The Webb Space Telescope snapped images of Saturn’s moon Titan last month, which are now released for our viewing pleasure. The images offer a newly detailed view of Titan’s atmospheric makeup and even elements of its strange surface.
The telescope’s NIRCam instrument, which images in the near-infrared range, captured the views. They show clouds in Titan’s atmosphere (whimsically named A and B in annotated images) but also a blurry look at Kraken Mare, which is thought to be a methane sea, as well as dark sand dunes.
More data from Titan is expected from Webb’s instruments—including NIRSpec, which can take stock of the planet’s chemical composition, as it already has with distant exoplanets—in May or June 2023.
Titan is about 50% wider than Earth’s Moon. It’s the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere (dominated by nitrogen) and the only place besides Earth known to have rivers, lakes, and seas.
While many of these liquid bodies are hydrocarbons—imagine entire methane oceans—scientists believe that water oceans may sit beneath the moon’s icy surface. That makes Titan an alien environment with promise for the search for life beyond Earth.
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Future data will also be taken by MIRI, Webb’s mid-infrared instrument. MIRI will reveal more of Titan’s spectrum; images from the instrument are notable for their starbursts of color, what the Webb team refers to as “skittles” in the sky.
Titan’s makeup is so exciting and so enigmatic that NASA is planning to send a probe there in the mid-2030s. The 3-foot Dragonfly rotorcraft will make the billion-mile trek out to the moon. It will search for biosignatures and measure Titan’s chemical composition using a suite of 11 instruments.
It won’t be the first time humans put a spacecraft on Titan. In 2005, the Huygens probe alighted on the surface and even snapped an image before going dark. It offers a tantalizingly limited look at this distant and alien world.
NASA scientists have cut down a year of Perseverance’s audio recordings on the Martian surface to a five-hour playlist of the Red Planet’s best hits (you can listen to some here). The sounds are eerily quiet and offer a new way of exploring the Martian environment. They’ve already helped confirm some theories about the way sounds travels on the planet.
Audio from the rover was first published last year—none of the sounds were very pleasing to the ear, possibly due to electromagnetic interference. The latest sounds are softer than those screeches; an analysis of the sounds and what they can tell us about how sound travels on Mars was published last month in Nature.
Baptiste Chide, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, told Gizmodo in a video call last year that audio heard on Mars would sound like it was coming through a wall, due to the Martian atmosphere being 1% as dense as Earth’s. But Chide was still taken aback at just how quiet Mars turned out to be. “It is so quiet that, at some point, we thought the microphone was broken,” Chide said in an Acoustical Society of America release.
The Perseverance rover landed on Mars in February 2021 with a suite of technologies designed to find out whether Mars ever hosted microbial life in its ancient past. But besides those science instruments, the rover also came packed with two microphones, made from off-the-shelf components, to record the very first audio data on Mars.
One of the microphones on Perseverance is attached to the rover’s frame and sits just above one of its wheels. That microphone is encased in mesh to protect it from Martian dust, which is kicked up by the planet’s winds and can be fatal to spacecraft, as the Opportunity rover so inopportunely learned. The other microphone is fastened to the rover’s SuperCam, one of the machine’s main cameras that sits on an arm above the rover’s frame.
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As a result, the researchers found that the latter microphone picked up sounds of the wind blowing around the rover, while the former microphone picked up more sounds from the rover’s activities. The microphones successfully picked up the whine of the Ingenuity helicopter in flight, even when the rotorcraft was over 300 feet away.
In March, Chide’s team used the SuperCam microphone to measure the speed of sound on Mars. The more recent research leveraged both microphones to characterize the acoustic environment of Mars, and used near and distant sound sources to show how the carbon dioxide-heavy atmosphere affected sound’s ability to travel.
Mars is much colder than Earth, with a thinner atmosphere. NASA scientists expected sound to travel slower on Mars as a result, and it did. The researchers found that higher-frequency sounds traveled faster than lower-frequency noise, as well.
Sound on Mars will change throughout the planet’s 687-day year. During the Martian winter, carbon dioxide in the planet’s polar regions freezes, which will cause the loudness of sounds to fluctuate, according to the release. So stay tuned. As long as Perseverance performs as its name suggests, we ought to be getting a more diverse portfolio of Martian mixes soon.
