Forbes reports on ThreeFold, an ambitious new "long-term project to rewire the internet in the image of its first incarnation: decentralized, unowned, accessible, free." "We have 18,000 CPU cores and 90 million gigabytes, which is a lot of capacity," founder Kristof de Spiegeleer told me recently on the TechFirst podcast. "It's probably between five and ten times more than all of the capacity of all the blockchain projects together..."

"It's a movement," de Spiegeleer says about ThreeFold. "It's where we invite a lot of people to...basically help us to build a new internet. Now it sounds a little bit weird building a new internet. We're not trying to replace the cables... what we need help with is that we get more compute and storage capacity close to us." That would be a fundamentally different kind of internet: one we all collectively own rather than just one we all just use.

It requires a lot of different technology for backups and storage, for which ThreeFold is building a variety of related technologies: peer-to-peer technology to create the grid in the first place; storage, compute, and network technologies to enable distributed applications; and a self-healing layer bridging people and applications. Oh, and yes. There is a blockchain component: smart contracts for utilizing the grid and keeping a record of activities. "Farmers" (read: all of us) provide capacity and get micropayments for usage.

So instead of a Bitcoin scenario where some of the fastest computers in the world waste country-scale amounts of electricity doing arcane math to create an imaginary currency with dubious value (apologies, are my biases showing?) you have people providing actual tangible services for others in exchange for some degree of cryptocurrency reward. Which, in my (very) humble opinion, offers a lot more social utility...

ThreeFold and partners have invested more than $40 million in make it happen, de Spiegeleer says, and there are more than 30 partners working on the project or onboarding shortly. "So it's happening," he says.
In the interview, de Spiegeleer points out 80% of current internet capacity is owned by less than 20 companies, arguing on the podcast that "It really needs to be something like electricity.

"It needs to be everywhere and everyone needs to have access to it. It needs to be cost effective, it needs to be reliable, it needs to be independent..."

The James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's follow-on instrument to the wildly successful Hubble Space Telescope, will not meet its current schedule of launching in March 2021, according to the chief of NASA's science programs. Ars Technica reports: "We will not launch in March," said Thomas Zurbuchen, the space agency's associate administrator for science. "Absolutely we will not launch in March. That is not in the cards right now. That's not because they did anything wrong. It's not anyone's fault or mismanagement." Zurbuchen made these comments at a virtual meeting of the National Academies' Space Studies Board. He said the telescope was already cutting it close on its schedule before the COVID-19 pandemic struck the agency and that the virus had led to additional lost work time.

"This team has stayed on its toes and pushed this telescope forward at the maximum speed possible," he said. "But we've lost time. Instead of two shifts fully staffed, we could not do that for all the reasons that we talk about. Not everybody was available. There were positive cases here and there. And so, perhaps, we had only one shift." NASA and the telescope's prime contractor, Northrop Grumman, are evaluating the schedule going forward. This will include an estimate of when operations can completely return to normal -- Zurbuchen said telescope preparation and testing activities are nearing full staffing again -- and set a new date for a launch. This schedule review should conclude in July. "I'm very optimistic about this thing getting off the launch pad in 2021," Zurbuchen said. "Of course, there is still a lot of mountain to climb."

Dyson has revealed new photos and information about their failed electric SUV, which the company canceled last October due to high costs. The Verge reports: In a new blog post on his company's website, Dyson shows off some of the first images and videos of the real prototype it made before the project was killed last October, as well as a few more computer renderings. He describes the SUV as "a radical car which was loaded with technology," and says his company "solved lots of problems that are traditionally associated with electric vehicles," though the project was ultimately abandoned for not being "commercially viable." Missing from the post is any substantive explanation of what those problems were, though, or how the company was going to solve them. Dyson touts a "spoke, integrated and highly efficient Electric Drive Unit (EDU) comprising Dyson digital electric motor, single speed transmission and state of the art power inverter," though there's no explanation about what sets those technologies apart from the ones developed by other companies in the electric vehicle space.

Other listed design benefits (like a flexible battery pack design, improved interior space, longer wheelbase) and features (like a heads-up display or handle-free doors) are also far from unique. And while Autocar reports that the SUV was supposed to offer somewhere around 600 miles of range using a 150kWh battery, Dyson never got close enough to put that claim to the test. One of the few standout parts of the SUV is the steering wheel, which looks more like a video game controller than anything.

schwit1 quotes Space.com: A new explanation for a massive blast over a remote Siberian forest in 1908 is even stranger than the mysterious incident itself.

