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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The MARSIS does all of that using highly outdated software that hasn’t been updated since the spacecraft launched in June 2003.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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Dust Storm Sends China’s Mars Rover Into Safe Mode

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China’s Zhurong rover is currently in safe mode as it waits out a Martian dust storm, according to Chinese state-run media, and it may remain in safe mode until the end of 2022.

Zhurong landed on Mars a year ago this month; since then, the rover has recorded video and audio from a sweeping lava plain called Utopia Planitia, over 1,000 miles from NASA’s Perseverance rover.

Zhurong’s initial mission was just 90 days, but since then the rover has continued to study the Martian surface and atmosphere. The rover was also forced into a safe mode in September 2021, when a solar conjunction disrupted communications between Earth-based space agencies and all Martian spacecraft. Now, the issue is not with the motion of heavenly bodies but with local extreme weather.

It’s recently become winter in Utopia Planitia, and the conditions are harsh even without the dust storm. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) told state-run media Xinhua that daytime temperatures could go below -4 degrees Fahrenheit, and nighttime temperatures could be a cog-chilling -148 degrees Fahrenheit. The agency stated that Zhurong won’t wake up for a while—probably December, when the Martian spring returns, according to Xinhua.

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Utopia Planitia’s plain, like much of Mars, is dusty, making spacecraft on its surface susceptible to the massive storms kicked up by Martian winds. Such storms can be deadly to the Martian spacecraft that rely on solar power; the storms can blot out sunlight for months.

A 2018 dust storm led to the end of NASA’s Opportunity rover mission. In January this year, the InSight lander was forced into safe mode by a similar storm; though it survived, dust coating the lander’s solar panels means the spacecraft is operating on borrowed time and probably will be decommissioned by the end of the year.

Zhurong is expected to handle the ongoing storm with relative ease, though, and its safe mode is more a precaution than a desperate measure. In the meantime, CNSA’s Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter will continue to monitor the Martian atmosphere for any changes—for better or for worse—in the Red Planet’s weather.

More: Gigantic Dust Towers on Mars Could Explain How the Red Planet Lost its Water

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The InSight Mars Lander Mission Will End This Year, NASA Says

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NASA officials announced in a press conference today that the InSight lander on Mars will likely stop operating at the end of 2022, following three years of scientific work on the surface of the Red Planet.

InSight arrived on Mars in November 2018, and during its time on the Martian surface it has collected remarkable data on the planet’s structure and the seismic events that emanate from its interior. Most recently, the lander detected its largest marsquake yet and the biggest quake ever detected on another world: a magnitude 5 event. (Magnitude 5.0 earthquakes are often felt on Earth, and tend to cause minor damage; the previous largest quake on Mars was nearly 10 times smaller than that.)

But now, the lander is beset with dust that has settled on its solar panels, hindering its ability to take in light and generate power. The InSight team came up with a McGuyver-esque way of shaking some of that dust off: by scooping up Martian soil and dropping it on the dust, they were able to marginally clean up the panels. That maneuver was done successfully six times, according to Kathya Zamora Garcia, the Deputy Project Manager for InSight.

But the reality of InSight’s situation is that it’s in a hostile environment; nothing lasts forever, and the lander seems fated to conclude its scientific operations this summer and terminate all operations by the end of the year, according to the InSight team’s estimates.

“One of InSight’s legacies is that it really proves the technique of seismology for planetary science,” said Bruce Banerdt, the InSight Principal Investigator, during the press conference. “We’ve been able to map out the inside of Mars for the first time in history.”

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In its tenure, the lander has detected 1,313 marsquakes to date. When it began its science, InSight was capable of running for about 5,000 watt-hours per sol (Martian day); now, overwhelmed by the Martian dust, the lander can only manage 500 watt-hours per sol. The reduction is the equivalent of going from running an electric oven for an hour and 40 minutes per day on Earth to only about 10 minutes per day, Zamora Garcia said.

Seismic measurements are crucial for understanding the structure and evolution of rocky worlds like Earth, Mars, and Venus. On Earth, many seismic events are caused by plate tectonics, but others are caused by sources in the crust or convection in the mantle, the molten region below the crust. Mars has no plate tectonics, so the events are strictly the latter, though the seismometers also can pick up movements from impact events.

