Tag: Mars

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Martian methane fades away but mystery remains

Curiosity rover
This image was taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover on June 18. It shows part of Teal Ridge, which the rover has been studying in a region called the “clay-bearing unit.” (NASA / JPL-Caltech Photo)

BELLEVUE, Wash. — NASA says the record-setting belch of Martian methane that its Curiosity rover detected last week has faded away, leaving some big questions hanging in the air: Where did the gas come from, and what were its origins?

Much of the methane on Earth is produced biologically, from sources ranging from microbes to the digestive tracts of cows and humans. But methane can also be produced through geological, completely non-biological processes. For example, methane makes up about 5 percent of the atmosphere of the Saturnian moon Titan, which is so cold that methane and other hydrocarbons pool up in lakes and rivers.

Curiosity’s onboard chemistry lab — known as Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM — has an instrument that can sense methane levels in the Red Planet’s atmosphere, and those levels usually amount to less than 1 part per billion by volume. But SAM has registered several curious methane spikes during its seven years of surface operations — including a rise to 6 parts per billion in 2013 that got NASA’s attention, and another detection that rose even higher during the following Martian year.

Last week, methane levels spiked to the highest levels ever detected by Curiosity: 21 parts per billion. That caused the SAM science team to change their plans for the weekend and make follow-up measurements.

Those measurements were sent back to the science team this morning, and they showed that methane levels were back to their usual level.

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Is there life on Mars? The answer may be squishy

Curiosity rover
NASA’s Curiosity rover took this selfie in June 2018 by capturing a series of pictures with a camera mounted on its robotic arm. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Photo)

BELLEVUE, Wash. — NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected fresh whiffs of Martian methane, once again sparking speculation about a potential biological source — but researchers at the space agency say it’s too early to raise the alert for life on Mars.

Scientists who are gathering here for the annual Astrobiology Science Conference, or AbSciCon, acknowledge that depending on the context, methane could be an indicator of biological activity, as it is on Earth. But it could just as well be of purely geological origin.

“It’s not in itself a biosignature,” Abigail Allwood, a field geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told GeekWire today during a media workshop.

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Put your name on NASA’s Mars 2020 rover

Members of the public who sign up to have their names sent to Mars will get a souvenir boarding pass to print out as well. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Image)

Space fans have been sending their names to Mars and other extraterrestrial destinations for more than two decades, and it’s that time again: From now until Sept. 30, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is taking names for the Mars 2020 rover mission.

All you have to do is type your name and location into an online form on NASA’s website and hit the “Send” button. You’ll instantly get the opportunity to print out or save a souvenir boarding pass, listing more than 300 million miles’ worth of faux frequent-flier award points.

Once all the names pass muster, they’ll be handed over to JPL’s Microdevices Laboratory to be etched onto a silicon chip with an electron beam. Each line of text will be a mere 75 nanometers wide — which is less than a thousandth the thickness of a human hair.

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Mars fans seek share of space spotlight

Mars mission
An artist’s conception depicts a crewed mission to Mars. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Illustration / 2004)

As NASA shifts the focus of its space exploration effort to the moon, the advocates of Mars exploration and settlement have a message for future lunar explorers: Don’t get too comfortable.

“I do think the moon should be included in the plan for human expansion into space,” Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and author of a new book titled “The Case for Space,” told GeekWire. “But we don’t want it to become an obstacle for further human expansion into space.”

Chris Carberry, executive director of Explore Mars, takes a similar stance.

“If we spend years and years and years getting there, and then we decide we’re going to stay there for a long time, it could delay Mars by decades,” he said.

Future Mars exploration will be grabbing a share of the spotlight once more this week at the annual Human to Mars Summit, sponsored by Carberry’s nonprofit group in Washington, D.C. Among the speakers on the agenda are NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, other officials from NASA and the European Space Agency who are planning Mars missions, and Paul Wooster, one of the engineers leading SpaceX’s charge to the Red Planet.

The three-day conference will be live-streamed from start to finish, starting at 8:30 a.m. ET (5:30 a.m. PT) on May 14.

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Elon Musk shows off Starship on moon and Mars

Starship on moon
An artist’s rendering shows SpaceX’s Starship on the moon. (Elon Musk via Twitter)

New renderings of SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket, shared by CEO Elon Musk on Twitter early today, show the shiny spaceship sitting on bare ground on the moon and Mars.

