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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
These yellow crystals were revealed after NASA’s Curiosity happened to drive over a rock and crack it open on May 30. Using an instrument on the rover’s arm, scientists later determined these crystals are elemental sulfur — and it’s the first time this kind of sulfur has been found on the Red Planet.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS NASA’s Curiosity captured this close-up image of a rock nicknamed “Snow Lake” on June 8, 2024, the 4,209th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Nine days earlier, the rover had crushed a similar-looking rock and revealed crystalline textures — and elemental sulfur — inside.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Among several recent findings, the rover has found rocks made of pure sulfur — a first on the Red Planet.
Scientists were stunned on May 30 when a rock that NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover drove over cracked open to reveal something never seen before on the Red Planet: yellow sulfur crystals.
Since October 2023, the rover has been exploring a region of Mars rich with sulfates, a kind of salt that contains sulfur and forms as water evaporates. But where past detections have been of sulfur-based minerals — in other words, a mix of sulfur and other materials — the rock Curiosity recently cracked open is made of elemental, or pure, sulfur. It isn’t clear what relationship, if any, the elemental sulfur has to other sulfur-based minerals in the area.
While people associate sulfur with the odor from rotten eggs (the result of hydrogen sulfide gas), elemental sulfur is odorless. It forms in only a narrow range of conditions that scientists haven’t associated with the history of this location. And Curiosity found a lot of it — an entire field of bright rocks that look similar to the one the rover crushed.
Pan around this 360-degree video to explore Gediz Vallis channel, the location where NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover discovered sulfur crystals and drilled its 41st rock sample. The images that make up this mosaic were captured by the rover’s MastCam in June. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS “Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert,” said Curiosity’s project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “It shouldn’t be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting.”
It’s one of several discoveries Curiosity has made while off-roading within Gediz Vallis channel, a groove that winds down part of the 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) Mount Sharp, the base of which the rover has been ascending since 2014. Each layer of the mountain represents a different period of Martian history. Curiosity’s mission is to study where and when the planet’s ancient terrain could have provided the nutrients needed for microbial life, if any ever formed on Mars.
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this view of Gediz Vallis channel on March 31. This area was likely formed by large floods of water and debris that piled jumbles of rocks into mounds within the channel.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Floods and Avalanches
Spotted from space years before Curiosity’s launch, Gediz Vallis channel is one of the primary reasons the science team wanted to visit this part of Mars. Scientists think that the channel was carved by flows of liquid water and debris that left a ridge of boulders and sediment extending 2 miles down the mountainside below the channel. The goal has been to develop a better understanding of how this landscape changed billions of years ago, and while recent clues have helped, there’s still much to learn from the dramatic landscape.
Since Curiosity’s arrival at the channel earlier this year, scientists have studied whether ancient floodwaters or landslides built up the large mounds of debris that rise up from the channel’s floor here. The latest clues from Curiosity suggest both played a role: some piles were likely left by violent flows of water and debris, while others appear to be the result of more local landslides.
While exploring Gediz Vallis channel in May, NASA’s Curiosity captured this image of rocks that show a pale color near their edges. These rings, also called halos, resemble markings seen on Earth when groundwater leaks into rocks along fractures, causing chemical reactions that change the color. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Those conclusions are based on rocks found in the debris mounds: Whereas stones carried by water flows become rounded like river rocks, some of the debris mounds are riddled with more angular rocks that may have been deposited by dry avalanches.
Finally, water soaked into all the material that settled here. Chemical reactions caused by the water bleached white “halo” shapes into some of the rocks. Erosion from wind and sand has revealed these halo shapes over time.
“This was not a quiet period on Mars,” said Becky Williams, a scientist with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and the deputy principal investigator of Curiosity’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam. “There was an exciting amount of activity here. We’re looking at multiple flows down the channel, including energetic floods and boulder-rich flows.”
A Hole in 41
All this evidence of water continues to tell a more complex story than the team’s early expectations, and they’ve been eager to take a rock sample from the channel in order to learn more. On June 18, they got their chance.
While the sulfur rocks were too small and brittle to be sampled with the drill, a large rock nicknamed “Mammoth Lakes” was spotted nearby. Rover engineers had to search for a part of the rock that would allow safe drilling and find a parking spot on the loose, sloping surface.
After Curiosity bored its 41st hole using the powerful drill at the end of the rover’s 7-foot (2-meter) robotic arm, the six-wheeled scientist trickled the powderized rock into instruments inside its belly for further analysis so that scientists can determine what materials the rock is made of.
