Mars Looks Strangely Familiar in Stunning New Panorama
A 360-degree panorama, taken by the Perseverance Rover on Mars, could just as easily have been snapped in a rocky desert somewhere here on Earth.
The difference lies in a subtle tweak to the color contrast.
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"The relatively dust-free skies provide a clear view of the surrounding terrain," says planetary scientist Jim Bell, the principal investigator of the rover's 'eyes' – the two cameras of the Mastcam-Z instrument.
"In this particular mosaic, we have enhanced the color contrast, which accentuates the differences in the terrain and sky."
The only time the red planet's skies should look this blue is during a sunset – the opposite of the color scheme we see here on Earth.
Yet with just a hint of color enhancement, the resulting landscape is strangely familiar.
Looking through Percy's eyes across the jagged rocks, ripples of sand, and rolling hills, you can almost imagine you are standing in the Atacama desert.
That stark similarity is precisely why NASA scientists are testing future rovers in the Chilean desert.
Already, they have successfully detected molecular evidence of life there "in one of the most biologically sparse environments on Earth," according to a 2023 paper published in Astrobiology.
The hope is that one day, these new-and-improved rovers will join Perseverance, Opportunity, and Curiosity on Mars to accomplish similar feats.
But seeing the red planet through an Earthly lens is like wearing rose-tinted glasses. It sure looks promising, but as you can see from the natural-color version of the image, there's a lot that sets Mars apart from the Atacama.
As the fourth planet from the Sun, Mars receives less than half of the sunlight that Earth does, and the volume of its atmosphere is less than 1 percent of that of Earth's atmosphere.
Whether remnants of ancient life can exist under such hostile and destructive conditions remains to be seen… possibly with Percy's own two eyes.
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CNN
an hour ago
- CNN
The perfectly fine, already-paid-for satellites Trump wants to destroy in a fiery atmospheric reentry
Space programs Climate change Donald Trump Federal agencies FacebookTweetLink NASA is planning to decommission premier satellite missions that gather information on planet-warming pollution and other climate vital signs beginning as soon as October, sources inside and outside of the agency told CNN. The destruction of the satellites — which will be abandoned and allowed to eventually burn up in a fiery descent into Earth's atmosphere — marks the latest step by the Trump administration to scale back federal climate science. President Donald Trump's budget proposal takes a hatchet to NASA's Earth science spending for fiscal year 2026, which begins in October. The greenhouse gas monitoring missions, known collectively as the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, are some of the many Earth science casualties in the proposal. Other satellites and instruments on the chopping block include the long-lived Aqua satellite, which carries a high-resolution Earth imaging instrument called MODIS, that among other uses, helps detect wildfires worldwide. Also at risk are the Terra and Aura missions, each of which have climate science applications, and planned satellites that would precisely measure solar radiation, heavy precipitation and clouds. While the Trump administration says it is looking to end the OCO and other missions to cut costs, scientists involved in the projects see an anti-climate science pattern at work. Congress is still considering Trump's budget request and may reject some, or all, of the Earth science cuts, but NASA is proceeding as if the White House spending blueprint will be implemented as-written. David Crisp, a former NASA scientist who worked on the OCO missions and managed them until he retired in 2022, confirmed the decommissioning planning for OCO-2 and OCO-3. Other sources, including one NASA employee, also confirmed this plan, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren't approved to discuss the issue. NASA calls a mission's closeout phase — the period when the program team works out how to end it — 'Phase F.' The Phase F state of planning for the OCO missions was first reported by NPR. In response to questions from CNN, a NASA spokesperson pointed to Trump's budget request. 'It would not be appropriate for us to comment at this time as the budget process is still happening. Should the budget pass as proposed — it still needs to make its way through Congress — this will be implemented upon the start of the next fiscal year.' Together, the OCO-2, a freestanding satellite, and OCO-3, which is mounted on the International Space Station, measure the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, specifically sniffing out climate pollution. The OCO missions are particularly useful for tracking fossil fuel and ecosystem-related emissions, scientists told CNN. The instruments also help scientists monitor plant productivity — critical for farmers and the researchers studying forest loss. While OCO-3 could be switched off and remain attached to the ISS, perhaps to be turned on again in the future, the decommissioning process for OCO-2 is far more complicated — and fiery. The satellite would be moved into a much lower orbit and exist there as space junk for years until it burns up in the Earth's atmosphere. The purposeful abandonment or destruction of multimillion-dollar satellites and instruments is essentially unprecedented, scientists told CNN. They are particularly baffled by the decision to destroy OCO-2, given it already has enough fuel on it to last through 2040. The OCO missions are still functioning and are thought to have many years left of data-gathering, in addition to the fuel onboard, which has already been bought by American taxpayers. It is not business as usual to shut off working satellites without conducting a comprehensive review, sources told CNN, nor is it typical to kill functional spacecraft that can cost billions to put into space in the first place. 