ORIGINAL MARS SCIENCE LABORATORY WIND DISINFORMATION

1. Design of the REMS Booms. This section is lifted directly from NASA/JPL. Comments by Barry S. Roffman are shown in red or blue. Figure 1 is taken from  the paper entitled REMS: The Environmental Senor Suite for the Mars Science Laboratory Rover by J. Gómez-Elvira et al. (2012)

PI: Javier Gómez-Elvira, Centro de Astrobiología, Spain

REMS has been designed to record six atmospheric parameters: wind speed/direction, pressure, relative humidity, air temperature, ground temperature, and ultraviolet radiation. All sensors are located around three elements: two booms attached to the rover Remote Sensing Mast (RSM), the Ultraviolet Sensor (UVS) assembly located on the rover top deck, and the Instrument Control Unit (ICU) inside the rover body.

       The booms are approximately 1.5 m above ground level. Boom length is similar to the RSM diameter, and therefore the wind flow perturbation by the RSM may reach the boom tip where the wind sensor is located. The two booms are separated in azimuth by 120 degrees to help insure that at least one of them will record clean wind data for any given wind direction. The figure below shows the booms’ relative position. There is a 50 mm height difference to minimize mutual wind perturbation.

      Boom 2, which points in the driving direction of the rover, has wind sensors and the relative humidity sensor.

       Boom 1, which looks to the side and slightly to the rear of the rover, hosts another set of wind sensors and the ground temperature sensor. Both booms have an air temperature sensor. See Figures 1 and 2 above.

      Wind speed and direction will be derived based on information provided by three two-dimensional wind sensors on each of the booms. The three sensors are located 120 degrees apart around the boom axis. Each of them will record local speed and direction in the plane of the sensor. The convolution of the 12 data points will be enough to determine wind speed as well as pitch and yaw angle of each boom relative to the flow direction. The requirement is to determine horizontal wind speed with 1 m/sec accuracy in the range of 0 to 70 m/sec, with a resolution of 0.5 m/sec. The directional accuracy is expected to be better than 30 degrees. For vertical wind the range is 0 to 10 m/sec, and the accuracy and resolution are the same as for horizontal wind.

       As mentioned previously, the wind field at the booms will be perturbed by the RSM and by the rover itself. Calibration will be done via a variety of wind tunnel tests under Mars conditions as well as numerical analysis. Simulations will be used to obtain results where tests conditions cannot be reproduced on Earth. 

2. The Partial (or total) Malfunction on Landing. This section is lifted directly from Spaceflight 101. Comments by Barry S. Roffman are shown in blue.

"During REMS checkouts, it was found that the boom looking to the side was sending saturated data at either high or low levels which was not valid."

The broken boom that looks to the side is Boom 1. In Section 1 above it was claimed that it hosts another set of wind sensors and (only) the ground temperature sensor. However, on Figure 1 above it is seen that Boom 1 houses both ground and air temperature sensors. Boom 2 only has an air temperature sensor (plus the relative humidity sensor) leading to questions about whether any ground temperatures published are correct.  Click HERE to see MSL ground (and air) temperatures published by NASA. Update: We have published an update that shows all MSL weather claimed for 616 days of MSL operation HERE. However, the data was obviously edited by JPL to make it match expected values. This is reflected on the chart where we show original data and then how JPL revised it.

The article on Spaceflight 101 continues: "The issue was traced back to the exposed circuit boards and it was determined that two of three boards on the boom in question had damaged wiring. Teams assessed the situation and came to the conclusion that this type of damage was permanent without a chance of recovery. The REMS instrument and its wind sensors were successfully checked during cruise so that instrument health following launch and ascent aboard the Atlas V rocket back in November 2011 was confirmed. With the instruments starting to send bad data after landing while functioning during cruise has led to teams assuming that the instrument's circuit boards were damaged during Entry, Descent and Landing. Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity deputy project scientist, has stressed that there is now way of finding out what exactly happened to the hardware, but that teams have developed the hypothesis of small rocks damaging the tiny wires of the circuit boards during the propulsive landing. Following landing, images have shown small pebbles on the Rover Deck that were picked up by the Mars Landing Engines while the Descent Stage was hovering above Curiosity during landing.

