A fresh impact crater is seen in this image taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 19, 2013. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
The great thing about the longevity of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is that we can see changes taking place on the Red Planet, such as this relatively new and rather large impact crater. This image shows a stunning 30-meter-wide crater with a rayed blast zone and far-flung secondary material surrounding. Scientists say the impact and resulting explosion threw debris as far as 15 kilometers in distance.
Before and after pictures of this region show the new impact crater formed between July 2010 and May 2012.
The image has been enhanced in false color and so the fresh crater appears blue because of the lack of reddish dust that covers most of Mars’ surface.
With MRO’s help, scientists have been able to estimate that Mars gets pummeled with about 200 impacts per year, but most are much smaller than this new one.
The usual procedure for finding new craters is that MRO’s Context Camera, or CTX, or cameras on other orbiters identify anomalies or dark spots that appear in new images and then MRO’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera is targeted to follow up by imaging those dark spots in greater detail.
Artist's impression of New Horizons' encounter with Pluto and Charon. Credit: NASA/Thierry Lombry
Less than a year from now, the New Horizons spacecraft will begin its encounter with Pluto. While closest approach is scheduled for July 2015, the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager or “LORRI” will begin snapping photos of the Pluto system six months earlier.
This first mission to Pluto has been a long time coming, and this new “trailer” put out by the New Horizons team recounts what it has taken to send the fastest spacecraft ever on a 5 billion km (3 billion mile) journey to Pluto, its largest moon, Charon, and the Kuiper Belt beyond. The spacecraft has been zooming towards the edge of our Solar System for over eight years since it launched on January 19, 2006.
By late April 2015, the approaching spacecraft will be taking pictures of Pluto that surpass the best images to date from Hubble. By closest approach in July 2015 –- when New Horizons will be 10,000 km from Pluto — a whole new world will open up to the spacecraft’s cameras. If New Horizons flew over Earth at the same altitude, it’s cameras could see individual buildings and their shapes.
“Humankind hasn’t had an experience like this–an encounter with a new planet–in a long time,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator. “Everything we see on Pluto will be a revelation.”
It’s likely there could be some new planetary bodies discovered during the mission in addition to the five known moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra.
“There is a real possibility that New Horizons will discover new moons and rings as well,” says Stern.
No matter what, Stern said, this is going to be an amazing ride.
“We’re flying into the unknown,” he said, “and there is no telling what we might find.”
See the countdown clock and find out more about the mission at the New Horizons website.
NASA's Opportunity Mars rover recorded the component images for this self-portrait near the peak of Solander Point and about three weeks before completing a decade of work on Mars. The rover's panoramic camera (Pancam) took the images during the interval Jan. 3, 2014, to Jan. 6, 2014. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State University
Want to get an engineer excited? Give them a challenge. And the Opportunity rover has provided plenty of challenges in the past 10 years on Mars. Fun challenges, though; amazing tests of wit and skill, doing repairs on a rover that is sometimes a hundred million kilometers away. But with the longevity of the rovers also comes some amazing science.
The Opportunity rover is celebrating ten years on Mars. While the rovers were designed for about 1 kilometer of odometry, Oppy has now traveled 38.7 kilometers (24 miles). At yesterday’s briefing, the rover scientists and engineers said Opportunity is still in very good health and still is scientifically productive.
In the recent “selfie” image below, you can see how the rover is covered with dust, almost perfectly camouflaged with its environment. That montage was taken a few weeks ago, but recently there have been some wind cleaning events that have dusted off the solar panels, improving the solar power from 47% to 60%, which is higher than it has been through the past two Martian winters. This means they can continue to drive and explore even more, perhaps even during the upcoming winter.
Dust covering the rovers’ solar panels was one of the reasons that the initial estimates of the rovers’ life was only for 90 days. The dust cleaning events have been an unexpected benefit that has allowed for the long missions for the MER rovers.
Beyond the scientific findings of potential habitability announced yesterday, John Callas, project manager for the Mars Exploration Rovers said both Spirit and Opportunity have given us a great intangible.
