REDS GO TO RED PLANETChina Makes History, Successfully Launches Mars Mission

Tianwen-1, a spacecraft carrying an orbiter, lander, and rover, will reach Mars in February 2021 alongside Mars missions from NASA and the United Arab Emirates.

By Becky Ferreira
July 23, 2020, 

SCREENGRAB: YOUTUBE/CGTN
In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, a Long March-5 rocket carrying the Tianwen-1 Mars probe lifts off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in southern China's Hainan Province, Thursday, July 23, 2020. China launched its most ambitious Mars mission yet on Thursday in a bold attempt to join the United States in successfully landing a spacecraft on the red planet. (Cai Yang/Xinhua via AP)

China launched its first successful mission to Mars early on Thursday, a major milestone for the nation’s spaceflight program that may lead to it becoming the second nation ever to operate a rover on Mars, after the U.S.

Tianwen-1, the spacecraft that is now on its way to the red planet, is carrying an orbiter, a lander, and a rover that will reach Mars in 2021. The spacecraft’s name means “questions to heaven,” a phrase lifted from a poem by Qu Yuan, a renowned writer and politician who lived during China’s Warring States period some 2,300 years ago.

China previously attempted to send an orbiter to Mars in 2011 as part of an interplanetary ride-share with a Russian mission to a Martian moon. Unfortunately, the launch failed and left the spacecraft marooned in orbit for several months until it fell back to Earth and burned up in the atmosphere. To that point, landing an operational rover on Mars is so challenging that the United States remains the only country that has ever pulled it off.

Tianwen-1 blasted off at 12:41 PM local time (12:41 AM EST) on a Long March 5 rocket from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on Hainan Island. The spacecraft will now spend seven months traveling to Mars and is expected to insert itself into orbit around the planet in February next year.

Two or three months after its arrival in orbit, the lander and rover will detach, as one unit, and attempt to touch down on the Martian surface. The landing site has not been announced yet.

The Tianwen-1 rover weighs about 530 pounds, which is twice as large as the two “Yutu” rovers that China has successfully landed on the Moon. The mobile robot has six instruments onboard: two cameras, a radar sensor, a weather monitor, and detectors designed to study Mars’ surface composition and magnetic field.

The orbiter will relay the rover’s messages back to Earth and also carry instruments to study Mars from its perspective above the planet’s skies.

“The main task of Tianwen-1 is to perform a global and extensive survey of the entire planet using the orbiter, and to send the rover to surface locations of scientific interests to conduct detailed investigations with high accuracy and resolution,” according to a recent paper in Nature Astronomy led by the late Weixing Wan, the chief scientist of China's Mars exploration program, who sadly died in May just a few months short of the launch.

“Tianwen-1 is going to orbit, land and release a rover all on the very first try, and coordinate observations with an orbiter,” Wan’s team said. “No planetary missions have ever been implemented in this way. If successful, it would signify a major technical breakthrough.”

While the success of Tianwen-1 would be a singular accomplishment for China, the mission and its various components will have lots of company on Mars. On Sunday, the United Arab Emirates launched its first Martian orbiter, named Hope, and NASA is expected to launch its own next-generation rover, Perseverance, next Thursday.

The missions are all launching within a few weeks to take advantage of an alignment between Earth and Mars that occurs every 26 months and is ideal for interplanetary trips. ExoMars, a European-Russian mission that includes both a rover and a lander, was originally supposed to launch in this window as well, but that mission has been pushed back to 2022 due to coronavirus-related delays and because its parachutes require more tests.

In addition to all of these new arrivals, Mars is still home to two operational surface probes from NASA: the InSight lander and the Curiosity rover. Hopefully, both of those Martian explorers will still be hard at work by the time the new trio of spacecraft arrive at Mars in February. Curiosity and Perseverance are beneficiaries of NASA’s decades of success with Mars rovers, and they are both about four times as massive as the Tianwen-1 rover.

“The international planetary science community looks forward to these exciting missions,” said Wan and his colleagues in the recent paper, adding that they “will certainly advance our knowledge of Mars to an unprecedented level.”

China launches ambitious attempt to land rover on Mars
By SAMUEL McNEIL and ANIRUDDHA GHOSAL2 hours ago


3 of 9In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, a Long March-5 rocket carrying the Tianwen-1 Mars probe lifts off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in southern China's Hainan Province, Thursday, July 23, 2020. China launched its most ambitious Mars mission yet on Thursday in a bold attempt to join the United States in successfully landing a spacecraft on the red planet. (Cai Yang/Xinhua via AP)


BEIJING (AP) — China launched its most ambitious Mars mission yet on Thursday in a bold attempt to join the United States in successfully landing a spacecraft on the red planet.

Engines blazing orange, a Long March-5 carrier rocket took off under clear skies around 12:40 p.m. from Hainan Island, south of China’s mainland. Hundreds of space enthusiasts cried out excitedly on a beach across the bay from the launch site.

“This is a kind of hope, a kind of strength,” said Li Dapeng, co-founder of the China branch of the Mars Society, an international enthusiast group. He wore a Mars Society T shirt, and was there with his wife, 11-year-old son and 2,000 others on the beach to watch the launch.

Launch commander Zhang Xueyu announced to cheers in the control room that the rocket was flying normally about 45 minutes later. “The Mars rover has accurately entered the scheduled orbit,” he said in brief remarks shown live on state broadcaster CCTV.

China’s space agency said that the rocket carried the probe for 36 minutes before successfully placing it on the looping path that will take it beyond Earth’s orbit and eventually into Mars’ more distant orbit around the sun.

Liu Tongjie, spokesman for the mission, said in a press briefing that the launch was a “key step of China marching towards farther deep space.” He said that China’s aim wasn’t to compete with other countries, but to peacefully explore the universe.

