Tag: Mars

Curiosity finds nitrates on Martian surface

12:01 pm

Using data from Curiosity scientists have for the first time identified nitrates, also called fixed nitrogen, on the Martian surface.

There is no evidence to suggest that the fixed nitrogen molecules found by the team were created by life. The surface of Mars is inhospitable for known forms of life. Instead, the team thinks the nitrates are ancient, and likely came from non-biological processes like meteorite impacts and lightning in Mars’ distant past.


Features resembling dry riverbeds and the discovery of minerals that form only in the presence of liquid water suggest that Mars was more hospitable in the remote past. The Curiosity team has found evidence that other ingredients needed for life, such as liquid water and organic matter, were present on Mars at the Curiosity site in Gale Crater billions of years ago.

The data also suggests that these nitrates are widespread on the Martian surface.

The most important aspect of this discovery to me is not so much that it suggests the faint possibility of past life on Mars but that it makes Mars a more hospitable place for life in the future. Nitrates are essentially fertilizer, and for Mars to have this material in the soil already means it will be easier to figure out how to grow crops there.

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Opportunity’s flash memory reformatted successfully

10:15 am

A three month old flash memory problem on the Mars rover Opportunity has finally been fixed by reformatting the rover’s memory banks.

Since the problem came up in December they have been operating the rover without any flash memory, essentially running it on the equivalent of its ram memory. This fix allows them to once again store data on the rover and gives them more flexibility of operation.

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India extends Mangalyaan’s mission by six months

9:20 am

Western slopes of Arsia Mons

Having successfully completed its nominal six month mission and continuing to operate perfectly, ISRO has extended the mission of India’s Mangalyaan Mars orbiter for another six months.

Take a gander at the images the orbiter has been sending down. Quite impressive. The cropped image on the right shows the western slopes of the giant volcano Arsia Mons, with white water vapor hovering above those slopes. (Click on the image for the full resolution version.) The water vapor is significant because scientists believe that this region once had many glaciers, and that much of that water is still present and trapped below the surface as ice, possibly in many of the caves that are there. The vapor’s presence, a routine occurance here, strengthens this theory.

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Mars One finalist kicked out for publicly criticizing company.

9:31 am

The Mars One finalist who publicly criticized the company’s proposed one-way Mars mission has been kicked out.

The company claims he breached their confidentiality rules. In addition, other finalists have contested his criticisms. Their points seem reasonable, but the bottom line remains that the project is unrealistic and will not fly. They lack the funding and the technology to do it, and won’t have it for decades.

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A Mars One finalist accuses the company of fraud

9:24 pm

One of the finalists in the one-way-to-Mars competition by the company Mars One has now accused the company of fraud.

Most egregiously, many media outlets continue to report that Mars One received applications from 200,000 people who would be happy to die on another planet — when the number it actually received was 2,761.

As [finalist Joseph] Roche observed the process from an insider’s perspective, his concerns increased. Chief among them: that some leading contenders for the mission had bought their way into that position, and are being encouraged to “donate” any appearance fees back to Mars One — which seemed to him very strange for an outfit that needs billions of dollars to complete its objective. “When you join the ‘Mars One Community,’ which happens automatically if you applied as a candidate, they start giving you points,” Roche explained to me in an email. “You get points for getting through each round of the selection process (but just an arbitrary number of points, not anything to do with ranking), and then the only way to get more points is to buy merchandise from Mars One or to donate money to them.”

There’s more at the link. Essentially, the whole operation has apparently devolved into a petty scam to milk money from the finalists themselves.

None of this surprises me. From the beginning I considered the whole proposal unrealistic, which thus almost forced the people in charge to commit fraud.

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Curiosity moves on

9:18 am

After six months and a short pause in work while engineers analyzed a short circuit, Curiosity has finally left the Pahrump Hills are on the slopes of Mount Sharp.

