Meteorite from Mars

Meteorite from Mars

From Sotheby's:

The largest piece of Mars on Earth is now the most valuable meteorite ever sold at auction after it achieved $5.3 million in the Natural History sale during Sotheby's Geek Week.

Somebody is convinced that it came from Mars. Rocks fall out of the sky everyday, most of them are too small to notice, and most of them don't come from Mars. Assuming somebody is right, then this is a really freak occurrence. It would have to have been a big meteor to hit Mars in order to knock this rock into space where it floated for a zillion years until it got captured in Earth's gravity and plummeted to the ground in Africa. Very freaky.

I would have thought it would have rounded edges, not angular ones, being as it probably entered the Earth's atmosphere traveling at several miles per second, but whatever.

Via RT

This Is How We Get To Mars

This Is How We Get To Mars
The Space Race

The Aldrin Mars Cycler is new to me. It might work out, but right now it strikes me as extremely sketchy. And the business of using solar panels to generate power on Mars also sounds marginal. A nuclear power plant would be better. Of course, a nuclear power plant would be a big chuck of mass. Question is whether a nuclear power plant would weigh less than six acres of solar panels.

The Soviet's Secret Mars Landing (declassified)

The Soviet's Secret Mars Landing (declassified)
The Space Race

This seems to be weird Soviet stuff weekend.

DSOC - Deep Space Optical Communication

Testing Space Lasers for Deep Space Optical Communications (Mission Overview)
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The Silicon Graybeard reports on the Psyche mission. Laser communications are a staple of Science Fiction stories (sometimes referred to as tight beam communications). Radios broadcast, which means those signals can be picked up by anyone with a receiver. Microwaves are a little better, but the beam tends to spread out a bit as it goes. Laser beams spread out more slowly meaning the enemy has less chance of intercepting your communications. Lasers also give you higher data rates, as evidenced by a zillion people all connected to the same fiber optic cable, all watching different Netflix movies.

Mars or Bust

Red Dead No Redemption
exurb1a

He does a good job of laying out all the problems you are going to encounter trying to live on Mars. Mars does not look like a good candidate for colonization, but just going through the motions of setting up any kind of base there would be a good learning experience, because as we all should know, there is a good deal of difference between theory and practice. Assuming we can develop a spaceship capable of traversing interstellar differences, setting up a base on a planet in another star system is going to encounter all of the same problems we would have in setting up a base on Mars, we'd just have longer transit times.

Martian Sky

Martian Sky

A pretty snazzy SIMULATED 360-degree view of Mars at night as seen by the Perseverance rover.

Once you get outside of the Earth's atmosphere, the view of space becomes mucho bettero, as the Hubble has demonstrated. I'll be curious to see what kind of strange new worlds we will discover once the James Webb Telescope gets going.

Via The Unwanted Blog

Mars Helicopter

First Video of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in Flight, Includes Takeoff and Landing (High-Res)
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
We've been getting hints about this thing for months but they finally got it to fly. Shipped all the way from Earth, it survived the landing, got unpacked, and managed to take off, hover (and rotate if my eyes don't deceive me) and land. It's flying autonomously, the time time-lag for any signals coming from Earth is too long to be able to exert any kind of flight control. If things continue to go well, they should start doing some aerial surveys of the surrounding area. Very cool, NASA.

I don't know, but I suspect the connection between the current crawler and Earth is too thin to support video. It was probably stored on board and then piped to Earth at a reduced data rate.

Via The Unwanted Blog

Mars

Perseverance delivers new Mars surface pics, including rocks in wheel!
VideoFromSpace

It's not really a video, they are just panning and zooming across a couple of still images, but it's quick and easy enough to embed. And hey look! Little bitty Martian rocks in the wheel! What? Is that the best headline they could come up with? Whatever.

Here's an image that escaped the censors:

Alf on Mars

Proof positive there are alien life forms loose in our Solar System.

Robots Invade Mars

Rover being lowered to Martian surface

This happened a day or two ago. We should be getting more pictures shortly.