Suspicions that Mars once had oxygen-rich air are backed by the NASA Curiosity rover’s find of manganese oxide in surface rocks
Source: First direct evidence of ancient Mars’s oxygen-rich atmosphere | New Scientist
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Curiosity Rover Makes Big Water Discovery in Mars Dirt, a ‘Wow Moment’
Future Mars explorers may be able to get all the water they need out of the red dirt beneath their boots, a new study suggests.
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has found that surface soil on the Red Planet contains about 2 percent water by weight. That means astronaut pioneers could extract roughly 2 pints (1 liter) of water out of every cubic foot (0.03 cubic meters) of Martian dirt they dig up, said study lead author Laurie Leshin, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.
“For me, that was a big ‘wow’ moment,” Leshin told SPACE.com. “I was really happy when we saw that there’s easily accessible water here in the dirt beneath your feet. And it’s probably true anywhere you go on Mars.”
Curiosity touched down inside Mars’ huge Gale Crater in August 2012, kicking off a planned two-year surface mission to determine if the Red Planet could ever have supported microbial life. It achieved that goal in March, when it found that a spot near its landing site called Yellowknife Bay was indeed habitable billions of years ago.
But Curiosity did quite a bit of science work before getting to Yellowknife Bay. Leshin and her colleagues looked at the results of Curiosity’s first extensive Mars soil analyses, which the 1-ton rover performed on dirt that it scooped up at a sandy site called Rocknest in November 2012.
Using its Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, or SAM, Curiosity heated this dirt to a temperature of 1,535 degrees Fahrenheit (835 degrees Celsius), and then identified the gases that boiled off. SAM saw significant amounts of carbon dioxide, oxygen and sulfur compounds — and lots of water on Mars.
SAM also determined that the soil water is rich in deuterium, a “heavy” isotope of hydrogen that contains one neutron and one proton (as opposed to “normal” hydrogen atoms, which have no neutrons). The water in Mars’ thin air sports a similar deuterium ratio, Leshin said.
“That tells us that the dirt is acting like a bit of a sponge and absorbing water from the atmosphere,” she said.
Full article: http://www.space.com … curiosity-rover.html
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Mars Rover Curiosity Beams Home 1st Color Panorama of Red Planet
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has captured a magnificent postcard from the Red Planet — a 360-degree color view that offers a glimpse of the rover’s colorful and apparently diverse surroundings.
Curiosity, which is also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, successfully touched down on Mars on Sunday (Aug. 5 PDT), and has already snapped a flurry of photos, including sweeping black-and-white and color images of the Martian landscape and a self-portrait. In a news briefing today (Aug. 9), NASA released images and video of Curiosity’s first color panorama view, a mosaic taken on the rover’s third full day on Mars, which mission managers refer to as Sol 3.
The panoramic view shows Curiosity’s own shadow reflected onto the Martian surface, with a dark band of dunes in the distance, and the rim of Gale Crater beyond that. Nearby on the left and right, gray patches where the spacecraft’s rocket-powered sky crane blasted the ground can be clearly seen. The sky crane helped slow Curiosity’s speed as it flew through the Martian atmosphere to the planet’s surface.
The impact of the rocket plumes kicked up material from the surface, leaving these gaping scars that scientists are now eager to investigate.
“There’s been a lot of discussion and an awful lot of eagerness to know what the composition of the rocks are, and to use our laser,” said Dawn Sumner, a Mars Science Laboratory scientist and a geology professor at the University of California, Davis.
The color panorama was stitched together using 130 images that are 144 by 144 pixels each. A selected number of full frame versions from the panorama are expected to be relayed back to Earth at a later date, said Michael Malin, of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego and principal investigator of Curiosity’s imaging system, called Mastcam.
The panoramic view also showcases Mars’ true colors, albeit slightly brighter.
“They’re what the camera sent back, I just brightened them up,” Malin said. “That’s what the bare filter gets you when you look at Mars.”
Mission controllers are now preparing for a roughly 4-day procedure to update Curiosity with new software from the ground. This transition is expected to begin on Saturday (Aug. 11), and will switch the rover’s focus from landing to its new life of operating on the Martian surface, NASA officials said.
Full article: http://www.space.com … norama-pictures.html