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Ingenuity, MOXIE and Perseverance: Inside the technology NASA's sending to Mars – Mayerthorpe Freelancer

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The new Mars rover boasts better instruments and a helicopter. ‘For the first time, we’re going to have HD video of a spacecraft landing on another planet’

Take a look at Perseverance, the rover that NASA is sending to Mars on Thursday, and you may notice that it bears a striking similarity to Curiosity, which landed on the planet eight years ago and is still driving. But picture Curiosity as a 2012 Mercedes with a basic package of extras. In that scenario, Perseverance is a 2021 model with all the bells and whistles.

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What does that upgrade get you? Here’s Matt Wallace, Deputy Project Manager, Mars 2020, whose work on Mars vehicles goes back to Sojourner, the Austin Mini of rovers that landed in 1997. “I’ve worked on five Mars missions and I can tell you this one’s pretty special,” he says.

Reached early this week, Wallace wasn’t particularly busy in the days leading up to the launch, with the rover already stowed inside the Atlas rocket that’s due to list off Thursday morning. “It’s a bit of a lull before the storm, or maybe the storm’s behind us,” he says. “We’re just watching the launch vehicle team go through their paces.”

He notes that Perseverance is about 126 kg heavier than Curiosity, topping out at 1,025 kg. That extra weight gets you some nice scientific add-ons as well as technology demonstrations.


A low-angle self-portrait of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover vehicle at the site from which it reached down to drill into a rock target called “Buckskin” on lower Mount Sharp, Mars, released June 7, 2018.

Handout by NASA/AFP/Getty Images

The former includes upgraded cameras, ground-penetrating radar, spectrometers, laser scanners and sensors to measure local temperature, wind velocity, pressure and humidity. Mars has weather, and while daytime highs in the summer can crack 20 degrees Celsius, it generally falls to at least minus 80 C every night.

But it’s the technology components that will bring the most wow factor. “We have microphones on this rover which for the first time will give us the sounds of descent and landing, and the wheels turning over the surface,” says Wallace.

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Then there’s MOXIE, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. The acronym needs some work, but MOXIE has moxie. “It ingests the Martian carbon dioxide atmosphere and using electrolysis it separates the oxygen out,” says Wallace. That means not just air for future explorers, but rocket fuel to bring them home. “MOXIE is a scaled demonstration of that capability that we’ll need in the future.”

The atmosphere is just one per cent as thick as the air on Earth, which makes Ingenuity an even more amazing add-on. Riding under the Perseverance chassis, Ingenuity is a tiny helicopter that will, after it’s dropped off, perform several test flights to become the first aircraft to operate on another world. Its metre-long twin rotors will spin at 2,400 r.p.m. (a typical Earth helicopter blade might do 500 r.p.m.) to generate lift.

“It’s a difficult endeavour,” says Wallace. “It’s a very aggressive, high-risk-high-reward experiment. We’re looking forward to getting it there and seeing it fly.”


Artist’s conception of Ingenuity, the must-have option on rovers this year.

NASA

Seeing is Perseverance’s forte. In addition to mounting 19 cameras on various parts of the rover, NASA has added cameras to the sky crane, a powered descent vehicle that will, after being slowed down by a massive parachute, lower the rover to the ground on a cable before flying away.

“For the first time, we’re going to have high-definition video of a spacecraft landing on another planet,” says Wallace. “We’re going to have some really exciting imagery.”

One of Perseverance’s final tricks will be years in the making. The rover has the capability to collect and store up to 40 rock and soil samples that can be returned to Earth on a future mission.

“That’s really the point of the sample return,” says Wallace. “Making a claim that there was once ancient life on a planet other than the Earth is a fairly profound statement, and it requires a pretty high bar when it comes to proof. And the community has come to the conclusion that it can’t get to that level of understanding without bringing the full power of terrestrial scientific elements to bear on samples. The signatures are just too faint and varied to do that with the limited set of instrumentation that you can take to the surface.”

To that end, the rover will collect its samples and leave them on the surface for a so-called “fetch rover,” currently in development, to collect later this decade.

Or, says Wallace, “if the rover stays healthy, one option is to have our vehicle take it to the next lander and drop off the samples right there. The lander will put them into what’s called a Mars Ascent Vehicle, which is a small rocket, and put them up into orbit around Mars, and then an orbiter would rendezvous with the samples in orbit and collect those and bring them back to the Earth.”

If Perseverance is a late-model automobile, consider that the ultimate in curbside pickup.

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NASA to launch sounding rockets into moon's shadow during solar eclipse – Phys.org

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This photo shows the three APEP sounding rockets and the support team after successful assembly. The team lead, Aroh Barjatya, is at the top center, standing next to the guardrails on the second floor. Credit: NASA/Berit Bland

NASA will launch three sounding rockets during the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, to study how Earth’s upper atmosphere is affected when sunlight momentarily dims over a portion of the planet.

The Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path (APEP) sounding rockets will launch from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to study the disturbances in the created when the moon eclipses the sun. The sounding rockets had been previously launched and successfully recovered from White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, during the October 2023 .

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They have been refurbished with new instrumentation and will be relaunched in April 2024. The mission is led by Aroh Barjatya, a professor of engineering physics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, where he directs the Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab.

The sounding rockets will launch at three different times: 45 minutes before, during, and 45 minutes after the peak local eclipse. These intervals are important to collect data on how the sun’s sudden disappearance affects the ionosphere, creating disturbances that have the potential to interfere with our communications.

The ionosphere is a region of Earth’s atmosphere that is between 55 to 310 miles (90 to 500 kilometers) above the ground. “It’s an electrified region that reflects and refracts and also impacts as the signals pass through,” said Barjatya. “Understanding the ionosphere and developing models to help us predict disturbances is crucial to making sure our increasingly communication-dependent world operates smoothly.”

A sounding rocket is able to carry science instruments between 30 and 300 miles above Earth’s surface. These altitudes are typically too high for science balloons and too low for satellites to access safely, making sounding rockets the only platforms that can carry out direct measurements in these regions. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

The ionosphere forms the boundary between Earth’s lower atmosphere—where we live and breathe—and the vacuum of space. It is made up of a sea of particles that become ionized, or electrically charged, from the sun’s energy or .

When night falls, the ionosphere thins out as previously ionized particles relax and recombine back into neutral particles. However, Earth’s terrestrial weather and space weather can impact these particles, making it a dynamic region and difficult to know what the ionosphere will be like at a given time.

It’s often difficult to study short-term changes in the ionosphere during an eclipse with satellites because they may not be at the right place or time to cross the eclipse path. Since the exact date and times of the are known, NASA can launch targeted sounding rockets to study the effects of the eclipse at the right time and at all altitudes of the ionosphere.

As the eclipse shadow races through the atmosphere, it creates a rapid, localized sunset that triggers large-scale atmospheric waves and small-scale disturbances or perturbations. These perturbations affect different radio communication frequencies. Gathering the data on these perturbations will help scientists validate and improve current models that help predict potential disturbances to our communications, especially high-frequency communication.

This conceptual animation is an example of what observers might expect to see during a total solar eclipse, like the one happening over the United States on April 8, 2024. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

The APEP rockets are expected to reach a maximum altitude of 260 miles (420 kilometers). Each rocket will measure charged and neutral particle density and surrounding electric and magnetic fields. “Each rocket will eject four secondary instruments the size of a two-liter soda bottle that also measure the same data points, so it’s similar to results from fifteen rockets while only launching three,” explained Barjatya. Embry-Riddle built three secondary instruments on each rocket, and the fourth one was built at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

In addition to the rockets, several teams across the U.S. will also be taking measurements of the ionosphere by various means. A team of students from Embry-Riddle will deploy a series of high-altitude balloons. Co-investigators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts and the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico will operate a variety of ground-based radars taking measurements.

Using this data, a team of scientists from Embry-Riddle and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory are refining existing models. Together, these various investigations will help provide the puzzle pieces needed to see the bigger picture of ionospheric dynamics.

The animation depicts the waves created by ionized particles during the 2017 total solar eclipse. Credit: MIT Haystack Observatory/Shun-rong Zhang. Zhang, S.-R., Erickson, P. J., Goncharenko, L. P., Coster, A. J., Rideout, W. & Vierinen, J. (2017). Ionospheric Bow Waves and Perturbations Induced by the 21 August 2017 Solar Eclipse. Geophysical Research Letters, 44(24), 12,067-12,073. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL076054

When the APEP- launched during the 2023 annular solar eclipse, scientists saw a sharp reduction in the density of charged particles as the annular eclipse shadow passed over the atmosphere.

“We saw the perturbations capable of affecting radio communications in the second and third rockets, but not during the first rocket that was before peak local eclipse,” said Barjatya. “We are super excited to relaunch them during the total eclipse to see if the perturbations start at the same altitude and if their magnitude and scale remain the same.”

The next total solar eclipse over the contiguous U.S. is not until 2044, so these experiments are a rare opportunity for scientists to collect crucial data.

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Royal Sask. Museum research finds insect changes may have set stage for dinosaurs' extinction – CTV News Regina

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Research by the Royal Saskatchewan Museum (RSM) shows that ecological changes were occurring in insects at least a million years before dinosaur extinction.

Papers published in the scientific journal, Current Biology, describe the first insect fossils found in amber from Saskatchewan and the unearthing of three new ant species from an amber deposit in North Carolina, according to a release from the province.

