Monthly Archives: June 2022

On April 18, 2022, NASAs Ingenuity Mars helicopter made a record-breaking 25th flight. The rotorcraft covered 704 m (2,310 feet) at a max speed of 5.5 m/sec (12 mph).

For our record-breaking flight, Ingenuitys downward-looking navigation camera provided us with a breathtaking sense of what it would feel like gliding 10 m (33 feet) above the surface of Mars at 5.5 m/sec, said Ingenuity team leader Dr. Teddy Tzanetos, a researcher at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The first frame of the video clip begins about one second into Ingenuitys 25th flight.

After reaching an altitude of 10 m, the helicopter heads southwest, accelerating to its maximum speed in less than three seconds.

The rotorcraft first flies over a group of sand ripples then, about halfway through the video, several rock fields.

Finally, relatively flat and featureless terrain appears below, providing a good landing spot.

The video of the 161.3-second flight was speeded up approximately five times, reducing it to less than 35 seconds.

NASAs Perseverance rover acquired this image on April 22, 2021, using its left Mastcam-Z camera. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS.

Ingenuitys navigation camera has been programmed to deactivate whenever the rotorcraft is within 1 m (3 feet) of the surface.

This helps ensure any dust kicked up during takeoff and landing wont interfere with the navigation system as it tracks features on the ground.

Ingenuitys flights are autonomous, explained Ingenuitys pilots at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

We plan them and send commands to NASAs Perseverance rover, which then relays those commands to the helicopter.

During a flight, onboard sensors the navigation camera, an inertial measurement unit, and a laser range finder provide real-time data to Ingenuitys navigation processor and main flight computer, which guide the helicopter in flight.

This enables Ingenuity to react to the landscape while carrying out its commands.

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This article is based on text provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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Ingenuity Performs Its Longest and Fastest Flight to Date on Mars ...

NASA is hailing the Perseverance rover's improved ability to pick its own targets as a way of speeding up science on Mars.

Without explicit direction from Earth, the Perseverance rover zapped two rock targets with its SuperCam instrument on Sol 442 (May 18) to learn more about their elemental compositions, mission scientists said in an update Tuesday (May 31) about the Mars mission.

"Normally, when the rover team picks the targets, the observations are not made until the following day," Roger Wiens, principal investigator of SuperCam and a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said in a statement (opens in new tab). "If Perseverance picks its own targets, it can shoot them right after a drive.

"Having the SuperCam results right away can alert the team to unusual compositions in time to make decisions about further analyses before the rover moves on," Wiens added.

Related: 1 year later, Ingenuity helicopter still going strong on Mars

Perseverance's software for target selection is called Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS), which was developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California for other rover missions, Wiens said. The software was then adapted for Perseverance's SuperCam instrument.

"AEGIS requests Navcam images to be taken, and it then analyzes the images to find rocks and prioritize them for analysis based on size, brightness and several other features," Wiens said. "It subsequently initiates a sequence in which SuperCam fires its laser to determine the chemical makeup of one or two top priority targets selected from the Navcam images."

AEGIS was tested for this new capability starting in March. In May, the rover also took images to show where the laser (a newer addition to the testing sequence) was used. With this test showing success, the team plans to use AEGIS "to provide more rapid data on the composition of rocks around the rover's path," Wiens added.

Perseverance landed on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021, and, along with a helicopter called Ingenuity, is exploring an ancient river delta in an environment that was potentially rich with microbes billions of years ago.

The rover will cache its most promising samples for a future mission that will pick up the materials and send them back to Earth in the 2030s.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter@howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom (opens in new tab)or Facebook.

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Perseverance rover on Mars picks rocks to shoot with laser | Space

June 01, 2022

This series of images from a navigation camera aboard NASAs Perseverance rover shows a gust of wind sweeping dust across the Martian plain beyond the rovers tracks on June 18, 2021 (the 117th sol, or Martian day, of the mission). The dust cloud in this GIF was estimated to be about 1.5 square miles (4 square kilometers) in size; it was the first such Martian wind-lifted dust cloud of this scale ever captured in images.

