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By European Space Agency
ESA’s Hera mission has completed the first critical manoeuvre on its journey to the Didymos binary asteroid system since launch on 7 October.
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By NASA
Mars: Perseverance (Mars 2020) 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 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
Mars 2020 Perseverance Joins NASA’s Here to Observe Program
Katie Stack Morgan and Nicole Spanovich with the NASA Here to Observe Program students and faculty from Kutztown University. Kutztown University The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission has recently joined the NASA Here to Observe (H2O) program, where NASA planetary missions are partnered with universities to encourage undergraduate students from historically marginalized groups to pursue a career in STEM. As part of this program, the Perseverance mission has been paired with Kutztown University, located in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Selected undergraduate students at the university will be able to observe and interact with Perseverance mission team members throughout this academic year to learn about the individuals who are part of the team and what it means to work on the rover mission.
To help kick off the program and our new partnership, I traveled to Kutztown along with the Perseverance Deputy Project Scientist, Katie Stack Morgan. We met several members of the Kutztown faculty and staff, toured their beautiful campus, and spent time getting to know the students participating in the H2O program this year. Katie and I were impressed by the enthusiasm and engagement exhibited by the students during our visit. We presented an introduction to the Perseverance mission including the recent discoveries, upcoming plans, and who comprises the mission team. There was also ample time to answer the many thoughtful questions about both the mission and the career paths of both me and Katie.
As part of this program, the students will observe select Perseverance mission meetings and activities. We kicked this off in October when the students observed a Geologic Context Working Group meeting to learn how scientists work together to understand the data gathered by the rover and make decisions about what the rover should do next. The students will also be paired with mentors from the Perseverance mission team throughout this academic year where they’ll have the chance to learn about the various career paths our team members have taken, read scientific papers, and prepare for a trip to the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference.
Overall, we have a great plan for our H2O partnership and are looking forward to welcoming Kutztown University to the Perseverance mission!
Written by Nicole Spanovich, Mars 2020 Perseverance Science Office Manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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Mars 2020 Team Members with the ‘NASA Here to Observe Program’ Students at Kutztown University
Nov 6, 2024
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Last Updated Nov 06, 2024 Related Terms
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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 Mosaics 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 4352-4354: Halloween Fright Night on Mars
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image of the target surface feature nicknamed “Reds Meadow,” using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), located on the turret at the end of the rover’s robotic arm. Curiosity captured the image Oct. 31, 2024, at 19:09:10 UTC, on sol 4350 — Martian day 4,350 of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Earth planning date: Friday, Nov. 1, 2024
Yesterday evening (Thursday) was Halloween for many of us here on Earth. My neighborhood in eastern Canada was full of small (and not so small!) children, running around in the dark collecting sweets and candy but also getting scared by the ghostly decorations hung at each house. Little did we suspect that our poor rover on Mars was also getting spooked. Curiosity completed about a meter (about 3 feet) of the planned drive before becoming unsettled … scared, if you will! … when its left front wheel got hung up on a rock and stopped moving.
Luckily, we understood this kind of frightened behavior and were able to resume planning today as per usual. That meter was enough to give us a whole new set of targets to choose from. As APXS Strategic Planner this week, I had chosen darker-looking targets in the workspace — “Ladder Lake” and “Reds Meadow” (shown in the accompanying MAHLI image) — earlier in the week. I was happy that bumping backwards by a meter allowed us to reach some of the more typical pale colored bedrock at “Eureka Valley” and a second APXS analysis on “Black Bear Lake,” which is a mixture of both pale bedrock and some darker layers. MAHLI added in a bonus set of images on “Stag Dome,” focusing on small, rougher patches on the pale bedrock.
ChemCam is taking advantage of the short bump, too, adding a passive observation on the brushed Reds Meadow target, analyzed by APXS and MAHLI in Monday’s plan. A ChemCam LIBS target “Hoist Ridge” focuses on a small vertical face of dark material. Two long distance images planned for ChemCam’s Remote Micro Imager (RMI) look at the distribution of rocks along the Gediz Vallis ridge in the distance.
Mastcam is taking several mosaics this weekend (must have gotten extra energy from the Halloween sugar!). Close to the rover, Mastcam will acquire single-frame images of the targets Hoist Ridge and Eureka Valley, and a small mosaic of some surficial troughs just a little further away. Moving further afield, a small 3×1 mosaic (three images in one row) will image the same area as the ChemCam RMI of the Gediz Vallis ridge, and a larger 9×2 mosaic will focus on the faraway yardang unit, where we hopefully will be in a few years.
