After cruising through space for about seven months, the time has arrived for NASA’s Mars InSight mission to settle down on the Red Planet and get to work.
The culmination of this almost 90 million mile journey is expected Monday, Nov. 26, at about 12:00 p.m. Pacific.
To safely land, InSight has to slow down from its entry speed upon reaching the atmosphere, 12,300 miles per hour to just about 5 mph, within six minutes. (For a video explanation of InSight’s path to the ground, see below.)
To control its entry, small rockets will direct it toward the surface. Insight needs to enter the atmosphere at a precise 12-degree angle to avoid either burning up or bouncing off the planet’s surface.
Then, the spacecraft will release a large parachute to slow its progress, cast off its heat shield and extend a trio of shock-absorbing landing legs.
Finally, the lander will separate from its backshell (a protective covering) and parachute. A dozen engines, known as retro rockets, will begin firing to help the lander set down gently on the Martian soil — its new permanent home.
Want to watch? Read on.
Online
NASA will webcast the landing and the scene from Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. You’ll be able to watch on KQED Science (link will be live at 10:30 a.m. Monday, Nov. 26) or directly on the agency’s website.
Watch In Person
There may be a viewing party planned near you. Check the map below.
Phew! Took a little while but we have word now that InSight’s solar panels are open and collecting sunlight. This solar-powered robot is ready for action.
Aaah…soaking up the Sun with my solar panels. After a long flight, and thrilling #MarsLanding, it feels great to get a good stretch and recharge my batteries. (Like, literally.) It’s just what I’ll need to really start getting in tune with #Mars. https://t.co/yse3VEst3Gpic.twitter.com/LpsiI0KNNz
Data from Odyssey indicate @NASAInSight’s solar arrays are open and batteries are charging. The transmission also included this view from the instrument deployment camera, showing the seismometer (left), grapple (center) and robotic arm (right): https://t.co/yZqPextm89pic.twitter.com/2kBHT5caGS
UPDATE 12:50 p.m., Mon.
Ben Burress, Chabot Staff Astronomer and KQED’s space blogger, gives us an overview of the day and a preview of what’s ahead for InSight.
As we wait for InSight’s next check in (confirming if the solar arrays are deployed OK) @ChabotSpace‘s Ben Burress looks ahead to what’s next for the mission. pic.twitter.com/SF3gdjszVO
And, that’s it for now folks! Later today we’ll update once NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter confirms that InSight’s solar arrays have deployed. This may happen around 5:35 p.m. Pacific, but could be many hours after that. Once the solar panels are out, the two-year surface phase of this mission has officially begun.
UPDATE 12:05 p.m., Mon.
Lots to celebrate for the Mars InSight team. The lander still has a bit more work to do. Later today, once the dust its kicked up settles, it’ll unfurl its twin solar panel arrays and check in again with home.
UPDATE 11:59 a.m., Mon.
InSight sends its first picture home, relayed by the MarCO satellites. Picture a little obscured by dust, but clearly shows the horizon of the red planet (and it has a lander leg in it).
Parachute is working! Hoots and claps from mission control and space fans at Chabot. All good news so far.
UPDATE 11:50 a.m., Mon.
InSight is now experiencing peak heat. Stay cool up there! Next step will be the parachute deployment. Travelling at 1,000 meters per second. Audience at Chabot is holding their breath.
UPDATE 11:48 a.m., Mon.
ENTRY! The lander has entered the atmosphere. Now it will slow down as it approaches the surface.
UPDATE 11:42 a.m., Mon.
The lander has separated from the spacecraft that carried it millions of miles away from home.
Update from Mission Control: Both CubeSats and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have checked in and all seems good.
Curious about the instruments aboard InSight? They’re the product of teams from the U.S., France and Germany. Learn more.
InSight is the first mission to investigate the interior of Mars. (NASA/JPL)
UPDATE 11:15 a.m., Mon.
NASA’s livestream from mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has started. Peanuts, a tradition to bring good luck to landings, are being passed out.
Chabot’s theater is almost full with members of the public, like the Crawford’s of Hayward who brought their young daughter.
Lots of families here @ChabotSpace to watch the @NASAInSight lander. Erica & Steven Crawford of Hayward brought their planetary-enthusiast daughter Stefanie. Stefanie likes Mars, but says her favorite planet is Neptune. She wants to be an astronaut when she grows up. #MarsLandingpic.twitter.com/pE4fOtrnl5
With the minutes ticking down till Mars InSight’s anticipated landing at 12:00 p.m. Pacific, KQED Science is ready to bring you up-to-the-minute information on the mission. We’ll embed the live feed from mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. And we’ll bring you the scene from the viewing party at the Chabot Observatory in Oakland.
First, some background on the mission. This is the first mission to land on Mars since 2012, when the Curiosity rover touched down. Unlike that landing, with its novel, high-risk innovations (remember the ‘sky crane‘?), InSight is landing using tried-and-true technology. The landing sequence will be similar to past missions, such as NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander.
There are three main stages of landing.
Entering the Atmosphere: Small rockets will direct the spacecraft toward the surface. The rockets must maintain a precise 12-degree angle to prevent InSight from either burning up or bouncing off the planet’s surface.
Parachute Descent: The spacecraft will cast off its heat shield (a protective covering), release a parachute to slow down, and extend its three, shock-absorbing landing legs.
Powered Descent: A dozen engines, known as retro rockets, will begin firing to help the lander set down gently on the Martian soil — its new permanent home.
Want more info? See the sidebar above.
Anything going wrong at any one of these steps could cause this $830-million dollar mission to crash, burn up or bounce off back into space. But at the moment, all seems ready for a smooth landing. Yesterday InSight’s engineers made a final flight path tweak to maneuver the spacecraft over its targeted entry point.
A crowd of several hundred people chose to spend their midday Monday at Chabot Space & Science Center to witness live-streamed coverage of the landing of NASA’s InSight — something they might have done in the comfort of their own homes, as many people likely did.
Visitors at Chabot Space & Science Center watching NASA’s live-streamed coverage of the InSIGHT landing on Mars. (Conrad Jung)
But sharing the tense and thrilling moments of a live landing on another planet in the company of other eager space exploration enthusiasts, of all ages, and on a giant screen, makes for a far more memorable experience.
After all, people flock to theaters for midnight premieres of a new blockbuster movie, or fill outdoor stadiums in freezing weather to watch a live sporting event — so it’s heartening to witness similar enthusiasm for the live screening of another Mars landing.
Astro Community Celebrates
First, there were jubilant cheers when InSight reported a safe planet-fall. You could see the release of pent-up nervous energy in the crew at mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. It was palpable, as well, to those in the applauding crowd at Chabot.
In the days since landing, a collective sigh of relief has been followed by all eyes turning to the mission ahead, and the promise of its rich scientific rewards.
Right now, public enthusiasts and mission scientists alike must wait to find out what InSight will reveal of Mars’ interior, since it will take at least a few days to carefully plan and deploy the lander’s specialized sensors, and probably months to collect enough data to begin telling that story.
But after six uneventful months of flight, and six minutes of nail-biting worry, at least NASA and JPL scientists and engineers can now make themselves busy setting up and testing InSight’s instruments and other systems.
Those of us on the outside will just have to be patient.
Play-by-Play Action
How did the action go down? NASA’s InSight lander, which has been en route to Mars since launching last May, approached the upper extent of Mars’ thin atmosphere on November 26 right on schedule, shortly before noon Pacific Time.
Then followed six-and-a-half hushed, tense minutes as a series of critical EDL (Entry, Descent, and Landing) maneuvers were performed by the spacecraft: detachment from interplanetary cruise stage, alignment for atmospheric entry, parachute deployment, heat shield jettison, landing legs extension, radar-ground detection, retrorocket ignition, and…wait for it…touchdown!
Controllers in Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory reacting to news of InSIGHT’s successful landing. (NASA/B. Ingalls)
Meanwhile, mission control operators at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory could only watch as telemetry came in, relayed by the twin MarCO “cubesats” that tagged along to give us a real-time report of InSight’s descent. The eight-minute travel delay of radio waves sent from Mars to Earth means that the entire landing sequence would be completed before the radio reports reached mission control.
Robots or Humans?
I didn’t ask anyone the question: Should we be sending humans, or robots, to explore planets? But it was on one visitor’s mind anyway.
“You enjoyed the landing?” I asked him. He nodded vigorously. “Should we send more?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “I don’t think that a lot of people appreciate how much we can learn with missions like these, at a fraction of the cost of a mission sending humans anywhere.”
At $814 million for the total InSight mission cost, on average each American taxpayer paid less than $6. How much does a cappuccino at Starbucks cost these days? Or bridge toll? Or, for that matter, a blockbuster movie at the theater? (Rarely $6 even at matinee prices).
Artist illustration of the InSIGHT lander on Mars, with solar panels, seismometer, and thermal probe deployed. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Personally, I’ve always been fascinated by human space voyages — from real ones like the Apollo Moon landings to Star Trek.
But I appreciate that we don’t need to go to other planets in person to accomplish some amazing feats. We’ve explored every planet in the solar system, some comets and asteroids, a few moons, and even the fringes of interstellar space, entirely with robots.
Real-World Epic Blockbuster
The drama of InSight’s landing was not presented through live video or stunning imagery from the spacecraft, as it burned a high-speed trail through the upper atmosphere, or when its parachute gloriously bloomed in the Martian skies above, or as a cloud of rusty dust was raised by the blast of roaring landing rockets.
That would be exciting — and may be what a general American movie-watching audience would expect in an epic Mars adventure.
But the only visuals offered in a real-world EDL maneuver are pictures of avid, often nervous-looking engineers and scientists sitting tensely before their consoles, their perspiration coldly illuminated by screens full of numbers and graphs. The first few pictures from Mars, taken after landing, arrived on our screens an hour or so later.
“I was a little disappointed that we didn’t see any pictures from InSight while it was landing; I kind of expected that,” said one visitor with a small child in tow. “But it was still very exciting to be here watching when it landed. Definitely worth coming out for.”
Self portrait taken by InSIGHT shortly after landing. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Smooth Landing
InSight now rests safely on the ground in Elysium Planitia, the vast flat equatorial plain from where the spacecraft will conduct its mission to probe Mars’ interior. Every vital step of its landing sequence was pulled off flawlessly — almost an anticlimax to all the possible perilous missteps that could have ended the mission in a heartbeat.
Take a deep breath, now. The main adventure is only beginning.
Weather and other delays marred what had been anticipated as a banner day for space launches Tuesday, as both SpaceX and Blue Origin were forced to postpone launches that had been scheduled to take place within minutes of each other. Both companies say they will look at moving their launches to Wednesday morning.
