Terraforming Mars

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

We love Lucy—our spacecraft that will visit the ancient Trojan asteroids near Jupiter, that is. This week, let us count the ways this 2021 mission could revolutionize what we know about the origins of Earth and ourselves.

1. Lucky Lucy 

Earlier this year, we selected the Lucy mission to make the first-ever visit to a group of asteroids known as the Trojans. This swarm of asteroids orbits in two loose groups around the Sun, with one group always ahead of Jupiter in its path, and the other always behind. The bodies are stabilized by the Sun and Jupiter in a gravitational balancing act, gathering in locations known as Lagrange points.

2. Old. Really, Really Old

Jupiter’s swarms of Trojan asteroids may be remnants of the material that formed our outer planets more than 4 billion years ago—so these fossils may help reveal our most distant origins. “They hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system,” said Dr. Harold F. Levison, Lucy principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.

3. A Link to The Beatles

Lucy takes its name from the fossilized human ancestor, called “Lucy” by her discoverers, whose skeleton provided unique insight into humanity’s evolution. On the night it was discovered in 1974, the team’s celebration included dancing and singing to The Beatles’ song “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.” At some point during that evening, expedition member Pamela Alderman named the skeleton “Lucy,” and the name stuck. Jump ahead to 2013 and the mission’s principal investigator, Dr. Levison, was inspired by that link to our beginnings to name the spacecraft after Lucy the fossil. The connection to The Beatles’ song was just icing on the cake.

4. Travel Itinerary

One of two missions selected in a highly competitive process, Lucy will launch in October 2021. With boosts from Earth’s gravity, it will complete a 12-year journey to seven different asteroids: a Main Belt asteroid and six Trojans.

5. Making History

No other space mission in history has been launched to as many different destinations in independent orbits around the Sun. Lucy will show us, for the first time, the diversity of the primordial bodies that built the planets.

6. What Lies Beneath 

Lucy’s complex path will take it to both clusters of Trojans and give us our first close-up view of all three major types of bodies in the swarms (so-called C-, P- and D-types). The dark-red P- and D-type Trojans resemble those found in the Kuiper Belt of icy bodies that extends beyond the orbit of Neptune. The C-types are found mostly in the outer parts of the Main Belt of asteroids, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. All of the Trojans are thought to be abundant in dark carbon compounds. Below an insulating blanket of dust, they are probably rich in water and other volatile substances.

7. Pretzel, Anyone?

This diagram illustrates Lucy’s orbital path. The spacecraft’s path (green) is shown in a slowly turning frame of reference that makes Jupiter appear stationary, giving the trajectory its pretzel-like shape.

8. Moving Targets

This time-lapsed animation shows the movements of the inner planets (Mercury, brown; Venus, white; Earth, blue; Mars, red), Jupiter (orange), and the two Trojan swarms (green) during the course of the Lucy mission.

9. Long To-Do List

Lucy and its impressive suite of remote-sensing instruments will study the geology, surface composition, and physical properties of the Trojans at close range. The payload includes three imaging and mapping instruments, including a color imaging and infrared mapping spectrometer and a thermal infrared spectrometer. Lucy also will perform radio science investigations using its telecommunications system to determine the masses and densities of the Trojan targets.

10. Dream Team

Several institutions will come together to successfully pull off this mission. The Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, is the principal investigator institution. Our Goddard Space Flight Center will provide overall mission management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver will build the spacecraft. Instruments will be provided by Goddard, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and Arizona State University. Discovery missions are overseen by the Planetary Missions Program Office at our Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for our Planetary Science Division.

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Mars Orbiter Mission: April 11, 2016 Clouds over Olympus Mons, April 11th 2016

Olympus Mons is a large shield volcano on the planet Mars. It has a height of nearly 22 km. Olympus Mons stands almost three times as tall as Mount Everest’s height above sea level. It is the youngest of the large volcanoes on Mars, having formed during Mars’s Amazonian Period. Several meteorological factors contribute to cloud formation. This MCC image was taken on April 11, 2016 at an altitude of 22,794 km and resolution of 1,185 meters. The image shows cloud around Olympus Mons Region.

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Even after dozens of spacecraft have been sent to Mars, much remains unknown about that world. Here we have 7 fascinating yet unanswered questions about Mars.

