Tag: Mars

A “What the heck!?” crater on Mars

3:16 pm

A
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image falls into what I call my “What the heck?” category. The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 31, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It was also picked by the science team as that camera’s picture of the day on July 12, 2022. From the caption:

This seems to belong to a class of craters in the Cerberus Plains that was flooded by lava, which was subsequently uplifted and fractured by an unknown process. This class of filled, uplifted and fractured craters is informally called “the waffle.” A combination of volcanic and periglacial processes seems possible.

In other words, the scientists only have a vague idea what created the broken up floor of this crater. For example, why did only the material in the interior of the crater get uplifted and fractured? Did this uplift occur before, during, or after the lava event?

The overview map below tells us a little about where that lava came from, and when.
» Read more

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Get above 30 degrees latitude on Mars and you can find ice everywhere

1:23 pm

Global overview of Mars' ice features

Glacial features inside a Mars crater
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image provides further proof that there is ample near surface ice almost anywhere on Mars once you get above 30 degrees latitude, in either the northern or southern hemispheres. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was taken on May 26, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the interior slope of an unnamed 15-mile-wide crater that sits inside the much larger 185-mile-wide Newton crater, located in the cratered southern highlands of Mars.

The black cross on the global map of Mars above marks the location of this crater.

The photo was taken as part of the routine monitoring planetary scientists are doing of the gullies that flow down this crater’s interior rim, a monitoring program that goes back to 2007. It is thought that those gullies might be created by seasonal frost, either water ice or dry ice, that causes erosion.

What struck me about the photo however was the glacial features on the floor of the crater. Near the bottom of the interior slope those features look broken up, as if the pressure from above pushed the ice sheets apart. Farther from the interior slope the features more resemble a typical glacial flow, slowly inching downward toward the crater’s low spot. All these glacial features also lend weight to the theory that water ice somehow caused or contributed to the formation of those gullies.

The global map above shows that this crater, while well within the 30 to 60 degrees mid-latitude band where many Martian glaciers are found, is also far from the many regions on Mars that scientists have mapped as having high concentrations of glaciers. And yet, the glacial features are here as well.

Near surface ice will not be found at every spot on Mars. However, once you get above 30 degrees latitude, the evidence increasingly suggests that you won’t have to go far or dig down deep to find it.

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InSight’s power status continues to hold steady on Mars

11:21 pm

InSight power status through August 14, 2022

According to a new status update posted today by the science team, the power status for the Mars InSight lander continues to hold steady.

The graph to the right adds the new data, showing that the daily watt hours of power produced each day continues to hold at 400, while the dust in the atmosphere continues to drop towards its normal level of between 0.6 and 0.7 tau during the non-dust seasons.

These new numbers appear to be generally good news. Even though the dust continues to settle out of the atmosphere, it does not appear to be adding dust on the solar panels that would reduce their capability to generate power. Though the science team had predicted that the power levels would cause the mission to end sometime in August, at 400 watts per hour InSight has apparently continued to generate enough electricity to keep its seismometer running for at least another week.

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Dust and clouds in the Martian atmosphere, as seen by UAE’s Al-Amal orbiter

11:18 am

Two new science papers have just been released detailing results from the Al-Amal (Hope) Mars orbiter that was designed and built by American universities for the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Both papers used data obtained from the orbiter’s infrared spectrometer, dubbed the Emirates Mars Infrared Spectrometer (EMIRS).

Daily cloud cover changes on Mars
Figure 1 from paper. Click for full image.

First, the instrument tracked the daily changes in the planet’s cloud cover.

A prominent region of clouds that is commonly observed near the equator during Mars’ cold season—known as the aphelion cloud belt—was observed to reach a minimum near midday, with more clouds typically observed in both the morning and afternoon. Distinct differences were found in clouds observed near volcanoes, which tended to reach a minimum before local noon and increase throughout the afternoon.

The figure to the right shows this. In the morning and afternoon (LTST’s 7 and 17), there is a high concentration of clouds in the equatorial region above the Tharsis Bulge where the highest Martian volcanoes are located. During the middle of the day (LTSTs 11 and 13) this cloud cover largely dissipates, with a corresponding increase in cloud cover in Hellas Basin, in the southern hemisphere.

