MARSBUGS: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 9, Number 7, 18 February 2002. Editors: Dr. David J. Thomas, Science Division, Lyon College, Batesville, AR 72503-2317, USA. 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 monthly 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. Information concerning the scope of this newsletter, subscription formats and availability of back-issues is available from the Marsbugs web page at http://welcome.to/marsbugs or http://www.lyon.edu/webdata/users/dthomas/marsbugs/marsbugs.html. _____________________________________________________________________ CONTENTS 1) OUR SOLAR SYSTEM AS SEEN BY ALIEN ASTRONOMERS By Robert Roy Britt 2) KEEPING ALIEN SAMPLES SAFE FOR STUDY By Erik Baard 3) UF RESEARCHER: DISTANT SPACE TRAVEL BETTER CONDUCTED AS FAMILY AFFAIR By Cathy Keen 4) PATCHES FOR A BROKEN HEART By Karen Miller and Tony Phillips 5) UW SCIENTISTS DISCUSS "LIFE IN THE ROCKS" AT ANNUAL AAAS MEETING By Rob Harrill 6) THE NEW BIOLOGY OF ROCKS: "ARE THERE MEDICAL IMPLICATIONS OF GEOMICROBIOLOGY?" University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign release 7) ARTIFICIAL MUSCLES COME TO LIFE IN A PAIR OF FREE LECTURES NASA/JPL release 8) NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas 9) CASSINI MISSION STATUS NASA/JPL release 10) INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION STATUS NASA/JSC release 11) MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR SHOWS OFF IMAGES FROM EXTENDED MISSION NASA/JPL image advisory 12) STARDUST STATUS REPORT NASA/JPL release _____________________________________________________________________ OUR SOLAR SYSTEM AS SEEN BY ALIEN ASTRONOMERS By Robert Roy Britt From Space.com 12 February 2002 If alien astronomers from a nearby star system pointed their version of the Hubble Space Telescope at Earth, astronomer Markus Landgraf believes they would not see our planet but they would find hints of our presence. With their infrared camera, the smart aliens would detect a vast donut-shaped ring of dust with a classic hole in the middle, all surrounding a yellow star. A little math, Landgraf says, and they could deduce the presence of a large planet, like Jupiter, that had cleared out the hole. They would also spot Neptune's signature scrawled in the dust. If this culture's astronomical knowledge were as advanced as ours, they would then wonder if a planet like their own, a habitable world, also orbited the yellow star. Get the full story at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/dust_view_020212- 1.html. _____________________________________________________________________ KEEPING ALIEN SAMPLES SAFE FOR STUDY By Erik Baard From Space.com 13 February 2002 It's human nature to clean for company more thoroughly than one would for oneself, but nowhere is this truth taken to greater extremes than at the Johnson Space Center. NASA's setting new standards of cleanliness in its labs that handle samples returning from space. And their efforts are laying the groundwork for samples that might some day contain evidence of extraterrestrial life from Mars, Europa, and other points little known. Welcome to the Advanced Curation Laboratory, where the guests could entirely change our view of the Solar System. And please, check your plastics at the door. Where we stop straightening up at Lysol and a Dustbuster, the Advanced Curation Team (ACT) start with oxygen plasma and radiation bombardment. The guest room in this new twist on Southern hospitality includes a pressurized "glovebox" containing a robotic arm, and the whole lab's water and nitrogen "air" are ultrapure. Get the full story at http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/astrobio_guards_02 0213-1.html. _____________________________________________________________________ UF RESEARCHER: DISTANT SPACE TRAVEL BETTER CONDUCTED AS FAMILY AFFAIR By Cathy Keen University of Florida release 14 February 2002 Forget Starship Troopers and steely-eyed astronauts--the right stuff for spaceship travel to faraway solar systems is more likely to be a family affair conducted by mom, dad, the kids, kinfolk, and generations to come, says a University of Florida anthropologist. Families have the kind of natural organization--and just as essential, the motivation--to take on the unique stresses likely to occur on space trips of 200 years or more to settle remote planets, said John Moore, a UF anthropologist who will speak to the American Association for the Advancement of Science on the subject Friday (15 February). "We are much less likely to go crazy in space and much more likely to accomplish our interstellar missions if we send crews into space that are organized along family lines," he said. With clear lines of authority between parent and child as well as older and younger siblings, families produce a division of labor that can accomplish any kind of work, Moore said. More important, they offer the rewards of marriage and children, he said. "Whenever colonization is done on Earth, it's always by people looking for a better life," he said. "All of the colonizations that I know about as an anthropologist have been done by families, especially young couples." A Russian cosmonaut has warned that situations