InSight was charged with (and delivered on) giving humanity the best-yet look at Mars’ geological and seismological systems. InSight revealed the thickness and makeup of the Martian crust, as well as details of the planet’s mantle and core. But the lander also had its struggles. Dust storms previously forced the lander into safe mode, and the InSight ‘Mole’—a heat probe that was supposed to dig into the Martian surface—got stuck in the vexing consistency of the Martian soil. The Mole was abandoned in January 2021.

Scientific operations could end as early as mid-July, Zamora Garcia said, but InSight’s fate ultimately comes down to the favorability (or ire) of the Martian climate. “It’s exceeded our expectations at just about every turn on Mars,” Banerdt said. “It may actually last longer than that.”

An errant dust storm could doom the lander even earlier, or a fortuitous dust devil could whip the accreted dust off the lander’s solar panels, providing a boost in power. “We’re working to get as much as we can, but we’ll just have to see what Mars and InSight gives us,” Banerdt said.

Barring any Martian miracles, the fastidious InSight lander is on its last legs. For every one of its struggles and failures, the lander produced a bevy of data on the buried secrets of rocky worlds beyond our own. So thanks, InSight, for all your unheralded perseverance.

More: NASA’s InSight Caught a Lonely Martian Sunrise

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Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Went Silent, Leaving Anxious NASA Team in the Dark

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Late last week, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter managed to reestablish its connection with the Perseverance rover following a brief communications disruption. The space agency says the looming winter is likely responsible and is making adjustments as a result.

On Thursday, Ingenuity—mercifully—sent a signal to Perseverance after the intrepid helicopter missed a scheduled communications session. It marked the first time since the pair landed together on Mars in February 2021 that Ingenuity has missed an appointment, according to NASA.

The team behind the mission believes that Ingenuity had entered into a low-power state to conserve energy, and it did so in response to the charge of its six lithium-ion batteries dropping below a critical threshold. This was likely due to the approaching winter, when more dust appears in the Martian atmosphere and the temperatures get colder. The dust blocks the amount of sunlight that reaches the helicopter’s solar array, which charges its batteries.

The Perseverance rover is on a mission to find evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars, while the rover’s much smaller companion, Ingenuity, became the first powered aircraft to lift off from the surface of another planet on April 19, 2021. The two robots share a communication line, with Perseverance relaying Ingenuity’s messages to Earth. Ingenuity uses small antennas to communicate with Perseverance, exchanging data that is then routed to the rover’s main computer and transferred to Earth through NASA’s Deep Space Network (a global array of radio antennas).

Ingenuity has an alarm that wakes the helicopter for its scheduled communication sessions with Perseverance. But on May 3, Ingenuity was a no-show for the scheduled daily data exchange after its field-programmable gate array lost power overnight, causing a reset of the helicopter’s onboard clock (the gate array manages Ingenuity’s operational state, switching its electronic systems on and off to conserve power). The Sun’s rays recharged Ingenuity’s batteries the following morning, but the helicopter’s clock was now out of sync with Perseverance’s clock. By the time Ingenuity was able to send out a signal, the rover was no longer listening.

Two days later, mission control set out to fix the pair’s communication issue by programming the rover to spend nearly the entirety of its 429th sol (a Martian day, which lasts slightly longer than a day on Earth) listening for the helicopter’s signal. Ingenuity’s call finally came in on May 5 at 11:45 a.m. local Mars time. Although brief, Ingenuity’s call reassured the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that the helicopter’s battery was healthy and that the solar array was recharging its batteries.

Ingenuity wasn’t exactly built to withstand the harsh Martian winter nights, as the rotorcraft was designed to last only 30 sols on Mars. But the 19-inch tall (48 cm), 4-pound (1.8 kg) helicopter has gone far beyond its test flights, recently receiving an extension on its mission to assist Perseverance as it explores the Martian terrain. Ingenuity will now fly above the Martian surface, advising Perseverance’s controllers on the most ideal routes.

“We have always known that Martian winter and dust storm season would present new challenges for Ingenuity, specifically colder sols, an increase in atmospheric dust, and more frequent dust storms,” Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity team lead at JPL, said in a statement. “Every flight and every mile of distance flown beyond our original 30-sol mission has pushed the spacecraft to its limits each and every sol on Mars.”

