MARSBUGS: The Electronic Exobiology Newsletter Volume 5, Number 7, 14 March, 1998. Editors: David Thomas, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID, 83844-3051, USA, thoma457@uidaho.edu or Marsbugs@aol.com. Julian Hiscox, Division of Molecular Biology, IAH Compton Laboratory, Berkshire, RG20 7NN, UK. Julian.Hiscox@bbsrc.ac.uk or Marsbug@msn.com MARSBUGS is published on a weekly to quarterly basis as warranted by the number of articles and announcements. Copyright of this compilation exists with the editors, except for specific articles, in which instance copyright exists with the author/authors. E- mail subscriptions are free, and may be obtained by contacting either of the editors. Article contributions are welcome, and should be submitted to either of the two editors. Contributions should include a short biographical statement about the author(s) along with the author(s)' correspondence address. Subscribers are advised to make appropriate inquiries before joining societies, ordering goods etc. Back issues and Word97 files suitable for printing may be obtained via anonymous FTP at: ftp.uidaho.edu/pub/mmbb/marsbugs. Also, an official web page is under construction. Currently it is part of http://members.aol.com/marsbugs/dave.html (right now, the page simply points to the FTP site). The purpose of this newsletter is to provide a channel of information for scientists, educators and other persons interested in exobiology and related fields. This newsletter is not intended to replace peer-reviewed journals, but to supplement them. We, the editors, envision MARSBUGS as a medium in which people can informally present ideas for investigation, questions about exobiology, and announcements of upcoming events. Exobiology is still a relatively young field, and new ideas may come out of the most unexpected places. Subjects may include, but are not limited to: exobiology proper (life on other planets), the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), ecopoeisis/ terraformation, Earth from space, planetary biology, primordial evolution, space physiology, biological life support systems, and human habitation of space and other planets. ------------------------------------------------------------------ INDEX 1) EXOTIC-LOOKING MICROBES TURN UP IN ANCIENT ANTARCTIC ICE by Dave Dooling 2) MORE EVIDENCE POINTS TO IMPACT AS DINOSAUR KILLER JPL release 3) ASTEROID WILL MISS EARTH BY "COMFORTABLE DISTANCE" IN 2028 JPL release 4) FLIGHT TEAM MAKES FINAL ATTEMPT TO CONTACT PATHFINDER LANDER JPL note 5) MARS PATHFINDER UPDATE JPL release 6) MARS PATHFINDER MISSION STATUS JPL release 7) STARDUST STATUS REPORT by Ken Atkins 8) NEW MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES JPL release 9) GALILEO EUROPA MISSION STATUS JPL release 10) RAINFOREST MAPPING TECHNIQUES HIGHLIGHTED IN JPL EVENING TALK JPL release ------------------------------------------------------------------ EXOTIC-LOOKING MICROBES TURN UP IN ANCIENT ANTARCTIC ICE by Dave Dooling 13 March, 1998 Mickey Mouse, Klingon, porpoise, sphere, and leftover turkey are nicknames given to objects found in ancient Antarctic ice from as deep as 1,249 meters beneath Vostok Station. Two scientists exploring a microworld locked in ancient ice have found a wide range of life forms from fungi, algae, and bacteria to a few diatoms--and a few items with strange shapes. "We've found some really bizarre things--things that we've never seen before," said Richard Hoover of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Hoover and Dr. S. S. Abyzov of the Russian Academy of Sciences have been examining deep ice core samples from the Vostok Station about 1,000 km (620 miles) from the South Pole. The objects have fanciful names--like Mickey Mouse and Klingon-- based on passing resemblance. Hoover expects that most will fall into known categories of microorganisms as he and Abyzov study the images. "We're exploring a new world," Hoover said. "Until we get a lot more experience, we're going to see brand new things all the time." The ice harboring these finds is as old as 400,000 years, depending on the depth. Russian scientists at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, developed the technology for drilling ice cores without contaminating the samples. Since 1974, they have worked at Vostok Station, extracting cores from ever greater depths. In 1996, the Russian Academy of Sciences announced that a large lake of liquid water lies beneath the 3 km-deep glacier at Vostok. Meanwhile, the ice samples from above the lake's surface (which has not been breached) are stirring interest in the scientific community. In the 1970s, Abyzov discovered--and in some cases revived--microorganisms in ice that conventional wisdom had said was sterile. Now the discovery of ice and slush on Europa and mounting evidence of water on Mars and on our own Moon are leading