Tag Archives: Exploration of Mars

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China’s First Mission to Mars Seems to Be Struggling

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The Chinese rover snapped this selfie of itself on Mars shortly after landing on the Red Planet.
Image: China News Service

China’s Zhurong rover went into hibernation mode in May 2022 to avoid the harsh winter season on Mars, but communication issues, both with the rover and orbiter, suggest something’s now very wrong with the mission.

The six-wheeled Martian rover was scheduled to wake up in late December, but it hasn’t been heard from since entering into its scheduled hibernation mode, unnamed sources told the South China Morning Post, as first reported by SpaceNews.

Zhurong landed on Mars on May 14, 2021 as China’s first Martian mission. The rover was sent to Mars with the Tianwen-1 orbiter, which relays data between the rover and ground controllers on Earth. About a year after roaming and investigating the Red Planet, the rover entered hibernation—a kind of low power safe mode—in anticipation of the Martian winter, when temperatures reach around -4 degrees Fahrenheit (-20 degrees Celsius) during the day and -148 F (-100 C) at night. The winter season on Mars also includes sand and dust storms, which block the rover’s solar panels and prevent it from collecting sunlight to generate power. For its own protection, Zhurong hunkered down in a dormant state for those chilly, dusty months on Mars.

By late December, which marks the beginning of Martian spring, the rover was supposed to autonomously resume its activities. However, the China National Space Administration has yet to send out any updates regarding the rover, in what is an ominous sign. The rover’s solar panels could be covered by dust, reducing its ability to generate power and preventing it from turning back on, according to the SCMP’s sources. It’s worth noting that NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are able to power through Mars’s winter season using a radioisotope power system.

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And it may not just be the rover that’s in trouble. The mission’s Tianwen-1 orbiter has also reportedly gone silent. Scott Tilley, professor at the Florida Institute of Technology, noted on Twitter that the radio signals between the ground station and Tianwen-1 indicate that mission controllers may have stopped trying to communicate with the orbiter after failing to achieve contact. This is unfortunate, as China planned to perform aerobraking tests in 2023 with Tianwen-1 in anticipation of a future Mars sample return mission.

It’s possible that the problem with the orbiter is related to the problem with Zhurong, but we’ll have to wait for China to finally say something official on the matter. In the event we don’t hear back from the rover and its orbital companion, China’s mission to Mars will still be deemed a success, as it was initially designed to last for three months on the Red Planet but managed to live on for over a year.

More: China’s Zhurong Rover Captures Remarkable Sights and Sounds on Mars



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An Ancient Asteroid Impact May Have Caused a Megatsunami on Mars

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The Viking 1 lander arrived on the Martian surface 46 years ago to investigate the planet. It dropped down into what was thought to be an ancient outflow channel. Now, a team of researchers believes they’ve found evidence of an ancient megatsunami that swept across the planet billions of years ago, less than 600 miles from where Viking landed.

In a new paper published today in Scientific Reports, a team identified a 68-mile-wide impact crater in Mars’ northern lowlands that they suspect is leftover from an asteroid strike in the planet’s ancient past.

“The simulation clearly shows that the megatsunami was enormous, with an initial height of approximately 250 meters, and highly turbulent,” said Alexis Rodriguez, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute and lead author of the paper, in an email to Gizmodo. “Furthermore, our modeling shows some radically different behavior of the megatsunami to what we are accustomed to imagining.”

Rodriguez’s team studied maps of the Martian surface and found the large crater, now named Pohl. Based on Pohl’s position on previously dated rocks, the team believes the crater is about 3.4 billion years old—an extraordinarily long time ago, shortly after the first signs of life we know of appeared on Earth.

According to the research team’s models, the asteroid impact could have been so intense that material from the seafloor may have dislodged and been carried in the water’s debris flows. Based on the size of the crater, the team believes the impacting asteroid could have been 1.86 miles wide or 6 miles wide, depending on the amount of ground resistance the asteroid encountered.

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The impact could have released between 500,000 megatons and 13 million megatons of TNT energy (for comparison, the Tsar Bomba nuclear test was about 57 megatons of TNT energy.)

“A clear next step is to propose a landing site to investigate these deposits in detail to understand the ocean’s evolution and potential habitability,” Rodriguez said. “First, we would need a detailed geologic mapping of the area to reconstruct the stratigraphy. Then, we need to connect the surface modification history to specific processes through numerical modeling and analog studies, including identifying possible mud volcanoes and glacier landforms.”

