Before we send humans to the Red Planet, it might be a good idea to send bacteria first. In his dissertation, Benjamin Lehner, a doctoral candidate at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, suggested that we send bacteria to Mars that can mine usable iron out of the Martian soil. Specifically, he suggested that we send the bacterial species Shewanella oneidensis .
"In its natural form, we can't use much of the iron in the Martian soil," Lehner said in a statement . "But S. oneidensis has the ability to turn part of the soil into magnetite, a magnetic oxide of iron."
And here's another article:
Happy Mars-iversary, InSight! NASA Lander Marks 1 Year on Red Planet | Space
How time does fly: NASA's InSight Mars lander has now been on the Red Planet for a full (Earth) year.
The past year has been a very eventful one for the stationary InSight, which is probing the Martian interior like never before. The lander's supersensitive seismometer suite has detected more than 150 vibration events to date, about two dozen of which are confirmed marsquakes. But InSight's other primary science instrument, a burrowing heat probe called the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3), has had tougher sledding.
NASA's Briefcase-Size MarCO Satellite Picks Up Honors – NASA's Mars Exploration Program
Engineer Joel Steinkraus uses sunlight to test the solar arrays on one of the Mars Cube One (MarCO) spacecraft. As the first CubeSat to enter deep space, MarCO earned a 2020 Laureate from Aviation Week & Space Technology. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Full image and caption ›
Aviation Week & Space Technology is bestowing a prestigious Laureate award on NASA's pair of briefcase-size Mars Cube One spacecraft. Known as MarCO , they're the first CubeSats — compact spacecraft made up of cube-shaped units — to travel into deep space.
European Mars rover in a 'race against time' to fix parachutes | Science | AAAS
Getting a probe safely to the surface of Mars is not easy: Numerous landing attempts have ended in a crash. Sufficiently slowing a lander in the thin air requires plenty of sophisticated kit, including designer heat shields, powerful retrorockets, and, sometimes, giant airbags. But the European-Russian Exo-Mars mission is struggling with a piece of 18th century technology: parachutes.
High-altitude tests earlier this year revealed that ExoMars's chutes were tearing as they were pulled from their bags. The European Space Agency (ESA) has turned to NASA colleagues for help, and this week, a joint team began tests to see whether redesigned bags and chutes now work, and if not, why. It could be their last chance to fix the problem and preserve a launch set for next summer—or face 2 years of delay.
Quite a lot has been going on:
Ballistic SQUID Drone Could Solve Mars Exploration Challenges - DRONELIFE
When public safety organizations are putting drones to work, taking off can be the most time-consuming and risky part of an operation. People, structures and other environmental factors tend to slow down flights and the speed at which they get underway – which isn’t ideal when every second counts.
One way to get around this problem is to standardize the launch process. Researchers from Caltech University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have done exactly that, with a dynamic solution that fires the drone from a cannon.
News | NASA's Mars 2020 Heads Into the Test Chamber
In this time-lapse video, taken on Oct. 9, 2019, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, bunny-suited engineers move the Mars 2020 rover from a high bay in the Spacecraft Simulator Building into the facility's large vacuum chamber for testing in Mars-like environmental conditions.
"Whenever you move the rover, it is a big deal," said Mars 2020 engineer Chris Chatellier of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "There is a technician on every corner, and other engineers and safety inspectors are monitoring and assisting every step of the way. Every move is choreographed, briefed and rehearsed."
Happening on Twitter
A notable theme in these hearings: some career officials seem to act as though their job is to decide America's for… https://t.co/Bll4G3KUEU RepMarkMeadows (from Jackson County, NC) Thu Nov 21 15:38:02 +0000 2019
Let's have some fun and help people be limitless. We are going to have a contest and give away 10 books (and send t… https://t.co/GKmNb1duaY joboaler (from Stanford University) Tue Nov 26 19:48:56 +0000 2019
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