Monday briefing: Nasa is sending a helicopter drone to Mars

Nasa Mars Helicopter — Nasa's Mars Helicopter is intended demonstrate the viability and potential of heavier-than-air vehicles on the red planet

Your WIRED daily briefing. Today, Nasa wants to carry out autonomous aerial surveillance of the red planet, the BBFC's latest porn block proposal will allow UK residents to verify their age by buying a code at a newsagent, SpaceX's redesigned Falcon 9 has made its first flight and more.

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1. Nasa is sending a helicopter drone to Mars

Nasa has revealed that it will be sending its autonomous Mars Helicopter drone to the red planet as part of the Mars 2020 rover mission (The Verge). A concept and demonstration video shows the aircraft taking off and landing, as well as giving an idea of the kind of imagery Nasa hopes it'll capture on Mars. Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, says: "We already have great views of Mars from the surface as well as from orbit. With the added dimension of a bird’s-eye view from a 'marscopter,' we can only imagine what future missions will achieve."

2. Newsagents to sell 'porn passes' to give over-18s access to restricted online content

The Telegraph has published details of a plan proposed by the British Board of Film Classificiation to introduce a "porn pass" that will allow adults to verify their age online when the UK's internet porn block comes into force later this year (TheNextWeb). The block, which has already been delayed once, will require all online porn producers to bar access to UK viewers who have not confirmed that they're over 18. To avoid discriminating against people without bank accounts and the privacy conscious, the BBFC has proposed a 16-digit passcode, priced at around £10, that can be bought from newsagents and will also verify users' adult status for buying alcohol and knives online.

3. SpaceX's redesigned Falcon 9 has made its first flight

SpaceX's Friday launch of Bangabandhu Satellite-1 – Bangladesh's first geostationary comms satellite – was the first outing for an almost entirely redesigned Falcon 9 rocket booster (Ars Technica). The new Block5 variant of the rocket is more powerful but, critically, more robust and easier to refurbish when it does require maintenance. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk claims that, unlike the previous generation of Falcon 9 boosters, the rockets will not need "regular maintenance" between flights, allowing them to be quickly turned around for multiple launches and fly around 10 times before being brought in for refurbishment.

4. This photo captures the otherworldly destruction of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano

The eruption of the Kilauea volcano on May 3, 2018, on Hawaii’s Big Island has laid waste to dozens of buildings, as molten lava plotted its course through the suburban streets of Puna district (W(RED). It has triggered a series of earthquakes across the island, with livid molten rock spurting hundreds of feet in the air from fissures in the ground. The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory recorded a lava temperature of 103°C at a crack in the ground at Leilani Estates on May 9, with residents describing the ground as mushy from the heat.

5. The Nintendo NES Classic is coming back in June

Nintendo has announced on Twitter that it will be restocking 2016's wildly successful NES Classic Mini console this summer (Polygon). While the tweet only gives us a US release date – June 29 – it's safe to assume that Europe and Japan will be getting their own new stock of the games machine, which comes preloaded with 30 titles but isn't designed to take extra games. The NES Classic's initial release sold out almost instantly, but Nintendo promises that the new version, along with the SNES Classic, will be available "through the end of the year".

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