Looking for answers to Mars mysteries in the wind, Ep. 225

Here's what's happening this week on CNET's CRAVE blog. A student from MIT has developed optical detection software that allows a drone to autonomously fly at speeds up to 30 mph, avoiding trees along the way. MIT computer science and artificial intelligence PhD student, Andrew Barry built the drone out of standard component parts adding stereoscopic cameras to both the wings So that the drone can scan its surroundings in real time up to 33 feet in front of it. They embedded an algorithm into the software that allows the drone to see its surroundings and turn to avoid objects in its path autonomously. The software quickly extracts depth information from the view of the cameras at a rate of 120 frames per second at a speed of 8.3 milliseconds per frame. Barry is working to improve his, Algorithm to work at different depths, allowing a drone to fly safely through more crowded settings. [MUSIC] NASA released a video of the Sun this week that was produced at NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory in stunning 4K ultra-high- definition video. Capturing these close-up video images of the Sun is no walk in the park However. Each minute of footage takes the observatory media specialists about ten hours to produce using a complicated process. According to the video, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory images the sun every 12 seconds and ten wavelengths have invisible ultraviolet Of light. Each wavelength is assigned a unique color and every image is eight times the resolution of HD video. [MUSIC] X Dubai and Jetman Dubai took to the skies again for another jetpack flying adventure centered around in Emirates Airlines Airbus A380 super jumbo jet. The jetpack wearing daredevils only have about ten minutes of fuel in those personal jetpack devices But it was enough time to get some amazing footage of the jetpacks flying alongside the massive jumbo jet. Make sure to read the article and watch the video in its entirety embed in the [UNKNOWN] blog post. [MUSIC] NASA's newest Mars spacecraft, Maven, was launched in 2013 to help figure out why Mars lost its early atmosphere. It arrived at the planet to begin orbiting Mars in 2014, and since then has provided NASA scientists with vast amounts of data, to help crack this long standing mystery. Well, this morning NASA held a live press conference to explain what it believes caused Mars to be stripped of its atmosphere. To help illustrate what researchers have discovered, NASA lead scientist, Michael Meyer, borrowed a song lyric from Bob Dylan, stating, The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind. NASA scientists believe that Mars was stripped of its atmosphere by solar winds radiating from our own sun which over a long period of time eventually blew away all of the ions in Mars' atmosphere. It is believed that Mars was once a lush, water covered planet just like Earth. But because of its lack of a magnetic Field which repelled solar winds from the Sun on Earth. Mars was vulnerable and was basically being constantly pressure washed by charged ions blasting its surface from the Sun. This allowed the Mars atmosphere to slowly, Escape and dissipate into space leaving it a cold, desert like, lifeless planet. Stay tuned to the crave blog for more information on NASA's big announcement. All right guys. That's the show, thank you very much for watching. As always, you can find all these news stories at CNET's Crave blog at crave.cnet.com. Make sure you follow Crave on Twitter @Crave and check out this week's Crave giveaway. This week's Crave giveaway is the Blast Motion Easton Power Sensor for improving your baseball swing. Go to the blog and enter to win. [BLANK_AUDIO] [SOUND] [BLANK_AUDIO] [SOUND] [BLANK_AUDIO] [SOUND]