Just two days after officially (and quietly) confirming that it intends to replace the International Space Station with a commercial station by 2030, NASA has awarded over $400 million in agreements to three companies to further develop private station plans. TechCrunch reports: The three companies, which received the awards under the agency's Commercial low Earth orbit (LEO) Destinations program, are: Nanoracks for $160 million; Blue Origin for $130 million; and Northrop Grumman for $125.6 million. NASA received eleven proposals in total, director of commercial spaceflight Phil McAlister said Thursday. He added that of the three chosen proposals, there was a diversity of technical concepts and a variety of logistical and launch vehicle options offered. "This diversity not only enhances the likelihood of success of NASA strategy, but it also leads to a high degree of innovation, which is critical in most commercial space endeavors," he said.

The three companies have already released a handful of details about their proposals. Blue Origin is calling its station concept "Orbital Reef," and it is designing it with Boeing, Sierra Space and others. The team said it wants to launch the station in 2027. Meanwhile, Nanoracks is calling its station, which is being developed with its parent company Voyager Space and aerospace prime Lockheed Martin, "Starlab." While Northrop didn't give its station proposal a flashy name, it's working with Dynetics to deliver a modular design based around its Cygnus spacecraft.

These substantial awards mark the first phase of a two-phase process as NASA seeks to ensure that there will be no gap between the retirement of the ISS and the introduction of a new station. NASA has repeatedly stressed, both to Congress and more recently in a report by the Office of Inspector General, that the overall success of the development of a thriving economy in LEO is dependent upon avoiding this gap. "If there is no habitable commercial destination in low Earth orbit after the ISS is decommissioned, NASA will be unable to conduct microgravity health research and technology demonstrations needed for long-duration human exploration missions to the Moon and Mars, significantly increasing the risk of -- or delaying -- those missions," the agency said in the report.

Today, Vice President Kamala Harris' office released a new framework for US space policy, detailing how the Biden administration plans to approach commercial, civil, and military space activity moving forward. From a report: Called the United States Space Priorities Framework, the document keeps many of the same space priorities from the previous administration but adds a new emphasis on using space to help combat climate change and investing in STEM education. The new framework comes ahead of today's National Space Council meeting, the first one to be held under the Biden administration. Harris, who chairs the National Space Council, will convene the policy advisory group at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, at 1:30PM ET today.

[...] When it comes to space, the Biden administration is carrying forward many of the priorities set by the Trump administration. Notably, NASA's ambitious Artemis program, which was solidified under Trump, is still a major focus under Biden. And plenty of the topics discussed under Pence's Space Council are included in the new framework released by Harris. A few of the key points include maintaining US leadership in space by sending humans back to the Moon and exploring the Solar System with robotic spacecraft, fostering a competitive, regulatory environment for space companies, and defending against security threats in space while strengthening our space assets. In the biggest break from the previous administration, there looks to be a renewed focus on using space in the fight against climate change. In the new framework, the administration pledges to invest in satellites that can observe Earth from space, helping scientists better understand our changing climate. "Open dissemination of Earth observation data will support both domestic and international efforts to address the climate crisis," the document states. To further drive home this new emphasis on climate research from space, President Biden plans to sign a new Executive Order today that will add five new members to the National Space Council, including the Secretaries of Education, Labor, Agriculture, and the Interior, but also notably the National Climate Advisor.

Nasa has postponed a planned spacewalk outside the International Space Station due to flying "debris," two weeks after Russia blew up one of its own satellites in a missile test that created clouds of zooming shrapnel in orbit. From a report: Washington's space agency did not mention the Russian test in its announcement, but a Nasa official had warned a day earlier of a slightly elevated risk to astronauts due to the 14 November incident. The strike generated thousands of pieces of "space junk" that are now hurling around the Earth at about 17,000 mph (27,400km/h) -- much faster than the speed of a bullet. At that velocity, even tiny flecks of paint can damage spacecraft, with spacesuits even more vulnerable.

On Tuesday, about five hours before the astronauts Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron were due to venture outside the space station, Nasa said on Twitter that the spacewalk to fix a failed antenna had been cancelled. "Nasa received a debris notification for the space station. Due to the lack of opportunity to properly assess the risk it could pose to the astronauts, teams have decided to delay the 30 November spacewalk until more information is available," it tweeted. Moscow has said its test to destroy its own spacecraft, Tselina-D, which had been in orbit since 1982, was successful and the debris posed no "threat to space activity."

