Missions to Mars

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Bringing Mars back to Earth

The US and European space agencies are about to begin an audacious effort to bring samples of Martian rock and soil back to Earth. It will involve two robotic rovers to collect the best specimens, and an elaborate delivery system to get this material home.

Scientists hope to then learn more about whether life has ever existed on the Red Planet by studying the samples using techniques that are only available in Earth laboratories.

A new rover built by Nasa and named Perseverance will land on Mars in February 2021 using the "sky crane" method. A giant parachute and rocket motors will slow the mission's descent before the rover is lowered to the surface using cables.

Perseverance - a six-wheeled robotic machine with 23 cameras and a drill - will seek signs of ancient life in a large crater Jezero. It will collect rock and soil samples that look like they may have been altered by contact with microorganisms.

The rover will store its samples in metal canisters - but leave them behind on the Martian surface to continue its mission. Perseverance's plutonium-based power supply could keep the rover trundling around Mars for 10 years or more.

Later this decade - after 2026 - a second, smaller rover, to be built by the European Space Agency (Esa), will arrive on Mars. This "fetch rover" will travel across the surface picking up the sample canisters left behind by Perseverance.

The canisters will be loaded into a protective container and placed into a small rocket - the Mars Ascent Vehicle or MAV. This will blast into the sky, placing the container into orbit around Mars.

The sample container will be met in orbit and caught by a European satellite. This "return orbiter" will act like a cargo ship, bringing the precious rock and soil specimens back to Earth.

We don't expect the satellite to arrive home until at least 2031, by which time the sample container will have been packaged in a heavily protected capsule, to be sent into Earth's atmosphere to land in North America.

Scientists will then study the rocks and soil using advanced techniques, including some that have yet to be invented because there should be enough material to investigate for decades ahead. The samples will shed light on Mars' history and whether it has ever supported microbial lifeforms.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53553623

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July 27, 2020

NASA’s Next Mars Rover to Test Tech Useful for Human Missions

Robot explorers are helping pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet. NASA’s newest Mars rover, Perseverance, is equipped with technology to teach us more about the environment and demonstrate what’s needed to support future crewed missions.

“Perseverance paves the way for new science and technological discoveries,” said Jim Reuter, the associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD). “The knowledge and capabilities we gain from this mission will help prepare us for human missions on Mars as early as the 2030s. Technology will drive that exploration.”

Capabilities needed by future pioneers will get their first test on the Red Planet in 2021. Hardware to ensure a precise landing, a mobile weather station and a brand-new method of producing oxygen from carbon dioxide is packed with all of the science gear.

FULL REPORT

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Edited July 30, 2020 by CaaC (John)

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The launch was succesful!

 

 

 

 

Fantastic photos, and a good start of the mission... 7 long months until it reaches Mars and attempts to land.

 

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[CaaC (John)+]

Edit: Post deleted, wrong forum, now posted in Space: The Final Frontier thread.  

 

Edited August 2, 2020 by CaaC (John)

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Can't wait for February and hopefully Perseveran reaches and lands on Mars successfully

 

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NASA/JPL Eyes

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A group of lakes found under the surface of Mars

September 29, 2020

Scientists have long thought that there could be water trapped beneath the surface of Mars. Credit: Steve Lee, Univ. Colorado/Jim Bell, Cornell Univ./Mike Wolff, SSI/NASA

The possibility of life on Mars is a subject of huge interest. When searching for life beyond Earth, scientists commonly follow the water.

In 2018, scientists reported a subglacial lake on Mars, under the ice at Mars’s south pole. It was presumed to be a body of saltwater some 20 km (12 mi) across.

Now, additional observations confirmed the presence of that lake — and found three more. The lakes are spread over about 75,000 square kilometres. The largest, central lake measures 30 kilometres across and is surrounded by three smaller lakes, each a few kilometres wide.

Scientists used a radar instrument on Mars Express called the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) to probe the planet’s southern polar region. MARSIS sends out radio waves that bounce off layers of material in the planet’s surface and subsurface.

The way the signal is reflected indicates the kind of material present at a particular location — rock, ice, or water. A similar method is used to identify subsurface glacial lakes on Earth. The team detected some high reflectivity areas indicating bodies of liquid water trapped under more than one kilometre of Martian ice.

Although Mars’ surface was periodically wet and could have been hospitable to microbial life billions of years ago, if such reservoirs exist, they could be potential habitats for Martian life.

