Using Nuclear Rockets to get to MARS

Scientists have long proposed nuclear fission-fueled rockets to get to Mars fast — but one is warning that making it happen will be an uphill battle.

In an explainer for The Conversation, nuclear engineering expert Dan Kotlyar noted that fueling rockets with nuclear fission, which results from the energy emanated from splitting atoms, will indeed cut the years-long journey to and from Mars by a wide margin.

One of the chemical compounds that goes into the production of nuclear fuel, however, makes those dreams difficult to achieve.

Kotlyar, a nuclear and radiological engineering assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, pointed out that the United States government and major companies like General Electric funded development into nuclear thermal propulsion technology.   READ MORE...

Transforming MARS Could be Easier

One of the classic tropes of science fiction is terraforming Mars: warming up our cold
neighbor so it could support human civilization. The idea might not be so far-fetched, research published today in Science Advances suggests.

Injecting tiny particles into Mars’s atmosphere could warm the planet by more than 10°C in a matter of months, researchers find—enough to sustain liquid water. Although the scheme would require about 2 million tons of particles per year, they could be manufactured from readily available ingredients found in martian dust.

“It’s not that often you get some really quite new, innovative idea for terraforming,” says Colin McInnes, a space engineer at the University of Glasgow not involved with the work. “The gap between where Mars is and where Mars could be for habitability is narrower than we might think.”            READ MORE...

NASA: Past Life on Mars

• 
  In its ancient past, Mars likely contained many of the necessarily ingredients for microbial life to flourish on its surface.
• Now, a new discovery by NASA’s Perseverance rover shows a trifecta of compelling evidence—including the presence of water, organic compounds, and a chemical energy source—all on one rock located in the Jezero Crater.
• Although this is the best clue yet that microbial life existed on Mars, there are still other explanations that could explain this geologic display without the existence of microbes.

“Is there life on Mars” is a question that has vexed astrobiologists and David Bowie alike. While the latter imagined some macabre collection of arachnids on the Red Planet, NASA scientists are fixated on finding evidence that microbial life once flourished on the fourth rock from the Sun. So fixated, in fact, that the space agency has spent more than $5 billion getting two immensely complicated robotic rovers—Curiosity and Perseverance—onto the Martian surface with this specific microbial mission in mind.     READ MORE...

NASA's Proposed Plasma Rocket

The future of space travel depends on our ability to reach celestial pit stops faster and more efficiently. As such, NASA is working with a technology development company on a new propulsion system that could drop off humans on Mars in a relatively speedy two months’ time rather than the current nine month journey required to reach the Red Planet.

NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program recently selected six promising projects for additional funding and development, allowing them to graduate to the second stage of development. 

The new “science fiction-like concepts,” as described by John Nelson, NIAC program executive at NASA, include a lunar railway system and fluid-based telescopes, as well as a pulsed plasma rocket.

The potentially groundbreaking propulsion system is being developed by Arizona-based Howe Industries. To reach high velocities within a shorter period of time, the pulsed plasma rocket would use nuclear fission—the release of energy from atoms splitting apart—to generate packets of plasma for thrust.   READ MORE...

Mar's Largest Mountain

We often marvel at the largest peaks that grace our planet—Everest, K2, Denali—but there is a mountain that dwarfs all these giants not just by a little, but by an astronomical margin. Olympus Mons, is the largest volcano in our solar system. It’s located not on Earth, but on Mars.

Olympus Mons stands at a staggering height of about 22 kilometers (13.6 miles) with a base diameter of approximately 600 kilometers (373 miles). 

To put that into perspective, Mount Everest, Earth’s highest peak at approximately 8.8 kilometers (5.5 miles), is nearly 2.5 times shorter than Olympus Mons. 

The sheer scale of this Martian giant is not just impressive in terms of its height but also in its volume and area. Olympus Mons covers an area similar to the size of Arizona or Italy!  READ MORE...

Alone in the Universe

Are we alone in the universe?

It's a question that's been posed again and again. Carl Sagan posed it in the 1970s as a NASA mission scientist as the agency prepared to send its twin Viking landers to Mars.

And nearly 50 years after the first of two landers touched down on Mars, we're no closer to an answer as to whether there's life — out there.

Scientists haven't stopped looking. In fact, they've expanded their gaze to places like Saturn's largest moon, Titan and Jupiter's moon Europa.

