Monthly Archives: February 2021

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) The world got its first close-up look at a Mars landing on Friday, as NASA released a stunning picture of its newest rover being lowered onto the dusty red surface.

The photo was released less than 24 hours after the Perseverance rover successfully touched down near an ancient river delta, where it will search for signs of ancient life and set aside the most promising rock samples for return to Earth in a decade.

NASA equipped the spacecraft with a record 25 cameras and two microphones, many of which were turned on during Thursdays descent.

The rover is shown in extraordinary detail just 6 1/2 feet (2 meters) off the ground, being lowered by cables attached to an overhead sky crane, the red dust kicked up by rocket engines. NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, promises more photos in the next few days and possibly also an audio recording of the descent.

This is something that weve never seen before, flight system engineer Aaron Stehura noted at a news conference. It was stunning, and the team was awestruck. Theres just a feeling of victory that we were able to capture these and share it with the world.

Chief engineer Adam Steltzner called the picture iconic, putting it right up there with photos of Apollo 11s Buzz Aldrin on the moon, Saturn as seen by Voyager 1, and the Hubble Space Telescopes pillars of creation shot.

A number of thumbnail images have been beamed down so far, too many to count, said Pauline Hwang, strategic mission manager for surface operations. The team went wild at seeing these first pictures, she said.

The picture is so clear and detailed that deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan at first thought she was looking at a photo from an animation. Then I did a double take and said: `Thats the actual rover!

The vehicle is healthy, according to officials, after landing on a flat, safe surface in Jezero Crater with just 1 degree of tilt and relatively small rocks nearby. For now, the systems still are being checked. It will be at least a week before the rover starts driving.

The river delta awash 3 billion to 4 billion years ago is just over 1 mile (2 kilometers) away. Scientists consider it the most likely place to find rocks with evidence of past microscopic life.

Another photo of Perseverances front right wheel, near rocks full of holes, already has scientists salivating. Theyre eager to learn whether these rocks are volcanic or sedimentary.

Its the ninth time that NASA has successfully landed on Mars __ and the fifth rover.

As it did with 2012s Curiosity rover still roaming 2,300 miles (3,750 kilometers) away NASAs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed Perseverance descending beneath its massive parachute. In each case, the spacecraft and chute resembled specks.

Curiositys cameras caught a stop-motion movie of the last two minutes its descent, but the images were small and fuzzy. NASA loaded up the heftier Perseverance and its descent stage with more and better cameras, and made sure they were turned on for the entire seven-minute plunge through the Martian atmosphere.

China will attempt to land its own much smaller rover in late spring. Its been orbiting Mars for 1 1/2 weeks. The United Arab Emirates also put a spacecraft into Martian orbit last week.

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Mars landing team 'awestruck' by photo of descending rover - The Associated Press

It has barely gotten to know its new home on the Martian surface. Yet, Perseverance is sending missives home already.

Some of the first information relayed from NASA's new rover through spacecraft orbiting Mars and back to Earth was data that indicated the rover was healthy after its "seven minutes of terror" from the top of the planet's atmosphere to the surface. It has also sent back a couple of images. Friday night, NASA shared one that shows the rover landing. The image is from a video of the landing thathas not yet been shared with the world.

The snapshot was taken from the descent stage of the spacecraft, which was part of the rover's final landing maneuvers. It lowered Perseverance to the Martian surface on tethers. Curiosity, the last rover to land on Mars, sent back a stop motion movie of its descent. Perseverance, on the other hand, has cameras that were intended to capture video of the touchdown. We'll get a peek at that soon.

In the weeks and months (and years!) to come, we'll get more familiar with Perseverance and all it is capable of telling us about Mars. We can, however, get excited about the imaging capabilities right now. "The majority of Perseverance's cameras capture images in color," NASA says. "After landing, two of the Hazard Cameras (Hazcams) captured views from the front and rear of the rover, showing one of its wheels in the Martian dirt." You can see an image from that angle here as well.