       Possibly, these pebbles could have hit the fragile hardware on the mast which was in its stowed position with the REMS booms facing outward, leading to the damage teams are seeing.

       With one damaged wind sensor, teams will have to learn how to put the one remaining sensor to best use to provide wind speed and direction data to support the science goals of REMS." Update of May 5, 2014: They never succeeded. Eventually, at least in part as a result of pressure that we put on them, they changed  every single weather report by the REMS team that had listed the wind permanently at 2 m/s from the east to NOT AVAILABLE. 

4.  History of wind measurement problems on Mars.

Until Phoenix landed in 2008, the only landers carrying dedicated meteorology instruments were Vikings 1, 2 and Pathfinder. There was little wind speed data for Mars after the Vikings due to calibration problems with the wind sensors for Pathfinder (Schofield et al., 1997).  Winds were too light (largely <5 m/s), but wrong assumptions about air pressure on Mars might have also caused calibration problems as wind speed u is related to pressure through Equation 1 from a NASA article about the Mars Pathfinder Windsock:

EQUATION 1: u = sqrt{[2 R(1) M g tan (theta)]/ [R(2) A(d) rho]}

In Equation1 R(1) = distance between pivot and center of mass, M =  non-counter-balanced mass, g = acceleration of gravity, R(2) =  distance between pivot and center of aerodynamic pressure,  A(d) =  effective aerodynamic cross-section, and rho = atmospheric  density (a function of pressure, temperature, and molecular weight).

    An MPF hot-wire anemometer also had calibration problems. Such technology is sensitive to pressure, gas composition, air temperature, and their own overheating which may induce systematic errors (Pedrero, Jaime, 2010).

Schofield et al. (1997) indicate that while Pathfinder was operational from July 4 to September 27, 1997, it had no pressure data for the most crucial sol – its first operational day on Mars. The reason given by the above reference is there were “various spacecraft software reset and downlink problems.” If the problems only occurred after the first day and if the first day’s pressure data was consistent with the Vikings, then Pathfinder’s data could be used to refute the claims made in our report, MARS CORRECT: Critique of All NASA Mars Weather Data with Emphasis on Pressure. However, that is not the case. We are still dealing with a Tavis transducer with no way to keep the dust out of its pressure tube on or in the seconds before landing, and no way to change a clogged dust filter. The critical time is in the final landing process. So when the spacecraft has to reset the software and correct downlink problems then, the issue of exactly what is entailed in these corrections becomes one of extreme importance.

       J. Gómez-Elvira et al. (2012) claim that hot wire anemometry was used in the Viking mission and from then on, has been a reference in the design of wind sensors for Mars due mainly to its simplicity. Frankly, an old fashion anemometer with spinning cups (and varying pressure-related thresholds for movement) and a wind sock would seem a lot simpler. In support of this as mentioned above NASA never succeeded in calibrating the anemometer on Pathfinder. REMS follows the Viking design and uses thermal anemometry to record the wind speed also. Now we face a situation on MSL where one boom is out of service. Even had both booms survived the landing REMS, unlike previous landers with an arm or mast that isolated the wind sensor from the lander body, wind data would have been be strongly influenced by the rover body and some of its appendages (e.g. masthead, RTG, robotic arm).

      As for how the Viking landers compared to MSL, the Vikings wind sensor assemblies each consisted of two hot wires oriented at right angles to each other. A reference air temperature was measured using an identical hot wire located between the two wind sensors. For REMS the hot wire anemometry is based on recording either the amount of power required to heat a wire so that it maintains a constant temperature difference with the ambient (CTA) or to record the temperature of the wire when supplied with a constant amount of power (CPA). The convective power is then calculated, which in turn is used to obtain the wind speed. The REMS wind sensors use a thin film instead of a wire: titanium thin film resistors patterned on the surface of a silicon chip (Domínguez et al. 2008).

