Planets - Blog Posts

That's a wrap! Thank you all for the wonderful questions.

NASA Mars Perseverance Rover Mission Engineer Chloe Sackier answered questions about how we prepared for the mission, Perseverance’s entry, descent, and landing, and what Perseverance will do once on Mars.

Check out her full Answer Time for more: Career | Preparation | Entry, Descent, & Landing | Operation

We hope you had fun today and learned a little bit about our robotic astrobiologist landing on Mars on February 18th. You won't want to miss this! Tune in to NASA TV HERE starting at 2:15 p.m. EST.

If today’s Answer Time got you excited, team up with us to #CoutdownToMars! We created a virtual Mars photo booth, have sounds of Mars to listen to and more for all you Earthlings to channel your inner Martian. Check out ways to participate HERE.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Hello!! Its wonderful to be able to ask questions, thank you!

About Perseverance, does it have a self-repair option? And as Curiosity is still operational, will they run missions together? Or will they split up to cover more distance?

Is this a sign that we're close to being able to set foot on Mars?

My final question is how do you receive the messages from such a long distance?

Thanks for all your hard work! 加油/Good luck!

“Is this a sign that we are close to being able to set foot on Mars?”

What do you hope to find on the mars? / What would be the best possible outcome?

How will the audio feed from Perseverance make its way back to Earth?

What kind of math is needed to get to Mars? How is the path of the lander calculated?

Will the robot be able to send vedio footage?

I've been very curious about the basis on which the landing site is decided! I read that it will land in the Jerezo crater, so is there a particular reason behind choosing that place for the landing?

Why is the final phase so difficult?Sorry if I sound dumb,I'm just curious.Also,what will be the rover's first task after landing?

Is there any chance that something could go wrong?

What is the weirdest thing you had to account for when building the perseverance rover?

what has nasa and jpl learned from opportunity that has helped with developing this new project?

what is the biggest challenge in the preparation of such a mission and how do you handle it?

What do you hope to find using this new technology? When you were a kid, did you ever dream of landing on Mars? Even if you may not be visiting, tech that you have sway over is.

“When you wer a kid, did you ever dream of landing on Mars?”

how much (or are you at all) treated differently for being a women in your field? I know it’s a different experience for everyone and I just wanted to hear your perspective

hi! i hope you're doing well. i wanted to ask, how do you land a job at nasa?

thanks!

What led you to this job? (what’s your degree in/what are your passions)

What's your favorite part of the job?

Thank you for joining the #CountdownToMars! The Mars Perseverance Answer Time with expert Chloe Sackier is LIVE!

Stay tuned for talks about landing a rover on Mars, Perseverance's science goals on the Red Planet, landing a career at NASA and more. View ALL the answers HERE. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Earth Facts that Live Rent-Free in Our Heads

Earth is a big weird planet. With so much going on, it’s easy to forget some of the many, many processes happening here. But at the same time, some stuff is so unexpected and just plain strange that it’s impossible to forget. We asked around and found out lots of people here at NASA have this problem.

Here are some facts about Earth that live rent free in our heads:

Earth has a solid inner core that is almost as hot as the surface of the Sun. Earth’s core gets as high as 9,800 degrees Fahrenheit, while the surface of the Sun is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Dust from the Sahara fertilizes the Amazon rainforest. 27.7 million tons blow all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to the rainforest each year, where it brings phosphorus -- a nutrient plants need to grow.

Ice in Antarctica looks solid and still, but it’s actually flowing -- in some places it flows so fast that scientific instruments can move as much as a kilometer (more than half a mile!) a year.

Speaking of Antarctica: Ice shelves (the floating part of ice sheets) can be as big as Texas. Because they float, they rise and fall with the tide. So floating ice as big as Texas, attached to the Antarctic Ice Sheet, can rise and fall up to ~26 feet!

Melting ice on land makes its way to the ocean. As polar glaciers melt, the water sloshes to the equator, and which can actually slow the spin of Earth.

