The general consensus seems to be that the Mars One vs MIT students debate last week at the Mars Society conference was a clear win for the students: Mars One admits its mission is not feasible to MIT students – Tech Insider.

You can decide for yourself by watching the debate here:

https://youtu.be/MvIVb7QlzUI

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I’ve always thought Mars One made a big mistake in not tying its prospects directly to the plans of Elon Musk and SpaceX. The only way a non-government organization can send people to Mars is if the costs of space transport drop by a factor of 10 or more. SpaceX, as well as other companies like Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, are attempting to achieve such reductions with reusable rockets.

Here is an extensive but very readable and entertaining report on How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars at Wait But Why.

Stephen L. Petranek, who has been the top editor at Discover and This Old House, has written the book: How We’ll Live on Mars. In this interview, he also talks of SpaceX being the key to settling Mars: The Next Jamestown: A new book says that a life on Mars will no longer be science fiction – A&S Interview – Air & Space Magazine.

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Meanwhile, on Mars the Curiosity rover uses the camera at the end of its arm to take many images of itself its surroundings to create a panoramic selfie: Looking Up at Mars Rover Curiosity in ‘Buckskin’ Selfie

This low-angle self-portrait of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the site from which it reached down to drill into a rock target called “Buckskin” on lower Mount Sharp.

The selfie combines several component images taken by Curiosity’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on Aug. 5, 2015, during the 1,065th Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s work on Mars. For scale, the rover’s wheels are 20 inches (50 centimeters) in diameter and about 16 inches (40 centimeters) wide. This view is a portion of a larger panorama available at PIA19807.

A close look reveals a small rock stuck onto Curiosity’s left middle wheel (on the right in this head-on view). The rock had been seen previously during periodic monitoring of wheel condition about three weeks earlier, in the MAHLI raw image athttp://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=1046MH0002640000400290E01_DXXX&s=1046.

MAHLI is mounted at the end of the rover’s robotic arm. For this self-portrait, the rover team positioned the camera lower in relation to the rover body than for any previous full self-portrait of Curiosity. This yielded a view that includes the rover’s “belly,” as in a partial self-portrait (/catalog/PIA16137) taken about five weeks after Curiosity’s August 2012 landing inside Mars’ Gale Crater.

The selfie at Buckskin does not include the rover’s robotic arm beyond a portion of the upper arm held nearly vertical from the shoulder joint. With the wrist motions and turret rotations used in pointing the camera for the component images, the arm was positioned out of the shot in the frames or portions of frames used in this mosaic. This process was used previously in acquiring and assembling Curiosity self-portraits taken at sample-collection sites “Rocknest” (PIA16468), “John Klein” (PIA16937), “Windjana” (PIA18390) and “Mojave” (PIA19142).

And here is an update on Curiosity’s other recent activities and plans: NASA Mars Rover Moves Onward After ‘Marias Pass’ Studies.