Space and astronomy news
In this latest video update from the Mars Science Laboratory team, Ashwin Vasavada, the mission’s Deputy Project Scientist, discusses the recent finding that the Red Planet doesn’t have the same atmosphere it used to. Curiosity’s microwave oven-sized Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument analyzed an atmosphere sample and the results provided the most precise measurements ever made of isotopes of argon in the Martian atmosphere.
Although today Mars’ atmosphere is sparse and thin — barely 1% the density of Earth’s at sea level — scientists don’t believe that was always the case. The Red Planet likely had a much denser atmosphere similar to ours, long, long ago. So… what happened to it?
NASA’s Curiosity rover has now found strong evidence that Mars lost much of its atmosphere to space — just as many scientists have suspected. The findings were announced today at the EGU 2013 General Assembly in Vienna.
Curiosity’s microwave oven-sized Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument analyzed an atmosphere sample last week using a process that concentrates selected gases. The results provided the most precise measurements ever made of isotopes of argon in the Martian atmosphere.
Isotopes are variants of the same element with different atomic weights.
“We found arguably the clearest and most robust signature of atmospheric loss on Mars,” said Sushil Atreya, a SAM co-investigator at the University of Michigan.
SAM found that the Martian atmosphere has about four times as much of a lighter stable isotope (argon-36) compared to a heavier one (argon-38). This ratio is much lower than the Solar System’s original ratio, as estimated from measurements of the Sun and Jupiter.
This also removes previous uncertainty about the ratio in the Martian atmosphere in measurements from NASA’s Viking project in 1976, as well as from small volumes of argon extracted from Martian meteorites retrieved here on Earth.
These findings point to a process that favored loss of the lighter isotope over the heavier one, likely through gas escaping from the top of the atmosphere. This appears to be in line with a previously-suggested process called sputtering, by which atoms are knocked out of the upper atmosphere by energetic particles in the solar wind.
Lacking a strong magnetic field, Mars’ atmosphere would have been extremely susceptible to atmospheric erosion by sputtering billions of years ago, when the solar wind was an estimated 300 times the density it is today.
These findings by Curiosity and SAM will undoubtedly support those made by NASA’s upcoming MAVEN mission, which will determine how much of the Martian atmosphere has been lost over time by measuring the current rate of escape to space. Scheduled to launch in November, MAVEN will be the first mission devoted to understanding Mars’ upper atmosphere.
Find out more about MAVEN and how Mars may have lost its atmosphere in the video below, and follow the most recent discoveries of the MSL mission here.
Source: NASA/JPL
Curiosity and Mount Sharp – Parting Shot ahead of Mars Solar Conjunction
Enjoy this parting view of Curiosity’s elevated robotic arm and drill staring at you; back dropped with her ultimate destination – Mount Sharp – in this panoramic vista of Yellowknife Bay basin snapped on March 23, Sol 223, by the rover’s navigation camera system. The raw images were stitched by Marco Di Lorenzo and Ken Kremer and colorized. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Marco Di Lorenzo/KenKremer (kenkremer.com)
See video below explaining Mars Solar Conjunction[/caption]
Earth’s science invasion fleet at Mars is taking a break from speaking with their handlers back on Earth.
Why ? Because as happens every 26 months, the sun has gotten directly in the way of Mars and Earth.
Earth, Mars and the Sun are lined up in nearly a straight line. The geometry is normal and it’s called ‘Mars Solar Conjunction’.
Conjunction officially started on April 4 and lasts until around May 1.
From our perspective here on Earth, Mars will be passing behind the Sun.
Watch this brief NASA JPL video for an explanation of Mars Solar Conjunction.
Therefore the Terran fleet will be on its own for the next month since the sun will be blocking nearly all communications.
In fact since the sun can disrupt and garble communications, mission controllers will be pretty much suspending transmissions and commands so as not to inadvertently create serious problems that could damage the fleet in a worst case scenario.
Right now there are a trio of orbiters and a duo of rovers from NASA and ESA exploring Mars.
The spacecraft include the Curiosity (MSL) and Opportunity (MER) rovers from NASA. Also the Mars Express orbiter from ESA and the Mars Odyssey (MO) and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) from NASA.
Because several of these robotic assets have been at Mars for nearly 10 years and longer, the engineering teams have a lot of experience with handling them during the month long conjunction period.
“This is our sixth conjunction for Odyssey,” said Chris Potts of JPL, mission manager for NASA’s Mars Odyssey, which has been orbiting Mars since 2001. “We have plenty of useful experience dealing with them, though each conjunction is a little different.”
But there is something new this go round.
“The biggest difference for this 2013 conjunction is having Curiosity on Mars,” Potts said. Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter relay almost all data coming from Curiosity and the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, as well as conducting the orbiters’ own science observations.
