Mars Missions In Focus: NASA , ESA, MRO Aim For Red Planet
In 2015 Mars underwent a bit of renaissance with space geeks thanks to news about manned missions, evidence of water, and an Academy Award-nominated movie. Here's a look at why NASA and the ESA are so focused on the red planet this year.
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After taking a backseat to Pluto for a while, Mars came roaring back into the public's imagination in the later part of 2015, when NASA announced it has found evidence of water intermittently flowing on the surface of Mars, and the space agency teased that it would like to send a manned mission to the red planet in the coming decades.
The Martian didn't hurt, either.
Now that it's 2016, Mars continues to fascinate. In the past few weeks, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have announced new missions, one of which launched earlier this month.
That joint mission to Mars by the ESA and Russia, ExoMars, gets its name from the term exobiology -- the study of life beyond Earth. It will search for evidence of methane and other trace atmospheric gases that could be signatures of active biological or geological processes, and will test key technologies in preparation for ESA's contribution to subsequent missions to Mars.
[Check out the best images from NASA in 2015.]
NASA's mission, for which the space agency has targeted a fall 2018 landing date, is called Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport (InSight).
That mission's goal is to study the deep interior of the planet so that scientists can better understand how rocky planets -- including our own -- were formed and have evolved.
Alongside these two missions, NASA's research arm Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is also celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's (MRO) arrival at the planet.
The spacecraft also had the longevity to track seasonal changes over several Martian years, and imaging spectroscopy to map surface composition. Of the seven Mars missions currently active, MRO returns more data every week than the other six combined.
With all the perpetual excitement around the fourth planet, InformationWeek has assembled a visual overview of Mars missions past, present, and future. Enjoy.
The European Space Agency (ESA) successfully launched its joint mission to Mars with Russia, called ExoMars, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a Russian Proton rocket this month, marking the start of a seven-month journey to the Red Planet and a run-up to a more extensive, complex future endeavor.
Three days before reaching the atmosphere of Mars, Schiaparelli -- that's the landing module part of the ExoMars mission -- will be ejected from the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and head towards the planet, where it will decelerate using aerobraking and a parachute, and brake with the aid of a thruster system, before landing on the surface of the planet.
The ExoMars 2016 entry, descent, and Schiaparelli will touch down on Meridiani Planum, a relatively smooth, flat region on Mars. One of the reasons for choosing this landing site was due to its relatively low elevation, which will help the craft land safely.
Although designed to demonstrate entry, descent, and landing technologies, Schiaparelli also offers limited, but useful, science capabilities. It will deliver a science package that will operate on the surface of Mars for a short duration after landing, approximately two to four Martian days.
The four major instruments on the Schiaparelli include AMELIA (Atmospheric Mars Entry and Landing Investigation and Analysis), COMARS+ (Combined Aerothermal and Radiometer Sensors instrumentation package), the DeCa (Descent Camera), INRRI (INstrument for landing-Roving laser Retroreflector Investigations), and DREAMS (the Dust Characterisation, Risk Assessment, and Environment Analyser on the Martian Surface).
The solar arrays on NASA's InSight lander are deployed in this test inside a clean room at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver. This configuration is how the spacecraft will look on the surface of Mars. The mission will place a single geophysical lander on Mars to study its deep interior.
By using sophisticated geophysical instruments, InSight will delve deep beneath the surface of Mars, detecting the fingerprints of the processes of terrestrial planet formation and measuring the planet's vital signs -- its "pulse" (seismology), "temperature" (heat flow via probe), and "reflexes" (via precision tracking).
This map shows the area under evaluation as the InSight mission's Mars landing site, the flat-lying Elysium Planitia. The landing ellipse on this map covers an area within which the spacecraft has about a 99% chance of landing when targeted for the center. It is about 81 miles long and about 17 miles wide.
NASA's MRO has revealed in unprecedented detail a planet that held diverse wet environments billions of years ago and remains dynamic today. One example of MRO's major discoveries was published last year, the possibility of liquid water being present seasonally on present-day Mars.
The mission's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, managed by the University of Arizona, Tucson, has returned images that show features as small as a desk in observations that now have covered about 2.4% of the Martian surface, an area equivalent to two Alaskas.
The mission's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, managed by the University of Arizona, Tucson, has returned images that show features as small as a desk in observations that now have covered about 2.4% of the Martian surface, an area equivalent to two Alaskas.
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