Want to fly over the surface of Mars? ESA scientists have produced a movie using the data produced by their Mars Express orbiter in the past decade.
Video below the fold. More details here.
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The Mars rover Opportunity is heading up hill.
Even after a decades, this rover is still functioning and doing real exploration. It is an incredible engineering achievement.
The great Martian dust storm of 1971.
There has only been one comparable global dust storm on Mars since then. What made the 1971 even more significant historically is that the first human orbital probe had arrived at that very moment to record it.
By late 1971 and into January 1972 the storm abated, and Mariner 9 began to send back some spectacular images – a total of over 7,300 pictures that mapped the entire martian surface with resolutions ranging from 1 kilometer per pixel to as good at 100 meters per pixel.
The image here gives a sense of the magnitude of the storm. This was what the scientists began to see as the dust settled. The only visible features are the three great Tharsis Montes shield volcanoes, poking up through the haze in a line. The tallest of these reaches an altitude of over 18 kilometers. These peaks, and the enormous bulk of Olympus Mons had never been imaged by a spacecraft before, earlier flybys had missed them.
The late Bruce Murray (Caltech) was on the camera team and recalls, “there was a gradual clearing, like a stage scene, and three dark spots showed up.” The Mars that came out of the storm was a revelation, from these colossal mountains to the great rift of Valles Marineris and the steep valleys of Noctis Labyrinthus.
The image on the right is a cropped close-up of a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image taken in early September that shows a fresh cluster of impacts, all smaller than six feet across. Nearby but not visible in this image are four larger craters about 12 to 15 feet in diameter. The impact cluster is located just northwest of Gale Crater and was not present in images taken before Curiosity’s arrival on Mars. The cluster is also in line with other impact craters produced by other debris dropped by Curiosity as it descended onto the Martian surface.
Scientists are at the moment unsure what spacecraft debris caused these impacts.
Assigning each of the impacts to specific pieces of hardware is a challenging puzzle, but it is thought that the four large craters were produced by two large tungsten weights that broke in half to make these four craters, or by pieces of the cruise stage, which was designed to break up in the atmosphere for planetary protection purposes, to kill any Earthly microbes.
The cluster imaged here adds to the mystery, and may have been produced by a piece of the cruise stage that traveled farther through the Martian atmosphere and was therefore more thoroughly fragmented by the time it crashed onto the surface.
Identifying the source of the debris is a challenging engineering problem that also has scientific interest. Knowing what caused the impacts and then studying how the surface was changed by them will tell geologists a great deal about the make up of that surface.
The Twitter comment of the day: “More people have applied to live on Mars than have signed up for Obamacare.”
I almost never look at Twitter comments, but this one was too good to pass up.
A collection of new images from Mars by a variety of spacecraft and rovers.
Posted as we approach El Paso and the Texas-New Mexico border.
Making Martian clouds — on Earth.
They’ve recreated Mars-like conditions within a three-story-tall cloud chamber in Germany, adjusting the chamber’s temperature and relative humidity to match conditions on Mars — essentially forming Martian clouds on Earth. While the researchers were able to create clouds at the frigid temperatures typically found on Mars, they discovered that cloud formation in such conditions required adjusting the chamber’s relative humidity to 190 percent — far greater than cloud formation requires on Earth. The finding should help improve conventional models of the Martian atmosphere, many of which assume that Martian clouds require humidity levels similar to those found on Earth.
The required high humidity seems very counter-intuitive, considering Mars’s presently dry environment. I suspect it implies that there are other unknown factors about the Martian atmosphere that the scientists have not yet considered.
NASA and JPL have now stated that the government shutdown will not interfere with their promised support for India’s Mars Orbiter Mission.
Earlier reports had suggested that NASA’s Deep Space Network, used to communicate with planetary probes, would not be available because of the shutdown, and the mission would have to be delayed because of this.
Posted from Columbia, Maryland.
Because India depends on the American Deep Space communications network — mostly unavailable due to the government shutdown — the launch of its first Mars probe, set for October 28, might have to be delayed for two years.
This is unfortunate news indeed. However, if I was India (as well as other countries) I would consider this a call to develop their own deep space network.
NASA has decided to exempt its Mars probe, MAVEN, from the government shutdown, allowing preparations to resume for its November launch.
NASA Headquarters in Washington determined that Maven’s preparations should go ahead on an emergency basis — not because of its scientific objectives, but because of its expected role as a communications relay satellite for the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers on Mars. “Both Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Odyssey have been acting as communication relays, but they’ve passed their design lifetime,” Jakosky explained. “Maven carries communication equipment to take over that job as necessary. Getting us launched at this opportunity is a way to preserve that ability to communicate.”
As I’ve said before, as much as I am in favor of launching this kind of science mission, the number of arbitrary decisions relating to this shutdown makes the whole thing look ridiculous. NASA can act to protect its investments on Mars, but the National Park Service is required to interfere with the normal actions of private restaurants here on Earth?
The truth is that these science missions really don’t fall under the intended definition of “essential operations”. The federal bureaucracy, under the direction of the White House, is simply stretching that definition for their own convenience, wherever they like.
Scientists believe they have identified the remains of a supervolcano on Mars.
This volcano would apparently be bigger than Mars’s four giant volcanoes that are still the biggest known in the solar system.
Chicken Little report: With a launch window from November 18 to December7, the government shutdown might delay NASA’s next Mars unmanned probe MAVEN until 2016.
It is absolutely possible that the shutdown could cause MAVEN to miss its launch window. Such is life. The world won’t end, and as much as I am a big supporter of space exploration, I also recognize that there are actually bigger issues than NASA hanging in the balance.
Note that the article above bleeds tears for the poor government officials who might not get paid during the shutdown. Well, the economy has sucked for the past five years, with no signs of improvement and plenty of evidence that Obama and Congress have done a great deal to make things worse, especially with the passage of Obamacare. Maybe we should instead have some sympathy for the people who earn the money to pay for NASA and the government and have been screaming at these politicians to just leave them alone.