Even though it looks it, the ocean isn’t level. The surface has peaks and valleys and varies due to changes in height of the land below, winds, temperature, saltiness, atmospheric pressure, ocean circulation, and more.

Earth isn’t the only mind-blowing place out there. From here, we look out into the rest of the universe, full of weird planets and galaxies that surprise us.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Curious about how NASA will land the next mission to the Red Planet – the Perseverance Mars rover? Here’s your chance to ask our expert! 

After nearly 300 million miles, our Perseverance rover completes its journey to Mars on Feb. 18. To reach the surface of the Red Planet, it has to survive the harrowing final phase known as Entry, Descent, and Landing. Mission engineer Chloe Sackier will be taking your questions in an Answer Time session on Thursday, Feb. 4 from noon to 1pm ET here on our Tumblr! Make sure to ask your question now by visiting http://nasa.tumblr.com/ask. 

Chloe Sackier is a systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. She works on the Mars 2020 Entry, Descent and Landing team, tasked with safely delivering the Perseverance rover to the surface of Mars.

Landing Perseverance on Mars – fun facts: 

The landing system on the mission includes a parachute, descent vehicle, and an approach called a "skycrane maneuver" for lowering the rover on a tether to the surface during the final seconds before landing.

Perseverance will use new technologies for landing, including Terrain-Relative Navigation. This sophisticated navigation system allows the rover to detect and avoid hazardous terrain by diverting around it during its descent through the Martian atmosphere. 

A microphone allows engineers to analyze entry, descent, and landing. It might also capture sounds of the rover at work, which would provide engineers with clues about the rover's health and operations.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

What’s Up in December 2020 – Skywatching Tips from NASA!

Catch the Geminids meteor shower as the peak coincides with darker skies during a new Moon. Plus, Jupiter and Saturn appear closer than in decades, and the winter solstice arrives. Check this out for when and where to observe! Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

The Search for Starless Planets

While it’s familiar to us, our solar system may actually be a bit of an oddball. Our Milky Way galaxy is home to gigantic worlds with teeny-tiny orbits and planets that circle pairs of stars. We’ve even found planets that don’t orbit stars at all! Instead, they drift through the galaxy completely alone (unless they have a moon to keep them company). These lonely island worlds are called rogue planets.

Where do rogue planets come from?

The planet-building process can be pretty messy. Dust and gas around a star clump together to form larger and larger objects, like using a piece of play-dough to pick up other pieces.

Sometimes collisions and close encounters can fling a planet clear out of the gravitational grip of its parent star. Rogue planets may also form out in space on their own, like the way stars grow.

Seeing the invisible

We’ve discovered more than 4,000 exoplanets, but only a handful are rogue planets. That’s because they’re superhard to find! Rogue planets are almost completely invisible to us because they don’t shine like stars and space is inky black. It’s like looking for a black cat in a dark room without a flashlight.

Some planet-finding methods involve watching to see how orbiting planets affect their host star, but that doesn’t work for rogue planets because they’re off by themselves. Rogue planets are usually pretty cold too, so infrared telescopes can’t use their heat vision to spot them either.

So how can we find them? Astronomers use a cool cosmic quirk to detect them by their effect on starlight. When a rogue planet lines up with a more distant star from our vantage point, the planet bends and magnifies light from the star. This phenomenon, called microlensing, looks something like this:

Imagine you have a trampoline, a golf ball, and an invisible bowling ball. If you put the bowling ball on the trampoline, you could see how it made a dent in the fabric even if you couldn’t see the ball directly. And if you rolled the golf ball near it, it would change the golf ball’s path.

A rogue planet affects space the way the bowling ball warps the trampoline. When light from a distant star passes by a rogue planet, it curves around the invisible world (like how it curves around the star in the animation above). If astronomers on Earth were watching the star, they’d notice it briefly brighten. The shape and duration of this brightness spike lets them know a planet is there, even though they can’t see it.

