Tag: science

Tianwen-1’s engineers set mid-May for rover landing on Mars

7:59 am

The new colonial movement: The science team for China’s Tianwen-1 orbiter are now targeting mid-May for when they will release and land the as-yet unnamed rover for its landing on Mars.

Wang Chi, director of the National Space Science Center at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said March 23 that Tianwen 1’s lander and rover are scheduled to touch down on Mars in May.

“The first Chinese Mars mission, Tianwen 1, is now orbiting Mars, and we are landing in the middle of May,” Wang said in a presentation to the National Academies’ Space Studies Board. “We are open to international cooperation, and the data will be available publicly soon.” [emphasis mine]

Though China has generally released the scientific data of its lunar probes eventually, they have done it slowly. In the case of Tianwen-1, they released so far practically nothing, with the only images released being two hi-resolution ground images and a handful of distant global pictures of Mars.

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Very peculiar flow features on Mars

12:29 pm

Peculiar flows on Mars
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image focuses on one of the weirdest flow features I have yet seen on Mars. The first photo to the right, rotated and cropped to post here, comes from a January 27, 2021 picture by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). This cropped section focuses on the middle of three such weird features, two close flows heading downhill on the interior rim of very eroded 28-mile-wide crater. For some reason the flows also have depressions on their crowns. The depressions almost look like someone carved them out with a spackling spatula. In fact, the MRO science team agrees, labeling this image as “Spatulate Depressions with and without Upslope Gullies.”

The second image to the right shows a wider crop of the same picture, and explains the reason for the last half of that label.
» Read more

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Ingenuity unfolded and ready for placement on ground

9:59 am

Ingenuity unfolded
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The photo to the right, taken yesterday, shows Perseverance’s Ingenuity helicopter now vertical with its legs deployed, hanging from the bottom of the rover and ready for placement on the ground.

The next step will be drop Ingenuity those last few inches. Once released Perseverance will quickly drive away, as it will no longer be providing power to the helicopter and will instead be blocking its solar panels from sunlight.

Perseverance will then proceed to its lookout post while engineers check out Ingenuity to make sure all is working.

The targeted flight date remains April 8th.

UPDATE: JPL just announced that it is delaying Ingenuity’s flight to April 11th. The announcement was done by a tweet, so provided no explanation as to why JPL decided to delay three days.

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Ice under Mars’ biggest volcanic ash field, at the equator?

11:24 am

Wind eddies on Mars
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According to new data obtained from the radar instruments on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Express, scientists now think that the Medusae Fossae Formation, Mars’ biggest volcanic ash field and thought by some to be the source of most of the planet’s dust, might have an underground layer of ash that is also ice-rich. From their abstract:

The Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF) on Mars covers a vast area along the boundary between the rugged southern highlands and the smooth northern plains. While the MFF appears to be thick sediments or volcanic ash slowly eroding in the martian winds, how this material was emplaced remains mysterious. Most intriguing is evidence suggesting that some areas of the MFF may contain water ice. In this work we use sounding radar data from the SHARAD instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to probe up to 600 m below the surface and measure the electrical properties of the MFF material. The results suggest that the shallow parts of the MFF deposits are very porous and compress readily under their own weight. To match deeper probing by the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding instrument on Mars Express requires a second layer of either vast porous deposits or ice‐rich material protected from sublimation by the dry sediments.

The MRO image above, originally posted here in November 2020, shows one example of the typical wind erosion found in the Medusae ash field. Apparently the ground-penetrating radar from orbit now suggests the possibility that there is an ash layer rich in ice, at depths beginning somewhere between 1,000 to 2,000 feet below the surface.
» Read more

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X-rays from Uranus detected for the 1st time

10:02 am

Composite Uranus image of X-ray and optical data

Astronomers using the Chandra X-ray Observatory in orbit have for the first time detected X-rays coming from the planet Uranus.

In the new study, researchers used Chandra observations taken in Uranus in 2002 and then again in 2017. They saw a clear detection of X-rays from the first observation, just analyzed recently, and a possible flare of X-rays in those obtained fifteen years later. The main graphic [posted to the right] shows a Chandra X-ray image of Uranus from 2002 (in pink) superimposed on an optical image from the Keck-I Telescope obtained in a separate study in 2004. The latter shows the planet at approximately the same orientation as it was during the 2002 Chandra observations.