The second paper took a more general look at the data, including the change in temperature depending on elevation as well as dust and water content during the Martian northern spring and summer. From the abstract:
» Read more

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Cones south of Starship’s prime landing sites on Mars

3:55 pm

Cones near Phlegra Mountains
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 7, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissnace Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists have labeled as “Cones in Phlegra.”

Cones such as these are one of the prime geological mysteries of Mars’ northern lowland plains. Scientists do not know yet whether they are either mud or lava volcanoes, or even if they are sedimentary mesas that resisted subsequent erosion. In fact, it was hoped by some American scientists that the Chinese would send its Zhurong rover north towards a nearby cone to find out, but alas, the Chinese decided to head south instead.

Zhurong however was on the other side of Mars. The overview map below shows us where these cones are located.
» Read more

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A distant cliff and a rocky path forward

11:11 am

Mosaic of Gediz Vallis
Click for full image.

Close-up of distant cliff face
Click for full image.

Two cool images arrived today from Curiosity, as it is about to enter the Martian canyon of Gediz Vallis. The mosaic above, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was assembled from photos taken by the rover’s right navigation camera on August 15, 2022. The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken the same day by the rover’s Chemistry camera, normally designed to take very close-up pictures of nearby features. In this case the science team aimed it at a distant cliff face, marked by the arrow in the panorama above, to get a preview of some of the many layers in that mesa.

And has become quite expected from Mars, the number and types and variety of layers is astonishing. The layer that forms the flat bright area at the center of this image is what scientists have dubbed “the marker layer”, since they have found it at similar elevations in many places on the flanks of Mount Sharp. (See the annotated overview map from a post last week.)

Curiosity’s planned route is to head to the right of this mesa, circling around it to get into the upper reaches of Gediz Vallis. First however engineers are going to have to figure out how to get the rover past the somewhat large scattered rocks on the ground directly ahead, without further damaging Curiosity’s already tattered wheels. At first glance there does not appear to be any clear path.

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Curiosity finally looks out into Gediz Vallis

12:56 pm

First look into Gediz Vallis
Click to view full mosaic.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! Curiosity’s right navigation camera today produced the mosaic above, cropped and reduced to post here, taking its first good look into Gediz Vallis, the canyon that the rover has been aiming for since it landed on Mars ten years ago.

The green dot on the overview map to the right marks the approximate location of a recurring slope lineae, a streak that comes and goes depending on the seasons whose cause remains uncertain. The yellow lines show the approximate area covered by the mosaic. The red dotted lines show Curiosity’s upcoming route. According to previously announced plans, the rover will not head straight into Gediz Vallis, but circle to the west or right of the mesa to the right of Kukenan.

The valley of course looks spectacular. For scale, the cliff face of Kukenan is estimated to be about 1,500 feet high.

The most important revelation from this image however is the ground terrain. It looks like Curiosity will have no problem moving forward into the canyon from this point, something the science team could not know for sure until the rover reached the saddle and could look down and actually see ahead.

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InSight seismometer data suggests no underground ice at landing site

9:25 am

Using a computer model combined with seismometer data gathered by the Mars lander InSight, scientists have concluded that there is little or no underground ice in the equatorial region where InSight sits.

From the paper’s abstract:

We use rock physics models to infer cement properties from seismic velocities. Model results confirm that the upper 300 m of Mars beneath InSight is most likely composed of sediments and fractured basalts. Grains within sediment layers are unlikely to be cemented by ice or other mineral cements. Hence, any existing cements are nodular or formed away from grain contacts. Fractures within the basalt layers could be filled with gas, 2% mineral cement and 98% gas, and no more than 20% ice. Thus, no ice- or liquid water-saturated layers likely exist within the upper 300 m beneath InSight. Any past cement at grain contacts has likely been broken by impacts or marsquakes.

As the lander sits just north of the equator in the red planet’s equatorial zone, which ample orbital data has suggested is a dry region (as shown in the global map below), this result is not a surprise. It does provide further confirmation however of this conclusion, that if there is any water on Mars within 30 degrees latitude of the equator, it will be deep underground, and likely only in certain regions.
» Read more

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A typical Martian rock on Mount Sharp

10:03 am

Panorama of pass
Click for full 360 degree panorama.

