Monthly Archives: February 2021

With missions from three nations expected to reach the Red Planet this month, 2021 might be the most illuminating year in the history of Mars research.

Earthlings have been sending probes and robots to and near Mars since the 1960s, and dozens have successfully captured images and data about the planet, gradually revealing its desert mysteries. We've learned a bit about its geology and atmosphere, found ice, and uncovered compelling evidence that Mars was once home to blue oceans.

Now, we're looking deeper. The looming missions will search for evidence of past life on Mars, gather a complete picture of the planet's weather systems, prepare soil samples to be picked up by a future mission, and even attempt the first flight on Mars (via a small helicopter).

From the United States comes Perseverance, NASAs fifth Mars rover. In the country's first independent mission to Mars, China is sending Tianwen-1. And the Hope orbiter from the United Arab Emirates will be the first interplanetary mission from any Arab nation.

All three of these missions launched from Earth in July 2020. Hopefully, by the end of 2021, theyll teach us plenty of new things about Mars.

NASA's Perseverance is expected to land in Jezero Crater, just north of the Martian equator.

We're going to a really old area of Mars and we expect that because the climate was warmer and wetter around 3.5 million years ago, which is the age of these rocks that we're looking at, if life had a chance to arrive, this might be a good place to search for that evidence, said Mitch Schulte, Mars 2020 program scientist at NASA.

Once the rover lands, it will check to make sure its parts and scientific instruments are working, which can take a month or two. But once its ready, the search for past life can begin.

Perseverance is equipped with cameras, lasers, and other instruments to help it examine Mars and scan for traces of atoms left behind by tiny lifeforms.

Schulte was in charge of the process that determined what instruments would be included on the rover. That process wrapped up back in 2014, two years after the team started to develop this mission.

Instruments on the rover's arm will be able to detect the presence of organic matter but we're not expecting, like, dinosaur bones or anything like that, Schulte said. We're really looking at fine detail in the environment that the organisms might have inhabited.

Those instruments on the rovers arm are called SHERLOC and PIXL. SHERLOC can hit surfaces two inches away with an ultraviolet laser to detect organic chemicals, and is partnered with a camera named WATSON.

PIXL uses an X-ray beam to search for organic material, traces of which can last millions of years after a microscopic organism lived.

Before its hunt begins, the rover will attempt to launch the first flight on Mars. Aboard Perseverance is Ingenuity, a roughly 4-pound drone equipped with a camera. It can fly for around 90 seconds, covering almost 1,000 feet at heights of 10 to 15 feet on pre-set paths. It's solar-powered and can recharge its own battery.

This will be the first time flying anything on another planet. That's pretty spectacular, said Michael Meyer, Mars Exploration Program lead scientist at NASA. As lead scientist, Meyer works with the global community of Mars scientists to determine what the next steps of Mars exploration should be and how missions should proceed in the future.

"This will be the first time flying anything on another planet. That's pretty spectacular."

If the test flight goes well, it might open a path for other drones in space exploration, which could survey planets between the far-out scale of orbiters and six-foot-high scale of rovers.

It really does improve your possibilities for where you should go and take samples, Meyer said. That outcrop that you don't see from the rover or don't see from space, that could be the perfect place to take a sample. As you think more about this and we learn more about how to fly on Mars, you can start thinking about putting other things on it that might be able to pick up samples, do things for you that might be too dangerous or steep to get a rover.

An artist's representation of what the first flight on Mars with the Ingenuity helicopter will look like.

Mars has plenty of carbon dioxide, but little oxygen. So Perseverance will use a tool called MOXIE to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, compress it, and then use a solid oxide electrolysis cell to strip the oxygen out of it, Schulte said.

If the test is successful, MOXIE could be used to provide future astronauts with breathable air. Oxygen is also a vital component of rocket fuel. If spacecraft could launch from Earth with less fuel for the return trip, they would be able to carry more cargo with the same amount of fuel or alternatively need less fuel thanks to the lighter load.

