A new paper published in Nature Geoscience details the impacts, which ranged between 85 and 290 kms from InSight's location, a region of Mars called Elysium Planitia.
The first of the four confirmed meteoroids made the most dramatic entrance: It entered Mars' atmosphere on September 5, 2021, exploding into at least three shards that each left a crater behind.
Then, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter flew over the estimated impact site to confirm the location.
After locating these spots, the orbiter's team used the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, or HiRISE, to get a colour close-up of the craters.
"After three years of InSight waiting to detect an impact, those craters looked beautiful," said Ingrid Daubar of Brown University, a co-author of the paper.
After combing through earlier data, scientists confirmed three other impacts had occurred on May 27, 2020, February 18, 2021 and August 31, 2021.
InSight's seismometer has detected over 1,300 marsquakes.
Provided by France's space agency, the instrument is so sensitive that it can detect seismic waves from thousands of miles away.
"But the September 5, 2021, event marks the first time an impact was confirmed as the cause of such waves," said NASA.
The sound of a meteoroid striking Mars - created from data recorded by NASA's InSight lander - is like a "bloop" due to a peculiar atmospheric effect.
The four meteoroid impacts confirmed so far produced small quakes with a magnitude of no more than 2.0. But the impacts will be critical to refining Mars' timeline.
"Impacts are the clocks of the solar system," said the paper's lead author Raphael Garcia. "We need to know the impact rate today to estimate the age of different surfaces."
Scientists can approximate the age of a planet's surface by counting its impact craters: The more they see, the older the surface.
Perseverance landed in the Jezero Crater, a spot chosen partly for the crater's history as a lake and as part of a rich river system, back when Mars had liquid water, air and a magnetic field.
What the rover found once on the ground was startling. Rather than the expected sedimentary rocks -- washed in by rivers and accumulated on the lake bottom -- many of the rocks are dark green in nature, according to researchers from Purdue University in the US.
"We started to realise that these layered igneous rocks we were seeing look different from the igneous rocks we have these days on Earth. They're very like igneous rocks on Earth early in its existence," said planetary scientist Roger Wien in the study published in the journals Science and Science Advances.
Understanding the rocks on Mars, their evolution and history, and what they reveal about the history of planetary conditions on Mars helps researchers understand how life may have arisen on Mars and how that compares with early life and conditions on ancient Earth.
"One of the reasons we don't have a great understanding of where and when life first evolved on Earth is because those rocks are mostly gone, so it's really hard to reconstruct what ancient environments on Earth were like," said Briony Horgan, associate professor in Purdue's College of Science.
"The rocks Perseverance is roving over in Jezero have more or less just been sitting at the surface for billions of years, waiting for us to come look at them. That's one of the reasons that Mars is an important laboratory for understanding the early solar system," he added.
The rocks and lava the rover is examining on Mars are nearly 4 billion years old.
Rocks that old exist on Earth but are incredibly weathered and beaten, thanks to Earth's active tectonic plates as well as the weathering effects of billions of years of wind, water and life.
On Mars, these rocks are pristine and much easier to analyse.
Scientists can use conditions on early Mars to help extrapolate the environment and conditions on Earth at the same time when life was beginning to arise.
"From orbit, we looked at these rocks and said, 'Oh, they have beautiful layers!' So we thought they were sedimentary rocks," Horgan said.
"And it wasn't until we were very close up and looked at them, at the millimeter scale, that we understood that these are not sedimentary rocks," he added.
In a clear sky, the planets can be seen shining before dawn. It is a special opportunity to see Mercury, which is usually obscured from view by the Sun's bright light, the BBC reported on Friday.
The conjunction was brightest on Friday morning but will remain visible until Monday from most parts of the world.
The last time this conjunction happened was 2004 and it won't be seen again until 2040, the report said.
The planets appear "like a string of pearls spread out from close to the horizon", explains space scientist and chief stargazer at the Society for Popular Astronomy Prof Lucie Green.
It is also a special event because the planets appear in the order they are positioned from the sun.
That is not always the case for planetary conjunctions because of our perspective from Earth looking into the solar system, Prof Green says.
On Friday, a crescent Moon also joined the line-up, appearing between Venus and Mars.
The quake estimated to be of magnitude 5 occurred on May 4, the 1,222nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission, NASA said in a statement.
This adds to the catalogue of more than 1,313 quakes InSight has detected since landing on Mars in November 2018.
The largest previously recorded quake was an estimated magnitude 4.2 detected on August 25, 2021.
"WOW! @NASAInSight's team & partners just received preliminary data from Mars on what's believed to be the largest seismic activity ever recorded on another planet!" NASA Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen said in a tweet on Tuesday.
"Preliminary estimate: Magnitude 5 event," he added.
The InSight lander arrived on Mars on November 26, 2018, touching down in Elysium Planitia, the second largest volcanic region on the Red Planet.
While Mars has been the target of numerous planetary science missions, the InSight mission is the first to specifically measure the subsurface using seismic methods.
Although a magnitude 5 quake is a medium-size quake compared to those felt on Earth, it's close to the upper limit of what scientists hoped to see on Mars during InSight's mission.
The science team will study this new quake further before being able to provide details such as its location, the nature of its source, and what it might tell us about the interior of Mars.
"Since we set our seismometer down in December 2018, we've been waiting for 'the big one'," said Bruce Banerdt, InSight's principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California which leads the mission, in the statement.
"This quake is sure to provide a view into the planet like no other. Scientists will be analysing this data to learn new things about Mars for years to come," he added.
The lander carries a highly sensitive seismometer, provided by France's Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), to study the deep interior of the planet.
As seismic waves pass through or reflect off material in Mars' crust, mantle, and core, they change in ways that seismologists can study to determine the depth and composition of these layers.
What scientists learn about the structure of Mars can help them better understand the formation of all rocky worlds, including Earth and its Moon.
Meanwhile, the large quake comes as InSight is facing new challenges with its solar panels, which power the mission. As InSight's location on Mars enters winter, there's more dust in the air, reducing available sunlight.
On May 7, the lander's available energy fell just below the limit that triggers safe mode, where the spacecraft suspends all but the most essential functions. This reaction is designed to protect the lander and may occur again as available power slowly decreases.
The lander completed its prime mission at the end of 2020, meeting its original science goals, but NASA extended the mission through December 2022.
An international team of scientists reveals how fast sound travels through the extremely thin, mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere, how Mars might sound to human ears, and how scientists can use audio recordings to probe subtle air-pressure changes on another world -- and to gauge the health of the rover.
People can hear the "puff, whir, zap" of the rover's tools, the rover's mechanical whine and click in a light Martian wind; the whir of rotors on Ingenuity, the Mars helicopter and the crackling strike of a rock-zapping laser.
"It's a new sense of investigation we've never used before on Mars," said Sylvestre Maurice, an astrophysicist at the University of Toulouse in France and lead author of the study.
"I expect many discoveries to come, using the atmosphere as a source of sound and the medium of propagation."
Most of the sounds in the study, published in the journal Nature, were recorded using the microphone on Perseverance's SuperCam, mounted on the head of the rover's mast.
On Earth, sounds typically travel at 1,234 kms per hour (343 metres per second). But on Mars, low-pitched sounds travel at about 854 kms (240 metres per second) while higher-pitched sounds move at 900 kms per hour (250 metres per second).
The variable sound speeds on the Red Planet are an effect of the thin, cold, carbon dioxide atmosphere, according to NASA.
Another effect of this thin atmosphere is that sounds carry only a short distance, and higher-pitched tones carry hardly at all.
On Earth, sound might drop off after about 213 feet (65 metres); on Mars, it falters at just 26 feet (8 metres), with high-pitched sounds being lost completely at that distance.
The recordings also reveal previously unobserved pressure variations produced by turbulence in the Martian atmosphere as its energy changes at tiny scales.
Martian wind gusts at very short timescales also were measured for the first time.
One of the most striking features of the sound recordings, Maurice said, is the silence that seems to prevail on Mars. "At some point, we thought the microphone was broken, it was so quiet," he added.
That, too, is a consequence of Mars having such a thin atmosphere.
A key objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life.
The rover is the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).
Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The one centimetre wide, beautiful branching rock that looks a bit like a coral or a sponge, was likely formed when water still covered the Red Planet, Live Science reported.
Curiosity took the image of the mineral flower, that bears resemblance to a living organism, but is not alive, on February 25 near Aeolis Mons, also known as Mount Sharp - situated at the heart of the 154 kilometres Gale crater on the Red Planet.
According to NASA, the mineral flower was imaged using an onboard focusing process, the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) aboard NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. It was created by merging two to eight images previously taken by the MAHLI, located on the turret at the end of the rover's robotic arm.
