The original mission of the Mars Helicopter (named Ingenuity) was to successfully complete a single 30-second long flight on Mars. That happened back in April. After several more successful flights, Ingenuity’s 30-day mission came to an end, but the helicopter was doing so well that NASA decided to keep it flying. Several months later, JPL promised that Ingenuity would “complete flight operations no later than the end of August,” but as of late November, the little helicopter has completed 17 flights with no sign of slowing down.

NASA has kept the helicopter operational, in part, because it’s transitioned from a pure technology demonstration to an operations demonstration. In fact, Ingenuity has turned out to be quite useful to both the science team as well as the roboticists who operate the Perseverance rover. While NASA never planned to have Ingenuity make occasional scouting flights, its having that capability seems to have paid off. To understand just how much of a difference the helicopter is making to Perseverance’s mission, we talked to one of the Mars rover drivers at JPL, Olivier Toupet.

Toupet has been at JPL for nine years, and he’s the supervisor of JPL’s Robotic Aerial Mobility group (which includes key members of the Mars Helicopter team). He’s also the deputy lead of the rover planner team for Perseverance, meaning that he’s one of the folks who tells the rover where to go and how to get there. In his role as a Perseverance rover driver, Toupet specializes in strategic route planning, which means listening to where the scientists want the rover to go and thinking about how to best reach all of those targets while considering things like safety and longer term goals. “We design routes to visit the targets that scientists are interested in, or we tell them that it’s too dangerous,” Toupet tells us.

“Initially there was a lot of pushback, even from the science team, because they thought it was going to be a distraction. But in the end, we’re all very happy with the helicopter, including the science team.”
—Olivier Toupet, NASA JPL

Toupet was also one of the rover drivers on the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) and Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) programs, and over the years, he and his team have developed a solid intuition about how to drive Mars rovers over different types of terrain—how to do it efficiently, but also minimizing the chances that the rover could get damaged or stuck. Obviously, the stakes are very high, so the rover team takes no chances, and sometimes having even a single picture from Ingenuity of a potential route can completely change things, says Toupet.

IEEE Spectrum: How much of a difference has it made for you to have Ingenuity scouting for Perseverance on Mars?

Olivier Toupet: My team designs the routes for the rover to drive, and typically we have orbital imagery [from Hi-RISE], which is as you can imagine very low resolution, and then we have imagery from the rover on the surface, but it can only see a few hundred meters. With the orbital imagery, we can’t see rocks that are smaller than typically about a meter. But a rock that is taller than 35 centimeters is an obstacle for the rover—it can’t put its wheel over a rock that size. So it’s been really helpful to have that helicopter imagery to refine our strategic route and plan to avoid challenging terrain well before the rover can see it."

Animated gif cycling between blurry orbital imagery, less blurry rover imagery, and high resolution helicopter images This animation shows the different kinds of imagery that the rover planners are able to use for route planning, including imagery from the rover’s own cameras, images taken from orbit, and helicopter images.NASA/JPL

What about planning for day-to-day rover operations?

We do look at the helicopter images when planning our daily drives, but we can’t fully trust the 3D mesh obtained from pairs of overlapping images because we don’t know the exact distance the helicopter flew in between each one. We use the images in a qualitative way, but we can’t tell where obstacles are with the precision that we’d need for drive planning—we can’t entrust the life of the rover to those images.

You and your team must be highly skilled at understanding Martian terrain from the relatively low-resolution orbital images, since JPL has been planning for rovers on Mars based entirely on orbital images for decades now. With that in mind, how actually useful is high-resolution imagery like the helicopter provides?

I was actually a rover planner on Opportunity, Curiosity, and now Perseverance, so I’ve been doing this for a long time! But it’s a fair question. You are correct that we’re very experienced with interpreting orbital imagery, but there are still some cases where higher resolution imagery can be very important. With Curiosity, there’s a place called Logan Pass, where of course we had relied on orbital imagery for our strategic route planning.

Panoramic image of the Mars surface showing a sandy depression with hills and mountains in the background View southeastward towards Logan Pass from Curiosity’s Mast Camera, taken in May of 2015.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

We thought there was a shortcut to get there that we could squeeze through. We drove all the way there to the start of a slope that we were going to have to drive on with a large field of sand dunes beneath it. We’d thought that the slope was likely to be compacted sand, which would have been fine, but what we couldn’t see on the orbital imagery was that the slope was actually a thin layer of sand on top of pebbles, and when the rover tried driving on it, it began to slip substantially down towards the sand trap. We tried to get across the slope a couple of times, but we ended up deciding that it wasn’t safe at all, so we had to take a pretty substantial detour because that strategic route wasn’t feasible.

Curiosity’s path shown as a white line which goes into a dead end and out again Orbital imagery of Curiosity’s route showing attempt to traverse Logan Pass, followed by detour through Marias Pass.NASA

So overall, it’s true that typically orbital imagery is good enough, especially on terrain that’s pretty benign. But there are times where having higher resolution imagery ahead of time is very valuable for route planning.

What about for Perseverance? Are there any examples of specific ways in which detailed imagery from Ingenuity caused you to change your mind about a route?

We landed right next to an area called Séítah, which is actually very hard to drive through because it’s full of large sand dunes. And getting stuck in sand is the nightmare of every rover planner, because it could be mission-ending. Right after landing, the scientists were saying, “let’s cross over Séítah and get to the delta!” I said, that’s not going to happen, we have to drive around it.

Orbital image showing Perseverance’s route as a white line traveling around an area of hills and sand dunes View of Perseverance’s route around Séítah and current position of the rover and helicopter on the south side of Séítah.NASA

While we were driving around, the helicopter just flew right over to the west side of Séítah on Flight 9. That was really interesting, because it gave us excellent images and we realized that while there were some places we wouldn’t want to drive in, there were other places that actually looked traversable.

