Artist concept of a Mars Sample Return mission. Credit: Wickman Spacecraft & Propulsion.
A Mars sample return mission has long been a dream and goal of many planetary scientists. Getting Martian soil samples back here on Earth would allow them to be studied in ways rovers and landers just can’t do. Of course, the big reason for getting samples of Mars back to Earth would be to really determine if there ever was – or is — life on Mars. But a sample return mission would be “hellishly difficult,” Steve Squyres of the MER mission once said.
But forget sending a lander, scooping up samples, putting them in a capsule and somehow rocketing them back to Earth. Human genome sequencer Craig Venter wants to send a DNA sequencing machine Mars, and beam back the DNA data to Earth. Not to be outdone, Jonathan Rothberg, founder the DNA sequencing company Ion Torrent, is working on getting his Personal Genome Machine to Mars and sending back the data.
In articles in the Los Angeles Times and MIT’s Technology Review this week the two biologists seem to be in a race, of sorts, to see who could send their DNA machines to Mars first. Venter was quoted as saying, “There will be life forms there,” Venter said, and wants to build a “biological teleporter.”
Rothberg is looking to be part of a NASA-funded project at Harvard and MIT called SET-G, or “the search for extraterrestrial genomes.”
An MIT researcher involved in the project, Christopher Carr, told Technology Review that his lab is working to shrink Ion Torrent’s machine from 30 kilograms down to just three kilograms so that it can fit on a NASA rover, and they are testing how well the device can withstand the heavy radiation it would encounter on the way to Mars.
With NASA’s current budget woes, a sample return mission likely couldn’t happen until around 2030. But another Mars rover mission may be slated for 2018, if all goes well, and a DNA sequencer could potentially be part of the mission, the two biologists said. And an in-situ DNA sequencer avoids the potential pitfalls of a sample return mission.
“People are worried about the Andromeda strain,” Venter said. “We can rebuild the Martians in a P-4 spacesuit lab instead of having them land in the ocean.”
Image caption: Time lapse context view of Curiosity maneuvering her robotic arm. Curiosity conducts a close- up examination of windblown ‘Rocknest’ ripple site and inspects sandy material at “bootlike” wheel scuff mark with the APXS (Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer) and MAHLI (Mars Hand Lens Imager) instruments positioned on the rotatable turret at the arm’s terminus. Colorized mosaic was stitched together from Sol 57 & 58 Navcam raw images shows the arm in action just prior to 1st sample scooping here. Surrounding terrain and eroded rim of Gale Crater rim is visible on the horizon. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo
NASA’s Curiosity rover is actively searching for uncontaminated Martian soil after finding new flecks of “bright material” of unknown origin in the windblown sands at “Rocknest” ripple.
The team leading the Curiosity Mars Science Lab (MSL) mission decided to dump the second scoopful of dusty material collected last week on Sol 66 (Oct. 12). Instead they will search for pristine Martian sand to pour into the rover’s critical sample-processing mechanisms to use as a decontamination agent for cleansing the interior chambers and walls of Earthly residues.
Image Caption: Bright Particle of Martian Origin in Scoop Hole. This image contributed to an interpretation by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity science team that some of the bright particles on the ground near the rover are native Martian material. Other light-toned material nearbyhas been assessed as small debris from the spacecraft. Curiosity’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera took this image on Sol 66 (Oct. 12, 2012) showing part of the hole or bite left in the ground when Curiosity collected its first scoop of Martian soil five sols earlier. A clod of soil near the top center of the image contains a light-toned particle. The observation that the particle is embedded in the clod led scientists to assess this particle as Martian material, not something from the spacecraft. This assessment prompted the mission to continue scooping in the area, despite observations of a few light-toned particles in the area being scooped. The image shows an area about 2 inches (5 centimeters) across. It is brightened to improve visibility in the shaded area. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
The science team is proceeding with appropriate caution – just as they indicated at press briefings – so as not to gum up the sample processing system with material that could give false positive readings for organic compounds or compromise the integrity of the rover’s delicate sample handling and delivery system.
“Concerns that the bright spot is more material shed from the flight system, and that some of this terrestrial material is in the scooped dirt, led the tactical team to decide to dump the scoop and take MAHLI images of the scoop targets first,” wrote MSL scientist Ken Herkenhoff in a rover team update.
The second scoopful of Martian sand from Rocknest was intentionally discarded on Sol 67 (Oct.13) after up close imaging by the MAHLI microscopic imaging camera revealed several specks of bright material that could be debris from the landing system or the rover itself or possibly even native Martian material.
