Author: Fraser Cain

Image credit: NASA
Scientists have found clues that dust devils on Mars might have high-voltage electric fields, based on observations of their terrestrial counterpart. This research supports NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration by helping to understand what challenges the Martian environment presents to explorers, both robotic and eventually human.

NASA and university researchers discovered that dust devils on Earth have unexpectedly large electric fields, in excess of 4,000 volts per meter (yard), and can generate magnetic fields as well. Like detectives chasing down a suspect, the scientists attached instruments to a truck and raced across deserts in Nevada (2000) and Arizona (2001), driving through dust devils to get their measurements as part of the Martian Atmosphere and Dust in the Optical and Radio (MATADOR) activity. The Arizona observations also included a fixed base camp with a full suite of meteorological instruments (refer to Item 2 for a picture of the Arizona campaign).

Dust devils are like miniature tornadoes, about 10 to 100 meters wide with 20- to 60-mile-per-hour (32- to 96-km/hr) winds swirling around a hot column of rising air. “Dust devils are common on Mars, and NASA is interested in them as well as other phenomena as a possible nuisance or hazard to future human explorers,” said Dr. William Farrell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “If Martian dust devils are highly electrified, as our research suggests, they might give rise to increased discharging or arcing in the low-pressure Martian atmosphere, increased dust adhesion to space suits and equipment, and interference with radio communications.” NASA’s Mars Testbed missions in the coming decade may be able to investigate whether such is the case. Farrell is lead author of a paper on this research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research April 20.

“Complex tracks, generated by the large Martian dust devils, are commonly found in many regions of Mars, and several dust devils have been photographed in the act of scouring the surface,” said MATADOR Principal Investigator Dr. Peter Smith of the University of Arizona (Tucson). “These Martian dust devils dwarf the 5- to 10-meter terrestrial ones and can be greater than 500 meters in diameter and several thousand meters high. The track patterns are known to change from season to season, so these huge dust pipes must be a large factor in transporting dust and could be responsible for eroding landforms.”

“Two ingredients, present on both Earth and Mars, are necessary for a dust devil to form: rising air and a source of rotation,” said Dr. Nilton Renno of the University of Michigan, a member of the research team who is an expert in the fluid dynamics of dust devils. “Wind shear, such as a change in wind direction and speed with altitude, is the source for rotation. Stronger updrafts have the potential to produce stronger dust devils, and larger wind shear produces larger dust devils.”

Dust particles become electrified in dust devils when they rub against each other as they are carried by the winds, transferring positive and negative electric charge in the same way you build up static electricity if you shuffle across a carpet. Scientists thought there would not be a high-voltage, large-scale electric field in dust devils because negatively charged particles would be evenly mixed with positively charged particles, so the overall electric charge in the dust devil would be in balance.

However, the team’s observations indicate that smaller particles become negatively charged, while larger particles become positively charged. Dust devil winds carry the small, negatively charged particles high into the air, while the heavier, positively charged particles remain near the base of the dust devil. This separation of charges produces the large-scale electric field, like the positive and negative terminals on a battery. Since the electrified particles are in motion, and a magnetic field is just the result of moving electric charges, the dust devil generates a magnetic field also.

If Martian dust grains have a variety of sizes and compositions, dust devils on Mars should become electrified in the same way as their particles rub against each other, according to the team (refer to Item 1 for an artist’s concept of an electrified Martian dust devil). We experience more static electricity on dry days because water molecules draw charge from electrified objects. Since the Martian atmosphere is extremely dry, the charging is expected to be strong, as there will be few atmospheric water molecules to steal charge from the dust grains. However, since the density of the Martian atmosphere is much lower than Earth’s, the near-surface electrical conductivity of the Martian atmosphere is expected to be 100 times higher. A Martian dust devil will therefore take longer to fully charge, since the increased atmospheric conductivity draws charge away from Martian dust grains.

To date, none of the robotic Mars landers and rovers that have operated on the Martian surface have experienced any consequences of this phenomena, including the rovers Spirit and Opportunity. However, more complex landed laboratories, such as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), slated to launch in 2009, may be far more sensitive to electrical disturbances than previous missions. As such, this research is a key stepping stone to more advanced robotic and human exploration of Mars.

Martian dust storms, which can cover the entire planet, are also expected to be strong generators of electric fields (Item 3 shows dust suspended in the Martian atmosphere as a result of Martian dust devil and dust storm activity). The team hopes to measure a large dust storm on Earth and have instruments to detect atmospheric electric and magnetic fields on future Mars landers.

The team includes researchers from NASA Goddard, NASA Glenn (Cleveland, Ohio), NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, Calif.), University of Arizona (Tucson), University of California (Berkeley), SETI Institute (Mountain View, Calif.), University of Washington (Seattle), University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and Duke University (Durham, N.C.). This research was sponsored in part by the NASA Mars Fundamental Research Program, which is operated out of NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.

