After feeling an electrical surge in the drilling instrument last month, the Curiosity rover has once again picked up and continued its journey toward mount Sharp in the Gale Crater. On Wednesday, the rover finished transporting recently drilled material from it’s robotic arm to instruments on the rover’s body, before driving 33 feet on Thursday. The short circuit occurred on February 28th, and since then the mission team has been running tests to ensure everything was okay before resuming operations. The short circuit was caused by the percussive function of the rock drill on the rover’s robotic arm, and as the...
I love to discuss Mars rovers. The thought of robots roaming around the empty red desert, doing science in pure form, unmasking the surprising history of our red neighbour, it’s exciting and it’s the frontier of discovery. The limits of science and engineering are pushed as we send complex machines to travel further than any human in history. But with such a marvellous feat, issues can arise, and when they do, the nearest mechanic is 55 Million Km away. On February 27th, during the transfer of a sample of dust from the rover’s drill to its instruments, the rover suffered...
The Opportunity rover has just about reached it’s 11 year anniversary of it’s 90 day mission puttering around Mars. The actual day is tomorrow since the rover landed on January 25th, 2004. To mark its incredible accomplishment, the imaging team produced a lovely panorama of what the rover would see from its current position on a high point along the rim of endeavour crater. The map below shows the path of Opportunity over its past 11 years, from the Eagle crater, to endurance crater, to Victoria crater, and finally on to the much more massive Endeavour crater, where it currently...
It’s been an amazing week for detection and study of water in our Solar system. Just last week we received the first results of the Rosetta mission’s analysis of water from comet 67P. Now we’ve received the latest breakthrough from the Curiosity Rover on Mars, results on Water, Methane, and even Organic material! The Sample Analysis at Mars instrument (SAM) took measurements of the Martian atmosphere over a period of 20 months, and for two of these months in late 2013 and early 2014, the Methane levels were 10 times as high as measurements before and after the spike. “This temporary...
In a press conference yesterday, NASA officials revealed the latest data from the Curiosity rover mission on Mars. The data shows that the Rover’s current location, at the base of Mount Sharp in the Gale Crater, was once deep underwater, part of a vast lake filling the entire crater. The results suggest that ancient Mars had a climate that could sustain large lakes across the planet over millions of years. “If our hypothesis for Mount Sharp holds up, it challenges the notion that warm and wet conditions were transient, local, or only underground on Mars,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity deputy...
Over the past month I’ve been developing a new podcast entitled ‘What’s the Latest?’ Each show a particular topic in Astronomy is discussed from its discovery, through history, all the way up to the latest news and developments. Also at the end some big questions are asked and future developments are discussed. The first podcast will air Monday, April 15th, on Astronomy FM after York Universe, but if you’d like to hear the show before then, it is live here on RyanMarciniak.com. You can find it by clicking on ‘Podcasts.’ The podcast will air on a biweekly basis. If there...
