Will Mars Remain an Impossible Dream?

[Jacob Petersheim]

@SallyForth Thank you, I never heard of this Movie!

Oh, it's pretty eerie. Not to mention depressing. It positively drips with... well, I can see why it resonates so deeply with a certain demographic.

I've heard it is the middle of a trilogy of films indulging in such depression, but I don't think I've ever heard of the other two.

 

[Nancy Hart]

Why NASA's Perseverance rover keeps taking pictures of this maze on Mars (LINK)

"The maze is a calibration target — one of 10 for Perseverance's Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals instrument, otherwise known as SHERLOC. Perseverance detects organic compounds and other minerals on Mars that could indicate signs of ancient microbial life. To do that accurately, the system must be carefully calibrated, and that's where this Sherlock Holmes–inspired tool comes in."

AI says ... "According to NASA, the SHERLOC maze is solvable."

Close up of center

 

[Joe Riley]

Shocking Signs of Life Found on Mars — And It’s Not Sci-Fi Anymore

 

[Joe Riley]

Can NAA' troubled Mar ample Return mission be aved?​

Can we really outspend China...so we can say "our rock collection is bigger than yours!"

The now vetoed NASA Mars Sample Return architecture made use of a set of machines, including use of helicopters, to collect Martian soil, rock and atmospheric specimens for return to Earth. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

"There appears to be an unofficial robotic space race underway involving the Red Planet. Both the U.S. and China are scripting strategies for bringing goodies back to Earth from Mars via their respective Mars Sample Return (MSR) endeavors."

"For America, things are currently happening in real-time on Mars. NASA's Perseverance rover is busily wheeling about within the ins and outs of Jezero Crater, biting into and snatching primo chunks of Mars for eventual pick-up by a future MSR mission. But early on, for NASA, the space agency found itself caught between a Mars rock and a budgetary and timing hard place. The space agency's plans for MSR eventually rang a price tag upwards of $11 billion. Additionally, NASA estimated that samples of Mars dirt, rock, and atmosphere wouldn't be returned to Earth until 2040."
"That plan, as blueprinted by NASA and its cooperative MSR partner, the European Space Agency (ESA), was unacceptable and declared so by NASA leadership. What followed were a set of studies for NASA, from within and outside the agency, to help pinpoint avenues to cut MSR costs and shorten the calendar time for return to Earth of prime-time Mars collectibles. Now, yet another shoe is set to drop thanks to an additional review by an independent committee looking into the MSR program."

NASA wants new ideas for its troubled Mars Sample Return mission​

 

[Axel Slingerland]

Put Donald Trump and Elon Musk in a rocket and send them to Mars and see if they could survive.

 

[Jacob Petersheim]

Mars trilogy - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Mars trilogy is a series of science fiction novels by Kim Stanley Robinson that chronicles the settlement and terraforming of the planet Mars through the personal and detailed viewpoints of a wide variety of characters spanning 187 years, from 2026 to 2212. Ultimately more utopian than dystopian, the story focuses on egalitarian, sociological, and scientific advances made on Mars, while Earth suffers from overpopulation and ecological disaster.

These were good books. I could imagine a TV series based on them.