“Through these rovers our species has gone to work on Mars, and now a generation has grown up with these rovers and have been inspired by them,” Callas said. “Because of these rovers Earthlings have become Martians too, dual citizens, if you will. We now live in a larger world, a world than now extends beyond our own home planet these rovers have made Mars our neighborhood and our backyard, something truly remarkable.”
For the first time, a spacecraft will follow a comet as it approaches the Sun and land on its nucleus. But today is key to the success of the mission. After nearly two and a half years in hibernation, its time for Rosetta to wake up!
Rosetta has been soaring through the inner solar system for nearly a decade –flying past Mars and Earth several times and even briefly visiting a couple of asteroids. A special ‘hibernation mode’ for the spacecraft was designed by engineers to allow it to survive the large distances from the Sun during its cruise. Since it went into hibernation on June 9, 2011, Rosetta has orbited entirely on its own completely out of contact. But now the Rosetta spacecraft is finally entering the home stretch of its mission to orbit the 4-km-wide comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
Screenshot from Steve Squyres presentation celebrating 10 years of the Mars Exploration Rovers. A rock suddenly appeared where there was none 12 sols earlier.
During last night’s celebration at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of ten years of the Mars Exploration Rovers, mission principal investigator Steve Squyres shared several stories about the exploration and discoveries made by the rovers Spirit and Opportunity since they landed on Mars in 2004. An intriguing recent mystery is a strange rock that suddenly appeared in photos from the Opportunity rover in a spot where photos taken just 12 sols earlier showed no rock.
“One of the things I like to say is that Mars keeps throwing new things at us,” Squyres deadpanned.
A colorized version of the rock called Pinnacle Island. Credit: NASA/JPL, color by Stuart Atkinson.
Squyres described the rock as “white around the outside, in the middle there’s low spot that is dark red. It looks like a jelly donut,” he said. “And it appeared. It just plain appeared and we haven’t driven over that spot.”
They’ve named it “Pinnacle Island,” and the team is contemplating a few ideas of why the rock mysteriously showed up.
“One theory is that we somehow flicked it with a wheel,” Squyres said. “We had driven a meter or two away from here and somehow maybe one of the wheels managed spit it out of the ground. That’s the more likely theory.”
The other?
“The other theory is that there might be a smoking hole in the ground nearby and this may be crater ejecta. But that one is less likely,” Squyres said.
Another idea suggested by others is that it may have tumbled down from a nearby rock outcrop.
Image from Sol 3528 of the area showing no rock. Click to see original on the rover’s raw image website. Credit: NASA/JPL.Image of same area on Sol 3540 where the ‘jelly donut’ rock appears. Click to see original. Credit: NASA/JPL.
But as intriguing as the sudden appearance of the rock is what the team is finding out about it.
“We are as we speak situated with the rover, with its instruments, making measurements on this rock. We’ve taken pictures of both the donut part and the jelly part,” Squyres said. “The jelly part is like nothing we’ve seen before on Mars. It’s very high in sulfur and magnesium and it has twice as much manganese as anything we’ve seen before. I don’t know what any of this means. We’re completely confused, everybody on the team is arguing and fighting. We’re having a wonderful time!”
But that’s the beauty of this mission, Squyres said.
“I used to have this comforting notion that at some point, we could sit back and say ‘we did it, we’re finished, we’ve learned everything we could about this location.’ But Mars is not like that. It keeps throwing new things at us.”
“And what I’ve come to realize,” Squyres concluded, ” – and it was true when we lost Spirit and it will be true when we lose Opportunity — there will always be something tantalizing just beyond our reach that we just won’t get to. That’s just the nature of exploration, and I feel so very fortunate to have been part of this mission.”
You can watch the entire replay of the celebration below, and read a great look back at the past 10 years from Stuart Atkinson’s Road to Endeavour blog.
