Tag: exploration

Perseverance looks across Jezero Crater from on high

11:11 am

Panorama of Jezero Crater
Click for full resolution annotated image. Click here for unannotated full resolution image.

Cool image time! The panorama above, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was assembled from 44 pictures taken by the rover Perseverance on September 27, 2024 as it began its climb up the rim of Jezero Crater. If you click on it you can see the full resolution image that is also annotated to identify features within the crater as well as places where Perseverance has traveled.

The overview map below, with the blue dot showing the rover’s location when this panorama was taken. The yellow lines indicate the area covered by the panorama, with the arrow indicating the direction.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

According to the information at the link, the rover has been experiencing some slippery sandy ground as it has been climbing.
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Two cubesats on Hera signal home

10:07 am

Engineers on the ground have now established good communications with the two cubesats that are being carried by the European probe Hera on its way to the binary asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos.

“Each CubeSat was activated for about an hour in turn, in live sessions with the ground to perform commissioning – what we call ‘are you alive?’ and ‘stowed checkout’ tests,” explains ESA’s Hera CubeSats Engineer Franco Perez Lissi.

…Travelling with Hera are two shoebox-sized ‘CubeSats’ built up from standardised 10-cm boxes. These miniature spacecraft will fly closer to the asteroid than their mothership, taking additional risks to acquire valuable bonus data.

Juventas, produced for ESA by GOMspace in Luxembourg will make the first radar probe within an asteroid, while Milani, produced for ESA by Tyvak International in Italy, will perform multispectral mineral prospecting.

This use of small cubesats in conjunction with a larger interplanetary probe is becoming increasingly routine, and provides a cheap and efficient way to increase the data and information obtained. Note too that both cubesats were apparently built entirely by private companies, thus establishing their creditionals as providers of interplanetary probes.

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Using spectroscopic data, astronomers create 3D map of ancient supernova remnant

10:55 am

Supernova 1181
Click for original image.

Astronomers have now createdsdft a 3D map of the remnant formed by a supernova that occurred in 1181, using detailed spectroscopic data to determing which remnant filaments are moving towards us and which are moving away.

The picture to the right is from figure 1 of their paper, and shows how the filaments radiate out from the center in straight lines, something that is unusual for such remnants. It was taken in 2023 by a ground-based telescope at Kitt Peak in Hawaii. From simple optical data it is impossible however to determine which filaments are in the rear, expanding away from us, and which are in the front, expanding towards us.

To probe the three-dimensional structure of the supernova remnant, the astronomers turned to KCWI, an instrument that can capture multiwavelength, or spectral, information for every pixel in an image. This is like breaking apart the light captured in every pixel into a rainbow of colors. The spectral information enabled the team to measure the motions of the filaments poking out from the center of the explosion and ultimately create a 3D map of the structure. The filament material that is flying toward us shifted toward the blue higher-energy portion end of the visible spectrum (blue-shifted), while light from material moving away from us shifted toward the red end of the spectrum (red-shifted).

…The results showed that the filament material in the supernova is flying outward from the site of the explosion at approximately 1,000 kilometers per second. “We find the material in the filaments is expanding ballistically,” says Cunningham. “This means that the material has not been slowed down nor sped up since the explosion. From the measured velocities, looking back in time, you can pinpoint the explosion to almost exactly the year 1181.”

The 3D information also revealed a large cavity inside the spindly, spherical structure in addition to some evidence that the supernova explosion of 1181 occurred asymmetrically.

Using this data, they were able to create that 3D map, shown below in a coarse animation video.
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A pointy mesa once washed by theorized Martian ocean

11:09 am

A pointy mesa on Mars
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image returns to the same region yesterday’s cool image visited. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 21, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It was clearly taken to get a close look at this unusual pointy mesa.

MRO elevation data says this mesa is about 800 feet height. The color difference between the north and south flanks suggests the accumulated presence of dust on the north, suggesting the prevailing winds here come from the northeast and blow to the southwest. This conclusion is reinforced by the dark accumulated dust found in the southwest quadrants of all the crater floors in the full image. The wind blows this dust into the craters, where it gets trapped against the southwest crater wall.