This image has been enhanced in order to show maximal detail, with some color distortion.

A key objective for Perseverances mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planets geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

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

JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more about Perseverance:

mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

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Perseverance Views Wind Lifting a Massive Dust Cloud NASA Mars ...

Animation showing an artists rendition of Mars interior structure. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASAs Mars Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) launched in May 2018 and safely landed on the Martian surface in November of that same year. Its two-year mission was to study the deep interior of Mars to learn how celestial bodies with rocky surfaces, such as the Earth and the Moon, formed. It recently recorded a record-setting, monster quake on Mars, but sadly, it is almost lights out for InSight.

One of InSights key tools for that mission is Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS). This round, dome-shaped instrument takes the pulse or seismic vibrations of Mars. Using data from SEIS, scientists have made a new discovery about marsquakes.

Volcanic activity beneath the surface of Mars could be responsible for triggering repetitive marsquakes, which are similar to earthquakes, in a specific region of the Red Planet, scientists from The Australian National University (ANU) suggest.

New research published in Nature Communications shows scientists from ANU and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing have discovered 47 previously undetected marsquakes beneath the Martian crust in an area called Cerberus Fossae a seismically active region on Mars that is less than 20 million years old.

It can help us answer fundamental questions about the solar system and the state of Mars core, mantle and the evolution of its currently lacking magnetic field.

The authors of the study speculate that magma activity in the Martian mantle, which is the inner layer of Mars sandwiched between the crust and the core, is the cause of these newly detected marsquakes.

The findings suggest magma in the Martian mantle is still active and is responsible for the volcanic marsquakes, contrary to past beliefs held by scientists that these events are caused by Martian tectonic forces.

According to geophysicist and co-author Professor Hrvoje Tkalcic, from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences, the repetitive nature of these quakes and the fact they were all detected in the same area of the planet suggests Mars is more seismically active than scientists previously thought.

We found that these marsquakes repeatedly occurred at all times of the Martian day, whereas marsquakes detected and reported by NASA in the past appeared to have occurred only during the dead of night when the planet is quieter, Professor Tkalcic said.

Therefore, we can assume that the movement of molten rock in the Martian mantle is the trigger for these 47 newly detected marsquakes beneath the Cerberus Fossae region.

Professor Tkalcic said the continuous seismicity suggests the Cerberus Fossae region on Mars is seismically highly active.

Knowing that the Martian mantle is still active is crucial to our understanding of how Mars evolved as a planet, he said.

It can help us answer fundamental questions about the solar system and the state of Mars core, mantle and the evolution of its currently-lacking magnetic field.

The researchers used data collected from a seismometer attached to NASAs InSight lander, which has been collecting data about marsquakes, Martian weather, and the planets interior since landing on Mars in 2018.

Using a unique algorithm, the researchers were able to apply their techniques to the NASA data to detect the 47 previously undiscovered marsquakes.

The study authors say while the quakes would have caused some shaking on Mars, the seismic events were relatively small in magnitude and would barely be felt if they had occurred on Earth. The quakes were detected over a period of about 350 sols a term used to refer to one solar day on Mars which is equivalent to about 359 days on Earth.

According to Professor Tkalcic, the marsquake findings could help scientists figure out why the Red Planet no longer has a magnetic field.

The marsquakes indirectly help us understand whether convection is occurring inside of the planets interior, and if this convection is happening, which it looks like it is based off our findings, then there must be another mechanism at play that is preventing a magnetic field from developing on Mars, he said.

All life on Earth is possible because of the Earths magnetic field and its ability to shield us from cosmic radiation, so without a magnetic field life as we know it simply wouldnt be possible.

Therefore, understanding Mars magnetic field, how it evolved, and at which stage of the planets history it stopped is obviously important for future missions and is critical if scientists one day hope to establish human life on Mars.

