Tag: Mars

Russia heads for Mars

11:59 am

Russia heads for Mars: a detailed look at the Phobos/Grunt sample return mission, set to launch on November 8.

I really wish the Russians good luck with this project. Not only would it herald their return to planetary science since the fall of the Soviet Union, success here would break their long string of failures to the red planet. Though their unmanned planetary program had some remarkable achievements during the Soviet era, of the 19 missions they flew to Mars in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, all were failures, producing almost no useful data.

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Sailing to Mars

9:15 am

With the end of the Mar500 simulated mission this coming Friday, the Russians are now proposing an eighteen month simulated Mars mission on board the International Space Station.

The Russians have been pushing to do this on ISS for years. Unfortunately, NASA has always resisted.

Yet, as I wrote in Leaving Earth, we will never be able to send humans to any other planets until we have flown at least one simulated mission, in zero gravity in Earth orbit, beforehand. Wernher von Braun pointed out this reality out back in the 1950s, and that reality has not changed in the ensuing half century. Not only will such a mission tell us a great deal about the medical issues of living in weightlessness for years at a time — issues that are far from trivial — it will give us the opportunity to find out the engineering problems of building a vessel capable of keeping humans alive during interplanetary flight, far from Earth.
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Catching an avalanche on Mars, as it happens

4:38 pm

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team today released this really cool image from Mars, showing an avalanche near the North Pole, in progress. The image looks directly down the cliff face from above. At the base of the cliff we can see the dust cloud from the crash of material billowing out away from the scarp.

What impresses me most about this image is that it was taken by an orbiting spacecraft approximately 200 miles above the planet’s surface, moving at thousands of miles an hour. Yet, the camera not only had the resolution to see the cloud of dust, it could snap the image fast enough to capture the actual fall of material (the white wisps down the side of the cliff that are reminiscent of a waterfall).

Also intriguing is the visible steep face of the cliff face itself. I know a lot of rock climbers who would love to literally get their hands (and chocks) on that rock face. And in Mars’s one-third gravity, rock climbing would surely be different.

avalanche on Mars

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The red cliffs of Mars

9:44 am

Red cliffs on Mars

Last week the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team released this beautiful image of what they call “layered yardangs” on Mars.

What creates these sharp ridges? This layered terrain has been sculpted by the wind. The aligned ridges are called yardangs, which are formed in areas where the dominant erosional force is the wind. Yardangs are also found on Earth, usually in very dry areas.

What I see are majestic red cliffs rising out of a aqua-colored sand desert. What a place to visit!

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Mars atmosphere has more water vapor than predicted

6:46 pm

Data from Mars Express has found that the Martian upper atmosphere has far more water vapor than predicted.

“The vertical distribution of water vapour is a key factor in the study of Mars’ hydrological cycle, and the old paradigm that it is mainly controlled by saturation physics now needs to be revised,” said Luca Maltagliati [of the Laboratoire Atmosphères, Milieux, Observations Spatiales (LATMOS) in Guyancourt, France]. “Our finding has major implications for understanding the planet’s global climate and the transport of water from one hemisphere to the other.”

“The data suggest that much more water vapour is being carried high enough in the atmosphere to be affected by photodissociation,” added Franck Montmessin, also from LATMOS, who is the Principal Investigator for SPICAM and a co-author of the paper. “Solar radiation can split the water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen atoms, which can then escape into space. This has implications for the rate at which water has been lost from the planet and for the long-term evolution of the Martian surface and atmosphere.”

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The rover Opportunity as seen from Mars orbit

11:10 am

Opportunity on Endeavour Crater rim

The image to the right was taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, with the white arrow showing the Mars rover Opportunity perched on the rim of Endeavour Crater.

The rover’s scientists hope that the rocks found on the crater rim, dredged up from deep below when the crater impact occurred, will be the oldest rocks so far touched on the Martian surface, and thus give them a peek at ancient Martian geology.

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New images from Opportunity

7:28 pm

Opportunity begins exploring the rim of Endeavour Crater, taking a bunch of new images . I especially like this one, of which I’ve posted a cropped scaled-down version below. The image looks across the 13-mile-wide Endeavour Crater to its far rim on the horizon. Note the haze. Mars very clearly has an atmosphere, even though it is far thinner than Earth’s. In the foreground are scattered rocks, ejecta produced from the impact that formed a smaller nearby crater now named Opportunity Crater.

Endeavour Crater as seen by Opportunity

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Endeavour Crater at last!

8:31 am

The science team for the rover Opportunity have released their first image taken from the rim of Endeavour Crater.

Since this picture looks south from Spirit Point less than a football field’s distance from the rim, it appears to look into the crater, the mountains on the right being the crater’s rim. What looks like a debris field running across the center of the image looks to me to be a combination of exposed patches of bedrock and boulders on the plateau above the rim. For the scientists, those boulders will be the prime research targets, as they are possibly ejecta produced at crater impact and could therefore be material thrown out from deep within the Martian crust.

a view of Endeavour Crater

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More evidence that there are active flows of water on Mars

2:34 pm

flow features on Mars

More evidence that there are active flows of water on Mars.

Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring. Repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in the middle latitudes of Mars’ southern hemisphere.

Though there are a number of unsolved issues about these features, the best explanation appears to be a liquid brine.

Saltiness lowers the freezing temperature of water. Sites with active flows get warm enough, even in the shallow subsurface, to sustain liquid water that is about as salty as Earth’s oceans, while pure water would freeze at the observed temperatures.

Go here to see the full image.

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The Painted Desert of Mars

11:58 pm

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter released this picture yesterday of what the Orbiter’s scientists have labeled “The crazy floor of Hellas Basin.” Below you can see a cropped image of only one part of the large higher resolution image. The NASA caption says that the wild colors probably “indicate that diverse minerals are present,” meaning that any settlers of the red planet will probably take a close look at this location with the reasonable hope of finding the resources they need to colonize a planet.

To me, these colors also indicate that this place on Mars would probably one of its most popular tourist spots. As I look at the image my eye instinctively wants to trace out the best trail route along the ridges and down into the gullies in order to give hikers the best view of this colorful terrain.

Hellas Basin

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The next Mars rover will land at Gale Crater

11:46 am

The next Mars rover will land at Gale Crater.

The car-sized Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity, is scheduled to launch late this year and land in August 2012. The target crater spans 96 miles (154 kilometers) in diameter and holds a mountain rising higher from the crater floor than Mount Rainier rises above Seattle. Gale is about the combined area of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Layering in the mound suggests it is the surviving remnant of an extensive sequence of deposits. The crater is named for Australian astronomer Walter F. Gale. . . . The portion of the crater where Curiosity will land has an alluvial fan likely formed by water-carried sediments. The layers at the base of the mountain contain clays and sulfates, both known to form in water.

More here, including images of landing site.

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Opportunity’s journey on Mars tops 20 miles

7:50 pm

On July 17 the Mars rover Opportunity passed the twenty mile mark on its now seven year journey on Mars. The image below was taken on that day. In the distance, now only about 4,000 feet away, can be seen the rim of Endeavour Crater, fourteen miles wide. Opportunity has been traveling toward that crater now since 2008.

With the rover able to travel about 300 to 500 feet each sol, it should be reaching the crater’s rim sometime in the next few weeks.

Opportunity looks at Endeavour Crater from .8 miles away

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