What could cause Uranus to emit X-rays? The answer: mainly the Sun. Astronomers have observed that both Jupiter and Saturn scatter X-ray light given off by the Sun, similar to how Earth’s atmosphere scatters the Sun’s light. While the authors of the new Uranus study initially expected that most of the X-rays detected would also be from scattering, there are tantalizing hints that at least one other source of X-rays is present.

One explanation could be that the X-rays could be coming from Uranus’s rings, as such X-rays do from Saturn. This is not confirmed as yet however. More data will be needed.

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China’s Long March 4C launches Earth observation satellite

8:52 am

China today used its Long March 4C rocket to successfully place another Earth observation satellite into orbit.

The article at the link also gives a short update on the status of China’s space station, with its first module Tianhe-1 presently scheduled for launch on April 29th, using their biggest rocket, the Long March 5B.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

9 SpaceX
7 China
5 Russia
2 Rocket Lab

The U.S. still leads China 13 to 7 in the national rankings.

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Al-Amal reaches science orbit

1:22 pm

Cerberus Fossae, as seen by Al-Amal
Click for full image.

Elysium Mons and Cereberus Fossae

The new colonial movement: The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Al-Amal (Hope) Mars Orbiter has now reached its science orbit, and will begin its two years of observations (one full Martian year) of the Martian atmosphere on April 14th.

The photo to the right, cropped to post here, is part of a much larger image covering a good portion of the 600-mile-long fissures dubbed Cerberus Fossae and located Elysium Planitia, the vast lava plains located between the giant volcanoes Elysium and Olympus Mons, where most of the Martian quakes have so-far been detected by InSight. The context map below provides a wider context (the red boxes indicating high resolution Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter images). I think the area covered by this section of Al-Amal’s picture is near the western end of Cerberus Fossae.

The image was posted today in the image gallery for Al-Amal. Unfortunately there is no separate webpage for this particular post, so that link will take a long time to load, as apparently all the images there are large, not thumbnails. From their text:

On 15 March 2021, the Emirates eXploration Imager (EXI) captured a monochromatic image of the Cerberus Fossae, a fracture system that stretches for more than 1,000 km across the Martian surface, with a spatial scale of approximately 180 meters/pixel. The Emirates Mars Mission transitioned from the capture orbit to its science orbit with the successful completion of a 510-second burn of its thrusters. The Hope Probe is now in its final orbit of Mars and ready for its two-year science data gathering – the core aim of the mission. The science phase will commence on 14 April 2021.

The goal of Al-Amal is to study the atmosphere. This camera will provide wide shots, mostly for the purpose of observing the coming and going of cloud features. Nonetheless, this is a nice wide view of Mars.

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NASA in contact with China to get the orbital data of its Tianwen-1 Mars Orbiter

10:20 am

Though by law NASA and the scientists cannot exchange data or communications with China due to security concerns, NASA and Chinese officials did exchange communications recently in order to coordinate the orbits of their orbiters presently circling Mars.

Jurczyk noted that NASA’s knowledge of China’s space program is largely limited to publicly available information because of restrictions placed by federal law on its interactions with Chinese organizations. Those restrictions do allow NASA to engage with China if approved by Congress. “Most recently, we had an exchange with them on them providing their orbital data, their ephemeris data, for their Tianwen-1 Mars orbiting mission, so we could do conjunction analysis around Mars with the orbiters,” he said.

In a brief statement to SpaceNews late March 29, NASA confirmed it exchanged information with the China National Space Administration (CNSA), as well as other space agencies that operate spacecraft at Mars. “To assure the safety of our respective missions, NASA is coordinating with the UAE, European Space Agency, Indian Space Research Organisation and the China National Space Administration, all of which have spacecraft in orbit around Mars, to exchange information on our respective Mars missions to ensure the safety of our respective spacecraft,” the agency said. “This limited exchange of information is consistent with customary good practices used to ensure effective communication among satellite operators and spacecraft safety in orbit.”

Such limited communications are actually permitted under the law that Congress passed, as long as they do not involve any exchange of technical information. There has been a push, however, in the planetary community for years to increase direct communications with China, allowing the transfer of all kinds of information, both scientific and technical. Until the law gets changed none of this should happen.

Of course, what matters laws these days? I will not be surprised if the Biden administration, rather than demanding a change in the law, instead begins expanded communications between NASA and China, in complete and utter contempt for the law, with no one objecting.

