The new era

Perseverance rover, which has already sealed 24 samples in titanium tubes, is inadvertently providing atmospheric scientists with a unique opportunity to study the Martian air

Nasa’s Perseverance rover, which has entered a new unexplored world on Mars, is not only collecting rock and soil samples but also capturing valuable atmospheric data in the process. 

The rover, which has already sealed 24 samples in titanium tubes, is inadvertently providing atmospheric scientists with a unique opportunity to study the Martian atmosphere in unprecedented detail. 

The titanium sample tubes contain air from Mars.

The Mars Perseverance Rover is part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission. It launched on 30 July 2020 and landed in the Jezero Crater successfully on 18 February 2021. The site was picked because it’s a dried up river bed and if there is any evidence of ancient primitive life on Mars, it is a likely location. Perseverance is equipped with a host of instruments including a drone named Ingenuity to survey the planet. 

One exciting element of the mission is the collection of rock samples as part of the Mars Sample Return Campaign. Twenty four core samples have been collected to date and deposited on the surface ready for collection by a future mission. It’s not just rock samples that have been collected though. Known as ‘headspace’ there is air in the space around the rock samples and it is this that has got scientists excited

Tucked away with each rock and soil sample collected by the agency’s Perseverance rover is a potential boon for atmospheric scientists.

Atmospheric scientists get a little more excited with every rock core NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover seals in its titanium sample tubes, which are being gathered for eventual delivery to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return campaign. Twenty-four have been taken so far.

Most of those samples consist of rock cores or regolith (broken rock and dust) that might reveal important information about the history of the planet and whether microbial life was present billions of years ago. But some scientists are just as thrilled at the prospect of studying the “headspace,” or air in the extra room around the rocky material, in the tubes.

The Value of Headspace

Among the samples that could be brought to Earth is one tube filled solely with gas deposited on the Martian surface as part of a sample depot . But far more of the gas in the rover’s collection is within the headspace of rock samples. These are unique because the gas will be interacting with rocky material inside the tubes for years before the samples can be opened and analyzed in laboratories on Earth. What scientists glean from them will lend insight into how much water vapor hovers near the Martian surface, one factor that determines why ice forms where it does on the planet and how Mars’ water cycle has evolved over time.

Apollo’s Air Samples

In 2021, a group of planetary researchers, including scientists from NASA, studied the air brought back from the Moon in a steel container by Apollo 17 astronauts some 50 years earlier.

“People think of the Moon as airless, but it has a very tenuous atmosphere that interacts with the lunar surface rocks over time,” said Simon, who studies a variety of planetary samples at Johnson. “That includes noble gases leaking out of the Moon’s interior and collecting at the lunar surface.”

Do we have samples from Mars on Earth?

Meet two of the Martian samples that have been collected and are awaiting return to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return campaign. As of late June 2023, NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover has collected and sealed 20 scientifically selected samples inside pristine tubes. The next stage is to get them back for study

What are the problems with Mars Sample Return?

NASA’s Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission has run aground, wrecked by a $10 billion price estimate, a 16 year timeline and excessive mission and programmatic risk. If the mission is to proceed, a much simpler and cheaper approach must be found

This is an extraordinary time for the exploration of Mars, the fourth planet in the solar system from the inside out. The spacecraft of America, China and United Arab Emirates, which reached the orbit of Mars this year, are continuously sending information while orbiting it. Our own Mangalyaan is probably also included in this list, about which ISRO had said in February last that it was accurate and continuously sending data. However, anything newsworthy regarding Mangalyaan was last heard in 2018 only. The American vehicle Perseverance has been landing on the surface of Mars for two and a half months, while Ingenuity, a small helicopter weighing two and a quarter kilos with a powerful camera, has made five flights on this alien planet in the last fifteen days. China’s rover has also been looking for a place to land for three months.

Why is there so much controversy about Mars right now? Mainly for three reasons. Firstly, apart from the Earth, there is going to be no other place other than Earth suitable for human habitation in the next thousand years. The news of water on the Moon has certainly aroused enthusiasm, but the practical situation is that everything from air and water will have to be carried here and due to its proximity to the Sun, the radiation is so terrible that it is difficult to imagine staying there even for two-four days. This can be done only in caves or chambers with very special construction. However, the Moon is a better place for robots. Human movement there will be good only for work like planning and coordination. In contrast, Perseverance had done the work of producing oxygen from the thin air of Mars just a few days ago and water is seen emerging at every landing site there, even if it takes a lot of effort to make it drinkable

The second reason is the search for life on Mars, which currently seems almost impossible according to calculations. Keep in mind, the distance of Mars from Earth always changes. Its minimum measurement has been recorded as 5 crore 46 lakh kilometres, while the maximum measurement can go up to 40 crore 10 lakh kilometres. Living so far away, it is still too far away for us to say anything definite about whether there is life on Mars or not. But if there is life there and its form is cell-based like life on Earth, then considering the radiation present on Mars, its presence should be at least 25 feet below the surface. We can hope that if the soil dug 25-30 feet deep and extracted in a completely packed state can be brought to earth, then by examining it, we may encounter very old, dormant bacteria of Archaea category. No device capable of digging so deep has been sent to Mars yet, but even X-ray spectrography can definitely be done.

The third reason is to understand Earth’s own evolution through the study of Mars. There are four eras of Earth’s development, which are commonly called Eons. Keep in mind, the age of the Earth was measured to be 4 billion 54 crore years and its first era ends some four billion years ago i.e. about 60 crore years after the formation of the Earth. In this era called Hadean, the first 120 million years are without moon and any form of life is still beyond imagination. This era is believed to have ended with the emergence of early forms of life on Earth. On the basis of these organisms, this era which lasted for about one billion years was named Archean era. So far, there is no major difference in the planetary history of Earth and Mars. In fact, due to its distance from the Sun compared to Earth, there is a possibility of life developing there sooner. But in the middle of the Archean era, both the worlds got separated

Mars Sample Return (MSR) will be an ambitious, multi-mission mission by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) aimed at returning carefully selected samples to Earth. MSR will fulfill one of the science community’s highest priority Solar System exploration goals. Returned samples will revolutionize our understanding of Mars, our solar system, and prepare for human explorers to the Red Plan

Looking for new design
On April 15, 2024, NASA announced the agency’s path forward for the Mars Sample Return Mission to seek innovative designs that will reduce the cost, risk, and complexity of the mission. To achieve this goal, the agency has asked the NASA community to work together to develop a revised plan that leverages innovation and proven technology, as well as solicited proposals from industry for architectures that could be implemented in the 2030s. Could bring samples back to Earth

Please like subscribe comment your precious thoughts on universe discoveries

Full article source google

https://www.amazon.in/b?_encoding=UTF8&tag=555101-21&link

https://fb07bfisb9t0kzl4cpk86f-k76.hop.clickbank.net/?&traffic_source=google&traffic_type=blog