Touchdown! NASA's Mars Perseverance rover safely lands on Red Planet

 The largest, most advanced rover NASA has sent to another world touched down on Mars Thursday, after a 203-day journey traversing 293 million miles (472 million kilometers). Confirmation of the successful touchdown was announced in mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California at 3:55 p.m. EST (12:55 p.m. PST).

Packed with groundbreaking technology, the Mars 2020 mission launched July 30, 2020, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The Perseverance rover mission marks an ambitious first step in the effort to collect Mars samples and return them to Earth.

"This landing is one of those pivotal moments for NASA, the United States, and space exploration globally -- when we know we are on the cusp of discovery and sharpening our pencils, so to speak, to rewrite the textbooks," said acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk. "The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission embodies our nation's spirit of persevering even in the most challenging of situations, inspiring, and advancing science and exploration. The mission itself personifies the human ideal of persevering toward the future and will help us prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet."

About the size of a car, the 2,263-pound (1,026-kilogram) robotic geologist and astrobiologist will undergo several weeks of testing before it begins its two-year science investigation of Mars' Jezero Crater. While the rover will investigate the rock and sediment of Jezero's ancient lakebed and river delta to characterize the region's geology and past climate, a fundamental part of its mission is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. To that end, the Mars Sample Return campaign, being planned by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency), will allow scientists on Earth to study samples collected by Perseverance to search for definitive signs of past life using instruments too large and complex to send to the Red Planet.

"Because of today's exciting events, the first pristine samples from carefully documented locations on another planet are another step closer to being returned to Earth," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA. "Perseverance is the first step in bringing back rock and regolith from Mars. We don't know what these pristine samples from Mars will tell us. But what they could tell us is monumental -- including that life might have once existed beyond Earth."

Some 28 miles (45 kilometers) wide, Jezero Crater sits on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator. Scientists have determined that 3.5 billion years ago the crater had its own river delta and was filled with water.

The power system that provides electricity and heat for Perseverance through its exploration of Jezero Crater is a Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, or MMRTG. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) provided it to NASA through an ongoing partnership to develop power systems for civil space applications.

Equipped with seven primary science instruments, the most cameras ever sent to Mars, and its exquisitely complex sample caching system -- the first of its kind sent into space -- Perseverance will scour the Jezero region for fossilized remains of ancient microscopic Martian life, taking samples along the way.

"Perseverance is the most sophisticated robotic geologist ever made, but verifying that microscopic life once existed carries an enormous burden of proof," said Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division. "While we'll learn a lot with the great instruments we have aboard the rover, it may very well require the far more capable laboratories and instruments back here on Earth to tell us whether our samples carry evidence that Mars once harbored life."

Paving the Way for Human Missions

"Landing on Mars is always an incredibly difficult task and we are proud to continue building on our past success," said JPL Director Michael Watkins. "But, while Perseverance advances that success, this rover is also blazing its own path and daring new challenges in the surface mission. We built the rover not just to land but to find and collect the best scientific samples for return to Earth, and its incredibly complex sampling system and autonomy not only enable that mission, they set the stage for future robotic and crewed missions."

The Mars Entry, Descent, and Landing Instrumentation 2 (MEDLI2) sensor suite collected data about Mars' atmosphere during entry, and the Terrain-Relative Navigation system autonomously guided the spacecraft during final descent. The data from both are expected to help future human missions land on other worlds more safely and with larger payloads.

On the surface of Mars, Perseverance's science instruments will have an opportunity to scientifically shine. Mastcam-Z is a pair of zoomable science cameras on Perseverance's remote sensing mast, or head, that creates high-resolution, color 3D panoramas of the Martian landscape. Also located on the mast, the SuperCam uses a pulsed laser to study the chemistry of rocks and sediment and has its own microphone to help scientists better understand the property of the rocks, including their hardness.

Located on a turret at the end of the rover's robotic arm, the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) and the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC) instruments will work together to collect data on Mars' geology close-up. PIXL will use an X-ray beam and suite of sensors to delve into a rock's elemental chemistry. SHERLOC's ultraviolet laser and spectrometer, along with its Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering (WATSON) imager, will study rock surfaces, mapping out the presence of certain minerals and organic molecules, which are the carbon-based building blocks of life on Earth.

The rover chassis is home to three science instruments, as well. The Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX) is the first ground-penetrating radar on the surface of Mars and will be used to determine how different layers of the Martian surface formed over time. The data could help pave the way for future sensors that hunt for subsurface water ice deposits.

Also with an eye on future Red Planet explorations, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) technology demonstration will attempt to manufacture oxygen out of thin air -- the Red Planet's tenuous and mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere. The rover's Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) instrument, which has sensors on the mast and chassis, will provide key information about present-day Mars weather, climate, and dust.

Currently attached to the belly of Perseverance, the diminutive Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is a technology demonstration that will attempt the first powered, controlled flight on another planet.

Project engineers and scientists will now put Perseverance through its paces, testing every instrument, subsystem, and subroutine over the next month or two. Only then will they deploy the helicopter to the surface for the flight test phase. If successful, Ingenuity could add an aerial dimension to exploration of the Red Planet in which such helicopters serve as a scouts or make deliveries for future astronauts away from their base.

Once Ingenuity's test flights are complete, the rover's search for evidence of ancient microbial life will begin in earnest.

"Perseverance is more than a rover, and more than this amazing collection of men and women that built it and got us here," said John McNamee, project manager of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission at JPL. "It is even more than the 10.9 million people who signed up to be part of our mission. This mission is about what humans can achieve when they persevere. We made it this far. Now, watch us go."

More About the Mission

A primary objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology research, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet's geology and past climate and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith, paving the way for human exploration of the Red Planet.

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA, will send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA's Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

Read more at Science Daily

Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Mission to Red Planet successfully launched

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover onboard launches from Space Launch Complex 41, Thursday, July 30, 2020, at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Perseverance rover is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the Red Planet.

NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission is on its way to the Red Planet to search for signs of ancient life and collect samples to send back to Earth.

Humanity's most sophisticated rover launched with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at 7:50 a.m. EDT (4:50 a.m. PDT) Friday on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

"With the launch of Perseverance, we begin another historic mission of exploration," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. "This amazing explorer's journey has already required the very best from all of us to get it to launch through these challenging times. Now we can look forward to its incredible science and to bringing samples of Mars home even as we advance human missions to the Red Planet. As a mission, as an agency, and as a country, we will persevere."

The ULA Atlas V's Centaur upper stage initially placed the Mars 2020 spacecraft into a parking orbit around Earth. The engine fired for a second time and the spacecraft separated from the Centaur as expected. Navigation data indicate the spacecraft is perfectly on course to Mars.