The search for life beyond planet earth continues to captivate. And NASA has upcoming missions to both moons. Could we be closer to answering that question Carl Sagan asked some 50 years ago?     READ MORE...

Signs of Life on MARS

A school science experiment is answering questions that are out of this world. While there had been concerns that any evidence of organic matter on Mars might be obscured by the planet's geology, new research suggests this might not be the case.

A group of budding young researchers has helped to demonstrate how evidence of life on Mars could be found.

Students from St Bernard's Convent High School in Westcliff-On-Sea, Essex, assisted scientists from the Natural History Museum and University College London in an experiment to see what evidence any potential ancient life may have left on the red planet.  READ MORE...

TWENTY-TWO People Needed to Colonize Mars

Researchers estimated that as few as 22 people would be needed to sustain a colony on Mars. But there are lots of caveats, and the new study largely misses the point of colonizing the Red Planet in the first place, experts say.

Only 22 people are needed to create a colony on Mars, an optimistic new study suggests. However, not everyone agrees, and some experts think many more people would be needed to create a lasting human presence on the Red Planet.

In the study, which was uploaded to the pre-print database arXiv on Aug. 11 and has not been peer-reviewed, researchers used a computer program, known as an agent-based model (ABM), to predict how many people would be needed to sustain a colony on Mars. ABMs simulate how well groups react to challenging scenarios based on their personality types.

The model looked at four personality types: agreeables, who are not very competitive or aggressive; socials, who are extroverted and do well in social settings; reactives, who struggle to deal with changes to routine; and neurotics, who are highly competitive and aggressive. The model then varied the number of each type when doing key tasks such as Martian mining and farming.

The researchers found that iIf most people were agreeables or socials, just 22 people could sustain a colony. With more neurotics and reactives, larger groups were needed to succeed.

Limiting the size of the first Martian colonies will be very important, because the more people and equipment that are needed, the more expensive it will be.    READ MORE...

Nuclear Powered Spaceships

The space race has been revived, but this time, the goal post has been shifted much further – to Mars. As recent technological advancements promise to open new horizons of exploration, NASA plans to cut the travel time to Mars with a nuclear powered spacecraft.

A trip to Mars currently takes approximately seven months, covering a staggering 300-million-mile journey. NASA, in collaboration with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), now proposes an ambitious plan that hinges on the promise of nuclear thermal propulsion technology to reduce this duration significantly.

DRACO spacecraft is nuclear powered
NASA aims to launch a nuclear-powered spacecraft, known as DRACO (Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations), into Earth’s orbit either by late 2025 or early 2026. The spacecraft, under construction by Lockheed Martin, a leading aerospace and defense company, will serve as a testbed for this groundbreaking technology.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson said that this technology “would allow humans to travel in deep space at record speed.” However, it remains unclear by how much the nuclear thermal propulsion technology can decrease the travel time.

DRACO is expected to provide a treasure trove of critical data that will usher in a new age of space exploration.

“We’re going to put this together, we’re going to fly this demonstration, gather a bunch of great data and really, we believe, usher in a new age for the United States [and] for humankind, to support our space exploration mission,” said Kirk Shireman, vice president of Lockheed Martin Lunar Exploration Campaigns.
Groundbreaking technology

A nuclear thermal rocket (NTR), the underpinning technology of the DRACO, boasts a thrust-to-weight ratio approximately 10,000 times greater than electric propulsion and two-to-five times more efficiency than in-space chemical propulsion.

The technology utilizes heat from a nuclear powered fission reactor to heat a hydrogen propellant, which then expands through a nozzle to provide thrust, propelling the spacecraft forward.

Increased safety needed to put humans on Mars
Apart from speeding up transit, the NTR propulsion system also promises increased safety for astronauts. Reduced travel duration translates into a decreased risk of exposure to deep-space radiation and a smaller logistical footprint due to the lesser quantity of supplies required for the trip. “If we have swifter trips for humans, they are safer trips,” said NASA deputy administrator and former astronaut Pam Melroy.  READ MORE...

Largest Nuclear Fusion Rocket

Nuclear fusion propulsion technology has the potential to revolutionize space travel in terms of both speeds and fuel usage. The same kinds of reactions that power the Sun could halve travel times to Mars, or make a journey to Saturn and its moons take just two years rather than eight.

