MARSBUGS: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 6, Number 29, 17 September 1999. Editors: Dr. David J. Thomas, Biology and Chemistry Division, Lyon College, Batesville, AR 72503-2317, USA. Marsbugs@aol.com or dthomas@lyon.edu Dr. Julian A. Hiscox, School of Animal and Microbial Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6AJ, United Kingdom. J.A.Hiscox@reading.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 from the official Marsbugs web page at http://www.lyon.edu/webdata/users/dthomas/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) E.T. WAS HERE By Lou Bergeron 2) SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY BEING USED TO STUDY LOBSTER POPULATION OFF MAINE COAST, NOAA ANNOUNCES NOAA release 99-R321 3) THE WORLD'S OCEANS SEEM TO BE DRAINING AWAY From New Scientist 4) UI TEAM WINS $4 MILLION NASA CONTRACT TO SEARCH FOR WATER ON MARS University of Iowa release 5) EARTH TO MARS CLIMATE ORBITER: ARE WE THERE YET? JPL internet image advisory 6) REQUEST FOR DISCUSSION (RFD)--UNMODERATED GROUP SCI.ASTRO.SETI By Christopher Jones 7) UPCOMING PBS PROGRAMS OF INTEREST TO ASTROBIOLOGISTS By Larry Klaes 8) MARS CLIMATE ORBITER TIMELINE JPL release 9) TRACKS IN IRON PROVIDE AN INSIGHTFUL MAP OF MICROBIAL WORLD University of Wisconsin--Madison release 10) UA SCIENTISTS SAY OCEAN TIDES CREATE EUROPA'S UNIQUE "CYCLOID" CRACKS University of Arizona release 11) NEWLY RELEASED SATELLITE IMAGES OF ANTARCTICA A VALUABLE SCIENTIFIC BENCHMARK National Science Foundation release 99-54 12) MARS CONFERENCE SLATED FOR OCTOBER 1-3 AT MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology release 13) NRA-99-HEDS-03 RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES IN SPACE LIFE SCIENCES: BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH AND COUNTERMEASURES PROGRAM NASA release 14) STARDUST STATUS REPORT JPL release 15) MARS CLIMATE ORBITER/MARS POLAR LANDER MISSION STATUS JPL release 16) MARS CLIMATE ORBITER MISSION STATUS JPL release ---------------------------------------------------------------- E.T. WAS HERE By Lou Bergeron From New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990904/newsstory12.html 4 September 1999 If life ever existed on Mars, it may have left behind a massive calling card in the shape of a white rock mound covering over 200 square kilometers. According to a team of researchers in Scotland and Turkey, the mound looks very like those built by bacteria over 3 billion years ago here on Earth. The immense rock sits just inside the edge of an unnamed crater in a region called Terra Sabaea near the martian equator. Because of its light color, most other researchers thought the rock might be made of calcium sulfate, formed by the evaporation of water rich in the mineral. But a team led by Michael Russell, a geologist at the Scottish Universities Research and Reactor Center in Glasgow, think the rock might be a stromatolite--a carbonate mound built by microbes. In The Journal of the Geological Society of London (volume 156, page 869), they say the martian rock resembles some unusual stromatolites that they recently discovered in Turkey. For the full story, see http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990904/newsstory12.html ---------------------------------------------------------------- SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY BEING USED TO STUDY LOBSTER POPULATION OFF MAINE COAST, NOAA ANNOUNCES NOAA release 99-R321 9 September 1999 A team of scientists, fishermen and resource managers in Maine is working together to demonstrate how satellite technology can be used to study the lobster population, the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced today. The team is obtaining oceanographic data from NOAA's polar-orbiting and geostationary environmental satellites that will help determine the status of the lobster population in the Penobscot Bay ecosystem. This information is critical. Lobster landings have remained at historically high levels over the past several years, but concerns have been raised about the long-term sustainability of this important fishery. "Satellites offer a unique opportunity to observe how the Penobscot Bay interacts with the offshore Gulf of Maine and possible lobster broodstock populations," said Lee Dantzler, of NOAA's Ocean Remote Sensing Program. The project will use the Internet to provide access to the data for use by resource managers, scientists and fishermen who are trying to answer these questions. "State resource managers have never really had a good handle on predicting trends in our coastal fisheries, but through this project we are developing tools and techniques that can tell us whether lobster abundance is increasing or decreasing in the Bay," said State Planning Office Director Evan Richert. "It is a model we can use in other bays in the Gulf of Maine." "Because Penobscot Bay is the center of the most valuable lobster grounds in the entire North Atlantic, where the future of the lobster resource is being questioned, this work especially is timely," said Philip Conkling, president of the Island Institute of Rockland, which is administering the project. "This project is the first time an interdisciplinary team of scientists has worked with a large number of fishermen to put together a comprehensive understanding of the ecosystem of the largest bay in the Gulf of Maine." The project, in its third year, involves more than 20 scientists, managers and 120 lobstermen. Funding was initiated by NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), which has contributed over $1.5 million to the effort so far. Working in cooperation with NOAA's Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management and the Coastal Program of the Maine State Planning Office, NESDIS has just announced the award of $465,560 to the project for year four, which starts in September. Support by other public and private organizations will bring the project funding for next year to more than $750,000. ---------------------------------------------------------------- THE WORLD'S OCEANS SEEM TO BE DRAINING AWAY From New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com 8 September 1999 Within a billion years, our planet could be as dry and barren as Mars, claim geologists in Tokyo. They have calculated that the oceans are leaking water into the Earth's mantle five times as fast as it is being replenished. Geoscientists believe that a huge reservoir of water is bound up in minerals in the transition zone between the upper and lower mantles, about 400 kilometers below the Earth's surface (New Scientist, 30 August 1997, p 22). Water enters the mantle at subduction zones, where