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Science

'A small part, but it was an important part': Manitoba company helped ensure Perseverance Rover landed safely on Mars – CTV News Winnipeg

Published

5 hours ago

February 24, 2021

Harry Miller

WINNIPEG —
A Manitoba company helped ensure that a recent mission to Mars landed successfully.

Canadian Photonic Labs, based in Minnedosa, supplied their Mega Speed high-speed cameras to help NASA as it was preparing to launch and land the Perseverance Rover, which successfully touched down on the Red Planet last week.

The company, which launched in 1995, creates high-speed cameras that are used to capture clear images from objects travelling at high rates of speed.

“We played a small part, but it was an important part, because you have to get the data,” said Mark Wahoski, president and founder of Canadian Photonic Labs. “It’s happening so fast that the human eye can’t see it. So, you need to slow time down.”

More than 20 of the cameras are in use at SuperSonic Navel Ordinance Research Track in China Lake, California. The track, which includes a sled that can launch items at speeds past the sound barrier, is used to test advanced products from organizations such as NASA and Lockheed Martin.

(Image submitted by Mark Wahoski)

“When you’re testing these items that are so expensive, and are so complicated to do, people pay attention on what equipment is actually working,” Wahoski said.

Wahoski said the cameras were used to help NASA test its decelerator and parachute, which were used to land Perseverance safely on Mars, in the years prior to the launch.

(Image submitted by Mark Wahoski)

“When you’re going to Mars, there’s a lot of complex things that need to work out besides even just getting there,” he said, noting that approximately half of all missions to Mars fail because of an incorrect landing or missing the planet altogether.

Perseverance was launched on July 30, 2020, and safely landed on Mars on Feb. 18. According to NASA, the rover is the most sophisticated rover to land on Mars, and is looking for signs of ancient life on the planet.

Wahoski said seeing Perseverance landing successfully was incredible to watch, and he is proud of his staff and the NASA engineers.

“We tend to forget about it, but when you think back on it, it’s just super, super cool,” he said. “You get super stoked.

“Where it really hits you is (that) we’ve had a lot of friends comment on it. When they wish you well, that’s when your heart goes out.”

Canadian Photonic Labs already has a new mission with NASA lined up. Wahoski said the company is providing equipment for a project involving a large vacuum chamber.

Science

The inspiring hidden message in the Mars Perseverance rover's parachute – CNN International

Published

10 hours ago

February 24, 2021

Harry Miller

In the video, the colorful orange-and-white parachute can be seen above the rover as it helped to slow the descent of the spacecraft.

This annotated image was taken by a parachute-up-look camera on the protective back shell of the Perseverance rover during its landing on Mars.

“You might notice the pattern that’s on the parachute here,” said Allen Chen, the entry, descent and landing lead for the rover, on Monday. “Distinct patterns are useful in helping us determine the clocking orientation of the parachute. Also, the contrasting sections can be useful in tracking different portions of the parachute as it inflates.

“In addition to enabling incredible science, we hope our efforts and our engineering can inspire others. Sometimes we leave messages in our work for others to find for that purpose. So we invite you all to give it a shot and show your work.”

Eagle-eyed space fans took up Chen’s challenge and made short work of unraveling the code.

“It looks like the internet has cracked the code in something like 6 hours! Oh internet is there anything you can’t do?” tweeted Adam Steltzner, the rover’s chief engineer.

The parachute’s hidden message includes the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory motto, “Dare mighty things,” as well as GPS coordinates for JPL in Pasadena, California.

The messages were included in the parachute using binary code within the white and orange gores, or triangles of fabric. The inner part of the parachute includes “Dare mighty things,” with each word in an expanding ring of gores. The band around the parachute is where the GPS coordinates for JPL can be found.

The motto borrows from a Theodore Roosevelt quote: “Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure … than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

The rover was built by the team at JPL, where the mission is managed.

Ian Clark, the rover’s systems engineer, was the mastermind behind the binary code pattern on the parachute.

“The brain child of Ian Clark- who has done anything the project asked him to do, whether it was lead, develop, and execute a supersonic parachute test program, prove the cleanliness of the sampling system, or support EDL operations. All around sharp and selfless dude,” Chen tweeted.

It’s not the first Easter egg to be included with the Perseverance rover, and the mission team has suggested that more will be revealed in images returned by the rover in the future.

The rover carries silicon chips containing the names of nearly 11 million people who participated in the “Send Your Name to Mars” campaign, as well as 155 essays submitted by students who entered a contest to name the rover. Perseverance also has a metal plate as a tribute to health care workers during the pandemic.

A placard commemorating NASA's "Send Your Name to Mars" campaign is on the rover.

