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Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter
Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
Editor/Publisher: David J. Thomas, Ph.D., Science Division, Lyon College,
Batesville, Arkansas 72503-2317, USA. [email protected]
Marsbugs is published on a weekly to monthly basis as warranted by the number of articles and announcements. Copyright of this compilation exists with the editor,
but individual authors retain the copyright of specific articles. Opinions expressed in this newsletter are those of the authors, and are not necessarily endorsed by the
editor or by Lyon College. E-mail subscriptions are free, and may be obtained by contacting the editor. Information concerning the scope of this newsletter,
subscription formats and availability of back-issues is available at http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs. The editor does not condone "spamming" of subscribers.
Readers would appreciate it if others would not send unsolicited e-mail using the Marsbugs mailing lists. Persons who have information that may be of interest to
subscribers of Marsbugs should send that information to the editor.
Page 11
IN SEARCH OF DIVERSITY
By Mitch Sogin
Page 13
DOES LIFE EXIST ON OTHER PLANETS?
University of Bristol release
BOEING AND LOCKHEED MARTIN PUSH SEPARATE
DESIGNS FOR POSSIBLE MOON MISSIONS
By Brian Berger
Page 13
COMING CLUES TO THE ORIGIN OF THE SOLAR
SYSTEM (BUT PROBABLY NOT THE EXPECTED ONES)
By Tom Van Flandern
ASTRONOMERS DISCOVER MOST EARTH-LIKE
EXTRASOLAR PLANET YET
By Robert Sanders
Announcements
Articles and News
Page 2
Page 3
Page 3
READY FOR DINNER ON MARS?
ESA release
Page 13
INTERESTED IN AN EXTREME ENVIRONMENT
FACILITY?
From the NAI Newsletter
Page 14
NATIONAL WORKSHOP ON ASTROBIOLOGY—26
OCTOBER 2005
From the NAI Newsletter
SMA CONFIRMS PROTO-PLANETARY SYSTEMS ARE
COMMON IN THE GALAXY
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics release 05-17
Page 14
NASA INVESTIGATES REVOLUTIONARY SPACE
EXPLORATION CONCEPTS
NASA release 05-151
Page 6
OUTER PLANET-PALOOZA! EUROPA, TITAN
MISSIONS GET SUPPORT
By Leonard David
Page 14
NATIONAL ACADEMIES UNVEIL EVOLUTION WEB
PAGE
National Academies release
Page 6
JUST HOW "EARTH-LIKE" IS THE NEWEST PLANET?
By Leslie Mullen
Page 14
RESULTS OF LIFE SCIENCES RESEARCH IN SPACE TO
BE PRESENTED IN COLOGNE
ESA release 32-2005
Page 7
SETTING SETI'S SIGHTS: LATEST PLANET DISCOVERY
SUGGESTS NEW TARGETS
By Douglas Vakoch
Page 4
FACE ON MARS: WHY PEOPLE SEE WHAT'S NOT
THERE
By Michael Scherber
Page 4
DETAILING THE SCIENCE OF MAN ON MARS
From SpaceDaily
Page 4
Page 7
Page 8
Page 9
Page 10
Page 11
WOMEN, SPACE TRAVEL AND INFECTION:
INTERNATIONAL BED-REST STUDY INVESTIGATES
FEMALE IMMUNE RESPONSE ON EXTENDED
MISSIONS
National Space Biomedical Research Institute release
Mission Reports
Page 16
CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS FOR 9-15 JUNE 2005
NASA/JPL release
Page 18
DEEP IMPACT UPDATES
Multiple agencies' releases
Page 19
ARIZONA REGENTS APPROVE UA ASTROBIOLOGY
CENTER
By Lori Stiles
MER UPDATES
NASA/JPL releases
Page 19
MOON, MARS MISSIONS NOT A PRIORITY FOR
TAXPAYERS
Citizens Against Government Waste release
MARS EXPRESS: SMOOTH DEPLOYMENT FOR SECOND
MARSIS ANTENNA BOOM
ESA release
Page 20
MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES
NASA/JPL/MSSS release
THE MARTIAN HOT SPOTS
By Joy Crisp
Page 21
MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES
NASA/JPL/ASU release
TERRAFORMING: HUMAN DESTINY OR HUBRIS?
By Dave Brody
Page 21
ROSETTA MONITORS DEEP IMPACT
ESA release
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
2
READY FOR DINNER ON MARS?
ESA release
13 June 2005
nine must comprise at least 40% of the final diet, while the remaining (up to)
60% could be additional vegetables, herbs, oil, butter, salt, pepper, sugar and
other seasoning brought from Earth.
"Martian bread and green tomato jam," "Spirulina gnocchis" and "Potato and
tomato mille-feuilles" are three delicious recipes that two French companies
have created for ESA and future space explorers to Mars and other planets.
The challenge for the chefs was to offer astronauts well-flavored food, made
with only a few ingredients that could be grown on Mars. The result was 11
tasty recipes that could be used on future ESA long-duration space missions.
ADF (Alain Ducasse Formation) and GEM are the two French companies that
produced the recipes, and their mutual experience in creating new products
and "haute cuisine" have led to excellent results.
"We are aiming initially at producing 40% locally for astronauts' food on
future long-duration space missions, for example to Mars," says Christophe
Lasseur, ESA's biological life-support coordinator responsible for recycling
and production of air, water and food for long-term space missions.
Space recipe "Potato and tomato mille-feuilles": the thin slices of
potato, tomatoes and onion are cooked one by one, for a
homogeneous color and a melting and crispy sensation in the mouth.
The basic ingredients are potatoes and tomatoes, both thought to be
easy to grow in space, on Mars or other planets. Image credit: ADF.
Space recipe "Spirulina Gnocchis": this dish has been created in the
traditional way of making gnocchi. Beyond the nutritional aspect
provided by the Spirulina, its original green color marries perfectly with
the tomato sauce. The basic ingredients are potatoes, Spirulina and
tomatoes, all envisioned to be grown in space, on Mars or other
planets. The recipe was developed for ESA, in a research project
defining nutrition for astronauts on future long-duration space missions.
Image credit: ADF.
Space recipe "Martian bread and green tomato jam": this bread is a
perfect combination of the genuine flavor of wheat and the sweet
acidity of the tomato. A green tomato jam is presented as a side dish
complementing the flavors of the main course. The basic ingredients
are wheat and tomatoes, both envisioned to be grown in space, on
Mars or other planets. Image credit: ADF.
The French gourmet company ADF—Alain Ducasse Formation
developed, with the French company GEM, 11 recipes for ESA in a
research project defining nutrition for astronauts on future longduration space missions. At least 40% of the diet should consist of
nine basic ingredients that ESA envisions to grow in greenhouses on
other planets. They are: rice, onions, tomatoes, soya, potatoes,
lettuce, spinach, wheat and Spirulina. Image credit: ADF.
The menus were all based on nine main ingredients that ESA envisions could
be grown in greenhouses of future colonies on Mars or other planets. The
"Why 40%? By growing enough plants to cover around 40% of what we eat,
we also get 'for free' the oxygen and water needed to live", explains Lasseur.
The nine basic ingredients that Lasseur plans to grow on other planets are:
rice, onions, tomatoes, soya, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, wheat and Spirulina—
all common ingredients except the last. Spirulina is a blue-green alga
[cyanobacterium], a very rich source of nutrition with lots of protein (65% by
weight), calcium, carbohydrates, lipids and various vitamins that cover
essential nutritional needs for energy in extreme environments.
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
3
ASTRONOMERS DISCOVER MOST EARTH-LIKE EXTRASOLAR
PLANET YET
By Robert Sanders
University of California, Berkeley release
13 June 2005
The world's preeminent planet hunters have discovered the most Earth-like
extrasolar planet yet: a possibly rocky world about 7.5 times as massive as the
Earth. This hot "super-Earth," just 15 light years away, travels in a nearly
circular orbit only 2 million miles from its parent star, Gliese 876, and has a
radius about twice that of Earth. All the nearly 150 extrasolar planets
discovered to date that are orbiting normal stars have been larger than Uranus,
an ice giant about 15 times the mass of Earth.
"This is the smallest extrasolar planet yet detected and the first of a new class
of rocky terrestrial planets," said team member Paul Butler of the Carnegie
Institution in Washington. "It's like Earth's bigger cousin."
Astronauts and cosmonauts from three different crews about to share
a meal in the Zvezda Service Module on the International Space
Station (ISS), 15 August 2001. Scott J. Horowitz opens a can of food
as he floats near the ceiling. Others from the left are Susan J. Helms,
Frank L. Culbertson, Jr., Yury V. Usachev, James S. Voss, and
Vladimir N. Dezhurov. Image credit: NASA.
Today all the food for astronauts in space is brought from Earth, but this will
not be possible for longer missions. Although still on the drawing board, ESA
has already started research to see what could be grown on other planets—and
what a self-supporting eco-system might look like on Mars.
"This planet answers an ancient question," said team leader Geoffrey Marcy,
professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. "Over 2,000
years ago, the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Epicurus argued about
whether there were other Earth-like planets. Now, for the first time, we have
evidence for a rocky planet around a normal star."
Marcy, Butler, theoretical astronomer Jack Lissauer of NASA's Ames
Research Center, and post-doctoral researcher Eugenio J. Rivera of the
University of California Observatories/Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz
presented their findings today (Monday, June 13) during a press conference at
the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, VA.
"In addition to being healthy and sufficiently nutritious for survival, good
food could potentially provide psychological support for the crew, away from
Earth for years," emphasizes Lasseur.
ADF chef Armand Arnal, adds: "The main challenge was to create a wide
panel of recipes, distinct and full-flavored, with only nine basic products."
"Moreover, we had absolute restrictions on using salt, but were allowed to add
a bit of sugar and fat, ingredients normally essential to the elaboration of a
dish and to highlight its flavors."
Read the original news release at
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMQTE1DU8E_index_0.html.
Additional articles on this subject are available at:
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1602.html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/food-05d.html
http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/mmm_food_mars.html
BOEING AND LOCKHEED MARTIN PUSH SEPARATE DESIGNS
FOR POSSIBLE MOON MISSIONS
By Brian Berger
From Space News
13 June 2005
Although Boeing and Lockheed Martin plan to combine production of their
respective Delta 4 and Atlas 5 rockets in the near future, for now the
companies are pushing separate solutions based on those vehicles to help
NASA achieve its goal of returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020. The U.S.
Air Force spent a decade and well over $1 billion developing the Delta 4 and
Atlas 5 under its Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program, and
the White House and Department of Defense want NASA to leverage that
investment in carrying out U.S. President George W. Bush's vision for space
exploration. The alternative is a vehicle that uses the propulsion elements of
NASA's space shuttle orbiter—its main engines, solid-rocket boosters and
giant external tank.
Read the full article at
http://www.space.com/spacenews/businessmonday_050613.html.
Artist illustration of the rocky planet around the M dwarf Gliese 876.
Image credit: NSF.
Part of a system that includes two other Jupiter-size planets, the new rocky
planet whips around its star in a mere two days, and is so close to the star's
surface that the astronomers say its temperature probably tops 200 to 400
degrees Celsius (400 to 750 degrees Fahrenheit)—oven temperatures far too
hot for life as we know it. Nevertheless, the ability to detect the tiny wobble
that the planet induces in the star gives them confidence that they will be able
to discover even smaller rocky planets in orbits more hospitable to life. The
team measures a minimum mass of 5.9 Earth masses for the new planet,
which is orbiting Gliese 876 with a period of 1.94 days at a distance of 0.021
astronomical units (AU), or 2 million miles. Though the team has no proof
that the planet is rocky, its low mass precludes it from retaining gas like
Jupiter. Three other purportedly rocky extrasolar planets have been reported,
but they orbit a pulsar, the flashing corpse of an exploded star.
Gliese 876 (or GJ 876) is a small, red star known as an M dwarf—the most
common type of star in the galaxy. It is located in the constellation Aquarius,
and, at about one-third the mass of the sun, is the smallest star around which
planets have been discovered. Butler and Marcy detected the first planet in
1998, and it proved to be a gas giant about twice the mass of Jupiter. Then, in
2001, they reported a second planet, another gas giant about half the mass of
Jupiter. The two are in resonant orbits, the outer planet taking 60 days to orbit
the star, twice the period of the inner giant planet. Data on the Gliese 876
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
system, gathered from research the astronomers conducted at the Keck
Observatory in Hawaii, were analyzed by Lissauer and Rivera in order to
model the unusual motions of the two known planets. Three years ago, they
got an inkling that there might be a smaller, third planet orbiting the star. In
fact, if they hadn't taken account of the resonant interaction between the two
known planets, they never would have seen the third.
"We had a model for the two planets interacting with one another, but when
we looked at the difference between the two-planet model and the actual data,
we found a signature that could be interpreted as a third planet," Lissauer said.
A three-planet model consistently gave a better fit to the data, added Rivera.
"But because the signal from this third planet was not very strong, we were
very cautious about announcing a new planet until we had more data," he said.
Recent improvements to the Keck Telescope's high-resolution spectrometer
(HIRES) provided the crucial new data. Vogt, who designed and built
HIRES, worked with the technical staff in the UC Observatories/Lick
Observatory Laboratories at UC Santa Cruz to upgrade the spectrometer's
CCD (charge coupled device) detectors last August.
