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By NASA
Explore This Section Perseverance Home Mission Overview Rover Components Mars Rock Samples Where is Perseverance? Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Mission Updates Science Overview Objectives Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Perseverance 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 Mars Home 2 min read
Navigating a Slanted River
Finessing a fractured rock: NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image showing the “Slants River” target, which fractured after being abraded by the rover. Perseverance captured the image using its SHERLOC WATSON camera, located on the turret at the end of the rover’s robotic arm. SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) is an instrument using cameras, spectrometers, and a laser to search for organics and minerals that have been altered by watery environments and may be signs of past microbial life. In addition to its black-and-white context camera, SHERLOC is assisted by WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering), a color camera for taking close-up images of rock grains and surface textures. In the case of Slants River, thanks to work by the team’s rover planners and engineers, in spite of the fracture SHERLOC was able to maneuver close to this topographically-challenging surface and conduct a spectroscopy scan. This important activity enabled the team to collect the Main River core, just next to this abrasion patch. Perseverance acquired this image on March 5, 2025 — sol 1436, or Martian day 1,436 of the Mars 2020 mission — at the local mean solar time of 14:29:29. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Denise Buckner, student collaborator at University of Florida
Perseverance is hard at work on Mars, overcoming obstacles for scientific exploration! Just a few sols after successfully sealing the challenging Green Gardens core, Perseverance roved on to the Broom Point workspace to collect another sample called Main River. Broom Point is situated a few hundred meters down-slope from where Green Gardens was collected, and the Science Team chose to explore this area because orbiter images show some intriguing, alternating light and dark layers.
Upon reaching the workspace, images captured by Perseverance confirm that these distinct layers are visible on the ground, as well. Layers are interesting because they record different geological events that occurred in the planet’s past, which may include deposition of sediments, lava flows, or volcanic ash. By conducting proximity science with rover instruments and collecting a core to return to Earth for future analyses, the team is investigating what this material is composed of and how it was emplaced.
When the team is planning to collect a sample from an outcrop, the first step is to abrade the rock, grinding away the top few millimeters and smoothing out the surface so the SHERLOC and PIXL instruments can move in and conduct their scans. Although Perseverance has abraded more than 30 rocks across Jezero crater, new rocks still present unique challenges. While abrading the Slants River target at Broom Point, the rock unexpectedly fractured, resulting in an uneven surface. SHERLOC and PIXL require just a few millimeters of clearance to safely approach the rock, and while PIXL was able to reach the broken surface, the topography looked a little more dicey for SHERLOC.
The team’s engineers and rover planners took stock of the situation and decided to use WATSON, SHERLOC’s companion camera, to snap some images of the abrasion patch from another angle. These images built a surface model of the small cracks and crevices, and with this knowledge in hand, the team found a way to safely maneuver the instrument to the same spot that PIXL scanned, and collected a co-located spectroscopy map. Once this abrasion proximity science was completed, the rover went on to drill and seal the Main River core, an activity that went off without a hitch.
With another core in the bag, Perseverance is off to the next workspace, ready to tackle whatever challenges may lie ahead!
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Last Updated Mar 13, 2025 Related Terms
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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
A NASA exhibit of SLS (Space Launch System), which will return humanity to the Moon, is displayed in front of the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery during Alabama Space Day 2023 on April 11, 2023. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, and aerospace industry partners, will host the 2025 Alabama Space Day in Montgomery on Tuesday, Feb. 25 to celebrate Alabama’s robust aerospace contributions and capabilities. The public and news media are invited to attend. NASA/Hannah Maginot Media are invited to attend the 2025 Alabama Space Day from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. CST on Tuesday, Feb. 25, at the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, and aerospace industry partners will host the annual public event to celebrate Alabama’s robust aerospace contributions and capabilities, which provide significant economic benefits for the entire state.
Area middle school and high school students will have an opportunity to speak with NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara and participate in activities and exhibits. The event also will include a reading of a Space Day resolution by Alabama legislators with NASA Marshall Director Joseph Pelfrey, highlighting Alabama’s contributions to space exploration.
Media interested in interviewing NASA Marshall officials or attending NASA events should contact Hannah Maginot at hannah.l.maginot@nasa.gov or 256-932-1937.
Space Day 2025 exhibitors include: NASA Marshall, Teledyne Brown Engineering, KBR, Special Aerospace Services (SAS), Sentar, Blue Origin, Astrion, ULA, The University of Alabama in Huntsville’s Propulsion Research Center, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing.
Media opportunities for the day include:
9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. – Exhibits and STEM activities
Location: South Capitol Lawn and Tunnel between Capitol Building and State House
10:30 to 11 a.m. – Alabama Space Day 2025 Proclamation Ceremony
Location: Capitol Auditorium
11 to 11:30 a.m. – Alabama Space Authority Meeting
Location: Capitol Auditorium
1 to 2 p.m. – Resolution readings on the House and Senate Floors
About the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is celebrating 65 years of blending legacy with innovation, advancing space exploration and scientific discovery through collaboration, engineering excellence, and technical solutions that take humanity beyond tomorrow’s horizon.
For more information on NASA Marshall, visit https://www.nasa.gov/marshall.
Media Contact:
Hannah Maginot
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
hannah.l.maginot@nasa.gov
256-932-1937
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Last Updated Feb 24, 2025 EditorBeth RidgewayLocationMarshall Space Flight Center Related Terms
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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Data from the SWOT satellite was used to calculate average water levels for lakes and reservoirs in the Ohio River Basin from July 2023 to November 2024. Yellow indicates values greater than 1,600 feet (500 meters) above sea level; dark purple represents water levels less than 330 feet (100 meters). Data from the U.S.-European Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission gives researchers a detailed look at lakes and reservoirs in a U.S. watershed.
