Aaron Hamm, an assistant hotel engineer who deals with HVAC, cooling systems, and maintenance, lacks the traditional qualifications to be an astronaut. But that doesn't mean he wants to stay on Earth. "I felt… I was discouraged as a child [from becoming an astronaut] just because of how unbelievably competitive it is,” Hamm told Ars. “I’m a very intelligent person and I’m driven to try and achieve my dreams but, at the same time, I felt like it was an really unrealistic goal to try and pursue. As smart as I am, there's always plenty of people that are smarter.”

Hamm, an Ars forum user by the name of Quisquis, has just applied for the private Mars One colony program. For him, a large part of the appeal is that the program seeks a different type of astronaut.

“I think that the Mars One mission and the idea of going somewhere that you're not coming back from for life… that's different than the general astronaut program,” he said. Hamm also emphasized his own pioneer spirit, which he will need if accepted—there’s no return journey planned for Mars One colonists.

A new horizon

Mars One is a private space mission that hopes to send a group of people to Mars in a decade and leave them there to foster the first human colony. It has received endorsement and support from the likes of Gerard ’t Hooft, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. But it has also been criticized on several counts, including treating a serious life-threatening scenario as a reality show for the purposes of monetization and seeking funding while being glib about nearly all the practical details.

Mars One—the private space project that plans to be the first to send humans to Mars and leave them there—officially opened its virtual doors to would-be Mars residents, per a press release and press conference Monday. Today is the first day anyone who has ever thought it might be neat to put on a helmet and see Earth from outside its atmosphere can submit an application to be considered for the first permanent human colony on Mars. The Mars One foundation reports it has received 10,000 messages of interest about the program prior to this point. We'll soon see how many of those translate to applications.

The Mars One project was started by Bas Lansdorp, a Dutch entrepreneur, with the goal of setting up a small, human-inhabited outpost on Mars. The tentative schedule has supplies landing on the red planet in 2016 and the settlers in 2023.

Lansdorp has asserted many times that all of the technology necessary to accomplish the mission already exists. It's just a matter of coordinating a lot of sophisticated hardware, billions of dollars, cooperation between a few hundred people and companies. (Oh, and the whole trust thing from a few people who will leave Earth and never come back.)

NASA’s Curiosity rover has cracked open a Mars rock that contained several elements necessary to life as we know it. The presence of the elements, including hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, suggest that the planet may once have played host to a habitable environment, according to a news release and NASA press conference held on Tuesday.

The data was obtained from a sample collected and analyzed by the rover in a location on Mars’ called Yellowknife Bay in Gale Crater. The area was home to an “ancient river system or intermittently wet lake bed.” The site was only a few hundred yards away from where the rover collected samples of smectite, or clays that form in the presence of water, back in September 2012.

The full list of relevant elements were sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and carbon. Scientists noted that a mixture of oxidized, less-oxidized, and non-oxidized chemicals were present in the sample, and some of these could be favorable energy sources for some of the microbes that live on Earth. Researchers first noted the samples' distinct characteristics when they cut into the soil and found the interior to be gray, rather than Mars’ characteristic red.

Mars clearly had a watery history, with strong evidence of flowing streams and even some indications that an ocean was present in the distant past. The fate of Mars' water isn't understood, but there's evidence that some may have gone underground and is currently circulating in the bedrock of the red planet.

A study being released by Science finds further evidence that some of Mars' underground waters have burst to the surface violently. Using radar imaging, a team of scientists has tracked a series of channels that are buried under more recent features and followed them back towards their source. The imaging showed that the main channel was about 40 kilometers wide and at least 70 meters deep. That's roughly the same size as the features carved by the largest well-characterized floods on Earth.

The work involved a radar instrument called SHARAD on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The radar can penetrate some surface features, revealing several layers beneath—depending on how they reflect the incoming radiation. This turned out to be extremely useful at the feature in question, Marte Vallis. It's one of a number of features on the Martian surface that suggests catastrophic flooding, but it's quite young at 500 million years old, long after water was thought to be common on the Martian surface. Unfortunately, studying it is complicated by the fact that it has been buried by an even younger feature: volcanic eruptions that make it difficult to even identify the source of the flood waters.

A comet spotted earlier this year may pass close enough for Mars to feel the rock’s hot breath down its neck, according to new reports that surfaced Monday and Tuesday. The comet, named C/2013 A1, may pass within a few tens of thousands of miles of Mars’ center, with a remote chance that the miles-wide comet will collide with the planet.

