NASA : Mars 'Marathon Valley' Overlook .- Marte "Valle del Marathon" Overlook

Hola amigos: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., hemos recibido de la Agencia Espacial NASA, la información sobre un punto de vista de NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity; que nos  muestra una parte de la "Maratón del Valle," un destino en el borde occidental del cráter Endeavour, visto desde un mirador norte del valle.

 

Mars 'Marathon Valley' Overlook

 

This view from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows part of "Marathon Valley," a destination on the western rim of Endeavour Crater, as seen from an overlook north of the valley.

The scene spans from east, at left, to southeast. It combines four pointings of the rover's panoramic camera (Pancam) on March 13, 2015, during the 3,958th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's work on Mars.

The rover team selected Marathon Valley as a science destination because observations of this location using the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter yielded evidence of clay minerals, a clue to ancient wet environments. By the time Opportunity explores Marathon Valley, the rover will have exceeded a total driving distance equivalent to an Olympic marathon. Opportunity has been exploring the Meridiani Planum region of Mars since January 2004.

This version of the image is presented in approximate true color by combining exposures taken through three of the Pancam's color filters at each of the four camera pointings, using filters centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers (near-infrared), 535 nanometers (green) and 432 nanometers (violet).

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell Univ./Arizona State Univ.

 

NASA's Opportunity Mars Rover Finishes Marathon, Clocks in at Just Over 11 Years

 

This illustration depicts some highlights along the route as NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity drove as far as a marathon race during the first 11 years and two months after its January 2004 landing in Eagle Crater. The vehicle surpassed marathon distance of 26.219 miles (42.195 kilometers) with a drive completed on March 24, 2015, during the 3,968th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity's work on Mars. For this map, north is on the left.

Image Credit: 

 

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell Univ./USGS/Arizona State Univ.

There was no tape draped across a finish line, but NASA is celebrating a win. The agency’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity completed its first Red Planet marathon Tuesday -- 26.219 miles (42.195 kilometers) – with a finish time of roughly 11 years and two months.

This map shows the southward path driven by Opportunity from late December 2014 until it passed marathon distance on March 24, 2015, during the 3,968th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work on Mars.

Image Credit: 

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

"This is the first time any human enterprise has exceeded the distance of a marathon on the surface of another world," said John Callas, Opportunity project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. "A first time happens only once." 

This map shows the rover's entire traverse from landing to that point.

Image Credit: 

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/NMMNHS

 

The rover team at JPL plans a marathon-length relay run at the laboratory next week to celebrate.

The long-lived rover surpassed the marathon mark during a drive of 153 feet (46.5 meters). Last year, Opportunity became the long-distance champion of all off-Earth vehicles when it topped the previous record set by the former Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 moon rover.

"This mission isn't about setting distance records, of course; it's about making scientific discoveries on Mars and inspiring future explorers to achieve even more," said Steve Squyres, Opportunity principal investigator at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "Still, running a marathon on Mars feels pretty cool."

Opportunity's original three-month prime mission in 2004 yielded evidence of environments with liquid water soaking the ground and flowing on planet’s surface. As the rover continued to operate far beyond expectations for its lifespan, scientists chose the rim of Endeavour Crater as a long-term destination. Since 2011, examinations of Endeavour's rim have provided information about ancient wet conditions less acidic, and more favorable for microbial life, than the environment that left clues found earlier in the mission.

JPL manages the Mars rover projects for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Mars Exploration Rover Project, NASA's newer Curiosity Mars rover, and three active NASA Mars orbiters are part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, which seeks to characterize and understand Mars as a dynamic system, including its present and past environment, climate cycles, geology and biological potential. In parallel, NASA is developing the human spaceflight capabilities needed for its journey to Mars.

For more information about Opportunity, visit

/rovers

Follow the project on social media at:

http://twitter.com/MarsRovers

http://www.facebook.com/mars.rovers

NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

ayabaca@gmail.com

ayabaca@hotmail.com

ayabaca@yahoo.com

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ASTRONOMY: NASA Study of Clays Suggests Watery Mars Underground

Hi my Friends: A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., During the past five years, researchers used OMEGA and NASA's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer, or CRISM, instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to identify clay minerals at thousands of locations on Mars. Clay minerals that form where the ratio of water interacting with rock is small generally retain the same chemical elements as the original volcanic rocks later altered by the water. Impact cratering and erosion combine to reveal the composition of the Martian underground by exposing materials from the subsurface. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHUAPL .

Clay Minerals in Craters and Escarpments on Mars
Impact cratering and erosion combine to reveal the composition of the Martian underground by exposing materials from the subsurface. Investigation of exposed clay minerals at thousands of Martian sites by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggests a long period of wet, warm conditions, mostly underground.

