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Post by skywalker on Dec 4, 2012 17:24:46 GMT -6
So what ever happened with the big announcement? I've been so busy working my little reindeer butt off delivering toys to toy stores that I missed it. What happened? Did they discover Martian microbes? The Rocknest monster? A new color of rock...what?
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Post by Morgan Sierra on Dec 4, 2012 17:43:57 GMT -6
I found the press conference where they made the announcement but haven't been able to listen to all of it yet. It's over an hour long and it seems like the first 59 minutes are introductions. www.ustream.tv/recorded/27478475
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Post by skywalker on Dec 4, 2012 18:22:00 GMT -6
So far I have heard them say they found some organic compounds that include carbon but they don't know yet where it came from. They are still trying to determine if it is Martian carbon or leftover crap from earth.
Still listening to the rest...
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Post by skywalker on Dec 4, 2012 18:42:31 GMT -6
Apparently the discovery of carbon is the "big" discovery they were jumping up and down about. That doesn't mean it came from a life-form though. It could have come from something else. That is why they tried to downplay it after the first announcement. We will have to wait and see... Of course they could just quit wasting their time with all this nonsense and listen to me. I have been saying for years that there is life there.
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Post by auntym on Dec 4, 2012 19:27:07 GMT -6
www.livescience.com/25237-mars-rover-curiosity-discovery-hype-misunderstanding.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Livesciencecom+%28LiveScience.com+Science+Headline+Feed%29&utm_content=Google+Reader Mars Rover Discovery Hype a Big Misunderstanding[/color] by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer Date: 04 December 2012 SAN FRANCISCO — The chief scientist for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity was just excited about the mission, and thrilled that one of the six-wheeled robot's key instruments was acing its first Red Planet tests. That's all he meant to convey. But when an NPR story last month quoted John Grotzinger as saying that data recently gathered by Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, or SAM, were destined "for the history books," the world imposed its own interpretation. Rumors begin flying around the Internet that SAM had perhaps detected complex organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it — on the Red Planet. Curiosity Self Portrait Hi Res NASA's Mars rover Curiosity used its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) to snap a set of 55 high-resolution images on Oct. 31, 2012. Researchers stitched the pictures together to create this full-color self-portrait. CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems View full size image SAN FRANCISCO — The chief scientist for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity was just excited about the mission, and thrilled that one of the six-wheeled robot's key instruments was acing its first Red Planet tests. That's all he meant to convey. But when an NPR story last month quoted John Grotzinger as saying that data recently gathered by Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, or SAM, were destined "for the history books," the world imposed its own interpretation. Rumors begin flying around the Internet that SAM had perhaps detected complex organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it — on the Red Planet. What Curiosity foundSAM's actual findings, which were revealed Monday (Dec. 3) in a press conference here at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, are intriguing but fall a bit short of the fevered speculation. SAM has detected simple, chlorinated organics — chemicals containing carbon and at least one chlorine atom — but it's unclear if the carbon within them is native to Mars or whether it hitched a ride from Earth, researchers said. Grotzinger, a geologist at Caltech in Pasadena, said he meant to convey the excitement his team felt to see SAM — a mobile chemistry lab that takes up more than half of Curiosity's science payload by weight — working according to plan on Mars. [Organic Compounds On Mars - Did Curiosity Bring it? | Video] He was surprised by the way his words rocketed around the Internet. "We're doing science at the speed of science. We live in a world that's sort of at the pace of Instagrams," Grotzinger said during Monday's press conference. "The enthusiasm that we had — that I had, that our whole team has about what's going on here — I think was just misunderstood." "What I've learned in this is that you have to be careful about what you say, and even more careful about how you say it," he added. CONTINUE READING: www.livescience.com/25237-mars-rover-curiosity-discovery-hype-misunderstanding.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Livesciencecom+%28LiveScience.com+Science+Headline+Feed%29&utm_content=Google+Reader[/color]
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Post by lois on Dec 4, 2012 21:10:30 GMT -6
What is this other location they are going to on Mars the first of the year. How does it differ? .. i listen to the whole video Sky.. thank you..
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Post by skywalker on Dec 5, 2012 11:51:13 GMT -6
The place they are going to in the future is a small mountain. Mountains usually have lots of complex geological formations and different layers of exposed rock so they should be able to get some really interesting samples besides just the dirt that is laying on the surface. It is interesting that the rover originally landed in an old river bed which proved conclusively that there used to be flowing water on the planet (which I have also been saying for years ). Rivers and oceans would be the best place for life and organic compounds to form so it is possible that the carbon they found really is biological. We shall have to wait and see.
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Post by paulette on Dec 5, 2012 13:35:40 GMT -6
"chlorinated organics — chemicals containing carbon and at least one chlorine atom — but it's unclear if the carbon within them is native to Mars or whether it hitched a ride from Earth, researchers said.
Well...that is a sorta big something.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 7, 2012 2:44:31 GMT -6
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Post by lois on Dec 7, 2012 9:36:48 GMT -6
Lets just pray it last for a longer duration than they expect. At least while they are at the mountain..
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Post by swamprat on Mar 1, 2013 19:40:37 GMT -6
NASA's Mars Rover Curiosity in Safe Mode After Computer Glitchby Clara Moskowitz 01 March 2013 A computer glitch on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has forced the robot to switch to a backup computer while engineers try to resolve the problem. In the meantime, Curiosity's science work is on hold, and the spacecraft is in a minimal-activity state known as "safe mode" while its backup computer is updated with the command codes and parameters it needs to take over the rover's full operations. "We're still early on in the process," said Richard Cook, Curiosity project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We have probably several days, maybe a week of activities to get everything back and reconfigured." www.space.com/20034-mars-rover-curiosity-computer-glitch.html
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Post by paulette on Mar 1, 2013 23:42:43 GMT -6
I wonder if Curiosity saw something it shouldn't have and was zapped. But someone. Or....it actually did seen back data that our governments don't want us to know about - so the story now is its in sleep mode. Or maybe it broke...
