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Mars Curiosity Thread.

Started by Tank, August 05, 2012, 08:05:20 PM

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Davin

We lost one rover, but extra time out of the other two made up for it.

I wonder what the planning sessions for their extra time went, like how they prioritized the science they wanted to do.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Tank

Quote from: Davin on March 26, 2018, 10:09:44 PM
We lost one rover, but extra time out of the other two made up for it.

I wonder what the planning sessions for their extra time went, like how they prioritized the science they wanted to do.
It would be very interesting to be a fly on the wall for many NASA meetings.
If religions were TV channels atheism is turning the TV off.
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ― Richard P. Feynman
'It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.' - Terry Pratchett
Remember, your inability to grasp science is not a valid argument against it.

Ecurb Noselrub

Quote from: Tank on March 27, 2018, 08:29:21 AM
Quote from: Davin on March 26, 2018, 10:09:44 PM
We lost one rover, but extra time out of the other two made up for it.

I wonder what the planning sessions for their extra time went, like how they prioritized the science they wanted to do.
It would be very interesting to be a fly on the wall for many NASA meetings.

They don't allow flies in there. Very sanitary, from what I could tell on my visit.

Icarus


Icarus

Well whoopee, astronomers have discovered a new star or some sort of object that is the farther from the earth than any other object in the catalogues. Some nine billion light years away.  It is catalogued as MACS J1149.   The astronomers are calling it Icarus. Yeahhhhh, I am almost  famous but kind of far out.

joeactor

Quote from: Icarus on April 09, 2018, 11:38:08 PM
Well whoopee, astronomers have discovered a new star or some sort of object that is the farther from the earth than any other object in the catalogues. Some nine billion light years away.  It is catalogued as MACS J1149.   The astronomers are calling it Icarus. Yeahhhhh, I am almost  famous but kind of far out.

Congrats!

Tank

NASA Finds Ancient Organic Material, Mysterious Methane on Mars

QuoteNASA's Curiosity rover has found new evidence preserved in rocks on Mars that suggests the planet could have supported ancient life, as well as new evidence in the Martian atmosphere that relates to the search for current life on the Red Planet. While not necessarily evidence of life itself, these findings are a good sign for future missions exploring the planet's surface and subsurface.

The new findings – "tough" organic molecules in three-billion-year-old sedimentary rocks near the surface, as well as seasonal variations in the levels of methane in the atmosphere – appear in the June 8 edition of the journal Science.
If religions were TV channels atheism is turning the TV off.
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ― Richard P. Feynman
'It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.' - Terry Pratchett
Remember, your inability to grasp science is not a valid argument against it.

Recusant

More on the variations in methane levels observed in the atmosphere of Mars:

"Curiosity's Mars Methane Mystery Continues" | NASA

QuoteCuriosity's team conducted a follow-on methane experiment this past weekend. The results came down early Monday morning: The methane levels have sharply decreased, with less than 1 part per billion by volume detected. That's a value close to the background levels Curiosity sees all the time.

The finding suggests last week's methane detection — the largest amount of the gas Curiosity has ever found — was one of the transient methane plumes that have been observed in the past. While scientists have observed the background levels rise and fall seasonally, they haven't found a pattern in the occurrence of these transient plumes.

"The methane mystery continues," said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We're more motivated than ever to keep measuring and put our brains together to figure out how methane behaves in the Martian atmosphere."

Curiosity doesn't have instruments that can definitively say whether the source of the methane is biological or geological. A clearer understanding of these plumes, combined with coordinated measurements from other missions, could help scientists determine where they're located on Mars.

[Continues . . .]

Now, an "oxygen mystery" has been added.

"With Mars Methane Mystery Unsolved, Curiosity Serves Scientists a New One: Oxygen" | NASA

QuoteFor the first time in the history of space exploration, scientists have measured the seasonal changes in the gases that fill the air directly above the surface of Gale Crater on Mars. As a result, they noticed something baffling: oxygen, the gas many Earth creatures use to breathe, behaves in a way that so far scientists cannot explain through any known chemical processes.

