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Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 12, Number 22, 29 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. Articles and News Announcements Page 1 BACTERIA ABLE TO CARRY OUT PHOTOSYNTHESIS IN OCEAN DEPTHS By Skip Derra Page 10 JOIN THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR GRAVITATIONAL AND SPACE BIOLOGY By Paul Todd Page 2 RUSSIA PLANS TWO NEW MISSIONS TO MARS From United Press International and SpaceDaily Page 10 ABSTRACT DEADLINE APPROACHING FOR MARS SOCIETY CONVENTION Mars Society release Page 2 NASA'S HUBBLE CHASES UNRULY PLANET NASA release 05-158 Page 11 NATIONAL MARS EDUCATION CONFERENCE NASA/JPL/ASU release ELUSIVE EARTHS By Henry Bortman Page 12 NASA FUNDS SPACE RADIATION RESEARCH PROPOSALS NASA release 05-168 Page 3 Page 4 SETTING SETI'S SIGHTS II: ABODES FOR LIFE? By Douglas Vakoch Page 4 DETOUR: PLANETARY CONSTRUCTION ZONE AHEAD Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics release Page 12 CASSINI UPDATES NASA/JPL releases A FORCE FIELD FOR ASTRONAUTS? By Patrick L. Barry Page 15 DEEP IMPACT UPDATES Multiple agencies' releases Page 18 MARS EXPRESS RADAR READY TO WORK ESA release 34-2005 Page 19 MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release Page 19 MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release Page 20 MARS RECONNAISSANCE ORBITER STATUS NASA expendable launch vehicle status report E05-04 Mission Reports Page 5 Page 7 TULIPS ON THE MOON—MOON BASE TO EXPAND LIFE FROM EARTH By Bernard Foing Page 7 COLORFUL CHLOROPHYLL AROUND MARQUISES ISLANDS NASA Earth Observatory release Page 8 LIFE DETECTION INSTRUMENT PASSES KEY TEST ON ROAD TO MARS By Robert Sanders Page 9 MARS IN POP CULTURE: FILM By David Catling BACTERIA ABLE TO CARRY OUT PHOTOSYNTHESIS IN OCEAN DEPTHS By Skip Derra Arizona State University release 20 June 2005 A team of researchers, including a photosynthesis expert from ASU, has found evidence of photosynthesis taking place deep within the Pacific Ocean. The team found a bacterium that is the first photosynthetic organism that doesn't live off sunlight but from the dim light coming from hydrothermal vents nearly 2,400 meters (7,875 feet) deep in the ocean. The discovery of the green sulfur bacteria living near hydrothermal vents off the coast of Mexico has significant implications for the resiliency of life on Earth—and possibly on other planets, says Robert Blankenship, a member of the research team and professor and chair of ASU's chemistry and biochemistry department. "Life finds a way," Blankenship says of the plucky bacteria that were found in a vent field called 9 North off the coast of Mexico. The bacteria apparently live in the razor-thin interface between the extremely hot water (350 degrees Celsius, or 662 degrees Fahrenheit) coming from a flange vent and the very cold water (2 degrees Celsius, or about 36 degrees Fahrenheit) surrounding it. The research team is led by J. Thomas Beatty of the University of British Columbia, located in Vancouver, British Columbia. They published their discovery in an article titled "An obligately photosynthetic bacterial anaerobe from a deep sea hydrothermal vent," in the June 20 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In addition to Blankenship and Beatty, team members are Jörg Overmann and Ann Manske, University of Munich, Germany; Michael Lince, ASU; Andrew Lang, University of British Columbia and University of Alaska, Fairbanks; Cindy Van Dover, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA; Tracey Martinson, University of Alaska, Fairbanks; and F. Gerald Plumley, University of Alaska, Fairbanks and the Bermuda Biological Station for Research, St. George's, Bermuda. The team collected water samples around the hydrothermal vents of 9 North and surrounding areas. From the samples near the vents, they cultivated a microbe that grew in response to illumination near the thermal vents. By using DNA analysis, the team classified the microbe as a member of the green sulfur bacteria family, which use light and sulfur to obtain energy. The fact that the organism is obligate means it solely relies on photosynthesis to live. Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 "This is startling in the sense that you do not expect to find photosynthesis in a region of the world that is so completely dark," Blankenship says. Sunlight can penetrate 100 meters to 200 meters (about 330 feet to 660 feet) into the ocean, slowly dimming as the depth increases. Because these organisms live nearly 2,400 meters below the surface—almost 1.5 miles down—the team believes they must be getting light from the hydrothermal vent near where they were found. "These organisms are the champions of low-light photosynthesis," Blankenship says. "These guys have the most elaborate and sophisticated antenna system, which we have studied for a long time in organisms that are relatives of the one discovered near the vents." Blankenship says the antenna system of the bacteria uses a chlorosome complex, which basically acts like a microscopic satellite dish, to efficiently collect any light it can and transfer it to the organism's reaction center. The reaction center is where the photosynthesis takes place. Blankenship says this discovery is important on two different levels. One is what it means to life on Earth; the other is what it means about where to look for life forms on other planets. 2 NASA'S HUBBLE CHASES UNRULY PLANET NASA release 05-158 22 June 2005 A detailed image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope offers the strongest evidence yet that an unruly and unseen planet may be gravitationally tugging on a dusty ring around the nearby star Fomalhaut (HD 216956). The most detailed visible light image ever taken of a narrow, dusty ring unequivocally shows the center is a whopping 1.4 billion miles away from the star; a distance nearly halfway across our solar system. The most plausible explanation is an unseen planet, moving in an elliptical orbit, is reshaping the ring with its gravitational pull. The geometrically striking ring, tilted toward Earth, would not have such a great offset if it were only being influenced by Fomalhaut's gravity. An offset of the ring center from the star has been inferred from previous lower resolution submillimeter wavelength telescope observations; and by applying theoretical modeling and physical assumptions. Hubble's sharp images directly reveal the ring's offset from Fomalhaut. The observations provide strong evidence at least one unseen planetary mass object is orbiting the star. If the orbiting object were larger than a planet, such as a brown dwarf star, Hubble would have detected it. "This shows that photosynthesis is something that is not limited only to the very surface of our planet," he says. "It lets you consider other places where you might find photosynthesis on Earth, as well as on other planets." For example, Europa, a planet-sized satellite of Jupiter, long has been thought to have some of the necessary attributes to harbor life. But it is far too distant from the Sun for traditional forms of photosynthesis. It is believed that under the ice-covered surface of Europa are liquid oceans—and at the bottom of those oceans it is speculated there might be very hot thermal vents. Those vents could harbor the potential for spawning photosynthetic organisms. "This find shows us that there is this ability of organisms to survive and live in areas that we wouldn't have imagined possible, and that life is much stronger than what we realized," Blankenship says. "This is just one example of life in extreme environments." Journal reference: J. Thomas Beatty et al., 2005. An obligately photosynthetic bacterial anaerobe from a deep-sea hydrothermal vent. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 102(26):9306-9310, http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/102/26/9306. Contact: Skip Derra ASU Marketing & Strategic Communications Phone: 480-965-4823 E-mail: [email protected] Read the original news release at http://www.asu.edu/news/research/ocean_bacteria_062005.htm. An additional article on this subject is available at: http://cl.exct.net/?ffcd16-fe541674706d0d757314-fe28167073670175701c72 RUSSIA PLANS TWO NEW MISSIONS TO MARS From United Press International and SpaceDaily 20 June 2005 Russian space officials said Monday they are preparing two unmanned missions to Mars before 2015. Georgy Polischuk, director general and designer general of the Lavochkin production and science association, was quoted by the Interfax-AVN news agency as saying the first mission is scheduled for October 2009. A research craft will orbit Mars, and then a rover will be dropped on the surface of Phobos—one of the tiny twin martian moons, to collect soil samples to return to Earth. The second mission is intended to land on Mars to conduct various experiments, he added. "Our new images confirm those earlier hypotheses that proposed a planet was perturbing the ring," said astronomer Paul Kalas of the University of California at Berkeley. The ring is similar to our solar system's Kuiper Belt, a vast reservoir of icy material left over from the formation of our solar system planets." The ring's inner edge is sharper than its outer edge, a telltale sign that an object is gravitationally sweeping out material like a plow clearing away snow. Another classic signature of a planet's influence is the ring's relatively narrow width, about 2.3 billion miles. Without an object to gravitationally keep the ring material intact, the particles would spread out much wider. The suspected planet may be orbiting far away from Fomalhaut, inside the dust ring's inner edge, between 4.7 billion and 6.5 billion miles from the star. The ring is approximately 12 billion miles from Fomalhaut, much farther than our outermost planet Pluto is from the sun. These observations do not directly detect the planet, so astronomers cannot measure its mass. They will use computer simulations of the ring's dynamics to estimate its mass. Read the full article at http://www.marsdaily.com/news/mars-future-05o.html. Fomalhaut, a 200-million-year-old star, is a mere infant compared to our own 4.5-billion-year-old sun. It is 25 light-years from the sun in the constellation Piscis Austrinus (the Southern Fish). The Fomalhaut ring is 10-times as old as debris disks previously seen around the stars AU Microscopii and Beta Pictoris, where planets may still be forming. If our solar system is any Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 example, planets should have formed around Fomalhaut within tens of millions of years after the birth of the star. 3 Contacts: Dolores Beasley NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1753 Susan Hendrix NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD Phone: 301-286-7745 Donna Weaver Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD Phone: 410-338-4493 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1613.html http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/06/22_exoplanet.shtml http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050622_fomalhaut.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/extrasolar-05zg.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/extrasolar_planet_reshapes_ring.ht ml ELUSIVE EARTHS By Henry Bortman From Astrobiology Magazine 22 June 2005 "The size of Fomalhaut's dust ring suggests not all planetary systems form and evolve in the same way—planetary architectures can be quite different from star to star," Kalas said. "While Fomalhaut's ring is analogous to the Kuiper Belt, its diameter is four times greater." Kalas and his collaborators used Hubble over a five-month period in 2004 to map the ring's structure. They used the Advanced Camera for Surveys' (ACS) coronagraph to block out light from the bright star, so they could see details in the faint ring. One side of the faint ring has yet to be imaged, because it extended beyond the ACS field of view. Astronomers plan to map the entire ring later this summer. Geoff Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Center for integrative Planetary Science, leads a team of planet-hunters credited with the discovery of more than 100 planets that orbit nearby stars. At a recent symposium on extrasolar planets, Marcy spoke with Astrobiology Magazine Managing Editor Henry Bortman about recent discoveries and the likelihood of finding other solar systems like our own. Astrobiology Magazine (AM): You've found Jupiter- or Neptune-mass planets orbiting about 6.5 percent of the 1300 stars you've been monitoring in your radial-velocity survey. Almost all of these planets are closer to their host stars than Jupiter is to our own Sun. I know you need to see a planet's complete orbit to figure out its mass and its distance from its star. By now, though, I would imagine you have some strong hints about how many of the remaining stars have Jupiters or Saturns farther out from their stars. What kinds of indications are you getting about the prevalence of giant planets? Geoff Marcy (GM): Something like 5 percent of the remaining stars show a velocity variation, which has to be due to a companion. But even if we see a linear or near-linear velocity increase, followed by a decrease, you still don't know what the orbital period is, because it could go for decades before it comes back up again. You might have caught it near the top, and now you're catching it going over the top, but it could go down for 3 decades or more. So, sadly, we can't really constrain the orbital period or the mass of a planet, or even know whether it is a planet, based on an incomplete orbit. Most of them probably are planets. They're probably a Jupiter mass, or a little bit more, out at 5 AUs or 10 AUs or 15 AUs, where the orbital period is 10 or 20 or 30 years. So, as we all would have guessed as children, there probably is a population of Jupiters sitting out there at Jupiter and Saturn-like distances, but we just haven't watched them long enough to confirm that. That's what's happening with many of our planets. We first caught them on the rise, then they hooked over. We kept taking data, and now they've come back around. Once the orbit closes, that's when we publish a paper. So we've learned that, with patience, they all become full orbits after a while. Kalas and collaborators, James Graham of the University of California at Berkeley and Mark Clampin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, findings appear in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature. For information about the research on the Web, visit http://hubblesite.org/news/2005/10. For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html. Journal reference: Paul Kalas, James R. Graham and Mark Clampin, 2005. A planetary system as the origin of structure in Fomalhaut's dust belt. Nature, 435(7045):10671070, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7045/abs/nature03601.html. AM: So when all of these orbits have closed, you estimate that you'll end up with about double the number of giant planets that you have now, that roughly 12 percent of the stars will have giant planets? GM: Yeah. Right now 6.5 percent of our stars have Jupiters and Saturns. That's a done deal. But if you just mildly extrapolate to these longer-period ones, it's probably 12 percent, out to say 20 AUs. So something like 12 percent of all stars have a Jupiter or a Saturn like our own, that is to say, roughly the same mass, in a solar-system-like orbit. On the other hand, 85 percent of the stars don't have a Jupiter or a Saturn, which I think is interesting to note. Some of the planetary systems clearly don't have giant planets. Maybe they don't have any planets. But we can rule out the giant planets. Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 AM: What about Neptune-mass planets? GM: We have just found the first three Neptune-class planets, with minimum masses of 15, 18, and 21 Earth-masses. They orbit 55 Cancri, HD 190360, and Gliese 436. For comparison, our Neptune has 17 Earth-masses. Most remarkably, we also found a planet with a likely mass of only 7 Earth-masses, orbiting the star Gliese 876. This planet is probably rocky, a "super-Earth" with a radius only twice that of our Earth. So we have found the first planets that resemble the terrestrial planets in our Solar Systems, albeit larger. AM: So you know for certain that some 85 percent of your stars don't have a Jupiter or a Saturn. But you can't tell yet whether most of them have a Neptune or only a handful do? GM: Empirically you're right. Of the 85 percent that show definitively they don't have a Jupiter or a Saturn, they could have Neptunes, they could have Earths, and so on. But we have no information. If you wanted my guess, any star that's reasonably isolated—single stars, or stars that have a distant stellar companion—almost certainly had a protoplanetary disk around it when it was young, and those disks almost have to make planets. This is a guess, so put a red flag about what I'm about to say. Based on theory, the guess would be that protoplanetary disks did exist around virtually all of the stars that we currently don't see any planets around at all. Those stars probably have Neptunes and Earths. If you had to bet, you'd bet there are Earth-size, Venussize, Mars-size, maybe even Neptune-size planets around 80 percent of all the stars, 90 percent, maybe even virtually all of them. It's hard to avoid it. If I may just elaborate, because it's a very exciting issue for astrobiology and the prevalence of Earths in the galaxy: the only way a star can form is by gas accreting onto the star, and it does so conserving angular momentum, creating a disk. And then the viscosity of that disk drains the material onto the star. So almost every star must have had a protoplanetary disk for a few million years. And therefore, it almost certainly must have made Earths. Why would some disks make Earths and Jupiters and others not? So, the odds are that our non-detections, the 85 percent of the stars that haven't yet shown planets still have lower-mass planets. That would be the bet, without any evidence. AM: What about orbital eccentricity? The planets in our solar system have nearly circular orbits. But that doesn't appear to be true of the planets around other stars. Most of them have eccentric orbits. GM: To me, that's the most dramatic discovery of all that we've learned about extrasolar planets. And the anthropocentric surprise is that of the 104 extrasolar planets that my team has discovered, 90 percent of them have eccentricities, elongations of the orbits, greater than those seen among the planets in our own solar system. And most of them are much greater: 0.25 is the average eccentricity. By comparison, Jupiter has an eccentricity of 0.05. AM: What does a 0.25 eccentricity look like? GM: If you take the average distance of a planet from its star, the eccentricity determines how close in it comes and how far out it goes. A 0.25 eccentricity brings the planet in 25 percent closer than its average, and it swings the planet out 25 percent farther than its average. Most of the comets have eccentricities of 0.8 or 0.9. Halley's comet has eccentricity of 0.97. They're way eccentric. AM: You said you were studying about 1300 stars. Does that include many M dwarfs? GM: We have 150 of these low-mass M-dwarf stars on our survey. We've been watching them for 3 or 4 years. Of the 150, only 2 of them have shown planets: Gilese 436, which has a Neptune that we recently discovered; and Gilese 876, which has 3 planets (including the 7 Earth-mass one), with orbital periods of 30, 60, and 1.9 days. Two out of 150 is a low occurrence rate, relative to the Sun-like stars. So the early suggestion—and it's more than a suggestion—is that the low-mass stars, the M dwarfs, have fewer Jupiters and Saturns in orbits comparable to those that we seen in the solar-type stars. Because we would have seen them if the M dwarfs had them. Now you could argue that maybe M dwarfs have plenty of Jupiters and Saturns, but they orbit so far away that we haven't detected them yet. I suspect not. Much more likely, and I don't think I'm grasping too far—one or two theorists have looked into this—is that low-mass stars formed out of lowmass molecular cloud cores, in turn making low-mass protoplanetary disks. So it really isn't much of a surprise, in retrospect, that low-mass stars would be associated with lower-mass planets, Neptune-mass or lower. One 4 theoretical paper has suggested that the mass of the planets would be roughly proportional to the mass of the host star. So M dwarfs, being a third of a solar mass, might only make Saturns and below. AM: You said that your guess is that planets are likely to form around most stars. Let me ask you to speculate further. How likely do you think habitable planets are? GM: That's harder, and of course, I'm asked that a lot. You know, the problem is that the properties of a planet that render it habitable are still under fairly serious debate. There was the book, Rare Earth, that raised a number issues, and there are other issues about habitability that are still being learned. How stable does the rotation axis have to be? The orbit probably has to be circular enough that liquid water would persist for a long time. So what fraction of earthlike planets would be in circular enough orbits that liquid water could persist for billions of years? There's the question of a carbon cycle that allows greenhouse effects to remain stable, and so on. These are issues that are just not well understood. So I don't think anybody knows. If I were to articulate our lack of knowledge, if earthlike planets form near 1 AU, 50 percent of them retain their liquid water, making oceans and lakes, and they're habitable by the definitions that we suggest. It could also be that it's one in a million. I think it's fair to argue the other end of the spectrum: that retention of liquid water, stably, not freezing or vaporizing, for a few billion years, to let Darwinian evolution do its thing and create creatures that can write cello concertos—that kind of stability could be a rarity. I don't think anybody can speak intelligently about the fraction of rocky planets at 1 AU that might retain liquid water. In fact, there's even a firstorder question, which is, "How many rocky planets even have the amount of liquid water that we have on the Earth?" Too much and you have a water world. Too little and it gets absorbed into the silicates, hydrated rocks, and you don't have any liquid water on the surface. We have a rather special amount of liquid water on the Earth. It gives us oceans that have enough thermal inertia to remain liquid and maintain stable temperature. So I think we're not in a good position right now to make an educated guess about whether habitable worlds are around 50 percent of all the stars, or 1 in a million. It could be either way, as far as I can tell. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1611.html. SETTING SETI'S SIGHTS II: ABODES FOR LIFE? By Douglas Vakoch From Space.com 23 June 2005 With the latest discovery of a "Super-Earth" around a dim, red star 15 light years from Earth, SETI scientists have been pondering the implications for their search for intelligence on other worlds. "This planet answers an ancient question," said Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and leader of the team that discovered the planet, which is seven to eight times the mass of Earth. "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." Team member Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington emphasized the similarity between this most recently detected planet, located around an M star called Gliese 876, and our own world. "This is the smallest extrasolar planet yet detected and the first of a new class of rocky terrestrial planets," he explained. "It's like Earth's bigger cousin." Read the full article at http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_newplanet2_050623.html. DETOUR: PLANETARY CONSTRUCTION ZONE AHEAD Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics release 24 June 2005 Interstellar travelers might want to detour around the star system TW Hydrae to avoid a messy planetary construction site. Astronomer David Wilner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and his colleagues have discovered that the gaseous protoplanetary disk surrounding TW Hydrae holds vast swaths of pebbles extending outward for at least 1 billion miles. These Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 rocky chunks should continue to grow in size as they collide and stick together until they eventually form planets. "We're seeing planet building happening right before our eyes," said Wilner. "The foundation has been laid and now the building materials are coming together to make a new solar system." 5 Located about 180 light-years away in the constellation Hydra the Water Snake, TW Hydrae consists of a 10 million-year-old star about four-fifths as massive as the Sun. The protoplanetary disk surrounding TW Hydrae contains about one-tenth as much material as the Sun—more than enough to form one or more Jupiter-sized worlds. "TW Hydrae is unique," said Wilner. "It's nearby, and it's just the right age to be forming planets. We'll be studying it for decades to come." Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, 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. Journal reference: D. J. Wilner, P. D'Alessio, N. Calvet, M. J. Claussen and L. Hartmann, 2005. Toward planetesimals in the disk around TW Hydrae: 3.5 centimeter dust emission. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 626:L109-L112, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/journal/issues/ApJL/v626n2/19374/bri ef/19374.abstract.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] Christine Pulliam Public Affairs Specialist Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Phone: 617-495-7463 Fax: 617-495-7016 E-mail: [email protected] Read the original news release at http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/pr0521.html. The star system TW Hydrae, shown here in an artist's conception, possesses a protoplanetary disk holding vast numbers of pebble-sized rocky chunks. Those pebbles eventually should grow to become fullsized planets. Image credit: Bill Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF). Wilner used the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array to measure radio emissions from TW Hydrae. He detected radiation from a cold, extended dust disk suffused with centimeter-sized pebbles. Such pebbles are a prerequisite for planet formation, created as dust collects together into larger and larger clumps. Over millions of years, those clumps grow into planets. "We're seeing an important step on the path from interstellar dust particles to planets," said Mark Claussen (NRAO), a co-author on the paper announcing the discovery. "No one has seen this before." Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1615.html http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2005/twhydrae/ http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050624_planet_construction.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/extrasolar-05zi.html http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0506/25planetary/ http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/planets_under_construction.html. A FORCE FIELD FOR ASTRONAUTS? By Patrick L. Barry From NASA Science News 24 June 2005 Opposite charges attract. Like charges repel. It's the first lesson of electromagnetism and, someday, it could save the lives of astronauts. A dusty disk like that in TW Hydrae tends to emit radio waves with wavelengths similar to the size of the particles in the disk. Other effects can mask this, however. In TW Hydrae, the astronomers explained, both the relatively close distance of the system and the stage of the young star's evolution are just right to allow the relationship of particle size and wavelength to prevail. The scientists observed the young star's disk with the VLA at several centimeter-range wavelengths. NASA's Vision for Space Exploration calls for a return to the Moon as preparation for even longer journeys to Mars and beyond. But there's a potential showstopper: radiation. Space beyond low-Earth orbit is awash with intense radiation from the Sun and from deep galactic sources such as supernovas. Astronauts en route to the Moon and Mars are going to be exposed to this radiation, increasing their risk of getting cancer and other maladies. Finding a good shield is important. "The strong emission at wavelengths of a few centimeters is convincing evidence that particles of about the same size are present," Claussen said. The most common way to deal with radiation is simply to physically block it, as the thick concrete around a nuclear reactor does. But making spaceships from concrete is not an option. (Interestingly, it might be possible to build a moonbase from a concrete mixture of moondust and water, if water can be found on the Moon, but that's another story.) NASA scientists are investigating many radiation-blocking materials such as aluminum, advanced plastics and liquid hydrogen. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Not only does TW Hydrae show evidence of ongoing planet formation, it also shows signs that at least one giant planet may have formed already. Wilner's colleague, Nuria Calvet (CfA), has created a computer simulation of the disk around TW Hydrae using previously published infrared observations. She showed that a gap extends from the star out to a distance of about 400 million miles—similar to the distance to the asteroid belt in our solar system. The gap likely formed when a giant planet sucked up all the nearby material, leaving a hole in the middle of the disk. This research was published in the June 20, 2005, issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Those are all physical solutions. There is another possibility, one with no physical substance but plenty of shielding power: a force field. Most of the dangerous radiation in space consists of electrically charged particles: high-speed electrons and protons from the Sun, and massive, Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 positively charged atomic nuclei from distant supernovas. Like charges repel. So why not protect astronauts by surrounding them with a powerful electric field that has the same charge as the incoming radiation, thus deflecting the radiation away? 6 sit statically on the spheres), not much power would be needed to maintain the charge. The spheres would be made of a thin, strong fabric (such as Vectran, which was used for the landing balloons that cushioned the impact for the Mars Exploration Rovers) and coated with a very thin layer of a conductor such as gold. The fabric spheres could be folded up for transport and then inflated by simply loading them with an electric charge; the like charges of the electrons in the gold layer repel each other and force the sphere to expand outward. Supernovae create dangerous radiation. Image credit: FORS Team, 8.2-meter VLT, ESO. Many experts are skeptical that electric fields can be made to protect astronauts. But Charles Buhler and John Lane, both scientists with ASRC Aerospace Corporation at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, believe it can be done. They've received support from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, whose job is to fund studies of far-out ideas, to investigate the possibility of electric shields for lunar bases. "Using electric fields to repel radiation was one of the first ideas back in the 1950s, when scientists started to look at the problem of protecting astronauts from radiation," Buhler says. "They quickly dropped the idea, though, because it seemed like the high voltages needed and the awkward designs that they thought would be necessary (for example, putting the astronauts inside two concentric metal spheres) would make such an electric shield impractical." How the voltage would vary above a lunar base for the sphere configuration shown above. You can learn more about this and other configurations in the report, "Analysis of a Lunar Base Electrostatic Radiation Shield Concept." http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/ final_report/921Buhler.pdf. Placing the spheres far overhead would reduce the danger of astronauts touching them. By carefully choosing the arrangement of the spheres, scientists can maximize their effectiveness at repelling radiation while minimizing their impact on astronauts and equipment at the ground. In some designs, in fact, the net electric field at ground level is zero, thus alleviating any potential health risks from these strong electric fields. Buhler and Lane are still searching for the best arrangement: Part of the challenge is that radiation comes as both positively and negatively charged particles. The spheres must be arranged so that the electric field is, say, negative far above the base (to repel negative particles) and positive closer to the ground (to repel the positive particles). "We've already simulated three geometries that might work," says Buhler. Artist’s concept of an electrostatic radiation shield, consisting of positively charged inner spheres and negatively charged outer spheres. The screen net is connected to ground. Image courtesy of ASRC Aerospace. Buhler and Lane's approach is different. In their concept, a lunar base would have a half dozen or so inflatable, conductive spheres about 5 meters across mounted above the base. The spheres would then be charged up to a very high static-electrical potential: 100 megavolts or more. This voltage is very large but because there would be very little current flowing (the charge would Portable designs might even be mounted onto "moon buggy" lunar rovers to offer protection for astronauts as they explore the surface, Buhler imagines. It sounds wonderful, but there are many scientific and engineering problems yet to be solved. For example, skeptics note that an electrostatic shield on the Moon is susceptible to being short circuited by floating moondust, which is itself charged by solar ultraviolet radiation. Solar wind blowing across the shield can cause problems, too. Electrons and protons in the wind could become trapped by the maze of forces that make up the shield, leading to Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 strong and unintended electrical currents right above the heads of the astronauts. The research is still preliminary, Buhler stresses. Moondust, solar wind and other problems are still being investigated. It may be that a different kind of shield would work better, for instance, a superconducting magnetic field. These wild ideas have yet to sort themselves out. But, who knows, perhaps one day astronauts on the Moon and Mars will work safely, protected by a simple principle of electromagnetism even a child can understand. Read the original article at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/24jun_electrostatics.htm. TULIPS ON THE MOON—MOON BASE TO EXPAND LIFE FROM EARTH By Bernard Foing From Astrobiology Magazine 27 June 2005 Bernard Foing, Chief Scientist at the European Space Agency, is also Project Scientist for SMART-1, a spacecraft now orbiting the Moon. SMART-1 is currently mapping the lunar surface topography and mineralogy, and scientists hope this information will lead to new insights about the Moon's evolution. In this essay, Bernard Foing ponders what steps will need to be taken to establish future human bases on the Moon. The Moon has one-sixth of Earth's gravity and no atmosphere, but the difficulties of living there could be eased by something as beautiful and delicate as a flower. 7 I believe what is important, for the return of humans to the Moon, is to learn how to develop life on the Moon. It's a different environment, exposed to high levels of radiation, so we have to be careful. We could bring some bacterial colonies to the Moon to see how they would adapt or mutate. We have developed a concept of a small life science prototype to learn how such life would adapt. We named our miniature life support demonstrator the First Extraterrestrial Man Made Ecosystem, or FEMME. That doesn't mean we want to send only women to the Moon, but we want a few! Hopefully we'll have the first woman on the Moon, it's about time. Another step is to bring some plant life communities to the Moon. And what is more beautiful in terms of life communities than a flower? A flower is not a single system. A flower is a host to a series of organisms. So it is just like a microorganism biosphere that you could bring to another planet. And also, symbolically, pictorially, a flower has a strong meaning. We are collaborating with botanical groups in Ukraine and the Netherlands, looking at very resistant plant forms. We have to start with a plant that can survive the trip. Because I live in Holland, and I cross the tulip fields on my way to work, I thought tulips could be a nice example. You can freeze a bulb. You can sterilize it. You can transfer it to the Moon and then, with sufficient water, some heat, and an artificial CO2 atmosphere, you could see the flower grow. I have some colleagues developing very miniature cameras. So I want to see, day after day, this flower grow. We could set up the camera to show Earth in the background, showing in three dimensions how we are bringing life from Earth to another planet. We are thinking about other kinds of flowers or plants that could be brought to the Moon as a sophisticated life science experiment. For instance, we are looking at various ornamental plants, to help provide psychological comfort to the astronauts. Seeing these plants grow could make them happy, because they would see life developing in the lunar desert. The Moon is a great laboratory to learn how to expand Earth life to another planet. That is because the Moon is a part of the Earth. 4.5 billion years ago, an asteroid collision with Earth caused expelled material to form the Moon. We don't believe there is any indigenous life on the Moon. We have to eventually revisit that, because if there are some polar ice deposits, there may be organic contaminants coming from comets. Short episodes during subsequent impacts might warm and process this ice and organic mixture. But besides that, most of the Moon is barren and dry, so it's a good place to try to turn a desert into an oasis. Left: A moon base could be used to expand life from Earth. Image credit: NASA. Center: The Lunar Clementine mission shows the South Pole of the Moon. The permanently shadowed region center showed earlier evidence of meteor cratering and ice never exposed to direct sunlight. Image credit: NASA/DOD Clementine. Right: The view of Earth from the Moon was psychological comfort for Apollo astronauts. Image credit: NASA. Of course, we cannot globally terraform the Moon all at once. We would need to start with an artificial biosphere. It would be a little bit like Las Vegas; when you go into the hotel, you have an artificial domain. You cannot stand it outside, it is too hot. The Moon has no atmosphere, but the soil is rich in minerals. There's about 45 percent of oxygen in the soil, for instance. So we have to learn how to extract resources that we can use later for sustaining these areas. And there are also some resources that can be used for producing energy back on Earth. We are also involved in activities to grow plants in a greenhouse—to grow salad and other foods for the diet—so astronauts could start living off the land. To do this, we need to learn how to recycle some of the water and nutrients. The European Space Agency's MELISSA project (Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative) uses different compartments to recycle wastes from animals, and from this we can grow algae. Another very interesting plant to grow on the Moon is called Arabidopsis, from the mustard family. It is very resistant, prolific with a short 6-week cycle, and can be cultivated in restricted space. Its genome has been mostly sequenced, with a large number of mutant lines and genomic resources. Growing on the Moon mustard, algae, and salad would be the start of lunar gastronomy (maybe adding lunar garlic for French and Italian cooks!). So the first step to bring life to the Moon would be to grow bacterial colonies, with precursor experiments such as FEMME, followed by more advanced life science experiments on the upcoming lunar landers. We believe this could be done sometime between 2010 and 2015. What we learn from that can teach us about the problems of growing plants, and developing greenhouses on the Moon. After that, we could consider the next steps to take for animal life and then human. This is how we are going to develop sustainable systems for future human bases on the Moon. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1618.html. COLORFUL CHLOROPHYLL AROUND MARQUISES ISLANDS NASA Earth Observatory release 28 June 2005 The disturbance that islands cause in the flow of water currents in the ocean creates turbulence that mixes surface waters with deeper ocean layers. This mixing increases the amount of nutrients available in the warm surface waters where microscopic ocean plant life grows. Iron-rich sediments running off the islands also enhance plant productivity, particularly when the islands are steep and do not have shallow lagoons where the sediment can settle. This colorful image shows the concentration of chlorophyll in the waters around the Marquises Islands (or "Marquesas," as they are commonly known in English) in French Polynesia, a collection of islands in the western Pacific Ocean about ten degrees south of the equator. Surface waters with less chlorophyll are Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 colored in blue, while progressively higher amounts of plant chlorophyll are yellow. Clouds are white, and the islands are dark gray. 8 "We feel that measuring homochirality—a prevalence of one type of handedness over another—would be absolute proof of life," said Mathies, professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley and Skelley's research advisor. "We've shown on Earth, in the most Mars-like environment available, that this instrument is a thousand times better at detecting biomarkers than any instrument put on Mars before." The instrument has been chosen to fly aboard the European Space Agency's ExoMars mission, now scheduled to launch in 2011. The MOA will be integrated with the Mars Organic Detector, which is being assembled by scientists directed by Frank Grunthaner at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena together with Jeff Bada's group at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Skelley, a graduate student who has been working on amino acid detection with Mathies for five years and on the portable MOA analyzer for the past two years, is hoping to remain with the project as it goes through miniaturization and improvements at JPL over the next seven years in preparation for its longrange mission. In fact, she and Mathies hope she's the one looking at MOA data when it's finally radioed back from the Red Planet. The largest of the three islands arranged in a triangle in image center is Nuku Hiva. To its east is Ua Huka, while to the south is Ua Pou. The highest chlorophyll levels in the region are south of this triangle of islands, while another strong plume is visible stretching northward from Hiva Oa, farther east. Although these islands appear as just a speck on a map of the entire Pacific Ocean, they have a large influence on plant, and, in turn, animal life in the region. NASA image by Norman Kuring, MODIS Ocean Color Team. "When I first started this project, I had seen photos of the martian surface and possible signs of water, but the existence of liquid water was speculative, and people thought I was crazy to be working on an experiment to detect life on Mars," Skelley said. "I feel vindicated now, thanks to the work of NASA and others that shows there used to be running liquid water on the surface of Mars." Read the original news release at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id =16955. LIFE DETECTION INSTRUMENT PASSES KEY TEST ON ROAD TO MARS By Robert Sanders University of California, Berkeley release 28 June 2005 The dry, dusty, treeless expanse of Chile's Atacama Desert is the most lifeless spot on the face of the Earth, and that's why Alison Skelley and Richard Mathies joined a team of NASA scientists there earlier this month. The University of California, Berkeley, scientists knew that if the Mars Organic Analyzer (MOA) they'd built could detect life in that crusty, arid land, then it would have a good chance some day of detecting life on the planet Mars. Left: UC Berkeley graduate student Alison Skelley sampling at the Rock Garden site in the Atacama Desert. Photo by Richard Mathies, UC Berkeley. Right: The capillary electrophoresis instrument of the Mars Organic Analyzer (right) and the subcritical water extractor, both of which together form the Mars Astrobiology Probe being assembled by UC Berkeley, JPL and Scripps. Photo by Alison Skelley, UC Berkeley. "The connection between water and life has been made very strongly, and we think there is a good chance there is or was some life form on Mars," Mathies said. "Thanks to Alison's work, we're now in the right position at the right time to do the right experiment to find life on Mars." Mathies said that his experiment is the only one proposed for ExoMars or the United States' own Mars mission—NASA's roving, robotic Mars Science Laboratory mission—that could unambiguously find signs of life. The experiment uses state-of-the-art