this about?” he asks me.

Well, 50 years ago, he was at Mission Control in Houston when men walked on the moon. What was it like?

Perlman was covering arguably the most momentous event in human history for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he retired as science editor two year ago. He’d worked for the paper since 1940, when he’d landed a job as copy boy. In 2014, Perlman told KQED’s Craig Miller he caught the journalism bug after seeing the 1931 film “The Front Page.” The film described newspaper reporters as “seedy, catatonic Paul Reveres, full of strange oaths and a touch of childhood,” Perlman said. “I wanted to be like that.”

Since then, he’s lived through the dawn of the atomic, space and computer ages. He still recalls details of stories he reported 40 years ago better than many of us can remember the events of last week.

Craig Miller described Perlman’s corner cubicle at the Chronicle as resembling “an archaeological dig.” But his home is quite tidy, though he is still surrounded by books, magazines and newspapers. Perlman stays on top of the news cycle even though he no longer has a hand in shaping it.

For some time, Perlman says, he was the only Chronicle reporter covering science. In the summer of 1969, he was reporting on a medical conference in New York when the police raided a gay bar in Greenwich Village called the Stonewall Inn, an incident that sparked the modern gay rights movement.

He switched gears and filed his story, then hopped on a plane to Houston. But he hadn’t booked a hotel, so the managing editor of The Washington Post let him stay in one of the rooms it had reserved for its own reporters.

“So at least I had a place to sleep,” Perlman says.

In Houston, he worked alongside a hundred or so reporters from around the country. Normally an unimpressed bunch, the press corps were for those few days electrified.

“At that time it was one of the most thrilling episodes any reporter could have expected in his life,” Perlman says.

Within the enormous press area, in a building across a highway from the control room, reporters watched the action on large screens.

“I remember there was a moment of silence when the two guys climbed out of the spacecraft and actually set foot on the moon,” Perlman said. “And we typed our stories as fast as we could.”

Larger media, such as the The New York Times and the Post, had sections of the room to themselves, set up like minibureaus. They also had the luxury of teletype machines, devices that could send text over a phone line.

“Reporters like me, all by ourselves, had a desk and that was all,” Perlman says. “But the desk had a typewriter.”

Western Union clerks walked up and down the aisles. Perlman typed a few paragraphs at a time, put his newspaper’s name at the top, and filed his story in sections by telegraph.

On July 21, 1969, the Chronicle ran Perlman’s front-page article on the scientific observations that were already pouring in. Perlman’s lead reads:

Two men and a spaceship began to re-write the science of the solar system last night. Within minutes of their landing on the moon, in an exploration televised for all the earth to watch, they found unexpected rocks, collected uncontaminated nuclear particles frim the sun and examined craters of curious shapes and sizes. The rocks may well prove the existence of volcanic activity. Perhaps eons ago, perhaps very recently.

Subsequent missions have confirmed the moon’s  history of volcanic activity.

How long did it take to file this story about such a momentous event?

“A hell of a short time. I dunno, 20 minutes? You know, deadlines are deadlines.”

And what was it like to be part of a day humans will probably still pay homage to in a thousand years, assuming we’re around? At the time, Perlman didn’t think that way.

“I guess that’s because there wasn’t a lot of poetry in me,” he says. “I was covering a damn story! The important thing was to meet a deadline. Not to think about the implications in mankind’s quest for knowledge.”

After the moon landing, he wrote about virtually every planetary mission and discovery humans have made.

“It’s only much later that I’ve had a chance to stop and think, golly I was really part of a period of exploration that isn’t going to happen again until we go beyond the solar system and look at what is out there beyond.

“It’s only when people like you ask me a question that I stop and think a little poetically maybe about being part of human exploration of the unknown.”

The moon is a dusty, airless rock that we last set foot on in 1972. What’s left there for us?

Plenty, it would seem.

There’s been so much talk in the past decade about sending humans to Mars that one may have wondered if we would ever walk on the moon again. After all, Mars is bigger, and unlike the moon, it has an atmosphere and vast reservoirs of water ice.

But it turns out that we have room in our imaginations, and our pocketbooks, for more than one obsession in our solar system. Not only is NASA sending robotic spacecraft to explore the moon, the agency just announced 12 upcoming lunar science and technology investigations. The U.S. also plans to send astronauts back to the moon in 2024.

Other countries are also extremely keen on learning about our natural satellite. In January, China deployed a rover to the far side of the moon, a first. Within the last 15 years, India, Israel and Japan have also sent landers, probes and other devices to land on, crash into, or fly by the moon.

All these recent missions and future plans attest to enormous continued interest in the moon, as an object of scientific curiosity we’re still trying to understand more fully. It is also, like Mars, an accessible proving ground where we can develop the knowledge and experience to send people to more distant worlds.

Humans and the Moon: A Love Story

From the beginning of humanity’s romance with the cosmos, the moon has occupied a sweetheart position in our aspirations to explore. It is by far our most easily reached destination in the universe, only 240,000 miles away. It’s close enough for us to see details of its surface features with the smallest telescopes, and even with our eyes.

In the 1600s, Galileo squinted through his small telescope at the moon and saw its craters, mountains and wide flat plains, and Shakespeare wrote about “Th’inconstant moon / That monthly changes in her circled orb.” The moon has always been a tantalizing, shadowy source of mystery, familiar yet unknown territory to be explored.

From the very earliest era of telescopic observations, scientists studying the moon and its multitude of impact craters have used it as a window into our solar system’s past. The fact that the moon has no erosive atmosphere, and has been largely geologically inactive for almost 4 billion years, means that the scars of past events like collisions and volcanic activity are preserved on its surface. Scientists can literally read the history of the moon’s development and the conditions in our solar system from far back into its youth.

More recently, chemical analysis of rock samples brought back by the Apollo missions tells us that Earth and the moon have a common origin, as described by the Giant Impact Hypothesis. According to this moon-formation idea, over 4 billion years ago, Earth was struck by another planet about the size of Mars. The impact blasted a large amount of rock into space that eventually coalesced into the moon. This makes the moon even more personal to us Earth-dwellers, more like an extension of Mother Earth than an alien, extraterrestrial world.

Forwarding Address: Moon City

The last crewed lunar landing was Apollo 17, in 1972. Mars missions may take up the bulk of the headlines today, but we’ve never stopped looking to the moon as a future home base on which to build a more enduring installation, or colony, or some future lunar city.

Now the U.S., the European Space Agency, Russia and China are actively working toward establishing a permanent lunar base.

The U.S. moon effort got a big boost when the George W. Bush administration called for the development of a new human-crewed spacecraft for traveling beyond low-Earth orbit, and a return of humans to the moon with the goal of “living and working there for increasingly extended periods of time.”

The Obama administration committed to increase NASA’s funding to complete a heavy-lift launch vehicle that will be vital to human missions and predicted a human-crewed mission to Mars by the mid 2030s.

The Trump administration has put the moon back on the table for human flights, and NASA has scheduled the first Orion spacecraft for a quick around-the-moon-and-back trip in 2022.

