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China Releases Sound and Video of its Rover Landing

Remember the stunning video of the Perseverance rover landing on Mars? The Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) has now released similar video footage from its Zhurong rover, including the sounds recorded as it plummeted through the Martian atmosphere on its way to landing in Utopia Planitia. The CNSA also released sounds of the rover driving off the landing platform.

The footage from the rover’s landing on May 14, 2021 shows the parachute deployment, backshell separation, and a view from the lander as it approached the surface of Mars. Or as the CNSA put it in their press release, “descent process of the landing patrol.”

Interestingly, the parachute appears to have markings on it similar to Perseverance’s chute, which included a secret message in binary code, The message, “Dare Mighty Things” is a tagline of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and originally comes from a speech by 26th president of the US, Theodore Roosevelt.

The sounds from the surface of Zhurong driving off the lander were captured by its climate station, which primarily will be used to record wind sounds.

“The audio includes live sounds during the process of powering up the driving mechanism of the rover and starting to move, driving on a ramp, and driving onto the surface of Mars,” CNSA said. “The sound of the rover moving away mainly comes from the driving mechanism, the friction between the wheels and the ramp, and the friction between the wheels and the ground.”

The sounds are muffled, perhaps due to the weaker atmosphere on Mars compared to that on the Earth. It will be interesting to hear more sounds from Mars from Zhurong over the course of the three-month-long mission.

The photo shows the wheel tracks left behind by the Mars rover Zhurong. Credit: Xinhua and CNSA.

Perseverance had the first functional microphone on Mars. At least three previous Mars missions had microphones as part of their design. The first, which flew to Mars in 1999 aboard NASA’s Mars Polar Lander, but it crashed on the surface. A similar microphone was supposed to be part of the French space agency’s (CNES) Netlander mission, scheduled to launch in 2007, but the mission was canceled due to funding difficulties. The Phoenix lander, which touched down near Mars’ north pole in 2008, had a  microphone that was part of its descent imaging system.  However, just before the mission launched, engineers detected a potential electronics problem in the microphone that might affect other systems, and the mic was deactivated.

Also in the video is footage from the a remote Wifi camera that the rover had placed when still close to the landing platform. The Zhurong rover then returned to pose for a “family photo” with the lander.

A wireless camera took this ‘group photo’ of China’s Tianwen-1 lander and rover on Mars’ surface. Credit: Chinese Space Agency

On its first try, China's Zhurong rover hit a Mars milestone that took NASA decades

By Sara Webb, Rebecca Allen 

(Image credit: China National Space Administration)

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Sara Webb, PhD candidate in Astrophysics, Swinburne University of Technology

Rebecca Allen, Swinburne Space Office Project Coordinator | Manager Swinburne Astronomy Productions, Swinburne University of Technology

China's Zhurong rover landed safely on Mars on May 15, making China only the third country to successfully land a rover on the red planet.

More impressively still, China is the first Mars-going nation to carry out an orbiting, landing and rovering operation as its first mission.

Planetary scientist Roberto Orosei told Nature China is "doing in a single go what NASA took decades to do," while astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell described China's decision to include a rover in its maiden Mars outing as a "very gutsy move."

Related: Hear the 1st sounds from China's Mars rover Zhurong and watch it drive in n

Where did it land?

Zhurong, named after the god of fire in Chinese mythology, separated from the Tianwen-1 orbiter and touched down close to the site of previous NASA missions, on a vast plain called Utopia Planitia.

This area of Mars was formed billions of years ago, when a martian meteorite smashed into the planet’s surface. The surrounding area is largely featureless, covered mostly in volcanic material.

Zhurong is not the first rover to explore this region. In 1976, NASA's Viking 2 lander touched down further north within the Utopia Planitia basin, returning high-resolution images of the martian surface and analyzing soil samples.

The Viking 2 lander lacked the ability to investigate any further than its initial landing site. But the Zhurong rover should be well equipped to roam farther afield during its mission.

What will it do?

The mission’s three-month scientific program will begin once the Zhurong rover disembarks from the landing craft and begins its journey across the martian surface. The 240-kilogram, six-wheeled rover is equipped with six individual scientific instruments, and has four large solar panels, giving it the appearance of a "blue butterfly."

Zhurong's design, instruments and technology on board Zhurong are comparable to those on board NASA's twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which touched down in January 2004. Although Zhurong is not at the cutting edge of current space exploration technology, the sheer speed of this program’s development since its initiation in 2006 is awe-inspiring.

