Take A Little Piece of Mars, Now, Honey

Tuckerfan · May 26, 2021

MARS ROVERS: 5 THINGS YOU DON’T REALIZE UNTIL YOU DRIVE ONE FOR 13 YEARS

Bickendan · May 28, 2021

We Are Borg said: ↑

Music on Mars: If you thought space was silent, take a closer listen
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Hmm, sounds supsiciously like Holst

steve2^4 · May 28, 2021

NASA’s Mars helicopter had a midair brain fart

Tuckerfan · Jun 7, 2021

Tuckerfan · Jun 11, 2021

China's rover takes a selfie.

Tuckerfan · Jun 27, 2021

Tuckerfan · Jul 11, 2021

Flight number 9.

NASA Mars helicopter pulls off 'nail-biter' ninth flight over rough terrain

When NASA sent the Ingenuity helicopter to Mars, it was gamble. Now it's pushing its limits, flying fast and reaching new heights. NASA announced on Monday that Ingenuity successfully completed its ninth and "most challenging" flight, and we now have the details of what NASA called a "nail-biter."

NASA's goal was to go big with a daring "high-speed flight across unfriendly terrain" that would take the rotorcraft far from its robotic buddy, the Perseverance rover.

Instead of merely hopping ahead of the the rover, the helicopter took a shortcut over a sandy area, setting records for distance, air time and speed in the process. It hit a speed of 16 feet (5 meters) per second and flew for 166.4 seconds while snapping images of the landscape.

The terrain below presented some new challenges for the helicopter's navigation system. Ingenuity had to make sense of "high slopes and undulations" and its team was concerned the machine might accidentally land in a treacherous area. NASA described it as "the most nerve-wracking flight since Flight 1."

The helicopter's navigation system was optimized for flat ground. It looks down, assesses what it sees and uses that information to get where it's going.

For the ninth flight, the chopper had to dip into a crater, a potentially dangerous move for a machine trained to make sense of flat terrain. To compensate, the Ingenuity team reduced its speed at that point and selected a large potential landing zone in case Ingenuity got a little lost along the way.

Ingenuity landed in a good spot and NASA reported the team was jubilant on learning the chopper was alive and well.

Ingenuity will be sending back color images from the adventure, which will show how a flying machine can be a useful scout for a land-bound rover. "This flight was also explicitly designed to have science value by providing the first close view of major science targets that the rover will not reach for quite some time," NASA said in a statement on Wednesday.

Ingenuity has already overcome a variety of potential obstacles, from a software glitch to an in-flight anomaly. While the flight was risky, it made sense for what was always considered a high-risk, high-reward technology experiment.

"A successful flight would be a powerful demonstration of the capability that an aerial vehicle (and only an aerial vehicle) can bring to bear in the context of Mars exploration -- traveling quickly across otherwise untraversable terrain while scouting for interesting science targets," NASA said. Consider it demonstrated.
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Tuckerfan · Sep 11, 2021

How about two pieces?

Perseverance Cored Two Martian Rocks That May Be Volcanic and Shaped by Water

In a press conference on Friday, NASA revealed more about the Perseverance rover’s first successful collection of Martian rock, which was confirmed Monday. The successful sampling is the fundamental first step in a 10-year-plan to bring Martian rock to Earth for close examination.

A surprise from the conference was that, since that first collection, Perseverance actually collected a second sample core from the same rock. NASA scientists said that the rock was so nice (meaning scientifically intriguing) that they cored it twice. The hope is that samples like these will make it to Earth by the 2030s, in one of the most ambitious experiments humans have conducted in space, and will offer insights into Martian geologic history and the tantalizing possibility of ancient Martian life.

“I’m happy to say that not one, but that the first two samples of another planet are prepped and stowed as the first official candidate samples to be returned to Earth by a future mission,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. “One of the reasons we explored Mars is because it holds a rock record that’s been untouched for about 3.5 to 4 billion years … Mars doesn’t have plate tectonics, so its early history is well preserved in the layers of rocks on the planet’s surface.”

The first attempt to sample rock was unsuccessful, as previously reported by Gizmodo. Though early indications suggested that a rock sample had been taken, later analysis revealed there was no sample in the tube. NASA suspects the failure was due to the frailty of the target rock, which appears to have crumbled during the coring process.

