Radiation resistance is baked into the Perseverance Mars rover. Here’s why that’s important.

Think about the number of times your computer on Earth has crashed. Now imagine how challenging that would be during a rover mission on Mars. From time to time, the Curiosity rover has gone into “safe mode” to deal with glitches and software problems since it landed on Mars in August 2012. But each time, the mission has recovered to continue its epic climb up a Martian mountain in search of habitable environments.  All those “lessons learned” from safe mode incidents are now embedded into the new Perseverance rover, the…

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Welcome to Mars! Bill Nye and Robert Zubrin hail new Red Planet visitors.

Two prominent space advocacy groups are cheering the new generation of Mars explorers. While NASA’s newly landed Perseverance rover is getting the lion’s share of coverage in the United States, both the United Arab Emirates and China also entered Mars orbit successfully in February. The Planetary Society’s CEO Bill Nye expressed optimism that China’s Tianwen-1 mission might open up opportunities for collaboration between the country and the United States, which have had tricky international relations for decades over matters ranging from intellectual property to security concerns and human rights. Notably,…

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Is there a pattern to the universe?

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of How to Die in Space. For decades, cosmologists have wondered if the large-scale structure of the universe is a fractal — that is, if it looks the same no matter how large the scale. After completing massive surveys of galaxies, scientists finally have an answer: No, but kind of, in a way. In the early 20th century, astronomers — beginning with Edwin Hubble and his discovery…

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