Hmmmmmm writes: China is developing a powerful nuclear reactor for its moon and Mars missions, according to researchers involved in the project. The reactor can generate one megawatt of electric power, 100 times more powerful than a similar device Nasa plans to put on the surface of the moon by 2030. The project was launched with funding from the central government in 2019. Although technical details and the launch date were not revealed, the engineering design of a prototype machine was completed recently and some critical components have been built, two scientists who took part in the project confirmed to the South China Morning Post this week.

To China, this is an ambitious project with unprecedented challenges. The only publicly known nuclear device it has sent into space is a tiny radioactive battery on Yutu 2, the first rover to land on the far side of the moon in 2019. That device could only generate a few watts of heat to help the rover during long lunar nights. Chemical fuel and solar panels will no longer be enough to meet the demands of human space exploration, which is expected to expand significantly with human settlements on the moon or Mars on the agenda, according to the Chinese researchers. "Nuclear power is the most hopeful solution. Other nations have launched some ambitious plans. China cannot afford the cost of losing this race," said one researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences who asked not to be named as they were not authorised to speak to the media.

If all goes as planned, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will launch early Wednesday morning "to test whether slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid can nudge it into a different trajectory," reports The New York Times. "Results from the test, if successful, will come in handy if NASA and other space agencies ever need to deflect an asteroid to save Earth and avert a catastrophic impact." From the report: The DART spacecraft is scheduled to lift off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday at 1:20 a.m. Eastern time (or 10:20 p.m. local time) from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. NASA plans to host a livestream of the launch on its YouTube channel starting at 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday. If bad weather around the Vandenberg launch site prompts a delay, the next opportunity for liftoff would be about 24 hours later.

After launching to space, the spacecraft will make nearly one full orbit around the sun before it crosses paths with Dimorphos, a football-field-size asteroid that closely orbits a bigger asteroid, called Didymos, every 11 hours and 55 minutes. Astronomers call those two asteroids a binary system, where one is a mini-moon to the other. Together, the two asteroids make one full orbit around the sun every two years. Dimorphos poses no threat to Earth, and the mission is essentially target practice. DART's impact will happen in late September or early October next year, when the binary asteroids are at their closest point to Earth, roughly 6.8 million miles away.

Four hours before impact, the DART spacecraft, formally called a kinetic impactor, will autonomously steer itself straight toward Dimorphos for a head-on collision at 15,000 miles per hour. An onboard camera will capture and send back photos to Earth in real time until 20 seconds before impact. A tiny satellite from the Italian Space Agency, deployed 10 days before the impact, will come as close as 34 miles from the asteroid to snap images every six seconds in the moments before and after DART's impact.

A short update on the projected launch date of the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope came out of NASA on Monday, and it wasn't exactly a heart-warming missive. From a report: The large, space-based telescope's "no earlier than" launch date will slip from December 18 to at least December 22 after an "incident" occurred during processing operations at the launch site in Kourou, French Guiana. That is where the telescope will launch on an Ariane 5 rocket provided by the European Space Agency. "Technicians were preparing to attach Webb to the launch vehicle adapter, which is used to integrate the observatory with the upper stage of the Ariane 5 rocket," NASA said in a blog post. "A sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band -- which secures Webb to the launch vehicle adapter -- caused a vibration throughout the observatory."

"An Australian company is part of an international effort to recycle dangerous space junk into rocket fuel — in space," reports the Guardian.

Slashdot reader votsalo shared their report (which also looks at some of the other companies working on the problem of space debris). South Australian company Neumann Space has developed an "in-space electric propulsion system" that can be used in low Earth orbit to extend the missions of spacecraft, move satellites, or de-orbit them. Now Neumann is working on a plan with three other companies to turn space junk into fuel for that propulsion system... Another U.S. company, Cislunar, is developing a space foundry to melt debris into metal rods. And Neumann Space's propulsion system can use those metal rods as fuel — their system ionises the metal which then creates thrust to move objects around orbit.

Chief executive officer Herve Astier said when Neumann was approached to be part of a supply chain to melt metal in space, he thought it was a futuristic plan, and would not be "as easy as it looks".

"But they got a grant from NASA so we built a prototype and it works," he said...

Astier says it is still futuristic, but now he can see that it's possible. "A lot of people are putting money into debris. Often it's to take it down into the atmosphere and burn it up. But if it's there and you can capture it and reuse it, it makes sense from a business perspective, because you're not shipping it up there," he said.