Like the many Mars rovers before it, Zhurong will probe this alien planet’s environment, and search for signs of water ice on the surface.

The mission is expected to survey four aspects of its local environment:

• topography and geological structure
• soil structure and possible presence of water ice
• chemical composition, minerals and rock types
• physical characteristics of the atmosphere and the rocky surface.

Zhurong will thus help build a more complete geological picture of the Red Planet's history. And, in a genuine first for Martian exploration, it is equipped with a magnetometer to measure the planet's magnetic field. This is an important study that will help address why Mars has lost much of its atmosphere, leaving its landscape so barren.

China's growing space presence

The Tianwen-1 mission is just one of an impressive list of accomplishments by the China National Space Administration in the past year. Its other feats include launching dozens of Long March rockets, each with multiple payloads, including that of the Chang'e 5 lunar probe, which brought moon rocks back to Earth for the first time since the end of NASA's Apollo program in the 1970s.

Last month, China launched the first stage of its Tiangong space station, which next year is set to become the world's second long-term home for humans in space. The momentous launch didn't go off without a hitch, however, as debris from the launch vehicle made an uncontrolled re-entry back to Earth, eventually splashing down in the Indian Oc

Thankfully no one was hurt in that incident, but it is a timely reminder that China's accelerating pace of space missions and rocket launches need to be carefully managed.

This year of activity has solidified China's powerful presence in space, and we are only seeing the beginning of its ambitious future. By 2045, China hopes to become a leading space power, as outlined in the 2018 Aerospace Science and Technology Corporations route map.

In the coming years we can look forward to seeing China launch crewed missions to the Tiangong space station, and in the coming decades can expect to see China join other spacefaring nations in missions back to the moon and Mars.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 

Researchers account for some of the lithium missing from our universe

by University of Tokyo

Experimental setup. As a beam of beryllium comes in from the left, the deuteron Trojan horse intercepts it at the target and delivers its neutron soldier. This allows the decay products of the beryllium and neutron reactions to be captured by a curved array of six detectors on the right. Credit: Hayakawa et al.

There is a significant discrepancy between theoretical and observed amounts of lithium in our universe. This is known as the cosmological lithium problem, and it has plagued cosmologists for decades. Now, researchers have reduced this discrepancy by around 10%, thanks to a new experiment on the nuclear processes responsible for the creation of lithium. This research could point the way to a more complete understanding of the early universe.

There is a famous saying that "in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." This holds true in every academic domain, but it's especially common in cosmology, the study of the entire universe, where what we think we should see and what we really see doesn't always match up. This is largely because many cosmological phenomena are difficult to study due to inaccessibility. Cosmological phenomena are usually out of our reach because of the extreme distances involved, or often they have occurred before the human brain had even evolved to worry about them in the first place—such is the case with the big bang.

Project Assistant Professor Seiya Hayakawa and Lecturer Hidetoshi Yamaguchi from the Center for Nuclear Study at the University of Tokyo, and their international team are especially interested in one area of cosmology where theory and observation are very misaligned, and that is the issue of the missing lithium, the cosmological lithium problem (CLP). In a nutshell, theory predicts that in the minutes following the big bang that created all matter in the cosmos, there should be an abundance of lithium around three times greater than what we actually observe. But Hayakawa and his team accounted for some of this discrepancy and have thus paved the way for research that may one day resolve it entirely.

"13.7 billion years ago, as matter coalesced from the energy of the big bang, common light elements we all recognize—hydrogen, helium, lithium and beryllium—formed in a process we call Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN)," said Hayakawa. "However, BBN is not a straightforward chain of events where one thing becomes another in sequence; it is actually a complex web of processes where a jumble of protons and neutrons builds up atomic nuclei, and some of these decay into other nuclei. For example, the abundance of one form of lithium, or isotope—lithium-7—mostly results from the production and decay of beryllium-7. But it has either been overestimated in theory, underobserved in reality, or a combination of the two. This needs to be resolved in order to really understand what took place way back then."

Lithium-7 is the most common isotope of lithium, accounting for 92.5% of all observed. However, even though the accepted models of BBN predict the relative amounts of all elements involved in BBN with extreme accuracy, the expected amount of lithium-7 is around three times greater than what is actually observed. This means there is a gap in our knowledge about the formation of the early universe. There are several theoretical and observational approaches which aim to resolve this, but Hayakawa and his team simulated conditions during BBN using particle beams, detectors and an observational method known as the Trojan horse.

