Mars: Nasa's Perseverance rover sends stunning images

 

Nasa's Perseverance rover landed on Mars at 20:55 GMT on 18 February after almost seven months travelling from Earth.

Since then, it has sent back some amazing images from around its landing site, Jezero Crater, a 49km (30-mile) wide impact depression just north of the Red Planet's equator.

Here is a selection of the pictures sent back from the mission, as Perseverance hunts for signs of past microbial life, seeks to characterise the planet's geology and past climate, and collects Martian rock.

NASA gives up trying to burrow under Mars surface with 'mole' probe

 

 

NASA’s “mole” on Mars has failed. After nearly two years of attempting to dig the InSight lander’s heat probe – nicknamed the mole – into the Red Planet’s surface, engineers have finally given up.

The InSight lander arrived on Mars in November 2018. Its main purpose is to study the planet’s deep interior in order to help us understand the history of the solar system’s rocky worlds. The lander has three main instruments to help it do that: a seismometer to catch vibrations traveling through the ground a radio to precisely measure Mars’s rotation and learn more about its metal core and a setup called the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP³) to measure the heat flowing out of the planet’s center.

The mole is a key part of HP³ and is a sort of self-hammering nail designed to burrow about 5 metres under the ground, deeper than any human-made device has dug on any rocky planet, moon or asteroid before. However, once the mole started its ill-fated burrowing attempts, the soil proved to be unexpectedly clumpy, so it didn’t provide the instrument with the friction it needed in order to dig.

The scientists and engineers working on the mission tried everything they could think of to get the mole into the ground, even pressing down on it with the scoop on InSight’s robotic arm. Nothing worked, so after a final attempt on 9 January, the team has now ended its efforts.

“We’ve given it everything we’ve got, but Mars and our heroic mole remain incompatible,” said Tilman Spohn at the German Aerospace Center, the leader of the HP³ team, in press release “Fortunately, we’ve learned a lot that will benefit future missions that attempt to dig into the subsurface.” Researchers on future missions will understand the Martian soil better thanks to the many attempts to bury the mole.

While that particular instrument didn’t work, InSight’s other tools are  performing well The seismometer has already recorded nearly 500 marsquakes, and NASA has extended the mission until December 2022.

source: Newscients.com

  

Planet Mars, explained

The rusty world is full of mysteries—and some of the solar system's most extreme geology. Learn more about Earth's smaller, colder neighbor.

The red planet Mars, named for the Roman god of war, has long been an omen in the night sky. And in its own way, the planet’s rusty red surface tells a story of destruction. Billions of years ago, the fourth planet from the sun could have been mistaken for Earth’s smaller twin, with liquid water on its surface—and maybe even life.

 

Now, the world is a cold, barren desert with few signs of liquid water. But after decades of study using orbiters, landers, and rovers, scientists have revealed Mars as a dynamic, windblown landscape that could—just maybe—harbor microbial life beneath its rusty surface even today.

 

Longer year and shifting seasons

With a radius of 2,106 miles, Mars is the seventh largest planet in our solar system and about half the diameter of Earth. Its surface gravity is 37.5 percent of Earth’s.

 

 

Recent NASA exploratory expeditions revealed some of the red planet's biggest mysteries. This video explains what makes it so different from Earth and what would happen if humans lived there.

Mars rotates on its axis every 24.6 Earth hours, defining the length of a Martian day, which is called a sol (short for “solar day”). Mars’s axis of rotation is tilted 25.2 degrees relative to the plane of the planet’s orbit around the sun, which helps give Mars seasons similar to those on Earth. Whichever hemisphere is tilted closer to the sun experiences spring and summer, while the hemisphere tilted away gets fall and winter. At two specific moments each year—called the equinoxes—both hemispheres receive equal illumination.

 

 

But for several reasons, seasons on Mars are different from those on Earth. For one, Mars is on average about 50 percent farther from the sun than Earth is, with an average orbital distance of 142 million miles. This means that it takes Mars longer to complete a single orbit, stretching out its year and the lengths of its seasons. On Mars, a year lasts 669.6 sols, or 687 Earth days, and an individual season can last up to 194 sols, or just over 199 Earth days.

 

The angle of Mars’s axis of rotation also changes much more often than Earth's, which has led to swings in the Martian climate on timescales of thousands to millions of years. In addition, Mars’s orbit is less circular than Earth’s, which means that its orbital velocity varies more over the course of a Martian year. This annual variation affects the timing of the red planet’s solstices and equinoxes. On Mars, the northern hemisphere’s spring and summer are longer than the fall and winter.

 

There’s another complicating factor: Mars has a far thinner atmosphere than Earth, which dramatically lessens how much heat the planet can trap near its surface. Surface temperatures on Mars can reach as high as 70 degrees Fahrenheit and as low as -225 degrees Fahrenheit, but on average, its surface is -81 degrees Fahrenheit, a full 138 degrees colder than Earth’s average temperature.

 

Windy and watery, once

The primary driver of modern Martian geology is its atmosphere, which is mostly made of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon. By Earth standards, the air is preposterously thin; air pressure atop Mount Everest is about 50 times higher than it is at the Martian surface. Despite the thin air, Martian breezes can gust up to 60 miles an hour, kicking up dust that fuels huge dust storms and massive fields of alien sand dunes.

 

Once upon a time, though, wind and water flowed across the red planet. Robotic rovers have found clear evidence that billions of years ago, lakes and rivers of liquid water coursed across the red planet’s surface. This means that at some point in the distant past, Mars’s atmosphere was sufficiently dense and retained enough heat for water to remain liquid on the red planet’s surface. Not so today: Though water ice abounds under the Martian surface and in its polar ice caps, there are no large bodies of liquid water on the surface there today.

Source: National Geographic.com

Would you like to live in Mars?

 

The study suggests the presence of water traces on Mars, raising the question of the chances of life.

The study suggests the presence of water traces on Mars, raising the question of the chances of life.

There is growing evidence suggesting the presence of aqueous environment on ancient Mars, raising the question of the possibility of living in such an environment.

Although no life has been detected yet on the Martian surface, in a new effort, astrophysicist and research scientist Dimitra Atri at the Center for Space Science at NYU Abu Dhabi finds that conditions below the surface could potentially support it.

Atri researched the biological capability of galactic cosmic-ray-induced, radiation-driven chemical disequilibrium in the Martian subsurface environment.

Until now, Martian subsurface, which is less harsh and has traces of water, has never been explored. Atri thinks that the steady bombardment of penetrating galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) might provide the energy needed to catalyze organic activity there.

Atri used a combination of numerical models, space mission data, and studies of deep-cave ecosystems on Earth for his research to propose mechanisms through which life if it ever existed on Mars, could survive and be detected with the upcoming ExoMars mission (2022) by the European Space Agency and Roscosmos.

He hypothesizes that galactic cosmic radiation, which can penetrate a few meters underneath the surface, will induce chemical reactions that can be utilized for metabolic energy by existing life, and host life organisms using mechanisms seen in chemical and radiation environments on Earth.

Atri said, “It is exciting to contemplate that life could survive in such a harsh environment, as few as two meters below the surface of Mars. When the Rosalind Franklin rover onboard the ExoMars mission (ESA and Roscosmos), equipped with a subsurface drill, is launched in 2022, it will be well-suited to detect extant microbial life and hopefully provide some important insights.

Source:Techexplorist.com