MARSBUGS: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 10, Number 14, 7 April 2003. 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) NOVA II CAPSULE UNVEILED Starchaser Industries release 2) SPLASHING DOWN ON TITAN'S OCEANS From ESA Science News 3) NASA, CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY TO TEST ROBOT IN CHILE NASA/ARC release 03-19AR 4) EXTREME LIFEFORMS: NOTHING TO SNEEZE AT From Astrobiology Magazine 5) NASA STRIVING TO IMPROVE EARTH SCIENCE MISSION PLANNING NASA/ARC release 03-20AR 6) ASTRONOMY: CENSORED IN SCIENCE EDUCATION By Edna DeVore 7) UB STUDENTS TO "EXPLORE MARS" IN UTAH University of Buffalo release 8) EARTH'S OLDEST FOSSILS REVERSE COURSE By David Tenenbaum 9) NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas 10) CONTINUING COVERAGE OF THE COLUMBIA DISASTER By David J. Thomas 11) CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS NASA/JPL release 12) NEW LAUNCH DATE FOR DEEP IMPACT NASA/JPL/Deep Impact Project release 13) MARS EXPLORATION ROVERS: SPACECRAFT AND EXPENDABLE VEHICLES STATUS REPORT By George H. Diller 14) PROLIFIC NASA ORBITER ADDS THOUSANDS OF PHOTOS TO MARS ALBUM NASA image advisory 2003-048 15) MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release 16) STARDUST STATUS REPORT NASA/JPL release ________________________________________________________________________ NOVA II CAPSULE UNVEILED Starchaser Industries release 1 April 2003 Starchaser are unveiling the first man rated capsule at an open day in Hyde Cheshire on Thursday 3 April 2003. This is a great opportunity for you to inspect the capsule airframe and cockpit and meet members of the team who built it. The team will be conducting presentations and holding comprehensive Q+A sessions throughout the day. The capsule weighs 200 kg and measures 3 meters in length; the single seater Nova II capsule is being readied for shipment to the USA where it is to be fitted with a custom parachute system. The manned capsule will then be dropped from a C-123K transport aircraft at an altitude of 14,000 feet over the Red Lake Drop Zone in Arizona in order to practice landing the reusable craft. Once proven, the capsule will be attached to the Starchaser Nova rocket, which was first flown from Morecambe Bay in November 2001, for further unmanned tests followed by a manned launch to an altitude of at least 30,000 feet. NOVA II will become Britain's first manned rocket capsule and will test a variety of systems for use in project Thunderbird-- Starchaser Industries' entry into the U.S. $10 million X-Prize, which is an offer to the first non-governmental organization capable of launching three people into space. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/starchaser_capsule_03 0403.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/rocketscience-03n.html ________________________________________________________________________ SPLASHING DOWN ON TITAN'S OCEANS From ESA Science News 1 April 2003 Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is a mysterious place. Its thick atmosphere is rich in organic compounds. Some of them would be signs of life if they were on our planet. How do they form on Titan? Will they help us to discover how life began on Earth? ESA's Huygens probe, arriving at Titan in 2005, will help find answers. Here on Earth, ground-based telescopes are playing their part also. They will help scientists to decide how and where precisely Huygens will land. What will it be--on solid ground or in an ocean of methane? NASA's Voyager 1 provided the first detailed images of Titan in 1980. They showed only an opaque, orange atmosphere, apparently homogeneous. It was so thick that you could not see the surface. However, other data revealed exciting things. Similarly to Earth, Titan's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen but there are also methane and many other organic compounds. Organic compounds form when sunlight destroys the methane. If sunlight is continuously destroying methane, how is methane getting into the atmosphere? On Earth today, it is life itself that refreshes the methane supply. Methane is a by-product of the metabolism of many organisms. Could this mean there is life on Titan? Titan is not a pleasant place for life. It is far too cold for liquid water to exist, and all known forms of life need liquid water. Titan's surface is -180°C. According to one exotic theory, long ago, the impact of a meteorite, for example, might have provided enough heat to liquify water for perhaps a few hundred or thousand years. However, it is unlikely that Titan is a site for life today. Jean-Pierre Lebreton, Huygens Project Scientist, is puzzled by the amount of methane that persists in Titan's atmosphere. Could there be oceans of methane on or under the surface? Before Huygens arrival, planned for January 2005, astronomers will observe Titan using the most powerful ground-based telescopes. "More and more astronomers are pointing their instruments to this amazing cold world. And their results are helping us a lot," points out Lebreton. Images from the W. M. Keck Observatory reveal methane-containing clouds near Titan's south pole. Could Titan have the equivalent of a weather cycle? Lebreton says "It is a major discovery. It means that the atmosphere is much more dynamic than we used to think." The NASA Cassini orbiter will clearly see these clouds, carrying out precise observations before, during and after releasing the Huygens probe. Over the years, scientists have dramatically changed their minds about Titan's surface. In the mid-nineties, the NASA-ESA Hubble Space Telescope spied an area on Titan that was brighter than the rest. More recent observations show the same feature better. What are these bright and dark patches? Lebreton wonders if, "the bright area could be a continent and the rest oceans. We don't know yet. There is no doubt, though, that the surface appears very diverse, not uniform. There are a lot of surprises waiting for us there." Where will Huygens land? On the bright patch or on a dark one? "Closer to the bright surface, but not on it," answers Lebreton. "Just imagine! We could be landing in an ocean! It would be really exciting, the first landing in an ocean outside the Earth!" To land on an ocean would probably mean better data from Huygens. Even if the probe lasted only a few minutes before sinking, it would at least stay in an upright position. Being the right way up is essential for sending the data back to the Cassini orbiter and to the scientists on Earth. Moreover, some of Huygens's instruments are better prepared to analyse liquids. If Huygens lands on a solid surface instead, there is a higher risk of falling in the wrong direction and not being able to easily communicate with Cassini. Such is the fate of an ESA probe--to