Monthly Archives: May 2022

In terms of seismic events on the red planet (or indeed any other planet besides Earth), this is the biggest one recorded so far: the NASA InSight lander has recorded a 'monster' of a marsquake, which is estimated to have hit magnitude 5 on the scale used on Earth.

That beats the previous record holder, a magnitude-4.2 marsquake that Insight recorded back on 25 August 2021. The new quake happened on Mars on May 4 of this year, the 1,222nd sol (or Martian day) of the lander's mission.

A magnitude-5 quake on Earth would be classed as moderate, only causing minor damage. However, it's right at the upper end of the size of quakes that scientists are discovering on Mars, due to less seismic activity.

The full marsquake spectrogram. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/ETH Zurich)

Right now we don't know what caused the marsquake or where exactly on the red planet it originated from, but it's already of intense interest for researchers. It adds to the more than 1,300 quakes that Insight has detected since landing in November 2018.

By studying the seismic waves traveling across Mars, scientists hope to learn more about the planet's crust, mantle, and core. That in turn should inform understanding about how Mars (and other similar planets, such as Earth) formed in the first place.

"Since we set our seismometer down in December 2018, we've been waiting for 'the big one'," says planetary geophysicist Bruce Banerdtfrom the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, and the leader of the InSight mission.

"This quake is sure to provide a view into the planet like no other. Scientists will be analyzing this data to learn new things about Mars for years to come."

As marsquakes aren't typically as violent as earthquakes, they're more difficult to detect, and other vibrations from the wind, for example can interfere with readings. With that in mind, InSight is fitted with a highly sensitive seismometer called the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure.

Volcanic activity is also thought to be generating seismic waves on Mars, and experts continue to identify new patterns in the data that Insight and its seismometer have already logged and beamed back to Earth.

With that in mind, you can expect to hear plenty more about the data collected by Insight on 4 May 2022, in the future, but for now it's clear that the quake is a record-breaker and way above average for what would normally be expected on Mars.

Unfortunately, Insight has now run into some technical difficulties: With the onset of the Martian winter and increased levels of dust in the air, the lander is struggling to get enough sunlight on the solar panels that power it up.

As a result, the machine has put itself into safe mode for the time being. This hibernation shuts down all but the most essential functions, and it may be some time before we hear anything from Insight again.

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'Monster' Quake on Mars Is The Biggest Ever Recorded on Another Planet, NASA Says - ScienceAlert

Enlarge / NASA's Mars Ingenuity helicopter has been flying across the red planet for more than a year.

NASA

The achievement of powered flight on another world is one of the great spaceflight feats of the last decade. Since its first brief hop on April 19, 2021, the Mars Ingenuity helicopter has subsequently made an additional 27 flights, traveling nearly 7 km across the surface of the red planet and scouting ahead of NASA's Perseverance rover. It has wildly exceeded the expectations and hopes of its scientists and engineers.

But recently, the small, automated helicopter has had problems with dust accumulating on its solar panels, NASA says. This dust reduces the ability of the vehicle to recharge its six lithium-ion batteries. And just as the helicopter needs all of the solar energy it can get, the northern hemisphere of Mars is approaching the dead of winter, which comes in a little more than two months.

Due to these battery issues, the helicopter's team of flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory lost contact with the helicopter on May 3. They had been closely monitoring the health of their tiny spacecraft, particularly the charge state of its batteries. After losing contact, the engineers figured that the Ingenuity's field-programmable gate arrayessentially, its flight computerentered into shutdown mode due to a lack of power. In such a situation, virtually all of the helicopter's on-board electronics turned off to protect them from the cold nighttime temperatures, more than 100 Fahrenheit below freezing. This included the internal clock.

With this working hypothesis, the engineers on Earth took an extraordinary step to save their plucky helicopter. Ingenuitylanded on Mars in February 2021 as a small component on the much larger Perseverance rover, which it uses as a bridge to communicate back to Earth. After it shut down earlier this month, the engineers figured that when the Sun rose and Ingenuity's batteries started to charge, it would try to communicate with the nearby rover. Only, because its internal clock had reset, whenIngenuity tried to call Perseverance, the rover wouldn't be listening.

