Tag Archives: Mars

Rare alignment of five planets will be visible until end of June

Luke 21:25 “And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves”

Important Takeaways:

  • Five planets align perfectly, visible until end of June
  • Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn have lined up in a rare alignment that won’t occur again until 2040, according to AccuWeather.
  • Last occurred in 1864 and won’t occur again for almost 20 years.
  • The alignment is best viewed in the early morning around an hour before sunrise and will remain as is until the end of June.
  • According to Space.com on the mornings of Thursday to Saturday, June 23-25, the waning crescent moon will be located between Mars and Venus, making identifying the planets easier even for people who are not well-versed in astronomy.

Read the original article by clicking here.

In Ivory Coast, a battle to save cocoa-ravaged forests

By Joe Bavier, Maytaal Angel and Ange Aboa

DJIGBADJI, Ivory Coast (Reuters) -This cocoa-growing settlement was all but destroyed last year by Ivorian forest agents, leaving farmers to rake through their beans amid broken concrete and other remnants.

“They set the whole village on fire,” said Alexis Kouassi Akpoue, describing the day in January 2020 when the agents raided the settlement in Rapides Grah, a protected forest, where he had illicitly planted cocoa with thousands of other farmers. “The next morning at 5 o’clock they sent in the bulldozers.”

Yet when Reuters returned to the village a year later, business was again thriving. Farmers dried and bagged beans among the demolished buildings as buyers hunted for quality cocoa, much of it destined for use in chocolate bars and candies made in Europe.

The government of Ivory Coast, the world’s top cocoa-growing country, has been cracking down on cultivators after decades of intensive and often illicit farming decimated its tropical forests. Leading chocolate and cocoa companies are meanwhile monitoring their own supply chains for illicitly grown cocoa.

But the conservation efforts are falling short, European Union officials say.

That’s one reason the bloc’s executive arm, the European Commission, proposed legislation on Wednesday that would compel companies to find and fix environmental and human rights risks in their international supply chains – or face penalties. Companies would be restricted from sourcing beans grown on land deforested after a certain date, which is to be set by the law.

“Voluntary initiatives by companies to stop deforestation have largely failed,” said EU Parliament member Delara Burkhardt. Though not finalized, the legislation is expected to pass in some form as soon as 2023.

Chocolate and cocoa companies say they support the new regulations but dispute that their efforts have failed. They told Reuters their supply chain monitoring systems, including GPS mapping, satellite surveillance and third-party certification, give them assurance that the beans they source do not come from the Rapides Grah forest or other illegal farming operations.

However, the sector’s leading cocoa certification body has acknowledged that thousands of farms in protected areas received its stamp of approval in error.

In addition, purchasing documents and interviews with farmers and farmer cooperatives suggest that co-ops serving some of the chocolate industry’s biggest players – including Nestle, Mars Inc, Cargill Inc and Touton S.A. – source at least a portion of their beans from protected forests.

Reuters did not trace specific shipments of illicitly farmed cocoa to the companies. In separate statements, Cargill, Mars and Nestle said they had not knowingly purchased illegally grown cocoa. Touton did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

Tracing the origin of cocoa beans is extremely difficult, in part because co-ops regularly buy from growers who are not members. Ivory Coast’s Ministry of Water and Forests estimates 20% to 30% of the roughly 2 million tonnes of cocoa produced annually is grown illegally and that practically all those beans enter the global supply chain.

“We want that to stop,” said Water and Forests Minister Alain-Richard Donwahi.

The Ivorian government faults locals for the problem but contends multinational corporations continue to profit from deforestation and have a duty to help forests recover.

PROGRESS AND CHALLENGES

In 2017, Ivory Coast and neighboring Ghana, the world’s No. 2 cocoa producer, teamed up with dozens of companies under an initiative aimed at eliminating deforestation. A study by the University of Maryland found the two African countries reduced the rate of primary forest loss by over 50% in 2019 compared to the previous year.

Ivory Coast now aims to plant 3 billion trees on government-managed land over the next decade. Meanwhile, state forestry management company SODEFOR estimates some 1.3 million people are living illegally in protected forests, mostly farming cocoa.

