Avi Blizovsky
Direct link to this page: https://www.hayadan.org.il/marsrover2.html
This week the Madimai SUV No. 2 will undergo pressure tests in a wind tunnel. It is expected to give a view of Mars as never seen before.
The vehicle has already undergone an experiment of shaking, baking in heat and even simulations of vibrations that occur during a missile launch. It is now undergoing a survival test in the temperature and air environment that awaits it on Mars, as well as a simulation of the freezing cold in space.
"We filled the wind tunnel with nitrogen and cooled the chamber to the temperature found on Mars," said Stephen Squires, principal investigator of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover (MER) program.
The vehicle is supposed to drive itself, turn around and pull out a robotic arm. The launch is expected in six months. And as part of it, two robotic vehicles will be flown equipped with computers, cameras and communication equipment. They will serve as field geologists to explore the red planet.
The purpose of the operation is to investigate the environmental conditions and check if they are suitable for life, instead of looking for evidence of life itself, said Dr. Squires of the American Geophysical Union, at a conference held in San Francisco. "Life depends on water, and therefore finding environments friendly to life means looking for water among the minerals And the rocks of Mars. Now they are looking for a landing site where the chances of finding water nearby will be great. In about a month, about a hundred scientists will gather in Pasadena to examine all the conditions and decide on the landing site.
"The new rover is a huge leap from the Sojourner that visited Mars in 1998. Sojourner depended on its lander to communicate with Earth. The new rover will be autonomous. They will be able to get off the rover and start scraping the surface," said Mark Adler, director MER program.
The landing vehicle will actually be similar to the Pathfinder - the vehicle that flew the Sojourner. However, after leaving the spaceship, the cabin with the SUVs will deploy the airbags, and will begin to roll for about a kilometer until it stops. After the landing vehicle opens, the vehicles will reveal themselves using the customer's trick of Japanese paper cutouts - origami. They will move using a certain type of pedals that cover 5-6 inches per hour. In this way, the two vehicles will be able to cover 100 meters per day, which the Sojourner did during its entire period of activity.
Each of the vehicles will be flown in a separate cabin. The first will be launched on May 30, 2003 and will arrive on January 4, 2004. The second rover will arrive one month later. By then, they will already have names to choose from a competition between children. Public involvement will continue even after the landing. NASA plans to transmit real-time data over the network as soon as possible.
In January, an exhibition dedicated to Mars is scheduled to open at the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem. Details later on.
Dr. David Issachari, director of the Walla Science Forum, adds on the importance of searching for "signs of life" on Mars.
First of all, it is clear that the discovery of a "second case" of life in the universe will be a tremendous sensation on a cosmic scale.
At the same time, the discovery will be of enormous scientific importance. Why?
1. It is clear that if they find remains of life on Mars, this will be an attempt to repeat the experiment and understand the mechanisms that led to the creation of life. (ATP, photosynthesis, genetics, etc...).
2. Mars is a planet that has lost its atmosphere and most of its water. Therefore, if life was formed there in the past, it has already frozen with the disappearance of the atmosphere, also due to the absence of the "greenhouse effect" that maintains a temperature that is comfortable for life (golden problem as you remember). And if this is true, then we have a life form in the beginning that was frozen, which is not on earth.
3. That's why we have a "sample" of the first or close to the first stage of life! And this is every biologist's wet dream.
4. On the surface of the earth there is "plate tectonics" which grinds and crushes all the continents slowly but surely, so that it is very rare to find rocks over a billion years old. As we know, the processes of the supposed beginning of life took place about 3 billion years ago. Therefore, our chances of finding empirical evidence about the beginning of life here are extremely small, in advance.
5. There is no plate tectonics on the surface of Mars, it is all one plate. Therefore if life originated there and froze, it is possible to find their remains there.
This is the set of expectations that gives tremendous importance to the search for "signs of life" on Mars.
Yedan Adiim - articles starting in 2002 and a link to previous articles
For information on the BBC website
https://www.hayadan.org.il/BuildaGate4/general2/data_card.php?Cat=~~~398838016~~~77&SiteName=hayadan