It marked the second flight to Mars this week, after a United Arab Emirates orbiter blasted off on a rocket from Japan on Monday. And the U.S. is aiming to launch Perseverance, its most sophisticated Mars rover ever, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, next week.

“It’s amazing that another nation has launched the case for Mars,” said Dr. Katarina Miljkovic, a planetary scientist at Curtin University in Australia, adding that the world was no longer in a space race. “It’s more like this marathon of space that we all want to be running.”

China’s tandem spacecraft — with both an orbiter and a rover — will take seven months to reach Mars, like the others. If all goes well, Tianwen-1, or “quest for heavenly truth,” will look for underground water, if it’s present, as well as evidence of possible ancient life.
A security guard is silhouetted near a display depicting rovers on Mars during an exhibition in Beijing on Thursday, July 23, 2020. China launched its most ambitious Mars mission yet on Thursday in a bold attempt to join the United States in successfully landing a spacecraft on the red planet. The Tianwen-1 was launched on a Long March-5 carrier rocket from a launch site on Hainan Island. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
A security guard adjusts his mask near an exhibition of rovers and bio-domes on Mars in Beijing Thursday, July 23, 2020. China launched its most ambitious Mars mission yet on Thursday in a bold attempt to join the United States in successfully landing a spacecraft on the red planet. The Tianwen-1 was launched on a Long March-5 carrier rocket from a launch site on Hainan Island. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Security guards watch over an exhibition depicting rovers and bio-domes on Mars in Beijing Thursday, July 23, 2020. China launched its most ambitious Mars mission yet on Thursday in a bold attempt to join the United States in successfully landing a spacecraft on the red planet. The Tianwen-1 was launched on a Long March-5 carrier rocket from a launch site on Hainan Island. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
A woman and child wearing masks to curb the spread of the coronavirus look at a model depicting a rover on Mars during an exhibition in Beijing Thursday, July 23, 2020. China launched its most ambitious Mars mission yet on Thursday in a bold attempt to join the United States in successfully landing a spacecraft on the red planet. The Tianwen-1 was launched on a Long March-5 carrier rocket from a launch site on Hainan Island. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

This isn’t China’s first attempt at Mars. In 2011, a Chinese orbiter accompanying a Russian mission was lost when the spacecraft failed to get out of Earth’s orbit after launching from Kazakhstan, eventually burning up in the atmosphere.

This time, China is going at it alone. It also is fast-tracking, launching an orbiter and rover on the same mission instead of stringing them out.

China’s secretive space program has developed rapidly in recent decades. Yang Liwei became the first Chinese astronaut in 2003, and last year, Chang’e-4 became the first spacecraft from any country to land on the far side of the moon.

Conquering Mars would put China in an elite club.

“There is a whole lot of prestige riding on this,” said Dean Cheng, an expert on Chinese aerospace programs at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

The launch was “gutsy,” said Dr. Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The next challenge is for the probe to be “still working when it gets to Mars and survives entry and landing.”

Landing on Mars is notoriously difficult. Only the U.S. has successfully landed a spacecraft on Martian soil, doing it eight times since 1976. NASA’s InSight and Curiosity rovers still operate today. Six other spacecraft are exploring Mars from orbit: three American, two European and one from India.

Unlike the two other Mars missions launching this month, China has tightly controlled information about the program — even withholding any name for its rover. National security concerns led the U.S. to curb cooperation between NASA and China’s space program.

In an article published earlier this month in Nature Astronomy, mission chief engineer Wan Weixing said Tianwen-1 would slip into orbit around Mars in February and look for a landing site on Utopia Planitia — a plain where NASA has detected possible evidence of underground ice. Wan died in May from cancer.
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The landing would then be attempted in April or May, according to the article. If all goes well, the 240-kilogram (530-pound) golf cart-sized, solar-powered rover is expected to operate for about three months, and the orbiter for two years.

There is uncertainty even after the rover lands on Mars, said Liu Tongjie. “For instance, if there is a sand storm, it needs to modify its mode of work to prevent sands falling on solar panel, which will affect its ability to get energy,” he said.

Though small compared to America’s hulking, car-sized 1,025-kilogram (2,260-pound) Perseverance, it’s almost twice as big as the two rovers China has sent to the moon in 2013 and 2019. Perseverance is expected to operate for at least two years.

This Mars-launching season — which occurs every 26 months when Earth and Mars are at their closest — is especially busy.

The UAE spacecraft Amal, or Hope, which will orbit Mars but not land, is the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission. NASA’s Perseverance rover is up next.

“At no other time in our history have we seen anything like what is unfolding with these three unique missions to Mars. Each of them is a science and engineering marvel,” the Space Foundation’s chief executive officer Thomas Zelibor said in an online panel discussion earlier this week.

China’s road to Mars hit a few bumps: A Long March-5 rocket, nicknamed “Fat 5” because of its bulky shape, failed to launch earlier this year. The coronavirus pandemic forced scientists to work from home. In March, when instruments needed to be transported from Beijing to Shanghai, three team members drove 12 hours to deliver them.

While China is joining the U.S., Russia and Europe in creating a satellite-based global navigation system, experts say it isn’t trying to overtake the U.S. lead in space exploration.

Instead, Cheng of the Heritage Foundation said China is in a “slow race” with Japan and India to establish itself as Asia’s space power.

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Ghosal reported from New Delhi. Follow him and McNeil on Twitter: @aniruddhg1 and @stmcneil. Associated Press researcher Chen Si in Shanghai and researcher Yu Bing and producer Olivia Zhang in Beijing contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

MARS TRIFECTA
Three space missions heading to Mars, from NASA, China and UAE
ABC Science / By Genelle Weule
Posted Tuesday 14 July 2020

Destination Mars: three new missions are heading for the Red Planet.

