Rover

• Swifto, a leader in technology-driven pet care services, announces its acquisition of Wagz 'n Whiskerz, a reputable dog walking company near Charlotte, North Carolina.
• Integrating Wagz 'n Whiskerz’s local expertise, Swifto enhances its offerings for a seamless blend of technology and personal touch.
• "We are thrilled to integrate Wagz 'n Whiskerz into the Swifto family, marking our expansion into North Carolina.
• This acquisition provides Swifto a new footprint in Lake Norman, North Carolina, demonstrating its commitment to expanding.

• HUNTSVILLE, Ala., April 16, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- NASA will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Human Exploration Rover Challenge when the competition returns to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center's Aviation Challenge Course in Huntsville, Alabama, Friday, April 19, and Saturday, April 20.
• The event is free and open to the public with rover excursions occurring each day from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. CDT or until the last rover completes the obstacle course.
• Media are invited to watch more than 600 students from around the world attempt to navigate a complex obstacle course by piloting a human-powered vehicle of their own design and production.
• Media interested in attending or setting up interviews should contact Taylor Goodwin in the Marshall Office of Communications at 938-210-2891 no later than 2 p.m. Thursday, April 18.

• A critical NASA mission in the search for life beyond Earth, Mars Sample Return, is in trouble.
• Its budget has ballooned from US$5 billion to over $11 billion, and the sample return date may slip from the end of this decade to 2040.

The habitability of Mars

• But studies conducted over the past decade suggest that the planet may have been much warmer and wetter several billion years ago.
• Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, is still active; its twin, Perseverance, which landed on Mars in 2021, will play a crucial role in the sample return mission.

Why astronomers want Mars samples

• This meteorite is a piece of Mars that landed in Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984.
• They’re free samples that fell to Earth, so while it might seem intuitive to study them, scientists can’t tell where on Mars these meteorites originated.
• There’s no substitute for bringing back samples from a region known to have been hospitable to life in the past.

A compelling and complex mission

• Bringing Mars rocks back to Earth is the most challenging mission NASA has ever attempted, and the first stage has already started.
• The rover inserts the samples in containers the size of test tubes.
• The complex choreography of this mission, which involves a rover, a lander, a rocket, an orbiter and the coordination of two space agencies, is unprecedented.

Sample return breaks the bank

• Mars Sample Return has blown a hole in NASA’s budget, which threatens other missions that need funding.
• It’s likely that Mars Sample Return’s budget partly caused the layoffs, but they also came down to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory having an overfull plate of planetary missions and suffering budget cuts.
• Within the past year, an independent review board report and a report from the NASA Office of Inspector General raised deep concerns about the viability of the sample return mission.

Thinking out of the box

• Proposals are due by May 17, which is an extremely tight timeline for such a challenging design effort.
• And it’ll be hard for private companies to improve on the plan that experts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had over a decade to put together.
• For the Artemis III mission, SpaceX will attempt to land humans on the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years.

• It’s not clear whether that rocket could return the samples that Perseverance has already gathered.
• Sending astronauts also carries extra risk and cost, and a strategy of using people might end up more complicated than NASA’s current plan.
• With all these pressures and constraints, NASA has chosen to see whether the private sector can come up with a winning solution.

Chris Impey receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

• DENVER, April 3, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- NASA has awarded a Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services (LTVS) contract to the Lunar Dawn team, led by Lunar Outpost as the prime contractor along with its principal partner Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) and teammates General Motors (GM), The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, and MDA Space .
• This next-generation Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) will enable the exploration of the surface of the Moon in unprecedented fashion as part of NASA's Artemis campaign.
• The Lunar Dawn team's vehicle exceeds all the requirements set forth by NASA and was designed with mission growth capability in mind.
• As the lead of the Lunar Dawn Team, Lunar Outpost is pioneering a new teaming paradigm for the space industry.