Mars News and Discussions

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[Yuli Ban]

^Lucky metal bastard!

Mars' buried polar 'lakes' may just be frozen clay

Bright reflections that radar detected beneath the south pole of Mars may not be underground lakes as previously thought but deposits of clay instead, a new study finds.

For decades, scientists have suspected that water lurks below the polar ice caps of Mars, just as it does here on Earth. In 2018, researchers using the MARSIS radar sounder instrument on the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft detected evidence for a lake hidden beneath the Red Planet's south polar ice cap, and in 2020, they found signs of a number of super-salty lakes there. If these lakes were remnants of water that was once on the surface, these reservoirs may have once harbored life and may still, the scientists noted.

However, in order to form and maintain liquid water at this spot on Mars, an implausible amount of heat and salt may be needed, given what is currently known about the Red Planet, according to the lead author of the new study, Isaac Smith, a planetary scientist at York University in Toronto, and his colleagues.

The bright white region of this image, captured by Europe's Mars Express spacecraft in December 2012, shows the icy cap that covers Mars’ south pole, composed of frozen water and frozen carbon dioxide. (Image credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/Bill Dunford)

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[weatheriscool]

Mars rover comes up empty in 1st try at getting rock sample
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-mars-rove ... ample.html
by Christina Larson

NASA's newest Mars rover came up empty Friday in its first attempt to pick up a rock sample to eventually be brought back to Earth.

The rover Perseverance drilled into the floor of the planet's Jezero Crater to extract a finger-sized sample from slabs of flat rocks. The drill seemed to work as intended, but it appeared no rock made it into the sample tube, the agency said Friday.

Engineers were working to figure out what happened.

"While this is not the 'hole-in-one' we hoped for, there is always risk with breaking new ground," said NASA's science mission chief Thomas Zurbuchen.

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NASA Mars rover begins collecting rock in search of alien life

In this image acquired on August 6, 2021 and released by NASA, the shadow of the Perseverance Mars rover is cast next to its first hole drilled in a rock.

NASA's Perseverance rover has begun drilling into the surface of Mars and will collect rock samples to be picked up by future missions for analysis by scientists on Earth.

The US space agency published images Friday of a small mound with a hole in its center next to the rover—the first ever dug into the Red Planet by a robot.

"Sample collection has begun!" tweeted Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate.

https://phys.org/news/2021-08-nasa-mars ... -life.html

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NASA rover has been exploring surface sediments, not lake deposits, for last eight years: study
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-nasa-rove ... ments.html
by The University of Hong Kong

In 2012, NASA landed the rover Curiosity in the Gale crater on Mars because the crater was thought by many scientists to be the site of an ancient lake on Mars more than 3 billion years ago. Since that time, the rover has been driving along, carrying out geological analyses with its suite of instruments for over 3,190 sols (martian days, equivalent to 3278 earth days). After analyzing the data, researchers from Department of Earth Sciences, the Faculty of Science at HKU, have proposed that the sediments measured by the rover during most of the mission did not actually form in a lake.

The researcher team suggested that the large mound of sedimentary rocks explored and analyzed for the last eight years actually represent sand and silt deposited as air-fall from the atmosphere and reworked by the wind. The alteration minerals formed by the interaction between water and the sand did not occur in a lake setting. The "wet" environment, they propose, actually represents weathering similar to soil formation under rainfall in an ancient atmosphere that was very different from the present one.

[weatheriscool]

Ingenuity Mars Helicopter spots Perseverance from above
https://phys.org/news/2021-08-ingenuity ... rance.html
by Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Can you see NASA's newest rover in this picture from Jezero Crater?

NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter recently completed its 11th flight at the Red Planet, snapping multiple photographs during its trip. Along with capturing the boulders, sand dunes, and rocky outcrops prevalent in the "South Séítah" region of Jezero Crater, a few of the images capture NASA's Perseverance rover amid its first science campaign.

Ingenuity began as a technological demonstration to prove that powered, controlled flight on Mars is possible. It is now an operations demonstration intended to investigate how a rotorcraft can add an aerial dimension to missions like Perseverance, scouting possible areas of scientific interest and offering detailed views of nearby areas too hazardous for the rover to explore.