The third test sample will be carefully analyzed by MAHLI, ChemCam and Mastcam and verified to be free of FOD before the team decides to pour the new processed sand into the processing system and eventually into the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) and Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) analytical chemistry instruments on the rover deck.
Image Caption: Small Debris on the Ground Beside Curiosity – This image from the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity shows a small bright object on the ground beside the rover at the “Rocknest” site about half an inch (1.3 centimeters) long. The rover team has assessed this object as debris from the spacecraft, possibly from the events of landing on Mars. The image was taken on Sol 65 (Oct. 11, 2012). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Progress has been slowed somewhat by communications glitches with a radio transmitter at a Deep Space Network ground station and an unrelated new problem with NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) which went into “safe mode” on Sol 69. MRO serves as the highest volume communications relay for Curiosity’s images and scientific and engineering data.
Tosol is Sol 71 and Curiosity is now 10 weeks into her two year long mission to investigate whether Mars ever had conditions sufficient to sustain microbial life forms.
Curiosity made a pinpoint landing inside Gale Crater on Aug. 5/6, just a few miles away from her ultimate destination – the sedimentary lower layers of Mount Sharp holding deposits of hydrated minerals.
Video Caption: This 256 frame video clip shows the 1st sample of Martian material being vibrated inside Curiosity’s table spoon sized scoop on Oct. 7, 2012.
While scooping its first samples of Martian soil, NASA’s Curiosity rover captured the image above, which shows what seems to be a small, seemingly metallic sliver or chip of… something… resting on the ground. Is it a piece of the rover? Or some other discarded fleck of the MSL descent mechanisms? Or perhaps an exotic Martian pebble of some sort? Nobody knows for sure yet, but needless to say the soil samples have taken a back seat to this new finding for the time being.
ChemCam shot of a recently spotted unknown object on Mars. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The ChemCam image, although monochrome, reveals some interesting and curiously organic-looking edges on the object… although it could be a bit of something that came loose from the rover itself. Perhaps a bit of plastic wrap or tape from a cable? Or a flake of metal from the back shell?
Or, as MSNBC’s Alan Boyle jokingly (?) suggested, another piece of “Martian macaroni”?
Curiosity’s first scooping activity appeared to go well on Oct. 7. Subsequently, the rover team decided to refrain from using the rover’s robotic arm on Oct. 8 due to the detection of a bright object on the ground that might be a piece from the rover. Instead of arm activities during the 62nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission, Curiosity is acquiring additional imaging of the object to aid the team in identifying the object and assessing possible impact, if any, to sampling activities.
Stay tuned for more info on this intriguing news as it’s available!
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
P.S. Of course, the now-famous “Sarcastic Rover” had something to say about it on Twitter:
Image caption: Context view of Curiosity working at ‘Rocknest’ Ripple. Curiosity’s maneuvers robotic arm for close- up examination of ‘Rocknest’ ripple site and inspects sandy material at “bootlike” wheel scuff mark with the APXS (Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer) and MAHLI (Mars Hand Lens Imager) instruments positioned on the rotatable turret at the arm’s terminus. Mosaic was stitched together from Sol 57 & 58 Navcam raw images and shows the arm extended to fine grained sand ripple in context with the surrounding terrain and eroded rim of Gale Crater rim on the horizon. Rocknest patch measures about 8 feet by 16 feet (2.5 meters by 5 meters).See NASA JPL test scooping video below. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo
NASA’s Curiosity rover is set to scoop up her 1st sample of Martian soil this weekend at a soil patch nicknamed ‘Rocknest’ -see our context mosaic above – and will funtion as a sort of circulatory system cleanser for all the critical samples to follow. This marks a major milestone on the path to delivering Mars material to the sample acquisition and processing system for high powered analysis by the robots chemistry labs and looking for the ingredients of life, said the science and engineering team leading the mission at a media briefing on Thursday, Oct 4.
Since landing on the Red Planet two months ago on Aug. 5/6, Curiosity has trekked over 500 yards eastwards across Gale crater towards an intriguing area named “Glenelg” where three different types of geologic terrain intersect.
This week on Oct. 2 (Sol 56), the rover finally found a wind driven patch of dunes at ‘Rocknest’ with exactly the type of fine grained sand that the team was looking for and that’s best suited as the first soil to scoop and injest into the sample acquisition system.