But the amount of salt present could pose problems. It’s thought that any underground lakes on Mars must have a reasonably high salt content for the water to remain liquid. Although this far beneath the surface, there may be a small amount of heat from the interior of Mars, this alone would not be enough to melt the ice into water.

John Priscu, an environmental scientist at Montana State University, said, “Lakes with salt content about five times that of seawater can support life, but as you approach 20 times that of seawater life is no longer present. There’s not much active life in these briny pools in Antarctica. They’re just pickled. And that might be the case [on Mars].”

Elena Pettinelli of Italy’s Roma Tre University said, “Here we have not just an occasional body of water, but a system. The system was probably existing a long time ago, when the planet was very different, and this is maybe the remnant of that.”

The discovery reported on 28 September in Nature Astronomy

https://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/Science

 

Edited September 29, 2020 by CaaC (John)

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Smallsat View Of Tianwen-1 On Its Way To Mars

Andrew Jones @AJ_FI - Here's an image of Tianwen-1 in deep space and on its way to Mars, released today [CLEP]. The spacecraft is currently 24.1 million km from the Earth with a total flight distance of 188 million km. Source

NASA/JPL Eyes

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New topographic map of Jezero Crater – Mars 2020’s future home

On 18 February 2021, NASA’s Mars 2020 spacecraft will touch down on the surface of Mars. The mission, which launched in July of this year and is carrying a rover named Perseverance on board, will seek signs of ancient life on the Red Planet and collect samples of rock and soil so that these can later be returned to Earth by ESA and NASA.

Mars 2020 will land in Jezero crater, the intriguing feature shown in this new topographic map from ESA’s Mars Express. The landing zone for the mission is highlighted by the black ellipse. This map was created using observations from Mars Express’ High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), and shows the topography of the landscape (as indicated by the coloured bar to the right of the frame, and the associated elevation graph to the bottom). Regions of higher elevation are shown in reds and oranges, while lower dips and depressions are highlighted in blues and greens.

Jezero is an impact crater of roughly 45 kilometres in diameter and is thought to have once hosted an ancient lake. Evidence of this can be seen in the features scattered across the crater basin: deltas, inlet valleys (marked by solid black lines that wind into the crater to the upper left), channels, and a smoother topography along the northern crater rim (where the material was swept up by flowing water) than the southern (where these materials were later deposited). Jezero also hosts a large outlet channel, as seen to the right of the frame (east) in shades of pale blue, and marked by a solid black line. In order to carve such a substantial valley, the crater must have once been replenished by a relatively constant supply of water. This is an exciting prospect in our hunt for life on Mars, as the carbonates and clay minerals thought to still be present in Jezero – which formed in the presence of ancient water – may have locked up signatures of past life.

Mars 2020 will explore the history and chemistry of Jezero to characterise such ancient lakeshore environments in detail – an essential step towards better understanding what early Mars was really like. One of Mars 2020’s key objectives is to collect samples for a future return to Earth. This endeavour will require cooperative robotic missions from both NASA and ESA. Current plans for ESA-NASA Mars Sample Return rely on ESA’s small Sample Fetch Rover collecting the samples cached by Mars 2020’s Perseverance rover before these are launched into Mars orbit by NASA. A further ESA mission, the Earth Return Orbiter, will then swoop in to collect the basketball-sized container of rock and soil samples and return these safely to Earth.

This map comprises observations gathered during Mars Express orbits 5252 and 5270, and covers an area of the Martian surface located at approximately 18° N, 77° E.

http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/09/New_topographic_map_of_Jezero_Crater_Mars_2020_s_future_home

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Planet Mars is at its 'biggest and brightest'

Get out there and look up!

Mars is at its biggest and brightest right now as the Red Planet lines up with Earth on the same side of the Sun.

Every 26 months, the pair take up this arrangement, moving close together, before then diverging again on their separate orbits around our star.

Tuesday night sees the actual moment of what astronomers call "opposition".

All three bodies will be in a straight line at 23:20 GMT (00:20 BST).

"But you don't have to wait until the middle of the night; even now, at nine or 10 o'clock in the evening, you'll easily see it over in the southeast," says astrophotographer, Damian Peach. "You can't miss it, it's the brightest star-like object in that part of the sky," he told BBC News.

Even though this coming week witnesses the moment of opposition, it was Tuesday of last week that Mars and Earth actually made their closest approach in this 26-month cycle.

A separation of 62,069,570km, or 38,568,243 miles. That's the narrowest gap now until 2035.

