Monthly Archives: April 2022

Ice and dust pile on the Martian surface like a layer cake in fresh images based on data from the Mars Express spacecraft.

The European Space Agency (ESA) mission shows so-called "mantle deposits" of ice and dust at in Utopia Planitia, a region that is roughly twice the size of Earth's Sahara Desert. Utopia is one of three major basins in Mars' northern hemisphere and has a lot of ice within it. (The plain also happens to be the landing site of the Chinese Zhurong rover.)

Studying the icy deposits of Utopia Planitia may give more clues about the basin's complex history, ESA officials said in a statement, as scientists suspect it was formed through depositions of sediments, lavas and volatile substances (like water or hydrogen).

Related: 12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover's 1st year on Mars

These depositions blew across the Martian surface by wind, rain or similar processes, ESA officials noted; in fact, the depositions spotted at Utopia Planitia likely came in more than 10 million years ago, when Mars had a more tilted rotational axis that allowed snow to fall regularly. Today, all we see of that snow is the ice and dust that the precipitation brought with it.

The second-largest crater in the image, visible at left in the image at the top of the story and at left in the image below, features so-called "brain terrain." This terrain is often associated with icy material, and is named because the ridges look somewhat like the outer surface of a human brain.

Brain terrain tends to be located at the boundary of the lower, northern plains of Mars and the southern highlands, ESA said.

The image also shows a dark-colored region where the ground is contracting under the icy load, as well as numerous circular depressions that formed as ground ice melted or turned to gas, causing the surface to collapse.

Mars Express has found abundant evidence of water since the spacecraft began science operations in 2004, the ESA webpage about the mission states.

"Key discoveries include the presence of minerals that form only in the presence of water, the detection of water-ice deposits underground, and evidence to suggest volcanism on Mars may have persisted until recent times," ESA said on the mission webpage.

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Mars crater complex shows layers of ice in stunning spacecraft photos - Space.com

Researchers studying recordings made by microphones on NASA'sPerseverance roverfound that sound travels much slower on Mars than it does on Earth. In a study published inNatureon Friday, the team said it looked at recordings dating back to February 19, 2021, the day after the roverarrivedon the planet.

Using recorded sounds generated by the rover like shock waves from the rover's laser that was used to cut rocks, and flight sounds from the Ingenuity helicopter the researchers were able to compare the Martian sounds to Earth sounds. They determined that sound travels 100 meters per second slower on Mars than on Earth.

In addition, the researchers realized that there are two speeds of sound on Mars one for high-pitched sounds and one for low-pitched sounds. This would "make it difficult for two people standing only five meters apart to have a conversation," according to apress releaseon the findings.

The unique sound environment is due to the incredibly low atmospheric surface pressure. Mars' pressure is 170 times lower than Earth's pressure. For example, if a high-pitched sound travels 213 feet on Earth, it will travel just 26 feet on Mars.

While sounds on Mars can be heard by human ears, they are incredibly soft.

"At some point, we thought the microphone was broken, it was so quiet," said Sylvestre Maurice, an astrophysicist at the University of Toulouse in France and lead author of the study,according to NASA.Besides the wind, "natural sound sources are rare," the press release said.

But NASA scientists think Mars may become more noisy in the autumn months, when there is higher atmospheric pressure.

"We are entering a high-pressure season," co-author of the study Baptiste Chide said in the press release. "Maybe the acoustic environment on Mars will be less quiet than it was when we landed."

When the initial recordings were made last year, researchers declared it the first time sounds from a foreign planet had ever been captured.

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said at the time the recordings are "the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit."

Perseverance is now hunting for signs of ancient life in theJezero Crater. In October, it found Mars experienced"significant"flash floods that carved the landscape into the rocky wasteland we see today. And a decade from now, the rover plans to be the first tosend samplesfrom the red planet back to Earth.

Sophie Lewis contributed reporting.

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Sound travels much slower on Mars than on Earth, researchers find - CBS News

Our solar system is a dynamic, evolving realm of space.