Image of the sandy, rocky surface of Mars, with the shadow of the Mars helicopter in flight at the bottom Image taken by Ingenuity showing bedrock poking through sand, suggesting that some areas might be traversable by the Perseverance rover.NASA/JPL-Caltech

And so it was really helpful to have that helicopter imagery over Séítah to refine our strategic route. Thanks to the helicopter, we ended up modifying our route—we were initially going to drive over a kind of hill, but the helicopter flew right above that hill, and I was able to see that the hill looked much more challenging than I thought from the orbital imagery. In the end, we decided to drive around it.

Aerial image of a hill on Mars showing a red line labeled "Initial Route" going over the hill and a green line labeled "Refined Route" going around the hill Image taken by Ingenuity of the hill Perseverance had planned to climb, which helped the rover planning team decide to drive around the hill instead.NASA/JPL-Caltech

If we hadn’t had the helicopter imagery, I think we would still have made it work and found the same route. But having the helicopter, we were able to plan the route ahead of time, and make a much better estimate of how long it would take, which helps the whole Perseverance rover team to plan more efficiently. That’s pretty valuable.

What has the reaction been to having the Mars Helicopter stick around as a scout?

The whole team, we all love it! We didn’t know we were going to love it—it’s really interesting, I think initially there was a lot of pushback, even from the science team, because they thought it was going to be a distraction. But in the end, we’re all very happy with the helicopter, including the science team. The more information we have the better—for the science team, for example, the helicopter can save us a lot of time by quickly investigating potentially interesting areas.

“We’ve found a way to do both rover and helicopter activities in parallel, in a way that’s very low impact and very high value.”
—Olivier Toupet, NASA JPL

For example, when we flew the helicopter over Séítah, over the area where the scientists wanted the rover to go, the pictures that the helicopter took enabled the scientists to decide whether it was even worth trying to drive the rover that far—it would have taken us two or three weeks to even get there. But the images from the helicopter led the scientists to say, “hey, yeah, this area is actually really interesting, and we see valuable rocks that we’d like to go and sample. And so it enabled us to make that decision early on rather than potentially wasting two to three weeks driving over there for nothing.

At one point, JPL said that even if everything with the helicopter was working great, flight operations would cease “no later than the end of August.” Obviously, the helicopter is still flying—how much of a surprise has that been?

Frankly, it’s been a big surprise, but we should have known better! Opportunity was supposed to be a 90-day mission, and it was still going 14 years later. Some of us suspected that the helicopter mission would continue to be extended, but the helicopter team played their cards pretty close to their chest. Obviously, they were very focused on accomplishing the tech demo, and that was always a top priority. So whenever we’d ask, “what happens next,” they’d tell us not to get distracted because a successful tech demo was why the helicopter was funded to go to Mars.

But I remember being in a meeting with someone from NASA HQ, who said something that is very true, which was that the tech demo is great, but the long-term goal is to show the potential of flying on Mars. I really hope that Ingenuity being such a success means that in the future there will be another helicopter mission to Mars. You can imagine a helicopter flying into Vallis Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system. It would be amazing.

The official story was always that there were going to be five flights and that was probably going to be the end, and so I’m glad that we’re now at flight 17, and the helicopter has been extremely successful. I can’t wait to see all the things we’ll be able to do in the months to come, including when we reach the delta—there are many steep slopes, and lots of dunes, so having the helicopter there is going to be especially valuable.

Black and white image taken from orbit giving a 3D effect of an ancient river delta Oblique view of the Jezero crater delta looking west.NASA/MSSS/USGS

Do you think that part of the reason that the mission keeps getting extended is because NASA is realizing just how valuable having a helicopter scout can be for a rover like Perseverance?

Yes, I think maybe we didn’t initially realize just how useful the helicopter would be in supporting our scientific mission. I would also say that another reason the helicopter mission keeps getting extended is because it’s turned out to have a fairly minimal impact on the rover team, in the sense that the helicopter team has been pretty independent and they are only flying once every two to three weeks. We’ve found a way to do both rover and helicopter activities in parallel, in a way that’s very low impact and very high value.

It sounds like having a helicopter scout would make an especially big difference once Perseverance reaches the delta. Are you hoping Ingenuity will survive that long, and that it’ll be able to scout for the rover indefinitely?

I definitely hope so! Initially, there were some concerns about whether the helicopter’s electronics will be able to survive the winter [through March of next year]. There are still some questions about this, but things are looking promising. There are also communications challenges—so far, the helicopter has been staying pretty close to the rover, within about 300 meters. But once we’re done with this area to the southwest of Séítah, the rover will be driving very quickly back around Séítah to the foot of the delta. Specifically, we’ll be using multi-sol autonav, which is where we tell the rover to keep on driving itself autonomously as quickly as it can to its destination over multiple Martian days. Put the pedal to the metal! And so there is a little bit of concern whether the helicopter can keep up with us. It’s funny, I love the helicopter, but I also work on the autonav software, so I hope the rover goes fast.

Orbital image of Jezero crater with a dotted yellow line taking a winding kilometers-long route around craters to a location called Three Forks. Perseverance’s planned route from Séítah to Jezero’s river deltaNASA

But I think it’s going to be fine. The helicopter team is working on improved capabilities, including the capability to pop up in the sky and talk to the rover, and that could substantially improve the communications range, perhaps even to kilometers. So while they’re going to do their best to try and keep up with the rover, in parallel they’re working on improving the capability of the helicopter to stay in communications even from farther away. So I’m very hopeful that Ingenuity will be around for a long time!

