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Post by Deleted on Jul 4, 2019 1:37:00 GMT
MARS
www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-03/map-mars-geology-red-planetFor centuries, Mars has been mythically defined by its characteristic red appearance.
In Babylonian astronomy, Mars was named after Nergal, the deity of fire, war, and destruction. In Chinese and Japanese texts, the planet was known as 火星, the fire star.
Although this unique reddish hue has been a key defining characteristic of Mars in culture for centuries, Visual Capitalist's Nicholas LePan notes that today we now know that it’s the iron oxide soil of the Martian landscape that makes it the “Red Planet” – and that there is much more to Mars than its color upon closer observation.
Above, today’s map, posted and created by Reddit user /hellofromthemoon, brings together the data from centuries of observation and the numerous missions to the Red Planet to map out its geology on a grand scale.
A Red Dot in the Sky
Egyptian astronomers first observed the planet Mars four thousand years ago and named it “Horus-the-red.” Babylonian astronomers marked its course through the night sky to track the passage of time. But it was not until 1610, when Galileo Galilei witnessed Mars with his own eyes through a telescope, that Mars was revealed as a whole other world.
Over the centuries with improving technology, a succession of astronomers observed and crudely mapped out everything from polar ice caps to yellow clouds, and white and dark spots denoting varying elevations across the Martian surface. Some of the earliest maps of Mars date to 1831. But there is only so much you can accurately observe from the surface of the Earth.
On July 14, 1965, NASA successfully received the first up-close images of Mars from the Mariner 4 spacecraft, passing within 9,844 kilometers (6,117 miles) of Mars’ surface. Mariner 4 captured the image of a large ancient crater and confirmed the existence of a thin atmosphere composed largely of carbon dioxide.
Since then, four space agencies have successfully made it to Mars: NASA, the former Soviet Union space program, the European Space Agency and the Indian Space Research Organization. From orbital satellites to surface exploration with robots, each successful mission has brought back important data to develop an evolving picture of the planet.
Here is a complete list of both the successful and failed missions to Mars.
Martian Geology
On Mars, we see volcanoes, canyons, and impact basins much like the ones on Earth. The yellows scattered across the map indicate meteor impacts of varying size while the swaths of red indicate volcanoes and their associated lava flows. The varying colors of brown indicate the cratered highlands and midlands that make up most of the southern hemisphere.
The planet appears asymmetric. Most of the southern hemisphere is heavily cratered and resembles the moon’s highlands. In contrast, the northern hemisphere is sparsely cratered and has many large volcanoes.
Mars is approximately one-half the diameter of the Earth, but both planets have the same amount of dry land. This is because the current surface of Mars has no liquid water.
Mars and Earth are very different planets when it comes to temperature, size, and atmosphere, but geologic processes on the two planets are eerily similar. The sheer size of some landforms on Mars would shadow over similar features on Earth because of the lack of water erosion. This lack of erosion has preserved billion year-old geologic features.
The tallest mountain on Mars and in the solar system is Olympus Mons, and it is two and a half times taller than Mt. Everest. A Martian canyon system, called Valles Marineris, is the length of the entire continental United States and three times deeper than the Grand Canyon.
Mars Colony: Location, Location, Location
The first step to building a colony is to figure out where the best chance of survival is. For Mars, some researchers have identified the planet’s poles, which contain millennia-old ice deposits. These are thought to contain large amounts of ice, which mars settlers could extract and turn into liquid water.
The poles also host other natural resources, such as carbon dioxide, iron, aluminum, silicon and sulfur, which could be used to make glass, brick and plastic. Furthermore, the planet’s atmosphere contains enough hydrogen and methanol for fuel.
Closing the Distance
The map above represents the culmination of centuries of work which we are lucky enough to view here on a computer, conveniently online for us to appreciate and wonder what life’s like on the surface of Mars.
Who knows what more exploration will reveal.
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Post by swamprat on Jul 16, 2019 14:03:17 GMT
In case you want to plant a crop.....:
A material way to make Mars habitable
Silica aerogel could warm the Martian surface similar to the way greenhouse gasses keep Earth warm
Date: July 15, 2019
Source: Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Summary:
New research suggest that regions of the Martian surface could be made habitable with a material -- silica aerogel -- that mimics Earth's atmospheric greenhouse effect. Through modeling and experiments, the researchers show that a 2- to 3-centimeter-thick shield of silica aerogel could transmit enough visible light for photosynthesis, block hazardous ultraviolet radiation, and raise temperatures underneath permanently above the melting point of water, all without the need for any internal heat source.
People have long dreamed of re-shaping the Martian climate to make it livable for humans. Carl Sagan was the first outside of the realm of science fiction to propose terraforming. In a 1971 paper, Sagan suggested that vaporizing the northern polar ice caps would "yield ~10 s g cm-2 of atmosphere over the planet, higher global temperatures through the greenhouse effect, and a greatly increased likelihood of liquid water."
Sagan's work inspired other researchers and futurists to take seriously the idea of terraforming. The key question was: are there enough greenhouse gases and water on Mars to increase its atmospheric pressure to Earth-like levels?
In 2018, a pair of NASA-funded researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder and Northern Arizona University found that processing all the sources available on Mars would only increase atmospheric pressure to about 7 percent that of Earth - far short of what is needed to make the planet habitable.
