Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Tonight’s the Night Mars Will NOT Look as Big as the Full Moon

The night sky on August 27, 2010. Image from EarthSky.org

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I wasn’t going to write an article about the Mars-Moon Hoax this year because I thought it was too passé — we’ve written articles about this email-circulated fallacy every year since 2003 and another article would be like beating a dead horse because surely, there’s no one out there anymore that actually believes Mars can look as big as the full Moon.

But I just looked at some stats and saw that our article on the topic from 2007, “Will Mars Look as Big as the Full Moon On August 27? Nope” has gotten like a gazillion hits the past few days, so obviously people are Googling the topic, wondering if Mars will look as big as the full Moon tonight.

Short answer: No. If you looked at the night sky last night, Mars was not as big as the full Moon then, and it won’t be that big tonight. Moreover, it won’t be that big, ever. It is impossible for Mars to ever look as big as the full Moon. And this year (2010) in August, Mars is just barely visible, as a faint object low in the west after sunset. Take a look at the sky chart above from EarthSky.org which shows you where it is. And you can read more about Mars in 2010 at the EarthSky.org website, which is a great resource for all sorts of science topics and is written by some of the world’s top scientists.

The confusion arises from an erroneous and completely hoaxy email that started in 2003 when Mars was about as close to Earth it will ever get, but still, it was very far away, about 55,758,006 kilometers (34,646,418 miles). It did not look as big as the full Moon then, and it certainly never will. Take a look at JPL’s blog post, “Five Things About Viewing Mars in August” written by outreach specialist Jane Houston Jones. She writes:

“The moon is one-quarter the size of Earth and is relatively close — only about 384,000 kilometers (about 239,000 miles) away. On the other hand, Mars is one-half the size of Earth and it orbits the sun 1-1/2 times farther out than Earth’s orbit. The closest it ever gets to Earth is at opposition every 26 months. The last Mars opposition was in January and the next one is in March 2011.

At opposition, Mars will be 101 million kilometers (63 million miles) from Earth, almost twice as far as in 2003. So from that distance, Mars could never look the same as our moon.”

NASA usually writes an article about this every year as well — and this year it is called “The Mutating Mars Hoax.”

Every year, Universe Today has been debunking the erroneous email that has been going around since 2003. If you’d like to look back, here are a few: 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005. If you don’t believe Fraser and me, Phil Plait the Bad Astronomer debunks the email here, here , here, and here’s the original one back in 2003.

And by the way, I stole the title for this article from my friend Rob Sparks, who said on Twitter this morning, “Today’s the day Mars won’t look as big as the full Moon.” He wrote a great blog post about the Mars-Moon hoax on his “Half-Astrophysics” blog.

So, yes, tonight is the night Mars will NOT look as big as the full Moon, and that goes for every other night, as well.

Just remember, you can’t always believe everything you read in a forwarded email!

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Latest from Mars: Exposed Ice in Fresh Crater, Plus 100’s More New Images

At the center of this view of an area of mid-latitude northern Mars, a fresh crater about 6 meters (20 feet) in diameter holds an exposure of bright material, blue in this false-color image. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

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Mars-o-philes rejoice! New images from Mars galore, including this “after” image of Mars’ northern hemisphere which reveals a new crater was created sometime between April 2004 and January 2010. Intriguingly, scientists believe exposed ice is visible in this new image from the HiRISE camera. This is just one of the latest release of hundreds of high-resolution HiRISE images, so go get your fill of Mars at the HiRISE site. But what about that ice?

The crater is at a latitude of 44 degrees North and is itself located on the ejecta of a larger crater. The image was acquired in early summer, when frost at this latitude is not expected. That’s why the HiRISE science team believes the bright blue material in this false-color color image is sub-surface ice that was exposed by the impact.

This ice is probably at the same depth and has a similar origin to that excavated by the Phoenix lander back in 2008. The area of exposed ice based on the HiRISE images is about 1-2 square meters (10-20 square feet.

An intriguing image, and a great example of the treasures available in this newest release of images from Mars.

