Mars is here!

It’s been a big year for Mars. The InSight lander is on the way to the Red Planet, scheduled to land November 26 on a mission to take the vital signs of Mars. There’s a big dust storm on Mars just as it reaches opposition this week, its closest approach to Earth since 2003. Oh, and organics have been found on Mars.

We may have buried the lede on that one.

July 18 image of Mars by the Hubble Space Telescope.
 (Image credit NASA, ESA, and STScI)

Dave Cuomo and Keith Krumm from the Pacific Science Center were guest speakers at the July meeting of the Seattle Astronomical Society, and discussed all things Mars.

The discovery of organics on Mars is evidence that science is not necessarily fast. The work came out of a hole the Curiosity rover drilled in a Mars rock way back in 2015. The papers outlining the discovery just came out earlier this year.

“What it found in a rock that is about three-and-a-half billion years old was organic molecules,” Cuomo said. The substance found was kerogen, which Cuomo called, “a gooey precursor to petroleum.”

Cuomo repeatedly stressed that this does not, not, not mean that there is or ever was life on Mars.

“What we have found is evidence that the building blocks for life on Mars certainly did exist three-and-a-half billion years ago,” he said. “This was the first time that we found clear evidence that this was there.”

Cuomo noted that we know a good bit about the history of the surface of Mars.

“Mars certainly was a warmer and a wetter environment that could have supported life, that life could have evolved on,” he said. “What we don’t know—and this is what InSight is going to help us find out—is how long Mars was more Earth-like.” The longer that warm, wet environment lasted, the greater the potential that life could have arisen.

InSight

Krumm noted that InSight is something of an interplanetary RN.

“It’s going to be taking Mars’ vital signs,” he said. It will use a seismometer to take Mars’s pulse, a heat flow probe to measure its temperature, and the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment, RISE, will check its reflexes, precisely tracking the location of the lander to determine just how much Mars’ north pole wobbles as it orbits the Sun. Cuomo said a big part of the mission’s purpose is to find out if Mars has a molten core today.

“It has volcanoes, so we know at some point in the past it had a molten interior,” he said. “It had a magnetosphere—the remnants of it are frozen in the rocks—but it does not have an active magnetosphere.”

InSight will help us figure out of the core solidified, or if there’s some other reason for the loss of the magnetosphere. Krumm and Cuomo showed this video about the InSight mission.



The Pacific Science Center plans an event for watching the InSight landing on November 26. Watch this space for details!

Dust storm

The rover Opportunity is powered by solar panels, and the dust storm on Mars has blocked the Sun to an extent that Opportunity has shut down. NASA hasn’t heard from Opportunity since June 10. It’s programmed to switch back on every so often, and shut right back down if it doesn’t find power. Cuomo said that can only go on for so long.

“It’s possible it won’t wake up,” he said. If that happened, it would be a sad end to a tremendous run. Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, landed on Mars in 2004 on missions expected to last 90 days. The last contact with Spirit, stuck in the sand, was in March 2010, while Opportunity, up until last month, at least, has been running for more than 14 years.

Opposition

Mars reached opposition to Earth on the evening of July 26 in Pacific Daylight Time, and will be at its closest approach to Earth for the year on Tuesday, July 31. Those dates are different because of the geometry of the elliptical orbits of the two planets. In any case, we’re closer to Mars than at any time since the great apparition of 2003, which is good news for amateur astronomers. The bad news is that the dust storm could foil our attempts to image and observe surface features of Mars. There was word this week, however, that the storm is fading. Bright red Mars will be a good observing target for the rest of the summer and into early fall.