Missions to Mars

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The science of Dune: Could we terraform Mars?

Dune is set on a desert planet in a distant star system, where science has enabled humans to live and breathe. Could we use the same technology to terraform Mars?

Dune is the informal name for the planet Arrakis, a rugged desert world located in the star system Canopus and where much of the story unfolds. Its two main inhabitants are a tough group of people called the Fremen, and the native Shai-Hulud – a species of giant sandworm that lives for thousands of years and can grow to more than two kilometres in length.

The major diet of the Shai-Hulud is sand, supplemented with tiny organisms known as sand plankton. As they digest this rather bland fare, their metabolism releases oxygen – which perhaps isn’t so far-fetched given that sand is just silicon dioxide (an atom of silicon bonded to two atoms of oxygen). And this gives Arrakis an atmosphere that’s breathable to humans.

On Earth, we owe our breathable atmosphere to photosynthesis by plants and bacteria. These take in carbon dioxide and water, combine them with sunlight to create food for themselves in the form of sugars, and give out oxygen along the way.

Humans – and animal life in general – could not have evolved on Earth had it not been for the Great Oxygenation Event between 2 and 2.4 billion years ago, when photosynthesising cyanobacteria living in the planet’s early oceans spewed oxygen into the atmosphere.

Read more about the science of Dune:

• Could we make a superhuman, like Dune’s hero?
• Where the ideas behind the Dune’s strange universe came from

“This culminated in an atmosphere that could support metazoans [multicellular organisms] around 540 million years ago and then us somewhat later,” says Prof Gary King, of Louisiana State University.

King is researching the possibility of using photosynthesising bacteria – also known as phototrophs – to introduce oxygen into the atmosphere of Mars. This process of engineering an alien world to make it more like our own, and potentially habitable by humans, is sometimes known as ‘terraforming’.

In 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover found direct evidence for the presence of water on Mars – a key ingredient for photosynthesis. Most of the water is frozen solid, however. One way King’s terraforming plan could work is by building automated factories on Mars that generate greenhouse gases to warm the planet and melt the ice into a usable liquid form.

“Conceivably, Mars’s temperature could be raised enough to support phototrophs. But that still leaves challenges,” says King.

One potential issue is the stream of high energy radiation pouring from the Sun. On Earth, we have a magnetic field to bat away these particles. But Mars has no such protection, and this is thought to be how the planet’s original atmosphere got blasted away – a process called ‘spallation’ – some 3.5 billion years ago.

How do you stop the same thing happening again?

King believes that once microbes have established an active biosphere on Mars, then oxygen production may be able to keep pace with the spallation losses – in much the same way that plants on Earth keep pace with the consumption of oxygen by animals and other aerobic life.

Could we survive without water?

Deserts aren’t the most hospitable locations, but Dune’s Arrakis is especially harsh. Rain never falls on this desolate planet, and its human population, the Fremen, must resort to some resourceful tactics to survive.

One of their innovations is the stillsuit, a full body suit that’s designed to recycle all moisture excreted by a human. Perspiration passes through the porous inner layers of the suit, to be filtered and collected in pockets from where it can be drunk through a tube. Urine and faeces go to the thigh pads, from where water is similarly reclaimed. The suit is powered by the walking action of the wearer. As the Fremen leader Liet Kynes puts it, “With a Fremen suit in good working order, you won’t lose more than a thimbleful of moisture a day…”

Nothing quite like a stillsuit exists in the world today, because there’s not a great need for it. In space, however, the story’s quite different.

On the International Space Station (ISS) there is no natural source of water. Any new water brought to the station has to be launched on a rocket from Earth, at a cost of several thousand dollars per litre. And for that reason, the station employs a closed-loop water purification system, similar to the Fremen stillsuits, albeit on a slightly less personal scale.

The ISS system is able to recycle up to 93 per cent of the water used by the astronauts on board. That includes moisture from the air, secreted by sweating and breathing, as well as waste washing water and urine – which is purified by distillation then centrifuged to eliminate further impurities. All waste water is passed through further treatment and filtration processes to eliminate toxins and microorganisms. The purity is then tested electrically, and any water not making the grade gets processed again.

It may come with the yuck-factor, but the drinking water on the ISS is purer than what comes out of most domestic taps.

Similar water-preservation measures are likely to be employed on Mars, where usable liquid water will be scarce. Other measures on the Red Planet could include water harvesting from the atmosphere, or using condensers to turn vapour in the atmosphere into liquid water suitable for drinking.

A research paper published in 2018, in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, detailed a trial of such a system in Saudi Arabia. It used 35 grams of a moisture-absorbing gel to extract 37 grams of water overnight at a humidity of 60 per cent.

“This technology provides a promising solution for clean water production in arid and land-locked remote regions,” the authors of the study reported.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/dune-could-we-terraform-mars/

 

 

Edited November 2, 2021 by CaaC (John)
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Which craters spat out Martian meteorites?

Using AI to trace the origins of Mars rocks.

Where do Martian meteorites come from? This seems like a tautological question, but in order to learn more about the geology of Mars, it’s important to find out where on the red planet these rocks originated before they ended up on Earth.

“The only rocks we get from Mars are Martian meteorites,” says Dr Anthony Lagain, a researcher at Curtin University’s Space Science and Technology Centre.

There aren’t many of these Martian rocks on Earth, making it difficult to draw conclusions about the geology of the planet in the same way we can study Earth.

“It’s very important to understand: what is the context of these rocks?” says Lagain. “Where are they coming from?”

Lagain and colleagues have used a supercomputer and an algorithm they developed to learn more about these meteorites. In doing so, the researchers have been able to say that a group of meteorites likely began in a couple of craters in Mars’ Tharsis region, before their ejection 1.1 million years ago.

A paper describing their research is published in Nature Communications.

The researchers figured out the origin of these rocks by looking at craters on the Martian surface.

“When the rocks are being ejected from the surface, they are being ejected by an impact,” explains Lagain.

In order to make it to Earth, these impacts need to have come at an angle and force that launches rocks off the planet. Such impacts should leave behind craters of certain shapes and sizes. Secondary craters, which form from matter ejected by a larger crater, can yield a lot of information here.

Unfortunately, secondary craters are very small, and there are millions of them on Mars, so it would take a lifetime to manually find the meteorite-generating craters.

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Read more: Do exoplanets have plate tectonics?

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This is why the researchers used an AI to examine the Martian surface.

“The idea is to try to detect all of these small secondary craters in order to identify … larger craters that are responsible for the ejection of Martian meteorites,” says Lagain.

The researchers did this by feeding a convolutional neural network (a type of machine learning algorithm) images of craters, where the craters had been marked out.

“Then you apply it on very high-resolution imagery, and what it will give you is a list of the craters,” says Lagain.