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Post by skywalker on Mar 3, 2013 19:12:53 GMT -6
It's computer must have been made by the same company that made mine.
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Post by swamprat on Mar 11, 2013 12:58:51 GMT -6
NASA Unveiling New Mars Discoveries by Curiosity Rover Tuesdayby Tariq Malik, SPACE.com 11 March 2013 NASA will reveal new discoveries about Mars gleaned from the Curiosity rover's first rock powder sample in a high-profile press conference on Tuesday (March 12). The Mars rover press conference, which will be held at the agency's headquarters in Washington, will begin at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT). It will be broadcast live on NASA's TV and webcast channels, a departure from recent teleconferences that have been a staple of Curiosity rover mission updates. www.space.com/20154-mars-discoveries-curiosity-rover.html
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Post by swamprat on Mar 12, 2013 12:44:24 GMT -6
Ancient Mars could have supported primitive life, NASA saysBy Mike Wall Published March 12, 2013 It's official: Primitive life could have lived on ancient Mars, NASA says. A sample of Mars drilled from a rock by NASA's Curiosity rover and then studied by onboard instruments "shows ancient Mars could have supported living microbes," NASA officials announced Tuesday in a statement and press conference. The discovery comes just seven months after the Curiosity rover landed on Mars to spend at least two years determining if the planet could have ever supported primitive life. "A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have supported a habitable environment," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "From what we know now, the answer is yes." Curiosity drilled into a rock on Feb. 8, boring 2.5 inches into an outcrop called John Klein using its arm-mounted hammering drill, going deeper than any robot had ever dug into the Red Planet before. Two weeks later, the rover transferred the resulting gray powder samples into two onboard instruments called Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) and Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM. CheMin and SAM identified some of the key chemical ingredients for life in this powder, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon. The fine-grained John Klein rock also contains clay minerals, suggesting a long-ago aqueous environment that was salty and neutral, researchers said — that is to say, a place that likely was habitable. Read more: www.foxnews.com/science/2013/03/12/mars-could-have-supported-life-nasa-says/#ixzz2NLt9qnJS
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Post by Deleted on Jun 19, 2013 16:57:33 GMT -6
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Post by Deleted on Jun 19, 2013 18:07:40 GMT -6
Beautiful photos Jo! Thanks for sharing!
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Post by lois on Jun 19, 2013 22:50:19 GMT -6
Amazing.. thanks Jo.
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Post by swamprat on Jun 10, 2018 7:53:35 GMT -6
Huge Dust Storm on Mars Hits NASA's Opportunity RoverBy Tariq Malik, Space.com Managing Editor | June 10, 2018
A growing dust storm on Mars is seen blurring the planet's features in this photo taken on June 6, 2018 by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The blue dot shows the location of NASA's Opportunity rover, which is in the dust storm. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
A massive dust storm on Mars has sidelined NASA's Opportunity rover, stalling the robot's science work as it waits out the still-growing tempest.
The Martian dust storm was first spotted from space by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, NASA officials said.
"As soon as the orbiter team saw how close the storm was to Opportunity, they notified the rover's team to begin preparing contingency plans," NASA officials said in a statement. "In a matter of days, the storm had ballooned."
As of Friday (June 8), the storm covers more than 7 million square miles of Mars (18 million square kilometers), according to NASA. That's an area larger than all of North America on Earth.
"Full dust storms like this one are not surprising, but are infrequent," NASA officials said in the statement. "They can crop up suddenly but last weeks, even months."
The area blanketed by the dust storm includes Perseverance Valley, Opportunity's current home on the vast Martian plains of Meridiani Planum.
Opportunity has been exploring Mars since 2004, but it runs on solar power. With the dust storm clogging up the sky, the amount of sunlight the rover can use to recharge has dropped. NASA compared the conditions to "an extremely smoggy day that blots out sunlight."
By Wednesday (June 6), Opportunity's power levels saw a major drop, forcing the rover to stop all science to conserve power. If the storm lasts too long, the main concern will be the Martian cold, a danger Opportunity has faced in the past, NASA officials said.
"There is a risk to the rover if the storm persists for too long and Opportunity gets too cold while waiting for the skies to clear," NASA wrote in the statement. Cold is thought to be what killed NASA's Spirit rover, Opportunity's twin, in 2010 after that robot got stuck in the Martian sand.
But Opportunity is a survivor. And it's seen dust storms bigger than the one it's experiencing now.
In 2007, a dust storm on Mars covered the entire planet and forced Opportunity to hunker down for two weeks in a sort of survival-mode of minimal operations. To save power, the rover went days without phoning home to its controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
It was during that 2007 storm that Opportunity's handlers worried about the rover's ability to power its vital survival heaters with the low power levels caused by that dust storm. But Opportunity survived.
In fact, Opportunity has been surviving for 15 years.
The rover (and its twin Spirit) launched separately to Mars in 2003 and landed in January 2004 for what was originally scheduled to be a 90-day mission. But like the dust storm now battering Opportunity, the rover's mission ballooned from 3 months to 15 years, 14 of them on the Martian surface.
www.space.com/40847-mars-dust-storm-stalls-opportunity-rover.html
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Post by swamprat on Aug 5, 2018 13:11:36 GMT -6
Build a Backyard Mars Rover with NASA DIY ManualBy Doris Elin Salazar, Space.com Contributor | August 5, 2018
An Open Source Rover example, built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory: In this image, the rover shows off its ability to roll over a pile of rocks. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Students and enthusiasts can now build their own Martian rovers, thanks to a new NASA project.