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Martian glaciers flowing off interior walls of Renaudot Crater

12:57 pm

Overview map

Cool image time! In the March 1st image release from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) were two pictures covering sections of the interior rim of 40-mile-wide Renaudot Crater, located in the northern lowland plains of Mars north of the region I dub Mars’ glacier country.

The map to the right provides the context. The two red boxes in Renaudot Crater show the location of the two images below, with the first being the one to the left. Located at about 42 degrees north latitude, we should expect to see evidence of ice and glacial features here, and that is exactly what both photos show.
» Read more

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South Korea’s leader announces his nation’s goals in space

2:53 pm

The new colonial movement: Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s president since 2017, on March 25th gave his first speech focused on his nation’s goals in space, outlining plans to encourage private enterprise as well as achieving an unmanned mission to the Moon by 2030.

His speech listed three main programs. First, they are developing their own home-built rocket, dubbed the KSLV-2, which they hope to launch on its first orbital test flight by October of this year.

Second, he touted a project to send a probe to the asteroid Apophis in 2029. I described this probe in my November 2020 report on a science conference focused entirely on Apophis. If all goes well, they hope to have the probe fly in formation with the asteroid as it makes its close approach that year.

Third, he committed his nation to landing an unmanned lander on the Moon by the end of this decade. (Sound familiar?)

While much of this was the typical photo-op stuff that politicians love, designed mostly to enhance their public image, Moon did make it clear their goals are also to foster a new private aerospace industry that would compete in the emerging new space market.

Moon underscored the role of the private sector in enhancing Korea’s space development capabilities. To that end, he said, the government will step up efforts to build an “innovative industrial ecosystem that nurtures global space companies such as SpaceX.”

Another issue he put forth was strengthening international competitiveness of made-in-Korea satellite systems, in the lead-up to the introduction of 6G wireless networks, self-driving vehicles, and other products and services enabled or enhanced by satellites.

All-in-all, it is actually surprising that up to now South Korea has not made its presence felt in space. This announcement suggests they now intend to change that.

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Baffling ridges on Mars

1:01 pm

Baffling ridges on Mars
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image is one of my “what the heck?” photos. The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here and taken on September 3, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), shows a strange dune field of many parallel long dunes, cross-cut by larger ridges.

Are the larger ridges dunes? Or are they some form of volcanic or tectonic ridge, which is also very typical of this region, called Tempe Terra and located in the transition zone between the southern cratered highlands and the northern lowland plains?

Or are they eskers, ridges frequently found in places that were once covered by glaciers? At 35 degrees north latitude, it would not be surprising to see glacial features here, but as far as I can tell, the full image has no obvious such features.
» Read more

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Radar images of Apophis during its March close approach of Earth

9:45 am

Apophis as seen by radar March 9, 2021
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Using two radar dishes, Green Bank in West Virginia and Goldstone in California, astronomers were able to produce radar images of the asteroid Apophis during its most recent close fly-by of Earth on March 10th.

The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows Apophis on March 9th. If you go to the full image you can also see the March 10th and 11th images, which appear to show the asteroid in different orientations as it rotated.

These images represent radar observations of asteroid 99942 Apophis on March 8, 9, and 10, 2021, as it made its last close approach before its 2029 Earth encounter that will see the object pass our planet by less than 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers). The 70-meter radio antenna at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex near Barstow, California, and the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia used radar to precisely track Apophis’ motion. At the time of these observations, Apophis was about 10.6 million miles (17 million kilometers) from Earth, and each pixel has a resolution of 127 feet (38.75 meters).

The data obtained has firmly removed any chance Apophis will impact the Earth in the next 100 years. However, it still could hit us late in the 22nd century.

These observations were originally planned to also include data from the Arecibo Observatory, but that telescope was destroyed in December when its instrument platform collapsed. If it had been operational, these radar images would have had much better resolution.

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Ice-filled crater in Mars’ glacier country

2:06 pm

Crater filled with ice
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Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here and taken on January 7, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), provides us a perfect example of the kind of glacial feature that scientists find routinely in the 30 to 60 degree mid-latitude bands on Mars. In this case the crater is in the northern reaches of a chaos region dubbed Nilosyrtis Mensae, the easternmost mensae region of what I dub glacier country on Mars.

