Category Archives: Mars

Our solar system is a dynamic, evolving realm of space.

A powerful camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter a satellite orbiting the red planet spotted a relatively recent impact site on the Martian surface. The spacecraft detected a dark spot on the ground, and then the high-resolution camera (called the High-Resolution Imaging Experiment) snapped the detailed shot.

The impact, which is brand new in cosmic terms, likely formed between February 2006 and March 2014, noted the imaging team at the University of Arizona. For a size reference, the entire black and white image is under five kilometers, or some 3 miles, across. Blasted-out rays of material are clearly visible around the crater, which formed from a falling asteroid or meteorite.

Mars is absolutely covered in craters. NASA estimates there are over a quarter-million impact craters about the size of Arizona's famous Barringer Crater, which is some 4,000 feet across. And there are over 43,000 Martian craters larger than three miles wide.

Meanwhile, Earth has just around 120 known impact craters. That's because over hundreds of millions of years, different parts of Earth's surface have both been covered in lava or recycled as the giant plates that compose Earth's crust (tectonic plates) continually move rock below and back up to the surface. Mars isn't nearly geologically dead marsquakes frequently occur there but it's not nearly as active as Earth, a water-blanketed planet teeming with erupting volcanoes. On Mars today, there's little to wash away, or cover up, new craters.

One of Mars' most recent impact craters, then, might be visible for millions and millions of years.

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Space object crashed into Mars and created this new impact crater - Mashable

It has cost 840m to develop and taken 15 years to build. But now fears are mounting that the British-built robot rover which was to have flown on Europes ExoMars mission in September may never make it to the red planet.

The craft was to have drilled deep below the Martian surface to collect samples that could bear signs of past or present life, but had its launch on a giant Russian Proton rocket postponed last month after the invasion of Ukraine.

At best, the rover built in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, and financed by the European Space Agency will have to wait two more years, when the next window opens for sending a spacecraft to Mars. However, some astronomers fear that prospects for the rover, named after the British DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin, now look grim. If delays continue, it could ultimately be mothballed, scientists have warned.

It is inconceivable that we can work with Russia under present circumstances, and that attitude is going to last a long time, said astronomer Professor John Zarnecki of the Open University. This could delay ExoMars for the rest of the decade. By then, its technology will be getting dated.

The alternative would be to find another launcher. However, such a move poses other problems. Russia was also supplying the Kazachok lander that was to settle the Rosalind Franklin safely on the planets surface. First, a huge parachute would have decelerated the craft as it descended through the Martian atmosphere. Then Kazachoks retro rockets would have further slowed it down so the rover could land gently, said Professor Andrew Coates, of University College London.

It is an extremely tricky, complex manoeuvre and designing a replacement landing system will not be easy, added Coates, who is principal investigator for the rovers panoramic camera experiment.

Previous Martian rovers have managed to scrape soil samples from a depth of only about 6cm. That is the key feature of this mission, said Coates. We will be bringing samples from depths of two metres, where any signs of life are going to be better protected from the cosmic rays that batter Mars surface.

Several dozen planetary scientists in Britain have been involved in work on ExoMars including ine OBrien, at Glasgow University.

Its a weird experience for all of us, she told the Observer. We are sad because of what has happened to our work and the chance of being involved in searching for life on Mars but you also feel guilty for feeling sad because, among everything else, its a really minor setback compared with what the people of Ukraine are suffering.

While some scientists remain relatively optimistic that Europe and Russia might cooperate in space again, others remain doubtful.

If it ends up being postponed until the end of the decade, as we hunt for new launchers and develop new landing systems, then the mission will all start to look old, said Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society. That is why there is speculation now that it might never fly.

This view was backed by OBrien: In the end, we may have to cut our losses and concentrate on other Mars missions.

Nor is ExoMars likely to be the only casualty of the invasion of Ukraine. Russia provides relatively cheap but powerful rockets that have been used to launch many European missions in the past. Immediate victims of the suspension of future launches will include two Galileo navigation satellites , while The ESAs EarthCare science mission, developed in cooperation with the Japanese space agency, Jaxa, and the Euclid infrared space telescope will also be affected.

More perplexing is the likely impact on the International Space Station, which relies on a Russian propulsion system to boost away from Earth as its orbit decays and to move it to avoid space debris. Should Russia pull out of the ISS, then the vast orbiting laboratory would slowly spiral lower and lower until it crashed.