Maybe a whole moon city is yet some time away, but setting up a base on the moon for astronauts to live and work is widely seen as an idea with some traction and practical applications.

Not everyone agrees with the goal of a moon-base for humanity. Buzz Aldrin, the second man ever to walk on the moon, famously believes that mankind’s future lies on Mars. In 2009, he wrote an editorial in the Washington Post. “A race to the moon is a dead end. While the lunar surface can be used to develop advanced technologies, it is a poor location for homesteading,” he declared.

Fueling a Mission to Mars

These initiatives for returning to and working on the moon are part of a larger plan to prepare ourselves for a much more challenging journey to Mars. Harnessing the moon’s material resources to build, fuel and launch a Mars mission would come with some major advantages. The moon’s surface gravity is one-sixth as strong as Earth’s, and there is no atmosphere to push through when launching. Both factors reduce the need for fuel, lowering the weight and cost of the spacecraft.

It turns out that the moon is not a dusty, airless rock after all. Finding water on the moon in 2009 was a huge revelation, and a useful one. NASA turned up evidence of polar water when the impactor vehicle of its LCROSS mission was deliberately smashed into the moon’s south pole, blasting out a plume of soil in the process. The LCROSS spacecraft detected water in that plume, minutes before it, too, collided with the moon.

These ancient deposits of water ice on perma-shadowed crater floors could represent a water supply for thirsty lunar astronauts, if it can be made into drinkable form. It could also supply oxygen for breathing.

But the moon has some other inherent qualities that pose a challenge to potential human colonists living there for months at a time.

One is generating power to run all of a base’s systems, including life support. The easiest way to produce electricity — the way that most current space missions, human or robotic, do — is with solar panels, converting the light of the sun into useful electricity. Most places on the moon, however, experience nights that are two weeks long, a long time to be in the dark and running on stored battery power.

Like the water resource problem, the moon’s polar regions may offer a practical solution. The peaks of some polar mountains and crater rims enjoy practically around-the-clock sunlight. Placing solar panels at these polar heights would provide almost uninterrupted solar energy, something that is impossible even on the surface of the Earth.

Moon dust is also something that astronauts will need to manage. When the Apollo astronauts walked around on the moon, their spacesuits collected a lot of dust, which was unavoidably tracked back inside the lunar landing module. Dust on the moon is very gritty and sticks to practically everything. Unlike dust and sand on Earth, which are weathered down by wind and water into smooth, round grains, moon dust has sharp edges and points. Without the effects of erosion to smooth them out, moon dust tends to act like tiny bits of broken glass. Without strict dust management, future lunar inhabitants may suffer severe health problems.

As we continue to scrutinize minute details on the moon’s surface through our ongoing missions, new surprises are sure to come to light. The moon has never failed us in this.

For more on the space race, watch ‘Chasing the Moon’ — a new, three-part series premiering this week on KQED 9 at 9 PM.

Today, the basic physics of getting to the moon and back seem disarmingly simple. Apply the force of rocket thrust to oppose the force of Earth’s gravity, using it to lift off the ground. Apply further rocket thrust to propel your spacecraft toward the moon, then coast the rest of the way. Finally, use rockets to counter the moon’s gravity to control your downward speed and make a soft landing.

But the Apollo missions that made the round-trip voyage between 1969 and 1972 represented an unprecedented challenge for engineers of the day, who managed to deliver 12 astronauts to the surface of the moon and bring them back to Earth employing technology that today seems astonishingly primitive. Looking back at those events from our privileged high-tech perspective can prompt feelings of awe.

Apollo Flights Were Triumphs for Their Time

Consider the details of the primitive technological tools and complicated orbital mathematics that allowed us to navigate those simple laws of nature to get there and back again. If you were alive during the Apollo missions, you remember what things were like. Black-and-white tube televisions took minutes to warm up. Households shared a landline telephone. Even simple pocket calculators were yet to be invented.

Computers were more a creation of science fiction than something most regular folks had ever seen in person. They were barely beginning to evolve toward today’s miniature digital miracles — they employed transistors, electronic resistors, capacitors, and other basic components that were either wired together on circuit boards, or (at best) early versions of printed circuit technology — a far cry from the printed microchip devices we are dependent on today.

In comparison, the smartphone in your pocket crunches numbers a hundred million times faster than the best computers of the Apollo age and can store billions of times more data.

Rocket technology grew up out of post-World War II military applications, as well as the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Rockets were simple tubes of solid fuel ignited like Roman candles, or single-use tanks of liquid fuel poured into combustion chambers and set alight. Today, the SpaceX Corporation has developed reusable rockets that return to Earth and land softly after lifting their payloads skyward.

Deep Into the Unknown

Having never sent a human farther into space than low Earth orbit, the road to the moon was unpaved by human experience. NASA sent out a few preliminary robotic probes between 1962 and 1968 — the Rangers and Surveyors — to get an idea of what lay ahead for the Apollo astronauts. But many questions and unknown dangers remained.

For starters, the surface of the moon was itself a largely unknown environment. Might there be a dusty lunar version of quicksand in some locations into which an Apollo lander or astronaut might sink, such as envisioned by Arthur C. Clarke in his novel “A Fall of Moondust”? Would the ground be stable and solid or collapse into hidden caverns below?

Though prior robotic landers had set down safely, no one knew how varied the lunar landscape would be at any given Apollo landing site.

Another real concern at the time: space viruses and bacteria. No one was sure whether microscopic lunar critters would hitch a ride on the returning astronauts. So cautious were NASA directors and scientists about potential threats from space and the moon, the crew of the first three landing missions (Apollos 11 through 14) were quarantined in isolation for three weeks after returning to Earth.

Virgin space travel gave NASA plenty of other headaches. For starters, NASA gave serious attention to the swaths of high-energy radiation that surround Earth, the Van Allen Radiation Belts. Discovered by James Van Allen in the 1950s, these zones of potentially dangerous radiation are formed by electrons and protons trapped within Earth’s magnetic field. To minimize the risk to moon-bound astronauts, NASA aimed the Apollo 11 spacecraft to pass through the danger zone as quickly as possible.

Solar radiation also concerned scientists. The dangers of radiation bursts from the sun, including solar flares and coronal mass ejections, were not as well understood in the 1960s as they are today. Once bursts of X-rays and high-energy solar particles venture outside the protection of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field, they can inflict damage on astronauts and electronic equipment. Even today, crews aboard the International Space Station are sometimes instructed by Mission Control to take shelter in the portion of the ISS with the thickest radiation shields during powerful solar eruptions.

Fortunately, all three years of the Apollo moon flights took place during a “solar minimum,” a period when the sun is relatively quiet and exhibits few dangerous eruptions.

Finally, astronauts had dangerous space rocks to contend with. Even a pebble-sized rock flying at several miles per second can punch a hole in the thin-walled hull of a spacecraft, causing equipment damage or a leak of precious cabin air.