Curiosity has since driven away from Mammoth Lakes and is now off to see what other surprises are waiting to be discovered within the channel.
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
News Media Contacts
Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600 / 202-358-1501
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Jul 18, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
5 min read
NASA’s Fermi Detects Surprise Gamma-Ray Feature Beyond Our Galaxy
This artist’s concept shows the entire sky in gamma rays with magenta circles illustrating the uncertainty in the direction from which more high-energy gamma rays than average seem to be arriving. In this view, the plane of our galaxy runs across the middle of the map. The circles enclose regions with a 68% (inner) and a 95% chance of containing the origin of these gamma rays. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Astronomers analyzing 13 years of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have found an unexpected and as yet unexplained feature outside of our galaxy.
“It is a completely serendipitous discovery,” said Alexander Kashlinsky, a cosmologist at the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, who presented the research at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans. “We found a much stronger signal, and in a different part of the sky, than the one we were looking for.”
Intriguingly, the gamma-ray signal is found in a similar direction and with a nearly identical magnitude as another unexplained feature, one produced by some of the most energetic cosmic particles ever detected.
A paper describing the findings was published Wednesday, Jan. 10, in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The team was searching for a gamma-ray feature related to the CMB (cosmic microwave background), the oldest light in the universe. Scientists say the CMB originated when the hot, expanding universe had cooled enough to form the first atoms, an event that released a burst of light that, for the first time, could permeate the cosmos. Stretched by the subsequent expansion of space over the past 13 billion years, this light was first detected in the form of faint microwaves all over the sky in 1965.
In the 1970s, astronomers realized that the CMB had a so-called dipole structure, which was later measured at high precision by NASA’s COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) mission. The CMB is about 0.12% hotter, with more microwaves than average, toward the constellation Leo, and colder by the same amount, with fewer microwaves than average, in the opposite direction. In order to study the tiny temperature variations within the CMB, this signal must be removed. Astronomers generally regard the pattern as a result of the motion of our own solar system relative to the CMB at about 230 miles (370 kilometers) per second.
This motion will give rise to a dipole signal in the light coming from any astrophysical source, but so far the CMB is the only one that has been precisely measured. By looking for the pattern in other forms of light, astronomers could confirm or challenge the idea that the dipole is due entirely to our solar system’s motion.
“Such a measurement is important because a disagreement with the size and direction of the CMB dipole could provide us with a glimpse into physical processes operating in the very early universe, potentially back to when it was less than a trillionth of a second old,” said co-author Fernando Atrio-Barandela, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Salamanca in Spain.
The team reasoned that by adding together many years of data from Fermi’s LAT (Large Area Telescope), which scans the entire sky many times a day, a related dipole emission pattern could be detected in gamma rays. Thanks to the effects of relativity, the gamma-ray dipole should be amplified by as much as five times over the currently detected CMB’s.
The scientists combined 13 years of Fermi LAT observations of gamma rays above about 3 billion electron volts (GeV); for comparison, visible light has energies between about 2 and 3 electron volts. They removed all resolved and identified sources and stripped out the central plane of our Milky Way galaxy in order to analyze the extragalactic gamma-ray background.
“We found a gamma-ray dipole, but its peak is located in the southern sky, far from the CMB’s, and its magnitude is 10 times greater than what we would expect from our motion,” said co-author Chris Shrader, an astrophysicist at the Catholic University of America in Washington and Goddard. “While it is not what we were looking for, we suspect it may be related to a similar feature reported for the highest-energy cosmic rays.”
Cosmic rays are accelerated charged particles – mostly protons and atomic nuclei. The rarest and most energetic particles, called UHECRs (ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays), carry more than a billion times the energy of 3 GeV gamma rays, and their origins remain one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics.
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Top: An all-sky map of extragalactic gamma rays in which the central plane of our galaxy, shown in dark blue where data has been removed, runs across the middle. The red dot and circles indicate the approximate direction from which more gamma rays than average seem to be arriving. Bottom: A similar all-sky map showing the distribution of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays detected by the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina. Red indicates directions from which greater than average numbers of particles arrive, blue indicates directions with fewer than average. This video superposes the Fermi map onto the cosmic ray map, illustrating the similarity of the dipole directions. Credit: Kashlinsky et al. 2024 and the Pierre Auger Collaboration Since 2017, the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina has reported a dipole in the arrival direction of UHECRs. Being electrically charged, cosmic rays are diverted by the galaxy’s magnetic field by different amounts depending on their energies, but the UHECR dipole peaks in a sky location similar to what Kashlinsky’s team finds in gamma rays. And both have strikingly similar magnitudes – about 7% more gamma rays or particles than average coming from one direction and correspondingly smaller amounts arriving from the opposite direction.
