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      Mars rover finds signs of seasonal floods

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 9 August, 2023 - 19:34

    two images. At left, a sandy, brownish area filled with hexagonal shapes. At right, this image is faded out, but the hexagonal shapes are outlined in red.

    Enlarge / The newly described deposits (left) have their shapes highlighted in red at right. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/IRAP )

    The prodigious evidence for water on Mars has eliminated scientific debate about whether Mars had a watery past. It clearly did. But it has left us with an awkward question: What exactly did that past look like? Some results argue that there were long-lived oceans and lakes on Mars. Others argue that the water largely consisted of ice-covered bodies that only allowed water to burst out onto the surface on occasions .

    The picture is further confused by the fact that some or all of these may have been true at different times or in different locations. Creating a clear picture would help shape our understanding of an environment that might have been far more conducive to life than anything that exists on present-day Mars.

    A new paper describes evidence that at least one part of Mars went through many wet/dry cycles, which may be critical for the natural production of molecules essential to life on Earth—though they don't necessarily mean conditions in which life itself could thrive.

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      New legged robots designed to explore planets as a team

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 21 July, 2023 - 17:56 · 1 minute

    Image of three red, legged robots exploring rocky terrain.

    Enlarge / The robots exploring a simulated alien environment. (credit: ETH Zurich / Takahiro Miki )

    While rovers have made incredible discoveries, their wheels can hold them back, and erratic terrain can mean damage. There is no replacing something like Perseverance , but sometimes rovers could use a leg up, and they could get that from a small swarm of four-legged robots.

    They look like giant metal insects, but the trio of ANYmal robots customized by researchers at ETH Zurich was tested in environments as close to the harsh lunar and Martian terrain as possible. Robots capable of walking could assist future rovers and mitigate the risk of damage from sharp edges or loss of traction in loose regolith. Not only do the ANYmals’ legs help them literally step over obstacles, but these bots work most efficiently as a team. They are each specialized for particular functions but still flexible enough to cover for each other—if one glitches, the others can take over its tasks.

    “Our technology can enable robots to investigate scientifically transformative targets on the Moon and Mars that are unreachable at present using wheeled rover systems,” the research team said in a study recently published in Science Robotics.

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      No sign of the expected lake bed where Perseverance rover landed

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 23 November, 2022 - 19:54 · 1 minute

    Image of the rover's mast in the red environment of Mars.

    Enlarge / No, those donut tracks aren't mine, officer. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS )

    The Perseverance rover landed in Mars' Jezero Crater largely because of extensive evidence that the crater once hosted a lake, meaning the presence of liquid water that might once have hosted Martian life. And the landing was a success, placing the rover at the edge of a structure that appeared to be a river delta where the nearby highlands drained into the crater.

    But a summary of the first year of data from the rover, published in three different papers being released today, suggests that Perseverance has yet to stumble across any evidence of a watery paradise. Instead, all indications are that water exposure in the areas it explored was limited, and the waters were likely to be near freezing. While this doesn't rule out that it will find lake deposits later, the environment might not have been as welcoming for life as "a lake in a crater" might have suggested.

    Putting it all together

    Perseverance can be considered a platform for a large suite of instruments that provide a picture of what the rover is looking at. Even its "eyes," a pair of cameras on its mast, can create stereo images with 3D information, and offer information on what wavelengths are present in the images. It also has instruments that can be held up to rocks to determine their content and structure; sample-handling hardware can perform a chemical analysis of materials taken from rocks.

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