Mars  

Although they did not detect the actual salty brines, researchers looking at data from the Mars Curiosity rover are now confident there are small amounts of liquid water just beneath the surface of the red planet.

The weather on Mars, combined with soil conditions in the prescence of a type of salt NASA's Curiosity rover has identified in Martian soil, mean a liquid salty brine may exist on the red planet, just under the surface.

Perchlorate identified in Martian soil by the Curiosity mission, and previously by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission, has properties of absorbing water vapor from the atmosphere and lowering the freezing temperature of water. This has been proposed for years as a mechanism for possible existence of transient liquid brines at higher latitudes on modern Mars, despite the Red Planet's cold and dry conditions.

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New calculations were based on more than a full Mars year of temperature and humidity measurements by Curiosity. They indicate that conditions at the rover's near-equatorial location were favorable for small quantities of brine to form during some nights throughout the year, drying out again after sunrise. Conditions should be even more favorable at higher latitudes, where colder temperatures and more water vapor can result in higher relative humidity more often.

"Liquid water is a requirement for life as we know it, and a target for Mars exploration missions," said the report's lead author, Javier Martin-Torres of the Spanish Research Council, Spain, and Lulea University of Technology, Sweden, and a member of Curiosity's science team that published their findings in the journal Nature Geoscience. "Conditions near the surface of present-day Mars are hardly favorable for microbial life as we know it, but the possibility for liquid brines on Mars has wider implications for habitability and geological water-related processes."

The weather data in the report published today in Nature Geosciences come from the Cuirosity's Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS), which was provided by Spain and includes a relative-humidity sensor and a ground-temperature sensor. NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project is using Curiosity to investigate both ancient and modern environmental conditions in Mars' Gale Crater region. The report also draws on measurements of hydrogen in the ground by the rover's Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) instrument, from Russia.

"We have not detected brines, but calculating the possibility that they might exist in Gale Crater during some nights testifies to the value of the round-the-clock and year-round measurements REMS is providing," said Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, one of the new report's co-authors.

"Conditions near the surface of present-day Mars are hardly favorable for microbial life as we know it, but the possibility for liquid brines on Mars has wider implications for habitability and geological water-related processes."

Curiosity is the first mission to measure relative humidity in the Martian atmosphere close to the surface and ground temperature through all times of day and all seasons of the Martian year. Relative humidity depends on the temperature of the air, as well as the amount of water vapor in it. Curiosity's measurements of relative humidity range from about five percent on summer afternoons to 100 percent on autumn and winter nights.

Air filling pores in the soil interacts with air just above the ground. When its relative humidity gets above a threshold level, salts can absorb enough water molecules to become dissolved in liquid, a process called deliquescence. Perchlorate salts are especially good at this. Since perchlorate has been identified both at near-polar and near-equatorial sites, it may be present in soils all over the planet.

Scientists using the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have in recent years documented numerous sites on Mars where dark flows appear and extend on slopes during warm seasons. These features are called recurring slope lineae, or RSL. A leading hypothesis for how they occur involves brines formed by deliquesence.

"Gale Crater is one of the least likely places on Mars to have conditions for brines to form, compared to sites at higher latitudes or with more shading. So if brines can exist there, that strengthens the case they could form and persist even longer at many other locations, perhaps enough to explain RSL activity," said HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson, also a co-author of the new report.

In the year following its August 2012 landing, Curiosity found evidence for ancient streambeds and a lakebed environment more than 3 billion years ago that offered conditions favorable for microbial life. Now, the rover is examining a layered mountain inside Gale Crater for evidence about how ancient environmental conditions evolved.


SOURCE  Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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 Space  

While Curiosity is getting a software upgrade on the Red Planet, NASA scientists are already working on the details of the next Mars rover.  The next mission may involve a system to ferry Mars rocks back to Earth for study.

New NASA Mars Rover head, Ashwin Vasavada has an ambitious idea for a mission that will require multiple robots, a rocket lifting off from the surface of Mars and a spacecraft that will scoop up Martian rocks orbiting the Red Planet.

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Vasavada said scientists are working on a plan to not just send a rover to study rocks on Mars but are working to bring some of those rocks back to Earth so geologists can study them here.

Vasavada, a planetary scientist, has been the deputy project scientist for NASA's Curiosity rover since 2004. He has now taken over as the project head, succeeding John Grotzinger, who was at the post for seven years. Grotzinger is now chairman of Caltech's Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences but will remain a member of Curiosity's science team.

"In the future, we'll work to bring [Martian] rocks back to Earth," Vasavada told Computerworld. "I'm looking forward to that. Curiosity is about the most you can do sending tools to Mars. The next step will be to send rocks back to Earth."

