Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 10, Number 41, 14 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) METAL IN THE MEADOW By Dave DeBoer 2) BOINC AT HOME By Amir Alexander 3) NASA ACCEPTING PROPOSALS FOR STUDENT EXPERIMENTS NASA release 03-322 4) MARTIAN CHRONICLES V: CUTTING METAL By Steve Squyres 5) ON THE EDGE: IS ANYBODY OUT THERE? By Diane Stresing 6) HABITABILITY: BETTING ON 37 GEM From Astrobiology Magazine 7) ROCKS COULD REVEAL SECRETS OF LIFE ON EARTH AND MARS By Kate Groves 8) ENTHUSIASM FOR MANNED CHINESE SPACE MISSION GROWS AS LAUNCH WINDOW IS FIRMED By Leonard David 9) CHINA CONFIRMS OCTOBER SPACE DATE From CNN 10) MARTIAN CREATURES TO "COME TO LIFE" IN NASA STUDENT CHALLENGE NASA/ARC release 03-79AR 11) MARTIAN CHRONICLES VI: GOOD PROBLEMS By Steve Squyres 12) MARTIAN CHRONICLES VII: BETTER IS THE ENEMY By Steve Squyres 13) THE PROBLEMS IN THINKING ABOUT HUMANS AND SPACE By Mathew Faulk 14) THE DRAKE EQUATION REVISITED, PART III: CAUSE FOR OPTIMISM By David Grinspoon 15) UC SCIENTISTS DISCOVER PLANT GENE THAT PROMOTES PRODUCTION OF OZONE-DESTROYING METHYL HALIDES University of California, San Diego release 16) NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas 17) CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS NASA/JPL release 18) MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 19) MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release 20) STARDUST STATUS REPORT NASA/JPL release ________________________________________________________________________ METAL IN THE MEADOW By Dave DeBoer From Astrobiology Magazine 7 October 2003 Despite the beautiful landscape and the shining dishes of the millimeter-wave radio telescope at Hat Creek, the scene is rather unremarkable--a drilling rig in a sage-covered field. It could be drilling a new water-well for the local rancher or an exploratory oil well for a transnational company. In fact, the rig's rhythmic pounding and the rising plume of dust signify the first moments of construction of the Allen Telescope Array. The Allen Telescope Array will consist of 350 individual 20-foot antennas linked to form the equivalent of a single large antenna. When fully operational in 2005, the Allen Telescope Array will have more collecting area than the newly completed Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, and better resolution than the venerable Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico that has been so important to the SETI Institute. This innovative new telescope--a joint project between the SETI Institute and the University of California Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Lab (RAL)--is funded through prototype construction by visionary philanthropists Paul G. Allen and Nathan P. Myhrvold. The Allen Telescope Array will be the "new kid in town" at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in northern California, where the University of California currently operates an array called BIMA (Berkeley-Illinois- Maryland Array) that observes at millimeter-wavelengths. Because BIMA will perform better at a higher elevation site, it will migrate south in the next few years to mate with an array operated by Caltech, leaving the Allen Telescope Array alone in the lava and sage-covered valley just north of Mount Lassen National Park. The development of the Allen Telescope Array is marked by many innovations crafted with the express purpose of building a world-class state-of-the-art astronomical facility at a fraction of the price of existing radio telescopes. Some examples of these innovations are: the gangly offset Gregorian optics; the ultra-precise 20-foot primary antenna surface, made by a novel process that rapidly forms a single flat piece of aluminum into the required shape; an intriguing wide-band microwave "feed" and receiver, that collects all of the energy transported via radio waves from the far reaches of the universe so they may be amplified and examined by scientists; miniature refrigerators (housed inside the feed itself) that use sound waves to chill down the amplifiers to -315°F, preventing the thermal rattling of the electrons in the wires from adding its local roar to the quiet whisper of the received distant signal; analog fiber-optic links that allow us to cheaply bring back the entire band of frequencies at which we can operate for processing, allowing different astronomers to examine the universe at separate frequencies simultaneously. Although the physical structure of the Allen Telescope Array is dominated by the "metal in the meadow" described above, what truly makes it distinctive is that it will be one of the first digital radio telescopes to allow astronomers to look at completely different frequencies at the same time, and to observe completely different parts of the sky concurrently. This means that the Allen Telescope Array is not just one instrument, but in effect, many. The capability allowed by this flexibility makes the partnership between the SETI Institute and the Radio Astronomy Lab particularly beneficial; while the RAL embarks on its ambitious observing programs of astronomical sources, the SETI Institute will concurrently use the full extent of the array to search our galactic neighborhood for that quiet tone with its thunderous implications. The Allen Telescope Array allows everyone to not only get their cake and eat it too, but also to pick out their favorite flavors and toppings as well. In fact, each person gets the whole cake and not just a small, unsatisfying sliver. And finding the distant whine from a galactic neighbor would certainly be a very nice cherry on top. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article623.html. ________________________________________________________________________ BOINC AT HOME By Amir Alexander From The Planetary Society and Astrobiology Magazine 7 October 2003 BOINC--the "Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing"--is moving through its development phases, and a new version of SETI@home is being tested right along with it. BOINC is the system being developed by SETI@home project director David Anderson and his team to spread the credo of distributed computing to fields beyond SETI. BOINC will make it possible for researchers in areas as diverse as molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics to tap into the enormous but under- utilized calculating power of personal computers world-wide. The remarkable success of SETI@home, which quickly became the most powerful computing network ever assembled, made it clear that distributed computing could be used for many other computing-intensive scientific projects. The most powerful computer, IBM's ASCI White, is rated at 12 TeraFLOPS and costs $110 million. SETI@home currently gets about 15 TeraFLOPs and has cost $500K so far. Why BOINC? In principle, scientists do not necessarily have to wait around for BOINC to be completed in order to make use of distributed computing in their research. They could launch their own distributed computing programs, and some indeed have done so. folding@home and climateprediction.net are only two of the better known projects, dedicated to research in the fields of molecular biology and climatology respectively. Folding@home is a distributed computing project that so far has enlisted the aid of more than 200,000 PC owners, whose screensavers are dedicated to simulating the protein-folding process. Simulating protein folding is often considered a "holy grail" of computational biology, Vijay S. Pande, the folding project scientist added. "This is an area of hot competition that includes a number of heavyweights, such as IBM's $100 million, million-processor Blue Gene supercomputer project." But launching an independent distributed computing project is a complex and labor-intensive task even for professional computer scientists. For researchers in other fields it is a daunting undertaking, which would take precious time and resources away from the main focus their of research. They will, in most cases, avoid it. BOINC will change all that. With BOINC, the basic distributed computing infrastructure will be available to any scientific group that wishes to make use of this remarkable new technique. With relatively small changes, the basic BOINC format could be used to research anything from long term evolutionary changes to the search for gravity waves. Furthermore, BOINC will bring to these different projects an inestimable resource without which no distributed computing project can proceed--a large pool of PC users, willing to put their computers' calculating power in the service of science. Currently BOINC is in its "Beta testing" phase, meaning that it is being tested by a limited number of users who are running the program on their computers. Within the next two months David Anderson and his team hope to expand this select group of volunteers from several hundred to around ten thousand. For several months now, the Beta testers have been running a BOINC-based program known as "astropulse." This program searches the masses of data collected by the SETI@home receiver at Arecibo for brief but powerful electromagnetic bursts, signifying the collapse of black holes. In the past few weeks astropulse was joined on the volunteers' computers by an experimental BOINC-based version of SETI@home itself. In the long term, the current SETI@home platform will be phased out for all users and replaced by the new BOINC version. The new SETI@home What will the new SETI@home be like? In most respects it will not be very different from the current version, but it will allow for greater flexibility for both the SETI@home scientists and for the millions of users around the world who run the program on their computers. Most notably, the current SETI@home program is designed to analyze only data that fits the parameters of the equipment currently used at Arecibo. For example, the program only looks for Gaussians that last around 12 seconds, because that happens to be the time it takes the Arecibo beam to scan any given point in the sky. Similarly, it can only analyze data from a 2 bit recorder, because that happens to be the type of instrument currently used to record data at Arecibo, and so on. Any data that deviates from these strict parameters simply cannot be processed. As a result, the current SETI@home program can never be used to analyze data collected at any location other than Arecibo, or using instruments other than those currently in place. This can be a problem. It could, for instance become a serious hurdle if and when SETI@home follows up on its plans to collect data at Australia's Parkes observatory, because the parameters and instruments on the Australian radio telescopes are very different from those at Arecibo. To analyze this data, SETI@home users would have to download a completely new version of the program, tailored specifically for the Parkes observatory. Once they did so, they could no longer process the old-style data originating at Arecibo. Even now, when Arecibo is the sole source of SETI@home observations, the inflexibility of the program can cause problems. This became clear following the Stellar Countdown session at Arecibo last March, when in addition to SETI@home's standard 2 bit recorder, Chief Scientist Dan Werthimer's team employed a highly sensitive 8 bit recorder as well. The analysis of the 2 bit recordings was completed quickly, by sending ordinary work units to users around the world. The 8 bit recordings, however, are still unanalyzed because they cannot be processed by the standard SETI@home program, installed on users computers. This will soon change, says David Anderson. In the new BOINC-based SETI@home parameters such as a radio telescope's beam-width or a recorder's level of sensitivity will not be "hard wired" into the program. Instead, they will be part of the information provided with every work unit. A standard work unit from Arecibo will instruct the program that the data was recorded at a 2 bit sensitivity, and that the telescope's beam-width--and therefore a Gaussian's duration--is 12 seconds. A work unit originating at Parkes, or recorded at a higher resolution, will carry with it different parameters and the SETI@home program will adjust itself accordingly. SETI@home and BOINC are gradually converging, and the benefits for both are substantial. While SETI@home enjoys the increased flexibility of the BOINC platform, it brings to BOINC something of inestimable value to a distributed computing project: millions of SETI@home users, willing to use their computers' processing power for the advancement of scientific research. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article624.html. ________________________________________________________________________ NASA ACCEPTING PROPOSALS FOR STUDENT EXPERIMENTS NASA release 03-322 7 October 2003 NASA's Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program is accepting proposals from undergraduate teams across the country to fly their experiments on a unique agency airplane. Since its inception in 1995, the program has offered the unique venue of NASA's specially equipped KC-135 airplane to student researchers. Participation in the program will enable students to learn how scientific research conducted in micro- gravity differs from research conducted on Earth. Students also will have the opportunity to explore how the human body reacts to weightlessness. Students, the next generation of explorers, scientists and engineers, will have the chance to float free and perform experiments in an environment usually reserved for space travelers. The four-engine KC-135, a modified version of the standard U.S. Air Force tanker, is similar to the Boeing 707. Weightlessness is achieved by flying the plane in carefully choreographed maneuvers: climb at a 45- degree angle, "over the top" and then down at 45 degrees. The maneuver creates a weightless free-fall environment that lasts about 25 seconds. Each flight incorporates 30 of these parabola-shaped sequences. The program provides a unique academic experience for students to successfully propose, design, fabricate, fly and evaluate a reduced gravity experiment of their choice over the course of a school year. The overall experience includes scientific research, hands-on experimental design, test operations and educational/public outreach activities. The deadline for applications is October 20. For information about the Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program on the Internet, visit http://microgravityuniversity.jsc.nasa.gov. For information about NASA's Education programs on the Internet, visit http://education.nasa.gov. For information about NASA on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov. Contacts: Gretchen Cook-Anderson NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-0836 Julie Burt NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX Phone: 281-483-5111 ________________________________________________________________________ MARTIAN CHRONICLES V: CUTTING METAL By Steve Squyres From Astrobiology Magazine 9 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 24, 2001 The guys at Honeybee Robotics have been making a lot of progress lately on the Rock Abrasion tool, also known as the RAT. The RAT is the one really new invention on our payload for 2003, so we're devoting a lot of attention to making sure we get it right. We held a Preliminary Design Review for it several weeks ago, the result of which was a thumbs-up to go forward with the detailed design work. The mechanical design of the RAT is pretty far along now, and much of the focus this past week has been on the electronics that go with it. This thing has a lot of wires, and we're building a full-scale mockup of it to help us figure out exactly where to run them all. We're also testing what are called "breadboard" electronics--electronics that do the same things that the final version will, but that are built so that they're easy to take apart and change while we're still figuring out how to get it all to work. March 3, 2001 We made a really major change this week: We added a dust cover to the Microscopic Imager. That may not sound like a big deal, but at this stage of the game, it is. The reason we did it, obviously, is that Mars is a very dusty place, and we were worried that at some point we might accidentally push the microscopic imager into the dirt. The reason it's a big deal is that it adds more complexity to an already complex system: another motor, more wires, the mass of the cover, the software to make it all work, the testing to prove that it works, and so forth. But it was the right thing to do, and now we feel comfortable that we'll be able to keep that lens as clean as we need it to be. March 10, 2001 We had a very good week... one of those weeks where you make progress on a dozen different things at once. We've now got a design for the door that will protect the APXS from dust. We've almost got the design worked out for the "contact sensor" that will tell us when the Mössbauer Spectrometer has touched a target. The new Pancam electronics are coming together. And we seem to have finally decided how we're going to keep the insides of the Mini-TES as dry as they need to be in the humidity of Florida when it's time to launch. That's the good news. The bad news is that we're going to have to keep making progress at close to this pace if we're going to make it to the launch pad in time. March 17, 2001 We had a great week! On Wednesday, we pulled Mini-TES 1 out of storage and fired it up in what is called an "aliveness test". This is just what it sounds like: a test to see if the instrument is still alive. We didn't expect anything bad, but any time you pull five million bucks worth of hardware out of storage after nine months, there's a little bit of anxiety the first time you hit that power switch. As it turns out, there was no cause for worry--Mini-TES 1 works just as well now as it did the last time we used it. It's a good thing, too, since it's going to have to go in one of the rovers. Now all we have to do is build another Mini-TES to go in the other one... March 31, 2001 The big event this past week was our first test of Mars Exploration Rover operations. We did it using the FIDO rover, which is an early prototype of the rovers we'll be launching in 2003. The test was a pretty wild experience: a couple of dozen scientists and engineers spending two solid days in a detailed simulation of everything we'll do once the MER rovers are on Mars. We learned a lot! We'll have to do it a lot more, too. The way to train for space flight has always been to do plenty of simulations ahead of time, and this project is no exception. Our next test will be two weeks from now. April 7, 2001 This was a landmark week for our project: the Mars Odyssey orbiter was launched! Odyssey is a great mission by itself, and it's also very important to our rovers. The rovers can transmit some of their data directly to Earth, but a lot of it--including many of the best pictures- -will be relayed to Earth by an orbiter overhead. And Mars Odyssey is that orbiter. The launch was picture-perfect. The weather was as good as it gets, and Boeing's Delta II rocket gave Odyssey a flawless ride. So Odyssey's on its way to Mars now, and should be waiting there for us when we arrive in 2004. April 14, 2001 This week we finished up our second operations test with the FIDO rover. Just like two weeks ago, we spent Thursday and Friday simulating four martian days of rover operations. These past two tests have taken place with the rover in the "Mars Yard" at JPL... an outdoor facility that looks like a little bit of Mars. The test this week went really well, and we feel now like maybe we're ready for something bigger. We'd better be. Just two weeks from now we'll begin a 10-day test with the rover somewhere out in the desert. April 21, 2001 We made a little change to the payload this week. The RAT is a very cool little machine, and we expect it to work really well. There's just one problem. While we're confident that the RAT will be able to grind into hard martian rocks just fine, we're worried about soft rocks. The grinding wheels on the RAT are a little like sandpaper, and when we grind into really soft rock we've found that they can get "gummed up". It's simple, really--tiny particles of rock get caught between the little diamonds that do the grinding, and if too much of that happens the RAT just can't work well any more. It's a low-tech problem, and we're using a low-tech solution: putting a stiff wire brush on the rover that we can use to clean the RAT off after each use. Who says rocket science is complicated? April 28, 2001 Rocket launches are pretty violent events, with lots of noise and lots of vibration. All of our hardware has to survive launch, so we spent a lot of time thinking about how to make sure our designs are sturdy enough to take it. The real proof, though, is testing. This past week our APXS instrument faced its first vibration test. Vibe tests can be a little scary. You put the instrument on a "shake table" that vibrates it as violently as a launch will (or even harder). Sometimes things break. The APXS passed with flying colors, though, so it looks like we've got a solid design. May 12, 2001 We conducted an enormously successful test this past week with the FIDO rover. This is a prototype of the MER rovers, and we used it to simulate twenty days worth of rover operations on the surface of Mars. The rover itself was in the Mojave Desert, and we operated it "in the blind" from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, just as we will with the real rovers at Mars. We investigated a number of rocks and soils, took lots of images and spectra, and drove over 120 meters. Most importantly, we learned a lot about how we'll operate the MER rovers in 2004. May 19, 2001 The Rock Abrasion Tool (a.k.a., The RAT) passed an important milestone this week: its Critical Design Review. We still have one or two odds and ends to work out, but with this review behind us now it means that we're ready to start building the real RATs that will go to Mars. May 26, 2001 We've had a little bit of a problem lately. Our rovers are big machines, and they each have to be folded up in a complicated way to fit inside their lander. After landing, we need to fold out lots of important pieces: the wheels, the antenna, the camera mast, and so forth. Each of these pieces needs to be held firmly in place before it folds out, so that vibrations during launch and landing don't do any damage. The difficulty is figuring out how to release each piece. The usual way you do this on a spacecraft is with what's called a "pyro": a little explosive device. Pyros are very simple and reliable. Problem is, this rover is folded up so tight that we'd have to set these little explosions off right next to our instruments, and some recent calculations have suggested that the shock might be so great that instruments could be damaged. June 2, 2001 We've got another problem on our hands this week. We did some calculations a while ago, and they showed that if we were ever to point Mini-TES at the sun we could damage the instrument. That's not bad news scientifically... there's no reason we'd want to look at the sun with Mini-TES anyway. But what if we did it accidentally? We could have a toasted spectrometer on our hands. So now we have to figure out how to keep such an accident from ever happening. It shouldn't be hard... it's easy to calculate where the sun will be in the sky, and we'll just make sure that we don't point Mini-TES in a dangerous direction. But it's one more thing to put in the software, and time is getting tight. As of this week, we're less than two years away from launch. June 9, 2001 The star of the show lately has been Mini-TES. We learned a lot when we built the first one, and we're using what we learned now as we build Mini-TES 2. Not only are we weeks ahead of schedule, it's starting to look like a real instrument. It'll be on its way to Mars in just two more years. The other Mini-TES news is that we've figured out how we're going to keep from pointing it at the sun accidentally, which we were worried about last week. The best answer turns out to be the simplest one. The rover always knows roughly which way it's pointed, and also what time it is... which means that it can figure out where the sun is. So we keep Mini-TES pointed away from where the rover thinks the sun is, and we keep it far enough away that even if the rover's off by a little, Mini- TES will be safe anyway. June 23, 2001 The slang that's always used in the space business to mean that you have started building some hardware is to say that you've started "cutting metal". Well, we've started to cut metal on all our cameras now, literally. The drawings of all the metal parts for Pancam and the Microscopic Imager were completed last week, and they've now been sent to the machine shops for the building to begin. These are the same machine shops that will be cutting metal for both rovers before long, so we figured we'd better get our order in early! It shouldn't be long before we have the real flight camera bodies in our hands. June 30, 2001 We've had a problem come up regarding two of our instruments: the Mössbauer Spectrometer and the APXS. The sensor heads for both of these instruments sit right next to one another, on the end of our instrument arm. The problem is that the Mšssbauer spectrometer has a little bit of radioactive material in it (it's cobalt-57), and the APXS electronics are sensitive to radiation. We did a test this past week with the two instruments together, and it appears that the APXS electronics are indeed having some radiation problems. The solution is going to be to protect the APXS with a little bit of radiation shielding, using a material called tantalum. July 14, 2001 Mini-TES 2 is now a real instrument! Well, maybe not quite, but we're getting there. We hooked the electronics up to the optics and the motor last week. It still has a long way to go, of course. Right now the electronics boards are "fanned out", which means that they're hanging out where they're easy to get to, rather than tucked neatly inside the Mini-TES box where they belong. And we still have more pieces to put inside the box before the instrument is really done. Most importantly, there's enormous amount of testing that still has to happen. But what was just a bunch of parts a few months ago is now starting to look very much like a real scientific instrument. July 21, 2001 It's always something. We just came across a dumb little problem that could have caused a lot of headaches in the months ahead. There are an awful lot of cameras on this rover... ten on each. Most of them are in pairs, but how do we keep them all straight? In going through our documents this week, we realized that there was a lot of potential for confusion. There's one pair of cameras on the front of the rover, pointing forward. Another pair is on the back, pointing backward. Four more are on top of a rotating mast. So how do we name the cameras in each pair? Camera 1 and camera 2? If so, which is which? Port and starboard, like on a ship? If so, then what about the ones that rotate? It sounds trivial, but this is the kind of thing that can lead to wiring mistakes and all kinds of other goof-ups if you're not careful. We decided to keep it simple... name the cameras in each pair left and right, as if they were eyeballs in somebody's head. That way it's clear which is which, no matter which direction the cameras point. So three years from now when you see a martian picture from the rover's "Left Rear Hazcam", there shouldn't be any question about which camera really took the picture. July 28, 2001 It's CDR time. CDR stands for Critical Design Review, and it's a pivotal event in the life of any space mission. No project team does its work without a lot of help. MER is no exception; in fact, we seem to be getting more help than most. A Critical Design Review can be one of the most helpful events of all. At a CDR, we bring together a panel of outside experts, and we have them go over everything we're doing. Their questions can cover anything from the detailed design of the smallest component to the overall health of the project. Actually, we don't have just one CDR, but a whole series of them, culminating in the Flight System CDR this coming week (that's a review of the whole spacecraft, including the instruments), and the Project CDR a couple of weeks after that. We've spent months getting ready for this, and we're really hoping it's going to go well. August 4, 2001 Believe it or not, our biggest worry this week has been ghosts. Or, to be more specific, we've been worried about what are called "ghost images". One of the most important jobs for our Pancam camera will be to take pictures of the sun. Part of the reason we're going to do this is to figure out how dusty the martian atmosphere is: the more dust there is in the sky, the darker the sun will look. The really important reason, though, is to figure out which way is north. Mars doesn't have a magnetic field, so we can't use a compass to figure out directions. Instead, we use Pancam to see where the sun is in the sky, and then use that information to work out which way is which. Taking pictures of the sun isn't all that hard: we just have to give Pancam special dark filters. They're sunglasses for our rover, really. But even with the filters, all that sunlight can sometimes bounce around inside the camera in funny ways, creating the "ghost images" we were worried about. But after lots of good work by the optics experts at JPL this week, we've concluded that it shouldn't be a problem. So we're not afraid of ghosts any more. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article626.html. ________________________________________________________________________ ON THE EDGE: IS ANYBODY OUT THERE? By Diane Stresing From Space.com 9 October 2003 Is the Earth really unique in its ability to support life? Right now, that's a $300 million question. When NASA's Kepler Mission launches in 2007, we may find the answer. Started more than a decade ago, the Kepler Mission (www.kepler.arc.nasa.gov/index.html) is the first program to search for Earth-sized planets. What's more, it will look for planets that, based on their orbits, are capable of supporting life. Named in honor of 16th-century German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, the project bears his name primarily because Kepler proved that planets travel in an ellipse (not a circle) around the sun. The name is also appropriate because Kepler's laws of optics are still used in telescopes. The Kepler Mission will look at the "habitable zone" of stars, where planets maintain orbits a sufficient distance from their star so that they remain relatively temperate and, therefore, may contain water. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/ontheedge_0310.html. ________________________________________________________________________ HABITABILITY: BETTING ON 37 GEM From Astrobiology Magazine 9 October 2003 "We are witnessing the birth of a new observational science: the discovery and characterization of extrasolar planetary systems." --G. Marcy, UC Berkeley If life does exist elsewhere, it's likely to be on a middle-aged star in the constellation of Gemini, according to astrobiologist Maggie Turnbull, of the University of Arizona in Tucson, as reported in a New Scientist article. Turnbull has compiled a shortlist of 30 possibly habitable planets and stars and one called 37 Gem is her top choice. "This stable, middle-aged star is just a bit hotter and brighter than our sun. And if alien life is anywhere, it's likely to be there," New Scientist magazine said. The star is in the constellation, Gemini, which gives it the astronomical name, 37 Gem. Turnbull made the list for NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), a space telescope project that will search for habitable planets after it is launched in about 10 years time. In an earlier article published this year, "Target Selection for SETI: I. A Catalog of Nearby Habitable Stellar Systems," in the Astrophysical Journal, their survey identified 17,129 potentially habitable hosts for complex life. For such a study, Maggie Turnbull and adviser Jill Tarter have been in the process of compiling this much larger list called HabCat, or Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems. HabCat was created from what is known about habitable stars, or "habstars", near our sun. Seventy-five percent are within 140 parsecs, or around 450 light years. These Sun- like, habitable stars have just the right distance, constancy, and light to qualify in a forthcoming enlarged radio search. The amount of heavy metal present when the star is formed and its age were important criteria for Turnbull. Young stars typically have high rotations, they emit soft X-rays above and beyond their estimated temperatures, or they haven't burned through enough light elements to produce metals (heavy elements like iron). But Gem 37, the 37th brightest star in the constellation of Gemini, came out on top because it looks most like our sun. Luminosities are "perhaps the most important information", Turnbull told Astrobiology Magazine, "we use in determining the habitability of nearby stars" for complex life, because luminosity indicates which phase of life the star is in, and that in turn dictates how long the star will remain stable. To be included in the short list of habitable stars, each candidate stellar systems is weighted for X-ray luminosity, rotation, spectral types or color, kinematics, metallicity, and Strömgren photometry. Hotter, more massive stars have always been considered less likely to harbor life, though not because they would be too hot. Planets could still enjoy temperate climates, just at orbits farther away from the star. The problem is one of time, not temperature. Hotter stars tend to burn out faster--perhaps too fast for life to develop there. Our sun, considered a typical G2V dwarf, is approximately 4.5 billion years old. G stars are characterized by the presence of metallic lines and weak hydrogen. Given the billions of years required for evolution of life on earth, scientists could question whether life would stand a chance in a shorter-lived solar system. The star identified in the Turnbull survey, 37 Gem, is a G0V dwarf. "Priority will be assigned," said Turnbull, "based on location in the color-magnitude diagram [CMD] and on distance. A plot of the CMD score would look like a bull's-eye centered on the sun's absolute visual magnitude and B-V color, with the highest score at the center. The distance scoring will go as the inverse square of distance, or the detectability of a given signal". "We are still considering how to weight these two factors, but most likely the distance score will dominate within a certain distance", Turnbull told Astrobiology Magazine. "One idea is that, given the first terrestrial transmissions of a century ago, HabCat stars within the possible ETI [extraterrestrial intelligence] response distance of 50 light years should have scores dominated by distance". "This work falls within the broader themes of, first, the overall habitability of the Milky Way, and, second, the remote sensing of biosignatures", said Turnbull. "My dissertation work includes topics such as characterizing the Earthshine signal, including spectral signatures of life; constraining the fraction of habitable stars in the solar neighborhood; identifying suitable targets for the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission; and examining the concept of a habitable belt in the Galaxy". The task is challenging, not just because of the large number of stars to consider, but also the difficulty of defining conditions for habitability. As Turnbull and Tarter concluded in their Astrophysical Journal article: "Despite the broad array of data used to assemble this catalog, this exercise has forced us to admit that we are defining habitability from a position of considerable ignorance...For SETI this humbling situation is amplified when we consider that we have no indisputable definition for life itself, to say nothing of the precise conditions that are necessary and sufficient for life to evolve into a technological civilization detectable by a SETI search program." What's next? For HabCat surveys, the current best set of stellar distances comes from what astronomers call Hipparcos parallax measurements . These measurements give values accurate to ~ 1 milli-arcsecond. Several new astrometric satellites are now being planned to measure star distances, which will improve the selection criteria for habitability. The most ambitious planned star cataloguing projects are NASA's Space Interferometry Mission [SIM] and ESA's Galactic Census Project, or GAIA mission, which may yield large numbers of parallaxes with precisions better than ~ 10 micro-arcseconds. SIM is scheduled to operate from 2006 to 2011 while GAIA, if accepted by ESA, could launch in 2009 with a 5 year lifetime. SIM would provide astrometric measurements of 10,000 stars and GAIA would measure around 10 billion positions. The next scheduled astrometry mission, however, was the now cancelled FAME (Full- sky Astrometric Mapping Explorer), which was scheduled to be launched in 2004. When the Allen Telescope Array turns on in 2005, it will be capable of searching to the farthest of 17,000 habstars, just beyond 300 parsecs. Scientists hope to launch six new space-borne missions over the next few years to search for terrestrial planets. They include France's small- scale COROT, NASA's more-ambitious Kepler mission, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Eddington and NASA's Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). The French COROT mission, approved and due for launch in late 2004, will study asteroseismology, or oscillations within stars, and likely will be the first orbiting telescope to search for extrasolar planets. It will look at 50,000 to 60,000 stars and should find a few dozen terrestrial planets and several hundred close-in gas-giant planets during a two- to three-year mission, says Pierre Barge, an astronomer at the Laboratory of Astrophysics in Marseille and leader of COROT's exoplanets group. COROT--for Convection, Rotation and Planetary Transits--is a mission of CNES, the French National Center for Space Studies, in partnership with ESA, Italy, Belgium and Germany. When searching for extrasolar planets, COROT's 27-centimeter (10.6-inch) telescope will use a method called photometry, in which sensitive light detectors look for a slight drop in a star's brightness as a small planet "transits" the star (crosses the face of the star as viewed from COROT). The Kepler mission is scheduled for launch into solar orbit in October 2006. Kepler will simultaneously observe 100,000 stars in our galactic "neighborhood," looking for Earth-sized or larger planets within the "habitable zone" around each star--the not-too-hot, not-too-cold zone where liquid water might exist on a planet. To highlight the difficulty of detecting an Earth-sized planet orbiting a distant star, Borucki, Kepler's principal investigator, points out it would take 10,000 Earths to cover the Sun's disk. One NASA estimate says Kepler should discover 50 terrestrial planets if most of those found are about Earth's size, 185 planets if most are 30 percent larger than Earth and 640 if most are 2.2 times Earth's size. In addition, Kepler is expected to find almost 900 giant planets close to their stars and about 30 giants orbiting at Jupiter-like distances from their parent stars. Because most of the gas giant planets found so far orbit much closer to their stars than Jupiter does to the Sun, Borucki believes that during the four- to six-year mission, Kepler will find a large proportion of planets quite close to stars. If that proves true, he says, "We expect to find thousands of planets." In 2008 or later, the European Space Agency hopes to launch the Eddington mission (named for the late British astronomer Arthur Eddington). Eddington primarily would study stars' interior structures and the processes that govern how stars evolve, but it would spend three years scanning 500,000 stars for planets, including terrestrial planets in habitable zones. Like Kepler and COROT, Eddington would use a camera with a large optical telescope, in this case a wide-field 1.2-meter (47- inch) one, to detect planetary transits using photometry. Also due for launch in 2009 is the almost $1 billion NASA-ESA Next Generation Space Telescope, or NGST [James Webb Space Telescope], a near-infrared telescope that will succeed the Hubble Space Telescope. Planet hunting will be a minor part of its job. Like Hubble, NGST will be a general-purpose telescope with an emphasis on cosmology. But it will investigate stars with dusty disks--the early stage of planet formation--and may also be able to study Jupiter-size planets. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article627.html. ________________________________________________________________________ ROCKS COULD REVEAL SECRETS OF LIFE ON EARTH AND MARS By Kate Groves University of Glasgow release 9 October 2003 A new UK project could help detect evidence of life on Mars and improve our understanding of how life evolved on Earth. The aim is to develop a technique that can identify biomolecules in water that have been trapped in rocks for millions to billions of years. The three-year initiative will be carried out by geologists and bioengineers at the University of Aberdeen and the University of Glasgow, with funding from the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The initiative is being led by Dr. John Parnell of the University of Aberdeen's Geology and Petroleum Geology Department, in collaboration with Professor Jonathan Cooper of the University of Glasgow's Department of Electronics. Professor Cooper says, "With our collaborators in Aberdeen, we are fortunate to have the possibility of working on one of the most exciting projects in the universe, the search for life on other planets!" As well as analyzing samples from Earth, the technique could be used to obtain important information from water sealed within rock samples brought back from Mars. The team will also consider how the technique could be miniaturized for incorporation into spacecraft that travel to other planets. The research will explore significant technological challenges at the interface between the physical sciences and engineering. These include microfluidic methods for sample pre-concentration (i.e. the extraction and handling of exceptionally small amounts of fluid), single molecule detection technologies to locate very small amounts of biomaterials and the elimination of contaminants. The project is highly innovative, attempting to access a source of biomolecules that have not been tapped before. Analysis of material dating from the time before the Earth's fossil record became extensive is a major project aim, potentially resulting in our knowledge of the development of life on Earth being significantly enhanced. Contact: Kate Groves E-mail: k.groves@admin.gla.ac.uk Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article630.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/life-03zzc.