TIME - Science

SpaceX Dragon Capsule With NASA Astronauts Makes Successful Splashdown

Sun, 02 Aug 2020 19:39:16 GMT

(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — Two NASA astronauts returned to Earth on Sunday in a dramatic, retro-style splashdown, their capsule parachuting into the Gulf of Mexico to close out an unprecedented test flight by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.

It was the first splashdown by U.S. astronauts in 45 years, with the first commercially built and operated spacecraft to carry people to and from orbit. The return clears the way for another SpaceX crew launch as early as next month and possible tourist flights next year.

Test pilots Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken rode the SpaceX Dragon capsule back to Earth less than a day after departing the International Space Station and two months after blasting off from Florida. The capsule parachuted into the calm gulf waters about 40 miles off the coast of Pensacola, hundreds of miles from Tropical Storm Isaias pounding Florida’s Atlantic coast.

“Welcome back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX,” said Mission Control from SpaceX headquarters.

“It was truly our honor and privilege,” replied Hurley.

The astronauts’ ride home in the capsule dubbed Endeavour was fast, bumpy and hot, at least on the outside.

The spacecraft went from a screaming orbital speed of 17,500 mph (28,000 kph) to 350 mph (560 kph) during atmospheric reentry, and finally to 15 mph (24 kph) at splashdown. Peak heating during descent was 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,900 degrees Celsius). The anticipated top G forces felt by the crew: four to five times the force of Earth’s gravity.

“Endeavour has you loud and clear,” Hurley radioed following a brief communication blackout caused by the heat of atmospheric entry.

A SpaceX recovery ship with more than 40 staff, including doctors and nurses, moved in quickly following splashdown and lifted the 15-foot capsule onto its deck. Two smaller, faster boats arrived first at the capsule while it was slowly bobbing upright in the water. To keep the returning astronauts safe in the pandemic, the recovery crew quarantined for two weeks and were tested for the coronavirus.

After medical exams, the astronauts were expected to fly home to Houston for a reunion with their wives and sons.

The last time NASA astronauts returned from space to water was on July 24, 1975, in the Pacific, the scene of most splashdowns, to end a joint U.S.-Soviet mission known as Apollo-Soyuz. The Mercury and Gemini crews in the early to mid-1960s parachuted into the Atlantic, while most of the later Apollo capsules hit the Pacific. The lone Russian “splashdown” was in 1976 on a partially frozen lake amid a blizzard following an aborted mission; the harrowing recovery took hours.

SpaceX made history with this mission, which launched May 30 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. It was the first time a private company launched people into orbit and also the first launch of NASA astronauts from home turf in nearly a decade. Hurley came full circle, serving as pilot of NASA’s last space shuttle flight in 2011 and the commander of this SpaceX flight.

Musk monitored the descent and splashdown from SpaceX Mission Control in Hawthorne, California.

NASA turned to SpaceX and also Boeing to build capsules and ferry astronauts to and from the space station, following the retirement of the shuttles. Until Hurley and Behnken rocketed into orbit, NASA astronauts relied on Russian rockets. SpaceX already had experience hauling cargo to the space station, bringing those capsules back to a Pacific splashdown.

“This is the next era in human spaceflight where NASA gets to be the customer,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said from Johnson Space Center in Houston shortly before the astronauts’ return.

SpaceX needs six weeks to inspect the capsule before launching the next crew around the end of September. This next mission of four astronauts will spend a full six months aboard the space station. Hurley and Behnken’s capsule will be refurbished for another flight next spring. A Houston company run by a former NASA official, meanwhile, has partnered with SpaceX to send three customers to the space station in fall 2021.

Boeing doesn’t expect to launch its first crew until next year. The company encountered significant software problems in the debut of its Starliner capsule, with no one aboard, last year. Its capsules will touch down in the U.S. Southwest desert.

By beating Boeing, SpaceX laid claim to a small U.S. flag left at the space station by Hurley and the rest of the last shuttle crew. The flag — which also flew on the first shuttle flight — was carefully packed aboard the Dragon for the homecoming.