The artwork is similar to less shiny renderings that came out a couple of years ago when Musk laid out the architecture for the Starship launch system (which was then known as the BFR) at the International Astronautical Congress in Australia.

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Scientists narrow down source of Martian methane

Mars Express
The European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter has been circling Mars since 2003. (Spacecraft image credit: ESA / ATG Medialab; Mars: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

It may sound like an April Fool’s joke about flatulent aliens, but this is serious: The scientists behind the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter think they know where a smelly outburst of Martian methane came from.

Any joke would fall flat, because the proposed explanation is purely geological rather than, um, biological.

The source of Martian methane has been a mystery for 15 years, thanks in part to earlier findings from Mars Express.

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AI (and a few jokes) will keep crews sane on Mars

Daedalus crew on "Mars"
A crew touches down on the Red Planet in “Mars,” a National Geographic miniseries that delves into the dynamics of future Mars crews. (Credit: National Geographic Channels)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — When the first human explorers head for Mars, they’re likely to have a non-human judging their performance and tweaking their interpersonal relationships when necessary.

NASA and outside researchers are already working on artificial intelligence agents to monitor how future long-duration space crews interact, sort of like the holographic doctor on “Star Trek: Voyager.” But there’ll also be a need for the human touch — in the form of crew members who could serve the roles of social directors or easygoing jokesters.

That’s the upshot of research initiatives discussed over the weekend here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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NASA sings requiem to Opportunity rover

Opportunity rover
Ths colorized image of the Opportunity rover’s shadow was taken on July 26, 2004, by the rover’s front hazard-avoidance camera as it moved farther into Endurance Crater in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Photo)

After months of silence from Mars, NASA finally read the rites over its Opportunity rover, hailing the six-wheeled machine as an overachiever that found some of the first and best evidence of the Red Planet’s warmer, wetter past.

The solar-powered rover’s demise was no surprise: It fell out of contact with controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., last June — due to a globe-girdling Martian dust storm that kept Opportunity from charging its batteries.

Mission managers tried all sorts of tricks to wake up the comatose rover and re-establish communications, but it was to no avail. The last attempt was made on the night of Feb. 12.

Today’s final Opportunity news briefing took on the trappings of a memorial service, featuring far more ceremony than NASA employed when the Spirit rover — Opportunity’s twin in the Mars Exploration Rover mission — went dead in 2011.

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Mini-probes fade into the sunset beyond Mars

MarCO view of Mars
This image of Mars was captured by one of NASA’s MarCO satellites from a distance of about 4,700 miles, about 10 minutes after the descent of NASA’s Mars InSight lander on Nov. 26, 2018. The grid seen on the right edge of the image is the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Photo)

Farewell, WALL-E and EVE: NASA says it’s lost contact with two briefcase-sized MarCO nanosatellites, more than two months after their history-making Mars flyby.

And yet another robotic explorer, NASA’s Opportunity rover, has been mute on Mars for eight months, heightening suspicions that its 15-year watch could be at an end.

There’s still hope for Oppy: Mission managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory say they haven’t been able to rouse the golf-cart-sized robot since a global dust storm wiped kept it from recharging its solar-powered battery system last June. But with Martian winter closing in, they’ve just begun a new set of wakeup strategies.

There’s less hope for the two MarCO satellites, whose nicknames come from a couple of robotic characters in the Disney/Pixar animated film “WALL-E.”

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InSight lander sets first tool on Martian ground

Seismometer on Mars
An image from NASA’s InSight lander shows the probe’s robotic arm putting a seismometer on Mars. This is the first time a seismometer has been placed onto the surface of another planet. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Photo)

After three weeks of checking out the scene on the Red Planet, NASA’s InSight landerhas placed its first scientific instrument on the Martian surface.

The probe’s robotic arm pulled InSight’s seismometer, known as the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure or SEIS, from the spacecraft’s deck on Dec. 19 and slowly, gingerly set it down on a flat spot directly in front of the lander. The arm stretched out to nearly its maximum reach, 5.367 feet away from the deck.

Deploying SEIS is a major milestone for InSight’s two-year mission to monitor seismic activity and internal heat flow on the Red Planet. (The mission’s name is an acronym that stands for “Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.”)

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