Mars Odyssey celebrates 100,000 orbits, captures epic view of solar system's largest volcano

NASA's Odyssey spacecraft, the longest-running mission at Mars, circled the Red Planet for the 100,000th time today, the mission team announced in a statement. To celebrate the milestone, the space agency released an intricate panorama of Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the solar system; Odyssey captured the view in March. The volcano's base sprawls 373 miles (600 kilometers) near the Martian equator while it soars 17 miles (27 kilometers) into the planet's thin air. Earlier this month, astronomers discovered ephemeral morning frost coating the volcano's top for a few hours every day, offering fresh insights into how ice from the poles circulates throughout the parched world. In Odyssey's latest image of the volcano, the bluish-white band seen grazing Olympus Mons shows the amount of dust floating in the Martian air when the image was taken, according to NASA. The thin coat of purple just above likely hints at a mixture of atmospheric dust with bluish water-ice clouds. The blue-green layer at the top-edge of the world marks where water-ice clouds reach up about 30 miles (48 kilometers) into the Martian sky, scientists say.

On March 11, 2024, NASA's Odyssey orbiter captured an intricate panorama of Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in our solar system. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)

To capture the latest panorama, scientists commanded Odyssey to slowly rotate such that its camera pointed toward the Martian horizon, capturing views similar to the kind International Space Station dwellers take of Earth."Normally we see Olympus Mons in narrow strips from above, but by turning the spacecraft toward the horizon we can see in a single image how large it looms over the landscape," Jeffrey Plaut, who is Odyssey's project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, said in the recent news release. "Not only is the image spectacular, it also provides us with unique science data."

By snapping similar images at different times during the year, scientists can study how the Martian atmosphere changes over the planet's four seasons, which last from four to seven months each.

Scientists say the groundwork for the latest image began as early as 2008, when another NASA mission named Phoenix landed on Mars. When Odyssey, which served as a communication link between the lander and Earth, pointed its antenna at the lander, scientists noticed its camera was able to view Mars' horizon.

"We just decided to turn the camera on and see how it looked," said Steve Sanders, who serves as Odyssey's mission operations spacecraft engineer at Lockheed Martin Space in Denver, Colorado. "Based on those experiments, we designed a sequence that keeps [the camera's] field-of-view centered on the horizon as we go around the planet."

The Odyssey mission launched in April 2001 and is managed by JPL. It was NASA's first successful mission to Mars after a pair of failures two years earlier. In 1998, the Mars Climate Orbiter reportedly burned up in Mars' atmosphere after mission engineers mixed up translations between two measurement systems. A year later, the Mars Polar Lander smashed onto the Martian surface due to its engine abruptly shutting off prior to touchdown. Odyssey was therefore widely viewed as a mission of redemption.

Odyssey slid into an orbit around Mars in October 2001, and has since revealed previously hidden water-ice reservoirs just beneath the planet's surface, which may be within reach of future Mars astronauts. The spacecraft also mapped vast swaths of the planet's surface, including its craters, which have helped astronomers decode Mars' history.

The spacecraft's recent milestone of 100,000 orbits means it has covered over 1.4 billion miles (2.2 billion kilometers). The sun-powered spacecraft does not have a fuel gauge, so the mission team relies on their math skills to estimate leftover fuel that keeps the 23-year-old mission running. "Physics does a lot of the hard work for us," said Sanders. "But it's the subtleties we have to manage again and again."

Recent calculations suggest Odyssey has about 9 pounds (4 kilograms) of propellant remaining, which is sufficient to last the legacy mission until the end of 2025.

"It takes careful monitoring to keep a mission going this long while maintaining a historical timeline of scientific planning and execution — and innovative engineering practices," said Joseph Hunt, Odyssey's project manager at JPL. "We're looking forward to collecting more great science in the years ahead."

NASA studying larger Mars helicopters

With the Ingenuity helicopter continuing to demonstrate its abilities on Mars, NASA engineers are examining concepts for larger, more capable rotorcraft that could be flown on future missions. Ingenuity performed its eighth flight on Mars June 21, traveling 160 meters and landing at a new site 133.5 meters from the Perseverance rover. The flight, which lasted 77.4 seconds, was the third since Ingenuity shifted from its original five-flight technology demonstration mission, proving it could fly in the thin Martian atmosphere, to serving as an operations demonstration working in conjunction with Perseverance. Those flights are scheduled to continue for at least a few more months. “Part of what is going to be happening in the coming months are additional flights that demonstrate how this dance can work between the helicopter and the rover,” said Ken Farley, chief scientist for the Mars 2020 mission, during a June 21 meeting of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG). That includes, he said, obtaining imagery of places that the rover cannot travel, such as a region called Seitah that is too rough for the rover to traverse. Helicopter images could also be used to create “terrain meshes” to enable longer drives by the rover by giving it information about terrain the rover’s own cameras, mounted on a mast, cannot see.

A concept called Mars Science Helicopter, shown in a video at a recent Mars exploration meeting, would fly a 30-kilogram hexacopter capable of traveling up to 10 kilometers per flight and carry five kilograms of science payloads. Credit: NASA JPL/NASA Ames/AeroVironment

“That is going to continue for at least few more months, with a cadence of a couple of flights,” he said. “That is the level that we can easily make this coordination work.”

“We hope to fly many, many more,” said Teddy Tzanetos of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, part of the Ingenuity team, at MEPAG. The helicopter has flown a cumulative distance of nearly one kilometer, including 266 meters in one flight. However, the project is considering “stretch capabilities” of individual flights up to one kilometer long, lasting up to three minutes. “That would really be pushing the limit of what the technology demonstrator is capable of.”

Data collected by Ingenuity is supporting planning of a future helicopter design by engineers at JPL, NASA’s Ames Research Center and AeroVironment. The Mars Science Helicopter would be a hexacopter, or six-rotor helicopter, with a mass of about 30 kilograms. Ingenuity, by contrast, weighs 1.8 kilograms. Mars Science Helicopter could carry as much as five kilograms of science payloads and fly up to 10 kilometers per sortie.

“We’re trying to look at the science applications: what science is enabled by having the aerial dimension added,” he said. That includes traveling to locations inaccessible to rovers, such as the sides of cliffs and into caves.

In a white paper submitted as part of the ongoing planetary science decadal survey, scientists identified several applications for the Mars Science Helicopter, from studies of Martian geology and atmosphere to examination of “special regions” of astrobiological interest without risk of contamination.

One notional mission described in the paper is to visit an outflow channel called Mawrth Vallis that is difficult for rovers to access, collect samples at several locations and then return them to a lander for analysis. “We’re open to ideas and new concepts,” Tzanetos said.

He did not discuss potential costs or flight opportunities for Mars Science Helicopter, although the white paper notes that “there are viable roles for [Mars Science Helicopter] across a range of mission classes,” including NASA’s Discovery and New Frontiers classes. A simpler helicopter design included in the white paper, essentially a scaled-up version of Ingenuity, “is sufficiently low mass and low volume that it should be considered in all future launch opportunities to Mars’ surface,” the paper concluded.

Agency officials said earlier this year they were not considering adding a helicopter to its next lander mission, the Sample Return Lander that is part of the Mars Sample Return program and is scheduled for launch no earlier than 2026.

