NASA’s Mars Helicopter Spots Gear That Helped Perseverance Rover Land - UNIVERSE

This image of Perseverance’s backshell and parachute was collected by NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter during its 26th flight on April 19, 2022. Images obtained during the flight may provide insight into the components’ performance during the rover’s entry, descent, and landing on Feb. 18, 2021. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Eyeing some of the components that enabled the rover to get safely to the Martian surface could provide valuable insights for future missions.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter recently surveyed both the parachute that helped the agency’s Perseverance rover land on Mars and the cone-shaped backshell that protected the rover in deep space and during its fiery descent toward the Martian surface on Feb. 18, 2021. Engineers with the Mars Sample Return program asked whether Ingenuity could provide this perspective. What resulted were 10 aerial color images taken April 19 during Ingenuity’s Flight 26.

“NASA extended Ingenuity flight operations to perform pioneering flights such as this,” said Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity’s team lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Every time we’re airborne, Ingenuity covers new ground and offers a perspective no previous planetary mission could achieve. Mars Sample Return’s reconnaissance request is a perfect example of the utility of aerial platforms on Mars.”

Entry, descent, and landing on Mars is fast-paced and stressful, not only for the engineers back on Earth, but also for the vehicle enduring the gravitational forces, high temperatures, and other extremes that come with entering Mars’ atmosphere at nearly 12,500 mph (20,000 kph). The parachute and backshell were previously imaged from a distance by the Perseverance rover.

But those collected by the rotorcraft (from an aerial perspective and closer) provide more detail. The images have the potential to help ensure safer landings for future spacecraft such as the Mars Sample Return Lander, which is part of a multimission campaign that would bring Perseverance’s samples of Martian rocks, atmosphere, and sediment back to Earth for detailed analysis.

This image of the backshell and supersonic parachute of NASA’s Perseverance rover was captured by the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter during its 26th flight on Mars on April 19, 2022. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“Perseverance had the best-documented Mars landing in history, with cameras showing everything from parachute inflation to touchdown,” said JPL’s Ian Clark, former Perseverance systems engineer and now Mars Sample Return ascent phase lead. “But Ingenuity’s images offer a different vantage point. If they either reinforce that our systems worked as we think they worked or provide even one dataset of engineering information we can use for Mars Sample Return planning, it will be amazing. And if not, the pictures are still phenomenal and inspiring.”

In the images of the upright backshell and the debris field that resulted from it impacting the surface at about 78 mph (126 kph), the backshell’s protective coating appears to have remained intact during Mars atmospheric entry. Many of the 80 high-strength suspension lines connecting the backshell to the parachute are visible and also appear intact. Spread out and covered in dust, only about a third of the orange-and-white parachute – at 70.5 feet (21.5 meters) wide, it was the biggest ever deployed on Mars – can be seen, but the canopy shows no signs of damage from the supersonic airflow during inflation. Several weeks of analysis will be needed for a more final verdict.

Flight 26 Maneuvers

Ingenuity’s 159-second flight began at 11:37 a.m. local Mars time April 19, on the one-year anniversary of its first flight. Flying 26 feet (8 meters) above ground level, Ingenuity traveled 630 feet (192 meters) to the southeast and took its first picture. The rotorcraft next headed southwest and then northwest, taking images at pre-planned locations along the route. Once it collected 10 images in its flash memory, Ingenuity headed west 246 feet (75 meters) and landed. Total distance covered: 1,181 feet (360 meters). With the completion of Flight 26, the rotorcraft has logged over 49 minutes aloft and traveled 3.9 miles (6.2 kilometers).

“To get the shots we needed, Ingenuity did a lot of maneuvering, but we were confident because there was complicated maneuvering on flights 10, 12, and 13,” said Håvard Grip, chief pilot of Ingenuity at JPL. “Our landing spot set us up nicely to image an area of interest for the Perseverance science team on Flight 27, near ‘Séítah’ ridge.”