oceanic crustal plates dive under continental plates. It returns to the surface at volcanic hot spots and mid-ocean ridges, where molten rock from the upper mantle is pushed up through the Earth's crust. Most researchers have assumed that these flows are roughly in balance. But when Shigenori Maruyama and his colleagues at the Tokyo Institute of Technology tried to provide some hard numbers, they came to a very different conclusion. Each year, they say, about 1.12 billion tons of ocean water seeps into the mantle's transition zone. Yet they can only account for 0.23 billion tons moving in the opposite direction. "The world's oceans will dry up within a billion years," says Maruyama. "Earth's surface will look very much like the surface of Mars, where a similar process seems to have taken place." Maruyama bases his calculations on estimates of the volume of rock being subducted and the volume leaving the mantle, and experiments showing how much water is absorbed by the minerals, primarily lawsonite, formed in subduction zones at about 100 kilometers below the surface. As they travel deeper, these minerals become unstable and release the water into hydrous dense silicates, which enter the transition zone. But this happens only if the temperature increases relatively slowly with depth--otherwise the water would be released at a shallower depth and return to the surface. "In the early part of Earth's history the temperature gradient in the subduction zones was far too high," says Maruyama. "But around 750 million years ago the subduction zones cooled to the point where the process could begin." Since then, Maruyama estimates, the leakage will have caused sea level to drop by around 600 meters. This trend would largely be obscured in the geological record by shorter-term variations in sea level. Maruyama will present his findings at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December. But his team's work is already making waves. "The general idea appears quite plausible," says Raymond Jeanloz of the University of California at Berkeley. The difficulty, he says, is being sure you've accounted for all the mantle's inputs and outputs. Maruyama believes that his figures for water loss from the oceans are conservative. But he admits that there are uncertainties about the exact amount of water emerging from mid- ocean ridges. Even if Maruyama's calculations are spot on, however, the process will not counter the short-term problem of sea level rises caused by global warming. And a billion years from now, the Earth will probably have bigger problems than leaky oceans. By that time the Sun will be expanding, making life uncomfortably hot for whoever--or whatever--is still living on the planet. ---------------------------------------------------------------- UI TEAM WINS $4 MILLION NASA CONTRACT TO SEARCH FOR WATER ON MARS University of Iowa release 9 September 1999 University of Iowa professor and space physicist Don Gurnett has won a $4 million NASA contract in collaboration with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA to develop and use radar in a search for underground water on Mars. The UI investigation is part of an international project aboard the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft scheduled for launch in 2003. Formally known as Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS), the joint Italian- U.S. project includes the University of Rome and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Co-Investigator Gurnett at the University of Iowa. Under the terms of a contract with JPL, Gurnett and his UI colleagues Rich Huff, Don Kirchner and Jim Phillips will provide the 160-foot-long antennas and related electrical instruments that the Mars-orbiting spacecraft will use to probe beneath the planet's surface, as well as study the ionosphere in the martian skies. Also, Rockwell Collins of Cedar Rapids will collaborate with the UI in designing the radio transmitter and coupling it to the antennas. Gurnett says that the project offers an excellent opportunity to learn what happened to the water that most scientists believe was responsible for carving the planet's spectacular canyons, some of which are longer and deeper than the Grand Canyon. Because the planet's atmospheric pressure is extremely low, liquid water would have long ago evaporated from the surface. However, water may exist just below the surface in the form of permafrost and, farther down, as a liquid due to radioactive heating from the interior of the planet. "Our objective is to use a low-frequency radar to penetrate the Martian surface to a depth of five kilometers--about three miles," he says. "As the radar signal penetrates into the permafrost, we should be able to detect a strong radar reflection from the ice-water interface. The hope is that we'll be able to detect the interface and tell how much water is there." Jeffrey Plaut, planetary geologist at JPL and co-principal investigator of MARSIS, noted, "Much of the water may lie too deep for us to detect, but the radar will be capable of showing boundaries between many kinds of geologic materials, such as layers of lava, sheets of sand, sediments, debris from impacts, and ice-rich rock and soils. Seeing into the third dimension of the crust of Mars is what makes this a unique and exciting experiment." The other part of the project involves examining the Martian ionosphere, the electrically charged layer of the upper atmosphere that on Earth reflects radio signals back to the ground, sometimes hundreds of miles from their point of origin. "Currently, very little is known about the ionosphere of Mars. We'll bounce radar signals off of the ionosphere and measure the time delay of the signals to learn the shape and height of the ionosphere," Gurnett says. "The result should be a major increase in our knowledge of the ionosphere around Mars." The UI team is an excellent choice for this multidisciplinary project because, as Gurnett points out, even though radar is not his usual area of expertise, his UI research team for many years has specialized in the construction of low-frequency, space- borne radio systems. Unlike the much-higher frequency radars normally used by airplanes and spacecraft to map surface features, the low-frequency radar provided by the UI team will penetrate deep beneath subsurface rocks and permafrost on Mars. Gurnett's team has provided low-frequency radio antennas for numerous spacecraft, including Cassini, scheduled to arrive at Saturn in 2004. Gurnett, who was recently elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, is a veteran of more than 25 major spacecraft projects, including the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 