Mars InSight: why we'll be listening to the landing of the Perseverance rover

By Benjamin Fernando, PhD student and college lecturer, University of Oxford

As I write this, Nasa’s Perseverance Rover is hurtling toward Mars at a speed of more than 80,000 km/h and is set to land at the Red Planet on February 18. Landing on Mars is no mean feat - the spacecraft will have to decelerate from more than 30 times the speed of sound to stationary in a matter of minutes, while it’s heated to more than 1,000°C by friction with the atmosphere.

Just over 3,000kms away from Perseverance’s landing site, another Nasa mission, InSight,…

Read complete article

~	TikTok fears point to larger problem: Poor media literacy in the social media age

~	Donald Trump trial: why it took so long to select a jury and how the process is different to the UK

~	Bitcoin is halving again – what does that mean for the cryptocurrency and the market?

~	Liz Truss: an economist explains what she got wrong (and what she’s actually right about)

~	Domestic politics will be a key factor in how far things escalate between Israel and Iran

~	Peter Higgs’ famous particle discovery is now at the heart of strategies to unlock the secrets of the universe

~	Why you shouldn’t be afraid to start running after middle age

~	The world’s oldest conjoined twins have died – what we know about this rare condition

~	Stonehenge may have aligned with the Moon as well as the Sun

~	Rhapsody in Blue: celebrating 100 years of Gershwin’s groundbreaking classical-jazz masterpiece