Daily Archives: September 27, 2022

NASA released a new blueprint for shaping exploration throughout the solar system. Credit: NASA

Last week, NASA published a revised version of its Moon to Mars objectives, forming a blueprint for shaping exploration throughout the solar system. These guideposts in NASAs Moon to Mars exploration approach will help shape the agencys investments, as well as those of industry and international partners, toward the Moon and beyond.

Earlier this year, things started with 50 draft objectives developed by agency leaders across NASA mission directorates. Then NASA solicited feedback from its workforce, the public, industry, and the agencys international partners, and followed up with two workshops with industry and international partners to engage in further discussions.

The outcome was 63 revised final objectives that reflect a matured strategy for NASA and its partners to develop a blueprint for sustained human presence and exploration throughout our solar system. Four broad areas are covered: science; transportation and habitation; lunar and Martian infrastructure; and operations. In addition, NASA added a set of recurring tenets to address common themes across objectives.

We need a roadmap with staying power, and through a collaborative process, weve identified a core set of defined objectives to achieve our exploration goals with our partners, said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy. These objectives are both practical and aspirational, and we were gratified by the thoughtful contributions of our workforce, industry, and international partners who will join us in shaping our future together.

Under Artemis, NASA has set a vision to explore more of the Moon than ever before. With its Artemis I mission now on the launchpad, the agency plans to return humans to the Moon and establish a sustained cycle of missions including at the lunar south polar region. These missions will set up a long-term presence to inform future exploration of farther destinations, including Mars.

In November 2021, senior leaders at NASA started working on the objectives in coordination with an Agency Cross-Directorate Federated Board, whose purpose is to ensure NASAs focus is integrated with common strategic goals and direction across the agencys mission directorates. The objectives enable NASA to explore synergies between the United States and other nations objectives for lunar and Martian exploration, including potential opportunities for collaboration.

The draft, high-level objectives were released to the public and the NASA workforce in mid-May 2022 with a solicitation for comments before June. (The deadline was later extended to June 3.) As a result, NASA received more than 5,000 inputs and many of the ideas were modified and some new objectives were added. NASA held consultation workshops with both industry and international partners to help refine and discuss the objectives and identify any gaps.

Were helping to steward humanitys global movement to deep space, said Jim Free. He is NASAs associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, which managed the objectives team, and is ultimately responsible for the agencys Moon to Mars architecture. The objectives will help ensure a long-term strategy for solar system exploration can retain constancy of purpose and weather political and funding changes. They help provide clear direction as new technologies, vehicles, and elements are developed in the coming years and are designed to be realistically achievable.

The Artemis campaign represents the capabilities and operations needed to safely conduct deep space science and exploration missions at the Moon and is tightly connected with Mars mission planning. Along with key exploration technology objectives, science is a top priority of the Artemis missions.

Following a successful Artemis I launch later this month, NASA plans to send the first humans back to orbit the Moon with Artemis II no earlier than 2024, and to the lunar surface no earlier than 2025 on the Artemis III mission. NASA will use elements of Artemis to test systems and concepts for the journey to and from Mars. By using the Moon as a testbed, the follow-on Mars campaign will remain connected to the agencys sustained presence on the lunar surface.

Kurt Vogel is the director of space architectures in the office of the NASA Administrator. He said, We wanted to shape objectives to guide the upcoming missions, as opposed to previous approaches, which consisted of building elements and capabilities first to support the campaign. The community provided enormously helpful inputs, and were ready to move toward the next steps in architecture planning.

The final framework objectives are available online at: https://go.nasa.gov/3BUkHGL

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NASA Releases Revised Version of Its Moon to Mars Objectives - SciTechDaily

The craft discards pieces of the module as it descends, and these pieces can land in different locations on the planets surfacethere may be a lower heat shield in one place and a parachute in another. When this debris crashes to the ground, it can break into smaller pieces, as happened during the Perseverance rover landing in 2021. These small pieces can then get blown around because of Martian winds.

