NASA’s First Weather Report from Jezero Crater on Mars

 

NASA - Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover logo.

Apr 6, 2021

The weather often plays a role in our daily plans. You might put on a light jacket when the forecast calls for a cool breeze or delay your travel plans because of an impending storm. NASA engineers use weather data to inform their plans, too, which is why they’re analyzing the conditions millions of miles away on Mars.

Animation above: Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) system, which is now providing atmospheric measurements to engineers from Jezero Crater on Mars. Animation Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) system aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover first powered on for 30 minutes Feb. 19, approximately one day after the rover touched down on the Red Planet. Around 8:25 p.m. PST that same day, engineers received initial data from MEDA.

“After a nail-biting entry descent and landing phase, our MEDA team anxiously awaited the first data that would confirm our instrument landed safely," said Jose Antonio Rodriguez Manfredi, MEDA principal investigator with the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) at the Instituto Nacional de Tecnica Aeroespacial in Madrid. "Those were moments of great intensity and excitement. Finally, after years of work and planning, we received the first data report from MEDA. Our system was alive and sending its first meteorological data and images from the SkyCam.”

MEDA weighs roughly 12 pounds (5.5 kilograms) and contains a suite of environmental sensors to record dust levels and six atmospheric conditions – wind (both speed and direction), pressure, relative humidity, air temperature, ground temperature, and radiation (from both the Sun and space). The system wakes itself up every hour, and after recording and storing data, it goes to sleep independently of rover operations. The system records data whether the rover is awake or not, both day and night.

As engineers received MEDA’s first data points on Earth, the team pieced together its first weather report from the Jezero Crater on Mars.

Image above: A pre-launch photo of the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) system, which is now providing atmospheric measurements to engineers from Jezero Crater on Mars. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The data showed it was just below minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius) on the surface when the system started recording, and that temperature dropped to minus 14 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 25.6 degrees Celsius) within 30 minutes.

MEDA’s radiation and dust sensor showed Jezero was experiencing a cleaner atmosphere than Gale Crater around the same time, roughly 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) away, according to reports from the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) aboard the Curiosity rover stationed inside Gale. And MEDA’s pressure sensors told engineers the pressure on Mars was 718 Pascals, well within the 705-735 Pascal range predicted by their models for that time on Mars.

Bridging the Atmospheric Gap

Thanks to telescopes here on Earth and spacecraft orbiting Mars, scientists have a good understanding of the Red Planet’s climate and even some insight into the magnitude of dust storms throughout a single Martian year (two Earth years). However, predicting dust lifting and transport, or how small storms evolve into large ones encircling the whole planet, will benefit future science and exploration missions.

Over the next year, MEDA will provide valuable information on temperature cycles, heat fluxes, dust cycles, and how dust particles interact with light, ultimately affecting both the temperature and weather. Just as important will be MEDA’s readings of solar radiation intensity, cloud formations, and local winds that might inform the design of the planned Mars Sample Return mission. Additionally, the measurements will help engineers better understand how to prepare humans and habitats to deal with the conditions on Mars.

REMS aboard the Curiosity rover currently provides similar daily weather and atmospheric data. MEDA, conceived through an international collaboration, builds upon REMS’ autonomous weather station setup and features a few upgrades. The system was provided by Spain and developed by CAB with contributions from the Finnish Meteorological Institute. The U.S. contributions were funded by the Game Changing Development program within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.

Image above: MEDA highlighted on the Mars 2020 rover. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Boasting higher overall durability and additional temperature readings, MEDA can record the temperature at three atmospheric heights: 2.76 feet (0.84 meters), 4.76 feet (1.45 meters), and 98.43 feet (30 meters), in addition to the surface temperature. The system uses sensors on the rover’s body and mast and an infrared sensor capable of measuring temperature nearly 100 feet above the rover. MEDA also records the radiation budget near the surface, which will help prepare for future human exploration missions on Mars.

With MEDA’s weather reports, engineers now have atmospheric data from three different locations on the Red Planet – Perseverance, Curiosity, and NASA’s InSight lander, which hosts the Temperature and Wind sensors for InSight (TWINS). The trio will enable a deeper understanding of Martian weather patterns, events, and atmospheric turbulence that could influence planning for future missions. In the near term, MEDA’s information is helping decide the best atmospheric conditions for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter flights.

As Ingenuity achieved pre-flight milestones, a MEDA report from the 43rd and 44th Martian days, or sols, of the mission (April 3-4 on Earth) showed a temperature high of minus 7.6 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 22 degrees Celsius) and low of minus 117.4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 83 degrees Celsius) in Jezero Crater. MEDA also measured wind gusts at around 22 mph (10 meters per second).