The algorithm was able to put together a database of 90 million impact craters on the Martian surface.

This could then be used to determine the origin of shergottites, one of the Martian meteorite groups that have been found on the Earth’s surface. The researchers traced these meteorites to the Tooting and 09-000015 craters, both in the Tharsis region of the red planet.

This has interesting implications for the geology of Mars.

“This finding implies that volcanic eruptions occurred in this region 300 million years ago, which is very recent at a geological time scale,” says Professor Gretchen Benedix, also from Curtin.

“It also provides new insights on the structure of the planet, beneath this volcanic province.”

Lagain says that the algorithm, which was co-developed with CSIRO and Curtin computer science researchers, can now also be used on other planetary bodies, as well as in identifying the origins of other Martian meteorite groups.

The researchers are planning to examine the surface of the Moon and Mercury next.

The algorithm can also “be applied to Earth to assist with managing agriculture, the environment and even, potentially, natural disasters such as fires or floods”, according to Lagain.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astronomy/martian-meteorites-origin-craters-ai/

 

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False fossils could hamper search for life on Mars

Chemical processes could mimic signs of extraterrestrial life, study says.

If you’re an interplanetary alien hunter scouring the red expanses of Mars for signs of life, you’re more likely to come across microbes than little green men. You’re even more likely to come across fossils of ancient critters that lived billions of years ago.

But new research warns that chemical processes can create “pseudofossils”, potentially fooling future exo-palaeontologists.

“At some stage a Mars rover will almost certainly find something that looks a lot like a fossil, so being able to confidently distinguish these from structures and substances made by chemical reactions is vital,” says astrobiologist Sean McMahon from the University of Edinburgh, UK.

“For every type of fossil out there, there is at least one non-biological process that creates very similar things, so there is a real need to improve our understanding of how these form.”

In a study published in the Journal of the Geological Society, McMahon and colleagues from the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford assessed dozens of known processes that could have created life-like traces in Martian rocks.

Many chemical processes can mimic the structures created by microscopic lifeforms, like bacterial cells or carbon-based molecules that make up the building blocks of life as we know it.

Stromatolites are one example of fossils that could be impersonated. These rock-like structures formed from layers deposited by communities of blue-green algae. Called “living fossils”, they are still found in shallow aquatic environments today, and at more than 3.5 billion years old they’re among the oldest evidence for life on Earth.

But non-biological processes can produce pseudofossils that mimic the domes and columns of stromatolites. Surprisingly, similar deposits can build up in places like factory floors, where cars are spray-painted, as well as more natural processes like the deposition of silica around hot springs, some of which have recently been found on Mars.

Another example of ambiguous fossils can be found in sandstone beds from the Ediacaran period, 550 million years ago. Animal and plant-like imprints are embedded in “textured” rocks, where the texture actually represents fossilised microbial mats that once covered the ancient sea floor.

A joint Australian-US team has recently been awarded NASA funding to see if AI can distinguish between rocks that are formed from biological signatures (like these microbial mats) or from purely abiotic chemical processes.

The team’s ultimate goal is to apply similar machine learning techniques to geological images taken by Mars rovers.

This new paper by UK astrobiologists says that research like this may be key to the success of current and future exobiology missions.

“We have been fooled by life-mimicking processes in the past,” says co-author Julie Cosmidis, a geobiologist from the University of Oxford. “On many occasions, objects that looked like fossil microbes were described in ancient rocks on Earth and even in meteorites from Mars, but after deeper examination they turned out to have non-biological origins.

“This article is a cautionary tale in which we call for further research on life-mimicking processes in the context of Mars, so that we avoid falling into the same traps over and over again.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astrobiology/false-fossils-on-mars-could-hamper-search-for-life/

 

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MISSION UPDATES | December 1, 2021

Sols 3314-3315: Bountiful, Beautiful Boulders!

Written by Lucy Thompson, Planetary Geologist at University of New Brunswick

The engineers at JPL responsible for driving Curiosity yet again delivered a perfect drive to some boulders that the science team have been interested in investigating. The large boulders are thought to represent the darker, resistant rocks exposed just above us that cap the underlying less resistant, lighter coloured rocks we have been driving over. The caprocks and boulders both show two different textures; 1) layered and 2) more massive and irregular with cavities. The team want to examine these different textures in more detail and determine whether there are differences in composition between the two. We will also be able to compare the chemistry of these boulders with the pediment capping sandstones we analyzed when we first ascended the pediment. Does the more massive texture represent alteration of the layered caprock? This contact is an important one within Gale crater and represents an unconformity (a gap in time) between the underlying Mount Sharp group (laid down in lakes and rivers) and the overlying Siccar Point group (primarily wind-blown sedimentary rocks).

We are able to place the APXS and MAHLI instruments in contact with the “Yarrow Stone” target, which will allow us to examine the chemistry and close-up texture of the more massive rock. We can compare the composition with the small, layered float, APXS target, “Camusnagaul,” acquired in yesterday’s plan. ChemCam will use passive spectroscopy to examine the same “Yarrow Stone” target, and LIBS to look at another spot on the same boulder (“Avochie”), also with the massive texture. We will examine the layered, “Borve” target on the same block with ChemCam LIBS. Mastcam will acquire complementary imaging of these targets and the surrounding area. MAHLI will also image two of the layered targets (“Whaligoe Steps” and “Arainn”), which we may try to place APXS on over the weekend. To investigate the probable source area for these boulders, we plan to take Mastcam and ChemCam RMI imaging of the pediment.

Environmental monitoring activities will include a Navcam dust devil movie and line of site observation, a Mastcam tau, and SAM atmospheric observation. Standard DAN, RAD and REMS activities round out the plan.

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission-updates/9087/sols-3314-3315-bountiful-beautiful-boulders/

 

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Taken by Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z instrument, this video features an enhanced-color composite image that pans across Jezero Crater’s delta on Mars. The delta formed billions of years ago from sediment an ancient river carried to the mouth of a lake that once existed in the crater.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

The findings by rover scientists highlight the diversity of samples geologists and future scientists associated with the agency’s Mars Sample Return program will have to study.

Scientists with NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover mission have discovered that the bedrock their six-wheeled explorer has been driving on since landing in February likely formed from red-hot magma. The discovery has implications for understanding and accurately dating critical events in the history of Jezero Crater – as well as the rest of the planet.

The team has also concluded that rocks in the crater have interacted with water multiple times over the eons and that some contain organic molecules.

These and other findings were presented today during a news briefing at the American Geophysical Union fall science meeting in New Orleans.

Even before Perseverance touched down on Mars, the mission’s science team had wondered about the origin of the rocks in the area. Were they sedimentary – the compressed accumulation of mineral particles possibly carried to the location by an ancient river system? Or where they igneous, possibly born in lava flows rising to the surface from a now long-extinct Martian volcano?