A lot of small, windblown trash has been found over the yearslike the netting material found recently. Earlier in the year, on June 13, Perseverance rover spotted a large, shiny thermal blanket wedged in some rocks 1.25 miles (2 kilometers) from where the rover landed. Both Curiosity in 2012andOpportunity in 2005also came across debris from their landing vehicles.

Thenine inactive spacecraft on the surface of Marsmake up the next type of debris. These craft are the Mars 3 lander, Mars 6 lander, Viking 1 lander, Viking 2 lander, the Sojourner rover, theformerly lost Beagle 2 lander, the Phoenix lander, the Spirit rover and the most recently deceased spacecraft, the Opportunity rover. Mostly intact, these might be better considered historical relics than trash.

Wear and tear take their toll on everything on the Martian surface. Some parts ofCuriositys aluminum wheels have broken offand are presumably scattered along the rovers track. Some of the litter is purposeful, with Perseverancehaving dropped a drill bit onto the surfacein July 2021, allowing it toswap in a new, pristine bitso that it could keep collecting samples.

Crashed spacecraft and their pieces are another significant source of trash. At least two spacecraft have crashed, and an additional four have lost contact before or just after landing. Safely descending to the planets surface is the hardest part of any Mars landing missionand it doesnt always end well.

When you add up the mass of all spacecraft that have ever been sent to Mars, you get about 22,000 pounds (9,979 kilograms). Subtract the weight of the currently operational craft on the surface6,306 pounds (2,860 kilograms)and you are left with 15,694 pounds (7,119 kilograms) of human debris on Mars.

Today, the main concern scientists have about trash on Mars is the risk it poses to current and future missions. The Perseverance teams are documenting all debris they find and checking to see if any of it could contaminate the samples the rover is collecting. NASA engineers have also considered whether Perseverance could get tangled in debris from the landing but haveconcluded the risk is low.

The real reason debris on Mars is important is because of its place in history. The spacecraft and their pieces are the early milestones for human planetary exploration.

Cagri Kilic is a postdoctoral research fellow in robotics at West Virginia University.

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Mars is littered with over 15,000 pounds of human trash - Fast Company

Ever since robotic explorers began visiting the Red Planet during the 1960s and 70s, scientists have puzzled over Mars surface features. These included flow channels, valleys, lakebeds, and deltas that appear to have formed in the presence of water.

Since then, dozens of missions have been sent to Mars to explore its atmosphere, surface, and climate to learn more about its warmer, wetter past. In particular, scientists want to know how long water flowed on the surface of Mars and whether it was persistent or periodic in nature.

The ultimate purpose here is to determine whether rivers, streams, and standing bodies of water existed long enough for life to emerge. So far, missions like Curiosity and Perseverance have gathered volumes of evidence that show how hundreds of large lakebeds once dotted the Martian landscape.

But according to a new study by an international team of researchers, our current estimates of Mars surface water may be a dramatic understatement. Based on a meta-analysis of years worth of satellite data, the team argues that ancient lakes may have once been a very common feature on Mars.

The research was led by Joseph Michalksi, an associate professor with the Department of Earth Sciences and the Deputy Director of the Laboratory for Space Research (LSR) at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). The new paper was published in the journal Nature.

An example of a large, impact crater-hosted lake on Mars (left)) and a small, permafrost-hosted lake (right). Credit: ESA/JPL/NASA/ASU/MSSS

As Michalski explained in a recent HKU press release, current research has focused on larger bodies of water on Mars, potentially neglecting the many smaller lakes that may have existed there:

We know of approximately 500 ancient lakes deposited on Mars, but nearly all the lakes we know about are larger than 100 km2. But on Earth, 70% of the lakes are smaller than this size, occurring in cold environments where glaciers have retreated. These small-sized lakes are difficult to identify on Mars by satellite remote sensing, but many small lakes probably did exist. It is likely that at least 70% of Martian lakes have yet to be discovered.

