Searching for Signs of Life on Mars: Perseverance’s Robotic Arm Starts Conducting Science

Mastcam-Z Views ‘Santa Cruz’ on Mars: NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its dual-camera Mastcam-Z imager to capture this image of “Santa Cruz,” a hill about 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) away from the rover, on April 29, 2021, the 68th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The entire scene is inside of Mars’ Jezero Crater; the crater’s rim can be seen on the horizon line beyond the hill. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

NASA’s newest Mars rover is beginning to study the floor of an ancient crater that once held a lake.

NASA’s Perseverance rover has been busy serving as a communications base station for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter and documenting the rotorcraft’s historic flights. But the rover has also been busy focusing its science instruments on rocks that lay on the floor of Jezero Crater.

What insights they turn up will help scientists create a timeline of when an ancient lake formed there, when it dried, and when sediment began piling up in the delta that formed in the crater long ago. Understanding this timeline should help date rock samples – to be collected later in the mission – that might preserve a record of ancient microbes.

Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z Images Intriguing Rocks: NASA’s Perseverance rover viewed these rocks with its Mastcam-Z imager on April 27, 2021. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

A camera called WATSON on the end of the rover’s robotic arm has taken detailed shots of the rocks. A pair of zoomable cameras that make up the Mastcam-Z imager on the rover’s “head” has also surveyed the terrain. And a laser instrument called SuperCam has zapped some of the rocks to detect their chemistry. These instruments and others allow scientists to learn more about Jezero Crater and to home in on areas they might like to study in greater depth.

One important question scientists want to answer: whether these rocks are sedimentary (like sandstone) or igneous (formed by volcanic activity). Each type of rock tells a different kind of story. Some sedimentary rocks – formed in the presence of water from rock and mineral fragments like sand, silt, and clay – are better suited to preserving biosignatures, or signs of past life. Igneous rocks, on the other hand, are more precise geological clocks that allow scientists to create an accurate timeline of how an area formed.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used the WATSON camera on the end of its robotic arm to conduct a focus test on May 10, 2021, the 79th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

One complicating factor is that the rocks around Perseverance have been eroded by wind over time and covered with younger sand and dust. On Earth, a geologist might trudge into the field and break a rock sample open to get a better idea of its origins. “When you look inside a rock, that’s where you see the story,” said Ken Farley of Caltech, Perseverance’s project scientist.

While Perseverance doesn’t have a rock hammer, it does have other ways to peer past millennia’s worth of dust. When scientists find a particularly enticing spot, they can reach out with the rover’s arm and use an abrader to grind and flatten a rock’s surface, revealing its internal structure and composition. Once they’ve done that, the team gathers more detailed chemical and mineralogical information using arm instruments called PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) and SHERLOC (Scanning for Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals).

Perseverance’s PIXL at Work on Mars (Illustration): In this illustration, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover uses the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL). Located on the turret at the end of the rover’s robotic arm, the X-ray spectrometer will help search for signs of ancient microbial life in rocks. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

“The more rocks you look at, the more you know,” Farley said.

And the more the team knows, the better samples they can ultimately collect with the drill on the rover’s arm. The best ones will be stored in special tubes and deposited in collections on the planet’s surface for eventual return to Earth.

More About the Mission

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.

Magnetoelectric Chips to Power a New Generation of More Efficient Computing Devices

Harnessing the Hum of Fluorescent Lights for More Efficient Computing

The property that makes fluorescent lights buzz could power a new generation of more efficient computing devices that store data with magnetic fields, rather than electricity.

A team led by University of Michigan researchers has developed a material that’s at least twice as “magnetostrictive” and far less costly than other materials in its class. In addition to computing, it could also lead to better magnetic sensors for medical and security devices.

Magnetostriction, which causes the buzz of fluorescent lights and electrical transformers, occurs when a material’s shape and magnetic field are linked — that is, a change in shape causes a change in magnetic field. The property could be key to a new generation of computing devices called magnetoelectrics.

Magnetoelectric chips could make everything from massive data centers to cell phones far more energy efficient, slashing the electricity requirements of the world’s computing infrastructure.

Made of a combination of iron and gallium, the material is detailed in a paper published today (May 12, 2021) in Nature Communication. The team is led by U-M materials science and engineering professor John Heron and includes researchers from Intel; Cornell University; University of California, Berkeley; University of Wisconsin; Purdue University and elsewhere.

Magnetoelectric devices use magnetic fields instead of electricity to store the digital ones and zeros of binary data. Tiny pulses of electricity cause them to expand or contract slightly, flipping their magnetic field from positive to negative or vice versa. Because they don’t require a steady stream of electricity, as today’s chips do, they use a fraction of the energy.

“A key to making magnetoelectric devices work is finding materials whose electrical and magnetic properties are linked.” Heron said. “And more magnetostriction means that a chip can do the same job with less energy.”

