Day: February 18, 2021

Humanity’s on-again, off-again exploration of Mars appears to have lived through its latest make-or-break moment, and scientists around the world are beginning to breathe sighs of relief.

Shortly after 3:44 P.M. Eastern time today, a visitor from Earth fell from a clear, cold Martian sky into a 3.5-billion-year old, 50-kilometer-wide bowl of rock, dust and volcanic ash called Jezero Crater that once held a large lake. Seven minutes earlier, it had touched the top of the planet’s atmosphere at nearly 20,000 kilometers per hour, bleeding off most of its speed through friction, protected from the resulting fireball by a heat shield. A supersonic parachute the size of a Little League baseball field unfurled to slow it further, followed by a final computer-piloted descent on a robotic jetpack called a sky crane, which used a detachable tether to gently lower the visitor to rest upon the crater floor. Far overhead, orbital spacecraft monitored its progress, awaiting the first signals confirming its successful landing, which, beamed Earthward at the speed of light, would arrive at our planet some 11 minutes later.

At long last, NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover has arrived. Conceived a decade ago and distilled from the dreams of generations of scientists, the SUV-sized, nuclear-fueled rover launched in July 2020, months into a world-transforming pandemic, traveling nearly a half billion kilometers in seven months and surviving a high-tension seven-minute planetfall from space to reach Jezero Crater—where its real hard work will now begin.

Perseverance (or even just “Percy,” for short) is meant to trundle across the terrain for at least a Martian year (two Earth years), following an ambitious to-do list. Explore the environment with rock-vaporizing lasers and ground-penetrating radar, and snap high-resolution panoramas, 3-D stereograms and microscopic close-ups with a suite of sophisticated cameras? Check. Listen to Martian soundscapes, and create weather reports with onboard sensors? Check. Test a device for manufacturing oxygen from the suffocatingly thin air, and launch Ingenuity, a first-of-its-kind four-bladed Marscopter on sorties through those alien skies? Check.

According to Matt Wallace, the project’s deputy project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and a veteran of all previous Mars rover missions, those latter two tasks and Perseverance’s overall complexity make it “the first one I think of as a human precursor mission.” Scaled up, its oxygen-producing experiment, MOXIE, could provide breathable air and rocket fuel for future astronauts, who could also use more advanced Marscopters to scout out their surroundings.

But, truth be told, all of that is secondary or supplemental to Perseverance’s true reason for being, which is to determine if life ever existed on Mars—and if it ever will.

Perseverance’s Quest

“This rover is, at its heart, a robotic geologist and a mobile astrobiologist,” said Lori Glaze, head of NASA’s planetary science division, during a public presentation on Wednesday. “We’re really going after the ability to identify which rocks might be most likely to have preserved the organic fingerprints of life in the past.”

Since the dawn of the space age, the Red Planet has been the most prized target for astrobiological studies, being the closest remotely Earth-like body in the solar system. Although it is presently a cold, hostile desert of a world, billions of years ago it was warmer and wetter—presumably a perfectly fine place for the basics of biology to arise. But somehow, long ago the paths of Mars and Earth diverged, leaving only one planet teeming with life.

Seeing no sign of ancient life on Mars would bolster the case that Earth is indeed rather special, suggesting that despite almost identical initial conditions no wee beasties ever managed to emerge on our sister world. In contrast, finding an independent origin of life on Mars would be potent evidence for the mind-boggling notion that the universe is in some sense built for biology’s blossoming. And while most scientists suspect fossilized microbes to be the most advanced organisms we could discover at the Red Planet, any extant life there—even if single-celled—would spur some to call for a planetary quarantine, to leave Mars to the Martians. A seemingly sterile planet would be, in some respects, the most promising scenario for eventual human exploration and even settlement there.

Perseverance promises to bring us closer to answers for these interlinked mysteries than any other mission in history. Not the least because of its landing site, Jezero Crater, which harbors one of the planet’s largest ancient lake-and-delta systems and is filled with sediments (and, just maybe, microfossils) washed in from the surrounding watershed.

Additionally, Jezero is sandwiched in space and time between two formative occurrences in Mars’s history. It lies within Syrtis Major, a volcanic complex that formed about 3.8 billion years ago, which itself sits adjacent to the Isidis Planitia basin, a gargantuan impact crater that formed about a hundred million years before Syrtis’s first eruptions. The site “is bookended by these major planetary events… we see their influence in the rocks around Jezero,” said Katy Stack Morgan, Perseverance’s deputy project scientist at JPL. At Jezero, she said, “we have this window into early solar system evolution, and the period of time when life was emerging on Earth and might have been emerging on Mars as well.”