“I was beginning to despair we would never find the answer,” said Perseverance Project Scientist Ken Farley of Caltech in Pasadena. “But then our PIXL instrument got a good look at the abraded patch of a rock from the area nicknamed ‘South Séítah,’ and it all became clear: The crystals within the rock provided the smoking gun.”

The drill at the end of Perseverance’s robotic arm can abrade, or grind, rock surfaces to allow other instruments, such as PIXL, to study them. Short for Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, PIXL uses X-ray fluorescence to map the elemental composition of rocks. On Nov. 12, PIXL analyzed a South Séítah rock the science team had chosen to take a core sample from using the rover’s drill. The PIXL data showed the rock, nicknamed “Brac,” to be composed of an unusual abundance of large olivine crystals engulfed in pyroxene crystals.

“A good geology student will tell you that such a texture indicates the rock formed when crystals grew and settled in a slowly cooling magma – for example a thick lava flow, lava lake, or magma chamber,” said Farley. “The rock was then altered by water several times, making it a treasure trove that will allow future scientists to date events in Jezero, better understand the period in which water was more common on its surface, and reveal the early history of the planet. Mars Sample Return is going to have great stuff to choose from!”  

The multi-mission Mars Sample Return campaign began with Perseverance, which is collecting Martian rock samples in search of ancient microscopic life. Of Perseverance’s 43 sample tubes, six have been sealed to date – four with rock cores, one with Martian atmosphere, and one that contained “witness” material to observe any contamination the rover might have brought from Earth. Mars Sample Return seeks to bring select tubes back to Earth, where generations of scientists will be able to study them with powerful lab equipment far too large to send to Mars.

Still to be determined is whether the olivine-rich rock formed in a thick lava lake cooling on the surface or in a subterranean chamber that was later exposed by erosion.

This graphic depicts Perseverance’s entry into “Séítah” from both an orbital and subsurface perspective. The lower image is a subsurface “radargram” from the rover’s RIMFAX instrument; the red lines indicate link subsurface features to erosion-resistant rocky outcrops visible above the surface.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/USGS/FFI

 

Organic Molecules

Also great news for Mars Sample Return is the discovery of organic compounds by the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument. The carbon-containing molecules are not only in the interiors of abraded rocks SHERLOC analyzed, but in the dust on non-abraded rock.

Confirmation of organics is not a confirmation that life once existed in Jezero and left telltale signs (biosignatures). There are both biological and non-biological mechanisms that create organics.

“Curiosity also discovered organics at its landing site within Gale Crater,” said Luther Beegle, SHERLOC principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “What SHERLOC adds to the story is its capability to map the spatial distribution of organics inside rocks and relate those organics to minerals found there. This helps us understand the environment in which the organics formed. More analysis needs to be done to determine the method of production for the identified organics.”

The preservation of organics inside ancient rocks – regardless of origin – at both Gale and Jezero Craters does mean that potential biosignatures (signs of life, whether past or present) could be preserved, too. “This is a question that may not be solved until the samples are returned to Earth, but the preservation of organics is very exciting. When these samples are returned to Earth, they will be a source of scientific inquiry and discovery for many years,” Beegle said.

Six facsimile sample tubes hang on the sample tube board in this image taken in the offices of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

 

‘Radargram’

Along with its rock-core sampling capabilities, Perseverance has brought the first ground-penetrating radar to the surface of Mars. RIMFAX (Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Experiment) creates a “radargram” of subsurface features up to about 33 feet (10 meters) deep. Data for this first released radargram was collected as the rover drove across a ridgeline from the “Crater Floor Fractured Rough” geologic unit into the Séítah geologic unit.

The ridgeline has multiple rock formations with a visible downward tilt. With RIMFAX data, Perseverance scientists now know that these angled rock layers continue at the same angle well below the surface. The radargram also shows the Séítah rock layers project below those of Crater Floor Fractured Rough. The results further confirm the science team’s belief that the creation of Séítah preceded Crater Floor Fractured Rough. The ability to observe geologic features even below the surface adds a new dimension to the team’s geologic mapping capabilities at Mars.

More About Perseverance

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-perseverance-mars-rover-makes-surprising-discoveries

 

Edited December 16, 2021 by CaaC (John)
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5 January 2022 /  Ellen Phiddian
Perseverance’s latest discovery: more organic molecules on Mars

Elementary: SHERLOC discovers exciting signatures in the Red Planet’s rocks.

 

We’ve known for a few years that Mars has organic, carbon-containing molecules, thanks to the data gathered by the Curiosity rover. Now, Perseverance has added to the tale, with the discovery of more organic compounds in the Jezero Crater.

The molecules are ‘organic’ in the chemical sense – meaning they contain carbon and hydrogen. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they were created by living organisms: there are plenty of non-biological ways to make organic molecules.

The discovery was announced at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in December. Researchers from the Perseverance mission also announced that they had determined that the bedrock of the Jezero Crater was probably igneous – meaning it had formed from magma.

 

The organics were identified with the help of one of Perseverance’s instruments: the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals, or SHERLOC.

This instrument uses Raman spectroscopy to determine the contents of the rocks. This technique shines visible, or near-visible, light through samples and examines how they scatter light: different molecules will scatter it differently.

“Curiosity also discovered organics at its landing site within Gale Crater,” says Luther Beegle, SHERLOC principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, US.

“What SHERLOC adds to the story is its capability to map the spatial distribution of organics inside rocks and relate those organics to minerals found there. This helps us understand the environment in which the organics formed.

“More analysis needs to be done to determine the method of production for the identified organics.”

If there is evidence of life in the Jezero crater, it could still be some time before it’s discovered.

 “This is a question that may not be solved until the samples are returned to Earth, but the preservation of organics is very exciting,” says Beegle.

“When these samples are returned to Earth, they will be a source of scientific inquiry and discovery for many years.”

Perseverance is collecting rock and atmosphere samples that will be returned to Earth at a later date – the mission to retrieve these samples will launch in 2028 at the earliest.

It’s currently filled and sealed six tubes, out of a maximum of 43. Four of the tubes contain rock cores, one has Martian atmosphere, and one is a reference tube to determine contamination from the rover.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/exploration/perseverance-organic-molecules-on-mars/

 

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More intriguing findings, this time in a shape of carbon isotopes:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-curiosity-rover-measures-intriguing-carbon-signature-on-mars

Possible explanations so far:

• UV radiation
• Interstellar dust
• Ancient life

It's crazy to think that we've only just started looking and have barely scratched the surface, and we're finding out a lot of new stuff already...