Mars 2020 sent its first signal to ground controllers viaNASA's Deep Space Networkat 9:15 a.m. EDT (6:15 a.m. PDT). However, telemetry (more detailed spacecraft data) had not yet been acquired at that point. Around 11:30 a.m. EDT (8:30 a.m. PDT), a signal with telemetry was received from Mars 2020 by NASA ground stations. Data indicate the spacecraft had entered a state known as safe mode, likely because a part of the spacecraft was a little colder than expected while Mars 2020 was in Earth's shadow. All temperatures are now nominal and the spacecraft is out of Earth's shadow.

When a spacecraft enters safe mode, all but essential systems are turned off until it receives new commands from mission control. An interplanetary launch is fast-paced and dynamic, so a spacecraft is designed to put itself in safe mode if its onboard computer perceives conditions are not within its preset parameters. Right now, the Mars 2020 mission is completing a full health assessment on the spacecraft and is working to return the spacecraft to a nominal configuration for its journey to Mars.

The Perseverance rover's astrobiology mission is to seek out signs of past microscopic life on Mars, explore the diverse geology of its landing site,Jezero Crater, and demonstrate key technologies that will help us prepare for future robotic and human exploration.

"Jezero Crater is the perfect place to search for signs of ancient life," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "Perseverance is going to make discoveries that cause us to rethink our questions about what Mars was like and how we understand it today. As our instruments investigate rocks along an ancient lake bottom and select samples to return to Earth, we may very well be reaching back in time to get the information scientists need to say that life has existed elsewhere in the universe."

The Martian rock and dust Perseverance's Sample Caching System collects could answer fundamental questions about the potential for life to exist beyond Earth. Two future missions currently under consideration by NASA, in collaboration with ESA (European Space Agency), will work together to get the samples to an orbiter for return to Earth. When they arrive on Earth, the Mars samples will undergo in-depth analysis by scientists around the world using equipment far too large to send to the Red Planet.

An Eye to a Martian Tomorrow

While most of Perseverance's seven instruments are geared toward learning more about the planet's geology and astrobiology, the MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) instrument's job is focused on missions yet to come. Designed to demonstrate that converting Martian carbon dioxide into oxygen is possible, it could lead to future versions of MOXIE technology that become staples on Mars missions, providing oxygen for rocket fuel and breathable air.

Also future-leaning is the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which will remain attached to the belly of Perseverance for the flight to Mars and the first 60 or so days on the surface. A technology demonstrator, Ingenuity's goal is a pure flight test -- it carries no science instruments.

Over 30 sols (31 Earth days), the helicopter will attempt up to five powered, controlled flights. The data acquired during these flight tests will help the next generation of Mars helicopters provide an aerial dimension to Mars explorations -- potentially scouting for rovers and human crews, transporting small payloads, or investigating difficult-to-reach destinations.

The rover's technologies for entry, descent, and landing also will provide information to advance future human missions to Mars.

"Perseverance is the most capable rover in history because it is standing on the shoulders of our pioneers Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity," said Michael Watkins, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "In the same way, the descendants of Ingenuity and MOXIE will become valuable tools for future explorers to the Red Planet and beyond."

About seven cold, dark, unforgiving months of interplanetary space travel lay ahead for the mission -- a fact never far from the mind of Mars 2020 project team.

"There is still a lot of road between us and Mars," said John McNamee, Mars 2020 project manager at JPL. "About 290 million miles of them. But if there was ever a team that could make it happen, it is this one. We are going to Jezero Crater. We will see you there Feb. 18, 2021."

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of America's larger Moon to Mars exploration approach that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. Charged with sending the first woman and next man to the Moon by 2024, NASA will establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through NASA's Artemis program.

Read more at Science Daily

Promising signs for Perseverance rover in its quest for past Martian life

New research indicates river delta deposits within Mars' Jezero crater -- the destination of NASA' Perseverance rover on the Red Planet -- formed over time scales that promoted habitability and enhanced preservation of evidence.

Undulating streaks of land visible from space reveal rivers once coursed across the Martian surface -- but for how long did the water flow? Enough time to record evidence of ancient life, according to a new Stanford study.

Scientists have speculated that the Jezero crater on Mars -- the site of the next NASA rover mission to the Red Planet -- could be a good place to look for markers of life. A new analysis of satellite imagery supports that hypothesis. By modeling the length of time it took to form the layers of sediment in a delta deposited by an ancient river as it poured into the crater, researchers have concluded that if life once existed near the Martian surface, traces of it could have been captured within the delta layers.

"There probably was water for a significant duration on Mars and that environment was most certainly habitable, even if it may have been arid," according to lead author Mathieu Lapôtre, an assistant professor of geological sciences at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). "We showed that sediments were deposited rapidly and that if there were organics, they would have been buried rapidly, which means that they would likely have been preserved and protected."

Jezero crater was selected for NASA's next rover mission partly because the site contains a river delta, which on Earth are known to effectively preserve organic molecules associated with life. But without an understanding of the rates and durations of delta-building events, the analogy remained speculative. The new research, published online on April 23 in AGU Advances, offers guidance for sample recovery in order to better understand the ancient Martian climate and duration of the delta formation for NASA's Perseverance Rover to Mars, which is expected to launch in July 2020 as part of the first Mars sample return mission.

Extrapolating from Earth

The study incorporates a recent discovery the researchers made about Earth: Single-threaded sinuous rivers that don't have plants growing over their banks move sideways about ten times faster than those with vegetation. Based on the strength of Mars' gravity, and assuming the Red Planet did not have plants, the scientists estimate that the delta in Jezero crater took at least 20 to 40 years to form, but that formation was likely discontinuous and spread out across about 400,000 years.

"This is useful because one of the big unknowns on Mars is time," Lapôtre said. "By finding a way to calculate rate for the process, we can start gaining that dimension of time."

Because single-threaded, meandering rivers are most often found with vegetation on Earth, their occurrence without plants remained largely undetected until recently. It was thought that before the appearance of plants, only braided rivers, made up of multiple interlaced channels, existed. Now that researchers know to look for them, they have found meandering rivers on Earth today where there are no plants, such as in the McLeod Springs Wash in the Toiyabe basin of Nevada.

"This specifically hadn't been done before because single-threaded rivers without plants were not really on anyone's radar," Lapôtre said. "It also has cool implications for how rivers might have worked on Earth before there were plants."

The researchers also estimated that wet spells conducive to significant delta buildup were about 20 times less frequent on ancient Mars than they are on Earth today.