C/2013 A1 “Siding Spring,” a comet between 5 and 30 miles wide, was spotted January 3 by astronomer Robert H. McNaught. Researchers were able to look back in the image history of the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona and spot signs of the comet as early as December 8, 2012. NASA states that other archives have traced sightings back to October 4, 2012.

According to scientists at NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office, Siding Spring originates from the Oort Cloud of our Solar System and has been journeying to this point for more than a million years. In less than two years, around October 19, 2014, the comet will pass very close to Mars.

The Mars rover Curiosity is switching over to a backup computer after a corrupted file caused the primary, "A-side" computer to glitch. On Wednesday, February 27, the rover failed to send its daily data dump back to Earth and switch into sleep mode. Mission Control made the decision to switch Curiosity over to its backup computer and suspend its scientific work for a few days.

"Don't flip out: I just flipped over to my B-side computer while the team looks into an A-side memory issue," NASA posted on the rover's Twitter account.

Like most spacecraft, Curiosity has two computer systems on board. The A-side computer is used for daily operations and the B-side is used as a backup. Until the B-side computer has been updated with the data necessary to assume control of the rover, Curiosity will sit on the Martian surface in "safe mode."

A newly announced and privately organized mission to Mars, dubbed "Inspiration Mars: A Mission For America," intends to give one man-and-woman married couple a round-trip ticket around the red planet less than five years from now, as disclosed in a press conference Wednesday. Though the project shares its space travel goals with no less than President Barack Obama, its details and time frame are getting the side-eye from scientists and researchers for its unbridled optimism.

Inspiration Mars is the brainchild of Dennis Tito, an entrepreneur who paid $20 million in 2001 to the Russian space program to become the first space tourist. The Mars trip he envisions would be 501 days in total, and would fly the two people on board the ship to, around, within 100 miles of, and back from Mars, but would never actually land on the planet.

Forbes points out that the mission has a myriad of hurdles ahead of it. Funding appears to be muddy, and the project is currently without support from NASA or any of the major commercial space exploration companies like SpaceX (though Tito has an agreement to develop tech with NASA). The spacecraft for the mission has yet to be designed and is a collaboration with Paragon Space Development using current space technology.

Regardless how you feel about the manned space program, it's difficult to argue with the logic that motivated one of the more unusual experiments we've ever reported on. Given that we're almost certain to send a manned mission to Mars before the end of the century, the Russian Academy of Sciences organized a six-person crew to perform a simulation of a 520-day mission to Mars.

During the simulated mission, which ran from June 3, 2010 until November 4, 2011, the crew was given plenty of things to do near the launch and landing, and period of heavy activity in the middle of the "trip," where they simulated landing on Mars and collecting samples. But, in between, they were allowed to set their own schedule and adjust their lighting and activity to their own tastes. As you might expect, this generally didn't work out well; the test subjects gradually became sedentary, and many had problems holding to a steady sleep schedule. The most striking thing, however, is that they generally adopted different sleep schedules, leaving one of the crew having a "day" that was an hour longer than the rest, and another napping mid-day.

The people running the simulation went out of their way to make things as accurate as they could. The long list of factors that they added included "a spaceship-like habitat; continuous isolation from Earth’s environment; realistic mission activities; a mid-mission landing on a simulated Mars surface; accurate mission duration and timeline; operations between crew and mission controllers; communication delays inherent in interplanetary travel; limited consumable resources; exercise equipment for physical fitness; diurnal weekly work schedule; crew control of habitat lighting; and video monitoring of crew in habitat common areas." Note the delay in communications—that could range anywhere from a low of a few minutes to over 20.

NASA has announced plans for a second Mars rover to launch in 2020, but other sources suggest that NASA's new budget may cut joint Mars programs with Europe, according to the Associated Press. The sources also suggest that NASA will cut its exploration programs for other planets in part to fund the replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, named the James Webb Telescope.

The current Mars budget is $581.7 million, but it's set to be cut by over $200 million, according to two scientists briefed on the matter who spoke to the AP. Mars exploration missions in 2016 and 2018 that were to be jointly conducted with European programs will be cut, said the scientists. According to the AP, the European Space Agency is speaking to Russia about filling the US’s vacancy in the programs, which would map sources of methane on Mars and drill into the ground for evidence of life.

In a press event at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, NASA associate administrator for science John Grunsfeld announced that the administration will in fact play roles in the two ESA missions. NASA will provide the UHF communications systems for the 2016 mission, and in 2018 will provide a molecular analyzer for the ExoMars rover. Grunsfeld confirmed that the Russian space agencies will constitute a “major partnership” in both ESA-led missions.