MARSBUGS: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 6, Number 14, 28 May 1999. Editors: Dr. David Thomas, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID, 83844-3051, USA. Marsbugs@aol.com or davidt@uidaho.edu. Dr. Julian Hiscox, Division of Molecular Biology, IAH Compton Laboratory, Berkshire, RG20 7NN, UK. Julian.Hiscox@bbsrc.ac.uk 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. While we cannot copyright our mailing list, our readers would appreciate it if others would not send unsolicited e-mail using the Marsbugs mailing list. The editors do not condone "spamming" of our subscribers. Persons who have information that may be of interest to subscribers of Marsbugs should send that information to the editors. 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 Adobe Acrobat PDF files suitable for printing may be obtained via anonymous FTP at ftp.uidaho.edu/pub/mmbb/marsbugs or at the official Marsbugs web page at http://members.aol.com/marsbugs/marsbugs.html. 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. Astrobiology 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 and astrobiology (life on other planets), the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), ecopoeisis and terraformation, Earth from space, planetary biology, primordial evolution, space physiology, biological life support systems, and human habitation of space and other planets. ------------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENTS 1) ET, PHONE SETI@HOME! By Tony Philips 2) TALKSPACE.NET--A NEW SPACE COMMUNITY SITE From SpaceViews 3) FIRST GLOBAL 3-D VIEW OF MARS REVEALS DEEP BASIN AND PATHWAYS FOR WATER FLOW From NASA Space Science News and NASA release 99-66 4) SEARCH FOR LIFE ON MARS WILL START IN SIBERIA: NASA FUNDS PERMAFROST STUDY TO SUPPORT ASTROBIOLOGY RESEARCH By Dave Dooling 5) WHO WROTE THE BOOK OF LIFE? PICKING UP WHERE D'ARCY THOMPSON LEFT OFF By Leslie Mullen 6) CALL FOR PAPERS--CONFERENCE ON INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION UTILIZATION By John-David Bartoe ------------------------------------------------------------------ ET, PHONE SETI@HOME! By Tony Philips From NASA Space Science News 23 May 1999 Last week nearly 300,000 home computers contributed 1100 years of CPU time to the search for extraterrestrial life. The Arecibo Observatory, the world's largest radio telescope, completely fills a natural karst valley in the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. The 1000-foot diameter reflector is so big that scientists actually run around it for exercise. Many discoveries are credited to the great dish, including the first known extrasolar planets orbiting a neutron star, relativistic binary pulsars that spectacularly confirm Einstein's theories, and thousands of new galaxies that delineate the structure of the local Universe. What's next for Arecibo? Some scientists hope it will be the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence. And now you can help. SETI@home--a free screen-saver program that sifts through data from the Arecibo Observatory in search of extraterrestrial transmissions--was made available on-line for the general public on May 17, 1999. The program is easy to download and install. Downloading requires about 5 minutes over a 28.8 kbps modem. "Installing it was no problem," said Science@NASA artist Duane Hilton, a self-professed technophobe. "If I can do it anyone can!" [Download the program from http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu] The program literally runs itself. Whenever your computer is idle, the SETI@home screen saver pops up and begins to analyze Arecibo data fetched from a web server in Berkeley, CA. SETI@home connects to the Internet only when it needs to transfer data. This occurs once every few days and lasts for about 5 minutes. In only one week since SETI@home's official release, 298,000 computers have devoted over 9.5 million hours of CPU time to the project. That's 1100 years of CPU time, and the totals are mounting! SETI@home organizers are understandably excited. Louis Friedman, Executive Director of the Planetary Society, which sponsors SETI@home, said, "With SETI@home, anyone, anywhere could be the person who helps discover intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. This is a grand experiment--in science, in technology and in society--and a global cooperative effort at the frontiers of knowledge." An instrument at Arecibo called SERENDIP IV, which was installed in September 1998, collects data for the SETI@HOME project. A dedicated receiver tuned to a frequency near 1420 MHz collects signals from the sky 24 hours a day, seven days a week (except during periods of maintenance and testing). The data are recorded on tape and also fed to the 160 million-channel SERENDIP spectrum analyzer. Every 1.7 seconds SERENDIP checks the latest data and looks for very narrow bandwidth signals of the sort expected from extraterrestrial radio transmitters. Candidates are logged and stored for follow-up analysis and/or confirmation. The observing frequency, 1420 MHz, corresponds to the wavelength of radiation produced by a quantum mechanical "spin-flip transition" in neutral hydrogen atoms. Because hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe and because 1420 MHz is a relatively quiet frequency free from sources of natural radio interference, many SETI experts think that 1420 MHz is a good place to tune in interstellar broadcasts. Would aliens reason the same way? There's no way to know, but the search has to start somewhere. The SERENDIP program runs "piggy back" on