NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter successfully completed its 54th flight on Aug. 3, the first flight since the helicopter cut its July 22 flight short. The 25-second up-and-down hop provided data that could help the Ingenuity team determine why its 53rd flight ended early.

Flight 53 was planned as a 136-second scouting flight dedicated to collecting imagery of the planet's surface for the Perseverance Mars rover science team.

The basic idea of turning an asteroid into a rotating space habitat has existed for a while. Despite that, it's always seemed relatively far off regarding technologies, so the concept hasn't received much attention over the years. But, if you're retired and have an underlying interest in researching space habitats, developing a detailed plan for turning an asteroid into one seems like a great use of time.

And that is precisely what David W. Jensen, a retired Technical Fellow at Rockwell Collins, recently did. He released a 65-page paper on the arXiv preprint server that details an easy-to-understand, relatively inexpensive, and feasible plan to turn an asteroid into a space habitat.