"It's like developing a gas station in space."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.org: NASA and the nation's top federal nuclear research lab on Friday put out a request for proposals for a fission surface power system. NASA is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory to establish a sun-independent power source for missions to the moon by the end of the decade. If successful in supporting a sustained human presence on the moon, the next objective would be Mars. NASA says fission surface power could provide sustained, abundant power no matter the environmental conditions on the moon or Mars. The reactor would be built on Earth and then sent to the moon.

Submitted plans for the fission surface power system should include a uranium-fueled reactor core, a system to convert the nuclear power into usable energy, a thermal management system to keep the reactor cool, and a distribution system providing no less than 40 kilowatts of continuous electric power for 10 years in the lunar environment. Some other requirements include that it be capable of turning itself off and on without human help, that it be able to operate from the deck of a lunar lander, and that it can be removed from the lander and run on a mobile system and be transported to a different lunar site for operation. Additionally, when launched from Earth to the moon, it should fit inside a 12-foot (4-meter) diameter cylinder that's 18 feet (6 meters) long. It should not weigh more than 13,200 pounds (6,000 kilograms). The proposal requests are for an initial system design and must be submitted by Feb. 19.

Satellite trackers have been working overtime to figure out just how much dangerous debris Russia created when it destroyed one of its own satellites early Monday -- and the picture they've painted looks bleak. Multiple visual simulations of Russia's anti-satellite, or ASAT, test show a widespread cloud of debris that will likely menace other objects in orbit for years. The Verge reports: It's going to take weeks or even months to fully understand just how bad the situation is, but early visualizations of the ASAT test created by satellite trackers show an extensive trail of space debris left in the wake of the breakup. The fragments appear like a dotted snake in orbit, stretching out and moving in roughly the same direction that Kosmos 1408 used to move around Earth. And there's one thing the visualizers agree on: this snake of debris isn't going anywhere anytime soon. "There will be some potential collision risk to most satellites in [low Earth orbit] from the fragmentation of Cosmos 1408 over the next few years to decades," LeoLabs, a private space tracking company in the US, wrote in a blog post.

Two visualizations created by the European Union's Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) network and space software company AGI reveal what likely happened in the first moment of impact when Russia's missile intercepted Kosmos 1408. They both show how the debris cloud grew instantly and spread throughout space. AGI's simulation also shows just how close the cloud comes to intersecting with the International Space Station, validating NASA's concerns and the agency's decision to have the astronauts shelter in place.

Another visualization created by Hugh Lewis, a professor of engineering at the University of Southampton specializing in space debris, shows just how widely the debris from Kosmos 1408 has spread out in space. Lewis explains that when Russia's missile hit the satellite, each of the fragments that were created got a little kick, sending them to higher and lower altitudes. Each piece is moving at a different speed depending on the height of its orbit. Lewis says that the cloud will continue to morph over time. The debris fragments in the lower orbits will fall to Earth and out of orbit more quickly, while the ones in higher orbits will stay in space much longer.

NASA has now released the most detailed footage yet of Ingenuity in flight. Gizmodo reports: The two videos were taken during the rotorcraft's 13th flight, which took place on September 4. The 16-second flight saw Ingenuity travel nearly 700 feet horizontally, at an altitude of 26 feet. The Perseverance rover recorded the rotorcraft's maneuvers using its two-camera Mastcam-Z, from a distance of about 1,000 feet away.

"The value of Mastcam-Z really shines through with these video clips," Justin Maki, deputy principal investigator for the Mastcam-Z instrument at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a NASA press release. "Even at 300 meters [984 feet] away, we get a magnificent closeup of takeoff and landing through Mastcam-Z's âright eye.' And while the helicopter is little more than a speck in the wide view taken through the 'left eye,' it gives viewers a good feel for the size of the environment that Ingenuity is exploring."

Recently, the scientists at NASA had to program Ingenuity to move a little faster, to compensate for the thinner atmosphere on Mars as the planet's seasons change. The helicopter's navigation system is automated and uses artificial intelligence to constantly measure and correct for environmental variables like wind speed and the level of the ground below it. "It's awesome to actually get to see this [automatic correction] occur," said Havard Grip, Ingenuity's chief pilot, in the same release. "It reinforces the accuracy of our modeling and our understanding of how to best operate Ingenuity."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Elon Musk on Wednesday said SpaceX is "hoping" to launch the first orbital flight test of its mammoth Starship rocket in January, a schedule that depends on testing and regulatory approval. "We'll do a bunch of tests in December and hopefully launch in January," Musk said, speaking at a meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Space Studies Board.

