Sol 2311, February 5, 2019. The two Mastcam lenses (34mm and 100mm) were put to use profiling Vera Rubin Ridge (above, with the 34mm lens) and an outcrop (below, 100mm), both seen from down on the rolling terrain of the clay-bearing unit. Click either image to enlarge it.
Sol 2311 raw images (from all cameras).
The ExoMars rover that will search for the building blocks of life on the Red Planet has a name: Rosalind Franklin. The prominent scientist behind the discovery of the structure of DNA will have her symbolic footprint on Mars in 2021.
A panel of experts chose ‘Rosalind Franklin’ from over 36 000 entries submitted by citizens from all ESA Member States, following a competition launched by the UK Space Agency in July last year.
The ExoMars rover will be the first of its kind to combine the capability to roam around Mars and to study it at depth. The Red Planet has hosted water in the past, but has a dry surface exposed to harsh radiation today.
The rover bearing Rosalind Franklin’s name will drill down to two metres into the surface to sample the soil, analyse its composition and search for evidence of past – and perhaps even present – life buried underground… [More at link and here]
Sols 2313-14, February 6, 2019, update by MSL scientist Scott Guzewich: Curiosity is cruising through the clay-bearing unit on some compacted clast-rich soil, seen in this capture from Navcam. It’s some of the best driving terrain we’ve encountered in Gale Crater, with just some occasional sandy patches in the lee of small ridges. Our route will take us northward along the east and south flank of the Vera Rubin Ridge toward our anticipated first drilling stop in the clay-bearing unit. Along the way, we’re stopping regularly for “touch-and-go” contact science, including in today’s plan. Given the lack of even modest size rocks or bedrock outcrops nearby, we targeted a small soil patch termed “Alba.” We also will use ChemCam and Mastcam to interrogate the area around Alba, in addition to some geologic targets both near and far… [More at link]
In this complex crater (about 44-kilometers in diameter), we see bedrock in several locations from different depths in the crust. The central uplift exposes large fragments of green-toned bedrock that possibly originated from several kilometers beneath the surface.
To the south of the crater, we see more of this bedrock along with material that was excavated and thrown out after the impact. In craters of this size, the rim is unstable and collapses inwards forming terraces, which occasionally exposes more bedrock that would have originated from close to the surface than the rocks exposed within the uplift itself. Central uplifts have better exposures of bedrock, but in this example the terraces steal the show, displaying beautiful green- and light-toned bedrock at multiple locations. [More at link]
THEMIS Image of the Day, February 7, 2019. This VIS image shows a section of an unnamed channel. This channel starts within Claritas Fossae and empties down hill into Icaria Planum.
Two thousand, three hundred and two Martian days. That is how long it took from landing day for Curiosity to reach the “clay-bearing unit.” The clay-bearing unit is a region at the base of Mount Sharp where Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted unmistakable signs of a potentially habitable ancient environment, clinching the choice of Gale as Curiosity’s landing site. It’s the green stripe on this map, which was instrumental in the selection of Gale as a landing site.
Of course, Curiosity has discovered lots and lots of evidence for ancient habitable environments in Gale — not to mention plenty of clay — on its way to the clay-bearing unit. But it’s a relief to finally get to the place that the team has been looking forward to for so long. On the map below, Curiosity crossed into the clay-bearing unit at the little square at sol 2302.
In this update, I’ll discuss Curiosity’s final work on the top of Vera Rubin Ridge, walk through the plans for the clay-bearing unit campaign, and provide brief updates on a regional dust event and progress on the recovery from the B-side computer anomaly. I’ll briefly mention some of the science that’s come out in the recently released 2019 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) abstracts — if you can’t get enough Curiosity science (or any other planetary science, for that matter), you’ll find lots and lots of great stuff in those abstracts! Thanks as usual to project scientist Ashwin Vasavada for filling me in on the details of operations over the last 2 months. [More at link]
Conditions across Mars were similar to that of the previous week. Dust hazes remained present over many southern hemisphere regions. Looking to the northern hemisphere, a couple of dust storms associated with the north polar hood were observed north of Alba Patera and over northern Utopia near the end of the week. Lee wave clouds, known for their ripple like appearance, were spotted trailing behind Tempe Terra and among the Deuteronilus Mensae. Focusing on the tropics, optically-thin orographic water ice clouds were spotted above Arsia Mons (southernmost volcano of the Tharsis… [More at link, including video]
In this image many sand dunes are visible. They have an elongated crescent form and are called “barchan dunes.” They are formed by the continuous action of the wind, blowing in the same direction, giving this particular shape.
The orientation of these dunes tell us that the prevailing wind blows from the right to the left (east to west). The wind is continuously moving sand grains up the longer dune slope, towards the top. The small ripples on the slope are caused by this movement. When the sand grains arrive at the top, they fall down the steeper and shorter slope, which as a consequence, has no ripples. It is this gradual sand movement that causes the dunes to slowly move over time. [More at link]
THEMIS Image of the Day, February 6, 2019. Sand dunes cover part of the floor of this unnamed crater in Terra Cimmeria.
[From Emily Lakdawalla’s blog at the Planetary Society]
Just a brief update to point out that the InSight mission has successfully placed the wind and thermal shield over the seismometer. The seismometer will now be shielded from winds and kept warm over the cold Martian nights, so the quality of its data should dramatically increase. The next step for InSight is the placement of the heat probe instrument, which could happen as early as next week.
It took a couple of days for the skirt on the shield to relax and complete its connection with the ground, as the weight of the chain mail tugs on the tightly folded thermal blanketing material…. [More at link]
