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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its right-front navigation camera to capture this first view over the rim of Jezero Crater on Dec. 10, 2024, the 1,354th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The camera is facing west from a location nicknamed “Lookout Hill.”NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captured this scene showing the slippery terrain that’s made its climb up to the rim of Jezero Crater challenging. Rover tracks can be seen trailing off into the distance, back toward the crater’s floor.NASA/JPL-Caltech The road ahead will be even more scientifically intriguing, and probably somewhat easier-going, now that the six-wheeler has completed its long climb to the top.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has crested the top of Jezero Crater’s rim at a location the science team calls “Lookout Hill” and rolling toward its first science stop after the monthslong climb. The rover made the ascent in order to explore a region of Mars unlike anywhere it has investigated before.
Taking about 3½ months and ascending 1,640 vertical feet (500 vertical meters), the rover climbed 20% grades, making stops along the way for science observations. Perseverance’s science team shared some of their work and future plans at a media briefing held Thursday, Dec. 12, in Washington at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, the country’s largest gathering of Earth and space scientists.
“During the Jezero Crater rim climb, our rover drivers have done an amazing job negotiating some of the toughest terrain we’ve encountered since landing,” said Steven Lee, deputy project manager for Perseverance at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “They developed innovative approaches to overcome these challenges — even tried driving backward to see if it would help — and the rover has come through it all like a champ. Perseverance is ‘go’ for everything the science team wants to throw at it during this next science campaign.”
A scan across a panorama captured by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover shows the steepness of the terrain leading to the rim of Jezero Crater. The rover’s Mastcam-Z camera system took the images that make up this view on Dec. 5. NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS Since landing at Jezero in February 2021, Perseverance has completed four science campaigns: the “Crater Floor,” “Fan Front,” “Upper Fan,” and “Margin Unit.” The science team is calling Perseverance’s fifth campaign the “Northern Rim” because its route covers the northern part of the southwestern section of Jezero’s rim. Over the first year of the Northern Rim campaign, the rover is expected to visit as many as four sites of geologic interest, take several samples, and drive about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers).
“The Northern Rim campaign brings us completely new scientific riches as Perseverance roves into fundamentally new geology,” said Ken Farley, project scientist for Perseverance at Caltech in Pasadena. “It marks our transition from rocks that partially filled Jezero Crater when it was formed by a massive impact about 3.9 billion years ago to rocks from deep down inside Mars that were thrown upward to form the crater rim after impact.”
This animation shows the position of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover as of Dec. 4, 2024, the 1,347th Martian day, or sol, of the mission, along with the proposed route of the mission’s fifth science campaign, dubbed Northern Rim, over the next several years. NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/University of Arizona “These rocks represent pieces of early Martian crust and are among the oldest rocks found anywhere in the solar system. Investigating them could help us understand what Mars — and our own planet — may have looked like in the beginning,” Farley added.
First Stop: ‘Witch Hazel Hill’
With Lookout Hill in its rearview mirror, Perseverance is headed to a scientifically significant rocky outcrop about 1,500 feet (450 meters) down the other side of the rim that the science team calls “Witch Hazel Hill.”
“The campaign starts off with a bang because Witch Hazel Hill represents over 330 feet of layered outcrop, where each layer is like a page in the book of Martian history. As we drive down the hill, we will be going back in time, investigating the ancient environments of Mars recorded in the crater rim,” said Candice Bedford, a Perseverance scientist from Purdue University in West Layfette, Indiana. “Then, after a steep descent, we take our first turns of the wheel away from the crater rim toward ‘Lac de Charmes,’ about 2 miles south.”
Lac de Charmes intrigues the science team because, being located on the plains beyond the rim, it is less likely to have been significantly affected by the formation of Jezero Crater.
After leaving Lac de Charmes, the rover will traverse about a mile (1.6 kilometers) back to the rim to investigate a stunning outcrop of large blocks known as megabreccia. These blocks may represent ancient bedrock broken up during the Isidis impact, a planet-altering event that likely excavated deep into the Martian crust as it created an impact basin some 745 miles (1,200 kilometers) wide, 3.9 billion years in the past.
More About Perseverance
A key objective of Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including caching samples that may contain signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, to help pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet and as the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.
NASA’s Mars Sample Return Program, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), is designed to send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
For more about Perseverance:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance
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DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
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agle@jpl.nasa.gov
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Last Updated Dec 12, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Current brake system technology cool disc brakes with air pulled from inside the vehicle’s body to prevent overheating. The channels cut into the exterior of the disc brakes developed by Orbis Brakes draw in external air, which is cooler, ensure the brakes work more efficiently.Credit: Orbis Brakes Inc Just as NASA needs to reduce mass on a spacecraft so it can escape Earth’s gravity, automotive manufacturers work to reduce weight to improve vehicle performance. In the case of brake rotors, lighter is better for a vehicle’s acceleration, reliable stopping, and even gas mileage. Orbis Brakes Inc. licensed a NASA-patented technology to accomplish that and more. This revolutionary brake disc design is at least 42% lighter than conventional cast iron rotors, with performance comparable to carbon-ceramic brakes.