This threat was recently made explicit by Dmitry Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos. Russia would determine on its own how long the ISS will operate, he told the countrys state news agency, Tass.

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UK Mars rover is casualty of war as science severs its links with Russia - The Guardian

While accepting the Grammy award for record of the year, which was Silk Sonic's fourth Grammy Award win of the night, Bruno Mars' collaborator,Anderson .Paak, announced, "In the industry, we call that a clean sweep!" Then, in a move that stunnedTwitter, Mars pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it up on the Grammys stage.

Viewers were shocked at Mars' disregard for others' comfort with smoking indoors, and noted that the out-of-date move matched up with his old school approach to music. Twitter user @jonathanjewel wrote, "Seriously, why is Bruno Mars smoking while accepting an award? It's 2022, not 1962."

Another user, @lostchildcle, had a bold statement to make, reflecting on other recent award show faux pas. They wrote, "Bruno Mars lighting up a cigarette, indoors, in 2022 was more shocking than Will Smith slapping Chris Rock [at the 2022 Academy Awards]." Though Mars certainly turned fewer heads that Smith's dramatic move, he could be considered similarly disrespectful within the Recording Academy. Only time will tell.

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Bruno Mars' Behavior At The Grammys Has Twitter In A Tizzy - The List

A robotics presentation plays out at Amazons MARS 2022 conference. (Andy Jassy via Twitter)

Billionaire Jeff Bezos missed out on his usual chauffeuring duties at the West Texas launch orchestrated today by his Blue Origin space venture, but he had a good excuse: He was presiding over Amazons MARS 2022, an invitation-only conference held this week in California.

His successor as Amazons CEO, Andy Jassy, was there as well.

The hush-hush MARS conference had its first annual run back in 2016, and spawned a public event called re:MARS in 2019. The acronym stands for Machine learning, Automation, Robotics and Space and it also evokes Bezos long-term goal of having millions of people living and working in space.

MARS is an opportunity for the compu-cognoscenti to rub elbows (but our invitation must have gotten lost in the mail again). Its also a photo opportunity for Bezos: Who can forget the shots of Buff Bezos striding alongside a robo-dog, or Bezos at the controls of a giant robot, or trying out a hexacopter?

The 2020 and 2021 conferences had to be called off due to the coronavirus pandemic, but based on the tweets and Instagram posts emanating from this years site in Ojai, Calif., MARS was back in full force in 2022. Heres a sampling:

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Wheres my jetpack? It was at MARS conference, along with Jeff Bezos and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy - GeekWire

Everyone knows that going to space is really expensive. Millions of dollars go into research and designing rockets that make space exploration a possibility in our world. From satellite launches to crew missions, thousands of experts work toward making space travel a reality each day. So it's pretty wild to learn that the film "Gravity" had a higher budget than India's Mars Orbiter Mission.

In September 2014, India's Mars Orbiter Mission (also known as Mangalyaan, which is Hindi for "Mars Craft") went into orbit around Mars after a 10-month journey.

The launch was historic for India it became the only country in the world to successfully put a satellite into Mars' orbit on its first attempt. Other countries, including the United States, Russia, and the European Union, have also successfully reached the planet, but none on their first attempt.

To add to that achievement, India managed to conduct the successful mission with just $73 million $27 million less than the budget for Cuarn's "Gravity." Although the mission won't be conducting any research and is merely for demonstration purposes, it is a massive feat for India's rising space program. And to do it successfully with a modest budget is a big win for India.

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Alfonso Cuarn's Gravity Had A Bigger Budget Than The Mars Orbiter Mission - /Film

The famous Milky Way candy bar has Minnesota roots as its inventor, Frank Mars (1883-1934) grew up in the city of Hancock. (FOX 9)

MINNEAPOLIS (FOX 9) - In the universe of candy, the constellation of options seems as endless as the stars. But one candy bar created in Minneapolis is in a galaxy of its own.

For nearly a century, the Milky Way's combination of milk chocolate, caramel and nougat has helped satisfy America's sweet tooth. But what was once the best-selling candy bar in the country had its humble beginnings here in Minnesota.

Minneapolis is known for many things, one being that it's the birthplace to one of the most popular candy bars in the world -- the Milky Way. Here's the story behind one Minnesotan man's success in building a American candy bar empire.

"I know that's a story we really need to tell because it's part of a bigger picture that we really had a candy industry here," local historian Kathy Kullberg said.

Mars Incorporated founder Frank Mars was born to a pair of farmers in Hancock, Minnesota in 1883. He learned how to hand dip chocolate after he contracted polio as a young boy and wasn't able to help out on the farm after school.

