In preparation for its October arrival in Mars orbit, the European ExoMars probe has successfully sent back its first images of the red planet.
The image is very fuzzy with a very low resolution, but that is expected considering the distance. What the image demonstrates is that ExoMars’ camera is working as expected.
After almost a year exploring Marathon Valley, an east-west cut through the western rim of Endeavour Crater, the Mars rover Opportunity is about to head out and south, following the outside of the crater’s rim.
For a rover that was only supposed to last 90 days, Opportunity has now traveled more than 26.5 miles in its 12 years of operation on the Martian surface.
After four years of southwest travel to skirt a large dune field at the base of Mount Sharp, Curiosity has finally turned due south to aim directly up the mountain.
“Now that we’ve skirted our way around the dunes and crossed the plateau, we’ve turned south to climb the mountain head-on,” said Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. “Since landing, we’ve been aiming for this gap in the terrain and this left turn. It’s a great moment for the mission.”
The competition heats up: In an interview with the Washington Post this week, Elon Musk gave some more hints at his company’s future plans to send its Dragon capsules to Mars.
“Essentially what we’re saying is we’re establishing a cargo route to Mars,” [Musk] said. “It’s a regular cargo route. You can count on it. It’s going happen every 26 months. Like a train leaving the station. And if scientists around the world know that they can count on that, and it’s going to be inexpensive, relatively speaking compared to anything in the past, then they will plan accordingly and come up with a lot of great experiments.”
The key to Musk’s effort is that he plans on doing it. He isn’t sitting around waiting for others, or trying to convince others to join him in a partnership before proceeding. He is simply doing it, and is welcoming others to take advantage of the opportunity he is offering.
Data from the many Martian orbiters since 1997 have allowed scientists to roughly outline a seasonal pattern of dust storms on Mars.
Most Martian dust storms are localized, smaller than about 1,200 miles (about 2,000 kilometers) across and dissipating within a few days. Some become regional, affecting up to a third of the planet and persisting up to three weeks. A few encircle Mars, covering the southern hemisphere but not the whole planet. Twice since 1997, global dust storms have fully enshrouded Mars. The behavior of large regional dust storms in Martian years that include global dust storms is currently unclear, and years with a global storm were not included in the new analysis.
They have also found three types of regional dust storms, all of which appear to occur each Martian year.
New research using data from a variety of Mars orbiters suggests that large tsunamis previously smashed against the shores of the red planet, shaping the geography.
The group zeroed in on a region on Mars where the highlands known as Arabia Terra bump up against the lowlands of Chryse Planitia — a place where the waters of an ancient ocean might have lapped at the shoreline. Using imagery from several Mars-orbiting spacecraft, Rodriguez’s group identified two particular geological formations that they say formed during two different tsunamis. The first, older formation looks as if an enormous wave had rushed up onto the edge of the highlands, dropping boulders as big as 10 metres across. The water then drained back down into the ocean, leaving channels cut through the freshly deposited debris.
Then, millions of years passed. Temperatures dropped and glaciers crept across the landscape, scouring deep valleys. Finally, a second impact-generated tsunami came rushing again towards the shore. “But this time it is different,” Rodriguez says. Because the climate was so much colder, the tsunami moved over the landscape like an icy slurry. It froze before it had a chance to wash back into the ocean, leaving dense lobes of frozen debris on the ground.
They propose the waves were caused by large meteorite impacts. They also admit that there are large uncertainties in their theory and conclusions.
Two stories this week illustrate the difference between lobbying the government to get anything accomplished, and doing it yourself with the goal of making money from it from private customers.
In the first case SpaceX is planning to fly a Dragon capsule to Mars, using its Falcon Heavy rocket, and do it by 2018. It would not be manned, but would do the initial engineering testing for later manned missions, using larger interplanetary spacecraft. SpaceX is not asking the government to help pay for it. They are only making sure they have dotted all the legal “I”s required. The goal is to build spacecraft that can take anyone to Mars who is willing to pay for the flight.
In the second case Lockheed Martin is proposing a big government program to put six astronauts in orbit around Mars, in 2028. They haven’t really built anything yet to do this, they merely are lobbying the federal government to pay for it.
Which do you think is more likely to happen? Anyone who reads Behind the Black knows that I choose SpaceX. For 40 years I have seen many different variations of Lockheed Martin’s proposal, all of which came to nothing. They are powerpoint proposals, not real engineering, designed to wow Congress and NASA and get funding for the company. Nothing will ever be built, since the actual construction is so far into the future and so untested that it is impossible to predict what will really happen.
SpaceX however is planning a real mission, which is being designed to lay the groundwork for later more complex attempts. Rather than propose something big for far in the future, they are building something reasonable and doable now. Moreover, they aren’t lobbying the government, they are advertising their skills to the entire world, with the goal of convincing everyone to buy their very real product.
UPDATE: I should add a link here to Orbital ATK’s proposal in Congressional hearings on Monday to use their Cygnus capsule to build a cislunar space station by 2020. Like Lockheed Martin, they are lobbying Congress to build a mostly powerpoint concept. Why don’t they instead make an investment of their own money, like SpaceX, to send some Cygnus capsules to lunar space and demonstrate the concept, while also learning what needs to be done? I would have greater faith in the reality of their concept if they did that.
The Curiosity science team has released the weather data they have gathered during the rover’s two Martian years spent in Gale Crater.
The temperatures have ranged from a high just below freezing to lows around minus 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
New data of past volcanic activity on Mars suggest that the red planet was once covered by at least one extensive ice sheet.
There is a great deal of uncertainty in this conclusion, however. They have found one example with the right geology to suggest past ice sheets under which volcanoes erupted. Translating this into an extensive ice sheet requires many assumptions that might not prove true with further research.
After looking at their schedules the Russians and Europeans have agreed that they cannot meet the schedule to launch the second ExoMars mission by the next launch window in 2018, and have agreed to delay the mission until 2020.
This really isn’t a surprise, since Russia was a late replacement of the U.S. when the Obama administration backed out of the project suddenly. They need time to prepare.
Scientists now think that the dark streaks they see seasonally develop on Martian slopes are caused when frozen underground water brine is exposed to the atmosphere so that the water boils off, leaving the salt.
More here, including videos of their Earthbound experiments. On Earth, the boiling water caused avalanches and streaks, but because of the higher gravity they were not as long.
Good news: The Curiosity engineering team has found that the rough and fractured rocky terrain the rover has been recently traveling across on Naukluft Plateau has not significantly increased the wear & tear on the rover’s wheels.
The rover team closely monitors wear and tear on Curiosity’s six wheels. “We carefully inspect and trend the condition of the wheels,” said Steve Lee, Curiosity’s deputy project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. “Cracks and punctures have been gradually accumulating at the pace we anticipated, based on testing we performed at JPL. Given our longevity projections, I am confident these wheels will get us to the destinations on Mount Sharp that have been in our plans since before landing.”
Inspection of the wheels after crossing most of the Naukluft Plateau has indicated that, while the terrain presented challenges for navigation, driving across it did not accelerate damage to the wheels.
