Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
-
Similar Topics
-
By NASA
Explore This SectionScience Europa Clipper Buoyant Rover for Under Ice… Europa Clipper Home MissionOverview Facts History Timeline ScienceGoals Team SpacecraftMeet Europa Clipper Instruments Assembly Vault Plate Message in a Bottle NewsNews & Features Blog Newsroom Replay the Launch MultimediaFeatured Multimedia Resources About EuropaWhy Europa? Europa Up Close Ingredients for Life Evidence for an Ocean To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video
Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are developing the Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration, a technology that could one day explore oceans under the ice layers of planetary bodies. The prototype was tested in arctic lakes near Barrow, Alaska. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are developing the Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration, a technology that could one day explore oceans under the ice layers of planetary bodies. The prototype was tested in arctic lakes near Barrow, Alaska.
Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Europa Clipper Resources
Jupiter
Jupiter Moons
Science Missions
View the full article
-
By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Drag your mouse or move your phone to pan around within this 360-degree view to explore the boxwork patterns on Mars that NASA’s Curiosity is investigating for the first time. The rover captured the 291 images that make up this mosaic between May 15 and May 18.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS The rover recently drilled a sample from a new region with features that could reveal whether Mars’ subsurface once provided an environment suitable for life.
New images from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover show the first close-up views of a region scientists had previously observed only from orbit. The images and data being collected are already raising new questions about how the Martian surface was changing billions of years ago. The Red Planet once had rivers, lakes, and possibly an ocean. Although scientists aren’t sure why, its water eventually dried up and the planet transformed into the chilly desert it is today.
By the time Curiosity’s current location formed, the long-lived lakes were gone in Gale Crater, the rover’s landing area, but water was still percolating under the surface. The rover found dramatic evidence of that groundwater when it encountered crisscrossing low ridges, some just a few inches tall, arranged in what geologists call a boxwork pattern. The bedrock below these ridges likely formed when groundwater trickling through the rock left behind minerals that accumulated in those cracks and fissures, hardening and becoming cementlike. Eons of sandblasting by Martian wind wore away the rock but not the minerals, revealing networks of resistant ridges within.
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this scene while looking out across a region filled with boxwork patterns, low ridges that scientists think could have been formed by groundwater billions of years ago.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS The ridges Curiosity has seen so far look a bit like a crumbling curb. The boxwork patterns stretch across miles of a layer on Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain whose foothills the rover has been climbing since 2014. Intriguingly, boxwork patterns haven’t been spotted anywhere else on the mountain, either by Curiosity or orbiters passing overhead.
“A big mystery is why the ridges were hardened into these big patterns and why only here,” said Curiosity’s project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “As we drive on, we’ll be studying the ridges and mineral cements to make sure our idea of how they formed is on target.”
Important to the boxwork patterns’ history is the part of the mountain where they’re found. Mount Sharp consists of multiple layers, each of which formed during different eras of ancient Martian climate. Curiosity essentially “time travels” as it ascends from the oldest to youngest layers, searching for signs of water and environments that could have supported ancient microbial life.
The rover is currently exploring a layer with an abundance of salty minerals called magnesium sulfates, which form as water dries up. Their presence here suggests this layer emerged as the climate became drier. Remarkably, the boxwork patterns show that even in the midst of this drying, water was still present underground, creating changes seen today.
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover viewed this low ridge, which looks a bit like a crumbling curb, on May 16. Scientists think the hardened edges of such ridges — part of the boxwork region the rover is exploring — may have been formed by ancient groundwater.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Scientists hope to gain more insight into why the boxwork patterns formed here, and Mars recently provided some unexpected clues. The bedrock between the boxwork ridges has a different composition than other layers of Mount Sharp. It also has lots of tiny fractures filled with white veins of calcium sulfate, another salty mineral left behind as groundwater trickles through rock cracks. Similar veins were plentiful on lower layers of the mountain, including one enriched with clays, but had not been spotted in the sulfate layer until now.
“That’s really surprising,” said Curiosity’s deputy project scientist, Abigail Fraeman of JPL. “These calcium sulfate veins used to be everywhere, but they more or less disappeared as we climbed higher up Mount Sharp. The team is excited to figure out why they’ve returned now.”
New Terrain, New Findings
On June 8, Curiosity set out to learn about the unique composition of the bedrock in this area, using the drill on the end of its robotic arm to snag a sample of a rock nicknamed “Altadena.” The rover then dropped the pulverized sample into instruments within its body for more detailed analysis.
Drilling additional samples from more distant boxwork patterns, where the mineral ridges are much larger, will help the mission make sense of what they find. The team will also search for organic molecules and other evidence of an ancient habitable environment preserved in the cemented ridges.
As Curiosity continues to explore, it will be leaving a new assortment of nicknames behind, as well. To keep track of features on the planet, the mission applies nicknames to each spot the rover studies, from hills it views with its cameras to specific calcium sulfate veins it zaps with its laser. (Official names, such as Aeolis Mons — otherwise known as Mount Sharp — are approved by the International Astronomical Union.)
The previous names were selected from local sites in Southern California, where JPL is based. The Altadena sample, for instance, bears the name of a community near JPL that was severely burned during January’s Eaton Canyon fire. Now on a new part of their Martian map, the team is selecting names from around Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, Earth’s largest salt flat. This exceptionally dry terrain crosses into Chile’s Atacama Desert, and astrobiologists study both the salt flat and the surrounding desert because of their similarity to Mars’ extreme dryness.
More About Curiosity
Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio.
