Perseverance Rover

Doesn't appear to be a thread for the MAVEN mars probe so I will put this here.

NASA's Mars MAVEN spacecraft spent 3 months on the brink of disaster​

"The safe mode event was — catastrophic is too strong, but I mean, we did get close to losing the spacecraft," Curry said, calling the incident "incredibly serious" and "scary." And when the team wanted to be celebrating the end of the six-month mission extension campaign, the timing stung. "It was like getting the wind knocked out of you. On your birthday."
The spacecraft carries two of what engineers call inertial measurement units, or IMUs: one primary version, dubbed IMU-1, and an identical backup called IMU-2. Whichever IMU the spacecraft is using at any given time is responsible for keeping MAVEN in the right attitude, or orientation in space. (Attitude is crucial: functions like charging solar panels and communicating with Earth can't occur properly when a spacecraft loses attitude.)


After worrying IMU-1 issues cropped up in late 2017, the MAVEN team switched the spacecraft to its backup unit. But late last year, the team noticed that the IMU-2 unit was starting to, essentially, wear out much faster than expected. So in early February, the team returned the spacecraft to its original IMU-1 unit.


Two weeks later, on Feb. 22, the very day of MAVEN's mission extension presentation, the spacecraft suddenly couldn't seem to use either IMU to properly position itself.


"For different reasons, both of our [IMU]s started showing problems," Curry said. "When we went into safe mode, it was because one of them really crashed, basically, and then the other just was losing lifetime."
The slow ramp-up back to full operations also meant that MAVEN spent an extra month unable to serve as a relay satellite for the InSight lander and Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, the three NASA robots currently active on the Martian surface. Although other satellites also participate in this work, MAVEN bears one of the largest loads. So the spacecraft's three-month outage meant not just reduced science from MAVEN but reduced science from Mars overall.


"It's been really hard on all of the surface assets," Curry said. And in turn, the rescue was about more than MAVEN itself. "It wasn't just simply to make sure we saved our spacecraft. This was enabling a lot of data at Mars in general."
Although all-stellar mode can do the job for normal operations, it isn't precise enough to see MAVEN safely through its most delicate maneuvers, and the spacecraft still has precious little time left on its IMUs.


"We have to spend this summer and the next year or two coming up with very clever ways to stop using the IMU when we normally would," Curry said. "If we did nothing, we would not make it the next 10 years." (The recent mission extension sees the spacecraft through 2025, but NASA has said it wants to use MAVEN's relay capability during its planned Mars sample-return mission campaign, which is currently targeting delivery at Earth in 2033.)
 
Perseverance and its pet wheel rock.

How do you choose a rock on Mars? Sometimes you don’t— it chooses you.
For the past 4 months, Perseverance has had an unexpected traveling companion. Back on sol 341— that’s over 100 sols ago, in early February— a rock found its way into the rover’s front left wheel, and since hitching a ride, it’s been transported more than 5.3 miles (8.5 km). This rock isn’t doing any damage to the wheel, but throughout its (no doubt bumpy!) journey, it has clung on and made periodic appearances in our left Hazcam images.

 
Perseverance and its pet wheel rock.

How do you choose a rock on Mars? Sometimes you don’t— it chooses you.
For the past 4 months, Perseverance has had an unexpected traveling companion. Back on sol 341— that’s over 100 sols ago, in early February— a rock found its way into the rover’s front left wheel, and since hitching a ride, it’s been transported more than 5.3 miles (8.5 km). This rock isn’t doing any damage to the wheel, but throughout its (no doubt bumpy!) journey, it has clung on and made periodic appearances in our left Hazcam images.


I wonder how the rock managed to get onto the wheel in the first place? And to have been on the wheel for so long without getting flung of again is highly unusual.
 
Caution, we don't know what kind of squirrel they have there!

Squirrel_Pittsburgh.2e16d0ba.fill-735x490.png
 
NASA’s Perseverance Studies the Wild Winds of Jezero Crater

The rover’s weather sensors witnessed daily whirlwinds and more while studying the Red Planet.