"People have been thinking more and more about the fact that flows on Mars probably were not continuous and that there have been times when you had flows and other times when you had dry spells," Lapôtre said. "This is a novel way of putting quantitative constraints on how frequently flows probably happened on Mars."

Findings from Jezero crater could aid our understanding of how life evolved on Earth. If life once existed there, it likely didn't evolve beyond the single-cell stage, scientists say. That's because Jezero crater formed over 3.5 billion years ago, long before organisms on Earth became multicellular. If life once existed at the surface, its evolution was stalled by some unknown event that sterilized the planet. That means the Martian crater could serve as a kind of time capsule preserving signs of life as it might once have existed on Earth.

Read more at Science Daily

Trembling aspen leaves could save future Mars rovers

The traditional harvester on the left, and the new harvester on the right.

Researchers at the University of Warwick have been inspired by the unique movement of trembling aspen leaves, to devise an energy harvesting mechanism that could power weather sensors in hostile environments and could even be a back-up energy supply that could save and extend the life of future Mars rovers.

University of Warwick third year engineering undergraduates have in recent years been set the task of the examining the puzzle of why Aspen leaves quiver in the presence of a slightest breeze. University of Warwick Engineering researchers Sam Tucker Harvey, Dr Igor A. Khovanov, and Dr Petr Denissenko were inspired to look more closely at this task they were annually setting for their students and to take the phenomenon one step further.

They decided to investigate whether the underlying mechanisms that produce the low wind speed quiver in Aspen leaves could efficiently and effectively generate electrical power, simply by exploiting the wind generated mechanical movement of a device modelled on the leaf. They have today 18th March 2019 published the answer to that question as a paper entitled "A Galloping Energy Harvester with Flow Attachment" in Applied Physics Letters and the answer is a resounding yes.

University of Warwick PhD engineering researcher Sam Tucker Harvey, the lead author on the paper, said:

"What's most appealing about this mechanism is that it provides a mechanical means of generating power without the use of bearings, which can cease to work in environments with extreme cold, heat, dust or sand. While the amount of potential power that could be generated is small, it would be more than enough to power autonomous electrical devices, such as those in wireless sensor networks. These networks could be utilised for applications such as providing automated weather sensing in remote and extreme environments."

Dr Petr Denissenko further noted that one future application could be as a backup power supply for future Mars landers and rovers.

"The performance of the Mars rover Opportunity far exceeded its designers' wildest dreams but even its hard working solar panels were probably eventually overcome by a planetary-scale dust storm. If we could equip future rovers with a backup mechanical energy harvester based on this technology, it may further the lives of the next generation of Mars rovers and landers."

The key to Aspen leaves' low wind but large amplitude quiver isn't just the shape the leaf but more importantly relates to the effectively flat shape of the stem.

The University of Warwick researchers used mathematical modelling to come up with a mechanical equivalent of the leaf. They then used a low speed wind tunnel to test a device with a cantilever beam like the flat stem of the Aspen leaf, and a curved blade tip with a circular arc cross section acting like the main leaf.

The blade was then oriented perpendicular to the flow direction, which allows the harvester to produce self-sustained oscillations at uncharacteristically low wind speeds like the aspen leaf. The tests showed that the air flow becomes attached to the rear face of the blade when the blade's velocity becomes high enough, hence acting more similarly to an aerofoil rather than to the bluff bodies which have typically been studied in the context of wind energy harvesting.

In nature, the propensity of a leaf to quiver is also enhanced by the thin stem's tendency to twist in the wind in two different directions. However, the researchers modelling and testing found that they did not need to replicate the additional complexity of a further degree of movement in their mechanical model. Simply replicating the basic properties of the flat stem in as a cantilever beam and curved blade tip with a circular arc cross section acting like the main leaf was enough to create sufficient mechanical movement to harvest power.

Read more at Science Daily

Mars rover Curiosity makes first gravity-measuring traverse on the Red Planet

In a selfie taken in mid-January 2019, Mars rover Curiosity prepares to enter a new, clay-mineral-rich unit on its traverse up Mount Sharp in Gale Crater. Mission scientists are anxious to see what a new gravity-measuring technique will reveal about the mountain and Gale Crater's history.

A clever use of non-science engineering data from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has let a team of researchers, including an Arizona State University graduate student, measure the density of rock layers in 96-mile-wide Gale Crater.

The findings, to be published February 1, 2019, in the journal Science, show that the layers are more porous than scientists had suspected. The discovery also gives scientists a novel technique to use in the future as the rover continues its trek across the crater and up Mount Sharp, a three-mile-high mountain in its center.

"What we were able to do is measure the bulk density of the material in Gale Crater," says Travis Gabriel, a graduate student in ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration. He worked on computing what the grain density should be for the rocks and ancient lakebed sediments the rover has been driving over.

"Working from the rocks' mineral abundances as determined by the Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument, we estimated a grain density of 2810 kilograms per cubic meter," he says. "However the bulk density that came out of our study is a lot less -- 1680 kilograms per cubic meter."

The much lower figure shows that the rocks have a reduced density most likely resulting from the rocks being more porous. This means the rocks have been compressed less than scientists have thought.

Like a Smartphone, but better

The engineering sensors used in the study were accelerometers and gyroscopes, much like those found in every smartphone. In a phone, these determine its orientation and motion. Curiosity's sensors do the same, but with much greater precision, helping engineers and mission controllers navigate the rover across the martian surface.

But while the rover is standing still, the accelerometers also measure the local force of gravity at that spot on Mars.

The team took the engineering data from the first five years of the mission -- Curiosity landed in 2012 -- and used it to measure the gravitational tug of Mars at more than 700 points along the rover's track. As Curiosity has been ascending Mount Sharp, the mountain began to tug on it, as well -- but not as much as scientists expected.

"The lower levels of Mount Sharp are surprisingly porous," says lead author Kevin Lewis of Johns Hopkins University. "We know the bottom layers of the mountain were buried over time. That compacts them, making them denser. But this finding suggests they weren't buried by as much material as we thought."

Making Mount Sharp

Planetary scientists have long debated the origin of Mount Sharp. Mars craters the size of Gale have central peaks raised by the shock of the impact that made the crater. This would account for part of the mound's height. But the upper layers of the mound appear to be made of wind-scoured sediments more easily eroded than rock.

Did these sediments once fill the entire bowl of Gale Crater? If so, they might have weighed heavily on the materials at the base, compacting them.

But the new findings suggest Mount Sharp's lower layers have been compacted by only a half-mile to a mile (1 to 2 kilometers) of material -- much less than if the crater had been completely filled.