For now, the team has put together a plan to help the tiny helicopter survive the looming winter. The newly issued commands “lower the point at which the helicopter energizes its heaters from when the battery falls below 5 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 15 degrees Celsius) to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 40 degrees Celsius),” according to NASA, which added that the “helicopter then shuts down quickly, rather than consuming the battery charge with the heaters.” This should allow Ingenuity to accumulate battery charge during the day, which it can then use to survive the bitterly cold nights.

“Our top priority is to maintain communications with Ingenuity in the next few sols, but even then, we know that there will be significant challenges ahead,” Tzanetos said. “We are hopeful that we can accumulate battery charge in order to return to nominal operations and continue our mission into the weeks ahead.”

Even with the dropped call, Ingenuity still remains the little copter that could, surpassing expectations with a total of 28 flights logged on Mars. Hard to believe now, but the original plan was to have Ingenuity perform just five flights on the Red Planet.

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See the ‘Brain Terrain’ of Mars in New Satellite Images

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Recent images captured by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter reveal large craters in Utopia, the largest known impact basin in the Solar System.

Utopia is about 2,050 miles wide—roughly the distance from London, England to Alexandria, Egypt. These striking geological features are located in Utopia Planitia, a massive lava plain that is now rich with ice that sits on and beneath its surface. (Utopia Planitia is also where China’s Zhurong rover landed nearly one year ago; the rover has spent its time driving around the vast plain and taking selfies).

Zipping above the Martian atmosphere, the orbiter and its High Resolution Stereo Camera captured two craters on the lava plain. The topographical image, below, was created from data collected by the orbiter in July but only recently produced and shared with the public in an ESA release. On either side of the craters are flat surfaces called mantled deposits, which are layers of dust and ice that probably originated from ancient Martian snows, when the planet’s rotational axis had a more severe tilt than it does today.

One of the craters (toward the bottom of the image) has ‘brain terrain’ inside it, so-named for its resemblance to the ridges of the human brain. If you look closely, you can make out the undulating ridges within the crater.

A cropped view of the brain terrain.
Image: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin

There are several ideas about brain terrain’s origins; one leading theory is that the terrain comes from buried water that sublimates, weakening the Martian surface and giving it a rippled look. It’s hard to deduce how the geological feature forms from Martian orbit, but some brain terrain on Earth may offer clues.

Adjacent to the craters in the Mars Express images is a swath of darker material; ESA researchers believe that icy ground cracked in places, which allowed dust blowing around the planet to settle in the cracks.

For all its burnt reds and hazy yellows—all too reminiscent of a terrestrial desert—Mars is a frigid (albeit dynamic!) wasteland of carbon dioxide, dust, and ice. Observing from space can only offer so many insights; the more robots we land on the planet, the more we’ll understand the geological and hydrological process of the Red Planet.

The Perseverance rover has noticed some interesting details about how Jezero Crater took shape over millions of years, and the planned ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover—still alive but barely breathing—is supposed to dig into the Martian soil, perhaps revealing insights even InSight couldn’t deliver.

Brain terrain remains an intriguing aspect of the Martian surface, and with more boots—erm, wheels—on the ground we may figure out exactly what causes it.

More: NASA and ESA Change Plans for Ambitious Mars Sample Return Mission

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The Speed of Sound on Mars Is Kinda Funky, New Evidence Suggests

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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.

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Ingenuity Helicopter Had an ‘Anomaly’ on Mars, Just Before the Solar Conjunction

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The Ingenuity helicopter will need to wait a couple of weeks for its next flight, as Mars is fully on the far side of the Sun from Earth, disrupting communications with spacecraft stationed there. But all solar conjunctions aside, the helicopter has another issue: It needs to adapt to a changing atmosphere.

The problem comes down to the fact that Ingenuity has been way too good at what NASA designed it for. The plan was for the helicopter to demonstrate the utility of controlled, powered flight on Mars, for the sake of future exploration of the planet and, perhaps someday, more regular travel on it.

Ingenuity was to demonstrate that in five flights; when the helicopter passed those tests, it was promoted to a Martian scout, flitting around the hazy tan skies to assist the Perseverance rover in its science mission. It has done that well, too.