The new area of operations in Jezero Crater’s dry river delta marks a dramatic departure from the modest, relatively flat terrain Ingenuity had been flying over since its first flight. Several miles wide, the fan-shaped delta formed where an ancient river spilled into the lake that once filled Jezero Crater. Rising more than 130 feet (40 meters) above the crater floor and filled with jagged cliffs, angled surfaces, projecting boulders, and sand-filled pockets, the delta promises to hold numerous geologic revelations – perhaps even proof that microscopic life existed on Mars billions of years ago.

Upon reaching the delta, Ingenuity’s first orders may be to help determine which of two dry river channels Perseverance should climb to reach the top of the delta. Along with route-planning assistance, data provided by the helicopter will help the Perseverance team assess potential science targets. Ingenuity may even be called upon to image geologic features too far afield for the rover to reach or to scout landing zones and sites on the surface where sample caches could be deposited for the Mars Sample Return program.

Perseverance’s backshell, supersonic parachute, and associated debris field is seen strewn across the Martian surface in this image captured by NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter during its 26th flight on April 19, 2022. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

More About Ingenuity

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was built by JPL, which also manages the project for NASA Headquarters. It is supported by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, provided significant flight performance analysis and technical assistance during Ingenuity’s development. AeroVironment Inc., Qualcomm, and SolAero also provided design assistance and major vehicle components. Lockheed Space designed and manufactured the Mars Helicopter Delivery System.

At NASA Headquarters, Dave Lavery is the program executive for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter.

More About Perseverance

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more information about Ingenuity: mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter

Source: NASA’s Mars Helicopter Spots Gear That Helped Perseverance Rover Land | NASA

Old skins cells reprogrammed to regain youthful function

Research from the Babraham Institute has developed a method to ‘time jump’ human skin cells by 30 years, turning back the ageing clock for cells without losing their specialised function. Work by researchers in the Institute’s Epigenetics research programme has been able to partly restore the function of older cells, as well as rejuvenating the molecular measures of biological age. The research is published today in the journal eLife and whilst at an early stage of exploration, it could revolutionise regenerative medicine. 

What is regenerative medicine?

As we age, our cells’ ability to function declines and the genome accumulates marks of ageing. Regenerative biology aims to repair or replace cells including old ones. One of the most important tools in regenerative biology is our ability to create ‘induced’ stem cells. The process is a result of several steps, each erasing some of the marks that make cells specialised. In theory, these stem cells have the potential to become any cell type, but scientists aren’t yet able to reliably recreate the conditions to re-differentiate stem cells into all cell types.

Turning back time

The new method, based on the Nobel Prize winning technique scientists use to make stem cells, overcomes the problem of entirely erasing cell identity by halting reprogramming part of the way through the process. This allowed researchers to find the precise balance between reprogramming cells, making them biologically younger, while still being able to regain their specialised cell function.

In 2007, Shinya Yamanaka was the first scientist to turn normal cells, which have a specific function, into stem cells which have the special ability to develop into any cell type. The full process of stem cell reprogramming takes around 50 days using four key molecules called the Yamanaka factors. The new method, called ‘maturation phase transient reprogramming’, exposes cells to Yamanaka factors for just 13 days. At this point, age-related changes are removed and the cells have temporarily lost their identity. The partly reprogrammed cells were given time to grow under normal conditions, to observe whether their specific skin cell function returned. Genome analysis showed that cells had regained markers characteristic of skin cells (fibroblasts), and this was confirmed by observing collagen production in the reprogrammed cells.

Age isn’t just a number

To show that the cells had been rejuvenated, the researchers looked for changes in the hallmarks of ageing. As explained by Dr Diljeet Gill, a postdoc in Wolf Reik’s lab at the Institute who conducted the work as a PhD student: “Our understanding of ageing on a molecular level has progressed over the last decade, giving rise to techniques that allow researchers to measure age-related biological changes in human cells. We were able to apply this to our experiment to determine the extent of reprogramming our new method achieved.”

Researchers looked at multiple measures of cellular age. The first is the epigenetic clock, where chemical tags present throughout the genome indicate age. The second is the transcriptome, all the gene readouts produced by the cell. By these two measures, the reprogrammed cells matched the profile of cells that were 30 years younger compared to reference data sets.