such as the proposed Mars mission, in which seven heterosexual adults sit shoulder to shoulder for nine months provides "all the conditions necessary for murder," Moore said. Mulling such issues is not farfetched. Experts predict such a space mission as early as 2080, Moore said. While the fortitude and physical conditioning of John Glenn and the Apollo astronauts, made legendary in Tom Wolfe's book "The Right Stuff," was needed to fit into early small space capsules, spacecraft size no longer is a constraint, making candidates of overlooked groups such as midwives and handymen, Moore said. "For a space crew that is going to colonize and reproduce for many generations," he said, "a midwife is just as important as a propulsion expert." In researching the best way to send earthlings off toward Alpha Centauri, Moore drew some inspiration from the ancient Polynesian seafaring custom of young couples setting out in canoe flotillas on long voyages across the Pacific Ocean. "They didn't know where they were going, but with the trade winds blowing them in one direction they were pretty sure they weren't coming back," he said. Starting with a population of childless married couples also works best on board a spaceship because it gives the initial crew a few years to adjust to their new surroundings without the distraction and additional responsibility of caring for children, he said. People may be horrified at the idea of children living and dying in space, with their only images of Mother Earth coming from pictures and videos, Moore admits. But parents continually make choices affecting the course of children's lives, he said. "We change jobs, we move to Chicago, we emigrate to a foreign country," he said. "The decision made by parents to join a space crew is not different in kind from decisions made by parents on Earth, only different in degree. If educated properly, I think kids in space might one day say, 'Gosh, I'm sure glad I'm on this spaceship and not back on old yucky, dirty Earth.'" A starting population of 150 to 180 would best sustain itself at the same rate over six to eight generations, while fitting into the geometric contours of a spacecraft, Moore said. Every person would have the opportunity to be married--with a choice of at least 10 possible spouses within three years of their age--and to be a parent, he said. Ideally, the group should share social and cultural values. "Having some people accustomed to monogamy and others to plural marriages would create some confusion when it comes time to marry off the sons and daughters of the first generation," he said. Designing morals for people on such a fantastic voyage is problematic, Moore said, because ultimately earthbound designers would have little influence once the crew is on its own. "If the space crew inaugurates a system of lifetime slavery for some and privilege for others, there is little the planners on Earth can do to prevent it," he said. Returning crews might park in space for a couple of years to learn what happened on Earth while they and their ancestors were away, Moore said. The precedent dates to New Bedford whaling days, when men who had been gone for several years moored the ship and waited while people in the community came on board to tell them who had died. "Once they got used to all the changes," he said, "they got off the ship and went home." Contacts: Cathy Keen E-mail: ckeen@ufl.edu John Moore Phone: 352-392-2031 E-mail: moojohn@anthro.ufl.edu _____________________________________________________________________ PATCHES FOR A BROKEN HEART By Karen Miller and Tony Phillips From NASA Science News 14 February 2002 Using a space-age device called a bioreactor, researchers have grown patches of tissue that beat and respond much like a human heart does. Thump-thump, thump-thump. There's nothing more reassuring than the cadence of a healthy beating heart. It's the first thing your doctor listens for when you go in for a check-up. Gurgles, swishes, and hiccups, on the other hand, are worrisome. They are the tell-tale sounds of imperfect or diseased hearts. Millions of Americans have hearts that don't work as they should; indeed, heart disease is the single leading cause of death in the United States. One day, perhaps, biomedical engineers will simply grow new hearts for people who need them, using cells taken from the patients themselves as seeds. Such hearts would be young, alive, and welcomed by the immune systems of their recipients. It's a far-off goal, but some researchers are already making progress. Among them are MIT scientists Lisa E. Freed and Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic. The pair has used a NASA-designed device called "the bioreactor" to grow tiny patches of heart tissue--patches that beat much like a healthy human heart. "It's the most exciting thing to see these tissues contract," says Freed, with enthusiasm. "Everybody loves to watch them." The tissue contracts all together, she says, in a synchronous way, exactly like a beating heart. The tissue itself is tan, and it's kept in a red liquid that looks like Hawaiian punch. NASA developed the bioreactor for cell studies in space. It is a soup-can-sized chamber that slowly turns. Fluid within it delivers oxygen