When first identified scientists named this concentric crater fill, a purposely vague term that is only descriptive because they then did not know what it was made of, though they had their suspicions that it was buried glacial ice. Since then radar data has routinely confirmed that there is ice in such filled craters, making this particular glacial feature one of the most prevalent in those mid-latitude bands.

You can see a quite similar ice-filled crater, also in Nilosyrtis, in an earlier post from October 2020. While that earlier crater was on the southern edge of Nilosyrtis, today’s crater is about 300 miles almost due north, near the region’s northern fringe. In between are lots of similar glacial features, sometimes in craters, sometimes flowing off the slopes of mesas, and sometimes flow features in the open canyons between.

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Mars’ polar ice canyons are young and the source for mid-latitude ice

9:40 am

Mars' north pole icecap
Mars’ north polar ice cap.

Scientists have now proposed that the giant ice canyons seen at the edges of Mars’ polar ice caps are very young and are also the source of the water that sublimates away when the planet’s rotational tilt (its obliquity) is high, to fall as snow in the mid-latitudes where it forms the glaciers and ice sheets we now find there.

The image to the right, reduced to post here, shows the entire north pole ice cape on the left, with its spiral canyons. The two inserts on the bottom show for scale Hawaii’s Big Island and the Grand Canyon. From the release:

“Erosion formed a huge ice canyon system, and that erosion is a source of the long-known mid-latitude mantles on Mars,” said Rodriguez, lead author of “North polar trough formation due to in‑situ erosion as a source of young ice in mid‑latitudinal mantles on Mars” that appears in Nature Scientific Reports.

The troughs are arranged in a vast spiral pattern covering an area the size of Texas. We find that their growth lateral to katabatic wind (wind that carries high-density colder air from a higher elevation down a slope) directions produced widespread simple intersections, from which the highly complex spiral arrangement emerged, Rodriguez said. “The spiral pattern seen in the troughs is basically an erosional byproduct,” he said. “As the pits grow and intersect over a pre-existing dome-shaped polar cap, the spiral pattern emerges.

“It has long been proposed that sublimation of water ice from the north polar cap during high-obliquity cycles was an essential source of the planet’s mid-latitude icy plains. Our finding identifies the troughs as direct evidence of those sublimation phases,” Rodriguez said.

These spiral trough features formed very recently, in geologic terms: between a few million and 50,000 years ago, Rodriguez said.

This hypothesis, if true, is very important in understanding the long term geological history of Mars. The present theory is that when the obliquity rises to as high of 60 degrees, compared to today’s 25 degrees (similar to Earth’s), the mid-latitudes are colder than the poles, and the ice at the poles then migrates to the mid-latitudes. This paper gives us the place at the poles where the icecap shrinks as that ice sublimates away.

Knowing that these polar canyons are young and the source of the mid-latitude ice scientists can now begin to write the geological history of the polar ice caps themselves. They can also use this information to maybe determine whether the caps are presently in a steady state, as now believed, or growing or shrinking.

The youth of these canyons also suggests that any mid-latitude ice from them is also young, and thus more likely pure water unpoisoned by the toxic perchlorates found in many places on the Martian surface. It will thus be easier to obtain pure drinkable water from them.

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The 1st image of a black hole’s magnetic field

8:54 am

The magnetic field lines of a black hole

Using the data from the first image of a black hole, obtained in 2019, scientists have now extracted evidence of the magnetic field lines near the event horizon, and from this produced the first image of such lines.

The image to the left, reduced to post here, shows the spiraling magnetic field lines against the bright event horizon ring.

As the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team describes today in a pair of papers in Astrophysical Journal, the new picture uses the same data as in the original image, produced from a series of observations in 2017 of the supermassive black hole at the core of nearby galaxy M87, using the combined collecting power of eight radio observatories across the world. To extract the polarization information, the data have gone through many months of additional analysis.

The scientists also note that the orientation of the field lines might eventually help explain the jets being thrown from its poles.

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Layers upon layers of Martian volcanic ash

2:05 pm

Layers upon layers of Martian volcanic ash
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Today’s cool image provides I think a hint at the vast amount of time that has passed on Mars, allowing uncounted major events to occur which each lay down a bit of the geological history, a history that is now piled up on the surface so deeply that it will take decades of research to untangle it.

