How To Do Business With NASA

Nora AlMatrooshi

Nora AlMatrooshi, the first Emirati woman astronaut, worked as a piping engineer before becoming an astronaut candidate for the United Arab Emirates. https://mbrsc.ae/team/nora/

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Whilst practicing solar distancing, Parker Solar Probe caught this rare glimpse of the twin tails on comet NEOWISE.☄

The twin tails are seen more clearly in this WISPR instrument processed image, which increased contrast and removed excess brightness from scattered sunlight, revealing more de-"tails". C/2020 F3 NEOWISE was discovered by our Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), on March 27. Since it's discovery the comet has been spotted by several NASA spacecraft, including Parker Solar Probe, NASA’s Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory, the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, and astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

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The Hunt for New Worlds Continues with TESS

We're getting ready to start our next mission to find new worlds! The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will find thousands of planets beyond our solar system for us to study in more detail. It's preparing to launch from our Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Once it launches, TESS will look for new planets that orbit bright stars relatively close to Earth. We're expecting to find giant planets, like Jupiter, but we're also predicting we'll find Earth-sized planets. Most of those planets will be within 300 light-years of Earth, which will make follow-up studies easier for other observatories.

TESS will find these new exoplanets by looking for their transits. A transit is a temporary dip in a star's brightness that happens with predictable timing when a planet crosses between us and the star. The information we get from transits can tell us about the size of the planet relative to the size of its star. We've found nearly 3,000 planets using the transit method, many with our Kepler space telescope. That's over 75% of all the exoplanets we've found so far!

TESS will look at nearly the entire sky (about 85%) over two years. The mission divides the sky into 26 sectors. TESS will look at 13 of them in the southern sky during its first year before scanning the northern sky the year after.

What makes TESS different from the other planet-hunting missions that have come before it? The Kepler mission (yellow) looked continually at one small patch of sky, spotting dim stars and their planets that are between 300 and 3,000 light-years away. TESS (blue) will look at almost the whole sky in sections, finding bright stars and their planets that are between 30 and 300 light-years away.

TESS will also have a brand new kind of orbit (visualized below). Once it reaches its final trajectory, TESS will finish one pass around Earth every 13.7 days (blue), which is half the time it takes for the Moon (gray) to orbit. This position maximizes the amount of time TESS can stare at each sector, and the satellite will transmit its data back to us each time its orbit takes it closest to Earth (orange).

Kepler's goal was to figure out how common Earth-size planets might be. TESS's mission is to find exoplanets around bright, nearby stars so future missions, like our James Webb Space Telescope, and ground-based observatories can learn what they're made of and potentially even study their atmospheres. TESS will provide a catalog of thousands of new subjects for us to learn about and explore.

The TESS mission is led by MIT and came together with the help of many different partners. Learn more about TESS and how it will further our knowledge of exoplanets, or check out some more awesome images and videos of the spacecraft. And stay tuned for more exciting TESS news as the spacecraft launches!

Watch the Launch!

*April 16 Update*

Launch teams are standing down today to conduct additional Guidance Navigation and Control analysis, and teams are now working towards a targeted launch of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) on Wednesday, April 18. The TESS spacecraft is in excellent health, and remains ready for launch. TESS will launch on a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

For more information and updates, visit: https://blogs.nasa.gov/tess/

Live Launch Coverage!

TESS is now slated to launch on Wednesday, April 18 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from our Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Watch HERE.

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10 Things Einstein Got Right

One hundred years ago, on May 29, 1919, astronomers observed a total solar eclipse in an ambitious  effort to test Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity by seeing it in action. Essentially, Einstein thought space and time were intertwined in an infinite “fabric,” like an outstretched blanket. A massive object such as the Sun bends the spacetime blanket with its gravity, such that light no longer travels in a straight line as it passes by the Sun.

This means the apparent positions of background stars seen close to the Sun in the sky – including during a solar eclipse – should seem slightly shifted in the absence of the Sun, because the Sun’s gravity bends light. But until the eclipse experiment, no one was able to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity, as no one could see stars near the Sun in the daytime otherwise.

The world celebrated the results of this eclipse experiment— a victory for Einstein, and the dawning of a new era of our understanding of the universe.

