Curiosity's Powerful Laser Pulse Kick-Starts Search for Evidence of Mars Life

Curiosity's Powerful Laser Pulse Kick-Starts Search for Evidence of Mars Life
Curiosity's Powerful Laser Pulse Kick-Starts Search for Evidence of Mars LifeThe Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel: Sci, Space, TechFollow the Daily Galaxy  « NASA Asks "How Did Phosphorus Become a Key Building Block of Life on Earth?" |Main| 1st Ever Death Star Discovered (Weekend Feature) »

August 24, 2012 Curiosity's Powerful Laser Pulse Kick-Starts Search for Evidence of Mars Life

 

           

 

Much to the delight of NASA/JPL's Mars Science Lab team, the laser instrument has fired nearly 500 shots so far that have produced strong, clear data about the composition of the Martian surface. "The spectrum we have received back from Curiosity is as good as anything we looked at on Earth," said Los Alamos National Laboratory planetary scientist Roger Wiens, Principal Investigator of the ChemCam Team.

The MSL science team plans next to take the rover out for a short spin to test out other systems. As the mission progresses, researchers will study the Martian environment in the vicinity of Mount Sharp, a towering peak with a summit nearly three miles above the rover. Mount Sharp appears to contain layers of sedimentary history dating back several billion years. These layers are like pages of a book that could teach researchers much about the geological history of the planet, including whether the Martian environment ever was, or ever may be, suitable for life as we know it.

 "When ChemCam fires its extremely powerful laser pulse, it briefly focuses the energy of a million light bulbs onto an area the size of a pinhead. The laser blast vaporizes a small amount of its target up to seven meters (23 feet) away. The resultant flash of glowing plasma is viewed by the system's 4.3-inch aperture telescope, which sends the light down an optical fiber to a spectrometer located in the body of the rover. There, the colors of light from the flash are recorded and then sent to Earth, enabling scientists to determine the elemental composition of the vaporized material.

 

                             

 

Scientists tested the system on Earth in a chamber that simulated the Martian atmosphere. Some of the initial spectral data from Mars look similar to some of the terrestrial standards at first glance. In the coming weeks, ChemCam researchers will pore over the data to look for tiny variations among the peaks and valleys within spectral data captured on Earth and on Mars. These comparisons will allow the team to fine tune and calibrate the instrument, ensuring that every spectral signature gathered by the rover is accurate. Each element on the Periodic Table has a unique spectral signature.

ChemCam scientists will be able to use these spectral fingerprints to decipher the composition of Martian geology, including information about whether Mars rocks ever existed in a watery environment or underwent changes due to interactions with biological organisms.

With regard to Coronation rock (the rock formerly known as N-165), ChemCam's inaugural target, "at first glance it appears consistent with a basaltic composition," Wiens said. "What's more interesting, however, is whether the rock had dust on it or some other kind of surface coating," he said. "ChemCam saw peaks of hydrogen and magnesium during the first shots that we didn't see in subsequent firings. This could mean the rock surface was coated with dust or some other material."

"After Coronation, we got to shoot at a group of ugly-looking rocks in the area named 'Goulburn,'" Wiens said. "That is one of the areas near the rover that was blasted by the thrusters of the landing vehicle, but these rocks were much farther away from the rover than Coronation, providing a bit more of a test for the ChemCam's laser."

The ChemCam system is one of 10 instruments mounted on the MSL mission's Curiosity rover—a six-wheeled mobile laboratory that will roam more than 12 miles of the planet's surface during the course of one Martian year (98 Earth weeks). The system is designed to capture as many as 14,000 observations throughout the mission.

"We are just jubilant," Wiens said. "This mission is absolutely amazing. Everything is working so well. The same applies to our instrument."