Telescopes on the ground have to look through Earth’s turbulent atmosphere to search for rogue planets. But when our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches in the mid-2020s, it will give us a much better view of distant stars and rogue planets because it will be located way above Earth’s atmosphere — even higher than the Moon!

Other space telescopes would have to be really lucky to spot these one-in-a-million microlensing signals. But Roman will watch huge patches of the sky for months to catch these fleeting events.

Lessons from cosmic castaways

Scientists have come up with different models to explain how different planetary systems form and change over time, but we still don’t know which ones are right. The models make different predictions about rogue planets, so studying these isolated worlds can help us figure out which models work best.

When Roman spots little microlensing starlight blips, astronomers will be able to get a pretty good idea of the mass of the object that caused the signal from how long the blip lasts. Scientists expect the mission to detect hundreds of rogue planets that are as small as rocky Mars — about half the size of Earth — up to ones as big as gas giants, like Jupiter and Saturn.

By design, Roman is only going to search a small slice of the Milky Way for rogue planets. Scientists have come up with clever ways to use Roman’s future data to estimate how many rogue planets there are in the whole galaxy. This information will help us better understand whether our solar system is pretty normal or a bit of an oddball compared to the rest of our galaxy.

Roman will have such a wide field of view that it will be like going from looking at the cosmos through a peephole to looking through a floor-to-ceiling window. The mission will help us learn about all kinds of other cool things in addition to rogue planets, like dark energy and dark matter, that will help us understand much more about our place in space.

Learn more about the Roman Space Telescope at: https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

New results from our Juno mission suggest the planet is home to “shallow lightning.” An unexpected form of electrical discharge, shallow lightning comes from a unique ammonia-water solution. ⁣

⁣It was previously thought that lightning on Jupiter was similar to Earth, forming only in thunderstorms where water exists in all its phases – ice, liquid, and gas. But flashes observed at altitudes too cold for pure liquid water to exist told a different story. This illustration uses data obtained by the mission to show what these high-altitude electrical storms look like. ⁣

Understanding the inner workings of Jupiter allows us to develop theories about atmospheres on other planets and exoplanets! ⁣

Illustration Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Heidi N. Becker/Koji Kuramura⁣

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Was There Once Life On Mars?  Our Perseverance Rover Aims to Find Out

Our Perseverance mission is set to launch on Thursday, July 30 and could help answer many longstanding astrobiology questions about Mars. The mission will deliver our Perseverance rover to the Martian surface, and this powerful rover is equipped with a multitude of tools to study the planet's environment and to answer questions about whether or not the Red Planet could have had life in the past.

In preparation for launch, our Astrobiology Program is releasing a new update to Issue #2 of the graphic history series, Astrobiology: The Story of our Search for Life in the Universe. This new, fourth edition tells the tale of our exploration of Mars in relation to astrobiology.

The history of our exploration of Mars is full of struggle and triumph. Mars is a dangerous and difficult planet to visit, with frigid temperatures, damaging dust storms, low gravity, and a thin atmosphere. Despite the challenges, NASA missions have opened our eyes to a world that was much more Earth-like in its past, with environments that contained all the necessary conditions for life as we know it.

Issue #2 tells the complete history of our endeavours on Mars, from the Mariner missions to Viking and Pathfinder to Curiosity. In this fourth edition, you’ll find  details on the Perseverance rover and its journey to search for ancient signs and signatures of life that could once and for all tell us whether or not life gained a foothold on the ancient Red Planet.

Perseverance will also drill into Martian rocks and collect samples that will one day be returned to Earth by a future Mars Sample Return mission. The samples will be stored in special containers and carefully 'cached' in a location on Mars where they will be easily accessible for retrieval. These samples will allow astrobiologists to perform detailed experiments that robots are not yet able to undertake remotely.