So, the engineering team commanded Perseverance to halt all of its ongoing science activities for a full day to essentially sit there and listen intently for Ingenuity's call. The significance of this decision is that the helicopter was initially viewed as an add-on technology demonstration. Some of the rover's leadership team did not even want the added risk of bringing Ingenuity along. The helicopter was supposed to make five experimental flights in 30 days and then be set aside. Now, the entire Mars mission was being put on hold, nearly 13 months after Ingenuity's first flight, in the hopes of saving the small vehicle.

Well, happily,Ingenuity did call home after about 24 hours. According to NASA, the link was stable, and the solar array managed to charge its batteries to 41 percent. The engineers say they hope to resume Ingenuity's flight campaign within the next several days after bringing the helicopter's batteries to a full charge.

Unfortunately, this may be the beginning of the end for a helicopter that has vastly exceeded all expectations. The NASA engineers have had to take some fairly drastic steps to preserveIngenuity's battery charge. For example, they have now commanded the helicopter's heaters to come on only when the battery's temperature falls to -40, far colder than the previous point of 5 Fahrenheit. It is not known how many of the off-the-shelf components on the vehicle will fare without this additional heating during the cold Martian nights.

And Mars will only get colder and darker for the next 10 weeks as winter deepens.

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After losing contact with its helicopter, NASA put the entire Mars mission on hold - Ars Technica

While it still has plenty of mysteries for us to solve, Mars is becoming clearer to us every day, thanks to the dozen functioning robots we currently have either on the red planet's surface or in its orbit.

In this latest release from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express orbiter, a unique feature of Mars's geology is shown with breathtaking detail.

Looking like giant scratches across the planet's surface, these grooves are part of a giant fault system on Mars known as Tantalus Fossae.

Aside from the detail in the image, what's really gobsmacking is the scale we're looking at these troughs are up to 350 meters (1,148 feet) deep and 10 kilometers wide (6.2 miles) and can stretch for up to 1,000 kilometers.

The image is true color, which means it represents what humans would see if they were looking at the region with their own eyes.

It's not technically a 'photo'; the image was generated from a digital terrain model of Mars and using the color channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA's Mars Express but it presents an incredibly clear view of the vast area.

(ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

The image above shows an oblique perspective, while the shot below is a top-down view of Tantalus Fossae.

(ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

According to an ESA press release, the ground resolution of these images is approximately 18 meters/pixel and the images are centered at about 43N/257E. North is to the right.

So what are we looking at?

A fossa is a hollow or depression, and Tantalus Fossae run along the east side of a sprawling, relatively flat Martian volcano called Alba Mons.

When it comes to surface area, Alba Mons is the biggest volcano on Mars its volcanic flow fields extend at least 1,350 km (840 miles). But at its highest point, its elevation is only 6.8 kilometers.

These fossae were created when Alba Mons lifted up out of the planet's crust, causing the area around it to become warped and broken.

(ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

"The Tantalus Fossae faults are a great example of a surface feature known as grabens," explains the release."Each trench formed as two parallel faults opened up, causing the rock between to drop down into the resulting void."

A similar feature is found on the western side of Alba Mons, known as Alba Fossae.

These images aren't just beautiful to look at they may also help us understand more about how the surface of Mars formed.

It's thought these structures didn't all form at once, but one after the other, which results in some of the troughs crisscrossing each other.

For example, the impact crater you see in the images has grabens running across it, suggesting the crater was there first. In the top two images, you can see a smaller crater to the left that's on top of the troughs and is likely younger.

Mars Express has been orbiting Mars for more than 18 years now. We look forward to seeing more of its unique views of our neighboring planet.

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Breathtaking New Images Show Giant 'Claw Marks' on The Surface of Mars - ScienceAlert

In 1666, famed Italian astronomer and mathematician Giovanni Cassini (the man who discovered four of Saturns largest moons) observed the Martian polar ice caps for the first time. However, it was not until the late-18th century, when Sir William Herschel recorded his own observations, that the connection to Earths own ice caps was established. In his subsequent treatise, On the remarkable appearances at the polar regions on the planet Mars (1784), noted how the southern cap grew and shrunk due to seasonal changes.

With the development of modern telescopes and robotic explorers, scientists have learned a great deal more about these polar deposits. In 2011, they learned that unlike the northermost ice sheet, the southern cap is largely composed of frozen carbon dioxide (aka. dry ice). According to new research led by the Planetary Science Institute (PSI), glaciers of carbon dioxide ice have been moving and carving features in the southern polar region for more than 600,000 years and are on the move right now!