A powerful camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter a satellite orbiting the red planet spotted a relatively recent impact site on the Martian surface. The spacecraft detected a dark spot on the ground, and then the high-resolution camera (called the High-Resolution Imaging Experiment) snapped the detailed shot.

The impact, which is brand new in cosmic terms, likely formed between February 2006 and March 2014, noted the imaging team at the University of Arizona. For a size reference, the entire black and white image is under five kilometers, or some 3 miles, across. Blasted-out rays of material are clearly visible around the crater, which formed from a falling asteroid or meteorite.

Mars is absolutely covered in craters. NASA estimates there are over a quarter-million impact craters about the size of Arizona's famous Barringer Crater, which is some 4,000 feet across. And there are over 43,000 Martian craters larger than three miles wide.

Meanwhile, Earth has just around 120 known impact craters. That's because over hundreds of millions of years, different parts of Earth's surface have both been covered in lava or recycled as the giant plates that compose Earth's crust (tectonic plates) continually move rock below and back up to the surface. Mars isn't nearly geologically dead marsquakes frequently occur there but it's not nearly as active as Earth, a water-blanketed planet teeming with erupting volcanoes. On Mars today, there's little to wash away, or cover up, new craters.

One of Mars' most recent impact craters, then, might be visible for millions and millions of years.

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Space object crashed into Mars and created this new impact crater - Mashable

It has cost 840m to develop and taken 15 years to build. But now fears are mounting that the British-built robot rover which was to have flown on Europes ExoMars mission in September may never make it to the red planet.

The craft was to have drilled deep below the Martian surface to collect samples that could bear signs of past or present life, but had its launch on a giant Russian Proton rocket postponed last month after the invasion of Ukraine.

At best, the rover built in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, and financed by the European Space Agency will have to wait two more years, when the next window opens for sending a spacecraft to Mars. However, some astronomers fear that prospects for the rover, named after the British DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin, now look grim. If delays continue, it could ultimately be mothballed, scientists have warned.

It is inconceivable that we can work with Russia under present circumstances, and that attitude is going to last a long time, said astronomer Professor John Zarnecki of the Open University. This could delay ExoMars for the rest of the decade. By then, its technology will be getting dated.

The alternative would be to find another launcher. However, such a move poses other problems. Russia was also supplying the Kazachok lander that was to settle the Rosalind Franklin safely on the planets surface. First, a huge parachute would have decelerated the craft as it descended through the Martian atmosphere. Then Kazachoks retro rockets would have further slowed it down so the rover could land gently, said Professor Andrew Coates, of University College London.

It is an extremely tricky, complex manoeuvre and designing a replacement landing system will not be easy, added Coates, who is principal investigator for the rovers panoramic camera experiment.

Previous Martian rovers have managed to scrape soil samples from a depth of only about 6cm. That is the key feature of this mission, said Coates. We will be bringing samples from depths of two metres, where any signs of life are going to be better protected from the cosmic rays that batter Mars surface.

Several dozen planetary scientists in Britain have been involved in work on ExoMars including ine OBrien, at Glasgow University.

Its a weird experience for all of us, she told the Observer. We are sad because of what has happened to our work and the chance of being involved in searching for life on Mars but you also feel guilty for feeling sad because, among everything else, its a really minor setback compared with what the people of Ukraine are suffering.

While some scientists remain relatively optimistic that Europe and Russia might cooperate in space again, others remain doubtful.

If it ends up being postponed until the end of the decade, as we hunt for new launchers and develop new landing systems, then the mission will all start to look old, said Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society. That is why there is speculation now that it might never fly.

This view was backed by OBrien: In the end, we may have to cut our losses and concentrate on other Mars missions.

Nor is ExoMars likely to be the only casualty of the invasion of Ukraine. Russia provides relatively cheap but powerful rockets that have been used to launch many European missions in the past. Immediate victims of the suspension of future launches will include two Galileo navigation satellites , while The ESAs EarthCare science mission, developed in cooperation with the Japanese space agency, Jaxa, and the Euclid infrared space telescope will also be affected.

