April 20, 2024, 09:18:44 am
Welcome,
Guest
. Please
login
or
register
.
1 Hour
1 Day
Forever
Login with username, password and session length
News
: Giant crater may lie under Antarctic ice
http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn9268
Home
Help
Arcade
Gallery
Links
Staff List
Calendar
Login
Register
Field Trip on Mars
Atlantis Online
>
Forum
>
Space
>
Mars, the Red Planet
>
Field Trip on Mars
Pages: [
1
]
Go Down
« previous
next »
Print
Author
Topic: Field Trip on Mars (Read 208 times)
0 Members and 131 Guests are viewing this topic.
Red7Planet
Superhero Member
Posts: 3878
Field Trip on Mars
«
on:
January 11, 2015, 12:44:31 am »
Field Trip on Mars
Curiosity, the Mars rover, is the next best thing to being there.
By John Grotzinger
Photograph by NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS)
“There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson, a Scot, was exploring California in 1880 with his new bride. I’m one of a team of more than 500 travelers exploring Mars from California with the most sophisticated robot ever sent to another planet. As I write, Curiosity is pounding a hole into a rock in Gale crater. That Neanderthal feat may not seem like proof of its sophistication. But it is. It took us ten years of engineering on Earth and six months of preparation on Mars to get to that rock. Drilling a two-inch-deep hole into it and extracting a baby-aspirin-size piece will take weeks more. We’re doing it all to look for chemical evidence that Mars is not so different from Earth—that it too was once hospitable to life.
I’m a geologist, and I do fieldwork on Earth. I usually head out with only a handful of other people. We drive into remote areas with four-wheel-drive trucks or get dropped off by small airplanes or helicopters. Then we walk a lot. To plan a field campaign takes months, not a decade, and when I want to sample a rock, I reach into my rucksack, grab my rock hammer, and knock off a piece. Sampling takes minutes, not weeks. Back in the lab we analyze samples in a few days rather than the months it takes Curiosity. On Earth as on Mars, doing fieldwork well takes a great deal of practice—but on Mars it’s at a different level.
For starters, we need a bunch of brilliant engineers just to figure out how to wield the hammer or the drill. At Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory they practiced for years on Curiosity’s twin sister, testing tens of thousands of lines of computer code that command the seven-foot robotic arm to make sure they could execute the hundreds of motions required to place a 65-pound drill as gently as a feather on a target the size of a pea. We drilled scores of real rocks, and then we made fake rocks and drilled those too, because we worried that the rocks might be different on Mars. We were certain the weather would be different. The daily 180-degree-Fahrenheit temperature swings on Mars would cause the whole rover, including the drill bit, to expand and contract. So we had to figure out how to keep it from getting stuck. We worried too whether the powder produced by drilling would clump and clog the tiny tubes and sieves of our onboard chemical lab. We sweated a lot of details.
Report Spam
Logged
Red7Planet
Superhero Member
Posts: 3878
Re: Field Trip on Mars
«
Reply #1
on:
January 11, 2015, 12:45:11 am »
Report Spam
Logged
Red7Planet
Superhero Member
Posts: 3878
Re: Field Trip on Mars
«
Reply #2
on:
January 11, 2015, 12:45:35 am »
Then, after we endured the famous “seven minutes of terror” as the sky crane set Curiosity down lightly on Mars, we went through six months of hand-wringing. We had to go easy with our brand-new $2.5 billion vehicle. When I swing my hammer on Earth, every once in a while I miss and whack the hand that holds the chisel. Band-Aids and time usually solve the problem. On Mars we really don’t want the drill or the percussion hammer to hit the rover, ever. The arm was built with as little slop as possible in the joints, and those thousands of lines of software were checked and checked again—but we still didn’t know exactly how it would all work on Mars until we tried it. For one thing, gravity there is about one-third as strong as it is on Earth. And so the dozens of activities we had practiced already in California, we practiced again on Mars, in very small steps. If working on Mars weren’t so amazing, it would be enough to make you scream sometimes. But after six months we were ready to drill a rock.
