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NASA Watches Mars Light Up During Epic Solar Storm


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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)

In addition to producing auroras, a recent extreme storm provided more detail on how much radiation future astronauts could encounter on the Red Planet.

Mars scientists have been anticipating epic solar storms ever since the Sun entered a period of peak activity earlier this year called solar maximum. Over the past month, NASA’s Mars rovers and orbiters have provided researchers with front-row seats to a series of solar flares and coronal mass ejections that have reached Mars — in some cases, even causing Martian auroras.

This science bonanza has offered an unprecedented opportunity to study how such events unfold in deep space, as well as how much radiation exposure the first astronauts on Mars could encounter.

The biggest event occurred on May 20 with a solar flare later estimated to be an X12 — X-class solar flares are the strongest of several types — based on data from the Solar Orbiter spacecraft, a joint mission between ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA. The flare sent out X-rays and gamma rays toward the Red Planet, while a subsequent coronal mass ejection launched charged particles. Moving at the speed of light, the X-rays and gamma rays from the flare arrived first, while the charged particles trailed slightly behind, reaching Mars in just tens of minutes.

The unfolding space weather was closely tracked by analysts at the Moon to Mars Space Weather Analysis Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, which flagged the possibility of incoming charged particles following the coronal mass ejection.

If astronauts had been standing next to NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at the time, they would have received a radiation dose of 8,100 micrograys — equivalent to 30 chest X-rays. While not deadly, it was the biggest surge measured by Curiosity’s Radiation Assessment Detector, or RAD, since the rover landed 12 years ago.

The purple color in this video shows auroras on Mars’ nightside as detected by the ultraviolet instrument aboard NASA’s MAVEN orbiter between May 14 and 20, 2024. The brighter the purple, the more auroras that were present.
NASA/University of Colorado/LASP

RAD’s data will help scientists plan for the highest level of radiation exposure that might be encountered by astronauts, who could use on the Martian landscape for protection.

“Cliffsides or lava tubes would provide additional shielding for an astronaut from such an event. In Mars orbit or deep space, the dose rate would be significantly more,” said RAD’s principal investigator, Don Hassler of Southwest Research Institute’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this active region on the Sun continues to erupt, meaning even more solar storms at both Earth and Mars over the coming weeks.”

During the May 20 event, so much energy from the storm struck the surface that black-and-white images from Curiosity’s navigation cameras danced with “snow” — white streaks and specks caused by charged particles hitting the cameras.

Similarly, the star camera NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter uses for orientation was inundated with energy from solar particles, momentarily going out. (Odyssey has other ways to orient itself, and recovered the camera within an hour.) Even with the brief lapse in its star camera, the orbiter collected vital data on X-rays, gamma rays, and charged particles using its High-Energy Neutron Detector.

This wasn’t Odyssey’s first brush with a solar flare: In 2003, solar particles from a solar flare that was ultimately estimated to be an X45 fried Odyssey’s radiation detector, which was designed to measure such events.

Learn how NASA’s MAVEN and the agency’s Curiosity rover will study solar flares and radiation at Mars during solar maximum – a period when the Sun is at peak activity. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC/SDO/MSSS/University of Colorado

Auroras Over Mars

High above Curiosity, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) orbiter captured another effect of the recent solar activity: glowing auroras over the planet. The way these auroras occur is different than those seen on Earth.

Our home planet is shielded from charged particles by a robust magnetic field, which normally limits auroras to regions near the poles. (Solar maximum is the reason behind the recent auroras seen as far south as Alabama.) Mars lost its internally generated magnetic field in the ancient past, so there’s no protection from the barrage of energetic particles. When charged particles hit the Martian atmosphere, it results in auroras that engulf the entire planet.

During solar events, the Sun releases a wide range of energetic particles. Only the most energetic can reach the surface to be measured by RAD. Slightly less energetic particles, those that cause auroras, are sensed by MAVEN’s Solar Energetic Particle instrument.

Scientists can use that instrument’s data to rebuild a timeline of each minute as the solar particles screamed past, meticulously teasing apart how the event evolved.

“This was the largest solar energetic particle event that MAVEN has ever seen,” said MAVEN Space Weather Lead, Christina Lee of the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. “There have been several solar events in past weeks, so we were seeing wave after wave of particles hitting Mars.”

New Spacecraft to Mars

The data coming in from NASA’s spacecraft won’t only help future planetary missions to the Red Planet. It’s contributing to a wealth of information being gathered by the agency’s other heliophysics missions, including Voyager, Parker Solar Probe, and the forthcoming ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission.

Targeting a late-2024 launch, ESCAPADE’s twin small satellites will orbit Mars and observe space weather from a unique dual perspective that is more detailed than what MAVEN can currently measure alone.

More About the Missions

Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

MAVEN’s principal investigator is based at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder. LASP is also responsible for managing science operations and public outreach and communications. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the MAVEN mission. Lockheed Martin Space built the spacecraft and is responsible for mission operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California provides navigation and Deep Space Network support. The MAVEN team is preparing to celebrate the spacecraft’s 10th year at Mars in September 2024.

