It may come as a shock that the depths of Earth's oceans are more alien to scientists than the surface of the moon, 240,000 miles away in space.But it's true: With cameras and sensors, spacecraft have mapped lunar landscape features over the decades. Meanwhile, charting the ocean floor has presented its own daunting challenges. The intense water pressure found deep in the abyss can crush most equipment, and the seafloor is essentially hidden from view under miles upon miles of water, which absorbs light and becomes opaque. That makes direct observations especially difficult. A new effort ...moreusing data from a NASA-led satellite is helping to change that, providing one of the most detailed maps of the bottom of the world's oceans ever created. The SWOT satellite, short for Surface Water and Ocean Topography, is a collaboration between NASA and its French counterpart, the Centre National d'Études Spatiales. "This satellite is a huge jump in our ability to map the seafloor," said David Sandwell, a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in a statement.
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This global map of the ocean floor is based on data from NASA's SWOT satellite.
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
Launched in December 2022, the satellite actually was built to measure water height across the planet’s oceans, lakes, and rivers. Though not designed for seafloor mapping, scientists have found its advanced technology can help them estimate the size and shape of structures underwater more precisely.Scientists of many disciplines say knowing what's down there is important. Maps help ships navigate around safety hazards and guide engineers in laying underwater communication cables. They also play a role in studying deep-sea currents, tides, and the movements of Earth’s tectonic plates, those massive puzzle pieces of Earth’s crust that shift over millions of years. Experts have been working on mapping the ocean floor with traditional methods, sending ships across the water with sonar technology — sound waves that bounce off the bottom — to measure depth. But the process has moved at a snail's pace: Ships can only cover small areas at a time, leaving much of the ocean uncharted. That slow progress means scientists may not meet their goal of having a complete seabed map by 2030. Though satellites are swarming in low-Earth orbit, most have a resolution that isn’t as good as sonar. But the new data from SWOT is about twice as detailed as older satellite maps, making it easier to see previously unknown features. A new SWOT-based seafloor map was published in the journal Science in December.
NASA created an animation, posted above, of some of the new information revealed in the SWOT data, including in regions off Mexico, South America, and the Antarctic Peninsula. Purple areas highlight lower regions around higher underwater elevations, shown in green. The satellite’s new type of radar technology has allowed it to detect seamounts less than half the size of those previously mapped, potentially increasing the number of known seamounts from 44,000 to 100,000. These underwater mountains affect ocean currents and can create nutrient-rich areas that attract marine life."We won’t get the full ship-based mapping done by" 2030, Sandwell said. "But SWOT wil...
SAN JOSE, Kalifornien (IT-Times) - Der US-Server-Spezialist Super Micro Computer hat ein Research-Update von der Bank JP Morgan erhalten, die das Unternehmen hochstuft.
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Tens of millions of miles beyond Earth, a nuclear-powered, car-sized rover is climbing a Martian mountain. NASA's Curiosity rover, while investigating Mars' past, has snapped over 683,790 pictures as it's rumbled over 21 miles of unforgiving desert terrain since 2012, and a recent view shows the space agency's robot overlooking a vast Martian wilderness. Some 3.7 billion years ago, a large object smashed into Mars, leaving the sizeable, 96-mile-wide Gale Crater we see today. When the region's surface rebounded after the powerful collision, it left a central peak, Mount Sharp, which preserves l...moreayers of the intriguing, and watery, Mars past.
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From its perch in the foothills of the 3.4-mile-high mountain, you can see over an expanse of plains, called Aeolis Palus, and beyond that the hilly walls of Gale Crater. In the foreground, Martian hills are shadowed in the low sunlight. This view, captured on March 18, 2025, was the Curiosity rover's 4,484th Martian day, or Sol, on the Red Planet. (A Martian Sol is a bit longer than a day on Earth, at 24 hours and 39 minutes.)
The Curiosity rover's view of the Martian landscape below, captured on March 18, 2025.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
Today, the Martian world we see is 1,000 times drier than the driest desert on Earth. But evidence gathered by rovers and spacecraft operated by NASA and other space agencies shows this wasn't always the case. A vast Mars ocean may have blanketed a swath of the world, and lakes once fed gushing rivers and streams.As Curiosity has scaled Mount Sharp, it has encountered rocks with minerals (sulphates) that show when Mars began to dry out. It has also revealed ripple formations on the surface, which is compelling evidence of small waves breaking on lake shores billions of years ago. Observations like this suggest that Mars once was warm, wet, and quite habitable before it gradually transformed into the extremely dry and frigid desert we see today."Taken together, the evidence points to Gale Crater (and Mars in general) as a place where life — if it ever arose — might have survived for some time," NASA explained.Still today, there's no certain proof microbial life ever existed on Mars. But Curiosity's robotic sibling, the Perseverance rover, has found intriguing rock samples that could potentially show evidence of past microbial activity. (The samples must be robotically returned to Earth to inspect.)Curiosity is currently headed to a new destination on Mount Sharp, a place home to expansive and compelling "boxworks" formations. From space, they look like spiderwebs. "It’s believed to have formed when minerals carried by Mount Sharp's last pulses of water settled into fractures in surface rock and then hardened," NASA explained. "As portions of the rock eroded away, what remained were the minerals that had cemented themselves in the fractures, leaving the weblike boxwork."What more might the boxworks reveal? Godspeed, Curiosity....
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