They knew that hematite was gonna be present because they saw it in the original polar satt's tES. However the bands that they could resolve from orbit were buffered by cO2 emmissions spec. the theories they were working on were hematite in the 550 cm-1 band would be direct precipitation. The other 2 means were fom the removal of hydroxyls from an original mineral GOETHITE or by direct oxidation from MAGNETITE. both of the last 2 would imply a temperature of about 300 C and that would mean no water. But the mini-tES can resolve to the 550-560 band and that means hematite was precipitated from an iron rich solution. hence =water.
this is getting cooler by the day
The existence of hematite was expected, but its form of existence was not known. Now its existence is confirmed in real pebbles or sands.
Is this confirmation that there was water on Mars?
For those who are interested this link gives a pretty good explaination of the "Thermal Emission Spectroscopy" numbers that farmerman is talking about. It is a pretty neat technology that allows us to tell about the chemistry of a substance by measuring the different frequencies of infrared light it emits.
http://emma.la.asu.edu/
The "550-560 band" refers to a range of frequencies (the numbers refer to wavelengths). There must be some characteristic frequencies that this specific form of hematite emits in this range of frequencies (but this is outside of my field of knowledge).
Pretty cool stuff.
Littlek, hold on... I don't think there is conclusive proof yet. But, it may be soon!
littlek- the light emitted by a rock when its reflecting a beam of infrared or visible light, is unique to every solid. The mini tES is an instrument that , on the ground, will read the reflected light from an IR "flashlight"(the sun and a quartz lamp for calibration) and by comparing it against a little computerized "dictionary' of known emmission wavelengths , the instrument can tell what form that rock has. I looked up in my tES guides the spectrum for iron oxides of fe2O3 form. i found that the crystal habit was unique and the emmission spec is in the 550 -590 cm_1 range .
This means that, most likely the hematite was precipitated from out of a solution of red water. On earth, i can give you a comparison, the Mesabi Range Iron Deposits ofMinn and the Menamini of Michigan and the were deposited from a water /iron oxide "soup". The other spectra are unique to other forms of hematite that could only be deposited as igneous rock or verry hot mixed metal solutions like those seen in franklin NJ and Minas geraes brazil. The news that the 550 band was captured means that , unless there is wavelength interference that hasnt already been accounted for, this hematite was water deposited. The TES on the rover has been calibrated on earth and its first tasks were to calibrate itself in the Martian atmosphere. I forget what they used. I believe it was a quartz wedge and a salt crystal.
I have a brother who, when he was teaching at Cornell in the 80's, spent a good deal of his time helping to compile that dictionary for inter planetary probs ( a little family bragging here).
Opportunity is finally off the lander and on the soil
link to news article
Link to NASA press release
littlek wrote:Is this confirmation that there was water on Mars?
For your question, the following headline would be appropriate..
Rover Offers More Evidence
"At a news conference on Saturday at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory here, Dr. Philip Christensen, a professor of geological sciences at Arizona State University, confirmed that an instrument on the Opportunity had detected the iron oxide hematite in the dark pebbles and gravel that dot the landing site."
At this moment what the bedrock consists of is a mystery, which is going to be solved shortly.
theyll make an announcement , but it is probably water deposited if the damn instrument is well calibrated and the geology is right . I saw in sattas article that these were individual pebbles , so theyre probably gonna need the outcrops where the hematite came from.
You can understand that Christensen is trying to avoid an early announcement syndrome that almost made NASA and some academics like Dick zare( who will probably get a Nobel one of these years) look silly when they annonced that there was evidence of life on MArs as seen from iron carbonate in an old meteorite.
There is the outside chance that the hematite could be an alteration product of magnetite but theyd need an xray diffraction unit to be certain.
There are a series of animations
available here which are very informative.
One animation describes the Autonomous Rover Navigation system which is used for mapping and negotiating terrain during travel to a target.
Another is the
landing and unfolding sequence in which a small metal probe from space drags through Mars atmosphere and parachutes to the surface before inflating into a custer of balloons which bounce the rovers to a halt at their destination on Mars. Once settled onto the surface, the unfolding sequence is also quite lovely to watch
(root directory for videos)
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2004/48.cfm
The Mars rover Spirit has made a
full recovery from the computer illness.
Quote:
For Spirit, part of the cure has been deleting thousands of files from the rover's flash memory -- a type of rewritable electronic memory that retains information even when power is off. Many of the deleted files were left over from the seven- month flight from Florida to Mars. Onboard software was having difficulty managing the flash memory, triggering Spirit's computer to reset itself about once an hour.
Two days after the problem arose, engineers began using a temporary workaround of sending commands every day to put Spirit into an operations mode that avoided use of flash memory. Now, however, the computer is stable even when operating in the normal mode, which uses the flash memory.
"To be safe, we want to reformat the flash and start again with a clean slate," Adler said. That reformatting is planned for Monday. It will erase everything stored in the flash file system and install a clean version of the flight software.
Reformatting and reinstalling..
do they have to hit Start to reboot?
Hi,
This Spirit software business sounds like an old Win user's practice:
format the disk&reinstall from time to time.
I wonder how long is it going to take before some space probe fails
because of a virus..
I wish MER team a good run from here.
Relative
They haven't mentioned deleting any files from Opportunity's Flash to prevent the same problem encountered by Spirit (unless I've missed the mention of it).
Does anyone know if they are anticipating similar problems with Opportunity (due to Flash file overload), and are taking action to prevent it?
I saw a mention of 'Engineers say the flash may need to be reformatted every one-to-two weeks to prevent further trouble. Similar measures are likely for sister-rover Opportunity.
The source :
SpaceflightNow article
Relative wrote:I saw a mention of 'Engineers say the flash may need to be reformatted every one-to-two weeks to prevent further trouble. Similar measures are likely for sister-rover Opportunity.
That's what I was looking for. Thank you
Relative wrote:
This Spirit software business sounds like an old Win user's practice:
format the disk&reinstall from time to time.
The VxWorks is a legacy from '80s.
