Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 10, Number 30, 25 July 2003. Editor/Publisher: David J. Thomas, Ph.D., Science Division, Lyon College, Batesville, Arkansas 72503-2317, USA. dthomas@lyon.edu 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 editor, except for specific articles, in which instance copyright exists with the author/authors. The editor does not condone "spamming" of subscribers. Readers would appreciate it if others would not send unsolicited e-mail using the Marsbugs mailing lists. Persons who have information that may be of interest to subscribers of Marsbugs should send that information to the editor. E-mail subscriptions are free, and may be obtained by contacting the editor. Information concerning the scope of this newsletter, subscription formats and availability of back-issues is available from the Marsbugs web page at http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/. ________________________________________________________________________ CONTENTS 1) EARTH WITHOUT LIFE? From Astrobiology Magazine 2) SETI INSTITUTE RADIO SHOW ARCHIVED From The SETI Observer 3) STARS RICH IN HEAVY METALS TEND TO HARBOR PLANETS, ASTRONOMERS REPORT By Robert Sanders 4) SEARCH FOR LARGE ASTEROIDS NEARS COMPLETION, EXPERTS PONDER GAPS IN PROGRAM By Michael Paine 5) INTERVIEW WITH NEVILLE WOOLF From Astrobiology Magazine 6) 101 AMAZING EARTH FACTS By Robert Roy Britt 7) CHINA ON SCHEDULE TO LAUNCH FIRST MANNED SPACECRAFT IN OCTOBER From Agence France-Presse and SpaceDaily 8) MASS EXTINCTION FEARED FROM CARBON STORED UNDER EARTH'S CRUST From Agence France-Presse and SpaceDaily 9) EARTH, MARS SIMILARITIES FUEL SPECULATION ABOUT LIFE By Leonard David 10) PANSPERMIA: SPREADING LIFE THROUGH THE UNIVERSE By Seth Shostak 11) LOS ALAMOS RELEASES NEW MAPS OF MARS WATER Los Alamos National Laboratory release 12) NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas 13) CONTINUING COVERAGE OF THE COLUMBIA DISASTER By David J. Thomas 14) CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS NASA/JPL releases 15) MARS ROVER OPPORTUNITY MISSION STATUS NASA release 2003-101 16) MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 17) MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release 18) STARDUST STATUS REPORTS NASA/JPL releases ________________________________________________________________________ EARTH WITHOUT LIFE? From Astrobiology Magazine 17 July 2003 On the night of 3 July 2003, the Mars Express spacecraft was pointed backwards to obtain a view of the Earth-Moon system from a distance of 8 million kilometers [4.8 million miles] while on its way to Mars. The Earth-Moon banner image at top is the first picture of planetary objects obtained by the Mars Express's High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). Although the spatial resolution is low at this great distance, the picture gives a good indication of what to expect from Mars Express in its orbit around Mars. At only 250-300 kilometers above Mars, the camera will obtain very high-resolution images, in brilliant color and impressive 3D of most of the martian surface, at resolutions of up to 2 meters [about the height of a person]. The image was built by combining a super resolution black-and-white snap-shot image of the Earth and the Moon taken by the HRSC with color information obtained by the blue, green, and red sensors of the instrument. How the Earth may look lifeless During a series of instrument tests, the OMEGA spectrometer on board Mars Express acquired "spectra" of the Earth and the Moon, in visible and near-infrared light. This particular spectrum corresponds to the entire Earth's illuminated crescent, dominated by the Pacific Ocean, and indicates the molecular composition of the atmosphere, the ocean, and some continents. As the peaks in the image indicate, water (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2) dominate. Molecular oxygen (O2) is also identified, as well as ozone (O3), methane (CH4) and several other minor constituents. During the observations, the Earth rotated so as to offer a varying observed surface and atmospheric composition. These Earth observations by OMEGA have several unique features. In fact, OMEGA provided a global view of the Earth's disc from a high-phase angle, contrary to low-orbit observations by previous space missions. Such global disc spectra are useful not only for observations at Mars, but also to prepare future observations of Earth-like planets, such as for the Darwin mission. The evocative phrase describing the Earth as a "pale blue dot" was coined by Carl Sagan after seeing our planet as a single pixel. The view was taken from the departing Voyager spacecraft. The entire earth could be encompassed as a flicker of light. The first image of Earth ever taken from another planet that actually shows our home as a planetary disk was captured by the Mars Orbital Camera on May 8th. As Anne Druyan, Sagan's widow, later described this perspective image to Astrobiology Magazine, that Voyager shot made "us look at this tiny planet, at the pale blue dot, and to see it in its real context, in its actual circumstances, in its true tininess. I don't know anyone who's able to really see that one-pixel Earth and not feel like they want to protect the Earth; that we have much more in common with each other than we're likely to have with anyone anywhere else." Black dots, lifeless oceans? The Earth, as seen from a distant vantage point, has long captivated the imagination of planet finders. And in 1993, a team of researchers inspired by Carl Sagan, used an Earth fly-by of the Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter to catch a glimpse of how the Earth might appear from afar. For astrobiologists, Sagan's results were surprising. Rather than seeing the Earth as an obvious candidate for life, the Galileo pictures gave surprisingly few clues of the biological potential of our own planet. From afar, how Galileo missed the obvious signs of terrestrial life as we would have expected to see them, was at first disconcerting to the scientific community, because future missions aim to observe more distant extrasolar planets and detect what would be visible in the spectra--the "pale blue dot" scenario. One answer may lie in the fact that the spacecraft made its observations while still quite close to the Earth. "The spectrograph was designed to look at small areas of Jupiter, so the field of view of the spectrograph was quite small," said Nick Woolf of Arizona, in earlier discussions with the Astrobiology Magazine. "Also, since the surface brightness of Jupiter [the Gaileo's intended visual target] is far less than the Earth, the spectrograph detectors saturated except when the spectrograph was pointed at the darkest area of Earth--a cloud-free section of sea," Woolf noted. The cloud-free sea is considered very dark relative to the dominance of bright clouds in a global picture of Earth. Thus it should come as no surprise that Galileo was successful in only imaging a relatively dark and lifeless planet, mainly because its design was not intended to look at Earth, but to probe Jupiter instead. Recipe from afar A spectroscope that will detect infrared or visible light mainly is focused on four gases that are found in Earth's atmosphere and linked to life. * Water vapor. A baseline sign, indicating the presence of liquid water, a requirement of known life. * Carbon dioxide. Can be created by biological and non-biological processes. Because it is necessary for photosynthesis, it would indicate the possible presence of green plants. * Methane. Considered suggestive of life, it also can be made both by biological and non-biological processes. * Molecular oxygen (O2), or its proxy, ozone (O3). The most reliable indicator of the presence of life, but still not conclusive. Unless molecular oxygen in the atmosphere is constantly replenished by photosynthesis, it is quickly consumed in chemical reactions, in the atmosphere, on land and in seawater. So the presence of a large amount of oxygen in an extrasolar planet's atmosphere would be a sign that it might host an ecosystem like present-day Earth's. An additional oxygen- related biosignature is the possibility of detecting green plants that make oxygen. Chlorophyll reflects near-infrared light very strongly, a phenomenon known as the "red edge" because the light is just beyond the range of colors human eyes can see. (If humans could see the red edge, plants would look red instead of green.) Near-infrared cameras would have no trouble picking up this distinctive signal. Although methane is often biogenic, detecting it on a distant world would not automatically indicate the presence of life. Jupiter and Saturn, for example, have traces of it. Most space detectors probably could not see methane at Earth's present concentration, 1.6 parts per million (ppm), since