Image above: From its landing site, “Octavia E. Butler Landing,” NASA’s Perseverance rover can see a remnant of a fan-shaped deposit of sediments known as a delta with its Mastcam-Z instrument. Scientists believe this delta is what remains of the confluence between an ancient river and a lake at Mars’ Jezero Crater. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

“We’re very excited to see MEDA working well,” said Manuel de la Torre Juárez, deputy principal investigator for MEDA at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “MEDA’s reports will provide a better picture of the environment near the surface. Data from MEDA and other instrument experiments will reveal more pieces of the puzzles on Mars and help prepare for human exploration. We hope that its data will help make our designs stronger and our missions safer.”

More About Perseverance

The key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s 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.

Mars Perseverance Rover. Animation Credits: NASA/JPL

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s 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:

https://nasa.gov/perseverance and https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

Images (mentioned), Animations (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Written by Hillary Smith/Clare Skelly/JPL/Andrew Good.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Hubble Spots Double Quasars in Merging Galaxies

 

NASA - Hubble Space Telescope patch.

Apr 6, 2021

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is "seeing double." Peering back 10 billion years into the universe's past, Hubble astronomers found a pair of quasars that are so close to each other they look like a single object in ground-based telescopic photos, but not in Hubble’s crisp view.

The researchers believe the quasars are very close to each other because they reside in the cores of two merging galaxies. The team went on to win the "daily double" by finding yet another quasar pair in another colliding galaxy duo.

Image above: This artist's conception shows the brilliant light of two quasars residing in the cores of two galaxies that are in the chaotic process of merging. The gravitational tug-of-war between the two galaxies stretches them, forming long tidal tails and igniting a firestorm of starbirth. Quasars are brilliant beacons of intense light from the centers of distant galaxies. They are powered by supermassive black holes voraciously feeding on infalling matter. This feeding frenzy unleashes a torrent of radiation that can outshine the collective light of billions of stars in the host galaxy. In a few tens of millions of years, the black holes and their galaxies will merge, and so will the quasar pair, forming an even more massive black hole. A similar sequence of events will happen a few billion years from now when our Milky Way galaxy merges with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. Image Credits: NASA, ESA, and J. Olmsted (STScI).

A quasar is a brilliant beacon of intense light from the center of a distant galaxy that can outshine the entire galaxy. It is powered by a supermassive black hole voraciously feeding on inflating matter, unleashing a torrent of radiation.

"We estimate that in the distant universe, for every 1,000 quasars, there is one double quasar. So finding these double quasars is like finding a needle in a haystack," said lead researcher Yue Shen of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The discovery of these four quasars offers a new way to probe collisions among galaxies and the merging of supermassive black holes in the early universe, researchers say.

Quasars are scattered all across the sky and were most abundant 10 billion years ago. There were a lot of galaxy mergers back then feeding the black holes. Therefore, astronomers theorize there should have been many dual quasars during that time.

"This truly is the first sample of dual quasars at the peak epoch of galaxy formation with which we can use to probe ideas about how supermassive black holes come together to eventually form a binary," said research team member Nadia Zakamska of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

The team's results appeared in the April 1 online issue of the journal Nature Astronomy: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01323-1

Image above: These two Hubble Space Telescope images reveal two pairs of quasars that existed 10 billion years ago and reside at the hearts of merging galaxies. Each of the four quasars resides in a host galaxy. These galaxies, however, cannot be seen because they are too faint, even for Hubble. The quasars within each pair are only about 10,000 light-years apart -- the closest ever seen at this cosmic epoch. Quasars are brilliant beacons of intense light from the centers of distant galaxies that can outshine their entire galaxies. They are powered by supermassive black holes voraciously feeding on infalling matter, unleashing a torrent of radiation. The quasar pair in the left-hand image is catalogued as J0749+2255 and the pair on the right as J0841+4825. The two pairs of host galaxies inhabited by each double quasar will eventually merge. The quasars will then tightly orbit each other until they eventually spiral together and coalesce, resulting in an even more massive, but solitary black hole. The image for J0749+2255 was taken Jan. 5, 2020. The J0841+4825 snapshot was taken Nov. 30, 2019. Both images were taken in visible light with Wide Field Camera 3. Image Credits: NASA, ESA, H. Hwang and N. Zakamska (Johns Hopkins University), and Y. Shen (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).

Shen and Zakamska are members of a team that is using Hubble, the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, as well as several ground-based telescopes, to compile a robust census of quasar pairs in the early universe.

The observations are important because a quasar's role in galactic encounters plays a critical part in galaxy formation, the researchers say. As two close galaxies begin to distort each other gravitationally, their interaction funnels material into their respective black holes, igniting their quasars.