The rovers and orbiters can continue working and collecting science images and spectral data.
But that data will all be stored in the on board memory for a post-conjunction playback starting sometime in May.
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Learn more about Curiosity’s groundbreaking discoveries and NASA missions at Ken’s upcoming lecture presentations:
April 20/21 : “Curiosity and the Search for Life on Mars – (in 3-D)”. Plus Orion, SpaceX, Antares, the Space Shuttle and more! NEAF Astronomy Forum, Suffern, NY
April 28: “Curiosity and the Search for Life on Mars – (in 3-D)”. Plus the Space Shuttle, SpaceX, Antares, Orion and more. Washington Crossing State Park, Titusville, NJ, 130 PM
How cool is this? An animation of seven images from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show a “flapping” of the parachute that allowed the Curiosity rover to descend safely through Mars atmosphere images. The chute, imaged as it lay on the ground following the rover’s safe landing, was blown about by the Martian breeze! The images were acquired by HiRISE between August 12, 2012 and January 13, 2013. The different images show distinct changes in the parachute, which is attached to the backshell that encompassed the rover during launch, flight and descent.
The HiRISE team explains the animation:
In the first four images there are only subtle changes, perhaps explained by differences in viewing and illumination geometry.
Sometime between September 8, 2012 and November 30, 2012, there was a major change in which the parachute extension to the southeast (lower right) was moved inward, so the parachute covers a smaller area. In the same time interval some of the dark ejecta around the backshell brightened, perhaps from deposition of airborne dust.
Another change happened between December 16, 2012 and January 13, 2013, when the parachute shifted a bit to the southeast. This type of motion may kick off dust and keep parachutes on the surface bright, to help explain why the parachute from Viking 1 (landed in 1976) remains detectable.
Here’s another version from UnmannedSpaceflight.com’s Doug Ellison:
And here’s a look at how big the chute really is (note the people for scale):
Source: HiRISE
Mars Gigapixel Panorama – Curiosity rover: Martian solar days 136-149 in The World
Photographer and panoramacist Andrew Bodrov has again taken advantage of that old shutterbug, the Curiosity rover, and the images she’s taken of her surroundings. This huge new interactive panorama stretches across 90,000 x 45,000 pixels, and includes 295 images from the Narrow Angle Camera taken on Sols 136-149 and 112 images from Medium Angle Camera taken on Sol 137. Enjoy playing around and visiting Curiosity’s ‘hood. If you click the link below the pan, it will take you to the host website where the panorama spreads across your screen. Enjoy!
FYI, today is Sol 228 for Curiosity on Mars. Has it been that long already?
Bodrov is a photographer from Estonia who specializes in interactive panoramic photography. He did a Curiosity pan in February 2013 another in August 2012 and he’s also taken lots of images at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Curiosity is back! After a multi-week hiatus forced by a computer memory glitch, NASA’s mega rover is back to full operation.
And the proof is crystal clear in the beautiful new panoramic view (above) snapped by Curiosity this weekend from Yellowknife Bay, showing the robot’s arm and drill elevated and aiming straight at you – raring to go and ready to feast on something deliciously Martian.
“That drill is hungry, looking for something tasty to eat, and ‘you’ (loaded with water and organics) are it,” I thought with a chuckle as Curiosity seeks additional habitats and ingredients friendly to life.
So my imaging partner Marco Di Lorenzo and I celebrated the great news by quickly creating the new panoramic mosaic assembled from images taken on Saturday, March 23, or Sol 223, by the robot’s navigation cameras. Our new Curiosity mosaic was first featured on Saturday at NBC News Cosmic Log by Alan Boyle – while I was hunting for Comet Pan-STARRS.
So the fact that Curiosity is again snapping images and transmitting fresh alien vistas and new science data is a relief to eagerly waiting scientists and engineers here on Earth.
Drilling goes to the heart of the mission. It was absolutely essential to the key finding of Curiosity’s Martian foray thus far – that Mars possesses an environment where alien microbes could once have thrived in the distant past when the Red Planet was warmer and wetter.
Curiosity has found widespread evidence for repeated episodes of flowing liquid water on the floor of her Gale Crater landing site – an essential prerequisite to life as we know it.
After coring and analyzing the first powder ever drilled from the interior of a Martian rock in February 2013, NASA’s Curiosity robot discovered some of the key chemical ingredients necessary to support life on early Mars billions of years ago.
Curiosity found that the fine-grained, sedimentary mudstone rock at the rovers current worksite inside the Yellowknife Bay basin possesses significant amounts of phyllosilicate clay minerals; indicating the flow of nearly neutral liquid water and a habitat friendly to the possible origin of simple Martian life forms eons ago.
