The Deep Space Network section in the Charles Elachi
Mission Control Center during perseverance rover landing event can be seen in
above collage and you can notice on the big screen above showing first images
from Mars sent by perseverance rover to the mission control as well as space
inspired cute kid with various planets wall pictures in her home curious to
know about Mars and hence asking questions to the event panelist in the mission
control. Also shows Emily Calandrelli who run show ‘Emily’s Wonderlab’ joined
the panel sharing her experience that how she gets lots of wonderful questions
from kids about the space and telling the importance of educating kids about
science and how they learn to think systematically as a scientist seeking truth
in the world which can nurture critical thinking in them helpful for them on
various level, but mainly you can notice Deep Space Network section at the
bottom in the every photo where they studying the data received from DSN. On 4th
March 2021, President Biden video called NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to
congratulate the mission team for the successful landing of the Perseverance
Mars rover; you can see again the DSN console at the JPL Mission Controller
Room.
The DSN provides two types of communication for deep space
missions: Direct to Earth and Relay Operations. Direct to Earth is a direct
radio signal between the rover on Mars and the DSN. For Relay Operations,
signals sent to nearby orbiting spacecraft, which send their own data signals
back to the DSN along with the rover’s Mars data. In case Mars’ rotation puts
the rover away from Earth’s view, it sends the data by Relay Operations. Rather
than using a significant amount of rover’s power for transmitting data to Earth
directly, the signals effectively ‘hitch a ride’ on the data transmission from
orbiting spacecraft. Hence here comes an important aspect of international
collaboration as ESA helped Perseverance rover for much needed phone call to
home.
As I wrote in the Mars Rover Quote blog in
year 2016 that; Mars exploration is the first step to the new era of human
space exploration before reaching nearby stars to explore Earth like exoplanets
in future to understand fraction of many mysteries of the universe. If you read
the post title again which is a very inspiring quote indeed. The fascinating
thing about it is this thought is originated from the names of three successful
rovers NASA sent for Mars exploration which are Spirit (MER-A), Opportunity
(MER-B) and Curiosity (MSL) to investigate the habitability of Mars. For
centuries Mars has held humankind of imagination and we have come closer than
ever when NASA sent these rovers to unravel some of the red planet secrets and
inspired us to envision the possibility of colonizing Mars.
So now in year 2021 with
the successful landing of NASA’s another rover, I will have to update Mars Rover Quote as,
“CURIOSITY with PERSEVERANCE should be in our SPIRIT to find new OPPORTUNITY
for a hopeful future of mankind.”
Totally make sense
right? And now this year which is truly international Mars exploration with
three successful missions from three different space agencies within 10 days.
And with names of these latest Mars missions I have new thought too; in year
2021 all I can say,
“UAE’s hope is to join the NASA’s perseverance
seeking answers for China’s questions to
the sky.”
The Tian-wen in Chinese meaning "Questions to the Sky” is
the name of a text attributed to the poet Qu Yuan, who lived between the fourth
and third centuries BC, a work that takes the form of a series of questions in
verse with which the author questions some fundamental, philosophical and
scientific issues. In the poem, Qu Yuan raises a series of questions about the
sky, the stars, and natural phenomena, showing his desire for the truth, which
perfectly fits this mission. As with many Mars missions, Tianwen-1 is about
learning more about the Red Planet and, through that, for scientists to learn
more about our own planet. Evidently now China hopes to find the answer to some of these
questions, considering that the space probe currently traveling to Mars has
decided to give the name Tianwen-1. A name that according to the Chinese Space
Agency will be given to all of China's planetary exploration missions,
signifying the Chinese nation's perseverance in pursuing truth and science and
exploring nature and the universe.
Speaking of questions,
Let’s start with the one I encountered on 8th March 2021 while I was
almost about to post this article and so decided to start with the same as it
is quite relevant to the topic and quite thought provoking too.
Sagan warned against
humans' tendency towards anthropocentrism. He was the faculty adviser for the
Cornell Students for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. In the Cosmos chapter
"Blues For a Red Planet", Sagan wrote, "If there is life on
Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the
Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes."
I don’t know if I am
answering the question or not but I feel it is quite related to my blog ‘Science-Philosophy Singularity: Magic of Absolutism’, and so I am going to answer by
referring to the same.
As Sagan wrote
frequently about religion and the relationship between religion and science, expressing
his skepticism about the conventional conceptualization of God as a sapient
being. For example: “Some people think God is an outsized, light-skinned male
with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky,
busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Others—for example Baruch Spinoza
and Albert Einstein—considered God to be essentially the sum total of the
physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling
evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some
hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence
of physical laws.”
In another description
of his view on the concept of God, Sagan wrote: “The idea that God is an
oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the
fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical
laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is
emotionally unsatisfying ... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of
gravity.”
As I mentioned in ‘Science-Philosophy Singularity’ blog that I am not certain about whether science can determine
the human values or not, as morality is neither testable nor fact based on the
understanding over the time due to its relative premises and murky absolute
truth. Even though morality is being questioned and corrected in few cases with
advancement of science, it certainly can’t be programmed as a lack of
consciousness which itself is still a mystery.
Also science is based on the certain assumptions which take us
in the direction based on those assumptions and then going deep down at the end
of the rabbit hole, we question the assumptions made initially which led us to
lot many theories and speculations. For examples about our nature of reality
such as whether it is continuous space time universe obeying Einstein’s theory
of relativity or one of the parallel universes based on uncertain discrete
quantum mechanics or aliased continuous simulation reality as a convolution of
discretely sampled high dimensional consciousness with our perception.
As scientific principle’s intertwined with our thoughts and
evolving together rising our understanding towards an emergent conceivable
objective reality which is far away from the imperceptible absolute truth of
reality. When science who questions everything to fetch factual answers gets
saturated before reaching absolute conclusion, we should take these emergent
scientific principle’s to tweak the fundamental philosophical ideas behind our
evolved science leading to new science in a Conway's game of life manner. And this
back forth inspiration to correcting each other in auto-catalytic way until it
merges at a singular point answering the mysteries like singularity and beyond.
So Absolute morality
is as mysterious like absolute truth of reality but both are related and hence
human values can be based on the facts, but at the same time it’s not just
objective to imagine its fundamental nature with simplicity unless it is
programmed and you are in simulation reality :). Rather it perceived as an
emergent phenomenon making the world dynamic and diverse resulted based on
certain premises. Metaethics is huge to study the grounding problem of ethics
to search for foundation of moral beliefs, out of just considering absolutism
and relativism for current context to see the analogical beauty between
scientific principle and human values.
