In , however, the team determined the methane spike was not a seasonal event. There are smaller background changes in methane, however, that could be linked to the seasons. Curiosity also made the first definitive identification of organics on Mars, as announced in December Organics are considered life's building blocks, but do not necessarily point to the existence of life as they can also be created through chemical reactions.
Initial results released at the Lunar and Planetary Science conference in showed scientists found complex organic molecules in Martian samples stored inside the Curiosity rover, but using an unexpected method. In , results based on Curiosity's work added more evidence that life was possible on Mars. One study described the discovery of more organic molecules in 3. The seasonal changes could mean that the gas is produced from living organisms, but there's no definitive proof of that yet.
Besides hunting for habitability, Curiosity has other instruments on board that are designed to learn more about the environment surrounding it.
Among those goals is to have a continuous record of weather and radiation observations to determine how suitable the site would be for an eventual human mission. Curiosity's Radiation Assessment Detector runs for 15 minutes every hour to measure a swath of radiation on the ground and in the atmosphere.
Scientists in particular are interested in measuring "secondary rays" or radiation that can generate lower-energy particles after it hits the gas molecules in the atmosphere. Gamma-rays or neutrons generated by this process can cause a risk to humans. Additionally, an ultraviolet sensor stuck on Curiosity's deck tracks radiation continuously.
A mission with days flying to Mars, days on the surface and days heading back to Earth would create a dose of 1. The total lifetime limit for European Space Agency astronauts is 1 sievert, which is associated with a 5-percent increase in fatal cancer risk over a person's lifetime. The Rover Environmental Monitoring Station measures the wind's speed and chart its direction, as well as determining temperature and humidity in the surrounding air.
By , scientists were able to see long-term trends in atmospheric pressure and air humidity. Some of these changes occur when the winter carbon-dioxide polar caps melt in the spring, dumping huge amounts of moisture into the air. In early , Curiosity sent back pictures of crystals that could have formed from ancient lakes on Mars.
There are multiple hypotheses for these features, but one possibility is they formed after salts concentrated in an evaporating water lake. Some Internet rumors speculated the features were actually signs of burrowing life , but NASA quickly discounted that hypothesis based on their linear angles — a feature that is very similar to crystalline growth.
Vapors from a "wet chemistry" experiment filled with a fluid called MTBSTFA N-methyl-N-tert-butyldimethylsilyl-trifluoroacetamide contaminated a gas-sniffing analysis instrument shortly after Curiosity landed. Since the scientists knew the collected samples were already reacting with the vapor, they eventually derived a way to seek and preserve the organics after extracting, collecting and analyzing the vapor.
Curiosity had a dangerous computer glitch just six months after landing that put the rover within only an hour of losing contact with Earth forever, NASA revealed in Another brief glitch in briefly stopped science work, but the rover quickly resumed its mission. If you have an ACS member number, please enter it here so we can link this account to your membership.
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Three rovers will launch to Mars in aiming for different landing sites. It will also test an instrument that could aid future exploration by humans on the Red Planet. Mars reaches its closest point to Earth every 26 months. The first mission aims to, for the first time, collect martian samples that will one day be returned to Earth. Like most Mars rovers, all three carry instruments that can analyze molecules in rocks and soil to look for evidence that life existed—or exists—on the Red Planet.
If all three rovers land successfully and are able to return data to scientists on Earth, they will be the 9th, 10th, and 11th spacecraft to do so.
Related: What can we learn from Venus? The trip to Mars takes about 7—10 months. While the launch and the long journey pose their own dangers—several past missions have failed during these stages—the real trick to putting a rover on Mars is sticking the landing. Although the atmosphere is thin, it still contains air molecules that cause friction.
A heat shield protects the spacecraft as it plunges through these molecules toward the surface. And a specially designed parachute or parachutes deploy to slow the spacecraft to hundreds of kilometers per hour as it continues to plummet toward Mars. Rockets then fire to slow the craft further.
Contact us to opt out anytime. All of this takes about 7 minutes. The time delay also means a craft has to find its way to the surface without human control.
The Rosalind Franklin rover should then land softly on shock-absorbing legs. About 20 m from the surface, the lander will lower the rover softly onto the ground on cables, then detach and fly away to crash-land at a safe distance.
The NASA spacecraft will use new technology to pick a safe landing site. The three rovers scheduled to explore Mars in will carry some similar instruments and some unique ones. Plate tectonics, volcanoes, and liquid water have shaped and reshaped our planet over its history. Mars is much less active, but scientists are confident it had some or all of those features in its past. Those types of ancient geological activity, combined with meteorite impacts, have produced a diversity of features on the Red Planet, including mountains, lake beds, river valleys, and deltas.
