• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Mars Exploration 1: Unmanned Missions (Probes; Rovers; etc.)

I also always think, you've got a whole planet to land on, why not land the rovers somewhere that at least has a scenic backdrop of Olympus Mons.
 
Nasa 'flying saucer' tests Mars tech
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News

A US space agency (Nasa) experiment on Saturday to test future Mars landing technologies proved largely successful.
A flying saucer-shaped vehicle was sent high into the atmosphere via a balloon to trial a new type of parachute and an inflatable Kevlar ring that could help slow down a spacecraft as it approaches the Red Planet's surface.

All of the equipment appeared to work apart from the parachute, which failed to deploy fully.
The experiment was sent up from Hawaii.
Nasa hopes the lessons learned will enable it put heavier payloads on Mars in the decades ahead.
The current limit is about one-and-a-half tonnes.
If humans are ever to go to the planet, this mass capability will have to rise to well beyond 10 tonnes.

Saturday's test vehicle, known as the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD), ditched in the Pacific after its flight.
Teams were despatched to try to locate the demonstrator so that its data recorder could be recovered.
This will give engineers the most detailed information on what precisely happened during the experiment.
Video cameras on the ground and on the LDSD captured most of the flight.

The helium balloon was launched from the US Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai at just after 08:40 local time (18:40 GMT).
It took over two hours to raise the saucer-shaped vehicle to roughly 35km (120,000ft), whereupon it was released.

A rocket motor then kicked the LDSD on up through the stratosphere to above 50km (160,000ft), and to a velocity of Mach 4 (four times the speed of sound) - the sort of conditions a spacecraft approaching Mars might encounter.

As the vehicle began to slow, it deployed the first of its two new atmospheric braking systems.
This first system was a 6m (20ft) inflatable "doughnut". It enlarged the LDSD's girth and so will have slowed the saucer further by increasing the amount of drag it experienced.

The second braking system, however, did not come out properly.
Upward-looking video showed the 30m-diameter supersonic parachute failing to unfurl correctly.

Nasa engineers said before the test that they would gather valuable data whether the technologies on the LDSD worked properly or not.
The project hopes to return to Hawaii next year to conduct two further test flights.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27799129
 
Curiosity Mars rover 'solves mountain riddle'
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News

Scientists working on Nasa's Curiosity rover think they can now explain why there is a huge mountain at the robot's landing site in Mars's Gale Crater.
They believe it is the remains of sediments laid down in successive lakes that filled the deep bowl, probably over tens of millions of years.
Only later did winds dig out an encircling plain to expose the 5km-high peak we see today.

If true, this has major implications for past climates on the Red Planet.
It implies the world had to have been far warmer and wetter in its first two billion years than many people had previously recognised.
Ancient Mars, says the Curiosity team, must have enjoyed a vigorous global hydrological cycle, involving rains or snows, to maintain such humid conditions.

One tantalising consequence of this is the possibility that the planet may even have featured an ocean somewhere on its surface.
"If we have a long-standing lake for millions of years, the atmospheric humidity practically requires a standing body of water like an ocean to keep Gale from evaporating," said Dr Ashwin Vasavada, the Curiosity deputy project scientist.

For decades, researchers have speculated that the northern lowlands could have held a large sea in Mars' early history. The latest Curiosity results are sure to re-ignite interest in that idea.

Craters like Gale often feature central mounds that are created as the ground rebounds after a bowl-forming impact from an asteroid or comet.
But Mount Sharp is far too big to be explained in this way.

Curiosity's revelation follows from over a year's geological observations as it drove south towards the big peak from its 2012 landing site, out on the crater's plain.
In that time, the robot saw abundant banded sediments that were very obviously deposited by ancient rivers.
And the further south Curiosity rolled, the clearer it became that this fluvial activity ended in deltas and static lakes at the bowl's centre.

But the critical tell-tale was the inclination of these sediment beds, which the rover could see all dipped down towards the mountain, even as it climbed to higher and higher ground.
"We always see this same systematic pattern, which is quite intriguing," observed mission scientist Prof Sanjeev Gupta from Imperial College London, UK.
What this suggests is that water was running downhill from the crater rim towards Gale's centre where it would have pooled.

Over millions of years, the sediment raining out of this static body of water would have built the layers of rock - stack upon stack - that now make up Mount Sharp.
The peak stands proud today, says the team, because subsequent wind erosion has had many hundreds of millions of years to remove material between the crater perimeter and what is now the edge of the mountain.

