More Evidence for a Wetter, “Volcanier” Mars
A "bomb sag" near Spirit's location at Home Plate. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Spirit may have settled in for an eternal sleep on Mars but the data she’s sent back is still helping researchers piece together clues for a wetter history of the red planet!
The image above, a false-color view from the “Home Plate” region where Spirit now sits, points to a feature geologists call a “bomb sag”. Bombs are rocks ejected from volcanic eruptions, and a sag is the crater that’s formed when said rocks impact the ground. A team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley used this photographic evidence to recreate what the conditions of Mars’ air and soil may have been like during the time of the bomb sag’s formation.
What did they find? Read the rest of this article on National Geographic Newswatch.
A Rover Sees Its Shadow
Opportunity's shadow silhouettes her instruments
As luck would have it, it does foretell an oncoming winter. Opportunity is preparing to find a spot to safely weather the frigid winter months on Mars, a long six months of reduced sunlight (which means less power from her solar panels) and temperatures dropping well into the -100ºs C (almost -200ºs F).
A wonderful award-winning 45-minute program about the life – and death – of the amazing Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit. From National Geographic TV…check it out.
A New Mystery on Mars!
Latest image of "Homestake". NASA/JPL-Caltech/Stu Atkinson
After eight years on Mars, Opportunity is still going strong – and still discovering new things! “Completely new” things, in fact, to paraphrase principal investigator Steve Squyres…
While roaming about on Cape York, a large rise on the southwestern edge of Endeavour crater, Opportunity spied a bright vein of rock sticking up through the scrabbly Martian soil. It’s spotted these before, while on approach to Endeavour, but at that point the MER team had their sights set on reaching the crater. Now Opportunity’s spotted another vein, and it’s time to take a closer look!
The Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla got a chance to hone her animation skills further with this cool sequence showing clouds drifting over the surface of Mars, made from images taken by the Mars Express orbiter back in October 2010. Awesome!
The region shown here is known as Noachis Terra, in Mars’ southern hemisphere.
The key to making this animation work so well was the use of “tweening”, which helps smooth out the motion between original image frames acquired by the spacecraft’s cameras.
This video represents a milestone for me – I learned how to “tween” an animation! “Tweening” is short for ”inbetweening,” a word coined by animators to describe the generation of frames in between two key frames,” stated Emily on The Planetary Society’s blog. “The need is similar with animating space images, because individual photos from space are almost never taken at a high enough frame rate to appear to animate smoothly.
“Making these few seconds of video was a somewhat arduous process, but I think the result was worth it,” she continued. “The process can be broken down into two big tasks: generating the individual animation frames from the raw data, and generating a tweened animation from individual animation frames.”
Well the result was, in my opinion, well worth the effort… it looks awesome! Great job Emily!
Credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin (G Neukum); animation by Emily Lakdawalla
From the LITD Archives: Face to Face
Mars' famous "face", imaged in 2007.
Remember the photo of the mysterious “face on Mars” taken by the Viking spacecraft in 1976? Well here’s the same landform, imaged by the HiRISEcamera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Just goes to show that things aren’t always what they seem.
Mars face in 1976. Image: NASA
The surprisingly human-looking “face” was really just a trick of the light combined with the relatively low-resolution of Viking’s camera. Rather than a carved monument erected by an ancient humanoid civilization, the feature has long since been proven to be a lava dome, creating a mesa rising above the surrounding landscape. With the right lighting and perspective, shadows create shapes interpreted – pretty easily, I must say – as eyes, nose and an open mouth…and perhaps even a sort of headdress or ring of hair. But hey, as people, I guess we’re somewhat biased that way.
In the high-resolution image of the same feature, taken from 300km above the surface, it all dissolves into a typical Mars landform. Although interesting in its own right, it’s no timeless sentinel staring out into space. But that’s the beauty of science, really….revealing the reality behind imagination. Not to destroy it but hopefully to inspire even more fascination because of it. Reality, after all, still has plenty of surprises in store for us.
Read more on Universe Today.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Originally posted on July 29, 2010.
Posted in mars
Curiosity in Action
Here’s a very cool video, an animation created by the folks at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory showing the descent, landing and operation of the next rover headed to Mars: the Mars Science Laboratory, a.k.a. “Curiosity.”
Curiosity arrives at KSC on June 22 aboard a C-17
Curiosity just recently arrived in Florida after a cross-country flight from JPL’s facility in Pasadena. It’s planned to launch this November (given no budgetary issues) and arrive at Mars in August 2012. One of the most interesting parts of the video is the revolutionary landing system which will use a hovering “sky-crane” to lower the rover carefully to the surface.
Bigger than any previous rover, Curiosity is too large and heavy to risk using inflated balloons or relying on parachutes alone to mitigate the impact of landing.
Something else they did well in this video was depicting the sense of incredible solitude Curiosity will have on Mars. It’s hard to imagine an entire planet devoid of company (besides a few other robots scattered in remote locations…some operational, some not) and even though Curiosity is “just” a machine, it’s human nature to put oneself in its position when watching this. Which I’m sure was exactly the idea!
“It is a treat for the 2,000 or more people who have worked on the Mars Science Laboratory during the past eight years to watch these action scenes of the hardware the project has developed and assembled.”– Pete Theisinger, Mars Science Laboratory Project Manager
Anyway, it’s a fascinating look at what’s next in the exploration of the red planet. Curiosity will investigate the surface of Mars much more closely than ever before possible, both visually with high-definition cameras and scientifically with a slew of on-board tools and research equipment.
Although not officially finalized, its landing site will most likely be Gale Crater, an area rich in diverse landforms that seem to indicate a history of liquid water.
Read more on Curiosity on the MSL site here, and you can also see a shorter narrated version of the video above here.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
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