its spectroscopic lines overlap those of water. However, methane levels around 1,000 ppm may have occurred on Earth between 2.3 and 3 billion years ago, produced as a waste byproduct by primitive microorganisms called methanogens. This strong a methane signal would probably be visible to a biosignature detector, although methane is largely considered a suggestive but not convincing biosignature. Finding oxygen along with methane might constitute the most convincing biosignature. What's next? The discovery of about 100 extrasolar planets over the past decade has placed a momentous task on the scientific agenda: finding planets that could harbor life. Most of the newly discovered planets are gas giants that orbit close to their stars. They're broiling hot, and probably dead. The job of Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) is to find "terrestrial" (Earthlike) planets, and then to scan them for biosignatures--chemical signs of life. For most planet finders, the real challenge is to identify faint planets in the glare of their much brighter parent stars. To overcome the distortion of how our own atmosphere may further obscure this detection, both large land-based telescopes and space missions will likely combine in the future to complete the picture. Both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) propose space missions to look for Earth-like planets in the infrared. NASA is developing the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) project, part of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Navigator Program, and ESA is developing its DARWIN project. The European Southern Observatory is exploring the possibility of ground-based searches using the future Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL) project. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article528.html. ________________________________________________________________________ SETI INSTITUTE RADIO SHOW ARCHIVED From The SETI Observer 18 July 2003 Now you can hear each episode of "Are We Alone?" for up to two weeks after the original broadcast date by visiting the "Are We Alone?" page (http://www.seti.org/epo/seti_radio/Welcome.html). On the June 29 show, series host Dr. Seth Shostak interviews NAI Co-Investigator Dr. Emma Bakes and also Dr. Jill Tarter, Director of SETI Research. ________________________________________________________________________ STARS RICH IN HEAVY METALS TEND TO HARBOR PLANETS, ASTRONOMERS REPORT By Robert Sanders University of California, Berkeley release 21 July 2003 A comparison of 754 nearby stars like our sun--some with planets and some without - shows definitively that the more iron and other metals there are in a star, the greater the chance it has a companion planet. "Astronomers have been saying that only 5 percent of stars have planets, but that's not a very precise assessment," said Debra Fischer, a research astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. "We now know that stars which are abundant in heavy metals are five times more likely to harbor orbiting planets than are stars deficient in metals. If you look at the metal-rich stars, 20 percent have planets. That's stunning." "The metals are the seeds from which planets form," added colleague Jeff Valenti, an assistant astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, MD. Fischer will present details of the analysis by her and Valenti at 1:30 PM Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) on Monday, July 21, at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Sydney, Australia. Iron and other elements heavier than helium--what astronomers lump together as "metals"--are created by fusion reactions inside stars and sown into the interstellar medium by spectacular supernova explosions. Thus, while metals were extremely rare in the early history of the Milky Way galaxy, over time, each successive generation of stars became richer in these elements, increasing the chances of forming a planet. "Stars forming today are much more likely to have planets than early generations of stars," Valenti said. "It's a planetary baby boom." As the number of extrasolar planets has grown--about 100 stars are now known to have planets--astronomers have noticed that stars rich in metals are more likely to harbor planets. A correlation between a star's "metalicity"--a measure of iron abundance in a star's outer layer that is indicative of the abundance of many other elements, from nickel to silicon--had been suggested previously by astronomers Guillermo Gonzalez and Nuno Santos based on surveys of a few dozen planet-bearing stars. The new survey of metal abundances by Fischer and Valenti is the first to cover a statistically large sample of 61 stars with planets and 693 stars without planets. Their analysis provides the numbers that prove a correlation between metal abundance and planet formation. "People have looked already in fair detail at most of the stars with known planets, but they have basically ignored the hundreds of stars that don't seem to have planets. These under-appreciated stars provide the context for understanding why planets form," said Valenti, who is an expert at determining the chemical composition of stars. The data show that stars like the sun, whose metal content is considered typical of stars in our neighborhood, have a 5 to 10 percent chance of having planets. Stars with three times more metal than the sun have a 20 percent chance of harboring planets, while those with 1/3 the metal content of the sun have about a 3 percent chance of having planets. The 29 most metal-poor stars in the sample, all with less than 1/3 the sun's metal abundance, had no planets. "These data suggest that there is a threshold metalicity, and thus not all stars in our galaxy have the same chance of forming planetary systems," Fischer said. "Whether a star has planetary companions or not is a condition of its birth. Those with a larger initial allotment of metals have an advantage over those without, a trend we're now able to see clearly with this new data." The two astronomers determined metal composition by analyzing 1,600 spectra from more than 1,000 stars before narrowing the analysis to 754 stars that had been observed long enough to rule a gas giant planet in or out. Some of these stars have been observed for 15 years by Fischer, Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley, and colleague Paul Butler, now at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, in their systematic search for extrasolar planets around nearby stars. All 754 stars were surveyed for more than two years, enough time to determine whether a close-in, Jupiter-size planet is present or not. Though the surfaces of stars contain many metals, the astronomers focused on five--iron, nickel, titanium, silicon and sodium. After four years of analysis, the astronomers were able to group the stars by metal composition and determine the likelihood that stars of a certain composition have planets. With iron, for example, the stars were ranked relative to the iron content of the sun, which is 0.0032%. "This is the most unbiased survey of its kind," Fischer emphasized. "It is unique because all of the metal abundances were determined with the same technique and we analyzed all of the stars on our project with more than two years of data." Fischer said the new data suggest why metal-rich stars are likely to develop planetary systems as they form. The data are consistent with the hypothesis that heavier elements stick together easier, allowing dust, rocks and eventually planetary cores to form around newly ignited stars. Since the young star and the surrounding disk of dust and gas would have the same composition, the metal composition observed from the star reflects the abundance of raw materials, including heavy metals, available in the disk to build planets. The data indicate a nearly linear relationship between amount of metals and the chance of harboring planets. "These results tell us why some of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy have planets while others do not," said Marcy. "The heavy metals must clump together to form rocks which themselves clump into the solid cores of planets." The research by Fischer and Valenti is supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) in the United Kingdom, the Anglo-Australian Observatory, Sun Microsystems, the Keck Observatory and the University of California's Lick Observatories. Read the original news release at http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/07/21_stars.shtml. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sun-like_stars_030721.