As someone who’s been working on several generations of Mars rovers, what would you like to see from the next-generation Mars helicopter?

The big advantage of a helicopter is of course that it can fly, and the Mars Science Helicopter will be able to fly tens of kilometers in a single day. To give you a sense of perspective, we’re hoping that Perseverance will be able to drive a few hundred meters in a day. So the helicopter would have several orders of magnitude more range, which is amazing—you could imagine going not just to one site on Mars, but to multiple sites.

A rendering showing on right the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, 0.5m across, next to the Mars Science Helicopter concept, which has six rotors and is six times the size. Mars Science Helicopter concept compared to Ingenuity.

But the big disadvantage of the helicopter, unfortunately, is the payload. A rover can carry a lot of science instruments, while the helicopter, because the air density is so low on Mars, has a much lower maximum payload, which restricts how much science you can do. That being said, you could imagine being able to swap instruments—what if you could carry just the instrument that was necessary for the specific site you’re visiting that day? Of course there are technical challenges with that, but yeah, personally I do think that the next mission should be a helicopter just by itself. It would be great to see that in the future.

And when we send another rover to Mars, should it have its own helicopter scout?

That’s a great question, and a controversial one, because the next mission to Mars is about sample return, and the European Space Agency is making the rover, not NASA. And so, I don’t know who gets to make such decisions, but I personally do think that a helicopter would be extremely valuable—not just as a scout, but potentially also as a backup, that could retrieve the samples if the rover had some issues. That would be great to have for sure.

Source: https://spectrum.ieee.org/mars-perseverance

A joint European Union and Russian mission has discovered “significant amounts of water” lying just below the surface of Mars – and scientists say it could be “easily exploitable” by future explorers.

The largest canyon in our Solar System, Valles Marineris sits just south of Mars’ equator and is some 10 times longer and five times deeper than Earth’s Grand Canyon. It’s also hiding a body of water the size of the Netherlands, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced on Wednesday.

The water was detected by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a joint project of the ESA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos. The satellite detected a large amount of hydrogen less than a meter below the canyon’s surface, and, as hydrogen molecules bind into water molecules, the discovery indicates the soil in that location is rich in moisture, which probably exists as ice.

Breaking news: I’ve spotted hidden #water – either ice or water-rich minerals ? – in #Mars’ Grand Canyon! ❄️??The reservoir is large, not too deep below ground, & could be easily exploitable for future explorers ?Read on: https://t.co/lIAEuz2tNW#ExploreFarther#ExoMarspic.twitter.com/j1jwSCJebq
— ExoMars orbiter (@ESA_TGO) December 15, 2021

“We found a central part of Valles Marineris to be packed full of water – far more water than we expected,” Alexey Malakhov of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences wrote. “This is very much like Earth’s permafrost regions, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures.”

The ESA press release noted that water ice usually evaporates in this region of Mars due to the temperature and pressure conditions near the planet’s equator. The fact that this Netherlands-sized body of water hasn’t suggests either a previously unknown mix of atmospheric conditions or that the water is somehow being replenished.

The discovery isn’t the first sign of water on Mars. Ice caps cover its polar regions, and previous ESA missions have found potential water stores several kilometers beneath its surface. However, the latest find reveals water the ESA says is much more “exploitable,” and makes “Valles Marineris an even more promising target for future human exploration missions to the planet.”

The Trace Gas Orbiter launched in 2016 and began orbiting Mars two years later. The project was originally planned as a collaboration between the ESA and NASA, but the Europeans partnered with Roscosmos in 2012, after US President Barack Obama slashed NASA’s budget. The orbiter will be joined in 2022 by a European rover and a Russian surface platform, as the hunt for past life on the Red Planet continues.

Source: https://www.rt.com/russia/543319-water-mars-discovered-roscosmos-esa/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Email

[The first ever flying vehicle on another planet, the little Martian helicopter, is a huge success. The Martian atmosphere is getting thinner due to a seasonal change, but NASA was testing higher rotor spinning speeds to see if they can still keep the helicopter going! Jan]

NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity has soared through alien skies yet again.

"The #MarsHelicopter keeps going, going, going! Ingenuity successfully completed its 18th flight, adding 124.3 seconds to its overall time aloft on the Red Planet," officials with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which manages Ingenuity’s pioneering mission, said via Twitter today (Dec. 17).

Ingenuity covered 754 feet (230 meters) of ground while cruising at 5.6 mph (9.0 kph) during the flight, which took place on Wednesday (Dec. 15), JPL officials added.

The 4-lb. (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity landed last February with NASA’s Perseverance rover on the floor of the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater, which hosted a big lake and a river delta billions of years ago.

Ingenuity’s main goal was to show that powered flight is possible in the thin air of Mars. The little chopper checked off that box over the course of five initial flights, then shifted into an extended mission during which it has been pushing its limits and serving as a scout for the life-hunting, sample-caching Perseverance.

The rotorcraft has performed extremely well, racking up an impressive set of off-Earth accomplishments. Ingenuity has now spent nearly 33 minutes aloft in the Martian air, for example, and visited 10 different Red Planet airfields.

"Few thought we would make it to flight one, fewer still to five. And no one thought we would make it this far," Ingenuity team lead Teddy Tzanetos of JPL said in a statement earlier this week. "The aircraft’s continued operations speaks to the robustness [of] the design and the diligence and passion of our small operations team."

That’s not to suggest that it has all been perfectly smooth sailing for the little chopper. For example, during its sixth flight, which took place on May 23, Ingenuity suffered a glitch that interrupted the flow of navigation images to its onboard computer.