(Supplied: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

July is a big month for missions to Mars.

Three new spacecraft — from NASA, China and the United Arab Emirates — are due to lift off on their journey to the Red Planet.

That's because there is window between mid-July and mid-August when Earth and Mars are in a good position relative to each other to allow the shortest possible trip.

If the mission launches go as planned, the first of which is due this week, the spacecraft will arrive early next year.

They will join a slew of other orbiters, landers and rovers that are already probing the planet.

And each is tasked to look at questions that no other spacecraft has answered before as the race to find evidence of past life on Mars heats up.

The entry of China and the UAE into Mars exploration, a field that has so far been dominated by the US and Russia, will benefit future missions to the Red Planet, said Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist at Flinders University.


"The more nations entering [deep space exploration] increases the chance of success ... and builds up the library of proven engineering heritage."

Along with new science, these nations are also testing different types of technologies.

So let's take a quick look at what each mission has to offer.
Perseverance and Ingenuity: NASA's new rover and helicopter

Perseverance has been tasked with finding evidence of past life.

(Supplied: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA's Mars 2020 mission plans to put a new rover on the Red Planet called Perseverance.

If it survives the landing it will be the United States' 10th successful attempt to put a robot on Mars since 1975, and will join the Curiosity rover and Mars Insight probe.

Perseverance is the first rover ever tasked with finding evidence of past life on Mars, said Abigail Allwood, an Australian geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who is in charge of PIXL, one of the seven instruments onboard the rover.

"Previous missions have been looking for evidence of water and evidence of habitability," Dr Allwood said.


"No mission has ever been given the mandate to look for evidence of life."

The rover, which looks almost identical to Curiosity except for its wheels, will descend towards Mars using the same 'seven minutes of terror' technique as its predecessor albeit using new terrain technology to help guide its landing.

All going well, it will touch down in an old lake bed known as Jezero Crater.

The Mars 2020 mission will land in an area known as Jezero Crater.

(Supplied: NASA/JPL)

The rover is kitted out with several tools that will investigate the geology of the landform in minute detail, and use a drill to collect sediment samples to be returned to Earth for analysis in 2026.

The Mars 2020 mission will also be the first mission to attempt test flights of a small unmanned helicopter called Ingenuity.

The helicopter, which is strapped to the bottom of the rover, will be released once the rover lands.

"If that helicopter flight is successful it will be huge for Mars exploration," Dr Allwood said.

YOUTUBENASA plans to do a test flight of a helicopter

Swarms of small helicopters could be used to map the surface where samples come from, and a successful flight could demonstrate a capacity that can aid human missions.

"[Unmanned aerial vehicles] could be the next thing we see before any human missions," she said.

The Perseverance rover will also be doing some of the groundwork for setting up a base.

Onboard are tools that will test a method of extracting oxygen from the atmosphere (which is 96 per cent carbon dioxide), identify resources such as subsurface water and minerals, and gather more data on dust storms and weather conditions.

The mission is currently slated to launch around July 30.
Tianwen-1: China's Heavenly Questions

China's new mission will send the first orbiter/lander/rover combo to Mars.

Called Tianwen-1 — which means Heavenly Questions — it is the nation's second attempt to send a mission to the Red Planet.

China's first mission, the 'Yinghuo-1' Mars orbiter, was lost in 2012 when the Russian space agency spacecraft it was piggybacking a ride on failed and crashed back to Earth.

But now, China is using its own technologies that have been successfully used in its space program, including two Moon landings.

It will use parachutes developed for its Shenzhou crewed spaceflight program, and propulsion and autonomous guidance systems and designs used in its Chang'e-3 and Chang'e-4 moon landers.

If the spacecraft reaches Mars and touches down, China will become the third country to land on the Red Planet.

China's Tianwen-1 lander undergoes testing in late 2019.

(Reuters: Jason Lee)

It's a very ambitious goal, said Andrew Jones, a space journalist who follows the China space program.

"The failure rate for Mars missions is around 50 per cent, so to try to combine [the orbiter/lander/rover] for your first attempt at a [solo] interplanetary mission is very challenging," Mr Jones said.

Successful missions since 1971*

US: 7 orbiters, 5 landers, 4 rovers

Russia: 2 orbiters (1 joint with EU), 1 lander

EU: 2 orbiters (1 joint with Russia)

India: 1 orbiter
Failed or partially failed missions since 1971*

US: 3 orbiters, 1 lander, 1 probe

Russia: 7 orbiters, 6 landers (including joint EU project), 1 rover, 2 probes

EU: 2 landers (including joint Russian project)

Japan: 1 orbiter

China: 1 orbiter (joint mission with Russia)

*Excluding flybysLanding on Mars is a lot more challenging than landing on the Moon.

The Red Planet has a thin atmosphere, which heats up the spacecraft but doesn't slow it down very effectively, so the timing of parachutes and rockets is critical.

Although the exact landing site of the Chinese mission has not been revealed, it is likely to be somewhere in an area known as Utopia Planitia.

"These are very low elevation areas so that gives more atmosphere to slow down the landing attempt," Mr Jones said.

The location is also good for the operation of the mission's solar powered rover.

Another potential touchdown area is Chryse Planitia, close to the landing sites of NASA'S Viking 1 and Pathfinder.

Like the new NASA mission, Tianwen-1 plans to explore the Red Planet's atmosphere, use ground-penetrating radar to peer below the surface, and look for evidence of past life.

"Having two ground penetrating radars in two different places on Mars brings a lot of science value."

But before even attempting a complex landing, the spacecraft must actually reach Mars

To do this, China is using its biggest rocket: the Long March 5. After one semi-successful flight and a failure, the rocket finally put a satellite into geostationary orbit late last year.

