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By NASA
Curiosity Navigation Curiosity Home Mission Overview Where is Curiosity? Mission Updates Science Overview Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Curiosity Raw Images Images Videos Audio More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions The Solar System The Sun Mercury Venus Earth The Moon Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto & Dwarf Planets Asteroids, Comets & Meteors The Kuiper Belt The Oort Cloud 3 min read
Sols 4314-4315: Wait, What Was That Back There?
A view of the right-middle wheel of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, one of the rover’s six well-traveled wheels. Curiosity acquired this image using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), located on the turret at the end of the rover’s robotic arm, on Sept. 22, 2024, sol 4312 (Martian day 4,312) of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission, at 18:37:41 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Earth planning date: Monday, Sept. 23, 2024
After a busy weekend of activities, Curiosity is ready for another week of planning. One of the activities over the weekend was our periodic check-in on our wheels to see how they are holding up on the rough terrain. The image shows the MAHLI view of the right-middle (RM) wheel, which is still holding up well despite taking some of the worst abuse from Mars.
We are planning contact science with APXS and MAHLI on “Burst Rock,” which is a target that has an interesting texture and has bright-toned clasts and a gray coating. It is part of the Gediz Vallis Ridge channel deposits and will help out understanding of the channel. Unfortunately, it was too rough to brush, but it is clean enough that we can still get good science data.
We are doing a lot of imaging and remote science today. We are taking Mastcam mosaics of multiple targets. “Log Meadow” is a target designed to get a look at the distribution of the white stones in the channel. “Grand Sentinel” is a target on the opposite side of our previous workspace, allowing us to document it from a different angle. “Tunnel Rock” and “Tombstone Ridge” are sedimentary rocks that may have ripple-like layers; examining the layer contours helps inform how rocks were formed. Lastly, “Gravel Ridge” is a target in “Arc Pass” where we are continuing to examine clasts and sedimentary layers. We also take a ChemCam LIBS observation of Log Meadow and a long-distance RMI image of “Chanbank,” another area of white stones. We round it off with a Navcam mosaic of the rover to monitor dust on the deck.
After wrapping up the targeted and contact science, we’re ready to drive. As the science team had time to look a bit more at the data collected in that region, they discovered this target that was worth going back for. We are driving back to the area of the white stones to do more contact science on rocks that look similar to the elemental sulfur we saw earlier this year. Planning ahead, I got to scout this drive on Friday, laying out the safest path and looking for parking spots that were both good for communications as well as for doing contact science. The target “Sheep Creek” is about 50 meters (about 164 feet) to the northeast, which makes the drive a challenge — the resolution of our imagery at that range makes it harder to pinpoint these small rocks. We do have really good imaging in that direction, and the terrain isn’t super scary, so the Rover Planners are going to try to make it in one drive. During the drive, we will be taking a MARDI “sidewalk” movie (a series of images looking below the rover for the entire length of the drive), which will help document the channel. On the second sol of the plan, we do some additional atmospheric and untargeted science. We have a Navcam suprahorizon movie (looking at the crater rim to evaluate dust in the atmosphere) and a dust devil movie. We also have a ChemCam AEGIS observation, where the rover will autonomously select a target to image. Overnight, CheMin does an “empty cell” analysis to confirm that the system is cleaned out and ready for the next sampling campaign.
Written by Ashley Stroupe, Mission Operations Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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Last Updated Sep 24, 2024 Related Terms
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By USH
On May 12, 1994 astronomers Michael Irwin and Anna Jitk were working at the observatory in the Canary Islands observing the Kuiper Belt when they spotted something and it glowed and dimmed in a regular rhythm every 5 and a half hours and according to science this object shouldn't even exist.
On April 7, 2016, the NASA team running NASA’s New Horizons mission were waiting nervously. The spacecraft was about to enter the outermost reaches of our solar system.
