Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 10, Number 42, 21 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) STRANGER IN A NEW LAND By Kate Wong 2) NEW NASA FACILITY WILL HELP PROTECT SPACE CREWS FROM RADIATION NASA release 03-326 3) TOUCHDOWN OR SPLASHDOWN? TITAN PROBE MAY GET ALL WET By Robert Roy Britt 4) DYSON'S LONG SHOT By Seth Shostak 5) CHINA PUTS MAN INTO ORBIT TO JOIN ELITE SPACE CLUB WITH RUSSIA AND U.S. From Agence France-Presse and SpaceDaily 6) PLANETARY SOCIETY LEADERS TO TESTIFY TO CONGRESS, CALL FOR EXPLORATION TO BE PRINCIPAL OBJECTIVE OF FUTURE HUMAN SPACE FLIGHT By Susan Lendroth 7) CHINA YEARS BEHIND U.S. AND RUSSIA IN SPACE, BUT CATCHING UP FAST By Cindy Sui 8) TIME ENOUGH FOR LIFE By Peter Backus 9) SPACE COULD BE CHINESE BY THE YEAR 2050, EXPERTS SAY From Agence France-Presse and SpaceDaily 10) THIRD ROCKS FROM THE STARS Based on NASA/Terrestrial Planet Finder report 11) MARTIAN CHRONICLES VIII: TORTURE TESTS By Steve Squyres 12) MARTIAN CHRONICLES IX: HAYWIRES By Steve Squyres 13) THE DRAKE EQUATION REVISITED, PART IV: IS INTELLIGENCE A BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE? By Frank Drake, Peter Ward and David Grinspoon 14) NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas 15) CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS NASA/JPL release 16) MARS EXPRESS STATUS REPORT ESA release 17) MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 18) MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release 19) SPACE INFRARED TELESCOPE FACILITY MISSION STATUS NASA/JPL release 20) STARDUST STATUS REPORT NASA/JPL release ________________________________________________________________________ STRANGER IN A NEW LAND By Kate Wong From Scientific American 13 October 2003 In an age of spacecraft and deep-sea submersibles, we take it for granted that humans are intrepid explorers. Yet from an evolutionary perspective, the propensity to colonize is one of the distinguishing characteristics of our kind: no other primate has ever ranged so far and wide. Humans have not always been such cosmopolitan creatures, however. For most of the seven million years or so over which hominids have been evolving, they remained within the confines of their birthplace, Africa. But at some point, our ancestors began pushing out of the motherland, marking the start of a new chapter in our family history. It was, until recently, a chapter the fossil record had kept rather hidden from view. Based on the available evidence--a handful of human fossils from sites in China and Java--most paleoanthropologists concluded that the first intercontinental traveling was undertaken by an early member of our genus known as Homo erectus starting little more than a million years ago. Long of limb and large of brain, H. erectus had just the sort of stride and smarts befitting a trailblazer. Earlier hominids, H. habilis and the australopithecines among them, were mostly small-bodied, small-brained creatures, not much bigger than a modern chimpanzee. The H. erectus build, in contrast, presaged modern human body proportions. Read the full article at http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=0008C127-C322- 1F80-B57583414B7F0103. ________________________________________________________________________ NEW NASA FACILITY WILL HELP PROTECT SPACE CREWS FROM RADIATION NASA release 03-326 14 October 2003 Imagine a human spacecraft crew voyaging through space. A satellite sends a warning; energetic particles are being accelerated from the sun's corona, sending dangerous radiation toward their spacecraft, but the crew isn't worried. Long before their journey, researchers on Earth conducted experiments to accurately measure the hazards of space radiation and developed new materials and countermeasures to protect them. To ensure the safety of spacecraft crews, NASA biologists and physicists will perform thousands of experiments at the new $34 million NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) commissioned today at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY. The laboratory, built in cooperation between NASA and DOE, is one of the few facilities that can simulate the harsh space radiation environment. "Scientists will use this facility as a research tool to protect today's crews on the International Space Station and to enable the next generation of explorers to safely go beyond Earth's protected neighborhood," said Guy Fogleman, director of the Bioastronautics Research Division, Office of Biological and Physical Research (OBPR), at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Space radiation produced by the sun and other galactic sources is more dangerous and hundreds of times more intense than radiation sources, such as medical X-rays or normal cosmic radiation, usually experienced on Earth. When the intensely ionizing particles found in space strike human tissue, it can result in cell damage and may eventually lead to cancer. Approximately 80 investigators will conduct research annually at the new facility. "The NSRL will enable us to triple the ability of researchers to perform radiobiology experiments and the resulting science knowledge," said Frank Cucinotta, the program scientist for NASA's Space Radiation Health Project at Johnson Space Center, Houston. "Scientists at universities and medical centers across the nation will use the facility to investigate how space radiation damages cells and tissues such as the eyes, brain and internal organs," he said. For each experiment, an accelerator produces beams of protons or heavy ions. These ions are typical of those accelerated in cosmic sources and by the sun. The beams of ions move through a 328-foot transport tunnel to the 400-square-foot, shielded target hall. There, they hit the target, which may be a biological sample or shielding material. "Physicists will measure how specific particles interact with shielding material," said James Adams, the program scientist for the Space Radiation Shielding Program at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. "We can use this knowledge to improve our ability to predict the effectiveness of various materials and to develop and test new materials." At NSRL, the radiation health team will perform extensive tests with biological samples placed in the path of the radiation. They will use the information to understand mechanisms of radiation damage to cells, predict risks, and develop countermeasures that mitigate radiation effects. "Advances in radiation detection, shielding and other radiation-mitigation techniques may be applied to workers in space and on Earth and may lead to improved use of radiation to treat disease on Earth and prevent radiation-induced illnesses," Fogleman said. Since the 1970s, NASA has been using particle accelerators to understand and mitigate the risks of space radiation. The NSRL will take advantage of the high-energy particle accelerators at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a DOE facility established in 1947. Construction of the new facility began in 1998, and was funded in part by NASA's Office of Biological and Physical Research. For more information about NASA on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov. For information about Brookhaven National Laboratory, contact Mona S. Rowe at 631-344-5056, or for information on the Internet, visit http://www.bnl.gov. Contacts: Dolores Beasley NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1753 William Jeffs NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX Phone: 281-483-5035 Steve Roy NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL Phone: 256-544-0034 Read the original news release at http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2003/oct/HQ_03326_new_facility.html. An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/brookhaven_lab_created.html. ________________________________________________________________________ TOUCHDOWN OR SPLASHDOWN? TITAN PROBE MAY GET ALL WET By Robert Roy Britt From Space.com 14 October 2003 No craft has ever landed in a lake or ocean beyond our home planet. A new study suggests that could change in 2005 when the Cassini spacecraft sends its detachable Huygens probe parachuting down to Saturn's moon Titan. Since well before the mission launched, exactly 6 years ago tomorrow, astronomers have wondered whether Huygens would touch down or splash down. Titan is no waterworld, but it may be a liquid methane world, mounting evidence suggests. Titan is half again as large as Earth's Moon. It is the only satellite in the solar system with a serious atmosphere. Like Earth's air, Titan's is mostly nitrogen. Problem is Titan's atmosphere is so thick with natural smog that astronomers can hardly see through it, so they know little about what exists at the surface. For decades, researchers have speculated that Titan could harbor liquid lakes or seas made of hydrocarbons, which would rain out of the atmosphere as a result of sunlight breaking down methane, also prevalent in the air. A study three years ago found evidence for this strange rain. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/titan_huygens_031014.html. ________________________________________________________________________ DYSON'S LONG SHOT By Seth Shostak From Astrobiology Magazine 14 October 2003 Freeman Dyson is betting that alien life doesn't live on a world like yours. More specifically, if you check out the tentative wager this celebrated physicist has logged at the Web site www.longbets.org, you'll see that Dyson's hunch is that the first discovery of extraterrestrial life will be made someplace other than on a planet or on a satellite of a planet. In other words, if we succeed in finding some biology beyond Earth, it won't be camped out on a large ball of rock. I have great admiration for Freeman Dyson's breathtaking ideas. But I suspect he's taking a long shot here. He hasn't qualified the bet to say "intelligent extraterrestrial life." So if an upcoming mission to Mars, Titan, or Europa discovers microbes busy eking out a living deep underground or afloat in hidden oceans of water or natural gas, then Dyson will have to pay up, assuming we haven't found some other biology first. Is there something else we could find first? There's always the possibility of breaking open a fallen meteorite to reveal some sort of metabolizing slime within. Or maybe intelligent aliens will make an unequivocal landing behind the White House rose garden. But if you're talking near-term success in uncovering life elsewhere, then SETI's a big part of the mix. SETI, of course, could find a signal at any time. So how reasonable is Dyson's hypothesis of a non-planetary home for intelligent life? After all, the usual convention in SETI--as expressed in everything from the Drake Equation to the strategy of targeted searches--is that complex, thinking beings will evolve on Earth-like worlds, and stay there. The first conjecture isn't enormously controversial. But the second may be too conservative. Intelligent beings might travel, and at the very least could spread through their own solar systems. Dyson has pointed out that the fundamental problem with planets is that there's not much real estate for the mass involved. Spheres have the minimum surface area for a given volume of stuff. You can improve things by chopping the Earth in two and rolling up each of the halves like clay balls. This will increase the acreage by 26%. Do it again (now four balls), and you'll win another 26%. Reconfiguring Earth is a big job, and would probably run afoul of environmental protection agencies. But there's no need: as Dyson has noted, if more space is your thing, then the asteroids are already available as bite-size hunks of matter, close enough to the Sun to intercept interesting amounts of energy, and composed of materials suitable for supporting life. There's at least ten thousand times as much surface area on the asteroids as on our home planet. So our future, Dyson suggests, lies in exploiting this abundant acreage, for otherwise we may crowd ourselves into a nasty situation here on Earth. Assuming that intelligent species elsewhere have done the same, shouldn't we be broadening (in a literal sense) our SETI searches? In fact, our searches already are broad! The Arecibo telescope's beam, as used for Project Phoenix, covers all of a 100 light-year-distant solar system out to two thousand times the Earth-Sun distance. It will encompass anyone's asteroid belt. Our optical searches are similarly sensitive to wide swaths of other star systems. But what if life has adapted to existence in a vacuum (another Dyson suggestion)? You might think that life in a vacuum sucks, but if such atmosphere-independent biology exists, it might migrate to giant molecular clouds and other interstellar feeding grounds where resources are far more plentiful than in a planetary system. If this has happened, SETI sky surveys (such as SERENDIP IV, the data-collecting component of the SETI@home effort) might turn up intelligence situated between the stars. Is Freeman Dyson right? Obviously, no one yet knows, and it's certainly possible that life--even of the savvy variety--might be situated elsewhere than on planetary surfaces. Fortunately, today's SETI searches have those extraplanetary bases reasonably covered. Meanwhile, those who are optimistic about the chances for finding life beneath Mars' dusty dirt or under Europa's icy crust may wish to step forward and take up Freeman Dyson's bet. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article632.html ________________________________________________________________________ CHINA PUTS MAN INTO ORBIT TO JOIN ELITE SPACE CLUB WITH RUSSIA AND U.S. From Agence France-Presse and SpaceDaily 15 October 2003 China Wednesday launched an astronaut into space aboard the Shenzhou V craft in a historic mission which catapults the country into an elite club alongside Russia and the United States. The Long March II F rocket carrying the capsule blasted into clear skies from the remote Gobi desert in north China's Inner Mongolia at 9:00 AM for a 21-hour flight that will see the craft orbit the Earth 14 times. Shenzou V went into preset orbit 10 minutes after take-off as China became just the third country after the United States and the former Soviet Union to put a man in space 42 years after Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's epic first flight. Read the full article at http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/031015025140.2zzgs9dn.html. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.msnbc.com/news/976744.asp http://www.spacedaily.com/news/china-03zo.html http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/031016040033.aui0osa6.html http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/031016024357.yvvtcqwo.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-03zzo.html http://spaceflightnow.com/shenzhou/status.html http://www.universetoday.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=717 http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/shenzhou_5_launches.html ________________________________________________________________________ PLANETARY SOCIETY LEADERS TO TESTIFY TO CONGRESS, CALL FOR EXPLORATION TO BE PRINCIPAL OBJECTIVE OF FUTURE HUMAN SPACE FLIGHT By Susan Lendroth Planetary Society release 15 October 2003 Bruce Murray, Chairman of the Board of The Planetary Society, and Wesley T. Huntress, the Society's President will testify to the House Science Committee on Thursday, October 16 on the Future of Space Flight. Dr. Murray is former Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Dr. Huntress is the former Associate Administrator for Space Science at NASA. Both Dr. Murray and Dr. Huntress emphasize that the risk and cost of human space flight for any nation should only be incurred when the goals are large enough to justify them, such as the exploration of other worlds. Their testimony coincides with the anticipated launch of China's first human space flight. China will become only the third nation, after the United States and Russia, to launch humans to space. Speculation in various media sources and analysts' reports about long-range Chinese plans for space flight include future lunar missions. Dr. Murray will comment "Mars is the true space frontier; it is the legitimate abode for the dreams of the young for many generations to come. Thus, America should lead the world in that grand, positive human endeavor. We can use some of our enormous and visible technological capability to dramatically demonstrate our commitment to Earth's future beyond the blood and conflict which inevitably will color much of the 21st century." Dr. Huntress will say, "The human space flight program is marching into a blind alley, stuck in Earth orbit with an expensive, complex and risky infrastructure not designed to support destinations beyond Earth orbit. We need to establish Mars as a destination for human space flight in the next 50 years; retire the Shuttle in favor of a simpler, less risky and less costly system; limit the Space Station to research on human physiology in space; and devise a new architecture to establish a permanent human presence in deep space." Dr. Murray's testimony will focus strongly on the need to combine the human and robotic Mars exploration programs as the mission objectives evolve from exploration through development of infrastructure and possible outposts to human flight. Murray has led The Planetary Society's advocacy of Mars Outpost development--both as a goal for the robotic program and as an enabling step for human exploration. Huntress cites his current leadership of a study of the International Academy of Astronautics, "The Next Steps in Exploring Deep Space." That study is developing an approach for the future of human space flight leading to Mars. Huntress drew on his experience at NASA from the 1990s when he was a key architect of both the reinvigorated Mars exploration program and of NASA's Human Exploration and Development of Space initiative that holds, as its goal, to make human space exploration a major element of subsequent missions to Mars. Their full congressional testimony will be presented to the Committee tomorrow and will be available on The Planetary Society web site, http://planetary.org. This web site also carries the conclusions and recommendations from a workshop about the future of human space transportation endorsed by the Society and the American Astronautical Society. Read the original news release at http://planetary.org/html/news/articlearchive/headlines/2003/congress_te stimony.html. An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-03zzr.html. ________________________________________________________________________ CHINA YEARS BEHIND U.S. AND RUSSIA IN SPACE, BUT CATCHING UP FAST By Cindy Sui From Agence France-Presse and SpaceDaily 16 October 2003 China might have become only the third country to send a person into space Wednesday, but little has been achieved in terms of new scientific innovations, experts say. However, they cautioned it would be foolish to brush aside China's manned spaceflight because the country's highly- ambitious space program could yet come to rival any other at the rate it is developing. "It's mostly prestige. It's not scientific. The scientific part has been pretty small," said Brian Harvey, Dublin-based author of The Chinese Space Programme. China's spacecraft--Shenzhou V or Divine Vessel V--is a copy of the Russian spacecraft Soyuz, which the Soviets sent into space 36 years ago. Chinese astronauts have trained in Russia and even the type of spacesuit they wear is a replica of the Russian suits, according to Western experts, although Beijing disputes this. Read the full article at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/china-03zn.html. ________________________________________________________________________ TIME ENOUGH FOR LIFE By Peter Backus From Space.com 16 October 2003 In our hectic world, we seldom have time enough for life: time for family, time for friends, or time for the pleasures of life. In studying the universe, Astrobiologists face a different problem: which stars might provide time enough for life? The answer depends on the life of the star. It may seem odd to speak of the life of a star, but stars go through processes akin to birth, maturity, and even death. It is the pacing of those stages in a star's life that determine whether biological life has a chance on an orbiting planet. The life of a star is an ongoing struggle between the force of gravity trying to collapse the star and the energy released by nuclear fusion which heats the gas and makes it expand. The "metabolism" of a star, how fast it consumes hydrogen, is determined by this simple balance of forces. The more massive the star, the greater the force of gravity pulls it together, and the more it must "burn" hydrogen to fight the collapse. In the case of a star, there is no question of "nature vs. nurture." Its fate is determined the day it is born. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_backus_life_031016.html. ________________________________________________________________________ SPACE COULD BE CHINESE BY THE YEAR 2050, EXPERTS SAY From Agence France-Presse and SpaceDaily 16 October 2003 It is the year 2053. Zhang Jianwei, a Chinese air force colonel, peeps out of the cockpit of his "Ziqiang VIII" space shuttle to catch a last glimpse of the Jiuquan Space Center before blasting off to Mars. Sitting next to him is Neil Glenn, a US Air Force major who has been invited to visit China's "Red Horizon" base on Mars, as a goodwill gesture to the American losers in the race to send a man to the red planet. "Shi, jiu, ba ..." goes the Mandarin-language countdown. "...three, two, one--and lift-off!" Could this be simply science fiction, at a time when China has just sent a man into orbit around the Earth and merely succeeded in doing what the Americans and Russians accomplished four decades earlier? Yes, experts say, but it is definitely within the realm of the technically feasible. Read the full article at http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/031016024357.yvvtcqwo.html. ________________________________________________________________________ THIRD ROCKS FROM THE STARS Based on NASA/Terrestrial Planet Finder report From Astrobiology Magazine 17 October 2003 The ill-fated protagonist of Shakespeare's play Hamlet admonished his friend that: "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Today we might instead warn ourselves of the certainty that there are more kinds of Earths in the heavens than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Any mission to detect and spectroscopically characterize terrestrial planets around other stars must be designed so that it can characterize diverse types of terrestrial planets with a useful outcome. Such missions are now under study--the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), by NASA, and Darwin by ESA, the European Space Agency. The principal goal of TPF/Darwin is to provide data to the biologists and atmospheric chemists. These investigators will evaluate the observations of a potentially broad diversity of objects in terms of evidence of life and the environmental conditions in which such life would be present. The TPF/Darwin concept hinges on the assumption that one can screen extrasolar planets for habitability spectroscopically. For such an assumption to be valid, we must answer the following questions. What makes a planet habitable and how can that be studied remotely? What are the diverse effects that biota might exert on the spectra of planetary atmospheres? What false positives might we expect? What are the evolutionary histories of atmospheres likely to be? And, especially, what are robust indicators of life? TPF/Darwin must survey nearby stars for planetary systems that include terrestrial sized planets in their habitable zones ("Earth-like" planets). Through spectroscopy, TPF/Darwin must determine whether these planets have atmospheres and establish whether they are habitable. We define a habitable planet in the "classical" sense, meaning a planet having an atmosphere and with liquid water on its surface. The habitable zone therefore is that zone within which light from the planet's parent star (its "Sun") is sufficiently intense to maintain liquid water at the surface, without initiating runaway greenhouse conditions that dissociate water and sustain the loss of hydrogen to space. The size of a planet can determine its capacity to sustain habitable conditions. Larger planets sustain higher levels of tectonic activity that also persists for a longer time. Tectonic activity sustains volcanism and also heats crustal rocks and recycles CO2 and other gases back into the atmosphere. These outgassing processes are required to ensure climate stability over geologic timescales. There are interesting potential examples where liquid water might exist only deep below the surface, such as the Jovian moon Europa, or on present-day Mars. However, biospheres for which liquid water is present only in the subsurface might not be detectable by TPF/Darwin. Thus a planet having liquid water at its surface meets our operational definition of habitability, which is that habitable conditions must be detectable. Although the "cross hairs" of the TPF/Darwin search strategy should be trained upon "Earthlike" planets, TPF/Darwin should also document the physical properties and composition of a broader diversity of planets. This capability is essential for the proper interpretation of potential biosignature compounds. For example, the presence of molecular oxygen in the atmospheres of Venus and Mars can indeed be attributed to non- biological processes, but only through a proper assessment of the conditions and processes involved. On the other hand, a planet might differ substantially from Earth yet still be habitable. Why? Our search for life elsewhere will inevitably deepen our understanding of life itself. Current definitions of life usually enumerate its key properties. For example, they cite the ability of cells and ecosystems to harvest energy, metabolize, replicate and evolve. Our definitions are based upon life on Earth yet they will affect our strategy to search for life elsewhere. Accordingly, we must distinguish between attributes of life that are truly universal versus those that solely reflect the particular history of our own biosphere. Herein we assume that all life requires complex organic compounds that interact in a liquid water solvent. These assumptions do not seem overly restrictive, given that life is an information-rich entity that depends fundamentally upon the strong polarity of its associated solvent. Carbon compounds and structures appear to be unrivaled in their potential for attaining high information contents. Other plausible solvents cannot match the strong polar-nonpolar dichotomy that water maintains with certain organic substances; and this dichotomy is essential for