The rover has begun driving away from the Pahrump Hills outcrop where it had spent the last six months. On Thursday, March 12, it drove about 33 feet (about 10 meters) southwestward. The rover team plans on taking Curiosity through a valley called “Artist’s Drive” to reach higher geological layers of Mount Sharp. Curiosity is currently heading towards a rock outcrop known as “Garden City.”

The link has a nice image showing Curiosity’s recent travels as well as its future route.

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Drill design flaw source of short circuit on Curiosity

9:47 am

NASA engineers have confirmed that the rover’s drill is the source of the intermittent short circuit that forced them to shut down Curiosity temporarily.

“The most likely cause is an intermittent short in the percussion mechanism of the drill,” Erickson said in a statement. (Curiosity’s drill doesn’t simply rotate; it hammers into rock, via that percussion mechansism, as well.) “After further analysis to confirm that diagnosis, we will be analyzing how to adjust for that in future drilling.” A brief short occurred during a test on Thursday (March 5) that used the drill’s percussive action, NASA officials explained.

This is not a surprise, as it has been known since before launch that a design flaw in the drill could cause short circuits, possibly serious enough to permanently shut down the rover. They have thus used the drill much less than they had originally planned, and with great care.

Once they get a handle on the specifics causing this short, they say that Curiosity will go back into operation. However, I suspect that they may no longer use the drill, or if they do, they will use it under very very very limited circumstances.

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New images from Mangalyaan

10:18 am

Arsia Mons

Indian scientists have released a new set of color images taken by their Mars orbiter, Mangalyaan.

The image on the right is of Arsia Mons, one of the three giant volcanoes to the east of Mars’ biggest volcano, Olympus Mons. Arsia Mons is important for future manned colonization, as there are known caves on its western flanks. In addition, those western flanks show solid evidence of past glaciers, which means that it is very likely that those caves will harbor significant quantities of water-ice, making settlement much easier.

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The oceans that Mars lost

12:47 pm

The lost oceans of Mars

New data from a six year study of the water in the modern Martian atmosphere have allowed scientists to estimate the amount of water Mars once had.

About four billion years ago, the young planet would have had enough water to cover its entire surface in a liquid layer about 140 metres deep, but it is more likely that the liquid would have pooled to form an ocean occupying almost half of Mars’s northern hemisphere, and in some regions reaching depths greater than 1.6 kilometres. “Our study provides a solid estimate of how much water Mars once had, by determining how much water was lost to space,” said Geronimo Villanueva, a scientist working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, USA, and lead author of the new paper.

The image on the right is an artist’s conception of the oceans that would have existed on Mars, based on modern elevation data.

I must note that this conclusion, the size of the lost Martian ocean, is based on the assumption that the isotope ratios of Martian water started out the same as the Earth’s. While this is a reasonable assumption, it does not have to be true. Nonetheless, these conclusions, using ground-based telescopes, do match up with similar data obtained by Curiosity.

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NASA picks landing site for next Mars lander

8:51 am

NASA scientists have chosen a specific region of Mars, Elysium Planitia, to land its next Mars science probe.

The landing-site selection process evaluated four candidate locations selected in 2014. The quartet is within the flat-lying “Elysium Planitia,” less than five degrees north of the equator, and all four appear safe for InSight’s landing. The single site will continue to be analyzed in coming months for final selection later this year. If unexpected problems with this site are found, one of the others would be imaged and could be selected. The favored site is centered at about four degrees north latitude and 136 degrees east longitude.

InSight launches next year.

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NASA considering ion engines for next Mars orbiter

9:40 am

Rather than using conventional chemical thrusters for a Mars orbiter planned for the 2020s, NASA managers are considering using ion engines instead.

Worried its fleet of Mars orbiter is aging, NASA intends to dispatch the spacecraft to the red planet in September 2022 to link ground controllers with rovers and extend mapping capabilities expected to be lost when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter stops functioning.

Engineers also want to add ion engines to the orbiter and fly the efficient electrically-powered thruster system to Mars for the first time, testing out a solar-electric propulsion package that officials say will be needed when astronauts visit the red planet. Ion engines produce just a whisper of thrust, using electric power to ionize atoms of a neutral gas and spit out the particles at high speed. While the drive given by the thrusters is barely noticeable in one instant, they can operate for months or years, burning scant fuel compared to traditional chemical rockets.

