The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said on 5 August that its Mars 2020 rover had undergone an “eye exam” after several new cameras were installed on it.

The rover contains a veritable armada of imaging capabilities, from wide-angle landscape cameras to narrow-angle high-resolution zoom lens cameras. The cameras tested included two Navcams, four Hazcams, a SuperCam and two Mastcam-Z cameras.

Mounted on the rover’s remote sensing mast, the Navcams (navigation cameras) will acquire panoramic 3D image data that will support route planning, robotic-arm operations, drilling and sample acquisition.

The Navcams can work in tandem with the Hazcams (hazard-avoidance cameras) mounted on the lower portion of the rover chassis to provide complementary views of the terrain to safeguard the rover against getting lost or crashing into unexpected obstacles. They’ll be used by software enabling the Mars 2020 rover to perform self-driving over the Martian terrain.

Along with its laser and spectrometers, SuperCam’s imager will examine Martian rocks and soil, seeking organic compounds that could be related to past life on Mars. The rover’s two Mastcam-Z high-resolution cameras will work together as a multispectral, stereoscopic imaging instrument to enhance the Mars 2020 rover’s driving and core-sampling capabilities.

The Mastcam-Z cameras will also enable science team members to observe details in rocks and sediment at any location within the rover’s field of view, helping them piece together the planet’s geologic history.

“We completed the machine-vision calibration of the forward-facing cameras on the rover,” Justin Maki, chief engineer for imaging and the imaging scientist for Mars 2020 at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. “This measurement is critical for accurate stereo vision, which is an important capability of the vehicle.”

To perform the calibration, the 2020 team imaged target boards that feature grids of dots, placed at distances ranging from one to 44 yards (one to 40 meters) away. The target boards were used to confirm that the cameras meet the project’s requirements for resolution and geometric accuracy.

“We tested every camera on the front of the rover chassis and also those mounted on the mast,” Maki added. “Characterizing the geometric alignment of all these imagers is important for driving the vehicle on Mars, operating the robotic arm and accurately targeting the rover’s laser.”

NASA expects the imagers on the back of the rover body and on the turret at the end of the rover’s arm to undergo similar calibration sometime in the next few weeks.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is building and will manage operations of the Mars 2020 rover for the NASA Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. NASA plans to use Mars 2020 and other missions, including to the Moon, to prepare for human exploration of the so-called Red Planet.

The agency intends to establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration plans.

Two of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) CubeSats have executed a coordinated manoeuvre in space for the first time, demonstrating technology that could one day allow swarms of small satellites to carry out coordinated missions, the agency said on 3 August.

The water-powered spacecraft, which are about the size of a standard tissue box, were approximately 5.5 miles apart when one told the other to activate its thruster and move in closer via radio frequency communications. The fuel tanks on both spacecraft are filled with water, which was converted to steam by the thrusters to move the spacecraft during the manoeuvre.

CubeSats are a class of research spacecraft called nanosatellites and are, unsurprisingly, cube-shaped. They are spacecraft size in units or U’s, typically up to 12 U  (a unit is defined as a volume of about 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm and usually weighs under 1.33 kg).

Conducted on 21 June, the demonstration took place in low-Earth orbit as part of NASA’s Optical Communications and Sensor Demonstration (OCSD) mission. It was designed with a series of safeguards to ensure that only a pre-planned and authorized manoeuvre could take place.

While it was choreographed by human operators on the ground, the demonstration shows it is possible for a series of manoeuvres to be planned using onboard processing and executed cooperatively by a group of small spacecraft, NASA said.

Three OCSD spacecraft were developed and are operated for NASA by The Aerospace Corporation. The first OCSD was a risk-reduction mission that launched in 2015 to calibrate and refine tools to support this current flight of the OCSD-B and OCSD-C spacecraft.

OCSD is funded by NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology program within the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology program is managed by NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.

“Demonstrations such as this will help advance technologies that will allow for greater and more extended use of small spacecraft in and beyond Earth-orbit,” Roger Hunter, program manager of the Small Spacecraft Technology program, said in a statement.

