Mars News and Discussions

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weatheriscool
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NASA's Perseverance celebrates first year on Mars by learning to run
https://phys.org/news/2022-02-nasa-pers ... -mars.html
by Jet Propulsion Laboratory
NASA's Perseverance rover has notched up a slew of firsts since touching down on Mars one year ago, on Feb. 18, 2021, and the six-wheeled scientist has other important accomplishments in store as it speeds toward its new destination and a new science campaign.

Weighing roughly 1 ton (1,025 kilograms), Perseverance is the heaviest rover ever to touch down on Mars, returning dramatic video of its landing. The rover collected the first rock core samples from another planet (it's carrying six so far), served as an indispensable base station for Ingenuity, the first helicopter on Mars, and tested MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), the first prototype oxygen generator on the Red Planet.

Perseverance also recently broke a record for the most distance driven by a Mars rover in a single day, traveling almost 1,050 feet (320 meters) on Feb. 14, 2022, the 351st Martian day, or sol, of the mission. And it performed the entire drive using AutoNav, the self-driving software that allows Perseverance to find its own path around rocks and other obstacles.

The rover has nearly wrapped up its first science campaign in Jezero Crater, a location that contained a lake billions of years ago and features some of the oldest rocks Mars scientists have been able to study up close. Rocks that have recorded and preserved environments that once hosted water are prime locations to search for signs of ancient microscopic life.
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Data from Mars rover Zhurong shows evidence of wind, and possibly water, erosion
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-mars-rove ... sibly.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org
A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in China and one each from Canada and Germany, has found data from the Chinese Mars rover Zhurong over its first 60 sols, showing evidence of wind erosion and possibly impacts from water erosion, as well. In their paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, they discuss what they have found thus far.

China's Mars rover Zhurong has been on the surface of Mars since May of last year. During that time, it has rolled approximately 450 meters over the course of 60 Martian days (sols). Recently, the team working with Zhurong made the data from the rover public. In this new effort, the researchers have been studying the data sent back to learn more about what it has found.

Zhurong was deployed on the planet's Utopia Planitia—a volcanic plain situated in the northern hemisphere. It is a site that some have suggested was likely once covered with water. Data from the rover's cameras showed that the part of the plain where Zhurong has been rolling along is generally quite flat, with very few boulders. And data from the wheels showed that the surface beneath the rover is covered with small, non-round rocks. Zhurong has also been collecting soil samples as it wanders—thus far, the composition of the soil in the area is similar to that collected by rovers on other parts of the planet.

Image data has also shown that the small rocks have etched grooves on them that appear to be due to wind erosion. They also found some evidence of flakiness in some of the rocks, possible evidence of water erosion.
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Perseverance rover hightails it to Martian delta
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-persevera ... delta.html
by Jet Propulsion Laboratory
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover is trying to cover more distance in a single month than any rover before it—and it's doing so using artificial intelligence. On the path ahead are sandpits, craters, and fields of sharp rocks that the rover will have to navigate around on its own. At the end of the 3-mile (5-kilometer) journey, which began March 14, 2022, Perseverance will reach an ancient river delta within Jezero Crater, where a lake existed billions of years ago.

This delta is one of the best locations on Mars for the rover to look for signs of past microscopic life. Using a drill on the end of its robotic arm and a complex sample collection system in its belly, Perseverance is collecting rock cores for return to Earth—the first part of the Mars Sample Return campaign.

"The delta is so important that we've actually decided to minimize science activities and focus on driving to get there more quickly," said Ken Farley of Caltech, Perseverance's project scientist. "We'll be taking lots of images of the delta during that drive. The closer we get, the more impressive those images will be."

The science team will be searching these images for the rocks they'll eventually want to study in closer detail using the instruments on Perseverance's arm. They'll also hunt for the best routes the rover can take to ascend the 130-foot-high (40-meter-high) delta.

But first, Perseverance needs to get there. The rover will do this by relying on its self-driving AutoNav system, which has already set impressive distance records. While all of NASA's Mars rovers have had self-driving abilities, Perseverance has the most advanced one yet.

