Category Archives: Mars

Images of dunes and gullies on a Mars crater wall

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter sends a terrific view of dunes and gullies formed on a crater wall on the Red Planet:

The Contrasting Colors of Crater Dunes and Gullies 

Gullies are relatively common features in the steep slopes of crater walls, possibly formed by dry debris flows, movement of carbon dioxide frost, or perhaps the melting of ground ice.

This example shows a section of crater wall from the rocky crater rim at the far left of the image, down to the dark dusty dunes on the crater floor in the bottom right. (North is to the left.) The rock of the crater walls shows up deep orange, and the sandy deposits on the crater floor and the base of the crater walls appear blue. The sand isn’t really blue; the different colors in this image represent different material compositions.

The gullies in this image have two main sections: a scalloped alcove at the top of the gully (left/center), and defined channel sections further down the crater wall (right/center). Material from the alcove will have traveled down the channel to the crater floor. This normally forms a third section to a typical gully, a debris fan. Fans commonly visible at the base of gullies are not obvious in this example however, as the wind blown sediments (blue) have covered the crater floor after gully formation.

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

Hi-Rise raw image. Click for larger version

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Video: Crew of 6 enters HI-SEAS Mars sim for 8 month stay

HI-SEAS (Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) is a NASA funded project run by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in which teams of volunteers spend long periods in an isolated habitat atop Mauna Loa to simulate long term missions on Mars: HI-SEAS Mission V crew preparing to enter Mars simulation habitat – University of Hawaiʻi System News

While the 0.376 g gravity of Mars can’t be generated, they try to simulate as much as they can. Whenever a crew person goes outside, for example, they must wear a space suit. Communications between the crew and anyone on “earth” have lengthy time delays added.

A team of six people entered the geodesic domed facility on January 19th to begin an eight month stay:

During the eight-month HI-SEAS Mission V the crew will perform exploration tasks such as geological fieldwork and life systems management. The isolated and confined conditions of the mission, including 20-minutes of delayed communication and partial self-sufficiency, have been designed to be similar to those of a planetary surface exploration mission. Daily routines include food preparation from only shelf-stable ingredients, exercise, research and fieldwork aligned with NASA’s planetary exploration expectations.

Under the watchful eye of the research team and supported by experienced mission control, the crew will participate in eight primary and three opportunistic research studies. The NASA-funded primary research will be conducted by scientists from across the U.S. and Europe who are at the forefront of their fields.

The primary behavioral research includes a shared social behavioral task for team building, continuous monitoring of face-to-face interactions with sociometric badges, a virtual reality team-based collaborative exercise to predict individual and team behavioral health and performance and multiple stress, cognitive countermeasure and monitoring studies.

Here is a TMRO.tv Spacepod short report on the project: 6 people chosen for MARS MISSION! – Space Pod 01/18/17 – TMRO

Lisa Stojanovski reveals the 6 humans chosen for an 8 month simulated Mars mission, HI-SEAS Mission V, and explains where they’ll live, and the kinds of research they’ll perform. For more information on HI-SEAS visit hi-seas.org

The crew are: Ansley Barnard, Samuel Payler, James Bevington, Joshua Ehrlich, Laura Lark and Brian Ramos.

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“The Mars Generation” – Documentary debuts at Sundance

Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker Michael Barnett has a new : Teen rocket scientists star at Sundance’s SLC opening | The Salt Lake Tribune

Space exploration offers humans the chance to survive as a species.

That’s the unifying message offered by Michael Barnett’s “The Mars Generation,” which focuses on the funny, smart teenage wannabe rocket scientists attending the U.S. Space and Rocket Center’s Space Camp. Along the way, the documentary offers an inspiring call to action as it details America’s past and future space dreams.

The Friday night screening marked the Salt Lake City opening of the Sundance Film Festival. The “Mars Generation” premiere on Inauguration Day seemed significant, the director said, because he hopes it will jump-start a conversation about space exploration.

“Now is not the time to become nearsighted about the big idea of becoming interplanetary,” Barnett said. “This film is about the generation who is going to take us to Mars — if they are empowered to do so.”

More at

 

Radar study finds Mars ice deposit with water comparable to Lake Superior

A huge underground deposit of water has been detected on Mars:

Mars Ice Deposit Holds as Much Water as Lake Superior

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This vertically exaggerated view shows scalloped depressions in a part of Mars where such textures prompted researchers to check for buried ice, using ground-penetrating radar aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona › Full image and caption

Frozen beneath a region of cracked and pitted plains on Mars lies about as much water as what’s in Lake Superior, largest of the Great Lakes, researchers using NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have determined.

Scientists examined part of Mars’ Utopia Planitia region, in the mid-northern latitudes, with the orbiter’s ground-penetrating Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument. Analyses of data from more than 600 overhead passes with the onboard radar instrument reveal a deposit more extensive in area than the state of New Mexico. The deposit ranges in thickness from about 260 feet (80 meters) to about 560 feet (170 meters), with a composition that’s 50 to 85 percent water ice, mixed with dust or larger rocky particles.


Fast Facts:

› Water ice makes up half or more of an underground layer in a large region of Mars about halfway from the equator to the north pole.

› The amount of water in this deposit is about as much as in Lake Superior. It was assessed using a radar aboard a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars.

› This research advances understanding about Mars’ history and identifies a possible resource for future astronauts.


At the latitude of this deposit — about halfway from the equator to the pole — water ice cannot persist on the surface of Mars today. It sublimes into water vapor in the planet’s thin, dry atmosphere. The Utopia deposit is shielded from the atmosphere by a soil covering estimated to be about 3 to 33 feet (1 to 10 meters) thick.

