NASA recently launched its latest rover to Mars, armed with a host of instruments to hunt for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.
The mission has been seven years in the making, and the space agency had to overcome recent challenges in order to ensure that the rover makes it to Mars on time. The Perseverance rover's journey to the Red Planet has not always been smooth sailing, launching a car-sized robot to Mars during unprecedented times to fulfill its one-of-a-kind mission.
In partnership with Cosmic Perspective, Inverse has been following Perseverance all the way to the launch pad and until it soared above Earth's atmosphere. We have put together a video that details the rover's journey from going through testing at NASA's labs, to being strapped onto a rocket headed for Mars.
The Perseverance rover launched at 7:50 a.m. Eastern on July 30 from the Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, where the rover was strapped onto a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 541 rocket.
Perseverance is scheduled to land on Mars on February 18, 2021. The robotic explorer will land at Jezero Crater, a 28-mile wide, 500-meter-deep crater located in a basin slightly north of the Martian equator. Jezero Crater once housed a lake estimated to have dried out 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. Therefore, it is the ideal location for Perseverance to hunt for signs of past microbial life.
Once there, Perseverance will begin looking for clues of ancient life on Mars. These will help scientists understand the history of the planet, which is hypothesized to have once been a wet, habitable world.
Ethan Siegel (FORBES) offers:
For as long as humanity has been watching the skies, we’ve been fascinated with the possibility that other worlds — much like Earth — might contain living organisms. While our visits to the Moon taught us that it’s completely barren and uninhabited, other worlds within our Solar System remain full of potential. Venus might have life in its cloud-tops. Europa and Enceladus might have life teeming in a sub-surface ocean of liquid water. Even Titan’s liquid hydrocarbon lakes provide a fascinating place to search for exotic living organisms.
But by far, the most fascinating possibility is the red planet: Mars. This smaller, colder, more distant cousin of Earth most certainly had a wet past, where liquid water clearly flowed on the surface for more than a billion years. Circumstantial evidence has pointed to the plausibility of life on Mars, not only in the ancient past, but possibly still living, and perhaps occasionally active, even today. There are five possibilities for life on Mars.
Staying on Mars, AFP reports:
Researchers from Canada and the United States examined more than 10,000 Martian valleys and compared them to channels on Earth that were carved under glaciers.
"For the last 40 years, since Mars's valleys were first discovered, the assumption was that rivers once flowed on Mars, eroding and originating all of these valleys," said lead author Anna Grau Galofre in a statement released by the University of British Columbia.
But these formations come in a huge variety "suggesting that many processes were at play to carve them," she added.
Researchers found similarities between some Martian valleys and the subglacial channels of Devon Island, in the Canadian Arctic, which has been nicknamed "Mars on Earth" for its barren, freezing conditions and hosted NASA space training missions.
So ice. Mars was covered with ice. Amit Maleware (TECH EXPLORIST) reports:
Past studies have suggested that significant river runoff persisted on Mars later into its history than previously thought. And the runoff was intense—rivers on Mars were much wider. But a new study by the UBC suggests that a large number of the valley networks scarring Mars’s surface were carved by water melting beneath glacial ice, not by free-flowing rivers.
This conclusion was drawn after examining thousands of Martian valleys. Scientists developed and used new techniques to investigate thousands of Martian valleys.
So we used to think they were carved by rivers and now we have evidence that it was due to glacial ice. That's science, we are constantly learning. That's what makes it so exciting.
He also earned a lifetime of post-service ailments, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and a traumatic brain injury (TBI). As a result of his injuries, Worsley was given a 100 percent disability rating from the Department of Veteran’s Affairs. He treated the worst symptoms of both injuries with medical marijuana prescribed to him legally in Arizona.
Now, Worsley sits in an Alabama jail facing five years in the state’s notoriously violent prison system after admitting to an officer he was in possession of medical marijuana while driving through Alabama and a subsequent probation violation for missing a court date.
State Sen. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he is aghast that this could happen in Alabama.
“This is an anomaly. This is not the norm,” Ward said. “Most police departments in Alabama do not arrest people anymore solely for marijuana possession.”
Ward said usually when someone is charged with marijuana possession, they are charged with other felonies and marijuana possession is an add-on charge.
Ward said that marijuana possession is a class D offense under the sentencing reform package that he sponsored, which passed the Alabama Legislature in 2016. With a class D offense, there is no prison time.
Biden will turn 78 in November, and he was first elected to the Senate in 1972. That was before the Watergate investigations and the end of the Vietnam War. So he was actually a political veteran when he announced his first Presidential run in 1987. At that point he was in his mid-40s and in the midst of his third term in the Senate. He was not a political novice, though he was already combing his hair over to hide his increasing baldness. Many people who were alive and old enough to read at the time likely remember that he had to leave that race because of a disgraceful admission: he had giv en a speech as his own which was actually an old stump address of British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. Probably they assume that an aide had given him the speech and that he had not known that it was plagiarized.