"There are still many questions about how Mount Sharp developed, but this paper adds an important piece to the puzzle," said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which manages the mission. "I'm thrilled that creative scientists and engineers are still finding innovative ways to make new scientific discoveries with the rover."

Read more at Science Daily

Rover findings indicate stratified lake on ancient Mars

Sedimentary Signs of a Martian Lakebed (Shallow Part): This evenly layered rock imaged in 2014 by the Mastcam on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows a pattern typical of a lake-floor sedimentary deposit near where flowing water entered a lake. Shallow and deep parts of an ancient Martian lake left different clues in mudstone formed from lakebed deposits.

A long-lasting lake on ancient Mars provided stable environmental conditions that differed significantly from one part of the lake to another, according to a comprehensive look at findings from the first three-and-a-half years of NASA's Curiosity rover mission. While previous work had revealed the presence of a lake more than three billion years ago in Mars' Gale Crater, this study defines the lake's chemical conditions and uses Curiosity's powerful payload to determine that the lake was stratified.

Stratified bodies of water exhibit sharp chemical or physical differences between deep water and shallow water. In Gale's lake, the shallow water was richer in oxidants than deeper water was.

"We're learning that in parts of the lake and at certain times, the water carried more oxygen," said Roger Wiens, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and co-author of the study, published today in the journal Science. "This matters because it affects what minerals are deposited in the sediments, and also because oxygen is important for life. But we have to remember that at the time of Gale Lake, life on our planet had not yet adapted to using oxygen -- photosynthesis had not yet been invented. Instead, the oxidation state of certain elements like manganese or iron may have been more important for life, if it ever existed on Mars. These oxidation states would be controlled by the dissolved oxygen content of the water."

"These were very different, co-existing environments in the same lake," said Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University, lead author of the report. "This type of oxidant stratification is a common feature of lakes on Earth, and now we've found it on Mars. The diversity of environments in this Martian lake would have provided multiple opportunities for different types of microbes to survive."

Whether Mars has ever hosted any life is still unknown, but seeking signs of life on any planet, whether Earth, Mars or more-distant icy worlds, begins with reconstruction of the environment to determine if it was capable of supporting life. NASA is using Curiosity to explore habitable environments on the ancient surface of Mars.

Read more at Science Daily

Obama: NASA Will Land on Mars in the 2030s

In a patriotic and emotional op-ed for CNN Tuesday morning, President Barack Obama reaffirmed NASA's aim to land and return astronauts on the Martian surface by the 2030s, "with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time."

To take this next giant leap into interplanetary space, Obama added, NASA will partner with private companies to make this vision a possibility.

"Getting to Mars will require continued cooperation between government and private innovators, and we're already well on our way," he writes. "Within the next two years, private companies will for the first time send astronauts to the International Space Station."

Since NASA's inception, the space agency has contracted private companies to provide hardware for space exploration and NASA currently contracts private space launch companies to deliver equipment and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS), invigorating a new race to commercialize space.

Now the space station is, in part, supplied by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences and these partnerships are set to continue and expand to the delivery of astronauts to the orbiting outpost. So it may not come as a surprise that NASA will seek partnerships in the private sector to make a Mars mission possible.

Six years ago, on Oct. 11, 2010, Obama signed into law a redirection in NASA's road map to Mars, skipping the moon and developing the technologies to visit an asteroid and then send a human mission to the Red Planet. And in his op-ed, Obama reflects on the achievements NASA has made in the past six years to drive forward investment in the private sector, while boosting the economy and inspiring the nation. But now, NASA aims to push humanity beyond Earth orbit.

"I'm excited to announce that we are working with our commercial partners to build new habitats that can sustain and transport astronauts on long-duration missions in deep space," he writes. "These missions will teach us how humans can live far from Earth -- something we'll need for the long journey to Mars."

In response to the President's remarks, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said that NASA is primed to test technologies that will allow astronauts to live in space for days or weeks away from Earth, rather than hours.

"For example, in the mid-2020s, NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission will send a robotic spacecraft to a nearby asteroid to test out important exploration technologies such as solar-electric propulsion, conduct scientific and planetary defense experiments, and then return a boulder from the asteroid to an orbit around the Moon for astronauts to study," Bolden writes. The Asteroid Redirect Mission -- known as "ARM" -- will be an opportunity to prepare and refine technologies for missions to Mars and beyond.

In his statement, Bolden provided some detail on what NASA is doing now to make these aims possible, including the "NextSTEP" program that is asking private enterprises to come up with new and innovative designs for space habitats.

In addition, Bolden discussed the possibility of adding a "commercial module" to a special port on the space station in "preparation for one or more future commercial stations in Low Earth Orbit, ready to take over for the Space Station once its mission ends in the 2020s." In response to this challenge, private companies have responded "enthusiastically," he writes.

NASA continues to develop its next powerful rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion capsule that will be used to get astronauts to asteroids and Mars, but in the background, private companies are developing their own, independent plans for getting to Mars.

Read more at Discovery News

Major Dust Storm Could Soon Hit Mars

This image illustrates the haze that engulfs Mars during major dust storms. These two images were taken in 2001, about a month apart.

A raging Martian dust storm is expected to sweep across the Red Planet within the next few months, according to a study that found a way to predict these otherwise variable weather events.

Global dust storms on Mars threaten robotic rovers traversing the Martian surface, as well as astronauts that may one day set up camp on the Red Planet. However, based on past weather patterns, Martian dust storms may soon become more predictable -- and if history repeats itself, the next storm is just around the corner, according to a statement from NASA.

"Mars will reach the midpoint of its current dust storm season on October 29th of this year," James Shirley, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the statement. "Based on the historical pattern we found, we believe it is very likely that a global dust storm will begin within a few weeks or months of this date."

Local dust storms are fairly frequent on Mars. However, these localized storms can grow into regional or, in some cases, global storms. The dust storm season typically reaches its peak during the spring and summer in the planet's southern hemisphere, when Mars is closest to the sun, NASA officials said in the statement.

Dust storms on Mars create a massive haze that blankets the planet. The last global dust storm on Mars was in 2007. During this storm, NASA Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity received scarce solar power, but were able to survive.

"The global dust storm in 2007 was the first major threat to the rovers since landing," John Callas, project manager for Spirit and Opportunity, said in the statement. "We had to take special measures to enable their survival for several weeks with little sunlight to keep them powered. Each rover powered up only a few minutes each day, enough to warm them up, then shut down to the next day without even communicating with Earth. For many days during the worst of the storm, the rovers were completely on their own."

Before 2007, major Martian dust storms have been recorded in 1971, 1977, 1982, 1994 and 2001. Using data on the orbital motion of Mars, Shirley discovered a pattern in the occurrence of these storms. He found other planets impact the momentum of Mars as it orbits the solar system's center of gravity.

