THEMIS: Goodbye Opportunity

Posted on April 2, 2019 by rburnham

Meridiani Planum in false color (THEMIS_IOTD_20190402)THEMIS Image of the Day, April 2, 2019. This false-color VIS image shows part of Meridiani Planum. While this image does not show where the Opportunity MER rover explored, Meridiani Planum was Opportunity’s home since it arrived in January 2004.

Opportunity was last heard from at the start of the large dust storms during the summer of 2018. After many months trying to reestablish communications, NASA declared the mission over in February 2019. The rover covered over 25 miles of travel and provided new insights into the geology of Mars.

Opportunity’s original mission length was just 90 days, but it lasted 15 years! Good night Opportunity. For more information about Opportunity, and her sister rover Spirit, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/overview.

The THEMIS VIS camera contains 5 filters. The data from different filters can be combined in multiple ways to create a false color image. These false color images may reveal subtle variations of the surface not easily identified in a single band image.

Explore more THEMIS Images of the Day by geological subject.

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Curiosity update: Drilling on the horizon?

Posted on April 1, 2019 by rburnham

NLB_607099615EDR_F0751128NCAM00250M_-br2Sols 2363-64, April 1, 2019, update by MSL engineer Ashley Stroupe: Curiosity is getting close to the area in which we next want to drill. We are possibly as close as 2-3 drives (including today’s) away from our next drill target! But before heading off, we are taking a lot of imaging with ChemCam and Mastcam of the local features – including some close-by small sand ripples and some of the pebbles in our workspace in order to help understand the relationship. We are also doing contact science with MAHLI and APXS on two small targets, Maud and Ardnamurchan; Maud will be partially “cleaned” by ChemCam so APXS might have a better view despite the target being too small to brush. We also continue our atmospheric studies, as we seem to be in a fairly windy period, including a dust devil movie and a tau measurement… [More at link]

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Evidence against vast glaciation in Mars’ grandest canyons

Posted on April 1, 2019 by rburnham

kissick_image2Planetary Geomorphology Image of the Month, April 1, 2019: Lucy Kissick (Durham University, now at University of Oxford).

The Valles Marineris (Image 1) form the largest system of interconnected canyons on Mars, up to 2000 km long and in parts 10 km deep, and have long been a focal point of interest in planetary geomorphology. Recently, researchers including Mège and Bourgeois (2011), Cull et al. (2014), and Gourronc et al. (2014) outlined the case for a vast glaciation filling these canyons to several kilometres in depth. The implications of such a fill on the climate history and global water budget of Mars would be paradigm-shifting, but with high resolution imagery, features attributed as glacial may be better explained by more common geomorphological processes.

In Image 2, several features attributed to formation by glacial erosion are discredited when viewed in the 25 cm/pixel imagery of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE). These include a lateral moraine in Figure 2A as described by Gourronc et al. (2014), which on Earth are rubbly mounds of glacially-eroded sediment that accumulates at the edges of valley glacier margins. Up close, however, these bench-like platforms protruding from the walls of Coprates Chasma in eastern Marineris show regular, organised layering more like strata, disagreeing with moraines’ characteristic disorganised hummocks… [More at link]

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Rivers raged on Mars late into its history

Posted on April 1, 2019 by rburnham

aeolis_zephyria_meander_noline_noscale_revcLong ago on Mars, water carved deep riverbeds into the planet’s surface — but we still don’t know what kind of weather fed them. Scientists aren’t sure, because their understanding of the Martian climate billions of years ago remains incomplete.

A new study by University of Chicago scientists catalogued these rivers to conclude that significant river runoff persisted on Mars later into its history than previously thought. According to the study, published March 27 in Science Advances, the runoff was intense — rivers on Mars were wider than those on Earth today—and occurred at hundreds of locations on the red planet.

This complicates the picture for scientists trying to model the ancient Martian climate, said lead study author Edwin Kite, assistant professor of geophysical sciences and an expert in both the history of Mars and climates of other worlds. “It’s already hard to explain rivers or lakes based on the information we have,” he said. “This makes a difficult problem even more difficult.”

But, he said, the constraints could be useful in winnowing the many theories researchers have proposed to explain the climate.

Mars is crisscrossed with the distinctive tracks of long-dead rivers. NASA’s spacecraft have taken photos of hundreds of these rivers from orbit, and when the Mars rover Curiosity landed in 2012, it sent back images of pebbles that were rounded—tumbled for a long time in the bottom of a river.

But it’s a puzzle why ancient Mars had liquid water. Mars has an extremely thin atmosphere today, and early in the planet’s history, it was also only receiving a third of the sunlight of present-day Earth, which shouldn’t be enough heat to maintain liquid water. “Indeed, even on ancient Mars, when it was wet enough for rivers some of the time, the rest of the data looks like Mars was extremely cold and dry most of the time,” Kite said. [More at links]

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Mars Express saw same methane spike detected by Curiosity

Posted on April 1, 2019 by rburnham

ESA_MarsExpress_methane_mechanisms_625A reanalysis of data collected by ESA’s Mars Express during the first 20 months of NASA’s Curiosity mission found one case of correlated methane detection, the first time an in-situ measurement has been independently confirmed from orbit.

Reports of methane in the martian atmosphere have been intensely debated, with Mars Express contributing one of the first measurements from orbit in 2004, shortly after its arrival at the Red Planet.

The molecule attracts such attention because on Earth methane is generated by living organisms, as well as geological processes. Because it can be destroyed quickly by atmospheric processes, any detection of the molecule in the martian atmosphere means it must have been released relatively recently – even if the methane itself was produced millions or billions of years ago and lay trapped in underground reservoirs until now.

