Eight years and 34 million miles on, Mars rover nears end of road

By Adam Sherwin

From http://www.independent.co.uk/

REUTERS

An artist's impression of one of the two Mars rovers, which have been studying geological samples on the planet

• enlarge

It travelled at an average speed of 60cm an hour and it has arrived a year late. But the Mars rover Opportunity is finally approaching its destination, the rim of the vast Endeavour crater.

Nasa hailed the six-wheel Opportunity's approach to the 22.5km-wide crater last night as a "tremendous scientific success".

The ageing robotic field geologist has logged more than 32km since it was first parachuted on to the planet's surface in 2003, along with its twin rover Spirit, for a planned three-month mission after their 34 million-mile journey from Earth. Spirit emitted its last signal a year ago after becoming trapped in sand. Opportunity crawled out from a crater in 2008 and headed south to the Endeavour, a two-year journey in theory, which has taken longer because Opportunity had to drive backwards to prevent its front wheel from wearing out.

At the crater, Opportunity will travel south across the rim to perform a geological assessment of the location, examining the clay minerals formed under wet conditions at the oldest of the four craters it has visited.

The finishing point was nicknamed Spirit Point in honour of Opportunity's fallen twin. Scott Maxwell, leader of the Mars Rover driving team, tweeted: "The drive we uplink today will actually take us physically on to Cape York. So. *Freaking*. Excited."

Project manager John Callas, of the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that reaching the Endeavour crater was an important science target: "We will likely spend years at this location. It's not just one spot. There's kilometres of interesting geology to explore."

Endeavour is more than 25 times wider than the Victoria crater, an earlier stop that the rover examined for two years. Nasa believes Endeavour is much older. The minerals and sediments had previously only been viewed at a distance by orbiting spacecraft.

Mr Callas said: "It represents geology from very early in Mars history. It's understanding what happened to Mars a long time ago."

Both rovers have made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars. Scientists now know that Mars was at one time like Earth, with an atmosphere thick enough to support liquid water which may have been favourable for microbial life.

Mr Callas said the Spirit rover also found evidence of ancient hydrothermal systems on Mars that could support an ecosystem. He said the Opportunity was still in good health despite some "arthritis" in its joints, adding: "We're on the surface of a planet that's hundreds of millions of kilometres away in frigid cold temperatures."

7 Awesome Images That Will Make You Mourn The Space Shuttle

From:  http://www.cracked.com/

Last week marked the final official mission of the Space Shuttle. It's over: No more manned space missions on the agenda. As of now, America is pursuing a "flexible path" space-flight program, which essentially means we have nothing. They'll say the program died because of funding cuts and age, but that's not the whole story. Astronauts and the Space Shuttle used to reign as the unquestionable rulers of badass, but then somewhere along the line, cultural opinion shifted, and somehow wrapping a man in a giant metal bullet and firing him into the face of the void became thought of as stuffy and boring. The space program didn't die because of budgetary concerns; it died because we forgot how goddamn awesome it was. And that's something we had no excuse for doing, as these images will prove:

#7. Burn Down the Sky

This is the Saturn V rocket, carrying the Apollo 11 moon mission:

This is the Discovery launch:

This is the Athena II:

These images bring up an important question: At what point did we forget that the Space Shuttle was, essentially, a program that strapped human beings to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math? How jaded do we have to be to lose collective interest in that? We celebrate the 4th of July every year, all across the nation. If explosions are that important to us, why don't we just channel a third of our yearly fireworks budget into one big bastard of a shot -- one mad, screaming, man-made asteroid hurled right back up into the face of nature, just to prove to the bitch that she doesn't have a lock on that kind of thing?

The Endeavour, mankind's polite rebuttal to the meteor strike.

#6. What Void?

With most photographs being taken in the contextless void, it's easy to forget that astronauts are just human beings wrapped up in fancy clothes, floating miles up in the air, surrounded on all sides by a lethal nothing. And then you see an image like this:

An image that really drives home the fact that these are people -- tiny, fragile beings that die if they swallow a pretzel wrong or slip in the shower -- and they're existing so far removed from the planet they could be saying, "Oh excuse me, New Zealand, I didn't see you there."
Space is a vast and frightening thing; it is an extreme and murderous absence; it's the closest physical metaphor for the disturbing unknowns that follow death; space is a villain from a children's book -- it's the Nothing from The NeverEnding Story. And now, here's Bruce McCandless, an astronaut on the Challenger, taking the first untethered spacewalk.

He had no ties to any earthly bond whatsoever, he was hundreds of miles beyond the point where the sky gives up, and he said, "No, thank you," to a lifeline, then went for a bit of a constitutional ... into the abyss.

#5. Battle Tanks are GO!

Remember those famous pictures of the Mars rovers, where they looked like tiny, plastic, chintzy little toys?

