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    DOGE Cuts Hobble Office That Would Aid NASA and SpaceX Mars Landings

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    The Astrogeology Science Center, which has helped astronauts and robots reach other worlds safely, is facing a substantial number of job reductions.An office in an obscure corner of the federal government that NASA has relied on to safely land astronauts on the moon and robotic probes on Mars is facing pressure to cut its tight-knit team of experts by at least 20 percent, according to two people familiar with the mandate.The thinning of the staff has already started at the Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Ariz., the people said, the result of an assortment of voluntary resignation offers put forward by the Department of Government Efficiency, led by the billionaire Elon Musk. More employees are expected to be laid off in the coming weeks, following a new open call for early retirements and resignations on April 4. The office, which is part of the U.S. Geological Survey under the Department of the Interior, has been subject to the cost-cutting efforts initiated in a mass email that Mr. Musk’s team sent across the federal government in January.Representatives for the Interior Department, the U.S.G.S. and the astrogeology center did not reply to requests for comment on the staff reductions or their potential ramifications.The cuts could affect crewed missions to Mars in the future, a key goal of Mr. Musk, who founded SpaceX. He has said he conceived of the company to make human life multiplanetary.Matthew Golombek, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has worked on the selection of landing sites for multiple probes to Mars, described the Astrogeology Science Center’s precision mapping as “the gold standard that basically everyone in the community uses.”At the start of the year, the office had 53 employees. Eight are already set to leave, with more encouraged to consider the latest offer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mars Got Cooked During a Recent Solar Storm

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      Days after light shows filled Earth’s skies with wonder, the red planet was hit by another powerful outburst of the sun.The sun fired off a volley of radiation-riddled outbursts in May. When they slammed into Earth’s magnetic bubble, the world was treated to iridescent displays of the northern and southern lights. But our planet wasn’t the only one in the solar firing line.A few days after Earth’s light show, another series of eruptions screamed out of the sun. This time, on May 20, Mars was blitzed by a beast of a storm.Observed from Mars, “this was the strongest solar energetic particle event we’ve seen to date,” said Shannon Curry, the principal investigator of NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution orbiter, or MAVEN, at the University of California, Berkeley.When the barrage arrived, it set off an aurora that enveloped Mars from pole to pole in a shimmering glow. If they were standing on the Martian surface, “astronauts could see these auroras,” Dr. Curry said. Based on scientific knowledge of atmospheric chemistry, she and other scientists say, observers on Mars would have seen a jade-green light show, although no color cameras picked it up on the surface.The specks in the sequence of images in this video were caused by charged particles from a solar storm that hit a navigation camera of the Curiosity Mars rover on May 20.NASA/JPL-CaltechBut it’s very fortunate that no astronauts were there. Mars’s thin atmosphere and the absence of a global magnetic shield meant that its surface, as registered by NASA’s Curiosity rover, was showered by a radiation dose equivalent to 30 chest X-rays — not a lethal dose, but certainly not pleasant to the human constitution.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Space: The Longest Goodbye’ Review

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      This documentary by Ido Mizrahy examines the psychological challenges of space exploration for astronauts and their loved ones as scientists consider whether humans could reach Mars.In “Space: The Longest Goodbye,” scientists researching the problems of long-term space exploration go where movies have gone before. Sending astronauts into hibernation to conserve scarce resources? Pairing them with an artificially intelligent entity that can act as a pal and sounding board? Screenwriters have tried these things already, with results probably best kept in fiction.But such gambits may offer real solutions for getting humans to Mars. And they are gambits that this fitfully intriguing, sometimes wide-eyed documentary, directed by Ido Mizrahy, takes seriously.“Soft, squishy humans are completely unfathomable to engineers,” says Jack Stuster, an anthropologist who asked residents of the International Space Station to keep journals. One of the principal interviewees is Al Holland, a psychologist who assembled a unit at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to provide support for astronauts. He discusses his experience in 2010 consulting on the Chilean mine disaster, which had striking parallels with the isolation of space life.We also hear from Kayla Barron, a submarine warfare officer who decided to go to space, and her husband, who stayed behind; as a military couple, they were used to living separately, but this posed a different challenge. And we see clips of personal video chats that the astronaut Cady Coleman held with her husband and son back on Earth, through a system that sometimes didn’t work. “It’s hard for me to really realize how hard it was for a little kid to just have to be so very patient,” she recalls in the documentary.On Mars missions, distance will make similar real-time communication impossible, which means that astronauts won’t even have that kind of intermittent contact. “Space: The Longest Goodbye” leaves open the question of whether anyone could get to the red planet with his or her sanity intact.Space: The Longest GoodbyeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More