On the rover’s deck is a symbol-laden calibration target for Mastcam-Z, or the rover’s pair of zoomable cameras. The calibration target includes color swatches to adjust the cameras’ settings, but also symbols of a man and a woman, a fern, a dinosaur, a rocket traveling from Earth to Mars, a model of the inner solar system, DNA and cyanobacteria, which is one of the earliest forms of life on Earth.

The target also includes the motto, “Two worlds, one beginning,” which alludes to the idea that Earth and Mars were created from the same dust swirling around the sun billions of years ago.

The Mastcam-Z's calibration target includes different symbols.

The calibration target for the SHERLOC instrument, or Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals, also carries some hidden gems.

The bottom row includes spacesuit materials to see how they react over time to the radiation in the Martian atmosphere. One is a piece of polycarbonate that could be used for a helmet visor. It doubles as a geocaching target and is etched with 221B Baker Street, the address of the beloved fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.

SHERLOC's calibration target carries some Easter eggs as well.

The top row, which will be used to fine-tune settings on the instrument, includes a slice of Martian meteorite.

Perseverance’s fellow rover Curiosity also carries its share of Easter eggs. When the rover began to explore the Martian surface in August 2012, it left zigzagging patterns in the red dust based on the tread of its aluminum wheels.

Embedded in those treads are tiny dots, which create a repeating pattern the rover uses to drive more accurately. The dot pattern is actually Morse code for JPL. So with every roll of the wheel across Mars, Curiosity is stamping “JPL” into the surface of the red planet.

Science

The Greek woman who … went to Mars reveals: "We have seen pictures from another world!" – Aviation Analysis Wing

Published

11 hours ago

February 24, 2021

Harry Miller

“We simply knew it at the time. I’m really excited!” We saw the pictures come back from another world. ”With these words, Eleni Ravani, the Greek researcher who participated in NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance mission, describes to NEA for the seconds The historical record in which the robotic probe safely touched the Earth of the Red Planet.The spacecraft had already traveled 471 million kilometers in six and a half months, aiming to discover traces of ancient life on Mars. ”The Greek researcher, who was in“ contact ”with it in the past, explains: Mankind is now from the conquest of the Red Planet “: As a planetary researcher and doctoral candidate at the University of Hawaii, she worked for several months in” perseverance, “but before that he worked for two years in Spain on the ESA’s Mars Express mission.

“The Perseverance spacecraft that landed last Thursday will look for signs of ancient life on Mars,” he told NEA, explaining the mission’s scientific forecast. This is the first part of a series of missions by NASA and the European Space Agency that will collect samples from the surface of Mars and transport them to Earth. Ms Ravani said: “What is particularly important in this case is where the spacecraft landed: This is the Jezero crater, which is It is believed that it was once a lake in which life could live. Perseverance is the most technologically advanced space device in history. It is like a car that has many new scientific-technological tools attached to it. One of them is the Mastcam-Z, also on the team I’m part of, that can take enlarged images of the Martian surface. Among other things, it also has a MEDA weather station. The car will take many pictures and take measurements using these special tools, in order to learn more about the region and help us better understand what is happening on Mars. “

People are on Mars

But how far are we from human exploration of the planet? Humans have been walking on Mars for several years. However, “March 2020” brings us one step closer to that, the researcher said, “because one of the main goals of the mission is to help us prepare for this human exploration.”

I’ll explain to you in two examples what this means: We have an experiment called “MOXIE”, which is going to collect carbon dioxide from the red planet’s atmosphere and convert it into oxygen. This kind of technology could one day be used by humans. Also from the MEDA data, which I mentioned above, we will study how atmospheric dust could affect future technology on Mars, that is, human life support systems. The samples that we will get from the planet will also be based on some new technologies necessary for the safe passage of people to Mars and for their return. “

According to Ms. Ravani, the first part of the mission is expected to last … a Martian year, equivalent to about two years on Earth, “but if the spacecraft remains thriving, it may continue to operate for many years, as it did with the Curiosity rover.”

Tasks like these require, after all, long intense work. “I have been working on the project for a few months, but some of my colleagues have been working on the mission for many years. At the moment of their successful joining, I felt very happy for them too,” adds the Greek researcher. “Now we have a new future ahead. The information that we will gather will help us better understand not only the past of Mars but also our past, that is, the past of the Earth. We hope to answer the question: Was life created on Mars before?” And through this, to prepare our next step. We have already started. Scientific discussions with researchers from all over the world about the data we are receiving and this is exciting. I look forward to the rover moving to the surface and pulling more material. Of course to bring the samples that it will collect back to Earth, because after that the mission “Mars 2020 will be successful.” Oh really”.

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