For more images, see the HiRISE website.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

NASA Braces Rover Fans for the Worst About Spirit

Spirit rover, as seen by HiRISE on Feb. 15, 2010. Crop and colorization by Stuart Atkinson, image credit: NASA/JPL, U of AZ

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JPL issued a press release today with an update that mission controllers have still not heard from the hibernating Spirit rover. Even though the rover is experiencing one of Mars’ harshest winters since the rovers arrived, the rover team has begun an active “paging” technique called ‘sweep and beep’ in an effort to communicate with Spirit instead of just passively listening for any activity from the rover. Based on models of Mars’ weather and its effect on available power, mission managers believe that if Spirit responds, it most likely will be in the next few months. But in a ‘hope for the best, prepare for the worst’ kind of way, the press release added, “However, there is a very distinct possibility Spirit may never respond.”

“It will be the miracle from Mars if our beloved rover phones home,” said Doug McCuistion, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. “It’s never faced this type of severe condition before – this is unknown territory.”

The Martian winter runs from May through November here on Earth, so there’s still a lot of long, dark winter to get through. Spirit has not communicated since March 22, 2010 and is likely in a low-power hibernation mode since the rover was not able to get to a favorable slope for its fourth Martian winter. The low angle of sunlight during these months limits the power generated from the rover’s solar panels. During hibernation, the rover shuts down communications and other activities so available energy can be used to recharge and heat batteries, and to keep the mission clock running.

On July 26, rover engineers began the sweep and beep. “Instead of just listening, we send commands to the rover to respond back to us with a communications beep,” said John Callas, project manager for the rover. “If the rover is awake and hears us, she will send us that beep.”

The earliest date the rover could generate enough power to send a beep to Earth was calculated to be around July 23. However, mission managers don’t anticipate the batteries will charge adequately until late September to mid-October.

So, there is still a lot of time to wait things out. While I don’t think the rover team is giving up on Spirit at all, it appears they want to prepare the rover faithful for the worst.

But I’m going to make a prediction here: not only will Spirit wake up, but the rover driving team will be able to get her out of the sand trap she is stuck in. Just a hunch, but you heard it here and only time will tell if my prediction comes true.

Based on previous Martian winters, the rover team anticipates the increasing haziness in the sky over Spirit will offset longer daylight for the next two months. The amount of solar energy available to Spirit then will increase until the southern Mars summer solstice in March 2011. JPL says that if we haven’t heard from Spirit by March, 2011 it is unlikely that we will ever hear from it.

Leave it to Steve Squyres, however, principal investigator for the rovers, to leave us with a little hope: “This has been a long winter for Spirit, and a long wait for us,” he said. “Even if we never heard from Spirit again, I think her scientific legacy would be secure. But we’re hopeful we will hear from her, and we’re eager to get back to doing science with two rovers again.”

Source: JPL

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Bulls-Eye on Mars and, Apparently, an Industrial Complex

Bull's-Eye Impact Crater. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

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Here’s some doses of coolness and craziness for your Friday. This top image is one of the latest from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and shows what looks like a target on the Red Planet. Researchers from the HiRISE team aren’t sure yet whether this is two impacts — one impact that occurred dead center within another — or just unusual subsurface layering within one impact. I’m voting for two impacts, just because it is such a cool, lightning-strikes-twice concept. While no ejecta from the interior crater can be seen, the team says the ejecta could have been removed by extensive periglacial modification. Additionally, the floor fill around the inner crater resembles impact ejects elsewhere at this latitude, and some of the “landslides” to the East could be flow-back of ejecta off the walls of the larger crater. Likely the team will be looking closer at this impact to sort out the history and likelihood of a double impact. (UPDATE: I just saw that the Bad Astronomer has posted a more detailed CSI into this image, which you should read!)

Now, this next one is the crazy part…

Mars industrial site with (a) nozzle spray and (b,c) domes. Credit: NASA, annotations from Farsight Institute, via the SciGuy.

There’s a guy, and apparently a team of “remote viewing experts” who have found what they believe is a massive industrial complex on Mars. Eric Berger at his SciGuy blog at the Houston Chronicle wrote about this today, and it is just way too wacky to believe, kind of like the people who zoom in on rocks on Mars and say they see Bigfoot. Anyway, these folks say they can even tell that there are artificial structures at this site with a laboratory. What’s more they can see that there are lifeforms there wearing uniforms, and there are more men than women. Yep.