"The story goes he would watch his mother while she was making different candies or cooking in the kitchen and that got him kind of inspired to do some other adventures along the way," Kullberg said.

After working as a Molasses Chips salesman in Wadena and a candy wholesaler in Tacoma, Washington, Mars and his second wife moved to Minneapolis in 1920.

He started producing chocolate candy bars with whipped cream centers called the Mar-O-Bar, which did well enough to give him a foothold in the industry.

Mar-O-Bar, one of Frank Mars' first creations (FOX 9)

But it wasn't until his estranged son Forrest, from his marriage to his first wife, called his dad to bail him out of jail after getting in trouble with the law in Chicago, that Mars would come up with the idea that would put his candy company on the map.

"After he gets bailed out, they were sitting in a soda shop and having, the story is, having malted milkshakes," Kullberg explained. "They joked around and said, Well why don't you put this in a candy bar? That gave him the idea that he came back to Minneapolis to do that."

Mars called his new creation, The Milky Way, after the malted milkshakes that inspired it, not the star system as many people believe.

When it was introduced in 1923, the candy bar's sales were out of this world, making $800,000 its first year, which would be about $11 million today.

"It was under a million dollars, but still when you are talking the 20s, that was a lot of money. It was a lot today, but it was really a lot of money, so therefore there was a claim it was successful."

Mars used some of that money to buy a home on West Minnehaha Parkway that was known by the kids in the neighborhood as the Milky Way house. Even though Mars only lived there three years, his mother-in-law stayed in the home for nearly a decade after that.

"The story from some of the children, who are much older today, they loved going to there for Halloween. They called it the Milky Way house because they would get full-sized Milky Way bars and anything Mars was putting out," Kullberg said. "That was the first place they had to go."

Production of the Milky Way moved from Minneapolis to Chicago in 1929. (FOX 9)

In 1929, Mars moved his company to Chicago for better national distribution, where it would eventually become one of the largest candy makers in the world, adding other iconic items like Snickers, 3 Musketeers, M&Ms and Twix.

But Frank Mars only got to enjoy his success for a few years before he died in 1934.

"He was probably traveling out east, but he ended up dying in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins Hospital after a 10-day illness he had, which was attributed to heart and kidney disease. So that was 1934, so really it was like five years after he left Minneapolis."

Mars eventually came back to his Minnesota roots. He is buried in a mausoleum at Lakewood Cemetery in south Minneapolis, along with his second wife and son Forrest.

In the meantime, the building on Washington Avenue in the North Loop, where the Mars candy empire got its start, has a plaque on the outside commemorating its special place in Minneapolis history.

"It's a great story, and I'm glad you are telling it, so that it gets out in the world," Kullberg said. "It kind of puts us on the map for other things than wheat and grain. Something everyone can relate to."

Plaque on North Loop building commemorating Frank Mars and his contributions to the candy industry (FOX 9)

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The Milky Way: How Frank Mars started a candy bar empire in Minnesota - FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul

Friday, February 18th marked the first anniversary ofNASAsPerseverance roversMarslanding.

The rover first touched down in the planets Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.

The Mars 2020 missionlaunchedJuly 30, 2020, from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Since then, NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)noted in a statement, it has racked up a series of accomplishments, including new distance records.

The2,263-pound robotic geologistcollected the first rock core samples from anotherplanet, tested the first prototype oxygen generator on Mars and deployed Ingenuity, the first robotic helicopter to take off on another planet.

According to the agency, Percy also recently broke a record for the most distance driven by a Mars rover in a single day, traveling almost 1,050 feet using its AutoNav software on Feb. 14.

Perseverance which carried the most cameras ever sent to Mars has nearly wrapped up its firstsciencecampaign in the crater, which contained a lake billions of years ago.

It is currently gathering rock cores from the crater floor the first step in theMars Sample Return campaign.

Two more samples will be collected in the coming weeks that scientists believe could provide an age range for Jezeros formation and lake.

The samples Perseverance has been collecting will provide a key chronology for the formation of Jezero Crater, Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASAs Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. Each one is carefully considered for its scientific value.

Perseverances journey has run into a couple of snags thus far.

Itsfirst attemptat drilling a rock core was unsuccessful and somepebbleshindered progress last month.

In subsequent missions in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), NASA would send spacecraft to Mars to collect the sealed samples and return them to Earth.