Known as the Tunguska event, the blast flattened more than 80 million trees in seconds, over an area spanning nearly 800 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) — but left no crater. A meteor that exploded before hitting the ground was thought by many to be the culprit. However, a comet or asteroid would likely have left behind rocky fragments after blowing up, and no "smoking gun" remnants of a cosmic visitor have ever been found.

Now, a team of researchers has proposed a solution to this long-standing puzzle: A large iron meteor hurtled toward Earth and came just close enough to generate a tremendous shock wave. But the meteor then curved away from our planet without breaking up, its mass and momentum carrying it onward in its journey through space.

NASA and SpaceX are closer than ever to a moment both have been preparing for since the beginning of the Commercial Crew program in 2010. SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon spacecraft are now set to fly with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken onboard, making a trip to the International Space Station, and both the agency and SpaceX announced today that they have officially passed the final flight readiness review, meaning everything is now a 'go' for launch. From a report: According to NASA Commercial Crew Program manager Kathy Leuders during a press conference on Monday, everything went well with all pre-launch flight checks thus far, including a full-length static test fire of the Falcon 9's engines, and a dress rehearsal of all launch preparation including strapping Hurley and Behnken into the rocket. The only remaining major hurdle for SpaceX and NASA now is the weather, which is currently only looking around 40% favorable for a launch attempt on schedule for Wednesday, May 27 at 4:33 PM EDT, though during today's press conference officials noted it is actually trending upwards as of today. SpaceX and NASA will be paying close attention to the weather between now and Wednesday, and since this is a highly sensitive mission with actual astronauts on board the spacecraft, you can bet that they'll err on the side of caution for scrubbing the launch if weather isn't looking good. That said, they do have a backup opportunity of May 30 in case they need to make use of that.

"One of the longer chapters of the International Space Station has come to a close," writes Engadget.

"NASA has sent the last of its 11 ExPRESS (Expedite the Processing of Experiments to the Space Station) science racks to the orbiting facility, 19 years after sending the first two." They don't look like much, but they provide the power, storage, climate control and communications for up to 10 small payloads — they're key to many of the experiments that run aboard the ISS and will help the station live up to its potential research capabilities. This last rack was carried aboard a Japanese cargo ship and should be installed and functioning by fall 2020. While the EXPRESS racks should be useful for a while yet, this effectively marks the end of an era for NASA's ISS work...
Originally developed by engineers at Boeing and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, "The first two completed racks were delivered to the space station on STS-100 in 2001 and have been in continuous operation ever since," notes a NASA press release, "as have all the subsequent added racks." And since then NASA has logged more than 85 total years of combined rack operational hours. "The sheer volume of science that's been conducted using the racks up til now is just overwhelming," says Shaun Glasgow, project manager for the EXPRESS Racks at Marshall.

"And as we prepare to return human explorers to the Moon and journey on to Mars, it's even more exciting to consider all the scientific investigations still to come."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are about to star in the biggest spaceflight event of the decade: launching on the inaugural flight of SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft. For years, they've anticipated this moment, picturing throngs of people lined up on Florida's beaches to watch them ascend into the sky. Now, their launch will likely look very different, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to grip the nation. That electric atmosphere they expected will mostly be absent for this monumental flight as NASA has urged spectators to watch the launch from home -- and it's what the two astronauts want, too.

Even though the atmosphere will be different, Hurley and Behnken, both longtime colleagues and friends, are still set to make history together when they board the Crew Dragon on May 27th. They'll be the first passengers that SpaceX has ever launched into space, and they'll also be the first people to launch to orbit from the United States since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. All of NASA's astronauts have had to fly on Russian rockets out of Kazakhstan for nearly the last decade. But thanks to a partnership with NASA, SpaceX is set to start launching the agency's astronauts from Florida once again with the Crew Dragon, beginning with Behnken and Hurley. "An invaluable part of their training is the fact that Behnken and Hurley have been good friends since they were first selected to be astronauts in 2000," adds The Verge. "In fact, they became so close that they were in each other's weddings when they each married fellow astronauts from that same class. They claim that their friendship provides a certain level of trust that only comes from years of knowing one another."

