Life on Mars/ Everything discovered on mars so far.

 Life on Mars/ Everything discovered on mars so far.

Even the most die-hard Nasa stan has to admit the Martian surface is a pretty dry subject. But what if we told you Nasa’s new Perseverance rover has already made startling discoveries involving a harbour seal, the Wright Brothers airplane, and the merits of rigorous personal hygiene? Join us today as we prove how much this dead planet rocks and learn what has been found on Mars so far.

 

Nasa’s Mars 2020 mission is all about seeking traces of the microbial life scientists think might have existed some three billion years ago, when conditions on Mars were probably very similar to those on Earth. If successful, technical insights gained on this mission will also help pave the way for future manned adventures to the red planet.

 

 At the time of writing, the rover has been on the surface for less than a hundred days. But plenty has been discovered nevertheless. For one, vital proof-of-concept data was collected from the very landing process itself.

The mission’s all new Terrain-Relative Navigation used innovative on-board mapping, cross-referencing input from the craft’s onboard cameras, to help pinpoint the Perseverance landing zone to within a few metres. No small feat, when even a minor overshoot would have landed the rover in trouble, weeks of hard driving from where it needs to be.

 

 And this data will prove invaluable to future sorties. Three types of sensors – thermocouples, heat flux sensors, and pressure transducers – were deployed during entry and landing, collecting data on the temperatures and outside pressure, before and after that iconic parachute was deployed. One potentially key discovery was that every last thermocouple survived the landing intact, suggesting heat shield damage was minimal.

 

 And as the thermocouples are by no means mission-critical, it follows that future landers could maybe get by with thinner heat shields, saving all-important weight. Safely deposited on the Martian surface, Perseverance has since been doing exactly what we’d all be doing in its position – blasting rocks with it’s awesome space laser.

 

You’ll have seen in those photos sent back from the red planet, showing that the rover’s new Jezero Crater home is studded with light coloured rocks peering out from a landscape of russet-coloured soil.

 

Well, some of those rocks have been singled out for special attention by arguably the coolest man-made device ever sent into space, the Perseverance Super Cam. Super-Cam rocks up to its target stone and fires a tiny pinpoint laser, accurate up to seven metres away.

 

 When that powerful beam strokes the rock it sends up a brief, super-heated cloud of plasma, comprising free-floating ions and electrons. Perseverance’s on-board spectrograph reads this short plasma signature, and can identify the chemical composition of the rock.

 

Two particular rocks scientists have identified as worthy of the super cam treatment have been nicknamed Máaz and Yeehgo. They’re noth words from the Navajo dialect, by the way, coined by Aaron Yazzie, a Nasa engineer and proud Navajo nation member.

 

Anyway, it turns out that Máaz, which means‘Mars’ and ‘Yeehgo’, meaning ‘diligent’, are basalt-like in composition. So they’re igneous, as in they’ve come from a volcano, but crucially it seems they were moulded into their present shape amid some long-gone watery environment. Proof, if it were needed that Mars wasn’t always such a dry topic.

 

Another noteworthy rock Perseverance has pored over is nicknamed the harbour seal. Dark and smooth, Nasa believes it was sculpted into a sinuous likeness of that playful marine carnivore by the natural erosion of powerful north westerly winds.

 

This finding supports existing weather modelling of the Martian atmosphere. So counts as a valid and useful data point for researchers. As well as being darn cute. Super Cam’s super-duper laser doesn’t only furnish Perseverance with visual clues for the mineral composition of rocks.

 

Oh no. The very sound of it’s zapping sci-fi laseral so offers sonic clues to the makeup of stones. Indeed, one of the most ground breaking aspects of this mission so far is that it’s enabled anybody back home on earth to listen in on the martian soundscape, thanks to Perseverance’s on-board battery of microphones. 

In addition to the pew-pew of that laser, an audio track also dropped on Nasa’s sound cloud of the rover’s heavy metal wheels clanging and banging across the hard rocking Martian terrain. Not to mention the eerie ambient susurration of extra terrestrial winds, available to anybody who wants to hear it online.