[CaaC (John)+]

14 hours ago, nudge said:

More intriguing findings, this time in a shape of carbon isotopes:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-curiosity-rover-measures-intriguing-carbon-signature-on-mars

Possible explanations so far:

• UV radiation
• Interstellar dust
• Ancient life

It's crazy to think that we've only just started looking and have barely scratched the surface, and we're finding out a lot of new stuff already...

Looking at that link and photo @nudge reminded me of an episode in Star Trek and The Next Generation episode ' A cultural Observation Post', just a tongue in cheek thought but you never know...  

Spoiler

Spoiler

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Cultural_observation_post

 

Edited January 20, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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MISSION UPDATES | January 21, 2022

Sols 3364-3366: Back at the Prow

Written by Abigail Fraeman, Planetary Geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

On Wednesday we collected our first MAHLI images of the outcrops we’ve been studying the last few sols, and then drove back to the Prow to give us another chance to investigate the fascinating sedimentary structures we see preserved in this region. This morning we were pleased to find the rover was parked within a short bump distance to the Prow outcrop, exactly where we’d hoped to start the day.

In today’s plan, we’ll collect lots of remote sensing data of the Prow from our standoff location. We’re taking two ChemCam RMI mosaics of the area on targets named “Kangurama” and “Kaietur,” as well as ChemCam LIBS observations of the upper portion of the Prow on a target named “Alegre” and a nearby rock named “Formoso.” Additionally, APXS and MAHLI will examine a layered rock at the rover’s feet named “Mazaruni,” and Mastcam will collect several mosaics of the area.

Today in planning, I served as the Surface Properties Scientist, so I put my geologist hat on and worked closely with the Rover Planners as they designed a precision bump to place Curiosity within arm’s reach of our favorite spot on the Prow. There are lots of little rocks and some sand in the area, so it was a fun challenge to pick a parking location that will allow us to place MAHLI very close to the face of the Prow while also avoiding parking the rover on unstable rocks. Never a dull day on Mars!

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission-updates/9117/sols-3364-3366-back-at-the-prow/

 

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Martian water nothing but a mirage

Hope for groundwater on the red planet dries up

A wave of excitement rippled through the scientific community in 2018, when researchers announced they had found evidence of liquid water on Mars. Where there’s water, there’s also the tantalising possibility of microbial life – at least, if life on Earth is anything to go by.

Sadly, a new study of the red planet led by researchers at the University of Texas casts doubt on the 2018 findings, suggesting a disappointingly mundane alternative conclusion: the shimmering reflections initially taken to be sub-glacial water are nothing but a mirage caused by volcanic rock buried under ice.

The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, documents similar reflections in volcanic plains found all over the planet’s surface, where conditions are unassailably unsuitable for liquid water.

At the heart of the discrepancy between the two conclusions lies a simple truth: it’s hard to do science on another planet.

The 2018 announcement cited evidence from a radar instrument aboard the European Space Agency (ESA) Mars Express orbiter. Radar signals can penetrate rock and ice, and in this case they showed bright signals beneath the Martian polar ice cap that researchers believed were consistent with liquid water.

The claim was a big one. The possibility of potentially habitable liquid environments for microbes was thrilling. But big claims require sturdy evidence, and other scientists questioned the unlikely conditions needed to keep water in a liquid state at Mars’ cold, arid south pole. While water ice is plentiful, it is generally thought that any water warm enough to be liquid on the surface would last for only a few moments before turning into vapour in the wispy Martian atmosphere.

“For water to be sustained this close to the surface, you need both a very salty environment and a strong, locally generated heat source, but that doesn’t match what we know of this region,” says the study’s lead author, Cyril Grima, a planetary scientist at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics. 

With the terrain beneath the Martian icecap obscured by more than a kilometre of ice, getting to the truth of what really lay beneath was a challenging task.

In a leap of lateral thinking, the team wondered how other Martian terrain features might appear to radar signals if they were similarly ice-bound.

Using an exceptionally detailed radar map of Mars based on three years of data from MARSIS, a radar instrument launched in 2005 aboard the European Space Agency’s Mars Express, the team superimposed an imaginary global ice sheet across the entire planet, looking for features that might produce radar signals consistent with those at the pole if they were similarly buried under a thick blanket of ice.

The simulated icesheet yielded stark results.

The bright reflective signals that had held the promise of water were scattered about the entire surface, across all latitudes. In as many as could be confirmed, they matched the locations of known volcanic plains.

On Earth, iron-rich lava flows can leave behind rocks that reflect radar in a similar way, making this a strong candidate explanation. Other possibilities include mineral deposits in dried riverbeds, a conclusion consistent with other recent studies of these shimmering mirages.

Isaac Smith, a Mars geophysicist at York University in Canada, believes the bright radar signatures are a kind of clay made when rock erodes in water. In a 2021 study, Smith found that Earth-based clays produce bright radar reflections akin to those that were taken to be water in 2018.

“I think the beauty of Grima’s finding is that while it knocks down the idea there might be liquid water under the planet’s south pole today, it also gives us really precise places to go look for evidence of ancient lakes and riverbeds and test hypotheses about the wider drying out of Mars’ climate over billions of years,” he says.

For Smith, the study is a sobering lesson on the scientific process that is as relevant to Earth as it is to Mars.

“Science isn’t foolproof on the first try,” says Smith. “That’s especially true in planetary science where we’re looking at places no one’s ever visited and relying on instruments that sense everything remotely.”

Grima and Smith are now collaborating on proposed missions to find water on Mars with radar, both as a resource for future human landing sites and to search for signs of past life.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/martian-water-a-mirage/

 

 

[OrangeKhrush]

mission to mars was a meh movie

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MISSION UPDATES | February 15, 2022

Sols 3388-3390: Pediment Passage

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

Curiosity is advancing westward through a largely boulder-strewn channel that is leading us toward the Greenheugh Pediment. The Pediment is where our rover will spend the next many months, as we turn back uphill to the south and continue our ascent up Mt. Sharp. Despite it being quite craggy in our current location, we did have to drive over a large sand patch to get to our current parking location!

Today’s objective was to study one of the last remaining bedrock patches available to us before we ascend onto the Pediment in the days ahead. We quickly identified “Loch Coruisk” as our preferred bedrock slab for contact science with MAHLI and APXS. ChemCam will then zap it with LIBS in addition to two other bedrock pieces nearby. Both ChemCam and Mastcam will also be imaging the edge of the Pediment to our southwest and northwest so we can study the geologic contact that the edge represents. That imaging includes a Mastcam 360° mosaic, which will surely be spectacular! As we’re quickly approaching the dust storm season on Mars, we also added several dust devil movies with Navcam and observations to monitor the dust amounts in the atmosphere above us and within Gale Crater itself.

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission-updates/9132/sols-3388-3390-pediment-passage/

 

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A Year on Mars: What has Perseverance achieved?