Preventing a minuscule, super-fast “micrometeoroid” from hitting a spacecraft is practically impossible since there is no way to see it coming, or to move out of its way quickly enough even if you could. So Apollo astronauts were equipped with spacesuits that could save their lives even if cabin air pressure was compromised. If depressurization was not catastrophic, they might have time to don that protection.

Beyond this precaution, NASA relied heavily on the vastness of space and the sparseness of space debris to protect their missions’ intrepid crews. It still does.

Despite enormous advancements in computer, material and propulsion technology, returning to the moon today won’t be done with a snap of the fingers. We still have to contend with the physics of gravity and rocket thrust, the radiation dangers in space, and a lethal physical environment held tenuously at bay by the thin walls of a spacecraft and a few swaddling layers of spacesuit material. But at least we know something about the challenges along the way, thanks to the early experiences of the Apollo astronauts, engineers, and scientists.

The rewards of our nation’s ventures in space go beyond astonishing scientific discoveries and breathtaking human drama on the stage of the cosmos. Not to be overlooked are a multitude of down-to-earth technological “spin-offs” that we all share in and enjoy in our daily lives.

All modern technological conveniences have roots somewhere in the past, whether stemming from great need, from a military conflict, or simply by happy accident.

The discovery of life-saving penicillin was a laboratory accident. Early mechanical “logic machines,” like Alan Turing‘s Nazi code breaker in World War II, paved the way for digital computers in the decades that followed. Microwave ovens emerged from post-World-War-II military radar technology (the first microwave model was called the ‘Radarange’ for a reason).

In some cases, that useful gadget in your home is a true space-age miracle. Many of the materials, devices, and processes originally invented for the moon landings and other space ventures were later commercially developed to deliver “space-age” conveniences and applications into our communities, work places, and homes.

Here are some examples.

Solar Power

The photoelectric effect, when light knocks electrons off of certain types of atoms to create an electrical current, has been known to us for over a century. Early light-sensitive detectors and meters made use of this phenomenon.

But photoelectric technology didn’t become advanced enough to produce useful quantities of electrical power until the space age, when the need to power orbital satellites and space probes challenged engineers to action.

Solar cells were first used in space on the United States’ Vanguard spacecraft in 1958 to extend the life of the battery-powered satellite.

In 1959, the Explorer 6 satellite was launched, carrying large wing-like arrays of solar panels that enabled it to operate for months.

Today, solar panels are found everywhere, from giant collector arrays on building rooftops to small panels (or cells) powering all manner of gadgets.

Cold-Weather Wearables

In 1992, NASA contracted Aspen Technologies to develop “aerogel” fabrics for thermal insulation material. Aerogel, first invented in 1931, is created by removing the liquid components from a gel and leaving behind the thin skeleton of its solid structure.

The extremely sparse material is a very poor conductor of heat, making it perfect as a lightweight thermal insulator. NASA employed the insulators developed from aerogel in the heat shields of spacecraft and also the swaddling layers of its astronauts’ spacesuits.

Professional explorers and serious wilderness enthusiasts on Earth have benefited from commercial spinoffs of these insulators, in the form of glove liners, boot insoles, and even lightweight insulated jackets.

One climber who summited Mount Everest with a pair of “Toasty Feet” insoles inside her boots reported that her feet remained warm and comfortable throughout her climb, despite wearing only a single pair of socks.

Foil Blankets

The silvery-foiled “space blanket” you may have used on camping trips, or keep in the emergency roadside kit in your car, was another product of the Apollo program, developed in 1964.

The multi-layer, aluminized-mylar material was created to address the need for lightweight and compactly stored thermal insulation to protect astronauts from temperature extremes in space.

Scratch-Resistant Glasses

The scratch resistant coating you may have on your sunglasses, eyeglasses, or ski mask also stems from the development of spacesuit materials.

In the 1980s NASA’S Ames Research Center came up with a material to prevent astronauts’ spacesuit helmet visors from becoming scratched — a serious consideration during space walks and other maneuvers where clear vision is essential, and scratch-covered lenses and visors cannot be readily replaced.

Miniature, Inexpensive Digital Cameras

If you have marveled at the detailed, rich, and colorful pictures that tiny little camera on your smart phone takes — or are just glad to have such a small and portable camera with you at all times — you can thank NASA.

An engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed the CMOS sensor in 1995, a photographic chip tailored for the reliability, image quality, and low power consumption required aboard robotic space probes with limited power budgets and the need to take many thousands of pictures each day. CMOS stands for “complementary metal-oxide semiconductor,” a solid-state technology previously developed for use in microprocessors and other computer applications.

This space-camera innovation later spun off a family of smaller, cheaper imaging chips for a range of commercial applications, including smart phones, sport cams, web cams, compact digital and DSLR cameras.

Fireproof Clothing

You might not be a firefighter, astronaut, or airplane pilot, but it  should comfort you to know that many of society’s professional first responders and other heroic personnel won’t easily catch fire if put into an incendiary situation.

The fatal Apollo 1 training drill fire that killed three astronauts in 1967 pressed NASA engineers to rethink the use of combustible materials in spacesuits and other furnishings on board their spacecraft.

Working with a synthetic fiber called polybenzimidazole, NASA developed a fabric that would not catch fire, especially in the high-oxygen environment of an Apollo space capsule.

This innovation bestowed fire protection not only upon Apollo astronauts of later missions, it also protects post-Apollo astronauts to this day.

The technology quickly branched out into other government and commercial applications, from the outer fire-resistant shells of firefighter gear, to sporting applications such as clothing worn by race car drivers, to uniforms and protective clothing for workers in industrial settings.

Vac-Packed Food

You go to your kitchen’s pantry shelf and select a rigid plastic-wrapped food item, slit the plastic, and hear that little “phhht!” as the package seems to melt into softness.  Then, time to cook.

You may appreciate how the vacuum-packaging keeps your food shelf-safe for months (or even years) without refrigeration, but did you know that the technique was developed for use in space by astronauts?

NASA developed a process for freeze-drying and vacuum-packaging food for astronauts in space as early as Gemini missions. It has been used to supply or supplement the food of all human space missions since.

Bacterial contamination and growth is prevented by the hermetic seal and the low-pressure and -oxygen environment inside. Vacuum-sealing also reduces the volume of the package, making for more compact storage.

Out of this space innovation came improvements to the preparation of commercially supplied food on Earth. Extending the shelf-life of food means less waste from spoilage, greater ease of transportation and distribution, and increased food safety and public health.

Memory Foam

Have your running shoes lost their springy step? Does that old mattress welcome you to bed each night with the hug of a permanent body-formed declivity? Do you have a favorite sitting spot on your couch because the rest of it is just too firm and supportive?

Looks like a job for memory foam.

Developed under a contract by NASA/Ames Research Center in 1966 to cushion test pilots pulling high-G maneuvers in jet aircraft, the springy, resilient, always-snaps-back-to-the-same-shape material that we have come to know as memory foam has found many commercial and domestic applications over the last few decades. Your happy feet, good night’s sleep, and general couch-potatoing enjoyment are proof.