"We scrutinized more than ever before one of the BBN reactions, where beryllium-7 and a neutron decay into lithium-7 and a proton. The resulting levels of lithium-7 abundance were slightly lower than anticipated, about 10% lower," said Hayakawa. "This is a very difficult reaction to observe since beryllium-7 and neutrons are unstable. So we used deuteron, a hydrogen nucleus with an extra neutron, as a vessel to smuggle a neutron into a beryllium-7 beam without disturbing it. This is a unique technique, developed by an Italian group we collaborate with, in which the deuteron is like the Trojan horse in Greek myth, and the neutron is the soldier who sneaks into the impregnable city of Troy without tipping off the guards (destabilizing the sample). Thanks to the new experimental result, we can offer future theoretical researchers a slightly less daunting task when trying to resolve the CLP."

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Explore further

The universe has a lithium problem

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More information: S. Hayakawa et al, Constraining the Primordial Lithium Abundance: New Cross Section Measurement of the 7Be + n Reactions Updates the Total 7Be Destruction Rate, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2021). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ac061f

Journal information: Astrophysical Journal Letters 

 

Anti-gov’t engineers hopeful after Lebanon syndicate victory

Winning coalition sees victory at syndicate election as reclaiming another civic space entrenched by sectarian parties.

By Kareem Chehayeb

1 Jul 2021

Beirut, Lebanon – When the results of the Lebanese engineers’ syndicate election were announced on Sunday, a large group of engineers and activists gathered at its Beirut headquarters erupted in celebration.

A coalition of grassroots activists and political groups had just decisively won against all odds.

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“It feels amazing. I didn’t expect this victory,” said Abir Saksouk, an architect among those elected. “We did expect to make a breakthrough of some sort because we had so many opposition candidates for the first time in the syndicates’ history – but nothing like this.”

The coalition, dubbed The Syndicate Rises, amassed 7,650 votes, effectively controlling six of the syndicate’s seven branches. A broad alliance of the country’s otherwise wrangling political parties clinched the other branch, which represents architects and engineers working at state institutions.

This coalition’s sweeping victory is the second of its kind in Lebanon since an uprising against a ruling class of sectarian elites rocked the country in October 2019. The Beirut Bar Association had also beaten candidates that represented the country’s traditional political powers to elect an independent leader in November 2019.

The result came amid increasing frustration in Lebanon, a country reeling from an economic crisis that has plunged more than half the population into poverty, with the local currency having lost well above 80 percent of its value against the United States dollar in less than two years.

Saksouk, who has worked for years on a slew of issues, from housing rights to public spaces, now hopes that the rest of the country’s syndicates and unions – for decades under the thumb of sectarian political parties – can be “reclaimed” and become effective again.

It was an even sweeter victory for Paul Naggear, an electric engineer who also ran with The Syndicate Rises.

“For the first time since August 4, we felt a sense of relief,” he said.

On that day, nearly 11 months ago, a massive explosion at Beirut’s port flattened much of the Lebanese capital, killing some 200 people and wounding more than 6,500 others.

Naggear lost his three-year-old daughter, Alexandra, to the explosion.

The disaster was seen as the deadly byproduct of years of corruption and neglect in Lebanon, with the authorities leaving more than 2,700 tonnes of a mysterious shipment of explosive ammonium nitrate in the port for several years.

Almost one year later, the state-led investigation continues to stall, leaving thousands like Naggear wondering if they would ever see justice.

“When you can’t find justice, you have to take on another battle,” he said. “But for the first time, my wife and I, after seeing the results, felt there was a battle we could win.”

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Syndicates in Lebanon cannot pass laws, but The Syndicate Rises has promised to work towards improving working conditions for engineers and architects, as well as break the hold of a handful of contracting companies that dominate the market and reform unjust building codes to improve access to housing.

Some believe the victory will also give the grassroots activists greater freedom amid an entrenched system of clientelism and political patronage.

Bassel Salloukh, a professor of political science at the Lebanese American University, said syndicates and other civic spaces have been co-opted by Lebanon’s ruling elite after the end of the country’s 15-year civil war in 1990 to suffocate any forms of viable opposition.

“All this has meant that after the October 17 protests, the invention of new sites for political opposition has to necessarily be incremental and strategic,” Salloukh said.

“One small victory at a time in those sites that form the soft underbelly of the sectarian system.”

Looking ahead, members of the winning coalition hope to also score a victory this month, when engineers and architects vote for the syndicate’s new head.

VIDEOS https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/1/anti-government-lebanese-engineers-win-syndicate-elections

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA