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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 2 min read
Sols 4297-4299: This Way to Tungsten Hills
This image was taken by Left Navigation Camera aboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 4296 — Martian day 4,296 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — on Sept. 6, 2024, at 06:47:03 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Earth planning date: Friday, Sept. 6, 2024
Contact science in our immediate workspace includes a joint effort by MAHLI and APXS to characterize a gray rock with two targets named “Big Baldy” and “Big Bird Lake.” ChemCam focused its Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) instrument on a rock with a reddish coating, “Purple Creek,” and a light-toned rock, “Garlic Meadow,” to determine their chemical composition. ChemCam included a long distance RMI image of the yardang unit that caps Mount Sharp as well as a standard post-drive AEGIS activity, which allows autonomous target selection for upcoming geochemical spectrometry.
The Mastcam team assembled several beautiful mosaics to document Curiosity’s surroundings. One mosaic will extend the imaging of the current workspace and is planned at dusk to take advantage of the diffuse lighting. Two separate mosaics, one of which is in stereo, will characterize the floor of the depression in front of Tungsten Hills to investigate the exposed light rocks and document depositional processes. Finally, a stereo mosaic will image Tungsten Hills and the surrounding terrain in advance of our approach over the weekend.
With the weekend plan in place the science team will now patiently wait for data to be returned and for planning to resume on Monday!
Curiosity completed an impressive 60-meter drive (about 197 feet) across the channel floor within Gediz Vallis and parked along the edge of a shallow linear depression. Just about 20 meters (66 feet) away, an intriguing dark, textured rock named “Tungsten Hills” is the destination for our weekend drive and our contact science on Monday. Today I served as the “Keeper of the Plan” for the Geology theme group and worked with the science team to compile a variety of contact science and targeted science in this three-sol plan.
Written by Sharon Wilson Purdy, Planetary Geologist at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
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Last Updated Sep 10, 2024 Related Terms
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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
A mirror that was later installed inside the telescope for NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor shows a reflection of principal optical engineer Brian Monacelli during an inspection of the mirror’s surface at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on July 17.NASA/JPL-Caltech A technician operates articulating equipment to rotate NEO Surveyor’s aluminum optical bench — part of the spacecraft’s telescope — in a clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on July 17.NASA/JPL-Caltech The mirrors for NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor space telescope are being installed and aligned, and work on other spacecraft components is accelerating.
NASA’s new asteroid-hunting spacecraft is taking shape at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Called NEO Surveyor (Near-Earth Object Surveyor), this cutting-edge infrared space telescope will seek out the hardest-to-find asteroids and comets that might pose a hazard to our planet. In fact, it is the agency’s first space telescope designed specifically for planetary defense.
Targeting launch in late 2027, the spacecraft will travel a million miles to a region of gravitational stability — called the L1 Lagrange point — between Earth and the Sun. From there, its large sunshade will block the glare and heat of sunlight, allowing the mission to discover and track near-Earth objects as they approach Earth from the direction of the Sun, which is difficult for other observatories to do. The space telescope also may reveal asteroids called Earth Trojans, which lead and trail our planet’s orbit and are difficult to see from the ground or from Earth orbit.
NEO Surveyor relies on cutting-edge detectors that observe two bands of infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. Near-Earth objects, no matter how dark, glow brightly in infrared as the Sun heats them. Because of this, the telescope will be able to find dark asteroids and comets, which don’t reflect much visible light. It also will measure those objects, a challenging task for visible-light telescopes that have a hard time distinguishing between small, highly reflective objects and large, dark ones.
This artist’s concept depicts NASA’s NEO Surveyor in deep space. The black-paneled angular structure in the belly of the spacecraft is the instrument enclosure that is being built at JPL. The mission’s infrared telescope will be installed inside the enclosure.NASA/JPL-Caltech “NEO Surveyor is optimized to help us to do one specific thing: enable humanity to find the most hazardous asteroids and comets far enough in advance so we can do something about them,” said Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for NEO Surveyor and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We aim to build a spacecraft that can find, track, and characterize the objects with the greatest chance of hitting Earth. In the process, we will learn a lot about their origins and evolution.”
Coming Into Focus
The spacecraft’s only instrument is its telescope. About the size of a washer-and-dryer set, the telescope’s blocky aluminum body, called the optical bench, was built in a JPL clean room. Known as a three-mirror anastigmat telescope, it will rely on curved mirrors to focus light onto its infrared detectors in such a way that minimizes optical aberrations.