At the last opposition, in 2018, Earth and Mars were just 58 million km apart, but what makes this occasion a little more special for astrophotographers in the Northern Hemisphere is the Red Planet's elevation in the sky. It's higher, and that means telescopes don't have to look through quite so much of the Earth's turbulent atmosphere, which distorts images.

Experienced practitioners like Damian use a technique called "lucky imaging" to get the perfect shot. They take multiple frames and then use software to stitch together the sharpest view.

Damian's picture at the top of this page shows up clearly the "Martian dichotomy" - the sharp contrast between the smooth lowland plains of the Northern Hemisphere and the more rugged terrain in the Southern Hemisphere. Evident too is Mars' carbon dioxide ice cap at the southern pole.

The image was captured using a 14-inch Celestron telescope.

"That's quite a serious bit of equipment; it's not something you get on a whim," says Damian. "But even a telescope half that size will show up all the major features on Mars quite easily. And if you've got a good pair of binoculars, you'll certainly be able to make out that it's actually a planet and not a star."

It's around opposition that space probes are launched from Earth to Mars. Obviously - the distance that needs to be travelled is shorter, and the time and energy required to make the journey is less.

Three missions are currently in transit, all of which were sent on their way in July: The United Arab Emirates's Hope orbiter; China's Tianwen orbiter and rover; and the Americans' Perseverance rover.

Europe and Russia had hoped to despatch their ExoMars "Rosalind Franklin" rover, too, but they missed the launch window and will now have to wait until late 2022. That's the penalty you pay when the planets align only every 26 months.

Hope, Tianwen and Perseverance are all on course to arrive at Mars in February.

In 2003, Mars made its closest approach to Earth around opposition in nearly 60,000 years - a separation of just 56 million km.

The distance between the two at opposition can be over 100 million km, as happened in 2012.

The variation is a consequence of the elliptical shape of the orbits of both Mars and Earth.

NASA/JPL EYES

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54483853

 

Edited October 11, 2020 by CaaC (John)

[Stan]

Terrible pic cos it was off the phone very much zoomed in but this was Mars last night with a clear sky over London 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

31 minutes ago, Stan said:

Terrible pic cos it was off the phone very much zoomed in but this was Mars last night with a clear sky over London 

 

Nothing wrong with the shots, I copied them into my computer album and zoomed them in. 

[CaaC (John)+]

 

The Red Planet Dashboard

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112 days to go.

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Elon Musk says first Mars colony settlers will live in ‘glass domes’ before terraforming the planet

The first human colony on Mars will be built using “glass domes”, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

The billionaire entrepreneur, who this week became the third richest person in the world, has frequently spoken of his ambition to travel to Mars in his lifetime and turn humanity into a multi-planetary species.

Early settlers will live in temporary habitats before a more radical solution is sought to make the planet more accessible, he tweeted on Thursday.

Mr Musk also said he hoped to populate Mars with a million people by 2050.

© Provided by The Independent
Early Mars colonies will involve ‘life in glass domes’, according to SpaceX boss Elon MuskNasa

Nasa

In order to make the planet more habitable, Mr Musk is a proponent of a process known as terraforming. This involves blasting the planet with nuclear weapons at its poles to cause the ice caps to melt and induce accelerated warming to make it comfortable for humans to live there.

“Life in glass domes at first. Eventually, terraformed to support life, like Earth,” he tweeted.

“Terraforming will be too slow to be relevant in our lifetime. However, we can establish a human base their in our lifetime. At least a future spacefaring civilization – discovering our ruins – will be impressed humans got that far."

Mr Musk first proposed terraforming as a viable way to speed up the habitability of Mars in 2014, when he described it as a “fixer-upper of a planet” in an interview with US TV host Stephen Colbert.

“Eventually you can transform Mars into an Earth-like planet," he said. "There’s a fast way and a slow way. The fast way is to drop thermonucular weapons over the poles."

He elaborated on what the slow way might be several years later when he suggested a system of giant mirrors could be placed in orbit around Mars in order to reflect sunlight onto the surface.

His hope of transforming Mars was dealt a blow last year when a study published in Nature Astronomy claimed that “terraforming Mars is not possible using present-day technology”.

“Life in glass domes at first. Eventually, terraformed to support life, like Earth,” he tweeted.

“Terraforming will be too slow to be relevant in our lifetime. However, we can establish a human base their in our lifetime. At least a future spacefaring civilization – discovering our ruins – will be impressed humans got that far."