A key objective for the Perseverance mission is astrobiology and the hunt for signs of ancient microbial life.

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Perseverance Mars rover marks a year on red planet - New York Post

Clouds can be seen passing through the Martian sky in new images taken by NASA's Curiosity rover.

Curiosity is one of NASA's Mars exploration vehicles which has been on the planet's surface since August 2012. It is the predecessor to the newer Perseverance rover which touched down on Mars almost exactly one year ago in February, 2021.

While Perseverance may be more technically advanced, Curiosity is still operating to this day, and is conducting valuable research on the Red Planet.

Last week, NASA released new images from Curiosity that were taken in mid-December last year at a time when the rover was more than 3,300 Martian days into its ongoing mission.

The images, taken using Curiosity's navigation camera, are snapshots of Mars' clouds. Taken some time apart, the images have been stitched together to form two eight-frame videos.

Taken from two different perspectives, one of the videos shows the clouds passing directly overhead while the other shows the clouds passing over the landscape.

They can be seen below.

The presence of clouds on Mars does not mean liquid water, however. By comparing the two perspectives, scientists were able to calculate that the clouds were around 50 miles high and were probably made out of carbon dioxide ice due to the extremely low temperatures at that altitude.

Scientists should also be able to calculate how fast the clouds are moving, though NASA did not disclose a figure.

Mars is a cold, inhospitable planet with an average temperature of around -81 degrees Fahrenheit, and an atmosphere largely composed of carbon dioxide with some water vapor.

It's not the first time that Curiosity has photographed clouds on Mars. In May 2021, NASA released images of "shining clouds" taken by the rover in March of that year.

The space agency described the Martian clouds as "wispy puffs filled with ice crystals that scattered light from the setting Sun, some of them shimmering with color."

By studying images of Mars' clouds, scientists can understand how they form on Mars and why some are different to others.

NASA's Mars rovers have a habit of exceeding their initial planned operation times. Curiosity's primary mission was due to last just 23 months, but the rover continues to work nearly a decade later.

While this is no doubt an impressive feat of endurance, Curiosity is yet to surpass the marathon efforts of the Opportunity rover, which was designed to last just 90 Martian days and travel around 3,300 feet after landing on Mars in 2004.

But Opportunity just kept on going and its mission was finally declared over in February 2019 after failing to communicate with Earth following a severe dust storm.

By this time the rover had surpassed all expectations, surviving for more than 60 times its life expectancy and travelling more than 28 miles.

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Incredible NASA Mars Images Show Clouds Passing Across Martian Sky - Newsweek

For almost sixty years, robotic missions have been exploring the surface of Mars in search of potential evidence of life. More robotic missions will join in this search in the next fifteen years, the first sample return from Mars (courtesy of the Perseverance rover) will arrive here at Earth, and crewed missions will be sent there. Like their predecessors, these missions will rely on mass spectrometry to analyze samples of the Martian sands to look for potential signs of past life.

Given how much data we can expect from these missions, NASA is looking for new methods to analyze geological samples. To this end, NASA has partnered with the global crowdsourcing platform HeroX and the data-science company DrivenData to launch the Mars Spectrometry: Detect Evidence for Past Life challenge. With a prize purse of $30,000, this Challenge seeks innovative methods that rely on machine learning to automatically analyze Martian geological samples for potential signs of past life.

Despite sixty years of concerted efforts by multiple space agencies, the search for life on Mars has yielded little more than inconclusive results (as demonstrated by the Viking 1 and 2 landers). Nevertheless, modern surveys have found that Mars was a much warmer and wetter place billions of years ago. This discovery is one of the most profound breakthroughs in planetary science and has led to renewed efforts to find evidence of past (and maybe even present) life on Mars.

During the Noachian Period (ca. 4.1 to 3.5 billion years ago), Mars had a denser atmosphere, and surface conditions were warm enough that liquid water flowed on its surface. Evidence of this is preserved today in the form of river channels, sedimentary deposits, delta fans, and other features known to form in the presence of flowing water. By knowing how long these conditions persisted, scientists hope to determine how long life could have existed.

Unfortunately, conducting chemical analysis on soil and rock samples is time-consuming work. Moreover, analyses can suffer from false positives when they are strictly reliant on human interpretation. By leveraging machine-learning techniques, where analytical models are created from huge datasets, scientists hope to automate the chemical analysis process, making it more efficient and less time-consuming.