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NASA Released Stunning Images of the Perseverance Rover Landing on Mars - Thrillist

Milwaukee native shares in success of NASA's Mars rover

Darian Dixon works as a photographer on NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover and credits his time at Riverside High School and UW-Milwaukee for helping him achieve his science goals.

Updated: 9:13 AM CST Feb 22, 2021

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>> ITS BREATHTAKING EVERY DAY. BEN: MORE THAN 130 MILLION MILES AWAY, DARIAN DIXONS PHOTOGRAPHS ARE AMONG THE MOST SPECTACULAR IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM. IS IT FAIR TO SAY THIS IS A DREAM JOB OF YOURS? >> OH, YEAH. ABSOLUTELY. BEN: THE RIVERSIDE HIGH AND U.W. MILWAUKEE GRAD IS PART OF A TEAM THAT OPERATES THE CAMERAS ON NASA PERSEVERANCE ROVER ON MARS. DIXONS CAMERA WORK WILL HELP SCIENTISTS LOOK FOR ANCIENT SIGNS OF LIFE. >> SCIENCE AND SPACE WERE ALWAYS MY THING, SO I WAS ALWAYS VERY INTERESTED IN SCIENCE, ALWAYS VERY INTERESTED IN SPACE FROM AN EARLY AGE. AND I WAS REALLY FORTUNATE TO HAVE JUST A GREAT FAMILY AND A GREAT MOTHER THAT REALLY NURTURED THAT CURIOSITY, AND NURTURED THAT DESIRE TO LEARN. BEN: DIXON IS ALSO PART OF THE CURIOSITY ROVER MISSION, WHICH CAPTURED THESE STUNNING IMAGES OF THE RED PLANET. WHILE HE LIVES HIS DREAM, HE HOPES KIDS, ESPECIALLY PEOPLE OF COLOR, REALIZE REACHING FOR THE STARS COULD, TOO, LAND THEM ON MARS. >> I DO BELONG IN THESE SPACES. I CAN BE HERE. I CAN DO THIS WORK. AND I WOULD ENCOURAGE EVERYONE, NO MATTER WHO THEY ARE, WHATEV THEIR GOALS ARE, TO NEVER, NEVER LOSE SIGHT OF THAT, AND TO NEVER FOR A SECOND THINK THAT, OH, MAYBE BECAUSE OF WHO I AM AND WHERE I COME FROM, THIS ISNT NECESSARILY A PLACE FOR ME. DOT -- DONT EVER BELIE THAT, NOT FOR A SECOND. BEN: DIXON SAYS HE OWES HIS TEACHERS AT RIVERSIDE AND UWM A TON OF CREDIT FOR HELPING HIM PURSUE HIS PAS

Milwaukee native shares in success of NASA's Mars rover

Darian Dixon works as a photographer on NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover and credits his time at Riverside High School and UW-Milwaukee for helping him achieve his science goals.

Updated: 9:13 AM CST Feb 22, 2021

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Milwaukee native shares in success of NASA's Mars rover - WISN Milwaukee

After a nearly seven month journey through space, Perseverance -- the largest and the most advanced rover NASA has ever sent to another world -- successfully touched down on the surface of Mars on Friday in a nail-biting landing that marks its first step in the search for signs of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.

Packed with groundbreaking technology, the Mars 2020 mission launched on July 30, last year, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, US.

The rover streaked through the Martian atmosphere and landed safely inside the vast Jezero Crater on Mars, after traversing 472 million kilometres from the Earth, the US space agency said.

The touchdown of the rover marks an ambitious first step in the effort to collect Mars samples and return them to Earth, it said.

"This landing is one of those pivotal moments for NASA, the US, 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 mission itself personifies the human ideal of persevering towards the future and will help us prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet," Jurczyk said in a statement.

While the rover will investigate the rock and sediment of Jezero's ancient lakebed and river delta to characterise the region's geology and past climate, a fundamental part of its mission is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life, it said.

To that end, the Mars Sample Return campaign, being planned by NASA and European Space Agency (ESA), 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," Zurbuchen said.

Some 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.

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

"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 harboured life," Glaze added.

Director of NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory (JPL), Michael Watkins, noted that landing on Mars is always an incredibly difficult task.

