Zitat Perseverance rover finds organic matter ‘treasure’ on Mars By Ashley Strickland, CNN Updated 2:35 AM EDT, Fri September 16, 2022
Investigating the site of an ancient river delta, the Perseverance rover has collected some of the most important samples yet on its mission to determine if life ever existed on Mars, according to NASA scientists.
A few of the recently collected samples include organic matter, indicating that Jezero Crater, which likely once held a lake and the delta that emptied into it, had potentially habitable environments 3.5 billion years ago.
“The rocks that we have been investigating on the delta have the highest concentration of organic matter that we have yet found on the mission,” said Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. ... The rover investigated the crater floor and found evidence of igneous, or volcanic, rock. During its second campaign to study the delta over the past five months, Perseverance has found rich sedimentary rock layers that add more to the story of Mars’ ancient climate and environment.
The mission team nicknamed one of the rocks that Perseverance sampled as Wildcat Ridge. The rock likely formed when mud and sand settled in a saltwater lake as it evaporated billions of years ago. The rover scraped away at the surface of the rock and analyzed it with an instrument known as the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals, or SHERLOC.
This rock-zapping laser functions as a fancy black light to uncover chemicals, minerals and organic matter, said Sunanda Sharma, SHERLOC scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
The instrument’s analysis revealed that the organic minerals are likely aromatics, or stable molecules of carbon and hydrogen, which are connected to sulfates. Sulfate minerals, often found sandwiched within the layers of sedimentary rocks, preserve information about the watery environments they formed in.
Organic molecules are of interest on Mars because they represent the building blocks of life, such as carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, as well as nitrogen, phosphorous and sulfur. Not all organic molecules require life to form because some can be created through chemical processes.
“While the detection of this class of organics alone does not mean that life was definitively there, this set of observations does start to look like some things that we’ve seen here on Earth,” Sharma said. “To put it simply, if this is a treasure hunt for potential signs of life on another planet, organic matter is a clue. And we’re getting stronger and stronger clues as we’re moving through our delta campaign.”
Zitat von January 9, 2023China’s Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter and rover appear to be in trouble
HELSINKI — The two spacecraft making up China’s first interplanetary mission are both suffering issues, with the rover potentially lost on the surface after winter hibernation.
The Zhurong Mars rover has been hibernating on the Martian surface since May 18 last year and was expected to resume activity in December, around the time of the Spring equinox in the northern hemisphere.
However no announcement of establishing contact with the rover has been made. The South China Morning Post reported Jan. 7, citing sources that do not wish to be named, that teams on Earth have yet to receive a signal from Zhurong.
The Zhurong rover landed in Mars’s Utopia Planitia region in May 2021 but entered a period of hibernation to ride out winter, when both temperatures and solar radiation levels are too low for the solar-powered rover to operate.
The rover was expected to autonomously resume activities once it can generate sufficient energy from solar power and when temperatures reach around minus 15 degrees Celsius.
Zhurong entered hibernation when local temperatures were around minus 20 degrees, according to the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, after the autumn equinox in late February. Conditions should already by more favorable following the Spring equinox on Dec. 26. Mars has an axial tilt of around 25 degrees, meaning it has has similar seasonal variations to Earth during its orbit around the sun.
While there has so far been no official comment, the rover may have been impacted by sand storms in the area, which could reduce the levels of energy generation. The Tianwen-1 orbiter noted storms around the landing area in March and April 2021. ... Meanwhile the Tianwen-1 orbiter has been tasked with assessing the area and attempting to contact the rover. Teams are however also having trouble receiving data from the orbiter, according to SCMP.
Radio amateurs have also noted issues with attempts for ground stations to lock onto the orbiter.
Zitat Dr. Phil Metzger@DrPhiltill A few years ago the joke was that scientists keep rediscovering water on Mars every 2 years. But this one is different and is a big discovery. 4:23 PM · Aug 13, 2024
Zitat Prof. Abel Méndez 🔭 🔬@ProfAbelMendez Scientists find oceans of water on Mars. It's just too deep to tap. - Berkeley News https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/08/12/sci
Zitat Scientists find oceans of water on Mars. It’s just too deep to tap. Seismic data from NASA's Insight lander indicate deep, porous rock filled with liquid water
Using seismic activity to probe the interior of Mars, geophysicists have found evidence for a large underground reservoir of liquid water — enough to fill oceans on the planet’s surface.
The data from NASA’s Insight lander allowed the scientists to estimate that the amount of groundwater could cover the entire planet to a depth of between 1 and 2 kilometers, or about a mile.
While that’s good news for those tracking the fate of water on the planet after its oceans disappeared more than 3 billion years ago, the reservoir won’t be of much use to anyone trying to tap into it to supply a future Mars colony. It’s located in tiny cracks and pores in rock in the middle of the Martian crust, between 11.5 and 20 kilometers (7 to 13 miles) below the surface. Even on Earth, drilling that deep would be a challenge.