China's Long March 5 rocket successfully put a satellite into orbit on its third attempt in 2019.(AFP Via Getty Images)

But the launch of the Tianwen-1 mission will be the first attempt at getting the rocket into an orbit that will put a spacecraft on a path to Mars.

"It shouldn't be that much different, but still it's something they haven't done," Mr Jones said.

While no official launch date from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center has been announced, Mr Jones predicted it would take off around July 23.
Hope: the quest to be the first Arab nation to go to Mars

Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates is planning to become the first Arab nation to send a spacecraft to the planet.

If it is successful, the 'Al Amal' or 'Hope' spacecraft will join six other orbiters from the US, Europe and India currently surveying Mars from orbit.

Timed to arrive 50 years after the UAE was founded, it is also carrying the aspirations of its nation and Arab and Islamic science.

"The UAE is small compared to those other nations but they are putting so many resources into their space programs and they've made it really clear that these are priorities for them," Dr Gorman said.

The Hope spacecraft will take seven months to reach the Red Planet

(Supplied: UAE Space Agency)

About the size of a small car flanked by two solar panels, the hexagonal-shaped orbiter is on a two-year mission to explore the Red Planet's upper and lower atmosphere and weather.

Kitted out with three scientific instruments, it hopes to answer questions about why the Red Planet is losing its upper atmosphere to space, and to create a global picture of how the Martian atmosphere changes from day to day and season to season.

The spacecraft will be launched from Tanegashima, a remote Japanese island.

The original launch date of July 15 (AEST) has been pushed back to July 17 (AEST) according to latest reports from the UAE space agency.

Once it separates from its rocket, the spacecraft will rely on star-tracker sensors, which recognise constellations, to guide it to Mars.



YOUTUBEUAE mission video
A race against time

All going well, the three missions will reach Mars in February next year.

The Mars 2020 mission plans to touch down on February 18, while the Chinese Tianwen-1 mission will survey the Red Planet using a high-res camera onboard the orbiter before selecting a landing site in April.

But if the missions miss the launch window, they will not be able to fly for another two years when Earth and Mars are aligned again.

NASA's Mars 2020 mission has already been delayed twice. Originally it was planned to lift off around July 17, but with a current launch date of at least July 30 it has used up half the window.

A fourth mission to Mars which was also due to lift off this month — the European Union and Russian Space Agency's ExoMars mission carrying the Rosalind Franklin rover — has already been postponed until 2022.

REDS GO TO RED PLANET

China successfully launches first independent Mars mission

China has launched an unmanned probe to Mars in its first independent mission to another planet, a bid for global leadership in space and a display of its technological prowess and ambition.

Key points:
Only the United States and Soviet Union have successfully landed rovers on Mars to date

A China-Russia joint mission to Mars in 2011 failed when the spacecraft failed to leave the Earth's orbit

This year's Mars launching season is particularly busy, with the US and UAE also launching missions

The Tianwen-1 was launched on a Long March-5 carrier rocket from the Wenchang Space Launch Centre on the southern island of Hainan.

Livestreams showed a successful lift-off, with rockets blazing orange and the spacecraft heading upward across clear blue skies.

Hundreds of space enthusiasts cried out excitedly on a beach across the bay from the launch site.


If successful, it will make China the first country to orbit, land and deploy a rover in its inaugural mission.

China's tandem spacecraft — with both an orbiter and a rover — will take seven months to reach Mars, like the others. Landing, meanwhile, will take seven minutes.

The probe is expected to reach Mars in February. It will then attempt to deploy a rover to explore the planet for 90 days.

If all goes well, Tianwen-1, or "quest for heavenly truth", will look for underground water as well as evidence of possible ancient life.

There will be challenges ahead as the craft nears Mars, Liu Tongjie, spokesman for the mission, told reporters ahead of the launch.


"When arriving in the vicinity of Mars, it is very critical to decelerate," he said.

"If the deceleration process is not right, or if flight precision is not sufficient, the probe would not be captured by Mars," he said, referring to gravity on Mars taking the craft down to the surface.

Mr Liu said the probe would orbit Mars for about two and a half months and look for an opportunity to enter its atmosphere and make a soft landing.

China's Mars rover shown in action during the testing phase.(AP: Andy Wong)
'A whole lot of prestige' riding on successful landing

It marked the second flight to Mars this week, after a United Arab Emirates orbiter blasted off on a rocket from Japan on Monday.

The US is also aiming to launch Perseverance, its most sophisticated Mars rover ever, from Florida's Cape Canaveral next week.

This year's launch is not Beijing's first attempt at sending a spacecraft to Mars.

In 2011, a Chinese orbiter accompanying a Russian mission was lost when the spacecraft failed to get out of Earth's orbit after launching from Kazakhstan, eventually burning up in the atmosphere.

This time, China is going at it alone. It also is fast-tracking, launching an orbiter and rover on the same mission instead of stringing them out.

China's secretive space program has developed rapidly in recent decades.
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Yang Liwei became the first Chinese astronaut in 2003, and last year, Chang'e-4 became the first spacecraft from any country to land on the far side of the moon.

"There is a whole lot of prestige riding on this," said Dean Cheng, an expert on Chinese aerospace programs at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, referring to the launch today.

Landing on Mars is notoriously difficult. Only the US has successfully landed a spacecraft on Martian soil on several occasions, doing it eight times since 1976.

NASA's InSight and Curiosity rovers still operate today. Six other spacecraft are exploring Mars from orbit: three American, two European and one from India.

Unlike the two other Mars missions launching this month, China has tightly controlled information about the program — even withholding any name for its rover.

National security concerns led the US to curb cooperation between NASA and China's space program.