flights to the outer planets, the Galileo mission to Jupiter, and the Cassini mission to Saturn. He made the first observations of plasma waves and low-frequency radio emissions in the magnetospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and discovered lightning in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Neptune. Gurnett and his UI colleagues, engineering group manager Rich Huff, principal engineer Don Kirchner and design engineer Jim Phillips, have 111 years of spacecraft instrument design and construction between them. ---------------------------------------------------------------- EARTH TO MARS CLIMATE ORBITER: ARE WE THERE YET? JPL internet image advisory 10 September 1999 Like a kid looking out of the window of the family minivan, the camera on board NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter has snapped its first look at the red planet while it was still 4.5 million kilometers (2.8 million miles) away. The image shows Mars as a tiny red "half moon" dot. It was taken on Tuesday, September 7, by the spacecraft's color camera, one of two science instruments onboard. The image is available at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.msss.com. Mars Climate Orbiter arrives at Mars in the early morning hours of September 23, 1999. It will fire its main engine at about 1:55 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time to put itself into orbit around the planet. The orbiter will become the first weather satellite at Mars, taking weather and climate measurements during a two- year long mapping mission. More information about the mission is available at the project's home page, http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/orbiter/. Mars Climate Orbiter is one of a series of missions in a long- term program of Mars exploration known as the Mars Surveyor Program that is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. ---------------------------------------------------------------- REQUEST FOR DISCUSSION (RFD)--UNMODERATED GROUP SCI.ASTRO.SETI By Christopher Jones 10 September 1999 This is a formal request for discussion (RFD) for the creation of a world-wide unmoderated Usenet newsgroup sci.astro.seti. This is not a call for votes (CFV); you cannot vote at this time. Procedural details are below. Newsgroup line: sci.astro.seti The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Changes from previous RFD Only one group is being proposed. Rationale sci.astro.seti The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is the scientific discipline of searching for electromagnetic evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations. SETI has received a lot of attention recently due to the SETI@home project. The SETI@home project has shown that at least several hundred thousand individuals are willing to dedicate computer resources to the search for alien radio signals. This has brought an increase in the amount of discussion of SETI and the possibilities of extra- terrestrial intelligence (ETI). Which has increased the number of posts about SETI in related newsgroups (sci.astro, etc.) by a large amount. The SETI@home project is a distributed computing project which harnesses the computing power of hundreds of thousands of Internet connected computers to search for radio evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations. It is the newest and most public SETI project to date. Currently it has attracted almost a million people willing to donate computer time to this search. However, SETI@home is not the only SETI project, nor will it be the last new one. Several SETI projects are on the drawing board (1HT, etc.) and many of them will require as much or more computing power as the SETI@home project uses currently. It would be surprising if none of these new SETI programs use the distributed computing model that has allowed SETI@home to harness computing power equivalent to multi-million dollar super-computers for very low costs. This newsgroup will serve as a forum for discussion of SETI in general, and any SETI projects in specific. This includes discussion of SETI@home, both it's scientific aspects, as well as the use, configuration, and troubleshooting of the SETI@home client software and any similar software by future SETI projects. Additionally, it will serve as a place to discuss the technical specifics of all current and future SETI projects, and as a place for teachers who are developing curricula around SETI projects (such as SETI@home). Charter sci.astro.seti This group will be unmoderated and distributed worldwide. This newsgroup is intended for the discussion of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Appropriate topics for discussion include the following: 1) Discussion of SETI projects (such as SERINDIP, Phoenix, SETI@home, BETA, ARGUS, etc.) 2) Installation and configuration of the SETI@home client or other SETI projects using distributed computing. 3) Trouble shooting the use of the SETI client programs. 4) The possibilities of Alien life (Drake equation, planetary abundance and its relavance to SETI, etc.) 5) Discussion of statistical results for SETI projects. 6) The potential content of alien messages and how to decode them, as well as any messages we (humans) have / will / could send into space that are intended for ETI's (such as the Voyager record, the Arecibo message to M13, the Encounter 2001 project, etc.) 7) Potential alien technology in the context of detection / communication by / with humans (using visible light lasers instead of radio, for example). 8) Discussion of school curricula built around a SETI program Inappropriate posts include: 1) Commercial advertisements of any kind, including those for items related to SETI or any SETI project. 2) Binaries, with the exception of cryptographic signatures. 3) Discussions concerning UFOs, "alien abductions", etc, which should take place in other groups. End charter. Procedure This is a request for discussion, not a call for votes. In this phase of the process, any potential problems with the proposed newsgroups should be raised and resolved. The discussion period will continue for a minimum of 21 days (starting from when the first RFD for this proposal is posted to news.announce.newgroups), after which a Call For Votes (CFV) may be posted by a neutral vote taker if the discussion warrants it. Please do not attempt to vote until this happens. All discussion of this proposal should be posted to news.groups. This RFD attempts to comply fully with the Usenet newsgroup creation guidelines outlined in "How to Create a New Usenet Newsgroup" and "How to Format and Submit a New Group Proposal". Please refer to these documents (available in news.announce.newgroups) if you have any questions about the process. Distribution This RFD has been posted to the following newsgroups: news.announce.newgroups, news.groups, sci.astro, sci.astro.amateur, sci.space.science, alt.sci.seti This RFD will also be advertised on the SETI@home web site after it's initial posting in news.groups. This RFD may be distributed freely to other relevant newsgroups or maillists, provided the followup line (to news.groups) is unaltered. Note that discussion regarding this RFD should be conducted only in news.groups! Proponent: Christopher M. Jones, cjones@cs.uoregon.edu Proponent: Jeff Cobb, jeffc@ssl.berkeley.