Tag: science

Citizens enlisted to find changes to Comet 67P/C-G during Rosetta mission

9:56 am

The European Space Agency (ESA) and Zooniverse have partnered to create a new citizen science project, allowing anyone to more easily review the archive of high resolution photos taken by Rosetta of Comet 67P/C-G and look for changes that occurred during the probe’s mission to the comet.

“The Rosetta archive, which is openly accessible to scientists and the public, contains a vast amount of data collected by this extraordinary mission that have only been partially explored,” says Bruno Merín, head of ESA’s ESAC Science Data Centre near Madrid, Spain. “In the past few years, astrophotographers and space enthusiasts have spontaneously identified changes and signs of activity in Rosetta’s images. Except for a few cases, though, it has not been possible to link any of these events to surface changes, mostly due to the lack of human eyes sifting through the whole dataset. We definitely need more eyes!”

This is why ESA partnered with the Zooniverse, the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research. The new Rosetta Zoo project presents a particular set of data: pairs of images collected by Rosetta’s OSIRIS camera showing Comet 67P’s surface before and after perihelion.

Volunteers are invited to view images of roughly the same region side by side and identify a variety of changes, from large-scale dust transport to comet chunks that moved or even vanished. Sometimes this may require zooming in or out a few times, or rotating the images to spot changes on different scales, getting up close and personal with the iconic comet.

Using Rosetta Zoo will require no software, nor will anyone need to register to use it. You simply go to the website and begin comparing pairs of images, for as long as you wish, marking differences you spot of the same locations.

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A quake south of Starship’s prime landing sites on Mars

1:31 pm

The lowlands south of Starship's prime landing site
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on February 23, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Though it shows the largely featureless northern lowland plains of Mars, it is particularly interesting for two reasons.

First, according to the photo’s label this scarp/ridge is apparently near a quake detected by the seismometer placed on Mars by the lander InSight, located about a thousand miles to the southwest. Though no information of the strength of this quake is available, it is likely to have been a small and weak one, interesting mostly because it indicates some small underground instability or a recent small impact on the surface. The image favors the former, as it shows no obvious recent features of change. What it does show is one very intriguing flow feature draping the scarp. As the location is at 34 north latitude in a region where scientists have found a lot of evidence of water ice very close to the surface, the flow could very well be glacial in nature, though dismissing a lava origin would be a mistake.

The second reason this location is of interest is what lies relatively nearby, as shown in the overview map below.
» Read more

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ESA: ExoMars will likely be delayed till ’28 at the soonest

9:03 am

An official of the European Space Agency (ESA) at a May 3rd science meeting announced that the launch of its ExoMars rover will likely be delayed until 2028 at the earliest because of the partnership breakup with Russia due to its invasion of the Ukraine.

Russia had been providing both the launch rocket as well as the lander on Mars.

Speaking at a May 3 meeting of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), Jorge Vago, ExoMars project scientist at ESA, said he doubted a new lander could be ready by 2026. “It is theoretically possible, but in practice we think it would be very difficult to reconfigure ourselves and produce our own lander for 2026,” he said. “Realistically, we would be looking at a launch in 2028.”

Launching in 2028 could pose technical challenges for ExoMars. One trajectory would get the rover to Mars relatively quickly, but have it arrive just a month before dust storm seasons starts at the preferred landing site. An alternative trajectory would require traveling for more than two years to each Mars, but get the rover there six months before dust storms start.

“We have been trying very hard to convince the engineering team that the dust storm season is not death,” Vago said. “We should concentrate on making the rover more robust and able to weather a dust storm.”

There are other issues. The rover will need new radioisotope heating units, or RHUs, to provide power, since Russia will no longer providing them. If the U.S. provides, the launch for security reasons will have to take place in the U.S., which means the launch provider will have to be American.

The delay to ’28 also could cause the ExoMars rover mission to be completely changed, repurposed to become part of the sample return mission that the ESA and NASA are partnering to bring back the cached samples that Perseverance is gathering. If so, this repurposing might delay its launch to Mars even further.