That this decision requires long-winded and extended high level negotiations at NASA illustrates the slow and lumbering nature of government. Private enterprise is embracing ion engines now, and NASA itself is seeing its own spectacular ion engine success with Dawn. The decision should be a no-brainer, especially because the benefits of ion engines (low weight, more power, greater flexibility) are so obvious.

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Curiosity in trouble?

9:05 am

The Mars rover Curiosity has temporarily ceased work as engineers investigate what appears to be a short circuit in its electrical system.

The space agency said Tuesday that the electrical problem was discovered over the weekend as Curiosity tried to transfer bits of powder from a rock that it had drilled into. The short circuit stopped the rover’s robotic arm. Engineers are diagnosing the issue, and the testing is expected to take several days.

The worrisome components of this story are the words “short circuit” and “drill”, because of a known design flaw in the electrical system of the rover’s drill. It could very well be that this flaw, which could cause a short that could bring down the rover, is the cause of this electrical problem.

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Methane does exist in the Martian atmosphere

6:32 pm

The uncertainty of science: Curiosity has confirmed the presence, and fluctuation, of methane in the local Martian atmosphere.

SAM [Sample Analysis at Mars, one of Curiosity’s instruments] has been detecting basal levels of methane concentration of around 0,7 ppbv, and has confirmed an event of episodic increase of up to ten times this value during a period of sixty soles (Martian days), i.e., of about 7 ppvb. The new data are based on observations during almost one Martian year (almost two Earth years), included in the initial prediction for the duration of the mission (nominal mission), during which Curiosity has surveyed about 8 kms in the basin of the Gale crater.

Since methane has a short life expectancy, something must be doing something to generate it.

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Jet lag is worse on Mars

9:45 am

Research and actual experience has found that adjusting to the slightly longer Martian day is not as easy as you would think.

If you’re on Mars, or at least work by a Mars clock, you have to figure out how to put up with the exhausting challenge of those extra 40 minutes. To be exact, the Martian day is 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds long, a length of day that doesn’t coincide with the human body’s natural rhythms. Scientists, Mars rover drivers, and everyone else in the space community call the Martian day a “sol” to differentiate it from an Earth day. While it doesn’t seem like a big difference, that extra time adds up pretty quickly. It’s like heading west by two time zones every three days. Call it “rocket lag.”

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How to drill rocks on Mars

9:02 am

Engineers have found that to properly drill on Mars, Curiosity need only use its lowest power settings.

The new drilling procedures essentially call for the rover to use its lowest energy setting right from the beginning, rather than starting with a setting a few levels up. Curiosity has six settings on its drill that have a nearly 20-fold range in energy. The drill has only been used three times before Curiosity reached Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons), its ultimate science goal, late last year.

On those three occasions and when the drill was used once at Mount Sharp, Curiosity began its investigations at the drill’s Level 4. The first rock probed at Mount Sharp broke under this pressure. The new algorithm instead starts at Level 1 and only progresses upwards if drilling proves too slow.

The engineers have found that the rocks they have drilled into on Mars have been more fragile that expected, which actually shouldn’t be a surprise, due to the lower gravity. In fact, this one simple fact probably reveals a great deal of important information to geologists about the geology of Mars and how it formed.

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Work stalls on Mars One robotic missions

7:03 pm

Mars One, the company that just this week announced the 100 finalists in its competition to send 24 people on a one-way trip to Mars, has quietly suspended all work on two robotic missions heralded as precursors to that manned mission.

These facts just add weight to my conviction that the Mars One competition is at the moment nothing more than a reality television show. It is a cool idea for a television show, but journalists should stop selling it as anything more than that.

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A television reality show to pick 24 candidates to go to Mars — one way

10:01 am

The competition heats up? The private effort to choose 24 people to make a one-way flight to Mars has narrowed its candidates down from more than two hundred thousand to 100 finalists.

