- 3153 - MARS - robots write home? “Perserverence” rover and “Ingenuity” helicopter are two robots that not only share a mission, but they also use the same phone line back to Earth. Robots are exploring Mars for us.
- ----------------------- 3153 - MARS - robots write home?
- ( See Review 3056 - PERSEVERANCE - the rover has safely landed. It is the most technologically advanced rover that humans have set on the Mars surface. . The Mars 2020 Mission will use five new technologies to help future missions on Mars, both crewed and uncrewed. Two of these are technology demonstrations.)
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- This Review is an update for May, 2021. In order to communicate with mission control in San Diego, Ingenuity needs Perseverance to deliver its messages. The helicopter and the rover use shiny little antennas to exchange data at about 100 kilobits per second, which is then routed from the Ingenuity-facing antenna to the rover’s main computer before being transferred to Earth via an orbiting spacecraft and an array of giant radio antennas here on Earth..
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- Ingenuity is communicating to a planet located 33,900,000 miles away.
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- Perseverance follows in the wheel tracks of four other rovers previously sent to Mars, but this mission had an added feature, a 19-inch tall, 4-pound heavy helicopter that has already made history by being the first to take flight on another planet.
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- The two will slowly get further and further apart, to just under a mile, but still talking back and forth. Ingenuity has a little gold-colored antenna that lives in it. Data from Ingenuity goes through that antenna, and talks to the helicopter antenna that lives in the rover.
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- The operations team puts together the plan for the day for both Perseverance and Ingenuity, sending out a set of commands that the two robots follow on Mars.
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- That program information gets sent through the Deep Space Network (DSN), which is NASA’s interplanetary communications network or a way for the space agency to make very, very long-distance calls.
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- The DSN uses radio frequency transmissions that travel through large antenna systems with specialized receivers. The network is made up of three deep-space communications facilities in three different locations across the world, strategically placed approximately 120 degrees apart.
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- One facility is located at Goldstone, in California's Mojave Desert, another is near Madrid, Spain, and the third is near Canberra, Australia. The reason behind this placement is to ensure that at any point in time, one or more of these complexes can communicate with the spacecraft as the Earth rotates around its 360-degree axis.
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- As the information reaches Perseverance, it goes to the rover’s helicopter base station. The helicopter base station is an electronics assembly that lives on Perseverance and has its own antenna that communicates directly to Ingenuity.
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- To drive a rover on Mars, rover drivers must first adjust to the Martian schedule.
Earth operates on a 24-hour day basis. But on Mars, one day is 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds. So drivers begin each workday about 40 minutes later than the day before.
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- Because of the distance between Earth and Mars, it takes about 20 minutes for the commands to reach the rover. Drivers use images captured by the Perseverance rover to create a three-dimensional world, and use 3D glasses to immerse themselves in that world.
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- Perseverance has several missions another one is to turn carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen. The SUV-sized robot performed the ultimate scientific miracle on another planet, converting carbon dioxide into oxygen. Using a toaster-sized instrument named Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), the rover inhaled some of Mars’ thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and successfully produced oxygen from it.
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- Not only will this be useful to future astronauts looking to breathe fresh air on the planet, reducing cargo weight in-transit, but it could be paired with hydrogen to create hydrolyzing, a powerful rocket fuel.
- Perseverance used MOXIE to test out this technology on another planet for the first time, converting the Red Planet’s thin, carbon-rich atmosphere into oxygen. The MOXIE experiment is the size of a toaster, but a future, grown-up MOXIE needs to produce a lot more oxygen to sustain a human mission.
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- For its first test, MOXIE produced about five grams of oxygen, or about 10 minutes worth of breathable oxygen for astronauts. MOXIE produces oxygen the same way a tree does: it breathes in carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen. The conversion of carbon to oxygen requires a lot of heat, temperatures must reach up to approximately 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit.
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- MOXIE is about the size of a toaster, and is made with heat-tolerant materials like 3D-printed nickel alloy parts, which heat and cool the gases flowing through it, and a lightweight aerogel that helps hold in the heat.
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- The process works by separating oxygen atoms from carbon dioxide molecules, which are made up of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms. After splitting the oxygen atoms from the carbon molecules, the oxygen atoms eventually combine with each other to produce molecular oxygen while carbon monoxide is emitted into the Martian atmosphere as waste.
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- The small unit is also coated with gold on the outside to reflect infrared heat and keep it from radiating outward. MOXIE is designed to produce about 10 grams of oxygen an hour.
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- Mars’ atmosphere is made up of 96% carbon dioxide. While oxygen may be crucial for humans to breathe, it also plays an important role in the production of rocket fuel.
