#MARS #CURIOSITY ROVER’S FIRST TEST FOR METHANE: NOTHING . . .YET

 Mars Curiosity Rover  Photo credit NASA/JPL-Caltech/

The three complex lab tools of rover’s gold-plated Sample Analysis on Mars (SAM), its main instrument for its astrobiology research, has failed to detect the presence of methane gas on the Red Planet.

Ninety percent of the methane in Earth’s atmosphere is produced by living organisms, making methane an important by-product to search for in determining if Mars had ever supported some form of life.

Previous testing on earth and in space detected low concentrations of the gas on Mars.

Because Methane concentrations vary somewhat by region and over time, SAM hasn’t necessarily challenged the validity of those earlier results.  Photochemical reactions in the atmosphere may have destroyed the gas, or it may have been absorbed by the Martian surface.

“At this time, we don’t have a positive detection of methane on Mars,” said Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan, a SAM co-investigator.  “But that could change over time, depending on how methane is produced and how it is destroyed on Mars.”

The presence of Methane isn’t proof-positive of earlier life, because non-biological sources, such as comet strikes, degradation of interplanetary dust motes by ultraviolet light and water-rock interactions also release the gas.

“The bottom line is that we have no detection of methane so far,” Chris Webster, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena told reporters.  “But we’re going to keep looking in the months ahead–since Mars, as we all know, may yet hold surprises for us.”

Sources:   Livescience, November 5, 2012

#MARS #CURIOSITY ROVER ANALYZES MARTIAN SOIL, HOPING TO IDENTIFY SHINY #“SCHMUTZ”

The robotic arm of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity scooped three bites out of Martian sandy “Rocknest“ on its 69^th Martian sol (day) on October 15, 2012.

The three samples came from the sandy soil at Curiosity’s target site, Glenelg Intrigue, a.k.a. the “promised land,” where three different types of Martian terrain converge.

Curiosity delivered the samples to the rover’s observation tray on its 70^th sol, October 16, 2012.  Rover then shook some soil inside sample-processing chambers to scrub internal surfaces of residue carried from Earth.

On its 71^st sol, rover’s robotic arm deposited a sieved sample of soil, about the size of a baby aspirin, into the inlet funnel of the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument for analysis of the soil’s mineral content.   CheMin will direct X-ray beams as fine as a human hair through the powdered material to determine its mineral content.

Researchers were perplexed when they found a half-inch chunk of bright material in one of the scoops and later identified it as debris from the spacecraft.

”Schmutz” shines center stage in this portion of Curiosity’s second scoop of Rocknest soil. 

More intriguing, though, are the smaller bits of light-toned material retrieved from the second scoop of sample soil.   The preliminary assessment is that these smaller, bright particles are native to Martian soil and are not debris from the spacecraft.

Stumped as to how to classify these particles, Curiosity lead scientist at the California Institute of Technology, John Grotzinger, reported that the science team refers to them as “schmutz.”

He continued, “We had a lot of fun with that, labeling them and comparing, but in the end it turns out we really feel this is a different sort of particle.

”We are crossing a significant threshold for this mission by using CheMin on its first sample.  This instrument gives us a more definitive mineral-identifying method than ever before used on Mars:  X-ray diffraction.  Confidently identifying minerals is important because minerals record the environmental conditions under which they form.”

“Schmutz” not withstanding, Curiosity Project Manger Richard Cook of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, refers to the brightly colored shards as “fodder for the mission’s scientific studies.”   He says the discovery of the unexpected bright particles focused researchers’ attention on the unknown possibilities of the mission.

“We got to believing there were things around us and began to look at everything through that lens,” he said.  “We definitely are more aware of what’s out there now and are more careful about everything we look at.”

Cook explained that the information gained about the rocks and soil at Glenelg Intrigue will help scientists to decide where to finally break out Curiosity’s drill.

Source:   NASA website, October 18, 2012   Dailymail Online UK, October 19, 2012     Photo credits NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

#MARS #CURIOSITY’S ROVER RACING TOWARD GLENELG INTRIGUE AT 0.1 MPH

Rover’s track prints in the sands of Mars 

 “It’s nice to see some Martian soil on our wheels,” said mission manager Arthur Amador of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Earlier this week the rover traveled 52 feet southeastward, flat out at 1.6 inches per second toward its short-term goal of reaching Glenelg Intrigue.  Glenelg is still a quarter-mile from rover’s present location.

Once rover arrives, the hope is that it will find suitable rockbed on which to use its industrial-strength drill to sample Martian geology.

The site intrigues scientists because it’s where three different types of terrain meet, giving them the opportunity to study the Red Planet’s diverse geologic morphology (formations) and the geological history that caused three such divergent types of material to converge.