Blue Origin says its launch was scrubbed due to what the company calls a “ground infrastructure issue.” Blue Origin says the rocket remains ready.
SpaceX says an abort order was triggered by the flight computer onboard the Falcon 9 rocket. Paired with an earlier delay due to unfavorable upper-level winds, the slowdown pushed the rocket past its launch window.
“Vehicle and payload remain healthy,” SpaceX said via Twitter, adding, “next launch attempt is tomorrow” at 9:07 a.m. ET.
SpaceX team called a hold due to an out of family reading on first stage sensors. Vehicle and payload remain healthy; next launch attempt is tomorrow at 9:07 EST, 14:07 UTC.
In addition to those missions from two of America’s top private space companies, two other space launches had been planned for Tuesday — but only one of them is now still scheduled.
The delays threw cold water on a day that had left some space aficionados giddy with excitement. “If you’re a space fan, Christmas comes a week early this year,” Space.com wrote of the four planned launches.
SpaceX was poised to send its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, with a live webcast that started streaming about 15 minutes before the intended liftoff.
SpaceX plans to carry the first GPS III satellite into medium Earth orbit; it comes from Lockheed Martin, which says the new system will “launch the next generation of connection.” Because of the satellite’s weight and flight plan, the Falcon 9 will not return for a landing. Instead, it will be sent into the atmosphere to prevent space junk from accumulating in orbit.
The new GPS III satellites are designed to be three times more accurate than the current system, which went into civilian operation in the 1990s. As for how it might affect regular GPS users, the firm says, “our phones will receive an upgraded GPS signal from this satellite by the end of 2019.”
Vice President Mike Pence was in Florida for the now-delayed SpaceX launch.
Blue Origin had targeted 9:30 a.m. ET to launch its New Shepard rocket for a suborbital flight from its facility in West Texas, in the tenth mission for the reusable rocket system.
The New Shepard (named for astronaut Alan Shepard) will carry nine different NASA-sponsored research and experimental projects that have come from five colleges and several agencies and engineering firm Controlled Dynamics.
The day had promised four potential launches — but then the delays took hold.
The final launch of the day is planned to take place in California, where the United Launch Alliance will send a Delta IV Heavy rocket up from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 8:57 p.m. ET. It will carry a U.S. National Reconnaissance Office satellite called the NROL- 71, which the Air Force says will help to give “innovative overhead intelligence systems for national security.”
Around midday Tuesday, Arianespace had planned to launch a Soyuz rocket from the spaceport in French Guiana to carry a French defense and intelligence imaging satellite designated CSO-1 into orbit. That’s now scheduled for Wednesday at 11:37 a.m. ET.
Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit www.npr.org.
It was a happy New Year for NASA. Only minutes into 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft made another historic achievement in space exploration: a fly-by of the most distant object ever visited, the Kuiper Belt Object called “Ultima Thule.”
At 12:33 a.m. Eastern, January 1, New Horizons passed within 2,200 miles of the KBO, collecting about 7 gigabytes of data that will be transmitted back to Earth in the months ahead.
At 19 miles long and 4 billion miles away from Earth, Ultima Thule is equivalent to a 1-inch target seen from 3,000 miles away.
What is Ultima Thule, and How Did We Find It? Ultima Thule, which is translated as “beyond the known world,” may be a tiny object, but just as New Horizons’ encounter with Pluto almost four years ago showed us, surprising and wonderful things can be wrapped up in small packages.
The object was discovered by observations from the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014, as part of a search for potential post-Pluto destinations of discovery for New Horizons.
New Horizon’s first image of the Kuiper Belt Object “Ultima Thule,” captured during approach from a distance of 18,000 miles. (NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI)
As suspected from those observations, and now confirmed by New Horizons, Ultima Thule is a “contact binary“: two smaller objects that at some time in the past met each other. And so gently did they make contact, like the lightest of “kisses” between two billiard balls, both remained intact, and did not rebound from each other.
The pair have remained joined at the hip from then on, possibly since the earliest times in the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.
Two For the Price of One
When Ultima Thule (officially designated 2014 MU69) was selected from a short list of candidates as an extended target for New Horizons following the 2015 Pluto encounter, little more was known about it than its orbital characteristics, a rough estimate of its size, and that it had an elongated shape.
Added to these meager facts was an assumption that the object was composed largely of frozen volatile materials (ices of water, ammonia, methane, and others), as cold and distant Kuiper Belt Objects are expected to be.
With the up-close encounter of Ultima Thule, NASA has bagged not only what were originally two separate KBOs, but potentially any morphological markings left behind by their union, so long ago.
Three potential angles to peer into the past is not bad.
The Kuiper Belt The Kuiper Belt is a disk-shaped region of the solar system found between the orbit of Neptune (30 Astronomical Units from the sun, 1 AU being one sun-Earth distance) to about 50 AU.
The journey of New Horizons, from its 2006 launch to its 2015 Pluto encounter and its path through the Kuiper Belt to date. (NASA)
First hypothesized as a wide belt of myriad small, icy objects in 1930, it wasn’t until 1992 that the first Kuiper Belt Object was discovered, 15760 Albion, orbiting the sun at distances between 40 and 46 AU.
Being so far from the heat of the sun and the gravitational disturbance of large planets, the Kuiper Belt represents a vast treasure trove of mostly undisturbed, pristine evidence of the earliest conditions in the solar system.
Artist concept of the early stages of formation of a hypothetical star system similar to our solar system. (NASA)
On planets like Earth, meteoric impacts, weathering and tectonic activity tend to erase most traces of times long gone — but no so on a KBO. Frozen in time-capsule fashion, Kuiper Belt Objects can inform us of what was going on 4.6 billion years ago that led to the formation of the planets, including the Earth.
The data acquired on Ultima Thule will add importantly to the growing body of “solar system archaeological evidence” amassed by other comet, asteroid, and planetary missions, such as OSIRIS-REx, Hayabusa 2, Rosetta and soon InSIGHT.
What’s On the Horizon For New Horizons Now? In the months ahead, New Horizons will send back all the pictures and other data acquired during the brief fly-by of Ultima Thule, so we have yet to be dazzled by the crispest, highest resolution images of the tiny contact binary. More to come.
With all systems still functioning, and plenty of course-correction fuel remaining on board, NASA is interested in finding yet another Kuiper Belt Object for New Horizons to target in the years ahead. So the adventure may not yet be over.
Fifty years after astronauts first set foot on the lunar surface, our curiosity and passion for exploring our celestial neighbor is alive and well. Nearly a hundred total missions (from the U.S., Russia, Japan and other space agencies) have traveled to the moon, and several more are in the pipeline. Humanity’s lunar obsession remains high.
The moon is our nearest and most accessible neighbor. We also now understand that Earth and the moon likely have a common origin. We are thus, not cut from the same cloth per se; we are cut from the same rock.
Here are a few highlights of what make 2019 a year to renew our personal fascination with Earth’s longtime companion.
Moon Year Kickoff with Chang’e 4 and Yutu-2
China kicked off the year by accomplishing something no space agency had before: successfully landing the Chang’e 4 spacecraft and its Yutu-2 rover on the far side of the moon.
Picture of the Chang’e 4 lander (left) taken by the Yutu-2 rover, and of the rover (right) taken from Chang’e 4. (CNAS/CLEP)
All prior landings, by all countries, took place on the moon’s Earth-facing side, the face that human eyes have beheld since the dawn of our species.
Before 1959, when the Soviet Luna 3 became the first spacecraft to photograph the far side of the moon, no one had ever viewed its rugged, heavily cratered terrain. And it wasn’t until Apollo 8 orbited the moon in 1968 that humans laid eyes directly on it.
So, as far as wheels-on-the-ground exploration goes, the far side of the moon was luna incognita, until Jan. 3 when Chang’e 4 landed in the 110-mile wide Von Karman crater, within the vast South Pole-Aitken Basin.
Landing on the far side of the moon isn’t just good for China’s space-faring prestige, the scientific results should tell us a lot about the moon’s structure, how it was formed, and its history over the last 4.5 billion years.
The moon’s near and far hemispheres: the side that faces Earth (left) and the far side that we cannot see. (NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University)
The far side of the moon’s terrain is physically different from that of the near side. The far hemisphere is dominated by rugged highlands and possesses many more impact craters than the near side. Lunar maria, which means “seas” (these are the dark, blotchy lava plains that we can see with our eyes from Earth) are much less numerous and smaller than on the near side.
Tracing the history of the moon’s formation requires an understanding of the reasons for the stark differences between the two lunar hemispheres, so Chang’e 4 and the Yutu-2 rover are well-positioned to turn up some eye-opening clues.
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
Ten years ago, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter began mapping the lunar surface in high detail, and continues to send back enormous amounts of high-res, close-up imagery today.
In fact, there were so many pictures pouring back from the spacecraft that volunteer citizen scientists were enlisted to help.
Picture of the central peak of moon’s Tycho Crater, taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. (NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University)
For several years, anyone with a computer and a desire to pore over thousands of pictures of dirt, rock, and craters — some of them never seen by another human — could contribute to mapping the moon by participating in crater-counting.
That might sound dull to some, but the science of counting craters can tell us a lot about the moon’s history, when and how much the moon was bombarded by debris at different times in the past.
Picture of Chang’e 4 (center) and its Yutu-2 rover (smaller spot toward the upper left), captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter when it passed 50 miles above. (NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University)
On Jan. 30, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped a picture of China’s Chang’e 4 and the Yutu-2 rover as it cruised by overhead, pinpointing its landing location and demonstrating the level of detail its powerful camera can capture.
Apollo 11 Anniversary
This July 2019 we mark and celebrate five decades since the first human landing on the moon, by Apollo 11 and its astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (and let’s not forget Michael Collins orbiting high above in the Apollo command module).
The first footprint (or bootprint) on the moon, made by Neil Armstrong on the Apollo 11 mission, July 20 1969. (NASA)
This feat, which NASA repeated five more times from 1969 to 1972, has yet to be matched, although more than one nation has its sights set on a human return there.
Coming Up
Several lunar missions are scheduled to launch in 2019, including India’s Chandrayaan-2 lander and rover, the Moon Express’s (USA) Lunar Scout, and China’s Chang’e 5 sample return mission.
A return to the moon in person by humans won’t happen until 2022, when NASA is scheduled to test a crewed Orion spacecraft in a single free-return maneuver around the moon and back. It’ll be a quick trip, with no landings, but the mission will lay a path for returning to the moon’s surface again, and one day traveling far beyond.
Scientists may have rediscovered a long-lost recipe from Earth’s primordial cookbook for life, one that takes chemical ingredients that were available in the oceans of Earth’s youth, adds heat, and churns out the organic molecular building blocks of life.