So what is this precious powder we come in search of, like early explorers to the Spice Islands? Curiosity is looking for evidence that life could once have existed on Mars—for environments that could have supported microbes and for organic molecules the microbes might have made. We’re not searching for life itself; that would take instruments even more advanced than Curiosity’s. Its job is to help us figure out where a future mission should look for life.
A habitable environment includes three important ingredients: water, a source of energy, and the chemical building blocks of life, such as carbon. Earlier missions proved that Mars was once wet. Orbiters photographed ancient river valleys; rovers found minerals that contained water in their crystal structure. Curiosity is testing for the other two ingredients of habitability. Since the surface of Mars today is not hospitable, we’re hunting for ancient rocks that preserve records of a wetter, more Earth-like environment. We’re expecting to find such rocks in the stacked sediment layers of Mount Sharp, at the center of Gale crater. But we stumbled on some not far from our landing spot, and so we’re drilling there first.
Report Spam
Logged
Red7Planet
Superhero Member
Posts: 3878
Re: Field Trip on Mars
«
Reply #3
on:
January 11, 2015, 12:45:55 am »
We have to drill to find the good stuff. Drilling gets at material inside the rock that is less degraded and more likely to contain a faithful record of an ancient environment. From the study of Earth’s ancient environments, the major focus of my research for more than two decades, I’ve learned how difficult it is to discover such a record—and especially to find organic molecules that may have been made by ancient organisms.
Even on Earth, which we know was teeming with microbial life billions of years ago, we find the traces in only a few locations. The paradox is that water, an essential ingredient for life, can also destroy organic carbon molecules. In just the places where we might look for life, places where water has flowed through sand or silt, precipitating minerals that bind the particles into rock, the water has often erased the organic traces of life—with rare exceptions. On Earth we’ve learned how to hunt for those exceptions. It’s a long shot, but we’re hoping Curiosity will find organic molecules on Mars. They can be made by nonliving processes too, so finding them wouldn’t prove there was once life on Mars. But it would tell us where to look.
We’ve already proved, with the first rock we drilled, that Mars was once habitable. A flat mudstone, shot through with veins of a mineral that formed in water, the rock looks like something from a mining district. Curiosity’s analysis showed that the water was not too acidic for life—it would have been drinkable. It contained sulfur compounds that on Earth are an energy source for some microbes. It contained a carbon source too. We still can’t say that the pond our rock formed in, maybe three billion years ago, was inhabited—only that it could have been.
We didn’t need a gas chromatograph, though, to sense that Gale crater is full of promise. We just needed to look at the photographs. Within a month of landing, we realized that Curiosity had touched down on an ancient streambed. The stones looked like the ones I’d sent skimming across the creek behind my house in Pennsylvania, back when I was a boy.
Images of distant and unknown places have long inspired explorers and the public too. The photographs made during the Hayden expedition to Yellowstone were an essential reason it was selected as America’s first national park in 1872. Photographer William Henry Jackson captured the public’s imagination and support by confirming the existence of western landmarks previously regarded as glorified myths: the Grand Tetons, Old Faithful, and strange pools of boiling-hot mud. Half a century later photographer Ansel Adams began his long career of delighting the public with luminous pictures of parks that many would never visit.
Curiosity’s photos are like that—inspiring but also familiar. Our robot is no Ansel Adams, and Gale crater is not the next national park, but its strikingly Earth-like appearance in Curiosity’s postcards has delighted the public and all of us at the Jet Propulsion Lab too. From the day we landed, this place looked different from all the others we’d visited on previous missions to Mars. From the summit of Mount Sharp to the highlands of the crater rim to the close-up of those stones shaped by water in an ancient stream, the images have reminded us of home.
It’s a strange and potent thought to have about another planet. Soon after you read this, we should be on our five-mile way across the crater to the mountain. As a traveler on Mars now, I’m feeling the truth of Stevenson’s statement: This land is not so foreign. It’s a beautiful place to go for a drive.
THE NEW AGE OF EXPLORATION is a yearlong series of articles celebrating National Geographic at 125.