to cells and wafts away their wastes without vigorous stirring that might rip apart tissues and cell clusters. Back on Earth scientists discovered that the bioreactor mimicked some aspects of weightlessness. Cell clusters inside the bioreactor continually fall yet never hit bottom--much like freely-falling spacecraft that orbit our planet. In Earth-labs, cells are most often grown in petri dishes, where they settle in a flat layer at the bottom. But in the bioreactor, floating cells can easily gather into 3-dimensional structures that resemble real tissues and organs in the human body. The recipe for growing a patch of heart tissue in the bioreactor begins with 5 million or so individual heart cells. To function as tissue, those cells need to form mutual connections known as gap junctions, which allow them to exchange electrical signals. The ability of cardiac cells to transfer such signals is what allows the heart to contract, or beat. "Cells like to be connected with each other," notes Freed. In a close, nutrient-filled environment like the bioreactor they will try to form gap junctions on their own. Freed and colleagues guide the process with the aid of a scaffold: a three-dimensional structure on which the cells can gather. "We've found that the best scaffolds look like textiles," says Freed. They're made of fibers 10 or 15 microns in diameter (about the same size as the cells), and these fibers are linked into a fabric or a mesh. The scaffold is constructed of biodegradable materials like the polymer used in absorbable surgical stitches. After the tissues have formed (in the 3-D shape defined by the scaffold) the underlying scaffold simply dissolves. Cardiac cells are sensitive to their growth environment, notes Freed. They require lots of oxygen. In the human heart each cell is within 20 micrometers of a blood vessel, which brings it oxygen. But there are no blood vessels in bioreactor-grown tissue--not yet anyway. Instead, the bioreactor's circulating fluids must deliver any oxygen the cells need. It takes about one week for the bioreactor to produce a patch of tissue five millimeters in diameter and a mere tenth of a millimeter thick. Like real heart tissue, these patches beat spontaneously. "They'll pick a rate and they'll beat at it," says Freed. "If you blow on them, they'll change." They're very sensitive to stimulation, she says. "If they warm up or cool down, if someone slams the door, their rate can change." Freed, Vunjak-Novakovic, and collaborators hope to improve the tissue by making it thicker. To do this, says Freed, they'll need to develop tiny conduits--like blood vessels--that can supply nutrients and oxygen to cells trapped in the inner tissue mass. She and other researchers have begun to culture heart cells and blood vessel cells together, but they haven't yet succeeded in coaxing blood vessels to form. More work is needed. Eventually lab-grown cardiac tissue could be used to repair heart defects or to replace tissue damaged in a heart attack. That, though, is still in the future. A more immediate use might be to test pharmaceuticals. New drugs are typically tested on monolayers of cells grown in Petri dishes. But, Freed points out, such tests "might not [reveal all the] good effects or bad effects, simply because [cells grown in petri dishes] are not a good model system for heart tissue..." Testing drugs using a bioreactor-grown heart tissue might yield more realistic results. The ultimate goal is to grow replacement body parts--and not only hearts. Cartilage, liver, prostate and kidney tissues have also been produced in a bioreactor. The possibilities are breathtaking ... yet distant. There's much to be done and many years of research lie ahead. Even so, a quarter-inch disk of beating heart is a very exciting start. More information on this article is available at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2002/14feb_heart.htm?list52260. _____________________________________________________________________ UW SCIENTISTS DISCUSS "LIFE IN THE ROCKS" AT ANNUAL AAAS MEETING By Rob Harrill University of Washington release 15 February 2002 In years past, scientific speculation about how life began on Earth envisioned primordial soups and slimy goo as the incubators in which the first tiny microorganisms developed, billions of years ago. More recently, microbiologists have examined places formerly seen as too harsh and inhospitable to foster biology, seeking answers about how life developed and adapts. Hydrothermal vents, for example--areas on the ocean floor that expel seawater superheated deep in the Earth's crust--and the exotic creatures that live there have received increased attention. Now scientists are scrutinizing another location for clues in unraveling some of life's riddles--deep in the ground, underneath the planet's surface. "We've pretty much left Darwin's warm little pond in the dust," said David Stahl, a University of Washington professor of civil and environmental engineering whose work focuses on ecology and evolution. "The subsurface is being increasingly viewed as an important and largely unexplored part of the biosphere. Depending on how you calculate it, its biomass may exceed the biomass on the surface of the planet." Stahl's