travel extremely far to an object you know comparatively little about to measure extremely familiar organic compounds extremely quickly. Space is a risky place and it is all about extremes. Read the original article at http://sci.esa.int/content/news/index.cfm?aid=12&cid=35&oid=31826. An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/saturn-titan-03a.html. ________________________________________________________________________ NASA, CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY TO TEST ROBOT IN CHILE NASA/ARC release 03-19AR 1 April 2003 A team of NASA and Carnegie Mellon University scientists will travel to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile April 1 to conduct research that will help them develop and deploy a robot and instruments that may someday enable other robots to find life on Mars. The researchers will be using the Atacama, described as one of the most arid regions on Earth, as a martian analog. NASA Ames Research Center is providing the autonomy technology for the research, which is part of NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring the Planets (ASTEP) project. "This field campaign is a good example of what we hope to accomplish with NASA's ASTEP program," said Michael Meyer, senior scientist for astrobiology and the 2001 Mars Odyssey program scientist, NASA Headquarters. "By pushing the limits of technology in harsh environments, we'll also push the known limits of life on Earth and be better prepared to search for life on other worlds," Meyer added. "Our goal is to make genuine discoveries about the limits of life on Earth and to generate knowledge that can be applied to future NASA missions to Mars," said project leader David Wettergreen, a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. "We will conduct three annual field experiments in the Atacama. Each time, an increasingly capable robot will use sensing and intelligence to find land forms or environmental conditions that could harbor life." The group is funded with a $3 million, three-year grant from NASA to the university's Robotics Institute. The group is collaborating with scientists at Carnegie Mellon's Molecular Biosensor and Imaging Center, who have a $900,000 grant from NASA to develop fluorescent dyes and automated microscopes that the robot will eventually use to locate various forms of life. This year, the team will be using an autonomous, solar-powered robot named Hyperion, to determine the optimum design, software and instrumentation for a new robot that will be used in the more extensive experiments to be conducted over the next two years. In 2001, scientists tested Hyperion on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, where it successfully demonstrated a concept called sun- synchronous navigation. The robot tracked the sun as a source of power and explored its surroundings as it traveled continuously through a 24- hour period of daylight. During this year's visit to the Atacama, researchers will focus on measurements and experiments with the robot's hardware and software components. They will test Hyperion as it travels through the desert and collect data with scientific instruments, including a fluorescence imager, near-infrared spectrometer, and a high-resolution panoramic imager. Wettergreen said that Hyperion will travel some 10 kilometers through the desert this year, while researchers study issues related to robotic autonomy. The robot's solar panels have been laid flat on top of its body for the upcoming experiments so it can capture the maximum amount of sunlight in the equatorial environment. In the Arctic, the panels were mounted vertically, like sails on a boat, because the sun was often low on the horizon. A next-generation robot, developed from the findings of this year's work, should perform 50 kilometers of autonomous traverse in the desert in 2004. In 2005, the final year of the project, a robot equipped with a full array of instruments should operate autonomously as it travels 200 kilometers over a two-month period. During this climactic journey, the robot should map sites where life is abundant, and then move into drier areas where life has not been detected. In 2005, plans call for the science team to operate as if it were exploring Mars in a scenario that would include a time delay and limited communication. "We'll operate under the constraints of martian exploration in order to better develop procedures for seeking life on another planet," Wettergreen said. "The robot will monitor its own power, balance, locomotion, communication and science operations as it goes. It needs to be able to move into unknown terrain using cameras and internal sensors--the same instruments and information that would be available to a robot exploring Mars." Nathalie Cabrol, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute, will lead the science team for the investigation of the Atacama. Members of the science team are geologists and biologists who study both Earth and Mars at institutions including NASA Ames and NASA Johnson Space Center, the SETI Institute, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of Arizona, the University of Tennessee, Carnegie Mellon and Universidad Catolica del Norte (Chile). "The role of the science team is to develop new astrobiological exploration strategies that will help the science community to better understand both the limits of life on Earth in one of its most arid deserts where water and microorganic life are extremely scarce, and also to derive automated life search and detection scenarios for future missions to Mars," Cabrol said. "This project will field test innovative combinations of science instruments and new rover search modes. If life appeared once on Mars and has been preserved in some way, whether as fossils or extant communities, it is then critical that future missions be capable of automatically and unambiguously detecting it. This project is aiming at achieving this goal in the Atacama in three years as a stepping stone to Mars." For more information, updates and images from the Atacama beginning April 7 visit http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/atacama. Contacts: Michael Mewhinney NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA Phone: 650-604-3937 or 650-604-9000 E-mail: Michael.Mewhinney@nasa.gov Anne Watzman Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA Phone: 412-268-3830 E-mail: aw16@andrew.cmu.edu Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article419.