"The flower-like rock, which has been named the Blackthorn Salt, is a diagenetic feature, or one made from minerals that precipitated from ancient water that had previously been mixed with Martian rock," Abigail Fraeman, a planetary scientist and deputy project scientist for the Curiosity rover, was quoted as saying to Live Science.
Diagenetic features found on Mars are similar in size but can have either a branched shape, also known as dendritic form, like the Blackthorn Salt, or be more rounded or even spherical, like other rocks in the same photo, she added.
Since its arrival on Mars in 2012, Curiosity has discovered several other diagenetic features including flower-like deposits from the Pahrump Hills area in 2015 and other diagenetic features from the Murray formation in 2019.
Continuing to document new diagenetic features like the Blackthorn Salt is important because it could help researchers figure out when liquid water disappeared from Mars.
"We can learn more about the complex and long-lived history of water at Mount Sharp," Fraeman said. This could reveal more information about how long the environment could have been potentially habitable to life, she added.
The InSight lander arrived on Mars on November 26, 2018, touching down in the Elysium Planitia region -- the second largest volcanic region on the Red Planet.
Geophysicists from ETH Zurich and University of Cologne, used seismic data to analyse the composition of the Elysium Planitia region.
The data suggested the presence of a shallow sedimentary layer sandwiched between lava flows beneath the planet's surface.
The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.
The team examined the shallow subsurface to around 200 metres in depth.
Right beneath the surface, they discovered a regolith layer of dominantly sandy material approximately three metres thick above a 15 metre layer of coarse blocky ejecta -- rocky blocks that were ejected after a meteorite impact and fell back to the surface.
Below these top layers, they identified around 150 metres of basaltic rocks, that is, cooled and solidified lava flows, which was largely consistent with the expected subsurface structure.
However, between these lava flows, starting at a depth of about 30 metres, the team identified an additional layer 30 to 40 metres thick with low seismic velocity, suggesting it contains weak sedimentary materials relative to the stronger basalt layers.
Further, they found that the shallower lava flows are approximately 1.7 billion years old, forming during the Amazonian period -- a geological era on Mars characterised by low rates of meteorite and asteroid impacts and by cold, hyper-arid conditions, which began approximately 3 billion years ago.
In contrast, the deeper basalt layer below the sediments formed much earlier, approximately 3.6 billion years ago during the Hesperian period, which was characterized by widespread volcanic activity.
The team proposed that the intermediate layer with low volcanic velocities could be composed of sedimentary deposits sandwiched between the Hesperian and Amazonian basalts, or within the Amazonian basalts themselves.
"While the results help to better understand the geological processes in Elysium Planitia, comparison with pre-landing models is also valuable for future landed missions, since it can help to refine predictions," said earthquake specialist Dr Brigitte Knapmeyer-Endrun from the University of Cologne.
Mars has been the target of numerous planetary science missions, but the InSight mission is the first to specifically measure the subsurface using seismic methods.
While Mars has no liquid water on its surface today, remote sensing studies and analyses of Martian meteorites dating back to the 1980s posit that Mars was once water-rich, compared to Earth.
NASA's Viking orbiter spacecraft -- and, more recently, the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on the ground -- returned dramatic images of Martian landscapes marked by river valleys and flood channels.
Researchers have proposed many possible explanations, including a weakening of Mars' magnetic field that could have resulted in the loss of a thick atmosphere.
But a recent study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests a more fundamental reason why today's Mars looks so drastically different from the "blue marble" of Earth.
"Mars' fate was decided from the beginning. There is likely a threshold on the size requirements of rocky planets to retain enough water to enable habitability and plate tectonics, with mass exceeding that of Mars," said Kun Wang, Assistant Professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
For the study, the team used stable isotopes of the element potassium (K) to estimate the presence, distribution and abundance of volatile elements on different planetary bodies.
Potassium is a moderately volatile element, but the scientists decided to use it as a kind of tracer for more volatile elements and compounds, such as water. The team measured the potassium isotope compositions of 20 previously confirmed Martian meteorites, selected to be representative of the bulk silicate composition of the red planet.
Using this approach, the researchers determined that Mars lost more potassium and other volatiles than Earth during its formation, but retained more of these volatiles than the moon and asteroid 4-Vesta, two much smaller and drier bodies than Earth and Mars.
The researchers found a well-defined correlation between body size and potassium isotopic composition.
"It's indisputable that there used to be liquid water on the surface of Mars, but how much water in total Mars once had is hard to quantify through remote sensing and rover studies alone," Wang said. "There are many models out there for the bulk water content of Mars. In some of them, early Mars was even wetter than the Earth. We don't believe that was the case."
The findings also have implications for the search for life on other planets besides Mars, the researchers noted.
Opportunity's last communication with Earth was received June 10, 2018, as a planet-wide dust storm blanketed the solar-powered rover's location on the western rim of Perseverance Valley, eventually blocking out so much sunlight that the rover could no longer charge its batteries.
Although the storm eventually abated and the skies over Perseverance cleared, the 15-year-old rover has not communicated with Earth since then.
"I haven't given up yet. This could be the end. Under the assumption that this is the end, it feels good. I mean that," The New York Time quoted Cornell University Professor Steven Squyres, the mission's Principal Investigator, as saying.
If the storm knocked out the rover for good, "that's an honourable death", he added.
In a last bit of effort, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, are transmitting a new set of commands to the Opportunity rover in an attempt to compel the 15-year-old Martian explorer to contact Earth.
The new commands, which will be beamed to the rover during the next several weeks, address low-likelihood events that could have occurred aboard Opportunity, preventing it from transmitting, NASA said.
"We have and will continue to use multiple techniques in our attempts to contact the rover," said John Callas, project manager for Opportunity at the JPL.
"Over the past seven months, we have attempted to contact Opportunity over 600 times.
"While we have not heard back from the rover and the probability that we ever will is decreasing each day, we plan to continue to pursue every logical solution that could put us back in touch," he said.
The "dust-clearing season" -- the time of year on Mars when increased winds could clear the rover's solar panels of dust that might be preventing it from charging its batteries -- is drawing to a close.
Meanwhile, Mars is heading into southern winter, which brings with it extremely low temperatures that are likely to cause irreparable harm to an unpowered rover's batteries, internal wiring and/or computer systems.
Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit, were launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2003.
Spirit landed on Mars in 2004, and its mission ended in 2011.
InSight landed safely at Elysium Planitia on Mars on November 26, kicking off a two-year mission to explore the deep interior of the Red Planet.
On December 6, the InSight lander used a camera on its robotic arm to take its first selfie -- a mosaic made up of 11 images. The image includes the lander's solar panel and its entire deck, including its science instruments, weather sensor booms and UHF antenna, NASA said in a statement on Wednesday.
In addition, InSight sent another set of mosaic composed of 52 individual photos.
It showcases the first complete look of "workspace" -- the approximately 14-by-7-foot (4-by-2-metre) crescent of terrain directly in front of the spacecraft --, where the spacecraft's instruments such as seismometer (called the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, or SEIS) and heat-flow probe (known as the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package, or HP3) can be placed.
"The near-absence of rocks, hills and holes means it'll be extremely safe for our instruments," said InSight's principal investigator Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
"This might seem like a pretty plain piece of ground if it weren't on Mars, but we're glad to see that," Banerdt added.
InSight's landing team deliberately chose a landing region in Elysium Planitia that is relatively free of rocks.
The spacecraft sits in what appears to be a nearly rock-free "hollow" -- a depression created by a meteor impact that later filled with sand.
Working with US companies is the next step to achieving long-term scientific study and human exploration of the Moon and Mars, NASA said in a statement on Tuesday.
"We are announcing new Moon partnerships with American companies... The US is returning to the surface of the Moon, and we're doing it sooner than you think!" Jim Bridenstine, NASA Administrator tweeted.
The agency will reveal details about its endeavour to return to the moon at a press conference on Thursday afternoon.
NASA will unveil the names of future partners chosen to send astronauts back to the Moon, for the first time in nearly five decades.
Known as the "Moon to Mars" project, NASA will lead an innovative and sustainable exploration of the Moon together with commercial and international partners.
The initiative falls under the Space Policy Directive-1, signed by US President Donald Trump in December 2017.
"The directive I am signing today will refocus America's space programme on human exploration and discovery. It marks a first step in returning American astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972, for long-term exploration and use," Trump had said.
"This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprints -- we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday, worlds beyond."
It is going to use seismometers to study the planet's interior so we can learn more about how it formed and why it's so different from Earth, BBC reported on Sunday.
In less than two days, NASA is landing on Mars with NASA InSight! Thank you to the NASA workforce... Let's get this done and start the next phase!, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted on Saturday.
InSight will hit the top of the Martian atmosphere at 19,800 kilometres per hour (kph) and slow down to eight kph -- about human jogging speed -- before its three legs touch down on Martian soil.
That extreme deceleration has to happen in just under seven minutes.
