The final launch of the summer of Mars missions is nearly underway.

On Thursday, NASA hopes to send a robotic rover and a small experimental helicopter on a journey of six and a half months to the red planet. It follows two earlier launches by the United Arab Emirates and China.

NASA was originally scheduled to lift off earlier in July, but had to overcome a number of technical delays that pushed back the launch. While it is last to leave, all three missions should arrive at the red planet at about the same time, in February.

NASAs Perseverance rover will lift off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Thursday at 7:50 a.m. Eastern time.

The launch, aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, is being streamed live by NASA on its website. Or you can watch it in the video player below:

The rocket with the rover on top was rolled out to its launchpad on Wednesday, and about two hours before the scheduled launch time, U.L.A. reported that fueling had started.

Weather looked promising, with an 80 percent chance of favorable conditions for launch.

Perseverance is a car-size wheeled robot nearly identical in design to NASAs previous Mars rover, Curiosity, which landed in 2012. However, Perseverance is headed to a different place a crater named Jezero that was once a lake carrying a different set of instruments. Curiosity was designed to look for habitable environments, and it found signs of a freshwater lake. Perseverance is to go a step farther and search for evidence of past life that might have lived in the lake at Jezero.

Perseverance is also carrying a couple of devices that are more fun than scientific: several cameras, which will record various views as the spacecraft zooms through the atmosphere en route to landing; and two microphones, which will be the first to record sounds on another planet.

It is carrying an experimental helicopter, too.

Yup, its called Ingenuity. The four-pound Marscopter is a technology experiment, and if it works, it will be the first powered flight on another planet. The rotors have to spin at 2,4000 revolutions a minute to generate lift in the thin atmosphere of Mars, just one percent as dense at Earths at the surface.

A couple of experiments on Perseverance have nothing to do with searching for past life, but they could help future life on Mars astronauts from Earth.

One of the crucial supplies that astronauts will need is oxygen, for breathing and as a rocket propellant.

The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE, will take carbon dioxide molecules from the Martian atmosphere and split them into oxygen atoms and carbon monoxide.

MOXIE will try to demonstrate that is possible on the surface of the red planet. But the amount of oxygen it could produce less than ounce per hour is tiny.

Were only making about enough oxygen to keep a small dog alive, said Michael Hecht, the principal investigator for MOXIE.

But if the idea works, the technique could be employed in the future on a much larger scale to fill up a rocket. So astronauts in a future Mars mission could take off from Mars to come home, he said.

Perseverance is also carrying samples of materials used in spacesuits, mounted on a target used to calibrate one of the rovers instruments.

When I send somebody to Mars in my spacesuit, I want to make sure that they stay alive that whole time, Amy Ross, one of NASAs spacesuit designers said during a news conference on Tuesday.

With Perseverance taking repeated measurements over a couple of years on Mars, we can understand how our materials hold up or dont in that environment, she said.

Perseverance will land on Mars on Feb. 18 next year at 3:40 p.m. Eastern time.

Every 26 months, Earth and Mars come close to each other, which allows the quickest, most efficient trip from Earth to Mars. If the launch does not occur by the middle of August, NASA would have to wait until the next opportunity, in 2022.

Jezero crater was filled with water about 3.5 billion years ago when Mars was warmer and wetter. From orbit, earlier NASA spacecraft spotted a dried-up river on one side of Jezero and an outflow channel can be seen on the other side. The sediments of a fan-shape delta can be seen where the river spilled into the crater. No one knows if anything ever lived on Mars, but if it did, Jezero would be a prime place to look, scientists decided.

Landing on Mars is difficult. The planets thin atmosphere isnt thick enough to provide enough drag to slow down a spacecraft like Perseverance, which will be arriving at more than 12,000 miles per hour. But the atmosphere is still thick enough to generate thousands of degrees of heat, complicating the task of slowing down Perseverance before it slams into the ground. Quite a few landing attempts by NASA and other space agencies have ended with creating new craters on the red planets surface.

But NASA has pulled off five consecutive successful landings. To increase the likelihood that Perseverance rover will be the sixth, NASA has made adjustments to the parachute that slows the spacecraft when it reaches the Martian atmosphere. It has also improved the rovers ability to identify a smooth landing site.

The Emirates Mars Mission successfully lifted off on a Japanese rocket on July 20.

The space program of the United Arab Emirates is modest, and its bid to join the ranks of countries that have reached Mars is part of an ambitious effort to inspire Emirati youth to take up careers in science and technology.

Its Hope spacecraft will orbit Mars for a number of years, helping scientists study the planets weather cycles.

China launched the second mission, Tianwen-1, on July 23.

The countrys space program has seen a number of successes in recent years, including two rovers that landed on Earths moon as well as a pair of space stations deployed in orbit. But its previous attempt to get to Mars in 2011 was lost when the Russian rocket it was riding on failed and burned up in Earths atmosphere.

The new Chinese mission includes an orbiter, a lander and a rover. While other countries have taken a staggered approach to visiting Mars an orbiter first, then a lander, then finally a rover China emphasizes that it will attempt to operate all of these components for the first time at once.

The orbiter, according to four scientists involved in the mission, will study Mars and its atmosphere for about one Martian year, or 687 days on Earth. In addition to two cameras, the spacecraft carries subsurface radar, a detector to study the Martian magnetic field and three other scientific instruments.

The rover will try to land in the Utopia Planitia region in the mid-northern Martian latitudes. NASAs Viking 2 mission touched down there in 1976. Earlier studies using data from NASAs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showed that Utopia Planitia has a layer of water ice equivalent to what is found in Lake Superior on Earth.

If it manages the perilous Martian landing, the rover will use a mix of cameras, ground-penetrating radar and other instruments to better understand the distribution of underground ice, which future human colonists on Mars could use to sustain themselves. Chinas mission is to last about 90 Martian days.

A fourth mission, the joint Russian-European Rosalind Franklin rover, was to launch this summer, too. But technical hurdles, aggravated by the coronavirus pandemic, could not be overcome in time. It is now scheduled to launch in 2022.

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NASAs Mars Perseverance Rover Launch: When to Watch - The New York Times

Megaripples near a sand dune on Mars.

By Katherine KorneiJul. 23, 2020 , 8:00 AM

Researchers have spotted large waves of martian sand migrating for the first time. The discovery dispels the long-held belief that these megaripples havent moved since they formed hundreds of thousands of years ago. Theyre also evidence of stronger-than-expected winds on the Red Planet.

Its pretty staggering that humans can detect these changes on Mars, says Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who was not involved in the research. We can now measure processes on the surface of another planet that are just a couple times faster than our hair grows.

Megaripples are found in deserts on Earth, often between dunes. Waves in the sand spaced up to tens of meters apart, theyre a larger version of ripples that undulate every 10 centimeters or so on many sand dunes.

But unlike dunes, megaripples are made up of two sizes of sand grains. Coarser, heavier grains cap the crests of megaripples, making it harder for wind to move these features around, says Simone Silvestro, a planetary scientist at Italys National Institute of Astrophysics in Naples.

Since the early 2000s, Mars rovers and orbiters have repeatedly spotted megaripples on the Red Planet. But they didnt seem to change in any measurable way, which led some scientists to think they were relics from Marss past, when its thicker atmosphere permitted stronger winds.

Now, using images captured by NASAs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Silvestro and his colleagues have shown that some megaripples do creep alongjust very slowly.

The researchers focused on two sites near the equator of Mars. They analyzed roughly 1100 megaripples in McLaughlin crater and 300 in the Nili Fossae region. They looked for signs of movement by comparing time-lapse images of each sitetaken 7.6 and 9.4 years apart, respectively. Megaripples in both regions advanced by about 10 centimeters per year, the team reports in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. Thats about how fast megaripples move in the Lut Desert of Iran.

Its a surprise that megaripples move at all on Mars, says Jim Zimbelman, a planetary geologist at the Smithsonian Institutions Air and Space Museum. Just a few decades ago, there was no evidence that sands on Mars were mobile, he says. None of us thought that the winds were strong enough.

Winds on Mars might be accelerating small grains of sand, Silvestro and his colleagues suggest. Once these grains start to rollor bounce, they can act like battering rams, knocking into larger grains and setting them in motion. This process, known as impact-driven creep, has been observed on Earth.

Sand dunes on Mars likely donated their grains to the megaripples migration, the team concludes, because nearby dunes moved in the same direction as the megaripples.

Atmospheric models of Mars suggest winds capable of moving sand are rare. This discovery of migrating megaripples will force those models to be revised, the team suggests.