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-robot-03b.html ________________________________________________________________________ EXTREME LIFEFORMS: NOTHING TO SNEEZE AT From Astrobiology Magazine 2 April 2003 Fifty years ago today in 1953, the journal Nature published a paper from Francis Crick and James Watson, entitled "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid". In their terse description, they drew the first double helix structure for DNA. Only a few years earlier, Watson had received his doctorate from Indiana University while working on a group of remarkable viruses that infect bacteria called the phages. At that time, great interest surrounded how they worked, and if they were alive. The border between the stuff of life, whether molecular or biological, was about to become considerably more fuzzy. That same year, two University of Chicago scientists, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, demonstrated that 13 of the 21 amino acids necessary for life could be made in a glass flask. Placing water in an acidic atmosphere [and] sparking a lightning discharge into simple organic molecules like ammonia surprised everyone by producing some of biology's essential building blocks. Indeed the formation of life had begun to take on a distinctly molecular character, as Charles Darwin had foreseen as his classical warm pond of organic soup: (...some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity etc...). Holding together this tapestry of "how a molecule becomes an organism" is one of the great mysteries still remaining in biology, and a central consideration for detecting or predicting how life might take hold elsewhere beyond Earth. Are the same viruses of the sort that James Watson first worked on fifty years ago truly "living", or just a complex but highly efficient ordering of inanimate molecules? The broad case for life Viruses are the smallest, simplest form of life on earth. They cannot reproduce without a host. No virus can duplicate itself outside another cell. It needs to hijack a host to survive--a true parasite in the wild. They are the smallest of all candidates that might define the universe of Earth's living things--if indeed they are alive at all, and if they assume the defining characteristics of all metabolizing organisms: to be self-replicating, feed, then die. Around 1700, when the Dutch lens-maker, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, first turned the best microscopes of his time on "snow-water", he found many "wee animalcules" at 300 times visual magnifying power. He wrote: "The whole stuff seemed to me to be alive. But notwithstanding, the number of these animalcules was so extraordinarily great that it would take a thousand million of some of them to make up the bulk of a coarse sand- grain." Unlike what Leeuwenhoek first saw as animalcules, viruses are not cells, but they do nevertheless require cells. Viruses are just an assembly of nucleic acids wrapped by a protein coat (or capsid). When frozen, their readiness to crystallize in highly ordered patterns was taken as a key cross-over between the purely chemical and the biological. Once crystallized, a virus can remain dormant and inert for years. But any sense that such viruses are somehow inactive or sluggish is not warranted. When matched with a compatible host cell, a single viral nucleic acid can spawn hundreds or thousands of copies of itself. As a replicating machine, a typical virus can outproduce its living host cell by 100-fold. So the question remains, as to whether this "self-replication" is of any importance to the definition of life itself. Indeed in 1944 when the renowned physicist Erwin Shrödinger published his book, What is Life?, he pointed out the central problem of how life must reproduce itself faithfully to survive. This need for inter-generational reliability can seem at first glance to be quite a challenge for such a simple and compact structure as a virus. For instance, when compared to a computer file, the simplest of plant viruses (called viroids) contains a miniscule 240 "bits" of information to sustain their circular chromosome. By contrast, this simplicity is 10 million times less complex than the human information base (3 billion bits). Written out as a linear series of one-letter abbreviations, the code or nucleotide sequence for a single virus would take a whole page of text. The code for a human being would take five hundred thousand pages. Century of struggle and discovery The Latin name itself for virus means "poison". From the Far East, the global outbreak of a new pneumonia virus (severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS) or the African HIV epidemic are just the most current examples of what historically has devastated entire civilizations. Most notably, when European Spaniards first encountered the Amerindians, a raging smallpox epidemic decimated the indigenous culture in 1520. In the last century, the 1918 influenza A pandemic claimed between 20 and 40 million lives. Today, the names of viruses alone elicit strong visceral reactions: rabies, polio, smallpox, measles, flu, herpes, hepatitis, West Nile, and AIDS. The collection labs have identified thousands (approximately 3500) so far. Behind all these questions resides a large and in some cases promising body of research, including new vaccines, the global eradication of smallpox (since October 1977, after a 2000 year human scourge), and even how viral causes may be intertwined with the twentieth century's greatest killer, cancer itself. How it works The basic modus operandi of a virus is to take over another organism's cellular machinery. The virus thus ties its fate intimately with the internal--and not external--ecosystem of another species. Indeed a small virus (0.045 micron, or 45 billionths of a meter) has to hijack a big chunk of the host cell's DNA. So oversized is the match that the host DNA can be wrapped about a thousand times around the viral circumference. Its survival relies on spooling the host DNA around its outer coat like a tightly wrapped ribbon. In this way the virus is akin to the tiny mouse that spooks an elephant. But it is the rapid evolution of this DNA packing that enables its serpentine infection to spread, since the outer coat quickly begins to resemble the host material more than its own naked protein core. This "inside-out" innovation helps explain how viruses can claim to rule both the plant and animal kingdoms. Viruses have another key qualification to be called "living", if their rapid evolution and mutation are part of those criteria. Unlike any other living organism, the storage of viral genetic codes can be carried forward by RNA (ribonucleic acid), and not DNA. While not able to infect or grow without a cellular host, RNA viruses like polio and the (common-cold-causing) rhinoviruses are thus the only reproducing forms of life not employing DNA for their all important code storage. Since the first virus was isolated one-hundred and eleven years ago (1892, by Russian Dimitrii Ivanovsky), the number of questions centering