"There's a reason engineers call landing on Mars 'seven minutes of terror'," Rob Grover, InSight's entry, descent and landing (EDL) lead, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has said in a statement.
"We can't joystick the landing, so we have to rely on the commands we pre-programme into the spacecraft. We've spent years testing our plans, learning from other Mars landings and studying all the conditions Mars can throw at us.
"And we're going to stay vigilant till InSight settles into its home in the Elysium Planitia region," Grover said.
Launched on May 5, Mars Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) lander marks NASA's first Mars landing since the Curiosity rover in 2012.
The landing will kick off a two-year mission in which InSight will become the first spacecraft to study Mars' deep interior.
Its data will also help scientists understand the formation of all rocky worlds, including our own.
About 80 live viewing events for the public to watch the InSight landing will take place around the world. It will be at 1.30 a.m. on Tuesday in India.
People from around the world will be able to watch the event live on NASA Television, the agency's website and social media platforms, including on YouTube.
The region, a furrowed, rock-filled escarpment known as Nili Fossae sits at the boundary of the northern and southern hemisphere.
It is an impressive example of past activity on the planet and shows signs of where flowing wind, water and ice once moved material from place to place, carving out distinctive patterns and land forms as it did so, the ESA said in a statement on Wednesday.
Despite Mars' reputation as a dry, arid world today, water is believed to have played a key role in sculpting Nili Fossae via ongoing erosion.
Nili Fossae is filled with rocky valleys, small hills, and clusters of flat-topped land forms (known as mesas in geological terms), with some chunks of crustal rock appearing to be depressed down into the surface creating a number of ditch-like features known as graben, the ESA noted.
Further, the image also showed the higher-altitude terrain of Nili Fossae. This appears to consist mostly of rocky plateaus while the lower terrain comprises of smaller rocks, mesas, hills and more, with the two sections roughly separated by erosion channels and valleys.
The shapes and structures scattered throughout this image are thought to have been shaped over time by flows of not only water and ice, but also wind, ESA said.
The images showed patches of the surface that appear to be notably dark against the ochre background, as if smudged with charcoal or ink.
These are areas of darker volcanic sand, which have been transported and deposited by present-day martian winds. Wind moves sand and dust around often on Mars' surface, creating rippling dune fields across the planet and forming multi-coloured, patchy terrain like Nili Fossae, the researchers said.
The data comprising this image was gathered by Mars Express' High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on February 26.
InSight will hit the top of the Martian atmosphere at 19,800 kilometres per hour (kph) and slow down to eight kph -- about human jogging speed -- before its three legs touch down on Martian soil.
That extreme deceleration has to happen in just under seven minutes.
"There's a reason engineers call landing on Mars 'seven minutes of terror,'" Rob Grover, InSight's entry, descent and landing (EDL) lead, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.
"We can't joystick the landing, so we have to rely on the commands we pre-programme into the spacecraft. We've spent years testing our plans, learning from other Mars landings and studying all the conditions Mars can throw at us.
"And we're going to stay vigilant till InSight settles into its home in the Elysium Planitia region," Grover said.
Launched on May 5, Mars Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) lander marks NASA's first Mars landing since the Curiosity rover in 2012.
The landing will kick off a two-year mission in which InSight will become the first spacecraft to study Mars' deep interior.
Its data also will help scientists understand the formation of all rocky worlds, including our own.
About 80 live viewing events for the public to watch the InSight landing will take place around the world. It will be at 3 p.m. EST meaning 1.30 a.m. in India on November 27.
People from around the world will be able to watch the event live on NASA Television, the agency's website and social media platforms, including on YouTube.
"Landing on Mars is exciting, but scientists are looking forward to the time after InSight lands," said Lori Glaze, Acting Director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA headquarters.
Jezero Crater, 45 kilometres in size, is located on the western edge of Isidis Planitia -- a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator.
Its ancient lake-delta system offers many promising sampling targets of at least five different kinds of rock, including clays and carbonates that have high potential to preserve signatures of past life.
"The landing site in Jezero Crater offers geologically rich terrain, with land forms reaching as far back as 3.6 billion years, that could potentially answer important questions in planetary evolution and astrobiology," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement on Monday.
"Getting samples from this unique area will revolutionize how we think about Mars and its ability to harbour life," he added.
The crater, once home to an ancient river delta, could have collected and preserved ancient organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life from the water and sediments that flowed into the crater billions of years ago.
In addition, the site contains numerous boulders and rocks to the east, cliffs to the west, and depressions filled with aeolian bedforms (wind-derived ripples in sand that could trap a rover) in several locations.
Selecting a landing site this early allows the Rover drivers and science operations team to optimise their plans for exploring Jezero Crater once the Rover is safely on the ground.
The Rover mission is scheduled to launch in July 2020 as NASA's next step in exploration of the Red Planet.
It will not only seek signs of ancient habitable conditions and past microbial life but will also collect rock and soil samples and store them in a cache on the planet's surface.
Earlier in November, ExoMars rover -- the European Space Agency (ESA) and Russian Roscosmos' joint venture to the Red Planet that will set out in 2020 -- also chose a landing site on Mars' equator called Oxia Planum, which had in the prehistoric era housed a massive pool of water.
The soundtrack was created by scanning a picture from left to right, pixel by pixel, and looking at the brightness and colour information and combining them with terrain elevation.
The team used a technique called "data sonification" that deployed computer algorithms to assign each element a specific pitch and melody to translate a photograph into music.
"We are absolutely thrilled about presenting this work about such a fascinating planet," said Domenico Vicinanza, Director of the Sound and Game Engineering (SAGE) research group at Anglia Ruskin.
"Image sonification is a really flexible technique to explore science and it can be used in several domains, from studying certain characteristics of planet surfaces and atmospheres, to analysing weather changes or detecting volcanic eruptions," Vicinanza added.
The quiet, slow harmonies are a consequence of the dark background and the brighter, higher pitched sounds towards the middle of the piece are created by the sonification of the bright sun disk.
The data sonification technique can be applied in health science to provide scientists with new methods to analyse the occurrence of certain shapes and colours, which is particularly useful in image diagnostics, the team said.
Vicinanza along with Genevieve Williams from the University of Exeter,
will present the piece entitled Mars Soundscapes in the NASA booth at the forthcoming Supercomputing SC18 Conference in Dallas.
It will be presented using both conventional speakers and vibrational transducers so the audience could feel the vibrations with their hands, thus enjoying a first-person experience of a sunrise on Mars.
Opportunity is a robotic rover that has been providing photographic data on Mars for NASA since 2004.
Earlier in 2018, it ceased communications following a dust storm. Scientists hope that it may resume its function later this year.
A team led by scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), calculated that if liquid water exists on Mars, it could -- under specific conditions -- contain more oxygen than previously thought.
According to the study reported in the journal Nature Geoscience, the levels could even theoretically exceed the threshold needed to support simple aerobic life.
However, the finding runs contrary to the current, accepted view of Mars and its potential for hosting habitable environments.
Researchers have long dismissed the idea that liquid water on Mars might be oxygenated, given that Mars's atmosphere is about 160 times thinner than that of Earth and is mostly carbon dioxide.
"Oxygen is a key ingredient when determining the habitability of an environment, but it is relatively scarce on Mars," said Woody Fischer, a Professor at Caltech.
"Nobody ever thought that the concentrations of dissolved oxygen needed for aerobic respiration could theoretically exist on Mars," added Vlada Stamenkovic from the JPL.
For the study, the team developed a chemical model describing how oxygen dissolves in salty water at temperatures below the freezing point of water.
Then, they examined the global climate of Mars and how it has changed over the past 20 million years.
The team found that, at low-enough elevations (where the atmosphere is thickest) and at low-enough temperatures (where gases like oxygen have an easier time staying in a liquid solution), an unexpectedly high amount of oxygen could exist in the water -- a value several orders of magnitude above the threshold needed for aerobic respiration in Earth's oceans today.
Further, the locations of those regions have shifted as the tilt of Mars's axis has changed over the past 20 million years. During that time, the highest oxygen solubilities have occurred within the past five million years.
The findings could inform future missions to Mars by providing better targets to rovers searching for signs of past or present habitable environments, Stamenkovic said.
Called the "CO2 Conversion Challenge", the competition asks public to discover ways to develop novel synthesis technologies that use carbon dioxide as the sole carbon source to generate molecules that can be used to manufacture a variety of products, including "substrates" for use in microbial bioreactors.
"Because CO2 is readily abundant within the Martian atmosphere, such technologies will translate into in-situ manufacturing of products to enable humans to live and thrive on the planet," said NASA in a statement on Sunday.
It will also be implemented on Earth by using both waste and atmospheric CO2 as a resource, read the information on NASA Conversion Challenge website.
The challenge asks individuals, teams and organisations to design and develop technology that has the potential to be useful on Mars and on Earth.
