MARSBUGS: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 9, Number 35, 23 September 2002. Editor/Publisher: David J. Thomas, Ph.D., Science Division, Lyon College, Batesville, AR 72503-2317, USA. dthomas@lyon.edu Contributing Editor: Julian A. Hiscox, Ph.D., 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 effectively 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/. _____________________________________________________________________ CONTENTS 1) FOSTERING THE NEXT GENERATION OF MARS EXPLORERS NASA/JPL release 2) AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE MARS GRAVITY BIOSATELLITE PROJECT By Leonard David 3) TANTALIZING SIGNS OF WATER SEEN ON PLANETS ORBITING DISTANT STARS From Agence France-Presse and SpaceDaily 4) ESA TO SEARCH FOR LIFE, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT From ESA Science News 5) LIVING IN A GLASS HOUSE From SpaceDaily 6) SHORTLISTING STARS WITH PLANETS From Astrobiology Magazine 7) NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas 8) CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS NASA/JPL release 9) INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION SCIENCE OPERATIONS STATUS REPORT NASA/MSFC release 02-232 10) MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release 11) STARDUST STATUS REPORT NASA/JPL release 12) PH.D. STUDENTSHIPS AVAILABLE IN REACTION DYNAMICS, PLANETARY CHEMISTRY, ASTROCHEMISTRY University of Hawai'i release _____________________________________________________________________ FOSTERING THE NEXT GENERATION OF MARS EXPLORERS NASA/JPL release http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/msip01.html 16 September 2002 "Watch out NASA! We're coming!" were the words of a high-school student who recently participated in the Mars Student Imaging Project, jointly sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, and Arizona State University in Tempe. The Mars Student Imaging Project allows students from the fifth grade through community college to take their own pictures of Mars using a thermal infrared visible camera system onboard NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which is currently circling the red planet. "The effect we are having on the students and their teachers is our validation," said Mars Student Imaging Project Assistant Director Keith Watt. "We're changing the way teachers teach and students learn in a dynamic, cutting-edge environment, using the exploration of Mars as the hook." The formula for success: Mars exploration for all The Mars Student Imaging Project is for everyone, not just for the most motivated students and space-savvy teachers. The project was designed "by teachers, for teachers," so the lessons and activities are easy to implement in the classroom, and reflect the National Science Education Standards for learning. In addition, the project's educational staff has made adaptations for students who speak Spanish or who use sign language. Future plans also include working on activities for visually impaired students. Students of all backgrounds say they feel like adults or real scientists because they are learning the same skills that professional scientists use on a regular basis. Just as Mars scientists use the camera to map landforms and geologic features on the martian surface, the students are imaging everything from small, unnamed craters to large and familiar features such as Valles Marineris, the largest canyon system in the solar system. Students watch their image come down from the spacecraft and learn how to analyze data using image-processing techniques. They also get a chance to discuss their preliminary analysis with actual Mars mission scientists. "The neat part of this project is that the student teams get to make the decision to target whatever site on Mars they feel will best allow them to answer their own scientific questions," said Mars Student Imaging Project Assistant Director Paige Valderrama. "They're working side by side with the scientists, avidly wondering about the geology and climate of another world." Preparing the next generation of workforce Many of the students who have been involved in the project are now considering careers in space exploration. Those who weren't motivated at all in school are excited about their studies and almost forget that they are learning. As one student put it, "This is better than school!" Creators of the Mars Student Imaging Project like to think of it as an example of what school can actually be in this increasingly high- tech age: a chance-of-a-lifetime experience for students to be directly involved with a NASA mission to another planet. NASA has a vital interest in inspiring the next generation of explorers, and the Mars Student Imaging Project aligns with that intent. With a planned program of multiple orbiters around Mars for the next few decades, the nation's space agency will essentially establish a "permanent presence" for research around Mars. The exciting extension of this orbital presence is that it opens up opportunities for a "permanent presence" in the classroom, open to new groups of students year after year. These