They'd aimed toward Pluto. Which lives in a region of the solar system called the Kuiper Belt. Just before arriving at the dwarf planet, the team noticed an object, discovered by the astronomers in 1994, nearby. And it was acting very strange. This object, whatever it was, was spinning faster than everything else around it. Too fast. Artificially fast. And the object reflected light in an odd way.
New Horizons changed course to do a fly-by. They wanted a better look at this bizarre behavior. But as the spacecraft approached the object, all communications went down.
The New Horizons spacecraft suddenly put itself into safe mode. Nothing was broken but NASA wasn't able to see or hear anything.
Something or someone was controlling it and blocking the signal and if there is someone controlling the object, they don't want to be seen and of all the places in the solar system the Kuiper belt is the best place to hide.
Whoever it was did not want NASA to know they were here and that they’ve been watching us for a very long. time.
Even though NASA did lose contact with New Horizon at one point in time it is not a surprise that there's no official record of New Horizons breaking down.
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By NASA
Discovery Alert: The Planet that Shouldn’t Be There
Artist’s rendering of planet 8 Ursae Minoris b – also known as “Halla” – amid the field of debris after a violent merger of two stars. The planet might have survived the merger, but also might be an entirely new planet formed from the debris. W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko By Pat Brennan
NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program
The discovery: A large planet is somehow orbiting a star that should have destroyed it.
Key facts: Planet 8 Ursae Minoris b orbits a star some 530 light-years away that is in its death throes. A swollen red giant, the star would have been expected to expand beyond the planet’s orbit before receding to its present (still giant) size. In other words, the star would have engulfed and ripped apart any planets orbiting closely around it. Yet the planet remains in a stable, nearly circular orbit. The discovery of this seemingly impossible situation, relying on precise measurements using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), shows that planet formation – and destruction – are likely far more intricate and unpredictable than many scientists might have thought.
Details: As stars like our Sun approach the ends of their lives, they begin to exhaust their nuclear fuel. They become red giants, expanding to their maximum size. If that happened in this case, the star would have grown outward from its center to 0.7 astronomical units – that is, about three-quarters the distance from Earth to the Sun. It would have swallowed and destroyed any nearby orbiting planets in the process. But planet b, a large gaseous world, sits at about 0.5 astronomical units, or AU. Because the planet could not have survived engulfment, Marc Hon, the lead author of a recent paper on the discovery, instead proposes two other possibilities: The planet is really the survivor of a merger between two stars, or it’s a new planet – formed out of the debris left behind by that merger.
The first scenario begins with two stars about the size of our Sun in close orbit around each other, the planet orbiting both. One of the stars “evolves” a bit faster than the other, going through its red giant phase, casting off its outer layers and turning into a white dwarf – the tiny but high-mass remnant of a star. The other just reaches the red giant stage before the two collide; what remains is the red giant we see today. This merger, however, stops the red giant from expanding further, sparing the orbiting planet from destruction. In the second scenario, the violent merger of the two stars ejects an abundance of dust and gas, which forms a disk around the remaining red giant. This “protoplanetary” disk provides the raw material for a new planet to coalesce. It’s a kind of late-stage second life for a planetary system – though the star still is nearing its end.
Fun facts: How can astronomers infer such a chaotic series of events from present-day observations? It all comes down to well understood stellar physics. Planet-hunting TESS also can be used to observe the jitters and quakes on distant stars, and these follow known patterns during the red-giant phase. (Tracking such oscillations in stars is known as “asteroseismology.”) The pattern of oscillations on 8 Ursae Minoris, the discovery team found, match those of red giants at a late, helium-burning stage – not one that is still expanding as it burns hydrogen. So it isn’t that the star is still growing and hasn’t yet reached the planet. The crisis has come and gone, but the planet somehow continues to exist.
The discoverers: The paper describing the TESS result, “A close-in giant planet escapes engulfment by its star,” was published in the journal Nature in June 2023 by an international science team led by astronomer Marc Hon of the University of Hawaii.
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