Space Stories: Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is Back, Reclaiming More Water on the ISS, and Directly Imaging an Exoplanet

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—NASA: “NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Phones Home“

The 52nd flight of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is now in the official mission logbook as a success. The flight took place back on April 26, but mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California lost contact with the helicopter as it descended toward the surface for landing. The Ingenuity team expected the communications dropout because a hill stood between the helicopter’s landing location and the Perseverance rover’s position, blocking communication between the two. 

—Phys.org: “NASA Achieves Water Recovery Milestone on International Space Station“

Astronauts on interplanetary missions will be a bit less thirsty after a new NASA system succeeded at reclaiming 98% of waste water aboard the International Space Station (ISS) by converting things like urine into a drinkable state. Future crewed deep space missions that will last months or even years will be very different from any that have come before. Until now, astronauts have either carried their own supplies along or relied on regular visits from cargo ships. As to waste products, these were simply disposed of in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, deep space missions don’t have that luxury.

—SCI.News: “Astronomers Directly Image Jupiter-Like Exoplanet around Nearby Young Star“

AF Leporis is a bright F8V star located about 87.5 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Lepus. Also known as AF Lep, HD 35850, HIP 25486 and HR 1817, the star has an age of 24 million years and a mass of 1.2 solar masses. The star hosts a young exoplanet, AF Leporis b (AF Lep b), which is located about 8 times the Earth-Sun distance and is among the first ever discovered using a technique called astrometry. This method measures the subtle movements of a host star over many years to help astronomers determine whether hard-to-see orbiting companions, including planets, are gravitationally tugging at it.

Space Quote: NASA’s Mars Simulator Has Long-term Guests

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Interior of NASA’s Mars Simulator, the Mars Dune Alpha. (NASA)

“They are about to embark on an analog mission that encompasses operations, logistics, and research of living and working on Mars. The importance of this study cannot be overstated…NASA scientists will learn critical insights on the physical and behavioral aspects of a mission on Mars.”

-Statement by Judith Hayes, NASA’s Chief Science Officer in the Human Health and Performance Directorate, as quoted in Universe Today. The four member “crew” entered the simulator last week and will live in the 1,700 square foot facility for the next year. The year-long mission is one of three planned by NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Texas.

Study Findings: Drift of Earth’s Pole Confirms Groundwater Depletion as a Significant Contributor to Global Sea Level Rise 1993–2010

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, NASA GSFC

Geophysical Research Letters (plain language) abstract:

Melting of polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers has been understood as a main cause of sea level rise associated with contemporary climate warming. It has been proposed that an important anthropogenic contribution is sea level rise due to groundwater depletion resulting from irrigation. A climate model estimate for the period 1993–2010 gives total groundwater depletion of 2,150 GTon, equivalent to global sea level rise of 6.24 mm. However, direct observational evidence supporting this estimate has been lacking. In this study, we show that the model estimate of water redistribution from aquifers to the oceans would result in a drift of Earth’s rotational pole, about 78.48 cm toward 64.16°E. In combination with other well-understood sources of water redistribution, such as melting of polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers, good agreement with PM observations serves as an independent confirmation of the groundwater depletion model estimate.

Citation: Ki-Weon Seo, Dongryeol Ryu, Jooyoung Eom, Taewhan Jeon, Jae-Seung Kim, Kookhyoun Youm, Jianli Chen, Clark R. Wilson. Drift of Earth’s Pole Confirms Groundwater Depletion as a Significant Contributor to Global Sea Level Rise 1993–2010. Geophysical Research Letters  (2023).
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abo6192

Study-related stories:

Note: We have been unintentionally terra-forming the Earth while looking at Mars and elsewhere to find candidates for intentional terra-forming. I believe we are learning that it is much easier to break a working system than create a new system from scratch.

$10 Billion for Some Martian Rocks?

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Hole left by the Perserverance rover as it collected its 14th sample of Martian rock. (NASA)

A recent ARS Technica article, “NASA’s Mars Sample Return Has a New Price Tag—and it’s Colossal,” discusses the potential plans to retrieve rocks from the Martian surface at a total cost of $10 billion. This has the potential to crowd out other important NASA projects and may need to be reconsidered at a time of budget constraints.

NASA has been seeking innovative solutions from the private sector to lower the retrieval costs, but the mission may be on hold for some time. Getting rocks from the Moon and even an asteroid seems easy by comparison.

Maybe NASA needs to seen another private sector solution – a study of Martian rocks on the surface of Mars. It may be easier to land a laboratory and conduct long-term experiments in situ rather than attempting a journey back to Earth. It is something to consider for now and may give us quicker access to the rocks.

Of course, we can always wait until Elon Musk lands on the Red Planet and retrieves them.

Podcast: Should We Be Talking to the Stars (or Exoplanets, to be More Precise)?

Posted on by onespaceman2000

I recommend you tune into another episode from The Planetary Society’s podcast Planetary Radio. In the episode, Space Policy Edition: The Policy Implications of Active SETI, we hear a discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of an active SETI program, and whether we can even cease outreach to the neighboring systems given what has already been transmitted and the nature of our world today.

The guest on the episode is Jacob Haqq Misra, Senior Research Investigator at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. He is the author of a new book, Sovereign Mars: Transforming Our Values Through Space Settlement, though his main points related to our SETI program.

For instance, whether or not people support an active or passive SETI program often depends on whether we believe in benevolent or destructive aliens. Of course, the matter is unknowable until it happens, yet fraught with fears based on what we know about ourselves and our own exploration.

The discussion also discussed the presentation of SETI in films, such as Contact, as well as the definition of intelligence itself, be it whales (remember Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home?) or even ChatGPT. And we are already past the point of turning off our “active outreach” given that interested aliens are probably looking for both bio-signatures and techno-signatures, which we are creating without any thought. Astronomers are currently searching for such signatures among the exoplanets, so it would make sense the same type of search is being focused on our solar system.

Plenty of food for thought. Enjoy the show.

Credit: University Press of Kansas