Over the course of three Mars years (or nearly six Earth years) an instrument in the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) portable chemistry lab inside the belly of NASA's Curiosity rover inhaled the air of Gale Crater and analyzed its composition. The results SAM spit out confirmed the makeup of the Martian atmosphere at the surface: 95% by volume of carbon dioxide (CO2), 2.6% molecular nitrogen (N2), 1.9% argon (Ar), 0.16% molecular oxygen (O2), and 0.06% carbon monoxide (CO). They also revealed how the molecules in the Martian air mix and circulate with the changes in air pressure throughout the year. These changes are caused when CO2 gas freezes over the poles in the winter, thereby lowering the air pressure across the planet following redistribution of air to maintain pressure equilibrium. When CO2 evaporates in the spring and summer and mixes across Mars, it raises the air pressure.

Within this environment, scientists found that nitrogen and argon follow a predictable seasonal pattern, waxing and waning in concentration in Gale Crater throughout the year relative to how much CO2 is in the air. They expected oxygen to do the same. But it didn't. Instead, the amount of the gas in the air rose throughout spring and summer by as much as 30%, and then dropped back to levels predicted by known chemistry in fall. This pattern repeated each spring, though the amount of oxygen added to the atmosphere varied, implying that something was producing it and then taking it away.

[Continues . . .]

Something like anaerobic bacteria, perhaps?  As a bonus, we have an article from a NASA scientist who describes an old experiment and its results which he believes were evidence of life on Mars. That particular experiment has not been repeated.

"I'm Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s" | Scientific American

QuoteWe humans can now peer back into the virtual origin of our universe. We have learned much about the laws of nature that control its seemingly infinite celestial bodies, their evolution, motions and possible fate. Yet, equally remarkable, we have no generally accepted information as to whether other life exists beyond us, or whether we are, as was Samuel Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, "alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide wide sea!" We have made only one exploration to solve that primal mystery. I was fortunate to have participated in that historic adventure as experimenter of the Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment on NASA's spectacular Viking mission to Mars in 1976.

On July 30, 1976, the LR returned its initial results from Mars. Amazingly, they were positive. As the experiment progressed, a total of four positive results, supported by five varied controls, streamed down from the twin Viking spacecraft landed some 4,000 miles apart. The data curves signaled the detection of microbial respiration on the Red Planet. The curves from Mars were similar to those produced by LR tests of soils on Earth. It seemed we had answered that ultimate question.

When the Viking Molecular Analysis Experiment failed to detect organic matter, the essence of life, however, NASA concluded that the LR had found a substance mimicking life, but not life. Inexplicably, over the 43 years since Viking, none of NASA's subsequent Mars landers has carried a life detection instrument to follow up on these exciting results. Instead the agency launched a series of missions to Mars to determine whether there was ever a habitat suitable for life and, if so, eventually to bring samples to Earth for biological examination.

[Continues . . .]
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Recusant

#38
Curiosity has found oil, sort of. The link to MSN below will probably expire at some point (not soon, but I've noticed before that MSN doesn't maintain stories on its site indefinitely), and the original is behind a paywall. The news release from WSU linked in the story should remain on the net, though.

"Scientists Found Oil on Mars. Or Truffles." | MSN/The Daily Beast

The paywall has been removed. Original article: "Scientists Found Oil on Mars. Or Truffles." | The Daily Beast

QuoteTechnically speaking, Dirk Schulze‑Makuch and Jacob Heinz didn't find oil. Rather, they found organic compounds called "thiophenes" that are also present in crude oil, coal, and truffles.

Thiophene molecules include four carbon atoms and a sulfur atom in a ring-like shape. There are lots of ways thiophenes get created. Not all of them are "biotic," meaning they involve life.

But many of them are biotic. And if that's the case with the thiophenes Schulze‑Makuch and Heinz found on Mars, then the discovery could be proof of, well, alien life.

"If they are biotic, it means that there was early life on Mars," Schulze‑Makuch told The Daily Beast, "and that there is possibly still extant life in some ecological niches of Mars today."

The thiophenes turned up in dried-up mud that NASA's Curiosity Rover dug up in Mars' Gale Crater. Curiosity landed on the Red Planet in 2012 and has spent the last eight years rolling around Mars, periodically pausing to scoop up samples, analyze them, and beam the raw data back to Earth.

Schulze‑Makuch from Washington State University and Heinz from Berlin's Technische Universität studied the numbers from Curiosity and concluded the Martian dirt held thiophenes. They published their findings this month in the science journal Astrobiology.

The astrobiologists can't say for sure what produced the Martian thiophenes. On Earth, thiophenes often result from the eons-long process of fossilization: plankton living, dying, sinking to the seafloor, getting buried and pressure-cooked into oil.