"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," Watkins said.

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, NASA said.

The US space agency said that Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable science cameras on Perseverance's remote sensing mast, or head, creates high-resolution, colour 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.

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

It said the project engineers and scientists will now put Perseverance through its paces, testing every instrument, subsystem, and subroutine over the next month or two, adding that 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, NASA added.

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NASA's Perseverance rover lands on Mars, will search for signs of life - Economic Times

As a contrast in extremes, last weeks extraordinary developments in space and the southern United States take some beating. At the very moment Nasas Perseverance rover scored a technological triumph with its flawless landing on the surface of Mars, millions of American citizens in Texas were thrust back into a chaotic, pre-industrial dark age of no electricity, no water and, for some, no food by unprecedented freezing temperatures.

Many lessons may be drawn from the confluence of these two events, positive and negative. The performance of the Perseverance mission is frankly breathtaking. Having travelled the 38.6m miles from Earth measured by Marss closest approach in 2020 over seven months, the rover touched down without any apparent damage to its sophisticated scientific equipment and cameras.

The landing marks the beginning of a new era of space exploration in which rocks from the red planet will be returned to Earth for the first time. Nasas photos of the descent are a marvel in themselves, and may become as celebrated as those of the first Moon landing. From its base in the Jezero crater, Perseverance will begin to offer answers to age-old questions about space including one of the biggest of all: was there (or is there) life on Mars?

What a success for science, for technology, and for the people who designed and built Perseverance. As one excited Nasa controller said: This shows what we can do when we all work together. Indeed it does. Thats a lesson worth holding on to as selfish commercial and nationalistic instincts fracture the global fight against Covid-19. Last weeks G7 leaders meeting reached a similar conclusion. It bears constant repetition.

The misery and mayhem in Texas and neighbouring states show what can happen when that lesson is ignored. The Lone Star state is one of the wealthiest in the US, itself one of the wealthiest nations. Texas is famous for its bountiful energy resources and big-hatted, big-hearted oilmen. So how could a few days of admittedly extreme weather create such a startling breakdown, leaving millions in need and many dead?

One obvious answer is global heating and the climate crisis, which last week produced considerably higher temperatures in Anchorage, Alaska, than in Austin, Texas. Greg Abbott, the states Republican governor, can carry on denying that climate is a factor if he must. At one point in the crisis, he blamed blackouts on frozen wind turbines, even though they accounted for only 13% of outages. Ever fewer people believe him. That, hopefully, is another lesson learned.

The virtual collapse of many of Texass life support systems water supply pipelines, food distribution networks and natural gas, coal and nuclear power plants were all temporarily knocked out speaks to a bigger, ongoing national failure to invest in critical infrastructure. This is partly the result of repeated Republican tax and budget-cutting. In 2016, Donald Trump said he would fix the problem. He didnt. Joe Biden promises to do so.

Texan travails have also highlighted inequality. In Houston, less well-off residents complained of sudden, unaffordable rises in rents and water and gas charges as price-gougers took advantage. The shameful decision by Ted Cruz, the millionaire Republican Texas senator and Capitol Hill insurrectionist, to head for warmer climes in Mexico dramatically symbolised this gulf.

Its ironic that Texas Republicans, normally so keen on self-reliance, political autonomy and states rights, are now welcoming financial aid from Washington. Abbott has asked Biden to declare a major disaster, making the state eligible for federal funds. It would also allow eligible Texans to apply for assistance to help address broken pipes and related property damage. It seems that central, unified government has its uses after all.

Biden will offer personal reassurance to Texans in a visit this week. As this moment of extreme national triumph and tragedy, working together works.

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The Observer view on triumph on Mars and tragedy in Texas - The Guardian

NASA has released new images of the Perseverance rover two metres above the surface of Mars as it gave more details of the mission.

The US space agency's robot successfully landed on the Red Planet just before 1pm local time on Thursday.

Speaking at a news briefing in California on Friday, NASA officials revealed the rover landed 2km (1.24 miles) from the ancient river delta it was aiming for.