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------- UPCOMING PBS PROGRAMS OF INTEREST TO ASTROBIOLOGISTS By Larry Klaes 11 September 1999 Life Beyond Earth Wednesday, November 10, 1999, (8-10:00 pm) This program tells the story of humanity's search for extraterrestrial life and why many scientists believe that life is abundant in the Universe. (CC, Stereo) http://www.pbs.org/whatson/1999/fall/lifebeyondearth.html Intimate Strangers: Unseen Life on Earth Tuesdays, November 9-30, 1999 (8-9:00 pm) This program explores the mysterious, silent, invisible world of microbes--the first life forms on Earth--responsible for the production of most of the Earth's oxygen. (CC, Stereo, WWW) Intimate Strangers Get an introduction to the science of microbiology with this companion site that offers a "game of life" and an online quiz to test what you know about our microbial friends and enemies. http://www.pbs.org/intimatestrangers/ (Scheduled launch date: Wednesday, October 13) Jane Goodall: Reason for Hope Wednesday, October 27, 1999, (8-9:00 pm) Narrated by Harrison Ford, this program reveals an unexpected spiritual dimension to this universally admired scientist and animal rights activist. (CC, Stereo) http://www.pbs.org/whatson/1999/fall/janegoodall.html ---------------------------------------------------------------- MARS CLIMATE ORBITER TIMELINE JPL release 14 September 1999 The Mars Climate Orbiter is just 9 days from entering orbit around Mars. This event, called Mars Orbit Insertion (MOI), will occur on September 23, 1999, when the spacecraft approaches its closest point to the planet coming in over the northern hemisphere. The spacecraft will fire its 640-newton main engine for 16 minutes 23 seconds to brake into an elliptical capture orbit. Below it the timeline for the key events during the orbit insertion. Mars Climate Orbiter MOI Timeline September 23, 1999 All times in Earth Receive Time (ERT). One way light time from Mars is 10 minutes 55 seconds. Event PDT EDT UTC Orbiter stows solar array 01:41 04:41 08:41 Orbiter turns to correct 01:50 04:50 08:50 orientation to begin main engine burn Orbiter fires pyrotechnic 01:56 04:56 08:56 devices, which open valves to begin pressurizing the fuel and oxidizer tanks Main engine burn starts, 02:01 05:01 09:01 fires for 16 minutes 23 seconds. Orbiter passes behind Mars, 02:06 05:06 09:06 out of view from Earth Main engine burn ends 02:17 05:17 09:17 Orbiter turns to 02:19 05:19 09:19 orientation, which will allow Earth contact Orbiter comes out from 02:27 05:27 09:27 behind Mars, flight controllers regain contact Solar array unstows 02:30 05:30 09:30 Mars Climate Orbiter was launched on December 11, 1998 from a Delta II launch vehicle at Cape Canaveral Air Station, Florida. The spacecraft carries instruments to seek clues to the history of climate change on Mars, and will map the martian surface and profile the structure of the atmosphere. The orbiter, along with the Mars Polar Lander, are the second installment in NASA's long-term program of robotic exploration of Mars, which was initiated with the 1996 launches of the currently orbiting Mars Global Surveyor and the Mars Pathfinder lander and rover. The 1998 missions will advance our understanding of Mars' climate history and the planet's current water resources by digging into the enigmatic layered terrain near one of its poles for the first time. Instruments onboard the orbiter and lander will analyze surface materials, frost, weather patterns and interactions between the surface and atmosphere to better understand how the climate of Mars has changed over time. Key scientific objectives are to determine how water and dust move about the planet and where water, in particular, resides on Mars today. Water once flowed on Mars, but where did it go? Clues may be found in the geologic record provided by the polar layered terrain, whose alternating bands of color seem to contain different mixtures of dust and ice. Like growth rings of trees, these layered geological bands may help reveal the secret past of climate change on Mars and help determine whether it was driven by a catastrophic change, episodic variations or merely a gradual evolution in the planet's environment. Today the martian atmosphere is so thin and cold that it does not rain; liquid water does not last on the surface, but quickly freezes into ice or evaporates and resides in the atmosphere. The temporary polar frosts which advance and retreat with the seasons are made mostly of condensed carbon dioxide, the major constituent of the Martian atmosphere. But the planet also hosts both water-ice clouds and dust storms, the latter ranging in scale from local to global. If typical amounts of atmospheric dust and water were concentrated today in the polar regions, they might deposit a fine layer every year, so that the top meter (or yard) of the polar layered terrains could be a well-preserved record showing 100,000 years of martian geology and climatology. Next week, Mars Climate Orbiter will fire its main engine to put itself into an elliptical orbit around Mars. The spacecraft will then skim through Mars' upper atmosphere for several weeks in a technique called aerobraking to reduce velocity and circularize its orbit. Friction against the spacecraft's single, 5.5-meter-long (18-foot) solar array will slow the spacecraft as it dips into the atmosphere each orbit, reducing its orbit period from more than 14 hours to 2 hours. Finally, the spacecraft will use its thrusters to settle into a polar, nearly circular orbit averaging 421 kilometers (262 miles) above the surface. From there, the orbiter will await the arrival of Mars Polar Lander and serve as a radio relay satellite during the lander's surface mission. After the lander's mission is over, the orbiter will begin routine monitoring of the atmosphere, surface and polar caps for a complete Martian year (687 Earth days), the equivalent of almost two Earth years. The orbiter carries two science instruments: the