Lakebeds are currently one of the prime targets for robotic explorers on Mars because ancient lakes would possess all the ingredients for microbial light including water, nutrients, and energy sources like light (for photosynthesis).

Today, the lakebeds of these ancient bodies of water contain sedimentary deposits rich in iron/magnesium clay minerals and carbonates, as well as sulfates, silica, and chlorides. These deposits could potentially contain preserved evidence that would attest to the ancient atmospheric and climatic conditions on Mars.

But as they indicate in the paper, most known Martian lakes date to the Noachian Period (ca. 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago) and lasted for only 1,000 to 1 million years. In geological terms, this is a relatively short span of time and represents a tiny fraction of the 400 million-year Noachian timeline.

This could mean that ancient Mars was also cold and dry, and flowing water was episodic and short-lived. Because of Mars lower gravity and fine-grained soil, the team also theorized that lakes on Mars would have been murky, making it difficult for light to reach very deep and presenting challenges for photosynthesis.

As a result, Michalski and his colleagues argue that large, ancient, environmentally diverse lakes would make a much more promising target for future exploration.

Not all lakes are created equal, said Michalski. In other words, some Martian lakes would be more interesting for microbial life than others because some of the lakes were large, deep, long-lived, and had a wide range of environments such as hydrothermal systems that could have been conducive to the formation of the simple life.

However, there is also evidence that lakes existed on Mars during more recent geological periods but left fewer traces. These include paleolakes in the Hesperian Period (3-3.7 billion ago) and shallow marshy lakes during the Amazonian (less than 3 billion years ago).

These features would be similar to those found on Earth, where similarly cold conditions exist, and would likely resemble shallow lakes found in drier regions (Hesperian) and thermoklasts (marshy hallows) that occur during permafrost thaws (Amazonian).

Pingualuit crater lake in Canada is a modern-day example of a cold impact crater-hosted lake on Earth analogous to ancient crater lakes on Mars.Stocktrek Images/Stocktrek Images/Getty Images

David Baker is an ecologist at HKU School of Biological Sciences and a co-author on the paper who is well-versed in microbial systems in Earths lakes. As he summarized, Earth analogs could help expand the search for life on Mars by allowing scientists to look in more diverse environments:

Earth is host to many environments that can serve as analogs to other planets. From the harsh terrain of Svalbard to the depths of Mono Lake we can determine how to design tools for detecting life elsewhere right here at home. Most of those tools are aimed at detecting the remains and residues of microbial life,

This research bolsters the ESAs recently-released mineral map of Mars, which showed how aqueous minerals (those that form in the presence of water) are ubiquitous on the surface.

It could also help inform future robotic missions, which include the ESAs Rosalind Franklin rover, which is currently scheduled to launch by 2028. Chinas first lander and rover mission to Mars, Tianwen-1 and Zhurong, landed on May 14th, 2022, and is currently exploring the plains of Utopia Planitia.

This region was once the site of an ocean that covered most of the northern hemisphere, and likely contains mineralogical and chemical evidence of how and when Mars transitioned from a warmer, wetter planet to what we see today.

The Perseverance rover is currently collecting and caching samples that will be retrieved by an ESA-NASA sample-return mission in the coming years. This will be the first time that samples from Mars are brought back for comprehensive analysis that can only take place in Earth-based labs.

China is planning a similar sample-return mission that could be sent to a Hesperian or Amazonian lakebed and will likely occur by the end of the decade. These and other missions will also pave the way for crewed missions, which NASA and China are planning on mounting by the early 2030s.

These missions will land in regions that have accessible water, which could double as a site for potential research. If there really was life on Mars billions of years ago (or still is today), the evidence wont remain elusive for much longer!

This article was originally published on Universe Today by Matt Williams. Read the original article here.

LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERY DAY.