NASA’s next target was a rock to the west in Jezero Crater, where Perseverance landed in February and is the site of an ancient lake, long since dried up. On the west side of Jezero is a river delta, which scientists believe is the most intriguing location to search for biosignatures—evidence of life—likely in the form of fossilized microbial mats, similar to the primordial life on Earth.

Perseverance’s science mission has the rover meandering westward toward the delta, picking up rock samples as it goes. The drilling process is thus: Perseverance’s robotic arm has a coring drill on its end, which is placed on the rock target. The rock’s surface is abraded to get rid of any crud that has accumulated. As the rock is drilled, it is extracted and placed in a narrow white sample tube. The arm then pulls the filled sample tube into the rover’s body, which has a sampling processing center. There, the sample is imaged, measured, sealed, and stored. And all this is happening 246 million miles away from the human controllers.

“We all take significant pride in continuing to do things that are hard and challenge ourselves, but we know, and as demonstrated by what we’ve just done, that continuing to work as a team we really can achieve these amazing accomplishments,” said Jessica Samuels, Perseverance’s surface mission manager, during the press conference.

The first, failed sample site is called Roubion and is located on a flat Martian paving stone. The second and third sites were on a more robust rock on the nearby Artuby ridge. That rock is called Rochette, and its core sites are named Montdenier and Montagnac. NASA scientists said that Roubion may be visited later and tried again, as it is still a site of great scientific interest.

Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance’s deputy project scientist, said that, based on current observations, the team tentatively believes both the paving stone and Rochette originated in ancient lava flows. (This determination comes on the heels of much debate as to whether Jezero’s rock is sedimentary or igneous/volcanic.) They determined this based on both the visible textures of both rocks and finer-scale textures.

“They show signs of sustained interactions with groundwater,” Stack Morgan said. “If these rocks experienced water for long amounts of time, there may be habitable niches within these rocks that could have supported ancient microbial life.”

Spectral analysis of the rock cores using different instruments aboard the rover, including the PIXL instrument, identified calcium, sulfur, and small inclusions of salt in the rock.

“We have collected a rock from the floor of the Jezero Crater that is igneous, or volcanic, in origin, and it has salts within it. The presence of salts indicate that the rock was subject to water. The water percolated through the rock and, as it percolated and evaporated afterwards, it left behind this salty residue,” said Yulia Goreva, the Perseverance return sample investigation scientist.

Back on Earth, such a sample would be analyzed to determine its exact mineralogical composition, its age, and its chemistry. Tiny inclusions in the salt would reveal something of what Jezero Crater was like when it was covered in water, Goreva added.

It’s a huge, metaphorical sigh of relief that Perseverance is able to core the rock at all. The Martian surface behaves in unexpected ways, as the InSight Mars lander team found out when their “mole” digger got hopelessly stuck in the dusty surface and had to be abandoned.

Once the samples get to Earth, they will be handled carefully to make sure they last. It’s not every day that you get the funding and human power to bring rocks from a distant world to our planet. It also marks a precursor to NASA’s long game: getting humans on Mars, so that we don’t have to do this whole robotic rigamarole forever.
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More pics at the link.

Tuckerfan · Oct 22, 2021

Tuckerfan · Nov 19, 2021

Flying high again.

Perseverance Rover Captures Awesome Video of Helicopter Flying on Mars

Though Ingenuity continues to break its own records as the first powered, controlled flying machine on another planet, we haven’t had have much visual evidence of its exploits. There’s the telemetry data that NASA scientists receive on Earth, but not much in the way of photos and videos. Happily, NASA has now released the most detailed footage yet of Ingenuity in flight.

The two videos were taken during the rotorcraft’s 13th flight, which took place on September 4. The 16-second flight saw Ingenuity travel nearly 700 feet horizontally, at an altitude of 26 feet. The Perseverance rover recorded the rotorcraft’s maneuvers using its two-camera Mastcam-Z, from a distance of about 1,000 feet away.

“The value of Mastcam-Z really shines through with these video clips,” Justin Maki, deputy principal investigator for the Mastcam-Z instrument at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a NASA press release. “Even at 300 meters [984 feet] away, we get a magnificent closeup of takeoff and landing through Mastcam-Z’s ‘right eye.’ And while the helicopter is little more than a speck in the wide view taken through the ‘left eye,’ it gives viewers a good feel for the size of the environment that Ingenuity is exploring.”

Recently, the scientists at NASA had to program Ingenuity to move a little faster, to compensate for the thinner atmosphere on Mars as the planet’s seasons change. The helicopter’s navigation system is automated and uses artificial intelligence to constantly measure and correct for environmental variables like wind speed and the level of the ground below it.

