Tag Archives: Mars

Mars Rover Discovers Chocolate on Mars

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Scientists at the National Air and Space Museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies announced an astounding discovery at a press conference this morning: the NASA Mars rover Curiosity has found chocolate on Mars.*

“Definitely more than just a trace,” said CEPS spokesperson Dr. John Grant. “More than a trace, less than a Snickers. But there could be more.”

“We were completely blindsided by this,” he said. “The Gale Crater area of Mars is about the last place you’d look for chocolate if you were looking for chocolate on Mars, which we weren’t.”

Mars

This color panorama shows a 360-degree view of the landing site of NASA’s Curiosity rover, including the highest part of Mount Sharp visible to the rover. That part of Mount Sharp is approximately 12 miles (20 kilometers) away from the rover.

 

“Here we were, searching for evidence of whether Mars was ever habitable, and we found this. Complete surprise. Curiosity was scraping away some surface materials and unearthed this small, dark, irregularly shaped mass,” Grant said, showing a sharp, close-up photo of the find, which looked vaguely like a Hershey’s bar left out on the beach.

“The initial chemical analysis was perplexing. We were prepared for the possible discovery of organic substances of some sort, but nothing like this. We ran the numbers and scratched our heads, then suddenly realized, ‘Whoa! This is, like, 90 percent cocoa, at least. Maybe more!’ Very pure stuff. Very exciting.”

The discovery begs the obvious question, where did the chocolate come from? Could it be a contaminant introduced by Curiosity itself? Perhaps a smudge left on the rover by a sloppy technician with sticky hands? “No way,” Grant asserted. “the rover is extremely clean and virtually sterile at launch. And because of the nature of the deposition, we don’t think it was a candy bar accidentally dropped by a passing alien or something. It’s a mystery.”

Curiosity

Artist concept of rover Curiosity on Mars.

When asked about the prospect of beds of chocolate on Mars that could perhaps be mined and used to sustain future explorers on the Red Planet, Grant laughed. “That’s just science fiction,” he said. “For now anyway. We don’t even know how much there is, but we’re certainly going to try and find out.”

The discovery clearly has profound implications for science and for humanity. It presents many consequential questions that scientists and others will now begin to grapple with. Of most immediate importance? Grant says: “Is it edible?”

David Romanowski is a writer and editor in the Exhibitions Department of the National Air and Space Museum.

*April Fools!

 

That was the Year That Was…2012 in Air and Space

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No question 2012 will be remembered as a simultaneously joyous and tumultuous year, certainly in politics but also in air and space. As a retrospective of the year just gone, here are my five most significant events in air and space. Like all such lists, it is idiosyncratic and I recognize that others might choose different events. I list them in order of their occurrence—not according to their significance—during the year, along with my reason for including them on this list. Comments are most welcome from others concerning other events that might find their way into this discussion of 2012 in air and space.

  1. A century of U.S. Marine Corps aviation (May 22, 1912). One hundred years ago, on May 22, 1912, the first Marine Corps aviator, First Lieutenant Alfred A. Cunningham, began the effort to create a flying corps for the Marines. He took flight at the Burgess and Curtiss aircraft factory at Marblehead, Massachusetts, in August 1912. During the year that followed Cunningham made 400 sorties in the Curtiss Model B-1, instructing others, and working through tactics of air operations. From that modest beginning the Marine Corps built a formidable flying force that has engaged in combat as needed throughout the world.

    Lt. Alfred A. Cunningham

    Lt. Alfred A. Cunningham in a Curtiss hydroaeroplane in 1914. Cunningham was Naval Aviator No. 5 and as the first Marine aviator, is considered the father of Marine Aviation.

  2. Landing of Curiosity rover on Mars (August 6, 2012). There was nothing magic about it, but the event itself transcended the hard-edged scientific and technological knowledge that made the latest Mars landing successful. After years of hard work and dedication, the team working on Mars Curiosity had their moment of truth about 1:30 a.m. EDT on August 6. The first data back demonstrated that the rover has reached the surface of the red planet safely, and the first images to reach Earth showed where Curiosity was sitting on the Gale Crater floor. It was euphoric,…at mission control, around NASA, in numerous science centers, and in Times Square where thousands gathered to watch the proceedings. It was a geek’s dream come true as the folks in Times Square watching on the big screen began chanting “sci-ence, sci-ence, sci-ence.” Of course, at year’s end there was still more to do—a lot more—as Mars Curiosity undertakes its multi-year mission to explore the Gale Crater and to climb Mt. Sharp in its center. Curiosity brings to the red planet’s surface a formidable life sciences laboratory that may well help us resolve beyond serious question whether or not life ever existed on Mars. This rover is the first full-scale astrobiology mission to Mars since the Viking landers of 1976. The mission is intended to help NASA answer this massively large question: Are there locations on or under the surface that could have supported—or might still support—life on Mars?