Pilot-phase reforestation efforts, which include eliminating illegal settlements in the Rapides Grah forest, point to a tough road ahead for the government and farmers. Most growers are immigrants living below the United Nations poverty line of $1.90 a day.

Over the years, the 10,000 or so residents of Djigbadji – commonly known as Bandikro, or Bandit Town – chopped down the towering canopy. The 315,000-hectare forest is today covered in cocoa plantations, most of them illegal.

The proposed legislation by the EU Commission would prohibit companies that sell products in the EU from sourcing beans grown in officially protected forests like Rapides Grah, no matter when they were cleared.

Separately, under the Ivorian government’s plan to double the country’s forested area, farmers who help with reforestation can stay and maintain existing cocoa plantations for 10 to 15 years, until their trees die off.

“Listen, we have the national interest in mind,” Lt. Olivier Nogbo of SODEFOR, who is in charge of Rapides Grah’s northern half, told Reuters during an armed patrol last year, with his handful of agents dressed in camouflage and carrying AK47s.

“It’s not for 10,000 people that we’re going to allow the environment to be destroyed.”

SIGNS AMID THE RUBBLE

During an initial visit to Bandikro weeks after the January 2020 raid, Reuters scoured the remains of half a dozen demolished co-op purchasing outposts that store cocoa. It found remnants of a thriving buying hub as well as possible indications of who was purchasing the illicit beans.

At one bulldozed outpost, Reuters found a receipt book along with the sign that once hung above the door, both bearing the name of the farmer cooperative SCAES COOP-CA.

SCAES is part of the in-house sustainability programs run by Cargill and Touton, two of the world’s largest agricultural commodities traders. The companies say the programs aim to ensure their practices do not harm people or the planet. Cargill sells SCAES’ cocoa to Nestle, according to Nestle’s supply-chain disclosures on its website.

Jean-Robert Gnanago, a SCAES director and head office employee at the co-op’s headquarters in Meagui, told Reuters the co-op sold cocoa to various industry majors, including around 5,000 tonnes a year to Cargill, but denied it purchased beans inside Rapides Grah.

“If someone used our sign somewhere, that’s possible,” Gnanago said. “But we aren’t aware of it.”

In a statement, the chairman of SCAES’s board of directors, Souleymane Coulibaly, said the co-op does not buy cocoa from protected land and that it stopped sourcing from buyers who operate near high-risk areas in 2015. The statement added that the cocoa purchase receipts Reuters discovered in Bandikro predate SCAES’s move out of high-risk areas.

Cargill and Nestle did not directly address Reuters inquiries about the SCAES receipt book and sign.

Many co-ops that once operated inside Bandikro have since the January 2020 raid simply moved their purchasing outposts just outside the Rapides Grah boundary, Reuters found. But “eighty percent of the product comes from here,” said Bandikro village leader Francis Bogui, referring to the protected forest.

Bandikro’s traditional chief Phillipe Ipou Kouadio told Reuters early this year he had personally sold 120 tonnes of cocoa to a co-op called SOCAGNIPI between October 2020 and January. Several other Bandikro farmers also told Reuters they sold beans to SOCAGNIPI.

SOCAGNIPI is listed as a supplier by U.S. confectionary giant Mars, maker of M&Ms and Snickers. The co-op participates in Mars’ in-house sustainability program.

In its statement to Reuters, Mars did not address questions about SOCAGNIPI. Employees at SOCAGNIPI’S main office, in an Ivory Coast town called Gnipi 2, declined to speak to Reuters.

The co-ops named in this article were audited by independent third parties such as UTZ, a Dutch nonprofit that certifies sustainable agriculture. Auditors’ labels indicate a product has been certified as free from human rights and environmental abuses such as deforestation and child labor.

UTZ used a subcontractor called Bureau Veritas to audit SCAES in 2019. Later that year, UTZ reprimanded Bureau Veritas for poor performance. In a statement to Reuters, Rainforest Alliance, which merged with UTZ in 2018, said the reason for the reprimand is confidential.

Bureau Veritas could not be reached for comment.

After a 2019 review discovered that nearly 5,000 of its certified farms in Ivory Coast were on protected land, UTZ suspended the expansion of its certification programs in Ghana and Ivory Coast, saying it wanted to focus on improving the quality of current certification.