Infrared light indicates terrains of different composition in false-color infrared images (top) of a crater (left) and an escarpment (right). Each of the scenes is about 6 miles (10 kilometers) wide. The lower images of the same sites show how distinctive absorption bands permit identification and mapping of specific minerals. In the lower images, iron-magnesium clays are mapped in blue. These are the most common clays on Mars, occupying large sections of the deep crust and mostly formed by subsurface water. These clays are beneath unaltered volcanic layers that contain the mineral olivine (green). The site shown in the image on the right also contains aluminum clays (red), which formed by waters near the surface. These clays are uncommon on Mars but are sometimes located on top of iron-magnesium clays in a distinctive stratigraphy, indicating formation later in time.

These two example sites, out of thousands where CRISM has observed clay minerals, are at 10.65 degrees south latitude, 98.22 degrees east longitude (left pair) and 22.06 degrees north latitude, 74.63 degrees east latitude (right pair). In the top two images, the false color comes from presenting observed brightnesses in three different wavelengths of invisible infrared wavelengths -- 2,529 nanometers, 1,506 nanometers and 1,080 nanometers -- as red, green and blue, respectively, composited into color images. In the bottom two images, colors are assigned to absorption-band characteristics: infrared frequencies at which the materials on the Mars surface are less bright compared to their brightness at other frequencies. The data presented as red are pixel-by-pixel absorption-band depths at 2,210 nanometers, the data presented as green are broad absorption-band depths near 1,000 nanometers, and the data presented as blue are the absorption-band depths at 2,300 nanometers. These color data were then overlain and merged with the brightness at 770 nanometers to show the relationship of detected minerals with underlying topography. For more information on mineral mapping and more CRISM images, see http://crism-map.jhuapl.edu .

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory led the effort to build the CRISM instrument and operates CRISM in coordination with an international team of researchers from universities, government and the private sector. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHUAPL

PASADENA, Calif. -- A new NASA study suggests if life ever existed on Mars, the longest lasting habitats were most likely below the Red Planet's surface.
A new interpretation of years of mineral-mapping data, from more than 350 sites on Mars examined by European and NASA orbiters, suggests Martian environments with abundant liquid water on the surface existed only during short episodes. These episodes occurred toward the end of a period of hundreds of millions of years during which warm water interacted with subsurface rocks. This has implications about whether life existed on Mars and how the Martian atmosphere has changed.
"The types of clay minerals that formed in the shallow subsurface are all over Mars," said John Mustard, professor at Brown University in Providence, R.I. Mustard is a co-author of the study in the journal Nature. "The types that formed on the surface are found at very limited locations and are quite rare."
Discovery of clay minerals on Mars in 2005 indicated the planet once hosted warm, wet conditions. If those conditions existed on the surface for a long era, the planet would have needed a much thicker atmosphere than it has now to keep the water from evaporating or freezing. Researchers have sought evidence of processes that could cause a thick atmosphere to be lost over time.
This new study supports an alternative hypothesis that persistent warm water was confined to the subsurface and many erosional features were carved during brief periods when liquid water was stable at the surface.
"If surface habitats were short-term, that doesn't mean we should be glum about prospects for life on Mars, but it says something about what type of environment we might want to look in," said the report's lead author, Bethany Ehlmann, assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also in Pasadena. "The most stable Mars habitats over long durations appear to have been in the subsurface. On Earth, underground geothermal environments have active ecosystems."
The discovery of clay minerals by the OMEGA spectrometer on the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter added to earlier evidence of liquid Martian water. Clays form from the interaction of water with rock. Different types of clay minerals result from different types of wet conditions.
During the past five years, researchers used OMEGA and NASA's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer, or CRISM, instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to identify clay minerals at thousands of locations on Mars. Clay minerals that form where the ratio of water interacting with rock is small generally retain the same chemical elements as those found in the original volcanic rocks later altered by the water.
The study interprets this to be the case for most terrains on Mars with iron and magnesium clays. In contrast, surface environments with higher ratios of water to rock can alter rocks further. Soluble elements are carried off by water, and different aluminum-rich clays form.
Another clue is detection of a mineral called prehnite. It forms at temperatures above about 400 degrees Fahrenheit (about 200 degrees Celsius). These temperatures are typical of underground hydrothermal environments rather than surface waters.
"Our interpretation is a shift from thinking that the warm, wet environment was mostly at the surface to thinking it was mostly in the subsurface, with limited exceptions," said Scott Murchie of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., a co-author of the report and principal investigator for CRISM.
One of the exceptions may be Gale Crater, the site targeted by NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission. Launching this year, the mission’s Curiosity rover will land and investigate layers that contain clay and sulfate minerals.
NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, or MAVEN, in development for a 2013 launch, may provide evidence for or against this new interpretation of the Red Planet's environmental history. The report predicts MAVEN findings consistent with the atmosphere not having been thick enough to provide warm, wet surface conditions for a prolonged period.
JPL, a division of Caltech, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. APL provided and operates CRISM.

For more information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mro and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/ .
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
ayabaca@hotmail.com
ayabaca@gmail.com

ayabaca@yahoo.com

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