The potential applications of this technique are dependent on the cells not only appearing younger, but functioning like young cells too. Fibroblasts produce collagen, a molecule found in bones, skin tendons and ligaments, helping provide structure to tissues and heal wounds. The rejuvenated fibroblasts produced more collagen proteins compared to control cells that did not undergo the reprogramming process. Fibroblasts also move into areas that need repairing. Researchers tested the partially rejuvenated cells by creating an artificial cut in a layer of cells in a dish. They found that their treated fibroblasts moved into the gap faster than older cells. This is a promising sign that one day this research could eventually be used to create cells that are better at healing wounds.

In the future, this research may also open up other therapeutic possibilities; the researchers observed that their method also had an effect on other genes linked to age-related diseases and symptoms. The APBA2 gene, associated with Alzheimer’s disease, and the MAF gene with a role in the development of cataracts, both showed changes towards youthful levels of transcription.

The mechanism behind the successful transient reprogramming is not yet fully understood, and is the next piece of the puzzle to explore. The researchers speculate that key areas of the genome involved in shaping cell identity might escape the reprogramming process.

Diljeet concluded: “Our results represent a big step forward in our understanding of cell reprogramming. We have proved that cells can be rejuvenated without losing their function and that rejuvenation looks to restore some function to old cells. The fact that we also saw a reverse of ageing indicators in genes associated with diseases is particularly promising for the future of this work.”

Professor Wolf Reik, a group leader in the Epigenetics research programme who has recently moved to lead the Altos Labs Cambridge Institute, said: “This work has very exciting implications. Eventually, we may be able to identify genes that rejuvenate without reprogramming, and specifically target those to reduce the effects of ageing. This approach holds promise for valuable discoveries that could open up an amazing therapeutic horizon.”

Source: https://www.babraham.ac.uk/news/2022/04/new-technique-rewinds-age-skin-cells-30-years

Journal article: https://elifesciences.org/articles/71624

Source: Old skins cells reprogrammed to regain youthful function – Scents of Science (myfusimotors.com)

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Black Holes Raze Thousands of Stars to Fuel Growth - UNIVERSE

A new survey of over 100 galaxies by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has uncovered signs that black holes are demolishing thousands of stars in a quest to pack on weight. The four galaxies shown in this graphic are among 29 galaxies in the sample that showed evidence for growing black holes near their centers. X-rays from Chandra (blue) have been overlaid on optical images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of the galaxies NGC 1385, NGC 1566, NGC 3344, and NGC 6503. The boxes that appear in the roll-over outline the location of the burgeoning black holes.

These new results suggest a somewhat violent path for at least some of these black holes to reach their present size — stellar destruction on a scale that has rarely if ever been seen before.

Astronomers have made detailed studies of two distinct classes of black holes. The smaller variety are "stellar-mass" black holes that typically weigh 5 to 30 times the mass of the Sun. On the other end of the spectrum are the supermassive black holes that live in the middle of most large galaxies, which weigh millions or even billions of solar masses. In recent years, there has also been evidence that an in-between class called "intermediate-mass black holes" (IMBHs) exists. The new study with Chandra could explain how such IMBHs are made through the runaway growth of stellar-mass black holes.

One key to making IMBHs may be their environment. This latest research looked at very dense clusters of stars in the centers of galaxies. With stars in such close proximity, many stars will pass within the gravitational pull of black holes in the centers of the clusters. Theoretical work by the team implies that if the density of stars in a cluster — the number packed into a given volume — is above a threshold value, a stellar-mass black hole at the center of the cluster will undergo rapid growth as it pulls in, shreds and ingests the abundant neighboring stars in close proximity.

Of the clusters in the new Chandra study, the ones with density above this threshold had about twice as many growing black holes as the ones below the density threshold. The density threshold depends also on how quickly the stars in the clusters are moving.

The process suggested by the latest Chandra study can occur at any time in the universe's history, implying that intermediate-mass black holes can form billions of years after the Big Bang, right up to the present day.

