Mars Lives.

[BridgeTroll]

OPPORTUNITY UPDATE:  New Flight Software to Fix Memory Issues is Onboard Rover - sols 3937-3943, February 19, 2015-February 26, 2015:

Opportunity is on the west rim of Endeavour Crater near "Marathon Valley," a putative location for abundant clay minerals now only about 492 feet (150 meters) away.

The project is preparing to mask off the troubled Bank 7 sector of the Flash file system with a new version of the flight software (FSW). The preparations for the FSW load and build were to begin with the 3-sol plan on Sol 3938 (Feb. 20, 2015). However, bad weather and a complex power outage in Canberra, Australia prevented the plans from being sent. The rover was allowed to safely execute its onboard runout plan for the weekend.

On Sol 3941 (Feb. 23, 2015), preparations were restarted for the FSW build. Remote sensing observations of Marathon Valley were also performed. On Sol 3942 (Feb. 24, 2015), the FSW patch was uploaded and the new FSW was successfully built and saved onboard. On the next sol, Opportunity successfully booted onto the new version of FSW and is running without error. Further remote observations of Marathon Valley with the Panoramic Camera (Pancam) and the collection of an atmospheric argon measurement with the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer were also commanded. The plan ahead is to allow a few days to confirm all aspects of the new FSW before performing the reformat of the Flash file system with the new software.

As of Sol 3943 (Feb. 26, 2015), the solar array energy production was 559 watt-hours with an atmospheric opacity (Tau) of 0.734 and a solar array dust factor of 0.674.

Total odometry is 26.13 miles (42.05 kilometers).

[BridgeTroll]

Nasa finds evidence of a vast ancient ocean on Mars

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/05/nasa-finds-evidence-of-a-vast-ancient-ocean-on-mars

Ian Sample, science editor @iansample

Thursday 5 March 2015 14.00 EST 

A massive ancient ocean once covered nearly half of the northern hemisphere of Mars making the planet a more promising place for alien life to have gained a foothold, Nasa scientists say.

The huge body of water spread over a fifth of the planet's surface, as great a portion as the Atlantic covers the Earth, and was a mile deep in places. In total, the ocean held 20 million cubic kilometres of water, or more than is found in the Arctic Ocean, the researchers found.

Unveiled by Nasa on Thursday, the compelling evidence for the primitive ocean adds to an emerging picture of Mars as a warm and wet world in its youth, which trickled with streams, winding river deltas, and long-standing lakes, soon after it formed 4.5bn years ago.

The view of the planet's ancient history radically re-writes what many scientists believed only a decade ago. Back then, flowing water was widely considered to have been a more erratic presence on Mars, gushing forth only rarely, and never forming long-standing seas and oceans.

"A major question has been how much water did Mars actually have when it was young and how did it lose that water?" said Michael Mumma, a senior scientist at Nasa Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Writing in the journal, Science, the Nasa team, and others at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Munich, provide an answer after studying Mars with three of the most powerful infra-red telescopes in the world.

The scientists used the Keck II telescope and Nasa's Infrared Telescope Facility, both in Hawaii, and the ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile, to make maps of the Martian atmosphere over six years. They looked specifically at how different forms of water molecules in the Martian air varied from place to place over the changing seasons.

Martian water, like that on Earth, contains standard water molecules, made from two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, and another form of water made with a heavy isotope of hydrogen called deuterium. On Mars, water containing normal hydrogen is lost to space over time, but the heavier form is left behind.

When normal water is lost on Mars, the concentration of deuterium in water left behind goes up. The process can be used to infer how much water there used to be on the planet. The higher the concentration of deuterium, the more water has been lost.

The infrared maps show that water near the Martian ice caps is enriched with deuterium. The high concentration means that Mars must have lost a vast amount of water in the past, equivalent to more than six times that now locked up in the planet's frozen ice caps.

The scientists calculate that the amount of water was enough to create a global ocean that covered the entire surface of Mars to a depth of 137m. But Mars was probably never completely submerged. Based on the Martian terrain today, the scientists believe the water pooled into a much deeper ocean in the low-lying northern plains, creating an ocean that covered nearly a fifth of the planet's surface. The Atlantic, by comparison, covers about 17% of Earth's surface.

"Ultimately we can conclude this idea of an ocean covering 20% of the planet which opens the idea of habitability and the evolution of life on the planet," said Geronimo Villanueva, the first author on the study.

The huge body of water lasted for millions of years. But over time, the Martian atmosphere thinned. The drop in pressure meant more ocean water wafted into space. The planet lost much of its insulation too. No longer warm enough to keep the water liquid, the ocean receded and eventually froze. Today, only 13% of the ocean remains, locked up the Martian polar caps.