A Long March-5 rocket is seen at the Wenchang Space Launch Centre in Hainan, China.(AP: Zhang Gaoxiang Via Xinhua)

US and UAE launching Mars missions this month

This Mars-launching season — which occurs every 26 months when Earth and Mars are at their closest — is especially busy.
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The UAE spacecraft Amal, or Hope, which will orbit Mars but not land, is the Arab world's first interplanetary mission.

NASA's Perseverance rover is up next.

"At no other time in our history have we seen anything like what is unfolding with these three unique missions to Mars. Each of them is a science and engineering marvel," the Space Foundation's chief executive officer Thomas Zelibor said in an online panel discussion earlier this week.

China's road to Mars hit a few bumps: A Long March-5 rocket, nicknamed "Fat 5" because of its bulky shape, failed to launch earlier this year.

The coronavirus pandemic forced scientists to work from home. In March, when instruments needed to be transported from Beijing to Shanghai, three team members drove 12 hours to deliver them.

While China is joining the US, Russia and Europe in creating a satellite-based global navigation system, experts say it isn't trying to overtake the US lead in space exploration.

Instead, Mr Cheng of the Heritage Foundation said China is in a "slow race" with Japan and India to establish itself as Asia's space power.

The United Arab Emirates' Hope probe is the first to be launched from the Arab world.(AP: MBRSC)

The former Soviet Union is the only other country to land a rover on Mars: Mars 3, which became the first spacecraft to touch down safely on the red planet, on December 2, 1971.

It stopped transmitting after just 14.5 seconds for unknown reasons, however, according to NASA.

In 2016, a European space probe was destroyed on impact when it attempted a surface landing.

Another launch initially planned for this year, the EU-Russian ExoMars, was postponed for two years due to the coronavirus pandemic.

ABC/wires

93-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard Bruno Dey convicted

GOOD RIDDANCE LET HIM SPEND HIS LAST YEARS ROTTING IN A CELL
Thursday 23 July 2020, 

Bruno Dey was aged 17 when he was guarding a concentration camp.Credit: AP

A German court has convicted a 93-year-old former SS private of being an accessory to murder at the Stutthof concentration camp, where he served as a guard in the final months of the Second World War.Bruno Dey was given a two-year suspended sentence by the Hamburg state court, news agency dpa reported.He was convicted of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder, equal to the number of people believed to have been killed at Stutthof during his service there in 1944 and 1945, and one count of accessory to attempted murder.Because he was only 17, and later 18, at the time of his alleged crimes, Dey’s case was heard in juvenile court. Prosecutors had called for a three-year sentence and the defense for an acquittal.

Bruno Dey hides his face in the dock.Credit: AP

“How could you get used to the horror?” presiding judge Anne Meier-Goering asked as she announced the verdict.The trial opened in October, and in deference to Dey’s age, court sessions were limited to two, two-hour sessions a week. Additional precautions also were taken to keep the case going through the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

German court convicts 93-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard on accessory to murder charges

Former SS private Bruno Dey was convicted of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder.(DPA: Daniel Bockwoldt)

A German court has convicted a former Nazi guard on more than 5,000 counts of accessory to murder at the Stutthof concentration camp, where he served as a guard in the final months of World War II.
Key points:
Bruno Dey served as a guard at the Stutthof concentration camp when he was 17 years old
The judge handed down a two-year suspended sentence
The 2011 conviction of a Sobibor death camp guard set a precedent for Nazi accessory convictions
The 93-year-old former SS private Bruno Dey was convicted of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder, equal to the number of people believed to have been killed at Stutthof during his service there in 1944 and 1945, and one count of accessory to attempted murder. Dey was given a two-year suspended sentence.

"How could you get used to the horror?" presiding judge Anne Meier-Goering asked as she announced the verdict.

Because he was only 17, and later 18, at the time of his alleged crimes, Dey's case was heard in juvenile court. Prosecutors had called for a three-year sentence, while the defence demanded acquittal.

The trial opened in October and in deference to Dey's age, court sessions were limited to two two-hour sessions a week.

In a closing statement to the court earlier this week, the wheelchair-bound German retiree apologised for his role in the Nazis' machinery of destruction, saying "it must never be repeated."

"Today, I want to apologise to all of the people who went through this hellish insanity," Dey said.
17-year-old Dey 'heard screams' from gas chambers from guard tower

Prosecutors argued that as a Stutthof guard from August 1944 to April 1945, Dey — although "no ardent worshipper of Nazi ideology" — aided all the killings that took place there during that period as a "small wheel in the machinery of murder."

Dey gave wide-ranging statements to investigators about his service, saying that he was deemed unfit for combat in the regular Germany army in 1944 so was drafted into an SS guard detachment and sent to the camp near Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk.

Initially a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from Danzig, Stutthof from about 1940 was used as a so-called "work education camp" where forced labourers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died.

Others incarcerated there included political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity and Jehovah's Witnesses.

More than 60,000 people were killed there by being given lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, shot or starved. Others were forced outside in winter without clothing until they died of exposure, or were put to death in a gas chamber.

Dey told the court that as a trained baker's apprentice, he attempted to get sent to an army kitchen or bakery when he learned he'd been assigned to Stutthof.

Precautions were taken to keep the case going through the height of the coronavirus pandemic.(DPA: Daniel Bockwoldt/ Pool)

As a guard there, he said he frequently was directed to watch over prisoner labour crews working outside the camp.

Dey acknowledged hearing screams from the camp's gas chambers and watching as corpses were taken to be burned, but he said he never fired his weapon and once allowed a group to smuggle meat from a dead horse they'd discovered back into the camp.

"The images of misery and horror have haunted me my entire life," he testified.
21st-century precedent opens door to further WWII-era convictions

For at least two decades, every trial of a former Nazi has been dubbed "likely Germany's last".