The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on December 23, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the layered nature of the Medusae Fossae Formation, the largest volcanic ash deposit on Mars (about the land area of India) and thought by some to be the source of most of the dust across the entire red planet.
» Read more

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Scientists: Mars is losing water seasonally through its atmosphere

9:38 am

The uncertainty of science: Two new studies using data Europe’s Trace Gas Orbiter and Mars Express orbiters have found that Mars is losing water seasonally through its atmosphere.

The studies also found that global dust storms accelerate the process.

Anna and colleagues found that water vapour remained confined to below 60 km when Mars was far from the Sun but extended up to 90 km in altitude when Mars was closest to the Sun. Across a full orbit, the distance between the Sun and the Red Planet ranges from 207 million to 249 million km.

Near the Sun, the warmer temperatures and more intensive circulation in the atmosphere prevented water from freezing out at a certain altitude. “Then, the upper atmosphere becomes moistened and saturated with water, explaining why water escape rates speed up during this season – water is carried higher, aiding its escape to space,” adds Anna.

In years when Mars experienced a global dust storm the upper atmosphere became even wetter, accumulating water in excess at altitudes of over 80 km.

But wait, didn’t planetary scientists just announce that Mars hasn’t lost its water through the atmosphere, but instead lost it when it became chemical trapped in the planet’s soil? Yup, they did, but that was a model based on new ground data. This new result is based on atmospheric data.

Or to put it another way, the model was incomplete. While it could be true that a large bulk of Mars’ water is trapped chemically in the ground, that is not proven, only hypothesized. What has been proven, and is now confirmed by these two studies, is that, depending on weather and season, the water of Mars does leak into its upper atmosphere where it can escape into space, never to return.

What remains unknown is how much water escaped into space, and when. Moreover, the ground-based model could still be right, even if it is true that Mars is losing water through its atmosphere. At the moment the data is too incomplete to answer these questions with any certainty.

Meanwhile, this press release once again gives the false impression that the only water left on Mars is at its poles (and in this case, only the south pole). This is not accurate, based on numerous studies finding evidence of buried ice and glaciers everywhere on the planet down to the 30th latitude, in both the north and south hemispheres. Mars might have far less water now than it did billions of years ago, but it still has plenty, and that water is not found only at the poles.

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A data-based broad look at the entire COVID epidemic, one year later

2:24 pm

The Scream by Edvard Munch
The Scream by Edvard Munch

One year ago I posted an essay entitled COVID-19: the unwarranted panic. At that time we had just begun a “15-day-lockdown” to slow the spread of the virus, a lockdown that has ended up lasting a year with literally no signs of ending, even though vaccines for the coronavirus are now available and are being administrated widely to millions.

In that essay I reviewed four early science studies that provided some solid initial data about the coronavirus, all of which strongly suggested that it was not the plague many government healthy officials at that time were proclaiming it to be. Instead, these studies showed that it was only a threat to the elderly sick, that it was relatively harmless to a young population, and that the death rate was low, likely well below 1% and possibly very comparable to the flu.

These data strongly suggested to me that lockdowns, social distancing, masks, and restrictions on the freedom of the healthy and young were all a bad idea. Better to follow the traditional response to past such epidemics in which you quarantine the sick, protect the vulnerable (the elderly), and allow everyone else to go about their lives as normal.

We did not do this, however. Instead, as a society we chose in the past year to do the exact oppose, imposing strict lockdowns, mandating social distancing and mask use everywhere, while quarantining the healthy. We did this based on the worst scenarios and models put forth by health officials, who firmly believed COVID-19 was far worse than any past epidemic, and required a new, radical, and much harsher response.

I now want to ask, one year later: Whose conclusions about the seriousness of COVID-19 were more accurate? Was it just another type of flu, though maybe somewhat worse, as I posited, or was it the deadly pestilence predicted by the world’s health authorities?
» Read more

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Twisted and tilted bedrock in Martian crater

11:36 am

tilted strata in Martin Crater
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated cropped, and reduced to post here, is only a small example of the strangely tilted and twisted strata in the central peak region of 38-mile-wide Martin Crater on Mars. The full image shows more.

The picture was taken on January 12, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The section I’ve cropped out shows a series of stratified strata that are are not only significantly tipped from the horizontal, but have also been bent and deformed.