"We now know Mars was wet for a much longer time than we thought before," said Mumma. Nasa's Curiosity rover has already shown that Mars had standing water for 1.5 billion years, longer than it took for life to emerge on Earth. "Now we see that Mars must have been wet for a period even longer," Mumma added.

John Bridges, a planetary scientist at Leicester University, who works on Nasa's Curiosity rover mission, said Mars was surely at least habitable in the distant past. "Ten years ago, the story of water on Mars was an occasional flood of rocky debris every 100m years that then switched off again. We now know it's more continuous. There were long-standing bodies of water: lakes, deltas and perhaps even seas," he said.

"It seems to me that we have excellent evidence that Mars was once habitable, though whether it was ever inhabited is not clear. But there's a chance. A life-bearing meteorite might have been ejected from Earth and could have landed in the water on Mars," he added.

The search for life on Mars will ramp up in 2018 when the European Space Agency sends its Exomars rover to the red planet. The rover will look for chemical signatures of life, perhaps emanating from microbes living deep beneath the Martian soil. Last year, Nasa's Curiosity rover detected methane in the Martian atmosphere. The finding sparked intense speculation that the gas might be coming from living organisms. It might, but there is no evidence to suggest it is. Methane is regularly produced on planets through geological processes without any need for life.

Charles Cockell, professor of astrobiology at Edinburgh University, said: "The longer water persists on a planetary body in one location, particularly if there is geological turnover, the more likely it is that it would provide a habitable environment for a suitable duration for life to either originate or proliferate. An ocean would meet this need." That life was possible does not make it inevitable though. "Of course, it could have been uninhabited," he added.

http://www.youtube.com/v/FLP16_J4ZDQ

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March 05, 2015


Rover Examining Odd Mars Rocks at Valley Overlook


NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity climbed last month to an overlook for surveying "Marathon Valley," a science destination chosen because spectrometer observations from orbit indicate exposures of clay minerals.

Near the overlook, it found blocky rocks so unlike any previously examined on Mars that the rover team has delayed other activities to provide time for a thorough investigation.

"We drove to the edge of a plateau to look down in the valley, and we found these big, dark-gray blocks along the ridgeline," said Opportunity Project Scientist Matt Golombek of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "We checked one and found its composition is different from any ever measured before on Mars. So, whoa! Let's study these more before moving on."

The first rock checked at the site has relatively high concentrations of aluminum and silicon, and an overall composition not observed before by either Opportunity or its twin rover, Spirit. This was determined by examining the rock, called "Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau," with the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer instrument on the end of Opportunity's robotic arm. The next target rock at the site is called "Sergeant Charles Floyd." The team's target-naming theme in the area is from the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Although the rocks are gray, the visible-light spectrum of the Charbonneau type has more purple than most Mars rocks, and the spectrum of the Floyd type has more blue. Of the two types, the bluer rocks tend to lie higher on the ridge.

Actions to restore use of Opportunity's non-volatile flash file system will resume after inspection of the rocks on this ridge. Due to recurrent problems with the flash memory, including "amnesia events" and computer resets, Opportunity has been operating since late 2014 in a mode that avoids use of the flash memory.

Between the stops at Charbonneau and Floyd, the rover team uploaded to Opportunity a new version of the rover's flight software. The new version is designed to use only six of the rover's seven banks of flash memory. It will avoid the seventh bank, known to be a problem area.

The rover is using the new software, but a memory reformatting will be needed before resuming use of flash memory. After reformatting, the operations team will avoid use of the rover's arm for several days to make sure the flash file system is fixed and no longer causes resets. A reset during the use of the rover's arm would require a complex recovery effort.

As of March 5, Opportunity has driven 26.139 miles (42.067 kilometers) since it landed on Mars in January 2004. This brings it within 140 yards (128 meters) of reaching the distance of a marathon footrace.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. For more information about Opportunity and Spirit, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/rovers

and

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov

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March 23, 2015

NASA Reformats Memory of Longest-Running Mars Rover

Things to know:
-- The rover team reformatted the aging rover's flash memory to restore use of overnight data storage
-- Opportunity completed inspections of blocky rocks above Marathon Valley
-- The rover is nearing the equivalent of a marathon in total driving distance

After avoiding use of the rover's flash memory for three months, the team operating NASA's 11-year-old Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has reformatted the vehicle's flash memory banks and resumed storing some data overnight for transmitting later.
The team received confirmation from Mars on March 20 that the reformatting completed successfully. The rover switched to updated software earlier this month that will avoid using one of the seven banks of onboard flash memory. Some of the flash-memory problems that prompted the team to adopt a no-flash mode of operations in late 2014 were traced to Bank 7. The remaining six banks provide more nonvolatile memory capacity than the rover has used on all but a few days since landing on Mars in January 2004.

In the no-flash mode of operations, Opportunity continued conducting science investigations and driving, but transmitted each day's accumulated data before powering down for overnight conservation of energy. Flash memory is nonvolatile, meaning it retains data even without power. Opportunity also uses random access memory, which retains data only while power is on.