This is an artist's concept of NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft preparing to take a sample from asteroid Bennu. Credit:
NASA/Goddard/Chris Meaney
NASA and the Planetary Society are teaming up to give everyone the opportunity tag along on the next mission to an asteroid … well, your name can go along on the trip, anyway! You can submit your name to be added on to a microchip that will be aboard the Origins-Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft, which will launch to the asteroid Bennu in 2016 and arrive in 2018.
“We’re thrilled to be able to share the OSIRIS-REx adventure with people across the Earth, to Bennu and back,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx mission from the University of Arizona in Tucson. “It’s a great opportunity for people to get engaged with the mission early and join us as we prepare for launch.”
The spacecraft will spend more than two years at the 1,760-foot (500-meter)-wide asteroid. The spacecraft will collect a sample of Bennu’s surface and return it to Earth in 2023 in a sample return capsule.
The “Messages to Bennu!” microchip will travel to the asteroid on the spacecraft, and once the sample return capsule deploys, the spacecraft will be placed into a long-term solar orbit around the Sun, along with the microchip and every name on it.
You can submit your name at this website. The deadline is September 30, 2014.
After you submit your name, you can download and print a certificate.
“You’ll be part of humankind’s exploration of the solar system — How cool is that?” said Bill Nye, chief executive officer of The Planetary Society.
Participants who “follow” or “like” the mission on Facebook will receive updates on the location of their name in space from launch time until the asteroid samples return to Earth. Facebook fans also will be kept apprised of mission progress and late-breaking news through regular status updates.
The OSIRIS-REx mission goal is to address basic questions about the composition of the very early solar system, the source of organic materials and water that made life possible on Earth, and to better predict the orbits of asteroids that represent collision threats to the Earth. It will collect a minimum of 2 ounces (60 grams) of surface material.
A mosaic of 67 images from the Mars Express spacecraft of Kasei Valles on Mars. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU (G. Neukum)
Over 3 billion years ago, dramatic flood events likely carved this gigantic channel system on Mars. It extends some 3,000 km and covers over 1.55 million square kilometers. ESA released this flyover video today, on the 10th anniversary of the Mars Express spacecraft’s launch to the Red Planet on January 14, 2004.
ESA describes the scene in the video:
The scene spans 987 km in the north–south direction, 19–36°N, and 1550 km in the east–west direction (280–310°E). It covers 1.55 million square kilometers, an area equivalent to the size of Mongolia.
Kasei Valles splits into two main branches that hug a broad island of fractured terrain — Sacra Mensa — rising 2 km above the channels that swerve around it. While weaker materials succumbed to the erosive power of the fast-flowing water, this hardier outcrop has stood the test of time.
Slightly further downstream, the flood waters did their best to erase the 100 km-wide Sharonov crater, crumpling its walls to the south. Around Sharonov many small streamlined islands form teardrop shapes rising from the riverbed as water swept around these natural obstacles.
One image from an infographic showing trajectories of 21 different unmanned spacecraft. Click for full image. Credit: Kevin Gill.
Want to know the orbital paths where different spacecraft have traveled and where they are now? A great new infographic put together by Kevin Gill is a visualization of where 21 different unmanned spacecraft have traveled through the Solar System. “The spacecraft data and planet orbital data is derived from NASA/JPL Horizons ephemeris,” said Gill on G+. “The image was rendered using a modified version of my Orbit Viewer WebGL application and put into infographic form using Photoshop. Body and spacecraft positions are as of December 15, 2013.”
See the full infographic below or on Kevin’s website here:
Paths range from the earliest vector data available, typically just following launch, to either the latest data available or December 15, 2013, whichever is earlier.
“Originally intended as an animation, my browser was not too amused with the quantity of data being thrown at it,” Kevin said via G+. “In the new year, given sufficient demand, I may optimize the modeling and animation algorithms and either produce the animation or release it as a distinct WebGL visualization.”
We certainly look forward to that!
Three different views of our Solar System and the paths of unmanned spacecraft trajectories from their launches to Dec. 15, 2013. Credit: Kevin Gill.