Report Spam
Logged
Red7Planet
Superhero Member
Posts: 3878
Re: Field Trip on Mars
«
Reply #4
on:
January 11, 2015, 12:46:11 am »
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/125-curiosity-mars-rover/grotzinger-text
Report Spam
Logged
Red7Planet
Superhero Member
Posts: 3878
Re: Field Trip on Mars
«
Reply #5
on:
January 11, 2015, 12:46:50 am »
Report Spam
Logged
Red7Planet
Superhero Member
Posts: 3878
Re: Field Trip on Mars
«
Reply #6
on:
January 11, 2015, 12:47:39 am »
Report Spam
Logged
Red7Planet
Superhero Member
Posts: 3878
Re: Field Trip on Mars
«
Reply #7
on:
January 11, 2015, 12:48:00 am »
Report Spam
Logged
Red7Planet
Superhero Member
Posts: 3878
Re: Field Trip on Mars
«
Reply #8
on:
January 11, 2015, 12:48:23 am »
Report Spam
Logged
Red7Planet
Superhero Member
Posts: 3878
Re: Field Trip on Mars
«
Reply #9
on:
January 11, 2015, 12:48:40 am »
Report Spam
Logged
Red7Planet
Superhero Member
Posts: 3878
Re: Field Trip on Mars
«
Reply #10
on:
January 11, 2015, 12:49:02 am »
Report Spam
Logged
Red7Planet
Superhero Member
Posts: 3878
Re: Field Trip on Mars
«
Reply #11
on:
January 11, 2015, 12:49:27 am »
Photograph by NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS)
After taking its first scoops of Martian soil, Curiosity posed for a self-portrait. Stitched together from 63 images, it shows the entire rover and even the imprints in the sand of its scoop and wheels—but not the seven-foot robotic arm that was holding the camera.
Report Spam
Logged
Red7Planet
Superhero Member
Posts: 3878
Re: Field Trip on Mars
«
Reply #12
on:
January 11, 2015, 12:49:49 am »
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/125-curiosity-mars-rover/mars-photography#/06-curiosity-self-portrait-high-angle-670.jpg
Report Spam
Logged
Pages: [
1
]
Go Up
Print
« previous
next »
Jump to:
Please select a destination:
-----------------------------
Atlantis Online - Messages
-----------------------------
=> Messages
=> Administrative Messages
=> Commemorating Dates in History
=> Alerts & Warnings
=> Upcoming Events, Releases & Ads
=> Television: Shows & Events
-----------------------------
the Coffee Shop
-----------------------------
=> the Coffee Shop
=> Atlantis: Polls & News
=> Poltical Alerts
=> Causes & Activism
-----------------------------
Videos, Documentaries & Online Movies
-----------------------------
=> Ancient History & Lost Civilizations
=> Ghosts, UFOs & the Esoteric
=> Music, Entertainment & the Arts
=> Conspiracies & Suppressed Knowledge
=> Documentary & Videos
-----------------------------
Ages of the Earth
-----------------------------
=> The Early Earth, Geology & Fossils
=> Dinosaurs
=> Catastrophes & Mass Extinctions
=> Ice Age
=> Humanity's Origins & Civilization's First Steps
-----------------------------
Mythology & Heroic Sagas of Culture & Myth
-----------------------------
=> Mythology
=> Greek Mythology
=> Arthurian Myth
=> Quest for King Arthur
-----------------------------
Atlantis
-----------------------------
=> Atlantis & the Atlantic Ocean
=> Atlantis: Theories & Speculation
=> Plato's Atlantis
=> the Scientific Atlantis
=> Geology & Atlantis
=> Atlantis & the New Age
=> Atlantis in the Media
-----------------------------
Satellite Discoveries & Alternate Archaeology
-----------------------------
=> Alternate Archaeology
=> Satellite Discoveries & Aerial Archaeology
=> the Bock Saga
-----------------------------
Maps, Explorers & Adventurers
-----------------------------
=> the Oceans
=> Islands
=> the Bahamas, Bermuda, Cuba & the West Indies
=> Explorers & Adventurers
=> Maps, Cartographers & Cartography
-----------------------------
Egypt & the Pyramids
-----------------------------
=> Gods of Egypt
=> Egypt & the Pyramids
=> the Giza Complex
=> the Dynasties of Egypt