Well, this is what the new model, Curiosity, looks like:

It looks like something that should be laying siege to G.I. Joe Headquarters. It looks like it's about to call Optimus Prime a pussy and then kill John Connor for good this time.
The NASA PR campaigns showed us the rover looking tiny, flat, kind of bland, and nobody cared. No matter how crazy awesome it was that we were playing RC cars on Mars, the public didn't have a catchy visual, so everybody wrote it off as more dry science stuff. But look at that thing again: Every kid in the world needs a toy version of that, and they need it right now, because that's how kids need everything. Release a scaled down RC car of Curiosity, call it something like "CrushStomper," slap a couple of ads up on episodes of Bakugan, and there you go: You've got NASA funded for the next 10 years.

#4. He's Got the Whole World ... in His Face.

Odds are you're at work right now, reading this instead of collating or conglomerating or whatever adults with real jobs are supposed to do. Also, odds are your cell phone has a camera in it. So let's perform a quick social experiment: Fire it up, and take a self-portrait of you just doing your job, right now.
How'd that picture turn out?
Does that gripping image of you making crude pixel-tits in Excel fill onlookers with awe and wonder? Does that photograph of you quietly mourning the death of the last Red Bull capture the insanity, beauty and existential terror of mankind's progress?
No?
Funny, because when Clay Anderson, flight engineer for Expedition 15 tried this same experiment at his job ...

... it totally did all of those things like a motherfucker.

 

 

#3. Thrust Diamonds

That's the engine of an SR-71 Blackbird being tested, but you can be forgiven if you panicked just now and slapped at the button that calls James Bond into your office. (Also, hey, thanks for reading, Q! Big fan.) The shapes in that Death Ray up there aren't tricks of the camera, either -- they're called Thrust Diamonds, and to NASA, that shit ain't even a thing.

Brother can't take a dump up in NASA without firing off some Thrust Diamonds.

#2. The Crawler-Transporters

If you're the kind of person that skips right to the moneyshot when watching porn, you've probably only seen the actual take-off portion of a shuttle launch. And hey, if a missile being fired into the throat of the unknown armed with a warhead of "dudes who just don't give a fuck" doesn't impress you, surely nothing else about the launch process will.
How about the world's largest tank?

The machine that brings the shuttle to the launchpad is called a crawler-transporter, and it's the largest self-powered land vehicle in the world. They're twin mobile platforms weighing 3,000-tons a piece, 131-feet-long by 114-feet-wide, driven by a crew of 30, and powered by four 1,400 (not a typo) horsepower engines, one on each corner. That big, fuck-all structure holding the shuttle up there? Here it is cruising down the highway.

For scale, here it is next to a human being:

It's like taking an oil rig out for a spin.
It costs the USA $1 billion more than NASA's entire budget to provide air conditioning for the Armed Forces in the Middle East. Clearly, our national priorities are skewed towards conflict. That's kind of messed up, but OK, fine: Objectively, we know the crawler-transporter isn't armed or armored, but next time we start a war, let's do it by driving Hans and Franz up there (their actual names, by the way) right into the other guys' capital. I promise you, that war would be won in an afternoon.
I mean, would you shoot at it?

#1. The Space Shuttle is Metal as F*ck

Here's the Space Shuttle doing its best impression of a Dio album cover.

Large version.
This isn't some lucky fluke shot, either. Lightning loves itself some Shuttle. Here's another:

Large version.
Jesus Christ. That's clearly the tower of some evil techno-wizard.

Holy shit. That's the picture you'd see on the real estate brochure for God's house. Here's another angle:

Large version.
Somewhere, there's a big-haired anime character with a disproportionately large sword who's trying to shut down the shield reactors so he can get in there.
***
All I've really done here is (hopefully) prove that the Space Shuttle was badass, but I'm an adult now, and I understand that we can't keep funding something just because it's bitchin'. That's not how budgets work; there's no spreadsheet column for "badical." We didn't fund these programs to start with because they were cool; it was because we had to get to space before the Russians, and because we had to establish a sense of national identity in a conflicted period in our nation's history. In a nutshell, we went into space because nothing brings people together like shoving something in somebody else's face.
So in the interest of that: I heard Europe talking the other day, America, and I mean -- I don't want to start anything here, so you didn't hear it from me -- but they were saying you don't go into space anymore because you're scared. Then they said that Italy was a much bigger landwang than Florida, and Africa made some crack about how the Gulf of Mexico must be cold this time of the year, and then all the other continents laughed.
Are you really gonna take that?

Meet NASA’s next Mars rover: Curiosity. It has a plutonium-powered laser

By Sebastian Anthony
From http://www.extremetech.com/

After a series of moderately successful Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), NASA is about to take its game to the next level. Say hello to Curiosity, which is 10 feet (3m) long and weighs almost a ton, four times more than Spirit and Opportunity. It is expected to launch in November or December, and arrive on Mars about eight months later.

Not only is Curiosity huge, but it’s also equipped with a robot arm, a laser that can vaporize rocks at seven meters, and a percussive drill for boring into Mars’ surface. The machine itself is powered by the heat given off by 4.8kg plutonium dioxide, meaning it won’t rely on solar power, which has caused issues with older space craft. It’s not just the rover itself that’s cool cool, though: because it’s so heavy, Curiosity can’t use the highly scientific approach of “airbagging” to soften its landing — instead, it will descend through the Mars atmosphere using a retrorocket jet pack.