4.1 Anemometer/Telltale Wind Speed Issues. 

Understanding Martian wind is crucial in preparing for future manned missions to Mars.  As such, one of the first instruments chosen for Phoenix should have been an anemometer, but Taylor et al. (2008) refer to the failure to do so.  Their paper states, “We had hoped to include an anemometer in the MET package.  Faced with a lack of resources to achieve this, and the real desire to have some wind information we decided to make use of the SSI camera and have a novel Telltale to achieve this.”  See Figure 4.

       The MPF IMP windsock was ineffective because light wind (< 5m/s) dominated the mission. Calibration for this windsock was only at 1,015 mbar and ~15 mbar of terrestrial air – see Annex H of our report.  Higher surface pressures for Mars were apparently not considered. The 15 mbar figure factored  in the difference between our air and CO₂.

4.2. Martian Bedforms – Too Much Movement of Sand Dunes and Ripples for 6.1 mbar. 

       On November 17, 2011 an article was published by Dwayne Brown of NASA Headquarters and Priscilla Vega at JPL entitled NASA Orbiter Catches Mars Sand Dunes In Motion. The first startling confession was that:

 “Mars either has more gusts of wind than we knew about before, or the winds are capable of transporting more sand, said Nathan Bridges, planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., and lead author of a paper on the finding published online in the journal Geology. We used to think of the sand on Mars as relatively immobile, so these new observations are changing our whole perspective."

        The article makes clear that the HiRISE has documented movements of a few yards or meters per year in dozens of locations across the planet. It then states that wind-tunnel experiments have shown that a patch of sand would require winds of about 80 mph (35.76 m/s) to move on Mars compared with only 10 mph on Earth. It also makes the understatement that measurements from the Viking landers, in addition to climate models, showed such winds should be rare on Mars. The word rare was too generous.

How does the above required 80 mph compare with winds observed on Mars? The set of graphs on Figure 5 below show how wind speed varied at Viking 1 between its sols 1 and 350 (with the exception of sols 116 to 133 because data was missing then). Every sol (Martian day) was divided into 25 time bins, with wind readings provided for each one. During sols 1 to 199 the maximum wind recorded was 36.7 mph. Between sols 200 and 350 there was one incident where winds reached 57.9 mph, but at no measured point over 8,331 measurements, did the wind ever reach 80 mph. Average winds for Viking 1 were about 6.12 mph during sols 1 to 199, and 11.86 mph during its sols 200 to 350. All wind data was obtained from the Viking Project Group headed by Professor James Tillman.

       For Viking 2 during sols 1 to 199 the maximum wind recorded was 22.1 mph. From sols 200 and 399 it was a good bit windier, but the maximum winds at 51.9 mph – were still short of the 80 mph figure required to move the sands as was actually seen. Average wind for Viking 2 was about 7.54 mph from sols 1 to 199; and 13.33 mph from sols 200 to 399. 

4.3. Issues Raised by the paper on Planet-wide sand motion on Mars by Nathan T. Bridges (et al., 2012).

The Bridges et al. paper states that, “prior to Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter data, images of Mars showed no direct evidence for dune and ripple motion. This was consistent with climate models and lander measurements indicating that winds of sufficient intensity to mobilize sand were rare in the low-density atmosphere.” It then reveals new findings that show that many sand ripples and dunes across Mars exhibit movement of as much as a few meters per year, demonstrating that Martian sand migrates under current conditions in diverse areas of the planet. However, in an effort to explain it, they speculate that “most motion is probably driven by wind gusts that are not resolved in global circulation models.”