This is false.
In fact, Biden had given the speech many times, and he had even told people on at least one occasion that it was a Kinnock speech. More remarkably, in it he had claimed that his family were ordinary coal miners, regular folk who had been unfairly disadvantaged by economic circumstances. But Biden’s background in Pennsylvania’s anthracite country was monied. His father’s family hadn’t been miners but rather oil company owners. Nonetheless, in the speech Biden suggested that his forebears had been so destitute that they had only rarely come up from underground to see the light of day and play an occasional game of football. In Kinnock’s case that had referred to soccer. While Biden had played football—American football—it was at a private Catholic school that his parents had paid to send him to. The speech was about how some people wrongly start out at the bottom, and he had used it to mislead people into thinking that he was one of them.
Nor was this the only talk from which Biden cribbed. On repeated occasions he used pieces from effective speeches he had heard given before by other Democrats he admired, including John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.
He had commenced the race with an announcement address in which he had spoken about the importance of character and values. Attacking Reagan, he had affirmatively declared that, “We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society, for nothing suffocates the promise of America more than unbounded cynicism and indifference.” But plagiarism and lying were not new to Biden.
During the race, reporters discovered that Biden had failed a course at Syracuse Law School because he had stolen a paper from a Fordham Law Review article. Five pages of the paper were taken word for word. Showing impressive chutzpah, Biden said that this was unintentional. Biden also claimed that he had graduated in the top half of his law school and had received a full scholarship. In fact, his scholarship was only partial, and he had graduated 76th out of a class of 85 students.
Biden also spoke frequently during the race of his experiences marching for equality during the Civil Rights era. This, too, was a fabrication. And when confronted about these lies, he challenged the reporters who asked him about them, saying that he had done his part by running for office, asking them what they had done for Civil Rights.
In addition, Biden had managed to avoid service in Vietnam by claiming that he suffered from asthma—even though he had been a star halfback and wide receiver in high school.
Nor did all of these revelations shame him into leaving the race. Instead, he held a press conference in which he insisted that he was going to continue with his campaign, and he only dropped out a week later when it became clear that his persistent lying had defined his candidacy and that it was affecting fundraising.
August 2020 marks the 30th anniversary of Iraq’s infamous invasion of Kuwait. It also marks 30 years since the U.S. military begun its involvement in Iraq. That involvement has lasted, in one form or another, almost continuously to this day.
On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein launched his invasion of Kuwait and conquered the tiny oil-rich sheikdom in a highly effective two-day operation. By doing so, he rapidly turned the United States and most of the world against him.
The George H.W. Bush administration promptly established a multinational coalition consisting of 35 countries. It launched Operation Desert Shield, a military build-up in Saudi Arabia primarily aimed at protecting that kingdom from any potential Iraqi attack.
Saddam, likely believing the Americans were bluffing with their threat of military force, refused to withdraw from Kuwait by the deadline set by the United Nations Security Council. Consequently, in January 1991, the U.S. launched Operation Desert Storm, an enormous air campaign against Iraq that rapidly devastated both its armed forces and infrastructure.
Television viewers across the world saw the bombing of Baghdad in real-time. The U.S. military showcased its hi-tech military gear, particularly its stealthy F-117 Nighthawk bombers, Tomahawk cruise missiles, and various precision-guided ‘smart’ bombs.
The Iraqi military stood no chance against this superior firepower and technology.
Following Desert Storm, the U.S. launched a ground campaign called Operation Desert Sabre that lasted a mere 100-hours. U.S.-led armored forces battled the Iraqis in the desert and suffered minuscule losses compared to their Iraqi adversary. Iraqi forces fled Kuwait, after infamously looting it and setting its oil wells on fire, and the war was formally ended by a ceasefire by the end of February.
In the lead-up to the war, Bush had promised a quick and decisive victory, insisting that the Persian Gulf War would be nothing like the costly and demoralizing quagmire the U.S. experienced in Vietnam. In many ways, in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War, the U.S. felt it had gotten over its so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” since it achieved its objectives quickly and suffered very few casualties.
However, the removal of Saddam’s forces from Kuwait and the ceasefire did not end the U.S. military’s involvement in Iraq. In many ways, it was merely the beginning.
Iraqi Shiites and Kurds rose against Saddam in March 1991, shortly after the U.S.-Iraq ceasefire. They believed that Bush’s suggestion that Iraqis should take matters into their own hands and overthrow Saddam from power meant that the U.S. military would support their uprising. Instead, it stood by.
Despite gaining much momentum and ground early on, the widespread uprisings were brutally crushed and countless numbers of people were massacred by Saddam’s ruthless forces.
Bush wanted to avoid becoming entangled in any internal conflict in Iraq. However, images of destitute Kurdish refugees fleeing into the mountains under fire from Saddam’s helicopter gunships resulted in widespread public pressure for the U.S. to do something.