There is relativism
with flexible moral belief system allowing it to vary based on the situations,
perception and reminiscent subjective experience, while absolutism making it
idealistic universal principle for all space and time. On universal scale with
moral relativism rises skepticism with incoherent moral truth, whereas only
absolutism with unclear absolute moral truth may leads to objectivity. Hence
there has to be balance between these two to smooth out diverse fluctuations
with thought-out reasoning, arguments and discussions.
One example that relativism can be illusive but not the absolute
truth, as universe is expanding making galaxies nearby permanently out of reach
as speed of light will not be able to overcome the ever widening space which
may mislead astronomers in the far future as they will observe nothing but
endless stretch of static space to conclude universe is static, which is the
same reality perceived by our ancestors due to lack of technology back then.
It’s like the parable of the blind men and an elephant with each blind man
feels a different part of the elephant body and describing elephant based on
their partial experience , hence as perception supersedes reality relativism
may fetch truth but incomplete out of big fat elephant which is absolute truth.
In the same way absolute nature of reality is like an elephant
which we are not able to understand from our partial experience as current
technology and study says that laws of physics are forbidden at extreme limits
of absolutes. As at absolute zero temperature halts any motion even photon
hence zero speed of light, on the other hand absolute high temperature at the
dawn of the time near big bang twists the space. The answers to the absolute
truth lie at these limits of absolutes.
On atheism, Sagan
commented in 1981: “An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not
exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know
of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times
and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more
about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be
certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God
seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and
uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.”
In reply to a question
in 1996 about his religious beliefs, Sagan answered, "I'm agnostic."
Sagan maintained that the idea of a creator God of the Universe was difficult
to prove or disprove and that the only conceivable scientific discovery that
could challenge it would be an infinitely old universe. Sagan's views on
religion have been interpreted as a form of pantheism comparable to Einstein's
belief in Spinoza's God. His son, Dorion Sagan said, “My father believed in the
God of Spinoza and Einstein, God not behind nature but as nature, equivalent to
it.” His last wife, Ann Druyan, stated: “When my husband died, because he was
so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to
me—it still sometimes happens—and ask me if Carl changed at the end and
converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I
will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never
sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see
each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl.”
As I mentioned in my
one of previous blog, ‘The day at museum and surprises’ that the story of
Buddha says that he after living life of opulence as a prince fulfilling every
desire on command, kept away from the suffering. When he realized that it is
not the reality, triggered sudden transformation for him from the innocent life
to the eagerness of the truth behind the sufferings and ultimate nature of
reality and so he left his kingdom for the journey towards the enlightenment.
If Buddha discovered
the nirvana freedom from the cycle of birth, which is not believed in many
other religions. No idea what he might have discovered but definitely he might
have faced challenges to pass it to the materialistic followers. Because being
in nirvana state would be his absolute
state and hard or impossible to explain or to be understood by any other person
unless he/she experience the same transformation what he gone through. But yet
he tried to convey that message to his followers which would make him being relative in that knowledge sharing
process.
I mentioned earlier my
very recent blog ‘Classical Antiquity in 2021’ that in book series ‘Tusculanae Disputationes’, Cicero attempted to
popularize Greek philosophy in Ancient Rome. Comparing Greek thinkers like
Archimedes to tyrants, Cicero declared that lives of the former were preferable
to those of the latter as his fifth Disputation concludes that virtue is
sufficient for living a happy life. Teaching us importance of thinkers,
philosophers or poets to guide the world as they have the overview effect with
their knowledge trying to reach god’s view but crawling up from ant view, the
similar journey of an astronauts to reach certain height opening their mind
with an ‘overview effect’ perspective giving them awareness of Carl Sagan’s
poetic pale blue dot. We can see those thinkers who changed the world were
actually consciously or subconsciously aware of this overview effect as they
didn’t bound themselves with their contemporary local saturated believes or
mindset imbued with traditional rigid thinking instead looked to the ancients
for guidance as their writings provided an overview of all of Greek and Roman
learning which offered them fresh new ideas and perspectives when they combined
those ancient thoughts with their own interpretations of those ancient
thoughts.
So what I think is being at absolute states is forbidden or quite difficult and only way for us to understand it piece by piece gathering all incomplete ‘relative trues’ leading way towards complete ‘absolute truth’ and that’s what easy and naturally perceivable for almost majority of us. And Mars is that ‘relative true’, the only forward way compatible to our today’s technology to understand the vastness of the universe, nature of reality; and it gives us positive purpose, hope and a way of perceivable enlightenment.
Carl Sagan saw one of
the Fair's most publicized events, the burial of a time capsule at Flushing
Meadows, which contained mementos of the 1930s to be recovered by Earth's
descendants in a future millennium. "The time capsule thrilled Carl",
writes Davidson. As an adult, Sagan and his colleagues would create similar
time capsules. The capsules that would be sent out into the galaxy; these were
the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record précis, all of which were
spinoffs of Sagan's memories of the World's Fair. Sagan was a proponent of the
search for extraterrestrial life. He urged the scientific community to listen
with radio telescopes for signals from potential intelligent extraterrestrial
life-forms. Sagan was so persuasive that by 1982 he was able to get a petition
advocating SETI published in the journal Science, signed by 70 scientists, including
seven Nobel Prize winners. His plans getting cosmic messages out there
diversifying our archive and gives a better chance for future alien visitors or
whatever is left of humanity, to find out that we were once here. Sagan helped
Frank Drake write the Arecibo message, a radio message beamed into space from
the Arecibo radio telescope on November 16, 1974, aimed at informing potential
extraterrestrials about Earth. The most elaborate message he helped to develop
and assemble was the Voyager Golden Record, which was sent out with the Voyager
space probes in 1977. Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have reached interstellar
space, the region between stars where the galactic plasma is present. Like
their predecessors Pioneer 10 and 11, which featured a simple plaque, both
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched by NASA with a message aboard—a kind of
time capsule, intended to communicate to extraterrestrials a story of the world
of humans on Earth.
So though Carl Sagan’s thought of ‘to do nothing with Mars’ on
finding life on Mars seems to be absolute (difficult to grasp) to me but he
himself was being relative when he and his team sent these messages as there is
something vulnerable about the message. It's delivered to an unknown recipient,
“Hello from Planet Earth” sending this message into the darkness of cosmos. It
is likely to survive a billion years into the future, when our civilization is
profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the
two hundred billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some, perhaps many, may have
inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization
intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our
message. This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds,
science, images, music, thoughts and feelings. We are attempting to survive our
time, so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we
face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our
hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.