The research team was led by Isaac Smith, a former PSI research scientist and an assistant professor of Earth and Space Science at York University in Toronto (where he also holds a Canada Research Chair in Planetary Science). He was joined by geologists, glaciologists, and engineers from the PSI, York University, the Institute of Low-Temperature Science and Arctic Research Center at Hokkaido University in Japan, and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

The presence of carbon dioxide glaciers in Mars southern polar region was first confirmed in 2011 by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Along with data obtained by the ESAs Mars Express, scientists noted that they were flowing like glaciers of water ice do here on Earth, based on the surface features they carved in their wake. As Smith described in a recent PSI press release:

Approximately 600,000 years ago, CO2 ice started forming at the Martian south pole. Due to climate cycles, the ice has increased in volume and mass several times, interrupted by periods of mass loss through sublimation. If the ice had never flowed, then it would mostly be where it was originally deposited, and the thickest ice would only be about 45 meters thick. Instead, because it flowed downhill into basins and spiral troughs curvilinear basins where it ponded, it was able to form deposits reaching one kilometer thick.

These observations also showed that the portion of the ice cap composed of water ice appears to be stationary, remaining at high altitudes. In previous research, which Smith helped contribute to while still with the PSI, scientists investigated the strength properties (aka. flow laws) of the carbon dioxide glaciers to determine why this was happening. Their results indicated that under the types of conditions that exist around the southern polar region, carbon dioxide ice flows were almost 100 times faster than water ice glaciers.

For this, they concluded that the CO2 ice behaves like glaciers here on Earth, which makes the slow-moving water ice cap appear stationary. The glaciers have enough mass that if sublimated, they would double the atmospheric pressure of the planet, Smith added, citing a 2018 paper by Than Putzig, a PSI Senior Scientist and co-author on this paper. The longest glacier is about 200 kilometers long and about 40 kilometers across. These are big!

For this study, Smith and his colleagues relied on the NASA Ice Sheet and Sea-Level System Model (ISSM) to model the glaciers movements. When adapted for conditions on the surface of Mars and with CO2, they found that typical methods were not moving the carbon dioxide glaciers. They found that while the activity is ongoing, the flow rates peaked about 400,000 years ago when the deposition was at its greatest. Since their ice is currently decreasing in mass, said Smith, the flow rate of the glaciers is currently in a slow period:

Atmospheric deposition would put the ice in a pattern we dont see. It would be much more evenly spread and thinner. What the glacier interpretation provides is a mechanism to move the ice from high places, into the lower basins that are also at lower [latitudes].

If atmospheric deposition were the only process acting on the ice, then most of it would be found at the highest latitude and highest elevation. Thats just not the case. The ice is flowing downhill into basins, much like water flows downhill into lakes. Only glacial flow can explain the distribution we found in 2018.

This work is bolstered by additional research performed by Smith and his team, which identified several surface features that are very good analogs for features seen on terrestrial glaciers. These include topographic profiles, crevasses, and compression ridges, which provided a basis to compare with their adapted-ISSM models.These findings could also inform future planetary surveys and point towards more Earth-like glacier activity.

To date, Earth, Mars, and Pluto are the only bodies in the Solar System known to have actively flowing ice, ranging from water ice and CO2 to frozen nitrogen. But there are many other icy bodies in the Solar System, including the larger satellites that orbit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and the growing number of smaller planets discovered in the Kuiper Belt. Many of these same bodies experience regular exchanges between their interiors and surfaces (endogenic resurfacing, cryovolcanism, etc.).

Many of these bodies will likely have glaciers of their own composed of substances like carbon monoxide, ammonia, and methane, which could behave in even more exotic ways! In the coming years, scientists will be able to test these theories thanks to missions like the Europa Clipper and the Enceladus Orbiter, which will explore two major satellites that have interior oceans and may even support life. The dynamics of their icy surfaces could provide additional evidence of how these moons formed and evolved.

The paper that describes their findings recently appeared in the journal JGR Planets, a publication overseen by the American Geological Union (AGU).

Further Reading: PSI

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Mars' Carbon Dioxide Glaciers are on the Move - Universe Today

There are many mysteries on Mars, and scientists might have just solved two of them.

