Tag: Mars

SpaceX Starship Rocket Explodes After Test Launch

The Starship, the most powerful rocket system ever built, was designed to send astronauts to the moon, Mars and beyond.


SpaceX launched the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built on Thursday.

Minutes after liftoff, however, the vessel exploded.

“As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation,” SpaceX tweeted after the explosion.

SpaceX claims success despite explosion

SpaceX founder Elon Musk congratulated the SpaceX team for “an exciting test launch” and said on Twitter 2 the social media platform that he bought for $44 billion 2 that he had “Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.”

This was the second liftoff attempt of the Starship spacecraft, after a first test flight was aborted on Monday due to an issue with a pressurization valve.

The spacecraft took off from Starbase, the SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas. It was due to drop its first-stage Super Heavy booster into the Gulf of Mexico. The spacecraft will then continue eastward to complete a near-circle of the Earth before splashing down near Hawaii.

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary,” SpaceX tweeted.

Kate Tice, a SpaceX quality systems engineer, said that clearing the launchpad tower “had been our only hope.”

The entire flight had been expected to last just 90 minutes.

First human journey to the Moon since 1972

The 50-meter (164-foot) Starship spacecraft had been designed to carry crew and cargo and sits atop a 70-meter-tall first-stage booster rocket.

The spacecraft and rocket have never flown together, so the test flight had aimed to assess their performance in combination.

As part of the Artemis III mission, NASA has selected Starship to transport astronauts to the moon in late 2025, marking the first human journey there since the Apollo program concluded in 1972.

Compared to NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), which has been under development for over a decade, Starship is larger and more powerful, with the capability to lift more than 100 metric tons into orbit.

The primary objective of Starship is to make space travel more accessible and cost-effective.

Musk: It is ‘possible’ to become ‘multi-planet species’

In the future, SpaceX intends to refuel the Starship spacecraft in orbit by using another Starship, allowing it to travel to Mars or beyond.

Billionaire Musk hailed what he described as a pivotal moment ahead of the launch.

“We are at this brief moment in civilization where it is possible to become a multi-planet species,” he said. “That’s our goal. I think we’ve got a chance.”

He has set his sights on making Starship reusable and bringing down the price per flight to a few million dollars.

This article was originally published on DW.

Two Major Leadership Changes in NASA as it Prepares for Race to the Moon

The biggest change to rock the agency is the demotion of Bill Gerstenmaier, who was leading the efforts to return humans to the lunar surface.

Orlando, Florida: As NASA scrambles to meet US president Donald Trump’s mandate to return humans to the moon by 2024, two longtime heads of NASA’s human exploration wing were demoted on Wednesday in a slew of administrative shakeups, officials said in an internal memo.

The biggest change to rock the agency is the demotion of Bill Gerstenmaier, who was leading the efforts to return humans to the lunar surface.

He has been with the agency since 1977, led some of its most high profile programs and was the head of the human exploration office in a fourteen-year tenure.

The agency’s chief Jim Bridenstine announced the changes in an internal memo to employees, signalling the latest leadership changes.

“As you know, NASA has been given a bold challenge to put the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024, with a focus on the ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars,” Bridenstine said in the memo.

“In an effort to meet this challenge, I have decided to make leadership changes to the Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate.”

Also read: Five Moon-Landing Innovations that Changed Life on Earth

Bridenstine placed Ken Bowersox, a former astronaut and vice-president of Astronaut Safety and Mission Assurance for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, as acting associate administrator for the human exploration wing.

Gertenmaier was reassigned as a special assistant to Bridenstine’s deputy, Jim Morhard.

Bill Hill, a deputy associate administrator under Gerstenmaier, was also moved to a special assistant position under NASA’s associate administrator Steve Jurczyk.

The White House has shown frustration with the pace of NASA’s efforts, especially with its premier workhorse rocket known as the Space Launch System, which is years behind schedule and plagued with cost overruns.

Vice-president Mike Pence commanded the agency in March to get the job done in five years and reorganise its structure in an effort to return humans to the moon

He said, “if NASA’s not currently capable of landing American astronauts on the moon in five years, we need to change the organisation, not the mission.”