NASA's Insight Mars Lander Is 'in Crisis', And Has Entered Emergency Hibernation

NASA's $800 million Mars lander is in an energy crisis. InSight, which landed in a Martian plain called Elysium Planitia in 2018, has detected more than 500 Mars quakes, felt more than 10,000 dust devils pass by, and started to measure the planet's core. But over the past few months, InSight has been fighting for its life as the red planet's unpredictable weather threatens to snuff out the robot. Unlike other sites where NASA has sent rovers and landers – including the landing spot of the new Perseverance rover and its Mars helicopter – powerful gusts of wind have not been sweeping Elysium Planitia. These winds, called "cleaning events," are needed to blow the red Martian dust off the solar panels of NASA's robots. Without their help, a thick layer of dust has accumulated on InSight, and it's struggling to absorb sunlight. InSight's solar panels were producing just 27 percent of their energy capacity in February, when winter was arriving in Elysium Planitia. So NASA decided to put the lander in "hibernation mode," switching off different instruments each day. Soon the robot will shut down all functions that aren't necessary for its survival. By pausing its scientific operations, the lander should be able to save enough power to keep its systems warm through the frigid Martian nights, when temperatures can drop to negative-130 degrees Fahrenheit.

"The amount of power available over the next few months will really be driven by the weather," Chuck Scott, InSight's project manager, said in a statement.

Now almost halfway through its expected hibernation period, InSight is still in good condition, but the risk of a potentially fatal power failure is ever-present. If the lander's batteries die, it might never recover.

"We would be hopeful that we'd be able to bring it back back to life, especially if it's not asleep or dead for a long period of time," Bruce Banerdt, InSight's principal investigator, told Insider. "But that would be a dicey situation."

The agency expects to restart InSight's full operations after Mars swings back toward the sun in July. If it can survive this Martian winter, the lander could keep listening for quakes and tracking weather into 2022.

InSight's power shortage contributed to NASA's decision to abandon the lander's "mole" in January. That burrowing probe was supposed to measure the temperature deep in the Martian crust – crucial data in the study of the planet's history and internal structure.

Now scientists are missing out on even more data as the lander shuts down its instruments. Its Mars weather measurements have become scarce, and in the next month or so, it will stop listening for quakes.

Banerdt said he fears the lander could miss some big quakes, but it's worth it to keep the robot alive. If InSight's batteries die, he added, "it's a good zombie spacecraft" – meaning it's programmed to recharge and start up again once the sun comes out.

"The problem with that scenario is that in the meantime, the spacecraft is very, very cold. And this is happening during the coldest part of the year for the spacecraft," Banerdt said. "A lot of the electronics is pretty delicate. And it's, unfortunately, pretty likely that something would be damaged by the cold."

Banerdt suspects that's what happened to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Both ran out of energy on the Martian surface and were unable to power up again. He's hopeful that InSight won't have to die, though.

"Right now, our predictions, our projections are that we should be able to make it through the lowest-power point and come out the other side," Banerdt said.

Still, an odd dust storm in the next four or five months could tip the scales by piling more dirt onto InSight's solar panels. That's what happened to Opportunity. But luckily, it's not dust-storm season.

"We think we're pretty well off, but Mars is unpredictable. We never know exactly what's going to happen," Banerdt said.

Who is controlling Nasa's Mars rover? Indian-origin scientist from his flat in London

Nasa's Perseverance Mars rover made history earlier this year by successfully landing on the red planet. Nearly seven months after its takeoff, the Perseverance rover landed at Mars' Jezero Crater on February 19. Would you believe that Nasa's life-on-Mars mission valued at $3 billion is being controlled by an Indian-origin doctor from his one-bedroom apartment in London? Professor Sanjeev Gupta, a scientist with Nasa is controlling the Mars rover 'Perseverance' from his flat in south London. Professor Gupta was supposed to be at mission control in California but the Covid-19 pandemic restricted him to his flat above a hairdresser in Lewisham. "I should be at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, in a series of offices each one about three times bigger than this lounge, full of hundreds of scientists and engineers with their heads buried in laptops surrounded by large screens," Professor Sanjeev Gupta told the Daily Mail. 

Professor Sanjeev Gupta

When he found out that he would not be able to work out of mission control in California, Professor Sanjeev Gupta decided to rent a one-bedroom flat in Lewisham.

I did not want to disturb the sleep of my wife and children, he told the UK publication.

Professor Gupta has turned his rented apartment into a mini control centre with at least five computers and two other screens for video conferences with fellow scientists at Nasa.

One of Nasa's leading scientists working on the Perseverance Mars rover, Professor Gupta is a geology expert at London's Imperial College.

Accompanied by a team of nearly 400 scientists, Professor Sanjeev Gupta is directing the Perseverance rover to drill for samples on Mars. These samples will be transported back to Earth by 2027.

Nuclear-powered rocket could get astronauts to Mars faster

By 2035, NASA wants to land humans on Mars. But reaching the red planet, on average around 140 million miles away, will be a mammoth feat. Colder than Antarctica and with little to no oxygen, Mars is a hostile environment. The longer it takes astronauts to get there and the longer they stay, the more they are at risk. That's why scientists are looking at ways to reduce trip time. Seattle-based company Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies (USNC-Tech) has proposed a solution: a nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) engine that could get humans from Earth to Mars in just three months. Currently, the shortest possible trip for an unmanned spacecraft is seven months, but a crewed mission is expected to take at least nine months. Michael Eades, director of engineering at USNC-Tech, says that nuclear-powered rockets would be more powerful and twice as efficient as the chemical engines used today, meaning they could travel further and faster, while burning less fuel. "Nuclear technology will expand humanity's reach beyond low Earth orbit, and into deep space," he tells CNN. As well as enabling human space travel, it could open up space for galactic business opportunities, he says. Most rockets today are powered by chemical engines. These could get you to Mars, but it would take a long time -- at least three years for a round trip -- says Jeff Sheehy, chief engineer of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate. NASA wants to get there faster, to minimize the crew's time in outer space, he says. This would reduce their exposure to space radiation, which can cause health problems including radiation sickness, increased lifetime risk of cancer, central nervous system effects and degenerative diseases.

It would also decrease the overall risk of the mission. "The longer you're out there, the more time there is for stuff to go wrong," he adds. That's why the space agency is looking to develop nuclear-powered rockets. An NTP system uses a nuclear reactor to generate heat from a uranium fuel. That thermal energy heats a liquid propellant, usually liquid hydrogen, which expands into a gas and is shot out the back end, producing thrust. NTP rockets produce twice the thrust per unit of propellant than a chemical system -- which is like saying it does "double the miles per gallon," says Sheehy. This means the technology could get astronauts to Mars and back in less than two years.

An illustration of a spacecraft with a nuclear-enabled propulsion system. Courtesy of NASA

However, one of the main challenges for building an NTP engine is finding a uranium fuel that can withstand the blistering temperatures inside a nuclear thermal engine. USNC-Tech claims to have solved this problem by developing a fuel that can operate in temperatures up to 2,700 degrees Kelvin (4,400 degrees Fahrenheit). The fuel contains silicon carbide, a material used in tank armor, which forms a gas-tight barrier that prevents the escape of radioactive products from the nuclear reactor, protecting the astronauts. Along with other companies developing similar technology, USNC-Tech has presented its development to NASA. While Sheehy would not comment on the specifics of any individual designs, he said the developments show that nuclear engines are feasible and could make "a good choice for human exploration to Mars."

Is the nuclear option safe?

Shorter missions would limit the crew's exposure to space radiation, but there is still concern about the radiation emitted from the nuclear reactor inside the spacecraft. This would be mitigated through the rocket's design, Eades explains. The liquid propellants -- stored between the engine and the crew area -- block out radioactive particles, acting as "a tremendously good radiation shield," he says.

A rendering of the USNC-Tech NTP systems in line at a rocket hangar. The system is roughly 13 feet (four meters) long.