A response to the resolution suggestion is that, as is noted before in conjunction with the 8,331 wind velocity measurements recorded at Viking 1 and Viking 2, in no case was a gust ever caught that hit 80 mph. The windiest day seen was with Viking 1 with a 57.9 mph gust during its sol 214.78 when the planet was at Ls 210.872 (Martian fall in the northern hemisphere).  Did this gust come out of a sudden event like a dust devil? No, obviously it was a storm of some sort, because the winds began to rise in the morning that day at sol fragment 214.38, then the fell off toward Martian midnight. Based on data from Professor Tillman's Viking Project Site, the incident is shown growing and subsiding on the Table below (on Figure 5) which is a profile of the windiest day Viking day on Mars with the greatest wind gust recorded at VL-2 sol 214.78.

Bridges et al. state, “Below the resolution of HiRISE as seen by the MER rovers, the evidence for motion of fine sand is compelling, with indications of sand blowing out of Victoria Crater that erases rover tracks (Geissler et al., 2010), craters superposed on the ripples being filled with sand (Golombek et al., 2010), ripples from winds funneled along the troughs, and one observation of small sand ripple migration (Sullivan et al., 2008)."

An example of tracks being erased is shown in Figure 6 where Spirit’s tracks vanished during the 2007 global dust storm. Spirit landed at about 1.9 km below areoid. If the average pressure at areoid is about 6.1 mbar, with a scale height of 10.8 km, the average pressure at -1.9 km should only be about 7.27 mbar – quite low if wind is expected to move the sand.  Unfortunately the rover carried no meteorological instruments. This means that it could not measure pressure or wind. However we can compare the time that it felt the dust storm to the time that Viking 1 experienced its two global dust storms in 1977 (see Figure 26 from our Basic Report HERE). We could also look at what happened to Viking 2 then, but both MER Spirit and Viking 1 were in the Martian tropics while Viking 2 was at almost 48° North. As such, it is appropriate to examine the winds experienced by Viking 1 during dust storm 1977a, which began at Ls ~205, and dust storm 1977b which started at ~Ls 275 (see Figure 26). Note – both Vikings landed at an altitude about 3.5 km below the areoid. Identical winds at Spirit, about 1.6 km higher, would be less able to move sand.

We reviewed the hourly winds for 20 sols after each of these Ls (Solar Longitude) positions in the Martian orbit, where Ls 0 = the start of spring (in the northern hemisphere where Viking 1 landed), Ls 90 = the start of summer, Ls 180 = the start of fall, and Ls 270 = the start of winter. In skimming through the data it appears that in the 20 sols that begin at Ls 205, the maximum wind at Viking 1 was 25.9 m/s (57.93 mph - see Figure 5 above), but this velocity did not occur until Ls 210.872.  For the second dust storm the maximum wind was 18.3 m/s (40.9 mph). Note: For Global Dust Storm 1977a the first hourly wind for Viking 1, Ls 205 was reached by coincidence at its Sol 205. The initial hourly wind examined was at Ls 205.017 at Sol 205.38. Hourly winds were then tracked through its Sol 224.98. This occurred at Ls 217.301. For Global Dust Storm 1977b the first hourly wind examined for Viking 1 was at Ls 275.005 at its Sol 314.14. Hourly winds were then tracked through its Sol 333.98. This occurred at Ls 287.385.

5. Implication in terms of correct analysis of Martian air pressure. Figure 6 is useful in understanding the main problems at hand. Sand moves on Mars much more than it should at the NASA-advertised pressures. Dust devils are abundant on Mars despite the fact that NASA could not replicate them at 10 mbar in a wind tunnel at Ames unless it used winds higher than any ever seen on Mars and more than 11 times higher than Martian winds typically seen. JPL's latest attempt to explain the failure of its chosen wind sensor relates to rocks that were kicked up by the rocket engines hitting Boom 1. On Phoenix NASA couldn't afford an anemometer even though the MET package cost $37,000,000. On Pathfinder they couldn't calibrate the anemometers (to do that it really helps to have the air pressure measured correctly), and NASA had a computer problem and couldn't do that on the all-critical first day on Mars. So, after the 1976 and 1977 landings on Mars, when no  movement of sand was reported seen at Viking 1 or 2, all we really have for measured wind speeds are from Viking 1 and 2.