Eventually, a mission will be sent to pick up 43 sample tubes that Perseverance will have filled and stored inside itself until they're ready to be left outside.

Scientists on Earth will have to determine where to collect the samples, and where and when to set them down. There is some debate on the timing of this. If the samples aren't deposited and something unexpected happens to the rover, they would be inaccessible to the pick-up mission, Meyer explained.

The science community and the engineers will get nervous about having all those samples on board, Meyer said. When they're on board, they can't be accessed. They're in the trunk but the trunk is locked. At some point in time you have to decide to let those samples go, put them on the surface of Mars, so that the future mission can collect them.

By the end of the year, we may have an idea of where the samples will be awaiting their ferry back to Earth.

While the China National Space Administration has not made much information publicly available about Tianwen-1, the agency did release its main goals and what it will be launching.

Between the orbiter and the rover, Tianwen-1 will use various cameras, radar, and other tools to examine the soil, structure, and climate of Mars, most notably looking at the presence of water and ice in the planet's soil, according to an article published in Nature Astronomy.

After the lander settles, a ramp will allow the rover to roll onto the surface of the Utopia Planitia, a broad plain hundreds of miles northwest of where Curiosity has explored and northeast of where Perseverance is headed.

Despite having little information about the Tianwen-1 mission, Meyer said the fact the rover is going somewhere new is exciting.

Let's face it, any time you send a rover and you land somewhere where you haven't landed before, you're going to learn something new, because now you're looking at a new place up close and personal, he said.

Meanwhile, the orbiter will serve as a communications relay between the rover and Earth. It will also observe Mars to help analyze the planet's atmosphere and subsurface.

The United Arab Emirates has much more information about its Hope orbiter mission, so named because the UAE Space Agency would like it to inspire people in the Middle East.

The Hope orbiters primary goal is to observe, measure, and analyze the Martian atmosphere. Onboard it has an infrared spectrometer, ultraviolet spectrometer, and imager for capturing high-resolution photos.

Its infrared spectrometer will be used to study the lower atmosphere, measuring dust, ice clouds, and water vapor distribution, as well as temperature. This will help give us an understanding of the planets atmospheric circulation and seasons.

Hope's UV spectrometer will measure gases in the thermosphere (the second-highest layer of the atmosphere), including carbon monoxide and oxygen. And it will create a 3D map of hydrogen and oxygen in the exosphere, the outermost layer of the atmosphere.

The Hope orbiter is inspected before its launch.

While there are other Mars orbiters, such as NASAs MAVEN, Meyer said that Hopes physical orbit is unique: its both very large and equatorial.

Other orbiters like MAVEN orbit around the poles of Mars, running north and south while the planet rotates underneath. They also stay much closer to the planet, which can give a more detailed look at the planet but limits their breadth, Meyer said.

Because of the large orbit, it's something like 40,000 km the furthest away, [Hope is] going to be able to look at Mars kind of as an entire planet, this synoptic view, Meyer said, noting that it will complement MAVEN and other missions very well.

Additionally, Hope will measure atmospheric escape, specifically looking at hydrogen and oxygen. Scientists know this happens, but haven't been able to accurately measure yet.

Once Hope reaches Mars, it wont be long before Earth receives new images and measurements of Martian weather.

As Schulte and Meyer explained, reaching this level of Mars exploration has been a long process. The Perseverance mission is a step in an astrobiological strategy that was laid out back in 1995.

Earlier, NASA was able to determine that there was liquid water scattered near Mars' surface, Schulte said. That led naturally into actually searching for signs in the rock records that life might have left behind on Mars.

NASA Attitude Control Systems lead Chris Pong wears a mask while the mission to Mars continuesduring the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now that technology has caught up to their curiosity, their hard work is paying off, despite the worst pandemic in a century.

Everything is hard already and you throw in the pandemic where people have to isolate and people have to be away from their families for extended periods of time, Meyer said. It's pretty amazing the challenges people have overcome to make these missions successful.

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Everything we hope to learn from 3 historic missions to Mars - Mashable

Martian landslides might help explain mystery lines seen on the surface of the Red Planet, a new study finds.

