What old rocks and dust can tell us about Mars
The Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are roaming Mars, taking observations and sampling some of the surrounding terrain.
Both rovers drill on Mars, taking samples of the rock and dust they find. Recently, Perseverance grabbed an interesting sample -- a rock that appears ancient and what could be the oldest rock Perseverance has discovered so far.
By studying Martian rocks and dust, the rovers are searching for signs of ancient life, and how Mars has formed and changed over the years. Plus, the rovers’ observations are helping future missions, like human missions to Mars.
Amy Williams, an astrobiologist at the University of Florida and a scientist on Perseverance and Curiosity Mars rovers said the really old rock is called Singita, and it’s probably the same age as the oldest rocks on Earth.
“We think that it is this like crystalline, so meaning like made of big crystals, igneous rock, meaning it was made from a magma at some point, slowly crystallized and made this rock,” Williams said. “It's been probably exposed through an impact. I mean, it probably almost certainly was billions of years ago ... but it's almost certainly has to be older than the Jezero impact.”
Williams said this rock sample is unlike some of the other Perseverance has collected before. Because Mars doesn’t have plate tectonics or weathering processes that we have here on Earth, a lot of the Martian rocks are preserved for longer periods of time. The rovers are still actively exploring and finding new samples, so Williams said they try to be selective on what they keep, and what samples the science team put back.
“We've gotten to the point where we don't even seal them anymore because there's this fear of missing out of like, ‘oh, you filled the tubes and then you find, the rock that makes the difference,’” Williams said. “So, we've left some actually unsealed, so that we could potentially dump that core out and take a new one. We've become really picky about what it means to have a seat in in our cache of samples.”
How’s the Roman Space Telescope doing these days?
On Aug. 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched from the Kennedy Space Center. The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer. NASA said she’s also known as the “mother of the Hubble Space Telescope.”
Now just a few months after launch, the telescope is getting closer to its planned home in space, called lagrange point 2, which is about a million miles away from Earth.
The Roman team is monitoring the telescope’s status and the equipment on board as it comes online. Soon, the observatory will be able to take wide-view images and surveys of our universe like never before. The telescope will study things like exoplanets, or planets that orbit other stars. Plus, it’s studying dark matter, what holds galaxies together, and dark energy or what causes galaxies to expand.
Scott Smith, Roman Space Telescope manager, said Roman’s technology and power will help take images like we’ve never seen before. Roman can take images and surveys using a field of view that’s 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope.
“It gives me goosebumps when I look at the images that we've collected and you can see so many things,” Smith said of currently unreleased images from the mission. “I've looked at Hubble images or Web images for all of my career, and you see these postage stamp size images, and they're beautiful. But looking at a huge swath of what is a wide field of view, there's just something else. I think the magnitude of the number of galaxies and stars is just going to be breathtaking.”
The images and data Roman will send back to Earth will be available to the public. Smith said the telescope helps connect all people, not just the science community. By studying things like dark matter and dark energy, he said Roman could find the answers to how our universe was created and how it works.
“That's what makes it relatable is that it's an interesting challenge” Smith said. “It’s easy for anybody to ask the question, ‘what makes up the universe?’ But it's the hard part to answer that and to really understand that. I think there's an element of hope and unification that happens when you know there's something that's internal to all of us where we look up at the stars.”
