Category Archives: Mars

NASAs plucky Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, is about to embark on its 49th flight on the red planet.

The diminutive drone-like aircraft arrived on Mars with the Perseverance rover in February 2021.

The rovers primary goal is to search for evidence of ancient life on the distant planet, and Ingenuity has been assisting by using its onboard camera to scout the best routes for Perseverance to take across the rocky surface.

At the start of its mission more than two years ago, the team at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is overseeing the current Mars adventure, was merely interested in seeing if the helicopter would be able to get airborne in Mars thin atmosphere.

After achieving its maiden flight in April 2021 to become the first aircraft to fly on another planet, the team has sent Ingenuity on increasingly complex trips that culminated in the flights to assist the rover.

Despite its impressive accomplishments, the team behind Ingenuity is still keen to push the aircraft to its limits, and a flight this week could send it to its highest altitude yet.

According to a tweetfrom JPL, Ingenuity could fly as high as 52.5 feet (16 meters), beating its previous record of 46 feet (14 meters) set on December 3, 2022.

The same flight is expected to see the 1.6-foot-tall (0.49 meters) helicopter fly for around 135 seconds and cover a distance of 894 feet (272.5 meters) while traveling at approximately 10 mph.

Ingenuitys current record for time spent in the air stands at 169.5 seconds in a flight taken in August 2021, while the furthest its flown in a single outing is 2,325 feet (708.9 meters), in April 2022.

So impressed has NASA been with Ingenuitys ability to last this long, while also overcoming a number of technical issues, that its planning to build a more advanced version of the aircraft for future missions to Mars and possibly other planets.

NASA would use the vehicle to gather visual data from the air for mapping and to assist rovers on the ground. It could also be used to transport rock and soil samples to waiting spacecraft that would bring them home for closer analysis by scientists keen to learn more about a planets history and the formation of our solar system.

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NASAs plucky Mars helicopter eyes another flight record

1. See Mars, Uranus, Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury All at Once in Tonight's Sky  Travel + Leisure
2. Look up TONIGHT: Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Uranus and Mars will appear  Daily Mail
3. Five Planets' Alignment: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus And Moon Line Up. See PICS  ABP Live

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See Mars, Uranus, Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury All at Once in Tonight's Sky - Travel + Leisure

NASAs Mars helicopter recently aced its 43rd flight, one that turned out to be its longest in almost a year.

During the February 11 flight, Ingenuity traveled 1,280 feet (390 meters) across the martian surface for 146 seconds, reaching a maximum altitude of 40 feet (12 meters) while reaching a top speed of 8.9 mph (4 meters per second). The flight was a repositioning mission in preparation for providing further assistance to NASAs Perseverance rover as it continues to explore Jezero Crater.

NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is overseeing the current Mars mission, tweeted about the helicopters 43rd flight just a couple of days before the second anniversary of Perseverance and Ingenuitys spectacular arrival on the red planet:

Ingenuitys 43rd flight was its longest in terms of both time in the air and distance covered since April 29 last year when it completed a mission that lasted 153 seconds across a distance of 421 meters.

The furthest its traveled to date is 708.9 meters in a flight on April 8, 2022, and the longest its stayed airborne is 169.5 seconds in a trip taken on August 16, 2021.

During its two years on Mars, Ingenuity has exceeded expectations, flying way more missions than originally planned, while also surviving a bitterly cold martian winter. A downward-facing camera on Ingenuity has been gathering images of the martian terrain, data thats enabled the Perseverance team to plan the best routes for the ground-based rover as it continues to explore the planet for evidence of ancient microbial life.

NASA engineers have been so impressed with Ingenuitys performance that they plan to build more advanced versions of the flying machine for future Mars missions. One of them could be the Mars Sample Return mission in the 2030s, which is exploring the possibility of using an Ingenuity-like helicopter to collect samples of martian material already gathered by Perseverance. The samples would then be transferred to a spacecraft and returned to Earth for scientific analysis.

