Starship Asterisk*

neufer wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 1:23 pm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parzival wrote:
<<Parzival is a medieval romance by the knight-poet Wolfram von Eschenbach in Middle High German. The poem, commonly dated to the first quarter of the 13th century, centers on the Arthurian hero Parzival (Percival in English) and his long quest for the Holy Grail following his initial failure to achieve it. We learn that Parzival fights for the good but suffers from his alienation from God. After nearly five years of wandering and fighting, from combat he gains a new horse, owned by a Grail knight, and this horse leads him to Trevrizent. He stays with this holy man for fourteen days and learns about the hidden meaning of life. Through his loneliness and through his yearning for the grail he puts himself outside the world of Arthur. He is called to another world, that of the Grail.>>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percival_Lowell wrote:
<<Percival Lowell (March 13, 1855 – November 12, 1916) was an American businessman, author, mathematician, and astronomer who fueled speculation that there were canals on Mars. He founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and formed the beginning of the effort that led to the discovery of Pluto 14 years after his death.

Martian canals depicted by Percival Lowell.

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Laser Altimeter Topographic Map over Shiaparelli’s 1886 Map. .............Perseverance rover is located at 18.44°N / 77.45°E

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For some fifteen years (1893 to about 1908) Lowell studied Mars extensively, making intricate drawings of the surface markings as he perceived them. Lowell published his views in three books: Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906), and Mars As the Abode of Life (1908). With these writings, Lowell more than anyone else popularized the long-held belief that these markings showed that Mars sustained intelligent life forms.

His works include a detailed description of what he termed the "non-natural features" of the planet's surface, including especially a full account of the "canals," single and double; the "oases," as he termed the dark spots at their intersections; and the varying visibility of both, depending partly on the Martian seasons. He theorized that an advanced but desperate culture had built the canals to tap Mars' polar ice caps, the last source of water on an inexorably drying planet.

While this idea excited the public, the astronomical community was skeptical. Many astronomers could not see these markings, and few believed that they were as extensive as Lowell claimed. As a result, Lowell and his observatory were largely ostracized. Although the consensus was that some actual features did exist which would account for these markings, in 1909 the sixty-inch Mount Wilson Observatory telescope in Southern California allowed closer observation of the structures Lowell had interpreted as canals, and revealed irregular geological features, probably the result of natural erosion. The existence of canal-like features was definitively disproved in the 1960s by NASA's Mariner missions.>>

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

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The descent stage holding NASA's Perseverance rover can be seen falling through the Martian atmosphere, its parachute trailing behind, in this image taken on Feb. 18, 2021, by the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The ancient river delta, which is the target of the Perseverance mission, can be seen entering Jezero Crater from the left.

HiRISE was approximately 435 miles (700 kilometers) from Perseverance and traveling at about 6750 mile per hour (3 kilometers per second) at the time the image was taken. The extreme distance and high speeds of the two spacecraft were challenging conditions that required precise timing and for Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to both pitch upward and roll hard to the left so that Perseverance was viewable by HiRISE at just the right moment.

Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 3:30 pm

johnnydeep wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 3:27 pm

APOD Robot wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 5:08 am Mars Perseverance Sol 0

Explanation: After a 203 day interplanetary voyage, and seven minutes of terror, Perseverance has landed on Mars. Confirmation of the successful landing at Jezero crater was announced from mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California at 12:55 pm PST on February 18. The car-sized Mars rover's Front Left Hazard Avoidance Camera acquired this initial low resolution image shortly after touchdown on mission Sol 0. A protective cover is still on the camera, but the shadow of Perseverance, now the most ambitious rover sent to the Red Planet, is visible cast across the martian surface.

Woo-hoo! So, even the low res hazard avoidance camera - with a protective cover still on, mind you - can take a pretty good picture!

One question: I know one of the primary goals of this mission is to gather samples into tubes to be retrieved by a subsequent lander and sent back to earth for comprehensive analysis. That's great. But is Perseverance itself capable of providing definitive evidence of life? Other than happening to catch a current "live" organism crossing the field of view, of course! (And yes, I read most of neufer's two posts about the advaned capabilities of the PIXL and the FPGAs that enable its capabilities.)