opportunities contribute to the education of today's students so that they will be prepared for the high-skill careers of the future. "By design, the skills required to do these Mars science activities can be applied to many different aspects of life," said Mars Student Imaging Project Director Sheri Klug. "These are core skills, like problem solving and critical thinking, which will academically help them no matter what career paths they end up choosing." Extending opportunities to participate Perhaps one of the biggest bonuses of the Mars Student Imaging Project is that the student teams are now voluntarily acting as mentors for other interested students. For example, a recent student team of eleven participants went back to their school, reaching out to an additional 100 students. While some student teams decide to come to Arizona State University (often, on their own initiative, holding yard sales and finding corporate sponsors in their communities), others can have the same interactive experience through Internet conferencing and teleconferencing, or with archived data sets available online. That opens the doors for anyone to participate, right from their desktops. Even the teachers benefit from the experience by learning how to teach what Klug calls an "instead of" curriculum. That is, "instead of" using standard, pre-set classroom worksheets and simulations, the curriculum provides a hands-on, engaging way to participate in genuine planetary exploration and discovery. This participation in real, ongoing scientific discovery-not as bystanders, but as decision-makers-not only boosts students' self-esteem and motivates them to learn, but also gives them a new experience of themselves. "I wish there was some way to preserve this enthusiasm for learning and pass it on to all students," said Cindy Wurmnest, an Illinois teacher who participated in the project. Any teacher in the United States can fully participate in the program by downloading the Mars Student Imaging Project curriculum materials from http://msip.asu.edu . More information about NASA's long-term Mars Exploration Program can be found at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov. _____________________________________________________________________ AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE MARS GRAVITY BIOSATELLITE PROJECT By Leonard David From Space.com 18 September 2002 ...The Mars Gravity Biosatellite is an unmatched international effort that pools top-notch technical talent from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, the University of Washington in Seattle, and the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. The plan is to build a spacecraft capable of housing a small crew of mice. Hurled into low Earth orbit, this troop of "right stuff" rodents will live aboard the spinning satellite--a specially designed craft that creates artificial gravity identical to the true gravity field found on Mars. Spending seven-weeks in orbit, the mice will live, grow, and develop in a Mars-like gravity environment. That is one-third the gravity of their native Earth. Then the satellite and its precious cargo are to reenter and land safely back on terra firma. Get the full story at http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/mars_biosatellite_ 020918.html. _____________________________________________________________________ TANTALIZING SIGNS OF WATER SEEN ON PLANETS ORBITING DISTANT STARS From Agence France-Presse and SpaceDaily 18 September 2002 Italian astronomers believe they have glimpsed water, a building block of life, in the atmosphere of planets that are light years from Earth, New Scientist says. The team reported their findings at a workshop in Austria this week, saying they had found telltale microwave emissions, called MASERS, that can emanate from atmospheric water when it is bathed in infrared light from a nearby star. "This would be a historic discovery--the first detection of a prebiotic molecule in an extrasolar planet," Cristiano Cosmovici, of the Institute for Cosmic and Planetary Sciences in Rome, was quoted by the British weekly as saying. Get the full story at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/020918180155.0lbd47ez.html. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.space.com/news/astronotes-1.html http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/09/18/planets.water.reut/index.htm l _____________________________________________________________________ ESA TO SEARCH FOR LIFE, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT From ESA Science News http://sci.esa.int 19 September 2002 This week, astrobiologists are discussing what ESA's Huygens space probe might discover when it parachutes to the surface of Saturn's mysterious moon, Titan, in 2005. Titan possesses a rich atmosphere of organic molecules, which Huygens will analyze. Recently some scientists have begun to think that, by redefining life, in broader terms, what we may find on Titan may be life. If this is the case, it certainly will not be life as we know it. Titan is an astrobiologist's dream laboratory. Its atmosphere is composed