But thiophenes can also result from a non-organic process called thermochemical sulfate reduction, which involves heating up certain compounds to hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit. A meteorite impact could spark thermochemical sulfate reduction.

The best Schulze‑Makuch and Heinz could do was identify all the ways the thiophenes might have gotten into the Martian dirt.

"We identified several biological pathways for thiophenes that seem more likely than chemical ones, but we still need proof," Schulze‑Makuch said in a statement. "If you find thiophenes on Earth, then you would think they are biological, but on Mars, of course, the bar to prove that has to be quite a bit higher."

To prove that the Martian compounds came from some kind of alien life, Schulze‑Makuch and Heinz would have to find the parent molecule. In other words, tiny fragments of the Martian equivalent of Earth's plankton tissues that, over millions of years, eventually became oil.

Just don't count on Curiosity to do the heavy lifting. The decade-old rover doesn't have the equipment to handle really delicate samples. Curiosity gathers a lot of its data by way of pyrolysis gas chromatography—in essence, it burns up samples and analyzes the resulting gas.

The extreme heat the process requires can wreck the very thing it's examining. The sample in which Schulze‑Makuch and Heinz found their thiophenes reportedly was a bit damaged.

[Continues . . .]

Only the abstract of the paper is currently available.

QuoteThe question whether organic compounds occur on Mars remained unanswered for decades. However, the recent discovery of various classes of organic matter in martian sediments by the Curiosity rover seems to strongly suggest that indigenous organic compounds exist on Mars. One intriguing group of detected organic compounds were thiophenes, which typically occur on Earth in kerogen, coal, and crude oil as well as in stromatolites and microfossils. Here we provide a brief synopsis of conceivable pathways for the generation and degradation of thiophenes on Mars. We show that the origin of thiophene derivatives can either be biotic or abiotic, for example, through sulfur incorporation in organic matter during early diagenesis. The potential of thiophenes to represent martian biomarkers is discussed as well as a correlation between abundancies of thiophenes and sulfate-bearing minerals. Finally, this study provides suggestions for future investigations on Mars and in Earth-based laboratories to answer the question whether the martian thiophenes are of biological origin.
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Icarus

Maybe Orson Wells famous program was not the hoax that it seemed to be.

Recusant

A new Mars rover (called Perseverance) is nearing its launch date. Hat-tip to Lark for this story.  :boaterhat:

In due time Perseverance will no doubt have its own thread, but it's not safely there yet . . .

"Nasa Mars rover: Meteorite to head home to Red Planet" | BBC

QuoteA small chunk of Mars will be heading home when the US space agency launches its latest rover mission on Thursday.

Nasa's Perseverance robot will carry with it a meteorite that originated on the Red Planet and which, until now, has been lodged in the collection of London's Natural History Museum (NHM).

The rock's known properties will act as a calibration target to benchmark the workings of a rover instrument.

It will give added confidence to any discoveries the robot might make.

This will be particularly important if Perseverance stumbles across something that hints at the presence of past life on the planet - one of the mission's great quests.

[. . .]

The rock has been put in a housing, along with nine other types of material, on the front of the rover where it will be scanned from time to time by the Sherloc instrument.

This is a tool that contains two imagers and two laser spectroscopes, which together will investigate the geology of the rover's landing site - a 40km-wide crater called Jezero.

Satellite images suggest the bowl once held a lake, and scientists consider it to be one of the best places on Mars to try to find evidence of past microbial activity - if ever that took place.

Sherloc will study the local rocks and soil, looking for signatures of ancient biology.

What scientists don't want, however, is to have what they think is a "eureka moment" only to then realise Sherloc had developed some systematic error in its observations.

"We'll look at the calibration target in the first 60-90 days and perhaps not again for six months because we think the instrument is really very stable," said Dr Luther Beegle, Sherloc's principal investigator from Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"But if we start seeing interesting things on the surface of Mars that we can't explain in the spectra, then we'll look back to the calibration target to make sure that the instrument's working correctly.

"I think the best we're going to be able to do from a scientific perspective is identify what we would call a 'potential bio-signature'.

"I don't think we'll ever be necessarily 100% sure because that's a hard measurement to make, which is why the sample-return aspect of Perseverance is so important."