Over time, radiation from these high-intensity "light bulbs" launch powerful galactic winds, which sweep out most of the gas from the merging galaxies. Deprived of gas, star formation ceases, and the galaxies evolve into elliptical galaxies.

"Quasars make a profound impact on galaxy formation in the universe," Zakamska said. "Finding dual quasars at this early epoch is important because we can now test our long-standing ideas of how black holes and their host galaxies evolve together."

Astronomers have discovered more than 100 double quasars in merging galaxies so far. However, none of them is as old as the two double quasars in this study.

The Hubble images show that quasars within each pair are only about 10,000 light-years apart. By comparison, our Sun is 26,000 light-years from the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy.

The pairs of host galaxies will eventually merge, and then the quasars also will coalesce, resulting in an even more massive, single solitary black hole.

Finding them wasn't easy. Hubble is the only telescope with vision sharp enough to peer back to the early universe and distinguish two close quasars that are so far away from Earth. However, Hubble's sharp resolution alone isn't good enough to find these dual light beacons.

Astronomers first needed to figure out where to point Hubble to study them. The challenge is that the sky is blanketed with a tapestry of ancient quasars that flared to life 10 billion years ago, only a tiny fraction of which are dual. It took an imaginative and innovative technique that required the help of the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite and the ground-based Sloan Digital Sky Survey to compile a group of potential candidates for Hubble to observe.

Located at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, the Sloan telescope produces three-dimensional maps of objects throughout the sky. The team pored through the Sloan survey to identify the quasars to study more closely.

The Flickering Light of Dual Quasars

Video above: This simulation shows the brilliant, flickering light from a pair of quasars. Astronomers in a recent study deduced that the blinking light is a telltale sign of the presence of two quasars and not a single object. Quasars reside at the hearts of galaxies. They are ignited by monster black holes voraciously feeding on infalling matter, unleashing a torrent of radiation. A quasar’s light fluctuates in brightness based on how much material its black hole is gobbling up at the time. This quasar pair is pouring out light because their galaxies are in the process of merging, which provides plenty of fuel for their hungry black holes. The quasars appear close together because they, too, are in the process of merging, along with their galaxies. The quasars were first identified by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, which measures small changes in the brightness of stars. The quasar pair is too far away for Gaia to resolve. Instead, the pair looks like a single bright object. However, Gaia also measured an apparent “jiggle” in the light. The “jiggle” is a signal of the independent flickering light between two separate quasars, similar to a pair of alternating lights on a railroad-crossing signal. The Hubble Space Telescope is sharp enough to resolve the quasar pair, which astronomers had suspected from the Gaia data. Video Credits: NASA, ESA, and J. Olmsted (STScI).

The researchers then enlisted the Gaia observatory to help pinpoint potential double-quasar candidates. Gaia measures the positions, distances, and motions of nearby celestial objects very precisely. But the team devised a new, innovative application for Gaia that could be used for exploring the distant universe. They used the observatory's database to search for quasars that mimic the apparent motion of nearby stars. The quasars appear as single objects in the Gaia data. However, Gaia can pick up a subtle, unexpected "jiggle" in the apparent position of some of the quasars it observes.

The quasars aren't moving through space in any measurable way, but instead their jiggle could be evidence of random fluctuations of light as each member of the quasar pair varies in brightness. Quasars flicker in brightness on timescales of days to months, depending on their black hole's feeding schedule.

This alternating brightness between the quasar pair is similar to seeing a railroad crossing signal from a distance. As the lights on both sides of the stationary signal alternately flash, the sign gives the illusion of "jiggling."

When the first four targets were observed with Hubble, its crisp vision revealed that two of the targets are two close pairs of quasars. The researchers said it was a "light bulb moment" that verified their plan of using Sloan, Gaia, and Hubble to hunt for the ancient, elusive double powerhouses.

Team member Xin Liu of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign called the Hubble confirmation a "happy surprise." She has long hunted for double quasars closer to Earth using different techniques with ground-based telescopes. "The new technique can not only discover dual quasars much further away, but it is much more efficient than the methods we’ve used before," she said.

Their Nature Astronomy article is a "proof of concept that really demonstrates that our targeted search for dual quasars is very efficient," said team member Hsiang-Chih Hwang, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and the principal investigator of the Hubble program. "It opens a new direction where we can accumulate a lot more interesting systems to follow up, which astronomers weren’t able to do with previous techniques or datasets."

Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Animation Credits: NASA/ESA

The team also obtained follow-up observations with the National Science Foundation NOIRLab's Gemini telescopes. "Gemini’s spatially-resolved spectroscopy can unambiguously reject interlopers due to chance superpositions from unassociated star-quasar systems, where the foreground star is coincidentally aligned with the background quasar," said team member Yu-Ching Chen, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Although the team is convinced of their result, they say there is a slight chance that the Hubble snapshots captured double images of the same quasar, an illusion caused by gravitational lensing. This phenomenon occurs when the gravity of a massive foreground galaxy splits and amplifies the light from the background quasar into two mirror images. However, the researchers think this scenario is highly unlikely because Hubble did not detect any foreground galaxies near the two quasar pairs.

Galactic mergers were more plentiful billions of years ago, but a few are still happening today. One example is NGC 6240, a nearby system of merging galaxies that has two and possibly even three supermassive black holes. An even closer galactic merger will occur in a few billion years when our Milky Way galaxy collides with neighboring Andromeda galaxy. The galactic tussle would likely feed the supermassive black holes in the core of each galaxy, igniting them as quasars.

Future telescopes may offer more insight into these merging systems. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, an infrared observatory scheduled to launch later this year, will probe the quasars' host galaxies. Webb will show the signatures of galactic mergers, such as the distribution of starlight and the long streamers of gas pulled from the interacting galaxies.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.

Artist's Illustration: NASA, ESA, and J. Olmsted (STScI).
Science: NASA, ESA, Y. Shen and X. Liu (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), and H.-C. Hwang and N. Zakamska (Johns Hopkins University).

Related links:

ESA Gaia: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia_overview

Sloan Digital Sky Survey: https://www.sdss.org/

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): https://webbtelescope.org/

Hubble Space Telescope (HST): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/main/index.html

Images (mentioned), Animation (mentioned), Video (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Lynn Jenner/GSFC/Claire Andreoli/Space Telescope Science Institute/Donna Weaver/Ray Villard/University of Illinois/Yue Shen/Xin Liu/Johns Hopkins University/Hsiang-Chih Hwang/Nadia Zakamska.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Exodus of civilization into space - Geochronological Ice Ages, periods, eras. Part 3

 

Snowball Earth logo.

April 5, 2021

Preamble

Here the third article of a series of articles by Ph.D. Morozov Sergey Lvovich, expert in chronology and calendar systems, as well as space biology and medicine, Parliamentarian of Asgardia (AMP) the first space Nation.

Ph.D. Morozov Sergey Lvovich

Geochronological Ice Ages, periods, eras

Earlier, we considered the biblical and astrophysical End of the World, which did not take place in 1492 and is assumed to be 5.5 billion years later, respectively.

The trouble, however, today is that a disastrous situation for civilization can actually ripen very soon for a completely different reason, that is, long before the astrophysical End of the World. This can be caused by natural evolution and the struggle of the species of Darwinian natural selection for existence.

This is evidenced by the WHO forecast of the possibility of a new virulent virus emerging by 2050 with a mortality rate of up to 35%.

Planet Earth has three main models of the temperature existence of its surface in geological history:

1. The "greenhouse" option, when tropical temperatures extend to both poles and there are no ice sheets at all;

2. The variant of a "refrigerator", when there is some permanent ice, although its length and thickness on the Earth's surface varies greatly;

3. A variant of the "snowball". Snowball Earth, in which the entire surface of the planet is completely frozen and presented as endless blocks of ice and snow, many kilometers thick.

Snowball Earth Model

Specifically, now the Earth is in the "refrigerator" version: its poles are covered with an ice shell, which includes the sea ice of the Arctic and the Antarctic ice sheet.

Thus, there is a so-called "temperature swing" or "temperature pendulum": the Earth's surface is completely covered with ice and snow, then completely free of them, constantly moving from one extreme to another through the state of the "refrigerator".

This process is regulated between three variants of the Earth's surface temperature existence by Milankovitch's long cosmic astrophysical cycles, first described by the author in 1941 (Milankovitch, Milutin. 1941. Canon of Insolation and the Ice Age Problem. Belgrade: Zavod za Udz̆benike i Nastavna Sredstva. ISBN 978- 86-17-06619-0 .; Astronomical Theory of Climate Change).

Diagram of the Milankovitch cycle mechanism

This temperature pendulum swings very slowly. Geologists distinguish the following four great Ice Ages in the geochronological history of the Earth:

- Early Proterozoic - 2.5 ÷ 2.2 billion years BC;

- Late Proterozoic - 900 ÷ 590 million years BC;

- Paleozoic - 380 ÷ 200 million years BC;

- Cenozoic - 65 million years BC - Until now.

Each such large Ice Age, in turn, is divided into smaller Ice and Interglacial Ages (including Small Ice Ages), and each such Period is divided into even smaller geological Ages.

Temperature cycles have a direct effect on the flora and fauna that live on the Earth's surface. This mechanism of climate-temperature influence has been named by Darwin's "natural selection" after Charles Darwin, the scientist who discovered it.