‘GREATER ASSURANCE’

Mars, Nestle and Cargill said they use GPS technology to map farms belonging to cooperatives with which they partner, making sure their boundaries don’t overlap with protected areas. Cargill said it monitors those farms via satellites that alert it in real time to forest loss.

In separate statements, Cargill and Nestle said they source beans from SCAES COOP-CA and that the co-op participates in their in-house sustainability programs. Cargill said audits of the co-op had not found evidence it buys from protected land.

Mars and Cargill both said they have yield estimates for farms belonging to co-ops in their sustainability programs. If yields are high compared to estimates, this can result in supply-chain audits.

Cargill and Nestle said the co-ops with which they partner also tag and bar-code the sacks of beans they get from individual farmers.

This “gives us greater assurance that beans come from known and mapped farms,” Cargill said.

(Reporting by Joe Bavier and Ange Aboa in Djigbadji, Ivory Coast, and Maytaal Angel in London. Editing by Julie Marquis and Alexandra Zavis)

NASA’s astrobiology rover Perseverance makes historic Mars landing

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – NASA’s science rover Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology laboratory ever sent to another world, streaked through the Martian atmosphere on Thursday and landed safely on the floor of a vast crater, its first stop on a search for traces of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.

Mission managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles burst into applause and cheers as radio signals confirmed that the six-wheeled rover had survived its perilous descent and arrived within its target zone inside Jezero Crater, site of a long-vanished Martian lake bed.

The robotic vehicle sailed through space for nearly seven months, covering 293 million miles (472 million km) before piercing the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour (19,000 km per hour) to begin its approach to touchdown on the planet’s surface.

The spacecraft’s self-guided descent and landing during a complex series of maneuvers that NASA dubbed “the seven minutes of terror” stands as the most elaborate and challenging feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight.

“It really is the beginning of a new era,” NASA’s associate administrator for science, Thomas Zurbuchen, said earlier in the day during NASA’s webcast of the event.

The landing represented the riskiest part of two-year, $2.7 billion endeavor whose primary aim is to search for possible fossilized signs of microbes that may have flourished on Mars some 3 billion years ago, when the fourth planet from the sun was warmer, wetter and potentially hospitable to life.

Scientists hope to find biosignatures embedded in samples of ancient sediments that Perseverance is designed to extract from Martian rock for future analysis back on Earth – the first such specimens ever collected by humankind from another planet.

Two subsequent Mars missions are planned to retrieve the samples and return them to NASA in the next decade.

Thursday’s landing came as a triumph for a pandemic-weary United States in the grips of economic dislocation caused by the COVID-19 public health crisis.

SEARCH FOR ANCIENT LIFE

NASA scientists have described Perseverance as the most ambitious of nearly 20 U.S. missions to Mars dating back to the Mariner spacecraft’s 1965 fly-by.

Larger and packed with more instruments than the four Mars rovers preceding it, Perseverance is set to build on previous findings that liquid water once flowed on the Martian surface and that carbon and other minerals altered by water and considered precurors to the evolution of life were present.

Perseverance’s payload also includes demonstration projects that could help pave the way for eventual human exploration of Mars, including a device to convert the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into pure oxygen.

The box-shaped tool, the first built to extract a natural resource of direct use to humans from an extraterrestrial environment, could prove invaluable for future human life support on Mars and for producing rocket propellant to fly astronauts home.

Another experimental prototype carried by Perseverance is a miniature helicopter designed to test the first powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet. If successful, the 4-pound (1.8-kg) helicopter could lead to low-altitude aerial surveillance of distant worlds, officials said.

The daredevil nature of the rover’s descent to the Martian surface, at a site that NASA described as both tantalizing to scientists and especially hazardous for landing, was a momentous achievement in itself.

The multi-stage spacecraft carrying the rover soared into the top of Martian atmosphere at nearly 16 times the speed of sound on Earth, angled to produce aerodynamic lift while jet thrusters adjusted its trajectory.

A jarring, supersonic parachute inflation further slowed the descent, giving way to deployment of a rocket-powered “sky crane” vehicle that flew to a safe landing spot, lowered the rover on tethers, then flew off to crash a safe distance away.