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/method_finding_life_mars.html ________________________________________________________________________ ENTHUSIASM FOR MANNED CHINESE SPACE MISSION GROWS AS LAUNCH WINDOW IS FIRMED By Leonard David From Space.com 10 October 2003 Enthusiasm for China's first launch of humans into space is growing as a launch next week became more certain Friday. The People's Daily Online, a Chinese news service, reports that the time window for launching a piloted Shenzhou 5 spacecraft is between October 15-17, citing an unnamed official in charge of the country's manned spaceflight program. Similarly, the official Xinhua News Agency in China noted the same launch dates, adding that all is progressing smoothly for China to become the third nation capable of rocketing humans into Earth orbit. The launch has for weeks been surrounded by rumor and speculation with little official word. A Long March 2F booster will boost the Shenzhou spaceship from China's Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu Province in early morning daylight, circle Earth for some 21 hours, then parachute into an Inner Mongolia target zone before nightfall. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/china_launch_031010.html. ________________________________________________________________________ CHINA CONFIRMS OCTOBER SPACE DATE From CNN 10 October 2003 China has confirmed that it is planning to launch its first manned space flight at "an appropriate time" between October 15 and 17. The announcement was made Friday by an unidentified official in charge of the country's manned space program, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported. If it is successful, the flight will put China in an elite club of space powers, making it only the third nation--in addition to the United States and Russia--capable of putting humans into space. "The Shenzhou V spacecraft will carry out the first manned space mission and will lift off from the China Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center," Xinhua quoted the official as saying. "Now all preparatory work for the launch is progressing smoothly." Read the full article at http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/10/10/china.space/index.html. ________________________________________________________________________ MARTIAN CREATURES TO "COME TO LIFE" IN NASA STUDENT CHALLENGE NASA/ARC release 03-79AR 10 October 2003 As five spacecraft from countries around this world rapidly approach Mars, NASA educators are challenging students to learn about the "Red Planet" and design creatures that could survive in the harsh martian environment. On October 13, NASA Quest at NASA Ames Research Center, located in California's Silicon Valley, will launch the "Design-a- Martian Challenge." NASA Quest is an educational Web site dedicated to bringing the NASA experience to K-12 students. The seven-week challenge builds upon the growing excitement about the red planet, and provides students an opportunity to interact with NASA Mars experts and other students from around the world. "The Design-a-Martian Challenge is a great opportunity to have students actively participate in one of the greatest scientific endeavors in recent history," said Donald James, education director at NASA Ames. "With the knowledge gained from the challenge, the students will be Mars experts within their families and classrooms when the twin Mars Exploration Rovers land on Mars at the beginning of 2004." During the first few weeks of the challenge, students can use NASA's Astro-Venture, a Web site that helps students understand what makes a planet habitable, to research the conditions needed by humans to survive on Earth so they can apply that knowledge to Mars. As the students gain a better understanding of the planet, they can begin designing creatures that could survive punishing sand storms, cold temperatures and the other harsh conditions on Mars. During the challenge, students will be able to interact with NASA scientists to talk about Mars, NASA's missions to the red planet, and their martian creature designs. Two chats, via the Internet, are scheduled for Wednesday, October 29 and Thursday, November 20. Each chat will take place from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM PDT. "As NASA scientists, we are always looking to encourage students to take an active interest in science and exploration," said Geoff Briggs, scientific director of NASA's Center for Mars Exploration. "The Design- a-Martian outreach program builds upon the interest generated by the recent close opposition (alignment) of Earth and Mars and upon the excitement of the up-coming Mars landings. It's a great way to spark students' interest." Final martian creature designs are due by November 26. The Design-a- Martian Challenge will conclude with a webcast on December 3. During the webcast, NASA scientists will update the students with the latest on Mars research, the progress of the Mars Rovers, and provide final feedback on the student's martian creature designs. For more information about the Design-a-Martian Challenge on the Internet, visit http://quest.nasa.gov/projects/astrobiology/astroventure/challenge/index .html. For more information about NASA Quest on the Internet, visit http://quest.nasa.gov/index.html. For more information about the Astro-Venture Web site, visit http://astroventure.arc.nasa.gov. For information about NASA's Education programs on the Internet, visit http://education.nasa.gov. For information about NASA on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov. Contact: Jonas Dino NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA Phone: 650-604-5612 or 650-604-9000 E-mail: jonas.dino@nasa.gov ________________________________________________________________________ MARTIAN CHRONICLES VI: GOOD PROBLEMS By Steve Squyres From Astrobiology Magazine 11 October 2003 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. August 11, 2001 We had a little bit of a scare this week. A problem popped up early in the week that looked pretty stupid, but maybe also real. Our payload includes several magnets, whose job it is to gather magnetic mineral grains from the martian atmosphere. We'll look at these minerals with the instruments, including our Mössbauer Spectrometer. The Mössbauer, as it turns out, is built with a fair amount of magnetic metal in it. This metal gets attracted to the magnet, of course, when we bring the instrument close to it. Early in the week, some calculations suggested that the arm that the Mössbauer is mounted on might not be strong enough to pull the Mössbauer back off the magnet once it has touched it! Imagine going all the way to Mars, using the Mössbauer to look at the magnet sometime early in the mission, and then getting it stuck there. Not good. We spent a couple of days worrying about it before concluding that we can fix things by making a pretty simple change in the way the arm is controlled for that one maneuver. August 18, 2001 We've been having a lot of reviews lately... projects like this one tend to attract a lot of attention! But this coming week is the review of all reviews: the Project Critical Design Review. It literally is the review of all our other reviews, actually. We've had reviews of just about everything you can imagine on this project, from some of the smallest electronic parts all the way up to the whole spacecraft. Every piece of the payload has been through it too, of course, most of them several times. And now it all comes together this week at a three-day review of the whole MER project. It's no fun... preparing for these reviews is a lot of work. But reviewers from outside the project bring a fresh perspective, and that means that they sometimes catch things that we don't. Once this review is behind us, though, we've got to really step on the gas. Assembly and test of the first spacecraft begins in February, just five and a half months from now. August 25, 2001 The Critical Design Review is done. It was a long review and it made for a long week, but we've got it behind us now. Of all the things that we talked about at the review, the one that got the most attention was our schedule. It's tight. Missions to the planets aren't like other space missions. You can only launch when the alignment of the planets is right. Miss a launch opportunity to Mars and you have to wait 26 months for the next one. Our launches are in the summer of 2003. That's almost two years away, but two years is a very small amount of time for all the work we need to get done. So we're going to be watching our schedule very closely. One thing that's certain is that the pace isn't going to ease up at all, any time between now and the end of the mission. September 1, 2001 Our biggest problem this past week has been working out the details of how our Pancam and Mini-TES instruments will work together. The Pancam cameras sit right at the top of the tall mast at the front of the rover. The reason that the mast is so fat is that it also acts as a periscope. Mini-TES sits down inside the rover and uses some mirrors near the top of the mast to get almost the same view of the world that Pancam does. It's that "almost" that's the problem. The Mini-TES mirrors actually sit a little bit below the Pancam cameras, so they don't quite have the same vantage point. Also, we couldn't get everything to fit inside the lander until we turned the Mini-TES mirrors around so that they look in exactly the opposite direction from Pancam. So this means that we have to swing the mast around 180 degrees to look at the same object with both instruments. The tricky part of all this is building the hardware and software so that when we tell Mini-TES to look at something that Pancam has already seen, we don't miss it, even by a little bit. We're making progress, but this one is going to keep us busy for awhile. September 8, 2001 This was one of those weeks where so much was going on that it's hard to decide what to write about. We're getting into real hardware testing now, and things are starting to get intense. I guess the biggest events of the week were the final preparations for two critical tests. One is the first vibration test of our new APXS design. In a "vibe" test, you shake a piece of hardware to simulate the vibrations it'll experience during launch. We're going to vibe the APXS in Berlin next week, and they're working very hard over in Germany to get ready for it. The other big test we prepared for this week is the first "thermal vacuum" test of our latest Mini-TES instrument. In a thermal vac test, you put the hardware into a chamber with no air in it to simulate space, and then run it through its paces at the kinds of temperatures it'll experience in flight. This one's going to happen in Santa Barbara, and they're working really hard there as well. September 15, 2001 Like everyone else, our focus this week was on the tragic events in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Our hearts go out to all who suffered. September 22, 2001 We're testing hardware now. It started this week, with vibration tests on an engineering model of our APXS instrument. An engineering model is a piece of hardware that is pretty much identical to what we're going to fly, but that we can test pretty severely to make sure the design is good. We took the APXS to a test facility in Berlin this past week, and shook in three different directions at levels more violent than anything we should see in flight. We've still got a little more shaking to do, but so far nothing has broken. The APXS uses a new design that we've never tested before, so it'll be real good to have this set of tests behind us. September 29, 2001 When you start testing hardware is when you start finding problems, and we hit one this week. Believe it or not, it was with Mini-TES, which has been the smoothest-running part of the whole payload until now. It's a weird problem. The instrument works fine when it's lying on its side, but goes bad when we turn it rightside-up! The guys in Santa Barbara took it apart this week to figure out what's wrong, and it looks like they found the problem. It seems to be a simple one: some wires are routed wrong, in a way that pulls the mirrors a tiny bit out of line when the instrument is rotated. We should know for sure this week if that was the problem. If it is it's an easy fix, but it will have taken us three weeks to track it down and take care of it. Good thing Mini- TES was thirteen weeks ahead of schedule before this happened! October 6, 2001 Probably the most exciting thing going on this past week has been the progress on our cameras: Pancam and the Microscopic Imager. These were problem areas for awhile, but they really seem to be coming around. On a payload this big there's bound to be something that lags behind everything else, and for us it has been the cameras. But the camera work has really been going well lately. All of the mechanical parts-- things like camera housings--are now done. All of the electronics boards should be done in another week and a half. And the lenses are basically done too. So it's not going to be too long now before we can start putting some real Mars cameras together... and taking real pictures with them. October 13, 2001 The guys at Raytheon found and fixed our Mini-TES problem this week. It was what we expected: a cable had been put in the wrong place, and it caused a sensitive part of the instrument to bend very slightly when we turned it rightside-up. It wasn't much of a bend, but it was enough to cause the trouble we were seeing. We opened the instrument up, re- routed the cable, fastened everything back together, and then ran it through its paces sideways, upside-down, and rightside-up. And now it works right no matter which way we're tilted. So now it's on to the next problem... whatever that turns out to be! October 20, 2001 This was a huge week for us. We began this project over a year ago with something like 185 possible landing sites for our rovers. Now we're down to the Final Four. There was a big landing site selection meeting this week, and dozens of scientists who have spent their careers studying Mars were there. The four sites that came out on top are the Meridiani "Hematite" site, Melas Chasma in the Valles Marineris, Gusev Crater, and a place called Athabasca Vallis in the Elysium region. They're all great sites! Check out our landing site page for more on all of them except Athabasca. (Athabasca was a bit of a dark horse, and we don't have a map of it ready yet. We'll provide an update with details soon.) We have a big week ahead of us, too. On Tuesday evening, the Mars Odyssey spacecraft is scheduled to go into orbit around Mars. This is a terrific new science mission, and it also will be a key communication satellite for our rovers once we get there in 2004. October 27, 2001 Mars Odyssey is in orbit! The orbit insertion maneuver took place early this week, and it went