More here.

As interesting as this effort is, it is very important to remember that it is not an effort to fly these people to Mars. They don’t have the money and no one yet has the technical ability to make the flight. What they are actually doing is putting together a television reality show, where these 100 individuals will compete to be the final 24. If they do it right, which I am somewhat doubtful, the show will be entertaining and scientifically educational.

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The mystery of Martian plumes

9:27 am

The uncertainty of science: Scientists struggle to explain the discovery by amateurs of Martian atmospheric plumes 125 to 150 miles high.

Amateur astronomers spotted the bizarre feature rising off the edge of the red planet in March and April of 2012. It looked like a puff of dust coming off the surface, but it measured some [125 to 155] kilometres high. That is much higher than would be expected from the lower-altitude dust storms that rage across the planet. Now a team of astronomers proposes that the plume was either a cloud of ice particles or a Martian aurora. But neither possibility fully explains the plume — raising new questions about the state of the Martian atmosphere.

Read it all. No explanation really works to explain the plume’s height.

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A drone for Mars

10:12 pm

Engineers at JPL have begun testing prototypes of a drone that would be used on Mars to aid future rovers.

The newest solution proposed by JPL is the Mars Helicopter, an autonomous drone that could “triple the distances that Mars rovers can drive in a Martian day,” according to NASA. The helicopter would fly ahead of a rover when its view is blocked and send Earth-bound engineers the right data to plan the rover’s route.

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Ancient fossils on Mars?

8:41 am

A close look at features on the Martian surface seen by Curiosity suggests to one scientist the presence of ancient fossils of carpet-like microbiology.

On Earth, carpet-like colonies of microbes trap and rearrange sediments in shallow bodies of water such as lakes and costal areas, forming distinctive features that fossilize over time. These structures, known as microbially-induced sedimentary structures (or MISS), are found in shallow water settings all over the world and in ancient rocks spanning Earth’s history.

Nora Noffke, a geobiologist at Old Dominion University in Virginia, has spent the past 20 years studying these microbial structures. Last year, she reported the discovery of MISS that are 3.48 billion years old in the Western Australia’s Dresser Formation, making them potentially the oldest signs of life on Earth.

In a paper published online last month in the journal Astrobiology (the print version comes out this week), Noffke details the striking morphological similarities between Martian sedimentary structures in the Gillespie Lake outcrop (which is at most 3.7 billion years old) and microbial structures on Earth.

Noffke is very careful in her analysis. She doesn’t claim any proofs, only that her expert eye sees the same things on both planets. Most intriguing.

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India’s Mangalyaan Mars probe working fine

9:22 am

After three months in orbit around Mars, India’s Mangalyaan spacecraft continues to function as designed, and is expected to operate beyond its planned six month mission.

In the last three months, Mangalyaan has captured nearly 300 pictures. On an average the spacecraft takes four pictures in three days. Besides capturing the images of dust storm activities, it has also taken images of comet Siding Spring.

Because of Mangalyaan’s orbit and the wide-angle nature of its camera the pictures are generally global. This output also is not spectacular compared to other probes. Nonetheless, this is an achievement for which India should be proud.

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Curiosity finds organic materials on Mars, including fluctuating levels of methane

2:53 pm

Data from Curiosity has found both organic chemicals in the surface of Mars as well as quickly changing levels of methane in the nearby atmosphere.

NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover has measured a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical, in the atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a rock-powder sample collected by the robotic laboratory’s drill. “This temporary increase in methane — sharply up and then back down — tells us there must be some relatively localized source,” said Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Curiosity rover science team. “There are many possible sources, biological or non-biological, such as interaction of water and rock.”

The organic material does not prove there is or was ever life on Mars. What it shows is that conditions on Mars could have once supported life. The methane detection, however, is a more significant finding, as it suggests that something very nearby to Curiosity is causing the spike. It could be life, or it could be chemical activity, but in either case, it means there is activity.

The one caveat is that the spike still did not amount to much, 7 parts per billion. Whatever is causing it is not really doing very much.

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