NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander weathered its first dust storm on the red planet this past weekend, though the dust did lower the lander’s solar power and put the brakes on some of its planned activities.
Phoenix project manager Barry Goldstein of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told reporters about the weekend’s events during a lecture discussing the mission at the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Conference in here on Wednesday.
The nearly 23,000 square-mile (37,000 square-km) storm moved west to east around the northern arctic plains of Mars, and weakened considerably by the time it reached the lander on Saturday, Oct. 11. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter circling the planet took a snapshot of the storm as it blew over Phoenix.
At the height of the storm, all the dust it had kicked up increased the opacity of the atmosphere over the spacecraft, letting less sunlight through to its solar arrays, the lander’s sole source of power.
Phoenix’s power levels “really dropped drastically,” Goldstein told SPACE.com.
The hit to the lander’s already diminishing power supplies limited what the spacecraft could do over the weekend.
Phoenix Lander Survives Martian Dust Storm
SpaceDev Founder Jim Benson Dies at 63
American entrepreneur Jim Benson, founder of the aerospace firm SpaceDev that helped build the rocket engine that launched the world’s first privately-built manned spaceship into suborbital space, died early Friday of a brain tumor, the company announced today.
Benson died in his sleep from a glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor, which he was diagnosed with last year, SpaceDev officials said. He was 63.
“Jim was a true visionary,” said Mark Sirangelo, SpaceDev’s CEO and Chairman of the Board. “He saw that space exploration could be more effective if done commercially, and formed SpaceDev to make that dream become a reality.”
Benson founded the Poway, Calif.-based SpaceDev in 1997 after 30 years working in the computer industry.
Frozen Death Looms for Phoenix Mars Lander
After more than four months on the arctic plains of the red planet, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander’s days are finally numbered.As the sun begins to set for the frigid Martian winter, the spacecraft will lose its energy supply, freeze and eventually fall into a mechanical coma from which it will likely never wake up.
Phoenix’s mission has been to dig up samples of Martian dirt and the subsurface layer of rock-hard water ice at its landing site in Mars’ Vastitas Borealis plains. The lander has been scanning the samples for signs of the region’s past potential for habitability.
Phoenix landed on Mars on May 25, late spring in the Martian northern hemisphere. The mission was originally slated to last three months, to the end of August, but was extended twice; first to the end of September and recently through the end of December.
But whether or not Phoenix will survive that long is uncertain and depends on how the spacecraft’s systems handle its ever-dwindling energy supply and the harsh conditions of the Martian winter.
Listening In: Lander to Record Mars Sounds
NASA scientists hope to hear what it sounds like on the surface of Mars for the first time when they attempt to switch on the Phoenix Mars Lander’s microphone in the next week or two, mission leaders announced on Monday.
“This is definitely a first,” said Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith, of the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Phoenix’s microphone is a part of the Mars Descent Imager system that was included on the underside of the lander to take downward-looking images during the three minutes of descent before the spacecraft touched down on the planet’s surface. The MARDI on Phoenix was originally designed for the Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander missions, which were eventually canceled. The system is also similar to the one aboard 1999’s ill-fated Mars Polar Lander.
The plan to use the imager and microphone on May 25 (when Phoenix landed) were scrapped when tests showed that using the system would create an unacceptable risk to a safe landing for Phoenix.
Signs of Underground Plumbing Seen on Mars
A NASA probe has spotted hundreds of small surface fractures near Mars’ equator that may have acted as underground natural plumbing to channel groundwater billions of years ago.
Geologists compare the fractures in the sandstone rock deposits on Mars to features called deformation bands on Earth, which can arise from the influence of groundwater in the underground bedrock. The bands and faults have strong influences on groundwater movement on Earth, and seem to have played the same role on Mars. Other research has examined how surface water from rain or snow shaped the planet surface, but many agree that groundwater has an equally important influence.
“Groundwater often flows along fractures such as these, and knowing that these are deformation bands helps us understand how the underground plumbing may have worked within these layered deposits,” said Chris Okubo, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz. who headed up a new study of the Martian fractures.
NASA Awards $485M Mars Project Delayed by Conflict of Interest
NASA chose a University of Colorado proposal for a $485 million Mars mission on Monday after a nine-month delay caused by a conflict of interest in the selection process. The delay cost the space agency time, money and science.
The price of the probe increased by $10 million, its launch was postponed by two years, and the science-gathering mission will be cut in half to one year, an official said. NASA chose the University of Colorado’s proposal to study the Martian atmosphere from 20 other ideas to study Mars that were trimmed to just two before a conflict of interest was declared.
NASA has not disclosed what the conflict of interest was or who it involved, other than to say last year that it was not created by NASA but by one of the two groups. The space agency said last December that a “serious” conflict of interest in one of two proposals forced it to disband the board formed to pick the winner, and create a new panel to award the contract.
Very Short Movie: The Clouds of Mars
There’s a new Martian movie, though it’s not quite feature-length.
A series of still images taken by the Phoenix Mars Lander of water-ice clouds sailing overhead on the red planet has been turned into a short animation by NASA mission scientists.
“The images were taken as part of a campaign to see clouds and track wind. These are clearly ice clouds,” said Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University and the lead scientist for the lander’s surface stereo imager, which snapped the pictures of the clouds during a 10-minute period on Aug. 29. The resulting animation is just a few seconds long.
Water Ice on Mars Confirmed
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has confirmed the existence of water ice on Mars.
Mission scientists celebrated the news after a sample of the ice was finally delivered to one of the lander’s instruments. Phoenix’s mission has also officially been extended for one month beyond its original mission, NASA announced today at a briefing at the University of Arizona at Tucson, where mission control is currently based.
“I’m very happy to announce that we’ve gotten an ice sample,” said the University of Arizona’s William Boynton, co-investigator for Phoenix’s Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA), which heats up samples and analyzes the vapors they give off to determine their composition.
“We have water,” Boynton added. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.”
Living on Mars Time: Scientists Suffer Perpetual Jet Lag
Morten Bo Madsen spends his work day crunching data on a laptop seated in front of a clear plastic-covered box about the size of a widescreen computer monitor that emits a startlingly bright blue light.
No, this isn’t a scene from a sci-fi movie. Madsen is one of the 150 scientists and engineers working on NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander mission. The bright light keeps Madsen’s internal clock in check, because Madsen, you see, is living on Mars time.
Phoenix is a $420 million mission with the aim of sampling and analyzing the dirt and subsurface ice layer in the north polar regions of Mars as it looks for signs that the red planet may have been habitable at some point in the past.
Since the spacecraft landed on Mars on May 25, mission controllers have been living on its schedule, or rather the exact opposite of it. When the spacecraft is sleeping during the Martian night, the scientists are up analyzing data; when the spacecraft rises at the beginning of the day on Mars, they retire and let Phoenix do its work.
Mars Lander Pulls All-Nighter
NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander pulled an all-nighter for the first time Monday.
Mission controllers extended the spacecraft’s schedule to keep it awake during the Martian night so the lander could coordinate with observations made by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) as it flew over Phoenix.
Phoenix is using its weather station (which measures temperature, wind speed and wind direction), stereo camera and fork-like thermal and conductivity probe to monitor changes in the lower atmosphere and at the surface of Mars as MRO monitors the atmosphere and ground from above.