Goddard Planetary Instruments Score a Hat Trick

Dec. 5, 2013

Three mass spectrometers built at Goddard were operating on the same day at the moon, on Mars and en route to Mars.
Image Credit: NASA

Planetary instruments from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., hit the trifecta on Dec. 4, running three experiments of the same kind at different places in space.

The instruments, all flying on NASA missions, are mass spectrometers, designed to take in atmospheric, rock or soil samples and identify particular molecules in them. The investigations lined up because of the operating schedules for the three, which must take turns with other instruments on their respective spacecraft.

“At the moon and Mars and part way in between, we had three mass spectrometers happily operating in their other-worldly environments or being checked out for the first time in space on the same day,” said Paul Mahaffy, the principal investigator for the instruments.

Goddard’s Planetary Environments Lab, headed by Mahaffy, built all three instruments. The mass spectrometers identify gases in atmospheric samples or gases that get released from rock or soil samples as they are processed. To pick out individual components in a sample, an electron beam is used to break the large molecules into smaller fragments. Then high-frequency electric fields are applied to the resulting mixture to sort the fragments by mass and electric charge, producing a fingerprint of the molecules present.

Stationed at the moon was NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, which entered an equatorial orbit on Nov. 20 and began science operations the following day. On Dec. 4, the mission’s Neutral Mass Spectrometer was checking out the moon’s thin atmosphere. The instrument will continue to collect samples over multiple orbits with the moon in different space environments.

En route to Mars was NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, mission. Launched on Nov. 18, the spacecraft is in the early cruise phase and is scheduled to arrive at the Red Planet in September 2014. The mission’s Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer was turned on for the first time on Dec. 4 and measured calibration gases in the instrument.

Upon the spacecraft’s arrival at Mars, the instrument will study the planet’s fragile upper atmosphere, examining its composition and determining how quickly some of the gases are escaping into space over time. This information will help scientists understand what the Martian atmosphere looked like billions of years ago and how most of it has been lost since then.

On the surface of Mars was NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory’s Curiosity rover, which carries the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite. SAM has been analyzing multiple samples of the atmosphere and soils and rocks to help scientists understand how habitable Mars was in the past.

“With these studies, mass spectrometry is helping us piece together the histories of the moon and Mars and offers a vision of their futures,” said Mahaffy. “It’s a perfect example of how invaluable these instruments are for space science.”

MAVEN's principal investigator is based at the University of Colorado Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder. Goddard manages the MAVEN mission. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., built the Curiosity rover and manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project. NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California manages the LADEE mission.

By Elizabeth Zubritsky, NASA

(www.nasa.gov)

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NASA Issues Human Exploration Rover Challenge To Students

November 30, 2013

Image Credit: Thinkstock.com

Susan Bowen for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Students, some of whom will have only recently earned their driver’s licenses, will soon have the opportunity to test drive vehicles for use on other planets, asteroids, moons and comets.

NASA has issued a new engineering design challenge for teams of high school and college students: to design, build and test vehicles on the simulated surface of another world.

Registration for the NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge will be open until early in 2014 and will provide students with an authentic engineering challenge.

“We designed this engineering challenge to align with NASA’s commitment of sending humans to Mars by the 2030s,” said Rocky Lind, who manages education and outreach efforts in the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The student teams will be timed, ranked and scored based on design, safety and how well they traverse the set course. The results of the competition will contribute to the design process for NASA’s future exploration goals.”

Continue Learning: http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1113016275/stem-nasa-human-exploration-rover-challenge-113013/

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Is Inspiration Enough To Launch Inspiration Mars?

NASA By Amy Shira Teitel Posted Nov. 22, 2013

An artist’s concept of Inspiration Mars Inspiration Mars
Credit: Inspiration Mars

In 2001, Dennis Tito used his millions to buy a seat on a Soyuz spacecraft for an eight-day visit to the International Space Station. On February 27 of this year, he announced his plan to foot a large portion of the bill for Inspiration Mars, a flyby mission to the red planet. On Wednesday in front of a House Committee on Space, he called for NASA to pick up the slack to see his mission fly, both financially and technologically. Inspiration Mars had some obvious problems from the start, but this latest development looks a little like it might be the first nail in the mission’s coffin.

Tito unveiled Inspiration Mars earlier this year as a philanthropic mission; technological and scientific ends were secondary to the primary goal of inspiring the nation to aspire to great things in space once again. The mission itself is fairly straightforward. A crew of two (a married, middle-aged, heterosexual couple) will launch in January of 2018, fly to Mars, and whip around the planet’s far side using gravity to boost them back to Earth. The mission isn’t designed to land on Mars of even go into orbit. It would be a 501 day flight with a very short but exciting flyby around one of our neighbours.