Note the mesa’s wide base, with one crater partly eaten away on its eastern edge. The overall shape of this base suggests that it was carved by some flow coming from the southwest, as indicated by the arrow.
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The obvious visual evidence for assuming Mars once had catastrophic floods

12:03 pm

The obvious visual evidence of past catastropic floods on Mars
Click for original image.

Since the first comprehensive orbital data of Mars was sent back in the early 1970s by Mariner 9, scientists have generally concluded that many of the features seen at the eastern end of the giant Valles Marineris canyon were caused by one or several catastrophic floods.

The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here and taken on July 26, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), provides a good example of why the scientists have come to that conclusion. It shows what the camera team labels a “streamline feature surrounding crater.” I have added the arrows to indicate the presumed direction of flow. The flow went around this 2.5-mile-wide unnamed crater because the impact had compacted it, making it resistent to erosion. The flow however was strong and large enough to wash away the plateau on which the crater sits, as well as cutting into the crater’s southwest rim. In addition, the rim on the southeast was also cut through at some point, this time from what might have been flow eddies as the flood pushed past.

Hence, the theory of catastrophic floods.

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A galaxy squashed as it plows its way through the intergalactic medium

9:21 am

A galaxy squashed by a vacuum
Click for original image.

Time for another cool image on this relatively slow day in the space news business. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released today by the European Space Agency’s press department. From the caption:

Appearances can be deceiving with objects so far from Earth — IC 3225 itself [the galaxy to the right] is about 100 million light-years away — but the galaxy’s location suggests some causes for this active scene, because IC 3225 is one of over 1300 members of the Virgo galaxy cluster. The density of galaxies in the Virgo cluster creates a rich field of hot gas between them, the so-called ‘intracluster medium’, while the cluster’s extreme mass has its galaxies careening around its centre in some very fast orbits. Ramming through the thick intracluster medium, especially close to the cluster’s centre, places an enormous ‘ram pressure’ on the moving galaxies that strips gas out of them as they go.

IC 3225 is not so close to the cluster core right now, but astronomers have deduced that it has undergone this ram pressure stripping in the past. The galaxy looks as though it’s been impacted by this: it is compressed on one side and there has been noticeably more star formation on this leading edge, while the opposite end is stretched out of shape. Being in such a crowded field, a close call with another galaxy could also have tugged on IC 3225 and created this shape. The sight of this distorted galaxy is a reminder of the incredible forces at work on astronomical scales, which can move and reshape even entire galaxies!

What makes the impact on this galaxy of that intercluster medium so astonishing is that medium is so relatively empty of material. The space between galaxies in the Virgo cluster is in all intents and purposes a vacuum far more empty than any that we can create in a chamber on Earth. And yet it was enough to distort this galaxy and cause star formation on the galaxy’s leading edge.

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Young lava on the Moon?

9:08 am

Young lava on the Moon?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on November 27, 2023 by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and was today featured by the science team. From their caption:

One of the early findings from the LRO mission was the discovery of volcanic features known as Irregular Mare Patches (IMPs) scattered across the nearside. These landforms are generally considered volcanic. However, their ages are hotly debated. They may be as young as 50 million years or as old as 3.5 billion years. The Aristarchus IMP (25.045°N, 313.233°E) is one of the smallest and most enigmatic IMP. The fact that this IMP is found within the Aristarchus crater ejecta suggests it formed after the crater, which is dated at 200 million years.

Alternatively, this IMP may have formed as part of ejecta emplacement from the Aristarchus crater forming impact. However, no other crater ejecta on the Moon exhibits a similar landform.

Astronomers for decades before and since Sputnick have reported what appears to be some activity in the Aristachus region, though none of those reports have ever been confirmed. In LRO’s long mission orbiting the Moon it has not yet detected any obvious changes there, suggesting that there is little or no present activity. These patches however appear to indicate activity in the relatively recent past.

The patches however also indicate activity that seems alien. Why would the lava form in this manner, as rough patch of knobs, sometimes aligned, sometimes not?