General relativity has many important consequences for what we see in the cosmos and how we make discoveries in deep space today. The same is true for Einstein's slightly older theory, special relativity, with its widely celebrated equation E=mc². Here are 10 things that result from Einstein’s theories of relativity:

1. Universal Speed Limit

Einstein's famous equation E=mc² contains "c," the speed of light in a vacuum. Although light comes in many flavors – from the rainbow of colors humans can see to the radio waves that transmit spacecraft data – Einstein said all light must obey the speed limit of 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second. So, even if two particles of light carry very different amounts of energy, they will travel at the same speed.

This has been shown experimentally in space. In 2009, our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected two photons at virtually the same moment, with one carrying a million times more energy than the other. They both came from a high-energy region near the collision of two neutron stars about 7 billion years ago. A neutron star is the highly dense remnant of a star that has exploded. While other theories posited that space-time itself has a "foamy" texture that might slow down more energetic particles, Fermi's observations found in favor of Einstein.

2. Strong Lensing

Just like the Sun bends the light from distant stars that pass close to it, a massive object like a galaxy distorts the light from another object that is much farther away. In some cases, this phenomenon can actually help us unveil new galaxies. We say that the closer object acts like a “lens,” acting like a telescope that reveals the more distant object. Entire clusters of galaxies can be lensed and act as lenses, too.

When the lensing object appears close enough to the more distant object in the sky, we actually see multiple images of that faraway object. In 1979, scientists first observed a double image of a quasar, a very bright object at the center of a galaxy that involves a supermassive black hole feeding off a disk of inflowing gas. These apparent copies of the distant object change in brightness if the original object is changing, but not all at once, because of how space itself is bent by the foreground object’s gravity.

Sometimes, when a distant celestial object is precisely aligned with another object, we see light bent into an “Einstein ring” or arc. In this image from our Hubble Space Telescope, the sweeping arc of light represents a distant galaxy that has been lensed, forming a “smiley face” with other galaxies.

3. Weak Lensing

When a massive object acts as a lens for a farther object, but the objects are not specially aligned with respect to our view, only one image of the distant object is projected. This happens much more often. The closer object’s gravity makes the background object look larger and more stretched than it really is. This is called “weak lensing.”

Weak lensing is very important for studying some of the biggest mysteries of the universe: dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is an invisible material that only interacts with regular matter through gravity, and holds together entire galaxies and groups of galaxies like a cosmic glue. Dark energy behaves like the opposite of gravity, making objects recede from each other. Three upcoming observatories -- Our Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, WFIRST, mission, the European-led Euclid space mission with NASA participation, and the ground-based Large Synoptic Survey Telescope --- will be key players in this effort. By surveying distortions of weakly lensed galaxies across the universe, scientists can characterize the effects of these persistently puzzling phenomena.

Gravitational lensing in general will also enable NASA’s James Webb Space telescope to look for some of the very first stars and galaxies of the universe.

4. Microlensing

So far, we’ve been talking about giant objects acting like magnifying lenses for other giant objects. But stars can also “lens” other stars, including stars that have planets around them. When light from a background star gets “lensed” by a closer star in the foreground, there is an increase in the background star’s brightness. If that foreground star also has a planet orbiting it, then telescopes can detect an extra bump in the background star’s light, caused by the orbiting planet. This technique for finding exoplanets, which are planets around stars other than our own, is called “microlensing.”

Our Spitzer Space Telescope, in collaboration with ground-based observatories, found an “iceball” planet through microlensing. While microlensing has so far found less than 100 confirmed planets,  WFIRST could find more than 1,000 new exoplanets using this technique.

5. Black Holes

The very existence of black holes, extremely dense objects from which no light can escape, is a prediction of general relativity. They represent the most extreme distortions of the fabric of space-time, and are especially famous for how their immense gravity affects light in weird ways that only Einstein’s theory could explain.

In 2019 the Event Horizon Telescope international collaboration, supported by the National Science Foundation and other partners, unveiled the first image of a black hole’s event horizon, the border that defines a black hole’s “point of no return” for nearby material. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope all looked at the same black hole in a coordinated effort, and researchers are still analyzing the results.

6. Relativistic Jets

This Spitzer image shows the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) in infrared light, which has a supermassive black hole at its center. Around the black hole is a disk of extremely hot gas, as well as two jets of material shooting out in opposite directions. One of the jets, visible on the right of the image, is pointing almost exactly toward Earth. Its enhanced brightness is due to the emission of light from particles traveling toward the observer at near the speed of light, an effect called “relativistic beaming.” By contrast, the other jet is invisible at all wavelengths because it is traveling away from the observer near the speed of light. The details of how such jets work are still mysterious, and scientists will continue studying black holes for more clues. 