It’s been a mission of firsts, and it’s still going strong.

It’s been a year since NASA’s Perseverance arrived at the Red Planet, successfully completing the 471-million-kilometre, seven-month journey from Earth. After the nail-biting landing sequence, dubbed ‘seven minutes of terror’, the rover touched down to its new home, with the helicopter Ingenuity, strapped to its belly on 18 February 2021.

In that time, the dynamic duo has expanded our knowledge and understanding of Mars in a series of firsts, collecting over 50 gigabytes of data.

Here are some of the milestones Perseverance and Ingenuity have achieved, after a year on Mars.

 

Edited February 19, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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Europe's Mars rover 'very unlikely' to launch in 2022

It's "very unlikely" the British-built Mars rover, Rosalind Franklin, will launch this year.

The European Space Agency (Esa) says the project is now at risk because of the worsening diplomatic crisis over the war in Ukraine.

The robot is part of a joint venture with the Russian space agency.

It's due to launch on a Russian rocket in September and land eight months later using Russian hardware, but this cooperation may now be hard to justify.

Esa said in a statement on Monday that "sanctions and the wider context" had put a big question mark next to Rosalind Franklin, which is named after the British scientist who co-discovered the structure of DNA.

"We deplore the human casualties and tragic consequences of the war in Ukraine," the agency stated.

"We are giving absolute priority to taking proper decisions, not only for the sake of our workforce involved in the programmes, but in full respect of our European values, which have always fundamentally shaped our approach to international cooperation."

At the weekend, the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced it would be suspending flights of its Soyuz rockets from the European Kourou spaceport in French Guiana, as retaliation for EU economic sanctions.

Untangling decades of space cooperation

 

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Mars helicopter’s odyssey

Originally deployed as something of an experimental novelty, the Mars Ingenuity helicopter has proved to be both useful and durable.

Credit: Mark Garlick / Science photo library / Getty

 

A year and 20-plus flights into what was supposed to be a one-month mission, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter is not only still going strong, but has evolved into a valuable companion for the Perseverance Mars rover.

The 1.8-kilogram helicopter was designed as a technology demonstration – simply to find out if it is indeed possible to fly on Mars. But when Perseverance set off on the first phase of its mission – a one-year-exploration of the rocks forming the floor of its landing site in Jezero Crater, scientists and engineers scrambled to find ways to make the helicopter useful.

A big part of what was needed, says Matt Golombek, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in California, was to find a way to increase the helicopter’s range – not by somehow beefing up its battery; that’s clearly impossible – but by increasing how far it could safely advance in any given flight.

In its initial tests, the helicopter would fly out from one landing site to scout for possible new places to land, then return to its original site and wait for the flight team to examine the images it collected to decide where it could safely land. It would then hop to the new landing site and prepare to start the process anew.

It was a very safe process, but it was also cumbersome. “We quickly figured out that if we had to scout out every site before we landed, we would dramatically restrict operations,” Golombek said last week at the 2022 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. In fact, there were concerns that the helicopter would eventually get outrun by the rover and have to be abandoned.

What was needed was a way to find safe landing zones from space, so the helicopter could go directly from one to another without flying back and forth. Eliminating the need to do that would also double the distance it could go – an important factor because its maximum flying time between battery recharges is a little less than three minutes.

Doing that from space was tricky, however, because the tiniest rocks that could be spotted in high-resolution satellite images were 25 centimetres across, and for the tiny helicopter, a 25cm rock was plenty big enough to be a hazard.

Sussing out safe landing zones from space, however is something Golombek has been doing for a quarter of a century, ever since the Mars Pathfinder landing in 1997. “My day job is selecting landing sites on Mars,” he says, “so I’ve spent most of my career looking for rocks.”

And while spacecraft the size of Pathfinder don’t have to worry about 25cm rocks, one of the things he has learnt is that there is a consistent relationship between the numbers of big and smaller rocks. Basically, he says, if you see big rocks, there will be smaller ones nearby. But if you can’t see any big ones, you don’t have to worry about the smaller ones, either.

To be on the safe side, his team tested this by comparing Ingenuity’s high-resolution images of potential landing zones with the orbital images and what they found was that the 25cm resolution of the orbiting cameras was good enough. If they could see any rock of any size from space, the landing zone wasn’t safe. If they couldn’t, it was acceptable.

“That’s been our trick,” he says. “We’ve done that 15 times, so we’ve been quite successful.”

Freed to fly farther in any given hop (the record is about 630 metres), Ingenuity has been able not only to keep pace with the rover but to move ahead when needed – allowing it to be useful both to the engineers looking for the best route to follow and the scientists, looking for the best rock formations to study.

Not that this couldn’t have been done without the helicopter – “But the helicopter reconnaissance made it so much more efficient,” says Vivian Sun, a JPL planetary scientist and systems engineer on the Perseverance team.

Meanwhile, the helicopter is in good health, and poised to continue assisting the rover as it moves into the next phase of its mission.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/exploration/ingenuity-helicopter/

 

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Mar 18, 2022

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Hightails It to Martian Delta

The rover’s self-driving capabilities will be put to the test this month as it begins a record-breaking series of sprints to its next sampling location.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is trying to cover more distance in a single month than any rover before it – and it’s doing so using artificial intelligence. On the path ahead are sandpits, craters, and fields of sharp rocks that the rover will have to navigate around on its own. At the end of the 3-mile (5-kilometer) journey, which began March 14, 2022, Perseverance will reach an ancient river delta within Jezero Crater, where a lake existed billions of years ago.

This delta is one of the best locations on Mars for the rover to look for signs of past microscopic life. Using a drill on the end of its robotic arm and a complex sample collection system in its belly, Perseverance is collecting rock cores for return to Earth – the first part of the Mars Sample Return campaign.

“The delta is so important that we’ve actually decided to minimize science activities and focus on driving to get there more quickly,” said Ken Farley of Caltech, Perseverance’s project scientist. “We’ll be taking lots of images of the delta during that drive. The closer we get, the more impressive those images will be.”

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will follow the proposed route to Jezero Crater’s delta shown in this animation. The delta is one the most important locations the rover will visit as it seeks signs of ancient life on Mars.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/University of Arizona

 

The science team will be searching these images for the rocks they’ll eventually want to study in closer detail using the instruments on Perseverance’s arm. They’ll also hunt for the best routes the rover can take to ascend the 130-foot-high (40-meter-high) delta.

But first, Perseverance needs to get there. The rover will do this by relying on its self-driving AutoNav system, which has already set impressive distance records. While all of NASA’s Mars rovers have had self-driving abilities, Perseverance has the most advanced one yet.

