Daily Archives: September 6, 2022

Green sand might sound like a strange thing to find on the Red Planet, but that is exactly what a new paper from researchers led by a team at Purdue found in images from Perseverance.

The findings, published recently in a spate of papers in Science and Science Advances, even surprised some of the scientists working on the mission. While observing Perseverances landing site from orbit, it became clear that the rover would be landing near some spectacular layered rocks in Jezero Crater. What the team didnt realize is they were looking at volcanic rock rather than sedimentary.

That might seem like a minimal distinction, but it was a huge discovery for the geologists studying the crater. Scientists expected to find sedimentary rocks, which had been worn away by water when Jezero crater, and Mars more generally, was a much wetter place. And while they did find some sedimentary rocks, they were typically deposited near the floor of the crater, what would have been the lake bottom during that wetter period.

Rocks on the way up the sides of the crater, which are the ones that were the most visible from space, were igneous the type that forms from lava. Whats more, the rocks were a lot older than they expected. After observing them in detail with Perseverances SuperCam, the rovers geology team realized that these rocks were more than 4 billion years old.

On Earth, rocks that old would be weathered down by our climate. But on Mars, they are almost pristine, which means they are also easier to study. When the scientists did that, they discovered a color they were not expecting green.

Mars is known as the Red Planet for good reason oxidation has formed a red tint to almost everything on the planets surface. Upon closer inspection, though, these igneous rocks were actually made of a mineral called olivine. Olivine is a slightly less spectacular version of a commonly known gemstone here on Earth peridot.

Olivine is also what makes the beaches on Hawaii seem dark green, and it has the same effect on Mars. But on Mars, its age makes it even more special, especially as a laboratory for understanding the workings of the early solar system.

It is also a fascinating window into what the earlier Earth might have been like, right around when life formed almost 4 billion years ago. Earths environment from that time is lost to us, changed irrevocably by the climate and tectonics over millions of years. But on Mars, the environment has remained largely untouched until Perseverance happened upon it.

Finding the rocks and conducting a preliminary analysis is just the first step. Further, more detailed analysis is needed before anything conclusive can be said about the environment of Jezero crater earlier in the solar system and whether it could have been habitable. But that is one of the primary goals of Perseverance and its team of dedicated geologists. This newest discovery is a step in the right direction.

Learn More:Purdue The sands of Mars are green as well as red, rover Perseverance discoversFarley et al Aqueously altered igneous rocks sampled on the floor of Jezero crater, MarsLiu et al An olivine cumulate outcrop on the floor of Jezero crater, MarsUT Strange Intersecting Sand Dunes on MarsUT This is Probably Sandstone Layers on Mars. Absolutely Beautiful

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Some Sand on Mars is Green, Showing That it was Once wet - Universe Today

NASA's vision of astronauts walking on Mars hinges on first getting them back to the Moon.

Why it matters: NASA is planning to launch its first test flight of its new Moon rocket today, marking one of the agency's first major steps along a decades-long journey to Mars.

State of play: By using the Moon as a proving ground for technology needed for missions to Mars, NASA says it can make those future missions safer.

Between the lines: NASA has already started laying the groundwork for exploring Mars with astronauts one day.

The intrigue: NASA is shoring up international cooperation with its Artemis program that could one day translate to coordination between nations on Mars itself.

The big picture: NASA has been studying Mars from orbit and using rovers on the surface for decades, but a well-trained astronaut on the ground could be a game-changer for science on the Red Planet.

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The Moon is a jumping off point for Mars - Axios

NASA missions and movie productions have more in common than you might think, according to Steve Squyres, a scientist who was the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission.

There are way, way more good ideas for movies than there are movies that actually get made, Squyres tells The Hollywood Reporter. And there are way, way more good ideas for space missions than there are missions that actually get selected to fly. With space missions theres even more money on the line. The time that it takes to make the thing is comparable or maybe longer. And if you fail, you fail big.

Squyres has a unique perspective on the similarities between the space exploration and entertainment businesses, because both his brother and daughter work as film editors. But that perspective is deepening lately thanks to a new role the scientist plays: Squyres is one of the key human characters in Good Night Oppy, an Amazon Studios documentary that premiered at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend.

The actual lead of the film is Opportunity, the robot that was sent to Mars for a 90-day mission in 2003, but ended up surviving for 15 years, collecting images that helped confirm the previous existence of water on the planet and sparking international interest in space exploration. Good Night Oppy, which Amazon will release theatrically Nov. 4 and on Prime Video Nov. 23, provided one of the few feel-good experiences at Telluride this year, among an intense and divisive slate of movies. Directed by Ryan White (Ask Dr. Ruth, The Case Against 8), the documentary relies on a mixture of archival footage NASA shot of the missions scientists and engineers on earth, imagery that Opportunity and its sister rover, Spirit, obtained from Mars and photo realistic CGI of Mars created by Industrial Light & Magic.