It's incredibly exciting, but not everyone is convinced this is going to work: the tech needs ultra-high temperatures and pressures to function.

To help prove the viability of the technology, the largest ever fusion rocket engine is now being built by Pulsar Fusion in Bletchley, in the UK.

The chamber, some 8 meters (26 feet) long, is scheduled to start firing in 2027.

As you might expect, replicating the Sun inside a rocket isn't easy. At the center of nuclear fusion propulsion is an ultra-hot plasma locked inside an electromagnetic field, and scientists are continuing to figure out how to do this in a stable and safe way.

"The difficulty is learning how to hold and confine the super-hot plasma within an electromagnetic field," says James Lambert, CFO of Pulsar Fusion. "The plasma behaves like a weather system in terms of being incredibly hard to predict using conventional techniques."    READ MORE...

Mars is Alive

Color-coded topographic view shows the relative heights of features in Cerberus Fossae: reds and whites are relatively higher than blues and purples. The image is based on a digital terrain model of the region, from which the topography of the landscape can be derived. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Until now, Mars has generally been considered a geologically dead planet. An international team of scientists now reports that seismic signals indicate vulcanism still plays an active role in shaping the Martian surface.

Ever since the NASA InSight Mission deployed the SEIS seismometer on the surface of Mars in 2018, seismologists and geophysicists at ETH Zurich have been listening to the seismic pings of more than 1,300 marsquakes. 

Again and again, the researchers registered smaller and larger Mars quakes. A detailed analysis of the quakes’ location and spectral character eventually brought a surprise. With epicenters originating in the vicinity of the Cerberus Fossae — a region consisting of a series of rifts or graben — these quakes tell a new story. 

A story that suggests an active role is still played by vulcanism in shaping the Martian surface.

Mars shows signs of geological life
Led by ETH Zurich, an international team of researchers analyzed a cluster of more than 20 recent marsquakes that originated in the Cerberus Fossae graben system. From the seismic data, scientists concluded that the low-frequency quakes indicate a potentially warm source that could be explained by present-day molten lava, i.e., magma at that depth, and volcanic activity on Mars. Specifically, they found that the quakes are located mostly in the innermost part of Cerberus Fossae.  READ MORE...

Subsurface Water on Mars

An artist illustration of the InSight lander on Mars. InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is designed to give the Red Planet its first thorough check-up since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Physics connects seismic data to properties of rocks and sediments.

A new analysis of seismic data from NASA’s Mars InSight mission has uncovered a couple of big surprises.

The first surprise: the top 300 meters (1000 feet) of the subsurface beneath the landing site near the Martian equator contains little or no ice.

“We find that Mars’ crust is weak and porous. The sediments are not well-cemented. And there’s no ice or not much ice filling the pore spaces,” said geophysicist Vashan Wright of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. 

Wright and three co-authors published their analysis on August 9, 2022, in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.“These findings don’t preclude that there could be grains of ice or small balls of ice that are not cementing other minerals together,” said Wright. “The question is how likely is ice to be present in that form?”

The second surprise contradicts a leading theory about what happened to the water on Mars. It is believed the red planet may have harbored oceans of water early in its history. Many experts suspected that much of that water became part of the minerals that make up underground cement.  READ MORE...

Life at Jezero Crater

As for any consensus among scientists that signs of past or present life have been seen by Perseverance, once again, don't wait for a slam dunk observation.

Depiction shows Jezero Crater — the landing locale of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover — as it might have appeared billions of years ago when it was perhaps a life-sustaining lake. An inlet and outlet are also visible on either side of the lake. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Since its wheels-down landing in February of last year, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has been busily at work, on the prowl steering itself across the Jezero Crater landscape.


A key duty of the robot is to search for signs of ancient microbial life. The Mars machinery is industriously gathering up samples of Martian rock and soil that could help tease out an answer concerning the past habitability of the Red Planet.


Perseverance is on a roll, a collectible outing to stash core samples in sealed tubes that are to eventually find their way to Earth via the Mars Sample Return program.

But how tough is it to spot and sample potential past life on Mars? Perhaps the rover already has? Then there's the question of whether we need the samples back on Earth to find signs of past life, or can Perseverance, on-location, detect past or even present life with its suite of instruments?


Above all, just how hard might it be to have a consensus among scientists that, yes, signs of life, be it past or present has been observed by the rover? What's a slam dunk finding look like?  READ MORE...