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Zhurong travels another 1,300 feet

9:35 am

Overview map

UPDATE: After emailing this post to Alfred McEwen of the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory in Arizona, he responded to correct an error in my image. The MRO photo was taken when Zhurong had already traveled about half the 1,300 feet listed in the Chinese article below, thus making my original circle about two times too large.

I have corrected its size. It now shows the correct maximum distance Zhurong could have driven since that MRO picture was taken on March 11th.

Original post:
——————–
According to a short report yesterday in China’s state-run press, Zhurong has traveled another 1,300 feet on Mars since it was photographed from orbit on March 11, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The report provided no information at all about the rover’s path. The map to the right shows Zhurong’s position as of March 11th, with the blue circle marking the maximum distance it could have moved since then according to this report. Based on China’s earlier vague statements, it is likely the rover has moved to the south, though even that covers a lot of possibilities.

The report did say this however:

Mars is about to enter the winter season, during which night temperatures will drop below minus 100 degrees Celsius, with a high probability of sandstorms. Martian winters last an equivalent of six Earth months.

Because Zhurong uses solar panels, it relies on the Sun for power. With coming of winter and more sandstorms, it thus faces the risk of limited solar power. As its nominal mission was only supposed to last three months, not a Martian year of 24 months that includes a winter, it will be interesting to see if it can survive that season.

The story also added that Yutu-2 has now traveled about 3,875 feet on the Moon, but added nothing else.

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Navigating a rover on Mars

9:32 am

16 photos taken by Perseverance's right navigation camera on May 2, 2022

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The photo to the right is actually a screen capture of 16 consecutive photos taken on May 2, 2022 by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance.

The overview map below gives the context. The red dot marks Perseverance’s position when the photos were taken. The green dot marks Ingenuity’s position. The small white dot marks the spot where the rover’s parachute landed. The yellow lines indicate I think the area covered by the sixteen navigation images.

There is a reason for showing this panorama in this somewhat crude form. The engineers who run Perseverance have programmed its navigation cameras to send back its pictures so that they immediately line up in this coherent pattern. There is no need to rearrange them upon arrival. The engineers thus can instantly see how each picture relates to the others, and thus get an immediate sense of the nearby terrain in which they must plot the rover’s next move.

Perseverance is now in its second science campaign, focused on studying the base of the delta. As the science team studies the delta’s cliff face, they are also studying the best route to continue uphill. To do both, they have begun slowly moving along that face, going from west to east.

The rough panorama above thus shows them the ground ahead as they continue that traverse. I expect the rover’s next move will be to the northeast, once again moving along the base of the nearest cliff. The panorama shows that while the ground in this area has a few ridges, none are so high as to cause Perseverance any problems.

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Brain terrain in Mars’ glacier country

3:51 pm

Brain terrain in glacier country
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on February 10, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

It shows what planetary scientists have dubbed “brain terrain”, a truly unique Martian geological feature that is not found on Earth and also remains as yet unexplained. Specifically, the brain terrain is the speckled areas between the larger flow features, all of which are probably ice or glacier related.

What especially drew me to this MRO image however was the particular flow feature in the center left that looks like either a giant squid or something out of Lovecraft horror short story. Talk about a cool image!

The downward grade here is likely to the north, as this spot is inside a north-south canyon, cutting into the southern cratered highlands. The general north-south trend of the depression here reinforce this supposition.

The overview image below provides context.
» Read more

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NASA decides to end airborne SOFIA telescope operations

10:03 am

According to a joint announcement yesterday from NASA and the German space agency DLR, all operations of the airborne astronomy telescope SOFIA will end as of September ’22.

NASA has been trying to cancel this project for several years, because its capabilities have not justified its expense, about $85 million per year. Congress has repeatedly refused to go along, reinserting funding after NASA tried to delete it. That the astronomy community itself suggested in November that the project be canceled, however, probably means this Congress will likely go along with this most recent announcement.