The distance between the crew and reactor also provides a buffer, says Sheehy, and any NTP design would place the living quarters at the other end of the rocket to the reactor.To protect people on the ground, NTP spacecraft would not lift-off directly from Earth, Sheehy adds. Instead, a regular chemical rocket would hoist it into orbit, and only then would it fire up its nuclear reactor. Once in orbit, it could do little harm, he says, as blasts and thermal radiation cannot move through a vacuum. If disaster struck and the rocket's reactor broke up, the pieces would not land on Earth -- or any other planet -- for tens of thousands of years, he says. By that time, the radioactive substance would have "naturally decayed to the point where it wasn't hazardous anymore."

Deep space exploration

Although USNC-Tech's current goal for a one-way trip is five to nine months, nuclear-powered technology has the potential to cut journeys from Earth to Mars to just 90 days, says Eades. These faster journey times could open up a wealth of opportunities. USNC-Tech is hoping to develop its technology for government agencies like NASA and the Department of Defense, and for the commercial space market. The company says its concept could help to power space tourism and "rapid orbital logistics services," such as transporting satellites or delivering spacecraft capable of repairing satellites out in space. Sheehy agrees that nuclear-powered rockets will be key to opening up the solar system but cautions that it could be at least two decades before they are used widely. Numerous demonstrations and tests would need to be carried out before a crew is sent to Mars in an NTP rocket, he says.
"Nobody's ever flown nuclear propulsion yet," he says. "I think it's going to have to be flown a few times ... before somebody sells tickets."

Seven things to know about the NASA rover about to land on Mars

With only about 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) left to go in its 293-million-mile (471-million-kilometer) journey, NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover is nearing its new planetary home. The spacecraft has begun its approach to the Red Planet and in 43 days, on Feb. 18, 2021, Perseverance will blaze through Mars' atmosphere at about 12,100 mph (19,500 kph), touching down gently on the surface about seven minutes later. "We're working on our last adjustments to put Perseverance in perfect position to land in one of the most interesting places on Mars," said Fernando Abilleira, deputy mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "The team can't wait to put these wheels in some Martian dirt." Built and managed by JPL for NASA, Perseverance will be joining another rover and lander currently at work on Mars, with several orbiters in the skies above. What sets this six-wheeled robot apart?

1. Perseverance is searching for signs of ancient life.


While the surface of Mars is a frozen desert today, scientists have learned from previous NASA missions that the Red Planet once hosted running water and warmer environments at the surface that could have supported microbial life.

"We want Perseverance to help us answer the next logical question: Are there actually signs of past microbial life on Mars?" said Katie Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist at JPL. "This demanding goal means sending the most sophisticated robotic scientist yet to Mars."

To tackle this question, which is key in the field of astrobiology, Perseverance carries a new suite of cutting-edge science instruments. Two of them will play a particularly important role in the search for potential signs of past life: SHERLOC (short for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals), which can detect organic matter and minerals, and PIXL (short for Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry), which maps the chemical composition of rocks and sediments. The instruments will allow scientists to analyze these features together at a higher level of detail than any Mars rover has achieved before.

Perseverance will also use some instruments to gather science data from a distance: Mastcam-Z's cameras can zoom in on rock textures from as far away as a soccer field, while SuperCam will use a laser to zap rock and regolith (broken rock and dust) to study their composition in the resulting vapor. RIMFAX (short for Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Experiment) will use radar waves to probe geological features underground.

2. The rover is landing in a place with a high potential for finding these signs of past microbial life.


Terrain that is interesting to scientists can be challenging to land on. Thanks to new technologies that enable Perseverance to target its landing site more accurately and to autonomously avoid landing hazards, the spacecraft can safely touch down in a place as intriguing as Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer-wide) basin that has steep cliffs, sand dunes, and boulder fields.

More than 3.5 billion years ago, a river there flowed into a body of water about the size of Lake Tahoe, depositing sediments in a fan shape known as a delta. The Perseverance science team believes this ancient river delta and lake deposits could have collected and preserved organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life.

3. Perseverance is also collecting important data about Mars' geology and climate.

Context is everything. Mars orbiters have been collecting images and data from Jezero Crater from about 200 miles (322 kilometers) above, but finding signs of ancient life on the surface requires much closer inspection. It requires a rover like Perseverance.

Understanding Mars' past climate conditions and reading the geological history embedded in its rocks will give scientists a richer sense of what the planet was like in its distant past. Studying the Red Planet's geology and climate could also give us a sense of why Earth and Mars - despite some early similarities - ended up so different.

4. Perseverance is the first leg of a round trip to Mars.


The verification of ancient life on Mars carries an enormous burden of proof. Perseverance is the first rover to bring a sample caching system to Mars in order to package promising samples for return to Earth by a future mission.

Rather than pulverizing rock the way the drill on NASA's Curiosity rover does, Perseverance's drill will cut intact rock cores that are about the size of a piece of chalk and will place them in sample tubes that it will store until the rover reaches an appropriate drop-off location on Mars. The rover could also potentially deliver the samples to a lander that is part of the planned Mars sample return campaign by NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency).

Once the samples are here on Earth, we can examine them with instruments too large and complex to send to Mars, providing far more information about them than even the most sophisticated rover could.

5. Perseverance carries instruments and technology that will help pave the way for human missions to the Moon and Mars.


Among the future-looking technologies on this mission that will benefit human exploration is Terrain-Relative Navigation. As part of the spacecraft's landing system, Terrain-Relative Navigation will enable the descending spacecraft to quickly and autonomously comprehend its location over the Martian surface and modify its trajectory.

Perseverance will also have more autonomy on the surface than any other rover, including self-driving smarts that will allow it to cover more ground in a day's operations with fewer instructions from engineers on Earth. This fast-traverse capability will make exploration of the Moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies more efficient for other vehicles.

In addition, Perseverance carries a technology experiment called MOXIE (short for Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) that will produce oxygen from Mars' carbon dioxide atmosphere. It will demonstrate a way that future explorers might produce oxygen for rocket propellant as well as for breathing.

Two other instruments will help engineers design systems for future human explorers to land and survive on Mars: The MEDLI2 (Mars Entry, Descent, and Landing Instrumentation 2) package is a next-generation version of what flew on the Mars Science Laboratory mission that delivered the Curiosity rover, while the MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer) instrument suite provides information about weather, climate, and surface ultraviolet radiation and dust.

Perseverance is also giving a ride to the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. A technology experiment separate from the rover's science mission, Ingenuity will attempt the first powered, controlled aircraft flight at another world. If the helicopter is successful in its 30-Martian-day (31-Earth-day) demonstration window, the data could help future explorations of the Red Planet - including those by astronauts - by adding a new aerial dimension.

6. The Perseverance rover embodies the NASA - and the scientific - spirit of overcoming challenges.

Getting the spacecraft to the launch pad during a pandemic, searching for signs of ancient life, collecting samples, and proving new technologies are no easy feats. Nor is a soft touchdown on Mars: Only about 50% of Martian landing attempts, by any space agency, have been successful.

The mission team draws inspiration from the name of its rover, with particular awareness of the challenges the entire world is experiencing at this time. With that in mind, the mission installed a special plate to honor the dedication and hard work of the medical community and first responders around the globe. The team hopes to inspire the entire world, and future explorers, to forge new paths and make discoveries on which the next generation can build.

7. You will get to ride along.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission carries more cameras than any interplanetary mission in history, with 19 cameras on the rover itself and four on other parts of the spacecraft involved in entry, descent, and landing. As with previous Mars missions, the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission plans to make raw and processed images available on the mission's website.

If all goes well, the public will be able to experience in high-definition what it's like to land on Mars - and hear the sounds of landing for the first time with an off-the-shelf microphone affixed to the side of the rover. Another microphone on SuperCam will help scientists understand the property of rocks the instrument is examining and can also listen to the wind.

If you are among the 10.9 million people who signed up to send your name to Mars, your name is stenciled on one of three silicon chips embedded on a plate on the rover that carries the words "Explore as one" in Morse code.

