Latest news with #PerseveranceMars
Yahoo
19 hours ago
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Why does NASA's Perseverance rover keep taking pictures of this maze on Mars?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. If you've spent any time perusing the carousel of raw images from NASA's Perseverance Mars rover, you might have stumbled across an odd subject: a tiny, intricate maze etched into a small plate, photographed over and over again. Why is the Perseverance rover so obsessed with this little labyrinth? It turns out the maze is a calibration target — one of 10 for Perseverance's Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals instrument, otherwise known for its fun acronym, SHERLOC. This Sherlock Holmes–inspired tool is designed to detect organic compounds and other minerals on Mars that could indicate signs of ancient microbial life. To do that accurately, the system must be carefully calibrated, and that's where the maze comes in. Located on the rover's seven-foot (2.1-meter) robotic arm, SHERLOC uses spectroscopic techniques — specifically Raman and fluorescence spectroscopy — to analyze Martian rocks. In order to ensure accurate measurements, it must routinely calibrate its tools using a set of reference materials with specific properties. These are mounted on a plate attached to the front of the rover's body: the SHERLOC Calibration Target. "The calibration targets serve multiple purposes, which primarily include refining the SHERLOC wavelength calibration, calibrating the SHERLOC laser scanner mirror, and monitoring the focus and state of health of the laser," Kyle Uckert, deputy principal investigator for SHERLOC at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, tells The target is arranged in two rows, each populated with small patches of carefully selected materials. The top row includes three critical calibration materials: aluminum gallium nitride (AlGaN) on sapphire discs; the UV-scattering material Diffusil; and Martian meteorite SaU008, whose mineral makeup is already known and helps align wavelength calibration with real Martian geology. This is also where you'll find the maze. Why a maze? "SHERLOC is all about solving puzzles, and what better puzzle than a maze!" says Uckert. The purpose of the maze target is to calibrate the positioning of the laser scanner mirror and characterize the laser's focus, which requires a target with sharply contrasting spectral responses. The maze serves this purpose well." The maze is made of chrome-plated lines just 200 microns thick (about twice the width of a human hair) printed onto silica glass. "There are no repeating patterns and the spectrum of the chrome plating is distinct from the underlying silica glass," says Uckert. That makes it possible to measure the laser's focus and accuracy with extreme precision. If you look closely at the maze, you'll also notice a Sherlock Holmes portrait right at the center. While it's a cheeky nod to the instrument's name, it serves a practical function. "SHERLOC spectral maps can resolve the 200 micron thick chrome plated lines and the 50 micron thick silhouette of Sherlock Holmes at the center of the maze," Uckert notes. Like the portrait, the bottom half of the SHERLOC Calibration Target also serves a dual purpose: spectral instrument calibration and spacesuit material testing. It contains five samples of materials used in modern spacesuits, including some materials you might be familiar with, like Teflon, Gore-Tex, and Kevlar. And don't miss the "fun" target in this row — there's a geocache marker backing a polycarbonate target, and it does indeed have a tie-in to Sherlock Holmes. RELATED STORIES: — Perseverance rover's Mars samples show traces of ancient water, but NASA needs them on Earth to seek signs of life — Perseverance Mars rover finds 'one-of-a-kind treasure' on Red Planet's Silver Mountain — Perseverance Mars rover becomes 1st spacecraft to spot auroras from the surface of another world These materials are actively being tested under Mars conditions to determine how they hold up over time in situ, which is crucial for planning human exploration of the Red Planet. "Note that we use all of these materials to fine-tune SHERLOC," adds Uckert. "As a bonus, the spacesuit materials support unique science that will help keep future astronauts safe." Now, if all these Sherlock Holmes–related Easter eggs on the SHERLOC Calibration Target aren't enough for you, there's one final link. SHERLOC has a color camera as part of its instrumentation suite that sometimes images the target, and it's called the Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering. Yes, SHERLOC's sidekick is called WATSON.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Selfie on Mars? Here's how NASA caught a new glimpse of the Martian surface