The Milankovitch Cosmic Cycle is the cause of the periodic occurrence of Ice Age, Periods and Epochs, on Earth. In turn, this means that natural Darwinian selection takes place on the basis of Milutin Milankovich's climatic law. In each such Ice Age, Period and Epoch, almost all flora and fauna on the surface of the Earth always perished.

The past geochronological history of the Earth can be found by studying an ice core, for example, Vostok station in Antarctica:

Milankovitch's long-term climatic cycles over 415,000 years. Graphic Credit: Raphael Nudelman

Coming soon to read the continuation of the cycle "The Exodus of Civilization into Space" - the Biological End of the World.

Related articles:

Exodus of civilization into space - Astrophysical End of the World. Part 2
https://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.com/2021/04/exodus-of-civilization-into-space.html

The ideology of space expansion - Space calendar. Part 1
https://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-ideology-of-space-expansion-space.html

Related links:

About Ph.D. Morozov Sergey Lvovich: https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5fbb90753e3ad265054f930a/ob-avtore-kanala-5fbd2bf80b4af80149fb12c2

Original article in Russian on Zen.Yandex:
https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5fbb90753e3ad265054f930a/ishod-civilizacii-v-kosmos-chast-3--geohronologicheskie-lednikovye-ery-periody-epohi-5fc5fe864fa3013b23950540

Asgardia website: https://asgardia.space/

Author: Ph.D. Morozov Sergey Lvovich / Zen.Yandex. Editor / Translation: Roland Berga.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

NASA’s Mars Helicopter Survives First Cold Martian Night on Its Own

 

NASA - Mars Helicopter Ingenuity logo.

Apr 5, 2021

Making it through the frigid Martian temperatures after being deployed by NASA’s Perseverance rover is a major milestone for the small rotorcraft.

Image above: NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter can be seen on Mars as viewed by the Perseverance rover’s rear Hazard Camera on April 4, 2021, the 44th Martian day, or sol of the mission. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has emerged from its first night on the surface of Mars.

Evening temperatures at Jezero Crater can plunge as low as minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius), which can freeze and crack unprotected electrical components and damage the onboard batteries required for flight. Surviving that first night after being deployed from where it was attached to the belly of NASA’s Perseverance rover on April 3 is a major milestone for the 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) rotorcraft. In the days to come, Ingenuity will be the first aircraft to attempt powered, controlled flight on another planet.

“This is the first time that Ingenuity has been on its own on the surface of Mars,” said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “But we now have confirmation that we have the right insulation, the right heaters, and enough energy in its battery to survive the cold night, which is a big win for the team. We’re excited to continue to prepare Ingenuity for its first flight test.”

Devising a craft small enough to fit onto the rover, light enough to fly in Mars’ thin atmosphere, yet hardy enough to withstand the Martian cold presented significant challenges. To ensure the solar array atop the helicopter’s rotors could begin getting sunlight as soon as possible, Perseverance was instructed to move away from Ingenuity shortly after deploying it.

Image above: The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter took this image with its color camera from beneath the Perseverance rover after the rover had deployed the rotorcraft to the surface of Mars. Image was taken on April 3, 2021. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Until the helicopter put its four legs onto the Martian surface, Ingenuity remained attached to the belly of the rover, receiving power from Perseverance, which touched down at Jezero Crater on Feb. 18. The rover serves as a communications relay between Ingenuity and Earth, and it will use its suite of cameras to observe the flight characteristics of the solar-powered helicopter from “Van Zyl Overlook.”

The sole mission of Ingenuity, a technology demonstration, is to conduct flight tests in the thin atmosphere of Mars; the helicopter carries no science instruments. Within 30 Martian days, or sols (a Martian day is 24.6 hours), on the surface, Ingenuity will complete its testing, and Perseverance’s scientific exploration of Jezero Crater will kick into high gear.

“Our 30-sol test schedule is frontloaded with exciting milestones,” said Teddy Tzanetos, deputy operations lead for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at JPL. “Whatever the future holds, we will acquire all the flight data we can within that timeframe.”

The Month of Ingenuity

On April 4, Perseverance downlinked the first of the images of the helicopter on the surface of Mars. Taken by the rover’s rear left Hazard Avoidance camera, the image shows the helicopter’s rotor blades still stacked in alignment on top of each other (a configuration used to save room during the trip to Mars) and its four footpads firmly planted into the surface of Mars.

For the next two days, Ingenuity will collect information about how well the thermal-control and power systems perform now that the small helicopter is standing on its own in the Mars environment. That information will be used to fine tune Ingenuity’s thermal-control system to help it survive the harsh Mars nights through the entire flight experiment period.

