On June 1, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover kicked off the science phase of its mission by leaving the "Octavia E. Butler" landing site. Until recently, the rover has been undergoing systems tests, or commissioning, and supporting the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter's month of flight tests.

During the first few weeks of this first science campaign, the mission team will drive to a low-lying scenic overlook from which the rover can survey some of the oldest geologic features in Jezero Crater, and they'll bring online the final capabilities of the rover's auto-navigation and sampling systems.

Sunlight traveling through the atmosphere becomes polarized in different ways as it is scattered by water vapor, ice, aerosols created by living organisms, dust, and other particulates.

Measuring that polarization lets scientists extrapolate what is in the atmosphere, and the next generation of polarimeters for the job could benefit from a new technology developed by researchers at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Earth scientist Kerry Meyer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is working with Harvard partners to develop a science use for their "metasurface" technology. Using one flat optical component, the technology can analyze light along four polarization directions, allowing for a full characterization of light's polarized state: intensity, linear polarization (horizontal and vertical), and circular polarization.

Curtin University researchers have helped uncover the four billion year old story of a lunar sample brought from the moon to Earth, by the manned Apollo 17 mission more than 50 years ago.

The global research collaboration, involving scientists from the UK, Canada, Sweden and Australia, aimed to analyze the ancient rock sample through a modern lens to find out its age, which crater it came from and its geological trajectory.

That modern lens was provided, in part, by both Curtin's Geoscience Atom Probe Facility and Space Science and Technology Center (SSTC) where the research team was able to use the most advanced analytical equipment to accurately date the sample and perform sophisticated numerical impact simulations to determine the source crater.

Co-author Associate Professor Katarina Miljkovic from the SSTC in Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences said Curtin's involvement ensured the international team had access to world-class facilities in order to shed new light about Earth-moon origins.

"Through a truly international collaborative effort, we have connected a tiny lunar sample investigated on a microscopic scale with the moment when the moon's surface was smashed by a major impact event.