Rovers like Curiosity and Opportunity have allowed scientists to learn about the Red Planet in an up-close and personal way. Now, builders of all backgrounds can learn the skills it takes to create these rovers using plans and instructions from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Open Source Rover project, according to a statement published on Tuesday (July 31).
Open Source Rover is a "scaled down version of Curiosity," according to agency officials, and the project includes several features, like six-wheel steering and "rocker-bogie suspension." JPL published this design on the development platform GitHub. Instructions for building your own Open Source Rover are available for download here on the platform.
This project is a successor to an earlier educational rover model called "ROV-E," which received positive responses in schools and museums, NASA said. The Open Source Rover offers a more affordable, less complicated model, and according to agency officials, people can assemble the new model with off-the-shelf parts for about $2,500.
"While the OSR [Open Source Rover] instructions are quite detailed, they still allow the builder the option of making their own design choices," JPL officials said. "For example, builders can decide what controllers to use, weigh the trade-offs of adding USB cameras or solar panels and even attach science payloads. The baseline design of OSR … will allow users to choose how they want to customize and add to their rover, touching on multiple hardware and software principles along the way."
JPL is home to the Mars Science Laboratory (which manages Curiosity) and is based in Pasadena, California.
www.space.com/41374-build-your-own-mars-rover-diy.html
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Post by swamprat on Sept 7, 2018 10:25:46 GMT -6
Curiosity Rover Snaps Gorgeous Paannamic Selfie on Mars Mountain By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | September 7, 2018
This 360-degree paannama was taken on Aug. 9, 2018, by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity at its location on Vera Rubin Ridge. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has snapped a view of itself and its exotic, colorful Red Planet surroundings in a single glorious, 360-degree shot.
Curiosity took the paannamic photo on Aug. 9, shortly after bagging up its latest drilled-rock sample. The interactive image, which NASA released yesterday (Sept. 6), shows the diverse terrain of Vera Rubin Ridge, which the car-size rover has been exploring for about a year. Dust darkens the sky above Curiosity and peppers the six-wheeled robot's deck.
There's been a lot of dirt in the Martian atmosphere since late May, when a dust storm kicked up near Curiosity's older, smaller cousin, Opportunity. This flare-up intensified rapidly, blocking sunlight to the solar-powered Opportunity, which went silent on June 10. By June 20, the storm had grown into a planet-girding maelstrom.
The dust storm ceased intensifying in late July, and it continues to die down. Opportunity still hasn't made a peep, but NASA officials have expressed optimism that they could end up hearing from the venerable rover before too much longer.
Curiosity is nuclear-powered, so the dust storm hasn't affected its activities too much. But the 1-ton rover has been working through some other issues lately. For example, Curiosity's previous two drilling attempts — the ones before the early-August breakthrough — produced no usable samples.
WATCH VIDEO, "Curiosity Explores Vera Rubin Ridge":
These failures don't reflect on the effectiveness of Curiosity's new, workaround drilling technique, which the mission team adopted after a key drill component failed in late 2016. The new method works quite well, Curiosity team members said; the rocks the rover tried to drill were just superhard.
The hardness may be the result of long-ago groundwater flows, which spread a sort of cement throughout some of the sediments that came to comprise Vera Rubin Ridge, Curiosity principal investigator Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a NASA statement.
Vera Rubin Ridge sits on the flanks of Mount Sharp, the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) mountain that rises from the center of the 96-mile-wide (154 km) Gale Crater. The foothills of Mount Sharp have been Curiosity's prime science destination since before the rover launched; mission team members were always keen to have the rover climb through those foothills, reading a history of Mars' changing environmental conditions in the rocks as it goes.
The mission team plans to conduct two more drilling operations on Vera Rubin Ridge this month. If all goes according to plan, Curiosity will climb off the ridge in October, headed for clay- and sulfate-bearing deposits higher up on Mount Sharp, NASA officials said.
www.space.com/41743-mars-rover-curiosity-paannamic-selfie.html
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Post by jcurio on Sept 7, 2018 13:40:57 GMT -6
I think of this “selfie”, and then what I just read on Elon Musk and what he thinks about “reality”. 🤪
It’s mind-blowing. When you try ... to..... compare..... the ......two.
WE, or say, a batch of humans, figured out how to put a robot on Mars. More than once; mind you. (I’m not going to go into all the details of this particular adventure).
From here, a long ways away, we can tell Curiousity the Rover, to take a selfie, or it is preprogrammed to do so at certain intervals..... and we get to look at the picture in a certain amount of time (not withstanding major dust storms on the planet of Mars). That’s all I need to know, right now.
(Obviously I’m not especially curious about this “adventure”, because Skywalker was the one who informed me that Curiosity the Rover is never coming back home physically). So I guess Curiosity is NOT preprogrammed to load himself back onto a ship. And us remotely send this ship back to Earth. 😁
Okaaaaay! Does Curiosity KNOW why “he” takes a selfie?
Is Curiosity AWARE that “he” is on a planet?
Does Curiosity KNOW that he will probably never be touched by “human hands” again?
When Curiosity DIES....... I guess that we will have made a “newer, better, Curiosity, and it will be on a planet farther away.... _______________
Sigh. The only way I know to put it is....... Elon Musk should know by now, “feelings, are not facts”.
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Post by swamprat on Oct 13, 2018 17:38:59 GMT -6
An image taken by the Curiosity rover on 4 September shows a US 1-cent coin covered in Martian dust. The coin is used as a target by Curiosity to calibrate the Mars Hand Lens Imager, a camera fastened to the end of the rover’s robotic arm. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Source: Nature Briefing
The penny in this image is part of a camera calibration target on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. The Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on the rover took this and other images of the MAHLI calibration target during the 34th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (Sept. 10, 2012 UTC).
