A ULA Atlas V rocket is ready for launch this Saturday morning to send the Insight Lander to Mars, where it will use a seismograph and other instruments to study the interior of the Red Planet. Liftoff is set for 7:05 am EDT (4:05 am PDT, 1105 GMT). NASA TV coverage of the launch from Vandenberg AFB in California will start at 6:30 am EDT. On Thursday at 4:00 pm EDT, NASA TV will broadcast a pre-launch briefing about the mission.
InSight will be the first mission to peer deep beneath the Martian surface, studying the planet’s interior by measuring its heat output and listening for marsquakes, which are seismic events similar to earthquakes on Earth. It will use the seismic waves generated by marsquakes to develop a map of the planet’s deep interior. The resulting insight into Mars’ formation will help us better understand how other rocky planets, including Earth, were and are created.
JPL manages the InSight mission for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. InSight is part of NASA’s Discovery Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The spacecraft, including cruise stage and lander, was built and tested by Lockheed Martin Space in Denver.
Several European partners, including France’s space agency, the Centre National d’Étude Spatiales, and Germany’s DLR, are supporting the mission.
Here is an overview of the mission from NASA:
Lockheed-Martin was the lead contractor building the spacecraft:
Here is a science briefing on the mission held back in March:
The Planetary Society‘s “Planetary Post with Robert Picardo” reports from the spacecraft clean room:
Curiosity’s exploration of Vera Rubin Ridge is extended, while an attempt by Opportunity to climb back up Perseverance Valley to reach an interesting rock outcrop fails.
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Here is an overview of NASA JPL’s goal of one day bringing back a sample of Martian soil to earth:
Here is a new video from NASA JPL about a plan to return a sample of Martian soil to the earth:
And here is a video of a recent public lecture at the SETI Institute giving an overview of Mars research plans:
Three SETI Institute planetary scientists who have dedicated their career to the study of the red planet will tell us what we have learned from those studies, and what the next steps are in the exploration of Mars with the next generation of rovers. Janice Bishop will introduce the candidate landing sites for upcoming martian rovers. She will focus on the mineralogy determined from the CRISM spectrometer at Mars and what that can tell us about Mars’ early environment. Ginny Gulick will describe the fluvial morphology/water history of these sites as seen by the HiRISE and CTX cameras. Finally, Pablo Sobron will address the instruments scheduled for the Mars2020 and ExoMars rovers and how SuperCam, Sherlock and the ExoMars Raman/LIBS instrument will be used to explore mineralogy and organics at the future landing sites.
In 2014 the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe went into orbit around Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and spent a couple of years studying it. Jacint Roger Perez combined a series of 33 images made during a 25 minute period as the probe flew about 13 kilometers from the comet and the resulting time lapse creates the dramatic scene below:
Gif animation created by Jacint Roger Perez from Rosetta images of Comet 67P.
Although it looks like a blizzard, the white dots and streaks are a mix of stars in the dark background plus dust and ice particles, as well as radiation going through the imager. The comet’s surface at the time was stirred up from the heat of the sun.
More about the animation and the Rossetta mission:
In this animation the viewer is taken low over Jupiter’s north pole to illustrate the 3-D aspects of the region’s central cyclone and the eight cyclones that encircle it. The movie utilizes imagery derived from data collected by the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument aboard NASA’s Juno mission during its fourth pass over the massive planet. Infrared cameras are used to sense the temperature of Jupiter’s atmosphere and provide insight into how the powerful cyclones at Jupiter’s poles work. In the animation, the yellow areas are warmer (or deeper into Jupiter’s atmosphere) and the dark areas are colder (or higher up in Jupiter’s atmosphere). In this picture the highest “brightness temperature” is around 260K (about -13°C) and the lowest around 190K (about -83°C). The “brightness temperature” is a measurement of the radiance, at 5 µm, traveling upward from the top of the atmosphere towards Juno, expressed in units of temperature.
Scientists working on NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter shared a 3-D infrared movie depicting densely packed cyclones and anticyclones that permeate the planet’s polar regions, and the first detailed view of a dynamo, or engine, powering the magnetic field for any planet beyond Earth. Those are among the items unveiled during the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, Austria, on Wednesday, April 11.