This is not only an important step in the journey toward solving the puzzle of how and where life originated on Earth, it also offers guidance for narrowing the search for life on other worlds — where to search and what to look for.
What’s Cookin’ in NASA’s Kitchen?
NASA astrobiologist Laurie Barge and team, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, set out to demonstrate how organic molecules might have formed 4 billion years ago, in the pitch darkness on Earth’s deep-ocean floor surrounding vents of hot, chemical-laden water spouting from Earth’s interior.
An active hydrothermal ‘chimney,’ the mineral structure that forms around a hydrothermal vent. (New Zealand American Submarine Ring of Fire 2007 Exploration, NOAA Vents Program, NOAA OAR/OER)
Called hydrothermal vents, these deep-sea “hot springs” of chemicals and heat exist today, and all but certainly existed eons ago before life began.
To accomplish their goal, Barge and team recreated in their lab the conditions that prevailed around hydrothermal vents in Earth’s primordial ocean.
A time-lapse video of the formation of an amino acid ‘chimney’ from a plume of fluid injected into a mixture simulating ocean water of the primordial Earth. The experiment was to show how hydrothermal vents on Earth’s ocean floor may have produced the organic chemical precursors to life on Earth. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Flores)
They prepared a mixture of water, minerals and other chemicals that would have been present in ocean water on the young Earth, removing oxygen from the mix to account for the fact that little of that element existed in the ocean or atmosphere in Earth’s pre-life era. Then, heating the water to 158 degrees Fahrenheit (the water temperature surrounding a hydrotherapy vent), they injected a water solution that included small amounts of oxygen and other minerals, to simulate a hydrothermal vent.
The mixing of the simulated primordial fluids produced chemical reactions, out of which formed alanine, an amino acid, and alpha hydroxy acid. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, which in turn make up all living things.
A tasty result to say the least! Before their very eyes the experimenters witnessed the genesis of molecules all-important to the formation of life. And since they had been careful to recreate the natural conditions that existed on the primordial Earth, it was not just the result of a contrived chemistry experiment, but a re-enactment of nature’s own original cookery.
Hydrothermal Vents Near and Far
Today we find communities of advanced life forms thriving around hydrothermal vents. Fish, crustaceans, cephalopods and many more species teem around these geothermal oases on the cold, dark ocean floor, their ecosystems sustained entirely by the chemical bounty of the Earth — no sunlight required.
Marine life thriving in the environment surrounding a deep-ocean hydrothermal vent. (Submarine Ring of Fire 2006 Exploration, NOAA Vents Program)
It is probable that the ancestors of these complex organisms originated from the sunlit ocean world above and migrated to hydrothermal vents some time in the past, there to adapt to the very different environment.
But the question remains: Where did the first, single-celled living organisms appear on Earth? In a sunlit tidepool, where organic molecules were sloshed together by waves? Or, did the first microbe spring forth from the dark warmth of a hydrothermal vent, from an original recipe cooked up wholly by the Earth?
Understanding how organic compounds like amino acids might have originated around hydrothermal vents on Earth has powerful implications for our search for extraterrestrial life.
If we find signs of life on a planet like Mars, past or present, we will be pressed to answer questions about its origin similar to the question of how Earth life originated.
Mars once had seas, which may have had some form of hydrothermal vent spouting away on the sea floor. But the young Mars also had an atmosphere, a warm and watery surface environment, a water cycle, and other attributes similar to Earth.
And, that life-friendly environment dried up a long time ago, so we might hope to find only the residues of past living things — or at best something still living deep under Mars’ surface.
Looking for Life in Unexpected Places
But farther out from the sun we have detected oceans on at least two or three moons of gas giant planets, such as Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus.
Jupiter’s moon Europa, as photographed by the Galileo spacecraft. The pattern of cracks in the icy crust indicates that it floats on an ocean of liquid water. (NASA)
Neither of these moons has an atmosphere to speak of, and their surfaces are crusts of frigid ice exposed to the vacuum and radiation of space — not promising environments to search for life as we know it.
Under those icy crusts, though, are oceans of liquid water. Water vapor plumes erupting from cracks in Enceladus’ surface carry traces of chemicals like ammonia, one of the “precursor” chemicals for the formation of organic molecules.
Europa’s ocean is global, may be up to 100 miles deep and has twice the water of Earth’s ocean.
If the ocean floors of either of these moons sport hydrothermal vents, then there may be environments down there similar to those surrounding Earth’s vents.
We know that the hydrothermal vents on Earth support thriving communities of life, and from the laboratory recipe cooked up by Dr. Barge and team we know that such an environment can easily produce organic compounds, the precursor molecules of life.
Understanding the genesis of life on Earth would also focus our search for signs of life on extrasolar planets.
An artist illustration of an exoplanet (upper right) viewed from the surface of one of its moons. (IAU/L. Calçada)
No spacecraft will be reaching exoplanets in our lifetimes (or those of our great great great grandchildren in all probability), but knowing what chemical telltales might indicate the presence of life would be a powerful tool for exploring life beyond our solar system — in nearby star systems, in distant reaches across the Milky Way galaxy, and possibly even other galaxies.
I’d say that’s a lot of potential from a small bottle of hot mineral water bubbling away in a lab.
It’s not a Hollywood epic about the stranding and rescue of a lone astronaut, but a real-world expedition: the Mars 2020 rover mission.
And NASA’s newest robot explorer isn’t going alone. Mars 2020 is being accompanied by the first-of-its-kind Mars Helicopter. Yes, in this case, NASA saved its innovation for the engineering, not the nomenclature.
Mars Helicopter
In late January, the fully assembled softball-sized, 4-pound robot with twin rotors was tested at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
In a chamber that replicates the actual conditions on Mars that the helicopter must endure, temperatures were set as low as minus-130 degrees Fahrenheit, with a simulated atmosphere of carbon dioxide equivalent to the atmospheric pressure at 100,000 feet on Earth. (The highest altitude reached by a helicopter here on this planet was 29,000 feet, where it landed on the peak of Mount Everest.)
Artist depiction of the Mars Helicopter in flight on Mars. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Even Mars’ lower-surface gravity, one-third of Earth’s, was simulated during test flights, with a special tether providing a constant upward tug.
Mars Helicoper passed its two hovering test flights with flying colors, so to speak. The next time the helicopter takes off will be on Mars, in early 2021.
The Future of Martian Flight
Mars Helicopter is accompanying its mother-ship rover as a demonstration of technology that can be put to use on future missions — a beta test to see how well the technology performs on Mars, and to learn what features and capabilities might be included in next-generation copters.
Rovers are great for getting around on the surface of another planet, but the six-wheeled robots can’t roam everywhere; some terrain is navigationally challenging or simply impassable.
But a rover with a tiny solar-powered, flying camera-bot can deploy it to get close looks at intriguing geological features, scout what’s on the other side of hills and ridges that the rover can’t get to, and maybe even collect rock and soil samples over a wide range of territory.
Mars scientists are probably waking up late at night imagining how to put future whirly-bots to use.
Mission of Mars 2020
The exploration of Mars has been an exciting ongoing adventure for the past several decades, but Mars 2020 has the potential to deliver the most exciting news yet: evidence of past Martian life. Not since the Viking landers conducted inconclusive experiments to detect signs of present life has a mission looked for Martians.
Physically modeled after the rover Curiosity, which is presently looking for, and finding, clues to Mars’ past watery climate, one of Mars 2020’s objectives is to look for signs of anything that might have lived in those ancient seas and lakes.
Diagram of Mars 2020’s suite of instruments designed to look for the chemical residues of past Martian life, assess the climate, and investigate the geology at its landing site. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Along with a suite of highly advanced scientific instruments, the rover is also carrying an experiment, MOXIE, to produce oxygen from Mars’ atmospheric carbon dioxide to test how future human explorers might produce breathable oxygen from the Martian environment.
Carrying On a Long Legacy of Mars Crawling
With each successive landing mission, NASA adds something new to the conversation about the exploration of Mars.
In 1976, the Viking missions achieved the first successful landings on Mars, allowing for our first surface-view of the planet. They also attempted, optimistically, to find life.
In 1997, Pathfinder carried the first rover, Sojourner, to set wheels on Martian dirt, and the 330 feet it traveled from rock to rock at the time felt like a marathon.
In the final days of its 15-year trek on Mars, the rover Opportunity captured this sweeping panorama from its final resting place in Perseverance Valley. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University/ASU)
In 2004, Spirit and Opportunity were the first wheels-on-the-ground expedition to search for signs of past water on Mars, culminating in a spectacular 15-year, 26-mile odyssey of discovery by Opportunity.
The 2012 landing of Curiosity kicked off the first mission to take us on a tour through time, reading the pages of Mars’ climate history through sedimentary layers going back a couple billion years.
And the most recent mission, InSight, will give us our first look inside Mars, straight to the core.
Launch and Landing
The Mars 2020 mission, rover and helicopter, will launch in July 2020, with a landing projected for February 2021.
From all that we now know about Mars’ once more Earth-like conditions, about the tenacity and adaptability of extremophile life forms on Earth, and about the efficacy of the formation of organic compounds under the right conditions, scientists are optimistic that Mars 2020 could find evidence of life.
And while I’d love to see microscopic pictures of Martian microbe fossils, I’ll settle for any chemical residues left in rock that we can point to and say:
While prospecting the slopes of Mount Sharp for evidence of Mars’ past watery climates, NASA’s Curiosity rover struck clay.
If this doesn’t sound as worthy of a “Eureka!” as hitting the golden mother-lode, consider that, to scientists studying Mars’ past climates, clay is as good as gold.
Mosaic of the “clay-bearing unit” that NASA’s Curiosity rover arrived at in February. The edge of Vera Rubin Ridge, Curiosity’s previous exploration site, can be seen at the top of the picture. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Clay is a treasure to researchers because the minerals it contains are known to have formed in the presence of water. So, analyzing Martian clays is a means of exploring what role water has played in Mars’ past climates. Mars’ once wetter, possibly more Earth-like, and maybe even life-friendly environment has long since dried up, but clues to it persist in the rocks.
Curiosity drilled the April 6 clay sample from a patch of exposed bedrock, nicknamed “Aberlady,” within a region of Mount Sharp called the “clay-bearing unit.”
The Saga of Mars’ History Written in Stone
Mount Sharp is a 3-mile-high mound of sedimentary rock sitting in the middle of 90-mile-wide Gale Crater, which we know once contained deep lakes that repeatedly formed and dried up in cycles.