    Curiosity

    Curiosity on Mars (artist’s conception). Credit: NASA/JPL. Image number: PIA14156.

  3. Passing of Neil Armstrong (August 25, 2012). The aerospace world lost an iconic figure this past year with the passing of the first human to set foot on the Moon from complications resulting from heart bypass surgery. He was 82 years old. We will all miss him, not just because he was the first human being in the history of the world to set foot on another body in the solar system, but perhaps especially because of the honor and dignity with which he lived his life as that first Moon walker. He sought neither fame nor riches, and he was always more comfortable with a small group of friends rather than the limelight before millions. When he might have done anything he wished after his completion of the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, Armstrong chose to teach aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. My favorite memories of Neil Armstrong were at the various anniversaries of the Moon landing. He was always a bit perplexed by all of the praise heaped on him. It was the result of the labor of hundreds of thousands and the accomplishment of a generation of humanity, Armstrong always said. More than this, he was a superb research pilot, a geeky aerospace engineer, and a gentleman of true honor and dignity.

    Neil Armstrong

    Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong inside the Lunar Module during the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission. NASA photo.

  4. Space Dive by Felix Baumgartner (October 14, 2012). Dropping from a balloon at over 128,000 ft (39,000 m), Baumgartner broke the 1960 record of Joseph Kittinger for a high-altitude jump. Reaching a speed of Mach 1.24, Baumgartner safely returned to Earth at Roswell, New Mexico, after a 4-minute, 22-second free fall before opening his parachute at about 5,000 feet (1,524 meters). The Austrian sky diver had difficulty controlling his body at that high speed and went into a flat spin which he worked to recover from before passing out.
  5. Safest Year for flying in history (December 31, 2012). It is now officially safer to fly than ever before, according to the Aviation Safety Network which released its 2012 airliner accident statistics showing a total of 475 airliner accident fatalities, resulting from 23 fatal airliner accidents. Both figures were much lower than the ten-year average of 34 accidents and 773 fatalities. Compared to 2011, the number of fatal crashes and accidents fell dramatically over the last twelve months, to just one death for every 2.5 million flights. Almost 75 percent of the 2012 fatalities came because of two major incidents—153 lives were lost in Nigeria when a DANA Air jet crash landed in June and 127 deaths occurred when a Bhoja Air airliner crashed in Pakistan last April.

Roger D. Launius is a senior curator in the Space History Department at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.

Investigating the Apollo Valley

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Mauna Kea

Patrick Russell investigating the geology of Apollo Valley on Mauna Kea, Hawaii

In July, I joined a team from Johnson Space Center and elsewhere in investigating the geology of Apollo Valley with rover-deployed scientific instruments. Apollo Valley is a former 1960s Apollo-era astronaut training site at 3,505 meters (11,500 feet) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The project was funded by NASA’s Moon and Mars Analog Mission Activities Program, which funds projects that simulate scientific, robotic, and human aspects of exploring the Moon and Mars, with the goal of designing the most effective, efficient, and well-integrated future missions.

With plentiful basalt lava flows and cinder cones in a dry, barren environment, Mauna Kea is a good analog for the Moon and Mars. Reworking of rocks by ice and water provides another analogy to likely Mars processes. I led the ground-penetrating radar (GPR) investigation, with the radar antenna mounted off the back of the rover. Other rover-mounted instruments included panorama and video cameras, a Moessbauer spectrometer, and navigation instrumentation.

By sending radar waves into the subsurface and detecting their reflections off objects and layers and different materials, GPR provides a view of the upper 3-6 meters (10-20 feet) of the subsurface. We were able to trace surrounding lava flows under the bouldery valley fill to some extent, from which we can estimate the volume of material filling the valley. Also evident were multiple layers of cinders, sands, and gravels that sometimes interfingered or truncated against each other, suggesting multiple episodes of material movement (by wind, water, or mass wasting) and different source directions.