But having endured all these challenges, the Ingenuity helicopter finds itself in the weird position of needing to learn how to fly differently to accommodate for Mars’ changing seasons; when the planet gets colder, the atmospheric pressure drops. But a flight test scheduled for September 18, to acclimate to the atmospheric changes, was cancelled automatically by Ingenuity after the helicopter detected some irregularities in its motors.

The anomaly is yet to be fully understood, but, according to a blog post by deputy operations lead Jaakko Karras, it occurred in two of the six motors that run the mechanism that manages the helicopter’s pitch. Those motors, called servos, go through regular, automated testing on Mars.

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“The servo motors are much smaller than the motors that spin the rotors, but they do a tremendous amount of work and are critical to stable, controlled flight,” Karras wrote. “Because of their criticality, Ingenuity performs an automated check on the servos before every flight.”

So far, what NASA understands of the servo anomaly is that the motors were wobbling a bit; additional tests were run on September 21 and September 23 and nothing untoward happened, so perhaps it was a fluke.

“One theory for what’s happening is that moving parts in the servo gearboxes and swashplate linkages are beginning to show some wear now that Ingenuity has flown well over twice as many flights as originally planned (13 completed versus five planned),” Karras wrote. “Another theory is that the high-speed spin test left the upper rotor at a position that loads servos 1 and 2 in a unique, oscillation-inducing way that we haven’t encountered before.”

The issue doesn’t seem catastrophic, and with the additional tests showing things to be nominal, Ingenuity likely will be up in the air again soon. The solar conjunction lasts from October 2 to October 14. If the helicopter continues to impress as it has thus far, it will find flying in the winter Martian atmosphere no issue at all.

More: Listen to the Incredible Sound of NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter Flying on Mars

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Here’s What’s Next for NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover

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The Perseverance rover is gearing up to drill some Martian rocks, and mission scientists have seen evidence for ancient flash flooding in the dried-up lakebed where the rover landed. NASA shared these updates and more during a press conference today at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Perseverance landed on Mars in February, and its science mission officially began in June, following operational checks on its instruments and the historic flights taken by the Ingenuity helicopter. Perseverance is tasked with exploring Mars’ Jezero Crater, the site of a former lake that NASA scientists hope could contain fossilized evidence of Martian life. So far, Perseverance has driven about a kilometer (0.62 miles), imaging interesting rock formations along the way. These formations shed light on the Red Planet’s geologic history, and some of them are promising sites to investigate for biosignatures (evidence of life), which researchers expect could look like the stromatolites encased in ancient rock on Earth. Ultimately, the rock samples collected by the rover will be grabbed by another mission and brought to Earth—the first materials that will be retrieved from Mars.

Perseverance has been driving near the Martian Séítah, a hazardous stretch of sand dunes that the rover could easily get stuck on. Olivier Toupet, the rover’s enhanced navigation team lead, said that a major improvement in the rover’s artificial intelligence system has meant that the rover can think about where it will go next while it is driving, a big step beyond the stop-and-go navigation of previous rovers.

All the while, Perseverance has been conducting technological demonstrations that will inform future missions. Another demonstration besides Ingenuity was MOXIE, in which Perseverance generated a small amount of oxygen on the Martian surface, which has huge implications for human ambitions beyond Earth. “This experiment is feeding forward to these future missions where we’d want to extract oxygen, which we’d want to use for human astronauts to breathe and even launch vehicles,” said Jennifer Trosper, Perseverance’s project manager, during today’s press conference.

The view from one of Perseverance’s navigation cameras as the rover took its longest autonomous drive so far (358 feet) on July 1, 2021.

The rover’s final destination is called Three Forks, which demarcates a dried-up river delta that fans out from Jezero. On its way, it’ll visit several points of interest, including the Crater Floor Fractured Rough, the first sample site. NASA isn’t sure whether the fractured rough is igneous or sedimentary, the answer to which will inform scientists on how Jezero formed and what clues about life it could contain. Perseverance scientists expect the lake bed will hold some of the oldest rocks that the rover will have the chance to look at before it heads to the river delta.

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“One of the hypotheses that we’re trying to test is that the lake that once filled Jezero wasn’t there just once, but that it went through multiple episodes of filling up, drying down, and filling up again,” said Ken Farley, a Perseverance project scientist at Caltech, during the press conference. “This is very important because it means we’ll have multiple time periods in which we could possibly learn about environmental conditions on Mars, and we have multiple time periods where we might be able to look for ancient life that might’ve existed on the planet.”