See NASA JPL earthly test scooping video below to visualize how it works:
“We now have reached an important phase that will get the first solid samples into the analytical instruments in about two weeks,” said Mission Manager Michael Watkins of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
The rover used its wheels to purposely scuff the sand and expose fresh soil – and it sure looked like the first human “bootprint” left on the Moon by Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
Curiosity will remain at the “Rocknest” location for the next two to three weeks as the team fully tests and cleans the walls of most of the sample collection, handling and analysis hardware – except for the drilling equipment – specifically to remove residual contaminants from Earth.
Image caption: ‘Rocknest’ From Sol 52 Location on Sept. 28, 2012, four sols before the rover arrived at Rocknest. The Rocknest patch is about 8 feet by 16 feet (1.5 meters by 5 meters). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
The purpose of this initial scoop is to use the sandy material to thoroughly clean out, rinse and scrub all the plumbing pipes, chambers, labyrinths and interfaces housed inside the complex CHIMRA sampling system and the SAM and CheMin chemistry labs of an accumulation of a very thin and fine oily layer that could cause spurious, interfering readings when the truly important samples of Martian soil and rocks are collected for analysis starting in the near future.
The scientists especially do not want any false signals of organic compounds or other inorganic materials and minerals stemming from Earthly contamination while the rover and its instruments were assembled together and processed for launch.
“Even though we make this hardware super squeaky clean when it’s delivered and assembled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, by virtue of its just being on Earth you get a kind of residual oily film that is impossible to avoid,” said Daniel Limonadi of JPL, lead systems engineer for Curiosity’s surface sampling and science system. “And the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument is so sensitive we really have to scrub away this layer of oils that accumulates on Earth.”
The team plans to conduct three scoop and rinse trials – dubbed rinse and discard – of the sample acquisition systems. So it won’t be until the 3rd and 4th soil scooping at Rocknest that a Martian sample would actually be delivered for entry into the SAM and CheMin analytical chemistry instruments located on the rover deck.
“What we’re doing at the site is we take the sand sample, this fine-grained material and we effectively use it to rinse our mouth three times and then kind of spit out,” Limonadi said. “We will take a scoop, we will vibrate that sand on all the different surfaces inside CHIMRA to effectively sand-blast those surfaces, then we dump that material out and we rinse and repeat three times to finish cleaning everything out. Our Earth-based testing has found that to be super effective at cleaning.”
Limondi said the first scooping is likely to be run this Saturday (Oct 6) on Sol 61, if things proceed as planned. Scoop samples will be vibrated at 8 G’s to break them down to a very fine particle size that can be easily passed through a 150 micron sieve before entering the analytical instruments.
The team is being cautious, allowing plenty of margin time and will not proceed forward with undue haste.
“We’re being deliberately slow and incredibly careful,” said Watkins. “We’re taking a lot of extra steps here to make sure we understand exactly what’s going on, that we won’t have to do every time we do a scoop in the future.”
Curiosity’s motorized, clamshell-shaped scoop measures 1.8 inches (4.5 centimeters) wide, 2.8 inches (7 centimeters) long, and can sample to a depth of about 1.4 inches (3.5 centimeters). It is part of the CHIMRA collection and handling device located on the tool turret at the end of the rover’s arm.
“The scoop is about the size of an oversized table spoon,” said Limonadi.
Image caption: Curiosity extends 7 foot long arm to investigate ‘Bathurst Inlet’ rock outcrop with the MAHLI camera and APXS chemical element spectrometer in this mosaic of Navcam images assembled from Sols 53 & 54 (Sept. 29 & 30, 2012). Mount Sharp, the rover’s eventual destination is visible on the horizon. Thereafter the rover drove more than 77 feet (23 meters) eastwards to reach the ‘Rocknest’ sand ripple. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo
During the lengthy stay at Rocknest, the rover will conduct extensive investigations of the surrounding rocks and terrain with the cameras, ChemCam laser, DAN, RAD as well as weather monitoring with the REMS instrument.
After finishing her work at Rocknest, Curiosity will resume driving eastward to Glenelg, some 100 meters (yards) away where the team will select the first targets and rock outcrops to drill, sample and analyze.
At Glenelg and elsewhere, researchers hope to find more evidence for the ancient Martian stream bed they discovered at rock outcrops at three different locations that Curiosity has already visited.
Curiosity is searching for organic molecules and evidence of potential habitable environments to determine whether Mars could have supported Martian microbial life forms, past or present.
It was a slow week on Space news except for the massive announcement that an ancient riverbed was discovered on the surface of Mars. We took a look at this as well as the historic 55th anniversary of Sputnik, a precise measurement of the expansion of the Universe, and more!
