"Mars Gets Ready for Another Visitor"

Mars gets ready for another visitor.

 “Maven is not designed to land; rather, it will study Mars’ upper atmosphere from orbit”

NASA’s director of planetary science,

Jim Green.

           Launched in November 2013 and after 10 months and 442 miles (711 million kilometers), the NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) approaches Mars on September 21th, 2014. This Maven spacecraft could solve mystery of Mars's missing water. Different from 2012 Curiosity Rover, it will not land on the surface but it will be more important than other missions.

         The scientific’s goal this time is to use MAVEN data to determine and learn how Mars went from a warm, wet world that may have had microbial life during its first billion years to the cold, dry place of today, and allowing to make full sense of Curiosity’s individual discoveries. MAVEN should be able to help scientists understand about Mars’ atmosphere and climate, liquid water, and planetary habitability. MAVEN would help scientists answer the question: How the radical climate affected the planet? Further, MAVEN would help them understand if the water seeped down into the interior, or it was driven into space.

          With MAVEN, scientists at NASA expect to discover things they haven’t been able to ascertain in the past decades. It's NASA's 21st mission to Mars since the 1960s. There are three spacecraft now circling mars, one European and two Americans, in addition there are two NASA rovers exploring the surface.

         To go to Mars is not like going to another country in our planet, it is a big step for mankind. The planetary scientists are tracing the pathway for humans to be able to land and explore safely on Mars, and to understand everything about this planet; eventually humans will be capable to land not only in Mars, but also on other planets

CHEM1045 Honors Project Fall 2014:

Engineering Team: Stephany Cerezo, Anabel Alvarez Seivane and Milaidys Boffil.

"Curiosity Rover’s First Bite of Mount Sharp”

On September 24^th, the NASA's Mars rover Curiosity collected its first taste of Mount Sharp. Mount Sharp, with a height of 3.4 miles, had been the rover Curiosity’s main destination since it was launched in November 2011. On Sept. 22^th, the rover made a test drilling to a target rock on an outcrop at the mountain’s base called “Pahrump Hills”. The objective was to measure its suitability for sample collection. The test resulted satisfactory, encouraging the mission team to proceed with a full-on drilling operation on Wednesday, Sept. 24^th. The rover drilled about 2.6 inches (6.7 centimeters) deep into the basal–layer of the mountain and collected a powered-rock sample. Curiosity's robotic arm was used for close-up inspection of distinctive features on the nearby surface of the rock. The team now hopes to gain information about composition of fluids at that location from long ago and its progressive composition since the mountain was formed. "This first look at rocks we believe to underlie Mount Sharp is exciting because it will begin to form a picture of the environment at the time the mountain formed, and what led to its growth." said Curiosity Deputy Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of JPL.

The next steps of the mission is to run the sample through parts of the rover’s internal chemical lab.  The Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument, a tool in Curiosity’s laboratory, would hit the powdered rock with X-rays to examine its mineral structure and to reveal the basic composition of the rock. Further, the temperature under which it formed and even the acidity of water that may have altered the rock. Then, the sample runs to the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument suite (SAM), which will use a mass spectrometer to look at elemental abundances and perhaps even age-date the rock.

Chm 1045 Fall 2014 Honors Project:

Engineering Group: John Sevilla, Jazmina Olivas, Gabriela Barrera, Juan Albrecht