capillary electrophoresis arrays, novel microvalve systems and portable instrument designs pioneered in Mathies' lab to look for homochirality in amino acids. These microarrays with microfluidic channels are 100 to 1,000 times more sensitive for amino acid detection than the original life detection instrument flown on the Viking Landers in the 1970s. Located at an isolated crossroads in Chile's Atacama Desert, the Yunguy field station is an ideal spot to test instruments destined for Mars. Photo by Alison Skelley, UC Berkeley. In a place that hadn't seen a blade of grass or a bug for ages, and contending with dust and temperature extremes that left her either freezing or sweating, Skelley ran 340 tests that proved the instrument could unambiguously detect amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. More importantly, she and Mathies were able to detect the preference of Earth's amino acids for lefthandedness over right-handedness. This "homochirality" is a hallmark of life that Mathies thinks is a critical test that must be done on Mars. The Atacama Desert was selected by NASA scientists as one of the key spots to test instruments destined for Mars, primarily because of its oxidizing, acidic soil, which is similar to the rusty red oxidized iron surface of Mars. Skelley and colleagues Pascale Ehrenfreund, professor of astrochemistry at Leiden University in The Netherlands, and JPL scientist Frank Grunthaner visited the desert last year, but were not able to test the complete, integrated analyzer. This year, Skelley, Mathies and other team members carried the complete analyzers in three large cases to Chile by plane—in itself a test of the ruggedness of the equipment—and trucked them to the barren Yunguy field station, essentially a ramshackle building at a deserted crossroads. With a noisy Honda generator providing power, they set up their experiments and, with six other colleagues, tested the integrated subcritical water extractor Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 together with the MOA on samples from popular test sites such as the "Rock Garden" and the "Soil Pit." One thing they learned is that with low environmental levels of organic compounds, as is likely to be the case on Mars, the microfluidic channels in the capillary disks don't get clogged as readily as they do when used to test samples in Berkeley with its high bioorganic levels. That means they'll need fewer channels on the instrument that travels to Mars, and the scanner used to read out the data needn't be as elaborate. This translates into a cheaper and easier way to build instruments, but more importantly, an instrument that is smaller and uses less power. With the success of this crucial field test, Skelley and Mathies are eager to get to work on a prototype of their instrument that would fit in the allowed space within the ExoMars spacecraft. "I'm much more optimistic that we could detect life on Mars, if it's there," Mathies said. Read the original news release at http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/06/28_moaucb.shtml. MARS IN POP CULTURE: FILM By David Catling From Astrobiology Magazine 29 June 2005 9 Mission to Mars (2000). Directed by Brian De Palma. Starring Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle, Jerry O'Connell, Connie Nielsen. When the first manned mission to Mars meets with a catastrophic and mysterious disaster, a rescue mission is launched to investigate the tragedy and bring back any survivors. Mars Attacks! (1996). Directed by Tim Burton. Starring Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Natalie Portman, Pierce Brosnan, Annette Bening, Danny Devito, Rod Steiger, Tom Jones. Martians rocket across space and invade Earth. Humanity is corralled and subjugated in horrible conditions. Atrocious acts of brutal violence are witnessed. Slavering bug-eyed monsters are sighted pillaging the countryside. But have no fear! Eventually, the people of Earth defeat the Martians. Finally, the movie ends with Tom Jones jigging about to "It's not Unusual" and the Mars Attacks are clearly over, even though you wish they would start up again at this point. Total Recall (1990). Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Starring Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Sharon Stone. Douglas Quaid (Schwarzeneggar) is haunted by the same dream every night about a journey to Mars. He hopes to find out more about this dream and buys a vacation at Rekall Inc. where they sell implanted memories. Unfortunately, something goes wrong with the memory implantation and he remembers being a secret agent fighting against an evil Mars administrator, Coohagen. So the story begins, and what follows is a rollercoaster ride until the end of the movie, when atmospheric gases and water are liberated from sub-surface rocks of Mars. The latest movie incarnation of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds hits theaters today. Steven Spielberg's version of this classic tale is sure to scare (or at least entertain) millions of people as they watch aliens try to invade Earth. Alternatively the plot goes something like this: Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a man with big muscles; there are special effects and gratuitous violence; the end. Early movies relied on our nearest neighbors—Mars and Venus—to supply a steady stream of aliens that, one way or another, sought to conquer our world. But scientific findings in the later half of the twentieth century showed that these nearby planets had little prospects for advanced life forms. Thus, in more recent movies like Alien and Independence Day, the aliens have had to come from further afield to be seen as credible threats by moviegoers. While Mars may not be the dangerous source of villains it once was, it is still a source of inspiration for many modern films. Total Recall is based on a short story by sci-fi cyberpunk author Philip K. Dick entitled, "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," only twenty pages long, and set entirely in two small rooms in New York City. The story is complex and alien—a painful, detailed examination of a man recovering suppressed memories, and the reactions of those involved in his "therapy." Dick himself was in therapy at the time of writing the story. Philip K. Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, inspired the film Blade Runner (1982). This overview looks at how Mars and Martians have been represented throughout the history of the cinema. For a comprehensive list of Marsrelated movies, see the Mars Movie Guide (http://marsmovieguide.com/). Lobster Man from Mars (1989). Directed by Stanley Sheff. Starring Tony Curtis, Deborah Foreman, Patrick Macnee, Anthony Hickox. A comedy in which a young film student tries to sell his weird movie to a desperate film producer who is looking for a tax write-off. The producer screens the film, Lobster Man From Mars. A "film within-a-film" send-up follows: Mars suffers from the loss of its atmosphere, and the Martians send the evil Lobster Man to Earth to steal its air. A mad scientist, a girl, and an army colonel foil the alien plot. The producer buys the movie, but it makes a huge profit and he is sent to jail. The film student then takes his place as the studio hot shot. John Carter of Mars. In Production for a 2006 release. Plot summary by the Internet Movie Database: "Civil War vet John Carter is transplanted to Mars, where he discovers a lush, wildly diverse planet whose main inhabitants are 12-foot tall green barbarians. Finding himself a prisoner of these creatures, he escapes, only to encounter Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, who is in desperate need of a savior." Directed by Robert Rodriguez. War of the Worlds. Release date Wednesday, June 29, 2005. As Earth is invaded by alien war machines, Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) must fight for his family's survival. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Invaders from Mars (1986). Directed by Tobe Hopper. Starring Karen Black, Hunter Carson, Timothy Bottoms. In this remake of the classic 50s film, a boy tries to stop an invasion of his town by aliens who take over the the minds of his parents, his least-liked schoolteacher, and other townspeople. With the aid of the school nurse the boy enlists the help of the U.S. army. Older films T. S. Eliot once described the science fiction genre as a "product of the preadolescent mind." This is an unfair comment for genuine works of literary quality (e.g., by Wells and Bradbury), but probably wholly deserved for some of the movies that follow. Left to right: War of the Worlds, Red Planet and Mars Attacks! Ghosts of Mars (2001). Directed by John Carpenter. Starring Ice Cube, Natasha Henstridge, Jason Statham. Set 200 years in the future, a police unit must transport a dangerous prisoner from a martian mining outpost. But when the team arrives they find more than they bargained for. Red Planet (2000). Directed by Anthony Hoffman. Starring Val Kilmer, Benjamin Bratt, Carrie-Anne Moss, Simon Baker, Tom Sizemore. In the future, pollution and overpopulation are making the Earth uninhabitable. Humanity's only hope is to colonize the planet Mars by using algae to produce oxygen, but when the algae mysteriously disappear, a group of astronauts are sent to Mars on a mission to learn why. Planet of Blood (1966). Directed by Curtis Harrington. Starring Dennis Hopper, John Saxon, Basil Rathbone, Judi Meredith, Florence Marly. An expedition to Mars finds a crashed alien space ship. They bring back the only survivor; a green skinned, glowing eyed, bloodsucking, female alien who preys on the crew members. Mars Needs Women (1966). Directed by Larry Buchanan. Starring Tommy Kirk, Yvonne Craig, Byron Lord. The title says it all. Tommy Kirk leads his fellow Martians on an interplanetary quest for females. Yvonne "Batgirl" Craig is a scientist chosen by the invaders. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964). Directed by Nicholas Webster. Starring John Call, Pia Zadora, Jamie Farr. Santa is captured by Martians to stop Earth kids from being cheery. But once on Mars, Santa teaches those Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 little Martian brats the real meaning of Christmas. Quite possibly the silliest movie ever made. The most excruciating and cringe-inducing moment is at the end when the Martians, who are a bunch of kids attired in green stockings, sing "Hooray for Santy [sic] Claus." 10 (whatever that is), so the Martians plan to steal the Earthmen's rocket and conquer Earth. Fortunately, a sympathetic Martian underground helps the Earthmen foil the dastardly plan. Rocketship X-M (1950). Directed by Kurt Neumann. Starring Lloyd Bridges, Hugh O'Brian and Morris Ankrum. Five astronauts set off to explore the moon but due to a malfunction they end up on Mars (so annoying when that happens!). There they find evidence of an advanced civilization that has mostly perished in an atomic holocaust. The few Martian survivors now live like savage cavemen. After two of the astronauts are killed, the remaining three attempt to return to Earth. Left to right: Devil Girl from Mars, The Angry Red Planet, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars. Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964). Directed by Byron Haskins, who also directed War of the Worlds. Starring Paul Mantee, Victor Lundin, and Adam West ("Batman"). This movie follows Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe plot, but without the fear-factor of footprints from the original story. Commander Christopher Draper (Mantee) must survive on the barren planet accompanied only by his pet monkey, Mona. Draper discovers minor plant life in the "canals" of Mars and bakes martian rocks to release oxygen in an otherwise oxygen-poor atmosphere. Eventually a Man Friday appears and the trio ends up being chased by flying saucers to one of the polar icecaps. Some uncharitable people have said that the best acting in the movie is by Mona, the pet monkey. Many scenes were shot at Zabriskie Point, Death Valley. The Angry Red Planet (1959). Directed by Ib Melchior. Starring Gerald Mohr, Nora Hayden, Les Tremayne. A group of astronauts land on Mars. They then have to put up with continual battles against aliens, a giant amoeba, and the dreaded Rat-Bat-Spider thing (see picture). Colored lenses give a sickly pink hue to all the Mars sequences. Devil Girl from Mars (1954). Directed by David MacDonald. Starring Patricia Laffa, Hazel Court, Hugh McDermott, Adrienne Corri. Not the kind of girl you really want to get involved with: pouty, leather-clad alien bitch Patricia Laffa journeys to Earth in a giant spaceship (accompanied by the obligatory killer robot) to bring back men for breeding purposes. Very camp. The War of the Worlds (1953). Directed by Byron Haskin. Starring Gene Barry as Clayton Forrester. A film adaptation of H. G. Well's classic novel best understood if you bear in mind that it was made at the height of the Cold War—i.e., replace Martian with Russian. The residents of a small town are excited when a flaming meteor lands in the hills. Their joy is somewhat dampened when they discover it has passengers who are not very friendly. Won an Academy Award for special effects. Invaders from Mars (1953). Directed by William Cameron Menzies. Starring Arthur Franz, Helena Carter. Little David MacLean has a problem—all the adults in town begin acting strangely shortly after he sees strange lights settling behind a hill near his home. As more and more adults are affected, he must turn to the pretty Dr. Blake for protection. Eventually, he must confront his fears in the unusual conclusion. Remade in 1986. Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953). Directed by Charles Lamont. Lester (Bud Abbott) and Orville (Lou Costello) accidentally launch a rocket which is supposed to fly to Mars. Instead it goes to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. They are then forced by bankrobber Mugsy and his pal Harry to fly to Venus where they find a civilization made up entirely of women, men having been banished. Red Planet Mars (1952). Directed by Harry Horner. Starring Peter Graves, Andrea King, Morris Ankrum. A lame, anti-communist movie made under the influence of McCarthyism. Communications from Mars establish that the planet is almost a utopia ruled by a supreme authority. News of this somehow topples Russia and sends the world on to a new higher plane of existence. Flight to Mars (1951). Directed by Lesley Selander. Starring Carmon Mitchell, Arthur Franz, Marguerite Chapman. A team of scientists and a newspaper reporter fly to Mars only to find that Martians look identical to humans. Mars is running low on an important natural resource called Corium Flash Gordon: Mars Attacks the World (1938) (a.k.a. Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars, Deadly Ray from Mars). Directed by Robert F. Hill. Starring Buster Crabbe, Charles Middleton, Jean Rogers. A feature-length (badly edited) abridgement of the 15-episode serial, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars. Flash Gordon, his lady love Dale Arden, and scientific genius Dr. Zarkov blast off for Mars, where a mysterious force is sucking the nitrogen from the Earth's atmosphere. They hope to determine the source of this power and destroy it. The villain behind the Earth-threatening scheme is none other than "Ming the Merciless," who also foments a deadly feud between Prince Barin of the planet Mongo and the Clay People of Mars. Ming hopes that this battle will allow him to conquer the universe in the confusion. But the Clay People ultimately align with Barin and Flash Gordon, and Ming is defeated. Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924). Director: Jakov Protazanov. A silent Soviet propaganda film: a comparison between 1920s Russia and a capitalistic planet, Mars. Engineer Los is building a spaceship to reach Mars. He kills his wife, Natacha (a refugee care worker), flees to Mars, and falls in love with Aelita, the Queen of Mars. But it's all a dream, thank goodness. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1624.html. JOIN THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR GRAVITATIONAL AND SPACE BIOLOGY By Paul Todd ASGSB release 23 June 2005 All readers of Marsbugs are invited to become members of the American Society for Gravitational and Space Biology. The ASGSB currently has about 400 members consisting of gravitational biologists, space physiologists, biophysicists, and astrobiologists with interests ranging from the origin of life to the search for life in the universe. The Society is experiencing growth in this latter field and is an excellent specialty organization where astrobiologists can belong to a family that is truly biological and can take advantage of the collective voice of an organization as well as meet colleagues and present scientific results at the ASGSB annual meeting. To join please visit the ASGSB web site at www.asgsb.org and complete the membership application on line. We look forward to seeing you at our annual meeting in Reno, Nevada November 1-4, 2005. ABSTRACT DEADLINE APPROACHING FOR MARS SOCIETY CONVENTION Mars Society release 28 June 2005 The June 30 final abstract deadline for the 8th International Mars Society convention is now approaching. This year's conference will be held at the University of Colorado, Boulder, August 11-14, 2005. With a real human Moon-Mars exploration initiative now finally underway, the conference promises to be our most exciting ever. We have over 100 great talks already scheduled, with more pending. While written papers are not required to talk at the conference, those who do submit full papers will have a chance to have them published in the next On to Mars book published by Apogee books. (The first edition of On to Mars containing papers from the first several Mars Society conferences sold out its run of 6,000 copies. On to Mars 2, containing papers from the more recent conferences, will be published this fall. So if you've got something to say that people should hear, get your abstract in now. The final call for papers is presented below. Registration for the conference is open at www.marssociety.org. Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 Call for papers Presentations for the convention are invited dealing with all matters (science, engineering, politics, economics, public policy, etc.) associated with the exploration and settlement of Mars. Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent by June 30, 2005 to: The Mars Society, P. O. Box 273, Indian Hills, CO 80454, or via email to: [email protected] (e-mail submission preferred). NATIONAL MARS EDUCATION CONFERENCE NASA/JPL/ASU release 28 June 2005 National Mars Education Conference, 9-10 August 2005. Location: Doubletree Hotel, Cocoa Beach, FL and Kennedy Space Center, FL Sponsored by: NASA, The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Kennedy Space Center and the Arizona State University Mars Education Program NASA is getting ready to launch the next mission to the Red Planet! The launch window for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter opens on August 10, 2005. An exciting conference for educators is being held in Florida in conjunction with this event to highlight NASA's latest Mars mission. This conference will bring together key NASA mission personnel (Mars scientists and engineers) as speakers to share their personal stories and passions about their work and the "behind the scenes" stories that pertain to the upcoming mission. Education materials for classroom use (such as NASA-based PowerPoint presentations, Standards-based hands-on activities, and contextual materials that use cutting-edge science and technological real-world examples) will be distributed to participants. National Mars Education Conference Registration Information Dates: August 9 - 10, 2005 Location: Day 1 - August 9, 2005: Doubletree Hotel, Cocoa Beach, FL Day 2 - August 10, 2005: Kennedy Space Center Debus Conference Center Registration Cost: $100.00 per participant ($25.00 non-refundable deposit will be due after application is accepted). Registration cost includes: continental breakfast and lunch for Day 1 and lunch on Day 2, conference curricular materials, general admission into Kennedy Space Center for Day 2, and a special bus tour of the Kennedy Space Center on Day 2. Registration costs do not include: all lodging costs, any transportation (e.g., airport), transportation to and from conference locations (Doubletree Hotel in Cocoa Beach and Kennedy Space Center), or any meals (except those specified above). All of these costs are the responsibility of the conference participant. 11 Workshop participants are free to book lodging at any establishment of their choice. A block of 50 rooms have been reserved at the Doubletree Hotel in Cocoa Beach, FL and will be available for reservation at a special rate of $109.00 (+10% tax = $119.90) per room per night. This block will be available first come-first served and must be reserved by the participant by calling the Doubletree Hotel reservation desk directly. All hotel costs are the responsibility of the conference participant. The Doubletree Hotel Cocoa Beach Oceanfront is located at 2080 N. Atlantic Ave., Cocoa Beach, FL 32931. The phone number is 1-800-552-3224 or the direct line is 321-7839222. When reserving a room and to get the group rate of $119.90 (before July 11 and/or before all 50 rooms are reserved) you must ask to reserve under the MRO Educator Conference. Conference overview Day 1: Key Mars mission scientists and engineers from NASA Headquarters and the Mars Reconnaissance mission team will be the special guest speakers at this location. Mars education specialists will conduct Standards-based hands-on activities and provide curricular connections and contextual materials for conference participants that will enhance classroom teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Day 2: Conference participants will have the opportunity to see the first launch attempt of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft onboard the Atlas V rocket (as long as weather permits and no unforeseen spacecraftrelated issues occur). As with any launch, many factors (especially weather at this time of year in FL) can postpone a launch. Hence, the launch is not guaranteed to occur during this conference time. In the case of an early notification of a cancelled launch for this day, alternative education activities have been planned to fill this time slot and will be conducted by Mars education specialists and take place at the Debus Conference Center located at the Kennedy Space Center. During the afternoon session, Kennedy Space Center education specialists, will present an educator-focused Kennedy Space Center overview, followed by a bus tour of Kennedy Space Center. How to apply Please fill out the application below and submit a brief paragraph on how the information and materials from this conference will be used in an educational setting. Participants must indicate that they will be responsible for all noncovered expenses and will attend the entire conference. The conference hours will be from 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM on 8/9/05 and 6:00 AM (if there is a launch attempt) until 5:00 PM on 8/10. The conference will be limited to 125 participants and no non-adults (children or students) will be allowed to participate in the conference or conference-related activities. Please feel free to contact Sheri Klug, Director ASU Mars Education Team ([email protected]) if you have any questions about initial registration. National Mars Education Conference Application Dates: August 9-10, 2005 Cocoa Beach, FL and the Kennedy Space Center, FL Name: ____________________________________________________________________ Full Contact Address: ____________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ Contact Phone: ___________________________________________________________ E-mail: __________________________________________________________________ Fax: _____________________________________________________________________ Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 12 I understand that I will be responsible for all non-covered conferencerelated expenses. Please write a brief paragraph on how the information and materials from this conference will be used in an educational setting. Please mail, fax or e-mail application to: Meg Hufford Mars Space Flight Facility Arizona State University Moeur Bldg. Rm. 131, Box 876305 Tempe, AZ 85287-6305 Fax: (480) 727-7956 [email protected] NASA FUNDS SPACE RADIATION RESEARCH PROPOSALS NASA release 05-168 29 June 2005 NASA selected 21 space radiation research proposals for funding. Approximately $19 million will be spent on the research to support the Vision for Space Exploration. The goal of NASA's Space Radiation Program is to ensure humans can safely live and work in space. Safely means acceptable risks are not exceeded during crews' lifetime. Acceptable risks include limits on post and multimission consequences, such as excess lifetime fatal cancer vulnerability. Exposure to radiation during space flight is unavoidable. Space radiation penetrates the crew, spacesuits, spacecraft, habitats, and equipment. The interaction of radiation with materials changes both; and the interaction with living organisms leads to potentially harmful health consequences. The consequences include tissue damage, cancer, cataracts, electronic upsets, and material degradation. Space radiation is distinct from terrestrial forms. Space radiation is comprised of high-energy protons, heavy ions and their secondaries produced in shielding and tissue. Since there are no human epidemiological data for these radiation types, risk estimation is derived from mechanistic understanding. The estimates are based on radiation physics, molecular, cellular, and tissue biology related to cancer and other risks. NASA received 115 responses to the request for proposals issued on August 24, 2004. Proposals were peer-reviewed by scientific and technical experts from academia, government, and industry. The 21 proposals will seek to reduce the uncertainties in risk predictions, including cancer, degenerative tissue damage, cataracts, hereditary, fertility, and sterility. They also cover acute risks and development of effective shielding or biological countermeasures for them. For a list of grant recipients on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2005/jun/radiation_research_lists.html. Contacts: J. D. Harrington or Michael Braukus NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-5241 or -1979 CASSINI UPDATES NASA/JPL releases Final science activities in the S11 sequence included Composite InfraRedSpectrometer (CIRS) and Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) observations of the F-Ring, ISS movies of Saturn's southern hemisphere, and low-rate magnetospheric surveys performed by the Magnetospheric and Plasma Science (MAPS) instruments. Beginning on Friday, the entire suite of MAPS instruments, which include the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS), Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA), Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS), Magnetometer Subsystem (MAG), Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument (MIMI) and Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS), simultaneously performed low-rate outer magnetospheric surveys to observe the variability of magnetospheric boundaries at several geometrically similar apoapses. On Saturday the RADAR instrument obtained distant full-disk radiometry of Titan to help constrain the thermal properties of the surface. Optical remote sensing activities this week included ISS movie feature tracks of Saturn's winds and clouds in the southern hemisphere, a Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) mosaic of the entire ring system near apoapsis, Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) observations to detect flashes from meter-sized interplanetary impactors on Saturn's rings in order to constrain the flux of impact population for the ring's origins and evolution, and CIRS integrations of the rings to constrain their thermal properties, and determine their composition. Cassini Significant Events for 15-22 June 2005 NASA/JPL release, 24 June 2005 Thursday, June 16 (DOY 167): The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired Wednesday from the Goldstone 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. At a "Science 101, a Science Lecture Series for the Non-Scientist" talk, a member of the Cassini Science Team gave a presentation on unraveling the secrets of Saturn's moons. Because Nature often yields her secrets through the most bizarre examples, the talk focused on the unusual satellites Enceladus and Iapetus, the violent events that shaped these satellites, their connection to Earth, the stars, and life itself. Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 13 Epimetheus, and will contain two occultation periods occurring on DOY 177 and 196. Cassini achieved apoapsis today and began its tenth orbit around Saturn. The story of the solar system is written upon the faces of its many worlds, such as Saturn's icy moon Rhea, seen here in an image from Cassini. The moon's many impact craters attest to its violent beginnings and more than four billion years of subsequent history. Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. The S15 Science Operations Plan update process kicked off today. It will run for about five weeks and will conclude mid-July. A kick-off meeting for the DOY 177 Live Inertial Vector Propagator (IVP) update and live moveable block (LMB) process was held today. The Navigation team delivered the orbit determination files by end of day and the flight team will spend the next few days reviewing them. A Go/No Go meeting will be held for the update on Monday. Uplink Operations (ULO) radiated a real-time command for an overlay to the Reaction Wheel Assembly bias that will execute tomorrow. Saturn's moon Pan is seen here orbiting within the Encke Gap in Saturn's A ring in two differently processed versions of the same Cassini image. The little moon is responsible for clearing and maintaining this gap, named for Johann Franz Encke, who discovered it in 1837. Pan is 20 kilometers (12 miles) across. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Monday, June 20 (DOY 171): At the S12 LMB/Live IVP Go/No meeting today it was decided to proceed with the LMB but not with the Live IVP update. The leads for S15 received the first DSN allocation file pertaining to that sequence. It contained no changes that would cause significant impact to the data volume, so the decision was made to cancel the S15 Science Allocation Panel meeting scheduled for today. A real-time command was uplinked today for an INMS patch to FSW. Since no new requests for waivers were generated for the S13 sequence, the waiver disposition meeting was cancelled. Friday, June 17 (DOY 168): The S14 Project Briefing/Waiver Disposition meeting was held today. Members of the Science Planning team will be generating a hand-off package for the sequence to be given to ULO. On Monday the Science and Sequence Update Process (SSUP) will begin. The last commands were sent today for the S11 sequence. ULO uplinked a relative timed Immediate/Delayed Action Program to change the CDA wall impact detection parameter, a CAPS flight software (FSW) checkout file, and a CAPS overlay during FSW checkout to turn the actuator off for the Radio Science Subsystem High Gain Antenna Boresight Calibration on Tuesday of next week. CDA team members confirmed the execution of their file, and the sequence leads confirmed the registration and activation of the CAPS FSW checkout program. A member of the Mission Support and Services Office presented Cassini talks to groups of 5th and 6th grade students at a career day at Aldama Elementary School in Los Angeles, CA. Approximately 350 students attended. Science Planning gave a Cassini presentation to 150 middle school girls and 50 adults for Space Pioneers in Kansas City, Missouri. A new Cassini poster is available through the Cassini Outreach Office. This poster highlights Saturn and early tour results. English and Spanish language versions are available, the latter in limited quantity. To order, hit the "Contact Us" link at the very bottom of the Cassini web site. Allow at least 4-6 weeks for delivery. Today at approximately 5:11 PM the S12 background sequence began execution. The sequence will run for 43.9 days ending on July 31, and will contain Orbit Trim Maneuver #25, an Enceladus targeted flyby, solar conjunction, 6 non-targeted flybys of Titan, Tethys, Pan, Telesto, Rhea, and This close-up look at Saturn's moon Janus reveals spots on the moon's surface which may be dark material exposed by impacts. If the dark markings within bright terrain are indeed impact features, then Janus' surface represents a contrast with that of Saturn's moon Phoebe, where impacts have uncovered bright material beneath a darker overlying layer. Janus is 181 kilometers (113 miles) across. Janus may be a porous body, composed mostly of water ice. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 Tuesday, June 21 (DOY 172): The S14 SSUP development process kicked off today. The files for the SubSequence Generation phase were distributed to the instrument teams, Spacecraft Operations Office (SCO), and Navigation for review. 14 "I'd say this is definitely the best candidate we've seen so far for a liquid hydrocarbon lake on Titan," said Dr. Alfred McEwen, Cassini imaging team member and a professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson. The suspected lake area measures 234 kilometers long by 73 kilometers wide (145 miles by 45 miles), about the size of Lake Ontario, on the U.S. Canadian border. An image of the Cassini Crater on Earth's moon was taken by the European Space Agency's SMART-1 spacecraft, and dedicated to the Cassini-Huygens mission team. The occasion was the European Geoscience Union conference in Vienna, April 2005, when new results from both missions were presented. Saturn Observation Campaign members have shown the Cassini Crater along withMons Huygens on the moon to star party audiences. Here is a picture of both lunar features: http://soc.jpl.nasa.gov/experience/galleryphoto.cfm?id=243. For the full story go to http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/SMART-1/SEM4GN1DU8E_0.html. "This feature is unique in our exploration of Titan so far," said Dr. Elizabeth Turtle, Cassini imaging team associate at the University of Arizona. "Its perimeter is intriguingly reminiscent of the shorelines of lakes on Earth that are smoothed by water erosion and deposition." Wednesday, June 22 (DOY 173): "It's possible that some of the storms in this region are strong enough to make methane rain that reaches the surface," said Cassini imaging team member Dr. Tony DelGenio of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Today a non-targeted flyby of Titan occurred. An image of Saturn's rings taken with the sun on the opposite side of the ring plane is Astronomy Picture of the Day today. From this view the rings have similarities to a photographic negative of a front view. For example, the dark band in the middle is actually the normally bright B-ring. The ring brightness as recorded from different angles indicates ring thickness and particle density of ring particles. A delivery coordination meeting was held today for the SCO tool Flight Software Development System (FSDS) version 2.19. FSDS is a simulation environment for the Cassini ACS subsystem. Check out the Cassini web site at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov for the latest press releases and images. NASA's Cassini Reveals Lake-Like Feature on Titan NASA/JPL release 2005-103, 28 June 2005 Scientists are fascinated by a dark, lake-like feature recently observed on Saturn's moon Titan. NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured a series of images showing a marking, darker than anything else around it. It is remarkably lakelike, with smooth, shore-like boundaries unlike any seen previously on Titan. The feature lies in Titan's cloudiest region, which is presumably the most likely site of recent methane rainfall. This, coupled with the shore-like smoothness of the feature's perimeter makes it hard for scientists to resist speculation about what might be filling the lake, if it indeed is one. "Given Titan's cold temperatures, it could take a long time for any liquid methane collecting on the surface to evaporate. So it might not be surprising for a methane-filled lake to persist for a long time," DelGenio added. Despite earlier predictions, no definitive evidence for open bodies of liquid has been found on Titan. Cassini has not yet been in a favorable position for using its cameras to check for glints from possible surface liquids in the south polar region. "Eventually, as the seasons change over a few years, the convective clouds may migrate northward to lower latitudes," said DelGenio, "If so, it will be interesting to see whether the Cassini cameras record changes in the appearance of the surface as well." "An alternate explanation is that this feature was once a lake, but has since dried up, leaving behind dark deposits," Turtle said. Yet another possibility is that the lake is simply a broad depression filled by dark, solid hydrocarbons falling from the atmosphere onto Titan's surface. In this case, the smooth outline might be the result of a process unrelated to rainfall, such as a sinkhole or a volcanic caldera. "It reminds me of the lava lakes seen on Jupiter's moon, Io," Dr. Torrence Johnson, an imaging team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. "It is already clear that whatever this lake-like feature turns out to be, it is only one of many puzzles that Titan will throw at us as we continue our reconnaissance of the surface over the next few years," said Dr. Carolyn Porco, imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, CO. Thirty-nine more Titan flybys are planned for Cassini's prime mission. In future flybys the science teams will search for opportunities to observe the lake feature again and to look for mirror-like reflections from smooth surfaces elsewhere on Titan. Such reflections would strongly support the presence of liquids. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the Cassini mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder. To view a computer-enhanced image of the feature and a three-frame movie showing the evolution of nearby clouds on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://ciclops.org. This view of Titan's south polar region reveals an intriguing dark feature that may be the site of a past or present lake of liquid hydrocarbons. The true nature of this feature, seen here at left of center, is not yet known, but the shore-like smoothness of its perimeter and its presence in an area where frequent convective storm clouds have been observed by Cassini and Earth-based astronomers make it the best candidate thus far for an open body of liquid on Titan. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. 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. Contacts: Carolina Martinez Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-9382 Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 Erica Hupp or Dolores Beasley NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1237 or -1753 15 essentially digital cameras connected to telescopes. They record images and data before, during, and after impact. Preston Dyches Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations Space Science Institute, Boulder, CO Phone: 720-974-5859 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1623.html http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050628_titan_lake.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05zzg.html http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050627janus.html http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050628titanlake.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/pans_influence_rings.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/lake_on_titan.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/spotty_janus.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/xrays_sparkle_saturn.html DEEP IMPACT UPDATES Multiple agencies' releases Maryland-Led Deep Impact Detects Comet Nucleus University of Maryland release, 21 June 2005 For the first time, scientists have processed images from NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft and clearly seen the solid body, or nucleus, of the comet through the vast cloud of dust and gas that surrounds it. The new images provide important information about the mission's target: the "heart" of comet Tempel 1. The images were taken at the end of May with the spacecraft's medium resolution camera, at a distance of some 20 million miles from the comet. Unprocessed, the images are dominated by the comet's huge cloud of dust and gas, which scientists call the coma. However, scientists used a neat photometric trick to isolate the relatively small (3-mile by 9-mile) nucleus from the comet's coma, or atmosphere. The much larger, but less dense atmosphere was mathematically identified and then subtracted from the original images leaving images of the nucleus, the bright point in the center of the coma. "It's exciting to see the nucleus pop out from the coma," said University of Maryland astronomer Michael A'Hearn, who leads the Deep Impact mission. "And being able to distinguish the nucleus in these images helps us to better understand the rotational axis of the comet's nucleus, which is helpful for targeting this elongated body." "This is an important milestone for the Deep Impact team," explained Carey Lisse, a member of the Deep Impact team and leader of the effort to extract views of the nucleus from the spacecraft images. "From here on in we just watch the nucleus grow and grow and become brighter and bigger as the spacecraft closes in on the comet. We detected the nucleus a lot sooner than expected, but now we'll be watching the nucleus all the way to impact!" As illustrated in the attached figure, Deep Impact images taken on May 29-31 contain a well-formed coma with a detectable point source at the position of the brightest pixel. The brightness of the nucleus as determined from these images was close to that predicted from earlier observations with the Hubble and Spitzer space-telescopes and observations from large telescopes on the ground. At present, the nucleus contributes about 20 percent of the total brightness near the center of the comet. "The early detection of the nucleus in these images helps us to set the final exposure times for our encounter observations," said Michael Belton, deputy principal investigator for the Deep Impact Mission. "Next we need to determine, using additional nucleus detections, how the comet is rotating in space, so we can figure out what part we will hit on July 4th." 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - Impact! Deep Impact—which consists of a sub-compact-car-sized flyby spacecraft and a five-sided impactor spacecraft about the size of a washing machine—carries four instruments. The flyby spacecraft carries two imaging instruments, the medium resolution imager and the high resolution imager, plus an infrared spectrometer that uses the same telescope as the high-resolution imager. The impactor carries a single imager. Built to science team specifications by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., the three imaging instruments are A false color image of the comet, taken on 30 May 2005, is shown in the upper left. To its right is a mathematical model of the comet's atmosphere. The bottom left image is the difference between the two upper images and shows the nucleus. In the bottom right a trace through the center of the comet shows the brightness of the nucleus. In these images North is approximately up and East is to the left. The direction to the Sun is towards the upper left hand corner. The picture is about 100,000 miles across. At the beginning of July, after a voyage of some 268 million miles, the joined spacecraft will reach comet Tempel 1. The spacecraft will approach the comet and collect images and spectra of it. Then, some 24 hours before the 2 a.m. (EDT) July 4th impact, the flyby spacecraft will launch the impactor into the path of the onrushing comet. Like a copper penny pitched up into the air just in front of a speeding tractor-trailer truck, the 820-pound impactor will be run down by the comet, colliding with the nucleus at an impact speed of some 23,000 miles per hour. A'Hearn and his fellow mission scientists expect the impact to create a crater several hundred feet in size; ejecting ice, dust and gas from the crater and revealing pristine material beneath. The impact will have no significant affect on the orbit of Tempel 1, which poses no threat to earth. Nearby, Deep Impact's "flyby" spacecraft will use its medium and high resolution imagers and infrared spectrometer to collect and send back to Earth pictures and data of the event. In addition, the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and large and small telescopes on Earth also will observe the impact and its aftermath. Read the original news release at http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/sociss/release.cfm?ArticleID=1087. Astronomers' Holiday Special—A July 4 Comet Bash By Lori Stiles University of Arizona release 23 June 2005 Have a wish for the USA's birthday this year? If you're a ground-based astronomer in Arizona and states west through Hawaii, you'll wish for clear, dark skies in early July. It's your chance to watch what happens when NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft slams its 820-pound copper probe into comet Tempel 1 at 23,000 mph. The impact is expected at 10:52 PM MST Sunday, July 3. The mothership will fly next to the comet to document the fireworks, and several major NASA space telescopes—Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra—will witness the result. Big telescopes in Hawaii and major observatories in California and Arizona will Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 be watching from 83 million miles away, too. Southern Arizona astronomers will be watching the comet impact. Some, like those with Arizona Radio Observatory, which supports the NASA Deep Impact Ground-based Radio Science campaign, and at Kitt Peak National Observatory have already logged many nights studying the comet. The Deep Impact mission goal is to blast a crater for a first-ever look inside a comet, which is made of the same stuff that made up our solar system billions of years ago, before the planets formed. Scientists hope to learn a lot from the small comet, which is only about 8.7 miles long and 2.5 miles wide. No one knows what will happen on impact. 