"It is the higher precision data from the upgraded HIRES that gives us
confidence in this result," Butler said.
The team now has convincing data for the planet orbiting very close to the
star, at a distance of about 10 stellar radii. That's less than one-tenth the size
of Mercury's orbit in our solar system.
"In a two-day orbit, it's about 200 degrees Celsius too hot for liquid water,"
Butler said. "That tends to lead us to the conclusion that the most probable
composition of this thing is like the inner planets of this solar system—a
nickel/iron rock, a rocky planet, a terrestrial planet."
"The planet's mass could easily hold onto an atmosphere," noted Laughlin, an
assistant professor of astronomy at UC Santa Cruz. "It would still be
considered a rocky planet, probably with an iron core and a silicon mantle. It
could even have a dense steamy water layer. I think what we are seeing here
is something that's intermediate between a true terrestrial planet like the Earth
and a hot version of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune."
A paper detailing the team's results has been submitted to The Astrophysical
Journal. Coauthors on the paper are Steven Vogt and Gregory Laughlin of
the Lick Observatory at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Debra
Fischer of San Francisco State University; and Timothy M. Brown of NSF's
National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO.
Combined with improved computer software, the new CCD detectors
designed by this team for Keck's HIRES spectrometer can now measure the
Doppler velocity of a star to within one meter per second—human walking
speed—instead of the previous precision of 3 meters per second. This
improved sensitivity will allow the planet-hunting team to detect the
gravitational effect of an Earth-like planet within the habitable zone of M
dwarf stars like Gliese 876.
"We are pushing a whole new regime at Keck to achieve one meter per second
precision, triple our old precision, that should also allow us to see Earth-mass
planets around sun-like stars within the next few years," Butler said.
"Our UC Santa Cruz and Lick Observatory team has done an enormous
amount of optical and technical and detector work to make the Keck telescope
a rocky planet hunter, the best one in the world," Marcy added.
Lissauer also is excited by another feat reported in the paper submitted to The
Astrophysical Journal. For the first time, he, Rivera and Laughlin have
determined the line-of-sight inclination of the orbit of the stellar system solely
from the observed Doppler wobble of the star. Using dynamical models of
how the two Jupiter-size planets interact, they were able to calculate the
masses of the two giant planets from the observed shapes and precession rates
of their oval orbits. Precession is the slow turning of the long axis of a
planet's elliptical orbit. They showed that the orbital plane is tilted 40 degrees
to our line of sight. This allowed the team to estimate the most likely mass of
the third planet as 7.5 Earth masses.
"There's more dynamical modeling involved in this study than any previous
study, much more," Lissauer said.
4
The team plans to continue to observe the star Gliese 876, but is eager to find
other terrestrial planets among the 150 or more M dwarf planets they observe
regularly with Keck.
"So far, we find almost no Jupiter mass planets among the M dwarf stars
we've been observing, which suggests that, instead, there is going to be a large
population of smaller mass planets," Butler noted.
The astronomers' research was supported by NSF, the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration, the University of California and the Carnegie
Institution of Washington.
Read the original news release at
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/06/13_planet.shtml.
Additional articles on this subject are available at:
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1601.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050613_super_earth.html
http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/large_rocky_planet.html
FACE ON MARS: WHY PEOPLE SEE WHAT'S NOT THERE
By Michael Scherber
From LiveScience.com
13 June 2005
The ability to take in visual cues and basically fill in the blanks allows humans
to process information very quickly, but new research shows that it also can
lead to misperceptions—like seeing things that are not there.
"It's a manifestation of over-learning, such as when we find a man's face on
Mars' surface or in a forest or on a cloud," said Takeo Watanabe of Boston
University. "We've over-learned human faces so we see them where they
aren't."
In 1976, NASA's Viking 1 Orbiter spacecraft photographed a small patch on
the surface of Mars. The shadows from one of the mesas gave many the
impression of a human face—a face that has taken on a certain life of its own.
To study how our eyes may sometimes fool us, Watanabe and his colleagues
have studied perceptional learning—the increased sensitivity to a stimulus due
to repeated exposure.
Read the full article at
http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050613_mars_face.html.
DETAILING THE SCIENCE OF MAN ON MARS
From SpaceDaily
14 June 2005
The Mars Human Precursor Science Steering Group was chartered by
MEPAG in June 2004 to analyze the priorities for precursor investigations,
measurements, and technology/infrastructure demonstrations that would have
a significant effect on the cost and risk of the first human mission to Mars.
Based on this analysis, the MHP SSG proposes the following revised phrasing
for MEPAG's Goal IV, Objective A, and within it the investigations that
follow (in priority order). The measurements needed to carry out these
investigations are described in the subsequent sections of this white paper.
Read the full article at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-base-05e.html.
SMA CONFIRMS PROTO-PLANETARY SYSTEMS ARE COMMON
IN THE GALAXY
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics release 05-17
14 June 2005
Meeting this week in Cambridge, Mass., astronomers using the Submillimeter
Array (SMA) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, confirmed, for the first time, that many
of the objects termed "proplyds" found in the Orion Nebula do have sufficient
material to form new planetary systems like our own.
"The SMA is the only telescope that can measure the dust within the Orion
proplyds, and thereby assess their true potential for forming planets. This is
critical in our understanding of how solar systems form in hostile regions of
space," said Jonathan Williams of the University of Hawaii Institute for
Astronomy, lead author on a paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
5
a space about 4 light-years in diameter, the same as the distance between the
Sun and Proxima Centauri, the next closest star in space.
Blasted by the solar winds of the Trapezium, the proplyds are the next
generation of smaller stars to arise in Orion, this time with visible discs that
may be forming planets. It has remained unclear, however, whether they
contained enough material to form stable planetary systems. Using the SMA,
astronomers now have been able to probe deep inside these disks to measure
their mass and to unravel the formation process presented by these potential
infant solar systems.
"While the Hubble pictures were spectacular, they revealed only disk-like
shapes that did not tell us the amount of material present," said David Wilner,
of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Since some of the
discs appear to be comparable in size and mass to our own solar system, this
strengthens the connection between the Orion proplyds and our origins.
Since most Sun-like stars in the Galaxy eventually form in environments like
the Orion Nebula, the SMA results suggest that the formation of solar systems
like our own is common and a continuing event in the Galaxy.
"The same cycle of birth, life and death we experience here on Earth is
repeated in the stars overhead. Now, the SMA provides us with a front-row
seat in unraveling the wonder of these cosmic events," reflected Wilner.
In this artist rendering, the proplyds appear as rapidly spinning stars
surrounded by a dust disk around the middle and two stellar jets
extending from the poles. Nestled inside a cocoon of gas, these jets
slow down the angular momentum of the spinning star so that
eventually, planets may form. Artwork credit: David Aguilar, CfA.
Surviving in the chaotic regions within the Orion Nebula where stellar winds
can reach a staggering two million miles per hour and temperatures exceed a
searing 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the question remained—would enough
material endure to form a new solar system or would it be eroded away into
space like wind and sand eroding away desert cliffs? It now appears that these
protoplanetary disks are quite tenacious, bringing new grounds for optimism
in the search for planetary systems.
These are Hubble Space Telescope images of four newly discovered
protoplanetary disks around young stars in the Orion nebula, located
1,500 light-years away. The red glow in the center of each disk is a
young, newly formed star, roughly one million years old. Each image
is 167 billion miles across (30 times the diameter of our own solar
system). The disks range in size from two to eight times the diameter
of our solar system. Image credits: M. McCaughrean (Max Planck
Institute for Astronomy), C.R. O'Dell (Rice University) and NASA.
A Hubble Space Telescope view of a small portion of the Orion Nebula
reveals five young stars. Four of the stars are surrounded by
protoplanetary disks, or "proplyds," of gas and dust. These disks might
evolve into solar systems like our own. Image credits: C. R. O'Dell,
Rice University, NASA.
Imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope back in the early 1990s as misshapen
silhouettes against the nebular background, the most spectacular proplyds
appear bright. Their surrounding ionized cocoons glow due to their close
proximity to a nearby hot star formation called the Trapezium. The
Trapezium is a star cluster consisting of more than 1,000 young, hot stars that
are only 1 million years old. They condensed out of the original cold, dark
cloud of gas that now glows from their ionizing light. They are crowded into
Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA
scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution
and ultimate fate of the universe.
Images to accompany this release are available
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/pr0517image.html.
Contacts:
David Aguilar, Director of Public Affairs
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Phone: 617-495-7462
Fax: 617-495-7468
E-mail: [email protected]
online
at
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
6
Christine Pulliam
Public Affairs Specialist
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Phone: 617-495-7463
Fax: 617-495-7016
E-mail: [email protected]
Jonathan Williams
University of Hawaii, Institute for Astronomy
Office: 808-956-8355
Cell: 808-554-5604
E-mail: [email protected]
Read the original news release at
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/pr0517.html.
Additional articles on this subject are available at:
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1607.html
http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/planetary_systems_hellish.html
OUTER PLANET-PALOOZA! EUROPA, TITAN MISSIONS GET
SUPPORT
By Leonard David
From Space.com
14 June 2005
In the wake of the success if the Cassini mission to Saturn, there is
overwhelming support for dispatching a spacecraft to Jupiter’s moon,
Europa—an ice-covered world that may support an ocean, possibly teeming
with life. Another high-priority target is Titan, a moon of Saturn. The ongoing Cassini mission that dropped off Europe’s Huygens lander has shown
Titan to be an outlandish mini-world, deserving of further, intensive scrutiny.
One "trial balloon" of a concept is to study Titan using a blimp-like vehicle
that floats over the moon’s surface. Leading space scientists gathered here to
attend a June 9-10 meeting of NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group
(OPAG), planning, prioritizing, and advocating a new exploration agenda for
the distant planets.
Read the full article at
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050614_outer_planets.html.
JUST HOW "EARTH-LIKE" IS THE NEWEST PLANET?
By Leslie Mullen
From Astrobiology Magazine
15 June 2005
In the land rush known as extrasolar planet hunting, the most prized real estate
is advertised as "Earth-like." On Monday, June 13, scientists raced to plant
their flag on a burning hunk of rock orbiting a red star. This newly discovered
planet is about seven times the mass of Earth, and therefore the smallest
extrasolar planet found to orbit a main sequence, or "dwarf" star (stars, like
our sun, that burn hydrogen). There are even smaller planets known to exist
beyond our solar system, but they have the misfortune to encircle pulsars,
those rapidly spinning husks of dying stars. Such planets aren't thought to be
remotely habitable, due to the intense radiation emitted by pulsars.
Planets that are ten Earth masses or less are thought to be rocky, while more
massive planets are probably gaseous, since their stronger gravity means they
collect and retain more gas during planetary formation. 155 extrasolar planets
have been found so far, but most of them have masses that are more
comparable to gaseous Jupiter than rocky Earth (Jupiter is 318 times the mass
of Earth). Although this new planet is advertised as Earth-like because of its
relatively low mass, earthlings wouldn't want to rent a house there any time
soon. For one thing, the house would melt. The surface temperatures
estimated for this planet—200 to 400 degrees Celsius (400 to 750 degrees
Fahrenheit)—are due to the planet's kissing-close distance from its star. The
planet resides a mere 0.021 AU from the star Gliese 876 (1 AU is the distance
between the Earth and the sun), and completes an orbit in less then two Earth
days. The closest planet to the sun in our own solar system—blazing hot
Mercury—is nearly 20 times further away, orbiting at about 0.4 AU.
"Because the planet is in a two-day orbit, it is heated to oven-like
temperatures, so we do not expect life," says science team member Paul
Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
Gliese 876 is a close neighbor at only 15 light
years away, and located near the constellation
Aquarius. A 10th magnitude star, it is too faint to
be seen with the naked eye; a telescope is needed
to see it. The red arrow below Aquarius points to
Gl 876. Image credit: extrasolar.net.
In our solar system, the habitable zone—the temperate region where water
could exist as a liquid on a planet's surface—is roughly 0.95 to 1.37 AU, or
between the orbits of Venus and Mars. The star Gliese 876 is about 600 times
less luminous than our sun, so the proposed habitable zone is much closer in,
roughly between 0.06 and 0.22 AU. At 0.021 AU, the new planet is too close
to the star to be in the habitable zone, and it also is subjected to greater
amounts of high energy radiation like ultraviolet light and X-rays. While red
dwarfs like Gliese 876 emit lower levels of UV than stars like our sun, they do
emit violent X-ray flares.
Another complication from such a close orbit is that the planet may be tidally
locked, with the same side of the planet always facing the star. Unless there is
a substantial atmosphere to distribute heat, one side of the planet will be
overcooked while the other will remain cold.
Left: By combining the high sensitivity of space telescopes with
the sharply detailed pictures from an interferometer, TPF will be
able to reduce the glare of parent stars to see planetary
systems as far away as 50 light years. Right: The Real Earthlike Pale Blue Dot, view from space. Image credits: NASA.
