For the second time this week, a pair of astronauts floated outside Friday to get the International Space Station ready for new solar panels.

In-situ resource utilization (ISRU) is becoming an increasingly popular topic as space exploration begins to focus on landing on the surface of other bodies in the solar system. ISRU focuses on making things that are needed to support an exploration mission out of materials that are easily accessible at the site being explored, like European explorers in the New World building canoes out of the wood they found there.

Recently NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) has started looking more closely at a variety of ISRU projects as part of their Phase I Fellows program. One of the projects selected, led by Amelia Grieg at the University of Texas, El Paso, is a mining technique that would allow explorers to dig up water, metal and other useful materials, all at the same time.

Most ISRU schemes focus on using water, as it important for many exploration efforts. However, those schemes usually discard the rest of the material that is gathered in an effort to collect the water.

President Joe Biden on Thursday congratulated the NASA team responsible for last month's successful landing of an six-wheeled rover on Mars and for giving the country a "dose of confidence" at a moment when the nation's reputation as a scientific leader has been tattered by the coronavirus pandemic.

Biden speaking in video conference call with the leadership of space agency's jet propulsion laboratory team expressed awe over the Feb. 18 landing of Perseverance.

Perseverance, the biggest, most advanced rover ever sent by NASA, became the ninth spacecraft since the 1970s to successfully land on Mars, traveling some 300 million miles in nearly seven months, as part of an ongoing quest to study whether there was once life on the planet.