“We have been carefully managing the fabrication of the spacecraft’s telescope mirrors, all of which were received in the JPL clean room by July,” said Brian Monacelli, principal optical engineer at JPL. “Its mirrors were shaped and polished from solid aluminum using a diamond-turning machine. Each exceeds the mission’s performance requirements.”
Monacelli inspected the mirror surfaces for debris and damage, then JPL’s team of optomechanical technicians and engineers attached the mirrors to the telescope’s optical bench in August. Next, they will measure the telescope’s performance and align its mirrors.
Complementing the mirror assembly are the telescope’s mercury-cadmium-telluride detectors, which are similar to the detectors used by NASA’s recently retired NEOWISE (short for Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission. An advantage of these detectors is that they don’t necessarily require cryogenic coolers or cryogens to lower their operational temperatures in order to detect infrared wavelengths. Cryocoolers and cryogens can limit the lifespan of a spacecraft. NEO Surveyor will instead keep its cool by using its large sunshade to block sunlight from heating the telescope and by occupying an orbit beyond that of the Moon, minimizing heating from Earth.
The telescope will eventually be installed inside the spacecraft’s instrument enclosure, which is being assembled in JPL’s historic High Bay 1 clean room where NASA missions such as Voyager, Cassini, and Perseverance were constructed. Fabricated from dark composite material that allows heat to escape, the enclosure will help keep the telescope cool and prevent its own heat from obscuring observations.
Once it is completed in coming weeks, the enclosure will be tested to make sure it can withstand the rigors of space exploration. Then it will be mounted on the back of the sunshade and atop the electronic systems that will power and control the spacecraft.
“The entire team has been working hard for a long time to get to this point, and we are excited to see the hardware coming together with contributions from our institutional and industrial collaborators from across the country,” said Tom Hoffman, NEO Surveyor’s project manager at JPL. “From the panels and cables for the instrument enclosure to the detectors and mirrors for the telescope — as well as components to build the spacecraft — hardware is being fabricated, delivered, and assembled to build this incredible observatory.”
Assembly of NEO Surveyor can be viewed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, via JPL’s live cam.
More About NEO Surveyor
The NEO Surveyor mission marks a major step for NASA toward reaching its U.S. Congress-mandated goal to discover and characterize at least 90% of the near-Earth objects more than 460 feet (140 meters) across that come within 30 million miles (48 million kilometers) of our planet’s orbit. Objects of this size can cause significant regional damage, or worse, should they impact the Earth.
The mission is tasked by NASA’s Planetary Science Division within the Science Mission Directorate; program oversight is provided by the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which was established in 2016 to manage the agency’s ongoing efforts in planetary defense. NASA’s Planetary Missions Program Office at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center provides program management for NEO Surveyor.
The project is being developed by JPL and is led by principal investigator Amy Mainzer at UCLA. Established aerospace and engineering companies have been contracted to build the spacecraft and its instrumentation, including BAE Systems, Space Dynamics Laboratory, and Teledyne. The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder will support operations, and IPAC-Caltech in Pasadena, California, is responsible for processing survey data and producing the mission’s data products. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
More information about NEO Surveyor is available at:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/neo-surveyor
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202-358-1600 / 202-358-1501
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Last Updated Aug 28, 2024 Related Terms
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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This artist’s concept shows how NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover was lowered to the planet’s surface using the sky crane maneuver.NASA / JPL-Caltech The rocket-powered descent stage that lowered NASA’s Curiosity onto the Martian surface is guided over the rover by technicians at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in September 2011, two months before the mission’s launch. NASA/Kim Shiflett Twelve years ago, NASA landed its six-wheeled science lab using a daring new technology that lowers the rover using a robotic jetpack.
NASA’s Curiosity rover mission is celebrating a dozen years on the Red Planet, where the six-wheeled scientist continues to make big discoveries as it inches up the foothills of a Martian mountain. Just landing successfully on Mars is a feat, but the Curiosity mission went several steps further on Aug. 5, 2012, touching down with a bold new technique: the sky crane maneuver.
A swooping robotic jetpack delivered Curiosity to its landing area and lowered it to the surface with nylon ropes, then cut the ropes and flew off to conduct a controlled crash landing safely out of range of the rover.
Of course, all of this was out of view for Curiosity’s engineering team, which sat in mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, waiting for seven agonizing minutes before erupting in joy when they got the signal that the rover landed successfully.