For years, scientists analyzing the Martian surface have detected clusters of dark, narrow lines that seasonally appear on steep, sun-facing slopes in the warmer regions. Previous research has suggested that these enigmatic dark streaks, called recurring slope lineae (RSL), are signs that salty water regularly flows on the Red Planet during its warmest seasons.

Recent missions to Mars have revealed that the planet does possess huge underground pockets of ice. Prior work suggested that warmer temperatures during the Martian spring and summer could help generate salty brines capable, at least for a time, of staying liquid in the cold, thin air of the Red Planet.

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Related: The search for water on Mars in pictures

However, geologists have discovered problems with the concept of brines causing RSL, explained study lead author Janice Bishop, a planetary scientist at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute and NASA Ames Research Center, both of which are in California's Silicon Valley. For example, the angle of slopes where RSL occur and the features surrounding where they start "largely are inconsistent with a liquid flow process," she told Space.com.

Now Bishop and her colleagues suggest that chemical reactions could make the Martian surface vulnerable to landslides that might explain RSL.

"Although the surface of Mars today is dry and harsh and cold and dominated by wind and abrasion, underneath the surface, micro-scale interactions of salts with tiny ice and liquid water particles can be still occurring today," Bishop said.

The scientists focused on chemical reactions between sulfate minerals such as gypsum with chloride salts, of which table salt is one variety. "On Earth, interactions between gypsum and chloride salts have caused collapse of parts of caves, sinkholes in soft sediments near salty lakes and ponds, and uplift of roads," Bishop said.

The researchers speculated that similar interactions could happen on Mars, although the cold and dry conditions there would slow these reactions down. "I am super excited about the prospect of active chemistry below the surface on Mars, albeit at a slow rate," Bishop said.

In the new study, the scientists conducted lab experiments on mixtures of sulfates, chloride salts, tiny ice particles and volcanic ash similar to Martian soil. They froze and thawed such mixtures at the kinds of low temperatures found on the Red Planet.

The researchers found thin films of slushy water formed on the surfaces of the mineral grains. They suggested these films could expand and contract over time, leading to upheavals and contractions under the Martian surface. Wind and dust on these unstable surfaces could then set off landslides, producing the lines seen on the Red Planet, Bishop explained.

The scientists noted that in the future, surface missions on Mars to recent RSL sites could help test their model. They detailed their findings online today (Feb. 3) in the journal Science Advances.

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Intriguing dark streaks on Mars may be caused by landslides after all - Space.com

This ESA infographic explains how the new year works on Mars.

Sunday, Feb. 7, 2021 on Earth is a big deal for a lot of humans. It's Super Bowl Sunday. But it's also a big deal on Mars because it marks the Martian New Year, an event that happens much less often than on our own planet.

As we look ahead to someday sending humans to Mars, we should start thinking more about Martian holidays. A year on the red planet lasts 687 Earth days, so we would need a lot less champagne and noisemakers than we do back home.

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This week, the European Space Agency (ESA) offered some suggestions for marking the Martian New Year. "If you would like to feel younger, just divide your current age by 1.88 and casually mention to your friends that that's your real age on Mars," said ESA.

We know it's 2021 on Earth, but what year will it be on Mars? The answer: 36. "The count started in Earth year 1955," the ESA said. "This first Martian year coincided with a very large dust storm in its second half, aptly named 'the great dust storm of 1956.'"

If you ever feel like you don't have enough time in the day, Mars might be for you. Days on Mars (called "sols") last for about 24 hours and 39 minutes. NASA's Curiosity rover just marked its 3,000-Martian-day anniversary in January.

There are extra reasons for Earthlings to celebrate the Martian New Year this time around. It comes just days before a trio of spacecraft sent by NASA, China and the United Arab Emirates reach the planet. They'll arrive at slightly different times, and there's a lot of excitement around the landing of NASA's Perseverance rover on Feb. 18.

The next Mars New Year won't happen until Dec. 26, 2022, so break out the bubbly and raise a toast to the red planet and what promises to be an epic Martian year for exploration.