“The OCSD team is very pleased to continue demonstrating new technical capabilities as part of this extended mission, over 1.5 years after deployment,” Darren Rowen, director of the Small Satellite Department at The Aerospace Corporation, added.

“It is exciting to think about the possibilities enabled with respect to deep space, autonomously organizing swarms of small spacecraft,” he said.

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said on 1 July that it has selected 12 new science and technology “payloads” that it expects to help it study the Moon and explore more of its surface as part of the agency’s Artemis lunar program.

The selected investigations and demonstrations are expected to help the agency to send astronauts to the Moon by 2024 as a way to prepare to send humans to Mars for the first times.

They will go to the Moon on future flights through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) project which allows “rapid acquisition of lunar delivery services” for things that “advance capabilities for science, exploration, or commercial development of the Moon”.

According to NASA, many of the new selections incorporate existing hardware designed for missions that have already flow. Seven of the investigations are focused on answering questions in planetary science or “heliophysics” – the study of the effects of the Sun on our solar system – and five will “demonstrate new technologies”.

NASA’s plans for lunar exploration are based on a two-phase approach, focusing first on speed – landing astronauts on the Moon by 2024 – and then on establishing a “sustained human presence” on the Moon by 2028.

“The selected lunar payloads represent cutting-edge innovations, and will take advantage of early flights through our commercial services project,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a statement.

“Each demonstrates either a new science instrument or a technological innovation that supports scientific and human exploration objectives, and many have broader applications for Mars and beyond,” he added.

Here are just a few of the selected investigations:

MoonRanger

This small, fast-moving rover can drive beyond communications range with a lander and then return to it, allowing investigations that stretch within one kilometre of a lander. MoonRanger will aim to continually map the terrain it traverses and transmit data for future improvements to its systems.

The principle investigator on this project is: Andrew Horchler of Astrobotic Technology, Inc., Pittsburgh.

Heimdall

Sharing a name with the Norse god and guardian of Asgard, Heimdall is a flexible camera system built for conducting lunar science using commercial vehicles. It will use a single digital video recorder and four camera to model the properties of the Moon’s “regolith” – the soil and other material that makes up the top layer of the lunar surface – and “characterize and map geologic features” as well as potential landing or “trafficability” hazards, among other goals.

The principle investigator on this project is: R. Aileen Yingst of the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona.

The Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder

Using a flight-spare magnetometer – a device that measures magnetic fields – the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder is designed to characterize the structure and composition of the Moon’s mantle by studying electric and magnetic fields. The magnetometer in questions was originally made for the MAVEN spacecraft, which is currently orbiting Mars.

The principle investigator on this project is: Robert Grimm of the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio.

PlanetVac

PlanetVac is a technology for acquiring and transferring lunar regolith from the surface to other instruments that would analyse the material or put it in a container that another spacecraft could return to Earth.

The principal investigator on this project is: Kris Zacny of Honeybee Robotics, Ltd., Pasadena, California.

SAMPLR: Sample Acquisition, Morphology Filtering, and Probing of Lunar Regolith

SAMPLR is another sample acquisition technology that will make use of a robotic arm that is a flight spare from the Mars Exploration Rover mission, which included the long-lived rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

The principal investigator on this project is: Sean Dougherty of Maxar Technologies, Westminster, Colorado.

Peraton, a US defence and intelligence provider, said on 17 June it had entered into a “definitive agreement” to acquire Solers, a satellite ground systems and cloud-based services company, as part of an attempt to boost the company’s national security initiatives.

The company said that the acquisition would “accelerate both near- and long-range growth opportunities and enhance Peraton’s ability to deliver highly differentiated space protection and resiliency solutions that directly support mission objectives and critical national security initiatives” but did not specify what this would mean in practice.

The combined capabilities would enable Peraton to “expand its offerings of innovative and agile end-to-end solutions that address the growing complexity of customer mission needs across both national security and civilian agency space & ground programs”, Peraton said.

In a statement, Peraton chairman, president and CEO Stu Shea said that the acquisition represented “an important step” for the company and that it would “significantly enhance” its ability to serve customers on “critical missions” by bringing together “some of the most proven and innovative space protection and ground operations technologies in the industry”.