other, more conventional observing programs. For example, while one astronomer might use Arecibo's Gregorian feed system to track and study pulsars, SERENDIP collects data from the 1420 MHz feed located near the 400 MHz feed at the other end of the rotating platform suspended above the reflecting dish. As the Gregorian reflector tracks the neutron star, the 1420 MHz feed points at some random area of the sky typically 10 to 20 degrees away. Rather than focus on particular nearby stars, SERENDIP will survey all of the sky visible to the Arecibo telescope. Planners reasoned that we know so little about extraterrestrial intelligence that signals might come from any direction. Over the next two years the Arecibo piggybacking observations are expected to cover about 30% of the entire sky three times. Most of the SETI programs in existence today, like SERENDIP, use powerful computers that analyze data from the telescope in real time. Because flow of data is so rapid and voluminous, there's no time to look very deeply at the data for weak signals nor do they look for a large class of signal types including "chirped" and pulsed transmissions. To tease out the weakest signals, a great amount of computer power is necessary. This is where SETI@home comes in. By combining the power of hundreds of thousands of PCs on the internet, SETI researchers hope to discover elusive signals that SERENDIP's quick look approach might have missed. Click to learn more about SETI@home signal analysis. If such a signal is found using the SETI@home program, the person whose computer crunched that vital bit of data will go down in history as helping to forever alter humanity's view of our place in the universe. Initial funding for the SETI@home project came from the Planetary Society. Other sponsors include the University of California Berkeley, Sun Microsystems, Fujifilm Computer Products, and Informix. Paramount Pictures provided funding to the Planetary Society for this project in connection with the opening of the movie, "Star Trek: Insurrection." The acronym SERENDIP stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations. [For more information on this story see http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast23may99_1.htm] ------------------------------------------------------------------ TALKSPACE.NET--A NEW SPACE COMMUNITY SITE From SpaceViews 23 May 1999 Talkspace.net, a new site devoted to building space communities online, has created in cooperation with the online space publication SpaceViews a new discussion mailing list devoted to the extraordinarily popular SETI@home project. The new mailing list will allow SETI@home participants from around the world to answer questions and exchange information about the software. To subscribe, send e-mail to majordomo@klx.com with "subscribe setiathome" (without the quotes) in the body of the message. More information about the mailing list is available at http://www.talkspace.net/mlists/setiathome.html. A copy of the page is available at http://www.klx.com/talkspace/mlists/setiathome.html. Any questions about the list can be directed to Jeff Foust at jeff@spaceviews.com. The SETI@home mailing list is the first project for talkspace.net (http://www.talkspace.net), an effort to develop communities of space enthusiasts and activists online that officially opens later this year. The list is cosponsored by SpaceViews (http://www.spaceviews.com), the online publication of space exploration. The SETI@home mailing list at talkspace.net is not an official list endorsed by the SETI@home project (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/) or the University of California Berkeley. ------------------------------------------------------------------ FIRST GLOBAL 3-D VIEW OF MARS REVEALS DEEP BASIN AND PATHWAYS FOR WATER FLOW From NASA Space Science News and NASA release 99-66 27 May 1999 An impact basin deep enough to swallow Mount Everest and surprising slopes in Valles Marineris highlight a global map of Mars that will influence scientific understanding of the red planet for years. Generated by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA), an instrument aboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, the high-resolution map represents 27 million elevation measurements gathered in 1998 and 1999. The data were assembled into a global grid with each point spaced 37 miles (60 kilometers) apart at the equator, and less elsewhere. Each elevation point is known with an accuracy of 42 feet (13 meters) in general, with large areas of the flat northern hemisphere known to better than six feet (two meters). "This incredible database means that we now know the topography of Mars better than many continental regions on Earth," said Dr. Carl Pilcher, Science Director for Solar System Exploration at NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC. "The data will serve as a basic reference book for Mars scientists for many years, and should inspire a variety of new insights about the planet's geologic history and the ways that water has flowed across its surface during the past four billion years." "The full range of topography on Mars is about 19 miles (30 kilometers), one and a half times the range of elevations found on Earth," noted Dr. David Smith of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, the principal investigator for MOLA and lead author of a study to be published in the May 28, 1999, issue of Science. "The most curious aspect of the topographic map is the striking difference between the planet's low, smooth Northern Hemisphere and the heavily cratered