The image was acquired with MAHLI at a distance of 5 centimeters (2 inches). MAHLI can acquire images of even higher resolution and can be positioned as close as 2.5 centimeters (about 1 inch); however, as this is the first checkout of the robotic arm, it was decided not to attempt to place the MAHLI at its closest focus distance during this test.
The image shows that the calibration target already has a coating of Martian dust on it. This is unsurprising - the target was facing directly toward the plume of dust stirred up by the sky crane's descent engines during the final phase of the 6 August 2012 landing.
The penny is a nod to geologists' tradition of placing a coin or other object of known scale as a size reference in close-up photographs of rocks, and it gives the public a familiar object for perceiving size easily when it will be viewed by MAHLI on Mars.
The specific coin, provided by MAHLI's principal investigator, Ken Edgett, is a 1909 "VDB" penny. That was the first year Lincoln pennies were minted and the centennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. The VDB refers to the initials of the coin's designer, Victor D. Brenner, which are on the reverse side. Brenner based the coin's low-relief portrait of Lincoln on a photograph taken Feb. 9, 1864, by Anthony Berger in the Washington, D.C. studio of Mathew Brady.
The calibration target for the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) instrument also includes a "Joe the Martian" character, color references, a metric bar graphic, and a stair-step pattern for depth calibration. The MAHLI adjustable-focus, color camera at the end of Curiosity's robotic arm can be used for taking extreme close-ups of rocks and soil on Mars, as well as images from greater distances. The Joe the Martian character appeared regularly in a children's science periodical, "Red Planet Connection," when Edgett directed the Mars outreach program at Arizona State University, Tempe, in the 1990s. Joe was created earlier, as part of Edgett's schoolwork when he was 9 years old and NASA's Mars Viking missions, launched in 1975, were inspiring him to dream of becoming a Mars researcher.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_(rover)#/media/File:PIA16131-US_Lincoln_Penny_on_Mars.jpg
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Post by swamprat on Dec 10, 2018 12:20:21 GMT -6
How rovers get to Mars:
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Post by auntym on Feb 2, 2019 12:38:31 GMT -6
www.scientificamerican.com/article/lost-opportunity-after-a-15-year-odyssey-nasas-trailblazing-mars-rover-approaches-its-end/?amp;text=Lost Odyssey, NASA’s Trailblazing Mars Rover Approaches Its End Although resuscitation attempts are still underway, officials are on the verge of announcing the death of the Red Planet’s longest-lived robotic explorer By Rebecca Boyle / www.scientificamerican.com/author/rebecca-boyle/ January 31, 2019 NASA’s Opportunity rover casts a long shadow in this self-portrait from July 2004, when the intrepid explorer was only six months into what would become a 15-year mission on Mars. Credit: NASA and JPL-CaltechLost Opportunity: After a 15-Year Odyssey, NASA's Trailblazing Mars Rover Approaches Its End NASA’s Opportunity rover casts a long shadow in this self-portrait from July 2004, when the intrepid explorer was only six months into what would become a 15-year mission on Mars. Credit: NASA and JPL-CaltechMired in dust on the afternoon of June 10, 2018, NASA’s Opportunity rover received a final command from Earth. Take a photo of the sun, the Deep Space Network sang in code. Send telemetry.The rover’s cameras could barely see through all the swirling dust, which had been blown aloft by a planet-spanning storm. The sky was darkening, and Opportunity’s batteries, powered by sunlight, were draining. The reply was grim. The last transmitted image showed solar radiation was one fortieth its pre-storm level. Power was low: just 22 watt-hours, down from a normal 300 watt-hours on the solar panels. That’s enough to run a typical food processor for about five minutes. Minders on Earth prepared to let Opportunity hunker down for the dust storm, the worst such event ever witnessed in the more than four decades robots have been occupying Mars. On June 10 the rover woke up briefly, but its energy was too low to send a message home, and it fell silent. In the following weeks Opportunity would grow cold. Everyone hoped that once the winds died down and the Martian skies cleared, the solar panels could charge enough to rouse the rover and prompt it to call home. This series of images shows simulated views of the darkening sky above Opportunity during a global dust storm in summer 2018. At left, the sun is so bright its glare fills the frame; at right, the light is so obscured by dust the sun can scarcely be seen. Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech and TAMU So Opportunity waited, and everyone who cares about it also waited while Mars calmed down. Finally in September came good news from the other side of the planet; orbiters and the Curiosity rover saw the atmosphere clearing. Yet Opportunity lay silent. People at NASA began trying to wake it up. By January 22, they had sent 600 recovery commands. These lines of code cannot, by design, be plaintive. But humans can, and many of them started sending messages of their own. The messages were as much to one another as to the rover, and they were largely the same: Wake up, Oppy. Come back. Oppy did not. Last week NASA officials announced a new set of commands were being beamed to the still-silent rover instructing it—pleading with it, really—to reset its clock and cycle through its radio antennas. But even optimists admit this last-ditch effort has a low probability of success. Very soon, it seems, the agency will be forced to declare the rover’s mission complete—and the storied Mars Exploration Rover program officially over. Opportunity has endured for 15 years on the Red Planet, 61 times longer than its 90-day warranty. In NASA’s family of interplanetary explorers Opportunity will be survived by its rover descendant, Curiosity, as well as its cousin the InSight lander. It has been preceded in death by its closest kin—its twin, Spirit. As they grappled with the growing certainty the rover had met its end, several of the mission’s scientists and engineers were philosophical, even celebratory in their measured optimism. But their sadness is palpable. “You can always look back and say, ‘This is a rover that way outlived her expectations and accomplished a lot.’ But that doesn’t make the grief go away,” says Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist at the Space Science Institute. “It’s odd to think about grief being associated with a machine. But it’s a part of our lives. We worry about it; we think about its power, its usage of energy, like a care-and-feeding kind of thing. It’s not just a piece of machinery. It obviously is that, but also something that’s connected to everybody. We’ve gone through 15 years of living our lives, with operating the rover on Mars being the one constant thing in that,” he notes. COMING OF AGESpirit and Opportunity, also known by their formal title as Mars Exploration Rovers A and B, are well equipped robot geologists. They each are outfitted with a five-foot-tall, camera-topped neck called a mast, along with rock-grinding tools, scoops and multiple spectrometers to suss out minerals and rock compositions. They were designed to last three months—and NASA sent two partly because the agency wanted to hedge its bets in case one didn’t make it. “No one, on the engineering team or the science team, had the foggiest idea that Opportunity would still be operating after 15 years. It’s just a well-made American vehicle,” says Ray Arvidson, the mission’s deputy principal investigator and a planetary scientist at Washington University in Saint Louis. Together, they totally changed everything we know about the planet most like Earth. Opportunity landed on Mars January 25, 2004, in a small depression called Eagle Crater, just 20 days after Spirit landed on the other side of the planet. Abigail Fraeman was 15, obsessed with astronomy and Star Trek, and was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that night after winning a contest sponsored by the Planetary Society. The first paannamic color image beamed back by Opportunity, shortly after its landing in Eagle Crater. Credit: NASA, JPL and Cornell University“It was awesome. When it sent back pictures from Eagle Crater, it was totally different from any pictures of Mars we had seen. There were these smooth, dark sands that were just totally alien,” she says. “The scientists started saying, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s bedrock, I see cross-bedding,’ and they were so excited. I was like, ‘wait a minute, you can do this as a job? You can see that, and look at those pictures and understand the significance of what it means?’” Today Fraeman is the rover’s deputy project scientist, and until June she spent her days working with engineers and scientists to design the rover’s activities. After her night at JPL she went on to study planetary geology in college and attended graduate school at Washington University, where she studied with Arvidson. Many Mars geologists earned their doctorates under his tutelage; his office in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department serves as an Opportunity hub as well as the home of the Planetary Data System, which archives and distributes every piece of information U.S. robots have gathered from other rocky worlds. Washington University is Opportunity’s spiritual home, in a sense, along with mission control at JPL and the rover research office at Cornell University. When Fraeman took the job at JPL, the former lab director, Charles Elachi, encouraged her to draw a chart comparing her life with Opportunity’s. She marked milestones like “high school graduation” or “earn PhD” along rover milestones like “rover finds gypsum” and “rover reaches marathon distance.” She still has the chart. “You just see this rover there all along, and it really gives a sense of just how long this thing has been going,” she says. “The rover set the course of my life, literally.” DUST DEVILS, BLUEBERRIES AND WORLD-FAMOUS ROCKSOpportunity and Spirit were tasked with finding evidence of ancient water on Mars—and they did, in torrents. They found weird rock formations shaped by flowing water. They found clay formations that could have been hospitable for microbes long ago. Opportunity studied more than 100 individual craters, and drove more than a marathon’s distance across the surface of the fourth planet. Together, the twin rovers brought Mars to life in a way no other explorers had before. A year into the mission, the rovers’ solar panels had slowly accumulated dust—Martian regolith is powdery, fine stuff like flour—and their sun-collecting capacity had slowly diminished. One day, Spirit’s were suddenly clean. Engineers were perplexed, and scrutinized selfies from the rover to figure out what happened, Lemmon recalls. Looking downslope from its perch high on a ridge, Opportunity caught this view of a Martian dust devil twisting through the valley below in March 2016. Similar dust devils had given Opportunity’s sister rover, Spirit, a new lease on life when they cleared its solar panels of accumulated debris. Credit: NASA and JPL-Caltech“It happened overnight. You could see the trails behind the mast, a wind tail behind it where the dust had blown. Then we started seeing dust devils in the images,” he says. “We put together a series of still pictures with the navigation cameras, and produced dozens and dozens of these dust devil movies. Those were so cool, because they made Mars dynamic. All of a sudden, we can look at Mars and see things happening. It wasn’t just a planet with rocks on it.” Through Opportunity, even the rocks took on lives of their own. Opportunity found odd wind-carved “aeolian” rocks, iron-rich spheres nicknamed “blueberries,” even meteorites. Lead rover driver Heather Justice, whose 16th birthday was the day Opportunity landed, found one of the most famous rocks of all. After training for many months, Justice was cleared for her first solo drive January 4, 2014. Her job was to tell Opportunity to turn around, move a little to one side and situate its arm over some bedrock the team wanted to drill. A couple days later Opportunity sent some images so the engineers could verify it was on the right spot. “We’re looking at the picture, there’s the bedrock, and then one of the scientists says, ‘Hey, there’s something that wasn’t there before.’ They were like, ‘Hey, did something break off the rover?’” Justice recalls. “I’m starting to panic. Don’t tell me I broke something on my first drive!” A plump, rounded white object had appeared in the image. It resembled a jelly doughnut. The team frantically directed Opportunity to take selfies so they could determine whether any hardware was missing, but all was fine. The internet was not fine, however. Headlines around the world speculated the object was a message, an alien life-form, a message from an alien life-form, and other unlikely scenarios. Actor William Shatner of Star Trek fame joked on Twitter NASA should address “Martian rock throwers.” A private citizen filed a lawsuit alleging the rock was a fungal spore, and tried to compel the space agency to investigate. A view of Martian “blueberries” recorded in April 2004 using the microscopic imager on Opportunity’s robotic arm. Thought to have formed in liquid water, these small, spherical mineral deposits are further evidence for Mars’ warmer, wetter past. Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Cornell University and the U.S. Geological Survey Ultimately, the team determined Opportunity had driven over a rock, flipping it and scraping some dirt from its surface to expose white beneath. “It’s a really interesting balancing act for all of us to figure out how we can get the most interesting science, without doing too much or endangering the rover,” Justice says. “There is no one there to watch it and stop it if something goes wrong.” Justice notes most team members are fond of the rover, but they are fonder of one another, and the human bonds their thinking metal box represents. “It’s really exciting for us to come together, with all our expertise, and go explore another planet. The thought of losing that…” she trailed off. “It’s not just losing hardware, but the thought of losing our connection to Mars.” THE LONG GOOD-BYE On September 14, 2018, or Opportunity sol 5,204—that’s 5,204 Martian days, which are slightly longer than Earth days—I sat with Arvidson in his office as he worked on a scientific paper rounding up some of the rover’s findings at its final resting place, near the rim of Endeavour Crater. Arvidson and other scientists were debating the nature of a deltalike feature they nicknamed Perseverance Valley, “because we never thought we’d get there.” It might be wind-carved or it might be the work of water. The robot geologist had been trying to find out. Arvidson says he is focused on the rover’s legacy, and described his feelings as philosophical. He is soft-spoken and deliberate, a consummate scientist. But even he talked about Opportunity in anthropomorphic terms, explaining how without enough power, “she goes back to sleep,” and comparing its exploits with the travels of a favorite adventurous cousin. Weekly phone meetings between the scientists and engineering team at JPL kept everyone updated, but were also an excuse to stay connected to one another, like extended family hovering over a sick loved one. Arvidson had been here before. He has worked on every Mars mission since Viking 1, the first lander to send a photo from the surface of another planet, and watched many a robot come and go, most recently Spirit, Opportunity’s twin. Spirit lasted until March 2010, when it got stuck in a soft sand bed due in part to two broken wheels. It could not turn its solar panels toward the sun, which was slowly sinking on the winter horizon, and NASA declared the mission over in May 2011. During that 14-month wait, Mike Siebert, a former mission manager, would occasionally drive to JPL in the middle of the night, sometimes between 2 A.M. and 6 A.M., hoping to hear a signal. “My thought was, every time you did it, this could be the shift. You get one tone back from that spacecraft, and suddenly you are in full high gear,” he recalls. He continued working on Opportunity until June 2017, when he left JPL for a new job in Boulder, Colo. Seibert and his wife were married five days after his final shift. They wanted to hold the wedding on a summer Saturday, so they picked June 10: Spirit’s launch date. “It will hurt to lose Opportunity, no matter what. But it’s the most successful surface mission ever—period,” he says. “When contact was lost, it was killing me to not be there trying to figure out, how do we restore contact? The most I can do, if I happen to be in Pasadena, is to buy some beer for my friends.” In September 2018, after the skies over Opportunity had cleared, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped this image of the rover sitting silently on the surface far below. The rover is visible as a small, light-colored object at the center of the white box. Credit: NASA Steve Squyres of Cornell University, the principal investigator and godfather of the mission, says Spirit’s demise was noble, and believes the same is true for Opportunity. “I have always felt there were only two hoannable ways for this mission to end. Either we wear the thing out or Mars just reaches out and kills it—and there’s nothing we can do,” he says. He could not say how he would feel at Opportunity’s wake but predicted the mood would be both celebratory and somber. “We’ll see. I mean, I’ve got 30 years of my life invested in this,” he says. “At every step, the emotions have surprised me. This sounds really weird but at the launch it was kind of hard to say good-bye. You pour your heart and soul into these things, and strap it to a rocket and fling it out into space—then it’s as gone as it is ever going to get. So it was hard to let go. I wasn’t expecting that.” When I leave for lunch on sol 5,204, Arvidson walks me down the hall and we stop at a scale model of the rover, parked near the entrance of Washington University’s Rudolph Hall. I’ve seen it before, but each time I visit it seems bigger than I remember. Its solar panels, spread lotus-like toward the sun, are as wide as a couch. Its mast reaches eye level. Its arm, with its three flexible joints, is longer than my own. I stare at the mast’s eyelike cameras, one of the features that gives the rovers an open, petlike countenance. I imagine it parked on another rocky world 200 million kilometers from here. Its solar panels are caked in rust-colored flour. Its joints have grown creaky, its tools degraded, its protruding antenna scoured by flying sand. It is looking down a slope, en route to a channel where water maybe flowed eons ago, in a place people nicknamed Perseverance Valley. The orange sky is tinged with dust, but it is clearing. The view is sublime. www.scientificamerican.com/article/lost-opportunity-after-a-15-year-odyssey-nasas-trailblazing-mars-rover-approaches-its-end/?amp;text=Lost
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Post by auntym on Feb 13, 2019 14:33:06 GMT -6
www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/science/mars-opportunity-rover-dead.html NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year MissionSilent since a giant dust storm last summer, the rover was the longest-lasting robot on another planet ever.The shadow of NASA’s Opportunity rover on the Martian surface in 2004. The rover was designed for 90 days of exploration, but remained functional for more than 5,000 Martian days.CreditCreditNASA/JPL By Kenneth Chang / www.nytimes.com/by/kenneth-chang Feb. 13, 2019 The longest-lived robot ever sent from Earth to the surface of another planet, Opportunity snapped pictures of a strange landscape and revealed surprising glimpses into the distant past of Mars for over 14 years. But on Wednesday, NASA announced that the rover is dead. “It is therefore that I am standing here with a deep sense of appreciation and gratitude that I declare the Opportunity mission is complete,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science. For the scientists, that ends a mission of unexpected endurance. The rover was designed to last only three months. Opportunity provided scientists a close-up view of Mars that they had never seen: finely layered rocks that preserved ripples of flowing water several billion years ago, a prerequisite for life. The steady stream of photographs and data from Opportunity — as well as its twin, Spirit, which survived until 2010 — also brought Mars closer to people on Earth. Because the rovers continued so much longer than expected, NASA