Curiosity project scientist Prof John Grotzinger saluted the rover's careful field work.
The mystery of Mount Sharp, he argued, could only have been solved by a robot on the ground - not by satellite observations.
"There is no way to have recognised this from orbit," he told reporters.
"All that driving we did really paid off for science. It didn't just get us to Mount Sharp - it gave us the context to appreciate Mount Sharp."

There are still many outstanding questions.
The research team needs to understand better how persistent the water might have been through time; the activity that built the mountain could have been quite episodic.

And the notion that Mars was a lot warmer in the past is at odds with current climate models for that time.
"Even with a thicker atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases like water, sulphur dioxide or hydrogen, it's difficult in models to raise global temperatures enough. But unless you do so, any liquid water would quickly freeze," explained Dr Vasavada.

The team hopes to answer some of these questions in the coming months and years as Curiosity climbs the mountain and studies its different rock layers.

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/posti ... ply&t=9443
 
Recently, I've been looking at Youtube videos, exploring the weird stuff seen on Mars.
There really is a LOT of weird stuff on Mars, too.

Most of these videos are crap, because of the lack of serious rational thought (and the sheer amount of pareidolia).
...But this one stood out to me today as a very good collection of some obviously unusual stuff:

 
Annoying thing about the camera on the Curiosity rover... it's a measly 2 megapixels!
I just looked that up.
This is why the pictures are still pretty blurry.
We have to wait for NASA to catch up with modern technology. :rolleyes:
 
A definite weird on from Mars here.
Towards the top is a crater with a dome in it that looks smooth.
Then there are the giant worm-like structures.
These could possibly be explained by underwater volcanic activity at the point where tectonic plates intersected. 'Underwater' because there would have been a huge sea all over the planet at one time.
Also on this pic is some strange stuff at the bottom (which is probably just a software glitch).

m1501228.imq.jpg
 
Those ridged, squiggly-looking features - any idea of the size?

Volcanic activity is a more comforting explanation than giant worm fossils, which is the first thing that comes to mind. :p
 
Last edited:
Lost Beagle2 probe found 'intact' on Mars
By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

_80304473_main.jpg

Image analysts are confident that the features seen are those of Beagle2

The missing Mars robot Beagle2 has been found on the surface of the Red Planet, apparently intact.
High-resolution images taken from orbit have identified its landing location, and it looks to be in one piece.
The UK-led probe tried to make a soft touchdown on the dusty world on Christmas Day, 2003, using parachutes and airbags - but no radio contact was ever made with the probe.

Many scientists assumed it had been destroyed in a high-velocity impact.
The new pictures, acquired by Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, give the lie to that notion, and hint at what really happened to the European mission.

Beagle's design incorporated a series of deployable "petals", on which were mounted its solar panels.
From the images, it seems that this system did not unfurl fully.
"Without full deployment, there is no way we could have communicated with it as the radio frequency antenna was under the solar panels," explained Prof Mark Sims, Beagle's mission manager from Leicester University.
"The failure cause is pure speculation, but it could have been, and probably was, down to sheer bad luck - a heavy bounce perhaps distorting the structure as clearances on solar panel deployment weren't big; or a punctured and slowly leaking airbag not separating sufficiently from the lander, causing a hang-up in deployment," he told BBC News.

The discovery of Beagle comes less than a year after the death of the probe's principal investigator, Colin Pillinger. The Royal Society announced an award in commemoration of Prof Pillinger on Friday.
The Open University scientist was the driving force behind the project, and although his mission never got to explore Mars, he is credited with sparking a huge enthusiasm among the public for space research.
His wife and fellow Beagle team-member, Dr Judith Pillinger, said: "Colin was always fond of a football analogy. No doubt he would have compared Beagle2 landing on Mars, but being unable to communicate, to having 'hit the crossbar' rather than missing the goal completely.
"Beagle2 was born out of Colin's quest for scientific knowledge. Had he known the team came so close to scoring he would certainly have been campaigning to 'tap in the rebound' with Beagle3 and continue experiments to answer questions about life on Mars."

_80214104_80214103.jpg

Beagle had a system of deployable "petal" panels

The outcome will be deeply frustrating to the science and engineering teams behind the project, because they will now realise just how close they came to success.
Indeed, MRO's data confirms that Beagle landed just 5km from the centre of its targeted touchdown zone.
This was an ellipse, 500km by 100km, on a flat, near-equatorial plain known as Isidis. To be off-centre by such a small margin amounts to a bulls-eye.


