Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter
Volume 10, Number 43, 28 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 
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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)	MYSTERIES OF WOW
      By Seth Shostak

2)	NEW GENOMIC DATA HELP RESOLVE BIOLOGY'S TREE OF LIFE
      By Terry Devitt

3)	NASA SCIENTISTS TO STUDY LAKE'S PRIMITIVE LIFE TO LEARN ABOUT MARS
      NASA/ARC release 03-81AR

4)	THE PHOENIX SCOUT: RED PLANET DETECTIVE
      By Leonard David

5)	AMBER WAVES OF GRAIN ON A MISSION TO MARS
      By Jason Gorss

6)	NEW EVIDENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING IN EARTH'S PAST SUPPORTS CURRENT 
MODELS FOR HOW CLIMATE RESPONDS TO GREENHOUSE GASES
      University of California, Santa Cruz release

7)	MARTIAN CHRONICLES X: ON OUR WAY
      By Steve Squyres

8)	CAN ALIENS FIND US?
      By Seth Shostak

9)	MARTIAN CHRONICLES XI: FEELING REAL
      By Steve Squyres

10)	MARTIAN CHRONICLES XII: FLYING SORTS
      By Steve Squyres

11)	CHINA MAY SEND TWO INTO SPACE NEXT TIME
         By Joe McDonald

12)	NEW EVIDENCE SUGGESTS MARS HAS BEEN COLD AND DRY
      USGS release

13)	THE DRAKE EQUATION REVISTED, PART V: THE GALACTIC CIVILIZATIONS
      By Frank Drake, David Grinspoon and Peter Ward

14)	BAD MILEAGE: 98 TONS OF PLANTS PER GALLON
      University of Utah release

15)	NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX
      By David J. Thomas

16)	CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS
      NASA/JPL release

17)	MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES
      NASA/JPL/MSSS release
________________________________________________________________________

MYSTERIES OF WOW
By Seth Shostak
From Astrobiology Magazine

21 October 2003

Of the many "maybe's" that SETI has turned up in its four-decade 
history, none is better known than the one that was discovered in 
August, 1977, in Columbus, Ohio.  The famous Wow signal was found as 
part of a long-running sky survey conducted with Ohio State University's 
"Big Ear" radio telescope.  The Wow signal's unusual nomenclature 
connotes both the surprise of the discovery and its sox-knocking 
strength (60 Janskys in a 10 KHz channel, which is more than 50 thousand 
times more incoming energy than the minimum signal that would register 
as a hit for today's Project Phoenix.)

But is the Wow signal's notoriety merely the triumph of marketing over 
substance?  Could this momentary cosmic burp have really been ET, or was 
it just random terrestrial interference dressed up with a sexy moniker?  
For a decade, Robert Gray, a long-time, independent SETI researcher from 
Chicago, has been trying to find out.  Gray, like many others, was 
attracted by an intriguing feature of the Wow signal: the manner in 
which it rose and fell over the course of 72 seconds.  

Why is this interesting?  Just this: the Ohio State survey kept the 
telescope fixed, letting the Earth's daily spin rotate the heavens 
through its narrow beam.  The "beam," of course, was the elongated patch 
of sky to which the telescope was sensitive--the direction from which it 
could pick up cosmic signals.  The sensitivity was greatest at the 
center of the beam, falling off to either side.  

So as a celestial radio source passed by, it first rose in apparent 
intensity as Earth's rotation brought it into the beam, reached a peak 
in the beam center, and then faded away.   Given the size of the Ohio 
State beam, this rise and fall should take 72 seconds.  And for the Wow 
signal, it did.

Now contrast this with what you'd expect if the telescope had merely 
been briefly flooded by an interfering terrestrial signal.  The 
intensity would suddenly switch full on, and then, sometime later, 
switch off.  Even if the interference was due to a low-Earth orbit 
satellite, a source that might cause a rise and fall in intensity, you 
wouldn't expect it to fortuitously last for 72 seconds.  For these 
reasons, the Wow signal gets high marks for being a credible candidate 
for SETI.

On the other hand, there are some aspects of this seductive signal that 
nudge it toward a lower grade.  The Ohio State telescope actually used 
two beams, situated side-by-side on the sky.  Any cosmic source would 
therefore be seen first in one (for 72 seconds) and then--roughly 3 
minutes later--in the other (also 72 seconds.) The Wow signal failed 
this simple test.  It came on gangbusters in one beam, but was a no-show 
in the other: suspicious and disheartening.

But as Gray and others have realized, this odd, one-beam behavior could 
be caused by an alien transmission that simply went off the air during 
the 3 minutes between beams.  Maybe ET went on vacation, or took an 
extended lunch break.  If the putative aliens permanently shut down 
their transmitter, then there's no chance of ever hearing the Wow signal 
again.  Like a single sighting of the Loch Ness monster, we would never 
be able to prove what it was.  But if the signal is periodic--if, for 
example, the aliens are using a rotating radio beacon that sweeps the 
star-studded strata of the Milky Way once every five minutes or every 
five hours--then we could hope to find it by just looking again.

Robert Gray has looked again...  and again.  In the last decade, Gray 
and his colleagues have used the Harvard META SETI system and then the 
Very Large Array (VLA) to search for a reappearance of the Wow signal.  
The experiment at the VLA, in particular, was an impressive effort, as 
it was far more sensitive than the original Ohio State equipment and 
covered more of the band.  Neither attempt succeeded in retrieving the 
signal, however.

Gray realized that he might be the victim of insufficient patience.  The 
longest of his re-observations had been 22 minutes.  What if the aliens' 
beacon flashed less often than once every 22 minutes?  What if their 
transmitter was fixed to the home planet, rotating (and flashing) once 
every 20 or 30 hours?

In The Astrophysical Journal, Gray and Simon Ellingsen, of Australia's 
University of Tasmania, report on new observations (partially supported 
by the SETI Institute) designed to test this idea.  Their new try was 
made at the 26-meter radio telescope in Hobart, Tasmania.  This southern 
hemisphere instrument could continuously follow for most of a day the 
patch of sky (in the constellation of Sagittarius) where the "Big Ear" 
was pointing when it found the Wow signal.  They made six 14-hour 
observations, and even though their telescope was rather smaller than 
the venerable Ohio State antenna, they still had sufficient sensitivity 
to find signals only 5% as strong as Wow's 1977 intensity.  They also 
covered five times as much of the radio dial as the original "Big Ear" 
telescope.

Bottom line?  No dice.  To quote from their article, "no signals 
resembling the Ohio State Wow were detected..."  Of course, if the 
signal's repetition cycle were much longer than 14 hours, then even this 
careful experiment could have easily missed it.  But as Gray and 
Ellingsen point out, if the signal were really this infrequent, then the 
chance to have found it in the first place was very slim.  

So was the Wow signal our first detection of extraterrestrials?  It 
might have been, but no scientist would make such a claim.  Scientific 
experiment is inherently, and rightly, skeptical.  This isn't just a 
sour attitude; it's the only way to avoid routinely fooling yourself.  
So until and unless the cosmic beep measured in Ohio is found again, the 
Wow signal will remain a What signal.

Read the original article at 
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article641.html.
________________________________________________________________________

NEW GENOMIC DATA HELP RESOLVE BIOLOGY'S TREE OF LIFE
By Terry Devitt
University of Wisconsin--Madison release

22 October 2003

For more than a century, biologists have been working to assign plants, 
animals and microbes their respective places on the tree of life.  More 
recently, by comparing DNA sequences from a few genes per species, 
scientists have been trying to construct a grand tree of life that 
accurately portrays the course of life on Earth, and shows how all 
organisms are related, one to another.  However, despite the detailed 
insights provided by individual genes, that approach has proved 
cumbersome in its ability to resolve the order of events in the distant 
past.  

Now, a team of scientists from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at 
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, writing in the current issue (Oct.  
23) of the prestigious journal, Nature, has shown that new genomic-scale 
data offers powerful, unprecedented resolution of the evolutionary tree.  
The finding is important because an accurate depiction of a tree of life 
promises biologists a summary of the history of life on Earth during 
billions of years.  Such a rigorous historical framework is an essential 
backdrop--not just for evolutionary biology, but also for efforts as 
diverse as the search for new drugs and agricultural agents, studies of 
emerging diseases, and evaluating issues of species conservation and 
ecosystem restoration.  

"The overall goal is that we want to know who is related to whom," says 
Sean B. Carroll, a UW-Madison professor of genetics and the senior 
author of the Nature paper.  "The challenge has been to decipher the 
true tree from those that have changed as data have been added and re-
analyzed over time." 

In efforts to arrive at a reliable tree of life, scientists since the 
1980s have used genes to infer the evolutionary history for various 
organisms.  By comparing one or a few genes common to related animals or 
plants, and looking at differences in the selected genes, scientists 
began to map out family trees for different plants, animals and 
microbes.  The problem with that approach, according to the new 
Wisconsin study, is that trees constructed on single genes often seem to 
lack reliability.  Different genes give different answers so that one 
gene from a group of organisms depicts one tree, while a different gene 
from the same organisms will paint an entirely different phylogenetic 
picture.  More genes, it has been thought, could help resolve the issue, 
and the new Wisconsin study now provides the first glimpse at both just 
how unreliable single genes can be and how many genes might be needed to 
overcome the problem.  

Using new genomic sequences from eight yeast species, the group in 
Carroll's lab, which was led by post-doctoral fellows Antonis Rokas, 
Barry L.  Williams and Nicole King, were able to assess the reliability 
of trees constructed using more than 100 genes.  The result was a single 
tree with no doubt.  

"We were shocked.  We didn't expect such an unprecedented level of 
resolution," says Rokas.  "Some genes give you one story, some genes 
give you another, but with enough of them together we get a single 
picture." 

Apparently, the catch with the single-gene model is that some of the 
thousands of nucleotides that make up a gene can be biased as natural 
selection acts on the gene to fulfill a certain role.  "Each gene 
carries information concerning both history and selection.  Genes alone 
are biased, but together their shared history overrides each gene's 
unique bias and provides a surprisingly strong picture of evolution," 
says Williams.  

The implications of the study are exciting, and provide encouraging news 
for the future of understanding the tree of life, says Carroll.  As the 
data sets get larger, the influence of variation caused by natural 
selection becomes small enough that true historical relationships can be 
worked out.  

"The problem is that molecules don't all change in the same way," says 
Carroll.  "Now, with whole genomes being deciphered at a rapid clip, 
long-standing questions about the relationships between various animals 
and plants appear to be within our reach." 

The take-home message, according to Williams and Rokas, is that the 
advent of the genomic age means the data necessary to build robust 
phylogenetic trees are coming online.  Already, scientists have genomic 
sequences for a number of different organisms, ranging from bacteria to 
humans.  

"It's time for people to scale up," says Rokas.  "By increasing the 
amount of data, we will see a more robust picture of the tree of life."

Contacts: 
Terry Devitt 
Phone: 608-262-8282
E-mail: trdevitt@wisc.edu

Sean B.  Carroll
Phone: 608-262-6191
E-mail: sbcarroll@wisc.edu

Antonis Rokas
Phone: 608-265-2004
E-mail: arokas@wisc.edu

Barry L.  Williams
Phone: 608-265-2004
E-mail: bwilliams2@wisc.edu

Read the original news release at 
http://www.news.wisc.edu/view.html?id=9094.

