Parker Solar Probe: A surprising image of the night side of Venus, taken during a flyby of the planet last July, showing much more surface detail than expected. Way to overachieve, little space robot. (I went to the PSP launch back in August 2018, so I have a soft spot for this particular space robot.) Here’s the original image caption, since I don’t think I can summarize what’s going on here very well:
When flying past Venus in July 2020, Parker Solar Probe’s WISPR instrument, short for Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, detected a bright rim around the edge of the planet that may be nightglow — light emitted by oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere that recombine into molecules in the nightside. The prominent dark feature in the center of the image is Aphrodite Terra, the largest highland region on the Venusian surface. Bright streaks in WISPR, such as the ones seen here, are typically caused by a combination of charged particles — called cosmic rays — sunlight reflected by grains of space dust, and particles of material expelled from the spacecraft’s structures after impact with those dust grains. The number of streaks varies along the orbit or when the spacecraft is traveling at different speeds, and scientists are still in discussion about the specific origins of the streaks here. The dark spot appearing on the lower portion of Venus is an artifact from the WISPR instrument.
Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory/Guillermo Stenborg and Brendan Gallagher
Perseverance: Some early Navcam (navigation camera) images taken over the (Earth) weekend on sol 2. Originals are here: [1][2][3][4]. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Perseverance: Some EDL photos I picked out from the rover’s Raw Images page. They’d turned off posting new images over the weekend while putting the big EDL movie together, I guess to ensure today’s release was a big media event. People were mad about that on the internet for a couple of days, but it looks like it’s sorted out now and there are over 4000 images there already, though that includes a bunch they only have thumbnails of so far.
Detail pages for these photos are here: [1][2][3][4]. Image credit for all of these photos: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Perseverance: Amazing descent & landing video taken by the rover’s EDL cameras.
Perseverance: Here’s something cool we haven’t seen before, a photo from a camera on the rover’s descent stage, looking down at the rover.
Ah, sorry, that’s short for “hazard camera”. These are wide angle cameras the rover uses while driving, to help avoid driving into boulders, falling off cliffs, getting stuck in sand, etc. Perseverance has three stereo pairs of these: Main and backup pairs on the front end of the rover, and a single pair on the back end. As another example of this, you can look at all the latest hazcam images from the Curiosity rover here.
They use these cameras right after landing because most of the others are located on the rover’s camera mast – the thing that kind of looks like the rover’s head and neck – or its arm, and it’ll be a couple of days before they start using either of those.
Perseverance: Rear hazcam photo taken just after landing. Note that the clear lens caps are still on right now; picture quality should improve once those are removed.
Ok, so this little space Tumblr sort of went dormant in January 2019, on account of *gestures wildly at everything*. But NASA’s Perseverance rover lands on Mars tomorrow, with 23(!) cameras and two microphones on board, so I figured this would be a good time to dust it off for a while, at least. The video above is the traditional NASA media event they do before most major launches and landings. I usually skip the media questions part of these; doing that cuts the runtime to around 33 minutes instead of an hour, in case you’re in a hurry or whatever.
If the video isn’t detailed enough, here’s a little light reading to tide everyone over until tomorrow:
A paper about the rover’s many engineering cameras. The TL;DR there is that 1) landing videos will be from several angles this time: Looking down from the rover, looking up at the parachutes, looking down at the rover from the skycrane stage, etc. Assuming the landing goes well, obviously. And 2) navigation cameras are color this time, for the practical reason that you can’t tell how dusty your rover is with greyscale photos.
The rover’s eoPortal entry ended up being so detailed they split a couple of sub-pages off of it.
A paper on how you go about choosing a place to land on Mars. Which is not trivial when your project team includes hundreds of scientists across the globe, most of whom have important, strongly-held professional opinions about exactly where and where not to go. Along with hundreds of engineers trying to explain why various things the science folks want are either risky or impossible. TL;DR: There were meetings. Many, many, many meetings. (doc is 87 pages.)
Posted this on the wrong Tumblr yesterday because rusty at this
Perseverance: First hazcam photo from the surface of Mars. Woohoo!
Saturn’s largest moon is a high priority for exploration. Titan is an ocean world and the only moon in our solar system with a dense atmosphere, which supports an Earth-like hydrological cycle of methane clouds, rain, and liquid that flows across the surface to fill lakes and seas. The complex organic material on Titan’s surface makes it an ideal destination for studying the conditions and kinds of chemical interactions that occurred before life developed on Earth.
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory space scientist and Dragonfly Principal Investigator Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle describes the science and technology driving the mission, which could revolutionize how we explore the solar system.
Dragonfly is a rotorcraft lander – proposed to NASA’s New Frontiers Program – designed to take advantage of Titan’s environment to sample materials and determine surface composition in different settings. This bold mission concept includes the capability to explore diverse locations to characterize the habitability of Titan’s environment, to investigate how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed, and even to search for chemical signatures that could indicate water-based or hydrocarbon-based life.