Cordless Power Tools

Imagine you are an Apollo astronaut on the moon’s surface, assembling the lunar rover, setting up scientific instruments, and collecting rock specimens. You could really use an electric-powered tool. The problem: you’re on the moon and there are no electrical outlets for a quarter of a million miles. What do you do?

If you were NASA, you teamed up with the Black and Decker company to develop the specialized motors and batteries needed for completely cordless hand-tools that can operate in the airless, sometimes weightless environments of space.

Black and Decker had already invented battery-powered hand tools, but coming up with the very specialized devices NASA needed required some innovation. For the Gemini missions, the company produced an electric wrench that could turn a bolt in Zero-G without sending the astronaut into a spin of their own. For the Apollo missions, a special hammering rock drill was developed for astronauts to collect rock samples on the moon’s surface.

Spinning off the technology for commercial applications, Black and Decker later developed the light-weight, high-speed motor that powered their “Dustbuster” hand-held vacuum cleaner.

The 1969-72 Apollo moon landings took place in the era when humankind was just beginning to explore outer space with robotic probes and space-based observatories.  

It was a time when we took the cosmos more at face value, with a “what you see is what you get” attitude. Black holes, for instance, were mind-bending, hypothetical objects whose existence was yet to be verified. And we still wondered if our sun might be the only star in the universe with planets.

In the decades since the Apollo missions, a long list of fresh discoveries has reshaped our understanding of the universe, from the cosmic to the subatomic. Here are eight of the most important of those since humans last landed on the moon.

Black Hole Confirmed

In 1971 strong emissions of X-rays were detected from a point in the constellation Cygnus. Like smoke from an unseen gun, the X-rays were believed to emanate from the first-ever detected black hole, though this wasn’t confirmed for over 30 years.

The notion of a massive object with gravity so strong that even light cannot escape goes back to at least 1784, when the Englishman John Michell first published the idea. Einstein’s theory of general relativity in the early 20th century predicted black holes, though the theoretical objects had such bizarre properties that Einstein himself was not convinced they could exist.

Life on the Ocean Floor

In 1977, a thriving ecosystem of living organisms was found on the floor of the deep ocean, surrounding a hydrothermal vent and subsisting entirely on heat and chemical energy emerging from Earth’s interior. An NSF-funded team of marine geologists made the discovery in the geothermal hot spot of the Galapagos Rift.

This find provided a first example of life that thrives without sunlight in the cold, dark environment of the ocean floor, encouraging scientists to imagine how extraterrestrial life might form and prosper under very alien conditions on other worlds.

Dinosaur Killer Identified 

In 1980, the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez implicated an asteroid hitting Earth as the culprit responsible for the demise of the dinosaurs. This extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous geological period was a mystery that had gone unsolved for more than a century.

Alvarez’s team found an unusually high concentration of the element iridium in the worldwide geologic layer of sediment marking the end of the Cretaceous period. Iridium is rare in Earth rocks, but abundant in asteroids, suggesting that a global asteroid- impact catastrophe was the logical source.

In the 1990s, a 100-mile wide impact crater was identified at the northern tip of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, with its center near the town of Chixulub. Mostly buried under jungle and sea floor sediment, the crater was chemically dated to around 66 million years old, coinciding with the dying off of the dinosaurs.

Today, Chixulub crater is widely accepted as the fatal wound that ended the 200 million year dynasty of Earth’s most famous extinct creatures.

First Planets Outside Our Solar System Found

The first confirmed discovery of a planet outside our solar system occurred in 1992, when two extrasolar planets were detected orbiting a pulsar, which is the remnant core of a dead star, in the constellation Virgo. The first detection of an exoplanet orbiting a star that is still active and burning fuel took place three years later.

Before these events, the existence of planets orbiting other stars was only speculation. To date, a total of 4,096 planets in almost 3,000 planetary systems outside our solar system have been confirmed, most of them in our general neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy.

The Expansion of the Universe is Speeding Up

In 1998, the scientific community was stunned to discover that our universe is not only expanding, a fact known for decades, but expanding at an accelerating rate. Conventional wisdom dictated that gravitational attraction by matter within the universe should be slowing the expansion, but careful observations of a special type of supernova that serves as a precision tool for measuring distances across the universe revealed the opposite.

So the idea of “dark energy” was born,  a strange form of energy thought to permeate the universe and exert a repulsive force on all large-scale structures — galaxies and clusters of galaxies — driving them farther apart at an ever-faster rate. Though its nature remains largely unknown, it is estimated that at least 68% of the universe’s overall composition is made up of dark energy.

Factoring in another invisible substance called “dark matter,” it turns out that the objects in the universe that we can see — the type of stuff we and our planet and the stars are made of — make up only about 4% of the universe’s mass.

An Ocean on Jupiter’s Moon

In 1995, NASA’s Galileo mission all but confirmed the existence of a massive ocean of liquid water, concealed beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa.

Images of Europa’s cracked surface suggested that it is a shell of ice floating on top of an ocean that may be up to 100 miles deep and contain twice the water in Earth’s ocean.

The existence of an ocean on a nearby world is reason for celebration by astrobiologists interested in finding life beyond Earth, and has compelled NASA and the ESA to mount space missions to conduct further exploration of Europa.

Not long after Europa’s ocean was discovered, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft detected plumes of water vapor spewing from Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus, further upping the stakes in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Black Holes Collide

In 2016, researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, made the first-ever detection of gravity waves. Gravity waves are disturbances, or ripples, in the fabric of space-time, caused by the acceleration of massive objects in space. The detection of these waves allows us to perceive events in the universe that cannot be observed by conventional instruments like telescopes.

It was LIGO that detected the disturbance caused by two black holes colliding and merging, an event whose possibility was hypothesized but never observed. But because LIGO’s highly sensitive laser-and-mirror array enables it to measure distortions in space-time smaller than the nucleus of an atom, it was able to catch the collision.

First Image of a Black Hole 

In 2019, an international array of coordinated telescopes, collectively called the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT, achieved what was conventionally thought to be impossible: It captured an image of the silhouette of one of the most elusive objects in the universe, a black hole.

The supermassive black hole caught on camera lies 53 million light years away, at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87, and contains the equivalent mass of 6.5 billion stars the size of our sun.

Black holes have long been famed as the ultimate dark object in the universe, impossible to capture in pictures by virtue of their strong gravity, which prevents any light from escaping. While it is a fact that light cannot get out of a black hole from inside its event horizon — the distance at which the black hole’s gravity becomes strong enough to prevent light from escaping — it had long been thought that a black hole might be viewed in silhouette against the glow of hot gas surrounding it.

But black holes are too small and distant for conventional telescopes to observe. The EHT array, however, is not a conventional telescope; it’s a collection of multiple millimeter-wavelength radio telescopes stationed at observatories from Antarctica to Greenland, Spain to Hawaii, and throughout the Americas. When their collective observations of a target object are synchronized, the EHT achieves imaging resolutions equal to an imaginary telescope that would measure half the size of Earth’s diameter.

What’s Next?

Going forward, what can we imagine will be discovered in the next 50 years?