Check out SciGuy for all the nonsense.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Opportunity Rover Captures Her First Dust Devil on Mars

This is the first dust devil that NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has observed in the rover's six-and-a-half years on Mars. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University/Texas A&M

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The Opportunity rover has captured an image of a dust devil, and surprisingly, this is the first one ever that Oppy has spied. Spirit has seen dozens of dust devils over on the other side of the planet in Gusev Crater, and even the Phoenix lander’s camera captured several of these whirling dust dervishes during its short four-and-a-half month life. Plus the different orbiting spacecraft have seen evidence of plenty of dust devils by using their eyes from the skies. But this is the first one Oppy’s cameras have managed to shoot. This tall column of swirling dust appeared in a routine image that Opportunity took with its panoramic camera on July 15, 2010. The rover took the image in the drive direction, east-southeastward, right after a drive of about 70 meters (230 feet), and was taken for use in planning the next drive.

But obviously, over the years, Opportunity has benefited from dust devils – or perhaps just gusts of wind – as she has had a series of unexpected boosts in electrical power when the pervasive Martian dust gets cleaned off her solar panels. And just one day before Opportunity captured this dust devil image, wind cleaned some of the dust off the rover’s solar array, increasing electricity output from the array by more than 10 percent. These unexpected – but welcome – Martian “car washes” have helped extend the life of both rovers.

“That might have just been a coincidence, but there could be a connection” between the cleaning event and the dust devil in the image, said Mark Lemmon of the rover team from Texas A&M University. The team is resuming systematic checks for afternoon dust devils with Opportunity’s navigation camera, for the first time in about three years.

Lemmon said that Spirit’s location inside Gusev Crater, is rougher in ground texture, and dustier, than the area where Opportunity is working in the Meridiani Planum region. Those factors at Gusev allow vortices of wind to form more readily and raise more dust, compared to conditions at Meridiani. Orbiters have photographed tracks left by dust devils near Opportunity, but the tracks are scarcer there than near Spirit. Swirling winds at Meridiani may be more common than visible signs of them, if the winds occur where there is no loose dust to disturb.

Source: JPL

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Extreme Close-Up of the Face on Mars

The 'face' on Mars, a popular landform in Cydonia Region on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Here’s a picture you probably won’t see in the tabloid racks while waiting in line at the grocery store. This is the famous “Face on Mars,” and is the closest image ever of this landform, taken by the best Mars camera ever, HiRISE on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. And it certainly looks like …. the top of mesa, which is exactly what it is.

This feature in the Cydonia region of Mars is most likely a lava dome that has created an isolated mesa or butte-like structure, i.e., a hill. Compare this image to the original image from the Viking orbiter from 1976 image, below, which created such a furor, including a whole new culture of conspiracy theories, books, late-night radio talk show discussion and even a full-length feature film. Alas, its just a hill.


Original 1976 'Face on Mar' image from the Viking Orbiter. Credit: NASA

Viking had much lower spatial resolution than HiRISE, and at the time the picture was taken, a different lighting geometry, which made it look like a face. Yes, it does look like a face in this image. But things aren’t always as they appear, especially in low resolution and bad light. These newer and better images, starting with the Mars Orbiter Camera on the Mars Global Surveyor (which took images of the Cydonia region in 1998 and 2001) and now HiRISE — which shows incredible detail from 300 kilometers above the surface — have certainly set the record straight. Unfortunately, some people still cling to the notion of a face on Mars.

Side by side: a Viking 1 photo from 1976, a Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) image from 1998, and an MGS image from 2001. Credit: NASA

Here’s another look at the ‘face,’ a 3D perspective view of the Face on Mars landform, created from an image from MOC, which shows a side view of the feature,

3D persepective view. Credit: NASA/Jim Garvin (NASA) and Jim Frawley (Herring Bay Geophysics).

Here’s the HiRISE image in black and white:

HiRISE image from 2007 of the 'face' on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

And here’s one of my favorites. Jim Garvin, currently the chief scientist of the Sciences and Exploration Directorate Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center created a potential hiking map of the “face,” with a great description: “Hike length is approximately 5.5 km or 3.6 miles one way, with a total elevation gain of nearly a thousand feet. Rating…. easy at start and midsection, with some very steep sections. Take plenty of water and oxygen.”