'The reality is that as long as these instruments are producing high-quality data, it's essentially unheard of to decommission the satellites, because keeping them going is so cheap compared to building them and launching them in the first place,' Anna Michalak, a climate researcher at Carnegie Science and Stanford University who works with greenhouse gas emissions data, told CNN. The OCO missions are important for other countries, too, since they also use the data, Michalak said: 'It's not just that these are the only two NASA-funded missions. It's that these have been the most impactful missions in this space, globally, period.' Losing the OCO missions would hurt US leadership in climate science and create a multiyear gap in space-based climate pollution measurements, said Ben Poulter of Spark Climate Solutions, a nonprofit focused on climate risks and innovative fixes. Poulter was previously a NASA scientist and helped lead greenhouse gas monitoring efforts for the Biden administration. 'Losing these satellites prematurely gives away the leadership to Europe and to China in terms of monitoring CO2 concentrations and emissions,' Poulter said. Prematurely ending the OCO missions is consistent with the perception that the Trump administration 'doesn't want to do anything related to climate science and climate services,' he added. Crisp, the former NASA scientist, also told CNN that decommissioning so many Earth science missions at the same time fits a pattern. 'My guess is that they perceive these missions as missions that were designed for climate, for reinforcing climate hysteria or something,' Crisp said of the Trump administration. 'They think these missions were designed for a regulatory reason, for example. But I want to point out NASA is not a regulatory agency.' There are at least two possibilities for saving the carbon observatory mission, though researchers are not optimistic about either one coming to fruition. The first is Congress. Lawmakers could reject Trump's proposal and offer NASA the budget it needs to maintain US climate and Earth science status quo. Trump would also have to sign such a bill. The second possibility is to create a public-private partnership that pays the expenses for maintaining these instruments and processing the data back on Earth. This could take the form of a philanthropic organization, a wealthy individual or perhaps a university taking over OCO-2 or OCO-3, or perhaps both, for a period of time. The space agency has already issued a call for partnerships for OCO-3, and it is expected to put out a similar call for operating OCO-2 at some point this week, multiple researchers who work with OCO data said. 'There's this scramble to see what can be done before any sort of decommissioning or Phase F protocols go into effect later this year,' Poulter said. However, involving the private sector in operating OCO or other Earth-observing satellites can present complications, Michalak said, as it could diminish NASA's role in providing an accurate backbone of Earth observations. As the search for a partnership to save OCO-2 and OCO-3 begins, NASA only has less than two months to figure out how to keep the missions going.
CNN
an hour ago
- CNN
The perfectly fine, already-paid-for satellites Trump wants to destroy in a fiery atmospheric reentry
NASA is planning to decommission premier satellite missions that gather information on planet-warming pollution and other climate vital signs beginning as soon as October, sources inside and outside of the agency told CNN. The destruction of the satellites — which will be abandoned and allowed to eventually burn up in a fiery descent into Earth's atmosphere — marks the latest step by the Trump administration to scale back federal climate science. President Donald Trump's budget proposal takes a hatchet to NASA's Earth science spending for fiscal year 2026, which begins in October. The greenhouse gas monitoring missions, known collectively as the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, are some of the many Earth science casualties in the proposal. Other satellites and instruments on the chopping block include the long-lived Aqua satellite, which carries a high-resolution Earth imaging instrument called MODIS, that among other uses, helps detect wildfires worldwide. Also at risk are the Terra and Aura missions, each of which have climate science applications, and planned satellites that would precisely measure solar radiation, heavy precipitation and clouds. While the Trump administration says it is looking to end the OCO and other missions to cut costs, scientists involved in the projects see an anti-climate science pattern at work. Congress is still considering Trump's budget request and may reject some, or all, of the Earth science cuts, but NASA is proceeding as if the White House spending blueprint will be implemented as-written. David Crisp, a former NASA scientist who worked on the OCO missions and managed them until he retired in 2022, confirmed the decommissioning planning for OCO-2 and OCO-3. Other sources, including one NASA employee, also confirmed this plan, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren't approved to discuss the issue. NASA calls a mission's closeout phase — the period when the program team works out how to end it — 'Phase F.' The Phase F state of planning for the OCO missions was first reported by NPR. In response to questions from CNN, a NASA spokesperson pointed to Trump's budget request. 