The NASA competition has two phases, with a total prize of up to $1 million.
In the first phase, which is the concept challenge, five finalists will receive an award of $50,000 each.
In the second phase, where the selected candidates would have to build and demonstrate their solutions, the prize is up to $750,000, said NASA.
InSight stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.
The Mars lander carries a unique instrument -- Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) -- that is capable of measuring heat flowing out of the planet.
This could shed light on how the Mars' massive mountains -- which eclipse Mt Everest here on Earth -- first formed, NASA said in a statement.
"Planets are kind of like an engine, driven by heat that moves their internal parts around. With HP3, we'll be lifting the hood on Mars' engine for the first time," said Sue Smrekar, deputy lead for HP3 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.
The Red Planet has some of the tallest mountains in the solar system. They include Olympus Mons, a volcano nearly three times the height of Everest. It borders a region called the Tharsis plateau, where three equally awe-inspiring volcanoes dominate the landscape.
"Most of the planet's geology is a result of heat," Smrekar said.
"Volcanic eruptions in the ancient past were driven by the flow of this heat, pushing up and constructing the towering mountains Mars is famous for," Smrekar added.
The HP3, built and operated by DLR (German Aerospace Centre), will be placed on the Martian surface after InSight lands on November 26.
A probe called a mole will pummel the ground, burying itself and dragging a tether behind it. Temperature sensors embedded in this tether will measure the natural internal heat of Mars.
The mole has to burrow deep enough to escape the wide temperature swings of the Martian surface. Even the spacecraft's own "body heat" could affect HP3's super-sensitive readings, NASA said.
The findings of the InSight mission will also reveal to scientists how all rocky planets are formed -- including Earth, its Moon and even planets in other solar systems.
The rover had to undergo an emergency shutdown in June, after the Martian dust storm prevented it from powering itself through its solar panels.
Scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been listening for the rover everyday since its forced shutdown and attempting to send Opportunity a message command three times a week. So far, it has not sent a beep back, the Inverse reported on Tuesday.
Last NASA heard from Opportunity was on June 10 and since then there's no real update, Andrew Good from NASA's Mars and Mars technology media relations specialist told Inverse.
"We still haven't heard from it. A variety of scientists think early to mid-September might be a time when the skies clear enough that it could recharge," he said.
Moreover, the science team does not expect to hear anything from Opportunity until there has been a significant reduction in the atmospheric opacity over the rover site, NASA said in a statement.
"Since the last contact with the rover on June 10, Opportunity has likely experienced a low-power fault and perhaps, a mission-clock fault. Additionally, the up-loss timer has also since expired, resulting in another fault condition," it added.
First detected by NASA on June 1, a massive storm led to a "dark, perpetual night" over the rover in the Perseverance Valley.
The rover uses solar panels to provide power and to recharge its batteries.
Opportunity's power levels had dropped significantly by June 6, requiring the rover to shift to minimal operations and later to temporarily suspend science operations.
Despite the worsening dust storm, Opportunity had sent a transmission to NASA engineers on June 10.
"I touched down on #Mars six years ago. Celebrating my 6th landing anniversary with the traditional gift of iron… oxide. (It puts the red in Red Planet.)," said a tweet sent out by the rover on Sunday.
Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, was designed to assess whether Mars ever had an environment able to support small life forms called microbes. In other words, its mission is to determine the planet's "habitability."
The rover is currently keeping its "eyes" on a dust event that had gone global by June 20.
Most of NASA's spacecraft are studying the dust storm from above. But the Curiosity rover has a unique perspective: the nuclear-powered science machine is largely immune to the darkened skies, allowing it to collect science from within the beige veil enveloping the planet.
Curiosity has a number of "eyes" that can determine the abundance and size of dust particles based on how they scatter and absorb light, NASA said in a statement in July.
That includes its Mastcam, ChemCam, and an ultraviolet sensor on REMS, its suite of weather instruments.
NASA lost contact with its Opportunity rover due to the storm.
Based on the longevity of a 2001 global storm, NASA scientists estimate it may be September before the haze has cleared enough for Opportunity to power up and call home
The lake under the Martian ice stretches 20 kms across, said the team led by Roberto Orosei from the National Institute of Astrophysics in Bologna in a paper detailed in the prestigious journal Science.
The lake is about 1.5 km beneath Mars's surface and is at least one metre deep.
The detection was made using the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) instrument on European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft.
If confirmed, it would be the first confirmed news of liquid water ever detected on the Red Planet.
"We discovered water on Mars," said Orosei.
In 2015, in the first-ever definitive signs of the presence of liquid water on the Red Planet, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured strong evidence for seasonal flows of liquid salty water on the Martian surface.
In the new discovery, between May 2012 and December 2015, Orosei and colleagues used MARSIS to survey a region called Planum Australe, located in the southern ice cap of Mars.
They obtained 29 sets of radar samplings, mapping out an area exhibiting a very sharp change in its associated radar signal, about 1.5 km below the surface of the ice and extending sideways about 20 km.
The radar profile of this area is similar to that of lakes of liquid water found beneath the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets on Earth, suggesting that there is a subglacial lake at this location on Mars.
"Although the temperature is expected to be below the freezing point of pure water, Orosei noted that dissolved salts of magnesium, calcium, and sodium -- known to be present in Martian rocks -- could be dissolved in the water to form a brine," said the study.
"Together with the pressure of the overlying ice, this lowers the melting point, allowing the lake to remain liquid, as happens on Earth," the researchers noted.
According to the journal Nature, if further studies confirm the existence of a lake, it could open new avenues for investigating Mars.
"It begins a new line of inquiry that's very exciting," Jim Green, NASA's chief scientist, was quoted as saying.
Nearly 4.5 billion years ago, Mars had six and a half times as much water as it does now and a thicker atmosphere.
But most of this water has disappeared into space and the reason is that Mars no longer has global magnetic fields, like on the Earth.
The magnetic field protects the Earth's atmosphere against degradation from energy rich particles from the Sun.
Orosei and team wrote: "There is no reason to conclude that the presence of subsurface water on Mars is limited to a single location."
The images taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) showed the three-dimensional structure of massive ice deposits on Mars.
The ice sheets extend from just below the surface to a depth of 100 meters or more and appear to contain distinct layers.
It extending downward from depths as shallow as 1 to 2 meters below the surface, which could preserve a record of Mars' past climate, the researchers noted in the journal Science.
"We expect the vertical structure of Martian ice-rich deposits to preserve a record of ice deposition and past climate," said Colin M. Dundas, from the US Geological Survey.
"They might even be a useful source of water for future human exploration of the red planet," Dundas added.
The researchers investigated eight locations on Mars and found thick deposits cover broad regions of the Martian mid-latitudes with a smooth mantle.
However, erosion in these regions creates scarps that expose the internal structure of the mantle.
The scarps are actively retreating because of sublimation of the exposed water ice.
The ice deposits likely originated as snowfall during Mars' high-obliquity periods and have now compacted into massive, fractured, and layered ice.
Previous researchers have revealed that the Red Planet harbors subsurface water ice.
Recent observations by MRO's ground-penetrating Shallow Radar instrument revealed a buried ice layer that covers more ground than the state of New Mexico.
NASA's Phoenix lander had also dug up some ice near the Martian north pole in 2008, however, it is not clear if that is part of the big sheet.
The project, as part of China's Mars exploration preparation, was approved by experts in Beijing on Thursday, Xinhua news agency reported.
The village will be constructed in the red rock area of the Qaidam basin in western Qinghai, which has been dubbed "the most Martian place on Earth".
Covering 702 hectares, the "Mars Village" will consist of a tourism centre, a Mars community, a simulation base and other facilities.
The total investment is estimated at 850 million yuan (about $130 million).
Budweiser is upholding its commitment, announced earlier this year at an event "South by Southwest" that "it would create a beer suitable for drinking in space... and when people get there they will toast on Budweiser...", the company said in a statement this week.
"Budweiser is always pushing the boundaries of innovation and we are inspired by the collective American Dream to get to Mars," said Ricardo Marques, Vice President, Budweiser.
"We are excited to begin our research to brew beer for the red planet," Marques added.
The company also plans to send 20 barley seeds -- a core ingredient in Budweiser's recipe -- into space.
Twenty Budweiser barley seeds will be sent to the International Space Station (ISS), packaged in two Space Tango CubeLabs -- shoebox-sized facilities that host small-scale experiments.
They will be sent to space on the upcoming cargo supply mission SpaceX's CRS-13 scheduled to be launched on December 4 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.
The seeds will be in orbit for approximately 30 days to see how they react in a microgravity environment, before being brought back to earth for Budweiser's innovation team to analyse.
The two barley experiments will focus on barley seed exposure and barley germination.
Not only will the research offer insights on steps to creating beer on the Red Planet, but it could also provide valuable information on the production of barley and the larger agricultural community here on earth.