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A different kind of chaos on Mars

2:25 pm

A different kind of chaos on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 23, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). I had originally chosen to feature a different picture of this spot, taken on August 1, 2024 in order to create a stereo pair, but this week the camera team featured this first photo, providing a caption.

This disrupted surface is characterized by a collection of rounded to flat-topped mounds of various sizes connected by narrow flat floors, typical of the aptly named “chaotic terrain” on Mars.

What could have caused this flat surface to break into pieces? You might imagine that a flat surface could be broken up if it was inflated or collapsed. One hypothesis is that large amounts of water were released from deep below the ground to cause the surface break up.

Normally on Mars, especially in the mid-latitudes, chaotic terrain is associated with glacial activity, suggesting that glaciers over time erode valleys along random criss-crossing fault lines to create the mesas and canyons. This patch of chaotic terrain however suggests a different formation process.
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A water sprinkler in space

11:42 am

A sprinkler in space

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a long term program to monitor changes in the R Aquarii binary star system, located about 700 light years away.

R Aquarii belongs to a class of double stars called symbiotic stars. The primary star is an aging red giant and its companion is a compact burned-out star known as a white dwarf. The red giant primary star is classified as a Mira variable that is over 400 times larger than our Sun. The bloated monster star pulsates, changes temperature, and varies in brightness by a factor of 750 times over a roughly 390-day period. At its peak the star is blinding at nearly 5,000 times our Sun’s brightness.

When the white dwarf star swings closest to the red giant along its 44-year orbital period, it gravitationally siphons off hydrogen gas. This material accumulates on the dwarf star’s surface until it undergoes spontaneous nuclear fusion, making that surface explode like a gigantic hydrogen bomb. After the outburst, the fueling cycle begins again.

This outburst ejects geyser-like filaments shooting out from the core, forming weird loops and trails as the plasma emerges in streamers. The plasma is twisted by the force of the explosion and channeled upwards and outwards by strong magnetic fields. The outflow appears to bend back on itself into a spiral pattern. The plasma is shooting into space over 1 million miles per hour – fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 15 minutes! The filaments are glowing in visible light because they are energized by blistering radiation from the stellar duo.

The press release likens these filaments to the spray thrown out by a water sprinkler, and I must say that’s an apt description.

Since 2014 scientists have taken regular pictures of R Aquarii, and found that the central structures have been changing in a perceptible manner, despite their gigantic size. Below is a movie created from five photos taken from 2014 to 2023.
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Spring etch-a-sketch near the Martian south pole

1:06 pm

Spring etch-a-sketch near the Martian south pole
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 28, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled merely as a “terrain sample,” it was likely snapped not as part of any specific research project but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule so as to maintain its proper temperature.

The camera team tries to find interesting geology when they do this, and are frequently successful. In this case the image shows some truly alien Martian terrain at 77 degrees south latitude, about 475 miles from the south pole.

What are we looking at? I promise you it isn’t the iron filings found inside an Etch-A-Sketch drawing toy. My guess is that the base layer is the light areas, a mixture of ice and debris impregnated with dust and eroded into the unique Martian geological feature dubbed brain terrain. As for the dark lines and splotches, their explanation might lie in the time of year, the spring.
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The pimpled floor of Isidis Basin on Mars

1:30 pm

The pimpled floor of Isidis Basin on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 21, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled merely as a “terrain sample,” it was likely taken not as part of any specific research project but chosen by the camera team to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule in order to maintain its proper temperature.

When they do this they try to pick a target that is somewhat interesting, though it is not always possible. In this case it appears they succeeded in capturing a location filled with lots of puzzling stuff, including low 60-to-80-foot-high mesas with either flat- or hollow-tops, shallow craters that appear almost buried, and other craters that appear so deep and shadowed that it is even possible these are skylights into underground caves.

In between these features the flat landscape has a scattering of ripple dunes, all oriented in the same direction and thus implying that the prevailing winds are or were blowing from the northeast to the southwest.
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Monitoring a changing spot on Mars

1:12 pm

Monitoring a changing landscape on Mars
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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 18, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Based on its label, “Dark Filamentary Streak Year-Round Monitor Site in Promethei Terra,” it was apparently taken as part of a long-term project to monitor the changes that occur at this particular spot on Mars.