on their transmission and lifecycle seem to have ballooned. How do viruses move from host-to-host, how does the host's immune system try to check their replication, and even more simply, what do they look like? Among the two major viral classes, they are either rod-shaped or have a quasi-spherical shape termed an icosahedron. Similar to a miniature soccer ball, the icosahedron is composed of 5-sided and 6-sided faces (pentamers and hexamers). The appearance of their outer protein coat in the form of identical subunits gives them a factory-built appearance. Few other living shapes in nature have the kind of remarkable regularity of a viral encapsulate. Are viruses living, or just living with us? The problem with this question is how one defines life. Viruses do seemingly have "a plan", thus satisfying the earliest definitions for life offered by Aristotle. Viruses do furthermore offer a surprising and radical set of Darwinian choices; indeed high mutation rates are often credited with their robust survival strategies. A clean separation of viruses from the continuum of biochemistry seems unlikely. There is evidence that human DNA has many viral vestiges, thus elevating the virus kingdom to much more than some kind of biological passenger status. From generation to generation, viruses have introduced new genetic information into their victims and hosts. The debate on defining life rarely has reached scientific consensus, despite volumes written cataloguing the various qualifications for being "alive". Of note however, the presence of similar molecules like DNA and RNA, even in the simplest life forms like viruses, is often suggestive of a single origin event--or at least, a whittling away of inferior encoding molecules from a multitude of less fit alternatives. Although the only living candidate to store its key replicative information in RNA, viruses depend critically on adapting to the same code and cellular signals that govern their living hosts. Divergence into bizarre or out-of-family biochemistry would quickly prove fatal to any experiments that might widen to entirely new life-forms, since the virus is ultimately just a parasite. That is the co-dependence of the simplest terrestrial experiment with its most complex manifestations. The scientific community can agree on the important role that viruses have proven historically in the selection of future generations. If viruses are not alive, they certainly live with us. What's next? NASA's Astrobiology Institute has recently initiated a Working Group specifically devoted to studying the role of viruses and primordial life. Of note, recent research on such diseases as foot-and-mouth disease and mad-cow disease have linked their causes to an even more primitive ancestor than a virus. The causative agent is called a prion, which lacks DNA altogether but has a virus-like coat of proteins. Prions may thus constitute the most primitive form of life, or the original common molecular ancestor of a self-replicating, feeding and dying system. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article416.html. ________________________________________________________________________ NASA STRIVING TO IMPROVE EARTH SCIENCE MISSION PLANNING NASA/ARC release 03-20AR 2 April 2003 NASA scientists are developing a new planning and scheduling system for Earth observation satellites (EOS), designed to acquire and integrate data from multiple complementary Earth-sensing instruments, enabling them to build complex models of the Earth's ecosystem. Developed by a team of scientists at NASA Ames Research Center located in California's Silicon Valley and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, the new software is being designed to coordinate the observations made by entire fleets of satellites, which currently is done manually by each satellite's individual mission operation center. "The scientific need for multiple sources of Earth science data in order to explain complex phenomena will require coordination in instrument scheduling and operations," explained Robert Morris, a computer scientist at NASA Ames who serves as the project's principal investigator. Morris heads a seven-member team of experts in planning technology, systems integration and engineering, Earth science and mission operations. "We propose to develop both a set of technology concepts and a prototype system based on these concepts that will address problems in coordinated scheduling, while acknowledging the realities of present-day mission design concepts," Morris added. Entitled "Planning and Scheduling of Coordinated Science Observations," the project recently received funding from NASA's Office of Earth Science under the Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) Program. The project was one of 21 new investigations in information systems technology development that received over $20 million from the AIST Program. NASA Ames' project received nearly $900,000. Through the AIST Program, NASA invests in research and development of new and innovative information technologies. The research supports and enhances NASA's Earth science enterprise and applications objectives as part of the agency's mission to understand and protect our home planet. "The Committee on Earth Observation Satellites estimates that international space agencies are planning more than 80 Earth-observing missions over the next 15 years," Morris noted in the introduction to "An Integrated Architecture for Science Observation Scheduling for Fleets of Earth Observing Spacecraft," a research paper he co-authored with Jennifer Dungan, Jeremy Frank, Lina Khatib and David E. Smith. "The missions will carry over 200 different instruments, providing measurements of many environmental change parameters." Morris and his team of NASA scientists hope to improve communication between the various mission planners by using automated scheduling technology to coordinate satellite imaging and manage the increasing volume of scientific data produced during the missions. Over the course of the two-year project, the science team will design algorithms that can be used to integrate new observation requests with an EOS constellation's existing operations plan. Upon completion of that phase, the team will integrate science observation scheduling technology developed at NASA Ames with the Automated Mission Planning and Scheduling (AMPS) system developed at NASA Goddard for use with EOS missions involving either single or multiple satellites. Finally, the team will develop a technology plan for coordinated science planning for multiple missions and an enhanced automated tool for coordinated science planning of future EOS missions. The tool would be integrated with data collected by ground stations, to improve mission management and communication. When