Terraforming Mars, it seemed, was an unfulfillable dream.
Now, researchers from the Harvard University, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, and the University of Edinburgh, have a new idea. Rather than trying to change the whole planet, what if you took a more regional approach?
The researchers suggest that regions of the Martian surface could be made habitable with a material -- silica aerogel -- that mimics Earth's atmospheric greenhouse effect. Through modeling and experiments, the researchers show that a two to three-centimeter-thick shield of silica aerogel could transmit enough visible light for photosynthesis, block hazardous ultraviolet radiation, and raise temperatures underneath permanently above the melting point of water, all without the need for any internal heat source.
The paper is published in Nature Astronomy.
"This regional approach to making Mars habitable is much more achievable than global atmospheric modification," said Robin Wordsworth, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Department of Earth and Planetary Science. "Unlike the previous ideas to make Mars habitable, this is something that can be developed and tested systematically with materials and technology we already have."
"Mars is the most habitable planet in our Solar System besides Earth," said Laura Kerber, Research Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "But it remains a hostile world for many kinds of life. A system for creating small islands of habitability would allow us to transform Mars in a controlled and scalable way."
The researchers were inspired by a phenomenon that already occurs on Mars.
Unlike Earth's polar ice caps, which are made of frozen water, polar ice caps on Mars are a combination of water ice and frozen CO2. Like its gaseous form, frozen CO2 allows sunlight to penetrate while trapping heat. In the summer, this solid-state greenhouse effect creates pockets of warming under the ice.
"We started thinking about this solid-state greenhouse effect and how it could be invoked for creating habitable environments on Mars in the future," said Wordsworth. "We started thinking about what kind of materials could minimize thermal conductivity but still transmit as much light as possible."
The researchers landed on silica aerogel, one of the most insulating materials ever created.
Silica aerogels are 97 percent porous, meaning light moves through the material but the interconnecting nanolayers of silicon dioxide infrared radiation and greatly slow the conduction of heat. These aerogels are used in several engineering applications today, including NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers.
"Silica aerogel is a promising material because its effect is passive," said Kerber. "It wouldn't require large amounts of energy or maintenance of moving parts to keep an area warm over long periods of time."
Using modeling and experiments that mimicked the Martian surface, the researchers demonstrated that a thin layer of this material increased average temperatures of mid-latitudes on Mars to Earth-like temperatures.
"Spread across a large enough area, you wouldn't need any other technology or physics, you would just need a layer of this stuff on the surface and underneath you would have permanent liquid water," said Wordsworth.
This material could be used to build habitation domes or even self-contained biospheres on Mars on Mars.
"There's a whole host of fascinating engineering questions that emerge from this," said Wordsworth.
Next, the team aims to test the material in Mars-like climates on Earth, such as the dry valleys of Antarctica or Chile.
Wordsworth points out that any discussion about making Mars habitable for humans and Earth life also raises important philosophical and ethical questions about planetary protection.
"If you're going to enable life on the Martian surface, are you sure that there's not life there already? If there is, how do we navigate that," asked Wordsworth. "The moment we decide to commit to having humans on Mars, these questions are inevitable."
Story Source:
Materials provided by Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Original written by Leah Burrows. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
1. R. Wordsworth, L. Kerber & C. Cockell. Enabling Martian habitability with silica aerogel via the solid-state greenhouse effect. Nature Astronomy, 2019 DOI: 10.1038/s41550-019-0813-0
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Post by swamprat on Jul 18, 2019 19:10:53 GMT
Aerogel insulation could help in “regional terraforming” on Mars
18 Jul 2019 | Belle Dumé
The silica aerogel used in the experiment. Courtesy: Robin Wordsworth/Harvard University
Regions of Mars could be made habitable within decades using current technology. So say researchers at Harvard University, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of Edinburgh who suggest warming just certain areas of the planet – using greenhouse-like shields made from silica aerogels – rather than terraforming it entirely.
The surface of Mars is hostile to life as we know it – it is too cold for liquid water to exist and there is no ozone layer to protect it from ultraviolet radiation. Although researchers have put forward many proposals over the years to make Mars more hospitable, all these would require massive environmental modifications. “Such global terraforming will not be possible for centuries, if ever,” says Robin Wordsworth of the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, who led this new study.
Solid-state greenhouse effect
Wordsworth and colleagues have now put forward a new idea: exploiting a solid-state analogue to the atmospheric greenhouse effect here on Earth. This effect occurs when sunlight is absorbed inside translucent snow or ice layers. It is most pronounced in materials that are partially transparent to visible light but have low thermal conductivity and block infrared light. Unlike Earth’s polar ice caps, the polar ice caps on Mars (which contain a combination of both water ice and frozen carbon dioxide) are much too volatile to make robust solid-state greenhouse shields, say the researchers.
They explain that silica aerogels, which contain nanoscale networks of interconnecting silica clusters, contain over 97% air by volume and have some of the lowest measured thermal conductivities of any known material (of 0.02 W/m/K at 1 bar pressure or 0.01 W/m/K at Martian atmospheric pressure). Thanks to these properties, the materials are already routinely employed in many engineering applications, including in NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers where thin aerogel layers provided night-time thermal insulation.