"We've worked together so long that there's a part of the training that we don't have to worry about," Behnken told The Verge last year, adding, "It is important for us. I already know what Doug's responses are going to be in a lot of different situations. I know if he's ahead or behind on whatever we're working on, in the same way that he knows that about me. That makes it a lot easier. Those aren't extra words I need to put into the communication. He can just glance at me and know what my status is."

Scientists have gotten their most detailed view of the wild storms that swirl through the gas giant's atmosphere. Space.com reports: Every 53 days, Juno skims over Jupiter's cloud tops in a close approach called a perijove, gathering data all the while. Among the spacecraft's instruments is a microwave radiometer, which is tuned to identify lightning strikes and study what ammonia and water vapor are doing in the gas giant's atmosphere. The scientists behind the new research arranged to target Hubble and Gemini to study Jupiter in coordination with Juno's schedule. So while Juno studies a swath of the gas giant as it passes overhead, Hubble and Gemini study the bigger picture of atmospheric activity on Jupiter.

Juno has made 26 flybys of the gas giant to date, which means the trio of observatories have built up quite a data set about Jupiter's atmosphere, and scientists have only released the most preliminary findings to date. But those findings already suggested that lightning was most common in a feature that scientists call a filamentary cyclone. "These cyclonic vortices could be internal energy smokestacks, helping release internal energy through convection," Michael Wong, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author on the new research, said in the NASA statement. That convection pulls layers of Jupiter's atmosphere up and down depending on factors like temperature and humidity. Earth's atmosphere does this as well, but not in exactly the same way.

In the meantime, the researchers behind the observatory collaboration have already answered one longstanding question about Jupiter's atmosphere, specifically the Great Red Spot storm that has roiled for centuries. Astronomers had long wondered whether transient seemingly dark spots in the storm are caused by a different compound in the atmosphere or by gaps in the cloud cover. And combining the data gathered in close succession by Hubble and Gemini allowed scientists to answer that question: because the dark spots shine brightly in infrared, as deep water clouds do, they seem to represent gaps in upper clouds. "The scientists are also using the data set to analyze zonal winds, atmospheric waves, convective storms, cyclonic vortices and polar atmospheric phenomena like hazes -- and, of course, they anticipate that plenty of other scientific puzzles will benefit from the observations as well," the report adds.

The Trump administration is drafting a legal blueprint for mining on the moon under a new U.S.-sponsored international agreement called the Artemis Accords, Reuters reported Wednesday. From the report: The agreement would be the latest effort to cultivate allies around NASA's plan to put humans and space stations on the moon within the next decade, and comes as the civilian space agency plays a growing role in implementing American foreign policy. The draft pact has not been formally shared with U.S. allies yet.

The Trump administration and other spacefaring countries see the moon as a key strategic asset in outer space. The moon also has value for long-term scientific research that could enable future missions to Mars -- activities that fall under a regime of international space law widely viewed as outdated. The Artemis Accords, named after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's new Artemis moon programme, propose "safety zones" that would surround future moon bases to prevent damage or interference from rival countries or companies operating in close proximity.

Syfy Wire's "Bad Astronomy" column is written by astronomer Phil Plait, head science writer of Bill Nye Saves the World. This week he looked at the recently-declassified videos taken by the U.S. Navy's fighter jets showing unidentified flying objects "moving in weird and unexpected ways." ("The 'aura' around the object in some of the footage could simply be the camera overexposing around a bright object; infrared cameras can do that, creating an odd glow.")

But to prove they're not aliens, Plait ultimately cites an analysis on the site MetaBunk, "run by former video game programmer and critical thinker Mick West" -- and his videos summarizing discussions on the site's bulletin board:

[I]n this one he argues, convincingly to me, that the FLIR video just shows a passenger plane seen from a distance. He also shows that the rotation of the object in the GIMBAL video is almost certainly due to the motion of the camera itself as it tracks the objects. The fighter jet is turning, and at the same time the camera is mounted on a rotating mechanism that allows it to track. These two motions combine to make a somewhat confusing series of rotations in the image, which is why the object in the video appears to rotate around.

