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Old July 30th, 2020 #1
Ray Allan
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Default Nuclear-powered dune buggy Perserverance and helicopter Ingenuity set to go to Mars

The countdown has started. Launch is scheduled for 7:50 a.m. EDT at the start of a 2-hour launch window.


Animation of Atlas 5 booster launch sequence and mission profile:

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Old July 30th, 2020 #2
T.Garrett
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Thumbs up itz on itz way





Quote:
The Perseverance rover and its Ingenuity helicopter are finally on the journey to Mars.

The spacecraft carrying the rover and helicopter successfully launched to Mars Thursday morning aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 541 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 7:50 a.m. ET.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/30/world...scn/index.html
 
Old February 17th, 2021 #3
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Default 'Seven Minutes of Terror'

Quote:
After nearly 300 million miles (470 million km), NASA's Perseverance rover completes its journey to Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. But to reach the surface of the Red Planet, it has to survive the harrowing final phase known as Entry, Descent and Landing.

The best (and worst) Mars landings of all time

https://www.space.com/10930-mars-lan...ploration.html
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Old February 18th, 2021 #4
Hugo Böse
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It landed safely.
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Old February 18th, 2021 #5
Ray Allan
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hugo Böse View Post
It landed safely.
NASA, Perseverance in epicly successful entry, descent, and landing at Jezero Crater, Mars

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2021...jezero-crater/

Raw images are online:

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/
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Old February 19th, 2021 #6
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Mars2020 rover 'Perseverance' descending on its parachute just prior to landing in Jezero Crater photographed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera as it passed overhead, February 18, 2021.



View of the rover taken from the Skycrane descent stage as the rover dangled on cables just before landing.



First high-resolution color photo of the landing site from Perseverance's hazard camera (Hazcam). One of the rover's wheels is visible in the lower left in shadow.

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Old February 23rd, 2021 #7
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Entry, Descent and Landing--Parachute deploy, heat shield jettison, backshell separation and skycrane descent.


360 degree panorama of landing site.

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Old February 23rd, 2021 #8
Ray Allan
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Scott Manley's video of the landing.

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Old February 23rd, 2021 #9
Ryan LiarKiIIer
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here is the first video NASA supposedly released, that has 17 million views.

https://twitter.com/YourAnonOne/stat...90899361677312

til they declared it was fake.


https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmac...h=6f5de9bb2c23

Quote:
What NASA did not release over the weekend, however, was a video panning across the surface of Mars accompanied by the sounds of Martian wind.

That viral clip, which has been seen tens of millions of times on Twitter alone, is a misleading doctoring of images taken years ago by Curiosity, which has been roaming around another part of Mars.

While the images are actually from Mars, they’re panoramic stills stitched together to look as though the rover is panning around itself. The sound of wind added to the images is completely fake, as Curiosity is not equipped with microphones.

I mean, I'm sorry i know its crazy to think everything NASA does is bullshit, especially when they always have truthworthy jew adminstrators.

I mean I'm sure the faggots in power can manage to hire some legit scientists to carry out things like this, but you see how much the faggots push this lately which just makes me suspicious, faggots and jews NEVER push something like that unless it's some kind of hoax.

It's just when you see the control room, and every single person there is wearing a fucking mask to protect them from imaginary jew COVID it tends to make me have questions.

Also, NASA pushes that global warming bullshit like a cult.

but yeah yeah, I'm sure it's real and everything but who fuckin cares, bunch of scientists working for faggots and jews managed to land on Mars, so what, fuck them.

they gonna ruin that planet too?


One thing for sure, even if they did land a rover there and it really works, this Mars exploration thing is going to just be another bottomless black hole or Jews to suck your life out of you through expenditures.

They staged this whole 'Star Wars' thing in the 80's, 90's, spend trillions and nobody ever asked, where the fuck is it? Where is the proof ANY of this was real??

How could they spend trillions of dollars on Strategic Defense Initiative and there's nothing actually there?

Russia pretended it was super real and they pretended to beg US no,no, NOT STAR WARS omergawd.

Last edited by Ryan LiarKiIIer; February 23rd, 2021 at 10:16 PM.
 