The crater itself is located about 260 miles south of Valles Marineris, as shown on the overview map below.
» Read more

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Perseverance dumps debris shield in preparation for Ingenuity deployment

8:59 am

Dumped debris shield under Perseverance
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On March 21st the Perseverance engineering team released the debris shield that had been attached to the bottom of the rover to protect the Ingenuity helicopter during its journey to Mars, and thus began the deployment process for releasing the helicopter itself.

The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows that debris shield on the ground. The rover will next drive away from this spot and find the flat area where the helicopter will be placed on the ground for its April flight.

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Yutu-2 & Chang’e-4 complete 28th lunar day on Moon

8:42 am

The new colonial movement: China’s lunar rover Yutu-2 and its lander Chang’e-4 have successfully completed their 28th lunar day on the far side of the Moon, and have been placed in hibernation for the long lunar night.

According to this article from China’s state-run press, Yutu-2 has now traveled 683 meters (2,241 feet) since its landing. In the past two lunar days the rover has traveled about 180 feet, continuing its journey to the northwest away from Chang’e-5. Their pace continues to be about 80 to 100 feet per lunar day.

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A visit to Cydonia on Mars

1:00 pm

Strange geology in Cydonia on Mars
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Cool image time! The Cydonia region on Mars, located at around 30-40 degrees north latitude in the northern lowland plains just beyond the transition zone up to the southern cratered highlands, is well known to many on Earth because it was here that the Viking-1 orbiter took a picture of a mesa that, because of the sun angle, made its shadows resemble a face. Thus was born the “Face on Mars” that consumed the shallow-minded among us — and thus the culture, media, and Hollywood — absurdly for decades, until Mars Global Surveyor took the first high resolution image and proved without doubt what was really obvious from the beginning, that it was nothing more than a mesa.

Cydonia however remains a very intriguing region of Mars, mostly because it is home to a lot of strange geology, as shown by the photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here. Taken on January 16, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), it shows some of that strange and inexplicable geology.

While Cydonia is inside that 30-60 degree latitude band where MRO has imaged numerous glacial-type features, I do not know if many such features have been found there. Except for the pits and depressions in the photo’s lower right — which suggest decay in an ice sheet — little else at first glance in the picture clearly invokes any of the obvious glacial features one comes to expect. There appear to be what might be lobate flows in the image’s center going from the west to the east, but if they are glacial, they are so decayed to as leave much doubt.

The overview image below shows where Cydonia is on Mars, and helps explain partly what is found here.
» Read more

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Volcanic badlands on Mars

2:17 pm

Volcanic badlands on Mars
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Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on January 29, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a particularly ugly region of rough terrain located about 900 miles to the southwest of the giant volcano Arsia Mons, the southernmost of the chain of three giant volcanoes between Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris. The picture sits inside the floor of a very old and degraded 185-mile-wide crater dubbed Koval’sky.

The section I cropped out was picked at random, because the entire full image looked like this. Though only a handful of images have been taken of the floor of Koval’sky Crater by MRO’s high resolution camera, all show similar rough terrain. In June 2017 the MRO science team posted one of those few such photos with the following caption:
» Read more

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NASA confident Webb will launch in October

9:36 am

In a briefing held yesterday, NASA officials — in summarizing the status of the James Webb Space Telescope — stated they were presently confident that its launch will take place in October this year, as presently planned.

[Eric Smith, JWST program scientist> said the program is dealing with one new technical issue. Two communications transponders suffered separate problems during testing in January. Engineers have tracked down the problems with the two units and started repairs this week. “Those boxes will be back in time for us to make our planned shipping date,” he said.

That issue, he acknowledged, will use some of the remaining schedule margin. “The plan right now is that we’ll get them back in time so that we don’t have to use all of it,” he said. “That’s the main thing that we’re watching regarding the margin.”

If launched in October, Webb will only be a decade behind schedule and a mere 20 times over budget, having been initially proposed to launch in 2011 for a cost of $500 million. Instead, it will cost about $10 billion.

The article also notes that the Biden administration might change the telescope’s name because Webb as a bureaucrat early in his career apparently publicly opposed homosexual rights. Such opinions can no longer be allowed, and anyone who has them must be blackballed as quickly as possible.

No matter. Webb was merely NASA’s administrator through almost its entire first decade, leading the agency in its triumph over the Soviets in the race to the Moon. Such achievements cannot be honored as they illustrate the past greatness of America. Moreover, Webb was a white man, and this makes him totally unqualified to receive any laurels. Today’s modern America hates itself and all white men.

