• NASA commissioned a team of scientists to develop bio-inspired 'bees' to explore Mars.
• The tiny drones will have bumblebee shaped bodies and wings inspired by cicadas, the optimal shape for generating lift in the Martian atmosphere.
• The 'Marsbees' have a number of advantages over traditional, rotary-powered drones. 

Move over, Elon Musk. Future exploration of Mars may not be carried out by humans at all if a team of researchers has their way.

Engineers are developing swarms of robotic 'bees' that can hover above the Martian surface, collecting data and communicating with a mobile exploration base. It's bio-inspired engineering at its finest.

NASA commissioned a team at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, working in conjunction with a team of Japanese scientists, to develop the flying, micro-sized robots. 

Here's how they'd work, according to NASA: The Marsbees would be launched by a rover, acting as a sort of mobile base and recharging station. Inspired by insects, the robot 'bees' would have bodies shaped like bumblebees, with wing structures reminiscent of cicadas.

The bees would be able to fly by flapping their wings, generating enough lift to hover in the Martian atmosphere. There are a few specific advantages to using flapping, insectoid robots over traditional rotary-powered drones, according to NASA.

First, the robots would make for a much lighter payload, giving scientists the ability to deploy more robots to Mars for data collection. Second, the bees would function in mini-swarms, meaning if one gets destroyed, it's not a huge loss.

While the Marsbees are promising, they're still years away from being deployed on research missions.

There are only a few flapping drones that can actually fly in Earth's atmosphere (a hummingbird drone developed by the Japanese team) and NASA's robot bees are still in Phase I — the very early stages of design.

The future of space exploration, however, could belong to the (robot) insects. 

SEE ALSO: A 2nd 'Big Bang' could end our universe in an instant — and it's all because of a tiny particle that controls the laws of physics

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NOW WATCH: What living on Earth would be like without the moon

• Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, revealed a photo on instagram of a giant tool that will help build "Big Falcon Rocket" spaceships.
• The tool is a huge mold to create a carbon-fiber composite body for the spaceships, which could enable travel to Mars.
• Carbon-fiber is stronger than steel and lighter than aluminum, making it an excellent aerospace building material.
• SpaceX's first spaceships could launch by the end of 2018 and rocket toward Mars in 2022.

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, just showed off a huge development in his quest to build the largest and most powerful spaceship in history.

Musk posted a photo of a giant cylinder (below) to Instagram early Monday morning. It reveals a hollow metal spindle with spokes next to a Tesla Model 3 electric car.

"SpaceX main body tool for the BFR interplanetary spaceship," Musk said in his post.

The "BFR" abbreviation stands for Big Falcon Rocket— or, as Musk prefers, Big F---ing Rocket. SpaceX is designing the launch system with two fully-reusable parts: a 191-foot-tall rocket booster and a 157-foot-tall spaceship, which sits on top.

Once assembled, a BFR would stand about 15% taller than the Statue of Liberty and be able to launch 100 people and 150 tons of cargo into orbit around Earth. After a refueling in space, a ship could reach Mars in about 6 months.

Musk said in February that most of SpaceX's engineering resources are now focused on BFR — and the spaceship in particular.

"The ship part is by far the hardest," he said. "I think we understand reusable boosters. Reusable spaceships that can land propulsively? That's harder. We're starting with the hard part first."

What Musk's new photo reveals

Musk's image is small and grainy, and SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for more details; yet the image nonetheless reveals quite a bit.

A Tesla Model 3 is about 15.5 feet long, which means the tool next to it is about 30 feet in diameter and 40 feet long. The internal supports and central spindle also hint that the whole thing can rotate.

The dimensions match Musk's latest description of the BFR spaceship. Likewise, the spinning backs up SpaceX's plan to build the spaceship almost entirely out of carbon-fiber: a super-lightweight, ultra-strong material.

Carbon-fiber materials are many times stronger than steel and about 50% lighter than aluminum (a metal commonly used by aerospace companies).

This is why many rocket manufacturers now weave carbon-fiber thread into fuel tanks and other parts. If a rocket's weight can be reduced, heavier payloads can reach space; for larger vessels, this can translate to thousands of pounds of cargo. Safety is also improved, since carbon-fiber holds up better against the punishing forces of launch.

Musk confirmed in his Instagram post that the tool will be used to create carbon-fiber composites, and SpaceX is no stranger to working with the stuff on massive scales.

The company uses some of the material in its Falcon Heavy rocket system, for example. And in October 2017, Musk revealed a nearly 40-foot-wide cryogenic fuel tank made out of the stuff.

"We developed a new carbon-fiber matrix that's much stronger and more capable at cryo than anything before, and it holds 1,200 tons of liquid oxygen," he said at the time.

According to Teslarati, a contractor called Janicki Industries helped SpaceX build the giant fuel tank — but this time Musk's company is bringing the work in-house.

How the carbon-fiber spaceship tool might work

Carbon-fiber thread on its own isn't of too much use to aerospace engineers. But when the material is woven, impregnated with glues, and cured with heat, it takes on otherworldly properties.

The most precise way to create it is with robots.

A time-lapse video below shows a robot weaving a carbon-fiber filament around a spinning tank in a diamond pattern. Afterward, it winds a coating of adhesives around the tank, and then workers cure the whole thing in an oven to create the final carbon-fiber composite material.

The process shown above is more of a bench-top operation. What SpaceX is trying to do will likely break records — and require a lot more space.

With no room in its Hawthorne, California headquarters, SpaceX is looking to build a 250,000-square-foot Mars rocket factory at an 18-acre site located in the Port of Los Angeles (pending final approval from the city).

For now, as Musk's photo shows, the tool is being kept in a tent — most likely the 20,000-square-foot tent that SpaceX recently put up at a nearby site at the port, according to Ars Technica and Teslarati.

Eventually, SpaceX will need some very large robots decked out with weaving, adhesives, and heat-curing tools.

To get a sense of how SpaceX's super-size carbon-fiber molding operation might work, below is a clip of how a robot at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in 2014 worked on a fuel tank that stretched 18 feet in diameter:

The first SpaceX moon or Mars mission could happen sooner than you think

Once a BFR spaceship body is formed into a leak-proof shell, it will likely be removed from its mold.

Other carbon-fiber composite parts, such as a flight-stabilizing delta wing and the cone-shaped payload (and passenger) area, can then be mated to it to form the spaceship's hull.

SpaceX engineers will then have to attach four room-size Raptor rocket engines and two other engines, plus all of the other internal propellant tanks, plumbing, and electronics that a rocket requires.

The first enormous BFR spaceship — about 35 feet longer than NASA's space shuttle orbiters — could be built, shipped to SpaceX's testing facility in McGregor, Texas, and start "short hopper flights" by early 2019, Musk said in February.

Assuming the spaceship doesn't blow up during its testing, SpaceX will move on to the BFR booster.

Musk said late last year that his "aspirational" timeline for a first BFR launch to Mars will happen 2022, followed by the first crewed mission in 2024.

He hopes to eventually colonize Mars with BFR spaceships as a backup plan for humanity.

"It will start off building just the most elementary infrastructure, just a base to create some propellant, a power station, blast domes in which to grow crops — all of the sort of fundamentals without which you cannot survive," he said at the South by Southwest festival in March. "And then really there's gonna be an explosion of entrepreneurial opportunity, because Mars will need everything from iron foundries to pizza joints. I think Mars should really have great bars: the Mars Bar."

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk is expanding his SpaceX empire — here are the rocket company's most important locations as seen from space

SEE ALSO: SpaceX rocket launches are getting boring, and it's an incredible success story for Elon Musk

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NOW WATCH: There's a place at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean where hundreds of giant spacecraft go to die

• SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell spoke at the 2018 TED Conference in Vancouver on Wednesday.
• Shotwell said SpaceX will put humans on Mars"within a decade for sure"— a longer timeline than Elon Musk has promised.
• She said Mars is an important backup to have in case something happens to Earth, but described it as a "fixer-upper."
• Shotwell also said she wants SpaceX to travel to other solar systems. 

At the 2018 TED Conference on Wednesday, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell seemed for the first time to express an even grander vision than Elon Musk's plan to colonize Mars.

Speaking to the crowd, Shotwell said she won't be content to land a SpaceX rocket on Mars, or even to reach more distant planets like Saturn or Pluto. Instead, she revealed that she ultimately hopes to meet up with whoever's out there in other solar systems.

"This is the first time I might out-vision Elon," she said of the SpaceX founder.

Musk has said before that SpaceX could travel beyond Mars to far reaches of this solar system by using a series of planetary "filling stations"that could extend all the way to Pluto. But Shotwell said she doesn't want to stop there.

She's ready to travel to other parts of the galaxy, she said, adding that her ultimate goal is to find people "or whatever they call themselves" in an entirely separate solar system.

That's much farther than Musk has ever said he wants to go. But first, the company needs to land on Mars. And when it comes to putting people on the Red Planet, Shotwell is much more conservative about her timelines than Musk has been. 

Musk has said that uncrewed SpaceX ships will fly to Mars by 2022, and humans will be on red-planet-bound missions just two years later, in 2024. But Shotwell offered a slightly longer timeline at TED, saying the company will have humans on Mars "within a decade for sure."