The company's next major step in developing Starship is launching to orbit. First, the company needs a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration for the mission, with the regulator expecting to complete a key environmental assessment by the end of this year. Musk noted that he wasn't sure if Starship would successfully reach orbit on the first try, but emphasized that he is "confident" that the rocket will get to space in 2022. "We intend to have a high flight rate next year," Musk said.

SpaceX aims to launch as many as a dozen Starship test flights next year, he said, to complete the "test flight program" and move to launching "real payloads in 2023." He stressed that creating a mass production line for Starship is crucial to the program's long-term goals, noting that the current "biggest constraint" on rocket manufacturing is how fast the company can build the Raptor engines needed for Starship. "I think, in order for life to become multiplanetary, we'll need maybe 1,000 ships or something like that," Musk said. "The overarching goal of SpaceX has been to advance space technology such that humanity can become a multi-planet species and, ultimately, a spacefaring civilization." SpaceX received a $2.9 billion contract from NASA to develop Starship for delivering astronauts to the moon's surface, but Musk said the company is "not assuming any international collaboration" or external funding for the rocket program. "[Starship] is at least 90% internally funded thus far," Musk said.

According to Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, future generations "will visit Earth the way you visit Yellowstone National Park." Gizmodo reports: The remarks came last week at an event held at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and others talking about space policy. Bezos sat down for a one-on-one chat with Adi Ignatius, the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review. He brought up themes we've heard before, including his vision that all polluting industries will exist in space one day and that we'll all live on space colonies that could, in his estimation, support 1 trillion people. But he expanded on his vision in greater detail about what, exactly, will happen to the planet we'll all leave behind for Blue Origin-branded space colonies.

"This is the most precious planet in the world and we have to preserve it and conserve it and make sure that our children and their children and so on have this beauty in their lives," Bezos said. "We need to conserve what we have, restore what we've lost," he said. "This planet is so small, if we want to keep growing as a civilization, using energy as a civilization, most of that needs to be done off-planet. ... This place is special. You can't ruin it." To do that will require us all to live in space colonies. That would leave Earth to eventually be, in Bezos' vision, a place for future folks to visit but not live. "They may visit Earth the way you visit Yellowstone National Park," Bezos said. Ignatius asked a follow-up about who gets to live on Earth in this vision, which Bezos did not answer. "It's extremely telling that Bezos' vision for the future of Earth is Yellowstone National Park," comments Gizmodo's Brian Kahn, a former park ranger. "Bezos' big idea of turning Earth into Yellowstone elides the fact that humans are as much a part of this planet as they were part of Yellowstone before Americans showed up. He's pitching a very Western solution to the very Western problem of climate change and environmental degradation, problems that Bezos' very own businesses have played a major role in while enriching him to the point where he now has a huge sway on humanity's next step."

"NASA is not properly estimating costs for the Artemis program and could spend $93 billion between fiscal years 2021 and 2025," writes Slashdot reader schwit1. "NASA recently extended its target date for sending astronauts back to the moon to 2025 at the earliest." But, according to a new report (PDF) from NASA's Office of the Inspector General, it could be several years after 2024. The Verge reports: The recent prediction comes from NASA's Office of the Inspector General, which does periodic audits of the space agency's various programs. In its latest report, the OIG took a comprehensive look at NASA's Artemis program, the agency's ambitious initiative to send people back to the Moon, as well as land the first woman and the first person of color on the lunar surface. [...] NASA's Artemis program relies on a suite of complicated vehicles all working together to get astronauts safely to the Moon, including a massive new rocket called the Space Launch System, or SLS, that will send people to deep space inside a new crew capsule called Orion. Meanwhile, SpaceX is developing its next-generation spacecraft, called Starship, to carry people to and from the lunar surface for NASA -- part of a $2.9 billion contract awarded to the company in April.

However, Starship is still in very early stages of development and has yet to launch to orbit. SLS and Orion also have not flown on their first flight together. The OIG report, released Monday, highlights these issues and reveals just how much work is left to be done on Artemis, making a 2024 landing date unrealistic. "Given the time needed to develop and fully test the HLS and new spacesuits, we project NASA will exceed its current timetable for landing humans on the Moon in late 2024 by several years," the report states. [...] Rival space company Blue Origin had also hoped to receive a contract from NASA to develop a lunar lander, but when the space agency gave the award to SpaceX, the company sued in federal court. The lawsuit prevented NASA and SpaceX from working together on the lander until the litigation was resolved.