Also read: The Pitfalls of Searching for Alien Life

In another sign of internal shakeups in the space agency, Mark Sirangelo, a special assistant to Bridenstine, resigned in May, amid dwindling congressional support for the lunar initiative. He was hired after Pence’s remarks to lead the agency’s structure changes.

Wednesday’s shakeups are the latest as NASA aims to transform itself into “a leaner, more accountable and more agile organisation,” as Pence said in the March speech to the National Space Council.

(Reuters)

SpaceX Launches 60 Satellites for Elon Musk’s New Internet Service Starlink

These satellites represent the initial phase of a planned constellation capable of beaming signals for high-speed internet service from space to customers around the globe.

Cape Canaveral, Florida: SpaceX, the private rocket company of high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, launched the first batch of 60 small satellites into low-Earth orbit on Thursday for Musk’s new Starlink internet service.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the satellites blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at about 10:30 pm local time (02:30 GMT, Friday), clearing a key hurdle for a business venture that Musk hopes will generate much-needed cash for his larger ambitions in space.

The launch came a week after two back-to-back countdowns for the mission were scrubbed – once due to high winds over the Cape and the next night in order to update satellite software and “triple-check” all systems.

The 60 satellites flown into space were released into the orbit as planned about an hour after Thursday’s launch, and the Falcon 9’s main-stage reusable booster rocket flew back to Earth for a successful landing on a barge floating in the Atlantic.

SpaceX said it would probably take another day to learn whether all the satellites deployed were functioning properly. Each weighs about 500 pounds (227 kg), making them the heaviest payload carried aloft by SpaceX to date.

They represent the initial phase of a planned constellation capable of beaming signals for high-speed internet service from space to paying customers around the globe.

Also read: How Elon Musk’s SpaceX Lowered Costs and Reduced Barriers to Space

Musk has said he sees the new Starlink venture as an important new revenue stream for his California-based Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, whose launch service income he expects to top out at around $3 billion a year.

He told reporters last week that makes Starlink pivotal in helping pay for his larger goals of developing a new spacecraft to fly paying customers to the moon and for eventually trying to colonize Mars.

“We think this is a key stepping stone on the way towards establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars and a base on the moon,” said billionaire Musk, who is also chief executive officer of automaker Tesla Inc.

At least 12 launches carrying similar payloads are needed to achieve constant internet coverage of most of the world, Musk said. For now, Starlink is only authorized for US operations.

Musk faces stiff competition. Airbus SE-backed OneWeb launched its own clutch of satellites in February, while LeoSat Enterprises and Canada’s Telesat are also working to build data networks.

In each network, the tiny satellites orbit closer to Earth than traditional communications satellites, a technological shift made possible by advances in laser technology and computer chips.

Musk said SpaceX would begin approaching customers later this year or next year. As many as 2,000 satellites will be launched per year, with the ultimate objective of placing up to 12,000 into orbit.

(Reuters)

NASA Probe Detects Likely ‘Marsquake’ – an Interplanetary First

The breakthrough came nearly five months after InSight, the first spacecraft designed to study the deep interior of a distant world, touched down on the surface of Mars.

Reuters: NASA‘s robotic probe InSight has detected and measured what scientists believe to be a “marsquake,” marking the first time a likely seismological tremor has been recorded on another planet, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California reported on Tuesday.

The breakthrough came nearly five months after InSight, the first spacecraft designed specifically to study the deep interior of a distant world, touched down on the surface of Mars to begin its two-year seismological mission on the red planet.

The faint rumble characterised by JPL scientists as a likely marsquake, roughly equal to a 2.5 magnitude earthquake, was recorded on April 6 – the lander’s 128th Martian day, or sol.

It was detected by InSight’s French-built seismometer, an instrument sensitive enough to measure a seismic wave just one-half the radius of a hydrogen atom.

Also read | Methane on Mars: A New Discovery or Just a Lot of Hot Air?

“We’ve been collecting background noise up until now, but this first event officially kicks off a new field: Martian seismology,” InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt said in a news release.

