Checking in on our Martian robots
Curiosity and Perseverance have been busy exploring Mars, observing rocks, ridges, and even looking for signs of life or water.
Amy Williams, an astrobiologist at the University of Florida and a member of the rover science team, said Curiosity has been studying ridges called boxwork formations, which are geological structures normally made from groundwater.
“These features are super cool because they formed inside of the mountain, and they have since been eroded away and exposed that we're able to explore them with the rover today,” Williams said. “So, the way that we think boxworks form, you know, all over the place, but also specifically on Mars, is that water was flowing through these cracks and probably built-up sort of a cemented or resistant region which is the ridges in this boxwork.”
These formations are also commonly known as “spiderweb” formations. Williams said while this term is widely used, it doesn’t make sense to categorize them as spider webs since they don’t look like webs.
Perseverance has been exploring Mars using new technology. The rover has been using a new GPS-like system, that allows the rover to move around using AI.
“What we're doing now is getting the opportunity to give this system sort of its own GPS, in a way, where it can compare what it's seeing with where it expects to go and what the terrain looks like with Orbital images, and actually kind of figure it out for itself,” Williams said. “It's gotten really good I think you can get down to within like, 10 centimeters accuracy, which is crazy. I can barely park my car between the lines. I'm really impressed by this.”
Williams said this type of technology is merging the relationship between AI and human planners opens the door for more opportunities.
“To be able to tell a vehicle, like, I want to go over here, can you, you know, auto nav, can you drive yourself, and for it to be able to figure out where it is, know that it's avoiding, hazards, big rocks, stuff like that, sand dunes that we don't want to go through. And for it to be able to do that without necessarily requiring what we call ground in the loop we are the ground that makes a big difference in how much you can explore."
A closer look at what’s happening in our Ionosphere
In the ionosphere, terrestrial and space weather meet. The ionosphere is in the upper part of Earth’s atmosphere and it’s full of charged particles. These particles are formed from solar radiation interacting with Earth’s atmosphere.
Above the ionosphere is where we have some navigation and communication systems -- things like satellite, radios, and GPS systems. However, some of these systems can get disrupted by solar blasts, pressure changes and gravity waves in the ionosphere.
Matthew Zettergren, a Professor of Engineering Physics at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, is working on a project to better understand this phenomenon. He explained that gravity waves are like buoyancy waves.
“If you have a medium like the Earth's atmosphere, which is sort of stratified into layers, and they have different pressure levels, if you take a volume of air and move it down or up it has a tendency to oscillate back and forth,” Zettergren said. “Gravity wants to pull it down, and the buoyancy wants to support it. So, that's kind of the simplest possible way to think of it.”
From intense auroras above to terrestrial weather below, Zettergren said there are several ways for these waves to form. His project aims to understand how these waves impact technology in the Ionosphere.
“We want to better understand the details of the fundamental physical processes,” Zettergren said. “The way that we do that is largely through computer simulation…. we have models of the weather; we have models of the propagation of the gravity waves through the ionosphere; we have models of the ionosphere. We're working on, kind of tying all those things together into sort of a complete chain of physical reasoning.”
He said the goal is to understand these interactions more, and to be able to predict the gravity waves one day.
“We want to know what the uncertainties are,” Zettergren said. “We want to know how they affect the propagation of radio waves through the ionospheric environment. I know that those are very broad and very difficult to achieve goals, but ultimately, that's kind of what we're after. We're taking something that's extraordinarily difficult to do now and trying to make it more efficient and routine and precise as well.”
