tagged w/ Rover
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"Beautiful" mineral-rich site may contain evidence of ancient life, scientists say.NASA's next rover to land on Mars will touch down in a place called Gale crater, a site that scientists say will offer the best chance for studying whether the red planet could have supported life.
link:http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/07/110722-nasa-mars-rover-gale-crater-landing-site-curiosity-space-science/"Beautiful" mineral-rich site may contain evidence of ancient life,... more
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NASA and the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum are planning to organize new mission on Mars. The main purpose of this mission is looking for conditions that could sustain microscopic life and any evidence of past life on the planet.
The newest rover called Curiosity will land the Red Planet in August 2012. It will start its journey from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in November.
There are two other Mars rovers – Spirit and Opportunity that began their mission in 2004. The communication with Spirit was lost in 2010, but Opportunity is still at work.
Read more here: http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/22/on-the-radar-new-mars-mission-15-missing-boaters-korea-talks/?hpt=hp_midNASA and the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum are planning to organize... more
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The NASA equivalent of duct tape could leak enough methane to confuse the next Mars rover’s life-detecting sensors.
Astrobiologists found evidence for three distinct plumes of methane flowing from beneath the planet’s surface, like swamp gas or a burp, in January 2009. The gas could simply mean that Mars is more geologically active than previously thought. But because much of Earth’s methane is a byproduct of life, the plumes could point to something living, eating or breathing methane beneath the Martian surface.
To settle the question of the methane’s origin, the next Mars rover, called Mars Science Laboratory or Curiosity, will launch in late 2011 equipped with a suite of instruments capable of sniffing out one molecule of methane in a billion other molecules.
But some of the materials in the rover itself could also release methane and confuse the sensors. In a paper in press in the journal Icarus, microbiologist and veteran Mars simulator Andrew Schuerger of the University of Florida and colleagues show that the tape used to hold the rover’s joints together could release enough methane to be a problem.
“I think it’s a valid concern,”said planetary scientist Adam Johnson of Indiana University, who has investigated which Earth microbes could hitchhike to Mars but was not involved in the new work. “We’re sending a very very sensitive instrument, and we are able to produce concentrations of methane that are orders of magnitude above the detection limits for that instrument.”
Schuerger and colleagues placed 18 materials in the Mars Simulation Chamber, a stainless steel cylinder whose interior mimics the atmosphere, dustiness, sunlight, temperature and pressure at the Martian surface.
“Andrew’s simulation setup in his chamber is state of the art, the best simulation chamber in the world,” Johnson said. “As far as simulation of the Mars conditions, you can’t ask for much better.”
The researchers tested a variety of biological materials, including amino acids, DNA and spores of a common soil-dwelling bacterium. They also checked several materials used to build the rover itself, including vacuum grease, a small sundial like the one rovers Spirit and Opportunity use to calibrate colored images, and kapton tape, the space industry equivalent of duct tape.
“I kind of think of it as electrical tape on Mars,” Johnson said. “It’s used for everything on there.”
After eight hours in the chamber, all the organic materials tested emitted some amount of methane, though not enough to worry about in most cases. The methane comes from the interaction of sunlight with materials that contain a methyl group, one carbon atom attached to three hydrogen atoms. Ultraviolet radiation from the sun (or, in the simulation chamber, a special lamp) could rip methyl groups from the materials. The charged methyl groups could then steal an extra hydrogen atom from a neighboring molecule to form stable molecules of methane, which has one carbon and four hydrogens.
Surprisingly, the bacterial spores they tested leaked noticeable amounts of methane, even after they had been irradiated to death. But the standards for cleaning the rover before launch are so stringent that there probably won’t be enough spores left on the rover by launch time to pose much of a problem.
The most trouble could come from kapton tape, which is ubiquitous and unavoidable on the rover. Schuerger’s team found that in the first few Martian days of the mission, the sensors in Curiosity’s Tunable Laser Spectrometer could pick up a few tens of methane molecules per million other molecules, about 100 times above the instrument’s detection limits.
This is especially worrisome given that Curiosity uses about 3 square meters of kapton tape, more than any previous rover.
“It’s a big monster rover,” said NASA planetary scientist Paul Mahaffy, who is in charge of MSL’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument. “They use the appropriate level of tape to secure that stuff down. There’s just more of it than there might have been on [Spirit and Opportunity].”
The rover team already has a few low-tech solutions in mind to find the true Martian methane, Mahaffy said. First, they’ll take measurements at night, when ultraviolet radiation will be at a low.
“My best guess is, once you rotate into the dark, methane production stops pretty fast,” Mahaffy said. “By sampling at night we’d get a much cleaner sniff of the Martian atmosphere.”
