Tag: Mars

The mysterious shiny particles uncovered by Curiosity’s scoop are from Mars, not the rover.

4:00 pm

The mysterious shiny particles uncovered by Curiosity’s scoop are from Mars, not the rover.

After last week’s plastic encounter, Curiosity’s science team worried the new particles might be man-made. Since they turned up in scoop holes, however, the granules must have been buried in the subsurface. They likely came from larger minerals that broke down. They might also represent the product of some geological soil process that generates a bright but unknown mineral.

These are not the same mysterious objects first seen when the rover began science operations. Those particles were on the surface, and looked like bits of plastic that might have come off the rover or its descent stage.

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It appears that Curiosity is traveling across an ancient streambed on Mars.

2:46 pm

It appears that Curiosity is traveling across an ancient streambed on Mars.

“From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep,” said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. “Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them. This is the first time we’re actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it.”

This discovery also confirms the wisdom of Gale Crater as a target. Satellite data and images had suggested the crater had once been water filled. Now this suggestion appears confirmed.

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Mars’ clay minerals might have been formed by volcanic processes, not standing liquid water as generally believed.

9:37 am

The uncertainty of science: Mars’ clay minerals might have been formed by volcanic processes, not standing liquid water as generally believed, according to a new study.

Data collected by orbiting spacecraft show Mars’ clay minerals may instead trace their origin to water-rich volcanic magma, similar to how clays formed on the Mururoa atoll in French Polynesia and in the Parana basin in Brazil. That process doesn’t need standing bodies of liquid water. “The infrared spectra we got in the lab (on Mururoa clays) using a reflected beam are astonishingly similar to that obtained on Mars by the orbiters,” lead researcher Alain Meunier, with the University of Poitiers in France, wrote in an email to Discovery News. The team also points out that some of the Mars meteorites recovered on Earth do not have a chemistry history that supports standing liquid water.

If correct, this alternative explanation would mean that Mars was not that wet in the past, and would have been far less likely of ever having sustained life.

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The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team today released a set of images showing Curiosity’s recent travel on Mars, as well as some fascinating closeups of the spacecraft’s heat shield, parachute, and descent stage.

4:47 pm

Curiosity's first steps

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team today released a set of images showing Curiosity’s first steps on Mars, as well as some fascinating closeups of the spacecraft’s heat shield, parachute, and descent stage. The image on the left shows the tracks of the rover during its first few days of travel.

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Images from Curiosity have spotted some unexpected geology in Gale Crater.

9:03 am

Images from Curiosity have spotted some unexpected geology in Gale Crater.

A mosaic of high-definition images of Mount Sharp, the central peak dominating the landing site at Gale Crater, reveals tilted strata never before seen on Mars. The strata dip downwards at an angle close to that of the slope of the foothills of the 18,000-ft. tall mountain within which they are formed.

“The cool thing is the cameras have discovered something we were unaware of,” says mission chief scientist John Grotzinger. “This thing jumped out at us as being very different to what we expected,” he adds. Lying in the low-lying foothills beyond the dune field between the rover and the base of Mount Sharp, the inclined layers are a “spectacular feature” that could not be seen from orbit.

I think there are two reasons these tilted layers are puzzling scientists.
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NASA scientists in a battle with astronomers over who gets to name things on Vesta and Mars.

10:01 am

A rose by any other name: NASA scientists are in a battle with astronomers over who gets to name things on Vesta and Mars.

This is not a new problem. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has maintained its power over naming everything in space since the 1960s, even though the IAU has sometimes ignored the wishes of the actual discoverers and explorers and given names to things that no one likes. For example, even though the Apollo 8 astronauts wanted to give certain unnamed features on the Moon specific names, the IAU refused to accept their choices, even though those astronauts were the first human beings to reach another world and see these features up close.

Eventually, the spacefarers of the future are going to tell the IAU where to go. And that will begin to happen when those spacefarers simply refuse to use the names the IAU assigns.

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One of Curiosity’s two wind sensors has been found to be damaged and is inoperable.

6:57 pm

One of Curiosity’s two wind sensors was apparently damaged in landing and is inoperable.