Perseverance’s immediate predecessor, the rover Curiosity, landed in 2012 and remains in operation, as does the stationary lander InSight, which arrived in 2018 to study the deep interior of Mars.

Last week, separate probes launched by the United Arab Emirates and China reached Martian orbit. NASA has three Mars satellites still in orbit, along with two from the European Space Agency.

(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Will Dunham)

UAE’s Hope Probe enters orbit in first Arab Mars mission

By Lisa Barrington

DUBAI (Reuters) – The United Arab Emirates’ first mission to Mars reached the red planet and entered orbit on Tuesday after a seven-month, 494 million-km (307 million-mile) journey, allowing it to start sending data about the Martian atmosphere and climate.

The Mars program is part of the UAE’s efforts to develop its scientific and technological capabilities and reduce its reliance on oil. The UAE Space Agency, the fifth globally to reach the planet, even has a plan for a Mars settlement by 2117.

“Contact with #HopeProbe has been established again. The Mars Orbit Insertion is now complete,” said the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre, where the ruler of Dubai and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi were present to receive the news.

The attempt had a 50% chance of failing, Dubai’s ruler and UAE Vice President Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum had said. To enter Mars’ orbit, the probe needed to burn around half its 800 kg (1,760 lbs) of onboard fuel to slow down enough not to overshoot, the most dangerous part of the journey.

“Today is the start of a new chapter in Arab history … of trust in our capability to compete with other nations and people,” Sheikh Mohammed tweeted after the probe entered orbit. “The UAE will celebrate its Golden Jubilee with science, culture and inspiration because we aim to build a model of development.”

This year marks 50 years since independence from Britain and the founding of the UAE federation, which groups seven emirates, including Dubai. Mars probes launched by China and NASA just after the UAE’s lift-off in July are also set to reach the planet this month.

MARTIAN ATMOSPHERE

The Emirates Mars Mission, which has cost around $200 million, launched the Hope Probe from a Japanese space center. It aims to provide a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere for the first time, studying daily and seasonal changes.

Minister of State for Advanced Technology and chair of the UAE Space Agency Sarah al-Amiri told Reuters it would take a few weeks to start collecting a mixture of data and images, which could be made publicly available as early as September.

“It’s an endeavor in developing capabilities and talent in the country, it is something that has never been done before in terms of utilizing a planetary exploration mission to do this,” she said.

The UAE first announced plans for the mission in 2014 and launched a National Space Program in 2017 to develop local expertise. Its population of 9.4 million, most of whom are foreign workers, lacks the scientific and industrial base of the big spacefaring nations.

Hazza al-Mansouri became the first Emirati in space in 2019 when he flew to the International Space Station.

To develop and build the Hope Probe, Emiratis and Dubai’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) worked with U.S. educational institutions.

(Reporting by Lisa Barrington; Editing by Alexandra Hudson, Kevin Liffey and Alex Richardson)

Mars ready for its close-up: China releases space probe’s first image

BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s maiden space exploration mission to Mars has captured its first image of the red planet, the space agency said on Friday, some six months after the probe left Earth.

The uncrewed Tianwen-1 took the picture at a distance of around 2.2 million km (1.4 million miles) from Mars, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA), which supplied a black-and-white image.

The probe is now only half that distance away from Mars and around 184 million km from Earth after 197 days of the mission, the CNSA said in a statement, adding that its systems were in good condition.

The Tianwen-1 was launched in July from China’s southern Hainan island and expected to reach the orbit of Mars this month. In May, it will try to land in Utopia Planitia, a plain in the northern hemisphere, and deploy a rover to explore for 90 days.

If successful, the Tianwen-1 will make China the first country to orbit, land and deploy a rover in its inaugural mission to Mars, further boosting China’s space credentials after it last year became the first nation to bring back samples from the moon since the 1970s.

China previously made a Mars bid in 2011 with Russia, but the Russian spacecraft carrying the probe failed to exit Earth’s orbit and disintegrated over the Pacific Ocean.

(Reporting by Ryan Woo; writing by Tom Daly; editing by Nick Macfie)

China launches its first unmanned mission to Mars

By Ryan Woo

WENCHANG, China (Reuters) – China successfully launched an unmanned probe to Mars on Thursday in its first independent mission to another planet, in a display of its technological prowess and ambition to join an elite club of space-faring nations.