The sediments were laid down at different times in the past two billion years, and each layer represents a page in the climate history of Mars. Erosion by wind action has opened up these pages for Curiosity to read.
Curiosity’s Quest for Water
Mount Sharp’s “clay-bearing unit” was discovered from orbit by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in the years prior to Curiosity’s 2012 landing. That detection is one of the main reasons that Gale Crater, and particularly Mount Sharp, were chosen for Curiosity’s expedition.
Curiosity can bore into hard rock to get samples, with a hammering rock drill on its long robotic arm. The drill’s jack-hammer action was needed to penetrate earlier hard mudstones, but the April 6 clay tasting was of soft rock and required only rotary action.
The drilled rock samples are delivered by the robotic arm to Curiosity’s internal laboratory instruments for analysis.
Curiosity started detecting clay minerals in mudstone samples shortly after landing, discoveries that only continued along its uphill trail. These lower mudstones are believed to have formed when rivers carrying sediments flowed into ancient lakes, where the sediments settled out on the lake bottom near the inlet.
Fine sediment layers along Mount Sharp’s lower slopes typical of lake bottom sediments deposited by the waters of river inflow. Picture taken in 2014 by the Curiosity rover.
While scientists await results of Curiosity’s analysis of the Aberlady sample, they are surveying the unexplored territory surrounding the rover — maybe like kids in a candy shop. Several intriguing geological features beckon with promises of discovery. There’s a lot to look forward to.
Curiosity’s Progress and Future
With all the recent headlines grabbed by new and upcoming Mars missions — InSight and the Mars 2020 rover namely — plus 2018’s loss of the veteran Opportunity rover, Curiosity’s dogged and determined uphill progress may have been overshadowed by these robots of past, present, and future.
But, Curiosity weathered last year’s major global dust storm without a hitch — the same dust storm that ended Opportunity’s 15-year Martian marathon. Indeed, Curiosity has fed us regular reports of mineralogical paleo-water-sightings for many months now, making the truly remarkable findings almost a routine event.
Google Earth image showing Curiosity’s 2012 landing site and its present location in the Clay-Bearing Unit above Vera Rubin Ridge. The summit of Mount Sharp is at the upper right, and the distant rim of Gale Crater is shown in the background. (NASA/Google Earth)
But with this new rung of Mount Sharp’s sedimentary ladder now climbed, Curiosity’s progress up the 3-mile-high mountain can be appreciated. Though it has only climbed a vertical distance of about 1,000 feet in seven years, and in the bigger picture is still much closer to Mount Sharp’s foot than its summit, no other interplanetary rover in history can come close to boasting such a mountain-climbing record.
What will Curiosity encounter in this new phase of is exploration, and how much higher will it climb before it joins Opportunity in the history books?
Asteroids are out there, even if you can’t always see them.
Want some naked-eye proof? It’s coming, in the form of a mountain of space rock named Apophis, for the Egyptian god of chaos; his task is to prevent the sun from rising.
Stretching three-and-a-half football fields long, Apophis will cruise within 19,000 miles of Earth—the closest this large an asteroid has come in recorded history. Apophis will swing inside our ring of geosynchronous satellites on April 13, 2029.
And yes, that is a Friday.
Diagram showing the trajectory of the asteroid Apophis when it swings within 19,000 miles of Earth on April 13, 2029. The blue dots represent artificial satellites orbiting the Earth, and the purple ring shows the orbit of the International Space Station. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
But don’t worry, NASA has it all figured. Any bad luck that may befall you on that day won’t come from Apophis—probably. An earlier worst-case prediction that gave a 2.7 percent chance of Apophis striking the Earth has since been downgraded to practically nil. Actually, that’s an upgrade.
Apophis is a Sparkle in NASA’s Eye
In fact, NASA scientists look forward to Apophis’ near miss. Given a decade to prepare, NASA might even send a robotic probe to rendezvous with the rock. At minimum, it’s an incredible opportunity to make close-up observations of a large asteroid. Apophis is large enough, and will be close enough, to see with our bare eyes, so Earth-based optical and radio telescopes will have an unprecedented view of the spectacle.
The discovery photo of asteroid Apophis, June 19, 2004. (UH/IA)
At the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference held in Maryland this April, scientists brainstormed all the possible ways to take advantage of a flyby that others might see only as a narrowly averted disaster.
NASA has used radio telescopes before to produce rudimentary images of some passing asteroids, though these were either smaller ones or much farther away. The last time any rock this size passed close to Earth was in 2001, the asteroid 2017 VW13. That one is estimated to have passed within 76,000 miles, a third of the distance to the moon. And, since it wasn’t discovered until 2017, no one even noticed it fly by!
God of Chaos
Apophis is classified today as a “Potentially Hazardous Asteroid” (PHA). This means that it periodically crosses Earth’s orbital path, and is large enough to do some major damage if it were to hit us.
Far from being an infrequent visitor from deep space as many comets are, coming around only every few decades or centuries, Apophis is a denizen of the inner solar system. Its 324-day orbit carries it from just outside Earth’s orbit at its farthest point from the sun, almost to the orbit of Venus at its closest.
Diagram showing the orbits of the planets of the inner solar system, and the asteroid Apophis. (NASA/JPL)
You might think that because Apophis crosses Earth’s orbit more than once each year, the chance of collision is an ever-present threat.
However, most of the time when Apophis crosses our path, Earth is at a different point in its orbit. It’s only those times when our orbital positions sync up that there’s any chance of bumping into each other. Think of a carnival carousel and that brass ring you try to grab each time your horse passes by it. You only have a shot at getting that ring if it swings close when you pass—and even then there’s no guarantee.
April 13, 2029 is one of those match-ups, and scientists are keenly eyeing the brass ring of new discovery that will be briefly within their reach.
What Are the Chances?
While small objects pass close to Earth on a routine basis, and even collide with us more often than you might think, most go unnoticed. Three quarters of them fall over open ocean, most of the rest over sparsely populated land. And those that don’t break up in the atmosphere have limited effects when they hit the water or the ground anyway.
Larger, more dangerous rocks make appearances with far less frequency—and the bigger they are, the rarer the encounter.
Notable impacts in recent history include the Tunguska comet or meteorite impact in Siberia in 1908, and the Chelyabinsk event in Russia in 2013. Both were smaller than Apophis, but were relatively large objects: between 200 and 600 feet across in the case of Tunguska, and about 66 feet for Chelyabinsk. They exploded in Earth’s atmosphere, producing significant effects on the ground below, though no known fatalities.
Larger collisions with greater regional and even global effects can be found in prehistoric times, such as the impact that formed Barringer Crater (aka “Meteor Crater”) in Arizona 50,000 years ago.
To find a “dinosaur killer” impact event you’d have to look all the way back to, well, the dinosaur killer impact, 66 million years ago. The asteroid that contributed to ending the dinosaurs’s long reign on Earth, which struck the northern end of the Yucatan Peninsula near Chicxulub, Mexico, was probably six miles across.
Diagram detailing the remnants of the Chicxulub impact crater on the Yucatan Peninsula. Though now buried under jungle and ocean sediment, evidence of the crater can be found through radar imaging and mineral analysis of rock samples. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/David Fuchs)
Defending Against Near Earth Objects
Fortunately, we aren’t completely in the dark about the dangers posed by Near-Earth Objects. We’re also not completely helpless when it comes to defending our planet from them.
For years now, an international coalition of observers and researchers have collaborated to find, measure, and track Near-Earth Objects. The data they collect are used to calculate the probability of a collision, and to predict the level of damage in the event of a hit.
Ultimately, a major asteroid impact with Earth is a matter of when, not if. But the good news is that none are predicted in the foreseeable future.
The current approach to planetary defense hinges on the idea that the further in advance we can predict an impact, the more time we have to do something about it. If we know it’s coming years before the fact, a tiny “nudge” to the asteroid’s trajectory can make the difference between a catastrophic impact and a harmless near miss.
What About Apophis’ Next Flyby?
The probability of Apophis hitting the Earth in 2029 has been practically ruled out. Its close passage through Earth’s gravitational field, though, will result in a change in its orbital path, so careful observations of the flyby will yield more than scientific discovery, it will let us make more precise collision predictions for future encounters.
As things stand now, Apophis will make another close encounter with Earth in 2036, but will come no closer than 14 million miles. Beyond that, the chance of it hitting us anytime between 2060 and 2105 is 1 in 110,000.
We have come a long way in our understanding of the planet Mars in the last few decades, and even the past several years.
Once visible only as a reddish spark in the night sky, when all that humans had to behold it with were bare eyes, Mars became more intriguing after the invention of the telescope 400 years ago. Mysterious surface markings and seasonal changes in color on Mars’ surface tantalized human scientific curiosity, and we had to know more.
Since we began sending robotic orbiters and, later, landers our understanding of our neighbor planet has skyrocketed to new heights.
But no single mission has revealed so much of Mars’ surface in such astounding fine detail, revealed its dynamic geologic and meteorological processes with such exquisite finesse, and laid groundwork for so many other missions, as NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
MRO
This month NASA marks MRO’s tremendous achievements by celebrating its 60,000th orbit since arriving at Mars in 2006. In that time, the high-tech orbiter has brought us many discoveries and — if the past is a guide to the future — will bring many more.
To date, MRO has captured over 378,000 high-resolution images of the Martian surface, returned over 360 terabits of scientific data to Earth, scouted out or mapped landing sites for seven missions, tracked the descent of three of them, and relayed one terabit of data from multiple surface missions.
Loaded with a suite of scientific instruments, one of MRO’s most crowd-pleasing achievements is the fantastic set of hundreds of thousands of images of Mars’ surface captured with its HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera. With a half-meter wide aperture, HiRISE is the largest camera ever sent into deep space, beyond the Earth-Moon system.
Sand dunes that have formed by constant wind action moving in the same direction. Features like this help scientists map prevailing wind conditions on Mars’ surface. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Capable of spotting objects not much larger than a beach ball from 190 miles up, and retargeting any location as often as every two weeks, HiRISE has revealed details of Mars that can only be surpassed by a lander or rover’s on-the-ground point of view.
However, MRO has a high-ground advantage over its surface-based cousins: from its polar orbit that winds around the globe, MRO has a sweeping view of the entire planet.
Tracks left behind by dust devils crossing a flat frosty plain in Mars’ southern polar region. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Because MRO can capture images of the same regions repeatedly, it offers a sort of time-lapse perspective that reveals changes in Mars’ surface and atmosphere. This ability, more than for any other mission, has shown us that Mars is a highly dynamic planet, with seasonal cycles of carbon dioxide and water ice formation and decline, landslides, windstorms and dust devil activity, meteorite impacts, cloud formation and atmospheric circulation, and much more.
