Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 11, Number 2, 7 January 2004 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. 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 (http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs). The editor does not condone "spamming" of subscribers. Readers would appreciate it if others would not send unsolicited e-mail using the Marsbugs mailing lists. Persons who have information that may be of interest to subscribers of Marsbugs should send that information to the editor. __________________________________________________________________________ Articles and News 1) ANCIENT LAKEBED: SPIRIT LANDING SITE From Astrobiology Magazine 2) FIRST LIGHT, HELLO MARS From Astrobiology Magazine 3) RECOGNIZING MARTIANS: IF WE FIND ET, WILL WE KNOW? By Robert Roy Britt 4) ENDURANCE OF PLANTS UNDER QUARTZ ROCKS POSSIBLE MODEL FOR LIFE ON EARLY EARTH Duke University release 5) SUNS OF ALL AGES POSSESS COMETS, MAYBE PLANETS Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics release 04-01 6) NASA RESEARCHERS CONTEND WITH MARTIAN DAY From SpaceDaily and Agence France-Presse 7) SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA CREW MEMORIALIZED ON MARS NASA release 2004-006 8) MARS MANIA LANDS ONLINE NASA/JPL release 2004-008 9) NASA'S NEW STUDIES OF EARTH'S SEAS, SKIES AND SOILS NASA/JPL release 2004-009 10) EXPLORING MARS ON EARTH From NASA Tech Brief Insider Announcements 11) CATCH THE SPIRIT--THIS OPPORTUNITY WON'T LAST FOREVER By Chris Carberry 12) NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas Mission Reports 13) MARS EXPLORATION ROVER SPIRIT MISSION STATUS NASA/JPL release 2004-002 14) SPIRIT LANDS ON MARS AND SENDS POSTCARDS NASA/JPL release 2004-003 15) HEALTHY ROVER SHOWS ITS NEW NEIGHBORHOOD ON MARS NASA/JPL release 2004-004 16) MARS TEAM ENERGIZED ABOUT "SLEEPY HOLLOW" NEAR ROVER NASA/JPL release 2004-005 17) COLOR PICTURE FROM SPIRIT IS MOST DETAILED VIEW OF MARS EVER SEEN NASA/JPL release 2004-010 18) CLOSING IN ON THE RED PLANET: MARS EXPRESS ORBIT LOWERED ESA release 19) MARS EXPRESS ATTEMPTS TO "TALK" TO BEAGLE 2 ESA release 1-2004 20) NASA'S STARDUST SPACECRAFT MAKES GREAT CATCH, HEADS FOR TOUCHDOWN NASA/JPL release 2004-001 21) THE CALM AFTER THE COMETARY STORM NASA/JPL release 2004-007 __________________________________________________________________________ ANCIENT LAKEBED: SPIRIT LANDING SITE From Astrobiology Magazine 3 January 2004 Excitement built as the first Mars Exploration Rover (MER-A), Spirit, landed on Mars just after 8:35 PM Pacific Standard Time today, 3 January 2004 (04:35, 4 January 2004 UTC). From entry into the top of the atmosphere at twenty-seven times the speed of sound (Mach 27) to zero at the surface, up to one kilometer of bounces stood between the golf-cart sized rover and its destination in an ancient lakebed. As shown in the banner image, flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, gave a few "high-five" congratulatory gestures, as nearly three and half years of engineering and planning reached its next stages. The period between entering the atmosphere and coming to rest is referred to by the engineering team as "six minutes of terror". From Mach 27 to rest involves a large number of moving parts, including heat shield protection from 1600°C external temperatures, supersonic parachute deployment, heat shield detachment, rocket firing and airbag deployments. The EDL, or entry, descent and landing sequence, is considered one of the most challenging. While flight planners must trust their testing and computer controlled descent steps, the margin for correction is hindered by telemetry delays that make landing an automated sequence. The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) picture is a mosaic of MOC images of the Spirit landing site. The rover expected to land somewhere within the approximately 83 km (~52 mi) long by ~10 km (~6 mi) wide ellipse on the floor of Gusev Crater. The landing site is shown at 25 meters (82 feet) per pixel. Gusev Crater, is intriguing because it appears to be the site of an ancient lakebed, where layers of sediment were deposited by a long-term flow of water into the basin formed by the crater. From orbit, the crater looks like a big lake bed with a winding riverbed feeding into it, and represents a candidate for investigating martian water history as an example of what are called paleolakes. MOC has acquired 71 pictures of the landing site over a period spanning 3 Mars years (from July 1999 through December 2003), and more than 85 pictures were acquired within Gusev Crater specifically to support the Mars Exploration Rover landing site selection process. These recent pictures were acquired not only in different years, but in different seasons, so the illumination angle, overall brightness, and patterns of emphemeral, dark dust devil streaks and wind streaks are different from image to image within the mosaic. Gusev is a large crater basin, some 170 kilometers (105 miles) across. Most scientists believe it once was fed by water flowing through an enormous valley channel, Ma'adim Vallis. Snaking its way northward along the martian landscape for more than 900 kilometers (560 miles), Ma'adim Vallis is 1.5 times as long as the Grand Canyon. In images of Gusev taken by the Mars Orbital Camera(MOC) aboard the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft,some exposed outcrops appear to show faint layering. The prevailing scientific theory is that Gusev Crater contains sediment washed down Ma'adim Vallis from the highlands to the south nearly 4 billion years ago. Some researchers also believe that landforms visible in MOC images of the mouth of Ma'adim Vallis, where it enters Gusev Crater, resemble landforms seen in some terrestrial river deltas. "Deltas of this nature take tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years on Earth to be formed," says Nathalie Cabrol of the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center. "So here you have the place where water has been acting for a long time. And depositing and eroding sediments and shaping the landscape for--possibly that long." New Mexico State University planetary scientist Jim Murphy noted: "When the first spacecraft, Mariner 4, flew by Mars 38 years ago and took 21 pictures, it saw only 1 percent of the surface of the planet. It was heavily cratered like the moon, suggesting the planet was biologically dead." "The main concern [for the landers] is cold temperatures that can affect the instruments," Murphy said. The rovers will touch down just south of Mars' equator during late southern winter and their expected 90-day mission life spans will keep them operating until early autumn. Surface temperatures will likely range from zero to minus 100 Celsius, or roughly from freezing to 150 below zero on the Fahrenheit scale, he said. But according to astrobiologist, Dr. Chris McKay of NASA Ames, "the key environmental factor for making Mars a better place for life, a kinder, gentler planet, is not making it warmer. The key factor is raising the pressure up from 6 to maybe 100 millibar. [One hundred millibar is one- tenth of the pressure on Earth at sea level.] Not much higher than that would be needed". "At that pressure", McKay continued, "liquid water could exist on a very cold Mars. Lake Vanda in Antarctica could be an analog, for example, for Gusev Crater, which Nathalie Cabrol and many others have shown is likely once to have been full of water. If you look around at the terrain around Gusev, you can see that it would