Missions to Mars

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7 minutes ago, Stan said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-57233756

100 days since Nasa's Perseverance landed on Mars!

Have you seen the recent ones with the clouds? Mind blowing. Some moving gif images here as well: https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8956/nasas-curiosity-rover-captures-shining-clouds-on-mars/

[Stan]

4 minutes ago, nudge said:

Have you seen the recent ones with the clouds? Mind blowing. Some moving gif images here as well: https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8956/nasas-curiosity-rover-captures-shining-clouds-on-mars/

I have now!

The iridescent ones are spectacular. They all are, really, but those more so. 

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[CaaC (John)+]

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Mars Report: Update on NASA's Perseverance Rover SuperCam Instrument (June 10, 2021)

Since landing on the Red Planet, NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has been hard at work analyzing rocks and soil on the floor of Jezero Crater with the SuperCam instrument. SuperCam features a rock-vaporizing laser, camera, and microphone that can gather data from a distance.

This video provides an instrument update by Hemani Kalucha, one of the SuperCam operations team members from Caltech.

The laser pits shown are about .009 inches (250 microns) in diameter and spaced 1/8 inch (3 millimetres) apart. Sounds of an Ingenuity Mars Helicopter flight captured by the SuperCam microphone can be heard in the video NASA’s Perseverance Rover Hears Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in Flight.

For more information on Perseverance, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/perseverance.

 

Edited June 13, 2021 by CaaC (John)

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[CaaC (John)+]

JESERO CRATER

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Oldest ever methane-cycling microfossils discovered

The three billion-year-old fossils offer hints about life on Mars.

Optical microscope image of the filamentous microfossils. Credit: B. Cavalazzi

Researchers have discovered the fossilised remains of 3.4-billion-year-old methane-cycling microbes that lived in a hydrothermal system beneath the ancient seafloor – the oldest microfossils of this type found to date.

According to the study, published in Science Advances, these microfossils provide evidence that this type of life can survive in extreme volcanic environments – maybe even Mars.

“We found exceptionally well-preserved evidence of fossilised microbes that appear to have flourished along the walls of cavities created by warm water from hydrothermal systems a few metres below the seafloor,” says Barbara Cavalazzi of the University of Bologna, Italy, and the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, who led the study.

“Sub-surface habitats, heated by volcanic activity, are likely to have hosted some of Earth’s earliest microbial ecosystems and this is the oldest example that we have found to date.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/3-billion-year-old-microfossils-found-below-the-seafloor/

 

Edited July 16, 2021 by CaaC (John)

[SchalkeUK]

Anyone want to join me in sending a message to Tommy in Dussledorf - check  the Bundesliga posts if you do!

[CaaC (John)+]

NASA probe determines Mars Internal structure.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-57935742

 

[nudge+]

Perseverance to take its first core sample today.

 

[nudge+]

A mystery...

So the drilling was succesful, the drilling hole is there, but the sample is not in the container tube  

 

[CaaC (John)+]

11 hours ago, nudge said:

So the drilling was succesful, the drilling hole is there, but the sample is not in the container tube

Disintegates, dissolves in the tube or maybe @Batard has got that alian from Mars in his Mafia game and can make things vanish. 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Perseverance Mars rover's first rock sample goes missing

Engineers are trying to work out what went wrong when the US space agency's Perseverance rover tried to gather its first rock core on Mars.

The robot's mechanisms seemed to work perfectly but when a metal tube expected to hold the sample was examined, it was found to be empty.

The mission team think the particular properties of the target rock may have been to blame.

More images and telemetry pulled down from Mars should solve the puzzle.

"The initial thinking is that the empty tube is more likely a result of the rock target not reacting the way we expected during coring, and less likely a hardware issue with the sampling and caching system," said Jennifer Trosper, project manager for Perseverance at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

"Over the next few days, the team will be spending more time analysing the data we have, and also acquiring some additional diagnostic data to support understanding the root cause for the empty tube."

FULL REPORT

 

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Mars rover: Nasa confident Perseverance has first rock sample

The US space agency's Perseverance rover looks to have retrieved a rock sample on Mars at the second attempt.

The robot's drill made a neat hole in a thick slab dubbed "Rochette".

