u/ProximaScience

>Satellite carries Nvidia Orin NX processors on SpaceX Transporter-18 rideshare mission

>TakeMe2Space says it has signed 23 customers for mission

>Company plans larger satellites from 2027 to expand orbital computing capacity

It is the most sophisticated robotic explorer that humans have yet launched. Thanks to its explorations and experiments, it has increased our knowledge of another planet more than just about anything we’ve ever managed to launch from Earth. Five years into its mission, this rover continues to provide valuable scientific data. And thanks to its durable construction, we expect it to serve us for many more years to come.

After all, this rover isn’t called Perseverance for nothing.

The latest in a line of ingenious and hardy Martian robotic explorers, the vehicle dubbed Perseverance — or “Percy,” as it’s known to its friends — was sent off to our planetary neighbor as the main payload of the Mars 2020 mission. When it launched in July of that year, the compact-car-sized rover was loaded to the gills with all of the latest diagnostic and analytical tools that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory could cram onto its 2,300-pound, 6-wheeled, aluminum and titanium chassis.

Those tools have yielded exciting results. Over the next few years, Perseverance would complete numerous analyses of the Red Planet's geology and climate and log some impressive firsts for Mars exploration. Unfortunately, it would also eventually experience a major setback when one of its most important tasks was postponed indefinitely.

>My conclusion is that in a colonized universe the probability of the annihilation of the human race could actually rise rather than fall

Mars has no global magnetic field and a thin atmosphere, so surface radiation runs well above anything humans experience on Earth. Long-term exposure raises cancer risk and can damage the central nervous system over a multi-year mission. Burying a habitat under regolith is the most mass-efficient shielding option available, cutting primary radiation dose by roughly 41 percent at just one meter of depth, and it's the baseline in most serious colonization studies, including NASA's own work.

Burying the habitat doesn't just block radiation, it blocks daylight and the horizon too. Human circadian rhythm runs on light exposure. Remove that cue for months and sleep breaks down first. Sleep loss cascades into mood decline, irritability, and slower cognition, the exact pattern researchers have documented in crews at Antarctica's Concordia Station, a direct spaceflight analog. It's common enough there to have a name, winter-over syndrome, and it's considered predictable enough that crews get screened for it before deployment.

Put a crew underground on Mars for two or three years, with no light cycle, a small group, and no way to evacuate someone in crisis, and the shielding depth solving your radiation problem is the same depth creating your psychological one.

The engineering question isn't just how much regolith blocks radiation. It's how to shield a crew without shielding them from every cue their brain needs to stay regulated.

What's your suggested fix?

Roman just captured its first photons in space. On September 11th, NASA switched on the Wide Field Instrument, a 300 megapixel camera built to map the universe. The image above isn't a finished shot. It's raw starlight hitting the sensor for the very first time.

Getting to this point took patience. Roman launched on August 30th and spent ten days just drying out, since any leftover moisture near instruments this sensitive would cause real damage. Once that cleared, engineers began cooling the spacecraft down to minus 225 degrees Fahrenheit, cold enough to bring all 18 infrared instruments online. It's still cooling. The target is minus 300 degrees, close to the temperature of deep space itself.

Here's the part that matters. Once Roman is fully operational, one single image will cover a patch of sky bigger than the full moon. Over its five year mission, it will map more than 50 times as much sky as Hubble has covered in three decades of work.

NASA also tested the coronagraph for the first time, a system of mirrors and sensors built to directly photograph planets orbiting other stars instead of just detecting their shadow.

First images are expected around the holidays. Full science operations start January 2027. The universe is about to get a lot bigger, a lot faster.

NASA's Starling mission tested something called FALCON, a system that lets a satellite figure out its own position using nothing but other objects in space as landmarks.

Here's how it works. The satellite's star tracker camera, normally used just to figure out orientation, spots other spacecraft and debris nearby. FALCON matches what it sees against a public catalog of roughly 20,000 known space objects, confirms the match, then calculates the satellite's own orbit from those reference points. No ground station, no GPS signal required.

It went further than expected too. Over a three day stretch, FALCON quietly improved the known orbits of more than 200 objects on its own, no ground team involved, and did it more precisely than the existing catalog data.

This matters because GPS gets unreliable fast once you leave Earth orbit, and it does not exist at all around the Moon or in deep space. A navigation method that works off nearby objects instead of a signal from home could be the backbone for lunar satellite swarms and coordinated missions to Mars.

Starling launched in 2023 and is still active. Later this year it expands to four spacecraft working as a swarm, sharing tracking data and refining each other's positions in real time.

In 2005, a hurricane wiped every lizard off a set of small Bahamian islands. Researchers saw an opening. They took one male and one female brown anole from a single forested island and placed a pair on each of seven empty islands nearby.

Four years later, every population had shrunk its hind legs, exactly as predicted. Shorter limbs work better on the thin scrub branches of those islands than on the thick trunks back home. Natural selection did what it always does.

But the islands never converged to the same leg length. The population that started with the longest legged founders still had the longest legs at the end. The one that started shortest stayed shortest. Selection pushed every population in the same direction, and the founders decided where each one started from.

It is one of the cleanest field demonstrations of the founder effect ever recorded. Evolution had a rulebook and a memory running at the same time.

Plants evolved for one direction of gravity pulling roots down and shoots up. Take that away and a plant genuinely doesn't know which way to grow.

In microgravity, roots wander in every direction looking for something to orient to. NASA's solution has been LED grow chambers with tightly controlled light, water, and airflow that essentially replace gravity's job with engineering.

The real challenge isn't growing one lettuce plant on the ISS as a experiment. It's growing enough calories to feed a colony without shipping soil, without endless resupply missions, and without a single crop failure wiping out a season. Every future colony is really a farm first and a settlement second.

The water astronauts drink today already passed through their own bodies. More than once.

The International Space Station runs on a closed loop system called ECLSS, and in 2023 it hit a milestone that took over a decade to reach. The system now recovers 98 percent of all water on board, pulled from urine, sweat, and even the humidity in the crew's own breath. Urine goes through vacuum distillation first, then whatever's left over as brine gets pushed through a Brine Processor Assembly that squeezes out nearly the last drop. What comes out the other end passes stricter purity checks than most municipal tap water on Earth.

The 2 percent still lost matters more than it sounds. On the ISS, resupply ships can cover that gap every few months. On a multi year Mars mission, there's no resupply ship coming. Every fraction of a percent lost is water that has to be carried from Earth and never gets back.

This is the unglamorous side of space colonization nobody puts on a mission patch. Getting to another planet is rocket science. Staying there is plumbing.

There's a user in my subreddit who is constantly modmailing and harassing mods. Permanently banned and reported but he can still send modmail. Is there a way to stop him.