It is not yet known where Curiosity will land on Mars — the final choice will likely be made in the next few days — but there are two front-runners: Gale Crater, a 150-kilometer depression with a 5-kilometer-high mound of ancient sediment that might contain telltale signs of organic life, and Eberswalde Crater, which is thought to contain a river delta and lakebed deposits. Both landing sites are theorized to have once contained water, and Curiosity will be tasked with analyzing whether one of these regions — and Mars itself — was once habitable. The total cost of the Curiosity mission, incidentally, will be at least $2.3 billion — well beyond the $820 million spent on Spirit and Opportunity.

At this point, we strongly suggest that you look at the full-size images of Curiosity, both on NASA’s website and Wired.

If you want to read more about the mission itself, check out the Mars Science Laboratory website or Nature’s write-up.

New animation depicts next Mars rover in action

This artist concept features NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover, a mobile robot for investigating Mars' past or present ability to sustain microbial life. Curiosity is being tested in preparation for launch in the fall of 2011. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

(PhysOrg.com) -- Although NASA's Mars Science Laboratory will not leave Earth until late this year nor land on Mars until August 2012, anyone can watch those dramatic events now in a new animation of the mission.

The full, 11-minute animation, shows sequences such as the spacecraft separating from its launch vehicle near Earth and the mission's rover, Curiosity, zapping rocks with a laser and examining samples of powdered rock on Mars. A shorter, narrated version is also available below.

Curiosity's landing will use a different method than any previous Mars landing, with the rover suspended on tethers from a rocket-backpack "sky crane."

The new animation combines detailed views of the spacecraft with scenes of real places on Mars, based on stereo images taken by earlier missions.

"It is a treat for the 2,000 or more people who have worked on the Mars Science Laboratory during the past eight years to watch these action scenes of the hardware the project has developed and assembled," said Mars Science Laboratory Project Manager Pete Theisinger at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The animation also provides an exciting view of this mission for any fan of adventure and exploration."

Provided by JPL/NASA (news : web)

Next Mars Rover Will "See" in 3-D Color

from: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/



Two digital color cameras on the mast of NASA's next Mars rover will complement each other in showing the surface of Mars in exquisite detail.  They are the left and right eyes of the Mast Camera, or Mastcam, instrument on the Curiosity rover of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, launching in late 2011.

The right-eye Mastcam looks through a telephoto lens, revealing details near or far with about three-fold better resolution than any previous landscape-viewing camera on the surface of Mars. The left-eye Mastcam provides broader context through a medium-angle lens. Each can acquire thousands of full-color images and store them in an eight-gigabyte flash memory. Both cameras are also capable of recording high-definition video at about eight frames per second. Combining information from the two eyes can yield 3-D views of the telephoto part of the scene.

The motivation to put telephoto capability in Curiosity's main science imaging instrument grew from experience with NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity and its studies of an arena-size crater in 2004. The science camera on that rover's mast, which can see details comparably to what a human eye can see at the same distance, showed intriguing patterns in the layers of Burns Cliff inside Endurance Crater.

"We tried to get over and study it, but the rover could not negotiate the steep slope," recalled Mastcam Principal Investigator Michael Malin, of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego. "We all desperately coveted a telephoto lens." NASA selected his Mastcam proposal later that year for the Mars Science Laboratory rover.

The telephoto Mastcam, called "Mastcam 100" for its 100-millimeter focal-length lens, provides enough resolution to distinguish a basketball from a football at a distance of seven football fields, or to read "ONE CENT" on a penny on the ground beside the rover. Its images cover an area about six degrees wide by five degrees tall.

Its left-eye partner, called "Mastcam 34" for its 34-millimeter lens, catches a scene three times wider -- about 18 degrees wide and 15 degrees tall -- with each exposure.

Researchers will use the Mastcams and nine other science instruments on Curiosity to study past and present environments in a carefully chosen area of Mars. They will assess whether conditions have been favorable for life and favorable for preserving evidence about whether life has existed there. Mastcam imaging of the shapes and colors of landscapes, rocks and soils will provide clues about the history of environmental processes that have formed them and modified them over time. Images and videos of the sky will document contemporary processes, such as movement of clouds and dust.

Previous color cameras on Mars have taken a sequence of exposures through different color filters to be combined on Earth into color views. The Mastcams record color the same way consumer digital cameras do: They have a grid of tiny red, green and blue squares (a "Bayer pattern" filter) fitted over the electronic light detector (the charge-coupled device, or CCD). This allows the Mastcams to get the three color components over the entire scene in a single exposure.

Mastcam's color-calibration target on the rover deck includes magnets to keep the highly magnetic Martian dust from accumulating on portions of color chips and white-gray-balance reference chips. Natural lighting on Mars tends to be redder than on Earth due to dust in Mars' atmosphere. "True color" images can be produced that incorporate that lighting effect -- comparable to the greenish look of color-film images taken under fluorescent lights on Earth without a white-balancing adjustment. A white-balance calculation can yield a more natural look by adjusting for the tint of the lighting, as the human eye tends to do and digital cameras can do. The Mastcams are capable of producing both true-color and white-balanced images.