 The Daily Galaxy via Los Alamos National Laboratory

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"Evidence of Dark Matter Will be Found Near the Sun"

"Evidence of Dark Matter Will be Found Near the Sun"
"Evidence of Dark Matter Will be Found Near the Sun" The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel: Sci, Space, TechFollow the Daily Galaxy  « Curiosity's First Long-Range & Panoramic Images |Main| Image of the Day: Carl Sagan's Childhood Drawing of His Vision of Outer Space »

August 09, 2012 "Evidence of Dark Matter Will be Found Near the Sun"

 

                     

"We are 99% confident that there is dark matter near the Sun," says the lead author Silvia Garbari of the University of Zurich. "This could be the first evidence for a "disc" of dark matter in our Galaxy, as recently predicted by theory and numerical simulations of galaxy formation, or it could mean that the dark matter halo of our galaxy is squashed, boosting the local dark matter density."

Dark matter was first proposed by the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s. He found that clusters of galaxies were filled with a mysterious dark matter that kept them from flying apart. At nearly the same time, Jan Oort in the Netherlands discovered that the density of matter near the Sun was nearly twice what could be explained by the presence of stars and gas alone.

In the intervening decades, astronomers developed a theory of dark matter and structure formation that explains the properties of clusters and galaxies in the Universe, but the amount of dark matter in the solar neighbourhood has remained more mysterious. For decades after Oort's measurement, studies found 3-6 times more dark matter than expected. Then last year new data and a new method claimed far less than expected. The community was left puzzled, generally believing that the observations and analyses simply weren't sensitive enough to perform a reliable measurement.

An international team lead by researchers of the University of Zürich used a state-of-the-art simulation of the Milky Way to test their mass-measuring method before applying it to real data. This threw up a number of surprises: they noticed that standard techniques used over the past twenty years were biased, always tending to underestimate the amount of dark matter.

The researchers then developed a new unbiased technique that recovered the correct answer from the simulated data. Applying their technique to the positions and velocities of thousands of orange K dwarf stars near the Sun, they obtained a new measure of the local dark matter density.

Many physicists are placing their bets on dark matter being a new fundamental particle that interacts only very weakly with normal matter, but strongly enough to be detected in experiments deep underground. An accurate measure of the local dark matter density is vital for such experiments.

"If dark matter is a fundamental particle, billions of these particles will have passed through your body by the time your finish reading this article, said lead author George Lake."Experimental physicists hope to capture just a few of these particles each year in experiments like XENON and CDMS currently in operation. Knowing the local properties of dark matter is the key to revealing just what kind of particle it consists of."

Source: Silvia Garbari, Chao Liu, Justin I. Read, George Lake. A new determination of the local dark matter density from the kinematics of K dwarfs. Monthly Notice of the Royal Astronomical Society. 9 August, 2012. 2012arXiv1206.0015G.

The Daily Galaxy via University of Zurich

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“The amount of mass that we derive matches very well with what we see — stars, dust and gas — in the region around the Sun,” says team leader Christian Moni Bidin (Departamento de Astronomía, Universidad de Concepción, Chile). “But this leaves no room for the extra material — dark matter — that we were expecting. Our calculations show that it should have shown up very clearly in our measurements. But it was just not there!”

http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1217/

Posted by:orkneylad |August 09, 2012 at 09:52 AM

Why don't they just call it invisible matter? For all we know it just might be matter in a parallel universe existing right on top of us.

Posted by:Paul |August 09, 2012 at 10:44 AM

edelweiss dark matter experiment, i was speaking to two brothers sat in a sauna while i was snowboading in austria, they work for this project, they have found so much dark matter in far away constellations they are like huge planets but could pass through each other, and finding more and more all the time, they know its there because its gravitational pull bends light slightly around it, interesting stuff :)

Posted by:dave |August 09, 2012 at 03:43 PM

I am always wondering if the so called dark matter is actually the same thing like the light we know?

Our universe is filled with light( many types though )everywhere. But we can not see the light unless it comes straight to us.

Sounds strange , but light is dark matter ( invisible ) to me.

Posted by:Jack |August 09, 2012 at 07:29 PM

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