Scientists are still examining the data to conclusively determine the precise cause of the signal, but the trembling appeared to have originated from inside the planet, as opposed to being caused by forces above the surface, such as wind.

“The high frequency level and broad band is very similar to what we get from a rupture process. So we are very confident that this is a marsquake,” Philippe Lognonné, a geophysics and planetary science professor at University Paris Diderot in France and lead researcher for InSight’s seismometer, said in an email.

Still, a tremor so faint in Southern California would be virtually lost among the dozens of small seismic crackles that occur there every day.

“Our informed guesswork is that this a very small event that’s relatively close, maybe from 50 to 100 kilometers away” from the lander, Banerdt told Reuters by telephone.

A more distant quake would yield greater information about Mars’ interior because seismic waves would “penetrate deeper into the planet before they come back up to the seismometer,” he said.

No tectonic plates 

The size and duration of the marsquake also fit the profile of some of the thousands of moonquakes detected on the lunar surface between 1969 and 1977 by seismometers installed there by NASA‘s Apollo missions, said Lori Glaze, planetary science division director at NASA headquarters in Washington.

The lunar and Martian surfaces are extremely quiet compared with Earth, which experiences constant low-level seismic noise from oceans and weather as well as quakes that occur along subterranean fault lines created by shifting tectonic plates in the planet’s crust.

Also read | NASA Bids Adieu to Opportunity, the Mars Rover That Kept Going and Going

Mars and the moon lack tectonic plates. Their seismic activity is instead driven by a cooling and contracting process that causes stress to build up and become strong enough to rupture the crust.

Three other apparent seismic signals were picked up by InSight on March 14, April 10 and April 11 but were even smaller and more ambiguous in origin, leaving scientists less certain they were actual marsquakes.

Lognonné said he expected InSight to eventually detect quakes 50 to 100 times larger than the April 6 tremor.

(Reuters)

Methane on Mars: A New Discovery or Just a Lot of Hot Air?

For the first time, an instrument orbiting Mars and a rover on the surface have detected methane simultaneously – raising hopes for finding life on the red planet.

The discovery of life on Mars would get pretty much everyone excited. But the scientists hunting for it would probably be happy no matter what the outcome of their search – whether life turned out to extinct, dormant or extant. They’d even consider finding no evidence of life whatsoever to be an important discovery. But, as the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and it will take many decades of detailed exploration of Mars to be reasonably sure that life has always been absent there.

There have been no direct observations of living organisms or fossils on Mars so far. But there are other types of evidence. One of the most often cited is the controversial detection of methane in the planet’s atmosphere, first in 2004 and then in 2014. This could have been produced by some kind of past or present microbial lifeform. However, the abundance is so low that the data remain uncertain. And in 2018, the team behind the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter said they had failed to discover any methane.

Now a new paper, published in Nature Geoscience, reports a fresh detection of methane in the planet’s atmosphere, along with a theory of where it came from. But given how difficult it is to make reliable measurements of this gas, how confident can we be about the results?

Also Read: According to NASA Rover Data, Mars Had the Ingredients Needed for Life

Double detection

The new research used archival data acquired between 2012 and 2014 by the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer aboard Mars Express, which studies the composition of the planet’s atmosphere through the infrared radiation that is reflected and emitted by the planet. This is the same instrument that first detected low levels of methane in Mars’s atmosphere in 2004.

The difference between the two sets of observations comes from the mode in which the spectrometer operated. In 2004, the data were acquired by the instrument looking through the atmosphere to the surface as Mars Express orbited the planet. In the new study, the instrument was pointed at a single surface feature, and tracked the feature as the spacecraft orbited.

The significance of the data arises from the feature that the team selected to track: the Gale Crater. This, of course, is the site where the Curiosity rover is operating – and where the Tunable Laser Spectrometer on board Curiosity detected elevated levels of methane in 2014.

The spectrometer on Mars Express was tracking the Gale Crater before, during and after Curiosity’s detection. Excitingly, it also detected elevated levels of methane in the region – the first time that a simultaneous detection of methane at the surface and in the atmosphere has occurred. This, perhaps, makes the new measurement more reliable than the previous detections.