Then for the really big images: Mastcam will image the whole landscape in a special 360-degree view, so big it needs to be broken into two parts. The first will have 43×4 frames, the second 34×5 frames. These mosaics are huge, so we save them for when we are at a really good vantage point to allow us to capture as much detail as possible for science and engineering planning.
As ever, we continue our environmental monitoring of conditions, with Mastcam and Navcam movies and images looking at dust in the atmosphere above and around us in Gale crater, and watching out for dust devils.
Written by Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, Planetary Geologist at University of New Brunswick
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Last Updated Nov 04, 2024 Related Terms
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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
European company apetito uses Neurala’s vision inspection software to ensure the quality of its prepared meals, such as green bean portions pictured here. The software evolved from code Neurala was developing more than a decade ago, with NASA funding, for a rover that could independently learn to traverse Martian terrain. Credit: Neurala Inc. Artificial intelligence software initially designed to learn and analyze Martian terrain is now at the heart of a system to monitor assembly lines on Earth.
The vision inspection software from Neurala Inc., an artificial intelligence company in Boston, Massachusetts, works with existing cameras, computers, and even cellphones to monitor the quality of products running along a conveyor belt, for instance.
“Our software can learn very quickly on a processor with a very small footprint, a skill we learned working with NASA,” said Neurala cofounder and CEO Massimiliano Versace. “By doing so, we enable vision inspection with whatever components are already available, deploying in minutes. In our exploration of the market, we realized that the manufacturing space had a precise need for this technology.”
Versace and Neurala (Spinoff 2018) began working with NASA more than a decade ago on a project funded through the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program. NASA was interested in “adaptive bio-inspired navigation for planetary exploration,” and Versace and his team had been working on neural network AI software modeled on the human brain.
Focusing on a rover concept that could independently learn to traverse Martian terrain, Neurala went on to win STTR Phase II funding for the project. Additional money from a NASA Center Innovation Fund enabled the Neurala team to adapt its technology to drone navigation and collision avoidance.
In both the rover and the drone applications, the Neurala software could run on a small device on the vehicle itself, eliminating the delay of sending signals to a decision maker in another location. Since then, the company developed the software to help monitor assembly lines.
Onsite computing is an advantage in manufacturing, as well, where an assembly line may have a hundred items passing every minute, making visual inspections for quality control difficult.
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Last Updated Nov 01, 2024 Related Terms
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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 Mosaics 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 4348-4349: Smoke on the Water
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity created this composite image from its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), located on the turret at the end of the rover’s robotic arm. An onboard process, focus merging, makes a composite of images of the same target — acquired at different focus positions — to bring all (or, as many as possible) features into focus in a single image. Curiosity performed this merge on Oct. 27, 2024, sol 4346 (Martian day 4,346) of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission, at 15:45:47 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Earth planning date: Monday, Oct. 28, 2024
Before the science team starts planning, we first look at the latest Navcam image downlinked from Curiosity to see where the rover is located. It can be all too easy to get lost in the scenery of the Navcam and find new places in the distance we want to drive towards, but there’s so much beauty in the smaller things. Today I’ve chosen to show a photo from Curiosity’s hand lens camera, MAHLI, that takes photos so close that we can see the individual grains of the rock.
The planning day usually starts by thinking about these smaller features: What rocks are the closest to the rover? What can we shoot with our laser? What instruments can we use to document these features? Today we planned two sols, and the focus of the close-up contact science became a coating of material that in some image stretches looks like a deep-purple color.
We planned lots of activities to characterize this coating including use of the dust removal tool (DRT) and the APXS instrument on a target called “Reds Meadow.” This target will also be photographed by the MAHLI instrument. The team planned a ChemCam LIBS target on “Midge Lake” as well as a passive ChemCam target on “Primrose Lake” to document this coating with a full suite of instruments. Mastcam will then document the ChemCam LIBS target Midge Lake, and take a mosaic of the vertical faces of a few rocks near to the rover called “Peep Sight Peak” to observe the sedimentary structures here. Mastcam will also take a mosaic of “Pinnacle Ridge,” an area seen previously by the rover, from a different angle. ChemCam is rounding off the first sol with two long-distance RMI mosaics to document the stratigraphy of two structures we are currently driving between: Texoli butte and the Gediz Vallis channel.
In the second sol of the plan, after driving about 20 meters (about 66 feet), Curiosity will be undertaking some environmental monitoring activities before an AEGIS activity that automatically selects a LIBS target in our new workspace prior to our planning on Wednesday morning.
Written by Emma Harris, Graduate Student at Natural History Museum, London
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Last Updated Oct 30, 2024 Related Terms
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