A new video shows what it would be like to cruise over the surface of Mars, zooming in to the planet from orbit and into a channel called the Ares Vallis. Created from data taken by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express mission, it shows the region where NASA’s Pathfinder mission landed in 1997.
Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin and NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS. Data processing/animation: Björn Schreiner, Image Processing Group (FU Berlin)
The important stops along the journey are labeled in the video so you can see the sights of Mars as the camera passes over them. The flight is across a region called Oxia Palus, which covers a huge area of over 300,000 square miles, which hosts the famous Ares Vallis channel.
The tour begins with Mars as seen from orbit, with a rectangle indicating the area where the tour will be focused. On zooming in to the region, you can see the varied terrain of the Mars surface, beginning with the Pathfinder landing site where the Sojourner rover explored. Then the channel of the Ares Vallis comes into view — stretching over 1,000 miles in length, it is one of Mars’s longest outflow channels.
Channels like this are important for scientists to study as they show where water once flowed on the planet’s surface, allowing researchers to build up a picture of which regions were rich in water — and where life could possibly have evolved.
As the tour continues, two craters come into view. Named Masursky and Sagan, there is also evidence that water was here, too, as the rim of the Masursky crater shows erosion likely caused by water from the Tiu Valles system located nearby.
Another notable feature of the crater is the jagged, jumbled rocks located within it. Known, rather dramatically, as chaos terrain, these ridges and plains are often seen on Mars and are related to the historical presence of water as well. “Its distinctive muddled appearance is thought to arise when subsurface water is suddenly released from underground to the surface,” ESA explains. “The resulting loss of support from below causes the surface to slump and break into blocks of various sizes and shapes.”
Further craters are visible along the tour, many of which also have evidence of once being filled with water. You can see the direction in which the water once flowed from the tail shapes left on the surface.
Finally, the channel comes to an end in the smooth Oxia Planum region, where ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover will land following its launch in 2028, before the camera zooms out to show the whole region in all its fascinating glory.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.