has now had a continuous robotic presence on Mars for much of this century. That streak seems likely to continue for many more years. A larger, more capable rover, Curiosity, arrived in 2012, and NASA is planning to launch another in 2020. “Rovers and their observations resonate with people,” said Raymond E. Arvidson, a professor of planetary geology at Washington University in St. Louis and the deputy principal investigator for the mission. “It’s as if you were walking on the surface. It has that kind of perspective, and it’s not a particularly alien landscape.” On Tuesday night, NASA made one last call to Opportunity, which was silenced last summer by a giant dust storm. There was no answer. “It was an incredibly somber moment,” said Tanya Harrison, a member of the mission’s science team who was present in Pasadena, Calif., at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the final attempt to reach the rover. “Just waiting for the inevitable, basically.” The rover has been quiet since June. During the dust storm, Opportunity’s solar panels could not generate enough power to keep the spacecraft awake. NASA had hoped that once the skies cleared, the rover would revive to continue its work. Last fall, the space agency announced it would spend just a month trying to reconnect with Opportunity. “There were some that were willing to give up quite quickly, but there was a huge backlash,” Dr. Harrison said. “We didn’t feel like the rover was being given a fair chance.” NASA relented, but as time passed, it became more likely that the mission was finally over. Perhaps the solar panels are encrusted in a thick layer of dust, or some crucial electronic component broke down in the extremes of Martian weather. The windy season, when gusts have periodically cleaned the solar panels, has now ended, further reducing the chances of a revival. CONTINUE READING: www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/science/mars-opportunity-rover-dead.html NASA’s Opportunity Rover Dies on Mars www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/13/science/opportunity-rover-mars-map.html Oppy’s last message to Earth was “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.” THANKS OPPY: twitter.com/hashtag/ThanksOppy?src=hash&lang=en
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Post by auntym on Feb 18, 2019 14:27:52 GMT -6
www.livescience.com/64768-opportunity-rover-what-will-happen.html What Will Happen to the Opportunity Rover's Dead Body on Mars?By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer / www.livescience.com/authors/?name=Rafi%20Letzter February 14, 2019 NASA's Mars rover Opportunity reveals its shadow, seen on July 26, 2004, and snapped by the rover’s front hazard-avoidance camera. At the time, Opportunity was moving farther into Endurance Crater in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA's Opportunity Rover has died on Mars. The little solar-paneled robot apparently ran out of battery power during the Red Planet's awesome 2018 dust storm, and after one last attempt to contact it, NASA concluded yesterday (Feb. 13) that the far-off explorer is no more. Which raises the question: What's going to happen to its body? Many human artifacts wouldn't last very long beyond our protective biosphere. As Live Science reported previously, solar radiation has likely shredded the Tesla Roadster Elon Musk launched into space last year. But Tesla Roadsters have lots of organic fibers and plastics in their bodies. Mars rovers are made of tougher stuff. [Voyager to Mars Rover: NASA's 10 Greatest Innovations] Jeff Moersch, a professor of planetary science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a member of the Opportunity team, cautioned that he's not an expert in the rover's engineering. But he said that Opportunity does have some plastic bits that might eventually break down under the glare of the sun — its insulation, for example. "But, by and large, I think it'll look pretty much as we left it," when and if astronauts ever do come across its resting place, Moersch told Live Science. It'll probably be pretty dusty, though, he added. That's assuming that astronauts do make it to Mars in the relatively near future — the next century or two, for example. Over much longer periods, Moersch said, dust will settle on the rover. Opportunity functioned as long as it did because regular Martian winds tended to routinely blow dust off its body. But over longer periods, it's a bit of an open question whether the dust or the wind will win out. "I doubt it will end up buried in a mound, though," he added. What about millions of years in the future? On Earth, anything old and dead and sitting in one place on the surface tends to eventually end up underground. But that's thanks to the effects of water and plate tectonics, Moersch said — factors that aren't present in the same way on Mars. "Over the very long-term, you're going to get impacts that knock up ejecta [airborne Mars dirt] from where they hit, and that ejecta will very gradually resurface [on] the planet and bury things that were on the surface," he said. If Opportunity were to be left on Mars, aliens who landed there millions and millions of years from now would find the rover somewhere in the rock record — much like how paleontologists find dinosaur fossils here on Earth. But NASA is hoping to send humans to Mars one day. And there are dreams of establishing some sort of human settlement there. Steve Squyres, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and head of the Opportunity science mission, made clear during NASA's press conference announcing the rover's death that the agency has no plans to bring the rover back to Earth. (Why would we spend the money bringing material back from Mars when we already know exactly what it's made of? he asked.) That said, Moersch added, when humans do settle Mars, it's not unreasonable to imagine they might make some effort to recover and preserve Opportunity. Perhaps it could end up in museum, or the region explored by the rover might end up as a national park. Of course, if humans never get there, Opportunity might not make it into the fossil record at all. It's at least plausible that, given millions of years, a meteor could strike it directly and smash it to bits. www.livescience.com/64768-opportunity-rover-what-will-happen.html
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Post by auntym on Mar 5, 2020 14:24:07 GMT -6