The article also notes a variety of issues that will cause more delays of the new big astronomy boondoggle at NASA, the Roman Space Telescope. They say its launch will likely be delayed to 2026 because of the Wuhan flu panic. I predict this is only a foretaste. Expect many more delays and budget overruns, probably pushing its launch into the 2030s.

But no matter. What is really important is that this new boondoggle is named for a woman!

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SpaceX narrows Mars landing site for Starship to four prime locations

11:19 pm

The prime and secondary Martian landing sites for Starship

Capitalism in space: During this week’s 52nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, one poster [pdf] caught my eye as something significant. It was titled “SpaceX Starship Landing Sites on Mars.” The map to the right is figure 1 from that poster, annotated slightly by me based my earlier stories about SpaceX’s use of the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to research potential Martian landing sites for its Starship spacecraft. The stars indicate MRO images, most of which were described and linked to in my last major post about this SpaceX effort in November 2019.

The red spots covering some stars are the big story: SpaceX has narrowed its choice for its Starship landing site to four prime locations (indicated by the bright red spots) and three backup locations (indicated by the dark red spots). The images under the red spots numbered 2, 4, and 6 were linked to in my November 2019 post. The images under red spots marked by a “D” are earlier images taken by MRO when SpaceX was researching a potential Dragon landing site. The images under red spots labeled 1P and MRO are subsequent images taken by MRO since November 2019, with the 1P image previously linked to in a post in April 2020 entitled “The icy Phlegra Mountains: Mars’ future second city.”

The poster outlined why the prime candidate sites — PM1, EM16, AP1, and AP9 — were favored. For example, PM-1 in the Phlegra Mountains “…has the lowest latitude and elevation of the group, a clear association with LDAs [lobate debris aprons that resemble glacial features], well developed polygons, and has the highest SWIM [Subsurface Water Ice Mapping] score for geomorphic indicators of ice.”

EM 16 “…has a clear association with an LDA with nearby brain terrain and the strongest radar return for shallow ice and the highest combined SWIM score.”

AP1 “…appears to be the safest site and has a moderate combined SWIM score for ice.”

AP9 “…has the thickest ice from radar returns and geomorphology indicating shallow ice. It has the highest combined SWIM score for ice, but appears slightly rocky and rough.”

Below the fold are images, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, of the four primary landing sites, as well as links to the full images of all four plus the three back-up sites (AP8, EM15, and PM7).
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The changing seasons of Saturn

1:58 pm

Saturn changing
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Images of Saturn taken by the Hubble Space Telescope since 2018 now reveal the slow seasonal changes to the gas giant’s atmosphere during its lengthy year, twenty-nine Earth years long.

The Hubble data show that from 2018 to 2020 the equator got 5 to 10 percent brighter, and the winds changed slightly. In 2018, winds measured near the equator were about 1,000 miles per hour (roughly 1,600 kilometers per hour), higher than those measured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft during 2004-2009, when they were about 800 miles per hour (roughly 1,300 kilometers per hour). In 2019 and 2020 they decreased back to the Cassini speeds. Saturn’s winds also vary with altitude, so the change in measured speeds could possibly mean the clouds in 2018 were around 37 miles (about 60 kilometers) deeper than those measured during the Cassini mission. Further observations are needed to tell which is happening.

The photo above shows Saturn’s northern hemisphere in 2018, 2019, and 2020. Note how the darker region at the pole grows with time.

This data supplements the data obtained by Cassini when it was in orbit around Saturn, and is presently the best information we can get since the Cassini mission ended.

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A drainage channel on Mars

12:01 pm

A drainage channel on Mars
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Today’s cool image from Mars highlights what is probably the biggest geological conundrum the red planet presents for planetary scientists. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on February 1, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Though I have cropped it, I have cropped out very little, because the entire meandering drainage valley is its most interesting feature, and that takes up almost the entire image.

The photo was simply labeled by the camera team a “terrain sample northwest of Sytinskaya Crater”, so I suspect this was taken not in connection with any specific research but because they must use the camera at a regular intervals to maintain its temperature, and when they have gaps in their schedule they try to pick spots of interest in areas that have not had many high resolution photos taken. In this case however I suspect the location choice was very far from random, as they clearly wanted to capture this drainage system, in its entirety.