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NASAs Mars helicopter aces longest flight in almost a year

Max Kidruk: about artificial intelligence, scientific and technological progress, the Internet on Mars and the work of a writer  Mezha.Media

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Max Kidruk: about artificial intelligence, scientific and technological progress, the Internet on Mars and the work of a writer - Mezha.Media

1. What has Perseverance found in two years on Mars?  Science News Magazine
2. NASA's Perseverance Rover Set to Begin Third Year at Jezero Crater NASA Mars Exploration  NASA Mars Exploration
3. Mars rover completes first sample storage depot Spaceflight Now  Spaceflight Now

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What has Perseverance found in two years on Mars? - Science News Magazine

This story is part of Welcome to Mars, our series exploring the red planet.

Is that you, Smokey? NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped a view of Mars that should trigger your pareidolia instincts. Pareidolia is the human tendency to see familiar objects in random shapes. In this case, it's totally a bear.

The University of Arizona runs the HiRise (High Resolution Imaging Experiment) camera on board MRO. It featured the bear-like formation as a HiRise image of the day on Wednesday.

The "face," captured by MRO in December, is bigger than your average bear. Aversion of the image with a scale shows it stretches roughly 2,000 meters (6,560 feet) across.

Since we've established this isn't a real bear's face or even bear art made by Mars' nonexistent intelligent aliens, what is it? "There's a hill with a V-shaped collapse structure (the nose), two craters (the eyes), and a circular fracture pattern (the head)," the HiRise team said. "The circular fracture pattern might be due to the settling of a deposit over a buried impact crater." The nose might be formed by a volcanic or mud vent, so the material deposited over the crater could be lava or mud.

HiRise has a knack for finding imaginative faces on Mars. There's the Happy Face Crater, Beaker from The Muppet Show and, oddly enough, Ed Asner. So spotting a bear's mug is just another day on the red planet. Said the HiRise team, "Maybe just grin and bear it."

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NASA Looks Down at Mars, Sees Adorable Bear Face Staring Back

Nasa has unveiled plans to test nuclear-powered rockets that would fly astronauts to Mars in ultra-fast time.

The agency has partnered with the US governments Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) to demonstrate a nuclear thermal rocket engine in space as soon as 2027, it announced on Tuesday.

The project is intended to develop a pioneering propulsion system for space travel far different from the chemical systems prevalent since the modern era of rocketry dawned almost a century ago.

Using a nuclear thermal rocket allows for faster transit time, reducing risk for astronauts, Nasa said in a press release.

Reducing transit time is a key component for human missions to Mars, as longer trips require more supplies and more robust systems.

An additional benefit would be increased science payload capacity, and higher power for instrumentation and communication, according to the agency.

Nasa, which successfully tested its new-era Artemis spacecraft last year as a springboard back to the moon and on to Mars, has hopes of landing humans on the red planet some time in the 2030s as part of its Moon to Mars program.

Using current technology, Nasa says, the 300m-mile journey to Mars would take about seven months. Engineers do not yet know how much time could be shaved off using nuclear technology, but Bill Nelson, the Nasa administrator, said it would allow spacecraft, and humans, to travel in deep space at record speed.

With the help of this new technology, astronauts could journey to and from deep space faster than ever - a major capability to prepare for crewed missions to Mars, Nelson said.

Nuclear electric propulsion systems use propellants much more efficiently than chemical rockets but provide a low amount of thrust, the agency says.

A reactor generates electricity that positively charges gas propellants like xenon or krypton, pushing the ions out through a thruster, which drives the spacecraft forward.

Using low thrust efficiently, nuclear electric propulsion systems accelerate spacecraft for extended periods and can propel a Mars mission for a fraction of the propellant of high-thrust systems.

In a statement, Darpas director, Dr Stefanie Tompkins, said the agreement was an extension of existing collaboration between the agencies.

Darpa and Nasa have a long history of fruitful collaboration in advancing technologies for our respective goals, from the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the moon for the first time to robotic servicing and refueling of satellites, she said.

The space domain is critical to modern commerce, scientific discovery and national security. The ability to accomplish leap-ahead advances in space technology will be essential for more efficiently and quickly transporting material to the moon and, eventually, people to Mars.