Old February 24th, 2021 #10
Ray Allan
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In the video, Scott Manley mentioned the Skycrane descent stage reminded him of the Dropship from the 1986 science-fiction film Aliens. It reminds me a little of the Eagle transporters from Space: 1999. And after it deposits the rover on the surface, the descent stage flies off and crashes and blows up exactly like the Eagles on the show usually did.

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Last edited by Ray Allan; February 25th, 2021 at 07:32 PM.
 
Old February 27th, 2021 #11
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Default Perseverance’s eyes see a different Mars

Long piece from WIRED explaining why (from the layman's point of view) there won't be much to see. Maybe they should have just borrowed the cameras they took to the moon landings.

The rover is studded with a couple dozen cameras—25, if you count the two on the drone helicopter. Most of them help the vehicle drive safely. A few peer closely and intensely at ancient Martian rocks and sands, hunting for signs that something once lived there. Some of the cameras see colors and textures almost exactly the way the people who built them do. But they also see more. And less. The rover’s cameras imagine colors beyond the ones that human eyes and brains can come up with. And yet human brains still have to make sense of the pictures the cameras send home.

To find hints of life, you have to go to a place that was once likely livable. In this case, that’s Jezero crater. Three or four billion years ago, it was a shallow lake with sediments streaming down its walls. Today, those are cliffs 150 feet tall, striated and multicolored by those sediments spreading and drying across the ancient delta.

Those colors are a geological infographic. They represent time, laid down in layers, stratum after stratum, epoch after epoch. And they represent chemistry. NASA scientists pointing cameras at them—the right kind of cameras—will be able to tell what minerals they’re looking at and maybe whether wee Martian beasties once called those sediments home. “If there are sedimentary rocks on Mars that preserve evidence of any ancient biosphere, this is where we’re going to find them,” says Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and the principal investigator on one of the rover’s sets of eyes. “This is where they should be.”


continued:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021...ifferent-mars/
 
Old March 1st, 2021 #12
Ray Allan
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In an addendum to my above posts, "skycrane" is the actual maneuver, lowering the rover to the surface on cables. The vehicle itself is called the descent stage, like the Apollo Lunar Module's. When I think of "Skycrane," the Sikorsky S-64/CH-54 helicopter the army flew comes to mind.
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Old March 6th, 2021 #13
Ray Allan
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Default Percy's first test drive on Mars



Shot from one of the Perseverance rover's Hazcams showing wheel tracks made from first movement and turn-around. The areas of surface dust disturbed by the descent stage's rockets during the Feb. 18, 2021 landing can be seen as bright spots in upper right and center left above the wheel.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/n...for-first-time
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Old March 7th, 2021 #14
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Some additional images.

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Old March 11th, 2021 #15
Donncha Dennis
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Im wondering what kind of retrieval system they have for the drone, considering there probably is static electricity and other issues that could down the drone, what is the drones power system? Anyone have any idea on what sort of cameras are installed in the machines?
 
Old March 11th, 2021 #16
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Donncha Dennis View Post
Anyone have any idea on what sort of cameras are installed in the machines?
https://vnnforum.com/showpost.php?p=...0&postcount=11

The rover is studded with a couple dozen cameras—25, if you count the two on the drone helicopter. Most of them help the vehicle drive safely. A few peer closely and intensely at ancient Martian rocks and sands, hunting for signs that something once lived there. Some of the cameras see colors and textures almost exactly the way the people who built them do. But they also see more. And less. The rover’s cameras imagine colors beyond the ones that human eyes and brains can come up with. And yet human brains still have to make sense of the pictures the cameras send home.

To find hints of life, you have to go to a place that was once likely livable. In this case, that’s Jezero crater. Three or four billion years ago, it was a shallow lake with sediments streaming down its walls. Today, those are cliffs 150 feet tall, striated and multicolored by those sediments spreading and drying across the ancient delta.

Those colors are a geological infographic. They represent time, laid down in layers, stratum after stratum, epoch after epoch. And they represent chemistry. NASA scientists pointing cameras at them—the right kind of cameras—will be able to tell what minerals they’re looking at and maybe whether wee Martian beasties once called those sediments home. “If there are sedimentary rocks on Mars that preserve evidence of any ancient biosphere, this is where we’re going to find them,” says Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and the principal investigator on one of the rover’s sets of eyes. “This is where they should be.”