scientists to rethink the possibilities of life elsewhere in the universe. "These are very important questions for future cosmic research on places like Europa, comets, the Martian ice caps," Abyzov said of the mysteries in the Antarctic ice. Hoover and Abyzov are using Marshall's Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM) to examine material found in the ice. Their work is a collaborative effort between NASA/Marshall and the Institute of Microbiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences working in collaboration with the St. Petersburg Mining Institute and the Institute of Arctic and Antarctic Research in St. Petersburg, Russia. "This is very useful," Abyzov said, "because we do not have this equipment in our laboratory. We have scanning electron microscopes, but without the additional equipment you have." As might be expected, they have found a lot of atmospheric dust and debris, and possibly some cosmic dust. "There are some dust particles with unusual spectra," Hoover said. "Which may be cosmic dust particles." The ESEM allows the operator to designate a point on a specimen and then scan with X-rays to determine what elements are present. The ratios found in some of the dust particles do not match ratios expected in terrestrial dust grains. "Mickey Mouse" and other colonies of small microbes appear to be out of the ordinary. These are fluffy white objects, about 1 micron wide and resembling cotton balls. "Here's the shocker," said Hoover, pointing at the ESEM monitor, "these small coccoid bodies are covered with all this incredible fibrous structure." The filaments appear to be about 30 to 40 nanometers wide (that's about 1/10th a wavelength of visible light). "It's difficult for me to say what it is," Abyzov said, "but I tend to agree that this is biological." "There are all sorts of microorganisms in the ice. Some are readily recognizable as cyanobacteria, bacteria, fungi, spores, pollen grains, and diatoms, but some are not recognizable as anything we've ever seen before," Hoover said. Many will turn out to be known. It's just that they look different under the ESEM, which provides details that are not available through other microscopes. Familiar items include bits of sponge and feather, and diatom fragments, Hoover's other area of personal interest and expertise (he works at Marshall as an X-ray astronomer). They have also found a number of large cyanobacteria with nanobacteria attached. "What is clearly going on is that when microorganisms freeze, they shut down and go into this anabiotic state," Hoover explained. Anabiotic means alive but inactive, like suspended animation. Russian scientists have been able to revive and culture bacteria, yeast, fungi, and other microbes found in ice cores. "One of the things that was really exciting was that many of the cyanobacteria from 1,243 meters down had lots of antimony," Hoover said. The X-ray spectrum showed carbon, oxygen, zinc, silicon, aluminum, and potassium - all chemicals common to life. But it also showed an abnormal amount of antimony, a toxic heavy metal. "It was not just one of these that had it," Hoover said, "but microorganism after microorganism." Gregory Jerman, the ESEM operator, noted that the metal content has varied with depth. At some levels the microorganisms show large quantities of antimony, while in others zinc rings the bell With more than 150 ESEM images and almost as many spectra recorded, Hoover and Abyzov next go to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. There, Dr. Ken Nealson will try to extract genetic material from the microorganisms. As Hoover talked, another new image appeared on screen. "It's pretty big," he said of an object that looked like a porpoise and probably is a protozoan. "The work of identifying and classifying everything in the ice will be long and challenging," Hoover said. He compared it to his own initiation in the world of diatoms where for years everything looked new until he became familiar with it. Then he could quickly recognize the rare unusual specimen. "It's necessary to know what to look for and the kinds of things you can see," he said. Like the Klingon's forehead, a wrinkled object resembling a character from Star Trek, or the porpoise. For now some of them just have nicknames, until Hoover, Abyzov, and their colleagues analyze their exciting images and obtain more definitive identifications of these microscopic beasts of the frozen underworld. [To see the images mentioned in this article, see http://www.ssl.msfc.