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/extrasolar-03m.html http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0307/21parentstars/ ________________________________________________________________________ SEARCH FOR LARGE ASTEROIDS NEARS COMPLETION, EXPERTS PONDER GAPS IN PROGRAM By Michael Paine From Space.com 21 July 2003 A stated goal of finding 90 percent of all large Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) by 2008 is more or less on target, leading experts said last week at the General Assembly of the International Astronomy Union (IAU) in Sydney, Australia. The goal, originally outlined by NASA and mandated by the U.S. Congress, is designed to insure that space rocks in the vicinity of Earth's orbit, and larger than 1 kilometer (0.62 miles), are found and tracked. An object of this size could cause global destruction if one were to hit Earth. An international affiliation of groups, collectively called Spaceguard, carries out the search and follow-up observations needed to purse the targets. NASA funds much of the work. No asteroids are presently known to be heading toward the planet. Read the full article at http://space.com/scienceastronomy/asteroid_report_030721.html. ________________________________________________________________________ INTERVIEW WITH NEVILLE WOOLF From Astrobiology Magazine 21 July 2003 Astrobiology Magazine (AM): Your proposal to the NAI includes a plan to detect planets directly from Earth-bound telescopes. This has never been done before. What telescopes will you be using? Neville Woolf (NW): [We'll begin our work with] the Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT), which is now 6.5-meter and has an adaptive secondary mirror. This allows us to have very high angular resolution and very good images in the thermal infrared. Those are wavelengths longer than 2 microns. This is the first adaptive optics system that works well in the infrared. AM: Why is that important? NW: Because one of the ways of finding planets is by their heat emission, and the heat emission of planets tends to be rather stronger in comparison to their star than their reflected [visible] light. So it's a way of boosting the planet signal with respect to the star. AM: How does the MMT compare with the Keck telescope in Hawaii? NW: [The MMT has] a smaller mirror, but it's in a single piece, and it has an internal cooling system in it, so that it can stay at the night air temperature, and that really helps to make the images better. The Keck telescope has more light collecting power, it has in principle higher angular resolution, but when you look in detail at the images developed by the Keck telescope, even with adaptive optics, they show a great deal of the effects of the separate pieces that make up a Keck primary mirror. AM: You also have a new telescope, the Large Binocular Telescope, currently under construction. How is that work proceeding? NW: We will fairly soon have our first 8.4-meter mirror in the Large Binocular Telescope, and then that will tend to take over this kind of work from the MMT. Then as we put in the second mirror, then of course, we'll get the extra light collection and angular resolution. So we have an evolutionary program. AM: What is the advantage of the binocular telescope? NW: It will be 23 meters edge-to-edge, so we will reconstruct images that see the detail you would get with a 23-meter telescope, and it will have the light collecting power of an 11.9-meter telescope. Now, you could say, similarly, that with the Keck telescope you get the detail of a 75-meter telescope, but it doesn't quite work out the same way. The binocular telescope has its two mirrors on a single mount; they move together. You actually are able to pull the light together, have adaptive optics sharpening the image, and do all of that with only three warm surfaces that the light encounters. And therefore you don't get very much heat radiated by the telescope getting into the picture. So you can have high sensitivity. This makes the LBT and the Keck Interferometer complementary--each has its different area of greatest usefulness. AM: Can you explain what adaptive optics are? NW: Adaptive optics is a process of changing the shape of the optics to warp the light paths back to what they would be if there weren't an atmosphere. The atmosphere causes shimmering, and it causes blurring. Both of those are caused by the rays of light not going straight to a focus, as they would in an ideal optical system. What you do then, with the adaptive optics, is you measure exactly how far the path of the light is distorted and you tilt small areas of a mirror to [eliminate the distortion]. We take the secondary mirror of the telescope and we just bend it to the necessary shape to take out all the effects of the atmosphere. AM: So you've got the effect of a bunch of little fingers on the back of the mirror pushing on it? NW: That's right, pushing and pulling, yes, and changing the amount of push and pull every 1/1000 of a second. There are 336 fingers on the MMT and there will be 672 on each of the secondary mirrors for the Large Binocular Telescope. AM: You are personally working on a project that is trying to determine what Earth looks like from space. What's the focus of that work? NW: All of the devices that we've sent into space to look at the Earth look at tiny regions of the ground, and it's very, very hard to get a clear picture of what the Earth as a whole looks like. In particular, the cloud cover is fairly large and clouds are bright and the surface of the Earth is not very bright in comparison. So what we mostly see of Earth from space are the upper regions of clouds, and it's very hard to predict how the light contributions to the spectrum will add up and give us an overall spectrum similar to what we expect to see with a Terrestrial Planet Finder-like device. We've already learned from Earthshine that there are some features that show fairly well. Those include the Rayleigh scattering that causes our sky to be blue, and we see that in the Earthshine. And the other thing that we see is the signature of vegetation. Those are both very important as features we might look for in another [Earth-like planet]. In particular, the Rayleigh scattering is the only good external measure of the amount of nitrogen in our atmosphere, and we need to know that to interpret the spectrum. My current work is trying to look at Earthshine in the near-infrared (1- 2 microns)--and this is one of the goals that we've posed for our node of the [NASA Astrobiology] Institute. This is because the features of water vapor on Earth show up much better in the near-infrared, and we weren't seeing them as well as I had hoped in the spectra we were taking from the visible. AM: Earthshine is light reflected off the Earth, and then reflected back to Earth from the Moon's night side. How do you go about observing this? NW: What we do is we wait for the Moon to be nearly new. So most of it is not being lit up by the Sun, and instead it's facing the daylight side of the Earth, and so the Moon collects the light from all over the Earth, and if you take its spectrum, you see the spectrum of the Earth. Now, it's slightly modified. It's modified by the reflectivity of the Moon. But if you then compare the Earthshine spectrum with that of the crescent of the Moon that is receiving its light directly from the Sun, you can take out the effect of the Moon's reflectivity and you can take out the effect of the last passage of the light [back down] through the Earth's atmosphere. And you can get the answer you want: What does the Earth's spectrum look like from space? AM: So you have to do your observing during the daytime? NW: No, you do it just before the Sun rises or just after the Sun sets. It's not the easiest observation because of that. You're trying to get as close to new Moon as you can, and of course the Moon and the Sun are horribly close together. And you try and use the Earth as a kind of sunshade to prevent you from seeing the Sun or too much lit-up sky. It's an interesting and tricky observation, and you have to learn how to do it and slowly work your way in. I was up on Mt. Graham [in southeastern Arizona] earlier this week, and we have actually observed the Earthshine in the infrared. Not quite as well as I would hope, or as well as we're going to do, but we've proved to ourselves that it's possible with the telescope and the equipment we have up there, and so we're looking forward to pushing forward with that work. AM: You mentioned earlier that you would be using several different techniques in an attempt to detect planets around other stars. One of the research areas your team will be focusing on in that search is dust around young stars. Can you describe that work? NW: Well, we've got a few different handles on that. One is that the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) is hopefully going to be launched in August. And we have a link to the work there. We're part of the team that will be collecting all of the historic data from it and trying