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NASA’s resistance sensors will help prepare for future human exploration by taking meteorological measurements and examining dust particles.
Mars is about to receive a new stream of weather reports once NASA’s Perseverance rover lands on Mars on February 18, 2021. As it scans Jezero Crater for signs of ancient microbial life, Perseverance will collect the first planetary samples to return to Earth. on a future mission. The rover will also provide key atmospheric data that will allow future astronauts on the Red Planet to survive in a world without breathable oxygen, freezing temperatures, planet-wide dust storms and intense solar radiation.
The instrument underlying the meteorological data is called MEDA – short for “Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer”. Part of its goal is to get the basics: temperature, wind speed and direction, air pressure, and relative humidity. Temperature patterns at the Perseverance Landing Pad range from an average of minus 126 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 88 degrees Celsius) at night to about minus 9 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 degrees Celsius) in the afternoon.
Together with the meteorological instruments aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover and the InSight lander, the three spacecraft “will form the first meteorological network on another planet,” said Jose Antonio Rodriguez-Manfredi, principal investigator of MEDA at the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB ) at the Instituto Nacional de Tecnica Aeroespacial in Madrid, Spain.
A key difference between MEDA and its predecessors, however, is that it will also measure the quantity, shape and size of dust particles in the Martian atmosphere. Dust is a major factor in any surface mission to Mars. It is spread across everything, including spacecraft and their solar panels. It also guides chemical processes both on the surface and in the atmosphere and influences temperature and time. The Perseverance team would like to know more about these interactions; this will also help the team plan operations for the Ingenuity Mars helicopter.
“Understanding Martian dust is very important for this mission,” Rodriguez-Manfredi said. “These fine specks of dust rise from the surface and cover the entire planet. We don’t know how Martian winds and temperature changes are capable of causing these global dust storms, but this will be important information for future missions, ”Rodriguez-Manfredi said.
These storms may not blow with the force seen in the movies (the Martian atmosphere is too thin for that), but they can create a thick blanket of dust. A global dust storm in the summer of 2018 ended the mission of NASA’s most experienced solar-powered rover, Opportunity, after nearly 15 years in operation.
Dust is omnipresent – and invasive – on Mars even on calm days.
MEDA will be able to measure the details of the daily dust cycle: “We know that the atmosphere essentially raises dust at noon. At night, when temperatures drop, the atmosphere stabilizes and there is less dust, “said Manuel de la Torre Juarez, assistant principal investigator of MEDA at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.” We want to know more. , because the bigger our missions to Mars, the more relevant the dust considerations could become. “
Apollo astronauts found that moon dust was a common nuisance as it enters helmet rings, adheres to spacesuits and affects the space suit’s cooling systems. The Apollo missions to the moon lasted only a few days. Human missions to Mars are likely to take much longer, so the new data on daily dust cycles will benefit mission planners as well as spacecraft and spacesuit designers.
Cold and cloudy with a lot of radiation
Airborne dust also contributes to the amount of solar radiation that bombard the Martian surface. On earth, our atmosphere, along with our planet’s magnetic field, protects us from radiation. But there is no global magnetic field on Mars and its atmosphere is only 1% of the density of the Earth. So the measurement of dust and radiation go hand in hand, especially in the development of spacesuits.
“Radiation is probably the most extreme condition for astronauts,” Rodriguez-Manfredi said. “Suits that protect astronauts from this radiation will be crucial.
To this end, MEDA’s SkyCam will take photos and videos of the sky and clouds by monitoring the brightness of the sky at different wavelengths to help us better understand the radiation environment on Mars.
“We will have our own camera to monitor these clouds and the opacity – and the amount of dust or other aerosols in the atmosphere that could alter the intensity of the solar radiation,” Rodriguez-Manfredi said. “We will be able to see how the amount of dust in the atmosphere changes every hour,” Rodriguez-Manfredi said.
The information will also be useful in research into Perseverance’s past life. If, as on Earth, there was ever life on Mars, it was probably based on organic molecules. Solar radiation can alter the traces of this past life in rocks, and MEDA data will help scientists understand these changes.
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