Another First: Perseverance Captures the Sounds of Driving on Mars

As the Perseverance rover began to make tracks on the surface of Mars, a sensitive microphone it carries scored a first: the bangs, pings, and rattles of the robot’s six wheels as they rolled over Martian terrain.

“A lot of people, when they see the images, don’t appreciate that the wheels are metal,” said Vandi Verma, a senior engineer and rover driver at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “When you’re driving with these wheels on rocks, it’s actually very noisy.”

Article | #Mars2020
@EverythingScience

A Photographer Spent 12 Years Making This Milky Way Photo
Article | View High Quality Version
@EverythingScience

The Perseverance rover just released the debris shield that protected the Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, during landing.

So begins the process to safely deliver it to the surface of the planet. It's stowed sideways, folded up and locked in place, so there’s some reverse origami to do before it can set it down. First Perseverance will be off to the designated “helipad” a couple days drive from here.

Photo | #Mars2020
@EverythingScience

NASA Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Prepares for First Flight

NASA is targeting no earlier than April 8 for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter to make the first attempt at powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet. Before the 1.8-kilogram rotorcraft can attempt its first flight, however, both it and its team must meet a series of daunting milestones.

Ingenuity remains attached to the belly of NASA’s Perseverance rover. On March 21, the rover deployed the guitar case-shaped graphite composite debris shield that protected Ingenuity during landing. The rover currently is in transit to the “airfield” where Ingenuity will attempt to fly. Once deployed, Ingenuity will have 30 Martian days, or sols, (31 Earth days) to conduct its test flight campaign.

Press Release | #Mars2020
@EverythingScience

More Results From The Large Hadron Collider Point to Entirely New Physics

The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment is still insisting there's a flaw in our best model of particle physics. 

Previous results comparing the collider's data with what we might expect from the Standard Model threw up a curious discrepancy by around 3 standard deviations, but we needed a lot more information to be confident it truly reflected something new in physics.

Newly released data have now pushed us closer to that confidence, putting the results at 3.1 sigma; there's still a 1 in 1,000 possibility that what we're seeing is the result of physics just being messy, and not of a new law or particle. 

Article
@EverythingScience

NASA's Ingenuity helicopter is carrying a small piece of aviation history. Underneath the helicopter's solar panel is a stamp-sized piece of fabric. It was a part of the wing covering on the Wright brothers’ aircraft that took the first powered, controlled flight on Earth on Dec. 17, 1903.

Source | #Mars2020
@EverythingScience