And the communications link between Ingenuity and Perseverance was disrupted during the chopper’s descent on flight 17, which occurred on Dec. 5. This complication delayed the mission team’s assessment of the sortie, which was eventually determined to be a complete success. (All of the helicopter’s data and imagery reach Earth via Perseverance and Mars orbiters.)

Some people have speculated that the Dec. 5 communications dropout may be linked to log4j, a widely used programming code developed by the nonprofit Apache Software Foundation that was recently revealed to have a flaw that can leave it vulnerable to hackers. But this is not the case, JPL officials said, pointing instead to a much more prosaic cause.

"NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter does not run Apache or log4j, nor is it susceptible to the log4j vulnerability. NASA takes cybersecurity very seriously and, for this reason, we do not discuss specifics regarding the cybersecurity of agency assets," JPL officials wrote in an update Thursday (Dec. 16).

"The interruption in data communications between the Ingenuity helicopter and the base station on the Perseverance rover during flight 17 occurred when the signal was blocked by elevated terrain between the two as Ingenuity descended at the end of the flight," they added. "Effectively, Ingenuity ‘flew behind a hill’ or out of the rover’s line of sight, briefly interrupting high-speed communications between the two spacecraft."

Source: https://www.space.com/mars-helicopter-ingenuity-flight-18?utm_source=SmartBrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=58E4DE65-C57F-4CD3-9A5A-609994E2C5A9&utm_content=4B830476-8D6E-4252-8008-4C8A9FFA216B&utm_term=af536f6d-055d-443a-91f7-fd448d0cca73

Here’s something I’ve known about for long and I see lots of scientists talking about it. A rotating ball is unstable and would kill the very life that lives on it. If it wasn’t for the moon we wouldn’t exist.

My own view is that the "Rare Earth" hypothesis is the correct one. That we are an aberration. The religious types will take this as proof that God created us.

Combine this with our DNA lineage and achievements and you’ll grasp that our existence itself has always been on a knife-edge.

If we don’t take our existence seriously … nothing like us might crop up ever again. The universe is an extremely dangerous place for life actually.

We won’t be finding aliens any time soon, and, I would argue, if we did, you wouldn’t want to talk to them. Either they would kill us, or we would kill them.

But I think we have the edge.

[This is a very important fact that scientists have known about for a long time. This is a very bizarre twist in understanding life on Earth AND finding life on other planets. The moon is a really weird object with a really weird effect. This is a fact that crops up again and again. It is a very well established fact. A planet, by itself, is too unstable for life to exist. The Moon, which is a very weird object, allows this. It's something I've known about for a long time. See the short quote from the article below. Lots of scientists have pointed this out. Jan]

Here it is:-

Moons may be essential to life

In a press release, study co-author Siegfried Eggl of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign explained further applications of the method in determining the habitability of exoplanets:

“If we can use this method to show there are other moons out there, then there are probably other systems similar to ours. The moon is also likely critical for the evolution of life on our planet, because without the moon the axis tilt of the Earth wouldn’t be as stable, the results of which would be detrimental to climate stability. Other peer-reviewed studies have shown the relationship between moons and the possibility of complex life.”

Maybe the discovery of exomoons is the first step to finding life elsewhere in the cosmos. Understanding the similarities and dissimilarities with our solar system is a great place to start.

Source: https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/exomoon-life/

[The first one seems to be impossible. I've never seen anything like that. The others are definitely real but still amazing. Jan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQsYnLz2Gc

Studies of sleep are usually neurological. But some of nature’s simplest animals suggest that sleep evolved for metabolic reasons, long before brains even existed.

he hydra is a simple creature. Less than half an inch long, its tubular body has a foot at one end and a mouth at the other. The foot clings to a surface underwater — a plant or a rock, perhaps — and the mouth, ringed with tentacles, ensnares passing water fleas. It does not have a brain, or even much of a nervous system.

And yet, new research shows, it sleeps. Studies by a team in South Korea and Japan showed that the hydra periodically drops into a rest state that meets the essential criteria for sleep.

On the face of it, that might seem improbable. For more than a century, researchers who study sleep have looked for its purpose and structure in the brain. They have explored sleep’s connections to memory and learning. They have numbered the neural circuits that push us down into oblivious slumber and pull us back out of it. They have recorded the telltale changes in brain waves that mark our passage through different stages of sleep and tried to understand what drives them. Mountains of research and people’s daily experience attest to human sleep’s connection to the brain.

But a counterpoint to this brain-centric view of sleep has emerged. Researchers have noticed that molecules produced by muscles and some other tissues outside the nervous system can regulate sleep. Sleep affects metabolism pervasively in the body, suggesting that its influence is not exclusively neurological. And a body of work that’s been growing quietly but consistently for decades has shown that simple organisms with less and less brain spend significant time doing something that looks a lot like sleep. Sometimes their behavior has been pigeonholed as only “sleeplike,” but as more details are uncovered, it has become less and less clear why that distinction is necessary.

It appears that simple creatures — including, now, the brainless hydra — can sleep. And the intriguing implication of that finding is that sleep’s original role, buried billions of years back in life’s history, may have been very different from the standard human conception of it. If sleep does not require a brain, then it may be a profoundly broader phenomenon than we supposed.

Recognizing Sleep

Sleep is not the same as hibernation, or coma, or inebriation, or any other quiescent state, wrote the French sleep scientist Henri Piéron in 1913. Though all involved a superficially similar absence of movement, each had distinctive qualities, and that daily interruption of our conscious experience was particularly mysterious. Going without it made one foggy, confused, incapable of clear thought. For researchers who wanted to learn more about sleep, it seemed essential to understand what it did to the brain.