NASA’s Mars Helicopter Ingenuity (Trailer)

On April 7, the restraints that have been holding the rotor blades together since before launch are scheduled to be released. If the mission team meets that milestone, the next several sols will involve more testing of the rotor blades as well as the motors that drive them. There are also checkouts of the inertial measurement unit (an electronic device that measures a body’s orientation and angular rate) and onboard computers tasked with autonomously flying the helicopter. Additionally, the team will continue to monitor the helicopter’s energy performance, including assessment of solar-array power and state of charge of the craft’s six lithium ion batteries.

If all goes well with each of the myriad preflight checks, Ingenuity’s first attempt to lift off from the middle of its 33-by-33-foot (10-by-10-meter) “airfield” – chosen for its flatness and lack of obstructions – will be no sooner than the evening of April 11.

Subsequent flight tests will be scheduled throughout the Month of Ingenuity, with Perseverance’s cameras providing plenty of high-definition images of the historic mission.

More About Ingenuity

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was built by JPL, which also manages this technology demonstration project for NASA Headquarters. It is supported by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, and the NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate. NASA’s Ames Research Center and Langley Research Center provided significant flight performance analysis and technical assistance.

At NASA Headquarters, Dave Lavery is the program executive for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. At JPL, MiMi Aung is the project manager and J. (Bob) Balaram is chief engineer.

JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter.

For more information about Ingenuity:

https://go.nasa.gov/ingenuity-press-kit and https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter

More About Perseverance

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s 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.

Related article:

Perseverance Rover on Mars: Ingenuity helicopter is on Martian soil
https://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.com/2021/04/perseverance-rover-on-mars-ingenuity.html

JPL built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more about Perseverance:

https://nasa.gov/perseverance and https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

Images (mentioned), Video (NASA), Text, Credits: NASA/ony Greicius/Alana Johnson/Grey Hautaluoma/JPL/DC Agle.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

NASA’s Curiosity Team Names Martian Hill That Serves as Mission ‘Gateway’

 

NASA - Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) patch.

Apr 5, 2021

The team of scientists and engineers behind NASA’s Curiosity rover named a hill along the rover’s path on Mars in honor of a recently deceased mission scientist. A craggy hump that stretches 450 feet (120 meters) tall, “Rafael Navarro mountain” is located on Mount Sharp in northwest Gale Crater.

Image above: This panorama, made up of multiple 100-millimeter Mastcam images stitched together, was taken by NASA's Curiosity rover on Feb. 13, 2021, the 3,030th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The white balance has been adjusted to approximate Earth-like illumination and the sky has been filled in for aesthetic reasons. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

The inspiration for the name is award-winning scientist Rafael Navarro-González; he died on Jan. 28, 2021, from complications related to COVID-19. A leading astrobiologist in Mexico, Navarro-González was a co-investigator on the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), a portable chemistry lab aboard Curiosity that has been sniffing out the chemical makeup of Martian soil, rocks, and air. As such, he helped lead the team that identified ancient organic compounds on Mars; his many accomplishments also included identifying the role of volcanic lightning in the origin of life on Earth. Navarro-González was a researcher at Nuclear Sciences Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City.

“We are truly honored to have a prominent hill named after our dad; it’s his and our dream come true to see this happen,” wrote Navarro-González’s children, Rafael and Karina Navarro Aceves, in a statement to NASA. “Ever since our parents met, their dreams merged together and they became a beautiful team, working very hard for 36 years. Our dad was an accomplished scientist, but above all, a great human being who managed to balance work and family. Our mom, Faby, would always tell him that his name one day would be on Mars, and now that is coming true. We all believe that there must be a party in heaven.”

Rafael Navarro mountain sits at a major geological transition in Gale Crater from a clay-rich region to one that’s rich in sulfate minerals. Analyzing sulfate minerals may help scientists better understand the major shift in the Martian climate from wetter to drier conditions, according to Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

“We think of this hill as a gateway,” Vasavada said. “Rafael Navarro mountain will be constantly in our sights for the next year as Curiosity winds around it.”

Image above: Rafael Navarro-González in his home office in Mexico City. Image Credit: Luz Fabiola Aceves Diaz.

The new hill name is informal and meant for the use of Curiosity’s global team members. The team unofficially has named thousands of features in Gale Crater, from drill holes to rocks to dunes. “Team members agree on a name for a particular feature of interest, so that people don’t get confused if we observe it with multiple instruments,” Vasavada said.

Before Rafael Navarro mountain, the Curiosity team has named four other features after deceased mission scientists: “Jake Matijevic” is the first boulder Curiosity studied and is named after a rover engineer who died in 2012. Curiosity’s first drill hole, “John Klein,” honors the mission’s deputy project manager who died in 2011. “Nathan Bridges dune” gets its name from a co-investigator on Curiosity’s ChemCam instrument who died in 2017. And “Heinrich Wänke” is a rock target that commemorates Wänke's contributions to the development of a rover instrument, APXS, which analyzes the chemical makeup of Martian rocks.