Another important aspect of the project was the pre-field planning and post-field data analysis based solely on rover-collected data, by scientists who were not in the field, to determine how to improve planetary geologic exploration and science return from remote, robotic operations.

The rover itself (~272 kg. or 600 lbs. with four ~40 centimeter- or 16 inch-diameter wheels treaded with small metallic plates) was developed by a Canadian company, Ontario Drive and Gear, in coordination with the Canadian Space Agency, with a view towards future planetary surface missions. The rough lava surfaces, bouldery terrain, and slopes at the site provided grueling physical tests of particular interest to the rover’s engineering and design team. The rover turned in an impressive performance, proving to be quite capable on terrains far rougher than traversed by the rovers currently on Mars.

Patrick Russell is a geoscientist in the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum.

Drive on Curiosity, Drive On!

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“You put an X anyplace in the solar system, and the engineers at NASA can land a spacecraft on it,” so said actor Robert Guillaume in an episode of “Sports Night,” a situation comedy about a team that produced a nightly cable sports broadcast in 2001. Amen brother, the team that landed Curiosity proved the truth of that statement one more time with the successful landing of a big rover on Mars in the wee morning hours of August 6, 2012! It was a stunning success.

Curiosity

This is the first image taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars the evening of Aug. 5 PDT (morning of Aug. 6 EDT). The rover’s shadow is visible in the foreground. Photo Credit: NASA/JPL. Photo Number: PIA15969-428

There was nothing magic about it, but the event itself transcended the hard-edged scientific and technological knowledge that made the latest Mars landing successful. After years of hard work and dedication, the team working on Mars Curiosity had their moment of truth about 1:30 a.m. EDT this morning. The first data back demonstrated that the rover has reached the surface of the red planet safely, and the first images to reach Earth showed where Curiosity was sitting on the Gale Crater floor. It was euphoric,…at mission control, around NASA, in numerous science centers, and in Times Square where thousands gathered to watch the proceedings. It was a geek’s dream come true as the folks in Times Square watching on the big screen began chanting “sci-ence, sci-ence, sci-ence.”

Of course there is more to do—a lot more—as Mars Curiosity begins its multi-year mission to explore the Gale Crater and to climb Mt. Sharp in its center. Curiosity brings to the red planet’s surface a formidable life sciences laboratory that may well help us resolve beyond serious question whether or not life ever existed on Mars. This rover is the first full-scale astrobiology mission to Mars since the Viking landers of 1976. Having followed the water, and found evidence of it, it is now time for NASA to answer this massively large question: Are there locations on or under the surface that could have supported—or might still support—life on Mars? This is a bold question requiring the boldest type of mission to answer it. Mars Curiosity has 10 different instruments designed to help find the answer to this question. It will look for processes that might have preserved clues about life, either now or in the past, on the Red Planet.

Times Square

Reaction in Times Square as Mars Curiosity landed in the early morning of August 6, EDT. Photo Credit: CS Muncy.

So here’s to the team that landed Curiosity on the surface of Mars in a very small target inside Gale Crater! All I can say at present after the superb Martian landing is drive on Curiosity, drive on!

Roger D. Launius is a senior curator in the National Air and Space Museum’s Division of Space History.

Satisfying Our Curiosity: Mars Science Laboratory and the Quest for the Red Planet

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Mars has long held a special fascination for humans—in no small measure because of the possibility that life either presently exists or at some time in the past has existed there. In his classic work Cosmos, Carl Sagan asks an important question: “Why Martians?” Why do Earthlings not similarly obsess over “Saturnarians” or “Plutonians?” As a planet resembling our own, Sagan concludes, Mars “has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our earthly hopes and fears.”

NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover is scheduled to land on the Red Planet in the early morning hours of August 6, 2012 EDT. Thus, “Why Mars?” is a question that we will seek to answer for visitors to the National Air and Space Museum.

Curiosity

Curiosity on Mars (artist’s conception). Credit: NASA/JPL. Image number: PIA14156.

The size of a small car, the nuclear-powered Curiosity is dedicated — using its cameras, spectrometers, radiation detectors, and other instruments — to revealing the mysteries of Mars’ Gale Crater and environs. The first task and perhaps the greatest challenge facing Curiosity will be reaching the Martian surface safely. Much of the focus for NASA’s pre-landing publicity has been Curiosity’s complicated landing procedure, which evokes a science fiction-like “Seven Minutes of Terror,”  a video that has all the makings of a trailer for a Hollywood blockbuster. The audacious landing, run entirely by computer, will bring Curiosity from a speed of 20,921 kilometers per hour (13,000 miles per hour) to stationary-touchdown using, in successive stages, a massive supersonic parachute, radar-imaging, rocket boosters, and a sky crane.