have been very cold at the time. So the remnant of an ice-covered lake could be what the MER-A lander 'Spirit' is going to land in. And what might it find? Probably the best thing it might find in a place like this is a fossil". The robotic rovers are carrying cameras, spectrometers and geology instruments to analyze their surroundings. "We should get some fabulous pictures," Murphy said. About the missions By launching the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft in November 1996, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory began America's return to Mars after a 20-year absence. Images and measurements from two NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars, Global Surveyor and Odyssey, have provided scientists and engineers evaluating potential landing sites with details of topography and geology. The Surveyor spacecraft is a rectangular-shaped box with wing-like projections extending from opposite sides. When fully loaded with propellant at the time of launch, the spacecraft weighed only 1,060- kilograms (2,342 pounds). The spacecraft traveled nearly 750 million kilometers (466 million miles) over the course of a 300-day cruise to reach Mars on September 11, 1997. During mapping operations, the spacecraft circled Mars once every 118 minutes at an average altitude of 378 kilometers (235 miles). After mapping finishes, the spacecraft will function as a communications satellite to relay data back to Earth from surface landers launched as part of future Mars missions. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article750.html. __________________________________________________________________________ FIRST LIGHT, HELLO MARS From Astrobiology Magazine 4 January 2004 One of the most intriguing initial panoramas from Spirit's new resting place shows a depression or crater in the near-center of the horizon, and hills in the distance. The site appears "clean" to principal investigator, Steven Squyres, who is anxious for enough rocks to look for lake-bed sediments, but not too many for restricted driving. The lander is currently facing south, with a 73 centimeter rock (or partially deflated airbag) butted against its nominal egress path and another semi-retracted airbag. To get off the landing petal and drive around as a robotic geologist, the team is considering a one-third turn in place or waiting for any protruding airbags to cool more at night and deflate. The rover team indicated after landing, that in all their simulations done to date, they never have had so many things go right at once like today. Much of the tension of one thousand days of work was seen in the faces of those who made the latest Mars rover pass successfully through its highest risk maneuver: safe landing. Three and half years of planning presented an accelerated timeline. Late changes were made to include a horizontal correction rocket, in case winds on Mars began to tilt the descent path or interfere with parachute attitudes. During the NASA press conference at JPL in Pasadena after the landing, one of the loudest cheers came when mission managers thanked all the families that weathered long hours needed to make the landing possible. To celebrate the human side of exploration, in this fourth endeavor on Mars, the mission team gave a synopsis of their reactions, which are summarized by the faces and comments in the immediate afterwards of a long, tense waiting period. Conference articipants included NASA Administrator, Sean O'Keefe; NASA Science Administrator, Dr. Ed Weiler; JPL Center Director, Dr. Charles Elachi; JPL Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager, Pete Theisinger; Deputy Project Manager, Richard Cook; and development manager for the landing phase, Rob Manning. Most of this team held positions during the successful 1997 Pathfinder landing, but also suffered disappointments as 1999 anomalies led to an extensive review and revision of many mission planning features. Most notable among these changes was a return to airbag landings, from the 1999 rocket-fired soft landing profiles. Six months ago, just after Spirit launched, Weiler said, "Everytime I see the descent and landing video, I get nervous. There are too many moving parts, too many things that can go wrong. We can do absolutely everything right... after the failure of Mars 99, but if we get a gust of wind that exceeds the limits [on descent in January], we can lose the lander." "There was a huge boulder next to Viking," noted Weiler, as he described the 1976 rocket-powered Viking spacecrafts' descent onto Mars. "All it takes is a boulder of the wrong size in the wrong place. Three [successes] out of 9 [attempts] aren't good odds." But as Rob Manning, the development manager for what is otherwise described as this landing's "six minutes from Hades"--the Entry, Descent and Landing phase, or EDL--put it, their task was to "make sure this cannonball is shiny". Sean O'Keefe, NASA Administrator: We're back. And we're on Mars. Ed Weiler, NASA Science Administrator: I feel speechless. It was six minutes from hell. We said the right prayers, and got up to heaven. Charles Elachi, JPL Center Director: When I looked in the mirror this morning, I had a full head of black hair. Now I have a thin, gray cap. But in the darkest days of 1999, Congress said "don't stop"--keep exploring. Pete Theisinger, JPL Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager: I told myself this morning [Saturday] that when I woke up on Sunday, the world would be different. This is a tremendous day. Richard Cook, Deputy Project Manager: I really, really like doing it when it works like this. Theisinger: We've retired a lot of risks with this landing. Cook: Seven years ago [during Pathfinder] we were young and didn't know what wasn't possible. Rob Manning, EDL Development Manager: It's a lot of fun when it works. It is very intense. EDL is up in the war room, figuring out what happened. Weiler: When the parachute came out, I went through my phase shift. I felt this might work. Manning: Entry timing went perfectly. Navigation, perfect. We can't tell any differences between predictions and what happened. O'Keefe: Steve Squyres [Cornell's principal investigator for the science package called Athena] told me he has been thinking about this project for sixteen years now. That is the dedication it takes. Manning: Mars is a busy place right now [approximately 2 pm Mars time]. The sun is up. Earth has set. [The landing involved] an astounding set of "good circumstances". It did however appear that we had wind shear and a horizontal velocity, so we had to fire the lateral correction thrusters, or rockets, to correct. Winds at Gusev were expected. We had added self- induced velocity from Spirit's own wake, which with the wind gave us about twenty meters per second horizontally. O'Keefe: I'm told in a golf analogy, that landing on Mars is a hole-in- one, from Paris to Tokyo. Weiler: With a water hazard. 