to put it together. In particular, there will be a study of stars of a variety of ages near to the Sun, and a search to find out what exists in the way of dust around them, whether the dust shows signs of being chopped off in places, as it would be if planets were there and sweeping out the dust. AM: Is this like the gaps in the rings of Saturn? NW: It is very much like the gaps in the rings of Saturn. The Cassini division [in the rings] is caused by Saturn's satellite Mimas, and in the same way a dust disc around a star will have gaps cause by resonances with planet orbits. And then there is another part of it, which will be done from the Kitt Peak Observatory, where they will be looking for spectral features. The gas shows up well in the places where the dust has been swept out. And so we'll be using that as a tool for looking for gaps in the rings. Most of the dust-disk work will be concerned with gaps. AM: Once you find the gap, will you be able to detect a planet in the gap, or are the stars that you're studying too far away for that? NW: We're not quite sure at the present time how the pieces will fit together. Sometimes it will be possible, sometimes it won't. Sometimes we'll have to change wavelengths to look for gaps where there is a chance of seeing planets. To put together a complete picture of a planetary system, you need to learn about planets that are close in, planets that are further out, and so on. It's really a mixture of techniques that have to be used. But we really don't have any feel about the planetary systems that have been detected to date. How far out from the star do planets go? Are there planets that are somewhat lower mass than the ones that we're seeing? Even lower mass planets would cause gaps in rings and might still be bright enough to be seen on their own. But they don't cause much effect in the radial-velocity spectroscopy, which is the current way of detection. So the new work will be a way of extending our current knowledge. AM: Will this study help in understanding the evolution of planetary systems? NW: I would expect so. In general, the dust one sees in a planetary system has not persisted for very long. It's made by breaking up of small objects, like asteroids, and they break up because they're stirred up to collide with each other by giant planets, which then also shape the orbits of the dust residue. The dust does not last long. I hope the work will help to understand how planetary systems evolve with time. We've been trapped with so little and fragmentary knowledge. We've felt like the blind men trying to decide what an elephant is, one feeling the side and another the trunk and another yet the tail. And we've got to try to put the pieces together. And so we are hoping that our study will start this process of putting the pieces together. AM: You also plan to search for interstellar molecules that may be relevant to the origin of life. NW: [That is] the third piece [of our research]. There seems to be a process that collects together the dust and molecules of space and turns them into comets and brings them into planetary systems. And while it's nice that the material does come in, it's only possible to determine what it is either when it's out in space or when you end up with a solid lump on the ground [as a meteorite]. And, of course, being part of a planetary system that's almost five billion years old, quite a lot has happened to the stuff [that has fallen to Earth] by now. So we'd like to look out into space with radio telescopes to try to determine what is out there. We think that sugars are particularly important. And the reason for that is they don't tend to form very well under acidic conditions. Yet they are needed for early life, and we think that early life formed under acidic conditions. So it might be helpful to life starting if the sugars were available early, and life only had to learn a little bit later how to make sugars. So we think it would be very interesting to find whether sugars are formed in space and whether they enter the solar system in comets. There has been already an indication of a first sugar in space. It hasn't been one of the key biologically interesting ones, but we think as we go on, improve identifications, increase identifications, that it will be possible to find many, many more complex organic molecules out there in space [that would have been] collected and come into the early Earth. The problem with looking for sugars in the radio spectrum is that there are a huge number of unidentified spectral lines. So you need laboratory studies of all the wavelengths where a given substance will emit spectral lines. And you have to observe many lines with high wavelength precision to decide whether a particular molecule has been detected. And then you can finally straighten out exactly what you're seeing, what materials are out there. So it will be a combination of observational work with radio telescopes and lab work to identify what spectral lines are associated with what particular molecules. AM: Will you be looking in any particular region of space? NW: There are some regions in space which are particularly dense concentrations of interstellar molecules. There are some roughly in the direction of the galactic center, but there are other regions like Orion where you can see things, too. And, certainly, a lot of the study of the molecules will be in the directions of the dense, dark clouds where these molecules are found most easily. AM: What is the procedure you use in the lab work? NW: In the lab work you have to get the molecules into a vacuum and excite them so that they will radiate all of their spectral lines. You then detect all of these spectral lines, [measure] their various strengths and [see] how the wavelengths are related. And that allows you to then go back and look at the big table that you're creating of unidentified spectral lines in various places. The reason that progress hasn't gone further has been mainly that there hasn't been the appropriate lab work to combine with the observations from the telescopes. AM: Once you have constructed your library of spectra, do you use primarily intuition or computer searches to match them up with the telescope observations? NW: It has to be a massive computer search program. One of the good features about it is that the spectral lines are extremely sharp and therefore can be measured to very high precision, but the concern is that [you have to] match all the lines. You may need a simultaneous detection of, say, 20 spectral lines from a complex molecule to be sure you have found it. AM: And I assume it's complicated by the fact that you usually detect lots of molecules at once. NW: You have lots and lots of them, and this is why it's a great untangling process. But we think the work is important because the material that came to Earth is one ingredient of the way that life was able to get started. And until we know what came to Earth, we can't ask some key questions. Note: The University of Arizona NAI lead team will also conduct a winter school for each of the next five years. The school will invite graduate students--biologists, geologists and chemists, as well as astronomers-- to spend the winter semester in Tucson working collaboratively with the astronomers on the NAI team and researchers in a broader range of astrobiological fields. Read the original articles at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article531.html and http://www.astrobio.net/news/article533.html. ________________________________________________________________________ 101 AMAZING EARTH FACTS By Robert Roy Britt From Space.com 22 July 2003 We live on a sphere of extremes and oddities. In fact it's not really a sphere, but it is a wild planet, mottled with deadly volcanoes, rattled by killer earthquakes, drenched in disastrous deluges. But do you know which were the worst? Some of Earth's valleys dip below sea level. Mountains soar into thin air. Can you name the lowest spot? The tallest peak? Do you know how far it is to the center of the planet or what's there? Where are the planet's hottest, coldest, driest and windiest places? The following list of Earth's extremes and other amazing facts is presented in Q&A format, so you can cover the answers to test your knowledge of the home planet. Sources include the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with other SPACE.com reporting. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/101_earth_facts_030722-1.html. ________________________________________________________________________ CHINA ON SCHEDULE TO LAUNCH FIRST MANNED SPACECRAFT IN OCTOBER From Agence France-Presse and SpaceDaily 23 July 2003 China is on schedule to launch its first manned spacecraft in October, becoming only the third nation to send a human into orbit, officials involved in the program said Wednesday. "The current plan is that Shenzhou V will be launched in October but it is very hard to say the exact date," an official at the China Rocket Research Institute told AFP. "Many factors will affect the decision." Read the full article at http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/030723090355.co4y2s22.html. ________________________________________________________________________ MASS EXTINCTION FEARED FROM CARBON STORED UNDER EARTH'S CRUST From Agence France-Presse and SpaceDaily 23 July 2003 A vast reservoir of carbon is stashed beneath the Earth's crust and could be released by a major volcanic eruption, unleashing a mass extinction of a kind that last occurred 200 million years ago, German scientists say. Researchers have known for years that carbon is stored in the Earth's mantle, a layer of plasticky rock that lies beneath the planet's fragile crust. Exactly how much is down there is unknown. Most estimates, drawn from analyses of gases emerging from the mantle, say the store is many times more than all the carbon in the Earth's atmosphere, soil and sea combined. The worry is that if just a part of this gigantic reservoir is quickly released as carbon dioxide (CO2), that could create a runaway greenhouse effect. The CO2-soaked atmosphere would store up heat from the Sun, shriveling plant life and destroying species along the food chain. Read the full article at http://www.terradaily.com/2003/030723190552.6u46gdd6.html. ________________________________________________________________________ EARTH, MARS SIMILARITIES FUEL SPECULATION ABOUT LIFE By Leonard David From Space.com 24 July 2003 The prospect of finding life on Mars is alive and well. Despite its extremely hostile environment, the red planet may indeed be an asylum for microorganisms. That viewpoint is gaining support, thanks to scientists looking for life in a range of extreme conditions right here on planet Earth. Experts that are on the trail of finding life on Mars are taking part this week in the Sixth International Conference on Mars sponsored by the California Institute of Technology, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Lunar and Planetary Institute, NASA, and the Planetary Society. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/jpl_caltech_030724.html. ________________________________________________________________________ PANSPERMIA: SPREADING LIFE THROUGH THE UNIVERSE By Seth Shostak From Space.com 24 July 2003 The conventional wisdom is that Earthly life began... on Earth. A few decades ago, many scientists believed (as did Charles Darwin) that terrestrial life first appeared in "some warm little pond." Today's astrobiologists are less fond of ponds, and more likely to suggest that biology began in the hot, sulfurous thicket of a deep sea vent. But there is a controversial alternative to this life from hell scenario. It's life from heaven. Or if not from heaven, at least from the stars. About 25 years ago, two British astronomers, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramsinghe, proposed that comets might be the Johnny Appleseeds of life, carrying vital spores from star system to star system, an idea that is known today as panspermia. If the tail of such a life-loaded comet were to brush the Earth, it might pass some of its frozen microorganisms into the atmosphere where they could descend to our planet's surface. The two astronomers ventured that this might account for the start of life on Earth. They also made the disturbing suggestion that panspermia could spread disease. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_panspermia_030724.html. ________________________________________________________________________ LOS ALAMOS RELEASES NEW MAPS OF MARS WATER Los Alamos National Laboratory release 24 July 2003 "Breathtaking" new maps of likely sites of water on Mars showcase their association with geologic features such as Vallis Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system. The maps detail the distribution of water- equivalent hydrogen as revealed by Los Alamos National Laboratory- developed instruments aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft. In an upcoming talk at the Sixth International Conference on Mars at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, Los Alamos space scientist Bill Feldman and coworkers will offer current estimates of the total amount of water stored near the martian surface. His presentation will be at 1:20 PM, Friday, July 25. For more than a year, Los Alamos' neutron spectrometer has been carefully mapping the hydrogen content of the planet's surface by measuring changes in neutrons given off by soil, an indicator of hydrogen likely in the form of water-ice. The new color maps are available online at http://www.lanl.gov/worldview/news/photos/mars.shtml. "The new pictures are just breathtaking, the water-equivalent hydrogen follows the geographic features beautifully," said Feldman. "There's a lane of hydrogen-rich material following the western slopes of the biggest volcanoes in the solar system, a maximum reading sits right on Elysium mons, and another maximum is in the deepest canyon in the solar system." The new maps combine images from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on the Mars Global Surveyor with Mars Odyssey spectrometer data through more than half a martian year of 687 Earth days. From about 55 degrees latitude to the poles, Mars boasts extensive deposits of soils that are rich in water-ice, bearing an average of 50 percent water by mass. In other words, Feldman said, a typical pound of soil scooped up in those polar regions would yield an average of half a pound of water if it were heated in an oven. The tell-tale traces of hydrogen, and therefore the presence of hydrated minerals, also are found in lower concentrations closer to Mars' equator, ranging from two to 10 percent water by mass. Surprisingly, two large areas, one within Arabia Terra, the 1,900-mile-wide martian desert, and another on the opposite side of the planet, show indications of relatively large concentrations of sub-surface hydrogen. Scientists are attracted to two possible theories of how all that water got into the martian soils and rocks. The vast water icecaps at the poles may be the source. The thickness of the icecaps themselves may be enough to bottle up geothermal heat from below, increasing the temperature at the bottom and melting the bottom layer of the icecaps, which then could feed a global water table. On the other hand, there is evidence that about a million years or so ago, Mars' axis was tilted about 35 degrees, which might have caused the polar icecaps to evaporate and briefly create enough water in the atmosphere to make ice stable planet-wide. The resultant thick layer of frost may then have combined chemically with hydrogen-hungry soils and rocks. "We're not ready yet to precisely describe the abundance and stratigraphy of these deposits, but the neutron spectrometer shows water ice close to the surface in many locations, and buried elsewhere beneath several inches of dry soils," Feldman said. "Some theories predict these deposits may extend a half mile or more beneath the surface; if so, their total water content may be sufficient to account for the missing water budget of Mars." In fact, a team of Los Alamos scientists has begun a research project to interpret the Mars Odyssey data and their ramifications for the history of Mars' climate. The project is funded through the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program--which funds innovative science with a portion of the Laboratory's operating budget - and seeks to develop a global martian hydrology model, using vast amounts of remote sensing data, topography maps and experimental results on water loading of minerals. Members of the Planetary Science team at Los Alamos working with Feldman on the Odyssey project include Bruce Barraclough, David Bish, Dorothea Delapp, Richard Elphic, Herbert Funsten, Olivier Gasnault, David Lawrence, G. McKinney, Kurt Moore, Robert Tokar, Thomas Prettyman, David Vaniman and Roger Wiens as well as Sylvestre Maurice of the Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées (France), S. W. Squyres of Cornell University, and Jeff Plaut of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Los Alamos' neutron spectrometer, a more sensitive version of the instrument that found water ice on the moon five years ago, is one component of the gamma-ray spectrometer suite of instruments aboard Odyssey. W. T. Boynton of the University of Arizona leads the gamma-ray spectrometer team. The neutron spectrometer looks for neutrons generated when cosmic rays slam into the nuclei of atoms on the planet's surface, ejecting neutrons skyward with enough energy to reach the Odyssey spacecraft 250 miles above the surface. Elements create their own