NASA MISSION UPDATE
One week after landing on far-northern Mars, NASA Phoenix spacecraft lifted its first scoop of Martian soil as a test of the lander’s Robotic Arm.
The practice scoop was emptied onto a designated dump area on the ground after the Robotic Arm Camera photographed the soil inside the scoop. The Phoenix team plans to have the arm deliver its next scoopful, later this week, to an instrument that heats and sniffs the sample to identify ingredients.
A glint of bright material appears in the scooped up soil and in the hole from which it came. “That bright material might be ice or salt. We’re eager to do testing of the next three surface samples collected nearby to learn more about it,” said Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, Phoenix co-investigator for the Robotic Arm.
The camera on the arm examined the lander’s first scoop of Martian soil. “The camera has its own red, green and blue lights, and we combine separate images taken with different illumination to create color images,” said the University of Arizona’s Pat Woida, senior engineer on the Phoenix team.
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander left behind a Yeti-like “footprint” on Mars in its first successful attempt to touch the planet’s frozen surface on Saturday. The mark so reminded NASA officials of the mythical snow beast that they actually named the spot…..wait for it….Yeti. Features and locations around the Phoenix lander are being named for fairy tale and mythological characters.
“This first touch allows us to utilize the Robotic Arm accurately. We are in a good situation for the upcoming sample acquisition and transfer,” said David Spencer, Phoenix’s surface mission manager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
One hopes the image doesn’t become fodder for conspiracy theorists who believe that NASA is covering up evidence of life on Mars, or is faking the mission in an abandoned quarry in the Northwest where Bigfoot roams. (Remember, you heard that here first….)
A photo shows the underside of the Phoenix lander and what appears to be exposed surface ice.
NASA PRESS RELEASE
A view of the ground underneath NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander adds to evidence that descent thrusters dispersed overlying soil and exposed a harder substrate that may be ice.
The image received Friday night from the spacecraft’s Robotic Arm Camera shows patches of smooth and level surfaces beneath the thrusters.
“This suggests we have an ice table under a thin layer of loose soil,” said the lead scientist for the Robotic Arm Camera, Horst Uwe Keller of Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany.
“We were expecting to find ice within two to six inches of the surface,” said Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, principal investigator for Phoenix. “The thrusters have excavated two to six inches and, sure enough, we see something that looks like ice. It’s not impossible that it’s something else, but our leading interpretation is ice.”
Continue reading ‘Phoenix Finds Ice Near Martian North Pole; Discovery Deemed “Absolutely Astounding”’
As NASA’s Phoenix lander barrels toward a Memorial Day weekend landing at the Martian north pole, the Red Planet is once again morphing from the subject of endless fascination into something far more sinister.
Yes, the old death planet label is being trotted out again to describe the difficulty of sending anything to Mars. NASA officials are talking up the seven minutes of “terror” the spacecraft will endure on May 25 as it enters the atmosphere and attempts a soft landing.
Perhaps these labels are appropriate for a rust-colored planet named after the Roman god of war where a number of spacecraft have indeed vanished. The Galactic Ghoul, as NASA has dubbed it, may be eagerly awaiting Phoenix’s arrival, ready to smash the lander into a thousand pieces on Mars’ perpetually frozen surface.
Or maybe not.
Continue reading ‘Planet Terror: A NASA/JPL Production of a Robert Rodriquez Film’
The Times of India reports that engineers are making good progress in preparing that nation’s first lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-1, for launch later this year.
The spacecraft is being assembled at the Indian Space Research Organisation’s facility in Bangalore. Officials report that five instruments from the United States and Europe have been successfully tested.
The launch has slipped a couple of months. ISRO officials have said they expect to send the orbiter off on its mission sometime in the third quarter of the year.
UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA PRESS RELEASE
We’ve all heard about the space missions that are DOA when NASA engineers lose touch with the spacecraft or lander. In other cases, some critical system fails and the mission is compromised.
Both are maddening scenarios because the spacecraft probably could be easily fixed if engineers could just get their hands on the hardware for a few minutes.
Ali Akoglu and his students at The University of Arizona are working on hybrid hardware/software systems that one day might use machine intelligence to allow the spacecraft to heal themselves.
Akoglu, an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, is using Field Programmable Gate Arrays, or FPGA, to build these self-healing systems. FPGAs combine software and hardware to produce flexible systems that can be reconfigured at the chip level.
Continue reading ‘Spacecraft: Heal Thyself’
The German Mars Society has completed final testing on its MIRIAM balloon prototype in advance of a planned June 14 suborbital launch from the ESRANGE rocket facility near Kiruna, Sweden.
“MIRIAM is a flight test within the ARCHIMEDES atmospheric sounding probe for Mars project, and tests the full inflation and subsequent entry of an atmospheric entry balloon (”ballute”) here on Earth. It is jointly developed by The Mars Society Germany and several institutes of the University of the Federal Armed Forces of Germany in Munich.”
MIRIAM will be launched by a REXUS4 sounding rocket managed and built by the DLR Moraba group of Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany.
ESA PRESS RELEASE
ESA’s Mars Express radar sounder, MARSIS, has looked beneath the martian surface and opened up the third dimension for planetary exploration. The technique’s success is prompting scientists to think of all the other places in the Solar System where they would like to use radar sounders.
No matter how accurate a camera is, it can only map a planet’s surface. To retrieve information about the underground realm, planetary scientists in the past would have thought it necessary to land on the surface and start digging.
But that would only be good for a single spot on a large planet and the first few decimetres of the surface. To get the global picture of the subsurface they need a radar sounder, such as the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS), to find the best spots for the future landers to go and dig.
MARSIS is built to map the distribution of liquid and solid water in the upper portions of martian crust. If reservoirs of water are detected, it will help us understand the hydrological, geological, climatic and possibly biological evolution of Mars. The radar experiment works because every time a radar wave crosses a boundary between different substances, it generates an echo that the orbiter detects.
Continue reading ‘ESA Breaks on Through to the “Third Dimension” on Mars’
Spaceflight Now has a great feature on the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, a NASA mission set for launch in October. LCROSS, built on a relative shoestring budget of $79 million, will guide a spent Centaur rocket stage into the moon in a search for frozen water.
“The Centaur, playing an unprecedented role in a space mission, will be used as a projectile to dive into a crater shrouded in darkness near one of the moon’s poles,” Spaceflight Now’s Stephen Clark writes. “An array of space-based telescopes and ground observatories will be used to analyze the material ejected from deep within the target crater in an effort to determine the extent of hypothesized water ice deposits there.”
The Xinhua news agency reports that Shanghai engineers have built and tested three prototypes of lunar rovers in advance of a planned 2013 landing.
“The Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology had made significant progress in key technologies for the locomotion system,” Xinhau reports.
You can see a picture of one prototype here. The 1.5-meter tall, 200-kilogram rover is designed to travel at an average speed of 100 meters per hour.