The planet's momentum increases and decreases in a cycle that lasts 2.2 years, slightly longer than the Martian year, which is 1.9 years. Shirley found that global dust storms tend to occur when the momentum is increasing during the first part of the dust storm season, which doesn't happen during every Martian year. The finding is reported in a new study, published May 2015 in the journal Icarus.

Read more at Discovery News

Curiosity Finds Unique Ripples in Mars' Dunes

Though both Mars and Earth possess wind-blown sand dunes with very similar characteristics, it seems Martian dunes have a little something extra.

Mars is a planet shaped by aeolian -- or "wind-driven" -- processes. So it probably doesn't come as a surprise to know the Red Planet also sports some pretty big sand dunes.

From afar, these dunes strongly resemble the dunes we have on our planet. But in a new study carried out by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, an active dune field on Mars has revealed that, though many of the processes that shape Martian dunes are the same processes that shape terrestrial dunes, there's an extra ripple that can only form in Mars' atmosphere.

"Earth and Mars both have big sand dunes and small sand ripples, but on Mars, there's something in between that we don't have on Earth," said graduate student Mathieu Lapotre, of Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., in a NASA statement.

On both Earth and Mars dunes can be as large as a football field and consist of a gently-sloping upwind face and a steep downwind face that is shaped by continuous sand avalanches as the prevailing wind keeps pushing material over the apex of the dune. Classical arc-shaped barchan dunes can often result on both planets and Mars satellites have captured some stunning observations of these types of dunes from orbit. Just look at them, they're amazing.

On Earth, the surfaces of these dunes are often rippled with peaks and troughs spaced around 30 centimeters (12 inches) apart. These rows of ripples are created by wind-carried grains of sand colliding with stationary grains, eventually creating a corrugated texture on dunes covering sandy deserts and beaches.

Until Curiosity started its approach to the active dark Bagnold Dunes six months ago on the northwestern slopes of Mount Sharp, scientists didn't know whether these small-scale "impact ripples" existed. From orbit, larger ripples measuring around three meters (10 feet) from peak to peak could be seen and it was generally assumed that these larger-scale ripples were equivalent to Earth's impact ripples, only much larger owing to the thin Martian atmosphere and lower gravity.

But when Curiosity arrived at Bagnold, the rover didn't only see the 10 feet-wide ripples, but it also saw the small-scale ripples just like Earth's impact ripples.

"As Curiosity was approaching the Bagnold Dunes, we started seeing that the crest lines of the meter-scale ripples are sinuous," said Lapotre, who's also science team collaborator for the Curiosity mission. "That is not like impact ripples, but it is just like sand ripples that form under moving water on Earth. And we saw that superimposed on the surfaces of these larger ripples were ripples the same size and shape as impact ripples on Earth."

So it turns out that Mars dunes have an added complexity that could only be proven by rolling up close and taking photos. Mars dunes have the small impact ripples, plus medium-sized "sinuous ripples" that can be resolved from space.

Interestingly, though Earth's dunes don't possess sinuous ripples, they can form underwater -- on a riverbed, for example. Rather than particles colliding, these sinuous ripples are created as flowing water drags particles, causing them to settle in a rippled pattern.

Lapotre, who is lead author of a study that was published on July 1 in the journal Science, thinks that the Martian sinuous ripples are being driven in a similar way, but it's the Red Planet's thin atmosphere that's dragging the particles to form the medium-sized ripples on the sand dunes. Lapotre's team have nicknamed them "wind-drag ripples."

"The size of these ripples is related to the density of the fluid moving the grains, and that fluid is the Martian atmosphere," he said. "We think Mars had a thicker atmosphere in the past that might have formed smaller wind-drag ripples or even have prevented their formation altogether. Thus, the size of preserved wind-drag ripples, where found in Martian sandstones, may have recorded the thinning of the atmosphere."

Read more at Discovery News

Mars Rover Finds Rich Mineral Stew in Fractured Rock

Chemical analysis by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity indicates that water made several repeat appearances to create the rich mineral veins at a site called “Garden City” in the lower part of Mount Sharp.

The veins form in places where fluids have move through fractured rocks, depositing minerals and leaving telltale chemical fingerprints on surrounding areas. Some of the mineral veins at Garden City protrude the equivalent of two finger widths above the now-eroded bedrock in which they formed.

The site was not accessible to Curiosity’s drill, but in March the rover zapped 17 targets with its ChemCam laser and discovered a diverse chemical stew.

“I think this has some of the most extreme chemistry that we’ve seen in a very localized area. There’s been other places where we’ve seen very strong chemistry, but in this kind of meter-square area, up until this point I don’t think we’ve seen anywhere with this much variability and this much unexpected chemistry,” Curiosity scientist Diana Blaney, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, told Discovery News.

Many of the veins contain rich deposits of calcium sulfate. Others are laced with magnesium sulfate or fluorine. Levels of iron vary.

The three-mile-high Mount Sharp rises from the floor of a huge impact basin that once held water. The Garden City veins were created after mud in the lake had hardened into rock and cracked.

“At Garden City, because there’s such good preservation and we get the cross-cutting, we’re able to start pulling out some chemical signatures that we saw at different places into distinct fluids. And by looking at the cross-cutting relationships and the difference in chemistries, I think we have really strong evidence that they’re distinct fluid events,” Blaney said.

“We don’t know how far apart in time these different events occurred, or what was driving them,” she added. “I think as we get more information on what it’s going to take to chemically evolve these fluids, we might be able to pin that down.”

Curiosity is scouring Mount Sharp to look for habitats that could have supported past life and for places suitable to preserve organics.

“Veins have a good potential — because it’s a fluid and there is crystallization — to include things as inclusions, but the organic preservation has a lot of factors,” Blaney said.

Read more at Discovery News

Mars Rover Finds Gale Crater was Once a Big Lake

About the time that life was taking hold on Earth, Mars not only had the ingredients for life as well, but long-lived lakes that could support it, new research from NASA’s Curiosity rover team shows.

Analysis of sediments and geologic features found in the rover’s Gale Crater landing site show that the basin periodically filled with water that lasted for hundreds or even thousands of years. Previously, the rover discovered evidence of an ancient shallow lake and streams.

“You have a deep hole, filled with water that is stable,” which indicates that Mars must have had a denser atmosphere at that point in its history than can be explained by current computer models, geologist John Grotzinger, with the California Institute of Technology, told Discovery News.

“It also means that other places were wet as well,” he added.