The Ohio River Basin stretches from Pennsylvania to Illinois and contains a system of reservoirs, lakes, and rivers that drains an area almost as large as France. Researchers with the SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) mission, a collaboration between NASA and the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales), now have a new tool for measuring water levels not only in this area, which is home to more than 25 million people, but in other watersheds around the world as well.
Since early 2023, SWOT has been measuring the height of nearly all water on Earth’s surface — including oceans, lakes, reservoirs, and rivers — covering nearly the entire globe at least once every 21 days. The SWOT satellite also measures the horizontal extent of water in freshwater bodies. Earlier this year, the mission started making validated data publicly available.
“Having these two perspectives — water extent and levels — at the same time, along with detailed, frequent coverage over large areas, is unprecedented,” said Jida Wang, a hydrologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a member of the SWOT science team. “This is a groundbreaking, exciting aspect of SWOT.”
Researchers can use the mission’s data on water level and extent to calculate how the amount of water stored in a lake or reservoir changes over time. This, in turn, can give hydrologists a more precise picture of river discharge — how much water moves through a particular stretch of river.
The visualization above uses SWOT data from July 2023 to November 2024 to show the average water level above sea level in lakes and reservoirs in the Ohio River Basin, which drains into the Mississippi River. Yellow indicates values greater than 1,600 feet (500 meters), and dark purple represents water levels less than 330 feet (100 meters). Comparing how such levels change can help hydrologists measure water availability over time in a local area or across a watershed.
Complementing a Patchwork of Data
Historically, estimating freshwater availability for communities within a river basin has been challenging. Researchers gather information from gauges installed at certain lakes and reservoirs, from airborne surveys, and from other satellites that look at either water level or extent. But for ground-based and airborne instruments, the coverage can be limited in space and time. Hydrologists can piece together some of what they need from different satellites, but the data may or may not have been taken at the same time, or the researchers might still need to augment the information with measurements from ground-based sensors.
Even then, calculating freshwater availability can be complicated. Much of the work relies on computer models. “Traditional water models often don’t work very well in highly regulated basins like the Ohio because they have trouble representing the unpredictable behavior of dam operations,” said George Allen, a freshwater researcher at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and a member of the SWOT science team.
Many river basins in the United States include dams and reservoirs managed by a patchwork of entities. While the people who manage a reservoir may know how their section of water behaves, planning for water availability down the entire length of a river can be a challenge. Since SWOT looks at both rivers and lakes, its data can help provide a more unified view.
“The data lets water managers really know what other people in these freshwater systems are doing,” said SWOT science team member Colin Gleason, a hydrologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
While SWOT researchers are excited about the possibilities that the data is opening up, there is still much to be done. The satellite’s high-resolution view of water levels and extent means there is a vast ocean of data that researchers must wade through, and it will take some time to process and analyze the measurements.
More About SWOT
The SWOT satellite was jointly developed by NASA and CNES, with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the UK Space Agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California, leads the U.S. component of the project. For the flight system payload, NASA provided the Ka-band radar interferometer (KaRIn) instrument, a GPS science receiver, a laser retroreflector, a two-beam microwave radiometer, and NASA instrument operations. The Doppler Orbitography and Radioposition Integrated by Satellite system, the dual frequency Poseidon altimeter (developed by Thales Alenia Space), the KaRIn radio-frequency subsystem (together with Thales Alenia Space and with support from the UK Space Agency), the satellite platform, and ground operations were provided by CNES. The KaRIn high-power transmitter assembly was provided by CSA.
To learn more about SWOT, visit:
https://swot.jpl.nasa.gov
News Media Contacts
Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0307 / 626-379-6874
jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov
2024-176
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Last Updated Dec 17, 2024 Related Terms
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Hubble Space Telescope Home Hubble Spots a Spiral in the… Hubble Space Telescope Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts E-books Online Activities Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More 35th Anniversary 2 min read
Hubble Spots a Spiral in the Celestial River
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy NGC 1637. ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker The subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is NGC 1637, a spiral galaxy located 38 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus, the River.
This image comes from an observing program dedicated to studying star formation in nearby galaxies. Stars form in cold, dusty gas clouds that collapse under their own gravity. As young stars grow, they heat their nurseries through starlight, winds, and powerful outflows. Together, these factors play a role in controlling the rate at which future generations of stars form.
NGC 1637 holds evidence of star formation scattered throughout its disk, if you know where to look. The galaxy’s spiral arms have pockets of pink clouds, many with bright blue stars. The pinkish color comes from hydrogen atoms excited by ultraviolet light from young, massive stars forming within the clouds. This contrasts with the warm yellow glow of the galaxy’s center, which is home to a densely packed collection of older, redder stars.
The stars that set their cloudy birthplaces aglow are comparatively short-lived, and many of these stars will explode as supernovae just a few million years after they’re born. In 1999, NGC 1637 played host to a supernova named SN 1999EM, lauded as the brightest supernova seen that year. When a massive star expires as a supernova, the explosion outshines its entire home galaxy for a short time. While a supernova marks the end of a star’s life, it can also jump start the formation of new stars by compressing nearby clouds of gas, beginning the stellar lifecycle anew.
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Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
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Last Updated Dec 05, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Galaxies Goddard Space Flight Center Hubble Space Telescope Spiral Galaxies Stars Supernovae View the full article
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