Alan W. Dowd is a Senior Fellow with the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes on the full range of topics relating to national defense, foreign policy and international security. Dowd’s commentaries and essays have appeared in Policy Review, Parameters, Military Officer, The American Legion Magazine, The Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, The Claremont Review of Books, World Politics Review, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Jerusalem Post, The Financial Times Deutschland, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Examiner, The Detroit News, The Sacramento Bee, The Vancouver Sun, The National Post, The Landing Zone, Current, The World & I, The American Enterprise, Fraser Forum, American Outlook, The American and the online editions of Weekly Standard, National Review and American Interest. Beyond his work in opinion journalism, Dowd has served as an adjunct professor and university lecturer; congressional aide; and administrator, researcher and writer at leading think tanks, including the Hudson Institute, Sagamore Institute and Fraser Institute. An award-winning writer, Dowd has been interviewed by Fox News Channel, Cox News Service, The Washington Times, The National Post, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and numerous radio programs across North America. In addition, his work has been quoted by and/or reprinted in The Guardian, CBS News, BBC News and the Council on Foreign Relations. Dowd holds degrees from Butler University and Indiana University. Follow him at twitter.com/alanwdowd.

ASCF News

Scott Tilley is a Senior Fellow at the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes the “Technical Power” column, focusing on the societal and national security implications of advanced technology in cybersecurity, space, and foreign relations.

He is an emeritus professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. Previously, he was with the University of California, Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, and IBM. His research and teaching were in the areas of computer science, software & systems engineering, educational technology, the design of communication, and business information systems.

He is president and founder of the Center for Technology & Society, president and co-founder of Big Data Florida, past president of INCOSE Space Coast, and a Space Coast Writers’ Guild Fellow.

He has authored over 150 academic papers and has published 28 books (technical and non-technical), most recently Systems Analysis & Design (Cengage, 2020), SPACE (Anthology Alliance, 2019), and Technical Justice (CTS Press, 2019). He wrote the “Technology Today” column for FLORIDA TODAY from 2010 to 2018.

He is a popular public speaker, having delivered numerous keynote presentations and “Tech Talks” for a general audience. Recent examples include the role of big data in the space program, a four-part series on machine learning, and a four-part series on fake news.

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Victoria (1995).

Contact him at stilley@cts.today.

NASA's Perseverance Rover Launched on Mission to Mars

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Categories: ASCF News Bipartisianship Missile Defense

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NASA’s ambitious Perseverance rover rocketed toward Mars on a mission to find signs of life there that might have existed billions of years ago when the solar system was a cradle of evolution.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket boosted the $2.7 billion spacecraft from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida early Thursday on a 300-million-mile voyage between the planets. If all goes to schedule, the spacecraft will land on Feb. 18 at a 28-mile-wide basin called Jezero Crater just north of the Martian equator.

Mission scientists believe that between three billion and four billion years ago the crater was a vast lake fed by an ancient river delta that deposited carbonite minerals and clay potentially preserving organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life. During a two-year mission, the nuclear-powered Perseverance rover will try to detect any such biosignatures, extract them from rocks or soil and pack the samples for eventual return to Earth.

“We expect the instruments onboard will be able to detect biosignatures, but it will be very difficult to confirm that until we get them back to Earth,” said NASA planetary science division director Lori Glaze. It will require at least two additional Mars missions to pick up and return those samples, agency officials said.

The NASA Perseverance mission joins two spacecraft already on the way to Mars that were launched by China and the United Arab Emirates earlier this month. It is the first Mars mission for both countries. All three are expected to arrive at Mars at about the same time next year.

NASA’s 2,200-pound Perseverance rover is the most complex off-world vehicle NASA has ever launched, agency engineers said. In a cab the size of a compact car, it packs 13 onboard computers, 23 cameras and seven onboard experiments designed to probe rocks and sediments for signs left by microscopic life-forms—if any ever existed on the planet.

About six weeks after a safe landing, the rover will unpack and deploy an experimental robotic helicopter called Ingenuity, which will be flight-tested in the first powered flights on another planet.

Photo: JOE SKIPPER/REUTERS

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-s-perseverance-rover-launched-on-mission-to-mars-11596111859

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