An artistic hypothetical view of Jezero Crater on Mars, once a lake.
Jezero Crater is minus 83 to minus 22 degrees Celsius, with winds of 22 miles per hour and a pressure of 718 Pascals – after InSight and Curiosity, Perseverance, which landed on Mars earlier in the year, has added a new weather station to the planet. Perseverance) added a new weather station to Mars.
Weather forecasting is a service that people rely on in their daily lives on Earth, and NASA engineers need information on weather conditions to guide the daily schedule of activities for rovers on Mars.
About a day after landing on Mars, the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) system onboard Trail was activated for the first time, operating for about 30 minutes, and by the evening of the same day, engineers on Earth had received the first report of local weather data from the system.
Together with the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) on Curiosity and the Temperature and Wind Sensor (TWINS) on InSight, NASA now has a total of three weather service stations on Mars that can provide local weather information and measure weather conditions in three regions on Mars. Trail and Curiosity are both mobile rovers located in Jethro Crater and Gale Crater, respectively, and Insight is a fixed lander located on the Elysium Planitia.
The MEDA system weighs about 5.5 kg and has a set of environmental sensors capable of recording atmospheric dust levels and atmospheric data in six areas, including wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, relative humidity, air temperature, ground temperature, and radiation values (including radiation from the sun and radiation from space).
This system operates independently from the other systems of the rover. Whether the rover is working or dormant, the system is automatically activated every hour day and night to measure and record weather data.
MEDA data shows that just within 30 minutes of the system’s first operation, the ground temperature in the Jazzero Crater area had dropped from -20 to -25.6 degrees Celsius.
Trailblazer’s MEDA system made some upgrades and improvements to Curiosity’s REMS system, which can measure air temperatures at three altitudes – 0.84 meters, 1.45 meters and 30 meters – in addition to the ground temperature.
Gale Crater, where Curiosity is currently located, is about 3,700 kilometers from Trailhead. From the first measurement, the air in the Jezero crater area is somewhat cleaner than the air in the Gale crater area measured during the same time. The atmospheric pressure on Mars at that time measured 718 pascals, which is fully in the range of values predicted by scientists from 705-735 pascals.
Through a variety of sources such as ground-based telescopes and the Mars Orbiting Probe, scientists now have a good understanding of the weather conditions on Mars. The next step scientists hope to analyze the activity pattern of dust storms on Mars during the year. A year on Mars is equivalent to two years on Earth.
When each dust storm on Mars begins to form, how it moves, and how it develops from small dust storms to large dust storms that sweep across the globe are important for future Mars exploration missions.
Next year, MEDA hopes to provide more important information, including the pattern of temperature cycles on Mars over the course of a year, heat flux (heat energy per unit area), the cycle of dust storms, how dust interacts with sunlight to affect temperature and weather, and more.
NASA is also planning a large mission to collect samples from Mars to send back to Earth, and in addition to solar radiation density, information on cloud formation, local wind conditions, etc. is also important. Of course, all the information is an important basis for future human exploration on Mars.
In the near future, MEDA’s information will help Ingenuity, the first miniature helicopter on Mars, plan its travel missions by selecting the best weather conditions for its itinerary.
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