Latest news with #MarsSurface
Digital Trends
23-05-2025
- Science
- Digital Trends
Perseverance's new selfie is cool, but its hunt for life in ancient rocks is even cooler
It's not only Instagram users and holiday makers snapping selfies — even robots are getting in on the action. This new image from the NASA Perseverance rover shows a selfie that's out of this world, captured as the rover collected its latest sample of martian rock. Taken on May 10, the selfie was devised to celebrate the rover's 1,500th day on Mars. As a day on Mars is just a little bit longer than an Earth day, at around 24 hours and 39 minutes, NASA measures its Mars missions in 'sols' or martian days. As well as being a fun image for scientists and the public to enjoy, it gives the engineering team on the ground the chance to check the look and the status of the rover as it has been exploring since it landed in February 2021. Recommended Videos You can see plenty of red dust covering the rover, as the surface of Mars is covered in a dusty material called regolith which gives the planet its famous red color. Dust can be quite the challenge for Mars missions, as it gets everywhere when it is whipped up by huge dust storms and can cause problems by gumming up electronics and covering solar panels. But fortunately for Perseverance, the rover may look a little grubby on the outside but its essential functions are all still working well. 'After 1,500 sols, we may be a bit dusty, but our beauty is more than skin deep,' said Art Thompson, Perseverance project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 'Our multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator is giving us all the power we need. All our systems and subsystems are in the green and clicking along, and our amazing instruments continue to provide data that will feed scientific discoveries for years to come.' Even with all the instruments working correctly, though, getting the rover to take a selfie isn't a quick job. The image was captured using Perseverance's WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera, which is located at the end of its robotic arm. As the rover was working on capturing the selfie, it also caught an unexpected photobomber: a wind feature called a dust devil which popped up in the background. 'To get that selfie look, each WATSON image has to have its own unique field of view,' explained Megan Wu, a Perseverance imaging scientist from Malin Space Science Systems. 'That means we had to make 62 precision movements of the robotic arm. The whole process takes about an hour, but it's worth it. Having the dust devil in the background makes it a classic. This is a great shot.' With its celebrations well in hand, the rover is now moving on to investigate a new area of Mars: a region called 'Krokodillen' after a Norwegian mountain ridge. This area is particularly exciting because it is thought to contain some of the oldest rocks on Mars, which could help to unlock the secrets of how the solar system formed. Here on Earth, our planet has a system of tectonics in which parts of the planet's crust are gradually pulled down toward the mantle when they meet at a fault line. That means that the rocks on Earth are essentially recycled in an ongoing cycle of melting down toward the planet's interior then rising up and cooling to become part of the surface. That's why there are very few extremely old rocks on Earth. On Mars, however, it's a different story. Mars doesn't have plate tectonics, so very old rocks can stay on its surface for billions of years. Some of these are up to 4 billion years old, or even older, so studying them can help scientists learn about how the rocky planets formed in our solar system around 4.5 billion years ago. To study these very old rocks, though, Perseverance needs to find them first. There are thought to be extremely old rocks along the edge of the huge crater in which the rover landed, called Jezero. The Jezero Crater is almost 30 miles across, likely created by a huge meteorite impact billions of years ago. When this object slammed into the martian surface, it threw up large amounts of material like huge chunks of rock which landed nearby and are still there to this day. That means that by looking along the rim of the crater, Perseverance can search for these ancient chunks of rocks and use its instruments to study them. That can also help to answer one particularly important question that scientists want to understand, which is how long there was water on Mars. They know that, although Mars is dry and arid today, it once had plentiful liquid water on its surface. It may even have looked a lot like Earth at one point — and we know that water is essential for the formation of life. What scientists don't agree on is exactly how long there was water on Mars, and whether it would have been around for long enough to give potential life the chance to develop there. So knowing exactly when Mars lost is water is a key part of understanding the planet and whether it could ever have supported life. To that end, Perseverance will be keeping a lookout for clay minerals which form in the presence of water, perhaps even formed before the impact which created the crater. These could contain potential indications of life, called biosignatures, such as organic compounds. 'If we find a potential biosignature here, it would most likely be from an entirely different and much earlier epoch of Mars evolution than the one we found last year,' said NASA scientist Ken Farley. 'The Krokodillen rocks formed before Jezero Crater was created, during Mars' earliest geologic period, the Noachian, and are among the oldest rocks on Mars.'