This monitoring began in 2008, not long after MRO began science operations. In that first image, taken in the Martian autumn, almost the entire terrain was covered with dust devil tracks, all running more-or-less parallel to each other in a northwest-to-southeast direction.

That unusual tiger-striped landscape prompted later monitoring. However, a follow-up photo in 2010, also in autumn, showed practically no dust tracks here at all. Another image, taken in 2011 during the Martian summer, showed new dust devil tracks, but instead of being aligned as in 2008, the tracks went in all directions, with only a hint of alignment to the southeast.
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Curiosity’s upcoming travel route

12:36 pm

Curiosity's upcoming route
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above, cropped and annotated to post here, was taken on October 6, 2024 by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. It looks south, down the slopes of Mount Sharp and across Gale Crater, the distant crater rim barely visible through the dusty air twenty to thirty miles away.

The overview map to the right provide the context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present position. The yellow lines the approximate area covered by the panorama. The red dotted line indicates the rover’s planned route, with the white dotted line the path it has recently traveled.

As you can see, the rover has moved up onto a higher terrace surrounding the Texoli butte, and will now travel downhill a bit to skirt around its northern nose. From there, the science team plans to send the rover westward, traversing along the contour lines on the side of Mount Sharp. Along the way it will lose more elevation, but eventually, after passing several parallel north-south trending canyons, it will finally turn south into one canyon to resume its climb up the mountain.

To review the rover’s journey, Curiosity during its dozen years on Mars has traveled just over 20 miles and climbed about 2,500 feet. The peak of Mount Sharp however is still about 26 miles away and about 16,000 feet higher. Getting there will probably take at least three more decades, which is possible since the rover uses a nuclear power source similar to that used by the two Voyager interplanetary probes, now functioning in space for almost a half century.

In fact, it would not surprise me if the first human Mars colonies are established while Curiosity is still working, and that in its later years it sends its data to that colony directly (via an orbiting relay satellite), rather than beaming it back to Earth.

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Frozen Martian eddies at the confluence of two glacier rivers

1:46 pm

Frozen eddies at the confluence of two glacial rivers
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Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 3, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels the photo as capturing a “contact near Reull Vallis,” a 1,000-mile-long Martian canyon that flows down the eastern slopes of Hellas Basin, the death valley of Mars.

What I see isn’t a geological contact but a complex jumble of odd-shaped depressions and mesas, surrounded by an eroded surface that seems squashed and deformed by some process. If this is all we had to go on, I would simply label this as another “What the heck?” image on Mars and move on. However, the larger context of the overview map helps explain it all, at least as best as we can explain using orbital data.
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The strange terrain of the Martian southern ice cap

12:13 pm

The strange terrain of Mars' south pole
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 29, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a section at the Martian south pole at the very high latitude of 87 degrees south, only about 100 miles from the pole itself.

The label for this picture is “possible water ice and mesas,” suggesting we are looking at an ice cap of water that is partly sublimated away.

In truth, things are much more complicated. It was summer when this photo was taken. Note the drainage in the lower right and the dark spidery lines there. In the winter on Mars atmospheric carbon dioxide falls as snow and coats the poles to about 60 degrees latitude with a thin mantle of dry ice. In the spring this mantle sublimates away, but does so in an counter-intuitive manner. The sublimation first occurs at the mantle’s base, and the trapped gas flows up until it finds a weak spot in the mantle and cracks through, spewing out and deposting dark splotches of dust.

At the south pole this upward flow always follows the same paths, producing the dark spidery patterns we see here. In the case of the drainage in the lower right, this is a drainage of gas eastward until it pops out at the slope, causing that depression to become darkly stained.

This is only part of the story of this complex geology, however.
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Perseverance looks uphill

9:51 am

Perseverance looks uphill
Click for full resolution. The original images can be found here and here.

Cool image time! The panorama above was created by me from two pictures taken today by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance (found here and here). The haziness in the air is the left over from a local dust storm in Jezero Crater during the past month.

