News at a glance: U.S. rules on carbon emissions, better vehicle batteries, and a Mars moon ’s close-up

PLANETARY SCIENCE Mars’s moon may be its kin Researchers have long believed that Mars’s two moons, Deimos and Phobos, are captured asteroids. But the first close-up images of Deimos, taken by the United Arab Emirates’s $200 million Hope spacecraft, suggest the 12-kilometer-wide body instead formed from the same material as Mars, researchers revealed this week at the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union. The imagery, taken during a 10 March flyby, indicates that Deimos’s surface is covered by volcanic basalts like those on Mars, with no signs of the carbon-rich rock more often found on asteroids. Hope began orbiting Mars in 2021 to study the martian atmosphere. When it completed its planned observations, controllers adjusted its orbit to take the images of the peach-shaped Deimos, the smaller of the two moons. Phobos’s orbit is too low for Hope to have made similar observations. LUNAR SCIENCE Private Moon probe fails A bid this week by a Japanese company to become the first to put a commercial lander on the Moon was unsuccessful. The company, called ispace, tracked the descent of its Hakuto-R Mission 1 lunar lander until seconds before the scheduled landing in Atlas crater, after which it lost contact. The craft carried small rovers supplied by the United Arab Emirates and by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Tomy Company, a Japanese toymaker. ispace plans to launch another lander in 2024....
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news