Potential hiking map of the mesa, previously known as the Face on Mars. Credit: NASA/Jim Garvin

And still, if you need more convincing, here’s an animation created from actual images of the ‘face’ by ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft which provides a full trip around the hill.

For more, including high-res versions of the color image on top and a “Hi-Flyer” of the image, check out this page on the HiRISE website.

Sources: HiRISE, Science@NASA, ESA

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Curiosity Rover Takes First Test Drive

Even though there were no wheelies or skid marks, it was an exciting day for the teams working on the next Mars rover. The Mars Curiosity rover (or the Mars Science Laboratory) took its first short drive in the JPL clean room where it is being built. This video was captured from live broadcast on July 23, 2010. Cheers and commentary provided by mission team members who watched the event from a viewing gallery above the clean room floor. In this clip the rover drives backward for the first time.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Best Reality TV Ever: Camera Will Take Video of Next Mars Rover Landing

This graphic portrays the sequence of key events in August 2012 from the time the NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft, with its rover Curiosity, enters the Martian atmosphere to a moment after it touches down on the surface. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

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Now THIS is what I call “must-see TV!” A camera on the next Mars Rover — MSL, also known as Curiosity – will start recording high-definition video about two minutes before the rover lands on Mars, currently scheduled for August 2012. The Mars Descent Imager, or MARDI, will provide all of us Martian-wannabes with the first-ever ride along with the landing — and this will be a very unique landing, with the “Sky –Crane” lowering Curiosity to the planet’s surface. The video won’t be live, however – that’s way too much data for the spacecraft to send back to Earth at such an important event, but we will get to see it later. JPL provided a description of what the video should look like:


This Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) camera will fly on the Curiosity rover of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

MARDI will start recording high-resolution video about two minutes before landing in August 2012. Initial frames will glimpse the heat shield falling away from beneath the rover, revealing a swath of Martian terrain below illuminated in afternoon sunlight. The first scenes will cover ground several kilometers (a few miles) across. Successive images will close in and cover a smaller area each second.

The full-color video will likely spin, then shake, as the Mars Science Laboratory mission’s parachute, then its rocket-powered backpack, slow the rover’s descent. The left-front wheel will pop into view when Curiosity extends its mobility and landing gear.

The spacecraft’s own shadow, unnoticeable at first, will grow in size and slide westward across the ground. The shadow and rover will meet at a place that, in the final moments, becomes the only patch of ground visible, about the size of a bath towel and underneath the rover.

Dust kicked up by the rocket engines during landing may swirl as the video ends and Curiosity’s surface mission can begin.

All of this, recorded at about four frames per second and close to 1,600 by 1,200 pixels per frame, will be stored safely into the Mars Descent Imager’s own flash memory during the landing. But the camera’s principal investigator, Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, and everyone else will need to be patient. Curiosity will be about 250 million kilometers (about 150 million miles) from Earth at that point. It will send images and other data to Earth via relay by one or two Mars orbiters, so the daily data volume will be limited by the amount of time the orbiters are overhead each day.

“We will get it down in stages,” said Malin. “First we’ll have thumbnails of the descent images, with only a few frames at full scale.”

Subsequent downlinks will deliver additional frames, selected based on what the thumbnail versions show. The early images will begin to fulfill this instrument’s scientific functions. “I am really looking forward to seeing this movie. We have been preparing for it a long time,” Malin said. The lower-resolution version from thumbnail images will be comparable to a YouTube video in image quality. The high-definition version will not be available until the full set of images can be transmitted to Earth, which could take weeks, or even months, sharing priority with data from other instruments.”

Read more about the MARDI camera and MSL at JPL’s website.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Wind Gust Gives Opportunity Rover a Power Boost

The Opportunity rover's solar panels got a cleaning sometime between Sol 2274 and 2299. Credit: NASA/JPL, collage and annotation by Stu Atkinson.

