Tag: Mars

Returning samples from Mars is proving difficult for NASA to get sorted – which, considering plans of various forms have been under consideration since before Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, might sound confusing. However, early proposals for such a mission were hampered by the fact that the density of Mars’ atmosphere was unknown, making the analysis of preferable vehicle masses and trajectory options to achieve a successful atmospheric entry somewhat difficult.

Things became easier in this regard following the successful Viking mission landings in the mid-1970s, but there were still significant technical issues to overcome – such as the number and type of vehicles required to reach Mars, land safely, obtain samples get them safely back to orbit and from there back to Earth.

Such were the complications involved that even as relatively recently as 2002, some at NASA felt that skimming a vehicle through the upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere and which used an aerogel to collect samples that would include high-altitude dust would be a easier proposition than trying to gather samples from the planet’s surface.

Also since the early 2000s, efforts have focused on the potential for international / joint efforts to recover samples from Mars, perhaps the most notable being the proposal NASA-ESA sample recovery mission, intended to recover sample tubes deposited on Mars by NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance mission.

However, even this has suffered from spiralling costs – in part due to an increasing reliance on complex technologies. By 2022, the mission required no fewer than five vehicles (not including Perseverance): a sample retriever lander + ascent vehicle (NASA); a sample return vehicle (ESA); and a sample collection lander and rover combination (ESA) – later replaced by two Ingenuity-class helicopters to – gather sample tubes deposited by Perseverance. This complexity and cleverness resulted in the cost estimates for the mission surpassing US $11 billion by April 2024, with the return of any samples collected by the Mars 2020 mission unlikely to occur before 2040.

As a result, NASA sought alternate architectures to complete such a sample return mission possible, turning to external expertise as well as looking to its own capabilities. The idea here would be to reduce costs and return samples gathered by Perseverance in a more reasonable time frame than 2040.

On January 7th, 2025, NASA announced it intended to spend a further 18 months studying two alternate architectures by which to recover sample caches created on Mars by Perseverance. One leverages technologies developed by NASA, whilst the other involved commercially-developed technologies, with both utilising the existing proposal for the European-built Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) from the mission architecture outlined above to return the gathered samples to Earth.

The principle difference between the two options is that the NASA option proposes using the “skcrane” system sued to which both the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers to deliver the same recovery lander / ascent vehicle onto the surface of Mars, whilst the second would utilise a commercial “heavy lander”. Exactly what form this would take is unclear from the NASA statement – however, both Blue Origin and SpaceX have tried to muscle-in on the mission, suggesting the use of variants of their Blue Moon and Starship lunar landers. In both mission outlines, Perseverance would be used to deliver sample tubes to the sample return craft.

Exactly how much of an improvement / cost reduction these two methodologies will bring over current plans is very debatable; NASA’s own estimates put the two options at a cost of between US $7 and $8 billion – which is about the same as original estimates for the NASA-ESA proposal at the time when it was already causing concerns, having risen to US $7 billion from an intended cost of US $4 billion. Further, NASA suggests that while either approach might achieve a sample return by 2035 – a more likely timeframe is 2035-2039; hardly any improvement at all over the current 2040 timeframe.

Hence why, perhaps, Peter Beck’s Rocket Lab has placed a formal request with the incoming Trump administration to re-examine sample return mission options rather than green-lighting the updated NASA approach. This is because Rocket Lab – at NASA’s request – has developed a completely alternate sample-return architecture designed to fit NASA’s requested mission cap of US $4 billion, whilst potentially returning the sample to Earth by 2031/32.

Whilst on the surface as complex as NASA’s joint approach with ESA, the Rocket Lab mission is actually far more direct and lightweight, comprising a total of three launches from Earth, and six vehicle elements. These comprise:

• The Mars Telecommunications Orbiter (MRO): this would offer an orbital communications relay for the rest of the mission – and other Mars surface missions.
• The Mars Entry and Descent System (EDS): an aeroshell vehicle carrying within it the Mars Lander and the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV).
• The Earth Return Orbiter (ERO), which includes the Earth Entry System (EES).

Rocket Lab’s mission would proceed as follows:  a Rocket Lab Neutron launcher is used to send the MRO to Mars. This is followed by to further Neutron launches, one for the EDS and one for the ERO. On arrival at Mars, the MRO arrives first, entering an orbit where it can act as communications relay. The EDS then makes a direct atmosphere entry, protecting the lander / MAV through the heat of atmospheric entry prior to the lander making a parachute descent and propulsive landing.