While spacecraft and telescopic observations from Earth have in general reported no or very low detections of methane, or measurements right at the limit of the instruments’ capabilities, a handful of spurious spikes, along with Curiosity’s reported seasonal variation at its location in Gale Crater, raise the exciting question of how it is being generated and destroyed in present times.

Now, for the first time, a strong signal measured by the Curiosity rover on 15 June 2013 is backed up by an independent observation by the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) onboard Mars Express the next day, as the spacecraft flew over Gale Crater. (…)

“In general we did not detect any methane, aside from one definite detection of about 15 parts per billion by volume of methane in the atmosphere, which turned out to be a day after Curiosity reported a spike of about six parts per billion,” says Marco Giuranna from the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology in Rome, Italy, the principal investigator for the PFS experiment, and lead author of the paper reporting the results in Nature Geoscience today. [More at links]

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HiRISE: Frost-covered dunes

Posted on April 1, 2019 by rburnham

ESP_054738_2560Frost-covered dunes. Sprinkled with hopes and dreams, no less. This is a relatively new monitoring site that seems to have heavy carbon-dioxide snowfall.

HiRISE Picture of the Day archive [More at links]

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NASA, Google join in simulating Mars exploration

Posted on April 1, 2019 by rburnham

Haughton-Mars-Project-Research-Station-Devon-IslandA crewed mission to Mars might be a long way off, but researchers are busy preparing, nonetheless. One of the best ways to prepare is by training scientists and testing new technologies in some of the most Mars-like locations on Earth, simulating the experience as much as possible.

On March 25, 2019, the Mars Institute and the SETI Institute jointly announced a new partnership between Google and NASA’s Haughton-Mars Project (HMP) to further the goal of human Mars exploration and the public’s understanding of it. Their focus is Devon Island in Nunavut, Canada, in the Arctic. Devon Island is one of the most Mars-like places that can be found on Earth and the single largest continuous area of barren rocky polar desert on Earth.

The announcement was accompanied by the release of new public outreach products including Street View imagery; a Google Earth guided tour highlighting the Mars-like geology of Devon Island (Chrome browser needed); and a documentary short captured at NASA’s Haughton-Mars Project with a Google Pixel 3. Want an example? Highlights from Google Street View include… [More at link]

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THEMIS; Rutherford Crater in false color

Posted on April 1, 2019 by rburnham

Rutherford Crater in false color (THEMIS_IOTD_20190401)THEMIS Image of the Day, April 1, 2019. Today’s VIS image shows part of the floor of Rutherford Crater. Blue tones in false color images are indicative of basaltic sand. Rutherford Crater is approximately 107 km (66 miles) in diameter. This crater is located in Arabia Terra.

The THEMIS VIS camera contains 5 filters. The data from different filters can be combined in multiple ways to create a false color image. These false color images may reveal subtle variations of the surface not easily identified in a single band image.

Explore more THEMIS Images of the Day by geological subject.

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Groundwater origin for recurring slope lineae?

Posted on March 29, 2019 by rburnham

newevidenceoIn mid-2018, researchers supported by the Italian Space Agency detected the presence of a deep-water lake on Mars under its south polar ice caps. [Ed. note: previously reported here.] Now researchers at the USC Arid Climate and Water Research Center (AWARE) have published a study [in Nature Geoscience] that suggests deep groundwater could still be active on Mars and could originate surface streams in some near-equatorial areas on Mars.

The researchers at USC have determined that groundwater likely exists in a broader geographical area than just the poles of Mars and that there is an active system, as deep as 750 meters, from which groundwater comes to the surface through cracks in the specific craters they analyzed.

Heggy, who is a member of the Mars Express Sounding radar experiment MARSIS probing Mars subsurface, and co-author Abotalib Z. Abotalib, a postdoctoral research associate at USC, studied the characteristics of Mars Recurrent Slope Linea, which are akin to dried, short streams of water that appear on some crater walls on Mars.

Scientists previously thought these features were affiliated with surface water flow or close subsurface water flow, says Heggy.

“We suggest that this may not be true. We propose an alternative hypothesis that they originate from a deep pressurized groundwater source which comes to the surface moving upward along ground cracks,” Heggy says.

“The experience we gained from our research in desert hydrology was the cornerstone in reaching this conclusion. We have seen the same mechanisms in the North African Sahara and in the Arabian Peninsula, and it helped us explore the same mechanism on Mars,” said Abotalib Z. Abotalib, the paper’s first author.

The two scientists concluded that fractures within some of Mars’ craters, enabled water springs to rise up to the surface as a result of pressure deep below. These springs leaked onto the surface, generating the sharp and distinct linear features found on the walls of these craters. The scientists also provide an explanation on how these water features fluctuate with seasonality on Mars… [More at links]

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Curiosity: Rolling along behind the ridge

Posted on March 29, 2019 by rburnham

2361-navcam-rearSol 2361, March 29, 2019. Leaving a zigzag track (click the composite image above), Curiosity continues to roll northeastward behind Vera Rubin Ridge, roughly paralleling its direction.

Sand dune “blow-overs” are visible to the left of the rover in the view below, which looks forward. These small dune fields hugging the ridge crest suggest that winds, either past or present, blow across the ridge from the other side. The wind carries sand grains up and over, then as the wind slackens after passing the ridge crest the grains fall to the ground.

Note several low, linear ridges of sand near the rover. These are also shaped by the winds, which have herded the sand grains into what geologists call “transverse eolian ridges,” or TARs for short. (Click either image to enlarge it.)

Sol 2361 raw images (from all cameras).

2361-navcam-ahead

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