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Enlarge / Artist's view of what InSight looked like after landing. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Mars appears to be a frozen expanse of red dust, gaping craters, and rocky terrain on the outside—but what lies beneath its wind-blasted surface? NASA’s InSight lander might have discovered this before it took its proverbial last breaths in a dust storm.
Whether the core of Mars is solid or liquid has been long debated. While there is no way to observe the Martian core directly, InSight tried. Its seismometer, SEIS, was the first instrument to find possible evidence of a liquid core. In the meantime, its RISE (Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment) instrument had been measuring minuscule changes in the planet’s rotation as it orbited, “wobbles” in its axis caused by the push and pull of the Sun’s gravity.
“Our analysis of InSight’s radio tracking data argues against the existence of a solid inner core and reveals the shape of the core, indicating that there are internal mass anomalies deep within the mantle,” write the researchers behind the instrument in a study recently published in Nature.
Elon Musk, Mars, and bioethics: is sending astronauts into space ethical?
The recent crash of the largest-ever space rocket, Starship, developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, has certainly somewhat disrupted optimism about the human mission to Mars that is being prepared for the next few years. It is worth raising the issue of the safety of future participants in long-term space missions, especially missions to Mars, on the background of this disaster. And it is not just about safety from disasters like the one that happened to Musk. Protection from the negative effects of prolonged flight in zero gravity, protection from cosmic radiation, as well as guaranteeing sufficiently high crew productivity over the course of a multi-year mission also play an important role.
Fortunately, no one was killed in the aforementioned crash, as it was a test rocket alone without a crew. However, past disasters in which astronauts died, such as the Space Shuttle Challenger and Space Shuttle Columbia disasters, remind us that it is the seemingly very small details that determine life and death. So far, 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts have died in space flights. 11 more have died during testing and training on Earth. It is worth mentioning that space flights are peacekeeping missions, not military operations. They are carried out relatively infrequently and by a relatively small number of people.
It is also worth noting the upcoming longer and more complex human missions in the near future, such as the mission to Mars. The flight itself, which is expected to last several months, is quite a challenge, and disaster can happen both during takeoff on Earth, landing on Mars, and then on the way back to Earth. And then there are further risks that await astronauts in space.
The first is exposure to galactic cosmic radiation and solar energetic particles events, especially during interplanetary flight, when the crew is no longer protected by both Earth’s magnetic field and a possible shelter on Mars. Protection from cosmic radiation for travel to Mars is a major challenge, and 100% effective protective measures are still lacking. Another challenge remains being in long-term zero-gravity conditions during the flight, followed by altered gravity on Mars. Bone loss and muscle atrophy are the main, but not only, negative effects of being in these states. Finally, it is impossible to ignore the importance of psychological factors related to stress, isolation, being in an enclosed small space, distance from Earth.
A human mission to Mars, which could take about three years, brings with it a new type of danger not known from the previous history of human space exploration. In addition to the aforementioned amplified impact of factors already known—namely microgravity, cosmic radiation, and isolation—entirely new risk factors are emerging. One of them is the impossibility of evacuating astronauts in need back to Earth, which is possible in missions carried out at the International Space Station. It seems that even the best-equipped and trained crew may not be able to guarantee adequate assistance to an injured or ill astronaut, which could lead to her death—assuming that care on Earth would guarantee her survival and recovery. Another problem is the delay in communication, which will reach tens of minutes between Earth and Mars. This situation will affect the degree of autonomy of the crew, but also their responsibility. Wrong decisions, made under conditions of uncertainty, can have not only negative consequences for health and life, but also for the entire mission.
“It is worth raising the question of the ethicality of the decision to send humans into such a dangerous environment.”
Thus, we can see that a future human mission to Mars will be very dangerous, both as a result of factors already known but intensified, as well as new risk factors. It is worth raising the question of the ethicality of the decision to send humans into such a dangerous environment. The ethical assessment will depend both on the effectiveness of available countermeasures against harmful factors in space and also on the desirability and justification for the space missions themselves.