The researchers also attempted to pinpoint the source of methane using a grid-mapping technique. They created computer models of emission scenarios in each grid and also looked at geological features in each place to see if there were potential sources of methane. They inferred that the methane was released from a region to the east of Gale Crater and that the most likely origin of the gas was seepage of along faults in ice beneath the surface.

Finding where the methane came from is only a stage in determining how it formed. Importantly, there are many mechanisms other than living organisms that could have produced it, for example geological processes. For example, a geological event may have fractured the ice containing bubbles of methane to release it into the atmosphere.

Also read: Five Reasons to Forget Mars for Now and Return to the Moon

But the new study does not attempt to make any conclusions about the origin of the methane. However, the authors do comment that their findings, especially in corroborating the Curiosity data, suggest that the methane release is more likely to be by small, short events, rather than episodic large exhalations. Indeed, it could be speculated that small events are more likely than large ones if Mars turns out to experience the “marsquakes” (similar to an earthquake) that the Insight mission is programmed to detect.

So whatever the source, it does seem there may be methane on Mars after all. However, we’ll need further confirmation to be completely sure. Fortunately, fresh findings are most likely to be available soon. The team that failed to discover methane with the Trace Gas Orbiter has been analysing new data for several months.

As it has an extremely sensitive detector for methane on board, it is anticipated that continued data collection over the next few years will give a much better picture on whether there is a seasonal, or an episodic variation in atmospheric methane. Or it could reveal that it is just an illusory will-o-the-wisp.The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Did You Know? On Average, Mercury Is Earth’s Closest Neighbour.

Trying to improve stargazing and space-journeying are lofty goals but we often forget that pursuing and celebrating curiosities are valuable, too.

Which planet is closest to Earth? Common sense suggests it’s Venus or Mars, and common sense would be right. However, technically speaking, this isn’t entirely true. At different points in their respective orbits, Earth, Venus and Mars are at different distances from each other. Out of curiosity, if these variations in distance were factored in, which planet would be closest?

The answer is weird: it’s Mercury.

Point-circle method (PCM) is a technique that averages the distance between every point on a planet’s orbit and every point on the second planet’s orbit. Using this, three researchers found that Venus is on average is 1.14 astronomical units (AU) away from Earth and Mercury is 1.04 AU away.

The researchers figured that for any two bodies in the same plane and moving in concentric orbits, the average distance between the two bodies is directly proportional to the radius of the inner orbit.

To validate this corollary, they plotted the planets in their actual elliptical orbits in 3D and ran a simulation for 10,000 years. The simulation recorded the distances between each pair of planets every 24 simulation hours.

The average measured distances deviated from the results from PCM by less than 1% – so their calculation was right. On average, Mercury is Earth’s closest neighbour.

To be completely honest, this isn’t entirely useful information. The researchers’ finding doesn’t change how astronomers and spaceflight planners work. In fact, it could even be a case of ‘data torture’: analysing a large dataset in multiple ways and finding one interesting result – the statistical equivalent of a broken clock being right twice a day.

One astrophysicist told The Wire, “Any physical quantity is interesting to the degree to which it determines the solution of interesting questions. For planetary dynamics, some of the interesting questions are about the evolution of the orbits of the planets, satellites, asteroids, comets and other minor bodies. The physical quantities of interest are the Keplerian orbital elements, whose long-time evolution is in general difficult to calculate.”

In this picture, the “average distance” the researchers have calculated – the astrophysicist said – might not be worthwhile. “Further discussion on this topic may enliven casual conversation but writing more about it could be, in my opinion, a waste of time.”

These are sobering words. However, the researchers’ article does have one very important redeeming quality. Trying to improve stargazing and space-journeying are lofty goals but we often forget that pursuing and celebrating curiosities are valuable, too. So knowing that Mercury is in a certain way closer to Earth is – to name that quality – wow. And wow needn’t be a waste of time.

Pratik Pawar is a science writer and a recipient of the S. Ramaseshan science writing fellowship.

NASA Bids Adieu to Opportunity, the Mars Rover That Kept Going and Going

Engineers lost contact with the solar-powered vehicle on June 10 during a dust storm that encircled Mars.