Encased in its aeroshell, NASA’s Curiosity rover descended through the Martian atmosphere on a parachute on Aug. 5, 2012. The scene was captured from far above by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona This was one of the first images sent back by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover after landing on Aug. 5, 2012. It was taken by the one of the hazard-avoidance camera on the rover’s left-rear side.NASA/JPL-Caltech The sky crane maneuver was born of necessity: Curiosity was too big and heavy to land as its predecessors had — encased in airbags that bounced across the Martian surface. The technique also added more precision, leading to a smaller landing ellipse.
During the February 2021 landing of Perseverance, NASA’s newest Mars rover, the sky crane technology was even more precise: The addition of something called terrain relative navigation enabled the SUV-size rover to touch down safely in an ancient lake bed riddled with rocks and craters.
Watch as NASA’s Perseverance rover lands on Mars in 2021 with the same sky crane maneuver Curiosity used in 2012.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Evolution of a Mars Landing
JPL has been involved in NASA’s Mars landings since 1976, when the lab worked with the agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, on the two stationary Viking landers, which touched down using expensive, throttled descent engines.
How We Land on Mars For the 1997 landing of the Mars Pathfinder mission, JPL proposed something new: As the lander dangled from a parachute, a cluster of giant airbags would inflate around it. Then three retrorockets halfway between the airbags and the parachute would bring the spacecraft to a halt above the surface, and the airbag-encased spacecraft would drop roughly 66 feet (20 meters) down to Mars, bouncing numerous times — sometimes as high as 50 feet (15 meters) — before coming to rest.
The entry, descent, and landing team for NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover celebrates the spacecraft’s touchdown on Aug. 5, 2012. Al Chen, who was part of the team, is at right.Curiosity Landing Team Celebrates It worked so well that NASA used the same technique to land the Spirit and Opportunity rovers in 2004. But that time, there were only a few locations on Mars where engineers felt confident the spacecraft wouldn’t encounter a landscape feature that could puncture the airbags or send the bundle rolling uncontrollably downhill.
“We barely found three places on Mars that we could safely consider,” said JPL’s Al Chen, who had critical roles on the entry, descent, and landing teams for both Curiosity and Perseverance.
It also became clear that airbags simply weren’t feasible for a rover as big and heavy as Curiosity. If NASA wanted to land bigger spacecraft in more scientifically exciting locations, better technology was needed.
Rover on a Rope
In early 2000, engineers began playing with the concept of a “smart” landing system. New kinds of radars had become available to provide real-time velocity readings — information that could help spacecraft control their descent. A new type of engine could be used to nudge the spacecraft toward specific locations or even provide some lift, directing it away from a hazard. The sky crane maneuver was taking shape.
JPL Fellow Rob Manning worked on the initial concept in February 2000, and he remembers the reception it got when people saw that it put the jetpack above the rover rather than below it.
“People were confused by that,” he said. “They assumed propulsion would always be below you, like you see in old science fiction with a rocket touching down on a planet.”
Manning and colleagues wanted to put as much distance as possible between the ground and those thrusters. Besides stirring up debris, a lander’s thrusters could dig a hole that a rover wouldn’t be able to drive out of. And while past missions had used a lander that housed the rovers and extended a ramp for them to roll down, putting thrusters above the rover meant its wheels could touch down directly on the surface, effectively acting as landing gear and saving the extra weight of bringing along a landing platform.
But engineers were unsure how to suspend a large rover from ropes without it swinging uncontrollably. Looking at how the problem had been solved for huge cargo helicopters on Earth (called sky cranes), they realized Curiosity’s jetpack needed to be able to sense the swinging and control it.
“All of that new technology gives you a fighting chance to get to the right place on the surface,” said Chen.
Best of all, the concept could be repurposed for larger spacecraft — not only on Mars, but elsewhere in the solar system. “In the future, if you wanted a payload delivery service, you could easily use that architecture to lower to the surface of the Moon or elsewhere without ever touching the ground,” said Manning.
More About the Mission
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.
For more about Curiosity, visit:
science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity
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Andrew Good
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5 Min Read ‘Current’ Events: NASA and USGS Find a New Way to Measure River Flows
The River Observing System (RiOS) tracking the motion of water surface features from above a section of the Sacramento River in Northern California in 2023. Credits: NASA/USGS/Joe Adams and Chris Gazoorian A team of scientists and engineers at NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) collaborated to see if a small piloted drone, equipped with a specialized payload, could help create detailed maps of how fast water is flowing. Rivers supply fresh water to our communities and farms, provide homes for a variety of creatures, transport people and goods, and generate electricity. But river flows can also carry pollutants downstream or suddenly surge, posing dangers to people, wildlife, and property. As NASA continues its ongoing commitment to better understand our home planet, researchers are working to answer the question of how do we stay in-the-know about where and how quickly river flows change?