Southern Hemisphere, "which sits, on average, about three miles (five kilometers) higher than the north, Smith added. The MOLA data show that the Northern Hemisphere depression is distinctly not circular, and suggest that internal geologic processes shaped it during the earliest stages of martian evolution. The massive Hellas impact basin in the Southern Hemisphere is another striking feature of the map. Nearly six miles (nine kilometers) deep and 1,300 miles (2,100 kilometers) across, the basin is surrounded by a ring of material that rises 1.25 miles (about two kilometers) above the surroundings and stretches out to 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) from the basin center. This ring of material, likely thrown out of the basin during the impact of an asteroid, has a volume equivalent to a two-mile (3.5-kilometer) thick layer spread over the continental United States, and it contributes significantly to the high topography in the Southern Hemisphere. The difference in elevation between the hemispheres results in a slope from the South Pole to North Pole that was the major influence on the global-scale flow of water early in martian history. Scientific models of watersheds using the new elevation map show that the Northern Hemisphere lowlands would have drained three-quarters of the martian surface. On a more regional scale, the new data show that the eastern part of the vast Valles Marineris canyon slopes away from nearby outflow channels, with part of it lying a half-mile (about one kilometer) below the level of the outflow channels. "While water flowed south to north in general, the data clearly reveal the localized areas where water may have once formed ponds," explained Dr. Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, and Goddard. The amount of water on Mars can be estimated using the new data about the south polar cap and information about the North Pole released last year. While the poles appear very different from each other visually, they show a striking similarity in elevation profiles. Based on recent understanding of the North Pole, this suggests that the South Pole has a significant water ice component, in addition to carbon dioxide ice. The upper limit on the present amount of water on the martian surface is 800,000 to 1.2 million cubic miles (3.2 to 4.7 million cubic kilometers), or about 1.5 times the amount of ice covering Greenland. If both caps are composed completely of water, the combined volumes are equivalent to a global layer 66 to 100 feet (22 to 33 meters) deep, about one-third the minimum volume of a proposed ancient ocean on Mars. During the ongoing Mars Global Surveyor mission, the MOLA instrument is collecting about 900,000 measurements of elevation every day. These data will further improve the global model, help engineers assess the area where NASA's Mars Polar Lander mission will set down on December 3, and aid the selection of future landing sites. MOLA was designed and built by the Laser Remote Sensing Branch of the Laboratory for Terrestrial Physics at Goddard. The Mars Global Surveyor mission is managed for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC, by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, a division of the California Institute of Technology. MOLA topographic images may be viewed at http://pao.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/spacesci/pictures/mola/mars3d.htm More details about the MOLA instrument and science investigation can be found at http://ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/mola.html ------------------------------------------------------------------ SEARCH FOR LIFE ON MARS WILL START IN SIBERIA: NASA FUNDS PERMAFROST STUDY TO SUPPORT ASTROBIOLOGY RESEARCH By Dave Dooling From NASA Space Science News 27 May 1999 NASA and Russian scientists have been selected to take the search for life in the solar system to the frozen reaches of Earth. Richard Hoover of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and Professor Elena A. Vorobyova of Moscow State University will investigate the microbiota found in the permafrost and ice of Siberia, Alaska, and Antarctica. NASA's Office of Space Science has announced that their proposal, Permafrost as Microbial Habitat--in-situ Investigation, was one of 18 chosen from 123 proposals submitted for funding under the Joint U.S./Russian Research in Space Science (JURRISS) Program. "The microorganisms found in the permafrost, glaciers, and polar ice caps of Earth are of profound significance to astrobiology," Hoover said. "Dormant ancient microbes, and even higher plants such as moss, can remain viable by cryopreservation, resuming metabolic activity upon thawing after being frozen in glacial ice or permafrost for thousands to millions of years. "The microbial extremophiles in the Arctic and Antarctic glaciers and permafrost represent analogues for cells that might be encountered in the permafrost or ice caps of Mars or other icy bodies of the solar system." Hoover is a solar scientist by training who is applying his passion for diatoms--"nature's living jewels"--to NASA's astrobiology research. He is a co-investigator on two of the major research initiatives that NASA selected last year for its new Astrobiology Institute. Hoover's research on astromaterials is concerned with the microstructure and chemical composition of microfossils in ancient rocks and meteorites. He is collaborating on these projects with Alexei Rozanov, director of the Institute of Paleontology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He also is examining microorganisms