Mr Musk first proposed terraforming as a viable way to speed up the habitability of Mars in 2014, when he described it as a “fixer-upper of a planet” in an interview with US TV host Stephen Colbert.

“Eventually you can transform Mars into an Earth-like planet," he said. "There’s a fast way and a slow way. The fast way is to drop thermonucular weapons over the poles."

He elaborated on what the slow way might be several years later when he suggested a system of giant mirrors could be placed in orbit around Mars in order to reflect sunlight onto the surface.

His hope of transforming Mars was dealt a blow last year when a study published in Nature Astronomy claimed that “terraforming Mars is not possible using present-day technology”.

© Provided by The Independent
SpaceX says its Starship spacecraft could transport people to the moon and Mars

SpaceX

Yet he appears undeterred, with his Twitter profile currently displaying a banner image of the terraforming process. SpaceX also features a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Nuke Mars’ in its online store.

SpaceX has also prioritised the development of its Mars-bound Starship spacecraft, which is being built to ferry up to 100 people around the Solar System.

Earlier this year, Mr Musk said Starship was the firm’s “top priority”, writing in a company-wide email that progress needed to speed up “dramatically and immediately” in order to meet the ambitious target of sending the first humans to Mars before 2030.

Read More
Elon Musk’s SpaceX says it will ‘make its own laws on Mars'

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/elon-musk-says-first-mars-colony-settlers-will-live-in-glass-domes-before-terraforming-planet/ar-BB1bcG6O?pfr=1

 

Edited November 21, 2020 by CaaC (John)

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2 December

A new way of making oxygen on Mars

The breakthrough process is about more than Perseverance.

Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. Bell (ASU), and M. Wolff (Space Science Institute)

In a discovery that may someday help astronauts on Mars, scientists have found a new way of making oxygen under Martian conditions – one that appears to be 25 times more efficient than that to be tested by NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is due to land on the Red Planet in February.

Not that this means there is anything wrong with the NASA process. “Both will be needed,” says Vijay Ramani, a chemical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis, US.

The NASA process, which will be tested in a shoebox-sized chemical plant called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment), uses electrical energy to split carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon monoxide, both of which are useful: oxygen for life support, and carbon monoxide as a building block for rocket fuel for future astronauts’ return journeys from Mars.

Ramani’s new approach starts with water and uses electricity to break it into oxygen and hydrogen.

At heart, it is simply old-fashioned electrolysis of water: something generations of chemistry students have witnessed in classrooms worldwide. “If you use a cell like a battery, you can pass electricity through water, and split the water into hydrogen and oxygen,” Ramani says.

It hadn’t previously been considered for Mars because Mars is cold. “If you have pure water, it’s going to be frozen.” But Martian water may not be pure, because Martian soils are known to have a lot of perchlorates

On Earth, perchlorate is an industrial chemical used in explosives, fireworks and road flares: not something you want in your water. On Mars, however, it can act as antifreeze, allowing water to remain liquid even at temperatures of minus 50 degrees Celsius, raising the prospect that Mars may have perchlorate brines close to its surface.

The trick to the new process, Ramani says, was trying to figure out how to do electrolysis of perchlorate-rich water, something that won’t work in conventional electrolysis because chemicals like perchlorate poison the cells and block their operation.

But, his team reports in a paper in the journal PNAS, this isn’t an insurmountable obstacle. By using cells with a mix of exotic compounds, including ruthenium, lead and platinum, they found they could not only cope with the problem but do so with surprising efficiency.

That said, Ramani thinks his team’s process and the MOXIE process should be viewed as complementary, not competing.

MOXIE has the advantage that it can be used anywhere since all that it requires is carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere – which, although thin, is 95% carbon dioxide. His team’s process needs perchlorate brine, which might not be as ubiquitous.

Also, the two processes produce different products.

Ramini’s produces hydrogen and oxygen. MOXIE’s produces oxygen and carbon, in the form of carbon monoxide. If you are looking for feedstocks for more complex chemical syntheses, you need all three elements.

Most likely, Ramani says, the first manned missions to Mars will draw on multiple technologies for generating oxygen to breathe and fabricating rocket fuel for the return, if for no other reason than that, that far from home, you don’t want to put all of your eggs in one technological basket.