Of particular interest to NASA is a light-colored expanse showing up in satellite thermal imagery that may have been cemented through natural processes.  This hypothesis is contrary to that of a scientist on the mission who recently told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation the expanse was formed by volcanic activity.

On its journey, expected to take several weeks, the rover will continue to test its equipment and send back images of the landscape using its twin mast-mounted cameras, the Mastcam.

Given the number of detours, such as Glenelg, Curiosity’s rover should reach its long-term goal, driving partway up the 3.4 mile-high Mount Sharp, in about a year.

Mount Sharp sits in the 96-mile wide Gale Crater where the nuclear-powered, one-ton Mars Science Laboratory landed on August 6.

 JPL Morse code in track prints 

 Each of rover’s wheel treads includes a single line of Morse code spelling “JPL” molded in the zigzag pattern making up the remainder of the wheel.

“The purpose of the pattern is to create features in the terrain that can be used to visually measure the precise distance between drives,” according to Matt Heverly, the lead rover driver for Curiosity.

The Morse code gives scientists the ability to measure more accurately driving distances and proximity to other features using the visual odometry software onboard.  The software is helpful because the Martian terrain is loose, granular and varied–the rover might slip and get stuck.

The Mars Science Laboratory will be in full-service for the next 23 months, but its nuclear-powered battery extends its useful lifetime well beyond that time frame.

Source:   Discovery News, August 30, 2012    Los Angeles Times, August 29, 2012     TPMIdeaLab, August 30, 2012        Photo credits NASA/JPL-Caltech

#MARS #CURIOSITY ROVER SENDS BACK FIRST MT SHARP PHOTOS & FIRST VOICE MESSAGE

The base of 18,000 ft high Mt Sharp  Photo credit NASA/JPL/Caltech/MSSS

A lot more good news from Mars.

In fact, it’s beyond good.  It’s exciting.

Curiosity already returned more data from the surface of Mars than have all of NASA’s earlier rovers combined.  And it’s less than a month into its two-year mission.

NASA’S Curiosity’s rover beamed back the first images of Mount Sharp taken by its 100 mm telephoto lens and 34 mm wide angle lens of the Mast Camera (Mastcam) instrument.

The photos show a mountainside marked by eroded knobs and gulches with clearly visible geological layering.

According to Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, the area in the photo is the area Curiosity will drive over and explore in a year or so.

“Those layers are our ultimate objective,” he said.  “The dark dune field is between us and those layers.  In front of the dark sand you see redder sand, with a different composition suggested by its different color.

“The rocks in the foreground show diversity—some rounded, some angular–with different histories.  This as a very rich geological site to look at and eventually to drive through.”

Curiosity moved to the spot where one of its landing engines had scoured away gravelly soil and exposed underlying rock.  Researchers will use the Rover’s neutron-shooting device on the rover to check for the presence of water molecules bound into the rock’s minerals.

The rover’s team also reported the results of their earlier testing of Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, which measures the composition of samples of atmosphere, powdered rock or soil.

SAM principle investigator, Paul Mahaffy, said, “As a test of the instrument, the results are beautiful confirmation of the sensitivities for identifying the gases present.  We’re happy with this test, and we’re looking forward to the next run in a few days when we can get Mars data.”

As a capper to its successes earlier this week, Curiosity also debuted the first recorded human voice that traveled from Earth to another planet and back.

Here are some of the spoken words of NASA Administrator Charles Bolden that were radioed to the rover on Mars and back to NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) on Earth:

“The knowledge we hope to gain from our observation and analysis of Gale Crater will tell us much about the possibility of life on Mars as well as the past and future possibilities for our own planet.

“Curiosity will bring benefits to Earth and inspire a new generation of scientists and explorers, as it prepares the way for a human mission in the not too distant future.”

Dave Lavery, NASA Curiosity program executive, said, “With this voice, another small step is taken in extending human presence beyond Earth, and the experience of exploring remote worlds is brought a little closer to us all.

“As Curiosity continues its mission, we hope these words will be an inspiration to someone alive today who will become the first to stand upon the surface of Mars.

“And like the great Neil Armstrong, they will speak aloud of that next giant leap in human exploration.”

Sources:  NASA website, August 28, 2012   TG Daily, August 28, 2012   Discovery News, August 28, 2012

NASA’S #CURIOSITY ROVER ‘S CHEMCAM ZAPS ROCK WITH LASER BEAM

Coronation, the fist-sized target rock before ChemCam bombarded it with laser beams

Sunday the Mars rover successfully completed a test of its camera, ChemCam, a key instrument in the search for the life-supporting habitat.