"That's Gwynne time. I'm sure Elon wants to go faster," she said. 

Shotwell said that exploring Mars isn't just for kicks, echoing what Musk has said about the need for a backup planet — a kind of Martian life-raft for humanity. 

"If something were to happen on Earth, you need humans living somewhere else," she said. "I think you need multiple paths to survival, and this is one of them." 

But that doesn't mean she's excited about the conditions there. 

"Mars is fine, but it’s a fixer-upper planet," Shotwell said.

With an average surface temperature of around -81˚F and harsh Martian winds, it would be extremely challenging for humans to survive on the red planet. But before landing there, the first problem to tackle is how SpaceX might keep humans alive for the trip to Mars, a journey that will likely take more than 80 days.

But Shotwell said once those questions are answered, Mars won't be the final stop for SpaceX. 

SEE ALSO: NASA is sending a new solar-powered lander to Mars next month to check out what's been happening for the past 4.5 billion years

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: SpaceX is about to launch its monster Mars rocket for the first time — here's how it stacks up against other rockets

• Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has spoken often of colonizing Mars with his company SpaceX.
• Many experts believe that setting up a crewed Martian outpost is possible if not inevitable.
• However, the technologies required to establish a permanent, thriving colony on the red planet don't yet exist.
• Biosphere 2 — a large-scale experiment from the early 1990s — remains one of the best illustrations of the challenges that lie ahead.

One by one, four men and four women wearing dark coveralls stepped up to a lectern to deliver their final remarks.

"I take my last breaths of this atmosphere, knowing that I will take breaths from a different atmosphere from all of you," said Jane Poynter, one of the crew members.

Then they lined up in front of a velvet rope, waved to the cameras, and stepped through an airlock crafted from submarine bulkheads. The doors were sealed. It was September 26, 1991. The group wouldn't leave until 1993.

The airtight facility they entered, called Biosphere 2, is dug into a hillside of the Sonoran Desert near Oracle, Arizona. It's a geodesic cocoon made of 6,500 triangular glass panes, and it looks something like a cross between a brilliant jewel and a sprawling terrarium. Inside are acres of lush green plants, millions of cubic feet of air, and an undulating 675,000-gallon saltwater ocean.

Poynter was walking into the largest, longest-running space colony simulation ever built. It would not only pioneer a system to regenerate all the food, air, and water needed to survive on Mars but also test the crew's physical and mental limits. Poynter would also face a daunting emotional trial with another crew member, Taber MacCallum: a relationship they'd hidden for years from public view.

"It was an incredibly audacious and, in so many ways, incredibly successful attempt at building a prototype space base," Poynter, who now co-runs the high-altitude-balloon company World View, told me nearly 25 years after she emerged from the biosphere.

People no longer get sealed inside Biosphere 2. Today it's a scientific research facility run by the University of Arizona. Yet the original mission of the biospherians has taken on new relevance as threatening changes to the Earth’s climate, and ultimately to humanity, take alarming shape.

The outlook has grown so gloomy that, in the eyes of some, the idea of colonizing Mars as a backup drive for the human race now seems appropriate, if not inevitable. Joining Stephen Hawking and others is billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, whose grand ambitions have made talk of inhabiting the red planet using his aerospace company, SpaceX, part of casual conversation.

The ultimate goal of his entrepreneurial existence, Musk has said, is to build a permanent, self-sustaining city of 1 million people on Mars — complete with pizza joints — as a sort of insurance policy against all-out catastrophe on Earth.

SpaceX hopes to launch a "Big F---ing Rocket," a reusable space vehicle Musk is designing to ferry up to 100 people to the red planet, with the first (though uncrewed) missions starting in 2022.

"That's not a typo, although it is aspirational," Musk said during anOctober 2017 presentation.

There’s a question that looms larger than the months-long trip to Mars: How will anyone survive on a dry, irradiated, and nearly airless world for years on end? Musk has not yet explained how SpaceX plans to sustain a hypothetical Martian metropolis, and he declined to comment for this story through a spokesperson.

Yet Biosphere 2, a now decades-old expedition with troubling results, still offers some of the clearest answers to that question.

Agents of Gaia

Biosphere 2 was envisioned as a scaled-up test of the Gaia hypothesis, which is the idea that life will adapt to a given environment, no matter how inhospitable, to make it habitable.

MacCallum, Poynter, and the other biospherians were outsized members of Gaia's adaptive workforce inside their sealed habitat. They farmed crops, raised animals, managed the air supply, and recycled every speck of waste. They grew rice, peanuts, beans, bananas, and wheat, and tended to pigs, goats, and chickens, providing nearly all their food for the duration.

Crew members took turns cooking meals using whatever they could grow. They inspected the system's health, logging research data and completing other myriad tasks that routinely filled 12-hour workdays.

"The dinner bell rang at 7, then we collapsed, exhausted, only to get up at 6:30 to do it all over again," Poynter wrote in her 2006 autobiographical book, "The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2."

Their mission remains one of the grandest attempts yet to demonstrate what spaceflight experts call bioregenerative life support: a self-contained system of plants, microbes, and animals that can recycle and replenish all the air, food, and water that people need. Such a system is necessary for longer excursions on Mars, a planet that's an average of 158 million miles from Earth and passes nearby only once every two years.

"The scenario in 'The Martian' is completely doable," D. Marshall Porterfield, the former director of NASA's Space Life and Physical Sciences Division, told me, referring the sci-fi book and movie. But that scenario was about a temporary outpost, he said, and any permanent city on Mars would absolutely require bioregenerative life support.

When MacCallum and Poynter were locked inside Biosphere 2, an array of small, diverse biomes — desert, marshland, savannah, ocean, towering rainforest — worked in conjunction to keep them alive. Sunlight beamed through the geodesic glass, driving photosynthesis in carefully selected populations of plants; the plants took carbon dioxide out of the air, breathing out oxygen and storing leftover solar energy as sugars and starch for meals; microbes in the soil broke down organic matter (including feces), generating compost and carbon dioxide for the plants; and water sucked up by the plants transpired into vapor, filtering it for reuse.

Hidden below the wilderness, a mechanical underbelly called the technosphere worked to circulate air, pump water, keep communications gear running, and more using an external power plant. (On Mars, solar or nuclear energy would provide this energy.)

Failure constantly threatened the mission.

Oxygen levels began to inexplicably dip almost immediately after the airlock was closed, while the amount of carbon dioxide rose. Core crops went extinct because of infestations and disease. Fatigue, hunger, and frustration besieged the crew as they tackled one issue after the next. About nine months into the endeavor, the crew split into two opposing factions.

Tubes for the moon and Mars

While the biospherians dug in the dirt, NASA was developing its own shrunk-down, sterile approach to bioregenerative life support: hydroponic greenhouses.

This soil-less farming technique feeds plant roots with mineral-infused water. But instead of relying on them just for food, NASA's versions would use the plants inside to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and to cleanse water.

Phil Sadler, a botanist turned machinist who wears a worn cap with "South Pole Station" embroidered on the front, showed me one of several prototypes of a Mars Lunar Greenhouse that he helped design and build. Inside the 18-foot-long tube, the leafy stems of sweet-potato plants reached toward blinding LED lights.

One unit operating at its full planned potential, Sadler said, could provide 100% of the air, 100% of the water, and 50% of the food that one astronaut needs on Mars or on the moon. The project began around 2004, when NASA was exploring the idea of long-duration lunar missions.

"The idea was just, 'OK, show us how much food you can generate and water you can harvest and oxygen can be generated, and give us some numbers on the farming labor,'" Sadler said. So he worked with scientists and engineers to assemble and test them in a University of Arizona warehouse that's a 45-minute drive south of Biosphere 2.

In each Mars Lunar Greenhouse tube, plastic troughs ferry computer-controlled, nutrient-laden liquid to plant roots, and a cement-mixer-like composter helps digest human and plant waste while filtering the water. The tubes can also be configured to grow insects, mealworms, or other arthropodic protein sources.

Each unit is 7 feet in diameter and built around a lightweight aluminum frame and lighting rig. Everything collapses to be 4 feet long — small enough to fit in a decent-sized spaceship — and takes two people just 10 minutes to assemble.

On the moon or on Mars, the system would land ahead of a human mission, deploy an autonomous rover to dig a foundation in the soil, and inflate the tubes. The rover would bury the units to guard plants against dangerous radiation levels and micrometeorite strikes. Sunlight would enter the greenhouses through Himawari devices: large, satellite-like dishes that collect, concentrate, and distribute natural light.

Sadler and his colleagues said there’s more work left to achieve full efficiency — oxygen production, for example, is about half of what it should be. A space-grade version would be a boon to President Donald Trump's grand (yet nebulous) goal for NASA to send astronauts back to the moon, then on to explore Mars.

"We're looking at supporting six people on one mission for two years," Sadler said. "If we can do that, then we'll be successful." Yet NASA’s funding for the greenhouse project ran dry in August 2017, leaving Sadler and his colleagues hunting for more money to refine and perfect their designs. Without more cash, the project may join similarly abandoned NASA projects, including the Biomass Production Facility and BIO-Plex.

While NASA’s work on bioregenerative life support stalls, China is vaulting ahead. The nation is rumored to have 1 million people working on its space program, Sadler said. In July, four students locked themselves inside its airtight "Lunar Palace 1" system to subsist on plants and mealworms for 200 days.

