#planetary exploration

It started with a spring breeze. The Opportunity rover watched with its robotic eyes as the wind blowing through Perseverance Valley kicked puffs of rusty Mars dust into the air. In more than 14 Earth years of exploring the Red Planet, the rover had seen plenty of this kind of weather.

But the dust grew thicker. Small flecks swirled like wildfire smoke through the atmosphere, turning sun-filled midday into dusk, then night. Within a week, the dust storm spanned more than twice the area of the contiguous United States and eventually encircled the whole planet, allowing just 5 percent of the normal amount of light to reach Opportunity’s solar panels. The rover went quiet.

“It got so bad so quickly, we didn’t even have time to react,” says Keri Bean of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Bean had joined Opportunity’s rover-driving team just before that May 2018 storm.

Dust storms like that one, which snuffed out Opportunity for good, are the most dramatic and least predictable events on the Red Planet (SN: 3/16/19, p. 7). Such storms can make the nail-biting process of landing on Mars even more dangerous and could certainly make life difficult for future human explorers.

Despite almost 50 years of study, scientists are missing some key data that would help explain how dust gets kicked into the air to form planet-wide storms and what keeps it circulating for weeks or months at a time.

“We just do not understand how dust storms form on Mars,” says planetary meteorologist Scott Guzewich of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. History has shown that certain regions and seasons are more prone to dust than others. “Other than that, we’re … blind.”

Mars missions set to launch this summer, from the United States, China and the United Arab Emirates, will help solve that pressing mystery. NASA’s new rover, Perseverance, will carry a suite of weather sensors called MEDA, for Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer. Those sensors will build on decades of Mars exploration and fill in missing puzzle pieces.

Ogawa & Tokoro - Planetary Exploration 惑星探査 (Oriental Tapes)

Martian selfies….

ELYSIUM PLANITIA, MARS (December 6, 2018) -- After a 301 million-mile (484 million-kilometer) voyage over six months, the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) InSight spacecraft has landed on Mars....and begun setting-up shop for some of the most in-depth scientific data so far observed on our planetary neighbor.

The images above:

Top: An artist’s conception of how the InSight lander looks on the surface of equatorial Mars -- solar arrays deployed and robotic arm activated....with the surface cut-away at the bottom of the image to illustrate the tools that will sit on the surface, and, one drilled 16 feet (5 meters) into the surface of Mars to, essentially, take the planet’s vital signs!

Photo #2: This is a two-frame semi-GIF showing the first activation of the critical robotic arm (6 feet (2 meters) long) that will be performing the majority of the work during the craft’s 1-to-2-year mission. (Selfie taken by the lander on November 27, 2018, shortly after InSight landed on Mars.)

Photo #3: The scoop on the end of the robotic arm that will gather soil and rock samples for in-depth analysis onboard the spacecraft. (Taken by the Mars lander, of itself, on December 6, 2018.)

Bottom: With the robotic arm in the foreground, the onboard cameras offer us a view of InSight’s new neighborhood....ideal landscape for the experiments and data collection the lander is design to perform. (Taken on December 7, 2018.)

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I prepared this post with the same glee I felt as a young teenager in the late-1960s, when America was conducting similar activities on the surface of the Moon....in preparation for the first man to walk on the Moon nearly 50 years ago (July 20, 1969).

As I watched those first Moon explorations, I was already dreaming ahead of Mars....with the fervent hope that I would live to see the first human arrive on Mars.

May happen....

The first human on the Moon, Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong, Apollo 11 mission commander, sets-up camp near his spacecraft in Mare Tranquilitatis -- in the mid-Northern latitudes of the Moon. (Photo taken by the second man on the Moon, Astronaut Buzz Aldrin.)

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Jordana Blacksberg

(born approximately 1972) Planetary instrument scientist

Jordana Blacksberg is a senior member of the technical staff in the Instruments Division at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Her research interests are in the development of the next-generation of on-surface planetary instruments for exploration of Mars and its moons, primitive bodies such as asteroids and comets, Venus, and Earth’s moon.