A tour of the impact craters that Curiosity created when it landed on Mars.
A tour of the impact craters that Curiosity created when it landed on Mars.
A tour of the impact craters that Curiosity created when it landed on Mars.
A tour of the impact craters that Curiosity created when it landed on Mars.
NASA announced yesterday plans to launch by 2020 a twin rover of Curiosity to Mars.
Though it makes sense to use the same designs again, saving money, I must admit a personal lack of excitement about this announcement. First, I have doubts it will fly because of the federal government’s budget woes. Second, it is kind of a replacement for the much more challenging and exciting missions to Titan and Europa that the Obama administration killed when they slashed the planetary budget last year.
The big news is out. Today the eagerly awaited press conference at the American Geophysical Society meeting in San Francisco on the recent results from the Mars rover Curiosity was finally held. The announced results had been hyped like crazy when rumors began to spread a few weeks ago that Curiosity had discovered something truly spectacular.
Well, here are some of the headlines heralding the results.
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Surprise, surprise! NASA is downplaying the hype about a possible big discovery by Curiosity.
As I noted, Curiosity might have found something that is interesting and exciting, but every news source that hyped this story deserves criticism. Good journalism is reporting the news, not speculating about something that hasn’t happened yet.
Has Curiosity made a big discovery?
There has been a lot of buzz the past twenty-four hours about the possibility of a major discovery from Curiosity. However, I agree with Jeffrey Kluger at Time. It is dangerous to pay much attention to these wild speculations, as they are often wrong. Stay calm, and wait for some real information. The most likely possibility is that they have found something very intriguing and exciting, but not Earth-shaking.
Dust devils and radiation in Gale Crater.
Engineers have switched Mars Odyssey to its backup navigation equipment in order to save the failing primary system.
Scientists have released a spectacular panorama taken by the now dead rover, Spirit, from its perch at its 2006 winter haven. I have posted a cropped section of that panorama below the fold, with some analysis.
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Curiosity has found evidence showing how Mars lost its atmosphere.
More evidence of past glaciers on Mars.
The first results from Curiosity’s soil samples have come back.
“Much of Mars is covered with dust, and we had an incomplete understanding of its mineralogy,” said David Bish, CheMin co-investigator with Indiana University in Bloomington. “We now know it is mineralogically similar to basaltic material, with significant amounts of feldspar, pyroxene and olivine, which was not unexpected. Roughly half the soil is non-crystalline material, such as volcanic glass or products from weathering of the glass. ”
Bish said, “So far, the materials Curiosity has analyzed are consistent with our initial ideas of the deposits in Gale Crater recording a transition through time from a wet to dry environment. The ancient rocks, such as the conglomerates, suggest flowing water, while the minerals in the younger soil are consistent with limited interaction with water.” [emphasis mine]
These results suggest that there has been very little water on the Martian surface for a very long time. They do not, however, mean that there is no water there now.
The marshes of Mexico and their similarities to Gale Crater.
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.
Curiosity takes its first scoop.
The very tiny bright object spotted on the ground nearby has ironically turned out to be more intriguing to the science team than the dirt in the scoop.
The weather in Gale Crater on Mars: warmer than expected.
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.
The Martian weather, as recorded by the Curiosity weather station.
Curiosity has zapped its first rock and moved on.
Curiosity snaps a Martian lunar eclipse.
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.
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.
Who would have thought? Climate changes on Mars are driven by the Sun.
Snark aside, the article describes how scientists have made a first attempt to link the visible layers of ice and dust at Mars’ north pole with expected past changes in climate due to the planet’s orbital variations around the Sun.
The journey begins: Curiosity heads east 52 feet on the first leg of its exploration of Gale Crater.
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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Curiosity has made its first test drive, moving about fifteen feet.
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.
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.