Bringing Mars Rocks to Earth Could Cost an Astronomical $11 Billion

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03034-1


Humanity’s biggest and most ambitious plan to search for extraterrestrial life is about to go back to the drawing board.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have been working on a strategy to fly a set of Mars rocks, carefully collected by the Perseverance rover, back to Earth for study. But a new independent assessment of the plan says it can’t be done on current budgets and schedules. The entire project will probably cost between US$8 billion and $11 billion — far more than the roughly $4 billion estimated in a previous independent review report, issued three years ago. And there’s a “near zero probability” of the missions launching in 2027 and 2028, as the space agencies had hoped. Even pushing the launch dates out to 2030 would still cost between US$8 billion and $9.6 billion, the report estimates — comparable with the cost of building the James Webb Space Telescope, the single most expensive astronomy project in history.

The report, released on 21 September, stresses that Mars sample return is strategically important to the space agencies, in that it would demonstrate US and European ‘soft power’ at a time when China has also announced plans to bring back rocks from Mars. The mission is also scientifically important: it is the culmination of a decades-long quest to search for life beyond Earth. But the current plan is unworkable, according to the report, which was commissioned by NASA and led by a former NASA manager, Orlando Figueroa.

NASA says it will put current plans on hold and come up with an alternative strategy by early next year. “It’s going to take a little time for us to assess the path forward,” says Lori Glaze, head of NASA’s planetary-science division in Washington DC. The recommendations from the report are “big”, she says. “They’re not things that can be answered overnight.”

In a statement, ESA said it is evaluating how it can adjust its plan while still achieving the overall mission objectives. “We are conducting preliminary studies to assess all options given the various scenarios and will inform member states and coordinate with NASA on the outcome as soon as possible.”

A valuable collection

As currently envisioned, a Mars sample-return mission would involve NASA building a lander that would fly to the Red Planet to grab up to 30 rock samples, as well as a rocket that would blast off from the Martian surface to carry them into orbit around Mars. ESA would build the spacecraft to retrieve the precious cargo from orbit and fly it back to Earth.

Scientists can analyse the rocks in much greater detail in laboratories on Earth than with the compact instruments available on robotic rovers. The analysis would include hunting for ‘biosignatures’, molecules or other signals of past life in the samples. “These measurements are difficult to do remotely,” says Daniel Glavin, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “You really want the samples back and in the lab.”

NASA’s Perseverance rover has already collected a bevy of samples from Mars’s Jezero Crater and has even placed ten sealed tubes, containing rock cores, on the ground for possible retrieval. The rover continues to travel around Jezero, gathering more samples that make its collection increasingly valuable as time goes on, the report says. The rocks gathered so far formed in an ancient river delta and lake that were probably once similar to life-friendly environments on Earth.

Competing priorities

Mars sample return was one of the highest-ranked priorities recommended for NASA in the last two planetary ‘decadal’ surveys — reports, put together with input from the research community, that aim to guide the direction of US planetary science for the following ten years. But the project has struggled to remain affordable as engineers have refined the designs for the various spacecraft that would be part of the mission. The earlier independent review, which NASA commissioned from experts outside the agency specifically to head off problems with unexpected cost increases, recommended spending $3.8 billion to $4.4 billion on the sample-return project.

But that was before engineers had a full sense of what would be involved and hence how much it would cost, Glaze says. And NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which would lead much of the Mars sample-return project, has struggled with an overstretched work force. This led NASA to delay last year’s planned launch of a separate mission, a spacecraft destined for the asteroid Psyche.

There are also questions about how to balance the cost of Mars sample return against other missions in the $3.2-billion budget for NASA’s planetary-science division. The most recent decadal survey, released in 2022, recommended limiting the cost of Mars sample return to no more than 35% of the division’s overall budget. That’s a big challenge as the agency also tries to keep funding going for other priority projects, such as the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan, slated for later this decade, and a mission to Uranus next decade.

That means all eyes remain on how to pay for Mars sample return. “The community knew that prioritization of a multi-mission effort and the single most ambitious effort in the history of planetary sciences would have challenges,” says Bethany Ehlmann, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who helped to lead the most recent decadal survey. “That’s why the [survey] highlights the importance of NASA working with Congress to augment the budget and figure out the appropriate funding profile to get Mars sample return done.”

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on September 27, 2023.

via Scientific American https://ift.tt/PxX8ENS

October 3, 2023 at 11:21AM

AI Algorithms Are Biased Against Skin With Yellow Hues

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-algorithms-are-biased-against-skin-with-yellow-hues/


After evidence surfaced in 2018 that leading face-analysis algorithms were less accurate for people with darker skin, companies including Google and Meta adopted measures of skin tone to test the effectiveness of their AI software. New research from Sony suggests that those tests are blind to a crucial aspect of the diversity of human skin color.

By expressing skin tone using only a sliding scale from lightest to darkest or white to black, today’s common measures ignore the contribution of yellow and red hues to the range of human skin, according to Sony researchers. They found that generative AI systems, image-cropping algorithms, and photo analysis tools all struggle with yellower skin in particular. The same weakness could apply to a variety of technologies whose accuracy is proven to be affected by skin color, such as AI software for face recognition, body tracking, and deepfake detection, or gadgets like heart rate monitors and motion detectors.

“If products are just being evaluated in this very one-dimensional way, there’s plenty of biases that will go undetected and unmitigated,” says Alice Xiang, lead research scientist and global head of AI Ethics at Sony. “Our hope is that the work that we’re doing here can help replace some of the existing skin tone scales that really just focus on light versus dark.”

But not everyone is so sure that existing options are insufficient for grading AI systems. Ellis Monk, a Harvard University sociologist, says a palette of 10 skin tones offering light to dark options that he introduced alongside Google last year isn’t unidimensional. “I must admit being a bit puzzled by the claim that prior research in this area ignored undertones and hue,” says Monk, whose Monk Skin Tone scale Google makes available for others to use. “Research was dedicated to deciding which undertones to prioritize along the scale and at which points.” He chose the 10 skin tones on his scale based on his own studies of colorism and after consulting with other experts and people from underrepresented communities.

X. Eyeé, CEO of AI ethics consultancy Malo Santo and who previously founded Google’s skin tone research team, says the Monk scale was never intended as a final solution and calls Sony’s work important progress. But Eyeé also cautions that camera positioning affects the CIELAB color values in an image, one of several issues that make the standard a potentially unreliable reference point. “Before we turn on skin hue measurement in real-world AI algorithms—like camera filters and video conferencing—more work to ensure consistent measurement is needed,” Eyeé says.

The sparring over scales is more than academic. Finding appropriate measures of “fairness,” as AI researchers call it, is a major priority for the tech industry as lawmakers, including in the European Union and US, debate requiring companies to audit their AI systems and call out risks and flaws. Unsound evaluation methods could erode some of the practical benefits of regulations, the Sony researchers say.

via Wired Top Stories https://www.wired.com

October 3, 2023 at 06:06AM