of nitrogen and methane gas. Ultraviolet light from the Sun can break the methane molecules apart, leading to the formation of complex organic molecules by which scientists mean molecules containing carbon. Carbon compounds are the first step towards life, as we know it on Earth. Life, itself, is based on extremely complicated carbon molecules such as DNA. Some scientists believe the composition of Titan's atmosphere closely resembles that of early Earth, before life began on our planet. Huygens's investigations may reveal how life began on Earth. Jean- Pierre Lebreton, ESA's Project Scientist for Huygens says, "One of the key questions we hope to address is how complex the organic molecules have grown in Titan's atmosphere." However, organic molecules are still a long way from life itself. So, what defines life? What is the difference between the living and the non-living? Scientists are still unsure. No satisfactory definition has been found so far. Any attempt to define life's characteristics either excludes some types of life or includes some inanimate objects. When looking for an appropriate definition of life, there is one property all scientists seem to agree on: all life needs energy to sustain its metabolism. For example, plants use sunlight, while animals extract energy from organic molecules in the food they eat. This happens not only in these higher-level organisms, but also in the simplest forms of life on Earth, microbes. Microbes are single-cell organisms that capture their life-energy from a dizzying array of inorganic chemical reactions. Such chemical metabolisms are so different from those in the animals and plants of Earth, that astrobiologists now wonder if life could arise in any place that can sustain a rich network of chemical reactions, such as on Titan. Moreover, on Earth, microbes have adapted to the extreme environmental conditions. Scientists therefore now ask, "Could life arise on Titan?" By all standards, Titan is an extreme and hostile environment to life, as we know it. Any life on Titan would have to be totally different from all Earthly forms. Lebreton says, "The conditions on Titan are not adequate for the kind of life we understand today. It is very cold and there is no liquid water but we should be ready for surprises." Identifying life is tricky, especially when you are unsure what to look for. Huygens's geological and environmental investigations, and Cassini's mapping from orbit, might record chemical anomalies or curious geological structures that warrant further investigation as possible life indicators. Another chemically puzzling place is the planet Venus. Similarly to Titan, Venus is a world that scientists would traditionally call hostile to life, as we understand it. However, there is something odd in its clouds. Venus's chemically laden atmosphere displays some curious phenomena, such as the planet's ability to absorb ultraviolet radiation. Scientists cannot explain this. Some speculate that perhaps microbes in the atmosphere are responsible. If ESA's Venus Express is given the final go-ahead later this year, it might help solve the mystery. For centuries, scientists have struggled to define life. Space investigations present the best chance for astrobiologists to find the missing link in our understanding of what separates the living from the non-living. When we know that, we will finally have defined life here on Earth. There are other European Space Agency missions with strong emphasis on astrobiology coming soon. Rosetta will study organic molecules on Comet Wirtanen, investigating how comets might have seeded the early Earth with such compounds, which possibly favored the origin of life. Mars Express and its lander, Beagle 2, will scour Mars for environments likely to harbor past or present life. Huygens Huygens will be the first space probe to land on a world in the outer Solar System. In early 2005, it will land on the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, and the only moon in the Solar System to possess a thick atmosphere. The Huygens data may offer clues about how life began on Earth. Huygens is currently in space, hitching a ride on NASA's Cassini mission, which was launched by a Titan IVB/Centaur rocket on 15 October 1997. Venus Express Venus Express is the latest mission to be added to ESA's Cosmic Vision 2020 Science Programme. It is scheduled for launch in November 2005 and will be build around the design of Mars Express, making it quicker and cheaper to develop. It will study the Venusian atmosphere and surface in detail and use radar to conduct the first investigation of the planet's subsurface layers. With Venus Express, Mars Express, and BepiColombo, ESA is the only space agency in the world with current plans to visit each planet in the inner Solar System. Astrobiologists are gathering this week at the Second European Workshop on Astrobiology in Graz, Austria. Contacts: Dr. Jean-Pierre Lebreton ESA Huygens Project Scientist and Venus Express Study Scientist ESTEC, The Netherlands Phone: +31 71 565 3600 E-mail: jean-pierre.lebreton@esa.int ESA Science Programme Communications Service Phone: +31 71 565 3273 E-mail: irina.bruckner@esa.int Useful links for this story Life in extreme conditions http://spdext.estec.esa.nl/content/doc/56/30550_.htm What is life? http://spdext.estec.esa.nl/content/doc/57/30551_.htm More about Huygens http://sci.esa.int/huygens/ More about Rosetta http://sci.esa.int/rosetta/ [Image 1] http://sci.esa.int/content/searchimage/searchresult.cfm?aid=12&cid=12 &oid=30548&ooid=25335 Cassini-Huygens approaching Saturn. [Image 2] http://sci.esa.int/content/searchimage/searchresult.cfm?aid=12&cid=12 &oid=30548&ooid=13955 Artist's impression of Huygens descending through Titan's atmosphere. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/saturn-titan-02b.html http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0209/20life/ _____________________________________________________________________ LIVING IN A GLASS HOUSE From SpaceDaily 19 September 2002 Why live in a glass house? For diatoms--tiny ocean-dwelling organisms that live in exquisitely ornate glass cases--the benefit turns out to be enormous. In a paper published in the September 13 issue of Science, Princeton scientists show that diatoms probably depend on glass to survive because the material facilitates photosynthesis. However, their study suggests that this domestic arrangement has a much bigger beneficiary: the entire planet, which owes its present-day, oxygen-rich and carbon-poor atmosphere in part to diatoms and their effective use of glass. Get the full story at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/life-02zm.html. _____________________________________________________________________ SHORTLISTING STARS WITH PLANETS From Astrobiology Magazine 23 September 2002 Markus Landgraf of the European Space Agency and colleagues have found the first direct evidence that a bright disc of dust surrounds our Solar System, starting beyond the orbit of Saturn. Remarkably, their discovery gives astronomers a way to determine which other stars in the Galaxy are most likely to harbor planets and allows mission planners to draw up a "short-list" of stars to be observed by future planet-search missions, such as Eddington and Darwin. Mature stars thought not to be dusty The discovery of the Solar System's dust ring strengthens the idea that such features around mature stars are signposts to planetary systems. The reason for this is that planetary systems are thought to condense from a cloud of gas and dust. Planets form near the central star, where the material is densest. However, at great distances from the star, the gas and dust is sparse and can coalesce only into a vast band of small, icy bodies. In our Solar System, they form the so-called Edgeworth-Kuiper belt that extends out beyond the orbit of Neptune. Any remaining dust is lost to deep space. "After the first circumstellar dust disks were discovered around very young stars," says Landgraf, "it was concluded from numerical modeling that mature stars will not have such a disk." Ordinarily, dust is either incorporated into larger celestial bodies or ejected from the Solar System. "The reason is that dust disks erode very quickly (within 100 million years) by mutual collisions and evaporation of the dust grains," Landgraf says. "It was only after a dust disk was observed around the still young, but already mature star, Vega, that people thought about dust disks around mature stars. Recently there was the finding of a circustellar disk around the 1 billion-year old star Epsilon Eridani, which confirmed this hypothesis. Whether or not our Sun has such a disk was discussed after the discovery of the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt. It was only now, after our analysis, that the dispute over its existence is settled, since the Pioneer 10 data give direct evidence for the disk." But for such dust still to be present today around a mature star like our Sun, means a very large source must be found since something is replenishing it. "In order to sustain such a ring, 50 tons of dust have to be generated every second," says Landgraf. He and his colleagues believe that collisions between the icy remnants of the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt create the Solar System's dust ring. If the same is going on in other planetary systems, then those stars will also have dusty rings around them. "If you have a dust disc around a star that's not particularly young, then it's extremely interesting because the dust has to come from somewhere. The only explanation is that the star has planets, comets, asteroids or other bodies that collide and generate the dust," says Malcolm Fridlund, ESA's study scientist for Darwin, the mission under development to search for life-supporting planets around other stars. Celestial dust detectives To trace the collisions in the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, Landgraf and colleagues had to do some celestial detective work. They began by sifting through data from the 1970s and early 1980s, when NASA space probes Pioneer 10 and 11 first found dust particles of unknown origin beyond Saturn's orbit. "The motivation for this