16 The UA/Smithsonian 6.5-meter MMTO observatory on Mount Hopkins, AZ. Web site: http://www.mmto.org/. Science contacts: MMTO Director Faith Vilas, 281-483-5056, [email protected]; Kurtis A. Williams, UA Steward Observatory, 520-621-9262, [email protected]. Williams will be observing stars and galaxies with a multi-object spectrograph on the MMTO on July 3-4, but also comet Tempel 1 according to a strategy being developed by Faith Vilas, the new MMTO director. "We expect to be surprised," said University of Arizona Regents Professor H. Jay Melosh, a member of the Deep Impact science team. "We don't know what the comet's surface is like. We could hit something as hard as concrete or as soft as cornflakes." The Catalina Sky Survey, a consortium of three cooperating surveys: the original Catalina Sky Survey and the Mount Lemmon Sky Survey in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson, and the Siding Spring Survey near Coonabarabran, New South Wales, Australia. Web site: http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/css/. Science contact: Steve Larson, 520-6214973, [email protected]; Rob McNaught, [email protected]. Melosh will be at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, CA, during the probe-comet collision. The Jet Propulsion Lab is managing Deep Impact, which is a NASA Discovery class mission conducted by the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. The cooperating surveys share a common goal—to help inventory more than 90 percent of Near Earth Objects (NEOs) that are one kilometer or larger. The three surveys have been monitoring the Tempel 1 comet and will observe during impact from both the northern and southern hemispheres. Melosh will talk on "First Results from the Deep Impact Mission" in Tucson on Saturday, July 9. His talk will be at 6:15 PM in the Kuiper Space Sciences Building, 1629 E. University Blvd., Tucson. The lecture, which is part of a program sponsored by UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory Public Outreach Program, is free and open to the public. Seating is first come, first served, so event organizers recommend showing up when LPL opens its doors at 5:00 PM. UA's 61-inch Kuiper Telescope in the Santa Catalina Mountains, north of Tucson. Web site: http://james.as.arizona.edu/~psmith/61inch/. Science contact: Carl Hergenrother, 520-621-9690, [email protected] Mike Belton, president of Belton Space Exploration Initiatives, Tucson, and deputy-principal investigator on the mission, came up with the mission name "Deep Impact" before a drama-sci-fi-thriller with the same title was released in 1998. (The movie, starring Robert Duvall and Tea Leoni, is about humans preparing to survive a catastrophic comet impact.) Spacewatch on Kitt Peak, AZ. Web site: http://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/. Science contacts: Spacewatch Director Robert McMillan, 520-621-6968, [email protected]; James Scotti, 520-621-2717, [email protected]. Melosh noted that Deep Impact's copper probe could no more send comet Tempel 1 careening toward Earth than a kamikaze gnat could change the flight path of a fully loaded Boeing 747. Here's the rundown of what southern Arizona observatories are doing the week of Deep Impact. The Arizona Radio Observatory (ARO) 12-meter Kitt Peak telescope and ARO's 10-meter Heinrich Hertz Submillimeter Telescope on Mount Graham, AZ. The 12-m ARO web site is http://kp12m.as.arizona.edu/. Science contacts: UA Professor Lucy Ziurys, ARO director. 520-621-6525, [email protected]; St. Cloud State University Professor Maria Womack, principal investigator, 320-308-4171, [email protected]. The ARO 12-meter telescope has been observing comet Tempel 1 for baseline information on the kinds and quantities of molecules that are present around the comet before impact. ARO's Heinrich Hertz Submillimeter Telescope on Mount Graham, Ariz., begins making baseline observations June 23. The project is led by St. Cloud State University astronomer Maria Womack, a collaborator of the NASA Deep Impact Ground-based Radio Science team. The observers will study molecules ejected in debris after impact, molecules rarely detected in coma gas. "We're most interested in 'parent' molecules— those which sublimate directly from the nucleus," Womack said. "By measuring their abundances we can determine the chemical composition of the comet nucleus and, therefore, get information about the conditions in which the comet formed." Womack added, "Remote observing procedures work so well that I don't need to be at the Arizona telescope, and that gives me the chance to collect much more data than I otherwise would have." "These molecules should be bright enough for our telescope to detect in a few minutes after impact," said ARO graduate student Stephanie Milam, who'll assist with the observations and is heavily involved in cometary studies. National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) on Kitt Peak, AZ. Web site: http://www.noao.edu/kpno/. Media contact: Douglas Isbell, 520-3188230, [email protected]. All major NOAO telescopes on Kitt Peak will be observing the comet for several nights before impact as well as the impact itself. These include the Mayall 4-meter telescope, the Kitt Peak 2.1-meter telescope, and the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope. The comet will be about 20 degrees above the horizon, and sets about two hours after impact. With a 61-inch telescope, Hergenrother plans to observe as many as 50 other comets as well as Tempel 1 from July 2 through July 5. McMillan and Scotti have made no specific plans for watching comet Tempel 1 during Deep Impact because the comet is so low in the sky, although Scotti said he may try for some before-and-after impact images of Tempel 1. The 25-year-old Spacewatch project is the pioneering comet-and-asteroid survey, and another source of top comet and asteroid experts. Campus Station 21-inch telescope, adjacent to the astronomy department buildings on the UA campus. Web site: http://www.as.arizona.edu:8080/Astro/department/res_facil/opt_tele.html. Science contacts: Steward Observatory associate astronomer Thomas Fleming, 520-621-5049, [email protected]; UA astronomy major Joshua V. Nelson, [email protected]. Fleming and Nelson photographed the comet with Steward Observatory's 21inch telescope at Campus Station on June 8, using a light-pollution reduction filter to cut out some of the street light pollution. They'll use the same setup to observe the comet on encounter night, starting at 10:00 PM. Tempel 1 is named after Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel, who discovered the comet on April 3, 1867, in Marseilles, France. The comet is now on a south-southeast course through constellation Virgo. It is about 40 times dimmer than is visible to the unaided eye, but could brighten enough after impact to be seen through binoculars, astronomers say. However, they add, it could take minutes to hours, even days before the comet fully brightens, and there's no guarantee that Earth-based telescopes will even see the immediate impact flash. Flandrau Science Center will open its observatory special hours Sunday, June 3, through Saturday, June 9. Because comet Tempel 1 will be so faint and low in the Arizona sky during its collision with the probe at 11:00 PM. Sunday night, the comet will be difficult to find in large amateur telescopes from light polluted city locations. For stargazers who want to try Sunday night, Flandrau will open its 16-inch telescope from 7:30 PM until midnight, for real time video imaging and for direct viewing if the comet is bright enough. The best nights to view the comet from Flandrau's 16-inch telescope may be Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights after impact. The telescope will be open for the public from 7:30 PM to 10:00 PM. Monday through Saturday, July 4 - 9. Flandrau's 16-inch telescope is the only free public telescope open on a regular basis in the state of Arizona. Normal telescope hours are 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM Monday through Wednesday, weather permitting. For more Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 information, visit Flandrau's Web page at http://www.flandrau.org and call the Flandrau Astronomy News line at 520-621-4310. Related Web sites: Deep Impact: http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html UA Lunar & Planetary Lab: http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/ UA Steward Observatory: http://www.as.arizona.edu/ LPL Public Events Program: http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/pop/ Flandrau Science Center: http://www.flandrau.org/ Observatory Web sites: Arizona Radio Observatory, 12m: http://kp12m.as.arizona.edu/ 6.5-m MMT Observatory: http://www.mmto.org/ Kitt Peak National Observatory: http://www.noao.edu/kpno/ Catalina Sky Survey: http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/css/ Kuiper 61-inch: http://james.as.arizona.edu/~psmith/61inch/ Spacewatch: http://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/ 21-inch Campus Station: http://www.as.arizona.edu:8080/Astro/department/res_facil/opt_tele.html Hibernating Spacecraft Awakens for Comet Impact Mission Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics release, 28 June 2005 The Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS) has been asleep on orbit for the past 11 months. SWAS operators placed it into hibernation after a highly successful 5.5-year mission highlighted by the discovery of a swarm of comets evaporating around an aging red giant star. Now, they have awakened SWAS again for the first-ever opportunity to study a comet on a collision course with a U.S. space probe. 17 Current SWAS measurements indicate that Comet Tempel 1 is ejecting about 730 pounds of water per second, which is modest by cometary standards. Deep Impact mission designers specifically selected the target for this reason because the probe's mothership will have a better chance of surviving the flyby. SWAS will watch closely for any changes to the water production rate during and after the impact. Its measurements will help constrain the nature of the comet's nucleus, including its chemical makeup. NASA and the SWAS team decided to reawaken the satellite because it offers several unique advantages for observing the impactor-comet collision. SWAS can determine the water production rate directly. It has a large field of view that encompasses both the comet nucleus and the surrounding envelope of vaporized gases known as the coma. And, it is above the atmosphere and unaffected by weather, allowing SWAS to monitor the comet almost continuously. In early June, the satellite was powered up and its components successfully tested. SWAS will remain active through the end of August, watching Comet Tempel 1 for any long-term changes. "It's gratifying that a satellite that has contributed so much during its lifetime has been given one more opportunity," said Melnick. "Helping to decipher the composition of material thought to be unchanged since the birth of our solar system seems like a great last act." Read the original news release at http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/pr0522.html. NASA's Deep Impact Craft Observes Major Comet "Outburst" NASA/JPL release 2006-104, 28 June 2005 NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft observed a massive, short-lived outburst of ice or other particles from comet Tempel 1 that temporarily expanded the size and reflectivity of the cloud of dust and gas (coma) that surrounds the comet nucleus. The outburst was detected as a dramatic brightening of the comet on June 22. It is the second of two such events observed in the past two weeks. A smaller outburst also was seen on June 14 by Deep Impact, the Hubble Space Telescope and by ground based observers. SWAS will have a ringside seat for a probe-comet impact on July 4, 2005. Image credit: NASA, B. Scott Kahler, David Aguilar. "We knew there was life left in SWAS," said SWAS Principal Investigator Gary Melnick (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics). "SWAS's ability to detect emission from water convinced us that we could contribute to the broader understanding of comets generated by this event. This once-in-alifetime event was just too tempting to pass up." NASA's Deep Impact mission will rendezvous with Comet Tempel 1 at the end of June. Twenty-four hours before collision, on July 3rd, the flyby spacecraft will deploy a 39-inch long by 39-inch wide, 802-pound copperreinforced impactor to strike the comet's nucleus. As the main Deep Impact spacecraft watches from a safe distance, the impactor will blast material out of the comet, excavating a football stadium-sized crater of pristine ice from the interior. SWAS will measure the abundance of water molecules as the icy comet debris vaporizes. "Because a comet is composed mostly of ice and rock, water is the most abundant molecule released by a comet. Everything else vaporizing from the comet is measured relative to the amount of water," said Melnick. "Water is the gold standard for comets, so knowing how much water is being released per second is a very useful piece of information." In a dress rehearsal for the rendezvous between NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft and comet 9P/Tempel 1, the Hubble Space Telescope captured dramatic images of a new jet of dust streaming from the icy comet. Image credit: NASA, ESA, P. Feldman (Johns Hopkins University), and H. Weaver (Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Lab). "This most recent outburst was six times larger than the one observed on June 14, but the ejected material dissipated almost entirely within about a half day," said University of Maryland College Park astronomer Michael A'Hearn, principal investigator for the Deep Impact mission. A'Hearn noted that data from the spectrometer aboard the spacecraft showed that during the June 22 outburst the amount of water vapor