Images on Thursday appeared to show a rock core was securely picked up. A previous attempt last month saw the sample crumble to dust.

If Perseverance has been successful this time, it would represent the first ever rock section collected on another planet intended for return to Earth.

The rover is tasked with gathering more than two dozen cores over the next year or so that will be fetched home by a joint US and European effort later this decade.

FULL REPORT

 

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MISSION UPDATES | September 10, 2021

Sols 3235-3237: The Colors of Mars

One of our ChemCam LIBS targets in today’s plan is named "Chocolate Bloc." And aside from making me hungry, it reminded me of the wide range of colors of Mars. Colors ranging from the bright white of its polar caps, to the deep chocolate browns of the sand dunes, to a thousand shades of red, pink, tan, and yellow. It reminded me of a scene in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy of novels where the characters try to identify all the various colors they see outside on the planet’s surface. But color is often very much in the eye of the beholder and making it as uniform as possible, so different locations can be properly compared, is an important job. Mastcam regularly takes pictures of its (now very dusty and seemingly uniform in color) calibration target for this very purpose (this is the most recent one from last weekend).

Aside from getting the measure of Chocolate Bloc, our primary goal this weekend is for SAM to study the material from our Maria Gordon drill hole. SAM will heat the material to very high temperatures to determine what it’s made of and how water may have interacted with the rock in the distant past. We’ll also do a variety of imaging with Mastcam and a ChemCam long-distance image of Rafael Navarro mountain.

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission-updates/9037/sols-3235-3237-the-colors-of-mars/

 

 

Edited September 12, 2021 by CaaC (John)

[CaaC (John)+]

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Plucky Mars rover’s perseverance rewarded

Perseverance’s sample success triggers interplanetary relay race.

NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars has at last found a rock that’s a hard place.

After an initial failed attempt last month, the robotic prospector has successfully drilled two core samples from a Martian rock and stowed them away for eventual return to Earth.

An unexpected failure occurred in early August when Perseverance attempted to drill into a rock on the floor of Jezero Crater. This ancient lakebed is hoped to contain traces of past life.

That core disintegrated into dust, raising fears that the drill may have malfunctioned and ruined the sample.

But while the rock selected for the first sample was appealing because it appeared to be among the oldest rocks on the crater floor, it was also heavily weathered. That meant it might simply have been too soft, Jessica Samuels, the rover’s surface mission manager, said Saturday at a press briefing.

The team then turned its attention to a low ridge 560 metres to the west, because it appeared to be capped by a layer of tougher rock. A suitable contender (about the size of a mailbox) was identified, and Perseverance successfully drilled two samples out of it. Each core is about 6 centimetres long and the diameter of a piece of blackboard chalk.

The rover will carry these samples until enough are collected to create a cache. A future rover will then locate and retrieve the cache before delivering it to a lander. That, in turn, will launch the samples into space where an orbiting satellite will catch them before redirecting them to Earth.

It’s a multi-stage process that can’t possibly begin before 2026. That means the samples won’t arrive on Earth before 2031 at the earliest. But, with the first two samples literally in the can, NASA’s Planetary Science Division Director Lori Glaze says “[this] can be officially declared as the start of the Mars sample-return relay”.

“While it was a long time waiting, it feels fantastic,” she adds.

Matt Robinson, Perseverance’s strategic sampling operations team chief, adds that it’s proof of the capabilities of super-complex robotic systems. With its robotic arm, coring drill and intricate methods for containing, sealing and storing the sample, he says “[this] is the most complex mechanism ever flown into space”.

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Read more: Insight into the Martian underworld

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Meanwhile, scientists are already learning from the samples.

Before drilling into a rock, the rover uses an abrasion tool to rub away the top few millimetres of weathered surface to see what’s inside, “just like geologists in the field who hammer a rock to see a fresh surface,” says Julia Goreva, the team’s return sample investigation scientist.

But instead of looking at the exposed surface with the naked eye or a magnifying glass, the rover activates various precision instruments. These look for clues as to what the rock is made of—and whether or not it is worth drilling.

What Perseverance found was that the rock was probably volcanic. This is useful because volcanic rocks are easy to date via the decay of long-lived radioactive elements such as uranium. This, in turn, helps scientists puzzle out the chronology of events in Jezero Crater – including the emergence and disappearance of the potentially life-supporting lake they know once filled it.