from 3.6 km (2.3 miles) beneath the ice sheet above Lake Vostok, Antarctica. Their object is to investigate the microorganisms in the permafrost--permanently frozen soil--and to establish morphological characteristics and chemical biomarkers by which these microbes can be recognized. For more than a century scientists have studied the frozen remains of mammoths and other creatures that died and were preserved during the last ice age. Hoover and Vorobyova find greater import in far smaller organisms. Diatoms, bacteria, yeasts, cyanobacteria and other microorganisms may thrive in the ice and permafrost. Other microbes can be revived after being frozen for long periods. While some microbes, plants and even large mammals such as mammoth and bison are dead, they may contain magnificently preserved cellular components, DNA, RNA, proteins and enzymes. "Icy bodies are by far the most numerous of the solar system," Hoover pointed out. "The dirty snowballs we call comets, the ice- encrusted oceans of the Jovian moons of Europa and Callisto, the icy moons of Saturn, and the polar ice caps and permafrost of Mars are of paramount importance to astrobiology. They may harbor active microorganisms; ancient microbes that remain viable in a deep anabiosis (i.e., suspended animation) or even long-dead microbes with their microstructure, biochemistry, and perhaps even genetic material preserved." "We are studying the microorganisms found in the Arctic and Antarctic permafrost, glaciers and ice sheets," Hoover said. "This is a very stable ecosystem because the temperature remains the same for long periods of time. The paleolife of the permafrost may hold keys to the evolution of life on Earth and the distribution of life in the cosmos." Hoover said that three types of life forms are found in permafrost: active ones that eke out a living, forms in suspended anabiosis until things get better, and the ones that simply gave up and died. "We're very excited about the living microbes and plants that we have found in permafrost and on ice wedges and glaciers and the viable but long dormant, ancient microorganisms that can be cultured from the deep ice cores," Hoover said. "Even dead microbes from ancient permafrost and deep ice are tremendously interesting due to their state of preservation." These preserved life forms (from diatoms and bacteria to mammoths) can yield genetic material for clues about how life has changed on the molecular level and provide a treasure trove of ancient enzymes, proteins, and biochemicals. The ecosystems of the ice and permafrost should provide clues to the potential for life in the permafrost or ice caps of Mars, comets, and on the ice-covered moons of Jupiter (Europa, Ganymede, Callisto) and Saturn (Miranda, Titan), among others. "We also need to understand glaciers to know what to look for and how to seek life on the ice caps of Mars," Hoover explained. For example, cryoconite holes can be temporary glacial micro-Edens. Cryoconite is rock debris broken from mountains and rock surfaces by the moving ice and captured in the ice. When dark cryoconite is transported near the surface of the ice, it absorbs sunlight and becomes warm enough to melt the ice to produce a hole with liquid water, rich in minerals and nutrients from the rock dust, below the rock. For a few hours or weeks, it's springtime on the glacial ice for a world of minute diatoms, cyanobacteria, green algae, protozoa, rotifers, and even animals like tardigrades and nematodes. To understand where to look, Hoover and Vorobyova will study the microbial content of permafrost and the structure of the interface between the soil and ice, and develop techniques that could be used in exploring Mars, Europa, comets, and other icy worlds of our Solar System. [For more information on this story see http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast27may99_1.htm] ------------------------------------------------------------------ WHO WROTE THE BOOK OF LIFE? PICKING UP WHERE D'ARCY THOMPSON LEFT OFF By Leslie Mullen From NASA Space Science News 28 May 1999 During the May 18th press conference announcing Nobel Laureate Dr. Baruch Blumberg as the new head of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, Blumberg posed a challenge to the scientific community. "The mission is to look for life without any specifications. Nothing in the mission would preclude looking for rather strange and unusual life forms that we can't even imagine right now," said Blumberg. NASA Administrator Dan Goldin concurred, stating, "We're looking for any form of biological life. Single-cell (organisms) would be a grand slam." In order to search effectively for life on other planets, we first have to come to an understanding about what life is. One way to do this is to study the forms that life can take. In his 1917 work, "On Growth and Form," D'Arcy Thompson altered mathematical functions in order to visualize how species changed shape over time. NASA scientists are using Thompson's biomathematical studies of life forms on Earth to postulate about life forms throughout the universe. There are certain universal conditions that will always affect the shape of a life form, wherever that life may be. "Everywhere Nature works true to scale, and everything has a proper size accordingly," wrote Thomspon. "Cell and tissue, shell and bone, leaf and flower are so many portions of matter, and it is in obedience to the laws of physics that their particles have been moved, moulded and conformed." Gravity, for instance, acts on all particles and affects matter cohesion, chemical affinity and