the project is completed, Morris and the other members of the science team hope that the new planning and scheduling system will help Earth scientists develop better models of the Earth's ecosystem. "The goal is that through this sort of automation and increased coordination, the ultimate outcome will be more useful scientific data," Morris said. Contact: Michael Mewhinney NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA Phone: 650-604-3937 or 650-604-9000 E-mail: Michael.S.Mewhinney@nasa.gov An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/eo-03v.html. ________________________________________________________________________ ASTRONOMY: CENSORED IN SCIENCE EDUCATION By Edna DeVore From Space.com 3 April 2003 Teachers from across the nation converged on Philadelphia for the annual National Science Teachers Association's meeting, March 26 through March 30. NSTA convenes the largest meeting of science educators in the world, and this year more than 13,000 people attended. The meeting spanned the breadth of science: physics, chemistry, biology, earth and space sciences. The SETI Institute education team presented workshops and short courses, and participated in the earth and space science events that share lessons with teachers. We also had our exhibit in the trade show arena of the meeting, adjacent to NASA's exhibits. Throughout the five days, a steady stream of interested teachers talked with us about SETI and our science education materials at the booth. Like NASA, we were always busy interacting with the attendees. Over and over again, teachers remarked that their students are always asking about SETI and astronomy. Kids have a keen interest in astronomy, space sciences, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. What's out there? Are we alone? Ironically, this interest is not uniformly reflected in the state science education standards across the USA and these state standards drive textbook content. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_devore_astro_030403.html. ________________________________________________________________________ UB STUDENTS TO "EXPLORE MARS" IN UTAH University of Buffalo release 3 April 2003 University at Buffalo doctoral student Brent Garry has always wanted to go to Mars, but for now he'll settle for Utah. For the next 10 days, he and Abby Semple, another UB doctoral student, will be part of a small team that is simulating the living and working conditions on Mars by donning space suits, exploring the geology of the very "Mars-like" canyons of Utah and essentially living in and working out of a two-story tin can similar to a spaceship. The opportunity was made possible, courtesy of The Mars Society, a private organization whose mission it is to encourage and foster exploration of Mars and which receives funding for some of its "Mars missions" from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Garry applied for the opportunity to live and work at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) with high hopes, but he knew that his acceptance depended on the qualifications the group needed. "When I found that I had been accepted, I was in a happy state of shock," said Garry, who recommended fellow UB student and officemate Semple when he heard there was a need for one more geologist. He and Semple study volcanology and lava flows in UB's Volcano Studies Group and work in the laboratory of Tracy Gregg, Ph.D., assistant professor of geology in the Department of Geology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. The focus of the upcoming mission, which will run until April 13, is to test equipment, including voice-activated robotic equipment, being developed for use by geologists and astronauts who one day will explore martian terrain. "They're expecting us to behave like regular geologists exploring an outcrop we've never looked at," said Semple, who recently earned her master's degree in geology from UB. She added that participants deliberately have not been told much about the geology of the terrain they'll be exploring. "The idea is to better understand our thought patterns so that the equipment they make can be made more useful to geologists who one day will explore Mars," she explained. Garry, who has been a counselor at Space Camp, operated by the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL, hopes to begin to understand how geologists and engineers can work together toward the common goal of Mars exploration. "I love teaching geology and space exploration," he said. "One of my goals is to one day help train the astronauts who go back to the moon or to Mars how to do field work." Garry also has a very practical interest in the mission. He wants to know what it feels like to do geological field work in a space suit. "I would personally like to come up with ways to make doing field geology in an astronaut suit more efficient," he said. The Mars Society is on the Web at http://www.marssociety.com. See this article online at: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/fast- execute.cgi/article-page.html?article=61660009 Multimedia is available with this article online at http://www.buffalo.edu/news/fast-execute.cgi/article- page.html?article=61660009 For more information please see the UB News Services web site at http://www.buffalo.edu/news. Contact: Ellen Goldbaum Phone: 716-645-5000 ext 1415 Fax: 716-645-3765 E-mail: goldbaum@buffalo.edu ________________________________________________________________________ EARTH'S OLDEST FOSSILS REVERSE COURSE By David Tenenbaum From Astrobiology Magazine 7 April 2003 In paleontology, as in real estate, location is everything. The rocks which enclose a fossil are a prime source of information on the age and history of that fossil. The importance of location has resurfaced in a spirited debate over microscopic structures found in ancient greenstone beds from Western Australia. (Greenstones are ancient sedimentary and volcanic rocks that have been heated and deformed through the ages; the ones in question were apparently deposited at the bottom of an ocean.) The disputed structures are either the oldest fossils on Earth or deceptive geologic features that happen to contain carbon and, according to some, to resemble fossilized bacteria. The Western Australian greenstones, together with similar rocks from Greenland and South Africa, are some of the oldest rocks on Earth. In 1993, J. William Schopf, a professor of paleobiology at the University of California at Los Angeles, published an article interpreting microscopic structures found in 3.465-billion-year-old Western Australian greenstones as the fossils of 11 species of bacteria. Specifically, the fascinating fossils were found in vertical intrusions called chert dikes that cut through the greenstone rocks. Chert is