We don't even have a clear definition of "life". There are instruments that can detect an assortment of chemical signatures that we generally consider to be indicative of some kind of biological processes. But even so, such signatures are likely to be ambiguous. The most convincing thing would be an image of a fossil lifeform. Not some vague little string of blobs, but an actual complex structure. Not very likely, though, even if there are such fossils.

neufer wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 8:53 pm

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 3:30 pm

johnnydeep wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 3:27 pm

APOD Robot wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 5:08 am Mars Perseverance Sol 0

Explanation: After a 203 day interplanetary voyage, and seven minutes of terror, Perseverance has landed on Mars. Confirmation of the successful landing at Jezero crater was announced from mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California at 12:55 pm PST on February 18. The car-sized Mars rover's Front Left Hazard Avoidance Camera acquired this initial low resolution image shortly after touchdown on mission Sol 0. A protective cover is still on the camera, but the shadow of Perseverance, now the most ambitious rover sent to the Red Planet, is visible cast across the martian surface.

Woo-hoo! So, even the low res hazard avoidance camera - with a protective cover still on, mind you - can take a pretty good picture!

One question: I know one of the primary goals of this mission is to gather samples into tubes to be retrieved by a subsequent lander and sent back to earth for comprehensive analysis. That's great. But is Perseverance itself capable of providing definitive evidence of life? Other than happening to catch a current "live" organism crossing the field of view, of course! (And yes, I read most of neufer's two posts about the advaned capabilities of the PIXL and the FPGAs that enable its capabilities.)

We don't even have a clear definition of "life". There are instruments that can detect an assortment of chemical signatures that we generally consider to be indicative of some kind of biological processes. But even so, such signatures are likely to be ambiguous. The most convincing thing would be an image of a fossil lifeform. Not some vague little string of blobs, but an actual complex structure. Not very likely, though, even if there are such fossils.

Stromatolites (/stroʊˈmætəlaɪts, strə-/[2][3]) or stromatoliths (from Greek στρῶμα strōma "layer, stratum" (GEN στρώματος strōmatos), and λίθος líthos "rock")[4] are layered sedimentary formations that are created by photosynthetic cyanobacteria. These microorganisms produce adhesive compounds that cement sand and other rocky materials to form mineral “microbial mats”. In turn, these mats build up layer by layer, growing gradually over time.[5][6] A stromatolite may grow to a meter or more.[7][8] Although they are rare today, fossilized stromatolites provide records of ancient life on Earth.

johnnydeep wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 3:27 pm
Woo-hoo! So, even the low res hazard avoidance camera - with a protective cover still on, mind you - can take a pretty good picture!

Other than happening to catch a current "live" organism crossing the field of view, of course! (And yes, I read most of neufer's two posts about the advaned capabilities of the PIXL and the FPGAs that enable its capabilities.)

Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 3:30 pm

johnnydeep wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 3:27 pm

APOD Robot wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 5:08 am Mars Perseverance Sol 0

Explanation: After a 203 day interplanetary voyage, and seven minutes of terror, Perseverance has landed on Mars. Confirmation of the successful landing at Jezero crater was announced from mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California at 12:55 pm PST on February 18. The car-sized Mars rover's Front Left Hazard Avoidance Camera acquired this initial low resolution image shortly after touchdown on mission Sol 0. A protective cover is still on the camera, but the shadow of Perseverance, now the most ambitious rover sent to the Red Planet, is visible cast across the martian surface.

Woo-hoo! So, even the low res hazard avoidance camera - with a protective cover still on, mind you - can take a pretty good picture!

One question: I know one of the primary goals of this mission is to gather samples into tubes to be retrieved by a subsequent lander and sent back to earth for comprehensive analysis. That's great. But is Perseverance itself capable of providing definitive evidence of life? Other than happening to catch a current "live" organism crossing the field of view, of course! (And yes, I read most of neufer's two posts about the advaned capabilities of the PIXL and the FPGAs that enable its capabilities.)