An additional article on this subject is available at 
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/life-03zzh.html.
________________________________________________________________________

NASA SCIENTISTS TO STUDY LAKE'S PRIMITIVE LIFE TO LEARN ABOUT MARS
NASA/ARC release 03-81AR

22 October 2003

Scientists from NASA, the SETI Institute and other institutions will 
study microscopic life forms in some of the highest lakes on Earth atop 
a South American volcano to learn what life may have been like on early 
Mars.  From October 27 to November 23, scientists will conduct field 
tests to examine life forms in several lakes, including the Licancabur 
volcano crater lake, at nearly 20,000 feet in the Andean Altiplano on 
the border of Bolivia and Chile.

"Studying life in these lakes not only provides critical information 
about the habitability potential of early Mars and other planets in the 
solar system, it also opens a window into our own past to reveal how 
life survived on Earth 2 billion years before the ozone layer formed," 
said the project's principal investigator and expedition lead, Dr. 
Nathalie A.  Cabrol of NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, and 
the SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA.

Intense ultraviolet (UV) radiation, low oxygen, low atmospheric pressure 
and cold temperatures make the environment a close analog to martian 
lakes 3.5 billion years ago.  Despite the extreme conditions at 
Licancabur, scientists say microscopic life is present and diverse.  Its 
survival strategy might be very ancient, according to Cabrol.

During their first expedition last year to the same area, Cabrol's 
science team discovered that very small plankton-like algae called 
diatoms had 10 times more deformities than similar algae in other lakes.  
UV is believed to be the "prime suspect" that may have triggered the 
malformed algae, according to Cabrol.

One of the scientists' goals is to identity the species living in the 
high lakes and to learn how these living things cope--or do not cope--
with UV and other stresses.  "Most of the lakes we study there are 
shallow and do not provide substantial protection to living organisms.  
They have nowhere to hide from UV," Cabrol said.  "We want to understand 
if these diatoms have developed some sort of 'sunscreen.' If not, they 
are probably on their way to extinction," she added.

"Either case represents potentially an immense source of knowledge," 
Cabrol said.  "On the one hand, we might learn more about life strategy 
against UV with all its implications for early planets' habitability and 
future astrobiological mission exploration strategies, and on the other 
hand, we might possibly be on our way to identifying a limit to life's 
adaptation on Earth," Cabrol explained.

The team will set up data-collection stations with instruments and 
experiments to measure UV and its effect on life in the area.  The 
stations also will measure temperature, water properties and other 
conditions.  The instruments are the first element in a planned large 
network of stations that the team will position in coming years at high-
altitude lakes up to 20,130 feet.  Commonly used in marine and lower 
altitude lake environments, these stations have never been taken to such 
high altitude; scientists believe they will record unprecedented data 
for years.

Cabrol and several other scientists also will "free" dive to collect 
biological samples and sediments at various locations in Licancabur Lake 
that are not accessible by boat.  During their dives, scientists plan to 
take underwater pictures and video to document the lake's biology and 
its habitats.

Divers will wear "LifeGuard" devices to monitor the divers' conditions 
including real-time vital signs (ECG, heart rate, respiration, oxygen 
saturation, temperature and human activity) from the expedition site.  A 
satellite will relay this data to NASA Ames.  Members of the ascent team 
also will wear the LifeGuard telemedicine monitors.  The "Astrobionics" 
team at NASA Ames developed the monitors for use on Earth and in space.

NASA and the National Geographic Society funded the project, with 
additional support from the SETI Institute and other organizations.  A 
list of the expedition's participants, additional information, audio, 
video, still pictures and live educational activities are on the project 
web site at http://www.extremeenvironment.com.

Contacts:
Kathleen Burton
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
Phone: 650-604-1731 or 604-9000
E-mail: kburton@mail.arc.nasa.gov

Diane Richards
SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA
Phone: 650-960-4513
E-mail: drichards@seti.org

Additional articles on this subject are available at:
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article644.html
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0310/26lakelife/
http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/primitive_life_lake.html
________________________________________________________________________

THE PHOENIX SCOUT: RED PLANET DETECTIVE
By Leonard David
From Space.com

22 October 2003

As a flotilla of Mars-bound probes nears their target, scientists and 
engineers have begun work on the Mars Phoenix lander, the flagship 
spacecraft for NASA's Scout line of innovative and econo-class Red 
Planet explorers.  In some ways, the Phoenix lander is a "been here, 
nearly done that" type of mission.  It's a robotic return to flight of 
hardware lost when NASA's Mars Polar Lander apparently smashed into the 
planet's south pole terrain on December 3, 1999.  It was never heard 
from after repeated attempts to make contact.  

A follow-on lander was being tested to fly as part of the 2001 Mars 
Surveyor program, but this work was halted after the failure.  That gear 
was stored in a clean room at Lockheed Martin in Denver in 2000.  
Phoenix, in effect, was created from the embers of previous missions.  

In August of this year, NASA picked Phoenix over other competitive 
concepts, giving it the go-ahead as the first of a hoped for line of 
relatively low-cost Mars Scout missions.  It will be launched in August 
of 2007, headed for a still to be selected high northern latitude locale 
on Mars.  Once on duty, the robot is to characterize the landing zone's 
cache of ice, soil, rock, as well as study the local atmosphere using 
state-of-the-art methods.

Read the full article at 
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/scouts_detective_0310
22.html.
________________________________________________________________________

AMBER WAVES OF GRAIN ON A MISSION TO MARS
By Jason Gorss
From the American Chemical Society News Service 

23 October 2003

Mars came nearer to Earth this year than it has in more than 50,000 
years, but a new technology could bring it closer still.  Scientists 
have developed a fully sustainable disposal system to deal with waste on 
long-range space flights using a simple byproduct of wheat.  

Wheat grass, an inedible part of the wheat plant, can be used to reclaim 
pollutants produced from burning waste on a spaceship, according to 
researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and NASA.  The 
wheat grass itself would normally be trash, but now it can be put to 
good use in a process that moves the space program one step closer to a 
manned mission to Mars.  The findings are in the current issue 
(September/October) of Energy & Fuels, a peer-reviewed bi-monthly 
journal of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific 
society.  

A manned mission to Mars has long been a goal of the space program, 
though it is still just a prospect of the fairly distant future.  Such a 
mission would take about three years, depending on the proximity of Mars 
in its orbit.  

"In these three years, you cannot have a supply from Earth, like in a 
space station," says Shih-Ger Chang, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the 
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and lead author of 
the paper.  "So the key is to develop a way for a sustainable supply of 
material to the astronauts.  They need a fully regenerative life support 
system because they have to conserve the materials that they carry with 
them." 

The main problem facing astronauts will be their own "biomass"--human 
feces and inedible portions of crops grown for food, such as wheat 
grass.  "If they discard wheat grass or human feces into space, then 
they throw away nutrients," Chang says.  "The astronauts need to recover 
everything for reuse." 

One promising method to deal with this waste is to burn it.  
Incineration rapidly and completely converts the waste to carbon 
dioxide, water and minerals, and it is a thoroughly developed technology 
here on earth.  Although plants readily absorb carbon dioxide, the major 
difficulty with incineration, especially in an enclosed spaceship, is 
that it produces other pollutants, like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen 
oxides.  We have effective ways of dealing with these pollutants on 
Earth but they all require expendable materials, such as activated 
carbon, which need to be replaced every few months.  

And that's where growing wheat in space comes into play.  The inedible 
portion of the wheat--the wheat grass--can be converted to activated 
carbon onboard the space vehicle by heating it to about 600°C.  
Emissions from waste incineration are then sent through the activated 
carbon, which absorbs nitrogen oxides.  These are subsequently recovered 
and converted to nitrogen, ammonia and nitrates.  The nitrogen can be 
used to replace cabin pressure leakage, while the ammonia and nitrates 
can be used as fertilizer.  When the activated carbon loses its capacity 
to absorb nitrogen oxides, the process starts over with new wheat grass.  

In earlier research, Chang and his colleagues demonstrated that gas from 
the incineration of biomass contains insignificant amounts of sulfur 
dioxide, so they focused their efforts in this study on controlling 
nitrogen oxides.  Wheat for a spaceship can be grown hydroponically--in 
a nutrient solution exposed to artificial sunlight.  About 203 kilograms 
of carbon derived from wheat straw could be produced per year, which 
should be more than enough to sustain a crew of six astronauts, 
according to Chang's calculations.  

"It's a recyclable and sustainable process," Chang says.  The technology 
is also simple to operate and functional under microgravity conditions.  

NASA is planning studies to scale up the process at its Ames Research 
Center in Moffett Field, CA.  

Read the original news release at 
http://acs.yellowbrix.com/pages/acs/Story.nsp?story_id=42928599.

An additional article on this subject is available at 
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-general-03r.html.
________________________________________________________________________

NEW EVIDENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING IN EARTH'S PAST SUPPORTS CURRENT MODELS 
FOR HOW CLIMATE RESPONDS TO GREENHOUSE GASES
University of California, Santa Cruz release

23 October 2003

Scientists have filled in a key piece of the global climate picture for 
a period 55 million years ago that is considered one of the most abrupt 
and extreme episodes of global warming in Earth's history.  The new 
results from an analysis of sediment cores from the ocean floor are 
consistent with theoretical predictions of how Earth's climate would 
respond to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  
The new study, led by James Zachos, professor of Earth sciences at the 
University of California, Santa Cruz, will be published online by 
Science Express on October 23, and will appear in a later print edition 
of Science magazine.  

The researchers analyzed sediments deposited on the seafloor during a 
period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when a massive 
release of heat-trapping greenhouse gases is thought to have triggered a 
runaway process of global warming.  Climate theory predicts that the 
increase in greenhouse gases would have caused temperatures to rise all 
over the planet, with greater increases in sea surface temperatures at 
high latitudes than at low latitudes.

Zachos and a team of researchers at UCSC and several other institutions 
have now obtained the first reliable estimates of the change in tropical 
sea surface temperatures during this period.  When combined with 
existing records of sea surface temperatures at high latitudes, the 
findings fit well with the predictions of computer simulations based on 
current climate theory.  The study provides important backing for the 
climate models that scientists are using to predict the effects of the 
current rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide due to industrial emissions, 
Zachos said.

"The predictions from the models seem to be consistent with the geologic 
record, so I'd say greenhouse climate theory is alive and well," he 
said.  "People have raised questions about how accurate these models are 
in terms of handling heat transport in response to rising greenhouse 
gases, but this study indicates that the climate people have got it 
right or close to right."

The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, starting about 55 million years 
ago and lasting about 150,000 years, is marked by dramatic changes in 
the fossil record of life in the ocean and on land.  Average global 
temperatures increased by about 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees 
Fahrenheit).  The increase in sea surface temperatures at high latitudes 
was 8 to 10 degrees Celsius, and the new study shows a 4- to 5-degree 
Celsius increase in tropical sea surface temperatures.  

"This event is the best example of greenhouse warming in the geologic 
record, and for the first time we have been able to document the climate 
response on a relatively broad planetary scale, from the tropics to 
polar latitudes," Zachos said.  

The temperature estimates were derived from chemical analyses of the 
shells of microscopic plankton preserved in the seafloor sediments.  The 
chemical composition of the plankton's calcite shells reflects the 
temperature of the water in which they were formed.  A key measurement 
examined in this study was the ratio of magnesium to calcium, which 
increases exponentially with the temperature at which the shells formed.  

"The ratio of magnesium to calcium in seawater is relatively constant 
over the timescale of this event, so the ratio in the shells is really 
only sensitive to one variable, the calcification temperature," Zachos 
said.

UCSC graduate students Michael Wara and Steven Bohaty performed most of 
the chemical analyses.  The researchers analyzed sediment cores 
recovered from a site called Shatsky Rise in the tropical Pacific during 
an expedition of the ship JOIDES Resolution in 2001 (Leg 198 of the 
Ocean Drilling Program).  The cores provided a complete sequence of 
deposits representing the boundary between the Paleocene and Eocene 
epochs.  