So as a relative all Carl Sagan and team could do was to send
flyby missions in their contemporary, but in mind they wanted to do more which
wasn’t possible in their contemporary time. Today we are all relatives in
the fabric of space and time that are making effort towards searching for life
on Mars and perhaps if time unfolds the new opportunities in space, we may go
to the Mars as we see it today as stepping stone towards the beyond unknown
that Carl Sagan himself once envisioned.
In 2016, I wrote blog titled as, “CURIOSITY should be in
our SPIRIT to find new OPPORTUNITY for a hopeful future of mankind”, which I
referred in that blog as a ‘Mars Rover Quote’ and I wrote further that: This
quote is perfect example of how science can inspire us in fact I will say as we
are passionate to explore the Mars, all universe is conspiring in helping us to
achieve it or an Mars exploration is an attempt by universe to understand
itself, the same way as physicist Michio Kaku’s quote “A physicist is an
attempt by an atom to understand itself”, as physicists are made of atoms.
Where both atom and universe has their own different theories of physics;
microscopic atoms governed by quantum mechanics whereas macroscopic universe
governed by general relativity because theory of everything has not yet been
discovered.
In 1996, Carl Sagan recorded the audio for future astronauts who
will one day walk on Mars. The landing site of the unmanned Mars Pathfinder
spacecraft was renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station on July 5, 1997. Sagan's
son, Nick Sagan, wrote several episodes in the Star Trek franchise. In an
episode of Star Trek: Enterprise entitled "Terra Prime", a quick shot
is shown of the relic rover Sojourner, part of the Mars Pathfinder mission,
placed by a historical marker at Carl Sagan Memorial Station on the Martian
surface.
The marker displays a quote from Sagan: “Whatever the reason
you're on Mars, I'm glad you're there, and I wish I was with you.” As Carl
Sagan once poetically explained deeper meaning of “Pale Blue Dot” to grasp the
unimportance of humanity in the great context of the vast universe and the
importance of our role in it to address the big issues like climate change
which are opposite to war needing global cooperation with multilateralism as a
key and the sense of we all as part of this pale blue dot which many astronauts
described through their overview effect experience. And space exploration is
also one way to move towards sustainable future which not only unites us for
single cause but also only possible with global cooperative efforts means if
Carl Sagan's poetic narration of pale blue dot is not inspiring enough then at
least prisoners dilemma philosophy should. Universe is vast and resourceful,
subjectively and objectively.
“We are bathing in mystery and confusion on many subjects, and I
think that will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer
than our ability to understand it.”- Carl Sagan.
“I think the human race
has no future if it doesn’t go into space. There are many ambitious experiments
planned for the future. We will map the positions of billions of galaxies, and
we will better understand our place in the universe. But we must also continue
to go into space for the future of humanity. I don't think we will survive
another thousand years without escaping beyond our fragile planet. It has been
a glorious time to be alive, doing research in theoretical physics. The fact
that we humans, who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of
nature, have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws
governing us and our universe is a great triumph, and I am happy if I have made
a small contribution. I want to share my excitement and enthusiasm about this
quest, so remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to
make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be
curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can
do and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up. While there's life,
there is hope." ”- Stephen Hawking.
“While there's life, there is hope.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero
“While there's life, there is hope.” – Stephen Hawking
And so the search is
already begun for possible life into the space with telescopes like Hubble
& Kepler discovering potential earth like planets few light years away but
interstellar mission is long way to go with current technology, but as Stephen
Hawking once announced we can reach our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri
(4.3 light years away) within 20 years with project ‘Breakthrough Starshot’
which current fastest spacecraft would take 30000 years. But our current
technology is sufficient enough to take us to our nearest possible home in our
solar system, Planet Mars.
Programs like Hope Mars mission do actually usually take
about 10 years from a design phase and the UAE with its baby space agency have
done such a great job in pulling it all together now just in the last six years.
We typically see the big headlines from organizations like NASA, ESA and this
mission is a really important way to show that some of the smaller players can still
have a big impact. China is also a huge player today which never was in the
scene before, India as well is a big player now and now of course with the UAE
coming in, so it's a huge opportunity. UAE
and China made history joining club of mission Mars as before this only USA,
Russia, EU and India were the countries in the world to ever reach the red
planet. And I am sure many more will join the campaign with some sort of
collaboration in this globalized world.
What kind of information
will UAE’s hope probe be gathering and how will this help us better understand
climate change back here on earth?
Hope will be gathering
observations about the entire Martian atmosphere and this is a new way of
looking at the Martian atmosphere. Most previous missions have looked at one
single time of day, but hope will be looking at the global atmosphere in every
geographic region at every time of day. And when you do something like that you
can figure out how different regions are connected to each other, how the
bottom of the atmosphere connects to the top of the atmosphere. You learn about
how the entire atmosphere works as a system and when you get an understanding
like this, it can feed back on how atmospheres work at any place in the solar
system for any planet.
As if Hope probe know
the beauty of overview effect and
give us picture of what kind of animal mars is, just not be mistaken as blind
men limiting to observe only specific part of elephant. The hope probe will
spend the next two years gathering data for scientists back on earth because
most mars satellites fly low enough to study the surface craters in detail, but
researchers say this also limits their ability to study its global weather
pattern. After entering mars orbit the information that the probes special
instruments collects over the next two years will help scientists begin to
understand what the climate and weather is like there at different layers of
the Martian atmosphere and create the first global picture of how the Martian
atmosphere changes not only during the day but during the entire seasons as
well.
Other probes have
orbited between the north and south poles of mars, the hope probe orbits around
mars in an elliptical manner completing a loop around the planet's equator
every 55 hours. Now this allows it to get as close as 20,000 kilometers to the
Martian planet the smallest ever distance reached by the probe to the surface
of mars, its unusual elliptical orbit will allow it to fly higher than previous
Martian satellites observing the entire planet across both night and day in
each cycle. So Hope's journey is particularly unique providing the very first
complete view of its atmosphere, day and night, and season to season.
For the first time in the history of Martian exploration a
single spacecraft will bring to the Red Planet an orbiter, a lander and a
rover, with a scientific load of 13 instruments: seven mounted on board the
spacecraft that will enter in orbit around the planet, and six on board the
rover that will be released shortly after the landing module will rest on
Martian soil. Tianwen-1
orbiter will be studying the upper atmosphere in ways similar to what MAVEN is
doing. The rover is going to analyze the surface chemistry and take images of
the surface. The orbiter will operate in a polar
orbit in order to map Mars’ morphology and geological structure while also
using the Mars-Orbiting Subsurface Exploration Radar instrument to investigate
soil characteristics and water-ice distribution. It will also measure the
ionosphere and the electromagnetic and gravitational fields. It will
investigate the surface soil characteristics and the water-ice distribution. The
rover will investigate the surface soil characteristics and water-ice
distribution with its own Subsurface Exploration Radar. It will also analyze
surface material composition and characteristics of the Martian climate and
environment on the surface. Well with Tianwen1, China too want to get whole
picture as much as possible like to know overview and to know what kind of
animal is planet Mars.