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast12mar98_1.htm] Author: Dave Dooling Curator: Linda Porter NASA Official: Gregory S. Wilson ------------------------------------------------------------------ MORE EVIDENCE POINTS TO IMPACT AS DINOSAUR KILLER JPL release 12 March, 1998 Two new impact crater sites in Belize and Mexico add further evidence to the hypothesis that an asteroid or comet collided with Earth about 65 million years ago, subsequently killing off the dinosaurs and many other species on the planet. Researchers Adriana Ocampo of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, CA, and Kevin Pope of Geo Eco Arc Research, La Canada-Flintridge, CA, led an international team that discovered the two new sites during a recent expedition sponsored by NASA's Exobiology Program and The Planetary Society, Pasadena, CA. "We discovered an important new site in Alvaro Obregon, Mexico, about 230 kilometers (140 miles) from the rim of the Chicxulub crater. This crater was formed when a 10 to 14 kilometer diameter (6 to 8 mile) asteroid or comet collided with Earth," Ocampo said. "The site contains two layers of material, or ejecta, thrown out by the impact that flowed across the surface like a thick fluid, known as fluidized ejecta lobes," added Pope. "This is the closest surface exposure of ejecta to the Chicxulub crater that has yet been found and the best example known on Earth from a really big impact crater." Centered on the coast of Yucatan, Mexico, the Chicxulub crater is estimated to be about 200 kilometers (120 miles) in diameter. The impact 65 million years ago kicked up a global cloud of dust and sulfur gases that blocked sunlight from penetrating through the atmosphere and sent Earth into a decade of near-freezing temperatures. The drop in temperature and related environmental effects are thought to have brought about the demise of the dinosaurs and about 75 percent of the other species on Earth. The Earth orbits the Sun in a swarm of so-called near-Earth objects, whether they are comets or asteroids, yet the science of detecting and tracking them is still relatively young. Only a handful of astronomers around the world search for these objects, and they estimate that currently only about one-tenth of the population of near-Earth objects has been detected. Chicxulub is the only impact event that has been correlated with mass extinctions to date. The site has been dated geologically to the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, also known as the K/T boundary. Local geologist Brian Holland of Punta Gorda, Belize, guided the expedition to another new ejecta site about 480 kilometers (290 miles) from the crater rim. This Belize site contains tiny spheres of altered green glass, called tektites. Tektites are rocks that have been melted to glass by the severe heat of an impact. Expedition member Jan Smit of Free University, Amsterdam, noted that the Belize tektites were similar to those found in Haiti and northern Mexico. This finding links the stratigraphy of the Belize sites to the more distant Caribbean and Mexican ejecta sites. Alfred Fischer of the University of Southern California, Michael Gibson of the University of Tennessee at Martin, and Jaime Urrutia and Francisco Vega of the National Autonomous University of Mexico helped the team collect 400 kilograms (900 pounds) of samples, including drill cores, for paleomagnetic studies. They also collected fossils from the site to help date the deposits and add new pieces to the puzzle of what happened at Chicxulub 65 million years ago. Impact ejecta is very rare on Earth, but covers much of the surface of Mars because Mars' surface has remained stable and unchanged for billions of years, thus preserving debris from these rare impact events. Also, such fluidized ejecta lobes have never been observed directly on Earth before and can serve as an excellent laboratory for studying the ejecta lobes surrounding many Martian craters. "The discovery of these new ejecta sites is very exciting," said team co-leader Ocampo. "It is like seeing a bit of Mars on Earth." The exact nature of these ejecta lobes on Mars remains a mystery, Ocampo noted. Some scientists think they were created by an abundance of water in the Martian crust, which turned the ejecta into a muddy, molasses-like material. Others suggest the fluidized ejecta lobes were enabled by a much thicker atmosphere in Mars' early history. As flying ejecta from an impact event flew through the Martian atmosphere, it was reduced by friction to a very dense, turbulent cloud of debris that also flowed like water. Study of the Chicxulub fluidized ejecta may help settle this debate and shed new light on theories that the Martian surface may once have been more hospitable for life. Volunteers who assisted The Planetary Society and the scientists in the field have posted their photographs of the expedition on The Planetary Society web site at the following URL: http://planetary.org. Information about and images of newly discovered near-Earth objects found by JPL's ongoing Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) program are available at http://huey.jpl.nasa.gov/~spravdo/neat.html. Ocampo and Pope's