Besides the affixed red-green-blue filter grid, the Mastcams have wheels of other filters that can be rotated into place between the lens and the CCD. These include science spectral filters for examining the ground or sky in narrow bands of visible-light or near-infrared wavelengths. One filter on each camera allows it to look directly at the sun to measure the amount of dust in the atmosphere, a key part of Mars' weather.

"Something we're likely to do frequently is to look at rocks and features with the Mastcam 34 red-green-blue filter, and if we see something of interest, follow that up with the Mastcam 34 and Mastcam 100 science spectral filters," Malin said. "We can use the red-green-blue data for quick reconnaissance and the science filters for target selection."

When Curiosity drives to a new location, Mastcam 34 can record a full-color, full-circle panorama about 60 degrees tall by taking 150 images in about 25 minutes. Using Mastcam 100, the team will be able to broaden the swath of terrain evaluated on either side of the path Curiosity drives, compared to what has been possible with earlier Mars rovers. That will help with selection of the most interesting targets to approach for analysis by Curiosity's other instruments and will provide additional geological context for interpreting data about the chosen targets.

The Mastcams will provide still images and video to study motions of the rover -- both for science, such as seeing how soils interact with wheels, and for engineering, such as aiding in use of the robotic arm. In other videos, the team may use cinematic techniques such as panning across a scene and using the rover's movement for "dolly" shots.

Each of the two-megapixel Mastcams can take and store thousands of images, though the amount received on Earth each day will depend on how the science team chooses priorities for the day's available data-transmission volume. Malin anticipates frequent use of Mastcam "thumbnail" frames -- compressed roughly 150-by-150-pixel versions of each image -- as an index of the full-scale images held in the onboard memory.

Malin Space Science Systems built the Mastcam instrument and will operate it. The company's founder, Michael Malin, participated in NASA's Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s, provided the Mars Orbiter Camera for NASA's Mars Global Surveyor mission, and is the principal investigator for both the Context Camera and the Mars Color Imager on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The science team for Mastcam and two other instruments the same company provided for Curiosity includes the lead scientist for the mast-mounted science cameras on Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity (James Bell of Arizona State University); the lead scientist for the mast camera on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander (Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University); James Cameron, director of such popular movies as "Titanic" and "Avatar"; and 17 others with expertise in geology, soils, frost, atmosphere, imaging and other topics.

The Daily Galaxy via  http://www.nasa.gov/msl. You can follow the mission on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/MarsCuriosity and on Twitter @marscuriosity . A full listing of JPL social media accounts is at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/social .
This color image at the top of the page is a three dimensional (3D) view of a digital elevation map of a sample collected by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander's Atomic Force Microscope (AFM).

The image shows four round pits, only 5 microns in depth, that were micromachined into the silicon substrate, which is the background plane shown in red. This image has been processed to reflect the levelness of the substrate. A Martian particle -- only one micrometer, or one millionth of a meter, across -- is held in the upper left pit.

The rounded particle -- shown at the highest magnification ever seen from another world -- is a particle of the dust that cloaks Mars. Such dust particles color the Martian sky pink, feed storms that regularly envelop the planet and produce Mars' distinctive red soil.

The particle was part of a sample informally called "Sorceress" delivered to the AFM on the 38th Martian day, or sol, of the mission (July 2, 2008). The AFM is part of Phoenix's microscopic station called MECA, or the Miscroscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer.

The AFM was developed by a Swiss-led consortium, with Imperial College London producing the silicon substrate that holds sampled particles.

 Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

Posted at 12:10 AM | Permalink

Rover spots ‘strange stuff’ on Martian rock: Scientists puzzle over images showing tightly packed blueberries

MSNBC.com

Space.com

An enhanced-color image of the Chocolate Hills rock on Mars shows a strange coating that one researcher has called a "blueberry sandwich." The coating appears blue in this picture due to the false-color effect, but the naked eye would see this scene in shades of rusty red. Chocolate Hills is about the size of a loaf of bread. Click on the picture for a larger version.

NASA's Mars rover Opportunity has found a Martian rock covered in weird material as its odometer hit a major milestone this week, with the long-lived robot completing equivalent to a half–marathon on the Red Planet.

Opportunity, now in its seventh year on Mars, found the odd Mars rock during the past six weeks studying investigating a crater called "Concepción."

The crater is about 33 feet (10 meters) in diameter, with dark rays extending from it, as seen from orbit, which made it a target of interest for rover inspection because they suggest the crater is young.

The rover made the pit stop to investigate the crater on its long journey to the large crater Endeavour, which is still about 7 miles (12 kilometers) away. It was while Opportunity was at Concepción that the rover surpassed 12.43 miles (20 kilometers) of total driving, about the length of a half-marathon.