380 million miles away. Manning: We were living in near tension for three and half years. So now you think you're in practice. But this is not a rehearsal. Our testing has always had to do double-duty. When it comes to the real McCoy, I was surprised how calm it was. But just after landing may have happened, when the signal disappeared, that caused us some... pause. For about ten minutes, we had nothing. But once we rolled to a stop, we landed base petal down [which is optimal]. That has only a one in four chance. Weiler: I'm buying lottery tickets. Cook: We saw something in the data that we had landed. We celebrated. Then nothing. [The data disappeared]. In the pit of my stomach, the agony built. Then it's very surreal. Manning: Changes in the parachute release timing, due to the possibility of dust storms at Gusev, that is one of the key questions for the EDL reconstruction [for Opportunity]. We want to make sure this cannonball is shiny. Theisinger: This shows the design is solid for Opportunity [landing in three weeks]. It is a confidence builder. We can still change things at very subtle levels. The two rovers are identical as can be. They were built at the same time. They broadcast at different frequencies for Deep Space Network [DSN] reasons. Manning: I'm excited about seeing the [three] descent images [used to gauge horizontal speed as in a time-lapse]. We have 7 minutes of data from then, and we will be listening for that bounce data. The [betting] pool [to guess the exact landing position] has begun. There are people who will race to know where we are. But we are probably in the middle of the [landing] ellipse. There will be one big crater to the south, and more mesas to the south. Cook: It's an inspiring thing. Elachi: Don't forget we are roving. Everyday now we get the equivalent of a new lander in a different location. Manning: We appear to have bounced for quite awhile. [Remember this landing involves]: 8 thrusters, 37 pyrotechnic devices, 8 cable-cutters, 4 sensors, 2 radios, 1 computer--and airbags. And they work! Theisinger: We have added a fourth place to land on Mars. The scientists selected a safe site. It has the potential to answer questions about Mars' past. Manning: I use the analogy of building bicycles in the 1800's. We have even stranger ideas about how to land. Our inexperience needs practice to progress. But I'm not sure how many more times I could do this. Cooke: At least one more time... [Opportunity is three weeks away.] Manning: [Mars] is not that far away. It is not cheap. We don't visit too often. But when you see these pictures, it will be familiar. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article751.html. __________________________________________________________________________ RECOGNIZING MARTIANS: IF WE FIND ET, WILL WE KNOW? By Robert Roy Britt From Space.com 5 January 2004 As NASA prepares to set twin robots loose on the martian surface and makes plans to send another in 2007, the agency's long term goal is clear: determine whether the red planet does or ever did harbor life. But the current search for life is necessarily limited to life as we know it, organisms dependent on liquid water. A SPACE.com reader recently suggested that "we as humans are arrogant, simply believing that any other form of life will be just like us." Researchers devoted to the search for ET have a similar view. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_monday_040105.html. __________________________________________________________________________ ENDURANCE OF PLANTS UNDER QUARTZ ROCKS POSSIBLE MODEL FOR LIFE ON EARLY EARTH Duke University release 5 January 2004 Microscopic Mojave Desert plants growing on the underside of translucent quartz pebbles can endure both chilly and near-boiling temperatures, scavenge nitrogen from the air, and utilize the equivalent of nighttime moonlight levels for photosynthesis, a new study reports. The plants, which receive enough light through the pebbles to support photosynthesis, could offer a model for how plants first colonized land, as well as how they might have evolved on Mars, said the scientists who performed the study. "Here you have a really bizarre habitat," said William Schlesinger, dean of Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and principal author of a paper on the study that appears in the December, 2003 issue of the research journal Ecology, which was just published. "When I first went to the site in 1978 I thought: 'That's weird, how do these plants photosynthesize?' Then it dawned on me that they photosynthesized on the light coming through the rocks." Years after he first noticed the primitive plants--mostly species of blue- green algae--growing under every quartz pebble he turned over at the site in California's Joshua Tree National Park, Schlesinger assembled a scientific team to investigate the phenomenon. He said what the scientists learned suggests a possible way that land plants established their first toehold in the harsh conditions of the early Earth: by staying under cover. Such habitats may also be "prime locations to search for extraterrestrial life" on other planets, wrote Schlesinger and his other team members in their paper. Other authors include Schlesinger's technician Jeffrey Pippen and Duke graduate students Matthew Wallenstein and Kirsten Hofmockel; also Bruce Mahall of the University of California at Santa Barbara and Debra Klepeis, Mahall's graduate student. Under Schlesinger's direction, Pippen counted 295 whitish, light transmitting quartz pebbles commingled with a much larger number of opaque black pebbles within a 1-by-50 meter desert test plot. The scientists found all quartz pebbles that were about one inch or less thick supported active plant colonies on their undersides. Quartz pebbles thicker than one inch still had rings of plant life around those parts of their bottom edges where sunlight could penetrate through the stone at an oblique angle. By placing heat sensors above and below some of the pebbles in all four seasons, the scientists documented that living under the quartz pebbles kept the plants warmer in winter and cooler in summer compared to conditions underneath black pebbles. In fact, their Ecology paper suggested that sunlight transmitted through the translucent quartz might "confer a modest greenhouse effect" during the cooler months, in essence trapping some of the sun's heat. Comparatively moderate though they were, temperatures underneath the quartz pebbles still logged as low at 41 degrees Fahrenheit in January and almost 150 degrees Fahrenheit at midday in August under harsh desert conditions. The researchers then brought some pebble samples back to their laboratory at Duke and heated them to 194 degrees for six hours. Despite that ordeal in the lab, when the baked rocks were then moistened, their resident plant colonies proved still able to photosynthesize. Photosynthesis is the process by which plants synthesize sugars using atmospheric carbon dioxide through the action of light on green chlorophyll molecules. The algae's demonstration of high temperature resilience presented a paradox, because chlorophyll molecules themselves normally begin to degrade at about 167 degrees, according to Schlesinger, who is a biogeochemist and ecologist. "Either they have some special kind of chlorophyll, or they were in a resting phase which bacterial groups can go into to get through really extreme conditions," Schlesinger said. Blue- green algae are more properly called cyanobacteria. Wallenstein's DNA identification of the algae species in plant colony samples revealed 26 different kinds of cyanobacteria. Of those, the Ecology paper suggested that five species may be previously unknown to science. Cyanobacteria are suspected of being "one of the first colonizers of land" on Earth, Schlesinger noted--a time when there was no atmospheric ozone shield to block harmful solar ultraviolet radiation and no nitrogen-rich topsoil covering the ground. The lack of soil nitrogen provided no obstacle for the plant colonies living under the quartz rocks. Hofmockel, another of Schlesinger's graduate students, found those algae obtain