China’s largest carrier rocket, the Long March 5 Y-4, blasted off with the probe at 12:41 p.m. (0441 GMT) from Wenchang Space Launch Center on the southern island of Hainan.

In 2020, Mars is at its closest to Earth, at a distance of about 55 million km (34 million miles), in a window of about a month that opens once every 26 months.

The probe is expected to reach Mars in February where it will attempt to land in Utopia Planitia, a vast plain in the northern hemisphere, and deploy a rover to explore the planet for 90 days.

If successful, the Tianwen-1, or “Questions to Heaven”, the name of a poem written two millennia ago, will make China the first country to orbit, land and deploy a rover in its inaugural mission.

There will be challenges ahead as the craft nears Mars, Liu Tongjie, spokesman for the mission, told reporters ahead of the launch.

“When arriving in the vicinity of Mars, it is very critical to decelerate,” he warned.

Liu said the probe would orbit Mars for about two and a half months and look for an opportunity to enter its atmosphere and make a soft landing.

“Entering, deceleration and landing (EDL) is a very difficult (process),” he said.

Since 1960, half of all the 50-plus missions to Mars including flybys failed, due to technical problems.

China previously made a Mars bid in 2011 with Russia, but the Russian spacecraft carrying the probe failed to exit the Earth’s orbit and disintegrated over the Pacific Ocean.

Eight spacecraft – American, European and Indian – are either orbiting Mars or on its surface with other missions underway or planned.

The United Arab Emirates launched a mission to Mars on Monday, an orbiter that will study the planet’s atmosphere.

NEW SINO-U.S. FRICTIONS?

The United States may launch a probe as soon as end-July to Mars. It will deploy a rover called Perseverance, the biggest, heaviest, most advanced vehicle sent to the Red Planet by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

NASA’s InSight is currently probing the interior of Mars on a plain called Elysium Planitia. Curiosity, a car-sized rover deployed by NASA, is studying soil and rocks in Gale Crater, searching for the building blocks of life.

Asked if Tianwen-1 would present new frictions with the United States, Liu told Reuters the Chinese mission is a scientific exploration project not to compete with anyone but cooperate with each other.

“From our point of view, Mars is large enough for multiple countries to explore and carry out missions,” Liu said in an interview, when asked if there was a chance the Chinese rover would meet with Curiosity and InSight.

Liu declined to give a cost estimate for China’s mission.

China’s probe will carry 13 scientific instruments to observe the planet’s atmosphere and surface, searching for signs of water and ice.

“Scientists believe there was an ancient ocean in the southern Utopia Planitia. At a place where an ancient ocean and land meet, scientists hope to make a lot of discoveries,” Liu said.

(Reporting by Ryan Woo in Wenchang; Additional reporting by Liangping Gao in Beijing; Writing by Jane Wardell and Gabriel Crossley; Editing by Neil Fullick, Robert Birsel, William Maclean)

Ten years after ‘suicide’ mission, NASA thirsts for lunar water

By Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A decade after NASA sent a rocket crashing into the moon’s south pole, spewing a plume of debris that revealed vast reserves of ice beneath the barren lunar surface, the space agency is racing to pick up where its little-remembered project left off.

The so-called LCROSS mission was hastily carried out 10 years ago Wednesday in a complex orbital dance of two “suicide” spacecraft and one mapping satellite. It proved a milestone in the discovery of a natural lunar resource that could be key to NASA’s plans for renewed human exploration of the moon and ultimately visits to Mars and beyond.

“The LCROSS mission was a game changer,” NASA’s chief Jim Bridenstine told Reuters, adding that once water had been found the United States “should have immediately as a nation changed our direction to the moon so we could figure out how to use it.”

The agency now has the chance to follow up on the pioneering mission, after Vice President Mike Pence in March ordered NASA to land humans on the lunar surface by 2024, accelerating a goal to colonize the moon as a staging ground for eventual missions to Mars.

Bridenstine says the moon holds billions of tons of water ice, although the exact amount and whether it’s present in large chunks of ice or combined with the lunar soil remains unknown. To find out before astronauts arrive on the moon, NASA is working with a handful of companies to put rovers on the lunar surface by 2022.