But the instruments also spotted grains of what appears to be mineral salts deposited long ago by percolating water. This is important, Goreva says, because salt grains like these might retain microscopic bubbles of billion-year-old water. If so, these would allow scientists back on Earth to peer back to the dawn of Martian history.

Meanwhile, the rover’s mission is to rove. It’s already headed for its next sample site, a mere 200 metres away, called South Séítah. It’s a zone of low ridges, sand dunes, boulders and rock shards. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory mission scientist Ken Farley compares this terrain to “broken dinner plates”, offering another chance to reconstruct the sequence of events that shaped the crater and its one-time lake.

After that, the geological treasure hunt continues.

“Our job’s not done,” Robinson says. “We have an additional 35 sample tubes [for] samples.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/exploration/mars-rover-perseverance-gathers-first-rock-samples/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

A couple of months old but this video from Mars makes me tingle all over, I wished to fuck I was there just walking around...sigh. 

Tour Mount Sharp With Curiosity: This video tour highlights a new panorama from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, captured on July 3, 2021 (the 3,167th Martian day, or sol of the mission). Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS. 

 

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Rejuvenated Insight ‘hears’ three strong marsquakes

NASA’s InSight Mars lander has hit two major milestones: 1,000 sols (Mars days) on the surface, and the detection of the three largest marsquakes ever recorded.

After succeeding in a bold attempt to brush dangerous amounts of dust from its solar panels, NASA’s InSight Mars lander has hit two major milestones: 1,000 sols (Mars days) on the surface, and the detection of the three largest marsquakes ever recorded.

Earlier this year, says the mission’s principal investigator, Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, dust had reduced the capacity of the lander’s solar panels by nearly 80%. There was no indication that dust devils or other strong breezes might come by to clean them, the way they had periodically rejuvenated the Spirit and Opportunity rovers in the 2000s. And without a strong-enough wind, Banerdt says, “dust clings pretty well.”

But there’s another way to get rid of it: use the materials at hand to create a whisk broom.

And what material does Mars have a lot of that might do this? Sand.

The idea, Banerdt says, came from geologists on the team, who noted that not only does it take less wind to set sand grains in motion than to blow off clinging dust, but that tumbling sand often leaves dust-free streaks on the Martian surface. So why not use the lander’s robotic arm to put sand on the upwind side of one of the solar panels and let the wind whisk it across the surface, knocking some of the dust free in the process?

The idea, Banerdt admits, sounded so preposterous that when the scientists first suggested it, they pretty much got laughed out of the room. “The last thing you want to do is put more dirt on the panels when they’re getting dirty,” he says.

But still, everyone had seen images of how blowing sand had removed dust on the Martian surface. So, with no better option, they tried it.

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Read more: Just a little perseverance

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And it worked. It didn’t sweep away all of the dust, but it cleaned away enough that the lander is again very much a going concern.

Had nobody thought of doing this, Banerdt says, the lander’s all-important seismometer would probably have had to be shut down, or maybe reduced to operating every third or fourth day.

Instead, it was up and functional when the Martian crust rumbled. “I feel very strongly that we would not have seen these quakes if we had not been able to clean these panels the way we did,” Banerdt says.

Marsquakes were above magnitude 4.2

The quakes came in fairly rapid succession. Two were on 25 August, with magnitudes of 4.2 and 4.1. The third was on 18 September and clocked in at magnitude 4.2.

By earthly standards, none of these was huge, but Mars isn’t as tectonically active as Earth. Before these three, the record-holding Martian temblor measured in at magnitude 3.7—which, on the logarithmic scale used for measuring earthquake strength, corresponds to only one-fifth the power.

But these quakes weren’t just big. One rattled the lander’s seismometer for an hour and a half.

On Earth, such a thing would be unthinkable. Yes, Banerdt says, some giant earthquakes can make the entire Earth ring like a bell for a day or longer, but only at very low frequencies, on the order of 15–20 minutes. For the more rapid type of shaking normally detected by seismometers, he says, “I don’t think that has ever happened for more than 20 minutes.”