The latter will be made close to one of the sample caches created by Perseverance, allowing it to collect up to 20 sample tubes (depending on the size of the cache) – although how this will be done is not fully defined in the rocket Lab proposal. The sample tubes are delivered to the MAV on the top of the lander, the MAV using the lander as its launch pad to return to orbit.

Once in orbit, the MAV rendezvous with the ERO, transferring the sample container to the ERO, which sterilises it using onboard systems as it returns the container to Earth and uses the EES to deliver the sample container back to Earth’s surface.

While Rocket Lab might seem an unlikely candidate for a Mars Sample Return mission when compared to the likes of SpaceX, the company arguably has a lot more experience with the technologies required for such a mission. The company has supplied elements used within several Mars missions from the Mars Science Laboratory onwards – including developing solar arrays for power, support systems to maintain vehicles while en-route to Mars, and build the EscaPADE Mars orbiters and their support bus, and re-entry technologies being utilised by other companies.

It’s not clear how the incoming NASA Administrator (whether it be Jared Isaacman or someone else)  will respond to Rocket Lab’s request; a lot, in this regard, might be dependent upon how much influence Elon Musk  – whose SpaceX, like it or not, still very much depends upon NASA and government contracts for its survival – welds over NASA’s decision-making in the coming months.

Big Birds Set to Fly

Two significant launches are due to take place in the coming week, one of which could mark the entry of a significant new player in the space launch market.

Blue Origin’s massive New Glenn vehicle, of carrying up to 45 tonnes of payload to orbit – although for the most part it will likely carry far less than that – is due to lift off from Space Launch Complex 36 at Canaveral Space Force Station at 06:00 on Monday, January 13th. It’s a mission I’ve written about extensively already, but there is a lot riding on the broad success of the mission in delivering its upper stage and payload to orbit.

New Glenn has, from the outset, been designed to fulfil a wide variety of roles, from delivering individual and multiple satellite payloads to orbit and to places like the Moon, through to playing a crucial role in helping Blue Origin and its partners establish their planned Orbital Reef space station, to even carrying out human-rated launches. As a payload launcher, it will – subject to a second qualifying flight after this one – be used for US government launches as well carrying out commercial launch operations.

This first flight will carry a prototype of Blue Origin’s Blue Ring orbital vehicle as the payload – although it will not separate from the vehicle’s upper stage – and will attempt a recovery of the core booster on the landing recovery ship Jacklyn, some 1,000 km off the Florida coast.

Some will likely point to Wednesday, January 15th as being more important, as it is on that day at 22:00 SpaceX is due to carry out the seventh integrated flight test of their Starship / Super Heavy behemoth,  featuring the first flight of their Block 2 version of the Starship vehicle.  This features revised forward aerodynamic flaps (used to control the vehicle during its fall through the atmosphere), a 25% increase in propellant load, a 3.1 metres increase in length and an updated thermal protection system.

Overall, the flight should follow a similar format to Flight 6 – attempting a recovery of the booster at the launch site and the Starship vehicle splashing down in the Indian Ocean. However, a test of the thermal protection system and the deliberate exposure of parts of the vehicle to the heat of re-entry might result in its complete loss. This flight will also see the first attempt to deploy Starlink communication satellite “simulators” from the payload bay.

Starship, with its stated payload capability of up to 100 tonnes far outclasses New Glenn in lifting capabilities – but contrary to SpaceX fans, this actually does not guarantee the vehicle is destined for commercial success once it reaches any form of operational status beyond being a Starlink delivery mechanism. A lot in this regard depends on the price-point for launches with the system, and the continuing downwards trend in the size and mass of many classes of satellite which make smaller, low-cost launchers potentially far more attractive for such launches (I’m deliberately ignoring the claims that Starship is about opening Mars to colonisation, as that had a world of issues in its own right).

I’ve have a report on the flights – assuming they go ahead – in the next Space Sunday.

When discussing the robotic exploration of Mars, the focus tends to be on the current NASA missions: the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover Curiosity and the Mars 2020 rover Perseverance and its flight-capable companion, Ingenuity. This is because of all the active Mars missions, these are the most visually exciting. But it does mean the other missions still operating around Mars – a total of 8, including China’s Tainwen-1 orbiter and Zhurong rover and UAE’s Hope mission – tend to get overlooked.

