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NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover Extracts First Oxygen from Red Planet
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By European Space Agency
12 November 2024 marks the start of a new year on Mars. At exactly 10:32 CET/09:32 UTC on Earth, the Red Planet begins a new orbit around our Sun.
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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 2 min read
Sols 4359-4361: The Perfect Road Trip Destination For Any Rover!
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image of its workspace, which includes several targets for investigation — “Buttress Tree,” “Forester Pass,” “Crater Mountain,” “Mahogany Creek,” and “Filly Lake.” Curiosity used its Left Navigation Camera on Nov. 8, 2024 — sol 4357, or Martian day 4.357, of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 00:06:17 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Earth planning date: Friday, Nov. 8, 2024
After the excitement of Wednesday’s plan, it was a relief to come in today to hear that the drive toward our exit from Gediz Vallis completed successfully and that we weren’t perched on any rocks or in any other precarious position. This made for a very smooth planning morning, which is always nice on a Friday after a long week.
But that isn’t to say that Curiosity will be taking it easy for the weekend. Smooth planning means we have lots of time to pack in as much science as we can fit. Today, this meant that the geology group (GEO) got to name eight new targets, and the environmental group (ENV) got to spend some extra time contemplating the atmosphere. Reading through the list of target names from GEO felt a bit like reading a travel guide — top rocks to visit when you’re exiting Gediz Vallis!
If you look to the front of your rover, what we refer to as the “workspace” (and which you can see part of in the image above), you’ll see an array of rocks. Take in the polygonal fractures of “Colosseum Mountain” and be amazed by the structures of “Tyndall Creek” and “Cascade Valley.” Get up close and personal with our contact science targets, “Mahogany Creek,” “Forester Pass,” and “Buttress Tree.” Our workspace has something for everyone, including the laser spectrometers in the family, who will find plenty to explore with “Filly Lake” and “Crater Mountain.” We have old favorites too, like the upper Gediz Vallis Ridge and the Texoli outcrop.
After a busy day sightseeing, why not kick back with ENV and take a deep breath? APXS and ChemCam have you covered, watching the changing atmospheric composition. Look up with Navcam and you may see clouds drifting by, or spend some time looking for dust devils in the distance. Want to check the weather before planning your road trip? Our weather station REMS works around the clock, and Mastcam and Navcam are both keeping an eye on how dusty the crater is.
All good vacations must come to an end, but know that when it’s time to drive away there will be many more thrilling sights to come!
Written by Alex Innanen, Atmospheric Scientist at York University
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Last Updated Nov 11, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
Dr. Annie Meier (second from left) and her team inside the Applied Chemistry Lab at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida began supplementing their normal workload in mid-2023 with efforts to improve the lab’s sustainable practices. In 2024, the laboratory became the first at NASA to receive certification from the non-profit My Green Lab for its efforts in sustainability.NASA/Kim Shiflett NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida has a long record of achievements in sustainability and recently added another to the list when the spaceport’s Applied Chemistry Lab became the first in the agency to be certified for its environmentally conscious practices.
The My Green Lab Certification recognizes sustainability best practices in research facilities around the world. The certification program run by My Green Lab, a non-profit dedicated to creating a culture of sustainability through science, is considered a key measure of progress towards a zero-carbon future by the United Nations Race to Zero campaign.
“When I heard our lab achieved certification, I was so happy,” said Dr. Annie Meier, one of the laboratory’s chemical engineers. “It meant we could now make a conscious effort to share these green practices with all who work in our lab. We even added them to our training materials for new and incoming members in the lab.”
The lab performs research and technology development for a wide range of chemistry and engineering-related applications to solve the unique operational needs of NASA and outside partners. The lab primarily focuses on in-situ resource utilization and addressing technology gaps related to lunar and Martian sustainability. The lab’s scientists also provide expertise in the fields of logistics reduction, plasma science, hypergolic fuels, analytical instrumentation, and gas analysis.
While sustainability has long been a focus of the lab, the journey to the certification began when Riley Yager, a doctoral student from University of Alabama at Birmingham – where Meier was a technical monitor – shared her knowledge of the program after pursuing green lab practices at her university.
“I work as a sustainability ambassador at my university, so I knew of this program,” Yager said. “Sustainable practices are something woven into my everyday life, so naturally I wanted to bring those practices into my lab environments.”
After learning about the program from Yager and discovering the many other academic institutions and companies certified globally, Meier submitted a proposal to NASA and obtained funding to pursue certification for the Applied Chemistry Lab.