The Rems team first noticed there was something wrong when readings from the side-facing boom were being returned saturated at high and low values. Further investigation suggested small wires exposed on the sensor circuits were open, probably severed. It is permanent damage. No-one can say for sure how this happened, but engineers are working on the theory that grit thrown on to the rover by the descent crane’s exhaust plume cut the small wires. The wind sensor on the forward-facing mini-boom is unaffected. With just the one sensor, it makes it difficult to fully understand wind behaviour.

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NASA has announced its next planetary mission, a lander to Mars that will drill down thirty feet into the planet’s surface

3:36 pm

NASA has announced its next planetary mission, a lander to Mars that will drill down thirty feet into the planet’s surface.

Though exciting in its own right, this mission is far less ambitious than the two missions which competed against it, a boat that would have floated on the lakes of Titan and a probe that would have bounced repeatedly off the surface of a comet. I suspect the reason this mission was chosen is the tight budgets at NASA, combined with Curiosity’s success which makes it politically advantageous to approve another Mars mission. As the NASA press release emphasized,
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Earth spacecraft on Mars fires its laser for the first time.

2:59 pm

War of the Worlds! The Earth invading spacecraft on Mars has fired its laser for the first time!

Forgive me the hyperbole. I have this childhood vision from that moment when I first read H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, when the Martian tripod first rose up and fired its death ray at a crowd of curious humans. And here we are, a century after Wells penned that classic science fiction novel, and humans have put a spacecraft on Mars, Curiosity, capable of firing lasers! The laser isn’t a death ray but a scientific tool, but nonetheless the ironies remain delicious.

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The promised land: where Curiosity is headed.

1:48 pm

The promised land: where Curiosity is headed.

This image (cut out from a mosaic) shows the view from the landing site of NASA’s Curiosity rover toward the lower reaches of Mount Sharp, where Curiosity is likely to begin its ascent through hundreds of feet (meters) of layered deposits. The lower several hundred feet (meters) show evidence of bearing hydrated minerals, based on orbiter observations. The terrain Curiosity will explore is marked by hills, buttes, mesas and canyons on the scale of one-to-three story buildings, very much like the Four Corners region of the western United States.

Click through to the image itself. Like all mountains, what appears to be a featureless mountainside from a distance instead becomes a complex and rough terrain in close-up.

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“Obama lauds NASA for Mars landing, pledges continued investment.”

11:15 pm

“Obama lauds NASA for Mars landing, pledges continued investment.”

What a joke. This Reuters’ article is so busy campaigning for Barack Obama that it fails to note one fundamental fact: It is the Obama administration that gutted NASA’s science program so that there is little likelihood of any missions to Mars, or elsewhere, in the foreseeable future. As noted correctly in this Science article describing the same Obama telephone call to JPL,

The president’s sweeping endorsement of research, however, carefully avoids the fact that his 2013 budget would cut funding for NASA’s Mars exploration program by nearly one-third and end the country’s role in two Mars missions planned jointly with the European Space Agency for later in the decade. Both the House of Representatives and a Senate spending panel have added back money for Mars exploration, although Congress is unlikely to settle on a final budget for the agency until next spring.

Look, I freely admit the federal budget has to be cut. And I am freely willing to have those cuts occur in NASA. What I can’t abide is the kind of junk journalism seen in the Reuters piece above, selling Obama as a big supporter of space research when he clearly has not been.

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A UCLA scientist is proposing that the largest canyon on Mars was formed by plate tectonics

10:03 pm

A UCLA scientist is proposing that Valles Marineris — the largest canyon on Mars and the solar system, was formed by plate tectonics.

“In the beginning, I did not expect plate tectonics, but the more I studied it, the more I realized Mars is so different from what other scientists anticipated,” Yin said. “I saw that the idea that it is just a big crack that opened up is incorrect. It is really a plate boundary, with horizontal motion. That is kind of shocking, but the evidence is quite clear. The shell is broken and is moving horizontally over a long distance. It is very similar to the Earth’s Dead Sea fault system, which has also opened up and is moving horizontally.”

The two plates divided by Mars’ Valles Marineris have moved approximately 93 miles horizontally relative to each other, Yin said. California’s San Andreas Fault, which is over the intersection of two plates, has moved about twice as much — but the Earth is about twice the size of Mars, so Yin said they are comparable.

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