unique distribution of neutron energy--fast, thermal or epithermal--and these neutron flux signatures are shaped by the elements that make up the soil and how they are distributed. Thermal neutrons are low-energy neutrons in thermal contact with the soil; epithermal neutrons are intermediate, scattering down in energy after bouncing off soil material; and fast neutrons are the highest-energy neutrons produced in the interaction between high- energy galactic cosmic rays and the soil. By looking for a decrease in epithermal neutron flux, researchers can locate hydrogen. Hydrogen in the soil efficiently absorbs the energy from neutrons, reducing their flux in the surface and also the flux that escapes the surface to space where it is detected by the spectrometer. Since hydrogen is likely in the form of water-ice at high latitudes, the spectrometer can measure directly, a yard or so deep into the martian surface, the amount of ice and how it changes with the seasons. The Los Alamos expertise in neutron spectroscopy stems from longtime nuclear nonproliferation work at the Laboratory, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. The ability to measure and detect signatures of nuclear materials is a vital component of the Laboratory's mission to reduce the threats from weapons of mass destruction. Mars Odyssey was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in April 2001 and arrived in martian orbit in late October 2001. During the rest of the spacecraft's 917-day science mission, Los Alamos' neutron spectrometer will continue to improve the hydrogen map and solve more martian moisture mysteries. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office of Space Science in Washington, DC. Investigators at Arizona State University in Tempe, the University of Arizona in Tucson and NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston, operate the science instruments. Additional science partners are located at the Russian Aviation and Space Agency and at Los Alamos National Laboratories, New Mexico. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, the prime contractor for the project, developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL. Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by the University of California for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) of the U.S. Department of Energy and works in partnership with NNSA's Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories to support NNSA in its mission. Los Alamos develops and applies science and technology to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent; reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction, proliferation and terrorism; and solve national problems in defense, energy, environment and infrastructure. Read the original news release at http://www.lanl.gov/worldview/news/releases/archive/03-101.shtml. Contacts: Nancy Ambrosiano E-mail: nwa@lanl.gov Phone: 505-667-0471 Jim Danneskiold E-mail: jdanneskiold@lanl.gov Phone: 505-667-1640 ________________________________________________________________________ NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/astrobiology.html 25 July 2003 Astrobiology and planetary engineering articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles1.html L. David, 2003. Earth, Mars similarities fuel speculation about life. Space.com. S. Shostak, 2003. Panspermia: spreading life through the universe. Space.com. Terrestrial extreme environments articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles2.html R. R. Britt, 2003. 101 amazing Earth facts. Space.com. Human space exploration articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles3.html Agence France-Presse, 2003. China on schedule to launch first manned spacecraft in October. SpaceDaily. M. Wilson, 2003. A migration to outer space. SpaceDaily. Evolution (biological, chemical and cosmological) articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles5.html Agence France-Presse, 2003. Mass extinction feared from carbon stored under Earth's crust. SpaceDaily. W. Cromie, 2003. Earth's birth date turned back: formed earlier than believed. SpaceDaily. Planetary protection articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles6.html M. Paine, 2003. Search for large asteroids nears completion, experts ponder gaps in program. Space.com. Extrasolar planets articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles7.html Astrobiology Magazine, 2003. Earth without life? Astrobiology Magazine. Astrobiology Magazine, 2003. Interview with Neville Woolf, part I. Astrobiology Magazine. Astrobiology Magazine, 2003. Interview with Neville Woolf, part II. Astrobiology Magazine. R. R. Britt, 2003. Sun-like stars more likely to harbor planets. Space.com. R. Sanders, 2003. Heavy metals-rich stars tend to harbor planets. SpaceDaily. ________________________________________________________________________ CONTINUING COVERAGE OF THE COLUMBIA DISASTER By David J. Thomas 25 July 2003 The investigation of the Columbia tragedy and its aftermath continues. I have included (below) a non-exhaustive list of links to recent articles on the subject. http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/foia/index.html http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/caib_weather_030717.html http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/sts107_debris_030721.html http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/sts107_ham_030722.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-03zu.html http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030722mmt/ http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030722ham/ http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=624&ncid=624&e=6&u=/ap/2 0030721/ap_on_sc/disaster_on_display ________________________________________________________________________ CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS NASA/JPL releases 2-9 July 2003 The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Madrid tracking station on Wednesday, July 9. 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. On-board activities this week included clearing of the ACS high water marks, a Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) High Frequency Receiver calibration, execution of an RPWS cyclic, a Composite InfraRed Spectrometer module test, completion of the Radio Frequency Subsystem conjunction testing, and the start of Reaction Wheel #4 checkout. Events this week for the S14 Science and Sequence Update Process (SSUP) Verification and Validation (V&V) activity included holding the second Preliminary Sequence Integration and Validation (PSIV2) Sequence Change Request approval meeting, distribution of the stripped PSIV2 sub- sequences, and waypoint analysis run. Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph and Magnetometer investigation teams submitted sample Planetary Data System (PDS) archive volume data for volume generation and review by the PDS Atmospheres and Plasma Physics Interactions nodes. The Radio Science Subsystem (RSS) Group prepared a report on the status of the Ka-Band Translator (KaT) anomalies for the on-going Solar Conjunction Experiment #2, along with data in the form of high time resolution spectra movies for the Italian Space Agency, Alenia Spazio, and the Italian members of the Radio Science Team to review. In collaboration with Italian colleagues, a plan for recovery actions was developed, and began implementation 7 July, as the Sun-Earth separation angle increased, and spacecraft attitude control switched to Reaction Wheels. Actions to be performed included frequent power cycling, an Alenia approved S-band transmitter turn-on, and an uplink sweep. At this time there is no evidence of improvement in the KaT. The first volume of The Cassini-Huygens Mission: Overview, Objectives and Huygens Instrumentarium, has been published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. It is edited by Christopher T. Russell and reprinted from Space Science Reviews, Volume 104 Nos. 1-4, 2002. Papers in Volume 1 include Cassini and Huygens science, mission and spacecraft overviews, six Huygens probe papers, and a series of five scientific overview papers on Saturn, Titan, icy satellites, rings, and Saturn's magnetosphere. A second volume is in preparation and will include papers on the Cassini orbiter instruments. The general public, as well as scientists working with Cassini data, will be interested in these papers. Volume 1 can be ordered soon from local bookstores. A delivery coordination meeting was held for a Spacecraft Operations Office delivery of Kinematic Prediction Tool (KPT)/ Inertial Vector Propagator (IVP) V9.1. There were a few minor changes to KPT with most of the changes in IVP to provide new target options for the pointing design tool. Information about Cassini's flyby of the satellite Phoebe in June of 2004 has been posted to the Cassini website at: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/operations/approach.cfm In the first 9 days of new applications for Cassini's Saturn Observation Campaign, Outreach has received 25 applications. For more information on the program or to apply to become a member, check out the website at http://soc.jpl.nasa.gov. 10-16 July 2003 The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Goldstone tracking station on Wednesday, July 16. 