"Self-driving processes that took minutes on a rover like Opportunity happen in less than a second on Perseverance," said veteran rover planner and flight software developer Mark Maimone of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which leads the mission. "Because autonomous driving is now faster, we can cover more ground than if humans programmed every drive."
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Analysis of sounds captured by Perseverance rover reveals speed of sound on the Red Planet
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-analysis- ... veals.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org
An international team of researchers analyzing the sounds captured by the Perseverance rover has determined the speed of sound on Mars. Baptiste Chide, with Los Alamos National Laboratory, gave a presentation at this year's 53rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference outlining the findings by the team.

The Perseverance rover landed successfully on the surface of Mars a little more than a year ago, and since that time, has been rolling around, studying the landscape with a host of cameras and sensors. Perseverance has also been outfitted with a microphone, which allowed the rover to beam back the first sounds ever heard from a distant world—many of those sounds can be heard on NASA's Perseverance rover page. In this new effort, the researchers have been analyzing the sounds sent back by Perseverance to find out if they might reveal anything useful.

Chide reported that the team has used data from the microphone to measure the speed of sound on Mars. This was done by measuring the amount of time it took for sounds emanating from laser blasts from Perseverance to return to the rover's microphone. The laser blasts were used to vaporize nearby rocks to learn more about their composition. They found sound to be traveling on Mars at approximately 240 m/s. But they also found that different frequencies of sound travel at different speeds on Mars. The speed increases by approximately 10 m/s above 400 Hz. This finding suggests that communication would be extremely difficult on Mars with different parts of speech arriving to listeners at different times, making conversations sound garbled.
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The Problem of Dust on Mars
by Georgina Torbet
March 30, 2022

https://www.inverse.com/innovation/martian-dust

Introduction:
(Inverse) MARS IS AN INHOSPITABLE place, with freezing temperatures, barely any oxygen, and radiation that bombards its surface. But one of the trickiest environmental problems to deal with there is something rather unexpected and even mundane: dust. Dust covers the planet and is whipped up into massive dust storms which can wreak havoc on machines and, potentially, human explorers too.deal with there is something rather unexpected and even mundane: dust.

Now, though, new research is helping us understand this strange dusty environment and paving the way for safer Mars missions in the future — like a crewed landing and possibly even a permanent settlement.

THE PROBLEM OF DUST

Mars's surface is covered in fine particles of dust. With its smaller size than Earth, it has lower gravity – around one-third of the gravity here – and a thinner atmosphere, which is around one percent of the density of Earth's atmosphere. That means it is easy for winds to form and to pick up those dust particles, blowing them into a dust storm.

Something that is unusual about Mars is just how big these dust storms can become. Sometimes, they can grow from regional events to global ones, covering whole portions of the planet. And that is a big problem for missions there.

Some robotic missions like NASA's InSight lander use solar panels for power, and when dust storms blow in they cover these panels in a layer of dust, rendering them less effective and dooming the missions to eventual power failure. Dust also gets into mechanical parts and wears them down, as the Apollo astronauts found when visiting the moon and dealing with lunar dust.
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Volcanic activity may be the cause of marsquakes
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-volcanic-marsquakes.html
by Australian National University
Volcanic activity beneath the surface of Mars could be responsible for triggering repetitive Marsquakes, which are similar to earthquakes, in a specific region of the Red Planet, researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) suggest.

New research published in Nature Communications shows scientists from ANU and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing have discovered 47 previously undetected Marsquakes beneath the Martian crust in an area called Cerberus Fossae—a seismically active region on Mars that is less than 20 million years old.

The authors of the study speculate that magma activity in the Martian mantle, which is the inner layer of Mars sandwiched between the crust and the core, is the cause of these newly detected Marsquakes.

The findings suggest magma in the Martian mantle is still active and is responsible for the volcanic Marsquakes, contrary to past beliefs held by scientists that these events are caused by Martian tectonic forces.
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NASA's self-driving Perseverance Mars rover is breaking records
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-nasa-self ... rover.html
by Jet Propulsion Laboratory

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover is using its self-driving capabilities as it treks across Jezero Crater seeking signs of ancient life and gathering rock and soil samples for planned return to Earth.

With the help of special 3D glasses, rover drivers on Earth plan routes with specific stops, but increasingly allow the rover to "take the wheel" and choose how it gets to those stops. Perseverance's auto-navigation system, known as AutoNav, makes 3D maps of the terrain ahead, identifies hazards, and plans a route around any obstacles without additional direction from controllers back on Earth.