body volume. Other influences that are consistent throughout the universe are temperature, pressure, electrical charge and chemistry. But before we can conduct a comprehensive search for unknown extraterrestrial forms of life, there needs to be an extensive classification of known life forms on Earth. The history of life on Earth provides us with a good model for how life can evolve in the universe. Fossils, even microbial fossils, can tell us a great deal about all the different life forms that have at one time or another shown their face on our planet. "Some fossils in the ancient Burgess shale are so alien we can't determine which end of the creatures are up, and yet these monsters evolved right here on Earth from the same origins that we did," wrote Johan Forsberg, a Swedish psychologist. By becoming forensic scientists, researchers at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the Marshall Space Flight Center can develop an encyclopedia of microbial life forms that have developed on Earth. Because so many life forms need to be catalogued, the scientists are working to develop a "D'Arcy Machine" to help them create a comprehensive "Book of Life." This Book of Life project has three phases. Phase 1--compiling a beginning database of microbial life forms--has already been completed. This image database is composed of 10,000 examples and distinguishes the basic microbial shapes such as rods, spheres, filaments, clusters that look like grapes (cocci), and spirochete (spirals). A computer neural network has been trained to recognize and classify these microbial life forms with 90 percent accuracy. Phase 2 of the project will expand the basic database by using a more powerful neural network. Funds from the NASA Advanced Concepts Office provided Marshall scientists with a Beowulf-class parallel supercomputer. NASA developed the Beowulf Project to address scientific problems associated with large data sets. Scientists at Marshall have named the new parallel supercomputer "Leibniz," after the German mathematician whose lifelong goal was to organize all human knowledge. This computer system will expand the image database by acquiring and classifying new and ambiguous images. To discriminate organic life forms from inorganic shapes, microbiologists often use the vague criteria, "Does it look alive to you?" A parallel supercomputer using pattern recognition can make this task easier and more exact by breaking the starting image down into identifiable parts. "Human judgement is still very much depended upon for identifying microbial life forms," says Dr. David Noever of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. "Automated filters would be much like the filters commonly used to sort out useful e-mails from useless ones. The user of the neural network would get a morning menu of microbial candidates for further detective work." Although the trained human eye is better at recognizing microbial life forms, using a computer "filter" to check for life-like patterns could help cut the immense scale of the Book of Life project down to a more manageable size. By Phase 3 of the project, the neural network will be so advanced in its learning that it will be able to acquire and classify new images with minimal human supervision. This network would then be equipped for future search scenarios, including the examination of meteorites found on Earth and samples retrieved from lunar or interplanetary space missions. This advanced neural network will be a fast and efficient classifier of the vast amount of microbial images that will need to catalogue. A Big Problem This speed and efficiency are extremely important due to the detail with which the samples must be analyzed. Not only are there a lot of samples to study, but there are multiple dimensions to consider. D'Arcy Thompson used mostly linear and quadratic maps to compare different life forms. Linear maps between two shapes require four coefficient variables, while quadratic maps use 10 variables. Thompson wrote in "On Growth and Form," "I know that in the study of material things number, order, and position are the threefold clue to exact knowledge: and that these three, in the mathematician's hands, furnish the first outlines for a sketch of the Universe." While Thompson and other biomathematicians used almost exclusively linear and quadratic distortions to study how life forms change over time, it is unlikely that complex life forms throughout the universe will be confined to these narrow statistical relationships. In a paper presented last September at the 50th anniversary D'Arcy Thompson conference in Dundee, Scotland, Noever asked, "What if D'Arcy had had a computer?" When D'Arcy Thompson introduced the idea of studying organisms by their geometric shapes, he could only draw figures by hand. The supercomputers of today can take Thompson's research much further. By repeatedly comparing and contrasting learnable imagery, a D'Arcy machine would expand the chapters of the Book of Life Project and give us an interplanetary version of D'Arcy Thompson's classic "On Growth and Form." Computers with artificial intelligence using neural networks provide more opportunities to answer complex astrobiology imaging questions. The non-linear evolution of artificial intelligence is customized to handle the learning of multiple patterns or images. Computers with artificial intelligence could accommodate various influencing variables (such as gravity) that change over scales much larger than a linear variance can include. Changes in the effects of gravity on a body can occur, for