research was funded in part by the Exobiology Program of NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. ------------------------------------------------------------------ ASTEROID WILL MISS EARTH BY "COMFORTABLE DISTANCE" IN 2028 JPL release 12 March, 1998 Asteroid 1997 XF11 will pass well beyond the Moon's distance from Earth in October 2028 with a zero probability of impacting the planet, according to astronomers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. The asteroid "is predicted to pass at a rather comfortable distance of about 600,000 miles (about 960,000 kilometers) in 2028," reported Dr. Donald K. Yeomans and Dr. Paul W. Chodas, JPL scientists who specialize in computing the predicted orbits of comets, asteroids, planets and other bodies in the solar system. Data on the asteroid from March 1990 (well before its discovery in December 1997) was integrated into the orbit calculations by Yeomans and Chodas to arrive at the distance the asteroid will pass Earth. The 1990 observations of the object were found today in the Palomar Planet Crossing Asteroid Survey conducted at Caltech's Palomar Observatory, by JPL's Eleanor Helin and Ken Lawrence and by Brian Roman, formerly of JPL. Even prior to the discovery of the earlier Palomar observations, however, Yeomans and Chodas had determined that the impact probability would be zero. The new calculations further underscore that conclusion, they said. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology. ------------------------------------------------------------------ FLIGHT TEAM MAKES FINAL ATTEMPT TO CONTACT PATHFINDER LANDER JPL note 9 March, 1998 The Mars Pathfinder flight team will make its final attempt to contact the spacecraft tomorrow using NASA's Deep Space Network 34-meter antenna at Goldstone, CA. Project representative Ben Toyashima will be the "ace," or primary flight controller, listening for a signal from the spacecraft. One-way light time from Earth to Mars is currently 19 minutes, 30 seconds, so a two-way signal could be received in about 40 minutes. If no signal is detected within the first hour of the pass, Toyashima will send a set of commands to activate the spacecraft's thumbnail-size auxiliary transmitter, located on the top of the lander's base petal. Although the flight team is not optimistic that a signal will be received, they would see a brief blip on the computer monitor if the spacecraft is still operating. Mars Pathfinder fell silent on September 27, 1997, which was the 83rd day of surface operations, after having nearly tripled its design lifetime of 30 days. ------------------------------------------------------------------ MARS PATHFINDER UPDATE JPL release 10 March, 1998 Today starting at 10:00 AM PST we will make our final attempt to contact Pathfinder. 10:15 AM - The high efficiency 34 meter Deep Space Network (DSN Station #15) antenna located in Goldstone California is currently attempting to lock onto a carrier signal using a Block 5 receiver. Mars is currently 2.35 Astronomical Units (AU), or 351 million kilometers away from Earth. The one way light time is 19.8 minutes. The first command will be sent at 10:51 AM PST 10:39 AM - At 10:51 AM PST we will send a command to Pathfinder to activate an onboard sequence designed to turn on the primary Pathfinder transmitter. Since the one way light time is 19.8 minutes, we will have to wait for approximately 40 minutes before we can expect a response from Pathfinder, assuming the command was received and the sequence activated. 10:53 AM - The command to activate the onboard sequence is now being radiated to Pathfinder. 11:22 AM - We are now waiting to receive the signal. Mars is currently 49.2 degrees above the horizon at the Goldstone DSN station located in the Mojave desert in southern California. 11:35 AM - We should have heard the signal by now, but we have not. We will sweep for the carrier for 50 minutes. ------------------------------------------------------------------ MARS PATHFINDER MISSION STATUS JPL release 10 March, 1998 The long goodbye to NASA's Mars Pathfinder lander and the Soujourner rover ended today when the lander failed to respond to the final command to communicate with controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Pathfinder mission, which operated three times longer than its original 30-day planned lifetime on the martian surface, is acknowledged as one of NASA's most successful endeavors as a dramatic example of the space agency's new style of "faster, better, cheaper" planetary exploration. Today's last-ditch effort to listen for a signal from Pathfinder effectively ends the mission, said project manager Brian Muirhead. No further attempts will be made to communicate with Pathfinder, he added. Pathfinder flight controllers Ben Toyoshima and Rob Smith at JPL spent nearly four hours today alternately commanding