Typical Martian rock
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to right, taken by the Mars rover Curiosity on August 9, 2022, provides a nice close-up of what might be a somewhat typical rock on the flanks of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, many layered with some of those layers extending outward to the side for somewhat ridiculous distances as thin flakes.

The scientists call it a float rock, because they think it actually fell from the cliff dubbed Bolivar in the panorama above. Thus, it gives geologists data on the layers higher up that are not easily accessible from Curiosity’s present position.

The panorama is a mosaic created from images taken by the rover’s right navigation camera on August 8, 2022. The white arrow marks the rock. The green dot marks the approximate location on the cliff face of a previously observed recurring slope lineae, streaks that appear to come and go seasonally whose origin is still not understood.

The red dots mark my guess as to the route engineers will pick for Curiosity as it weaves its way around the other float rocks ahead.
» Read more

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Fractures in the Martian northern lowland plains

1:35 pm

Fractures in the northern lowland plains
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on April 21, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of a spot in the Martian northern lowland plains.

Generally the surface of these lowland plains — especially at high latitudes above 30 degrees — tends to appear very water saturated, producing blobby features and what look like mud volcanoes. This picture however features something different, what the scientists have labeled fractures, geological features that appeared caused by dry conditions and sudden quake-like events. The break in the fracture near the top of the photo illustrates why water flow had little if anything to do with its formation. Other fractures in the full image show the same thing. Also the stippled surface along the picture’s right edge also suggest there is little near surface water or ice at this location.

The location, as shown by the overview map below, suggests that water might still have played a part, but only a long time ago.
» Read more

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InSight’s power status holding steady on Mars

9:47 am

InSight's status as of August 9, 2022

Yesterday the InSight science team posted the lander’s ongoing power status, as it has been doing about every week since in June the team announced that they expected power to run out sometime in August, ending the mission.

I have created the graph to the right, showing the data from all those updates, to try to glean the overall trends. The red line indicates the tau level of dust in the atmosphere, essentially telling us how much that dust is blocking light from the Sun. Normally outside of dust season this number should range from 0.6 to 0.7. Since May 17 that dust level has been steadily declining, which thus increases the amount of sunlight reaching the panels.

The blue line marks the amount of power the lander’s panels have been able to produce. The lack of change in this line reveals both good and bad news. The good news is that the power level is holding steady, at a level that allows InSight’s one operating instrument, its seismometer, to continue to function. Should this power level continue to remain stable, that seismometer should be able to operate past August, thus extending the instrument’s life longer than expected.

The bad news is that the power levels are not going up as the dust level is dropping. This suggests that the dust layer on the panels that is preventing them from generating power is actually getting thicker. InSight has still not experienced any puff of Mars’ weak wind capable of blowing dust off those panels. Instead, as the dust settles out of the atmosphere with the end of dust season, some is settling on the panels themselves.

As new updates arrive I will update this graph. Stay tuned. InSight is not yet dead, though the vultures are unfortunately circling overhead.

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Further damage to Curiosity’s wheels

10:14 am

Curiosity wheel comparison of damage
For the original images, click here for the top photo and here and here
for the bottom photo.

The photo comparison to the right, created from high resolution images taken by Curiosity on Mars two months apart, provides us a new update on the state of the rover’s damaged wheels. It shows damage on the same wheel that I have been tracking for several years.

The numbers indicate the same treads, or grousers as termed by the science team. The “+” sign indicates spots where new damage has occurred since the previous photo.

The top photo was taken on June 3, 2022, and was the first to show new damage in more than five years. The bottom photo was taken on August 6, 2022, and shows that another small piece on the same grouser has broken off during the past two months.

Other than this change, however, the rest of the grousers appear unchanged. Moreover, a comparison with an earlier image of this same wheel taken in the summer of 2021 shows that grouser #6 as well as the unnumbered one just below appear also unchanged.

The damage in grouser #5 however is still concerning, and reflects the increasing roughness of the terrain as Curiosity climbs higher and higher on Mount Sharp. Though the science team has been very careful since the rover’s first few years on Mars to travel around obstacles that could damage the wheels, it apparently is becoming harder to do so.