In order to get a rocket off the ground, astronauts need something to burn, or fuel, and something to burn it, an oxidizer. Liquid oxygen is used as an oxidizer to create propellant.
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- A future human mission to Mars carrying four astronauts would require around 15,000 pounds, or 7 metric tons, of rocket fuel and 55,000 pounds, or 25 metric tons, of oxygen just to get off the Martian ground. But carrying that much oxygen from Earth to Mars is way too costly.
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- Before we can venture into Mars, NASA will need to scale up MOXIE about 100 times larger to produce the desired 25 metric tons of oxygen, and a future, larger MOXIE will also be built to store the oxygen into tanks rather than release it.
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- There's not a good reason to think that Mars should have had liquid water. It only receives 44 percent of the sunlight of Earth. It’s cold and inhospitable today and should, by all measures, always have been. But once, Mars had flowing rivers and pooling lakes. For a window of time, it had all the right ingredients for life.
- Ancient clouds on Mars trapped in enough heat to keep water on the ground stable, and thus create all the right opportunities for life. Although, Mars' atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide is a known climate regulating greenhouse gas meaning that it absorbs and then emits radiation, trapping heat in a planet’s atmosphere.
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- Mounting evidence suggests Mars was once a wet, warm, and possibly habitable planet. Atmospheric loss caused rapid climate change and water loss that left the planet cold with a thin atmosphere just 1 percent the atmospheric pressure of Earth’s
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- Anywhere there’s water on Earth, some form of life has managed to survive. Given that Mars had large bodies of surface water in the past, it had a lot of the right conditions for life billions of years ago.
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- Perseverance will hunt for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars, possibly revealing whether or not life began on a planet beyond Earth. Perseverance will explore Jezero Crater, a dried-up, ancient lake that may have once housed microbial life billions of years ago.
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- Despite receiving just 30% of the Earth’s present-day insolation, Mars had water lakes and rivers early in the planet’s history, due to an unknown warming mechanism. A possible explanation for the lake-forming climates is warming by water ice clouds.
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- However, this suggested cloud greenhouse explanation has proved difficult to replicate and has been argued to require unrealistically optically thick clouds at high altitudes. Here, we use a global climate model (GCM) to show that a cloud greenhouse can warm a Mars-like planet to global average annual-mean temperature that is warm enough for low-latitude lakes, and stay warm for centuries or longer.
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- In a warm, arid climate, lakes could be fed by groundwater upwelling, or by melting of ice following a cold-to-warm transition. Results are consistent with the warm and arid climate favored by interpretation of geologic data, and support the cloud greenhouse hypothesis.
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- Ingenuity, the 19-inch-tall helicopter, flew from the surface of Mars, marking humanity’s first powered, controlled flight on another planet. Although brief, these flights are meant to help space engineers understand whether or not it is possible to explore Mars from an aerial perspective.
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- Subsequent helicopters will carry a suite of instruments, whereas Ingenuity has just a camera aboard. The helicopter only 19 inches tall, with two four-foot-long carbon-fiber rotors spinning in opposite directions weighs four pounds.
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- Ingenuity is packed with a downward-facing camera, a radio, and four “commercial, off-the-shelf batteries that you can buy from Amazon.
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- Mars’ atmosphere is much thinner than Earth’s, about one percent of the air pressure. It also only has about 40 percent of Earth’s gravity. This means flying a helicopter on Mars is very different than flying it on Earth.
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- The helicopter could fly for up to 90 seconds, to distances of almost 980 feet at a time and about 10 to 15 feet above the ground. The videos will be beamed back to your television screens. Enjoy. ------------------------ Here are some other reviews available:
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- 3071 - MARS - size of the crater, math? - There is a satellite circling the planet Mars. It takes a photo of a crater on the surface. How big is the crater?
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- 3061 - MARS - how to find life? NASA’s Perseverance rover is there on Mars, February 21, 2021. One part of the Perseverance rover mission is to search for fossilized microscopic life on Mars. How will scientists know whether they've found it?
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- 3056 - PERSEVERANCE - the rover has safely landed. It is the most technologically advanced rover that humans have set on the Mars surface. . The Mars 2020 Mission will use five new technologies to help future missions on Mars, both crewed and uncrewed. Two of these are technology demonstrations.
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- 3023 - MARS - returning rock samples to Earth? - Fundamental questions about Mars remain related to its potential for life; the geological history of the planet; the history of its climate and the driving forces behind these changes; the evolution of geologic processes and the interior composition and structure; and more recent atmospheric, polar, surface, and interior processes.
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- May 10, 2021 MARS - robots write home? 3153
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--------------------- --- Tuesday, May 11, 2021 ---------------------------
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