CBS News
21-05-2025
- Science
- CBS News
NASA's Mars Perseverance rover captures new selfie featuring a Martian dust devil
The latest selfie by NASA's Mars Perseverance rover has captured an unexpected guest: a Martian dust devil. Resembling a small pale puff, the twirling dust devil popped up 3 miles behind the rover during this month's photo shoot. Dust devils, a combination of air and dust, are common on Mars. Released Wednesday, the selfie is a composite of 59 images taken by the camera on the end of the rover's robotic arm, according to NASA. This image provided by NASA shows Perseverance taking a selfie on May 10, 2025. NASA via AP It took an hour to perform all the arm movements necessary to gather the images, "but it's worth it," said Megan Wu, an imaging scientist from Malin Space Science Systems, which built the camera. "Having the dust devil in the background makes it a classic," Wu said in a statement. The picture — which also shows the rover's latest sample borehole on the surface — marks 1,500 sols, or Martian days, for Perseverance. That's equivalent to 1,541 days on Earth. Perseverance is covered with red dust, the result of drilling into dozens of rocks. Perseverance, which landed on Mars in 2021, is collecting samples for an eventual return to Earth from Jezero Crater, an ancient lakebed and river delta that could hold clues to any past microbial life. Last month, released images showed a Martian dust devil consuming a smaller one on the surface of the red planet.
RNZ News
15-05-2025
- Science
- RNZ News
NASA's Perseverance rover films first auroras from the surface of Mars
By Ellen Phiddian NASA's Perserverance rover has photographed images of an aurora from the surface of Mars. Photo: AFP / NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS Auroras on Mars don't look quite like they do on Earth - but they still produce a weird and fascinating light show. NASA's Perseverance rover has snapped pictures of a visible-light aurora from the Martian surface. It is the first time an aurora has been observed from the surface of a planet other than Earth, and the first time visible auroras have been seen on Mars. The weak green light was photographed in March last year, with the pictures just released in a new study published in Science Advances. Auroras on Earth are formed by particles from the Sun interacting with the planet's magnetic field. But auroras have also been observed on nearly every other planet in the Solar System. The light show was first detected around Mars 20 years ago from space. Unlike Earth, Mars does not have a global magnetic field - instead, its magnetism is patchy and varies across the planet's surface. This means its auroras are caused by slightly different phenomena. One type of aurora Mars sees, called a solar energetic particle (SEP) aurora, comes from super-energised particles from the Sun hitting the Martian atmosphere directly. These have been observed in ultraviolet light before, from NASA's MAVEN instrument that orbits around Mars. But when the Sun emitted a solar flare and a coronal mass ejection (CME) in the direction of Mars last year, a team of researchers spotted an opportunity to see the auroras from the planet's surface. They scrambled to ready the Perseverance rover, which is trundling through Mars' Jezero crater. The team used computer models to predict when and where the aurora would be visible in the Martian sky, and what colour and intensity of light they could expect the rover to spot. They expected particles from the CME would react with oxygen atoms in the Martian atmosphere, causing a faint glow in a very precise shade of green. Elise Knutsen, a physicist at the University of Oslo and lead author of the study, said the team needed to pick a strong CME to test their models. "When we saw the strength of this one, we estimated it could trigger an aurora bright enough for our instruments to detect," Dr Knutsen said. Days after the solar flare, two instruments on Perseverance recorded the exact shade of green in Mars' sky the researchers had predicted. Hannah Schunker, a physicist at the University of Newcastle who was not involved in the research, called the study a "neat observation". "It's a nice test of the Martian atmosphere models - and also a little more indirectly, it can be used to test our models of the coronal mass ejections," Dr Schunker said. The first visible-light image of a green aurora on Mars, left, taken by NASA's Perseverance rover. A comparison image, right, shows the night sky without the aurora but featuring the Martian moon Deimos. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/SSI Disappointingly for future space travellers, it's unlikely the aurora would be as dazzling as those seen on Earth. "Even on Earth, when we observe auroras, they often look quite different to the beautiful images we see," Dr Schunker said. "The photographic images that are taken of the auroras on Earth are often exposed for some minutes, so you get these really bright, vivid colours. Whereas if you see it with your eyes, it doesn't look quite so bright and quite so vivid, although still impressive." Mars, meanwhile, has fainter auroras to start with: lacking Earth's magnetism, the solar particles produce less light when they crash into the planet's atmosphere. "There might be a detectable change in the atmosphere, but it would not be strong and it would not be very obvious to the eye," Dr Schunker said. While it might not be the best light show in the Solar System, the research will be useful for better understanding solar weather from different angles, according to Dr Schunker. "Mars is not aligned with Earth at the moment. So we would not have experienced this particular CME," she said. We might be able to expect more observations like this in coming months, she said, thanks to "solar maximum": the point in its roughly 11-year cycle when the Sun produces the highest number of flares and sunspots. This is why people on Earth have seen so many auroras in the past year, often much further away from the poles than they can normally be spotted. "We're approaching, or we're in the middle of, solar maximum at the moment. We never know if we've reached solar maximum until we're on the other side of it," Dr Schunker said. - ABC