=> Egypt: Latest Discoveries
-----------------------------
the Guanches, Basques, Berbers & Sea People
-----------------------------
=> Guanches, Basques & Berbers
=> Pirates, Phantom Islands & Stories of the Sea
=> the Sea People
-----------------------------
the Ancient World
-----------------------------
=> Neolithic Europe
=> Stonehenge & the Druids
=> the Library of Alexandria, Ancient Historians & Philosophers
=> Ancient Warfare
=> the Spartans
-----------------------------
the Dawn of Civilization
-----------------------------
=> Africa, the Cradle of Life
=> China & the Asian Empires
=> Eastern Mysticism, India, & the Ancient Far East
=> Zoroastrianism, Arabia & the Near East
=> the Sumerians
=> Ancient Asia Minor
=> Hawaii, Australia, Alaska & the Pacific Rim
-----------------------------
Ancient Mediterranean Cultures
-----------------------------
=> Minoan Crete
=> Phoenicians & Carthage
=> Mediterranean Islands
=> Israelities & the Kabbalah
=> Etruscans
=> Ancient Greece
=> Rome: Empire & Republic
-----------------------------
Ancient European Cultures
-----------------------------
=> The Picts & Celts
=> Ireland: History & Myths
=> Balkan History
=> Italy & Magna Graecia
=> the Vikings & Scandinavia
=> Germanic History
-----------------------------
Timelines of Ancient Europe
-----------------------------
=> History of Britain
=> Scotland: in History & Lore
=> Continental Europe: Past & Present
=> the Dark Ages
=> the Medieval World
=> The Renaissance
-----------------------------
the Ancient Americas
-----------------------------
=> the Ancient Americas
=> Peru: Mysteries & Prehistory
=> Mesoamerican & South American Cultures
===> Aztec
===> Incan
===> Olmec
===> Toltec & Teotihuacan
=> Mayan
=> Native American
=> Canada: Past & Present
-----------------------------
The Crusades, Templars & the Holy Grail
-----------------------------
=> the Crusades
=> the Knights Templar
=> The Holy Grail & Christian artifacts
=> The Sacred Feminine, the Cathars & Gnosticism
=> the Da Vinci Code
-----------------------------
Ancient Mysteries
-----------------------------
=> Philosophy
=> Ancient Mysteries
=> Lemuria, Mu & other sunken civilizations
=> Easter Island
=> Oak Island
-----------------------------
Archaeology & Anthropology
-----------------------------
=> Museums & Universities
=> Archaeology
=> Ancient Languages
=> Archaeological News
=> Underwater Archaeology
-----------------------------
Ancient Knowledge, Mysticism & Sacred Beliefs
-----------------------------
=> Ley Lines, Ancient Astronomy & Archeoastronomy
=> Prophecy, 2012, End Times & the End of the World
=> Sacred Symbols
=> The Ancient Arts: Astrology, Alchemy, the Tarot, Arcane Recondite Practices & the I Ching
-----------------------------
Search for the Sacred
-----------------------------
=> Angels & Angelology
=> Goddess Worship
=> Search for the Sacred
=> World Religions
=> the Urantia Book
=> Wicca, Witchcraft, Paganism & Ritual Magic
-----------------------------
Health & Healing
-----------------------------
=> Health, Healing & Medical News
=> Human Biology
=> Love & Relationships
=> Women's Studies
-----------------------------
Science & Technology
-----------------------------
=> Science, Physics & Technology
=> History of Science
=> Evolution vs. Intelligent Design
=> Human Genetics
-----------------------------
Earth Changes
-----------------------------
=> Earth Changes
=> Global Warming
=> Botany & Plant Life
===> Plants of the Americas that Changed the World
=> Antarctica & the Arctic
-----------------------------
Space
-----------------------------
=> NASA
=> Mars, the Red Planet
=> Life on Other Worlds
=> the Universe
=> Images from Space
-----------------------------