A Martian selfie is giving Earthbound astronomers a look at environmental details on the red planet's surface. But the selfie was not taken by an extraterrestrial. Rather, it was a manmade explorer. On May 10, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover used its 1,500th sol, or Martian day, to take a selfie from the edge of the Jezero Crater called 'Witch Hazel Hill,' according to NASA on Wednesday. The selfie came together using a compilation of 59 individual pictures showing the whole rover and the Martian surface, NASA stated. 'To get that selfie look, each WATSON [Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering] image has to have its own unique field of view,' Megan Wu, a Perseverance imaging scientist from Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, said in NASA's statement. '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.' Unique to the complete image is a swirling natural phenomenon seen on Earth. To the left of the center of the image is a dust devil, 'located 3 miles to the north in Neretva Vallis,' Justin Maki, Perseverance imaging lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in NASA's statement. 'Having the dust devil in the background makes it a classic,' Wu said. 'This is a great shot.' Located on a gray spot just below the rover is the 'Bell Island' borehole, in which the rover collected a sample of Mars' soil, astronomers said. The selfie also gives NASA a chance to see what the Perseverance rover looks like over four years since it landed on the red planet. Though covered in dust, an American flag can still be seen on the rover's chassis. At the time the selfie was taken, Perseverance analyzed 37 rocks and boulders, collected 26 rock cores and has used its six wheels to drive more than 22 miles since it landed. New research says our universe only has a quinvigintillion years left, so make 'em good ones Video: Erupting volcanoes cause 'dancing' light show in space Massive solar flare erupts, causing radio blackouts across Earth Where will failed '70s Soviet probe land after it crashes back to Earth? Nobody knows Sorry, Pluto: The solar system could have a 9th planet after all, astronomers say Read the original article on MassLive.
India Today
22-05-2025
- Science
- India Today
Historic selfie: Perseverance rover completes 1,500 days on Mars
Historic selfie: Perseverance rover completes 1,500 days on Mars 22 May, 2028 Credit: Nasa A Martian dust devil photobombed NASA's Perseverance Mars rover as it took a selfie on May 10 to mark its 1,500th sol (Martian day) exploring the Red Planet. 1500 days on Mars NASA's Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars on February 18, 2021, inside the Jezero Crater, an area believed to be an ancient lakebed. Landed in 2021 Search for Ancient Life – Its primary goal is to search for signs of past microbial life, helping scientists understand if life ever existed on Mars. Mission Perseverance is drilling into Martian rocks and storing samples in sealed tubes, which NASA plans to bring back to Earth in a future mission for deeper study. Collecting Mars Samples Ingenuity – It brought along Ingenuity, a small robotic helicopter that made history as the first powered flight on another planet, testing aerial mobility in Mars' thin atmosphere. Flying Partner The rover has 19 cameras, a rock-zapping laser, a weather station, ground-penetrating radar, and instruments to study Mars' geology and climate. Loaded with High-Tech Tools Perseverance is also testing new technologies, like a device that makes oxygen from Martian air — crucial for future human exploration of the Red Planet. Prep for Human Missions
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Perseverance rover rolls into 'Crocodile' region on Mars to hunt for super-old rocks
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. NASA's Perseverance rover has made to a new region on Mars, which may contain some of the Red Planet's oldest and most interesting rocks. Perseverance landed inside the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater in February 2021, on a mission to search for past signs of Mars life and collect dozens of samples for future return to Earth. The car-sized rover has covered a lot of ground in the past four-plus years, and it has now reached yet another new spot — a plateau of rocky outcrops that the mission team named Krokodillen, after a mountain ridge on Prins Karls Forland island in Norway. (Krokodillen means "crocodile" in Norwegian.) Krokodillen, which covers about 73 acres (30 hectares), is a boundary of sorts between the ancient rocks of Jezero's rim and the plains beyond. Earlier work suggest that it harbors clay minerals, which form in the presence of liquid water. If Perseverance finds more such minerals throughout Krokodillen, it would suggest that the area may have been habitable long ago — an intriguing thought, given