Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 10, Number 40, 7 October 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) MARTIAN CHRONICLES I: SEEING FLIGHT HARDWARE By Steve Squyres 2) GALILEO'S SPYGLASS By Seth Shostak 3) JAPAN'S NEW SPACE AGENCY By Ron Baalke 4) ARCHAEAN SUNSCREEN By Leslie Mullen 5) ASTROBIOLOGY ROADMAP AVAILABLE IN ASTROBIOLOGY JOURNAL Liebert Enterprises release 6) MARTIAN CHRONICLES II: MISSION LOSS By Steve Squyres 7) MARS AGENDA NEEDS WORK, REPORT CONCLUDES By Leonard David 8) MARS ON EARTH GOES ON SALE! Mars Society release 9) THE GOLDILOCKS ZONE By Ron Koczor and Tony Phillips 10) ANTARCTIC ASTRONOMY: EXOPLANET HUNT MOVES WAY DOWN UNDER By Diane Richards 11) CORNELL-LED ASTRONOMERS CUT THROUGH TITAN'S ATMOSPHERE TO FIND EVIDENCE FOR HYDROCARBON LAKES Cornell University release 12) MARTIAN CHRONICLES III: FURIOUS PACE By Steve Squyres 13) "PLAYING WITH THE BIG BOYS"--CHINA READY FOR HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT By Leonard David 14) MARTIAN CHRONICLES IV: T-MINUS ZERO? By Steve Squyres 15) CHINA AIMS TO TOUCH THE MOON From Agence France-Presse and SpaceDaily 16) THE DRAKE EQUATION REVISITED, PART II: OUR LONELY GALAXY By Peter Ward 17) VOLUNTEERS NEEDED FOR MARS DESERT AND FLASHLINE STATION CREWS: HARD WORK, NO PAY, ETERNAL GLORY Mars Society release 18) NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas 19) CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS NASA/JPL release 20) MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 21) MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release 22) NOZOMI'S SWINGBY AND ITS BASIC PRINCIPLE JAXA release 23) STARDUST STATUS REPORT NASA/JPL release ________________________________________________________________________ MARTIAN CHRONICLES I: SEEING FLIGHT HARDWARE By Steve Squyres From Astrobiology Magazine 29 September 2003 Three spacecrafts are now hurtling toward the Red Planet to look for evidence that it might once have been wet enough to sustain life. Orbital projections of where Europe's Mars Express and the two NASA Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) are right now, can be continuously monitored over their half-year journeys. Experiments performed by the MERs will help to determine whether water might have once existed in volume on the red planet. The two Mars Exploration Rovers are targeting what imagery indicates might have been ancient dry lake beds and other geologically interesting sites in early 2004. The Martian Chronicles series gives an inside view of what it takes for scientists to deliver such a complex mars mission. The journal entries are from Cornell's Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers' scientific package called Athena. The chronicles begin sequentially from the beginning of July 1999, four years before launch, and will culminate in the dramatic landing of the twin rovers on Mars in January 2004. The expected mission time roaming the red planet is ninety days, from January to April. The chronicles include an insider's view of hardware tests and site selection, to problem solving and science planning on the surface of another planet. July 9, 1999 This week starts a new feature on the site: A summary of the major events of the past week. We're into one of the exciting phases of APEX now, with flight hardware being built and tests underway. The big event of this past week has been "thermal vac" testing of the Mini-TES flight instrument--putting it into a vacuum chamber in Santa Barbara and running it through the kinds of temperatures we'll see on Mars. We got a little bit of a scare at first... the instrument was performing beautifully at warm temperatures, but not nearly so well as it got colder. Some troubleshooting tracked the problem down, though, and it was easily fixed by changing just one part - a resistor - in the electronics. All in all, an elegant bit of sleuthing by the guys at Raytheon. July 16, 1999 We're deep into our test program. Mini-TES is still in the thermal vacuum chamber in Santa Barbara, and we're working to confirm that the fix we made last week worked. The most important event of this past week was that the Mössbauer spectrometer design has finally passed its vibration test in Germany. This was a big deal, because a wire inside the instrument had broken the first couple of times we tried it. The team in Darmstadt figured out a change that fixed the problem, and now we have a design that we're confident will be able to withstand the rigors of launch. July 23, 1999 This week we did our second big operations test with the FIDO rover. This one was in the "Mars yard": a gigantic rock-filled sandbox at JPL. In two days of work, we simulated the first 12 martian days (or "sols") of the Athena Rover's mission. Commanding the rover in the blind, we selected rocks for investigation, and then drove the rover into the precise positions necessary to sample them. These tests are crucial to learn how to operate the vehicle once we get to Mars, and they're also a ton of fun! August 6, 1999 Sorry about missing last week's report... things have been a little busy lately. Mini-TES has spent the better part of the last two weeks in continued thermal vacuum testing in Santa Barbara, making sure we've really chased down all the problems. As of this weekend, it looks like we've finally got it. The big news of this past week came from the Mössbauer Spectrometer. Uwe and Bodo from Darmstadt brought the first copy of the Mössbauer electronics to JPL this week, and when we hooked them up to the rest of the APEX electronics, everything worked! It doesn't always happen that way... August 20, 1999 APEX hardware is starting to come together very quickly now. The most important event of the week (and one of the most important APEX events to date) was that Mini-TES has now been delivered. The instrument was shipped from Santa Barbara to JPL, and is ready now to begin integration with the rest of the APEX flight hardware once it arrives. The Pancam flight cameras are coming together quickly now, too, and should look like real cameras within another few weeks. And calibration of the APXS instrument continues in Germany... a months-long process that has been going on round-the-clock since June. August 27, 1999 Lots of hard work this week. It's time to start getting our instruments ready to "talk" to the lander once it's built... to exchange commands and data in the same way that they will when we get to Mars. We had worked most of this out over the past several weeks, but there was one interface--the one that lets Pancam talk to the spacecraft--that wasn't working. Several of the APEX electronics and software hotshots hopped a plane to Denver early this week, and spent a very long day there with the Lockheed Martin lander team tracking down the problem. They got it, and as of this week all of the APEX interfaces to the spacecraft are tested and ready to go. September 3, 1999 The Mars 2001 Project is making progress toward picking a landing site. Back in June, there was a landing site workshop in Buffalo. Dozens of Mars scientists attended, and something like sixty or so possible sites were discussed. Lots of these sites would have been good scientifically, but there's also the issue of lander safety, which is essential. Since the workshop, the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft (which is orbiting Mars now) has put a lot of effort into taking high- resolution pictures of prospective sites. Many of them, it turns out, are too rugged for the lander to be able to land safely. But some of them look pretty good, and it's now down to a "short list" that MGS will inspect even more carefully over the next few months. The general landing area needs to be picked by the end of the year. After that, there'll plenty of time to fine-tune the location of the final site. September 10, 1999 Little troubles here and there this week. The good news is that the engineering model for the APEX Mössbauer Spectrometer has been delivered to JPL. The bad news is that it isn't working yet... or rather, that it isn't talking properly to the rest of the APEX electronics. We don't think it's a big problem, mostly because we got an earlier version of the Mössbauer to work just fine. But it's one of those things that you have to track down and fix, which ought to keep some of the team busy for the next few days. Meanwhile, we've hit a little bump in the road with the APXS, too, having to spend a week going in and changing some temperature-correction hardware and software that we thought was working right months ago. This is the reason that you put margin in your schedule! The instrument's doing fine overall, though, and we're still on track to deliver it to the Marie Curie rover early next month. September 17, 1999 We had a wild week, with lots going on. On APEX, the Mössbauer problem from last week was fixed, and we're making good progress toward assembling the flight versions of both the Mössbauer Spectrometer and the Pancam cameras. Over in Germany, the flight APXS instrument underwent the final refurbishment of its electronics, and is now almost completely calibrated. We should ship it to JPL to be put onto the Marie Curie rover in just a few weeks. On Athena, the big news of the week was the System Requirements Review... the first big formal review of the Mars Sample Return Project. This is the review where you make sure you've got all your requirements straight--in other words, where show that you understand the job that you're supposed to do. It went well, and the next big one will be the Preliminary Design Review, coming up in December. September 24, 1999 This was a very bad week for Mars exploration. On Thursday, we got the news that the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft had been lost during its orbit insertion maneuver. Apparently the spacecraft was sent too close to the planet as a result of a navigation error. The friction with the martian atmosphere at that altitude--only about 57 kilometers above the surface--would have been enough to destroy the spacecraft. This is a setback for the Mars program, though not a crippling blow. One of the reasons that NASA is sending so many spacecraft to Mars now is that it keeps the loss of any one spacecraft from causing serious damage to the program. And when you do things as hard as flying missions to Mars, mistakes and accidents will happen. APEX and Athena should not be impacted by the loss of MCO. But our hearts go out to the MCO Project family... we know how hard they worked on their spacecraft and their instruments, and we know how deeply they feel this loss. October 1, 1999 We hit a little snag with Pancam this week. The flight electronics for one of the cameras were put together and worked beautifully. When we put the second set together, however, there was some ugly noise in the images--stripes across the pictures like static in a bad TV picture. A little work by Enrique Villegas, our Pancam electronics whiz, showed that this was caused by the fact that the detector for that camera had been damaged--probably by a little accidental jolt of static electricity somewhere along the line. We're still not sure how it happened, but this is the reason you always make sure you have spares of critical components! We have a good number of flight-quality detectors, so we've popped one of them onto a new Pancam electronics board, and we're back in business. October 8, 1999 It looks like we're closing in on a landing site for APEX. There was a big workshop down in Houston this week, and now we seem to be down to just two candidate regions. One is a place on the rim of the Isidis Basin. This one is in some of Mars' oldest terrain, and is in an area with lots of small valleys and gullies that indicate that water once flowed there. It also has some spectacular topography, which could make for a very scenic landing. The other is a smooth, flat plain that has been found from orbit to have a lot of the mineral hematite present. Hematite normally forms in the presence of liquid water, so this is another place that may have once been warm and wet, and that is very different from almost everything else on the planet. There's still plenty of time to study these two places before the Project has to decide, but it's great to have two sites this exciting that we might go to. October 15, 1999 We had a real up-and-down week. The up part was that the APXS is now integrated into the Marie Curie rover! This whole operation took about a week, and went better than we could have imagined. The down part is that we ran into a bunch of annoying little problems on Pancam, including a motor that has to be replaced, a couple of devices called photodiodes that we wired in backwards by mistake, and the discovery that we have to redesign the sunshades a little bit. None of these are big deals, but they all worked to slow down what otherwise would have been one of our best weeks ever. October 22, 1999 The flight Mössbauer Spectrometer is coming together now. The electronics boards are all assembled and tested. They work fine, although we'll have to replace one part once it gets to JPL with a similar part that can survive all the radiation that we'll encounter in space. The other part of the instrument, the sensor head, is lagging behind a little bit, but should be ready near the end of November. The other news this week was that we just completed our second operations test with the FIDO rover in the Mars yard. We set this one up as a truly "blind" test, with the operations team in a windowless room in the JPL robotics lab, far from the Mars yard and interacting with the rover just as we'll have to do it on Mars. Each time we do this we learn more and more, and this was probably our most successful test to date. October 29, 1999 No big news this week, just lots of little odds and ends. Mini-TES and APXS are tucked away in storage at JPL, waiting for the other instruments to show up. Mössbauer is coming together in Germany, with the latest arrival being the special microcomputer chip the instrument needs to survive in the radiation environment of space. And Pancam is in pieces at JPL, getting fixed up for the next big round of calibration, which should start in two weeks. The biggest excitement of the week was getting our first look at the Mars 2001 lander. There's a long way to go, but it's great to finally be seeing the real flight hardware! Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article611.html. ________________________________________________________________________ GALILEO'S SPYGLASS By Seth Shostak From Astrobiology Magazine 30 September 2003 Last week, in the dim reaches of the outer solar system, the Galileo spacecraft hurled itself, silently and unseen, into Jupiter's gloomy atmosphere. It was promptly crushed and vaporized. A kamikaze-like ending to an orbiting spacecraft is hardly unusual. Many satellites eventually flat-line by self-immolation in the thin air a hundred miles above Earth. But Galileo's exit strategy was motivated by the wish to avoid contaminating one of Jupiter's large moons. In eight years of surveying the jovian system, the Galileo mission had produced a highly provocative result: some of these moons--and especially the milky-white Europa--showed evidence of hidden, ancient oceans. And with liquid water, there's always the possibility of life. This result is now so well known it has entered the realm of conventional wisdom. Consequently, it's easy to overlook the astrobiology revolution brought about by Galileo's satellite surveillance. This upheaval goes beyond the intriguing possibility that a microbe-laced ocean might lurk beneath Europa's rigid, frigid crust. The real paradigm shift was when we realized that Earth-like planets, with surface water and heavy atmospheres, are not the only type of world that might be habitable. Remarkably, this is the second time that Jupiter's moons have provoked a revolution in cosmic perspective. The first began nearly 400 years ago, when Galileo Galilei turned a 20-power spyglass on the heavens. His initial targets were the Moon and stars. Galileo soon made the astounding and dismaying discovery that the Moon was hardly the perfectly smooth body advocated by Aristotelian theory. Its surface was ruptured and riven by mountains and valleys: it was another world, not a divinely unblemished companion to Earth set in place for our pleasure. Galileo also noted that, wherever he pointed his telescope, he could see an order of magnitude greater number of stars than was visible to the eye. There was obviously more to heaven and Earth (especially the former) than was dreamed of in Aristotle's philosophy. But the Moon and the stars were not enough. The discovery that made Galileo a household word, and eventually a namesake for NASA spacecraft, occurred on January 7, 1610, when the ambitious math professor from Padua noticed some small stars around Jupiter. There were three such stars; two to the east of Jupiter's disk, and one to the west. That, per se, was not so peculiar. But something about this asterism caught Galileo's highly discerning eye. The stars were unusually and uniformly bright, and formed a straight line with Jupiter that was parallel to the ecliptic. The following night, Galileo once again pointed his glass toward Jupiter (undoubtedly a painstaking task, given his instrument's very narrow field of view). He was stunned to find that Jupiter was now east of the stars--even though its motion across the sky should have placed it to the west assuming the small constellation consisted of fixed, background stars. Galileo was puzzled, but relentless. Two nights later, he saw that Jupiter had sidestepped the stars to the west, and now only two were visible. It took Galileo no more than a week to decipher this celestial dance. The small stars (he eventually counted four) were satellites of Jupiter. The philosophical implications of this were big, really big. Here was a world that was not only festooned with moons--and remember that until then, only the Earth was known to be so favored--but festooned with four! (As an aside, the current tally for Jupiter is 61 moons.) In addition, Galileo had discovered a system in which moons were orbiting a planet that was, itself, in orbit. In other words, there was no single "center" to the universe, no single master. The still-controversial Copernican idea that Earth was only one of several rocky attendants to the Sun--the deflating premise that mankind's home and hearth was not the nexus of existence--was endorsed in heavy ink by one week of telescopic observation. The Galileo spacecraft, ten generations later, has done something similar, although it may take time to sink in. It has provided several lines of evidence for a vast, moon-girdling ocean beneath Europa's 10 mile-thick ice glaze. Similar oceans may exist on Ganymede and Callisto, all kept warm and liquid by the changing gravitational tugs among these moons and their host planet. Who, a generation ago, would have thought that moons no bigger than our own could harbor massive seas? That no one did is a testament to Nature's great variety, and mankind's occasional lack of ingenuity. Our concept of habitable worlds was, not so long ago, hardly more generous than the uncompromising Earth-centered view of Aristotle. The Galileo spacecraft has changed all that. The manner of its demise--intended to allow future missions to explore Europa without fear of prior contamination--is dramatic testimony to its success. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article612.html. ________________________________________________________________________ JAPAN'S NEW SPACE AGENCY By Ron Baalke 30 September 2003 The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will officially be born on October 1, 2003. The new space agency is a merger of three Japanese aerospace/space-related organizations: the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), the National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan (NAL), and the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA). A new JAXA web site is also expected to debut on October 1-- http://www.jaxa.jp. ________________________________________________________________________ ARCHAEAN SUNSCREEN By Leslie Mullen From Astrobiology Magazine 1 October 2003 As you slather on the sunscreen before heading out for a day on the beach, are you repeating an action that first occurred over 2 billion years ago? Some scientists believe that early life may have used sunscreen, although it was nothing like the white creams and lotions we use today. Instead, ancient sunscreens may have been mineral crusts made from iron, silica, and clay. These heavy sunscreens would have been needed to block out the full spectrum of the sun's ultraviolet (UV) rays. There are three kinds of UV rays: UV-A, UV-B, and UV-C. Modern sunscreens absorb UV-A and UV-B rays. UV-C rays are the most damaging, but they never reach the Earth because they are blocked by the ozone layer. But over 2 billion years ago, the Earth had little oxygen and no ozone layer. UV-C rays blazed down on the Earth's surface unimpeded, and would have fried to a crisp any life caught out sunbathing. Before photosynthesis led to the rise of oxygen and the formation of the ozone layer, early life protected itself by living underwater. Water can block UV light while allowing enough visible light to shine through for photosynthesis to take place. Early photosynthetic life would have had to stay below a certain water depth to take advantage of visible light while avoiding UV. But with a mineral-based sunscreen, early photosynthetic life may have been able to exist in much shallower waters, and perhaps even live out of the water entirely. Kurt Konhauser of the University of Alberta studies life at mineral hot springs. Mounds of precipitated minerals called sinters form at these springs, but Konhauser has found that the sinters are actually composed of microbial communities as well as mineral deposits. As silica and iron passively precipitate onto microbial mats, the microbes migrate up, forming a new mat on top of the minerals. Over time the sinter layers accumulate high enough to lift life out of the water. In a study published in 2001 in the journal Geology, Konhauser and his colleagues described just how effective mineral-based sunscreens can be. The scientists grew cultures from cyanobacteria taken from hot springs in Iceland, and exposed them to silica-iron concentrations that mimicked hot spring effluent. They then exposed the mineral-coated bacteria to UV light comparable to the levels that would have occurred over 2 billion years ago. They found that a control group of non-mineralized cyanobacteria experienced rapid damage to such UV exposure, with only 15 percent of the population remaining after 96 hours of radiation. The mineralized "sunscreened" bacteria, however, showed resistance to the UV, and after 384 hours of UV exposure, 90 percent of the population remained. The mineralized cyanobacteria not only had higher rates of survival, but also higher rates of growth, photosynthesis, and oxygen production than the control group bacteria. Curious to see just how heavy the sunscreen needed to be in order to be effective, Konhauser and his colleagues sliced a sinter into wafers of varying thickness. "We wanted to test what thicknesses were necessary to shield UV, but let in certain wavelengths of visible light," says Konhauser. Just as early photosynthetic life in water had to live in a zone where UV light was blocked but visible light was accessible, early photosynthetic life would have needed a sunscreen layer that blocked UV yet allowed visible light to shine through. They found this balancing act worked with even the thinnest wafer. Measuring a mere 0.15 millimeters, the wafer provided nearly 100 percent UV protection while still allowing visible light to penetrate. Konhauser and his colleagues have since tested hot springs in Kenya and New Zealand, and they have found that all types of microbes acquire a mineral coating. "Microbes take advantage of the lack of predation and the high levels of nutrients at hot springs, but in doing so, cannot help but get covered in silica and iron precipitates," says Konhauser. Such biomineralization seems to be an inevitable consequence of growing in geothermal solutions. Presumably, even the earliest photosynthetic life growing at hot springs would have been well coated with minerals. "Given that shallow water stromatolites already existed 3.5 billion years ago, and they may have consisted of cyanobacteria, then the microbes likely were biomineralized at that early stage," he says. Some have suggested that life could have originated at mineral hot springs. Konhauser says if life did start there, then biomineralization would have helped it survive. "In fact, if life did indeed start at hot springs, one could argue that they never would have survived had it not been for a biomineral coating to protect from UV," he notes. Over the past few years, astrobiologists have increasingly begun to see interconnections between early life and Earth's geology. For instance, the evolution of photosynthetic organisms is recorded in the rock record--not from fossils, but from chemical indications in the rocks themselves. The oxygen produced by these organisms reacted with iron in the rocks, causing the iron to rust and producing red beds and banded iron formations (BIFs). BIFs are thought to be tangible proof of Earth's transition from an anoxic to an oxygenated atmosphere, which took place between 2.5 and 2 billion years ago. Janice Bishop of the SETI Institute has been studying this connection between iron, photosynthetic organisms, and atmospheric oxygen. She thinks iron oxide-bearing minerals like ferrihydrite and schwertmannite could have acted as a sunscreen for early photosynthetic life. Both ferrihydrite and schwertmannite are "nanophase" minerals, which means the crystal size is only tens to hundreds of nanometers in size (a nanometer is one-millionth of a millimeter, or the length of ten hydrogen atoms laid side by side). "The nanophase character of these minerals is partially responsible for the beneficial spectral properties," Bishop says. In collaboration with Lynn Rothschild of NASA's Ames Research Center, Bishop has found that iron oxides mixed with silica and clay provide the best sunscreen protection, perhaps because the silica and clays help disperse the iron oxide particles. Bishop thinks small populations of early photosynthesizers lived in protected niches that contained nanophase iron oxide minerals. The iron oxide not only helped these early photosynthesizers survive, but may have actually promoted the evolution of such organisms. "If this in fact was an important factor, than it may well be that without the iron oxide minerals, photosynthesis may not have become widespread until a later date," says Bishop. The role iron may have played on early life naturally leads to questions about the potential for life on Mars. Mars has huge quantities of