Red-Planet Relay
MRO is the best communications point, to date, on the Red Planet — one that can serve both space robots and any human explorers alike. You may recall how important orbital satellites were to ground operations on the film, “The Martian.” It was through repeated orbital surveillance, that mission control knew astronaut Mark Watney was still alive after his crew mates left him for dead. Then, when he managed to hot-wire the derelict Pathfinder lander, his attempts at communication with Earth were facilitated by orbital relaying.
Okay, so there hasn’t been any human drama like that in reality — yet — but MRO has already had a fine career as an orbital surveillance and communications relay station.
At close range — from surface to orbit — radio signals are stronger and the data bandwidth greater. Curiosity can upload to MRO a large amount of data relatively quickly. Then, MRO can send the batch to Earth through its large, high-gain antenna. And since MRO has a direct line of sight with Earth most of the time, there is far less interruption in communication than for surface robots, which spend half of each day blocked from Earth by Mars.
Robot Spotting
Because MRO’s HiRISE surveillance covers the entire surface of Mars, and can spot objects as small as a card table, it has been a wonderful tool not only for tracking spacecraft as they make their descent toward landing, but for locating them and providing context imagery and data of the areas around their landing sites.
A “selfie” taken by NASA’s Pathfinder lander, which carried the first successful rover mission to Mars’ surface (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Over time, MRO has spotted Vikings 1 and 2, Pathfinder, the rovers Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, the Phoenix lander near Mars’ north pole, the new Insight lander, and even the ill-fated European Beagle 2, with which contact was lost during landing.
Of greater importance to landing missions is the job that puts the R into MRO: Reconnaissance. Landing a robot on Mars is tricky, especially for larger and more complicated vehicles like Curiosity, and the upcoming Mars 2020 rover.
So, getting detailed pictures and other measurements of the terrain and surface conditions of prospective landing sites gives mission planners the vital information they need to choose where to land, and then to plan the final landing maneuvers with as much safety as possible.
MRO has scouted and mapped the sites for seven landing missions, including pre-landing reconnaissance and post-landing surveillance.
Job Security For a Robot
With plenty of geologic and meteorological action continually taking place on Mars, and future missions to scout out possible landing sites for, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter should remain on the NASA payroll for years to come.
NASA can make the exploration of Mars look easy. Generations of robotic spacecraft sent to orbit, land upon, and rove about the Martian surface seem to do their jobs courageously without even working up a sweat.
But behind the scenes of the flashy news headlines of exploration successes, NASA scientists and engineers sweat plenty, bleed a bit at times, and even shed tears on occasion.
The mission currently on deck in the sweat shop of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the Mars 2020 Rover, the next robot that will set wheels on the dusty Martian landscape.
Color-enhanced image of Jezero Delta, a portion of Jezero Crater, the chosen landing destination for the Mars 2020 rover. The color enhancements indicate varying mineral content, with green showing water-formed clay deposits. Image created from measurements by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. (NASA/JPL/JHU-APL/MSSS/Brown University)
Shake and Bake Trials
It is a monumental feat to hurl a robot millions of miles through the cold, radiation-blasted vacuum of space and safely navigate through an alien atmosphere to land on hard rock and abrasive, wind-blown soil. It is only accomplished after months and years of planning, testing, retesting and ultimately crossing fingers in hope of success.
To lessen the risk of even a minor problem ending a mission prematurely — an electrical connector shaking loose, a bolt popping out, or a tiny but disastrous fuel leak — all space-bound equipment is subjected to rigorous testing, “trials of pain” designed to simulate the brutal conditions to be endured on the actual mission.
In April, scarcely a year from its scheduled launch, NASA’s Mars 2020 was put through such trials.
First were the vibration tests — a sort of trial by very loud noise.
A duplicate stand-in of the Mars 2020 rover was placed within the aeroshell cocoon the real one will ride in all the way into Mars’ atmosphere, assembled in the same configuration it will be for launch in July 2020.
This spacecraft “stack” was placed in a large chamber and blasted with over 150 decibels of random noise to simulate the vibrations of launch, the moment in any mission when spacecraft components are most likely to shake loose and come apart. Sound at the 150 decibels level is about what you’d experience standing 80 feet from a large jet engine at take-off — loud enough to rupture your eardrums.
The Mars 2020 test stack passed the tests, letting mission engineers worry a bit less.
Engineers get the Mars 2020 rover (duplicate stand-in) and its aeroshell enclosure ready for thermal and vacuum testing in JPL’s Space Simulator Facility. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The chamber simulates the harsh environment of space, which the spacecraft will have to endure over seven months of cruising between Earth and Mars.
After pumping the air out of the chamber to near vacuum, liquid nitrogen super-chilled its walls to -200 degrees F, a temperature cold enough to freeze a person solid in seconds.
Then, as a finishing touch, powerful xenon lamps bathed the spacecraft in simulated sunlight, approximating the raw solar radiation the equipment will need to survive.
The trial concluded successfully after a full eight days, assuring engineers that the spacecraft is as ready as it will ever be for the perils ahead.
Rehearsing a Mars Landing Here on Earth
The most intense, nail-biting, nerve-wracking part of the entire journey to Mars is not the thunderous rocket launch, or the seven months of interplanetary cruising to follow, but the brief moment of atmospheric entry, descent, and landing (EDL), which has earned the title “Seven Minutes of Terror” from NASA operators.
With so many things that could go wrong during EDL—a parachute failing to deploy, a rocket failing to fire, or a terminal crash-landing in unexpectedly rugged terrain—every iota of advanced disaster prevention that can be imagined is planned out and tested.
Accordingly, NASA has made use of the arguably most Mars-like landscapes on Earth, Death Valley National Park, to test Mars 2020’s special Lander Vision System. The LVS will guide Mars 2020 to a safe landing spot on the floor of its ultimate destination, Jezero Crater, in February 2021.
NASA testing the Mars 2020 mission’s Landing Vision System on the nose of an Airbus helicopter in Death Valley National Park. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
NASA mounted an engineering duplicate of the LVS on the nose of a helicopter and flew it through a series of maneuvers over the rugged mountainous desert terrain in Death Valley. During the flights the LVS collected and analyzed imagery of the surface below, testing its ability to identify landing hazards and safe havens on the ground.
Mars 2020 will be the first mission with the ability to assess a prospective landing site in real-time and, if necessary, divert to an alternate, safer site. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Mars 2020 will be the first-ever robotic landing mission with the ability to retarget its precise landing site on the fly, based on real-time terrain imaging data — something that past missions left somewhat to chance.
Practice Makes Perfect?
The exploration of other worlds in our solar system has never been easy. If you think that exploring Mars is a cakewalk, consider that of the 45 Mars missions attempted since 1960, only 22 have been successful (or partially successful).
Some of the unsuccessful attempts didn’t even get as far as Earth orbit, some experienced a failure during their interplanetary voyage, and some ended up crashing spectacularly upon arrival.
NASA has taken all the precautions it can to ensure a safe trip for Mars 2020. Engineers have tested everything that can be tested, imagined and planned for most things that can go wrong, and will continue to do so up to the day of launch in July 2020.
Then, all that will be left to do is to cross fingers and hope.
Exoplanet hunters and astrobiologists have searched for so-called “other-Earths” like knights of old pursuing the holy grail. They’ve identified only a small number among the thousands of exoplanets discovered since 1992, but those heavenly bodies have the potential to harbor environments friendly to life as we know it.
Artist illustration of NASA’s exoplanet hunting spacecraft TESS. (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Meaney)
NASA’s infrared Spitzer Space Telescope confirmed TESS’s discovery, refining estimates of the exoplanet’s size and distance from its star and placing it squarely in the class of potentially Earth-like interstellar destinations.
Meet TOI 700-d
The planet, named TOI 700-d, orbits a red dwarf star about 40 percent the size and half the brightness of our sun. TESS also discovered two other planets, TOI 700-b and -c, orbiting closer to the star but not within its habitable zone.
The exoplanet TOI 700-d orbits its M-class dwarf star just inside its habitable zone, where the strength of the star’s light is moderate enough to support liquid water on the planet’s surface. (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)
Located in the southern constellation Dorado, the star TOI 700 and its potential planetary riches are 100 light years away, well beyond human civilization’s ability to reach in the foreseeable future. (Even Voyager 1, the fastest and now most-distant interstellar spacecraft we have sent out, would take another 2 million years to get there.)
TOI 700-d is just 20 percent larger than Earth, and it receives close to the same amount of energy from its star that Earth gets from the sun. Such similarities between the two planets may encourage visions of blue skies, salty seas, and earth-like landscapes on TOI 700-d.
But a handful of earthly properties don’t tell the entire story. The resemblance between our planet and TESS’s other-Earth may not extend beyond its size and how much sunlight it receives.
Why? For starters, the nature of its atmosphere — if it possesses one— could make TOI 700-d a very alien world. Is its atmosphere thin and cold like Mars’, or super-thick and hot like Venus’? Is it made of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or a blend of air very unlike our own? Is there oxygen?
Without enough atmospheric pressure, water cannot persist in a liquid state, so the presence of rivers, lakes and oceans is not guaranteed, even on a planet in a habitable zone.
Another likely aspect of TOI 700-d is that it is tidally locked to its star. That means the same side perpetually faces sunlight, and the other is stuck in eternal night.
Artist concept of TOI 700-d, the first potentially Earth-like extrasolar planet discovered by NASA’s TESS spacecraft. (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)
Tidal locking is the eventual fate of most objects that orbit close to a larger parent object, and TOI 700-d is only 15 million miles from its star, zipping around it once every 37 days. This synchronization of an object’s rotation and revolution, caused by gravitational interaction, is what keeps the same face of the moon always aimed at Earth, and what will eventually lock the planet Mercury into a state of permanently light and dark hemispheres.
Imagine a world in which you could experience the sun never leaving the sky, or the sunrise never interrupting perpetual night, depending on which part of the planet you live.
In one scenario for TOI 700-d, which scientists have generated with computer models, a planetwide ocean lies under a dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide, with a thick cataract of cloud layers shading the day side from its star.
Another scenario digitally imagines a cloudless world of dry land with global wind patterns circulating from the night side across the twilight zone to converge at the center of the day side.
So, even just throwing in the possibility that TOI 700-d is tidally locked to its star practically guarantees that this “Earth-like” exoplanet might be very unlike the world we call home.
TESS; Searching for Planets Much Closer to Home
TESS launched on April 18, 2018, picking up the baton from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, which retired the same year in November. Kepler, the most productive exoplanet-hunting spacecraft to date, spent much of its nine-year career searching for exoplanets orbiting a patch of relatively distant stars in the constellation Cygnus.