work examining sulfide-eating bacteria from deep in the Earth has revealed genetic similarities in the microorganisms from different parts of the world, hinting that the existence of such life may be widespread throughout the planet's subsurface. Those microorganisms, he added, are among the more primitive, in terms of their metabolism, of Earth's life forms. He and UW colleague James T. Staley, a microbiology professor in the School of Medicine, will join Abigail Salyers of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Edward F. Delong of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute for a 2:30 PM session today on "The New Biology of Rocks" at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston. The session is in the Hynes Convention Center, Plaza Level, Room 109. Stahl has spent the past several years gathering samples from wells drilled in eastern Washington for use as deep-injection sites to dispose of hazardous waste. The drillers tapped into an artesian system and couldn't use the wells for disposal, so they were capped. Industry's loss was science's gain--the wells provide ready access to tiny microorganisms that exist deep within the earth. These deep subsurface habitats are are radically different from "surface" biology. They never see the sun, so energy from photosynthesis, which provides the platform upon which life on the Earth's surface is built, isn't an option. Oxygen and fixed carbon are scarce, so they must "eat" inorganic compounds--such as hydrogen, CO2 and sulfate--that originate from geothermal processes in the Earth's hot interior. Stahl and his collaborators compared those bacteria with bacteria they extracted from deep in African gold mines and from geothermal springs in Yellowstone, and found some strong similarities based on comparative sequencing of genes. That provides a yardstick for estimating evolutionary relationships among them. The studies suggest that the organisms are specialized for life in the subsurface and are very widely distributed on Earth. So did life start in the rocks? Stahl will be the first to bluntly say, "We don't know." But it's a new place to look for answers about biological diversity and how that diversity relates to environments that used to be seen as barren. And who knows what further research will uncover? "There are some things that make it an attractive option--at the time we think life arose, the Earth was undergoing almost constant bombardment by asteroids and the like, which should have been enough to kill anything that developed on the surface, including microorganisms," he said. "This scenario would provide shelter from what was happening on the surface. But the bottom line, at this point, is that we really don't know enough to know. We're just getting to the point that we can start to ask these questions." Contacts: Rob Harrill Phone: 206-543-2580 E-mail: rharrill@u.washington.edu David Stahl Phone: 206-685-3464 E-mail: dastahl@u.washington.edu _____________________________________________________________________ THE NEW BIOLOGY OF ROCKS: "ARE THERE MEDICAL IMPLICATIONS OF GEOMICROBIOLOGY?" University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign release 15 February 2002 If microbial life is found on Mars, will it be native to the planet or something carried there from Earth? Either way, will it be safe to return samples of such organisms to Earth? Astrobiology, the search for life elsewhere, says a University of Illinois microbiologist, is making us look a lot closer at microbial life on Earth--how it adapts and its relationship to emerging infectious diseases. "Even if we don't find life on other planets, we are learning a lot about life on the Earth, particularly microbial life," Abigail Salyers said in an interview about her speech today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She challenged scientists to consider far-reaching possibilities in a talk titled "Are There Medical Implications of Geomicrobiology?" Salyers, a professor of microbiology and the College of Medicine at the UI's Urbana-Champaign campus, is the outgoing president of the American Society for Microbiology, the oldest and largest life sciences organization in the world, with more than 42,000 members. Her year as president, she said, has made her "an antenna absorbing the information coming from the members and trying to transmit some sense of it all." Although the ASM represents 25 disciplines of microbial specialization, she said, there has been in the last five years a blurring of distinctions among them, and an increasing amount of communication. And now, she said, scientists need to focus more about life on Earth as the quest for life "out there" is attracting growing attention. "The big question for scientists, and which has implications for Earth, is can you have microorganisms evolve that would be able to cause disease in humans, animals or plants in a place where there are no humans, animals and plants?" she said. Adaptability, Salyers added, "makes the issue a big one for astrobiology as we send spaceships to other planets." Earth already has yielded examples of the ability of microbes to exist in seemingly harsh and hostile environments, and bacteria normally not associated with disease