Wright, alongside colleagues Michael Manga of UC Berkeley and Matthias Morzfeld of Scripps Oceanography, detailed their analysis in a paper that will appear this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The scientists employed a mathematical model of rock physics, identical to models used on Earth to map underground aquifers and oil fields, to conclude that the seismic data from Insight are best explained by a deep layer of fractured igneous rock saturated with liquid water. Igneous rocks are cooled hot magma, like the granite of the Sierra Nevada.
“Establishing that there is a big reservoir of liquid water provides some window into what the climate was like or could be like,” said Manga, a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science. “And water is necessary for life as we know it. I don’t see why [the underground reservoir] is not a habitable environment. It’s certainly true on Earth — deep, deep mines host life, the bottom of the ocean hosts life. We haven’t found any evidence for life on Mars, but at least we have identified a place that should, in principle, be able to sustain life.”
Manga noted that lots of evidence — river channels, deltas and lake deposits, as well as water-altered rock — supports the hypothesis that water once flowed on the planet’s surface. But that wet period ended more than 3 billion years ago, after Mars lost its atmosphere. Planetary scientists on Earth have sent many probes and landers to the planet to find out what happened to that water — the water frozen in Mars’ polar ice caps can’t account for it all — as well as when it happened, and whether life exists or used to exist on the planet.
The new findings are an indication that much of the water did not escape into space but filtered down into the crust.
Zitat Blue Origin@blueorigin #NewGlenn’s inaugural mission aims to send @NASA’s ESCAPADE to Mars, with a launch date no earlier than October 13. 10:24 PM · Aug 23, 2024
Die beiden Satelliten sind von Rocket Lab gebaut worden, die dieses Mal nicht die Startrakete stellen.
Zitat ESCAPADE features two identical smallsats, called Blue and Gold, that will go into orbit around Mars. The spacecraft carry instruments to study the planet’s magnetosphere and its interaction with the solar wind.
The spacecraft, built by Rocket Lab, are almost ready for launch. The Blue spacecraft has completed environmental testing while Gold is going through final vibration testing. “It’s been really exciting to see these two probes finally come together after working on them for so many years,” he said.
The launch of ESCAPADE has arguably attracted more attention that the mission itself. The spacecraft are scheduled to launch on the first flight of New Glenn under a NASA task order awarded in February 2023 valued at $20 million.
If ESCAPADE launches this fall, the spacecraft will arrive at Mars 48 hours apart in September 2025 and begin their one-year prime science mission in April 2026. Lillis said he hoped that the spacecraft could work in conjunction with several other Mars orbiters from NASA and other agencies to open a “golden era” of studies of the Martian magnetosphere.
Zitat Scott Manley@DJSnM The first air crash investigation on another world has concluded that the crash of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars was caused by the inability of the navigation system to track the relatively featureless terrain. This resulted in a touchdown with too much lateral velocity, applying a hard banding moment to the rotor blades causing them to snap. You can watch the full presentation from @theAGU https://youtube.com/watch?v=p45y3e
Zitat Eleven months after the Ingenuity helicopter made its final flight on Mars, engineers and scientists at NASA and a private company that helped build the flying vehicle said they have identified what probably caused it to crash on the surface of Mars.
In short, the helicopter's on-board navigation sensors were unable to discern enough features in the relatively smooth surface of Mars to determine its position, so when it touched down, it did so moving horizontally. This caused the vehicle to tumble, snapping off all four of the helicopter's blades.
It is not easy to conduct a forensic analysis like this on Mars, which is typically about 100 million miles from Earth. Ingenuity carried no black box on board, so investigators have had to piece together their findings from limited data and imagery.
"While multiple scenarios are viable with the available data, we have one we believe is most likely: Lack of surface texture gave the navigation system too little information to work with," said Ingenuity’s first pilot, Håvard Grip of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a news release.
A team from NASA and a company that specializes in unmanned aerial vehicles, AeroVironment, started by looking at the terrain where Ingenuity was operating over during its 72nd flight, on January 18 of this year. The helicopter’s navigation system tracked visual features on the surface using a downward-looking camera. During its initial flights, Ingenuity was able to discern pebbles and other features to determine its position. But nearly three years later, Ingenuity was flying in a region of Jezero Crater filled with steep, relatively featureless sand ripples.
The navigation system uses these visual cues to help determine the vehicle's velocity and ensure that it returns to the surface with almost no lateral or vertical motion, to make a soft touchdown. About 20 seconds into the final flight, according to data from the vehicle, the navigation system was unable to lock on to features for sufficient positioning and velocity data.
As a result, when Ingenuity touched down, it had a horizontal velocity that caused it to make a hard impact and pitch and roll. One of the blades was ripped wholly off—instead of being sheared part way up the blade—draining the vehicle's power and leading to a loss of communications.
Amazingly, the vehicle was able to recharge somewhat with its solar panels and is continuing to communicate about once a week with the Perseverance rover that brought it to Mars in February 2021. This will last a little while longer before the rover and helicopter lose line-of-sight communications.
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