In their experiments, Wordsworth and co-workers replicated the surface conditions of Mars in the laboratory. They then placed a layer of silica aerogel particles or tiles on a base that reflects little light surrounded by a thermally insulating material. Next, they exposed the apparatus to visible light from a solar simulator. They measured the broadband light flux incident on the aerogel layer using a pyranometer and the temperature with calibrated glass-bead thermistors.
2-3 cm thick silica aerogel layer is enough
Both the aerogel particles and tile layers received visible flux in the 100-200 W/m2 range. To compare, Earth receives on average 342 W/m2 and Mars 147 W/m2.
The team found that a 3 cm layer of silica aerogel can increase the temperature of the underlying surface by 45 K when it receives a flux of 150 W/m2. Aerogel tiles, which transmit more visible light, increase temperatures by a further 10 K, reaching over 50 K at just 2 cm thicknesses.
The researchers say they can obtain warming to 0°C or higher under Mars-like insulation levels using a 2-3 cm thick silica aerogel layer. The maximum amount of warming possible is likely even higher since heat is lost in the experimental set up.
They also measured how much UV light the aerogel and tiles absorbed and found that it strongly blocked UVA and UVB radiation (280-400 nm wavelengths) and nearly totally blocked the most hazardous UVC (220-275 nm) radiation.
“The aerogel is effective at transmitting visible light but blocks infrared radiation and is an extremely effective insulator,” says Wordsworth. This makes it very efficient at warming via the solid-state greenhouse effect, while also blocking harmful UV radiation,” he tells Physics World.
Habitation domes and self-sustaining biospheres
The material could be used as a shield to warm up small, sufficiently ice-rich, relatively dust-free regions of Mars’ surface – to build habitation domes, for example, or even self-sustaining biospheres, he adds.
“There are many mid-latitude locations rich in ground ice and low dust accumulation rates within the latitude band where solar flux is high throughout the year (45°S–45°N). We calculated how the Martian subsurface would evolve using our aerogel for one location (Deuteronilus Mensae).
“Assuming the presence of a 2.5-cm-thick aerogel layer, subsurface temperatures down to depths of several metres are high enough to allow liquid water throughout the Martian year after a few years at this location.”
“Small islands of habitability”
“Mars is the most habitable planet in our Solar System besides Earth,” explains Laura Kerber of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech. “But it remains a hostile world for many kinds of life. A system for creating small islands of habitability would allow us to transform Mars in a controlled and scalable way.”
The team, reporting its work in Nature Astronomy 10.1038/s41550-019-0813-0, now plans to investigate the response of the aerogel shield to the pressure changes expected to occur on heating the Martian surface. “We also plan to perform field tests in analogue, extreme, environmental sites on Earth, such as in the dry valleys of Antarctica or Chile, to increase the realism of our setup,” says Wordsworth.
There are also the all-important philosophical and ethical questions concerning astrobiological planetary protection that will need to be answered before any such technology can realistically be employed. “If you’re going to enable life on the Martian surface, are you sure that there’s not life there already? If there is, how do we navigate that,” he asks. “The moment we decide to commit to having humans on Mars, these questions are inevitable.”
physicsworld.com/a/aerogel-insulation-could-help-in-regional-terraforming-on-mars/
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Post by swamprat on Nov 12, 2019 21:37:28 GMT
Snoopy is gonna go!
Snoopy Boldly Goes to Red Planet in 'A Beagle of Mars'
By Chris Arrant an hour ago Entertainment
Following in the pawprints of Laika.
On Dec. 18, Peanuts' Snoopy will follow in the pawprints of the Russian cosmonaut Laika and venture into space - but go where no beagle has gone before: Mars.
In the original graphic novel (OGN) "Snoopy: A Beagle of Mars," Charles M. Schulz' loveable canine goes on what BOOM! Studios calls "his grandest adventure yet!"
This graphic novel touches on a long association Peanuts - and Snoopy in particular - has had with outer space. The lunar module and command module of the historic 1969 Apollo 10 mission were named after Snoopy and Charlie Brown. That same year, NASA started an annual Silver Snoopy Award given out to employees for "outstanding achievements related to human flight safety or mission success."
In 2018, Peanuts Worldwide and NASA re-doubled their partnership with the Space Act Agreement, an effort to inspire space exploration and STEM education among students.
"In 'Snoopy: A Beagle of Mars,' Snoopy, the world-famous astronaut, heads to the stars in his most out-of-this-world adventure yet!" reads BOOM!'s description of the OGN. "What mysteries does the red planet hold? Will he find water? Will he find life? Will he find the time to get in a quick nine holes? Snoopy grabs his golf clubs and blasts off for Mars in this original graphic novel from the world of Charles M. Schulz and Peanuts!"
"Snoopy: A Beagle of Mars" is written by Jason Cooper, with art from Robert Pope and Hannah White.
"Snoopy: A Beagle on Mars" from Boom! Studios will be available on Dec. 18. It can be pre-ordered from Amazon for $9.99.
www.space.com/snoopy-beagle-of-mars-graphic-novel.html
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Post by swamprat on Nov 13, 2019 23:32:37 GMT
Hmmmm.....
There's a Mysterious Source of Oxygen in Mars' Atmosphere, and No One Can Explain It
By Yasemin Saplakoglu - Staff Writer - Nov. 13, 2019 - Space
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover sits in the Marias Pass area of lower Mount Sharp.