And so, in the mid-20th century, if you wanted to study sleep, you became an expert reader of electroencephalograms, or EEGs. Putting electrodes on humans, cats or rats allowed researchers to say with apparent precision whether a subject was sleeping and what stage of sleep they were in. That approach produced many insights, but it left a bias in the science: Almost everything we learned about sleep came from animals that could be fitted with electrodes, and the characteristics of sleep were increasingly defined in terms of the brain activity associated with them.

This frustrated Irene Tobler, a sleep physiologist working at the University of Zurich in the late 1970s, who had begun to study the behavior of cockroaches, curious whether invertebrates like insects sleep as mammals do. Having read Piéron and others, Tobler knew that sleep could be defined behaviorally too.

She distilled a set of behavioral criteria to identify sleep without the EEG. A sleeping animal does not move around. It is harder to rouse than one that’s simply resting. It may take on a different pose than when awake, or it may seek out a specific location for sleep. Once awakened it behaves normally rather than sluggishly. And Tobler added a criterion of her own, drawn from her work with rats: A sleeping animal that has been disturbed will later sleep longer or more deeply than usual, a phenomenon called sleep homeostasis.

A figure showing some of the body postures of cockroaches, which the researcher Irene Tobler used as diagnostics for sleep in the insects.

Courtesy of Irene Tobler

Tobler soon laid out her case that cockroaches were either sleeping or doing something very like it. The response from her colleagues, most of whom studied higher-order mammals, was immediate. “It was heresy to even consider this,” Tobler said. “They really made fun of me in my early years. It wasn’t very pleasant. But I sort of felt time would tell.” She studied scorpions, giraffes, hamsters, cats — 22 species in all. She was convinced that science would eventually confirm that sleep was widespread, and in later studies of sleep, her behavioral criteria would prove critical.

Those criteria were on the minds of Amita Sehgal at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Paul Shaw (now at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis) and their colleagues in the late 1990s. They were part of two independent groups that had begun to look closely at the quiescence of fruit flies. Sleep was still largely the domain of psychologists, Sehgal says, rather than scientists who studied genetics or cell biology. With respect to mechanisms, from a molecular biologist’s perspective, “the sleep field was sleeping,” she said.

However, the neighboring field of circadian clock biology was exploding with activity, following the discovery of genes that regulate the body’s 24-hour clock. If molecular mechanisms behind sleep could be uncovered — if a well-understood model organism like the fruit fly could be used to study them — then there was the potential for a revolution in sleep science as well. Flies, like Tobler’s cockroaches and scorpions, could not be easily hooked up to an EEG machine. But they could be observed minutely, and their responses to deprivation could be recorded.

With Less and Less Brain

In January 2000, Sehgal and her colleagues published their paper asserting that flies were sleeping. That March, Shaw and colleagues published their parallel work confirming the claim. The field was still reluctant to admit that true sleep existed in invertebrates, and that human sleep could be usefully studied using flies, Shaw says. But the flies proved their worth. Today more than 50 labs use flies to study sleep, generating findings that suggest that sleep has a set of core features present across the animal kingdom. And biologists did not stop with flies. “Once we showed that flies slept,” Shaw said, “then it became possible to say that anything slept.”

The sleep that researchers studied in other species was not always similar to the standard human variety. Dolphins and migrating birds can send half their brain to sleep while appearing awake, researchers realized. Elephants spend almost every hour awake, while little brown bats spend almost every hour asleep.

In 2008, David Raizen and his colleagues even reported sleep in Caenorhabditis elegans, the roundworm widely used as a model organism in biology laboratories. They have only 959 body cells (apart from their gonads), with 302 neurons that are mostly gathered in several clusters in the head. Unlike many other creatures, C. elegans does not sleep for a portion of every day of its life. Instead, it sleeps for short bouts during its development. It also sleeps after periods of stress as an adult.

The evidence for sleep in creatures with minimal nervous systems seemed to reach a new high about five years ago with studies of jellyfish. The Cassiopea jellies, about four inches long, spend most of their time upside down, tentacles reaching toward the ocean surface, and pulsating to push seawater through their bodies. When Michael Abrams, now a fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and two other graduate students at the California Institute of Technology asked if Cassiopea might sleep, they were continuing the line of inquiry that Tobler had followed when she studied cockroaches, investigating whether sleep exists in ever simpler organisms. If jellyfish sleep, that suggests sleep may have evolved more than 1 billion years ago and could be a fundamental function of almost all organisms in the animal kingdom, many of which do not have brains.

The “upside down” Cassiopea jellyfish does not have a centralized nervous system but it sleeps. The animals never stop moving completely, but at night their rate of pulsations slows, and they show other behaviors associated with sleep.

Jacopo Werther

That’s because, among animals, jellyfish are evolutionarily about as far away as you can get from mammals. Their neighbors in the tree of life include the sponges, which spend their lives attached to rocks in the ocean, and placozoans, tiny clusters of cells first seen by scientists on the walls of seawater aquariums. Unlike other creatures observed sleeping, Cassiopea have no brain, no centralized nervous system. But they can move, and they have periods of rest. It should be possible, the Cal Tech students reasoned, to apply the criteria for behavioral sleep to them.

The first few boxes were relatively easy to check. Although the jellyfish pulsed night and day, Abrams and his collaborators showed that the rate of pulsing slowed in a characteristic way at night, and that animals could be roused from this state with some effort. (There were also indications that the jellyfish favored a particular posture on a platform in the tank during these quieter periods, but Abrams considers that evidence to still be anecdotal.) Testing whether the jellyfish had sleep homeostasis was much harder and required finding ways to gently disturb them without distressing them. In the end, Abrams and his collaborators settled on dropping the platform out from underneath them; when that happened, the Cassiopea would sink and rise again, pulsing at their daytime rate.