Gliese 876 is thought to be about 11 billion years old, making it more than
twice as old as our sun. But in a way, Gliese is a teenager to our sun's middleaged adult. G-class stars like our sun live about 10 billion years, while Mclass red dwarfs are thought to live for 100 billion years (older than the age of
the universe!). Science team member Geoff Marcy of the University of
California, Berkeley, says that M stars take a long time to cool off and shrink
down to their main sequence size and luminosity. He says that if the planet
migrated inwards to its present day close orbit, it probably made this move
during the first few million years, and then was subjected to much more
radiation than at present for hundreds of millions of years.
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
7
Gliese 876 is thought to be metal-poor (to an astronomer, any element heavier
than hydrogen and helium is classified as a "metal"). The formation of planets
may be related to the metallicity of the star, since both the star and the planets
form from the same original material. So a rocky planet like the Earth, made
out of elements such as silicates and iron, is expected to orbit a star that is
metal-rich. Despite being metal-poor, Gliese 876 is a multiple planet system.
Two gas giant planets are known to orbit Gliese 876: the outermost planet is
nearly twice the mass of Jupiter, and orbits at 0.21 AU; the middle planet is
about half the mass of Jupiter, orbiting at 0.13 AU.
smallest extrasolar planet known to orbit a sun-like star. This announcement
came less than a week before two other Neptune-mass planet discoveries were
announced by Marcy and Butler.
"The whole planetary system is sort of a miniature of our solar system," says
Marcy. "The star is small, the orbits are small, and in closer is the smallest of
them, just as the architecture is in our own solar system, with the smallest
planets orbiting inward of the giants."
The Kepler mission, due to launch in June 2008, will search for terrestrial
planets orbiting distant stars. The mission defines an Earth-size planet as
being between 0.5 and 2.0 Earth masses, or between 0.8 and 1.3 Earth's
diameter. Planets between 2 and 10 Earth masses, such as the planet
announced on Monday, are defined as Large Terrestrial planets.
We have a lot more elbow room in our solar system. Mercury is further away
from the sun than the distances of all these planets combined. The planets in
the Gliese 876 system are so close together, they gravitationally interact with
each other. This sort of gravitational tug of war was how the scientists were
able to detect the planets in the first place. Over the course of an orbit, planets
will gravitationally pull on their star from different sides. Scientists measure
the resulting shift in star light to determine the existence of orbiting planets.
To learn more about Gliese 876's smallest planet, scientists would need to use
another planet-hunting technique called transit photometry. This method
looks at how a star's light seems to dip when a planet passes in front of the star
from our field of view. The eclipse of the orbiting planet allows astronomers
to determine that planet's mass and radius. Pinning down those numbers
indicates the planet's density, which then suggests what the planet is made of,
and whether the planet is rocky or gaseous. Transit photometry can't be used
to tell us anything about planets orbiting Gliese 876, however, because the
system is inclined 40 degrees from our point of view. This angle means the
planets won't block any of the starlight that reaches Earth.
Red dwarfs are the most common type of star in our galaxy, comprising about
70 percent of all stars. Yet out of the 150 red dwarfs they have studied over
the years, Marcy and Butler only have found planets orbiting two of them.
Because most of the planets found so far are gas giants, this could mean that
red dwarfs are less apt to harbor those kinds of worlds.
Marcy says they will continue to monitor Gliese 876 for any hints of a fourth
or fifth planet. "This will definitely be one of our favorite stars from now on."
A race to the finish line
The research paper describing this discovery has been submitted to The
Astrophysical Journal. The scientists say they received a favorable
preliminary referee's report, and they expect their paper will be accepted and
then published in a few months. During Monday's press conference, the
scientists were asked why they decided to publicize their finding now, before
the paper had been accepted for publication. Was it done to beat out other
planet hunters who might be hot on their heels?
Marcy replied that they wanted to prevent news of their discovery from
leaking out. "We knew about it three years ago, we've been following it
quietly, carefully, guarding the secret while we double and triple checked.
Then about a month ago I talked with Michael Turner here, people at NSF
(National Science Foundation), and jointly we decided that this discovery was
so extraordinary, maybe what you would call a milestone in planetary science,
that it was difficult to imagine keeping the lid on this for very much longer.
So we decided that rather than have it leak out to the news media, and be
dribbled around, with one newspaper learning about it early and so on, that it
would be better to quickly announce this."
Marcy then launched into a defense for why he believed their finding is
correct, and he was quickly backed by his fellow team members. However,
the accuracy of their finding had not been questioned. Perhaps their early
announcement, combined with the need for secrecy beforehand, is evidence of
the intense competition that has marked planet hunting since the beginning.
The first extrasolar planet discovery was announced October 5, 1995 by
Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the Geneva Observatory, and Marcy and
Butler confirmed the observations the following week. A recent example of
the competition to grab other extrasolar planet "firsts" occurred last summer,
when on August 25, 2004, Mayor, Nuno Santos, and colleagues announced
the discovery of the first extrasolar Neptune-mass planet—at the time the
Mayor and his colleagues also have studied Gliese 876. At an astronomy
conference in June 1998, Mayor and Marcy each independently announced
the detection of the more massive gas giant orbiting this star. Marcy and
Butler were first to follow up on this finding, announcing the discovery of the
star's second gas giant planet in 2001.
Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1603.html.
SETTING SETI'S SIGHTS: LATEST PLANET DISCOVERY
SUGGESTS NEW TARGETS
By Douglas Vakoch
From Space.com
16 June 2005
SETI scientists are taking notice of the latest discovery of a "Super-Earth"
beyond the solar system as they fine-tune their list of stars to target in their
search for extraterrestrial intelligence. With the recent announcement of a
planet seven to eight times the Earth’s mass circling an M dwarf star, the
chances for habitable worlds seem greater than ever. "It may well be that
there are far more habitable planets orbiting M dwarfs than orbiting all other
types of stars combined," explained Frank Drake, the Director of the SETI
Institute’s Center for the Study of Life in the Universe.
"This is really exciting news for those interested in life beyond Earth," said
Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute, commenting on the
discovery of a planet around Gleise 876, a small, red M star located just 15
light years from Earth. "To begin with, it's at least a tentative indication that
small planets—those more or less the same heft as our own world—might be
commonplace. Secondly, it's proof that dim, little M dwarf stars, which are
roughly eight times as plentiful as stars like the Sun, can also host rocky
planets."
Read the full article at
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_newplanet_050616.html.
WOMEN, SPACE TRAVEL AND INFECTION: INTERNATIONAL
BED-REST STUDY INVESTIGATES FEMALE IMMUNE RESPONSE
ON EXTENDED MISSIONS
National Space Biomedical Research Institute release
16 June 2005
A bed-rest study with female participants will help scientists understand
changes to the immune response and decreased resistance to infection in
space. Investigators with the National Space Biomedical Research Institute
(NSBRI) are researching the immune system as part of the Women's
International Space Simulation for Exploration (WISE), a collaborative
venture that includes NASA, the European Space Agency, the Centre National
D'Études Spatiales (French Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.
The study is being carried out by the French Institute for Space Medicine and
Physiology (MEDES) in Toulouse, France.
"It is clear from existing data that space flight conditions alter immune
responses," said Dr. Gerald Sonnenfeld, a researcher on the NSBRI’s
Immunology, Infection and Hematology Team. "Space has such limited
access; to research the immune response, we use a bed-rest model because it
provides conditions similar to space conditions—fluid shift to the head and a
lack of weight-bearing on the lower limbs."
Changes in immunity could have serious effects on an astronaut's ability to
resist infection and the development of tumors. Possible causes for a
compromised immune system include exposure to radiation and the effects of
microgravity. With current expeditions to the International Space Station for
extended periods and future exploration missions to the moon and Mars,
astronauts will be exposed to chronic radiation that could result in serious
health problems.
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
8
similar tests are taken for comparison. Participants will return to measure
how their bodies recovered for up to three years.
"The data garnered by this study is not only historic, it will be valuable in
international efforts to plan long-duration missions," Sonnenfeld said. "It
could help determine how exercise and nutritional countermeasures for other
space flight-induced problems including bone and muscle loss influence the
immune system, making researchers better able to coordinate solutions to the
challenges of human space flight."
Sonnenfeld's team also is composed of Dr. Janet Butel of Baylor College of
Medicine, Dr. William Shearer of Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor
College of Medicine, Dr. David Niesel of the University of Texas Medical
Branch at Galveston, and Drs. Michel Abbal and Antoine Blancher of the
Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse.
Blood samples collected from one of the 12 female volunteers are
compared against baseline data gathered at the beginning of the WISE
study. The results may help researchers better understand the effects
of space flight on immune response. Photo courtesy of CNES/
Stéphane Levin, 2005.
To help unravel the infection-resistance issue, Sonnenfeld is researching the
overall impact of the body's immune response under space-like conditions.
Through tests taken before, during and after bed rest, he will gauge whether
participants' white blood cells divide normally and whether messengers of the
immune system, called cytokines, are produced. Sonnenfeld also will study
the frequency by which latent viruses are reactivated and whether participants
mount an immune response to a harmless vaccine, phiX174, that is introduced
during the study.
"In the past, most bed-rest studies for immunity have been carried out on men.
It is significant to be part of the international WISE study because scientists
and the space community want valid conclusions about effects on women,"
said Sonnenfeld, who is also vice president for research at Binghamton
University, State University of New York.
The study involves 24 healthy, non-smoking female volunteers between the
ages of 25 and 40. Candidates in the first phase came from the Czech
Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, The Netherlands and
Poland. Recruitment for another 12 volunteers, who are needed for the second
campaign, is currently ongoing (http://www.medes.fr). Each subject is
assigned to one of three groups, which include bed rest, bed rest with a series
of exercises targeting the lower body, and bed rest with a nutritional
supplement. Participants lie with their heads tilted six degrees below
horizontal so that their feet are slightly higher than their heads.
NSBRI, funded by NASA, is a consortium of institutions studying the health
risks related to long-duration space flight. The Institute's research and
education projects take place at more than 70 institutions across the United
States.
Contact:
Lauren Hammit
Senior Communications Specialist
National Space Biomedical Research Institute
One Baylor Plaza, NA-425
Houston, TX 77030-3498
Phone: 713-798-7595
Fax: 713-798-7413
Read the original news release at
http://www.nsbri.org/NewsPublicOut/Release.epl?r=83.
An additional article on this subject is available at
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/spacetravel-05zzt.html.
ARIZONA REGENTS APPROVE UA ASTROBIOLOGY CENTER
By Lori Stiles
University of Arizona release
16 June 2005
The Arizona Board of Regents approved the creation of a center for the study
of astrobiology at The University of Arizona today. The center, called the
Life and Planets Astrobiology Center (LAPLACE), will bring more UA
researchers from various fields together to study the existence of life
elsewhere in the universe.
"Astrobiology touches our most human desire to belong and to understand
where we came from," said UA astronomy Professor Nick Woolf, who directs
the two-year-old Tucson "node" of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. The
Tucson astrobiology node involves the National Optical Astronomy
Observatory (NOAO) as well as the UA and is one of 15 such programs
nationwide. It forms the foundation for UA's new astrobiology center.
"Astrobiology asks the questions, what is life? How does it originate? What
is the future for human life?" Woolf said. "Since the only life we know occurs
in a planetary system, astrobiology also asks how planetary systems form, and
what these systems and planets are like."
UA planetary sciences Professor Jonathan I. Lunine said, "The university
astrobiology program is an effort to use the latest space technology to
understand where we came from and whether we are, as an intelligent species,
unique in the cosmos. LAPLACE will expand the emphasis on astronomy,
chemistry and planetary sciences to include researchers from other
departments, including geology, biochemistry, molecular biophysics, and
ecology and evolutionary biology."
For two months, participants lie at a 6-degree angle and never leave
the bed. In this position, volunteers experience conditions similar to
those encountered by astronauts subjected to weightlessness for long
periods. Photo courtesy of CNES/Stéphane Levin, 2005.
During the study, researchers begin by collecting physiological data to serve
as a baseline. Blood samples, urine samples and saliva swabs are taken at
specified intervals during the 60 days of bed rest. After the bed-rest period,
Regents' approval for the university's LAPLACE will significantly expand the
study of astrobiology at the UA, said College of Science Dean Joaquin Ruiz.
"What the new university center is all about is expanding over a much wider
range of problems in astrobiology, to look in more detail at what it is that is
required for early life," Ruiz said.
"Astrobiology is exciting to me personally because I'm very interested in
knowing how you form a planet that is habitable and then how life populates
it," Ruiz said. "But astrobiology is also very exciting to me as a dean because
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
9
it's going to produce very interesting conversations that otherwise wouldn't
happen. Astrobiology becomes the forum in which people from all these
different disciplines creatively talk together."
MOON, MARS MISSIONS NOT A PRIORITY FOR TAXPAYERS
Citizens Against Government Waste release
16 June 2005
The details of how things assemble themselves and disperse, for example, are
important in astrobiology, Ruiz said. But how life self-replicates and spreads
has long been a basic question for biology, for physics and, more recently, for
engineering. "Self-assembly of liquids in substrates is hugely important for
the electronics industry," Ruiz said. "Engineers would love to build structures
that self-assemble when, say, you add a drop of water."
Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today criticized plans to move
forward with missions to the moon and Mars with an impending record
deficit, chronic management problems at NASA, and unresolved questions
about the missions’ cost and feasibility. NASA’s new administrator Michael
Griffin has said that the space agency will have the money to implement
President Bush’s "Vision for Space Exploration," aimed at returning humans
to the moon by 2020 and eventually sending them to Mars.
In addition to new research, LAPLACE is expected to generate additional
grant funding and spark interest from private donors. The center will also
undertake fundraising to promote research, operational and educational
outreach activities. Woolf and Lunine will be interim directors of the
university's LAPLACE, Ruiz said. A new faculty member, an astrobiologist,
will be hired and placed in a biology, planetary sciences, astronomy or
chemistry department by fall.
NASA awarded the Tucson astrobiologists a $5 million, 5-year research grant
in 2003. The team includes 22 co-investigators and collaborators: 17 from the
UA, three from NOAO and one each from the University of California,
Berkeley and Ohio State University. There are four basic parts to the NASAfunded astrobiology program:
1) UA astrochemist Professor Lucy Ziurys leads research on the prebiotic
compounds and complex organic molecules in the interstellar medium
that are the building blocks of life. The research involves studies of
prebiotic compounds and molecules already known in space, searches
for new ones by laboratory experiments and follow-up observations, and
theoretical modeling.
2) UA Assistant Professor Michael Meyer and Stephen Strom and Joan
Najita of NOAO study environments and conditions under which
habitable worlds form and evolve. They use such state-of-the-art
facilities as the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Gemini and Keck
telescopes in studying gas content and physical structure of disks in the
planet forming regions as well as model thermal and chemical structure
of the disks. Mark Giampapa of the Tucson-based National Solar
Observatory studies how magnetic activity leads to variability in the
luminous output of sun-like stars, from "young suns" to stars the age of
our sun.
3) UA Regents' Professor of astronomy J. Roger P. Angel and astronomer
Phil Hinz lead observations to directly detect and characterize extrasolar giant planets. UA astronomy Professor Adam Burrows leads
theoretical studies that aim to learn about giant planet atmospheres that
contain water and even whether these atmospheres support some kind of
microbial life.
4) UA science education Associate Professor Tim Slater leads an education
and public outreach program to incorporate astrobiology in general
science education.
In 2004, the John Templeton Foundation and the Metanexus Institute awarded
the UA a 3-year, $270,000 grant for a project titled "Astrobiology and the
Sacred: Implications of Life Beyond Earth." The project, led by UA
astronomy Professor Chris Impey, is designed to stimulate interdisciplinary
thinking and research on the implications of life beyond Earth. More
information
about
the
program
is
online
at
http://scienceandreligion.arizona.edu.
Additional information about LAPLACE is available at
http://www.laplace.arizona.edu/.
Contacts:
Nick Woolf
Phone: 520-621-3234
E-mail: [email protected]
Joaquin Ruiz
Phone: 520-621-4090
E-mail: [email protected]
Lori Stiles
UA News Services
Phone: 520-621-1877
An additional article on this subject is available at
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0506/17astrobio/.
"A manned mission to Mars is of questionable scientific value and could cost
up to $1 trillion," CAGW President Tom Schatz said. "The immense
technological challenges involved are expected to be overcome by an agency
that currently lacks the ability to launch a shuttle beyond low-earth orbit."
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board described in stinging detail the
long-term and widespread failures of NASA's entire management that caused
the Columbia and Challenger disasters and the problems that continue to
plague the manned-spaceflight program. Institutional arrogance precludes
managers from dealing honestly with internal problems or outside criticism.
Management routinely "deferred to layered and cumbersome regulations
rather than the fundamentals of safety." Also, a recent report from the
Government Accountability Office (GAO) faulted NASA for not adequately
exploring alternatives to the space shuttle. NASA has been unable to
complete an audit of the agency's budget for the past five years and its
accounting is labeled "high risk" by the Bush Administration. A 2004 GAO
report revealed that NASA had lost $34 million in government property since
1997 and has failed to keep track of items including a $300,000 robot.
The President’s initiative was left for dead in the summer of 2004 after a
lukewarm reception from the public and deep skepticism from prominent
scientists. But funding for the initiative was included at the last minute in the
fiscal 2005 omnibus bill. For fiscal 2006, House appropriators have marked
up NASA’s budget at $16.5 billion including $3.1 billion for the moon/Mars
initiative which is $275 million above fiscal 2005 levels and $15 million
above the President’s budget request.
Grandiose tales of bases on the moon and trips to Mars are reminiscent of the
International Space Station (ISS), which was once envisaged as a beehive of
research, a stopover service station for space travelers, and an assembly and
manufacturing plant. The ISS is expected to be finished in 2010 16 years
behind schedule, $92 billion over budget, with perhaps one-eighth of the
capability that engineers had hoped. NASA expects to abandon the ISS after
only seven years of full operation. The ISS is a glaring link in a continuous
chain of space projects that are either abandoned, end in disaster, or deliver far
less than promised. NASA’s unbroken string of six cancelled vehicle
programs stretches back to the Reagan Administration, and the $125 million
Mars orbiter was lost to improper conversion between metric and English
units.
"Mankind’s future in space no longer depends on politicized bureaucracies
and tax-funded boondoggles," Schatz concluded.
"The success of
SpaceShipOne, startup space companies, and the advent of space tourism have
opened the door to an exciting future of private enterprise in space. Such
endeavors are economical, realistic, and more likely to yield tangible benefits
for mankind and taxpayers."
Citizens Against Government Waste is the nation's largest nonpartisan,
nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and
mismanagement in government.
Contacts:
Tom Finnigan or Lauren Cook
Phone: 202-467-5309 or 467-5318
Read the original news release at
http://www.cagw.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8992.
An additional article on this subject is available at
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nasa-05n.html.
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
THE MARTIAN HOT SPOTS
By Joy Crisp
From Astrobiology Magazine
16 June 2005
In their explorations of Mars, both the Spirit and Opportunity rovers found
evidence that liquid water was once on the planet's surface. Joy Crisp,
project scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers, discussed the rovers'
long journey and their surprising discoveries at a public lecture on May 19,
2005. In this final part of the edited transcript, Joy Crisp answers questions
from the audience.
10
A: Right now it's the middle of spring in the southern hemisphere, so we made
it through our first winter. When we landed, it was late summer. We thought
we'd have to hibernate in the winter. But then we drove our rovers onto
slopes that kept our solar panels tilted towards the sun. When we did that, we
did not have to hibernate. So it's possible that we could keep going and going
without hibernating in the winters. But we don't know how long these rovers
could last. They could die at any moment. They're way beyond their tested
lifetimes. Also, if we get a global dust storm, we're not sure if we'll get
enough incoming sunlight to keep our electronics warm. But so far, so good.
Left: Martian polar cap. Image credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS MOC.
Middle: Liquid water may have flowed over the surface of Mars in the
planet's distant past (artist's conception of a delta filling a crater).
Image credit: NASA. Right: The mineral hematite is abundant on
Mars. Image credit: Amethyst Galleries, Inc.
Q: What's the current situation with the RAT—the rock abrasion tool?
A: On Spirit, it may be at the end of its life. The last time we used it to grind
into a rock, it chattered quite strongly. We've done some tests of a fairly worn
down rock abrasion tool, and gotten that same kind of chatter. If it is at the
end of its grinding teeth, it could hurt the arm if we continue to use it. But we
can still use it to clear dust, spinning the brush around to remove dust. Spirit's
RAT has done 15 grindings so far, and about 50 brushes.
Wind-sculpted flats on Mars near Olympus Mons. Image credit: ESA,
Mars Express.
Q: Have you found any fossils on Mars?
A: We have not found any fossil evidence so far. A lot of folks in the public
have asked us about things that they've seen in the NASA images. We are
looking for compelling evidence for fossils, and would love it if we saw it.
But the scientists on the team who are experts in fossils say everything that we
have seen so far could be explained by non-biologic processes. Minerals can
create interesting shapes — we know that from Earth.
Opportunity's rock abrasion tool has done 22 grindings. We ground a lot of
the volcanic hard rock with Spirit, and wore the teeth down a lot faster than
the sulfate rock, which is softer, that Opportunity encountered. So it has a lot
more life to it.
Q: What's the next Mars mission to help answer some of these questions?
A: The mission after ours is a landed mission, the Phoenix Lander, but it's not
a rover. It's just going to have a robotic arm that digs, it'll have some ovens
that can analyze soil and ice, a wet chemistry lab, a meteorology mast, and it'll
have cameras.
Q: Is there a correlation between hematite and elevation on Mars?
A: Not really. This coarse-grained hematite is just in a couple of spots on
Mars. The elevation of the Meridiani Plains, where we find hematite, is kind
of a medium elevation on Mars. Hematite probably forms based on time and
chemistry—where this kind of water was, and where these kinds of conditions
were, rather than elevation.
Q: In the places where you found evidence for water, how long was it around?
Are we talking about days, or years?
A: We have a difficult time pinning precise numbers to that. We did not bring
age-dating equipment with us. We may need to bring samples back from
Mars to the Earth to determine how long the water had to be around. It was
probably there for hundreds of years, minimum. It could be much more, but
we don't have the equipment to say how much more.
Q: Could you obtain water from the rocks of Mars, for future explorers to
access?
A: In theory you could. We have estimated that the Meridiani rocks could
possibly contain seven-weight percent water. You'd have to heat up the rocks
to release that water, though, and that might require a lot of energy. If you
were going to use that as a resource for a future human mission, you'd want to
make sure how much water the rocks really contain. We don't directly
analyze the water content. We're making indirect assessments of it. It's
possible that we might find other deposits that would be even better resources
for water.
Q: When is it martian summer, and when are you going to have to shut down
for the winter?
Montage of soil textures: Moon, Venus, Mars
multi-sites. Image credit: NASA/JPL.
The next rover mission is called the Mars Science Laboratory. It might launch
in 2009 or 2011, and its design is a much larger rover that can carry more
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
instruments. It basically has a "stomach" in it, with a couple of instruments
that are like analytical chemistry labs. One does X-ray diffraction, which
identifies minerals and X-ray fluorescence, which can tell you the elemental
abundances in the sample. Another can measure organic compounds and
isotopes. If you can look at certain isotopes of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
nitrogen, that can help you see if there's fossil evidence of life in the rocks.
These two instruments inside the "stomach" of the rover accept rock samples
that are cored through by a drill, and then ground up by a rock crusher. It also
has a robotic arm to look up close and measure the chemistry. It also has a
laser induced breakdown instrument that can tell us roughly what the
composition of a rock is from far away, and it has color cameras on the mast.
It also has a robotic arm with instruments. It will be built to last longer, and
hopefully like Spirit and Opportunity, it will go beyond its expected lifetime.
Q: There's a lot of variety in the terrain. What inferences can you make about
that?
A: With Spirit, we consistently see water having affected the rocks, but in
different ways. If these layered rocks that we keep finding are volcanic, then
it may be a sign that there were different magma compositions. We have that
kind of situation in the Earth, where magma chambers at depth under the
surface of the Earth change composition, or there could be different sources of
magma, and that could result in different compositions. For the water that
seems to have soaked the rocks and altered them, the chemistry of those
waters could have varied. If the rocks are instead sedimentary, laid down by
water, brought in by rivers and flowed into the crater, each layer could
represent a different episode of a different river bringing different source
material to the site. So we're not sure what the variety means with Spirit.
We're still pondering it.
11
that the Hills look strongly impacted, like they've been hit many times in the
past.
Q: What do you expect as you go to a higher latitude?
A: Mars is not bland and homogenous, so you can't just say "to high
latitudes." You have to specify where exactly on Mars. And then you would
have ideas, based on what you see from orbit, as to what you'll see close-up
when you get down on the surface. We didn't know exactly what we would
find with Spirit and Opportunity. Look at Spirit - we didn't know it would
land on volcanic rocks. We didn't know that the Hills would be a good place
to go, until we got down there. So all I can make are very broad
generalizations that, if you went to high latitudes, what we have seen from
orbit is that there's a striking amount of ice in the soil. That is what Phoenix
Lander wants to go look at for sure. But in terms of rocks at high latitudes, I
don't know.
Q: You mentioned Star Wars in your introduction.
footprints of droids on Mars?
Have you seen any
A: (laughs) No, but that reminds me of a fun thing that we recently saw.
Spirit is at the back of Larry's Lookout, and we come around, look at that rock
ledge, and there's this big patch of soil that has slid down. We've noticed
several places on Mars where this soil has a crusty top to it. And so this
crusty soil had slid down, but how did that happen? Well, we used to be up
on top on the other side, and we were grinding away, so you put two and two
together. We may have been producing our own little seismic activity there,
and causing a mini-landslide.
Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1604.html.
With Opportunity, there is variety in the texture, but it's been essentially the
same kind of rock. It's layered rock very rich in sulfate, sedimentary,
deposited either by wind or water, but it's very similar looking rock, with the
exception of an iron meteorite that we encountered.
TERRAFORMING: HUMAN DESTINY OR HUBRIS?
By Dave Brody
From Ad Astra and Space.com
17 June 2005
Q: Have you seen anything like desert varnish?