        If someone wanted to sabotage the truth about the real nature of Mars, they would do well to allow the wind booms on MSL to be destroyed. Why were they not shielded? The first picture ever taken from Mars showed rocks kicked up and sitting on top a lander footpad. The paper REMS: The Environmental Senor Suite for the Mars Science Laboratory Rover by J. Gómez-Elvira et al. (2012) lists one of its authors as Kahanpää. He was a designer of the FMI's Vaisala pressure transucer. When we wrote to him about his complaints about not being given critical information about heat sources during the design phase of the Vaisala (used again on MSL) due to ITAR, and about not knowing about air access tubes to the dust filter for his sensor, he indicated that the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a $2 billion (actually. $2.5 billion) cornerstone mission and it is therefore handled in a different way than the $454 million dollar scout mission Phoenix. But apparently not different enough to fund boom protection.

        MSL is a mission that's mostly about geology. There is already preliminary approval for another geology mission to Mars. But the really important questions about Mars focus on climate/weather. If Mars once had an ocean and abundant water elsewhere, where did all that water go? If Mars is red because of all the iron oxide there, where did the oxygen come from? On Earth it came from life via photosynthesis. Is the same true for Mars? NASA's emphasis, long after it wrongly shot down the signs of life detected on the Vikings, has been on the possibility of finding bacteria there. But Mars may have once had life far more significant than that.

       In the end if the moving sands (and weather) of Mars point to higher pressures than advertised by NASA, the question must be asked, "Did NASA get Mars wrong due to incompetence, or did it choose to hide the truth for fear of cultural impact?" The REMS Team has published weather reports that contain numerous goofy mistakes. This is shown on Figure 3 above. But it's hard to believe that the people on the REMS paper can all be incompetent. What organizations are they associated with? A partial list  includes the Centro de Astrobiologia in Madrid, Spain. They had oversight over REMS and publish the daily weather reports. I discuss Ashima Research in conjunction with their flawed Ashima/MIT Mars Generation Circulation Model (GCM) elsewhere on this site. I was only motivated to check on their GCM when I noticed a pattern of sloppy reports that are discussed in my article about them. One of their members was from MIT. JPL, the FMI (who created the pressure sensors), NASA Ames, Michigan Unversity and three Spanish universities had authors on the paper. While incomptence is possible, disinformation cannot be ruled  out. This will be discussed in Section 6 below.

6. Credibility of NASA/JPL with respect to its overall portrayal of Mars and its history. 

       Five ago my son was just beginning his studies at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (now he is a PhD student at the Universityof Florida). He had an assignment to write a paper for a 1-credit Introduction to Space Science course. David asked if I had any ideas for a topic. I suggested that he look at the issue of how dust devils could form on Mars with an average pressure of 6.1 mbar at areoid. I've long viewed dust devils as the Achilles' Heel of accepted Martian pressure.

       The initial reaction of his professors was one of certainty that accepted pressures were correct, but as David brought in more contradictory evidence, we saw them in private begin to express the possibility that he (and, in the background, I) might be on to something. The more we checked out the details, the more we suspected that our Government might be giving us a snow job about Martian air pressure. In fact, we even discovered that snow was seen falling at the Phoenix lander, although this was supposedly not unexpected.

      When I suggested the topic to David, it wasn't out of simple Curiosity (for which the MSL rover is named). It was because I suspected that truth about Mars was part of a larger truth that has been covered up since 1947. In the Basic Report, as has been discussed somewhat above, we provide the results of interviews with Professor James Tillman, Director of the Viking Computer Facility; Henriq Kahanpää who designed the Phoenix and MSL Vaisala pressure transducers, a sales representative for Tavis who gave us the CADs for the Vikings and Pathfinder; the historian at the NASA Ames facility. Elsewhere on my son's site we present the debate results (see http://davidaroffman.com/photo4_5.html) between us and Dr. Andrew Ingersoll at Cal Tech/JPL. He is shown on a history chart (see http://davidaroffman.com/images/fig_35_history.png) as having professed a surface pressure on Mars of under 10 mbar back in 1969. Twice in 2011 we spoke with Dr. Ashwin Vasavada, Deputy Project Scientist for MSL.