Continue Learning: http://www.popsci.com/blog-network/vintage-space/inspiration-enough-launch-inspiration-mars

Clock Ticking for 2018 Private Manned Mars Mission

By Mike Wall, Senior Writer | November 21, 2013 06:00am ET

An artist’s illustration of the manned spacecraft for the Inspiration Mars
mission to send two astronauts on a Mars flyby mission in 2017-2018.
Credit: Inspiration Mars

A private manned Mars mission won’t get off the ground as planned in January 2018 unless it secures the support of the federal government within the next few months, officials say.

The nonprofit Inspiration Mars Foundation aims to partner with NASA to send two astronauts on a flyby mission to the Red Planet in 2018. Inspiration Mars has little chance of making this launch date unless it receives assurances very soon from Congress and the White House that the mission will be a NASA priority, officials said.

“We have a just a couple of months to get some signals that would indicate that there’s serious interest developing,” Inspiration Mars founder Dennis Tito, who became the world’s first space tourist when he paid his own way to the International Space Station in 2001, told reporters during a teleconference Wednesday (Nov. 20). “So, not much time.” [Private Mission to Mars Explained (Infographic)]

Inspiration Mars’ “Mission for America” would launch a married couple on a 501-day flyby mission to the Red Planet in January 2018. The astronauts would not land on Mars, but would streak within 100 miles (160 kilometers) of its surface before beginning the long trek back to Earth.

The mission would lay the foundation for even more ambitious exploration efforts in the future and help cement the United States’ status as a global leader in science and technology by inspiring the next generation of researchers and engineers, Inspiration Mars officials say.

Continue Learning: http://www.space.com/23678-inspiration-mars-manned-mission-deadline.html

Martian Geology More Diverse Than Previously Thought

November 18, 2013

Image Caption: NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is providing new spectral "windows" into the diversity of Martian surface materials. Here in a volcanic caldera, bright magenta outcrops have a distinctive feldspar-rich composition. Credit: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/MSSS

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

For years, scientists have thought of Mars as being made up of just one kind of rock – a very simplistic planet compared to the diverse geology of Earth.

However, a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience suggests there may be granite on Mars and puts forward a theory for how it could have formed there.

“We’re providing the most compelling evidence to date that Mars has granitic rocks,” said study author James Wray, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The study is based on the large deposit of feldspar, a mineral found in granite, recently found in an inactive Martian volcano. The location of the feldspar suggests protracted magmatic activity under the Martian surface could produce large-scale granite deposits, the study team said.

The Martian surface is mostly covered with basalt, the dark-colored rock commonly found throughout Hawaii. However, in the area around the Martian feldspar deposit, minerals rich in iron and magnesium and common in basalts are almost completely absent.

Continue Learning: http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1113006200/mars-has-granite-111813/

New Algorithm Will Help Curiosity Rover Analyze Mars Soil

November 16, 2013

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

While the instruments on NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity are able to easily identify the chemical composition of rocks, measure the speed of the wind and snap amazing images from mast-mounted cameras, the process of analyzing soil images can be a somewhat daunting task, according to researchers from Louisiana State University (LSU).

After all, the university points out, many times there are several thousand images to analyze, and the soil particles are typically only five to 10 pixels wide. Now, however, a research team led by Suniti Karunatillake of the LSU Department of Geology and Geophysics has come to the rescue with a new algorithm that should make the task easier.

Karunatillake and colleagues from Rider University, Stony Brook University and the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Flagstaff, Arizona joined forces to create an image analysis and segmentation algorithm specifically to help NASA scientists complete this basic, but nonetheless challenging, part of their mission.

Continue Learning: http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1113005274/mars-curiosity-algorithm-for-soil-images-111613/

Mission to Mars moon could be a sample-return twofer, study says

The Martian moon Phobos has accumulated dust and debris
from the surface of Mars, knocked into its orbital path by
projectiles colliding with the planet. A sample-return
mission to Phobos would thus return material both from
Phobos and from Mars. Credit: NASA

The study helps to confirm the idea that the surface of Phobos contains tons of dust, soil, and rock blown off the Martian surface by large projectile impacts. Phobos' orbital path plows through occasional plumes of Martian debris, meaning the tiny moon has been gathering Martian castoffs for millions of years. That means a sample-return mission planned by the Russian space agency could sample two celestial bodies for the price of one.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-11-mission-mars-moon-sample-return-twofer.html#jCp

Prolific NASA Mars Orbiter Passes Big Data Milestone

This artist's concept of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Image credit: NASA/JPL

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has overhauled understanding of the Red Planet since 2006, has passed 200 terabits in the amount of science data returned. The data returned by the mission alone is more than three times the total data returned via NASA's Deep Space Network for all the other missions managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., over the past 10 years.

While the 200 terabits number includes all the data this orbiter has relayed to Earth from robots on the surface of Mars, about 99.9 percent of the volume has come from the six science instruments aboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The 200 terabits are equivalent to the data volume in three nonstop months of high-definition video. The number does not include the engineering data that specialists operating the orbiter from JPL and Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, use for monitoring its health and performance.

Continue Learning: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/news/mro20131108.html#.Un_psPmKK-3