Cheaper magnetoelectric devices with a tenfold improvement

Most of today’s magnetostrictive materials use rare-earth elements, which are too scarce and costly to be used in the quantities needed for computing devices. But Heron’s team has found a way to coax high levels of magnetostriction from inexpensive iron and gallium.

Ordinarily, explains Heron, the magnetostriction of iron-gallium alloy increases as more gallium is added. But those increases level off and eventually begin to fall as the higher amounts of gallium begin to form an ordered atomic structure.

So the research team used a process called low-temperature molecular-beam epitaxy to essentially freeze atoms in place, preventing them from forming an ordered structure as more gallium was added. This way, Heron and his team were able to double the amount of gallium in the material, netting a tenfold increase in magnetostriction compared to unmodified iron-gallium alloys.

“Low-temperature molecular-beam epitaxy is an extremely useful technique — it’s a little bit like spray painting with individual atoms,” Heron said. “And ‘spray painting’ the material onto a surface that deforms slightly when a voltage is applied also made it easy to test its magnetostrictive properties.”

Researchers are working with Intel’s MESO program

The magnetoelectric devices made in the study are several microns in size — large by computing standards. But the researchers are working with Intel to find ways to shrink them to a more useful size that will be compatible with the company’s magnetoelectric spin-orbit device (or MESO) program, one goal of which is to push magnetoelectric devices into the mainstream.

“Intel is great at scaling things and at the nuts and bolts of making a technology actually work at the super-small scale of a computer chip,” Heron said. “They’re very invested in this project and we’re meeting with them regularly to get feedback and ideas on how to ramp up this technology to make it useful in the computer chips that they call MESO.”

While a device that uses the material is likely decades away, Heron’s lab has filed for patent protection through the U-M Office of Technology Transfer.

Reference: “Engineering new limits to magnetostriction through metastability in iron-gallium alloys” by P. B. Meisenheimer, R. A. Steinhardt, S. H. Sung, L. D. Williams, S. Zhuang, M. E. Nowakowski, S. Novakov, M. M. Torunbalci, B. Prasad, C. J. Zollner, Z. Wang, N. M. Dawley, J. Schubert, A. H. Hunter, S. Manipatruni, D. E. Nikonov, I. A. Young, L. Q. Chen, J. Bokor, S. A. Bhave, R. Ramesh, J.-M. Hu, E. Kioupakis, R. Hovden, D. G. Schlom and J. T. Heron, 12 May 2021, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22793-x

The research is supported by IMRA America and the National Science Foundation (grant numbers NNCI-1542081, EEC-1160504 DMR-1719875 and DMR-1539918).

Other researchers on the paper include U-M associate professor of materials science and engineering Emmanouil Kioupakis; U-M assistant professor of materials science and engineering Robert Hovden; and U-M graduate student research assistants Peter Meisenheimer and Suk Hyun Sung.

Brand New Physics of Superconducting Metals – Busted

Lancaster scientists have demonstrated that other physicists’ recent “discovery” of the field effect in superconductors is nothing but hot electrons after all.

A team of scientists in the Lancaster Physics Department has found new and compelling evidence that the observation of the field effect in superconducting metals by another group can be explained by a simple mechanism involving the injection of the electrons, without the need for novel physics.

Dr. Sergey Kafanov, who initiated this experiment, said: “Our results unambiguously refute the claim of the electrostatic field effect claimed by the other group. This gets us back on the ground and helps maintain the health of the discipline.”

The experimental team also includes Ilia Golokolenov, Andrew Guthrie, Yuri Pashkin, and Viktor Tsepelin.

Their work is published in the latest issue of Nature Communications.

Superconducting circuits find applications in sensing and information processing. Credit: Lancaster University

When certain metals are cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, their electrical resistance vanishes — a striking physical phenomenon known as superconductivity. Many metals, including vanadium, which was used in the experiment, are known to exhibit superconductivity at sufficiently low temperatures.

For decades it was thought that the exceptionally low electrical resistance of superconductors should make them practically impervious to static electric fields, owing to the way the charge carriers can easily arrange themselves to compensate for any external field.

It therefore came as a shock to the physics community when a number of recent publications claimed that sufficiently strong electrostatic fields could affect superconductors in nanoscale structures — and attempted to explain this new effect with corresponding new physics. A related effect is well known in semiconductors and underpins the entire semiconductor industry.

The Lancaster team embedded a similar nanoscale device into a microwave cavity, allowing them to study the alleged electrostatic phenomenon at much shorter timescales than previously investigated. At short timescales, the team could see a clear increase in the noise and energy loss in the cavity — the properties strongly associated with the device temperature. They propose that at intense electric fields, high-energy electrons can “jump” into the superconductor, raising the temperature and therefore increasing the dissipation.