Mars sports vast regions of frost that can only be seen in the infrared range of the spectrum, not in visible light, for reasons scientists couldn't explain. Now, using data from NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, scientists at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, and Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, have come up with a theory that explains this "invisible" frost on the Martian surface. Thescientists suggest that the frost may be camouflaged by dust, an idea that could also explain the similarly mysterious phenomenon of dust avalanches on Mars.

Frost on Mars develops overnight and is made of carbon dioxide. It's essentially dry ice, so when the sun rises, the frost vaporizes rather than melts. The visible-light camera on Mars Odyssey, which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2001, captures regions of the blue-white frost regularly.

But the spacecraft's infrared camera shows a very different landscape it photographsmore expansive areas of frost that don't appear on the visible-light camera.

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

"Our first thought was ice could be buried there," Lucas Lange, a JPL intern on the project said in a statement. "Dry ice is plentiful near Mars' poles, but we were looking closer to the equator of the planet, where it's generally too warm for dry ice frost to form."

So the scientists turned to an alternative theory they suspect what the infrared camera is picking up is "dirty frost," which is contaminated by dust. This dirty frost is camouflaged in visible light, but the heat-sensitive camera can still capture its cold temperature.

The dirty frost theory would also explain another Martian mystery, the phenomenon of dust avalanches. Scientists have explained long, dark streaks on Martian slopes as the result of dust avalanches that have removed the top layer of regolith to reveal a darker colored material underneath.

The researchers investigating the "invisible" frost determined that these "slope streaks," as they're known, appear in areas that have morning frost. So the scientists suggested that the avalanches may be triggered as the frost vaporizes, loosening the dust grains on the slopes.

"Every time we send a mission to Mars, we discover exotic new processes," Chris Edwards, a planetary scientist at Northern Arizona University and a co-author of the paper, said in the statement. "We don't have anything exactly like a slope streak on Earth. You have to think beyond your experiences on Earth to understand Mars."

The team's research was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research last month.

Follow Stefanie Waldek on Twitter @StefanieWaldek. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Mars sports 'invisible' frost and dust avalanches, and scientists may finally know why - Space.com

Greetings, brave astronauts! We are super excited to share some early details of our new title, the cinematic adventure game Deliver Us Mars, which will be coming soon to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.

As a studio weve truly been on an incredible journey these past few years and were pleased that so many of you took our debut game, 2019s Deliver Us The Moon, into your hearts. We always knew that our next game had to be bigger and bolder than what had come before. The scale of our ambition as a team is constantly growing, spurred on and inspired by some of the most memorable games to come to PlayStation over the last decade not least Naughty Dogs masterpiece, The Last of Us Part II.

For the past several years, our team at Keoken has quietly been hand-crafting Deliver Us Mars to combine the grandeur of a save-the-world sci-fi epic with a personal story and heartfelt motivations. We wanted to pick a setting for our game that reflects our lofty goals for the project. In our own reality, humanity faces huge challenges in the face of climate change. As the space agencies (and some wealthy individuals) have well and truly turned their eyes to Mars, so too have we.

In Deliver Us Mars, which is set ten years after the Fortuna mission in Deliver Us The Moon, humanity is closer than ever to extinction. As part of the crew of the Zephyr, your protagonists goal is to retrieve three stolen colony ships from the Red Planet, in order to ensure the continued survival of the human race on Earth. Players will explore Mars as they uncover the origins of a mysterious distress signal that led the crew there.

This next level of storytelling demanded that we take the series to new frontiers. For the first time, we have a fully motion-captured cast to enhance the emotional impact of the story, and were giving players new and improved gameplay mechanics including a whole traversal system, inspired by PlayStation classics like Tomb Raider and Uncharted. On top of all of that, well be offering truly next-gen visual fidelity with the support of real-time ray traced shadows and reflections on the PS5.

Mars is the next frontier, an unexplored world with limitless storytelling potential. Youll get to explore the surface of the Red Planet like never before, encountering not only the dusty plains that are synonymous with our view of Mars but also icy craters and canyons, as you unravel the mystery at the heart of the game.

We always wanted to be astronauts. Sadly, we never made it, so instead we created a game with the hope to inspire others to look to the stars who knows, maybe one of you reading this might make the journey to Mars yourself one day! We hope you enjoy your first glimpse of Deliver Us Mars development in this video, and we cant wait to share more with you over the coming months.

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Journey to the Red Planet with Deliver Us Mars on PS4 and PS5 - PlayStation