While a few other names of notable scientists not involved with Curiosity, such as astronomer Vera Rubin, and even writers, such as Ray Bradbury, grace the features of Gale Crater (which was named after Australian astronomer Walter F. Gale), the rover team’s general strategy is to name regions, and features within them, after areas of geological significance on Earth. For example, the region where Curiosity landed, the site of an ancient lake, was named “Yellowknife” after a city in northwest Canada where scientists gather to kick off geologic expeditions. The features in Martian Yellowknife were named after towns (“Bathurst Inlet”), mountains (“Sayunei”), or lakes (“Knob Lake”) in northern Canada.

Animation above: This animation shows the past and future route of NASA's Curiosity rover, which is climbing lower Mount Sharp on Mars. The labels identify different regions that scientists are investigating. Until recently, the rover was parked at the Nontron drill site. The rover will wind around Rafael Navarro mountain as it crosses from the clay-bearing into the sulfate-bearing unit. Animation Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/University of Arizona/JHUAPL/MSSS/USGS Astrogeology Science Center.

In late March, Curiosity left “Nontron,” a region that takes the name of a village in southwestern France where the mineral nontronite was first described by scientists. Nontronite is part of a group of the most common types of clays on Mars. Now, Curiosity will navigate around Rafael Navarro mountain, stopping in different regions of scientific interest to drill samples.

“We won’t have Rafael with us for this next stretch, but we will bring his considerable expertise, creativity, and great enthusiasm for astrobiology studies to bear on our investigation of the ancient habitable environments in Gale Crater,” said Paul Mahaffy, principal investigator of Curiosity’s SAM experiment who’s based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Rafael was a good friend and dedicated scientist, and it has been a privilege and honor for our Mars exploration team to work with him over the years.”

Related links:

Rafael Navarro-González: https://www.iau.org/administration/membership/individual/16738/

Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM): https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/instruments/sam/

Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Svetlana Shekhtman/GSFC/By Lonnie Shekhtman.

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SpaceX Crew Ship Moves to New Station Port

 

SpaceX - Dragon Crew-1 Mission patch.

April 5, 2021

Crew Dragon Resilience with NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi, have re-docked to the International Space Station, another first for a commercial crew spacecraft.

Crew Dragon autonomously undocked from the forward port of the station’s Harmony module at 6:30 a.m. and relocated to the space-facing port at 7:08 a.m.

Image above: The SpaceX Crew Dragon is pictured after undocking from the forward port on the Harmony module beginning its short trip to the space-facing port. Image Credit: NASA TV.

This is the start of a process that will enable extraction of new solar arrays from the SpaceX CRS-22 cargo mission’s trunk when it arrives to dock at the Node 2 zenith port following Crew-1 departure.

NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and  Megan McArthur, JAXA astronaut Aki Hoshide, and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet are scheduled to launch to the station Thursday, April 22, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

SpaceX Crew-1 Dragon relocation

Following a short handover, Crew-1 NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, along with JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi, plan to return home off the coast of Florida about five days after the Crew-2 arrival to the space station as long as mission priorities and weather cooperate.

Related links:

Space Station Research and Technology: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/overview.html

International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Image (mentioned), Video, Text, Credits: NASA/Mark Garcia/NASA TV/SciNews.

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On the night side of Venus: ozone bursts and sulfur dioxide volatility

 

ESA - Venus Express Mission patch.

April 4, 2021

Graphic above: Map of observations of sulfur dioxide (A) and ozone (B) in the night hemisphere of Venus at heights of 85-100 km according to SPICAV-UV data for 2006-2014 of the Venus Express mission (ESA). Local time is shown horizontally; vertical - latitude. The asterisks indicate the cases of detection, the empty circles - the rest of the observations, where the absorption of gases was not registered. Graphic Credit:  Evdokimova et al. (2021).

In the nighttime atmosphere of Venus at altitudes of 85–100 km, there is extremely little ozone, and the sulfur dioxide content changes significantly over several days. These conclusions were made based on the results of processing the data from the SPICAV instrument on board the Venus Express spacecraft, created with the active participation of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. An article with the results of the work was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

The Venus Express orbital spacecraft of the European Space Agency operated near Venus in 2006–2014. On board was installed, among other scientific instruments, a complex of spectrometers SPICAV / SOIR (Spectroscopy for the Investigation of the Characteristics of the Atmosphere of Venus), created with the active participation of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The ultraviolet channel of the SPICAV spectrometer was the only instrument on board the Venus Express capable of simultaneously studying the distribution of elevated concentrations of such trace gases as ozone (O₃) and sulfur dioxide (SO₂) in the upper mesosphere of Venus.

