The Perseverance rover on Mars is set to begin its newest challenge: a slog up the rim of the Jezero Crater that will take months to complete. The rover will face steep slopes and difficult terrain, testing its wheels and suspension system, but its efforts should help to uncover rocks from the most ancient part of the Mars crust.
Since the rover landed in the Jezero Crater in 2021, it has been exploring the floor of the crater and the site of an ancient river delta. This area was chosen because it was once home to an ancient lake, so the rock cores that the rover has collected will help to uncover information about the history of water on Mars — which is vital to determine if the planet could ever have been habitable.
“Among these rock cores are likely the oldest materials sampled from any known environment that was potentially habitable,” said Perseverance scientist Tanja Bosak of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a statement. “When we bring them back to Earth, they can tell us so much about when, why, and for how long Mars contained liquid water and whether some organic, prebiotic, and potentially even biological evolution may have taken place on that planet.”
Now, the rover will start heading up to the crater’s rim, taking in a new area of the martian landscape. “Our samples are already an incredibly scientifically compelling collection, but the crater rim promises to provide even more samples that will have significant implications for our understanding of martian geologic history,” said fellow scientist Eleni Ravanis of the University of Hawaii. “This is because we expect to investigate rocks from the most ancient crust of Mars. These rocks formed from a wealth of different processes, and some represent potentially habitable ancient environments that have never been examined up close before.”
To reach the crater’s rim, Perseverance will have to journey up slopes of up to 23 degrees and gain a total elevation of around 1,000 feet (300 meters). The rover will begin its climb this week, marking the fifth phase of its mission so far.
“Perseverance has completed four science campaigns, collected 22 rock cores, and traveled over 18 unpaved miles,” said Perseverance project manager Art Thompson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “As we start the Crater Rim Campaign, our rover is in excellent condition, and the team is raring to see what’s on the roof of this place.”
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.