Curiosity

Curiosity during a mobility test. Credit: NASA/JPL. Image Number: PIA14256.

Further complicating Curiosity’s already daring arrival technique is the specificity of its landing target. The elliptical-shaped target landing area for the 1976 Viking Mars lander was gigantic by comparison: 300 kilometers (186 miles) across. Curiosity’s landing ellipse, only six kilometers (four miles) wide and 19 kilometers (12 miles) long, is so minute (relatively speaking) because its target is a specific area inside Gale Crater, an exciting location for scientists to explore on Mars. Gale is a low point located close to Aeolis Mons (also called “Mount Sharp”) which is six kilometers (3.7 miles) high (by comparison, Mount Everest is 8.8 kilometers or 5.4 miles high). This mountain, which sits in the center of the crater, is made up of layers of rock that enable geologists to trace the history of the planet’s evolution. Through investigation of Martian geology, scientists may well discover the secret of whether or not Mars ever held life. By employing a “follow the water” strategy—since H2O is the fundamental building block of life as we understand it—NASA is attempting on this mission not to actually find life but to locate environments where life may once have existed or perhaps could exist in the future.

Martian Landing Sites

Landing ellipses for Mars exploration missions: Viking (1970’s), Pathfinder (1997), Mars Exploration Rover (MER) (2003), Phoenix (2008), and Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) (2012). Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum).

Yet, hasn’t NASA sent robotic explorers to Mars in search of life already? The Viking missions of the 1970s were charged in part with searching for evidence of life on Mars and 2003’s twin Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), Spirit and Opportunity, conducted geological experiments  seeking evidence of water/ice on Mars. Curiosity, then, indicates that NASA, despite previous failures, is seemingly unable to shake the possibility that there is, was, or could be in the future life not only elsewhere in the solar system, but specifically on Mars.

The lure of Mars has also helped determine another goal of MSL: to “prepare for human exploration.” No rovers are set to explore Venus, the Moon, or any of the planets beyond the asteroid belt, which have been definitively deemed uninhabitable, though both Venus and the Moon have shown some traces of water molecules. NASA’s quest to find life on Mars and investigate the potential of human colonies there indicates humanity’s seemingly inexorable quest to unmask the mysteries of universe, and in the process learn more about our own planet Earth and those who inhabit it.

As an institution devoted not just to the history and technology of aeronautics and spaceflight but also the scientific discoveries made about our universe, the National Air and Space Museum has long related the story of Mars exploration. The Museum features an entire exhibit on Exploring the Planets with a recently updated section on Mars exploration that probes how we understand our not-so-distant planetary neighbor and displays mock-ups of the MER rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Furthermore, as discussed in our recent “Mars Day!” event, John Grant of the Museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies (CEPS) is heavily involved in Curiosity’s success and he helped choose Gale Crater as the rover’s landing site and Mount Sharp as its destination point.

Those staying up to view Curiosity‘s landing live on TV will have a suspenseful watching experience: will news from the rover come back right away or take minutes, or even hours? Because of Mars’ distance from the Earth, signals from Curiosity take 14 minutes to reach Earth. The landing process, however, takes only seven minutes, hence the “seven minutes of terror.”  When NASA receives its first signals from Curiosity, the rover will already have been sitting on the Martian surface, in one piece or otherwise, for seven minutes. Yet, as is the case with most space-based communication, “seven minutes” may turn into a number of hours, and the success of Curiosity’s complicated landing may not be known until a day or so later. The rover itself will not begin exploring Mars right away as NASA will spend some time assessing the condition of the rover, which will take and transmit its first photographs before beginning its journey up Aeolis Mons.

Even if Curiosity does not find evidence for the possible presence of life on Mars, NASA would like to continue efforts to learn more about the red planet. While Curiosity is slated to function for 687 Earth-days (one Martian year), humanity’s curiosity about Mars and its potential for life is seemingly never-ending.

Jonathan Cohen of McGill University is an intern in the Space History Division of the National Air and Space Museum.

Get the latest information on the mission at http://www.nasa.gov/mars and follow the Mars Curiosity rover’s progress on twitter https://twitter.com/marscuriosity