The scientists think it’s likely the two phenomena are linked – that as yet unidentified sources are producing both the gamma rays and the ultrahigh-energy particles. To solve this cosmic conundrum, astronomers must either locate these mysterious sources or propose alternative explanations for both features.
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership managed by Goddard. Fermi was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States.
Download high-resolution images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
By Francis Reddy
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media contact:
Claire Andreoli
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
(301) 286-1940
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Last Updated Jan 11, 2024 Related Terms
Astrophysics COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) Cosmic Microwave Background Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope Goddard Space Flight Center Origin & Evolution of the Universe The Universe Explore More
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
On Christmas Day in 1968, the three-man Apollo 8 crew of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders found a surprise in their food locker: a specially packed Christmas dinner wrapped in foil and decorated with red and green ribbons. Something as simple as a “home-cooked meal,” or as close as NASA could get for a spaceflight at the time, greatly improved the crew’s morale and appetite. More importantly, the meal marked a turning point in space food history.
The prime crew of the Apollo 8 lunar orbit mission pose for a portrait next to the Apollo Mission Simulator at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC). Left to right, they are James A. Lovell Jr., command module pilot; William A. Anders, lunar module pilot; and Frank Borman, commander.NASA On their way to the Moon, the Apollo 8 crew was not very hungry. Food scientist Malcolm Smith later documented just how little the crew ate. Borman ate the least of the three, eating only 881 calories on day two, which concerned flight surgeon Chuck Berry. Most of the food, Borman later explained, was “unappetizing.” The crew ate few of the compressed, bite-sized items, and when they rehydrated their meals, the food took on the flavor of their wrappings instead of the actual food in the container. “If that doesn’t sound like a rousing endorsement, it isn’t,” he told viewers watching the Apollo 8 crew in space ahead of their surprise meal. As Anders demonstrated to the television audience how the astronauts prepared a meal and ate in space, Borman announced his wish, that folks back on Earth would “have better Christmas dinners” than the one the flight crew would be consuming that day.1
If that doesn’t sound like a rousing endorsement, it isn’t.
Frank Borman
Apollo 8 Astronaut
Over the 1960s, there were many complaints about the food from astronauts and others working at the Manned Spacecraft Center (now NASA’s Johnson Space Center). After evaluating the food that the Apollo 8 crew would be consuming onboard their upcoming flight, Apollo 9 astronaut Jim McDivitt penciled a note to the food lab about his in-flight preferences. Using the back of the Apollo 8 crew menu, he directed them to decrease the number of compressed bite-sized items “to a bare minimum” and to include more meat and potato items. “I get awfully hungry,” he wrote, “and I’m afraid I’m going to starve to death on that menu.”2
In 1969, Rita Rapp, a physiologist who led the Apollo Food System team, asked Donald Arabian, head of the Mission Evaluation Room, to evaluate a four-day food supply used for the Apollo missions. Arabian identified himself as someone who “would eat almost anything. … you might say [I am] somewhat of a human garbage can.” But even he found the food lacked the flavor, aroma, appearance, texture, and taste he was accustomed to. At the end of his four-day assessment he concluded that “the pleasures of eating were lost to the point where interest in eating was essentially curtailed.”3
Food used on the Gemini-Titan IV flight. Packages include beef sandwich cubes, strawberry cereal cubes, dehydrated peaches, and dehydrated beef and gravy. A water gun on the Gemini spacecraft is used to reconstitute the dehydrated food and scissors are used to open the packaging.NASA Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman concurred with Arabian’s assessment of the Apollo food. The one item Borman enjoyed? It was the contents of the Christmas meal wrapped in ribbons: turkey and gravy. The Christmas dinner was so delicious that the crew contacted Houston to inform them of their good fortune. “It appears that we did a great injustice to the food people,” Lovell told capsule communicator (CAPCOM) Mike Collins. “Just after our TV show, Santa Claus brought us a TV dinner each; it was delicious. Turkey and gravy, cranberry sauce, grape punch; [it was] outstanding.” In response, Collins expressed delight in hearing the good news but shared that the flight control team was not as lucky. Instead, they were “eating cold coffee and baloney sandwiches.”4
