From mid-September
during the day just frosting on the rover Curiosity Martian environment. REMS
mediambiental Station, Spanish production, has been a 'nice' day temperature of
6 ° C and atmospheric pressure is also rising slightly. Of course, at night it
is very cold: below -70 ° C, according to data presented this week at the
European Planetary Science Congress.
The average air
temperature has reached at 6 ° C during the day in the Gale Crater on Mars,
where last August 6 vehicles landed on NASA's Curiosity. So what has been the
leading Spanish instrument onboard REMS (Rover Environmental Monitoring
Station).
"The longer we are
seeing day temperatures as ‘warm’ are a surprise and very interesting,"
said Felipe Gomez, a researcher at the Centre for Astrobiology (CAB, INTA-CSIC)
which has developed the instrument. REMS the first data is presented this week
at the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC2012) which was held in Madrid.
The environmental
station data, which are available in English and Castilian in a web, confirm
that since 13 September temperatures have been at or above 0 ° C during the
day. In fact it has frozen in half the days recorded while the sun shone in the
southern hemisphere of Mars, where Curiosity-but close to Ecuador-spring
approaches, and scientists are eager to learn how to evolve the temperatures
until midsummer.
"We are still at
an early stage and testing our models, but if this trend continues 'warm'
during the summer and is not timely, we could even predict temperatures around
20," said Gomez. "And this would be very exciting from the point of
view of the habitability (the goal of the mission's rover MSL), and we could
have daytime temperatures high enough for the formation of liquid water. "
Frigid nights
At night, however,
dramatically lower registers below -70 ° C. Since the Martian atmosphere is
much thinner than Earth's and much drier surface, the effects of solar heating
in the air and soil are much more pronounced than on Earth.
REMS has also found
that the pressure has increased from a daily average of about 730 Pascals
during the first three weeks after landing until about 750 pascals-less than
one hundredth of earth pressure. The figure of 685 is minimum and 780 maximum
pascals, slightly higher values than expected. Most of the variation is due
to the 'tidal' Martian, there are related to the sun's energy rather than the
influence of the Moon as on Earth.
"The tides are
affected by the distribution of clouds and dust in the atmosphere, and the
pattern of large-scale wind," says Javier Gomez-Elvira, the principal
investigator and director of the CAB REMS.
Concerning the two
units REMS wind, Gomez-Elvira explained to SINC that was damaged "probably
for some small stone that crashed during landing, although the ultimate reason
we do not know yet." Regarding the other, located on the second boom,
"and we have a collection of data that we are processing and expect to be
operational in the coming weeks."
"The rest of the
sensors are working properly," confirms the researcher, "but the
humidity is in a period of 'characterization' and is checking in collaboration
with the team of the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI, Finland) that has
developed”.
Both Gomez and
Gomez-Elvira have highlighted the announcement made yesterday by NASA of the
discovery of rocks that confirm the presence of past water on Mars, but it is a
visual observation in which REMS Curiosity has not intervened.
A crater drier than
expected
During the presentation
at the conference of the preliminary data of the Spanish season, have also
released the first results of another instrument: DAN (Dynamic Albedo
Neutrons). It is a device that analyzes the presence in the subsoil water
through the effect of one of its two elements, hydrogen, on the neutrons.
The information
provided by DAN far suggests that the environment could be drier Curiosity than
expected. "The prediction based on previous measurements with data from
the Mars Odyssey orbiter was that the crater floor would have about 6% water,
but the data show that only a fraction of that," said Maxim Mokrousov,
Space Research Institute Russia and principal designer of the instrument.
One possible
explanation for this discrepancy could be that the water content varies
considerably along the surface of Mars. The Polar Regions are those with more
water, but there may be significant local variations, including at specific
regions, such as Gale crater.