The orbiter will provide a relay communication link to the
rover, while performing its own scientific observations for one Martian year.
So the Tianwen-1 mission is also a unique as it is going to orbit, land and release
a rover all on the very first try, and coordinate observations with an orbiter.
No other interplanetary mission has done so in the past. Even NASA has either
sent Orbiters or Rovers, but China plans to do all the three together. If
successful, it would signify a major technical breakthrough.
What changed Mars into a red planet?
Mars is fourth planet in the solar system in order of distance
from the Sun, seventh in size and mass. It is a periodically conspicuous
reddish object in the night sky. Mars is red because of hematite, which is a
red form of ferric oxide. Its color ranges from black to gray or red to brown
depending on which variety is present. Hematite is made up of iron and oxygen;
a type of iron oxide, it takes its name from Greek word for “blood” and is a
rusty color in powdered form. Although ferric oxides are found in many places, only
the hematite is largely responsible for the red color and the small dust
particles that are suspended in the atmosphere that coat the top few millimeters
to meters of Mars’ surface are wholly responsible for the red color we see. The
gray hematite spherules appeared blue in the false-colored data from Mars and
were therefor nicknamed Martian “blueberries”. On mars grey hematite may help
prove whether large amounts of liquid water ever flowed on Mars’ surface. Where
water was, life may have had a chance to thrive as well. Centuries of assiduous
studies by earthbound observers, extended by spacecraft observations since the
1960s, have revealed that Mars is similar to Earth in many ways. Like Earth,
Mars has clouds, winds, a roughly 24-hour day, seasonal weather patterns, polar
ice caps, volcanoes, canyons, and other familiar features. There are intriguing
clues that billions of years ago Mars was even more Earth-like than today, with
a denser, warmer atmosphere and much more water, rivers, lakes, flood channels,
and perhaps oceans. By all indications Mars is now a sterile frozen desert.
In recent times Mars
has intrigued people for more-substantial reasons than its baleful appearance.
The planet is the second closest to Earth and it is usually easy to observe in
the night sky because its orbit lies outside Earth’s. It is also the only
planet whose solid surface and atmospheric phenomena can be seen in telescopes
from Earth. Mars is probably the most likely place in the solar system other
than the earth for life to evolve at some point in time. Before we go there we
need a map and we also need to make sure what Mars is made out of, are there
any toxins in air, is there any biology there we have to worry about and the
only way to do that really well is to go there and do a robotic sample return
mission. It’s not sufficient to know what kind of animal it is from outside,
but to get to know its nature, for that it is necessary to sneak peek into its heart.
The Perseverance Rover equipped with a coring drill and sample
tubes will store the rocks in collection tubes after extraction. Mars Sample
Return Campaign is an effort to bring samples of Martian rocks and soil back to
Earth, where they can be investigated in unprecedented detail, using all the
capabilities of terrestrial laboratories. It's not a single mission, we call it
a campaign because it need multiple launch opportunities to be able to set the
infrastructure on the surface of the planet, get the samples back off of the
planet and return those to Earth safely. Perseverance
will be collecting samples soil samples, rock samples burrowing down and
putting them in canisters and then leaving them dozens of these canisters on
the surface in piles. And then in 2026 what you have is perhaps the most
ambitious of all missions where they are going to be sending in conjunction
with the European Space Agency. NASA fetch rover which will go to Mars and will
collect the samples bring them to a rocket on the surface, bring them to orbit
and then another orbiter will come and collect the samples and bring them back to
earth around 2031. The hope is that within these samples that they bring back
they will finally be able to answer the pivotal question that everybody wants
to know. NASA and ESA have embarked on a
joint program for Mars Sample Return and the driving reason behind their collaboration
is to build our capabilities to return samples from Mars in this decade that's
a complicated series of missions. Mars is
not easy it's difficult, what we're seeing right now as far as the NASA’s
mission is concerned is to be seeing the first part of what will be a two-part
mission which stretch out over 11 years, more than a decade and there's really
not a lot or no way to really speed it up because of the fact that it's every
two years you're flying and every two years you're coming back, so it does make
it stretch out.
ESA is providing the
Earth Return Orbiter which is also called as ‘first interplanetary cargo ship’,
Sample Fetch Rover, and the landers robotic arm to the partnership. NASA is
providing the Sample Retrieval Lander, Mars Ascent Vehicle and the
Capture/Containment and Return System payload on the Earth Return Orbiter. The
driving goal for this broad collaboration is the ability to do that in an
international context; that the science of these missions could be very
paradigm changing science. And this needs to be an international collaboration due
its high expectation of scientific return of investment and also because we may
change paradigms around the world with what we find out from these missions.
Also these missions when you go to the surface of another planet become especially
challenging cost wise as well as technically. So by merging we are keeping a
very vibrant program in place that will allow us to go to Mars on every
opportunity. Which essentially is a planetary alignment between Mars and Earth
is optimum every 26 months makes the trip much shorter makes it easier to get
to and so we like to go on those opportunities. This kind of collaboration
allows us to do that on essentially every opportunity and we know it’s not
possible for a single space agency to do it alone and actually could not do the
Mars sample return campaign by itself. As it's complicated, expensive and really
need to be an international collaboration to make it a viable mission so to be
able to do more sample return in a high collaborative fashion. So it's very important
to get used to working with each other.
We cannot send humans
to Mars without actually understanding the details of dust characteristics,
toxicity of the soils, is there something alive in that soil, a threat to our
astronauts. Mars sample return is almost mandatory before you send humans to
the planet. This will get us kicked off on that as well. Mars was wet, it had
standing water, it has organic material, it has energy, it's got all the
ingredients for life and there may have been life there some time now. It might
have only been you know bacteria type of life but it's important to find out
because it's the very first place; we look for life in depth. Whether we find it
or find fossil evidence of it that has profound implications for a universe as
we know that now hundreds if not thousands if not billions of planets out there
and it says something about the possibilities of life in the universe.