On the overview map below, the blue dot marks Perseverance’s present position, with the red dotted line indicating the approximate planned route of the rover uphill. The yellow lines are my guess as to the area covered by the panorama above. That guess could be wrong, as not all the features in the picture match the overview map. The view could be much closer, with the hill and ridgeline nothing more than the small outcrops close to the rover.

Nonetheless, these navigation pictures show us the kind of terrain the rover will be climbing as it works its way up the rim of Jezero Crater. The ground is relative smooth, though steep. My guess is that this is about a 25% grade, which on Earth would be a problem but on Mars it is a grade that NASA’s other rover, Curiosity, has routinely traversed. Perseverance has not yet traveled this kind of steepness, but there is no reason to expect it to have any difficulties doing so.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

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Curiosity spots a corroded weathered rock

9:15 am

a weathered and corroded rock
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 29, 2024 by the close-up camera mounted at the end of the robot arm of the rover Curiosity on Mars.

This is a small rock, less than three inches across. It is embedded in the sand and soil of Mars, its surface clearly weathered and smoothed by some process. The holes and gaps in the rock could have occurred prior to that smoothing, getting exposed by it. Or possibly the holes developed during the smoothing, with sections breaking off because the material was like sandstone, easily friable.

What caused the smoothing? The data from Curiosity as it climbs Mount Sharp suggests some water process, either flowing water or glacial ice. The scientists at present tend to prefer the liquid explanation, but that requires the Martian atmosphere to have once been much thicker and warmer, conditions that no model has yet demonstrated convincingly was ever possible.

The rock is also likely another example of sulfur, part of the sulfate-bearing unit of geology that Curiosity is presently traversing.

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Crazy swirling Martian landscape

1:48 pm

Crazy swirling Martian landscape
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, sharpened, and annotated to post here, was taken on July 1, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this “Contacts between Likely Sulfates and Chaos Blocks.” That contact I have indicated with the dotted line. To the west the lighter terrain is likely the sulfate-bearing unit, similar to the sulfate-bearing unit that Curiosity has been traversing on Mount Sharp for the past year or so.

To the east are the chaos blocks, but I think that description is wholly inadequate. In truth, I haven’t the faintest idea how this terrain got to be the way it is. It is evident that a lot of dust and sand has gotten trapped in the hollows, leaving behind ripple dunes in some places, but why the higher ridges swirl and curve about as they do is utterly baffling.
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Monitoring gullies on Mars for changes

12:25 pm

Overview map

Monitoring gullies on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on June 29, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The scientists label the picture simply as “gully monitoring,” with an apparent goal of looking to see if this gully has changed since MRO took the first high resolution image two years previously. In the interim this terrain went from Martian spring, through summer and winter, and has now returned to spring.

As far as I can tell, no changes are visible, but then I am not using the highest resolution data available. Small changes might be detectable in the highest resolution using good detection software. Overall, the gully drops about 3,000 feet.

The white dot in the overview map above marks the location, on the southwest interior rim of an unnamed 30-mile wide crater. This region in the Martian cratered highlands was featured in a four part cool image series I did back 2023 (here, here, here, and here), with this as my conclusion:

Overall, our short survey of the southern cratered highlands suggests that the glacial material and ice found in the southern mid-latitudes affects the Martian surface differently than in the northern lowland plains. In the north the craters and the surrounding terrain often appear blobby, as if the ice is close to the surface and also a dominant component of the ground. Impacts therefore cause significant soft melt features, with craters often heavily distorted. Similarly, there is evidence of the existence of past mud volcanoes that once spewed water and mud from below ground.

In the south however the surface is at a higher elevation, and it appears the ice layer is deeper underground. Thus, it appears the ground is more firm, and the only obvious evidence of an underground layer of ice is revealed when sublimation and the subsequent erosion produce these large pits inside craters.

In the case of this crater, a small impact on its interior southwest slope apparently caused that underground layer of ice to melt temporarily and flow downhill, leaving behind the gully and flow features we see today. Based on the two MRO pictures taken a full Martian year apart, it appears the feature is generally stable and thus likely old, left over from that impact. If things are changing seasonally they are doing so in small amounts and slowly.