NASA's Curiosity Takes Selfie With 'Mary Anning' on the Red Planet

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has a new selfie. This latest is from a location named "Mary Anning," after a 19th-century English paleontologist whose discovery of marine-reptile fossils were ignored for generations because of her gender and class. The rover has been at the site since this past July, taking and analyzing drill samples. Made up of 59 pictures stitched together by imaging specialists, the selfie was taken on Oct. 25, 2020 – the 2,922nd Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's mission. Scientists on the Curiosity team thought it fitting to name the sampling site after Anning because of the area's potential to reveal details about the ancient environment. Curiosity used the rock drill on the end of its robotic arm to take samples from three drill holes called "Mary Anning," "Mary Anning 3," and "Groken," this last one named after cliffs in Scotland's Shetland Islands. The robotic scientist has conducted a set of advanced experiments with those samples to extend the search for organic (or carbon-based) molecules in the ancient rocks. Since touching down in Gale Crater in 2012, Curiosity has been ascending Mount Sharp to search for conditions that might once have supported life. This past year, the rover has explored a region of Mount Sharp called Glen Torridon, which likely held lakes and streams billions of years ago. Scientists suspect this is why a high concentration of clay minerals and organic molecules was discovered there.

This close-up shot shows the three drill holes created by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover at the "Mary Anning" location.

 Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

It will take months for the team to interpret the chemistry and minerals in the samples from the Mary Anning site. In the meantime, the scientists and engineers who have been commanding the rover from their homes as a safety precaution during the coronavirus pandemic have directed Curiosity to continue its climb of Mount Sharp. The rover's next target of exploration is a layer of sulfate-laden rock that lies higher up the mountain. The team hopes to reach it in early 2021.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, leads the Curiosity mission. Curiosity took the selfie using a camera called the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), located on the end of its robotic arm. (Videos explaining how Curiosity's selfies are taken can be found here.) MAHLI was built by Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.

For more information about Curiosity, visit:

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/

https://nasa.gov/msl

NASA InSight's 'Mole' is out of sight

NASA's InSight lander continues working to get its "mole" - a 16-inch-long (40-centimeter-long) pile driver and heat probe - deep below the surface of Mars. A camera on InSight's arm recently took images of the now partially filled-in "mole hole," showing only the device's science tether protruding from the ground. Sensors embedded in the tether are designed to measure heat flowing from the planet once the mole has dug at least 10 feet (3 meters) deep. The mission team has been working to help the mole burrow to at least that depth so that it can take Mars' temperature. The mole was designed so that loose soil would flow around it, providing friction against its outer hull so that it can dig deeper; without this friction, the mole just bounces in place as it hammers into the ground. But the soil where InSight landed is different than what previous missions have encountered: During hammering, the soil sticks together, forming a small pit around the device instead of collapsing around it and providing the necessary friction. After the mole unexpectedly backed out of the pit while hammering last year, the team placed the small scoop at the end of the lander's robotic arm on top of it to keep it in the ground. Now that the mole is fully embedded in the soil, they will use the scoop to scrape additional soil on top of it, tamping down this soil to help provide more friction. Because it will take months to pack down enough soil, the mole isn't expected to resume hammering until early 2021.

"I'm very glad we were able to recover from the unexpected 'pop-out' event we experienced and get the mole deeper than it's ever been," said Troy Hudson, the scientist and engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led the work to get the mole digging. "But we're not quite done. We want to make sure there's enough soil on top of the mole to enable it to dig on its own without any assistance from the arm."

The mole is formally called the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package, or HP3, and was built and provided to NASA by the German Space Agency (DLR). JPL in Southern California leads the InSight mission. Read more about the mole's recent progress at this DLR blog.

NASA's Perseverance rover bound for Mars to seek ancient life

NASA's latest Mars rover Perseverance launched Thursday on an astrobiology mission to look for signs of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet -- and to fly a helicopter-drone on another world for the first time. Previous trips to Mars have discovered it was far warmer and wetter three billion years ago than it is today, creating the conditions necessary for carbon-based life. Perseverance's goal is to go a step further, and discover whether "habitable" translated to "habited." "There would be no bigger discovery in the history of humanity than finding life that is not on our own world," NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said. "If we were to make a discovery that it in fact was, everything from that point forward is going to be 'Okay, what other life is out there? How do we get to it? How do we study it?'" An Atlas V rocket carrying Perseverance's spaceship took off on schedule at 7:50 am (1150 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and its stages separated according to plan. But as the spacecraft passed through the Earth's shadow, the temperature of a heating system dropped, triggering a "safe mode" that switched off all but essential systems. NASA said it hadn't encountered this problem before because previous spaceships followed a different flight path, but added the issue was not serious and the vessel would soon be back in normal mode. "The philosophy is that it is far better to trigger a safe mode event when not required, than miss one that is," the agency said. If all goes to plan, Perseverance will reach Mars on February 18, 2021, becoming the fifth rover to complete the voyage since 1997.

So far, all have been American. China launched its first Mars rover last week, which should arrive by May 2021.

By next year, the planet could have three active rovers, including NASA's Curiosity, which landed in 2012.

- Faster and smarter -

Perseverance is an improved version of Curiosity -- faster, smarter, and capable of autonomously navigating 200 meters (650 feet) per day.

About the size of a small SUV, it weighs a metric ton, has 19 cameras and two microphones -- which scientists hope will be the first to record sound on Mars.

It has a two-meter-long robotic arm, and is powered by a small nuclear battery.

Once on the surface, NASA will deploy the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter -- a small 1.8 kilogram (four pound) aircraft that will attempt to fly in an atmosphere that is only one percent the density of Earth's.

The idea is to lay down a proof of concept that could one day revolutionize planetary exploration, since rovers can only cover a few dozen kilometers in their whole lifespans and are vulnerable to sand dunes and other obstacles.

- A little MOXIE -

Another goal is to help pave the way for future human missions -- and a major obstacle is the planet's atmosphere of 96 percent carbon dioxide.

Liquid oxygen can be brought from Earth, or oxygen can be mined from ice underneath the Martian surface.

A simpler approach is converting it from the atmosphere, which is what the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE can do, using a process called electrolysis.

The plan is to perform at least 10 oxygen-producing runs using the car battery-sized device under as many different seasonal and environmental conditions as possible.

But Perseverance's primary mission is to scour the planet for evidence of ancient life forms.

The rover's drill will collect around 30 intact rock cores and place them in test tubes, to be collected by a future joint US-European mission.

Indisputable proof of past life on Mars will most likely not be confirmed, if it exists, until these samples are analyzed, which is unlikely to happen before the 2030s.

- Ancient delta -

NASA has chosen the Jezero crater as its landing site, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator.

Between three and four billion years ago, a river flowed there into a large body of water.

"At Jezero we have river valleys that flow into and out of the crater and we know that the lake filled up with water and that overflowed," geologist Katie Stack Morgan of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California said Thursday.

"We think that Jezero has all the building blocks to support past life."

The mission is set to last at least two years, but probably much longer given the endurance previous rovers have shown.

Emirati 'Hope' probe heads for Mars

The first Arab space mission to Mars blasted off from Japan on Monday on a mission to unravel the secrets of weather on the Red Planet. The unmanned probe named Al-Amal -- Arabic for Hope -- took off after several weather delays, marking the next step in the United Arab Emirates' ambitious space programme. Here are some facts and figures about the oil-rich nation's project, which draws inspiration from the Middle East's golden age of cultural and scientific achievements. The UAE, made up of seven emirates including the capital Abu Dhabi and freewheeling Dubai, has nine functioning satellites in orbit with plans to launch another eight in coming years. In September, it sent the first Emirati into space -- Hazza al-Mansouri, who was part of a three-member crew. They blasted off on a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan, returning home after an eight-day mission in which he became the first Arab to visit the International Space Station. But the UAE's ambitions go well beyond that, with a goal of building a human settlement on Mars by 2117. In the meantime, it plans to create a white-domed "Science City" in the deserts outside Dubai, to simulate Martian conditions and develop the technology needed to colonise the planet. Under a national space strategy launched last year, the UAE is also eyeing future mining projects beyond Earth and space tourism, and has signed a memorandum of understanding with Richard Branson's space tourism company Virgin Galactic.