Invisible bullets from deep space

To keep harmful levels of carbon dioxide at bay, the Biosphere 2 crew stockpiled and dried plant waste to prevent decay and slow formation of the gas, and ran a chemical scrubber that MacCallum had installed just a day before closure.

But about 17 months into the mission, the vanishing oxygen took a turn for the worse. Plants could not generate oxygen as fast as predicted and levels dipped from 20.9% — which is normal at Earth's surface — to about 14%, "beyond the point where pilots and air passengers go on oxygen," Poynter wrote in her book.

Poynter, MacCallum, and others suffered from sleep apnea. They'd stop breathing, gasp for air, and jerk awake every few minutes. Walking up a flight of stairs was exhausting, as was remembering a list of simple tasks. In January 1993, MacCallum found Roy Walford, the crew's medical officer, hunched over a lab notebook and unable to do simple math.

Mission controllers wheeled 14 metric tons of liquid oxygen into an airlock to replace what had gone missing. An overabundance of oxygen-hungry bacteria in the soil, plus the biosphere's unsealed concrete foundation, was later discovered to be responsible for the problem.

But even when conditions inside were at their worst, Biosphere 2 left out one dramatic risk for a real Mars colony: radiation.

Two types of radiation in space are extremely harmful to humans: protons spewed out by the sun and cosmic rays. Like tiny bullets, these high-energy particles and the secondary radiation they create penetrate deep into cells, promoting chronic and sometimes deadly diseases such as cancer.

Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere protect us by deflecting and absorbing most of this energy.

"The background radiation rates on the ground are 100 times to 1,000 times smaller than they would be above the atmosphere in free space," Edward Semones, a radiation health officer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said.

In addition to an increased risk of cancer, deep-space radiation can promote cataracts and impair eyesight. Even high-flyingcommercial-airline workers face that risk because of the thinner atmosphere. Animal-based experiments also suggest radiation could damage the nervous system, including the brain, which might impair astronauts’ focus and memory.

"You’re somehow losing cognitive ability," Semones said, adding that, over the years, this "may impact conducting the mission."

The more thick and heavy shielding there is between a person and the vacuum, the better. Semones said about 20 centimeters of water can soak up most space radiation. Yet water is dense and expensive to launch from Earth into space.

One solution, Sadler said, is for early round-trip Mars colonization missions to use Phobos, the planet's largest moon, as a pit stop since it likely harbors water ice just below its ruddy surface. Probes drilled into Phobos could heat and melt the ice, pump the water into elastic cells that surround a spacecraft, and shield a crew from radiation.

More radical solutions for radiation have been proposed. Christopher Mason, a geneticist and biomedical researcher, suggests creating transgenic humans as part of a 10-phase, "500-year plan" to colonize space. His concept is to use a technology like CRISPR to edit a space flier’s genome to constantly repair, as Mason put it, "do not disturb" regions that lead to cancers and other problems.

"You can't dismiss it as an idea, but right now but we don't know the mechanisms," Semones said.

Ultimately, colonists may try to terraform Mars — a deliberate and unprecedented act of climate change. Frozen carbon dioxide at the Martian poles could be turned into greenhouse gases, building a radiation-absorbing atmosphere that would insulate the surface. Plants could convert the thin air into oxygen and, over hundreds of years, temperatures may warm enough to melt hidden water and make it again flow on the surface — and permit spacesuit-free excursions.

Jim Green, the head of NASA’s planetary science division, has proposed building an artificial magnetic shield for Mars to protect that hypothetical nascent atmosphere from the sun's proton radiation, which might otherwise blow the air into space.

Our own worst enemies?

The truth may be that humanity itself is the most basic and significant threat to inhabiting Mars.

Months before Poynter left Biosphere 2, two fellow crew members approached her and spat in her face.

The fury arose over proposed changes meant to appease outside scientists and convince them of the experiment's credibility. The struggle infused psychological strain in the crew, leading the formerly chummy group to divide into bitterly opposed halves — "Us and Them," as Poynter wrote — just nine months after the airlock shut.

Instead of communal dinners they had enjoyed during the early months, the crew increasingly ate alone or in their own group of four. People would pass each other without words or expression. Shouting matches would erupt over minor transgressions. Even a decade later, encounters between members of the two groups were awkward.

"The literature is replete with examples of social problems developing during extended isolated missions," Poynter said in her book, citing a 1994 conference paper. "In a 1970 Antarctic expedition," wrote the study’s author, Debra Facktor Lepore, "one crew member got into an argument and shot and killed another over wine taken from a trailer."

Other experiments that have isolated volunteer crews for months on end, such as HI-SEAS in Hawaii, NASA's isolation chamber in Houston, and Mars500 in Moscow, back up these and other human-level challenges.

'We have not figured this out yet'

Poynter and MacCallum got married on the lawn of Biosphere 2 the summer after their mission ended. A second crew, the facility's last inhabitants, looked on from inside the habitat as the two exchanged vows.

Despite the challenges that the couple faced inside Biosphere 2, both said they would volunteer to live inside a hypothetical Biosphere 3 and go on the first human mission to Mars.

"That we stayed in there for two years, and made almost all our food and water and everything, changed what people thought was possible," MacCallum said. "It completely recalibrated our understanding of, 'Can we create self-sustaining environments? Are biospheres possible? Is space colonization really even possible?'"

The couple’s history, technical expertise, bond, and willingness to risk their lives later short-listed them for a mission called"Inspiration Mars," which would have sent a small space capsule flying past the red planet during a proposed 500-day round trip. The American billionaire and engineer Dennis Tito announced in 2013 that he would fund the project with $300 million, but NASA, a necessary partner, ultimately declined to help.

Poynter said she would still accept the opportunity to make the trip — in a heartbeat.

"Are you kidding? Going to Mars and actually seeing the red planet in your capsule window?" Poynter said. "And then turning around and looking back at planet Earth as a tiny pale-blue dot, thinking about how all human history as we know it happened on that one little tiny dot? That would be amazing."

But how we’ll get to Mars, and when, are questions that remain unanswered.

John Adams, deputy director of Biosphere 2, said that even the "Earth-in-a-bubble" approach is nowhere near ready. "We have not figured this out yet," he said. "But I do think that the lessons learned from the original biosphere and the mission are just tremendous, and we could make a much better go at it a second time around."

Poynter and MacCullum said they admire Musk’s bold urgency to colonize Mars, even if he still lacks a plan to keep adventurers alive on the red planet, let alone during the trip there.

"As a species, we've always sought higher ground," Poynter said. "We’ve always gone up to the top of the mountain to see what what's out there and this is the next step. 110%, I think we need to do this."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Animated map of Mars reveals where humans should build the first Martian cities

• NASA and SpaceX want to send people to Mars.
• However, radiation in deep space and on the surface of the red planet poses a major threat.
• Solving the threats posed by radiation will be essential to visiting Mars, let alone colonizing the planet.
• Here's how a trip to Mars compares to dental X-rays, radiation-worker exposure limits, and more.

Space may look like a vast and empty void.

But the cosmos teems with invisible, high-energy radiation — particles traveling near light-speed that can pummel human travelers and the surfaces of worlds like tiny bullets.

Addressing the threats posed by space radiation is growing all the more necessary: Elon Musk is dedicating thousands of SpaceX employees and multiple facilities to the task of colonizing Mars with 1 million people, while NASA pushes to set up an outpost at the red planet.

NASA recently signed on to test a new polymer-based radiation-blocking vest for astronauts, called AstroRad, on its next mission around the moon.

Musk, meanwhile, has said his new Big Falcon Rocket will use water to block radiation, though only during emergencies.

"Ambient radiation damage is not significant for our transit times," Musk said during an Oct. 2017 chat on Reddit. "Just need a solar storm shelter, which is a small part of the ship."

But just how bad is the problem of radiation in space?

The graphic below — created using data provided by NASA, the EPA, FDA, NRC, scientific journals, and other sources — compares various exposure levels in scenarios both familiar and far-flung.

Hover over a category box to see how it compares. 

Musk has "aspirational" hopes to launch a round-trip mission to the red planet with humans in 2024, but the trip could total a year, and astronauts may spend about 500 days on Mars' surface.

The whole journey would expose astronauts to about 1,000 millisieverts — depending on how many solar storms belch high-energy particles toward Mars, and whether the first entity to reach the planet actually lands on it.

This means the first Martian explorers could get roughly eight times the amount of radiation per year of a radiation worker's annual exposure limit. In total, the space travelers would get about one-third of the way toward hitting a NASA astronaut's maximum lifetime exposure limit (2,500-3,250 mSv).

Where the radiation comes from — and why cancer isn't the only danger

Two main types of radiation in space are extremely harmful to humans: protons spewed out by the sun and cosmic rays. These high-energy particles and the secondary radiation they create penetrate deep into cells, promoting chronic and sometimes deadly diseases such as cancer.

Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere protect us by deflecting and absorbing most of this energy.

"The background radiation rates on the ground are 100 times to 1,000 times smaller than they would be above the atmosphere in free space," Edward Semones, a radiation health officer at NASA's Johnson Space Center, previously told Business Insider.