Reference: Repetitive marsquakes in Martian upper mantle by Weijia Sun and Hrvoje Tkalcic, 30 March 2022, Nature Communications.DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29329-x

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Volcanic Activity Beneath the Surface of Mars: Magma Makes Marsquakes Rock Red Planet - SciTechDaily

A long-running NASA rover imaged twisted Red Planet rock pillars.

The Curiosity rover spotted (opens in new tab) the sinewy rocks on May 15, according to raw images the mission sends down to Earth. The images were obtained on Sol (Martian day) 3474 of the mission, as Curiosity speeds towards completing its first decade of work on Mars on Aug. 6.

"The spikes are most likely the cemented fillings of ancient fractures in a sedimentary rock," the SETI Institute wrote (opens in new tab) of the feature on May 26. Sedimentary rock is formed by layers of sand and water, but the rest of the rock feature "was made of softer material and was eroded away," the institute added on Twitter.

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

The delicate features may also have been shaped by the planet's lighter gravity, which is about one-third of what we experience on Earth. SETI, however, did not elaborate on other environmental factors in its tweet. The size of the features was also not specified.

On sols 3473 and 3475, Curiosity was working at a location on Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons) nicknamed Mirador Butte, according to a statement posted to the mission's official blog (opens in new tab) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on May 13.

Curiosity's Mast Camera or Mastcam, which took the odd Mars rock picture sometime during this period, was going to be "very busy in this interesting landscape," according to Curiosity blog post writer Susanne Schwenzer, a planetary geologist at The Open University in the United Kingdom.

"There will be a mosaic on the hill just off at a distance, now called 'Sierra Maigualida,' which will tell us more about the textures of the uppermost unit of the hill," Schwenzer said of the imaging plan.

The rover was also expected to examine "interesting structures" on a target nicknamed "La Paragua," to do multispectral analysis on a second target called "San Pedro," and to use stereo imaging on a feature called Tapir, which was likely formed by sediments forming rock via chemical and physical changes.

Curiosity is on a long-term plan to seek habitable conditions at Gale Crater, and is now climbing Mount Sharp to look at environmental depositions over the eons.

A newer NASA rover, Perseverance, landed Feb. 18, 2021, to seek potential ancient microbes in an ancient river delta inside Jezero Crater. Perseverance plans to cache some samples for a future mission to pick up for shipment to Earth in the 2030s.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter@howellspace. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcomor Facebook.

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These bizarre spiky Mars rocks likely formed by erosion and ancient fractures (photo) - Space.com

A daunting, three-hour presentation to NASA leadership about the MAVEN Mars orbiter's future was supposed to be the biggest challenge for the mission team early this year. But just as the presentation was going smoothly on Earth, the spacecraft itself was in serious trouble millions of miles away.

As she finished leading the presentation on that February day, Shannon Curry, recently appointed principal investigator for the MAVEN mission, felt confident about the team's work making the case that the Mars mission should continue at least three more years, an argument based on six months of exhaustive work from the team.

Then her phone rang. "We finally finish the presentation, I turn everything back on, and our project manager calls me immediately," Curry told Space.com. "Now, I'm thinking he's calling me to be like, 'Congratulations, you did it, you're doing great,' and he was like, 'We're in safe mode.'"

Related: The boldest Mars missions in history

Safe mode means that a spacecraft has run into a problem it can't solve on its own, so it has shut down everything it doesn't need to survive until engineers on Earth can assess the situation. Sometimes, the solution is simple, the cosmic equivalent of rebooting an internet router.

But not this time.

"The safe mode event was catastrophic is too strong, but I mean, we did get close to losing the spacecraft," Curry said, calling the incident "incredibly serious" and "scary." And when the team wanted to be celebrating the end of the six-month mission extension campaign, the timing stung. "It was like getting the wind knocked out of you. On your birthday."