- Hope's journey -

The next milestone was the launch of the "Hope" probe, which officials say is designed to inspire the region's youth and pave the way for scientific breakthroughs.

The 1,350-kilogramme (2,970-pound) probe -- about the size of an SUV -- lifted off from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center on Monday at 6:58 am local time (2158 GMT Sunday) after poor weather delayed initial plans.

The probe successfully detached from the Japanese launch rocket about an hour after blast-off, with a UAE space official hailing the launch as an "important milestone for the UAE and the region."

Unlike the other two Mars ventures scheduled for this year, including Tianwen-1 from China and Mars 2020 from the United States, the UAE's probe will not land on the Red Planet but orbit it for a whole Martian year -- 687 days.

Hope will take seven months to travel the 493 million kilometres (307 million miles) to Mars, in time to mark the 50th anniversary of the emirates' union in 2021.

Once in orbit, one loop will take 55 hours at an average speed of 121,000 kph, while contact with the UAE command and control centre will be limited to six to eight hours twice a week.

- Study and inspire -

Three instruments mounted on the probe will provide a picture of the Mars atmosphere throughout the Martian year.

The first is an infrared spectrometer to measure the lower atmosphere and analyse the temperature structure.

The second is a high-resolution imager that will provide information about ozone levels. And the third, an ultraviolet spectrometer, is set to measure oxygen and hydrogen levels from a distance of up to 43,000 kilometres from the surface.

Understanding the atmospheres of other planets will allow for a better understanding of the Earth's climate, officials say.

But the project is also designed to inspire a region too often beset by turmoil, and recall its heyday of scientific advances during the Middle Ages.

"The UAE wanted to send a strong message to the Arab youth and to remind them of the past, that we used to be generators of knowledge," Omran Sharaf, the mission's project manager, told AFP.

The quest to find signs of ancient life on Mars

Mars may now be considered a barren, icy desert but did Earth's nearest neighbour once harbour life?It is a question that has preoccupied scientists for centuries and fired up sci-fi imaginings. Now three space exploration projects are gearing up to launch some of the most ambitious bids yet to find an answer. Scientists believe that four billion years ago the two planets both had the potential to nurture life -- but much of Mars' intervening history is an enigma. The new Mars probes from the United States, United Arab Emirates and China will launch this summer. Their goal is not to find Martian life -- scientists believe nothing would survive there now -- but to search for possible traces of past lifeforms. These vast and costly programmes could prove futile. But astrobiologists say the red planet is still our best hope for finding a record of life on other planets. Mars is "the only planet with concrete chances of finding traces of extraterrestrial life because we know that billions of years ago it was inhabitable," said Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of French space agency CNES in a conference call with journalists this week. Le Gall is one of the architects of NASA's Mars 2020 exploratory probe, which is scheduled for launch at the end of July when Earth and Mars will be the closest for more than two years. The more than $2.5 billion project is the latest -- and most technologically advanced -- attempt to uncover Mars' deep buried secrets. But it is not alone, as enthusiasm for space exploration has reignited.

- 'News from Mars' -

Scientific enquiry of the red planet began in earnest in the 17th Century.

In 1609 Italian Galileo Galilei observed Mars with a primitive telescope and in doing so became the first person to use the new technology for astronomical purposes.

Fifty years later Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens used a more advanced telescope of his own design to make the first ever topographical drawing of the planet.

Mars -- compared to the "desolate, empty" moon -- has long seemed promising for potential inhabitability by microorganisms, wrote astrophysicist Francis Rocard in his recent essay "Latest News from Mars".

But the 20th century presented setbacks.

In the 1960s, as the race to put a man on the moon was accelerating towards its dazzling "Giant Leap", Dian Hitchcock and James Lovelock were putting a dampener on hopes of finding life on Mars.

Their research analysed the planet's atmosphere looking for a chemical imbalance, gases reacting with each other, which would hint at life.

"If there is no reaction, then there is probably no life there," Lovelock told AFP.

"And that was the case -- Mars has an atmosphere that is completely inactive as far as chemistry is concerned."

Their conclusion was confirmed a decade later, when the Viking landers took atmospheric and soil samples that showed the planet was no longer inhabitable.

This discovery was a "real tanker" for Mars research, Rocard told AFP.

Mars programmes essentially paused for 20 years.

Then in 2000 scientists made a game-changing discovery: they found that water had once flowed over its surface.

- Follow the water -

This tantalising finding helped rekindle the latent interest in Mars exploration.

Scientists pored over images of gullies, ravines, scouring the Martian surface for evidence of liquid water.

More than 10 years later, in 2011, they definitively found it.

The "follow the water, follow the carbon, follow the light" strategy has paid off, Rocard said.

Every mission since the discovery of water has brought "more and more evidence to light that Mars is not quite as dead as we thought," Michel Viso, an astrobiologist at CNES, told AFP.

The latest US rover to make the journey -- aptly named Perseverance -- is scheduled to touch down in February of next year after a six-month journey from launch time.

The probe is perhaps the most highly-awaited yet. Its landing spot, the Jezero Crater, may have once been a wide, 45-kilometre river delta.

Rich in sedimentary rocks, such as clay and carbonates -- the same types of rocks that hold fossil traces on Earth -- Jezero could be a treasure trove.

Or perhaps not.

"We know that water once flowed, but the question remains: for how long?" asked Rocard. "We don't even know how long it took for life to appear on Earth."

If the mission can bring these rocks back to Earth they might yield answers to the questions that have long confounded scientists.

But they will have to wait at least 10 years for the analysis to be available.

Viso said the results will likely be "a bundle of clues" rather than a clear answer.

- In the beginning -

Scientists are also considering perhaps an even more profound question.

If life never existed on Mars, then why not?

The answer to this could enrich our understanding of how life developed on our own planet, Jorge Vago, the spokesperson of the European Space Agency said.

Due to shifting plate tectonics below the Earth's core, it is exceedingly difficult to find any traces of life here before 3.5 billion years ago.

Mars has no tectonic plates and so there is a chance that four-billion-year-old signs of life that "one could never find on Earth" may be preserved there, Vago said.

And if the latest Mars programmes fail to find signs of ancient Martian life, there are always further frontiers to explore.

Encelade and Europe, two of Saturn's and Jupiter's moons, respectively are considered promising contenders.

Although reaching them remains more science fiction than reality.

Johnson-Built Device to Help Mars Perseverance Rover Search for Signs of Life

Later this summer, NASA is launching the Mars Perseverance Rover to the Red Planet with the Mars 2020 Mission. The rover is loaded with equipment to search for signs that there once was life on Mars. One device, called the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument, will be used to detect chemicals on the Martian surface that are linked to the existence of life. To keep the instrument working well, a team from the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) division at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) recently built a new calibration device for the rover to check SHERLOC's function and properly tune it during the upcoming mission. "SHERLOC is pretty complicated, and we came up with a list of 11 things that all have to be calibrated on this instrument," said Marc Fries, ARES planetary scientist and Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover instrument co-investigator. "This sophisticated calibration device is also going to be used for a lot of other scientific and engineering investigations, and we're really excited that it's JSC's contribution to the Mars 2020 rover." SHERLOC is mounted on the end of the rover's seven-foot robotic arm and includes a laser, camera and chemical analyzers, called spectrometers. The sensitive components will be used together to search for substances that have been altered by water and possibly reveal evidence of past microscopic life on Mars.