Cancer is a major risk of radiation exposure, but there are more immediate and surprising symptoms. Deep-space radiation might promote cataracts and impair eyesight. Even high-flying commercial-airline workers face that risk because of the thinner atmosphere.

Animal-based experiments also suggest radiation could damage the nervous system, including the brain, which might impair astronauts' focus and memory.

"You're somehow losing cognitive ability," Semones said, adding that, over the years, this "may impact conducting the mission."

Doing battle with deep-space radiation

NASA's potential use of AstroRad vests and Musk's solar-storm shelter would just be a starting point for Mars adventurers and colonists.

The more thick and heavy shielding there is between a person and the vacuum, the better. Semones said about 20 centimeters of water can soak up most space radiation. Yet water is dense and expensive to launch from Earth into space.

One solution is for Mars colonization missions to use Phobos, the planet's largest moon, as a pit stop since it likely harbors water ice just below its ruddy surface. Probes drilled into Phobos could heat and melt the ice, pump the water into elastic cells that surround a spacecraft, and shield a crew from radiation.

More radical solutions for radiation have also been proposed. Christopher Mason, a geneticist and biomedical researcher, suggests creating transgenic humans as part of a 10-phase, "500-year plan" to colonize space. His concept is to use a technology like CRISPR to edit a space flier's genome to constantly repair, as Mason put it, "do not disturb" regions that lead to cancers and other problems.

"You can't dismiss it as an idea, but right now but we don't know the mechanisms," Semones said of that far-fetched plan. (About 1,000 genes are estimated to be involved in cancer alone.)

Ultimately, colonists may try to terraform Mars— a deliberate and unprecedented act of climate change.

Frozen carbon dioxide at the Martian poles could be turned into greenhouse gases in order to create a radiation-absorbing atmosphere that would insulate the surface. Plants could then convert the thin air into oxygen and, over hundreds of years, temperatures may warm enough to melt hidden water and make it again flow on Mars' surface. One day, that could even permit spacesuit-free excursions.

Jim Green, the former head of NASA's planetary science division, has proposed building an artificial magnetic shield for Mars to protect a hypothetical nascent atmosphere from the sun's proton radiation, which might otherwise blow the air into space.

"This may sound 'fanciful' but new research is starting to emerge revealing that a miniature magnetosphere can be used to protect humans and spacecraft," Green and other researchers wrote in a brief study of the concept in 2017. "If this can be achieved in a lifetime, the colonization of Mars would not be far away."

Read more about the challenges of colonizing Mars: "Life in a bubble: How we can fight hunger, loneliness, and radiation on Mars."

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk says he will colonize Mars — but a 25-year-old experiment in the Arizona desert reveals disturbing challenges that lie ahead

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NASA is about to launch InSight: a new, $850-million Mars lander that will probe the red planet's secrets like never before.

InSight is slated to lift off on Saturday, which is one day after International Space Day, on May 4. But it's just one of dozens of robotic and satellite missions that humanity has rocketed to Mars over the decades.

These spacecraft have beamed back dazzling photos, inspired sci-fi movies like "The Martian", and even helped give Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, the idea to colonize the red planet with the Big Falcon Rocket.

While scientists readily admit they have much to learn about Mars, including the planet's internal structure (a mystery InSight will try to solve), what we have found out so far is incredible.

Here are 13 fascinating facts about Mars and our robotic exploration of the red planet.

SEE ALSO: SpaceX just got approval to build Mars spaceships in Los Angeles from the city's mayor

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Volcanoes

Olympus Mons is more than twice as high as Hawaii's Mauna Loa, the tallest mountain on Earth from top to bottom.

Canyons

Compared to the Grand Canyon on Earth, Valles Marineris on Mars is nearly five times deeper, about four times longer, and 20 times wider.

Mars quakes

The red planet doesn't have plate tectonics, which is what causes most quakes on Earth. But rising plumes of magma could trigger Mars quakes, as could meteorite impacts and the contraction of the world due to cooling. InSight will listen for them with its seismometer.

• NASA's Mars InSight lander is set to take off from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base on Saturday.
• The InSight will take six months to reach Mars, where it will drill into the red planet and measure marsquakes.
• This will be the first time NASA launches an interplanetary rocket from the West Coast.
• Watch it blast off live Saturday (weather permitting) at 4:05 a.m. PT (or 7:05 ET) below.

Some Californians are about to witness to a rare treat on Saturday morning: NASA's first interplanetary rocket launch from the West Coast.

If all goes according to plan, people located about 150 miles north of Los Angeles will be able to venture out before dawn to see NASA's Mars InSight lander blast off from Vandenberg Air Force Base on an Atlas V rocket.

The launch is scheduled for 4:05 a.m. local time. Those not nearby Vandenberg will also be able to watch the event via live-streamed video (which we've embedded below). Launch video coverage is expected to begin at 3:30 a.m. PT on Saturday.

Assuming the 730,000 pound-payload launches successfully, the InSight lander will then spend about six months traveling through space before it touches Martian soil.

It's scheduled to plop down on Mars November 26, 2018, which is when InSight's real work will begin. 

Once safely landed and set up, the lander will weigh roughly 800 pounds, stretch 20 feet long, and be powered by two 7-foot wide solar arrays, as shown in this rendering:

The lander has three main objectives:

• Drill  about 16 feet down into Martian soil to check the planet's temperature.
• Study marsquakes (movement like earthquakes, but on Mars) by putting a seismometer on the soil.
• Put up a pair of antennas to record how much the planet shakes and wobbles. That data could provide some clues about whether the core of Mars is liquid or solid, and help researchers figure out exactly how big the core is.

"We expect that our very sensitive pressure sensor will be able to detect dust devils much farther away than in previous missions," Don Banfield, a planetary scientist from Cornell University who's on NASA's InSight team, said in a release. 

The launch window on Saturday morning closes around 6 a.m., and it's possible that weather conditions at Vandenberg will get too foggy to launch. NASA is forecasting a thick layer of marine fog in the area, which will reduce visibility to roughly 3/4 to 1 1/2 miles from the launch pad.

If conditions aren't favorable enough, the rocket scientists will likely try the launch again Sunday around 3:55 a.m. PT. 

Since most of us can't get to the watch sites near the base, you can see the launch live online via NASA's stream below: 

You can learn more about everything InSight will do on Mars here. 

SEE ALSO: NASA is about to launch a new solar-powered lander to Mars — here's what the InSight will do on the red planet

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NOW WATCH: The surprising reason why NASA hasn't sent humans to Mars yet

• NASA's InSight mission to Mars got off to a successful start Saturday morning.
• An Atlas 5 rocket bearing the InSight lander took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at around 4 a.m. local time.
• Video footage from the NASA launchpad, and some from a passing plane, gave an impressive view of the launch.
• InSight is expected to take six months to reach Mars, where it will probe beneath the surface for new data.

NASA launched a robotic space lander bound for Mars on Saturday morning, beginning a journey to explore the deep interior of the red planet.

The InSight probe was carried into orbit from a launch site in California at around 4:05 a.m. local time.

An Atlas 5 rocket sent the probe hurtling towards Mars, a voyage which is expected to take around six months.

The early stages of the mission appeared to go off without a hitch at Vandenberg Air Force Base. A NASA video feed showed the rocket taking off, though the foggy, pre-dawn conditions made for a less spectacular launch than other space missions.

Here's what the Atlas rocket looked like at the moment of ignition:

Not long after, it disappeared into the clouds, but was followed into the sky by black and white camera footage:

However, a group of people flying overhead in a regular plane managed to take a video of the rocket bursting through the clouds, which was posted to Instagram:

A video camera mounted on the side of the rocket showed a different view:

After the rocket went beyond camera range, NASA telemetry data generated an impression of how the lander looks look travelling above the earth.

The pointed nose cone, known as a payload fairing, was jettisoned once it reached the appropriate altitude, exposing the InSight lander itself:

The mission is the first interplanetary spacecraft to be launched over the Pacific.

The craft is bound for a broad plain near the Martian equator, the Elysium Planitia, where the InSight lander will attempt to push a probe below the surface of Mars to gather data on its interior.

Here is a NASA animation showing how the probe, which can extend up to 16 feet, is expected to work:

NASA hopes the data will help it work out the depth, density and composition of the various layers of the planet, including the crust, mantle and core.

You can watch the entire launch back, with commentary from NASA staff and experts, here:

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• A former NASA scientist says "The Martian" sci-fi book and movie "is completely doable."
• The movie depicts a temporary Mars outpost with pre-delivered supplies and habitats.
• But Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, rallies his rocket company around the idea of colonizing Mars.
• Building a self-sustaining city on the red planet is a far greater challenge than a stay of a year or two.

In the 2015 blockbuster sci-fi movie "The Martian," astronaut Mark Watney lands on Mars with five other intrepid explorers in the not-so-distant future.

Their Ares III mission is one of several human landings on the red planet, and the crew arrives at a pre-assembled outpost, complete with enough food, water, and air to last them about a month. There are also tube-shaped rovers on the ground and a nuclear-powered mothership in orbit.

There's good amount of fiction in the movie (as well as the book it was adapted from), but fans and scientists alike hailed the concept as delightfully realistic — and maybe even inevitable.

"The scenario in 'The Martian' is completely doable," D. Marshall Porterfield, the former director of NASA's Space Life and Physical Sciences Division, previously told Business Insider.