Opportunity has driven farther than any other wheeled robot to land on Mars. Its robotic twin Spirit, which landed in January 2004 just weeks ahead of Opportunity, has driven about 4.8 miles (7.7 kilometers), while NASA's Sojourner rover, a small robot that landed in 1997, could drive only about a third of a mile (about half a kilometer) from the Pathfinder base it landed with.

Mars rock oddity
With new software that allows Opportunity to photograph rocks and other aspects of the Martian terrain and decide for itself what is worth closer inspection, the rover took an up-close look at a few rocks ejected by the impact that created Concepción.

What Opportunity has seen are chunks of the same type of bedrock it has seen at hundreds of locations since landing in January 2004: soft, sulfate-rich sandstone holding harder peppercorn-size dark spheres like berries in a muffin. The little spheres, rich in iron, gained the nickname "blueberries." But these rocks have some unusual twists as well.

"It was clear from the images that Opportunity took on the approach to Concepción that there was strange stuff on lots of the rocks near the crater," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator for Opportunity and Spirit. "There's dark, grayish material coating faces of the rocks and filling fractures in them. At least part of it is composed of blueberries jammed together as close as you could pack them. We've never seen anything like this before."

Opportunity used tools on its robotic arm to examine this unusual material on a rock called "Chocolate Hills." In some places, the layer of closely packed spheres lies between thinner, smoother layers.

"It looks like a blueberry sandwich," said Matt Golombek, a rover science-team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell A false-color image from the Opportunity rover's microscopic imager shows details of the "blueberry" coating on Chocolate Hills. The view covers an area about 1.2 inches (3 centimeters) across. Click on the picture to see a larger version.

Melted Mars rocks
Initial analysis of the coating's composition does not show any obvious component from whatever space rock hit Mars to dig the crater, but that is not a surprise, Golombek said. "The impact is so fast, most of the impactor vaporizes," he said. "Thin films of melt get thrown out, but typically the composition of the melt is the stuff that the impactor hit, rather than the impactor material."

The composition Opportunity found for the dark coating material fits at least two hypotheses being evaluated, and possibly others. One is that the material resulted from partial melting of blueberry-containing sandstone due to the energy of the impact. Another is that it formed from the filling of fractures in this type of rock before the impact occurred.

"It's possible that when you melt this rock, the sandstone melts before the blueberries do, leaving intact blueberries as part of a melt layer," Squyres said.

"As an alternative, we know that this type of rock has fractures and that the sandstone can dissolve," he said. "Long ago, water flowing through fractures could have dissolved the sandstone and liberated blueberries that fell down into the fracture and packed together. In this hypothesis, the impact that excavated the crater did not play a role in forming this material, but split rocks along fractures so the material is exposed on the exterior like a coating."

NASA / JPL-Caltech / UA An orbital image captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Opportunity rover (indicated by the white pointer) perched on the edge of Concepcion crater on Mars.

Golombek said, "One consideration that jumps out is that we've been driving around this part of Mars for six years and never seen this stuff before, then we get to this young crater and it's coating rocks all around the crater. Sure looks like there's a connection, but it could just be a coincidence."

The observation that the rocks thrown from the crater have not yet eroded away much is evidence that the crater is young, confirming the suggestion from the dark rays.

"We're not ready to attach a number to it, but this is really young. It is the youngest crater we've ever seen with Opportunity and probably the youngest either rover has seen," Squyres said.