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A puzzling striped rock on Mars

9:32 am

A striped rock on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 13, 2024 by one of the high resolution cameras on the Mars rover Perseverance. The rock’s striped nature makes it unique, unlike any feature spotted by any rover previously. From an update today:

The science team thinks that this rock has a texture unlike any seen in Jezero Crater before, and perhaps all of Mars. Our knowledge of its chemical composition is limited, but early interpretations are that igneous and/or metamorphic processes could have created its stripes. Since Freya Castle [the name the science team gave the rock] is a loose stone that is clearly different from the underlying bedrock, it has likely arrived here from someplace else, perhaps having rolled downhill from a source higher up. This possibility has us excited, and we hope that as we continue to drive uphill, Perseverance will encounter an outcrop of this new rock type so that more detailed measurements can be acquired.

Without doubt the rock’s rounded surface suggests it was ground smooth by either water or ice. That surface certainly resembles glacial cobble seen across the northeast of the U.S. where ice glaciers once covered the entire landscape. The rock also resembles river cobble, smoothed by flowing water.

The stripes however suggest that prior to its being smoothed, this rock underwent a much more complex geological process, whereby two different materials were intermixed and squeezed together.

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Layered mesas in Martian chaos

12:27 pm

Layered mesas in Martian chaos
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 19, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a 2,500 to 3,000-foot-high mesa with what the scientists call “bedrock layers”, most obvious as the lower terraces on the mesa’s western slopes.

What makes this mesa especially interesting is its overall shape. It appears as if something has taken a bite out of it, resulting in that bowl-like hollow on the mesa’s southern half.

Was this caused by an impact? Or has some other long term Martian processes caused it?

This mesa is just one of many mesas in a region of chaos terrain dubbed Hydraotes Chaos. Such chaos terrain is thought to form when erosion processes, possibly glacial in nature, that carve out canyons along faultlines, leaving behind mesas with randomly oriented canyons cutting in many directions.
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Webb takes an infrared look at a galaxy looked at by Hubble

12:21 pm

Comparing Hubble with Webb
For original images go here and here.

Cool image time! The bottom picture on the right, cropped to post here, is a just released false color infrared image of the galaxy Arp 107, taken by the Webb Space Telescope. The picture at the top is a previously released optical image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and featured as a cool image back in September 2023. The Hubble image was taken as part of a survey project to photograph the entire Arp catalog of 338 “peculiar galaxies,” put together by astronomer Halton Arp in 1966. In this case Arp 107 is peculiar because it is actually two galaxies in the process of merging. It is also peculiar because the galaxy on the left has an active galactic nuclei (AGN), where a supermassive black hole is sucking up material and thus emitting a lot of energy.

The Webb infrared image was taken to supplement that optical image. The blue spiral arms indicate dust and star-forming regions. The bright orange object in the center of the galaxy is that AGN, clearly defined by Webb’s infrared camera.

When I posted the Hubble image in 2023, I noted that “if you ignore the blue whorls of the left galaxy, the two bright cores of these merging galaxies are about the same size.” In the Webb image the two cores still appear about the same size, but in the infrared they produce emissions in decidedly different wavelengths, as shown by the different false colors of orange and blue. The core of the galaxy on the right is dust filled and forming stars, while the core of the left galaxy appears to have less dust with all of its emissions resulting from the energy produced by the material being pulled into the supermassive black hole.

The universe is very active and changing, but to understand that process we humans have to look at everything across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, not just in the optical wavelengths our eyes see.

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Some new “What the heck?” geology on Mars

1:12 pm

What the heck is going on here?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on April 21, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

My first reaction on seeing this picture was to scratch my head? What am I looking at? Are those fluted dark features going downhill to the south, or uphill to the north? What are they? Are they slope streaks? Avalanches? How do they relate to the flat-topped ground in the middle of the picture?

I have made it easier for my readers to interpret the picture by adding the “low” and “high” markers. We are looking at two parallel thin mesas about 1,400 feet high, with the saddle between them only dropping about 350 feet.