Object Found on Mars

Scientists were left puzzled when a weird “spaghetti-like” object was spotted on Mars by the Perseverance rover. It sparked a lot of debate online and a number of experts came up with their own explanations about the “alien” material found on July 12. 

However, NASA has released an official statement about the object, and they said that it was actually a part of the rover itself.

According to the official briefing by the US space agency, the Dacron netting got detached from the entry, descent and landing (EDL) gear when the rover landed on the planet in February 2021.

“This particular piece of netting appears to have undergone significant unravelling/shredding, suggesting that it was subjected to strong forces,” the blog published by NASA stated.

It also said that Dacron is “a synthetic fiber embedded with resin often used in high performance sail cloth, but in the case of Perseverance was likely a part of a thermal protection blanket”.

This is not the first time that a debris from the rover was found on Mars. Earlier, parts of the EDL were found around the site where Perseverance landed, and the Ingenuity helicopter also pictured a protective shell and its parachute near a collection of rocks on the Mars surface.  READ MORE...

Fusion Rocket Breakthrough

Richard Dinan is the visionary entrepreneur who wants to help humans leave Earth and inhabit other planets in the Milky Way. And he wants to do it fast. His company, Pulsar Fusion, is betting on harnessing the power of nuclear in space to cut the time it takes to get to Mars in half – and unlock the secrets beyond our Solar System.

Speaking exclusively to Science Digest, the former Made In Chelsea star, 35, said: "In the Milky Way there are believed to be billions of habitable planets orbiting G-type stars like ours.

"That doesn't mean that they've got people on them, but it means that they could support life.

"We're living in a world now where maybe the entrepreneurs of the future can own their own planets.  "To do that, they will need very, very fast rockets.

That may sound like a ludicrous thing to say, but we are almost there - Mars has got quite a keen interest.

"I think part of being human is to leave our planet – we've always followed the stars since prehistoric times and now we need to emulate that."

To make this possible, Mr Dinan wants to replicate the fusion process used by stars like our Sun.  Tipped as the "holy grail" energy source, nuclear fusion has been studied for over a century.

Unlike nuclear fission – the powerful reaction that led to the creation of nuclear weapons – fusion takes two light atomic nuclei to combine to form a single heavier one while releasing massive amounts of energy.  READ MORE...

Alien Doorway on Mars

One of the most recent snaps beamed back from the Curiosity rover on Mars has revealed a rather interesting feature in the rocks: what looks to be a perfectly carved out doorway nestling in the Martian landscape.

The doorway doppelgänger is so eerily convincing we're almost tempted to start believing that it leads to a little hideaway for Martians, or perhaps a portal to another Universe entirely. We're also getting 'tunnel to the center of the planet' vibes from this.

However, the far more sensible people of Reddit have pointed to this likely being a shear fracture: the result of some kind of strain on the rock breaking part of it off, perhaps given a helping hand by a marsquake or two.

In fact, the largest temblor recorded on the red planet so far happened on May 4 of this year, and scientists are still working to pinpoint where exactly it happened and what caused it.

What's more, while the the door-like rock formation may appear to be full-sized in our imaginations, it's possible the cavity seen is only a few centimeters or inches tall in real life, though it's difficult to be certain from the picture.

At the very least, the picture and the geological feature it's captured would seem to be enough to inspire a science-fiction movie or two.  READ MORE...

Giant Claw Marks on Mars

While it still has plenty of mysteries for us to solve, Mars is becoming clearer to us every day, thanks to the dozen functioning robots we currently have either on the red planet's surface or in its orbit.

In this latest release from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express orbiter, a unique feature of Mars's geology is shown with breathtaking detail.

Looking like giant scratches across the planet's surface, these grooves are part of a giant fault system on Mars known as Tantalus Fossae.

Aside from the detail in the image, what's really gobsmacking is the scale we're looking at – these troughs are up to 350 meters (1,148 feet) deep and 10 kilometers wide (6.2 miles) and can stretch for up to 1,000 kilometers.

The image is true color, which means it represents what humans would see if they were looking at the region with their own eyes.

It's not technically a 'photo'; the image was generated from a digital terrain model of Mars and using the color channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA's Mars Express – but it presents an incredibly clear view of the vast area.  READ MORE...