The pulsation of a Cassiopea jellyfish can be observed in this series of photos, taken from above. The outer rim of the animal is relaxed at left. It contracts over the next two images, and then relaxes again. The rate of this pulsation helps to indicate sleep in the jellyfish.

Courtesy of Michael Abrams

Later, the telltale signs of homeostatic regulation were there: The more the jellyfish were disturbed, the less the creatures moved the next day. “We weren’t sold on it until we saw the homeostatic regulation,” Abrams said. The team’s results were published in 2017, and Abrams has continued to probe the jellyfish’s genetics and neuroscience since then.

Sleeping in Context

The new revelations about sleep in hydras push the sleep discoveries to a new extreme. The hydra’s body and nervous system are even more rudimentary than Cassiopea’s. Yet as the researchers from Kyushu University in Japan and Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea demonstrated, once a hydra entered a rest state, a pulse of light would rouse it, and it too slept longer after repeated deprivation, among other findings.

Hydra sleep has its peculiarities: Dopamine, which usually makes animals sleep less, caused the hydra to go still. The hydra does not seem to sleep on a 24-hour cycle, instead spending part of every four hours asleep. Something about the hydra’s way of life may have made these traits advantageous, Tobler suggests.

When it is active, a hydra uses its tentacles to ensnare passing prey. The hydra then pulls its victim into its mouth.

Tom Branch/Science Source

But despite those differences, hydra sleep may overlap with other animals’ sleep at the genomic level. When the researchers looked for gene activity altered by sleep deprivation in hydras, they saw a few familiar ones. “At least some genes conserved in other animals are involved in sleep regulation in hydra,” wrote Taichi Itoh, an assistant professor at Kyushu University and a leader of the new study, in an email to Quanta. That finding suggests that the Cnidaria phylum of animals, which includes hydras and jellyfish, already had some genetic components of sleep regulation before it diverged from the ancestors of other groups of animals. As those animals gradually evolved centralized nervous systems, sleep may have taken on new functions for maintaining them.

What, then, does sleep do in the absence of a brain? Raizen suspects that at least for some animals, sleep has a primarily metabolic function, allowing certain biochemical reactions to take place that can’t happen during waking hours. It may divert the energy that would be used by alertness and movement into other processes, ones that are too costly to take place while the animal is awake. For example, C. elegans seems to use sleep to enable the growth of its body and support the repair of its tissues. In sleep-deprived hydras, the cell divisions that are part of everyday life are paused. Something similar has been seen in the brains of sleep-deprived rats and in fruit flies. Managing the flow of energy may be a central role for sleep.

All this research on very simple sleepers raises questions about the very first organism that slept. This first sleeper, whatever it was, probably vanished more than 1 billion years ago. If it was the common ancestor between hydras and humans, it likely had neurons and something like muscle that enabled it to move — and the absence of that movement was characteristic of its version of sleep, fulfilling its special needs.

“If that animal slept, sleep was for whatever that context was,” Abrams said. Sleep might have helped to maintain the first sleeper’s rudimentary nervous system, but it could just as easily have been for the benefits of its metabolism or digestion. “Before we had a brain, we had a gut,” he said.

Even deeper questions are now being asked. In a 2019 opinion paper, Raizen and his co-authors wondered: If sleep happens in neurons, then what is the minimum number of neurons that can sleep? Can the need for sleep be driven by other kinds of cells, as work implicating liver and muscle cells suggests?

“If you really want to push the envelope, do animals that do not have neurons at all sleep?” Raizen asked.

In fact, there are a few organisms whose behavior might someday reveal the answer. Placozoans, the microscopic multicellular creatures that seem to be among the simplest in the animal kingdom, move and react to their surroundings. They have no neurons and no muscles. Neither do sponges, which are anchored in place but still respond to their environment.

“I’m often asked, ‘Do sponges sleep?’” said Abrams. “That’s a whole new world. There might be ways to test that.”

Source: https://www.quantamagazine.org/sleep-evolved-before-brains-hydras-are-living-proof-20210518/

[This is a fascinating idea, and perfect for computer control. I would like to see how this progresses. Jan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAczd3mt3X0

Its ‘decadal survey’ pitches big new space observatories, funding for large telescopes and a reckoning over social issues plaguing the field.

An observatory at night, shown with the stars "circling" the sky from a long exposure.

With input from many astronomers, ‘decadal surveys’ periodically help to set the priorities for US astronomy.Credit: Stan Honda/AFP via Getty

A long-anticipated road map for the next ten years of US astronomy is here — and it’s nothing if not ambitious.

It recommends that NASA coordinate, build and launch three flagship space observatories capable of detecting light over a broad range of wavelengths. It suggests that the US National Science Foundation (NSF) fund two enormous ground-based telescopes in Chile and possibly Hawaii, to try to catch up with an advanced European telescope that’s under construction. And for the first time, it issues recommendations for how federal agencies should fight systemic racism, sexism and other structural issues that drive people out of astronomy, weakening the quality of the science.

“There are tremendous scientific opportunities before us — twenty-first-century astrophysics is incredibly rich,” says Fiona Harrison, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and co-chair of the steering committee that wrote the report, known as Astro2020. The plan, released on 4 November, attempts to capitalize on some of those opportunities while also being realistic about budget and schedule constraints, she says.

How the fight over a Hawaii mega-telescope could change astronomy

US astronomy has sometimes taken a haphazard approach to building research facilities. Astro2020 is “imposing order on the field in a way that probably hasn’t been done before”, says Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington DC. For instance, Astro2020 describes how the NSF could consider withdrawing its support from either of the large ground-based telescopes if they fail to reach certain milestones. It also sets out the deliberate steps NASA should take to develop technology for its ambitious space missions.