Silvestro plans to expand his search for migrating megaripples to the whole planet. He suspects the speediest megaripples will be near Marss fastest moving dunes. Megaripples on the move are beacons of windy conditions, which might in turn kick-start dust storms, the researchers suggest. Airborne dust can blanket solar panels, reducing their efficiency, and it can also gum up mechanical parts like gears. Thats bad news for Mars rovers and human habitats alike.

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Giant waves of sand are moving on Mars - Science Magazine

Humanitys hunger to reach Mars edged a step closer on Thursday as China launched its latest mission to the Red Planet.

While lift-off was successful, the toughest hurdle will be landing, a feat which is notoriously difficult on the fourth planet from the Sun.

Here, we summarise who is attempting to explore Mars and why.

Why Mars?

Mars is seen as an ideal candidate for exploration because it is close by in our solar system and is the most similar to Earth.

One of the biggest questions is whether life has existed beyond Earth, and Mars is a good place to start investigating, given that evidence points to it once being full of water, warmer and with a thicker atmosphere, making it a potentially habitable environment.

Who has made it to Mars?

The US is the only country to successfully land a spacecraft on Martian soil so far, having done so eight times since 1976 its InSight and Curiosity rovers are still operational.

Six other spacecraft are currently observing Mars from above, including three belonging to the US, two European and one from India.

What of Chinas latest attempt?

Chinas Tianwen-1 mission includes an orbiter and a rover, which will take seven months to reach Mars.

If successful in landing, their aim is to explore for underground water as well as searching for evidence of possible ancient life.

The solar-powered rover weighs 529lb (240kg) and should operate for about three months, while the orbiter is expected to last two years.

China previously tried to reach the Red Planet in 2011, sending an orbiter with a Russian mission, but the spacecraft failed to make it out of Earths orbit.

Didnt the United Arab Emirates launch a mission?

Yes, the United Arab Emirates set off to Mars just a few days ago though this is a probe, so will not take on the difficult task of landing on the planet.

Amal or Hope is the first interplanetary mission for the Arab world and aims to look at the upper atmosphere and monitor climate change for at least two years.

Isnt the US planning to launch another mission to Mars?

Nasa is preparing its next mission to Mars, Perseverance, with a daily launch window set to open on July 30.

It will also seek out signs of ancient life, as well as collect rock and soil samples for possible return to Earth.

And what about Europe?

The European Space Agency, along with the Russian Roscosmos, is hoping to send its first rover, named after English chemist Rosalind Franklin, to Mars.

Originally planned for launch this summer, the ExoMars mission has been postponed for at least two years as a number of key tests still need to be carried out.

Given that the journey from Earth to Mars can only be attempted when the planets are in specific positions, the next launch date will not be until between August and October 2022.

Who else is interested in Mars?

Technology entrepreneur Elon Musk is a notable party also keen to reach Mars and even hopes to live there himself one day.

His firm, SpaceX, has been working closely with Nasa, recently managing to take two astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on behalf of the agency.

But the 49-year-old has his eyes set on the Red Planet, where he dreams of establishing a self-sustaining city, complete with iron foundries and even pizzerias.

In 2017, Mr Musk said he hoped to send unmanned spacecraft to Mars by 2022, followed by the first crewed flight in 2024.

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The race to Mars: Who is blasting off to the Red Planet and why? - The Irish News

On Monday the United Arab Emirates launched a research mission to Mars, intent on studying the planets atmosphere and climate. China launched a Mars orbiter and probe on Thursday. And next week, the United States will launch its most sophisticated Mars rover ever, Perseverance. Likewise, Japan plans a mission to the Red Planet in 2024. And the U.S. intends to put humans on Mars by the mid-2030s. Russia is on the quest, too. Is this a new space race?

Chris Goyne, a University of Virginia professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, is training students who will play roles in engineering humanitys future on the fourth planet from the sun.

Here, he discusses Mars exploration for readers of UVA Today.

Q. Why is there so much international interest in visiting Mars? Is it because technological advancements are such that any advanced nation can get in the game?

A. Astronomically speaking, Mars is relatively close to Earth; sometimes as close as 34 million miles away. When you live next door to someone, you usually want to get to know them. I guess its a little bit like that with Mars, since it is Earths neighbor.

There is a lot of activity in terms of launching missions to Mars this year because, to shorten the trip and use less fuel, its best to wait until Earth and Mars are best aligned. This happens every two years, so many nations are launching right now.

In terms of technological advances, electronics are constantly getting smaller and computers are becoming more powerful, so nations can do more science with smaller spacecraft, and the smaller size lowers the mission cost.

Q. Is this the making of a new space race?

A. There is definitely national pride at stake in the exploration of Mars. Many of the current robotic missions to Mars are paving the way for human exploration. It will be a significant achievement to land humans on Mars, and from a technical perspective, the feat will surpass landing people on the moon.

There will definitely be some bragging rights, and therefore I think countries have an eye on each other.

Q. Do you expect findings to be shared between nations? Would we do better with more collaboration and less competition?

A. At the end of the day, missions to Mars are scientific endeavors and they are focused on learning more about our solar system. Historically, we have done a good job with international exchange of scientific data, particularly when it is not related to defense. Many people would like to see more collaboration in space exploration.

My hope is that, rather than Mars exploration be a race, we can use the International Space Station as a model and one day develop an international human Mars mission. A crewed Mars mission will be expensive, and so international cooperation would be a way to share the cost.

Q. Do you think evidence of past life on Mars will be discovered? Is it discoverable with rovers and eventually helicopters, considering the vastness of the Martian surface and subsurface?

A. Mars may once have been a warm and wet place, but it is now cold and dry. So, the planet was once more like Earth. We know that life can exist in very extreme places on Earth. Outside of Earth, Mars is the most likely planet in our solar system to have harbored life in the past.

If life did exist there, we will find out. Mars spacecraft and rovers have very sophisticated instruments for detecting the traces of life. My hunch is that it is only a matter of time before we find something.

Q. Considering the ever-increasing capabilities of robots for exploration, does it make sense to send humans to Mars?

A. Robots are quickly becoming more and more sophisticated, so one could argue that we dont need to send humans to Mars to learn about the planet. But robots dont capture our imagination like other humans do. We want to ask someone, What was it like to travel to Mars? and What did you feel while you were there? Robots cant answer these questions.

Beyond the emotional aspect, humans are better problem-solvers than robots. We do a much better job when things break or dont go as planned.

Q. Is UVA doing anything in this realm, such as student training?

A. UVA has a highly ranked aerospace engineering program that includes training in astronautics and spacecraft design.It is very exciting to think that some of our current students could be the few people to walk on Mars.

Human missions to Mars are expected to take place in the mid-2030s. Many people enter the NASA astronaut corps in their mid-to-late 30s and retire by 50. This means that some of our current students and recent alumni are in the right age range to be eligible for a crewed mission to Mars. UVA has some of the best students in the world and our engineering program will prepare them well to be a Martian astronaut.

To any of my current students: Can I tag along?

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Q&A: The World is Going to Mars. An Aerospace Engineer Explains - University of Virginia

Though many Mars products are eaten, the company has developed significant pathways to interact with ... [+] customers digitally.

Sandeep Dadlani is the Chief Digital Officer of Mars, a post he has held for a bit more than three years. As he noted in a recent conversation I had with him, his mandate is to leverage technology, data, analytics and new digital experiences to help Mars achieve its purpose and its ambition faster. He noted, We call it 100X or 100 times faster.

This is a remarkably aggressive goal. By way of example, he noted that the thrust of this will be accomplished by making the enterprise more digitally savvy, by creating new business models and by driving synergies in the companys technology platforms. He indicated there are two teams and added automation that are important to bring these to life.

First is a team called User Centricity. It is a small team that helps the company engage consumers better to drive new insights, which then drive the companys offerings, products and business model in new directions.

The second team focuses on data and analytics. Over the last three years, we set up some great data lakes, infrastructures, hired data scientists, created a vendor ecosystem now that has hundreds of petabytes of data, said Dadlani. Now, we are in a position move forward in the data and analytics journey meaningfully.

Automation has also been critical. Dadlani noted, To take away menial work from [employees] jobs, then to provide them more meaningful work, automation became an important area to be good at.

Collectively, these three pillars make up what Mars refers to as its Digital Engine. The magic is in the combination. The Digital Engine enables Mars to find the problem with the consumer, solve it using analytics and data, then once [we] find the solution, scale the solution using automation, said Dadlani. Over the last three years, his team has tracked over 500 sprints using the Digital Engine. Though he underscores that the team is still in the early stages, the company has shown greater agility, and the pace of innovation and change is picking up toward the 100X goal.