Pressure Modulator Infrared Radiometer, a copy of the atmospheric sounder on the Mars Observer spacecraft lost in 1993, and the Mars Color Imager, a new, light-weight imager combining wide-and medium- angle cameras. The radiometer will measure temperatures, dust, water vapor and clouds by using a mirror to scan the atmosphere from the Martian surface up to 80 kilometers (50 miles) above the planet's limb. Meanwhile, the imager will gather horizon-to-horizon images at up to kilometer-scale (half-mile-scale) resolutions, which will then be combined to produce daily global weather images. The camera will also image surface features and produce a map with 40-meter (130-foot) resolution in several colors, to provide unprecedented views of Mars' surface. Mars Polar Lander, launched a month after the orbiter, will arrive on December 3, 1999, two to three weeks after the orbiter has finished aerobraking. The lander is aimed toward a target sector within the edge of the layered terrain near Mars' south pole. Like Mars Pathfinder, Mars Polar Lander will dive directly into the martian atmosphere, using an aeroshell and parachute scaled down from Pathfinder's design to slow its initial descent. The smaller Mars Polar Lander will not use airbags, but instead will rely on onboard guidance and retro-rockets to land softly on the layered terrain near the south polar cap a few weeks after the seasonal carbon dioxide frosts have disappeared. After the heat shield is jettisoned, a camera will take a series of pictures of the landing site as the spacecraft descends. As it approaches Mars about 10 minutes before touchdown, the lander will release the two Deep Space 2 microprobes. Once released, the projectiles will collect atmospheric data before they crash at about 200 meters per second (400 miles per hour) and bury themselves beneath the martian surface. The microprobes will test the ability of very small spacecraft to deploy future instruments for soil sampling, meteorology and seismic monitoring. A key instrument will draw a tiny soil sample into a chamber, heat it and use a miniature laser to look for signs of vaporized water ice. About 100 kilometers (60 miles) away from the microprobe impact sites, Mars Polar Lander will dig into the top of the terrain using a 2-meter-long (6-1/2-foot) robotic arm. A camera mounted on the robotic arm will image the walls of the trench, viewing the texture of the surface material and looking for fine-scale layering. The robotic arm will also deliver soil samples to a thermal and evolved gas analyzer, an instrument that will heat the samples to detect water and carbon dioxide. An onboard weather station will take daily readings of wind temperature and pressure, and seek traces of water vapor. A stereo imager perched atop a 1.5-meter (5-foot) mast will photograph the landscape surrounding the spacecraft. All of these instruments are part of an integrated science payload called the Mars Volatiles and Climate Surveyor. Also onboard the lander is a light detection and ranging (LIDAR) experiment provided by Russia's Space Research Institute. The instrument will detect and determine the altitude of atmospheric dust hazes and ice clouds above the lander. Inside the instrument is a small microphone, furnished by the Planetary Society, Pasadena, CA, which will record the sounds of wind gusts, blowing dust and mechanical operations onboard the spacecraft itself. The lander is expected to operate on the surface for 60 to 90 martian days through the planet's southern summer (a martian day is 24 hours, 37 minutes). The mission will continue until the spacecraft can no longer protect itself from the cold and dark of lengthening nights and the return of the martian seasonal polar frosts. The Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 missions are managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. Lockheed Martin Astronautics Inc., Denver, CO, is the agency's industrial partner for development and operation of the orbiter and lander spacecraft. JPL designed and built the Deep Space 2 microprobes. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. For more information on the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander missions, please visit our web site at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98 ---------------------------------------------------------------- TRACKS IN IRON PROVIDE AN INSIGHTFUL MAP OF MICROBIAL WORLD University of Wisconsin--Madison release 16 September 1999 Reading the narrow bands of iron found in some sedimentary rocks, scientists may have found a way to assess microbial populations across time and space, opening a window to the early history of life on Earth and possibly other planets. Writing in the Friday, September 17 issue of the journal Science, a team of scientists led by UW-Madison geochemist Brian L. Beard describes a geochemical signature in iron indicative of life. If the technique is confirmed and refined, it could be used to trace the distribution of Earth's microorganisms in the distant past, and could help resolve disputes about the existence of past life on other planets such as Mars. "This could be an ideal biosignature," Beard says in describing a set of iron isotope-sorting experiments designed to determine if iron found in different kinds of rocks has been metabolized by microorganisms. Iron is vital to plant, animal and microbial life. Nearly all organisms ingest it in the course of daily life. If scientists can devise a method to distinguish between iron that has been processed by a living organism and iron that has not been metabolized, they will have a way to measure the distribution of microbes on Earth billions of years ago. Because iron is common on the moon, planets and other objects in space, the technique could be used to detect signs of past life beyond our own planet. Beard's group measured the isotopic composition of iron from two distinct sources: sedimentary rock and igneous rock. Sedimentary rock reflects the accumulation of sediments, including organic material and trace elements such as iron. Igneous rock is forged deep in the Earth at very high temperatures where life is absent. It also can contain iron. Working in collaboration with scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Institute for Great Lakes Study at UW-Milwaukee, the Wisconsin team sampled the isotopic composition of iron from the two sources by incinerating samples of iron and measuring charged particles from the reaction is a mass spectrometer, a device that sorts and counts ionized particles. "Measurable isotopic variations can be seen," says Beard. "The mass differences are small, but large enough that a