These experiments on the ISS are the first of many steps Budweiser will take to reach its larger goal of creating a microgravity beer for Mars, the statement said.
Testing of the Kilopower project is due to start in November and go through early next year, with NASA partnering with the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Nevada National Security Site to appraise fission power technologies, NASA said on Tuesday.
"The Kilopower test programme will give us confidence that this technology is ready for space flight development," said Lee Mason from NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate.
"We'll be checking analytical models along the way for verification of how well the hardware is working," Mason said.
The pioneering Kilopower reactor represents a small and simple approach for long-duration, Sun-independent electric power for space or extraterrestrial surfaces.
Offering prolonged life and reliability, such technology could produce from one to 10 kilowatts of electrical power, continuously for 10 years or more, Mason pointed out.
The prototype power system uses a solid, cast uranium-235 reactor core, about the size of a paper towel roll.
Reactor heat is transferred via passive sodium heat pipes, with that heat then converted to electricity by high-efficiency Stirling engines.
A Stirling engine uses heat to create pressure forces that move a piston, which is coupled to an alternator to produce electricity, similar in some respects to an automobile engine.
Having a space-rated fission power unit for Mars explorers would be a game changer, Mason added.
"A space nuclear reactor could provide a high energy density power source with the ability to operate independent of solar energy or orientation, and the ability to operate in extremely harsh environments, such as the Martian surface," Patrick McClure, project lead on the Kilopower work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said.
Moving the power system from ground-testing into a space system is an achievable objective, said Kilopower Project Manager Don Palac.
Looking into the future, Mason suggests that the technology would be ideal for furthering lunar exploration objectives too.
"The technology doesn't care. Moon and or Mars, this power system is agnostic to those environments," Mason said.
The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera on Mars Odyssey orbiter, launched in 2001, observed Phobos on September 29.
Phobos has an oblong shape with an average diameter of about 22 kilometres.
Cameras on other Mars orbiters have previously taken higher-resolution images of Phobos, but none with the infrared information available from THEMIS.
Observations in multiple bands of thermal-infrared wavelengths can yield information about the mineral composition of the surface, as well as the surface texture, NASA said in a statement this week.
"Although THEMIS has been at Mars for 16 years, this was the first time we have been able to turn the spacecraft around to look at Phobos," said THEMIS Mission Planner Jonathon Hill of Arizona State University.
The researchers combined visible-wavelength and infrared data to produce an image colour-coded for surface temperatures of this moon, which has been considered for a potential future human-mission outpost, NASA said.
"This half-moon view of Phobos was chosen because it allowed us to observe a wide range of temperatures on the surface," Hill added.
One major question about Phobos and Mars' even smaller moon, Deimos, is whether they are captured asteroids or bits of Mars knocked into the sky by impact.
The researchers believe that compositional information from THEMIS might help pin down their origin.
Since Odyssey began orbiting the Red Planet in 2001, THEMIS has provided compositional and thermal properties information from all over Mars, but never before imaged either Martian moon.
The September 29 observation was completed to validate that the spacecraft could safely do so, as the start of a possible series of observations of Phobos and Deimos in coming months.
"There is heightened interest in Phobos because of the possibility that future astronauts could perhaps use it as an outpost," said Odyssey Project Scientist Jeffrey Plaut of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
According to Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) Mission -- a space probe developed by NASA designed to study the Martian atmosphere while orbiting Mars -- a solar event on September 11 triggered the global aurora at Mars more than 25 times brighter than any previously seen by the MAVEN orbiter.
The orbiter, which has been studying the Martian atmosphere's interaction with the solar wind since 2014, also recorded radiation levels on the surface more than double any previously measured by the Curiosity rover's Radiation Assessment Detector, or RAD, since that mission's landing in 2012.
The high readings lasted more than two days, NASA found.
"The current solar cycle has been an odd one, with less activity than usual during the peak, and now we have this large event as we're approaching solar minimum," said Sonal Jain of the University of Colorado Boulder, who is a member of MAVEN's Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph instrument team.
This event was big enough to be detected at Earth too, even though Earth was on the opposite side of the Sun from Mars.
"This is exactly the type of event both missions were designed to study, and it's the biggest we've seen on the surface so far," added RAD Principal Investigator Don Hassler.
The Sun always emits a continuous stream of charged particles, mainly electrons and protons.
Occasionally, eruptions called coronal mass ejections occur, with higher density, energy and speed of the ejected particles. These events vary in strength.
According to Jain: "When a solar storm hits the Martian atmosphere, it can trigger auroras that light up the whole planet in ultraviolet light. The recent one lit up Mars like a light bulb.
"An aurora on Mars can envelope the entire planet because Mars has no strong magnetic field like Earth's to concentrate the aurora near polar regions. The energetic particles from the Sun also can be absorbed by the upper atmosphere, increasing its temperature and causing it to swell up."
In January, the crew of four men and two women were quarantined on a vast plain below the summit of the giant volcano Mauna Loa -- one of Hawaii's five volcanoes and the world's largest.
They remained there for an eight-month simulation activity to gain a better understanding and to get a bit of a feel for how astronauts would respond mentally, physically, and most important, psychologically to a long-term on a manned space mission as well as in an inhospitable environment.
"Long term space travel is absolutely possible," Laura Lark, specialist at the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) project, led by the University of Hawaii at Manoa, was quoted as saying to the inquisitr.com on Saturday.
"There are certainly technical challenges to be overcome. There are certainly human factors to be figured out, that's part of what HI-SEAS is for. But I think that overcoming those challenges is just a matter of effort. We are absolutely capable of it," Lark added.
Their experiment included everything from being forced to live in the cramped habitat of the dome to having to rely solely on packaged food - and virtually no contact with another living soul.
The atmosphere was as similar as possible to what life on Mars would be. All of the communications the crew could have with the outside world was subjected to a 20-minute delay -- the time it takes for signals to get from Mars to the Earth.
The data gathered during this mission can better help in choosing crews that have certain traits and a better chance of doing well during a potential two-to-three year Mars expedition, which would then pave the way for humans settlement in the red planet by around 2030.
The competition, announced in May, saw participation from over 140 students aged eight to 18 from across the world.
The art consisted of still images, composed by traditional methods, such as pencil, charcoal, watercolours or paint, or by computerised means and was submitted by the students via a special online form on May 31.
The participants illustrated any part of the human future on the Red Planet, including the first landing, human field exploration, operations at an early Mars base, the building of the first Martian cities, terraforming the Red Planet and other related human settlement concepts.
"My painting is a depiction of the possibility of new life on Mars. This is the only planet after Earth which can be tested for evolution of life forms and hence we should definitely give it a good try," Devina Manchanda, a class three student, from GD Goenka Public School, Model Town, who won the second prize, said in a statement on Friday.
The contest was divided into three categories: Upper Elementary (grades 4-6), Junior High (grades 7-9), and High School (Grades 10-12).
While Manchanda received a cash prize of $500 in the category of elementary school, the third place was a tie between Arna Kakkar, Gaurish Anand and Gopika Chawla, also from the same school, who received a cash prize of $250 in the same category.
Japman Singh from KR Mangalam World School, Aditya Prakash from Bal Bharati Public School, Pitampura, Anvi Gaur and Rachit Birman from Sri Venkateshwar International School, Dwarka and Yash from Indraprastha International School, Dwarka, received an honourable mention and a certificate.
The students were part of the "Universe In The School Programme" -- a curriculum based academic educational programme -- of New Delhi-based Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE) organisation.
"We as an organisation and countrymen are proud and glad to see students excelling in their category, showing fantastic prowess in the innovation and creativity to the whole world," said Pankaj Bahmba, Director, SPACE.
The winning works of art will be posted on the Mars Society web site and may also be published as part of a special book about Mars art.
In addition, the student winners have also received a special invitation to join the "2017 International Mars Society Convention" at the University of California, Irvine from September 7-10, where their art will be displayed.
"We were amazed and delighted by the quantity and quality of Mars art produced by students from every continent. Many of these works are truly first rate! It is clear that young people around the world can see the vision of the human future in space, and can use art to allow others to see with their eyes what youth can already see with their minds," said Robert Zubrin, President at the Mars Society -- a volunteer-driven space-advocacy non-profit organisation.
MAVEN is the first spacecraft dedicated to understanding Mars' upper atmosphere and began its primary science mission in November 2014.
The spacecraft aims to determine the role that loss of atmospheric gas to space played in changing the Martian climate through time.
"We're excited that MAVEN is continuing its observations. It's now observing a second Martian year, and looking at the ways that the seasonal cycles and the solar cycle affect the system," said Gina DiBraccio, MAVEN Project Scientist at NASA, in a statement.
MAVEN has also measured the rate at which the Sun and the solar wind are stripping gas from the top of the atmosphere to space, along with the details of the removal processes.