User Centricity has become a movement of sorts within the company that Dadlani believes will be a catalyst for even greater progress. The User Centricity team has worked with every segment of the business from Mars Petcare to the chocolate and gum business, Mars Wrigley, to Mars Food (with brands like Uncle Bens and Dolmio sauces) to the personalized nutrition brand Mars Edge. The team framed the problems each business hoped to solve through their plans for the future and reframed them using User Centricity.

In partnership with Mars University, which provides training across the company, Dadlanis team provides modules on topics of growing importance. Machine learning is an interesting example. A course was created for technical associates across the company, but the link for the training was accidentally forwarded to thousands of associates who were not in the traditional technical disciplines that the course was developed for. To my shock, I found many of those associates in Sales, in Supply Chain in other functions eagerly signing up for that training, said Dadlani. Because everybody wanted to learn machine learning, a sense of collective awareness that these skills are becoming more important as we move into the future, regardless of what you are going to grow up to be. That allowed us to create a curriculum around myAnalytics for which level zero is applicable for everybody.

Ultimately, Dadlani believes that the path to realizing the 100X vision is the focus on the consumer. This idea of continuously forcibly dragging the consumer into the conversation; that has driven pace, he said.

I asked Dadlani about the metrics he and the team use to gauge progress. He indicated that they use lagging and leading metrics. The former includes revenue streams and pace at which digital or eCommerce revenue is growing, as well as supply chain costs and throughput. The leading metrics, which he believes are early indicators of whether the company are correctly traveling towards a digital journey, include the number of processes automated and the number of hours freed up due to the changes made.

Though the company has further to go on this journey, the progress has been remarkable so far, and Dadlani believes he is bending the culture just enough to achieve this audacious goal.

Peter Highis President ofMetis Strategy, abusiness and IT advisory firm. His has written two bestselling books, moderates theTechnovationpodcast series, and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow himon Twitter@PeterAHigh.

Original post:

Mars Will Be 100 Times Faster Through Its Digital Engine - Forbes

Mars moves into focus this week as NASA launches a new mission that USC experts say will be key to ascertaining if life ever existed on the planet next door and how humans might travel there.

The long-awaited launch of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover is slated for 4:50 a.m. PDT on July 30. The mission, the latest in a series of U.S. and global endeavors spanning five decades, will achieve the most intimate understanding yet of Mars potential to host past and future life. China, Japan and the United Arab Emirates participated in launches of other Mars probes this month, the best travel window afforded in two years.

Going to Mars will be an international effort as we divvy up the work and go as a species, the human race, said Kenneth Phillips, an adjunct professor of physics and astronomy at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and curator of aerospace science at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. This is a continuing adventure, and its getting more and more exciting. Were scratching way below the surface on Mars now.

To learn more, watch scientists and engineers from USC and the California Science Center for the Countdown to Mars broadcast on USCs Facebook page. Panelists included former astronaut Garrett Reisman, astrobiology pioneer Kenneth Nealson and former NASA engineer Anita Sengupta.

Sengupta is an associate professor of astronautics at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and a former engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. An expert in spacecraft design, she was responsible for the supersonic parachute system of the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars in 2012.

Space agencies around the world are working together toward the goal of sending people to Mars. I think it will happen in my lifetime if we work together, she said. It takes a global village of explorers to share costs and leverage engineering expertise.

The rocket ship carries a robot rover, Perseverance, which is an ATV with a mobile laboratory accompanied by a helicopter companion, Ingenuity. The rover will land in a big crater once filled with water to look for signs of microbes. It will drill into the dirt, cache samples and leave them for pickup by a later mission. The Perseverance rover is a 1-ton, nuclear-powered mobile laboratory that operates on 100 watts of energy comparable to an indoor light bulb, said Madhu Thangavelu, professor of astronautical engineering at USC Viterbi and the USC School of Architecture.

Its the holy grail for scientists to know if we are the exception or if the universe is teeming with life.

Madhu Thangavelu

For the first time, we will be looking closely at the Martian surface. My hope for this mission is that we learn if there is or ever was life on Mars. Its the holy grail for scientists to know if we are the exception or if the universe is teeming with life, Thangavelu said. Hes an expert in the design of complex space projects, including space stations and exploratory missions.

Mars is particularly inhospitable to life today as it has no breathable atmosphere, temperature extremes and lethal radiation, Phillips said. But conditions were different in the past.

Mars was once a wet planet with water flowing across its surface, and the Perseverance rover is headed to a place called Jezero crater that is rich in clay and alluvium. Itll poke around, checking for signatures of microorganisms and ancient life.

Astrobiology is core to this mission. I would bet theres no life on the surface of Mars today its an extremely hostile environment but theres excitement that were going to find evidence whether there ever was life there in the past, said Nealson, emeritus professor of Earth sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He is an expert in microbial life in extreme environments and is a member of the science team for the 2020 Mars mission.

Another goal is to make ready for the next big step: sending a manned spacecraft to Mars. The Perseverance rover will conduct an experiment called MOXIE in an attempt to convert carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere to oxygen. Scientists say thats an important steppingstone to putting humans on Mars.

Travel to Mars is exceedingly difficult. Humans have only been as far as the moon, a mere 240,000 miles, but the average distance to Mars is about 140 million miles and takes about eight months.

And landing on Mars is tricky. For the landing craft, the deceleration forces are more than 10 times Earths gravity, and the entry vehicle exterior will exceed 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The vehicle decelerates from about 13,000 miles per hour to less than 1 mile per hour in less than 7 minutes, Sengupta explained.

Clearly, its going to take a long time before an astronaut can make the journey. A manned mission to Mars will require a worldwide commitment of resources as well as the energy and brilliance of the next generation of young people.

For students and young people, the Mars mission is an adventure thats getting more exciting as we inch our way farther into the solar system with the goal to put boots on the ground on another planet, Phillips said. We need to sustain that work, and this is a moment to capture imaginations so that highly motivated young people around the world commit to the adventure, pick up the baton and carry it forward.

More stories about: Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Astronomy, Earth Sciences

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Was there life on Mars? USC experts explore the upcoming NASA mission - USC News

Future spacecrafts bound for the moon or beyond will benefit from high-powered computer simulations underway at the University of Michigan that model the particulate mayhem set in motion by rocket thruster-powered landings.

During descent, exhaust plumes fluidize surface soil and dust, forming craters and buffeting the lander with coarse, abrasive particles. This action presents a host of variables that can jeopardize a landing. Our current understanding of those millions of interactions is based on data that is, in some cases, 40 to 50 years old.

Jesse Capecelatro is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan

Much of the available data used in the design stage, including for the upcoming Mars 2020 mission, is based on Apollo-era data, said Jesse Capecelatro, U-M assistant professor of mechanical engineering.

Landing-relevant data is very difficult to generate because you cant just run an experiment on Earth. Existing mathematical models break down in these more extreme conditions when particles approach supersonic speeds. Our group is developing new numerical algorithms that enable such simulations.

Capecelatro leads a team developing physics-based models that can be incorporated into codes used by NASA to help predict what will happen when a spacecraft attempts to land millions of miles from home.

A simulation of a spacecraft descent and plume-induced surface cratering using the Gas-Granular Flow Solver. Image credit: Manuel Gale, CFD Research Corporation

He specializes in messy turbulent flows and simulating the behavior of fluids made of two phases of matterin this case solid particles suspended in a gas.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral on July 30 and land on Feb. 18, 2021.

What we know and why its not enough

Apollo-era landings showed that disturbed surface material can spread up to half a mile, posing hazards not only on the lander itself but for neighboring vehicles or landing sites. Despite advances made in the years since, landings remain fraught with potential hazards.

Craters formed during InSight landing. Image credit: NASA/JPL

Eight years ago, a wind sensor on the Curiosity rover was damaged during its Mars landing. And in April 2019, Israels SpaceIL lander, Beresheet, was minutes from touchdown on the moon when communications failed and the craft crashed.

As NASA moves toward new crewed missions under the Artemis Program, this work becomes more vital. Not only do humans onboard raise the stakes, they mean larger payloads and, subsequently, stronger exhaust plumes interacting with the planets surface.

Toward advanced physics-based predictive models

Much of the work is performed on Great Lakes, U-Ms newest high-performance computing cluster. That allows the research team to partition the problem over hundreds, and even thousands, of processors simultaneously. Therefore, each processor does a portion of the work and only needs to store a small fraction of the total data.

Simulation showing shock waves (black/white) and wakes (color) past solid particles in a fluid flow. Image credit: Capecelatro Research Group, Michigan Engineering

But even the most powerful computers in the world right now can only resolve so many of these interactions. To go deeper, Capecelatro uses modelsbest guesses based on all available datato push the simulations further. The goal is to provide a framework NASA can use to better predict how different designs will impact the ground and the landing, and adjust.