The Apollo 8 Christmas menu included dehydrated grape drink, cranberry-applesauce, and coffee, as well as a wetpack containing turkey and gravy.U.S. Natick Soldier Systems Center Photographic Collection The Apollo 8 meal was a “breakthrough.” Until that mission, the food choices for Apollo crews were limited to freeze dried foods that required water to be added before they could be consumed, and ready-to-eat compressed foods formed into cubes. Most space food was highly processed. On this mission NASA introduced the “wetpack”: a thermostabilized package of turkey and gravy that retained its normal water content and could be eaten with a spoon. Astronauts had consumed thermostabilized pureed food on the Project Mercury missions in the early 1960s, but never chunks of meat like turkey. For the Project Gemini and Apollo 7 spaceflights, astronauts used their fingers to pop bite-sized cubes of food into their mouths and zero-G feeder tubes to consume rehydrated food. The inclusion of the wetpack for the Apollo 8 crew was years in the making. The U.S. Army Natick Labs in Massachusetts developed the packaging, and the U.S. Air Force conducted numerous parabolic flights to test eating from the package with a spoon.5
Smith called the meal a real “morale booster.” He noted several reasons for its appeal: the new packaging allowed the astronauts to see and smell the turkey and gravy; the meat’s texture and flavor were not altered by adding water from the spacecraft or the rehydration process; and finally, the crew did not have to go through the process of adding water, kneading the package, and then waiting to consume their meal. Smith concluded that the Christmas dinner demonstrated “the importance of the methods of presentation and serving of food.” Eating from a spoon instead of the zero-G feeder improved the inflight feeding experience, mimicking the way people eat on Earth: using utensils, not squirting pureed food out of a pouch into their mouths. Using a spoon also simplified eating and meal preparation. NASA added more wetpacks onboard Apollo 9, and the crew experimented eating other foods, including a rehydrated meal item, with the spoon.6
Malcolm Smith demonstrates eating space food.NASA Food was one of the few creature comforts the crew had on the Apollo 8 flight, and this meal demonstrated the psychological importance of being able to smell, taste, and see the turkey prior to consuming their meal, something that was lacking in the first four days of the flight. Seeing appetizing food triggers hunger and encourages eating. In other words, if food looks and smells good, then it must taste good. Little things like this improvement to the Apollo Food System made a huge difference to the crews who simply wanted some of the same eating experiences in orbit and on the Moon that they enjoyed on Earth.
Footnotes
[1] Apollo 8 Mission Commentary, Dec. 25, 1968, p. 543, https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/mission_trans/AS08_PAO.PDF; Apollo 8 Technical Debriefing, Jan. 2, 1969, 078-15, Apollo Series, University of Houston-Clear Lake, Houston, Texas (hereafter UHCL); Malcolm C. Smith to Director of Medical Research and Operations, “Nutrient consumption on Apollo VII and VIII,” Jan. 13, 1969, Rita Rapp Papers, Box 1, UHCL.
[2] Jim McDivitt food evaluation form, n.d., Box 17, Rapp Papers, UHCL.
[3] Donald Arabian to Rapp, “Evaluation of four-day food supply,” May 8, 1969, Box 17, Rapp Papers, UHCL.
[4] Apollo 8 Mission Commentary, Dec. 25, 1968, p. 545.
[5] Malcolm Smith, “The Apollo Food Program,” in Aerospace Food Technology, NASA SP-202 (Washington, DC: 1970), pp. 5–8; Whirlpool Corporation, “Space Food Systems: Mercury through Apollo,” Dec. 1970, Box 9, Rapp Papers, UHCL.
[6] Smith, “The Apollo Food Program,” pp. 7–8; Smith to the Record, “Christmas Dinner for Apollo VIII,” Jan. 10, 1969, Box 1, Rapp Papers, UHCL; Smith et al, “Apollo Food Technology,” in Biomedical Results of Apollo, NASA SP-368 (Washington, DC: NASA, 1975), p. 456.
About the Author
Jennifer Ross-Nazzal
NASA Human Spaceflight HistorianJennifer Ross-Nazzal is the NASA Human Spaceflight Historian. She is the author of Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe and Making Space for Women: Stories from Trailblazing Women of NASA's Johnson Space Center.
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Last Updated Dec 21, 2023 EditorMichele Ostovar Related Terms
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By HubbleSite
Wrecks between two galaxies were a common occurrence in the early cosmos. But pileups among several galaxies? Astronomers conducting a three-year survey of ultra-luminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) have discovered more than 24 of them involved in three-, four-, or even five-galaxy smashups. Astronomers have made this discovery by analyzing Hubble telescope pictures of these pileups, including the nine presented here. These results offer a snapshot of what conditions were like in the early universe, when galaxy collisions were commonplace.
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