As you might be aware, humans need oxygen to live. Earth has a good supply of it, but other planets do not. Thanks to a recent experiment by NASA, however, Mars has a bit more oxygen than it previously did.

“MOXIE isn’t just the first instrument to produce oxygen on another world,” Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, said in a statement. She called it the first technology of its kind to help future missions “live off the land” of another planet.

The instrument works through electrolysis, which uses extreme heat to separate oxygen atoms from molecules of carbon dioxide, which accounts for about 95% of the atmosphere on Mars.

The moon landings began and ended well before I was born, but I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to witness a Mars landing in my lifetime.

If you’d like to see proof of how much your dog misses you, or you just want to get off this planet, NASA is hiring the next crop of astronauts.

After set a new record for the longest continuous time in space by a woman, NASA astronaut Christina Koch returned from space in early February. While I’m sure her family and friends were thrilled to have her back, I can’t imagine anyone was happier to see her than her dog.¹

Footnotes:

1. Here’s an archive of the video, just in case the tweet gets deleted.↩︎

If Wolf Cukier had to write a “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” essay this past fall, he definitely earned an A+.

NASA is looking at visiting an asteroid named Psyche 16, which is comprised of several different valuable metals, including gold and platinum. As a result, there have recently been many stories about just how valuable this asteroid is, with headlines like:

• “Gigantic golden asteroid could make everyone on Earth a billionaire”

Well, that’d really be something.

The combined total value of all those precious metals would equal out at something like $700 quintillion.

That’s 700,000,000,000,000,000,000 (700 quintillion) dollars for 7,000,000,000 (7 billion) people, which works out to $100,000,000,000 each. Score!

Of course, even if this asteroid could be fully mined, monetary value doesn’t actually work that way. The linked article even discusses this, but not before using a spurious headline to lure you in, of course.

Last week, NASA announced the discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system, which contains seven planets very similar to Earth. Space.com has a great explanation of what it’s like on those planets.

Much like those of us on Earth, astronauts in space may find themselves struggling with too much shit. NASA’s looking for help figuring out how to handle this very literal problem.

Wired has a great profile of Margaret Hamilton, an early computer software engineer who helped create the software that helped America reach the moon.

Lauren had crashed the simulator by somehow launching a prelaunch program called P01 while the simulator was in midflight. There was no reason an astronaut would ever do this, but nonetheless, Hamilton wanted to add code to prevent the crash. That idea was overruled by NASA. “We had been told many times that astronauts would not make any mistakes,” she says. “They were trained to be perfect.”…Hamilton wanted to add error-checking code to the Apollo system that would prevent this from messing up the systems. But that seemed excessive to her higher-ups. “Everyone said, ‘That would never happen,’” Hamilton remembers.

But it did.

And thus did Hamilton show why a better understanding of human-computer interaction is so important.