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. On-board activities this week included a Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) high frequency receiver calibration, conclusion of the RPWS cyclic, a Magnetometer Subsystem (MAG) bus interface unit reset, MAG power on reset, Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS) instrument maintenance, ACS, CDS, Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), and Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) flight software normalization, CDA and VIMS Instrument Expanded Block (IEB) uplink, completion of the Reaction Wheel Assembly (RWA)-4 articulation and checkout activity, Saturn Orbit Insertion (SOI) demo sequence uplink to the SSR, and clearing of the high water marks. The normalization of ACS and CDS flight software loads on the SSR was in preparation for the SOI Critical sequence demo. Old versions of flight software had been kept in the prime partitions following ACS A8 and CDS V9 checkout. All partitions now reflect the A8 and V9 copies. The Spacecraft Operations Office (SCO) completed the Articulated Reaction Wheel Mechanism (ARWM) and RWA-4 checkout activities this past week. RWA-4 has now been moved by the ARWM to match the RWA-3 angular momentum position and has been verified to be in the proper position. There was a delay of two days during checkout activities due to questions about the direction to be commanded for the ARWM. After reviewing pre-launch special tests and the original problem failure report on commanded direction, the correct direction was commanded and verified by the remaining tests. A project briefing was held later in the week where Reaction Wheels 1-2-4 were approved as the prime reaction wheels. The Radio Science Subsystem (RSS) Solar Conjunction Experiment #2 (SCE) concluded this week. Throughout the month of the experiment, the RSS team was unable to move the Ka-Band Translator (KaT) frequency from its current bad region. Given the uncertainty about future KaT performance, Radio Science believes a re-scoped Gravitational Wave Experiment #3 (GWE) plan is appropriate and responsible given the Project's policy of minimizing time spent on reaction wheels. The team has suggested observations only for the last 20 days of the currently allocated 40-day interval. The re-scope does not affect GWE scientific objectives or GWE3's unique geometry for observations of the galactic center. The official port#3 merged products were delivered to ACS/SCO as part of Science Operations Plan implementation for tour sequences S7 and S8. A wrap-up meeting for this process has been scheduled for July 30. A Science Planning Team Project Briefing was held for cruise sequence C40. The integrated product has been approved for implementation. At the meeting it was decided that the first 2 hours of the new 20-day GWE#3 would be allocated to ACS to perform an RWA bias. GWE now spans 2003-314T06:42:00 to 2003-334T06:05:00 SCET for a duration of 019T23:02, 37 minutes shy of 20.0 days. A total of five Sequence Change Requests (SCR) was approved at a Preliminary Sequence Integration and Validation SCR approval meeting for C39. Two were corrections to items previously submitted and the other three were reactions to the removal of the VIMS straylight activities, which were moved from C39 to C40. Implementation of these SCRs was also performed this week, and new input files sent back to the Sequence Team lead by the affected teams. Events this week for the S14 Science and Sequence Update Process (SSUP) Verification and Validation (V&V) activity included PSIV2 subsequence input port, default Live Movable Block (LMB) and trigger Immediate/Delayed Action Program delivery, distribution of the full merged sequence products with LMB requests included for the V&V PSIV2 phase, updated PSIV2 IEB loads sent to the Sequence Team lead by the instrument teams, publication of updated Sequence Phase List of Ancillary Files (SPLAF) products, conclusion of waypoint analysis and report distribution, and PSIV2 IEB Command Packet File inputs to CDS. System Engineering gave a presentation on the background, timeline, goals and success criteria, test plan, and open issues for the Live Update V&V. Live Update V&V is part of the SSUP real-time commanding process. The V&V will operationally certify the processes, timeline, and execution of commands in the Integrated Test Laboratory. Live Update V&V will begin after the conclusion of SSUP V&V and will run from mid August to mid September. All teams and offices supported the Cassini monthly management review. System Engineering (SE) assisted Science Planning and Mission Planning in generating a SPLAF and associated Pointing Design Tool and Sequence Generator configuration files for both Uplink V&V S14, and for C40. The tools are still being refined, but appear to be time-savers for the Operations Teams. Software Requirements Certification Review delivery meetings were held for the VIMS v7.1, Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer V6, and CAPS v4.0 instrument flight software (FSW). The FSW has been delivered to the project software library and approved for processing to uplink as part of the C39 sequence activities. Delivery coordination meetings were held for BECON V1, Flight System Dynamics Simulator V2.16, and a Cassini Information Management System patch delivery V2.5.1. BECON, the Best fit conic gradient optimizer, uses spacecraft and celestial body ephemeris data to construct the Inertial Vector Propagator conic vector that minimizes the maximum vector fit error over the time interval of the Probe Relay. 17-23 July 2003 The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Goldstone tracking station on Wednesday, July 23. The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and is operating normally. On-board activities this week included Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) High Frequency Receiver (HFR) calibrations, Cosmic Dust Analyzer decontamination and Instrument Expanded Block (IEB) load execution, Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) functional test and deep space characterization, and Saturn Orbit Insertion (SOI) demo sequence uplink to RAM. Memory read outs have verified that the sequence was successfully loaded into RAM, and is registered but not active in both the prime and online strings. On July 18, a real-time command moratorium was initiated to support the SOI sequence demonstration. It will be in effect until August 5. Commanding is planned during this time frame. At the end of each commanding period, a new command loss timer (CLT) value will be uplinked. This will simulate the SOI situation where deliberate management of the CLT hedges against a hardware command decoder failure. Mission Support and Services Office personnel conducted an Emergency Control Center (ECC) demonstration at the DSS complex at Goldstone, California. The demo confirmed the capability to flow telemetry, and to issue commands from the ECC. The C39 Final Sequence Integration and Validation (FSIV) sequence generator, sequence translator, and sequence of events generation products corresponding to the merged files have been released for review by the Spacecraft Operations Office (SCO) and instrument teams. These products include the Sequence Change Requests (SCR) approved at the July 11 SCR approval meeting, as well as some instrument internal changes which did not require change documentation. S07/S08 Science Operations Plan implementation process completed this week, with a final wrap-up meeting scheduled for next week. A waiver disposition meeting was held this week as part of the S14 Science and Sequence Update Process (SSUP) Verification and Validation (V&V) activity. In addition, Preliminary Sequence Integration and Validation 2 (PSIV) SCRs and comments were delivered, the sequence lead delivered a merged background sequence containing Inertial Vector Propagator/Star ID commands, updated PSIV2 IEB loads were delivered, then processed by the command data subsystem and sequence leads for a final release. The FSIV SCR approval meeting will be held next week along with the FSIV sequence approval meeting. Solar Conjunction Experiment #2 ended last Tuesday with the Ka-band Translator (KaT) frequency still in its bad region. As a result, the Project has approved an additional period for continuing recovery attempts for