What caused it, he thinks, is that the marsquake set off seismic waves that initially went off in all directions. Some headed quickly toward InSight and its seismometer. Others went in different directions, then hit discontinuities in the Martian interior that reflected them back toward InSight sometime later. Some may have followed even more circuitous paths. “So, you have waves that have traveled this drunken walk to get to your seismometer,” Banerdt says. “That’s our theory.”

At the moment, he says, the sources of these quakes haven’t been localised, though it does appear that one came from 8,500 kilometres away, vastly farther than the region 1,500km away that has been the source of almost all prior events.

More sophisticated analysis, he says, may allow scientists to pinpoint the precise source, something that can be done by studying how the seismic waves are polarized (meaning that their vibrations are mostly in one plane of motion). “That’s tough,” he says, “but we can do it with some events.”

“We’re still working on it,” he says.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/exploration/marsquake-heard-by-insight/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Perseverance breathes fresh life into the mining and space sectors

Mars Rover Perseverance’s CO2-splitting MOXIE device draws the eye of the world’s biggest miners.

Members of NASA's Mars 2020 project install the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) into the chassis of NASA's next Mars rover. Credit: NASA.

When it comes to combining space ingenuity with mining pragmatism, all it takes is a little moxie.

Woodside Energy vice president of technology Jason Crusan displayed some grit of his own at the 12 Australian Space Forum in Adelaide last week, stating that his industry was looking to the stars for inspiration.

Efficiency. Resilience. Harsh environment operations.

All are shared challenges both industries could teach each other a lot about, he said. If only they would speak to each other more often.

If they did, the sky is the limit.

Crusan singled out the Mars rover Perseverance’s MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilisation Experiment).

It’s a 17kg box that breaks carbon dioxide into oxygen through a solid oxide electrolysis system at a rate of about 10 grams per hour – roughly that of a large tree. NASA says a version of this device, scaled up some 100 times, would support a human mission to the Red Planet. Not to mention eliminate the need for an otherwise massive cargo haul.

“When we send humans to Mars, we will want them to return safely, and to do that, they need a rocket to lift off the planet,” the project’s principal investigator, Michael Hech, said. “Liquid oxygen propellant is something we could make there and not have to bring with us.”

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Read more: How did Perseverance make oxygen on Mars?

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Crusan was thinking bigger.

Much bigger.

“If we could get MOXIE working, we’d want to process 500 tonnes a day,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of great uses for the MOXIE technology of Perseverance. But, again, it’s early days.

The former NASA engineer told the Space Forum that a significant hurdle to sharing such technology was that their engineers spoke different ‘languages’.

In mining, “modularity” is a term of scale – meaning a vast industrial plant split into different pieces.

In space, “modularity” is a standardised unit – such as a constellation of satellites that can work individually or together on the same task. 

Such differences aren’t only in engineering terminology. It’s also in their thinking.

“If we could actually think about how to make our energy or mining equipment better by reducing the size weight and mass, and then being able to build a thousand of them on a production line versus the very, very large builds assembled from things we had to bring onshore … there are some good lessons to be learned,” he said.

He used MOXIE as an example.

“It’s fundamentally a stack technology that could be built module (large scale) to basically crack CO2. If we could crack CO2 and make pure oxygen from it, our emissions would drop drastically for any CO2 source on any industrial plant. And MOXIE is doing that by creating an oxidiser for future human and robotic missions on Mars.”

Perseverance produced its first oxygen in April this year. The toaster-size unit successfully separated about five grams of oxygen from Mars’ mostly CO2 atmosphere.

That’s about 10 minutes of breathing time for an astronaut.

One tonne would be needed to support a Mars mission of four astronauts for a year. Seven tonnes would be required to power a rocket for the return trip to Earth.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/perseverance-breathes-fresh-life-into-the-mining-and-space-sectors/

 

 

Edited September 29, 2021 by CaaC (John)
Spacing correction

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Nasa facing Mars blackout as it prepares to lose contact with robots for two weeks

Nasa engineers send robotic explorers on Mars a list of commands in advance to carry out for the two weeks

Nasa’s robotic missions on Mars will soon be forced to go on a “short vacation” during a brief communications blackout that could disrupt regular explorations this year.