[caltrek]

Evidence of Relatively Recent Mudslide Might Have Been Found on Mars
by Theo Nicitopoulos
August 23, 2021

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-n ... -mudslide/

Introduction:

(Sky & Telescope) Approximately 5 million years ago, a portion of the western wall of a large and deep impact crater located in the Nilosyrtis Mensae region of Mars gave way. The Red Planet’s landscape abounds with steep canyon walls that have collapsed, so landslides must be quite common. But what makes this one particularly interesting is that it shows traits of being a mudslide.

In a new study published in the October 15th Planetary and Space Science journal, researchers used high-resolution imagery to construct a digital elevation model of the landslide. Then they compared its shape and form to actual landslides on Mars and Earth, and to a computer-generated landslide, and found signs that water could have been involved at a time when Mars was expected to be dry.

The Landslide

The Nilosyrtis Mensae landslide is big by Earth-standards (it carried approximately 200,000 dump trucks’ worth of material), but smaller than most Martian landslides that have been studied. The slide happened on a 25-degree slope and travelled a distance of about six football fields, resulting in a deposit area that had a maximum thickness of about 30 meters and covered the equivalent of about 10 average-sized city blocks.

Nilosyrtis Mensae is an ancient terrain is a circular landform that probably got its shape from an impact crater.
NASA / JPL / Univ. of Arizona

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[weatheriscool]

Elon Musk Talks About Going to Mars in Ten Years
September 2, 2021 by Brian Wang

Tesla had an employee all hands meetings. It had several interesting leaks. Elon Musk said he may go to Mars in 10 years.

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After six months on Mars, NASA's tiny copter is still flying high
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-months-ma ... opter.html
by Lucie Aubourg

NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, photographed on the surface of Mars by the Perseverance rover on June 15, 2021.

It was only supposed to fly five times. And yet NASA's helicopter on Mars, Ingenuity, has completed 12 flights and it isn't ready to retire.

Given its stunning and unexpected success, the US space agency has extended Ingenuity's mission indefinitely.

The tiny helicopter has become the regular travel companion of the rover Perseverance, whose core mission is to seek signs of ancient life on Mars.

"Everything is working so well," said Josh Ravich, the head of Ingenuity's mechanical engineering team. "We're doing better on the surface than we had expected."

Hundreds of people contributed to the project, though only about a dozen currently retain day-to-day roles.

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Mars rocks collected by Perseverance boost case for ancient life

A Martian rock dubbed "Rochette" that provided NASA's Perseverance rover its first two samples.

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has now collected two rock samples, with signs that they were in contact with water for a long period of time boosting the case for ancient life on the Red Planet.

"It looks like our first rocks reveal a potentially habitable sustained environment," said Ken Farley, project scientist for the mission, in a statement Friday. "It's a big deal that the water was there for a long time."

The six-wheeled robot collected its first sample, dubbed "Montdenier" on September 6, and its second, "Montagnac" from the same rock on September 8.

Both samples, slightly wider than a pencil in diameter and about six centimeters long, are now stored in sealed tubes in the rover's interior.

A first attempt at collecting a sample in early August failed after the rock proved too crumbly to withstand Perseverance's drill.

https://phys.org/news/2021-09-mars-pers ... cient.html

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[caltrek]

Was Mars Ever habitable? Study Sheds Light on the Planet's Past
by Passant Habbie
September 21, 2021

https://www.inverse.com/science/mars-no ... -potassium

(Inverse) THE SEARCH FOR LIFE BEYOND EARTH MAY BE AT STAKE. A new study suggests that Mars may not have been habitable after all.

The reason? Its small size.

Despite previous evidence that the Red Planet once hosted lakes, rivers, and other possible bodies of water, analysis of Martian meteorites shows that Mars may have had a much drier past than scientists believed.

As NASA’s Perseverance rover scours the Martian terrain to look for clues of ancient microbial life, the recent research could mean that the rover’s search will turn up empty and our hunt for life beyond Earth may suffer a major setback.

“Mars is likely ‘drier’ than we previously thought,” Zhen Tian, a Ph.D. candidate at Washington University and author on the paper, tells Inverse.

[weatheriscool]

NASA's InSight finds three big marsquakes, thanks to solar-panel dusting
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-nasa-insi ... panel.html
by Jet Propulsion Laboratory

On Sept. 18, NASA's InSight lander celebrated its 1,000th Martian day, or sol, by measuring one of the biggest, longest-lasting marsquakes

the mission has ever detected. The temblor is estimated to be about a magnitude 4.2 and shook for nearly an hour-and-a-half.