Life forms swimming in Europa’s remote ocean? A fresh and unexpected picture of the universe seen through the lens of dark energy telescopes? The long-sought radio signals from distant, intelligent civilizations?

If recent history is a guide, we can imagine now what we may soon no longer need to.

Since the recent Mojave Desert and Ridgecrest earthquakes, tremors in the ground have been on people’s minds. And the approaching 30th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake reminds the Bay Area  that  we all live on shaky ground.

Scientists —not just those who listen to Earth’s restless rumbling crust with their global arrays of seismometers — have seismic activity on their minds, too. At NASA they’ve put their ears to the ground on the planet Mars.

NASA’s InSight lander made its debut “marsquake” detection on April 6th, with its Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument. Like a doctor’s stethoscope, SEIS is placed against the Martian surface to listen for faint sounds from deep within the planet.

To Feel a Marsquake

You would not have felt the marsquake SEIS detected even had you been standing near the lander when it happened. Like the thousands of “moonquakes” that Apollo mission seismometers detected on the moon between 1969 and 1977, the April 6 Mars-tremor was little more than a faint and distant murmur picked up by the highly sensitive SEIS detector.

To get a feel for the dynamics of the marsquake, experimenters at the Swiss university ETH Zurich ran the SEIS tremor data through a “shake room,” a simulator that replicates the motion of earthquakes from recorded seismometer data. A shake room offers a more visceral quake-replay experience than you would get simply by studying tables of figures and graphs of the data.

But to make the marsquake even noticeable to people in the shake room, the experiment crew really had to crank up the volume on the SEIS signals–10 million times.

Why Study Marsquakes?

The characteristic motions of quakes—the direction of shaking, the frequency of vibrations, the duration and strength of the seismic event—all tell scientists about the materials and geologic structures the seismic waves passed through on their way to the detector.

Varying densities in different geologic layers bend and focus the waves in different ways and directions as they bounce and echo  inside a planet, and with enough data it’s possible to map these otherwise buried and hidden structures.

The April 6 marsquake did not contain enough information for scientists to begin mapping the planet’s internal structure, but this first-ever detection of a tremor ringing through Mars is a resounding opening bell for a new field in science, Martian Seismology.

What Causes Marsquakes?

The violent collision or edge-on-edge grinding of moving crustal plates driven by upwelling currents of molten magma in the hot mantle below cause most quakes on Earth. Scientists call this process plate tectonics.

Imagine an over-crowded bumper-car rink, packed with vehicles trying to move in their own directions. The cars push against each other in a tense state of deadlocked traffic, but occasionally, something slips and a jerk of motion passes through the cars and riders. That’s kind of how quakes go down on Earth.

On Mars, as well as the moon, conditions are different.

These masses have cooled off to the point that they no longer experience plate tectonics, if they ever did.

Instead, as they continue to cool their interiors are gradually contracting, a global “collapse” that creates stress in the hardened crust–stress that occasionally reaches a breaking point, causing it to fracture and collapse. Marsquakes are the result.

InSight’s Insightful Mission

Scientists sent InSight to Mars with three main scientific instruments designed to do essentially one thing: offer a look inside Mars and develop a picture of its internal structure and composition, straight to its core.

Seismic vibrations—marsquakes— allow scientists to listen for clues about the planet’s interior.

For decades on Earth, seismic listening posts located all around the globe have performed a similar function. They track the motion and qualities of shock waves that seismic events cause to develop a picture of Earth’s internal structure.

InSight’s second experiment is a string of temperature sensors buried in the top few feet of Mars’ soil.

By measuring ground temperature at different depths, scientists can calculate how much heat is escaping from Mars’ interior into space, and estimate temperatures deeper down, even to its core. Knowing these two factors, scientists can also chart the history of the cooling of Mars from the time of its formation.

Lastly, scientists are measuring the Doppler shift of InSight’s radio transmissions to make very precise calculations of Mars’ rotational motion. By analyzing peculiar wobbles and gyrations in Mars’ rotation they can glean useful information about the distribution of mass within Mars.

This is similar to how each load of laundry you run causes the washing machine to vibrate or dance to a slightly different tune during the spin cycle, as it distributes each load of wet laundry a bit differently.

All the data points that InSight is gathering give scientists information about what’s inside Mars, how its interior is laid out, and even the geologic history of its formation over eons.

Understanding how Mars is put together and has evolved can, by example, tell us how the other rocky planets of the inner solar system—Earth, Venus, and Mercury—formed, and infer the conditions in the early solar system that shaped them.

The phenomena that InSight studies are incredibly subtle: Echoes of sound ten million times too weak to feel; the slow crawl of heat through a few feet of cold soil; minute perturbations in Mars’ spin.

But by taking the pulse, temperature, and reflexes of Mars, scientists can begin to understand how our home planet came to be.

NASA has taken a big step closer to testing the waters of the ocean hiding under the icy crust of Europa, Jupiter’s most enigmatic moon.

The Europa Clipper mission, in development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, has just been approved for its final design and construction phase. It’s on track for a 2025 launch.

“Clipper” is the culmination of decades of dreaming and years of conceptual and preliminary design. It is only the second mission NASA has dedicated to exploring a moon in the solar system—our own moon was the first. The target, Jupiter’s icy Europa, is very different from Earth’s moon.

Believed to possess a heated rocky core and mantle surrounded by an ice-topped ocean of liquid water up to 100 miles deep, Europa is arguably the best place in our solar system to look for life beyond Earth.

Why Are We Interested in this Icy Jovian Moon?

Astrobiologists‘ mouths water at the prospect of an ocean of liquid water — particularly a salty one — in contact with a rocky ocean floor.

They theorize that heat from within Europa’s rocky interior, generated by tidal forces of Jupiter’s gravity, powers eruptions of hot, mineral-laden water on Europa’s ocean floor. Such “hydrothermal vents” could supply all the ingredients necessary to sustain some form of life.

Hydrothermal vents dot Earth’s own oceans in volcanically active areas. Since their discovery, researchers have found communities of life forms that thrive around hydrothermal vents, subsisting entirely on thermal and chemical energy emerging from Earth’s interior.

How life arrived at these deep ocean oases is still open to scientific debate. One theory poses the idea that life on Earth could have gotten its start at hydrothermal vents and migrated later to the surface.

The Challenge of Exploring a Concealed Ocean Half a Billion Miles Away

You might wonder, if there’s a saltwater ocean on Europa, and the strong possibility of a life-friendly environment, why don’t we already have robot submarines in the water sending us images of beautiful bioluminescent jellyfish, or something?

Easier said than done. Even landing a robot on Europa’s unexplored surface would be a great engineering challenge. Designing a mission capable of boring through miles of ice and descending through a hundred miles of water to reach the ocean floor, and still able to communicate with us back on Earth, is presently an adventure of science fiction.

Although earlier mission concepts flirted with dropping robots onto Europa’s surface, the Clipper mission won’t do that. It won’t even orbit Europa.

That moon resides within bands of intense radiation that surround Jupiter, an environment where even a radiation-hardened spacecraft might survive only a few weeks. Such a short visit wouldn’t allow much time to explore, let alone transmit the huge volumes of collected scientific data back to Earth before a fatal failure brought an end to the mission.

Instead, Clipper will follow a looping trajectory around Jupiter that will send it careening past Europa on 45 close flybys. Some will pass as close as 16 miles near the surface.

Between flybys the spacecraft will retreat to the far end of its elongated orbit, away from Jupiter and into safer climates beyond the deadly radiation zone. The longer mission time and extended orbits will ultimately let Clipper collect and send home up to three times as much data as a Europa-orbiting spacecraft could.

Europa Clipper Will See Under Europa’s Skin

Europa Clipper will carry nine scientific instruments designed to offer a detailed look at the moon, particularly the vast ocean lurking beneath its icy crust.

Apart from the usual cameras and spectrometers that will take high-resolution pictures and analyze the composition of Europa’s surface, Clipper will carry instruments to investigate what lies below that surface.

An ice-penetrating radar will probe the frozen crust to determine its thickness and map its structure. Scientists will look for any subsurface lakes in chambers closer to the surface, which may be sources of water plumes detected by the Hubble Space Telescope.

A magnetometer will measure the disturbance of Jupiter’s magnetic field by Europa’s salty ocean, divining its salinity and depth.

Two different instruments will analyze particles “sniffed” during very close flybys. The composition of particles and gases in Europa’s tenuous atmosphere and possibly plumes of water and chemicals erupting from its surface could help explain what Europa’s ocean is made of, if those plumes originate from the ocean’s waters.

How Long Have We Known About Europa’s Ocean?

We caught our first scent of Europa’s ocean in 1979 when the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft flew through the Jupiter system. The spacecraft captured images of Europa’s fractured surface. Its patterns of cracks and fissures were best explained by a thin icy crust floating on a body of liquid.

Starting in 1995 the Galileo spacecraft made 11 close flybys of Europa, capturing images of much higher detail and measuring Europa’s effects on Jupiter’s magnetic field. The images further confirmed the presence of the hidden ocean, and Europa’s magnetic disturbances suggested that ocean is salty.

In the past few years, observations by the Hubble Space Telescope have tentatively detected what may be plumes of water vapor emanating from Europa’s southern polar region, further whetting scientists’ appetites to explore the exo-ocean.

We’ll have to wait a few more years before getting our next taste of Europa’s ocean waters, but at least we know that Europa Clipper is on the way.

NASA plans soon to send another robotic rover to Mars. The only problem is, the agency needs a good name for it.

That’s where young minds come in. If you’re in kindergarten to 12th grade, you may be able to help out. 

Instead of sitting around a conference room table and brainstorming a list of cute, nerdy acronyms, NASA is holding a contest for students in the U.S. to name the Mars 2020 Rover under construction at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. 

The car-sized, six-wheeled, robot-arm-wielding explorer will hunt for signs of past Martian life. It’ll carry a small experimental helicopter drone that will be the first machine ever to fly on Mars, or on any planet. 

If you have a great name idea and can write a short, inspiring essay to sell it, you could claim the credit. Imagine that. 

Essays must be submitted by Nov. 1st. Make sure they’re no more than 150 words long.

If you need further inspiration for your winning name and essay, you can discover more amazing facts about this Martian-seeking robot at NASA’s Mars 2020 website. 

The Mars 2020 Rover

Mars 2020 launches next summer, headed for a February 2021 landing in Jezero Crater on Mars. 

Jezero Crater may be a great place to look for the chemical and mineral signs left behind by ancient Martian organisms. Researchers believe the crater used to be flooded with water. Today it possesses river-delta-like fans of clay deposits. What upstream materials did river waters wash along and deposit there in the ancient past? We don’t know, yet — but Mars 2020 is determined to find out. 

The robot is physically very similar to NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity. Right now it’s exploring the layers of sedimentary rock on Mount Sharp, in Gale Crater, studying Mars’ past climates and the role liquid water played throughout the planet’s history. 

Teams have designed Mars 2020 to look for evidence of past life on Mars, not just water. No Mars mission has been equipped to look for Martians since the Viking landers in 1976. They carried biochemistry experiments to test soil samples for activity of present-day life processes. The results were inconclusive. 

Other Mars Robots Named By Students

From the first Mars rover, Sojourner in 1997, Earth’s youngest space enthusiasts have been naming these machines. The 23-pound robot for the Pathfinder mission got its name after a year-long, international contest in which NASA challenged students up to 18 years old to submit essays of their personal heroines and their historical accomplishments.

Twelve-year-old Valerie Ambrose of Bridgeport, Connecticut wrote an essay about Sojourner Truth, a 19th Century African-American abolitionist who championed women’s rights and traveled “up and down the land” in pursuit of her cause. 

“Sojourner” means “traveler.”  Although the tiny rover traveled no more than 330 feet, it was the very first ground an explorer from Earth traversed on Mars.

Seven years after Sojourner, nine-year-old Sofi Collis of Scottsdale, Arizona named the twin Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Sofi’s essay described how she arrived in America from an orphanage in Siberia, and how coming here could make her dreams come true. “Thank you for the ‘Spirit’ and the ‘Opportunity’,” she wrote in her essay.

Twelve-year-old Clara Ma of Lenexa, Kansas wrote the essay that named the next Mars rover, six years after Spirit and Opportunity landed. Her essay, “Curiosity,” about the flame of wonder burning in everyone’s minds, apparently resonated with NASA’s passion for exploring Mars, and so Curiosity became the given name of the Mars Science Laboratory rover.

Out of This World Competition

So, the count stands at four Mars rovers named by three pre-teen girls. That’s pretty steep competition, but the contest to name the Mars 2020 rover is open to all U.S. students from kindergarten to 12th grade. 

If you think you have a winning name, start writing that winning essay. 

As they conceive a new generation of robotic “rovers,” NASA engineers are challenging themselves to think outside the box.

The contraptions they envision bear little resemblance to the car-like, six-wheeled cruisers we’ve followed during rolling adventures on Mars. Future space exploration robots may resemble “Transformers.”

That’s because a robot operating semi-autonomously on very alien turf must be able to negotiate a broad range of terrains and environmental conditions, the likes of which may not exist on Earth. So, how to design – and prepare the rover – for situations engineers may not even anticipate?

Shapeshifter

To handle one of the more distant and fascinating objects in our solar system – Saturn’s moon Titan – NASA engineers have come up with Shapeshifter.

Concept drawings and working models of this robot resemble farm equipment- some kind of rolling grain harvester or threshing machine.

But it helps to see past Shapeshifter’s prototype and imagine how engineers might take apart its components and put them back together in different forms to suit different needs, like Lego toys.

To demonstrate this concept, they built the Shapeshifter mockup  from two separate and complementary assemblies: a pair of flight-capable drones housed within their own halves of a pipe-frame cylinder structure.

Combined, the prototype can roll like a barrel to easily traverse stretches of flat or mounded terrain. Separately, one half can ascend skyward on propellers, using the other half as a launch pad.