FollowCNET's 2021 Space Calendarto stay up to date with all the latest space news this year. You can even add it to your ownGoogle Calendar.

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Happy New Year, Mars! Feb. 7 marks what could be a future Martian holiday - CNET

Editors note: Jim Bell is a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and has worked on a number of Mars missions. On Feb. 18, NASAs Mars 2020 mission will be arriving at the red planet, and hopefully will place the Perseverance Rover on the surface. Bell is the primary investigator leading a team in charge of one of the camera systems on Perseverance. We spoke with him for The Conversations new podcast, The Conversation Weekly, which launches today.

Below are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

What were looking for is evidence of past life, either direct chemical or organic signs in the composition and the chemistry of rocks, or textural evidence in the rock record. The environment of Mars is extremely harsh compared to the Earth, so were not really looking for evidence of current life. Unless something actually gets up and walks in front of the cameras, were really not going to find that.

There was a three- or four-year process that involved the entire global community of Mars and planetary science researchers to figure out where to send this rover. We chose a crater called Jezero. Jezero has a beautiful river delta in it, preserved from an ancient river that flowed down into that crater and deposited sediments. This is kind of like the delta at the end of the Mississippi River in Louisiana which is depositing sediments very gently into the Gulf of Mexico.

On Earth, this shallow water is a very gentle environment where organic molecules and fossils can actually be gently buried and preserved in very fine-grained mudstones. If a Martian delta operates the same way, then its a great environment for preserving evidence of things that were flowing in that water that came from the ancient highlands above the crater.

Theres lots of things we dont know, but there was liquid water there. There were heat sources there were active volcanoes 2, 3, 4 billion years ago on Mars and there are impact craters from asteroids and comets dumping lots of heat into the ground as well as organic molecules. Its a very short list of places in the solar system that meet those constraints, and Jezero is one of those places. Its one of the best places that we think to go to do this search for life.

The Perseverance Rover looks a lot like Curiosity on the outside because its made from something like 90% spare parts from Curiosity thats how NASA could afford this mission. Curiosity has a pair of cameras one wide angle, one telephoto.

In Perseverance, were sending similar cameras, but with zoom technology so we can zoom from wide angle to telephoto with both cameras the Z in Mastcam-Z stands for zoom. This allows us to get great stereo images. Just like our left eye and our right eye build a three-dimensional image in our brain, the zoom cameras on Perserverance are a left eye and a right eye. With this, we can build a three-dimensional image back on Earth when we get those images.

3D images allow us to do a whole range of things scientifically. We want to understand the topography of Mars in much more detail than weve been able to in the past. We want to put the pieces of the delta geology story together not just with two-dimensional, spatial information, but with height as well as texture. And we want to make 3D maps of the landing site.

Our engineering and driving colleagues really need that information too. These 3D images will help them decide where to drive by helping to identify obstacles and slopes and trenches and rocks and stuff like that, allowing them to drive the rover much deeper into places than they would have been able to otherwise.

And finally, were going to make really cool 3D views of our landing site to share with the public, including movies and flyovers.

Perseverance is intended to be the first part of a robotic sample return mission from Mars. So instead of just drilling into the surface like the Curiosity Rover does, Perseverance will drill and core into the surface and cache those little cores into tubes about the size of a dry-erase marker. It will then put those tubes onto the surface for a future mission later this decade to pick up and then bring back to the Earth.

Perseverance wont come back to the Earth, but the plan is to bring the samples that we collect back.

In the meantime, well be doing all of the science that any great rover mission would do. We are going to characterize the site, explore the geology and measure the atmospheric and weather properties.

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This is where it gets a little less certain, because these are all ideas and missions in the works. NASA and the European Space Agency are collaborating on a concept to build and launch a lander that will send a little fetch rover that goes and gets the little tubes, picks them up and brings them back to the lander. Waiting on the lander would be a small rocket called a Mars Ascent Vehicle, or MAV. Once the samples are loaded into the MAV, it launches them into Mars orbit.