7. A Gravitational Vortex

Speaking of black holes, their gravity is so intense that they make infalling material “wobble” around them. Like a spoon stirring honey, where honey is the space around a black hole, the black hole’s distortion of space has a wobbling effect on material orbiting the black hole. Until recently, this was only theoretical. But in 2016, an international team of scientists using European Space Agency's XMM-Newton and our Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NUSTAR) announced they had observed the signature of wobbling matter for the first time. Scientists will continue studying these odd effects of black holes to further probe Einstein’s ideas firsthand.

Incidentally, this wobbling of material around a black hole is similar to how Einstein explained Mercury’s odd orbit. As the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury feels the most gravitational tug from the Sun, and so its orbit’s orientation is slowly rotating around the Sun, creating a wobble.

 8. Gravitational Waves

Ripples through space-time called gravitational waves were hypothesized by Einstein about 100 years ago, but not actually observed until recently. In 2016, an international collaboration of astronomers working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors announced a landmark discovery: This enormous experiment detected the subtle signal of gravitational waves that had been traveling for 1.3 billion years after two black holes merged in a cataclysmic event. This opened a brand new door in an area of science called multi-messenger astronomy, in which both gravitational waves and light can be studied.

For example, our telescopes collaborated to measure light from two neutron stars merging after LIGO detected gravitational wave signals from the event, as announced in 2017. Given that gravitational waves from this event were detected mere 1.7 seconds before gamma rays from the merger, after both traveled 140 million light-years, scientists concluded Einstein was right about something else: gravitational waves and light waves travel at the same speed.

9. The Sun Delaying Radio Signals

Planetary exploration spacecraft have also shown Einstein to be right about general relativity. Because spacecraft communicate with Earth using light, in the form of radio waves, they present great opportunities to see whether the gravity of a massive object like the Sun changes light’s path.  

In 1970, our Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that Mariner VI and VII, which completed flybys of Mars in 1969, had conducted experiments using radio signals — and also agreed with Einstein. Using NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), the two Mariners took several hundred radio measurements for this purpose. Researchers measured the time it took for radio signals to travel from the DSN dish in Goldstone, California, to the spacecraft and back. As Einstein would have predicted, there was a delay in the total roundtrip time because of the Sun’s gravity. For Mariner VI, the maximum delay was 204 microseconds, which, while far less than a single second, aligned almost exactly with what Einstein’s theory would anticipate.

In 1979, the Viking landers performed an even more accurate experiment along these lines. Then, in 2003 a group of scientists used NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft to repeat these kinds of radio science experiments with 50 times greater precision than Viking. It’s clear that Einstein’s theory has held up! 

10. Proof from Orbiting Earth

In 2004, we launched a spacecraft called Gravity Probe B specifically designed to watch Einstein’s theory play out in the orbit of Earth. The theory goes that Earth, a rotating body, should be pulling the fabric of space-time around it as it spins, in addition to distorting light with its gravity.

The spacecraft had four gyroscopes and pointed at the star IM Pegasi while orbiting Earth over the poles. In this experiment, if Einstein had been wrong, these gyroscopes would have always pointed in the same direction. But in 2011, scientists announced they had observed tiny changes in the gyroscopes’ directions as a consequence of Earth, because of its gravity, dragging space-time around it.

BONUS: Your GPS! Speaking of time delays, the GPS (global positioning system) on your phone or in your car relies on Einstein’s theories for accuracy. In order to know where you are, you need a receiver – like your phone, a ground station and a network of satellites orbiting Earth to send and receive signals. But according to general relativity, because of Earth’s gravity curving spacetime, satellites experience time moving slightly faster than on Earth. At the same time, special relativity would say time moves slower for objects that move much faster than others.

When scientists worked out the net effect of these forces, they found that the satellites’ clocks would always be a tiny bit ahead of clocks on Earth. While the difference per day is a matter of millionths of a second, that change really adds up. If GPS didn’t have relativity built into its technology, your phone would guide you miles out of your way!

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Colors of Earth

When we think of our globe from a distance, we generally visualize two colors: blue and green. Water and land. Mostly water, consequently, our planet’s nickname of the blue marble.

Traveling around the globe every 90 minutes covering millions of miles with a focused lens on our beautiful planet from 250 miles above, I’ve captured many beautiful colors beyond blue and green that showcase Earth in new and interesting ways. Some colors are indicative of nature like desert sands and weather like snow. Other colors tell stories of Earth’s climate in bright splashes of yellows and greens of pollen and muted grey tones and clouded filters of pollution.