Jonathan Lee, structural materials engineer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, uses his skills as a mechanical designer backed with material science training on multiple projects including the Space Launch System and the International Space Station. Interested in supporting NASA’s other mission to advance technology to improve life on Earth, he was looking for an innovative way to design a better automobile disc brake.
He started with a single disc with a series of small fins around the central hub. As they spin, these draw in air and push it across the surface of the disc, where the brake pads make contact. This cools the rotor, as well as the brake pads and calipers. He then added several long, curved depressions around the braking surfaces, radiating from the center to create the regular, periodic pattern that gives the new technology, known as Orbis, its PeriodicWave brand name.
The spinning fins and the centrifugal force of the wheel push air into trenches, causing a turbulent airflow that draws away heat. These trenches in the braking surfaces also increase the available surface for air cooling by more than 30% and further reduce the weight of the disc. They also increase friction in the same way that scoring concrete makes steps safer to walk on – the brake pads are less likely to slip, which makes braking more reliable.
The troughs draw away more than just heat, too. Water and road debris getting between the pad and rotor are equally problematic, so the grooves provide a place for the air vortex to push any substance out of the way. A small hole machined at the end of each one creates an opening through which unwanted material can escape.
The expertise developed while solving problems in space has proven useful on Earth, too. Orbis’s brakes are sold as aftermarket modifications for high performance cars like the Ford Mustang, as well as some Tesla models.
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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
The north polar region of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io was captured by NASA’s Juno during spacecraft’s 57th close pass of the gas giant on Dec. 30, 2023. Data from recent flybys is helping scientists understand Io’s interior. Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Image processing by Gerald Eichstädt A new study points to why, and how, Io became the most volcanic body in the solar system.
Scientists with NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter have discovered that the volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io are each likely powered by their own chamber of roiling hot magma rather than an ocean of magma. The finding solves a 44-year-old mystery about the subsurface origins of the moon’s most demonstrative geologic features.
A paper on the source of Io’s volcanism was published on Thursday, Dec. 12, in the journal Nature, and the findings, as well as other Io science results, were discussed during a media briefing in Washington at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, the country’s largest gathering of Earth and space scientists.
About the size of Earth’s Moon, Io is known as the most volcanically active body in our solar system. The moon is home to an estimated 400 volcanoes, which blast lava and plumes in seemingly continuous eruptions that contribute to the coating on its surface.
This animated tour of Jupiter’s fiery moon Io, based on data collected by NASA’s Juno mission, shows volcanic plumes, a view of lava on the surface, and the moon’s internal structure. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/Koji Kuramura/Gerald Eichstädt Although the moon was discovered by Galileo Galilei on Jan. 8, 1610, volcanic activity there wasn’t discovered until 1979, when imaging scientist Linda Morabito of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California first identified a volcanic plume in an image from the agency’s Voyager 1 spacecraft.
“Since Morabito’s discovery, planetary scientists have wondered how the volcanoes were fed from the lava underneath the surface,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “Was there a shallow ocean of white-hot magma fueling the volcanoes, or was their source more localized? We knew data from Juno’s two very close flybys could give us some insights on how this tortured moon actually worked.”
The Juno spacecraft made extremely close flybys of Io in December 2023 and February 2024, getting within about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of its pizza-faced surface. During the close approaches, Juno communicated with NASA’s Deep Space Network, acquiring high-precision, dual-frequency Doppler data, which was used to measure Io’s gravity by tracking how it affected the spacecraft’s acceleration. What the mission learned about the moon’s gravity from those flybys led to the new paper by revealing more details about the effects of a phenomenon called tidal flexing.
This five-frame sequence shows a giant plume erupting from Io’s Tvashtar volcano, extending 200 miles (330 kilometers) above the fiery moon’s surface. It was captured over an eight-minute period by NASA’s New Horizons mission as the spacecraft flew by Jupiter in 2007.NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/SwRI Prince of Jovian Tides
Io is extremely close to mammoth Jupiter, and its elliptical orbit whips it around the gas giant once every 42.5 hours. As the distance varies, so does Jupiter’s gravitational pull, which leads to the moon being relentlessly squeezed. The result: an extreme case of tidal flexing — friction from tidal forces that generates internal heat.
“This constant flexing creates immense energy, which literally melts portions of Io’s interior,” said Bolton. “If Io has a global magma ocean, we knew the signature of its tidal deformation would be much larger than a more rigid, mostly solid interior. Thus, depending on the results from Juno’s probing of Io’s gravity field, we would be able to tell if a global magma ocean was hiding beneath its surface.”
The Juno team compared Doppler data from their two flybys with observations from the agency’s previous missions to the Jovian system and from ground telescopes. They found tidal deformation consistent with Io not having a shallow global magma ocean.