"The rover's scientific instruments go through all sorts of harsh conditions from the time they leave the lab until they arrive on the surface of Mars. SHERLOC needed a way to make sure it still operates as expected once it's on the surface and throughout the duration of the mission," said Trevor Graff, a scientist from Jacobs who works for ARES.

The solution was to create the calibration target, or "cal target" for short. The device is approximately the size of a large cell phone and mounted on the front of the rover. On its face are 10 "targets," which consist of samples of different materials. The idea is that researchers will occasionally check SHERLOC's function by directing it to scan the different materials on the cal target. The researchers will already know what the readings on those materials should be when SHERLOC is working correctly. If the actual readings are off, they'll make adjustments to SHERLOC to get it set properly, or know to compensate for the errors when they analyze the data later.

Graff led the JSC cal target team, which included Jacobs engineers Ryan Weiner and Vinh Tran.

"I don't always get to see the hardware that I work on in person," Weiner said, "So I really enjoyed being so hands-on helping to assemble the calibration target."

"It was a great experience overall, and I'm confident the design will arrive on Mars in one solid piece," Tran added.


Science on the Side

In addition to tuning SHERLOC, the targets on the calibration device are serving double duty in other tests and experiments. For example, a number of the targets hold spacesuit materials that could one day be used to protect astronauts exploring Mars. SHERLOC's scans of those materials will not only help tune the instrument, but measure how the advanced fabrics and other suit materials will hold up in the Martian environment, too.

"We also plan to build a small Mars exposure instrument here at JSC, and match the conditions inside it with weather data from the rover," Fries said. "We'll then place an identical set of spacesuit samples inside the chamber and periodically remove them to, for example, test the strength of fabrics or the clarity of helmet visor plastics. The result is we'll be able to test spacesuit materials in Mars-like conditions long before astronauts ever go there."

Another target contains an actual sample of a meteorite ejected from Mars long ago and discovered on Earth in 1999. Researchers plan to closely watch the rock sample to see how the Martian environment alters it over time, which will help them understand the chemical interactions between the planet's surface and its atmosphere.

Summer road trip for Curiosity rover has begun

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has started a road trip that will continue through the summer across roughly a mile (1.6 kilometers) of terrain. By trip's end, the rover will be able to ascend to the next section of the 3-mile-tall Martian (5-kilometer-tall) mountain it's been exploring since 2014, searching for conditions that may have supported ancient microbial life. Located on the floor of Gale Crater, Mount Sharp is composed of sedimentary layers that built up over time. Each layer helps tell the story about how Mars changed from being more Earth-like - with lakes, streams and a thicker atmosphere - to the nearly-airless, freezing desert it is today. The rover's next stop is a part of the mountain called the "sulfate-bearing unit." Sulfates, like gypsum and Epsom salts, usually form around water as it evaporates, and they are yet another clue to how the climate and prospects for life changed nearly 3 billion years ago. But between the rover and those sulfates lies a vast patch of sand that Curiosity must drive around to avoid getting stuck. Hence the mile-long road trip: Rover planners, who are commanding Curiosity from home rather than their offices at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, expect to reach the area in early fall, although the science team could decide to stop along the way to drill a sample or study any surprises they come across. Depending on the landscape, Curiosity's top speeds range between 82 and 328 feet (25 and100 meters) per hour. Some of this summer road trip will be completed using the rover's automated driving abilities, which enable Curiosity to find the safest paths forward on its own. Rover planners allow for this when they lack terrain imagery. (Planners hope for more autonomy in the future; in fact, you can help train an algorithm that identifies Martian drive paths.)

"Curiosity can't drive entirely without humans in the loop," said Matt Gildner, lead rover driver at JPL. "But it does have the ability to make simple decisions along the way to avoid large rocks or risky terrain. It stops if it doesn't have enough information to complete a drive on its own."

In journeying to the "sulfate-bearing unit," Curiosity leaves behind Mount Sharp's "clay-bearing unit," which the robotic scientist had been investigating on the lower side of the mountain since early 2019. Scientists are interested in the watery environment that formed this clay and whether it could have supported ancient microbes.

Extending across both the clay unit and the sulfate unit is a separate feature: the "Greenheugh Pediment," a slope with a sandstone cap. It likely represents a major transition in the climate of Gale Crater. At some point, the lakes that filled the 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer-wide) crater disappeared, leaving behind sediments that eroded into the mountain we see today. The pediment formed later (though whether from wind or water erosion remains unknown); then windblown sand blanketed its surface, building into the sandstone cap.

The northern end of the pediment spans the clay region, and though the slope is steep, the rover's team decided to ascend Greenheugh back in March for a preview of terrain they'll see later in the mission. As Curiosity peeked over the top, scientists were surprised to find small bumps along the sandstone surface.

"Nodules like these require water in order to form," said Alexander Bryk, a doctoral student at University of California, Berkeley who led the pediment detour. "We found some in the windblown sandstone on top of the pediment and some just below the pediment. At some point after the pediment formed, water seems to have returned, altering the rock as it flowed through it."

These bumps may look familiar to Mars rover fans: One of Curiosity's predecessors, the Opportunity rover, found similar geologic textures dubbed "blueberries" back in 2004. Nodules have become a familiar sight throughout Mount Sharp, though these newly discovered ones are different in composition from what Opportunity found. They suggest water was present in Gale long after the lakes disappeared and the mountain took its present shape. The discovery extends the period when the crater hosted conditions capable of supporting life, if it ever was present.

"Curiosity was designed to go beyond Opportunity's search for the history of water," said Abigail Fraeman of JPL, who has served as deputy project scientist for both missions. "We're uncovering an ancient world that offered life a foothold for longer than we realized."

First Arab mission to Mars designed to inspire youth

The first Arab space mission to Mars, armed with probes to study the Red Planet's atmosphere, is designed to inspire the region's youth and pave the way for scientific breakthroughs, officials said Tuesday. The unmanned probe Al-Amal -- Hope in Arabic -- is to blast off from a Japanese space centre on July 15, with preparations now in their final stages. The project is the next giant step for the United Arab Emirates, whose colossal skyscrapers and mega-projects have put it on the world map. The UAE sent its first astronaut into space last year and is also planning to build a "Science City" to replicate conditions on Mars, where it hopes to build a human settlement by 2117. Omran Sharaf, the mission's project manager, said that apart from the ambitious scientific goals, the mission was designed to hark back to the region's golden age of cultural and scientific achievements. "The UAE wanted to send a strong message to the Arab youth and to remind them of the past, that we used to be generators of knowledge," he told AFP. "People of different backgrounds and religion coexisted and shared a similar identity," he said of the Arab world, where many countries are today wracked by sectarian conflicts and economic crises. "Put your differences aside, focus on building the region, you have a rich history and you can do much more."

- Narrow window -

Sarah al-Amiri, the mission's deputy project manager, said it was imperative that the project have a long-term scientific impact.

"It is not a short-lived mission, but rather one that continues throughout the years and produces valuable scientific findings -- be it by researchers in the UAE or globally," she told AFP.

She said that the probe will provide a comprehensive image of the weather dynamics in Mars' atmosphere with the use of three scientific instruments.

The first is an infrared spectrometer to measure the planet's lower atmosphere and analyse the temperature structure.

The second, a high-resolution imager that will provide information about the ozone; and a third, an ultraviolet spectrometer to measure oxygen and hydrogen levels from a distance of up to 43,000 kilometres from the surface.