For more about Curiosity, visit:
science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity
News Media Contacts
Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
2025-080
Share
Details
Last Updated Jun 23, 2025 Related Terms
Curiosity (Rover) Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mars Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Explore More
4 min read NASA Mars Orbiter Captures Volcano Peeking Above Morning Cloud Tops
Article 2 weeks ago 6 min read NASA’s Ready-to-Use Dataset Details Land Motion Across North America
Article 2 weeks ago 5 min read 3 Black Holes Caught Eating Massive Stars in NASA Data
Black holes are invisible to us unless they interact with something else. Some continuously eat…
Article 3 weeks ago Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
By NASA
NASA/Charles Beason Two students guide their rover through an obstacle course in this April 11, 2025, image from the 2025 Human Exploration Rover Challenge. The annual engineering competition – one of NASA’s longest standing student challenges – is in its 31st year. This year’s competition challenged teams to design, build, and test a lunar rover powered by either human pilots or remote control. More than 500 students with 75 teams from around the world participated, representing 35 colleges and universities, 38 high schools, and two middle schools from 20 states, Puerto Rico, and 16 other nations.
See the 2025 winners.
Image credit: NASA/Charles Beason
View the full article
-
By USH
The photograph was captured by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover on Sol 3551 (August 2, 2022, at 20:43:28 UTC).
What stands out in the image are two objects, that appear strikingly out of place amid the natural Martian landscape of rocks and boulders. Their sharp edges, right angles, flat surfaces, and geometric symmetry suggest they may have been shaped by advanced cutting tools rather than natural erosion.
Could these ancient remnants be part of a destroyed structure or sculpture? If so, they may serve as yet another piece of evidence pointing to the possibility that Mars was once home to an intelligent civilization, perhaps even the advanced humanoid beings who, according to some theories, fled the catastrophic destruction of planet Maldek and sought refuge on the Red Planet.
Objects discovered by Jean Ward Watch Jean Ward's YouTube video on this topic: HereSee original NASA source: Here
View the full article
-
By NASA
Arsia Mons, an ancient Martian volcano, was captured before dawn on May 2, 2025, by NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter while the spacecraft was studying the Red Planet’s atmosphere, which appears here as a greenish haze.NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU The 2001 Odyssey spacecraft captured a first-of-its-kind look at Arsia Mons, which dwarfs Earth’s tallest volcanoes.
A new panorama from NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter shows one of the Red Planet’s biggest volcanoes, Arsia Mons, poking through a canopy of clouds just before dawn. Arsia Mons and two other volcanoes form what is known as the Tharsis Montes, or Tharsis Mountains, which are often surrounded by water ice clouds (as opposed to Mars’ equally common carbon dioxide clouds), especially in the early morning. This panorama marks the first time one of the volcanoes has been imaged on the planet’s horizon, offering the same perspective of Mars that astronauts have of the Earth when they peer down from the International Space Station.
Launched in 2001, Odyssey is the longest-running mission orbiting another planet, and this new panorama represents the kind of science the orbiter began pursuing in 2023, when it captured the first of its now four high-altitude images of the Martian horizon. To get them, the spacecraft rotates 90 degrees while in orbit so that its camera, built to study the Martian surface, can snap the image.
Arsia Mons is the southernmost of the three volcanoes that make up Tharsis Montes, shown in the center of this cropped topographic map of Mars. Olympus Mons, the solar system’s largest volcano, is at upper left. The western end of Valles Marineris begins cutting its wide swath across the planet at lower right.NASA/JPL-Caltech The angle allows scientists to see dust and water ice cloud layers, while the series of images enables them to observe changes over the course of seasons.
“We’re seeing some really significant seasonal differences in these horizon images,” said planetary scientist Michael D. Smith of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s giving us new clues to how Mars’ atmosphere evolves over time.”
Understanding Mars’ clouds is particularly important for understanding the planet’s weather and how phenomena like dust storms occur. That information, in turn, can benefit future missions, including entry, descent and landing operations.
Volcanic Giants
While these images focus on the upper atmosphere, the Odyssey team has tried to include interesting surface features in them, as well. In Odyssey’s latest horizon image, captured on May 2, Arsia Mons stands 12 miles (20 kilometers) high, roughly twice as tall as Earth’s largest volcano, Mauna Loa, which rises 6 miles (9 kilometers) above the seafloor.
The southernmost of the Tharsis volcanoes, Arsia Mons is the cloudiest of the three. The clouds form when air expands as it blows up the sides of the mountain and then rapidly cools. They are especially thick when Mars is farthest from the Sun, a period called aphelion. The band of clouds that forms across the planet’s equator at this time of year is called the aphelion cloud belt, and it’s on proud display in Odyssey’s new panorama.
“We picked Arsia Mons hoping we would see the summit poke above the early morning clouds. And it didn’t disappoint,” said Jonathon Hill of Arizona State University in Tempe, operations lead for Odyssey’s camera, called the Thermal Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS.
The THEMIS camera can view Mars in both visible and infrared light. The latter allows scientists to identify areas of the subsurface that contain water ice, which could be used by the first astronauts to land on Mars. The camera can also image Mars’ tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, allowing scientists to analyze their surface composition.
More About Odyssey
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Odyssey Project for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the spacecraft and collaborates with JPL on mission operations. THEMIS was built and is operated by Arizona State University in Tempe.
For more about Odyssey:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/odyssey/
News Media Contacts
Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
2025-077
Share
Details
Last Updated Jun 06, 2025 Related Terms
Mars Odyssey Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mars Explore More
6 min read NASA’s Ready-to-Use Dataset Details Land Motion Across North America
Article 22 mins ago 5 min read 3 Black Holes Caught Eating Massive Stars in NASA Data
Black holes are invisible to us unless they interact with something else. Some continuously eat…
Article 2 days ago 4 min read NASA’s MAVEN Makes First Observation of Atmospheric Sputtering at Mars
After a decade of searching, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere Volatile Evolution) mission has, for the…
Article 1 week ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.