the age of the rocks. "The Krokodillen rocks formed before Jezero Crater was created, during Mars' earliest geologic period, the Noachian, and are among the oldest rocks on Mars," Ken Farley, deputy project scientist for Perseverance from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a statement on Monday (May 19). "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 in the crater with 'Cheyava Falls,'" Farley added. Cheyava Falls is an arrowhead-shaped rock that Perseverance studied in 2024. The rover found chemical signatures and structures that are consistent with the activity of ancient microbial life. But such features may also have been produced by geological processes, so they remain potential rather than definitive biosignatures. Indeed, confirming the presence of current or past life on Mars may be too tall a task for Perseverance, given its limited scientific payload. That's why the rover is collecting samples that can be returned to Earth for study in well-equipped labs around the globe. (The future of Mars sample return is currently in doubt, however; the Trump administration's 2026 budget request would cancel the current plan to bring Perseverance's collected material home.) Related stories: — Perseverance rover: Everything you need to know — NASA's Perseverance Mars rover finds possible signs of ancient Red Planet life — Trump's 2026 budget plan would cancel NASA's Mars Sample Return mission. Experts say that's a 'major step back' And speaking of sampling: The Perseverance team is implementing a new strategy going forward, according to the Monday statement. The rover will now leave some of its newly filled tubes unsealed, so it can dump out collected samples in favor of potentially more exciting ones if need be. The team is taking this tack because Perseverance is getting low on unsealed tubes and still has a lot of intriguing ground to cover. The rover carries 43 tubes, 38 of which are for collecting samples. (The other five are "witness" tubes that are designed to help the mission team determine if any materials in the collected samples are contaminants from Earth.) Perseverance has filled all but seven of its sample tubes at this point, according to Perseverance acting project scientist Katie Stack Morgan of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "We have been exploring Mars for over four years, and every single filled sample tube we have on board has its own unique and compelling story to tell," she said in the same statement. "This strategy allows us maximum flexibility as we continue our collection of diverse and compelling rock samples."
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Trump's 2026 budget plan would cancel NASA's Mars Sample Return mission. Experts say that's a 'major step back'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has been on the prowl within Jezero Crater following its touchdown in February 2021. That car-sized robot has been devotedly picking up select specimens from across the area, gingerly deploying those sealed pick-me-ups on the Red Planet's surface, as well as stuffing them inside itself. Those collectibles may well hold signs of past life on that enigmatic, dusty and foreboding world. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have for years been intently plotting out plans to send future spacecraft to Mars and haul those Perseverance-plucked bits, pieces, and sniffs of atmosphere to Earth for rigorous inspection by state-of-the-art equipment. But President Trump's Fiscal Year 2026 proposed budget blueprint issued on May 2 by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) calls for a 24.3 percent reduction to NASA's top-line funding and could slashing the space agency's science budget by 47 percent. A casualty stemming from this projected budget bombshell is the Mars Sample Return (MSR) venture. In fact, MSR is tagged in the White House's proposed 2026 budget as "grossly over budget and whose goals would be achieved by human missions to Mars," explaining that MSR is not scheduled to return samples until the 2030s. The preliminary White House budget says its intent is in line with the Administration's objectives of "returning to the moon before China and putting a man on Mars," with the budget reducing lower priority research and terminating unaffordable missions such as MSR. But some experts say that the mission still has a wealth of scientific and spaceflight returns to offer that are in line with the administration's push to put humans on Mars. To understand why that mission got so costly, we must look to spaceflight history courtesy of John Connolly, a 36-year NASA veteran that directed human lunar and Mars mission designs. He is now professor of practice at Texas A&M University's Department of Aerospace Engineering. Mars Sample Return has been on NASA's radar since mid-1970's studies