However, even if this wheel eventually loses all the metal between the zig-zag grouser treads, the science team has said it has “proven through ground testing that we can safely drive on the wheel rims if necessary.” The team as also said they do not think that is likely, at least not for a long time, and based on the rate of damage documented by these pictures, this appears very true.

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Strange terrain southwest of Jezero Crater

1:17 pm

Strange terrain near Jezero Crater

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on June 16, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists have merely label “landforms.”

I instead call them strange. Clearly we are seeing exposed layering that surrounds the mesa in the middle of the image. This in turn suggests that the mesa top was once the surface of this whole region, and that region had been formed by the repeated placement of multiple sedimentary layers. Then, over time the surrounding terrain was eroded away, exposing those underlying layers.

Even so, some of the parallel lines do not appear to be layers, but striations etched into the ground. To get a better look, the white box marks the area covered by a full resolution close-up below.
» Read more

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Curiosity celebrates ten years on Mars

9:31 am

Curiosity's location in Gale Crater

Sometime today the rover Curiosity will celebrate its tenth anniversary on Mars. The oblique graphic of Gale Crater above, first released by the science team shortly before landing in 2012, has been further annotated with a red line to show the rover’s journey since then. As noted by Scott VanBommel, Planetary Scientist at Washington University, today on the science team’s blog:

As we the science and engineering teams have aged this last decade, so has Curiosity. The toll of ten years and nearly 28.5 km [17.7 miles] of Mars driving shows with every MAHLI wheel imaging activity, with less energy available for a plan, and with aging mechanisms. This is the life of a Mars rover. Spirit and Opportunity were no different, yet they persisted and paved the way scientifically and technologically for the rovers of today. Curiosity has made numerous scientific discoveries during these ten years, emphasized by the over 500 science team publications, with many more ahead as we continue our ascent and exploration of Gale crater and Mount Sharp.

I look forward to the next ten years.

Despite that aging, Curiosity’s general condition appears quite excellent, with its wheels the greatest concern but generally holding up. Based on the last ten years, the rover is likely to remain operational for at least ten more years, if not longer.

In the more immediate future, the rover is only days away from getting its first good look down into Gediz Valles, that canyon on the graphic above that it has been traveling towards since day one.

A good review of five of Curiosity’s biggest discoveries using its sample analysis instrument can be found here.

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Glacial flows pushing out through a Martian crater rim

12:51 pm

Wider view of 6-mile-wide crater
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image once again illustrates how Mars is far from a waterless planet. Instead, there is strong evidence that water ice can be found across most of the Red Planet’s surface, excluding the equatorial regions lower than 30 degrees latitude.

The photo to the right was taken on September 11, 2021 by the wide view context camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a 6-mile-wide unnamed crater on Mars, located at 35 degrees south latitude, with what appears to be a glacier in its interior, flowing to the southwest towards several breaches in the crater’s southwest rim. Several of those breaches now sit higher than the flow, suggesting that the glacier itself was once higher and flowed out of those gaps. Now the level has dropped, and the only place the glacier exits the crater is the central gap at the center of the white rectangle.

That white rectangle marks the area covered by a recent MRO high resolution image, taken on March 29, 2022 and cropped and reduced to post below.
» Read more

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The scattered debris from Perseverance’s landing, now being tracked by the rover

10:51 am

Perseverance's parachute, as photographed by Ingenuity
Click for full image.

A piece of string on Mars
Click for full image.

The Perseverance science team today posted a detailed update on the various pieces of debris that both the rover and the Ingenuity helicopter have been tracking since both landed on Mars in February 2021.

Some of the EDL [entry, descent, landing] hardware broke into smaller pieces when it impacted the surface. These pieces of EDL debris have been spotted in images of the Hogwallow Flats region, a location roughly 2 km to the northwest of the EDL hardware crash zones. As of Sol 508 (July 24, 2022), the operations team has catalogued roughly half a dozen pieces of suspected EDL debris in this area. Some of these EDL debris are actively blowing around in the wind. So far, we’ve seen shiny pieces of thermal blanket material, Dacron netting material that is also used in thermal blankets, and a stringlike material that we conclude to be a likely piece of shredded Dacron netting.

To the right are two of the most interesting examples. The top image shows the parachute and associated equipment from the landing, taken by Ingenuity during a flight in April 2022. That image, when compared with an earlier picture taken from orbit, showed that the wind of Mars, though incredibly weak, had been able to shift the parachutes edges.