We don't even have a clear definition of "life". There are instruments that can detect an assortment of chemical signatures that we generally consider to be indicative of some kind of biological processes. But even so, such signatures are likely to be ambiguous. The most convincing thing would be an image of a fossil lifeform. Not some vague little string of blobs, but an actual complex structure. Not very likely, though, even if there are such fossils.

johnnydeep wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 3:27 pm

APOD Robot wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 5:08 am Mars Perseverance Sol 0

Explanation: After a 203 day interplanetary voyage, and seven minutes of terror, Perseverance has landed on Mars. Confirmation of the successful landing at Jezero crater was announced from mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California at 12:55 pm PST on February 18. The car-sized Mars rover's Front Left Hazard Avoidance Camera acquired this initial low resolution image shortly after touchdown on mission Sol 0. A protective cover is still on the camera, but the shadow of Perseverance, now the most ambitious rover sent to the Red Planet, is visible cast across the martian surface.

Woo-hoo! So, even the low res hazard avoidance camera - with a protective cover still on, mind you - can take a pretty good picture!

One question: I know one of the primary goals of this mission is to gather samples into tubes to be retrieved by a subsequent lander and sent back to earth for comprehensive analysis. That's great. But is Perseverance itself capable of providing definitive evidence of life? Other than happening to catch a current "live" organism crossing the field of view, of course! (And yes, I read most of neufer's two posts about the advaned capabilities of the PIXL and the FPGAs that enable its capabilities.)

APOD Robot wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 5:08 am Mars Perseverance Sol 0

Explanation: After a 203 day interplanetary voyage, and seven minutes of terror, Perseverance has landed on Mars. Confirmation of the successful landing at Jezero crater was announced from mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California at 12:55 pm PST on February 18. The car-sized Mars rover's Front Left Hazard Avoidance Camera acquired this initial low resolution image shortly after touchdown on mission Sol 0. A protective cover is still on the camera, but the shadow of Perseverance, now the most ambitious rover sent to the Red Planet, is visible cast across the martian surface.

https://www.fierceelectronics.com/electronics/nasa-mars-rover-perseverance-launches-thursday-to-find-evidence-life-red-planet wrote:

Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival

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<<Among the research instruments aboard Perseverance is PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry), an X-ray flouresence spectrometer and high-resolution imager to map the composition of Martian surface materials. PIXL has the technology to permit more detailed detection and analysis of chemical elements than ever before, according to NASA.

[Neufer's son Dr. Stephen Neuendorffer's San Jose company] Xilinx,the chipmaker that invented the Field Programmable Gate Array, provided its Virtex FPGA for PIXL to be used to help identify chemical elements at size of a grain of salt, according to Minal Sawant, space system architect for Xilinx. She spoke in an interview with FierceElectronics. “If you are looking for signs of ancient life, you want to look at a small scale and get detailed information about chemical elements present,” said Abigail Allwood, the principal investigator for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, in a statement.

PIXL hardware is about the size of a lunchbox and is mounted on a turret at the end of a robotic arm aboard Perseverance, according to NASA. The sensor head weighs nearly 10 pounds while the electronics weigh another 6 pounds. It operates on 25 watts and returns about 16 megabits of data per experiment, which could total about 2 megabytes per day. A laboratory tool to do the same job is normally about the size of a large beach cooler and weighs more than 500 pounds. The instrument will focus an X-ray beam to a tiny spot on the target rock or soil and analyze the induced X-ray fluorescence. PIXL can detect more than two dozen elements in five seconds each, according to NASA.

Xilinx Virtex FPGAs will also be used in several other Perseverance instruments: Electra-lite (a UHF transceiver), Mastcam-Z (a mast-mounted camera system for taking 3D pictures and video at high speed to examine distant objects) and SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals). Xilinx also provided the FPGA for a radar-based Terminal Descent Sensor (TDS) that uses Ka-band radar to provide range and velocity measurements for Perseverance’s Entry, Descent and Landing after heatshield separation in the Martian atmosphere.