The new research “strongly bolsters the case that if life ever did evolve on Mars there would have been many habitable environments,” Grotzinger said. “This is the definitive evidence that you need to say that lakes were stable on Mars.”

The study, published in this week’s Science, not only proves that impact craters can -- and indeed did -- fill with water, but also settles debate about how Mount Sharp, a three-mile high mound of sediment rising from the floor of Gale Crater, formed.

Analysis of data collected by the rover shows that water collected on the crater’s floor, which gradually rose over time until the basin was completely filled.

“The only way to get that is to have a body of standing water that receives sediment and fills the lake. Then the water rises and that creates more space for sediment to accumulate again and again. In that fashion, like a dipstick rising, you see the crater progressively filling up layer after layer after layer after layer after layer until it goes up to 1,000 meters, maybe 2,000 meters, then stops,” Grotzinger said.

Then a new cycle began, this time driven by winds. The layers of sediment eroded away until all that was left was a mountain in the middle of the crater.

Scientists estimate the crater filled and eroded within a span of about 500 million years approximately 3.2 billion to 3.7 billion years ago, a period of time that overlaps with the oldest sedimentary rocks on Earth.

Read more at Discovery News

Mars Mission Will Drill Deep for Inside Information

Besides some Martian meteorites collected on Earth, some gravity data from spacecraft and other bits of information, our knowledge of the planet’s insides is small, said Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator of a new lander called InSight, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. But that's about to change.

InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) will launch for Mars in March on a quick six-month journey to the Red Planet. Upon arriving at the Martian equator, the spacecraft will deploy a small drill to probe the planet’s interior and a seismometer to measure any “marsquakes” that occur.

“Mars is a really good laboratory to understand how planets form into the complex bodies they are,” Banerdt told Discovery News. This is because the lack of plate tectonics means the planet did not meld its early rocks into the interior (unlike Earth). Also, it’s big enough to have a complex interior with a core and mantle, unlike Earth’s nearby moon.

For the past two months, engineers have been testing InSight’s chops at a Lockheed Martin facility in Colorado. So far, things are going well, the company says. The contractor has decades of experience working with NASA and helps to operate two spacecraft that will relay information from InSight to orbit — Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — and then to Earth. (MRO was recently repositioned in orbit to help with InSight’s landing.)

Testing is divided into two phases — the launch and cruise to Mars, and then the complex entry, descent and landing. Luckily for InSight, a similar system was tested before when the Phoenix lander safely made it to the surface in August 2007. But there still are a number of steps to consider, including separating the lander from the cruise shield and safely deploying the legs InSight will rest on while sitting on the surface.

“After we touch down, the first most critical event is the deployment of the landing solar array,” Stu Spath, InSight program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co., told Discovery News. “It will unfurl into a nearly circular pattern and collect the solar energy for power. Then we’ll test our most critical components and do a communications check to communicate properly (to Earth).”

The first 80 sols (Martian days) of work will be busy. In the first 40 sols, InSight will test out its systems and place the seismometer on the surface. Then comes the drill. It will be slowly lowered below the surface a half-meter (1.6 feet) at a time. Investigators will then take a few days to send out a heat pulse to see how the environment around the drill is reacting. The mission goal is to get the drill at least 3 to 5 meters (10 to 16 feet) deep.

Read more at Discovery News

Curiosity's 3 Years Unraveling Mars' Mysteries

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has now been trundling across the Red Planet for three very productive and eventful years.

Curiosity landed on the night of Aug. 5, 2012, pulling off a dramatic and unprecedented touchdown with the aid of a rocket-powered "sky crane" that lowered the 1-ton rover gently to the Martian surface via cables.

The six-wheeled robot then set out to determine if its immediate environs — a 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) crater named Gale — could ever have supported microbial life. That work and more are chronicled in a new NASA video on Curiosity's discoveries on the Red Planet.

Curiosity quickly succeeded in this main task. The rover's observations of rocks at an area near its landing site called Yellowknife Bay allowed mission scientists to deduce that Gale Crater supported a potentially habitable lake-and-stream system for long stretches in the ancient past — perhaps for millions of years at a time.

Curiosity departed the Yellowknife Bay area in July 2013, making tracks toward the foothills of the towering Mount Sharp, which rises 3.4 miles (5.5 km) into the Martian sky from Gale's center.

Mount Sharp's base has been Curiosity's primary destination since before the $2.5 billion mission's November 2011 launch. The rover team wants Curiosity to climb up through the mountain's lower reaches, reading a history of Mars' changing environmental conditions in the rocks along the way.

Curiosity reached the mountain in September 2014, rolling up to a Mount Sharp outcrop team members dubbed Pahrump Hills. The rover studied the Pahrump Hills area for about five months, drilling into rocks three separate times for analysis purposes.

"That was an investment of time specifically because it was the first chance we got to see what the mountain was made out of," said Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "That was a great five months."

Curiosity left Pahrump Hillls in March to investigate outcrops higher up the mountain. Recently, the rover has been eyeing a geological "contact zone" where two distinct rock types come together.

"It's been an adventure, partly because we're on the mountain now, and driving is much more challenging," Vasavada told Space.com.

For example, thick sand and steep, slippery terrain thwarted Curiosity's first attempt to reach the contact zone. But the rover team found another route and got Curiosity where it needed to go.

The rover's work at Mount Sharp's base so far strongly suggests that liquid water deposited the bottom layers of the mountain, Vasavada said. These results extend the discoveries made at Yellowknife Bay, providing a more complete picture of the region.

"Our view of Gale Crater as an ancient habitable environment has grown tremendously, both spatially and through time in Mars history," Vasavada said. "And that's really what the rest of the mission will be about as well."

Curiosity currently sits at an elevation of perhaps 66 to 98 feet (20 to 30 meters) above Gale Crater's floor, he added. The rover team would ideally like to climb about 1,650 feet (500 m) up, to sample a number of different Mount Sharp layers.

Such mountaineering will take time — time that the mission team does not officially have at the moment. Curiosity is about halfway through its first two-year extended mission, which NASA approved after the two-year prime mission ended in 2014. The rover's handlers plan to keep applying for additional two-year extensions for the foreseeable future, Vasavada said.

He said he thinks they'll have a very good case for at least the next four years, because Curiosity remains productive and in good health.

The rover team has made a lot of progress in troubleshooting a glitch that recently cropped up in Curiosity's drilling mechanism, and concerns about the mounting damage to the rover's six wheels have abated recently, Vasavada said.

Read more at Discovery News

Curiosity Has Hit a Martian Mineral Jackpot

As far as rocks on any planet go, this formation looks fascinating. But it’s even more fascinating to know that this particular rocky outcrop was photographed on Mars by NASA’s Curiosity rover and it holds further clues to the red planet’s wet past and, potentially, Mars’ habitable potential.