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite being prepared for launch. (NASA)
By contrast, TESS is designed to look for exoplanets much closer to home and across most of the sky. From the high vantage point of its elliptical orbit, which loops between 67,000 and 233,000 miles from Earth, TESS scans huge swaths of the sky’s brightest, nearest stars searching for planetary “transits” — the slight dimming of starlight caused by a planet passing between its star and the Earth.
Because most of the exoplanets that TESS discovers are nearby, they are easier to explore with follow-up observations by other space- and ground-based observatories — and possibly with visits in the future.
The soon-to-retire Spitzer Space Telescope, and the up-and-coming James Webb Space Telescope (successor to the Hubble) will analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets discovered by spacecraft like Kepler and TESS. This will allow us to explore more deeply their similarities to Earth, or to better envision their captivating alien natures.
Exoplanet Discoveries to Date
Since the first extrasolar planet was detected in 1992, a total of 4,104 have been confirmed to exist in 3,047 planetary systems. The Kepler mission was responsible for more than 2,700 of these discoveries. TESS, in operation for less than two years, has confirmed 37 exoplanets. Both missions have also amassed lists of thousands of potential candidates, many of which will ultimately be confirmed as extant exoplanets.
Of the total population of confirmed exoplanets, 161 are classified as “terrestrial,” or roughly Earth-sized, and of these only a dozen or so are considered potentially habitable: exoplanets of Earth’s stature orbiting within their stars’ habitable zones.
Artist illustration representing our Milky Way galaxy, which contains at least 200 billion stars. The white circle shows the region within which most of the 4000+ known extrasolar planets have been discovered. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)
Based on the abundance of exoplanets we have observed in a relatively small sample of the Milky Way galaxy’s stars, some scientists estimate that our galaxy may contain as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting within their stars’ habitable zones.
Imagine the possibilities. The reality of other-Earths may far exceed even the wildest imaginings of science fiction.
Last year, the space agency posed this question to students in Kindergarten through 12th grade, along with a homework assignment: Write an essay to convince 4,700 contest judges that their name choice rises above all others.
Young people submitted more than 28,000 essays after the competition opened in August.
Now, the volunteer judges—professionals, teachers, and space science fanciers from all over the U.S. — have selected nine finalists for interplanetary naming privileges. They are:
The choices reflect public enthusiasm for Mars exploration. The children and teens used exceedingly positive words to describe the enterprise.
This month, NASA let the public consider the nine finalist names and essays, and even vote on their favorites. There’s not much time left – this link expires at midnight Monday, Jan. 27. The agency will consider the results in its final naming decision.
Robot With a Unique Mission
The Mars 2020 rover is scheduled for launch this July. If all goes well, it will land on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. Bound for Jezero Crater, the car-sized, six-wheeled robot is built on the design of its predecessor, Curiosity. That rover still explores the water-lain sediments of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater.
Unlike Curiosity, whose mission is to investigate Mars’ climate and the role that water played in the past, Mars 2020 will look for signs of anything that might have lived in those ancient waters.
Composite imagery of the western edge of Jezero Crater, the designated landing site for the Mars 2020 rover. The river inlet to the left deposited the delta sediments that appear in the middle. Colors represent different mineral composition. Images by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. (NASA)
Surveys made from space by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed evidence that parts of Jezero Crater were once sunken beneath the waters of a lake, and fed with runoff and sediment from at least one river inlet.
Excellent Hunting Ground for Ancient Martians
No mission has searched for signs of Martian life since the 1977 Viking landers. They looked for present microbial activity in Mars’ soil and came up with inconclusive results.
But subsequent missions— notably the Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, as well as orbital spacecraft — have revealed that in its early history Mars had a much more Earth-like environment: a thicker, warmer atmosphere, rain and rivers feeding deep lakes, and even wide shallow seas.
Map of estimated depths of an ancient sea that once existed in Mars’ southern Eridiani Basin. The sea is estimated to have contained nine times as much water as in all of the Great Lakes on Earth. (NASA)
So, in the search for life beyond Earth, looking to Mars’ past may have a greater chance of payoff than hoping to find something surviving today in Mars’ cold, dry deserts.
How NASA Names Its Spacecraft
NASA doesn’t usually name its space-faring missions through contests.
Many mission names are acronyms, like the Mercury spacecraft MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging). This embodies a description of the scientific mission and offers a historical nod to the Roman messenger god for which the planet Mercury is named.
A single person, Dr. Abe Silverstein, is responsible for the naming of Project Apollo in 1960. While reading a book of mythology at home, NASA’s director of space flight programs decided that the Greek sun god Apollo blazing across the sky in his fiery chariot was an image that matched the grandeur of a mission to send people to the moon.
Only Mars landing missions — and of those, only rovers — have gotten their names through student essay contests. Sojourner, which launched in 1996, was the first. Even the little rover’s parent lander, Pathfinder, bore only the official name of the mission.
Cartoon illustration of the Mars 2020 rover, made for the student naming contest in August 2019. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Why do only rovers get personal names? Maybe because we give them wheels to scurry around on, and twin-camera “eyes” mounted on neck-like masts, and arms that dig into the Martian soil looking for cool things buried there. Robotic rovers just seem more “alive,” like us, and deserving of a personality.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy told his country, “We choose to go to the moon!” It took another seven years before the first two men of the Apollo program set foot there.
But now, have you heard? NASA plans to return human beings to the moon, and in only four years.
But wait, it gets better! The next “manned” mission to the moon’s surface will put the next man on the moon, yes, but also the first woman ever to voyage farther into space than the International Space Station. As glass ceilings go, this one is 240,000 miles high, and with any luck, it will be broken forever.
NASA’s Artemis program plans to deliver its coed crew to the moon by 2024, and establish a regular program of lunar exploration with commercial partners by 2028. Its ultimate goal is to channel the knowledge and experience gained toward launching a human mission to Mars.
Artemis, by the way, is the moon goddess in Greek mythology, twin sister of the sun god Apollo. What better name for humanity’s second visit to the moon, one in which the first woman will stand on lunar soil?
NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which will carry the next astronauts bound for the moon from Earth to lunar orbit. (NASA/Radislav Sinyak)
The ambitious project includes designing and building a new generation of launch vehicles, human-crewed spacecraft and landers, along with the Lunar Gateway, a moon-orbiting station that will serve as a depot for spacecraft arriving from Earth and landers traveling to and from the moon’s surface.
Do You Have the Right Stuff?
Are you interested in joining the ranks of NASA astronauts as part of a new generation of space explorers heading for the moon, some asteroids, possibly, and maybe even Mars?
To meet the demand of its expanding human space exploration endeavors, NASA’s astronaut candidate program is accepting applications from March 2 to the end of the month. Now is a good time to polish up that resume if a space-bound career appeals to you.
And remember, women, the Artemis moon-shot isn’t a guys-only club. Anyone with the right stuff is eligible.
Designing Spacecraft With Wind Tunnels and Supercomputers
Before Artemis astronauts will ever set boot on lunar soil, the space agency will have to do a lot of preliminary work. That’ll include deploying an array of scientific instruments on the moon’s surface to lay the groundwork for that historic return.
Three of the 16 scientific robotic landers, provided by commercial partners of NASA, that will be sent to the moon in 2021, paving the way for the next astronauts to land there in 2024.
NASA just finalized 16 experiments to be sent to the moon in 2021, provided by two commercial partners — Astrobiotic and Initiative Machines — in the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.
Another large playing piece to set on the game board of moon exploration is the launch vehicle that will get the astronauts there. The Space Launch System is NASA’s next heavy lifter. It will be the most powerful rocket ever built, capable of delivering human-crewed spacecraft to the moon and beyond.
You might think that after successful launches of the Saturn 5 rocket in the 1960s, which propelled the Apollo spacecraft and astronauts to the moon more than half a dozen times, NASA engineers already know how to do this. But they can’t design a new rocket that will carry a new spacecraft by copying notes from previous missions.
New aerospace materials, propulsion technologies, and fuel and combustion systems all give shape to a new vehicle the space agency must test for safety, efficiency and capability.
The aerodynamic test model of NASA’s SLS rocket being tested in a high-speed wind tunnel at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The pink coating is a press-sensitive layer that changes color with air pressure, offering continuous real-time imagery that is processed in Ames’ Pleiades super-computing facility. (NASA/Ames Research Center/Dominic Hart)
Knowing exactly how the dynamic pressures of the high-velocity passage out of Earth’s atmosphere will affect the launch vehicle and its nose-borne payload are critical to their aerodynamic design. So, putting a physical model to the test in actual high-speed wind pushes the design’s limits in a way that computer simulations can only approximate.
The enormous amounts of test data the wind tunnel tests generate are processed by the Pleiades supercomputer housed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames, a warehouse-sized building filled with rack upon rack of linked computers comprising tens of thousands of core processors. As an ensemble, the supercomputer is capable of performing up to 7 quadrillion calculations per second.
NASA’s Pleiades super-computing facility at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. (NASA/Ames Research Center)
Looking for another entertaining, educational thing to do during your stay-at-home confinement? Here’s a list of favorite space images, collected by an astronomer — me — passing the time in isolation, like everbody else.
Seeing Saturn with Super-Vision
The vision of NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows us Saturn in a light that human eyesight can never perceive. This false-colored visual-and-infrared composite paints the gas giant in color-coded temperatures, including a dazzling crown of auroras, shown in green, rising 600 miles above the cloud tops of Saturn’s southern polar region.
Composite false-color visible-and-infrared image of Saturn, featuring southern polar auroras (green). Image taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. (NASA/University of Arizona/VIMS)
Gullies on the Walls of Mars Crater
What may look deceptively like water-carved gullies running down the sandy slopes of Russell Crater on Mars are likely caused by the seasonal thawing of carbon dioxide ice instead. Multiple images of this spot taken at different times in the planet’s seasonal year reveal that these channels form in the Martian winter, when water ice is still frozen, but the more volatile carbon dioxide could be able to flow in some way.
Seasonal gullies carved into the sandy slope of Mars’ Russell Crater, likely caused by thawing of carbon dioxide ice. Image taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. (NASA/UA/HiRISE)
‘Swiss cheese’ Terrain at Mars’ Southern Polar Ice Cap
Smooth patches of carbon-dioxide ice rise 10 meters above surrounding blob-shaped depressions. This is another of Mars’ unearthly artforms made possible by seasonal temperatures low enough to freeze carbon dioxide from the thin air, which is eaten away as the season warms to form pits and other spectacular features.