Looking very similar to the iconic first footprint on the Moon from the Apollo 11 landing, this new raw image from the Curiosity rover on Mars shows one of the first “scuff” marks from the rover’s wheels on a small sandy ridge. This image was taken today by Curiosity’s right Navcam on Sol 57 (2012-10-03 19:08:27 UTC). Rover driver Matt Heverly described a scuff as spinning one wheel to move the soil below it out of the way.
Besides being on different worlds, the two prints likely have a very different future. NASA says the first footprints on the Moon will be there for a million years, since there is no wind to blow them away. Research on the tracks left by Spirit and Opportunity revealed the time scale for track erasure by wind is typically only one Martian year or two Earth years.
Here’s one of Buzz Aldrin’s bootprint, to compare:
The GRIN website (Great Images in NASA) says this is an image of Buzz Aldrin’s bootprint from the Apollo 11 mission. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon on July 20, 1969. Credit: NASA
Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger compared earlier images of some of the first tracks left on Mars by Curiosity to images of the footprints left by Aldrin and Armstrong on the Moon. “I think instead of a human, it’s a robot pretty much doing the same thing,” he said.
Why is everyone so excited about these dusty Mars rocks?
This week’s big news was the announcement of evidence for flowing water on Mars, based on images of what appear to be smooth river rock-type pebbles found by Curiosity. Of course that’s a big statement to make, and for good reason — identifying water, whether present or past, is one step closer to determining whether Mars was ever a suitable place for life to develop. Yet here we are, not even two months into the mission and Curiosity is already sending us solid clues that Mars was once a much wetter place than it is now.
JPL released a video today providing a brief-but-informative overview of what Curiosity has discovered in Gale Crater and why it’s gotten everyone so excited.
Check it out so you’ll have something to talk about over the weekend:
MSL Long Term Planner Sanjeev Gupta reviews Curiosity’s latest discovery
NASA’s Curiosity rover found evidence for an ancient, flowing stream on Mars at a few sites, including the rock outcrop pictured here, which the science team has named “Hottah” after Hottah Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech
The Curiosity rover has come across a place in Gale Crater where ankle-to-hip-deep water once vigorously flowed: an ancient streambed containing evidence of gravel that has been worn by water. At a press briefing today, members of the Mars Science Laboratory team said the rover has found “surprising” outcrops and gravel near the rover landing site that indicate water once flowed in this region, and likely flowed for a long time.
“Too many things that point away from a single burst event,” said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. “I’m comfortable to argue that it is beyond the 1,000 year timescales, even though this is very early on in our findings.”
This set of images compares the Link outcrop of rocks on Mars (left) with similar rocks seen on Earth (right). Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech
From the size of gravel found by the rover, the science team can interpret the water was moving about 1 meter (3 feet) per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep.
“Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them,” said Dietrich. “This is the first time we’re actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it.”
What Curiosity found on Mars was described as conglomerate rock made up of water-transported gravels, meaning the gravel is now cemented into a layers of rock, and the sizes and shapes of stones offer clues to the speed and distance of a long-ago stream’s flow.
“The shapes tell you they were transported and the sizes tell you they couldn’t be transported by wind. They were transported by water flow,” said Curiosity science co-investigator Rebecca Williams of the Planetary Science Institute.
The discovery comes from examining two outcrops, called “Hottah” and “Link,” with the telephoto capability of Curiosity’s mast camera during the first 40 days after landing. Those observations followed up on earlier hints from another outcrop, named Goulburn, which was exposed by thruster exhaust as Curiosity touched down.
“Hottah looks like someone jack-hammered up a slab of city sidewalk, but it’s really a tilted block of an ancient streambed,” said Mars Science Laboratory Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology.
An alluvial fan, or fan-shaped deposit where debris spreads out downslope are usually formed by water, and new observations from Curiosity of rounded pebbles embedded with rocky outcrops provide concrete evidence that water did flow in this region on Mars. Elevation data were obtained from stereo processing of images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UofA
Even though the team classified the finding as “surprising,” they later said they actually weren’t too surprised at what they found so early in the mission – just 51 sols, or Martian days, in.
“We are getting better about integrating the orbital data,” said Grotzinger. “We see an alluvial fan and debris flow from orbit, and then see these water-transported pebbles from the ground. This is not rocket science, but shows exactly the reason we chose this landing site, and you build on those foundations you think you are mostly likely to establish. Now we’ll look at more rocks and get more context to recreate the environment in greater detail along with understanding the chemistry of the time to see if this is a place that could be habitable.”