The three tools will allow researchers to observe the Red Planet "at all times of the day and observe all of Mars during those different times", Amiri said.

"Something we want to better understand, and that's important for planetary dynamics overall, is the reasons for the loss of the atmosphere and if the weather system on Mars actually has an impact on loss of hydrogen and oxygen," she said, referring to the two components that make up water.

Sharaf said that fuelling of the probe is to begin next week.

It is scheduled to launch on July 15 from Japan's Tanegashima Space Centre and return to Earth in February 2021, depending on many variables including the weather.

"If we miss the launch opportunity, which is between mid-July and early August, then we'd have to wait for two years for another window," Sharaf said.

But hopes are high that the mission will take place as scheduled, and not be derailed by the coronavirus pandemic.

In a new sign of warming ties between Israel and Gulf Arab nations, the Jewish state Tuesday wished the UAE success with the mission.

We "hope this step will contribute towards deeper cooperation between all countries in the region," its foreign ministry's "Israel in the Gulf" Twitter account wrote in Arabic.

Scientist captures new images of Martian moon Phobos to help determine its origins

Christopher Edwards, assistant professor in NAU's Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, just processed new images of the Martian moon Phobos that give scientists insight into the physical properties of the moon and its composition. The images of the small moon, which is about 25 kilometers (15 miles) in diameter, were captured by NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter. When reviewed in combination with three previously released images, these new images could ultimately help settle the debate over whether the planetary body is a "captured asteroid"--pulled into perpetual orbit around Mars--or an ancient chunk of Mars blasted off the surface by a meteorite impact. Along with scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and Arizona State University, Edwards used the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) onboard the 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter to capture the images from about 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles) above the moon's surface to measure temperature variations during different phases--waxing, waning and full: 

+ An image taken on December 9, 2019, shows the surface of Phobos at its maximum temperature, 81 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius).

+ An image taken on February 25, 2020, shows Phobos while in eclipse, where Mars' shadow completely blocked sunlight from reaching the moon's surface. This event resulted in some of the coldest temperatures measured on Phobos to date, with the coldest being about -189 degrees Fahrenheit (-123 degrees Celsius).

+ On March 27, 2020, Phobos was observed exiting an eclipse, when its surface was still warming up.

Edwards has been a part of the THEMIS team since 2003. All of the THEMIS infrared images are colorized and overlain on THEMIS visible images taken at the same time, except for the eclipse image, which is overlain on a synthetic visible image of what Phobos would have looked like if it hadn't been in complete shadow.

"The THEMIS instrument is designed to look at the composition and physical properties of the surface of Mars under various conditions using its multi-wavelength visible and infrared cameras," Edwards said.

From the new images, he said, "We're seeing that the surface of Phobos is relatively uniform and made up of very fine-grained materials. These observations are also helping to characterize the composition of Phobos, which appears to be mostly basaltic. Future observations will provide a more complete picture of the temperature extremes on the moon's surface."

Odyssey is the longest-operating spacecraft around Mars, and has been orbiting the Red Planet for more than 18 years.

"In an effort to continue advancing new science from the Odyssey mission as it matures," Edwards said, "a couple of years ago we proposed we could look at Phobos as part of our extended mission proposal. That requires a BIG spacecraft maneuver, rotating it 180 degrees into a geometry in which it was never intended to operate."

"As far as Phobos goes," he said, "its origins are enigmatic. The orbit it is in is not very stable, and some scientists have proposed that the moon has been destroyed and reformed multiple times because of its orbital position. It also turns out that the orbit's exact geometry makes it hard to capture--so some teams have proposed it is derived from Mars. How that happened is not clear, either!

"Perhaps it's from a big meteorite impact that ejected material into the orbit, and the material grouped together to form Phobos. So that's why we're looking for the physical properties of the surface, which might help identify locations where we could see the primary composition and not just the fine-grained dust."

Edwards added, "JAXA, Japan's space agency, is sending a whole mission to investigate Phobos and Diemos (Mars' other moon) called the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX), so we're providing some good reconnaissance data for that upcoming mission!"

MAVEN maps electric currents around Mars that are fundamental to atmospheric loss

Five years after NASA's MAVEN spacecraft entered into orbit around Mars, data from the mission has led to the creation of a map of electric current systems in the Martian atmosphere. "These currents play a fundamental role in the atmospheric loss that transformed Mars from a world that could have supported life into an inhospitable desert," said experimental physicist Robin Ramstad of the University of Colorado, Boulder. "We are now currently working on using the currents to determine the precise amount of energy that is drawn from the solar wind and powers atmospheric escape." Ramstad is lead author of a paper on this research published May 25 in Nature Astronomy. Earth has such current systems, too: we can even see them in the form of colorful displays of light in the night sky near the polar regions known as the aurora, or northern and southern lights. Earth's aurora are strongly linked to currents, generated by the interaction of the Earth's magnetic field with the solar wind, that flow along vertical magnetic field lines into the atmosphere, concentrating in the polar regions. Studying the flow of electricity thousands of miles above our heads, though, only tells part of the story about the situation on Mars. The difference lies in the planets' respective magnetic fields, because while Earth's magnetism comes from within, Mars' does not.

Planetary magnetic fields
Earth's magnetism comes from its core, where molten, electrically conducting iron flows beneath the crust. Its magnetic field is global, meaning it surrounds the entire planet. Since Mars is a rocky, terrestrial planet like Earth, one might assume that the same kind of magnetic paradigm functions there, too. However, Mars does not generate a magnetic field on its own, outside of relatively small patches of magnetized crust. Something different from what we observe on Earth must be happening on the Red Planet.

What's going on above Mars?
The solar wind, made up largely of electrically charged electrons and protons, blows constantly from the Sun at around a million miles per hour. It flows around and interacts with the objects in our solar system. The solar wind is also magnetized and this magnetic field cannot easily penetrate the upper atmosphere of non-magnetized planets like Mars.

Instead, currents that it induces in the planet's ionosphere cause a pile-up and strengthening of the magnetic field, creating a so-called induced magnetosphere. How the solar wind powers this induced magnetosphere at Mars has not been well understood until now.

As solar wind ions and electrons smash into this stronger induced magnetic field near Mars, they are forced to flow apart due to their opposite electric charge. Some ions flow in one direction, some electrons in the other direction, forming electric currents that drape around from the dayside to the nightside of the planet.

At the same time, solar x-rays and ultraviolet radiation constantly ionize some of the upper atmosphere on Mars, turning it into a combination of electrons and electrically charged ions that can conduct electricity.

"Mars' atmosphere behaves a bit like a metal sphere closing an electric circuit," Ramstad said. "The currents flow in the upper atmosphere, with the strongest current layers persisting at 120-200 kilometers (about 75-125 miles) above the planet's surface."

Both MAVEN and previous missions have seen localized hints of these current layers before, but they have never before been able to map the complete circuit, from its generation in the solar wind, to where the electrical energy is deposited in the upper atmosphere.

Directly detecting these currents in space is infamously difficult. Fortunately, the currents distort the magnetic fields in the solar wind, detectable by MAVEN's sensitive magnetometer. The team used MAVEN to map out the average magnetic field structure around Mars in three dimensions and calculated the currents directly from their distortions of the magnetic field structure.

"With a single elegant operation, the strength and paths of the currents pop out of this map of the magnetic field," Ramstad said.

The Red Planet's destiny
Without a global magnetic field surrounding Mars, the currents induced in the solar wind can form a direct electrical connection to the Martian upper atmosphere. The currents transform the energy of the solar wind into magnetic and electric fields that accelerate charged atmospheric particles into space, driving atmospheric escape to space.

The new results reveal several unexpected features particular to MAVEN's goal to understand atmospheric escape: the energy that drives escape appears to be drawn from a much larger volume than was often assumed.

