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By Paulo de Souza
NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
Paulo de Souza, CSIRO
This is again touched on Mars, thanks to NASA's InSight probe. This last mission will continue our exploration of many things still unknown on the planet.
Seen from Earth, the big red dot in the night sky has certainly caught the attention of humans since we began to contemplate the universe.
The first observations with telescopes gave us a much clearer picture of Mars, with ice-covered poles and different shades of red and black in the tropics.
NASA's InSight mission (inland exploration with the help of seismic surveys, geodesy and heat transport) should: Tell us more about the interior of Mars and the way the planet is formed.
To find out more:
Evidence of aliens? What to do research and reports on 'Oumuamua, our visitor of space
Beware of the Martians
Perhaps the most curious tale of Mars is that of the & u ua ua [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[ItalianastronomerGiovanniSchiaparelliin1877HeobservedadensenetworkoflinearstructuresonthesurfaceofMarsthathecalled"cbadi"inItalianmeaning"cbads"
NASA / Flammarion, The Planet Mars [19659005] But the term was misinterpreted by some English speakers as "cbads", this which implies that they were made by Martians.
Our love affair and our fear with Mars escalated to another level in 1938, when Orson Welles broadcast a show as complete as possible. actual adaptation of the clbadic HG Wells, The War of the Worlds.
The televised broadcast of the Martian invasion on Earth on Halloween night apparently led some US listeners to panic, while they were taking fiction for de facto ( a story told in the 19 75 film, The Night Panic in America).
HG Wells' 1898 novel has since inspired more than a few Hollywood movies, television series, and musical narratives, including Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, published in 2005.
Close-up of Mars
] The first close-up images of Mars came in 1965 with the Mariner 4 spacecraft flying over the planet, and then with the entry into orbit of Mariner 9 in 1971.
NASA
The two spacecraft show Mars as a cold, barren and desert world. Before these missions, we had seen Mars only with the help of telescopes and the question of whether the planet was habitable (or inhabited) was still open.
I still remember my childhood in front of a television show showing images of the Viking mission. landed two probes on Mars in 1976.
Instead of talking about our first successful spacecraft landing on Mars and sending us images and scientific data from the surface of another planet, the program has long talked about a device that looked like a human face on the surface of Mars and structures resembling pyramids.
NASA / JPL
These images certainly affected me and played a key role in my fascination with Mars and space in general.
Inheritance The first geochemical characterization from the surface and the detailed badysis of the atmospheric composition of Mars by Viking landers are fantastic.
The results of Viking are fantastic in many respects, but disappointing too, as they indicate a dry planet, covered with primary rocks turned into minerals if water was present.
NASA / JPL
Extracted from the surface showed no sign of life – no sign of small shrubs, some moss on rocks, or a green man smiling at the cameras.
We lost interest in Mars until it attacked us with meteorites. 19659036] Rocks of Mars [19659012] The rocks of the planets and the moon, as well as the meteors, contain chemical cues on their origin. It is therefore possible to know if a meteorite comes from our Moon, Mars or elsewhere.
A meteorite found in Antarctica (nicknamed ALH84001) is a meteorite that, according to scientists, comes from Mars.
NASA / JSC / Stanford University
Martian meteorites can be found on Earth because a large meteorite probably fell on Mars and, in doing so, ejected pieces. of the surface in space.
Some were big enough to enter our atmosphere and be found later. ALH84001 is mainly composed of carbonate: a mineral that needs water to form. So, indirectly, we can conclude that Mars was once wet.
To make it even more interesting, this Martian postcard has tiny structures that look like bacteria found on Earth.
NASA
Scientists are still wondering whether these structures are Martian fossils or not. But the discovery and badysis of ALH84001 brought us back to Mars. The time had come for us to counterattack.
Rover Missions on Mars
NASA then announced the first rover mission on Mars called Pathfinder. The microwave-sized rover that he wore, called Sojourner, landed on Mars in 1997.
The rover gave results quite similar to those found by Viking, indicating a very dry past and present. on Mars. This resulted in a considerable effort to obtain more images of the Martian surface of the orbiters and to choose where to land with future payloads.
After discussing more than 174 potential landing sites, scientists and engineers involved in Mars research discussed and two places to land on Mars with two large engines: Spirit and Opportunity.
After seven months of interplanetary travel, the vehicles landed in January 2004. The first results obtained by Spirit were similar to those of Viking and Mars Pathfinder. [19659007] The first innovative results were obtained with Opportunity with the discovery of jarosite and hematite: two minerals that require the formation of water and acids.
After far exceeding their manufacturing guarantee (three months), the rovers binoculars transformed our knowledge of Mars' past.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / Arizona State Univ.
Before our landing, the question of whether Mars was wet or not was asked. We now know that there are oceans on Mars as salty as the Dead Sea, as well as hot springs and freshwater streams.
More:
Discovery: a huge lake of liquid water located under the south pole of Mars [19659059] The water on Mars was not only present, but it existed under different forms. Mars had ideal conditions long enough for life to form and evolve. At least, we can say that Mars was habitable.
Spirit was active for six years and Opportunity, after 15 years, is still officially active.
Meanwhile, a lander named Phoenix lands in the green valley of Castitas Borealis on the northern Martian hemisphere, near the North Pole. The key finding of Phoenix was the presence of low concentrations of perchlorate, a potent bacterial killer salt.
NASA / JPL- Caltech / University of Arizona / Texas A & M University
Despite the impact of these missions on our understanding of Mars, there were a number of 39 instruments that we would like to use a lot and that we could not integrate into a rover.
A fully equipped Martian laboratory pushed scientists to propose a new mission: Mars Science Laboratory, with a much larger rover. It is equipped with laser beams capable of badyzing remote rocks, crushers and badyzers capable of providing a more detailed characterization of rocks, soil and Mars atmosphere.
Perchlorates were also found by the Rios Curiosity robot, the Mars Science Laboratory mission, and also on a Martian meteorite called EETA79001 that suggests a worldwide distribution of these bacteria-killing salts.
A new overview of Mars
The last 50 years have been rich in discoveries on the surface of Mars, but little is known about its subsoil. or inner core. This is where the InSight mission about to land on Mars comes in.
It is supported by NASA's Deep Space Network, including our Canberra station managed on behalf of NASA by CSIRO. The InSight team hopes to discover how deep inside Mars formed and how it would be similar to other rocky worlds such as Venus, Mercury, our Moon, our Earth or these exoplanets from other solar systems.
This is the first. mission that is designed to investigate deep within Mars. Insight has a seismometer and a temperature sensor in its payload.
To learn more:
Curious Kids: What are some of the challenges faced by traveling to Mars?
The future will be dominated by back-to-back missions: these spacecraft able to land on Mars and bring back samples to Earth (like what the Russians did on the Moon ) and through our efforts to allow astronauts to explore Mars on their own feet.
We do not have the technology yet to do this. happen. The CSIRO Space Industry Roadmap, which outlines some of the key technologies needed for future exploration and the unique contributions that Australian companies and universities could offer in this regard, is illustrated by an overview from the coming challenge
our solar system continues and I still face a lot of unanswered questions. Hopefully, InSight will provide some of these answers, but there is still much to learn about what is above us on Mars, the fourth planet of the sun.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Paulo de Souza, Scientific Manager – Cybernetics, CSIRO
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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