More advanced visions for the Shapeshifter stick with the paradigm of smaller robots working together – “co-bots” – that form different configurations, but involve greater numbers of base robot units.

These simplified future co-bots may combine into forms that can swim through a sea of liquid, fly together to lift and carry other equipment, such as a larger “mothership” lander, or roll around almost any terrain by reassembling into a sphere.

Bizarre Environments Call For Bizarre Robots

In 2005, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft dropped the European “Huygens” probe onto the surface of Saturn’s mysterious, cloud-shrouded moon Titan. With a simple plan to descend through the thick nitrogen atmosphere on a parachute and set down on any available surface, hopefully with enough battery power for a few minutes of picture-taking, Huygens offered a brief flash of insight into Titan.

NASA scored with that touchdown. Huygens, and further investigations by Cassini from space, demonstrated that Titan is a world like no other in the solar system, worthy of further exploration. Scientists also learned what a challenging physical environment Titan presents, and recognized the need for a new, super-flexible roving machine.

Unlike Earth’s quiescent airless moon, Titan has a thick, dynamic and extremely cold atmosphere. Unlike the dry desert plains and mountains of Mars, Titan has a liquid cycle, similar to Earth’s water cycle. Titan’s rain, rivers, lakes and seas, however, are freezing cold liquid methane – a material that exists as a gas on Earth.

Titan’s landscapes include vast plains of dunes, high and steep-walled mountains peppered with deep alpine lakes, complex networks of river-carved canyons, and several wide seas of liquid methane.

In some respects, Titan’s physical environment will make it easier for a co-botic transforming Shapeshifter craft to move about.

Its surface gravity is about one-seventh that of Earth. Titan is also the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere – thicker than Earth’s – so engineers don’t have to reinvent the helicopter propeller to make their Titanian co-bots fly.

Science Fiction Leading the Way?

“Transformers” isn’t the only example of unconventional robot designs in the realm of science fiction that have played with ideas like shapeshifting and flexible configurations.

The robots TARS and CASE in the movie “Interstellar” looked like awkward rectangular blocks of plastic or metal, but their designers gave them the ability to articulate smaller building-block components into different configurations to walk, run, climb, lift, and even pinwheel through a shallow extraterrestrial sea as the situation demanded.

I won’t go into the liquid-metal polymorphing robot from “Terminator 2,” but who knows? Engineers are giving shape and motion to blobs of “ferrofluid” with magnetic fields, so it’s not inconceivable that they may one day deploy a fluid “Explorinator” morphing around the surfaces of distant worlds.

In its quest to find signs of  water in the sediments of Mount Sharp, NASA’s rover Curiosity has turned up some tantalizing clues to when and how the young, watery Mars began to dry up.

Images of geologic formations and measurements of mineral residues collected over two years tell a tale of a watery world caught in the process of drying up, and maybe not giving up without a fight.

A four-foot-wide patch of ancient mudstone called “Old Soaker,” encountered late in 2016 within Mars’ Gale Crater, may be a snapshot of the moment Mars began its transition from a wet and possibly lively planet to the cold, dry, apparently lifeless world we know today.

Bearing a network of cracks that may have formed in drying mud, Old Soaker shows that even as water was becoming scarce on Mars, it persisted in seeps, trickling streams and shallow desert lakes.

The moment captured in the Old Soaker mudstone over three billion years ago is one picture in a larger album that Curiosity has been assembling since it landed in 2012. Its compendium of Martian climatic history has captivated our imaginations.

Curiosity’s Quest For Water

Did liquid water ever exist on Mars? When, and how much? Was the environment ever capable of supporting life?

These are the big questions Curiosity went forth to tackle.

So far, Curiosity’s confirmed that liquid water once flowed into and pooled within Gale Crater, from very early in its history.

Imagery of geologic formations Curiosity captured in its earlier travels tell a captivating story of the young Gale Crater Lake. Sedimentary layering, lakebed mudstone, and aggregations of river pebbles and stones found in the oldest, lowest formations of Mount Sharp reveal that a wide deep lake, fed by rivers and streams, may have persisted in Gale Crater for many millions of years.

Taking Gale Crater and its ancient lake as an indicator of Mars’ global environment, we know the atmosphere had to be much warmer and thicker than it is today. It almost certainly supported a water cycle of precipitation, runoff, pooling in lakes and seas, and evaporation similar to Earth’s.

Reading the Pages of Geologic History

Gale Crater is an ideal location to investigate Mars’s climate history. Piled over three miles high within the crater is Mount Sharp, a mega-mound of sedimentary rock whose stacked layers scientists can read like the pages of geological history book.

The crater formed 3.8-3.5 billion years ago when an asteroid hit Mars. It gradually filled though wind and water action with layer upon layer of sediments.

In more recent times after Mars dried up, wind eroded some of the infill, sculpting the multi-layered mountain Curiosity is doggedly crawling up today. As it visits each formation of sedimentary rock on its uphill climb, Curiosity is reading the pages of Mars’s history.

Death Throes of a Drying World?

Now seven years into its mission, Curiosity has climbed to higher points on Mount Sharp, analyzing layers of rock that formed at different times and under different climatic conditions.

The story told by Old Soaker’s mudstone cracks may be a page in a saga of tumultuous environmental change. Mars’ environment dried up, became wet again, then swung back to dry in repeating cycles. Wetter periods preceded and followed the dry episode that formed this specimen, based on what Curiosity found at adjacent rock layers in the Mount Sharp stack.

Curiosity has also found mineralogical evidence to corroborate the Old Soaker’s tale of a drying world.

Early in its mission Curiosity detected an abundance of clay minerals in the oldest layers of lake bed sediment. They indicated that those layers were deposited when lake waters were deep and plentiful.  Freshwater conditions on Earth formed similar clays.

Higher on the mountain’s slopes, the rover found chloride and sulfate salts in younger sediments, dated to about 3.5 billion years. Such mineral salts are known byproducts of bodies of water undergoing evaporation, like a lake drying up during a shift to a more arid climate.

Take a Walk Through a Mars-like Past—on Earth

If you’ve been to a place like Death Valley National Park, you may have witnessed evidence of long-gone water in that dry and desolate landscape.

Mineral salts, once dissolved in the waters of an ancient lake that filled today’s Death Valley, now cover huge areas of the valley floor in thick, white crystalline deposits. When the drying climate east of the Sierra Nevada mountains reduced the 70-mile-long, 600-foot-deep Lake Manly to a salt-lined desert valley, it left behind the briny residue.

It’s still possible to see, and even walk upon, ancient shorelines carved into the side of Shoreline Butte by the action of lapping waves.

In some side canyons of Death Valley are mudstone formations bearing the petrified imprints of ripples formed in the lake floor mud, now preserved in stone.

A few briny “springs” still issue seasonal seepage and offer a watery habitat for pupfish, the surviving descendants of that paleolake’s fishy inhabitants.