“Self-driving processes that took minutes on a rover like Opportunity happen in less than a second on Perseverance,” said veteran rover planner and flight software developer Mark Maimone of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which leads the mission. “Because autonomous driving is now faster, we can cover more ground than if humans programmed every drive.”

How Rover Planning Works

Before the rover rolls, a team of mobility planning experts (Perseverance has 14 who trade off shifts) writes the driving commands the robotic explorer will carry out. The commands reach Mars via NASA’s Deep Space Network, and Perseverance sends back data so the planners can confirm the rover’s progress. Multiple days are required to complete some plans, as with a recent drive that spanned about 1,673 feet (510 meters) and included thousands of individual rover commands.

Some drives require more human input than others. AutoNav is useful for drives over flat terrain with simple potential hazards – for instance, large rocks and slopes – that are easy for the rover to detect and work around.

Thinking While Driving

AutoNav reflects an evolution of self-driving tools previously developed for NASA’s Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity rovers. What’s different for AutoNav is “thinking while driving” – allowing Perseverance to take and process images while on the move. The rover then navigates based on those images. Is that boulder too close? Will its belly be able to clear that rock? What if the rover wheels were to slip?

Upgraded hardware allows “thinking while driving” to happen. Faster cameras mean Perseverance can take images quickly enough to process its route in real-time. And unlike its predecessors, Perseverance has an additional computer dedicated entirely to image processing. The computer relies on a single-purpose, super-efficient microchip called a field-programmable gate array that is great for computer vision processing.

“On past rovers, autonomy meant slowing down because data had to be processed on a single computer,” Maimone said. “This extra computer is insanely fast compared to what we had in the past, and having it dedicated for driving means you don’t have to share computing resources with over 100 other tasks.”

Of course, humans aren’t completely out of the picture during AutoNav drives. They still plan the basic route using images taken from space by missions like NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Then, they mark obstacles such as potential sand traps for Perseverance to avoid, drawing “keep out” and “keep in” zones that help it navigate.

Another big difference is Perseverance’s sense of space.

Curiosity’s autonomous navigation program keeps the rover in a safety bubble that is 16 feet (5 meters) wide. If Curiosity spots two rocks that are, say, 15 feet (4.5 meters) apart – a gap it could easily navigate – it will still stop or travel around them rather than risk passing through.

But Perseverance’s bubble is much smaller: A virtual box is centered on each of the rover’s six wheels. Mars’ newest rover has a more sensitive understanding of the terrain and can get around boulders on its own.

“When we first looked at Jezero Crater as a landing site, we were concerned about the dense fields of rocks we saw scattered across the crater floor,” Maimone said. “Now we’re able to skirt or even straddle rocks that we couldn’t have approached before.”

While previous rover missions took a slower pace exploring along their path, AutoNav provides the science team with the ability to zip to the locations they prioritize the most. That means the mission is more focused on its primary objective: finding the samples that scientists will eventually want to return to Earth.

More About the Mission

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-perseverance-rover-hightails-it-to-martian-delta

 

 

Edited March 22, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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How should we power a mission on Mars?

Research shows solar power could be deployed across half the planet.

As humanity turns its attention to Mars, with manned missions tipped to launch by the 2030s, the question of how we might power those missions is becoming ever more important. To safely live, work and travel on the surface of Mars will require significant amounts of energy – so what’s the best way to get it?

While the main source of power for NASA’s Mars rovers comes from a solar array, most scientists have assumed that to power a manned mission would require a more reliable and constant power source – in this case nuclear energy, powered by a miniaturised nuclear fission device. That’s because solar energy isn’t being produced at night, or during a dense dust storm.

But a new study published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences has found that might not be the case. 

Weighing up the options

In a first-of-its-kind investigation, researchers from the University of California Berkeley, US, compared various methods for generating power on the red planet, taking into account the equipment mass required for a six-person mission including a 480-day-stay on the surface, as well as local factors such as how gases in the atmosphere might absorb and scatter light. 

When they crunched the numbers, they found that a photovoltaic array that uses compressed hydrogen for energy storage could be a more effective power source across at least half of the planet, when you take into account the weight of the solar panels and their efficiency.

The key is the hydrogen gas, which can store the energy to power a Mars base at night or during a dust storm, making the array just as reliable as a fission device and with a reduced mass – at least closer to the equator. Nearer to the poles, nuclear energy wins out, because solar arrays would be less productive.

“I think it’s nice that the result was split pretty close down the middle,” says co-lead author Aaron Berliner, a bioengineering graduate at UC Berkeley. “Nearer the equator, solar wins out; nearer the poles, nuclear wins.”

But such a solar array would require a more modern, lightweight and flexible solar panel.

“The silicon panels that you have on your roof, with steel construction, glass backing etc, just won’t compete with the new and improved nuclear,” says co-lead author Anthony Abel. “But newer lightweight, flexible panels all of a sudden really change that conversation.”

Powering life on Mars

In the past, NASA estimates of the power needs of astronauts on Mars have focused on short stays. But as talk of long-term settlement grows, scientists have turned their attention to how you can support human life – providing food, fuel, materials and medicine – during a long stay on the planet.

That’s how Berliner and study co-lead author Anthony Abel first came up with the study concept. They’re both members of the Centre for the Utilisation of Biological Engineering in Space (CUBES), a multi-university project to genetically engineer microbes that could produce food, materials and drugs. But without knowing how much power would be available on an extended mission, they realised they couldn’t assess the practicality of any bio-manufacturing processes. 

So, they built a computer model of various power demands, including habitat maintenance, fertiliser production for agriculture, methane production for rocket propellant to return to Earth, and bioplastics production for manufacturing spare parts.

Berliner, who is also pursuing a degree in nuclear engineering, came to the study with a bias towards nuclear power, while Abel was more in favour of solar power.

“I feel this paper stems from a healthy scientific and engineering disagreement on the merits of nuclear versus solar power, and that really the work is just us trying to figure out and settle a bet,” Berliner said. ” I think I lost, based on the configurations we chose in order to publish this. But it’s a happy loss, for sure.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astronomy/power-mission-mars/

 

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NASA’s Mars Helicopter Spots Gear That Helped Perseverance Rover Land

Eyeing some of the components that enabled the rover to get safely to the Martian surface could provide valuable insights for future missions.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter recently surveyed both the parachute that helped the agency’s Perseverance rover land on Mars and the cone-shaped backshell that protected the rover in deep space and during its fiery descent toward the Martian surface on Feb. 18, 2021. Engineers with the Mars Sample Return program asked whether Ingenuity could provide this perspective. What resulted were 10 aerial color images taken April 19 during Ingenuity’s Flight 26.

“NASA extended Ingenuity flight operations to perform pioneering flights such as this,” said Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity’s team lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Every time we’re airborne, Ingenuity covers new ground and offers a perspective no previous planetary mission could achieve. Mars Sample Return’s reconnaissance request is a perfect example of the utility of aerial platforms on Mars.”

