21st Century Innovative Technologies and Developments as also discoveries, curiosity ( insolite)...

Die amerikanische Raumfahrtbehörde Nasa arbeitet mit Howe Industries (Scottsdale, Arizona), einem US-Unternehmen für Technologieentwicklung, an einem neuen Antriebssystem. Damit sollen Menschen in nur zwei Monaten zum Mars transportiert werden – schneller als mit dem geplanten Atomantrieb, an dem in China geforscht wird.

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You're opening up the outer solar system to scientific exploration. You don't have to wait for the planets to align. You'll have launch opportunities every year," said Dale Thomas, deputy director of the University of Alabama in Huntsville's Propulsion Research Center. "And, by the way, since we're talking about direct trajectories, you get there in about half the time.

With nuclear-thermal propulsion, getting to Mars could take as little as two months instead of nine, depending on the path taken, engineers said. And reducing the trip time would have the advantage of limiting the supplies needed for such a journey.

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Jede Kolonie auf einem fernen Planeten erfordert Wasser. Ein Team hat Daten aus früheren Mars-Missionen analysiert, um abbaubare Vorkommen zu identifizieren.

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Le rover Mars 2020 qui va s'envoler dans quelques mois vers la planète rouge ne se contentera pas d'y chercher d'éventuelles traces de vie passée, il servira aussi de «précurseur à une mission humaine sur Mars», ont déclaré vendredi les scientifiques de la Nasa en présentant l'engin à la presse.

En Californie, une «salle blanche» stérile pour la planète rouge

Le rover Mars 2020 sera bientôt en route pour la planète rouge, mais c'est dans une «salle blanche» de Californie qu'il a vu le jour, comme tous ses prédécesseurs et déjà avant eux les sondes Voyager, Galileo ou Cassini qui ont sillonné notre système solaire. Cette «salle blanche» est l'une des deux pièces ultra-stériles nichées sur le site d'assemblage des véhicules spatiaux du JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) à Pasadena, dans la banlieue de Los Angeles. Elle était vendredi exceptionnellement ouverte à la presse pour présenter le rover.

Le robot a effectué la semaine dernière ses premiers tours de roue dans la grande salle stérile du Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) de Pasadena, près de Los Angeles, où il a vu le jour. Il doit quitter la Terre en juillet 2020 depuis Cap Canaveral (Floride) pour se poser sur Mars en février 2021.

«Il est conçu pour chercher des signes de vie, donc il emporte un grand nombre d'instruments différents qui vont nous aider à comprendre le contexte géologique et chimique à la surface de Mars, et aussi collecter des échantillons dans le but de pouvoir un jour les rapporter sur Terre», résume pour l'AFP Matt Wallace, responsable adjoint de la mission Mars 2020.

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Scientists using images from an orbiting NASA spacecraft have detected eight sites where huge ice deposits near the Martian surface are exposed on steep slopes, a potential source of water that could help sustain future human outposts.

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We once thought of Mars as a dried up husk of a planet with no significant water resources on its surface. After further study, scientists have discovered the Red Planet has vast amounts of water ice, and there may even be some water flowing on its surface. Mars’ water reserves may even be more accessible than we believed. A new analysis of past NASA data points to water ice near the Martian equator where scientists thought it could not exist.

NASA didn’t have to send a new probe to Mars to figure this out. In fact, the instrument used to obtain this data has long since been retired. Scientists reevaluated data from the NASA Odyssey Spacecraft, which was in operation between 2002 and 2009. The goal of this mission was to map the surface of Mars while also looking for evidence of water. It was used to identify landing sites for surface missions, and to this day still acts as a data relay for the Curiosity rover.

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Sie sollen künftig Raumstationen auf dem Mond oder dem Mars mit Energie versorgen: Mikro-Nuklearanlagen für den Weltraum. Nun hat Rolls-Royce gezeigt, wie solch ein Atomreaktor aussehen könnte.

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It wasn't the average marsquake that the Insight Mars lander heard rip-roaring through the red planet's ground last Christmas Eve.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter apparently found the source of the rumble a couple of months later from its vantage point in space: a spectacular meteor strike over 2,000 miles away near Mars' equator, estimated to be one of the largest impacts observed on the neighboring planet.

But what's thrilled scientists perhaps as much as or more than the recorded seismic activity is what the meteor uncovered when it slammed into Mars — huge, boulder-size chunks of ice blasted out of the crater. Up until now, underground ice hadn't been found in this region, the warmest part of the planet.

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When NASA's Mars 2020 rover lands on the Red Planet in February 2021, it will touch down in Jezero Crater, the site of a lake that existed 3.5 billion years ago. The next generation rover will build on the goals of previous robotic explorers by collecting the first samples of Mars, which would be returned to Earth at a later date.

"On the science side, we're really thinking about new discoveries we can make on the surface and how [that] will inform what we learn when we get the samples back," said Katie Morgan Stack, deputy project scientist for the rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Our job is to find the best samples, collect and store them, and place them on the surface."
But the new rover will also be on a mission to lay the groundwork for future human exploration.

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Before humanity sets foot on Mars, bees are more likely to do so, or at least their robotic version. Biorobots—machines that emulate the functioning of biological organisms—have reached space exploration with Marsbees, NASA’s plan to explore all corners of the red planet, even those where their rovers can’t reach.

The US space agency has had great success with its rovers, especially Curiosity and Opportunity, but these are limited in the extent of land they can cover. The rocky terrain of Mars is hellish for everything that moves on wheels, so the idea of NASA’s aerospace engineers is to use robots that can collect data by flying over the surface.

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NASA initially worked with Goodyear in the mid-2000s to develop a prototype spring tire. These tires were composed of a flexible mesh with hundreds of coiled steel wires. It gave the tires the ability to support heavy loads with good traction, but even the strongest steel springs deform. On Mars, rolling over rocks while carrying a heavy loadout of instruments would cause the steel to change shape over time.


The answer was a new material based on a stoichiometric nickel-titanium alloy. Like regular spring tires, there’s no air inside. It’s just a lattice of coiled metal that flexes as it rolls over obstacles. That means it won’t get punctured by sharp Martian rocks. The bonds in the nickel-titanium alloy can rearrange in response to stress instead of stretching, so the tire snaps back — no deformation.

NASA plans to use shape memory tires on future Mars rovers, possibly even on the upcoming 2020 rover that will take over for Curiosity in the next few years. It’s even possible we could see this design on Earth-based tires one day.

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New findings from NASA’s Curiosity Rover provide evidence that significant amounts of oxygen once permeated the atmosphere of ancient Mars. The Red Planet, it would seem, was more Earth-like than we thought.

Using the ChemCam instrument atop Curiosity, scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have discovered high levels of manganese oxides in Martian rocks. The rover made the discovery in mineral-filled cracks in sandstones in the Kimberley region of Gale crater. The presence of this chemical element suggests that high levels of free-floating oxygen once existed on Mars, and that in addition to having a warmer climate and lakes of liquid water, this planet was once quite Earth-like in terms of its chemical composition.

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