The blackout occurs on the Red planet for two weeks every two years and it could happen in October this year, which is when the space agency is planning to pause most of its robotic exploration missions, it said in a statement on Tuesday.

Nasa will stop commands to most of its missions between 2 and 16 October and give its robotic explorers a moratorium period or “a short vacation”.

“Like parents who raise youngsters to be responsible and let them go on a short vacation with their friends, they’ve done all they can to ensure the voyagers will be healthy and safe,” the space agency said in its statement.

“Each mission has been given some homework to do until they hear from us again,” said Roy Gladden, manager of the Mars Relay Network at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

“Though our Mars missions won’t be as active these next few weeks, they’ll still let us know their state of health,” Mr Gladden added.

The blackout happens because Earth and Mars, in their eternal orbits around the Sun, become obscured from each other by the fiery orb of the star, in a period known as the solar conjunction.

The solar conjunction is expected to occur between 2 and 14 October this year, when Mars will almost be on the same plane as the Sun.

With the Sun between the Earth and Mars, radio signals that are sent to the Red Planet could get corrupted by hot, ionised gas expelled by the Sun into space and may lead to unexpected behaviour from Nasa’s Martian robotic explorers.

During this period, the Perseverance rover would take weather measurements, perform a few experiments and capture new sounds on the Red Planet using its microphones. Its exploration partner, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, will remain stationary.

Nasa said its InSight lander will continue using its seismometer to look out for Marsquakes – quakes on the Red Planet – during this period while the Curiosity rover will take weather and radiation measurements.

“Nasa’s three orbiters – Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and MAVEN – will all continue relaying some data from the agency’s surface missions back to Earth, in addition to gathering their own science,” the space agency said.

While a small amount of data from these experiments will reach Earth during the Solar conjunction, Nasa said the robotic explorers would save most of their information or “homework” and transmit it once the moratorium is lifted.

https://www.independent.co.uk/space/nasa-facing-mars-blackout-as-it-prepares-to-lose-contact-with-robots-for-two-weeks-b1928998.html

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Fast and furious floods shaped Martian surface

Overflowing lakes sculpted Mars billions of years ago.

US scientists have discovered that overflowing lakes on Mars caused floods that carved out a quarter of the planet’s river valleys, creating deep chasms and shifting vast amounts of sediment.

Today, the Red Planet is a cold and dry desert, but in its early days it had an active water cycle. Before about 3.5 billion years ago, the planet’s denser atmosphere and higher surface temperatures supported water that flowed across the surface, with lakes bigger than some small seas on Earth.

Evidence for this is written in the rocks: the planet is covered in telltale geological clues, including flood-scoured outflow channels extending for hundreds of kilometres, networks of river valleys, deltas, lake beds, and rocks and minerals that could only have been formed by liquid water.

Now, a new study published in Nature has provided insights into how Mars’ enormous network of river valleys formed.

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Read more: Rejuvenated Insight ‘hears’ three strong marsquakes

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The team, led by geoscientist Timothy Goudge from the University of Texas, looked at the importance of flooding from overflowing lakes, specifically lakes that filled craters. When the water became too much to hold, it would spill over the edge of the crater and trigger catastrophic floods.

Goudge and colleagues used global maps of Martian valley systems to study the shape and form of the landscape around 262 these lakes. They compared this with river valleys elsewhere.

The river valleys near crater lakes were found to punch far above their weight – with a median depth of 170 metres they are more than twice as deep as river valleys formed elsewhere, which have a median depth of 77m.

In total, the team found that nearly a quarter of river valleys on the whole planet were carved out by lakes overflowing.

“If we think about how sediment was being moved across the landscape on ancient Mars, lake breach floods were a really important process globally,” says Goudge. “And this is a bit of a surprising result because they’ve been thought of as one-off anomalies for so long.”

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Read more: Martian climate had ups and downs

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Some of these floods, he says, may have only lasted weeks – yet left impressions still visible billions of years later. This is very different to Earth, where ongoing dynamic processes have wiped away most evidence of ancient geological features.

“When you fill [the craters] with water, it’s a lot of stored energy there to be released,” Goudge says. “It makes sense that Mars might tip, in this case, toward being shaped by catastrophism more than the Earth.”