Transporting the Martian rocks back to Earth will take a multi-staged plan that might take over a decade to complete.

"In the future, we'll work to bring [Martian] rocks back to Earth."

The next robotic rover is expected to be sent to Mars in 2020. It is being designed to hunt for signs of past life, as well as to make oxygen and rocket fuel on the Red Planet itself.

The next Mars rover is also being designed to collect rocks and soil samples and store them in a cache. The rover will leave that cache behind as it moves on to conduct other scientific studies on Mars. After that, another NASA mission will send a rocket and a smaller rover to the surface of Mars. That rover will pick up the cache of samples and put them on the rocket, which will launch itself and place those samples in orbit around Mars.

To wrap up the effort, another spacecraft will be launched for Mars that will grab the samples in orbit and bring them back to Earth, where scientists can study them firsthand.

Vasavada said the project is intended to be completed before NASA is expected to send humans to Mars in the 2030s.


SOURCE  Computerworld

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 Mars  

NASA's Mars Curiosity rover on Mars has produced new results—methane and other organic chemicals. Researchers do not know what caused the spikes, but the most intriguing  possible explanation is "biological."

NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has found a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical, in the atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a rock-powder sample collected by the robotic laboratory’s drill.

The research is published in the journal Science.

"This temporary increase in methane—sharply up and then back down—tells us there must be some relatively localized source," said Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Curiosity rover science team.

"There are many possible sources, biological or non-biological, such as interaction of water and rock."

Researchers used Curiosity’s onboard Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) laboratory a dozen times in a 20-month period to sniff methane in the atmosphere. During two of those months, in late 2013 and early 2014, four measurements averaged seven parts per billion. Before and after that, readings averaged only one-tenth that level.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity drilled into the rock target, "Cumberland," (shown above) during the 279th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work on Mars and collected a powdered sample of material from the rock's interior.

Curiosity also detected different Martian organic chemicals in powder drilled from the rock, the first definitive detection of organics in surface materials of Mars. These Martian organics could either have formed on Mars or been delivered to Mars by meteorites.

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Organic molecules, which contain carbon and usually hydrogen, are chemical building blocks of life, although they can exist without the presence of life. Curiosity's findings from analyzing samples of atmosphere and rock powder do not reveal whether Mars has ever harbored living microbes, but the findings do shed light on a chemically active modern Mars and on favorable conditions for life on ancient Mars.

"We will keep working on the puzzles these findings present," said John Grotzinger, Curiosity project scientist of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (Caltech). "Can we learn more about the active chemistry causing such fluctuations in the amount of methane in the atmosphere? Can we choose rock targets where identifiable organics have been preserved?"

"This first confirmation of organic carbon in a rock on Mars holds much promise. Organics are important because they can tell us about the chemical pathways by which they were formed and preserved. In turn, this is informative about Earth-Mars differences."

Researchers worked many months to determine whether any of the organic material detected in the Cumberland sample was truly Martian. Curiosity’s SAM lab detected in several samples some organic carbon compounds that were, in fact, transported from Earth inside the rover. However, extensive testing and analysis yielded confidence in the detection of Martian organics.

Identifying which specific Martian organics are in the rock is complicated by the presence of perchlorate minerals in Martian rocks and soils. When heated inside SAM, the perchlorates alter the structures of the organic compounds, so the identities of the Martian organics in the rock remain uncertain.

"This first confirmation of organic carbon in a rock on Mars holds much promise," said Curiosity participating scientist Roger Summons of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "Organics are important because they can tell us about the chemical pathways by which they were formed and preserved. In turn, this is informative about Earth-Mars differences and whether or not particular environments represented by Gale Crater sedimentary rocks were more or less favorable for accumulation of organic materials. The challenge now is to find other rocks on Mount Sharp that might have different and more extensive inventories of organic compounds."

Researchers also reported that Curiosity's taste of Martian water, bound into lakebed minerals in the Cumberland rock more than three billion years ago, indicates the planet lost much of its water before that lakebed formed and continued to lose large amounts after.

SAM analyzed hydrogen isotopes from water molecules that had been locked inside a rock sample for billions of years and were freed when SAM heated it, yielding information about the history of Martian water. The ratio of a heavier hydrogen isotope, deuterium, to the most common hydrogen isotope can provide a signature for comparison across different stages of a planet's history.

"It's really interesting that our measurements from Curiosity of gases extracted from ancient rocks can tell us about loss of water from Mars," said Paul Mahaffy, SAM principal investigator of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of a the report.