iron, as evidenced by the rusty red color of its soil. Mars also has silica, many volcanic features, large quantities of water ice at the poles, and perhaps even some water ice or liquid water underground in lower latitudes. Most scientists think Mars is too cold and dry at present for life to exist, but the combination of water, heat, and sunscreen materials makes it tempting to think microbial life could have existed during a warmer, wetter period in the Red Planet's history. Mars has a thin atmosphere and almost no oxygen, so the surface is highly irradiated--just as the Earth's surface was over 2 billion years ago. Konhauser says that studies of microbial sunscreen on Earth suggest that life could have once survived on the surface of Mars, as long as there had been some protection against direct irradiation. "If life did exist on Mars when liquid water was available, then biomineralization would also have been likely," he says. "Along similar lines, those same biominerals may have led to their fossilization--and our current searches for life on Mars are looking for such fossils." Bishop notes that a variety of forms of iron are present on Mars. "In contrast to nanophase grains, the grain size of the gray hematite detected on Mars is probably tens of microns, and the grain size of the red hematite is probably a few microns," says Bishop. "We don't know much yet about the specific iron oxide-bearing minerals present on Mars, although we suspect that there are a lot of nanophase iron oxides." Bishop says that if life ever existed on Mars, it would not necessarily have needed sunscreen in order to survive. Life could have lived deep underground, protected from the irradiated surface, gaining energy from chemicals in the rocks. Like early life on Earth, the only organisms that would have needed to risk exposure to the sun were those that made their food from photosynthesis. What's next? Bishop says she has a number of experiments planned to study the ability of iron oxide-bearing minerals to protect photosynthetic organisms from UV radiation. Thanks to funding through NASA's Astrobiology Institute, she and Rothschild will take a closer look at the interactions between iron oxides and photosynthetic organisms at Yellowstone National Park and other field sites. Konhauser is continuing to study hot spring sites in Kenya and New Zealand. He hopes to assess how microbes influence silica and calcium carbonate precipitation under different geothermal conditions. His original experiments tested cyanobacteria, but there has been some doubt cast on whether cyanobacteria were the earliest photosynthesizing organisms. Konhauser and his colleagues are now conducting experiments on Aquificales, a deeply rooted bacterial lineage found in both terrestrial and deep-sea hydrothermal systems. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article613.html. ________________________________________________________________________ ASTROBIOLOGY ROADMAP AVAILABLE IN ASTROBIOLOGY JOURNAL Liebert Enterprises release 1 October 2003 The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has outlined its high-priority scientific objectives for the next three to five years with the publication of its Astrobiology Roadmap. The Roadmap is published in Volume 3, Issue 2 of Astrobiology, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. The Roadmap is available at no charge online at www.liebertpub.com/ast. Astrobiology is a multidisciplinary journal, covering these and other related fields of inquiry: • Astrophysics • Astropaleontology • Bioastronomy • Cosmochemistry • Ecogenomics • Exobiology • Extremophiles • Geomicrobiology • Gravitational Biology • Life Detection Technology • Meteoritics • Origins of Life • Planetary Geoscience • Planetary Protection • Prebiotic Chemistry • Space Exploration Technology • Terraforming For complete manuscript submission instructions and information on how to subscribe, visit us www.liebertpub.com/ast. ________________________________________________________________________ MARTIAN CHRONICLES II: MISSION LOSS By Steve Squyres From Astrobiology Magazine 1 October 2003 Three spacecrafts are now hurtling toward the Red Planet to look for evidence that it might once have been wet enough to sustain life. Orbital projections of where Europe's Mars Express and the two NASA Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) are right now, can be continuously monitored over their half-year journeys. Experiments performed by the MERs will help to determine whether water might have once existed in volume on the red planet. The two Mars Exploration Rovers are targeting what imagery indicates might have been ancient dry lake beds and other geologically interesting sites in early 2004. The Martian Chronicles series gives an inside view of what it takes for scientists to deliver a complex mars mission. The journal entries are from Cornell's Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers' scientific package called Athena. The chronicles begin sequentially from the beginning of July 1999, four years before launch, and will culminate in the dramatic landing of the twin rovers on Mars in January 2004. The expected mission time roaming the red planet is ninety days, from January to April. The chronicles include an insider's view of hardware tests and site selection to problem solving and science planning on the surface of Mars. November 5, 1999 We had a tough week. After getting all the Pancam problems we knew about straightened out, we put the cameras back in the test chamber. Problem is, as soon as we cooled them down to martian temperatures (it was the first time we'd done this with the flight cameras), they both acted up, and in fact one of them stopped taking pictures altogether. When they were warmed back up the bad one started working again, so we're hoping it isn't too serious. The whole thing reminded us of the problems we had with Mini-TES when we first took it to low temperatures back in August. We solved that one, and we'll solve this one too... it's all part of the game. In fact, within the last 24 hours, we may have found the problem. And if we're right, it could be just a simple software fix to get everything working again. We'll see... November 19, 1999 Things have been crazy. The big news is that we've found and fixed the problems with Pancam. This wasn't easy! It turns out that there were two separate problems. One was pretty simple to fix. The way our software was written, we'd try to take a picture very quickly after the camera was turned on. The electronics didn't like this, and it was simple to put in a little delay that fixed that problem. The other problem, though, was much tougher to track down, and it took us more than a week to find it. The Pancam electronics team at JPL, with Enrique Villegas leading the way, nailed it after a lot of work, and we're now back in business. Calibration starts again soon... but first we're going to let the team rest up over the Thanksgiving weekend! November 26, 1999 Pancam is fixed. What a relief! Everything now works just the way it's supposed to, all the way down to the coldest temperatures we'll see on Mars. On Monday of this week we'll put the cameras back in the test chamber, fire them up, and start a week-long effort to complete all the tests we need to perform before flight. The other big news this week is that half of the Mössbauer spectrometer has been delivered to JPL. Bodo Bernhardt brought the electronics board over from Germany at mid-week. This is the part that sits inside the lander; the sensor head, which is the part that's out on the Robotic Arm, should arrive late next month. The week ahead is a very big one, with the landing of Mars Polar Lander on Friday. The Mars '01 lander is a lot like this one, so we're going to be watching closely... holding our breath. December 4, 1999 There's been plenty of APEX and Athena progress this week, but the real news is about the Mars Polar Lander. As of this writing, our MPL friends still haven't heard from their spacecraft. It's a complicated machine, and there's still a good chance that it's up there, safe and sound, and waiting to phone home. All we can do now is wait and hope, and wish our friends the best of luck. December 11, 1999 It has been a very, very bad week. All signs now suggest that the Mars Polar Lander has failed. This is terrible news for the Mars program, since MPL was going to be a great mission. It also looks like bad news for APEX. The Mars '01 lander has nearly the same design as MPL. And at this point, we know that the MPL design failed, but we don't know why. In the space business, when a vehicle has a problem you don't understand, you ground it until you figure out what went wrong and you fix it. So for now, at least, the '01 lander is grounded, and APEX is grounded with it. December 18, 1999 This week was devoted to odds and ends as we get ready to wrap up for the holiday break. There's been plenty of progress on all the APEX instruments: The motors and gearboxes for Pancam and Mini-TES are now all done, we've just finished some new "baffles" to keep light from scattering around too much inside the Pancam cameras, and the Marie Curie rover team is starting to build the covers that'll protect the APXS instrument from dust. It's good progress, and all we really can do at this point is just keep going... and see what comes out of NASA's review of the Mars Polar Lander failure. January 1, 2000 The last couple of weeks have been pretty quiet due to the holidays. We're still waiting to see what the new Mars program will look like after the loss of Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander. One piece of really good news is that NASA has appointed a blue-ribbon panel to look at what happened to the missions we just lost, and what to do about the future ones. It's a very good group, chaired by Tom Young. Tom is a member of the NASA Advisory Council, a former director of Goddard Space Flight Center, and a former executive with the Martin Marietta Corporation. He also played a big role in the Viking project back in the '70s, so he knows what it takes to be successful in exploring Mars. It'll be very interesting over the coming weeks to see what kinds of changes this group comes up with. January 14, 2000 NASA's efforts to figure out how to restructure the Mars Exploration program continue. We still don't know what it's going to look like... only that it's going to be different from that timeline you see over there to the left! For now, we're just focusing on getting the APEX [Athena Precursor Experiment] instruments done, so that they'll be ready to fly when the opportunity comes. The Pancam mast is all assembled now, and early last week we deployed it for the first time... made it stand up just like we will right after landing. The cameras are finished now too, and we should have them on the mast within the next few weeks. January 22, 2000 We're still not sure what's going to happen with the '01 mission, but other than that we had a great week. The biggest news of the week is probably that the Mössbauer spectrometer sensor head passed its vibration test, and is now only about a week or so away from delivery. The other big accomplishment was that the Pancam mast has been put together, and we've put it through its first motion tests. The tests went beautifully... it was nice to see the hardware in action! January 28, 2000 It has been an interesting week, to say the least! The APEX news is that we've finally wrapped up the testing of the Pancam cameras, and we're now ready to start putting them on the mast. The big Mars news is that it sounds like there's a slim chance that the Mars Polar Lander team may have heard from their spacecraft! It's far from certain, but there's at least a chance that the spacecraft was still alive weeks after it landed. Getting any data back from it looks like a real long shot, but it'd be great just to know it got onto the surface in one piece. February 4, 2000 The Mössbauer Spectrometer is at JPL, and it works! Goestar Klingelhoefer flew the sensor head in from Germany early in the week, and spent several days getting it hooked up with the electronics. There were some problems at first, and by the middle of the week we were a little bit worried. A phone call to Ralf and Bodo in Mainz cleared things up, though... it was just a software problem that was easy to fix. A few minor changes, and the whole setup was working perfectly. This is a very big milestone for us, since it means that all the APEX instruments are now built and delivered to JPL. We still don't know if we're going to launch them next year or not, but we're on track to do it if the opportunity comes. February 11, 2000 We had a bit of a slow week for a change. With all the APEX instruments now delivered to JPL, our focus has turned to getting them hooked up together and tested. A lot of this past week was spent on software work. The next big event happens this coming week: our big "electromagnetic interference" (EMI) test. What we do in this test is put all the instruments and radio transmitters onto a mockup of the lander deck, and then operate them individually and together, checking to see that stray electromagnetic signals from one piece of hardware don't mess up what another piece of hardware is trying to do. We're hoping to find no unpleasant surprises! February 18, 2000 We didn't have a very good week. This was the week that we were planning to do our first big test of all the APEX hardware together. The test is called EMC, for "electromagnetic cleanliness". Basically, it means making sure all of the pieces work together without creating any electrical interference for one another. Problem was, we never really got to do all the testing we had hoped to do. Every piece of APEX hardware had been tested before this week, except for one cable that runs up the outside of the Pancam mast. Well, it turns out that that cable has some real problems with it, and the problems kept us from getting a lot of the testing done. We'll be able to build a new cable and fix it, but it's one of those setbacks you can hit at this stage of the game. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article614.html. ________________________________________________________________________ MARS AGENDA NEEDS WORK, REPORT CONCLUDES By Leonard David From Space.com 1 October 2003 NASA faces thorny technological problems and money woes in furthering its Mars exploration agenda over the years to come, SPACE.com has learned. A skyrocketing price tag for a Mars lander in 2009, planetary protection issues, approaches to collect martian rock and soil for Earth return, and the overall scope of science investigations done at the red planet have been called to question. A Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG) has flagged NASA regarding these and other concerns in plotting out future exploration plans of that puzzling planet. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/news/mars_report_031001.html. ________________________________________________________________________ MARS ON EARTH GOES ON SALE! Mars Society release 1 October 2003 The long-awaited book, Mars on Earth: Adventures of Space Pioneers in the High Arctic, has now gone on sale. Written by Mars Society president Robert Zubrin, the book chronicles the successful effort of the Mars Society to build and operate analog human Mars exploration stations in the Canadian Arctic and the American desert. Starting from the pioneering work of the earliest Mars analog researchers in the natural science area, such as Wolf Vishniac and Imre Friedman, the book moves through the founding of the Mars Society and its decision to construct the first actual Mars analog research station Devon Island. The book then relates the story of the crisis-wracked but ultimately triumphant construction of Flashline Station in the summer of 2000, and the mission simulations which followed in 2001 and 2002. The building and operation of the Mars Desert Research Station through its first ten crews in 2002 is also discussed at length. Finally, in an extensive chapter, Zubrin analyzes the results of the Arctic and Desert mission simulations and their implications for the design of human missions to Mars. Mars on Earth (ISBN 1-58542-255-x) is published in hardcover by Tarcher/Penguin and sells for $28.95. It is available now from Amazon.com. If you want to help the Mars Society, make your purchase by going to the Mars Society web site at www.marssociety.org. On the left hand side of the web page, there is a picture of the book cover. Clicking on it will take you to Amazon.com. The price to you will be then same as that obtained by going to amazon.com directly, but the Mars Society will obtain a percentage of the sale (shop for Mars!). The book is enlivened by accounts of many of the colorful characters who have participated in the program. Its Table of Contents is given below: 1. The Challenge of Mars 2. Searching for Martian Life on Earth 3. Enter the Mars Society 4. Devon Island 5. Toward Flashline Station 6. Crisis in the Arctic 7. Preparing the Simulation 8. Letters from Mars: Devon Island 2001 9. Into the Desert 10. A Thousand Days on Mars 11. Lessons of the Sims 12. Where Do We Go from Here? The book's dedication reads as follows: To my friends, The Mars Society Volunteers-- Soldiers of Hope Dreamers and Seekers Fighters for the Future For further information about the Mars Society, visit our web site at www.marssociety.org. ________________________________________________________________________ THE GOLDILOCKS ZONE By Ron Koczor and Tony Phillips From NASA Science News 2 October 2003 "This porridge is too hot," Goldilocks exclaimed. So she tasted the porridge from the second bowl. "This porridge is too cold." So she tasted the last bowl of porridge. "Ahhh, this porridge is just right!" she said happily. And she ate it all up. --"Goldilocks and the 3 Bears" children's story Scientists hunting for alien life can relate to Goldilocks. For many years they looked around the solar system. Mercury and Venus were too hot. Mars and the outer planets were too cold. Only Earth was just right for life, they thought. Our planet has liquid water, a breathable atmosphere, a suitable amount of sunshine. Perfect. It didn't have to be that way. If Earth were a little closer to the sun it might be like hot choking Venus; a little farther, like cold arid Mars. Somehow, though, we ended up in just the right place with just the right ingredients for life to flourish. Researchers of the 1970s scratched their heads and said we were in "the Goldilocks Zone." The Goldilocks Zone seemed a remarkably small region of space. It didn't even include the whole Earth. All life known in those days was confined to certain limits: no colder than Antarctica (penguins), no hotter than scalding water (desert lizards), no higher than the clouds (eagles), no lower than a few mines (deep mine microbes). In the past 30 years, however, our knowledge of life in extreme environments has exploded. Scientists have found microbes in nuclear reactors, microbes that love acid, microbes that swim in boiling-hot water. Whole ecosystems have been discovered around deep sea vents where sunlight never reaches and the emerging vent-water is hot enough to melt lead. The Goldilocks Zone is bigger than we thought. To find out how big, researchers are going deeper, climbing higher, and looking in the nooks and crannies of our own planet. Searching for life in the Universe is one of NASA's most important research activities. Finding extreme life here on Earth tells us what kind of conditions might suit life "out there." NASA scientists Richard Hoover and Elena Pikuta are among the hunters. This month they've announced a new species of extreme-loving microorganism, Tindallia californiensis, found in California's Mono Lake. Mono Lake is an extremely salty and alkaline body of water. It is almost 3 times saltier than sea water and has a pH of 10, about the same as WindexTM, a household glass cleaner. (For comparison, a pH of 7 is neutral; 14 corresponds to pure lye.) Surprisingly, though, Mono Lake supports a wide array of life from microbes, to plankton, to small shrimp. T. californiensis is right at home there. It thrives in highly alkaline conditions (pH 8-10.5) and at salt concentrations near 20%. Earlier this year Hoover and Pikuta announced another strange microbe: Spirochaeta americana. They found it living with T. californiensis and perhaps hundreds of other microbial species in Mono Lake mud samples. Finding new species in this abundant collection of microbial life is a detective story worthy of Perry Mason or Hercule Poirot. "Collecting samples from the muddy bottom of this lake and keeping them alive can be tricky business," says Hoover. "These species are killed by the presence of oxygen, so great care must be taken to protect them." "The battery of tests required to identify a particular species in a sample is extensive," says Pikuta. "For an organism to be identified and then recognized as a new species, it must be completely understood. This includes identifying its growth requirements and metabolism, colonial habit, cellular characteristics, DNA and genome properties, and sensitivity to antibiotics for detailed comparison with other known life forms." Before a life form can be considered a valid new genus or species, it must be deposited in two separate International Collections of Microorganisms and a scientific paper describing all new features of the organism must be either published in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology or, if published in another journal, it must be verified by the International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes (ICSP), the clearinghouse for bacterial species. Once a microbe is finally accepted as a valid new species, says Hoover, the years of intense lab work and wallowing in smelly lake mud suddenly become worthwhile. The Goldilocks Zone gets a little bigger. And life "out there" seems more likely than ever. Read the original article at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/02oct_goldilocks.htm?list52260. An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/life-03zza.html. ________________________________________________________________________ ANTARCTIC ASTRONOMY: EXOPLANET HUNT MOVES WAY DOWN UNDER By Diane Richards From Space.com 2 October 2003 Sometimes being left out in the cold is a good thing. Or so thinks SETI Institute astrophysicist, Dr. Douglas Caldwell, whose planet hunting team has set up shop in one of the most cold, remote areas of the planet, the South Pole. At this location, the sun sets in April and rises in September. During the four-month night, the stars shine constantly against crisp black skies, never rising nor setting, but wheeling about in circles above the automated photometric search equipment. Weather, despite the cold (temperatures average a bone-chilling negative 49 degrees Centigrade!) is relatively mild with few storms and moderate winds. These are perfect conditions for a "transit search," the planet hunting technique that monitors the brightness of a star over time for regular and periodic "dimming" in that star's brightness. Such "winks" could indicate that an orbiting body like a planet has passed between the star and the observer. Transit searches use sensitive "photometers," basically telescopes coupled with digital camera-like recording devices that capture images of the stars under observation. Signal processing experts like Caldwell analyze the stored data for dips in brightness. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_planets_031002.html. ________________________________________________________________________ CORNELL-LED ASTRONOMERS CUT THROUGH TITAN'S ATMOSPHERE TO FIND EVIDENCE FOR HYDROCARBON LAKES Cornell University release 2 October 2003 The smog-shrouded atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has been parted by Earth-based radar to reveal the first evidence of liquid hydrocarbon lakes on its surface. The observations are reported by a Cornell University-led astronomy team working with the world's largest radio/radar telescope at the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Arecibo Observatory. The radar observations, reported in the journal Science on its Science Express Web site (October 2, 2003), detected specular--or mirror-like--glints from Titan with properties that are consistent with liquid hydrocarbon surfaces. Cornell astronomer Donald Campbell, who led the observation team, does not rule out that the reflections could be from very smooth solid surfaces. "The surface of Titan is one of the last unstudied parcels of real estate in the solar system, and we really know very little about it," he says. The observations were made possible by the 1997 upgrade of the telescope's 305-meter (1,000 feet) diameter dish, which has greatly increased the sensitivity of what was already the world's most powerful radar system. The observatory is managed by the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC), based at Cornell in Ithaca, NY, which has been operating the huge telescope for the NSF since 1971. Campbell, who is associate director of NAIC as well as a Cornell professor of astronomy, notes that for more than two decades astronomers have speculated that the interaction of the sun's ultraviolet radiation with methane in Titan's upper atmosphere--photochemical reactions similar to those that cause urban smog--could have resulted in large amounts of liquid and solid hydrocarbons raining onto Titan's frigid surface (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 179 degrees Celsius). Campbell explains that radar signals would specularly reflect--or glint- -from liquid surfaces on Titan, similar to sunlight glinting off the ocean. Although Titan's underlying surface is thought to be water ice, the complex chemistry in the upper atmosphere might have resulted in the icy surface being at least partly covered in liquid ethane and methane and solid hydrocarbons, says Campbell. One class of the solid hydrocarbons, often referred to as Titan tholins, was artificially created in a campus laboratory by a team led by the late Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan. Titan, which is about 50 percent larger than the Earth's moon, is the only satellite in the solar system with a dense atmosphere. This atmosphere is transparent to radio/radar waves and partially transparent at short infrared wavelengths but is opaque at visible wavelengths. The observations were made in November and December of both 2001 and 2002. The radar signal takes 2.25 hours to travel to Titan and back. The Arecibo radar operates at a 13-centimeter wavelength (2,380 megahertz), and the transmitted power is close to one megawatt (the equivalent of about 1,000 microwave ovens). Both the Arecibo telescope and the NSF's new 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope were used to receive the extremely weak radar echoes. Next summer, NASA's Cassini spacecraft, launched in 1997, is scheduled to go into orbit around Saturn and its moons for four years. The piggybacking Huygens probe is scheduled to plunge into the hazy Titan atmosphere and land on the moon's surface. On Campbell's team for the Arecibo radar observations of Titan were Gregory Black, the University of Virginia; Lynn Carter, Cornell graduate student; and Steven Ostro, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Arecibo Observatory part of NAIC, which is operated by Cornell University under a cooperative agreement with the NSF. NASA provides partial support for Arecibo's planetary radar program. The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope is part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, an NSF supported institution operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities Inc. Read the original news release at http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Oct03/Titan.Campbell.bpf.html. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article618.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/saturn-titan-03e.html ________________________________________________________________________ MARTIAN CHRONICLES III: FURIOUS PACE By Steve Squyres From Astrobiology Magazine 2 October 2003 Three spacecrafts are now hurtling toward the Red Planet to look for evidence that it might once have been wet enough to sustain life. Orbital projections of where Europe's Mars Express and the two NASA Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) are right now, can be continuously monitored over their half-year journeys. Experiments performed by the MERs will help to determine whether water might have once existed in volume on the red planet. The two Mars Exploration Rovers are targeting what imagery indicates might have been ancient dry lake beds and other geologically interesting sites in early 2004. The Martian Chronicles series gives an inside view of what it takes for scientists to deliver a complex mars mission. The journal entries are from Cornell's Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers' scientific package called Athena. The chronicles begin sequentially from the beginning of July 1999, four years before launch, and will culminate in the dramatic landing of the twin rovers on Mars in January 2004. The expected mission time roaming the red planet is ninety days, from January to April. The chronicles include an insider's view of hardware tests and site selection to problem solving and science planning on the surface of Mars. February 26, 2000 Well, this week was a good one for a change. We still have the problem with the Pancam cable, but all of the other instruments have now passed the electromagnetic cleanliness tests with flying colors. We still don't know when we're going to fly, or on what spacecraft, but the instruments are going to be ready to go when the opportunity arises. March 10, 2000 Well, after lots of thought and analysis, we've decided to take the easy way out of that problem that we found in the Pancam cable a few weeks back. It was a sophisticated cable called a "flexprint", and the elegant solution would have been to correct the design problems, build another one, and make it work. The easy way, though, is just to replace it with conventional cabling... in other words, plain old wires. It'll be a little heavier than the old design, but it's easy, it's cheap, and we know it'll work. And at this stage of a project, sometimes you just go with what you know will work! March 17, 2000 Despite the uncertainty about when we're going to fly, testing goes forward. This week, the focus has been on the Marie Curie rover. It carries our APXS instrument, and this week it has been in "thermal vac" testing, experiencing the temperatures and pressures it'll see on the way to Mars and on the martian surface. We expected this test to go pretty well... after all, Marie Curie is a copy of the Sojourner rover that did so well on Mars Pathfinder. Still, it's always nerve-wracking when you do something like this to a piece of hardware you've worked so hard on. The test isn't over yet, but so far the APXS has behaved like a champ, and we're keeping our fingers crossed. March 24, 2000 We had a great week. There is a lot of news, but the big event for us was the first real full-up test of Pancam. It's together in all its glory now, in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at JPL, and on Thursday and Friday the past week we took our first real panoramic images with it. It's going to take a lot of time to put them together to make a true panorama, but even a quick first look suggests it's going to be really good. March 31, 2000 Well, the event we've been expecting has finally happened... the Mars '01 Lander mission has been cancelled. Even though we expected it, and even though it's the right thing for NASA to do, it still isn't easy to take. We've been working on our hardware for years now, and to have our ride to Mars disappear just twelve months before launch is hard. It sure isn't as hard as what happened to the Mars Polar Lander team, though. Space exploration is an unforgiving business. "One strike and you're out", as Tom Young put it when his committee reported last week on what has been wrong with the Mars program. After everything that has happened, what's best for the nation's space program, and what's best for us, is to wait. Wait a little bit while NASA comes up with a more reliable way to land hardware on Mars. Wait a little bit to take a good hard look at our own work, and to make sure that we've done as good a job as we need to in a one-strike-you're-out business. We think our stuff is about as good as it could possibly be, but another good hard look at everything we've done sure won't hurt. So we'll wait. Right now, we don't even know when we'll fly. With Mars launch opportunities only every 26 months, the summer of 2003 looks like our next reasonable shot at it. NASA has told us to finish up our instruments, and that they'll fly them as soon as they can. So all we can do now is keep pushing. We'll be ready when the time comes. May 6, 2000 This week was devoted to final preparations for the APEX operations tests on May 10-12. The key event was putting the radioactive sources into the Mössbauer spectrometer. In order to work, the Mössbauer has to carry two tiny flecks of cobalt-57... one deep inside the instrument, and one at the business end of the sensor head that shines gamma rays onto the rock or soil we're studying. Bodo Bernhardt came over from Germany and put the sources in late in the week, so now the Mössbauer's all set. A few tweaks to the Mini-TES software Monday and Tuesday, and by Wednesday morning we should be ready to go. May 20, 2000 Things are going at a furious pace now. We have about seven weeks until the big review at which NASA will decide whether or not we'll fly in 2003. We're doing what seems like a thousand things at once: wrapping up work on the instruments, figuring out what changes we'll need to make to fly on this new rover, and working out how we'll use the rover to do the science we need to do. The FIDO rover test that finished up this past week has been a huge help in our planning, since it gave us our first good chance to operate a real rover in a real unknown environment. Now that the test is over, we've been told where it was: in the mountains outside of Ely, Nevada. We learned a lot about the geology of the site with the rover, and a lot more about how to use a rover to do exploration. May 27, 2000 The biggest effort of this past week has been processing all the data that we took during the test of our instruments that we conducted on May 10-12. We've still got a lot more work to do, but the results so far have been pretty spectacular. We'll put a bunch of data up on the site soon, but here's one teaser for now. It's a 360-degree Pancam panorama of the "high bay"--the big room in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at JPL where we did the tests. There are still a few odds and ends we need to fix up in this panorama, including mosaicking the frames together nicely so that the seams don't show. But the main thing to note is the resolution: the actual resolution of this image is ten times what's displayed here. That's ten times as much detail both horizontally and vertically, meaning a hundred times as many pixels as you see in this image. That's a lot of detail! More data, including some full-resolution views, will follow shortly. June 2, 2000 We're continuing to work with the data we collected during the tests we did with the Athena flight instruments last month. Here's the same panorama that we showed last week. It's reduced in resolution by a factor of ten in each direction so that it won't be too enormous to download. In this version, there are some red boxes... click on them to see portions of the panorama at full resolution. The slight speckling you see in some of the images is there because we were running the cameras at high temperatures; that'll be gone at martian temperatures. Now imagine a full martian panorama at this kind of resolution! June 9, 2000 Here's some more data from our tests last month. Click here first to see a Pancam image that shows part of the test facility at JPL, with some rock targets in the foreground. Then click in the red box to see a Mini-TES image of of the scene inside the box. For each and every pixel in that Mini-TES image, we have a complete infrared spectrum that tells us about the composition of the rocks. The image has been color-coded, with different colors representing different minerals: blue is hematite, pink is gypsum, orange is calcite, and so forth. We'll use data like this on Mars to figure out what the rocks are made of from a distance, and to decide which ones to go look at in more detail. By the way, that's a person sitting just to the left of the rock target in the Mini- TES image! June 16, 2000 Here's some more Mini-TES data from our tests last month. Last week we showed a Mini-TES image, color-coded to show the mineralogy of the rocks we were looking at. But Mini-TES produces much more than just images. Each "pixel" of a Mini-TES image is actually a complete, detailed infrared spectrum. Click here to see three examples of what Mini-TES data look like when you check them out in detail. And these are just the spectra for three pixels in the image... every other pixel has just as much information in it too. We can get a good idea of what the rocks around the rover are made of with Mini-TES, which lets us decide which ones to go and investigate in more detail with our other instruments. August 6, 2000 It's hard to imagine news that could be much better than what we've heard in the past week. We're back in business again. After six months of uncertainty about our fate, NASA has now decided to fly the Athena payload to Mars on a big, capable rover. We launch in the summer of 2003, and we land in January of 2004. See last week's press release for more details. So now we're back to work. Several of the instruments we built for the cancelled '01 lander should be ready for this rover: Pancam, Mini-TES, and the Mössbauer are all good to go. But we need to do a new APXS, we have to work out the design details for the our Microscopic Imager, and we have to essentially invent the Rock Abrasion Tool (a.k.a. the RAT) from scratch. And there's more. Not only has NASA decided to fly us, but they may decide to fly two copies of everything... on two rovers! If that happens, the rovers will both be launched in '03, and they'll land on Mars within a few weeks of one another. And, obviously, if that happens we'll have to build more copies of everything. At least we shouldn't have to wait long for this decision... it may come within the next few days. August 13, 2000 Another wild week. On Thursday, NASA announced that they plan to send not one but two rovers to Mars in 2003, both carrying identical copies of the Athena payload. This is great for the science, since it means we'll be able to land the rovers in two very different places, doubling the science without doubling the cost. In the near term, though, it means we have a lot more work to do! We thought we were done building some of our toughest instruments. Not so. Now we have to get started on another Mini-TES, another Pancam, another Mössbauer, and so forth. The experience we gained building the first set should help immensely, and we're hoping to avoid some of the little "adventures" we had the first time around. But it's going to be a long haul. August 27, 2000 This is an incredibly hectic time... which is why it has been two weeks since we've even been able to summarize here what's been going on! We're at the beginning phases of this project now, dealing with what seems like a million details of rover and mission design. The big event coming up in a couple of months is the mission's Preliminary Design Review, or PDR. (We love acronyms in this business.) The PDR is where we have to show that we don't have any show-stoppers in front of us... that there's a clear path from where we are to having a detailed design that will really work. So the big jobs now, before the PDR, are figuring out exactly what the whole rover and payload have to do, and then making the design decisions that will make it possible. Probably the biggest decision of the past two weeks was that we've decided to focus the Microscopic Imager just by moving the rover's arm, rather than putting a complicated little focusing mechanism into the camera. But that's just one decision among