Los Angeles: Opportunity, a remarkably durable NASA rover designed to roll along the surface of Mars for three months, has stopped communicating with Earth after 15 years of service, officials said on Wednesday, ending a mission that astounded the US space agency.

Engineers lost contact with the solar-powered vehicle on June 10 during a dust storm that encircled Mars. Since then, NASA officials made numerous attempts to reach the six-wheeled rover, which is about the size of a golf cart.

Opportunity’s equipment may have been compromised by the storm, which struck while the rover was at a site called Perseverance Valley and blotted out sunlight needed by the robot’s solar panels, officials said.

The vehicle was built to drive six-tenths of a mile (1 km), but ended up covering 28 miles (45 km) and lasting longer on Mars than any other robot sent to the surface of the Red Planet.

On Tuesday, engineers sent a transmission in a last attempt to revive the rover, but heard nothing back, said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

“It is, therefore, that I am standing here with a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude that I declare the Opportunity mission as complete,” Zurbuchen said during an online video presentation at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Wet and warm Mars

As Opportunity explored craters on Mars, it gathered evidence to demonstrate the planet in the ancient past was wet and warm enough to possibly sustain life, NASA said. That included the discovery of white veins of the mineral gypsum, an indication of water moving through underground fractures.

Opportunity landed on Mars in January 2004, a few weeks after its rover twin, Spirit.

Spirit ended its mission in 2010 after becoming stuck in soft soil.

The Opportunity mission cost more than $1 billion, with about 300 JPL staff members dedicated to the project soon after it landed, John Callas, project manager for Mars Exploration Rovers, said by phone.

The team had dwindled to 30 by the time Opportunity went silent, he said. Its members are going to other projects.

Another NASA rover called Curiosity, which arrived on Mars in 2012, continues its work on the Martian surface, collecting soil samples to analyse them for signs of organic compounds.

And NASA’s InSight spacecraft, the first robotic lander designed to study the deep interior of a distant world, touched down safely on the surface of Mars in November, with instruments to detect planetary seismic rumblings never measured anywhere but Earth.

InSight and the next Mars rover mission, scheduled for 2020, are both seen as precursors for eventual human exploration of Mars, an objective NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has said might be achieved as early as the mid-2030s.

(Reuters)

As China Surges Ahead in Space, India and Japan Band Together to Keep Up

Though both Japan and India have pursued national space missions, they have not matched up to China’s space capabilities, funded by its deep pockets and Xi Jinping’s strategic vision and leadership.

Setting foot on the Moon on July 20, 1969, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin and Neil Armstrong changed the course of space exploration. In the 50 years since that dramatic event, there have been six crewed missions by NASA under the Apollo programme, and several more uncrewed missions by the Soviet Union, European Space Agency (ESA), Japan, China and India, which returned to Earth with samples from the surface of the Moon.

Recently, American President Donald Trump announced that the US was returning to crewed missions, not only to the Moon but to Mars and beyond. A new US Space Policy Directive called on NASA to “lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities.”

Signing the directive, President Trump said that it “marks a first step in returning American astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972, for long-term exploration and use. This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprints – we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday, to many worlds beyond.”

In line with the directive, NASA is planning an “innovative combination of missions” with commercial and international partners, scheduled for the early 2020s. The goals are to enable better scientific understanding of the lunar surface in addition to readying it for a sustained human presence. The missions are also meant to use the lunar surface as a “crucial training ground” and as a “technology demonstration test site” to undertake human missions to Mars and across the solar system.

Also read: Private Cos Are Catalysing China’s Rise as a Space Superpower

Meanwhile, China has also announced big plans for its own Moon missions. Even as space agencies around the world are applauding it for soft landing the Chang’e 4 on the far side of the Moon in early January, Beijing has revealed its plans for additional lunar missions that would set a firm foundation for a possible science and research base on Moon.

Clearly, the historic landing has given a huge boost to China’s confidence in undertaking complex space exploration missions. The country will be launching a successor mission, Chang’e 5 towards the end of this year. And this is only the beginning.