       We have read countless papers, and I feel almost like I’ve lived on Mars after reviewing each of the hourly pressures, temperatures and winds on the two Viking landers for many hundreds of days. I can assure you that the same effort made to interview everyone alive who played a major role in establishing accepted pressure on Mars, was also made by me to interview people with personal, technical and professional knowledge of what I will only refer to here tangentially as the larger truth. My ArkCode.Com website has several of these interviews. I have many friends who have shared sensitive information with me. Much of it can't be published because of the effects it would have on careers, or more. But all of it points to a pattern of deliberate disinformation.

       Some of the deception is, at times, removed. We now know that the color of the Martian sky, as seen by MSL, is indeed blue although originally when people like Dr. Ron Levin saw that blue sky on their monitors at JPL, it was manually altered to a redder color. He fought that act for over 30 years; with his last paper about it at http://www.gillevin.com/Mars/5555-29.PDF. His father, Dr. Gil Levin, was told by NASA that there were no organic chemicals on Mars, but that has recently been proven false. We were told after Viking that there is no movement of sand on Mars, and that too (as was discussed above) has been proven false. But the pace of these recantations is so slow, that I find myself growing old now, with no manned landing seen on Mars, and none in sight for the foreseeable future.

       Based on five years of intense Mars research, and a huge number of interviews, it is my judgment that the first act of deception with respect to wrongly portraying the color of the Martian sky was part of an overall attempt to keep us from sending people to Mars. Here I digress briefly. If I were naïve, I would call for a Congressional inquiry into how data from Mars has been handled. But we live in an age when people are deceived by our Government over matters as simple as whether the attack against our consulate in Benghazi was linked to a cheap film about Mohammed, or whether it was an attack by Al Qaida which could cause political damage to the Administration. We live in an age of political spin, and news networks that spout the Government line. It is ironic that as an Orthodox Jew, I found that the only news seen in the last decade that made sense was an English version of Al Jazira before it was removed from the air. On my web site I lament the loss of Walter Cronkite, who once stood for integrity in his pursuit of the truth.

        In the end I must concede that I am only a retired Coast Guard officer, a retired high school science teacher, and an author with an axe to grind against those who sabotaged the magnificent space program that brought 12 Americans to the surface of the moon four decades ago. My son has realized the futility of fighting for the truth in reference to Mars, and he has thus moved on to an apparent future in experimental physics, whose scientists are often hijacked by the world of finance math. Memories of the Apollo program are mine and not his. I am more of a fighter than my son. And so I choose to fight this fight, and to do all in my power to bring forward the facts here, throughout my son’s web site and my own, and in our constantly updated report. I can hope that personnel associated with REMS, Ashima Research, JPL, or NASA will come forward with appropriate confessions, but I will not hold my breath waiting for it to happen. Perhaps one day, long after I’m gone, there will be people colonizing Mars, and they will know the truth. If there are, I hope they look back at our findings here and remember the efforts that we have made to open a new world for them.

Barry S. Roffman

May 5, 2014

WHERE CAN YOU FIND THE LATEST VERSION OF OUR MARS REPORT? Use the following Report Table of Contents to find it:

CONTENTS FOR MARS CORRECT:

 CRITIQUE OF ALL NASA MARS WEATHER DATA,

WITH EMPHASIS ON PRESSURE 

Some related articles by my son and I:

MSL Weather Record.

MSL Credibility.

MSL Weather Reports, Errors and Corrections

MSL Press Conference of 15 November 2012.

Mars Sunrise and Sunset Problems By Ashima Research.

REMS and Ashima research Date and Sol Numbering Problems.

Comparison of Similar Ls Pressures for Viking and MSL.

Sample Analysis at Mars

MSL Sky Color

Mars Sky Color