For this Challenge, NASA is looking innovative methods to automatically analyze data obtained by the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument aboard the Curiosity rover. This data is provided by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and Johnson Space Center (JSC), and the SAM science team. For years, Curiosity has used the SAM instrument to gather Martian soil and rock samples and subject them to evolved gas analysis (EGA).

This consists of heating samples until they emit gases that can be analyzed by spectrometers for specific chemical signatures. The SAM instrument accomplishes this with a gas chromatograph that separates gases to aid in identifying them, a mass spectrometer that detects elements necessary for life, and a tunable laser spectronometer that detects water vapor and analyzes methane to see if it is biotic in origin (produced by living things).

As Greg Lipstein, the Principal of DrivenData, said in the Challenge press release:

This is a fascinating research question where machine learning tools can have a real impact on how we can learn more about our place in the universe. Its a great chance to harness the collective intelligence and passion of the data community to advance the state of open science.

According to the Challenge page, the best methods should be able to detect certain families of chemical compounds that are of interest to astrobiologists. These include nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur, oxygen, and carbon, the chemical building blocks of life, and volatiles such as water, ammonia, and methane, which are associated with biological processes. Competitors will also be able to advantage of the many experimental runs done on analog samples.

From this, competitors are tasked with developing machine learning methods that will support scientists in analyzing and interpreting data collected by missions (in-situ samples) and laboratory instruments (from sample-return missions). It is also hoped that these advancements will help scientists conduct future mission operations with greater speed and efficiency. The competition launched on February 18th and will remain open to submissions until April 18th, 2022.

The winning techniques will receive $15,000 (first place), $7,500 (second), $5,000 (third), with a bonus prize of $2,500. In addition, the winning entries may be used to help analyze data from Mars and potentially even inform future instruments conducting in-situ analysis. This includes the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars 2022 mission, consisting of the Russian Kazachok lander, the ESA Rosalind Franklin rover, and NASAs Dragonfly mission to Titan (Saturns largest moon).

Its exciting to think there might be clues of past life on Mars, said HeroX CEO Kal K. Sahota. These challenges are so inspiring as we search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

The Challenge is open to anyone aged 18 or older, and participants may compete as individuals or as a team. The competition is open to individuals and teams from anywhere in the world, provided federal sanctions do not prohibit participation (some additional restrictions may apply). For more information on the rules, or to accept the Challenge, visit https://mars.drivendata.org

Further Reading: HeroX, DrivenData

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NASA and HeroX are Crowdsourcing the Search for Life on Mars - Universe Today

Landscape near Hooke Crater in Mars southern highlands captured by the CaSSIS camera onboard the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) on February 1, 2021. Credit: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Chaotic mounds, wind-sculpted ripples and dust devil tracks: this image shows a fascinating and otherworldly landscape near Hooke Crater in Mars southern highlands.

The image was taken by the CaSSIS camera onboard the ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) on February 1, 2021, and shows part of Argyre Planitia, centered at 46.2S/318.3E.

This type of scenery is similar to chaotic terrain: a kind of broken, disrupted terrain seen across Mars where haphazard groups of variously sized and shaped rocks irregular knobs, conical mounds, ridges, flat-topped hills known as mesas clump together, often enclosed within depressions. There are around 30 regions of chaotic terrain defined on Mars (see ESA Mars Express views of Ariadnes Colles, Pyrrhae Regio, and Iani Chaos for just a small sample); while this small patch has not been defined as one of these, its appearance is certainly chaotic.

Perhaps the most striking feature here is the wispy, snaking tendrils stretching out across the frame. These dark traces of past activity were caused by dust devils, whirlwinds of dust that occur on both Mars and Earth when warm air rises quickly into cooler air. These devils leave tracks on a planets surface as they travel through dusty landscapes. The tracks here appear to have a north-south orientation, indicating a possible local wind pattern.

The bluish tinge to the dust devil tracks seen here is a result of the three filters that were combined to create this image; while not representative of what an observer would see with the naked eye, these filters produce a color infrared image with greater sensitivity to variations in surface mineralogy.

TGO arrived at Mars in 2016 and began its full science mission in 2018. The spacecraft is not only returning spectacular images like this one, but also providing the best ever inventory of the planets atmospheric gases, and mapping the planets surface for water-rich locations. It will also provide data relay services for the second ExoMars mission, comprising the Rosalind Franklin rover and Kazachok platform, when it arrives on Mars in 2023.

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The Devils in the Detail: Fascinating and Otherworldly Landscape on Mars - SciTechDaily