(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
There's something strange about the oxygen in the atmosphere above Mars' Gale Crater: Its levels fluctuate dramatically as the seasons change. And this mysterious oxygen cycling can't be explained by any known chemistry, a new study found.
Gale Crater is a 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) depression that was created by a meteor crash 3.5 billion to 3.8 billion years ago. NASA's Curiosity rover has been exploring the crater since 2012, when it landed at the foot of Mount Sharp, a giant mountain at the heart of the crater, according to NASA.
For the past three Martian years (over five Earth years), the rover has been breathing in the air above Gale Crater and analyzing the atmosphere using an instrument called the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), which is part of a portable chemistry lab, NASA officials said in a statement.
SAM confirmed that 95% of Mars' atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide (CO2) and the other 5% is a combination of molecular nitrogen (two nitrogen atoms bound together), molecular oxygen, argon and carbon monoxide. SAM also found that, when CO2 gas freezes at the poles during the Martian winter, the entire planet's air pressure drops. When the CO2 evaporates in the warmer months, the air pressure rises again. Argon and nitrogen predictably rise and fall, depending on how much CO2 is in the air.
But when SAM analyzed the oxygen levels in the crater, the results were mystifying: The oxygen levels rose much higher than expected — as much as 30% of its baseline levels in the spring and summer — and then dropped to levels lower than predicted in the winter.
"We're struggling to explain this," lead author Melissa Trainer, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in the statement. "The fact that the oxygen behavior isn't perfectly repeatable every season makes us think that it's not an issue that has to do with atmospheric dynamics" or any physical processes that happen in the atmosphere such as the breakup of molecules. All of the possible explanations they came up with fell short.
Rather, "it has to be some chemical source and sink that we can't yet account for," she added.
This puzzle is reminiscent of a similar mystery about methane levels in the crater: SAM previously found that the typically indiscernible levels of methane sometimes increase by about 60% in the summer and plummet at other random times, for unknown reasons.
"We're beginning to see this tantalizing correlation between methane and oxygen for a good part of the Mars year," Sushil Atreya, a professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said in the statement. "I think there's something to it." But nobody knows what that "something" is yet, he added.
Both oxygen and methane can be produced biologically (such as by microbes) and geologically (such as by water and rocks), and scientists don't know which process could be producing the elements in excess. However, to the disappointment of alien hunters, it's more likely that the excess oxygen and methane are the results of a geological process, according to the statement. Currently, the most likely source of the excess oxygen is the Martian soil, the team reported. But even if that's the case, they have no idea what in the soil is releasing so much oxygen into the atmosphere.
The findings were published Nov. 12 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. You can see that here: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019JE006175
www.livescience.com/oxygen-levels-change-gale-crater-mars.html
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Post by swamprat on Nov 18, 2019 16:12:57 GMT
More on the oxygen detection:Curiosity’s ‘mind-boggling’ new Mars mystery: oxygen
by Paul Scott Anderson in SPACE | November 18, 2019
Scientists are still trying to figure out where Mars’ methane comes from. Now there’s a new mystery that might be connected: unusual fluctuations of oxygen in Mars’ atmosphere, detected by the Curiosity rover.
Recent self-portrait of NASA’s Curiosity on Mars, stitched together from 57 individual images taken by a camera on the end of Curiosity’s robotic arm on October 11, 2019 (Sol 2,553). Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.
The presence of methane in Mars’ atmosphere has been a fascinating puzzle for planetary scientists. That’s because, on Earth, methane is linked to life, but it can also be produced geologically. Some of the best data about Mars’ methane has come from the Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars after a daring descent through the atmosphere in August, 2012. Now Curiosity has made another intriguing discovery: oxygen at the rover’s location is behaving in ways that haven’t yet been explained by any known atmospheric or chemical process. The levels of the gas increase much more in the spring and summer months than had been predicted, similar to the still-mysterious methane. The big question, of course, is why?
The baffling peer-reviewed results were just published in the November 12, 2019, issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
Sushil Atreya, professor of climate and space sciences at the University of Michigan, said:
"The first time we saw that, it was just mind boggling."
So just what is happening?
Curiosity analyzed the composition of the air at Gale Crater over three Mars years (about six Earth years), using its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) portable chemistry lab. The results were pretty much what had been expected, and known for years: 95% carbon dioxide (CO2), 2.6% molecular nitrogen (N2), 1.9% argon (Ar), 0.16% molecular oxygen (O2), and 0.06% carbon monoxide (CO). (The methane is normally in much smaller amounts, about 0.00000004% on average).
The nitrogen and argon tend to follow a predictable pattern each year, increasing and decreasing relative to how much carbon dioxide there is. This is related to changing air pressure during the year, since carbon dioxide freezes as snow and ice over the planet’s poles during the winter, which lowers the air pressure. The air pressure rises again when the carbon dioxide evaporates in the spring and summer.
This is where it gets weird. Scientists had expected that the oxygen would follow the same pattern as the nitrogen and argon, but it didn’t. The oxygen level increased much more in spring and summer – as much as 30% – and then dropped back to normal levels, and even below, in the fall. This same process was observed by Curiosity each Martian spring and summer.
So what are the possible explanations? The researchers have considered several possibilities, but none of them explain all of the results.