Currently studying the “Pahrump Hills” region at the base of Mount Sharp in the center of Gale Crater, this new view snapped by Curiosity on March 18 shows a work site Curiosity’s mission scientists call “Garden City.” This area is interesting as it shows two-tone mineral veins protruding from the surrounding rock.

The tough mineral veins were formed in Mars’ ancient wet past and they are sticking out of the rock up to 6 centimeters (2.5 inches) high. This means that the veins formed within the rock and the softer surrounding bedrock has since eroded away.

When comparing the geology of this particular area with the rocks that Curiosity has analysed in lower sections of Mount Sharp, a story emerges Mars’ ancient geological history.

“Some of (the mineral veins) look like ice-cream sandwiches: dark on both edges and white in the middle,” said Linda Kah, Curiosity science-team member at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory news release. “These materials tell us about secondary fluids that were transported through the region after the host rock formed.”

Like previous rocks studied by Curiosity, the prominent veins at Garden City were formed when water flowed through cracks in bedrock, depositing minerals inside these fractures. The chemistry of the rock neighboring the fractures became altered and these tough veins formed. Previously, the robotic geologist has found other bright veins rich in calcium sulfate.

However, Garden City appears to be different from previous samples — the darker material in the veins suggest an early episode of water on Mars, whereas the brighter mineral deposits shows a later episode of water flow.

“At least two secondary fluids have left evidence here,” added Kah. “We want to understand the chemistry of the different fluids that were here and the sequence of events. How have later fluids affected the host rock?”

Curiosity has been studying rocky configurations since landing on the Martian surface in 2012.

Over the past 6 months, the rover has been focused on Pahrump Hills, studying the layers of rock spanning an elevation of only 10 meters. Garden City is the highest point (so far) of this survey and there are very obvious changes in the mineral history over this small cross section.

“We investigated Pahrump Hills the way a field geologist would, looking over the whole outcrop first to choose the best samples to collect, and it paid off,” said David Blake of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and principal investigator for Curiosity’s Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument.

Read more at Discovery News

Bad Memories: Mars Rover Suffers More Amnesia Events

Although engineers identified the problem and applied a software fix for Opportunity’s “amnesia events,” the aging NASA mars rover has again been afflicted with further memory issues.

“We changed how the rover uses flash memory in an attempt to correct problems the rover had been experiencing,” said John Callas, project manager for Opportunity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., in a news release “Although we are a little disappointed at the occurrence of an amnesia event only five days after reformatting, we are not surprised. There is still no clear understanding of what is causing the problems. Only time will tell if we have been successful in mitigating the most serious flash problems.”

The problem was thought to be centered around one of the seven memory banks in Opportunity’s flash memory — the rover’s on board “hard drive” of sorts, where data can be stored even if the rover is powered down. Rather than being lost, mission telemetry can be stored when the rover is switched off to preserve battery life during the Martian nights.

But late last year, the rover would “forget” valuable data, caused by a corrupt flash data bank. As a consequence, random resets would occur throughout the day. This was hindering the mission’s progress, prompting mission engineers to adopt a “no-flash mode” where Opportunity would avoid use of its flash memory, instead temporarily storing data to its volatile memory and regularly transmitting the data back to Earth before downtime.

Like the RAM on your PC or Mac, the volatile memory only provides temporary storage of data, becoming wiped when the rover powers down.

After uploading new software to avoid the use of the 7th flash memory bank, on March 20, engineers reformatted Opportunity’s memory. Although the rover isn’t currently exhibiting some of the worst symptoms associated with the amnesia, it appears that its memory problems are far from over.

From Discovery News

Mars Rover Landing Zone Scars Have Curiously Darkened

When NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity touched down inside Gale Crater in August 2012, it did so in dramatic fashion. In the final stages of its daring descent, the rover’s rocket-powered landing platform — known as a sky crane — lit up and blasted the dusty surface, carving out darkened divots before separating from the rover and flying out of harms way.

Over the months and years after landing, the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been keeping track of changes around Curiosity’s landing zone (named “Bradbury Landing”), the crash site of the sky crane and the parachute-endowed back-shell that slowed the rover’s entry into the Martian atmosphere.

After disturbing the ruddy regolith on the Martian surface, usually, over time, the darkened area is expected to fade, slowly returning to its natural state. But recent HiRISE imagery of four components of Curiosity’s landing have faded inconsistently, potentially revealing a previously unknown Mars surface dynamic.

“Spacecraft like Curiosity create these dark blast zone patterns where bright dust is blown away by the landing,” said Ingrid Daubar, a HiRISE team scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “We expected to see them fade as the wind moved the dust around during the months and years after landing, but we’ve been surprised to see that the rate of change doesn’t appear to be consistent.”

These followup observations are, in part, useful for NASA’s next Mars mission, InSight, that will launch in 2016. The InSight lander will deploy a probe that will be hammered a few meters into the ground to measure the heat traveling through the planet’s crust.

Any darkening of the surface is therefore really important for planetary scientists to understand. The darker the surface, the more sunlight that surface will absorb. The brighter the surface is, the more light is reflected and therefore less heating occurs.

From Discovery News

Rover Opportunity Has Found Some Odd Mars Rocks

Veteran Mars rover Opportunity is on the verge of completing a marathon on Mars, but before it crosses the imaginary finishing line at “Marathon Valley,” the plucky six-wheeled robot has found some odd rocks that require further investigation.

“We drove to the edge of a plateau to look down in the valley, and we found these big, dark-gray blocks along the ridgeline,” said Matt Golombek, Opportunity Project Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “We checked one and found its composition is different from any ever measured before on Mars. So, whoa! Let’s study these more before moving on.”

Marathon Valley is so-called as when the rover rolls into the area, it will have completed the distance of a marathon on Mars — 26 miles and 385 yards, or 42.195 kilometers. At its current location, Opportunity is a mere 128 meters from completing that distance.

Apart from being a momentous location for Opportunity’s epic 11 year-long exploration of the red planet, the valley also contains clay minerals as discerned from satellite spectroscopic data; clays that contain invaluable insights to Mars’ wet past. But it seems that the entrance to Marathon Valley is just as enticing as the valley itself promises.

One of the strange-looking blocks has been nicknamed “Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau” and, using its robotic arm-mounted Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer instrument, the rover has determined that the rock contains “relatively high concentrations of aluminum and silicon,” unlike any other rock sample analyzed by Opportunity or sister rover Spirit (that was sadly lost in 2010 after becoming stuck in a sand trap in Gusev Crater).