study," says Landgraf, "was actually to understand the data obtained with the Pioneer probes in comparison with the data we have received from the dust instruments on the ESA spacecraft Ulysses. So, we weren't actually looking for the dust ring, but we found it to be the only plausible explanation for the many dust particles detected by Pioneer 10 outside Saturn." The hypothesis of dust coming from comets was discarded: in fact near the Earth, comets give off dust; beyond Saturn, however, they freeze and shed little material. So, no one knew whether the Pioneer dust grains were coming from inside the Solar System--from a source other than comets--or beyond it from the interstellar space. Now, using data from ESA's Ulysses spacecraft, which has been orbiting the poles of the Sun for more than 10 years, Landgraf and colleagues have been able to rule out an origin beyond the Solar System. The Ulysses data shows that dust grains of interstellar origin are considerably smaller than interplanetary dust grains, which originate in the Solar System. Planet hunters look for tell-tale dust rings The interstellar grains detected by Ulysses are typically ten to a hundred times smaller than the smallest grain that could be detected by Pioneer. Thus, the Pioneer grains have to be made somewhere within our Solar System. So, by a process of elimination and computer simulations, the scientists came to the conclusion that the only possible source of the dust is the collisions between the small, icy objects in the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt. Since these are the remnants of planet formation, the team believes that planetary systems around other stars will also produce constantly replenishing dust rings. From the number of dust particles detected by the Pioneers, Landgraf and colleagues were able to calculate the density of dust in the ring. "There's only one dust particle every 50 cubic kilometers but it's enough for a bright dust ring like those we see around other stars," says Landgraf. Indeed, a number of such features have been observed shining brightly at infrared wavelengths around stars such as Vega and Epsilon Eridani. So in addition to solving the puzzle of how the dust is created, scientists hope to use such models to narrow down a list of stars likely to harbor planets. "If we see a similar dust ring around a main sequence star (a mature star, like the Sun), we'll know it must have asteroids or comets. If we see gaps in the dust ring, it will probably have planets which are sweeping away the dust as they orbit," says Landgraf. "There is no other explanation for a structure in the ring than perturbation of the dust grain's orbits by a planet," says Landgraf. "It is not only the sweeping effect of the planet, but also its gravity, which tends to catch the dust in resonant orbits, that is in orbits which have a period with a integer ratio compared to the planet's orbit period. [For example], many of the dust particles from the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt are on orbits that take them around the Sun once every time the planet Neptune goes around the Sun twice. This is caused by Neptune's gravity." The result slots into place another piece of the puzzle for those scientists working on missions that will search for extrasolar planets, as it will allow them to draw up a well motivated list of target stars based upon whether they are surrounded by dust rings. "This finding has exciting implications for both missions (Eddington and Darwin)," confirms Fridlund. What's next After solving the main mystery of dust replenishment, Landgraf and his colleagues would like to know more about the dust size and composition. "From the Pioneer data there is not much we can say about the size, only that the inner edge of the disk is at Saturn's orbit. The outer reaches are unknown and so is the total mass. There are theoretical calculations of the mass, but no direct measurement." Computer modeling is likely their only redress however as the experimental scale of collisions to produce these rings is so enormous. "Mutual collisions between Edgeworth-Kuiper belt objects as well as erosion by interstellar dust bombardment create grains of all sizes," says Landgraf. "It is not known exactly how many fragments of what size are created, because such a big collision like one between two Edgeworth-Kuiper belt objects can not be recreated in the lab. According to a model calculation both mechanisms (mutual collisions as well as interstellar erosion) cause the same amount of dust (in terms of mass). The interstellar dust grains are typically much smaller than the grains observed with the Pioneer instruments, they have about 100 times lower masses. Nonetheless they can release larger grains, because the hit the objects of the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt with high speed (more than 20 kilometre per second)." To fulfill another goal of the researchers--detecting an equivalent to the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt around another star-- presents some opportunities for future large telescopes. "With today's technology