Latest on Mars

  SpaceX CEO   Elon Musk   has said any future economy on Mars could be cryptocurrency based. The tech billionaire, who is one of the co-founders of online payments giant PayPal, hopes to  send the first humans to Mars as early 2024 , with the ultimate aim of setting up a “self-sustaining city on Mars as soon as possible". Responding to a Twitter thread started by AI researcher Lex Fridman, Mr Musk agreed a “ Mars  economy will run on crypto”, suggesting it could be with the novelty cryptocurrency dogecoin or the fringe cryptocurrency Marscoin. The Marscoin project was founded in 2014 and saw a brief surge in popularity during the cryptocurrency market bull run in late 2017 but has since drifted into obscurity. The altcoin currently has a market cap of less than $100,000, according to  CoinMarketCap . Dogecoin could be a more likely candidate, given it continues to be relatively popular and shares many of the same decentralised attributes as bitcoin. Last w...

  SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy concept rendering. SpaceX  is set to significantly ramp up its Starship development program in the new year, in more ways than one. SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk noted on Twitter on Thursday that the company will seek to make use of both of its two launch pads at its development facility in Boca Chica, Texas with prototype rockets set up on each, and that it will begin flight testing its Super Heavy booster (starting with low-altitude "hops") as quickly as "a few months" from now. Recently, SpaceX set up its SN9 prototype of Starship (the ninth in the current series) at Pad B at its Texas testing facility, which is on the Gulf of Mexico. SN9 will be next to undergo active testing, after SpaceX successfully flew its predecessor SN8 to an altitude of around 40,000 feet, and then executed a crucial belly flop maneuver that will be used to help control the powered landing of the production version. SN8 was destroyed when it tou...

Dec. 23 (UPI) --  NASA has shown what it will look like when its Perseverance rover touches down on Mars, a challenging sequence that the agency describes as "7 minutes of terror." The Perseverance rover was launched in the summer and is scheduled to arrive on Mars in February. Once it reaches Mars' atmosphere on its way to Jezero Crater, it must slow down from its speed of 12,000 mph in a span of 7 minutes, touch down on the rust-colored surface and disconnect from the main spacecraft. Tuesday, NASA released an animation that showed the complex process. "The more we know about Mars, the better prepared we are to send humans there and get them home safely," Ken Williford, deputy project scientist for the Mars 2020 mission,  told UPI in July . "We wish to understand how Mars formed, how it evolved as a planetary system and what all of that can tell us about our own planet, our solar system and our place in the universe." Since it takes about 11 minutes ...

  This is according to a new study which argues acidic fluids in Martian clay could have dissolved evidence of biological life. 2 Nasa's Perseverance rover aims to collect clay soil samples from Mars in 2021 Credit: AFP or licensors The researchers think acid could explain why life is so hard to find on the Red Planet. They've just published their research in the Nature journal  Scientific Reports . Martian soil has long been targeted as a substance that could protect evidence of organic material if it had been present on Mars. Nasa's Perseverance rover is even tasked with landing on Mars’ Jezero Crater in February 2021 to collect clay soil samples. 2 Acidic fluids on Mars could have dissolved signs of life Credit: Getty Images - Getty However, the new study suggests that even if we finally have Martian soil to examine, it might not be able to provide us with the evidence we're hoping for. One of the authors, Alberto Fairén, said: "We know that acidic fluids have f...

  See NASA's big plans for its new Mars rover, Perseverance   01:57 (CNN) In a high-stakes mission that could take five years to complete, NASA wants to land astronauts on Mars in the 2030s. Transporting enough oxygen and fuel on a spacecraft to sustain the mission for anywhere near that length of time, however, isn't currently viable. The way NASA plans to address this problem is by deploying  MOXIE , or the Mars Oxygen in Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. This system is in the testing phase on the Mars Perseverance rover, which launched in July. The apparatus will convert the carbon dioxide that makes up 96% of the gas in the red planet's' atmosphere into oxygen. The Perseverance rover is on its way to Mars. What's next? On Mars,  oxygen is only 0.13%  of the atmosphere, compared to 21%   of the   Earth's atmosphere. Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have now said they may have come up with another technique that could complement M...

  The picture of the Mars landscape was taken by the University of Arizona’s HiRISE camera. 2 Can you spot a dragon shape in this image of Mars? Credit: NASA/jpl/UArizona This camera is attached to Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter It's been collecting valuable information from the red planet since 2006. HiRISE’s official Twitter account posted the image and wrote: "We rotated this image of light-toned blocky material in southwestern Melas Chasma because from this perspective, it resembles a fabled Chinese dragon." The photo was snapped from 160 miles above. 2 Mars's Melas Chasma is said to be canyon Credit: NASA/jpl/UArizona It was first seen by scientists in 2007 but the outline of a dragon shape was not immediately obvious until the image was rotated. The photo actually shows Mar's Melas Chasma, this is the reddish orange section of the picture. Experts think this martian canyon is cutting through an ancient lake bed. A University of Arizona  blog post  explai...