Original Source: NASA News Release

Image credit: NASA/JPL
Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover, wrote in his science journal for April 16 that “Well, the Battle of Bounce Rock is over.”

Squyres was referring not only to the odd rock that rests alone on the otherwise flat, rockless Meridiani plains, but also what battles had to be waged even to consider it a rock at all.

“Not everybody on the team was even convinced that it was a rock at first,” noted Squyres. “There was some speculation that it might actually have been one of the airbag covers, shaken off during the landing by a particularly sharp jolt. Before we got to it we had a little guessing game going, with the votes about evenly split between ‘Mars rock’ and ‘flight hardware’, along with a few brave souls who thought it might be a meteorite.” Flight hardware has presented a number of fantastic images in the landscape, from objects like airbag threads and parachutes to tiny paper bits.

“There was only one object anywhere outside Eagle crater that looked even remotely like a decent-sized rock. We named it ‘Bounce Rock’ because we could see that the airbags had bounced right on top of it as the landing took place,” wrote Squyres. “It figures that if there was only one rock for what seems like miles in every direction, we’d find a way to hit it!”

“It was fun, and it sure was interesting, but it was a bit of a struggle,” described Squyres. “What had us going for awhile there was a very nice Mini-TES spectrum that seemed to show a lot of hematite in the rock. We knew there was hematite in the soil at Meridiani, but this was the first time we’d gotten a hematite signal from rock… so it looked very interesting. We rolled up to it, whipped out the Moessbauer Spectrometer, took some good data, and to our surprise we found no hematite in the rock at all. In fact, the only mineral that the Moessbauer detected was pyroxene, which made this rock look very different from anything we’d ever seen, at either landing site. We put a hole in it with the RAT, looked again, and saw the same thing — lots of pyroxene and no hematite.”

“So what was going on?”, asked Squyres. “Turns out we’d been faked out on the Mini-TES data. We had been pretty far away from the rock when we had first looked it, and the Mini-TES field of view had also included a particularly hematite-rich patch of soil immediately behind the rock. Once we got close enough to see the rock better with Mini-TES, the Mini-TES data confirmed the absence of hematite, confirmed the pyroxene, and also showed some plagioclase, another mineral, in the rock. So the story was coming together.”

“Then came the most interesting part of all, the APXS data.” Squyres referred to the alpha proton spectrometer, an instrument to determine chemical composition. “The APXS measures elemental chemistry, and what we found was that, chemically, Bounce Rock is almost a dead ringer for a rock called EETA 79001-B. Odd name for a rock; 79001 actually is a rock from Mars that was found in Antarctica back in 1979. It was knocked off of Mars long ago, orbited the sun for awhile, and eventually hit the Earth in Antarctica, where it was found many years later by an expedition sent there to collect meteorites. There are more than a dozen such rocks that are believed to be from Mars on Earth. But until Bounce Rock, nobody had ever found a rock that was actually on Mars and that matched the chemistry of one of these rocks. Now we have.”

“We’re not quite sure where on Mars Bounce Rock came from, but we suspect that it might have been thrown out of a big impact crater that’s about 50 kilometers southwest of our landing site,” concluded Squyres. “So it’s not a meteorite, but it probably did fall from the sky. And it turned out to be a very interesting stop on our drive across Meridiani Planum.”

The rover team has two hills on the horizon, each approaching closer everyday, as Spirit drives towards the Columbia Hills and Opportunity motors towards Endurance Crater with a slightly raised lip that otherwise stands out as the closest thing to a hill on the flat plains.

On its way to the Columbia Hills, Spirit acquired new microscopic imager views of its capture magnet on sol 92 (April 6, 2004). Both Spirit and Opportunity are equipped with a number of magnets. The capture magnet, as seen right, has a stronger charge than its sidekick, the filter magnet. The lower-powered filter magnet captures only the most magnetic airborne dust with the strongest charges, while the capture magnet picks up all magnetic airborne dust.

The magnets’ primary purpose is to collect the martian magnetic dust so that scientists can analyze it with the rovers’ Moessbauer spectrometers. While there is plenty of dust on the surface of Mars, it is difficult to confirm where it came from, and when it was last airborne. Because scientists are interested in learning about the properties of the dust in the atmosphere, they devised this dust-collection experiment.

The capture magnet is about 4.5 centimeters (1.8 inches) in diameter and is constructed with a central cylinder and three rings, each with alternating orientations of magnetization. Scientists have been monitoring the continual accumulation of dust since the beginning of the mission with panoramic camera and microscopic imager images. They had to wait until enough dust accumulated before they could get a Moessbauer spectrometer analysis. The results of that analysis, performed on sol 92, have not been sent back to Earth yet.