The largest supercomputers today can maybe handle a thousand particles where we directly capture all of the flow physics, Capecelatro said. So doing a full, square-kilometer landing site is out of the question.

Our simulations provide the fundamental insight on the flow physics needed to develop improved mathematical models that their codes need to simulate a full-scale landing event.

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Sticking the landing on Mars: High-powered computing aims to reduce guesswork - University of Michigan News

Northern Light Continuing Care copy

The Aroostook Health Center/Northern LIght Continuing Care in Mars Hill. (David Marino Jr.)

The Aroostook Health Center/Northern LIght Continuing Care in Mars Hill. (David Marino Jr.)

Nearly two weeks after an employee at the Aroostook Health Center continuing care nursing home tested positive for COVID-19, tests of 200 employees and residents have come back negative.

MARS HILL, Maine Nearly two weeks after an employee at the Aroostook Health Center continuing care nursing home tested positive for COVID-19, Northern Light A.R. Gould Hospital has announced that the second set of tests of 200 employees and residents have come back negative.

That positive test was the first confirmed COVID-19 case in the Presque Isle area. The employee interacted with several staff members and residents July 8-11 during which they showed no signs of the virus. The employee, whose name has not been released, tested positive for the virus on July 12, shortly after showing symptoms during a COVID-19 screening at the facility.

Nursing homes and other group homes have been some of the hardest hit facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, disaster seems to be averted in Mars Hill. Now that fears of spread are gone, the nursing home has gone back to its standard procedures, including accepting new patients and discharging residents who want to leave.

Hospital leadership attributed the lack of cases to their staff following mask and hygiene rules that health experts have long advocated to fight the spread of the virus in medical settings.

This is truly a testament to the importance of hand hygiene, masking and the appropriate use ofother personal protective equipment as needed, said Jay Reynolds, a senior physicianexecutive at Northern Light A.R. Gould. It also shows that the many safety protocols we have in place are successful for protecting our residents, patients, and staff.

Thank you for reading your 4 free articles this month. To continue reading, and support local, rural journalism, please subscribe.

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200 test negative after employee at Mars Hill nursing home confirmed to have COVID-19 - The County

NASA's Mars 2020 rover will store rock and soil samples in sealed tubes on the planet's surface for ... [+] future missions to retrieve, as seen in this illustration.

NASAs most complex Mars rover so far will this week launch into space and begin its seven-month journey to the Red Planet.

Strapped to the belly of the Perseverance rover will be Ingenuity, a 1.8kg demonstration helicopter thats getting a lot of headlines.

However, whats being overlooked is Perseverances core mission, which is about as exciting as it could beits going to search for traces of ancient life on Mars.

Then, incredibly, its going to prepare samples to be brought back to Earth by astronauts or robotic probes in the 2030s.

Perseverance will thus become the first planetary mission to collect and cache Martian rock core and dust samples.

Its being played-down, but Perseverance could be instrumental in achieving something quite remarkablethe first evidence of the existence of life beyond Earth.

Perseverance sets a new bar for our ambitions at Mars, said Lori Glaze, planetary science director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. We will get closer than ever before to answering some of sciences longest-standing questions about the Red Planet, including whether life ever arose there.

Heres everything you need to know about the Perseverance rover, from where it will land to what it will do on Mars.

Illustration of NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover studying a Mars rock outcrop (not to scale).

Part of NASAs Mars 2020 mission, Perseverance will be the largest, heaviest, most sophisticatedrover ever sent to the Red Planet. Thats because verifying ancient microscopic life on Mars carries an enormous burden of proof.

Its mission will be to analyze rock and sediment samples to see if Mars may have had conditions for microorganisms to thrive. It will drill a few centimeters into Mars and take core samples, then put the most promising into containers. It will then leave them on the Martian surface to be later collected by a human mission in the early 2030s.

Perseverances SuperCam spectrometer will make a contactless geochemistry analysis of Martian rocks and soil by using a pulsed laser.

However, only laboratories back on Earth would be able to prove definitively that Perseverance has found evidence of past life on Mars.

Perseverance is scheduled to launch on Thursday, July 30, 2020 at 11:50 UTC/07:50 EDT/12:50 BST/13:50 CEST on board an Atlas V launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

This map of the Red Planet shows Jezero Crater, where NASA's Mars 2020 rover is scheduled to land ... [+] in February 2021. Also included are the locations where all of NASA's other successful Mars missions touched down.

Perseverance is due to land on the red planet on February 18, 2021. It will land in a nearly four billion-year-old river delta in Mars 28 miles/45 kilometers-wide Jezero Crater.

Jezero Crater is on the western side of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator.

NASAs Perseverance rover is designed for a mission duration of one Mars year. Thats about two Earth years, though in practice its expected to last much longer than that.

Jezero Crater on Mars, the landing site for NASA's Mars 2020 mission. It was taken by instruments on ... [+] NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Its selection as the landing site is no accident; this region contains some of the oldest and scientifically most interesting landscapes on Mars. Its thought likely that Jezero Crater was home to a lake as large as Lake Tahoe more than 3.5 billion years ago.

Theres no water there todayand nor is there much of an atmosphere on Marsbut its possible that ancient rivers flowing in and out of Jezero Crater, carrying organic molecules and possibly even microorganisms.The region is known to be home to clay, which could contain preserved traces of life.

The science team has had many discussions internally and externally about where the next Mars rover should go, said Ken Farley, the missions project scientist, based at Caltech in Pasadena. We ultimately chose Jezero Crater because it is such a promising location for finding organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life.

Does the ancient river delta contain preserved evidence of ancient microbial life? If Perseverance succeeds in its mission it will go down in historyand the hunt for more life beyond Earth can begin.

We stand at the threshold of another monumental moment in exploration: sample collection at Mars, said NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine in June as the coronoavirus-hit preparations for Perseverance ramped-up. Future generations may well recognize the women and men of Perseverancenot only for what they will achieve 100 million miles from home, but for what they were able to accomplish on this world on the road to launch.

However, you spin it, theres no doubt that the launch of Perseverance could be a monumental moment in space exploration.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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Was There Life On Mars? NASAs $2 Billion Bot Launches This Week On Unique Sample Return Mission - Forbes

A small piece of rock will be hurled into space this week on one of the strangest interplanetary voyages ever attempted. A tiny piece of Martian basalt the size of a 10p coin will be launched on board a US robot probe on Thursday and propelled towards the red planet on a seven-month journey to its home world.

This extraordinary odyssey, the interplanetary equivalent of sending coals to Newcastle, will form a key part of Nasas forthcoming Mars 2020 expedition. Space engineers say the rock which has been donated by the Natural History Museum in London will be used to calibrate detectors on board the robot rover Perseverance after it lands and begins its search for signs of past life on the planet.

Some of the Martian meteorites we have are very fragile, but we chose this one specifically because its as tough as old boots

When you turn on instruments and begin to tune them up before using them for research, you calibrate them on materials that are going to be like the unknown substances you are about to study. So what better for studying rocks on Mars than a lump that originated there? said Professor Caroline Smith, the Natural History Museums curator of meteorites.

Scientists were confident that the rock they were returning to Mars originated on the planet, added Smith, who is also a member of the Mars 2020 science team. Tiny bubbles of gas trapped inside that meteorite have exactly the same composition as the atmosphere of Mars, so we know our rock came from there.

It is thought that the Martian meteorite was created when an asteroid or comet plunged into the planet about 600,000 to 700,000 years ago, spraying debris into space. One of those pieces of rubble swept across the solar system and eventually crashed on to Earth. That meteorite now known as SAU 008 was discovered in Oman in 1999 and has been in the care of the Natural History Museum since then.

Among the instruments fitted to the Perseverance rover is a high-precision laser called Sherloc, which will be used to decipher the chemical composition of rocks and determine if they might contain organic materials that indicate life once existed or still exists on Mars. The inclusion of a piece of SAU 008 is intended to ensure this is done with maximum accuracy.

The piece of rock we are sending was specifically chosen because it is the right material in terms of chemistry, but also it is a very tough rock, added Smith. Some of the Martian meteorites we have are very fragile. This meteorite is as tough as old boots.

Once Perseverance has selected the most promising rocks it can find, it will dump them in caches on the Martian surface. These will then be retrieved by subsequent robot missions and blasted into space towards Earth for analysis.

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Rock from Mars heads home after 600,000 years on Earth - The Guardian

Artistic illustration of Dr. Rosalind Franklin by artist Tami Wicinas. Credit: Tami Wicinas

If Rosalind Franklin had had a birthday wish, she probably never would have dreamed of having her name roving on Mars.