Good Night Oppy came together thanks to an aligning of visions between NASA and Hollywood. The federal agency doesnt embed cameras with every mission, but NASA had identified the Mars rovers as an unusual opportunity to reach the public, Squyres says, speaking during an interview with THR at Telluride, together with White. NASA does a lot of complicated things in space and a lot of them are really kind of hard to wrap your head around, he says. These are robots. Theyre looking at rocks. Its not that complicated. And so this mission gave NASA a unique opportunity to tell a story of a fundamentally scientific mission, but one that everybody can connect with.

A year after the mission ended, producers at Film 45, Peter Bergs company, identified Oppy as a potential documentary that could have rare, widespread, intergenerational appeal, and they partnered with Amblin, Steven Spielbergs company. The family friendly story about awe and discovery was squarely in the wheelhouse of the filmmaker behind E.T. and Jurassic Park, and Spielbergs name helped open doors at NASA and get the producers access to thousands of hours of archival footage from the mission. People had been trying for years to make the Spirit and Opportunity doc, and NASA is very protective of their archive, says White. Im sure it was Spielbergs name that convinced them.

In March of 2020, Film 45s Brandon Carroll met with White and his producing partner, Jessica Hargrave, over dinner to discuss the project Film 45 had produced the duos Netflix docuseries The Keepers and their EPIX Serena Williams documentary, and the company trusted Whites storytelling instincts. Id been pitched a lot of space films, but I like character based films, White says. But the log lines so good, right? The robots that were supposed to live for 90 days and live for 15 years is such a hook.

Because it relied so much on archival footage and visual effects, Good Night Oppy ended up being an ideal pandemic project. And NASAs Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, CA, where the mission was based and where many contemporary interviews took place, is just 10 minutes from Whites house in Atwater Village.

The ILM artists, who are responsible for hundreds of shots in the movie, consulted with NASA for accuracy, and the agency had to approve each frame of the archival footage that appears. As a documentary filmmaker, when you cut your film and then youre handing it over to a government agency and just waiting to see if they say, Take out this stuff, its terrifying, White says. I was afraid that they were gonna try to have some sort of creative oversight, but the only things we were told to take out were sensitive material on computer screens.

White enlisted Angela Bassett to narrate the footage and relied on the mission crews use of a morale-boosting morning wake-up song to help propel the story. White says obtaining the rights to those songs, from artists like The Beatles, ABBA and Billie Holiday, came surprisingly easy. I kept waiting for people to say no, ILM or Angela Bassett, or this music group, White says. And they kept saying yes. I really think it was the story itself that sold them.

In November of 2020, the filmmakers went out to potential distributors with a rough, 17-minute sizzle reel White describes as janky, basically a PowerPoint presentation. Nevertheless the timing was right for Oppys uplifting story. We were taking it out at the height of COVID, but also during the election, White says. It was a nasty political climate. My pitch was, this is a story about the best of humanity. This is apolitical its heartwarming. Its just a rare documentary that has that type of tone. All the major distributors were interested, but Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke called White and made an appeal that this was a four-quadrant film, which deserved a theatrical rollout and broad marketing.

The beginning of that rollout started at Telluride, where word traveled among festival goers on screening lines that there was at least one movie in the lineup this year that would make you happy-cry. Amazon requested that Good Night Oppy only screen at night, so that audiences would have the chance to step out of the theater into the dark, star-filled Rocky Mountain night sky, and the studio participated in the festivals City Lights program, which screens movies under secrecy for local middle and high school students before the festival begins.

For Squyres, who is now the chief scientist at Blue Origin, an aerospace manufacturer in Seattle founded by Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos, the movie is also a way of showing American taxpayers what their money buys at NASA. I wanted to share this experience with as many of the people who paid for it and their kids as possible, Squyres says. It is a huge privilege to be able to have the adventure of your lifetime paid for by the taxpayers. They deserve to know everything about what they got for their billion dollars in a very accessible way.

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NASA and Hollywood Shoot For the Stars With Mars Rover Documentary Good Night Oppy - Hollywood Reporter

Does life imitate art? In Elon Musks case, it seems so.

The newly slimline CEO of SpaceX has boasted that humans will land on Mars by 2024, and he wants to colonize space to ensure the survival of humanity. (Although not all of his big ideas turn out the way he pitched them.)

It turns out the future was written long ago, as a book published in 1953 predicted that someone named Elon would eventually lead humans on the red planet.

Musk once quoted the following line from Young Frankenstein on Twitter: "Destiny, destiny. No escaping that for me."

It refers to predestination, where every humans path in life is already mapped out.

It led to a Twitter user called Toby Li to respond: "Speaking about destiny, did you know that Von Braun's 1953 book Mars Project, referenced a person named Elon that would bring humans to Mars? Pretty nuts."

Thats the book Mars Project: A Technical Tale which was written by the German aerospace engineer Wernher Von Braun.

He developed rocket tech in Nazi Germany and, later, worked on rocket space technology in the US.

The book is non-fiction, but uses a narrative to map out to a layman how a voyage to Mars could look.

The tweet pointing out the similarities isnt entirely accurate, as in the book, it wasnt an Elon that took humans to Mars.

Instead, it said the name of the leaders position would be Elon, which in our view is even cooler.

Musk proclaimed himself imperator of Mars in a temporary change to his Twitter bio - showing that his destiny may gone to his head a little bit.