 

Magic, really. Even more magical, Perseverance’s marvellous MOXIE unit has performed nothing short of alchemy, transforming base CO2 into life-giving oxygen. Moxie, which stands for Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment since you ask, is a gold-plated gizmo roughly the size of a car battery. It works by diffusing atmospheric CO2 through a non-porous disc of yttria-stabilized zirconia (or YSZ), sandwiched between two porous electrodes. And on April 20, it produced a modest but nonetheless historic five grams of oxygen.

 

 That works out at around 10 minutes worth of breathable air. MOXIE isn’t just the first instrument to produce oxygen on another world, paving the way for humanity to literally colonise the universe. It’s also the very first device of its kind to help future missions “live off the land,” harnessing elements of another world’s environment for fuel.

 

This is known by fancy engineering types as‘ in-situ resource utilization’. That basically means using local C02 to make oxygen, to then make rocket propellant. Which is a much bigger job than plain old breathable air. In order to create enough fuel to launch, say, four astronauts off the Martian surface, a future mission would require approximately15,000 pounds, or seven metric tons, of rocket fuel and 25 metric tons of oxygen.

 

 That’s obviously way too much to carry from earth. By contrast, those four astronauts would only need around one metric tonne between them for breathing. And Moxie has proved that can certainly bed one, by a larger descendent unit anyway. A breath taking historic first. Of course, the most eye-catching wheeze on this mission so far has been the successful deployment of NASA’s $80 million Ingenuity helicopter.

 

 Affectionately named ‘Ginny’ – if you think that’s cute, wait till you learn Perseverance is nicknamed ‘Percy’ – this diminutive chopper only last month cemented its place in the annals of science by performing the first powered flight on another world. And the very fact it survived the trip at all is a miracle.

 

“If Ingenuity would have crashed after the very first flight, we still would have met a couple huge milestones,”

one Nasa technician told fans on reddit.

“Surviving launch, charging while en route, surviving the entry, descent, and landing… Also, deploying from the rover and surviving the cold Martian night… these are no small tasks.”

 

Certainly, making an airworthy vehicle that’s dinky enough to be stowed on an interplanetary rover is an amazing achievement, and paves the way for future missions exploring areas unsuitable for rovers. As we speak, engineers are greedily collecting data from this one-of-a-kind thin-air copter to be used in the design or smart micro-drones, or drones that fly at high altitude, for applications here on earth. One particularly arresting scientific observation concerned the solar panels mounted near Ginny’s rotor blades.

 

 Engineers spent a long time figuring if there was some way of mitigating the inevitable coating of Mars dust the panels would attract, and lose power in doing so. Various solutions, like mini windscreen wipers, were pitched, and rejected on the basis they’d add too much complexity and weight. But when those dual rotors started spinning, technicians noticed Ginny’s solar output actually increased by a couple of percentage points. Engineers have speculated this is becauseair flow from the blades ‘self cleaned’ Ginny’s dusty solar panels. Hygiene matters, even on Mars. Ginny is also carrying a very special payload. A postage-stamp sized square of fabric that was once part of the Wright Brothers’ historic 1903 flying plane was carefully attached to the craft, a tribute to the real aviation OGs. It’s still up there now.

 

 Before we get carried away with how adorable that is, Mi Mi Aung, NASA’s Ingenuity program manager had this to say.

“We’ve been thinking so long about having our Wright Brothers moment,”

 she said, modestly.

 “We will take a moment to celebrate our success and then take a cue from Orville and Wilbur regarding what to do next.”

 

 So what did the Wright brothers do next?

“History shows they got back to work — learning as much as they could about their new aircraft.” Onwards and upwards then.

 What do you think? Are these breakthroughs worth the insane budget?

 Or will we only be satisfied when Ginny sends back a selfie with a little green man? Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to hit subscribe for more high flying tech content.