Military ethics and bioethics may provide some analogy here. In civilian ethics and bioethics, we do not accept a way of thinking and acting that would mandate the subordination of the welfare, rights, and health of the individual to the interests of the group. In military ethics, however, this way of thinking is accepted, formally in the name of the higher good. Thus, if the mission to Mars is a civilian mission, carried out on the basis of values inherent in civilian ethics and bioethics rather than military ethics, it may be difficult to justify exposing astronauts to serious risks of death, accident, and disease.
One alternative may be to significantly postpone the mission until breakthrough advances in space technology and medicine can eliminate or significantly reduce the aforementioned risk factors. Another alternative may be to try to improve astronauts through biomedical human enhancements. Just as in the army there are known methods of improving the performance of soldiers through pharmacological means, analogous methods could be applied to future participants in a mission to Mars. Perhaps more radical, and thus controversial, methods such as gene editing would be effective, assuming that gene editing of selected genes can enhance resistance to selected risk factors in space.
But the idea of genetically modifying astronauts, otherwise quite commonsensical, given also the cost of such a mission, as well as the fact that future astronauts sent to Mars would likely be considered representative of the great effort of all humanity, raises questions about the justification for such a mission. What do the organizers of a mission to Mars expect to achieve? Among the goals traditionally mentioned are the scientific merits of such a mission, followed by possible commercial applications for the future. Philosophers, as well as researchers of global and existential catastrophes, often discuss the concept of space refuge, in which the salvation of the human species in the event of a global catastrophe on Earth would be possible only by settling somewhere beyond Earth. However, it seems that the real goals in our non-ideal society will be political and military.
Historically Black Morris Brown College in Atlanta has entered into an agreement with the John Marshall Law School to create a pathway for Morris Brown graduates to earn a law degree. Founded in 1933, John Marshall Law School is Atlanta’s only stand-alone law school focused on preparing talented students for legal careers in the public and private sectors.
Under the agreement, Morris Brown students will be able to seek application guidance from the Office of Admissions at John Marshall Law School and eligible applicants who meet the standard admissions criteria will receive priority law school admission.
“The partnership between John Marshall Law School and Morris Brown College will open doors for many students from underserved communities that show promise of succeeding in law school,” said Jace C. Gatewood, dean of the John Marshall Law School. “This partnership signals a change in the future of legal education where institutions work together to improve the educational opportunities for all students.”
Morris Brown College President Kevin James added that “we are ecstatic to partner with Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School. Morris Brown students now have an official pathway and opportunity to earn a juris doctorate.”
Looking deeper into the catalysts for violent crime. How an Iraqi U.S. Army interpreter became an underground drug kingpin. What plants have to teach us about life, both real and artificial. Aging, but with vitality and grace. How one Iceland town comes together to help baby puffins take their first flight, and our first-ever audience award. Here are five + one stories to kickstart your weekend reading.