‘Swiss cheese’ formations at Mars’ south pole, caused by seasonal thawing of carbon dioxide ice. Image taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. (NASA/UA/HiRISE)
Jupiter’s Masterpiece of Motion
The restless and complex cloud tops and deep atmosphere of Jupiter give Earth’s best artists some serious competition. Wrapped around a circular storm cell, an atmospheric jet stream stirs up magnificent and mind-bending swirls, eddies and vortices for us to behold through the eye of NASA’s Juno spacecraft.
Jupiter’s clouds stirred by a strong jet stream wrapped around a storm cell in the high northern latitudes. Image taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. (NASA/SwRI)
Sunset on Pluto
Fifteen minutes after its closest approach to Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft took this image, capturing smooth icy plains and some of the dwarf planet’s mountain ranges. The layers of Pluto’s thin, hazy atmosphere are backlit by the near setting sun.
Limb of Pluto caught near sunset, 15 minutes after NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to the dwarf planet. (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)
Curiosity Snaps a Selfie
NASA’s Curiosity rover paused to take this selfie on Feb. 26, 2020, before turning to climb the ridgeline of crumbling rock seen here in the background. Curiosity is alive and well and continuing its climb up Mount Sharp, in Gale Crater, investigating the geology for clues to Mars’ climatic history, and if the planet was ever capable of supporting life.
‘Selfie’ taken by NASA’s rover Curiosity on February 26, 2020. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Crab Nebula: Supernova Remnant Fireworks Burst
A supernova observed and recorded by Chinese and Japanese astronomers in A.D. 1054 marks the spot in the sky that telescopes later discovered the Crab Nebula, a cloud of hot gas expanding outward and dissipating into space. By virtue of that ancient observation, the Crab is the first supernova remnant whose parent star’s explosion was witnessed by human eyes. Below, images captured by different modern observatories were combined to form this stunning composite. A high-resolution visual image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope is layered with a radio image from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array and an X-ray image from the Chandra X-ray Telescope.
Composite visible, radio and X-ray image of the Crab Nebula supernova remnant, whose parent star was observed to explode in 1054 CE. Visible image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, radio image by the VLA, and X-ray image by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. (NASA/STScI)
Sweeping View of the Cosmos
The Pan-STARRS observatory at the summit of Haleakala on Maui, Hawaii, produced this mosaic map of every part of the sky viewable from the observatory’s latitude, combining a half-million images into one extraordinary view. Contained within this image are over 800 million celestial objects, including the ghostly sweep of the Milky Way galaxy’s stars and an obscuring disk of gas and dust.
Mosaic image of the entire sky viewable from the Pan-STARRS observatory on Maui, Hawaii, composed of half a million individual images captured over four years. (Danny Farrow, Pan-STARRS1 Science Consortium and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics)
Crater on Far Side of Moon
Always hidden from Earth’s gaze, located on the far side of the moon in the southern polar region, is Antoniadi Crater, an impact crater 80 miles in diameter that resides in a much vaster depression. This picture, taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, captures one end of Antoniadi from an oblique angle. The crater wall sweeping across the background rises almost 2.5 miles above the floor, and the “little” crater in the foreground would engulf the city of San Francisco. Fun fact: The bottom of the small foreground crater contains the lowest point on the moon’s surface, about 4.75 miles below mean surface level.
Oblique view of a portion of the moon’s Antoniadi Crater, captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. (NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University)
Lunar South Pole Illumination Map
This unusual looking picture of the moon’s south pole is a composite map made from images taken every two hours over a full lunar day (about four weeks on Earth). The brightness of each pixel tells how much sunlight that spot receives in the course of the moon’s day, white representing the most sunlight and black where sunlight never falls. Here at the moon’s south pole, the sun never rises far above the horizon, and sunlight shines across the landscape at a grazing angle. The black areas show places of permanent shadow, where observations have confirmed the presence of water ice.
Illumination map composite image of the moon’s south pole showing total sunlight exposure over a lunar day. Black indicates crater and canyon floors that never receive direct sunlight and are known to harbor water ice. (NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University))
Find Your Favorite
The multitude of captivating, awe-inspiring, and just plain run-of-the-mill stunning space images available online is nothing short of astronomical. Browse their image galleries in search of your own collection of faves; you’ll soon find your hours of isolation melting away in breathtaking wonder.
Benjamin Burress has been a staff astronomer at Chabot Space & Science Center since July 1999. Before that he served on the crew of NASA’s Kuiper Airborne Observatory at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and was the Head Observer at the Naval Prototype Optical Interferometer program at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. He has written over 300 pieces on astronomy and space exploration for KQED since 2007.
Curiosity drives where it’s told, stopping to take a picture or extend its robotic arm to drill into a rock. Under no shelter-at-home order, it’s business as usual for the rover.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, the room where Curiosity’s route is normally planned — by a team of scientists and engineers — stands empty.
Skeleton Crew, Ghost Staff
Due to the shelter-in-place and social distancing directives, the normally bustling 117-acre campus of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, California, where Curiosity is operated from, has become something of a ghost town.
The usual population of over 5,000 employees has been reduced to a skeleton crew of only a couple hundred performing essential functions that cannot be done remotely. Those who must come to the lab are all practicing social distancing, proper sanitization and wear personal protective equipment, or PPE.
Most of JPL’s mission operators and other personnel, including the Curiosity rover team, are adapting to doing their jobs remotely from home. So, how does interplanetary exploration work from home —where cats walk across keyboards, kids attend school by Zoom and the dog needs to be walked?
Exploring Another World— From Home
Curiosity rover driver Keri Bean studies the terrain around the rover using red-blue 3D glasses, an adaptation to operating Curiosity from home without access to higher-tech equipment. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
As the novel coronavirus began to hit countries around the globe, the Curiosity team predicted the need to carry on with rover operations remotely, and outfitted home offices for video conferencing. The team had to make sure it could stay in close contact to analyze data and imagery from the rover to map its surroundings in detail and plot its movement.
They had to adapt, and got creative. Without the high graphics computing and special equipment at JPL, at-home rover operators are using old theater-style 3D glasses to study the terrain and plan Curiosity’s work.
One such maneuver took place on March 20, when operators commanded Curiosity’s drill to bore into a block of sandstone at a site dubbed “Edinburgh” to extract a rock sample for analysis. Not only was the operation a success, it was also the first time the drill had been used to dig into rock since 2018, when a technical problem forced engineers to devise a new method of drilling.
Curiosity is on the move again, after a pit stop to diagnose an issue with its Mars Hand Lens Imager instrument. No time was wasted: The team directed Curiosity to collect images of the surrounding terrain and atmospheric data while it waited.
Impacts on Other Missions
In addition to Curiosity on Mars, JPL currently manages 20 different missions. All of them are impacted by the pandemic.
Artist concept of the Europa Clipper spacecraft making a flyby of Jupiter’s icy, ocean-harboring moon, Europa. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
One of these is Europa Clipper, a mission to send a spacecraft to Jupiter to investigate the ocean beneath the icy crust of the moon Europa. The Clipper team now works almost completely from home.
“The Europa Clipper team was already partly remote, since Clipper is a partnership between APL and JPL,” said Krys Blackwood, senior lead human centered designer at JPL. “So, we adapted to working from home fairly rapidly. Luckily, the leadership of the mission is incredibly supportive, working to accommodate people’s unique home and family situations. I find myself looking forward to all those moments when someone’s kids or pets pop into a video conference. Rather than letting it disrupt us, we roll with it and support each other.”
Another critical program at JPL is running NASA’s Deep Space Network, or DSN. That’s the global array of large radio dishes that keeps mission operators in contact with robotic missions across the solar system — including the veteran Voyager probes that are now traveling through interstellar space.
Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, nexus of NASA’s Deep Space Network for communicating with robotic missions across the solar system. (Ben Burress)
“Our research for Deep Space Network operations is definitely impacted,” said Blackwood of her Human Centered Design Group team, “as we mostly need to be face-to-face in order to measure and evaluate operational practices. So, we’re having to get creative about tools and methods, while trying not to impact operations at all — because no matter what, the DSN needs to keep receiving data.”
The Human Centered Design Group is also responsible for developing and programming the 3D terrain mapping system used by the Curiosity rover team.
To Boldly Zoom
Imagine the starship Enterprise traveling through interstellar space, exploring strange new worlds — and the Bridge is largely empty. All the crew, from captain to science officer to navigator, is cloistered away working from their personal quarters. The communications officer, also isolated, keeps everyone in touch via Zoom.
While most of us have been in shelter-at-home mode, Perseverance, NASA’s next-generation Mars rover, has been getting ready for a major trip. In February, it packed its bags, so to speak, and moved from its “nest” at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, California, to a “clean room” at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. An experimental Mars Helicopter went, too.
Wrapped up and awaiting loading into its travel crate, the Mars rover Perseverance (back and left) is prepared to leave its birthplace in the JPL’s Spacecraft Assembly Facility clean room for a flight to its launch point at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Krys Blackwood)
JPL and NASA team engineers are working on the final steps of assembly and testing for the rover and helicopter, which are scheduled to launch in July. Their mission? To seek out signs of past life on Mars and pioneer flying there!
Mounting a Mars Mission During Quarantine
Facing a critical launch window that begins on July 17 and ends Aug. 5, NASA and JPL have taken extraordinary pains to keep the mission on track, while maintaining social distancing practices to keep employees and the public safe.
Following its trip from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in February, the rover Perseverance and the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity are off-loaded from their C-17 cargo transport. (NASA/Cory Huston)
If the launch is delayed beyond Aug. 5, the next opportunity to send the rover to Mars is almost two years away. That’s because Earth and Mars only pass close enough for us to send spacecraft every 22 months.
The rover Curiosity, currently exploring Mars, is operated by team members who can conduct most of its mission remotely from home.
Perseverance, however, requires a lot of hands-on attention as it is prepared for launch. Some of that work can be done remotely, like analyzing data from engineering tests. But much of it must be done in-person. There’s the mission-critical job of “stacking” the spacecraft modules — connecting the rover to its rocket-propelled landing crane, sandwiching the assembly between its aeroshell and back shell enclosure, and sticking all that on top of the interplanetary cruise stage that will carry the rover to Mars.
In March and April, the task of assembling — or “stacking” — the components of the Mars 2020 spacecraft proceeded in a clean room at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Shown in this picture is the rover Perseverance and it’s belly-mounted Mars Helicopter, Ingenuity, attached under its rocket-powered descent stage (shown by its orange rocket nozzles), all under the umbrella of its back shell. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Fortunately, NASA engineers are used to working in “clean rooms,” with protective clothing, masks and rigorous sterilization standards —all designed to keep Mars free from contamination by any of Earth’s microbes.