NASA, the NSF, the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the US Air Force commissioned the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to research and produce Astro2020. It is the latest in a series of ‘decadal surveys’ that aim to guide the direction of US astronomy and astrophysics, by gathering input from thousands of astronomers every ten years. “They’re influential because they really do let the whole community speak their voice,” says Aki Roberge, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Funding agencies generally follow the decadal survey’s recommendations, which means that billions of dollars are at stake.

Many astronomers welcome the vision laid out in the new report. “They really set the whole framework for how we can go about doing this ambitious science,” says Scott Gaudi, an astronomer at The Ohio State University in Columbus. “It’s a very balanced view,” adds Priyamvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “I like that they really acknowledge that it takes time for the science and technology for missions to mature.”

A forced partnership

Astronomers have been worried about the United States falling behind Europe, which is building the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile. Slated to come online in 2028, that facility is larger and further along than either of the extremely large US telescope projects under way. The 24.5-metre-wide Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) is under construction in Chile, and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is planned for the Hawaiian mountain of Maunakea; Astro2020 recommends that the NSF buy into both of them, to help the country catch up.

A rendering of The Giant Magellan Telescope, currently being constructed at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

The Giant Magellan Telescope (artist’s rendering shown) is under construction in Chile.Credit: GMTO Corporation/M3 Engineering

Under this arrangement, the GMT and the TMT, once bitter rivals, would partner to cover skies in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, which the European telescope cannot do. Together, they could make new types of astronomical discovery in galaxy evolution, exoplanet studies and other fields. “The only way to have astronomy in the United States be competitive at this scale is with this kind of capability,” says John O’Meara, chief scientist at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Kamuela, Hawaii.

The decadal survey’s recommendation would deliver a much-needed boost in funding: the GMT is estimated to cost at least US$2 billion and the TMT $2.6 billion, but neither has all the money it needs. Both began as privately funded projects. Buy-in from the US federal government — the NSF might consider investing $800 million in each — would give all US astronomers a chance to compete for a portion of observing time on both telescopes.

But it’s not clear whether the NSF could afford to support both facilities. So Astro2020 lays out a process for deciding whether to jettison one of the telescopes if need be.

NASA won’t rename James Webb telescope — and astronomers are angry

It remains to be seen how the TMT might move forward, however. The project is planned for Maunakea — one of the best sites in the world for stargazing — but construction there has been halted since 2015 owing to protests from Native Hawaiians, to whom the mountain is sacred. The TMT’s back-up site, on the island of La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands, seemed to be knocked out of the running in July, when a court annulled the agreement that the TMT would need to build there. The project is appealing against the decision, but remains focused on building relationships at the preferred site in Hawaii, says Kerry Slater, the TMT’s vice-president of communications.

Other priorities on Astro2020’s wishlist for ground-based projects are a next-generation cosmology experiment in Antarctica and Chile that would probe the cosmic microwave background, commonly known as the afterglow of the Big Bang, and a major upgrade to the existing Very Large Array radio telescopes scattered across North America.

Triple threat

In addition to ground-based astronomy, the report provides guidance on the future of space-based missions, typically the most expensive and highest-profile astronomical observatories. Recommendations from previous decadal surveys have led to iconic spacecraft such as the Hubble Space Telescope. This time around, the top recommendation is to launch not one, but three flagship observatories, spanning different wavelengths of light to enable a variety of discoveries. The last time NASA coordinated projects in this way was between 1990 and 2003, when the agency launched four satellites dubbed the Great Observatories, beginning with Hubble.

A future NASA space telescope, recommended by Astro2020, could be a scaled-down version of this one, shown as an artist’s illustration.Credit: NASA GSFC

First out of the gate in the next set of missions, which some astronomers are calling the ‘New Great Observatories’, would be a space telescope similar to Hubble, but with a mirror more than twice the width of Hubble’s. It would detect light in ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared wavelengths, and be able to discover objects of astrophysical interest ranging from habitable planets to violent black holes. It would cost around $11 billion and launch in the early 2040s.

Second and third would be missions detecting X-rays, a sector of the electromagnetic spectrum in which some of the most powerful astrophysical phenomena can be observed, and far-infrared radiation, which can penetrate the shrouds of dust around newborn stars. These missions would cost $3 billion to $5 billion each, and a decision on whether to build them would be made five years after the start of the first Hubble-like mission.

Lurking behind these ambitious spacecraft is the spectre of previous space missions whose budgets have blown out of control. Neither of the top recommendations for large space-based missions from the past two decadal surveys are operational yet. The James Webb Space Telescope, the leading recommendation in the 2000 survey, is set to launch on 18 December, years later than intended, at a cost of nearly $10 billion — well above its original budget. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the main recommendation in the 2010 survey, had to accommodate a 2.4-metre primary mirror donated by a spy-satellite programme, which was supposed to save money but required design changes and extra processing that drove up the cost. The COVID-19 pandemic added costs and delays, and Roman is now targeted to launch no earlier than 2027, at a cost of $4.3 billion.

Astronomy impasse: What’s next for the Thirty Meter Telescope?

“We’ve learned a lot in the course of the last 10–20 years about how to do large missions,” says Gaudi. “For me, it’s almost inconceivable that we couldn’t do better the next time, because we’ve learned from our past mistakes.”

Astro2020 recommends that NASA save money by, among other things, terminating the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, a telescope-on-a-plane that has come under criticism for its relatively high operational price tag — nearly as much as Hubble’s — and relatively low scientific output so far, although that is improving. At the same time, the report advises that the agency fund mid-sized space missions, such as astrophysics spacecraft on the order of $1.5 billion each.