maintaining stable biomolecular and cellular structures. However, our own biosphere utilizes only a small fraction of the number of potentially useful organic compounds. Alien life forms probably explored alternative possibilities, and so their discovery will increase the known diversity of life. One major barrier to resolving these divergent views is that we know the history of only one biosphere. If we had other examples, we could directly compare them and begin to discern general principles of the origins and evolution of life. This circumstance creates a powerful scientific argument to look for life elsewhere. How? The detection in situ of life is a strategy that might be viable within the Solar System, but not for extrasolar planets. Within our own Solar System, the search for extraterrestrial life and evidence about the origin of Earthly life will likely be confined to Mars, Europa, and Titan. Small bodies such as comets, asteroids, and meteorites offer insights concerning chemical "building blocks" for the origins of life. However, it seems feasible to detect biological signatures, or "biosignatures," by remote sensing. There are at least two types of biosignatures; spectral and/or polarization features created by biological products, and electromagnetic signals created by technology. The latter example of a biosignature requires SETI-like searches. Spectral biosignatures can arise from organic constituents (e.g., vegetation) and/or inorganic products (e.g., atmospheric O2). One must bear in mind that the range of characteristics of rocky planets is likely to exceed our experiences with the four terrestrial planets and the Moon. While the nearly (but not quite) airless Moon and Mercury arguably represent the lifeless endmember case of terrestrial planets, there are always surprises. For example, Mercury appears, based on radar data, to support small polar caps of water ice, and the origin of the water appears to be exogenic impact of icy material followed by molecular migration to the poles. Were such a body to be in a planetary system in which the orbital plane happens to be face-on to the Earth, could that water ice signature be detectable in the near-infrared range, and, if so, what would one conclude about the habitability of such an object? Habitability might be ruled out if the semimajor axis were too small (indeed, the planet might be missed altogether), but no laws of physics rule out a "Mercury" placed at the orbit of, say, Venus (0.7 AU). What would one conclude then? What? Gas giant and terrestrial-sized planets can be easily distinguished by their apparent brightness (a function of area, albedo and phase) and orbital distance. Considering the surface area ratio of Jupiter to Earth and assuming the same albedo, Jupiter would be 120 times brighter than the Earth at the same orbital distance. Unless giant planet albedos are 10 to 100 times smaller than terrestrial planet albedos, confusion between giant and terrestrial-size planets is unlikely. A planet's color [or "color-mass"] can also indicate whether it is a giant or terrestrial type, based on our experience with the particular spectral properties of the planets and atmospheres in our Solar System. The simple observation that a planet exists at some distance from a star will determine whether the planet is in a predefined habitable zone of the star (which may or may not delineate where life is possible), but it in fact only provides a very rough estimate of the temperature. In general, if there is a greenhouse effect present (e.g., from CO2, H2O, CH4, or aerosols), then the surface temperature will be warmer than the effective temperature, which is determined by the stellar brightness, the star-planet distance, etc. Regarding the search for life, constraining a planet's surface temperature holds much greater value than constraining the effective temperature. For example, both Venus and Earth have similar effective temperatures (220K and 255K, respectively), but vastly different surface temperatures (730K and about 290K, respectively), owing to the divergent greenhouse gas column abundances. At its surface, Venus is a cloud-covered, hot-house--with soil capable of melting lead. Visible and/or infrared spectra can help interpret these cases, but neither is able to penetrate clouds; therefore surface conditions may well be difficult to estimate. The combination of infrared and visible observations is of course most valuable: neither region will yield all of the information, and either region will require modeling to interpret. There is, however, a concern that Earth is a peculiarly easy planet to interpret from external observations. Of the two larger terrestrial planets in our system one is roughly half cloud-covered (Earth) and the other completely cloud- covered (Venus). Planets that differ in their size, insolation or land- ocean fraction may well have more cloud cover and be much harder to interpret for that reason, as was the case for early studies of Venus. Both Venus and Titan are totally enshrouded by photochemical clouds, and spacecraft close flyby and in situ techniques have been required to determine the conditions in their lower atmospheres and at their surfaces. Planets with habitable surfaces that are hidden by deep, totally opaque atmospheres, or with only a small fraction of the surface exposed to view, probably cannot be recognized as habitable. We are limited to exploring habitability for only those planets that are habitable on a global scale, and which have mostly clear atmospheres in a significant part of the optical or infrared spectrum, or both. From albedo we can tell whether the cloud cover of the planet resembles that of the Moon, Mars, Earth or Venus. However, in the past, the Earth has been through a cold phase in which it had a high albedo (due to ice) and a low surface temperature. We could not distinguish such a snowball Earth from a Venus-like planet from albedo alone; spectra would be required to distinguish water ice from sulfuric acid droplets. When? While our Solar System provides a good template for interpreting brightness and color mass, a much greater diversity of planets is likely and challenges their use for estimating planetary radii and masses. For example, Earth has had very different signatures throughout geologic time. The postulated "snowball Earth" during the Neoproterozoic Eon would have had a very high albedo. Earth's atmosphere might have contained a larger methane component during the Archean Eon (prior to 2.5 billion years ago), and therefore exhibited extremely strong methane spectral features. Another exception to the Solar System template is an icy Uranus just at the outer border of the habitable zone. Strong deviations from Solar System gas giant spectral signatures also are expected for young, hot Jupiters. Oxygen: poison or predictor? Among biosignatures, oxygen is one of the most intriguing: in excess, oxygen will poison plant life, but this vegetative waste product is life-giving to animal life--including during the transformation of Earth's biosphere with rise of more complex life forms. There may be only a very small range of planetary conditions that might produce a false positive answer for oxygen--a large ice-bound planet or a small planet with a thin atmosphere but receiving a Venus-like insolation. Because non-biological oxygen is quickly absorbed by rocks, the need to regenerate oxygen continuously points to biology at work unless ice covers the rock-surfaces or acidic volcanoes react with oxygen to remove it. Detection of O2 or its photolytic product O3 merits highest priority. In summary, the first and best-known aspect of a planet from infrared observations is its size. From the size, insolation and integrated emission we can determine both the albedo and a temperature associated with the emitting layer. Estimates of planet size and albedo can definitely be determined from mid-infrared observations. [The preferred wavelength ranges are 7 to 25 microns in the mid-IR, and 0.5 to about 1.1 microns in the visible to near-IR.] Surface temperature determination is only possible if there is a planet with a substantial fraction that is cloud free. Wildcards: water? Liquid H2O is not a bioindicator but it is considered essential to life. Absorption by water poses an interesting challenge for interpretation. Water absorption is observed in the near-infrared spectra of cool giant stars and brown dwarfs. The bands are the same as those seen in Earth's spectrum, but they are somewhat broader and therefore they modify the apparent shape of the continuum between bands. A fairly precise measure of temperature is needed to take advantage of information about the strength of water bands. Substantial carbon dioxide CO2 indicates an atmosphere and oxidation state typical of a terrestrial planet. Abundant methane CH4 might require a biological source, yet abundant CH4 also can arise from a crust and upper mantle more reduced than that of Earth. It would be advisable to use this process to test against observations of Earth, Mars and Venus as well as simulations of a "smaller" Venus and "larger" Mars to explore the quality of the results. Indeed, it is a necessary step in this work that both visible and infrared processes be validated. The resulting library of spectral features should provide a useful and quantitative starting point for modeling of equivalent features identified in the light from extra-solar terrestrial planets. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article636.html. ________________________________________________________________________ MARTIAN CHRONICLES VIII: TORTURE TESTS By Steve Squyres From Astrobiology Magazine 18 October 2003 The Martian Chronicles, a multipart series, show the inside story of what it is like to join in a four-year space mission, in preparation for the dramatic landing sequence planned for January 2004. From the science diaries of Cornell's Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers' science package, this first-hand account shows exactly what it takes to plan and build a mission to another planet. June 8, 2002 We had a breakthrough in the development of our RAT this week. RAT stands for Rock Abrasion Tool, and it's what we'll use to grind the dusty and weathered surfaces off of martian rocks, exposing fresh rock underneath. It works well, and the RAT can grind about half a centimeter into even very hard rock. The problem, though, is that sometimes the dust created by all that grinding winds up filling the hole. And that's not exactly where we want dust to be, since the whole point of the RAT is to expose the clean rock underneath. So what to do? We're running out of time, and big design changes are out of the question at this point. The guys at Honeybee Robotics went to work on it, and came up with a simple solution that sounded like it ought to work: A new brush built into the RAT. The RAT already has a part that revolves slowly as the grinding takes place, and if we mounted a brush to this part and then spun it for awhile after the grinding was done, we figured that maybe that would do the trick. Turns out that it does. On Thursday we ran a test that was a duplicate of one we had done several weeks ago that had filled the hole with dust. The new brush cleared things right out, producing a nice clean rock surface. And it's a good thing it worked, too, since we've got to start bolting RATs onto rovers in not too many more weeks. It doesn't matter how clever you are if you run out of time before you run out of ideas. June 15, 2002 We have finally finished torturing Mini-TES. Before you can put anything on top of a rocket, you have to test it to make sure it can withstand all the rigors of spaceflight. It's necessary, but that doesn't mean it's fun. Over the past couple of weeks, we've finally finished doing all the testing we need to do on Mini-TES. It's scary stuff. The week before last, we did a test where we simulate what happens when you fire a "pyrotechnic" device on the rover. These are little explosive devices that are used to do things like release the instrument arm or the camera mast right after we land. They're very small explosions, but they're explosions nonetheless, and we have to make sure that when we fire them off we won't hurt Mini-TES. We simulated it, and nothing broke. Just as scary was the test that simulates landing. Even though our lander is cushioned by airbags, it still hits the martian surface pretty hard. So, of course, we have to make sure Mini-TES can survive that too. We don't do this by putting it in a lander and dropping it... we do it by putting it into a giant centrifuge, and spinning it until it feels stresses even worse than what it'll feel on landing. We survived that too, thank goodness, and the torture testing of Mini-TES is now over. Except, of course, next year when we put 'em both on real rockets and send them off to Mars... June 22, 2002 What a week... the APXS is done and Pancam is taking pictures! After a huge amount of work over in Germany, Rudi and Ralf came over with two completed APXS instruments this week. The electronics boards for each one are the ones that are actually going to Mars, and the team at JPL should start working with them sometime this week. The sensor heads-- the part that goes out on the arm--that they brought over are spare units. We can fly these spares if we have to, but we're planning on flying sensor heads that are still back in Germany and about to begin months of testing. If all that testing