[Continues . . .]
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Recusant

#41
Perhaps we'll get some interesting video of the Marsfall of Perseverance in a while. Launching on July 30--already today in some parts of the world.  :smokin cool:

"NASA added 6 HD video cameras to its next Mars rover so we can all watch the first footage of a spacecraft landing on another planet" | Business Insider

QuoteOne out of every two spacecraft that humanity rockets toward Mars for a landing never makes it.

Those are the rough odds facing NASA's upcoming Mars 2020 mission and Perseverance rover, which is currently scheduled to launch from Earth on July 30 and reach the red planet on February 18.

The mission's $2.4 billion cost, eight years of development, and work by thousands of people will come down to a recurring nightmare for aerospace engineers called the "seven minutes of terror" — the entry, descent, and landing phase that all Mars spacecraft must survive in order to explore the world's surface.

"We've got literally seven minutes to get from the top of the atmosphere to the surface of Mars, going from 13,000 mph to zero in perfect sequence, perfect choreography, perfect timing," Adam Steltzner, chief engineer of the Perseverance mission, said in a 2012 NASA-JPL video about its predecessor robot, the Curiosity rover (which is still going strong). "The computer has to do it all by itself with no help from the ground. If any one thing doesn't work just right, it's game over."

Like the Mars missions before it, Curiosity took some still photos of part of its descent, though no interplanetary spacecraft has ever recorded bonafide video of its landing phase, let alone in high-definition.

With Perseverance, however, the team behind the car-size, nuclear-powered robot is hoping to change that.

"We have something new this time: We've taken some ruggedized commercial cameras, and we've dispensed them around the spacecraft," Matt Wallace, deputy project manager of the Mars mission, said during a June 17 press briefing. "Those those cameras will be taking high-definition video of the spacecraft during entry, descent, and landing activity. So we should be able to watch this big parachute inflate supersonically, we should be able to watch the rover deploy and touch down on the surface."

He added: "This is going to be very exciting; it's the first time that we have ever been able to see a spacecraft land on another planet."

[Continues . . .]
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Randy

"Maybe it's just a bunch of stuff that happens." -- Homer Simpson
"Some people focus on the destination. Atheists focus on the journey." -- Barry Goldberg

Recusant

Quote from: Randy on July 29, 2020, 11:41:55 PM
Exciting stuff!

There was an error in my post. I said the landing date was July 30, but that's the launch date. I've edited the post to correct the error.  :embarrassed:
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


xSilverPhinx

Quote from: Recusant on July 29, 2020, 11:32:55 PM
Perhaps we'll get some interesting video of the Marsfall of Perseverance in a while. Launching on July 30--already today in some parts of the world.  :smokin cool:

"NASA added 6 HD video cameras to its next Mars rover so we can all watch the first footage of a spacecraft landing on another planet" | Business Insider

QuoteOne out of every two spacecraft that humanity rockets toward Mars for a landing never makes it.

Those are the rough odds facing NASA's upcoming Mars 2020 mission and Perseverance rover, which is currently scheduled to launch from Earth on July 30 and reach the red planet on February 18.

The mission's $2.4 billion cost, eight years of development, and work by thousands of people will come down to a recurring nightmare for aerospace engineers called the "seven minutes of terror" — the entry, descent, and landing phase that all Mars spacecraft must survive in order to explore the world's surface.

"We've got literally seven minutes to get from the top of the atmosphere to the surface of Mars, going from 13,000 mph to zero in perfect sequence, perfect choreography, perfect timing," Adam Steltzner, chief engineer of the Perseverance mission, said in a 2012 NASA-JPL video about its predecessor robot, the Curiosity rover (which is still going strong). "The computer has to do it all by itself with no help from the ground. If any one thing doesn't work just right, it's game over."

Like the Mars missions before it, Curiosity took some still photos of part of its descent, though no interplanetary spacecraft has ever recorded bonafide video of its landing phase, let alone in high-definition.

With Perseverance, however, the team behind the car-size, nuclear-powered robot is hoping to change that.

"We have something new this time: We've taken some ruggedized commercial cameras, and we've dispensed them around the spacecraft," Matt Wallace, deputy project manager of the Mars mission, said during a June 17 press briefing. "Those those cameras will be taking high-definition video of the spacecraft during entry, descent, and landing activity. So we should be able to watch this big parachute inflate supersonically, we should be able to watch the rover deploy and touch down on the surface."

He added: "This is going to be very exciting; it's the first time that we have ever been able to see a spacecraft land on another planet."

[Continues . . .]

That's really cool!  ;D
I am what survives if it's slain - Zack Hemsey