Solar-wind-driven atmospheric loss has been active for billions of years and contributed to the transformation of Mars from a warm and wet planet that could have harbored life into a global cold desert. MAVEN is continuing to explore how this process works and how much of the planet's atmosphere has been lost.

NASA's Curiosity Rover Finds Clues to Chilly Ancient Mars Buried in Rocks

By studying the chemical elements on Mars today - including carbon and oxygen - scientists can work backwards to piece together the history of a planet that once had the conditions necessary to support life. Weaving this story, element by element, from roughly 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) away is a painstaking process. But scientists aren't the type to be easily deterred. Orbiters and rovers at Mars have confirmed that the planet once had liquid water, thanks to clues that include dry riverbeds, ancient shorelines, and salty surface chemistry. Using NASA's Curiosity Rover, scientists have found evidence for long-lived lakes. They've also dug up organic compounds, or life's chemical building blocks. The combination of liquid water and organic compounds compels scientists to keep searching Mars for signs of past - or present - life. Despite the tantalizing evidence found so far, scientists' understanding of Martian history is still unfolding, with several major questions open for debate. For one, was the ancient Martian atmosphere thick enough to keep the planet warm, and thus wet, for the amount of time necessary to sprout and nurture life? And the organic compounds: are they signs of life - or of chemistry that happens when Martian rocks interact with water and sunlight? In a recent Nature Astronomy report on a multi-year experiment conducted in the chemistry lab inside Curiosity's belly, called Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), a team of scientists offers some insights to help answer these questions. The team found that certain minerals in rocks at Gale Crater may have formed in an ice-covered lake. These minerals may have formed during a cold stage sandwiched between warmer periods, or after Mars lost most of its atmosphere and began to turn permanently cold.

Gale is a crater the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. It was selected as Curiosity's 2012 landing site because it had signs of past water, including clay minerals that might help trap and preserve ancient organic molecules. Indeed, while exploring the base of a mountain in the center of the crater, called Mount Sharp, Curiosity found a layer of sediments 1,000 feet (304 meters) thick that was deposited as mud in ancient lakes.

To form that much sediment an incredible amount of water would have flowed down into those lakes for millions to tens of millions of warm and humid years, some scientists say. But some geological features in the crater also hint at a past that included cold, icy conditions.

"At some point, Mars' surface environment must have experienced a transition from being warm and humid to being cold and dry, as it is now, but exactly when and how that occurred is still a mystery," says Heather Franz, a NASA geochemist based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Franz, who led the SAM study, notes that factors such as changes in Mars' obliquity and the amount of volcanic activity could have caused the Martian climate to alternate between warm and cold over time. This idea is supported by chemical and mineralogical changes in Martian rocks showing that some layers formed in colder environments and others formed in warmer ones.

In any case, says Franz, the array of data collected by Curiosity so far suggests that the team is seeing evidence for Martian climate change recorded in rocks.

Carbon and oxygen star in the Martian climate story
Franz's team found evidence for a cold ancient environment after the SAM lab extracted the gases carbon dioxide, or CO2, and oxygen from 13 dust and rock samples. Curiosity collected these samples over the course of five Earth years (Earth years vs. Mars years).

CO2 is a molecule of one carbon atom bonded with two oxygen atoms, with carbon serving as a key witness in the case of the mysterious Martian climate. In fact, this simple yet versatile element is as critical as water in the search for life elsewhere. On Earth, carbon flows continuously through the air, water, and surface in a well-understood cycle that hinges on life.

For example, plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere in the form of CO2. In return, they produce oxygen, which humans and most other life forms use for respiration in a process that ends with the release of carbon back into the air, again via CO2, or into the Earth's crust as life forms die and are buried.

Scientists are finding there's also a carbon cycle on Mars and they're working to understand it. With little water or abundant surface life on the Red Planet for at least the past 3 billion years, the carbon cycle is much different than Earth's.

"Nevertheless, the carbon cycling is still happening and is still important because it's not only helping reveal information about Mars' ancient climate," says Paul Mahaffy, principal investigator on SAM and director of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA Goddard. "It's also showing us that Mars is a dynamic planet that's circulating elements that are the buildings blocks of life as we know it."

The gases build a case for a chilly period
After Curiosity fed rock and dust samples into SAM, the lab heated each one to nearly 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit (900 degrees Celsius) to liberate the gases inside. By looking at the oven temperatures that released the CO2 and oxygen, scientists could tell what kind of minerals the gases were coming from. This type of information helps them understand how carbon is cycling on Mars.

Various studies have suggested that Mars' ancient atmosphere, containing mostly CO2, may have been thicker than Earth's is today. Most of it has been lost to space, but some may be stored in rocks at the planet's surface, particularly in the form of carbonates, which are minerals made of carbon and oxygen.

On Earth, carbonates are produced when CO2 from the air is absorbed in the oceans and other bodies of water and then mineralized into rocks. Scientists think the same process happened on Mars and that it could help explain what happened to some of the Martian atmosphere.

Yet, missions to Mars haven't found enough carbonates in the surface to support a thick atmosphere.

Nonetheless, the few carbonates that SAM did detect revealed something interesting about the Martian climate through the isotopes of carbon and oxygen stored in them. Isotopes are versions of each element that have different masses.

Because different chemical processes, from rock formation to biological activity, use these isotopes in different proportions, the ratios of heavy to light isotopes in a rock provide scientists with clues to how the rock formed.

In some of the carbonates SAM found, scientists noticed that the oxygen isotopes were lighter than those in the Martian atmosphere. This suggests that the carbonates did not form long ago simply from atmospheric CO2 absorbed into a lake. If they had, the oxygen isotopes in the rocks would have been slightly heavier than the ones in the air.

While it's possible that the carbonates formed very early in Mars' history, when the atmospheric composition was a bit different than it is today, Franz and her colleagues suggest that the carbonates more likely formed in a freezing lake.

In this scenario, the ice could have sucked up heavy oxygen isotopes and left the lightest ones to form carbonates later. Other Curiosity scientists have also presented evidence suggesting that ice-covered lakes could have existed in Gale Crater.

So where is all the carbon?
The low abundance of carbonates on Mars is puzzling, scientists say. If there aren't many of these minerals at Gale Crater, perhaps the early atmosphere was thinner than predicted. Or maybe something else is storing the missing atmospheric carbon.

Based on their analysis, Franz and her colleagues suggest that some carbon could be sequestered in other minerals, such as oxalates, which store carbon and oxygen in a different structure than carbonates. Their hypothesis is based on the temperatures at which CO2 was released from some samples inside SAM - too low for carbonates, but just right for oxalates - and on the different carbon and oxygen isotope ratios than the scientists saw in the carbonates.

Oxalates are the most common type of organic mineral produced by plants on Earth. But oxalates also can be produced without biology. One way is through the interaction of atmospheric CO2 with surface minerals, water, and sunlight, in a process known as abiotic photosynthesis. This type of chemistry is hard to find on Earth because there's abundant life here, but Franz's team hopes to create abiotic photosynthesis in the lab to figure out if it actually could be responsible for the carbon chemistry they're seeing in Gale Crater.

On Earth, abiotic photosynthesis may have paved the way for photosynthesis among some of the first microscopic life forms, which is why finding it on other planets interests astrobiologists.

Even if it turns out that abiotic photosynthesis locked some carbon from the atmosphere into rocks at Gale Crater, Franz and her colleagues would like to study soil and dust from different parts of Mars to understand if their results from Gale Crater reflect a global picture. They may one day get a chance to do so. NASA's Perseverance Mars rover, due to launch to Mars between July and August 2020, plans to pack up samples in Jezero Crater for possible return to labs on Earth.