Also on board: a toy dinosaur named Tremor, sent into space by the astronauts’ young sons.

The boys recorded a wake-up call for their fathers Sunday morning, urging them to “rise and shine” and “we can’t wait to see you.”

“Don’t worry, you can sleep in tomorrow,” said Behnken’s 6-year-old son Theo, who was promised a puppy after the flight. “Hurry home so we can go get my dog.”

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Embarks On the Agency’s Most Ambitious Mars Mission Yet

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 18:33:17 GMT

If there were any intelligent beings on Mars, they’d likely be confused by a little plaque recently added to the side of the SUV-sized Perseverance Mars rover, which lifted off at 7:50 AM local time on Thursday morning from Cape Canaveral in Florida and is set to reach Mars in February. Nobody had planned any late additions to the rover—but no one had planned on a lot of things this year, least of all the COVID-19 pandemic which continues to burn across the world.

As it did with pretty much everyone else in the United States, the pandemic forced the Perseverance team to work from home if they could, social distancing in the factories and clean rooms if they couldn’t. As a nod to the challenges that presented, the flank of the rover now carries the medical community’s snake-and-staff caduceus symbol, along with a picture of Earth and the flight path of a spacecraft soaring away from it:

NASA/JPL-Caltech Seen from below, NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover is in position in the aeroshell that will protect the rover on its way to the Red Planet.

Perseverance is not the only ship that recently embarked on the seven-month journey from the troubled blue planet to its mysterious red neighbor. On July 19, the United Arab Emirates made its first bid to join the Mars game, launching the 1,360kg (3,000lb.), 3m (10ft.) tall Amal, or “Hope,” spacecraft on a mission to orbit Mars for at least two years while studying its atmosphere. Just four days later, China launched its Tianwen-1, or “Questions to Heaven,” spacecraft, a three-part ship with an orbiter, a lander and a six-wheeled, 200kg (440lb.) rover.

The ships on the Mars-bound international convoy will by no means be alone when they arrive. Mars, a cold, dry desert planet, is rapidly becoming something of a worker-bee world. Six spacecraft—three American, two European and one Indian—are currently in Martian orbit, while one stationary lander and one rover, both American, are busy on the surface. (A joint Russian-European mission, ExoMars, was also planned for this summer, but has been postponed to 2022 due to engineering problems.) What began as a collection of individual ships built by individual nations is rapidly becoming nothing short of an international scientific infrastructure hard at work on another world.

“There is lots of international collaboration both currently [going on] and planned for the future,” says Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. “Of those six spacecraft that are currently in orbit at Mars, we have collaborations on all of them. We are absolutely huge supporters of the transparent and open sharing of science discoveries.”

There are an awful lot of those discoveries to be made. The UAE’s Amal will investigate how Mars’s atmosphere—once thick and potentially able to sustain life, but now just 1% of the density of Earth’s—was stripped away by the solar wind, a slow loss of air that continues today. The Chinese rover will, like NASA’s still-active Curiosity rover, investigate the chemistry—and the hoped-for biochemistry—of the Martian soil.

But Perseverance, the fifth in a line of Mars rovers built by the experienced hands at NASA since 1997, is easily the most remarkable of the new explorers. There are its 23 cameras, for one thing. There’s its 2.1m (7ft)-long robotic arm, equipped with a rotating wrist, a rock drill, a camera of its own and a system to analyze the molecular structure of the Martian soil. There’s its on-board brain that allows it to map its surroundings and autonomously travel up to 200m (656 ft.). Oh, and it has its own helicopter. Really.

Attached to the underside of Perseverance is a .45m (1.6ft.), 1.8kg (4lb.) extraterrestrial flying machine, with a pair of 1.2m (4ft.)-long blades. The little chopper, dubbed Ingenuity, is just light enough to gain purchase in the thin Martian air. It will spend a month or so taking short test flights of up to 90 seconds long and 4.5m (15ft.) in altitude, never venturing far from the rover. Ingenuity carries no instruments except for a camera—a must-have for capturing the first ever helicopter flight over Mars—and is very much what NASA calls a technology demonstration.