“We need next to get on the surface with a rover to prospect for water, drill into it, and determine how suitable it is for extraction,” said Jack Burns, director of the Network for Exploration and Space Science at the University of Colorado.

Instead of launching expensive fuel loads from Earth, scientists say the lunar water could be extracted and broken down into its two main components, hydrogen and oxygen, potentially turning the moon into a fuel arsenal for missions to deeper parts of the solar system.

OPEN KIMONO

Weeks before the LCROSS impact booster struck the moon’s south pole, the mission’s development timeline “was a bad rush to the finish line,” Tony Colaprete, principal investigator for LCROSS, told Reuters.

“We wanted to make as large of a hole as possible to get as much materials out of the shadows and into the sunlight,” Colaprete said, describing an unusually fast-paced program using technology that had never been used in space before.

Engineers and mission leaders used the business phrase “open kimono” about disclosing company information to characterize the program’s breakneck development speed and the need for clear and open lines of communication between contractors and NASA.

“That almost became a mantra for the project,” Colaprete said.

The current lunar program is also “forcing some cultural changes” at NASA, he added, which has undergone a series of high-level management changes and delays with the agency’s commercial crew program, a public-private effort to resume U.S. human spaceflight for the first time since 2011.

“People are coming together in a way like they did on LCROSS.”

(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Richard Pullin)

Newfound comet likely an ‘interstellar visitor,’ scientists say

Comet C/2019 Q4 is imaged by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii's Big Island September 10, 2019. NASA/JPL/Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope/Handout via REUTERS

By Joey Roulette

(Reuters) – A newly discovered comet hurtling toward the orbit of Mars has scientists scurrying to confirm whether it came from outside the solar system, a likely prospect that would make it the second such interstellar object observed in our planetary neighborhood.

The trajectory of the comet, first detected by Crimean astronomer Gennady Borisov, follows a highly curved path barreling in the sun’s direction at unusually high speeds, evidence that it originated beyond the solar system.

“On our team we’ve been scrambling here at the University of Hawaii to get observations to make position measurements,” said Karen Meech, an astronomer at the university whose team concluded that the object’s size and tail of gas classify it as a comet.

“Every time a new comet is discovered, everybody starts to try and get data so that you can get the orbit,” Meech told Reuters, adding that her researchers “all are 100 percent convinced that this really, truly is interstellar.”

The comet, an apparent amalgam of ice and dust, is expected to make its closest approach to the sun on Dec. 8, putting it 190 million miles (300 million km) from Earth, on a route believed unique to such objects of interstellar origin.

Once confirmed interstellar, the comet – dubbed C/2019 Q4 by astronomers – would become only the second such body ever observed by scientists.

The first was a cigar-shaped comet dubbed ‘Oumuamua – a name of Hawaiian origin meaning a messenger from afar arriving first – that sailed into our planetary neighborhood in 2017, prompting initial speculation that it may have been an alien spacecraft. Astronomers soon reached a consensus that it was not.

Unlike ‘Oumuamua, which visited the solar system for only a week, the newfound comet will linger near Mars’ orbit for almost a year, giving scientists ample time to characterize its chemical signatures and seek further clues about its origin.

“The high velocity indicates not only that the object likely originated from outside our solar system, but also that it will leave and head back to interstellar space,” said Davide Farnocchia, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

(Reporting by Joey Roulette in Washington; Editing by Steve Gorman and Leslie Adler)

Explainer: NASA aims to build on moon as a way station for Mars

FILE PHOTO: Tourists take pictures of a NASA sign at the Kennedy Space Center visitors complex in Cape Canaveral, Florida April 14, 2010. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo

By Joey Roulette

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) – Unlike the Apollo program that put astronauts on the moon 50 years ago, NASA is gearing up for a long term presence on Earth’s satellite that the agency says will eventually enable humans to reach Mars.

“Now, NASA is working to build a sustainable, open architecture that returns humanity to our nearest neighbor,” Jim Bridenstine, the administrator of the U.S. space agency, said in a statement to a Senate committee on Wednesday.