“It’s awesome to actually get to see this [automatic correction] occur,” said Håvard Grip, Ingenuity’s chief pilot, in the same release. “It reinforces the accuracy of our modeling and our understanding of how to best operate Ingenuity.”

On its 13th flight, Ingenuity took 10 images of some interesting rock outcrops on the ground as part of its ongoing scouting mission for Perseverance. The Perseverance rover is basically a rolling geologist (complete with a mini-lab), and Ingenuity, having graduated from being a mere technology demonstration, is now using its flights to locate intriguing rock deposits.

With the solar conjunction over, during which time the Sun interrupted communications between Earth and Mars, Ingenuity will begin its journey back to its first airfield. The road ahead is long for Perseverance rover, but where Ingenuity’s going, it doesn’t need roads.
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Tuckerfan · Jan 1, 2022

Tuckerfan · Jan 18, 2022

Tuckerfan · Jan 31, 2022

Tuckerfan · Apr 1, 2022

More sounds from Mars!

Tuckerfan · Apr 1, 2022

Tuckerfan · Apr 9, 2022

Hard to believe that it's been a year, already.

Bickendan · Apr 11, 2022

Tuckerfan said: ↑

Hard to believe that it's been a year, already.

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Martian or Terran year?

Tuckerfan · Apr 20, 2022

Tuckerfan · May 8, 2022

We Are Borg · May 8, 2022

What is that?

Tuckerfan · May 8, 2022

We Are Borg said: ↑

What is that?
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What's left of the Skycrane that dropped Perseverance on Mars.

Tuckerfan · May 9, 2022

Ground Control to Major Tom.

Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Went Silent, Leaving Anxious NASA Team in the Dark

Late last week, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter managed to reestablish its connection with the Perseverance rover following a brief communications disruption. The space agency says the looming winter is likely responsible and is making adjustments as a result.

On Thursday, Ingenuity—mercifully—sent a signal to Perseverance after the intrepid helicopter missed a scheduled communications session. It marked the first time since the pair landed together on Mars in February 2021 that Ingenuity has missed an appointment, according to NASA.

The team behind the mission believes that Ingenuity had entered into a low-power state to conserve energy, and it did so in response to the charge of its six lithium-ion batteries dropping below a critical threshold. This was likely due to the approaching winter, when more dust appears in the Martian atmosphere and the temperatures get colder. The dust blocks the amount of sunlight that reaches the helicopter’s solar array, which charges its batteries.

The Perseverance rover is on a mission to find evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars, while the rover’s much smaller companion, Ingenuity, became the first powered aircraft to lift off from the surface of another planet on April 19, 2021. The two robots share a communication line, with Perseverance relaying Ingenuity’s messages to Earth. Ingenuity uses small antennas to communicate with Perseverance, exchanging data that is then routed to the rover’s main computer and transferred to Earth through NASA’s Deep Space Network (a global array of radio antennas).

Ingenuity has an alarm that wakes the helicopter for its scheduled communication sessions with Perseverance. But on May 3, Ingenuity was a no-show for the scheduled daily data exchange after its field-programmable gate array lost power overnight, causing a reset of the helicopter’s onboard clock (the gate array manages Ingenuity’s operational state, switching its electronic systems on and off to conserve power). The Sun’s rays recharged Ingenuity’s batteries the following morning, but the helicopter’s clock was now out of sync with Perseverance’s clock. By the time Ingenuity was able to send out a signal, the rover was no longer listening.

Two days later, mission control set out to fix the pair’s communication issue by programming the rover to spend nearly the entirety of its 429th sol (a Martian day, which lasts slightly longer than a day on Earth) listening for the helicopter’s signal. Ingenuity’s call finally came in on May 5 at 11:45 a.m. local Mars time. Although brief, Ingenuity’s call reassured the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that the helicopter’s battery was healthy and that the solar array was recharging its batteries.

Ingenuity wasn’t exactly built to withstand the harsh Martian winter nights, as the rotorcraft was designed to last only 30 sols on Mars. But the 19-inch tall (48 cm), 4-pound (1.8 kg) helicopter has gone far beyond its test flights, recently receiving an extension on its mission to assist Perseverance as it explores the Martian terrain. Ingenuity will now fly above the Martian surface, advising Perseverance’s controllers on the most ideal routes.

