NASA’s Perseverance rover recently took its sixth selfie from the Red Planet during a visit west of Mars’ Jezero Crater. And, researchers studying pollution from satellite megaconstellations found that soot from these launches may have some climate-related effects. Read on to learn more about the stories and other science news we found interesting this week.
Perseverance discovers Mars’ ‘Wild West’
For the past five years, NASA’s Perseverance rover has been studying a location on Mars called Jezero Crater, considered a promising site for finding signs of ancient microbial life. It recently flew past the rim of the crater, as the team says it’s the furthest west it’s ever explored, and it snapped a selfie to capture the moment (as well as to get a good look at the terrain around it). The selfie shared by NASA this week shows Perseverance in a rocky area called “Arethusa” within the “Lac de Charmes” region. “It represents some of the most scientifically compelling terrain ever seen by the rover,” NASA wrote in a blog post.
An animated version of the selfie, made up of 61 images taken by a camera on the rover’s robotic arm on March 11, even allows us to watch Perseverance rotate its camera head to look around. Perseverance has since moved to a different area of the area, “Arbat”. NASA shared a panorama of the spot captured by the rover’s Mastcam-Z on April 5, stitching together 46 images to create a detailed view of the rocky expanse. To the untrained eye it might not look that special, but NASA says there are plenty of features worth noting. Some of the rocks are as large as skyscrapers, and probably fell there after a meteorite impact about 3.9 billion years ago.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
“The image probably shows the oldest rocks we are going to examine during this mission,” said Ken Farley, Perseverance’s deputy project scientist at Caltech. There is also what “may have been a volcanic dam, a vertical intrusion of magma that hardened in place and was left standing as the surrounding softer material eroded away over billions of years.” In addition to taking pictures of its surroundings, Perseverance collects rock core samples and can grind the surface of rocks so the team at home can analyze their composition. It is still studying the rocky cliffs in the Arbot area, before it moves on to a site called “Gardevari”, located further south.
Pollution starts from ‘Megaconstellation’
The number of annual satellite launches has increased rapidly over the past decade due to the commercial activities of companies such as SpaceX. According to astronomer Jonathan McDowell, since 2019, SpaceX has launched approximately 12,000 satellites to form its Starlink megaconstellation, and more than 10,300 are currently operational in orbit. And other companies, including Amazon, have stepped up their own efforts to build satellite fleets that can compete. Unsurprisingly, researchers say this increase in satellite launches is creating more pollution in Earth’s atmosphere. A study was published this week in the journal future of earth Found that pollution from these megaconstellation launches will release approximately 870 metric tons of soot into the atmosphere annually by 2029.
The authors say pollution can persist for years in the upper atmosphere, which can have a much greater impact on climate than pollution in lower layers. That amount of soot could reduce sunlight enough to have a slight cooling effect on Earth’s climate. “The cooling effect from reduced sunlight that we calculate from our models may seem like a welcome change against the backdrop of global warming, but we need to be extremely cautious,” project lead Alois Marais, of University College London (UCL Geography), said in a statement.
“Space industry pollution is like a small-scale, unregulated geoengineering experiment that can have many unintended and serious environmental consequences,” Marais said. “The impact on the environment is small at present, so we still have a chance to act early, before it becomes a more serious issue that will be difficult to reverse or ameliorate.” The researchers found that megaconstellation launches contributed about 35 percent of the space sector’s climate impact in 2020, and that number could rise to 42 percent by 2029.
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