But what about the dark fluted features? To understand what these are requires more information.
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Intuitive Machines targeting January 2025 for launch of its next lunar lander

9:37 am

The landers either at or targeting the Moon's south pole
The landers either at or targeting the Moon’s south pole

The company Intuitive Machines is now aiming to launch its second Nova-C lunar lander, dubbed Athena, during a January 1-5, 2025 launch window.

The landing site is indicated on the map to the right, on the rim of Shackleton crater and almost on top of the south pole. While Chang’e-7 is targeting the same crater rim, it is not scheduled for launch until 2026.

The lander will not only include a drill for studying the surface below it, it will release a small secondary payload, the Micro-Nova Hopper, which will hopefully hop down into the permanently shadowed craters nearby.

The launch will also carry a lunar orbiter, dubbed Lunar Trailblazar, which will not only do spectroscopy of the lunar surface, looking for water, it will also be used as a communications relay satellite with Athena. That orbiter, designed to demonstrate the ability to build a smallsat at low cost, was previously threatened with cancellation because its builder, Lockheed Martin, went way over budget.

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New gravity map of Mars released

9:09 am

New global map of Mars gravity field
Click for original image.
Using both seismological data compiled over four years by the InSight Mars lander as well tiny changes in the orbits of Martian satellites, scientists have now created a global gravity map of the red planet, indicating the regions below the surface that are either low or high density.

That map is above, annotated by me to indicate some of Mars’ major surface features.

The density map shows that the northern polar features are approximately 300-400 kg/m3 denser than their surroundings. However, the study also revealed new insights into the structures underlying the huge volcanic region of Tharsis Rise, which includes the colossal volcano, Olympus Mons.

Although volcanoes are very dense, the Tharsis area is much higher than the average surface of Mars, and is ringed by a region of comparatively weak gravity. This gravity anomaly is hard to explain by looking at differences in the martian crust and upper mantle alone. The study by Dr Root and his team suggests that a light mass around 1750 kilometres across and at a depth of 1100 kilometres is giving the entire Tharsis region a boost upwards. This could be explained by huge plume of lava, deep within the martian interior, travelling up towards the surface.

I once again note that the largest impact basin on Mars, Hellas Basin, sits almost exactly on the planet’s far side from Tharsis, and appears to have a light density. This contrast once again makes me wonder if the origin of that impact and the Tharsis Bulge are linked.

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A fluted mesa on Mars

1:27 pm

A fluted mesa on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 9, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the science team labels a “silica-rich mound”, as indicated by the bright streaks on all the high ridge points.

The flat-topped mesa on the right drops about 200 feet to the valley floor. The rims of that depression to the west rise about 50+ feet higher, while mesa nose in the upper left rising another 50+ feet more.

Was the depression caused by an impact? If so, the landscape has changed radically since that impact occurred, with most of the surrounding terrain eroded away. The two flat-topped mesas hint at the ancient surface when that impact occurred.

A wider view however raises questions about this impact theory.
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A map of Io’s hot spots based on Juno data

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The hot spots on Io
Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science: Using the JIRAM infrared camera on the Jupiter orbiter Juno, scientists have now created a global map of volcanic activity, showing where it appears the hottest and greatest activity is located.

That data is illustrated by the graphic to the right, taken from figure 1 of the paper. The top row shows the coverage of the planet, with Io’s southern hemisphere getting the fewest observations. The bottom row shows the observed regions with the greatest heat. This quote from the abstract is most revealing:

Using JIRAM, we have mapped where volcanoes are producing the most power and compared that to where we expect higher heat flow from the interior models. Our map doesn’t agree with any of these models very well. JIRAM observed more volcanic activity at the poles than we expected to see based on previous observations. However, since the south pole was only observed twice, it’s possible that these observations don’t represent the average volcanic activity of the south pole. Very bright volcanoes that may have been continuously active for decades were also imaged during these Juno fly-bys, some of which are nearer the poles than the equator.

