Core Dump

It's been six years since the rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars and they're still working. Spirit is stuck in a sand trap and it's roving days are over, but it can still provide valuable science data. Opportunity is heading to Endeavour Crater, the biggest crater on its mission. Not bad for a couple of machines that were only designed to work for 90 days.

Air and Space has an article about the rovers and the peculiar relationship that's formed between them and the science team that runs them. The machines are now something more than machines, more like pets, and in some ways even more than that.

The mystique of the rovers has even touched Native American culture. Tim McCoy, a geologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, has been on the rover team for the last four years. He’s also a citizen of the Miami tribe from the Midwest. In their Algonquian language, explains McCoy, the Miami confer “animacy” on certain beings, such as people, animals, some plants, and ome natural phenomena, such as thunder. “Anthropomorphizing is not the right word,” he says. “It’s hard to describe. Some things have a living force to them, a spirit of sorts.”The Miami elders decide what types of modern technology have animacy. Cars do. Trains don’t. “I had heard Janet Vertesi talk in a rover team meeting about the boundary in her mind between people and machines,” says McCoy. “She was sort of struggling with that. But from a Native American sense, there’s no struggle there, no apparent conflict.”

McCoy and a Miami tribesman colleague who is a linguist at Miami University of Ohio debated whether the rovers had animacy. They went to a tribal elder and described what a rover is and how it works with humans. The elder pondered the question, then proclaimed that the rovers have animacy. A group of about 20 undergraduates from theMiami tribe at the university then named the rovers “neehpikalaankwa keeyosia,” or “the red star wanderer.” “To the Miami,” says McCoy, “the wanderer performs an important task as he or she gathers useful information during wanderings and brings it back for the community.”

McCoy shared the story with the rover team.“They weren’t surprised. You really feel like this thing is an extension of you. When one of them dies, there’s going to be a tangible loss and a period of grieving.”

Labels: Mars, science, space

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has returned some remarkable pictures of Mars from orbit. They're eerie, beautiful, and important from a scientific point of view. What's also notable is how similar portions of Mars look to portions of Earth, particularly the deep deserts of Saudi Arabia or high mountain plateaus. As usual, the large presentation of the Big Picture blog makes these images especially striking.

Labels: Mars, space

Here's a rather poignant photo. Taken from Martian orbit, it shows the Mars Phoenix Lander, sitting in a field of rocks covered in carbon dioxide frost. If NASA is very, very, lucky, they may be able to revive the Lander come Martian spring.

Labels: Mars, space

NASA's Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, will have been on Mars for five years this month. That's a remarkable achievement for machines that were designed to have a 90-day lifetime. JPL has put together a video the celebrate the mission.

Labels: Mars, science, space

The Martian winter has brought an end to the Mar Phoenix Lander program. After five months, two more than the vehicle was expected to last, it has finally lost power and contact with Earth.

Originally slated for a mere 90 days near the Martian north pole, clever NASA power engineers kept the Lander doing science for nearly two months beyond that goal. But now mission officials are certain: The lander has run out of power for its internal heater and is presumed to be frozen on the arctic plane.

"At this time, we're pretty convinced that the vehicle is no longer available for us to use," said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We're ceasing operations and declaring an end to mission operations at this point."

As late as last week, the team was still trying to eke a few more experiments out of the robotic lander, even as the declining amount of solar energy in the pole area made their task more difficult.

Labels: Mars, science, space

This is cool. The Phoenix Mars lander has photographed several dust devils on Mars. One passed directly over the lander and instruments recorded a drop in air pressure. The article has an animated GIF that shows one passing by just before the horizon.

Labels: Mars, space

There is a report on Universe Today that NASA has made a "provocative" finding in one of its Phoenix Lander experiments and that they've briefed president Bush in advance of a "huge" announcement. I'm not getting too excited over this yet, but it does sound quite interesting.