Was there a problem with the SAM lab? The researchers checked but the instrument was fine and working properly.
Could carbon dioxide or water molecules have released oxygen when they broke apart in the atmosphere due to solar radiation? Probably not, since it would take five times more water vapor than exists to produce the amount of oxygen observed. Carbon dioxide would break up too slowly to generate the same amount of oxygen over such a short time period.
As for the oxygen decrease seen later, could that have been caused by solar radiation breaking apart oxygen molecules? No, since that would be an even slower process, taking up to 10 years.
The scientists involved also think it is unlikely to be caused simply by atmospheric circulation patterns. According to Melissa Trainer, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GFSC) who led the research:
"We’re struggling to explain this. The fact that the oxygen behavior isn’t perfectly repeatable every season makes us think that it’s not an issue that has to do with atmospheric dynamics. It has to be some chemical source and sink that we can’t yet account for."
As Timothy McConnochie, assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland, also noted:
"We have not been able to come up with one process yet that produces the amount of oxygen we need, but we think it has to be something in the surface soil that changes seasonally because there aren’t enough available oxygen atoms in the atmosphere to create the behavior we see."
The paper itself goes into more detail about each of these hypotheses and how none of them adequately explain the results so far. Yet something is producing a lot more oxygen during the warmer months than there should be. Intriguingly, both the oxygen and methane have been observed to fluctuate like this in tandem on at least some occasions, suggesting there may be a common source. As Atreya also noted:
"We’re beginning to see this tantalizing correlation between methane and oxygen for a good part of the Mars year. I think there’s something to it. I just don’t have the answers yet. Nobody does."
On Earth, having oxygen and methane together is regarded as a biosignature, since they tend to destroy each other unless they are being continuously produced and fluxed into the atmosphere at relatively high rates. Because of this, the two gases are said to be in a state of thermodynamic disequilibrium.
By far, most of the oxygen and methane on Earth are produced by and/or consumed by life. Could that really be what’s happening on Mars? Or is there still some other unknown chemistry occurring? The Curiosity data showed that the background methane levels decreased at the same time as the oxygen levels did in the last half of each year, although the oxygen increases again earlier in the year than the methane, and is more variable year-to year. The larger “spike” in methane seen by Curiosity however, also occurred during the same period of time as the increase of oxygen in the spring. What all this means isn’t clear yet, and more study will be needed.
If there really is a correlation between the oxygen and methane on Mars, that could be a potential biosignature. A previous study in 2014 by Shawn Domagal-Goldman of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center found that while oxygen and methane by themselves could sometimes be created by non-biological processes, on exoplanets for example, but finding them together would be a more convincing biosignature:
"However, our research strengthens the argument that methane and oxygen together, or methane and ozone together, are still strong signatures of life. We tried really, really hard to make false-positive signals for life, and we did find some, but only for oxygen, ozone, or methane by themselves."
These odd fluctuations in the oxygen levels at Gale Crater – with a possible connection to the methane fluctuations and spikes – are a fascinating new mystery for Mars scientists to try and solve. As Trainer summarized:
"This is the first time where we’re seeing this interesting behavior over multiple years. We don’t totally understand it. For me, this is an open call to all the smart people out there who are interested in this: See what you can come up with."
Bottom line: NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected unusual increases and decreases in the level of oxygen in the air at Gale Crater. In some ways these are similar to the fluctuations of methane, and may even be connected.
earthsky.org/space/oxygen-methane-mystery-mars-curiosity-rover
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MARS
Mar 5, 2020 15:06:45 GMT
Post by swamprat on Mar 5, 2020 15:06:45 GMT
See Mars like never before in this highest-resolution panorama ever from the Curiosity rover
By Mike Wall 3 hours ago
The composite photo features 1.8 billion pixels.
A portion of a 1.8-billion-pixel panorama whose composite images were captured by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 2019. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has given us its sharpest-ever view of the Red Planet.
The Curiosity team just released a 1.8-billion-pixel panorama that features Glen Torridon, a region on the flanks of Mars' 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) Mount Sharp that the rover has been exploring recently.
The new photo is a composite of more than 1,000 images that Curiosity snapped between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 2019, when the rover team was taking a break for Thanksgiving.
"While many on our team were at home enjoying turkey, Curiosity produced this feast for the eyes," Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement Wednesday (March 4).
"This is the first time during the mission we've dedicated our operations to a stereo 360-degree panorama," he added.
Curiosity took the panorama's constituent photos using the telephoto lens on the rover's Mast Camera (Mastcam). The rover's handlers programmed the photography in advance, instructing Curiosity to take the pictures between noon and 2 p.m. local Mars time each day to ensure consistent lighting conditions, NASA officials said.
A second panorama that the rover team released today also spotlights Glen Torridon. This composite image, acquired using the Mastcam's medium-angle lens, is lower resolution, sporting "only" 650 million pixels.
A second, 650-million-pixel panorama captured by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 2019, shows more of the robot's body. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
These panoramas are zoomable, so the embedded photos in this story don't do them justice. To get the full experience, check out the originals via JPL here:
www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA23623
Curiosity landed inside Mars' 96-mile-wide (154 km) Gale Crater in August 2012, on a $2.5 billion mission to investigate the region's past potential to host microbial life. The car-size robot soon found compelling evidence that Gale hosted a habitable lake-and-stream system in the ancient past and that this system likely persisted for long stretches.
