Tag: Mars

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.

3 comments

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.

1 comment

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.

0 comments

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

0 comments

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

1 comment

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.

4 comments

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.

3 comments

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

3 comments

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.

1 comment

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.

2 comments

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.

5 comments

Collapsed dunes in Jezero Crater

10:31 am

Collapsed dune on Mars
Click for full image.

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.

1 comment
1 … 69 70 71 72 73 … 212