'It would not be appropriate for us to comment at this time as the budget process is still happening. Should the budget pass as proposed — it still needs to make its way through Congress — this will be implemented upon the start of the next fiscal year.' Together, the OCO-2, a freestanding satellite, and OCO-3, which is mounted on the International Space Station, measure the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, specifically sniffing out climate pollution. The OCO missions are particularly useful for tracking fossil fuel and ecosystem-related emissions, scientists told CNN. The instruments also help scientists monitor plant productivity — critical for farmers and the researchers studying forest loss. While OCO-3 could be switched off and remain attached to the ISS, perhaps to be turned on again in the future, the decommissioning process for OCO-2 is far more complicated — and fiery. The satellite would be moved into a much lower orbit and exist there as space junk for years until it burns up in the Earth's atmosphere. The purposeful abandonment or destruction of multimillion-dollar satellites and instruments is essentially unprecedented, scientists told CNN. They are particularly baffled by the decision to destroy OCO-2, given it already has enough fuel on it to last through 2040. The OCO missions are still functioning and are thought to have many years left of data-gathering, in addition to the fuel onboard, which has already been bought by American taxpayers. It is not business as usual to shut off working satellites without conducting a comprehensive review, sources told CNN, nor is it typical to kill functional spacecraft that can cost billions to put into space in the first place. 'The reality is that as long as these instruments are producing high-quality data, it's essentially unheard of to decommission the satellites, because keeping them going is so cheap compared to building them and launching them in the first place,' Anna Michalak, a climate researcher at Carnegie Science and Stanford University who works with greenhouse gas emissions data, told CNN. The OCO missions are important for other countries, too, since they also use the data, Michalak said: 'It's not just that these are the only two NASA-funded missions. It's that these have been the most impactful missions in this space, globally, period.' Losing the OCO missions would hurt US leadership in climate science and create a multiyear gap in space-based climate pollution measurements, said Ben Poulter of Spark Climate Solutions, a nonprofit focused on climate risks and innovative fixes. Poulter was previously a NASA scientist and helped lead greenhouse gas monitoring efforts for the Biden administration. 'Losing these satellites prematurely gives away the leadership to Europe and to China in terms of monitoring CO2 concentrations and emissions,' Poulter said. Prematurely ending the OCO missions is consistent with the perception that the Trump administration 'doesn't want to do anything related to climate science and climate services,' he added. Crisp, the former NASA scientist, also told CNN that decommissioning so many Earth science missions at the same time fits a pattern. 'My guess is that they perceive these missions as missions that were designed for climate, for reinforcing climate hysteria or something,' Crisp said of the Trump administration. 'They think these missions were designed for a regulatory reason, for example. But I want to point out NASA is not a regulatory agency.' There are at least two possibilities for saving the carbon observatory mission, though researchers are not optimistic about either one coming to fruition. The first is Congress. Lawmakers could reject Trump's proposal and offer NASA the budget it needs to maintain US climate and Earth science status quo. Trump would also have to sign such a bill. The second possibility is to create a public-private partnership that pays the expenses for maintaining these instruments and processing the data back on Earth. This could take the form of a philanthropic organization, a wealthy individual or perhaps a university taking over OCO-2 or OCO-3, or perhaps both, for a period of time. The space agency has already issued a call for partnerships for OCO-3, and it is expected to put out a similar call for operating OCO-2 at some point this week, multiple researchers who work with OCO data said. 'There's this scramble to see what can be done before any sort of decommissioning or Phase F protocols go into effect later this year,' Poulter said. However, involving the private sector in operating OCO or other Earth-observing satellites can present complications, Michalak said, as it could diminish NASA's role in providing an accurate backbone of Earth observations. As the search for a partnership to save OCO-2 and OCO-3 begins, NASA only has less than two months to figure out how to keep the missions going.