Both lines of investigation are noble pursuits, but it may be some time before a new Mars lander gets off the ground. NASA is always juggling missions, but its main planetary focus in the future is Venus. The DAVINCI+ and Veritas missions would see two spacecraft arrive at the second planet from the Sun at the turn of the decade.

There are no plans for a future Mars lander, besides the Mars Sample Return mission, which will retrieve the rock core samples currently being extracted by the Perseverance rover on the western edge of the planet’s Jezero Crater.

NASA is canceling and delaying missions as it deals with a budget crunch, so exactly when the agency could turn its attention to the Pohl crater is unclear. With the InSight lander on its last legs, we will soon lose one of our best interrogators of the Martian interior.

More: Stunning New View of Mars Shows Where Ancient Flowing Water Once Carved Its Surface

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Images Show Fresh Crater on Mars Caused by Major Meteorite Impact

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On December 24, 2021—the day before the Webb Space Telescope would launch—a rock hurtled through the thin Martian atmosphere and slammed into the ground, leaving a crater nearly 500 feet across. This week, NASA revealed images of the impact site taken by a Mars-orbiting satellite.

In a press conference Thursday, Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, said the rock that caused the crater was probably between 17 and 33 feet (5-10 meters) across. A paper describing the impact and its seismic effects was published this week in Science.

“It’s unprecedented to find a fresh impact of this size,” said Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at Brown University and who leads InSight’s Impact Science Working Group, in a NASA release. “It’s an exciting moment in geologic history, and we got to witness it.”

The meteorite strike was immediately detected as a magnitude 4 quake by NASA’s InSight lander, a four-year-old mission designed to study the geology of Mars. InSight’s seismometer picked up the seismic waves generated by the meteorite’s impact from 2,150 miles (3,460 kilometers) away.

The crater was first spotted on February 11 by scientists who operate the Context Camera and Mars Color Imager aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The Context Camera took images of the region where the meteorite crash-landed before and after the event. The region is called Amazonis Planitia; the impact event left a clear circle on the ground and kicked up a debris field that surrounds the crater.

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The HiRise camera aboard also captured the impact’s aftermath, in a striking color image of the site. The impact kicked up and scattered large chunks of ice, as seen in the HiRISE image. It’s the closest buried Martian ice has been observed to the Martian equator, the warmest part of Mars.

Using Mars Color Imager data, the team determined a 24-hour period in which the impact occurred, and then compared that data to the seismic activity detected by InSight. Comparing the two data sources revealed that what was previously thought to be an ordinary marsquake was actually a meteorite impact.

The imaging orbiter isn’t going anywhere, but the InSight lander will likely die very soon. It has already lasted far longer than scientists planned or expected. When the lander powers down, there will be no mission on Mars devoted to listening to the planet’s internal rumblings, and the Martian interior will become a black box once again.

More: NASA’s InSight Lander Detects Huge Rumble on Mars

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NASA Conducts ‘Dangerous’ Test of a Vacuum Gun to Study Space Rock Collisions

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NASA is up to something in Las Cruces, New Mexico. In this remote location, the agency is studying how different spacecraft designs will interact with super-tiny rocks whipping through space.

As NASA gears up for more missions off our planet, there’s a lot that can go wrong. From rocket failures to leaky airlocks, you might be surprised to hear that an equal or even greater threat are bits of tiny space rock that the untrained eye might categorize as nothing more than dust.

But to NASA, these rocks are a huge source of potential destruction for spacecraft traveling through the void, like the future Mars Sample Return Mission. These specks of dust are known to scientists as micrometeoroids, and in a remote facility in New Mexico, NASA is testing new ways to protect spacecraft carrying Martian surface samples.

“NASA White Sands is a remote test facility that the agency uses for some of the more dangerous testing that is needed to support the NASA missions,” said Marcus Sandy, a manager at the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, in a video.