the lander to turn on its transmitter, then listening for a response via NASA's Deep Space Network's 34-meter antenna at Goldstone, California, in the Mojave Desert. One-way radio communications to Mars from Earth take nearly 20 minutes. The final Pathfinder telecommunications session ended at 1:21 p.m. PST when no transmissions had been detected from Pathfinder. A description of the efforts to reestablish contact with Pathfinder can bee found at the following URL: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/readme.html ------------------------------------------------------------------ STARDUST STATUS REPORT by Ken Atkins, Stardust Project Manager 6 March, 1998 The Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations (ATLO) activities continued to make progress. The Telecom subsystem interface tests with the system were completed; work proceeded on commanding with the ground support equipment, and testing of compatibility with the Deep Space Network (DSN) was initiated. The assembly of the flight Sample Return Capsule (SRC) is nearing completion. The avionics package was installed. And ballast was added to increase the entry stability margin. This brings the capsule to 45 kg. The SRC Structural Model was returned to Denver from the Utah Test and Training Range. The recorded data showed an extremely soft (21 g) landing in the drop test. The Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) chassis seal review and assessment of the torque of the connector screws was completed. This resulted in agreement to proceed with installation of electronics for the dry o-ring leak test. Thermal vacuum testing of the spacecraft test battery was completed indicating acceptable temperature gradients. Random vibration with control on the test battery was also completed and qualified the composite bulkheads. In other news, Ambient temperature solar array deployment tests were completed on the qualification unit. Electromagnetic testing was completed on the Power Control Assembly (PCA). Random vibration and 2 axes of shock testing of the flight Command and Data Handling (C&DH) subsystem has been completed. The Block Dictionary and Flight Rules and Constraints were also published. For more information on the STARDUST mission--the first ever comet sample return mission--please visit the STARDUST home page: http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ NEW MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES JPL release 7 March, 1998 http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/images/3_9_98_release/ind ex.html Mission Update As of March 7, 1998, the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft has completed 163 orbits of Mars, during which it has reduced its orbital period from 45 to 13.75 hrs. The local time at the equator of the orbit is now roughly 11 AM. The spacecraft remains healthy and operating normally. Following the Mars Surveyor Operations Project's Delta-Critical Design Review the first week of March, the Project is now preparing to complete the first phase of aerobraking, raising the periapsis out of the atmosphere to suspend aerobraking until early September 1998. The planned orbital period (11.6 hr) should be reached around the end of March. At that time, the spacecraft will be placed in what is called the Science Phasing Orbit (or SPO), and enter a period that consists of three phases: * SPO-1 (early April to early May 1998), when science data will be collected from roughly 10:45 to 10:00 AM local Mars time, * Conjunction (roughly the month of May 1998), when the spacecraft will be placed in a quiescent state while the orbit of Mars moves behind the sun as seen from the Earth and communications become more difficult, and * SPO-2 (early June through early September 1998), when more science data will be acquired, at between 9:00 and 6:00 AM. For more information about the spacecraft and mission, visit the Mars Global Surveyor Project Web Site. Camera Update The Mars Orbiter Camera was turned off in mid-February, when the orbital period of the MGS spacecraft became too short to support both the playback of science data and the engineering activities associated with aerobraking. Although there is a low probability of any harm coming to the instrument while we are not receiving data from it, we felt it prudent to turn the camera off when not using it. This allowed us to turn on the heaters used to protect the instrument from getting too cold. Typical average temperatures within the camera rose from very near their coldest limits to as much as 20 degrees C (36 degrees F) warmer... what we call "nice and toasty." Preparations to resume imaging in early April are now underway. Malin Space Science Systems 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------ GALILEO EUROPA MISSION STATUS JPL release 11 March, 1998 NASA's Galileo spacecraft is once again