MAVEN, more formally known as Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, arrived in orbit around the Red Planet in 2014. Since then, the spacecraft has not only studied the Martian atmosphere, as its name promises, but has also acted as a key relay station for communications between NASA and its Martian landers and rovers, which cannot directly signal Earth.

It's not a mission that NASA wants to end, and indeed, at the end of the review process that culminated in the grueling presentation, the agency authorized the mission to continue work for three more years. However, MAVEN has spent more than eight years in space, far longer than it was initially designed for, and one particular part is giving the team trouble.

The spacecraft carries two of what engineers call inertial measurement units, or IMUs: one primary version, dubbed IMU-1, and an identical backup called IMU-2. Whichever IMU the spacecraft is using at any given time is responsible for keeping MAVEN in the right attitude, or orientation in space. (Attitude is crucial: functions like charging solar panels and communicating with Earth can't occur properly when a spacecraft loses attitude.)

After worrying IMU-1 issues cropped up in late 2017, the MAVEN team switched the spacecraft to its backup unit. But late last year, the team noticed that the IMU-2 unit was starting to, essentially, wear out much faster than expected. So in early February, the team returned the spacecraft to its original IMU-1 unit.

Two weeks later, on Feb. 22, the very day of MAVEN's mission extension presentation, the spacecraft suddenly couldn't seem to use either IMU to properly position itself.

"For different reasons, both of our [IMU]s started showing problems," Curry said. "When we went into safe mode, it was because one of them really crashed, basically, and then the other just was losing lifetime."

The first challenge was to stabilize the spacecraft, which required a procedure engineers call heartbeat termination.

The term "is not just for dramatic effect: basically, it's like ripping the cord out of the wall," Curry said. "The spacecraft rebooted its main onboard computer, and then when that didn't work, it had to swap to the backup computer, and we've never been on the backup computer before."

After more than an hour of the spacecraft trying to revive IMU-1, the computer swap, which also put MAVEN on IMU-2, held. And not a moment too soon: the spacecraft's focus on the sun was beginning to stray, an existential threat in and of itself.

But even once the MAVEN team had addressed the most urgent issues, the situation remained dangerous, since the team knew that using IMU-2 was courting disaster. "We've got one IMU left, and we don't have much time on it. At all," Curry said. "We recovered from the safe mode, and then we were still in pretty hot water."

So the team set to work developing what spacecraft managers call "all-stellar mode." That mode allows the spacecraft to determine its attitude by matching the stars it sees with its internal map of the cosmos. It's not quite as precise as using an IMU, but it doesn't have a limited lifetime. Unfortunately, all-stellar mode takes time to develop. The MAVEN team had intended to do that work later this year. "We already had it bookmarked for October as a 'just in case,' thinking we were, like, doing our extra credit homework," Curry said.

The spacecraft had other ideas. Once MAVEN was stable on IMU-2, the team scrambled to develop all-stellar mode as quickly as possible, completing the process in time to send the relevant commands to the spacecraft on April 19, just shy of two months after the crisis began.

For about a month after all-stellar was implemented, the MAVEN team gradually began to turn on and check instruments, although the spacecraft had to remain pointing to Earth throughout the time, limiting the science the mission could do.

Curry especially regrets the loss of data from MAVEN's extreme ultraviolet instrument, which can't observe at all when the spacecraft is pointing at Earth. Among other work, that instrument can measure certain types of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation from the sun as it arrives at the Red Planet.

And while MAVEN has been recovering, the sun has produced several major flares that the spacecraft has missed. "That's a real kicker," she said. "A couple of X-class flares have propagated past Mars and impacted Mars, and MAVEN is the only one who would be able to observe them and has not been able to."

The slow ramp-up back to full operations also meant that MAVEN spent an extra month unable to serve as a relay satellite for the InSight lander and Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, the three NASA robots currently active on the Martian surface. Although other satellites also participate in this work, MAVEN bears one of the largest loads. So the spacecraft's three-month outage meant not just reduced science from MAVEN but reduced science from Mars overall.