The second image shows the string that the rover photographed on July 12, 2022, and had blown away four days later when Perseverance re-photographed this site.

Today’s update notes that the area in the crater they have dubbed Hogwallow Flats “appears to be a natural collecting point for windblown EDL debris.” The flats are an area at the foot of the delta that flowed into Jezero Crater in the past, and is an area where Perseverance has been traveling most recently.

That the wind has been able to move small pieces so effectively is I think somewhat of a surprise. That it is gathering the material against the crater’s western cliffs suggests the prevailing winds here blow to the west.

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Curiosity heads into the pass

10:16 am

Mosaic by Curiosity
Click for full mosaic.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The mosaic above, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was created from 31 navigation images taken by the Mars rover Curiosity, and shows the rover’s upcoming drive. From the science team’s July 29, 2022 update:

We are attempting to reach a high point, just at the top right edge of the image, so we can look down into the valley to see if there is a way out on the other side and to help plan our path forward. High tilts, sand, and large and small rocks clutter the terrain, requiring the Rover Planners to pick their way around while making sure they stay clear of the hazards.

After the drive, we took a lot of imaging from our new location, including a 360 degree Mastcam mosaic and an upper tier of imaging to catch the tall relief of the valley walls.

The green dot in the image above as well as the overview map to the right indicates the approximate location on the cliff face of a previously observed recurring slope lineae, streaks that appear to come and go seasonally whose origin is still not understood.

The blue dot on the map marks the rover’s position on August 1, 2022. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the mosaic above. The large red dots on the overview indicate the rover’s original planned route, with the smaller red dots indicating the hoped-for route to get back to that path.

In the far distance the upper slopes of Mount Sharp can faintly be seen through the winter dust haze. That mountain is about 18,000 feet high, though its actual peak is not yet visible. Curiosity is still about 16,000 feet below that peak. Kukenan is about 1,500 feet high. The cliff with the slope lineae is probably about 400-500 feet high The two side hills that delineate the pass ahead are probably no more than 200 feet high.

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Ice in the Martian equatorial region?

1:55 pm

Global overview of ice on Mars

Glacial features in low latitude Martian crater

Today’s cool image to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, is actually an older captioned image, published in 2017 by the science team for the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). I missed its significance when it was first released. From the caption by Alfred McEwen of the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory in Arizona:

The material on the floor of this crater appears to have flowed like ice, and contains pits that might result from sublimation of subsurface ice. The surface is entirely dust-covered today. There probably was ice here sometime in the past, but could it persist at some depth?

This crater is at latitude 26 degrees north, and near-surface ice at this latitude (rather than further toward one of the poles) could be a valuable resource for future human exploration.

As shown in the global map of Mars above, this 26-mile-wide unnamed crater, marked by the black cross, is well inside the equatorial region 30 degrees north and south from the equator where almost no evidence of near surface ice has been found. Whenever I look at an image from MRO, if the picture appears to show ice or glacial features, its latitude is always 30 degrees or higher. If it does not, it is almost always in this equatorial region.

This crater however shows evidence of glacial features in its interior, but is far closer to the equator than normal. How could this be? It is possible that its high altitude, sitting in the southern cratered highlands, might have helped preserve its buried but near surface glacial features.

Regardless, as McEwen notes, its location closer to the equator is tantalizing, because it suggests that such ice could exist even in the equatorial regions, though buried and thus not detected by the instruments presently available in Mars orbit.

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Inverted Martian tadpole

2:17 pm

Inverted Martian tadpole
Click for full image.

Cool image time! On Mars it is not unusual to see what scientists call tadpole features, craters with meandering canyons or channels either flowing into or out from the crater’s rim. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, is another example, though with one major difference. The channel and crater are inverted, with the channel instead a ridge and the crater a circular plateau. The picture itself was taken on April 16, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Orbital images have found on Mars a lot of what scientists call pedestal craters, where the impact packed and hardened the ground under the crater so that when the surrounding terrain eroded away the crater remained, as a plateau.

Scientists have also found on Mars a lot of what they call “inverted channels,” places where the channels of a drainage pattern followed the same geological process, becoming more resistant to erosion so that over time it turned from a channel to a ridge.