This gives the rovers plenty to explore. Arvidson, a geologist at Washington University in St. The next best thing, he says, is to pick diverse landing sites for a few missions to explore. Spirit found evidence of a hot spring or volcanic vent in a crater on Mars. Opportunity found minerals that form where water flows on an open plain. James Cameron is a member of the camera team. Can they pull it off? The project has already hit some major snags.
A novel lubricant-free motor that NASA wanted to use failed during tests, forcing the engineers to go back to traditional designs. It had to be redesigned and retested, delaying its delivery—and leaving project managers wringing their hands.
But as before, the engineers march forward. Launch is scheduled for late November or early December. Why go to Mars? There are many reasons, JPL engineers will tell you.
But some on the team have personal motivations. Pete Theisinger says he once received a letter from a man in Ohio. The man wrote that one day he was watching TV with his young son, and they saw Spirit and Opportunity and the images their cameras had captured of the Martian landscape. He was building a rover out of Lego blocks. Craig S. China has taken another step toward semiconductor independence with Alibaba announcing the design of a 5-nanometer technology server chip that is based on Arm Ltd.
But, impressive as that feat is, an even more significant chip design development by the Chinese tech giant may be making available the source code to a RISC-V CPU core its own engineers designed. This means other companies can use it in their own processor designs—and escape architecture license fees. The company made both announcements at its annual cloud convention in its home city of Hangzhou last month. The Chinese government is funding a lot of startups that are designing a variety of chips.
The number of newly registered Chinese chip-related companies more than tripled in the first five months of from the same period a year ago. And the biggest Chinese technology companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Huawei are developing their own chips rather than banking on those from Intel, Nvidia, and other United States-based companies. China is intent on developing semiconductor independence, both in design and manufacture of state-of-the-art chips. The urgency for doing so has been helped along by U.
The sanctions extend to any Huawei suppliers that use U. The United States, alarmed at China's campaign to bring Taiwan under its control, has also begun an ambitious program to 'reshore' its semiconductor manufacturing after allowing much of it to migrate to Taiwan. Around 80 percent of the world's semiconductor production capacity is in Asia, and nearly all the most advanced logic chip production is in Taiwan.
No Chinese semiconductor foundry has yet achieved the 5-nanometer processing needed to make Alibaba's new ARM-based chip, so it is still beholden to Taiwan for manufacturing. But the implications of Alibaba's general choice of Arm and RISC-V instruction set architectures is perhaps more consequential for the long term.
An instruction set architecture, or ISA, is the language in which software talks to hardware, and thus determines the kind of software that can run on a particular chip. Most servers use CPUs based on Intel's x86 instruction set architecture. But UK-based Arm, which licenses its instruction set architecture to chip designers, has been gaining a foothold in this market. RISC-V, which refers to the fifth generation of an open-source reduced instruction set computer architecture created by U. This past June, China hosted the fourth annual RISC-V summit, bringing together industry, academia, and government to talk about the future of the architecture.
In the wake of the U. Unable to buy Intel chips because of the sanctions, Huawei most recently sold its x86 server unit to a company owned by China's Henan province. From the beginning, the company indicated that it intended to open the CPU's source code—the hardware description language that describes the structure and behavior of the CPU core's electronic circuits. It has now done so… with little fanfare.
Its Yitian server system on a chip SoC , manufactured by Taiwan's TSMC, will have a total of Arm-based cores, with 60 billion integrated transistors and a top clock speed of 3. Alibaba said it is the first server processor compatible with the latest Armv9 architecture. Alibaba said the SoC achieved a score of in SPECint a standard benchmark for measuring CPU integer processing power , surpassing that of the current state-of-the-art Arm server processor based on Armv8 by 20 percent in performance and 50 percent in energy efficiency.
The company also announced the development of proprietary servers, under the brand name Panjiu , developed for the next-generation of cloud-native infrastructure. By separating computing from storage, the servers are optimized for both general-purpose and specialized AI computing, as well as high-performance storage. The company vowed to provide more services and support for RISC-V development tools, software development kits, and customized cores in the future.
Sols Celebrating Zechstein with a Science Feast! Sols Go For Drilling on Zechstein! Now you can see the Mars Yard up close, roam the world-class Microdevices Lab, visit the shop where spacecraft parts are made, and stop into a clean room where spacecraft take shape. After our short bump on Tuesday, Curiosity has reached a new potential drill location. The Sol drive went well and MSL has a good view of nearby outcrops, so the science team had a lot of potential drill and contact science targets to discuss.
Sol Drill Sol Zero! The drive over the weekend was successful, gaining us more than 6 m in elevation - not bad for a weekend hike!
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