More: Here’s 16 Minutes of Perseverance Rover Going Kssst, Tiktik, and Pffft
A prototype of the ExoMars rover in Stevenage, England, in 2019.Photo: Dan Kitwood (Getty Images)
The European Space Agency is scrambling to figure out the ExoMars rover’s next-possible launch window after the agency suspended cooperation with the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover (named for the famous chemist) was slated to launch for the Red Planet in September. It is one half of the ExoMars program; the other half is a Mars orbiter that launched in 2016. Like the Perseverance rover, Rosalind Franklin will conduct an astrobiological search of Mars. But with the September launch called off, the rover’s components will now be stored in Italy until further notice.
“I hope that our Member States will decide that this is not the end of ExoMars, but rather a rebirth of the mission, perhaps serving as a trigger to develop more European autonomy,” said David Parker, director of Human and Robotic Exploration at the ESA, in an agency release.
The Rosalind Franklin rover was developed by ESA, but Roscosmos was providing the Proton rocket to launch the spacecraft, as well as the mission’s landing platform. The landing platform was to be a home base of sorts for the rover’s science experiments, and it would have taken measurements of Mars’ climate, atmosphere, and radiation levels.
Though the Russian invasion interrupted the rover’s timeline, the Rosalind Franklin rover nonetheless had its systems review this month. The ESA review board confirmed that the spacecraft would have been ready for the September launch.
In a statement released earlier this month, ESA said that several proposals on how to proceed with the ExoMars mission without Russian involvement would be submitted in the weeks ahead. But the damage is effectively done when it comes to the rover’s timeline.
A Roscosmos Proton rocket launches for Mars in 2016.Photo: Stephane Corvaja/ESA (Getty Images)
The rover’s development was previously delayed due to technical difficulties and the covid-19 pandemic. As the recent review revealed, technical issues had been resolved and, if not for the Ukraine invasion, another rover would soon be on its way to Mars.
Rosalind Franklin can do some things Perseverance cannot. It’s designed to be the first rover to drill over 6.5 feet into the Martian soil, a feat not even NASA’s Mole was capable of. (The InSight lander tried valiantly to dig into the planet, but the Martian soil clumped in a way that made it impossible for the Mole probe to make progress.) So when Rosalind Franklin does get to Mars—fingers crossed—it will be breaking new ground.
A fast-track study to determine ExoMars’ next steps sans Russia is on the way; because launch windows to Mars depend on Earth’s proximity to the Red Planet, it will be at least a couple of years before the mission gets off the ground.
More: NASA and ESA Change Plans for Ambitious Mars Sample Return Mission
A selfie taken by NASA’s Perseverance rover on September 10, 2021. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Using a microphone, a laser, and some crafty mathematics, a team of scientists has measured the speed of sound on Mars, in what is a scientific first and another cool finding made possible by NASA’s Perseverance rover.
There’s lots to love about the Perseverance mission, but one of my favorite aspects of the rover is that it’s capable of recording audio. Early last year, and for the first time ever, we actually got to hear sounds on Mars, both natural and synthetic. Using its SuperCam microphone, the rover recorded blowing Martian winds, clicks from its rock-scanning laser, and crunching sounds made by its rolling wheels.
That Perseverance’s microphone would detect these sounds wasn’t a certainty, given the achingly thin atmosphere on the Red Planet. Sound needs a medium to propagate, and Mars, with a paltry atmospheric pressure of 0.095 pounds per square inch (psi) at ground level, doesn’t offer much to work with. By comparison, Earth’s sea level atmospheric pressure is around 14.7 psi.
But there they were—discernible noises picked up by Percy’s microphone in Jezero crater. With sounds clearly audible on Mars, Baptiste Chide from Los Alamos National Lab in Los Angeles and colleagues were able to measure the speed of sound on Mars. The scientists recently presented their findings at the 53rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, held from March 7-11 in Texas.
The team leveraged Perseverance’s SuperCam experiment, which zaps rocks with lasers to study Martian geology and sits at the head of the rover’s mast some 6.9 feet (2.1 meters) above the Martian surface. The team took measurements from 150 laser shots taken at five distinct locations, while also tracking local weather conditions.
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By measuring the time it took the staccato-like clicking sounds to reach the SuperCam microphone, they were able to establish the speed of sound on Mars, to a precision of plus-minus 0.51%. They found that sound on Mars travels at 787 feet per second (240 meters per second), which is significantly slower than the sound of speed on Earth at 1,115 feet per second (340 m/s).