flawlessly. This is a huge step forward for NASA's Mars exploration program, and our congratulations go out to the Odyssey team. Odyssey will map Mars for several years, providing new information about what the planet's surface materials are made of. Odyssey is more than a scientific spacecraft. It's also a communication satellite, and that's what makes it big news for us. Once our rovers are on the martian surface, Odyssey will fly over each one twice per day, collecting data from them by radio and relaying it to Earth. We'll get roughly half of our data through Odyssey, so it feels very good to have it safely in its natural environment--in orbit around Mars. November 3, 2001 Landing sites were a big focus again this week. We settled on our landing sites in general terms at a meeting a couple of weeks ago. We're down to four prime sites and two backups now, and they're all really good. But it's not enough to pick the general areas where we think we might want to land. Mars Global Surveyor is up there taking pictures of these sites for us, and we need to tell them exactly where to take those pictures so they know where to point their camera. So this week we dialed in the exact positions of the sites, and passed them along to the Mars Global Surveyor folks. Now we have to be patient for a few months while MGS gets those shots for us. Fortunately we've got until next spring before we have to "downselect" to the final two sites. November 10, 2001 We learned something very interesting about the RAT in the past couple of weeks. The RAT is our Rock Abrasion Tool, and we'll use it on Mars to grind into rocks so that we can see what's inside them. In all the RAT tests that we had done until now, the grinding produced a lot of dust. Not only that, but the dust formed a kind of "plume"... rising almost like smoke as we'd grind away at the rock. This isn't good, since the dust in the plume could contaminate some of our instruments. To prevent contamination, we've put a "skirt" around the RAT, to catch the dust. Just recently, we did our first tests of the RAT in a special chamber that creates Mars-like environmental conditions. The very good news is that we saw no dust plume at all! Mars has a much less dense atmosphere than Earth does, and apparently the dust particles that the RAT creates are large enough that the martian atmosphere can't suspend them. We'll still need a dust skirt, since the RAT could always stir up martian dust, which we know is very fine. But now we know that the dust created by the RAT itself is unlikely to create much of a problem for us. November 17, 2001 We've had a hang-up with our cameras lately. The lenses are fine, the detectors are fine, and all the mechanical pieces are fine. But we're having some difficulties with the electronics. Both of our cameras, Pancam and the Microscopic Imager, use the same electronics design. We got all our electronics boards built a couple of weeks ago, but when we looked at them carefully we realized that there was a problem. It's simple stuff, really: the points where we have to attach little parts called resistors to the boards are spaced too close together, and the resistors won't fit. So now we have to have another set of boards built, which is going to delay our camera schedule a couple of weeks. This isn't a particularly big deal; stuff like this happens all the time. But it's the kind of thing you spend a lot of time worrying about when you get to this stage in a space project. November 24, 2001 There's been bad news about our cameras lately, but there's been some really good news too. Two weeks ago we were dealing with problems with the electronics for Pancam and the Microscopic Imager, and we're still dealing with them. But this past week we got the first really good look at the CCD's that we'll use for our cameras, and they're incredibly good. CCD stands for "charge coupled device", and it's the detector that lies at the heart of a digital camera--the device that forms the image, just as film does in a film camera. When CCD's are built, it's typical for them to vary in quality. So normally you build a bunch of them, and then put a lot of work into picking the few best ones to fly. It didn't quite work that way with the CCD's for our cameras. We built a whole bunch of them, alright, but now that we've checked them out, we've found to our surprise they're nearly all about as close to perfect as a CCD can be. The camera guys on our team are scratching their heads now over which ones to fly, because they can hardly even tell them apart. There are bad problems and good problems to have, and this one's a good problem! December 1, 2001 The Mini-TES saga continues. We found out some time back that the instrument wasn't quite working right when we tilted it in certain directions. That's a big deal, because the rover won't always park on level ground! It has been a long road to track this one down, but we seem to be almost there. Part of it was a problem with some wiring, but that wasn't all there was to it. There was also a subtle problem in the electronics. We've been testing the living daylights out of the instrument in Santa Barbara lately, and with some minor tweaks to the electronics design it now seems to be behaving itself nicely at every crazy angle the rover could find itself at. The instrument we've been doing this to has been our second Mini-TES... the one that's still not finished. So now, just to be safe, we have to test the one that we built a couple of years ago and make sure that it works properly at all angles too. This coming week, we're going to ship it (very carefully!) from JPL up to Santa Barbara, and make real sure that it's behaving itself as well. December 8, 2001 It's time for yet another big Critical Design Review. This one is the Mission System CDR, scheduled for Tuesday through Thursday of this coming week. A project like MER is divided into two big parts, called the Flight System and the Mission System. The Flight System is the hardware... the stuff that actually goes to Mars. The Mission System is the stuff on the ground, back here on Earth. It's just as important as the Flight System, because it's everything that makes the Flight System work: computers, software, people... lots of 'em. People to train the people. And so forth. For the past week (and for many weeks before that), a huge amount of our time and effort has been spent getting ready for a big review of the design of the MER Mission System. And now it's time to do it. Let's hope it goes as well as our other CDRs have gone. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article628.html. ________________________________________________________________________ MARTIAN CHRONICLES VII: BETTER IS THE ENEMY By Steve Squyres From Astrobiology Magazine 11 October 2003 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. December 15, 2001 A long-standing problem with the rover's arm was solved this week. The arm's job is to place several of our instruments onto martian rocks. Time on Mars is a precious commodity, so to keep from wasting time we'll often use the arm at night. But it gets really cold at night on Mars. So the motors on the arm need to have heaters on them, allowing the arm to move properly even when it's really cold out. The problem is this: What happens if we make a mistake and leave the heaters on in the daytime? The answer, unfortunately, is that the motors could get overheated--cooked, really--and be permanently damaged. Not good. For awhile there, it looked like maybe we were going to have to use much weaker heaters, which would have been safe but which would not have worked well at night. Instead, someone at JPL came up with a very slick design in which the motors are automatically protected from overheating by a thermostat. If a heater goes on at night then everything is fine, but if we leave it on accidentally in the daytime, the thermostat will automatically shut it off. So we can use the arm at night after all. Oh yes, and I almost forgot... the Mission System Critical Design Review was a big success! December 22, 2001 We've made good progress with the latest round of Mini-TES testing. After all the problems we had with Mini-TES 2 not working right when it was tilted, we decided a few weeks ago that we had better pull Mini-TES 1 out of storage and make sure that it was okay. We shipped it up to Santa Barbara (carefully!), and the guys there have spent the last couple of weeks checking it out. It's fine, as it turns out... everything works as it should. So now we know that both instruments for both rovers will behave themselves properly no matter how we tilt them. We don't want to fly instruments that won't work right if the rover is parked on a hill! January 5, 2002 We've got an awful lot of testing to do, but sometimes real-world problems get in the way. This was supposed to be the week that we were going to do some important vibration testing on our Mössbauer spectrometer. It didn't work out that way. Everything needs maintenance and refurbishment from time to time, including vibration test facilities. We've had to postpone tests that we were ready for a couple of times recently because the test facilities weren't ready for us. It's easy to get a little impatient when this happens. But that's why we've got margin in our schedule! January 12, 2002 The whole project is about to shift gears pretty soon, in a very big way. In only about a month, we start what's called "ATLO"... short for "Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations". ATLO is NASA-ese for the process of putting it together, making sure it works, and shooting it off. And that's what we're about to start doing. For a very long time now we've been planning, designing, and building bits and pieces of things. The planning is finished, the design is all done, and lots of bits and pieces are built. So starting next month, we begin to put it all together. This shift to the start of ATLO is one of the biggest changes that a space project goes through, so of course we have to have another review before we do it! Next up is our "ATLO Readiness Review", where we try to convince a review board (and ourselves) that we're ready to get on with it. The past week has mostly been spent getting ready for this review, and the next one will as well. After all these years, it's going to feel good to start actually building these things. January 19, 2002 It's always something. This week we discovered another one of those dumb mistakes that could really have gotten us into trouble us if we hadn't caught it now. One of the things we have to be very careful about is what's called "Planetary Protection." For us, Planetary Protection means not contaminating the surface of Mars with bacteria from Earth. There are all kinds of good reasons to be careful about this! One way to do Planetary Protection is to sterilize the hardware we fly, and we do that with much of what we build. But some things, like electronics, are not easy to sterilize. So the other thing we do sometimes is clean our hardware carefully, and then seal it up really tight so nothing bad can possibly get out. Of course, it's not that simple. Everything is full of air when we launch from Florida, and the air has to get out as we ascend into space. We can't let any bacteria leak out with the air, so we put special filters in place that let the air out while keeping the bugs in. And it all works really well. But there's a problem, as we just learned: These filters don't just let air through them... they can also let light through them. And we have them in our cameras! Let extra light leak into a camera, and you can take some very bad pictures. So now we're designing little "hats" to go over the filters. Air can still get out, but light can't get in. Problem solved. But like I said, it's always something... January 26, 2002 Murphy's Law seems to be one of the guiding principles behind space missions, but every now and then something goes right. We had two of 'em this week. Several weeks ago, we discovered that we had a problem with Mini-TES number two. The instrument worked fine in most ways, but the results we were getting were more "noisy" than they should have been... a little like too much static in a TV picture. The guys in Santa Barbara tracked this one down and thought that they had fixed it. We did some tests last week, and it turns out that they did more than just fix it... Mini-TES 2 is now even less noisy than Mini-TES 1 is. The other one had to do with our cameras. For a couple of months now we've been wrestling with a problem where the voltage of the electrical power delivered to the cameras wasn't coming out quite right. We found a fix, but it didn't look like a very elegant one. Even though it clearly would work, it looked like it could really increase the amount of power it would take to run each camera. And electrical power is really precious on a solar-powered rover! The JPL electronics guys have worked really hard to fix this, and this week we did some tests that showed that in reality the power usage of the cameras will be much lower than we had feared it would be... which means we can use that extra power to take more pictures. So this week was a combination of some great design work and a little bit of luck. Occasionally things go your way. February 2, 2002 We made a major change to our landing site plans this week. A few months ago, we narrowed our choices down to just four places on Mars, and since then all four have been under some really intense study. Unfortunately, that study has turned up what could be a real problem with one of them. The one that may be dangerous is the one we call Athabasca. It's a great site, but recently we've looked at some radar data that look really scary. You can bounce radar signals off of Mars from Earth, and when you do the signals that come back from Athabasca look like what you'd expect if the surface there were really rough. Not only that, but the roughness seems to be just about the same size as our wheels are. That's not good! To be honest, we're not 100% certain what the radar data really mean, and we can't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Athabasca's not perfectly safe. But it looks scary, and we're not about to take any big chances with these rovers. So Athabasca is off the list, and we've replaced it with a site in a place called Isidis. We still have several months before we have to pick the final two sites, and the work continues. February 9, 2002 We had a great week--Mini-TES 2 passed its vibe test! Vibration testing is one of the crucial events in the life of