Speaking to the press, Wu Yanhua, deputy head of the China National Space Administration, said, “Experts are still discussing and verifying the feasibility of subsequent projects, but it’s confirmed that there will be another three missions after Chang’e 5.” Wu suggested that China and other space powers are likely to soon want to test technologies for a lunar base.

China has plans to undertake an interplanetary mission to Mars sometime next year. Its ambitions also include building its own space station, Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, by 2022. And it will be built just as the International Space Station plans to wind up its mission by 2024 (or, if it is extended, by 2028).

Asia has other contestants in outer space. Both Japan and India have been eyeing the growth of China’s military space programme under the leadership of the People’s Liberation Army. The changing balance of power equations in Asia along with the troubled history among key Asian powers are likely to lead to competition in the outer space domain as well.

Even though China has time and again reiterated that its space programme is a peaceful one, there have not been too many takers. On the contrary, China’s achievements are driving India and Japan to cooperate with each other to keep up.

The India-Japan strategic partnership has been growing stronger, and this also extends to their cooperation on matters of outer space. The two countries recently announced that they will be holding their first space security dialogue in March this year. Until now, India has held a space security dialogue only with the US, which began only in March 2015.

So the upcoming India-Japan space security dialogue is an indication of how comfortable Tokyo and New Delhi are getting with each other. The bilateral space partnership between the two is also driven by the increasing alignment of strategic thinking in shaping a stable and secure Asian strategic order.

Though both Japan and India have pursued national space missions, including lunar ones, these have not matched up to China’s space capabilities, funded by its deep pockets and Xi’s strategic vision and leadership. This has led to some serious rethinking in both Japan and India. In fact, this prompted Shinzo Abe and Narendra Modi to underline the importance of outer space in their bilateral relations.

In September 2017, the two leaders applauded the deepening partnership between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on a number of important areas, including Earth observation, satellite-based navigation, space sciences and lunar exploration.

A couple months later, the president of JAXA noted that the two countries, by cooperating on a joint lunar mission, would “lead the space sector in the Asia-Pacific region”.

Also read: China Is Taking Over India’s Tech Space. Should We Worry?

Clearly, lunar missions are back with a bang, as is competition for space laurels, much like the US-Soviet space race during the Cold War. But there is also a bit more to the race this time because space-mining and its associated economics have been gaining greater traction in recent years. The ESA is already thinking of mining for oxygen and water on the Moon by the mid-2020s.

Similarly, both India and China are making separate plans to engage in space-mining. Ye Peijian, the chief commander and designer of China’s lunar exploration programme, has stated that the country will send the first batch of asteroid exploration spacecraft around 2020. He highlighted the fact that asteroids have a large concentration of precious metals, which could justify the significant cost and risks involved because the economic value of these activities could be in trillions of US dollars.

India has also been making a similar case. Prabhat Ranjan, executive director of the Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council, a policy organisation within the Department of Science and Technology, has argued that the “Moon is already being seen as a mineral wealth, and further, one can go up to the asteroids and start exploiting this.” He added that these are “game changer” developments “and if India doesn’t do this, we will lag behind.”

China’s rapid advances and achievements in outer space means that there is a good chance of India, Japan, Australia and the US seeking to cooperate more. Such consolidation among key Indo-Pacific powers is a clear sign of the growing discomfort in the region with China’s unilateral tendencies and approaches, not just in the space domain but in the broader strategic realm.

Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan is a distinguished fellow and head of the Nuclear and Space Policy Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.

Ingredients That Led to Life on Earth Could’ve Come From a Cosmic Accident

Life on Earth may have begun with a bang – as planet-sized bodies crashed into each other and scattered the chemical seeds of life over Earth.

Life on Earth may have begun with a bang – as planet-sized bodies crashed into each other and scattered the chemical seeds of life over Earth.

According to a new study, a Mars-sized planetary body that slammed into a young Earth and formed the Moon may have also delivered the ingredients necessary for life to begin.

Some elements were critical for life to have first arisen on Earth. They include oxygen, hydrogen, sulphur, nitrogen and carbon. Scientists generally believe that Earth didn’t have these elements available in ways conducive to the formation of life when it first formed. Instead, meteorites, comets and/or other interplanetary bodies rich in volatile materials brought them along when they collided with a nascent Earth.