microorganism could have made the difference." Isotopes from sedimentary rock, says Beard, match the isotopic signature of iron ingested and metabolized by bacteria in the lab. "What we found in the biological experiments was that microbes produce a measurable iron isotope fractionation. We wondered if inorganic processes might have the same effects, but we found that the isotopic composition of iron in igneous rocks is constant." Knowing this, it may now be possible for scientists to look at sedimentary rock and gain a sense of the worldwide ebb and flow of microbial populations in the distant past, perhaps as far back as 2 billion years ago, when the Earth's oceans were full of soluble iron. Such insight may help show how life evolved on Earth. "Iron has had a dramatic effect on how organisms have evolved," Beard says. "Microorganisms fight for iron and some have developed a chemical compound that allows them to grab iron and store it for future use." Beard says his group next plans to apply the technique to a piece of the Mars Rock, a controversial meteorite that some scientists believe harbors evidence of past microbial life on the Red Planet. It could also be used to screen samples brought back to Earth from planned NASA missions to Mars. Co-authors of the paper published in Science include Clark Johnson, a professor of geology and geophysics at UW-Madison; Lea Cox, Henry Sun and Kenneth Nealson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA; and Carmen Aguilar of the Institute for Great Lakes Study at UW-Milwaukee. ---------------------------------------------------------------- UA SCIENTISTS SAY OCEAN TIDES CREATE EUROPA'S UNIQUE "CYCLOID" CRACKS University of Arizona release 16 September 1999 When Voyager flew by Jupiter's moon Europa in 1979, it photographed geological surface features unlike any others ever seen in the solar system. Near Europa's south pole, chains of scalloped lines joined arc-to-arc at the cusp ran for hundreds of miles across the frozen, fractured surface. Until now, there have been no good ideas as to what formed these bizarre "cycloidal" features, or "flexi," as they were officially dubbed by the International Astronomical Union. Now, planetary scientists at the University of Arizona in Tucson provide a model for how these features are created. It is perhaps the most convincing evidence yet for a global ocean. They report on it in today's issue of Science (September 17). Scientists know that Europa has a 100-mile-thick layer of water- -20 times thicker than the Earth's oceans--but the visible top layer is frozen. This new strong evidence for a liquid global ocean below the surface makes Europa a prime target in the search for life beyond Earth. Gregory V. Hoppa, B. Randall Tufts, Richard Greenberg and Paul E. Geissler of the UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory theorize that cycloidal cracks form in Europa's solid-ice surface with the daily rise and fall of tides in the subsurface ocean. They painstaking modeled and scrutinized images of Europa taken by the Galileo spacecraft between 1996 and 1999. The new images show that cycloidal cracks and ridges are widely distributed over the entire moon. Hoppa has posted images and explanatory animation of cycloidal crack formation on the web site, http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~hoppa/science.html. Europa is about the size of our moon. Tidal stresses on its ice-covered ocean ebb and flow as it orbits Jupiter, which is 300 times as massive as Earth. According to the UA researchers' model, Europa's ocean tides rise and fall a distance of 30 meters. By comparison, tides at most ocean beaches on Earth rise and fall 1 to 2 meters, or 4 to 6 feet. "What causes the cycloid to form is that Europa is in a slightly eccentric orbit because of Io and Ganymede (other Jovian moons). Sometimes Europa is a little closer, other times a little farther from Jupiter. When Europa is closer to Jupiter, the tides are higher because Jupiter is pulling on it more. When Europa is farther, the tides fall because Jupiter's force falls. This causes Europa's ice shell to flex." The UA model shows that when tidal stress reaches the tensile strength of ice, the ice begins to crack. It takes very little stress to form the initial crack--something like the force it takes to break a saltine cracker--because Europa's surface ice is weakened by countless linear fractures. The crack propagates relatively slowly across the ever-changing stress field. It moves following a curving path until stress drops below the tensile strength of the ice, when it halts. A few hours later, when tidal stress again exceeds the tensile strength of ice, the crack begins a new curve in another direction. "You could probably walk along with the advancing tip of a crack as it was forming--if you could survive Europa's radiation environment," Hoppa said. "And while there's not enough air to carry sound, you would definitely feel vibrations as it formed." One of their most striking conclusions is that each arc segment forms in 3.5 days--the time it takes Europa to make one complete orbit around Jupiter. The cycloids faithfully record the 85- hour daily flexing of Europa's ice shell just as trees faithfully record each growing season in annual rings. "We can look at a crack that has 4 or 5 cusps, each formed every 3.5 days, and know that the entire chain formed in about 2.5 weeks," Hoppa said. Arc segments in the cycloid, each ranging from 75 km to 200 km long, form cracks stretching a thousand kilometers over the ice in a fraction of an instant in geological time. Eventually, cracks evolve into ridges, typically double ridges, according to the UA model. The scientists also can determine which direction the cracks traveled as they formed based on the orientation of the arcs and the hemisphere in which they are found. "What amazes me about this is just how long these features have been a mystery," Hoppa said. "We've been staring at pictures of them for 20 years, since Voyager. We didn't know what made them. And it seems what they've been telling us all along is that an ocean was there when these things formed." [For more information on this article, see http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~hoppa/science.html] ---------------------------------------------------------------- NEWLY RELEASED SATELLITE IMAGES OF ANTARCTICA A VALUABLE SCIENTIFIC BENCHMARK National Science Foundation release 99-54 16 September 1999 Surveillance satellite images of Antarctica's Dry Valleys region, made public today by President Clinton, will be an important tool for establishing a baseline to measure environmental fluctuations in one of the