Latest news with #CuriosityandPerseverance
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
'The Martian' predicts human colonies on Mars by 2035. How close are we?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Andy Weir's bestselling story "The Martian" predicts that by 2035 NASA will have landed humans on Mars three times, perfected return-to-Earth flight systems and collaborated with the China National Space Administration. We are now 10 years past the Hollywood adaptation's 2015 release and 10 years shy of its fictional timeline. At this midpoint, Mars exploration looks a bit different than how it was portrayed in "The Martian," with both more discoveries and more controversy. As a planetary geologist who works with NASA missions to study Mars, I follow exploration science and policy closely. In 2010, the U.S. National Space Policy set goals for human missions to Mars in the 2030s. But in 2017, the White House Space Policy Directive 1 shifted NASA's focus toward returning first to the Moon under what would become the Artemis program. Although concepts for crewed missions to Mars have gained popularity, NASA's actual plans for landing humans on Mars remain fragile. Notably, over the last 10 years, it has been robotic, rather than crewed, missions that have propelled discovery and the human imagination forward. Since 2015, satellites and rovers have reshaped scientists' understanding of Mars. They have revealed countless insights into how its climate has changed over time. As Earth's neighbor, climate shifts on Mars also reflect solar system processes affecting Earth at a time when life was first taking hold. Thus, Mars has become a focal point for investigating the age-old questions of "where do we come from?" and "are we alone?" The Opportunity, Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have driven dozens of miles studying layered rock formations that serve as a record of Mars' past. By studying sedimentary layers — rock formations stacked like layers of a cake — planetary geologists have pieced together a vivid tale of environmental change that dwarfs what Earth is currently experiencing. Mars was once a world of erupting volcanoes, glaciers, lakes and flowing rivers — an environment not unlike early Earth. Then its core cooled, its magnetic field faltered and its atmosphere drifted away. The planet's exposed surface has retained signs of those processes ever since in the form of landscape patterns, sequences of layered sediment and mineral mixtures. Related: NASA rover discovers out-of-place 'Skull' on Mars, and scientists are baffled One focus of scientific investigation over the last 10 years is particularly relevant to the setting of "The Martian" but fails to receive mention in the story. To reach his best chance of survival, protagonist Mark Watney, played by Matt Damon, must cross a vast, dusty and crater-pocked region of Mars known as Arabia Terra. In 2022 and 2023, I, along with colleagues at Northern Arizona University and Johns Hopkins University, published detailed analyses of the layered materials there using imagery from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey satellites. By using infrared imagery and measuring the dimensions of surface features, we linked multiple layered deposits to the same episodes of formation and learned more about the widespread crumbling nature of the terrain seen there today. Because water tends to cement rock tightly together, that loose material indicates that around 3.5 billion years ago, that area had a drying climate. To make the discussions about this area easier, we even worked with the International Astronomical Union to name a few previously unnamed craters that were mentioned in the story. For example, one that Watney would have driven right by is now named Kozova Crater, after a town in Ukraine. Despite rapid advances in Mars science, many unknowns remain. Scientists still aren't sure of the precise ages, atmospheric conditions and possible signatures of life associated with each of the different rock types observed on the surface. For instance, the Perseverance rover recently drilled into and analyzed a unique set of rocks hosting organic — that is, carbon-based — compounds. Organic compounds serve as the building blocks of life, but more detailed analysis is required to determine whether these specific rocks once hosted microbial life. The in-development Mars Sample Return mission aims to address these basic outstanding questions by delivering the first-ever unaltered fragments of another world to Earth. The Perseverance rover is already caching rock and soil samples, including ones hosting organic compounds, in sealed tubes. A future lander will then need to pick up and launch the caches back to Earth. Once home, researchers can examine these materials with instruments orders of magnitude more sensitive than anything that could be flown on a spacecraft. Scientists stand to learn far more about the habitability, geologic history and presence of any signs of life on Mars through the sample return campaign than by sending humans to the surface. This perspective is why NASA, the European Space Agency and others have invested some US$30 billion in robotic Mars exploration since the 1960s. The payoff has been staggering: That work has triggered rapid technological advances in robotics, telecommunications and materials science. For example, Mars mission technology has led to better sutures for heart surgery and cars that can drive themselves. It has also bolstered the status of NASA and the U.S. as bastions of modern exploration and technology; and it has inspired millions of students to take an interest in scientific fields. Colonizing Mars has a seductive appeal. It's hard not to cheer for the indomitable human spirit while watching Watney battle dust storms, oxygen shortages and food scarcity over 140 million miles from rescue. Much of the momentum toward colonizing Mars is now tied to SpaceX and its CEO Elon Musk, whose stated mission to make humanity a "multi-planetary species" has become a sort of rallying cry. But while Mars colonization is romantic on paper, it is extremely difficult to actually carry out, and many critics have questioned the viability of a Mars habitation as a refuge far from Earth. RELATED STORIES —NASA Mars satellite uncovers markings 'like paint dripping down a wall' on Martian surface —Scientists find hint of hidden liquid water ocean deep below Mars' surface —Lights on Mars! NASA rover photographs visible auroras on Red Planet for the first time Now, with NASA potentially facing a nearly 50% reduction to its science budget, the U.S. risks dissolving its planetary science and robotic operations portfolio altogether, including sample return. Nonetheless, President Donald Trump and Musk have pushed for human space exploration to somehow continue to progress, despite those proposed cuts — effectively sidelining the robotic, science-driven programs that have underpinned all of Mars exploration to date. Yet, it is these programs that have yielded humanity's richest insights into the red planet and given both scientists and storytellers like Andy Weir the foundation to imagine what it must be like to stand on Mars' surface at all. This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Did it snow on Mars? New research suggests ancient Red Planet precipitation was a lot like Earth