to modify a Viking Mars lander to perform a relatively simple sample return, Connolly told "It has always been thought of as the Holy Grail of Mars robotic missions, and has been studied extensively now for five decades." Over those decades, MSR has also grown more complex, Connolly said. The original 1970's concepts did not address the most recent requirements for planetary protection or the need for carefully selected samples. "The growth of the MSR requirements set has naturally increased the complexity and cost at each iteration of the MSR mission concept until we reached the current design of a multi-launch, multi-spacecraft, multi-sample-handoff mission," said Connolly. Indeed, over recent years, multiple reviews of the MSR project by independent groups have flagged MSR sticker shock. A last estimate was about $11 billion, with samples being returned to Earth in 2040, deemed by NASA itself as too costly and not being accomplished within an acceptable time frame. Last year, yet another appraisal group ended up finding it feasible to return Mars samples as early as 2035 for a cost of some $8 billion. "Our understanding of Mars has gotten to the point that the questions we're asking can best be addressed with returned samples," said Bruce Jakosky, a senior research scientist and professor emeritus at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. "To decide not to return them, or to put it off to an indefinite future time with human missions would be to take a major step back in exploring the solar system and the universe and in continuing to develop our scientific understanding of the world around us," Jakosky said. Returning samples from Mars will enable "risk reduction" for human missions, Jakosky added. It would allow us to determine the risk to human health from Martian dust and from chemicals that might be present in the dust that could be harmful, he added, such as toxic perchlorates that have been previously identified on Mars. Jakosky also emphasized that returning Mars samples to Earth would resolve technical problems in advance of sending humans. "It would demonstrate the first round-trip travel to Mars," he said, "and it would allow us to solve important problems in planetary protection so that we don't put the Earth at risk from possible Martian microbes." Of like mind is John Rummel, a former and founding chair of the panel on planetary protection of the COSPAR, an international confab of experts. He previously worked at NASA Headquarters (1986 to 1993 and 1998 to 2008) as the space agency's senior scientist for astrobiology and as NASA's Planetary Protection Officer. "There is much we would like to know about the environment of Mars — dust, for example — before bathing people in it. Mars Sample Return is one way of getting that information, while proving we can do a safe round-trip. Doing something similar with a crew in the loop could provide for a faster progression to a safe stay on Mars — but safety needs to be a strong consideration for both the crew and their eventual return to Earth," said Rummel. "The Mars dream is back," views Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society. He views the MSR cancellation differently, attaching his forward thinking vision to Elon Musk's still-in-the-works SpaceX Starship launch system. Zubrin envisions initial use of lots of robotic Mars scouts, then a robotic expedition, followed by humans to Mars. "I think that's possible, but would require total focus by NASA, SpaceX, Musk, and the Trump administration," Zubrin said. That said, however, he contends the Trump budget for NASA as it now stands is already moving to wreck the first two stages of the plan by trying to wreck NASA's Mars Exploration Program. "They need to change course," Zubrin advised. "If they do, a wave of robotic scouts in 2028, a robotic expedition in 2031 followed by a human mission in 2033 could still be pulled off," he said. RELATED STORIES: — Can Rocket Lab come to NASA's rescue with new Mars sample-return plan? — China moves Mars sample-return launch up 2 years, to 2028 — Perseverance rover's Mars samples must be brought back to Earth, scientists stress For Jakosky, he recognizes that "science" is not the only reason to send humans to Mars. "NASA also identifies national posture and inspiration as compelling means. But all of these fall apart if we end up sending people as a publicity stunt, to just to what has been called 'flags and footprints.' The underlying rationale for sending people has to be compelling enough to justify the risk to those people and the cost of the missions," Jakosky said. Science can provide much of that rationale, concludes Jakosky. "We have the opportunity today to implement the science in a way that makes sense from a programmatic, budgetary, and risk perspective. And isn't that what space exploration is all about?"