Seeking Signs of Life
Perseverance, and its companion helicopter Ingenuity, are bound for the once water-filled Jezero Crater, a little north of the Martian equator, in search of chemical and geologic evidence of ancient Martian microbial life.
Composite image of the section of Jezero Crater that NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will begin exploring in 2021. In the center of this image is an alluvial fan of material washed in from a river inlet (left) and deposited on the floor of an ancient lake. Mineral measurements of the materials in this delta deposit show the presence of clay and carbonates, possible evidence of past Martian life. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/JHU-APL)
Mission planners chose Jezero Crater not only because it was likely once filled with water (“jezero” means “lake” in several Slavic languages), but also because it is on the edge of what was probably a wide sea sometime in the past. Of particular interest is a dry river inlet and alluvial fan of material washed into the lake bottom at the western edge of the crater.
Dry river deltas are great places to prospect, especially for evidence of past life in lake sediment or materials washed in from land upstream. Scientists think if microbial Martian life ever existed, it most likely thrived in water.
Perseverance will use high-resolution cameras, and X-ray and ultraviolet spectrometers, to analyze chemical compositions, and a ground-penetrating radar to probe geologic structures in the ground beneath it. The rover will collect rock and soil samples with its drill for analysis by onboard instruments. And, it will cache samples in sealed tubes to leave along the trail for future missions to potentially bring back to Earth.
Perseverance and Ingenuity: What’s In a Name?
The naming of Martian rovers follows a student essay tradition that began in 1997 with the very first rover named: Sojourner!
This time, seventh grader Alexander Mather from Burke, Virginia, wrote an essay that beat eight other finalists and over 28,000 submissions from across the country. Alexander said he chose Perseverance because names given to previous Mars rovers reflect human qualities important in the enterprise of space exploration — and his choice, perseverance, acknowledges the unrelenting difficulties encountered by all missions to Mars.
A NASA Mars Helicopter team member works on the flight model of the experimental craft in February 2019. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Among the nine finalists, a second name rose to the top: Ingenuity. Submitted by 11th grader Vaneeza Rupani of Northport, Alabama, Ingenuity became the name of Perseverance’s flying companion, the Mars Helicopter.
Ingenuity is going to Mars as a proof of concept. The tiny, double-propellored craft will make one or more 90-second test flights that mission planners hope will open the door to a variety of uses in future missions. Ingenuity carries two small cameras, one of them color, to take pictures with during flight.
When asked why she thought Ingenuity was a good name for the helicopter, Vaneeza cited the creativity that engineers needed to design a craft that can fly in the extremely thin and cold Martian atmosphere, something that has never been done before.
Unprecedented Mission
If all goes well, sometime in the second half of July, or early August, Perseverance and Ingenuity will launch from Florida and begin a nine-month voyage to Mars. Once they touch down safely, Perseverance will do the job of looking for past life, and Ingenuity will become the first craft to take flight on another planet.
Almost 40 years have passed since the last time NASA astronauts blasted off into space on a brand new spaceship.
Now, as NASA looks forward to Wednesday’s planned test flight of the SpaceX Crew Dragon with a pair of astronauts on board, some in the spaceflight community have a little bit of déjà vu.
The first space shuttle, Columbia, flew on April 12, 1981. Crowds gathered in Florida to watch this strange new spacecraft. It looked more like an airplane than the familiar bell-shaped capsules of the Apollo moon missions.
Wayne Hale’s wife woke him up for the shuttle launch and he watched it on television in his bedroom, where he’d been trying to get a little sleep after working a prelaunch shift at Houston’s Mission Control. He’d just come to NASA a few years before, and he says that a lot about that time was not so different from now.
“The substantially similar thing is that we’ve been waiting too long without being able to send Americans into orbit from America,” says Hale, who went on to be a flight director for dozens of shuttle missions and head of the shuttle program.
Almost six years went by between the last flight of an Apollo spacecraft and the first space shuttle launch. “I remember a lot of talk about, ‘Well, we should never be in the position as a nation again of not being able to send astronauts into space for this long,'” Hale says.
This time around, though, NASA has been waiting even longer — almost nine years.
NASA retired its space shuttles in 2011 and, since then, it has been paying for seats on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to get its astronauts to the International Space Station. That means American astronauts have been launching from Kazakhstan.
Meanwhile, the space agency has been partnering with companies such as SpaceX and Boeing to help them build their own space vehicles. The idea was that NASA would focus on more ambitious missions like a return to the lunar surface, while letting space companies basically operate a taxi service to nearby station.
One of them — the SpaceX Crew Dragon — is finally ready to blast off with people on board. And some in the space industry think that this historic launch marks the start of a revolution for space travel.
That’s because folks outside of NASA will be able to fly on these space taxis, too, if they can afford the fare, opening up space as a more accessible travel destination. Already there’s talk of Tom Cruise riding a SpaceX capsule to the station to shoot an action movie.
Here again, history is repeating itself. Hale says the reusable space shuttle was supposed to transform space travel in a similar way.
“We were going to take Walter Cronkite, my goodness, we were going to have journalists in space, we were going to take entertainers,” he recalls. “We were going to take John Denver into space.”
All of that ended with the Challenger disaster and the deaths of all on board, including teacher Christa McAuliffe. The shuttle was more dangerous and more expensive than originally planned, and it flew far less often than NASA had hoped. The agency had to shelve its vision of bringing up lots of ordinary people.
“Let’s hope that this new generation of spacecraft really work out to be safe enough where we really can do that,” says Hale.
The safety of SpaceX’s capsule and rocket is better understood than the shuttle was at its start. SpaceX had a successful flight test to the station and back with no people on board — except after it had docked to the station, when astronauts on board the outpost opened the hatch and went inside.
The company also checked out the safety system for astronauts by deliberately destroying one of its rockets and checking to ensure that the capsule escaped without harm.
Nothing like that was true for the space shuttle. NASA had never launched anything like it before sending it up with two astronauts: veteran John Young and rookie Robert Crippen.
On Wednesday afternoon at 4:33 p.m. EDT, from the very same launch pad, the Space X vehicle is scheduled to carry up another pair of astronauts: Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken.
“It’s probably a dream of every test pilot school student to have the opportunity to fly on a brand-new spaceship and I’m lucky enough to get that opportunity,” says Behnken.
Hurley says that during their time in the astronaut corps, they both had an opportunity to interact with the first space shuttle flyers. He recently saw Crippen at an event in Texas a few years ago, and they talked about that first shuttle launch.
“I think one thing that really registered with me with what Bob Crippen said was, you know, ‘We were so focused on flying the mission, flying the vehicle, and executing and not making a mistake,'” says Hurley.
That’s the kind of intense focus Hurley has to have, even in the midst of a pandemic that has NASA begging people not to gather in crowds to watch as they’ve done in the past for the shuttle.
Both Behnken and Hurley have flown on the space shuttle — in fact, Hurley was on its last mission. The shuttle had a cockpit crammed full of switches and dials, but the more modern SpaceX capsule is controlled with a sleek touchscreen.
“Growing up as a pilot, my whole career, having a certain way to control a vehicle,” says Hurley. “This is certainly different.”
And when the duo returns to Earth, they’ll splash down in the ocean rather than coasting to a stop on a landing strip.
They will, however, be carrying some familiar cargo: an American flag. It flew on the first shuttle mission and the last. It’s been hung up on the space station for years, just waiting for a crew to launch from the U.S. and bring it back home.
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
The launch of a SpaceX rocket ship with two NASA astronauts on a history-making flight into orbit was called off with 16 minutes to go in the countdown Wednesday because of thunderclouds and the danger of lightning in Florida.
Liftoff was rescheduled for Saturday afternoon.
The commercially designed, built and owned spacecraft was set to blast off in the afternoon for the International Space Station, ushering in a new era in commercial spaceflight and putting NASA back in the business of launching astronauts from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade.
But thunderstorms for much of the day threatened to force a postponement, and the word finally came down that the atmosphere was so electrically charged that the spacecraft with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken aboard could get hit by a bolt of lightning.
“No launch for today — safety for our crew members @Astro_Doug and @AstroBehnken is our top priority,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted, using a lightning emoji.
The two men were scheduled to ride into orbit aboard the SpaceX’s bullet-shaped Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, taking off from the same launch pad used during the Apollo moon missions a half-century ago. Both President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence had arrived to watch.
The flight — the long-held dream of SpaceX founder Elon Musk — would have marked the first time a private company sent humans into orbit.
It would also have been the first time in nearly a decade that the United States launched astronauts into orbit from U.S. soil. Ever since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA has relied on Russian spaceships launched from Kazakhstan to take U.S. astronauts to and from the space station.
During the day, thunder could be heard as the astronauts made their way to the pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, and a tornado warning was issued moments after they climbed into their capsule.
The preparations took place in the shadow of the coronavirus outbreak that has killed an estimated 100,000 Americans.
“We’re launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil. We haven’t done this really since 2011, so this is a unique moment in time,” Bridenstine said.
With this launch, he said, “everybody can look up and say, ‘Look, the future is so much brighter than the present.′ And I really hope that this is an inspiration to the world.”
The mission would put Musk and SpaceX in the same league as only three spacefaring countries — Russia, the U.S. and China, all of which sent astronauts into orbit.
“What today is about is reigniting the dream of space and getting people fired up about the future,” he said in a NASA interview before the flight was scrubbed.
A solemn-sounding Musk said he felt his responsibilities most strongly when he saw the astronauts’ wives and sons just before launch. He said he told them: “We’ve done everything we can to make sure your dads come back OK.”
NASA pushed ahead with the launch despite the viral outbreak, but kept the guest list at Kennedy extremely limited and asked spectators to stay at home. Still, beaches and parks along Florida’s Space Coast are open again, and hours before the launch, cars and RVs already were lining the causeway in Cape Canaveral.
The space agency also estimated 1.7 million people were watching the launch preparations online during the afternoon.
Among the sightseers was Erin Gatz, who came prepared for both rain and pandemic. Accompanied by her 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son, she brought face masks and a small tent to protect against the elements.
She said the children had faint memories of watching in person one of the last shuttle launches almost a decade ago when they were preschoolers.
“I wanted them to see the flip side and get to see the next era of space travel,” said Gatz, who lives in Deltona, Florida. “It’s exciting and hopeful.”
NASA hired SpaceX and Boeing in 2014 to transport astronauts to the space station in a new kind of public-private partnership. Development of SpaceX’s Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner capsules took longer than expected, however. Boeing’s ship is not expected to fly astronauts into space until early 2021.
“We’re doing it differently than we’ve ever done it before,” Bridenstine said. “We’re transforming how we do spaceflight in the future.”
After a long flight, and thrilling 
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