the KaT. One condition is that real-time commands may not be used due to the current command moratorium. The suite of Ka-band equipment was powered back on and Radio Science Subsystem (RSS) personnel developed a strategy to use the additional passes at DSS-25 from now till August 2. The Cassini Archive Tracker System (CATS) was demonstrated to users at last week's Science Archive Working Group meeting. Positive feedback was received. Development of the system will continue with releases of new evaluation versions during the next few months. Training began on the Multimission Image Processing Laboratory (MIPL) Cassini Downlink and Reconciliation Subsystem (CDRS). This is the automated telemetry processing and evaluation process. Training covers starting/stopping of servers, visibility into the processes, manual intervention and configuration of user's accounts and privileges. A delivery coordination meeting was held for Mission Sequence Subsystem version D9.1 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. ________________________________________________________________________ MARS ROVER OPPORTUNITY MISSION STATUS NASA release 2003-101 18 July 2003 NASA's Opportunity spacecraft made its first trajectory correction maneuver today, a scheduled operation to fine-tune its Mars-bound trajectory, or flight path. The spacecraft and its twin, Spirit, in NASA's Mars Exploration Rover project are carrying field-geology robots for arrival at Mars in January. For the trajectory adjustment, flight team members at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, commanded Opportunity to perform a prescribed sequence of thruster firings to adjust the spacecraft's flight path. "It looks like a beautiful burn," said Jim Erickson, Mars Exploration Rover mission manager. "The thrusters fired correctly. We're on course for putting both spacecraft on Mars." The thruster-firing sequence had three main components. First, the entire spacecraft, which is spinning at about 2 rotations per minute, turned to point its spin axis in the direction of the needed course correction. Next, thrusters that accelerate the spacecraft along the direction of that axis burned steadily for about 54 minutes. Afterwards, the spacecraft turned to its next standard cruise attitude. The attitude is changed periodically during the cruise from Earth to Mars to keep the spacecraft's antencnas pointed toward Earth and its solar panels facing the Sun. The total trajectory correction maneuver amounted to a velocity change of 16.2 meters per second (36 miles per hour) applied to Opportunity's flight path. This velocity change has two major effects. The first is to move the arrival time at Mars earlier by 1.48 days, to the intended landing date at Meridiani Planum on January 25, 2004, Universal Time (January 24, Pacific Standard Time). The second effect is to move the aim point at Mars from one that misses Mars by 340,000 kilometers (211,000 miles) to one that is targeted to enter the atmosphere. At launch, the spacecraft was intentionally targeted to miss Mars so that the upper stage of the Boeing Delta II launch vehicle, traveling on a nearly identical trajectory, would not hit Mars. A key purpose of today's maneuver was to adjust for that initial targeting. As of 6:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time July 19, Opportunity will have traveled 31.5 million kilometers (19.6 million miles) since its July 7 launch. Spirit, launched on June 10, will have traveled 106.9 million kilometers (66.4 million miles). Spirit completed its first trajectory correction maneuver three weeks ago. After arrival, the rovers will examine their landing areas for geological evidence about the history of water on Mars. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. Additional information about the project is available from JPL http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer and from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer2. Contacts: Guy Webster Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-6278 Donald Savage NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1547 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/opportunity_update_030720.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars2003-03o.html http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/merb/030718maneuver.html ________________________________________________________________________ MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 17-23 July 2003 The following new images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are now available. Crater with Wavy Fog (Released 17 July 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/07/17/index.html Small Volcano (Released 18 July 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/07/18/index.html Spiders from Mars? (Released 19 July 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/07/199999999/index.html North Mid-latitude Crater (Released 20 July 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/07/20/index.html Polygons in Martian Frost (Released 21 July 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/07/21/index.html Stair-stepped Mound (Released 22 July 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/07/22/index.html Clouds near Icaria Planum (Released 23 July 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/07/23/index.html All of the Mars Global Surveyor images are archived at http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/index.html. Mars Global Surveyor was launched in November 1996 and has been in Mars orbit since September 1997. It began its primary mapping mission on March 8, 1999. Mars Global Surveyor is the first mission in a long-term program of Mars exploration known as the Mars Surveyor Program that is managed by JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) and the California Institute of Technology built the MOC using spare hardware from the Mars Observer mission. MSSS operates the camera from its facilities in San Diego, CA. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars Surveyor Operations Project operates the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft with its industrial partner, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, from facilities in Pasadena, CA and Denver, CO. ________________________________________________________________________ MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release 14-18, 21-25 July 2003 Fractures and Collapse (Released 14 July 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20030714a.html Huygens Crater (Released 15 July 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20030715a.html Processes of Geology (Released 16 July 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20030716a.html South Polar Layered Deposits (Released 17 July 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20030717a.html Tader Valles (Released 18 July 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20030718a.html Eroded Mesas (Released 21 July 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20030721a.html Wind Effects in Tharsis (Released 24 July 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20030724a.html Gusev Crater (Released 25 July 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20030725a.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 REPORTS NASA/JPL releases 18 July 2003 The Stardust team had seven periods of communication with the spacecraft in the past week. Telemetry relayed from the spacecraft indicates it is healthy and all subsystems continue to operate 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. Trajectory Correction Maneuver 9 was successfully completed on July 16. The 1 meter per second burn took about forty-three seconds to complete. Post-burn analysis indicates burn maneuver was right on the money. After the maneuver, the Cometary Interplanetary Dust Analyzer instrument was returned to operations. The Cometary Interplanetary Dust Analyzer was powered off for Deep Space Maneuver 3, which occurred back on June 17 and 18. The analyzer will now remain operational until after the Comet Wild 2 encounter. 25 July 2003 The Stardust team had six periods of communication with the spacecraft in the past week. Telemetry relayed from the spacecraft indicates it is healthy and all subsystems continue to operate normally. On Wednesday July 23, Stardust successfully completed its second orbit around the sun and has started its third and final orbit. The Stardust flight team is continuing its effort to finalize all plans for the Comet Wild 2 encounter. An 'Encounter Workshop' is scheduled for mid-August to complete all encounter action items. The remainder of this year will be spent in testing and training for encounter together with a formal critical events readiness review in November. 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 30.