harshest environments on Earth known to harbor life. "The imagery released today represents a valuable benchmark for studies of changes in the region," said Scott Borg, who manages the U.S. Antarctic Program's geology and geophysics program. The National Science Foundation (NSF), through the USAP, coordinates numerous scientific research efforts in the region. Borg noted that the satellite images will provide a basis for comparison with other data gathered in the region, thereby adding to a growing database of information that includes smaller-scale aerial photographs and high- resolution commercial satellite images. The President announced during a state visit to New Zealand that the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) would make the satellite images available to scientists. He said this action makes Cold War products available for research on a continent reserved by treaty for peace and science. The President also noted that Vice President Gore has been working for many years to open U.S. intelligence image archives for scientific use. The release of the Dry Valleys images and a previous release of satellite images from the Arctic Ocean are milestones in the process. The NIMA image set includes a wide-angle snapshot, taken by surveillance satellites in 1975, which will help scientists compare conditions then in the Transantarctic Mountains with other available images and data of a more recent vintage. The McMurdo Dry Valleys region is the only Polar desert site in the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, which consists of a network of 21 ecosystem research sites extending from Alaska to the continental United States to Puerto Rico to Antarctica. The LTER sites represent a variety of ecosystems, including grassland, desert, forest, tundra, lake, stream, river, agricultural, coastal systems, and urban systems. Two LTER sites are located in Antarctica, one in the Antarctica Peninsula marine ecosystem, near USAP's Palmer Station; and the other in the Dry Valleys, near McMurdo Station. The Dry Valleys are ecologically significant because they are a region where life approaches its environmental limits and they stand in stark contrast to most of the world's other ecosystems, which exist under far more moderate environmental conditions. Less than two percent of the Antarctic continent is ice-free. The Dry Valleys region is the largest of several areas that are predominantly ice-free. The perennially ice-covered lakes, ephemeral streams and extensive areas of exposed soil within the Dry Valleys are subject to low temperatures, limited precipitation and salt accumulation. Unlike most other ecosystems, life-forms in the Dry Valleys are dominated by few, sparsely distributed microorganisms, mosses, and lichens. Higher forms of life are virtually non-existent. Studying the ecological dynamics of the Dry Valleys region is difficult because of its geographic isolation and the fact that the area is in total darkness for many months out of the year. Although changes are known to take place in the glaciers, sand dunes, and stream channels of the area, documenting those changes has previously been done only through conventional aerial photography, which covers only a very small area at a time and other, similarly limited means. "The data released today provide a uniform image over the entire dry valleys region, at a single instant, as context for a wide range of studies on the ecology, hydrology, geology, and glaciology of the region," said Borg. "This comprehensive view, at a single point in time, is a unique aspect of these images." High-resolution digital versions of the declassified images may be downloaded from http://www.nsf.gov/od/opp/antarctic/imageset/satellite/start.htm . The images are at 300 dpi. ---------------------------------------------------------------- MARS CONFERENCE SLATED FOR OCTOBER 1-3 AT MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology release 16 September 1999 Selected speakers and times Friday, October 1 * Robert Zubrin, Mars Society President 7:45-9:00pm Saturday, October 2 * Franklin Chang-Diaz, NASA Astronaut 9:45-10:45am * Robert Zubrin 12:30-1:15pm * Maria Zuber, MIT 2:00-2:45pm * Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 Astronaut 3:45-4:30pm Check complete schedule at http://thinkmars.mit.edu/marsweek.html for updates. Astronauts, scientists, and other people interested in the human exploration of Mars will convene October 1-3 at MIT for "Mars Week," a student-run conference. The conference, designed as an inspirational event that will educate and excite individuals about Mars exploration, will feature speakers representing an array of interests in Mars and space science. Among those scheduled to speak are Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, astronaut Franklin Chiang-Diaz, Professor Maria Zuber of MIT, and Robert Zubrin, Mars Society president and author of The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet. The three-day event was planned by members of the "ThinkMars" initiative, a team of students from MIT, Harvard and other New England colleges, and is being presented in cooperation with the Mars Society, NASA Academy Alumni Association, National Space Society, and MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. ThinkMars was created last year to participate in NASA's "NASA Means Business" competition, and the student group was subsequently selected by the judges to develop a comprehensive business plan for a mission to Mars. That business plan went on to become a semifinalist in MIT's $50K Business Plan Competition. The team, which works via the internet, is using NASA's technical mission plan (the NASA Design Reference Mission) as the basis for a business plan that focuses on the financial, political and logistical aspects of human exploration of Mars. Team members hope to launch the company that organizes the first mission. "We weren't around for the first Moon walk, so this is our way of contributing to space exploration," said ThinkMars founder Justin Talbot-Stern, a graduate student at MIT. "To us, it's not just a competition anymore, it's real life." For more information about Mars Week and ThinkMars, see http://thinkmars.mit.edu. ---------------------------------------------------------------- NRA-99-HEDS-03 RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES IN SPACE LIFE SCIENCES: BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH AND COUNTERMEASURES PROGRAM NASA release 16 September 1999 Proposals requested by this Announcement may be for ground-based research investigations or for space-flight experiments designed for the Shuttle middeck or for the early phase of