It has been observed that a layer of metal ions in the Martian ionosphere results from incoming interplanetary dust hitting the atmosphere.
The spacecraft also discovered that some particles from the solar wind are able to penetrate unexpectedly deep into the upper atmosphere, rather than being diverted around the planet by the Martian ionosphere.
"MAVEN has made tremendous discoveries about the Mars upper atmosphere and how it interacts with the sun and the solar wind," said Bruce Jakosky, Principal Investigator, University of Colorado, Boulder.
"These are allowing us to understand not just the behaviour of the atmosphere today, but how the atmosphere has changed through time," Jakosky added.
MAVEN observed the distribution of gaseous nitric oxide and ozone in the atmosphere that showed unexpectedly complex behaviour.
This complexity indicated that there are dynamical processes of exchange of gas between the lower and upper atmosphere that are not understood at present.
As the rover approached the upper end of "Perseverance Valley" in early May, images from its cameras began showing parts of the area in greater resolution than what can be seen in images taken from the orbit above Mars.
"The science team is really jazzed at starting to see this area up close and looking for clues to help us distinguish among multiple hypotheses about how the valley formed," said Opportunity Project Scientist Matt Golombek of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena.
The process that carved Perseverance Valley into the rim of Endeavour Crater billions of years ago has not yet been identified.
It might have been flowing water, or might have been a debris flow in which a small amount of water lubricated a turbulent mix of mud and boulders, or might have been an even drier process, such as wind erosion.
The mission's main objective with Opportunity at this site is to assess which possibility is best supported by the evidence still in place, NASA said.
The upper end of the valley is at a broad notch in the crest of the crater rim. The rover team's plan for investigating the area begins with taking sets of images of the valley from two widely separated points at that dip in the rim.
This long-baseline stereo imaging will provide information for extraordinarily detailed three-dimensional analysis of the terrain.
The valley extends down from the rim's crest line into the crater, at a slope of about 15 to 17 degrees for a distance of about two football fields.
"The long-baseline stereo imaging will be used to generate a digital elevation map that will help the team carefully evaluate possible driving routes down the valley before starting the descent," said Opportunity Project Manager John Callas of JPL.
Reversing course back uphill when partway down could be difficult, so finding a path with minimum obstacles will be important for driving Opportunity through the whole valley.
Researchers intend to use the rover to examine textures and compositions at the top, throughout the length and at the bottom, as part of investigating the valley's history.
Opportunity and the next-generation Mars rover, Curiosity, as well as three active NASA Mars orbiters and surface missions to launch in 2018 and 2020 are all part of ambitious robotic exploration to understand Mars, which helps lead the way for sending humans to Mars in the 2030s.
New images from the lander show the seismometer on the ground, its copper-coloured covering faintly illuminated in the Martian dusk, NASA said in a statement.
"InSight's timetable of activities on Mars has gone better than we hoped," said InSight Project Manager Tom Hoffman, who is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
"Getting the seismometer safely on the ground is an awesome Christmas present," said Hoffman.
The InSight team has been working carefully towards deploying its two dedicated science instruments onto Martian soil since landing on Mars on November 26.
The Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment (RISE), which does not have its own separate instrument, has already begun using InSight's radio connection with Earth to collect preliminary data on the planet's core.
Not enough time has elapsed for scientists to deduce what they want to know -- scientists estimate they might have some results starting in about a year, according to NASA.
To deploy the seismometer (also known as the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, or SEIS) and the heat probe (also known as the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Probe, or HP3), engineers first had to verify the robotic arm that picks up and places InSight's instruments onto the Martian surface was working properly.
Engineers tested the commands for the lander, making sure a model in the test bed at JPL deployed the instruments exactly as intended.
Scientists also had to analyse images of the Martian terrain around the lander to figure out the best places to deploy the instruments.
On December 18, InSight engineers sent up the commands to the spacecraft. On December 19, the seismometer was gently placed onto the ground directly in front of the lander, about as far away as the arm can reach -- 1.636 metres, away.
"Seismometer deployment is as important as landing InSight on Mars," said InSight Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdt, also based at JPL.
"The seismometer is the highest-priority instrument on InSight: We need it in order to complete about three-quarters of our science objectives," Banerdt said.
The seismometer allows scientists to peer into the Martian interior by studying ground motion -- also known as marsquakes.
Each marsquake acts as a kind of flashbulb that illuminates the structure of the planet's interior.
By analysing how seismic waves pass through the layers of the planet, scientists can deduce the depth and composition of these layers.
"Having the seismometer on the ground is like holding a phone up to your ear," said Philippe Lognonne, principal investigator of SEIS from Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP) and Paris Diderot University.
"We're thrilled that we're now in the best position to listen to all the seismic waves from below Mars' surface and from its deep interior," Lognonne said.
In the coming days, the InSight team will work on levelling the seismometer, which is sitting on ground that is tilted 2 to 3 degrees.
The first seismometer science data should begin to flow back to Earth after the seismometer is in the right position, NASA said.
The tiny chemistry lab called the Mars Organic Molecule Analyser (MOMA) is a key instrument on the ExoMars Rover, a joint mission between the European Space Agency and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, with a significant contribution to MOMA from NASA.
It will be launched toward the Mars in July 2020.
"The ExoMars Rover's two-meter deep drill will provide MOMA with unique samples that may contain complex organic compounds preserved from an ancient era, when life might have gotten started on Mars," said Will Brinckerhoff, project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in the US.
Although the surface of Mars is inhospitable to known forms of life today, there is evidence that in the distant past, the Martian climate allowed the presence of liquid water - an essential ingredient for life - at the surface.
This evidence includes features that resemble dry riverbeds and mineral deposits that only form in the presence of liquid water.
NASA has sent rovers to Mars that have found additional signs of past habitable environments, such as the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers both currently exploring the Martian terrain.
The MOMA instrument will be capable of detecting a wide variety of organic molecules. Organic compounds are commonly associated with life, although they can be created by non-biological processes as well.
Organic molecules contain carbon and hydrogen, and can include oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements. To find these molecules on Mars, the MOMA team had to take instruments that would normally occupy a couple of workbenches in a chemistry lab and shrink them down to roughly the size of a toaster oven so they would be practical to install on a rover.
Mars rovers face another challenge when searching for evidence of life: contamination. Earth is saturated with life, and scientists have to be very careful that the organic material they detect was not simply carried with the instrument from Earth.
To ensure this, the MOMA team has taken great care to make sure that the instrument is as free as possible from terrestrial molecules that are signatures of life.
The ExoMars rover will be the first to explore deep beneath the surface, with a drill capable of taking samples from as deep as two metres.
This is important because Mars' thin atmosphere and spotty magnetic field offer insufficient protection from space radiation, which can gradually destroy organic molecules left exposed on the surface.
However, Martian sediment is an effective shield, and the team expects to find greater abundances of organic molecules in samples from beneath the surface.
MOMA recently completed both ESA and NASA pre-delivery reviews that cleared the path for the flight instrument to be delivered to the mission.
On May 16, the MOMA mass spectrometer was delivered to Thales Alenia Space in Italy, where it will be integrated into the rover's analytical laboratory drawer during upcoming mission-level activities this summer.
Following subsequent higher-level rover and spacecraft-level integration activities in 2019, the ExoMars Rover is scheduled to launch to Mars in July, 2020 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Image source: Representative image/Wikipedia
At 7.17 AM, the 440 Newton Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM) sizzled with life as it burnt along with the thrusters to slow down the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) spacecraft to be captured by the Red Planet.
"MOM has met Mangal," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said annnouncing the mission's success, after nerve-wracking final moments at the command centre of Indian Space Research Organisation here.
Modi, who witnessed the operation along with the space scientists, said the odds were stacked against "us with only 21 of the 51 missions to Mars being successful," but "we have prevailed."
The spacecraft was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and docked at the space station after orbiting Earth four times, the US space agency said in a statement.
NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren, Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Kimiya Yui join the other three astronauts already working on the ISS.
The three existing astronauts are Expedition 44 commander Gennady Padalka of Roscosmos and flight engineers Scott Kelly of NASA and Mikhail Kornienko of Roscosmos who have been aboard the ISS since March 27.
During more than five months on humanity's only microgravity laboratory, the Expedition 44 crew members will conduct more than 250 science investigations in fields such as biology, Earth science, human research, physical sciences and technology development.
Lindgren, Kononenko and Yui will remain aboard the station until late December.
The station will host nine crew members for 10 days in September during a Soyuz taxi flight that includes Russian cosmonaut Sergey Volkov and Denmark's first astronaut Andreas Mogensen of the European Space Agency.
At the end of the handover, Mogensen and Padalka will return to Earth in the Soyuz launched in March, leaving Kelly in command of Expedition 45.