However, Porterfield and other researchers have a lot of questions for Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX, about his ambitious long-term plans for sending people to Mars.

What SpaceX wants to do at Mars

If you apply to work at SpaceX, you'll see the following statement at the top of every job description:

"SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of enabling human life on Mars."

Musk has gone further in interviews and talks, saying it's crucial that we try to colonize Mars in case something goes seriously wrong on Earth.

During a 2016 presentation, for example, Musk said it's possible to put 1 million people on Mars within 100 years of SpaceX's first launch to the red planet. He envisions the company's Big Falcon Rocket — a nearly 35-story launch system that includes a 16-story spaceship — as the primary tool to get the job done.

Musk's "aspirational" timeline is to launch an uncrewed BFR mission to Mars in 2022, followed by a crewed mission in 2024.

BFR is being designed to be fully reusable, which would make it inexpensive to launch, land, and refuel. (Nearly all rockets today are discarded after one use.) SpaceX re-used a rocket booster with its Falcon 9 system for the first time in March 2017.

"This is a very helpful proof point that it's possible, and I hope people start to think of it as a real goal to which we should aspire, to establish a civilization on Mars," Musk told Business Insider during a press teleconference after that 2017 launch. "This is not just about humanity, it's about all the life that we care about."

Musk has mentioned the potential to use domed greenhouses to grow food on the red planet and water shielding to fight against radiation. But he has not elaborated much on his plans to sustain the first explorers, who are due to land on Mars in less than a decade, based on his timeline.

Building a city of 1 million on a cold, arid, and perhaps lifeless planet 158 million miles from Earth is, of course, an even more far-fetched goal.

What SpaceX might need to colonize Mars — but doesn't exist yet

"His idea about colonizing? That's going to require ... bioregenerative life support capabilities," Porterfield said.

The idea behind bioregenerative life support, which Porterfield worked on at NASA, is to collect a human crew's breath, liquid waste, and solid waste — then use plants and other life forms to recycle it into fresh food, water, and air.

This would dramatically reduce the need for resupply missions and help ensure a crew's long-term survival. It would also make a colony vastly more sustainable, affordable, and independent.

"Biological systems are really resilient," Porterfield said. "They tend to be self-healing, self-repairing, so that's one of the advantages of a bioregenerative life support capability."

Mars simulation experiments like Biosphere 2 in the 1990s explored the space-colonization concept on grand scales, but encountered significant problems (including a large loss of oxygen).

Specialized greenhouse habitats might enable bioregenerative life support systems to work on smaller scales. However, NASA's research in that area was mostly de-funded after 2000.

"NASA basically gutted the entire future of spaceflight exploration in order to finish building the space station, and we really haven't fully invested in supporting the sciences required to use the space station today so that we can be competitive," Porterfield said.

He added that China is poised to overtake the US in bioregeneration with its "Lunar Palace-1" experiment. In July 2017, four students locked themselves inside that structure's airtight confines and subsisted on plants and mealworms for 200 days. Perhaps a million people now work for China's space agency, some experts estimate.

Porterfield said making bioregenerative life support work is anything but easy — and earnest research should start now if we're serious about sending people to Mars for more than a short stay. (SpaceX representatives have so far declined to answer our questions about the company's life-support research.)

"We're really talking about technology that replaces what the Earth does," Porterfield said. "This is our current bioregenerative life support system."

Read more about the challenges facing Mars colonization efforts: "Life in a bubble: How we can fight hunger, loneliness, and radiation on Mars"

SEE ALSO: 13 incredible facts you probably didn't know about Mars

DON'T MISS: Potatoes can grow in 'extreme' Mars-like conditions, a new NASA-backed experiment shows

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• Elon Musk and SpaceX want to permanently colonize Mars, but traditional life support systems have finite supplies of air, food, and water.
• Plants and bacteria can recycle astronaut waste while growing them food to eat — an approach called bioregenerative life support.
• NASA funded a Mars Lunar Greenhouse project with a goal of supply 100% of the air and 50% of the food that astronauts need.
• China is accelerating bioregenerative life support research, but similar projects at NASA have slowed or stalled.

In recent years, Elon Musk has said his rocket company, SpaceX, is working toward colonizing Mars with 1 million people. His "aspirational" timeline is to launch an uncrewed Big Falcon Rocket in 2022, followed by the first human landing in 2024.

But the most important question remains unanswered by Musk, his company, and others eyeing the red planet: How will visitors to Mars stay alive, let alone permanently settle down?

The longest single trip in space was by Valery Polyakov at the Mir space station during the 1990s. He lived in space roughly 14 months, yet required resupply missions every few months. The longest anyone ever spent on a world other than Earth was just three days, during the Apollo 17 mission to the moon in December 1972.

Mars is a far more difficult challenge to survive. The red planet is an average of 158 million miles away from Earth, with a small window — just once every 26 months— to launch a relatively quick multi-month mission. Any hiccup in an infrequent supply chain of fresh air, food, and water, such as a launchpad explosion, might doom unprepared explorers.

"If you are stranded there, you need a lot of redundancy so you don't starve to death,'"Phil Sadler, a botanist-turned-machinist in Arizona, told Business Insider. "That's the worst-case scenario you can have, is a crew of six people on Mars calling back saying, 'We're starving to death, we're dying, we just ate Bob.'"

That's precisely why Sadler has for years worked with life support researchers at the University of Arizona and NASA on a crew survival system called the Mars Lunar Greenhouse.

Why NASA turned to hydroponic greenhouses to keep Mars astronauts alive

Humans have four vital needs in space: breathable air, clean water, nutritious food, and a way to discard of — or recycle — waste. But it can cost tens of thousands of dollars to send a single pound of anything to Mars with current rocket technology.

Bioregenerative life support systems, as they're known, promised a solution. The basic concept, which dates back to the Cold War, is to use plants and microbes in a self-contained system to recycle waste and regenerate it into air, water, and food.

"Biological systems are really resilient,"D. Marshall Porterfield, the former director of NASA's Space Life and Physical Sciences Division, previously told Business Insider. "They tend to be self-healing, self-repairing."

Hydroponic greenhouses — dirt-free farms that grow crops using flowing water and mineral salts — became an option in the 1980s, thanks to improved sensors, ever-faster computers, and the emergence of high-efficiency LED lighting. So NASA built and tested the Biomass Production Chamber from 1987 through 1998, and broke food production records in the process. 

The space agency took lessons from that project to start on the Bio-Plex at Johnson Space Center. The facility was designed as a two-level, multi-chamber space mission simulator that relied in part on hydroponic greenhouses for life support. Four astronauts were supposed to lock themselves inside for hundreds of days at a time, starting in 2003. But a change in presidential administrations — and NASA's exploration goals — halted construction in 2002.

Though NASA lost most of its funding for bioregenerative life support, it did manage to find outside grant money to fund the Mars Lunar Greenhouse project at the University of Arizona starting around 2004.

Each unit is a tube built around a lightweight aluminum frame and lighting rig that collapses to four feet long — small enough to fit in a decent-size spaceship — with pop-out supports. It takes two people just 10 minutes to assemble. Martian or lunar dirt could be piled on the outside to protect against meteorites and radiation.

Inside, plastic sleeves carry water to plant roots, delivering the nutrient-laden liquid on a computer-controlled schedule for maximum efficiency. An external composter managed by astronauts digests human and plant waste with microbes while also helping filter water.

Light can be generated by LEDs or directed from the outside using solar concentrators and fiberoptic cabling.

One unit operating at its full planned potential, Sadler said, could provide 50% of the food, 100% of the air, and 100% of the water that one astronaut needs on either Mars or the moon.

"The idea was just, 'Ok, show us how much food you can generate and water you can harvest and oxygen can be generated, and give us some numbers on the farming labor.' And that's what we started with," said Sadler, who was roped into the project because he was the guy who first brought year-round fresh produce — or "freshies"— to Antarctica. (Incidentally, the Southern Continent is considered the best Earth analog to Mars or the moon, given its extreme isolation and blistering -118-degree-Fahrenheit lows.)

Though designed primarily for plants, a tube can be configured to grow insects, mealworms, or other arthropodic delicacies for protein.

How the Mars Lunar Greenhouse works

The graphic below shows how a Mars-Lunar Greenhouse, if ever finished, would help keep a crewmember alive for about 2 years without any outside supplies.

Hover over each life support category to see how astronaut waste would regenerate into air, food, or water:

As advanced as it may seem, the system is far from being mission-ready. Oxygen production, for example, is roughly half of what it should be.

"We need to jam more plants in there, or make them grow faster, and produce more oxygen," Gene Giacomelli, the project's lead collaborator, and the director of the University of Arizona's Controlled Environment Agriculture Center, said in a video series about the effort.

NASA's funding for the greenhouse project also ran dry in August 2017. So Giacomelli, Sadler, and their colleagues are hunting for more research cash to advance the concept and get the systems to their full, targeted efficiency.

China, meanwhile, is poised to overtake the US in bioregeneration with its "Lunar Palace-1" experiment. In July 2017, four students locked themselves inside that structure's airtight confines and subsisted on plants and mealworms for 200 days. At least 170,000 people were working on China's space program in 2013, according to internal estimates, though more recent numbers are likely much higher.