a fine-grained sedimentary stone similar to flint. Since dikes, by definition, crosscut existing rock bodies, they must be younger than those rocks, but these dikes are almost as old as the greenstones. Schopf's findings were controversial, since his purported fossils were more than 1 billion years older than the oldest unquestioned bacterial fossils. If the structures were verified as fossil microorganisms, scientists could firmly establish that, by around 3.5 billion years ago, life had already established a firm foothold on Earth. Some of the most convincing contrary evidence came from Martin Brasier, professor of paleobiology at Oxford University, and colleagues from the Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Carnegie Institutioni of Washington. Brasier, in collaboration with Marti van Kranendonk, of the Geological Survey of Western Australia, who has mapped the region extensively, concluded that the chert dikes had precipitated from hot "hydrothermal" fluids that were moving upward through the crust just under the ocean floor. The situation was akin to the "black smokers" found at the ocean-bottom today, where mineral-rich fluids emerge from the ocean floor at 300°C (572°F) and up. If that was the case when the cherts formed, Brasier argues, the fluid was far too hot for life. That, he says, is one of eight reasons why the suspicious structures are not fossils. In February, however, the possibility that chert dikes could contain fossils got a boost from a talk at a general meeting of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. Stanford University Professor of Geological Science Donald Lowe presented results of a long-term study of chert dikes in South Africa. Lowe said the Barberton Greenstone Belt, which is about the same age as the Western Australia greenstones, formed from sediment that flowed down from the ocean floor and settled into cracks in rocks below. "We have examined dozens and dozens of dikes, and in every one where we can demonstrate which way the material moved, it moved down, not up. Therefore this material is not hydrothermal." To support his claim, Lowe pointed to spherules in the dikes. These tiny spherical grains contain isotopes indicating an extraterrestrial origin, and were apparently formed by asteroid impacts. A period of heavy impacts from 3.47 to 3.22 billion years ago left a number of spherule layers, 10 to 30 cm (4 to 12 inches) thick, on the surface around the globe, Lowe says. One of these layers supplied spherules to the sediments that later flowed into cracks in South African greenstones. The result was chert dikes containing telltale spherules. Because spherules are absent from rock below the chert dikes, Lowe says, the logical conclusion is that the dikes were emplaced from above, not formed by upwelling hydrothermal fluids. Two factors limit the applicability of Lowe's "location, location, location" interpretation to the debate over ancient life. First, Lowe did not look for microfossils. "It's an incredibly tedious job, and I've not undertaken any systematic search for microfossils," he says. And second, Lowe looked in South Africa, not in Australia. However, Lowe, who is an expert on the early terrestrial surface, says, "Chert dikes are very common in both greenstone terrains, and it would be unusual if they had a radically different origin." Brasier writes, via email, that he and his colleagues "welcome this fresh debate, [but that] while Lowe may be correct about some of the South African dikes, he appears to be mistaken about the Apex chert in Western Australia. We did indeed consider the possibility" that they were derived from overlying sedimentary rocks, "before coming to our hydrothermal conclusion." The presence in chert of chemical compounds typical of hydrothermal fluids supports the hydrothermal hypothesis, he said. But Paul Knauth, a geologist at Arizona State University, who has seen both the Australian and South African cherts, says, "I think Lowe is probably on the correct track. Evidence for the alternative view, that the Australian chert breccias [sedimentary rock containing chunks of rock bonded together by smaller grains of sediment] were hydrothermal vents on the sea floor, is incredibly weak. Lowe is one of the few experienced sedimentologists to have worked on Archean strata, so his interpretations should be considered very seriously." The Archean was roughly 3.8 billion to 2.5 billion years ago. Lowe's view of the dikes represents a reversal of a recent trend in geological analysis. Since the discovery of black smokers, hydrothermal vents at mid-oceanic ridges, "there has been a major movement over the last 10 to 15 years, toward viewing early Earth as dominated by hydrothermal processes," he says. "Our experience is that hydrothermal processes were not as significant as many would have us believe." If the chert dikes indeed formed from downward-flowing sediment rather than precipitated from hot fluids, they could be an excellent location for fossil-hunters. Sediment collects traces of organisms from the ocean floor. While forming into rock, it traps and protects organisms that can become fossils. Still, the issue is likely to remain contentious. Interpreting such ancient geology, says Lowe, amounts to "reading a book in a language we don't understand yet." To make the point he asks his students to consider a book written in Chinese. "They could take a Chinese class and learn a little bit of Chinese, but if two students translated one sentence, it would come out differently. It's the same way with the rock record. It's complicated, and very competent people understand the language in different ways." However, now that he's "read a part of the book" on South African cherts, Lowe would like to extend his studies to the greenstones of Western Australia. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article421.html. ________________________________________________________________________ NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas http://www.lyon.edu/webdata/users/dthomas/astrobiology/astrobiology.html 7 April 2003 Astrobiology, exobiology and terraformation articles http://www.lyon.edu/webdata/users/dthomas/astrobiology/online_articles1. html ESA, 2003. Splashing down on Titan's oceans. SpaceDaily. Terrestrial extreme environments articles http://www.lyon.edu/webdata/users/dthomas/astrobiology/online_articles2. html NASA Ames Research Center and Carnegie Mellon University, 2003. Carnegie Mellon University to test robot in Chile. SpaceDaily. P. P. Sheridan, V. I. Miteva and J. E. Brenchley, 2003. Phylogenetic analysis of anaerobic psychrophilic enrichment cultures obtained from a Greenland glacier ice core. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 69(4):2153-2160. Search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) articles http://www.lyon.edu/webdata/users/dthomas/astrobiology/online_articles4. html E. DeVore, 2003. Astronomy: censored in science education. Space.com. Evolutionary biology and chemistry articles http://www.lyon.edu/webdata/users/dthomas/astrobiology/online_articles5. html Astrobiology Magazine, 2003. Extreme lifeforms: nothing to sneeze at. Astrobiology Magazine. D. Tenenbaum, 2003. Earth's oldest fossils reverse course. Astrobiology Magazine. ________________________________________________________________________ CONTINUING COVERAGE OF THE COLUMBIA DISASTER By David J. Thomas 7 April 2003 The investigation of the Columbia tragedy continues to make headlines in both space and general media. I have included (below) a non-exhaustive list of links to recent articles on the subject. http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/03/31/sprj.colu.shuttle.investigation /index.html http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/04/02/sprj.colu.shuttle.investigation .ap/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/04/02/sprj.colu.shuttle.debris.ap/ind ex.html http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/01/national/nationalspecial/01SHUT.html?t h http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/sts107_emails_030331.html http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/sts107_plasma_030401.html http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/sts107_primer_030401.html http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/sts107_rocha_030401.html http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030401object/ ________________________________________________________________________ CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS NASA/JPL release 27 March - 2 April 2003 The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Canberra tracking station on Wednesday, April 2. 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/operations/present-position.cfm. Command and Data Subsystem (CDS) Flight Software (FSW) checkout activities continued this week. The new software was successfully loaded to the on-line (backup) CDS string. Both strings are now running version 9 of the flight software. CDS background sequence part 1, and Mission Sequence Subsystem D8 module programs were uplinked. CDS performed a turn-on of Solid State Recorder A, and executed data formatter and memory tests, and a CDS SSR-B to SSR-A image copy was performed. Sequence development continues for C37. A Preliminary Sequence Integration and Validation Sequence Change Request (SCR) approval meeting was held this week. Two waivers and four SCRs have been approved. It was decided at a simulation requirements meeting to test five days of this background sequence and TCM-19 in the Integrated Test Laboratory in system mode. Science Operations Plan (SOP) integration for tour sequences S15 and S16 concluded in March. A final wrap-up meeting will be held next week. The second official input port for S17/S18 has passed. Individual teams' Spacecraft Activity Sequence Files were merged and the resulting files delivered to ACS for end-to-end pointing validation. The results of this run were delivered per schedule last week. A discussion was held at the Mission Planning Forum on the science activities requested for C39 and C40. Because C39 and C40 are the last two sequences prior to the Approach Science Subphase, it was important for all teams to verify that required FSW updates, checkouts, and calibrations had been requested. A second topic addressed at the Forum was the level of DSN tracking schedule changes the tour and V&V can accommodate, and how the Project should be communicating this to the DSN schedulers. Uplink Verification and Validation (V&V) has begun with SOP Update V&V of tour sequence S14. The Navigation team delivered an "updated" set of ephemeris files, the DSN scheduling team delivered an "updated" DSN station allocation file, and the Science Planning team delivered a completed Cassini Information Management System delivery for the V&V. The new files have been reviewed per process, and the project is now working on responding to the updated information. A Science Advisory Panel (SAP) meeting occurred to determine the science cuts required to accommodate the changes resulting from the 'actual' DSN allocations for this exercise. A status meeting was held mid-week to assess how the processes, tools, and procedures have worked to date. Input was and will continue to be collected from the teams to quantify the success of the V&V activity. A delivery coordination meeting was held for Maneuver Automation Sub- system Version 2 software to review functionality and coordinate installation. The first planned use of this software is for Trajectory Correction Maneuver #19 in May. Outreach gave a Saturn Tour preview and presented an overview of the formal and informal education programs for the Cassini Mission at the annual Technology in Education conference in Ontario, California. The Kids' section of the Cassini web site is undergoing major format and content revisions. New features and information are coming online in a new "kid friendly" format. Access the kids' section of the Cassini web site at: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/kids/index.cfm Updated Saturn viewing information through December 2003 is available on the Saturn Observation Campaign web site at http://soc.jpl.nasa.gov/viewing.cfm. 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. ________________________________________________________________________ NEW LAUNCH DATE FOR DEEP IMPACT NASA/JPL/Deep Impact Project release 1 April 2003 A new launch window was announced for the Deep Impact project, the first mission to look deep inside a comet. Technical and management issues, including contamination in the propulsion system and late deliveries of key spacecraft components, resulted in delays in the pre-flight testing schedule. These concerns led Deep Impact Principal Investigator, Mike A'Hearn, to recommend to NASA a delay of launch. A launch window beginning December 30, 2004, previously identified as a back-up date, provides more thorough testing for the spacecraft systems before launch and allows the spacecraft to arrive at Comet Tempel 1 to impact it as originally scheduled on July, 4, 2005. NASA management approved the recommendation. Old Trajectory Diagram: http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/jpg/traj_old_color.jpg New Trajectory Diagram: http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/jpg/traj_new_color.jpg Deep Impact will be the first mission to make a spectacular, football- stadium-sized crater, seven to 15 stories deep, into the speeding comet. Dramatic images from both the flyby spacecraft and the impactor