“On July 4, 1997, NASA’s Mars Pathfinder lander and Sojourner rover successfully landed on the Red Planet utilizing a revolutionary airbag landing system. This special 20th anniversary show chronicles the stories and the people behind the groundbreaking mission that jump-started 20 years of continuous presence at Mars. Guests include: Former NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, former JPL Directors Ed Stone and Charles Elachi, JPL Director Michael Watkins and Pathfinder mission team members Jennifer Trosper and Brian Muirhead.”
“No one under 20 has experienced a day without NASA at Mars. The Pathfinder mission, carrying the Sojourner rover, landed on Mars on July 4, 1997. In the 20 years since Pathfinder’s touchdown, eight other NASA landers and orbiters have arrived successfully, and not a day has passed without the United States having at least one active robot on Mars or in orbit around Mars.”
“On Mars, wind rules. Wind has been shaping the Red Planet’s landscapes for billions of years and continues to do so today. Studies using both a NASA orbiter and a rover reveal its effects on scales grand to tiny on the strangely structured landscapes within Gale Crater.
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, on the lower slope of Mount Sharp — a layered mountain inside the crater — has begun a second campaign of investigating active sand dunes on the mountain’s northwestern flank. The rover also has been observing whirlwinds carrying dust and checking how far the wind moves grains of sand in a single day’s time.
Gale Crater observations by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have confirmed long-term patterns and rates of wind erosion that help explain the oddity of having a layered mountain in the middle of an impact crater.
“The orbiter perspective gives us the bigger picture — on all sides of Mount Sharp and the regional context for Gale Crater. We combine that with the local detail and ground-truth we get from the rover,” said Mackenzie Day of the University of Texas, Austin, lead author of a research report in the journal Icarus about wind’s dominant role at Gale.
The combined observations show that wind patterns in the crater today differ from when winds from the north removed the material that once filled the space between Mount Sharp and the crater rim. Now, Mount Sharp itself has become a major factor in determining local wind directions. Wind shaped the mountain; now the mountain shapes the wind.
The Martian atmosphere is about a hundred times thinner than Earth’s, so winds on Mars exert much less force than winds on Earth. Time is the factor that makes Martian winds so dominant in shaping the landscape. Most forces that shape Earth’s landscapes — water that erodes and moves sediments, tectonic activity that builds mountains and recycles the planet’s crust, active volcanism — haven’t influenced Mars much for billions of years. Sand transported by wind, even if infrequent, can whittle away Martian landscapes over that much time.”
“The ExoMars Rover, developed by ESA, provides key mission capabilities: surface mobility, subsurface drilling and automatic sample collection, processing, and distribution to instruments. It hosts a suite of analytical instruments dedicated to exobiology and geochemistry research: this is the Pasteur payload.
The Rover uses solar panels to generate the required electrical power, and is designed to survive the cold Martian nights with the help of novel batteries and heater units. Due to the infrequent communication opportunities, only 1 or 2 short sessions per sol (Martian day), the ExoMars Rover is highly autonomous. Scientists on Earth will designate target destinations on the basis of compressed stereo images acquired by the cameras mounted on the Rover mast.
The Rover must then calculate navigation solutions and safely travel approximately 100 m per sol. To achieve this, it creates digital maps from navigation stereo cameras and computes a suitable trajectory. Close-up collision avoidance cameras are used to ensure safety.
The locomotion is achieved through six wheels. Each wheel pair is suspended on an independently pivoted bogie (the articulated assembly holding the wheel drives), and each wheel can be independently steered and driven. All wheels can be individually pivoted to adjust the Rover height and angle with respect to the local surface, and to create a sort of walking ability, particularly useful in soft, non-cohesive soils like dunes. In addition, inclinometers and gyroscopes are used to enhance the motion control robustness. Finally, Sun sensors are utilised to determine the Rover’s absolute attitude on the Martian surface and the direction to Earth.
The camera system’s images, combined with ground penetrating radar data collected while travelling, will allow scientists on-ground to define suitable drilling locations.The Rover subsurface sampling device will then autonomously drill to the required depth (maximum 2 m) while investigating the borehole wall mineralogy, and collect a small sample. This sample will be delivered to the analytical laboratory in the heart of the vehicle. The laboratory hosts four different instruments and several support mechanisms. The sample will be crushed into a fine powder. By means of a dosing station the powder will then be presented to other instruments for performing a detailed chemistry, physical, and spectral analyses.”
“ExoMars (Exobiology on Mars) is a two-part Martian astrobiology project to search for evidence of life on Mars, a joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian space agency Roscosmos. The first part, launched in 2016, placed a trace gas research and communication satellite into Mars orbit and released a stationary experimental lander (which crashed). The second part is planned to launch in 2020, and to land a rover on the surface, supporting a science mission that is expected to last into 2022 or beyond.
ExoMars goals are to search for signs of past and present life on Mars, investigate how the Martian water and geochemical environment varies, investigate atmospheric trace gases and their sources and by doing so demonstrate the technologies for a future Mars sample return mission. The mission will search for biosignatures of Martian life, past or present, employing several spacecraft elements to be sent to Mars on two launches.
The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and a test stationary lander called Schiaparelli were launched on 14 March 2016. TGO entered Mars orbit on 19 October 2016 and will proceed to map the sources of methane (CH4) and other trace gases present in the Martian atmosphere that could be evidence for possible biological or geological activity. The Schiaparelli experimental lander separated from TGO on 16 October and was maneuvered to land in Meridiani Planum. As of 19 October 2016, ESA had not received a signal that the landing was successful. On 21 October 2016, NASA released a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image showing what appears to be the lander crash site. The landing was designed to test new key technologies to safely deliver the 2020 rover mission. The TGO features four instruments and will also act as a communications relay satellite.
In 2020, a Roscosmos-built lander (ExoMars 2020 surface platform) is to deliver the ESA-built ExoMars Rover to the Martian surface. The rover will also include some Roscosmos built instruments. The second mission operations and communications will be led by ALTEC’s Rover Control Centre in Italy.”
“Mawrth Vallis (Mawrth means “Mars” in Welsh) is a valley on Mars in the Oxia Palus quadrangle at 22.3°N, 343.5°E with an elevation approximately two kilometers below datum. It is an ancient water outflow channel with light-colored clay-rich rocks. Mawrth Vallis is one of the oldest valleys on Mars. It was formed in and subsequently covered by layered rocks, from beneath which it is now being exhumed.
The Mawrth Vallis region holds special interest because of the presence of phyllosilicate (clay) minerals which form only if water is available, first identified in data from the OMEGA spectrometer on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars has identified aluminium-rich and iron-rich clays, each with a unique distribution. Some of the clays recently discovered by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are montmorillonite and kaolinite, and nontronite. Since some clays seem to drape over high and low areas, it is possible that volcanic ash landed in an open body of water. On Earth such clays occur in (among other environments) weathered volcanic rocks and hydrothermal systems, where volcanic activity and water interact. Mawrth Vallis was at one point considered as a landing site for the Mars Science Laboratory, which ultimately landed at Gale Crater. Clay minerals easily preserve microscopic life on Earth, so perhaps traces of ancient life may be found at Mawrth. It is considered a potential landing site for the Mars 2020 rover.”
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