Then youve got this grapefruit- to soccer-ball-sized canister up there, and NASA and the Europeans are collaborating on an orbiter that will search for that canister, capture it and then rocket it back to the Earth, where it will land in the Utah desert. What could possibly go wrong?

If successful, thatll be the first time weve done that from Mars. The scientific tools on the rovers are good, but nothing like the labs back on Earth. Bringing those samples back is going to be absolutely critical to getting the most out of the samples.

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Bringing Mars rocks back to Earth Perseverance Rover lands on Feb. 18, a lead scientist explains the tech and goals - The Conversation US

When NASA's Mars Perseverance rover touches down on the red planet later this month, it will arrive with a lot of precious cargo. Among the brand new technology is a drone that is set to be the first ever to fly on another planet: the Ingenuity helicopter.

Ingenuity is essentially a test flight it's experimenting with flight on another planet for the first time, and has limited capabilities. It weighs only about 4 pounds, but its success will no doubt pave the way for more ambitious exploration of the red planet.

"The Wright Brothers showed that powered flight in Earth's atmosphere was possible, using an experimental aircraft," Hvard Grip, Ingenuity's chief pilot at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said in a statement. "With Ingenuity, we're trying to do the same for Mars."

The rover doesn't carry any science instruments to support Perseverance, and is considered an entirely separate mission from the rover. It currently sits in Perseverance's belly, only to emerge after the duo touches down on Mars on February 18.

Mars' thin atmosphere, which is 99% less dense than Earth's, will make it difficult for Ingenuity to achieve enough lift to properly fly. Because of this, it has been designed to be extremely lightweight. It stands just 19 inches tall.

Thehelicopter has four large carbon-fiber blades, fashioned into two rotors that span about 4 feet and spin in opposite directions at about 2,400 rpm significantly faster than typical helicopters on Earth.

Additionally, the Jezero Crater, Perseverance's landing spot, is extremely cold temperatures at night drop to minus-130 degrees Fahrenheit. A lot of Ingenuity's power will go directly towards keeping warm rather than flight itself.

Flight controllers at JPL won't be able to control Ingenuity while it's actually flying. Due to significant communication delays, commands will be sent in advance of flights, and the team won't know how the flight went until its over. Ingenuity will be able to make its own decisions about how to fly and keep itself warm.

"This is a technology that's really going to open up a new exploration modality for us, very much like the rovers did 20 years ago when we flew Sojourner on the first mission to Mars," Matt Wallace, Mars 2020 deputy project manager at JPL, said during a news conference last week.

Perseverance is carrying more than two dozen cameras and Ingenuity has two of its own. Here on Earth, we will have a front-row view of Ingenuity's test flights from the rover's perspective, as well as aerial shots from the helicopter itself.

The name Ingenuity was originally submitted by Alabama high school student Vaneeza Rupani for the Mars 2020 rover, which was ultimately namedPerseverance. But the NASA team figured it would be the perfect name for a helicopter that took so much creative thinking to get off the ground.

"The ingenuity and brilliance of people working hard to overcome the challenges of interplanetary travel are what allow us all to experience the wonders of space exploration," Rupani wrote. "Ingenuity is what allows people to accomplish amazing things."

Twenty-eight thousand students across the U.S. submitted essays and proposed names for NASA'snewest Mars rover. Virginia seventh-grader Alexander Mather's suggestion, Perseverance, was ultimately chosen.

The team at NASA has a list of milestones for the helicopter to survive before it ever takes off on Mars:

After all of this, Ingenuity will take off for the first time, hovering just a few feet from the ground for about 20 to 30 seconds before landing. If it makes a successful first flight, the team will attempt up to four other tests within a month's time frame, each gradually pushing the limits of distance and altitude, like a baby bird learning to fly.

"The helicopter Ingenuity is a high risk, high reward endeavor," Wallace said. "It's something we have not tried and there's always going to be some probability of an issue. But that's why we're doing it we'll learn from the issue if it occurs."

Adding a component of aerial exploration could prove crucial tofuture planetary exploration.