The plains appear to be uniform in character from the rover’s current position all the way to Endurance Crater. Granules of various sizes blanket the plains. Spherical granules fancifully called blueberries are present – some intact and some broken. Larger granules pave the surface, while smaller grains, including broken blueberries, form small dunes. Randomly distributed 1-centimeter (0.4 inch) sized pebbles (as seen just left of center in the foreground of the image) make up a third type of feature on the plains. The pebbles’ composition remains to be determined. Scientists plan to examine these in the coming sols.

Examination of this part of Mars by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter revealed the presence of hematite, which led NASA to choose Meridiani Planum as Opportunity’s landing site. The rover science conducted on the plains of Meridiani Planum serves to integrate what the rovers are seeing on the ground with what orbital data have shown. Opportunity will make stop at a small crater called “Fram” (seen in the upper left, with relatively large rocks nearby) before heading to the rim of Endurance Crater.

Original Source: NASA Astrobiology Magazine

NASA’s Opportunity rover has examined an odd volcanic rock on the plains of Mars’ Meridiani Planum region with a composition unlike anything seen on Mars before, but scientists have found similarities to meteorites that fell to Earth.

“We think we have a rock similar to something found on Earth,” said Dr. Benton Clark of Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, science-team member for the Opportunity and Spirit rovers on Mars. The similarity seen in data from Opportunity’s alpha particle X-ray spectrometer “gives us a way of understanding ‘Bounce Rock’ better,” he said. Bounce Rock is the name given to the odd, football-sized rock because Opportunity struck it while bouncing to a stop inside protective airbags on landing day.

The resemblance helps resolve a paradox about the meteorites, too. Bubbles of gas trapped in them match the recipe of martian atmosphere so closely that scientists have been confident for years that these rocks originated from Mars. But examination of rocks on Mars with orbiters and surface missions had never found anything like them, until now.

“There is a striking similarity in spectra,” said Christian Schroeder, a rover science-team collaborator from the University of Mainz, Germany, which supplied both Mars rovers’ Moessbauer spectrometer instruments for identifying iron-bearing minerals.

Mars Exploration Rover scientists described two such meteorites in particular during a Mars Exploration Rover news conference at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. One rock, named Shergotty, was found in India in 1865 and it gave its name to a class of meteorites called shergottites. A shergottite named EETA79001 was found in Antarctica in 1979 and has an elemental composition even closer to Bounce Rock’s. Those two and nearly 30 other meteorites found on Earth are believed to have been ejected from Mars by the impacts of large asteroids or comets hitting Mars.

Opportunity’s miniature thermal emission spectrometer indicates that the main ingredient in Bounce Rock is a volcanic mineral called pyroxene, said science-team collaborator Deanne Rogers of Arizona State University, Tempe. The Moessbauer spectrometer also identified pyroxene in the rock. The high proportion of pyroxene makes it unlike not only any other rock studied by Opportunity or Spirit, but also unlike the volcanic deposits mapped extensively around Mars by a similar spectrometer on NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter, Rogers said.

Thermal infrared imaging by another orbiter, Mars Odyssey, suggests a possible origin for Bounce Rock. An impact crater about 25 kilometers wide (16 miles wide) lies about 50 kilometers (31 miles) southwest of Opportunity. The images show that some rocks thrown outward by the impact that formed that crater flew as far as the distance to the rover. “Some of us think Bounce Rock could have been ejected from this crater,” Rogers said.

Opportunity is driving eastward, toward a crater dubbed “Endurance” that might offer access to thicker exposures of bedrock than the rover has been able to examine so far. With new software to improve mobility performance, the rover may reach Endurance within two weeks, said JPL’s Jan Chodas, flight software manager for both Mars Exploration Rovers.

Mission controllers at JPL successfully sent new versions of flight software to both rovers. Spirit switched to the new version successfully on Monday, and Opportunity did late Tuesday.

A parting look at the small crater in which Opportunity landed is part of a full 360-degree color panorama released at the news conference. The view combines about 600 individual frames from the rover’s panoramic camera, said science-team collaborator Jason Soderblom of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. It is called the Lion King panorama because it was taken from a high-ground viewpoint at the edge of the crater, like the high-ground viewpoint used by animal characters in the Lion King story.

The panorama gives a good sense of how wind has uncovered the outcrop at the upwind side of the crater and deposited sand in the downwind side of the crater and bright martian dust in the wind shadow of the crater, Soderblom commented. On the wide plain outside the crater lies Bounce Rock.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Images and additional information about the project are available from JPL at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., at http://athena.cornell.edu.

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release