After nearly 20 years of operations, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is on a roll, performing a new maneuver to squeeze even more science out of the busy spacecraft as it circles the Red Planet. Engineers have essentially taught the probe to roll over so that it’s nearly upside down. Doing so enables MRO to look deeper underground as it searches for liquid and frozen water, among other things.
The new capability is detailed in a paper recently published in The Planetary Science Journal documenting three “very large rolls,” as the mission calls them, that were performed between 2023 and 2024.
“Not only can you teach an old spacecraft new tricks, you can open up entirely new regions of the subsurface to explore by doing so,” said one of the paper’s authors, Gareth Morgan of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.
Together, Spirit and Opportunity represented the Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER)—itself part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.
The twin missions’ main scientific objective was to search for a range of rocks and soil types and then look for clues for past water activity on Mars. Each rover, about the size of a golf cart and seven times heavier (408 pounds or 185 kilograms) than the Sojourner rover on Mars, was targeted to opposite sides of the planet in locales that were suspected of having been affected by liquid water in the past.
The plan was for the rovers to move from place to place and to perform on-site geological investigations and take photographs with mast-mounted cameras (about five feet or 1.5 meters off the ground) providing 360-degree stereoscopic views of the terrain.
IN A NUTSHELL 🔍 Physicists in England discovered two opposing arrows of time in open quantum systems, challenging traditional views. 🌌 The study suggests time can move in both directions at the quantum level, revealing a symmetrical nature. ♻️ Entropy continues to increase in both directions of time, prompting a reevaluation of thermodynamic principles. 🧠.
The first study to use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to generate podcasts about research published in scientific papers has shown the results were so good that half of the papers’ authors thought the podcasters were human.
In research published in the European Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing (EJCN), researchers led by Professor Philip Moons from the University of Leuven, Belgium, used Google NotebookLM, a personalized AI research assistant created by Google Labs, to make podcasts explaining research published recently in the EJCN.
Prof. Moons, who also presented the findings at the Association of Cardiovascular Nursing and Allied Professions (ACNAP) conference in Sophia Antipolis, France, said, In September 2024, Google launched a new feature in NotebookLM that enables users to make AI-generated podcasts. It made me think about how it could be used by researchers and editors.