the nitrogen they needed for growth directly from the air like some less primitive plants are also able to do. The UC Santa Barbara researchers found that the pebbles did not filter out more ultraviolet rays than they did other wavelengths of sunlight, meaning that quartz did not provide an especially protective environment. On the other hand, analysis also showed that that only about 0.08 percent of the light of any wavelength that entered one-inch-thick pebbles could reach plants on the other end. "That's pretty shady," Schlesinger added. "That's like photosythesizing by moonlight on the bottom of the thickest rocks." "The growth of hypolithic (beneath rocks) algae under diaphanous quartz pebbles in the Mojave Desert is another illustration of the successful microbial exploitation of a novel habitat in an otherwise harsh environment," the authors concluded in their Ecology paper. "Similar environments might harbor life on other planets," the paper added. While the paper did not specify which other planets, Schlesinger singled out Mars, whose surface is known to harbor quartz rock, be extremely dry and cold, and receive larger doses of ultraviolet radiation than Earth's surface does today "Right now Mars doesn't look too good for life," Schlesinger said. "But if Mars had something alive two billion years ago, when it is believed to have been slightly wetter, this might have been where that something lived." Contact: Monte Basgall Phone: 919-681-8057 E-mail: monte.basgall@duke.edu An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/life-04b.html. __________________________________________________________________________ SUNS OF ALL AGES POSSESS COMETS, MAYBE PLANETS Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics release 04-01 5 January 2004 In early 2003, Comet Kudo-Fujikawa (C/2002 X5) zipped past the Sun at a distance half that of Mercury's orbit. Astronomers Matthew Povich and John Raymond (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues studied Kudo-Fujikawa during its close passage. Today at the 203rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Atlanta, they announced that they observed the comet puffing out huge amounts of carbon, one of the key elements for life. The comet also emitted large amounts of water vapor as the Sun's heat baked its outer surface. When combined with previous observations suggesting the presence of evaporating comets near young stars like Beta Pictoris and old stars like CW Leonis, these data show that stars of all ages vaporize comets that swing too close. Those observations also show that planetary systems like our own, complete with a collection of comets, likely are common throughout space. "Now we can draw parallels between a comet close to home and cometary activity surrounding the star Beta Pictoris, which just might have newborn planets orbiting it. If comets are not unique to our Sun, then might not the same be true for Earth-like planets?" says Povich. SOHO sees carbon The team's observations, reported in the December 12, 2003, issue of the journal Science, were made with the Ultraviolet Coronagraph Spectrometer (UVCS) instrument on board NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft. UVCS can only study a small slice of the sky at one time. By holding the spectrograph slit steady and allowing the comet to drift past, the team was able to assemble the slices into a full, two- dimensional picture of the comet. The UVCS data revealed a dramatic tail of carbon ions streaming away from the comet, generated by evaporating dust. The instrument also captured a spectacular "disconnection event," in which a piece of the ion tail broke off and drifted away from the comet. Such events are relatively common, occurring when the comet passes through a region of space where the Sun's magnetic field switches direction. Cometary building blocks More remarkable than the morphology of the carbon ion tail was its size. A single snapshot of Kudo-Fujikawa on one day showed that its ion tail contained at least 200 million pounds of doubly ionized carbon. The tail likely held more than 1.5 billion pounds of carbon in all forms. "That's a massive amount of carbon, weighing as much as five supertankers," says Raymond. Povich adds, "Now, consider that astronomers see evidence for comets like this around newly formed stars like Beta Pictoris. If such stars have comets, then perhaps they have planets, too. And if extrasolar comets are similar to comets in our solar system, then the building blocks for life may be quite common." Understanding our origins In 2001, researcher Gary Melnick (CfA) and colleagues found evidence for comets in a very different system surrounding the aging red giant star CW Leonis. The Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS) detected huge clouds of water vapor released by a Kuiper Belt-like swarm of comets which are evaporating under the giant's relentless heat. "Taken together, the observations of comets around young stars like Beta Pictoris, middle-aged stars like our Sun, and old stars like CW Leonis strengthen the connection between our solar system and extrasolar planetary systems. By studying our own neighborhood, we hope to learn not only about our origins, but about what we might find out there orbiting other stars," says Raymond. Other co-authors on the Science paper reporting these findings are Geraint Jones (JPL), Michael Uzzo and Yuan-Kuen Ko (CfA), Paul Feldman (Johns Hopkins), Peter Smith and Brian Marsden (CfA), and Thomas Woods (University of Colorado). Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe. An image to accompany this release is online at http://cfa- www.harvard.edu/press/pr0401image.html. Contacts: David Aguilar, Director of Public Affairs Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Phone: 617-495-7462 Fax: 617-495-7468 E-mail: daguilar@cfa.harvard.edu Christine Lafon, Public Affairs Specialist Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Phone: 617-495-7463 Fax: 617-495-7016 E-mail: clafon@cfa.harvard.edu Read the original news release at http://cfa- www.harvard.edu/press/pr0401.html. An additional article on this subject is available at http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0401/05suns/. __________________________________________________________________________ NASA RESEARCHERS CONTEND WITH MARTIAN DAY From SpaceDaily and Agence France-Presse 6 January 2004 Over the next few months, some 280 NASA scientists following the Rover mission on Mars will have to wake up 40 minutes later every day to keep up with martian time, as shutters block out the California sun to simulate night on the red planet. Clad in blue jeans and cowboy boots, mission scientist expert Steve Squyres proudly displays a specially designed watch that falls late 39 minutes and 35 seconds every day, showing time on Mars. "It's a unique piece, specially modified," the scientist told reporters, with a glint of mischief in his tired blue eyes. Read the full article at http://www.marsdaily.com/2004/040106112210.mufmzmai.html. __________________________________________________________________________ SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA CREW MEMORIALIZED ON MARS NASA release 2004-006 6 January 2004 NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe today announced plans to name the landing site of the Mars Spirit rover in honor of the astronauts who died in the tragic accident of the Space Shuttle Columbia in February. The area in the vast flatland of the Gusev Crater where Spirit landed this weekend will be