Opportunity’s science team has now selected another rock in the area, named “Sergeant Charles Floyd,” for additional analysis. The naming convention for these two rocks were inspired by the Lewis and Clark Expedition that ventured across Western portion of what is now the United States in the early 19th Century.

According to a NASA JPL news release, the rocks are gray, but the visible light spectrum of Charbonneau is more purple than most Mars rocks, whereas Floyd is more blue. The bluer rocks appear to lie higher on the ridge.

After analyzing Charbonneau, Opportunity’s mission team uploaded new software to the rover’s computer that is now instructing the rover to avoid writing data to a corrupt bank in the rover’s flash memory. It is now only writing data to 6 of the 7 banks in the hope that Opportunity’s “amnesia events” can be remedied.

Since late 2014, Opportunity has been in “no flash mode”, instead only using its volatile memory that is wiped every day. Lack of flash memory and frustrating rover resets have slowed progress in recent months, but with this new upgrade, mission engineers hope that Opportunity can shrug off these age-related issues and soldier on.

Read more at Discovery News

Lost Beagle Mars Lander Spotted by NASA Spacecraft

The Beagle has landed, new images taken by a sharp-eyed satellite orbiting Mars show, more than a decade after contact with the U.K.-built spacecraft was lost during the probe’s descent to the planet's surface.

Beagle 2 was released by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter on Dec. 23, 2003, and programmed to touch down in Isidis Planitia, an impact basin close to the Martian equator.

It was never heard from again.

"To be frank, I had all but given up hope of ever knowing what happened to Beagle 2," Mark Sims, a former mission manager with the University of Leicester, said in a statement.

Images taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and released on Friday show that Beagle 2 did indeed make it to the planet's surface and apparently at least partially deployed its solar panels.

"Whether all the panels have been opened up or not has yet to be determined by the Beagle team," planetary geologist Tim Parker, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a NASA interview.

The lost lander appeared as bright streaks in two images, confirmation that the object actually was something on the ground and not an optical artifact from a cosmic ray striking the camera's electronic eye.

Analysis of a third image was then used to distinguish glints of light reflecting from different angles. Working with the Beagle 2 team, Parker and colleagues were then able to identify what appears to be the lander itself in a partially deployed configuration and what is believed to be the rear cover with its drogue chute still attached. Beagle 2's main parachute is nearby.

Read more at Discovery News

Mars Microbe Traces Spotted by Rover? Probably Not

Intriguing features photographed by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity probably don't have a biological origin, mission team members say.

An outside researcher recently analyzed photos Curiosity took of an ancient sedimentary outcrop called Gillespie Lake, and noted some similarities to "microbially induced sedimentary structures" (MISS) here on Earth. Study author Nora Noffke, a geobiologist who is not a member of the Curiosity team, said the Gillespie Lake features could be consistent with a biological origin, but stressed repeatedly that this was just a hypothesis, and that she didn't regard the structures as proof of past Mars life.

Curiosity team members also noticed the Gillespie Lake structures (which include domes, cracks and pockets, among other shapes), said mission project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. But the rover team arrived at a different interpretation.

"We really didn't see anything that can't be explained by natural processes of transporting that sand in water, and the nature of the rocks suggested that it was just a fluvial sandstone," Vasavada told Space.com.

"We do have several members of our team who are always keen to look out for things that might be caused by biological processes, but there was no reason, we felt, to explore that at that site," he added. "It came down to nothing exceptional, from our point of view, that wasn't just a consequence of erosion of this sandstone."

Vasavada also stressed that he and the rest of the Curiosity rover team welcome analyses by outside researchers such as Noffke.

If mission scientists had decided to study Gillespie Lake more closely, they could have taken up-close photos using Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager, Vasavada said, or drilled the rock to deliver powder to the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, which is capable of detecting carbon-containing organic molecules.

The Curiosity team did decide to drill into a layer of fine-grained mudstone dubbed Sheepbed, which lies directly beneath Gillespie Lake within a broader region near the rover's landing site called Yellowknife Bay.

SAM's analysis of the Sheepbed mudstone, along with other Curiosity observations, allowed the rover team to determine that Yellowknife Bay could have supported microbial life in the ancient past. About 3.5 billion years ago, the area was part of a lake-stream system that may have been habitable for millions of years, mission scientists said.

SAM also detected organics in the Sheepbed sample, marking the first definitive detection of life's building blocks on Mars.

"We feel that choice paid off," Vasavada said of the focus on Sheepbed.

Read more at Discovery News

Lake in Mars' Gale Crater Adds Twist to Climate Story

The discovery that Mars' Gale Crater was once Gale Lake adds a powerful piece of evidence for an ancient wet and warm climate that lasted much longer than previous predictions. Now, if only the computer models would agree.

To account for a lake that lasted for millions or even tens of millions of years means the Martian atmosphere would have had to be not only far thicker than the puny envelope of gases that surrounds it today, but also loaded with water, said Ashwin Vasavada, deputy project scientist for NASA's Curiosity Mars rover.

The Curiosity science team announced Monday that the 96-mile-wide crater where the rover landed in August 2012 was once a lake.

"The landscapes of Mount Sharp indicate that rivers, lakes and groundwater were present over millions of years, something that would be impossible on Mars today," Vasavada said.

Today, water on Mars is frozen around the planet's poles. Even if the atmosphere were thicker (generating pressure that would permit water to exist as a liquid, rather than just as solid or gas) water would still preferentially gather in the polar regions, leaving the atmosphere dry. Gale Lake would have evaporated quickly.

"To get a long-lived lake in Gale Crater there must have been so much water in the climate system that the frozen latitudes were essentially filled up, that water was forced to warmer latitudes where it would exist as liquid," Vasavada said.

To humidify the atmosphere, Mars would need a vigorous hydrological cycle fed by either warmer ice at lower latitudes or a large expanse of liquid water, like an ocean.

"A humid atmosphere would slow the evaporation of Gale Lake and also resupply water to precipitation," Vasavada said.

Since the 19070s-era Viking days, scientists have been looking for remnants of a Martian ocean. They've found tantalizing hints, such as a network of valleys and channels cut into the highlands that lead downward toward a large basin. However, concrete evidence, like a shoreline, may have been obliterated by erosion.

"There is no smoking gun for an ocean in the northern hemisphere," Vasavada said.

Even accounting for greenhouse gases, computer models currently fall short in explaining how Mars could have stayed warm enough to sustain a lake like Gale for millions of years.

"Constructing a model of Mars ancient climate that was thick, warm and humid for millions of years has proven pretty challenging," Vasavada said.

Read more at Discovery News