“That means that it’s not required for the mission to be successful,” says Glaze. “But of course we want it to fly. Of course we want it to be successful.”

A much more important part of Perseverance’s mission will be its search for biology. For all of the talk about looking for life on Mars, previous and ongoing missions have not and are not equipped to do that. Rather, they have only looked for the chemical and environmental conditions that could allow life to thrive—and in some respects, they’ve found plenty. Mars is a world etched with dry river beds, stamped with ancient sea basins, marked by deep depressions that could only indicate long-vanished oceans. Perseverance is landing in one such place: the Jezero Crater, north of the Martian equator, which is lined with both inflow and outflow channels indicating it was once a vibrant sea. Previous rover analyses in similar locations have discovered chemicals and compounds that form only in the presence of water, proving that Mars was once, like Earth, exceedingly wet.

Perseverance will go further. While analyzing soil chemistry like its predecessor rovers, It will also take the critical step of preparing Martian samples to be returned to Earth. There are 43 test tube-sized sample containers on board the rover, and they go far beyond the simple rock boxes the Apollo crews used when they explored the moon. “They are ultra-clean,” says Ken Farley, project scientist for the Perseverance mission. “And by ultra-clean I mean they are surely the cleanest things that have ever flown.”

That’s critical, because Earth is crawling with microbes, which could easily contaminate the tubes even in a sterilized clean-room. That would be a very bad thing if you’re looking for Martian life, since it would be impossible to know if an organism you find in the soil was actually Martian, or originated on Earth and then hitched a ride to Mars and back. To avoid that, the tubes were made of titanium and then treated with nitrogen to convert the material to titanium nitride. “Titanium nitride is a wonderful substance that passivates the surface, which means that organic molecules won’t stick to it,” Farley says.

But once Perseverance collects its samples, the question becomes: how do you get them back to Earth? The answer: you don’t—at least, not yet. For now, Perseverance will leave the tubes it fills with Martian samples neatly on the ground, then go about the rest of its mission. The samples are set to be picked up on NASA’s next—and even more ambitious—Mars trip.

Set for launch in 2026, the sample-return mission will begin with the launch of the so-called “fetch rover,” which will land at the same site as Perseverance and gather up the tubes. A small onboard rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) will then loft the sample tubes into low Martian orbit. The samples will then be flown back to Earth through a collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), which will launch its own probe, also in 2026, to fly to Mars, rendezvous with the MAV, gather the test tubes and bring them back home, where they will land in the southwest U.S.

It’s a decidedly complicated mission, involving three launches from Earth (including the one just this morning) and one from Mars, and nobody pretends all of the technicalities have been figured out yet.

“What you do in science and especially in exploration is you have a plan and you beat it with a stick,” says NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen. “You want to make sure you understand every single problem with it. So frankly, we’re beating it with a stick right now.”

The fact that NASA and the ESA are doing that work together says something encouraging about both exploration and humanity as a whole. We may be an exceedingly fractious species on Earth, but as we reach out to Mars—as Americans and Europeans and Russians and Indians and Emiratis and Chinese and surely more in the future—we are reaching out as a species as well. If we can cooperate on a desert world like Mars, think what we could accomplish by doing the same on the garden world that is Earth.

NASA Launches Mars Rover to Look For Signs of Ancient Life

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 12:34:12 GMT

(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — The biggest, most sophisticated Mars rover ever built — a car-size vehicle bristling with cameras, microphones, drills and lasers — blasted off for the red planet Thursday as part of an ambitious, long-range project to bring the first Martian rock samples back to Earth to be analyzed for evidence of ancient life.

NASA’s Perseverance rode a mighty Atlas V rocket into a clear morning sky in the world’s third and final Mars launch of the summer. China and the United Arab Emirates got a head start last week, but all three missions should reach their destination in February after a journey of seven months and 300 million miles (480 million kilometers).

The plutonium-powered, six-wheeled rover will drill down and collect tiny geological specimens that will be brought home in about 2031 in a sort of interplanetary relay race involving multiple spacecraft and countries. The overall cost: more than $8 billion.