any piece of space flight hardware. You can read more about vibe testing on our Science Bites page. We had shaken Mini-TES 1 pretty hard some time ago, so we knew that the basic Mini-TES design was solid. This vibe test on Mini-TES 2 was what is sometimes called a "workmanship" test. We already knew it was designed well; this test showed us that this particular Mini-TES is also put together well. The guys in Santa Barbara put it through its paces right after the vibe, and everything checked out fine. So now it's on to the next test... February 16, 2002 Our schedule is so tight that even minor delays seem major, and we had a bunch of them this week. The camera electronics got set back a week because one of the cables in the design was bent a little more sharply than it ought to be, meaning that we had to change things once again to fix it. There's a minor problem with noise in the APXS electronics that's had everybody working crazy hours in Germany. And for some weird reason we've been having a terrible time lately just trying to ship stuff around. Electronics parts are "in the mail" for what seems like forever on their way to Mainz. Magnets on their way from Copenhagen to LA get hung up in Paris. Calibration targets vanish for a week while being shipped between Arizona and Colorado. It's maddening. Nothing's gotten lost permanentely, and if time weren't so precious, stuff like this wouldn't matter at all. In fact, the delays really haven't been all that serious. But when something's moving as fast as this project is, it can seem like the rest of the world is going in slow motion. February 23, 2002 This is it. On Monday, February 25th, we're about to begin ATLO: Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations for the rovers. Every space project has several critical phases in its life, and ATLO is one of them. ATLO is the process of actually putting the flight hardware together, making sure it works, and shooting it off to wherever it's going. For us, ATLO starts now. It's a funny feeling. On the one hand, we barely feel ready for it. Time is precious, and a few more weeks to get better prepared for a job this difficult would be nice. On the other hand, we've been waiting for this for so many years, it feels great to finally be doing it! These rovers have been in the planning stages--and have been at the very center of our professional lives--for more than six years now. And seeing the real flight hardware finally start coming together after all that time is a thrill that far outweighs whatever nervousness we might have. March 2, 2002 We had what looked like a pretty serious problem with our Mössbauer Spectrometers this week. We're now doing thermal testing, which means making sure that the instruments work properly at the temperatures that we'll actually see on Mars. The Mössbauers were behaving fine at room temperature, but when they got cold they started doing what we call "ringing". Each Mössbauer has a little drive system inside it that vibrates back and forth about 20 times a second. It's supposed to vibrate in a controlled way, but when it "rings" it's sort of like what happens when you put a microphone near a speaker and get feedback... it vibrates out of control. And if that happens, we don't get Mössbauer data. At mid-week it looked like we might have a pretty bad problem, but the guys in Germany--Goestar and Bodo and Daniel--have really hunkered down and worked hard on it over the past few days and nights. They traced the problem to one part in the electronics, and with a change to that part one of the two instruments is now behaving itself down to temperatures as cold as -120°C. We still have to finish the testing and then fix the other one (once everybody catches up on some sleep!), but right now things are looking pretty good. March 9, 2002 It's crunch time for the Mössbauer Spectrometer. The nasty "ringing" problem we had last week has definitely been solved, so it looks like we dodged that bullet. The latest problem is that one of the Mössbauer electronics boards--the part of the instrument that lives inside the rover body--is getting a little flakey on us when we run it at cold temperatures. It doesn't look like a serious problem, but it's going to take a little time to fix it. The Mössbauer sensor heads, though--the parts that go out at the end of the rover's arm--are ready to go. So we're going to deliver the instruments to JPL in two parts. This week Goestar is going to come over from Germany with the sensor heads, and spend the week at JPL putting them through a bunch of tests. We're going to shake them as hard as they'll be shaken during launch, whack them as hard as they'll get whacked when we land, vibrate them like they'll vibrate when the RAT is working, and so on. And once that's done, the sensor heads will be officially ready to go to Mars. Meanwhile, back in Germany, the rest of the guys will be running down the last of the electronics problems. So then, a few weeks from now, we'll get to do the same thing all over again with the electronics boards. March 16, 2002 This was Mössbauer week at JPL, and it was pretty wild. Goestar and Bodo brought over the sensor heads for both instruments. (The sensor head is the part that goes out on the rover's arm.) The big job for the week was to put them through vibration tests that simulate a rocket launch, and other tests that simulate the jolt of an airbag landing on Mars. These tests are quite something to watch. It's a lot like what they say about being a pilot: hours of boredom interspersed with moments of sheer terror. The hours of boredom are all the work of setting up for each test, and the moments of sheer terror come when your precious hardware gets subjected to such violent treatment. The uncanny thing about a vibration test is how much it sounds like a rocket launch. Of course, that makes perfect sense when you think about it. The vibration facility is really nothing other than a gigantic loudspeaker, and the electronics that make it work are nothing other than a gigantic synthesizer. And the song that the synthesizer was playing last week was simply the sound of a Delta rocket heading for space. We passed nearly all of the tests. Both instruments passed the landing test, and one of them passed the vibration test. The other one had an electronics board that wasn't quite fastened down right, and it shook loose during vibe. This is why you do tests! We'll fix it up and test it again in a few weeks. March 23, 2002 Our landing site situation just changed again. Sometime in the next couple of months we were due to recommend our two final landing site choices to NASA. But now we've had a delay, and for once a delay in our schedule is a good thing. The longer we can wait to pick our landing sites, the more we'll know about Mars. The Mars Odyssey spacecraft is just beginning to collect data at Mars, and it has started to return some fantastic new data for some of our possible sites. There has been very little time to study the data, and there's much more data to be taken. So if we can give Odyssey some more time, we'll know a lot more about Mars when the time comes to choose. And it turns out that we have some more time. For months we have been very worried that the mass of our spacecraft might be too high. But lately, as we have gotten more and more hardware built and weighed, that has become less of a worry. So with a little breathing room now, we've realized we can add a little bit more rocket fuel to the design. And with that extra fuel aboard, we can now target each spacecraft to land just about anywhere we want on the planet. The bottom line is that instead of having to pick our sites soon and stick with them, we've got almost another whole year before we have to make up our minds. March 30, 2002 We had a real good week, for a change. The first piece of good news is that the Mössbauer problem that popped up during vibration testing a couple of weeks ago is easy to fix. Bodo and Goestar have already fixed the one broken instrument in Germany, and the next time they come over they're going to apply the same fix to the two good instruments already at JPL, just to be on the safe side. The second piece of good news is that our second Mini-TES is now officially delivered to JPL. If you're keeping score, that's three and a half of our twelve payload elements delivered (two Mini-TESes and one and a half Moessbauers--we've delivered two Moessbauer sensor heads, but only one of the electronics boards). Lots more to go! April 6, 2002 We're working on a little design change to the RAT that should make a big difference in how it works. The Rock Abrasion Tool (a.k.a. "the RAT") is very good at grinding through rock. But all that grinding makes some rock dust, and the dust tends to get all over things. A problem that we've been worried about is that there might be some dust left on the rock surface after the RAT is done grinding away at it. Two of our instruments--the APXS and the Mössbauer Spectrometer--wouldn't be bothered by this. But the Microscopic Imager takes close-up pictures, and those pictures could be pretty useless if there's lots of dust on the rock. The old design of the RAT has two grinding wheels. What we've found after lots of testing is that the RAT works just about as well with one wheel as it does with two. So we're keeping one grinding wheel, but considering replacing the other with a brush that whisks away the dust, keeping the surface clean and beautiful. There's still more testing to be done, but if it works it should make for some great closeup pictures of the insides of martian rocks. April 13, 2002 When the schedule starts to get tight on a project like this, sometimes you have to start making some tough choices. And our schedule is getting very tight indeed. There's a small problem in the electronics of our cameras, and its result is that the pictures are a little bit more "noisy" than we'd like them to be. Imagine a TV picture with some "static" in it. The static is there in our cameras at a level far too low for the eye to see, but we know it's there. Being fussy scientists and engineers, we'd love to get rid of that little bit of noise. And we know how to do it. But the changes we'd have to make would take something like five to ten days. And our camera schedule is so tight now that any time we take to make the cameras a little bit better will come out of the time we need for critical testing over the coming months. So we have a choice: a little more noise than we'd like, or five to ten days out of our schedule. There's a saying in this business that "better is the enemy of good enough". And when the schedule is as tight as ours is, "good enough" starts to look pretty good. April 20, 2002 So much happened this week that it's impossible to pick one thing to write about. The electronics boards for the APXS passed their vibration tests in Berlin. We finished fixing the problem with the Mössbauer spectrometer sensor heads that popped up during their vibration tests last month. The motors that we've been waiting months for that go in the RAT finally arrived. A problem came up in our camera electronics board that's going to cost us another two or three week delay that we can barely afford. And we discovered a problem with one of the electronic parts inside Mini-TES 2 that we haven't figured out how to fix yet. It was quite a week! We're hoping for a slightly calmer one this week, but we're not counting on it. April 27, 2002 We've uncovered a very troubling problem with Mini-TES 2: we're afraid that it might grow whiskers. What we have learned, just recently, is that one of the electronic parts that we used deep inside Mini-TES 2 was made using some pure tin. And pure tin, it turns out, can do some very strange things. What it does, under certain conditions, is develop microscopic "whiskers"... tiny needle-like growths of metal that protrude out from the tin surface. They're nasty things to have inside a sensitive piece of electrical equipment. If they grow too far, or if they break off and start rattling around, you can get a short circuit. And then poof, no more instrument. So what do we do? The thing to do, it turns out, is to open up the part that has the tin in it, and then coat the inside with a kind of spray-on plastic. That'll help keep tin whiskers from growing, and also will hold any ones that do grow in place so they can't cause any mischief. You can imagine that cracking open an instrument that we thought was all done is not exactly high on the list of things we'd like to do! But we have to do it, and Mini-TES 2 is back up in Santa Barbara now, ready to undergo a little minor surgery. May 4, 2002 The surgery on our Mini-TES 2 instrument is over, and it seems to have gone well. We had to do this to fix the "tin whiskers" problem that I wrote about last week. It was a pretty scary operation. The guys in Santa Barbara had to open up the instrument, and then cut into the steel outer shell of one of the parts on the inside. The critical trick was to keep from getting little metal shavings loose inside the instrument-- those could be even worse than the tin whiskers we're trying to prevent! They cut into it nice and clean, and on Friday they coated the inside of the part with a spray-on plastic that should solve the whisker problem. We're not done yet, though. When you do something that severe to a piece of flight hardware, you have to do a lot of testing afterwards to make sure that nothing bad happened. So now we're in for more vibration testing, more thermal testing, and so forth. We're not out of the woods yet, but at least the really scary part seems to be over. May 11, 2002 Good news and bad news on the cameras this week. The good news is that we finally seem to have our electronics boards built. This has been an epic struggle, with one set of boards after another having some kind of problem that has made it impossible for us to fly them. We've finally got a good set of boards now--ones that are good enough to go to Mars. That's the good news. The bad news is that we're still having little problems with the electronics. They're not serious problems, or at least they don't seem to be. In fact, we're pretty sure we could fly things just as they are, and still take some very good pictures. But things still aren't quite right, and "not quite right" is not where we want to be for something as important as our cameras. The problem now isn't the boards. The problem is somewhere in all the dozens of little electronics parts that go on the boards. We're going to find it, probably within the next few days. But we're