Asked if it was hard to come to consensus on this long-term, quickly flowing water statement, given the large number of scientists involved with the mission, Grotziner said, “Given the evidence we have from orbit that has been analyzed, when we arrive with a robot we can test the hypothesis pretty quickly. If the geological signal for this process is large enough, it is easy to achieve a consensus pretty quickly.”
The finding site lies between the north rim of Gale Crater and the base of Aeolis Mons, or Mount Sharp, a mountain inside the crater. To the north of the crater, a channel named Peace Vallis feeds into the alluvial fan. The abundance of channels in the fan between the rim and conglomerate suggests flows continued or repeated over a long time, not just once or for a few years, the science team said.
But interestingly, the rover has already moved on from this spot, and yesterday took the longest drive yet, of between 52-53 meters, heading towards the Glenelg region where they want to do their first scooping and tests soil samples in Curiosity’s two instruments, SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) and ChemMin (Chemistry & Mineralogy X-Ray Diffraction/X-Ray Fluorescence Instrument). These two experiments will study powdered rock and soil samples scooped up by the robotic arm.
The Glenelg area marks the intersection of three kinds of terrain: bedrock for drilling, several small craters that may represent an older or harder surface, and also terrain similar to where Curiosity landed, so the science team can do comparisons.
“A long-flowing stream can be a habitable environment,” said Grotzinger. “But it is not our top choice as there might be other places that have preserved organic carbon better than this, and we need to assess the potential for preservation of organics. We’re still going to Mount Sharp, but this is insurance that we have already found our first potentially habitable environment.”
The slope of Aeolis Mons contains clay and sulfate minerals, which have been detected from orbit. This can be good preservers of carbon-based organic chemicals that are potential ingredients for life.
As for what’s next for Curiosity, Grotzinger said they have a couple of targets in the next 2-4 sols, and then they will park for a long period of time, about 2-3 weeks to prepare for reaching Glenelg. “This is such a complex set of processes that have never been done on Mars before, so we are going to be conservative and go slowly to make sure everything is working as it should. Then we’ll go to Glenelg and choose first candidate for drilling.”
This map shows the path on Mars of NASA’s Curiosity rover toward Glenelg. Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/University of Arizona
A device that works as a windshield wiper to eliminate Mars dust from the sensors on Mars spacecraft. Credit: UC3M
In the past when we’ve discussed how dust accumulates on the solar panels of the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, the most-often posted comments on those articles usually said something like, “They should have developed a windshield-wiper-like device to get rid of the dust!” Our readers will be happy to know such a device has now been invented. A team of researchers created extremely lightweight wipers that could be used to remove dust on Mars spacecraft. In fact, the researchers from Universidad Carlos III in Madrid, Spain developed the device for the Curiosity rover, but unfortunately, it wasn’t used for the MSL mission. But it’s ready to go for future Mars landers and rovers
While Curiosity doesn’t have solar panels, (it instead uses a longer-lasting RTG for power – a Thermoelectric Generator, which is a power system that produce electricity from the natural decay of plutonium-238) it does have sensors that can be affected by the accumulation of dust, such as the meteorological station, the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS).
The UC3M team created a brush made up of Teflon fibers, designed to clean the ultraviolet sensors on REMS.
“In our laboratories, we demonstrated that it worked correctly in the extreme conditions that it would have to endure on Mars,” said Luis Enrique Moreno, a professor who was head of the project, “with temperatures ranging between zero degrees and eighty below zero Celsius, and an atmospheric pressure one hundred times lower than that of the earth.”
Because weight is an issue when launching objects to other worlds, they used a very lightweight material for the wiper actuators, made from shape memory alloys (SMA), a very light nickel and titanium alloy that allows movement when the composite is heated.
“The main advantage is that these alloys produce a material that is very strong as related to its weight, that is, a thread of less than one millimeter can lift a weight of 4 or 5 kilograms,” said Moreno. “The problem presented by these mechanisms is that, because they are based on thermal effects, they are not as efficient as motor technology, although they are much lighter, which is a very important consideration in space missions.”
This group and other research groups at UC3M are currently working on a second, more elaborate prototype based on SMA technology. It will be used to clean dust from fixed meteorological stations that would be part of the MEIGA-METNET mission, a proposed Mars lander developed by Finnish Meteorological Institute, along with groups from Russia and Spain to do atmospheric observations, but which is not yet part of an official mission yet.
Here’s a look at the proposed unique landing proposed for METNET:
“We are also using this technology to develop the exoskeletons used to aid people with mobility problems, trying to substitute motors with these materials, in order to reduce the devices’ weight and increase agility in their use,” said Moreno, adding that this new product could even be used in the future to improve the joints on the gloves used by astronauts during EVAs.