Say the word “terraforming” amidst a gathering of space enthusiasts and it’s a
bit like upending your beer mug in an Australian pub. It means you’re ready
to duke it out with anybody in the joint. And the fight usually breaks out
along these lines. One team sees the quest to replicate the biosphere of Earth
on other planets as a moral imperative, an inevitable destiny, or both.
Others—equally passionate—recoil at such pretension, proclaiming with
surety that humans have no right to interfere with Nature as writ large upon
the face of other worlds. Both viewpoints are, of course, so fraught with selfdefeating conflicts as to be, well, flat out wrong.
A: We did on one rock, clearly, near the rim of Bonneville crater. There, as
we ground into the rock, we could see that we were removing an outer
coating. We took measurements, and could see some indications of the
chemistry of that coating. We don't know if that rock at some point was
exposed to some surface water, or if it was buried in the soil where there was
a little bit of water, forming this coating. But it had water signatures.
Q: Is Mars a very active planet?
A: Not that we know of. There's a desire among geophysicists to make
measurements and set up a network to see what kind of activity there is. We
have not seen any signs of volcanism, in looking at the current surface. We've
been looking with Mars Odyssey in the infrared to see if there are any hot
areas on the surface, and we haven't seen any. We have seen with Mars
Express a lot of new assessments saying, "Volcanism was active not too long
ago in the geologic past," so there isn't any reason why it couldn't still be
active, and no reason you couldn't have a little bit of associated seismic
activity. Mars has been predicted to have less seismic activity than the Earth
and more than the Moon.
Q: Do you think future missions might revisit these same places later on down
the line?
A: To me, it would make sense to go back to Meridiani sometime and look for
an organic or biomarker signature in those rocks, or get some of those rocks
and bring them back to the Earth to make careful measurements of them.
They preserve evidence of an environment that could have been good for life,
and these kinds of rocks would be good for possibly preserving fossil
evidence of life.
Q: The Columbia Hills are in a big flat crater bottom. How did the Hills
form?
A: I think that's one of our favorite things to argue about. That's a very basic
question that we aren't able to answer right now. Were the rocks originally
deposited with that 20 degree angle? Could we be on the side of some
volcanic construct? Could it be that the rocks were originally deposited
horizontally, and they've been tipped up by impact? We see signs from orbit
Weird, isn’t it, that an enterprise that no one now alive can remotely hope to
see fulfilled should arouse such fire and fury? (Nobody quibbles much about
warp drives, wormholes or what we’re actually going to reply to ET.) But
there seems to be something about the notion of taking a planet upon whose
surface you did not evolve and changing it to suit yourself that catalyzes all
audiences immediately to one pole or the other.
Bind yourself to the nearest mast and try to listen dispassionately to the
combatants and you’ll start to hear these discussions for what they really are:
religious conflicts. Disagreements rooted in faith, belief and longing. What
you won’t hear, usually, is good science. Not often sound engineering tips.
And not much of immediate practical use to those of us who want to expand
Humankind’s range to include the resource base of space, a primary goal of
the membership of the National Space Society.
Read the full article at
http://www.space.com/adastra/adastra_terraforming_brody-1.html.
IN SEARCH OF DIVERSITY
By Mitch Sogin
From Astrobiology Magazine
20 June 2005
Mitch Sogin heads the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Marine Biological
Laboratory team. At a recent conference, Sogin gave a talk about the work
that molecular evolutionists do and how it has contributed to understanding
the history of life on Earth. In this third and final part of a three-part series,
Sogin describes the challenges that face researchers in their efforts to explore
microbial diversity in extreme environments.
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12
appropriate computer algorithms you can generate evolutionary trees that
show you how closely the different organisms are related.
Left: Terrestrial options for early climate—early earth, snowball,
cauldron or temperate? Image credit: NASA. Right: In a eukaryote,
the DNA is located in the nucleus of the cell. A DNA molecule is
composed of two helically spiral strands, each composed of a linear
chain of sugar and phosphate molecules. Image credit: MIT.
Microbiologists are interested in studying extreme environments to find out
what organisms are living there, how diverse they are. Diversity is important
for us to keep in mind in the context of planetary exploration. But until
recently, studying microbial diversity has been very difficult to do. One
problem we face is that morphology (the form and structure of the organisms)
doesn't give you any kind of a metric for diversity. The second problem is
that most microbes are difficult to grow in the laboratory. We can only grow
one percent or less of the organisms in an environment.
For example, until about 20 years ago, marine biologists thought that there
were roughly 100 organisms per milliliter of sea water, because that's
approximately what they could get to grow. John Hobbie started to use DAPI
stains (which stain nucleic acids with fluorescent dye) and demonstrated that
microbial life in the oceans was much, much more dense. When you use a
DAPI stain on a sample of marine water and then look at it under a
microscope, you typically see on the order of 50 microbes in your field of
view. To see that many microbes in a single field means that there have to be
somewhere between 10 thousand and 100 thousand cells per milliliter. But
we can only cultivate about 100 of those organisms. So cultivation has been a
big problem, especially if you want to ask questions such as, "Is there
evidence of novel evolutionary lineages when you look in an extreme
environment?" or "How many different microorganisms are present?"
Of all the science that NASA's funded in the area of biology, Carl Woese's
research was probably the most significant contribution. Because it provided
a window into the microbial world, a quantitative window, not only in terms
of assessing diversity, but also in understanding how microbes are related to
each other. Woese also identified the Archaea as one of the primary domains
of life. Woese's insight was based on structural studies of ribosomal RNA.
Ribosomal RNAs are present in all cellular-based organisms on the planet.
By comparing ribosomal RNA sequences from different organisms, one can
infer their evolutionary relationships.
In 1987, based on comparisons of ribosomal RNA sequences solely from
organisms he was able to culture, Woese had identified about a dozen
different phyla (major groupings) of bacteria. By 1997, using molecular
characterizations of DNA extracted from natural habitats, Norman Pace was
able to enumerate 24 different major lineages, almost a third of which had no
cultured representatives. Today, about 80 different bacterial divisions have
been identified and we believe that as we continue to explore new
environments the number of major divisions is going to increase.
I want to talk about two sites where we've worked on this question of
diversity. The first is Guaymas Basin, which is in the Gulf of California.
Guaymas is one of a number of deep-sea hydrothermal vents that has been
studied. Interestingly enough, microbial population studies of vents are
actually quite limited: We only have detailed descriptions on half a dozen vent
sites. It's a very rich in terms of both bacterial and archaeal diversity. The
surface of the Guaymas sediments is composed of a bacterial mat of
filamentous Beggiatoa.
The system can be quite hot. One can extract cores close to the vents that
range in temperature from just a few degrees C (about 40 degrees F) all the
way up to 180 degrees C (about 360 degrees F). The deeper the core sample,
the warmer it gets, to the point that it's downright hot.
Among the archaea found at Guaymas, one sees methanogens (organisms that
make methane as a byproduct of their metabolism), thermophiles, all the
players that we would expect to find in this kind of environment. There is
archaeal diversity. But of the 80 known bacterial phyla, we only see about a
dozen in Guaymas. So it's a moderately complex environment, but it doesn't
appear that all the lineages in the bacterial world are present.
It's an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment principally, in which there's a lot
of interaction between archaea and bacteria. The end result is that the system
as a whole performs anaerobic methane oxidation. But it's important to
understand that this anaerobic methane oxidation doesn't occur because of a
single organism. Rather, it happens because there is a consortium of
organisms. It's really a very complex system. Indeed, complexity is an
underlying theme for life in extreme environments.
Another reason we were interested in Guaymas had to do with eukaryotic
diversity. We find many RNA sequences in these anoxic environments for
eukaryotes that represent new lineages, novel diversity. And while the
bacterial diversity only covers roughly a quarter to an eighth of the total
diversity in the bacterial domain, almost all known kinds of eukaryotes are
found in this setting.
The other system I wanted to mention in brief is the Rio Tinto. The Rio Tinto
in southwestern Spain is distinguished by the fact that it has very high iron
concentrations, and it's a very low-pH (very acidic) environment. We were
interested in that system initially in terms of the eukaryotic diversity. And if
you look at eukaryotic diversity in that system, once again, you run into the
same thing, namely that you find nearly all the possible eukaryotes you can
imagine in the Rio Tinto.
What we've learned in Rio Tinto is that protists (single-celled eukaryotes) can
operate at very low pHs. What strikes me about the system is that many of the
protists that we see in the Rio Tinto are very closely related to organisms that
are in culture collections today - organisms that don't live in acidic conditions.
What that effectively means is that adapting to an acidic environment like the
Rio Tinto doesn't take much time in an evolutionary time frame context.
Traditional classification resembling a "tree of life"
organized into six kingdoms. Newer molecular
phylogenies suggest that life's ancestry is more
complicated. Image credit: UCLA.
If you want to look at an environment and ask the question, "What kinds of
organisms are there?" you can use the presence of a particular ribosomal RNA
as a proxy for the presence of a particular organism. You can also look at
differences among the ribosomal RNA sequences. And then by using
What about the archaea and the bacteria in the Rio Tinto? One finds limited
archaeal diversity in the Rio Tinto. And there are only half a dozen or so
different bacteria that dominate the system. Is that an adequate description of
the diversity of the Rio Tinto? We are not sure. When you do molecular
surveys, you're constrained by how much you sample. How much you sample
is constrained by how much money you have. So if you're thinking about
doing a sequence analysis and each sequence costs you a couple of dollars, if
you want to count 10,000 samples, you better have a very well-funded grant.
We have started to explore an alternative methodology to deal with this
problem. It's called "serial analysis of ribosomal RNA sequence tags"—or
SARST-V6 for short. The idea is to try to get a measurement not only of
diversity in a natural environment, but also to get estimates of how many there
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are of each different kind of organism in a given environment. So that means
we're going to somehow sample thousands and thousands of sequences.
The technique that we settled on involves the idea of stringing together short
stretches of ribosomal RNA from different organisms. We focus on a region
of rRNA called V6, roughly 60 or 70 nucleotides in length, which is highly
variable from one organism to the next. It's flanked by some greenhighlighted sequence elements. This V6 region is and it's flanked on either
side by a very conserved sequence, a part of the ribosomal RNA that is pretty
much the same for all organisms. Our notion was that, if we could extract the
short V6 sequence from ribosomal RNAs, and randomly string them together
like beads on a string and then determine the structure of those short
sequences, each short sequence would be a proxy for the occurrence of an
organism in the environment.
The advantage of this technique is that now we can get out information about
10 to 20 different organisms for what it previously cost us to get information
about only 1. It can't give you information about deep phylogenetic
relationships. But it's useful for monitoring changes in population structure,
or for measuring the relative abundance of organisms in a population.
When we tested the system initially in Guaymas, we got essentially the same
kinds of distribution patterns, in this moderately complex environment, as we
had with more traditional techniques. But while older techniques found Rio
Tinto dominated by just 3 or 4 kinds of organisms, the SARST-V6 analysis
shows these 3 or 4 kinds or organisms to account for just over 80 percent of
the total population. When we go to the next 10 percent, we see a much larger
array of organisms. We start to pick up many organisms that were previously
invisible. And if we then include organisms that show up only a handful of
times, we see still more organisms, which we'd never see by traditional
sequencing.
So you see that the Rio Tinto is not made up of just a few organisms, but
rather is made up of a moderately complex environment. That means that we
shouldn't just be paying attention to the dominant organisms at Rio Tinto, but
we also have to pay attention to the minor players. Based on this new
analysis, we now think that Rio Tinto is not 3 or 4 or 5 organisms, but it's
going to be on the order of hundreds of different kinds of organisms.
The bottom line on all this is that, from the perspective of planetary
exploration, we should not be thinking that we're necessarily going to find
simple microbial environments when we go elsewhere. We should be
prepared for very complex microbial communities.
13
Bristol. He took up a prestigious 'Marie Curie Chair', an EU-funded position
designed to help reverse the brain drain, particularly to the USA, and to
encourage leading academics to return to and work in Europe. These posts
aim to attract world-class researchers. Professor Catling is an internationally
recognised researcher in planetary sciences and atmospheric evolution.
As well as his research into the surface and climate of Mars, Professor Catling
aims to produce a more quantitative understanding of how the Earth's
atmosphere originated and evolved. He comments: "Earth's surface is
stunningly different from that of its apparently lifeless neighbors, Venus and
Mars. But when our planet first formed its surface must also have been
devoid of life. How the complex world around us developed from lifeless
beginnings is a great challenge that involves many scientific disciplines such
as geology, atmospheric science, and biology".
Professor Catling grew up in Suffolk and received his doctorate from Oxford,
but he has been working in the USA for the past decade: six years as a NASA
scientist, followed by four years at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Professor Catling is now based in the Department of Earth Sciences at the
University of Bristol. He said of his return to the UK: "It's great to be back
and I'm looking forward to getting started at Bristol. My research will focus
on how Earth and Mars evolved over the history of the solar system to
produce such startlingly different environments at their surface."
Professor Catling will give a public lecture approximately every nine months
on topics such as the question of life on Mars, or results from recent missions
to Mars.
Journal reference:
David C. Catling, Christopher R. Glein, Kevin J. Zahnle, Christopher P.
McKay, 2005. Why O2 is required by complex life on habitable planets and
the concept of planetary "oxygenation time". Astrobiology 5(3):415-438,
http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ast.2005.5.415.