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" name="ci" type="hidden">Rover spots ‘strange stuff’ on Martian rock Scientists puzzle over images showing tightly packed blueberriesSpace.com
updated 1:45 p.m. ET,Thurs., March. 25, 2010NASA's Mars rover Opportunity has found a Martian rock covered in weird material as its odometer hit a major milestone this week, with the long-lived robot completing equivalent to a half–marathon on the Red Planet.Opportunity, now in its seventh year on Mars, found the odd Mars rock during the past six weeks studying investigating a crater called "Concepción."The crater is about 33 feet (10 meters) in diameter, with dark rays extending from it, as seen from orbit, which made it a target of interest for rover inspection because they suggest the crater is young.The rover made the pit stop to investigate the crater on its long journey to the large crater Endeavour, which is still about 7 miles (12 kilometers) away. It was while Opportunity was at Concepción that the rover surpassed 12.43 miles (20 kilometers) of total driving, about the length of a half-marathon. Opportunity has driven farther than any other wheeled robot to land on Mars. Its robotic twin Spirit, which landed in January 2004 just weeks ahead of Opportunity, has driven about 4.8 miles (7.7 kilometers), while NASA's Sojourner rover, a small robot that landed in 1997, could drive only about a third of a mile (about half a kilometer) from the Pathfinder base it landed with.Mars rock oddity
With new software that allows Opportunity to photograph rocks and other aspects of the Martian terrain and decide for itself what is worth closer inspection, the rover took an up-close look at a few rocks ejected by the impact that created Concepción.What Opportunity has seen are chunks of the same type of bedrock it has seen at hundreds of locations since landing in January 2004: soft, sulfate-rich sandstone holding harder peppercorn-size dark spheres like berries in a muffin. The little spheres, rich in iron, gained the nickname "blueberries." But these rocks have some unusual twists as well."It was clear from the images that Opportunity took on the approach to Concepción that there was strange stuff on lots of the rocks near the crater," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator for Opportunity and Spirit. "There's dark, grayish material coating faces of the rocks and filling fractures in them. At least part of it is composed of blueberries jammed together as close as you could pack them. We've never seen anything like this before."Opportunity used tools on its robotic arm to examine this unusual material on a rock called "Chocolate Hills." In some places, the layer of closely packed spheres lies between thinner, smoother layers."It looks like a blueberry sandwich," said Matt Golombek, a rover science-team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.Melted Mars rocks
Initial analysis of the coating's composition does not show any obvious component from whatever space rock hit Mars to dig the crater, but that is not a surprise, Golombek said. "The impact is so fast, most of the impactor vaporizes," he said. "Thin films of melt get thrown out, but typically the composition of the melt is the stuff that the impactor hit, rather than the impactor material."The composition Opportunity found for the dark coating material fits at least two hypotheses being evaluated, and possibly others. One is that the material resulted from partial melting of blueberry-containing sandstone due to the energy of the impact. Another is that it formed from the filling of fractures in this type of rock before the impact occurred."It's possible that when you melt this rock, the sandstone melts before the blueberries do, leaving intact blueberries as part of a melt layer," Squyres said."As an alternative, we know that this type of rock has fractures and that the sandstone can dissolve," he said. "Long ago, water flowing through fractures could have dissolved the sandstone and liberated blueberries that fell down into the fracture and packed together. In this hypothesis, the impact that excavated the crater did not play a role in forming this material, but split rocks along fractures so the material is exposed on the exterior like a coating."Golombek said, "One consideration that jumps out is that we've been driving around this part of Mars for six years and never seen this stuff before, then we get to this young crater and it's coating rocks all around the crater. Sure looks like there's a connection, but it could just be a coincidence."The observation that the rocks thrown from the crater have not yet eroded away much is evidence that the crater is young, confirming the suggestion from the dark rays."We're not ready to attach a number to it, but this is really young. It is the youngest crater we've ever seen with Opportunity and probably the youngest either rover has seen," Squyres said.© 2010 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com.URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36037050/MSN Privacy .
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NASA Builds World's Largest Space Parachute for Martian Landing

To survive the thin Martian atmosphere, the 2000-plus-lb. Mars Science Laboratory rover will depend on the largest space parachute ever built. Here’s how NASA’s next chute will work.

By Morgan Lord

Parachute Diameter: 52 feet. (Photograph by NASA).

When the NASA Mars Science Laboratory rover lands on Mars in 2012, it will face a unique obstacle: With an Earth weight of nearly a ton (compared to about 400 pounds for previous Mars rovers) and a Mars weight of about 750 pounds, it is too massive for any existing space parachute. So to cushion its fall through the thin Martian atmosphere (which is less than 1 percent as dense as Earth’s), NASA engineers had to come up with something really big. The new parachute opens to a diameter of 52 feet, making it twice the size of any parachute ever flown beyond Earth.

To test the parachute, which was built by Pioneer Aerospace, NASA brought it into the world’s largest wind tunnel, located at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. The parachute passed flight-qualification testing in April, and is now ready for the rover’s 2011 launch date.

• The parachute is designed to survive deployment in the Martian atmosphere at Mach 2.2, where it will generate 65,000 pounds of drag.

• The wind tunnel used to test the parachute is 80 feet tall and 120 feet wide, big enough to house a Boeing 737. It is part of the National Full-Scale Aerodynamics Complex, operated by the U.S. Air Force.

• A nylon and polyester composition keeps the parachute’s total weight down to just 120 pounds.

• The parachute is held by 80 suspension lines, each 150 feet long. The parachute design—where there is a band of material, open space and a mushroom cap—is called a disk-gap-band.

Mars Parachute Photo Gallery
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1. RE: NASA Builds World's Largest Space Parachute for Martian Landing
Website: http://singedrac.livejournal.com
Hey I know that wind tunnel! I've been in it! Largest wind tunnel in the world. Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California. It's like a mile away from me.

Weird New NASA Rovers Really Get Around

• By Lisa Grossman

At some point on their five-year journey, Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have both gotten their feet stuck in the soil, and NASA is taking notes for the design of the next generation of rovers.

In 2005, Opportunity spent five weeks spinning her wheels in a dune later dubbed “Purgatory.” Last week, Spirit sank into a sandpit scientists are calling “Troy,” and could stay there for weeks — or forever.

But rovers of the future may have an easier time of it. NASA scientists are building an army of prototypes with new and ever weirder ways to rove.

CLIFFBOT

One of the toughest tasks for rovers is climbing steep slopes. Some of the most interesting bits of Martian geology, like exposed rocks on cliff faces or gullies in craters that might once have been flowing streams, are off-limits to Spirit and Opportunity. Anxious engineers fear a spill, or worry that once they’re in, they won’t be able to get back out.