Shortly thereafter on September 15, Kelly and Kornienko will reach the halfway point of their one-year mission to advance understanding of the medical and psychological challenges astronauts face during long duration spaceflight, in addition to developing countermeasures that would reverse those effects.
The pair will return to Earth in March 2016 after 342 cumulative days living in space.
Expedition 44 crew members are expected to be the first to harvest and eat crops grown aboard the station, another necessary advance for astronauts travelling on deep space missions.
Astronauts will be allowed to eat half of the second crop of lettuce in the veggie investigation, freezing the other half for a return to Earth where scientists will analyse the plants and compare them to a control set grown at NASA's Kennedy Space Centre.
The crew members also are scheduled to receive several cargo spacecraft - including the fifth Japanese HTV resupply flight and two Russian Progress resupply missions - each delivering tonnes of food, fuel, supplies and research.
Russian crew members are scheduled to conduct a spacewalk for station maintenance and upgrades in August.
The discovery comes amid growing evidence that, in the past, Mars may have been much more similar to the ancient Earth than scientists had thought.
The robotic exploratory vehicle has been moving through the area surrounding Gale Crater, which was formed about 3.6 billion years ago, and there it has discovered light-coloured, quartzlike rocks that contrast with the ones of basaltic composition it had encountered in geologically younger areas so far on its Martian trek.
The continental crust, which is less dense and of a different composition than that beneath the oceans, had been thought to be unique to Earth and had been attributed to the complex magmatic process possibly related to the appearance of our planet's tectonic plates.
In the case of the Martian crust, however, scientists had thought that there was never any magmatic process at work and, thus, the crust must have been formed mainly of basalt, although recent missions to Mars have discovered isolated examples of materials rich in silica, casting doubt on the basalt-only hypothesis.
An international team analysed the ge-ochemical data from more than 22 rocks examined with Curiosity's ChemCam instrument - which uses a laser to zap rock samples and analyses the resulting vapour puff - while the small wheeled robot vehicle has been traversing an ancient landscape near Gale Crater.
The experts, headed by Violaine Sautter, with the French Museum of Natural History, found that the light rocks are rich in silica and are of different compositions.
The composition of some of those rocks is similar to some of the Earth's oldest continental crust materials.
The scientists suggest that the light rocks rich in silica could be the remains of an ancient Martian crust similar to Earth's first continental crust, although they said that more data is needed to be able to confirm that.
For the study, the researchers examined samples from six meteorites of volcanic rock that originated on Mars. All six samples also contained methane, which was measured by crushing the rocks and running the emerging gas through a mass spectrometer.
The discovery hints at the possibility that methane could be used as a food source by rudimentary forms of life beneath the Martian surface. On Earth, microbes do this in a range of environments.
"Our findings will likely be used by astrobiologists in models and experiments aimed at understanding whether life could survive below the surface of Mars today," said study co-author Sean McMahon from Yale University in the US.
"Even if Martian methane does not directly feed microbes, it may signal the presence of a warm, wet, chemically reactive environment where life could thrive," McMahon said.
The discovery was part of a joint research project led by the University of Aberdeen in Britain, in collaboration with the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre, the University of Glasgow, Brock University in Ontario, and the University of Western Ontario.
"One of the most exciting developments in the exploration of Mars has been the suggestion of methane in the Martian atmosphere," said University of Aberdeen professor John Parnell, who directed the research.
Recent and forthcoming missions by NASA and the European Space Agency are looking at this. However, it is so far unclear where the methane comes from, and even whether it is really there, Parnell said.
“However, our research provides a strong indication that rocks on Mars contain a large reservoir of methane," Parnell pointed out.
The findings appeared in the journal Nature Communications.
The image shows the Sun dipping to a Martian horizon in a blue-tinged sky.
Curiosity used its Mast Camera (Mastcam) to record the sunset during an evening of skywatching on April 15 this year.
The imaging was done between dust storms but some dust remained suspended high in the atmosphere.
The sunset observations help researchers assess the vertical distribution of dust in the atmosphere.
"The colours come from the fact that the very fine dust is the right size so that blue light penetrates the atmosphere slightly more efficiently," said Mark Lemmon from the Texas A&M University, College Station.
When the blue light scatters off the dust, it stays closer to the direction of the Sun than light of other colours does.
"The rest of the sky is yellow to orange, as yellow and red light scatter all over the sky instead of being absorbed or staying close to the Sun," he added.
Just as colours are made more dramatic in sunsets on the Earth, Martian sunsets make the blue near the Sun's part of the sky much more prominent, while normal daylight makes the rusty colour of the dust more prominent.
Since its landing inside Mars' Gale Crater, Curiosity has been studying the planet's ancient and modern environments.
The image was taken at the close of the mission's 956th Martian day, the US space agency said in a statement.
"Perhaps about 4.3 billion years ago, Mars would have had enough water to cover the entire surface in a liquid layer about 450 feet (137 metres) deep," Xinhua reported on Thursday, citing a NASA statement.
"More likely, the water would have formed an ocean occupying almost half of Mars' northern hemisphere, in some regions reaching depths greater than a mile (1.6 kilometres)," it added.
In all, the red planet's early ocean would have contained 20 million cubic kilometres of water, but since then, 87 percent of that water has been lost to space.
The new findings, published in the US journal Science, were based on six-year observations of two slightly different forms of water in Mars' atmosphere using the most powerful telescopes on Earth including the W. M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii.
By comparing the ratio of "heavy" water containing deuterium, a heavier form of hydrogen, with regular water, scientists believed that Mars must have lost a volume of water 6.5 times larger than the amount trapped in the present polar caps.
An early ocean on Mars containing the lost water would have covered 19 percent of the planet's surface, they said. By comparison, the Atlantic Ocean occupies 17 percent of the Earth's surface.
Based on the surface of Mars today, a likely location for this water would be in the Northern Plains, which has long been considered a good candidate because of the low-lying ground.
"With Mars losing that much water, the planet was very likely wet for a longer period of time than was previously thought, suggesting the planet might have been habitable for longer," said author of the study Michael Mumma, a senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
The latest self-portrait shows a sweeping view of the “Pahrump Hills” outcrop on Mars where NASA's Curiosity rover has been working for five months.
The selfie scene is assembled from dozens of images taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on the rover's robotic arm.
“Compared with the earlier Curiosity selfies, we added extra frames for this one so we could see the rover in the context of the full Pahrump Hills campaign,” said rover team member Kathryn Stack at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
“From the Mojave site, we could include every stop we have made during the campaign,” he added.
Pahrump Hills is an outcrop of the bedrock that forms the basal layer of Mount Sharp, at the centre of Mars' Gale Crater.
The mission has examined the outcrop with a campaign that included a “walkabout” survey and then increasingly detailed levels of inspection.
The rover climbed from the outcrop's base to higher sections three times to create vertical profiles of the rock structures and chemistry, and to select the best targets for sample-collection drilling.
The component images for this self-portrait were taken in late January, while Curiosity was at a drilling site called "Mojave 2".
At that site, the mission collected its second drilled sample of Pahrump Hills for laboratory analysis on Earth.
NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project is using Curiosity to assess ancient habitable environments and major changes in Martian environmental conditions.
The tunable laser spectrometer in the SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) instrument of the Curiosity robot has unequivocally detected an episodic increase in the concentration of methane in Mars' atmosphere.
This puts an end to the long controversy on the presence of methane in Mars, which started over a decade ago when this gas was first detected with telescopes from the Earth, the authors from the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) reported.
Since methane can be the product of biological activity - practically all the existing methane in the Earth's atmosphere originates in this way - this has created great expectations that Martian methane could also be of a similar origin.
"It is a finding that puts paid to the question of the presence of methane in the Martian atmosphere but it does pose some other more complex and far-reaching questions, such as the nature of its sources," said study co-author Francisco Javier Martin-Torres from the Andalusian Institute of Earth Sciences (CSIC-UGR) at the University of Granada, Spain.
"The sources, we believe, must lie in one or two additional sources that were not originally contemplated in the models used so far. Among these sources, we must not rule out biological methanogenesis," he added.
According to some current models, if there really existed methane in Mars, it would remain there for an average 300 years and during this period, it would be homogeneously distributed across the atmosphere.
SAM has been detecting basal levels of methane concentration and has confirmed an event of episodic increase of up to 10 times this value during a period of 60 Martian days.
The new data are based on observations during almost one Martian year (almost two Earth years), included in the initial prediction for the duration of the mission (nominal mission), during which Curiosity has surveyed about 8 kms in the basin of the Gale crater.
The newly arrived MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) from NASA will provide continuity for the study of this subject, the US space agency said in a statement.
In the near future, the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), jointly developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian Space Agency (Ruscosmos) will measure the concentration of methane on Mars at a larger scale.
The paper was published in the journal Science.
The first batch of scientific images of the rover, the panoramic view of the landing site, the topography of Mars were released by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) on Friday, calling it "tour group photos".