"There aren't many places in the Pacific where you can recover sediments 
of this age in which the fossils are not so recrystallized that they've 
lost their original geochemical signatures," Zachos said.

ODP Leg 198 and a complementary drilling expedition in the Atlantic 
earlier this year (ODP Leg 208) were designed to test the leading 
explanation for the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which attributes 
it to a massive release of methane.  Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, 
accumulates in frozen deposits known as clathrates found in the deep 
ocean near continental margins and also in the Arctic tundra.  For 
reasons that remain unclear, the clathrates suddenly began to decompose, 
releasing an estimated 2,000 gigatons (2 trillion tons) of methane.

Once released, the methane would have reacted with dissolved oxygen in 
the ocean to produce carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas.  Large 
amounts of both carbon dioxide and methane would have entered the 
atmosphere, raising temperatures worldwide.  

In addition to Zachos, Wara, and Bohaty, the coauthors on the Science 
paper are Margaret Delaney, professor of ocean sciences at UCSC, Maria 
Rose Petrizzo and Isabella Premoli-Silva of the University of Milan, 
Amanda Brill of the University of North Carolina, and Timothy Bralower 
of Pennsylvania State University.  Bralower and Premoli-Silva were co-
chief scientists on ODP Leg 198.

Read the original news release at 
http://www.ucsc.edu/news_events/press_releases/text.asp?pid=417.

An additional article on this subject is available at 
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/climate-03zg.html.
________________________________________________________________________

MARTIAN CHRONICLES X: ON OUR WAY
By Steve Squyres
From Astrobiology Magazine

23 October 2003

The Martian Chronicles series gives an inside view of what it takes for 
scientists to deliver a complex mars mission.  The journal entries are 
from Cornell's Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator for the Mars 
Exploration Rovers' scientific package called Athena.  The chronicles 
begin sequentially from the beginning of July 1999, four years before 
launch, and will culminate in the dramatic landing of the twin rovers on 
Mars in January 2004.  The expected mission time roaming the red planet 
is ninety days, from January to April.  The chronicles include an 
insider's view of hardware tests and site selection to problem solving 
and science planning on the surface of Mars.  

February 15, 2003

This week we put to rest what may have been the worst remaining problem 
that stood between us and launch.  This one was looking very nasty for 
awhile.  Back in December, we put the whole MER-2 rover into a big 
thermal chamber and took it down to cold martian temperatures.  Almost 
everything worked right, but one thing was very, very wrong.  When the 
rover got really cold, the pictures from one of our two Pancam cameras 
got bad.  In fact, they were worse than bad, they were terrible.  
Imagine a TV picture with static so bad you can barely tell what you're 
looking at.  That's what some of them were like.  It only happened in 
that one camera, and it went away as soon as we warmed things up a bit.  
But it was pretty scary, because we didn't know what was wrong.  

We chased this one for a long time.  The breakthrough came a few weeks 
ago, when Leo Bister at JPL took a really careful look at the cables 
that run to all the cameras at the top of the rover's mast.  Something 
just didn't seem quite right to him, and when he dug into it he realized 
that we had built the cable wrong.  That cable has a bunch of pairs of 
wires in it, with the pairs of them carefully twisted together.  Problem 
was, the wrong wires had been paired up when they were twisted, letting 
signals from the camera become contaminated by signals in other wires.  
It was the kind of thing that would get worse when the cable got cold, 
and it was also the kind of thing that could really mess up a picture.

This had to be it, but you can't be sure until you test.  We built some 
new cables, replaced the old ones, and late last week we put the whole 
rover back into the chamber again, cooled it down, and held our breath.  
It worked.  Every picture was clean and flawless, even at the coldest 
temperature.  It was a huge relief, and a nice piece of detective work 
by Leo.

February 22, 2003

It's that time again: Thermal-vac testing, this time for the MER-1 
rover.  Before each rover goes to Mars, we have to put it through all 
its paces under martian conditions.  This means putting into a big 
"thermal vacuum" chamber, pumping the air out, cooling the walls down, 
and filling the chamber with a little bit of very cold gas to simulate 
the martian atmosphere.  We then make the rover do just about every 
trick it knows, including operating all of the science instruments.

We did this with the MER-2 rover back in December, and it was a pretty 
exhausting experience.  Thermal vac runs 24 hours a day until it's over, 
and MER-2 thermal vac went on for something like ten days and nights.  
MER-1 has just gone into the chamber as I'm writing this, and the action 
should continue all this coming week.  The first big hurdle will be to 
make sure that the Pancam "speckle" problem that hit us on MER-2 is 
really gone.  And after that, we'll just rock around the clock until all 
the tests are done.

March 1, 2003

Thermal vac testing of MER-1 is almost over.  It's been quite an 
experience.  Back in December, when we put the MER-2 rover into a 
thermal vacuum chamber and ran it under martian conditions, it was quite 
a struggle.  We got all the data we needed, but a lot of things also 
went wrong.  The worst of them was the "speckle" problem in the right 
Pancam camera, which we finally killed off in a test on MER-2 last week.

For MER-1, though, thermal vac testing this past week has gone much more 
smoothly.  Everything has gotten better over the past couple of months: 
hardware, software, and people.  There was no speckling in the Pancam on 
this rover.  We got tons of Mini-TES data, and the data showed that this 
instrument is just as good as the one on MER-2, or even a tad better.  
And we did the first full-up test at martian temperatures of the fix to 
the Mössbauer Spectrometer problem that turned up months ago.  The 
Mössbauer data looked great, so that one is behind us now too.

As in the last test, two of the real standouts were the Instrument 
Deployment Device also known as the rover's arm and the Microscopic 
Imager that it carries.  Here's a sequence of five Microscopic Imager 
pictures, taken as the arm slowly moved the camera to bring things into 
focus.  Pretty cool, huh?  Now imagine what it'll be like next January 
when this same camera is taking close-up pictures of martian rocks.

March 8, 2003

Every now and then you catch a lucky break.  We caught one this week 
that we still don't completely understand, but we'll take it.  Our Rock 
Abrasion Tool (also known as the RAT) uses diamond grinding heads to 
wear away at martian rocks.  Even though diamonds are the hardest 
materials known, they can still wear out, and we've been very concerned 
about how long the RAT grinding heads will last on Mars.  We've done a 
lot of testing in the laboratory, and it looked like the RAT would do 
fine if martian rocks are soft.  If the rocks turn out to be really 
hard, though, it seemed that the RAT would make it through just a 
handful of grindings before wearing out.

The big question, of course, was how things would work under the very 
cold, dry, low-pressure atmospheric conditions on Mars.  We put a RAT 
into a test chamber recently, took it to real martian conditions for the 
first time, and got a very pleasant surprise.  The rate at which our 
diamond-studded teeth wear away slowed way down!  We're still figuring 
out why, but it turns out that when you put this martian RAT into its 
natural environment, its teeth don't wear down nearly as fast.  So we 
should be able to grind into as many rocks as we want to on Mars, no 
matter how hard they turn out to be.

March 15, 2003

This week marked one of the most important milestones since we started 
this thing more than seven years ago.  The second MER rover and its 
Athena payload arrived in Florida.

Since the summer of 1999 we've been putting weekly news updates on this 
web site.  We've had a lot of ups and downs over that span, including 
some times when it looked like maybe we weren't ever going to get our 
payload to the launch pad at all.  And now, after years of effort by 
hundreds of scientists and engineers, everything is at Cape Canaveral.  
It's an incredible feeling.  This picture, taken by Goestar 
Klingelhoefer, shows the last of the trucks rolling through the gate at 
Kennedy Space Center...  with me on my cell phone giving the news to the 
folks back home.  We're now less than eleven weeks away from our first 
launch.

March 22, 2003

We've just been through two of the toughest weeks we've had in the past 
couple of years.  Problem number one was with our Mössbauer 
spectrometer.  Each Mössbauer instrument is like four instruments in 
one...  four separate sensors that each return data.  When we got them 
to Florida, the MER-1 Mössbauer looked fine, but one of the four sensors 
on the MER-2 Mössbauer had gone totally dead.  We spent almost a week 
troubleshooting it, and we finally traced the problem to one tiny 
electronic part, called a resistor, that had failed.  We managed to 
figure out why it failed, and we confirmed that the problem shouldn't 
affect any of the other sensors.  Roberta Cerda flew out from JPL, put 
the broken hardware under a microscope, and fixed it.  She is a true 
artist with a soldering iron, and the instrument is now ready to go.

Problem number two was with our APXS instrument, and this one looked 
even worse.  Six hours into a test at JPL, the MER-1 APXS just plain 
died.  Or at least it sure looked like it had.  It suddenly stopped 
working, and when we made some quick measurements it was clear that a 
short circuit had developed somewhere inside the instrument.  That kind 
of thing can be fatal for flight hardware, and most of us were pretty 
convinced we were going to have to fly one of our spare instruments.  
But Ralf Gellert didn't give up on it.  He took the instrument apart, 
and he found the problem.  A tiny sliver of aluminum, probably stripped 
from a small screw, had gotten wedged in just the wrong part of the 
instrument and caused the short.  That's why we do tests, to find that 
kind of problem.  The instrument wasn't damaged, and when he took the 
sliver out everything started working fine again.  You can bet we 
inspected the inside of the instrument really carefully to make sure 
there was nothing else like that inside it!  So that one's ready to go 
too.

When problems like this happen a year or two before launch, it can be 
easy enough to deal with them.  But when they happen now, with both 
spacecraft at Cape Canaveral, it's a different story.  We really dodged 
a couple of bullets this week.  Ten weeks to go...

March 29, 2003

The Athena payload for the MER-2 rover is done.  At some point you have 
to be prepared to say goodbye to your hardware on a project like this, 
and that time is just about here.  We have taken the last data we'll 
ever take on this planet with the instruments on the MER-2 rover.  We 
stowed everything for launch this week.  The mast is locked down tight 
against the rover deck now, and the arm is tucked up against the front 
end of the rover.  Our instruments have been turned off, and they're 
going to stay that way for awhile.  The next time we talk to them, the 
rover will be in deep space, on its way to Mars.  And the next time we 
move the arm or the mast, or take any real pictures, we'll be down on 
the martian surface.

That's MER-2.  MER-1 is still very busy, taking pictures, driving 
around, and going through its last bit of testing in Florida before we 
stow that one for launch too.  But in another week or so, everything 
we've worked on for the past seven years is going to be ready to head 
into space.  Nine weeks until we launch...

April 5, 2003

It took awhile, but we finally did it.  We finally got a chance to take 
a picture that shows what our Pancam cameras are really capable of.  
We've been incredibly busy with pre-launch testing, and there hasn't 
been much time to just play around with the hardware and show what it 
can do.  But this past week, during an overnight "graveyard shift", 
Justin Maki pretty much had the MER-1 rover all to himself.  He put the 
opportunity to good use, taking the first really big panorama that we've 
gotten with Pancam.  We're calling it the Midnight Pan, because that's 
when Justin took it.

Here it is.  It's a full 360 panorama around the room at Cape Canaveral 
where the rovers are being readied for flight.  You can see the solar 
arrays of the MER-1 rover itself at the lower left and lower right 
corners of the image, and a whole lot of other hardware all over the 
room.

There still are some things about this picture that aren't like our Mars 
images will be.  We did just a quick-and-dirty job of putting the 
individual frames together, so you can see "seams" in the image, 
particularly for things close to the camera.  We'll take care of that in 
the martian images.  There are some weird glints in this image off of 
really shiny metallic surfaces; we don't expect to see stuff like that 
on Mars.  And of course on Mars we'll take a lot of our images in color 
rather than black and white.  Still, this gives you a feel for the kind 
of look at Mars that Pancam will give us.  Less than eight weeks until 
our first launch...  

