Organic compounds called thiophenes are found on Earth in coal, crude oil and oddly enough, in white truffles, the mushroom beloved by epicureans and wild pigs. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-03-molecules-curiosity-rover-early-life.html…
Tag: Curiosity Rover
Curiosity Mars rover snaps its highest-resolution panorama yet
NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured its highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface. Composed of more than 1,000 images taken during the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday and carefully assembled over the ensuing months, the composite contains 1.8 billion pixels of Martian landscape. The rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, used its telephoto lens to produce the panorama; meanwhile, it relied on its medium-angle…
Marsquakes: InSight lander shows active faults in planet’s crust
The results from its NASA’s Mars InSight lander’s first 10 months on the martian surface have been published in a series of papers. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/mars-quakes-insight-lander-shows-active-faults…
Could salt-loving microbes explain Mars’ methane?
New laboratory studies – simulating conditions on the planet Mars and using salt-loving microbes – suggest that similar organisms could be producing Mars’ mysterious methane. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/salt-loving-microbes-methane-on-mars…
Attention Mars Explorers: Besides Low-Gravity, There’s Also Radiation
The director of astrobiology at Columbia University saw something this week that he just had to respond to: Elon Musk “talking about sending 1 million people to Mars by 2050, using no less than three Starship launches per day (with a stash of 1,000 of these massive spacecraft on call).” Iwastheone shared this article from Scientific American: The martian radiation environment…
NASA’s Curiosity Rover Recovers From Glitch on Mars
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity “lost its orientation…partway through its last set of activities,” reported a planetary geologist on the rover’s team Monday. Curiosity had lost track of its position in space and the position of its various parts like its robotic arm. “Thus, Curiosity stopped moving, freezing in place until its knowledge of its orientation can be recovered. Curiosity kept sending…
Mars 2020 rover to launch within 7 months
NASA has confirmed that it has almost completed work on its upcoming robotic Mars exploration rover. A follow-up to the space agency’s Curiosity rover… Source: https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/333135/mars-2020-rover-to-launch-within-7-months…
Top 9 EarthSky stories of 2019
From the 1st landing on the moon’s far side to the 1st actual image of a black hole, here’s a quick roundup of 9 of the stories our readers enjoyed most in 2019. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/top-9-stories-of-2019…
Image: A cloudy martian night through the eyes of a supercomputer
As NASA’s Curiosity rover makes its way over the surface of Mars, it’s sometimes accompanied by clouds drifting by in the sky above. Like Earth, the Red Planet has a water cycle, with water molecules moving between the surface and the air, traveling through the atmosphere and coming together to form clouds. The behavior of water-ice clouds on Mars plays a…
Curiosity’s ‘mind-boggling’ new Mars mystery: oxygen
Scientists are still trying to figure out where Mars’ methane comes from. Now there’s a new mystery that might be connected: unusual fluctuations of oxygen in Mars’ atmosphere, detected by the Curiosity rover. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/oxygen-methane-mystery-mars-curiosity-rover…