“I’m excited to welcome the talented Solers team to Peraton, strengthening our already robust space portfolio, technical excellence and rapid innovation capabilities,” he added.

David Kellogg, president and CEO of Solers, described the partnership as “truly a strategic fit” and expressed his “full confidence” that the companies would continue to offer “high quality support” to their government clients.

 “Through our combination with Peraton – a company with whom we have many shared values – our customers will have access to some of the best people and technologies available to address their critical missions and our employees will benefit from greatly expanded growth opportunities as part of this new company,” he concluded.

“Peraton’s transformational acquisition of Solers will accelerate the company’s presence in the high-priority, emerging space and communications markets,” Ramzi Musallam, CEO and Managing Partner of Veritas Capital, which owns Peraton, said. “This combination will create a differentiated platform, strengthening Peraton’s ability to provide mission-critical services and solutions to its dynamic customer base.”

Investment bank KippsDeSanto acted as the financial advisor to Solers and Macquarie Capital acted as financial advisor to Peraton for the deal.

Engineers from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently visited lava tubes in the North East of California to test a rover that could be used to search for underground life on other planet, the agency said on 26 June.

Scientists predict that there are caves – known as lava tubes – beneath the surfaces of the Moon, Mars and Venus that are formed by flowing magma and covered in tiny crystals, and which could potentially host living organisms.

These lava tubes can stretch for miles. On other planets with less gravity, some caves could even be large enough to fit small cities. For places like Mars too dry for life and with atmospheres too thin to block dangerous space radiation, lava tubes could safely harbor potential life.

Beyond helping us pinpoint the best spots to search for life, these caves could bring us one step closer to a permanent presence on the Moon and safe exploration at Mars – the ultimate goal of NASA’s Artemis program.

On Earth, similar caves are home to complex ecosystems, all supported by microbes that “eat” rocks, converting them into energy for life. The scientists of the BRAILLE project believe such life could exist – or have once existed – in the caves of Mars as well.

Operated out of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, the Biologic and Resource Analog Investigations in Low Light Environments (BRAILLE) team is developing the capability to detect life on the walls of volcanic caves from afar by venturing into North America’s largest network of lava tubes, with the goal of advancing efforts to search for life elsewhere in the universe.

Already, data from the team’s first field deployment is helping scientists understand the interactions between biology and geology in these volcanic caves. New science from the project will be presented this week at the Astrobiology Science Conference in Seattle.

“We don’t think there’s life to find on the Moon now, but some day the life on the Moon might be us,” Jennifer Blank, the principal investigator for the BRAILLE project, said in a statement. “And if I were going to the Moon, I’d want to go to a lava tube.”

“Orbital satellite data suggests that there are a lot of these lava tubes on Mars,” she added. “If there is life there, those tubes are a good place to look. And if there was life in Mars’ ancient past, that’s where it’s most likely to be preserved.”

The BRAILLE team made its first descent at Valentine Cave, one of over 750 at the Lava Beds National Monument in California, close to the state’s northern border. According to NASA, smooth walls around 15 feet high and walkways up to 70 feet wide make it a practical place to drive a rover, and its well preserved lava flow features are similar to what the agency expects to find inside Martian lava caves.

With the right lighting, the cave’s layers of microbial material and mineral deposits create a dazzling array of colors but NASA’s cave rover – CaveR – can do even more with its scientific cameras and imaging tools.

These instruments take in small amounts of light that reflect off the cave wall’s surface, allowing scientists to identify chemical components that reveal signs of life. The rover also uses a laser scanner to map the subterranean caves.

BRAILLE’s three-week deployment involved sample collection from nine different caves, tackling scientific questions ranging from geochemistry to DNA sequencing. One result of this study is a working theory that the team calls the “Micro-Mineral Continuum,” describing how past and present microbial life appears in the caves.

Between two endpoints on this spectrum – from the walls being visibly bare rock to coated with colored films of microscopic life – are a range of different features, textures and secondary minerals created by the interactions of those microbes with the basaltic rock and water that drips down into the caves.

By studying the continuum further in future returns to Lava Beds and understanding the interplay between geology and biology in these caves, scientists will be able to know what they’re looking at when we one day send rovers to Martian caves.