Xilinx paired a Virtex 5 FPGA paid with a RAD750 CPU for vision processing tasks for the descent stage of the mission. Together the chips provide an interface between a camera and an inertial measurement unit. Sawant described the combined chips as providing an improvement of 18 times in the speed required to estimate a camera’s pose change when compared to the CPU on the Curiosity rover launched in 2011. It took Curiosity 160 seconds, which has been pared down to 8.8 seconds for Perseverance. The two chips optimize and rectify images, she said. Curiosity didn’t have an FPGA as Perseverance does, which allows offloading of processing tasks and greater efficiency.

Xilinx Virtex 4 chips aboard Perseverance and its lander are radiation tolerant to protect against the ravages of space. Ceramic packaging is used to ensure the resilience. Virtex 5 chips are radiation hardened through design, which partly means that single event unit hardness is built into the silicon. Xilinx chips have been part of satellites and other space vehicles for decades and the company anticipates more work in the space category. With the Europa mission planned for some time in the 2020s and Iridium satellites to be launched, among others, “there will hundreds of Vertix 5 FPGAs deployed,” Sawant predicted. “Everybody wants to launch satellites.”

In May, Xilinx announced the industry’s first 20nm space-grade FPGA for satellite and space applications called the Kintex UltraScale FPGA. Sawant said the Kintex FPGA will provide almost four times the compute power of the Virtex 5 FPGA allowing machine learning for edge inferencing in space. “It brings machine learning to space that’s never been done before,” she said. Satellites can use the Kintex chip with cameras to observe clouds in the atmosphere, then compress the images that are then stored on-board the satellite. A cloud detection machine learning algorithm can discard the unneeded images so they won’t take up space in transmission or clutter up post-processing work on earth. With the ML on board, a satellite can more easily detect objects separate from clouds, Sawant said.>>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parzival wrote:
<<Parzival is a medieval romance by the knight-poet Wolfram von Eschenbach in Middle High German. The poem, commonly dated to the first quarter of the 13th century, centers on the Arthurian hero Parzival (Percival in English) and his long quest for the Holy Grail following his initial failure to achieve it.

we learn that Parzival fights for the good but suffers from his alienation from God. After nearly five years of wandering and fighting, from combat he gains a new horse, owned by a Grail knight, and this horse leads him to Trevrizent. He stays with this holy man for fourteen days and learns about the hidden meaning of life. Through his loneliness and through his yearning for the grail and for Condwiramurs he puts himself outside the world of Arthur. He is called to another world, that of the Grail.>>

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/instruments/pixl/for-scientists/ wrote:

Planetary Instrument for X-Ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) is an x-ray fluorescence spectrometer to determine the fine scale elemental composition of Martian surface materials designed for the Perseverance rover as part of the Mars 2020 mission.

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<<The PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) for the Perseverance rover is a microfocus X-ray fluorescence instrument that rapidly measures elemental chemistry at sub-millimeter scales by focusing an X-ray beam to a tiny spot on the target rock or soil and analyzing the induced X-ray fluorescence. Scanning the beam reveals spatial variations in chemistry in relation to fine-scale geologic features such as laminae, grains, cements, veins, and concretions.

The high X-ray flux enables high sensitivity and short integration times: most elements are detected at lower concentrations than possible on previous landed payloads to Mars, and several new elements can be detected that were not previously detectable on these missions. Fast acquisition allows rapid scanning so that PIXL reveals the associations between different elements and the observed textures and structures. The same spectra can be summed for bulk analysis, allowing comparison with bulk chemistry measurements at sites previously explored on Mars. With PIXL’s simple design comes operational efficiency and experimental flexibility—an instrument that can adapt to different scientific opportunities to produce a diverse set of scientifically powerful data products within the constraints of the mission.

The instrument consists of a main electronics unit in the rover’s body and a sensor head mounted on the robotic arm. The sensor head includes an x-ray source, X-ray optics, X-ray detectors, and high-voltage power supply (HVPS), as well as a micro-context camera (MCC) and light-emitting diode (LED). The PIXL can detect elements: Na, Mg, Al, Si, P, S, Cl, K, Ca, Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, Br, Rb, Sr, Y, Ga, Ge, As, and Zr, with important trace elements such as Rb, Sr, Y and Zr detectable at 10’s ppm level.>>