But just last week, another ex-guard at Stutthof was charged at age 95 and more than a dozen further cases are actively being investigated by the special prosecutors' office that investigates Nazi-era crimes.

That's due in part to a precedent established in 2011 with the conviction of former guard at the Sobibor death camp in German-occupied Poland John Demjanjuk as an accessory to murder on allegations.

Before Demjanjuk's case, German courts had required prosecutors to justify charges by presenting evidence of a former guard's participation in a specific killing, a legal standard that was often next to impossible to meet given the circumstances of the crimes committed at Nazi death camps.

However, prosecutors successfully argued during Demjanjuk's trial in Munich that guarding a camp where the only purpose was murder was enough for an accessory conviction.

The Dey case extends the argument to apply to a guard at a concentration camp that did not exist for the sole purpose of extermination, rather than a death camp guard.

AP

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A Piece of Mars That Fell in Antarctica Contains Ingredient for Life, Scientists Discover

The new discovery adds to a growing pile of evidence that Mars may have been more hospitable to life in the distant past.

By Becky Ferreira
May 4, 2020, 

LEFT: NASA/JSC. RIGHT: FLICKR/DANIEL OBERHAUS


Humans have been chucking robots over to Mars for decades, but occasionally, Mars does us a literal solid by chucking a piece of itself back over to Earth. In 1984, for instance, scientists discovered a four-pound meteorite from Mars in the Allan Hills region of Antarctica, which is known as Allan Hills 84001. Now, scientists have determined that the four-billion-year-old fallen chunk of Mars contains a key ingredient for life.

According to a recent study in Nature Communications, scientists have identified organic compounds containing nitrogen, a vital building block of life as we know it, inside this rare meteorite. This makes it the first time that nitrogen has been detected in a Martian rock dating back to the period when Mars may have hosted an ocean.

A team led by Mizuho Koike, a planetary scientist at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), used advanced experimental techniques not only to detect this important element, but to confirm it as likely Martian, as opposed to contamination from Earth.


“Understanding the origin of organic material on Mars is a major issue in modern planetary science,” Kioke and his colleagues said in the study. “Recent robotic exploration of Martian sedimentary rocks and laboratory analyses of Martian meteorites have both reported plausible indigenous organic components.”

“However, little is known about their origin, evolution, and preservation,” the team said.

Allan Hills 84001 is a chunk of early Mars, dating back four billion years, which makes it a crucial snapshot of an era when the red planet may have been partly blue due to the presence of a huge sea. Based on its properties, the rock was likely ejected from the subsurface of the planet by a major impact some 17 million years ago. After wandering around in space for several million years, the meteorite crashed into Antarctica about 13,000 years ago.

The rock is a time capsule of a tantalizing era when Mars was likely wetter—perhap enabling it to support life—making it the topic of substantial debate and research.

Allan Hills 84001 caused a stir in the 1990s when scientists suggested that the meteorite contained fossilized bacteria, generating decades of heated debate over the origins and nature of the structures within the rock. While these signs of primitive life remain inconclusive, the new detection of nitrogen-bearing compounds in the meteorite provide an unprecedented look at the nitrogen cycle of early Mars, which is a key system for assessing habitability.

If “considerable amounts and variations of organic matter” were either produced by early geological processes on Mars, or delivered by impacts with other celestial bodies, the nitrogen-bearing compounds might have “a chance to evolve into more complicated forms,” the team said in the study.

Koike and his colleagues identified the Martian nitrogen using an advanced technique called Nitrogen K-edge micro X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure (µ-XANES) spectroscopy, which is designed to flag extremely subtle traces of this element in compounds. To reduce the risk of nitrogen contamination from Earth, the researchers meticulously isolated microscopic grains from the meteorite and compared them to terrestrial samples found near the rock.

While earthly contamination can not be totally ruled out, the team demonstrated that the nitrogen-bearing compounds “are most likely of Martian origin,” according to the study. While this is not the first detection of Martian nitrogen—NASA’s Curiosity rover has also sniffed out the element on Mars, for instance—it is “the first solid evidence for four-billion-year-old Martian organics containing nitrogen,” according to a statement.

The new discovery adds to a growing pile of evidence that Mars may have been more hospitable to life in the distant past. Nitrogen is an essential cog in the fundamental machinery of all Earthlings: It is present in DNA, RNA, and proteins, and is the main component of the air we breathe. Perhaps it helped bygone Martians emerge billions of years ago, as well.

We will need to send more spacecraft to Mars to better understand its early habitability, especially missions that can bring back more chunks of this neighboring planet to Earth.

“It is expected that additional hidden records of the Martian nitrogen cycle will be acquired by future investigations,” the team concluded, “including a sample return mission from the Martian Moons (Martian Moons eXploration), Mars Sample Return missions, and exploration of the Martian subsurface, as well as further advanced studies of Martian meteorites.”

ARCHAEOLOGY 

Humans Reached North America 10,000 Years Earlier Than We Thought, New Research Suggests

By George Dvorsky on 23 Jul 2020 

Archaeological discoveries in a Mexican cave suggest humans reached North America some 30,000 years ago, which is a whopping 10,000 to 15,000 years earlier than previous estimates. The new research means it’s all but certain that the first people to reach the continent did so by following a Pacific coastal route.

The first people to reach North America didn’t wait around for the giant ice shelves to melt, reaching the continent at the peak of the last ice age, according to two related studies published yesterday in Nature.

The newly revised time frame, as evidenced by stone tools and flakes found at Chiquihuite Cave in northern Mexico, suggests humans first ventured into North America between 31,000 and 33,000 years ago, instead of the more generally agreed upon window of 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. That’s a significant update to our thinking and a definite rewrite-the-textbooks kind of discovery.