NASA and USGS scientists have teamed up to create an instrument package – about the size of a gallon of milk – called the River Observing System (RiOS). It features thermal and visible cameras for tracking the motion of water surface features, a laser to measure altitude, navigation sensors, an onboard computer, and a wireless communications system. In 2023, researchers took RiOS into the field for testing along a section of the Sacramento River in Northern California, and plan to return for a third and final field test in the fall of 2024.
The River Observing System (RiOS) tracking the motion of water surface features from above a section of the Sacramento River in Northern California in 2023. “Deploying RiOS above a river to evaluate the system’s performance in a real-world setting is incredibly important,” said Carl Legleiter, USGS principal investigator of the joint NASA-USGS StreamFlow project. “During these test flights we demonstrated that the onboard payload can be used to make calculations – do the analysis – in nearly real-time, while the drone is flying above the river. This was one of our top-tier goals: to enable minimal latency between the time we acquire images and when we have detailed information on current speeds and flow patterns within the river.”
To realize this vision for onboard computing, the team uses open-source software, combined with their own code, to produce maps of water surface velocities, or flow field, from a series of images taken over time.
“You might think that we need to be able to see discrete, physical objects – like sticks or silt or other debris as they move downstream – to estimate the flow velocity, but that’s not always the case, nor is it always possible,” said Legleiter. “Using a highly-sensitive infrared camera, we instead detect the movement of subtle differences in the temperature of water carried downstream.”
Those same tiny temperature differences also appear wherever there are undulations – like at the boundary between the air and the water or ice below. Knowing this, NASA members of the StreamFlow team used this phenomenon to their advantage when developing methods for possible future landed planetary missions to navigate at distant and hard-to-see environments, including Europa, the icy moon orbiting Jupiter.
Our technology can precisely track the static surface of icy terrain while flying over it, or a moving surface, like water, while hovering above it to keep the spacecraft safe while gathering valuable data
uland wong
Co-investigator and NASA lead of the StreamFlow Project
“Icy surfaces present challenging visual conditions such as lack of contrast,” said Uland Wong, co-investigator and NASA lead of the StreamFlow project at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “Our technology can precisely track the static surface of icy terrain while flying over it, or a moving surface, like water, while hovering above it to keep the spacecraft safe while gathering valuable data.”
To prepare for the Sacramento River field tests, the NASA team built a robotics simulator to run thousands of virtual drone flights over the Sacramento River test site using flow fields modeled by USGS. These simulations are helping the team create intelligent software capable of selecting the best routes for the drone to fly and ensuring efficient use of limited battery power.
The next step in the partnership is for NASA to develop techniques for making the system more autonomous. The researchers want to use calculations of river flows – performed onboard in real time – to guide where the drone should fly next.
“Does the drone drop down to get better resolution data about a particular location or stay high and capture a wide-angle view,” posed Wong. “If it identifies areas that are flowing particularly fast or slow, could the drone more quickly detect areas of flooding?”
The USGS currently operates an extensive network of thousands of automated stream gauges and fixed cameras installed on bridges and riverbanks to monitor river flows in real-time across the country.
“Drones could enable us to make measurements in so many more areas, potentially allowing our network to be larger, more robust, and safer for our technicians to monitor and maintain,” said Paul Kinzel, StreamFlow co-investigator at USGS. “Drones could help keep our people and equipment out of harm’s way in addition to telling us how the environment is changing over time in as many locations as possible.”
A drone with the StreamFlow thermal mapping payload flying above the Sacramento River in Northern California.NASA/Massimo Vespignani For more information about how NASA improves life on Earth through climate and technological innovations, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/earth
The StreamFlow project is a collaboration between researchers with the USGS’s Hydrologic Remote Sensing Branch, Unmanned Aircraft Systems engineers with the USGS National Innovation Center, and scientists in the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA Ames. The Streamflow payload concept was demonstrated through research initially seeded by a grant from the USGS National Innovation Center and is now supported by NASA’s Advanced Information Systems Technology program, which is managed by the agency’s Earth Science Technology Office. The field tests were conducted in collaboration with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Southwest Fisheries Science Center, which helped collect direct field measurements of the river’s flow velocity and granted access to the field site, which is owned by the Nature Conservancy.
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Last Updated Aug 05, 2024 Related Terms
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