Mars News and Discussions

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caltrek
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This Ecologist Has an Audacious Plan to Build Forests on Mars – Here’s How
by Kiona Smith
December 7, 2022

Introduction:
(Inverse) A CENTURY FROM now, people on Mars might stroll through forests filled with juniper trees, kudzu vines, and heath shrubs. Maybe.
Ecologist Paul Smith of the University of Bristol suggests that long-term residents of Mars, whether they’re settlers or astronauts at research outposts, could build small nature preserves, shielded from the harsh Martian environment by clear domes or layers of Martian crust. But they’re not going to look quite like any forest on Earth.

He published his proposal in the Journal of Astrobiology.

WHAT’S NEW — Smith proposes that once humans have established a solid presence on Mars, they’re likely to want a small piece of home, partly to provide some fresh food and produce oxygen, but also to enable people to do the Martian version of going outside to touch some grass. He suggests about 20 hectares of forest park, carefully contained under protective pressurized domes or sheltered in lava tubes lit by mirrors and fiber optics.
These hypothetical nature preserves won’t be able to replicate any of Earth’s forests, however; even with help from 22nd-century engineers, the Martian environment will be a bizarre place to try and plant a forest. The best option, says Smith, will be to throw in as many species as possible and let evolution select the combination that works best. And the result may include some combinations that would never happen naturally on Earth.
Read more of the Inverse article here: https://www.inverse.com/science/can-we ... -on-mars

Read the plan as put forth the in the Journal of Astrobiology: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journal ... B6A4D9450

caltrek’s comment: Personally, for the short term at least (next hundred years), I would favor concentrating resource allocation on making Earth more livable. This might include more voluntary use of birth control and more imaginative optimization of living space and resources available here on this planet. Still, if there are hardy souls willing to relocate to Mars for colonization purposes, and if folks are willing to pay the additional tax burdens involved in financing such ventures…
Don't mourn, organize.

-Joe Hill
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ººº
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In a first, hear a Mars rover get hit by a 387-foot dust devil
Source: Washington Post
The towering vortex slammed into NASA’s Perseverance rover — and scientists are ecstatic

Scientists have seen plenty of dust devils on Mars, and now, for the first time, they’ve heard one. The vortex made a direct hit on NASA’s Perseverance rover, peppering the spacecraft with dust and whispering into a microphone that the team had smartly included in their package of instruments.

The trove of data coming from the encounter has thrilled scientists, who are keenly aware of the outsize influence Martian dust has on the planet’s climate. The fine-grained particles also can damage scientific instruments on Martian landers and rovers and potentially blanket solar panels to the point of uselessness. Studying the rover’s gritty recordings can provide insights into the way dust might affect ongoing Mars missions, and maybe even future human exploration.

The sound of the dust devil, published Tuesday to accompany a paper in the journal Nature Communications, is subtle. It’s crackly and percussive, like radio static, though one might more generously imagine a breeze ruffling some distant palm fronds.

Then come a few seconds of silence as the eye of the dust devil passes over the rover. Sound returns for another couple of seconds as the trailing wall of the dust devil spins over the rover again. Then it’s all over, and Mars is quiet once more.
Read more: https://wapo.st/3iUOc4h
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Biggest marsquake was five times larger than previous record-holder
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-biggest-m ... older.html
by American Geophysical Union
Late on the Earth night of May 4, or Sol 1222 on Mars, the seismometer aboard NASA's InSight Mars Lander detected a quake on the Red Planet, with reverberations lasting many hours. The marsquake was at least five times as large as the next largest quake recorded on the planet, according to new research published Wednesday in Geophysical Research Letters. Additional research related to the record marsquake is also being presented this week at AGU's Fall Meeting, in Chicago from 12 to 16 December and online everywhere.

"This was definitely the biggest marsquake that we have seen," said Taichi Kawamura, lead author and planetary scientist at the Institut de physique du globe de Paris, France. Kawamura is co-leader, along with co-author and seismologist John Clinton at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, of the marsquake service (MQS), an international team that monitors and evaluates the seismological data recorded by the NASA InSight Mars Lander.