One of those that tends to get overlooked is actually the second longest running of the current batch, the European Space Agency’s Mars Express, the orbital component of a 2-part mission using the same name. This recently celebrated the 20^th anniversary of its launch (June 2^nd, 2003) and will reach the 20^th anniversary of its arrival in its operational orbit around Mars on December 25^th, 2023.

The mission’s title – “Mars Express” – was selected for a two-fold reason. The first was the sheer speed with which the mission was designed and brought together as a successor to the orbital component of the failed Russian Mars 96 mission, for which a number of European Space Agency member nations had supplied science instruments, using an ESA-designed satellite unit (based on the Rosetta mission vehicle).

The second was the fact that 2003 marked a particularly “close” approach of Earth and Mars in their respective orbits around the Sun, allowing the journey time from one to the other to be at the shorter end of a scale which sees optimal Earth-Mars transit times vary between (approx.) 180-270 days. In fact, Earth and Mars were at the time the “closest” they have been in 60,000 years, hence why NASA also chose that year to launch the twin Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission featuring the Spirit and Opportunity rovers.

Taken as a whole, the Mars Express mission is perhaps more noted for its one aspect that “failed”: the British-built Beagle 2 lander (named for the ship that carried Charles Darwin on his famous voyage). This was a late addition to the mission, and the brainchild of the late Professor Colin Pillinger (whom I had the esteemed honour to know ); given it was effectively a “bolt on” to an established ESA mission, it was subject to extremely tight mass constraints (which tended to change as the Mars Express orbiter evolved). These constraints led to a remarkable vehicle, just a metre across and 12 cm high when folded and massing just 33 kg, yet carrying a considerable science package capable of searching for evidence of past or present microbial life on Mars.

Sadly, following its separation from Mars Express on December 19^th, 2003, ahead of both vehicles entering orbit around the planet and a successful passage through the upper reaches of Mars’ atmosphere, Beagle 2 never made contact following its planned arrival on the planet’s surface. For two months following the landing, repeated attempts to make contact with it were made before it was finally officially declared lost. While multiple theories were put forward as to what had happened, it wasn’t until 12 years later, in 2016 – and a year after Collin Pillinger had sadly passed away – that evidence was obtained for what appeared to have happened.

Using a technique called super-resolution restoration (SRR) on images obtained by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2015 and which appeared to show the lander intact on the surface of Mars, experts were able to enhance them to a point where they appeared to show it had in fact managed to land safely on Mars and had partially deployed its solar arrays.

The significance here is that due to its mass and size constraints, Beagle 2 was of a unique design, resembling an oversized pocket-watch and its cover. The “watch” contained the science and battery power systems, and the “cover” the communications system and flat antenna, with four round solar arrays stacked on top of it.

Following landing, Beagle 2 was supposed to fold back its “lid”, and then deploy the four arrays like petals around a flower. This would allow the arrays to recharge the lander’s batteries so it could operate for at least a Martian year, and expose the communications antenna. However, after enhancement using SRR, the NASA images appeared to show only two of the solar array petals had actually deployed; the other two remaining in their “stowed” position, blocking the lander’s communications antenna and denying it with a sufficient means to recharge its batteries.

However, there is one further element of intrigue: because it was known initial communications with Earth might be delayed – Beagle 2 was reliant on either Mars Express itself to be above the horizon post-deployment, or failing that NASA’s venerable Mars Odyssey orbiter – the lander was programmed to go into an automated science-gathering mode following landing. As the science instruments were quite possibly able to function, some of them might actually have deployed, allowing data to be recorded Solid State Mass Memory (SSMM) – data which might still be available for collection were the lander to ever be recovered by a human mission to Mars.

The mystery over the lack of contact with Beagle 2, coupled with the arrival of NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity on Mars at the start of 2004 combined to mean that Mars Express received very little attention following its arrival in its science orbit on December 25^th, 2003 – and apart from occasional reporting on its findings, this has continued to be the case for the last 20 years.

Which is a shame, because in the time, Mars Express has carried out a remarkable amount of work and has been responsible for some of the most remarkable images of Mars seen from orbit. 0For example, and just as a very abbreviated list intended to outlines the diversity of the orbiter’s work, within two months of its arrival around Mars, it was able to confirm the South Polar icecap is 15% water ice (the rest being frozen CO2).