If it was easy to send humans to mars we would have been there already. And though there is an old saying for human exploration of Mars that Mars has been 25 years away for 25 years. As sending humans to Mars they were saying 25 years ago, we are still saying that today. But time has changed and we entered into a new space age. We are launching more than ever since the beginning of the space age, thousands of spacecraft have been launched to space, with a dramatic increase in recent years. Also many actors are entered from the private sector, in the past couple of decades; the number of launches from private companies has dramatically increased. We are in the process of democratization of space, which is a domain that needs a high-intensity investment and R&D. We have been witnessing a changing paradigm wherein there is large scope for public-private partnership, private partners assume more responsibility for public projects than in traditional approaches and hence expected to improve efficiencies of the project. Large space groups have been forging alliances, leading to more interaction between upstream and downstream industries. Today there are many international space agencies with independent launch capability and the cost is astronomical. Every year the global price tag is whopping, $62 billion.
China is considered as one of the major beneficiaries of the
last run of globalization. China became world’s largest economy by Purchasing
Power Parity PPP according to IMF's calculation few years ago. Globalization
and political renewal led the Chinese government to make space exploration a
strategic cornerstone of its international policy. Suffice it to say that in 2020 China spent
about 11 billion dollars on space, making it the second economic power in the
sector after the US (22 billion dollar budget) surpassing Europe (7.5), Russia
(2.5), India (1.9) and Japan (1.7). This commitment led to the first orbital
flight of a taikonaut in 2003, which was followed in 2011 by the launch of a
space station to which two different missions with three-man crews docked. China
will not only have robotic mars missions but the sample return missions
proposed in the future and have their own space station. China’s Beidou
Navigation Satellite System will provide comprehensive service to the not only
the Asia-pacific regions but also promises to provide global coverage for
timing and navigation, offering an alternative to Russia’s GLONASS, the
European Galileo positioning system and America’s GPS.
USA and China are playing an important role in today’s
space exploration as both successfully sent rovers recently into the Mars
orbit, but there was not much cooperation between the two countries. Fifty years after the moon landing, NASA announced the plans to
return as part of their most ambitious mission yet. The investments announced
to be made will empower the people of NASA preparing to send American
astronauts to Mars in the 2030s. NASA decided to have a lunar orbiter first
that is a space station around the moon and then build the rocket around the
moon, so that it can then go to mars in a two-jump process. There is a debate whether
or not we should go to mars in one jump or whether we should go to mars in two
jumps. As China announced some technology development for some time, the super
heavy launch vehicles which are potential for the use of the future main
mission to the moon and so in the future china will also have much kind of
international corporations. For instance this time china has already cooperated
with France, Argentina and Austria for Tianwen1 mission and in the future
missions we can see more this kind of cooperation. China's space station also
will be act as an international platform for cooperation and not only as a
national space laboratory.
With Artemis Program with goal of landing “the first woman and
the next man” on the moon, NASA has led a group of nations expecting
international partnerships to play a key role in advancing Artemis as the next
step towards the long-term goal of establishing expedition team and a
sustainable presence on the moon, laying the foundation for private companies
to build a lunar economy, and eventually sending humans to Mars. The Artemis
Accords are an international agreement between governments of participating
nations in the Artemis Program on the principles for cooperation in the civil
exploration and use of the Moon, Mars, comets and asteroids for peaceful
purposes, and is grounded in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Artemis Accords which is a set of agreements
of nations and how they're going to work together, so we're inevitably going to
be seeing this not just with the moon but with mars and other planets because no
one country can do the best job by themselves and there's a strength in
collaboration which is exactly what is going on at Mars.
But Mars is 160 times
further away than the moon. It will take eight months to get there. Why go to
the expense and risk of going all that way? Well, the race to space began
through fear, as a reaction to the threat of an enemy. But while reaching to
the moon, we gained new perspective on our home planet. Today, new threats are
re-focusing our gaze back on our little blue marble. In order preserve it, the
nations of the world will need to work together. The next space race may not be
nation against nation, but humanity against the clock. So if climate change is
real that means terraforming is possible too, we are changing the planet's climate
here meaning. We are terraforming the earth right now, human activities
changing the weather of an entire planet. Some people say why not to do the
same on mars, the dinosaurs did not have a space program and that's why they're
not here today. There are no dinosaurs running around today because they didn't
have a space program and they were helpless when an asteroid or meteor hit Mexico
66 million years ago. But we do have a space program and perhaps one day we
will be able to do terraforming of Mars.
Heavy industry and all the polluting industry, all the things that are damaging our planet those will be done off earth. We get to have both that preserve this unique gem of a planet which is completely irreplaceable there is no planet B and terraforming of the Mars in the process. But this work is for future generations to sustain humankind in the process. They are going to build whole industries; thousands of future companies doing this work. The whole ecosystem, entrepreneurial activity, unleashed creative people coming up with new ideas about how to use space.
Next generation will be going to build those little
colonies in space for that purpose which is only possible if we do our job
today which it to build the infrastructure, a sustainable road to space and
comprehensive understanding of possible space for future generation’s human
settlement like Mars. This is what happening now as space agencies making
efforts to know Mars better as we have seen this year with three successful missions
from different agencies and private industries are racing with goal of making
reusable spacecraft with its main goal to fly to the moon and back without
wasting any boosters and maybe in future to take humans to Mars. Globalization
in last two decades indeed helped countries to carry dispute free trading,
increase in productivity and efficiency boosting technological development. In
the age of globalization and digital capitalism, the private industries as
digital entities which gained economic capacity, increased markets and more
capacity of investment which made them almost state-like entities given the
amount of population they can influence in the world at any moment. Hence when
government agencies are developing spacecraft it takes way longer relative to
the private industries which can afford failures during initial prototype
testing. The pace at which SpaceX is developing is truly astounding. In less
than three years they have built and flown eight different prototypes of Starship
SN series with every flight progress is made. And as I am writing today on 3rd
March 2021, quite important day not only because it’s my brother’s birthday but
SpaceX successfully conducted a soft landing for starship prototype SN10 during
test flight. The flight marked the first time a Starship prototype successfully
landed after attempting the bellyflop maneuver. This shows that balancing
government and private initiatives is somehow moving the space exploration
forward.
The information that UAE’s
Mars Hope probe gathers will be shared with the world for free to around 200 research
centers that seems quite unusual but it's been an important part of the entire
mission contributing to the international scientific effort on mars. And that's
been an incredibly deep component of the effort and quite exciting thing for scientists
working on mars climate data will be looking forward to this data to integrate it
with everything else we know about Mars. No one probe can answer every question
but we're sending a lot of spacecraft to Mars and that bring us a lot of data
together to address some of the fundamental questions.