As the world celebrates the 100th anniversary of the prominent scientist behind the discovery of the structure of DNA tomorrow, the ExoMars rover named after her prepares to leave her symbolic footprint on the Red Planet.

Rosalind Franklin with a microscope in 1955. Rosalind Elsie Franklin was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer who contributed to unraveling the double helix structure of our DNA. She also made enduring contributions to the study of coal, carbon, and graphite. Credit: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

The robotic explorer will drill down to two meters into the Martian surface to sample the soil, analyze its composition and search for evidence of life buried underground. The mission is set for launch in 2022.

Rosalind Franklin was a leading crystallographer, who looked into how atoms are arranged. She produced the best double helix image of DNA strands with X-rays, and that transformed our world, leading to the biggest advance in biology in the past century DNA technology, says Jim Naismith, director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, a national research center for life sciences in the UK.

She was not an undiscovered gem in her time, but a really influential scientist for her pioneering work in viruses. We regard her as the first structural biologist of viruses, adds Jim.

The scientists working to send ESAs Rosalind Franklin rover to Mars do not expect to find either DNA or viruses on our neighboring planet. DNA molecules and viruses are probably too fragile to last for four billion years on the ground, explains Jorge Vago, ESAs ExoMars project scientist.

But we hope that our rover will help write a new page in Mars exploration by allowing us to study organic molecules at depth, and perhaps find some suggestive traces of past life, says Jorge.

Rosalind Franklins legacy lives on a hundred years after her birth on planet Earth. Born on 25 July 1920, her family is touched by the worldwide recognition of her scientific work.

Many people have this vision of a solitary woman who was robbed of a Nobel Prize and was never acknowledged for helping discover the structure of the DNA helix, says her niece, also named Rosalind Franklin in her memory.

Rosalind meets Rosalind. After learning that the rover had been named in honor of her aunt the result of a public competition led by the UK Space Agency and also sharing the same name, Rosalind Franklin reached out to ESA, curious to learn more about the mission. Last month, she visited ESAs technical center in the Netherlands and is pictured here meeting the 1:1 scale model of the Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover for the first time. Credit: ESAG. Porter

She is committed to fighting off that conflictive image and representing her legacy bringing her out as a woman with a place in history. She inspires me to think that all of us, as individuals, have the power to make a difference.

The technical team behind the ExoMars spacecraft involves companies across more than 20 countries. This map highlights in red ESA Member and Cooperating States within Europe that are contributing to ExoMars. Participating countries outside Europe are listed at bottom right. Credit: ESAS. Poletti

Dr. Franklin was on a trip to America when she had difficulty fastening her skirt over her swollen stomach the first sign of an advanced ovarian cancer. She died two years later at 37 years old, working almost to the very end of her life.

A series of online talks and events, including a commemorative coin, is underway around the globe to celebrate the centenary of this woman of integrity who went after scientific discovery for the betterment of humankind, as her niece described her from her home in California, US.

Rosalind believes her aunt would have loved the ExoMars team spirit. The work of ESA engineers on the rover struck me they really do it for the results, not for themselves. This is what Rosalind Franklin was all about: commitment and dedication to science, she said after a visit to ESAs technical center in the Netherlands last year.

The scientist never conceived science as a race for awards.

As Mars exploration prepares for an international reawakening this year, the ExoMars mission that would have marked Dr Franklins centenary had to be postponed because tests to make all components of the spacecraft ready for the Mars adventure needed more time to complete.

On top of that, the coronavirus pandemic has halted the completion of several tests and verifications since March 2020.

ExoMars rover during environmental tests. Credit: Airbus

The fitness of the Rosalind Franklin rover to launch to the Red Planet in 2022 is currently being assessed during the qualification and acceptance review by ESA and dozens of industrial partners.

The rover successfully proved it can endure martian conditions during the environmental test campaign completed earlier this year in Toulouse, France.

The flight model awaits a more robust set of solar panels at Thales Alenia Space in Turin, Italy. In the same city is a full-scale model of Rosalind Franklin.

A team of engineers will simulate the roaming of the laboratory on wheels from the Rover Operations Control Centre (ROCC) at ALTEC, right next to one of Europes largest Mars yards.

While the ExoMars rover tunes up its gear and software for the challenges ahead, parachute tests are expected to resume in October in Oregon, US.

Further tests on the electrical and mechanical elements of the spacecraft will take place in Cannes, France, also in the autumn.

The ExoMars program is a joint endeavor between the Roscosmos State Corporation and ESA. Apart from the 2022 mission, it includes the Trace Gas Orbiter launched in 2016. The TGO is already both delivering important scientific results obtained by its own Russian and European science instruments and relaying data from NASAs Curiosity Mars rover and InSight lander. The module will also relay the data from the ExoMars 2022 mission once it arrives at Mars.

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From Earth to Mars: Rosalind Franklins Century of Science - SciTechDaily

Despite a global pandemic and some technical delays, NASAs 2020 Mars Rover the aptly named Perseverance is scheduled to launch this summer (currently slated for July 30) on a groundbreaking endeavor. Traveling from Earth to Mars is best done when the planets orbit nearest one another, providing only a narrow window of opportunity (rover pun intended) between mid-July and mid-August to start the journey. Its success will be the opening salvo in an ambitious series of missions designed to bring samples of Martian crust to Earth for the first time for study.

Go to the web site to view the video.

Kurt Hickman

NASAs 2020 Mars Rover the aptly named Perseverance is scheduled to launch this summer on a groundbreaking endeavor.

Rovers are the closest we can get to having a geologist on Mars at the moment, so any new rover data is really valuable, said Mathieu Laptre, an assistant professor of geological science at Stanfords School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth) who researches the geological processes that shape planetary surfaces. Every time we have a rover like this, a wave of discoveries follows. Its a very exciting time.

Stanford scholars have a long history of contributing to NASAs space missions including the design of technologies sent into space, guidance and control of spacecraft. That tradition continues with this latest Mars mission. For example, Marco Pavone, a former research technologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), helped develop algorithms to optimize the selection of landing spots on Mars in the case of Perseverance, an ancient meteorite impact site known as the Jezero Crater, or the Jezero Delta.

Even though NASA has an impressive track record of landing rovers on Mars, Pavone cautions against underestimating the adventure ahead. Landing on Mars is a tremendous challenge, said Pavone, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and director of Stanfords Autonomous Systems Laboratory. Even if we did it successfully in the past, it is certainly not a done deal.

Perseverance is the fifth Mars rover from NASA, following Curiosity, Opportunity, Spirit, and the original Mars rover, Sojourner, named for civil rights activist Sojourner Truth. That first trailblazing rover arrived on Mars in 1997 equipped with few instruments and only able to venture roughly 40 feet from its lander, Pathfinder. But the key requirement to demonstrate mobility on another planet was met, said Scott Hubbard, an adjunct professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford; Hubbard was the first Mars program director at NASA Headquarters, where he earned the nickname of Mars Czar.

Each rover since Sojourner has been sent to Mars with more sophisticated instruments, expanded capabilities and more ambitious goals. Curiosity directly preceded Perseverance and has the most in common with it, including size which is roughly that of a small SUV. To save money, the Perseverance rover was required to be a near duplicate of Curiosity wherever possible, even using leftover parts, said Hubbard, who also authored Exploring Mars: Chronicles from a Decade of Discovery.

Perseverance will pick up where Curiosity left off. After landing in February 2021, the rover will roam the planet for at least one Mars year, which is roughly equal to two Earth years. Its tool suite includes a novel drilling and storage mechanism to extract and cache roughly 30 rock samples. This is the rovers most critical function, according to Hubbard, because the plan is to retrieve those samples with a future fetch rover, shoot them into Martian orbit and eventually return them to Earth, where they will be analyzed for fingerprints of life. Getting those samples back to Earth has been the holy grail of Mars science for almost 50 years, Hubbard said.

Once the Martian rocks are on Earth, they will be quarantined for safety, and then subjected to a battery of tests and measurements that cannot be performed on Mars itself. With Curiosity, we are looking for habitable environments and organic molecules, said Laptre. But without bringing the samples back to Earth, it is really difficult to tell for sure if what we found was biogenic formed by something that was alive or abiogenic, meaning the organic molecules are not related in any way to life.

Its been a long road to reach this point. When the Mars Exploration Program was being revived by Hubbards team in the early 2000s after two mission failures, he believed the scientific, engineering and technology requirements of a sample return mission were too daunting to tackle. Twenty years later, the suite of missions, orbiters and rovers that came out of our re-planning effort have yielded a wealth of knowledge about the Red Planet, said Hubbard, including the ability to now select the all-important site for a sample return.