This is the third major quake InSight has detected in a month: On Aug. 25, the mission's seismometer detected two quakes of magnitudes 4.2 and 4.1. For comparison, a magnitude 4.2 quake has five times the energy of the mission's previous record holder, a magnitude 3.7 quake detected in 2019.

On Sept. 18, NASA's InSight lander celebrated its 1,000th Martian day, or sol, by measuring one of the biggest, longest-lasting marsquakes the mission has ever detected. The temblor is estimated to be about a magnitude 4.2 and shook for nearly an hour-and-a-half.

This is the third major quake InSight has detected in a month: On Aug. 25, the mission's seismometer detected two quakes of magnitudes 4.2 and 4.1. For comparison, a magnitude 4.2 quake has five times the energy of the mission's previous record holder, a magnitude 3.7 quake detected in 2019.

The mission studies seismic waves to learn more about Mars' interior. The waves change as they travel through a planet's crust, mantle, and core, providing scientists a way to peer deep below the surface. What they learn can shed light on how all rocky worlds form, including Earth and its Moon.

[weatheriscool]

NASA Rover Confirms Gigantic Martian Crater Used To Be a Lake
"Without driving anywhere, the rover was able to solve one of the big unknowns."
Ancient Lakes

New data from NASA’s Perseverance rover confirms that Jezero Crater, the area on Mars that it’s been exploring since it touched down back in February, is indeed the site of a gigantic ancient lake.

The rover found geological structures that researchers from NASA and a long list of American and European universities say could have only been formed by a river flowing into a lake for a long period of time, according to research published in the journal Science on Thursday. Images of a distant structure show distinct layers of sediment that wouldn’t have formed in a dry atmosphere, confirming that Mars used to harbor huge lakes or even oceans geologically similar to Earth’s.
Long-Range Science

Scientists have long suspected that Jezero Crater used to be a lake, but they had never been able to definitively prove it. They also had no way of knowing whether any surface water on Mars persisted for long periods of times or if it was fleeting, either evaporating or draining shortly after it pooled up.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-rove ... 0TVDZr_VzE

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Rover images confirm Jezero crater is an ancient Martian lake

The first scientific analysis of images taken by NASA's Perseverance rover has now confirmed that Mars' Jezero crater—which today is a dry, wind-eroded depression—was once a quiet lake, fed steadily by a small river some 3.7 billion years ago.

The images also reveal evidence that the crater endured flash floods. This flooding was energetic enough to sweep up large boulders from tens of miles upstream and deposit them into the lakebed, where the massive rocks lie today.

The new analysis, published today in the journal Science, is based on images of the outcropping rocks inside the crater on its western side. Satellites had previously shown that this outcrop, seen from above, resembled river deltas on Earth, where layers of sediment are deposited in the shape of a fan as the river feeds into a lake.

Perseverance's new images, taken from inside the crater, confirm that this outcrop was indeed a river delta. Based on the sedimentary layers in the outcrop, it appears that the river delta fed into a lake that was calm for much of its existence, until a dramatic shift in climate triggered episodic flooding at or toward the end of the lake's history.

"If you look at these images, you're basically staring at this epic desert landscape. It's the most forlorn place you could ever visit," says Benjamin Weiss, professor of planetary sciences in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and a member of the analysis team. "There's not a drop of water anywhere, and yet, here we have evidence of a very different past. Something very profound happened in the planet's history."

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-rover-ima ... cient.html

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With first Martian samples packed, Perseverance initiates remarkable sample return mission
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-martian-s ... ample.html
by Jet Propulsion Laboratory

NASA, along with the European Space Agency, is developing a campaign to return the Martian samples to Earth.

On Sept. 1, NASA's Perseverance rover unfurled its arm, placed a drill bit at the Martian surface, and drilled about 2 inches, or 6 centimeters, down to extract a rock core. The rover later sealed the rock core in its tube. This historic event marked the first time a spacecraft packed up a rock sample from another planet that could be returned to Earth by future spacecraft.

Mars Sample Return is a multi-mission campaign designed to retrieve the cores Perseverance will collect over the next several years. Currently in the concept design and technology development phase, the campaign is one of the most ambitious endeavors in spaceflight history, involving multiple spacecraft, multiple launches, and dozens of government agencies.

"Returning a sample from Mars has been a priority for the planetary science community since the 1980s, and the potential opportunity to finally realize this goal has unleashed a torrent of creativity," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program based at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

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