“When NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars this week, it also brought the Linux operating system to the Red Planet,” reports PC Magazine: The tidbit was mentioned in an interview NASA software engineer Tim Canham gave to IEEE Spectrum. The helicopter-like drone on board the Perseverance rover uses a Linux-powered software framework the space agency open-sourced a few years ago. “This…
Tag: ancient life
NASA’s Perseverance rover has landed safely on the surface of Mars
NASA’s Perseverance rover has landed, and it will soon start taking dust samples to be returned to Earth and searching for evidence of ancient life on Mars Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2268537-nasas-perseverance-rover-has-landed-safely-on-the-surface-of-mars/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
NASA rover lands on Mars to look for signs of ancient life
A NASA rover streaked through the orange Martian sky and landed on the planet Thursday, accomplishing the riskiest step yet in an epic quest to bring back rocks that could answer whether life ever existed on Mars. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-02-nasa-rover-mars-ancient-life.html…
Chinese spacecraft enters Mars’ orbit, joining Arab ship
A Chinese spacecraft went into orbit around Mars on Wednesday on an expedition to land a rover on the surface and scout for signs of ancient life, authorities announced in a landmark step in the country’s most ambitious deep-space mission yet. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-02-chinese-spacecraft-mars-orbit-arab.html…
Get ready for Perseverance’s landing on Mars February 18
Some call attempts to land on Mars “7 minutes of terror.” The Perseverance mission will provide the most detailed video and photos of a landing yet. We’ll watch ourselves land on another planet, for the first time ever. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/get-ready-nasa-perseverance-landing-feb2021…
6 space missions to look forward to in 2021
Here are some of the space missions to keep an eye out for in 2021. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/6-space-missions-2021-artemis-chandrayaa3-jameswebb…
Clues to Mars life in Earth’s Atacama Desert
Researchers in the U.S. and Spain have discovered a plethora of previously unknown microbes living in wet clay layers below Chile’s arid Atacama Desert. The finding will help future rovers search for life on Mars. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/microbes-clay-atacama-desert-life-on-mars…
Ancient life signs under dinosaur-killing Chicxulub crater
Researchers have found evidence for an ancient microbial ecosystem in a hydrothermal system beneath Mexico’s Chicxulub Crater, thought to be the site of the impact that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/dinosaur-killing-chicxulub-impact-crater-hydrothermal-microbial…
Life-hunting Perseverance rover is halfway to Mars
NASA announced that its Perseverance rover mission – which will search for evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars – has now passed the halfway mark in its journey to the planet. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/perservance-rover-halfway-to-mars-nasa-astrobiology…
Ancient microbial life used arsenic to thrive in a world without oxygen
Today, most life on Earth is supported by oxygen. But ancient microbial mats existed for a billion years before oxygen was present in the atmosphere. So what did life use instead? Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/ancient-microbial-life-arsenic…