Saddam remained in power, presiding over large swathes of a largely destroyed and destitute country subjected to a crippling international embargo that further devastated its economy and left many Iraqis hungry.
The no-fly zones remained in place throughout Bill Clinton’s presidency and U.S., along with British and French, fighter jets often patrolled designated swathes of Iraq’s airspace. While Clinton opted to contain Saddam Hussein his administration also took some limited military action against Iraq throughout the 1990s.
In his first year in power, Clinton launched Tomahawk cruise missiles against Baghdad in retaliation over a suspected Iraqi plot to assassinate former President Bush while he was on a visit to Kuwait to commemorate the coalition’s victory in the Gulf War.
In October 1994, the U.S. also promptly deployed forces to Saudi Arabia in Operation Vigilant Warrior when it looked like Saddam was positioning force for a second invasion of Kuwait — which, of course, never happened.
[. . .]
Clinton was succeeded by President George W. Bush, who ran on a platform of isolationism regarding foreign policy in the 2000 presidential elections. Bush’s worldview, however, quickly changed following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Although Saddam’s Iraq had nothing to do with that terrorist atrocity, his regime soon found itself in the Bush administration’s crosshairs.
In March 2003, ditching prior containment efforts, the U.S. outright invaded Iraq in Operation Iraqi Freedom. It toppled the Iraqi regime under the pretext of preventing it from developing deadly weapons of mass destruction. It quickly became apparent, however, that Saddam’s prior efforts at developing such weapons had long since ceased before that invasion.
While the Iraqi armed forces promptly crumbled in the face of the coalition’s superior firepower, the U.S. quickly became embroiled in an occupation and conflict against various insurgents. Its early decision to disband the old Iraqi Army proved fatal since it antagonized tens-of-thousands of Iraqis who had military training overnight.
[. . .]
During the 2008 presidential elections, Barack Obama vowed to bring all U.S. troops home from Iraq. On the other hand, his opponent John McCain once suggested he would support the U.S. military having an open-ended presence in the country that could last up to 100 years. McCain cited long-term U.S. deployments to Germany and South Korea as possible precedents.
We could go on and on -- and take on a major error in the piece (it's not quoted above). But I'm wondering if THE WASHINGTON POST plans to fact check FORBES?
Remember how objectivity and fairness and disclosure are all journalism things of the past? Which is how THE POST allowed Joe Biden buddy Glenn Kessler to pose as a fact checker and run interference for Joe's campaign. When Glenn lied I don't remember him getting called out elsewhere. Elsewhere. Dropping back to the April 9, 2019 snapshot:
Three more lives lost in the endless wars.
That's the reality and reality scares a lot of people. The laughable Glenn Kessler at THE WASHINGTON POST is scared by these remarks by Beto O'Rourke:
Glenn sets out to destroy Beto because that's what Glenn does.
Liars keep wars going and there's no bigger liar in the world than Glenn Kessler. He disputes the timeline that Beto offers -- though he does note it's the same one the Air Force's vice chief of staff Gen Stephen W. Wilson has offered in Congressional testimony.
Little Glenn knows so much better than everyone, doesn't he?
Which is why his timeline includes -- oh, wait, it doesn't include the sanctions during the Clinton presidency that killed over a half million.
Mad Maddie Albright, taking a moment from feeding on the bones of the dead to declare that "the price is worth it."
It's a funny sort of timeline that fails to note the long, long war the US government has carried out on Iraq.
Of course, Glenn being the whore he is, he pretends that troops left in 2011.
They didn't.
Dropping back to the December 12, 2011 snapshot:
A fact check, by the way, that takes six days to conduct over something this basic really argues that Glenn's not up to doing fact checks -- a point we've made before including when he went out of his way to misconstrue what Beto O'Rourke said in order to call Beto a liar. The real liar is Glenn Kessler. And his self-brag that he was reporting on Iraq before and after the start of the war in 2003 should not be seen as a good thing. The fact that he was reporting on it and doing so in a one-sided manner that failed to question the push to war tells you everything you need to know about liar Glenn Kessler.
In June, at least 230 people were killed, and 138 more were wounded. Also, 12 bodies were recovered from a mass grave or from the war rubble in Mosul. At least 254 people were killed, and 84 were wounded across Iraq during June.
At least 24 civilians, 38 security members, and 28 militants
were killed. The number of fatalities among the militants dropped dramatically,
while about the same number of deaths occurred among civilians and security
personnel. The same was true regarding the number of wounded: 24 civilians, 45
security personnel, and two militants.
However, British authorities reported on the deaths of 100 militants in
operations that began in April. It is unclear how many of those were only
during July, so all are being included in these figures.
Separately, protests turned violent. The slow movement of anti-corruption
measures and lack of appropriate services in the blistering summer heat were
two of the main complaints. At least five demonstrators were killed, and 67
were wounded.
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