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By NASA
3 min read
Sols 4345-4347: Contact Science is Back on the Table
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Right Navigation Camera on sol 4343 — Martian day 4,343 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — on Oct. 24, 2024 at 15:26:28 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Earth planning date: Friday, Oct. 25, 2024
The changes to the plan Wednesday, moving the drive a sol earlier, meant that we started off planning this morning about 18 meters (about 59 feet) farther along the western edge of Gediz Vallis and with all the data we needed for planning. This included the knowledge that once again one of Curiosity’s wheels was perched on a rock. Luckily, unlike on Wednesday, it was determined that it was safe to still go ahead with full contact science for this weekend. This consisted of two targets “Mount Brewer” and “Reef Lake,” two targets on the top and side of the same block.
Aside from the contact science, Curiosity has three sols to fill with remote imaging. The first two sols include “targeted science,” which means all the imaging of specific targets in our current workspace. Then, after we drive away on the second sol, we fill the final sol of the plan with “untargeted science,” where we care less about knowing exactly where the rover is ahead of time. A lot of the environmental team’s (or ENV) activities fall under this umbrella, which is why our dedicated “ENV Science Block” (about 30 minutes of environmental activities one morning every weekend) tends to fall at the end of a weekend plan.
But that’s getting ahead of myself. The weekend plan starts off with two ENV activities — a dust devil movie and a suprahorizon cloud movie. While cloud movies are almost always pointed in the same direction, our dust devil movie has to be specifically targeted. Recently we’ve been looking southeast toward a more sandy area (which you can see above), to see if we can catch dust lifting there. After those movies we hand the reins back over to the geology team (or GEO) for ChemCam observations of Reef Lake and “Poison Meadow.” Mastcam will follow this up with its own observations of Reef Lake and the AEGIS target from Wednesday’s plan. The rover gets some well-deserved rest before waking up for the contact science I talked about above, followed by a late evening Mastcam mosaic of “Fascination Turret,” a part of Gediz Vallis ridge that we’ve seen before.
We’re driving away on the second sol, but before that we have about another hour of science. ChemCam and Mastcam both have observations of “Heaven Lake” and the upper Gediz Vallis ridge, and ENV has a line-of-sight observation, to see how much dust is in the crater, and a pre-drive deck monitoring image to see if any dust moves around on the rover deck due to either driving or wind. Curiosity gets a short nap before a further drive of about 25 meters (about 82 feet).
The last sol of the weekend is a ChemCam special. AEGIS will autonomously choose a target for imaging, and then ChemCam has a passive sky observation to examine changing amounts of atmospheric gases. The weekend doesn’t end at midnight, though — we wake up in the morning for the promised morning ENV block, which we’ve filled with two cloud movies, another line-of-sight, and a tau observation to see how dusty the atmosphere is.
Written by Alex Innanen, Atmospheric Scientist at York University
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Last Updated Oct 28, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This low-angle self-portrait of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the site from which it reached down to drill into a rock target called “Buckskin” on lower Mount Sharp. When NASA conducts research beyond our world, scientists on Earth prepare as much as possible before sending instruments on extraterrestrial journeys. One way to prepare for these exploration missions is by using machine learning techniques to develop algorithms with data from commercial instruments or from flight instruments on planetary missions.
For example, NASA uses mass spectrometer instruments on Mars missions to analyze surface samples and identify organic molecules. Developing machine learning algorithms before missions can help make the process of analyzing planetary data faster and more efficient during time-limited space operations.
In 2022, Victoria Da Poian, a data scientist supporting machine learning research at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, collaborated with NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation to run two machine learning-based open science challenges, which sought ideas and solutions from the public. Solvers worldwide were invited to analyze chemical data sampled from commercial instruments located at NASA centers and data from the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) testbed, which is a replica of the instrument suite onboard the Curiosity rover. The challenges encouraged participants to be creative in their approaches and to provide detailed descriptions of their method and code.