April 12, 2003

What a week!  We passed two of the biggest milestones in the history of 
our project...  not just in the same week, but on the same day.  The 
first milestone is that the Athena payload is now done.  We have been 
working on this thing since 1995, and on Thursday of this past week the 
last piece was put in place.  Both masts are stowed, both arms are 
stowed, and all the testing is done.  The next time any of our hardware 
gets deployed, it'll be on Mars.

The other milestone is that NASA has selected our landing sites.  Not 
only that, they're the two sites that practically everybody in the Mars 
science business has been hoping we'd get: Meridiani Planum and Gusev 
Crater.  Meridiani is a place where there's a large concentration of a 
mineral called coarse crystalline hematite...  stuff that on Earth 
usually forms in the presence of liquid water.  And Gusev is a large 
impact crater with a big dried-up riverbed flowing into it.  Long ago 
there was a lake in Gusev Crater, and the crater must still be full of 
sediments.  They're both great sites...  in fact, they're the two best 
sites you could possibly find for a mission like this.  We're thrilled 
with them.  

So now it's a race to the finish, trying to get both spacecraft to their 
launch pads on time.  We have less than seven weeks to go before our 
first launch.

April 19, 2003

It's been a pretty crazy week.  We're getting very close to launch now, 
and the focus is starting to shift from our spacecraft to our rockets.  
Of course, the spacecraft story isn't over yet.  You saw in a news flash 
here last week that the spacecraft team down in Florida found a wiring 
problem that required taking both rovers apart and fixing an electronics 
board inside them.  That work is done now, and it went very smoothly.  
But it set us back a little, and the MER-A launch is now scheduled for 
June 6th, instead of the original date of May 30th.  It's a headache we 
could have done without.

The rocket story isn't entirely simple either.  For MER-A, it's pretty 
straightforward.  MER-A launches from pad 17-A, which is clear now and 
ready to have our first rocket put on it.  For MER-B, though, which is 
due to launch on June 25th, it's more complicated.

Right now, pad 17-B, which is where MER-B will launch from, has somebody 
else's rocket on it.  It's the launch vehicle for a mission called the 
Space Infrared Telescope Facility, or SIRTF.  SIRTF is a very cool 
mission...  a giant telescope to scan the universe at infrared 
wavelengths, just like the Hubble Space Telescope has done at visible 
wavelengths.  Thing is, there's a problem with one of the nine solid 
rocket motors on the SIRTF launch vehicle.  It's a minor problem, but 
NASA is playing it safe, and they've decided not to launch SIRTF until 
that motor can be replaced.  Replacing a motor isn't hard, but it takes 
time, and time is something the SIRTF team doesn't have...  because of 
us.

A mission like SIRTF can launch at just about any time, as long as the 
rocket and the spacecraft are ready.  But a Mars mission like MER-B has 
to go in a specific "launch window": a brief period of time when Earth 
and Mars are aligned properly to get from one to the other.  Our launch 
window is coming up soon, and that doesn't give the SIRTF guys enough 
time to fix their problem and get off the ground before we need to move 
onto pad 17-B.  We're the ones with the tight schedule, but it's SIRTF 
that has to take the hit, getting bumped to late summer to make room for 
us.  We feel bad about it...  SIRTF has been waiting for their ride into 
space even longer than we have.  But Mars won't wait.  So SIRTF goes 
back to the hangar for awhile, and we're up next.

April 26, 2003

It's pretty much impossible to have a week of nothing but smooth sailing 
on a project as complicated as this one, but the past week was about as 
close as we come.  The science payload on both rovers is all done.  The 
fix of the cable problem that made us delay our first launch a couple of 
weeks ago is done too.  And it went so well that the launch date for 
MER-A has moved forward by a day, from June 6th to June 5th.

The second rover is on its lander now.  The first rover is even farther 
along, folded up inside its lander and about to be tucked up inside its 
protective aeroshell...  where it will stay until it falls out of a pink 
sky over Gusev Crater next January.

And coolest of all, our first rocket is coming together now.  The first 
stage of the MER-A launcher was put up on launch pad 17-A at Cape 
Canaveral on Wednesday, and the second stage will follow shortly.  So 
there's most of a real Mars rocket down in Florida now, almost ready to 
have our first spacecraft to put on it.

May 3, 2003

The rovers are all done, the rockets are on the launch pads, and it's 
time now for the science team to turn our attention from how to build 
these things to how to operate them.  For years now, our focus has been 
on building the Athena payload and getting it to the launch pad.  But 
now, with all that behind us, we need to start earning our martian 
drivers licenses.  It's a complicated process.  These are very complex 
machines, and operating them will take a team of more than a hundred 
scientists working around the clock for months, starting next January.

This coming week, we'll take one of our first steps toward learning how 
to do it.  It's called a "thread test".  Think of it as being like the 
first walk-through by the cast members in a play.  We don't know all our 
lines yet.  We don't know where the props are.  And we sure aren't ready 
to perform in front of an audience.  But over the next week we're going 
to try walking slowly through all the things that we'll have to do over 
the course of a couple of martian days once our rovers are on the 
surface.

All of this is going to happen in the brand-new MER Project Mission 
Support Area at JPL.  The paint's barely dry yet!  They were still 
moving furniture in late last week.  So it's not just the scientists 
that aren't ready yet, it's the facilities too.  We'll start working the 
bugs out this week.

May 10, 2003

Well, we had our first big rover operations test this week.  It wasn't 
pretty, but it was a lot of fun.  This was the first test in which we 
actually walked through the procedures that we'll use to do science 
operations once the rovers are on Mars.  The thing that made it really 
interesting was that we did it in our new MER Mission Support Area at 
JPL.  It's a great facility, but everything was very new to us.  It was 
sort of like the first day in a new school...  you could almost hear 
people saying "Where's my homeroom?  What's my locker combination?" It 
took a little while to figure out where everything was.

Over three days we practiced two martian days, or sols, worth of surface 
operations.  The first sol was an "approach sol" where we drive the 
rover to a rock that we've selected.  The second one was a "spectroscopy 
sol" where we use the instruments on the arm to look at the rock in 
detail.  The first sol was pretty ragged, frankly...  everything was new 
and we had a lot to learn.  The second sol went a lot better, and that 
one probably would have actually worked out pretty well if we had been 
doing it for real on Mars.  So we're learning.

This kind of rehearsing is most of what we'll be doing over the next 
eight months or so.  And by the time we land next January, we're going 
to have to be very, very good at doing geology with robots on another 
planet.  It's a somewhat specialized skill, I guess, but it's one we're 
going to have to learn.

May 17, 2003

It's getting very close now.  The rockets are on the launch pads, and 
you can almost feel the pace accelerating.  This week, the solid rocket 
motors were put onto the outside of the Delta II rocket that will launch 
MER-A.  This picture shows our first rocket on pad 17A at Kennedy Space 
Center.  In the background you can see three of the white motors already 
on the vehicle.  One more can be seen on the cart in the foreground, 
about ready to go onto it.  Once everything is all put together, there 
will be nine of those white motors, all clustered around the base of the 
rocket.  See our launch pages to learn more.  

Of course, you'll notice that something's not quite right in that 
picture...  there's no spacecraft on top of the rocket yet!  So far, 
only the first and second stages of the vehicle are out on the launch 
pad.  The MER-A spacecraft will be mated with the third stage late this 
coming week.  It won't be until early the week after that that it gets 
taken out to the pad and hoisted on top of that beautiful blue-green 
spaceship you see in the picture.

May 24, 2003

We're less than two weeks from our first launch now, and the final 
preparation of the hardware for flight is almost done.  The big event of 
this past week was the mating of the MER-A spacecraft to the third stage 
of the Delta II rocket.  This isn't done out at the launch pad.  
Instead, they bring the whole third stage of the Delta indoors, into 
what's called the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at Kennedy Space 
Center.  The fact that they bring a whole live rocket motor into the 
room is why it's called the hazardous servicing facility!  The MER-A 
spacecraft, which will be the first to launch, was mated to the third 
stage on Friday, without a hitch.  And early this coming week the whole 
spacecraft-plus-third-stage "stack" will be driven slowly and carefully 
out to launch pad 17A, hoisted up the tower by a big crane, and mounted 
on top of the rocket.

May 31, 2003

This is it: show time for MER-A.  The spacecraft is on the launch pad, 
healthy and ready to fly.  The protective fairing that goes around it at 
the top of the rocket was put in place over the weekend.  We're working 
our way through all the pre-launch paperwork and reviews...  you can't 
be too careful about this kind of thing!  But once that's all done, 
we'll be ready to go.  And when it happens, years of work in preparation 
for flight will come to a thundering conclusion as our first Delta II 
climbs off of pad 17A.  I know what it's going to look like, since I've 
been to Delta launches before.  But I have no idea how it's going to 
feel.

June 7, 2003

Well, we scrubbed today.  That happens a lot in the rocket business.  A 
scrub is when you have to cancel a launch late in the countdown and try 
again another day.  Scrubs happen for all kinds of reasons.  Usually 
it's weather, and that's what got us today.

Early this morning it was beautiful on the Florida coast.  I watched 
dawn come up over Pad 17A, and as the sun's first rays hit the rocket it 
was a lovely thing to see.  It would have been nice if we could have 
gone right then, but you can't just launch a rocket whenever you want 
to.  Because the Earth is always spinning, you need to wait until it's 
at just the right point in its spin to launch it.  Otherwise, you'd be 
headed off in the wrong direction.  For us, the right time of day today 
to go to Mars was 2:05:55 PM Eastern Daylight Time.  But when the 
weather guys looked at their radars a couple of hours before liftoff, 
they could see some very bad stuff headed our way, and a scrub was 
called.  And sure enough, when launch time came around there were some 
very nasty clouds hanging over the pad.

You might think it'd be frustrating when something like this happens, 
but it really isn't.  We've waited so long to fly these things that 
another day doesn't seem like much.  And with $400 million worth of 
hardware out on the pad, the thing we really don't want anybody to do is 
take chances.  So we'll try again tomorrow.

June 10, 2003

Spirit lifted off into a hazy blue sky right on time this afternoon.  
The Delta II gave us a beautiful ride, and Canberra picked up the 
spacecraft on schedule.  Last I heard we had good attitude, good power 
from the arrays, batteries coming up, and strong telemetry.  We're on 
our way to Mars.

Read the original article at 
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article643.html.
________________________________________________________________________

CAN ALIENS FIND US?
By Seth Shostak
From Space.com

23 October 2003

It's a legend about as popular, and generally believed, as the reputed 
presence of alligators in the sewers of New York; namely, that the only 
human-made edifice that astronauts can see from space is the Great Wall 
of China.  Well, forget it.  The Great Wall is about 15 feet wide, which 
even from as little as 200 miles up (Shuttle cruising altitude) subtends 
an angle of only about one-twentieth of a minute of arc.  The human eye 
can see detail down to one minute of arc, which is obviously far too 
poor for Wall watching.

Still, with a really nice pair of binoculars, the Wall (not to mention 
less romantic constructions, such as interstate highways) does become 
visible from orbit.  Any curious aliens that made it to within a few 
hundred miles of Earth would have no trouble seeing the artifacts of our 
civilization.  They would know, without doubt, that technologically 
competent beings roamed our world.

