Below is the first of several color images sent back from Mars by the Perseverance Rover.

This is the first high-resolution, color image to be sent back by the Hazard Cameras (Hazcams) on the underside NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover after its landing on Feb. 18, 2021.

In this next image, a high-resolution color Hazard Cameras (Hazcams) captures an image of one of the six aluminum wheels aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover.

For this mission, NASA mounted a total of 23 cameras on Perseverance and the landing craft to provide some unprecedented views of the landing.

One of the cameras mounted on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this image of NASA’s Perseverance rover falling thorough the Martian atmosphere with its parachute trailing behind.

Finally, in this high-resolution still image, you can see the rover being lowered to the surface of Mars. This image is part of a video taken by a camera aboard the descent stage as it performed what NASA calls the sky-crane maneuver.

The full hi-definition videos of the landing, taken by all of the various cameras will be released by NASA in the coming days.

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While the video stream will broadcast live, because of the time delay between the Earth and Mars, by the time we start seeing the feed of the beginning of the landing phase, Perseverance will actually already be on the surface of Mars – hopefully.

Unlike missions to Mars of the past, this one will provide a number of incredible videos of various stages of the landing. Taking a cue from SpaceX, NASA has equipped Perseverance and the landing vehicles with a number of High-Definition cameras.

Watch Live Video Stream of Perseverance Rover Landing on Mars:

A little while after the Perseverance Rover has completed its landing, that video footage will be beamed back to earth. NASA will then release the various high-definition videos of the landing for the public to enjoy.

Many of us have already enjoyed the spectacular videos from recent SpaceX launches here on Earth. Similarly, the cameras mounted on the Perseverance lander will give the world an unprecedented view of a spacecraft entering the atmosphere and landing on another planet – Mars.

Perseverance is the “biggest, heaviest, cleanest, and most sophisticated robotic geologist ever launched into space,” according the NASA. The rover will search the Jezero Crater on for signs of ancient life on Mars. It is equipped with a drill that will collect complete core samples which will be returned to Earth by a future mission vehicle.

Live video coverage of the Perseverance Rover landing, including commentary from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) begins at 2:15 p.m. EST on Thursday Feb. 18, 2021.

In addition to the online live streams, the rover landing will also air on the NASA TV Public Channel. Online video sources to watch the Perseverance Rover Mars Landing include: NASA App, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitch, Daily Motion, and THETA.TV.

Perseverance is scheduled to touchdown on the surface of Mars at 3:55 p.m. EST.

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You can watch the complete Mars Perseverance Rover mission overview video below, but read on as we describe the key mission events as well.

The Mars Perseverance Rover will use a landing system much like that of the Curiosity rover. As it enters the atmosphere a parachute will help to initially slow the descent vehicle carrying Perseverance to the surface.

Next, the descent vehicle will use it engines to continue decelerating as it nears the surface. Finally, the descent vehicle will lower the Perseverance Rover the final few feet to the Martian surface before cutting its cables and flying away – referred to as a “skycrane maneuver.”

According to NASA, this type of landing system enables the agency to land much larger and heavier rovers without damaging them. Smaller, earlier rovers like Pathfinder essentially bounced the final few meters to the surface surrounded by airbags.

Once on the surface, Perseverance will begin what is planned to be at least a one year mission of exploration. The rover will be searching for signs of past microbial life on Mars. This time the rover has a drill and will collect and store core samples and soil samples.

Perseverance will also test a new technology – a way to extract oxygen from the 96% carbon dioxide Martian atmosphere. This is a very exciting test as it could be a big step forward for a human presence on Mars.

Another exciting moment will occur during the mission when the Perseverance rover unveils the new Mars Helicopter. That’s right, NASA will be testing its first powered flight vehicle on Mars.

We will provide a live stream of the Mars Perseverance Rover landing to allow our readers to watch the Mars landing play out live on February 18, 2021 – be sure to come back to watch that event here.