Da Poian said her team decided to use public competitions for this project to gain new perspectives: “We were really interested in hearing from people who aren’t in our field and weren’t biased by the data’s meaning or our scientific rules.”
As a result, more than 1150 unique participants from all over the world participated in the competitions, and more than 600 solutions contributing models to analyze rock and soil samples relevant to planetary science were submitted. The challenges served as proof-of-concept projects to analyze the feasibility of combining data from multiple sources in a single machine learning application.
In addition to benefitting from the variety of perspectives offered by challenge participants, Da Poian says the challenges were both time- and cost-efficient methods for discovering solutions. At the same time, the challenges invited the global community to participate in NASA research in support of future space exploration missions, and winners received $60,000 in total prizes across the two opportunities.
Da Poian used lessons learned to develop a new challenge with Frontier Development Lab , an international research collaboration that brings together researchers and domain experts to tackle complex problems using machine learning technologies.
The competition, titled “Stay Curious: Leveraging Machine Learning to Analyze & Interpret the Measurements of Mars Planetary Instruments,” ran from June to August 2024. Results included cleaning SAM data collected on Mars, processing data for a consistent, machine learning-ready dataset combining commercial and flight instrument data, investigating data augmentation techniques to increase the limited data volume available for the challenge, and exploring machine learning techniques to help predict the chemical composition of Martian terrain.
“The machine learning challenges opened the door to how we can use laboratory data to train algorithms and then use that to train flight data,” said Da Poian. “Being able to use laboratory data that we’ve collected for many years is a huge opportunity for us, and the results so far are extremely encouraging.”
Find more opportunities: https://www.nasa.gov/get-involved/
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By NASA
ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Koss, A, Barth This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy IC 4709 located around 240 million light-years away in the southern constellation Telescopium. Hubble beautifully captures its faint halo and swirling disk filled with stars and dust bands. The compact region at its core might be the most remarkable sight. It holds an active galactic nucleus (AGN).
If IC 4709’s core just held stars, it wouldn’t be nearly as bright. Instead, it hosts a gargantuan black hole, 65 million times more massive than our Sun. A disk of gas spirals around and eventually into this black hole, crashing together and heating up as it spins. It reaches such high temperatures that it emits vast quantities of electromagnetic radiation, from infrared to visible to ultraviolet light and X-rays. A lane of dark dust, just visible at the center of the galaxy in the image above, obscures the AGN in IC 4709. The dust lane blocks any visible light emission from the nucleus itself. Hubble’s spectacular resolution, however, gives astronomers a detailed view of the interaction between the quite small AGN and its host galaxy. This is essential to understanding supermassive black holes in galaxies much more distant than IC 4709, where resolving such fine details is not possible.
This image incorporates data from two Hubble surveys of nearby AGNs originally identified by NASA’s Swift telescope. There are plans for Swift to collect new data on these galaxies. Swift houses three multiwavelength telescopes, collecting data in visible, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray light. Its X-ray component will allow SWIFT to directly see the X-rays from IC 4709’s AGN breaking through the obscuring dust. ESA’s Euclid telescope — currently surveying the dark universe in optical and infrared light — will also image IC 4709 and other local AGNs. Their data, along with Hubble’s, provides astronomers with complementary views across the electromagnetic spectrum. Such views are key to fully research and better understand black holes and their influence on their host galaxies.
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By NASA
4 Min Read NASA’s Webb Provides Another Look Into Galactic Collisions
This composite image of Arp 107 reveals a wealth of information about the star-formation and how these two galaxies collided hundreds of million years ago (full image below). Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI Smile for the camera! An interaction between an elliptical galaxy and a spiral galaxy, collectively known as Arp 107, seems to have given the spiral a happier outlook thanks to the two bright “eyes” and the wide semicircular “smile.” The region has been observed before in infrared by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope in 2005, however NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope displays it in much higher resolution. This image is a composite, combining observations from Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera).