“This deposit probably formed as snowfall accumulating into an ice sheet mixed with dust during a period in Mars history when the planet’s axis was more tilted than it is today,”

said Cassie Stuurman of the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the lead author of a report in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

This vertically exaggerated view shows scalloped depressions in a part of Mars where such textures prompted researchers to check for buried ice, using ground-penetrating radar aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
This vertically exaggerated view shows scalloped depressions in a part of Mars where such textures prompted researchers to check for buried ice, using ground-penetrating radar aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona › Full image and caption

Mars today, with an axial tilt of 25 degrees, accumulates large amounts of water ice at the poles. In cycles lasting about 120,000 years, the tilt varies to nearly twice that much, heating the poles and driving ice to middle latitudes. Climate modeling and previous findings of buried, mid-latitude ice indicate that frozen water accumulates away from the poles during high-tilt periods.

Martian Water as a Future Resource

The name Utopia Planitia translates loosely as the “plains of paradise.” The newly surveyed ice deposit spans latitudes from 39 to 49 degrees within the plains. It represents less than one percent of all known water ice on Mars, but it more than doubles the volume of thick, buried ice sheets known in the northern plains. Ice deposits close to the surface are being considered as a resource for astronauts.

“This deposit is probably more accessible than most water ice on Mars, because it is at a relatively low latitude and it lies in a flat, smooth area where landing a spacecraft would be easier than at some of the other areas with buried ice,”

said Jack Holt of the University of Texas, a co-author of the Utopia paper who is a SHARAD co-investigator and has previously used radar to study Martian ice in buried glaciers and the polar caps.

The Utopian water is all frozen now. If there were a melted layer — which would be significant for the possibility of life on Mars — it would have been evident in the radar scans. However, some melting can’t be ruled out during different climate conditions when the planet’s axis was more tilted.

“Where water ice has been around for a long time, we just don’t know whether there could have been enough liquid water at some point for supporting microbial life,” Holt said.

Mars Ice Deposit Holds as Much Water as Lake Superior Subsurface Water-Ice Deposit in Utopia Planitia, MarsScalloped Terrain Led to Finding of Buried Ice on MarsRadargrams Indicating Ice-Rich Subsurface Deposit These two images show Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument data from two tracks in a part of Mars' Utopia Planitia region where the orbiting, ground-penetrating radar on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter detected subsurface deposits rich in water ice. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Rome/ASI/PSI
Mars Ice Deposit Holds as Much Water as Lake Superior Subsurface Water-Ice Deposit in Utopia Planitia, MarsScalloped Terrain Led to Finding of Buried Ice on MarsRadargrams Indicating Ice-Rich Subsurface Deposit These two images show Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument data from two tracks in a part of Mars’ Utopia Planitia region where the orbiting, ground-penetrating radar on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter detected subsurface deposits rich in water ice. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Rome/ASI/PSI › Full image and caption

Utopia Planitia is a basin with a diameter of about 2,050 miles (3,300 kilometers), resulting from a major impact early in Mars’ history and subsequently filled. NASA sent the Viking 2 Lander to a site near the center of Utopia in 1976. The portion examined by Stuurman and colleagues lies southwest of that long-silent lander.

Use of the Italian-built SHARAD instrument for examining part of Utopia Planitia was prompted by Gordon Osinski at Western University in Ontario, Canada, a co-author of the study. For many years, he and other researchers have been intrigued by ground-surface patterns there such as polygonal cracking and rimless pits called scalloped depressions — “like someone took an ice-cream scoop to the ground,” said Stuurman, who started this project while a student at Western.

Clue from Canada

In the Canadian Arctic, similar landforms are indicative of ground ice, Osinski noted,

“but there was an outstanding question as to whether any ice was still present at the Martian Utopia or whether it had been lost over the millions of years since the formation of these polygons and depressions.”

The large volume of ice detected with SHARAD advances understanding about Mars’ history and identifies a possible resource for future use.

“It’s important to expand what we know about the distribution and quantity of Martian water,” said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Deputy Project Scientist Leslie Tamppari, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. “We know early Mars had enough liquid water on the surface for rivers and lakes. Where did it go? Much of it left the planet from the top of the atmosphere. Other missions have been examining that process. But there’s also a large quantity that is now underground ice, and we want to keep learning more about that.”

Joe Levy of the University of Texas, a co-author of the new study, said,

“The ice deposits in Utopia Planitia aren’t just an exploration resource, they’re also one of the most accessible climate change records on Mars. We don’t understand fully why ice has built up in some areas of the Martian surface and not in others. Sampling and using this ice with a future mission could help keep astronauts alive, while also helping them unlock the secrets of Martian ice ages.”

SHARAD is one of six science instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which began its prime science phase 10 years ago this month. The mission’s longevity is enabling studies of features and active processes all around Mars, from subsurface to upper atmosphere. The Italian Space Agency provided the SHARAD instrument and Sapienza University of Rome leads its operations. The Planetary Science Institute, based in Tucson, Arizona, leads U.S. involvement in SHARAD. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, manages the orbiter mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Denver built the spacecraft and supports its operations.

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Mars weather seen in animations of orbiter images

Check out the cool animated clips of Mars weather in action created by Justin Cowart of The Planetary Society from still images taken by the HRSC (High/Super Resolution Stereo Colour Imager) on the Mars Express spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet:

Here are a couple of examples:

 

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Dust storm over Tempe Terra, seen by Mars Express’ HRSC during a pass on June 17, 2011. This image was taken during the spacecraft’s 9520th orbit of Mars. Credits: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin (G. Neukum) / Justin Cowart

 

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Wake clouds and dust lifting in Arcadia Planitia, seen by Mars Express’ HRSC during a pass on June 30, 2011. This image was taken during the spacecraft’s 9563rd orbit of Mars. Credits: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin (G. Neukum) / Justin Cowart

 

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