NASA's Perseverance Rover Finds Signs of Epic Ancient Floods on Mars

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October 14, 2021

Dear Reader, This week, William Shatner at last visited the final frontier. The 90-year-old 'Star Trek' actor soared aloft on a suborbital flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, becoming the oldest person to ever reach space. Once back on Earth, he delivered a profound soliloquy on our world's fragility, comparing it favorably to Mars. Our planetary neighbor, however, wasn't always so bereft, as fresh findings from NASA's Perseverance rover are revealing new details of the Red Planet's warmer, wetter past (and enticing targets for future searches for life). Elsewhere, we have stories on the physics of planetary climates and other complex systems, a bevy of fast radio bursts from a supersized Chinese telescope, exoplanetary aurorae and a novel proposal for protecting the Earth from asteroids.

Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Space & Physics @LeeBillings

Planetary Science NASA's Perseverance Rover Finds Signs of Epic Ancient Floods on Mars New results from the mission reveal that its landing site of Jezero Crater has a surprisingly dynamic and complex hydrologic history By Jonathan O'Callaghan

Space Exploration Blue Origin Launches William Shatner and Crew to the Final Frontier The 90-year-old Star Trek actor is now the oldest person to fly in space By Hanneke Weitering,SPACE.com

Quantum Physics Why the Physics Nobel Honored Climate Science and Complex Systems The prestigious award finally recognizes work that helped scientists understand climate change and, more broadly, find order in disorder By Daniel Garisto

Astrophysics FAST, the World's Largest Radio Telescope, Zooms in on a Furious Cosmic Source China's Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope has detected more than 1,600 fast radio bursts from a single enigmatic system By Ling Xin

Planetary Science Planetary Defense Is Good--but Is Planetary Offense Better? A new approach could mitigate the most damaging effects of an imminent asteroid or comet strike—or ensure many threatening objects never get close to striking Earth in the first place By Philip Lubin,Alexander Cohen

Astronomy 'Auroral' Exoplanets Could Help Boost Searches for Alien Life Four candidate worlds found via flashes of radio emission may be the first of many revealed by a new planet-hunting technique By Nola Taylor Tillman

Particle Physics New Universal Force Tested by Blasting Neutrons through Crystal A recent experiment has placed the best-yet limits on the strength of a long-sought fifth fundamental force By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Mathematics Gnarly, Centuries-Old Mathematical Quandaries Get New Solutions A set of puzzles called Diophantine problems are often simple to state but hard to solve—though progress could have big implications for the future of mathematics By Rachel Crowell

Cosmology The Kavli Prize Presents: Understanding The Universe [Sponsored] Ewine van Dishoeck received The Kavli Prize in Astrophysics in 2018 for elucidating the life cycle of interstellar clouds and the formation of stars and planets. What other mysteries of space are left to be uncovered? By Scientific American Custom Media | 06:19

Mathematics Simple Mathematical Law Predicts Movement in Cities around the World A new model could help model disease transmission and urban planning By Viviane Callier

FROM THE STORE Scientific American Space & Physics For $19.99 per year, your subscription includes six bi-monthly digital issues and every digital Space & Physics issue ever published!

QUOTE OF THE DAY "What I would love to do is to communicate as much as possible the jeopardy, the moment you see how... the vulnerability of everything -- it's so small! This air which is keeping us alive is thinner than your skin! It's a sliver, it's immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe. It's negligible, this air. Mars doesn't have it." William Shatner, upon returning to Earth from a suborbital spaceflight

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FROM THE ARCHIVE Physics Nobel Honors Breakthroughs in Understanding Climate and Other Complex Systems Half the award goes to Giorgio Parisi for his studies of disorder and chaos. The remainder is shared between Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann for modeling global warming and climate variability By Lee Billings,Nikk Ogasa | October 2021

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