But for all the signs of deep waters, flowing streams, and a once- thriving ecosystem, Lake Manly dried up thousands of years ago.

Curiosity is prospecting the Martian desert and turning up similar evidence of Mars’s ancient waters. It’s looking back three or more billion years, not just a few millennia.

No Signs of Life—Yet

One of Curiosity’s mission goals is to assess Mars’ past environment to determine whether it could ever have harbored some form of life. The result, so far, appears to be yes. When it more closely resembled Earth’s conditions, Mars may have been hospitable to some form of  life, if only single-celled organisms.

Scientists didn’t equip Curiosity to look for actual signs of life—just the water it might have lived in.

Next year, NASA plans to launch its next mission to the Red Planet, the Mars 2020 rover. It will bookend Curiosity’s mission by directly searching for the chemical residues left behind by any would-be Martian life.

So, get ready for the next chapter in the Martian saga.

For the first time in over 40 years, NASA plans to search for Martians — not living ones but the very long dead remains of life forms that may have thrived on a watery planet 3.5 billion years ago.

Call it a fossil hunt. NASA plans to send its soon-to-launch Mars 2020 rover to a spot researchers hope will yield direct evidence of past life there. It may turn up in the form of mineral residues of once-living creatures, or possibly in physical formations, like stromatolites — rocks formed by the activity of ancient microbes that thrived in shallow, sun-drenched water. On Earth, stromatolites are among the oldest extant remnants of the earliest terrestrial life.

Jezero Crater: Fossil-hunting Site?

Mars 2020’s target of interest is the 30-mile-wide Jezero Crater, an impact feature at the edge of Isidis Basin. Through measurements and images the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took from orbit, Jezero has shown great promise in the search for signs of past life.

About 3.5 billion years ago, when a more Earth-like environment existed on Mars, Jezero Crater was probably flooded with water. A fanning complex of delta-like deposits sprouting from a likely river inlet promises to be a repository of sediments washed down from higher ground.

And, maybe most tantalizing of all, researchers have discovered a layer of carbonate minerals ringing what once upon a time would have been a shoreline of the ancient lake, like a chalk outline of a body of water that has dried up.

On Earth, geologists find calcium carbonate in the fossils of ancient seashells, coral and stromatolite formations, as well as layers of sedimentary limestone that form over time from accumulations of these remains.

So, imagine astrobiologists’ excitement at finding concentrations of carbonates tracing the shoreline of an ancient lake, where sunny, shallow waters may have once provided a life-nurturing environment. Accordingly, Mars 2020 plans to visit this vestige of shoreline during its exploration of Jezero Crater.

Mars 2020

Scheduled for launch in 2020 and a landing on Feb. 18, 2021, Mars 2020 is the first spacecraft NASA has designed to search for signs of Martian life since the twin Vikings landed 43 years ago.

The Vikings tested scoops of Martian soil for the chemical signatures of biological respiration, signs of microscopic organisms alive on Mars today. The results remain controversial and inconclusive.

Mars 2020 is equipped with an instrument called SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals), mounted at the end of its robotic arm. With a magnifying camera to examine fine-scale mineralogical features, and an ultraviolet laser and spectrometer for detecting and classifying minerals, SHERLOC will get up close and personal with the rocks in Jezero Crater to look for shapes and chemicals ancient life may have left behind.

If the layer of carbonates lining the ancient shoreline of Jezero Crater’s now-dry lake bed harbors chemical residues or mineral structures that are the fossilized remains of Martians, then the long anticipated moment when life beyond Earth is discovered may be only a few years away.

Imagine that.

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.

The deadly blazes burning in California have put a spotlight on the crucial role of evacuation. To save lives and property, firefighters must predict where a fire will spread within moments after it starts.

Now, California firefighters are getting some help from a powerful new tool: supercomputers.

Crunching real-time data from satellites and weather stations, banks of servers are providing forecasts of how wildfires could behave over the next few hours.

Those predictions could help fire agencies add crucial minutes to evacuation orders.

Like other recent fires fanned by extreme weather and a warming climate, the still-burning Camp Fire in Butte County spread at a terrifying speed,

“The abnormal is the new normal,” says Jonathan Cox, division chief with Cal Fire. “It’s something that 30-year firefighters have never seen.”

Computing Fires

Today, fire agencies predict how a fire will move by looking at the weather, terrain and fuel moisture, as well as relying on the decades of experience of fire analysts.

“This is an inexact science that is having to be done during the middle of an emergency,” says Cox. “So it can be extremely difficult to get a really precise idea of where a fire is going.”

For years, many fire agencies have used basic software that can produce projections of the fire on laptop computers. But in recent years, the availability of real-time fire data has mushroomed. NASA satellites are providing detailed images of fire perimeters. Weather stations, field cameras and aerial reconnaissance flights provide even more.

That’s where supercomputers come in.

“Our current supercomputer is called Comet,” says Ilkay Altintas of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego. Comet has 2.76 petaflops of computing power — about the same as two million smartphones stuck together.

The supercomputer center has developed WIFIRE, a fire behavior model that builds on existing models and adds in real-time data. It can run many simulations simultaneously, as soon as a fire breaks out.

“We can understand where the fire will be, its rate of spread, its direction for the next couple of hours,” Altintas says. “Having that information in a matter of minutes, in your hand, as fast as possible, is very important.”

Lately Comet has been churning out forecasts for the Woolsey Fire burning in Southern California, and turning them over to Cal Fire. The agency has been reluctant to talk about their efficacy, saying use of the model is still experimental, but it’s part of a growing trend of more technology in firefighting.

“The more information we can get and decisions we can make based on technology is obviously the future,” Cox says.

Still, he doesn’t think machines will take the place of human judgment on the fire lines.

“It’s one more way that we can make decisions, but I don’t think it will ever replace the human factor because of the dynamics that come with these fires,” he says.

Predicting Erratic Fires

There are some wildfires that today’s computer models can’t predict well: in particular those that create their own weather.

California firefighters saw this back in July, battling the Carr Fire near Redding. It was “unpredictable,” according to Cal Fire, spreading erratically.

It also produced a massive “fire tornado” with winds over 160 miles per hour. It claimed the life of fire inspector Jeremy Stoke of the Redding Fire Department.

“We’ve seen a lot of fires that are driven primarily by these winds that are created by the fire itself,” says Janice Coen, scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.

In these “plume-dominated” conditions, fire-generated winds propel the flames forward. Those winds can top 50 miles per hour, even though the winds outside may be much weaker. Current fire behavior models don’t account for that in their forecasts.

“In some of the most destructive, most important cases, they come up short,” Coen says.

Coen is working on a computer model that simulates fire-driven weather, known as CAWFE. She says it’s shown promise, but the hard part is rolling it out to fire agencies, because adopting new technology is risky for them.

“It’s difficult to integrate new technology in firefighting in particular,” she says.

The potential, she says, is that communities in fire-prone areas will be a bit safer.

“I have a lot of hope that we’ll be able to understand fires and anticipate their behavior,” says Coen, “so that we can learn from it and avoid more catastrophes in the future.”