But my favorite bit is a video where he gives a single, simple explanation that accounts for two things seen in the Navy videos, specifically, why the object in the GOFAST video appears to scream across the water so rapidly, and how in the GIMBAL video the object seems to travel against a strong wind. The answer: It's an illusion due to parallax, how an object close to you seems to move more rapidly against a more distant background as the camera moves... Given the distance, angle, and motion, it's likely that the GOFAST video shows a balloon.
As a kind of consolation prize, the column concludes by sharing the cheesy opening credits to a 1970 precursor to the TV show Space: 1999 -- called UFO.

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Monday the city will close 40 miles worth of streets near parks to give residents a lot more room to get out of their homes. CNET reports: The eventual goal is to open 100 miles of public roads for residents to bike, walk, jog and more while spreading groups of people out. It's not clear which roads will be affected yet, but Mayor De Blasio said the street closures will be "mostly" near parks. Last week, the city of Milan announced that 22 miles of streets will be transformed over the summer, with a rapid, experimental citywide expansion of cycling and walking space to protect residents as COVID-19 restrictions are lifted. Many other cities across the world are expected to enact similar schemes to help social distancing.

The cigar-shaped interstellar visitor to our solar system known as 'Oumuamua could be the remnants of a larger body that was torn apart by its host star, according to researchers. From a report: The dark, reddish object that hurtled into our solar system in 2017 and was named after the Hawaiian word for messenger or scout has long puzzled scientists. Among its peculiarities is the lack of an envelope of gas and dust that comets typically give off as they heat up. Further work by experts suggested the body was accelerated by the loss of water vapour and other gases -- as seen with comets but not asteroids. The upshot was that âOumuamua was labelled a "comet in disguise." Now scientists say they have shed light on the mystery and addressed the myriad pieces of the 'Oumuamua puzzle. They say 'Oumuamua is an "active asteroid" formed from a body that was torn apart by its parent star and then ejected into interstellar space.

"Most planetary bodies ... consist of numerous pieces of rock that have coalesced under the influence of gravity. You could imagine them as sandcastles floating in space," said Dr Yun Zhang, a co-author of the new study from the Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur in France. These bodies experience a number of forces as they pass their star. "A tidal encounter between a planet or small body and a star is a tug-of-war game between the gravitational pull of the star and the self-gravity of the flyby body," said Zhang, noting that when the body passes too close to the star and enters the tidal disruption region, it can stretch and be torn apart giving rise to fragments.

Shifting sick-leave policy and communication issues are causing employees to assert themselves after they stayed on the job. From a report: As millions of Americans heed government orders to hunker down, ordering food and medicines and books and puzzle boards for home delivery, many of Amazon's 400,000 warehouse workers have stayed on the job, fulfilling the crushing demands of a country suddenly working and learning from home. Orders for Amazon groceries, for example, have been as much as 50 times higher than normal, according to a person with direct knowledge of the business. The challenge is keeping enough people on the job to fill those orders, according to more than 30 Amazon warehouse workers and current and former corporate employees who spoke with The New York Times. For all of its high-tech sophistication, Amazon's vast e-commerce business is dependent on an army of workers operating in warehouses they now fear are contaminated with the coronavirus.

[...] Amazon's response to the pandemic has differed from warehouse to warehouse. Over the years, that sort of autonomy has allowed Amazon to nimbly adjust to local market conditions. Now it is leading to distrust, as workers see some facilities close for cleaning while others remain open. Since the first worker in the Queens facility learned on March 18 that he had tested positive, the company has learned of cases in more than 50 other facilities, out of the more than 500 it operates across the country. In recent weeks, Amazon has raised wages and added quarantine leave, and it is offering overtime at double pay. It said it had tripled its janitorial staff. And it has added space between many workstations. But in private groups, conversations with their managers and public protests, some workers have expressed alarm about their safety.

sciencehabit writes: Not too close, but not too far. That's long been the rule describing how distant a planet should be from its star in order to sustain life. But a new study challenges that adage: A planet can maintain water and other liquids on its surface if it's heated, not by starlight, but by radioactive decay, researchers calculate. That opens up the possibility for many planets — even free-floating worlds untethered to stars — to host life, they speculate.

The Bad Astronomer writes: A new study of very young binary stars shows that exoplanets orbiting them (circumbinary planets) will orbit in the same plane as the stars if the two stars are relatively close together. If the stars are farther apart, the planets may have a perpendicular (polar) orbit around them. This study looked at the protoplanetary disks of dust and gas around binaries to draw this conclusion. Extrapolating to fiction, this means Tatooine in Star Wars was coplanar with its host stars.