called the Columbia Memorial Station. Since its historic landing, Spirit has been sending extraordinary images of its new surroundings on the red planet over the past few days. Among them, an image of a memorial plaque placed on the spacecraft to Columbia's astronauts and the STS-107 mission. The plaque is mounted on the back of Spirit's high-gain antenna, a disc- shaped tool used for communicating directly with Earth. The plaque is aluminum and approximately six inches in diameter. The memorial plaque was attached March 28, 2003, at the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, FL. Chris Voorhees and Peter Illsley, Mars Exploration Rover engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, designed the plaque. "During this time of great joy for NASA, the Mars Exploration Rover team and the entire NASA family paused to remember our lost colleagues from the Columbia mission. To venture into space, into the unknown, is a calling heard by the bravest, most dedicated individuals," said NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe." As team members gazed at Mars through Spirit's eyes, the Columbia memorial appeared in images returned to Earth, a fitting tribute to their own spirit and dedication. Spirit carries the dream of exploration the brave astronauts of Columbia held in their hearts." Spirit successfully landed on Mars January 3. It will spend the next three months exploring the barren landscape to determine if Mars was ever watery and suitable to sustain life. Spirit's twin, Opportunity, will reach Mars on January 25 to begin a similar examination of a site on the opposite side of the planet. A copy of the image is available on the Internet at http://www.nasa.gov. Contacts: Guy Webster Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-5011 Glenn Mahone NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1898 Bob Jacobs NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1600 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/shuttle-04a.html http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/040106columbia.html __________________________________________________________________________ MARS MANIA LANDS ONLINE NASA/JPL release 2004-008 6 January 2004 As the spacecraft flies, Mars is millions of miles away. Thanks to the Internet, NASA can bring it into your living room, to a local Internet cafe, or anywhere else with access to the World Wide Web. Between 12:00 noon Pacific Standard Time (3:00 PM Eastern Standard Time) Saturday and 6:30 AM PST (9:30 AM EST) Tuesday, NASA's Web portal, which includes the agency's home page, the Mars program Web and the Spaceflight Web, received 916 million hits, and users downloaded 154 million Web pages. The site's one-billionth hit was expected at about 12:00 noon PST (3:00 PM EST) Tuesday. In comparison, the portal received 2.8 billion hits for all of 2003. A hit is counted each time a Web site visitor downloads a picture, graphic element or the text on a Web page. Internet users began tuning in to the webcast of NASA Television on Saturday, January 4, and kept coming back. By Tuesday, more than 250,000 people had watched some of the mission coverage. More than 48,000 people tuned into mission control for the landing at 8:30 AM PST (11:30 PM EST) on Saturday. "The wonders of space are now a mouse click away," said Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, which manages the Mars Exploration Rover program. "Who knows how many kids will be inspired to study science or engineering because of the martian journey they're experiencing on our Web sites." The JPL site at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov, which features the latest news and images from the Mars rover Spirit, has received 107 million hits since Saturday. The NASA Portal site includes Mars information at http://marsrovers.nasa.gov. By early Tuesday, users downloaded nearly 15 terabytes of information from the portal (a terabyte is a million megabytes). A terabyte of data would fill about one million standard floppy disks or more than 1,300 data CDs. It would take more about 20,000 CDs to store 15 terabytes. That's a stack of CDs, without cases, more than 100 feet high. "Since 1994, when Comet Shoemaker-Levy collided with Jupiter, NASA has been using the Internet to bring the excitement of exploration directly to the public," said Brian Dunbar, NASA's Internet services manager. "Most of the time we host these sites on the NASA network, but events of this magnitude require more bandwidth than we can provide ourselves. So when we were defining requirements for the portal, a scalable, secure, offsite hosting environment was a requirement." For comparison, 24-hour traffic figures for major NASA events in the Internet era: Pathfinder, July 9, 1997, hits: 47 million Mars Polar Lander, December 3, 1999, hits: 69 million Columbia loss, February 1, 2003, hits: 75,539,052; sessions: 1,060,887; page views: 10,042,668; terabytes: 0.41 Stardust, January 2, 2004, hits: 12,011,502; sessions: 120,339; page views: 1,651,898; terabytes: 0.12 Spirit landing, January 3-4, 2004, hits: 109,172,900; terabytes: 2.2. Brought online less than a year ago, the NASA Web portal uses a commercial hosting infrastructure with capacity that can be readily increased to accommodate short-term, high-visibility events. Content is replicated and stored on 1,300 computers worldwide to shorten download times for users. In 1997, the Mars Pathfinder team built a volunteer network of reflector sites and served one of the biggest Internet events to that time, if not the biggest. For the Mars Exploration Rovers, the existing portal infrastructure was available, so the Mars Web content was incorporated into the environment. The portal prime contractor is eTouch Systems Corporation of Fremont, CA. Speedera Networks, Inc., of Santa Clara, CA is delivering the NASA Web content over its globally distributed on-demand computer network. Content is replicated and stored on thousands of computer servers around the world to shorten download times for users. This infrastructure enables NASA to provide access to the latest images from Mars, which will automatically be added to the Mars Exploration Rover site as they are received on Earth. The network also allows NASA's museum partners to access high-resolution images and video for big-screen, highly immersive experiences in local communities. Students and teachers will also find weekly classroom activities so that they can be a part of discovery on Mars. "The portal was designed technically and graphically to enable NASA to communicate directly with members of the public, especially young people," said Dunbar. "It's a key element of NASA's mission to inspire the next generation of explorers as only NASA can." For more information about NASA programs on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov. Contacts: Jane Platt Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-0880 Bob Jacobs NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1600 An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/internet-04b.html. __________________________________________________________________________ NASA'S NEW STUDIES OF EARTH'S SEAS, SKIES AND SOILS NASA/JPL release 2004-009 6 January 2004 They're carbonated, salty, and alternately wet and dry. Exotic champagnes? No, they're NASA's three Earth System Science Pathfinder small-satellite program missions: Orbiting Carbon Observatory, Aquarius and Hydros. NASA has awarded all three of these fine "wines" gold medals of sorts by authorizing them to proceed with mission formulation. Each mission performs a first-of-a-kind exploratory measurement that will help answer fundamental questions about how our planet works and how it may change in the future. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory will enhance our understanding of Earth's carbon cycle and climate. Aquarius will examine the way oceans affect and respond to climate change. Hydros will study how water, energy and carbon are exchanged between land and Earth's atmosphere. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, manages all three Earth System Science Pathfinder missions for NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, Washington, DC. "These three innovative missions have demonstrated they are ready to use state-of-the-art remote sensing technology to observe and help us understand the cycles of water, energy and carbon through Earth's system. These are essential ingredients for sustaining life on Earth, and NASA is using the power of space technology to understand them," said Dr. Ghassem Asrar, NASA's associate administrator for Earth Science. "NASA plans to negotiate contract awards for these low-cost missions that address key scientific questions regarding how Earth's atmosphere, oceans and land work together to shape our weather, climate and environment," he said. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory's two-year mission is targeted for launch in August 2007. It will provide the first global, space-based measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The measurements will have the precision to identify and monitor human and natural processes responsible for absorbing and emitting this important greenhouse gas, a fundamental building block for food, fiber and life on Earth. Precise ground-based measurements, collected since the 1970s, indicate only about half of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by fossil fuel combustion has remained there. The land and oceans have apparently absorbed the rest. However, ground-based measurements are not adequate to determine how or where this absorption is occurring. These uncertainties compromise our ability to predict future atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations or their effect on the climate system. Dr. David Crisp of JPL is principal investigator for the mission, which includes more than 19 universities, corporate and international partners. Aquarius's three-year mission, targeted for launch in September 2008, is the first satellite mission specifically designed to provide monthly global maps of how salt concentration varies on the ocean surface. Variations in ocean surface salinity are a key area of scientific uncertainty. Scientists wish to better understand how these variations modify the interaction between ocean circulation and the global water cycle, which, in turn, affects the oceans' capacity to store and transport heat and regulate Earth's climate. The mission seeks to determine how the ocean responds to the combined effects of evaporation, precipitation, ice melt and river runoff on seasonal and interannual time scales, and their impact on the global distribution and availability of fresh water. Dr. Gary Lagerloef of Seattle's Earth and Space Research is the principal investigator. More than 17 universities, corporate and international partners will be involved in the mission, including Argentina's Comision Nacionales de Actividades Espaciales. NASA will provide the Aquarius salinity sensor, project management, launch services and science data processing. Argentina will provide the spacecraft, additional instruments and mission operations. Hydros will make unprecedented measurements of Earth's changing soil moisture and the freeze/thaw status of land surface that, together, define the state of Earth's hydrosphere. This state links the water, energy and carbon cycles over land. Hydros measurements will open new frontiers in our understanding of how these global cycles work together in the Earth system. Numerical models used for day-to-day weather prediction need soil moisture estimates as initial conditions for forecasts. Incorporating real observations into these models will significantly improve forecast accuracy. Soil moisture is among the top terrestrial environment measurement requirements of the Departments of Defense and Transportation because of the impact on land navigation and aviation weather. Contributing partners for the Hydros mission, in addition to NASA, include the Canadian Space Agency and the Department of Defense. The Hydros science team draws from several universities, NASA centers, and research and operational branches of federal agencies. The principal investigator is Dr. Dara Entekhabi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Contacts: David E. Steitz NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1730 Alan Buis Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-0474 __________________________________________________________________________ EXPLORING MARS ON EARTH From NASA Tech Brief Insider 7 January 2004 As NASA's Spirit and Opportunity land on Mars this month, a cadre of 20 smart robots developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University--with support from NASA and Intel Corporation--have been set up at science museums around the nation allowing visitors to experience the excitement of exploring the red planet. Called Personal Exploration Rovers (PERs), the robots will reside in "Mars Yards," specially designed to mimic martian terrain at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC; its new Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles International Airport; the National Science Center in Augusta, GA; The San Francisco Exploratorium; and the new visitor's center at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, CA. All exhibits will be open through January 24. The PERs are 1.2 feet-tall, weigh 10 pounds, can move 1.6 inches/second, and feature mobility systems similar to that of Spirit and Opportunity. The rovers are equipped with cameras mounted on a custom-designed head that can create a panoramic, 360-degree image. They also can detect obstacles using an optical rangefinder. Visitors can access the PERs through a kiosk and then partner with a rover as it moves through the yard, scanning rocks and soil to find signs of life. For more information about Carnegie Mellon's PERs, visit http://link.abpi.net/l.php?20040107A2. For more information about NASA's Mars Exploration program, visit http://link.abpi.net/l.php?20040107A3. __________________________________________________________________________ CATCH THE SPIRIT--THIS OPPORTUNITY WON'T LAST FOREVER By Chris Carberry Mars Society release 6 January 2004 As Spirit begins to send its data and photographs back, and with Opportunity approaching Mars, we are presented with a wonderful opportunity for some spirited dialog concerning the future of the space program. We need to help build the ground swell of interest in Mars. If President Bush does indeed make a major space policy statement within the next month, he needs to know that the new policy should include humans to Mars. Utilizing the 100th anniversary of flight and these Mars robotic missions, we need to spend the next couple of months pushing hard to make sure that our message is heard loudly and clearly in Washington, DC. All interested in humans to Mars should call or write President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, and Congress. Tell all of your friends to do the same. Only