"It's been really hard on all of the surface assets," Curry said. And in turn, the rescue was about more than MAVEN itself. "It wasn't just simply to make sure we saved our spacecraft. This was enabling a lot of data at Mars in general."

After more than three months out of commission, MAVEN finally returned to its normal operations on Saturday (May 28), according to a statement from the University of Colorado Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, where the mission is headquartered. But the milestone doesn't mean the spacecraft team's work is done.

Although all-stellar mode can do the job for normal operations, it isn't precise enough to see MAVEN safely through its most delicate maneuvers, and the spacecraft still has precious little time left on its IMUs.

"We have to spend this summer and the next year or two coming up with very clever ways to stop using the IMU when we normally would," Curry said. "If we did nothing, we would not make it the next 10 years." (The recent mission extension sees the spacecraft through 2025, but NASA has said it wants to use MAVEN's relay capability during its planned Mars sample-return mission campaign, which is currently targeting delivery at Earth in 2033.)

Curry said she's confident the MAVEN team can tackle this challenge as well. "When all of a sudden, you're faced with this, frankly, existential threat of saying, 'Figure it out or you're gonna lose the spacecraft,' people figure it out. And so we have a path forward, we have a bunch of ideas to start testing," she said. "Is everything ironed out? No. It's going to take a lot more work to iron out some clever ways to do that. But again, this is a very, very, very creative and smart team."

In the meantime, now that MAVEN is back to normal operations, there's precious science to be done regarding Mars' atmosphere. In particular, Curry is excited to see upcoming data that will show how the atmosphere responds to the sun's increasing activity. The sun's activity fluctuates over an 11-year solar cycle, with the star on an upswing now that scientists expect will peak around 2025.

"The solar cycle is just cranking right now and we're still at least 18 months off the peak, so we could not be more excited to get back up and running in full," Curry said.

And the 2025 solar maximum is particularly intriguing because scientists expect it will coincide with the Red Planet's next serious dust-storm season. During the southern hemisphere's summer, weather conditions can trigger dust storms so large that some encompass the entire planet. It's dust-storm season on Mars now and MAVEN has watched previous seasons as well, but the alignment of cycles ups the stakes.

"MAVEN will be observing the most extreme conditions it ever has, because there'll be dust, so it's a driver from below, and then extreme solar activity as a driver from above," Curry said of the tantalizing 2025 opportunity. "We are anxious just to get back into it."

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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NASA's Mars MAVEN spacecraft spent 3 months on the brink of disaster - Space.com

Of all the little space robots scattered across the cosmos right now,Ingenuity, NASA's Mars helicopter, is probably my favorite. It has vastly exceeded its original mission goals and is now buzzing around like an alien gnat across the red sands of Mars, enjoying the thrill of flight on another world.

On Saturday, NASA dropped the latest video ofIngenuity, allowing you to experience those thrills for yourself.

During Ingenuity's 25th flight, on April 18, the little rotorcraft that could most certainlydid. The autonomous flight covered a distance of 2,310 feet more than seven football fields at a pace of 12 miles per hour. It was a record-breaker, the fastest and longest flight yet (though based on how well it's performed on Mars, expect that record to be broken too, no hex), and the whole thing was recorded with the chopper's downward-facing camera.

You can see the video below:

"For our record-breaking flight, Ingenuity's downward-looking navigation camera provided us with a breathtaking sense of what it would feel like gliding 33 feet above the surface of Mars at 12 miles per hour," said Teddy Tzanetos, who leads the Ingenuity team out of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

Ginny, as it's affectionately known, recently experienced ashort bout of silence after entering a low-power state, but it's almost ready to fly again. Its next flight will be its 29th. Not bad for a helicopter that was only supposed to make five flights in 30 days. Maybe next time it'll even find a secret doorway.

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NASA Mars Helicopter Delivers Epic View of the Red Planet During Record Flight - CNET