During a 10-second period, ChemCam zapped Coronation with 30 laser pulses of more than a million watts of power each.  Each pulse lasted about five one billionths of a second.

After the energy excites atoms in the rock into an ionized, glowing plasma, ChemCam catches the light emitted and analyzes it for information about what elements are in the target.

Coronation after bombardment

“We got a great spectrum of Coronation — lots of signal,” said ChemCam Principal Investigator Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM. “Our team is both thrilled and working hard, looking at the results. After eight years building the instrument, it’s payoff time!”

Initially, the goal of the ChemCam experiment was to serve as target practice for characterizing the instrument, but there may be additional value to the exercise.

Researchers will check to see if and how Coronation’s composition changed as the pulses progressed.  The spectrometers record intensity at 8,144 different wavelengths of visible, ultraviolet and infrared light.

“It’s surprising that the data are even better than we ever had during tests on Earth, in signal-to-noise ratio,” said ChemCam Deputy Project Scientist,  Sylvestre Maurice of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie (IRAP) in Toulouse, France. “It’s so rich, we can expect great science from investigating what might be thousands of targets with ChemCam in the next two years.”

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, the technique ChemCam uses, has previously been employed to interrogate the composition of targets in other extreme environments, such as within nuclear reactors and on the sea floor.  It’s had experimental applications in environmental monitoring and cancer detection.

Sunday’s investigation of Coronation is the first use of the technique on a planet other than Earth.

ChemCam was developed, built and tested by the US Department of Energy at its Los Alamos National Laboratory in partnership with scientists and engineers funded by the French national space agency, Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and the French research agency, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

Sources:  NASA website, August 20, 2012     Discovery News, August 20, 2012       Photos credit NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/IRAP

PHOENIX CLUSTER BREAKING COSMIC RECORDS, SPITS OUT STARS AT 1000x NORMAL RATE

Artist’s conception of star-forming gas erupting from Phoenix Cluster’s central galaxy  Image credit NASA/Chandra Observatory, Cambridge, Mass

The Phoenix Cluster is about 5,700,000,000 miles from Earth and is named as much for the constellation in which it is located as for its remarkable properties.

Michael McDonald, a Hubble Fellow at MIT and lead author of the paper published in Nature, explained, “While galaxies at the center of most clusters may have been dormant for billions years, the central galaxy in this cluster seems to have come back to life with a new burst of star formation.  The mythology of the Phoenix, a bird rising from the dead, is a great way to describe this revived object.”

The object is among the largest in the universe.

The supper-massive, super-bright, super-prolific cluster is birthing stars at a rate of more than 740 per year.

It’s more powerful than a steaming locomotive, in that it’s the most powerful producer of X-rays of any known cluster of galaxies.

McDonald said that Phoenix behaves so atypically that scientists were at first skeptical about what they were observing.  In most cases, jets of material from super-massive black holes at the centers of galaxies heat surrounding gases, which prevents them from reaching temperatures necessary for them to birth stars at high rates.

Brian McNamara, astrophysicist at Canada’s University of Waterloo and not  part of the study, said, ”For some reason this (heating) cycle isn’t working in the Phoenix Cluster, and we don’t know why—that’s the mystery.”

McDonald suggests that researchers have stumbled on a previously unknown, pivotal stage in the normal course of galactic evolution, a stage before its black hole becomes powerful enough to kick the heat into high gear.

“We suspect this phase should only last for about a 100,000,000 years,” he explained, “which is less than one percent of the age of the universe.  So it is not surprising that these systems are rare, since the odds of catching one during this starburst phase should be around one in a hundred.”

McNamara isn’t convinced, and said the Phoenix Cluster is “ . . . not behaving like most galaxies in cooling flows, and while we have lots of ideas for why this would be, we are not sure which, if any, are correct.”

Performance of the Phoenix Cluster is confirmed by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the National Science Foundation’s South Pole Telescope, and eight other telescopes on Earth and in orbit.

Sources:  NASA, August 16, 2012    National Geographic, August 15, 2012   Study published in Nature, August 15, 2012

 

 

NASA’S #CURIOSITY ROVER’S FIRST PANORAMIC PHOTO FROM #MARS

The view from Gale Crater, base of Mount Sharp in the distance

A few days ago, the rover raised its mast containing high-definition and navigation cameras, which will provide better views and better quality photos than those we’ve seen thus far. 

While waiting for new photos to be downloaded, scientists stitched together a series of thumbnails to create the above photo.

Over this weekend, the rover’s taking a break of several days to install a software upgrade on its computers, a process similar to the periodic updates we download for our earth-bound computers.  

