Eight people test positive for Ebola in Guinea in 'really concerning' resurgence of disease

Four people have died of Ebola in Guinea in the first resurgence of the disease in five years, the country's health minister has said.

Remy Lamah said officials were "really concerned" about the deaths, the first since a 2013-2016 epidemic - which began in Guinea - left 11,300 dead across the region.

One of the latest victims in Guinea was a nurse who fell ill in late January and was buried on February 1, National Health Security Agency head Sakoba Keita told local media.

"Among those who took part in the burial, eight people showed symptoms: diarrhoea, vomiting and bleeding," he said

"Three of them died and four others are in hospital."

The four deaths from Ebola hemorrhagic fever occurred in the southeast region of Nzerekore, he said.

Keita also told local media that one patient had "escaped" but had been found and hospitalised in the capital Conakry. He confirmed the comments to AFP without giving further detail.

The World Health Organisation has eyed each new outbreak since 2016 with great concern, treating the most recent one in the Democratic Republic of Congo as an international health emergency.

Early Sunday, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus tweeted that the UN health agency had been informed of two suspected cases of the deadly disease in Guinea.

"Confirmatory testing underway," the tweet said, adding that WHO's regional and country offices were "supporting readiness and response efforts."

DR Congo has faced several outbreaks of the illness, with the WHO on Thursday confirming a resurgence three months after authorities declared the end of the country's latest outbreak.

The country had declared that the six-month epidemic over in November. It was the country's eleventh Ebola outbreak, claiming 55 lives out of 130 cases.

The widespread use of vaccinations, which were administered to more than 40,000 people, helped curb the disease.

The 2013-2016 outbreak sped up the development of a vaccine against Ebola, with a global emergency stockpile of 500,000 doses planned to respond quickly to future outbreaks, the vaccine alliance Gavi said in January.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/eight-people-test-positive-ebola-105712040.html

>>12923571

Look at the size of nasty one on the right, compared to everyone else. Is that a real pic, or shopped?

Mike must be jelly.

NASA rover faces 'seven minutes of terror' before landing on Mars

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - When NASA's Mars rover Perseverance, a robotic astrobiology lab packed inside a space capsule, hits the final stretch of its seven-month journey from Earth this week, it is set to emit a radio alert as it streaks into the thin Martian atmosphere.

By the time that signal reaches mission managers some 127 million miles (204 million km) away at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles, Perseverance will already have landed on the Red Planet - hopefully in one piece.

The six-wheeled rover is expected to take seven minutes to descend from the top of the Martian atmosphere to the planet's surface in less time than the 11-minute-plus radio transmission to Earth. Thus, Thursday's final, self-guided descent of the rover spacecraft is set to occur during a white-knuckled interval that JPL engineers affectionately refer to as the "seven minutes of terror."

Al Chen, head of the JPL descent and landing team, called it the most critical and most dangerous part of the $2.7 billion mission.

"Success is never assured," Chen told a recent news briefing. "And that's especially true when we're trying to land the biggest, heaviest and most complicated rover we've ever built to the most dangerous site we've ever attempted to land at."

Much is riding on the outcome. Building on discoveries of nearly 20 U.S. outings to Mars dating back to Mariner 4's 1965 flyby, Perseverance may set the stage for scientists to conclusively show whether life has existed beyond Earth, while paving the way for eventual human missions to the fourth planet from the sun. A safe landing, as always, comes first.

Success will hinge on a complex sequence of events unfolding without a hitch - from inflation of a giant, supersonic parachute to deployment of a jet-powered "sky crane" that will descend to a safe landing spot and hover above the surface while lowering the rover to the ground on a tether.

"Perseverance has to do this all on her own," Chen said. "We can't help it during this period."

If all goes as planned, NASA's team would receive a follow-up radio signal shortly before 1 p.m. Pacific time confirming that Perseverance landed on Martian soil at the edge of an ancient, long-vanished river delta and lake bed.

SCIENCE ON THE SURFACE

From there, the nuclear battery-powered rover, roughly the size of a small SUV, will embark on the primary objective of its two-year mission - engaging a complex suite of instruments in the search for signs of microbial life that may have flourished on Mars billions of years ago.

Advanced power tools will drill samples from Martian rock and seal them into cigar-sized tubes for eventual return to Earth for further analysis - the first such specimens ever collected by humankind from the surface of another planet.

Two future missions to retrieve those samples and fly them back to Earth are in the planning stages by NASA, in collaboration with the European Space Agency.

Perseverance, the fifth and by far most sophisticated rover vehicle NASA has sent to Mars since Sojourner in 1997, also incorporates several pioneering features not directly related to astrobiology.

Among them is a small drone helicopter, nicknamed Ingenuity, that will test surface-to-surface powered flight on another world for the first time. If successful, the four-pound (1.8-kg) whirlybird could pave the way for low-altitude aerial surveillance of Mars during later missions.

Another experiment is a device to extract pure oxygen from carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere, a tool that could prove invaluable for future human life support on Mars and for producing rocket propellant to fly astronauts home.

'SPECTACULAR' BUT TREACHEROUS

The mission's first hurdle after a 293-million-mile (472-million-km) flight from Earth is delivering the rover intact to the floor of Jerezo Crater, a 28-mile-wide (45-km-wide) expanse that scientists believe may harbor a rich trove of fossilized microorganisms.

"It is a spectacular landing site," project scientist Ken Farley told reporters on a teleconference.

What makes the crater's rugged terrain - deeply carved by long-vanished flows of liquid water - so tantalizing as a research site also makes it treacherous as a landing zone.

more

https://www.yahoo.com/news/nasa-rover-faces-seven-minutes-114723253.html

>>12923666

Thought it was China Lake CA?

Even if we succeed in sending humans to Mars someday — NASA hopes to do that in the 2030s — astronauts would need a place to stay once they arrive.

To research how people might one day settle on Mars, engineers and scientists at a company called Interstellar Lab are designing space-inspired villages.

In November, the company announced a plan to build a development, called the Experimental Bioregenerative Station (EBIOS), in California's Mojave Desert starting in 2021. The design for that project features glass domes for growing food and luxurious bedrooms for astronauts and visitors.

The prototype space village could be used to train astronauts for life on the red planet — or give high-paying tourists a simulation of life away from Earth.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mars-settlement-california-train-astronauts-2020-1

Also –

GOOGLE MAPS HELPED ME LOCATE the Goldstone 70 meter antenna in Mars, California, but it couldn’t help me get there. The Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex (GDSCC) sits inside Fort Irwin, the U.S. Army’s National Training Center, which appears on the map as a vast, gray expanse in the Mojave Desert. Yet despite its air of mystery, it was quite easy to get directions to the complex by using the phone to call and schedule a tour. Hoping for a signal from the Red Planet, I set out to see NASA’s massive structures and to explore our own nearby martian landscape, Rainbow Basin.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mars-in-the-mojave