Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Arab world’s first Mars probe takes to the skies

Arab world's first Mars probe takes to the skies

The UAE's Mars Hope probe launches from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center at 6:58 local time. Credit: MBRSC

The car-sized, US$200-million craft lifted into Earth's orbit on a Mitsubishi H-IIA rocket at 6:58 a.m. local time on 20 July. After the launch, a second stage of the rocket fired, putting the craft on its Mars trajectory.

Two hours later, engineers at mission control at Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in Dubai declared success, having established communication with the craft.

Date: 2020-07-20
Twitter: @nature
Reference: (Read more) Visit Source



Other things to check out:

United Arab Emirates successfully sends its first mission toward Mars – Spaceflight Now

Riding a Japanese rocket, the Arab world's first interplanetary probe departed planet Earth on Sunday to begin a seven-month journey to Mars on a dual mission of scientific exploration and proving the mettle of the UAE's growing space program.

Funded and led by the United Arab Emirates, the Mars probe carries a digital camera to image the Martian surface, dust storms and ice clouds, and spectrometers to measure constituents at multiple levels of the planet’s atmosphere.

Reference: (Read more) Visit Source



NASA to Broadcast Mars 2020 Perseverance Launch, Prelaunch Activities – NASA's Mars Exploration

Mars 2020 Rover Is Roving ​: In a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, engineers observed the first driving test for NASA's Mars 2020 rover on Dec. 17, 2019. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Full image and caption ›

Starting July 27, news activities will cover everything from mission engineering and science to returning samples from Mars to, of course, the launch itself.

NASA is targeting 7:50 a.m. EDT (4:50 a.m. PDT) Thursday, July 30, for the launch of its Mars 2020 Perseverance rover on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The launch window is approximately two hours, with a launch opportunity every five minutes.

Publisher: NASA's Mars Exploration Program
Date: 2020-07-20 16:23:35 UTC
Author: mars nasa gov
Reference: (Read more) Visit Source



Emirates launches first Mars probe with help from UC Berkeley | Berkeley News

The Hope Probe will circle Mars on a 55-day orbit, analyzing its atmosphere. (Photo courtesy of the United Arab Emirates Hope Mars Mission)

At 2:58 p.m. PDT today (Sunday, July 19), the United Arab Emirates (UAE) successfully launched an interplanetary probe — the first by any country in the Arab world — thanks, in part, to science collaboration, training and instrument components provided by the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL).

Publisher: Berkeley News
Date: 2020-07-19T23:30:29 00:00
Twitter: @ucberkeley
Reference: (Read more) Visit Source



Not to change the topic here:

Chinese Spacecraft Poised for First Mars Mission - Scientific American

With a five-meter-wide, 57-meter-tall rocket waiting to blast off from China’s southern island of Hainan, the nation is quietly making final preparations for its first independent trip to Mars. When the launch window opens in mid-July, Chinese scientists will strive to send a probe to a planet that confused their ancestors with its constantly changing brightness and position in the sky.

Two major risks confront the five-metric-ton Tianwen-1, Logsdon says. First, China’s most powerful heavy-lift rocket, Long March 5, has only launched three times—including a major failure in 2017, when the rocket started to malfunction shortly after takeoff. It took more than two years for scientists to fix Long March 5’s core-stage-engine problem and score a successful flight in late 2019. Its track record makes observers nervous, however.

Publisher: Scientific American
Author: Ling Xin
Twitter: @sciam
Reference: (Read more) Visit Source



Who Wants to Count All the Craters on Mars? Not Me! - Eos

Astrogeology is yet another field that is benefitting from both data from advanced imaging of planets, moons, asteroids, and comets in our solar system, and machine learning from computer science. Researchers knew that there were hundreds of thousands of craters on Mars with diameters larger than 1 kilometer. All these craters were determined by humans. However, having a human identify craters quickly runs into a barrier – the crater size.

Benedix et al. [2020] present the results of computer crater selection that have been validated against current manual databases. The new algorithm is shown to successfully count craters down to 10 pixels diameter on any number of high‐resolution images. This means, for the first time, an automated crater counting tool can deliver geologically meaningful relative ages as well as counts for craters.

Publisher: Eos
Date: 2020-07-16T15:43:07 00:00
Twitter: @AGU_Eos
Reference: (Read more) Visit Source



UAE successfully launches the Arab world's first Mars mission - CNN Video
Publisher: CNN
Date: 2020-07-20T23:58:50Z
Reference: (Read more) Visit Source



Happening on Twitter

No comments:

Post a Comment