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Mars ancient lakes could help discover life on the Red Planet - Inverse

On Saturday (Sept. 24) and for several days around it, Mars will be visible by a star cluster in the constellation of Taurus labeled NGC1746 by astronomers.

While observing the Red Planet's closest approach, the stars in NGC1746 will be a loose 'clump' of stars roughly the width of a thumb above Mars and to the left. After Saturday the orbital path of Mars will see it migrate below NGC1746 and move to the left.

Because of its visual magnitude of 6.1, NGC1746 can be easily spotted with a pair of binoculars. Mars will brighten during September reaching a magnitude of -0.59 (with the minus symbol denoting very bright objects) meaning that when Mars is closest to the star cluster, it can be seen with binoculars. The two are close enough on Saturday to see together with a telescope.

Related: Night sky, September 2022: What you can see tonight [maps]

According to In-The-Sky.org (opens in new tab), the star cluster will be visible in the dawn sky over New York and reaches an altitude of 72 above the southern horizon. (A fist at arm's length corresponds to around 10 degrees.) NGC1746 is wider than the full moon in the sky and fades from view at around 5:37 a.m. EDT (0937 GMT) as dawn breaks.

There is some debate about the nature of NGC1746, located around 2,500 light-years from Earth and first described by German astronomer Heinrich Louis d'Arrest in 1863 and included in astronomy's New General Catalogue (opens in new tab) or NGC.

For many years it has been considered an open cluster. An open cluster is a collection of a few thousand stars that formed when dense patches in the same molecular cloud of cold gas undergo gravitational collapse.

There is now some doubt as to whether this is the case, however, with many astronomers suggesting that NGC1746 is actually a random association of unrelated stars of different origins against a dense background starfield. If correct, this means NGC1746 is a type of astronomical association called an asterism.

Asterisms are loose collections of stars that are associated only by their positions in the night sky above Earth similar to the constellation classification system. This means that some stars in an asterism could be closely located in space, while others just appear close together from our vantage point here on Earth.

Visible with the naked eye, some asterisms are small and very simple, while others are much larger and more complex. The most famous example of an asterism is arguably the Big Dipper, comprised of the seven brightest stars of the constellation Ursa Major, or the Great Bear.

Following its close encounter with NGC1746, Mars will reach its closest distance to Earth on Dec. 1, 2022, when skywatchers should be able to distinguish some of its dark surface features.

Whether you're new to skywatching or a seasoned veteran, be sure not to miss our guides for thebest binocularsand thebest telescopesto spot Mars, star clusters, and other objects in the night sky. For capturing the best moon pictures you can, check out our guide forphotographing the moon, along with our recommendations for the bestcameras for astrophotographyandbest lenses for astrophotography.

Editor's Note:If you snap a photo of Mars near NGC1746 and would like to share it with Space.com's readers, send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

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See Mars pass an asterism in the Taurus constellation on Saturday (Sept. 24) - Space.com

NASA's Ingenuity helicopter has flown again, taking to the Martian skies for the second time in as many weeks.

Ingenuity traveled about 308 feet (94 meters) on Sunday (Sept. 18), staying aloft for more than 55 seconds and reaching a maximum speed of 10.6 mph (17.1 kph), according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (opens in new tab) (JPL) in Southern California, which manages the Mars helicopter's mission.

Sunday's flight was the 32nd for Ingenuity overall and its second this month; the 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) rotorcraft also lifted off on Sept. 6.

Related: Mars helicopter Ingenuity: First aircraft to fly on Red Planet

That earlier flight took Ingenuity closer to an ancient river delta on the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) hole in the ground that the helicopter and its robotic partner, the Perseverance rover, have been exploring since February 2021. Presumably, Sunday's sortie continued that progress, as Ingenuity team members have said that getting to the delta is a near-term priority.

Perseverance has been studying the delta for several months now. The car-sized rover has collected four rock samples from the formation since July, two of them from a stone that's rich in organic molecules, the carbon-containing building blocks of life.