Europe and Russia have decided to push back the launch of their joint robotic rover to Mars until 2022, rather than launch this year as originally planned. More testing is needed on the vehicle's parachutes ahead of the launch, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), and there isn't enough time to get all of that work done before the launch window in July and August. The Verge reports: This is the second major delay for the rover, which is a critical piece of the ExoMars mission -- a partnership program between ESA and Russia's state space corporation Roscosmos aimed at figuring out if Mars ever hosted life. Originally, the rover, named after the famous chemist Rosalind Franklin, was meant to launch in 2018, but it was pushed until 2020 due to delays in delivering the scientific payloads. Now, the parachutes needed to land the vehicle on Mars are to blame. Last year, two high-altitude drop tests here on Earth damaged the parachutes, with some even tearing while they inflated. ESA wants to do two additional parachute tests ahead of the mission, but they won't occur in time to allow a summer launch to happen.

Additionally, some of the electronics inside the vehicle that carries the rover down to the surface need to be returned to their suppliers for troubleshooting. The final software for the mission is also delayed, and engineers don't have enough time to test it out before the summer. And if that wasn't enough, Jan Worner, the director general of ESA, admitted that the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic is playing a role in the delay. [...] Now, the earliest option to launch the Rosalind Franklin rover is 2022, thanks to how Earth and Mars orbit the Sun. The two planets only skim close by one another every 26 months, giving scientists a limited window to launch spacecraft to the Red Planet. With a launch window opening up this summer, multiple countries including the US, China, and the United Arab Emirates are launching spacecraft to Mars. But since ExoMars cannot make the deadline, the next opportunity to launch is between August and October 2022.

While ESA and Roscosmos wait for 2022, the rover will go into storage, and engineers will lubricate the vehicle over the next two years to maintain all of its components. In the meantime, the Russian Proton rocket that will launch the rover and the vehicle's European carrier spacecraft are all ready to go and have no issues. So the Rosalind Franklin rover should be ready to go by 2022 if the upcoming tests go well.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Following D-Wave's announcement of Leap 2, a new version of its quantum cloud service for building and deploying quantum computing applications, VentureBeat had the opportunity to sit down with Murray Thom, D-Wave's VP of software and cloud services. We naturally talked about Leap 2, including the improvements the company hopes it will bring for businesses and developers. But we also discussed the business applications D-Wave has already seen to date. Thom explained that D-Wave has seen success particularly with optimization and machine learning use cases. And he has the data to back it up: D-Wave's customer applications are about 50% optimization, 20% AI and ML, 10% materials science, and 20% other. Thom believes quantum computing and machine learning are "extremely well matched. The features the technology has and the needs of the field are very close."

"It's something I think is going to be a very productive use of the technology in the future because there's so many aspects of what the quantum computers can do in terms of the probabilistic sampling," Thom continued. "For optimization, the probabilistic sampling is like 'oh, I can do robust optimization with that.' But for machine learning it's essential for what you need to do. It's very hard to reproduce that with a classical computer and you get it natively from the quantum computer. So those features can't be accidental. It's just that it's going to take time for the community to find the right methods for incorporating it and then for the technology to insert into that space productively."

After pondering the totality of issues that arose during a December test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft this week, NASA chief of human spaceflight Doug Loverro said Friday that he decided to escalate the incident. From a report: So he designated Starliner's uncrewed mission, during which the spacecraft flew a shortened profile and did not attempt to dock with the International Space Station, as a "high visibility close call." This relatively rare designation for NASA's human spaceflight program falls short of "loss of mission" but is nonetheless fairly rare. It was last used by NASA after a spacewalk in 2013 when water began to dangerously pool in the helmet of astronaut Luca Parmitano. Asked to explain during a conference call with reporters why he did this, Loverro said, "We could have lost a spacecraft twice during this mission."