ABC News
15-05-2025
- Science
- ABC News
NASA's Perseverance rover spots first auroras from the surface of Mars
Auroras on Mars don't look quite like they do on Earth — but they still produce a weird and fascinating light show. NASA's Perseverance rover has snapped pictures of a visible-light aurora from the Martian surface. It's the first time an aurora has been observed from the surface of a planet other than Earth, and the first time visible auroras have been seen on Mars. The weak green light was photographed in March last year, with the pictures just released in a new study published in Science Advances. Auroras on Earth are formed by particles from the Sun interacting with the planet's magnetic field. But auroras have also been observed on nearly every other planet in the Solar System. The light show was first detected around Mars 20 years ago from space. Unlike Earth, Mars doesn't have a global magnetic field — instead, its magnetism is patchy and varies across the planet's surface. This means its auroras are caused by slightly different phenomena. One type of aurora Mars sees, called a solar energetic particle (SEP) aurora, comes from super-energised particles from the Sun hitting the Martian atmosphere directly. These have been observed in ultraviolet light before, from NASA's MAVEN instrument that orbits around Mars. But when the Sun emitted a solar flare and a coronal mass ejection (CME) in the direction of Mars last year, a team of researchers spotted an opportunity to see the auroras from the planet's surface. They scrambled to ready the Perseverance rover, which is trundling through Mars' Jezero crater. The team used computer models to predict when and where the aurora would be visible in the Martian sky, and what colour and intensity of light they could expect the rover to spot. They expected particles from the CME would react with oxygen atoms in the Martian atmosphere, causing a faint glow in a very precise shade of green. Elise Knutsen, a physicist at the University of Oslo and lead author of the study, said the team needed to pick a strong CME to test their models. 'When we saw the strength of this one, we estimated it could trigger an aurora bright enough for our instruments to detect,' Dr Knutsen said. Days after the solar flare, two instruments on Perseverance recorded the exact shade of green in Mars' sky the researchers had predicted. Hannah Schunker, a physicist at the University of Newcastle who wasn't involved in the research, called the study a "neat observation". "It's a nice test of the Martian atmosphere models — and also a little more indirectly, it can be used to test our models of the coronal mass ejections," Dr Schunker said. Disappointingly for future space travellers, it's unlikely the aurora would be as dazzling as those seen on Earth. "Even on Earth, when we observe auroras, they often look quite different to the beautiful images we see," Dr Schunker said. "The photographic images that are taken of the auroras on Earth are often exposed for some minutes, so you get these really bright, vivid colours. Whereas if you see it with your eyes, it doesn't look quite so bright and quite so vivid, although still impressive." Mars, meanwhile, has fainter auroras to start with: lacking Earth's magnetism, the solar particles produce less light when they crash into the planet's atmosphere. "There might be a detectable change in the atmosphere, but it would not be strong and it would not be very obvious to the eye," Dr Schunker said. While it might not be the best light show in the Solar System, the research will be useful for better understanding solar weather from different angles, according to Dr Schunker. "Mars is not aligned with Earth at the moment. So we would not have experienced this particular CME," she said. We might be able to expect more observations like this in coming months, she said, thanks to "solar maximum": the point in its roughly 11-year cycle when the Sun produces the highest number of flares and sunspots. This is why people on Earth have seen so many auroras in the past year, often much further away from the poles than they can normally be spotted. "We're approaching, or we're in the middle of, solar maximum at the moment. We never know if we've reached solar maximum until we're on the other side of it," Dr Schunker said.
South China Morning Post
13-05-2025
- Science
- South China Morning Post
‘Marsquakes' point to liquid water in red planet's crust, study finds
Liquid water may be locked in rock just a few kilometres beneath Martian ground – much closer to the surface of the red planet than previously thought. Using data from Nasa's now-retired InSight lander, a China-led international team of researchers analysed seismic waves from ' marsquakes ' and meteorite impacts recorded between 2018 and 2022. They revealed a mysterious zone in the planet's crust they said was best explained by a layer of water-saturated rock. 01:08 China's Zhu Rong rover discovers evidence of an ancient sea on Mars China's Zhu Rong rover discovers evidence of an ancient sea on Mars If confirmed, this underground layer – between 5.4km and 8km (3.3-5 miles) deep – could hold as much water as a global layer up to 780 metres (2,550 feet) thick, according to their paper published in National Science Review last month. The amount matched what scientists believe to be Mars' missing water , after taking into account the water that has escaped into space, become locked into rocks or remains as ice and vapour, said the researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Australian National University and the University of Milano-Bicocca. 'Our results provide the first seismic evidence of liquid water at the base of the Martian upper crust, shaping our understanding of Mars' water cycle and the potential evolution of habitable environments on the planet,' they wrote in the paper. Nasa's InSight lander arrived on Mars in 2018 with a unique mission: not to roam the surface, but to listen to what was happening beneath it. For four years, it used a sensitive seismometer to detect subtle ground movements caused by crustal stress and meteorite impacts.