The Cliffbot (known more formally as the Sample-Return Rover) gets around this by borrowing tricks from human mountaineers. It’s tethered to two “anchorbots” that belay it from the top of the cliff using modified fishing reels. This configuration lets it climb down 80 degree slopes to take pictures and soil samples at the bottom.

Cliffbot is already getting its feet dirty: It spent the past three summers doing field tests in Svalbard, Norway, where it froze its batteries off and dodged polar bears.

LEMUR

Another rover tackles the climbing problem with sheer dexterity. With a typically charming NASA acronym, the Lemur (Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robots) was designed to help build things in orbit. It can crawl along a segmented mirror and climb the walls in a rock gym. Engineers hope it will be able to place “holds” in rock and soil, like rock climbers do. And at just 18 inches across, it’s downright adorable.

ATHLETE

The behemoth Athlete (All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer) rover is based on the Lemur, but it’s anything but cuddly. Designed to carry people and equipment across the surface of the moon, it tackles tough terrain with sheer size. The prototype is four meters (about 13 feet) wide, and the rover is expected to be nearly twice that. It can roll up to six miles an hour on the lunar hills, while keeping the center of the vehicle perfectly level. That might not sound like much, but it’s more than 100 times as fast as the Mars rovers, which have each traversed about five miles in as many years. And unlike other rovers, it doesn’t just roll around. It can lift up its limbs to step over boulders (not to mention strike menacing scorpion-like poses).

Athlete would probably be used in tandem with a lunar rover like the one featured at Obama’s inauguration.

“It’s like retired people with their big Winnebago and the Jeep behind them,” said Richard Volpe, manager of Mobility and Robotics Systems Section of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “You park your Winnebago [in this case, Athlete] and it stays stationary for a week or two, and you do your little sorties in your Jeep.”

One way engineers imagine getting these colossal insects to the moon is to make them collapsible. They’d fold down into discs, stack up for the flight, and self-deploy on landing like giant robot spiders popping out of a Pringles can. Another is to have them split into two three-legged “Tri-Athletes” that can click back together or dock to other robots on the moon.

HOPPER

Able to leap small boulders in a single bound, this hopping robot doesn’t waste time on navigation. The prototype is so new it doesn’t have a catchy acronym yet, but it’s the latest in a long line of hopping robots, all designed to save the time and energy lost tiptoeing around obstacles. Most earlier hoppers landed on their heads and needed helmets to survive, which meant they couldn’t make long jumps or carry fragile equipment. This one deftly lands on its six spring-loaded feet. It can jump about a foot in the air on Earth, which would be six feet under lunar gravity. All six legs are also steerable, letting it take off and land at different angles. And it carries a small motorized gyroscope in its underbelly to keep it from tumbling mid-hop.

AXEL

The simplest proto-rover of them all, Axel is aptly named. It’s just two wheels connected to an axle. Its symmetry means it’s safe from one of the biggest rover worries on steep slopes: flipping over.

“Even if it’s turned upside-down it doesn’t matter, because upside-down is right-side-up,” Volpe said.

Like the Cliffbot, Axel would be tethered to a bigger rover that would stand at the top of a cliff. But Axel can take unprecedented amounts of abuse. Its wheels can be foldable or inflatable, letting it absorb a lot of impact on landing. It’s unperturbed by dangling in mid-air. It can carry scientific instruments in the cylinder that connects the two wheels, and could even take samples back the same way. All the tether rover needs to do is reel it back in when it’s done.

MARS SCIENCE LABORATORY

Most of these rovers are years away from seeing the dim light of space. According to Volpe, it typically takes 10 to 20 years from rover concept to deployment. But how will the next generation of Mars rovers handle the sand?

The Mars Science Laboratory, slated to launch in 2011, is based on the same basic system as Spirit and Opportunity, but twice as big.

“When it comes to rocky terrain, we can climb obstacles that are about twice as high or as deep as Spirit and Opportunity,” said mobility engineer Jaime Waydo. “In that undulating terrain where there’s rocks or holes, we do very well.”

But they haven’t solved the sand problem yet. “When it comes to sand, what you care about is something we call ground pressure, how much you float in the sand,” Waydo said. “MSL has the same ground pressure as Spirit and Opportunity, so when we start driving in sand, we expect the performance to be about the same.”

There’s an obvious trade-off at work: The heavier your rover, the more it sinks. MSL could be more buoyant if it had bigger wheels (which would be harder to ship) or took fewer instruments, but “that would be really sad,” Waydo said. “We could take less science, but that’s the whole reason we go.”

Images: NASA/JPL

(Re)Name NASA's Next Martian Rover

By Alexis Madrigal

From Wired Magazine Blog

With the recent detection of seasonal Martian methane emissions — which microbes could be generating or eating, NASA's next robotic mission to the planet could become the most exciting unmanned mission in the history of the agency by discovering definitive evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Which is exactly why the rover carrying out the mission needs a new name. Even NASA knows: they are holding a a kid-centric naming contest sponsored by Wall-E to replace the current snappy moniker, the Mars Science Laboratory.