And in an observation that matched prior predictions, the speed of sounds below 240 hertz fell to 754 feet per second (230 m/s). That doesn’t happen on Earth, as sounds within the audible bandwidth (20 Hz to 20 kHz) travel at a constant speed. The “Mars idiosyncrasy,” as the scientists call it, has to do with the “unique properties of the carbon dioxide molecules at low pressure,” which makes the Martian atmosphere the only one in the solar system to experience “a change in speed of sound right in the middle of the audible bandwidth,” as the scientists wrote. The reason for this is that sounds above 240 Hz don’t have time to relax their energy, according to the scientists.
The scientists go on to say that this acoustic effect “may induce a unique listening experience on Mars with an early arrival of high-pitched sounds compared to bass.”
Unique is right! Lots of acoustic information exists below 240 Hz, including the low end of music and the lowermost registers of the human voice (typically for males). Music on Mars would sound completely messed up (particularly with increased distance), with the middle and high frequencies reaching the listener slightly before the low frequency sounds, such as the lower registers of the bass guitar and kick drum. Add another effect of carbon dioxide, the attenuating, or dampening, of higher frequencies, and the acoustic experience gets even weirder.
As a neat aside, the technique used to measure the speed of sound can also be used to measure the local temperature. So in addition to Percy’s Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) instrument, the team has a new thermometer at its disposal. Looking ahead, Chide and his colleagues will run more tests to measure the speed of sound at different times of the day and during different Martian seasons.
Heart Spring in Yellowstone National Park.Photo: Daniel SLIM / AFP (Getty Images)
A team of geophysicists recently strung a large wire loop from a helicopter and flew over Yellowstone National Park in order to see its hidden underground networks. They managed to collect a trove of data that highlighted electrical and magnetic properties of the water and earth under the park, as well as how the hot springs are more interconnected than previously thought.
Yellowstone is a 3,500-square-mile park that has numerous hot springs on its surface, most famously Old Faithful, one of the park’s 500-odd geysers. But these researchers wanted to know more about how the water underground was sourced and how interconnected the entire system was. Their findings were published this week in Nature.
“We produced images of Yellowstone’s subsurface hydrothermal ‘plumbing’ system—the pathways that hydrothermally heated waters take to reach the surface,” said Steve Holbrook, a geophysicist at Virginia Tech and a co-author of the paper, in an email to Gizmodo. “We see clear geological controls on the hydrothermal plumbing—in particular, the roles of deep faults, shallow fractures, and the boundaries at the base of the thick lava flows (tuff and rhyolite), all of which guide the movement of water.”
Yellowstone’s ‘Old Faithful’ geyser erupts around every 90 minutes. Photo from June 1, 2011.Photo: MARK RALSTON/AFP (Getty Images)
The researchers generated over 2,500 miles of helicopter line data by flying a 80-foot-wide hexagonal instrument called SkyTEM over the park. SkyTEM sent electromagnetic pulses to the ground roughly every 90 feet. The pulses travel up to around 2,300 feet beneath the surface before bouncing back to a detector on the instrument.
“If we picture the helicopter flying over a football field, we could picture one sounding being taken at the back of the home end zone, the next one at the 20 yard line, the next one at midfield, then one at the other 20 yard line, and finally one at the back of the visitor’s end zone—five soundings total over the full length of the field,” Holbrook said. “Then we put those soundings next to each other over very long transects, and we get a picture of layers in the subsurface—how deep they are, which way they’re dipping, and so forth.”
The researchers also took magnetic field measurements, which gave them information on the magnetic properties of rocks as deep as 8,200 feet below Yellowstone. Taken together, the data allowed them to map out the electrically conductive and resistive elements beneath the surface: effectively, the plumbing of Yellowstone.
A significant finding from the work was how connected distant features are underground. Old Faithful and the park’s Upper Geyser basin share a hydrothermal source with the park’s Firehole Meadows at just 650 below the surface, though the sites are over 6 miles away from one another.
Holbrook added that the hydrothermal connection also implies connections in the various hot springs’ geochemistry and microbiology. Yellowstone’s hot springs are unique for their extremophile life; hardy critters like cyanobacteria that thrive in scalding temperatures make good subjects for scientists trying to figure out what alien life may be like. The newly discovered hydrothermal connections between different areas of the park may change biologists’ understanding of extremophile evolution.