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Either some little Martians came by and gave the Opportunity rover a quick once-over cleaning, or a recent gust of wind blew layers of dust off her solar panels. The image above (supplied by our favorite photo- whiz Stu Atkinson), shows Oppy’s solar panels on sol 2274 and 2299 (approximately June 18 and July 12 here on Earth) with a marked difference in the amount of dust on the panels. Yesterday, the Twitter account for the rovers, @marsrovers Tweeted: “Love those Martian dust busters! A recent wind gust cleaned Oppy’s solar panels giving her a little power boost for the road.” And on the road she is, heading earnestly for Endeavour Crater, with several recent drives of around 70 meters (230 feet) per sol. But she now has some new autonomous software the rover team is trying out, and with her new greater power capacity, she should be able to keep on truckin’. Mars rover driver Scott Maxwell reported on Twitter this week that Opportunity is 40% of the way from Victoria Crater to Endeavour.

And what’s the latest news about Spirit – still silent?

According to Maxwell (again on Twitter), the power models for sunlight hitting Gusev Crater say the very earliest we could possibly hear from Spirit could be sometime late this week. But he added that more likely would be hearing from Spirit by around mid-November.

But catching Spirit awake is complicated, with timing being everything. “Even if Spirit’s waking up (soon), we’ll have a hard time catching her during one of her wakeups,” Maxwell said. “This will take some luck as well as skill,” having the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter or Mars Odyssey overhead and listening at the very moment Spirit is talking. Maxwell added that the team is working on how to locate Spirit if she’s had a Mission Clock fault and doesn’t know how to send communications to Earth.

It is very likely that Spirit has experienced a low-power fault and has turned off all sub-systems, including communication and gone into a deep sleep. While sleeping, the rover will use the available solar array energy to recharge her batteries. When the batteries recover to a sufficient state of charge, and if the Mission Clock hasn’t gone completely bonkers, Spirit will wake up and begin to communicate.

Spirit’s odometry remains at 7,730.50 meters (4.80 miles).

But meanwhile, Oppy’s total odometry is 21,550.77 meters (21.55 kilometers, or 13.99 miles), and she’ll be putting on more as she heads towards Endeavour Crater. Maxwell later said he has an idea to speed up the rover’s drives as much as 30%, so that will be interesting to find out more about his idea. “A 30% speedup would shave 2-3 months off our trip to Endeavour — maybe even more than that. Worth a try! Phyllosilicates, here we come!,” he tweeted, referring to the water-based minerals that scientists are hoping to find within the crater. That would mean water helped form the rocks in Mars’ early history.

Features on Endeavour Crater named for Australian locations. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University

Speaking of Endeavour, recently, NASA and JPL released an image showing the newly-given names of different points on Oppy’s next destination, and there’s a push by some people in Australia for one additional feature to be named “Nobby’s Head.”

The rover team is using the theme of names of places visited by British Royal Navy Capt. James Cook in his 1769-1771 Pacific voyage in command of H.M.S. Endeavour. My friend Col Maybury from radio station 2NUR in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia is helping to promulgate this request to NASA, with the support of the Minister of Tourism and Newcastle’s Lord Mayor. “Hopefully we will get a favourable reply soon,” Col wrote me.

Cook first came to this location in May of 1770. At midnight by moonlight he saw an island jutting up from the sea and wrote in his journal: “A small round rock or Island, laying close under the land, bore South 82 degrees West, distance 3 or 4 Leagues.”

Now called Nobby Head, it is the entrance of Newcastle Harbour, formed by the Hunter River, a great coal port of New South Wales. The feature on Mars is the same shape as Nobby Head on Earth. Wish Col and the people of Newcastle good luck in their “endeavour” to name this feature! (Anyone from the rover team naming committee reading this?!)

The proposed Nobby's Head at Endeavour Crater on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL, annotation by Col Maybury.

And don’t forget, Friday July 16 is Mars Day! The National Air and Space Museum has some ideas on how to celebrate.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Curiosity Gets Her Wheels

She’s a rover with places to go and things to do, so one of the main components of NASA’s next Mars rover, the Mars Science Lab (named Curiosity) is wheels. Last week, the wheels and a suspension system were installed on the rover, an important step in getting ready for her mission to Mars. Launch is currently scheduled for sometime between November 25 and Decemeber 18, 2011, and Curiosity’s mission is to study its landing site for habitable environments – both ancient and current.
Continue reading “Curiosity Gets Her Wheels”