Yesterday in an event presented by himself, the aerospace company Blue Origin’s owner Jeff Bezos revealed the project of a lunar lander capable of transporting up to 6,500 kg of cargo but also human beings to the Moon and to transport cargoes and astronauts from the Moon to the Earth called Blue Moon. The goal is to offer his help in the return of American astronauts to the Moon and subsequently to create there a permanent human presence.
NASA has announced that its InSight lander detected what’s probably an earthquake on the planet Mars. What was nicknamed marsquake is a small earthquake that on Earth would be recorded with a magnitude of 2-2.5 and it’s only thanks to an instrument called SEIS designed for that purpose that it was detected on Mars on April 6, 2019. We’re at the beginning of Martian seismology therefore the data will be studied to confirm that it was indeed an earthquake and if that’s the case it will be the first one.
NASA’s Mars Rover Curiosity drilled a clay area, called a clay-bearing unit by the mission scientists, of Mount Sharp on Mars that was nicknamed Aberlady to take samples for analysis. The rock turned out to be quite friable so only the normal rotation of the drill was used, without the percussion system used on other occasions to drill much harder rocks. Clay is associated with water so the hope is that the results of the analysis will help to reconstruct the history of Mars with new information on the remote era in which there was a lake in the area.
A little while ago the Israeli lander Beresheet attempted a Moon landing but something didn’t work perfectly in its propulsion system and probably crashed on the Moon’s surface. The latt information concerned a problem with the main engine that didn’t burn correctly and when the mission control center was able to reactivate it it was too late. Telemetry was lost when Beresheet was coming down too fast.
An article published in the journal “Nature Geoscience” reports an independent confirmation of the detection of a methane peak on the planet Mars, east of Gale Crater, where NASA’s Mars Rover Curiosity is operating and detected the presence of methane. However, a team of researchers led by Marco Giuranna of the Italian National Astrophysics Institute in Rome used measurements of ESA’s Mars Express space probe’s PFS instrument to find methane. Independent detections carried out in orbit and on the ground with very different instruments are crucial in this research because methane can be produced by biological processes but also by geological processes.