“We plan to work with microbiologists looking to link areas of groundwater and gas mixing to regions of extreme microbial diversity, geologists using our models to map lava flows and estimate eruptive volumes, and hydrologists interested in incorporating flow paths and regions of hot and cold fluids to determine how the underground water flows,” said Carol Finn, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey and the paper’s lead author, in an email to Gizmodo.
“In the future, the integration of our models with new, deeper-sensing electromagnetic data offers the possibility of imaging the connections between Yellowstone’s shallow and deep hydrothermal systems and magma, providing a complete view of the system,” Finn added.
The immense amount of data the team collected is just waiting to be gleaned for more insights. The airborne research is just the first pass at a literally in-depth look at Yellowstone’s fundamental processes.
More: 5 National Parks to Visit Before You and/or They Die
The Japanese scientific drilling ship used to detect microbes living deep below the seafloor. Photo: JAMSTEC
A science expedition in 2016 revealed a subsurface habitat in which microbes were found living at temperatures approaching 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, a follow-up study reveals how this remarkable microbial community manages to beat the heat.
High metabolic rates make life possible for microorganisms living in sediments buried deep beneath the seafloor, according to new research published in Nature Communications. The study, led by marine geomicrobiologist Tina Treude from the University of California Los Angeles, casts subsurface microbes in a new light, showing some of them to be surprisingly active and capable of thriving in deep and hot conditions.
“We always found that microbes in the deep biosphere are an extremely sluggish community that slowly nibbles on the last remains of million-year-old, buried organic matter. But the deep biosphere is full of surprises,” Bo Barker Jørgensen, a microbiologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, said in a University of California press release. “To find life thriving with high metabolic rates at these high temperatures in the deep seabed nourishes our imagination of how life could evolve or survive in similar environments on planetary bodies beyond Earth.”
In an email, Virginia Edgcomb, a geologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who wasn’t involved in the new study, said she’s excited by the research because it shows “we cannot assume that microbial activities are insignificant simply because of the depth below seafloor or extreme temperatures,” particularly when “sufficient sources of carbon and energy are available.”
In this case, the required sources of carbon and energy were found in the Nankai Trough subduction zone off Japan. Seven years ago, a scientific expedition led by the same team drilled 3,930 feet (1,200 meters) below the seafloor, pulling up marine sediment samples and evidence of the extremophile microbes. They did so to investigate the temperature limit of the deep subseafloor biosphere and the extent to which life might be resident in this extreme habitat. Incredibly, they found a small community of microbes that appeared to be thriving despite temperatures reaching 250 degrees F (120 degrees C). It wasn’t totally obvious to the researchers how this was possible, prompting further study.
For the new investigation, Treude and her colleagues ran radiotracer experiments to measure the metabolic rates of the microbes, which they did under highly sterile conditions to prevent contamination. This wasn’t easy, given the low population density of the microbes; less than 500 cells were present in each cubic centimeter of sediment. The team also made special provisions to ensure that the observed metabolic rates were the same in the lab as they would be in the microbes’ natural environment.
This work resulted in the discovery of the microorganisms’ rapid metabolism, which the researchers say is what makes it possible for them to survive such extreme conditions. The scientists theorize that the high metabolic rates are a necessity, allowing the microbes to repair cells damaged by heat.
“The energy required to repair thermal damage to cellular components increases steeply with temperature, and most of this energy is likely necessary to counteract the continuous alteration of amino acids and loss of protein function,” said Treude.
At the same time, the microbes have ample access to nutrients supplied by the heating of organic materials, specifically hydrogen and acetate from water leaking through the marine sediment.
The new observations “might seem counterintuitive to many, which is that cells living close to the thermal limits of life at this location, and so deep below the seafloor, where we would expect them to be barely eking out an existence, are actually very active,” said Edgcomb. But their high rate of activity is for a very interesting reason: “To be able to provide enough energy to repair thermal cell damage so they can survive,” she added.
In an email, Jennifer Biddle, an associate professor at the University of Delaware who’s not affiliated with the research, said the new work “appears well done” and “nicely compliments” pre-existing work showing changes to microbial communities and increases in cell division as sediment temperatures get hotter. An argument presented in the new paper is that cells only get kick-started once they’re already buried—a finding that agrees with recent research co-authored by Biddle demonstrating that “once cells find their ‘happy place’ in the subsurface, they have plenty of power to grow,” she said.