But how visible are we to aliens that are farther away?  In the early 
nineteenth century, the Austrian physicist Joseph von Littrow is said to 
have suggested digging giant geometric shapes in the Sahara Desert as 
signaling devices.  The excavations would be filled with water and 
kerosene, and set afire at night to get the attention of our martian 
brethren.  The desert figures were to be roughly 20 miles across.  So to 
make out these patterns from the Red Planet would require a 10-meter 
Keck-size telescope perched on top of, say, Olympus Mons (where the 
effects of atmospheric "seeing" would be minimal).  If sophisticated 
Martians existed, they could presumably build such an instrument and 
admire von Littrow's flaming trench work.

Read the full article at 
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_shostak_aliens_031023.html.
________________________________________________________________________

MARTIAN CHRONICLES XI: FEELING REAL
By Steve Squyres
From Astrobiology Magazine

24 October 2003

The Martian Chronicles series gives an inside view of what it takes for 
scientists to deliver a complex mars mission.  The journal entries are 
from Cornell's Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator for the Mars 
Exploration Rovers' scientific package called Athena.  The chronicles 
begin sequentially from the beginning of July 1999, four years before 
launch, and will culminate in the dramatic landing of the twin rovers on 
Mars in January 2004.  The expected mission time roaming the red planet 
is ninety days, from January to April.  The chronicles include an 
insider's view of hardware tests and site selection to problem solving 
and science planning on the surface of Mars.  

June 14, 2003

We're flying.  Spirit was launched on Tuesday and so far she's behaving 
beautifully.  It's always a little nerve-wracking when you put a new 
spacecraft out into space for the first time.  It's in the environment 
that it was designed for, of course, so you expect things to go 
reasonably well.  Still, it's not uncommon for problems to pop up, both 
big and small, when you first get it out there.

The good news is that Spirit has been a very sweet little spacecraft so 
far.  The few problems that we have had have been very minor.  All in 
all, we've had about as good a first week in space as you could ever 
hope for.  And it's a good thing too, since we hardly have time to rest 
on our laurels.  It's almost time for our other rover, Opportunity, to 
leave the nest.  Opportunity will take flight just after midnight next 
Wednesday, and it should be another spectacular show.  

June 21, 2003

This was a good-news/bad-news week...  Good news for Spirit and bad news 
for Opportunity.  The good news for Spirit is that we had a good TCM-1.  
"TCM" stands for "trajectory correction maneuver", and this was our 
first one.  When we launch, the spacecraft is headed in the general 
direction of Mars, but it's not on a path that will take it directly to 
the planet.  There are several reasons for this, one of which is simply 
that the rocket by itself isn't accurate enough to do that.  The 
rocket's main job is to get us going really fast, not necessarily to get 
us going precisely to Mars.

In a trajectory correction maneuver, we use tiny rocket thrusters on the 
spacecraft to give it a little nudge in just the right direction.  We 
gave it its first nudge on Friday, and that nudge put us much, much 
closer to the path that'll get us to Gusev Crater next January.  
Everything seems to have gone according to plan...  "right down the 
pipe" as the space navigators like to put it.

The bad news was on Opportunity, which is still on the ground in 
Florida.  Each Delta rocket has a little bit of insulation on the 
outside of it, to keep the rocket temperature just right as it rises 
through the Earth's atmosphere.  Unfortunately, the insulation on the 
Opportunity rocket is cracking in a few places.  We know why it's 
cracking, and we know how to fix it.  But you have to do this sort of 
fix very carefully, and it's going to take several days to get the job 
done right.  So the launch date has slipped to Saturday night at the 
earliest.  Just one of the things you have to deal with when you're 
trying to get a precious piece of hardware like Opportunity safely on 
its way to Mars.

June 28, 2003

We're waiting.  The launch window for Opportunity opened almost a week 
ago, but right now we're still on the ground in Florida.  The problem is 
with our launch vehicle.  It has a layer of insulation made out of cork, 
believe it or not that protects the skin of the rocket from being heated 
too much as it ascends through the dense lower part of the Earth's 
atmosphere.  Some of this insulation came unglued from the rocket's 
skin, and they've got to replace it.  This is pretty low-tech stuff, 
gluing cork to metal...  sometimes even rocket science isn't rocket 
science.  But it's got to be done right, and we can't fly until 
everybody is 100% convinced that it's safe to do so.  They're working as 
fast as they can out on the launch pad, and all we can do is be patient.  
So we wait.

July 5, 2003

We're still waiting.  It's been a long week in Florida, and Opportunity 
is still on the ground.  The biggest problem we've had is the cork 
insulation on the outside of our launch vehicle.  The glue they were 
using to keep the cork on wasn't as sticky as they had hoped it would 
be.  The problem is caused by liquid oxygen.  Our rocket uses a lot of 
super-cold liquid oxygen, as the oxidizer that it combines with fuel to 
get its thrust.  When the liquid oxygen is loaded into the tank inside 
the rocket, the skin of the rocket gets very cold, and it shrinks a 
little bit.  When this happened, some of the cork was popping off the 
outside of the rocket because the glue holding it in place wasn't sticky 
enough.  They've switched to a better glue, and now the cork stays put.  
Problem solved.  

But that wasn't our only problem.  The other one was that there is a 
crucial battery inside the rocket that died a couple of days ago.  It's 
been replaced, and once some tests are finished we'll be ready to go.  
In fact, as I write this on Monday morning in Florida, we may be just 12 
hours or so from launch if all goes well.  The weather's looking good.  
Cross your fingers...  

July 7, 2003

The Mars rover Opportunity took flight this evening, at 11:18 PM Eastern 
time.  We had a little excitement on our first launch attempt, when a 
problem with the liquid oxygen fill-and-drain valve on the first stage 
of the Delta II caused a hold with just seven seconds to go in the 
countdown.  But the launch team did a fantastic job, recycling the 
vehicle for a second launch attempt about 40 minutes later.  Our rocket 
the first Delta II Heavy gave us a perfect ride.  Opportunity is in good 
shape, and on her way to Meridiani Planum.

July 12, 2003

We spent this week preparing for one of the first big events of the 
mission...  the first cruise checkout sequence.  All of our science 
instruments were turned off at launch, and they've been off ever since 
then.  Mars is where they'll do their job, so there's not much point in 
having them turned on all the way to Mars.  But launch is a dangerous 
and violent event, and we want to take enough data during the cruise to 
Mars to be sure that the instruments survived the launch and are working 
properly.  So this coming week we're going to send commands to all the 
instruments on Spirit, turning them on and taking data.

We've had to do a lot of work to prepare for this.  We have what we call 
a "testbed" on the ground, which is a very accurate replica of the rover 
and all its instruments.  Before you send any commands to a spacecraft 
this complicated, it's a good idea to try them out on the ground first, 
and that's what we've been doing, in the testbed, this week.  Everything 
has looked okay, so we expect the commands to work properly once we send 
them to the spacecraft.

We don't expect to see much in the data that we get back next week, of 
course, since the rover's safely tucked inside the aeroshell.  It's dark 
in there, so the pictures from all the cameras, for example, will just 
be black.  But even from black images we can tell whether or not the 
cameras are healthy, and that's all we need to know.  The pretty 
pictures and exciting spectra can come later.  If everything's in good 
shape, we'll all breathe a sigh of relief.  And if something's gone 
wrong, we can start figuring out what to do about it now, instead of 
having to wait until we're on Mars next January.  So fingers are 
crossed.

July 19, 2003

One down and one to go.  We did an in-flight checkout of all the 
instruments on Spirit last week.  This was the first time we had turned 
the payload on since launch, so it was a big event!  Fortunately, things 
are looking good.  Pancam, Mini-TES, Microscopic Imager and APXS are all 
looking completely normal.  There's one thing about the Mössbauer that 
looks a little funny, but we're working on it and we don't expect it to 
be a big problem on Mars.  So we've got one good-looking payload on the 
way.  We'll do the same thing on Opportunity the week after next.

July 26, 2003

We're getting ready to practice in a "sandbox." The "sandbox" is a 
facility at the Jet Propulsion Lab that contains martian-like dirt, 
rocks, simulated sunlight, and a replica of the rover.  Much of our 
effort this week has been focused on preparations for a test that uses 
this facility to help us learn to command the rovers on Mars.  The test 
is called PORT-3 Post-Launch Operations Readiness Test (formerly known 
as Surface Operations Readiness Test).  We will operate a bank of 
computers in one building at JPL to drive the model of the rover in 
another building.

To prepare for PORT-3, the science team has been ironing out details in 
teleconferences, downloading software to practice, and building 
sequences.  These sequences will command the rover in the sandbox to 
approach a rock target, position its arm near the target, and tell 
science instruments on the end of the arm to make contact with the rock.  

It takes weeks to prepare for a test like this.  But we're doing our 
homework and we'll be ready.

August 2, 2003

We've now completed checking out the science payload on Opportunity, so 
both rovers are done now.  On Opportunity, all of the instruments look 
good.  If each one operates on Mars exactly the way it's operating in 
space today, we'll get beautiful data from each and every one of them.

On Spirit, we're still dealing with a problem with the Mössbauer 
spectrometer.  We had thought that maybe the reason the Spirit Mössbauer 
data that we took a couple of weeks ago looked funny was simply that the 
instrument didn't behave the same way in zero-g that it does on Earth.  
We know now that that's not the case, since we just learned that the 
instrument on Opportunity is working just the way it did back on Earth.  
So something else is going on.

If we had to use the Spirit Mössbauer on Mars just like the way it's 
behaving now, we'd get science data that's not perfect but that's still 
useable.  We think that we may be able to improve the situation by 
reprogramming the way the instrument operates a bit.  So that's 
something that we'll be looking at very hard in the coming weeks and 
months.  We've got five months to get this worked out, and we're going 
to take our time with it.

The bottom line is that out of our ten science instruments on the two 
rovers, nine are working well and the other one is going to keep us busy 
for awhile.  

August 9, 2003

Wow, what a week!  It's been the biggest week by far since we've 
launched, and one of the biggest weeks since we started the project.  As 
I write this, we're four days into a five-day "Operations Readiness 
Test", or ORT.  In an ORT, we simulate in as much detail as we possibly 
can the process of operating a spacecraft.  And this is the very first 
ORT in the history of this project in which we have actually simulated 
the process of operating one of our rovers, with all its instruments, on 
Mars.

The rover isn't on Mars, of course, But we do have a complete rover, 
very much like the real ones, in a giant indoor "sandbox" at JPL.  The 
sandbox is full of rocks, and we're driving the rover around and 
operating it exactly as we will on Mars next January.

It hasn't all been smooth sailing.  In fact, we've made a bunch of 
mistakes, some of them pretty significant.  But that's what an ORT is 
for.  We're using these tests to shake out all the bugs, to find all our 
weak spots, and to figure out how to fix everything so that once we get 
to Mars it'll all work the way it's supposed to.

Despite all the challenges and problems and mistakes of a "first ORT", I 
have to say that I'm incredibly proud of the job the team has done.  
We've taken beautiful pictures with Pancam and we've taken lots of data 
with Mini-TES.  We've used the pictures to pick a rock target to drive 
to.  (We named the rock "Brain", since that's what it looks like.) We've 
driven the rover to the rock, and right now the rover is close enough 
that tomorrow we're going to try to reach out and look at it with the 
Microscopic Imager, the APXS, and the Mössbauer.  I don't know if we'll 
succeed or not driving rovers on Mars is the kind of business where you 
never know for sure if you'll succeed.  But these are very exciting 
times for our team.

August 16, 2003

We just completed a very successful ORT (Operations Readiness Test) and 
our instruments performed beautifully.  We were able to maneuver the 
rover arm into the perfect position to examine something interesting on 
a "martian" rock in JPL's giant indoor "sandbox." We're extremely busy 
right now assessing our performance

August 23, 2003

Boy, it's been a crazy couple of weeks.  We're still pulling together 
all the things we learned from our last operations readiness test, and 
already it seems like the next one is almost upon us.  These things will 
be coming at us fast and furious between now and landing.