Indeed, the scientific ramifications of these new papers aren’t trivial, as they weigh upon two notable theories: the Clovis-first Hypothesis and the Coastal Migration Hypothesis. If confirmed, the new discovery means the Clovis culture, with their distinctive fluted spear points, were not the first humans to reach North America some 13,000 years ago. It also means the initial route into the continent followed along the Pacific coast and not an interior corridor, given a human presence in these Mexican caves during the Last Glacial Maximum, when continental ice sheets were at their largest.

Team members entering Chiquihuite Cave. (Image: Devlin A. Gandy)

The first paper, led by archaeologist Ciprian Ardelean from Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas in Mexico, describes stone tools and flakes, the remains of plants, and scraps of non-human animal DNA found in Chiquihuite Cave, a high-altitude site located in the Astillero Mountains. A handful of artefacts found at the same site in 2012 hinted at the extreme age of human occupation, leading to this more extensive investigation.

In total, the archaeologists found 1,930 stone artefacts, the oldest of which were dated to around 27,000 years ago and the youngest to around 13,000 years ago. The artefacts were manufactured from limestone but knapped into a previously unknown lithic style.

“Overall, the assemblage represents a lithic industry with no evident similarities to any of the other cultural complexes of the Pleistocene or Early Holocene epochs known in the Americas,” wrote the authors.

This mode of industry likely required advanced flaking skills to turn the raw material – recrystallised limestone – into tools, according to the researchers. The scientists don’t yet know how or where the greenish limestone was sourced, but a chemical analysis suggests this material didn’t come from inside the cave.

In total, Ardelean and his colleagues obtained 52 ages from bone, charcoal, and sediment found at the site, using radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating techniques. Stone tools pulled out from the deepest layers, some 10 feet below the cave surface, were dated to 26,500 years old. Previous work by Ardelean at an even deeper layer yielded stone flakes produced by knapping, which pushes back “dates for human dispersal to the region possibly as early as 33,000–31,000 years ago,” according to the study. As Ardelean told Gizmodo, the 33,000- to 31,000-year timeframe “is proposed as the earliest possible presence, but the occupation is more evident” at around 26,500 years ago.

A stone tool, made from limestone, found at Chiquihuite Cave in Mexico. (Image: Ciprian Ardelean)

“This expansively dated site is rich in stone tool evidence unlike anything seen in the Clovis technology,” Kira Westaway, a geochronologist at Macquarie University in Australia who wasn’t involved in the new study, told Gizmodo. “It suggests a pre-Clovis community that dispersed to the Americas long before anyone had anticipated.”

In addition to the stone tools and flakes, the researchers analysed plant remains and traces of environmental DNA. Unfortunately, the researchers weren’t able to find any bones or DNA belonging to humans.

“This does not negate a human presence at Chiquihuite Cave, as the probability of detecting ancient human DNA from cave sediments has previously been shown to be low,” wrote the authors. “Further archaeological and environmental DNA work is required to better elucidate the origins of the inhabitants of Chiquihuite Cave, their bio-cultural relationship to other older-than-Clovis groups and the path that their ancestors followed to the Americas.”

Some scientists are sceptical of the new conclusions. “While the dating of the layers appears accurate, I am intrigued but unconvinced at present that this represents an early human presence,” Ben Potter, an archaeologist affiliated with the Arctic Studies Centre at the University of Liaocheng in China, told Gizmodo. “However, the authors are to be commended for bringing a strong multidisciplinary effort to understand the cave.”

Potter’s concern stems from the fact that much of the cave floor is covered in limestone roof-fall deposits, which happens to be the raw material used to produce the artefacts.

“The authors argue that the limestone artefacts are of a different material than the broken limestone of the cave and matrix [the stratigraphic layers containing the artefacts], but they don’t provide any analytical data demonstrating this,” said Potter.

An alternate explanation, he suggested, is that these pieces aren’t stone tools, but geofacts – natural stone formations that are difficult to distinguish from human-made artefacts. These geofacts could have been produced by limestone chunks falling from the ceiling to the floor and then eroding, among other possible natural processes, he said.

“Unfortunately, the key data that would help test between these hypotheses is not present: detailed technical illustrations showing flake scar removals and other technical attributes,” said Potter. “The photographs are intriguing and some of the items appear to be artefacts, but many appear to be broken tabular chunks without sharp working edges,” he said, adding that “no technical details” were provided in the paper or the supplements. Without this data, “it is difficult to fully distinguish geofacts from artefacts.”

Indeed, the study authors are making a big claim that requires robust evidence. The proposed dates in central America “would imply an even earlier peopling of the Americas from the North, perhaps following the Asian and American coastlines, at least doubling the presently accepted figures,” Chris Stringer, a physical anthropologist from the Natural History Museum in London who wasn’t involved with the new research, told Gizmodo.

Archaeologists sampling the cave sediments for DNA. (Image: Devlin A. Gandy)

The second Nature paper published yesterday is authored by Lorena Becerra-Valdivia from the University of New South Wales and Thomas Higham from the University of Oxford – both of whom also contributed to the Ardelean paper.

By reviewing radiocarbon and luminescence dates from 42 North American and Beringian archaeological sites, Becerra-Valdivia and Higham show that humans, though thinly populated, were most certainly in the Americas by about 26,500 to 19,000 years ago. As for more widespread human occupation, that didn’t happen until the last ice entered into its final death throes, about 14,700 to 12,900 years ago, according to the paper. The researchers used statistical modelling to estimate patterns of human dispersal across the continent, taking factors like genetics and climatic evidence into account, along with the archaeological evidence.

