Mars

nivek

As Above So Below
HiRISE Spots Curiosity Rover at Mars' 'Woodland Bay'

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A dramatic Martian landscape can be seen in a new image taken from space, showing NASA's Curiosity rover examining a location called "Woodland Bay." It's just one of many stops the rover has made in an area referred to as the "clay-bearing unit" on the side of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain inside of Gale Crater.

The image was taken on May 31, 2019, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). In the image, Curiosity appears as a bluish speck. Vera Rubin Ridge cuts across the scene north of the rover, while a dark patch of sand lies to the northeast.

Look carefully at the inset image, and you can make out what it is likely Curiosity's "head," technically known as the remote sensing mast. A bright spot appears in the upper-left corner of the rover. At the time this image was acquired, the rover was facing 65 degrees counterclockwise from north, which would put the mast in about the right location to produce this bright spot.

Mirror-like reflections off smooth surfaces show up as especially bright spots in HiRISE images. For the camera to see these reflections on the rover, the Sun and MRO need to be in just the right locations. This enhanced-color image of Curiosity shows three or four distinct bright spots that are likely such reflections.

The University of Arizona in Tucson operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colorado. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.


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nivek

As Above So Below
I wonder what this is all about, likely a natural phenomenon?...

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Mysterious Mars nighttime pulses baffle scientists as red planet's magnetic field emits never-before seen events

Never-seen-before bursts of magnetic energy on Mars have puzzled astronomers, whose space rover has gained fresh insights into the mysterious Red Planet.

The magnetometer fixed to the cutting-edge NASA InSight spacecraft detected a bizarre jump in pulsations on the surface of the planet at nighttime.

Since November 2018, the InSight capsule has been harvesting information from the Red Planet - including recording the ferocity of so-called 'Marsquakes' and taking the temperature of its upper crust.

Scientists have not yet determined the causes behind the sudden magnetic pulses, which were 20 times stronger than previous observations, according to National Geographic.

However the baffling aspect of these most recent findings was the clockwork-like frequency of the midnight pulses.

The InSight lander is currently placed on Mars's equator. On Earth's equator, no such pulses are ever recorded.

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nivek

As Above So Below
Meet the women and men going to Mars! Thirteen new astronauts join NASA under the Artemis program that aims to put humans on the Red Planet by the mid-2030s




It's been more than two years in the making, but 13 astronauts have finally joined NASA under the mission that will bring the first female to the moon and some may be the first humans to step on Mars. The group includes six women and seven men, all of which were chosen from record-setting pool of more than 18,000 applicants. The 13 astronauts, 11 from NASA and 2 from CSA, are the first candidates to graduate under the Artemis program and will become eligible for spaceflight, including assignments to the International Space Station, Artemis missions to the Moon, and ultimately, missions to Mars.


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nivek

As Above So Below
Mars: Alien Reptilian Creature Caught on Camera by NASA Curiosity Rover?

 

nivek

As Above So Below
NASA reveals highest-resolution panorama photo of Mars ever taken
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NASA's Curiosity rover had an active Thanksgiving holiday in 2019, snapping over 1,000 images of Curiosity is currently exploring inside Gale crater.

In a video, Vasavada delves into the stunning details captured in the photo, including the rim of the Gale crater, a 3-mile-wide crater called Slangpos and the rover's tracks trailing behind it.

Vasavada warned the image appears warped, similar to looking through a fisheye lens, because it captures 360 degrees around the rover. "This is the first time during the mission we've dedicated our operations to a stereo 360-degree panorama," he said.

Curiosity Mars Rover Snaps 1.8 Billion-Pixel Panorama (narrated video) by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on YouTube


 

nivek

As Above So Below
Scientists Found Oil on Mars. Or Truffles.

A pair of American and German astrobiologists has found oil on Mars. And where there’s oil, there’s usually life.

Technically speaking, Dirk Schulze‑Makuch and Jacob Heinz didn’t find oil. Rather, they found organic compounds called “thiophenes” that are also present in crude oil, coal, and truffles.

Thiophene molecules include four carbon atoms and a sulfur atom in a ring-like shape. There are lots of ways thiophenes get created. Not all of them are “biotic,” meaning they involve life.

But many of them are biotic. And if that’s the case with the thiophenes Schulze‑Makuch and Heinz found on Mars, then the discovery could be proof of, well, alien life.

“If they are biotic, it means that there was early life on Mars,” Schulze‑Makuch told The Daily Beast, “and that there is possibly still extant life in some ecological niches of Mars today.”

The thiophenes turned up in dried-up mud that NASA’s Curiosity Rover dug up in Mars’ Gale Crater. Curiosity landed on the Red Planet in 2012 and has spent the last eight years rolling around Mars, periodically pausing to scoop up samples, analyze them, and beam the raw data back to Earth.

Schulze‑Makuch from Washington State University and Heinz from Berlin’s Technische Universität studied the numbers from Curiosity and concluded the Martian dirt held thiophenes. They published their findings this month in the science journal Astrobiology.

The astrobiologists can’t say for sure what produced the Martian thiophenes. On Earth, thiophenes often result from the eons-long process of fossilization: plankton living, dying, sinking to the seafloor, getting buried and pressure-cooked into oil.

But thiophenes can also result from a non-organic process called thermochemical sulfate reduction, which involves heating up certain compounds to hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit. A meteorite impact could spark thermochemical sulfate reduction.

The best Schulze‑Makuch and Heinz could do was identify all the ways the thiophenes might have gotten into the Martian dirt.

“We identified several biological pathways for thiophenes that seem more likely than chemical ones, but we still need proof,” Schulze‑Makuch said in a statement. “If you find thiophenes on Earth, then you would think they are biological, but on Mars, of course, the bar to prove that has to be quite a bit higher.”

To prove that the Martian compounds came from some kind of alien life, Schulze‑Makuch and Heinz would have to find the parent molecule. In other words, tiny fragments of the Martian equivalent of Earth’s plankton tissues that, over millions of years, eventually became oil.


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Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
Meet the women and men going to Mars! Thirteen new astronauts join NASA under the Artemis program that aims to put humans on the Red Planet by the mid-2030s




It's been more than two years in the making, but 13 astronauts have finally joined NASA under the mission that will bring the first female to the moon and some may be the first humans to step on Mars. The group includes six women and seven men, all of which were chosen from record-setting pool of more than 18,000 applicants. The 13 astronauts, 11 from NASA and 2 from CSA, are the first candidates to graduate under the Artemis program and will become eligible for spaceflight, including assignments to the International Space Station, Artemis missions to the Moon, and ultimately, missions to Mars.


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Hmmm, 6 women and 7 men. They better carry some baby diapers in that cargo.

So one of the guys is destined to play it solo?
 
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