NASA’s Mars Mission Shields Up for Tests

The Remote Hypervelocity Test Laboratory is located within White Sands and features a 225-foot-long (69-meter) gun. The gun is powered with pressurized hydrogen gas and is able to shoot small pellets through a vacuum at speeds up to 22 feet (6.7 meters) per second (At least, that’s according to the NASA press release. A quick search suggests the projectile traveled closer to 22,000 feet per second, which makes far more sense. We reached out to the team for clarification and will update this post when we hear back)—which could get you from New York to San Francisco in about five minutes. According to NASA, engineers spent three days setting up a one-second long experiment, which aims to simulate what would happen if NASA spacecraft collided with a micrometeroid during the trek to or from Mars.

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“The goal here is to see how well those materials withstand those impacts to make sure that we don’t lose containment of our sample,” said Russ Stein, a NASA product design lead specialist for the Mars Sample Return mission.

While the pellets that emerge from the gun are moving at incredibly fast speeds, the micrometeroids that pepper space are moving about six times faster—around 50 miles (80 kilometers) per second. Figuring out which designs and materials are best for protecting precious Earth-bound Mars samples is crucial for our ability to study—and possibly even travel—to the Red Planet.

More: NASA’s DART Spacecraft Successfully Moved an Asteroid

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Abandoned Mars Rover Could Get a Second Chance on the Moon

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An illustration of the Mars Sample Fetch Rover on the surface of the Red Planet.
Illustration: Airbus

The Anon rover was built for Mars, but its interplanetary mission got derailed. The car-sized robot is now undergoing tests at a quarry near London in hopes that it could one day go to the Moon instead.

Over the past two weeks, Airbus has been testing its sample fetch rover in a quarry near Milton Keynes in the U.K., which nicely simulates alien environments. The developing team is hoping that the rover might eventually explore and work on the Moon, The Guardian reported.

The Mars Sample Fetch Rover, also known as Anon, was built by European aerospace company Airbus, and it’s designed to collect sample tubes left behind by NASA’s Perseverance rover, which has been roaming the Red Planet since February 2021. Earlier this year, however, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) announced a change of plans for its Mars Sample Return mission, which seeks to return samples to Earth next decade. Instead of using the sample fetch rover, NASA wants Perseverance to transfer the sample tubes to a lander that will be waiting nearby. The space agency also wants to send two Ingenuity-class helicopters to Jezero Crater to scoop up the sample tubes and deliver them to the vicinity of the lander.

The abrupt change in plans meant that Europe’s rover lost its ticket to Mars. That said, Anon’s developers, which have been working on the rover for the past four years, aren’t giving up on this little guy just yet and continue to run tests of the rover’s systems. “Even though the mission may have faded away, the core technology is still ready and able to go and this is the kind of the final step in proving that it works,” Ben Dobke, a project manager at Airbus, told The Guardian.

Instead of Mars, Anon could be headed to the Moon’s surface as part of NASA’s Artemis program, which seeks a sustained and sustainable presence in the lunar environment. The rover won’t collect sample tubes on the Moon, but it could be used for other purposes, such as helping to build lunar habitats.

The rover will need some tweaking for a Moon mission, otherwise it won’t survive the colder temperatures and the total lack of atmosphere. Anon will also have to be adjusted such that it can recover from the long nights on the Moon, which last for 14 days, thereby placing it in total darkness for extended periods, according to The Guardian. Anon does not yet have a ticket to the Moon, but its developers want to be ready should the opportunity emerge.

Anon is the second European-built Martian rover to miss out on its chance to visit the Red Planet. ESA’s ExoMars rover was supposed to launch this year, but the space agency suspended the joint mission with Russian space agency Roscosmos following the invasion of Ukraine. The two rovers are currently awaiting their new fate, but both seem ready for some celestial exploring.

More: The Perseverance Rover Finally Got Its First Martian Rock Sample, For Real This Time

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Retro Concept Art From NASA Makes Our Imagination Soar

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NASA concept art depicting the Apollo 13 mission (which never actually made it to the lunar surface).
Illustration: NASA

I’ve always been a huge fan of NASA’s concept art—sometimes you need to see what the future might be like to get sufficiently hyped. Missions to space often involve cameras that document these journeys, and it’s always fun to compare what we thought something would look like to how it actually appears. But in cases where cameras aren’t involved, or when probes can’t capture selfies, concept art is all we’ll ever have, aside from our imaginations. These historical conceptual images from NASA are among our favorites.