Read the original news release at http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2005/730.
Additional articles on this subject are available at:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/308/5729/1730
http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/few_planets_time_life.html
COMING CLUES TO THE ORIGIN OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM (BUT
PROBABLY NOT THE EXPECTED ONES)
By Tom Van Flandern
21 June 2005
Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1608.html.
DOES LIFE EXIST ON OTHER PLANETS?
University of Bristol release
20 June 2005
Whether life exists on other planets remains one of the great unanswered
questions of science. Recent research argues that an atmosphere rich in
oxygen is the most feasible source of energy for complex life to exist
anywhere in the Universe, thereby limiting the number of places life may
exist. Professor David Catling at Bristol University, along with colleagues at
the University of Washington and NASA, contend that significant oxygen in
the air and oceans is essential for the evolution of multicellular organisms, and
that on Earth the time required for oxygen levels to reach a point where
animals could evolve was almost four billion years.
Since four billion years is almost half the anticipated life-time of our sun, life
on other planets orbiting short-lived suns may not have had sufficient time to
evolve into complex forms. This is because levels of oxygen will not have
had time to develop sufficiently to support complex life, before the sun dies.
Professor Catling said: "This is a major limiting factor for the evolution of life
on otherwise potentially habitable planets." The research is published in the
June 2005 issue of Astrobiology.
Professor Catling is also part of the science team for NASA's Phoenix Lander,
which recently got the go-ahead to put a long-armed lander on Mars in 2007.
A robotic arm on the lander will dig a meter into the soil to examine its
chemistry. "A key objective is to establish whether Mars ever had an
environment conducive to more simple life", said Professor Catling.
Professor Catling is one of the country's first Professors of Astrobiology and
has recently returned from the USA to take up a post at the University of
The Deep Impact spacecraft is on its way to an encounter with Comet Tempel
1. Before arrival, it will release a 370 kg probe that will impact on the comet
at a very high speed. The impact should reveal the true nature of the comet
nucleus, which is poorly understood in the current mainstream model.
Predictions (in order of increasing strength of nucleus material) range from
the probe passing all the way through the comet, to fracturing and splintering
the nucleus into many fragments, to getting stuck in a soft rubble pile comet,
to making a huge, deep crater, to making a small, shallow crater. Mainstream
experts are divided about which outcome to expect. But one model, the
satellite model for comets, a corollary of the exploded planet hypothesis, is
unambiguous in its prediction: The comet nucleus is a single, solid asteroid.
The impact will leave a small, shallow crater perhaps 10-20 meters in
diameter, will produce no new jet, and will have no lasting consequences on
the comet. It will simply produce an impact flash as the probe vaporizes, then
will cause the comet's coma to temporarily brighten as new carbonaceous dust
is ejected from the asteroid regolith and the impact crater. Satellites of the
comet will probably not be seen because the nucleus is so elongated that, as
for asteroid Eros, the local gravity field of the nucleus is unstable for large
satellites.
Read the full article at
http://metaresearch.org/solar%20system/eph/DeepImpact.asp.
INTERESTED IN AN EXTREME ENVIRONMENT FACILITY?
From the NAI Newsletter
10 June 2005
Tim Ringrose at the Planetary and Space Science Research Institute (PSSRI)
at the Open University is developing to build a planetary simulation facility
(Extreme Environments Facility). PSSRI has a number of chambers,
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14

Magnetically Inflated Cable System for Space Applications (PI: Dr.
James Powell, Plus Ultra Technologies, Stony Brook, NY)
Ultra-High Resolution Fourier Transform X-ray Interferometer (PI: Dr.
Herbert Schnopper, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory,
Cambridge, MA)
Positron-Propelled and Powered Space Transport Vehicle for Planetary
Missions (PI: Dr. Gerald A. Smith, Positronics Research LLC, Santa Fe,
NM)
Modular Spacecraft with Integrated Structural Electrodynamic
Propulsion (PI: Mr. Nestor Voronka, Tethers Unlimited, Bothell, WA)
including ones that will do Mercury, Mars and potentially early and presentday extreme environments on Earth. He is interested in gauging the interest in
the community in the potential use of such a facility if it became available to
the community at large. It might be used for instrumentation as well as
biological/geochemical/geological studies.


If any of you out there are interested in planetary simulations or would be
potentially interested, can you drop Charles ([email protected]) or Tim
([email protected]) an e-mail. General details about PSSRI can be
found at http://pssri.open.ac.uk/.

NATIONAL WORKSHOP ON ASTROBIOLOGY—26 OCTOBER 2005
From the NAI Newsletter
10 June 2005
For more information about NIAC and these proposals on the Internet, visit
http://www.niac.usra.edu/.
For information about NASA and agency
programs on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html.
The "National Workshop on Astrobiology: Search of Life in the Solar
System" will be held in Capri island from the 26th to 28th of October. The
workshop is open to researchers and students interested in the origin of life in
the Solar System. The workshop will state the most recent theoretical and
experimental results and will deal with space mission strategies and
perspectives for searching signs of life in the Solar System. For more
information concerning the workshop registration, hotel reservation etc.,
please visit the web site at http://www.na.astro.it/meetings/astrobiology.
Contacts:
Mike Braukus or J. D. Harrington
NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC
Phone: 202-358-1979 or -5241
NASA INVESTIGATES REVOLUTIONARY SPACE EXPLORATION
CONCEPTS
NASA release 05-151
15 June 2005
NATIONAL ACADEMIES UNVEIL EVOLUTION WEB PAGE
National Academies release
17 June 2005
The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) has selected its 2005
Phase 1 awards. The Phase 1 awards are 12, six-month study proposals
beginning in September that could revolutionize space exploration. If the
concepts prove feasible, space explorers may one day deploy superconducting
cables that magnetically inflate to form the structure of a space telescope one
kilometer across; launch a satellite with a magnetic scoop to mine the
radiation belts surrounding Earth for antimatter fuel; or enjoy a feast from a
food replicator that creates a variety of meals from a few common ingredients.
Bill Steigerwald
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
Phone: 301-286-5017
The National Academies have designed a new Web page to allow easy access
to books, position statements, and additional resources on evolution education
and research. Evolution is one of science's most robust theories, and the
National Academies have long supported the position that evolution should be
taught as a central element in any science education program. Over the past
several years, there has been a growing movement around the country to
include non-scientifically based "alternatives" in science courses. Currently
there are challenges to the teaching of evolution in some 40 states or local
school
districts.
The
new
web
site
is
at
http://nationalacademies.org/evolution/.
"These new Phase I awards have the potential for enabling future missions
that are not thought to be possible with current systems. As a result of the
process of exploring advanced concepts, new enabling technologies may be
identified that could impact near-term plans and missions," said Dr. Robert
Cassanova of the Universities Space Research Association (USRA).
Cassanova is the NIAC director. The USRA runs NIAC for NASA.
NIAC was created in 1998 to solicit revolutionary concepts from people and
organizations outside the agency that could advance NASA's missions. The
proposals push the limits of known science and technology, and positive
results are not expected for at least a decade or more. Proposals selected for
Phase 1 awards typically receive up to $75,000 for a six-month study that
validates the viability of the concept and identifies challenges that must be
overcome to make the proposal a reality.
Proposals selected for the 2005 Phase 1 awards:

A Contamination-Free Ultrahigh-Precision Formation Flight Method
Based on Intracavity Photon Thrusters and Tethers (Principle
Investigator (PI): Dr. Young K. Bae, Bae Institute, Tustin, CA)

Extraction of Antiparticles Concentrated in Planetary Magnetic Fields
(PI: Mr. James Bickford, Draper Laboratory, Cambridge, MA)

Customizable, Reprogrammable, Food Preparation, Production and
Invention System (PI: Dr. Eric Bonabeau, Icosystem Corporation,
Cambridge, MA)

Scalable Flat-Panel Nano-Particle MEMS/NEMS Propulsion
Technology for Space Exploration in the 21st Century (PI: Dr. Brian
Gilchrist, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI)

Antimatter Harvesting in Space (PI: Dr. Gerald P. Jackson, Hbar
Technologies, LLC, Chicago, IL)

Multi-MICE: A Network of Interactive Nuclear Cryoprobes to Explore
Ice Sheets on Mars and Europa (PI: Dr. George Maise, Plus Ultra
Technologies, Inc., Stony Brook, NY)

Artificial Neural Membrane Flapping Wing (PI: Dr. Pamela A. Menges,
Aerospace Research Systems, Inc., Cincinnati, OH)

Lorentz-Actuated Orbits: Electrodynamic Propulsion without a Tether
(PI: Dr. Mason Peck, Cornell University College of Engineering, Ithaca,
NY)
Among the available resources are (left to right): Evolution in Hawaii: A
Supplement to Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science;
Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of
Sciences, Second Edition; Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of
Science; National Science Education Standards; The Search for Life's
Origins: Progress and Future Directions in Planetary Biology and
Chemical Evolution. Image credits: National Academies.
The nation turns to the National Academies—National Academy of Sciences,
National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National
Research Council—for independent, objective advice on issues that affect
people's lives worldwide.
RESULTS OF LIFE SCIENCES RESEARCH IN SPACE TO BE
PRESENTED IN COLOGNE
ESA release 32-2005
20 June 2005
On 26 June, the 9th European Symposium on Life Sciences Research in Space
will commence its proceedings at the Maternushaus in Cologne, Germany.
During the four-day gathering, biologists and medical researchers will present
the latest results of their current space research. The event is being hosted by
the European Space Agency (ESA) together with the International Society for
Gravitational Physiology (ISGP) and coincides with the 26th International
Gravitational Physiology Meeting.
The participants will be focusing on the theme of "Life in Space for Life on
Earth."
This provides an opportunity for biologists, physicians and
physiological scientists from around the world to share their findings from
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15
experiments performed onboard the International Space Station, its
predecessors and other research platforms such as drop towers, parabolic
flights, sounding rockets, Foton missions and bed-rest studies.
tailored for the media, with presentations of selected scientific disciplines
given in layman's language. This session will take place on Monday 27 June
from 14:00 to 17:00, featuring the following presentations:
During the sessions, other researchers will present papers on the effects of
gravitational changes on the physiology and behavior of humans, animals,
plants and cells. The presentations will cover the effects of weightlessness
during spaceflight, acute and chronic acceleration, impact and vibration, as
well as the various forms of real and simulated microgravity. The
evolutionary consequences of gravity and the role of gravity in animal and
plant growth will be also addressed by the scientists.
Dr. Marc Heppener, Head of ISS Utilisation and Promotion Division, ESA
Subject: ESA's Programme for Spaceflight-related Research
Four half-day symposia will cover concepts relating to gravitational
physiology, artificial gravity, the evolution of gravity-sensing in cells and
humans and the effects of gravity on gene expression. The symposia will also
highlight the important findings of space physiology and psychology studies,
with invited researchers presenting their papers. There will also be additional
oral and poster presentations based on contributions from the international
science community in the field of biological research.
Preliminary findings of the Women International Space Simulation for
Exploration (WISE), which is currently under way, will also be presented.
Since March, twelve women from seven European countries have been
confined to bed at the French Institute for Space Medicine and Physiology
(MEDES) in Toulouse. At the beginning of June, the twelve participants in
this first campaign got back on their feet. Some of the volunteers will attend
the conference and talk about the experience. ESA project manager Peter Jost
will present and explain the preliminary results of this exercise, the longest
female bed-rest experiment ever conducted in Europe. He will also report on
preparations for the second campaign scheduled for the autumn and on ESA’s
five-year strategic plan for bed-rest studies.
For the second time, the European Symposium on Life Sciences Research in
Space will also be focusing on young researchers. Exceptionally-talented
newcomers previously not involved in space research have been encouraged
to submit abstracts and present their research. 60 students submitted abstracts
and the vast majority have been selected to display their posters or present
papers. Selection was based on the scientific merits of the summaries
submitted.
Dr. Peter Norsk, Professor, Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, Denmark, ISGP
Chairman
Subject: Heart Function and Blood Pressure in Weightlessness
Dr. Martina Heer, Professor, Head of Space Physiology, DLR, Germany
Subject: The Importance of Proper Nutrition in Space
Dr. Dag Linnarsson, Professor, Section of Environmental Physiology,
Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
Subject: Commonalities between Space Walks and Diving
Dr. Pietro di Prampero, Professor, University of Udine, Italy
Subject: Bringing Gravity to Space
Dr. Peter Jost, Life Science Medical Doctor, ESA
Subject: The Ongoing ESA-lead Bed-rest Study with Female Subjects.
Planning for Future Activities
Media representatives wishing to attend this media opportunity are requested
to register using the attached form. Further information on the symposium
itself is available at http://www.congrex.nl/05a06/.
Contacts:
Franco Bonacina
ESA Media Relations Division
Tel: +33(0)1-5369-7155
Fax: +33(0)1-5369-7690
Dieter Isakeit
Directorate of Human Spaceflight, Microgravity and Exploration Programmes
Tel: +31(0)71-565-5451
Fax: +31(0)71-565-8008
The entire symposium is open to the media. In addition, for the first time at
an event of this kind, ESA is organizing a special overview session specially
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Maternushaus, Cologne
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Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS FOR 9-15 JUNE 2005
NASA/JPL release
17 June 2005
16
Uplink Operations sent commands to the spacecraft for the second S11 Live
IVP Update mini-sequence. The mini-sequence will begin execution
tomorrow. A live movable block mini-sequence will be uplinked over the
weekend and will execute on Wednesday, June 8.