A paper describing these results was accepted and appears in The Astrophysical Journal. It is also available online. The authors of the study are Vivienne Baldassare (Washington State University), Nicolas C. Stone (Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel), Adi Foord (Stanford University), Elena Gallo (University of Michigan), and Jeremiah Ostriker (Princeton University).

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.

Image credit: X-ray: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Washington State Univ./V. Baldassare et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI

Read more from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

For more Chandra images, multimedia and related materials, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/chandra

Source: Black Holes Raze Thousands of Stars to Fuel Growth | NASA

Clusters of Weather Extremes Will Increase Risks to Corn Crops, Society - EARTH/NASA

Drought caused this Iowa corn crop to fail in 2012. As the changing climate increases the frequency of extreme events, the risk will double that corn harvests will fail in at least three of the world’s five major breadbasket regions in the same year. Credits: USDA

To assess how climate warming will change risks such as crop failures and wildfires, it’s necessary to look at how the risks are likely to interact.

Troubles never come singly, the proverb says. A new NASA study shows that the old saying will become increasingly true of climate troubles in a warmer world. The study shows that extreme weather events such as floods and heat waves will increasingly cluster closer in time and space, heightening the risks of crop failures, wildfires, and other hazards to society.

By the year 2100, increases in heat waves, drought, and excessive rainfall combined will double the risk of climate-related failures of corn harvests in at least three of the world’s six major corn-growing regions in the same year, according to the study, published in Environmental Research Letters. The U.S. Midwest is at the highest risk of being the site of one of these multiple harvest failures.

Many previous studies have modeled changes in a single climate indicator, such as the number of days above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) in a certain region. But the greatest impacts usually come when extremes occur simultaneously or in close sequence. For example, Western states are all too familiar with the scenario where excessive heat and drought fuel a wildfire, and then heavy rainfall creates a new hazard, landslides, in the burned area.

Climate scientists have been working for years to understand and represent these complex chains of interacting events numerically in climate models – a daunting task that pushes the limits of available computing power. “It’s only in the last five or so years that a framework has been developed for applying compound-risk thinking to climate analysis in a way that you can actually compute without getting in hopelessly over your head,” said study lead author Colin Raymond, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

For their study, the research team used a well-known German climate model called the Max Planck Institute Grand Ensemble to run 100 individual simulations of the years 1991 to 2100. The simulations of the past (1991 to 2020) showed that the model was able to represent extreme-event clusters, such as the alteration of extreme heat with extreme rainfall, consistently with the way they actually occurred during that period. The researchers analyzed simulations of the future through 2100 to examine probable future changes in climate hazards, particularly in hazards that could occur simultaneously or in close succession.

Raymond and his colleagues focused on how the increased clustering of both temperature and precipitation hazards will affect corn. This important food crop is grown worldwide, with six major regions, or breadbaskets, accounting for about two-thirds of all production. The U.S. is the world’s top corn grower, harvesting some 419 million tons (380.3 million metric tonnes) in 2021.

The model simulations showed that by 2100, extreme heat waves around the world lasting at least three days will occur two to four times as often as they do now. Three-day extremes in rainfall will generally increase 10% to 50% in frequency. The researchers also analyzed how these increased events will cluster in time and in location. They then looked at how all of these changes combined could affect future corn harvests, using the relationship between climate extremes in heat and rainfall and past crop failures as a guide.

By their best estimate, the chance that a cluster of events will cause corn crops to fail in at least three of the world’s breadbaskets in the same year will nearly double, from 29% to 57%, by the year 2100. While small, the chance that harvests will fail in the five largest breadbasket regions in a single year will grow even more significantly – from 0.6% to 5.4%. The U.S. Midwest is the region most likely to be included in years with three breadbasket failures, followed by Central Europe.

The study also examined how risks to wildfires and human health would increase as extremes follow one another more closely. All the results showed, Raymond said, that “things are interconnected in a way that we haven’t quite appreciated up to this point. It’s not just heat waves. It’s not just heat and drought. It’s all of those interconnections that best explain the severe impacts we care most about when we’re trying to prevent major disasters.”

Source: Clusters of Weather Extremes Will Increase Risks to Corn Crops, Societ | NASA

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