very many. We have a long, long way to go... September 3, 2000 Our main focus this past week has been on the two newest pieces of our payload: The Microscopic Imager and the RAT (a.k.a. the Rock Abrasion Tool). The biggest issue lately has been figuring out how to make them work together. The RAT will grind away a circular area of rock, and then we'll use the Microscopic Imager to look at it and see what's inside the rock. The RAT needs to be able grind away an area as big as the MI's field of view. The bigger this is the more we'll see, but if it's too big, the RAT has to be pretty big and heavy to get the job done. After considering everything together, we came out with a RAT that grinds an area 47 millimeters in diameter, and a camera field of view that's 42 millimeters across its diagonal--giving us 5 millimeters of wiggle room in case we can't position the camera as accurately as we'd like. Just one of the hundreds of design decisions we've got to make before we're ready to start building more hardware. September 10, 2000 We're in the part of the project where dozens of important design decisions are made every week. The biggest decision of this past week is that we're probably going to build new Pancams for the 2003 mission, rather than using the ones that we already built for 2001. The 2001 cameras are great, but they require a fair amount of electrical power to keep them warm at night. We're going to be building a whole lot of new cameras that don't require heat anyway--cameras for navigation, and for detecting hazards. And as long as we're building so many, it doesn't take much additional effort to replace the Pancams we have now with new ones that'll work just as well (or even better). In the process we save electrical power, which will mean the mission will last longer. But it feels just a little sad to put aside those cameras that we worked so hard on for 2001. September 16, 2000 One of the big issues we're dealing with right now is filters for all the rovers' cameras. For Pancam, we're pretty much set. Pancam has a filter wheel for each camera, which means that each time we take a Pancam picture we can choose from among eight filters. The filter sets in the wheels are mostly different for each camera, and with two Pancams we get a total of fourteen different filters. That's a lot. We picked a bunch of good filters for Pancam a couple of years ago, and we're going to pretty much stay with them. None of the other cameras have filter wheels, though, so for each of them we have to pick one filter and stick with it. There are actually ten cameras on each rover: Two Pancams, two navigation cameras, four "hazard avoidance" cameras (two in the front and two in the back, to watch out for obstacles), the Microscopic Imager, and a sun camera for navigation. We've got about one more week to pick the filters for all of them, so we'll be doing a lot of work over the next several days to investigate different possible filter choices and, we hope, to pick the best ones. October 7, 2000 Things are happening so fast, and on so many fronts, that it's almost impossible to keep track. Here are just two examples of the dozens of things we've been thinking about this past week. One is where to put the calibration target for Mini-TES. This target is what we look at with Mini-TES to figure out how well the instrument is working. After some thought, we've decided to put it on the back side of the rover's main radio antenna... the one we'll use to talk to Earth. The nice thing about this is that putting target there doesn't take up space on the rover's solar array, which is our only source of electrical power. But the bad thing is that it means that we can't look at the target and talk to Earth at the same time. A second issue is how to protect the APXS from martian dust. We have a dust cover designed... it's a set of doors on the front of the instrument that can open and close. But how to open and close the doors? A separate motor would be complicated, so we want to just use the arm to press the doors against some surface, moving the doors. The new concept, courtesy of Steve Kondos at JPL, is a mechanism like the one in a ball-point pen... one click to open the doors, and another to close them. Clever idea... now all we have to do is design it! Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article615.html. ________________________________________________________________________ "PLAYING WITH THE BIG BOYS"--CHINA READY FOR HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT By Leonard David From Space.com 3 October 2003 China appears ready this month to make a stab at becoming the third nation capable of independent launch of humans into Earth orbit. Chinese space officials remain tight-lipped about details of when the flight of a piloted Shenzhou 5 might occur, who'll be onboard and scope of the overall mission. Meanwhile, rumors abound, seemingly pointing to liftoff of Shenzhou 5 atop a Long March 2F booster sometime between the next few days to two weeks. Sources indicate that the launch vehicle was delivered to China's Jiuquan Space Center on August 25, with the Shenzhou 5 spacecraft subsequently fitted to the booster. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/china_update_031003.html. ________________________________________________________________________ MARTIAN CHRONICLES IV: T-MINUS ZERO? By Steve Squyres From Astrobiology Magazine 4 October 2003 Three spacecrafts are now hurtling toward the Red Planet to look for evidence that it might once have been wet enough to sustain life. Orbital projections of where Europe's Mars Express and the two NASA Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) are right now, can be continuously monitored over their half-year journeys. Experiments performed by the MERs will help to determine whether water might have once existed in volume on the red planet. The two Mars Exploration Rovers are targeting what imagery indicates might have been ancient dry lake beds and other geologically interesting sites in early 2004. The Martian Chronicles series gives an inside view of what it takes for scientists to deliver a complex mars mission. The journal entries are from Cornell's Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers' scientific package called Athena. The chronicles begin sequentially from the beginning of July 1999, four years before launch, and will culminate in the dramatic landing of the twin rovers on Mars in January 2004. The expected mission time roaming the red planet is ninety days, from January to April. The chronicles include an insider's view of hardware tests and site selection to problem solving and science planning on the surface of Mars. October 14, 2000 It's PDR Week... time for the Preliminary Design Review. Everybody on the project has been spending weeks in preparation for this. NASA has put together what sounds like a very high-powered review board to check us out, and we're going to be spending three days showing them what we've got. Just about everything gets reviewed... hardware designs, schedules, budgets, the works. There won't be any time to rest once it's over, but no matter how it comes out it's going to be good to get this one under our belts. October 21, 2000 Well, we survived our Preliminary Design Review. This was a very big deal... there were nearly 250 people there! (Someone was joking that we may have to rent out the Rose Bowl when it's time for the Critical Design Review.) Anyway, it went pretty well. We've got a long way to go, and it's going to be a challenge to get this whole thing to work... especially to land a spacecraft this heavy using the Pathfinder airbag system. But it looks like we'll make it, and there was no question that the science payload is in pretty good shape for this stage of the game. Work has been going on even while the review was happening. The biggest development of the past week is that we have changed the design of the Microscopic Imager optics slightly. This is stuff that's familiar to any photographer: We've decided to "stop down" our lens to get more depth of field. We'll need to take somewhat longer exposures to make it work, but the net result is that this camera should be a lot easier to focus than it would have been with the previous design. November 4, 2000 We've been dealing with lots of odds and ends this week--nothing momentous, just the day-to-day stuff that in the end will determine whether or not this mission will really work. What kind of power converters to use in the Mössbauer spectrometer? How to make sure that the interior of the Mini-TES stays nice and dry in the humid Florida summer when it's time to launch? How far apart should the Pancam cameras be spaced? What kind of material to use in the RAT grinding wheels? With the Preliminary Design Review behind us now, it's now time to get all these issues settled. And it's going to be time to start building hardware again before too long... November 11, 2000 We've made an important change to the RAT... our Rock Abrasion Tool. The RAT uses a set of grinding wheels to work its way into martian rocks, exposing subsurface materials for the instruments to look at. The old design had a spike down the center to hold the RAT in place while the grinding wheels did their work. This was fine, but it left a small "island" of unabraded rock still standing after the RAT was done. Tom Myrick at Honeybee Robotics finally came up with a solution to this problem this week: a ring around the outside of the RAT instead, with a built-in pivot that allows it to adjust to the shape of the rock. With this change, the island is gone, and the instruments should see a smooth, flat surface of fresh rock each time the RAT has finished its work. November 18, 2000 The big issue this week has been how we're going to provide power to our two German instruments--the APXS and the Mössbauer Spectrometer. The rover solar arrays provide power at about 28 volts, but these instruments need other voltages: 6 volts for the Mössbauer, 5 and 12 volts for the APXS. So we have to convert from what the rover provides to what we need. Converting voltages isn't particularly hard for most kinds of electronics, but we have to use something that will work reliably in the radiation environment of space, and that will use power as efficiently as possible... we don't have much power to spare! After working on this for weeks, it looks like we're finally on the track of something that will work. December 2, 2000 We're making real progress with the RAT--our Rock Abrasion Tool. Honeybee Robotics (where the RAT is being built) is in Manhattan, and a few weeks ago a bunch of the guys from Honeybee piled into a pickup truck, drove to New Jersey, and dug up a few hundred pounds of Palisades basalt. This is very tough rock... as tough as anything we expect to find on Mars. We've now got an early version of the RAT working, and it can grind very nicely into this stuff. The next version of the RAT will be even nicer, and will get rid of that little "island" of rock. December 9, 2000 The big issue this week has been what's called the "purge" for the Mini- TES instrument. Mini-TES is a great piece of hardware, but it's got some touchy components. One of the ones we have to worry about most is deep inside the instrument... a piece of optics called a beamsplitter. What it does is pretty simple, but it's made out of a very special material called potassium bromide. Potassium bromide is great stuff, but it has one very nasty characteristic: if it ever gets exposed to too much humidity, it turns cloudy and is ruined forever. That's not a big deal in the laboratory or on Mars, but it's a major problem at launch... the launch site in Florida is in the middle of a swamp! So we're wrestling with the best way to make sure it'll stay nice and dry while we're waiting to light the rocket off. Sending a steady "purge" of dry nitrogen gas through the instrument is the way to go. But do we take the easy way out and turn the purge off hours before launch? Or do we do it the hard way and try to keep the purge going right up to T-minus-zero? We're still working on this one... December 16, 2000 The big deal this week has been radiation. One of our instruments, the Mössbauer Spectrometer, has a little bit of radioactive cobalt-57 in it. The radiation output is small, but it turns out that it may be enough that we need to worry about what it could do to some of our other instruments. The Microscopic Imager sits very close to the Mössbauer, and it has some electronic components in it that don't like radiation much. We've now measured how much radiation the Mössbauer produces, and the next step is going to be to figure out exactly where the Mössbauer will sit with respect to the Microscopic Imager. If it ends up so close that the MI doesn't like it, we'll wrap a little shielding around the Mössbauer to keep the MI safe from the radiation. December 30, 2000 It's been a quiet week for a change! Work doesn't stop completely over the holidays, but things have slowed down a good deal. It's the calm before the storm. January is wall-to-wall with design reviews. Highlights over the next few weeks include preliminary design reviews (we call 'em PDRs) for the RAT and the instrument arm, along with what's called the "delta" PDR for the whole MER project... a review where we'll clean up the issues that were left open after the big project PDR we had back in October. Another thing coming up soon is our first landing site workshop, where several dozen Mars scientists will get together