we can only detect the dust ring, not the Edgworth-Kuiper belt itself," explains Landgraf. "The reason is that all the tiny dust grains together have a much bigger surface area. You can compare it with a comet. You can see the comet's tail easily with the naked eye, but for the core you have to have extremely sensitive telescopes. This is despite the fact that the core is many million times more massive. Another example is the smoke of a fire. It is very visible without weighing much. The small ash particles and water droplets have just such a big surface area, which makes them visible. The big objects of the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt equivalent are in the order of 100 kilometers in diameter and are thus very compact and have little surface area for their mass." Future missions, such as ESA's Herschel mission will search for many more and take detailed pictures of stars that might harbor dust rings. As these images become available, astronomers will be able to predict the sizes and orbits of giant planets within the alien solar system. Additional information on this article is available at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article280.html. _____________________________________________________________________ NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas http://www.lyon.edu/webdata/users/dthomas/astrobiology/astrobiology.h tml 23 September 2002 Astrobiology, exobiology and terraformation articles http://www.lyon.edu/webdata/users/dthomas/astrobiology/online_article s1.html ESA, 2002. ESA to search for life, but not as we know it. SpaceDaily. ESA, 2002. To search for life, but not as we know it. Spaceflight Now. Human space exploration and microgravity effects articles http://www.lyon.edu/webdata/users/dthomas/astrobiology/online_article s3.html L. David, 2002. An inside look at the mars gravity biosatellite project. Space.com. Evolutionary biology and chemistry articles http://www.lyon.edu/webdata/users/dthomas/astrobiology/online_article s5.html Agence France-Presse, 2002. Tantalizing signs of water seen on planets orbiting distant stars. SpaceDaily. Reuters, 2002. Signs of water found on distant planets. Reuters/CNN. SpaceDaily, 2002. Living in a glass house. SpaceDaily. _____________________________________________________________________ CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS NASA/JPL release 12-18 September 2002 The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Goldstone tracking station on Wednesday, September 18. The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and is operating normally. Information on the present position and speed of the Cassini spacecraft may be found on the "Present Position" web page located at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/cassini/english/where/. Instrument activities this week included Radio and Plasma Wave Science High Frequency Receiver calibrations, execution and playback of Probe Checkout #10, and a Cassini Plasma Spectrometer Gain States Change. Additional on-board activities included clearing of the CDS error logs and ACS high water marks, and an autonomous Solid State Recorder Memory Load Partition repair activity. Sequence development for C34 concluded this week with release of the final products, and a Final Sequence Integration & Validation meeting. The sequence was then successfully uplinked over Wednesday's pass and will begin execution on Saturday. Last week the PC version of the Science Opportunity Analyzer (SOA) program was delivered by the Mission Sequence Subsystem (MSS) for installation on the download website. The installation is now complete and authorized users may download SOA for use on their local PCs. The software is subject to International Traffic in Arms Regulation restrictions and pre-approval for access to the download site is required. Hosted by System Engineering, several meetings have been held over the past week to discuss Cassini Information Management System (CIMS) requirements with the distributed science teams. This effort has culminated in a 3-hour workshop. A consensus has been obtained on the direction development should take. Focus is on the CIMS 2.4 delivery some time in November 2002. The Uplink Operations MSS team is now moving forward to develop detailed requirements and design for the Science Planning Attitude Spread Sheet and Spacecraft Activity Sequence File interface. A Software Requirements Certification Review meeting was held for RADAR flight software. The software will now go through uplink checkout and will be radiated to the spacecraft as part of the activities during C34. Mission Assurance has scheduled a meeting to discuss Risk Management with the Cassini Principal Investigators (PIs) during the October Project Science Group meeting. A NASA Independent Review Team has recommended PI involvement in the Risk Management process and this is the first step towards achieving participation. Advanced copies of the slides were distributed this week for review. Cassini is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA, manages the Cassini mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. _____________________________________________________________________ INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION SCIENCE OPERATIONS STATUS REPORT NASA/MSFC release 02-232 18 September 2002 The second Microgravity Science Glovebox research project is scheduled to begin Thursday aboard the International Space Station, studying bubbles that can become trapped in metal alloys used to produce engine turbine blades and semiconductor crystals for electronic devices. The Pore Formation and Mobility Investigation (PFMI) will melt samples of a transparent modeling material, succinonitrile and succinonitrile water mixtures. Investigators will be able to observe how bubbles form in the samples and study their movements and interactions. "Bubbles sound simple," said Dr. Richard Grugel, PFMI lead scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Al. "But when bubbles are trapped in solid samples, they can act as internal cracks that diminish a material's strength and usefulness, whether it's processed on Earth or in space." Bubbles are more likely to get trapped in samples processed in microgravity, which makes the Space Station a good place to study their movements and interactions. Information collected from PFMI is expected to provide insights into the processing of metals and alloys in space and on Earth. Observing and controlling his Space Station experiment from the telescience operations room at the Marshall Center, Grugel will observe bubbles in prepared samples and study their behavior. He will be able to send commands to the experiment in space, changing the processing temperature and other parameters to systematically investigate the conditions that stimulate bubble movement and eventual pore formation. The crew installed the PFMI furnace chamber in the Glovebox last week. On Tuesday, controllers and the science team on the ground conducted a non-sample checkout run with PFMI to verify procedures, commands, video and data connections. During the first sample run Thursday, one of two video cameras will send back images to the ground of the samples as they melt and resolidify. PFMI includes 15 samples. Each sample tube is 0.39 inches (1 centimeter) in diameter and 7.87 inches (20 centimeters) long. Watching from the ground during the seven-hour melting and freezing cycle, Grugel will be able to send commands to the experiment, changing temperatures, growth rate and other variables that affect sample processing. He will also be able to measure bubble size, numbers, movement and other interactions. The research is sponsored by NASA's Microgravity Research Program at the Marshall Center and by the Office of Biological and Physical Research in Washington, DC. The first Glovebox research program was completed last week. Flight Engineer Peggy Whitson completed the Solidification Using a Baffle in Sealed Ampoules (SUBSA). A total of eight samples processed during the research program are stored for return to Earth. Friday (September 13) marked the first-ever on-orbit practice use of the lab's Ultrasound imaging equipment for medical diagnosis. With guidance from flight surgeons at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Whitson used it on herself to capture live video images for more than four hours. The ability to capture and downlink Ultrasound imagery from orbit expands the kinds of medical research that can be conducted in space by scientists on Earth, and could offer physicians the chance to diagnose ailments in Space Station crewmembers earlier than they could otherwise. This possibly could improve the chances of effectively treating the problem without requiring an emergency crew return to Earth. Ultrasound is a generic commercially-produced diagnostic tool that provides three-dimensional image enlargement of the heart, lungs and other organs, muscles and blood vessels. On Monday (September 16), the crew removed fluid from the Advanced Astroculture plant growth experiment and a second fluid removal is scheduled for Friday. Both of these activities are part of the plant preservation and drying process prior to completing the experiment and preparing plant samples for return to Earth. On Tuesday (September 17), ground controllers conducted several tests to calibrate the Active Rack Isolation System in EXPRESS Rack 2. ARIS is designed to damp out tiny vibrations caused by crew motion, running equipment, etc., that could disturb experiments in the rack. Selected members of the crew conducted the Crew Interactions survey today (Wednesday). A weekly pre-spacewalk reading of the EVA Radiation Monitoring badges is scheduled for Friday and will be followed by a data download to the Human Research Facility (HRF) laptop computer. The crew continued its daily payload status checks of automated science payloads to make sure that all experiments and payload facilities continue to operate properly. Photography subjects for the Crew Earth Observations project this week included: Angolan biomass burning, industrialized Southeastern Africa, Recife in Brazil, Havanna, Cuba, tropical storm formation near Jamaica, reefs around Jarvis