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The automated flight, 27 hours long, began with a dramatic night launch from Kennedy Space Center. The SpaceX capsule carrying 4 NASA astronauts then docked with the International Space Station late on Monday night.

Watch the SpaceX video replay of Crew Mission 1 Docking with the ISS below:

The connection occurred when the capsule was 262 miles above the Earth. Kate Rubins, on making the first radio contact to the dragon’s commander, remarked how pleasant it was to hear a human voice.

This is the second time that SpaceX has launched an astronaut crew to the ISS. The first mission in October was a test mission with 2 crew onboard. This mission, Crew Mission 1, was the first official crew delivery to the ISS and marks the beginning of a new future for American astronauts traveling into orbit and beyond.

The next replacement crew for ISS is planned in April. Until then, the astronauts, a Japanese and 3 Americans, will be staying in the orbit lab.

This new crew is now united the three already onboard the ISS, including 2 Russians and an American. One of the members of this week’s Hopkins crew, Glover, is the only African-American who went for such a long journey.

The 4 members of the crew have named the capsule ‘Resilience’, owed to the fact that times are really hard for the entire world due to pandemic, and this mission can serve as hope. There was a video broadcast on Monday displaying the storehouse, screen controls and the gravity indicator while touring their capsule.

For the launch, guests were kept to minimum due to coronavirus. Even the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk didn’t join as he tweeted that he probably has an infection.

Instead, Elon Musk’s SpaceX was represented by Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX. While Elon Musk assured that he was quite involved, just a little remotely.

Dragon crew channeled the live streams showing views of New Zealand and the pacific almost 250 miles below when they were nearing the altitude to link-up. The SpaceX headquarters radioed saying that the view looks beautiful. 

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With no atmosphere on the moon, finding water in the lunar soil in an area in full sunlight was the last thing anyone expected. But in the announcement NASA said that its, Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has in fact confirmed the existence of water on the sunlit surface of the Moon.

“Without a thick atmosphere, water on the sunlit lunar surface should just be lost to space,” said Honniball, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Yet somehow we’re seeing it. Something is generating the water, and something must be trapping it there.”

SOFIA is essentially an observatory, with a 106-inch diameter telescope, built into a Boeing 747 aircraft. Using this as their platform, astronomers are able to fly high above most of the Earth’s atmosphere for a better view of the universe.

SOFIA is usually focused on deep-sky objects like star clusters and galaxies. But in something of a test, the team tried looking at the moon. They were testing to see if the telescope’s tracking system would be able to lock-on to an object so close.

“It was, in fact, the first time SOFIA has looked at the Moon, and we weren’t even completely sure if we would get reliable data, but questions about the Moon’s water compelled us to try,” said Naseem Rangwala, SOFIA’s project scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.

“It’s incredible that this discovery came out of what was essentially a test, and now that we know we can do this, we’re planning more flights to do more observations.”

The water was found, using an infrared camera on the SOFIA Telescope, in the Clavius Crater. Clavius is easily seen from the Earth near the southern end of the Moon.

Some earlier discoveries of hydrogen on the lunar surface were not able to distinguish between H2O (water) and OH (hydroxyl). However, the readings by SOFIA were in the unique wavelengths specific to water.

Finding water on the moon is a huge plus for plans to begin building a sustainable colony there by the end of the decade. But before you get too excited, the amount of water is as yet uncertain.

Based on the SOFIA data, current estimates put the amount of water in the lunar soil at about 100 times less than the amount of water in sand of the Sahara Desert. Despite the small amounts, the finding shows that anything is possible, and has positive implications for future exploration.

“This discovery challenges our understanding of the lunar surface and raises intriguing questions about resources relevant for deep space exploration,” said NASA’s Paul Hertz.

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In a first for space exploration, NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft briefly reached out to ‘TAG’ the surface of asteroid Bennu – grabbing a soil sample that it is bringing back to Earth.

Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) was launched by from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida Sept. 8, 2016. Seven years later, it will return to Earth carrying the asteroid sample it obtained this week.

The spacecraft has been orbiting Bennu since its arrival in December of 2018. But today, OSIRIS-Rex extended is specially designed TAGSAM arm – plunging it into the surface of Bennu. It kicked up a lot of dust and managed to collect a 5 billion-year-old soil sample for later analysis.

TAGSAM stands for Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism. As the name suggests, the design is ingeniously simple. As shown in the image and sequence video below, the TAGSAM device plunges into the soil briefly – forcing soil up into the collection area.

“This amazing first for NASA demonstrates how an incredible team from across the country came together and persevered through incredible challenges to expand the boundaries of knowledge,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.

“Our industry, academic, and international partners have made it possible to hold a piece of the most ancient solar system in our hands.”

The NASA team is working to determine whether the sample size obtained is large enough. If it is not, they will command another TAG maneuver in January. Otherwise, commands will be sent to the spacecraft, prepping it for storage of the sample.

The current plan is for the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft to exit its orbit and start heading back to Earth in March. For full mission details, visit this NASA.gov link.

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The first launch is a Delta IV-Heavy scheduled for 12:14am eastern on Sept 26, 2020. That’s a night launch in the very early hours of Saturday morning – or just after midnight on Friday night, depending on how you look at it.

While that’s technically a launch on Saturday, anyone going out to see the launch in person will certainly be driving out there Friday night.

The United Launch Alliance Delta IV-Heavy rocket will launch from pad 37B at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. This launch had been attempted earlier on August 29. But the flight was halted just 3 seconds prior to lift-off due to a technical issue.

Onboard the Delta 4 is a classified spy satellite for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office.

For anyone who can make it out to see the launch in person, it will be well worth the drive. A night launch of a rocket of this size will be something you will never forget.

The Delta IV-Heavy is the largest of the Delta IV family. It is the closest thing to what a night launch of the Space Shuttle was like.

With its 3 booster rockets mounted together, the launch will light up the midnight sky as if the Sun were rising out of the ground. Even from miles away, the Delta 4 will turn night into day all around you. It’s truly something that has to be experienced.

Second Rocket Launch of the Weekend

The second launch from the Space Center is also a rescheduled event.

On September 17, SpaceX scrubbed its latest launch attempt for a Falcon 9. Bad weather in the recovery zone for the Falcon 9 booster’s landing was to blame.

Instead, the Falcon 9 Starlink 12 rocket launch is now scheduled for 10:43am eastern on Sunday, Sept. 27.

Falcon 9 will blast off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. On this mission, it will put into orbit another 60 of the SpaceX Starlink Satellites.

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What the probes found there is often described as ‘hell’. The atmosphere on Venus is 96% carbon dioxide and incredibly dense. All of this creates a crushing pressure at the surface that is 92 times that which we experience on Earth.

For a person, it would be like diving nearly half a mine deep into the ocean. Depths that would crush a submarine.

The temperature on Venus is an unbelievable 867 degrees Fahrenheit, and clouds of sulfuric acid blanket the planet.

In an environment like this, most scientists agreed that chances of life existing on Venus would be highly unlikely. However, that thinking may change based on a recent discovery.

Nature Astronomy published the findings of the MIT based team which made the incredible find.

Using a telescope array in the Atacama region of Chile and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, the team peered into, and analyzed, the atmosphere of Venus.

No, the team has not spotted any Venusians with a telescope. But they have detected a gas (Phosphine) which they can only attribute to a living organism.

Since finding the Phosphine gas in the atmosphere, the team has been looking for any other explanation for its production. But they keep coming back to the same conclusion. – The gas could only have been produced by a living organism.

If they are correct, it means that there is some form of life in the clouds of Venus.  

NASA is currently working with Russia on the Venera-D mission slated for the late-2020s. Part of this mission will include probes to sample the atmosphere.

