CBS News reports, “While exploring a crater on Mars that may give scientists insights into life that potentially once existed there, NASA said its Perseverance rover made an unprecedented discovery. The rover, which landed on the Red Planet in 2021 specifically to probe the ancient Jezero crater, found a mysterious light-toned boulder earlier this month that was the first of its kind seen on Martian land.”
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Tag: On Mars
NASA’s Ingenuity Has Taken Its Last Flight on Mars
The Washington Post reports that the four-pound drone completed 72 flights before damaging its rotors during a landing last week.
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NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter Comes Back Online on Mars After Communications Glitch
SPACE reports that Ingenuity has officially “regained communication with ground control.” According to a January 20 NASA post, Perseverance “had conducted long-duration listening sessions to help pinpoint Ingenuity’s signal.” Everything “seemed fine during the probe’s 72nd hop on Mars’ red surface, as it successfully climbed to an expected maximum altitude of 40 feet (12 meters) and communicated its ascension status with Perseverance.” But, during descent, NASA said that “communications between the helicopter and rover terminated early, prior to touchdown.”
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Perseverance Rover Completes Sample Depot on Mars
CNET News reports that NASA’s Perseverance rover has created “the first sample depot on another world. NASA JPL announced Saturday that the rover has successfully placed 10 tubes on the Martian ground in a specific pattern that would allow a future mission to come fetch them if needed.” The rover’s efforts “have been in service of a big idea: getting pieces of Mars back to Earth for close study by scientists. Researchers hope they might tell the story of whether the red planet was once home to microbial life. The sample depot is an important part of the upcoming Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission to bring Martian rocks to Earth in the 2030s.” NASA called completion of the depot “a major milestone that involved precision planning and navigation to make sure the tubes could be collected by two helicopters from the MSR mission.”
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Curiosity Logs 4,000th Day on Mars
Phys (UK) reports that four thousand Martian days “after setting its wheels in Gale Crater on Aug. 5, 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover remains busy conducting exciting science.” The rover recently “drilled its 39th sample, then dropped the pulverized rock into its belly for detailed analysis.” To study “whether ancient Mars had the conditions to support microbial life, the rover has been gradually ascending the base of 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) Mount Sharp, whose layers formed in different periods of Martian history and offer a record of how the planet’s climate changed over time.”
Full Story (Phys)
Mars Rover Collects Samples which Indicate Possible Life on Mars
The Washington Post reported that NASA rover Perseverance “has hit what scientists are hoping is pay dirt.” Martian rocks excavated “by the rover show signs of a watery past and are loaded with the kind of organic molecules that are the foundation for life as we know it.” Scientists collaborating on the mission “also say the rock samples, which the rover has cached in tubes for a future return to Earth, have the right chemical recipe to preserve evidence of ancient Martian life, if it ever existed.” The new Perseverance research “is detailed in three extensive studies published Wednesday, one in the journal Science and two in the journal Science Advances.”
Aviation Today (Washington Post)