Visit astrobiology.nasa.gov/graphic-histories/ to download the new edition of Astrobiology: The Story of our Search for Life in the Universe, and read the entire series to explore NASA’s astrobiology journey to understand the origin and evolution of life on Earth, and the potential for life elsewhere in the Universe!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Three NASA Telescopes Look at an Angry Young Star Together

Science is a shared endeavor. We learn more when we work together. Today, July 18, we’re using three different space telescopes to observe the same star/planet system!

As our Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) enters its third year of observations, it's taking a new look at a familiar system this month. And today it won't be alone. Astronomers are looking at AU Microscopii, a young fiery nearby star – about 22 million years old – with the TESS, NICER and Swift observatories.

TESS will be looking for more transits – the passage of a planet across a star – of a recently-discovered exoplanet lurking in the dust of AU Microscopii (called AU Mic for short). Astronomers think there may be other worlds in this active system, as well!

Our Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) telescope on the International Space Station will also focus on AU Mic today. While NICER is designed to study neutron stars, the collapsed remains of massive stars that exploded as supernovae, it can study other X-ray sources, too. Scientists hope to observe stellar flares by looking at the star with its high-precision X-ray instrument.

Scientists aren't sure where the X-rays are coming from on AU Mic — it could be from a stellar corona or magnetic hot spots. If it's from hot spots, NICER might not see the planet transit, unless it happens to pass over one of those spots, then it could see a big dip!

A different team of astronomers will use our Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to peer at AU Mic in X-ray and UV to monitor for high-energy flares while TESS simultaneously observes the transiting planet in the visible spectrum. Stellar flares like those of AU Mic can bathe planets in radiation.

Studying high-energy flares from AU Mic with Swift will help us understand the flare-rate over time, which will help with models of the planet’s atmosphere and the system’s space weather. There's even a (very) small chance for Swift to see a hint of the planet's transit!

The flares that a star produces can have a direct impact on orbiting planets' atmospheres. The high-energy photons and particles associated with flares can alter the chemical makeup of a planet's atmosphere and erode it away over time.

Another time TESS teamed up with a different spacecraft, it discovered a hidden exoplanet, a planet beyond our solar system called AU Mic b, with the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope. That notable discovery inspired our latest poster! It’s free to download in English and Spanish.

Spitzer’s infrared instrument was ideal for peering at dusty systems! Astronomers are still using data from Spitzer to make discoveries. In fact, the James Webb Space Telescope will carry on similar study and observe AU Mic after it launches next year.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

That’s a wrap! Thank you all very much for the wonderful questions.


We’re so excited to send Perseverance off on her journey to Mars, and we will be launching on July 30 at 7:50 a.m. EDT from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 


If today’s Answer Time got you excited, team up with us to #CoutdownToMars! We created a virtual Mars photo booth, 3D rover experience and more for you to put your own creative touch on sending Perseverance well wishes for her launch to the Red Planet! View them all, HERE. 


Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Meet the people behind our next Mars rover – Perseverance.

Sending a rover to the Red Planet is more than just 3…2…1… Liftoff 🚀 

It takes thousands of people and years of hard work to get a spacecraft from Earth to Mars. So when our Perseverance (Percy) rover touches down on the Martian surface, it will be because of the talented minds that helped to make it happen. 

The team is on track to launch Perseverance on July 20 and land in Mars’ Jezero Crater in February 2021. Each week leading up to launch, learn not only what it’s like to work on this mission but also about the diverse background and career trajectories of the team members at our Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

Want to stay up to date on Percy’s mission? Follow her on Twitter and Facebook. For more information, visit the official mission site, HERE. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

How is it like to be a NASA Earth Scientist? What Subjects are you required to excel at to become one? Were you really good in your studies, when you were a young teenager?

When you first saw Earth from all the way up in space, what were your first thoughts? Did it change the way you viewed things?

Hi there! Does the study of Earth Science teach us much about the science of other planets? Can much be assumed to be similar, or is the geology/biology incomparable? Thank you!