Was Mars a friendly planet for water, even life, in its ancient past? Huge channel networks run across its surface. Rocks show signs of water immersion. Yet pictures sent back from NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rover missions continue to show their tracks in the endless desert. Where did the water come from, how much of it was there, and why did it leave? While the question of water is massively complex, a recent study in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets adds to the debate about how ancient water flowed – from the Red Planet's still icy poles, or in a water cycle that included precipitation, or in some combination. Precipitation, to be clear, includes any variant – not just water, but snow or freezing rain and other forms of water falling from the sky. Much like the Eastern Seaboard in winter, a "warm" Mars likely means slightly warmer than freezing, lead author Amanda Steckel said. "Of course, we don't have [direct] access to Mars yet, so we tried to be really simple," Steckel told Salon. She did the study's work as a doctoral student at the University of Colorado Boulder, and has since moved to the California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral scholar and research associate in planetary science. The study used landscape modeling techniques developed at CU Boulder. They placed a grid on a virtual surface and then ran models of a watery Martian climate to see how it evolved over time. To do so, they broke down the complexity of the climate into two scenarios, ideal for modeling and testing which might be stronger: ice caps pulling water downhill and forming the valley heads at a single elevation, or a precipitation-driven planet that created valley heads at many altitudes. The authors compared their work with imagery of Mars in the equatorial southern highlands, which is heavily cratered but also full of valley networks. They particularly focused on the valley heads, which is the source of the water in each of the networks. And what they found suggests that some kind of water did fall on Mars, as the valley heads were situated at many elevations – a situation that is hard to explain with ice. And it also matches what is observed on Mars, where variations in valley heads range in altitude between thousands of currently does snow on Mars — just not really like it does here and far less frequently. As NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory puts it, "Cold as it is, don't expect snow drifts worthy of the Rocky Mountains." Indeed, there are two kinds of snow on Mars: water ice and carbon dioxide, better known as dry ice, which has flakes that are actually cube-shaped. "Because Martian air is so thin and the temperatures so cold, water-ice snow sublimates, or becomes a gas, before it even touches the ground. Dry-ice snow actually does reach the ground," NASA's website states. That's pretty different from what we experience on Earth or what Mars may have had long ago. That said, a lot more study will be required to understand the weird history of water on Mars. To be sure, Mars likely hosted some kind of water on the surface between 3.7 billion and 4.1 billion years ago, when Earth and the rest of the solar system were still young. But how exactly the water flowed is an open question. The young sun was likely burning a little cooler than it is today, raising questions about how much of its warmth reached the surface. The Martian atmosphere also might have been thicker, allowing water to flow more easily – that is, until solar pressure eroded the lighter molecules into space and thinned the planet's protective "envelope" into the thin amount we see today. That's because Mars, for all its charm, has a lower gravity than Earth and less ability to hold on to atmospheric compounds like carbon dioxide. Steckel emphasized that even accepting the idea that precipitation fell on Mars, it was unlikely to be the only way that water moved around on the surface. After all, recent studies of the Red Planet have not only suggested water in the icy poles, but underground. Smaller sources of water may also have come from ancient meteorite strikes. "This is not a climate modeling study," she said of her work, adding her hope is that other climate scientists can use the data set to help inform future studies of the Red Planet. "There's a wide swath of possibilities" between the two water scenarios that her study identified, but to push forward on that, "I think that's where the climate modelers come in … when people try to replicate this dataset with climate modeling, that would be the natural next step." Hansjörg Seybold, a physicist at ETZ not affiliated with the new study, said the methodology was sound but it was only one piece of understanding how liquid water shaped the Martian surface. Studies like this, he emphasized, are limited as they are based on a theoretical Red Planet surface and do not aim to exactly match what is seen in today's channel networks. If Mars was "warm and wet," he continued, valley heads could be seen anywhere where rain accumulates. If the planet was instead a cold and wet location — fed by icy glaciers — the heads would be fed from a single elevation and would not create new branches downstream. "In the end, we are left with one more hint telling us that we actually don't understand Mars' ancient climate and the processes forming its channel networks," he emphasized. "If either of the two cases is actually real remains elusive, and leaves the underlying question of how Mars could have sustained a hydrological cycle open." Seybold said future studies should not only consider the valley networks, but also the geology of the area that we have picked up from Mars rover missions and from observations from orbiting satellites. Seybold also urged comparison with other planets; he led a study in Science Advances in 2018 that attempted to do just that. Seybold's study compared valley networks on Mars with valley networks on Earth to see if groundwater was important to forming Red Planet valley connections. They found that the Martian valleys' branching angles "are more similar to terrestrial valley networks incised by overland flow, than valley networks incised by re-emerging groundwater flow." Understanding the history of weather on Mars helps us learn more about our own planet, as well as informing us of the possibilities of life on the Red Planet and its potential to (maybe) someday host humans.