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Rover Gathers Rocks on Active Volcano to Simulate Moon Mission

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The four-wheeled, two-armed Interact rover spent four days collecting rocks on Mount Etna.
Photo: ESA

While working out of a hotel room in Italy, astronaut Thomas Reiter commanded a four-wheeled robot to pick up rocks from the surface of an active volcano on the Sicilian east coast, and he did so while role-playing as though he were in orbit around the Moon.

The four-day simulation is part of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) preparation for a future mission to the Moon, where it plans to land a rover on the lunar surface to collect rock samples. The rover, as part of the upcoming Artemis missions, will be guided by a team on Earth, as well as an astronaut aboard Lunar Gateway, a planned space station that will orbit the Moon.

The Scout crawler makings its way around Mount Etna.
Gif: ESA

Although it’s not quite the Moon, the volcanic surface of Mount Etna served as an analog for the lunar surface. The four-wheeled, two-armed Interact rover was modified for the rugged slopes of the volcano, and it explored the rough terrain alongside two other rovers, Lightweight Rover Units 1 and 2, belonging to the German Aerospace Center. In addition, a stationary lunar lander provided the rover with wifi and power, an overhead drone performed surface mapping, and a centipede-like crawler called Scout served as a relay between the Interact rover and the lander. Scout was provided by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

During the four days, ESA astronaut Reiter commanded the rover to pick up rocks using controls that were set up at a hotel room in Sicily. Interact rover was also guided by controllers in a rover control room, which was set up in a different hotel room since the controllers and the astronaut will be physically separated during an actual mission.

The rover itself was about 14 miles (23 kilometers) away from the hotel and at an altitude of about 8,500 feet (2,600 meters) on Mount Etna. To make the exercise more realistic, the team added one second of signal delay to the control system to simulate the time it would take for commands to reach the Moon’s surface from Lunar Gateway. As the rover picked up the rocks from the volcano, Reiter could feel what the rover’s gripper felt from the remote control—an added dimension to the ESA sample collection exercise.

Astronaut Reiter commanded the rover to pick up rocks from this hotel room nearby.
Photo: ESA

“We’ve learned a lot about collaboration between ground control on Earth and the crew aboard a space station orbiting the Moon, both operating a rover on the surface—this ‘shared’ operation can be extremely efficient—much more efficient than if either side does it alone,” Reiter said in a statement.

The Interact rover wrapped up its mission by bringing the rock samples to the lunar lander.
Gif: ESA

The system has been in development for more than a decade, beginning as a joystick that could be controlled by an astronaut while in orbit, according to ESA. The four-day simulation marks the first time that the Interact rover was put to the test during a mock outdoor setup. By the end of the four days, the rover successfully returned the rock samples to the lunar lander. The three rovers also worked together to set up an array of antennas across the simulated lunar surface to emulate a radio astronomy station on the Moon. Interestingly, these antennas actually managed to pick up a radio burst from Jupiter—the result of its volcanic moon Io passing through the planet’s magnetic field.

By the end of the simulation, ESA found that the controls for the rover were likely going to be too onerous for astronauts on board the future Lunar Gateway.

“What we soon found was that continuous remote oversight was very demanding on the astronaut operator, so we added in features to take some of the pressure off—equivalent to the assisted driving offered by modern cars,” Thomas Krueger, the head of ESA’s Human Robot Interaction Lab, said in a statement. “So for example the operator can point to a location and let the rover decide for itself how to get there safely. And its neural net has been programmed to recognize scientifically valuable rocks for itself.”

That definitely sounds much easier and certainly more fitting for the futuristic Artemis era. ESA hopes to launch the rover and put the control system into real action by the end of this decade.

More: Microbes May Hold the Secret to Creating More Powerful Rocket Fuel.

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Mars Spacecraft Finally Upgrading From Windows 98 Era Software

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An illustration of the Mars Express spacecraft which launched in 2003.
Illustration: ESA

The days of dial-up internet, AOL Instant Messenger, and Myspace may be over on Earth, but on Mars, the early years of the internet still live on. A Martian spacecraft has been running on software designed more than 20 years ago in a proprietary environment based on Microsoft Windows 98, and is long overdue for an upgrade.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is updating its Mars Express orbiter’s MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ioniospheric Sounding) software, 19 years after the spacecraft launched. The MARSIS instrument, the first radar sounder to orbit another planet, aided in the discovery of evidence for water on Mars in 2018. MARSIS sends low-frequency radio waves towards the planet using a huge, 131 foot long (40 meters) antenna, as the Mars Express spacecraft orbits around Mars.

