“The huge parachute used by NASA’s Perseverance rover to land on Mars contained a secret message,” reports the Associated Press — thanks to the rover’s puzzle-loving systems engineer Ian Clark. “During a live stream discussing the landing, one Nasa commentator said: ‘Sometimes we leave messages in our work for others to find. So we invite you all to give it a…
Tag: Mars rovers
Linux Is Now on Mars, Thanks to NASA’s Perseverance Rover
“When NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars this week, it also brought the Linux operating system to the Red Planet,” reports PC Magazine: The tidbit was mentioned in an interview NASA software engineer Tim Canham gave to IEEE Spectrum. The helicopter-like drone on board the Perseverance rover uses a Linux-powered software framework the space agency open-sourced a few years ago. “This…
Mars rovers safe from lightning strikes, research finds
If experiments done in small bottles in a University of Oregon lab are accurate, the friction of colliding Martian dust particles are unlikely to generate big electrical storms or threaten the newly arrived exploration vehicles or, eventually, human visitors. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-02-mars-rovers-safe-lightning.html…
Vint Cerf Is Working on an Internet for Outer Space
“TCP/IP doesn’t work at interplanetary distances,” 77-year-old Vinton Cerf tells Quanta magazine. “So we designed a set of protocols that do.” Specifically, bundle protocols: a disruption/delay-tolerant networking (DTN) protocol with nodes that can also store information: A data packet traveling from Earth to Jupiter might, for example, go through a relay on Mars, Cerf explained. However, when the packet arrives at…
Will More Powerful Processors Super-Charge NASA’s Mars Rovers?
The Texas Advanced Computer Center talks to Masahiro (Hiro) Ono, who leads the Robotic Surface Mobility Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory which led all the Mars rover missions (also one of the researchers who developed the software that allows the current rover to operate):
The Perseverance rover, which launched this summer, computes using RAD 750s — radiation-hardened single board computers manufactured…
Deep learning will help future Mars rovers go farther, faster, and do more science
NASA’s Mars rovers have been one of the great scientific and space successes of the past two decades. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-08-deep-future-mars-rovers-faster.html…
Mars landings: ‘7 minutes of terror’
To celebrate the 8-year anniversary of Curiosity rover’s arrival on Mars, here’s a video on the final 7 minutes of its chilling descent on August 5-6, 2012. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/mars-curiosity-rovers-seven-minutes-of-terror…
Giant Waves of Sand Are Moving On Mars
“Researchers have spotted large waves of martian sand migrating for the first time,” reports Science magazine. “The discovery dispels the long-held belief that these ‘megaripples’ haven’t moved since they formed hundreds of thousands of years ago. They’re also evidence of stronger-than-expected winds on the Red Planet.” It’s pretty staggering that humans can detect these changes on Mars, says Ralph Lorenz, a…
Check out this sloth robot
SlothBot is a slow-moving and energy-efficient robot that can linger in the trees to monitor animals, plants, and the environment below. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/sloth-robot-video…
A famous Mars meteorite, now with nitrogen
For the first time, nitrogen-containing organic molecules have been discovered in a Martian meteorite. The famous meteorite – Allan Hills 84001 – was picked up in Antarctica in 1984. The discovery provides more clues about habitable conditions on early Mars. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/mars-meteorite-alh-84001-1st-discovery-fixed-nitrogen…