Detailed photo of NASA’s Curiosity rover

Curiosity’s parked close to the Martian equator in a landscape bearing a striking similarity to California’s Mohave Desert 

“The first impression that you get is how Earth-like this seems looking at that landscape,” says John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology.   

“You would really be forgiven for thinking that NASA was trying to pull a fast one on you and we actually put a rover out in the Mojave Desert and took a picture.”

Grotzinger noted with excitement that in landing, rover’s rocket-powered sky crane had blasted away enough surface dirt to expose bedrock.

“Here we’ve got an exploration hole drilled for us.  We got a freebie right off the bat.”

Because of the complexity and sophistication of rover’s equipment, engineers are taking their time to thoroughly test its various components.  The Martian rover won’t take its first drive or flex its robotic arm for weeks.  

So far, mission manager Mike Watkins of NASA Propulsion laboratory says, Curiosity “continues to behave flawlessly.”

Sources:  NASA website   Huffington Post, August 12, 2012       Sky Valley Chronicle, August 12, 2012    Fox News, August 9, 2012      Photos credit NASA/JPL-Caltech, Pasadena

#MARS CURIOSITY ROVER’S LANDING FOOTPRINT/LANDING ELLIPSE

Simulated image of rover’s Landing footprint

Because of uncertainties about entry angle, entry mass, atmosphere and drag, it’s not possible to predict Curiosity’s landing point with precision.  By simulating the various reentry variables, scientists assign a numerical simulation to produce a plot referred to as a Landing footprint or Landing ellipse.

The image puts the Curiosity rover inside Gale Crater at the foot of Mount Sharp, a mountain 3 kilometers high, higher than any mountain on earth.

Weighing in at one ton, Curiosity is the size of a Mini Cooper.  It’s a robotic, roving geologist and roving chemistry lab in search of life on the Red Planet.  Mars.  It’s loaded with 165 pounds of the most sophisticated scientific instruments ever sent to the planet.

During its two-year mission, the rover will search for organic molecules, the chemical ingredients of life and will investigate whether the planet has ever offered conditions favorable to the presence of organic life.

If Gale Crater had once been a lake, Curiosity may find something interesting there.

Mount Sharp is also an area of interest for its potential to have been connected to organic life at one time.  Curiosity will climb the mountain later in its mission.

Sources:  Wikipedia    Universe Today, August 6, 2012    Others     Image credit NASA

NASA CURIOSITY ROVER’S FIRST PHOTOS FROM #MARS

Photo credit NASA/JPL-Caltech

(I took the liberty of removing some of the saturation/shadows to better show the details described by NASA.)

This is one of the first photos taken by the Curiosity after it landed on August 6, 2012.  The photo was taken by the left “eye” of wide-angle fisheye stereo lenses on a pair of Hazard-Avoidance cameras on rover’s left-rear side.

The clear dust cover protecting the camera sprang open during landing.  You can see part of the spring that released the dust cover at the bottom right, near rover’s wheel.

Part of the power supply is visible on the top left.

The saturated image is a result of the cameras’ looking directly into the sun, though the sun won’t hurt the cameras themselves.

The lines across the top are called “blooming,” a condition which occurs in the camera’s detector because of the saturation.

Full color photos are expected later this week.

John Grotzinger, project manager of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, explains the orientation of Curiosity’s rover:

“In the image, we are looking to the northwest.  What you see on the horizon is the rim of Gale Crater.  In the foreground you can see a gravel field.

“The question is, where does this gravel come from?

“It is the first of what will be many scientific questions to come from our new home on Mars.”

My Take:  Bring on the scientific answers—we’re all ears!

Sources:  NASA website   Huffington Post, August 7, 2012

#MARS PLAIN COVERED WITH DUNES

Though the surface of the Red Planet has not hosted earthquakes or volcanic eruptions as has the surface of Earth, winds and seasonal changes shape and reshape the Martian landscape.

The above mounds on what appears to be a hard, bumpy terrain of permafrost are called barchan dunes.  Barchans generally form where there’s a supply of sand and a prevailing wind.

In this photo, a prevailing wind blows sand into these 100-meter wide mounds to create the structures.  The “arms” or “horns” of the dunes point in the downwind direction, indicating that the prevailing winds blow toward the northwest.

Typically, the leading/upwind edge of the dune is gently sloped and more rounded.

Wide angle view of the barchan dunes

Scientists plan to use repeat imaging of this dune field to determine if the dunes are presently moving.

The photo was taken using the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Sources:  Discovery News  July 17, 2012    HiRISE  July 11, 2012

Photos credit NASA/JPL/University of Arizona