The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired Wednesday from the
Madrid and Madrid tracking stations. The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent
state of health and is operating normally. Information on the present position
and speed of the Cassini spacecraft may be found on the "Present Position"
web page located at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/operations/present-position.cfm.
The main science event this week was the third Radio Science Subsystem
(RSS) Occultation observation. More details on this observation appear in the
June 8 section of this report. Other activities during this week include a highresolution study of bow shocks and other magnetospheric boundaries by the
Cassini Plasma Spectrometer, Radio and Plasma Wave Science subsystem
(RPWS), Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument, and Magnetometer Subsystem
(MAG). The Optical Remote Sensing instruments observed Dione and Titan,
worked on identifying the orbit of newly discovered rings, attempted to detect
flashes from meter-sized interplanetary impacts on the rings, and worked to
obtain thermal measurements of the rings.
Wednesday, June 1 (DOY 152):
A member of the Science Planning team gave a talk to 20 engineers at the
monthly meeting of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology in
Anaheim, California. A delivery coordination meeting was held for the
Spacecraft Operations Office (SCO) tools Assisted Load Format (ALF)
version 11 and Predict Generation Tool V9.2. Members of the Magnetometer
Subsystem gave a presentation on recent Enceladus results at a Cassini
internal Tour Science Talk.
The Planetary Data System (PDS) announced the first data release from
NASA's Cassini Mission to Saturn. This release consists of data from the
RPWS instrument from October 1997 through January 2002. The next release
of Cassini data will be July 1, 2005. All available PDS data may be
downloaded from http://starbrite.jpl.nasa.gov/pds/index.jsp.
For further
information about PDS online services, see the PDS home page at
http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/.
Thursday, June 2 (DOY 153):
The Aftermarket process for the S15 sequence concluded today. The Science
Operations Plan Update (SOPU) process will begin on June 16. A delivery
coordination meeting was held for the SCO tools Kinematic Prediction Tool
(KPT)/Inertial Vector Propagator (IVP) version 11. The tools will be used in
operations after the delivery of the Mission Sequence Subsystem on June 15.
A Deep Space Mission Systems Delivery Review (DDR) was held for the
Telemetry, Tracking, Command & Data Management system version 29.1.1.
No issues were uncovered. The Mission Support & Services Office will now
begin Cassini testing and will develop a plan for infrastructure installation in
early July.
This montage of four images of Saturn's knotted F ring shows different
locations around the ring, even though all taken within a few hours of
each other. There is considerable variation in the structure of the ring
at these four locations. For example, the number of ring strands differs
from image to image. And in some images, kinks are clearly visible in
the ring, while others regions appear more smooth. Astronomers
believe that the structure of Saturn's F ring is governed by its
shepherding moons, Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across)
and Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across).
The ring's
appearance is expected to vary depending on how recently a ring
section has encountered each moon and how close the moon came to
the ring. These images were taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 3 and 4, 2005, from below the
ringplane and at distances ranging from 735,000 to 952,000 kilometers
(457,000 to 592,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale ranges from
4 to 6 kilometers (2 to 4 miles) per pixel. Image credit: NASA/JPL/
Space Science Institute.
Friday, June 3 (DOY 154):
Commands were sent to the spacecraft today to modify the System Fault
Protection Command Loss Timer (CLT) strategy. The CLT limit was
increased from 85 hours—roughly 3.5 days—to 5 days. The limit was
increased to span the duration of the next RSS occultation experiment. The
limit will be commanded back to 85 hours on June 9. Part of the fault
protection system monitors communications with the ground. If for any
reason a command is not received by the spacecraft before the expiration of
the time limit, the spacecraft will assume there is a "problem", call fault
protection, and put Cassini into safe mode until the "problem" is resolved.
This is a common feature on all spacecraft and CLT commands are sent each
time Cassini has a DSN pass to prevent the expiration of the time limit.
Participating teams delivered files for the official port for the S14 Science
Operations Plan Update process. The files will be merged the beginning of
next week.
Monday, June 6 (DOY 157):
An image of Enceladus and Saturn's rings was Astronomy Picture of the day
today. Members of the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS)
team and Integrated Test Laboratory successfully ran a test of the new SSR
region for VIMS command loads and the updated VIMS and ALF tool
software which gets the load into the instrument. The Official Port 1 Merge
for S14 SOPU is now complete and the products have been placed in the
Program file repository.
Tuesday, June 7 (DOY 158):
Outreach was accepted to give a workshop at the California Science Teachers'
Association (CSTA) in October 2005. The workshop will focus on "Reading,
Writing, and Rings". A new Cassini poster is due for delivery to Outreach
Friday June 10.
Wednesday, June 8 (DOY 159):
The Radio Science Subsystem (RSS) successfully measured the properties of
Saturn's rings and atmosphere by performing an egress radio occultation
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
17
experiment. The occultation occurred over Goldstone stations 14, 25, and 26
and Madrid stations 63 and 55. All five antennas supported the entire
observation. Fourteen open-loop receivers were recording simultaneously.
Everything appears to have gone nominally. During the occultation, VIMS
and the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph performed a solar occultation
ingress experiment and the Cosmic Dust Analyzer measured the dust flux and
particle composition during the Enceladus orbit crossing.
These two images, taken 10 minutes apart, demonstrate Cassini's
ability to see the different depths of Saturn's immense atmosphere,
using an array of specially designed spectral filters. The image at the
left was obtained using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of light at which
methane in Saturn's atmosphere is moderately absorbing. The image
at the right was taken in wavelengths where methane is strongly
absorbing. At the more weakly absorbing wavelengths, sunlight is able
to penetrate a bit deeper into the atmosphere than at the strongly
absorbing ones, revealing features deeper down. Several turbulent
storms are visible in both images, indicating that these features extend
from fairly deep to fairly high in the weather layer. The visible part of
Saturn's atmosphere, where such storms and swirls churn, represents
only a thin skin in the outermost part of the giant planet. The images
were taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 4,
2005, at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (800,000
miles) from Saturn. The image at the left was obtained using a
combination of filters sensitive to wavelengths of polarized and infrared
light centered at 705 and 728 nanometers, respectively. The image at
the right was taken using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of
infrared light centered at 890 nanometers. The image scale is 73
kilometers (45 miles) per pixel. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space
Science Institute.
The shepherd moon, Pandora, is seen here alongside the narrow F
ring that it helps maintain. Pandora is 84 kilometers (52 miles) across.
Cassini obtained this view from about four degrees above the
ringplane. Captured here are several faint, dusty ringlets in the vicinity
of the F ring core. The ringlets do not appear to be perturbed to the
degree seen in the core. The appearance of Pandora here is exciting,
as the moon's complete shape can be seen, thanks to reflected light
from Saturn, which illuminates Pandora's dark side. The hint of a
crater is visible on the dark side of the moon. The image was taken in
visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 4,
2005, at a distance of approximately 967,000 kilometers (601,000
miles) from Pandora and at a Sun-Pandora-spacecraft, or phase, angle
of 117 degrees. The image scale is 6 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.
An Aftermarket process assessment meeting for the S16 sequence was held
today. This Aftermarket process runs for five weeks and addresses proposed
discretionary changes that require re-integration of the segments contained in
a sequence.
At the Assessment meeting, the Project Scientist and
participating teams scope out the proposed changes and determine if they will
fit within the available workforce "budget".
A delivery coordination meeting for the Cassini Archive Tracking System
(CATS) software v3 was held today. CATS is a web application tool that
tracks required archive submissions into PDS, and allows the project and PDS
to accurately and efficiently report on archive submission status. The
software was accepted for delivery and will be in use as the first archive
volumes are completed this month.
Non-targeted encounters of two moons of Saturn—Pallene and Calypso—
occurred today. In a news release dated June 8, JPL announced the possible
discovery of a Titan volcano that could be a source of methane in Titan's
atmosphere. Images taken in infrared light show a circular feature roughly 30
kilometers in diameter that does not resemble any features seen on Saturn's
other icy moons. Scientists interpret the feature as an "ice volcano," a dome
formed by upwelling icy plumes that release methane into Titan's atmosphere.
The findings appear in the June 9 issue of Nature. For more information visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
Cassini looks toward Saturn's night side in this view, capturing a
glimpse of Dione's tortured surface in the foreground and a far-off view
of Epimetheus beyond Saturn. The spacecraft was just a 10th of a
degree above the ringplane when this image was taken. Parts of
Dione's surface have been stretched and ripped apart by tectonic
forces. Some of these faults are visible here, as is a large impact
basin near the moon's south pole. Although this crater's diameter has
not yet been measured by imaging scientists, it appears to be wider
than 250 kilometers (155 miles), which would make it the largest
impact structure yet identified on this moon. Dione is 1,118 kilometers
(695 miles) across. Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or 72 miles across)
presents a similar face here to that revealed in a spectacular falsecolor view from March, 2005. The image was taken in visible light with
the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 5, 2005, at a
distance of approximately 910,000 kilometers (570,000 miles) from
Dione, 1.28 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Epimetheus and
1.42 million kilometers (880,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale is
5 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel on Dione and 9 kilometers (6 miles) per
pixel on Epimetheus.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science
Institute.
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
18
Today we celebrate the 380th birthday of Giovanni Domenico Cassini. Born
June 8, 1625, Cassini was the first to observe four of Saturn's moons and
discovered what is now known as the Cassini Division in Saturn's rings.
Check out the Cassini web site at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov for the latest press
releases and images.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the
Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate,
Washington, DC. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter.
Additional articles on this subject are available at:
http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050619pandora.html
http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050619fring.html
http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/saturn_ripply_fring.html
DEEP IMPACT UPDATES
Multiple agencies' releases
Extracts from Deep News
20 June 2005
Encounter is less than one month away and as the spacecraft and Comet
Tempel 1 approach each other, the project team makes last minute
preparations for an evening of celestial fireworks as we make, for the first
time ever, a deep crater in a comet to see what is beneath the surface. If you
want to know more about the Deep Impact mission, take a look at
http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov or http://deepimpact.umd.edu.
Comet Tempel 1, the Deep Impact target, observed from the 2.1-m
telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. This image was
obtained on April 11, 2005, when the comet was near its closest
approach to the Earth. A pinkish dust jet is visible to the southwest,
with the broader neutral gas coma (CN, shown in blue) surrounding it.
North is up, East is to the left, and the field of view is about 80,000 km
(50,000 miles) wide. The Sun was almost directly behind the observer
at this time. The red, green and blue bars in the background are stars
that moved between the individual images. This pseudo-color picture
was created by combining three black and white images obtained with
different filters. The images were obtained with the HB Narrowband
Comet Filters, using CN (3870 A - shown in blue), C2 (5140 A - shown
in green) and RC (7128 A - shown in red). The CN and C2 filters
capture different gas species (along with the underlying dust) while the
RC filter captures just the dust. The images were obtained by Dr. Tony
Farnham and Matthew Knight (University of Maryland).
The Deep Impact mission is a partnership among the University of Maryland
(UMD), the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(JPL) and Ball Aerospace and Technology Corp (BATC). Deep Impact is a
NASA Discovery mission, eighth in a series of low-cost, highly focused space
science investigations. See http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov or our mirror site at
http://deepimpact.umd.edu.
Deep Impact: getting to the heart of a comet with Europe's contribution
ESA release 33-2005, 21 June 2005
Tempel 1 as seen with the medium resolution imager through a clear
filter on May 30, 2005. The spacecraft was 31,184,802.5 km
(19,377,340 miles) from the comet. The image shows Tempel 1 in a
field of background stars where some stars are partially obscured by
the comet's coma. Image credit: NASA/JPL.
One of the latest images from the spacecraft shows that it is drawing closer
and closer to Comet Tempel 1.
View the image at
http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/T1_doy150.html.
While the spacecraft sends images of its approach to Comet Tempel 1,
pictures also come to us from amateur astronomers peering through their
telescopes
on
Earth.
Take
a
look
at
http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/amateur_050601.html. To see other
new images from the spacecraft and ground observation, take a look at the
Deep
Impact
Image
Gallery
(http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/images.html).
On 4 July 2005 at 07:52 CEST (Central European Summer Time), NASA's
Deep Impact mission, launched on 12 January this year, will start exploring a
comet's interior by producing a crater with an impactor spacecraft, allowing
another spacecraft to look deep inside the comet during a fly-by immediately
afterwards. For the first time, it will be possible to study the crust and the
interior of a comet. As the material inside the comet's nucleus is pristine, it
will reveal new information on the early phases of the solar system. This is a
natural precursor to ESA's Rosetta cometary mission, which seeks to perform
the subtler task of orbiting and landing on a comet.
The impact will produce a crater expected to range in size from a house to a
football stadium and reach an unknown depth. Ice and dust debris will be
ejected from the crater, revealing fresh material beneath. Sunlight reflecting
off the ejected material will provide some brightening that will fade as the
debris dissipates into space or falls back onto the comet. Dramatic images of
the impactor spacecraft's final approach and possibly of the impact itself and
of the crater will be sent to Earth in near-real time by both spacecraft.
