Tag Archives: Mars landing

Science

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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Science

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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Science

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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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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Science

NASA’s InSight Caught a Lonely Martian Sunrise

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The InSight lander photographed the sunrise on April 10, 2022.
Gif: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Mars lander InSight photographed an austere Martian sunrise earlier this week. The probe has called Mars home since 2018 and has taken thousands of images during its time there, while also collecting some fascinating scientific data on the planet’s geology.

“I’ll never tire of sunrise on Mars,” InSight’s official Twitter account posted. “Each morning, that distant dot climbs higher in the sky, giving me energy for another round of listening to the rumbles beneath my feet.”

Why is the Sun so important to InSight?

Sunlight is crucial to InSight’s day-to-day (or should I say sol-to-sol) activities. The rover features two 7-foot-wide solar panels that generate approximately 3,000 watt-hours per Martian day. InSight is so reliant on its solar panels to function that it landed near the equator to maximize the amount of light it can receive.

All that sunshine is powering planetary research. InSight actually stands for “Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport,” and it features a suite of instruments designed to study the geologic history and interior of the planet.

First, InSight placed a seismometer on the Martian surface to detect any “marsquakes,” the data from which should allow scientists to develop a 3D model of Mars’ interior. Its radio communication system is also sending precise data on Mars’ rotation and wobble back to Earth. Results from InSight’s mission could shed more light on how the rocky interior planets of the solar system formed.

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How is the InSight mission going?

Well…

InSight has been active on Mars for three years and 140 days, and it has definitely hit a few snags. The heat probe, or Mole, was to be a major part of the mission, but NASA had to axe the project after two years of failed digging attempts.

Recently, excessive dust had settled across the solar panels, putting the whole mission in jeopardy. On the bright side, it seems that power levels have stabilized. Here’s hoping things will continue successfully through at least December 2022, the currently planned retirement for the probe.



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Mars Rover Perseverance Appears to Have Grabbed Its First Rock Sample

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The Perseverance rover had a bit of a false start to its science campaign on Mars last month, when it appeared to have successfully collected a rock only to find its sampling tube empty. In its second coring attempt, NASA directed the rover to a different patch of rock, and images received on Earth today suggest the rover was able to core and secure a Martian rock sample from that second site. Years from now, another mission may pick up Perseverance’s samples and carry them to Earth, where scientists will be able to inspect the Martian material up close.

NASA has yet to confirm that the rover’s extraction was a success, and until they do, there’ll be a bit of uncertainty. Early on September 2, the rover’s social media team confirmed that the rock target had been successfully drilled, posting an image of the rock with a marvelous hole in the middle of it. But that’s no guarantee on its own—a similar image of a hole in the ground indicated that the first rock sample site had been cored, but no rock had actually been retained by the rover. NASA concluded that the first sample likely crumbled to dust, surprising mission scientists who expected the rock to behave differently.

For the latest attempt, we have images from the rover that show it holding up a piece of the Red Planet in its robotic vice grip. They can be compared to later images with the bit of rock absent, suggesting the sample successfully made it into the tube.

If the sampling is affirmed by NASA to be a success, the victory may lie in the constitution of the second rock. The drilled rock is part of a stretch of ridgeline nicknamed Citadelle. Citadelle sticks out of Jezero Crater, the dried-up lake bed on which the rover alighted in February. The site differs from the previous sample attempt site—the Crater Floor Fractured Rough—in that NASA scientists believe it will be a bit more robust, so it won’t break down when the rover abrades away the rock surface and cores the layer underneath.

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The cores—Perseverance has room for over 30 more—are a first step toward a better understanding of Mars; if the rock samples don’t shed light on the planet’s past habitability, they will at least indicate something of the planet’s geology. NASA’s ultimate goal is return mission in the early 2030s, which will bring these tubes and their contents to Earth.

Depending on the results, Perseverance could stick around for another try at this stretch of rock or move on to its next target. Eventually, the rover is expected to sample an ancient river delta that once flowed from the lake in Jezero Crater. That’s thought to be the most likely location of stromatolite-like fossils, based on where the microbial organisms crop up on Earth.

More: Abigail Allwood’s Hunt for Alien Fossils on Mars Has Begun



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