Also read: From Volcanoes on Mars to Scarps on Mercury – How Places on Other Worlds Get Their Names

“Yes, there was the idea that the key elements for life came from planetary building blocks such as chondritic meteorites,” Damanveer Grewal, an author of the study and a PhD student at Rice University, Houston, told The Wire. “But what was thought is that the impacting materials were small, undifferentiated, primitive objects and not a planet-scale object.”

Another thing that bothered scientists, apart from the source of these materials, was the abundance of carbon relative to nitrogen or hydrogen. It was out of line with the amount of carbon found within the bodies of the earliest known lifeforms. In fact, the carbon-nitrogen ratio on the surface of early Earth – 40:1 – was much higher than that in the meteorites, known as carbonaceous chondrites, thought to have brought the volatiles to Earth. The ratio is closer to 20:1 on the chondrites.

Where was the excessive carbon coming from?

According to Grewal, this could’ve been possible if Earth’s core had been rich in sulphur. The ensuing geochemical reactions would then have ensured that more carbon was expelled from the core than nitrogen, and the carbon would then travel to the surface.

However, early Earth was rich in silicates, not sulphur, so Grewal and his colleagues wondered if there could have been another source.

And that’s when they began to suspect if two sulphur-rich planetary bodies may have crashed into each other somewhere near Earth.

To test their idea, the researchers hit the lab. Using metal and silicate mixtures that contained carbon, nitrogen, and sulphur, among other elements, they simulated the high pressure and high temperature conditions that would prevail in a cataclysmic collision.

The researchers were interested to find out where these elements ended up getting trapped: within metals or within silicates. If most of them ended up trapped within metallic compounds, then they would be sequestered into a planet’s core. If most of them ended up within silicates, then they would eventually be available on the planet’s surface.

Their experiments yielded a definite answer: that if a planet had a metallic core with a lot of sulphur dissolved in it, the planet’s outer layers would have a carbon-nitrogen, or carbon-sulphur, ratio similar to that on Earth.

Ergo, Earth’s life-giving elements, and the compounds they went on to form, need not have come predominantly from carbonaceous chondrites. They could’ve come from a whole other rocky planet.

And now that their premise seemed to hold up, the researchers set out to determine the size of the planetary body that could’ve bring the right dose of volatile materials to Earth. This they did using computer simulations built using the results of the previous experiment.

This led them to a body about the size of Mars.

Researchers have already reported strong evidence of a Mars-sized body having slammed into an inchoate Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The remnants of this impact are thought to have formed the Moon – borne out by its geochemical similarities to our planet.

Grewal and co. speculated that this event also delivered the ingredients for the recipe of life on Earth.

The results are not surprising, according to Simone Marchi, who studies the origins of terrestrial planets at the Southwest Research Institute, Colorado. “But the study provides a compelling evidence for this scenario, as opposite to other different scenarios proposed in the past.”

At the same time, he’s not completely convinced that the Moon-forming impact was the only collision that delivered the elements. “This aspect requires further testing, as it seems possible that even smaller collisions than what is required to form the Moon could deliver significant amount of volatiles to Earth.”

Also read: The Story of Dust, Through Space and Time

But even more interesting to him is the possibility that large collisions involving a young planet could drastically alter its budget of volatile elements. This has implications for the long-term evolution of the planet’s atmosphere and, of course, whether or not it can sustain life.

For example, a rocky planet needn’t possess all the ‘life-forming’ elements. It could simply collide with other bodies, and emerge in the aftermath with a newfound ability to support life.

And considering such unlikely origins of life is important in our search for alien life, especially now that we’re discovering exoplanets in the thousands.

“The exploration of other habitable worlds should recognise that there is not a single mechanism to establish conditions for habitability,” said Grewal.

Lakshmi Supriya is a freelance science writer based in Bengaluru.

Starship Alone Won’t Take Us to Mars – We’ll Need Lots of Enterprise Too

It surprises no one that since 1960, barely a dozen of the 56 probes launched to Mars have actually landed on the ruddy surface.