Juno mission scientists have taken data collected by the spacecraft’s Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument and generated the 3-D fly-around of the Jovian world’s north pole. Imaging in the infrared part of the spectrum, JIRAM captures light emerging from deep inside Jupiter equally well, night or day. The instrument probes the weather layer down to 30 to 45 miles (50 to 70 kilometers) below Jupiter’s cloud tops. The imagery will help the team understand the forces at work in the animation – a north pole dominated by a central cyclone surrounded by eight circumpolar cyclones with diameters ranging from 2,500 to 2,900 miles (4,000 to 4,600 kilometers).
“Before Juno, we could only guess what Jupiter’s poles would look like,” said Alberto Adriani, Juno co-investigator from the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology, Rome. “Now, with Juno flying over the poles at a close distance it permits the collection of infrared imagery on Jupiter’s polar weather patterns and its massive cyclones in unprecedented spatial resolution.”
Another Juno investigation discussed during the media briefing was the team’s latest pursuit of the interior composition of the gas giant. One of the biggest pieces in its discovery has been understanding how Jupiter’s deep interior rotates.
“Prior to Juno, we could not distinguish between extreme models of Jupiter’s interior rotation, which all fitted the data collected by Earth-based observations and other deep space missions,” said Tristan Guillot, a Juno co-investigator from the Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France. “But Juno is different — it orbits the planet from pole-to-pole and gets closer to Jupiter than any spacecraft ever before. Thanks to the amazing increase in accuracy brought by Juno’s gravity data, we have essentially solved the issue of how Jupiter’s interior rotates: The zones and belts that we see in the atmosphere rotating at different speeds extend to about 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers).
“At this point, hydrogen becomes conductive enough to be dragged into near-uniform rotation by the planet’s powerful magnetic field.”
The same data used to analyze Jupiter’s rotation contain information on the planet’s interior structure and composition. Not knowing the interior rotation was severely limiting the ability to probe the deep interior.
“Now our work can really begin in earnest — determining the interior composition of the solar system’s largest planet,” said Guillot.
At the meeting, the mission’s deputy-principal investigator, Jack Connerney of the Space Research Corporation, Annapolis, Maryland, presented the first detailed view of the dynamo, or engine, powering the magnetic field of Jupiter.
NASA’s Juno mission has provided the first view of the dynamo, or engine, powering Jupiter’s magnetic field. The new global portrait reveals unexpected irregularities and regions of surprising magnetic field intensity. Red areas show where magnetic field lines emerge from the planet, while blue areas show where they return. As Juno continues its mission, it will improve our understanding of Jupiter’s complex magnetic environment.
Connerney and colleagues produced the new magnetic field model from measurements made during eight orbits of Jupiter. From those, they derived maps of the magnetic field at the surface and in the region below the surface where the dynamo is thought to originate. Because Jupiter is a gas giant, “surface” is defined as one Jupiter radius, which is about 44,400 miles (71,450 kilometers).
These maps provide an extraordinary advancement in current knowledge and will guide the science team in planning the spacecraft’s remaining observations.
“We’re finding that Jupiter’s magnetic field is unlike anything previously imagined,” said Connerney. “Juno’s investigations of the magnetic environment at Jupiter represent the beginning of a new era in the studies of planetary dynamos.”
The map Connerney’s team made of the dynamo source region revealed unexpected irregularities, regions of surprising magnetic field intensity, and that Jupiter’s magnetic field is more complex in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere. About halfway between the equator and the north pole lies an area where the magnetic field is intense and positive. It is flanked by areas that are less intense and negative. In the southern hemisphere, however, the magnetic field is consistently negative, becoming more and more intense from the equator to the pole.
The researchers are still figuring out why they would see these differences in a rotating planet that’s generally thought of as more-or-less fluid.
“Juno is only about one third the way through its planed mapping mission and already we are beginning to discover hints on how Jupiter’s dynamo works,” said Connerney. “The team is really anxious to see the data from our remaining orbits.”
Juno has logged nearly 122 million miles (200 million kilometers) to complete those 11 science passes since entering Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, 2016. Juno’s 12th science pass will be on May 24.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The Italian Space Agency (ASI), contributed two instruments, a Ka-band frequency translator (KaT) and the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM). Lockheed Martin Space, Denver, built the spacecraft.