goes well, we'll swap the spare sensor head with the flight units sometime in the fall. And the Pancam pictures are beautiful! We just got the first Pancam put together early last week, and it took a perfect picture the first time we pushed the button. Amazing. This one is an engineering model, so it's not going to Mars either. But the flight cameras are identical to it, and those will be coming together over the next few weeks. As soon as we have some good pictures from those, we'll put 'em on this web site for the world to see. June 29, 2002 We've just gotten the first pictures taken by our Microscopic Imager, and they're fantastic! The picture that you see shows the surface of a rock, and covers an area about 3 centimeters (a little over an inch) across. You can see features in the images down to considerably less than 100 micrometers in size... less than the width of a human hair. It's really exciting to start seeing data like this, and we can't help but think what it's going to feel like the first time we see Mars at this scale July 6, 2002 We had another big week camera-wise! Last week it was the Engineering Model of the Miscroscopic Imager. This week, it was the first flight Pancams. It takes awhile to get these things ready, that's for sure. But Dave Thiessen and the rest of the camera crew at JPL put in some very long hours last week, and we now have the first real flight Pancams--ones that are going to Mars--in our hands. They're beautiful! It'll be a little while before they're taking pictures of anything interesting, but as soon as we have something to show we'll post them here on this site. And there have been big rover developments lately too. For a look at some recent progress, here's a picture of the Dynamic Test Model rover. This one isn't going to Mars--it's a test model that we'll use to make sure that the ones that really are going can withstand all the rigors of flight. But it looks very much like what part of each flight rover will look like when it's folded up and stowed inside its lander. July 20, 2002 As we get closer and closer to flight, our attention is gradually shifting away from the individual instruments, and more toward the business of putting the rovers together. We're almost "done" now with many of the instruments on an individual basis. The flight Mini-TES and Moessbauer instruments really are done. The flight APXS instruments are half-done, and the parts that aren't done yet are coming together quickly in Germany. The RATs should be done in a few weeks, and we now have the first flight Pancams and Microscopic Imagers in our hands and taking pictures. There's still plenty more work ahead, of course, but we really are getting to the point where getting ready to put things into the rovers is the main focus. And so we're very interested in how the rovers are doing! Fortunately, they seem to be doing pretty well. This past week, the Dynamic Test Model rover did its very first "mobility test". In other words, our baby took its first steps! It didn't go far, and the test wasn't without a glitch or two. But we have a real test rover now that can move, and that's a huge accomplishment. July 27, 2002 Shake a science camera and you might kick up some dust. That's what happened to the Microscopic Imager after a vibration test this week. When a delicate science instrument undergoes such a test, more tests are conducted "post-vibe" to make sure it is still functioning properly. One of these functional tests showed that small dust particles somewhere in the optics of the MI had moved slightly during vibration. This was not unexpected and we were able to confirm that we still have a healthy MI producing excellent images. But we want to take care of the dust problem and the good news is that it can be easily corrected. August 3, 2002 We just completed a test that lasted for an entire month. That may be your definition of a nightmare, but it's our way of learning how to avoid trouble when we're on the surface Mars. They are called "thread tests," and there will be several of them over the next few months. During the most recent exercise, we practiced the "uplink" procedure. That's when we send information from Earth to Mars to command the rovers. We used images of the martian landscape taken from the Pathfinder mission to formulate our uplink plan. If this were the real thing, we'd be working with images sent to us from the rovers. We studied surface features, selected rock targets, and created a list of commands. We practiced using all the procedures, processes and software that we will use for an uplink during the actual mission. As with any test, there were glitches along the way. But they helped us identify what needs to be corrected before we land on Mars. August 10, 2002 It's been almost impossible to even write a news update this week, since we've been so busy. We're in the middle of a test with the FIDO rover. FIDO is a rover similar to the ones that we'll be sending to Mars, and it's one that we can send out into real field settings to do real geology. Right now it's somewhere in the American Southwest (I don't know where), and we're driving it every day as if it were on Mars. The reason I don't know where it is is that this is a "blind" test. When we run the real rovers on Mars we're not going to know very much at all about where they really are, so making the test blind like this--not telling the science team where the rover is--is the only realistic way to do the test. We're three days into a 10-day test as I write this, and it's going wonderfully so far. The geology at the "landing site" is fantastic, the rover is working well, and the team is working well together. Watch this web site for updates... as soon as we have some images from the test that we can post, we'll put 'em here. August 24, 2002 Well, if the last couple of weeks weren't enough to teach us how to do science with a rover on Mars, there isn't much hope for us. We've just finished a ten-day test using the FIDO rover to simulate twenty martian days of MER operations. The FIDO guys took their baby out to a site somewhere out in the American Southwest, and we drove it from JPL just like we'll drive the real MER rovers when they're on Mars. The "landing site" was fantastic, with no vegetation, great rocks, and many geologic puzzles for us to solve. Very Mars-like! In our twenty "sols" of operations, we drove the rover more than 200 meters, made a bunch of detailed measurements of the chemistry of the rocks, and took a lot of spectacular pictures. Most importantly, the whole team learned an enormous amount about how to do this kind of thing on Mars. We have some great field geologists on our team, but they're used to doing geology in their own boots, with their own eyes and hands. FIDO has helped them to re-learn their trade, teaching them how to do field geology through the eyes of a robot. We made some mistakes, of course, which in a way was the best news of all. We're going to have to do this for real in about a year and a half, so it's good to make mistakes we can learn from now! August 31, 2002 It's alive! Our first rover arm has been delivered, and it's working beautifully. Each MER rover will carry a robotic arm that we'll use to position four of our scientific instruments: the Microscopic Imager, the APXS, the Moessbauer Spectrometer, and the RAT. The arm is the same size as a human arm, and like a human arm has a shoulder, an elbow, and a wrist. Our first flight arm--one of the ones that's going to Mars--recently arrived at JPL, and we've been putting it through its paces. We haven't put any of the instruments on it yet, though that'll happen soon. What we've done this past week has been to mount the arm on a rack, hook it up to the rover's electronics, and start seeing how well it moves. The real question on our minds has been how well the arm will be able to position the instruments, and the preliminary answer seems to be very well indeed. We still have to actually mount it on the rover body and run it at real martian temperatures, but all the indications so far are that it will be able to put the instruments where we want them every bit as accurately as we had hoped, or maybe even better. And on top of that, it's really something to see as the arm moves all its joints and reaches out toward some imaginary martian rock. It'll be doing the real thing soon enough. September 7, 2002 This has been another one of those weeks where there's so much happening that it's hard to decide what to write about. It's likely to be like that from here to the launch pads. We officially finished our first Microscopic Imager this week. It's built, tested, and delivered. Only five more science cameras to go! This newly-delivered Microscopic Imager now joins our two Moessbauer Spectrometers, our two APX Spectrometers, our two Mini-TESes, and the first of our two Rock Abrasion Tools as pieces of hardware that are ready to go to Mars. The second RAT should be ready to go in another week or two, and the other five cameras aren't far behind. It won't be long before some of the instruments are in place, either. The first of our two instrument arms has now completed its testing and is ready to take on some instruments. Within another week or so, we may have a whole bunch of them mounted onto an arm for the first time. And there's so much more going on, too. The first Mini-TES is mounted to its rover deck. The first Pancam Mast Assembly (the big mast that supports both Mini-TES and Pancam is done and is about to be mounted to the same deck. And the first assembled rover has been mounted to its lander and is ready for testing. We're cookin'! September 14, 2002 Oops. One of the things about our mission is that we're "hardware rich"; we have a lot of stuff going to Mars. It's a blessing, but it can also be a curse. This week, we mounted our first two completed Pancams to the camera bar that goes at the top of the rover's mast. These are two out of the total of four Pancams that we have built, and out of the eighteen cameras in all that will go on both rovers. That's a lot of cameras. Here's a nice picture of the two Pancams, along with two Navigation Cameras, as they were mounted on the camera bar. We spent about eight hours getting these suckers properly mounted, precisely aligned, and ready to go. Took a good look at our handiwork, congratulated ourselves on a job well done... and then noticed we had 'em reversed: right camera on the left, and left camera on the right. Ouch. The Pancams look almost identical from the outside, but they're not. Each has a wheel containing eight color filters, and the filter sets are very different in the two cameras. So why not just leave them where they were? Well, for one thing, we've got an awful lot of software already written that expects one set of filters to be on the left and the other to be on the right. And it would have taken a lot more time to rewrite and re-test all that software than whatever it was going to take to switch the cameras. So off they came. We've got it right now, and you can bet we're going to get it right the first time when we do the next camera bar! September 21, 2002 We had a million things happen this week, but it all pales in comparison to the news from the parachute test. Landing on Mars is hard, and one of the toughest parts of this job has been figuring out how to get our rovers down safely. The airbags that we use to cushion our impact on the surface gave us fits for quite a while, and it was only several months ago that we finally found an airbag design that we're confident will work. The parachute problem has been even worse. We did a set of chute tests back in May and June, and they did not go well. The chutes would deploy just fine, but as soon as they completely filled with air the pressure on them was too much. It gives you a pretty sick feeling to watch the parachute that you hoped was going to land you safely on Mars rip to shreds! Over the past several months, Adam Steltzner, Wayne Lee, and the rest of our EDL team have been working on the chute problem. The moment of truth for the newest chute design came this past Thursday, at NASA's Ames Research Center. Ames has an enormous wind tunnel. It's big enough to put a small airliner in, and it's easily big enough to do a full-scale deployment of our parachute. They cranked the fans up, popped the chute... and it worked! There was no damage at all. Just a big, solid, beautiful bowl of a parachute. We don't have to start building our flight chutes until November, so we're going to spend another several weeks doing more testing, to make sure that whatever we fly is as good ast it can be. But this problem, which frankly had some of us pretty worried, now finally seems to be under control. This week we took a crucial step forward on the road to Mars. September 21, 2002 It's said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Here's one that's worth that and more. Click here to see a picture that we recently took with the Pancam camera on the MER-2 rover. It's a pretty simple picture, just looking across the room at the cruise stage for the MER-1 spacecraft. But it's the first image that we've taken that really gives a sense of how good our pictures of Mars will be. This is just a single Pancam image, but consider this: A full Pancam panorama of Mars will be four of these images high, and twenty-four of these images around! We're not going to see anything that looks like this cruise stage when we get there, but we're going to get quite a spectacular view of the surface of Mars. October 5, 2002 You have good times and bad times on any project; the past few weeks may have been the best times we've had since we started this thing years ago. Right now the momentum and the morale on the MER project are the highest they've ever been. The two biggest technical challenges that we once faced--finding airbag and parachute designs that will work--are now finally behind us. All of the instruments have been built and delivered. And, best of all, we're starting to see fully assembled hardware. Here is a picture of the MER-1 spacecraft all put together and ready for testing. You can see the heatshield at the bottom, the backshell that protects the lander above that, and then the cruise stage at the top. There's a lander inside this thing, and inside that there's a rover! The whole vehicle is almost ready to go "up the hill", as we say... to be moved to the facilities where it will go through tests to simulate the vibration, noise, temperatures, and other effects of launch and flight to Mars. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article637.html. ________________________________________________________________________ MARTIAN CHRONICLES IX: HAYWIRES By Steve Squyres From Astrobiology Magazine 19 October 2003 October 12, 2002 The MER rovers are fiendishly complicated machines, and literally thousands of things are going to have to go right for this mission to work. All of them have to be tested, and it's pretty common for things not to work right on the first try. This past week, we've been troubleshooting our "step and settle" problem. The Mini-TES instrument sits at the bottom of a big piece of hardware called the Pancam Mast Assembly, or PMA. Mini-TES looks up the inside of the PMA tube, using it like a periscope to view the scene around the rover. There are mirrors at the top of the PMA, just like in a periscope, and one of them is supposed to move very quickly as the Mini-TES shifts its gaze from one spot to the next. The time this mirror has to "step and settle"--to move and then settle down so that it's motionless--is just two tenths of a second. And right now it's taking a good deal longer than that. If the mirror is still moving when Mini-TES is trying to look out at the world, we get a blurry view and bad data. The problem seems to be that we're not giving the motor that moves the mirror enough juice, so we're going to change that and try it again. We'll see how it goes. But it's just one of thousands of things we've got to get right before we can take these things to the launch pad. October 19, 2002 We're definitely in the troubleshooting phase of the project right now, and for the last couple of weeks annoying little troubles seem to be popping up faster than we can shoot them down. We're making progress on the step-and-settle problem that came up last week, but we still haven't solved it yet. And this week a new problem came up on the Mössbauer Spectrometer that we haven't figured out at all. This is a weird one. The Moessbauer has four different "channels": it's sort of like four instruments rolled into one. When we use it by itself, all four channels work beautifully. But when we hook it up to the rover, only one channel works right. The other three don't, and that means that we get only one-fourth as much good data as we should. In principle we can "fix" the problem by changing some software, but we're not real comfortable with that, at least for now. We don't understand yet what's causing the problem, and using a quick-and-dirty solution to fix a problem you don't understand is rarely the right thing to do. So we're going to test one idea, and then test another, and keep testing until we get it figured out for real. It just gets like this sometimes, and when it does you have to remind yourself that none of these problems are major and all of them have solutions. Still, it'll feel good once we've got this batch of problems behind us. October 26, 2002 Good news: We seem to have solved the "step-and-settle" problem that's been giving us fits for several weeks. The trouble here was that the mirror at the top of our mast didn't seem to be moving quickly enough. Our Mini-TES instrument is supposed to tell the mirror what to do. When Mini-TES is ready for the mirror to move, it sends out a signal that means "okay, I'm done taking data for a little while... go ahead and move the mirror." The mirror has two tenths of a second to get to its new position. Mini-TES then sends out a second, different message that says "okay, you'd better be done moving the mirror, because I'm going to start taking data again." And it starts to collect data, assuming that the mirror has stopped moving. What we thought was going on was that the mirror was moving too slowly, making the data blurry because it was still moving when Mini-TES started to collect data. But what was really going on was that the mirror was ignoring the first message completely, and starting to move when it got the second message! That'll pretty much guarantee that you're going to get blurry data, no matter how fast you move the mirror. We were afraid for a little while that this would be a nasty problem to fix, but Jason Gates found a very elegant solution that involved just putting a couple of tiny "haywires" onto one of the rover's electronics boards. We still have a little more testing to do, but it looks like one of our unpleasant problems has now been found and fixed. November 2, 2002 Well, we're hunting our problems down and killing them off one by one. But some are easier to deal with than others. Last week we found and fixed the Mini-TES step-and-settle bug. This week, the focus has been on fixing the Mössbauer Spectrometer problem that turned up a couple of weeks ago. Hunting down a problem like this can be tedious, and you have to be very methodical about it. You might start off with half a dozen different theories about what it could be. Then you have to come up with a test for each theory, and run through all the tests... knocking theories off one by one until you find the culprit. In this case, the culprit seems to be some rather innocent-looking wires. They're the wires that run up the rover's arm, connecting the Mössbauer's sensor head (which is out on the end of the arm) to the part of the instrument that's inside the rover. This thing isn't a normal bundle of wires, though. A normal wire bundle would be too stiff for the arm to bend. Instead, it's a very special kind of flexible cable. If the flexible cable is in place, the arm bends just fine, but the instrument doesn't work right. Replace the flexible cable with a normal bundle of wires and the instrument works fine. But we can't fly it that way, because if we did the arm wouldn't bend! So we have to figure out what's wrong with this flexible cable, and fix it. At least we know where the problem is now. November 9, 2002 There's a lot of news this week, both good and bad, but it all pales in comparison to the really big news: We just took one of our rovers for its first drive this week. This wasn't the FIDO rover, and it wasn't an engineering model either. This was the real deal... the MER-2 rover that's going to Mars. We put it on some blue mats in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at JPL, and put it through its paces: straight-line drives forward and backward, up and down ramps, turns, and a pirouette-like spin in place. It's hard to describe how it felt to watch our first flight rover go for its first drive. It was a very emotional experience. The drive took place five years to the day after NASA first let our science team know that we were going to do this mission. It has been a very long and difficult road since then to get to where we are today. After the driving was over, it was time for a historic photo op. Check out this picture. It's a mother-and-child family portrait of JPL Mars rovers, showing both MER-2 and a copy of the famous Sojourner rover from the Mars Pathfinder mission. The MER rovers were built using everything we learned from Sojourner, of course. So it's the little one in front that's the mother, and the great big one behind it that's the brand-new baby. November 16, 2002 We're still working what seems like a million problems at once. We think we've solved the problem with the scan mirror for the Mini-TES, which was taking longer to move than it should. We haven't been able to test the solution yet, though. The APXS has a bug that makes errors pop up in the spectra at random. We've found the bug and we know how to fix it, but we haven't gotten into either rover to do that yet either. We still have a problem with the cable that connects one part of the Mössbauer Spectrometer to the other, and it keeps the instrument from working properly. There are three possible fixes for that one, and we may use any or all of them. And imaging with all of the cameras takes much longer right now than we want it to. All of this sounds pretty dire, but it's not. This sort of thing is business as usual on a project as complicated as ours. Every one of these problems is complicated, but every one of them also has a solution. We'll find them all, and we'll do everything necessary to make the solutions work. The idea, of course, is to make it all look easy by the time we get to Mars. But if we do manage to succeed at that a little over a year from now, it'll be because we've overcome all the struggles we're having now. November 23, 2002 We dodged a bullet this week. We made a mistake a long time ago, and we just realized it very recently. It was almost too late. Our Microscopic Imager has to have a dust cover. After all, if you're going to be waving a sensitive scientific camera around on the surface of the dustiest planet in the solar system, it makes sense to have a cover to keep the lens clean. And the cover has to be transparent. We use a motor to open and close it, and the motor is a very reliable one. But even so, if it fails for some reason, we want to be sure we still can take pictures. When you use materials in space there are some special things you need to think about. One of them is called "outgassing". Some materials, when they get exposed to the vacuum of space, can outgas--meaning that stuff that would stay totally solid in the Earth's atmosphere actually evaporates a bit. That can be bad news if the stuff that evaporates condenses again someplace else... like onto the lens of a camera. We were dead certain that the transparent material we were making our dust covers out of was immune to outgassing, but we were wrong. We finally did a good test last week just to be on the safe side... with no camera present, of course. And lo and behold, a bunch of crud evaporated off of the cover material and condensed again right next to it, making a real mess. If that happened in flight, we'd have a useless camera on our hands. So just remove the cover and change to another material, right? Not so simple. Right now the dust cover is on the camera, the camera is on the MER-2 rover's arm, and the rover is all folded up and almost ready to go into a vacuum chamber for a test! Problem is, when the rover is folded up like that, it takes a couple of days of work to unfold it and get the arm out where you can get at it. And days in the schedule are the most precious thing we have right now. So we really didn't want to waste two days fixing a problem--especially a problem that never should have happened in the first place. And then a small miracle happened. Lori Shiraishi and a couple of the other mechanical wizards at JPL looked real hard at the thing, and somehow managed to come up with a special tool that let them snake their way in there, get to the cover, and get it off the camera. If they weren't mechanical engineers, I think they'd be safe crackers. So the cover is off now, and we can go ahead and put the rover into vacuum chamber and test it safely. In the meantime, we can build some new dust covers. And you can bet they'll be made of something that we know doesn't outgas! November 30, 2002 We've just made our last major design decision, and now our RATs have teeth. We settled most of the design details for our Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) a long time ago. In fact, the two flight RATs are built, tested, and at JPL. But we've left one thing open for a long time, and that's the exact design of the "business end" of the RAT... the grinding heads that will actually contact the rock and grind their way into it. We've known pretty much since the start that we were going to make the grinding heads using diamonds, since diamonds are the hardest materials we can possibly use. But finding the best way to use diamonds has been a very long research project. ("Diamonds are forever", as we put it.) We've tried grinding heads encrusted with tiny diamonds. We've tried big single diamonds. We've tried diamonds coated with nickel. All of these have worked, but they don't all work equally well. We have no idea how hard martian rocks are going to be, so we have to find the material that works the very best. And now we seem to have found it. The best grinding heads of all have been ones that are made of a hard resin with lots of fine diamond grit mixed in with it. The great thing about these bits is that they sharpen themselves. Even diamonds wear out after awhile. But the way this resin works, it's strong enough to hold the diamonds in place only for awhile. Then, after they've been used awhile the worn diamonds pull out and the resin wears