After a kickoff event hosted by My Green Lab in April 2023, the lab’s path to certification began with a self-assessment survey, in which members of the lab answered a series of questions about their practices in areas such as cold storage, green chemistry, infrastructure energy, resource management, waste reduction, and water. My Green Lab collected and analyzed the answers, providing a baseline assessment and recommendations to improve the lab’s sustainable practices.
“We took their initial survey and learned we had lots of room for improvements as a lab,” Meier said. “Then I worked with a few interns over the summer to spearhead the ‘green team’ to implement changes and get momentum from the entire lab.”
The lab began with minimizing purchases by improving efficiencies during the inventory process. The team also performed a waste audit of all seven of its laboratories. They adopted nitrile glove and pipette tip box recycling, reviewed the “12 principles of green chemistry” with the lab members, and installed stickers and signage about what can and cannot be unplugged to save energy. Additionally, they installed low-flow aerators on the lab tap sinks to reduce flow, and the lab now uses a recycling sink to save on water or solvents for cleaning parts.
As luck would have it, Yager ended up working at the Applied Chemistry Lab on a NASA fellowship and became a member of the green team.
“It was really fun to see that come full circle,” Meier said. “Almost all members of the lab, from our fellows to most senior members, used their self-motivation to get on the sustainability train.”
The green team continued to grow as the lab implemented changes to become more sustainable. Just over six months after the kickoff event, they completed another assessment survey. With possible certification levels of bronze, silver, gold, platinum, and green – the level that adheres closest to My Green Lab’s highest standards – the ACL was certified green, marking the first time any NASA center obtained a My Green Lab Certification.
“Our lab is looking to sustain these green practices and achieve the same status when we are reassessed in the future,” Meier said. “This effort could be a wonderful catalyst to inspire other work groups to lean towards more ‘green’ practices at the frontline in our laboratories.”
The NASA Kennedy lab joined over 2,500 labs in a range of sectors that received the My Green Lab certification. Maintaining the distinction will require recertification every two years.
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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
2 min read
NASA-Funded Study Examines Tidal Effects on Planet and Moon Interiors
NASA-supported scientists have developed a new method to compute how tides affect the interiors of planets and moons. Importantly, the new study looks at the effects of body tides on objects that don’t have a perfectly spherical interior structure, which is an assumption of most previous models.
The puzzling, fascinating surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa looms large in this newly-reprocessed color view, made from images taken by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. This is the color view of Europa from Galileo that shows the largest portion of the moon’s surface at the highest resolution. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute Body tides refer to the deformations experienced by celestial bodies when they gravitationally interact with other objects. Think of how the powerful gravity of Jupiter tugs on its moon Europa. Because Europa’s orbit isn’t circular, the crushing squeeze of Jupiter’s gravity on the moon varies as it travels along its orbit. When Europa is at its closest to Jupiter, the planet’s gravity is felt the most. The energy of this deformation is what heats up Europa’s interior, allowing an ocean of liquid water to exist beneath the moon’s icy surface.
“The same is true for Saturn’s moon Enceladus.” says co-author Alexander Berne of CalTech in Pasadena and an affiliate at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Enceladus has an ice shell that is expected to be much more non-spherically symmetric than that of Europa.”
The body tides experienced by celestial bodies can affect how the worlds evolve over time and, in cases like Europa and Enceladus, their potential habitability for life as we know it. The new study provides a means to more accurately estimate how tidal forces affect planetary interiors.
In this movie Europa is seen in a cutaway view through two cycles of its 3.5 day orbit about the giant planet Jupiter. Like Earth, Europa is thought to have an iron core, a rocky mantle and a surface ocean of salty water. Unlike on Earth, however, this ocean is deep enough to cover the whole moon, and being far from the sun, the ocean surface is globally frozen over. Europa’s orbit is eccentric, which means as it travels around Jupiter, large tides, raised by Jupiter, rise and fall. Jupiter’s position relative to Europa is also seen to librate, or wobble, with the same period. This tidal kneading causes frictional heating within Europa, much in the same way a paper clip bent back and forth can get hot to the touch, as illustrated by the red glow in the interior of Europa’s rocky mantle and in the lower, warmer part of its ice shell. This tidal heating is what keeps Europa’s ocean liquid and could prove critical to the survival of simple organisms within the ocean, if they exist. The giant planet Jupiter is now shown to be rotating from west to east, though more slowly than its actual rate. NASA/JPL-Caltech The paper also discusses how the results of the study could help scientists interpret observations made by missions to a variety of different worlds, ranging from Mercury to the Moon to the outer planets of our solar system.
The study, “A Spectral Method to Compute the Tides of Laterally Heterogeneous Bodies,” was published in The Planetary Science Journal.
For more information on NASA’s Astrobiology Program, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/astrobiology
-end-
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Nov 07, 2024 Related Terms
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