In light of this recent discovery, perhaps the probes will be modified to help explain the Phosphine gas – or look for life.

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It turns out that earlier this month, the Earth came very close to getting another similar size scar as an asteroid, estimated to be ten to twenty feet in diameter, passed closer to the planet than any other recorded so far – without impacting.

What’s perhaps even scarier – no one saw it coming.

The near-miss on August 16, by what has been named asteroid 2020 QG, was not known until after it had already passed.

As reported by the National Science Foundation, astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a robotic survey camera located at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, detected the asteroid just a few hours after it narrowly missed the Earth.

“The asteroid flew close enough to Earth that Earth’s gravity significantly changed its orbit,” says Zwicky Transit Facility co-investigator Tom Prince, a physicist at Caltech. Asteroids of this size that fly roughly as close to Earth as 2020 QG do occur about once a year or less, but many of them are never detected.

Doing the math and retracing 2020 QG’s path, they have calculated that it missed hitting the earth by only a mere 1,830 miles or 2,950 kilometers. That’s less than width of the continental United States.

The last asteroid to pass so dangerously close to our home planet was 9 years ago when asteroid 2011 CQ1 missed the Earth by about 3400 miles (5500 km).

Because this asteroid was a good deal smaller than the one that created Meteor Crater, it’s likely that it would have mostly burned up entering the Earth’s atmosphere if it had been a direct hit. But it still illustrates how precarious our existence truly is.

The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs (who inhabited the earth for hundreds of millions of years) was about 6 miles in diameter.

If this fly-by 2 weeks ago was 1800 miles closer, and if asteroid 2020 QG was a bit bigger, humans (who have only inhabited the earth for much less than one hundred thousand years – not millions) could easily have gone the way of the dinosaur.

In recent years, additional funding has been allocated for projects to help provide early warning of objects like this which could provide a threat to the Earth. In addition to its hunt for Supernova and other astronomical objects, the ZTF team provides part of that early warning system.

The ZTF combines a very large field lens with machine learning AI systems to quickly analyze images and point out threats like 2020 QG. A close object moving quickly in the sky compared to the background stars, like an asteroid, shows as a streak instead of a dot and is easily identified by the software.

While the software is able to capture and sort through over a hundred-thousand images, and narrow the potential threats to around a thousand – that still means that members of the team need to hand sort and follow up on about a thousand of these images each day.

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The OPWS is a full-scale military operation unit that collaborates with other security agencies to restore law and order to densely terrorized communities with their focus on Northern Nigeria.

Formed in May 2018, the OPWS draws its forces from the Army, Air force, Police, Navy, DSS, among others. On Wednesday the 26^th of august, the Defense Headquarters announced that the group put a stop to the gruesome activities of the Dural Salam gang that has been a menace to the society for a long time.

The news of the gang’s surrender was made public during a statement by Mr. John Enenche, the Coordinator of the Defense Media Operations. 

Mr. Enenche, a Nigerian army major general, also stated that while the OPWS were surrounding the terrorists, their operations patrol intelligence team was able to uncover a makeshift bomb-making factory used by the gang to build locally made ammunitions.

According to Mr. Enenche, the troops were able to recover several local materials used in the factory. He stated, “In the course of the operation, troops recovered several Improvised Explosive Device making materials at the location including 2 scales, 6 rocket launcher bombs, one bag of fertilizer, half a bag of gun powder, 10 locally made hand grenades, one Rocket Propelled Grenade bomb fuse, one locally made Rocket Launcher, 2 Improvised Explosive Devices, 13 Improvised rocket bombs, amongst others.”

He also stated that the terrorist camp was destroyed and several of them fled into the surrounding forests as the troops implored all measures to hunt them down.

The terrorists that were apprehended totaled 410 and they surprisingly included women and children. The gallant troops of ‘Operation Whirl Stroke’ were commended for their notable achievement by the Military High Command. They were also urged to continue curtailing the criminal activities prevalent in Northern Nigeria.

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