Zhurong joined NASA's Perseverance on Mars, making China the second country to land and operate a rover on the Red Planet.
The picture of the "touring group photo" shows the rover travelling about 10 metres south of the landing platform, releasing the separate camera installed at the bottom of the vehicle, and then retreating to the vicinity of the landing platform.
"The separate camera took pictures of the movement of the rover and the photo of the rover and the landing platform. The image is transmitted to the rover through wireless signals, and then relayed back to the ground by the rover through the orbiter," CNSA said in a statement.
China landed a probe on a planet other than Earth for the first time on May 15.
The Zhurong robot is due to study the planet's surface rocks and atmosphere. It will also look for signs of life, including any subsurface water or ice.
The six-wheeled solar-powered Zhurong rover resembles a blue butterfly and has a mass of 240 kg. It also has an expected lifespan of at least 90 Martian days (about three months on Earth).
Barely a week after its arrival, Zurong also sent back first footage from Mars -- two photos and two videos.
The rover weighs around 240 kilograms, has six wheels and four solar panels, and is able to move 200 metres per hour.
It carries six scientific instruments, including a multi-spectral camera, ground-penetrating radar and a meteorological measurer, and is expected to work around three months on the planet.
Spacecraft of the UAE, the US and China have recently entered the Mars orbit. NASA's Perseverance rover landed on the planet on February 18 after travelling for almost seven months.
Since then, it has sent back some striking images from around its landing site, Jezero Crater. It has also flown a helicopter to explore the red planet.
Previously the USA, Russia, the EU and India have succeeded in sending spacecraft to Mars.
India became the first Asian country to have successfully sent its spacecraft into Mars' orbit in 2014.
The announcement was made on Wednesday at a press conference at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, following NASA's last attempt to communicate with the rover on Tuesday night which got no response, Xinhua reported.
The rover last communicated with Earth on June 10, 2018, as a planet-wide dust storm blanketed the solar-powered rover's location on Mars. It has not been heard from for eight months since then.
Opportunity likely experienced a low-power fault, a mission clock fault and an up-loss timer fault, according to the mission team.
Team members have tried to rouse the rover ever since, and radiated more than a thousand commands to restore contact. However, no signal was heard from again.
"Saying goodbye is hard, but it comes the time," said John Callas, project manager for Opportunity.
"It is because of trailblazing missions such as Opportunity that there will come a day when our brave astronauts walk on the surface of Mars," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.
"When that day arrives, some portion of that first footprint will be owned by the men and women of Opportunity, and a little rover that defied the odds and did so much in the name of exploration," he said.
The golf-cart-sized rover far exceeded its planned 90-day mission lifetimes. It has worked for nearly 15 years and travelled over 45 km by the time it reached its most appropriate final resting spot on Mars -- Perseverance Valley.
Opportunity landed on Mars on January 24, 2004. First among the mission's scientific goals was to search for and characterise a wide range of rocks and soils for clues to past water activity on Mars.
The study by scientists at the University of Chicago catalogued these rivers and found that significant river runoff persisted on Mars later into its history than previously thought.
According to the study, published in the Science Advances journal, the runoff was intense and occurred at hundreds of locations on the red planet.
These findings suggest that climate-driven precipitation may have taken place on Mars even during the time that researchers think the planet was losing its atmosphere and was drying out.
This complicates the picture for scientists trying to model the ancient Martian climate, said lead author Edwin Kite, Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago.
"It's already hard to explain rivers or lakes based on the information we have. This makes a difficult problem even more difficult," he said.
But, Kite said, the constraints could be useful in winnowing the many theories that researchers have proposed to explain the climate.
The survey used image data of well-preserved paleo-river channels, alluvial fans and deltas across Mars, and calculated the intensity of river runoff using multiple methods, including an analysis of the size of the river channels.
In the river basins, for which there is most data, Mars' rivers were about two times wider than those on Earth.
Between 1 and 3.6 billion years ago, and likely after 1 billion years ago, there was intense runoff in these channels, amounting to 3 to 20 kg per square metre each day.
The runoff appeared to have been distributed globally, and was not a short-lived or localised phenomenon, the researchers said.
If the dates for these massive rivers are correct, the findings could suggest that Mars' late-stage atmosphere disappeared faster than previously calculated, or that there were other drivers of precipitation under low-atmosphere conditions, the researchers noted.
Souvenir boarding passes will display names submitted by the people which will also be on microchips aboard the Mars 2020 rover, NASA said in a statement on late Tuesday.
People who want to send their name to Mars on NASA's next rover mission to the Red Planet (Mars 2020) can get a souvenir boarding pass and their names etched on microchips to be affixed to the rover.
The rover is scheduled to launch as early as July 2020, with the spacecraft expected to touch down on Mars in February 2021.
The 1,000-kg rover would search for signs of past microbial life, characterize the planet's climate and geology, collect samples for future return to Earth, and pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet.
"As we get ready to launch this historic Mars mission, we want everyone to share in this journey of exploration," said Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD) in Washington, DC.
"It's an exciting time for NASA, as we embark on this voyage to answer profound questions about our neighbouring planet, and even the origins of life itself," he added.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California would use an electron beam to stencil the submitted names onto a silicon chip.
The chip (or chips) will ride on the rover under a glass cover.
More than two million names flew on NASA's InSight mission to Mars, giving each "flyer" nearly 500 million frequent flyer kms.
The last date to submit your name is September 30.
The goal of the Mars 2020 rover is to look for signs of ancient life. It will be the first spacecraft to collect samples of the Martian surface, caching them in tubes that could be returned to Earth on a future mission, Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday.
The atmosphere on Mars is mostly carbon dioxide and extremely thin, about 100 times less dense than the Earth's, with no breathable oxygen. There's no water on the surface and the landscape is freezing, with no protection from the Sun's radiation or from passing dust storms.
The key to survival will be technology, research and testing, said JPL, adding Mars 2020 will help on all those fronts.
When it is launched in July 2020, the spacecraft will carry the latest scientific and engineering tools.
Before touchdown on Mars, sensors in the spacecraft's aeroshell, the capsule that encloses the rover, will study how it heats up and performs during atmospheric entry.
The rover has a guidance system that will take a step toward safer landings. Called Terrain Relative Navigation, this new system figures out where the spacecraft is headed by taking camera images during descent and matching landmarks in them to a pre-loaded map.
If the spacecraft drifts toward dangerous terrain, it will divert to a safer landing target.
Living on Mars will require a steady supply of oxygen. A cube-shaped device, called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, is exploring a space-saving alternative that converts carbon dioxide into oxygen.
Mars 2020 will carry a ground-penetrating radar to Mars, which will be the first operated at the Martian surface. Scientists will use its high-resolution images to look at buried geology, like ancient lake beds.
The rover will also collect science that may help engineers design better shelters for future astronauts, said JPL.
The researchers from Texas A&M University College in the US examined Mars' geological terrains from Gale Crater, an immense 95-mile-wide rocky basin that is being explored by the NASA Curiosity rover since 2012 as part of the MSL (Mars Science Laboratory) mission, according to the study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The results show that the lake, which was present in Gale Crater over three billion years ago underwent a drying episode, potentially linked to the global drying of Mars.
Gale Crater was formed about 3.6 billion years ago when a meteor hit Mars.
"Since then, its geological terrains have recorded the history of Mars, and studies have shown Gale Crater reveals signs that liquid water was present over its history, which is a key ingredient of microbial life as we know it," said study co-author Marion Nachon from Texas A&M University.
"During these drying periods, salt ponds eventually formed. It is difficult to say exactly how large these ponds were, but the lake in Gale Crater was present for long periods of time - from at least hundreds of years to perhaps tens of thousands of years," Nachon said.
According to the researchers, Mars probably became drier over time, and the planet lost its planetary magnetic field, which left the atmosphere exposed to be stripped by solar wind and radiation over millions of years.
"With the atmosphere becoming thinner, the pressure at the surface became lesser, and the conditions for liquid water to be stable at the surface were not fulfilled anymore, so liquid water became unsustainable and evaporated," Nachon said.
The salt ponds on Mars are believed to be similar to some found on Earth, especially those in a region called Altiplano, which is near the Bolivia-Peru border.
Nachon said that the Altiplano is an arid, high-altitude plateau where rivers and streams from mountain ranges "do not flow to the sea but lead to closed basins, similar to what used to happen at Gale Crater on Mars.
"This hydrology creates lakes with water levels heavily influenced by climate. During the arid periods Altiplano lakes become shallow due to evaporation, and some even dry up entirely," she said.
Nachon added that the study shows that the ancient lake in Gale Crater underwent at least one episode of drying before "recovering."
It's also possible that the lake was segmented into separate ponds, where some of the ponds could have undergone more evaporation.
These results indicate a past Mars climate that fluctuated between wetter and drier periods, the researchers said.