will be sent back to distant Earth as data in near-real-time. These first-ever views deep beneath a comet's surface, and additional scientific measurements will provide clues to the formation of the solar system. Amateur astronomers will combine efforts with astronomers at larger telescopes to offer the public an earth-based look at this incredible July 2005 encounter with a comet. Additional information is available at http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/. ________________________________________________________________________ MARS EXPLORATION ROVERS: SPACECRAFT AND EXPENDABLE VEHICLES STATUS REPORT By George H. Diller NASA/KSC release 3 April 2003 Mission: Mars Exploration Rovers (MER-1/MER-2) Launch Vehicles: Delta II/Delta II Heavy Launch Pads: 17-A/17-B Launch Dates: May 30/June 25 Launch Times: 2:28 PM/12:34 PM EDT Yesterday on MER-1, the science boom was deployed, tested and retracted. On Monday, March 31 a functional test and mission simulation was performed that included deployment of the solar arrays, camera mast and camera. A functional test of the camera was also performed. This test will be repeated on Friday, April 4. On MER-2, the solar arrays have been stowed for flight and the rover was installed on the base petal on March 28. Closeouts are now underway. Installation of the landing airbags will also occur on Friday, April 4. Processing of the cruise stage, lander and heat shield elements for both missions continues. Once functional testing and mission simulation of the flight elements is complete, they will be integrated together. Each spacecraft will be mated to a solid propellant upper stage booster that will propel the spacecraft out of Earth orbit. After mating to the upper stage, the stack will undergo spin balance testing. Approximately ten days before launch, the fully integrated payload will be transported to the launch pad for mating with their respective Boeing Delta II rockets. On Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, first and second stage processing activities continue in launch vehicle hangars. A combined electrical system test is scheduled for Friday, April 4. The Boeing Delta II vehicle for the first launch of the two launches scheduled on May 30 is planned for erection on Pad 17-A at Space Launch Complex 17 beginning April 22. The Delta for the second launch on June 25 will begin its erection at Pad 17-B on May 1. Contact: George H. Diller NASA Kennedy Space Center Phone: 321-867-2468 Read the original release at http://www- pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/status/paylstat/2003/apr/4-03-03p.htm. ________________________________________________________________________ PROLIFIC NASA ORBITER ADDS THOUSANDS OF PHOTOS TO MARS ALBUM NASA image advisory 2003-048 4 April 2003 The winds of Mars leave their marks on many of the 11,664 new pictures being posted on the Internet today by the camera team for NASA's Mars Global Surveyor mission. In one image, the pattern of sand dunes on a patch of southern-hemisphere desert resembles scales on a fish. On a larger scale, full-globe Mars images show wispy water ice clouds shaped by winds as the seasons change. Other new images reveal details of features such as gullies, landslides and seasonal frost. The new batch, taken between February and July 2002, brings the total number of images in the online gallery to more than 123,800. The images are available on the Internet from the Mars Orbiter Camera Gallery at http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery. Mars Global Surveyor has been orbiting the red planet since September 12, 1997. The mission has examined the entire Mars surface and provided a wealth of information about the planet's atmosphere and interior. Evaluation of landing sites for two Mars Exploration Rover missions, due to launch in the next three months, has relied heavily on mineral mapping, detailed imagery and topographic measurements by Global Surveyor. "The extraordinary wealth of information contained in this unprecedented release of new views of Mars attests to the ongoing scientific value of the reconnaissance of Mars that has been provided by Mars Global Surveyor for the past five years," said Dr. James B. Garvin, NASA's lead scientist for Mars exploration at NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC. "Indeed, there remain new discoveries to be made about the history of water, climate variability, and character of future landing sites from the continuing flow of images, spectra, and related information from the Global Surveyor," Garvin continued. "Without the new perspectives provided by Mars Global Surveyor, the critical scientific and engineering assessment of potential landing sites for the Mars Exploration Rovers would not have been possible." The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, manages the mission 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. Additional information about Mars Global Surveyor is available online at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/. For more information about NASA and other space science programs on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov. Contact: Guy Webster Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-0880 Donald Savage NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1547 ________________________________________________________________________ MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release 31 March - 4 April 2003 Dunes (Released 31 March 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20030331a.html Landslides (Released 1 April 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20030401a.html Flooded Crater (Released 2 April 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20030402a.html Daedalia Planum (Released 3 April 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20030403a.html Acidalia Planitia (Released 4 April 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20030404a.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, DC. 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 4 April 2003 This past week, the Stardust flight team used the antennas of JPL's Deep Space Network on four occasions. Data relayed from the spacecraft during these contact indicated Stardust is healthy and all subsystems continue to run normally. Information on the present position and orbits of the Stardust spacecraft and comet Wild 2 may be found on the "Where Is Stardust Right Now?" web page located at http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/scnow.html. Four Star Camera images were taken and sent to the ground to determine the performance of the Star Camera. The performance evaluation is expected to be completed next week. 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 10, Number 14.