The conflict between the data and the theories could very well be explained simply by the short term nature of these observations. The models could very well be right, over centuries. For example, the new volcano discovered by Juno is near the equator, suggesting with time those models will turn out to be correct.

Or not. A lot more observations will have to be made of Io before any model of its volcanic activity can be considered trustworthy.

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A crack on Mars more than 600 miles long

2:18 pm

A crack on Mars more than 600 miles long
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on March 29, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this “troughs in Labeatis Fossae.” On Mars, the word “fossae” is used to indicate regions where there are a lot of parallel fissures. Though there are a few examples where such fissures might have been caused by the movement of ice or water, carving out the channel, in almost all cases this is not the cause. Instead, fossae are usually formed when the surface stretches, either because underground upward pressure pulls it apart, or because there is a sideways spread at the surface. The resulting cracks are generally considered what geologists call “grabens,” depressions caused at faultlines when the ground on either side moves apart in some manner.

In this case the break in the trough proves this is a graben, though why it broke at this spot is not clear.
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Musk: First unmanned Mars Starship targeting a ’26 launch

9:15 pm

The prime and secondary Martian landing sites for Starship

According to a tweet yesterday by Elon Musk, SpaceX is aiming for a 2026 launch of its first unmanned Starship to Mars.

The first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens. These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years.

Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years.

The graphic to the right indicates the planned landing zone, with the four red dots the four prime locations. Three of the four are very flat, though they also appear to have a lot of very near-surface ice, accessible simply by digging a shovel into the ground. Attempting to land at any will definitely test Statship’s ability to land on Mars intact. A global map of Mars is shown below, showing the location of this landing zone. The map shows where researchers believe the saltiest water on Mars would be. According to this data, in the Starship landing zone some of that near-surface ice will turn to liquid brine a little less than one percent of each year. Otherwise it will be more easily processed for drinking and fuel.

As always with these ambitious predictions, Musk is aiming high, with the likelihood that this first mission will not make that ’26 date. At the same time, he is making it very clear that a first attempt will certainly happen by ’28.

I also think the timing of this announcement is intriguing, coming one day after NASA was forced to cancel the launch in October of two Mars orbiters because it could not be certain Blue Origin would have the New Glenn rocket ready on time. Musk’s response is to say that SpaceX is now about to begin regularly privately funded and privately built missions to Mars, on a schedule, essentially asking: “Which company would you choose to do things in space?”
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NASA cancels launch of its two Escapade Mars Orbiters due to Blue Origin delays

2:59 pm

After reviewing the status of launch preparations by Blue Origin of its New Glenn rocket, NASA today decided to cancel the launch because it appeared that Blue Origin would not be able to meet the October 13-21 launch window for sending the agency’s two Escapade orbiters to Mars.

NASA announced Friday it will not fuel the two ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) spacecraft at this time, foregoing the mission’s upcoming October launch window. While future launch opportunities are under review, the next possible earliest launch date is spring 2025.

The agency’s decision to stand down was based on a review of launch preparations and discussions with Blue Origin, the Federal Aviation Administration, and Space Launch Delta 45 Range Safety Organization, as well as NASA’s Launch Services Program and Science Mission Directorate. The decision was made to avoid significant cost, schedule, and technical challenges associated with potentially removing fuel from the spacecraft in the event of a launch delay, which could be caused by a number of factors.

The press release of course is vague about why the launch has been canceled, but the reasons are obvious if you have been paying attention. Though Blue Origin has clearly been making progress towards the first launch of New Glenn, recent reports suggested strongly that it would be impossible for it to assemble the rocket, integrate the two orbiters, and get everything on the launchpad on time.

Rocket Lab, which built the orbiters, of course fully supported the decision, though that company very much wanted it to fly now to demonstrate its ability to make low cost smallsat planetary probes.

This failure of Blue Origin to meet this deadline speaks poorly of the company. To serve the satellite and especially the planetary research community rocket companies must be able to launch on schedule and on time. Blue Origin has failed to do so in this case. It appears Jeff Bezos needs to ramp up the pressure on his moribund company to finally get it to perform in the manner he desires, as described by Bezos himself recently.

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