A small chunk of Mars will be heading home when the US space agency launches its latest rover mission on Thursday. Nasa's Perseverance robot will carry with it a meteorite that originated on the Red Planet and which, until now, has been lodged in the collection of London's Natural History Museum (NHM). The rock's known properties will act as a calibration target to benchmark the workings of a rover instrument. It will give added confidence to any discoveries the robot might make. This will be particularly important if Perseverance stumbles across something that hints at the presence of past life on the planet - one of the mission's great quests.

Over the past decade terms such as "Data Science", "Big Data", "Data Lake", "Machine Learning", "AI" and so forth have risen to the forefront (and sometimes fallen back again) of the everyday vocabulary used in the widest variety of industries. I do not wish to engage in an extended argument on consistent nomenclature, but there are two frequently used terms that are of particular interest to me: "Data Scientist" and "Machine Learning Engineer". In the broadest possible sense, both of these terms could be understood as referring to "technically skilled people who build machine learning solutions". "Data Scientist" is a term that over the years has become associated with a sort of generalist mathematician or statistician who can also code a bit and knows how to interpret and visualise data. More recently, the term "Machine Learning Engineer" has become associated with software developers who have picked up some mathematics along the way.

A SpaceX capsule is headed back to Earth with precious science samples from NASA's one-year space station resident. The Dragon left the International Space Station in the morning, bound for an afternoon splashdown in the Pacific, a few hundred miles off the Southern California coast. The station's big robot arm set the Dragon free over Australia. The commercial cargo craft has been packed with about 3,700 pounds of cargo, spacewalk gear and biological samples for analysis on Earth. They include blood and urine samples from astronaut Scott Kelly's one-year mission. Kelly returned to Earth in March and has since retired from NASA.

A SpaceX capsule is headed back to Earth with precious science samples from NASA's one-year spaceman. The Dragon left the International Space Station on Wednesday morning, bound for an afternoon splashdown in the Pacific. The station's big robot arm set the Dragon free over Australia. The capsule had been at the station since April 10, dropping off supplies as well as an experimental, inflatable room that will pop open in two weeks. Nearly 4,000 pounds of items are packed into the Dragon, including blood and urine samples from astronaut Scott Kelly's one-year mission.