www.cnn.com/2020/03/05/us/mars-rover-2020-name-perseverance-scn-trnd/index.html?utm_content=2020-03-05T19%3A50%3A04&utm_term=link&utm_source=twCNN&utm_medium=social Mars 2020 rover is officially named 'Perseverance'By Ashley Strickland, CNN Thu March 5, 2020 (CNN)Meet Perseverance.The new name has been assigned to NASA's Mars 2020 rover, launching this July and scheduled to land on the red planet in February 2021. The winning name was entered during a nationwide contest by Alexander Mather, a seventh grade student in Virginia. He will be invited to watch the spacecraft launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida this summer. When Mather was 11, his parents sent him to Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. He saw the capsule of the Saturn V rocket rising over the building in 2018 and lost his mind, Mather said Thursday. "I immediately knew space was something I was doing for the rest of my life," he said. Mather wants to get a degree in engineering or science and hopes to work at NASA as an engineer. In his essay, 13-year-old Mather wrote, "Curiosity. InSight. Spirit. Opportunity. If you think about it, all of these names of past Mars rovers are qualities we possess as humans. We are always curious, and seek opportunity. We have the spirit and insight to explore the Moon, Mars, and beyond. "But, if rovers are to be the qualities of us as a race, we missed the most important thing. Perseverance. We as humans evolved as creatures who could learn to adapt to any situation, no matter how harsh. We are a species of explorers, and we will meet many setbacks on the way to Mars. However, we can persevere. We, not as a nation but as humans, will not give up. Even faced with bitter losses such as Opportunity and Vikram 2, the human race will always persevere into the future." The name was announced Thursday by Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's Science Mission Directorate's associate administrator, at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia. "Alex's entry captured the spirit of exploration," said Zurbuchen. "Like every exploration mission before, our rover is going to face challenges, and it's going to make amazing discoveries. It's already surmounted many obstacles to get us to the point where we are today -- processing for launch. "Alex and his classmates are the Artemis Generation, and they're going to be taking the next steps into space that lead to Mars. That inspiring work will always require perseverance. We can't wait to see that nameplate on Mars." Students have helped name Mars rovers since Sojourner in 1997, followed by Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity. "This was a chance to help the agency that put humans on the Moon and will soon do it again," said Mather. "This Mars rover will help pave the way for human presence there, and I wanted to try and help in any way I could. Refusal of the challenge was not an option." Students across the US, ranging from kindergarten to high school, submitted more than 28,000 potential names for NASA's Mars 2020 rover. A panel of 4,700 volunteer judges whittled that list down to 155 semifinalists. Then, people from around the world shared their opinions on nine finalists, registering more than 770,000 votes in a public poll. WATCH VIDEO & CONTINUE READING: www.cnn.com/2020/03/05/us/mars-rover-2020-name-perseverance-scn-trnd/index.html?utm_content=2020-03-05T19%3A50%3A04&utm_term=link&utm_source=twCNN&utm_medium=social
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Post by auntym on Mar 26, 2020 16:31:51 GMT -6
mars.nasa.gov/news/8634/109-million-names-now-aboard-nasas-perseverance-mars-rover/NEWS | March 26, 2020 10.9 Million Names Now Aboard NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover A placard commemorating NASA's "Send Your Name to Mars" campaign was installed on the Persevarnce Mars rover'Send Your Name' Placard Attached to Perseverance: A placard commemorating NASA's "Send Your Name to Mars" campaign was installed on the Persevarnce Mars rover. Three silicon chips (upper left corner) were stenciled with 10,932,295 names and the essays from 155 finalists in NASA's "Name the Rover" contest.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Full image and caption ›As part of NASA's 'Send Your Name to Mars' campaign, they've been stenciled onto three microchips along with essays from NASA's 'Name the Rover' contest. Next stop: Mars.NASA's "Send Your Name to Mars" campaign invited people around the world to submit their names to ride aboard the agency's next rover to the Red Planet. Some 10,932,295 people did just that. The names were stenciled by electron beam onto three fingernail-sized silicon chips, along with the essays of the 155 finalists in NASA's "Name the Rover" contest. The chips were then were attached to an aluminum plate on NASA's Perseverance Mars rover at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 16. Scheduled to launch this summer, Perseverance will land at Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. The three chips share space on the anodized plate with a laser-etched graphic depicting Earth and Mars joined by the star that gives light to both. While commemorating the rover that connects the two worlds, the simple illustration also pays tribute to the elegant line art of the plaques aboard the Pioneer spacecraft and golden records carried by Voyagers 1 and 2. Affixed to the center of the rover's aft crossbeam, the plate will be visible to cameras on Perseverance's mast. Perseverance rover at Kennedy Space Center Perseverance Rover at Cape: Top center: The plate on the aft crossbeam of NASA's Mars Perseverance rover — seen here on March 16, 2020, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center— carries 10,932,295 names submitted by people during NASA's "Send Your Name to Mars" campaign and essays of the 155 finalists in the "Name the Rover" contest. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Full image and caption › Currently, the coronavirus has not impacted the Mars Perseverance rover launch schedule. The installation was one of numerous recent activities performed by the Perseverance assembly, test and launch operations team. On March 21, the team began reconfiguring the rover so it can ride atop the Atlas V rocket. Steps included stowing the robotic arm, lowering and locking in place the remote sensing mast and high-gain antenna, and retracting its legs and wheels. The Perseverance rover is a robotic scientist weighing just under 2,300 pounds (1,043 kilograms). It will search for signs of past microbial life, characterize Mars' climate and geology, collect samples for future return to Earth, and help pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, is building and will manage operations of the Mars Perseverance rover for NASA. The agency's Launch Services Program, based at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is responsible for launch management. The Mars 2020 project with its Perseverance rover is part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. Charged with returning astronauts to the Moon by 2024, NASA will establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through NASA's Artemis lunar exploration plans. For more information about the mission, go to: mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mars.nasa.gov/news/8634/109-million-names-now-aboard-nasas-perseverance-mars-rover/
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Post by swamprat on Feb 22, 2021 14:13:58 GMT -6
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