A human endeavour

Astro2020 also attempts to grapple with the importance of equity and inclusion to the health of US astronomy. “Astrophysics is done by humans,” says Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at the Goddard centre. “How these humans treat each other, how they are led, how they hold each other accountable, what the policies and the systems are that they’re working in — this makes so much of a difference to the quality of the science that gets done.”

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered by the Maunakea Access Road in Hawaii to halt telescopes being built on sacred land.

Native Hawaiians have been protesting the construction of a new, extremely large telescope at Maunakea for years.Credit: Ronit Fahl/Zuma Press

US astronomy has found itself at the forefront of many social issues, such as the ethics of doing science on lands seized from Indigenous groups — such as Maunakea. The field has also faced widespread problems of sexism and racism in science, including a sexual harassment scandal surrounding prominent astronomer Geoff Marcy.

The report lays out some recommendations for reducing the systemic barriers that block many people from entering and staying in science. They include increasing federal funding for student and early-career researchers, making diversity a criterion in awarding grants, and gathering data to better track the lack of equity in funding. Collecting such data is the first crucial step towards distributing resources equitably, Natarajan says.

“Racial/ethnic diversity among astronomy faculty remains, in a word, abysmal,” the report says. Indigenous people are even more under-represented in astronomy than in other physical sciences, it notes, while calling for “a new model for respectful, collaborative decision-making in partnership with Indigenous and other local communities”.

NASA won’t rename James Webb telescope — and astronomers are angry

Attention will now turn to how the survey’s recommendations might become reality. Pandemic-related delays in the report’s release mean that the NSF, NASA and the DOE have already missed their chance to incorporate the findings into the budgets they are drawing up for the 2023 fiscal year. As a result, Astro2020 priorities will not start receiving funding until 2024 at the earliest. NASA says it will respond in detail to the recommendations within about ten weeks.

“It is now the community’s job to translate these words into actions,” says Tony Beasley, director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03027-y?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=d16d818218-briefing-dy-20211104&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-d16d818218-46019854

[The state of Western science is insane. These distances are beyond imagination and all this equipment and these methods were invented by Whites. Just read this article and try to grasp the insane distances that are involved. The accuracy of our science is beyond imagination. Truly. Jan]

Astronomers have found hints of what could be the first planet ever to be discovered outside our galaxy.

Nearly 5,000 "exoplanets" – worlds orbiting stars beyond our Sun – have been found so far, but all of these have been located within the Milky Way galaxy.

The possible Saturn-sized planet discovered by Nasa’s Chandra X-Ray Telescope is in the Messier 51 galaxy.

This is located some 28 million light-years away from the Milky Way.

This new result is based on transits, where the passage of a planet in front of a star blocks some of the star’s light and yields a characteristic dip in brightness that can be detected by telescopes.

This general technique has already been used to find thousands of exoplanets.

Dr Rosanne Di Stefano and colleagues searched for dips in the brightness of X-rays received from a type of object known as an X-ray bright binary.

These objects typically contain a neutron star or black hole pulling in gas from a closely orbiting companion star. The material near the neutron star or black hole becomes superheated and glows at X-ray wavelengths.

Because the region producing bright X-rays is small, a planet passing in front of it could block most or all of the rays, making the transit easier to spot.

The team members used this technique to detect the exoplanet candidate in a binary system called M51-ULS-1.

"The method we developed and employed is the only presently implementable method to discover planetary systems in other galaxies," Dr Di Stefano, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, US, told BBC News.

"It is a unique method, uniquely well-suited to finding planets around X-ray binaries at any distance from which we can measure a light curve."

The Chandra telescope was launched in 1999 to study X-ray emission from hot regions of the Universe

Future planet-hunting

This binary contains a black hole or neutron star orbiting a companion star with a mass about 20 times that of the Sun. A neutron star is the collapsed core of what had once been a massive star.

The transit lasted about three hours, during which the X-ray emission decreased to zero. Based on this and other information, the astronomers estimate that the candidate planet would be around the size of Saturn, and orbit the neutron star or black hole at about twice the distance Saturn lies from the Sun.

Dr Di Stefano said the techniques that have been so successful for finding exoplanets in the Milky Way break down when observing other galaxies. This is partly because the great distances involved reduce the amount of light which reaches the telescope and also mean that many objects are crowded into a small space (as viewed from Earth), making it difficult to resolve individual stars.

With X-rays, she said, "there may be only several dozen sources spread out over the entire galaxy, so we can resolve them. In addition, a subset of these are so bright in X-rays that we can measure their light curves.

"Finally, the huge emission of X-rays comes from a small region that can be substantially or (as in our case) totally blocked by a passing planet."

Messier 51 is also called the Whirlpool Galaxy because of its distinctive spiral shape

The researchers freely admit that more data is needed to verify their interpretation.

One challenge is that the planet candidate’s large orbit means it would not cross in front of its binary partner again for about 70 years, quashing any attempts to make a follow-up observation in the near-term.

One other possible explanation that the astronomers considered is that the dimming has been caused by a cloud of gas and dust passing in front of the X-ray source.

However, they think this is unlikely, because the characteristics of the event do not match up with the properties of a gas cloud.

"We know we are making an exciting and bold claim so we expect that other astronomers will look at it very carefully," said co-author Julia Berndtsson of Princeton University, New Jersey.

"We think we have a strong argument, and this process is how science works."

Dr Di Stefano said that the new generation of optical and infrared telescopes would not be able to compensate for the problems of crowding and dimness, so observations at X-ray wavelengths would likely remain the primary method for detecting planets in other galaxies.

However, she said a method known as microlensing might also hold promise for identifying extra-galactic planets.

The study has been published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Astronomy.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59044650?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=7a8f0a1880-briefing-dy-20211026&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-7a8f0a1880-46019854