have turned deadly under unexpected conditions, she said. Just last month, scientists reported in the journal Science the discovery of bacteria and fungi deep below the ice, in the rocks and soil, of Antarctica. For astrobiologists, Salyers said, this discovery heightens speculation that microbial life could dwell on or under a similar landscape on Mars or in the ice-covered seas of Europa and Ganymede, two of Jupiter's moons. Interestingly, while the early Viking and Mariner space probes were gathering data from Mars in the 1970s, scientists on Earth were discovering bacteria and the Archaea living and thriving in deep-ocean vents and other harshly cold and hot environments, she said. Could it be, she asked, that previous probes to Mars--Viking, Mariner and, more recently, the failed Mars Polar Lander--carried Earth bacteria that survived the cold vacuum and intense radiation exposure of space? "Many microbes are not as fragile as we long thought," she said. If microbial life is found on Mars, it may be difficult to determine if it began there or was imported from Earth and adapted to the Martian climate, she said. "Is it possible that we could populate Mars with bacteria from Earth? And if there is life on Mars, would the bacteria we introduce prove to be Mars' version of the Andromeda Strain," she said, referring to the 1971 movie in which scientists are faced with a deadly alien virus. On Earth, unexpected adaptations do happen. Salyers noted that: * In 1976, a mysterious lung-damaging illness to be known as Legionnaires' disease swept through a Philadelphia convention, killing 34 people. The causative bacterium was dubbed Legionella pneumophila, which lives in water. Microbiologists theorize that the bacterium may have adapted to live inside of amoebas, which usually digest and kill bacteria. Instead of dying out, the bacteria simply hitched a ride to a human host. * Another bacterium, Listeria monocytogenes, which is found in soil and water, often makes its way into food and causes food poisoning. Scientists have discovered that Listeria can survive and multiply even during refrigeration. * Black-band disease, which has been killing corals in the oceans, "may be caused or exacerbated by cyanobacteria," which normally dwell as part of phytoplankton in the ocean. Salyers was part of a research team, led by UI geologist Bruce Fouke, that reported in December that these bacteria might be teaming with human sewage and shipyard discharge in a way that kills coral under certain conditions. "In recent years, we've had unpleasant surprises in the form of emerging infectious diseases," Salyers said. "This is a shock. You would think that any organism capable of causing disease would have done so by now. Yet it is clear that there are microorganisms that have not been discovered out there in nature that are capable of causing disease. "Every time humans do something to benefit human beings, be it surgery, construction or air-conditioning, we create new opportunities for microorganisms to encounter things they have never encountered before," she said. "So, we as scientists must ask, what are the limits? Can we predict an emerging infectious disease before it happens? "We are hoping that by learning more about what bacteria experience out in nature, we might be able to determine what makes it possible for them to change and cause disease," she said. Contact: Jim Barlow, Life Sciences Editor Phone: 217-333-5802 E-mail: b-james3@uiuc.edu News Bureau, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 807 South Wright Street, Suite 520 East Champaign, Illinois 61820-6219 Phone: 217-333-1085, Fax: 217-244-0161 _____________________________________________________________________ ARTIFICIAL MUSCLES COME TO LIFE IN A PAIR OF FREE LECTURES NASA/JPL release 15 February 2002 A pioneer in the development of artificial muscles will share his vision of superhuman robotic explorers of the future in two free public lectures. In his lectures, called "Electroactive Polymers as Artificial Muscles," Dr. Yoseph Bar-Cohen, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, will speak about artificial muscles that may enable biologically inspired robotics. The lectures will be held on Thursday, February 21 at JPL and Friday, February 22 at Pasadena City College. Electroactive polymers, or artificial muscles, are lightweight strips of highly flexible plastic that bend or stretch and function similarly to biological muscles when subjected to electric voltage. Bar-Cohen is leading work on defining, developing and finding applications for artificial muscles. He and a small team of scientists and engineers at JPL, in cooperation with research centers worldwide, are working to turn such strips into grippers and strings that can grab and lift loads, among many other potential uses. Recent developments in this field lead researchers to believe that the idea of a bionic man or woman may someday be possible. Bar- Cohen's lecture will provide an overview of current developments and discuss the future possibilities for the Electroactive polymer technology. A webcast of the lecture will be available at 7:00 PM on Thursday, February 21 at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/lectures/feb02.html. Both lectures are open to the public and will start at 7:00 PM. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Thursday's lecture will be in JPL's von Karman Auditorium, located at 4800 Oak Grove Drive in Pasadena, off the Oak Grove Drive exit of the 210 (Foothill) Freeway. Friday's lecture will be at the Pasadena City College Forum, located at 1570 East Colorado Blvd. For more information, call (818) 354-0112 or go to http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/lectures.html. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Contact: Carolina Martinez Phone: 818-354-9382 _____________________________________________________________________ NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas http://www.lyon.edu/webdata/users/dthomas/astrobiology/astrobiology.h tml 18 February 2002 Articles about astrobiology, exobiology and terraformation http://www.lyon.edu/webdata/users/dthomas/astrobiology/online_article s1.html E. Baard, 2002. Keeping alien samples safe for study. Space.com. R. R. Britt, 2002. Our solar system as seen by alien astronomers. Space.com. _____________________________________________________________________ CASSINI MISSION STATUS NASA/JPL release 11 February 2002 NASA's Cassini spacecraft continues to fly in good health with less than 29 months to go before it becomes the first Earth envoy to enter orbit around Saturn. Last month, Cassini completed a 40-day period of data collection as part of a multi-year search for gravitational waves. The data comes from radio transmissions between Cassini and stations of NASA's Deep Space Network in California, Spain and Australia. The experiment used frequencies both in the X-band, which is the band commonly used by interplanetary spacecraft, and in the higher- frequency Ka-band, a new band for the Deep Space Network. Data was successfully collected for 90 percent of the possible transmission time in the Ka-band, a promising beginning for future uses of that band by Cassini and other spacecraft. In the traditional X-band, data was received for 98 percent of the possible time over the 40-day experiment. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space and time that are set off by acceleration of massive bodies, such as black holes or supernovas. Their existence has been confirmed indirectly, but never detected experimentally. This search assesses the Doppler effect on radio waves traveling between Cassini and Earth. The Doppler effect is how the frequency of a transmission is affected by the relative speed between the sender and receiver, such as the raised pitch of an approaching train's whistle. Scientists are looking for barely perceptible fluctuations that would be caused in Cassini's speed relative to Earth if gravitational waves of certain wavelengths were traveling through the solar system. They expect analysis of the data to take months. Cassini will be used for two more periods of gravitational wave investigation before it reaches Saturn. Engineers are making progress at correcting a problem of haze on the spacecraft's narrow-angle camera. Warming the camera for a week to a temperature just above freezing has significantly reduced the problem, so that treatment will be repeated for a longer period beginning March 5. "We're fully confident it is going to get better," said Robert Mitchell, Cassini-Huygens program manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. The usual operating temperature for the camera is -90 degrees Celsius (-130 degrees Fahrenheit). Haze on its optics appeared when it was cooled to that temperature after a routine-maintenance heating of the instrument to 30 degrees C (86 degrees F). That occurred following flawless imaging of Jupiter for several months of 2000 and 2001. Heating the camera again, but to only 4 degrees C (39 degrees F), is removing the haze. Test images taken of a star in late January showed the improvement. Cassini will reach Saturn on July 1, 2004, and release its piggybacked Huygens probe about six months later for descent through the thick atmosphere of the moon Titan on January 14, 2005. Cassini- Huygens is a cooperative mission of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. Additional information about Cassini-Huygens is available online at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. _____________________________________________________________________ INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION STATUS NASA/JSC release 15 February 2002 Activity on board the International Space Station this week focused on preparations for next week's spacewalk--the first to be conducted from the U.S. Quest airlock without a space shuttle docked. Expedition Four Commander Yury Onufrienko and Flight Engineers Carl Walz and Dan Bursch, beginning their 10th week on orbit, received volumes of information and training materials from the flight control team on the ground, participated in computer-based training sessions, and checked out the spacesuit, airlock and experiment systems that will be used February 20. A full dry-run of the airlock depressurization is planned Friday. The excursion will mark the first use of the station's airlock since July 2001 and will test equipment and techniques that will be used during