The OIG report notes that the lawsuit did have an impact on the overall schedule, but the office also argues that the development schedule for SpaceX's Starship is overly optimistic. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk continues to make bold predictions for Starship's first major test launch, claiming multiple times it'd be ready to fly to orbit for the first time this year. However, the OIG report estimates the first orbital flight test of Starship will occur sometime in the second quarter of 2022. The document does argue that SpaceX may be able to shave off some time due to its speedy testing pace compared with earlier NASA spaceflight programs. But there is still quite a lot of work to be done after Starship's orbital flight test. [...] The OIG report predicts that the debut of NASA's SLS rocket and Orion combo will also be delayed.

Scientists have identified what appears to be a small chunk of the moon that is tracking the Earth's orbit around the Sun. From a report: The asteroid, named Kamo'oalewa, was discovered in 2016 but until now relatively little has been known about it. New observations suggest it could be a fragment from the moon that was thrown into space by an ancient lunar collision. Kamo'oalewa is one of Earth's quasi-satellites, a category of asteroid that orbits the Sun, but remains relatively close to the planet -- in this case about 9m miles away.

Despite being close in astronomical terms, the asteroid is about the size of a ferris wheel and about 4m times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye. Consequently, the Earth's most powerful telescopes are needed to make observations. Using the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in southern Arizona, astronomers found the spectrum of reflected light from Kamo'oalewa closely matched lunar rocks from Nasa's Apollo missions, suggesting it originated from the moon. They had initially compared the light with that reflected off other near-Earth asteroids, but drawn a blank. "I looked through every near-Earth asteroid spectrum we had access to, and nothing matched," said Ben Sharkey, a PhD student at the University of Arizona and the paper's lead author.

SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft successfully docked with the International Space Station on Thursday evening, less than 24 hours after it launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Fox Business reports: NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn, and Kayla Barron, as well as European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer, will spend six months at the ISS conducting scientific research and monitoring the space station. The launch was supposed to occur nearly two weeks ago, but was delayed by bad weather and an undisclosed medical problem with a crew member. Wednesday's launch carried the 600th person to ever reach orbit and comes just days after SpaceX returned four astronauts to Earth on Monday, bringing an end to a 200-day mission at the space station.

"Another space agency, about one-tenth the size of NASA, is thinking outside of the planet-sized box in its search for Martian life," reports CNET: With its Martian Moons Exploration mission (or MMX), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, later this decade will touch down on a world no spacecraft has visited before: Phobos, one of Mars' mystifying moons. Scientists at JAXA, and other astronomers, hypothesize that on this curious moon they may find signs of ancient microbes that were catapulted off the surface of Mars and flung across the cosmos. The remains of these unwitting spacefaring organisms have been untouched for millions of years and, soon, could be plucked from Phobos' face and returned to Earth.

When an asteroid collides with a planet, the planet unleashes a mighty sneeze of dust and rock. The faster the asteroid smashes into the surface, the bigger the sneeze... [I]f the asteroid impact is powerful enough, the sneeze will fling dust and rock into space... Just like a human sneeze contains microbes, the material ejected by a planet may also contain microscopic life — or the remnants of it. If the asteroid death blast doesn't melt the rock and the microbes to mere atoms, there's a chance they can float into the cosmos... Mars is scarred by impacts from drifter asteroids that slammed into the surface over the planet's life. If these impacts were to hit in just the right spot, at just the right angle and just the right time, there's a chance the ejected material would make it to Phobos, Mars' curious, potato-shaped moon. Phobos has the closest orbit of any known moon to its parent body, circling the red planet at a distance of just 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles), about the same as the distance between Tokyo and Honolulu....

Phobos is practically hugging Mars, and moves around the planet so quickly that if you were to observe it from the surface, you'd be able to see it rise and set twice every Martian day. Its proximity to the red planet has led JAXA scientists and engineers to speculate about the potential for finding the remnants of Martian microbes on the moon's surface. "If Martian life once existed and was widespread elsewhere on Mars, the chance that its dead remains exist also on Phobos is, in my opinion, relatively high," says Ryuki Hyodo, a planetary scientist at JAXA's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science... It's possible, JAXA believes, that Phobos could be a satellite cemetery, unwittingly holding molecular evidence of long-dead microorganisms....

With a planned sample return date of 2029, MMX would be the first time samples have been returned from the Martian sphere. While the space agency estimates just 0.1% of Phobos' soil likely originated on Mars, there's a chance MMX could bring back the first samples of the red planet to Earth.