Last week, Opportunity completed examination of unusual rocks it found at an overlook to its "Marathon Valley" science destination. The rover is approaching an elongated crater called "Spirit of St. Louis" on the path to Marathon Valley. As of March 23, Opportunity has 47 yards (43 meters) remaining to drive before its odometry passes the distance of an Olympic marathon race.

"Opportunity can work productively without use of flash memory, as we have shown for the past three months, but with flash we have more flexibility for operations," said Opportunity Project Manager John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "The rover can collect more data than can be returned to Earth on any one day. The flash memory allows data from intensive science activities to be returned over several days."

Marathon Valley was selected as a science destination because spectrometer observations from orbit indicate exposures of clay minerals. Before entering the valley, Opportunity will observe Spirit of St. Louis Crater, which holds an interior rock structure rising higher than the crater rim.

As of March 16, Opportunity has driven 26.192 miles (42.152 kilometers) since it landed on Mars in January 2004. A marathon is 26.219 miles (42.195 kilometers).

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OPPORTUNITY UPDATE:  Rover Restored to Normal Operations After a Reset Error  - sols 4018-4023, May 14, 2015-May 19, 2015:

Opportunity is on the west rim of Endeavour Crater at the 'Spirit of St. Louis' crater near the entrance of 'Marathon Valley.' The rover had been exploring the outcrops inside the Spirit of St. Louis crater.

On Sol 4018 (May 14, 2015), the project attempted to restore the rover to master sequence control after an unexplained reset on Sol 4017 (May 13, 2015). However, an operational error prevented the use of the high-gain antenna (HGA), and the rover did not receive subsequent recovery commands.

The rover was successfully restored to normal operations on Sol 4020 (May 16, 2015). On that sol, Opportunity executed a very small turn-in-place of only 4.6 degrees to position a surface target within reach of the robotic arm instruments. That evening, an overnight atmospheric argon measurement using the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) was made. Another amnesia event occurred on the evening of Sol 4021 (May 17, 2015), but it was benign with no loss of data. On Sol 4023 (May 19, 2015), the Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) was used to brush a surface target for in-situ (contact) investigation. After the brushing, a Microscopic Imager (MI) mosaic was collected, followed by the placement of the APXS for a multi-hour integration.

As of Sol 4023 (May 19, 2015), the solar array energy production was 536 watt-hours with an atmospheric opacity (Tau) of 1.105 and a solar array dust factor of 0.727.

Total odometry is 26.28 miles (42.30 kilometers), more than a marathon.

[BridgeTroll]

While Mars science is on temporary hold during the Solar Conjunction... Ridley Scott has created some science fiction... Enjoy! 


http://www.youtube.com/v/Ue4PCI0NamI

[spuwho]

We dont have a good record of Martian based movies so far but Ridley Scott is a good director. Here's hoping.

After conjunction ends, there is going to be a lot of space in the news.

[PeeJayEss]

The book is quite good, so I'm hopeful for the movie, especially with Ridley Scott and that cast. Pretty stacked.
Trailer shows some promise.

[JeffreyS]

http://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-craft-finds-glass-on-mars/

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found glass in a crater on Mars.

No, it's not the leftovers from an ancient Mars cocktail party where rowdy guests smashed "marstini" glasses on the ground. It's a type of glass known as impact glass, which is formed from the heat of a meteorite impact. Because the material that's around when the meteorite hits can be sealed in the glass, NASA researchers believe the glass could provide a clue to possible past life on Mars.

That's especially true because some of the impact glass the MRO found was in a crater called Hargraves that's situated near a 400-mile-long (about 650 kilometers) trough known as Nili Fossae. That area is rich in hydrothermal fractures, which are vents that might have sustained life just below the Martian surface.

"If you had an impact that dug in and sampled that subsurface environment, it's possible that some of it might be preserved in a glassy component," Brown University researcher John Mustard said in a statement. "That makes this a pretty compelling place to go look around, and possibly return a sample."

Mustard worked with Brown graduate student Kevin Cannon to find the glass. The duo built on previous research from Peter Shultz (also of Brown) that showed plant matter and other organic molecules in impact glass found in Argentina from a meteorite collision millions of years ago.

"The work done by Pete and others showed us that glasses are potentially important for preserving biosignatures," Cannon said. "Knowing that, we wanted to go look for them on Mars and that's what we did here. Before this paper, no one had been able to definitively detect them on the surface." The paper Cannon is referring to was published last week in the journal Geology.

Seeing the glass in images from the MRO proved to be quite a challenge because -- believe it or not -- the glass doesn't give off as strong a signal as the rock that's mixed with it when light is reflected off the Martian surface.

