The artist’s impression of the Mars Express. The background is based on an actual image of Mars taken by the spacecraft’s high-resolution stereo camera. Credit: Image of the spacecraft: ESA / ATG medialab; Mars: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The MARSIS instrument of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, known for its role in detecting signs of liquid water on the Red Planet, has received a major software upgrade that will allow it to see beneath the surfaces of Mars and its moon Phobos in more detail than always.
Mars Express was ESA’s first mission to the Red Planet. Launched 19 years ago, on June 2, 2003, the orbiter spent nearly two decades studying its neighbor on Earth and revolutionizing our understanding of the history, present, and future of Mars.
MARSIS – The water of the Red Planet
Mars Express’s Advanced Marine Underground and Ionospheric Sounding Radar (MARSIS) was critical to the search for and detection of signs of liquid water on Mars, including an alleged lake 20 by 30 km (12 by 19 miles) of salt water buried below 1 , 5 km (0.9 miles) of ice in the South Polar Region.
Operated by the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF), Italy, and fully funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), MARSIS sends low-frequency radio waves down to the planet using its 40-meter (131-foot) antenna.
Impression of the artist from the water under the Martian surface. Credit: Illustration by Medialab, ESA 2001
Most of these waves are reflected from the planet’s surface, but significant amounts pass through the crust and affect the boundaries between the layers of various materials below the surface, including ice, soil, rock and water.
By studying the reflected signals, scientists can map the structure below the surface of the Red Planet to a depth of several kilometers and study properties such as the thickness and composition of its polar ice caps and the properties of volcanic and sedimentary rock layers.
From Windows 98 to Mars 2022
“After decades of fruitful science and a good understanding of Mars, we wanted to go beyond the instrument beyond some of the limits required since the beginning of the mission,” said Andrea Chicketti, PI Deputy and MARSIS Operations Manager at INAF, who is leading the development. on the upgrade.
ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft’s MARSIS radar instrument is used to detect characteristics such as water below the surface of Mars. He recently received a software upgrade, which significantly improved his scientific performance. In this graph you can see the region of the surface of Mars studied with the help of MARSIS during a passage over the area of Lunae Planum. The software upgrade reduces the speed at which the on-board storage tool fills up, allowing it to turn on much longer at once and collect data for a much larger region with each pass. right. The area that can be explored during one use is now on the left. Credit: INAF – National Institute of Astrophysics
“We have faced a number of challenges to improve MARSIS performance,” said Carlo Nena, MARSIS’s on-board software engineer at Enginium, who is implementing the upgrade. “Last but not least, because the MARSIS software was originally designed more than 20 years ago using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!”
The new software was designed jointly by the INAF team and Carlo and is now being implemented on Mars Express by ESA. It includes a series of upgrades that improve signal reception and on-board data processing to increase the quantity and quality of scientific data sent to Earth.
“Before, to study the most important features of Mars and study its Phobos moon in general, we relied on a sophisticated technique that stores a lot of high-resolution data and fills the instrument’s onboard memory very quickly,” says Andrea.
“By throwing away data we don’t need, the new software allows us to turn on MARSIS five times longer and explore a much larger area with each pass.”
“There are many regions near the South Pole of Mars where we may have already seen signals showing liquid water in lower-resolution data,” added ESA Mars Express scientist Colin Wilson.
“The new software will help us explore these high-resolution regions more quickly and in-depth and confirm whether they are home to new sources of water on Mars. It’s really like having a brand new instrument on board the Mars Express almost 20 years after launch. “
The Martian workhorse
Old enough to vote in many parts of the world, the Mars Express continues to provide incredible science, while remaining one of ESA’s cheapest missions to fly.
Mars Express continues to capture stunning images of the Red Planet 19 years after the launch. This color-coded topographic image shows some of the features of the landscape that makes up the Aonia Terra, a mountainous region in the southern mountains of Mars. It is created from data collected by ESA’s Mars Express on April 25, 2022. Credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
“Mars Express and MARSIS are still very busy,” said James Godfrey, Mars Express space operations manager at ESA’s ESOC mission operations center in Darmstadt, Germany. “The team did a great job designing the new software, maximizing its impact while keeping patches as small as possible, helping us continue to get the most out of this veteran spacecraft.”
MARSIS was developed by the University of Rome, Italy, in partnership with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The INAF team acknowledges the support of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) through the ASI-INAF 2019–21-HH.0 contract.
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