“We have always known that Martian winter and dust storm season would present new challenges for Ingenuity, specifically colder sols, an increase in atmospheric dust, and more frequent dust storms,” Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity team lead at JPL, said in a statement. “Every flight and every mile of distance flown beyond our original 30-sol mission has pushed the spacecraft to its limits each and every sol on Mars.”

For now, the team has put together a plan to help the tiny helicopter survive the looming winter. The newly issued commands “lower the point at which the helicopter energizes its heaters from when the battery falls below 5 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 15 degrees Celsius) to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 40 degrees Celsius),” according to NASA, which added that the “helicopter then shuts down quickly, rather than consuming the battery charge with the heaters.” This should allow Ingenuity to accumulate battery charge during the day, which it can then use to survive the bitterly cold nights.

“Our top priority is to maintain communications with Ingenuity in the next few sols, but even then, we know that there will be significant challenges ahead,” Tzanetos said. “We are hopeful that we can accumulate battery charge in order to return to nominal operations and continue our mission into the weeks ahead.”

Even with the dropped call, Ingenuity still remains the little copter that could, surpassing expectations with a total of 28 flights logged on Mars. Hard to believe now, but the original plan was to have Ingenuity perform just five flights on the Red Planet.
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Tuckerfan · May 9, 2022

Mouseover text

We all remember those famous first words spoken by an astronaut on the surface of Mars: "That's one small step fo- HOLY SHIT! LOOK OUT! IT'S GOT SOME KIND OF DRILL! Get back to the... [unintelligible] ... [signal lost]"
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Tuckerfan · May 22, 2022

Tuckerfan · May 27, 2022

Tuckerfan · May 29, 2022

Bickendan · Jun 12, 2022

Tuckerfan said: ↑

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No Uranus Rover?

Wasted opportunity, Cyanide and Happiness

Steal Your Face · Sep 1, 2022

Tuckerfan said: ↑

If you want oxygen on Mars, it takes MOXIE!

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Just Turned Martian CO2 Into Oxygen

A toaster-sized scientific instrument attached to NASA’s Perseverance rover just sucked up a bit of carbon dioxide from the surrounding Martian atmosphere and converted it into oxygen.

It’s a groundbreaking first that could lead to a future in which space travelers are not only able to generate air to breathe, but rocket fuel to get them back to Earth as well — while still on Mars.

The instrument, called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), is a technology demonstration that could eventually be scaled up to produce enough propellant to enable a crew of astronauts to take off from the surface of the Red Planet.

“This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars,” said Jim Reuter, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD), in a statement. “MOXIE has more work to do, but the results from this technology demonstration are full of promise as we move toward our goal of one day seeing humans on Mars.”

“Oxygen isn’t just the stuff we breathe,” he added. “Rocket propellant depends on oxygen, and future explorers will depend on producing propellant on Mars to make the trip home.”

To get a crew of four astronauts off of the Martian surface, you would need about 15,000 pounds of rocket fuel and 55,0000 pounds of oxygen, according to NASA. To breathe, though, you’d only need about a metric ton for a crew of four for an entire year, according to MOXIE’s principal investigator Michael Hecht.

Schlepping all that oxygen all the way to Mars would be complicated and costly. That’s why scientists are considering extracting oxygen in situ.

To convert the carbon dioxide, MOXIE had to heat up the gas to about 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit. It managed to produce about five grams of oxygen, which is about 10 minutes worth of breathable oxygen. It generates up to ten grams of oxygen per hour.

Hecht is now planning to “push the envelope” and have MOXIE try new operating modes or attempt to extract oxygen at varying temperatures.

“MOXIE isn’t just the first instrument to produce oxygen on another world,” said Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations within the Directorate. It’s also the first to lay the groundwork for future missions that could make use of in situ resources.

First, we had NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity perform the first ever controlled flight on the surface of another planet — and now this. Hats off to NASA’s tremendous efforts to bring Mars nearer to us than ever before.
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So it's producing a small tree's worth of oxygen.
https://www.cnet.com/science/space/...e/?utm_source=ground.news&utm_medium=referral

Tuckerfan · Dec 10, 2022

NASA's Mars Ingenuity helicopter just flew higher than ever before

Tuckerfan · Dec 22, 2022

How we’ll send samples of Mars to Earth. https://twitter.com/lmspace/status/1605752194657034241?s=46&t=NLQPYCVM6qXkDa6VHIXy0w

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