That’s what they’re looking for. But that’s not what they’ll see. Because some of the most interesting colors in that real-life, 50-meter infographic are invisible. At least they would be to you and me, on Earth. Colors are what happens when light bounces off or around or through something and then hits an eye. But the light on Mars is a little different than the light on Earth. And Perseverance’s eyes can see light we humans can’t—light made of reflected X-rays or infrared or ultraviolet. The physics are the same; the perception isn’t.

Mastcam-Z
Bell’s team runs Mastcam-Z, a set of superscience binoculars mounted atop Perseverance’s tower. (The Z is for zoom.) “We developed Mastcam-Z for a rover going to a spot on Mars that hadn’t been selected yet, so we had to design it with all the possibilities in mind—the optimal set of eyes to capture the geology of any spot on Mars,” says Melissa Rice, a planetary scientist at Western Washington University and co-investigator on Mastcam-Z.

Close-up, Mastcam-Z can see details about 1 millimeter across; from 100 meters out, it’ll pick up a feature just 4 centimeters wide. That’s better than you and me. It also sees color better—or, rather, “multispectrally,” capturing the broadband visible spectrum that human people are used to, but also about a dozen narrow-band not-quite-colors. (Rice co-wrote a very good geek-out about all this stuff.)

Its two cameras pull off this feat of supervision with standard, off-the-shelf image sensors made by Kodak, charge-coupled devices like the ones in your phone. The filters make them special. Ahead of the CCD is a layer of pixels that pick up red, green, and blue. Imagine a foursquare grid—the top squares are blue and green, the bottom green and red. Now spread that out into a repeating mosaic. That’s called a Bayer pattern, a silicon version of the three color-sensing photoreceptors in your eye.



Mars and Earth bathe in the same sunlight—the same hodgepodge of light at every wavelength. But on Mars there’s less of it, because the planet is farther out. And while Earth has a thick atmosphere full of water vapor to reflect and refract all that light, Mars has only a little atmosphere, and it’s full of reddish dust.

On Mars, that means a lot of red and brown. But seeing them on Mars adds a whole other perceptual filter. “We talk about showing an approximate true-color image, essentially close to a raw color image that we take with very minimal processing. That’s one version of what Mars would look like to a human eye,” Rice says. “But the human eye evolved to see landscapes under Earth illumination. If we want to reproduce what Mars would look like to a human eye, we should be simulating Earth illumination conditions onto those Martian landscapes.”

So on the one hand, the image processing team working on Perseverance’s raw feed can adjust Mars colors to Earthish colors. Or the team can simulate the spectra of Martian light hitting objects on Mars. That’d look a little different. No less true, but maybe more like what a human on Mars would actually see. (There’s no telling what a Martian would see, because if it had eyes, those eyes would have evolved to see color under that sky, and their brains would be, well, alien.)


NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its left Mastcam-Z camera.


But Rice kind of doesn’t care about any of that. “For me, the outcome isn’t even visual, in a sense. The outcome I’m interested in is quantitative,” she says. Rice is looking for how much light at a specific wavelength gets reflected or absorbed by the stuff in the rocks. That “reflectance value” can tell scientists exactly what they’re looking at. The Bayer filter is transparent to light with a wavelength higher than 840 nanometers—which is to say, infrared. In front of that layer is a wheel with another set of filters; block out the colors of light visible to humans and you’ve got an infrared camera. Pick narrower sets of wavelengths and you can identify and distinguish specific kinds of rocks by how they reflect different wavelengths of infrared light.

Before Perseverance left, the members of the Mastcam-Z team had to learn exactly how the cameras saw those differences. They created a “Geo Board,” a design brainstorm meeting’s worth of reference color swatches and also actual square slices of rocks. “We assembled it with rock slabs of all different types of material we knew to be on Mars, things we hoped to find on Mars,” Rice says. For example? On that board were pieces of the minerals basanite and gypsum. “In the normal color image they both just look like bright-white rocks,” Rice says. Both are mostly calcium and sulfur, but gypsum has more water molecules mixed in, and water reflects more at some wavelengths of IR than others. “When we make a false-color image using longer Mastcam-Z wavelengths, it becomes clear as day which is which,” Rice says.

For all its multispectral multitasking, Mastcam-Z does have its limits. Its resolution is great for textures—more on that in a bit—but its field of view is only about 15 degrees wide, and its draggy upload bandwidth would make your home router giggle. For all the wonderful images Perseverance is about to send home, it really doesn’t see all that much. At least, not all at once. All those vistas get bottlenecked by technology and distance. “Dude, our job is triage,” Bell says. “We’re using color as a proxy for, ‘Hey, that’s interesting. Maybe there’s something going on chemically there, maybe there’s some different mineral there, some different texture.’ Color is a proxy for something else.”

The narrowness of the rover’s field of view means that scientists by definition can’t see all they might hope. Bell and his team got a taste of those limits during their simulations of the camera-and-robot experience in the Southern California desert. “As a kind of joke, but also as an object lesson, my colleagues in one of those field tests once put a dinosaur bone right along the rover path,” he says. “We drove right past it.”

For identifying actual elements—and, more importantly, figuring out if they might have once harbored life—you need even more colors. Some of those colors are even more invisible. That’s where X-ray spectroscopy comes in.
Specifically, the team running one of the sensors on Perseverance’s arm—the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, or PIXL—is looking to combine the elemental recipe for minerals with fine-grained textures. That’s how you find stromatolites, sediment layers with teeny tiny domes and cones that can only come from mats of living microbes. Stromatolites on Earth provide some of the evidence of the earliest living things here; Perseverance’s scientists hope they’ll do the same on Mars.

The PIXL team’s leader, an astrobiologist and field geologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory named Abigail Allwood, has done this before. She used that technology in conjunction with high-resolution pictures of sediments to find signs of the earliest known life on Earth in Australia—and to determine that similar sediments in Greenland weren’t evidence of ancient life there. It’s not easy to do in Greenland; it’ll be even tougher on Mars.



X-rays are part of the same electromagnetic spectrum as the light that humans see but at a much lower wavelength—even more ultra than ultraviolet. It’s ionizing radiation, only a color if you’re Kryptonian. X-rays cause different kinds of atoms to fluoresce, to give off light, in characteristic ways. “We create the X-rays to bathe the rocks in, and then detect that signal to study the elemental chemistry,” Allwood says. And PIXL and the arm also have a bright-white flashlight on the end. “The illumination on the front started out as just a way of making the rocks easier to see, to tie the chemistry to visible textures, which hasn’t been done before on Mars,” Allwood says.

The color was a little vexing at first; heat and cold affected the bulbs. “We initially tried white LEDs, but with temperature changes it wasn’t producing the same shade of white,” she says. “So the guys in Denmark who supplied us with the camera, they provided us with colored LEDs.” Those were red, green, and blue—and ultraviolet. That combination of colors added together to make a better and more consistent white light.

That combination might be able to find Martian stromatolites. After locating likely targets—perhaps thanks to Mastcam-Z pans across the crater—the rover will sidle up and extend its arm, and PIXL will start pinging. The tiniest features, grains and veins, can say whether the rock is igneous or sedimentary, melted together like stew or layered like a sandwich. Colors of layers on top of other features will give a clue about the age of each. Ideally, the map of visible colors and textures will line up with the invisible, numbers-only map that the X-ray results generate. When the right structures line up with the right minerals, Allwood can tell whether she’s got Australia-type life signs or a Greenland-type bust. “What we’ve found that’s really interesting with PIXL is that it shows you stuff you don’t see, through the chemistry,” Allwood says. “That would be the key.”

“Hyperspectral datacube”
Allwood is hoping PIXL’s tiny scans will yield huge results—an inferred map of 6,000 individual points on the instrument’s postage stamp-sized field of view, with multiple spectral results for each. She calls this a “hyperspectral datacube.”