During its first couple hundred days in Jezero Crater, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover saw some of the most intense dust activity ever witnessed by a mission sent to the Red Planet’s surface. Not only did the rover detect hundreds of dust-bearing whirlwinds called dust devils, Perseverance captured the first video ever recorded of wind gusts lifting a massive Martian dust cloud.

A paper recently published in Science Advances chronicles the trove of weather phenomena observed in the first 216 Martian days, or sols. The new findings enable scientists to better understand dust processes on Mars and contribute to a body of knowledge that could one day help them predict the dust storms that Mars is famous for – and that pose a threat to future robotic and human explorers.
Jezero Crater may be in one of the most active sources of dust on the planet.
Manuel de la Torre Juarez
“Every time we land in a new place on Mars, it’s an opportunity to better understand the planet’s weather,” said the paper’s lead author, Claire Newman of Aeolis Research, a research company focused on planetary atmospheres. She added there may be more exciting weather on the way: “We had a regional dust storm right on top of us in January, but we’re still in the middle of dust season, so we’re very likely to see more dust storms.”

Perseverance made these observations primarily with the rover’s cameras and a suite of sensors belonging to the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA), a science instrument led by Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología in collaboration with the Finnish Meteorological Institute and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. MEDA includes wind sensors, light sensors that can detect whirlwinds as they scatter sunlight around the rover, and a sky-facing camera for capturing images of dust and clouds.

“Jezero Crater may be in one of the most active sources of dust on the planet,” said Manuel de la Torre Juarez, MEDA’s deputy principal investigator at JPL. “Everything new we learn about dust will be helpful for future missions.”

Frequent Whirlwinds

The study authors found that at least four whirlwinds pass Perseverance on a typical Martian day and that more than one per hour passes by during a peak hourlong period just after noon.

The rover’s cameras also documented three occasions in which wind gusts lifted large dust clouds, something the scientists call “gust-lifting events.” The biggest of these created a massive cloud covering 1.5 square miles (4 square kilometers). The paper estimated that these wind gusts may collectively lift as much or more dust as the whirlwinds that far outnumber them.

“We think these gust-liftings are infrequent but could be responsible for a large fraction of the background dust that hovers all the time in the Martian atmosphere,” Newman said.

Why Is Jezero Different?

While wind and dust are prevalent all over Mars, what the researchers are finding seems to set Jezero apart. This greater activity may be linked to the crater being near what Newman describes as a “dust storm track” that runs north to south across the planet, often lifting dust during the dust storm season.

Newman added that the greater activity in Jezero could be due to factors such as the roughness of its surface, which can make it easier for the wind to lift dust. That could be one explanation why NASA’s InSight lander – in Elysium Planitia, about 2,145 miles (3,452 kilometers) away from Jezero Crater – is still waiting for a whirlwind to clear its dust-laden solar panels, while Perseverance has already measured nearby surface dust removal by several passing whirlwinds.

“Perseverance is nuclear-powered, but if we had solar panels instead, we probably wouldn’t have to worry about dust buildup,” Newman said. “There’s generally just more dust lifting in Jezero Crater, though average wind speeds are lower there and peak wind speeds and whirlwind activity are comparable to Elysium Planitia.”

In fact, Jezero’s dust lifting has been more intense than the team would have wanted: Sand carried in whirlwinds damaged MEDA’s two wind sensors. The team suspects the sand grains harmed the thin wiring on the wind sensors, which stick out from Perseverance’s mast. These sensors are particularly vulnerable because they must remain exposed to the wind in order to measure it correctly. Sand grains blown in the wind, and likely carried in whirlwinds, also damaged one of the Curiosity rover’s wind sensors (Curiosity’s other wind sensor was damaged by debris churned up during its landing in Gale Crater).

With Curiosity’s damage in mind, the Perseverance team provided an additional protective coating to MEDA’s wires. Yet Jezero’s weather still got the better of them. De la Torre Juarez said the team is testing software changes that should allow the wind sensors to keep working.

“We collected a lot of great science data,” de la Torre Juarez said. “The wind sensors are seriously impacted, ironically, because we got what we wanted to measure.”