With space field has formed this kind of tradition that's
the scientific research data will be open to the whole world. After the first
one of the human being landing a robotic probe to the far side of moon and
China opened that data to the whole world. Although the United States congress
suspend the cooperation with China but NASA has also required that to consider
using of the data by China’s relay satellite named Queqiao meaning ‘the magpie
bridge’ for future mission to the far side of moon. Also the data again from
the perseverance and the curiosity rover will be very useful for Chinese
scientists to have a better and comprehensive understanding of the Mars and the
other of the future destination of Mars. Perseverance
rover, a car-sized rover will be not only look for possible evidence for life
on mars but also collect samples that we can bring back from mars to the earth
to study. All three recent successful Mars missions are very different from
each other and yet very complementary. Each one doing a different part addressing
a different part of the overall problem of understanding Mars and having this
progress whichever country it comes from; being able to collaborate and share this
information is so important. So in future it is possible to see cooperation between USA
and China for space missions.
Another question, if you
are wondering is there a chance that China and USA rovers will cross paths on
the red planet?
It is so huge and need the scientists to work that together to get a better understanding of this. So mostly they might not meet each other physically on Mars as its quite big place, but hope there will be sharing of knowledge because international collaboration is really key to success, first of all in helping the trajectories and landing smoothly and then afterward sharing information, knowledge to get a much more comprehensive picture of what is going on Mars, what went on Mars in the past and what might we learn that can help her on Earth to understand our own mother planet. So as researchers keenly interested to study why Mars's atmosphere is losing hydrogen and oxygen and the reasons behind the planet’s drastic climate change. It's hoped this will help scientists better understand and be able to answer important environmental questions about our own planet as well. Several dozen probes that have set off for mars since the 1960s many never made it that far or failed to land. 50 percent of all the spacecraft that have ever gone to mars have failed, only India has managed to enter the planet's orbit in a first attempt and now UAE, China has also joined the club. So from the first space probes to fly by the planet in the 1960s to the planetary orbiters and rovers of today, the United States, China, Russia, Europe, Japan, India and UAE have developed Mars exploration programmes to fulfill human aspirations. Though these countries seem as competing to reach mars, they will overall help humans to understand the Red Planet and fulfill the dream of colonizing Mars.
Soon we might witness the first human to Mars and start human settlement there once it gets friendlier than today. You can see in above collage there is elephant-headed Hindu god of beginning, who is traditionally worshiped before any major enterprise and is the patron of intellectuals, bankers, scribes and authors. Also believed as a remover of obstacles just like today’s space agencies with right intellectual scientists, proper funding and visionaries working on the singular bigger goals to do things which are never done before. It didn’t take long for NASA JPL engineers to precisely locate Perseverance. The onboard computer did an absolutely remarkable real-time job of decoding the terrain and comparing it to its database. All this to avoid dangerous area’s and choose a more secure and flat area for landing. The rover tilt was minimal as with Terrain Relative Navigation, a victory for collective intelligence of the team. The dreams are big and the journey is tough but that’s what the human civilization is about, winning and developing in every circumstance. As the everlasting quest for exploration is in our DNA since the origin of humans in Africa two hundred thousand years ago and we all descended from that small handful group of people with explorer’s gene who made their way out of Africa and spread human race by colonizing the rest of the world in spite of geographic problem and with lack of technology back then. Now we are doing it with space as a quite natural evolution. Sure it’s challenging and complex, but that complexity plays an important role in pushing technological innovations. For example, a device called ‘MOXIE’ stand for Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment on perseverance rover sent for converting the CO2 in the Mars atmosphere into oxygen.
Before writing
further, I would like to highlight context ‘Martian waves on Earth’ from my blog
‘Friendly nature of Mars’.
January
2018: ‘Martian waves on Earth’,
Friendly nature of Mars
For anything to happen
in reality had to happen in our mind first. Mars is happening and we are there
already in our minds. Today’s generation with worldwide societies like Mars
Society, Mars Generation etc., grad students, research scholars, bloggers, vloggers,
Hollywood are acting to realize their Mars imagination and buzz is growing in
autocatalytic way. Real life Mark Watney’s are studying to grow Martian
potatoes here on earth, Hi-seas project sending crew to simulated Mars to study
what’s like living in “Mars-like” conditions, and in fact few scientists are
living according to Martian time every sol. The rusty planet Mars have already
been studied with so many mission till date and many more lined up for the
coming year with current active and more new countries joining the curiosity
with their space research plan with varieties of rovers and landers including
NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, an advanced version of curiosity rover which is not
only designed to look for bio-signatures but also sample retrieval.
NASA’s rovers already
scratched the Martian surfaces setting the frontier for mars exploration. Along
with space agencies private companies have also set their eyes on the Mars for
the ‘fruitful race towards amazing space’. SpaceX and Blue Origin mesmerized
the world with reusable rockets, Ad Astra Rocket Company electrifying the
rocket technology with VASIMR plasma engine which is ten times faster and fuel
efficient than chemical rockets revolutionizing rocket technology in the same
way Tesla did in automobile sector. Many kick-starter campaigns contributing
with working on self-sustained ecology, space 3D printing technology, virtual
reality & robonauts concept, cost effective tiny satellites named CubeSats,
industrializing moon, asteroid mining etc. all for sustainable space
exploration.
Martian waves are all over the planet Earth inspiring diversity to unite for optimistic goal of discovering Martian flora and fauna, if not then feel the importance of same of our own planet Earth and take care of it.
And Martian wave continues even though 2020 year has been tough but it has been a very major year for space explorations and missions. A lot of major breakthroughs occurred this year. No one would have believed that a private company would send astronauts, but SpaceX did it. Countries sent their missions to mars for exploring the red planet and therefore bringing us one step closer to the dream of colonizing the Red Planet. Among the eight planets in the Solar System, Mars is the most similar to Earth and is also close by. It therefore naturally becomes a high-priority target for space exploration. Mars offers a substantial and pragmatic opportunity to answer key questions concerning the existence of extraterrestrial life, and the origin and evolution of the Solar System, and to explore the possibility of human habitation. The international planetary science community looks forward to these recent successful and exciting missions, which will advance our knowledge of Mars to an unprecedented level.
Speaking of public interest in Mars exploration in today’s globalized digital world, after NASA’s releasing mesmerizing video of descent, when the parachute unfurled with the strange random pattern of red and white bands. Netizens decoded that secret message within just few hours, Using binary code, two messages have been encoded, the inner portion spell out “Dare Mighty Things” which was mantra at JPL and adorns many of the centre’s walls. The outer band of the canopy provides GPS coordinates for JPL in Southern California, where the rover was built. Perseverance landed in Jezero crater near a dried-up river delta and was designed to search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover also carried a small helicopter, Ingenuity, the first flying machine designed for the skies of another planet. Mission controllers at NASA have received the first positive status report from the Ingenuity Helicopter, which was strapped to the underbelly of the Perseverance rover and is operating as expected according to the agency.