In the most recent one, we operated one of the rovers for five straight 
simulated martian days, or sols, in the big indoor Mars facility at JPL.  
It went amazingly well, considering it was the first time we'd ever 
tried it.  Unknown to us, the engineering team down in the test facility 
had glued pennies to about half a dozen of the many rocks that are 
scattered about the scene.  We first spotted a couple of them in Navcam 
images, and then we zeroed in on them with Pancam images.  Deciding that 
they'd be interesting targets to go after (they had, after all, been put 
there to tempt us), we drove the rover over to one of them, reached the 
arm out, and got data on it with all of the arm-mounted instruments.

This sounds deceptively simple, but in fact it was astonishing to have a 
machine as complicated as ours accomplish something that complex on the 
first try.  What we've proven, for the first time, is that we can use 
some of our instruments to pick a small target from a distance, drive 
over to it, and investigate it in more detail with the other 
instruments.  Now we just have to practice this stuff over and over and 
over again until we get extremely good at it.

August 30, 2003

We're starting to really put the RAT through its paces.  We've tested 
the RAT extensively, of course, but so far that's been mostly by itself 
on simple test stands, either at JPL or back at Honeybee Robotics in New 
York, where the RAT was built.  We've also tested the Instrument 
Deployment Device (also known as the rover's arm) quite a bit.  But 
until the last week or so, we had really never had the chance to do a 
complete test in which we used a RAT on the end of an arm to grind into 
a real rock.

Well, we finally did it, and it worked...  at least so far.  For our 
first test, we mounted the RAT on the end of an arm and used it to grind 
into some limestone.  We don't really expect to find limestone on Mars, 
but it's a nice soft rock that's an easy one to start with.  Things 
worked great.  We got a nice hole about 4 millimeters deep, brushed free 
of dust so we could see it with all the other instruments.  It was a big 
confidence builder!

But that's not enough.  What the RAT really needs to be able to do is 
grind into really hard, tough rock like basalt.  We've done that with a 
RAT on its own, but we still need to try it with a RAT on an arm.  So 
that'll be our next test, and if it works it'll be the proof we need 
that the RAT and the arm will really work together properly on Mars.

September 13, 2003

We're into our next Operational Readiness Test now, and this one's 
really different.  In the last one, we were practicing the process of 
driving and doing science on the martian surface.  In this one, we're 
focusing on landing the spacecraft and getting the rover off the lander.  
As I write this, on the morning of Tuesday the 16th, we're about to make 
decisions on whether or not to do some final trajectory correction 
maneuvers, or TCMs.  A TCM is a maneuver you do with a spacecraft's 
propulsion system to nudge it a little bit closer to your intended 
landing site.  In this test, we're simulating the landing of Spirit in 
Gusev crater, and the "landing" itself is planned for Friday evening.  
Between now and then is the TCM, and if we decide to do it, it'll happen 
late tomorrow night.  This is all starting to feel very real...

September 20, 2003

You might think it'd make your life easier if you could have an extra 
thirty-nine minutes every day.  Believe me, it doesn't.  We're more than 
a week into our latest operations readiness test now, and this business 
of living on Mars time really wears you down.

The martian day is longer than the Earth day, by 39 minutes.  Our rovers 
are solar powered, and they don't know or care if it's daytime or 
nighttime on Earth.  They only care about the time on Mars.

In this operations readiness test, we're simulating the process of 
landing on Mars and getting the rover off the lander.  As of today 
(Monday September 22nd) we're in our fourth day on the martian surface.  
The rover's day starts when it's about 9:00 AM on Mars...  which right 
now happens to come at about 6:00 PM Pacific time.  Tomorrow it'll be at 
6:39 PM, the day after that it'll be 7:18 PM, and so forth.  So a lot of 
us are doing just what we'll be doing next January...  sleeping during 
the Earth daytime, and working through the Earth night.  And even worse 
than that, the start times for our shifts are 39 minutes later every 
night than they were the night before.  It's like having jet lag all the 
time.  

Read the original article at 
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article645.html.
________________________________________________________________________

MARTIAN CHRONICLES XII: FLYING SORTS
By Steve Squyres
From Astrobiology Magazine

25 October 2003

The Martian Chronicles series gives an inside view of what it takes for 
scientists to deliver a complex mars mission.  The journal entries are 
from Cornell's Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator for the Mars 
Exploration Rovers' scientific package called Athena.  The chronicles 
begin sequentially from the beginning of July 1999, four years before 
launch, and will culminate in the dramatic landing of the twin rovers on 
Mars in January 2004.  The expected mission time roaming the red planet 
is ninety days, from January to April.  As Spirit and Opportunity speed 
toward Mars, more than three hundred scientists and engineers here on 
Earth will learn how to act in unison to master the art of commanding 
two very complex robots to do science on another world.  The chronicles 
include an insider's view of hardware tests and site selection to 
problem solving and science planning on the surface of Mars.

September 27, 2003

Well, we survived the latest operations readiness test.  It wasn't easy.  
As I mentioned last week, this test was focused mostly on the period we 
call "Impact Through Egress".  This is the period of time that begins 
when the lander comes to rest, and that ends when we've got six wheels 
in the dirt.  The test went amazingly well, all things considered.  

Impact Through Egress is one of the most complicated parts of the 
mission.  The rover lands in a tightly folded-up configuration, and over 
a period of several days it has to unfold, take a look around, stand up, 
and find its way off the lander and down onto the martian surface.  We 
did all of that in this test, and we successfully drove the rover off 
the lander right on schedule.

Of course, this was an easy test compared to what's to come.  At this 
point we're just trying to get all the basics down, so the test 
conductors didn't throw too many nasty surprises our way.  (There were 
several nasty-looking rocks right in front of the rover that we had to 
find a way around, though.) Future tests promise to be trickier.  And 
who knows what the actual landings on Mars will bring.  

October 4, 2003

Out of the frying pan and into the fire.  It feels like we just finished 
our last Operations Readiness Test, and now it's time to start the next 
one.  This one is going to be a killer.  Every other test that we've 
done (and every other test that we're going to do) involves running just 
one rover at a time.  But once we get to Mars we're going to have to be 
able to operate Both Spirit and Opportunity simultaneously.  So in this 
test, we're going to try running two rovers at once.  

We've got all the hardware we'll need, and we've got enough people.  The 
question is whether or not it'll all work when we try to make it happen.  
We'll find out real soon.  The test starts next Monday and runs for two 
weeks...  

October 18, 2003

If it's 3:00 AM in Los Angeles, what time is it at Gusev Crater?  That's 
the kind of problem we're wrestling with this week.  We're into the 
fourth martian day of our latest Operations Readiness Test.  In this 
test we're simulating the process of landing the Opportunity rover at 
Meridiani Planum at the same time that we're operating the Spirit rover 
at Gusev crater.  

Both rovers operate on Mars time, of course, and the martian day is 24 
hours and 39 minutes long.  That's bad enough, but it gets worse.  The 
two landing sites are in two different locations on Mars, and the local 
martian time at the two sites is completely different.

So, for example...  Right now, as I type this, it's 3:00 AM at the Jet 
Propulsion Laboratory.  It's 4:35 AM in Gusev crater, and it's 4:33 PM 
at Meridiani Planum.  At 3:00 AM Pacific time tomorrow it'll be about 
3:56 AM in Gusev crater, and about 3:54 PM at Meridiani Planum.  And so 
forth.  It gets really confusing.

Anyway, the test is going really well.  We've had a few hiccups, most of 
them because this time the people running the test have begun 
introducing some anomalies...  little challenges (and some big 
challenges) of the sort that we could encounter in flight.  Overall, 
though, it's going very well.  I just wish we didn't have to keep such 
strange hours...  

October 25, 2003

Is there life on Mars?  Could humans build a new off-Earth settlement on 
the red planet?  Like the Earth's little brother, Mars has long 
fascinated sky-watchers.  NASA's new plans for exploration of Mars 
include the Athena Payload: instruments and tools for a Mars rover.  
Equipped with the Athena Payload, the twin rovers of NASA's Mars 
Exploration Rover project will be robotic field geologists, exploring 
Mars' climate history and searching for signs of water and life.  So 
suit up, strap in, and prepare to blast off with Athena: roving soon on 
a planet near you.  

Read the original article at 
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article647.html.
________________________________________________________________________

CHINA MAY SEND TWO INTO SPACE NEXT TIME
By Joe McDonald
From Space.com

26 October 2003

China's next manned space launch might carry two astronauts into orbit, 
a government news agency said Saturday, citing a senior space program 
official.  The report by the China News Service came as the Shenzhou 5 
capsule that carried astronaut Yang Liwei into space was put on display 
in Beijing but drew only small crowds on its first day.  

Yang's 21 1/2-hour flight last week was lauded by state media as a 
triumph for the communist system, but the government has done little to 
engage China's people.  Officials announced Friday that Yang won't make 
his first public appearance until next week--and then not on the Chinese 
mainland but in Hong Kong.  

On Saturday, CNS quoted the space program's deputy chief designer as 
saying the rocket that fired Yang into orbit was strong enough to carry 
two or even three astronauts.  

"Shenzhou 6 might carry two people into space," CNS paraphrased Zhang 
Baokun as saying.

Read the full article at 
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/shenzhou6_update_031026.html.

An additional article on this subject is available at 
http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/031028032513.qtjcnpae.html.
________________________________________________________________________

NEW EVIDENCE SUGGESTS MARS HAS BEEN COLD AND DRY
USGS release

27 October 2003

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists studying Mars have discovered 
minerals with profound implications for the past history of the planet.  
The mineral olivine, an iron-magnesium silicate that weathers easily by 
water, has been found in abundance on Mars.  The presence of olivine 
implies that chemical weathering by water is low on the planet and that 
Mars has been cold and dry throughout its geologic history.  New surface 
maps of Mars, developed by USGS scientists through a monumental set of 
500 trillion calculations, provide amazing clarity and allow for more 
detailed study of the planet's minerals.

"The large expanses of olivine, about one-million square miles, means 
chemical weathering on Mars is very low and has been low for most of its 
geologic history.  This information contradicts a popular view of a past 
warm, wet period in Mars' geologic history," said USGS scientist Dr. 
Roger N. Clark at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical 
Society Division of Planetary Sciences in Pasadena, CA.  "If the warm 
period never occurred, other explanations for Mars' large canyons are 
warranted, and some have been proposed by other researchers."

Dr. Clark and Todd M. Hoefen at the USGS in Denver, CO found the 
plentiful olivine on Mars using data from the Mars Global Surveyor 
(MGS), Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES).  Olivine, a green mineral 
sometimes used in jewelry, is found on Mars in volcanic regions.  
Exposures include olivine-rimmed craters hundreds of miles across, and 
with different amounts of iron, giving lighter green and darker green 
rocks.

The Mars spacecraft has been in orbit in its surface mapping mission 
configuration for about 18 months, slowly building images of the 
surface.  At this point, the TES instrument has measured about 3/4 of 
the surface, measuring a narrow six-mile wide stripe in each two-hour 
orbit.  The USGS scientists just completed the set of 500 trillion 
calculations to combine all the data obtained so far into surface maps 
covering the area from 45 degrees north latitude to 45 degrees south 
latitude.  The more pole-ward regions have yet to be analyzed in this 
way.  The calculations were done at the finest detail of the instrument 
and for the first time, maps of minerals could be made with clarity 
never before possible.