The amber deposit from in the Big Muddy Badlands of Saskatchewan, which was formed about 67 million years ago, preserved insects that lived in a swampy redwood forest about one million years before the extinction of dinosaurs.

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“Fossils in the amber deposit seem to show that common Cretaceous insects may have been replaced on the landscape by their more modern relatives, particularly in groups such as ants, before the extinction event,” Elyssa Loewen, curatorial assistant, said.

The research team was led by Loewen and Dr. Ryan McKellar, the RSM’s curator of paleontology.

“These new fossil records are closer than anyone has gotten to sampling a diverse set of insects near the extinction event, and they help researchers fill in a 17-million-year gap in the fossil record of insects around that time,” Dr. McKellar said.

The three ant species discovered in North Carolina also belonged to extinct groups that didn’t survive past the Cretaceous period.

“When combined with the work in Saskatchewan, the two recent papers show that there was a dramatic change in ant diversity sometime between 77 and 67 million years ago,” Dr. McKellar said in the release.

“Our analyses of body shapes in the fossils suggests that the turnover was not related to major differences in ecology, but it may have been related to something like the size and complexity of ant colonies. More work is needed to confirm this.”

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Meteors, UFOs or something else? Dawson City, Yukon, residents puzzled by recent sightings in night sky – CBC.ca

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Some residents in Dawson City, Yukon, say they’ve been seeing unusual things in the night sky lately — and it’s not the Northern Lights. 

But some might say it’s equally as fascinating.

Over the past few weeks, some residents have taken to social media to report seeing what they described as a fireball or meteor overhead. And last week, two residents said they both saw something similar.

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Naomi Gladish lives in Henderson Corner, a subdivision approximately 20 kilometres from downtown Dawson City. She told CBC News she saw something while walking her dog Friday morning.

“I looked up and saw a bright star,” Gladish said. “Or what I thought was a star.” 

“Within a fraction of a second, I realized it was actually moving quickly. And then as I watched it, a second later it grew a long tail.”

Dawson City resident Naomi Gladish said she saw something similar to the fireball shown in this image from the American Meteor Society. (American Meteor Society)

Gladish said the unknown object started to change into a pale blue colour, like a gas flame. Then, a few seconds later, it appeared to burn out.

“I could see fire, or coal,” Gladish said. “Like red glowing bits, breaking off of it. And then that was it. I tried watching to see if I could see any dark chunks falling from that spot, or carrying on from that spot, but the sky was dark.”

A minute or two after Gladish saw what she thought was a meteor, she heard a boom in the distance.

“My dog and I both turned our head to that exact direction that I had just seen it,” she said.”I figured it was related.”

Two women walking through snowy mountain terrain.
Naomi Gladish hiking with her sister at Tombstone Park. (Submitted by Naomi Gladish)

Dawson resident Jeff Delisle reported seeing something similar at about the same time. He then took to social media to ask if anyone else had seen it. Two people responded saying they had. 

“It flew right above me,” Delisle wrote.

“Pretty cool looking…. What is it?”

Likely not a meteor, says astronomer

Christa Van Laerhoven, president of the Yukon Astronomical Society, came across Delisle’s post and got in touch. She asked about what he’d seen, such as how long it was in the sky and the colour.

Van Laerhoven told CBC News that based on descriptions from both Delisle and Gladish, she doesn’t believe it could have been a meteor.

She says a meteor would have been moving much faster, and the colouring would have appeared differently. 

“Meteors can be any colour but … as a rule, are a consistent colour. What these people were describing had different colours. So the head looked blue and then the tail was more of an orange,” van Laerhoven said.

“That’s just something that doesn’t happen with meteors.”

a meteor
This zoomed-in still from a dashcam video captured in 2020 by Louise Cooke from Mount Lorne, Yukon, shows what one space science expert said appears to be an unusually-bright meteor travelling across the sky. (Submitted by: Louise Cooke)

Van Laehoven believes there may be another explanation for the recent unusual sightings: space junk, falling to earth.

“Space junk, when it comes in … comes through the atmosphere and starts glowing that can be more irregular, because of the variety of materials that go into a spacecraft.”

Van Laerhoven also suggested it could a very fast plane, or someone playing with rockets.

Gladish, however, doesn’t think anyone in Dawson was playing with rockets on Friday morning.

“Unless they’re talking about someone in China, or like a distant land playing with very high, powerful rockets … then sure,” she said.

“This was not something that someone in Dawson was doing … This came from much, much higher and it was much, much different to anything that would be locally caused.”

Van Laerhoven also dismissed another possibility: alien visitors.

“If aliens were coming to Earth, we would know,” she said.

“Simply because it would take them so much effort to get here that it would be very hard to imagine them getting here and not doing something dramatic enough that we would actually know about it.”

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