Blue and green still remain vivid and beautiful colors on Earth from the vantage point of the International Space Station, but here are some other colors that have caught my eye from my orbital perspective.

African violet

Bahamas blues

Tropical in Africa

Yellow desert

Orange in Egypt

Red surprise 

Snow white 

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Solar System: Things To Know This Week

Weather permitting, you can observe the Moon most nights, unless it's a new moon, when the lighted side of the Moon faces away from Earth. The Moon is by far the brightest object in the night sky and there's plenty to see. But this week is special...

...October 28 is International Observe the Moon Night (also known as InOMN).

Here's all you need to know to join in and celebrate:

1. One Planet. One Moon. One Night.

Everyone on Earth is invited to join the celebration by hosting or attending an InOMN event and uniting on one day each year to look at and learn about the Moon together.

2. What's Up?

October's night skies are full of sights, from the first quarter Moon on InOMN to Saturn making a cameo appearance above the Moon October 23 and 24. Watch our What's Up video for details.

3. Be Social

Hundreds of events are planned around the globe. Click the top link on this page for a handy map. You can also register your own event.

4. Don't Just Stand There

Here are some activities for enhanced Moon watching.

5. Impress Your Friends with Moon Knowledge

Download InOMN flyers and handouts, Moon maps and even some pre-made presentations. There's even a certificate to mark your participation.

6. Guide to the Face of the Moon

Almost dead center on the Earth-facing side of the Moon is the Surveyor 6 robotic spacecraft impact side. Apollo 12 and 14 are a bit to the left. And Apollo 11 - the first steps on the moon - are to the right. This retro graphic tells the whole story.

7. Moon Shots

NASA photographers have done some exceptional work capturing views of the Moon from Earth. Here are a few galleries:

You can't have a solar eclipse without the Moon.

The 2016 "Supermoon" was pretty spectacular.

The Moon gets eclipsed, too.

That IS a Moon - AND the International Space Station.

The Moon is always a great photo subject.

Some spooky shots of the 2014 "Supermoon."

And 2013.

Tips from a NASA pro for photographing the Moon.

8. Walking on the Moon

Twelve human beings walked on the face of the Moon. Here are some of the best shots from the Apollo program.

9. Moon Watch

Our Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is up there right now, mapping the moon and capturing some spectacular high-resolution shots.

10. Keep Exploring

Make our Moon portal your base for further lunar exploration.

Check out the full version of ‘Ten Things to Know This Week’ HERE.

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It's a long ways down. This is a view from the vantage point of astronaut Shane Kimbrough during his spacewalk last Friday outside the International Space Station. Shane posted this photo and wrote, " View of our spectacular planet (and my boots) during the #spacewalk yesterday with @Thom_astro." During the spacewalk with Kimbrough and Thomas Pesquet of ESA, which lasted just over six-and-a-half hours, the two astronauts successfully disconnected cables and electrical connections to prepare for its robotic move Sunday, March 26.

Two astronauts will venture outside the space station again this Thursday, March 30 for the second of three spacewalks. Kimbrough and Flight Engineer Peggy Whitson will begin spacewalk preparation live on NASA Television starting at 6:30 a.m. EST, with activities beginning around 8 a.m. Watch live online here.

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World Teacher Appreciation Day!

On #WorldTeachersDay, we are recognizing our two current astronauts who are former classroom teachers, Joe Acaba and Ricky Arnold, as well as honoring teachers everywhere. What better way to celebrate than by learning from teachers who are literally out-of-this-world!

During the past Year of Education on Station, astronauts connected with more than 175,000 students and 40,000 teachers during live Q & A sessions. 

Let’s take a look at some of the questions those students asked:

The view from space is supposed to be amazing. Is it really that great and could you explain? 

Taking a look at our home planet from the International Space Station is one of the most fascinating things to see! The views and vistas are unforgettable, and you want to take everyone you know to the Cupola (window) to experience this. Want to see what the view is like? Check out earthkam to learn more.

What kind of experiments do you do in space?

There are several experiments that take place on a continuous basis aboard the orbiting laboratory - anything from combustion to life sciences to horticulture. Several organizations around the world have had the opportunity to test their experiments 250 miles off the surface of the Earth. 

What is the most overlooked attribute of an astronaut?