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled against Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin in the company's lawsuit versus NASA over a lucrative astronaut lunar lander contract awarded to Elon Musk's SpaceX earlier this year. Federal judge Richard Hertling sided with the defense in his ruling, completing a months-long battle after Blue Origin sued NASA in August. From a report: Blue Origin, NASA, and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the ruling. NASA in April awarded SpaceX with the sole contract for the agency's Human Landing System program under a competitive process. Worth $2.9 billion, the SpaceX contract will see the company use its Starship rocket to deliver astronauts to the moon's surface for NASA's upcoming Artemis missions.

Joshua Chou writes via The Conversation: Last month the Australian Space Agency announced plans to send an Australian-made rover to the Moon by as early as 2026, under a deal with NASA. The rover will collect lunar soil containing oxygen, which could eventually be used to support human life in space. Although the deal with NASA made headlines, a separate mission conducted by private companies in Australia and Canada, in conjunction with the University of Technology Sydney, may see Australian technology hunting water on the Moon as soon as mid-2024. If all goes according to plan, it will be the first rover with Australian-made components to make it to the Moon.

The ten-kilogram rover, measuring 60x60x50cm, will be launched on board the Hakuto lander made by ispace, a lunar robotic exploration company based in Japan. The rover itself, also built by ispace, will have an integrated robotic arm created by the private companies Stardust Technologies (based in Canada) and Australia's EXPLOR Space Technology (of which I am one of the founders). Using cameras and sensors, the arm will collect high-resolution visual and haptic data to be sent back to the mission control centre at the University of Technology Sydney. It will also collect information on the physical and chemical composition of lunar dust, soil and rocks -- specifically with a goal of finding water. We know water is present within the Moon's soil, but we have yet to find a way to extract it for practical use.

"NASA scientists have just published a commentary article in Nature calling for a framework for reporting extraterrestrial life to the world," reports Cosmos magazine (in an article shared by Slashdot reader Tesseractic): "Our generation could realistically be the one to discover evidence of life beyond Earth," write NASA Chief Scientist James Green and colleagues. "With this privileged potential comes responsibility. As life-detection objectives become increasingly prominent in space sciences, it is essential to open a community dialogue about how to convey information in a subject matter that is diverse, complicated and has a high potential to be sensationalised..."

Green and colleagues argue that...we should reframe such a discovery, so it isn't presented as a single moment when aliens are announced to the world. Instead, it should be seen as a progressive endeavour, reflecting the process of science itself. "If, instead, we recast the search for life as a progressive endeavour, we convey the value of observations that are contextual or suggestive but not definitive and emphasise that false starts and dead ends are an expected part of a healthy scientific process," they write. This will involve scientists, technologists and the media talking to each other to agree firstly on objective standards of evidence for life, and secondly on the best way to communicate that evidence.

This, they say, should preferably be done now before a detection of life is made, rather than scramble to put it together in the aftermath.
"The team kickstarts the conversation by proposing a 'confidence of life detection' (CoLD) scale, which contains seven steps taking us from first exciting potential detection of life to definitive confirmation," Cosmos points out. (With the stages including the discoveries of unquestionable biosignatures, a habitable environment, and then corroborating evidence.) Cosmos argues that "This is an increasingly important conversation to have — because experts think that the odds aliens exist are high."

And they close their article by quoting NASA's team. "Whatever the outcome of the dialogue, what matters is that it occurs. In doing so, we can only become more effective at communicating the results of our work, and the wonder associated with it."

NASA is calling on any interested humans to contribute to the machine learning algorithms that help Perseverance get around. All you need to do is look at some images and label geological features. ExtremeTech reports: The project is known as AI4Mars, and it's a continuation of a project started last year using images from Curiosity. That particular rover arrived on Mars in 2012 and has been making history ever since. NASA used Curiosity as the starting point when designing Perseverance. The new rover has 23 cameras, which capture a ton of visual data from Mars, but the robot has to rely on human operators to interpret most of those images. The rover has enhanced AI to help it avoid obstacles, and it will get even better if you chip in.

The AI4Mars site lets you choose between Opportunity, Curiosity, and the new Perseverance images. After selecting the kind of images you want to scope out, the site will provide you with several different marker types and explanations of what each one is. For example, the NavCam asks you to ID sand, consolidated soil (where the wheels will get good traction), bedrock, and big rocks. There are examples of all these formations, so it's a snap to get started.