Researchers will be able to study that intriguing material in detail here on Earth, if all goes according to plan: NASA and the European Space Agency are teaming up to bring the rover's samples to our planet, perhaps as early as 2033.

The sample-return architecture includes two Ingenuity-like helicopters capable of carrying sample tubes from one or more depots on Jezero's floor to the rocket that will launch them off the Red Planet. (That rocket, and the other robots that will help get the samples to Earth, remain in development.) It's unclear at the moment if the choppers will be pressed into such service; Perseverance may end up delivering the tubes to the rocket by itself.

Ingenuity initially embarked on a five-flight demonstration mission designed to show that rotorcraft flight is possible in the thin Martian atmosphere. The helicopter quickly aced that task and shifted into an extended mission, during which it's serving as a scout for Perseverance.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There (opens in new tab)" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).

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Ingenuity Mars helicopter soars on 32nd flight - Space.com

The video for 'Blacklight Shine' features Puerto Rican bomba dancers, which turn the preconceptions of dance on their head by allowing rhythm to be dictated by the dancer and not the drummer. That kind of reminds me of what you're saying here, the quote-unquote fans dictating how you should dance, as it were. It takes two to tango in the meaning-making of your music, right?

RODRGUEZ-LPEZ: It is a dance, but we have to come together in that. Again, the fans dictating anything aren't fans, that's just an absurd notion. That's the distinction we're trying to make. Fans are a supportive force; the root of the word is fanatical, which is related to extremism, which usually has to do with some sort of exploitation and oppression. We're trying to get as far away from that as we can in every aspect of our lives, let alone in the music, or this superficial understanding that people have from us because they know our music or have seen our picture somewhere. So it's protecting that personal freedom. Ha, what is that Wild at Heart Nicholas Cage snakeskin jacket quote?

BIXLER-ZAVALA: "It's a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom."

RODRGUEZ-LPEZ: Haha, exactly. And we're gonna protect that at all costs, and sure if you're on the other end of that as an oppressor, you better believe you're an enemy. [Cedric laughs] If that's what you were referring to, something I might have said in another interview, that's what I meant. If you're trying to oppress and exploit then yes, we back ourselves at all costs.

BIXLER-ZAVALA: We've experienced this since leaving At the Drive-In. Not only did fans f-cking get mad at us, but people we thought were friends in our home town, all sort of people, management, all just f-cking turned on us. People like KROQ threatened us and blackmailed us saying they would never play anything that would come from our new bands unless we got back together with At the Drive-In. The irony of that is that by the time The Mars Volta had done all the heavy lifting and got to play at a venue like The Wiltern and sell it out for two nights, then KROQ show up with their little van. As heard on KROQ, when you know god damn straight they weren't f-cking playing our shit at all, it was mostly f-cking snowboard and skateboard f-cking music. And, they don't even f-cking acknowledge the main person that made KROQ cool, which is Rodney [Bingenheimer].

We had this conversation record after record, band after band. Even when we did Antemasque, we had Mars Volta records being like What the f-ck is this? Because most Mars Volta fans at the time had no concept or terminology of what power pop was or why that was a cool thing to embrace, you know? But every record, every time there's a new person in the band, everybody comes out of the woodwork to say You're not at you're full potential, I'm just trying to help out. Well if you wanna help out, there's a muzzle, shut the f-ck up and listen. Just listen.

RODRGUEZ-LPEZ: Plus what would they know? It's the extreme irony that they became a quote-unquote fan, or fanatic, because they just stumbled upon something we were doing, you see what I'm saying? We were doing something without any kind of input from them, and then they came along and saw what we were doing and were like, That's great, I own you now and keep doing that.

BIXLER-ZAVALA: Mhmm.