Beagle2 was carried to the Red Planet by the European Space Agency's Mars Express (MEx) orbiter, which remains in working order today.
MEx released the little robot on to its landing trajectory on 19 December 2003. It even snapped a picture of Beagle, in its entry capsule, receding into the distance. What followed was a mystery.

Various theories were posited for the failure of the probe to make contact after the expected landing time of 02:45 GMT on 25 December.
The Beagle team itself suspected the robot was caught out by a Martian atmosphere that was thinner than the one for which it had planned.
This would have meant it was travelling too fast as it approached the surface.
But the pictures suggest that all elements of the entry, descent and landing (EDL) system did a job.

Beagle's EDL systems strewn across the surface
_80304477_downpage.jpg

  • The image features are at the limits of what MRO can see
  • But the objects and separations conform to what is expected
  • Beagle is partially deployed, with two (max three) petals out
  • Backshell with the drogue chute and main chute are close by
  • Scenario in images confirms that EDL software did its job
  • Beagle's on-surface operations software began its tasks
  • Why deployment tasks were not completed is unknown
  • Component damage or airbag obstruction are possibilities
  • Incomplete deployment meant radio transmitter was blinded
  • Nothing can be done to bring the Beagle probe back to life
_80111253_line976.jpg

The entry capsule clearly protected the probe from the heat of rubbing up against the Martian atmosphere, and the parachutes and bouncing bags must have come out to soften the final approach to the surface.
In the MRO images, it is even possible to identify some of the EDL elements on the ground close to Beagle.
Official inquiry

The Commission of Inquiry - jointly set up by the European Space Agency (Esa) and the forerunner of what is now the UK Space Agency - blamed the failure on a mix of poor management and inadequate testing of systems and components. It also conceded that too little money had been allocated to the Beagle project at its outset.
With a total budget of near £50m, it remains one of the cheapest interplanetary missions ever devised.
The report's 19 recommendations included the demand that communications with future probes be maintained through the various descent phases.
This has become standard practice in recent years, but with Beagle its last contact was essentially that black and white photo of it moving away from the MEx orbiter six days prior to landing.

...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30784886

So near and yet so far... :(
 
What a shame Pillinger didn't hang on for another year. Good news, anyway.
 
What does Beagle2 say about how to handle failure?

_80304251_2822141.jpg

Images show the daring mission, masterminded by the late Colin Pillinger, came tantalisingly close to glory

The discovery of Beagle2 on the surface of Mars confirms the mission as one of most glorious near-misses in the history of British exploration.
Bold, imaginative, and brilliantly-engineered, the spacecraft came very close to upstaging Nasa but ultimately failed.
Criticised by some for relying too much on the British tradition of "winging it with string and sticky tape", as one European space official put it, Beagle2 nevertheless caught the public imagination.

The mastermind behind the venture, the late Colin Pillinger, could have had a very successful career in marketing. Shyness was never an option.
His choice of the mission's name - after the vessel that had sailed Charles Darwin around the world - deliberately aligned it with one of the greatest journeys in the story of modern science.
Just as Darwin's venture had ultimately led to a revolution in scientific theory about life on Earth, Pillinger's was designed to answer the big question about life beyond it.

Distinctive whiskers in full bloom, mind fizzing with ideas, he and his wife Judith shuttled their very British Land Rover between the centres of power of the European Space Agency, hustling for support.
They enlisted help from some of the most fashionable names in British art and music: commissioning the artist Damien Hirst to paint the image that would calibrate the camera and the rock group Blur to compose the first transmission signal.

_80304560_80304503.jpg

This artist's impression shows how the lander was to have deployed its sampling tools on Mars

And once, while filming a story at Pillinger's lab at the Open University in Milton Keynes, I asked him to demonstrate Beagle2's scale. His answer was unbeatable, tapping into some uniquely British humour: he placed a replica of the barbecue-sized spacecraft in a supermarket trolley and wheeled it through the car park. A shot both hilarious and iconic was born.

Then, at the key moment, on Christmas morning in 2003, stars and celebrities joined our media throng for an agonising wait. This was not exactly mission control in Houston but a modest meeting room at the Open University's centre in north London.
Live on television, his shirt festooned with clip-on microphones, Pillinger was resolute as the clock approached the moment when the first message should have confirmed a safe landing. And he remained resolute when that moment passed.
Early days, he kept saying, no problem, a bold display of a stiff upper lip. But I caught sight of Judith's face which told a more forlorn story.