In September 2014, Curiosity arrived at the base of Mount Sharp, which rises from Gale's center. Ever since, the nuclear-powered rover has been climbing through the mountain's foothills, reading the rocks for clues about Mars' long-ago transition from a relatively warm and wet world to the cold desert planet we know today.
www.space.com/mars-rover-curiosity-biggest-panorama-photo-ever.html
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MARS
Mar 5, 2020 20:19:43 GMT
Post by swamprat on Mar 5, 2020 20:19:43 GMT
Meet 'Perseverance': NASA's Mars 2020 rover has a new name
By Mike Wall 23 minutes ago
"Percy" is already emerging as the favored nickname.
We don't have to call it "Mars 2020" anymore.
NASA's next Mars rover — a life-hunting, sample-caching robot scheduled to launch this summer — is officially called Perseverance, agency officials announced today (March 5).
The new name suits the car-size rover and its groundbreaking mission nicely, NASA officials said.
"There has never been exploration — never, never been making history — without perseverance," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said during a name-unveiling ceremony today.
"Perseverance is a strong word," he added. "It's about making progress despite obstacles."
Artist's illustration of NASA's 2020 Mars rover, now officially known as Perseverance, on the Red Planet. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The kids are all right
Like all of NASA's previous Mars rovers, Perseverance was named via a nationwide student competition. The contest kicked off last year and drew 28,000 essay submissions from K-12 students, NASA officials said.
This huge initial pool was culled to 155 semifinalists, which were whittled further to nine finalists this past January. Those nine included three proposals from each of the three age categories (grades K-4, 5-8 and 9-12). The finalist monikers, and the kids who proposed them, were:
• Endurance, K-4, Oliver Jacobs of Virgina.
• Tenacity, K-4, Eamon Reilly of Pennsylvania.
• Promise, K-4, Amira Shanshiry of Massachusetts.
• Perseverance, 5-8, Alexander Mather of Virginia.
• Vision, 5-8, Hadley Green of Mississippi.
• Clarity, 5-8, Nora Benitez of California.
• Ingenuity, 9-12, Vaneeza Rupani of Alabama.
• Fortitude, 9-12, Anthony Yoon of Oklahoma.
• Courage, 9-12, Tori Gray of Louisiana.
NASA encouraged the public to vote for their favorite of these final nine, but the decision ultimately was made by Zurbuchen.
As the proposer of the winning name, Mather, a seventh grader at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia, will get a free trip to Cape Canaveral, Florida, to watch Perseverance launch in July.
Mather read his winning essay during today's event and said he has a love of space and science that he plans to carry through his entire life.
"I want to go to college, get a degree in some form of engineering or science — space engineering and astronautics sound good right now," he said today. "And then, after that, go work at NASA as an engineer."
Watch Mather's essay presentation: www.space.com/nasa-mars-2020-rover-name-perseverance.html?jwsource=cl
Looking for signs of life
Perseverance will land inside Mars' 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater in February 2021, kicking off a $2.5 billion mission to search for signs of ancient Red Planet life — the first time a NASA surface craft has actively hunted for possible Martians since the twin Viking landers did so from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s.
Jezero is a great place to do this work, NASA officials have stressed. The crater harbored a lake and a river delta billions of years ago, meaning that life could have both flourished there and left lasting evidence of its existence. (Here on Earth, river deltas are great at preserving biosignatures, mission team members have said.)
The rover will look for signs of life on-site, using its powerful seven-instrument suite. But Perseverance will also collect and cache several dozen samples of pristine, promising Mars material for future return to Earth, where scientists can continue the hunt using advanced equipment in labs around the world. Those samples could be here as early as 2031, if all goes according to plan.
Perseverance will do a variety of other work as well, from characterizing Jezero's geology to helping pave the way for human exploration of Mars, which NASA aims to achieve in the 2030s. For example, the rover has a ground-penetrating radar instrument that will look for deposits of subsurface water ice — a valuable resource for astronaut pioneers. And another instrument will demonstrate the production of oxygen from the thin, carbon dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere.
That's not the only technology demonstration flying on the mission. Perseverance is also carrying a small helicopter scout, which will make brief sorties to show that rotorcraft can indeed explore the Red Planet air.
Perseverance also has 23 cameras and two microphones, potentially allowing us to hear the sounds of Mars for the first time ever. (Two previous NASA Mars craft, the Mars Polar Lander and the Phoenix lander, also carried microphones. But the Mars Polar Lander crashed, and Phoenix's microphone was never turned on.)
A naming tradition
NASA has let schoolkids name all of its Red Planet rovers to date.
NASA's first-ever wheeled Mars explorer, Sojourner, was deployed from the Pathfinder lander in July 1997. Sojourner was named by Connecticut 12-year-old Valerie Ambroise in honor of 19th-century abolitionist and activist Sojourner Truth.
Sofi Collis, a third grader from Arizona, won the competition to name Spirit and Opportunity, twin NASA rovers that landed on Mars three weeks apart in January 2004. And the car-size Curiosity rover, which has been exploring the Red Planet's Gale Crater since August 2012, was named by Kansas sixth grader Clara Ma.