Real estate agents will tell you that the value of a property has more to do with location than anything else; a landing site is not much different. Pavone describes the process of selecting the site as finding the sweet spot on the planets surface that strikes a balance between scientific potential and risk to the rover.

This specific landing site was chosen because of its promise in terms of astrobiological potential, said Laptre. In my opinion, it was very well chosen. Whether we find evidence for ancient life or not, I am convinced that we will learn a lot about the ancient environment on Mars.

Jezero Crater was once a lake formed by an ancient river filling a meteor impact crater. It makes for a great place to look for evidence of life, said Laptre, because, like the Nile or the Mississippi, this river likely picked up sediments and any forms of life that may have existed along its course and concentrated them in one place.

The Jezero location is also older than previous rover landing sites somewhere around 3.7 billion years, which is when scientists believe Mars may have been habitable. Any life on Mars at the time would consist of simple unicellular organisms like microbes. So scientists must look for biomarkers pieces of organic molecules or chemical indicators that these living things could have left behind in the rocky surface, rather than bones or fossils.

Another advantage of this site is that it could allow scientists to test the hypothesis that ancient organisms on Mars lived in the subsurface. This crater punctured through the Martian surface to expose ancient rocks, said Janice Bishop, a senior research scientist for the SETI Institute and a Stanford alumnus. Bishop utilizes remote sensing to study rocks on the surface of the Red Planet to gain insights about Mars watery past, so this mission is of particular interest as the selected landing site features an ancient river delta. Perseverance is expected to reveal secrets about the early history of water on Mars, Bishop added.

Like Mars, Earth was devoid of large organisms for most of its history, such that its geological processes were largely unaffected by macroscopic life. However, Earths surface is constantly recycled through the continual shifting of continent-sized plates; this process is known as plate tectonics and does not occur on Mars. A lot of us are super excited about how this information could improve our understanding of Earth before there was life, said Laptre. I will definitely use the mission data in my research program, and have PhD students combine rover and orbiter data to answer questions about the geologic history of Mars.

Information gleaned from the ancient river that once emptied into Jezero crater could change how scientists think about how rivers form, and tie into global carbon cycles and climate not only on Mars but also Earth and other planets.

Perseverance will be breaking new technological ground as well on this mission. Continuing in the tradition of using each Mars mission as a technology test-bed for new future capabilities, the rover will bring along a very small, four-pound helicopter, said Hubbard. Dubbed Ingenuity, the copter will be the first flying vehicle on another planet and will have to navigate the frigid nights and dust-filled skies of Mars while operating in an atmosphere that is 100 times thinner than Earths.

Sojourner was itself a technology demonstration to prove wheeled mobility on Mars, said Pavone. Who knows what well be able to do another 20 years down the road once we prove we can fly helicopters on Mars?

Nineteen high-resolution cameras on the 2020 rover should provide unprecedented images of the Martian surface, as well as the landing process. Perseverance is also equipped with an instrument called Moxie, which will test the potential of converting Mars thin atmosphere into oxygen for future human explorers.

If this were a perfect world, humans will be arriving on Mars in 2033, said Hubbard. This seems to be far in the future, but it is literally around the corner in space mission terms.

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Perseverance will seek signs of life on Mars | Stanford News - Stanford University News

The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover will seek signs of ancient life and collect rock and soil samples for possible return to Earth during a mission which will last at least one Mars year which is about 687 Earth days. Photo Courtesy LANL

Roger Wiens, a Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, is the principal investigator for the SuperCam project. Photo Courtesy LANL

Scientists work on the SuperCam instrument attached to the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover which launches from Cape Canaveral later this month. Photo Courtesy LANL

BY MAIRE ONEILLmaire@losalamosreporter.com

The SuperCam instrument designed, built and tested at Los Alamos National Laboratory is ready to leave Earth and travel to Mars with the Mars 2020 Perseverance Mission later this month and land there in February 2021. Roger Wiens, the principal investigator for the SuperCam project, chatted with the Los Alamos Reporter about the role Los Alamos National Laboratory is playing in the mission.

SuperCam is a follow-on to ChemCam, which is currently working on Mars and has been operated from Los Alamos every other week from since 2012, Wiens said. ChemCam, a suite of remote sensing instruments, went to Mars on the car-sized Curiosity rover that landed there on Aug. 6, 2012 to investigate the Martian climate and geology and assess whether Gale crater has ever had environmental conditions to support microbial life.

SuperCam is a significant step up from ChemCam. They look a lot alike and SuperCam carries out the same chemical analyses that ChemCam does. SuperCam also takes images like ChemCam but there was a desire by the science community to study not just the chemistry of the rocks and soils within 25 feet of the rover, but to also understand the mineralogy the mineral makeup of these rocks, Wiens said. Those are two very complementary pieces of information and so we heard them, and we added not one, but two mineralogy techniques into the instrument package and we succeeded in making SuperCam almost exactly the same size and weight as the original ChemCam.

The chemistry technique used by both ChemCam and SuperCam is laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) where the laser zaps the rocks or soil and makes a little plasma. From that little burst of light which is captured by a small telescope on the mast of the rover, spectrometers can determine the elemental composition of the sample as well as physical properties like hardness.

We are using the laser in SuperCams case in two different ways. Beyond the LIBS technique that were still using, we now have a way to change the wavelength or the color of the laser. Instead of infrared, we can use a green beam, and in that capacity, we can study the mineralogy with a technique that is called Raman spectroscopy, Wiens said. We use this Raman spectroscopy to tell us not just if the rocks have carbon but if they are actually a carbonate mineral, like limestone or dolomite for example, or if they have sulphur its not just that they have sulphur, but whether its gypsum the kind of mineral that makes up White Sands in Southern New Mexico. That tells us a lot more about how the rocks were formed and what the climate was like when the sediments were laid down and when the rocks solidified.

He said besides the Raman spectroscopy for mineralogy, infrared spectroscopy is used taking the sunlight that is reflected off the rock and dispersing it into the spectrum of infrared colors.

It turns out that there are some infrared absorption bands that occur when the light is reflected off the rock if there are carbonate minerals in the rock or if there are clay minerals or other water-bearing minerals, Wiens said.

Wiens noted that the projects partners at the French Space Agency wanted to put a microphone on board SuperCam but NASA didnt initially accept that proposal for it.

There has to be a really strong scientific justification for everything that goes to Mars, and we had some ideas. There was a student in France who was trying to understand the sound of the laser beam zapping the rock. We had used the zapping sound a little bit to tune the focus of our telescope that projects the laser beam. It turns out the sound can tell you if that laser beam is well in focus or not. Its much louder when its in focus and has a nicer zapping sound. It also turns out that if you have a hard rock, and you shoot it a bunch of times, its going to sound about the same every time you shoot it, but if you have a soft rock, the laser beam starts to burrow in and the sound starts to change as you create a cavity or pit from the laser beam, he said.

This means that scientists can tell without ever driving up to a rock whether its hard or soft by shooting the laser at it and listening to the change in sound.

Then we went back to NASA and said, Hey, we really think this is useful! So they accepted the idea that we would add the microphone and we did. So we will get to listen to whatever one hears on Mars, which will probably mostly be the wind and perhaps dust devils, the sounds of the rover, and that of the laser plasmas. Well find outmaybe there are other things we can listen to, Wiens said.

LANL also has a fairly significant part in one other instrument on the rover, known as SHERLOC the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals instrument which is mounted on the rovers robotic arm.

SHERLOC is a long acronym, but its a nice acronym, because you can imagine sleuthing for organic materials on Mars, which is what this instrument is going to do. Were happy to be part of that instrument as well, Wiens said.

As with other people this spring, the Mars operations teams had to find a new way to work during the Covid-19 pandemic. At this point were all operating from our houses. In fact, were sending up commands to ChemCam from home today (Wednesday, July 22).

The Los Alamos team trades off every other week with a team in France to operate ChemCam. That same arrangement will be taking place with SuperCam. Were partnering with the French Space Agency on SuperCams operations too. After the Perseverance rovers landing in February, we will probably be trading off every other week sending commands to SuperCam as well as ChemCam, so that will keep us busy. he said.

Wiens said the two rovers operate robotically because the travel time of signals to Mars is too long up to 20 minutes each way. He said instead of joy-sticking a rover as you would with a drone or some other remotely operated vehicle on earth, it has to be operated robotically.

We send it commands and let it do its thing with those commands until the next day, or sometimes longer. For example, today we are sending up commands to keep the Curiosity rover busy for five days. On Monday our French partners will give it the next set of commands, he said. Its a challenge, because you can imagine trying to drive a rover by sending it a set of commands and then expecting it to drive all on its own. And the same thing with picking targets on Mars for our laser.