SOURCE  NASA

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 Mars  

The first scoop of soil analyzed by the SAM instrument of NASA's Curiosity rover reveals that fine materials on the surface of the planet contain two percent water by weight. The discovery reveals new insights into the conditions on Mars and the planet's ability to support life.

NASA has announced that the Mars Curiosity rover has successfully found water in a sample of soil taken from a digging site known as "Rocknest." This isn't the first proof of water on Mars, but it could be the proof NASA needs to start realistically considering sending people to the Red Planet.

The announcement supports research from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), a NASA probe, say they've observed seasonally varying features on the surface of the Red Planet that could be carved by briny water.

Previously ice has been found on Mars at the planet's poles, inside some craters and sitting beneath the surface across vast swaths of the middle latitudes. Also, there is ample evidence that liquid water formed vast oceans on Mars in the distant past, carving valleys and other surface features.

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With a handful of exceptions, water is necessary for life as we know it. Not only is most of Earth's life water-based, but most scientists think life wouldn't have arisen in the first place if not for the watery "primordial soup" that covered the young Earth. Water makes it easier for organic molecules to swirl around and bump into each other to form interesting compounds.

"One of the most exciting results from this very first solid sample ingested by Curiosity is the high percentage of water in the soil," said Laurie Leshin, lead author of one paper and dean of the School Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "About 2 percent of the soil on the surface of Mars is made up of water, which is a great resource, and interesting scientifically." The sample also released significant carbon dioxide, oxygen and sulfur compounds when heated.

According to NASA, each cubic foot of Martian soil contains around two pints of liquid water, though the molecules are not freely accessible; they are bound to other minerals in the soil.

Sample Analysis at Mars instrument suite

The Curiosity rover has been on Mars for a little over a year now, landing in an area near the equator of the planet known as Gale Crater. Its target is to circle and climb Mount Sharp, which is near the center of the crater, a five kilometer high mound of layered rock that will help scientists unravel the history of the planet.

Now, NASA scientists published a series of five papers in the journal Science, which detail the experiments carried out by the various scientific instruments aboard Curiosity in its first four months on the martian surface. Though highlights from the year-long mission have been released at conferences and press conferences, these are the first set of formal, peer-reviewed results from the Curiosity mission.

One of those instruments was employed in the current research: the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite, which includes a gas chromatograph, a mass spectrometer and a tunable laser spectrometer. These tools enable SAM to identify a wide range of chemical compounds and determine the ratios of different isotopes of key elements.

"We tend to think of Mars as this dry place – to find water fairly easy to get out of the soil at the surface was exciting to me," said Laurie Leshin, dean of science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and lead author on the Science paper which confirmed the existence of water in the soil. "If you took about a cubic foot of the dirt and heated it up, you'd get a couple of pints of water out of that – a couple of water bottles' worth that you would take to the gym."

About 2% of the soil, by weight, was water. Curiosity made the measurement by scooping up a sample of the Martian dirt under its wheels, sieving it and dropping tiny samples into an oven in its belly, an instrument called Sample Analysis at Mars. "We heat [the soil] up to 835C and drive off all the volatiles and measure them," said Leshin. "We have a very sensitive way to sniff those and we can detect the water and other things that are released."

Aside from water, the heated soil released sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide and oxygen as the various minerals within it were decomposed as they warmed up.

Along with discoveries of organic chemicals on Mars, the existence of ample water on the planet further strengthens the impetus for humans to explore and eventually colonize Mars.


SOURCE  NASA

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 Space Exploration  

During a public event at NASA Headquarters, televised on NASA TV, agency officials and crew members aboard the International Space Station celebrated the one year anniversary of The Mars Curiosity Rover's landing on Mars and discussed how its activities and other robotic projects are helping prepare for a human mission to Mars and an asteroid.

During a public event at NASA Headquarters, televised on NASA TV, agency officials and crew members aboard the International Space Station celebrated the one year anniversary of The Mars Curiosity Rover's landing on Mars and discussed how its activities and other robotic projects are helping prepare for a human mission to Mars and an asteroid.

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The discussion focuses on the steps that will be required for NASA to put humans on Mars by the 2030's.  Jim Green, Director of Planetary Science for NASA enthusiastically went over some of the past robotic missions to Mars, like Pathfiinder and Curiosity.

"Our future is really in our hands. Our destiny is to leave low-earth orbit, and trek out into the solar system," Green says.  "The solar system is ours - let's take it."

Curiosity is presently headed to the base of the five kilometer high Mount Sharp to conduct further exploration.  In the future a new rover like Curiosity, with more instruments will be launched. Green says this mission will launch in 2020.

Mars exploration in the future

SOURCE  NASA

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