RODRGUEZ-LPEZ: It's like, we were just over here doing shit and you happened to stumble on us. I compare it to the narrative of Christopher Columbus discovering The Caribbean, and in The Caribbean on that day that's celebrated, we say that's the day that the Tanos, the indigenous people, found a lost group of Spaniards going circles around the island of what's now Santa Domingo, you know what I mean? It depends on your perspective. It's the history of the world and that is our enemy. That is our natural enemy. Anyone that would try and get in the way of us living a healthy, happy life, which they have no idea what that is for us? We protect ourselves against that at all costs.

BIXLER-ZAVALA: The funny thing is that there are people that sort of fetishise the different players we've had in the band, which I always call the Football Fantasy kind of fan. While they were fetishising one player, they missed the beauty of the next guy we introduced to the world.

RODRGUEZ-LPEZ: Then later on they come and say I never got to see that guy live.

BIXLER-ZAVALA: I never got to see that, will you play those songs? And I say, well you were too busy talking shit and trying to boycott us because we didn't help you chase the dragon again, so now you missed that. I feel like a lot of people missed out on the Deantoni Parks era of our band, and you know what? Your f-cking loss man, because that was some f-cking cool shit we were on. I'm not trying to say yeah we're awesome, I'm just saying we had some very f-cking beautiful conversations with god when Deantoni was in the f-cking band. You were stuck on [Jon] Theodore or [Thomas] Pridgen, you f-cking missed out on Deantoni. And now people come out of the woodwork and I see it all the time, I hear it all the time, Will you play the stuff from Nocturniquet? I'm sure we will, but you missed it when it was in its original form because you were stuck in nostalgia. If you understand that nostalgia is not your f-cking best friend, it's a consumer tactic.

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The Mars Volta: "Without a doubt it's a whole different era" | Interview - The Line of Best Fit

In the last few days, the space domain has seen some significant accomplishments with a pinch of disappointment. This past week, we saw an example of global cooperation with the launch of an American astronaut in a Russian rocket and the recent success of the James Webb Space Telescope which spotted rings around Neptune like never before. As we move into a new week, here is a quick recap of everything that happened in the last seven days.

Russia's state-owned space agency, Roscosmos launched NASA astronaut Frank Rubio along with cosmonautsSergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin in the MS-22 mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The trio was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on September 21 in a Soyuz rocket as part of the cross-flight agreement between NASA and Roscosmos. The launch was significant as space is currently the only area where the US and Russia are carrying out collaborative activities. All three members of MS-22 will spend six months aboard the ISS.

Earlier this week, NASA released a picture of Neptune with a clear view of the rings around it. Captured using the Webb telescope, the image also featured Neptune's Moon orbiting the planet. NASA explained that Neptune appears pale in this picturebecause Webb observed it in infrared. When observed in visible light, Neptune appears in a blue shade due to the presence of methane gas in its atmosphere. The planet's Moons were also spotted, the brightest of which is Triton due to 70% of sunlight being reflected from its atmosphere.

NASA's Insight lander on Mars, which the job of screening the planet's interior, picked up signals of meteor crashes that occurred between2020 and 2021. These signals were converted into sounds which NASA recently released. As explained by the agency, the impact sounds like a bloop "due to a peculiar atmospheric effectheard when bass sounds arrive before high-pitched sounds".

On September 24, NASA announced that it is standing down from the Artemis 1 launch opportunity available on September 27 due to the tropical storm Ian in the Caribbean Sea. The Moon mission was planned for launch during a 70-minute launch window opening at9:07 pm IST, however, teams are now mulling over rolling back the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket from the launch pad. A backup opportunity is available on October 3, given the rocket is not removed from the launch pad for protection from the approaching storm.

While Jupiter is at its closest in 59 years, Arizona-based astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy posted, what he says is his clearest shot of the gas giant. According to McCarthy, he produced the image by stitching together six lakh individual images he took using his 11-inch telescope. NASA says that Jupiter is currently 591 million kilometres away, the closest it has been since 1963.

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NASA's Artemis 1 delay to meteor crash on Mars; everything big that happened last week - Republic World