In this, Loverro referred to two software errors that occurred during the two-day flight. The first problem occurred when Starliner captured the wrong "mission elapsed time" from its Atlas V launch vehicle -- it was supposed to pick up this time during the terminal phase of the countdown, but instead it grabbed data 11 hours off of the correct time. This led to a delayed push to reach orbit. The second error, caught and fixed just a few hours before the vehicle returned to Earth through the atmosphere, was due to a software mapping error that would have caused thrusters on Starliner's service module to fire in the wrong manner. NASA and Boeing officials held Friday's teleconference to announce the conclusion of a report from an Independent Review Team established after December's flight. These reviewers made 60 recommendations to NASA and Boeing for corrective actions that ranged from fixing these software issues to ferreting out others that may still exist in the spacecraft's flight code.

A team of researchers from Plex Corporation, Bruker Scientific LLC and Harvard University has found evidence of a protein inside of a meteorite. They have written a paper describing their findings and have uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server. Phys.Org reports: In this new effort, the researchers have discovered a protein called hemolithin inside of a meteorite that was found in Algeria back in 1990. The hemolithin protein found by the researchers was a small one, and was made up mostly of glycine, and amino acids. It also had oxygen, lithium and iron atoms at its ends -- an arrangement never seen before. The team's paper has not yet been peer reviewed, but once the findings are confirmed, their discovery will add another piece to the puzzle that surrounds the development of life on Earth. Proteins are considered to be essential building blocks for the development of living things, and finding one on a meteorite bolsters theories that suggest either life, or something very close to it, came to Earth from elsewhere in space.

Proteins are considered by chemists to be quite complex, which means a lot of things would have to happen by chance for protein formation. For hemolithin to have formed naturally in the configuration found would require glycine to form first, perhaps on the surface of grains of space dust. After that, heat by way of molecular clouds might have induced units of glycine to begin linking into polymer chains, which at some point, could evolve into fully formed proteins. The researchers note that the atom groupings on the tips of the protein form an iron oxide that has been seen in prior research to absorb photons -- a means of splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen, thereby producing an energy source that would also be necessary for the development of life.

The first results from NASA's quake-hunting InSight Mars lander just came out, and they reveal that Mars is a seismically active planet. Space.com reports: Martian seismicity falls between that of the moon and that of Earth, [says InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory]. "In fact, it's probably close to the kind of seismic activity you would expect to find away from the [tectonic] plate boundaries on Earth and away from highly deformed areas," he said. InSight's observations will help scientists better understand how rocky planets such as Mars, Earth and Venus form and evolve, mission team members have said. The mission's initial science returns, which were published today (Feb. 21) in six papers in the journals Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications, show that InSight is on track to meet that long-term goal, Banerdt said.

The new studies cover the first 10 months of InSight's tenure on Mars, during which the lander detected 174 seismic events. These quakes came in two flavors. One hundred and fifty of them were shallow, small-magnitude tremors whose vibrations propagated through the Martian crust. The other 24 were a bit stronger and deeper, with origins at various locales in the mantle, InSight team members said. (But even those bigger quakes weren't that powerful; they landed in the magnitude 3 to 4 range. Here on Earth, quakes generally must be at least magnitude 5.5 to damage buildings.) That was the tremor tally through September 2019. InSight has been busy since then as well; its total quake count now stands at about 450, Banerdt said. And all of this shaking does indeed originate from Mars itself, he added; as far as the team can tell, none of the vibrations were caused by meteorites hitting the Red Planet. So, there's a lot going on beneath the planet's surface. What's interesting to note is that unlike Earth, where most quakes are caused by tectonic plates sliding around, Mars' quakes are caused by the long-term cooling of the planet since its formation 4.5 billion years ago. "As the planet cools, it contracts, and then the brittle outer layers then have to fracture in order to sort of maintain themselves on the surface," Banerdt said. "That's kind of the long-term source of stresses."

"A wealth of information can be gleaned from InSight's quake measurements," reports Space.com. "For example, analyses of how the seismic waves move through the Martian crust suggest there are small amounts of water mixed in with the rock, mission team members said." They can't say one way or the other whether there are large underground reservoirs of water at this point, but the research is convincing.

The new papers also mention a variety of other discoveries as well. "For example, InSight is the first mission ever to tote a magnetometer to the Martian surface, and that instrument detected a local magnetic field about 10 times stronger than would be expected based on orbital measurements," the report says. "InSight is also taking a wealth of weather data, measuring pressure many times per second and temperature once every few seconds. This information helps the mission team better understand environmental noise that could complicate interpretations of the seismic observations, but it also has considerable stand-alone value."