How Do You Stay Fit on a Mission to Mars?

This mini exercise device could be the key!

Onboard the International Space Station, astronauts need to work out to maintain their bone density and muscle mass, usually exercising 2 hours every single day. Throughout the week, they exercise on three different pieces of equipment–a bike, a treadmill and the Advanced Restive Exercise Device (ARED).

All these devices are needed to keep an astronaut healthy.

However, deep-space vehicles like our Orion Spacecraft aren’t as roomy as station, so everything — including exercise equipment — needs to be downsized. The Miniature Exercise Device (MED-2) is getting us one step closer to being able to keep astronauts’ bodies healthy on long journeys to the moon, Mars and beyond.

MED-2 is a compact, all-in-one exercise device that we developed and will be launching to the space station Tuesday, March 22. Onboard the station, we’ll see how MED-2 will perform in microgravity and how it will need to be further adapted for our Journey to Mars. However, it’s already pretty well equipped for deep space missions.

So what makes MED-2 so great for deep space travel and our Journey to Mars?

1. It is an all-in-one exercise device, meaning it can do both aerobic and resistive workouts. When we go to Mars, the less equipment we need, the better.

2. It’s incredibly light. The MED-2 weighs only 65 pounds, and every pound counts during space missions.

3. It has 5 - 350 pounds of resistance, despite weighing only 65 pounds. Astronauts don’t all lift the same amount, making the flexibility in MED-2’s “weights” essential.

4. It’s tiny. (Hence its name Miniature Exercise Device.) Not only is MED-2 incredibly light, but it also won’t take up a lot of space on any craft.

5. It powers itself. During an aerobic workout, the device charges, and then that power is used to run the resistive exercises. When traveling to space, it’s good when nothing goes to waste, and now astronauts’ workouts will help power the Journey to Mars.

MED-2 is only one of many devices and experiments flying on Orbital ATK’s Cygnus spacecraft. To find out more about the science on the space station, follow @ISS_Research and @Space_Station on Twitter.

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“Breakfast on Mars” by Simon Kono.

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ARE MYSTERY MARS PLUMES CAUSED BY SPACE WEATHER?

Mysterious high-rise clouds seen appearing suddenly in the martian atmosphere on a handful of occasions may be linked to space weather, say Mars Express scientists.

Amateur astronomers using telescopes on Earth were the first to report an unusual cloud-like plume in 2012 that topped-out high above the surface of Mars at an altitude around 250 km.

The feature developed in less than 10 hours, covered an area of up to 1000 x 500 km, and remained visible for around 10 days.

The extreme altitude poses something of a problem in explaining the features: it is far higher than where typical clouds of frozen carbon dioxide and water are thought to be able to form in the atmosphere.

Indeed, the high altitude corresponds to the ionosphere, where the atmosphere directly interacts with the incoming solar wind of electrically charged atomic particles.

Speculation as to their cause has included exceptional atmospheric circumstances, auroral emissions, associations with local crustal anomalies, or a meteor impact, but so far it has not been possible to identify the root cause.

Unfortunately, the spacecraft orbiting Mars were not in the right position to see the 2012 plume visually, but scientists have now looked into plasma and solar wind measurements collected by Mars Express at the time.

They have found evidence for a large ‘coronal mass ejection’, or CME, from the Sun striking the martian atmosphere in the right place and at around the right time.

“Our plasma observations tell us that there was a space weather event large enough to impact Mars and increase the escape of plasma from the planet’s atmosphere,” says David Andrews of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, and lead author of the paper reporting the Mars Express results.

“But we were not able to see any signatures in the ionosphere that we can categorically say were due to the presence of this plume.

“One problem is that the plume was seen at the day–night boundary, over a region of known strong crustal magnetic fields where we know the ionosphere is generally very disturbed, so searching for ‘extra’ signatures is rather challenging.”

To go further, the scientists have looked at the chances of these two relatively rare events – a large and fast CME colliding with Mars, and the mysterious plume – occurring at the same time.

They have been searching back through the archives for similar events, but they are rare.

For example, the Hubble Space Telescope observed a similar high plume in May 1997, and a CME was registered hitting Earth at the same time.

Although that CME was widely studied, there is no information from Mars orbiters to judge the scale of its impact at the Red Planet.