Maurice Chammah | The Marshall Project | March 2, 2023 | 7,750 words
When we look at the face of a criminal in a mug shot or in a courtroom, what do we see? Many adults facing the death penalty have been shaped by childhood trauma or violence they experienced or witnessed in prison as juveniles. Mitigation specialists work to uncover traumas and dig into the personal and family histories of people on death row — not with the aim to excuse or justify their crimes, but to help paint more complete portraits of them as human beings. Maurice Chammah spends time with mitigation specialist Sara Baldwin as she works on the case of James Bernard Belcher, a man on death row for the 1996 murder of Jennifer Embry. It’s a complex story that Chammah reports and tells with great care and empathy, and highlights a little-known profession that helps to illuminate why people hurt one another and are led to violence. —CLR
Benoît Morenne | Wired | March 9, 2023 | 5,403 words
There’s an old episode of Portlandia in which the city’s mayor goes on the dark web to buy fireworks, and of course winds up buying rocket launchers instead. Buffoonery and prosthetic noses aside, that was the impression most people have always had of the dark web: a place where you could buy absolutely anything with total anonymity. Alaa Allawi was one of the people making the first part of that impression come true. After becoming a U.S. Army interpreter at age 18, Allawi developed an impressive proficiency for low-level cybershenanigans — and when he ultimately left his native Iraq for the U.S., those cybershenanigans became his way out of poverty, courtesy of selling counterfeit Xanax online. But it turned out that “total anonymity” wasn’t quite right, and after the real fentanyl in his fake pills led to overdoses and a campus cop took notice, there wasn’t a prosthetic nose big enough to save him. With precision and a relentless chronological tick-tock, Benoît Morenne details Allawi’s rise and fall, as well as the federal investigation that slowly tightened around him. Sure, you’ll find bitcoin and giant champagne bottles and Lil Wayne cameos, but the kingpin stereotypes are few and far between. This story has no heroes, anti- or otherwise. That’s the point. —PR
Amanda Gefter | Nautilus | March 7, 2023 | 4,890 words
Professor Paco Calvo used to study artificial intelligence to try and understand cognition. However, he concluded that artificial neural networks were far removed from living intelligence, stating “what we can model with artificial systems is not genuine cognition. Biological systems are doing something entirely different.” The abilities of AI have been dominating many a headline of late, making Amanda Gefter’s essay on Calvo’s theories a refreshing read. Calvo claims we have much more to learn from plants than AI. Plants sense and experience their environment, learn from it, and actively engage with the world, which he sees as the key to consciousness. His theories may be a little out there (I am not convinced neurons are not necessary for thought), but this essay did make me consider the significance of our interactions with our external environment in the thinking process. Rather than leave you with these Big Thoughts, I will end with Calco’s joyful description of plants: “Upside-down, with their ‘heads’ plunged into the soil and their limbs and sex organs sticking up and flailing around.” You will never look at your roses in the same way. —CW
Jane Miller | London Review of Books | March 16, 2023 | 1,999 words
What makes time meaningful? Is it time spent with a book? Learning something new? Maintaining your fitness routine? Doing things for others? What’s the relationship between meaningful time and being satisfied and happy? How does the definition of happiness and satisfaction change over your lifetime? If you’re anything like Jane Miller, age 90, you might ask yourself these and other questions, reflecting on the one resource we share on earth: time. At the London Review of Books, Miller ponders all this and more. “When I was 78, I wrote a book about being old. I don’t think I’d ever felt the need to swim more than twenty lengths at that time, let alone record my paltry daily achievements. Now I put letters and numbers in my diary (a sort of code) to remind me that I’ve walked at least five thousand Fitbit steps and swum a kilometre, which is forty lengths of the pool,” she writes. While I can’t relate to her need to swim a kilometer a day, I can empathize with owning a body much closer to its “best before” date than its birth and the constant need to evaluate how I spend my time. In sharing her boredom and anxieties, Miller’s given me much to think about. —KS
Cheryl Katz | Smithsonian | February 14, 2023 | 3,125 words
Every year Bloomberg Businessweek publishes what it calls the Jealousy List, featuring articles that authors wish they’d written or that editors wish they’d assigned. If I were to have my own jealousy list for 2023, this piece by Cheryl Katz would be on it. I love it so much. Seriously, drop what you’re doing and read it. Katz’s story is about a village in Iceland where, every year, residents young and old work together to save baby puffins, also known as “pufflings.” The wee birds that look like they’re wearing tuxedos often get lost leaving their burrows and struggle to fly out to sea as they’re supposed to. Enter the Puffling Patrol, which cajoles the birds into boxes and carries them to a cliff where they can catch the wind they need to migrate.” Enter the Puffling Patrol, which cajoles the birds into boxes and carry them to a cliff where they can catch the wind they need to migrate. As climate change does its worst to the earth, ushering pufflings into the sky has never been more important. I’m jealous I didn’t get to write this story. Or maybe I’m just mad I’m not in the Puffling Patrol. They get to do good for the world by communing with adorable baby birds. How often is something so essential also so joyful? BRB, Googling flights to Iceland. —SD
Here’s the piece our audience loved most this week.
