THEMIS Image of the Day, December 4, 2018. This VIS image shows a linear depression in Syria Planum. Volcanic activity, including broad shield volcanoes and extensive volcanic plains created this region of the Tharsis system south of Noctis Labyrinthus.
Linear features, like the one in this image, can be caused by several different processes. In this case a combination of tectonic forces and lava emplacement created the depression.
Sol 2250-51, December 3, 2018, update by MSL scientist Suzanne Schwenzer: On sol 2250 Curiosity finishes the observations on and around the Highfield drill hole and drives on to an area where red Jura is exposed. The dataset Curiosity collected at the Highfield location is very informative already before tosol’s activities. It includes observations that especially benefit from the longer stay, such as the change detection imaging experiments. In one of the images, the sand movements became very apparent by the drill hole already starting to fill in – not a planned change detection, but an interesting one nonetheless. It is just a few sols since we drilled, yet sand has drifted in and parts of the drill fines have blown away. We were once more reminded, just how active Mars is!
Today’s plan included the two last ChemCam observations in the Highfield area: one measurement will be taken of the Highfield dump pile, and one of a vein target called “Niddrie.” Those will help us to better understand the drilled sample itself, and also the geologic and geochemical context of the drill site. Mastcam will document the activities as usual… [More at link]
Dunes in the shapes of Ts and Vs. They also look like funnel shapes.
Beautiful Mars series. [More at links]
December 2, 2018: Team Continues Search for Opportunity’s Signal as Windy Season Begins: While InSight closed in on the Red Planet and NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) focused on getting that lander down on the surface safely in November, the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) team, working with operators at the Deep Space Network (DSN), spent the month continuing to search for a signal from Opportunity.
Despite a host of false alarms, the rover that shattered virtually every robot record on Mars, completed the first-ever marathon on another planet, and is the longest-lived Martian explorer remained silent, presumably still sleeping at her site halfway down Perseverance Valley, along the western rim of Endeavour Crater.
The end of November marked 173 days since the MER team has heard from its rover. The last downlink received from Opportunity arrived June 10, 2018, and the minimal amount of data the rover returned revealed the planet encircling dust event (PEDE) was blotting out the Sun in a way the mission had never before experienced, reducing the solar-powered rover’s energy to the lowest ever recorded on the mission and forcing the ‘bot to shut down and enter into a kind of hibernation mode.
Along with the team, countless thousands of followers around the world have been waiting too, hoping that Opportunity will phone home soon. “We miss her,” said MER aficionado, author, and astronomy outreach educator Stuart Atkinson, who has been blogging about the rover’s mission for the last decade.
Although it’s been five and a half months, the sound of silence was still not all that surprising to members of the MER operations team and they have not lost hope, not yet. The mission’s long history on Mars indicates the dust-cleaning season that comes every Martian summer has begun, and that gave the team a sense of renewed optimism that in coming weeks their rover will be gifted with gusts of wind that will clear some of the accumulated dust on the solar arrays and enable the ‘bot to recharge her batteries, power up, and phone home.
“It has been a long time since we’ve heard from Opportunity,” said JPL’s MER Power Team lead Jennifer Herman, at month’s end. “But it’s still summer in the southern hemisphere of Mars and it’s not that cold. There’s a lot of cause for optimism, because we’ve only been in dust-cleaning season for 12 days at best.” [More at link]
Sol 2247, December 2, 2018. The Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) took a photo of the Highfield drill hole and the tailings on the surface around the hole. The wind has scattered some of the tailings, and scientists are studying them to learn more about the particles themselves and the winds at the site. (Click the image to enlarge it.)
Planetary Geomorphology Image of the Month, December 1, 2018: Stephen Brough (Newcastle University, U.K.). There exist thousands of putative debris-covered glaciers in the mid-latitudes of Mars (e.g. Souness et al., 2012; Levy et al., 2014).
Much like their terrestrial counterparts, many of these glaciers have undergone mass loss and recession since a former glacial maximum stand (e.g. Kargel et al., 1995; Dickson et al, 2008) (Image 1). However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the volume of ice lost since that time and whether such recession has been spatially variable.
Reconstructing glacial environments based on their landforms and structural assemblage is a powerful concept applied in terrestrial glaciology. Through utilising evidence left on the landscape with observations from modern glaciers, it is possible to reconstruct the extent and dynamics of both former (glaciated) and modern (glacierised) glacial environments (see Bennett and Glasser, 2009).
This month’s planetary geomorphology post investigates how similar techniques have been utilised to reconstruct the former extent of glaciers on our planetary neighbour, Mars… [More at link]
NASA Mars Exploration Rover Status Report, November 27, 2018: Mars atmospheric opacity (tau) over the rover site remains at a storm-free level of 0.8.
Since loss of signal on Sol 5111 (June 10, 2018), 359 recovery commands have been radiated including on both polarizations. No signal from Opportunity has been heard. Opportunity likely experienced a low-power fault, a mission clock fault and an up-loss timer fault. The project has been listening for the rover over a broad range of times, frequencies and polarizations using the Deep Space Network (DSN) Radio Science Receiver.
They have been commanding “sweep and beeps” throughout the daily DSN pass with both right-hand and left-hand circular polarization to address a possible complexity with certain conditions within mission clock fault. [More at link]
THEMIS Image of the Day, December 3, 2018. Today’s VIS image shows an unnamed crater located in Aonia Terra. Numerous gullies dissect the inner crater rim. This crater impacted onto the rim of the much larger Slipher Crater.
With InSight safely on the surface of Mars, the mission team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is busy learning more about the spacecraft’s landing site.
They knew when InSight landed on Nov. 26 that the spacecraft had touched down on target, a lava plain named Elysium Planitia. Now they’ve determined that the vehicle sits slightly tilted (about 4 degrees) in a shallow dust- and sand-filled impact crater known as a “hollow.” InSight has been engineered to operate on a surface with an inclination up to 15 degrees.
“The science team had been hoping to land in a sandy area with few rocks since we chose the landing site, so we couldn’t be happier,” said InSight project manager Tom Hoffman of JPL. “There are no landing pads or runways on Mars, so coming down in an area that is basically a large sandbox without any large rocks should make instrument deployment easier and provide a great place for our mole to start burrowing.”
Rockiness and slope grade factor into landing safety and are also important in determining whether InSight can succeed in its mission after landing. Rocks and slopes could affect InSight’s ability to place its heat-flow probe – also known as “the mole,” or HP3 – and ultra-sensitive seismometer, known as SEIS, on the surface of Mars… [More at link]
A crater immediately to the east of Biblis Patera. Some questions include: (a) what is the “deposit” on the west side of the crater, seeming to cover the wall/floor interface? (b) what is the floor material; did lava come up into this crater? The “deposit” might be taken by some to bear resemblance to materials sometimes interpreted as ice-related… but this is an equatorial crater.
Beautiful Mars series. [More at links]