Here we have a combination of both. The overview map below provides us the larger picture.
» Read more

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New paper: Glaciers on Mars could have been extensive, despite the lack of expected subsequent landforms

12:18 pm

glacial drainage patterns as expected on Mars
Click for full figure.

According to a new paper published this week, scientists now posit that glaciation could have been much more extensive in the geological history of Mars than presently believed, despite the lack of the expected subsequent landforms as seen on Earth.

From the abstract:

The lack of evidence for large-scale glacial landscapes on Mars has led to the belief that ancient glaciations had to be frozen to the ground. Here we propose that the fingerprints of Martian wet-based glaciation should be the remnants of the ice sheet drainage system instead of landforms generally associated with terrestrial ice sheets. We use the terrestrial glacial hydrology framework to interrogate how the Martian surface gravity affects glacial hydrology, ice sliding, and glacial erosion. …[W]e compare the theoretical behavior of identical ice sheets on Mars and Earth and show that, whereas on Earth glacial drainage is predominantly inefficient, enhancing ice sliding and erosion, on Mars the lower gravity favors the formation of efficient subglacial drainage. The apparent lack of large-scale glacial fingerprints on Mars, such as drumlins or lineations, is to be expected. [emphasis mine]

In other words, on Earth the higher gravity causes glaciers and ice sheets to slide, with the liquid water at the base acting as a lubricant. On Mars, the lower gravity slows that slide, so that the water at the glacier’s base drains away instead, causing erosion and the formation of a drainage pattern in the ground beneath the glacier or ice sheet.

The image above, from figure 1 of the paper, shows on the left a graphic of the two types of drainage patterns expected, and on the right two examples found on Earth (D1: Devon Island; D2: Northwest Territories). Orbiter images of Mars have found variations of these types of drainage patterns in numerous places in Mars’ mid-latitude glacial bands, as shown below.
» Read more

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NASA/ESA revise plan to recover Perseverance core samples from Mars

8:52 am

NASA and ESA yesterday announced that the agencies have revised their plan to recover Perseverance core samples from Mars, dropping the launch of a rover to pick up the samples.

Instead, they have decided to use Perseverance to bring the samples to the return vehicle, which will also carry two small helicopters.

In 2030, if all goes as planned, the NASA lander will touch down near where Perseverance is working. The rover will drive over to the lander, and an ESA-built robot arm will extract the tubes one by one and place them inside a spherical container the size of a basketball. In early 2031, a rocket on the lander will loft the container into Mars orbit, where a return craft built by ESA will snare it, enclose it in several layers of shielding for safety, and then head for home. In 2033, a saucer-shaped descent pod will carry the samples down to the Utah desert.

If Perseverance gets into difficulties during its 9-year wait for company, controllers can instruct it to drop its cargo of sample tubes onto the ground, creating a second depot. If that happens, the helicopters come into play: they can fly up to 700 meters, land next to a sample tube—each weighs up to 150 grams—and, with wheels on the bottom their feet, roll over the tube and pick it up with a grabber. On returning to the lander, they will drop the tubes on the ground for the arm to pick up.

The change means that the rover the United Kingdom was planning to build will either be abandoned, or repurposed as a lunar rover.

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A Martian slot canyon!

12:02 pm

A Martian slot canyon
For originals go here, here, and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The mosaic to the right is made up of three images produced by the high resolution camera on the Mars rover Perseverance (found here, here, and here). All three were taken on July 24, 2022 and look north to the nearest cliff face at the head of the large delta that flowed into Jezero Crater some time in the distant past.

The rover was about 80 feet away from the feature when the photo was snapped. Though scale in the photo is not provided, using the scale in the overview map below I would guess this slot canyon is several feet wide, with some spots narrow enough that your body would touch both walls at spots. Its height is likely nor more than 20 feet high, at the very most.

On the overview map, the blue dots mark Perseverance’s location, in both the main map and the inset. The green dot marks where the helicopter Ingenuity presently sits. The red dotted line is my guess as to the future route of the rover up into the delta. The yellow lines indicate the area viewed in the mosaic.