Of course, Perseverance has other cameras and instruments, other scanners looking for other hints of meaning in bits of rock and regolith. Adjacent to PIXL is a device that looks at rocks a whole other way, shooting a laser at them to vibrate their molecules—that’s Raman spectroscopy. The data Perseverance collects will be hyperspectral, but also multifaceted—almost philosophically so. That’s what happens when you send a robot to another planet. A human mission or rocks sent home via sample return would produce the best, ground truth data, as one exoplanet researcher told me. Somewhat behind that are X-ray and Raman spectroscopy, then rover cameras, then orbiter cameras. And of course all those things are working together on Mars.

“Finding life on Mars will not be, ‘Such and such an instrument sees something.’ It’ll be, ‘All the instruments saw this, that, and the other thing, and the interpretation makes life reasonable,” Allwood says. “There’s no smoking gun. It’s a complicated tapestry.” And like a good tapestry, the full image only emerges from a warp and weft of color, carefully threaded together.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021...ifferent-mars/

 
Old March 15th, 2021 #17
Ray Allan
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Default Pan Drop

Sol 22 (March 13, 2021)--Perseverance drops the pan covering the underside sample collecting system.


There is a lot of debris littering the immediate area of the landing site in Jezero Crater. Same with the other probes that have landed or crashed on Mars since the 1970s. The parachute, heat shield and descent stage are nearby (the same at Curiosity's landing site in Gale Crater), and now this pan cover. Who is going to come and clean all this up in about 50 years? I'm assuming they will all become historical sites just like the Apollo and other sites on the Moon.
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Old March 18th, 2021 #18
Ray Allan
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Sounds of Percy driving on Mars.


Something that would have been more interesting than the mechanical sounds of the rover would be broadcasting a recording of a human voice on Mars, perhaps Carl Sagan or somebody. No Martians there to hear it of course, it would be for Earthlings' benefit to know there was the sound of a human voice on Mars.
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Old March 22nd, 2021 #19
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Default Ingenuity's debris cover dropped in preparation for flight

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Old March 22nd, 2021 #20
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dawn Cannon View Post
https://vnnforum.com/showpost.php?p=...0&postcount=11

The rover is studded with a couple dozen cameras—25, if you count the two on the drone helicopter. Most of them help the vehicle drive safely. A few peer closely and intensely at ancient Martian rocks and sands, hunting for signs that something once lived there. Some of the cameras see colors and textures almost exactly the way the people who built them do. But they also see more. And less. The rover’s cameras imagine colors beyond the ones that human eyes and brains can come up with. And yet human brains still have to make sense of the pictures the cameras send home.

To find hints of life, you have to go to a place that was once likely livable. In this case, that’s Jezero crater. Three or four billion years ago, it was a shallow lake with sediments streaming down its walls. Today, those are cliffs 150 feet tall, striated and multicolored by those sediments spreading and drying across the ancient delta.

Those colors are a geological infographic. They represent time, laid down in layers, stratum after stratum, epoch after epoch. And they represent chemistry. NASA scientists pointing cameras at them—the right kind of cameras—will be able to tell what minerals they’re looking at and maybe whether wee Martian beasties once called those sediments home. “If there are sedimentary rocks on Mars that preserve evidence of any ancient biosphere, this is where we’re going to find them,” says Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and the principal investigator on one of the rover’s sets of eyes. “This is where they should be.”

That’s what they’re looking for. But that’s not what they’ll see. Because some of the most interesting colors in that real-life, 50-meter infographic are invisible. At least they would be to you and me, on Earth. Colors are what happens when light bounces off or around or through something and then hits an eye. But the light on Mars is a little different than the light on Earth. And Perseverance’s eyes can see light we humans can’t—light made of reflected X-rays or infrared or ultraviolet. The physics are the same; the perception isn’t.

Mastcam-Z
Bell’s team runs Mastcam-Z, a set of superscience binoculars mounted atop Perseverance’s tower. (The Z is for zoom.) “We developed Mastcam-Z for a rover going to a spot on Mars that hadn’t been selected yet, so we had to design it with all the possibilities in mind—the optimal set of eyes to capture the geology of any spot on Mars,” says Melissa Rice, a planetary scientist at Western Washington University and co-investigator on Mastcam-Z.