At the same time, efficiency matters. The more breathing air you can get from any given solar panel, the fewer solar panels you have to carry with you, and the easier it is to go to Mars for anything other than a quick touchdown and return.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/uncategorized/a-new-way-of-making-oxygen-on-mars/

 

Edited December 2, 2020 by CaaC (John)

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Glaciers may answer a Martian mystery

A new study offers a new theory on faint young Sun paradox.

A vertically exaggerated and false-colour perspective of a large, water-carved channel on Mars called Dao Vallis. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO / Lujendra Ojha

Rather than flowing across its surface during a warm, wet phase early in its history, the water that carved the river channels on Mars may have come from beneath thick ice sheets that slowly melted under the influence of heat escaping from the planet’s interior, scientists say.

For nearly 50 years, planetary scientists have known that early in its history Mars had enough water to scour deep valleys, but how the Red Planet could have been warm enough for that to occur has been a mystery.

Astrophysicists know when these valleys were formed billions of years ago the Sun was 25-30% dimmer than today. And, given that Mars is millions of kilometres farther out from the Sun than the Earth, that raises a problem.

“The climate of the early Mars should have been extremely cold,” says Lujendra Ojha, a planetary scientist at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, US.

Previous theories for how enough liquid water to create these valleys could have been present have focused on the early Martian atmosphere, positing that it might have been full of planet-warming greenhouse gases like water vapour, methane or vastly more carbon dioxide than remains today.

But even if you assume such gases were present, Ojha says, it still doesn’t appear to have been enough to warm the temperate above freezing.

The result is a problem known as the faint young Sun paradox, in which the early Sun doesn’t seem to have been bright enough to produce temperate climates, but in which we can see the evidence that Mars once had lakes and rivers.

The answer, Ojha’s team suggests in a paper in the journal Science Advances, is that parts of the early Mars may have been covered with glaciers thick enough to trap substantial amounts of heat from radioactive decay in the Martian crust and mantle.

In support of this idea, Ojha points to Paralana Hot Springs in South Australia, where – even without anything on the surface to trap it – heat from the decay of high concentrations of uranium and other radioactive elements in the underlying rocks is intense enough to produce the springs.

Early Mars wasn’t South Australia but, Ojha says, it did have about four times as much radioactivity in its crust and mantle as it does today. And that, combined with glaciers, is enough to explain what we see.

Today, Mars doesn’t have a lot of water. But it does have enough in its polar ice caps that if it were redistributed as glaciers on the planet’s southern highlands, the region where river channels are seen, there would be enough to blanket them to a depth of 700 metres.

And in its youth, Mars would have had substantially more water – water that has been slowly escaping to space, ever since.

If, four billion years ago, there was only a little more than twice as much as is now contained in the ice caps, Ojha says, that would be sufficient to create glaciers thick enough that heat escaping from the planet’s interior would be able to slowly melt them from beneath.

The meltwater, flowing beneath the ice, could then have scoured the river valleys we see today—many of which, Ojha adds, actually look like the type of valleys known to have formed beneath vanished glaciers, here on Earth.

That’s not only important for understanding the processes that might have produced water (and possible conditions for the emergence of life) on the early Mars, but also for our understanding of exoplanets.

Normally, Ojha says, we think in terms of life being possible in the “Goldilocks Zone”, where a planet is in the right range of distances from its star for liquid water to exist on its surface.

But maybe, he says, a planet can still be habitable substantially farther out – if, as may have been the case for the infant Mars, it has glaciers thick enough to trap enough heat escaping from its interior for them to melt from below. “Ice is a great insulator,” he says.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astronomy/glaciers-may-answer-a-martian-mystery/

 

 

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Euro-Russian Mars rover mission takes shape

A key milestone has been reached in the preparations for the joint European and Russian mission to Mars, scheduled for launch from Earth in 2022.

The Rosalind Franklin rover, which will search for life, has been mated to the Kazachok platform that will land it on the surface of the Red Planet.

It's the first time the two have been joined together.

The fit-check was conducted by engineers at the Cannes, France, factory of Thales Alenia Space.

The UK-assembled robot is seen sitting atop the lander in a folded configuration - as it will be for the journey to, and the touchdown on, Mars.

The rover and lander will later be enclosed in a capsule and then attached to a cruise module.

The capsule's job will be to protect the Franklin robot and Kazachok platform from the searing heat that is encountered on entry into Mars' atmosphere. The cruise module is the vehicle that shepherds the whole mission to the Red Planet after launch.

FULL REPORT

 

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Nice landing animation... 

 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Mars update

Edited January 3, 2021 by CaaC (John)