The helicopter will remain attached to the rover for 30 to 60 days from the time of touch down. The rarefied air on Mars makes helicopter flight extraordinarily challenging. Ingenuity will spin its two counter-rotating rotors five times faster than Earthly helicopters, about forty times per second. Ingenuity Mars helicopter is not carrying any science equipment onboard. Its primary objective is to check whether flight is possible in Mars’ extremely thin atmosphere.
In a less than a
single lifespan, we went from first manned flight to first man on the moon. And now if things go
as planned, Ingenuity will be the first helicopter to fly on another planet,
leading to an extraterrestrial ‘Wright Brothers moment’ on Mars, a potential
game-changer for deep space exploration. The helicopter expected to send a
status update to NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which relays messages
between Mars and Earth and has been orbiting the red planet since 2006. I
encountered a discussion on social media that Mars analogue mission astronauts
discussing to add drone to their simulated Mars mission if ingenuity flies
successfully on Mars.
While scientists have determined that there might be liquid
water underneath the polar ice on Mars, no drilling system exists to drill down
one mile to prove this hypothesis. But students at Washington State University are
developing ideas and funded by NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC)
program to develop their proposed idea for an autonomous drill for Mars
exploration. Perseverance is a robot astrobiologist that seeks to extract
cigar-sized bedrock cores for eventual return to Earth, but much remains to be
explored at even greater depths beneath Mars. One team at University of Glasgow
developing a novel drilling system on behalf of ESA over the course of project
named ‘DEEPER’. This technology shall be made capable of extracting samples 20
meters beneath the Mars subsurface in order to further examine the
astrobiological history of the planet.
“For anything to happen in reality had to happen in our
mind first. Mars is happening and we are there already in our minds”, my words
in my blog Friendly nature of Mars three years ago. Here is the story
I came across resonating with words above that really its first happens in mind
and then into reality.
Twardowsky colony already happened in minds of ‘Space is
More’ of course with the proper study and now perseverance landed just 2 km
from their proposed location for this colony. And we all know Elon Musk’s dream
about Mars, so future I leave it to you to imagine.
In 1996, Carl Sagan wrote a letter to NASA, urging the
space agency to include a microphone on a Mars lander. “Even if only a few
minutes of Martian sounds are recorded from this first experiment, the public
interest will be high and the opportunity for scientific exploration real”, he
wrote. Planetary Society members and supporters funded the world’s first Mars
microphone on NASA’s Mars Polar Lander, which launched in 1999. It was the
first citizen-funded science experiment to fly to another world. Unfortunately,
the spacecraft crashed on Mars later that year. In 2016, NASA announced it
would include 2 microphones on its Perseverance rover mission. One will record
the sounds of Perseverance plummeting through the Martian atmosphere and
landing on the surface, and another is attached to Supercam; a science
instrument that zaps rocks with a laser and records resulting light spectra to
determine the rocks’ compositions. Microphone attached to the rover did not
collect usable data during the descent, but commercial off-the-shelf device
survived the highly dynamic descent to the surface and obtained sounds from
Jezero Crater on 20th February about 10 seconds into the 60 second
recording, a Martian breeze is audible for a few seconds, as are mechanical
sounds of the rover operating on the surface.
What does Martian waves sound like? As NASA scientists
explained that gentle whirl that happens in the background that is a noise made
by rover, but for 10 seconds is an actual wind gust on the surface of Mars
picked up by the microphone sent back to us here on Earth, the analysis
indicates that was around a 5 meter per second type of wind gust. We know how
funny we sound when we breathe helium; it changes the sound of our voice and
illustrates how density affects the speed of sound. Due to its lower density
sound travels over twice as fast through helium than it does regular air. The
Martian atmosphere is an extremely thin sheet of gas and less dense than the
Earth’s atmosphere. Supercam equipped with a microphone not only picked gentle
whoosh of the Martian wind but also not-so-gentle snaps generated by the laser
when it hits a rock target as perseverance rover has begun using its
rock-zapping Supercam instrument on the Red Planet, which mission team members
announced on 10th March. The sounds of 30 impacts are heard, some
slightly louder than others. Variations in the intensity of the zapping sounds
will provide information on the physical structure of the targets, such as its
relative hardness or the presence of weathering coatings. The target under
study, ‘Maaz’ was about 10 feet (3.1 m) away.
This rock called “Maaz”, meaning Mars in Navajo is the
first feature of scientific interest to be studied by NASA’s Perseverance Mars
rover. The rover’s team, in collaboration with the Navajo Nation office of the
President and Vice president, has been naming features of scientific interest
with words in the Navajo language. Some terms were inspired by the terrain
imaged by Perseverance at its landing site. For example, one suggestion was
“tsewoki bee hazhmeezh” meaning “rolling rows of pebbles, like waves”,
“bidzill” meaning “strength” etc. Perseverance itself was translated to
“Ha’ahoni.” Also International Astronomical Union (IAU) choses to name craters
with scientific significance after small towns and villages of the world.
In 2007 IAU gave the Jezero crater its name because in many
Slavic languages Jezero describes a natural depression or depression filled
with water. In November 2018, 11 years after Jezero got its name, NASA
designated Jezero Crater the landing site of Mars 2020. A letter from NASA was
presented to the mayor of Jezero, Bosnia-Herzegovina, honoring the connection
between the town and Jezero Crater, the Mars 2020 rover landing site. “It takes
an international team of experts to create and support a mission with the
complexity and ambition of Mars 2020. I am proud that we can now include the
citizens of Jezero, Bosnia and Herzegovina, as honorary members of the Mars
2020 team. Together, we will explore one of the most scientifically captivating
as well as serene locations on Mars”, Said James Watzin, NASA’s Director of
Mars Exploration. The Perseverance rover landing in the Jezero crater was
broadcast live at the village’s only school. You can explore Jezero Crater like
Google map and track Perseverance rover for its day-by-day location on Mars in
NASA’s mars website for interactive map.
“Mars is a rock- cold, empty, almost airless, dead. Yet
it’s heaven in a way”, Octavia E. Butler describes Mars in her 1993 novel
“Parable of the Sower”. Decades later on 5th March 2021, NASA
announced that it had named the landing site of the Perseverance rover the
"Octavia E. Butler Landing" after the late science fiction novelist. Happily
ignorant of the obstacles that a black female writer could encounter, she
became unsure of herself for the first time at the age of 13, when her
well-intentioned aunt Hazel said: "Honey... Negroes can't be
writers." But Butler persevered in her desire to publish a story, and even
asked her junior high school science teacher, Mr. Pfaff, to type the first
manuscript she submitted to a science fiction magazine. She grew up in Pasadena
near Caltech, home of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Though intensely shy
and mildly dyslexic, and during a period when few women and no African American
women regularly published science fiction, Butler was determined to earn a
living at the craft. She read voraciously at the public library and wrote daily
for hours.