Though hardly as deep as the many slot canyons found in the American southwest, that this slot exists on Mars is quite intriguing. Did it form like those southwestern slots from water flow? Probably not. More likely we are looking at a fracture produced by shifts in the entire delta itself, and then later widened by wind.

That the cliff shows multiple layers suggests the delta was laid down in multiple events, and that the fracture occurred after the delta was emplaced. That the layers on either side of the fracture appear to match up strengthens this conclusion. These layers also suggest that the layering is not simply in a series of small events. The layers are also grouped into larger aggregates, suggesting those larger groupings mark longer epochs, each with its own unique conditions.

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The very end of an 800-mile-long Martian canyon

1:39 pm

The very end of an 800-mile-long Martian canyon
Click for full image.

Cool image time! While most geeks interested in Mars are familiar with Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system, Mars has other large canyons that while not a big are impressive in their own right. The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, shows us the very very end of one such canyon. Taken on April 19, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), it shows the easternmost spot where Cerberus Fossae begins. From here, this narrow fracture-caused canyon extends another 800 miles to the west, sometimes splitting into two or three parallel cracks, but always oriented in the same direction, slightly north of due west.

The overview map below provides the context and wider view.
» Read more

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Curiosity looks ahead

9:36 am

Curiosity looks ahead
Click for full resolution. For original images go here and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above, taken by one of the navigation cameras on the Mars rover Curiosity on July 23, 2022, forms a nice bookend to yesterday’s panorama. Yesterday Curiosity looked back at its past travels. Today it looks forward at where it is almost certainly heading in the days ahead.

On the overview map to the right, the yellow lines indicate the approximate area viewed by the panorama. The large red dotted line marks the rover’s original planned route, abandoned when the science team found the terrain on the Greenheugh Pediment too rough for Curiosity’s wheels. The smaller red dotted line is my present guess as to the rover’s future route to get back on course.

The flat-topped mountain dubbed Kukenán by the science team has probably been one of the prime goals of the entire mission, from the beginning. Its almost vertical face has innumerable layers, all of which record in great detail the geological history of Mars and Gale Crater. As noted by Abigail Fraeman from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on June 30, 2022:

Kukenán’s Earth namesake is a tepui, or distinctive isolated table-top mountain, found in South America. The Martian Kukenán is also somewhat flat topped and an impressive expression in Mt. Sharp’s topography. While it looks like it’s about the same size as the hills that bound it in the above Navcam image (“Deepdale” on the left and the edge of “Bolivar” on the right), this effect is just due to forced perspective. In reality, Kukenán is nearly five times farther away and over three times as tall as Deepdale! Curiosity’s strategic traverse path takes the rover right past Kukenán in about a kilometer or so, so this feature will become a familiar landmark rising in our windshield for months to come.

The science team will likely park Curiosity in the saddle of the gap ahead for at least a week and spend a lot of time documenting that cliff face with multiple cameras, since at this location the rover will have an excellent view of that entire face. As it gets closer the angle looking up will get steeper, thus making viewing of the upper layers more difficult.

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Curiosity looks back

11:49 am

Curiosity looks back
Click for full image.

Overview
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! Normally I’d be hiking today, but since it is raining in southern Arizona at every mountain location we might want to go, I am forced to imagine hiking on Mars instead. The photo above, cropped to post here, was part of a mosaic of images taken on July 22, 2022 by the right navigation camera on the rover Curiosity.

Curiosity had just completed several drives that had it skirt around those two boulders visible in the center of the picture, as shown in the inset in the overview map to the right. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the photo. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present location. The larger red dotted line the rover’s original planned route, with the smaller dotted line my guess as to the route the science team now plans to take to return to that course.

The rim of Gale Crater can be seen in the far distance, about 20 to 30 miles away and largely obscured by the winter dust that presently fills the atmosphere.

The science team had hoped to get close enough to these two boulders to touch them with the rover’s instruments, but decided to keep away because of both appeared a bit unstable.

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China releases one photo of Phobos taken by its Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter

3:58 pm

Phobos as seen by Tianwen-1
Click to see original photo.

China today released a single photo of the Martian moon Phobos, taken by its Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter, to mark the second anniversary of the orbiter’s launch.

The English press release at the link conveniently did not provide the image to the non=Chinese world, but the Chinese language release did. That picture is to the right, reduced slightly to post here. Considering its disinterest in making it easy to find this photo for English speakers, it is intriguing that China included the English language name Opik for one crater.