Farley said that images taken by Perseverance indicated that Jezero’s ancient lake had different water levels at different times, and that scientists saw evidence that ancient flash flooding moved large boulders across the delta. One of the greatest points of interest so far in the mission is a rock outcrop to the south of the rover’s landing site nicknamed Artuby, after a river in the south of France. Artuby appears to be fossilized Martian mud, exactly the sort of stagnant, unperturbed material from the ancient lake that NASA wants to investigate.

For sampling, the rover will first abrade the rock surface to clear it of any concealing elements, like Martian dust. Then the rover will extract a core of rock and seal it in a sampling tube within the rover’s belly. That tube will eventually be included in a sample cache that, if all goes well in the coming decade, will be brought to Earth by another spacecraft.

“A lot of what we’ve been doing recently both on Earth as well as on the vehicle is preparing for that first sample,” Trosper said. “We are ready to sample … we expect to get that first sample within the first few weeks of August.”

While Perseverance has not yet sampled any rock, it did process one of its five witness tubes. Witness tubes are very similar to the tubes meant for samples, but they contain with materials that detect contaminants. Witness tubes are opened and sealed to sample the local Martian environment before extracting any rock, so that when all the tubes are returned to Earth, NASA scientists will know whether any Earthly contaminations were present during sample collection. There are 38 other tubes meant to take on samples—that’s 38 opportunities for us Earthlings to see what Mars is made of, how the planet has changed, and what, if anything, once lived there.

All told, Perseverance’s upcoming project is ambitious as hell. Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for science at NASA, said the samples could be expected to arrive on Earth by the early 2030s.

More: NASA’s Perseverance Rover Is Finally hitting the Road on Mars

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Ingenuity Helicopter Takes an Ambitious Shortcut on Mars in Record-Breaking Ninth Flight

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An image of Ingenuity’s shadow taken by the helicopter on July 5, 2021.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Ingenuity helicopter has stuck the landing of its most difficult flight yet, the craft’s ninth. The helicopter took a high-speed sojourn over rough terrain.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced the flight’s success this morning in a tweet. The helicopter’s chief pilot, Håvard Grip, and its chief engineer, Bob Balaram, had earlier described their intentions for the flight in a NASA blog post. In their post, they indicated that Ingenuity’s ninth flight would break its current groundspeed, distance, and airtime records. Though we’ve yet to get full details on this latest flight, Grip and Balaram said the craft would be instructed to fly over 2,050 feet (625 meters) at 16 feet (5 meters) per second and that the entire flight would last nearly three minutes.

Since the Perseverance rover began its scientific explorations last month, Ingenuity has kept dutifully close to its terrestrial counterpart. Not this time. Perseverance is perched at the eastern edge of a rugged stretch of Mars called Séítah, or “amidst the sand” in Diné Bizaad, the Navajo language. The Séítah is characterized by undulating sands that NASA scientists believe would be tough for a wheeled vehicle to traverse. That made the region ideal for this episode in Ingenuity’s growth, as it forced the helicopter to venture well beyond the rover that carried it the 183 million miles from Earth. Flying across the dunes showed off the utility of aerial vehicles on Mars and beyond, a point already proven emphatically in the craft’s first five flights. The ninth flight also challenged Ingenuity’s navigation algorithm, which was really designed to read the flatter terrain of the Red Planet, not the undulating sands of the Séítah.

The Séítah on Mars, seen from 33 feet above the surface during Ingenuity’s sixth flight, in May 2021.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Some black-and-white imagery from the helicopter was released from the ninth flight, but still to come are new color images of the Séítah’s rocks and ripples, over which Ingenuity passed. The craft likely did not maintain a constant speed throughout its flight; because of uncertainty about the way Ingenuity’s navigation system would interpret Séítah’s fluctuating topography, the team instructed the craft to fly more slowly over the rougher parts of the region.

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Grip and Balaram said in their blog that this ninth flight was the most nerve-wracking since the helicopter’s maiden voyage on the Red Planet. Though they’ve yet to publish all the data from the flight, one thing is certain: The flight was a success, and we’ve yet to hit the limits of this record-breaking rotorcraft.

More: Ingenuity Flies Again as Perseverance Rover Stars Looking for Life on Mars



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