Death Spiraling Moon

Mars' moon Phobos crosses the face of the sun, captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover with its Mastcam-Z camera. The faint black specks to the bottom left are sunspots. 

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/SSI)

NASA’s Perseverance rover has captured the clearest ever footage of a solar eclipse over Mars, and the results are out of this world.

The rover snapped the ethereal video of Mars’ potato-shaped moon, Phobos, moving across the face of the sun on April 2. During the eclipse, Phobos projected its uneven shadow over the Martian surface — appearing almost as though it was the pupil of a gigantic eyeball rolling in its socket.

Perseverance recorded the footage midway through its journey to a river delta on Mars’ 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater, where it will search for evidence of life on the Red Planet. Training its state-of-the-art Mastcam-Z camera on the sky, the rover recorded the misshapen moon’s solar transit with the greatest zoom and at the highest framerate ever.

"I knew it was going to be good, but I didn't expect it to be this amazing," Rachel Howson, a mission operations specialist at Malin Space Science Systems and one of the Mastcam-Z team members who operates the camera, said in a statement.

Phobos, named after the Greek god of fear, is roughly 157 times smaller than Earth's moon and is one of Mars' two natural satellites, alongside the even smaller Deimos (whose name comes from the Greek god of dread).

Scientists believe that the brother moons were once roaming asteroids that were snared into Mars’ orbit by the planet’s gravitational field. The orbits of these captive asteroids are unstable, according to researchers, and scientists predict that in a few tens of millions of years' time Deimos will spin out into space while Phobos will slam into Mars’ surface.  READ MORE...

Speed of Sound on Mars

Scientists have confirmed the speed of sound on Mars, using equipment on the Perseverance rover to study the red planet's atmosphere, which is very different to Earth's.

What they discovered could have some strange consequences for communication between future Martians.

The findings suggest that trying to talk in Mars' atmosphere might produce a weird effect, since higher-pitched sound seems to travel faster than bass notes. Not that we'd try, since Mars' atmosphere is unbreathable, but it's certainly fun to think about!

From a science perspective, the findings, announced at the 53rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by planetary scientist Baptiste Chide of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, reveal high temperature fluctuations at the surface of Mars that warrant further investigation.

The speed of sound is not a universal constant. It can change, depending on the density and temperature of the medium through which it travels; the denser the medium, the faster it goes.

That's why sound travels about 343 meters (1,125 feet) per second in our atmosphere at 20 degrees Celsius, but also at 1,480 meters per second in water, and at 5,100 meters per second in steel.

Mars' atmosphere is a lot more tenuous than Earth's, around 0.020 kg/m3, compared to about 1.2 kg/m3 for Earth. That alone means that sound would propagate differently on the red planet.

But the layer of the atmosphere just above the surface, known as the Planetary Boundary Layer, has added complications: During the day, the warming of the surface generates convective updrafts that create strong turbulence.  READ MORE...

Controlling the Moon

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway and Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty

In 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy declared that his nation would be the first to land a man on the moon. That ambitious goal would later be fulfilled as two NASA astronauts took wobbly steps across the lunar surface on July 20, 1969, much to the dismay of Russia’s own space program leaders.

More than 60 years later, a new space race to the moon has begun, albeit with much higher stakes and brand new players ready to make the 238,855-mile journey. This time, the race to the moon is about much more than just planting a flag on its dusty surface. Getting to the moon first could also mean calling dibs on its limited resources, and controlling a permanent gateway to take humans to Mars—and beyond.

Whether it’s NASA, China, Russia, or a consortium of private companies that end up dominating the moon, laying claim to the lunar surface isn’t really about the moon anyway—it’s about who gets easier access to the rest of the solar system.

Everyone’s Got an Agenda

James Rice, a senior scientist at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, remembers growing up with the Apollo program and getting bitten by the space bug as he watched the 1969 moon landing unfold on television.

“As a kid, I saw that happening and I wanted to be a part of it,” Rice told The Daily Beast. “That’s basically why I’m in this career today.”

As Rice reflected on the current space race, he recognized some key differences. “Things have really changed dramatically in terms of the technology and the players that are out there,” he said. “This is not the moon we thought of during the Apollo days.” Scientists have learned so much more about the moon through more detailed analysis of lunar samples, as well as several missions that have probed exactly what might be sitting on the moon’s surface and remain hidden deep underground.  READ MORE...