One limitation, Biddle said, is that the researchers described microbial activity but didn’t provide any names or identify the microbes in question. She said “it would be great to know who is there, so we could even better estimate how fast they may be going,” adding that it would also be good to “culture some of these subsurface lineages to test their thermal ranges and how they may have adapted to this environment.”
Interestingly, these subseafloor microbes approach the thermal limits of life as we know it, but some scientists think microbes can survive in even hotter environments. Sounds like we need to dig a bit deeper next time, as even more extreme microbes could still be waiting to be found.
More: Ancient Microbes Spring to Life After 100 Million Years Under the Seafloor.
The team has made good progress implementing the initial recovery steps outlined in last week’s blog. Our first success: The upper two pebbles were ejected from the bit carousel during a test. This is great news, as these small chunks of debris are believed to be the cause of the unsuccessful transfer of the drill bit and sample tube into the carousel back on Dec. 29. Our second success: We appear to have removed most – if not all – of the cored rock that remained in Sample Tube 261.
Here is the latest…
Pebbles in Bit Carousel
Rotating Perseverance’s Bit Carousel: An annotated GIF depicts a rotational test of Perseverance’s bit carousel in which two of four rock fragments were ejected. The five images that make up the GIF were obtained by the rover’s WATSON imager on Jan. 17, 2022. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS. Download image ›
On Monday, Jan. 17, the WATSON camera imaged the bit carousel and its pebbles – and also took images underneath the rover to establish just what was down there before any recovery strategies were applied. Later that same Martian day, we rotated the bit carousel about 75 degrees before returning it back to its original position. WATSON imaging showed the two upper pebbles were ejected during the process. Tuesday night we also received the second set of under-rover images, which show two new pebbles on the surface, indicating the ejected pebbles made it fully through bit carousel and back onto the surface of Mars as planned.
The other two pebbles, located below the bit carousel, remain. It is interesting to note that some of the initial trials performed on our testbed here on Earth indicate that the location of the two leftover pebbles may not pose a significant problem with bit carousel operation, but we are continuing analysis and testing to confirm this.
Remaining Sample in Tube
Perseverance Expels Rock Fragments: A portion of a cored-rock sample is ejected from the rotary percussive drill on NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. The imagery was collected by the rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument on Jan. 15, 2022. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS. Download image ›
On Saturday, Jan. 15, the team performed an experiment using Perseverance’s rotary-percussive drill. After the robotic arm oriented the drill with Sample Tube 261’s open end angled around 9 degrees below horizontal, the rover’s drill spindle rotated and then extended. Our remarkable Mastcam-Z instrument (which has video capability previously used to document some of Ingenuity’s flights) captured the event. The imagery from the experiment shows a small amount of sample material falling out of the drill bit/sample tube. Later that same Martian day, the bit was positioned vertically over “Issole” (the rock that provided this latest core) to see if additional sample would fall out under the force of gravity. However, Mastcam-Z imaging of 261’s interior after this subsequent maneuver showed it still contained some sample.
Perseverance’s Sample Tube Looks Clean: This image, taken by the Mastcam-Z camera aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover on Jan. 20, 2022, shows the rover successfully expelled the remaining large fragments of cored rock from a sample tube held in its drill. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS. Download image ›
Given that some of the sample had already been lost, the team decided it was time to return the rest of the sample to Mars and hopefully completely empty the tube to ready it for potentially another sampling attempt. On Monday, Jan. 17, the team commanded another operation of the rotary percussive drill in an attempt to dislodge more material from the tube. With the tube’s open end still pointed towards the surface, we essentially shook the heck out of it for 208 seconds – by means of the percussive function on the drill. Mastcam-Z imagery taken after the event shows that multiple pieces of sample were dumped onto the surface. Is Tube 261 clear of rock sample? We have new Mastcam-Z images looking down the drill bit into the sample container that indicate little if any debris from the cored-rock sample remains. The sample tube has been cleared for reuse by the project.
Future Moves
The team is still reviewing the data and discussing next steps. Like all Mars missions, we’ve had some unexpected challenges. Each time, the team and our rover have risen to the occasion. We expect the same result this time – by taking incremental steps, analyzing results, and then moving on, we plan to fully resolve this challenge and get back to exploration and sampling at Jezero Crater.