In April and June 0f 2003, the vehicle confirmed both methane and ammonia to be present in the Martian atmosphere; two important finds, as both break down rapidly in Mars’ atmosphere, as so required either a geological or biological source of renewal.

In 2006, the orbiter put another nail in the coffin of the “ancient Martians” theories which abounded following the the Viking missions in the 1970s. In one set of images of the Cydonia region of Mars taken by the orbiter vehicles, there was a was a mesa which, thanks to the fall of sunlight, and the angle at which the image was taken, appeared to give it the appearance of a “face”. This quickly spiralled into ideas the 2 km long mesa had been intentionally carved as a “message” to us, together with claims of pyramids and the ruins of a city close by.

All of this was the result of pareidolia rather than any work by ancient Martians – as evidenced by much higher resolutions of the mesa taken by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter in 2001, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2007 (above). Mars Express further demonstrated the effects of pareidolia in an image of Cydonia captured in 2006, which showed both the “face” mesa, and – around 50 km to the west – another which looks like a skull. While the latter mesa is also visible in some of the Viking era images, it is no way resembles a skull; the resemblance on the Mars Express image again being the result of natural influences – the fall of light, etc., – coupled with the human brain’s propensity to impose recognisable form and meaning to shapes where none actually exists.

Continue reading “Space Sunday: a 20-year Mars Express” →

As I looked at the Mars 2020 mission in my previous Space Sunday piece (see: Space Sunday: A year on Mars and the Polaris Programme), I thought it time to catch up on some of the most recent news about NASA’s other “big rover” working on Mars, Perseverance’s “older sister”, Curiosity, the rover of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, which will mark its tenth anniversary on Mars later in 2022.

Curiosity’s mission to Gale Crater, almost half a world away from Perseverance continued onwards despite the dearth of regular updates posted to the official blog (but them, updates on Perseverance have been far less voluminous than see during the first year of MSL operations on Mars, largely thanks to NASA opting to make greater use of social media tools like Twitter to hand out bite-size nibbles of updates.

However, one recent discovery that got some hearts all a-flutter recently was that of a curious formation Curiosity imaged on flank of “Mount Sharp”, the huge mound rising from the middle of the crater – and officially called Aeolis Mons. At first glance, it appears to show a petrified flower sprouting from the surface of the planet – and while it is most certainly not any such thing or even the first of these formation Curiosity had encountered – the raw images captured by Curiosity were released sans any indication of scale, getting some website and individuals a little over-excited.

The object is in fact a mineral structure called a diagenetic crystal cluster. Essentially they are a collection of crystals formed by mineral precipitating from water, undergoing diagenetic recombination in the process, creating this beautiful, but tiny three-dimensional structures.

In fact, the rover first encountered structures like this since around Sol 870 of the mission, as it explored the Pahrump Hills at the base of “Mount Sharp”. However, this particular structure is somewhat different, as the structures found at Pahrump were formed by sulphate (salt) crystals, leached out of receding waters as the lakes that once repeatedly filled Gale Crater finally vanished. This structure formed from salts and other minerals, and most likely formed inside a small rock over which water coming off the slopes of “Mount Sharp” once flowed, before it was left to the mercy of the Martian wind, which slowly eroded it over the aeons until only this delicate-looking but tough structure remained.

The other interesting point with the image is the manner in which it was created. For most its mission, Curiosity has captured images of objects and structures, stored them, and then transmitted them to Earth for post-processing. Here, however, MAHLI took around eight images of the object all from very slightly different angles. The images were then processed by the rover itself, using a software package referred to as the onboard focusing process, which allowed them to be combined and adjusted to produce a single frame of great depth and detail that could then be transmitted to Earth.

In fact, so detailed is the  structure – dubbed Blackthorn Salt – in the image, and such is the depth afforded by the picture Simeon Schmauss was able to produce a 3D model of it using Sketchfab, allowing us to see it really up close and from almost any angle – click the image below and see for yourself. However, when doing so, please note that the blurred and “draped” grey elements seen “hanging” from the structure’s arm / branches when looking at it from the side are not a part of the structure, but are artefacts of the Sketchfab rendering process, as the image from MAHLI doesn’t show what is directly below the arms / branches.