Venus Express

This layer of the atmosphere corresponds to heights of 85–100 km, and is very interesting for researchers, since there is a zone of intersection of various modes of global atmospheric circulation. The behavior of ozone and sulfur dioxide in this region of the atmosphere on the night side, not illuminated by the Sun, has been rather poorly studied so far due to a lack of experimental data.

Now this has become possible thanks to the method of observations in the mode of stellar transmission, first implemented on Venus by the SPICAV spectrometer. The spectrometer "followed" the stars as they rise and set over the horizon of the planet and measured the spectra of their radiation, which passed through the atmosphere and was absorbed by its molecules. Thanks to this, it was possible to measure the concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂ is the main component of the atmosphere of Venus), SO₂ and O₃ at altitudes of 85–100 km.

Ozone was first detected in the atmosphere of Venus also thanks to Venus Express in 2011. Then it was possible to establish that the Venusian ozone layer is located approximately at an altitude of 100 km with a concentration of approximately 107-108 molecules per cm3, but these were only the first observations. Daria Evdokimova and Denis Belyaev, researchers at the Planetary Physics Department of the IKI RAS and the first authors of an article published in JGR: Planets, presented for the first time the results of a combined analysis of the ozone and sulfur dioxide content for all eight years of SPICAV observations.

“We recorded only the maximum ozone concentrations in the atmosphere of Venus at altitudes of 85–100 km, that is, from 107 to 108 molecules per cubic centimeter,” explains Daria Evdokimova. - These values ​​were obtained in 132 sessions of observations, and they show an extremely small content of this gas on the planet compared to the earth, which is about 10 thousand times more. The accumulated statistics, however, made it possible to estimate the average altitude profile of the relative content of O₃, that is, the ratio of the ozone density to the density of carbon dioxide as the main component of the atmosphere. In the studied altitude range, the estimated abundance increases from 1–30 parts per billion in volume (ppbv) at an altitude of 90 km to 6–120 ppbv per 100 km ”.

The observed distribution of ozone, the researchers believe, indicates that this gas interacts with chemical compounds carried by winds from the daytime side of the hemisphere to the nighttime. For example, it can be chlorine compounds, which are known to quickly react with ozone and destroy it. Observations of sulfur dioxide over all the years of the SPICAV experiment showed that its concentrations change significantly over a short time (several Earth days) from several units to several hundred ppbv. However, in this case, on average over the profile, its relative content at heights of 85–100 km is constant and amounts to 135 ± 21 ppbv.

The presence of rapid and significant variations does not allow an unambiguous conclusion about the temporal or spatial distribution of SO₂ in the night hemisphere without the use of improved chemical models that take into account the global circulation of the atmosphere.

Venus Express instruments

“These results show that the upper mesosphere of Venus is a very changeable environment that has yet to be described theoretically,” says Denis Belyaev. - The experimental data we have obtained on the distribution of O₃ and SO₂ will make it possible to refine the models of atmospheric circulation in the cross transit zone of about 100 km and bring us closer to understanding the nature of the atmosphere of Venus. It is strikingly different from the earthly one in physical characteristics, nevertheless, similar chemical processes take place in it, in which ozone and sulfur oxides are involved ”.

The Venus Express automatic interplanetary spacecraft was launched on November 9, 2005 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome using the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle with the Fregat upper stage. The device entered the first elongated orbit around Venus on April 11, 2006. In February 2015, the device entered the atmosphere of Venus and completed its mission, but the processing of its data continues to this day.

Specialists of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences took part in the development, manufacture and testing of two scientific instruments of the orbiter: a universal spectrometer and a high spectral resolution spectrometer SPICAV / SOIR (supervisors: J.-L. Bertaux / Jean-Loup Bertaux, France, O. I. Korablev, Russia, D. Nevejans / Dennis Nevejans, Belgium) and the planetary Fourier spectrometer PFS (made in Italy with the participation of Russia, scientific supervisor V. Formisano / Vittorio Formisano, Italy, L.V. Zasova, Russia). In the experiments VIRTIS, VMC, ASPERA Russian scientists took part as co-investigators.

IKI RAN: http://press.cosmos.ru/na-nochnoy-storone-venery-vspleski-ozona-i-izmenchivost-dvuokisi-sery

ROSCOSMOS Press Release: https://www.roscosmos.ru/30588/

Venus Express: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/Venus_Express

Images, Graphic, Text, Credits: ROSCOSMOS/ESA/Orbiter.ch Aerospace/Roland Berga.

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