NASA’s Mars 2020 mission team has been working methodically and thoroughly, making good progress on understanding the best path forward to remove the uninvited pebbles from Perseverance’s bit carousel. Over the previous weekend, and earlier this week, operational sequences were developed and tested to remove these rocky interlopers.
With terrestrial experimentation complete, we have begun executing our mitigation strategy on Mars. On Jan. 12 we did a detailed image survey of the ground below Perseverance. This was done so we would have a good idea what rocks and pebbles already exist down there before some more – from our bit carousel – join them in the not-so-distant future.
With this below-chassis, preliminary imaging, in hand, the team embarked on a maneuver with our robotic arm I never imagined we would perform – ever. Simply put, we are returning the remaining contents of Sample Tube 261 (our latest cored-rock sample) back to its planet of origin. Although this scenario was never designed or planned for prior to launch, it turns out dumping a core from an open tube is a fairly straightforward process (at least during Earth testing). We sent commands up yesterday, and later on today the rover’s robotic arm will simply point the open end of the sample tube toward the surface of Mars and let gravity do the rest.
I imagine your next question is, “Why are you dumping out the contents of the sample tube?” The answer is that, at present, we are not certain how much cored rock continues to reside in Tube 261. And while this rock will never make my holiday card list, the science team really seems to like it. So if our plans go well with our pebble mitigation (see below), we may very well attempt to core “Issole” (the rock from which this sample was taken) again.
Which brings me to next steps in our pebble mitigation strategy: we’re sending up commands to the rover later today, ordering it to do two rotation tests of the bit carousel. These tests (the first, a small rotation; the second, larger) will execute this weekend. Our expectations are that these rotations – and any subsequent pebble movement – will help guide our team, providing them the necessary information on how to proceed. Still, to be thorough, we are also commanding the rover to take a second set of under-chassis images, just in case one or more pebbles happen to pop free.
We expect the data and imagery from these two rotation tests to be sent to Earth by next Tuesday, Jan. 18. From there, we’ll analyze and further refine our plans. If I had to ballpark it, I would estimate we’ll be at our current location another week or so – or even more if we decide to re-sample Issole.
So there you have it. The Perseverance team is exploring every facet of the issue to ensure that we not only get rid of this rocky debris but also prevent a similar reoccurrence during future sampling. Essentially, we are leaving no rock unturned in the pursuit of these four pebbles.
On Wednesday, Dec. 29 (sol 306) Perseverance successfully cored and extracted a sample from a Mars rock. Data downlinked after the sampling indicates that coring of the rock the science team nicknamed Issole went smoothly. However, during the transfer of the bit that contains the sample into the rover’s bit carousel (which stores bits and passes tubes to the tube processing hardware inside the rover), our sensors indicated an anomaly. The rover did as it was designed to do – halting the caching procedure and calling home for further instructions.
This is only the 6th time in human history a sample has been cored from a rock on a planet other than Earth, so when we see something anomalous going on, we take it slow. Here is what we know so far, and what we are doing about it.
Imaging Perseverance’s Sample: This image shows the cored-rock sample remaining in the sample tube after the drill bit was extracted from Perseverance’s bit carousel on Jan. 7, 2022. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Download image ›
The anomaly occurred during “Coring Bit Dropoff.” It’s when the drill bit, with its sample tube and just-cored sample nestled inside, is guided out of the percussive drill (at the end of the robotic arm) and into the bit carousel (which is located on the rover’s chassis). During processing of previous cored rock samples, the coring bit travelled 5.15 inches (13.1 centimeters) before sensors began to record the kind of resistance (drag) expected at first contact with the carousel structure. However, this time around the sensor recorded higher resistance than usual at about 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) earlier than expected, and some much higher resistance than expected during the operation.
The team requested additional data and imagery to ensure proper understanding of the state post anomaly. Because we are presently operating through a set of “restricted Sols” in which the latency of the data restricts the type of activities we can perform on Mars, it has taken about a week to receive the additional diagnostic data needed to understand this anomaly.
Armed with that data set, we sent up a command to extract the drill bit and sample-filled tube from the bit carousel and undock the robotic arm from the bit carousel. During these activities, a series of hardware images were acquired.