“We are building for the long term, going to the Moon to stay, and moving beyond to Mars.”

The next manned mission to the moon will require leaps in robotic technologies and a plan for NASA to work with private companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to help cut the cost of space travel.

Using NASA’s Space Launch System, a heavy-lift rocket being built for a debut flight in late 2020, the agency is aiming to return humans to the moon by 2024 in an accelerated timeline set in March by the Trump administration.

No humans have launched from U.S. soil since the space shuttle program ended in 2011.

NASA officials say exploration of the moon and Mars are intertwined, with the moon becoming a testbed for Mars and providing an opportunity to demonstrate new technologies that could help build self-sustaining extraterrestrial outposts.

We are working right now, in fact, to put together a comprehensive plan on how we would conduct a Mars mission using the technologies that we will be proving at the moon,” Bridenstine told reporters on Monday, adding that a mission to the Red Planet could come as soon as 2033.

Technologies that can mine the moon’s subsurface water ice to sustain astronaut crews, but also to be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen for use as a rocket propellant, could be crucial for missions to Mars. The planet is reachable in months-long missions when at its closest orbital approach of 35.8 million miles from Earth’s utilization versus curiosity,” said roboticist and research professor at Carnegie Mellon University William Whittaker, comparing the Artemis program, as the new lunar mission has been dubbed, with Apollo. Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo and goddess of the moon in Greek mythology.

POLITICAL PRIORITIES

The last manned mission to the moon was almost a half-century ago in 1972, when Cold War-era tensions underscored President John F. Kennedy’s push to prove technologies that landed the first humans on the lunar surface.

“That’s 50 years of non-progress; I think we all ought to be a little ashamed that we can’t do better than that,” said Buzz Aldrin, who joined Neil Armstrong in walking on the moon on July 20, 1969.

Bridenstine said shifting political priorities were the key reason NASA had not returned to the surface of Earth’s natural satellite since then. “If it wasn’t for the political risk, we would be on the moon right now,” said the NASA chief, who is working to woo Republican and Democratic lawmakers to approve additional taxpayer funds for the program.

Development of NASA’s flagship rocket, Space Launch System, whose main contractor is Boeing Co, is taking years longer than expected with cost overruns of nearly $2 billion, a federal audit released in June found. Those delays could push the rocket’s first launch to June 2021, potentially endangering NASA’s plan to reach the moon by 2024.

“Cost and schedule matter,” Bridenstine said. “So we are working rapidly to put together a team that can assess the cost and schedule of these programs and create a realistic baseline that we can work toward.”

Bridenstine, under mounting pressure to meet the White House’s 2024 deadline, demoted two longtime heads of NASA’s human exploration division last week in a slew of administrative shakeups amid dwindling congressional support for the lunar initiative.

Charlie Duke, who piloted the lunar-landing module during the last lunar mission, Apollo 16, said leadership in the Apollo missions was “bold without being careless.”

“Don’t be so risk-averse that you don’t fly,” he said.

He added that the decision to put astronauts on top of a massive Saturn V rocket, the launch vehicle used by NASA for the Apollo program, “was a very gutsy call. They went through it carefully and they determined it was OK.”

(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Tom Brown)

NASA’s InSight lands on Mars to peer into planet’s deep interior

James Bridenstine (L), Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), speaks along Michael Watkins, JPL Director, Project Manager Tom Hoffman and scientists Bruce Banerdt, Andrew Klesh and Elizabeth Barrett after the landing of spacecraft InSight on the surface of Mars, in Pasadena, California, U.S. November 26, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

By Steve Gorman

PASADENA, Calif. (Reuters) – NASA’s InSight spacecraft, the first robotic lander designed to study the deep interior of a distant world, touched down safely on the surface of Mars on Monday with instruments to detect planetary seismic rumblings never measured anywhere but Earth.

Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles burst into cheers, applause and hugs as they received signals confirming InSight’s arrival on Martian soil – a vast, barren plain near the planet’s equator – shortly before 3 p.m. EST.

Minutes later, JPL controllers received a fuzzy “selfie” photograph of the probe’s new surroundings on the Red Planet, showing the edge of one lander leg beside a rock.