Call us homers, but we have more faith in Wired Science readers than we do in your little cousins to come up with the type of awe-inducing name that will fit the next-gen rover, which launches in fall 2011. After all, you did an inspiring job with the Mars Phoenix Twitter epitaph contest. So, we're introducing another Reddit widget below for you to go wild with. You can submit your own name and vote on others through January 26.

We can't promise that NASA will have anything to do with our official nickname, but we will link it from our future stories on the rover.

Nasa reveals life on Mars

By STAFF REPORTERS from The Sun

ALIEN bugs are responsible for strong plumes of methane gas detected on Mars, it was claimed tonight.

Nasa scientists say the gas emissions could have either a geological or biological source - as The Sun exclusively revealed today.

Nasa tonight streamed it historic findings live on its online television channel which you can watch by clicking HERE.

Life is responsible for more than 90 per cent of the Earth’s atmospheric methane.

Experts believe there is a good chance that organisms produced the gas emissions - as large as some of those seen on Earth - on Mars too.

Discovery ... Nasa created image of gas found on Mars

Susan Twardy/NASA

Scientist Michael Mumma of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said: “This raises the probability substantially that life was there or still survives at the present.

“We think the probability is much higher now based on this evidence.”

The bugs that made it may have vanished millions of years ago, leaving the methane frozen under the planet’s surface.

But another possibility is that some hardy organisms still survive on the Red Planet, living underground without sunlight and using hydrogen from water for energy. Similar microbes exist on Earth.

Methane produced by the action of water on hot carbon bearing rocks, as occurs in volcanic regions on Earth, is the alternative explanation.

Whatever the source is, scientists agree that something is replenishing the methane.

The find is seen as exciting new evidence that Martian microbes are still alive today.

Some scientists reckon methane is also produced by volcanic processes. But there are NO known active volcanoes on Mars.

Furthermore, Nasa has found the gas in the same regions as clouds of water vapour, the vital “drink” needed to support life.

Mission ... probe on the surface of Mars

Experts speculate that the methane is being emitted as a waste product by organisms called methanogens living in water beneath underground ice.

And they would have to be alive today because the methane would otherwise have been lost from the Martian atmosphere.

What a scoop ... Phoenix lander dug up chunks of ice last year

John Murray — a member of the Mars Express European space probe team — believes the mini-Martians may be in a form of suspended animation and could even be REVIVED.

He has found overwhelming evidence of a vast frozen ocean beneath the dust near the Martian equator where simple life could have thrived as microbes.

Today’s briefing will feature a star panel of Mars experts headed by Michael Meyer, chief scientist for Nasa’s Mars programme.

UK Mars expert Professor Colin Pillinger believes the methane can only point to the presence of life on the planet.

His ill-fated Beagle 2 probe was carrying a laboratory that would have looked directly for such signs of life when it crashed on Christmas Day 2003.

Plumes ... dramatic animation show how methane may have been produced below Mars' surface

Susan Twardy/NASA

Prof Pillinger told The Sun last night: “Methane is a product of biology. For methane to be in Mars’ atmosphere, there has to be a replenishable source.

“The most obvious source of methane is organisms. So if you find methane in an atmosphere, you can suspect there is life.

“It’s not proof, but it makes it worth a much closer look.”

Nasa’s findings confirm studies by Europe’s Mars Express probe, which has been orbiting the planet for five years and also reported signs of methane in 2004.

Britain’s top space expert Nick Pope last night hailed the new evidence of life as “the most important discovery of all time”.

He said: “What could be more profound than to know it’s not just us out there?

Expert ... Colin Pillinger

"We’ve really only scratched the surface — it’s an absolute certainty that there is life out there and we are not alone.

“If there is life on Mars then the logical conclusion is that there must be life elsewhere too.

“If it’s happened here on Earth, then why shouldn’t it happen anywhere? The implication is this is a universal law.

“Mars is very similar to Earth. It’s about the same size, it’s a rocky inner planet.

“Most scientists believe it probably has liquid water which is almost universally agreed as the pre-requisite for life. I am certain there is other life in the Universe and, most likely, intelligent life.”

The Red Planet has gripped the public imagination for more than a century as a possible home for aliens.

But life could not survive on its surface because, unlike the Earth, Mars has no magnetic shield to protect it against deadly sun radiation.

The planet resembles our own in many ways. It is made of rock, it has an atmosphere and weather systems.

Although much smaller with a diameter of around 4,222 miles, Mars’ day is just 40 minutes longer than ours and its tilted axis gives it seasons.

Water has been found in the form of buried ice and scientists believe that two billion years ago, Mars was covered with liquid oceans.

Proof that water is still on Mars came in 2007 when Mars Express used ground-piercing radar to study the region around the planet’s South Pole.

Nasa’s latest lander Phoenix dug up chunks of Martian ice last year. It swiftly evaporated into the thin atmosphere.

Nasa have controversially hit the headlines before for claiming evidence for Martians.

In 1996, they said they had discovered fossilised organisms in a meteorite from the planet.

But other scientists were sceptical.