The rovers 7 foot (2.1 meter) long robotic arm fed aspirin sized samples of the gray, pulverized powder into the miniaturized CheMin and SAM analytical instruments on Feb. 22 and 23, or Sols 195 and 196. The samples were analyzed on Sol 200 and then the rover experienced her first significant problems since landing on Aug. 5, 2012.
The Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument and Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instruments test the Martian soil and rock samples to determine their chemical composition and search for traces of organic molecules – the building blocks of life
No organics have been found thus far.
The rover’s science mission has been on hold for nearly a month since “a memory glitch on the A-side computer on Feb. 27, which prompted controllers to command a swap from the A-side computer to the B-side computer,” according to a NASA statement.
“That operator-commanded swap put Curiosity into safe mode for two days. The rover team restored the availability of the A-side as a backup and prepared the B-side to resume full operations.”
The memory issue may have been caused by a cosmic ray strike. The rover suffered another minor setback last week, briefly reentering ‘safe mode’. And in between, a solar storm forced the team to shut Curiosity down for a few more days.
All appears well now.
The next step is to reanalyze those 1st gray rock tailings to continue the hunt for traces of organic molecules.
But the next solar conjunction will interrupt communications starting around April 4 for several weeks. More on that shortly.
After conjunction, Curiosity will resume her drilling campaign
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Learn more about Curiosity’s groundbreaking discoveries and NASA missions at Ken’s upcoming lecture presentations:
April 20/21 : “Curiosity and the Search for Life on Mars – (in 3-D)”. Plus Orion, SpaceX, Antares, the Space Shuttle and more! NEAF Astronomy Forum, Suffern, NY
April 28: “Curiosity and the Search for Life on Mars – (in 3-D)”. Washington Crossing State Park, Titusville, NJ, 130 PM
Not even two and a half weeks after a memory glitch that sent NASA’s Curiosity rover into a safe mode on Feb. 27, the robotic Mars explorer once again went into standby status as the result of a software discrepancy — although mission engineers diagnosed the new problem quickly and anticipate having the rover out of safe mode in a couple of days.
“This is a very straightforward matter to deal with,” said Richard Cook, project manager for Curiosity at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “We can just delete that file, which we don’t need anymore, and we know how to keep this from occurring in the future.”
Via a JPL press release, issued March 18:
“Curiosity initiated this automated fault-protection action, entering ‘safe mode’ at about 8 p.m. PDT (11 p.m. EDT) on March 16, while operating on the B-side computer, one of its two main computers that are redundant to each other. It did not switch to the A-side computer, which was restored last week and is available as a back-up if needed. The rover is stable, healthy and in communication with engineers.
“The safe-mode entry was triggered when a command file failed a size-check by the rover’s protective software. Engineers diagnosed a software bug that appended an unrelated file to the file being checked, causing the size mismatch.”
The rover is stable, healthy and in communication with engineers.
– NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Once Curiosity is back online its investigation into the watery history of Gale crater will resume, but another hiatus — this one planned — will commence on April 4, when Mars will begin passing behind the Sun from Earth’s perspective. Mission engineers will refrain from sending commands to the rover during a four-week period to avoid data corruption from solar interference.
Keep up with the latest news from the MSL mission here.
Then again, there’s a certain personality on Twitter who claims a slightly different reason for these recent setbacks…
The science team guiding NASA’s Curiosity Mars Science Lab (MSL) rover have demonstrated a new capability that significantly enhances the robots capability to scan her surroundings for signs of life giving water – from a distance. And the rover appears to have found that evidence for water at the Gale Crater landing site is also more widespread than prior indications.
The powerful Mastcam cameras peering from the rovers head can now also be used as a mineral-detecting and hydration-detecting tool to search 360 degrees around every spot she explores for the ingredients required for habitability and precursors to life.
Researchers announced the new findings today (March 18) at a news briefing at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.
“Some iron-bearing rocks and minerals can be detected and mapped using the Mastcam’s near-infrared filters,” says Prof. Jim Bell, Mastcam co-investigator of Arizona State University, Tempe.
Bell explained that scientists used the filter wheels on the Mastcam cameras to run an experiment by taking measurements in different wavelength’s on a rock target called ‘Knorr’ in the Yellowknife Bay area were Curiosity is now exploring. The rover recently drilled into the John Klein outcrop of mudstone that is crisscrossed with bright veins.
Researchers found that near-infrared wavelengths on Mastcam can be used as a new analytical technique to detect the presence of some but not all types of hydrated minerals.
“Mastcam has some capability to search for hydrated minerals,” said Melissa Rice of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
“The first use of the Mastcam 34 mm camera to find water was at the rock target called “Knorr.”
“With Mastcam, we see elevated hydration signals in the narrow veins that cut many of the rocks in this area. These bright veins contain hydrated minerals that are different from the clay minerals in the surrounding rock matrix.”