Now the rover can drive through these more complex terrains, which helps Perseverance achieve its science goals and break driving records. The rover is traversing from an area near its landing site, "Octavia E. Butler Landing," to an area where an ancient river flowed into a body of water and deposited sediments (known as a delta).
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Perseverance rover arrives at ancient river delta for new science campaign
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-persevera ... delta.html
by Jet Propulsion Laboratory

After collecting eight rock-core samples from its first science campaign and completing a record-breaking, 31-Martian-day (or sol) dash across about 3 miles (5 kilometers) of Mars, NASA's Perseverance rover arrived at the doorstep of Jezero Crater's ancient river delta April 13. Dubbed "Three Forks" by the Perseverance team (a reference to the spot where three route options to the delta merge), the location serves as the staging area for the rover's second science expedition, the "Delta Front Campaign."

"The delta at Jezero Crater promises to be a veritable geologic feast and one of the best locations on Mars to look for signs of past microscopic life," said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The answers are out there—and Team Perseverance is ready to find them."

The delta, a massive fan-shaped collection of rocks and sediment at the western edge of Jezero Crater, formed at the convergence of a Martian river and a crater lake billions of years ago. Its exploration tops the Perseverance science team's wish list because all the fine-grained sediment deposited at its base long ago is the mission's best bet for finding the preserved remnants of ancient microbial life.
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Stunning New NASA Video Reveals Dramatic Solar Eclipse on Mars
by Nancy Atkinson
April 21, 2022

https://www.sciencealert.com/perseveren ... se-on-mars

Introduction:
(Science Alert) Imagine standing on Mars, and seeing this with your own eyes.

The Perseverance rover watched as the potato-shaped moon Phobos passed in front of the Sun, from the vantage point of Jezero Crater on Mars.

Perseverance used its high-resolution Mastcam-Z camera system to shoot video of Phobos, and NASA says the result is the most zoomed-in, highest frame-rate observation of a Phobos solar eclipse ever taken from the Martian surface.

The stunning eclipse took place on 2 April 2022 (Earth date, of course) and the eclipse lasted a little over 40 seconds. That means this video is very close to what Perseverance witnessed in real time.

The time it takes for Phobos to eclipse the Sun is much less time than a typical solar eclipse involving Earth's Moon, since Phobos is about 157 times smaller than our own Moon.

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caltrek
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Two of the Largest Marsquakes to Date Recorded from Planet’s Far Side
April 22, 2022

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/950574

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) The seismometer placed on Mars by NASA’s InSight lander has recorded its two largest seismic events to date: a magnitude 4.2 and a magnitude 4.1 marsquake. The pair are the first recorded events to occur on the planet’s far side from the lander and are five times stronger than the previous largest event recorded.

Seismic wave data from the events could help researchers learn more about the interior layers of Mars, particularly its core-mantle boundary, researchers from InSight’s Marsquake Service (MQS) report in The Seismic Record.

Anna Horleston of the University of Bristol and colleagues were able to identify reflected PP and SS waves from the magnitude 4.2 event, called S0976a, and locate its origin in the Valles Marineris, a massive canyon network that is one of Mars’ most distinguishing geological features and one of the largest graben systems in the Solar System. Earlier orbital images of cross-cutting faults and landslides suggested the area would be seismically active, but the new event is the first confirmed seismic activity there.

S1000a, the magnitude 4.1 event recorded 24 days later, was characterized by reflected PP and SS waves as well as Pdiff waves, small amplitude waves that have traversed the core-mantle boundary. This is the first time Pdiff waves have been spotted by the InSight mission. The researchers could not definitively pinpoint S1000a’s location, but like S0976a it originated on Mars’ far side. The seismic energy from S1000a also holds the distinction of being the longest recorded on Mars, lasting 94 minutes.

Both marsquakes occurred in the core shadow zone, a region where P and S waves can’t travel directly to InSight’s seismometer because they are stopped or bent by the core. PP and SS waves don’t follow a direct path, but rather are reflected at least once at the surface before traveling to the seismometer.
Don't mourn, organize.

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