Mars has been a topic of discussion this week. In addition to a newly flying Ingenuity helicopter to accompany the Perseverance rover’s first scientific mission, “Percy”‘s own attempt to collect samples of Martian soil failed. It’s not that there was something wrong with the rover, it performed all the actions correctly, but still it couldn’t collect anything. What happened to the sample?
Get a better grasp of this story and check out the week’s other space highlights:
The Persistence rover performed all autonomous procedures to collect a sample of Martian soil, but after drilling through the soil, there was nothing inside the collection tube. The mission team didn’t find anything unusual about the rover, which actually managed to use the drill and collect some of the debris, but the material had disappeared. NS NASA Investigated the matter and concluded that the problem was in the ground and not the persistence hardware or software.
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This conclusion is understandable, as the rover was able to drill an 8 cm hole in the Red Planet’s bottom, but data from the drilled cavity showed that the properties of the rock may be to blame. Maybe the pickup didn’t happen because the rover was drilled into a “too soft” rock, guess the team. If so, the soil structure is so fragile that drilling resulted in enough dust to escape the collection tube.
can you find me Ingenuity caught me hard at work as it overlooked the South Sita region here in the Jezero Crater. https://t.co/zzMWUTsAOY
— NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) 11 August 2021
Last week, the Ingenuity helicopter completed its 11th flight to Mars, which was a little over two minutes long, and photographed the persistence from a distance of 500 meters. The rover in the image was so small that NASA called “Where is the Valley?” took the opportunity to play. On the mission’s official Twitter profile. Photograph taken by helicopter shows the Perseverance rover during its first science mission. can you find it? Tip: You need to zoom in on the image.
Simplicity is prominently visible at the bottom of the photo, but persistence is far from over. If you look closely at the top of the image, you’ll find a slightly darker shape with a slightly softer reflection, just in front of a mound. Here’s our “Percy” working on Mars soil probe!
NASA wants to use “robot dog” spots Boston Dynamics, to investigate the caves of Mars. The initiative was announced only last year, but now the space agency has started exploring caves on Earth similar to those seen on the Red Planet. Its aim is to improve the technology and artificial intelligence of the robot so that it can be used in missions to Mars.
With its AI Nebula, the robotic “astronaut” of the future will be able to process information and make decisions while exploring caves without any prior information. That’s exactly what NASA experienced in the caves of the Earth. The team of researchers stayed outside the cave, performing actions scientists would do during an actual mission to Mars.
A team of scientists created a computer simulation to discover the type of object that fell to Earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. The study is based on a geochemical analysis of traces of impacts caused by the extinction of dinosaurs in the Chicxulub Crater, located in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. These analyzes concluded that the asteroid may be a carbonaceous chondrite, a primitive group of space objects possibly formed during the “infancy” of the Solar System.
Simulation results showed that asteroids greater than 9.6 km in diameter could be launched from the outermost part of the asteroid belt, which is located on a collision course with Earth between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. More specifically, it can happen once every 250 million years on average. Interestingly, the Chicxulub crater appears to have been formed by an impact within the last 250 million years.
RS Ophiuchi OUTBURST
Retrieved by Ernesto Guido, Marco Rocchetto and Adriano Valvassori on August 9, 2021 remotely from Australia via the @Telescope Live networkhttps://t.co/ttjH74mm0lThe recurrent Nova RS Oph is in the outburst. The last major eruption of RS Oph was in February 2006 → pic.twitter.com/FMqDZEQ0Xx
— mizuho kai (@mizuho73700856) August 9, 2021
An amateur astronomer observed a rare phenomenon: a star nova that explodes once every fifteen years. This event occurred between August 8 and 9 and made the star RS Ophiuchi so bright that it was possible to see the nova with the naked eye. So far, only 10 stars of the recurrent type (that is, those that explode at fixed time intervals) have been discovered in the Milky Way.
These explosions are not cataclysmic like supernovae, which completely extinguish the star. Periodic novae occur because the star is part of a binary system, composed of a white dwarf and a red giant. The two orbit each other while the white dwarf swallows matter from its companion until it gains enough mass to detonate a thermonuclear explosion.
Researchers compare the properties of the Sun, a type of G star, with other stars considered “cold”. This parameter was a measure of stellar activity established by combining the star’s rotational speed with its underground fluid flow, factors that affect the distribution of magnetic flux on its surface. The study shows that these cool stars are not much different from each other, which was a surprise.
What surprised astronomers most was the fact that the process by which a star produces a magnetic field can be very similar to that for cold stars. The study could help astronomers better understand the behavior of magnetically active stars.
A comet was discovered during its journey in the inner Solar System, and it may be visible to the naked eye while orbiting the Sun. This is C/2021 O3 (PanSTARRS), which was detected on August 1st. The bad news is that, perhaps, it doesn’t survive perihelion, when a celestial body reaches its maximum approximation with another object—in this case, the Sun.
For now, the comet doesn’t show a tail because it is so far from the Sun, but the images do reveal a compact coma (or cometary atmosphere) and a parabolic orbit. When detected, it had an apparent magnitude of 20 and was located in the constellation Pegasus, 4.3 times the average distance between Earth and the Sun.
Data collected by OSIRIS-REx, the unmanned space mission investigating the large asteroid Bennu, is helping scientists predict Earth impact risks. This information can be used to test the limits of astronomical models and calculate Bennu’s future trajectory with much greater certainty than if it were only analyzed remotely.
More precisely, the data should be used in simulations from the year 2135, when Bennu may have been attracted by Earth’s gravity and then on a collision course. Although the danger is not certain, scientists need to predict how Earth’s gravity will affect the object’s orbit around the Sun. it happens. However, preliminary analysis suggests that the probability of Bennu hitting Earth is very small.
NASA’s development of a new space suit for astronauts due to land on the Moon in 2024 will be delayed by nearly two years, which could undermine plans for the Artemis program. Called the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU), the suit was unveiled in 2019 but was delayed related to the closure of NASA centers due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, Elon Musk, CEO yes SpaceXoffered to design the suit and help NASA with this task. The proposal isn’t entirely surprising, as SpaceX is one of NASA’s partners in the Artemis program, tasked with developing the first commercial lander that will take astronauts to the lunar surface.
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