Nothing was ever heard from the tiny craft and there was no trace of it until now. The assumption was that it was lying in shattered pieces in the Martian dust.
And so the name Beagle entered the lexicon as a heart-warming example of plucky failure.

When a British mission to search for life beneath the ice of Antarctica was being planned, the chief scientist Martin Siegert told me he hoped it would not turn out to be "another Beagle".
The pristine waters of the ancient Lake Ellsworth, cut off for thousands of years, were the target of the drilling project. The quest was to see if life could survive in the icy darkness.

The Russians had already extracted water from another lake under the ice but the samples may have been contaminated. And an American project was drilling into a less isolated spot. The scientific prize - as with Beagle - was there to be seized by British hands.
But the team's hot-water drill could not be aimed as accurately as needed. Supplies of fuel to melt the ice were running low. And over Christmas 2012 - exactly nine years after Beagle - another British team faced crushing disappointment.

Of course, the ultimate example of near-triumph came from Captain Scott and his team in the Antarctic wilderness a century before that.
They made it to the South Pole only to find that the Norwegians had got there first. They then hauled back priceless geological samples but never made it, their bodies later found frozen in their tent.
Even so, Scott became established as a legend and inspired future generations of explorers. A key thread in the narrative of British exploration is a determination not to give up, a legacy of salvaging something positive from defeat.
So, the Lake Ellsworth scientists are hoping to win funding to try again. And British space scientists will have another go at Mars with a European mission in 2018.

Colin Pillinger himself never had the chance for a second attempt. But he always avoided using the word failure.
And, if he were alive today, he would surely argue that news of Beagle2 touching down intact proves him right, that Britain did manage to land on Mars, and by any standards that counts as success.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30842576
 
Beagle 2: probe find rewrites history and vindicates Colin Pillinger
The first images of Beagle 2 on Mars proves that the British scientists did land a probe on Mars
By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor
6:30AM GMT 17 Jan 2015

The history books must be re-written to show that the Beagle 2 mission was a success, scientists said on Friday, after the first pictures of the probe proved that it did land safely on Mars, vindicating lead scientist Colin Pillinger.

...

Yesterday his widow Judith, who named the mission, said that the scientist would be pleased to see he had “hit the crossbar rather than missing the goal completely.”
“Had he known the team came so close to scoring he would certainly have been campaigning to 'tap in the rebound' with Beagle 3 and continue experiments to answer questions about life on Mars,” she said.

Dr David Paker, CEO of the UK Space Agency added: "Beagle 2 was much more of a success than we previously knew. The history books need to be slightly rewritten to say that Beagle 2 did land on Christmas Day 2003.”

The images were taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) in 2013 but it wasn’t until after Prof Pillinger’s death that the Beagle 2 team was alerted to the finding.
“We saw a glinting object that wasn’t casting shadows,” said Dr John Bridges who led the selection of the original landing site. “It was clearly a man-made object.”

...

It appears that just one faulty motor was behind the unsuccessful landing. The pictures reveal that some of the solar panels which needed to folded out to uncover a radio-antenna, failed to open. An unlucky bounce on its side may also have misshapen the probe preventing it from opening up properly.

...

“Every Christmas Day since 2003 I have wondered what happened to Beagle 2,” added Prof Sims.
“To be frank I had all but given up hope of ever knowing what happened.
“The images show that we came so close to achieving the goal of science on Mars. The images vindicate the hard work put in by many people and companies both here in the UK and around Europe.”

...

...the new pictures suggest that criticism of the mission and Professor Pillinger was unfair.
Prof Sims added: “Personally I would say Beagle 2 was a great success.
“The UK can and will go back to Mars. Colin would have been pleased but very very frustrated. It's tinged with sadness that Colin doesn't know."
Prof Pillinger's daughter Shusanah said he would have been pleased to be able to "defy the critics who want to say that Beagle 2 is a failure".
"He would love that this is in the news again. He would love that this could inspire that next generation to do Beagle 3,” she said. :)

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/113...s-history-and-vindicates-Colin-Pillinger.html
 
Apologies if this has already been posted in this 25+ pages thread (it's mentioned briefly on page 2) but Beagle 2's 'report back' signal tune was written, performed and recorded by 90's UK indie pop band Blur ... sadly, there was only 180 hours or enough power to beam it back to Earth but here it is anyway .. is this the only human music stranded on a different planet? .... I vaguely remember something about one of the Apollo missions sending up and later abandoning music amongst other Earth info on the moon ..