"The Ingenuity team has done everything to test the helicopter on Earth, and we are looking forward to flying our experiment in the real environment at Mars," said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity's project manager at JPL. "We'll be learning all along the way, and it will be the ultimate reward for our team to be able to add another dimension to the way we explore other worlds in the future."

Helicopters on future Mars missions could act as robotic scouts, viewing terrain from above that rovers cannot access, or as spacecrafts carrying scientific instruments. They may even be able to help future astronauts someday explore the red planet.

But before any of this can happen, Perseverance needs to survive the "seven minutes of terror" that comprise its entry, descent and landing on Mars.NASAwill be live streaming the historic event on its website on February 18, beginning at 2:15 p.m. ET.

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Everything to know about NASA's Mars Ingenuity helicopter the first to fly on another planet - CBS News

China is holding a 40-day public vote to help select the name for its Mars rover which is currently closing in on the Red Planet.

The public can now vote for their favorites from a shortlist of 10 names for the Tianwen-1 mission rover.

The 10 names Hongyi, Qilin, Nezha, Chitu, Zhurong, Qiusuo, Fenghuolun, Zhuimeng, Tianxing and Xinghuo are taken from ideas including Chinese mythological figures, Confucian concepts and legendary animals.

Related: China's Tianwen-1 Mars mission in photos

Notably Hongyi, from the Confucian Analects, can be translated to "persistence" or perseverance, giving a similar meaning to the NASA Perseverance rover also heading for Mars. Others meanings include:

The Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center belonging to the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced the shortlist on Jan. 18 after soliciting suggestions after the mission launched in July last year.

China's Tianwen-1 mission includes both an orbiter and a rover, and the spacecraft are due to enter orbit around Mars on Feb. 10.

The rover will not attempt its landing until around May. The orbiter will image the landing site and determine the conditions on the ground in preparation for the landing.

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Within 148 pages, explore the mysteries of Mars. With the latest generation of rovers, landers and orbiters heading to the Red Planet, we're discovering even more of this world's secrets than ever before. Find out about its landscape and formation, discover the truth about water on Mars and the search for life, and explore the possibility that the fourth rock from the sun may one day be our next home.View Deal

If it lands successfully the roughly 530-lb. (240 kilograms) solar-powered rover will investigate the surface soil characteristics and potential water-ice distribution with its Subsurface Exploration Radar instrument. The rover also carries panoramic and multispectral cameras and instruments to analyze the composition of rocks.

The Tianwen-1 mission and the chance to name the rover have generated a fair amount of attention.

"More than 1.4 million entries have been received from 38 countries and regions since we initiated the naming campaign in July 2020. Over 200,000 of them are eligible. The netizens' active participation shows their great care for the Mars mission," Yuan Foyu, director of the naming campaign for China's first Mars rover, told CCTV.

The vote is being hosted by Chinese internet giant Baidu with a deadline of Feb. 28. Judges will then deliberate and announce a final name sometime before the landing.

Tianwen-1 is China's first independent interplanetary mission and it also draws its name from history, with "Tianwen" meaning "Heavenly Questions" or "Questions to Heaven," being taken from a poem written by Qu Yuan (around 340-278 BCE).

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China's 1st Mars rover will get one of these 10 names, and you can vote to select the winner - Space.com

Mars is a desolate planet that is both Sun-blasted and frozen over. Its atmosphere has been all but obliterated by the ravages of solar radiation over billions of years, but does that mean it is forever lost to time?

There might still be pieces of Martian atmosphere trapped in its largest moon. Phobos may have a name that literally translates to fear, but what could be hiding just beneath its surface is nothing to be afraid of. It orbits through charged particles, or ions, that were once part of Mars atmosphere but escaped into space. Scientists now believe ions from that lost atmosphere slammed into Phobos as it made its way through them, and are probably still trapped in its surface. Dust from Phobos could potentially tell us how the atmosphere of Mars evolvedor devolved.