going to feel an awful lot better if we can find it, and fix it, sooner rather than later. May 18, 2002 We're finally building cameras! It seemed like this day would never come, but it's finally here. Most parts of our two cameras--Pancam and the Microscopic Imager, have been coming along fine. The electronics, though, have been giving us fits. We were still troubleshooting problems as recently as a week ago, but Arsham and the rest of the camera electronics guys at JPL have been doing a great job, and now seem to have chased down the last major problems and killed them off. So now it's time to build a lot of hardware. The first batch of cameras, which are being put together now, will be what we call Engineering Models. They're essentially identical to the flight cameras, but instead of sending them to Mars we test the heck out of them, to make absolutely certain that the design is sound. We should have them in our hands this coming week. If all goes well, the real flight cameras--the ones that really go to Mars--will start coming together in a little over a week. May 25, 2002 The big news this week has been all about Mini-TES. The tin whisker problem that we had a few weeks ago now seems to be officially behind us. We had to do a pretty scary repair job on Mini-TES 2 to fix this, but it looks like the fix worked. We just finished putting the instrument through some pretty thorough "thermal vacuum" testing in Santa Barbara, subjecting it to the same kinds of temperatures it will experience on Mars. The news was as good as it possibly could have been--even after the repairs, the instrument works as well as it ever did. So Mini-TES 2 now has a clean bill of health. Of course, things are never simple. Mini-TES 2 may be healthy, but we've known for awhile that we're also going to have to do a little bit of repair work on Mini-TES 1, and the time for that has come. This isn't nearly as big a deal as the tin whisker job was; we just have to put one new wire in, to make the design a little safer and more reliable than it is now. But you have to do that sort of thing very carefully, which means a trip to Santa Barbara. So Mini-TES 2 heads back down the coast, Mini-TES 1 heads back up the coast, and we keep sweating just a little bit. June 1, 2002 Our focus this week has been the mad rush to finish up our first set of APXS instruments and get them delivered to JPL. This is a complicated business, because we have so many instruments to build. On the one hand, JPL needs some instruments right away, to start putting them into the rovers and testing the whole system to see if it works. On the other hand, each APXS that we're actually going to fly to Mars requires many, many months of testing back in Germany before it's ready to fly. JPL needs instruments now, but the flight instruments have to stay in Germany until sometime this fall. So what do we do? We build twice as many instruments. Right now, Rudi and Ralf are scrambling to finish up the first set of instruments, which should go to JPL next week. These will go onto the rovers temporarily. Then, after a day or two to catch their breath, Rudi and Ralf will start assembling the next pair... the ones that'll actually go to Mars. These will be tested over a long work-filled summer in Mainz, and then get delivered to JPL and swapped with the other ones sometime this fall. It's twice as many instruments, and an awful lot of work, but it's the only way to do it when the schedule is so tight. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article629.html. ________________________________________________________________________ THE PROBLEMS IN THINKING ABOUT HUMANS AND SPACE By Mathew Faulk From SpaceDaily 13 October 2003 What are the philosophical and social implications of human space involvement? What does it mean that humans have the ability to venture out into the cosmos, have come to manifest a society that extends into space? What does this say about humans and reality? Humanity, in some respect, has come to extend beyond the world or planet from which humanity itself arose, and from which the world view that is unique to this worldly existence arose. There is an aspect of human society that is beginning to flow out beyond this planet in both physical existence and in thinking, and both in manners unique to this era. In physical existence humans have now come to explore reality beyond the earth, into space and the surrounding cosmos. We have embarked upon the journey of space exploration, exploring reality beyond the terrestrial. This is manifest in, and manifests the presence of, people in space and social behaviors that extend beyond only a worldly end or intention. There are now substantial aspects of human life that are being directly confronted with this phenomenon. Human society must contend with, move out into keeping within the mind the consciousness of, the universe beyond the planet and the activity going on there. Read the full article at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-03zzk.html. ________________________________________________________________________ THE DRAKE EQUATION REVISITED, PART III: CAUSE FOR OPTIMISM By David Grinspoon From Astrobiology Magazine 13 October 2003 The Drake equation was developed as a means of predicting the likelihood of detecting other intelligent civilizations in our galaxy. At the NASA exobiology forum, Frank Drake, who formulated the equation 42 years ago, moderated a debate between Peter Ward and David Grinspoon. David Grinspoon is a principal scientist with the department of space studies at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder and he's the author of Venus Revealed and the forthcoming Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life. In this installment of the series, Dr. Grinspoon responds to Dr. Ward's comments, explaining why he is optimistic about the possibility of making contact with intelligent extraterrestrials. In part I of this series, Frank Drake discussed the history and content of the Drake equation. In part II, Peter Ward argued that contact with intelligent extraterrestrials is unlikely. Parts IV and V will present the question-and-answer period that followed the opening remarks by Drake, Ward and Grinspoon. David Grinspoon: First of all, I'm happy to be here and honored to be sharing the stage with Frank Drake and Peter Ward. Frank Drake has been a hero of mine, I'd have to say, since I was about eight years old, or whenever it was that I gained the sophistication to understand what it was that he does. I just thought that was the coolest. And I still do. And, of course, Peter Ward, the author of Rare Earth, and I have to say that I think it's a wonderful book. I totally recommend that you all read it, if you haven't. It's got some great descriptions of some really neat science and very current description of a lot of what we know about the history of Earth and the history of life on Earth. I disagree to some extent with some of the implications of all that knowledge that we can draw for life in the wider Universe and I think that's what we're going to talk about here a little bit. But it's certainly well-argued and well-written and I think that Ward and Brownlee have done us all a favor by instigating what I would call a minor anti-Copernican backlash. There is this wish to believe that we're connected to the cosmos and that there's lots of life out there. Personally, I think that there are also rational reasons to believe that. But we don't want to believe it just because of wishful thinking and so it's great to have somebody come along and kind of challenge that view. Thinking about the 40 years of advancement in our knowledge--or now I guess it's 42 years--since Frank Drake first wrote the Drake equation on the board at Green Bank what have we really learned that is new and different since that time, that really sheds new light on this question? To my mind there are three developments. There are a lot more, but there are three that come to mind that are significant. And one, I think, is in a certain sense negative as far as the prospects of extraterrestrial intelligence, and the other two are positive. The one that I would say is perhaps slightly negative is that at the beginning of the 60s there was more optimism about life on our immediate neighbors in our solar system than there is now. It was commonly believed by serious scientists that there was life on Mars, that there was at least vegetation on Mars. You can go back and find papers written in the 50s and early 60s that suggest that the markings that you can see changing on the surface of Mars--and, by the way, this is a very, very good week to see them, as I'm sure you've read, and hopefully have seen--that there was a lot of belief that there might be vegetation. And even Venus, which, of course, now we all think of as just hell, because of the results of the wonderful 40 years of planetary exploration that we've had was at that time thought to be perhaps a watery friendly planet. So our planetary exploration has been a little bit sobering as far as our hopes for life on our immediate neighbors. But then, of course, as you go out a little bit further, as Frank mentioned, there's the discovery of an ocean on Europa and the broadening of our views about what kinds of planets might support life. So that goes both directions. But there are two other developments that I think are most significant as far as what is really changed in 42 years. First of all, we've found planets orbiting other stars. We know that they are there. We don't know very much about them yet. We've only found the ones that are easy to see, which as Frank mentioned, are the ones that we know are not going to be like Earth. And there's still the majority of stars, by far--we have no idea whether or not they have planets. So there's still more that we don't know, much more, about extrasolar planets. And over the next coming decade and decades, it's going to be very exciting as that picture of the demographics of those planets clarify. But, no matter what, I think we have to see that development as very, very encouraging for the prospects of extraterrestrial life, and I would say extraterrestrial intelligence. The planets are out there. And then, finally, there's so much that we've learned about life on Earth. In particular, you've heard about extremophiles. The range of conditions that life can exist on the Earth, we had no idea, again, in the early 60s, when the Drake equation was formulated, about this incredible array of strategies for survival that organisms on Earth have developed, in terms of the kinds of fuel they can use, what they can eat, what they can breathe, the kinds of temperatures and pressures and acidities they can survive. And, again, I think that's a very encouraging development. It tells us that life is even more tenacious and adaptable and just clever--not clever in an intentional sense, but clever in terms of the problem- solving capabilities of evolution by natural selection. And you know that we still have not gotten anywhere near the bottom of that well. We're still discovering extremophiles, extreme life on Earth, that surprises us in the range of environments that it can survive in. And that has got to be a hopeful indication of the kinds of environments where life can survive in the Universe. Now, as far as the rare-Earth hypothesis, let me say why I don't completely agree with the kind of pessimistic conclusion that is drawn in it. Peter Ward: You alluded to the rare-Earth hypothesis. Brownlee and I simply said we thought life would be widespread, almost universal, thinking at that time that life evolved easily. But that complex life would be almost impossible to find. Or at far lower and lower levels. David Grinspoon: Okay, thanks. So the idea that simple life is going to be more widespread than complex life in the Universe is kind of obvious. It's almost a tautology. If you define complex life as something that sometimes evolves out of simple life and sometimes doesn't, then it is a tautology. It's a little bit like saying there are more acorns than there are oak trees. I mean, we all agree that there's likely to be more simple life than complex life. The real question is: what is the ratio? In terms of those factors that Frank described, what are those factors fi and L? So it only becomes interesting when you quantify it a little bit. Otherwise it's obvious. What kind of conclusion can we draw about the history of life on Earth? In Rare Earth, a lot is made out of various historical events that happened to the Earth, and various features of Earth that seem to be unusual. Earth has a large moon; most planets don't have a large moon. There are various ways in which our large moon is related to the history of life here. Earth has a particular climate, has the existence of plate tectonics, and so forth. And, in my mind, there's no question that all of these, what they call the rare-Earth factors, are very closely linked to the evolution of life and the evolution of complex life on Earth. But I think there's a logical fallacy we make when we look at that history and we say: only with this set of circumstances could we have arrived at a planet with complex life. I think you can imagine a lot of different kind of planetary histories that are very, very different from the history of Earth, with different kinds of unlikely historical contingencies, and complex life arising on that planet and first looking around and looking back at the history of its own planet and saying, "Well, look at all these unlikely things, and here we are. So clearly only on a planet like this can you have complex life." So the fact that complex and seemingly unlikely set of circumstances leads to complex life on one planet does not mean that the same set of circumstances has to apply. If you really buy that you must have a moon like Earth's moon, and you must have a planet the same size, with the same kind of water inventory and all of these things have to be very finely tuned, then I think you can make a case for complex life being much more rare. But I think we simply just don't know that. Another thing that's worth considering is the role of life itself in shaping the Earth and the way that the Earth is. Life is not just along for the ride on Earth. The history of Earth and it's environment is a complex interplay between life and the non-living parts of the planet. It's a give and take. Life has been a major player in determining the composition of the atmosphere, the composition of the oceans. Even, I think you can argue, things like plate tectonics, in the long run, are related to the existence of life and its effect on the hydrosphere and the atmosphere, and so forth. It's all related. I think there's a way that the rare-Earth hypothesis, at least taken to an extreme, you could call it the Pangloss hypothesis, in honor of Voltaire's character, Dr. Pangloss, who said that all things must be as they are in this, the most perfect of all worlds. I think that the rare-Earth hypothesis verges a little bit on claiming that this is the most perfect of all worlds, and that if you varied any of these factors, you would come up with a less-habitable planet. The fact is, we don't know that Earth is optimal for life, or complex life. Earth might be not that great a planet for complex life. It seems like almost a heretical thing to say, but we have no idea if this is the perfect planet for life. If you vary some of these factors, if Earth was a little bit larger, had a little bit more water, was within a different solar system with a bigger Jupiter or a smaller Jupiter, so we had a different impact rate affecting the rate of extinctions and evolution, life might have proceeded a lot faster. There might have been intelligent life on Earth after 2 billion years. And by now, who knows what would be here? So I think the whole notion that Earth's history is somehow optimized for complex life and it can't get any better than this is--to me it seems like pre-Copernican thinking. [So I think we need to get] away from this prejudice of assuming that if a planet isn't like Earth in one of these various ways, that that's going to mean that it's less likely to have complex life. It might make it more likely to have complex life. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article631.html. ________________________________________________________________________ UC SCIENTISTS DISCOVER PLANT GENE THAT PROMOTES PRODUCTION OF OZONE- DESTROYING METHYL HALIDES University of California, San Diego release 13 October 2003 A team of University of California scientists has identified a gene that controls the production by terrestrial plants of methyl halides, gaseous compounds that contribute to the destruction of ozone in the stratosphere. The discovery of the gene, detailed in the October 14 issue of the journal Current Biology, is important because it now provides scientists with a genetic tool with which to probe how and why plants produce methyl halides. The identification of the gene should also help researchers determine the extent to which plants emit methyl halides into the atmosphere and why certain plants increase their methyl halide emissions in high salt environments. The team of plant geneticists at UC San Diego and atmospheric chemists at UC Irvine dubbed the gene HOL for "Harmless to Ozone Layer" because disruption of the gene largely eliminates methyl halide production. The researchers discovered the gene in Arabidopsis, a mustard plant in the cabbage family that is used commonly in genetic studies. The researchers also found closely related variants, or homologues, of the HOL gene in the genetic databases of rice, cotton, corn and barley. Homologues had been identified separately in cabbage and a salt marsh plant by geneticists at the University of Montreal and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, respectively. These discoveries, taken together, indicate that the gene is likely a common trait of all terrestrial plants. However, the scientists emphasize that the ubiquity of the HOL gene in plants and their results cannot be used to suggest that plants are responsible for the depletion of the earth's ozone layer. "Stratospheric ozone depletion is a human-created problem," says Robert C. Rhew, an assistant professor of geography at UC Berkeley who noted that most of the bromine and chlorine that reach the stratosphere are produced by humans. "Methyl halides are tricky compounds to study because they emanate from both natural and human sources, and our study addresses the current pressing question of how and why these methyl halides are produced." Rhew conducted the study while a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Eric S. Saltzman, a professor of earth system science at UC Irvine who is also a co-author. "The take-home message of this study is that all plants probably have this gene," says Lars Østergaard, a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Martin Yanofsky, a UCSD biology professor and a co-author. "Now we can determine more precisely the impact plants have on the production of methyl halides and whether it might be appropriate or feasible to engineer crops to minimize the expression of this gene." Østergaard and Yanofsky began their collaboration with the UC Irvine chemists several years ago, when Rhew, a former graduate student at UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography working on identifying natural sources of methyl halides, wondered if a plant gene could be found that controlled methyl halide production. Human-produced compounds that release chlorine and bromine into the atmosphere-such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), halons and industrially produced methyl bromide-have long been identified as stratospheric ozone depleting compounds and are gradually being phased out under the 1987 Montreal Protocol in an effort to reduce the halogen load in the atmosphere. But a number of studies in recent years have found that some crops also contribute to the atmosphere a small fraction of ozone-reacting methyl halides, such as methyl chloride, methyl iodide and methyl bromide-a compound that is manufactured to be used in agriculture as a soil fumigant, but which will be phased out completely by the Montreal Protocol by 2005. One such study published in Science three years ago by a UC Irvine team estimated, from measurements of a rice paddy over a period of two years, that rice farming around the world contributes 1 percent of the total methyl bromide and 5 percent of the methyl iodide emissions. "The major industrial sources of these halides increasingly are being regulated, but we still must uncover their natural sources," says UCI Chancellor Ralph J. Cicerone, a leading expert on ozone depletion who headed the Science study. "We only know where half of the methyl chloride and two-thirds of the methyl bromide are coming from. The identification of the HOL gene is a critical step forward in allowing us to determine more precisely the contribution of plants to these unknown, natural sources of methyl halides." Another study, published by Rhew while a graduate student at Scripps, estimated that 10 percent of the natural global emissions of methyl chloride and methyl bromide could be coming from salt marshes, which make up less than a tenth of one percent of the global terrestrial surface area. Other studies have identified biomass burning, leaded gasoline combustion, fungi and the oceans as primary sources of methyl halides. Scientists have discovered that as the concentration of salts, or halides, increase in the soil or water, plants tend to release more of those methyl halides into the atmosphere. This suggests that the current push to generate new varieties of salt-tolerant crops to increase food production may have the unintended effect of increasing methyl halide emissions. The University of California team discovered that the HOL gene controls the production of an enzyme that catalyzes the production in plants of methyl bromide, methyl chloride and methyl iodide. The scientists found that the addition of bromide salts to a substrate on which their Arabidopsis plants grew led to a more than a thousand-fold increase in methyl bromide. But plants with a mutant, non-working copy of the HOL gene, the scientists discovered, produced only 15 percent of the methyl chloride, 4 percent of the methyl bromide and 1 percent of the methyl iodide of normal, wild-type plants. The UC scientists say the enzyme produced by the HOL gene may function to metabolize plant compounds that are thought to serve as insect repellents, suggesting that plants may have initially evolved the biochemical pathway that produces methyl halide emissions to ward off insects. This may provide an additional challenge to scientists seeking to genetically engineer salt tolerant crops that can minimize methyl halide production without losing their natural insect resistance. "By studying plants with normal and mutant copies of this gene," says Yanofsky of UCSD, "we should be able to address the question of whether the gene is important for pathogen resistance." The study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and NOAA's Postdoctoral Program in Climate and Global Change. Contacts: Kim McDonald, UCSD Phone: 858-534-7572 E-mail: kmcdonald@ucsd.edu Tom Vasich, UCI Phone: 949-824-6455 E-mail: tmvasich@uci.edu Robert Rhew Phone: 510-643-3579 E-mail: rrhew@atmos.berkeley.edu Lars Østergaard Phone: 858-534-7298 E-mail: larsoe@biomail.ucsd.edu Martin Yanofsky Phone: 858-534-7299 E-mail: myanofsky@ucsd.edu Eric Saltzman Phone: 949-824-3936 E-mail: esaltzma@uci.edu Read the original news release at http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/mchalides.htm. ________________________________________________________________________ NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/astrobiology.html 14 October 2003 Astrobiology and planetary engineering articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles1.html Agence France-Presse, 2003. Star 37 Gem: the best bet for finding E.T. SpaceDaily. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK), 2003. Revealing Rocks on Earth--and Mars. Astrobiology Magazine. K. Groves, 2003. New method for finding life on Mars. Universe Today. K. Groves, 2003. Rocks could reveal secrets of life on Earth - and Mars. SpaceDaily. Human space exploration articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles3.html CNN, 2003. China confirms October space date. CNN. L. David, 2003. Enthusiasm for manned Chinese space mission grows as launch window is firmed. Space.com. M. Faulk, 2003. The problems in thinking about humans and space. SpaceDaily. SETI articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles4.html A. Alexander, 2003. BOINC at home. Astrobiology Magazine. D. DeBoer, 2003. Metal in the meadow. Astrobiology Magazine. D. Grinspoon, 2003. The Drake equation revisited, part III: cause for optimism. Astrobiology Magazine. Extrasolar planets articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles7.html Astrobiology Magazine, 2003. Habitability: betting on 37 Gem. Astrobiology Magazine. D. Stresing, 2003. On the edge: is anybody out there? Space.com. ________________________________________________________________________ CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS NASA/JPL release 2-8 October 2003 The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the tracking station on Monday, October 6. 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. Imaging Science Subsystem, Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS), and Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) participated in observations of several stars for instrument calibration purposes. In addition UVIS and VIMS performed a solar port calibration. In preparation for next week's activities, RADAR instrument expanded block trigger commands and commands to reroute REU data were uplinked to the spacecraft, and Radio Science Subsystem (RSS) performed quiet test #2. As part of the Ka-band Translator (KaT) recovery efforts, and at the recommendation of members of the Radio Science Team, the KaT was turned off via a real-time command for an undetermined number of days during the Quiet Test. Preliminary and official port 3 deliveries were completed as part of the cruise C42 science planning team process. All teams and offices presented at the two-day Approach Science / Tour operations readiness review that was conducted this week. The review board members were highly complimentary of the volume of work that has been completed and the state of readiness that the Cassini team has achieved. 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 2-8 October 2003 The following new images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are now available. Mesas and Troughs (Released 02 October 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/02/index.html Small Impact Crater (Released 03 October 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/03/index.html Kasei Valles Flow (Released 04 October 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/04/index.html Valley near Nilus Chaos (Released 05 October 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/05/index.html Hellas Planitia (Released 06 October 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/06/index.html Flows of Olympus (Released 07 October 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/07/index.html East Candor Layers (Released 08 October 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/08/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 6-10 October 2003 Two Craters (Released 6 October 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20031006a.html Ritchey Crater (Released 8 October 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20031008a.html The Summit of Olympus Mons (Released 9 October 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20031009a.html A Different Medusae Fossae Formation (Released 10 October 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20031010a.html All of the THEMIS images are archived at http://themis.la.asu.edu/latest.html. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) was developed by Arizona State University, Tempe, in collaboration with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing. The THEMIS investigation is led by Dr. Philip Christensen at Arizona State University. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime contractor for the Odyssey project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. ________________________________________________________________________ STARDUST STATUS REPORT NASA/JPL release 10 October 2003 The Stardust team had three periods 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. There are 84 days remaining until the Comet Wild 2 encounter in January 2004. Stardust successfully exited from solar conjunction on October 7. Navigation Camera calibration images were taken on October 8. The testing of the Comet Wild 2 encounter sequence is continuing in the Spacecraft Test Laboratory. 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 41.