For more about these missions, visit:

http://mars.nasa.gov/msl

http://mars.nasa.gov/maven

News Media Contacts

Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Charles Blue
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600 / 202-802-5345
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / charles.e.blue@nasa.gov

2024-080

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      This is where an ocean-exploration mission concept called SWIM comes in. Short for Sensing With Independent Micro-swimmers, the project envisions a swarm of dozens of self-propelled, cellphone-size swimming robots that, once delivered to a subsurface ocean by an ice-melting cryobot, would zoom off, looking for chemical and temperature signals that could indicate life.
      Dive into underwater robotics testing with NASA’s futuristic SWIM (Sensing With Independent Micro-swimmers) concept for a swarm of miniature robots to explore subsurface oceans on icy worlds, and see a JPL team testing a prototype at a pool at Caltech in Pasadena, California, in September 2024. NASA/JPL-Caltech “People might ask, why is NASA developing an underwater robot for space exploration? It’s because there are places we want to go in the solar system to look for life, and we think life needs water. So we need robots that can explore those environments — autonomously, hundreds of millions of miles from home,” said Ethan Schaler, principal investigator for SWIM at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
      Under development at JPL, a series of prototypes for the SWIM concept recently braved the waters of a 25-yard (23-meter) competition swimming pool at Caltech in Pasadena for testing. The results were encouraging.
      SWIM Practice
      The SWIM team’s latest iteration is a 3D-printed plastic prototype that relies on low-cost, commercially made motors and electronics. Pushed along by two propellers, with four flaps for steering, the prototype demonstrated controlled maneuvering, the ability to stay on and correct its course, and a back-and-forth “lawnmower” exploration pattern. It managed all of this autonomously, without the team’s direct intervention. The robot even spelled out “J-P-L.”
      Just in case the robot needed rescuing, it was attached to a fishing line, and an engineer toting a fishing rod trotted alongside the pool during each test. Nearby, a colleague reviewed the robot’s actions and sensor data on a laptop. The team completed more than 20 rounds of testing various prototypes at the pool and in a pair of tanks at JPL.
      “It’s awesome to build a robot from scratch and see it successfully operate in a relevant environment,” Schaler said. “Underwater robots in general are very hard, and this is just the first in a series of designs we’d have to work through to prepare for a trip to an ocean world. But it’s proof that we can build these robots with the necessary capabilities and begin to understand what challenges they would face on a subsurface mission.”
      Swarm Science
      A model of the final envisioned SWIM robot, right, sits beside a capsule holding an ocean-composition sensor. The sensor was tested on an Alaskan glacier in July 2023 through a JPL-led project called ORCAA (Ocean Worlds Reconnaissance and Characterization of Astrobiological Analogs). The wedge-shaped prototype used in most of the pool tests was about 16.5 inches (42 centimeters) long, weighing 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms). As conceived for spaceflight, the robots would have dimensions about three times smaller — tiny compared to existing remotely operated and autonomous underwater scientific vehicles. The palm-size swimmers would feature miniaturized, purpose-built parts and employ a novel wireless underwater acoustic communication system for transmitting data and triangulating their positions.
      Digital versions of these little robots got their own test, not in a pool but in a computer simulation. In an environment with the same pressure and gravity they would likely encounter on Europa, a virtual swarm of 5-inch-long (12-centimeter-long) robots repeatedly went looking for potential signs of life. The computer simulations helped determine the limits of the robots’ abilities to collect science data in an unknown environment, and they led to the development of algorithms that would enable the swarm to explore more efficiently.
      The simulations also helped the team better understand how to maximize science return while accounting for tradeoffs between battery life (up to two hours), the volume of water the swimmers could explore (about 3 million cubic feet, or 86,000 cubic meters), and the number of robots in a single swarm (a dozen, sent in four to five waves).
      In addition, a team of collaborators at Georgia Tech in Atlanta fabricated and tested an ocean composition sensor that would enable each robot to simultaneously measure temperature, pressure, acidity or alkalinity, conductivity, and chemical makeup. Just a few millimeters square, the chip is the first to combine all those sensors in one tiny package.
      Of course, such an advanced concept would require several more years of work, among other things, to be ready for a possible future flight mission to an icy moon. In the meantime, Schaler imagines SWIM robots potentially being further developed to do science work right here at home: supporting oceanographic research or taking critical measurements underneath polar ice.
      More About SWIM
      Caltech manages JPL for NASA. JPL’s SWIM project was supported by Phase I and II funding from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program under the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. The program nurtures visionary ideas for space exploration and aerospace by funding early-stage studies to evaluate technologies that could transform future NASA missions. Researchers across U.S. government, industry, and academia can submit proposals.
      How the SWIM concept was developed Learn about underwater robots for Antarctic climate science See NASA’s network of ready-to-roll mini-Moon rovers News Media Contact
      Melissa Pamer
      Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
      626-314-4928
      melissa.pamer@jpl.nasa.gov
      2024-162
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      Last Updated Nov 20, 2024 Related Terms
      Europa Jet Propulsion Laboratory NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program Ocean Worlds Robotics Space Technology Mission Directorate Technology Explore More
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