The extraction took place yesterday (1/6) and data was downlinked early this morning. These most recent downlinked images confirm that inside the bit carousel there are a few pieces of pebble-sized debris. The team is confident that these are fragments of the cored rock that fell out of the sample tube at the time of Coring Bit Dropoff, and that they prevented the bit from seating completely in the bit carousel.
The designers of the bit carousel did take into consideration the ability to continue to successfully operate with debris. However, this is the first time we are doing a debris removal and we want to take whatever time is necessary to ensure these pebbles exit in a controlled and orderly fashion. We are going to continue to evaluate our data sets over the weekend.
This is not the first curve Mars has thrown at us – just the latest. One thing we’ve found is that when the engineering challenge is hundreds of millions of miles away (Mars is currently 215 million miles from Earth), it pays to take your time and be thorough. We are going to do that here. So that when we do hit the un-paved Martian road again, Perseverance sample collection is also ready to roll.
Optical and X-ray images of the Alpha Centauri system. Image: NASA
Our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, is 4.37 light-years from Earth, which is super close from a cosmological perspective but achingly far from a human point of view. A new telescope promises to bring this intriguing star system, and any habitable planets it holds, into closer view.
The new mission, called TOLIMAN, was announced today in a press release. TOLIMAN is the ancient Arabic name for Alpha Centauri—the closest star system to Earth—but it’s also an acronym for Telescope for Orbit Locus Interferometric Monitoring of our Astronomical Neighbourhood. Once in space, astronomers will use the orbital observatory to search for potentially habitable exoplanets around Alpha Centauri.
The international collaboration includes teams from the University of Sydney, Breakthrough Initiatives, Saber Astronautics, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Peter Tuthill from the Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney will lead the project.
Alpha Centauri A (left) and Alpha Centauri B as viewed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Image: NASA/ESA
We’re quite fortunate to have such an intriguing next-door neighbor. Alpha Centauri is a triple star system consisting of two Sun-like stars, named Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, and a red dwarf known as Proxima Centauri.
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Two exoplanets are known to orbit Proxima Centauri: an Earth-sized planet parked inside the habitable zone (i.e. that sweet spot within which liquid water is stable at the surface) and a super-Earth located farther out. Alpha Centauri A is suspected to host a Neptune-sized exoplanet, but astronomers aren’t entirely certain. An exoplanet has yet to be discovered in orbit around Alpha Centauri B. Other exoplanets are likely still awaiting detection—and that’s where TOLIMAN comes in.
Proposed design of the TOLMAN telescope.Image: University of Sydney/Peter Tuthill
“Our nearest stellar neighbours—the Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri systems—are turning out to be extraordinarily interesting,” Pete Worden, executive director of Breakthrough Initiatives, said in the press release. “The TOLIMAN mission will be a huge step towards finding out if planets capable of supporting life exist there.”
Breakthrough Initiatives, founded by billionaire Yuri Milner, provided seed funding for the project, as did the Australian government through its International Space Investment Expand Capability Grants program. Saber Astronautics, the recipient of AUD$788,00 (USD$573,300) from the Australian government, will provide spaceflight mission operations support, including space traffic management and satellite communications. The firm has facilities in both Australia and the United States.
Simulated view of the Alpha Centauri binary system as it’s expected to appear through the diffractive pupil lens. Image: Peter Tuthill
Jason Held, CEO of Saber Astronautics, described TOLIMAN in the press release as “an exciting, bleeding-edge space telescope,” one that will be “supplied by an exceptional international collaboration.” To which he added: “It will be a joy to fly this bird.”
TOLIMAN will be custom-tailored for the mission, and its strong suit will be in making extremely fine measurements of the positions of the stars. A key feature of the new telescope is a “diffractive pupil lens.” By dispersing stellar light into flower-like patterns, the lens will make it easier for astronomers to spot wobbles caused by orbiting exoplanets. Once an exoplanet is detected, more specialized telescopes can be recruited to search for potential biosignatures in the atmosphere or surface. The telescope is expected to reach orbit in 2023, as Centauri Dreams reports.
In 2019, scientists with Breakthrough Listen, one of several projects supported by Breakthrough Initiatives, identified a candidate signal coming from Proxima Centauri, in what was the first and so far only potential alien technosignature detected by the group. Subsequent research found the signal to be of human origin, ruling out an alien civilization as the source.
More: What to know about Kessler Syndrome, the ultimate space disaster.