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Rogozin: Expect delays for future Russian lunar probes

9:45 am

China/Russian Lunar base roadmap
The so-called Chinese-Russian partnership to explore
the Moon.

According to a statement by Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, yesterday in the Russian state-run press, the launch of two unmanned probes to the Moon, Luna-26 and Luna-27, are likely to be postponed due to “the current circumstances.”

“As for the Luna-26 lunar orbiter and the Luna-27 heavy lander mission, possibly, it will be adjusted taking into account that in the current situation we will be spending the main financial and industrial resources on increasing the orbital group. Now it is more important,” the space chief emphasized.

The Roscosmos CEO also asked for understanding if the mission is postponed. “Science is very important but now we are talking about the viability of Russia’s orbital group, about bringing it to a new level, its work as a group of double and military designation. Yet we are not postponing the lunar missions for long,” he added.

Rogozin added that Luna-25, scheduled for launch this year, has not been postponed.

Apparently the more than $1 billion of income that Roscosmos has lost by its refusal to launch OneWeb’s satellites is forcing it to make choices. For the government, the priority has to be launching communications, weather, navigation, and military surveillance satellites. Being tight on cash, Rogozin thus has no recourse but to favor those launches over any purely science missions.

This decision also demonstrates that Russia’s so-called partnership with China to explore the Moon, as shown in the graphic to the right that was released by China and Russia in June 2021, is pure hogwash. as I noted then:

Of the three Russian missions, Luna 25 is scheduled to launch later this year, making it the first all-Russian-built planetary mission in years and the first back to the Moon since the 1970s. The other two Russian probes [Luna-26 and Luna-27] are supposedly under development, but based on Russia’s recent track record in the past two decades for promised space projects, we have no guarantee they will fly as scheduled, or even fly at all.

Rogozin also said yesterday that he plans further talks with China in May to further their partnership concerning lunar exploration and building a lunar base. Let me translate: “We need cash to launch anything, and hope the Chinese will provide some.”

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As Curiosity retreats from rough country, scientists look at the future geology it will see

3:51 pm

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! For the past two weeks the Curiosity science team has been gingerly and slowing backing the rover off from the very rough terrain of the Greenheugh pediment, as shown on the overview map to the right. The blue dot indicates Curiosity’s present position, with the red dotted line marking its original planned route, now abandoned.

The main question remains: Where to go next? At this point the science team is still debating their exact path forward. As Catherine Weitz of the Planetary Science Institute explained to me in an email today,

The Curiosity team is still working out the details. Maybe in another month or so the new route will be finalized so stay tuned.

No matter what route they eventually choose, the white arrows mark one of the more interesting upcoming geological features that the scientists very much intend Curiosity to reach. In a paper published at the end of March in which Weitz was the lead author, they describe this “marker horizon” as follows:
» Read more

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Dunes on Jupiter’s volcano moon Io?

9:35 am

Dunes on Io?
Click for full image.

The uncertainty of science: According to a just published paper, scientists now propose that the dune-like ridges long known to exist on Io, Jupiter’s volcano-covered moon, might actually be dunes, even though Io has no real atmosphere.

The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was taken by the Galileo while it orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. It illustrates what the scientists believe is the proposed process:

McDonald and his colleagues used mathematical equations to simulate the force required to move grains on Io and calculated the path those grains would take. The study simulated the movement of a single grain of basalt or frost, revealing that the interaction between flowing lava and sulfur dioxide beneath the moon’s surface creates venting that is dense and fast moving enough to form large dune-like features on the moon’s surface, according to the statement.

In what might be a monumental understatement about the reality of interplanetary geology, McDonald said this in the press release: “This work tells us that the environments in which dunes are found are considerably more varied than the classical, endless desert landscapes on parts of Earth.”

Damn right. The possibility of unexpected geology of all kinds on the millions of planets, moon, and asteroids not yet studied is endless, and guaranteed.

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