This simple phenomenon can concisely explain the origin of the “electrostatic field effect” in nanoscale structures, without any new physics.

Reference: 12 May 2021, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22998-0

Pink Drinks Can Help You Run Faster and Further Compared to Clear Drinks

A new study led by the Center for Nutraceuticals in the University of Westminster shows that pink drinks can help to make you run faster and further compared to clear drinks.

The researchers found that a pink drink can increase exercise performance by 4.4 percent and can also increase a ‘feel good’ effect which can make exercise seem easier.

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition, is the first investigation to assess the effect of drink color on exercise performance and provides the potential to open a new avenue of future research in the field of sports drinks and exercise.

During the study participants were asked to run on a treadmill for 30 minutes at a self-selected speed ensuring their rate of exertion remained consistent. Throughout the exercise they rinsed their mouths with either a pink artificially sweetened drink that was low in calories or a clear drink that was also artificially sweetened and low in calories.

Both drinks were exactly the same and only differed in appearance — the researchers added food dye to the pink drink to change the color.

The researchers chose pink as it is associated with perceived sweetness and therefore increases expectations of sugar and carbohydrate intake.

Previous studies have also shown that rinsing the mouth with carbohydrates can improve exercise performance by reducing the perceived intensity of the exercise, so the researchers wanted to assess whether rinsing with a pink drink that had no carbohydrate stimulus could elicit similar benefits through a potential placebo effect.

The results show that the participants ran an average 212 meters further with the pink drink while their mean speed during the exercise test also increased by 4.4 percent. Feelings of pleasure were also enhanced meaning participants found running more enjoyable.

Future exploratory research is necessary to find out whether the proposed placebo effect causes a similar activation to the reward areas of the brain that are commonly reported when rinsing the mouth with carbohydrates.

Talking about the study, Dr. Sanjoy Deb, corresponding author on the paper from the University of Westminster, said: “The influence of color on athletic performance has received interest previously, from its effect on a sportsperson’s kit to its impact on testosterone and muscular power. Similarly, the role of color in gastronomy has received widespread interest, with research published on how visual cues or color can affect subsequent flavor perception when eating and drinking.

“The findings from our study combine the art of gastronomy with performance nutrition, as adding a pink colorant to an artificially sweetened solution not only enhanced the perception of sweetness, but also enhanced feelings of pleasure, self-selected running speed, and distance covered during a run.”

Reference: 12 May 2021, Frontiers in Nutrition.
DOI: 10.3389/fnut.2021.678105

James Webb Telescope’s Golden Mirror Wings Open for the Last Time on Earth

For the last time while it is on Earth, the world’s largest and most powerful space science telescope opened its iconic primary mirror. This event marked a key milestone in preparing the observatory for launch later this year.

As part of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s final tests, the 6.5 meter (21 feet 4 inch) mirror was commanded to fully expand and lock itself into place, just like it would in space. The conclusion of this test represents the team’s final checkpoint in a long series of tests designed to ensure Webb’s 18 hexagonal mirrors are prepared for a long journey in space, and a life of profound discovery. After this, all of Webb’s many movable parts will have confirmed in testing that they can perform their intended operations after being exposed to the expected launch environment.

This video shows the James Webb Space Telescope’s mirrors during their long string of tests, from individual segments to the final tests of the assembled mirror. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Michael P. Menzel (AIMM): Producer Michael McClare (KBRwyle): Lead Videographer Sophia Roberts (AIMM): Videographer Michael P. Menzel (AIMM): Video Editor

“The primary mirror is a technological marvel. The lightweight mirrors, coatings, actuators and mechanisms, electronics and thermal blankets when fully deployed form a single precise mirror that is truly remarkable,” said Lee Feinberg, optical telescope element manager for Webb at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This is not just the final deployment test sequence that the team has pulled off to prepare Webb for a life in space, but it means when we finish, that the primary mirror will be locked in place for launch. It’s humbling to think about the hundreds of dedicated people across the entire country who worked so hard to design and build the primary mirror, and now to know launch is so close.”

The process of deploying, moving, expanding and unfurling all of Webb’s many movable pieces after they have been exposed to a simulated launch is the best way to ensure they will perform as intended once in space. Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn

Making the testing conditions close to what Webb will experience in space helps to ensure the observatory is fully prepared for its science mission one million miles away from Earth.

Commands to unlatch and deploy the side panels of the mirror were relayed from Webb’s testing control room at Northrop Grumman, in Redondo Beach, California. The software instructions sent, and the mechanisms that operated are the same as those used in space. Special gravity offsetting equipment was attached to Webb to simulate the zero-gravity environment in which its complex mechanisms will operate. All of the final thermal blanketing and innovative shielding designed to protect its mirrors and instruments from interference were in place during testing.