Her response to the question, how did you first start
writing science fiction?
“I fell into writing it because I saw a bad movie called
‘Devil Girl from Mars’ and went into competition with it, but I think i stayed
with it because it was so wide open it gave me the chance to comment on every
aspect of humanity. People tend to think of science fiction as star wars or
star trek and the truth is there are no closed doors and there are no required
formulas. You can you can go anywhere with it.” At the age of 10, Butler begged
her mother to buy her a Remington typewriter, on which she "pecked [her]
stories two fingered". At 12, she watched the televised version of the
film ‘Devil Girl from Mars’ (1954) and concluded that she could write a better
story. Butler had a profound
influence on the growing popularity of Afrofuturism. That’s a cultural movement
where Black writers and artists who are inspired by the past, present and
future, produce works that incorporate magic, history, technology and much
more. And she is on the Mars which means even though she is gone her
inspiration resides both on Earth and Mars.
Mars successive oppositions occur about every 26 months and
take place at different points in the Martian orbit. And we have to grab every
cyclic opportunity as we have a window of opportunity that opens up every 26 months
when planets are aligned making most out of it as we did this year elevating us
on many levels and the process will go on.
As I already mentioned above in this blog the importance of
thinkers, philosophers or poets to guide the world as they have the overview
effect with their knowledge trying to reach god’s view but crawling up from ant
view, the similar journey of an astronauts to reach certain height opening
their mind with an ‘overview effect’ perspective giving them awareness of Carl
Sagan’s poetic pale blue dot.
President John F. Kennedy wasn’t kidding when he said going to
the Moon was hard. Much of the technology needed to get to the lunar surface
and return didn’t exist at the time of Kennedy’s famous 1962 speech. And much
was unknown. As NASA’s Apollo missions were being planned, there was concern
that the lunar module might sink right into the surface or become stuck in it. Thanks
in part to the massive, 400,000-person effort that put astronauts on the Moon
seven years later; our knowledge of the solar system has increased dramatically
in the decades since. The many challenges NASA overcame forced the agency and
its partners to devise new inventions and techniques that spread into public
life, many of which are taken for granted today. NASA’s Spinoff highlights NASA
technologies that benefit life on Earth in the form of commercial products.
We’ve profiled more than 2,000 spinoffs since 1976 — As Apollo technologies
have made their way into everyday life, there’s more space in your life than
you think!
SMART’s METL tire is based on NASA rover tech, startup working
with NASA’s Glenn Research Center, revealed its first product: An airless
bicycle tire based on technology so called “shape memory alloy” (SMA), NASA
engineers created to make future lunar and Martian rovers even more resilient.
SMA allows for a tire constructed entirely of interconnected springs, which
requires no inflation and is therefore immune to punctures, but which can still
provide equivalent or better traction compared to inflatable rubber tires, and
even some built-in shock absorbing capabilities. A rover on the Moon has metal
wheels that can flex around rocky obstacles, then reshape back to their
original form. On Earth, surgeons install tiny mesh tubes that can dilate a
heart patient’s blood vessels all in their own, without mechanical inputs or
any wires to help. These shape-shifting capabilities are all thanks to a
bizarre kind of metal called ‘nitinol’, a so-called shape-memory alloy that can
be trained to remember its own shape. The decades-old material has become
increasingly common in a wide range of everyday applications. The metal will
face its most challenging application yet: a sample return mission on Mars.
So just a reflection on the value of even saying that you want
to go into Space, the projects are not expensive or you're not colonizing yet
because by doing that can have an effect on culture. As space is a gateway
subject into the sciences, all of these physics, planetary geology, biology,
chemistry, medicine and all of this matters when you go into space. So it is
the ideal driver of STEM fields. Science technology engineering and math, STEM
fields are the engines of tomorrow's economy so if you have to ask what's your
budget for space exploration? and as Moneys are established by a tax base
funded by an electorate, research with unknown returns on investments in fields
not yet fully understood by the public. This is really hard to get money for,
but innovations in today's technology drive tomorrow's economies. If the world
economy and population is to keep expanding space is the only way to go.
One month ago, we witnessed spectacularly beautiful landing on
Mars by NASA. Hard not to be deeply impressed by the art of engineering that
went into Mars2020 mission. Krispy Kreme launched Mars Doughnut for that day to
celebrate safe arrival and in honor of NASA Perseverance rover’s Martian
landing. When the rover safely touched down on the Martian surface, inside
Jezero Crater, on Feb 18, 2021, it was also a safe landing for the nearly 11 million
earthling names on board, written on three fingernail-sized chips using an
electron beam. These names were from 250 countries and territories; and now
this month it is amazing to see that one million people from 249 countries
pre-registered their interest in the “dearmoon” project initiated by Japanese
billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, an opportunity of free trip to the moon for 8
civilians, and one or two crew members using SpaceX Starship, a fully reusable
super-heavy lift launch vehicle which is key element of SpaceX Mars program
initiated by Elon Musk.
With Apollo mission journey of 240,000 miles was not to just
discover magnificent desolation on the moon, but to get a whole bunch of new
questions to ask that we could ask ourselves. This enormous event regardless of
race, sex, or religious belief uniquely united the entire world in this singular
human achievement. After this journey we on the Earth is never the same as this
new perspective seeing the Earth from space, in all our unity and cohesion
brought us an unprecedented shift in our thinking. That was a powerful reminder
of our capacity for greatness as a species. Not simply represented the
engineering triumph, but the triumph of human ambition, the desire to reach
quite literally for the stars.
And now it’s 2021, Mars is happening almost everywhere on the
planet Earth. There is no single day without any buzz about Mars, even Buzz
Aldrin at 90 with his t-shirt message, “Get your ass to Mars”, wants humans to
go back to the moon. But this time he envisions the moon as a launch pad for
mission to Mars. We know how February 2021 was totally Mars month. Here is the
fun fact about March month. March was the start of the year for the Romans. Roman
warriors set on expanding their empire couldn’t help naming this month for
their god of war. The Roman god of war was known as Mars, a name we still use
today for our neighboring red planet. Hence the month of March belongs to the
Red Planet too.
Mars 2020 to March 20, 2021, “Martian waves are all over
the planet Earth.”