Mastcam thus serves as an early detective for water without having to drive up to every spot of interest, saving precious time and effort.
But Mastcam has some limits. “It is not sensitive to the hydrated phyllosilicates found in the drilling sample at John Klein” Rice explained.
“Mastcam can use the hydration mapping technique to look for targets related to water that correspond to hydrated minerals,” Rice added. “It’s a bonus in searching for water!”
The key finding of Curiosity thus far is that the fine-grained, sedimentary mudstone rock at the Yellowknife Bay basin possesses a significant amount of phyllosilicate clay minerals; indicating an environment where Martian microbes could once have thrived in the distant past.
“We have found a habitable environment which is so benign and supportive of life that probably if this water was around, and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it,” said John Grotzinger, the chief scientist for the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory mission at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.
Ahh — there’s nothing like a beautiful sunny day in Gale crater! The rusty sand crunching beneath your wheels, a gentle breeze blowing at a balmy 6º C (43º F), Mount Sharp rising in the distance into a clear blue sky… wait, did I just say blue sky?
I sure did. But no worries — Mars hasn’t sprouted a nitrogen-and-oxygen atmosphere overnight. The image above is a crop from a panoramic mosaic made of images from NASA’s Curiosity rover, showing Gale crater’s central peak Mount Sharp (or Aeolis Mons, if you prefer the official moniker.) Don’t let the blue sky fool you though — the lighting has been adjusted to look like a sunlit scene on Earth, if only to let geologists more easily refer to their own experience when studying the Martian landscape.
Click the image to see the full panorama, and a view of the same scene under more “natural” Martian lighting can be found below:
According to JPL, in both versions the sky has been filled out by extrapolating color and brightness information from the portions of the sky that were captured in images of the terrain.
The component images were taken by the 100-millimeter-focal-length telephoto lens camera mounted on the right side of Curiosity’s remote sensing mast, during the 45th Martian day of the rover’s mission on Mars (Sept. 20, 2012).
Informally named after planetary scientist Robert Sharp by the MSL science team, the peak rises rises more than 3 miles (5 kilometers) above the floor of Gale crater.
See more news and images from the Curiosity rover here (and to find out what the latest weather conditions in Gale crater are visit MarsWeather.com here.)
After analyzing the first powder ever drilled from the interior of a Martian rock, NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered some of the key chemical ingredients necessary for life to have thrived on early Mars billions of years ago.
Curiosity has achieved her goal of discovering a habitable environment on the Red Planet, mission scientists reported today at a briefing held at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Data collected by Curiosity’s two analytical chemistry labs (SAM and CheMin) confirm that the gray powder collected from inside the sedimentary rock where the rover is exploring – near an ancient Martian stream bed – possesses a significant amount of phyllosilicate clay minerals; indicating an environment where Martian microbes could once have thrived in the distant past.
“We have found a habitable environment which is so benign and supportive of life that probably if this water was around, and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it,” said John Grotzinger, the chief scientist for the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory mission at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.
Curiosity cored the rocky sample from a fine-grained, sedimentary outcrop named “John Klein” inside a shallow basin named Yellowknife Bay, and delivered pulverized powered to the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) and Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instruments inside the robot.
The presence of abundant phyllosilicate clay minerals in the John Klein drill powder indicates a fresh water environment. Further evidence derives from the veiny sedimentary bedrock shot through with calcium sulfate mineral veins that form in a neutral to mildly alkaline pH environment.
“Clay minerals make up at least 20 percent of the composition of this sample,” said David Blake, principal investigator for the CheMin instrument at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
The rovers 7 foot (2.1 meter) long robotic arm fed aspirin sized samples of the gray, pulverized powder into the miniaturized CheMin SAM analytical instruments on Feb. 22 and 23, or Sols 195 and 196. The samples were analyzed on Sol 200.
Scientists were able to identify carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus in the sample – all of which are essential constituents for life as we know it based on organic molecules.
“The range of chemical ingredients we have identified in the sample is impressive, and it suggests pairings such as sulfates and sulfides that indicate a possible chemical energy source for micro-organisms,” said Paul Mahaffy, principal investigator of the SAM suite of instruments at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The discovery of phyllosilicates on the floor of Gale crater was unexpected and has delighted the scientists. Based on spectral observations from Mars orbit. Grotzinger told me previously that phyllosilicates had only been detected in the lower reaches of Mount Sharp, the 3 mile (5 km) high mountain that is Curiosity’s ultimate destination.
Grotzinger said today that Curiosity will remain in the Yellowknife Bay area for several additional weeks or months to fully characterize the area. The rover will also conduct at least one more drilling campaign to try and replicate the results, check for organic molecules and search for new discoveries.