Watch parties for NASA’s live television coverage of the event were held at museums, libraries and other public venues around the world, including Times Square, where a small crowd of 40 or 50 people braved pouring rain to witness the broadcast on a giant TV screen affixed to a wall of the Nasdaq building.

InSight’s descent and landing, consisting of about 1,000 individual steps that had to be flawlessly executed to achieve success, capped a six-month journey of 301 million miles (548 million km) from Earth.

The spacecraft was launched from California in May on its nearly $1 billion mission. It will spend the next 24 months – about one Martian year – collecting a wealth of data to unlock mysteries about how Mars formed and, by extension, the origins of the Earth and other rocky planets of the inner solar system.

“The reason why we’re digging into Mars is to better understand not just Mars, but the Earth itself,” said JPL’s Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator.

A central question is why Mars, once a relatively warm, wet planet, evolved so differently from Earth into a mostly dry, desolate and cold world, devoid of life.

The answers are believed to have something to do with the as-yet unexplained absence, since Mars’ ancient past, of either a magnetic field or tectonic activity, said NASA’s chief scientist James Green.

While Earth’s tectonics and other forces have erased most evidence of its early history, much of Mars – about one-third the size of Earth – has seemingly remained largely static, creating a geologic time machine for scientists, Green said.

InSight and the next Mars rover mission, scheduled for 2020, are both seen as precursors for eventual human exploration of Mars, an objective that NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said on Monday might be achieved as early as the mid-2030s.

DAREDEVIL LANDING

InSight was the eighth spacecraft to have landed successfully on Mars, all of them operated by NASA.

The three-legged lander streaked into the thin Martian atmosphere at 12,300 miles (19,795 km) per hour and plunged 77 miles to the surface within seven minutes, slowed to a gentle touchdown by atmospheric friction, a giant parachute and retro rockets.

The stationary probe was programmed to pause for 16 minutes for the dust to settle, literally, around its landing site, before two disc-shaped solar panels were to be unfurled like wings to provide power to the spacecraft.

But scientists did not expect to verify successful deployment of the solar arrays for at least several hours.

The 880-pound (360 kg) InSight – its name is short for Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport – marks the 21st U.S.-launched Mars mission, dating back to the Mariner fly-bys of the 1960s.

Nearly two dozen other Mars missions have been sent from other nations.

InSight’s new home in the middle of Elysium Planitia, a wide, relatively smooth expanse close to the planet’s equator, is roughly 373 miles (600 km) from the 2012 landing spot of the car-sized Mars rover Curiosity, the last spacecraft sent to the Red Planet by NASA.

PEERING BENEATH SURFACE

InSight’s primary instrument is a French-built seismometer, designed to record the slightest vibrations from “marsquakes” and meteor impacts around the planet. The device, to be placed on the surface by the lander’s robot arm, is so sensitive it can measure a seismic wave just one half the radius of a hydrogen atom.

Scientists expect to see a dozen to 100 marsquakes during the mission, producing data to help them deduce the depth, density and composition of the planet’s core, the rocky mantle surrounding it, and the outermost layer, the crust.

The NASA Viking probes of the mid-1970s were equipped with seismometers, too, but they were bolted to the top of the landers, a design that proved largely ineffective.

Apollo missions to the moon brought seismometers to the lunar surface as well. But InSight is expected to yield the first meaningful data on planetary seismic tremors beyond Earth.

A second instrument, furnished by Germany’s space agency, consists of a drill to burrow as much as 16 feet (5 meters) underground, pulling behind it a rope-like thermal probe to measure heat flowing from inside the planet.

Meanwhile, a radio transmitter will send back signals tracking Mars’ subtle rotational wobble to reveal the size of the planet’s core and possibly whether it remains molten.

NASA officials say it will take two to three months for the main instruments to be deployed and put into operation.

The landing data and initial photograph were relayed to Earth from two briefcase-sized satellites that were launched along with InSight and were flying past Mars as it reached its destination. The twin “Cubesats” tagging along for the flight to Mars represented the first deep-space use of a miniature satellite technology that space engineers see as a promising low-cost alternative to some larger, more complex vehicles.

(Reporting and writing by Steve Gorman in Pasadena; Additional reporting by Pavithra George in Pasadena; Editing by Michael Perry and Tom Brown)