The MARSIS does all of that using highly outdated software that hasn’t been updated since the spacecraft launched in June 2003. The software was designed in an environment based on Windows 98, which doesn’t work with the modern-day internet unless you jump through a lot of hoops. “After decades of fruitful science and having gained a good understanding of Mars, we wanted to push the instrument’s performance beyond some of the limitations required back when the mission began,” Andrea Cicchetti, MARSIS deputy principal investigator, who led the development of the upgrade, said in a statement.

The new software was designed by the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy, which operates the spacecraft. The team behind the new software implemented a number of upgrades that would improve the instrument’s ability to send and receive signals, as well as its on-board data processing “to increase the amount and quality of science data sent to Earth,” according to ESA.

“Previously, to study the most important features on Mars, and to study its moon Phobos at all, we relied on a complex technique that stored a lot of high-resolution data and filled up the instrument’s on-board memory very quickly,” Cicchetti said. “By discarding data that we don’t need, the new software allows us to switch MARSIS on for five times as long and explore a much larger area with each pass.”

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The new software will be used to study regions near the south pole on Mars, where signs of liquid water on the Red Planet were previously detected in lower-resolution data. With MARSIS ditching its Windows 98 era software, it will be able to examine those regions much quicker, using high resolution data. Figuring out whether Mars had liquid water is crucial to knowing whether the planet was ever habitable during its early history, and if it could have possibly hosted some form of life.

Mars Express has been hard at work for the past 19 years, with the spacecraft’s mission being extended seven times so far. Although it is currently ESA’s lowest-cost mission, Mars Express has been delivering valuable data on Mars, and its moon Phobos. And with the new software update, the team behind the spacecraft is expecting greater things from this retro orbiter. “It really is like having a brand new instrument on board Mars Express almost 20 years after launch,” Cicchetti said.

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NASA Scientists Made a Martian ‘Soundscape’ Using Audio Recorded by Perseverance Rover

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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

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Here’s the Last Selfie From the Fading InSight Mars Lander

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NASA has shared the final self-portrait that will be taken by the InSight Mars lander, showing dust-caked solar panels that blend into the surrounding regolith. The InSight mission is expected to end this year, and the lander will need all of its remaining power to gather as much scientific data as possible.

In a press conference last week, NASA announced that InSight will likely cease all operations at the end of 2022. The mission’s end is due to the amount of dust that has accumulated on the lander’s solar panels, limiting the amount of power the spacecraft can draw from.

For three years, InSight has toiled on the Martian surface, taking images of the Martian skies and using its seismometer to detect marsquakes. For two years, the lander tried to use its ‘Mole’ heat probe to dig into the Martian surface, before the tool got stuck in the spongy soil. Earlier this month, the lander detected the largest-yet-known seismic activity on another planet: a magnitude 5 quake that occurred somewhere in the Martian interior.

The lander also gave scientists the best-ever look at the Martian insides, as well as the geological and seismological systems at work on the planet today. InSight has so far detected 1,313 marsquakes, and could yet detect more before its scientific operations end.

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The mission’s end has been a creeping certainty. The lander has previously been forced into safe modes by Martian dust storms. Stop-gap measures helped get some of the dust off the panels—namely, by intentionally dropping Martian dirt onto the dust to dislodge it—but such actions appear to have just prolonged the inevitable.

This final selfie was taken on April 24, and it shows the amount of dust that has built up on the spacecraft’s solar panels. It’s much more dust than was present in the lander’s first and second selfies, taken in December 2018 and between March and April 2019.

The selfies are mosaics, meaning they’re stitched together from multiple images, each of which requires the lander’s camera-carrying robotic arm to be in a different position. With dwindling power supply, the selfies simply aren’t worth the drain on the batteries, and the robotic arm will be moved into its resting position (or “retirement pose”) this month, according to NASA.

Kathya Zamora Garcia, the Deputy Project Manager for InSight, said in last week’s press conference that the lander’s scientific operations could end as soon as mid-July, but that the Martian climate is unpredictable.

However much time InSight has left, we likely won’t see the lander in such an exquisite panorama again.

More: Dust Storm Sends China’s Mars Rover Into Safe Mode

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