Porterfield said making bioregenerative life support work is anything but easy — and earnest research should start now if we're serious about sending people to Mars for more than a short stay. (SpaceX representatives have so far declined to answer our questions about the company's life-support research.)

"We're really talking about technology that replaces what the Earth does," Porterfield said. "This is our current bioregenerative life support system."

SEE ALSO: 8 men and women once sealed themselves inside this enormous fake Mars colony for 2 years — here's what it's like today

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• NASA is launching a car-size nuclear-powered rover to Mars in 2020.
• The space agency confirmed on Friday that the spacecraft will also carry a sidekick helicopter.
• To stay aloft in the thin Martian air, the 4-lb. scout drone must spin its blades 10 times faster than similar aircraft on Earth.

NASA said on Friday it will send a small helicopter to Mars as part of the U.S. space agency's 2020 mission to place a next-generation rover on the Martian surface, marking the first time such an aircraft will be used on another world.

The remote-controlled Mars Helicopter, designed to take flight in the thin Martian atmosphere with twin counter-rotating blades, weighs about four pounds, with a fuselage the size of a softball, NASA said. Its blades will spin at almost 3,000 rpm, roughly 10 times the rate employed by helicopters on Earth.

"The altitude record for a helicopter flying here on Earth is about 40,000 feet. The atmosphere of Mars is only one percent that of Earth, so when our helicopter is on the Martian surface, it's already at the Earth equivalent of 100,000 feet (30,480 meters) up," Mimi Aung, the Mars Helicopter project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.

NASA officials said the rotorcraft will reach the Red Planet's surface attached to the car-sized rover. After placing the helicopter on the ground, the rover will be directed to drive to a safe distance to relay commands. Controllers on Earth will command the helicopter to take its first autonomous flight after its batteries are charged and tests are conducted, NASA said.

"The idea of a helicopter flying the skies of another planet is thrilling," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement.

The helicopter is intended to demonstrate the viability and usefulness of such aircraft on Mars, NASA said, with potential roles as a low-flying scout or to reach locations inaccessible from the ground.

NASA said it plans a 30-day flight test period that will include up to five flights, starting with a short vertical jaunt to hover for about 30 seconds at an altitude of 10 feet and progressing to flight distances up to a few hundred yards and durations up to 90 seconds.

The helicopter contains solar cells to charge its lithium-ion batteries and a heating mechanism to keep it warm during frigid nights.

The Mars 2020 rover mission is scheduled to launch in July 2020 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida and reach Mars in February 2021. The rover is designed to carry out geological studies and ascertain the habitability of the Martian environment, NASA said.

Reporting by Will Dunham, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien

SEE ALSO: 13 incredible facts you probably didn't know about Mars

DON'T MISS: To survive on Mars, we need a 'technology that replaces what the Earth does.' This tube might be NASA's best hope.

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• When NASA launched its InSight Mars lander on May 5, it also sent along two small, identical satellites, collectively called Mars Cube One.
• One of the backpack-size "CubeSat" spacecraft recently took a photo 621,371 miles (1 million kilometers) from home.
• Earth and the moon appear in the picture — but they look really small.
• The image is meant to honor the "Pale Blue Dot" image taken by a Voyager spacecraft in 1990. 

The horizon seems to stretch toward infinity on Earth's surface, where most of us will spend our entire lives.

But photos from space don't lie about the real stature of our home planet.

Earth is a puny, insignificant speck that floats in an endless, black void, and a new NASA image is further evidence of this moving — and perhaps depressing— fact of life. The picture was taken from 621,371 miles (1 million kilometers) away by a tiny satellite on its way to Mars.

When NASA's InSight lander launched on May 5, it was accompanied by two identical backpack-size satellites collectively called Mars Cube One, or MarCO.

MarCO-A and MarCO-B are tiny, modular spacecraft known as "CubeSats," and today they're officially the smallest satellites ever sent past the moon.

During a series of tests on May 9, MarCO-B — which engineers also call "Wall-E"— took its first photo. Scientists used the image (below) to check the deployment of an antenna, but two familiar objects appear in the distance: Earth and its moon.

It's easy to miss the celestial partners in the picture.

To help us out, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a labeled version that highlights Earth, the moon, and various parts of MarCO-B.

Capturing Earth and the moon in the photo was no accident.

NASA said the image is meant to honor the "Pale Blue Dot" photo proposed by the famed physicist Carl Sagan and taken by the Voyager spacecraft in 1990.

"Consider it our homage to Voyager," Andy Klesh, MarCO's chief engineer at the laboratory, said in a press release about the image. "CubeSats have never gone this far into space before, so it's a big milestone. Both our CubeSats are healthy and functioning properly. We're looking forward to seeing them travel even farther."

The MarCO satellites are designed to test the benefits of launching CubeSats in deep space.

If at least one MarCO satellite safely reaches the red planet, it could help scientists on Earth get better, quicker information about the InSight spacecraft's attempt to descend toward and land on the Martian surface.

SEE ALSO: 13 incredible facts you probably didn't know about the red planet

DON'T MISS: NASA just launched a new solar-powered lander to Mars — here's what InSight will do on the red planet

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Colonizing Mars might be the best chance to ensure the human species survival in the future. In order to adapt to Mar’s hostile living conditions, our bodies will evolve in ways that might end up with a completely new species of human. Following is a script of the video.

When it comes to colonizing new worlds, Mars could be humanity's best option.

But the journey won’t be like it was in the past for pioneers like Ferdinand Magellan, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, and Neil Armstrong.

This new frontier will be the most extreme challenge yet. It’s not just learning how to survive on an alien planet with less oxygen, a weaker gravitational pull, and more harmful radiation. It’s enduring the changes that these extreme conditions will have on the human body manipulating it in ways that we can only begin to imagine.

Even astronauts know that you don’t have to spend much time off Earth to notice changes. The lower gravity can kick-start a whole list of physical alterations.

Just ask this guy: former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly. He lived for a year on the International Space Station. Without Earth’s gravitational pull, the zero-gravity weakened his bones and muscles, and expanded the space between his vertebrae, making him two inches taller.

Now the zero-gravity environment in space is more extreme than on Mars. However, these changes could still happen on smaller scales. And if you compound them over hundreds of years and tens of generations, the results could be similar, if not more pronounced.

Basically, humans will adapt to Mars’ conditions in one of two ways.

In the first few centuries, our skeletons and muscles will likely shrink and we’ll become meeker versions of our Earthling counterparts. This would almost certainly lead to shorter life spans and health complications, including neurological disorders if our skulls shrank with the rest of us.

So to survive, we may — over millennia — actually undergo the opposite reaction evolving stronger, more robust bodies like the “Tharks” in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ sci-fi novel “A Princess of Mars.”Though, us having six arms and green skin is less likely.

In fact, some scientists think we’d actually develop orange skin, not green. Turns out, the carotenoids that make carrots, sweet potatoes, and pumpkins look orange offer a certain amount of protection against harmful UV radiation.

When we eat these pigments in large amounts, we actually get a boost of protective carotene in our bloodstream and under our skin. So, yes, eating too many carrots can turn you orange!

But it may also be a great defense against cancer on Mars. The planet’s thin atmosphere lets in massive amounts of UV, and other high-energy, radiation compared to Earth.  

For example, the average Earthling receives about 3 millisieverts of radiation per year vs. the 30 they would get on Mars. To compare, here’s the minimum dose it takes to increase cancer risk. Compound the annual radiation levels on Mars over a lifetime and the average Martian would receive 5,000 times more radiation than someone on Earth.

And our big, orange bodies may not just look different on the outside. One of the most profound changes we could have coming is the next species of human!

Higher levels of radiation on Mars’ surface would mutate the DNA in our cells at an accelerated pace. Normally, a species like homo sapiens could take a few hundred thousand years to evolve on Earth but some scientists say the higher mutation rate could spawn new human species within centuries — 10 times faster than on Earth!

So, if the radiation didn’t outright kill us, the mutations that survived would be passed down through generations ultimately diversifying the gene pool and allowing natural selection to do its job.

As exciting as it may sound, there is a potential downside to all of this. If, one day in the future, a Martian falls in love with an Earthling it can only end in tragedy. The immune systems of Martians and Earthlings will be completely different. And a meeting between the two could be just as deadly as when two foreign groups have met in the past, like the European settlers who gave smallpox to the Native Americans.

Also — depending on how genetically different they are — even if they could meet they may not be able to have Martian-Earthlings of their own, since only closely-related species can reproduce.

Moving to Mars may be the best chance for humanity’s survival. But it may not be humans who live there, in the end.

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• Relativity Space is a 3D-rocket-printing startup founded by engineers named Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone.
• The two didn't have many connections in the investing world, so when they built their company, they decided to send Mark Cuban a cold email.
• Ellis said Cuban agreed over email to fund their entire $500,000 seed round. 

Tim Ellis has an audacious vision for the future of his company, Relativity Space: He's making a 3D printer that he hopes will someday be used to manufacture rockets on Mars.

While Ellis' vision might seem like the stuff of science fiction, he says that he's never once doubted his plan for his company and that this confidence has led to several successful funding rounds.