"The energy released by this single marsquake is equivalent to the cumulative energy from all other marsquakes we've seen so far, and although the event was over 2000 kilometers (1200 miles) distant, the waves recorded at InSight were so large they almost saturated our seismometer," said Clinton.

Seismology on Mars can give scientists a better idea about what lies under the planet's surface—including water—and how its crust and deep interior are structured. Like on Earth, most detected marsquakes are thought to occur due to fault movements.

The largest previous marsquake, recorded in August 2021 (Sol 976 on Mars), was around a magnitude of 4.2, while the May quake had a magnitude of 4.7. (marsquake magnitudes are comparable to those of earthquakes.)
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How Mars' thin and turbulent atmosphere leads to curiously sized dunes
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-mars-thin ... ously.html
by Josie Garthwaite, Stanford University
Among the mountainous dunes and small, undulating ripples of Mars' desert-like surface are sand structures, intermediate in size, that are not quite like anything on Earth.

Stanford University scientists have now used an AI model to analyze a million Martian dunes and uncover how these sandy waves form on our sister planet at a scale—roughly 1 meter between crests—that previously seemed incompatible with the physics of how ripples and dunes arise on Earth.

The results, published Nov. 22 in Nature Communications, suggest scholars going forward can use fossilized versions of these structures to reconstruct the atmospheric history of Mars. That's because there is a precise and consistent mathematical relationship between atmospheric density and the size of windblown ripples and dunes at all but the smallest scales.

"This is particularly important because it is thought that Mars used to have a thicker atmosphere in the past, perhaps sustaining Earth-like surface conditions," said senior study author Mathieu Lapôtre, an assistant professor of geological sciences in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. "However, it lost most of it, and we don't really know when, how fast, and why."
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NASA Mars lander InSight falls silent after four years
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-nasa-mars ... falls.html
by Marcia Dunn
It could be the end of the red dusty line for NASA's InSight lander, which has fallen silent after four years on Mars.

The lander's power levels have been dwindling for months because of all the dust coating its solar panels. Ground controllers at California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory knew the end was near, but NASA reported that InSight unexpectedly didn't respond to communications from Earth on Sunday.

"It's assumed InSight may have reached the end of its operations," NASA said late Monday, adding that its last communication was Thursday. "It's unknown what prompted the change in its energy."

The team will keep trying to contact InSight, just in case.

InSight landed on Mars in 2018 and was the first spacecraft to document a marsquake. It detected more than 1,300 marsquakes with its French-built seismometer, including several caused by meteoroid strikes. The most recent marsquake sensed by InSight, earlier this year, left the ground shaking for at least six hours, according to NASA.
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Experimentalists: Sorry, no oxygen required to make these minerals on Mars

by Washington University in St. Louis
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-experimen ... -mars.html
When NASA's Mars rovers found manganese oxides in rocks in the Gale and Endeavor craters on Mars in 2014, the discovery sparked some scientists to suggest that the red planet might have once had more oxygen in its atmosphere billions of years ago.

The minerals probably required abundant water and strongly oxidizing conditions to form, the scientists said. Using lessons learned from Earth's geologic record, scientists concluded that the presence of manganese oxides indicated that Mars had experienced periodic increases in atmospheric oxygen in its past—before declining to today's low levels.

But a new experimental study from Washington University in St. Louis upends this view.

Scientists discovered that under Mars-like conditions, manganese oxides can be readily formed without atmospheric oxygen. Using kinetic modeling, the scientists also showed that manganese oxidation is not possible in the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere expected on ancient Mars.

"The link between manganese oxides and oxygen suffers from an array of fundamental geochemical problems," said Jeffrey Catalano, a professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences and corresponding author of the study published Dec. 22 in Nature Geoscience. Catalano is a faculty fellow of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.

The first author of the study is Kaushik Mitra, now a postdoctoral research associate at Stony Brook University, who completed this work as part of his graduate research at Washington University.
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ººº wrote: Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:12 am Image
Looks like the Israeli space program beat us to Mars. Israel first ya know.
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