A 2002 news report about Blur's contribution:


The call sign still stranded on Mars:

 
Last edited:
Mythopoeika said:
A definite weird on from Mars here.
Towards the top is a crater with a dome in it that looks smooth.
Click to expand...
These are fascinating formations. The best theory is that they are domes formed by the expansion of ice, and there are several in that image, not all quite as regular as each other. They do look very strange, though.
Then there are the giant worm-like structures.
Click to expand...
These 'worm-like structures' are actually channels; they go in to the surface, rather than stick out. But once again, fascinating formations.

These could possibly be explained by underwater volcanic activity at the point where tectonic plates intersected. 'Underwater' because there would have been a huge sea all over the planet at one time.
Click to expand...
The ocean, assuming it existed, only covered the northern hemisphere, which is much lower than the south. Which is, in itself, pretty weird to our eyes.
 
Possible fatty acid detected on Mars
By Paul Rincon Science editor, BBC News website

A fatty acid might be among organic molecules discovered on Mars by Nasa's Curiosity rover.
However, it's not possible at this stage to determine whether the compound has a biological or non-biological origin.
And contamination could still be responsible for the finding.

The results come from Curiosity's SAM instrument, and were presented at the 46th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Texas.
Nasa scientist Daniel Glavin described the results from the first "wet chemistry" experiment carried out by Curiosity.
A long-chain carboxylic acid, or fatty acid, was a good fit for one of the data peaks detected in a mudstone called Cumberland, he told an audience at the meeting. A form of alcohol molecule may also be among the compounds analysed.
The preliminary result will excite scientists because fatty acids are key components of the cell membranes found in all life forms, including microbial organisms.
Dr Glavin told an audience that the result was "provocative", and said the link to biology was the "million-dollar question". But he explained that a non-biological origin was equally plausible at this stage of the research.

...

Curiosity landed on the Red Planet in August 2012, on a mission to explore Gale Crater, which billions of years ago would have held a lake.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31988540
 
Heres a pic from Google Mars that I found years ago. Probably a trick of the light.

0
 
That's no rodent. Hasn't anyone seen a wind-eroded rock before?

The blue sky 'controversy' is nonsense too; just some idiot messing about with photoshop. There isn't enough atmosphere to produce clear-air Rayleigh scattering on Mars, unfortunately, so the only colour comes from dust suspended in the atmosphere. The dust is reddish-brown, so the sky has a nice butterscotch tinge (except at sunrise and sunset, when the dust scatters blue light forward towards the camera like cigarette smoke).
 
Last edited:
I'm here all week, folks. :p
 
... What is different about LDSD and previous spacecraft that have landed on Mars?

Previous missions have relied upon a parachute for the bulk of the decent. A spacecraft will enter Mars’ atmosphere and go through an entry process similar to how spacecraft reenter on Earth (it’s not called reentry on Mars because the spacecraft is entering for the first time). However, the density and thickness of the atmosphere on Mars is much lower. This means the atmosphere doesn’t slow the craft down all the way. The next step is to open a parachute. Once the spacecraft is at a low enough speed, the parachute continues slowing the spaceship.

The LDSD is a little different. For the entry, the LDSD system has an extra step. As the spacecraft enters the atmosphere, it has an inflatable donut-shaped object around the spaceship. This increases the surface area and thus drag. This airbag-like device is called a supersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerator (SIAD). With the SIAD, the spacecraft will slow down more than a normal spacecraft and then move into the second part of the landing. ...

http://www.wired.com/2015/06/will-nasa-land-big-payloads-mars-inflatable-donuts/?mbid=social_twitter
 
Mice of Mars: Rodents Pave Way to Red Planet

Humans have launched themselves into orbit. They've landed on the moon. They've built habitable space stations that orbit the Earth. The next giant leap for mankind is to reach another planet — specifically, Mars.

The problem is, it's no easy task. The planet is 586 times further away from Earth than the moon, and it'll take around 180 to 220 days to reach Mars, depending on where each planet is in its orbit. Such long periods in space have suggested a whole host of potential health problems, including hormonal changes, skin conditions, and muscle and bone deterioration.

Here's where some furry friends come in. A wide range of animals have been in space, from fruit flies and spiders to cats, dogs and even geckos. Such experiments began as far back as the late 1940s in initial tests to see if living things could withstand the extreme g-force of a rocket launch. ...

http://www.space.com/29740-mice-of-mars-rodents-pave-way-to-red-planet.html?cmpid=514648
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top