in the coma doubled, while the amount of other gases, including carbon dioxide, increased even more. A movie of the cometary outburst is available on the Internet at www.nasa.gov/deepimpact. "Outbursts such as this may be a very common phenomenon on many comets, but they are rarely observed in sufficient detail to understand them because it is normally so difficult to obtain enough time on telescopes to discover such phenomena," A'Hearn said. "We likely would have missed this exciting event, except that we are now getting almost continuous coverage of the comet with the spacecraft's imaging and spectroscopy instruments." Deep Impact co-investigator Jessica Sunshine, with Science Applications International Corporation, Chantilly, Va., agreed that observing such activity Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 twice in two weeks suggests outbursts are fairly common. "We must now consider them as a significant part of the processing that occur on comets as they heat up when approaching the sun," she said. Dolores Beasley NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1753 Comet Tempel 1 is near perihelion, or the point in its orbit at which it is closest to the Sun. Lee Tune University of Maryland, College Park, MD Phone: 301-405-4679 "This adds to the level of excitement as we come down to the final days before encounter," said Rick Grammier, Deep Impact project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. "But this comet outburst will require no modification to mission plan and in no way affects spacecraft safety." Deep Impact consists of a sub-compact-car-sized flyby spacecraft and an impactor spacecraft about the size of a washing machine. The dual spacecraft carries three imaging instruments, two on the flyby spacecraft and one on the impactor. A spectrometer on the flyby spacecraft uses the same telescope as the flyby's high-resolution imager. The final prelude to impact will begin early on July 3, 24 hours before the 1:52 AM EDT July 4th impact, when the flyby spacecraft releases the impactor into the path of the comet. Like a copper penny pitched up into the air just in front of a speeding tractor-trailer truck, the 820-pound impactor will be run down by the comet, colliding with the nucleus at a closing speed of 23,000 miles per hour. Scientists expect the impact to create a crater several hundred feet in size; ejecting ice, dust and gas from the crater and revealing pristine material beneath. The impact will have no significant affect on the orbit of Tempel 1, which poses no threat to Earth. Nearby, Deep Impact's "flyby" spacecraft will use its medium and high resolution imagers and infrared spectrometer to collect and send to Earth pictures and spectra of the event. The Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and large and small telescopes on Earth also will observe the impact and its aftermath. The University of Maryland, College Park, conducts overall mission science for Deep Impact that is a Discovery class NASA program. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory handles project management and mission operations. The spacecraft was built for NASA by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation, Boulder, CO. Contacts: Lori Stiles, UA Phone: 520-626-4402 E-mail: [email protected] Virginia Pasek, LPL Public Events Phone: 520-621-9692 E-mail: [email protected] Mike Terenzoni, Flandrau Phone: 520-621-3646 E-mail: [email protected] Doug Isbell, NOAO Phone: 520-318-8230 E-mail: [email protected] David Aguilar, Director of Public Affairs Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Phone: 617-495-7462 Fax: 617-495-7468 E-mail: [email protected] Christine Pulliam Public Affairs Specialist Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Phone: 617-495-7463 Fax: 617-495-7016 E-mail: [email protected] D. C. Agle Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-393-9011 18 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1610.html http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1619.html http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1621.html http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1622.html http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/28jun_deepimpact.htm http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050621_deep_impact.html http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/050622_techwed_sim_ dp_imp.html http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050627_hubble_comet.html http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050628_deepimpact_effect.html http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050628_deep_impact_burst.html http://www.space.com/news/050628_swas_wakes.html http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/050629_deep_impact_beyond.htm l http://www.spacedaily.com/news/comet-05v.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/comet-05y.html http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0506/27deepimpact/ http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0506/28deepimpact/ http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0506/28deepimpactswas/ http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/jet_tempel_1.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/swas_wakes_up.html MARS EXPRESS RADAR READY TO WORK ESA release 34-2005 22 June 2005 MARSIS, the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding onboard ESA's Mars Express orbiter, is now fully deployed, has undergone its first checkout and is ready to start operations around the Red Planet. With this radar, the Mars Express orbiter at last has its full complement of instruments available to probe the planet's atmosphere, surface and subsurface structure. MARSIS consists of three antennas: two "dipole" booms 20 meters long, and one 7-meter "monopole" boom oriented perpendicular to the first two. Its importance is that it is the first-ever means of looking at what may lie below the surface of Mars. The delicate three-stage phase of radar boom deployment, and all the following tests to verify spacecraft integrity, took place between 2 May and 19 June. Deployment of the first boom was completed on 10 May. That boom, initially stuck in unlocked mode, was later released by exploiting solar heating of its hinges. Taking advantage of the lessons learnt from that first boom-deployment, the second 20-meter boom was successfully deployed on 14 June. Subsequently, ESA's ground team at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, commanded the non-critical deployment of the third boom on 17 June, which proceeded smoothly as planned. MARSIS's ability to transmit radio waves in space was tried out for the first time on 19 June, when the instrument was switched on and performed a successful transmission test. The instrument works by sending a coded stream of radio waves towards Mars at night, and analyzing their distinctive echoes. From this, scientists can then make deductions about the surface and subsurface structure. The key search is for water. But MARSIS's capabilities do not stop there. The same methods can also be used by day to probe the structure of the upper atmosphere. Before starting its scientific observations, MARSIS has to undergo its commissioning phase. This is a routine procedure for any spacecraft instrument, necessary to test its performance in orbit using real targets in situ. In this case, the commissioning will last about ten days, or 38 spacecraft orbital passes, starting on 23 June and ending on 4 July. During the commissioning phase, MARSIS will be pointed straight down (nadir pointing mode) to look at Mars from those parts of the elliptical orbit where the spacecraft is closest to the surface (around the pericenter). During this phase, Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 19 it will cover the areas of Mars between 15° S and 70° N latitude. This includes interesting features such as the northern plains and the Tharsis region, so there is a small chance of exciting discoveries being made early on. MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 16-22 June 2005 On 4 July, when the commissioning operations end, MARSIS will start its nominal science observations. In the initial phase, it will operate in survey mode. It will make observations of the martian globe's night-side. This is favorable to deep subsurface sounding, because during the night the ionosphere of Mars does not interfere with the lower-frequency signals needed by the instrument to penetrate the planet's surface, down to a depth of 5 kilometers. The following new images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are now available. Through to mid-July, the radar will look at all martian longitudes between 30° S and 60° N latitude, in nadir pointing mode. This area, which includes the smooth northern plains, may have once contained large amounts of water. The MARSIS operation altitudes are up to 800 kilometers for subsurface sounding and up to 1200 kilometers for studying the ionosphere. From midJuly, the orbit's closest approach point will enter the day-side of Mars and stay there until December. In this phase, using higher frequency radio waves, the instrument will continue shallow probing of the subsurface and start atmospheric sounding. "Overcoming all the technical challenges to operate an instrument like MARSIS, which had never flown in space before this mission, has been made possible thanks to magnificent cooperation between experts on both sides of the Atlantic," said Professor David Southwood, ESA's Science Programme Director. "The effort is indeed worthwhile as, with MARSIS now at work, whatever we find, we are moving into new territory; ESA's Mars Express is now well and truly one of the most important scientific missions to Mars to date," he concluded. The MARSIS instrument was developed by the University of Rome, Italy, in partnership with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The instrument team is led by Professor Giovanni Picardi. It is the first instrument to actually look below the surface of Mars, using low frequency microwaves reflected by the different layers of matter. Among its primary objectives are the attempt to detect underground water ice and the characterisation of terrains underneath layers of sediment. In addition, MARSIS will conduct large-scale altimetry mapping and provide data on the planet's ionosphere, as this electrically-charged region of the upper atmosphere reflects radio waves too. Gullied Crater Wall (Released 16 June 2006) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/06/16 Candor Chasma Features (Released 17 June 2006) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/06/17 South Hemisphere Gullies (Released 18 June 2006) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/06/18 Defrosting Sand (Released 19 June 2006) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/06/19 Crater with Streak (Released 20 June 2006) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/06/20 Mars at Ls 230 Degrees (Released 21 June 2006) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/06/21 Small Impact Crater (Released 22 June 2006) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/06/22 All of the Mars Global Surveyor images http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/index.html. MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release 20-24 June 2005 Contacts: Fred Jansen ESA, Mars Express Mission Manager E-mail: [email protected] Arsia Mons Overlapping Flows (Released 23 June 2005) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050623a.html ESA Media Relations Division Phone: +33(0)1-53-69-7155 Fax: +33(0)1-53-69-7690 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1612.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/marsexpress-05w.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/mars_express_booms_deployed.ht ml archived at 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 Express was launched on 2 June 2003 and reached the Red Planet on Christmas Day that same year. MARSIS was planned to deploy its three antenna booms in April 2004, towards the end of the orbiter's commissioning phase. Computer simulations pointed to a risk that the booms could lash back and harm the spacecraft and its instruments during deployment. ESA therefore delayed deployment until the boom supplier (JPL) and the spacecraft prime contractor (Astrium, France) together with ESA's experts had conducted further analyses and simulations of boom behavior during deployment and the possible impact on the spacecraft. Once the magnitude of the risk involved had been assessed and the relevant mitigation scenarios defined, ESA decided to proceed with releasing the MARSIS antennas in May 2005. Agustin Chicarro ESA, Mars Express Project Scientist E-Mail: [email protected] are Arsia Mons Southern Flank (Released 20 June 2005) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050620a.html Arsia Mons Lava Flows (Released 21 June 2005) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050621a.html Arsia Mons Surface Flow (Released 22 June 2005) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050622a.html Filled Crater (Released 24 June 2005) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050624a.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. Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 22, 29 June 2005 MARS RECONNAISSANCE ORBITER STATUS NASA expendable launch vehicle status report E05-04 23 June 2005 Mission: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) Launch Vehicle: Lockheed Martin Atlas V 401 Launch Pad: Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41), Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS), FL Launch Date: August 10, 2005 Launch Window: 7:53:58 to 9:53:58 AM (EDT) Power-on testing continues to go well. The high-gain antenna will be installed Friday. The solar arrays are being cleaned and inspected in preparation for installation; planned for June 28. On June 17, the Centaur upper stage for the Atlas V was transported from the hangar at the Atlas Space Operations Center to the Vertical Integration Facility (VIF) at SLC-41. It was hoisted atop the Atlas stage to begin checkout. The Launch Vehicle Readiness Test is under way. A countdown wet dress rehearsal with the launch vehicle fully fueled is scheduled in early July. The MRO will be transported from the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at KSC to the VIF in late July. It will join the Atlas V for the final phase of launch preparations. The spacecraft will undergo a functional test, a final week of integrated testing and closeouts. The MRO mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems is the prime contractor for the project and will provide launch services for the mission with International Launch Services. Previous status reports are available on the Internet at http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/launchingrockets/status/2005. For information about NASA and agency programs on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html. Contacts: Katherine Trinidad NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-3749 George H. Diller NASA Kennedy Space Center, FL Phone: 321-867-2468 End Marsbugs, Volume 12, Number 22. 20