Previous research has only focused on the scale of individual ancient lake systems, but this new study looks at the far-reaching impact of flooding lakes across the whole planet.

The researchers suggest that these floods also had an important role in shaping the rest of the surface, influencing the formation of nearby river valleys.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astrophysics/fast-and-furious-floods-shaped-martian-surface/

 

 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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RESEARCH ARTICLEMARTIAN GEOLOGY

Perseverance rover reveals an ancient delta-lake system and flood deposits at Jezero crater, Mars

 

Abstract

Observations from orbital spacecraft have shown that Jezero crater, Mars, contains a prominent fan-shaped body of sedimentary rock deposited at its western margin. The Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater in February 2021. We analyze images taken by the rover in the three months after landing. The fan has outcrop faces that were invisible from orbit, which record the hydrological evolution of Jezero crater. We interpret the presence of inclined strata in these outcrops as evidence of deltas that advanced into a lake. In contrast, the uppermost fan strata are composed of boulder conglomerates, which imply deposition by episodic high-energy floods. This sedimentary succession indicates a transition, from a sustained hydrologic activity in a persistent lake environment, to highly energetic short-duration fluvial flows.

 

Mars is currently cold and hyper-arid; liquid water is not stable at its surface. However, orbital and rover observations of features including valley networks, sedimentary fans and ancient lake beds indicate the planet once had a warmer, wetter climate (1–3). Uncertainties remain about the character, timing and persistence of aqueous activity (and therefore potential habitability) on early Mars. The Mars 2020 mission, whose main component is the Perseverance rover, is the first step in a planned multi-mission campaign to return Martian samples to Earth and examine them for potential biosignatures (4). The 45-km diameter Jezero crater was selected as the landing site based on orbital images, which showed geomorphic expressions of two sedimentary fan structures (western and northern) at the edges of the crater (5, 6). These were inferred to be river delta deposits that formed in an ancient lake basin during the Late Noachian or Early Hesperian epochs on Mars (~3.6–3.8 Ga) (5–9) (Fig. 1 and fig. S1). Spectroscopic observations from orbit have detected phyllosilicates and carbonates, minerals indicative of past aqueous environments (6, 7, 10). Rover investigations on the surface could provide insight into the evolution of Jezero’s ancient lake system and the timescale of liquid water residence on the surface.

FULL REPORT & PHOTOS

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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MISSION UPDATES | October 25, 2021

Sol 3278: Nacho Everyday Workspace

Written by Scott Guzewich, Atmospheric Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Likely because mission operations start near lunch time on the East Coast, I’m often thinking about food when I begin my planning shift. Today I was Science Operations Working Group chair and my first thought looking at the rocks near our workspace was “those look like piles of tortilla chips!” To the geologists on the team though, these incredibly thin and fragile layers indicate that the rocks were laid down in a sedimentary environment. The tilted “tortilla chip” fins indicate later water flowed through fractures in the rocks. Both the thin layers and fins can be seen along the bottom edge of the nearby Siccar Point, and it’s likely that the dark overlying material that’s still present on Siccar Point was eroded away at the location we’re parked, leaving the “tortilla chip terrain” (my term, not an official MSL feature term) exposed on the surface.

Today was a standard touch-and-go plan, with contact science on a large block (tortilla chip pile) in the workspace termed “Wardie.” We’ll also use ChemCam LIBS on another such block off to the rover’s right and take a series of Mastcam images of the various surface textures around the rover. Farther afield, we’ll take a large Mastcam mosaic of Rafael Navarro mountain and search for dust devils with Navcam.

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission-updates/9062/sol-3278-nacho-everyday-workspace/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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How to manage a mission to Mars

As principal investigator of NASA’s Insight Mars Lander, Bruce Banerdt gets to fulfil a lifelong dream.

Bruce Banerdt has the job he’s been dreaming of since he was a child growing up in the California desert, watching Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” on TV. “I always wanted to go to space,” he says.

Not that Banerdt is an astronaut. He’s principal investigator for a Mars mission. Astronauts, he realised growing up, spend a lot of time running other people’s experiments. Banerdt wanted to go to space, but he also wanted to run experiments he himself helped concoct, even if that meant managing them robotically from Earth. “I got to feeling that would be one of the best ways of going to space,” he says.

FULL REPORT