That humans were living in North America by roughly 20,000 years ago seems to be the case. Sites considered in the new paper include Cactus Hill in the US state of Virginia, dated to 19,000 to 20,000 years ago; Santa Elina in Brazil, dated to 23,000 years ago; Monte Verde II in south-central Chile, dated to 18,500 to 14,500 years ago; Cooper’s Ferry in the state of Idaho, dated to 16,000 to 15,000 years ago; Paisley Caves in the state of Oregon, dated to 14,000 to 13,000 years ago; and, of course, the new findings from Chiquihuite Cave.

More controversially, there’s the Cerutti site in California to consider, which archaeologists dated to 130,000 years ago, in a result so strange and seemingly outlandish that it’s largely ignored by archaeologists (including the authors of this paper).

Potter was unimpressed with the new study, saying the “authors assume that each date and site have no contextual or other problems,” which is “far from the case.” The “uncritical inclusion of some sites and exclusion of others leaves the reader with a confused picture,” a problem compounded by the absence of other data, such as the “genetic-derived dating of population splits, admixtures [interbreeding events], and population expansion and lineage diversification associated with the peopling of the Americas,” said Potter.

“In my opinion, the earliest widespread manifestation in the Americas dates to 14,500 to 14,000 years ago,” said Potter. There are some tentatively dated human sites prior to 16,000, he said, but sites earlier than that – including Chiquihuite Cave – are ambiguous at best, in his view.

Indeed, the time has come, despite these concerns, to put the Clovis-first theory to rest.

“For most of the 20th century, it was believed that the peopling of the Americas occurred by conquering hunters some 13,000 years ago via an ‘ice-free corridor’ through the vast ice sheets that still covered the landscape after the last ice age,” said Westaway. “They brought with them their own stone toolkit named the Clovis technology that rapidly spread across the Americas, and thus, this dispersal became known as the Clovis-first model.”

The two new papers “challenge this image of humans conquering the ‘ice wall’ and offer an alternative scenario to the Clovis-first model,” she said. “This combined research opens up a world of new research possibilities, it breaks down the limitations of accepted theories and dispersal routes and demonstrates the potential of new chronologies for changing our preconceived notions.”

Indeed, the Pacific Coastal Route hypothesis has never looked stronger. It certainly appears that, at the peak of the last ice age, humans hugged the Pacific coast, bypassing the impenetrable Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets. It’s still very likely that humans traveled through an ice-free corridor between these sheets, though at a later time.

We clearly have lots to learn about the peopling of the Americas, but the picture is increasingly coming into view.

Featured image: Ciprian Ardelean

British Airways reaches agreement with pilots over job losses and pay cuts
23 Jul 2020


British Airways has reached an agreement with pilots union BALPA over proposed restructuring and job losses.

In a statement the carrier’s owner said:

“International Airlines Group (IAG) welcomed last night’s announcement by British Airways’ pilots’ union BALPA that it intends to hold a consultative ballot of its members in relation to the proposed restructuring and redundancy agreement reached between the union and the airline. This is in response to the Covid-19 crisis affecting the aviation industry. BALPA has recommended to its members that they approve the proposals.

“The ballot is due to close on July 31, 2020. IAG will provide a further update at that time.”

For its part BALPA said it would recommend the deal to its members as “the best that can be achieved in these incredibly difficult circumstances”.

According to the union the key elements of the deal are as follows:
Voluntary part time working, voluntary severance, voluntary external secondments.
A holding pool of the equivalent of 300 pilots employed on reduced pay ready to return to flying as demand picks up.
These measures funded by pilot pay cuts starting at 20 per cent and reducing to 8 per cent over the next two years then further reducing toward zero over the longer term.
Despite these measures, BA pilots are devastated at the prospect of around 270 compulsory redundancies although we expect this number will fall further as voluntary mitigation measures continue to be taken up.
There will be no “fire and rehire” of pilots.

Commenting on the news BALPA’s General Secretary said that “It is hugely disappointing that during our extensive negotiations British Airways would not accept the full package of mitigations we put forward which would have avoided any job losses at all, and at no cost to BA”.

“As a result there will be some compulsory redundancies amongst the pilot community and that is a matter of huge regret. Given BA’s intransigence we have put together the best package we can to save as many jobs as possible.”

ba.com
Tags: BALPA, British Airways

LAWNORDER

US: Portland mayor teargassed at protest against federal crackdown

The US government teargassed the mayor of Portland as he stood at a fence guarding a federal courthouse during a protest against the presence of federal agents sent by President Trump to quell unrest in the city.
Agence France-Presse Portland July 23, 2020



In this image made from video, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, center in black with goggles looking away, stands at a fence as tear gas drifts by, in Portland Oregon, US. (Photo:AP)
The mayor of Portland was teargassed Wednesday as he met with demonstrators protesting against police brutality and the deployment of federal troops into US cities ordered by President Donald Trump.

AFP footage showed Democratic mayor Ted Wheeler wearing goggles and a facemask and being led away from a crowd amid clouds of gas and fireworks exploding nearby.

"This is an egregious overreaction on the part of the federal officers," Wheeler told the New York Times.

"This is flat-out urban warfare."

Thousands of protestors took to the streets Wednesday night, according to NBC affiliate KGW8, in the latest round of protests that were initially sparked by the killing in May of African-American George Floyd.

The city's police department said protestors had thrown flares and incendiary devices into the federal courthouse, causing small fires in the compound.

It later declared a state of riot in the area outside the Justice Center and ordered protesters to disperse immediately.

Earlier protests in Portland -- and much of the United States -- to denounce racism and police brutality following the death of Floyd at the hands of a white police officer, began losing steam at the start of July.

But then reports emerged of camouflaged federal officers snatching Portland protestors in unmarked vehicles.

Now the demonstrations have ramped up, with thousands showing up daily to face off against police well into the night.

Wheeler has previously called for the withdrawal of federal officers from the northwestern US city, accusing them of dangerously escalating the situation with abusive and unconstitutional tactics against protestors