Raquel Rutledge and Ken Armstrong | Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Pro Publica | November 16, 2022 | 13,808 words
This story starts with a house fire in 2013, then takes readers on a journey from the 1970s to the present, tracing the parallel yet wholly different existences of Todd Brunner, the landlord of the property, and Angelica Belen, the woman who lived there with her four young kids. Riveting and infuriating, Raquel Rutledge and Ken Armstrong’s work has been nominated for a 2023 National Magazine Award for feature writing. —SD
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Researchers have developed technology that would allow a flock of robots to explore subsurface environments on other worlds.
“Lava tubes and caves would make perfect habitats for astronauts because you don’t have to build a structure; you are shielded from harmful cosmic radiation, so all you need to do is make it pretty and cozy,” says Wolfgang Fink, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Arizona.
Fink is lead author of a new paper in Advances in Space Research that details a communication network that would link rovers, lake landers, and even submersible vehicles through a so-called mesh topology network, allowing the machines to work together as a team, independently from human input.
According to Fink and his coauthors, the approach could help address one of NASA’s Space Technology Grand Challenges by helping overcome the limited ability of current technology to safely traverse environments on comets, asteroids, moons, and planetary bodies.
In a nod to the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel,” the researchers named their patent-pending concept the “Breadcrumb-Style Dynamically Deployed Communication Network” paradigm, or DDCN.
“If you remember the book, you know how Hansel and Gretel dropped breadcrumbs to make sure they’d find their way back,” says Fink, founder and director of the Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory at Caltech and the University of Arizona. “In our scenario, the ‘breadcrumbs’ are miniaturized sensors that piggyback on the rovers, which deploy the sensors as they traverse a cave or other subsurface environment.”
Continuously monitoring their environment and maintaining awareness of where they are in space, the rovers proceed on their own, connected to each other via a wireless data connection, deploying communication nodes along the way. Once a rover senses the signal is fading but still within range, it drops a communication node, regardless of how much distance has actually passed since it placed the last node.
“One of the new aspects is what we call opportunistic deployment—the idea that you deploy the ‘breadcrumbs’ when you have to and not according to a previously planned schedule,” Fink says.
All the while, there is no need for input from the mother rover; each subordinate rover will make that determination on its own, Fink adds. The system can work in one of two ways, Fink explains. In one, the mother rover acts as a passive recipient, collecting data transmitted by the rovers doing the exploration. In the other, the mother rover acts as the orchestrator, controlling the rovers’ moves like a puppet master.
The new concept dovetails with the tier-scalable reconnaissance paradigm devised by Fink and colleagues in the early 2000s. This idea envisions a team of robots operating at different command levels—for example, an orbiter controlling a blimp, which in turn controls one or more landers or rovers on the ground.
Already, space missions have embraced this concept. For example, on Mars, the Perseverance rover is commanding Ingenuity, a robotic helicopter. A concept for another mission, which ultimately was not selected for funding, proposed sending an orbiter carrying a balloon and a lake lander to study one of the hydrocarbon seas on Saturn’s moon Titan.
The breadcrumb approach takes the idea one step further by providing a robust platform allowing robotic explorers to operate underground or even submerged in liquid environments. Such swarms of individual, autonomous robots could also aid in search and rescue efforts in the wake of natural disasters on Earth, Fink says.
Fink says the biggest challenge, apart from getting the rovers inside the subsurface environment in the first place, is to retrieve the data they record underground and bring it back to the surface. The DDCN concept allows a team of rovers to navigate even convoluted underground environments without ever losing contact to their “mother rover” on the surface. Outfitted with a light detection and ranging system, or lidar, they could even map out cave passages in all three dimensions, not unlike the drones that can be seen exploring an alien spacecraft in the movie Prometheus.