instance, when humans go into outer space. Astronauts often experience fluid retention, excessive bone loss and muscle wasting due to the effects of microgravity. The neural network at Marshall will be able to rapidly process the complex computations necessary for mathematically analyzing the shapes of life (morphometrics). If someone continuously used a hand calculator to tabulate just linear connections, at a rate of one calculation per second it would take forty years to finish a billion calculations. The 12 GigaFlop supercomputer at Marshall speeds up this process dramatically, processing 12 billion connections per second. Writing the Interplanetary Book of Life The powerful capabilities of a D'Arcy classification machine could also be used to study and catalogue images from the 14 known Martian meteorites. The total mass to be scanned exceeds 20 kilograms (44 pounds), so if micron scale images are included in future projects (1 micron is 1-millionth of a meter, or 1/25,000 of an inch) the combined image handling capabilities for biogenic classification will exceed several trillion frames. "Looking for life forms in Mars rocks means analyzing microfossils--like potential nanometer-size--so small that 50,000 could fit across the width of a single strand of human hair," says Noever. Based on past performance, the Antarctic meteorite (ANSMET) field teams are likely to recover at least 1,000 meteorites over the next three years. Although it is likely that only a small fraction of these meteorites will be of interest scientifically, already AMNSET has discovered 28 meteorites that are often sampled for study. Since 1976, 301 individual investigators representing 24 nations have received more than 10,800 meteorite samples. To put this scale of computer acquisition and search in context, compare it to the challenge of creating the 1996 animated feature "Toy Story." It took nearly 3 hours for a supercomputer to process each one of that film's 140,000 frames. The challenge of classifying images of life forms constitutes a task exceeding the creation of more than 10,000 high quality computer-animated films. Life is not an easy thing to define. Even now, we're finding life forms on Earth that we never before thought possible. Extremeophiles (bacteria that live in extreme environments) have recently been found living in hydrothermal vents and in high salt environments--areas once thought to be completely inhospitable to life. In 1997, Stephen Zinder of Cornell University discovered the existence of bacteria that thrive in the harsh solvents, perchloroethylene and trichloroethylene, that are used to clean machine parts. An acid-loving bacterium, Sulfolobus acidocaldarius, can live under conditions that would dissolve human skin in seconds. By using a D'Arcy machine to begin a morphometric study of microbial life on Earth, someday remote and automated instruments may be able to identify life elsewhere in the universe--whatever forms that life may take. The Book of Life has Many Signatures There are many details that make up the answer to the question, "What is life?" The following is an abbreviated list of some of the basic properties of life on Earth. Symmetries: Bilateral, asymmetry, posterior/anterior, radial (jellyfish, starfish), internal/external (humans have external symmetry but internal organs are not all symmetrical). Appendages: amoebic extendable, ciliated (with brush-like sweeping motions), attachment pods, flagella tail (for forward propulsion). Behaviors: locomotion or propulsion (dependent on gravity, fluid/gas environment, pressure), metabolic (feeding and respiration), methods of communication, avoidance of death. Nervous systems: diffuse (invertebrates), central nerve ring (starfish), dorsal nerve cord (vertebrates) Sensitivity to light (sight): infrared (snakes), ultraviolet (moths, bees), polarized light (octopus) Sensory perception for motion, temperature, position, gases (such as oxygen or carbon dioxide), certain chemicals, vibrations and electricity vary widely among organisms. Some sense perceptions seem to operate in a collective or cooperative manner, as in the case of army ants, termites, or bees, where group intelligence is greater than the knowledge of the single organism. [For more information on this story see http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast28may99_1.htm] ------------------------------------------------------------------ CALL FOR PAPERS--CONFERENCE ON INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION UTILIZATION By John-David Bartoe 21 May 1999 Come participate in the next Conference on International Space Station Utilization, and exchange ideas and information with your research colleagues, as well as station technical and management personnel! NASA is co-sponsoring the next International Space Station Utilization Conference in Albuquerque, NM on 30 January-3 February 2000. Over 20 sessions will cover all of the major research areas to be explored on the Space Station, including biotechnology, biomedicine, gravitational biology, materials science, fluid physics, combustion research, space science, earth science, and engineering research. Several sessions on Space Station research capabilities, commercial research, and commercial service activities are also included. The Call for Papers, as well as abstract submission instructions, is on the web at http://www- chne.unm.edu/isnps/staif/staif2000/staif2000.html Abstracts are due by 31 May 1999, and we hope you can contribute! ------------------------------------------------------------------ End Marsbugs Vol. 6, No. 14