If you are a good listener and follower, you can be successful on the space station. As you work with your team, you can rely on each other’s strengths to achieve a common goal. Each astronaut needs to have expeditionary skills to be successful. Check out some of those skills here. 

Are you able to grow any plants on the International Space Station?

Nothing excites Serena Auñón-Chancellor more than seeing a living, green plant on the International Space Station. She can’t wait to use some of the lettuce harvest to top her next burger! Learn more about the plants that Serena sees on station here. 

What food are you growing on the ISS and which tastes the best? 

While aboard the International Space Station, taste buds may not react the same way as they do on earth but the astronauts have access to a variety of snacks and meals. They have also grown 12 variants of lettuce that they have had the opportunity to taste.

Learn more about Joe Acaba, Ricky Arnold, and the Year of Education on Station.

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Our Newest Solar Scope Is Ready for a Balloon Ride 🎈

Along with the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, or KASI, we're getting ready to test a new way to see the Sun, high over the New Mexico desert.

A balloon — which looks a translucent white pumpkin, but large enough to hug a football field — will soon take flight, carrying a solar scope called BITSE. BITSE is a coronagraph, a special kind of telescope that blocks the bright face of the Sun to reveal its dimmer atmosphere, called the corona. BITSE stands for Balloon-borne Investigation of Temperature and Speed of Electrons in the corona.

Its goal? Explaining how the Sun spits out the solar wind, the stream of charged particles that blows constantly from the Sun. Scientists generally know it forms in the corona, but exactly how it does so is a mystery.

The solar wind is important because it’s the stuff that fills the space around Earth and all the other planets in our solar system. And, understanding how the solar wind works is key to predicting how solar eruptions travel. It’s a bit like a water slide: The way it flows determines how solar storms barrel through space. Sometimes, those storms crash into our planet’s magnetic field, sparking disturbances that can interfere with satellites and communications signals we use every day, like radio or GPS.

Right now, scientists and engineers are in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, preparing to fly BITSE up to the edge of the atmosphere. BITSE will take pictures of the corona, measuring the density, temperature and speed of negatively charged particles — called electrons — in the solar wind. Scientists need these three things to answer the question of how the solar wind forms.

One day, scientists hope to send an instrument like BITSE to space, where it can study the Sun day in and day out, and help us understand the powerful forces that push the solar wind out to speeds of 1 million miles per hour. BITSE’s balloon flight is an important step towards space, since it will help this team of scientists and engineers fine-tune their tech for future space-bound missions.  

Hours before sunrise, technicians from our Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility’s field site in Fort Sumner will ready the balloon for flight, partially filling the large plastic envelope with helium. The balloon is made of polyethylene — the same stuff grocery bags are made of — and is about as thick as a plastic sandwich bag, but much stronger. As the balloon rises higher into the sky, the gas in the balloon expands and the balloon grows to full size.

BITSE will float 22 miles over the desert. For at least six hours, it will drift, taking pictures of the Sun’s seething hot atmosphere. By the end of the day, it will have collected 40 feature-length movies’ worth of data.

BITSE’s journey to the sky began with an eclipse. Coronagraphs use a metal disk to mimic a total solar eclipse — but instead of the Moon sliding in between the Sun and Earth, the disk blocks the Sun’s face to reveal the dim corona. During the Aug. 21, 2017, total eclipse, our scientists tested key parts of this instrument in Madras, Oregon.

Now, the scientists are stepping out from the Moon’s shadow. A balloon will take BITSE up to the edge of the atmosphere. Balloons are a low-cost way to explore this part of the sky, allowing scientists to make better measurements and perform tests they can’t from the ground.

BITSE carries several important technologies. It’s built on one stage of lens, rather than three, like traditional coronagraphs. That means it’s designed more simply, and less likely to have a mechanical problem. And, it has a couple different sets of specialized filters that capture different kinds of light: polarized light — light waves that bob in certain directions — and specific wavelengths of light. The combination of these images provides scientists with information on the density, temperature and speed of electrons in the corona.

More than 22 miles over the ground, BITSE will fly high above birds, airplanes, weather and the blue sky itself. As the atmosphere thins out, there are less air particles to scatter light. That means at BITSE’s altitude, the sky is dimmer. These are good conditions for a coronagraph, whose goal is taking images of the dim corona. But even the upper atmosphere is brighter than space.

That’s why scientists are so eager to test BITSE on this balloon, and develop their instrument for a future space mission. The solar scope is designed to train its eyes on a slice of the corona that’s not well-studied, and key to solar wind formation. One day, a version of BITSE could do this from space, helping scientists gather new clues to the origins of the solar wind.  