“Once deployed, our sensors automatically establish a nondirected mesh network, which means each node updates itself about each node around it,” says Fink, who first detailed the DDCN concept in a proposal to NASA in 2019.
The new research “has the potential to herald a new age of planetary and astrobiological discoveries.”
“They can switch between each other and compensate for dead spots and signal blackouts,” adds Mark Tarbell, paper coauthor and senior research scientist in Fink’s laboratory. “If some of them die, there still is connectivity through the remaining nodes, so the mother rover never loses connection to the farthest node in the network.”
The robust network of communication nodes ensures all the data collected by the robotic explorers make it back to the mother rover on the surface. Therefore, there is no need to retrieve the robots once they have done their job, says Fink, who published the idea of using groups of expendable mobile robotic surface probes as early as 2014.
“They’re designed to be expendable,” he says. “Instead of wasting resources to get them into the cave and back out, it makes more sense to have them go as far as they possibly can and leave them behind once they have fulfilled their mission, run out of power, or succumbed to a hostile environment.”
“The communication network approach introduced in this new paper has the potential to herald a new age of planetary and astrobiological discoveries,” says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, president of the German Astrobiological Society and author of many publications on extraterrestrial life. “It finally allows us to explore Martian lava tube caves and the subsurface oceans of the icy moons—places where extraterrestrial life might be present.”
The proposed concept “holds magic,” according to Victor Baker, a professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences, geosciences, and planetary sciences. “The most amazing discoveries in science come about when advances in technology provide both first-time access to a thing or place and the means of communicating what is thereby discovered to creative minds that are seeking understanding,” Baker says.
In places that call for submersible robots, the system could consist of a lander—either floating on a lake, as might be the case on Titan, or sitting on the ice atop a subsurface ocean like on Europa—that is connected to the submarine, for example through a long cable. Here the communication nodes would act as repeaters, boosting the signal in regular intervals to prevent it from degrading.
Importantly, Fink points out, the nodes have the capabilities to gather data themselves—for example measuring pressure, salinity, temperature, and other chemical and physical parameters—and to ingest the data into the cable connecting back to the lander.
“Imagine you make it all the way to Europa, you melt your way through miles of ice, make it down to the subsurface ocean, where you find yourself surrounded by alien life, but you have no way of getting data back to the surface,” he says. “That’s the scenario we need to avoid.”
Having developed the rovers and the communication technology, Fink’s group is now working on building the actual mechanism by which the rovers would deploy the communication nodes.
“Basically, we’re going to teach our ‘Hansels’ and ‘Gretels’ how to drop the breadcrumbs so they add up to a functioning mesh communication network,” Fink says.
Source: University of Arizona
The post Robots on Mars could steal a trick from Hansel and Gretel appeared first on Futurity.
Off in the southwest, the last colors of sunset lit up the rim of the sky, as a crescent Moon and two planets lined up above. It was a gorgeous scene, but one that everyone was ignoring. Instead, all eyes were focused on a bright patch of artificial light on a barrier island a couple of miles away. The lights there were focused on a small, slender needle—small enough to be hauled to the launch pad by a pickup truck.
For years, the Electron rocket and the company behind it had been stuck in limbo at the Virginia launch site, waiting on various approvals—for regulatory agencies to share enough paperwork with each other to convince everyone that the launch was safe. Then weather and the end-of-year holidays kept pushing the launch back. But on Tuesday, everything went as smoothly as it is possible to imagine, and the Electron shot to orbit almost as soon as the launch window opened.
The launch is critical for Rocket Lab, which in some ways invested the future of the company in its Virginia operations. But it's also critical for the launch site, which is billed as a spaceport but hasn't seen much traffic leaving Earth.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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