More About the Mission

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more about Perseverance:

mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/
News Media Contact

Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
301-286-6284 / 202-358-1501
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov

 

NASA’s plan to get Ingenuity through the Martian winter
NASA engineers are trying to overcome colder nights and frequent dust storms.
Ingenuity, NASA’s autonomous Mars helicopter, was only meant to complete five flights. But since its history-making first flight in April 2021, the helicopter has flown 28 times, and preparation is underway for the 29th. Depending on dust levels and the schedule of the rover Perseverance, that flight could take place as soon as later this week. But now Ingenuity faces a new challenge: It’s unclear if the helicopter will survive the coming Martian winter, which begins in July.
 

NASA’s plan to get Ingenuity through the Martian winter
NASA engineers are trying to overcome colder nights and frequent dust storms.
Ingenuity, NASA’s autonomous Mars helicopter, was only meant to complete five flights. But since its history-making first flight in April 2021, the helicopter has flown 28 times, and preparation is underway for the 29th. Depending on dust levels and the schedule of the rover Perseverance, that flight could take place as soon as later this week. But now Ingenuity faces a new challenge: It’s unclear if the helicopter will survive the coming Martian winter, which begins in July.

Let's hope that they succeed Flyaway, I would like to see Ingenuity continue through another Martian year.
 
The sample return mission is ditching the rover and adding TWO helicopters.


Excellent, I like the idea that NASA have gone for helicopters instead of another rover for the Mars sample return mission after the success of Ingenuity over the past year, I wonder would the new helicopters be bigger and heavier than Ingenuity?
 

Excellent, I like the idea that NASA have gone for helicopters instead of another rover for the Mars sample return mission after the success of Ingenuity over the past year, I wonder would the new helicopters be bigger and heavier than Ingenuity?

The helicopters will be similar to Ingenuity in terms of size and mass, but with two key differences, NASA MSR program manager Richard Cook told reporters during a briefing today.

"There will be landing legs that include, at the bottom of them, mobility wheels," Cook explained, saying this new capability will allow the helicopters to "traverse across the surface." A mini robotic-arm on each of the craft will allow the drones to pick up the sample tubes Perseverance leaves behind, if need be.

I'm amazed by that. I did not expect an Ingenuity-size helicopter to have the extra lifting capacity to carry an arm and wheels, as well as a filled sample tube. I assume they will be trading off endurance, since they don't need to fly very far.
 
What would be neat is if they made another large rover, with a bigger RTG, that could act as a base station/charging station for a small group of helicopters.
 
What would be neat is if they made another large rover, with a bigger RTG, that could act as a base station/charging station for a small group of helicopters.

That is exactly what I would like to see too as well sferrin. :cool:
 
Its 30th flight on Mars after a two month break in operations.

View: https://twitter.com/nasajpl/status/1561853057423405056


The #MarsHelicopter is back in flight! After a two-month hiatus, the rotorcraft did a short hop over the weekend so the team can check its vitals and knock some dust off the solar panel.

Learn more about why the team wanted a simple Flight 30: https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/he...ngenuity-team-spun-up-for-upcoming-flight-30/
 
Its 30th flight on Mars after a two month break in operations.

View: https://twitter.com/nasajpl/status/1561853057423405056


The #MarsHelicopter is back in flight! After a two-month hiatus, the rotorcraft did a short hop over the weekend so the team can check its vitals and knock some dust off the solar panel.

Learn more about why the team wanted a simple Flight 30: https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/he...ngenuity-team-spun-up-for-upcoming-flight-30/

30 flights for Ingenuity, I wonder how many flights there are to go now Flyaway?
 
BLOG | August 31, 2022
A Day Full of MOXIE
Written by Michael Hecht, Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) Principal Investigator at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Today, we published our first peer-reviewed, post-landing paper on MOXIE, detailing the seven oxygen generation runs we completed during Perseverance’s first year on Mars. We’ve made considerable progress since those first seven runs, completing run #11 this past weekend – and it turned out to be the most productive MOXIE run to date!