away... exposing fresh, sharp diamonds underneath. After a lot of testing, we've built about a dozen of these bits, and we've now shipped them out to JPL to go into the two flight RATs. December 7, 2002 This week it's been all about preparation for one of the biggest tests we have in front of us before we launch. The motto you try to follow in this business is "test as you fly, fly as you test". In other words, test everything on the ground just like you plan to fly it, and then fly it that way. Coming up over the next couple of weeks is one of the most important test-'em-like-we'll-fly-'em events of the whole MER program. It's called the "surface thermal vacuum test". In this test we take the whole MER-2 rover, put it into a big space simulation chamber, take the atmosphere down to martian pressure, and take the temperature down to martian temperature. And then we make the rover do just about everything it knows how to do. We can't drive it, because there isn't enough room in the chamber. But we do everything else, and that's a lot. Every instrument gets tested under conditions just like we'll experience on Mars. To tell the truth, you'd have to be nuts not to feel just a little nervous before a test as important and complicated as this one. But we've been preparing for months, and we think we're ready. We'll find out soon. December 14, 2002 We're deep into thermal vac with the MER-2 rover now, and so far it's going great. "Thermal vac" is short for thermal vacuum testing, and it's one of the toughest tests we have between now and launch. We started on Thursday with the rover in the test chamber, all folded up the way it'll be when we land. We took the pressure and temperature in the chamber down to just what they'll be like on Mars. And then we put the rover to work. Out came the solar panels. Up went the mast and the antenna. The rover stood up, swung its wheels into place, released its arm, and was ready for action. One of the first things we did once the rover was ready--and one of the first things we'll do on Mars--was take a whole bunch of pictures. This one shows the Pancam calibration target, also known as the sundial. There are a lot of lights in the test chamber, so the central post doesn't cast just one shadow here like it will on Mars. But this gives a real sense of what our sundial pictures will look like. Of course, what we're really going to Mars to take pictures of is martian rocks. We didn't have any martian rocks to put in the test chamber, but we did cut some nice slabs of a bunch of different Earth rocks and take some pictures of them as well. Thermal vac isn't over yet... in fact, in many ways it's just getting started. We'll be at it all this coming week too: testing the rover's arm, taking more pictures, and--especially--putting Mini-TES to work. December 21, 2002 Thermal vac testing on our first rover is done, and we survived it. We have a very tired team! A test like this requires use of a very big, very complicated facility. So you don't run it just 8 or 12 hours a day... it's a round-the-clock operation. We've all just finished almost two weeks of irregular and very long shifts, but it was worth it. We got some great data, and we sure learned a lot about one of our new rovers. Over the next few weeks I'll post here several of the data products that we collected during the test. Here's a first one for starters. To give us something interesting and challenging to look at in the test chamber, Dick Morris from Johnson Space Center put together a really nice test target with lots of rocks on it. Before we're done with our testing, we're hoping to look at every rock on this target with every one of our instruments. The image was taken by Pancam, and shows color close-ups of two of the rocks. We've got some spectacular Mini-TES data on this target, which I'll post next time. For now, though, I'm going to go sleep for a week! December 28, 2002 We're still crunching through all the data that we took during the big MER-2 thermal vacuum test that ended last week. Here's a picture of a focus target taken by the Microscopic Imager. The whole image is only about 3 centimeters across, which is a little over an inch. And the size of the individual pixels is tiny: about half the thickness of a human hair. The best thing about this image isn't how sharp it is. The best thing is how we took it. The Microscopic Imager is on the end of the rover's arm. First we used a pair of cameras on the front end of the rover to spot this focus target and figure out where it was. Then we used the arm to put the Microscopic Imager where we thought the target was. We snapped a picture and bingo, there was the target. This is just the way we're going to do it on Mars, and it worked in the test chamber the first time we tried it. January 4, 2003 For weeks now, we've been chasing a nasty problem with our Mössbauer Spectrometer. There may finally be a light at the end of the tunnel. The problem's not the instrument... the instrument works just fine when we test it by itself. But the Mössbauer Spectrometer comes in two parts. One part is the "sensor head", which is out at the end of the rover's arm, and the other is the electronics, deep inside the rover body. The two parts are connected by a long and complicated cable, and it's the cable that's been the problem. The thing you'd want to do is simply replace the cable with one that works better, but that turns out not to be so simple. Half of the cable--the part of it that's inside the rover--is fairly easy to replace, and we've done that already. It helps, but it doesn't solve the problem. The other half of the cable, which runs up the arm, is very, very difficult to replace. We'd essentially have to take the whole arm apart to do it, and nobody wants to do that to a piece of flight hardware that's been assembled and tested, and that works beautifully. So what to do? A team of very talented electrical engineers, both in Germany and at JPL, has been working on that problem for a couple of months now. The solution appears to be to add a tiny little electronics board to the outside of the sensor head. This board improves the signal that runs up the arm enough that the cable can handle it. We tested it this week at JPL with one of our two flight instruments, and it worked. We still have to confirm that it works with the other one, and we also have to make sure that it works at martian temperatures. But the solution to one of our toughest problems now may be in sight. January 11, 2003 At this stage in a project, it's all about working out the little details, making sure we'll be ready to ship the rovers to the Cape when the time comes. And there sure are a lot of details! One of the ones we took care of this week involves our magnet experiment. To do the magnet experiment when we get to Mars, we'll use the Pancam cameras every few days to take a look at the magnets that are mounted on the rover. Once we see enough martian dust sticking to the magnets, we'll look at them with the APXS and the Mössbauer Spectrometer to find out what the magnetic stuff in the dust is made of. It's simple, but to do that experiment we need to know which direction to point the cameras so that the magnets will be in the field of view. It'd be easy to just wait until the rovers on Mars to figure it out, but time then will be even more precious than it is now. So we swung the cameras around to where we thought the magnets ought to be, and took a few pictures. In the first one, we missed! In the second one we at least managed to get both magnets in the frame. They're not centered, but it's good enough for now. We can center them up better once we get to Mars. And if you see off-center magnet pictures after we land a year from now, you'll know we didn't have time to make it pretty, and decided to just go with what we learned this week! January 18, 2003 There's been so much news lately that we never got around to posting what's probably the coolest data product of all from the MER-2 rover testing we did back in December. Here it is. The image on the left is one taken by the rover's navigation camera, or Navcam. The Navcams are black-and-white cameras, with a wider field of view than Pancam has. On Mars, we'll use them mostly to figure out where to drive the rovers. In this picture, you can see a special target that was built for this test by Dick Morris, one of our team members from Johnson Space Center in Houston. It's got a bunch of thin slabs on it, each cut from a different kind of rock. The cool thing is the stuff on the right. This is an image of the same target, but put together with data from our Mini-TES instrument. Mini- TES can sense what each rock is made of, and the "false colors" of the pixels in the image show the variation in the composition of the rocks on the target. But there's more in the Mini-TES data than you can see in just a simple image. For every pixel in that image, we have more than just a false color... we have a complete infrared spectrum to really tell us in detail what the rock is made of. This plot shows a spectrum for each of the rocks on the target. All those wiggles and squiggles, to a trained spectroscopist, are the distinctive fingerprint of a rock type. We did this as a "blind" test, meaning that the real compositions of the rocks on that target are known only to Dick, and he's not telling. But with data this good, they won't be unknown to the rest of the team for long. January 25, 2003 Time is getting short, and we're killing off problems as fast as we can. We just got another one. This was a strange one. During a test we did back in December, something odd happened to our APXS instrument. During a two-hour test, the instrument somehow got reset--that is, it got turned off and back on again--seventeen times. That kind of thing isn't good, and if it happened on Mars we'd lose data, just like you can lose data on your computer if it gets turned off before you've saved something. We couldn't figure out what was wrong, and it looked like it could be a real problem. After a lot of sleuthing, the answer became clear. During the same two hours that we were testing the APXS, the rover engineers were testing the rover's power system. That means they were working with things like the batteries, the electronics that run them, and so forth. And during that time, what we learned was that they had sent seventeen different commands to the power system. That was the clue we needed to solve the mystery. When we dug in deeply, we discovered that there is a nasty bug in the rover design: every time somebody sends a command to the power system, it inadvertently turns the APXS and the Mössbauer Spectrometer off and back on again! It's such a goofy bug we didn't believe it at first, but that turned out to be the problem. We're fixing it with a change to the software, and next month when we do the same test with APXS on the other rover, we're expecting it to behave itself. February 1, 2003 The space program is a lot like a family, and our family experienced a terrible loss this week. We'll return to Mars news next week. For now our thoughts and prayers are with the loved ones of the astronauts who lost their lives in the Columbia tragedy. February 8, 2003 We passed another big milestone this week--our very last vibe tests. Vibration tests are some of the scariest things you do to space flight hardware. It's a torture test: You bolt your instrument to a machine that shakes it as hard as the rocket will shake it when you launch it, or even harder. Sometimes the instrument survives the test, and sometimes it doesn't. These were the final vibe tests for our flight APXS instruments. We should have done these tests many months ago, of course, but sometimes things don't work out the way you'd like them to. Several months ago we discovered a very bad mistake that we had made in part of the APXS that detects alpha particles. This "alpha mode", as we call it, is essential for detecting important elements like carbon, and it simply wouldn't have worked on Mars the way we originally built it. At least we found the problem in time! But it meant that we had to go out and get new and improved alpha detectors, put them in the instrument, and then do all the testing months later than we originally wanted to. If we hadn't passed the tests this week, we would have been stuck flying our spare APXS instruments. The spares are okay in most respects, but their alpha detectors won't work right because of the design mistake we made. So it was with enormous apprehension that we shipped the APXS flight instruments, with the fixed alpha mode included, to Berlin for their final vibe tests. They both passed beautifully, and soon they'll be ready to go on the rovers. It's an enormous relief. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article639.html. ________________________________________________________________________ THE DRAKE EQUATION REVISITED, PART IV: IS INTELLIGENCE A BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE? By Frank Drake, Peter Ward and David Grinspoon From Astrobiology Magazine 20 October 2003 The Drake equation was developed as a means of predicting the likelihood of detecting other intelligent civilizations in our galaxy. At the forum, Frank Drake, who formulated the equation 42 years ago, moderated a debate between Peter Ward and David Grinspoon. In this installment, the three participants respond to audience questions about the biological aspects of the Drake equation. Previous parts of this series presented the opening remarks by Drake, Ward and Grinspoon. The final part will present the remainder of the question-and-answer period. Q: I'm having a little trouble with the concept of long-term stability being necessary for evolution, because it's my understanding that we've discovered in the last 30 years or so that what drives evolution is instability, rather than stability. The dinosaurs had a long reign on Earth, and it wasn't until an impact that things really changed and more development happened that led to us. So could you elaborate more on the factors that you see as necessary stability vs. necessary instability for evolution of intelligence? Ward: I think it's the degree of instability we're talking about. Look at climate. Seattle has just gone through 90 days without rain. This is a record. This has never happened in Seattle's history. Ninety days, not a drop. It's been great. I'm brown. This is, like, amazing. We can live with that sort of instability. But there are trees up there that are dying like crazy. And as I flew down here tonight, the entire Cascades [are] on fire. Well, this is like minor instability. But the instability that I worry about is all of a sudden, tomorrow, it's 200 degrees on the planet, and you're all burning up in your beds. Now that's the sort of instability that's too unstable. So, you're right. Small-term stuff creates evolution. Right now, plants are figuring out, well maybe since I live in Seattle now it doesn't rain very much, I can't last through this. I've got to be a plant that can last through three months of no rain. So evolution, natural selection is at work. But when we get to instability that's so great that it kills everything, it's over the top. So we're talking about minor versus major. Grinspoon: But, of course, it's relative. You can imagine creatures evolved on a planet something like Venus, that doesn't really have seasons, having this kind of a discussion and talking about why Earth is uninhabitable because of these horrible seasons, the fact that it goes from being frozen to being hot, over and over again. So it seems like a characteristic of life is that there are limits to the variability of environment that it can tolerate, yet there's a certain amount of variation that life seems to thrive on, or at least adapt to, and we certainly do not know what those limits are. So when we talk about planets that are tidally locked, and have one side that's very hot and one side that's very cold and say that that's uninhabitable, I think we have to think of the lesson of the Venusians who think that Earth is uninhabitable because of its seasons. Drake: I want to add just one comment to this. The degree of instability is, of course, important. If you get to a temperature that is lethal, that's the end of things, and similarly if you freeze the planet. However, with lesser instabilities, you have to take timescale into account. That is, if it goes from a temperature in California, typically, of 70 degrees, as we have now, to zero Farenheit overnight, there's big trouble. But if that happens over a period of hundreds of years, people adapt. And that's the point: that life can adapt or move or migrate, or whatever, if the timescale allows. So, in considering what the impact of instability must be, it's not only the magnitude of it but the timescale. Q: There's something that confuses me between rules in the world of the biology and rules in the world of physics, specifically thermodynamics. We evolved to be complex and intelligent because the mutations that brought us here didn't prevent us from doing that. But the rules of thermodynamics favor randomness and disorder. So, how does life, which favors complexity and orderedness, exist in a Universe where thermodynamics really is the larger ruling pattern? Grinspoon: Well, you've hit on a wonderful question that was examined in a couple of classic books, most recently by Freeman Dyson, but before that Schrödinger. There have been three or four asking exactly that. In a thermodynamic Universe, how could you expect to have life? What is it about life that allows its continued existence? One way of looking at it is there's something called non-equilibrium thermodynamics, where you develop spontaneous pockets of order in the presence of a flow of matter or energy. A very simple example is a whirlpool, where you have a flow of water and in certain conditions you develop this order. Well, the same thing happens with certain kinds of chemical reactions. If you have a flow of energy, you create order. And so it's a seeming violation of the second law of thermodynamics, but it's not, really, because the system is out of equilibrium. There's this whole new field of complexity theory, which is the study, essentially, of self-organization, or non-equilibrium thermodynamics. One way of looking at life is that it's the most extreme example we know of self-organization. The Universe clearly has a tendency to self- organize in certain non-equilibrium conditions. So there isn't really a violation of the laws of thermodynamics there. It takes a flow of energy. And even though we have disagreements about what conditions might be necessary for life in the Universe, I think one thing we can all agree on is that it will require a source of energy and a flow of energy and matter because it requires disequilibrium to exist. Q: I'm puzzled by a paradox. Biological life is evidently incredibly complex. All life appears to be DNA-based, it appears to have only evolved once. Take that on the one hand. And then, on the other hand, look at what people are doing on computers, where if you set up a fairly simple framework, like the Game of Life, set up some very simple rules, you can very quickly develop these very complex reproducing things, albeit in virtual space. But it seems like there should be chemical analogues to that. So my question is: One, why, if Earth is so friendly to life, is there only DNA-based life and none other; and two, why isn't there more work being done to try to find real-world analogs to what is being done in computer simulations, to find alternative types of life? Ward: Both are being done, actually. Some of the best minds on this planet are trying to figure out, starting with Miller [and] Urey, really, can we ever create life in a test tube? And what you're asking is: Why haven't we done it? Well, I'll go back to the computer simulation. What a computer is is simply a binary code. Sooner or later, you're looking at plus-minus. And then you're just expanding that outwards. Your computer simulations are so infinitely less-complex than the simplest species of bacteria. When you look at what it takes to be a bacterium, compared to just the simple codes of your little Game of Life, we're talking great differences. Grinspoon: And part of your question was: Why aren't there other kinds of life on this planet? And I think one answer to that might be that once there is one kind of life, it changes the conditions under which the origin of life can happen. In other words, once you already have DNA-driven organic life, then no other possible kind of life, even if it could work well, stands a chance of evolving, because the extant life has the advantage, and will gobble up any juicy morsels of free energy or any tempting organic molecules. It's no longer a level playing field once life gets started. Q: There are 10 million species. Why wouldn't there be more than one life chemistry? Grinspoon: Think of Microsoft. Q: I don't want to. Grinspoon: But that's my point. Once there's an operating system, it's no longer a level playing field. Drake: To put it simply, once there's a very effective way of life, any other kind of life that forms becomes lunch. Q: You could think of the Drake equation as being sort of three- dimensional, relating to a volume of space. But what about how it changes over time? It seems you'd have a likelihood-of-life curve and boundaries over time. Are we at the end of it, or the beginning? Grinspoon: I think you're absolutely correct that, if we really want to try to calculate the number of intelligent civilizations, time ought to be in the equation. All of these factors are varying with time. The number of planets is not remaining the same, the types of stars are changing, the number of planets with life is probably increasing over time, and also if intelligent civilizations can achieve effective immortality, where they exist for billions of years, then you can imagine these immortal civilizations are accumulating over time and the number of civilizations is probably rising. That's what I personally believe. Ward: Let me give a real quick take on that. Let's say from the Big Bang, how soon after the Big Bang could we have any life? And people are suggesting that in the first 2 billion years, you're not going to get any life at all. Because you have to have stars that go through their life cycle and get to supernovae so you can get heavier stuff. You can't get heavy stuff unless you have supernovae. First two billion: nothing. Now friends of mine, Guillermo Gonzales among them, are suggesting that the types of supernovae we need to produce radioactive heavy stuff--I'm a plate tectonic lover, being a geologist, and I tend to think you need it, and if you need it, you need a core that has radioactive material within it--those types of supernovae are diminishing. And so we may be in a case where, if we go a few more billion years down the road, we can't build habitable planets. Q: I'd like the panel members' opinions on what kinds of science you see going on right now that are most likely to reduce the uncertainties in the terms in the Drake equation. If you look ahead just one to two decades, which terms in the equation do you expect us to make the biggest dent in the uncertainty of? Grinspoon: There's one of these numbers that we don't know now that we will know in two decades, and that's Fp, the fraction of stars with planets. There's a spacecraft called Kepler that might help us pin down this number. And not just the fraction with planets, Fp, but the fraction with planets in the habitable zone, Ne. I think those two numbers stand a very good chance of being really nailed down within the lifetime of most of the people in this room. And the other ones, I think we're still working on. Ward: Some of the experiments that are most interesting to me at the moment are not those that are actually observing real things, but are taking place in computers. And some of the most impressive work that I've seen is the modeling of solar-system formations and especially the work that is asking: When solar systems form, how often do you get oceans? The Earth is inside the snow line. We shouldn't have all of the water that we have, according to some of the models. And if we replay this over and over again, how many times do we get an Earth-like planet that has an ocean, or an Earth-like planet that has too much ocean? And that's some of the interesting stuff, too. We're going to find out how much is too much, if there is such a thing as too much ocean. And how much land do you need. We're going to find out, on the size, if we're say at half an Earth size, an Earth size, 1.25 Earth size, 1.5 Earth size, can planets like that support plate tectonics? And there's a member of our NAI (NASA Astrobiology Institute) team at the University of Washington, Slava Solomatov, who's closing in on that now. He's looking, using his models of different planetary size. We're looking at how important Jupiter is. Without Jupiter, George Wetherill suggested in 1995, the impact rate on Earth would be 10 thousand times greater than it is now. Now if we didn't have Jupiter, and we only had Saturn, would Saturn do it? If we had a Saturn in Jupiter's orbit, would we have an impact rate as we do? And we're working on these things. This relates to the question of mass extinctions. When you get clobbered, if we have a hit, a Chicxulub-type hit, or any sort of asteroid hit, every year, year-in, year-out, what happens to your ability to have life on a planet? We'll find these things out. Drake: As I mentioned, one of the most controversial factors is Fi, the possibility of intelligence evolving, the fraction of biotas that have an intelligent species. And there is a research opportunity that has just never been carried out, because the resources haven't been available. And that is to do a much more thorough study of the fossil record to determine the real mathematically quantified path of brain evolution. Is the evolution of the brain and the size of the brain a random walk? Or is there a driver? If it's a random walk, intelligence may never occur. If there's a driver, intelligence is probably inevitable. And, it may seem a little strange, but in fact, there is probably enough data available from the fossil record to determine whether the evolution of brain size is driven or a random walk--and it hasn't been done. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article640.html. ________________________________________________________________________ NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/astrobiology.html 21 October 2003 Astrobiology and planetary engineering articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles1.html Astrobiology Magazine, 2003. Third rocks from the stars. Astrobiology Magazine. Human space exploration articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles3.html Agence France-Presse, 2003. China completes manned space flight, vows new mission within two years. SpaceDaily. Agence France-Presse, 2003. Space could be Chinese by the year 2050, experts say. SpaceDaily. Agence France-Presse, 2003. China puts man into orbit to join elite space club with Russia and US. SpaceDaily. Agence France-Presse, 2003. China successfully completes first manned space flight. SpaceDaily. L. David, 2003. Top 10 questions: China's march to space. Space.com. M. Jones, 2003. Shenzhou 5's ongoing mission. SpaceDaily. S. Lendroth, 2003. Planetary society leaders to tell Congress we must explore. SpaceDaily. J. McDonald, 2003. China plans more missions, space station. Space.com. NASA, 2003. NASA lab will study astronaut's radiation. Universe Today. National Space Society, 2003. The next step for humans in space. SpaceDaily. Spaceflight Now, 2003. Shenzhou 5 mission status center. Spaceflight Now. C. Sui, 2003. China years behind US and Russia in space, but catching up fast. SpaceDaily. Universe Today, 2003. Chinese launch is a success. Universe Today. SETI articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles4.html F. Drake, P. Ward and D. Grinspoon, 2003. The Drake equation revisited, part IV: is intelligence a biological imperative? Astrobiology Magazine. S. Shostak, 2003. Dyson's long shot. Astrobiology Magazine. Evolution (biological, chemical and cosmological) articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles5.html P. Backus, 2003. Time enough for life. Space.com. ________________________________________________________________________ CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS NASA/JPL release 9-15 October 2003 The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Madrid tracking station on Monday, October 15. 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. C39 activities this week included a continuation of last week's star observations and calibrations with the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS), Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), and Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) performing observations of alpha CMa. In addition, UVIS and ISS participated in image compression checkouts, wide-angle camera photometric calibrations, and blue star observations. RADAR powered on this week, loaded flight software (FSW) from the SSR, and performed a nominal flight software (FSW) checkout. A VIMS FSW checkout was uplinked that will execute next week. As part of this week's imaging activities, a number of calibration field images and optical navigation images of the Saturnian system was taken. None of the images was acquired due to the DSN station not locking up in time to support the downlink. Analysis of the current partition pointers and the planned recording during the current observation period make the recovery of the data impossible. The data will be overwritten before the next DSN pass. Another opportunity for this activity has already been planned for early in the Saturn approach phase. Preliminary Sequence Integration and Validation (PSIV) and Final SIV sequence approval meetings were held this week for C40. After approval, the background sequence for C40 was uplinked to the spacecraft. The spacecraft successfully received all eight programs. Three of the eight were successfully placed in the CDS activation table. The remaining five are load-only programs--cyclics--and are waiting to be called by the background sequence program. Instrument Expanded Blocks for Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer, ISS, Radio and Plasma Wave Science, and UVIS were also uplinked. This week marked the 6th Anniversary of the Cassini Launch on October 15th, 1997. The event fortuitously coincided with the 32nd Project Science Group meeting being held at JPL. This allowed many of the flight team members to get together to recognize this event. A lab-wide display of the best of this week's Saturn images was displayed as part of the PSG activities. The first preliminary port for science operations plan (SOP) integration of tour sequences S05 and S06, and the second preliminary port for the science planning team process for C43 occurred this week. Science Planning has begun the process of generating the handoff package for C42, the first approach science sequence. The Navigation Team completed the simulation of the Trajectory Correction Maneuver (TCM) 22 approval and validation meetings as a part of the Navigation Saturn Orbit Insertion approach Test & Training activity. The simulation of the TCM Go/No Go meeting will be conducted next week. A suite of Cassini-centric training classes was offered concurrently with the PSG. The timing was desirable to be able to provide necessary training to new flight team members to enable them to support Approach Science and tour operations. Uplink Operations coordinated and provided training in the Pointing Design Tool, Science Opportunity Analyzer, Cassini Information Management System, Automated Sequence Processor, and the Sequence Team process. Deep Space Mission System personnel gave instruction in Distributed Object Manager and the Multi-mission Ground Data System/DMD. Mission Support & Services Office gave training in Cassini specific security requirements and the Cassini SOS help desk, Instrument Operations lectured on the Planetary Data System and the E- Kernel, System Engineering gave talks on anomaly response and helpful stuff--miscellaneous items--of use to flight team members, and the Navigation Ancillary Information Facility provided a talk on Spacecraft, Planet, Instruments, C-matrix, and Events kernels. Implementation began this week to transition the flight team from the existing cruise schedule to the tour schedule. Meetings have been aligned with tour processes to best enable all necessary flight team members to attend without schedule conflicts. The schedule will be in place and become active as of October 20th along with the start of the tour SSUP process for C42. Cassini held a Delivery Coordination Meeting for the new Tracking, Telemetry, Command and Mission Data Management Services (TTC&DM) V28.1 software. This version supports the new Cassini workstation operating system and contains numerous enhancements including new telemetry packet processing. Deployment of the Solaris 9 OS has begun. A Software Requirements Certification Review delivery meeting was held for Composite InfraRed Spectrometer v3.0 FSW. The FSW has been accepted to the project software library and approved for processing to uplink as part of the C40 sequence activities. Pending resolution of a few open items, the FSW will be uplinked to the spacecraft in early November. Cassini/MSSO has requested the DSN Network Operations Project Engineer and TMS Manager initiate a team to look into Cassini's problems with high-rate telemetry (TLM) lockup. The objective is to be able to reliably achieve required TLM lockup times by start of Approach Science mission phase 10 January 2004. Cassini outreach provided DVD copies of the new planetarium show to visiting investigators attending this week's PSG meeting. Outreach also attended the International Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee to search for new and unique ways to present NASA mission information to the public. Several articles were published recently related to the possibility of the Huygens probe encountering liquid lakes when it descends upon Titan in 2005. For more information, go to: http://www.esa.int/export/esaCP/SEM1U51P4HD_index_0.html First Extra solar Planets, now Extra solar Moons! European Space Agency 8 October 2003 http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994227 Radar reveals Titan's methane lakes Stuart Clark New Scientist 02 October 03 http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Oct03/Titan.Campbell.bpf.html Cornell-led astronomers cut through Titan's atmosphere to find evidence for hydrocarbon lakes. 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 EXPRESS STATUS REPORT ESA release 15 October 2003 The Mars Express spacecraft is in good health and is operating normally. Some payload activities were executed on 30 September 2003, involving the SPICAM and OMEGA spectrometers. SPICAM and OMEGA were turned on in order to check the mechanisms of these instruments. The PFS and HRSC Interplanetary Cruise checkouts were conducted successfully on 6 October 2003. The remaining orbiter instruments checkouts to be done during the Interplanetary Cruise phase will be completed by the end of October. The first Interplanetary Cruise checkout of the Beagle-2 lander was conducted on 7 October 2003. The second and final Beagle-2 checkout for this phase is scheduled for the 3rd of November. On the spacecraft side, preparations and simulations for Beagle-2 ejection and Mars Orbit Insertion are proceeding well. The ESA Mars Express spacecraft will perform the Beagle-2 lander separation on 19 December 2003 and will go into Mars orbit insertion on 25 December 2003. The Beagle-2 lander will descend through the martian atmosphere and land on the planet on 25 December 2003. Today, Mars Express is 71 days from Mars Orbit Insertion. Information on the spacecraft's position and remaining distance to Mars can be accessed under "Orbit View" on the sidebar navigation (http://orbits.esa.int/orbits/science/app/mexp.htm). Read the original news release at http://sci.esa.int/jump.cfm?oid=34009. ________________________________________________________________________ MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 9-15 October 2003 The following new images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are now available. Arabian Slope Streaks (Released 09 October 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/09/index.html Dark Sand Dunes (Released 10 October 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/10/index.html Albedo Boundary (Released 11 October 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/11/index.html Polygon Patterns (Released 12 October 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/12/index.html Pavonis Wind Streaks (Released 13 October 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/13/index.html Northern Plains Patterns (Released 14 October 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/14/index.html Streamlined Island (Released 15 October 2003) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/15/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 13-17 October 2003 Terra Sirenum crater (Released 13 October 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20031013a.html Dunes on Ice (Released 14 October 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20031014a.html A Diminutive Volcano (Released 15 October 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20031015a.html Wonders of Eos Chasma (Released 16 October 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20031016a.html Meridiani Planum (Released 17 October 2003) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20031017a.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. ________________________________________________________________________ SPACE INFRARED TELESCOPE FACILITY MISSION STATUS NASA/JPL release 13 October 2003 The Space Infrared Telescope Facility, NASA's fourth and final Great Observatory, has been successfully focused. This crucial milestone-- which will enable the observatory's infrared eyes to see the cosmos in clear detail--was achieved after a series of delicate adjustments were made to the telescope's secondary mirror. Since launch on August 25, the Space Infrared Telescope Facility has performed as expected, proceeding through in-orbit checkout activities on schedule. In addition to achieving final focus, the telescope has cooled to an operating temperature of approximately 5 Kelvin (-268 Celsius or -451 Fahrenheit). This cold temperature will allow the observatory to detect the infrared radiation, or heat, from celestial objects without picking up its own infrared signature. "The science community now has an outstanding observatory with which to study the universe," said Dr. Michael Werner, project scientist for the mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. "We are eager to complete the fine-tuning of the observatory and begin the science program." In-orbit checkout activities are scheduled to continue for 11 more days, after which a one-month science verification phase will occur. Following this, the science program will begin. From its innovative Earth-trailing orbit around the Sun, the Space Infrared Telescope Facility will pierce the dusty darkness enshrouding much of the universe, revealing galaxies billions of light years away; brown dwarfs, or failed stars; and planet-forming discs around stars. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Space Infrared Telescope Facility for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. Further information about the Space Infrared Telescope Facility is available at http://sirtf.caltech.edu/. Read the original news release at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2003/136.cfm. An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/extrasolar-03p.html. ________________________________________________________________________ STARDUST STATUS REPORT NASA/JPL release 17 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. Recent images taken by Stardust's navigation camera indicate that a small amount of contamination has reappeared on the camera. The Stardust team has activated heaters on the spacecraft to remove the contamination. 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 42.