the April STS-110 assembly mission, when four spacewalks out of the Quest airlock will install the first piece of the station's structural and electrical "backbone." Bursch and Walz will perform a checkout of the airlock's systems, connect and disconnect several electrical cables, remove insulation blankets from the Z-1 truss structure and bring inside several tools to expedite the work planned for STS-110. They will use U.S. space suits, with Walz, wearing a suit with red stripes on the legs and Bursch wearing an all-white suit. The spacewalk is scheduled to begin at about 6:00 AM CST Wednesday. NASA Television coverage will begin at 5:30 AM CST Wednesday. Experiment work also continued aboard the station, as crewmembers set up and activated the second Advanced Astroculture experiment. The investigation will grow mustard plant seeds harvested on board the station by the Expedition Two crew and returned after analysis on Earth, making them a true second generation of space-grown plant life. The University of Wisconsin-sponsored experiment studies Arabidopsis thaliana, which is renowned in genetic research circles as a key to identifying genes and determining their functions for entire classes of similar organisms. The crew disassembled the Active Rack Isolation System, which suffered a push-rod failure, and will soon conduct repairs that will enable the system to resume its work. The system protects sensitive microgravity experiments from the motions caused by everyday crew life aboard the station. The crew also worked with flight controllers on the ground to complete some unplanned maintenance work after Sunday's failure in a Remote Power Conversion Module (RPCM) that distributes power to a variety of station systems. Full functionality was restored to the non-critical systems that were affected in the Destiny laboratory module after Bursch and Walz replaced the glorified breaker box with an onboard spare. To access the module, they removed Bursch's temporary sleep station and replaced it, installing additional high- density plastic radiation protection bricks while they had the opportunity. A planned upgrade of the station's software was postponed until after the February 20 spacewalk to allow software engineers on the ground to perform one last set of tests to verify all aspects of the software load. The new software will prepare the station's computer systems for the arrival of the truss structure and other components to be delivered on STS-110 and future flights. Information on the crew's activities aboard the space station, future launch dates and times, as well as station sighting opportunities from anywhere on the Earth, is available on the internet at http://spaceflight.nasa.gov. Details on station science operations can be found on an internet site administered by the Payload Operations Center at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, at http://www.scipoc.msfc.nasa.gov. The next ISS status report will be issued February 21, or sooner, if developments warrant. _____________________________________________________________________ MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR SHOWS OFF IMAGES FROM EXTENDED MISSION NASA/JPL image advisory 11 February 2002 Like any good camera-wielding tourist, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor continues to shoot stunning pictures as it begins the second extension of its successful mission. Some newly released images show a 3-D view of layers on the Martian surface that may be ancient sedimentary rocks, while others show an unusual spiral-shaped cloud over the giant Arsia Mons volcano. The images are available at: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/1yearExtend/ Launched November 7, 1996, Global Surveyor entered the Martian orbit on September 12, 1997. The mission has studied the entire Martian surface, atmosphere, and interior, and has returned more data about the red planet than all other Mars missions combined. Mars Global Surveyor 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 in Pasadena. JPL's industrial partner is Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, which developed and operates the spacecraft. The Mars Orbiter Camera is operated by Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, CA. _____________________________________________________________________ STARDUST STATUS REPORT NASA/JPL release 15 February 2002 There was one Deep Space Network (DSN) tracking pass in the past week, and all subsystems are performing normally. The Power Subsystem onboard the Stardust spacecraft continues to perform better than predicted, but the remaining three tracking passes in the current flight sequence will be reduced to approximately 2 hours to ensure the battery State of Charge (SOC) does not go below 80%. A conservative approach will be taken to minimizing spacecraft communications during the next 3 months while the spacecraft is more than 2.6 AU from the Sun. The Stardust Imaging Science team gave a colloquium to the Department of Physics and Astronomy at California State University, Los Angeles. 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. _____________________________________________________________________ End Marsbugs, Volume 9, Number 7.