This is the peak of the Martian winter, when cold nights and relatively high atmospheric pressures conspire to produce the highest air density of the year. The denser the air, the more CO2 MOXIE has to work with, and the more oxygen it can make. We’re always extremely cautious about designing runs for the irreplaceable flight model on Mars, but we pushed the envelope a little this time to briefly produce oxygen at a rate of nearly 10.5 grams per hour. If you were to double that, a human being could survive on it – it’s not a lot, but a record for us.

We have a long way to go before being able to make the 2 to 3 kilograms per hour that will be needed to make the tens of tons of propellant to lift a human crew of four to six astronauts off the surface of Mars and into orbit – the main goal of future oxygen generation technology to succeed MOXIE. But that will require 25 kilowatts of power, and Perseverance only gives us 100 watts, so we’re doing fine. And we’re learning how to make the next MOXIE a lot more power efficient. Right now, we only use about 10% of our power to generate oxygen. The rest goes to running the compressor that collects the air, to our electronics, and to making up for heat loss from our 800 degrees Celsius electrolysis unit through the wires and tubes.

In a full-scale version, we expect to use more like 90% of the power through a few simple changes, like running the compressor at lower pressure and designing a more efficient oven. I’d love to help build that unit, but one step at a time…


 
View: https://youtu.be/sCgwxizcpo0


NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover has arrived at an ancient delta in Jezero Crater, one of the best places on the Red Planet to search for potential signs of ancient life. The delta is an area where scientists surmise that a river once flowed billions of years ago into a lake and deposited sediments in a fan shape.

Rachel Kronyak, a member of the Perseverance science operations team, guides the viewer through this Martian panorama and its intriguing sedimentary rocks. It’s the most detailed view ever returned from the Martian surface, consisting of 2.5 billion pixels and generated from 1,118 individual Mastcam-Z images. Those images were acquired on June 12, 13, 16, 17, and 20, 2022 (the 466th, 467th, 470th, 471st, and 474th Martian day, or sol, of Perseverance’s mission).

In this panorama, an area called Hogwallow Flats is visible, as is Skinner Ridge, where two rock core samples were taken.

The color enhancement in this image improves the visual contrast and accentuates color differences. This makes it easier for the science team to use their everyday experience to interpret the landscape.


For more information on the Perseverance rover, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/perseverance.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
 
https://mars.nasa.gov/news/9261/nas...-investigates-geologically-rich-mars-terrain/

Highlights:

1) Delta materials contain organics and sulfates (the latter indicating salty water when deposits were made)
2) After collecting two more pairs of samples and preparing one additional witness tube, Perseverance will deposit a sample cache of the one each of the paired samples plus witness tube(s)
3) Perseverance will then continue exploring up the delta toward the crater rim for about a year. Hope to continue exploring beyond the rim.
 
3) Perseverance will then continue exploring up the delta toward the crater rim for about a year. Hope to continue exploring beyond the rim.

Is that a Martian year or an Earth year? I sometimes get confused when NASA talks about a year on NASA TV.
 
3) Perseverance will then continue exploring up the delta toward the crater rim for about a year. Hope to continue exploring beyond the rim.

Is that a Martian year or an Earth year? I sometimes get confused when NASA talks about a year on NASA TV.
I think it’s usual a Martian year.
 
View: https://twitter.com/nasajpl/status/1572247907147087872


The #MarsHelicopter completed Flight 32 over the weekend! The 55.3-second flight covered 93.74m at a max speed of 4.75 meters per second. Full details on the flight log: https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/#Flight-Log

Can you spot the two hints of Ingenuity in this image?
View: https://twitter.com/nasajpl/status/1573058198738989056


#MarsHelicopter update!

The rotorcraft is scheduled to take Flight 33 no earlier than Sept. 24. Its goal is to reposition itself, traveling west 111 meters with a max altitude of 10 meters. https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/status/407/flight-33-preview-by-the-numbers/
 
 
Perseverance, which is exploring Jezero Crater on Mars, collected its 13th drilled-out rock core in recent days, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which manages the car-sized robot's mission.