Just one of his many eyebrow-raising Twitter capers...

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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Book published in 1953 predicted that 'Elon' would lead humans on Mars - indy100

The solar system consists of a star called the Sun with nine planets rotating and revolving around it. The planets of our solar system are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. At the advanced level, the solar system includes the satellites of the planets; numerous comets, asteroids, meteoroids, and the interplanetary medium.

The Sun is the major source of electromagnetic energy (mostly in the form of heat and light) in the solar system. The Suns nearest known stellar neighbor is a red dwarf star called Proxima Centauri, at a distance of 4.3 light years away. A light year is a unit of astronomical distance equivalent to the distance that light travels in one year, equivalent to 6 trillion miles or 9.6 trillion km.

The whole solar system, together with the local stars visible on a clear night, orbits the center of our home galaxy, a spiral disk of 200 billion stars we call the Milky Way. The Milky Way has two small galaxies orbiting it nearby, which are visible from the southern hemisphere. They are called the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud. The nearest large galaxy is the Andromeda Galaxy. It is a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way but is 4 times as massive and is 2 million light-years away.

Our galaxy, one of the billions of galaxies known, is traveling through intergalactic space. The planets, most of the satellites of the planets, and the asteroids revolve around the Sun in the same direction, in nearly circular orbits. When looking down from above the Suns the North Pole, the planets orbit in a counter-clockwise direction. The planets orbit the Sun in or near the same plane called the ecliptic. Pluto is a special case in that its orbit is the most highly inclined (18 degrees) and the most highly elliptical of all the planets.

Because of this, for part of its orbit, Pluto is closer to the Sun than Neptune. The axis of rotation for most of the planets is nearly perpendicular to the ecliptic. The exceptions are Uranus and Pluto, which are tipped on their sides. The mystery of this space science is certainly beyond human comprehension and definitely beyond scope of this column. Scientists, around the years, are working to uncover these mysteries but instead are discovering more mysteries, a case of the more you look, the less you understand. You cannot, but marvel at the supreme and perfect design of the cosmos.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are the four innermost planets in the solar system. They are called terrestrial planets because of their compact, rocky surfaces. The planets, Venus, Earth, and Mars have significant atmospheres while Mercury has almost none. The other planets; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are called the Jovian (Jupiter-like) planets This is because they are all gigantic compared to our planet, Earth, and they have a gaseous nature like Jupiters. The Jovian planets are also referred to as the gas giants, although some or all of them might have small solid cores.

Over the past five decades, a myriad of space explorers has gone out of the Earths atmosphere discovered our planetary neighbors and their numerous satellites.My article on Apollo II: Marking 60 years of mans terrestrial romance with space published on 2nd September 2021 discussed the manned planetary mission to the moon, which were done successfully. The Apollo program of the United States landed people on the moon.

Six missions landed men on the Moon, beginning with Apollo 11 in July 1969. Apollo 13 was intended to land, but couldnt due to a malfunction aboard the spacecraft. All nine manned missions returned safely to the Earth. Countries leading in spacecraft technologies are USA, Russia, China, Japan and India. While the USA focused on the manned Apollo program, the Soviet Union focused on unmanned missions that deployed rovers and returned samples to the Earth. Three rover missions were launched, of which two were successful, and eleven samples return flights were attempted with three successes. After recording successes on the moon mission, the next challenge taken by the astronomers is the mission to mars.

Mars is the next simple destination after the moon mission for scientific discovery and robotic and human exploration as we expand our presence into the solar system. Mars formation and evolution are comparable to that of earth; therefore scientific study of Mars can help us learn more about our own planets history and future. Already some of the observations on Mars show conditions suitable for life in its past. Future exploration might uncover evidences of the fundamental mysteries of human existence and galaxies. This why the mans attention is focused on mars in the last 50 years.

As mentioned, mars is the fourth planet from the sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System, after Mercury. It is sometimes called the Red Planet because of the iron oxide prevalent on its surface, which gives it a reddish appearance. Mars as one of the terrestrial planets has a thin atmosphere, with surface features reminiscent both of the impact craters of the Moon and the valleys, deserts, and polar ice caps of Earth.

The rotational period and seasonal cycles of Mars are similar to those of Earth. Mars is the site of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano and second-highest Known Mountain in the Solar System. The smooth Borealis basin in the northern hemisphere covers 40% of the planet and may be a giant impact feature. Mars has two moons orbiting around it, Phobos and Deimos, they are small and of irregularly shaped. These could be captured asteroids, similar to 5261 Eureka, a Mars trojan.

Physically, Mars is approximately half the diameter of Earth and its surface area is only slightly less than the total area of Earths dry land. Mars is less dense than Earth, having about 15% of Earths volume and 11% of Earths mass, resulting in about 38% of Earths surface gravity. Studies have revealed that the red-orange appearance of the Martian surface is caused by iron (III) oxide.

The space station also advances our understanding of how the body changes in space and how to protect astronaut health. Is mans mission to the Mars possible?

(To be continued next week)

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Solar system: Mission to live on mars - Blueprint Newspapers Limited