The TES instrument senses heat from the surface of Mars; it does so by 
splitting the heat spectrum, or "color" of the heat into either 143 or 
286 wavelengths or colors of thermal infrared light.  The variations in 
the amount of heat emitted by those colors allow scientists to determine 
what materials are at the surface.

The USGS scientists have identified details in the infrared spectrum 
that indicate what is probably a sulfate in the pervasive dust and many 
bright soils on Mars.  Sulfates have been expected since the Viking 
Landers found sulfur in the martian soils in 1976, but the host mineral 
was never identified.  It could be a sulfide (sulfur attached to a 
metal) or a sulfate--sulfur attached to three oxygen atoms.  The latest 
study shows that sulfates are abundant, but there could still be small 
pockets of sulfides.

Putting all this together, about three percent of the surface mapped so 
far contains abundant olivine, and another three percent contains 
coarse-grained hematite, consistent with Mars' red color.  The olivine 
occurs in darker basaltic volcanic rocks that cover a large portion of 
the planet.  The sulfates occur in brighter rocks that are most likely 
mechanically weathered (meteor impacts, wind driven dust/sand erosion) 
with trace amounts of fine-grained hematite.  The fine-grained hematite 
probably also comes from mechanical grinding of the coarser grained 
rocks.

The origin of the coarse grained hematite is still unknown.  On earth, 
it is often associated with water, as in a hot spring or lakebed.  But 
such conditions would also produce other minerals that are not seen on 
Mars.  The presence of water and chemical weathering would also produce 
clay minerals, which are not seen in the latest data.

"Not seeing minerals that indicate chemical weathering is also 
consistent with the abundant olivine and that implies the chemical 
weathering is very low.  Thus, a consistent picture is forming that says 
Mars' surface has remained cold and dry for a long time," said Hoefen.

Clark concurs with other researchers that abundant water probably exists 
below the surface, but only in a frozen state and rarely, if ever, has 
it existed at the surface in a warm liquid form which makes searching 
for life much more difficult.

Additional information about Clark's research can be found at 
http://speclab.cr.usgs.gov/.

A map depicting the mineral composition of Mars can be downloaded from 
http://speclab.cr.usgs.gov/mars.tes.fig1.html.

As the nation's largest water, earth and biological science, and 
civilian mapping agency, the USGS works in cooperation with more than 
2000 organizations across the country to provide reliable, impartial, 
scientific information to resource managers, planners, and other 
customers.  This information is gathered in every state by USGS 
scientists to minimize the loss of life and property from natural 
disasters, to contribute to the conservation and the sound economic and 
physical development of the nation's natural resources, and to enhance 
the quality of life by monitoring water, biological, energy, and mineral 
resources.

Contacts:
Dave Ozman
Phone: 303-202-4744

Heidi Koehler Koontz
Phone: 303-236-5446

An additional article on this subject is available at 
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0310/24greenmars/.
________________________________________________________________________

THE DRAKE EQUATION REVISTED, PART V: THE GALACTIC CIVILIZATIONS
By Frank Drake, David Grinspoon and Peter Ward
From Astrobiology Magazine

27 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 evolution 
of machine intelligence and the potential for civilizations that span 
the galaxy.  Previous parts of this series presented the opening remarks 
by Drake, Ward and Grinspoon and the first half of the question-and-
answer period.

Q: This discussion is all very biologically oriented, and we are now in 
an era of the digital developments.  If you read Kurzweil, evolution is 
going to take us into a digital implementation in the not-too-distant 
future.  And with evolution being an exponential factor, that bodes well 
for the existence of intelligence.  Not necessarily biologic 
intelligence, but intelligence.

Grinspoon: Arthur C. Clarke, who as you know is the H. G. Wells of the 
paleocybernetic age, once said that we are near the end of biological 
evolution and near the beginning of the evolution of intelligence.  And 
I think that we have perhaps an innate bias against this idea.  We don't 
like it.  That the machines we create might outlive us and outlast us 
and become something superior to what we are.  

But when we get over that emotional reaction, there's no logical reason 
to believe that machine intelligence won't, in fact, inherit the Earth, 
and perhaps inherit the Universe.  And you can certainly imagine, even 
if it doesn't happen here, that on some planet intelligent machines have 
been created which are effectively immortal.  In fact, I think that it's 
hard to argue the opposite.  And so I very much agree with you that when 
we consider the entire spectrum of possibilities with evolution of 
extraterrestrial intelligence, that we do have to consider the existence 
of quasi-immortal machine civilizations out there.  And one intriguing 
possibility is that when we do receive a signal, which surely we will 
sooner or later--I prefer sooner--that we may not know if it comes from 
a machine or from a biological entity.

Q: One problem with humans reaching other star systems is that we don't 
come with off switches.  If humans were replaced or supplemented with 
artificial intelligences that did come with off switches, or if this had 
happened on some other planet or some other star system, it seems likely 
that they would have explored other star systems and colonized them, 
including ours.  Which means that if this sort of thing was common, it 
would be unlikely that it hasn't happened yet.  But, apparently it 
hasn't happened yet.

Ward: Is your name Fermi?  

Q: Yes, it is the Fermi paradox, but that Fermi paradox only works if 
you either have spacecraft that can go fast enough that the existing 
forms of life can take advantage of them, or if you have forms of life 
that can be turned off so that they can colonize the galaxy with 
spacecraft of modest speed.

Grinspoon: A couple of thoughts.  One, I do think that there's this 
temporal bias, in that we see it as impossible to travel between the 
stars because in a human lifetime we can't conceive of traveling between 
the stars, because they're very far away and we're limited certainly by 
the speed of light, and probably, practically, by much lower speeds.  
But, why should other beings evolved on other planets care about the 
timescale of a human lifetime?  You can imagine an intelligent sequoia 
tree that might not have a problem with interstellar travel.  So I think 
that we shouldn't be too temporally chauvinist, just because we have 
such pitifully short lives and the stars are so far away.

But the other comment that I would make is that we don't know that that 
hasn't happened.  Our solar system is almost entirely unexplored.  And 
while I completely support radio SETI and I think it's just obvious that 
we should continue and expand our efforts for radio SETI because it's 
cheap and it seems destined to succeed sooner or later, I also think 
that there are other ways to search.

And I think that, while here we verge into science fiction and into 
tabloid journalism and whatever, but there's no reason why we shouldn't, 
as we explore the solar system, be on the lookout for artifacts.  The 
asteroid belt could be riddled with alien garbage, and we wouldn't know 
about it yet.  And, certainly, if there was a buried obelisk on the 
moon, we would not have discovered it yet.  So, it's entirely possible 
that somebody has been through our region of space in the billions of 
years that our planetary system has been here.

Q: Dr. Drake, in your introductory remarks about the factor L, you 
talked about how human civilization has gone from radio transmission to 
cable in a hundred years, and so effectively we're quiet now.  But you 
said that there could be a civilization out there that was noisy for a 
billion years.  I assume you don't mean that they had the intelligence 
to develop radio transmission, but then it took them a billion years to 
develop cable.  So, what did you have in mind?

Drake: We, of course, have not disappeared yet.  The number of our high-
powered television transmitters has remained about constant at the 
present time.  It's just that, looking into the crystal ball, one sees 
that within 100 years or so, we will probably drop that means of 
delivering television and go entirely to satellites, fiber optics and 
cable.  And the prospect is that at least that sign of our existence 
will disappear.

Now the big question is: Will something else replace it?  For example, 
we are again seriously considering constructing solar-power satellites.  
These are huge solar-energy collectors we put in orbit.  They transmit 
the power they capture to Earth by microwave beams.  A few years ago 
these were considered and determined not to be practical economically.  
Not technologically, but economically.  Now that picture's changed, and 
the engineers are telling us: Yes, these systems would return more value 
than it would cost to put them in orbit.

Now, if that's the wave of the future, you may have hundreds of such 
things in space.  Their transmitter power is about a billion watts; 
that's what they transmit to Earth.  All antennas are imperfect, they 
reflect a little power into space, one percent, say, even a very fine 
antenna.  Well one percent of a billion watts is 10 million watts, which 
is more than our present typical TV transmitter.  So, if that's the wave 
of the future--and, of course that's an appealing way, because it's 
clean power, there's no pollution, you're not overheating the Earth, 
there're no bad things to that--if that's the wave of the future, 
civilization may stay visible for a very long time.

Of course, a billion years, who knows?  When we throw out a billion-year 
figure, we're talking about David's immortal civilizations, 
civilizations that want to communicate, and they create beacons for the 
benefit of other civilizations.  Now, that's very science-fiction stuff, 
but you can't rule it out.  And it has been proposed many times, 
seriously, that there is a galactic network, so to speak, of 
intercommunicating civilizations that have been in communication for 
literally billions of years, and if we just knew where to look and on 
what frequency, we could join that network.  So it's that which, of 
course, is totally speculative--no evidence whatsoever for its 
existence--which says, well, you must consider that perhaps, some very 
small fraction of civilizations remains detectable for a very, very long 
time.

Grinspoon: It's worth just thinking about the timescales of evolution.  
Biological evolution took us something like (depending on when you 
believe life started) a few billion years to get here.  And then 
contrast that to the timescale of technological evolution and look how 
much the world has changed in just the last 100 years.  And so when we 
try to imagine the technology even 100 years from now it's challenging.  
Try to imagine the technology a thousand years from now, or 10 thousand 
years.

When you start talking about civilizations that may have lasted a 
million, or a billion years, then you can call it science fiction, but 
perhaps the science fiction writers might be those among us who are best 
qualified to imagine those capabilities.  It's very difficult, but it's 
hard to rule out many possibilities that seem far-fetched, when you 
don't consider the timescale of technological change and what that may 
lead to over these cosmological timescales.

Q: We're not officially trying to contact anything, it's only through 
our TV transmissions and what-not.  But 20 years from now, if we do 
detect an Earth-like planet somewhere, do you think there would be an 
effort to direct communications towards that, and if so would it be 
radio or optical?  Any opinions on that?

Drake: At the present time we're not attempting to contact other 
civilizations.  We do not transmit.  And there are two good reasons for 
that.  One is it's very expensive; it's better to spend our resources 
listening.  And the other is the Earth's doing it for us for free.  
There are 2000 that receive our television, and about 1500 of them are 
just now seeing Super Bowl I and wondering how that's going to come out.

But there is a protocol in existence which says that should a message be 
detected, we will not reply until we have understood the message, 
understood enough about what that message meant to construct, if 
desirable, a meaningful reply.  But just how that would be done has not 
been determined.

Read the original article at 
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article649.html.
________________________________________________________________________

BAD MILEAGE: 98 TONS OF PLANTS PER GALLON
University of Utah release

27 October 2003

A staggering 98 tons of prehistoric, buried plant material--that's 
196,000 pounds--is required to produce each gallon of gasoline we burn 
in our cars, SUVs, trucks and other vehicles, according to a study 
conducted at the University of Utah.

"Can you imagine loading 40 acres worth of wheat--stalks, roots and all-
-into the tank of your car or SUV every 20 miles?" asks ecologist Jeff 
Dukes, whose study will be published in the November issue of the 
journal, Climatic Change.

But that's how much ancient plant matter had to be buried millions of 
years ago and converted by pressure, heat and time into oil to produce 
one gallon of gas, Dukes concluded.  Dukes also calculated that the 
amount of fossil fuel burned in a single year--1997 was used in the 
study--totals 97 million billion pounds of carbon, which is equivalent 
to more than 400 times "all the plant matter that grows in the world in 
a year," including vast amounts of microscopic plant life in the oceans.

"Every day, people are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all the plant 
matter that grows on land and in the oceans over the course of a whole 
year," he adds.