Island, and coral reefs in the Tuamotu Archipelago. The Payload Operations Center at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, manages all science research experiment operations aboard the International Space Station. The center is also home for coordination of the mission-planning work of a variety of international sources, all science payload deliveries and retrieval, and payload training and payload safety programs for the Station crew and all ground personnel. Contact: Steve Roy MSFC Media Relations Department Phone: 256-544-0034 E-mail: Steve.Roy@msfc.nasa.gov _____________________________________________________________________ MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release 16-20 September 2002 Yardangs near Olympus Mons (Released 16 September 2002) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20020916a.html Granicus Valles (Released 17 September 2002) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20020917a.html Arcadia Planitia Dark Splotch (Released 18 September 2002) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20020918a.html Lava Flows around Olympus Mons (Released 19 September 2002) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20020919a.html Semeykin Crater (Released 20 September 2002) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20020920a.html All of the THEMIS images are archived at http://themis.la.asu.edu/latest.html. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) was developed by Arizona State University, Tempe, in collaboration with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing. The THEMIS investigation is led by Dr. Philip Christensen at Arizona State University. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime contractor for the Odyssey project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. _____________________________________________________________________ STARDUST STATUS REPORT NASA/JPL release 20 September 2002 All of Stardust's subsystems are performing normally while collection of interstellar particles continues. The spacecraft had one period of radio contact through JPL's Deep Space Network this week. The spacecraft has not finished transmitting a set of calibration images taken by the navigation camera on September 3. More than half of the images have reached the ground. As reported last week, the images show signs of contamination on the camera's light-sensing electronic surface--the charge-coupled device. The contamination is less than on previous occasions. The camera is still usable in its current condition, but heaters will likely be turned on to remove the contamination. On a positive note, an image through the periscope showed improvement from previous images. An updated version of nucleus-tracking software ran successfully in Spacecraft Test Laboratory this week. The review board conducting a critical event readiness review on September 16 gave the Stardust team a positive response. 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. _____________________________________________________________________ PH.D. STUDENTSHIPS AVAILABLE IN REACTION DYNAMICS, PLANETARY CHEMISTRY, ASTROCHEMISTRY University of Hawai'i release 23 September 2002 The Department of Chemistry at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa invites applications for Ph.D. studentships in the fields of reaction dynamics, astrochemistry, planetary chemistry, astrobiology, and atmospheric chemistry beginning January 1, 2003. Exceptionally well- qualified candidates are offered teaching assistantships and full tuition fee waivers. The prime directive of our lab is to unravel the underlying reaction dynamics and elementary mechanisms on how complex (astrobiologically relevant) molecules are synthesized from the bottom up via single atoms, radicals, and small molecules in extraterrestrial ices and in atmospheres of planets and their satellites. Solid-state experiments employ two surface scattering machines and are conducted in collaboration with the Centre for Astrobiology, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. Elementary gas-phase reactions are carried out under single collision conditions utilizing a novel crossed molecular beams machine. Extensive collaborations exist with the Hawai'ian Institute of Geophysics and Planetology (HIGP), the Institute for Astronomy (IfA), and the International Astrophysics Network (IAN). Recent examples of our work can be found in Acc. Chem. Res. (34, 699-706, 2001), Int. J. Astrobiology (1, 15-23, 2002), Chemical Reviews (102, 1309-1358, 2002), Angew. Chemie Int. Ed. (41, 2350-2352, 2002), and Int. Rev. Physical Chemistry (21, 307-356, 2002). To apply, please send letter of interest, three letters of recommendation, transcripts or equivalent, and curriculum vitae to Professor Ralf I. Kaiser, Department of Chemistry, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, HI 96822-2275, USA, or via email to kaiser@gold.chem.hawaii.edu. Applications will be reviewed beginning October 1, 2002 on a continuous basis. _____________________________________________________________________ End Marsbugs, Volume 9, Number 35.