Space News & Blog Articles

In some of the best footage yet, the Perseverance rover has taken new video of the Ingenuity helicopter taking off and flying over Mars’ surface.

This video shows the dust initially kicked up by the helicopter’s spinning rotors, as well as Ingenuity taking off, hovering, and beginning its 440-meter (1,444-foot) journey to the southwest. The video was captured on March 9, 2023. At the time the video was taken, the rover was about 120 meters (394 feet) from the helicopter.

Although they’re operated separately, NASA keeps the two robots close together so they can work together, with Ingenuity scouting ahead for potential hazards and areas of interest for Perseverance. For this flight, Ingenuity reached an altitude of 12 meters, repositioning itself for an upcoming flight, and capturing images of science targets along its path.

This is the 47th flight of the tiny rotorcraft. It later landed successfully and off camera at what’s been dubbed Airfield Iota.

Originally, the helicopter was intended to perform a 30-day technology demonstration, making five flights at altitudes ranging 3–5 m (10–16 ft) for up to 90 seconds each. Now, it’s made nearly 50 flights, regularly traveling well over hundreds of meters/feet.

Using archival radar images taken in the 1990s by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft, scientists have found evidence of recent active volcanism on Venus.  The images revealed a volcanic vent that changed shape and increased significantly in size over an eight-month period.

The scientists say their findings confirm long-held suspicions that the planet, which is known to have a very geologically young surface and evidence of past volcanic eruptions, is still active today.

“We made the discovery is the most likely place that there should have been new volcanism,” said Robert Herrick, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, speaking at a briefing on March 15, 2023 from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas. “Extrapolating from a data set of one for an entire planet could be dangerous, but most scientists would say it’s pretty good evidence that being able to catch an eruption in an eight-month time frame means that others are taking place as well. It confirms there is modern geological activity on Venus.”

For the research Herrick teamed up with Scott Hensley, a radar scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to analyze full-resolution radar images captured by Magellan. They focused on an area containing two of Venus’ largest volcanoes, Ozza Mons and Maat Mons. This area has long been thought to be volcanically active, however there has been no direct evidence of recent activity.

Comparing images taken in February and October 1991, they noticed that a volcanic vent measuring 2 square kilometers (0.7 square miles) showed a major change, growing considerably larger to about 4 square km (1.5 square miles.).

Asteroid Didymos is spitting rocks out into space.

Last fall, when NASA’s DART mission impacted Didymos’ moon Dimorphos in a dramatic (and successful) attempt to change the object’s orbit, DART got a quick look at the Didymos system before the probe was purposefully smashed to pieces.

Alongside demonstrating the capability to prevent future asteroid strikes on Earth, DART also gathered new information about the dynamics of the pair of asteroids. The data collected suggests that Didymos is actively throwing material out into space, and there are likely millions of other small asteroids doing the same across the Solar System, all the time.

The popular image of an asteroid as an unchanging, solid chuck of rock has evaporated in recent years, as we’ve come to learn more about these objects. While some asteroids fit this classification, just as many do not. Asteroids are the detritus left over from the formation of the Solar System, and many of them are little more than loose rubble piles, held weakly together by gravity.

Asteroid Bennu, which was visited by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission in 2020, is a prime example. When OSIRIS-REx touched down to take a sample, it sank nearly two meters into the loose surface like a child in a ball pit. The spacecraft also unexpectedly photographed material ejecting off the asteroid and into space, indicating that these objects are more active and dynamic than once thought.