Schiaparelli lander to attempt a dangerous landing on Mars

Image: ISRO

  19 Oct 2016 , 09:35

The search for life on Mars may take a giant leap on Wednesday when a space lander is due to touch down on the red planet in Europe’s first attempt to land a craft there since the Beagle 2’s “heroic failure” more than a decade ago. The disc-shaped 577-kg (1,272 lb) Schiaparelli lander, which will test technologies for a rover due to follow in 2020, is expected to enter Mars’s atmosphere at a speed of nearly 21,000 km (13,049 miles) per hour at 1442 GMT.

It will use a parachute and thrusters to slow down before touching down on the planet’s surface only six minutes later. The lander is named for Giovanni Schiaparelli, the Italian astronomer who in 1877 began mapping the topography of Mars, extending study of what are now known as the planet’s canals, a mistranslation of the Italian word canali, or channels.

Schiaparelli is part of the European-Russian ExoMars program, which will search for signs of past and present life on Mars and represents only the second European attempt to land a craft on the red planet, after Britain’s Beagle 2 was ejected from the Mars Express spacecraft in 2003 but never made contact after failing to deploy its solar panels upon landing.

At the time it was dubbed “a heroic failure”. Landing on Mars, Earth’s neighbor some 35 million miles (56 million km) away, is

Maven mission by NASA beams back amazing ultraviolet images of Mars

  18 Oct 2016 , 14:20

NASA’s MAVEN mission has returned images showing the ultraviolet glow from the Martian atmosphere in unprecedented detail, revealing dynamic, previously invisible behaviour. They include the first images of “nightglow” that can be used to show how winds circulate at high altitudes, NASA said in a statement on Tuesday. Nightglow is a common planetary phenomenon in which the sky faintly glows even in the complete absence of external light.

Scientists predicted nitric oxide (NO) nightglow at Mars, and prior missions detected its presence, but MAVEN has returned the first images of this phenomenon in the Martian atmosphere, the statement added. Additionally, dayside ultraviolet imagery from the spacecraft shows how ozone amounts change over the seasons and

White House announces $300M in tech funding for digital health, smart cities, AI, and getting us to Mars

Image: White House Frontiers Conference

By Alison DeNisco | October 13, 2016, 1:03 PM PST

On Thursday, President Barack Obama hosted the White House Frontiers Conference, where he discussed America's initiatives to leverage tech for health, smart cities, and space travel.



On Thursday, the White House announced more than $300 million in funding, through partnerships, for tech innovations that will help Americans live in smart cities, improve healthcare, and even make it to Mars—while also addressing what increased automation could mean for job security.

At the first White House Frontiers Conference, co-hosted by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, President Obama opened up a conversation on current innovations underway in America, and ones to come.

"We may be in a slightly different period now, simply because of the pervasive applicability of AI and other technologies," said President Obama in a video shown at the start of the conference. "High-skill folks do very well in these systems, and can leverage their talents and interface with machines to extend their reach, sales, products, and services. Low-wage, low-skill individuals become more and more redundant, and their jobs may not be replaced, but wages will be suppressed."

Here are the five frontiers of innovation the White House examined at