To tease it out, Mustard and Cannon re-created a bit of Mars in the lab by firing powders similar to Martian rocks in an oven to create glass. Next they captured the light waves that glass reflected and created an algorithm to find similar signals in MRO's data. Their experiment was a success.

"This significant new detection of impact glass illustrates how we can continue to learn from the ongoing observations by this long-lived mission," said Richard Zurek, MRO project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

MRO has been orbiting Mars since its arrival on March 10, 2006, with the primary goal of figuring out whether water existed on the Red Planet for a long period of time in its history.

[JeffreyS]

Love that trailer BT.

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OPPORTUNITY UPDATE:  Rover In Good Health After Communication Blackout  - sols 4053-4058, June 19, 2015-June 24, 2015:

Opportunity is on the west rim of Endeavour Crater at the 'Spirit of St. Louis' crater near the entrance of 'Marathon Valley.'

The Earth-Mars Solar Conjunction command moratorium and communication blackout has just ended. Telemetry is again being received from the Opportunity and the rover is in good health. Normal tactical planning has resumed with the Sol 4059 (June 25, 2015) plan.

As of Sol 4055 (June 21, 2015), the solar array energy production was 477 watt-hours with an atmospheric opacity (Tau) of 0.797 and a solar array dust factor of 0.644.

Total odometry is 26.33 miles (42.37 kilometers), more than a marathon.

[BridgeTroll]

Opportunity time lapse from 2004 to 2015... 8 minutes long but check it out.   

https://www.youtube.com/v/3b1DxICZbGc

[BridgeTroll]

July 07, 2015

Opportunity Rover's 7th Mars Winter to Include New Study Area

Operators of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity plan to drive the rover into a valley this month where Opportunity will be active through the long-lived rover's seventh Martian winter, examining outcrops that contain clay minerals.

Opportunity resumed driving on June 27 after about three weeks of reduced activity around Mars solar conjuntion, when the sun's position between Earth and Mars disrupts communication. The rover is operating in a mode that does not store any science data overnight. It transmits the data the same day they're collected.

The rover is working about half a football field's length away from entering the western end of "Marathon Valley," a notch in the raised rim of Endeavour Crater, which is about 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter. Opportunity landed on Mars in 2004 and has been studying the rim of Endeavour since 2011.

Engineers and scientists operating Opportunity have chosen Marathon Valley as the location for the solar-powered rover to spend several months, starting in August, to take advantage of a sun-facing slope loaded with potential science targets.

Marathon Valley stretches about three football fields long, aligned generally east-west. Observations of the valley using the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have detected exposures of clay minerals holding evidence about ancient wet environmental conditions. Researchers plan to use Opportunity to investigate relationships among these clay-bearing deposits.

The team plans to drive Opportunity this month to sites on the valley's northern side, where the slope faces south. Right now, it is early autumn in the southern hemisphere of Mars. The shortest day of the hemisphere's winter won't come until January. As the sun's daily track across the northern sky gets shorter, the north-facing slope on the southern side of the valley will offer the advantage of tilting the rover's solar panels toward the sun, to boost the amount of electrical energy production each day.

First, though, the mission's initial activities for a few days after emerging from the solar conjunction period are to examine rocks in and near a band of reddish material at the northern edge of an elongated crater called "Spirit of St. Louis." During the driving moratorium, the rover used the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer on the end of its robotic arm to assess the chemical composition of a target in this red zone.

The rover is operating in a mode that avoids use of the type of onboard memory -- non-volatile flash memory -- that can retain data even when power is turned off overnight. It is using random-access memory, which retains data while power is on. The rover operated productively in this mode for several months in 2014. A reformatting of the flash memory earlier this year temporarily slowed the frequency of flash-induced computer resets, but the reset occurrences increased again later in the spring.

"Opportunity can continue to accomplish science goals in this mode," said Opportunity Project Manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "Each day we transmit data that we collect that day."

"Flash memory is a convenience but not a necessity for the rover," Callas said. "It's like a refrigerator that way. Without it, you couldn't save any leftovers. Any food you prepare that day you would have to either eat or throw out. Without using flash memory, Opportunty needs to send home the high-priority data the same day it collects it, and lose any lower-priority data that can't fit into the transmission."

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project landed twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity on Mars in 2004 to begin missions planned to last three months. Both rovers far exceeded those plans. Spirit worked for six years, and Opportunity is still active. Findings about ancient wet environments on Mars have come from both rovers. The project is one element of NASA's ongoing and future Mars missions preparing for a human mission to the planet in the 2030s. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about Opportunity, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/rovers
http://mars.nasa.gov/mer/

Follow the project on Twitter and Facebook at:

http://twitter.com/MarsRovers
http://www.facebook.com/mars.rovers

[Jason]

Excellent video! Was hoping to see some Martians though...

[BridgeTroll]

https://www.youtube.com/v/EADbiFTHirk