Curiosity itself continues to explore and climb “Mount Sharp”, attempting to make its way to higher slopes. Most recently, it has been making its way along a shallow and short “valley” that will hopefully provide access to the “Greenheugh Pediment” – a comparatively gentle slope, formed by water erosion and lying at the base of the mound’s steeper slopes. It is hoped that by crossing the Pediment will lead to a long valley (Gediz Vallis), which is hoped will provide a route further up “Mount Sharp”.

Since arriving on Mars in august 2012, the rover has travelled 27.3 kilometres and has gathered and analysed 34 rock samples and six soil samples, all of which indicate Gale Crater was once a warm, wet environment that may well once have harboured all the fundamentals for life to form.

Russia Stops Soyuz Launches out of Europe’s Spaceport, French Guiana

Following the sanctions imposed on Russia due to the invasion of Ukraine, Roscosmos has announced it is halting all cooperation with Europe with regards to Soyuz launches out of Europe’s Spaceport, French Guiana and withdrawing its 87 support personnel from the launch site.

The announcement will immediately impact the launch of two Galileo navigation satellites that had been scheduled for April aboard Soyuz, and potentially a follow-up launch of another pair of Galileo satellites due later in the year.

Also potentially impacted are Two ESA missions: the EarthCARE Earth science mission (developed in partnership with JAXA (Japanese space agency) and scheduled for February 2023, and the Euclid infrared space telescope (March 2023), together with the French government’s military CSO-3 reconnaissance satellite.

Soyuz is offered as a launch vehicle through French launch service provider Arianespace alongside of Ariane and Vega launch vehicles, with Arianespace, through its shareholding in Starsem, can also broker payload launches on Soyuz out of the Baikonaur spaceport, Kazakhstan. However, the future of Soyuz launches out of French Guiana has been the subject to debate for some time, given that Arainespace has been keen to move customers to their new Ariane 6 and Vega-C launchers, both of which are set to enter service from 2022.

No comment has been made by either the European Space Agency or Arianespace on the matter – but both are due to meet to discuss matters on Monday, February 28th. In terms of space cooperation, suspending Soyuz launches out of French Guiana is pretty much the only lever on space matters Russia can pull without adversely impacting their own operations; something that is in stark contrast to 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea.

At that time, the United States was reliant on Russia for both crewed launches to the ISS, and the supply of RD-180 motors used by the Atlas 5 vehicle. However, the US now has the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle for ISS missions, which should, in 2023, be joined by Boeing’s Starliner, while United Launch Alliance will be retiring the Atlas 5 (there are only 25 more launches on the books, and has sufficient RD-180 motors for many of those flights).

Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos also suggested that sanctions could impact Russian co-operation with the ISS, warning that without Russian support, the space station could fall into “uncontrolled descent from orbit and then falling onto the territory of the United States or Europe”.

The threat is based on the fact that Russian Progress resupply vehicles are periodically used to raise the space station’s orbit as drag with the tenuous atmosphere causes it to lower. However, the US and Japan both have the potential means to boost the orbit, whilst away from Rogozin’s tweets, NASA and Roscosmos alike have stated ISS operations continue to pretty much be “business as usual”.

Notably excluded from any threats – for the time being – is the European ExoMars mission, due to see the Rosalind Franklin rover and a Roscosmos-made lander launched to Mars from Baikonur in September atop a Proton-M rocket. This is a particularly critical launch, as the available window only lasts 12 days and if missed will mean another 26-month delay to the mission, which had initially been set to launch 2020.

Space Image of the Week¹

I am virtually sure it’s the most detailed ISS lunar transit to date 😊

I had to ride 250 km from home and find a remote place in the countryside between the blankets of fog, for this 1/2 second transit at 27000 km/h.

– Thierry Legault

The above comments refer to the image below, showing the International Space Station crossing between Earth and the Moon, captured by French amateur astronomer and astro-photographer Thierry Lagault, who travelled from Paris to Bourges in January 2022 in the hope that the winter weather would allow him to capture the space’s passage across the full Moon.

The image is being credited at one of the most detailed pictures of a ISS lunar transit every captured. It is so detailed, is it possible to see details of the primary solar arrays at either end of the station’s main truss structure, as can the structure of the station’s pressurised modules.

An enlarged version of the image, rotated through 90º so that south is to the right, reveals even more detail – the Russian modules of the ISS pointing towards the top of the image, and the US / international modules pointing down.

Continue reading “Space Sunday: minerals on Mars, space politics and more Dream Chaser” →