Perseverance Has Landed! Mars Rover Begins a New Era of Exploration

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February 18, 2021

Space Perseverance Has Landed! Mars Rover Begins a New Era of Exploration NASA's latest mission to the Red Planet will seek out signs of ancient life, gather samples for return to Earth, and even fly a first-of-its-kind interplanetary helicopter By Lee Billings

Space The First 100 Days on Mars: How NASA's Perseverance Rover Will Begin Its Mission With the space agency's latest rover set to touch down on February 18, here is the agenda for its initial months By Jonathan O'Callaghan

Public Health Booster Shots Against Scary COVID Virus Variants Are In the Works Vaccine makers are designing follow-up shots, based on new mutations, to keep the disease at bay By Charles Schmidt

Natural Disasters Why the Deep Freeze Caused Texas to Lose Power Issues with natural gas supplies and the grid's isolation both factored in to the massive outages By Benjamin Storrow,E&E News

Public Health Nursing Home Workers Had One of the Deadliest Jobs of 2020 An analysis of incomplete data shows they had a death rate higher than that of loggers, and may have rivaled fishers for most perilous profession By Tanya Lewis

Neuroscience People Answer Scientists' Queries in Real Time While Dreaming Researchers demonstrate that during REM sleep, people can hear—and respond to—simple questions (What is eight minus six?) By Diana Kwon

Policy & Ethics Virtual Conferences Aren't as Accessible as You Might Think They have some advantages for people with disabilities—but plenty of problems as well By Krystal Vasquez

Policy & Ethics Biden Channels FDR on STEM Policy The president's letter to his new science advisor emphasizes the crucial role science plays in our society—much as Roosevelt did in a similar missive in 1944 By Henry Jacoby,Gary Yohe,Ben Santer,Richard Richels

Evolution Mammoth Genomes Shatter Record for Oldest DNA Sequences Researchers extracted DNA from fossils that are more than a million years old, illuminating the origins of the woolly mammoth and the Columbian mammoth By Kate Wong

Behavior & Society Entitled People Are More Likely To Be Angry at Bad Luck Even when nobody is to blame, some feel they were victimized By Alex Jordan,Emily Zitek

FROM THE STORE Exploring Mars: Secrets of the Red Planet Our nearest planetary neighbor has been the subject of endless fascination and wide-ranging theories throughout history. Is there life on Mars? Was there ever life on Mars? What was the atmosphere like thousands or millions of years ago? From Percival Lowell, who built his own observatory so he could dedicate himself to studying the red planet, to NASA landing the car-sized Opportunity rover in 2012, this eBook traces Scientific American's coverage of the observation and exploration of Mars.

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FROM THE ARCHIVE Rocks, Rockets and Robots: The Plan to Bring Mars Down to Earth Coordinated by NASA and ESA, an ambitious effort to retrieve samples from the Red Planet faces major obstacles By Robin George Andrews | February 2020

QUOTE OF THE DAY "The science that Perseverance will do is going to inform our world for decades." Bobby Braun, director of planetary science at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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