Sampling on the Shoulders of Giants

Of the nearly 50 spacecraft that have been sent to Mars since the 1960s, to date only five—all from NASA, and including Perseverance—have successfully traveled across the surface (China’s Tianwen-1 lander, slated to touch down in May of this year with a rover of its own, seeks to be the sixth). First came a tiny pathfinder, Sojourner, that in 1997 showed roving was possible. Next were the twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, that arrived in 2004 to “follow the water” and establish the local abundance of life’s liquescent cornerstone. Those were followed by Perseverance’s near-clone and precursor, Curiosity, which reached the planet in 2012 to perform still-ongoing investigations of its habitability. None, however, came anywhere close to doing what many Earthbound experts believe to be the most crucial step in Mars exploration: Bringing modest, pristine pieces of the planet back to Earth, where researchers can study them for signs of biology using laboratory equipment that cannot fit into any conceivable rover.

“In my view, sample return from Mars is the planetary science endeavor of our generation,” said Bobby Braun, the director of planetary science at JPL. “It’s the ambitious, challenging, scientifically compelling goal that—if we work together over timescales of decades—is just within our reach.”

Unlike all its predecessors, Perseverance will be the opening shot in this audacious effort, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency dubbed the “Mars Sample Return” (MSR) campaign.

The Interplanetary Relay Race Begins

The crux of Perseverance’s MSR work will take place via a turret packed with cameras, spectroscopes, and drilling equipment at the end of its two-meter-long robotic arm. Wallace and others have compared this rugged assemblage to a miniaturized chemistry lab and clean room mounted on a jackhammer, all operating near the limits of technological tolerance for the dust, radiation and wild swings in temperature that define the Martian surface environment. Mission scientists will use the turret to identify and retrieve material of astrobiological interest, filling up to 43 test tube–like containers that will then be cached for later pickup by subsequent follow-up missions presently in development.

According to Stack Morgan, she and her colleagues are tentatively targeting several regions for prioritized sample-gathering, such as Jezero Crater’s floor and rim, as well as the site’s enormous delta and the margins of its ancient shoreline.

Now that Perseverance is safely on the surface, the clock is ticking. “We need to collect a lot of those samples very quickly,” Wallace said, citing 20 samples in one Martian year as the mission’s baseline goal. However many Perseverance collects, they all must be ready for eventual pickup by a tag-team duo—a Sample Retrieval Lander and an Earth Return Orbiter—that could launch late this decade. Working together like partners in a relay race, they could bring the baton—perhaps a half kilogram of precious specimens—across the terra firma finish line as early as 2031.

“The science that Perseverance will do is going to inform our world for decades,” Braun said. “There are scientists in schools today and perhaps not even born yet that will benefit from what’s about to happen…. Perseverance is the first step that initiates the sample return campaign, but already in the U.S. and across Europe we’re working on the next two missions.”

You can now pay for parking and bus fare in Google Maps. In some regions, the new tools can even replace the digital transit fare and parking apps your city already uses, meaning you can now plan, travel, and pay all within Google Maps.

Google Maps’ in-app parking payments are rolling out for Android users now and will arrive on iOS in the near future. At launch, over 400 U.S. cities accept Google Pay parking payments including Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington D.C.

As for buying bus and train tickets, Google says over 80 public transportation agencies worldwide will start accepting fares in Google Maps over the coming weeks.

How to pay for parking in Google Maps

1. Use Google Maps to navigate to your destination.
2. A “Pay for Parking” button will appear when you near the end of your trip. Find a parking spot then tap the button to begin the payment process.
3. Input your parking meter number and how much time you’re paying for.
4. Tap “Pay” to complete the transaction with Google Pay.

How to buy public transportation fare in Google Maps

1. Plan your trip in Google Maps using the Public Transportation option.
2. If you can pay in Google Maps, you’ll see a Google Pay icon next to a route. Select the route, then tap “Pay.”
3. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the payment.
4. Depending on where you live and the mode of transportation, you’ll either pay your fare in the app and receive a digital ticket to show drivers and transit officers, tap your phone to a fare booth to pay, or add funds to digital cards in cities like San Francisco.

Now that you can pay for parking and bus tickets in Google Maps, it seems it’s quickly becoming the all-in-one public transportation service. The app can also give you estimates on how full each train or bus is and has several features that can help you navigate to new locations safely.

With Texas, the biggest truck market in the country, currently in the middle of a nasty winter storm and subsequent widespread power outages, we’ve been wondering if anyone has put the generator capabilities of the 2021 Ford F-150 PowerBoost hybrid to the test. The answer is, unsurprisingly, yes. A few users at F150Gen14.com shared photos and experiences using the generator function, and they’re all rather glowing.

The user that kicked off the thread offered the most comprehensive review. He mainly powered household appliances, citing a space heater, toaster oven, coffee maker, lights, TV and refrigerator. He apparently let it run at least 10 hours a day for around three days, mainly for the refrigerator to keep the freezer section frozen. Besides keeping the appliances running, he noted that the truck was significantly quieter than some of his neighbors’ power generators. The truck’s large fuel tank meant he could run it a long time without refueling, which could have been an issue as local gas pumps weren’t working. We would bet that the truck also produces far fewer emissions than those outdoor generators, too.

Two other users chimed in with their experiences. One of them hooked up the house furnace to it the past few days so that the blower and igniter would work. Another was running household appliances like the original poster, and has had it running non-stop for 72 hours. He noted that the truck has gone through a quarter tank of fuel, so he could probably keep relying on it for some time to come.

