MARS MICROBES COULD KILL US... Red planet could put us on red alert
After a year’s delay, NASA announced it is targeting an October launch on Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
It will carry a probe that is 81ft long and 24ft wide, making it roughly the size of a tennis court with its solar panels extended.
NASA says that what makes it unique is that it appears to be the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet, one of the building blocks of our solar system. It said: “Psyche offers a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created terrestrial planets.”
A DANGEROUS amount of ■
rain is forecast today for New Zealand’s most populous city, four days after Auckland had its wettest day on record in a storm that claimed four lives.
A state of emergency was declared on Friday when a
A SPACE lab is being built to securely house rocks brought from Mars amid fears they could trigger an alien pandemic.
Boffins fear samples collected from the surface of the Red Planet by NASA’s Perseverance rover could harbour microbes deadly to humans.
Space agency chiefs plan to blast the specimens back to Earth so scientists can examine them for signs of extraterrestrial life.
NASA officials admit the mission will be the “most complex robotic space flight campaign ever attempted”. volume of rain that would typically fall over an entire Southern Hemisphere summer hit in a single day.
At least 5,000 homes and ■
businesses were being assessed for flood and landslide damage and several roads remained closed after more
In a bid to quash concerns the US space agency has announced it will create a specially-designed facility for safely housing the specimens.
Project
The Mars Sample Receiving Project office will be built at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
The samples — which have been collected from an ancient Martian river delta over two years by the unmanned rover — are set to be blasted back to Earth in 900F heat-sealed containers aboard a European Space Agency craft in 2033. Peter Doran, a geologist at Louisiana State University, who studies life in extreme environments, has warned the Earth needs to adopt a safety-first approach to the material. “I think that it’s a very low probability that there’s anything living at the surface of Mars,” he told US National Public Radio.
“But there is a possibility. than 15cm of rain fell in three hours.
Auckland Mayor Wayne ■
Brown warned: “My team’s current focus and our big worry is that some Aucklanders might think the worse is behind us, but it isn’t.”