Since founding Relativity Space in 2013, Ellis and his cofounder, Jordan Noone, have received a total of $45.1 million from investors including Social Capital, Y Combinator, and the legendary "Shark Tank" investor Mark Cuban.

Cuban has a long history with Relativity Space. Ellis says Cuban first agreed over an email exchange to invest in the ambitious 3D-printing company.

"The week when we decided to start building our own company, we realized that we didn't have any connections in the investing world," Ellis told Business Insider.

Ellis and Noone, who have worked as engineers at Blue Origins and SpaceX, respectively, took an unorthodox approach to securing funding. After they heard that Cuban responded to cold emails, they decided to pitch their idea for Relativity Space to his inbox.

"We didn't have his email address, so we guessed a bunch of different combinations and tried them out," Ellis said. "It turns out that his email address is pretty easy to guess."

Once the two landed their pitch in the appropriate inbox, it took a few short moments for Cuban to respond. He was in.

Though Ellis and Noone originally asked for $100,000, Cuban volunteered to fund their entire seed round at five times the amount, Ellis said, adding that the entire exchange took about five minutes.

"I was impressed at his email game to get back to us that fast," Ellis said.

When asked what it was about his pitch that made it so compelling, Ellis said he believes the concept for Relativity Space is innately attractive.

"Space is sexy," Ellis said. "I think the idea of 3D printing an entire rocket really appeals to people."

Ellis said that reaching out to Cuban taught him an important lesson about asking for help in building his company.

"If you have a vision that people want to see happen, and you explain it clearly, people are usually very receptive to helping or putting you in touch with someone who can help," Ellis said. "There's a lot of people who want to back great ideas and great companies."

Asking for help has landed Ellis other beneficial connections for his company as well, among them a seat on the National Space Council's Users Advisory Group, which advises on government decisions about outer space. Ellis said he was the board's youngest member and the only one coming from a venture-backed startup.

While many startups won't speak with the government early on, Ellis said, he testified before senators to give perspective on what it's like to come from a venture-backed company. The move paid off in big ways — Ellis said his government connections landed him a 20-year agreement to use one of NASA's facilities at cost, saving him what he estimates to be hundreds of millions of dollars in overhead.

Ellis rarely hesitates to reach out when it comes to furthering the interests of his company, he said.

"You might as well reach out," he said. "Basically the moment you decide not to try, you're already sealing your fate."

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• NASA is announcing a new discovery about Mars on Thursday.
• The Curiosity Rover, which has been roaming the Martian surface for nearly six years, beamed back the data that led to the finding.
• You can watch NASA scientists reveal their discovery live tomorrow at 2 p.m. ET. Here's how.

NASA's Curiosity Rover has found some new and exciting information about Mars, and the space agency is announcing that discovery to the world on Thursday.

The Curiosity Rover launched from Earth in November 2011 and landed on Martian soil on August 6, 2012. It has since been cruising around the red planet's surface, functioning as a 9-foot-wide roving science machine.

Curiosity has a few key tasks on Mars: it's meant to study the Martian climate, check for signs of life, search for ice and water, and serve as a kind of planetary scout to see if Mars could ever sustain human life. The laboratory-on-wheels can also take an excellent selfie. 

The new results of the Rover's work on Mars will be released in the journal Science tomorrow at 2 p.m. ET, which is also when NASA will air a live discussion of those findings.  You can tune in to NASA's website at that time to watch the conversation live, or find livestreams on Facebook Live, Twitch TV, Ustream, YouTube, and Twitter/Periscope.

During the announcement, you'll hear from two scientists who work at at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, along with two researchers from its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Did the rover find something funky in the Martian soil? Or detect a new kind of mineral? Perhaps it's learned something unique about the temperature on Mars, or gleaned a new insight into how the planet might one day sustain us? You'll find out tomorrow. 

If you have questions for the NASA scientists, you can submit them on Twitter by using the hashtag #askNASA.

SEE ALSO: A NASA astronaut who spent 665 days circling the planet reveals the misery of going to the bathroom in space

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• NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover has spent years analyzing the red planet's methane levels, and discovered they ebb and flow on a seasonal cycle.
• The rover has also drilled into some ancient rocks called mudstones that hold Earth-like organic and chemical matter inside.
• These clues suggest that the planet might have once harbored life, or still does — but it's too early to draw any big conclusions. 

NASA's 9-foot-long roving Martian science lab, the Curiosity Rover, may have just inched closer to discovering life on Mars. 

New data collected and beamed back from the rover has given two teams of scientists from NASA new hints about how Mars might harbor key ingredients for microbial, carbon-based life.

The teams, which are studying methane and ancient rocks on Mars, released their findings in two separate papers today. The journal Science published the studies online Thursday afternoon, and the Curiosity Rover's Twitter account quickly posted about them, too.

"Methane swells each summer and ancient carbon-compounds locked in rocks. I haven't found life on Mars, but signs say…we’re on the right track,"the Rover tweeted.

Methane on Mars follows the seasons

The first study, led by NASA planetary scientist Chris Webster, represents a kind of sniff test of the red planet.

Scientists used Curiosity to record methane levels in the atmosphere around the rover over the course of four and a half Earth years, or more than two Martian years.

Their data show that methane concentrations change seasonally by a factor of three: Levels in Mars' northern hemisphere ranged from a low of around 0.24 parts per billion in the spring, then nearly tripled to a high of 0.65 parts per billion by the end of summer.

Temperatures on Mars fluctuate between around 67 degrees Fahrenheit at their highest to −243 degrees at their lowest (near the poles), so the researchers think seasonal changes are behind the shifts in methane levels. In the paper, they suggest methane may be locked up underground in water-based crystals called "clathrates." That methane could be slowly seeping out of the clathrates, rising through faults, fractures, and breaches in the rocks — then getting heated up once it reaches Mars' surface. 

Methane is important in scientists' search for alien life because it may suggest the presence of life — 95% of the methane on Earth is produced by biological processes. 

"It's produced from termites, or rice paddies, or cows, or sheep," Webster said during NASA's livestreamed announcement of the findings.

Certain microbes release methane as a gassy waste or byproduct, so it could serve as an indirect clue of life. However, geologic processes can also make methane. 

Webster explained that discovering methane is also exciting because the compound doesn't last more than 300 years.

"If we see methane in the Martian atmosphere, that means something is happening today — it’s being released or it's being created," he said.

Webster and his 43-person team also point out in their study that methane may have helped create past climates on Mars that facilitated the formation of water, since it's a greenhouse gas. This may have been at play in the formation of lakes that are known to have existed on Mars in the past — which can create breeding grounds for microbes.

3-billion-year-old Mars rocks contain Earth-like chemicals and organic matter 

Another team of scientists, led by NASA’s Jen Eigenbrode, used the Curiosity Rover to drill 5 centimeters into soil in Mars’s Gale Crater.

The mudstones inside that crater are ancient — more than 3 billion years old. Ashwin Vasavada, a project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explained in the Thursday announcement that Curiosity helped scientists learn that "lakes existed for a long time — for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years" in the crater.

That makes it a promising spot for signs of life to be preserved. 

Curiosity extracted some rocks, dumped them into a microwave-sized on-deck sample analysis machine (SAM), and heated them up to analyze any gases that came out of the samples.

The rover found several organic and chemical molecules similar to those you might find on Earth, like stinky dimethyl sulfide that wafts from cooking cabbage, and equally vile methanethiol, which is one of the key compounds in bad breath. 

They think these tiny stink-bombs might be fragments of larger organic molecules, suggesting that maybe — just maybe — there was once life on Mars, or even still is.

"Organic matter can directly or indirectly fuel both energy and carbon metabolisms, and in doing so can support carbon cycling at the microbial community level," the authors wrote in their paper.

Other scientists aren’t so sure that these results imply anything certain about life on the red planet. 

Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) institute, believes we'll find life in space in the next couple of decades, but he cautions that finding indirect evidence of life on Mars doesn't mean Martians exist. 

"Chemical evidence, we've been through that before. Even the Viking landers got fooled by some chemical reactions in the dirt," Shostak told Business Insider, referencing the NASA Mars mission from the 1970s.

But he added that it's always gratifying for scientists to learn more about Mars. 

"It takes us, maybe, a little bit farther down the yellow brick road in the direction of finding out whether Mars has biology, or ever did have biology," he said. "Knowing more doesn't hurt you, ever."

SEE ALSO: NASA is announcing a new discovery from Mars on Thursday — here's how to watch it live

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NOW WATCH: NASA released this 5-year time-lapse of Mars from its Curiosity rover — and the footage looks amazing

• Mars Inc is one of the biggest family-owned companies in the world, with more than $35 billion in annual sales. 
• The 106-year-old company is known for its iconic candy brands, including Snickers, M&Ms, Milky Way, and Twix. But the company's biggest business is its pet-care business. 
• Business Insider spoke to Mars chairman Stephen Badger, the great-grandson of founder Franklin Mars, about what he has learned about leadership during his role at the company. 
• Badger said that the best things you can do when stepping into a new leadership position are to keep an open mind and engage others. He also said it's important to not think you must have all the answers. 

With some $35 billion in annual sales, Mars Inc, which is known for its iconic candy brands like Snickers and M&Ms, is one of the biggest family-owned businesses in the world. 

But the family doesn't just own the company. Some family members play key roles at the corporate giant. 