Image A: Arp 107 (NIRCam and MIRI Image)
This composite image of Arp 107, created with data from the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), reveals a wealth of information about the star-formation and how these two galaxies collided hundreds of million years ago. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI NIRCam highlights the stars within both galaxies and reveals the connection between them: a transparent, white bridge of stars and gas pulled from both galaxies during their passage. MIRI data, represented in orange-red, shows star-forming regions and dust that is composed of soot-like organic molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. MIRI also provides a snapshot of the bright nucleus of the large spiral, home to a supermassive black hole.
Image B: Arp 107 (MIRI Image)
This image of Arp 107, shown by Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), reveals the supermassive black hole that lies in the center of the large spiral galaxy to the right. This black hole, which pulls much of the dust into lanes, also display’s Webb’s characteristic diffraction spikes, caused by the light that it emits interacting with the structure of the telescope itself. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI The spiral galaxy is classified as a Seyfert galaxy, one of the two largest groups of active galaxies, along with galaxies that host quasars. Seyfert galaxies aren’t as luminous and distant as quasars, making them a more convenient way to study similar phenomena in lower energy light, like infrared.
This galaxy pair is similar to the Cartwheel Galaxy, one of the first interacting galaxies that Webb observed. Arp 107 may have turned out very similar in appearance to the Cartwheel, but since the smaller elliptical galaxy likely had an off-center collision instead of a direct hit, the spiral galaxy got away with only its spiral arms being disturbed.
The collision isn’t as bad as it sounds. Although there was star formation occurring before, collisions between galaxies can compress gas, improving the conditions needed for more stars to form. On the other hand, as Webb reveals, collisions also disperse a lot of gas, potentially depriving new stars of the material they need to form.
Webb has captured these galaxies in the process of merging, which will take hundreds of millions of years. As the two galaxies rebuild after the chaos of their collision, Arp 107 may lose its smile, but it will inevitably turn into something just as interesting for future astronomers to study.
Arp 107 is located 465 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo Minor.
Video: Tour the Arp 107 Image
Video tour transcript
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Danielle Kirshenblat (STScI) The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
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Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov, Rob Gutro – rob.gutro@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Matthew Brown – mabrown@stsci.edu, Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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Last Updated Sep 17, 2024 Editor Marty McCoy Contact Laura Betz laura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms
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Hubble Examines a Busy Galactic Center
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the active spiral galaxy IC 4709. ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Koss, A, Barth This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy IC 4709a located around 240 million light-years away in the southern constellation Telescopium. Hubble beautifully captures its faint halo and swirling disk filled with stars and dust bands. The compact region at its core might be the most remarkable sight. It holds an active galactic nucleus (AGN).
If IC 4709’s core just held stars, it wouldn’t be nearly as bright. Instead, it hosts a gargantuan black hole, 65 million times more massive than our Sun. A disk of gas spirals around and eventually into this black hole, crashing together and heating up as it spins. It reaches such high temperatures that it emits vast quantities of electromagnetic radiation, from infrared to visible to ultraviolet light and X-rays. A lane of dark dust, just visible at the center of the galaxy in the image above, obscures the AGN in IC 4709. The dust lane blocks any visible light emission from the nucleus itself. Hubble’s spectacular resolution, however, gives astronomers a detailed view of the interaction between the quite small AGN and its host galaxy. This is essential to understanding supermassive black holes in galaxies much more distant than IC 4709, where resolving such fine details is not possible.
This image incorporates data from two Hubble surveys of nearby AGNs originally identified by NASA’s Swift telescope. There are plans for Swift to collect new data on these galaxies. Swift houses three multiwavelength telescopes, collecting data in visible, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray light. Its X-ray component will allow SWIFT to directly see the X-rays from IC 4709’s AGN breaking through the obscuring dust. ESA’s Euclid telescope — currently surveying the dark universe in optical and infrared light — will also image IC 4709 and other local AGNs. Their data, along with Hubble’s, provides astronomers with complementary views across the electromagnetic spectrum. Such views are key to fully research and better understand black holes and their influence on their host galaxies.
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Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Sep 05, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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