Several observatories in orbit around Earth and countless Earth-bound
telescopes will work in concert for an unprecedented global observation
campaign to collect a maximum amount of additional data and information on
this event. ESA will use both its Rosetta comet chaser and the XMM/Newton
Observatory to observe the impact. ESA's 1-meter OGS telescope on Tenerife
(Canary Islands, Spain) will be used for observations from the ground. The
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
19
NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope will also observe the event. The
European Southern Observatory (ESO) will direct all seven telescopes it
operates at the La Silla and Parañal sites in Chile towards the event, amongst
them the Earth's currently most powerful and highest-resolution instruments in
the infrared and visible wavelength ranges. Initial data from these European
observations will be available on 4 and 5 July, beginning a few hours after the
impact, to enhance the images and information from the Deep Impact
spacecraft itself.
Highlights of the day will be:
4 July 2005
07:15 CEST (05:15 GMT): ESA TV live event (approx 60 minutes) based on
NASA-TV plus studio interviews and inserts, with links to ESO, MPI Lindau
(Rosetta), ESA/ ESAC (XMM/Newton) and
ESA/ESOC (mission
operations).
09:30 CEST (07:30 GMT): ESA TV update on European observations
(approx 20 minutes).
10:00 CEST (08:00 GMT): NASA media briefing, live rebroadcast by ESA
TV (approx 30 minutes).
18:00 CEST (16:00 GMT): ESA TV update with first Hubble image (black
and white) (approx 20 minutes).
20:00 CEST (18:00 GMT): NASA media briefing, live rebroadcast by
ESA TV (approx 30 minutes).
5 July 2005
06:00 CEST (04:00 GMT): ESA TV update with first ESO color images
The live portion of the ESA TV production and the NASA media briefing
(07:15-10:30 CEST) can be watched at various ESA centers and elsewhere in
Europe: ESA/ESOC at Darmstadt (Germany), ESA/ESTEC at Noordwijk (the
Netherlands), ESA/ESRIN at Frascati (Italy), ESA/ESAC at Villafranca
(Spain), La Cité de l'Espace in Toulouse, ESA Headquarters in Paris and Le
Parc-aux-Etoiles at Triel-sur-Seine (France), ESO in Garching, Munich and
PPARC, London. In most places, experts will be available for interviews.
Additional articles on this subject are available at:
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1600.html
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1606.html
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/050615_deepimpact_te
ch.html
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0506/15meteors/
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0506/17deepimpact/
http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/audio_ready_deep_impact.html
http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/first_view_tempel1_nucleus.html
MER UPDATES
NASA/JPL releases
Spirit update: Scenic Stop
Sol 511-517, 17 June 2005
This week Spirit finished examining an area on the rock "Backstay" that was
brushed away with the rock abrasion tool. Using the microscopic imager and
the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, the rover also looked closely at an
undisturbed area on the rock. Spirit then drove away, pulled over to a scenic
overlook to take some high-resolution imaging of "Methuselah," and drove
onward. Spirit's next goal is to drive to the top of the next ridge.
Opportunity update: Examining "Purgatory"
Sol 490-496, 17 June 2005
Opportunity is happy to be moving again and it's heading back to "Purgatory
Dune." The rover's wheels dug wonderful trenches during its egress, and the
science team is eager to get the robotic arm out and have a look at the soil
inside and outside of the tracks. As you can imagine, Opportunity has been
driving very carefully, backing away from the dune, turning around and then
re-approaching it.
The wheels of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity dug more
than 10 centimeters (4 inches) deep into the soft, sandy material of a
wind-shaped ripple in Mars' Meridiani Planum region during the rover's
446th martian day, or sol (April 26, 2005). Getting the rover out of the
ripple, dubbed "Purgatory Dune," required more than five weeks of
planning, testing, and carefully monitored driving. Opportunity used its
navigation camera to capture this look back at the ripple during sol 491
(June 11, 2005), a week after the rover drove safely onto firmer
ground. The ripple that became a sand trap is about one-third meter
(one foot) tall and 2.5 meters (8 feet) wide. Image credit: NASA/JPL.
Read the latest updates at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov.
Additional articles on this subject are available at:
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1605.html
http://www.marsdaily.com/news/mars-mers-05zzq.html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05zzp.html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05zzr.html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05zzs.html
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0506/15merrovers/
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0506/12mersunset/
MARS EXPRESS: SMOOTH DEPLOYMENT FOR SECOND MARSIS
ANTENNA BOOM
ESA release
16 June 2005
The second 20-meter antenna boom of the MARSIS instrument on board Mars
Express was successfully—and smoothly—deployed, confirmed today by the
ground team at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre. The command to
deploy the second MARSIS boom was given to the spacecraft at 13:30 CEST
on 14 June 2005.
Shortly before the deployment started, Mars Express was set into a slow
rotation to last 30 minutes during and after the boom extension. This rotation
allowed all the boom’s hinges to be properly heated by the Sun. Just after, an
autonomous maneuver oriented the spacecraft towards the Sun, to have the
spacecraft recharge its batteries and for a further heating of the hinges.
A first positive sign reached ground in the afternoon of 14 June, at 16:20
CEST, when Mars Express was able to properly re-orient itself and point
towards Earth to transmit data. The data received in the following hours
confirmed that the initial spacecraft behavior was consistent with two fully
and correctly deployed booms and that the deployment had not induced
disturbance frequencies that may have been dangerous for the spacecraft. A
series of tests during the following 48 hours was necessary to verify that the
long boom was successfully locked and that the deployment did not affect the
integrity of the spacecraft systems.
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
The command to deploy the second MARSIS boom was given to the
ESA's Mars Express spacecraft at 13:30 CEST on 14 June 2005.
Shortly before the deployment started, Mars Express was set into a
slow rotation to last 30 minutes during and after the boom extension.
This rotation allowed all the boom’s hinges to be properly heated by
the Sun. Image credit: ESA.
20
This is an impression of how the first two stages of deployment look for
the Mars Express MARSIS experiment. The 13 segments of the first
20-meter boom have sprung out and locked into place, followed by the
second 20-meter boom. Image credit: ESA.
Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA Director General, said, "This is a great success
following some tense moments and careful judgements. The result shows the
power of the teamwork between ESA, European industry and ESA's partners
in the scientific community in Europe and elsewhere."
Contact:
Fred Jansen
ESA Mars Express Mission Manager
E-mail: [email protected]
Read the original news release at
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEMT1T1DU8E_0.html.
Additional articles on this subject are available at:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/marsexpress-05u.html
http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/second_marsis_boom_deployed.ht
ml
MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES
NASA/JPL/MSSS release
9-15 June 2005
Mars Express was set into a slow rotation to last 30 minutes during
and after the boom extension. This rotation allowed all the boom’s
hinges to be properly heated by the Sun. Just after, an autonomous
maneuver oriented the spacecraft towards the Sun, to have the
spacecraft recharge its batteries and for a further heating of the hinges.
Image credit: ESA.
The complete success of the operation was announced today at 14:00 CEST,
when the ground team had completed all tests on the spacecraft systems. This
confirmed that the spacecraft is in optimal shape and under control, with the
second MARSIS boom straight and locked into the correct position. With the
two MARSIS 20-meter radar booms fully deployed, Mars Express is already
in principle capable of "looking" beneath the martian surface, and also
studying its ionosphere (the upper atmosphere).
The third 7-meter
"monopole" boom, to be deployed perpendicularly to the first two booms, will
be used to correct some surface roughness effects on the radio waves emitted
by MARSIS and reflected by the surface. The third boom deployment, not
considered critical because of its orientation and shorter length, will take place
on 17 June 2005. It will be followed by further tests on the spacecraft and the
MARSIS instrument for a few more days.
The radar, with its long booms, will allow Mars Express to continue its search
for water on Mars. By night, it will be used to make soundings for water
below the surface. By day, it will probe the structure of the ionosphere.
The following new images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the
Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are now available.
Daedalia Flow (Released 09 June 2006)
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/06/09
Inverted Channels (Released 10 June 2006)
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/06/10
Arabian Dunes (Released 11 June 2006)
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/06/11
Bouldery Impact (Released 12 June 2006)
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/06/12
Windstreaked Plain (Released 13 June 2006)
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/06/13
Mars at Ls 230 Degrees (Released 14 June 2006)
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/06/14
Olympica Fossae Landforms (Released 15 June 2006)
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/06/15
All of the Mars Global Surveyor images
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/index.html.
are
archived
at
Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 21, 21 June 2005
Mars Global Surveyor was launched in November 1996 and has been in Mars
orbit since September 1997. It began its primary mapping mission on March
8, 1999. Mars Global Surveyor is the first mission in a long-term program of
Mars exploration known as the Mars Surveyor Program that is managed by
JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. Malin Space
Science Systems (MSSS) and the California Institute of Technology built the
MOC using spare hardware from the Mars Observer mission. MSSS operates
the camera from its facilities in San Diego, CA. The Jet Propulsion
Laboratory's Mars Surveyor Operations Project operates the Mars Global
Surveyor spacecraft with its industrial partner, Lockheed Martin Astronautics,
from facilities in Pasadena, CA and Denver, CO.
MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES
NASA/JPL/ASU release
13-17 June 2005
Arsia Mons Mosaic (Released 13 June 2005)
http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050613A.html
Arsia Mons Caldera (Released 14 June 2005)
http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050614a.html
Arsia Mons Caldera Rim (Released 15 June 2005)
http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050615a.html
Arsia Mons Flank (Released 16 June 2005)
http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050616a.html
Collapse Features on Arsia Mons (Released 17 June 2005)
http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050617a.html
All of the THEMIS images are archived at http://themis.la.asu.edu/latest.html.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission
for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. The Thermal
Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) was developed by Arizona State
University, Tempe, in collaboration with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote
Sensing. The THEMIS investigation is led by Dr. Philip Christensen at
Arizona State University. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the
prime contractor for the Odyssey project, and developed and built the orbiter.
Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
ROSETTA MONITORS DEEP IMPACT
ESA release
20 June 2005
ESA’s comet chaser Rosetta will take part in one of the world’s largest
astronomical observation campaigns—the Deep Impact event—while on its
cruise to Comet 69P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta will be watching
from 29 June to 14 July 2005. Deep Impact is a NASA mission to send a 370
kg copper "impactor" probe to Comet 9P/Tempel 1 on 4 July 2005. Tempel 1
is a short-period comet, whose orbit runs between those of Mars and Jupiter.
There is scientific interest in comets because their composition carries
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important information about the origin of the Solar System, as they have
remained basically unchanged since then.
Rosetta, with its set of very sensitive instruments for cometary investigations,
will use its capabilities to observe Tempel 1 before, during and after the
impact. At a distance of about 80 million kilometers from the comet, which
will be lying about 90 degrees from the Sun, Rosetta will be in the most
privileged position to observe the event from space. The observing geometry
will be favorable for observations with Rosetta’s microwave spectrometer,
MIRO, and the VIRTIS visual and IR mapping spectrometer. MIRO will
concentrate on the chemical composition and temperature of the gas. VIRTIS
will analyze thermal emission by the comet to determine the composition of
the dust ejected, and thus reveal the comet’s mineralogy.
In addition, Rosetta will be the spacecraft carrying the best available
ultraviolet instrument, ALICE, to monitor the event. ALICE will analyze the
gas coming from the impact and tell about its chemical composition. The
Rosetta OSIRIS imaging system will also provide images of the comet’s
nucleus from a far-away distance. Scientists also hope to make a 3D
reconstruction of the dust cloud around the comet by combining the OSIRIS
images with those taken from ground observatories.
Rosetta’s observations will provide a unique data set complementary to the
observations from the Deep Impact spacecraft and the ground-based
telescopes. Before impact, Rosetta will observe Tempel 1 during three full
rotations of the comet around its axis. This allows characterizing the
variations of the comet’s state over rotation and time, and preparing for the
observations during and after impact. Rosetta will look at the comet
continuously. In the initial phase (starting on 29 June 01:34 CEST), when the
comet is expected to change only slowly due to its rotation, Rosetta will take
the time to study or "dwell" on several areas on the coma of Tempel 1. About
fifteen minutes before impact (due about 07:52 CEST), Rosetta will start
observing the comet with shorter dwell time, as fast changes are expected due
to the impact. At 09:19, about one hour and a half after impact, Rosetta will
go back to the monitoring mode as before the impact for 10 more days.
Rosetta will contribute to the major objectives of the Deep Impact mission.
The spacecraft’s instruments will measure the composition of the crater and
its ejected material—a cloud of dust and gas cloud expected to expand and
reach its maximum brightness about 10 hours after impact. Rosetta will also
monitor the changes in the natural outgassing of the comet following the
impact. With these observations, Rosetta may also help to confirm if the
impact has permanently triggered new activity on the comet.
Contact:
Gerhard Schwehm, ESA Rosetta Project Scientist
E-mail: [email protected]
An additional article on this subject is available at
http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/rosetta_set_deep_impact.html.
End Marsbugs, Volume 12, Number 21.