NASA UNTOLLED

NASA’s Perseverance and Curiosity rovers are exploring new terrain on Mars every day, adding thousands of names to the Red Planet over the last few years. Set in the Perseverance rover operations area at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, this edition of the Mars Report features geologist Tina Seeger of Caltech explaining the process for naming Mars rocks, drill targets, and other locations as the teams explore. This video discusses how official and unofficial names are decided by scientists who need a common language to reference while navigating Mars. For the Curiosity and Perseverance missions, scientists have been systematically dividing their maps into quadrants and giving each quadrant a theme from which to draw names, such as national parks around the world. For more information on the naming process, visit https://go.nasa.gov/3qsNgI1. For more information on NASA's Mars missions, visit mars.nasa.gov. Credits: Video production, rover engineering camera images, Pathfinder mission images: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Perseverance rover’s WATSON, Curiosity rover’s Mastcam, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s CTX images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS; Perseverance rover Mastcam-Z images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS; Mars maps: USGS Astrogeology Science Center, NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona, and ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO); Ubajara National Park: R. Ourico (public domain); West Virginia: K. Thomas (public domain); Belva Lockwood: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (CC0); Victoria Crater: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Cornell/Ohio State University; NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona; NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU; Spirit and Opportunity images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell; Shenandoah and Death Valley National Parks: NPS/N. Lewis and NPS (public domain); Death Valley aerial view: NASA; California Map: USGS George I Smith; personal images courtesy of T. Seeger

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is filling sample tubes with rocky material on the Red Planet as the agency works on the next steps to get them safely back to Earth. The Mars Sample Return campaign would bring samples collected by the Perseverance rover to Earth for detailed study. The campaign involves an international interplanetary relay team, including the European Space Agency (ESA). These samples could answer a key question: did life ever exist on Mars? Aaron Yazzie, who works on the Mars Sample Return campaign, explains the work being done at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to ensure the safe return of the sample tubes. For more information on Mars Sample Return, visit mars.nasa.gov/msr/ Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

In this video, measurements collected by the Waves instrument aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft during its close flyby of Jupiter’s moon Europa on Sept. 29, 2022 have been converted to an audible frequency. As the white line moves across the spectrogram, which is a visual way of representing signal strength over time, the variation of frequency of the plasma waves observed near Europa can be heard as the plasma density varies. The video shows data collected over approximately 1.5 hours during the Europa flyby.

James Stephen Donaldson, better known online as MrBeast, is an American YouTuber and philanthropist. He is credited with pioneering a genre of YouTube videos that centers on expensive stunts and challenges.

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