Moreover, this single picture release illustrates the paucity of Tianwen-1 photos made available to the public by China. Very few have been released, and though eventually China has been making its raw data available, it has not been doing so in a manner that makes it easy for outsiders to access it.

Nonetheless, this is one of the best pictures of Phobos I have yet seen.

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Collapsed dunes in Jezero Crater

10:31 am

Collapsed dune on Mars
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Cool image time! The photo above, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on July 20, 2022 by one of high resolution cameras on the rover Perseverance. It shows what appears to be a collapsed dune on the floor of Jezero Crater.

The arrows mark the highest dune ridge line that suddenly ends at a cliff, with the sand that is piled up at its base appearing almost like it flowed like thick mud outward away from that cliff. Apparently, that material broke off in one single event sometime in the past.

Note the many parallel lines pointing outward from the base of the cliff. These lines appear to reflect the internal structure visible in the cliff itself. Somehow, when that sand collapsed, it flowed away while retaining some of that structure.

When this collapse happened is unclear. I don’t think it has happened recently, since Perseverance’s arrival, but I could be wrong.

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Perseverance spots a string on Mars!

10:54 am

A piece of string on Mars
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According to the Perseverance science team, they believe the strange spaghetti-like object to the right, taken by one of the rover’s hazard avoidance camera’s on July 12, 2022, is actually a piece of string that fell here during the rover’s landing in February 2021.

The string could be from the rover or its descent stage, a component similar to a rocket-powered jet pack used to safely lower the rover to the planet’s surface, according to a spokesperson for the Perseverance mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Perseverance had not previously been in the area where the string was found, so it’s likely the wind blew it there, the spokesperson said.

The string, which appears to be a few inches across, was apparently gone four days later, when another hazard avoidance picture was taken of the same spot

An official description from the scientists is expected in a week or so.

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Martian terraces

12:51 pm

Overview map
Glacier country on Mars

Martian terraces
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 17, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists have labeled “Dipping layers against mound in Deuteronilus Mensae.”

Deuteronilus is the westernmost mensae region in the 2,000-mile-long strip of heavy glaciers found in the northern mid-latitudes that I dub glacier country. This photo, the location of which is marked by the white cross on the overview map above, is another example, though somewhat strange and puzzling. Normally the layers will dip away from the high point. Here, the layers dip towards the mound. I can think of only one explanation, that of prevailing winds causing the erosion in this unusual manner, but I also find that explanation very unsatisfactory.

The layers themselves illustrate the cycles that have shaped Martian geology, caused by the wide swings in the planet’s rotational tilt, from 11 to 60 degrees. When that tilt is high, the poles are warmer than the mid-latitudes, and water ice migrates from the poles towards the equator. When the tilt is low, the mid-latitudes are warmer, and the water ice heads back towards the poles. Thus, the many many layers the orbiters and rovers are now finding everywhere on Mars.

Right now scientists think, because Mars’ tilt is in the middle of these swings at 25 degrees, the planet is in equilibrium, with the water at the poles and mid-latitudes essentially going no where. This conclusion however is not yet confirmed.

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Perseverance gains a little height

11:47 am

View of Jezero Crater from Perseverance
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Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The photo above, rotated and cropped to post here, was taken on July 18, 2022 by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance.

The view isn’t that remarkable, when compared to many other pictures from Mars. What makes it newly interesting is that it shows that Perseverance has gained a little elevation as it explores the base of the delta that flowed into Jezero Crater. It is no longer on the crater floor, but above it, though not by much.

You can see the far rim of Jezero Crater in the distance, obscured somewhat by the dust that builds up in the Martian atmosphere during the winter. You can also see the gentle left-to-right downward slope of material that flowed down from that delta some time in the past. Also, though the resolution isn’t good enough to show it, the helicopter Ingenuity probably sits somewhere near the center of this picture, just to the right of the nose of the biggest ridgeline.

The overview map on the right gives the context, with the yellow lines showing my estimate of the area viewed by the picture above. The blue dot is Perseverance, the green dot is Ingenuity. The red dotted line is my present guess as to the planned route of Perservance up onto the delta.

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