It turns out that Mars can be a very windy place.
It perseverance explorer It landed on the Red Planet in February 2021 carrying, among other instruments, a weather station dubbed Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyst (MEDA). The instrument includes two wind sensors that measure speed and direction, among many other sensors that provide weather measurements such as humidity, radiation and air temperature.
Jose Antonio Rodriguez Manfredi, MEDA principal investigator, told Space that the pebbles moved upward by strong winds from the Red Planet recently destroyed one of the wind sensors, but MEDA was still able to track winds in the Jezero Crater landing area, and that with sensitivity. low. com.
Related: One year later, the innovative helicopter is still going strong on Mars
“Currently, the sensor’s capabilities are reduced, but it still provides a magnitude of speed and direction,” wrote Rodriguez Manfredi, a scientist at the Spanish Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, in an email. “The whole team is now resetting the retrieval procedure to get more accuracy from the undamaged detector readings.”
Two ruler-sized wind sensors in persistence are flanked by six individual detectors meant to provide accurate readings from all directions, according to Ingredients: (Opens in a new tab) from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which operates the rover.
Each of the two main wind sensors is attached to an arm which can be opened to move the sensor away from the rover while driving, since the tenacity of the vehicle’s size does not affect wind flow by its own motion during atmosphere of Marssaid the JPL office.
Rodriguez Manfredi notes that the Wind Sensor, like all tools in Tenacity, is designed with redundancy and protection in mind. “But of course, there are limits to everything.”
And for an instrument like MEDA, the limitations are more challenging, as the sensor must be exposed to environmental conditions to record wind parameters. But when stronger-than-expected winds lifted larger-than-expected gravel, the combination damaged several elements of the detector.
“Neither the forecast nor the experience we have from previous missions anticipated such strong winds, or a lot of such loose material,” said Rodriguez Manfredi. (He is also principal investigator for other temperature and wind sensors at NASA insights The lander has been on the Red Planet since November 2018 and its mission is expected to end this year.)
Ironically, he added, the sensor was damaged by the wind, or “especially because of what we saw.”
Perseverance lands on Mars on February 18, 2021, in a helicopter named clevernesshe is Explore ancient river deltas Which may have been rich in microbes billions of years ago.
In addition to measuring wind, weather, and rock composition, the rover picks up the most promising materials for future temporary storage of samples with the aim of delivering samples to a land in his thirties.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter tweet embed (Opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter tweet embed (Opens in a new tab) or Facebook.
–