"A beautiful site for collecting lucky rock core #13! Currently nerding out over this fine-grained sample, and aiming to get another like it from this area. #SamplingMars," JPL officials said via Twitter(opens in new tab) on Tuesday (Oct. 4), in a post that also featured photos of the newly collected sample.
 
Perseverance, which is exploring Jezero Crater on Mars, collected its 13th drilled-out rock core in recent days, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which manages the car-sized robot's mission.


"A beautiful site for collecting lucky rock core #13! Currently nerding out over this fine-grained sample, and aiming to get another like it from this area. #SamplingMars," JPL officials said via Twitter(opens in new tab) on Tuesday (Oct. 4), in a post that also featured photos of the newly collected sample.

The 13th rock sample for Perseverance? It is lucky for both NASA and the JPL.
 
First flight after it underwent a major software update to give it new capabilities:

View: https://twitter.com/nasajpl/status/1595511443096752129


The #MarsHelicopter completes the shortest flight in Martian aviation history!

Ingenuity conducted a short hover for Flight 34, popping up 16 ft (5 meters) for 18 seconds. This flight tested out the capabilities of a major software update.


STATUS UPDATES | November 23, 2022
Flight 34 Was Short But Significant
Written by Joshua Anderson, Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Operations Lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Compared to some of the other flights this past year, Flight 34 might not stand out. Even shorter than Ingenuity’s first flight, yesterday’s successful 18-second flight simply popped up to a little over 16 feet (5 meters), hovered, then landed. Despite the flight’s simple nature, the team is very excited because of what it means for the future of Ingenuity.

Over the past few weeks, the operations team has been at work installing a major software update aboard the helicopter. This update provides Ingenuity two major new capabilities: hazard avoidance when landing and the use of digital elevation maps to help navigate.

Ingenuity was developed as a technology demonstration and designed to operate on Mars in flat, smooth terrain like that at Wright Brothers Field. As Ingenuity moved on to exploring Jezero Crater alongside the Perseverance rover, we traveled through more challenging terrain than the team had ever anticipated.

In prior flights, Ingenuity’s pilots have needed to find airfields free of any rocks or other obstacles that could potentially damage the vehicle when landing. Jezero Crater is a rocky place, so safe airfields have been tough to find! Using Ingenuity’s downward-facing navigation camera, this software update adds hazard avoidance on landing. While in flight, Ingenuity will identify the safest visible landing site. When preparing to land, Ingenuity will then divert over to this selected site. This capability allows Ingenuity to safely land in rockier terrain than before, providing our pilots with many more potential landing sites.

Ingenuity’s navigation software was designed to assume the vehicle was flying over flat terrain. When the helicopter is flying over terrain like hills, this flat-ground assumption causes Ingenuity’s navigation software to think the vehicle is veering, causing Ingenuity to start actually veering in an attempt to counter the error. Over long flights, navigation errors caused by rough terrain must be accounted for, requiring the team to select large airfields. This new software update corrects this flat-ground assumption by using digital elevation maps of Jezero Crater to help the navigation software distinguish between changes in terrain and vehicle movement. This increases Ingenuity’s accuracy, allowing the pilots to target smaller airfields going forward.

Flight 34 may not seem like much, but it was Ingenuity’s first with this software update. The team will use results from this simple flight to start testing these new capabilities, ensuring that everything works as expected on the surface of Mars. The update brings out new functionality in Ingenuity, making it a far more capable vehicle and effective scout for Perseverance. We’re all excited to see where this update will allow us to take Ingenuity’s journey next!
 
On the other hand, new software updates tend to be a bit like UXBs at times...
 
On the other hand, new software updates tend to be a bit like UXBs at times...

I have had a few bad software updates in the past with my old computer, currently to date I have had none with my existing computer. Let's see what happens to Ingenuity with the new updates it looks like all things are well.
 
View: https://twitter.com/nasapersevere/status/1605674209522249728


Not one to brag, but this is pretty momentous. By dropping this one tube to the ground, I’ve officially started setting aside samples that Mars Sample Return could bring back to Earth someday.

Learn more:

 

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