The team also released the three first colour pictures of the landing, which they hope will go down in history with the likes of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon.

One picture shows the rover in its final stages of being lowered on to the surface, just two metres off the ground.

A second, taken by the robot's front hazard camera, captures the probe's shadow against the surface, while a third offers a view of one of the wheels and rocks close by.

Deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan said the rover has already taken more images "than she can count" and more will be made public on Monday.

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The area around the landing site has been named the Canyon de Chelly, after the Arizona national park, she added.

Describing the moment NASA first saw the images, she said: "The team went wild. We were in a dream-like state, we couldn't believe what we were seeing."

Her colleague, chief engineer Adam Steltzner, added: "It was stunning. The team was awestruck and there was a feeling of victory that we were able to capture these and share them with the world."

Perseverance had been travelling through space for seven months before it entered the Martian atmosphere yesterday.

It then took just seven minutes to touch down, travelling at 12,100mph - or 16 times the speed of sound - towards the surface.

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But ground controllers in Pasadena had another agonising 11 minutes to wait before they received confirmation of the safe landing, with radio signals travelling 33.9 million miles between Mars and Earth at the speed of light.

The rover slowed down as it plummeted closer and closer to the surface, releasing a 70ft parachute and a sky crane to lower itself the final 60ft.

NASA chose to land Perseverance near an ancient river delta and former lake known as the Jezero Crater.

Here it will drill deep down into the sediment of where the river once flowed, collecting material that may hold signs of life.

Although the work has only just begun, NASA managers breathed a sigh of relief yesterday that their $2.7bn (1.9bn) mission didn't end in a crash landing.

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Mars landing: Perseverance rover moments before touchdown among new images of Red Planet released by NASA - Sky News

CLEVELAND NASA successfully landed its Perseverance rover on Mars Thursday and a Northeast Ohio company, led by Case Western Reserve University alumni, is behind the images being sent back of the Red Planet.

Katie Colbaugh is a crystal growth manager at Gooch & Housego, a global leader in photonics technology. She graduated from CWRU in 2013 and works with other Case alumni at Gooch & Housego located in Highland Heights.

Colbaugh and her colleagues grow crystals and produce laser and photonics devicesand one of the crystals she helped grow at the facility now has a permanent home on Mars with Perseverance.

The material is heated up in a crucible and we dip a seed material into it and then we grow the crystal by layering atoms onto the seed material, rotating the crystal and pulling it out of the melt Colbaugh said. This process takes a few days.

The crystal is the core component in the rovers SuperCam which collects imaging, chemical and mineral analysis from a distance, searching for signs of life on Mars surface.

Colbaugh said the crystal will help the inbuilt infrared spectrometer device on Perseverance measure the chemical composition of the rocks on the surface of Mars with the data being passed through the crystals she and her colleagues grew.

What its actually seeing is a lack of light at certain wavelengths. So the soil that theyre looking at is illuminated and the chemicals in there absorb very specific frequencies, said Crystal Growth Manager Dr. Matt Whittaker, who also is a CWRU alumnus. Knowing what light is supposed to be there and finding out which light is missing is how the filter identifies what the composition of the material is.

Gooch & Housegos Highland Heights facility is one of the few places in the world growing crystals to use for the devices like the one on Perseverance.

Colbaugh said that there was a bit of a wow factor knowing that a crystal she helped grow is now a part of the current exploration of Mars.

It was very exciting knowing that our crystals were landing on Mars and I think we lose sight of the exciting technology that were doing here because were used to it and were here every day and so an event like this was certainly exciting for all of us here, Colbaugh said.

While Whittaker shared that same excitement, he said he's looking forward to the data and research to follow.

I can tell you that everybody that works in this facility was at home watching that landing and I was too and it was really exciting, Whittaker said. This is just the beginning of the science. The engineering challenge to get here was extremely impressive and they pulled it off, it looked like perfectly, but nowto meis when the fun part of the details and all the analysis starts.

RELATED: Perseverance pays off: NASA successfully lands Mars rover on red planet

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Case Western Reserve University alumni behind technology on Mars Perseverance rover - News 5 Cleveland