All of these owners said they had purchased the hybrid with the upgraded 7.2-kW generator capability, though all hybrids come standard with 2.4-kW generator ability. The non-hybrid trucks can provide 2-kW. As cars continue to get more robust electrical systems, we’ll be curious if these generator functions will become more common. There are examples of similar features in both current and upcoming vehicles. The Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV has 1,500 watts of electrical power that can be used when the crossover is switched off, and the upcoming Hyundai, Kia, Ioniq and Genesis electric cars built on the E-GMP platform will be able to provide up to 3.5 kW of power for electrical appliances.

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Open-ear audio is having a moment. JLab and Bose both have sunglasses that double as discreet headphones, but perhaps the most intriguing open-ear technology I’ve seen so far is the SoundBeamer, a device that can supposedly beam sound directly into your ears and your ears alone.

Israeli startup Noveto designed the device to sit on your desktop and use a 3D module to identify and track your ears. Noveto CEO Christophe Ramstein said the device then creates “invisible sound pockets” on either side of your head. It doesn’t matter if you have long hair, a thick beard, glasses, or even a face mask—the gadget can supposedly recognize individuals and keep up with them in real-time.

The wild part is Noveto claims the audio is private. Unlike regular speakers, which are meant to fill a room with sound, the SoundBeamer is designed to be a device that delivers personalized audio. Ramstein said this is possible because the device has a high level of acoustic attenuation. Put simply, the sound is dampened so it gets quieter by about 20dB over a distance of three feet. Normal speakers, according to Ramstein, only dampen sound by about 3dB across an entire room. So with the SoundBeamer, if you’re listening to music at roughly 75dB, someone standing fairly close to you might be able to tell you’re listening to something, but not exactly what. If you were listening at a quieter volume, they might not hear anything at all.

For these reasons, even though the SoundBeamer might look like a mini speaker or soundbar for your desk, it’s really more akin to a pair of headphones.

“What happens is we’re using the ability of the non-linearity of the air to convey inaudible sounds and then the ability to create audible sounds at one precise location in space,” Ramstein explained to Gizmodo over video. “What that means is we’re creating two pockets of sounds exactly based on where your head is. We create those pockets of audible sounds and each of them is independent, which means that our technology acts like invisible headphones.”

Some initial reports about the SoundBeamer came out a few months ago, but today Noveto is announcing some new hardware and software features. Now the device has a new AI-based built-in voice, which is capable of facial and gesture recognition as well as monitoring ambient sound.

Ramstein explained that the AI isn’t like the digital assistants we’ve become familiar with.

“We’re not building the engine to play music. I’m not saying, ‘Play my music or tell me a joke.’ We don’t do that,” Ramstein said.

The AI is there so that the device can better intuit what you’re asking for so you can get a better overall experience. Ramstein also added that no data collected via the SoundBeamer will be uploaded to the cloud, as everything is built-in and on-device.

This stuff sounds like it’s straight out of sci-fi. With other open-ear audio devices, generally, you can clearly see the speaker component and it’s placed close to the ear. While the audio quality might not end up being to your preference, it’s easy to understand how audio travels from the open-ear headphone to your ear. This is a much harder gadget to wrap your head around, and in the pandemic era, it’s also a gadget that’s impossible to demo. Personalized, sound-beaming audio doesn’t exactly translate well over a Zoom call. We can’t say for sure that it works as advertised until we try one for ourselves. Still, it would be pretty cool if instead of having to slip on headphones every time my husband takes a business call in our tiny studio apartment, a device could just beam his Zoom audio straight into his ears.

The first iteration of this device is meant to be stationary for a single person. However, Ramstein said that a second version may be able to support multiple users at once. As for potential future applications, Ramstein is ambitious. Envision, say, treadmills that can beam audio to your ears so no one at the gym has to wear headphones at all. Or going to a night at the movies and being able to send audio in different languages to each person. Or art museum tours where you can specify how much you want to hear about a particular painting in the language of your choice.

Alas, right now the SoundBeamer is only available for preorder on Kickstarter and is expected to retail for $595 later this year. (Early backers will get a discounted price of $345.) We usually caution against crowd-sourced gadgets that can easily turn out to be vaporware, leaving backers empty-handed after months of waiting. However, Ramstein is confident Noveto will be able to deliver the device in Q4 this year, and said the company is partnering with Foxconn—yes, Apple’s iPhone manufacturing partner Foxconn—to manufacture the device. And he’s optimistic that this tech won’t be limited to Noveto devices only.

“The good news is that when it’s ready, it’s also going to be ready for OEMs and the big tech companies,” Ramstein said. “Going from the Noveto-branded product that we’re shipping this year to anybody else who can integrate is going to be fairly easy. All the parts are produced by Foxconn and our partners, and we have all the intelligence being packaged in the chipsets, plus the software that comes with it will make it very easy to integrate.”

Needless to say, we are very curious to try it out for ourselves.