It would appear that the US President has been briefed by Phoenix scientists about the discovery of something more "provocative" than the discovery of water existing on the Martian surface. This news comes just as the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA) confirmed experimental evidence for the existence of water in the Mars regolith on Thursday. Whilst NASA scientists are not claiming that life once existed on the Red Planet's surface, new data appears to indicate the "potential for life" more conclusively than the TEGA water results. Apparently these new results are being kept under wraps until further, more detailed analysis can be carried out, but we are assured that this announcement will be huge…

Update: More on the story from Wired Science.
Update2: And here's an interesting post from SF writer Karl Schroeder, who speculates that we may have already found life on Mars - in 1976.

Labels: Mars, science

Here's a large (11 MB) high-resolution panorama of Mars taken by the Phoenix lander. It's desolate and eerily beautiful. There's more on the mission in this Gizmodo article.

Labels: Mars, space

It looks like NASA's Phoenix Lander has already accomplished a key part of its mission - finding ice - by landing right on an ice patch.
"It's the consensus of all of us that we have found ice," said Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, as he talked to reporters in a conference call only six days after Phoenix landed safely from Earth. "It's shiny and smooth - it's absolutely astounding!"

But Smith did add a note of scientific caution: "It's not impossible that it's something else," he conceded, "but our leading interpretation is ice. We are looking at an extended table of ice."

And it turns out that Phoenix itself made the epochal discovery, for it was the exhaust from the lander's twelve retrorockets - firing during the last few seconds of the spacecraft's touchdown last Sunday - that blew a mere 3 to 6 inches of Martian topsoil away and uncovered the patch of ice near one of the lander's three legs. The camera on the lander's robotic arm snapped images of the flat, gleaming slab.

Labels: Mars, space

The amazing Mars rovers are still going. Yesterday, Opportunity rolled into Victoria crater for this first time. And yes, Opportunity is on day 1,291 of its planned 90-day mission.

"We will do a full assessment of what we learned from the drive today and use that information to plan Opportunity's descent into the crater," said John Callas, rover project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Once Opportunity begins its extended exploration inside the crater, the rover will investigate layered rocks exposed on the interior slope.

Labels: Mars

Here's a Quick Time panorama of a winter scene on Mars, created from 1400 pictures taken by NASA's Spirit rover. It's about as close to being there as any of us will ever get. The rovers are still going too. Not bad, for a mission that was only expected to last 90 days.

Labels: Mars, space

Scientists using a radar instrument on the Mars Express orbiter have discovered huge deposits of water arounds Mars' south pole -- enough water to cover the whole planet to a depth of 10 metres.

Plaut and his colleagues probed the deposits with radar echo sounding, typically used on Earth to study the interiors of glaciers. The instrument, called the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding, or MARSIS, beams radio waves which penetrate the planet’s surface and bounce off features having different electrical properties.

The reflected beams revealed that 90 percent or more of the frozen polar material is pure water ice, sprinkled with dust particles. The scientists calculated that the water would form a 36-foot-deep ocean of sorts if spread over the Martian globe.

Labels: Mars, science

NASA has determined that a software bug was the likely cause of the demise of the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft.

We think that the failure was due to a software load we sent up in June of last year. This software tried to synch up two flight processors. Two addresses were incorrect - two memory addresses were over written. As the geometry evolved, we drove the [solar] arrays against a hard stop and the spacecraft went into safe mode. The radiator for the battery pointed at the sun, the temperature went up, and battery failed.

Labels: Mars, software, space

NASA Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which has been sending back high-resolution pictures of Mars for about 10 years, appears to have been lost. The problem is likely something that disabled the solar power array. Engineers have been unable to contact the spacecraft since November 2.

Fuk K. Li, the laboratory’s Mars program manager, said the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the newest spacecraft to explore the planet, drew blanks in several attempts on Friday and Monday to make a photographic inspection of the Global Surveyor. Given that failure, mission officials said yesterday that they had exhausted the most likely means of re-establishing radio communications.

Labels: Mars, space