One of those family members is Stephen Badger, the great-grandson of Mars' founder, Franklin Mars. 

Badger currently serves as the company's chairman, but he has also worked as the global director of corporate affairs and served as the president of Seeds of Change, a Mars subsidiary that makes organic food. 

While all of his positions at Mars have come with their own challenges, Badger said that becoming Mars chairman was by far the most difficult role to move into. 

"The biggest challenge that I've had in my career was when the second of my uncles stepped off the board and I stepped into being chairman. The difficulty in that is you are moving from a dynamic where you had two individuals who had run the business for over 40 years and really fundamentally were playing the role of both a governance role as well as an operational role in management in terms of running it," Badger said. 

"And so all of a sudden it was a significant shift in the dynamics of the board and in the dynamics of the family, in terms of really a generational transition."

Badger said he was able to get through the transition by being open with his family and building a collective vision for what the company was trying to do. 

While stepping into the chairman role was a challenge, Badger said he learned a lot about leadership. And he said if he had to give one piece of advice about how to grow into a new leadership gracefully, it would be to listen. 

"The biggest thing that I have learned is to not think that you do or need all the answers. I find it more powerful to approach a situation if I can get my ego out of the way and engage people with questions and an open mind and without a preconceived notion. That really helps," Badger said. 

"That's not to say that you shouldn't have an opinion and at a certain point need to make a judgment and a call, but to really approach it with an open mind, and not thinking that you need to or that you do have all the answers in advance."

Read more about what Mars has planned for the future: 

• Mars chairman explains why the $35 billion chocolate giant will never go public
• The chairman of the company behind Snickers and M&Ms reveals what's next for the chocolate giant
• The $35 billion chocolate giant Mars was once notoriously private. Here's why the company is now speaking out.

SEE ALSO: The chairman of the company behind Snickers and M&Ms reveals what's next for the chocolate giant

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• NASA's Mars Opportunity rover has hit a problem: A dust storm the size of North America.
• The exploration rover has been forced into hibernation mode since last week by the raging Red Planet storm.
• It requires solar power to operate, and there are concerns the storm could plunge it to dangerously low temperatures.

NASA's little Mars rover is battling a fierce dust storm the size of North America which is raging over the surface of the Red Planet.

The Opportunity rover was forced to halt operations last week as the storm swept over Perserverance Valley, bringing enough dust to blot out the sun.

Engineers at NASA have put the robot into minimal operations mode and are waiting to see if it will still function once the dust has settled.

The exploration rover relies on light to run its solar panels, which charge its internal battery and generate power for its heaters.

While the rover sent a transmission down to Earth on Sunday, the storm has intensified in recent days bringing "a dark, perpetual night over the rover's location", NASA said in a statement.

Scientists are concerned over the robot's power levels.

There is a risk that Opportunity will get too cold as it struggles to power its internal heaters, which protect its batteries from Mars' extreme cold.

Like the human body, the exploration rover cannot function well under excessively hot or cold temperatures. 

In order to survive, the rover must not exceed temperatures of -40C to +40C.

The storm was first detected on Saturday, June 1 and promptly grew to span more than seven million square miles - an area greater than North America.

Scientists said the swirling dust has created an extreme smog that blots out sunlight. 

NASA said Opportunity's power levels had dropped "significantly" by Wednesday, June 6, requiring the rover to shift to minimal operations.

But data from the transmission on Sunday told engineers that the rover still has enough battery charge to communication with ground controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

It also showed the rover's temperature to be around -29C.

NASA said it will continue to monitor the rover's power levels closely in the week to come.

However, it said that the rover has already proved hardier than expected by lasting nearly 15 years - despite being designed for a 90-day mission.

This is not the first time Opportunity has hunkered down in bad weather.

In 2007, a much larger storm covered the planet leading to two weeks of minimal operations, including several days with no contact from the rover to save power. 

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• Mars Inc is one of the biggest family-owned companies in the world, with more than $35 billion in annual sales.
• The 106-year-old company is known for its iconic candy brands, including Snickers, M&Ms, Milky Way, and Twix. But the company's biggest business is its pet-care business.
• Business Insider spoke to Mars chairman Stephen Badger, the great-grandson of founder Franklin Mars, to get some insight into what the company has planned for the future. 
• The biggest change coming to Mars in the next five years will be portfolio transformation, Badger said. 

Mars — the company that makes M&Ms, Snickers, Skittles, and other popular candies — has big plans to sell more than just food during the next five years. 

"The biggest transformation that we're continually pondering is our portfolio transformation," Mars chairman Stephen Badger told Business Insider. 

The 106-year-old company has historically been known for making some of the most popular candies in the world, and for making common household food brands like Uncle Ben's Rice. 

But as Mars expands, it's looking to not only add new products, but new services as well. 

One area it has been heavily been investing in is pet-care.

Mars bought VCA Inc, which manages some 800 veterinary hospitals in the United States and Canada, for $9 billion last September.

Mars' pet-care portfolio already includes Blue Pearl Veterinary Partners, which it acquired in 2015; Pet Partners, which it bought in 2016; and Banfield Pet Hospitals, which it purchased in 2007. The company also makes Iams, Nutro, Pedigree, Royal Canin, and Whiskas pet food.

"We used to be very much a pet-food company. Now we're a pet-care company with businesses like VCA and Banfield, where we are actually doing day-to-day treatment of animals all the way through to quite serious diagnostics and surgeries and treatments of animals," Badger said. "So I would say portfolio transformation is the issue at large, and it's going to come to play in a variety of ways."

Americans alone spent some $70 billion on pet products and services in 2017, according to the American Pet Products Association, so it's easy to see why Mars sees a big opportunity in the space. In fact, Mars now makes most of its money from its pet-care business. 

But the next five years won't be all about adding new products and services. The company also has big plans to find new ways to tell consumers about its products.

"It's incumbent upon us to perpetually think about the changing nature of consumers' behaviors, not only in terms of what they want to buy, but where they want to buy it, and how they want to be told about it," Badger said.

To do this, the company is working on a digital transformation that it hopes will better connect its products with people.

"In terms of digital, one of the biggest opportunities, and the thing that we're most proud of in terms of what we have, is our brands. Our brands are known around the world, loved around the world, and used by people on a daily basis," Badger said. "And the ability to actually engage in conversation with people is something that we're really excited about. And I think that's the next evolution in terms of what we're trying to undertake and that really excites me."

Read more about what Mars has planned for the future: 

• Mars chairman explains why the $35 billion chocolate giant will never go public
• The chairman of a $35 billion chocolate empire says leaders should avoid making these 2 common business mistakes
• The chairman of the $35 billion chocolate giant Mars shares a simple piece of advice that can make you a better leader
• The chairman of the company behind Snickers and M&Ms reveals what's next for the chocolate giant
• The $35 billion chocolate giant Mars was once notoriously private. Here's why the company is now speaking out.

SEE ALSO: The chairman of the company behind Snickers and M&Ms reveals what's next for the chocolate giant

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• A global dust storm has engulfed Mars, and NASA says it's "one of the most intense ever observed."
• The dust storm's total area is big enough to cover North American and Russia.
• From the perspective of NASA's long-lived Opportunity rover on Mars, the sky is nearly black in the middle of the day.

Mars is not a friendly place to be right now, especially if you're an aging solar-powered rover.

NASA says a global dust storm is forming. The storm is now about 10 billion acres in size, which is enough to cover North America and Russia, or more than one-quarter of Mars. Some regions of the Martian surface have become so obscured that daylight has turned to darkness.

"The storm is one of the most intense ever observed on the Red Planet," NASA said in a press release.

Dust storms on Mars start with sunlight. As soil gets warmed up, updrafts form in the thin Martian air and create dust devils, which suck fine dust high into the atmosphere. Over time the dust clouds grow to encompass entire regions, and those regional storms can combine to form globe-engulfing weather events.

During a teleconference on Wednesday, NASA researchers said they expect the storm to wrap around the entire planet within two or three days.

What the Martian dust storm looks like from the ground

From the surface of the red planet, NASA says Mars looks something like this:

The above image is a series of pictures that NASA simulated from the perspective of its Opportunity rover. The pictures show what the sun and sky look like during the brightest time of the day, and they're based on real photos taken by the rover.

The bright spot is, of course, the sun. It looks somewhat blue due to the composition of Mars' air (which is about 1% as thick as Earth's). NASA didn't specify which point in the storm the far-left image shows, but the agency said the far-right picture depicts what the Martian sky looks like this month — the sun is entirely blotted out to Opportunity.

The solar-powered Opportunity rover landed on Mars in 2004 and was supposed to last 90 days, though it has operated for more than 14 years.

But light is now so dim near Opportunity that NASA put the rover to sleep to conserve power, since its solar panels can't collect enough energy to operate normally. If enough dust covers the solar panels of the aging robot, Opportunity could be in danger, as scientists have said in the past. That's because it may not be able power its electronic circuits enough to prevent severe cold on Mars from damaging them.

Meanwhile, NASA's car-size Curiosity rover is doing fine, since it runs on nuclear power. It's also in a region that isn't as darkened as much by the storm.

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk says he'll colonize Mars — but the closest we've come was this grand experiment in the Arizona desert 25 years ago

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