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Fish school, insects swarm and birds fly in murmurations. Now, new research finds that on the most basic level, this kind of group behavior forms a new kind of active matter, called a swirlonic state. 

Physical laws such as Newton’s second law of motion — which states that as a force applied to an object increases, its acceleration increases, and that as the object’s mass increases, its acceleration decreases — apply to passive, nonliving matter, ranging from atoms to planets. But much of the matter in the world is active matter and moves under its own, self-directed, force, said Nikolai Brilliantov, a mathematician at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Russia and the University of Leicester in England. Living things as diverse as bacteria, birds and humans can interact with the forces upon them. There are examples of non-living active matter, too. Nanoparticles known as “Janus particles,” are made up of two sides with different chemical properties. The interactions between the two sides create self-propelled movement.

To explore active matter, Brilliantov and his colleagues used a computer to simulate particles that could self-propel. These particles weren’t consciously interacting with the environment, Brilliantov told Live Science. Rather, they were more akin to simple bacteria or nanoparticles with internal sources of energy, but without information-processing abilities. 

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(Image credit: Alex Solich/Getty)

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On February 18, if all goes according to plan, Perseverance, NASA’s latest-and-greatest rover, will land on Mars. Around 3 PM EST, Percy will attempt its tricky Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) maneuver. If it survives the experience, Percy will join the Curiosity rover as humanity’s foremost interplanetary explorers.

To get this tricky orbital choreography just right, NASA pushed forward with the $2.7 billion mission despite the spread of the novel coronavirus. “It’s very expensive if we have to take Perseverance and put it back in storage for a period of two years,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, said at a June 17 press conference.

Perseverance wasn’t the only mission hoping to take advantage of the orbital alignment. China National Space Administration rover (and orbiter) Tianwen-1 arrived at the Red Planet last week, and the United Arab Emirates’ Hope Mars orbiter arrived as well. ESA and Roscosmos were supposed to launch their ExoMars rover, dubbed Rosalind Franklin, in summer 2020, but work was delayed due to the spread of the coronavirus and the agencies postponed the launch. The rover will blast off in about two years.

NASA hopes that its newest rover, designed and developed in cooperation with partners from the European Space Agency, as well as researchers from Norway, Spain, and France—will be the first to find evidence of life outside of our pale, blue dot. 

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NASA’s Perseverance rover is ready to make its debut on the Red Planet. The intrepid spacecraft is designed to search for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars, collect geologic samples for return to Earth and send the first helicopter into the skies of another world. That’s just the beginning. For the first time ever, two microphones aboard the spacecraft—the Entry Descent and Landing Cam microphone and the SuperCam Microphone—will sample Mars’ sonic landscape. It could reshape our understanding of the Red Planet. It’s a project that has been decades in the making. One that traces its origins back to the mid-90s and the Mars Polar Lander Mission.

In the mid-1990s, a group of scientists from the Planetary Society and the Space Sciences Lab at UC Berkeley hatched a daring plan to send a microphone to record the sounds of Mars. At first, NASA wasn’t really interested.

As the agency planned its Mars Polar Lander mission, the Planetary Society asked the Russian space program to attach a dime-sized microphone to a Russian instrument already scheduled to go on the spacecraft.

“It was, in essence, a free ride because they agreed to do it and NASA agreed to look the other way, so to speak. Once the Russian instrument was installed on the Lander, so were we.”

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Here on Earth, as we continue to obsess over cleanliness and eradicating microscopic viruses, perhaps we should be turning to NASA for advice.

Despite being in the midst of a global pandemic, the space agency launched the $2.4 billion Mars Perseverance Rover to the Red Planet on July 30, 2020. Later this week, the rover finally lands on Mars. On the Red Planet, the rover will look for microscopic life and collect rock and soil samples that will one day (eventually) be sent back to Earth for future study.

What the rover won’t be doing is introducing Earth’s microscope life to Mars.

Cleaning practices, sanitary procedures, and sterilization methods instituted by NASA decades ago all but guarantee the rover will be clean of nearly everything that could potentially compromise the mission to our planetary neighbor.

“Viruses, e. coli, all the things we find on our skin, they are all puny wimps,” says Moogega Stricker, NASA Planetary Protection Engineer at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Everything they’ve done since the mission began seven years ago, she says, has made the spacecraft resilient against any and all contamination.

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