ExoMars set to drop a weather station on the Red Planet
Meteorologist/Science Writer
Wednesday, October 12, 2016, 2:48 PM - Ready for your Mars weather report? The ExoMars mission will be setting up a new weather station there next week. Plus, have Canadian scientists detected alien signals? It's What's Up In Space!
ExoMars soon to arrive at the Red Planet
The ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars 2016 mission is on approach to Mars as you read this, set for an October 19 arrival at its destination.
On route, currently scheduled for October 16, the spacecraft will release Schiaparelli, a lander that will test entry, descent and landing procedures for the planned 2020 rover mission (which is similar to the Curiosity rover's, although minus the skycrane). Additionally, after a successful landing, Schiaparelli will set itself up as a stationary Martian weather station, among other things, positioned near the planet's equator.
From there, Schiaparelli will read temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind and humidity, to give scientists back on Earth an idea of how electrified the dust is on Mars, and more generally, the conditions their rover will be exploring when it arrives there.
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According to the ESA:
The Schiaparelli surface payload, the DREAMS (Dust Characterisation, Risk Assessment, and Environment Analyser on the Martian Surface) package, consists of a suite of sensors to measure the wind speed and direction (MetWind), humidity (DREAMS-H), pressure (DREAMS-P), atmospheric temperature close to the surface (MarsTem), the transparency of the atmosphere (Solar Irradiance Sensor, SIS), and atmospheric electrification (Atmospheric Radiation and Electricity Sensor; MicroARES).
DREAMS will provide the first measurements of electric fields on the surface of Mars (with MicroARES). Combined with measurements (from SIS) of the concentration of atmospheric dust, DREAMS will provide new insights into the role of electric forces on dust lifting, the mechanism that initiates dust storms.
In addition, the DREAMS-H sensor will complement MicroARES measurements with critical data about humidity; this will enable scientists understand better the dust electrification process.
This is not the first weather station on Mars. The Mars Phoenix lander, which touched down near Mars' north pole, included weather sensors that actually made the first detection of Martian snowfall, but that lander went silent on November 10, 2008. More recently, the Mars Curiosity rover included weather instruments as well, although one of the wind gauges was damaged during landing, limiting the amount of reliable data that could be gathered from it.
The planned timeline for DREAMS' operations are for somewhere between 2 and 8 Martian days (Sols) after landing. No word yet on whether this could be extended.
According to a blog post on the ESA website, although a global dust storm appears to be developing on Mars, this is not expected to affect Schiaparelli's landing.
"The lander has been designed to be able to cope with a global dust storm," wrote Daniel Scuka, the Senior Editor for Spacecraft Operations at the ESA's European Space Operations Centre. "In fact, a global dust storm would be amazing for the science package, DREAMS, on Schiaparelli, which for the first time will measure the electrification of the martian atmosphere due to dust grain friction."
There is a concern for the lander's descent camera only capturing featureless grey pictures if there is a significant dust storm in progress on the 19th,
Meanwhile, in orbit, the ExoMars spacecraft, also known as the Trace Gas Orbiter or TGO, will slip into orbit around Mars, joining the space fleet currently there. Since TGO is on a collision course with Mars, to ensure that Schiaparelli is on target for the surface, it will take over a year of complicated maneuvers and breaking by the spacecraft in order to enter into a proper orbit for its part of the mission.
Stand by for more as ExoMars gets closer to its destination!
Are aliens signalling us with light?
Although SETI - the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - has been listening for alien radio signals for decades now, there has been a more recent idea put forward that the reason why the galaxy has been silent so far is because the aliens might be using a different mode of communication - light.
Two researchers from Quebec's Laval University are reporting that they may have found just that - pulses of light coming from 234 relatively Sun-like stars, in among 2.5 million stars included in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. According to the study, these pulses apparently cannot be easily explained away by other possibilities.
This, as with all claims involving anything to do with aliens, deserves our skepticism, of course. As we've seen in the past, nearly all claims have, subsequently, been shown to originate from Earth or have some other explanation. Even the famous Wow! Signal may simply be radio emissions from the hydrogen in comets.
The authors, Ermanno Borra and Eric Trottier, are not offering their study as conclusive proof, however. They simply present it as a possible explanation for what they are seeing - recurring, periodic pulses of light from these stars - and are calling upon others to confirm their findings through further observations or study.
According to a statement released by the Breakthrough Listen project:
The one in 10,000 objects with unusual spectra seen by Borra and Trottier are certainly worthy of additional study. However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It is too early to unequivocally attribute these purported signals to the activities of extraterrestrial civilizations. Internationally agreed-upon protocols for searches for evidence of advanced life beyond Earth (SETI) require candidates to be confirmed by independent groups using their own telescopes, and for all natural explanations to be exhausted before invoking extraterrestrial agents as an explanation. Careful work must be undertaken to determine false positive rates, to rule out natural and instrumental explanations, and most importantly, to confirm detections using two or more independent telescopes.
The Optical SETI program (OSETI), an evolution of the original SETI plan, is on the lookout for these exact kinds of light signals. So, these researchers are definitely on the right track.
We'll have to wait and see if the pulses they've found actually turn out to be something alien, however even if they're not, this discovery may still reveal something we didn't know about these particular Sun-like stars, the processing of astronomical survey data, or even the instruments used to conduct these surveys. That's the beauty of science. You may not find what you are looking for, but sometimes what you find is still important.
Sources: ESA ExoMars | Astronomy | UC Berkeley (pdf) | SETI
Editor's Note: A previous version of this article labelled ExoMars as only an European Space Agency mission, however this two-part mission - ExoMars 2016 and ExoMars 2020 - is a joint European-Russian venture between the ESA and Roscosmos. While ExoMars 2016 consists of the ESA Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and ESA Schiaparelli lander, there are two Russian-built instruments on TGO (the Atmospheric Chemistry Suite, or ACS, and the Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector, aka FREND). ExoMars 2020 will have much larger Roscosmos contribution, as it will consist of a Russian descent module, a Russian landing platform and an ESA rover. We apologize for any confusion.