Close-up, Mastcam-Z can see details about 1 millimeter across; from 100 meters out, it’ll pick up a feature just 4 centimeters wide. That’s better than you and me. It also sees color better—or, rather, “multispectrally,” capturing the broadband visible spectrum that human people are used to, but also about a dozen narrow-band not-quite-colors. (Rice co-wrote a very good geek-out about all this stuff.)

Its two cameras pull off this feat of supervision with standard, off-the-shelf image sensors made by Kodak, charge-coupled devices like the ones in your phone. The filters make them special. Ahead of the CCD is a layer of pixels that pick up red, green, and blue. Imagine a foursquare grid—the top squares are blue and green, the bottom green and red. Now spread that out into a repeating mosaic. That’s called a Bayer pattern, a silicon version of the three color-sensing photoreceptors in your eye.



Mars and Earth bathe in the same sunlight—the same hodgepodge of light at every wavelength. But on Mars there’s less of it, because the planet is farther out. And while Earth has a thick atmosphere full of water vapor to reflect and refract all that light, Mars has only a little atmosphere, and it’s full of reddish dust.

On Mars, that means a lot of red and brown. But seeing them on Mars adds a whole other perceptual filter. “We talk about showing an approximate true-color image, essentially close to a raw color image that we take with very minimal processing. That’s one version of what Mars would look like to a human eye,” Rice says. “But the human eye evolved to see landscapes under Earth illumination. If we want to reproduce what Mars would look like to a human eye, we should be simulating Earth illumination conditions onto those Martian landscapes.”

So on the one hand, the image processing team working on Perseverance’s raw feed can adjust Mars colors to Earthish colors. Or the team can simulate the spectra of Martian light hitting objects on Mars. That’d look a little different. No less true, but maybe more like what a human on Mars would actually see. (There’s no telling what a Martian would see, because if it had eyes, those eyes would have evolved to see color under that sky, and their brains would be, well, alien.)


NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its left Mastcam-Z camera.


But Rice kind of doesn’t care about any of that. “For me, the outcome isn’t even visual, in a sense. The outcome I’m interested in is quantitative,” she says. Rice is looking for how much light at a specific wavelength gets reflected or absorbed by the stuff in the rocks. That “reflectance value” can tell scientists exactly what they’re looking at. The Bayer filter is transparent to light with a wavelength higher than 840 nanometers—which is to say, infrared. In front of that layer is a wheel with another set of filters; block out the colors of light visible to humans and you’ve got an infrared camera. Pick narrower sets of wavelengths and you can identify and distinguish specific kinds of rocks by how they reflect different wavelengths of infrared light.

Before Perseverance left, the members of the Mastcam-Z team had to learn exactly how the cameras saw those differences. They created a “Geo Board,” a design brainstorm meeting’s worth of reference color swatches and also actual square slices of rocks. “We assembled it with rock slabs of all different types of material we knew to be on Mars, things we hoped to find on Mars,” Rice says. For example? On that board were pieces of the minerals basanite and gypsum. “In the normal color image they both just look like bright-white rocks,” Rice says. Both are mostly calcium and sulfur, but gypsum has more water molecules mixed in, and water reflects more at some wavelengths of IR than others. “When we make a false-color image using longer Mastcam-Z wavelengths, it becomes clear as day which is which,” Rice says.

For all its multispectral multitasking, Mastcam-Z does have its limits. Its resolution is great for textures—more on that in a bit—but its field of view is only about 15 degrees wide, and its draggy upload bandwidth would make your home router giggle. For all the wonderful images Perseverance is about to send home, it really doesn’t see all that much. At least, not all at once. All those vistas get bottlenecked by technology and distance. “Dude, our job is triage,” Bell says. “We’re using color as a proxy for, ‘Hey, that’s interesting. Maybe there’s something going on chemically there, maybe there’s some different mineral there, some different texture.’ Color is a proxy for something else.”

The narrowness of the rover’s field of view means that scientists by definition can’t see all they might hope. Bell and his team got a taste of those limits during their simulations of the camera-and-robot experience in the Southern California desert. “As a kind of joke, but also as an object lesson, my colleagues in one of those field tests once put a dinosaur bone right along the rover path,” he says. “We drove right past it.”