More perplexing is the likely impact on the International Space Station, which relies on a Russian propulsion system to boost away from Earth as its orbit decays and to move it to avoid space debris. Should Russia pull out of the ISS, then the vast orbiting laboratory would slowly spiral lower and lower until it crashed.

This threat was recently made explicit by Dmitry Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos. Russia would determine on its own how long the ISS will operate, he told the countrys state news agency, Tass.

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UK Mars rover is casualty of war as science severs its links with Russia - The Guardian

While accepting the Grammy award for record of the year, which was Silk Sonic's fourth Grammy Award win of the night, Bruno Mars' collaborator,Anderson .Paak, announced, "In the industry, we call that a clean sweep!" Then, in a move that stunnedTwitter, Mars pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it up on the Grammys stage.

Viewers were shocked at Mars' disregard for others' comfort with smoking indoors, and noted that the out-of-date move matched up with his old school approach to music. Twitter user @jonathanjewel wrote, "Seriously, why is Bruno Mars smoking while accepting an award? It's 2022, not 1962."

Another user, @lostchildcle, had a bold statement to make, reflecting on other recent award show faux pas. They wrote, "Bruno Mars lighting up a cigarette, indoors, in 2022 was more shocking than Will Smith slapping Chris Rock [at the 2022 Academy Awards]." Though Mars certainly turned fewer heads that Smith's dramatic move, he could be considered similarly disrespectful within the Recording Academy. Only time will tell.

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Bruno Mars' Behavior At The Grammys Has Twitter In A Tizzy - The List

A robotics presentation plays out at Amazons MARS 2022 conference. (Andy Jassy via Twitter)

Billionaire Jeff Bezos missed out on his usual chauffeuring duties at the West Texas launch orchestrated today by his Blue Origin space venture, but he had a good excuse: He was presiding over Amazons MARS 2022, an invitation-only conference held this week in California.

His successor as Amazons CEO, Andy Jassy, was there as well.

The hush-hush MARS conference had its first annual run back in 2016, and spawned a public event called re:MARS in 2019. The acronym stands for Machine learning, Automation, Robotics and Space and it also evokes Bezos long-term goal of having millions of people living and working in space.

MARS is an opportunity for the compu-cognoscenti to rub elbows (but our invitation must have gotten lost in the mail again). Its also a photo opportunity for Bezos: Who can forget the shots of Buff Bezos striding alongside a robo-dog, or Bezos at the controls of a giant robot, or trying out a hexacopter?

The 2020 and 2021 conferences had to be called off due to the coronavirus pandemic, but based on the tweets and Instagram posts emanating from this years site in Ojai, Calif., MARS was back in full force in 2022. Heres a sampling:

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Wheres my jetpack? It was at MARS conference, along with Jeff Bezos and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy - GeekWire

Everyone knows that going to space is really expensive. Millions of dollars go into research and designing rockets that make space exploration a possibility in our world. From satellite launches to crew missions, thousands of experts work toward making space travel a reality each day. So it's pretty wild to learn that the film "Gravity" had a higher budget than India's Mars Orbiter Mission.

In September 2014, India's Mars Orbiter Mission (also known as Mangalyaan, which is Hindi for "Mars Craft") went into orbit around Mars after a 10-month journey.

The launch was historic for India it became the only country in the world to successfully put a satellite into Mars' orbit on its first attempt. Other countries, including the United States, Russia, and the European Union, have also successfully reached the planet, but none on their first attempt.

To add to that achievement, India managed to conduct the successful mission with just $73 million $27 million less than the budget for Cuarn's "Gravity." Although the mission won't be conducting any research and is merely for demonstration purposes, it is a massive feat for India's rising space program. And to do it successfully with a modest budget is a big win for India.

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Alfonso Cuarn's Gravity Had A Bigger Budget Than The Mars Orbiter Mission - /Film