The lunar dust detector (visible on the far left of this Apollo 12 experiment package in 1969) measured dust build-up on the moon. Credit: NASA
Dust on the moon accumulates at a rate 10 times faster than previously believed, which could make it difficult for future human explorers to use solar power cells on the lunar surface, a new study says.
“You wouldn’t see it; it’s very thin indeed,” stated Brian O’Brien, a University of Western Australia professor who co-authored the research. “But, as the Apollo astronauts learned, you can have a devil of a time overcoming even a small amount of dust.”
O’Brien also developed the Lunar Dust Detector, an experiment that flew aboard three Apollo moon missions in the 1960s and 1970s. The experiment, which was about the size of a matchbox, had three tiny solar cells on board. Voltage from the experiment fell as dust accumulated.
His experiment was deployed on Apollo 12 (in 1969) and Apollos 14 and 15 (in 1971), then shut off in 1977 due to budget cutbacks.
In these years of data, electrical measurements showed that 100 microgams of lunar dust fell per year per square centimeter. “At that rate, a basketball court on the Moon would collect roughly 450 grams (1 pound) of lunar dust annually,” stated a press release from the American Geophysical Union.
Past models assumed that the dust built up because of meteor impacts and cosmic dust, but O’Brien’s data was far in excess of that. He suggested it could be because the moon has a “dust atmosphere” built up as individual particles jump between different locations.
“During each lunar day, solar radiation is strong enough to knock a few electrons out of atoms in dust particles, building up a slight positive charge,” the AGU stated.
“On the nighttime side of the Moon, electrons from the flow of energetic particles, called the solar wind, which comes off the sun strike dust particles and give them a small negative charge. Where the illuminated and dark regions of the moon meet, electric forces could levitate this charged dust, potentially lofting grains high into the lunar sky.”
Artist’s conception of NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) orbiting above the moon. Credit: NASA Ames/Dana Berry
This data especially has resonance for NASA now that its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft is orbiting about 155 miles (250 kilometers) above the moon. The agency is trying to learn more about how the dust environment on the moon works, particularly at the “terminator” — the point between light and darkness — where dust may levitate due to electrostatic charging.
“Something similar was reported by Apollo astronauts orbiting the Moon who looked out and saw dust glowing on the horizon,” stated Monique Hollick, who led the work and is also a researcher at the University of Western Australia.
The Surface Electrical Properties experiment deployed on the Apollo 17 mission. Scientists are concerned that solar panels, such as the one visible on this experiment, could quickly become unusable due to the buildup of lunar dust. Credit: NASA
NASA believed O’Brien’s data was lost for decades as the agency did not preserve the archival tapes, but in 2006 O’Brien — when he heard of NASA’s issue — informed them he still had the data.
“It’s been a long haul,” stated O’Brien. “I invented [the detector] in 1966, long before Monique was even born. At the age of 79, I’m working with a 23-year old working on 46-year-old data and we discovered something exciting—it’s delightful.”
The work was published this week in Space Weather and is available here.
Artist concept of an ancient, habitable Mars capable of supporting liquid water on its surface. Credit: Michael Lentz/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
4 billion years ago, the atmosphere of Mars could have been rich in oxygen and thick enough and warm enough to support oceans of liquid water – a critical ingredient for life. A new animation from the Goddard Space Flight Center shows how the surface of Mars might have appeared during this ancient clement period. The artist’s concept video, below, is based on evidence that Mars was once very different and perhaps very Earth-like.
This past summer, a paper studying the compositions of Martian meteorites found on Earth and data from NASA’s rovers suggested that Mars had an oxygen-rich atmosphere very early in the history of the planet.
Scientists have long thought that the ancient riverbeds and what appear to be shorelines provide hints that Mars once supported oceans of water. But there’s not much indication of how the Red Planet was stripped of its thick atmosphere, roughly 3.7 billion years ago.
The end of the video shows the MAVEN spacecraft, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, orbiting Mars. This spacecraft is scheduled to launch on Nov. 18, 2013, and it will investigate how Mars lost its atmosphere. It should reach the planet in September 2014.
Below is another new video from NASA, featuring LeVar Burton talking about MAVEN.