Entry, descent, and landing on Mars is fast-paced and stressful, not only for the engineers back on Earth, but also for the vehicle enduring the gravitational forces, high temperatures, and other extremes that come with entering Mars’ atmosphere at nearly 12,500 mph (20,000 kph). The parachute and backshell were previously imaged from a distance by the Perseverance rover.

But those collected by the rotorcraft (from an aerial perspective and closer) provide more detail. The images have the potential to help ensure safer landings for future spacecraft such as the Mars Sample Return Lander, which is part of a multimission campaign that would bring Perseverance’s samples of Martian rocks, atmosphere, and sediment back to Earth for detailed analysis.

“Perseverance had the best-documented Mars landing in history, with cameras showing everything from parachute inflation to touchdown,” said JPL’s Ian Clark, former Perseverance systems engineer and now Mars Sample Return ascent phase lead. “But Ingenuity’s images offer a different vantage point. If they either reinforce that our systems worked as we think they worked or provide even one dataset of engineering information we can use for Mars Sample Return planning, it will be amazing. And if not, the pictures are still phenomenal and inspiring.”

In the images of the upright backshell and the debris field that resulted from it impacting the surface at about 78 mph (126 kph), the backshell’s protective coating appears to have remained intact during Mars atmospheric entry. Many of the 80 high-strength suspension lines connecting the backshell to the parachute are visible and also appear intact. Spread out and covered in dust, only about a third of the orange-and-white parachute – at 70.5 feet (21.5 meters) wide, it was the biggest ever deployed on Mars – can be seen, but the canopy shows no signs of damage from the supersonic airflow during inflation. Several weeks of analysis will be needed for a more final verdict.

Flight 26 Maneuvers

Ingenuity’s 159-second flight began at 11:37 a.m. local Mars time April 19, on the one-year anniversary of its first flight. Flying 26 feet (8 meters) above ground level, Ingenuity traveled 630 feet (192 meters) to the southeast and took its first picture. The rotorcraft next headed southwest and then northwest, taking images at pre-planned locations along the route. Once it collected 10 images in its flash memory, Ingenuity headed west 246 feet (75 meters) and landed. Total distance covered: 1,181 feet (360 meters). With the completion of Flight 26, the rotorcraft has logged over 49 minutes aloft and traveled 3.9 miles (6.2 kilometers).

“To get the shots we needed, Ingenuity did a lot of maneuvering, but we were confident because there was complicated maneuvering on flights 10, 12, and 13,” said Håvard Grip, chief pilot of Ingenuity at JPL. “Our landing spot set us up nicely to image an area of interest for the Perseverance science team on Flight 27, near ‘Séítah’ ridge.”

The new area of operations in Jezero Crater’s dry river delta marks a dramatic departure from the modest, relatively flat terrain Ingenuity had been flying over since its first flight. Several miles wide, the fan-shaped delta formed where an ancient river spilled into the lake that once filled Jezero Crater. Rising more than 130 feet (40 meters) above the crater floor and filled with jagged cliffs, angled surfaces, projecting boulders, and sand-filled pockets, the delta promises to hold numerous geologic revelations – perhaps even proof that microscopic life existed on Mars billions of years ago.

Upon reaching the delta, Ingenuity’s first orders may be to help determine which of two dry river channels Perseverance should climb to reach the top of the delta. Along with route-planning assistance, data provided by the helicopter will help the Perseverance team assess potential science targets. Ingenuity may even be called upon to image geologic features too far afield for the rover to reach or to scout landing zones and sites on the surface where sample caches could be deposited for the Mars Sample Return program.

More About Ingenuity

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was built by JPL, which also manages the project for NASA Headquarters. It is supported by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, provided significant flight performance analysis and technical assistance during Ingenuity’s development. AeroVironment Inc., Qualcomm, and SolAero also provided design assistance and major vehicle components. Lockheed Space designed and manufactured the Mars Helicopter Delivery System.

At NASA Headquarters, Dave Lavery is the program executive for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter.

More About Perseverance

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-mars-helicopter-spots-gear-that-helped-perseverance-rover-land

 

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Perseverance: Nasa rover begins key drive to find life on Mars

Nasa's Perseverance rover has reached a big moment in its mission on Mars.

Tuesday will see the six-wheeled robot begin the climb up an ancient delta feature in the crater where it landed.

It will roll uphill, stopping every so often to examine rocks that look to have the best chance of retaining evidence of past life on the planet.

On its way back down, Perseverance will collect some of these rocks, placing the samples at the base of the delta to be retrieved by later missions.

The goal is to bring this material back to Earth in the 2030s for detailed inspection.

"The delta in Jezero Crater is the main astrobiology target of Perseverance," said deputy project scientist, Dr Katie Stack Morgan.

"These are the rocks that we think likely have the highest potential for containing signs of ancient life and can also tell us about the climate of Mars and how this has evolved over time," she told BBC News.

FULL REPORT

 

[nudge+]

@Bluewolf, think they found the secret entrance to your villain's lair on Mars  

[Bluewolf]

7 minutes ago, nudge said:

@Bluewolf, think they found the secret entrance to your villain's lair on Mars  

Fake news.... That's just a Red Herring, It's the minions entrance

This is the front door... They will need to shout though because the doorbells not working at the moment.. 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Mars mission’s last gasp?

The Insight Mars lander is making astonishing discoveries – and losing power.

Shortly after making its most dramatic observation to date, NASA’s InSight Mars lander appears to be on its last legs.

The new observation was a magnitude 5.0 marsquake that occurred on May 4, nearly an entire order of magnitude more powerful than the largest one previously observed, which was magnitude 4.2.

That’s important, because InSight’s primary task is to use seismic waves from such quakes to probe the Martian interior, all the way to the core, and the bigger the quake, the better.

“So, even as we are getting close to the end of our mission, Mars is giving us great things to see and add to the data record,” the mission’s principal investigator, Bruce Banerdt, said at a recent press conference.

The reason the mission appears to be coming to the end, added InSight’s deputy project manager, Kathya Zamora Garcia, is the steady accumulation of dust on the lander’s solar panels.

When InSight landed in November 2018, she says, these panels were able to generate about 5,000 watt-hours of power (5 kilowatt hours) per Martian day. Now that’s down to one-tenth that figure, and dropping. “Our solar panels are covered with Martian dust,” she says.

Last year, the InSight team fended off a similar problem by using the lander’s robotic arm to sprinkle sand on the lander’s body, upwind from the solar panels. When wind gusts picked up these sand grains, they tumbled across the panels, sweeping away some of the dust in the process.