UFOs, Aliens & Future Science
-----------------------------
=> UFO's
=> Aliens & Alien Abduction
=> UFO Evidence & in the Media
=> Alternate History & Multiverses
=> Future Science
=> Time Travel
-----------------------------
the Occult
-----------------------------
=> Ghosts & Apparitions
=> Communicating with the Dead
=> Paranormal Events, Reincarnation & Near Death Experiences
=> the Enchanted World
=> the Supernatural
=> the Occult
-----------------------------
the Unexplained
-----------------------------
=> Cryptozoology
=> Bigfoot Sightings
=> the Unexplained
=> the Hollow Earth, Crop Circles, Strange Structures & Devices
=> Vanishings & Unsolved Murders
-----------------------------
Science Fiction & Fantasy
-----------------------------
=> Lord of the Rings
=> Science Fiction
=> King Kong, Gigantopithecus & the Mountain Gorilla
=> Godzilla, King of Monsters
=> Comic Books
===> Comic Book Creators
===> Videogames & Toys
-----------------------------
Halloween & Seasonal
-----------------------------
=> Halloween
=> Seasonal
=> Monsters of Myth, Movies & Folklore
=> Ghost Stories
=> the Zombie Apocalypse
-----------------------------
Genres of Film & Literature
-----------------------------
=> Universal Horror
=> H. P. Lovecraft
=> Horror
=> Dark Shadows
=> Twin Peaks
=> Online Horror Movies Sci-Fi & TV Series
-----------------------------
Arts & Literature
-----------------------------
=> Online Books & Research Papers
=> Classical Literature & Book Reviews
=> Art History
=> Architecture
=> Sculpture & Statuary
=> the Great Masters
=> Music
-----------------------------
Media & Film
-----------------------------
=> Cinema
=> the History of Film
=> Marilyn Monroe
=> Actresses & Models
=> Entertainment News
-----------------------------
Modern Historical Mysteries
-----------------------------
=> American History
===> Presidents of the United States
=> the World Wars
===> the Great Depression
=> the Holocaust
=> the Middle East: Past & Present
=> Modern History
===> the Industrial Age
===> Civil Rights
=> Great Cities of the World
=> the Kennedys: Their History & Assasinations
=> New York City: Then & Now
-----------------------------
September 11th, 2001
-----------------------------
=> September 11th: Conspiracies, Cover-ups & Remembrance
=> The World Trade Center Remembered
===> Life of the Twin Towers
=> Modern Warfare
=> Environmental Disasters & Mass Tragedies
-----------------------------
Suppressed Knowledge
-----------------------------
=> New World Order
=> Conspiracies
=> Suppressed Knowledge
=> Media Matters
-----------------------------
Politics
-----------------------------
=> the Barack Obama Administration
=> Conservatives, Trump, & Republican Politics
=> Joe Biden, Democratic Politics & News
=> Tea Party, Constitution, Libertarian Parties & Ron Paul
=> Politics & News
-----------------------------
Current Events
-----------------------------
=> Current Events & Odd Stories
=> The World Today
=> Financial News & the Economy
===> The History of Labor
=> Breaking News
-----------------------------
General Category
-----------------------------
=> Opinions & Editorials
=> Cartoons, Humor & Comic Strips
=> Ecology, Pets & the Animal Kingdom
=> General & Miscellaneous
=> Sports
=> Computers & the Internet
-----------------------------
Art, Graphics & Creative Writing
-----------------------------
=> Fantasy Art & Graphics
=> Creative Writing
===> Horror Fiction
=> Poetry
=> Photography & Models
=> Earth Images
-----------------------------
Past Events
-----------------------------
=> Case for Bush Impeachment/War Crimes
===> Bush Administration Torture Scandal
=> Campaign 2008
=> Atlantis Online - Memorial & Biography
===> Atlantis Online - Old Posts
Powered by
EzPortal
Loading...