Boston Globe
2 hours ago
- Boston Globe
In troubled times on earth, the cosmos offers transcendent images
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory opened in June. Jointly operated by the National Science Foundation and US Department of Energy, it's located in northern Chile. The observatory's mission is to conduct a 10-year survey of the southern night sky. The images released so far have been astounding. They can be seen at The Vera C. Rubin Observatory. MARCOS ZEGERS/Marcos Zegers/The New York Times For almost as long as there has been photography, there have been photographs taken of the nighttime sky. The The Trifid and Lagoon nebulas, as seen from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. VERA C. RUBIN OBSERVATORY/NSF/DOE/Vera C. Rubin Observatory Advertisement Rubin was an astronomer who did pioneering work on galactic rotation rates. The Hubble is named for the cosmologist Edwin Hubble, and Webb was a pioneering NASA administrator. Both the Hubble and Webb have the advantage of being in outer space, without Earth's atmosphere to contend with. The Rubin has the advantage of possessing the world's largest digital camera. Advertisement The size of a small SUV, the observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera weighs more than three tons and has a 3.2-gigapixel sensor. That means the camera's resolution is more than 1,500 times greater than that of a high-definition television. Not surprisingly, distant galaxies require, let alone deserve, a greater degree of detail than Netflix does. Calibrating the camera at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. MARCOS ZEGERS/Marcos Zegers/The New York Times The observatory and telescopes afford a technological portal to a realm not just beyond comprehension but effectively beyond the imagination. 'The game I play is a very interesting one,' the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once said. 'It's imagination in a tight straitjacket.' The celestial photography produced by the Rubin, Hubble, and Webb removes that straitjacket. Or as the poet Paul Celan once wrote, 'there are/still songs to sing beyond/mankind.' The LSST camera is a particularly stunning reminder that before it's anything else a camera is a machine. That machine can be a tool or a plaything, a means to create art or a selling point for a smartphone upgrade — or, yes, all of the above. Yet whatever the intended purpose, that machine executes the same action. A camera captures a moment in time that also existed in space. How artfully it does so is up to the camera operator. How memorably it does so is owing to some combination of the ability of that operator, the quality of the machine, and the nature of the subject. The "Cosmic Cliffs," photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA With art photography, the emphasis is on the ability of the operator: the artist. With celestial photography things are different. The operator rarely matters, albeit there are notable exceptions, one of which we'll also get to later. It's far more likely to be an algorithm than an actual person deciding where, when, and how to direct the lens. So rather than the emphasis being on the operator it's on these phenomenal machines and the even more phenomenal subjects they record: galaxies and nebulae and constellations. Advertisement Time assumes a different aspect with celestial photography. It becomes the intersection of the instant when the lens registers light — that's true of all photography — and the light years it took for that light to reach the lens. Space, too, assumes a different aspect. It becomes literally cosmic, a distance defying dimensionality, a realm so vast the human mind cannot begin to comprehend it even as the camera documents small slices of it — which is also to say small slices of that vastness. Galaxy M83, the Southern Pinwheel, in a photo mosaic taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. REUTERS/NASA A certain much-used cliché has it that a picture is worth a thousand words. Like most clichés, it has a basis in reality. It acknowledges the uniquely thick descriptive power of the photographic image. Here, though, words take a back seat to wonder. Images like these render meaningless adjectives like 'spectacular' and 'astonishing' and 'overwhelming.' They seem not just earthbound but Earth-bound. Actually, that's not quite right. When the words are names, rather than mere modifiers, then they have a capacity to evoke that complements the images' power to reveal: Virgo Cluster, Large Magellanic Cloud, Triffid Nebula, Pillars of Creation, Cosmic Cliffs, Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, Lagoon Nebula, Southern Pinwheel, Pandora's Cluster. The names are as poetic as the images are epic (far too weak a word, but you get the idea). Advertisement If the statement 'a picture is worth a thousand words' is one cliché that's relevant here, another is the question 'But is it art?' If we define art as beauty mediated through human handiwork, then of course these images are. They are so utterly alien to human experience as to confound our standard aesthetic ideas. They don't just transcend our sense of beauty. They transcend our sense of … everything. Vincent van Gogh, "The Starry Night," 1889. Museum of Modern Art Long before telescopes, let alone space telescopes, Joining their ranks is the photographer An-My Lê. Earlier this year, the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York showed her series Advertisement An-My Lê, "Sun Point View, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, 2024," from "Dark Star," 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery/© An-My Lê 'Dark Star' is both a marked departure for The series shares a dynamic with the images from Hubble, Webb, and Rubin: the stars above, a human viewer below. But 'Dark Star' crucially differs from them in two key respects. First, there's the matter of human agency. Lê is the image-maker here, not an algorithm or computer program. Comparing the photographs within the series, one is aware of the countless decisions she had to make in deciding where to place the camera, when to click the shutter, what to emphasize. Also, 'Dark Star' explicitly connects the cosmos with Earth. The Rubin and space-telescope images leave out the planet. What they show is out there — way, way out there. Part of the power of Lê's photographs is the way they include the Earth. Each has a horizon line in the lower portion of the image, serving as a further, internal frame. It's a frame felt as well as seen. A Dec. 24, 1968, photo that shows the Earth behind the surface of the moon during the Apollo 8 mission and Earth as seen from Apollo 17 in 1972. NASA As it happens, the two most famous astronomical images show Earth, not outer space. They were taken on Apollo missions: 'Earthrise,' from 1968, and 'The Blue Marble,' from 1972. Both look back at the planet, not out from. How much of the appeal of the Rubin and space-telescope images is that they let us leave terrestrial concerns so exceedingly far behind? In April, Lê gave a lecture at Harvard. It included slides from 'Dark Star.' 'Perhaps it's the right time to look for a little comfort in the cosmos,' she mused. Advertisement Globe staffer Matt Juul contributed to this article. Star songs for the starry-eyed Celestial photography lets us see the music of the spheres. Here are 10 tunes to listen to while star gazing. Mark Feeney can be reached at