“Juno’s discovery that tidal forces do not always create global magma oceans does more than prompt us to rethink what we know about Io’s interior,” said lead author Ryan Park, a Juno co-investigator and supervisor of the Solar System Dynamics Group at JPL. “It has implications for our understanding of other moons, such as Enceladus and Europa, and even exoplanets and super-Earths. Our new findings provide an opportunity to rethink what we know about planetary formation and evolution.”
There’s more science on the horizon. The spacecraft made its 66th science flyby over Jupiter’s mysterious cloud tops on Nov. 24. Its next close approach to the gas giant will occur 12:22 a.m. EST, Dec. 27. At the time of perijove, when Juno’s orbit is closest to the planet’s center, the spacecraft will be about 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops and will have logged 645.7 million miles (1.039 billion kilometers) since entering the gas giant’s orbit in 2016.
More About Juno
JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Italian Space Agency (ASI) funded the Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft. Various other institutions around the U.S. provided several of the other scientific instruments on Juno.
More information about Juno is available at:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/juno
News Media Contacts
DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
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Last Updated Dec 12, 2024 Related Terms
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NASA Study: Crops, Forests Responding to Changing Rainfall Patterns
Earth’s rainy days are changing and plant life is responding. This visualization shows average precipitation for the entire globe based on more than 20 years of data from 2000 to 2023. Cooler colors indicate areas that receive less rain. Warm colors receive more rain. NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio A new NASA-led study has found that how rain falls in a given year is nearly as important to the world’s vegetation as how much. Reporting Dec. 11 in Nature, the researchers showed that even in years with similar rainfall totals, plants fared differently when that water came in fewer, bigger bursts.
In years with less frequent but more concentrated rainfall, plants in drier environments like the U.S. Southwest were more likely to thrive. In humid ecosystems like the Central American rainforest, vegetation tended to fare worse, possibly because it could not tolerate the longer dry spells.
Scientists have previously estimated that almost half of the world’s vegetation is driven primarily by how much rain falls in a year. Less well understood is the role of day-to-day variability, said lead author Andrew Feldman, a hydrologist and ecosystem scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Shifting precipitation patterns are producing stronger rainstorms — with longer dry spells in between — compared to a century ago.
“You can think of it like this: if you have a house plant, what happens if you give it a full pitcher of water on Sunday versus a third of a pitcher on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday?” said Feldman. Scale that to the size of the U.S. Corn Belt or a rainforest and the answer could have implications for crop yields and ultimately how much carbon dioxide plants remove from the atmosphere.
Blooms in Desert
The team, including researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and multiple universities, analyzed two decades of field and satellite observations, spanning millions of square miles. Their study area encompassed diverse landscapes from Siberia to the southern tip of Patagonia.
Yellow wildflowers and orange poppies carpet the desert following a wet winter for the Antelope Valley in California. NASA/Jim Ross They found that plants across 42% of Earth’s vegetated land surface were sensitive to daily rainfall variability. Of those, a little over half fared better — often showing increased growth — in years with fewer but more intense wet days. These include croplands as well as drier landscapes like grasslands and deserts.
In contrast, broadleaf (e.g., oak, maple, and beech) forests and rainforests in lower and middle latitudes tended to fare worse under those conditions. The effect was especially pronounced in Indo-Pacific rainforests, including in the Philippines and Indonesia.
Statistically, daily rainfall variability was nearly as important as annual rainfall totals in driving growth worldwide.
Red Light, Green Light
The new study relied primarily on a suite of NASA missions and datasets, including the Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) algorithm, which provides rain and snowfall rates for most of the planet every 30 minutes using a network of international satellites.
To gauge plant response day to day, the researchers calculated how green an area appeared in satellite imagery. “Greenness”, also known asthe Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, is commonly used to estimate vegetation density and health. They also tracked a faint reddish light that plants emit during photosynthesis, when a plant absorbs sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into food, its chlorophyll “leaks” unused photons. This faint light is called solar-induced fluorescence, and it’s a telltale sign of flourishing vegetation.
Growing plants emit a form of light detectable by NASA satellites orbiting hundreds of miles above Earth. Parts of North America appear to glimmer in this visualization, depicting an average year. Gray indicates regions with little or no fluorescence; red, pink, and white indicate high fluorescence. NASA Scientific Visualization Studio Not visible bythe naked eye, plant fluorescence can be detected by instruments aboard satellites such as NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2). Launched in 2014, OCO-2 has observed the U.S. Midwest fluorescing strongly during the growing season.
Feldman said the findings highlight the vital role that plants play in moving carbon around Earth — a process called the carbon cycle. Vegetation, including crops, forests, and grasslands, forms a vast carbon “sink,” absorbing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
“A finer understanding of how plants thrive or decline day to day, storm by storm, could help us better understand their role in that critical cycle,” Feldman said.
The study also included researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, Stanford University, Columbia University, Indiana University, and the University of Arizona.
By Sally Younger
NASA’s Earth Science News Team
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