NASA’s science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen, pronounced the launch the start of “humanity’s first round trip to another planet.”

“Oh, I loved it, punching a hole in the sky, right? Getting off the cosmic shore of our Earth, wading out there in the cosmic ocean,” he said. “Every time, it gets me.”

In addition to addressing the life-on-Mars question, the mission will yield lessons that could pave the way for the arrival of astronauts as early as the 2030s.

“There’s a reason we call the robot Perseverance. Because going to Mars is hard,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said just before liftoff. “It is always hard. It’s never been easy. In this case, it’s harder than ever before because we’re doing it in the midst of a pandemic.”

The U.S., the only country to safely put a spacecraft on Mars, is seeking its ninth successful landing on the planet, which has proved to be the Bermuda Triangle of space exploration, with more than half of the world’s missions there burning up, crashing or otherwise ending in failure.

China is sending both a rover an orbiter. The UAE, a newcomer to outer space, has an orbiter en route.

It’s the biggest stampede to Mars in spacefaring history. The opportunity to fly between Earth and Mars comes around only once every 26 months when the planets are on the same side of the sun and about as close as they can get.

Launch controllers wore masks and sat spaced apart at the Cape Canaveral control center because of the coronavirus outbreak, which kept hundreds of scientists and other team members away from Perseverance’s liftoff.

About an hour into the flight, controllers applauded, pumped their fists and exchanged air hugs and pantomimed high-fives when the rocket flawlessly broke out of Earth’s orbit and began hurtling toward Mars.

“That was overwhelming. Overall, just ‘Wow!’” said Alex Mather, the 13-year-old Virginia schoolboy who proposed the name Perseverance in a NASA competition and watched the launch in person with his parents.

The launch went off on time at 7:50 a.m. despite a 4.2-magnitude earthquake 20 minutes before liftoff that shook Southern California, the site of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is overseeing the rover mission.

If all goes well, the rover will descend to the Martian surface on Feb. 18, 2021, in what NASA calls seven minutes of terror, in which the craft goes from 12,000 mph (19,300 kph) to a complete stop, with no human intervention whatsoever. It is carrying 25 cameras and a pair of microphones that will enable Earthlings to vicariously tag along.

Perseverance will aim for treacherous unexplored territory: Jezero Crater, riddled with boulders, cliffs, dunes and possibly rocks bearing the chemical signature of microbes from what was once a lake more than 3 billion years ago. The rover will store half-ounce (15-gram) rock samples in dozens of super-sterilized titanium tubes.

It also will release a mini helicopter that will attempt the first powered flight on another planet, and test out other technology to prepare the way for future astronauts. That includes equipment for extracting oxygen from Mars’ thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere.

The plan is for NASA and the European Space Agency to launch a dune buggy in 2026 to fetch the rock samples, along with a rocket ship that will put the specimens into orbit around Mars. Then another spacecraft will capture the orbiting samples and bring them home.

Samples taken straight from Mars, not drawn from meteorites discovered on Earth, have long been considered “the Holy Grail of Mars science,” according to NASA’s original and now-retired Mars czar, Scott Hubbard.

To definitively answer the profound question of whether life exists — or ever existed — beyond Earth, the samples must be analyzed by the best electron microscopes and other instruments, far too big to fit on a spacecraft, he said.

“I’ve wanted to know if there was life elsewhere in the universe since I was 9 years old. That was more than 60 years ago,” the 71-year-old Hubbard said from his Northern California cabin. “But just maybe, I’ll live to see the fingerprints of life come back from Mars in one of those rock samples.”

Said Bridenstine: “There is nothing better than bringing samples back to Earth where we can put them in a lab and we can apply every element of technology against those samples to make determinations as to whether or not there was, at one time, life on the surface of Mars.”

Two other NASA landers are also operating on Mars: 2018′s InSight and 2012′s Curiosity rover. Six other spacecraft are exploring the planet from orbit: three from the U.S., two from Europe and one from India.