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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 European Space Agency
The Global Methane Budget 2024 paints a troubling picture of the current state of global methane emissions. The new report, which uses data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, reveals that human activities are now responsible for at least two-thirds of global methane emissions.
This marks a significant increase in human-produced methane sources over the past two decades, with emissions rising by 20%, with the fastest rise occurring over the last five years.
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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 3 min read
Behind the Scenes at the 2024 Mars 2020 Science Team Meeting
The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Science Team meets in person and online during the July 2024 team meeting in Pasadena, CA. Credits: R. Hogg and J. Maki. The Mars 2020 Science Team meets in Pasadena for 3 days of science synthesis
It has become a fun tradition for me to write a summary of our yearly in-person Science Team Meetings (2022 meeting and 2023 meeting). I’ve been particularly looking forward to this year’s update given the recent excitement on the team and in the public about Perseverance’s discovery of a potential biosignature, a feature that may have a biological origin but needs more data or further study before reaching a conclusion about the absence or presence of life.
This past July, ~160 members of the Mars 2020 Science Team met in-person in Pasadena—with another ~50 team members dialed in on-line—for three days of presentations, meetings, and team discussion. For a team that spends most of the year working remotely from around the world, we make the most of these rare opportunities for in-person discussion and synthesis of the rover’s latest science results.
We spent time discussing Perseverance’s most recent science campaign in the Margin unit, an exposure of carbonate-bearing rocks that occurs along the inner rim of Jezero crater. As part of an effort to synthesize what we’ve learned about the Margin unit over the past year, we heard presentations describing surface and subsurface observations collected from the rover’s entire payload. This was followed by a thought-provoking series of presentations that tackled the three hypotheses we’re carrying for the origin of this unit: sedimentary, volcanic (pyroclastic), or crystalline igneous.
Some of our liveliest discussion occurred during presentations about Neretva Vallis, Jezero’s inlet valley that once fed the sedimentary fan and lake system within the crater. Data from the RIMFAX instrument took center stage as we debated the origin and age relationship of the Bright Angel outcrop to other units we’ve studied in the crater.
This context is especially important because the Bright Angel outcrop is home to the Cheyava Falls rock, which contains intriguing features we’ve been calling “leopard spots,” small white spots with dark rims observed in red bedrock of Bright Angel. On the last day of the team meeting, data from our recent “Apollo Temple” abrasion at Cheyava Falls was just starting to arrive on Earth, and team members from the PIXL and SHERLOC teams were huddled in the hallway and at the back of the conference room trying to digest these new results in real time. We had special “pop-up” presentations during which SHERLOC reported compelling evidence for organics in the new abrasion, and PIXL showed interesting new data about the light-toned veins that crosscut this rock.
Between debates about the Margin unit, updates on recently published studies of the Jezero sedimentary fan sequence, and discussion of the newest rocks at Bright Angel, this team meeting was one of our most exciting yet. It also marked an important transition for the Mars 2020 science mission as we prepare to ascend the Jezero crater rim, leaving behind—at least for now—the rocks inside the crater. I can only imagine the interesting new discoveries we’ll make during the upcoming year, and I can’t wait to report back next summer!
Written by Katie Stack Morgan, Mars 2020 Deputy Project Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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By NASA
The NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) instituted the Entrepreneurs Challenge to identify innovative ideas and technologies from small business start-ups with the potential to advance the agency’s science goals. Geolabe—a prize winner in the latest Entrepreneurs Challenge—has developed a way to use artificial intelligence to identify global methane emissions. Methane is a greenhouse gas that significantly contributes to global warming, and this promising new technology could provide data to help decision makers develop strategies to mitigate climate change.
SMD sponsored Entrepreneurs Challenge events in 2020, 2021, and 2023. Challenge winners were awarded prize money—in 2023 the total Entrepreneurs Challenge prize value was $1M. To help leverage external funding sources for the development of innovative technologies of interest to NASA, SMD involved the venture capital community in Entrepreneurs Challenge events. Numerous challenge winners have subsequently received funding from both NASA and external sources (e.g., other government agencies or the venture capital community) to further develop their technologies.
Each Entrepreneurs Challenge solicited submissions in specific focus areas such as mass spectrometry technology, quantum sensors, metamaterials-based sensor technologies, and more. The focus areas of the latest 2023 challenge included lunar surface payloads and climate science.
A recent Entrepreneurs Challenge success story involves 2023 challenge winner Geolabe—a startup founded by Dr. Claudia Hulbert and Dr. Bertrand Rouet-Leduc in 2020 in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Geolabe team developed a method that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically detect methane emissions on a global scale.
This image taken from a NASA visualization shows the complex patterns of methane emissions around the globe in 2018, based on data from satellites, inventories of human activities, and NASA global computer models. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio As global temperatures rise to record highs, the pressure to curb greenhouse gas emissions has intensified. Limiting methane emissions is particularly important since methane is the second largest contributor to global warming, and is estimated to account for approximately a third of global warming to date. Moreover, because methane stays in the atmosphere for a shorter amount of time compared to CO2, curbing methane emissions is widely considered to be one of the fastest ways to slow down the rate of global warming.
However, monitoring methane emissions and determining their quantities has been challenging due to the limitations of existing detection methods. Methane plumes are invisible and odorless, so they are typically detected with specialized equipment such as infrared cameras. The difficulty in finding these leaks from space is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Leaks are distributed around the globe, and most of the methane plumes are relatively small, making them easy to miss in satellite data.
Multispectral satellite imagery has emerged as a viable methane detection tool in recent years, enabling routine measurements of methane plumes at a global scale every few days. However, with respect to methane, these measurements suffer from very poor signal to noise ratio, which has thus far allowed detection of only very large emissions (2-3 tons/hour) using manual methods.
This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI The Geolabe team has developed a deep learning architecture that automatically identifies methane signatures in existing open-source spectral satellite data and deconvolves the signal from the noise. This AI method enables automatic detection of methane leaks at 200kg/hour and above, which account for over 85% of the methane emissions in well-studied, large oil and gas basins. Information gained using this new technique could help inform efforts to mitigate methane emissions on Earth and automatically validate their effects. This Geolabe project was featured in Nature Communications on May 14, 2024.
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NASA Science Mission Directorate
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Last Updated Aug 20, 2024 Related Terms
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By European Space Agency
Video: 00:03:23 Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas contributor to climate change after carbon dioxide. Curbing methane emissions could deliver immediate and long-lasting benefits for the climate, seeing as the gas only lingers in the atmosphere for a relatively short time.
Satellites have a really important role to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Tropomi instrument onboard the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite is the only instrument that maps global methane concentrations every single day. This lets scientists detect hotspots for large methane sources around the world – allowing us to address the consequences of methane emissions on our climate and environment.
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