Nasas Artemis 2 mission, which will send humans around the moon for the first time in more than half a century, is scheduled for 2024. The subsequent Artemis 3 mission, which could come the following year, will land astronauts, including the first woman, on the moons surface for the first time since 1972.

The image caption was amended on 25 January 2023. An earlier version said that Nasa hoped to land humans on the moon in the 2030s; this should have been Mars.

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Nasa to test nuclear rockets that could fly astronauts to Mars in ...

Green Comet Begins Closest Approach To Earth As A Snow Moon Shines Near Mars: The Night Sky This Week  Forbes

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Green Comet Begins Closest Approach To Earth As A Snow Moon Shines Near Mars: The Night Sky This Week - Forbes

1. NASA images showcase eerie beauty of winter on Mars  CNN
2. NASA Takes the Sting Out of Cold Weather on Earth By Detailing Winter on Mars  ExtremeTech
3. Winter on Mars has cubed-shaped snowflakes, NASA says  Miami Herald

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NASA images showcase eerie beauty of winter on Mars - CNN

Cube-shaped snow, icy landscapes, and frost are all part of the Red Planets coldest season.

When winter comes to Mars, the surface is transformed into a truly otherworldly holiday scene. Snow, ice, and frost accompany the seasons sub-zero temperatures. Some of the coldest of these occur at the planets poles, where it gets as low as minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 123 degrees Celsius).

Cold as it is, dont expect snow drifts worthy of the Rocky Mountains. No region of Mars gets more than a few feet of snow, most of which falls over extremely flat areas. And the Red Planets elliptical orbit means it takes many more months for winter to come around: a single Mars year is around two Earth years.

Still, the planet offers unique winter phenomena that scientists have been able to study, thanks to NASAs robotic Mars explorers. Here are a few of the things theyve discovered:

Two Kinds of Snow

Martian snow comes in two varieties: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Because Martian air is so thin and the temperatures so cold, water-ice snow sublimates, or becomes a gas, before it even touches the ground. Dry-ice snow actually does reach the ground.

Enough falls that you could snowshoe across it, said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California whose research includes a variety of winter phenomena. If you were looking for skiing, though, youd have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface.

How We Know It Snows

Snow occurs only at the coldest extremes of Mars: at the poles, under cloud cover, and at night. Cameras on orbiting spacecraft cant see through those clouds, and surface missions cant survive in the extreme cold. As a result, no images of falling snow have ever been captured. But scientists know it happens, thanks to a few special science instruments.

NASAs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can peer through cloud cover using its Mars Climate Sounder instrument, which detects light in wavelengths imperceptible to the human eye. That ability has allowed scientists to detect carbon dioxide snow falling to the ground. And in 2008, NASA sent the Phoenix lander within 1,000 miles (about 1,600 kilometers) of Mars north pole, where it used a laser instrument to detect water-ice snow falling to the surface.

Cubic Snowflakes

Because of how water molecules bond together when they freeze, snowflakes on Earth have six sides. The same principle applies to all crystals: The way in which atoms arrange themselves determines a crystals shape. In the case of carbon dioxide, molecules in dry ice always bond in forms of four when frozen.

Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped, Piqueux said. Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair.

Jack Frost Nipping at Your Rover

Water and carbon dioxide can each form frost on Mars, and both types of frost appear far more widely across the planet than snow does. The Viking landers saw water frost when they studied Mars in the 1970s, while NASAs Odyssey orbiter has observed frost forming and sublimating away in the morning Sun.

Winters Wondrous End

Perhaps the most fabulous discovery comes at the end of winter, when all the ice that built up begins to thaw and sublimate into the atmosphere. As it does so, this ice takes on bizarre and beautiful shapes that have reminded scientists of spiders, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, and Swiss cheese.

This thawing also causes geysers to erupt: Translucent ice allows sunlight to heat up gas underneath it, and that gas eventually bursts out, sending fans of dust onto the surface. Scientists have actually begun to study these fans as a way to learn more about which way Martian winds are blowing.

News Media Contacts

Andrew GoodJet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.818-393-2433andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Alana JohnsonNASA Headquarters, Washington301-286-6284 / 202-358-1501karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov

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NASA Explores a Winter Wonderland on Mars