utilization of the International Space Station. Research emphases include: Physiology, Behavior and Performance, Environmental Health Research, Clinical Research in Support of Space Missions, and Radiation Health Research. This solicitation will be available electronically via the Internet at http://peer1.idi.usra.edu/peer_review/nra/99_HEDS_03.html Letters of Intent Due: October 15, 1999 Proposals Due: December 1, 1999 Paper copies of this NRA are available to those who do not have access to the Internet by calling (202) 358-4180 and leaving a voice mail message. Please leave your full name and address, including zip code and telephone number with area code, along with the name of the NRA you are requesting. Questions regarding this NRA may be addressed to NASA Headquarters, Code UL, Life Sciences Division, Washington, DC 20546, Attn: Dr. David Tomko. ---------------------------------------------------------------- STARDUST STATUS REPORT JPL release 10 September 1999 The Stardust spacecraft continues to perform well as it is successfully completing cruise sequence SC008. Sequence SC009 starts next Monday. The Flight Team at Lockheed Martin Astronautics (LMA) has been commanding the spacecraft to place updated downlink priority tables, configuration tables, telemetry content definitions and algorithm parameter values from Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) to Command & Data Handling Module Interface Card (CMIC) memory. These commanded changes have now been thoroughly validated during flight and will now become part of the default spacecraft reset state. Without being in CMIC memory, all of these past commands would have to be restored if the spacecraft would reset itself. LMA has tested and transmitted the commands to turn on the Dust Flux Monitor Instrument (DFMI) and Cometary and Interstellar Dust Analyzer (CIDA) heaters in preparation for turning on these payload instruments next week. Sequence SC009 has also been transmitted to the spacecraft, which will be implemented on Monday. Downlink has continued to be excellent with small forces and other engineering data being received as well as navigation doppler and ranging tracking data. The Stardust Project participated in a special concert at the Hollywood Bowl specially written and performed to honor the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and its space exploration activities. For more information on the Stardust mission--the first ever comet sample return mission--please visit the Stardust home page at http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov. ---------------------------------------------------------------- MARS CLIMATE ORBITER/MARS POLAR LANDER MISSION STATUS JPL release 15 September 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) The flight team completed its preparations for Mars Climate Orbiter's fourth and final course correction, TCM-4, on Tuesday (September 14), transmitting the TCM-4 command sequence to the spacecraft that evening. MCO successfully executed TCM-4 this morning, with a 15-second burn starting at 09:40 PDT, adjusting its velocity by 1.37 meters/second. Spacecraft performance was excellent; the updated gimble angle trajectory for the stow/unstow movements of the solar array worked just as expected, following last week's in-flight verification tests. Preparation of the MCO spacecraft for Mars Orbit Insertion (MOI) on September 23 has begun. A complete audit of the flight processor's file system was conducted during the past week, verifying both file names and contents versus the equivalent file system in the MCO ground-based simulator, which has been operating 24 hours/day, seven days per week in preparation for Mars arrival. On Friday (September 17), a series of new files will be transmitted to the spacecraft, placing it into the correct pre-MOI configuration. The baseline MOI command sequence will also be loaded at the same time; there is one scheduled updated to the main engine burn parameters, which will take place on Monday of next week (September 20). On the evening of September 21, the flight team will transition to a round-the-clock schedule of on-console spacecraft monitoring prior to MOI and post-MOI operations commencing on September 23. Mars Climate Orbiter is 8 days from MOI. Mars Polar Lander (MPL) Mars Polar Lander experienced a quiescent week of nominal cruise operations. Playback of telemetry data collected onboard from the spacecraft's science instruments during instrument checkout #2 on September 9 has been completed. One more repeat playback is scheduled in the coming week to ensure any gaps identified in the data set are filled. Lander activity is intentionally kept low during the next three weeks while the flight team maintains its focus on the critical MCO events leading up to and following orbit insertion. For more information on the Mars Surveyor 98 mission, please visit our web site at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98. ---------------------------------------------------------------- MARS CLIMATE ORBITER MISSION STATUS JPL release 15 September 1999 NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft completed its final maneuver this morning to adjust its flight path for arrival at Mars next week. The orbiter fired its maneuvering engines at 9:40 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time for 15 seconds. "After traveling 670 million kilometers (416 million miles) during the last nine months, Mars Climate Orbiter is now ready for its most dramatic moment, the orbit insertion burn," said Dr. Sam Thurman, the flight operations manager for the orbiter at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The spacecraft is on a course that will pass just 193 kilometers (120 miles) over the north pole of Mars, at which point it will fire its main engine to brake into orbit." Tomorrow, flight controllers will send the spacecraft a set of commands that will automatically execute the orbit insertion maneuver on September 23. These commands will be updated on September 20 to allow for a planned fine-tuning of the desired orbit-insertion flight path. The orbiter is now 2.24 million kilometers (1.39 million miles) from Mars, traveling at a speed of 3.3 kilometers per second (7,380 miles per hour). Mars Climate Orbiter will study the weather and climate of Mars and act as a communications relay for the Mars Polar Lander when that spacecraft arrives at the red planet on December 3. The Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander missions are managed by JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. ---------------------------------------------------------------- End Marsbugs Vol. 6, No. 29