At the end of BITSE’s flight, the crew at the Fort Sumner field site will send termination commands, kicking off a sequence that separates the instrument and balloon, deploys the instrument’s parachute, and punctures the balloon. An airplane circling overhead will keep watch over the balloon’s final moments, and relay BITSE’s location. At the end of its flight, far from where it started, the coronagraph will parachute to the ground. A crew will drive into the desert to recover both the balloon and BITSE at the end of the day.

For more information on how we use balloons for high-altitude science missions, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/scientificballoons

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Curiosity Rover: Five Years on Mars

The evening of August 5, 2012…five years ago…our Mars Curiosity rover landed on the Red Planet. 

Arriving at Mars at 10:32 p.m. PDT (morning of Aug 6 EDT), this rover would prove to be the most technologically advanced rover ever built.

Curiosity used a series of complicated landing maneuvers never before attempted. 

The specialized landing sequence, which employed a giant parachute, a jet-controlled descent vehicle and a daring “sky crane” maneuver similar to rappelling was devised because testing and landing techniques used during previous rover missions could not safely accommodate the much larger and heavier rover.

Curiosity’s mission: To determine whether the Red Planet ever was, or is, habitable to microbial life.

The car-size rover is equipped with 17 cameras, a robotic arm, specialized instruments and an on-board laboratory.

Let’s explore Curiosity’s top 5 discoveries since she landed on Mars five years ago…

1. Gale Crater had conditions suitable for life about 3.5 billion years ago

In 2013, Curiosity’s analysis of a rock sample showed that ancient Mars could have supported living microbes. Scientists identified sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon – some of the key chemical ingredients for life – in the powder Curiosity drilled out of a sedimentary rock near an ancient stream bed in Gale Crater.

Later, in 2014, Curiosity discovered that these conditions lasted for millions of years, perhaps much longer. This interpretation of Curiosity’s findings in Gale Crater suggests ancient Mars maintained a climate that could have produced long-lasting lakes at many locations on the Red Planet.

2. Organic molecules detected at several locations

In 2014, our Curiosity rover drilled into the Martian surface and detected different organic chemicals in the rock powder. This was the first definitive detection of organics in surface materials of Mars. These Martian organics could either have formed on Mars or been delivered to Mars by meteorites. 

Curiosity's findings from analyzing samples of atmosphere and rock powder do not reveal whether Mars has ever harbored living microbes, but the findings do shed light on a chemically active modern Mars and on favorable conditions for life on ancient Mars.

3. Present and active methane in Mars’ atmosphere

Also in 2014, our Curiosity rover measured a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical, in the atmosphere around the planet. This temporary increase in methane tells us there must be some relatively localized source.

Researchers used Curiosity’s onboard Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) laboratory a dozen times in a 20-month period to sniff methane in the atmosphere. During two of those months, in late 2013 and early 2014, four measurements averaged seven parts per billion.

4. Radiation could pose health risks for humans

Measurements taken by our Curiosity rover since launch have provided us with the information needed to design systems to protect human explorers from radiation exposure on deep-space expeditions in the future. Curiosity’s Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) was the first instrument to measure the radiation environment during a Mars cruise mission from inside a spacecraft that is similar to potential human exploration spacecraft.

The findings indicate radiation exposure for human explorers could exceed our career limit for astronauts if current propulsion systems are used. These measurements are being used to better understand how radiation travels through deep space and how it is affected and changed by the spacecraft structure itself. This, along with research on the International Space Station are helping us develop countermeasures to the impacts of radiation on the human body.

5. A thicker atmosphere and more water in Mars past

In 2015, Curiosity discovered evidence that has led scientists to conclude that ancient Mars was once a warmer, wetter place than it is today. 

To produce this more temperate climate, several researchers have suggested that the planet was once shrouded in a much thicker carbon dioxide atmosphere. You may be asking…Where did all the carbon go?

The solar wind stripped away much of Mars’ ancient atmosphere and is still removing tons of it every day. That said, 3.8 billion years ago, Mars might have had a moderately dense atmosphere, with a surface pressure equal to or less than that found on Earth.

Our Curiosity rover continues to explore the Red Planet today. On average, the rover travels about 30 meters per hour and is currently on the lower slope of Mount Sharp.

Get regular updates on the Curiosity mission by following @MarsCuriosity on Twitter.

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