The rover will also rotate the sensors into the wind to get the strongest whiff of the Martian atmosphere. Schuerger and colleagues suggest coming up with more detailed models of how much methane kapton tape will produce, and where on the rover it’s likely to show up. They also note that kapton tape gives off less and less methane as time goes on, so methane detections in the later parts of the mission should be more reliable.
“By no means does is nullify the measurement we’re trying to do on [Mars Science Laboratory],” Mahaffy said.
Still, the study is “very useful,” Mahaffy said. “It will help us do a better job of sorting out what’s really there on Mars, and what we might bring along from Earth. The last thing we want to do is have a false positive.”
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/msl-duct-tape/The NASA equivalent of duct tape could leak enough methane to confuse the next Mars... more
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Rover on Mars, the robotic geologist, is poised and ready to "taste" a rock named "Chocolate Hills." This rock has a thick, dark-colored coating that is interesting to scientists because many of the rocks in the surrounding area have the same mysterious dark stuff. The coating could be remnants of a layer that was changed by the action of water and weather or, it could be a layer of rock that melted when a meteor impacted Mars, ejecting this rock and others and creating the crater "Concepcion". ..... http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=156:follow-spirits-mars-progress-ready-to-qtasteq-a-rock-named-qchocolate-hillsq&catid=30:the-community&Itemid=51Rover on Mars, the robotic geologist, is poised and ready to "taste" a rock... more
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YO!TV heads out to the International Car Show at San Francisco's Moscone center. Which ones do you like?
YouthOutlook.org
NewAmericaMedia.orgYO!TV heads out to the International Car Show at San Francisco's Moscone center.... more
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The Opportunity rover has eyed an odd-shaped, dark rock, about 0.6 meters (2 feet) across on the surface of Mars, which may be a meteorite. The team spotted the rock called "Block Island," on July 18, 2009, in the opposite direction from which it was driving. The rover then backtracked some 250 meters (820 feet) to study it closer. Scientists will be testing the rock with the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer to get composition measurements and to confirm if indeed it is a meteorite.The Opportunity rover has eyed an odd-shaped, dark rock, about 0.6 meters (2 feet)... more
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The rover Spirit landed on January 3, 2004, with Opportunity touching down 21 days later.
NASA said the rovers had made important discoveries about the wet and violent conditions on ancient Mars.
They had returned 250,000 images, covered more than 21km (13 miles), climbed a mountain, descended into craters, struggled with sand traps and ageing hardware and survived dust storms, NASA said.
"These rovers are incredibly resilient considering the extreme environment the hardware experiences every day," said John Callas, Jet Propulsion Laboratory project manager for Spirit and Opportunity.
"We realize that a major rover component on either vehicle could fail at any time and end a mission with no advance notice but on the other hand, we could accomplish the equivalent duration of four more prime missions on each rover in the year ahead."
Martian winds had helped clean dust from the rovers.The rover Spirit landed on January 3, 2004, with Opportunity touching down 21 days... more
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October 29, 2008 (Computerworld) After about five months of collecting information on whether Mars can sustain life, NASA scientists have started to shut down heaters, scientific instruments and even the robotic arm onboard the Phoenix Mars Lander.
Since the Lander is powered by solar cells and the Mars night grows longer and longer this time of year, scientists are remotely powering down as many parts of the Lander as possible to minimize its energy needs so a few instruments can be kept running for maybe another month, said Chris Lewicki, mission manager of the Phoenix Mars Mission.
October 29, 2008 (Computerworld) After about five months of collecting information on... more
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"After decades of staying in Earth orbit, NASA hopes to return to the moon. There, astronauts will drive Chariot, the newly designed replacement for the lunar rover that transported astronauts and moon rocks during the Apollo 15 through 17 missions in 1971 and 1972. Mechanical engineers designed Chariot [shown here being tested on a mock lunar surface at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas] to be an all-purpose hauler of people, tools, geological samples and even mobile habitats.
Batteries power the current design, but liquid-oxygen and liquid-hydrogen fuel cells—no batteries to run out of power—could replace them in the future. The wheels will rotate 360 degrees, allowing the platform to travel in any direction. The only extraneous part of the design is the gold color, from ano-dized aluminum, added for retro flair. A more suitable (albeit pricier) metal, such as gold foil, will provide thermal protection when the rover goes into operation...""After decades of staying in Earth orbit, NASA hopes to return to the moon.... more
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The rover dug up white colored silica sand this past May, which is a sign that geological activity was present there, that typically results in microbial life on Earth. The rover recently freed itself after being stuck in the dirt for 2 weeks.The rover dug up white colored silica sand this past May, which is a sign that... more
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