In another calculation, Dukes determined that "the amount of plants that 
went into the fossil fuels we burned since the Industrial Revolution 
began [in 1751] is equal to all the plants grown on Earth over 13,300 
years."

Explaining why he conducted the study, Dukes wrote: "Fossil fuel 
consumption is widely recognized as unsustainable.  However, there has 
been no attempt to calculate the amount of energy that was required to 
generate fossil fuels, (one way to quantify the 'unsustainability' of 
societal energy use)."

The study is titled "Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption of 
Ancient Solar Energy." In it, Dukes conducted numerous calculations to 
determine how much plant matter buried millions of years ago was 
required to produce the oil, natural gas and coal consumed by modern 
society, which obtains 83 percent of its energy needs from fossil fuels.

"Fossil fuels developed from ancient deposits of organic material, and 
thus can be thought of as a vast store of solar energy" that was 
converted into plant matter by photosynthesis, he explains.  "Using 
published biological, geochemical and industrial data, I estimated the 
amount of photosynthetically fixed and stored [by ancient plants] carbon 
that was required to form the coal, oil and gas that we are burning 
today."

Dukes conducted the study while working as a postdoctoral fellow in 
biology at the University of Utah.  He now works for the Carnegie 
Institution of Washington's Department of Global Ecology on the campus 
of Stanford University in California.

How the calculations were done

To determine how much ancient plant matter it took to eventually produce 
modern fossil fuels, Dukes calculated how much of the carbon in the 
original vegetation was lost during each stage of the multiple-step 
processes that create oil, gas and coal.

He looked at the proportion of fossil fuel reserves derived from 
different ancient environments: coal that formed when ancient plants 
rotted in peat swamps; oil from tiny floating plants called 
phytoplankton that were deposited on ancient seafloors, river deltas and 
lakebeds; and natural gas from those and other prehistoric environments.  
Then he examined the efficiency at which prehistoric plants were 
converted by heat, pressure and time into peat or other carbon-rich 
sediments.  Next, Dukes analyzed the efficiency with which carbon-rich 
sediments were converted to coal, oil and natural gas.  Then he studied 
the efficiency of extracting such deposits.  During each of the above 
steps, he based his calculations on previously published studies.

The calculations showed that roughly one-eleventh of the carbon in the 
plants deposited in peat bogs ends up as coal, and that only one-
10,750th of the carbon in plants deposited on ancient seafloors, deltas 
and lakebeds ends up as oil and natural gas.  Dukes then used these 
"recovery factors" to estimate how much ancient plant matter was needed 
to produce a given amount of fossil fuel.  Dukes considers his 
calculations good estimates based on available data, but says that 
because fossil fuels were formed under a wide range of environmental 
conditions, each estimate is subject to a wide range of uncertainty.  

Plants in your tank?

Dukes calculated ancient plant matter needed for a gallon of gasoline in 
metric units:
* One gallon of oil weighs 3.26 kilograms.  A gallon of oil produces up 
to 0.67 gallons of gasoline.  So 3.26 kilograms for a gallon of oil 
divided by 0.67 gallons means that at least 4.87 kilograms of oil are 
needed to make a gallon of gasoline.
* Oil is 85 percent carbon, so 0.85 times 4.87 kilograms equals 4.14 
kilograms of carbon in the oil used to make a gallon of gasoline.
* Since only about one-10,750th of the original carbon in ancient plant 
material actually ends up as oil, multiply 4.14 kilograms by 10,750 to 
get roughly 44,500 kilograms of carbon in ancient plant matter to make a 
gallon of gas.
* About half of plant matter is carbon, so double the 44,500 kilograms 
to get 89,000 kilograms--or 89 metric tons--of ancient plant matter to 
make a gallon of gas.  In U.S. units, that is equal to a bit more than 
196,000 pounds or 98 tons.  

Dukes made similar calculations for oil, natural gas and coal to 
determine that it took 44 million billion kilograms (97 million billion 
pounds) of carbon in ancient plant matter to produce all the fossil fuel 
used in 1997.  That includes 29 million billion kilograms of prehistoric 
plants to produce a year's worth of oil (including gasoline), almost 15 
million billion kilograms of buried plant matter to make all the natural 
gas used in 1997, and 27,000 billion kilograms of dead plants to produce 
all the coal used in the same year.  

"It took an incredible amount of plant matter to generate the fossil 
fuels we are using today," says Dukes.  "The new contribution of this 
research is to enable us to picture just how inefficient and 
unsustainable fossil fuels are--inefficient in terms of the conversion 
of the original solar energy to fossil fuels.  Fortunately, it is much 
more efficient to use modern energy sources like wind and solar.  As the 
reasons keep piling up to switch away from fossil fuels, it is important 
that we develop these modern power sources as quickly as possible."

What about modern plant biomass?

Unlike the inefficiency of converting ancient plants to oil, natural gas 
and coal, modern plant "biomass" can provide energy more efficiently, 
either by burning it or converting into fuels like ethanol.  So Dukes 
analyzed how much modern plant matter it would take to replace society's 
current consumption of fossil fuels.

He began with a United Nations estimate that the total energy content of 
all coal, oil and natural gas used worldwide in 1997 equaled 315,271 
million billion joules (a unit of energy).  He divided that by the 
typical value of heat produced when wood is burned: 20,000 joules per 
gram of dry wood.  The result is that fossil fuel consumption in 1997 
equaled the energy in 15.8 trillion kilograms of wood.  Dukes multiplied 
that by 45 percent--the proportion of carbon in plant material--to 
calculate that fossil fuel consumption in 1997 equaled the energy in 7.1 
trillion kilograms of carbon in plant matter.

Studies have estimated that all land plants today contain 56.4 trillion 
kilograms of carbon, but only 56 percent of that is above ground and 
could be harvested.  So excluding roots, land plants thus contain 56 
percent times 56.4, or 31.6 trillion kilograms of carbon.

Dukes then divided the 1997 fossil fuel use equivalent of 7.1 trillion 
kilograms of carbon in plant matter by 31.6 trillion kilograms now 
available in plants.  He found we would need to harvest 22 percent of 
all land plants just to equal the fossil fuel energy used in 1997--about 
a 50 percent increase over the amount of plants now removed or paved 
over each year.

"Relying totally on biomass for our power--using crop residues and 
quick-growing forests as fuel sources--would force us to dedicate a huge 
part of the landscape to growing these fuels," Dukes says.  "It would 
have major environmental consequences.  We would have to choose between 
our rain forests and our vehicles and appliances.  Biomass burning can 
be part of the solution if we use agricultural wastes, but other 
technologies have to be a major part of the solution as well--things 
like wind and solar power."

Read the original news release at 
http://www.utah.edu/unews/releases/03/oct/gas.html.

An additional article on this subject is available at 
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/energy-tech-03zp.html.
________________________________________________________________________

NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX
By David J. Thomas
http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/astrobiology.html

28 October 2003

Astrobiology and planetary engineering articles
http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles1.html

USGS, 2003.  Green mineral indicates red planet is dry.  Spaceflight 
Now.

Terrestrial extreme environments articles
http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles2.html

NASA Ames Research Center, 2003.  Diving into a volcano.  Astrobiology 
Magazine.

NASA Ames Research Center, 2003.  Primitive life in lake could be 
similar to life on Mars.  Universe Today.

NASA Ames Research Center, 2003.  Scientists to study lake's primitive 
life to learn about Mars.  Spaceflight Now.

Human space exploration articles
http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles3.html

Agence France-Presse, 2003.  China to send three men into space for 
seven days next time.  SpaceDaily.

J. Gorss, 2003.  Amber waves of grain and other cereals crucial to 
humans on Mars.  SpaceDaily.

J. McDonald, 2003.  China may send two into space next time.  Space.com.

NASA, 2003.  New facility will help protect space crews from radiation.  
Spaceflight Now.

SETI articles
http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles4.html

F. Drake, D. Grinspoon and P. Ward, 2003.  The Drake equation revisited, 
part V: the galactic civilizations.  Astrobiology Magazine. 

S. Shostak, 2003.  Can aliens find us?  Space.com.

S. Shostak, 2003.  Mysteries of Wow.  Astrobiology Magazine.

Evolution (biological, chemical and cosmological) articles
http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles5.html

T. Devitt, 2003.  New genomic data helps resolve biology's tree of life.  
SpaceDaily.

University of California, Santa Cruz, 2003.  Evidence of global warming 
in the past supports greenhouse theory.  SpaceDaily.

Planetary protection articles
http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles6.html

Agence France-Presse, 2003.  Worried asteroid-watchers wrangle over 
alert system.  SpaceDaily.
________________________________________________________________________

CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS
NASA/JPL release

16-22 October 2003

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Goldstone 
tracking station on Wednesday, October 22.  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.

Final activities for C39 included a Visual and Infrared Mapping 
Spectrometer (VIMS) flight software test, Cosmic Dust Analyzer 
decontamination, Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) High Frequency 
Receiver calibration, clearing of the ACS high water marks, and 
participation in a DSN array demonstration.  C40 began execution on-
board the spacecraft on Sunday, October 19.  Initial activities included 
RWPS high rate observations, use of the Magnetometer Science Calibration 
Subsystem, and power-on of the Ka-band Exciter and Ka-band Traveling 
Wave Tube Amplifier in preparation for Gravitational Wave Experiment #3.

The science planning team process for C42, the first approach science 
sequence, concluded this week with a handoff package being provided to 
Uplink Operations.  The Science and Sequence Update Process for this 
sequence began with a kickoff meeting, and release of the stripped 
Spacecraft Activity Sequence Files to participating teams.  Official 
port#2 occurred for the C43 Science Planning Team process.  The product 
has been merged and handed off to ACS for the end-to-end pointing 
analysis.  Scoping for C44, the last approach science sequence before 
tour, was included activities that have already been integrated, what's 
coming up, what's new.

On 16 October 2003, a Mission Event Readiness Review of the Deep Space 
Mission System (DSMS) preparations to support the third Cassini 
Gravitational Wave Experiment (GWE) was conducted.  The Project 
expressed its gratitude for the fine work DSMS has done on the last GWE 
activities, as well as the preparations completed toward the upcoming 
activity.  The Team finds that the DSMS system needed to support GWE #3 
is on schedule and should be completed, including testing and document 
preparation.  The first and second gravitational wave experiments were 
supported with a very similar DSMS system.  No major risk items were 
found, and four requests for action were written.

A Delivery Coordination Meeting for Mission Sequence Subsystem (MSS) 
version D10.0, the Solaris 9 port of the current Solaris 7 MSS software 
version D9.1.2 was held this week.  The delivery was accepted, and the 
installation will be coupled with the workstation Solaris 9 upgrade.  
The Mission Support & Services Office (MSSO) is maintaining a master 
schedule, and is coordinating the installation and the adaptation.  The 
project is on track to have all systems upgraded by 1 Jan 2004.

Cassini is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and 
the Italian Space Agency.  The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of 
the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA, manages the 
Cassini mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC.
________________________________________________________________________

MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES
NASA/JPL/MSSS release

16-22 October 2003

The following new images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the 
Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are now available.

Dust-Raising Event (Released 16 October 2003)
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/16/index.html

Dust-Raising Event (Released 17 October 2003)
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/17/index.html

Chasma Boreale Dunes (Released 18 October 2003)
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/18/index.html

North Nilosyrtis Mesas (Released 19 October 2003)
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/19/index.html

Large Windblown Ripples (Released 20 October 2003)
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/20/index.html

Impact Crater (Released 21 October 2003)
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/21/index.html

Impact Crater (Released 22 October 2003)
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/10/22/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.
________________________________________________________________________

End Marsbugs, Volume 10, Number 43.