To observe objects in the distant cosmos, and to do science that’s never been done before, Webb’s mirror needs to be so large that it cannot fit inside any rocket available in its fully extended form. Like a piece of origami artwork, Webb contains many movable parts that have been specifically designed to fold themselves to a compact formation that is considerably smaller than when the observatory is fully deployed. This allows it to just barely fit inside a 16-foot (5-meter) rocket fairing, with little room to spare.

The conclusion of this test represents the team’s final in a long series of checkpoints designed to ensure Webb’s 18 hexagonal mirrors are prepared for a long life of profound discovery. Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn

To deploy, operate and bring its golden mirrors into focus requires 132 individual actuators and motors in addition to complex backend software to support it. A proper deployment in space is critically important to the process of fine-tuning Webb’s individual mirrors into one functional and massive reflector. Once the wings are fully extended and in place, extremely precise actuators on the backside of the mirrors position and bend or flex each mirror into a specific prescription. Testing of each actuator and their expected movements was completed in a final functional test earlier this year. 

“Pioneering space observatories like Webb only come to fruition when dedicated individuals work together to surmount the challenge of building something that has never been done before. I am especially proud of our teams that built Webb’s mirrors, and the complex back-end electronics and software that will empower it to see deep into space with extreme precision. It has been very interesting, and extremely rewarding to see it all come together. The completion of this last test on its mirrors is especially exciting because of how close we are to launch later this year,” said Ritva Keski-Kuha, deputy optical telescope element manager for Webb at Goddard. 

Following this test engineers will immediately move on to tackle Webb’s final few tests, which include extending and then restowing two radiator assemblies that help the observatory cool down, and one full extension and restowing of its deployable tower.

The James Webb Space Telescope will be the world’s premier space science observatory when it launches in 2021. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

Breaking Heisenberg: Evading the Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Physics

Schematic of the entangled drumheads. Credit: Aalto University

New technique gets around 100-year-old rule of quantum physics for the first time.

The uncertainty principle, first introduced by Werner Heisenberg in the late 1920’s, is a fundamental concept of quantum mechanics. In the quantum world, particles like the electrons that power all electrical products can also behave like waves. As a result, particles cannot have a well-defined position and momentum simultaneously. For instance, measuring the momentum of a particle leads to a disturbance of position, and therefore the position cannot be precisely defined.

In recent research, published in Science, a team led by Prof. Mika Sillanpää at Aalto University in Finland has shown that there is a way to get around the uncertainty principle. The team included Dr. Matt Woolley from the University of New South Wales in Australia, who developed the theoretical model for the experiment.

Instead of elementary particles, the team carried out the experiments using much larger objects: two vibrating drumheads one-fifth of the width of a human hair. The drumheads were carefully coerced into behaving quantum mechanically.

“In our work, the drumheads exhibit a collective quantum motion. The drums vibrate in an opposite phase to each other, such that when one of them is in an end position of the vibration cycle, the other is in the opposite position at the same time. In this situation, the quantum uncertainty of the drums’ motion is canceled if the two drums are treated as one quantum-mechanical entity,” explains the lead author of the study, Dr. Laure Mercier de Lepinay.

This means that the researchers were able to simultaneously measure the position and the momentum of the two drumheads — which should not be possible according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Breaking the rule allows them to be able to characterize extremely weak forces driving the drumheads.

“One of the drums responds to all the forces of the other drum in the opposing way, kind of with a negative mass,” Sillanpää says.

Furthermore, the researchers also exploited this result to provide the most solid evidence to date that such large objects can exhibit what is known as quantum entanglement. Entangled objects cannot be described independently of each other, even though they may have an arbitrarily large spatial separation. Entanglement allows pairs of objects to behave in ways that contradict classical physics, and is the key resource behind emerging quantum technologies. A quantum computer can, for example, carry out the types of calculations needed to invent new medicines much faster than any supercomputer ever could.

In macroscopic objects, quantum effects like entanglement are very fragile, and are destroyed easily by any disturbances from their surrounding environment. Therefore, the experiments were carried out at a very low temperature, only a hundredth a degree above absolute zero at -273 degrees.

In the future, the research group will use these ideas in laboratory tests aiming at probing the interplay of quantum mechanics and gravity. The vibrating drumheads may also serve as interfaces for connecting nodes of large-scale, distributed quantum networks.

Reference: “Quantum mechanics–free subsystem with mechanical oscillators” by Laure Mercier de Lépinay, Caspar F. Ockeloen-Korppi, Matthew J. Woolley and Mika A. Sillanpää, 7 May 2021, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.abf5389

Sillanpää’s group is part of the national Centre of Excellence, Quantum Technology Finland (QTF). The research was carried out using OtaNano, a national open access research infrastructure providing state-of-the-art working environment for competitive research in nanoscience and -technology, and in quantum technologies. OtaNano is hosted and operated by Aalto University and VTT.