Perseverance's body is modeled on that of Curiosity, and the new rover will employ the same sky-crane descent and landing system as its predecessor. And the link between the two missions goes deeper than that; Perseverance aims to extend work done by Curiosity, which determined that Gale Crater was capable of supporting Earth-like life long ago.
Zurbuchen acknowledged the ties between the two missions and stressed that their names go together well, too.
"Perseverance and curiosity together are what exploration is all about," he said.
www.space.com/nasa-mars-2020-rover-name-perseverance.html
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Post by Deleted on Mar 7, 2020 2:11:43 GMT
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MARS
Apr 12, 2020 14:12:49 GMT
ZETAR likes this
Post by swamprat on Apr 12, 2020 14:12:49 GMT
Trailblazing Mars helicopter attached to Perseverance rover for July launch
By Mike Wall 43 minutes ago
The little chopper will attempt to pioneer a new type of off-Earth exploration.
The Mars Helicopter, visible in lower center of the image, was attached to the belly of NASA's Perseverance rover at Kennedy Space Center on April 6, 2020. The helicopter will be deployed onto the Martian surface about two-and-a-half months after Perseverance lands. (Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The newest Mars rover's pioneering passenger has come aboard.
Technicians attached the first-of-its-kind Mars Helicopter to the belly of NASA's Perseverance rover on Monday (April 6) at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the robot is being prepped for its upcoming launch. That liftoff will take place during a three-week window that opens on July 17.
Prep work on the rover is officially in high gear. For example, over a four-day span in late March, mission team members finished installing Perseverance's parachute system and also put on the robot's six wheels.
The Mars Helicopter and its Mars Helicopter Delivery System were attached to the Perseverance Mars rover at Kennedy Space Center on April 6, 2020. The helicopter will be deployed about two-and-a-half months after Perseverance lands. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Perseverance's descent stage was also fueled up last weekend, just before the helicopter integration, NASA officials said.
The descent stage is the rocket-powered sky crane that will lower Perseverance onto the Martian dirt via cables in February 2021. Gassing up the crane was no trivial task; the craft's four tanks hold a total of 884 lbs. (401 kilograms) of hydrazine propellant, agency officials said.
"The last hundred days before any Mars launch is chock-full of significant milestones," David Gruel, the Mars 2020 assembly, test and launch operations manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. (JPL built Perseverance and is the lead center for the rover's mission, which is called Mars 2020.)
"Fueling the descent stage is a big step," Gruel added. "While we will continue to test and evaluate its performance as we move forward with launch preparations, it is now ready to fulfill its mission of placing Perseverance on the surface on Mars."
That placement will occur inside Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) hole in the ground that hosted a lake and a river delta in the Red Planet's ancient past. Perseverance will hunt for signs of long-dead Martian life, characterize the region's geology and perform a number of other tasks, chief among them collecting and caching samples for a future return to Earth.
The Mars 2020 mission will also demonstrate several new technologies, including an instrument that will generate oxygen from the carbon-dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere and the 4-lb. (1.8 kg) Mars Helicopter, which will be the first rotorcraft ever to ply the skies of a world beyond Earth.
If all goes according to plan, the helicopter will be deployed in May 2021, 2.5 months after Perseverance's touchdown. The little solar-powered chopper will then conduct a series of short flights during a test campaign that will last up to 30 days.
The Mars Helicopter won't gather any scientific data during these excursions; it carries no instruments. But a successful test campaign could pave the way for extensive aerial exploration of the Red Planet in the not-too-distant future, mission team members have said.
www.space.com/mars-helicopter-attached-perseverance-rover.html
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MARS
May 9, 2020 15:13:44 GMT
Post by swamprat on May 9, 2020 15:13:44 GMT
Mars, the first Earth?Scientists discover evidence of ancient, nitrogen-rich Martian groundwater hiding in Antarctica
By Rafi Letzter - Staff Writer 5 May 2020
Could life have swum in those waters billions of years ago?
Pieces of Mars made their way across the solar system to Antarctica, where they were discovered in the 1980s. Image: © Shutterstock)
A bit of 4-billion-year-old rock blasted off the Martian surface about 15 million years ago and eventually landed in Antarctica, where explorers found it in 1984. In the decades since, organic compounds found in that meteorite have been sources of controversy: Did they come from Mars, or did the meteorites get contaminated on Earth? Now, a team of Japanese researchers has reexamined the meteorites, and say they found traces of ancient oceans, rich in useful carbon and nitrogen — key ingredients for life.
The meteorite, known as Allan Hills 84001, after the location where it was first discovered, has long been known to contain organic materials. The hunk of space rock has been the subject of paper after paper after paper debating whether those materials came from Earth or Mars. There's even been a controversial claim, as Live Science sister site Space.com reported in 2016, that evidence for actual Martian life is hiding out in the rock.
The trouble was that researchers could never rule out the possibility that organic molecules from Antarctica got mixed up with the meteorites during their centuries locked in ice. Alternatively, the meteorite could have been contaminated with organic matter in a laboratory.
But now the researchers have taken extraordinary pains to rule out those possibilities. Their results suggest the organic compounds come from Mars — and for the first time show the meteor also contains nitrogen-bearing organic materials. Most nitrogen we've discovered on Mars is locked up in inert nitrogen gas (N2) or in harsh chemicals in the soil that break down organic matter, the researchers wrote. These newly-discovered organic nitrogen compounds in the carbonate suggest that if life did exist on Mars, it would have had access to the same forms of nitrogen that Earthly life relies on.