I called this merely a drainage channel without indicating what caused the channel, be it liquid water, ice, or wind, because in this case that is a main question. At first glance an Earthman will immediately suspect water, which is what scientists supposed for the last half century. The problem with that conclusion is that the Martian atmosphere is too cold and thin for liquid water to exist on its surface, and though there seems to be plenty of evidence that liquid water once existed there, no scientist has yet come up with a completely accepted climate model that allows for such conditions in anytime in Mars’ past.

The rover Opportunity found that some channels it explored might have been carved by wind, though to our human eyes it seems unlikely that a meandering tributary system such as this could have been carved by wind. The possibility however must not be dismissed out of hand, since Mars is an alien planet and alien things (to Earth) happen there.

The overview map below might provide some context.
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What it sounds like when Perseverance moves

8:41 am

NASA has released audio recorded by one of Perseverance’s microphones as the rover completed one of its earliest drives.

NASA released two versions of the audio — one 90-second file edited and processed to filter out background noise, and another 16-minute clip with raw, unfiltered sound.

…Perseverance recorded the sounds during a 90-foot (27.3-meter) drive March 7, according to NASA. The rover’s top speed is a little less than 0.1 mph, or about 152 meters per hour.

The longer, raw audio clip includes a high-pitched scratching noise. The origin of the sound remains a mystery. “Perseverance’s engineering team continues to evaluate the source of the scratching noise, which may either be electromagnetic interference from one of the rover’s electronics boxes or interactions between the mobility system and the Martian surface,” NASA said in a statement. “The EDL microphone was not intended for surface operations and had limited testing in this configuration before launch.”

You can hear the recordings at the link.

In addition, the science team has picked the location where Perseverance will deploy the Ingenuity helicopter. A briefing will be held next week on March 23rd to outline the schedule for its test flight, now set for sometime in early April.

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Quakes on Mars as seen by InSight

3:14 pm

Martian quake map as seen by InSight

After completing its first full Martian year on the surface of the Red Planet, the scientists for the lander InSight today gave a report [pdf] of their results at this year’s annual 52nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, normally held in Texas but being done virtually this year out of terror of the coronavirus.

All told the lander’s seismometer has, as of just a few days ago, detected just over 500 quakes. The map to the right, showing the most distinct quakes and their locations, was adapted from a different presentation [pdf] at the conference. The numbers indicate the sols after landing when these quakes were detected.

This is essentially the region on Mars that I call volcano country. Some of the lava flood plains here are the youngest on Mars. To the east just beyond the edge of the map is the Tharsis Bulge, which holds Olympus Mons and the string of three giant volcanoes to its east. South of Cereberus Fossae but north of the yellow-colored cratered highlands is the vast Medusae Fossae Formation, the largest volcanic ash deposit on Mars.

The quakes suggest they are occurring as large blocks shift along faults, creating fissures and cracks that geologists call grabens. The long fissures of Cereberus Fossae are considered an example of grabens, so this activity suggests that shifting is still going on in the region.

In addition to outlining the location of the detected volcanoes, the presentation today summarized these other discoveries made by InSight about Mars’ interior structure:

  • The crust of Mars has likely two or three layers either 12 or 24 miles thick, with a total thickness no more than 45 miles. This is much thinner than most scientists had expected.
  • The mantle layer below the crust is estimated at about 250 to 375 miles thick, with a temperature between 1,600 to 1,700 degrees Kelvin. While quite hot, this is a cooler mantle than expected.
  • The core of Mars is somewhere between 1,100 to 1,300 miles in diameter, with a outer layer made of liquid. These results are at the high end of pre-mission expectations.

As already admitted, it was noted that the heat sensor experiment will not be able to provide the interior temperature of Mars, as its digging mole was unable to dig into the ground the 9 to 15 feet planned.

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Scallops of Martian ice

11:19 am

Scallops of Martian ice
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Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was yesterday’s captioned image from the MRO science team. From the caption, written by Shane Byrne of the Lunar and Planetary Lab University of Arizona,

About a third of Mars has water ice just below the dusty surface. Figuring out exactly where is vital for future human explorers. One of the ways scientists do this is to look for landforms that only occur when this buried ice is present. These scallops are one of those diagnostic landforms.

A layer of clean ice lies just below the surface in this image. As the ice ablates away in some spots the surface dust collapses into the hole that’s left. These holes grow into the scallops visible here as more and more ice is lost.

You can see those holes near the top of the scallop’s slopes.
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