Mars News and Discussions

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Yuli Ban
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^Lucky metal bastard!

Mars' buried polar 'lakes' may just be frozen clay
Bright reflections that radar detected beneath the south pole of Mars may not be underground lakes as previously thought but deposits of clay instead, a new study finds.

For decades, scientists have suspected that water lurks below the polar ice caps of Mars, just as it does here on Earth. In 2018, researchers using the MARSIS radar sounder instrument on the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft detected evidence for a lake hidden beneath the Red Planet's south polar ice cap, and in 2020, they found signs of a number of super-salty lakes there. If these lakes were remnants of water that was once on the surface, these reservoirs may have once harbored life and may still, the scientists noted.

However, in order to form and maintain liquid water at this spot on Mars, an implausible amount of heat and salt may be needed, given what is currently known about the Red Planet, according to the lead author of the new study, Isaac Smith, a planetary scientist at York University in Toronto, and his colleagues.
Image
The bright white region of this image, captured by Europe's Mars Express spacecraft in December 2012, shows the icy cap that covers Mars’ south pole, composed of frozen water and frozen carbon dioxide. (Image credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/Bill Dunford)
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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weatheriscool
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Mars rover comes up empty in 1st try at getting rock sample
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-mars-rove ... ample.html
by Christina Larson
NASA's newest Mars rover came up empty Friday in its first attempt to pick up a rock sample to eventually be brought back to Earth.

The rover Perseverance drilled into the floor of the planet's Jezero Crater to extract a finger-sized sample from slabs of flat rocks. The drill seemed to work as intended, but it appeared no rock made it into the sample tube, the agency said Friday.

Engineers were working to figure out what happened.

"While this is not the 'hole-in-one' we hoped for, there is always risk with breaking new ground," said NASA's science mission chief Thomas Zurbuchen.
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NASA Mars rover begins collecting rock in search of alien life
In this image acquired on August 6, 2021 and released by NASA, the shadow of the Perseverance Mars rover is cast next to its first hole drilled in a rock.

NASA's Perseverance rover has begun drilling into the surface of Mars and will collect rock samples to be picked up by future missions for analysis by scientists on Earth.

The US space agency published images Friday of a small mound with a hole in its center next to the rover—the first ever dug into the Red Planet by a robot.

"Sample collection has begun!" tweeted Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate.
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-nasa-mars ... -life.html
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NASA rover has been exploring surface sediments, not lake deposits, for last eight years: study
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-nasa-rove ... ments.html
by The University of Hong Kong
In 2012, NASA landed the rover Curiosity in the Gale crater on Mars because the crater was thought by many scientists to be the site of an ancient lake on Mars more than 3 billion years ago. Since that time, the rover has been driving along, carrying out geological analyses with its suite of instruments for over 3,190 sols (martian days, equivalent to 3278 earth days). After analyzing the data, researchers from Department of Earth Sciences, the Faculty of Science at HKU, have proposed that the sediments measured by the rover during most of the mission did not actually form in a lake.

The researcher team suggested that the large mound of sedimentary rocks explored and analyzed for the last eight years actually represent sand and silt deposited as air-fall from the atmosphere and reworked by the wind. The alteration minerals formed by the interaction between water and the sand did not occur in a lake setting. The "wet" environment, they propose, actually represents weathering similar to soil formation under rainfall in an ancient atmosphere that was very different from the present one.
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Ingenuity Mars Helicopter spots Perseverance from above
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-ingenuity ... rance.html
by Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Can you see NASA's newest rover in this picture from Jezero Crater?

NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter recently completed its 11th flight at the Red Planet, snapping multiple photographs during its trip. Along with capturing the boulders, sand dunes, and rocky outcrops prevalent in the "South Séítah" region of Jezero Crater, a few of the images capture NASA's Perseverance rover amid its first science campaign.

Ingenuity began as a technological demonstration to prove that powered, controlled flight on Mars is possible. It is now an operations demonstration intended to investigate how a rotorcraft can add an aerial dimension to missions like Perseverance, scouting possible areas of scientific interest and offering detailed views of nearby areas too hazardous for the rover to explore.
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Evidence of Relatively Recent Mudslide Might Have Been Found on Mars
by Theo Nicitopoulos
August 23, 2021

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-n ... -mudslide/

Introduction:
(Sky & Telescope) Approximately 5 million years ago, a portion of the western wall of a large and deep impact crater located in the Nilosyrtis Mensae region of Mars gave way. The Red Planet’s landscape abounds with steep canyon walls that have collapsed, so landslides must be quite common. But what makes this one particularly interesting is that it shows traits of being a mudslide.

In a new study published in the October 15th Planetary and Space Science journal, researchers used high-resolution imagery to construct a digital elevation model of the landslide. Then they compared its shape and form to actual landslides on Mars and Earth, and to a computer-generated landslide, and found signs that water could have been involved at a time when Mars was expected to be dry.

The Landslide

The Nilosyrtis Mensae landslide is big by Earth-standards (it carried approximately 200,000 dump trucks’ worth of material), but smaller than most Martian landslides that have been studied. The slide happened on a 25-degree slope and travelled a distance of about six football fields, resulting in a deposit area that had a maximum thickness of about 30 meters and covered the equivalent of about 10 average-sized city blocks.
Image
Nilosyrtis Mensae is an ancient terrain is a circular landform that probably got its shape from an impact crater.
NASA / JPL / Univ. of Arizona
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Elon Musk Talks About Going to Mars in Ten Years
September 2, 2021 by Brian Wang

Tesla had an employee all hands meetings. It had several interesting leaks. Elon Musk said he may go to Mars in 10 years.
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