Together, the researchers wrote in the paper, which was published April 24 in the journal Nature Communications, these findings amount to the signature of an groundwater environment with plenty of potentially life-giving organic material.
The researchers studied the meteorites in a "class-100 clean lab," an environment where everyone wears head-to-toe bodysuits and the airflow is controlled to keep particulates from floating around. (Typically, such labs are used when manufacturing delicate advanced technologies like spacecraft or certain pharmaceuticals.) Past research into Allan Hills 84001, such as a 1999 study in the journal Advances in Space Research that argued the organics likely came from Mars, took place in more typical laboratory environments.
In their ultraclean environment, the scientists peeled off tiny grains of carbonate — the compound in the 4-billion-year-old meteorites. Then, they blasted the surfaces of the grains with a beam of focused charged molecules, or ions, to remove surface contaminants. The material underneath that surface layer, the researchers argued, represents a close approximation of the chemicals inside the meteorites before they were exposed to Earth.
They found levels of organic nitrogen far higher than could easily be explained by contamination from Antarctic ice, suggesting the nitrogen-bearing organic material entered the rock as it formed. The carbonate in Allan Hills 84001 formed in water, researchers believe. On Earth, carbonates like limestone and calcite are also the dried-out remnants of old water sources. Taken together, these lines of evidence suggest that the organic nitrogen compounds were plentiful in early Martian oceans.
That's important because "nitrogen is an essential element for all life on Earth, as it is necessary for protein, DNA, RNA and other vital materials," the researchers wrote.
These results fit with other evidence from the Red Planet. NASA's Curiosity rover and Viking landers found traces of organic material on the Martian surface. But rover instruments can't do the battery of tests that an Earthbound laboratory can,, so the rover data doesn't tell scientists where the organic compounds came from, how old they are or how they formed. This research, if borne out, suggests that at one point, when Mars was covered in oceans, those oceans flowed with organic matter.
All of that said, organic materials form in many lifeless places in the solar system, most notably comets. There's even evidence for organic material in the dust floating between stars, Space.com reported in 2011. So whether these apparent ancient, organic-rich oceans on Mars ever hosted life is still a mystery.
www.livescience.com/hidden-organic-nitrogen-water-evidence-life-mars.html
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Post by swamprat on Jul 4, 2020 17:21:06 GMT
Icy Mars Korolev Crater flyover animation from the ESA. The crater is 51 miles wide and 1 mile deep.
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MARS
Jul 27, 2020 17:13:36 GMT
gus likes this
Post by swamprat on Jul 27, 2020 17:13:36 GMT
For 10 minutes, enjoy the reality that is Mars in 4K. Make sure you go to "full screen"...
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Post by swamprat on Jul 31, 2020 20:27:24 GMT
NASA's Mars rover Perseverance is fine and out of 'safe mode'
By Mike Wall 3 hours ago
The life-hunting rover bounced back fast.
You can breathe easy now: All is officially well with NASA's newly launched Mars rover Perseverance.
Perseverance went into a protective "safe mode" shortly after its liftoff yesterday (July 30) because part of the spacecraft got a bit colder than expected when it zoomed through Earth's shadow.
NASA officials stressed at the time that this development was not particularly concerning and that Perseverance, the centerpiece of the agency's $2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, would likely bounce back quickly. That optimism was borne out: The rover has exited safe mode and resumed normal operations, mission team members announced today (July 31).
"With safe mode exit, the team is getting down to the business of interplanetary cruise," Mars 2020 deputy project manager Matt Wallace, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in an update today. "Next stop, Jezero Crater."
Perseverance will land inside the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero on Feb. 18, 2021. The crater harbored a lake and a river delta billions of years ago, and the car-sized rover will search the area for signs of ancient life and characterize its geology in detail.
Perseverance will also collect and cache several dozen samples on Mars, which a joint NASA/European Space Agency campaign will return to Earth, possibly as early as 2031.
Mars 2020 will also conduct several technology demonstrations. For example, one of Perseverance's instruments will generate oxygen from Mars' carbon dioxide-dominated atmosphere. The mission also features a small helicopter called Ingenuity, which will attempt to make the first-ever rotorcraft flights in the skies of another world.
Mars 2020 is one of three missions currently winging their way toward the Red Planet. The United Arab Emirates' Hope orbiter and China's Tianwen-1 orbiter-lander-rover mission launched on July 19 and July 23, respectively. All of these craft are scheduled to arrive at Mars in February 2021.
www.space.com/mars-rover-perseverance-is-fine-exits-safe-mode.html
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Post by swamprat on Dec 6, 2021 18:22:01 GMT
 NASA's Curiosity Mars rover snapped a spectacular 360-degree selfie of the Red Planet. The panoramic selfie is actually constructed from 81 individual images taken on November 20, 2021, using the Mars Hand Lens Imager. In the rocky landscape behind the rover is "Greenheugh Pediment" and "Rafael Navarro Mountain." Curiosity will next head toward the u-shaped opening to the left known as "Maria Gordon Notch."
www.coasttocoastam.com/article/curiosity-selfie/ |
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