Space and astronomy news
New video beamed back to Earth from the Perseverance Rover shows an incredibly detailed view of the Ingenuity helicopter’s flight back in September. The video – taken from about 300 meters (328 yards) away — shows Ingenuity’s takeoff and landing with such detail, that even a little plume of dust is visible during the helicopter’s ascent.
Continue reading “You can Watch Ingenuity’s Flight on Mars, Captured by Perseverance”
Two microphones aboard the Perseverance Rover have recorded “alien” sounds on Mars – the sounds of a human-made spacecraft crunching its wheels on the Red Planet’s surface, or its motors whirring, or blasts from its scientific laser instrument. Perseverance’s microphones have also captured the sounds of another spacecraft – the Ingenuity helicopter – taking flight. During the five or so hours recorded so far, you can hear the Martian wind gusting in the background.
“We’ve been able to see Mars from the rovers’ point of view for a quite a long time now,” said Greg Delory, a consultant to the Mars 2020 rover microphone team, “so to have another ‘sense’ on Mars is pretty incredible.”
Continue reading “The Sounds of Mars: Hear the Wind and Crunch of Rover Wheels on the Red Planet”
It’s another first for NASA.
In early September, the Perseverance rover successfully used its robotic arm and drill to drill into a rock and extract a sample. It extracted a rock core about 6 cm (2 in) long and placed it inside a sealed tube. This is the first time a robotic spacecraft has collected a sample from another planet destined for a return to Earth on a separate spacecraft.
Now we wait for the eventual return of the sample to Earth.
Continue reading “Perseverance has Collected its First Sample of Mars and Prepared it for Return to Earth… Eventually”
Nearly eight months into the Perseverance rover’s mission on Mars, researchers have confirmed that Jezero crater is (as was believed) an ancient lakebed, but more significantly, that it once experienced powerful flash floods that pushed boulders from tens of miles upstream into the crater basin.
Continue reading “Perseverance Sees Evidence of Flash Floods in Jezero Crater”
The Mars Perseverance rover is on the move! The HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted the rover from above, the first view since shortly after the rover landed in February 2021. Perseverance appears as the white speck in the center of the image above, in the the “South Séítah” area of Mars’ Jezero Crater.
The HiRISE team said the rover is about 700 meters (2,300 feet) from its original landing site.
Continue reading “Here’s Perseverance, Seen From Space”
Dust devils are generally used as a trope in media when the writers want to know that an area is deserted. They signify the desolation and isolation that those places represent. Almost none of the settings of those stories are close to the isolation of Perseverance, the Mars rover that landed on the planet earlier this year. Fittingly, the number of dust devils Perseverance has detected is also extremely high – over 300 in its first three months on the planet.
Continue reading “Perseverance has Already Detected Over 300 Dust Devils and Vortices on Mars”
When it landed on Mars in February of 2021, the Perseverance rover joined a small armada of robotic explorers working hard to characterize Mars’ environment and atmosphere and determine if it ever supported life. But unlike its predecessors, one of the key objectives of the rover is to obtain samples of Martian soil and rock, which it will leave in a cache for later retrieval by a joint NASA-ESA mission.
This will be the first sample return from Mars, and the analysis of these samples will provide new insight into the geological and environmental evolution of Mars. The first attempt to obtain a sample didn’t go so well, with the sample crumbling before it was placed in the cache. Undeterred, the science team moved onto the next site and prepared to try again. A few days ago, NASA confirmed that the rover succeeded in its second attempt and has the pictures to prove it!
Continue reading “Perseverance Drills Another Hole, and This Time the Sample is Intact”
The Ingenuity helicopter on Mars has now completed its 12th flight, where it acted as a scout, looking ahead for dangerous terrain for it’s partner in crime, the Perseverance rover.
Continue reading “Ingenuity’s Flight 12 was a Tricky one, Flying Over Hazardous Terrain”
Where’s Waldo (or Where’s Wally) is a very popular book series for all ages. One way to make it potentially more interesting is to adapt it to interplanetary exploration by searching for a Martian rover in a picture taken from a Martian helicopter. Ingenuity took a picture on its eleventh flight that would be a worthy addition to any interplanetary search game – in this image, the goal is to find Perseverance.
Continue reading “Ingenuity Sees Perseverance From Above”
Over the past few weeks, there was quite a bit of excitement in the air at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where mission controllers were prepping the Perseverance rover to acquire its first sample from the Martian surface. This mission milestone would be the culmination of years of hard work by a team of over 90 dedicated scientists and engineers.
The commands to commence operations to take its first sample (from drill site Roubion) were sent to the rover on Sol 164 (Thurs, Aug. 5th). On the morning of Friday, Aug. 6th, the team gathered to witness the sampling data come in. Everything appeared to be fine until they were notified a few hours later that the sample tube was empty! Since then, the rover’s science and engineering teams have been investigating what could have become of the sample.
Continue reading “Perseverance Fails to Collect its First Sample”