Phobos is original in the Solar System because it is also exposed to ions coming from the atmosphere of the Mars, UC Berkeley researcher Quentin Nnon, who recently led a study published in Nature Geoscience, told SYFY WIRE.

Runaway ions from Mars may prove or disprove the idea that Mars was once much more Earthlike, with a thick atmosphere and liquid water on its surface. There could have even been some sort of life. Whatever is left of the Red Planets atmosphere (if you could even call it that) has less than one percent of Earths atmospheric density. Phobos is thought to have collected quite a few ions from Mars because it orbits extremely close to the planet. Because it is tidally locked, like our Moon, so one side is always facing Mars. That side has been exposed to anywhere from 20 to 100 times more ions than the far side, so whatever relics are left of Mars atmosphere could be embedded in its surface.

This is where NASAs MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) spacecraft comes in. MAVEN has been orbiting Mars since late 2014 in an effort to investigate it lost its atmosphere, and also beams back insight about how the Martian climate has morphed into what it is now. To see if Phobos really was showered with Martian ions, as opposed to solar ions or other random particles flying around, Nnon analyzed MAVEN data from when the spacecraft passed through the moons orbit. Particle velocity and kinetic energy measurements from MAVENs STATIC (Suprathermal and Thermal Ion Composition) instrument gave away the mass of ions it ran into. Martian ions were singled out this way.

Most of the ions that impact the surface of Phobos have relatively high velocities, so that they actually penetrateinsidethe surface or rock, Nnon said. While traveling inside the surface, ions are decelerated until they stop somewhere inside the material. Once stopped, they are surrounded by many molecules, so that they cannot escape to space.

More mysteries surround Phobos and its brother moon, Deimos. Where they came from is unknown. The could have broken off from Mars, as Earths Moon is thought to have done, or they might have formed in the same cloud of dust and gas Mars emerged from. They might have even been huge hunks of debris from a collision or asteroids that were captured by Martian gravity. Getting evidence for any of these scenarios would need deeper probing, because the surfaces of Phobos and Deimos are nowhere near the same as they were when they were born. Nnon believes the absence of an atmosphere left both moon vulnerable.

Phobos does not have an atmosphere to protect its surface, so the primitive composition of rocks exposed to outer space is altered by the harsh space environment, he said. Basically, anything that impacts Phobos' surface alters its properties, including sunlight, the solar wind, micrometeoroids and large bodies."

Moons can often tell us about the distant past of the planets they orbit. Our own Moon is the best record we have of the early solar system, because it doesn't have an atmosphere or geological processes such as wind or flowing water to wear away at that evidence (this is unfortunately also the reason that Moon dust can be lethal to both humans and science instruments). Lunar craters that have essentially remained the same as they were four billion years ago have told scientists about the Late Heavy Bombardment, a period of turbulence during which both Earth and its satellite were beaten up by asteroids and other bodies.

Apollo astronauts brought back lunar soil that revealed the violent past Earth and the Moon went through. It would be just about impossible to tell what hit our planet at the same time that the moon was getting bombarded, because our atmosphere along with wind, water, the shifting of soil and other phenomena would have worn away at those craters for eons. Some may be buried deep underground while others disappeared completely. Astronauts didnt even have to traverse the Moon for scientists to find this out, because samples of its regolith were enough.

Right now, we do not know which specific insights a sample from Phobos could reveal about the ancient Martian atmosphere, said Nnon. The hope is to maybe constrain the composition of the ancient Martian atmosphere. Understanding the composition of Phobos' samples that will be brought back to Earth by MMX in 2029 will be a challenge, and our contribution is to highlight that one important piece of the puzzle, which is the transfer of ions from the atmosphere of Mars to the surface of its moon Phobos.

Even though Phobos has not been sampled yet, what Nnon and his team were able to find out even without physical evidence is still telling. JAXAs Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) probe will take off for Phobos in 2024, and is expected to bring something back by 2029, and scientists examining these samples will know what to look out for. They may finally reveal secrets that are still lingering in space.

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What secrets about Mars is its moon Phobos hiding? - SYFY WIRE