sending pictures and science information to Earth following a 2-1/2 week-hiatus caused by a period of "solar conjunction." Radio communications were hampered during this period, when the Sun passed between Earth and Galileo. Now that full communications have been re-established, Galileo is sending to Earth pictures and information stored on its onboard tape recorder during the close Europa flyby this past December. Included are observations of the Pwyll impact crater region, the Conamara Chaos region, and fields and particles information on Europa's interaction with Jupiter's magnetic and electric fields. This batch of information was actually transmitted once before, but this retransmission of the recorded data allows scientists to fill gaps caused by transmission problems, and to replay particularly interesting observations and additional data. A turn for attitude maintenance was performed successfully on Sat., March 7. On Tues., March 10, the spacecraft's attitude control system was tested. This test was designed to determine how Galileo was affected by intense radiation exposure during the February 10 Europa flyby. Intense radiation in the Jovian system is considered a prime candidate as a cause of recent anomalous behavior by an attitude control system gyroscope. After analyzing results of the test, it was determined that the gyro's performance had degraded further. Although this may affect future pointing accuracy and stability, the Galileo team believes strongly that spacecraft still can collect additional science information during future flybys. Later this week, the spacecraft will perform a flight path adjustment to ensure that it is aimed correctly for its next encounter with Europa, scheduled for March 29. ------------------------------------------------------------------ RAINFOREST MAPPING TECHNIQUES HIGHLIGHTED IN JPL EVENING TALK JPL release 11 March, 1998 "Mapping the Amazon: Science, Supercomputers and Synthetic Aperture Radar" will be the subject of a free public lecture on Thursday, March 19 at 7 p.m. in JPL's von Karman Auditorium, 4800 Oak Grove Dr., Pasadena. Seating is limited and will be on a first-come, first-served basis. The lecture will be presented by Dr. Anthony Freeman, Radar Instrument Manager for NASA's planned LightSAR mission. Freeman was manager of the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C (SIR-C) Outreach Program from 1994-96, and was recently involved with the discovery of evidence of a prehistoric civilization and remnants of ancient temples in Angkor, Cambodia, using the JPL-developed Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (AIRSAR). Scientists studying global climate change search for evidence of carbon, either released as carbon monoxide and methane, or stored in plant biomass in rainforest regions sometimes known as the "lungs" of the Earth. Using sophisticated supercomputers and synthetic aperture radar (called "SAR"), scientists are now developing large-scale models of the carbon exchange occurring over the world's rain forests. SAR is an imaging technique that uses radar to "see" objects under thick cloud and surface cover and at night. It was used in the early 1990s on the Magellan mission, penetrating Venus' thick clouds providing detailed images of that planet's surface, and onboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1994, allowing archaeologists to locate ancient Arabia's "lost" city of Ubar by revealing old caravan routes buried beneath the region's thick layer of sand. A SAR instrument onboard the Japanese JERS-1 satellite is now involved in the Global Rain Forest Mapping project, begun in 1995, to systematically map the world's tropical rain forests to better form models of global carbon exchange. The first result from that project is a new map of the entire Amazon basin, available on the internet at http://southport.jpl.nasa.gov/amazon. Working in conjuction with the SAR investigations are a host of sophisticated supercomputers, capable of multi-dimensional mathematical modeling which allows the extensive computations a product such as the newly-created Amazon map requires. The new map will be used by scientists to estimate the area subject to deforestation and the extent of the Amazon's annual flooding. These estimations are contributing to models of carbon exhange that are being developed for the Amazon as part of NASA's Mission to Planet Earth program. This lecture is part of the von Karman Lecture Series sponsored monthly by the JPL Media Relations Office. A web site on the lecture series is located at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/lecture. For directions and other information, call the Media Relations Office at (818) 354-5011. JPL is a division of the California Instititute of Technology. ------------------------------------------------------------------ End Marsbugs Vol. 5, No. 7