Wiens said the rover actually has software that will take its own pictures of the surface of Mars, pick its own targets and then shoot them. The team uses that automatic targeting about one fourth of the time.

That helps if the rover is driven somewhere and we havent got pictures back on earth yet to target ChemCam at that new site. The rover does it for us. We can get our ChemCam data faster that way, he said.

SuperCam, which is often referred to as a Swiss Army Knife of instruments, will leave Earth with the Perseverance rover aboard an Atlas V-541 rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The sensor head which is mounted on the rovers long-necked mast weighs about 12 pounds and the electronics mounted in the rovers body weigh 10.6 pounds.

Wiens holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Minnesota and is a Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Toulouse, France and was knighted by the French government for his work in forging strong ties between the French and American scientific communities and for inspiring many young, ambitious earthlings. He is the author of Red Rover: Inside the Story of Robotic Space Exploration from Genesis to the Mars Rover Curiosity.

Over one hundred experts at Los Alamos National Laboratory were involved in developing and testing SuperCam and SHERLOC for the Perseverance rover. These people included mechanical, electrical, optical, and systems engineers and technicians; chemists, computer scientists, managers, contract specialists, budget analysts, and export specialists.

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SuperCam Designed, Built And Tested At LANL Is Ready To Head To Mars With Perseverance Mission - Los Alamos Reporter

PhotographyScience#Mars#space#technology#video

Although many of us will never step foot on the red planet, a new compilation captured by Mars rovers walks through the rocky, sandy terrain in stunning detail. Throughout the video of 4K imagery, the rovers explore the wide-open plains and candy-colored stretches of the Martian landscape. As the narrator notes, getting actual footage of Mars currently is impossible, as even the most technologically advanced rovers like Curiosity still are limited to extremely slow data-transmission speeds back to Earth. Watch the full compilation on YouTube, check outthis 1.8 billion pixel panorama taken by Curiosity. (via Twister Sifter)

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Tag Along with Mars Rovers as They Explore the Red Planet in a New 4K Video - Colossal

Nasa plans to launch its latest mission to Mars this month, which aims to place the Perseverance rover on the surface of the planet in February 2021.

It is the latest attempt to explore a planet that has loomed large in the popular imagination for centuries. As the planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson, author of The Sirens of Mars,tells Rachel Humphreys, there is a long history of hopes, theories and fictional representations of life on Mars. But so far none has been discovered.

The latest mission will search for habitable conditions on the planets surface and gather rocks for a future mission to bring back to Earth. It is just one of several different Mars missions to launch this month, all with one ultimate question in mind: are we alone in the universe?

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Perseverance: the new mission to Mars | News - The Guardian

Nasa plans to launch its latest mission to Mars this month, which aims to place the Perseverance rover on the surface of the planet in February 2021.

It is the latest attempt to explore a planet that has loomed large in the popular imagination for centuries. As the planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson, author of The Sirens of Mars,tells Rachel Humphreys, there is a long history of hopes, theories and fictional representations of life on Mars. But so far none has been discovered.

The latest mission will search for habitable conditions on the planets surface and gather rocks for a future mission to bring back to Earth. It is just one of several different Mars missions to launch this month, all with one ultimate question in mind: are we alone in the universe?

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The Guardian is editorially independent.And we want to keep our journalism open and accessible to all.But we increasingly need our readers to fund our work.

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Will we ever find life on Mars? | Australia news - The Guardian

(Facebook Photo/NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover)

PHOENIX The name of a teen with Arizona ties who suffers from a rare disorder is headed to Mars.

Alex Yiu, a space enthusiast who turned 15 years old this week, wanted to leave his mark on the Red Planet with some help from his teacher.

She got his name onto the Perseverance Rover and he got a boarding pass, Alexs mom, Caroline Cheung-Yiu told KTAR News 92.3 FM. So, his name will be going on the rover to Mars.

His name will be etched on a microchip and embedded on the rover.

But thats not the only unique thing about the teen.

Yiu has a rare disorder known as NEDAMSS that took more than a decade to diagnose.

NEDAMSS is an acronym for neurodevelopmental disorder with regression, abnormal movements, loss of speech and seizures. This has left him bed-bound and non-verbal.

It was a long road trying to look for a diagnosis through many institutions and hospitals, Cheung-Yiu explained. In the fall of 2018, we got a call from [Alexs] neurologist that we finally got a diagnosis that was given through TGen.

The Translational Genomics Research Institute known as TGen is a Phoenix-based, non-profit research center that helped to find Yius diagnosis through its Center for Rare Childhood Disorders. Cheung-Yiu said they visited the Valley from the familys home in San Diego specifically to help find a diagnosis.

However, space can still put a twinkle in his eyes.

I, almost every day, read to him news about NASA and space, Cheung-Yiu said. Hes very interested and tends to select news more geared towards space and astronomy.

And while the Arizona teen and a new high-tech rover may seem to be separated by light-years, Cheung-Yiu believes they share similar paths.

Its very interesting that the journey and the whole preparation of the Perseverance Rover going to Mars is so fitting, she said.

Our own journey with [Alex], the 12 years [of looking for a diagnosis], has been long but we saw through it and persevered and were able to get a diagnosis.

On Saturday, Yiu will celebrate his birthday with a pre-launch Zoom party. The new rover is set to launch between July 30 and August 15 and will reach Mars sometime in February.

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Mars rover to carry name of teen with rare disorder and Arizona ties - KTAR.com

Australia's biosecurity regime is about to get a timely technological boost from an unlikely alliance.

Some young tech-savvy aerospace engineers have joined forces with one of Australia's largest dairy companies.

They've created the Purple Hive Project, which is aimed at safeguarding Australia's bee and honey industry from invasive and destructive pests.

Number one on the least-wanted list is Varroa destructor, a pinhead-sized, blood-sucking mite that has devastated hives around the globe.

Australia is the only inhabited continent still free of the pest. It's in New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.

"It frightens us to a great degree," said beekeeper Ian Cane. "Varroa mites have a devastating effect on bee health and their ability to pollinate food crops and produce honey around the world."

Mr Cane believes it's inevitable that varroa will reach our shores. So in recent months, he has been eagerly road-testing a high-tech purple device on his beehives in the tall eucalypt forests of Victoria's East Gippsland region.

It's purple because the colour is kind to a bee's sense of sight, and looks like a letterbox attached to the front of a hive.

The entry slot contains sophisticated surveillance equipment.

"It's got two cameras, one top, one bottom," explained co-developer Vignesh Murugan of the Melbourne-based Virmana Tech company.

"As a bee comes through the front slit we monitor the bees, take an image every second and detect whether varroa mite is there."

Individual images of thousands of bees per hive are taken over the course of a day. That's where artificial intelligence comes into play.

"So, we've invented the world's fastest and smallest artificial intelligence that can see like humans," said Dr Shivy Yohanandan, who works for the Australian branch of Xailient, a high-tech firm headquartered in Silicon Valley, California.

"So what's happening here is we've trained AI to count bees and detect hitchhiking varroa mites."

If the mite is detected, an alarm signal can be sent instantly to a device such as a mobile phone.

The inspiration for the Purple Hive owes much to the Red Planet.

In 2018, engineering students Joel Kuperholz and Vignesh Murugan were part of a team from Melbourne's Monash University that won the chance to compete in the University Rover Challenge in Utah, USA. They excelled at their challenge of using robotics to build the first semi-autonomous Mars rover, and late last year the pair formed their own company.

"We found we had a great working relationship, so we decided to take that and apply it to the Australian agriculture sector," said Mr Kuperholz.

"We both wanted to make a difference and help prevent the (varroa) mite getting into Australia."

This varroa identification chart was sent to registered beekeepers throughout Australia in 2012.(Matt Brann: ABC Rural)Bega Cheese Limited's involvement stems from its recent diversification from dairy products into table spreads.

In 2017, it bought the Vegemite brand and peanut butter from Kraft. This month, it launched into processing and selling Australian honey. Aware of the threat posed by pests such as varroa, it sought a high-tech safeguard.

"We identified a need and opportunity to leverage technology and innovation to protect the Australian bee industry," said Bega's Adam McNamara. "To make it easier for the monitoring of this mite."

At present, quarantine inspectors conduct regular physical inspections of so-called 'sentinel beehives' placed at ports and other points of entry to Australia to detect if the mite has arrived.

"The current process for monitoring the Varroa destructor is painstakingly manual," said Adam McNamara of Bega Cheese.