Elon Musk, the CEO of aerospace company SpaceX, wants to have his epitaph on Mars. In a television interview last week, Musk spoke of his wish to travel to Mars irrespective of the odds against his surviving the trip or – once there – succumbing to the harsh environs. Musk has been thinking aloud about going to the red planet since March 2013, when he said he would like to “die on Mars, just not on impact.”

Reflecting this, one of SpaceX’s goals is to transport a million colonisers to Mars using a reusable spacecraft it has already christened Starship. It will be equipped with solar arrays, thruster rockets and carbon-fibre fuel tanks.

More importantly, Starship is part of a three-stage ‘Interplanetary Transport System’ that also includes the gigantic rocket Raptor and a refuelling craft to reduce Starship’s launch weight.

The idea is for Raptor to first launch Starship into orbit around Earth and return to the launchpad. It is then launched again carrying the refuelling craft, which will dock with the Starship in orbit. After filling up, Starship will begin its Marsward journey.

Musk expects the first flights to begin before the next decade is out. Thereafter, SpaceX will have one mission every 26 months, when Mars is closest to Earth in its orbit.

Also read: Now Playing On Your Timeline, the Cult of Elon Musk

While Musk’s initiative is certainly an idea whose time has come, there is still aways to go before you can book a seat on Starship. Developing a launch system to get off of Earth and set course for Mars is only one part of the colossal engineering challenges that await wannabe Mars colonisers.

Although astronauts have been in space – off and on – for over five decades, except for a few quick trips to the Moon, they’ve never spent much time far from Earth. Deep space is filled with energetic protons from solar flares, gamma rays from newborn black holes and cosmic rays from exploding stars. With no big planet nearby to block or deflect this radiation, those who make the 128.7-million-km, three-year voyage to Mars and back will be tested to their limits.

Notwithstanding some tentative experiments onboard the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit, scientists still don’t know much about the effects of space travel on the human body. On Earth, for example, gravity pulls blood towards the lower body. In the absence of gravity, blood could collect in the torso and precipitate complications like oedema in the face or arms.

Other effects like muscle atrophy, in fact, seem more tolerable than space radiation. Exposure to space radiation, scientists believe, could affect the bloodstream and trigger unpleasant reactions like nausea and diarrhoea. Longer exposures could kill.

If these are not daunting enough, consider the navigation and engineering capabilities required. A successful Mars landing is so difficult that space agencies readily attest to Mars’ reputation for being a graveyard for exploratory spacecraft.

The orbital entry, descent and landing stages of a Mars mission are the most dangerous phase of its voyage from Earth. A major challenge is to decelerate the spacecraft as it drops from orbit on to the surface. The atmospheric pressure in this phase is so low that there is no drag to arrest the craft’s descent.

It is no wonder that since 1960, barely a dozen of the 56 probes launched to Mars have actually landed on the ruddy surface. The others have failed because of reasons ranging from the unexpected – as when a Martian storm destroyed the Polar Lander during touchdown in 1999 – to the bizarre – when mission controllers mixed up metric and imperial data and smashed the Mars Climate Orbiter into the red planet’s atmosphere.

The threats don’t subside even after landing. For example, Japan’s Nozomi had its electronics fried by a solar flare in 2003. The mission had to be abandoned.

Also read: Five Reasons to Forget Mars for Now and Return to the Moon

It is against this backdrop that space agencies and private entities like SpaceX are using bold science to get to know the red planet better, before the first manned missions liftoff. Mars offers a realistic option as a second home for humans. Robotic exploration has indicated the presence of a resource-rich environment, including mineral and metal deposits.

Thanks to these unmanned missions, we may soon have enough knowledge about the planet’s dynamic weather systems and become able to develop mineralogical maps even better than those of Earth. At first glance an arid planet covered in red dirt, Mars is now believed to contain large volumes of water locked up in subsurface deposits. This is an invaluable resource for manned Mars missions.

Once we get there, the possibilities range from using the planet as a second source of fuel, drinking water and oxygen to terraforming its face and prepare it for human settlement. Beyond that, the planet is also an excellent candidate as an interplanetary springboard: a pitstop for human missions going deeper into the Solar System.

Prakash Chandra is a science writer.