to start to narrow down the many possibilities for where we'll land. So we're kicking off this century about like we ended the last one... in high gear. January 6, 2001 Things are back in full swing after the holidays. There's been a lot happening this past week. Perhaps the most significant thing is that we've now got a good idea how much radiation the radioactive material in the Mössbauer Spectrometer will produce, and how much damage the radiation might do to some of the cameras on the rover, including the Microscopic Imager. The answer, unfortunately, isn't simple. The amount is not so tiny that we can ignore it, nor is it so great that we clearly have to fix it. It's in that uncomfortable in-between zone, where we still don't know for sure if we need to do something in the design to account for it. So there's still more work to be done. January 13, 2001 It was a very busy week, with two big events. The first was the Preliminary Design Review for the RAT. The review turned up the usual number of little technical issues, but no major problems. Our next step will be to build the "brassboard" RAT, which is a preliminary version that will look and work very much like the flight units. The second big event of the week was a workshop where we invited in a number of the world's leading sleep researchers to meet with some of the team. The martian day is about 24.6 hours long--a little bit longer than the Earth's 24 hours. During operations, the whole flight team is going to have to live on Mars time, not Earth time, and if we're not careful it's going to wreak havoc with people's schedules. The sleep researchers gave us lots of good advice on how to adapt to that kind of crazy work schedule for months on end. From the sound if it, it's going to be an interesting experience! January 20, 2001 A big issue for us this week has been dust... or more specifically, how to protect the APXS instrument from dust. The APXS has some pretty sensitive parts in it, particularly the detectors that we'll use to figure out what martian rocks are made of. If those detectors get too dirty then they won't work... and Mars is a pretty dirty place. Our plan has been to have some protective doors over the instrument that will open when we want to use it, and close to protect it from dust when we don't. But how to open and close the doors? We thought about a motor, but motors tend to be heavy and also would require more wires running up the instrument arm. So instead, it looks like we're going to design a little gizmo that's sort of like the clicker on a ballpoint pen. Use the arm to press the instrument once against a hard surface and click, the door will pop open. Make the measurement and then press it again and click, the door pops closed again. The hard surface can be someplace on the rover, or it can be a martian rock. This way we'll get the dust protection we need, but we'll avoid new wires and motors. January 27, 2001 The big event of this past week was the Mars landing site workshop at NASA's Ames Research Center. Nearly a hundred people came to this workshop to help select landing sites for our two rovers. At the beginning of the workshop there were 185 candidate sites. By the end, nine highest-priority sites had been chosen, along with a number of others. Among the nine are some fantastic places: sites with weird minerals on the surface, sites with old sediments that may have been laid down in ancient lakes, sites inside the biggest canyon in the solar system. The next step is going to be for the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft to spend several months taking high-resolution pictures of all the top sites. Then we'll see what we see. February 3, 2001 With the landing site work done for now, the focus is back on hardware issues this week. One of the things we're dealing with now is what's called "contact sensing". Two of our instruments, Pancam and Mini-TES, will look at Mars from atop a mast on each rover. They don't need to actually touch the rocks and soils that they're looking at. The other four pieces of the payload, though, need to touch the surface, which is why they're all on the end of an arm. But how do you tell when they're actually in contact with the surface? Taking pictures would do it, of course, but that would mean taking the time to transmit the pictures to Earth and look at them, which we don't want to do. Instead, we're equipping each instrument with contact sensors--little switches that close when the instrument gets pressed against a rock, telling the rover that the instrument is where it needs to be. Of course, it's not quite that simple. Each instrument is different, so the kinds of contact sensors tend to be different too. And we don't know how strong some of our targets will be... you might press an instrument against a target, only to find that it's very soft, fluffy soil, so that the switch doesn't close. But we seem to be making good progress. As of this week, we've got all of the contact sensors figured out except for the one for the Microscopic Imager. February 10, 2001 We've been starting to think hard lately about what's called "fault protection". This is basically the business of making sure you don't break a very expensive piece of equipment once you get it to Mars! A good example of what we've been working on is Mini-TES. It's a great instrument, but if you accidentally point it straight at the Sun you could be in big trouble. Mini-TES isn't built to handle that much heat and light, and if we stare right at the Sun for too long with it we could damage it, maybe permanently. So we have to make the rover smart enough not to accidentally point Mini-TES at the Sun. We know how to do this. The rover has a special camera for figuring out where the Sun is, and the onboard computer uses this information to keep Mini-TES safe. But it's one more thing to worry about on a very complicated machine. February 17, 2001 With the recent round of reviews now behind us, we're starting to turn our attention to the business of practicing rover operations. This spring we're planning to do three tests with JPL's FIDO rover. There will be a couple of two-day tests in the JPL "Mars Yard" in late March and mid-April. The Mars Yard is an outdoor facility at JPL that looks enough like Mars that it's a good place to take a rover for a spin. Then, at the beginning of May, we're going to do a 10-day field test. We don't know where the field site is--or at least most of us don't. It'll be a "blind" test, where the location is unknown to the operations team. We do it this way so that we'll be almost as ignorant about the landing site as we'll be with the real rovers once they land on Mars. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article619.html. ________________________________________________________________________ CHINA AIMS TO TOUCH THE MOON From Agence France-Presse and SpaceDaily 5 October 2003 China's space ambitions will not stop at just sending a person into space; the country plans to send astronauts to the moon, a top national defense official was quoted by Chinese media saying Sunday. "China will become the third country in the world to launch manned space flight. In the past, China's 'Shenzhou' (unmanned) spaceships have successfully gone into space to orbit the earth," Wang Shuquan, deputy secretary of the Commission for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence, was quoted as saying. "China will still continue to develop its space exploration plans. At a future time, China will carry out lunar landing and flight experiments." Wang was quoted by the semi-official China News service on its web site. Read the full article at http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/031005105418.jgzbov0p.html. ________________________________________________________________________ THE DRAKE EQUATION REVISITED, PART II: OUR LONELY GALAXY By Peter Ward From Astrobiology Magazine 6 October 2003 The Drake equation was developed as a means of predicting the likelihood of detecting other intelligent civilizations in our galaxy. At the forum, Frank Drake, who formulated the equation 42 years ago, moderated a debate between Peter Ward and David Grinspoon. Peter Ward is a paleontologist and professor in the department of Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington. He is the co- author, with Donald Brownlee, of two books, Rare Earth and The Life and Death of Planet Earth. In this installment of the series, Dr. Ward talks about why he thinks humanity is unlikely ever to make contact with or detect communications from other intelligent species in our galaxy. In part I of this series, Frank Drake discussed the history and content of the Drake equation. Subsequent parts will include the comments made by David Grinspoon and the question-and-answer period that followed the opening remarks. Peter Ward: Well the first thing that you should find striking about us sitting at this stage is not that David is here, because he's a planetary scientist, but that the person in the middle, me, is a paleontologist. And I think it says an awful lot about the evolution of astrobiology as a field that someone who studies the fossil record should be sharing the stage at all with Frank Drake. If someone told me even six or seven years ago that this would be happening, I'd have laughed. And maybe I still should laugh. I wrote the book Rare Earth because I began to think that maybe paleontology did have something to say. Luckily for me, I dragooned my friend Don Brownlee, who knows an awful lot about astronomy, to help me not make the more egregious mistakes, although many did creep in. The first conference I went to was a science-fiction convention, and the book had been out about a month. And I got on the stage, and my moderator--I was in a room full of people in wookie costumes and alien costumes, and they're all there--and I was introduced and the round of booing was unbelievable. Because I was the person that was there to take their aliens away from them. And I was lucky to escape with my life. Well, my sense is that we really should rename SETI, "SETL," the search for extraterrestrial life. And the reason I say that is that I think that even if we never do find intelligence out there, we would all settle for finding an alien, even if it were a bacteria. Because in our lifetime this would be simply stated, the greatest discovery of all time. Simply put, we'd like to know, is other life Earth-like? Does it have DNA or a DNA equivalent? Or is something radically different? And one of the greatest questions we have to face is what types of life are permitted by chemistry. If we assume that chemistry and physics are the same throughout the known Universe, chemistry and physics have rigorous rules that life will have to follow. Will life that is not Earth-like be more fragile or more durable? Because Earth-like life is very fragile, and seemingly, the more complex it gets, the more fragile it becomes. A bacterium can withstand temperatures from below freezing to well above boiling. But I say that any of you put into below freezing to above boiling for a very long time at all, will be turned into very different states of matter, none of which are thinking for very long. We complex beings can inhabit a very narrow range. Secondly, it takes us a long time to evolve. So we need, then, conditions that are narrow for long periods of time. And therein lies the problem. The second aspect that we tried to bring into Rare Earth is that all parts of the galaxy are not the same. Just as you live in neighborhoods--some are good and some are bad--we believe that the entire galaxy as a whole can be looked at as neighborhoods. People always say: the galaxy has 400 billion stars. The numbers are so huge; surely we can find all types of life out there. But are all 400 billion stars in real estate portions of the galaxy that will allow life to exist for long periods of time? And our thoughts are that perhaps many of the stars in the centers of galaxies live in very hostile neighborhoods. Hostile because life, being fragile, can find itself succumbing to catastrophe. And this is where paleontology enters. Our Earth has seen major catastrophes over the last 500 million years. Five of these have wiped out over half the species. One of these [destroyed] over 90 percent of the species. Now this comes close to annihilation of even the least- complex life forms, when you kill 90 percent. If you simply up the ante of whatever the conditions were, you can conceive of killing every animal and plant on the planet. Well, surely that catastrophe has befallen other planets. And where in galaxies do those neighborhoods exist where you can die out? What are the times between catastrophes? How long can you have a planet that allows it to be the crèche that allows the evolution of life, first of all, and secondly the evolution of complex life? Our ignorance is so daunting. And perhaps the most ignorant part of it is in the biology. We're doing much better in astronomy, because we're discovering planets. But I ask you this question. If we replay the tape of Earth--let's start out with the cosmic gas, the nebula that eventually produced our solar system; let's redo it 100 times--do we get life on this planet all 100 times? Do we get it once? Or do we get it some number in between? And there is no-one in this room, no-one on this planet that can give us even a close estimate. I hear over and over, and I've stated it myself: life must be easy to make, because we got it on Earth almost as soon as it could have evolved. Where's the science behind that? Those who are attempting to produce life in a test tube are getting nowhere. We are much more realistic in understanding the physical environments than the biological environments. And finally, intelligence. How often does intelligence arise? As a paleontologist, I can tell you there've been a lot of species on this planet in the past. There are easily 10 million species on the planet today. The average species of mammal lasts 5 million years. Clams last 10 million. But 10 million years is a good long time for a species. If there's 10 million species on the planet now, and there's been 500 million years of evolution to play with, we can run up to hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion species on planet Earth. And out of perhaps 500 million species, one has been able to build a radio telescope, the definition of intelligence that radio astronomers give us. Now are we saying that Earth life is particularly bad and stupid, that it doesn't produce more intelligent species than one in 500 million, and in over 500 million years of animals we get but one set of intelligence? We have but one planet to play with and one set of numbers. My own sense is there are indeed other intelligent species in our galaxy. How many there are is what we're all here to debate. The numbers are so huge. But it wouldn't surprise me in the least if, a thousand years in the future, after much looking, we've never heard from anybody. Because the number may be so small, the distances so vast, that we just never get to run into them. I would much greater put my bets on a bacterium than I would on an ewok. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article621.html. ________________________________________________________________________ VOLUNTEERS NEEDED FOR MARS DESERT AND FLASHLINE STATION CREWS: HARD WORK, NO PAY, ETERNAL GLORY Mars Society release 6 October 2003 The Mars Society is requesting volunteers to participate as members of the crew of the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) and Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS) during extended simulations of human Mars exploration operations in the Utah desert (Nov 2003-April 2004) and on Devon Island (summer 2004). Volunteers should state what segments of this span they are available. MDRS crew rotations are generally 2 weeks in duration, the FMARS season will consist of a single 4-week crew. Those wishing to serve in FMARS are encouraged to also apply to MDRS, as FMARS selection is extremely competitive and prior MDRS service is considered a strong plus in the crew selection process. Both volunteer investigators who bring with them a proposed program of research of their own compatible with the objectives of MDRS or Flashline Station and those simply wishing to participate as members of the crew supporting the investigations of others will be considered. Applications will be considered from anyone in good physical condition between 18 and 60 years of age without regard to race, creed, color, gender, or nation. Scientific, engineering, practical mechanical, wilderness, and literary skills are all considered a plus. Dedication to the cause of human Mars exploration is an absolute must, as conditions are likely to be tough and the job will be very trying. Those selected will be required to act under crew discipline and strict mission protocols during the desert or Arctic simulation. Crew members traveling to Utah will be expected to pay their own way to Salt Lake City. FMARS crew members will pay their own travel expenses to Resolute Bay. The Mars Society will field expenses during the simulation in the Desert or the Arctic. There will be no salary. Applications including resume, character references, and a brief letter explaining why you wish to participate should be sent to Volunteers, Mars Society, PO Box 273, Indian Hills, CO 80454 no later than October 31, 2003 (for MDRS) or January 31, 2004 (for FMARS). Total length of applications should not exceed 3 pages. Please include 3 copies. For further information about the Mars Society, visit our web site at www.marssociety.org. ________________________________________________________________________ NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/astrobiology.html 7 October 2003 Astrobiology and planetary engineering articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles1.html S. Shostak, 2003. Galileo's spyglass. Astrobiology Magazine. Terrestrial extreme environments articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles2.html R. Koczor and T. Phillips, 2003. The Goldilocks zone. NASA Science News. NASA Ames Research Center, 2003. Red River drills for Mars. Astrobiology Magazine. Human space exploration articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles3.html Agence France-Presse, 2003. China aims to touch the moon: top national defense official. SpaceDaily. L. David, 2003. "Playing with the big boys"--China ready for human spaceflight. Space.com. SETI articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles4.html P. Ward, 2003. The Drake equation revisited, part II: our lonely galaxy. Astrobiology Magazine. Evolution (biological, chemical and cosmological) articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles5.html L. Mullen, 2003. Archaen sunscreen. Astrobiology Magazine. Extrasolar planets articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles7.html D. Richards, 2003. Antarctic astronomy: exoplanet hunt moves way down under. Space.com. ________________________________________________________________________ CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS NASA/JPL release 30 September - 1 October 2003 The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Madrid tracking station on Wednesday, October 1. 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 High Frequency Receiver calibration and execution of Trajectory Correction Maneuver (TCM) 19b. The maneuver executed normally on October 1, 2003. This TCM was an in-flight verification of the energy burn cutoff algorithm and the yaw steering that will be used for Saturn Orbit Insertion. The main engine burn duration was 21.8 seconds, with a burn magnitude of 2.015 meters/second. Alcatel Space Systems hosted the fifth Huygens progress meeting in Cannes. A number of technical issues regarding the Huygens mission were discussed. The most important outcome of the meeting was the decision to baseline the pre-heating option. The purpose of pre-heating is to warm the data system circuitry to further reduce the doppler effect which has troubled the link performance. Pre-heating is accomplished by powering the probe four hours prior to entry at Titan. All analyses show that there are sufficient power reserves and that the mission is completely robust to this option. Science Planning hosted a kick-off meeting for Science Operations Plan implementation of the S05 and S06 tour sequences, and a post process wrap-up meeting for sequences S03 and S04. Preliminary and official port 1 deliveries were completed as part of the cruise C43 science planning team process. Uplink Operations presented the current plan and timeline for the Science and Sequence Update Process at this week's Cassini Design Team meeting. A number of modifications and lessons learned identified through the August Verification and Validation activity have been incorporated. System Engineering attended a workshop sponsored by Deep Space Mission Systems and Consolidated Space Operations Contract (CSOC) to redesign the current DSN allocation process. The implementation will occur between now and the end of the calendar year. The current CSOC contract expires in December. The Outreach Team gave two talks at Polytechnic High School in Long Beach, California to 250 high school students, and supported the Los Angeles County Fair. Science results from the Cassini Radio Science Team were published this week in Nature. The article "A test of general relativity using radio links with the Cassini spacecraft" may be accessed at http://www.nature.com/cgitaf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v425/n695 6/full/nature01997_fs.html A more general overview may be viewed at http://physicsweb.org/article/news/7/9/14 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 GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 25 September - 1 October 2003 The following new images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are now available. Dusty Troughs (Released 25 September 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/09/25/index.html Polar Sand Dunes (Released 26 September 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/09/26/index.html Pits and Layers (Released 27 September 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/09/27/index.html South Polar Mesas (Released 28 September 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/09/28/index.html Small Syrian Volcano (Released 29 September 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/09/29/index.html 10,232 New MOC Images From August 2002 through February 2003 Released (Released 30 September 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/09/03/index.html Olympica Fossae (Released 01 October 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/01/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 29 September - 3 October 2003 Lava Flows near Pavonis Mons (Released 29 September 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20030929a.html Martian Tracery (Released 30 September 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20030930a.html Craters Modified by Ice (Released 2 October 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20031002a.html Mars in Color (Released 3 October 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20031003a.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. ________________________________________________________________________ NOZOMI'S SWINGBY AND ITS BASIC PRINCIPLE JAXA release 1 October 2003 On June 19, the Mars explorer NOZOMI came close to Earth at a distance of approximately 11,000 km and implemented the earth swingby. This means that the "2nd swingby" in the NOZOMI's new orbit (see Fig. 1) was accomplished and, accordingly, we succeeded in putting NOZOMI into the orbit that enables to arrive at Mars in mid-December of this year. [Image - Figure 1] The technology called "swingby" has been often used for solar system explorers such as Voyager and Galileo. The purpose of this article is to give an explanation to answer the question, "What really is a swingby", that readers must have. I am not an orbital design specialist, so, conversely taking advantage of my non-expertise, I try to explain as plainly as possible. [Image--Figure 2] Usually, making change of spacecraft's direction or velocity in space requires much onboard propellant. The swingby is a technology to enable a large change of spacecraft's orbit by making use of gravity of celestial bodies such as Earth without consuming propellant. Gravity of a celestial body is in proportion to its mass and in inverse proportion to square of distance from it. A spacecraft cruising through interplanetary space in the solar system is under the influence of the gravity of Sun, the biggest celestial body in the system. But, when the spacecraft comes very close to a planet (or its satellite), gravity of the planet exceeds that of the Sun. The spacecraft, which is naturally tries to fly straight near by the planet, is pulled by the force of the planet and, accordingly, its orbit is curved. When the spacecraft passes through the planet's gravitational field, its trajectory describes a hyperbolic curve centering the planet (see Fig. 2 (a)). Relative velocity of the spacecraft to the planet is the same at both entering into its gravitational field and escaping from it. However, since the planet goes around the sun, velocity of the spacecraft to the absolute coordinate system is changed. In the case that the spacecraft passes by the opposite face of the direction of the planet's revolution, it is accelerated (see Fig. 2 (b)). In the case that the spacecraft passes by the face of the direction of the planet's revolution, it is slowed down (see Fig. 2 (c)). To conduct a swingby, precise orbital control in advance is essential. In preparation for the swingby in June, the position of NOZOMI was accurately determined by operations prioritizing ranging and VLBI, and its orbit was precisely adjusted. Following the orbital determination efforts conducted for one week after the swingby, we could confirm that NOZOMI entered into the planned orbit. Read the original news release at http://www.isas.ac.jp/e/snews/2003/08_01.shtml. ________________________________________________________________________ STARDUST STATUS REPORT NASA/JPL release 3 October 2003 The Stardust team had one period of communications 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. Although the spacecraft remains in a solar conjunction phase, commands were sent to the spacecraft to determine the spacecraft communications capability in this environment. Remarkably, the spacecraft received 4 of the 5 commands. Normal commanding will begin on October 7 when the spacecraft is 3 degrees from the sun, ending the solar conjunction phase. On October 8, 2003 Stardust's Principal Investigator, Don Brownlee, NASA, Lockheed Martin Astronautics and JPL management will review Stardust's flight plan for encounter flyby. 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 40.