Aris Petratos from the Victorian Apiarists' Association is delighted by the Purple Hive project(Landline: Tim Lee)"To the entry points of Australia, they are the biggest risk areas," said Mr McNamara. "We'd like to establish a mesh network where a Purple Hive can be attached to any beehive around Australia."

Apiarists are excited by the project. Aris Petratos of Victorian Apiarists' Association believes it represents an enormous advance in biosecurity and the ever-present threat of varroa.

"If technology alerts you on your phone, you instantly know there's a problem. You can go out and do something about it," said Mr Patratos. "If it (the pest) is there for a month or a week or two weeks, it may already be too late."

Watch this story on ABC TV's Landline at 12:30pm on Sunday, or on iview.

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Engineers brought together by Mars are now using technology to save Australia's bees from devastating varroa mites - ABC News

Mars is the most explored planet in the solar system other than Earth. With all of our robotic visitors there, weve discovered that it is a world far too dry, cold and irradiated to support the scheming humanoids or tentacled invaders once imagined by science fiction.

But our trips to Mars have opened a window into the deep past of the red planet, when conditions were far more conducive to life.

This summer, NASA will launch its latest rover, Perseverance, on a seventh-month journey to Mars. Like its predecessor, Curiosity, Perseverance will touch down in the remains of an ancient Martian lake bed. What it finds there along with missions launched by China and the United Arab Emirates could help us Earthlings understand what Mars was like as a young planet some four billion years ago, and whether life ever blossomed on its surface.

Its a serene image: A river flowing into an expansive lake that fills a crater basin. Waves lapping at the shoreline; sediment piling into a delta. A lake bed caked with clay.

This is the type of aquatic environment that might support life, and it was once a familiar sight on Mars.

The evidence for the lakes and rivers is incontrovertible, said Ken Farley, project scientist on Perseverance and a geochemist at the California Institute of Technology.

Although Mars was once a wet planet, there is substantial debate about the origins, extent and life span of its long-lost bodies of water.

For instance, early Mars might have been warmed by the gassy belches of active volcanoes, which thickened its atmosphere and caused Martian permafrost to melt. Cataclysmic asteroid impacts might have also unleashed 900-foot mega-tsunamis that flooded the planets terrain. Theres even disputed evidence that an ocean once covered its northern lowlands.

Was it weird, short, transient events, or was there an ocean? Dr. Farley said. I would say theres no consensus. Theres a lot of ideas out there, and we really need a lot more data to sort it out.

One major question concerns the longevity of Mars liquid water. Nobody knows how much time is required for life to emerge on a planet, including on Earth. But the odds of life forming get better the longer that stable bodies of water persist.

During Curiositys eight-year journey across Gale Crater, an ancient lake bed, the rover discovered sediments that suggest water was present for at least a few million years. Curiosity also detected organic compounds, key ingredients for life as we know it.

What weve learned from Curiosity suggests that Mars was habitable, said Dawn Sumner, a planetary geologist at the University of California, Davis, and a member of the Curiosity science team.

Of course, habitable does not necessarily mean inhabited. The surface of Mars is exposed to damaging solar and cosmic radiation, which could have reduced the odds of complex, multicellular life ever forming.

If life did exist on Mars, there would be a strong evolutionary force toward being resistant to radiation, Dr. Sumner said.

There are microbial extremophiles on Earth that can endure intense radiation, often healing their own DNA on the fly. So its not far-fetched to imagine that there might be Martian microbes that could tolerate an onslaught of radiation. Plus, they may have been able to retreat underground if conditions became particularly hostile at the surface.

The big lesson about life, from the revolution of being able to use DNA, is life is able to go everywhere, Dr. Farley said. It is amazing. It will fill every niche it can get itself into, and it will do it in a relatively short period of time.

The bygone oases of Mars are now mirages of a distant past, and modern Mars is a dried-up husk. Earth, in contrast, has been habitable to microbes for most of its life span and has positively burst at the seams with biodiversity for eons. Why did these sibling worlds experience such different outcomes?

As baby planets, Mars and Earth were each swaddled in two protective blankets: a relatively thick atmosphere and a strong magnetic field. Earth has held on to both comforts. Mars has neither.

Mars mysteriously lost its magnetic mojo billions of years ago. With no magnetic sheath to protect it from solar wind, the Martian atmosphere was stripped away over time, though it still maintains a thin shell of its past skies.

These changes have left Mars relatively inert for billions of years, while Earth reinvents itself through tectonic activity, atmospheric shifts and the ingenuity of life.

This is great news for Earthlings, as we need those processes to survive. Yet the sheer deadness of Mars over the past few billion years could make it easier to reconstruct its early history.

Life has been so successful on Earth that its hard to trace back its origin, Dr. Sumner said. On Earth, everything is covered with organic matter from modern life.

One of the really cool and exciting things about Mars is that, because it doesnt have plate tectonics, large parts of its surface have these super-old rocks, she continued. Its a good place to go to try to understand what an early planet would be like.

Robot explorers on Mars have turned up countless insights about the red planet, but they have never found clear-cut signs of creatures currently residing there. Life, at least as we know it on Earth, simply does not seem probable on the Martian surface.

If theres any life on Mars now, it needs at least some liquid water, Dr. Sumner said. The surface of Mars now is very dry. Just incredibly dry. If theres life on Mars now, it would be in the deep subsurface.

Theres some evidence that liquid water is locked away in subterranean reservoirs, so perhaps there are sunless ecosystems lurking there. If these habitats exist, they are beyond the direct reach of our rovers and landers.

Recent detections of methane and other gases in whats left of Mars atmosphere are a tantalizing potential signature, Dr. Farley said, bolstering speculation about subterranean Martians. Many microbes on Earth produce methane, so it is possible that whiffs of the gas on Mars could be traced to alien life-forms deep underground.

Curiosity, which is equipped with a methane-sensitive spectrometer, has compounded the mystery by recording weird spikes of the gas at the Martian surface that remain unexplained.

Unfortunately, the satellites orbiting the red planet have not been able to provide backup for these readings, and the new NASA and Chinese rovers on the red planet may not be able to solve the puzzle.

Methane can also be created by a wide range of natural processes that have nothing to do with life. Some experts, like Dr. Sumner, say that the presence of the gas on Mars is not a surprise because it has all the geological processes it needs to produce the gas without life.

The discovery of life on Mars, either in the form of ancient fossils or subterranean reservoirs, would be one of the most momentous breakthroughs in human history. At last, we would have another example of a living planet, even if it only flourished in the past, implying that, at the very least, life can strike twice in the universe.

But even if we never find Martians, Mars is a place we can go to answer some of the questions about life on Earth, Dr. Sumner said. The red planet remains an eerie time capsule of the era when life first sprouted on our own world, and the direction it could have gone had all the factors that made our world possible not turned out just the right way.

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3 Great Mysteries About Life on Mars - The New York Times

On July 30, NASA will launch its newest Mars rover.

The $2.7 billion Mars Perseverance is set to land February 2021 with a mission to look for evidence of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.

UNLV geoscientist Libby Hausrathis part of that exploration project. She was selected as a 'return sample science participating scientist' after submitting a proposal to NASA.

Were basically representing the interests of future scientists, who will be analyzing the samples that come back," she told KNPR's State of Nevada.

Unlike other rover missions, the samples Perseverance collects will be brought back to Earth.

Hausrath said a fetch rover and a launch vehicle will be sent to the surface to collect the samples and then will blast off back to Earth. She said it will be the first time NASA has launched from the surface of another planet.

Bringing them back to Earth will allow scientists to get a more detailed look at them besides the cameras and instruments onboard other rover missions.

There are actually multiple different kinds of bio-signatures, signatures of past life," Hausrath said, "It can be organic molecules. It can be isotopes that are fractionated by life. It can be chemical or mineralogical signatures or morphology the shape.

Before the samples return, scientists will get a good look at what they're made of with chemical analysis and fine-scale cameras on the rover.

That would be amazing, Hausrath said of the possibility of finding signs of past life on the Red Planet, I think it would be so exciting and help us learn so much more about our solar system, potentially more about Earth as well. It would be so exciting.

While she is excited about the prospect, she's not entirely sure that it exists, but she noted life on Earth exists in harsh conditions like the dryness of theMojave Desert, the deep freeze of the Arctic and the thermal vents of ocean floor.

I dont know whether its there. I think its possible that its there, she said.

Besides the main mission of finding signatures of ancient life, Hausrath hopes the mission sparks interest in science, technology, engineering and math in kids.

I think that is one of the really important aspects of the space program and missions such as this one to Mars is that it does attract children to science and that really benefits all of us when we have more people and the fulldiversity of people in science, she said.

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UNLV Professor Part Of NASA's Newest Mars Rover Team - KNPR