Since then, Garcia says, the team has done this five more times, but they are fighting a losing battle, especially because the lander’s part of Mars is moving into a dustier time of year, when haze will further reduce the amount of sunlight reaching its panels.

In the next two to three weeks, she estimates, power will fall too low for continuous operation of the seismometer. In a couple of months, possibly in mid-to-late July, it will no longer be possible even to run the seismometer episodically. By late December, power will be so low that the lander probably won’t even be able to take the occasional picture or communicate back to Earth.

That said, the scientists are thrilled the dust held off long enough to allow the seismometer to record the recent marsquake. “This quake was far and away bigger and more clear [in its seismic details] than anything else we’ve seen,” Banerdt says.

Once these details are fully untangled, they will add to scientists’ understanding of how seismic waves propagate through the Martian interior, moving at different speeds in different layers and bouncing off boundaries between layers – thereby revealing important details about the deep Martian interior. “This quake is really going to be a treasure trove of information once we can get our teeth into it,” Banerdt says.

And, he says, even though InSight is probably coming to the end of its life, the data it collected will persist, keeping scientists busy for decades to come as they come up with ever-better ways of teasing information out of it.

“The sunset of the spacecraft is not the sunset of the science that is to come,” says Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division.

Not that the lander’s fate is sealed. It is possible that a dust devil (whirlwind) will pass over it, blowing dust off the solar panels and restoring power, as happened repeatedly to keep NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers operating from 2004 to 2019.

It’s not like there aren’t dust devils around to do the trick. Banerdt says that the lander’s super-sensitive air-pressure gauge has detected fluctuations from several thousand of them passing within a few hundred metres of the site. Some seem to have come within tens of metres. But Banerdt says these dust devils appear to be quite small, and nothing less than a direct hit on one of the panels would do the trick. “It could still happen,” he says. “But it hasn’t happened yet in three and a half years, so we’re not too hopeful.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/exploration/last-days-insight-mars/

 

Edited May 20, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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NASA’s Perseverance rover sends back Mars soundscape playlist

While the recordings sent by Perseverance show Mars is quiet, closer listening reveals a variety of weather events.

Nearly two years after its launch, and almost 18 months after landing on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover has hours of audio recordings from the red planet’s atmosphere.

So, what does Mars sound like? On the whole, it’s quiet. Very quiet. But the recordings did pick up interesting weather events and changes which give us a better overall picture of Mars’s clime.

Perseverance’s primary mission is to explore sediments in a dormant river delta on the edge of the 45 kilometre-wide Jezero Crater, to learn about the crater’s formation and hopefully find signs of ancient life. But microphones are light and cheap, so it made sense to add a couple to the rover’s instruments.

The first audio from Mars was sent by Perseverance earlier this year. Now, a year’s worth of recording from the Martian atmosphere has been condensed into about five hours of sound.

The findings are due to be presented by Baptiste Chide of the Los Alamos National Lab during a seminar, “Mars soundscape: Review of the first sounds recorded by the Perseverance microphones,” at the 182nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America tomorrow, May 25, in Denver  in the US.

With no large dynamical natural phenomena, extant animal species (that we know of), industrial civilisation, or extreme weather events, you’d expect Mars to be pretty silent. And it is. Under the same conditions on Earth, sounds are 20 decibels louder than on Mars.

“It is so quiet that, at some point, we thought the microphone was broken!” says Chide.

But, like giving a new music album a second run-through, closer listening revealed some fascinating phenomena. The group heard much variability in the wind and abrupt changes in the atmosphere, see-sawing from calm to intense gusts.

The team noticed that the red planet’s soundscape is seasonal. During winter, carbon dioxide freezes in the polar caps. This causes changes in atmospheric density, and environmental volume fluctuates by about 20%. Atmospheric CO₂ also causes high-pitched sounds in the distance to become fainter.

The rover also used laser sparks to calculate the speed of sound’s dispersion, confirming a theory that high-frequency sounds travel faster than low frequencies.

“Mars is the only place in the solar system where that happens in the audible bandwidth because of the unique properties of the carbon dioxide molecule that composes the atmosphere,” notes Chide. While the rover will continue to record audio as it travels across Mars’s surface, Chide believes that the technique could be applied to studies of other celestial bodies. Planets and moons with denser and more volatile atmospheres, such as Venus and Titan, may yield even more information as sound waves interact more strongly and travel further.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/nasa-perseverance-rover-soundscape/

 

Edited May 27, 2022 by CaaC (John)
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NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Captures Video of Record Flight

Video from the navigation camera aboard NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter shows its record-breaking 25th flight on April 8, 2022. Covering 2,310 feet (704 meters) at a maximum speed of 12 mph (5.5 meters per second), it was the rotorcraft’s longest and fastest flight to date.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

 

Imagery has come down from Mars capturing a recent flight in which the rotorcraft flew farther and faster than ever before.

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s black-and-white navigation camera has provided dramatic video of its record-breaking 25th flight, which took place on April 8. Covering a distance of 2,310 feet (704 meters) at a speed of 12 mph (5.5 meters per second), it was the Red Planet rotorcraft’s longest and fastest flight to date. (Ingenuity is currently preparing for its 29th flight.)

“For our record-breaking flight, Ingenuity’s downward-looking navigation camera provided us with a breathtaking sense of what it would feel like gliding 33 feet above the surface of Mars at 12 miles per hour,” said Ingenuity team lead Teddy Tzanetos of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

The first frame of the video clip begins about one second into the flight. After reaching an altitude of 33 feet (10 meters), the helicopter heads southwest, accelerating to its maximum speed in less than three seconds. The rotorcraft first flies over a group of sand ripples then, about halfway through the video, several rock fields. Finally, relatively flat and featureless terrain appears below, providing a good landing spot. The video of the 161.3-second flight was speeded up approximately five times, reducing it to less than 35 seconds.

The navigation camera has been programmed to deactivate whenever the rotorcraft is within 3 feet (1 meter) of the surface. This helps ensure any dust kicked up during takeoff and landing won’t interfere with the navigation system as it tracks features on the ground.

Ingenuity’s flights are autonomous. “Pilots” at JPL plan them and send commands to the Perseverance Mars rover, which then relays those commands to the helicopter. During a flight, onboard sensors – the navigation camera, an inertial measurement unit, and a laser range finder – provide real-time data to Ingenuity’s navigation processor and main flight computer, which guide the helicopter in flight. This enables Ingenuity to react to the landscape while carrying out its commands.

Mission controllers recently lost communication with Ingenuity after the helicopter entered a low-power state. Now that the rotorcraft is back in contact and getting adequate energy from its solar array to charge its six lithium-ion batteries, the team is looking forward to its next flight on Mars.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-captures-video-of-record-flight

 

 

Edited May 28, 2022 by CaaC (John)
Spacing correction