For identifying actual elements—and, more importantly, figuring out if they might have once harbored life—you need even more colors. Some of those colors are even more invisible. That’s where X-ray spectroscopy comes in.
Specifically, the team running one of the sensors on Perseverance’s arm—the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, or PIXL—is looking to combine the elemental recipe for minerals with fine-grained textures. That’s how you find stromatolites, sediment layers with teeny tiny domes and cones that can only come from mats of living microbes. Stromatolites on Earth provide some of the evidence of the earliest living things here; Perseverance’s scientists hope they’ll do the same on Mars.

The PIXL team’s leader, an astrobiologist and field geologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory named Abigail Allwood, has done this before. She used that technology in conjunction with high-resolution pictures of sediments to find signs of the earliest known life on Earth in Australia—and to determine that similar sediments in Greenland weren’t evidence of ancient life there. It’s not easy to do in Greenland; it’ll be even tougher on Mars.



X-rays are part of the same electromagnetic spectrum as the light that humans see but at a much lower wavelength—even more ultra than ultraviolet. It’s ionizing radiation, only a color if you’re Kryptonian. X-rays cause different kinds of atoms to fluoresce, to give off light, in characteristic ways. “We create the X-rays to bathe the rocks in, and then detect that signal to study the elemental chemistry,” Allwood says. And PIXL and the arm also have a bright-white flashlight on the end. “The illumination on the front started out as just a way of making the rocks easier to see, to tie the chemistry to visible textures, which hasn’t been done before on Mars,” Allwood says.

The color was a little vexing at first; heat and cold affected the bulbs. “We initially tried white LEDs, but with temperature changes it wasn’t producing the same shade of white,” she says. “So the guys in Denmark who supplied us with the camera, they provided us with colored LEDs.” Those were red, green, and blue—and ultraviolet. That combination of colors added together to make a better and more consistent white light.

That combination might be able to find Martian stromatolites. After locating likely targets—perhaps thanks to Mastcam-Z pans across the crater—the rover will sidle up and extend its arm, and PIXL will start pinging. The tiniest features, grains and veins, can say whether the rock is igneous or sedimentary, melted together like stew or layered like a sandwich. Colors of layers on top of other features will give a clue about the age of each. Ideally, the map of visible colors and textures will line up with the invisible, numbers-only map that the X-ray results generate. When the right structures line up with the right minerals, Allwood can tell whether she’s got Australia-type life signs or a Greenland-type bust. “What we’ve found that’s really interesting with PIXL is that it shows you stuff you don’t see, through the chemistry,” Allwood says. “That would be the key.”

“Hyperspectral datacube”
Allwood is hoping PIXL’s tiny scans will yield huge results—an inferred map of 6,000 individual points on the instrument’s postage stamp-sized field of view, with multiple spectral results for each. She calls this a “hyperspectral datacube.”

Of course, Perseverance has other cameras and instruments, other scanners looking for other hints of meaning in bits of rock and regolith. Adjacent to PIXL is a device that looks at rocks a whole other way, shooting a laser at them to vibrate their molecules—that’s Raman spectroscopy. The data Perseverance collects will be hyperspectral, but also multifaceted—almost philosophically so. That’s what happens when you send a robot to another planet. A human mission or rocks sent home via sample return would produce the best, ground truth data, as one exoplanet researcher told me. Somewhat behind that are X-ray and Raman spectroscopy, then rover cameras, then orbiter cameras. And of course all those things are working together on Mars.

“Finding life on Mars will not be, ‘Such and such an instrument sees something.’ It’ll be, ‘All the instruments saw this, that, and the other thing, and the interpretation makes life reasonable,” Allwood says. “There’s no smoking gun. It’s a complicated tapestry.” And like a good tapestry, the full image only emerges from a warp and weft of color, carefully threaded together.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021...ifferent-mars/

Perseverance likely "saw" a great deal of interesting things on the surface of Mars.

Not that the Jewish-ran ZOG Propaganda Agency known as NASA will ever allow any of us to view it...


Last edited by Kosher Clown; March 22nd, 2021 at 09:08 AM.
 
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