together can we have an impact. If you have been waiting for the right time to express your opinion, this is the time. Pundits have declared that we are wasting our time--that we are naïve if we believe we can impact U.S. space policy. Now is the time to prove those pundits wrong. We need a space program worthy of this nation, worthy of our heritage of exploration--a space program that is going somewhere. Sending humans to Mars is a worthy goal. President Bush may be reached at president@whitehouse.gov, 202-456-1111, or by writing President George W. Bush, The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20500. Postal letters have the most impact, but if you have time, use all three methods to send Mr. Bush the message he needs to hear. NASA needs a driving goal to focus its energy, and that goal needs to be humans to Mars. Contact: Chris Carberry Political Director, The Mars Society Phone: 617-646-0523 cacarberry@yahoo.com __________________________________________________________________________ NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/ 7 January 2004 Astrobiology and planetary engineering articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles1.html R. R. Britt, 2004. Recognizing Martians: if we find ET, will we know? Space.com. Terrestrial extreme environments articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles2.html Duke University, 2004. Endurance of plants under quartz rocks possible model for life on early Earth. SpaceDaily. Oregon State University, 2004. Hilo: living in a volcanic rock. Astrobiology Magazine. Evolution (biological, chemical and cosmological) articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles5.html C. H. Lineweaver, Y. Fenner and B. K. Gibson, 2004. The galactic habitable zone and the age distribution of complex life in the Milky Way. Science, 303(5654):59-62. Extrasolar planets articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles7.html Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 2004. Suns of all ages possess comets, maybe planets. Spaceflight Now. __________________________________________________________________________ MARS EXPLORATION ROVER SPIRIT MISSION STATUS NASA/JPL release 2004-002 3 January 2004 Navigators for NASA's Spirit Mars Exploration Rover put the spacecraft so close to a bull's-eye with earlier maneuvers that mission managers chose to skip the final two optional maneuvers for adjusting course before arrival at Mars. With less than four hours of flight time remaining, Spirit was on course to land within a targeted ellipse 62 kilometers long by 3 kilometers wide (39 miles by 2 miles) within Mars' Gusev Crater. A trajectory correction maneuver scheduled for four hours before landing was cancelled. "The navigation status is truly excellent," said Dr. Lou D'Amario, the mission's navigation team chief at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. A slight trajectory adjustment on December 26 was the fourth and final for the flight. Preparations in the past two days for arrival at Mars have included an adjustment that will open Spirit's parachute about two seconds earlier than it would have been without the change, in order to compensate for recent weather on Mars. "A dust storm seen on the other side of the planet has caused global heating and thinning of the atmosphere at high altitudes" said JPL's Dr. Mark Adler, Spirit mission manager. Also, engineers sent commands today to alter the timing when several pyro devices (explosive bolts) will be put into an enabled condition prior to firing. Enabling will begin 40 minutes earlier than it would have under previous commands. These pyro devices will be fired to carry out necessary steps of descent and landing, such as deploying the parachute and jettisoning the heat shield. Mars is 170 million kilometers (106 million miles) away from Earth today, a distance that takes nearly 10 minutes for radio signals to cross at the speed of light. Counting that communication delay, Spirit will hit the top of Mars' atmosphere at about 04:29 Jan. 4, Universal Time (8:29 p.m. Jan. 3, Pacific Standard Time), and reach the surface six minutes later. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. Additional information about the project is available at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov, www.nasa.gov and from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, at http://athena.cornell.edu. Contact: JPL Newsroom Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-5011 __________________________________________________________________________ SPIRIT LANDS ON MARS AND SENDS POSTCARDS NASA/JPL release 2004-003 4 January 2004 A traveling robotic geologist from NASA has landed on Mars and returned stunning images of the area around its landing site in Gusev Crater. Mars Exploration Rover Spirit successfully sent a radio signal after the spacecraft had bounced and rolled for several minutes following its initial impact at 11:35 PM EST (8:35 PM Pacific Standard Time) on January 3. "This is a big night for NASA," said NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe. "We're back. I am very, very proud of this team, and we're on Mars." Members of the mission's flight team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, cheered and clapped when they learned that NASA's Deep Space Network had received a post-landing signal from Spirit. The cheering resumed about three hours later when the rover transmitted its first images to Earth, relaying them through NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter. "We've got many steps to go before this mission is over, but we've retired a lot of risk with this landing," said JPL's Pete Theisinger, project manager for the Mars Exploration Rover Project. Deputy project manager for the rovers, JPL's Richard Cook, said, "We're certainly looking forward to Opportunity landing three weeks from now." Opportunity is Spirit's twin rover, headed for the opposite side of Mars. Dr. Charles Elachi, JPL director, said, "To achieve this mission, we have assembled the best team of young women and men this country can put together. Essential work was done by other NASA centers and by our industrial and academic partners. Spirit stopped rolling with its base petal down, though that favorable position could change as airbags deflate, said JPL's Rob Manning, development manager for the rover's descent through Mars' atmosphere and landing on the surface. NASA chose Spirit's landing site, within Gusev Crater, based on evidence from Mars orbiters that this crater may have held a lake long ago. A long, deep valley, apparently carved by ancient flows of water, leads into Gusev. The crater itself is basin the size of Connecticut created by an asteroid or comet impact early in Mars' history. Spirit's task is to spend the next three months exploring for clues in rocks and soil about whether the past environment at this part of Mars was ever watery and suitable to sustain life. Spirit traveled 487 million kilometers (302.6 million) miles to reach Mars after its launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, FL, on June 10, 2003. Its twin, Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, was launched July 7, 2003, and is on course for a landing on the opposite side of Mars on January 25 (Universal Time and EST; 9:05 PM on January 24, PST). The flight team expects to spend more than a week directing Spirit through a series of steps in unfolding, standing up and other preparations necessary before the rover rolls off of its lander platform to get its wheels onto the ground. Meanwhile, Spirit's cameras and a mineral- identifying infrared instrument will begin examining the surrounding terrain. That information will help engineers and scientists decide which direction to send the rover first. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington. Additional information about the project is available from JPL at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, at http://athena.cornell.edu. Contacts: Guy Webster Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-6278 JPL Newsroom Phone: 818-354-5011 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article752.html http://www.astrobio.net/news/article753.html http://www.astrobio.net/news/article754.html http://www.marsdaily.com/2004/040104221653.w2fuearg.html http://www.marsdaily.com/2004/040104121830.1luickdl.html http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/05jan_spirit.htm http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/spirit_images_040104.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-04d.html http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/040104landing.html __________________________________________________________________________ HEALTHY ROVER SHOWS ITS NEW NEIGHBORHOOD ON MARS NASA/JPL release 2004-004 4 January 2004 NASA's Spirit Rover is starting to examine its new surroundings, revealing a vast flatland well suited to the robot's unprecedented mobility and scientific toolkit. "Spirit has told us that it is healthy," Jennifer Trosper of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, said today. Trosper is Spirit mission manager for operations on Mars' surface. The rover remains perched on its lander platform, and the next nine days or more will be spent preparing for egress, or rolling off, onto the martian surface. With only two degrees of tilt, with the deck toward the front an average of only about 37 centimeters (15 inches) off the ground, and with apparently no large rocks blocking the way, the lander is in good position for egress. "The egress path we're working toward is straight ahead," Trosper said. The rover's initial images excited scientists about the prospects of exploring the region after the roll-off. "My hat is off to the navigation team because they did a fantastic job of getting us right where we wanted to be," said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, principal investigator for the science payload. By correlating images taken by Spirit with earlier images from spacecraft orbiting Mars, the mission team has determined that the rover appears to be in a region marked with numerous swaths where dust devils have removed brighter dust and left darker gravel behind. "This is our new neighborhood," Squyres said. "We hit the sweet spot. We wanted someplace where the wind had cleared off the rocks for us. We've landed in a place that's so thick with dust devil tracks that a lot of the dust has been blown away." The terrain looks different from any of the sites examined by NASA's three previous successful landers--the two Vikings in 1976 and Mars Pathfinder in 1987. "What we're seeing is a section of surface that is remarkably devoid of big boulders, at least in our immediate vicinity, and that's good news because big boulders are something we would have trouble driving over," Squyres said. "We see a rock population that is different from anything we've seen elsewhere on Mars, and it comes out very much in our favor." Spirit arrived at Mars January 3 (EST and PST; January 4 Universal Time) after a seven month journey. Its task is to spend the next three months exploring for clues in rocks and soil about whether the past environment at this part of Mars was ever watery and suitable to sustain life. Spirit's twin Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity, will reach its landing site on the opposite side of Mars on January 25 (EST and Universal Time; January 24 PST) to begin a similar examination of a site on the opposite side of the planet from Gusev Crater. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington. Additional information about the project is available from JPL at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and from Cornell University at http://athena.cornell.edu. Contacts: Donald Savage NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1547 Guy Webster Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-5011 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/spirit_readied_040105.html http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/imagegallery/archive.php?category=se http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-04e.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-04f.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/spirit_gets_ready_to_explore.html __________________________________________________________________________ MARS TEAM ENERGIZED ABOUT "SLEEPY HOLLOW" NEAR ROVER NASA/JPL release 2004-005 5 January 2004 "Sleepy Hollow," a shallow depression in the Mars ground near NASA's Spirit rover, may become an early destination when the rover drives off its lander platform in a week or so. That possible crater and other features delighted engineers and scientists examining pictures from the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit's first look around. "Reality has surpassed fantasy. We're like kids in a candy store," said Art Thompson, rover tactical activity lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. "We can hardly wait until we get off the lander and start doing fun stuff on the surface." A clean bill of health from a checkout of all three science instruments on Spirit's robotic arm fortified scientists' anticipation of beginning to use those tools after the rover gets its six wheels onto the ground. Also, Spirit succeeded Sunday in finding the Sun with its panoramic camera and calculating how to point its main antenna toward Earth by knowing the Sun's position. "Just as the ancient mariners used sextants for 'shooting the Sun,' as they called it, we were successfully able to shoot the Sun with our panorama camera, then use that information to point the antenna," said JPL's Matt Wallace, mission manger. Within sight of Spirit are several wide, shallow bowls that may be impact craters, said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, principal investigator for the spacecraft's science payload. "It's clear that while we have a generally flat surface, it is pockmarked with these things." The mission's scientists, who are getting little rest as they examine the pictures from Spirit, chose the name "Sleepy Hollow" for one of these circular depressions. This one is about 9 meters (30 feet) across and about 12 meters (40 feet) north of the lander, Squyres said. "It's a hole in the ground," he said. "It's a window into the interior of Mars." One of the next steps in preparing Spirit for rolling onto the soil is to extend the front wheels, which are tucked in for fitting inside a tight space during the flight from Earth. Spirit arrived at Mars January 3 (EST and PST; January 4 Universal Time) after a seven month journey. Its task is to spend the next three months exploring for clues in rocks and soil about whether the past environment at this part of Mars was ever watery and possibly suitable to sustain life. Spirit's twin Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity, will reach its landing site on the opposite side of Mars on January 25 (EST and Universal Time; January 24 PST) to begin a similar examination of a site on the opposite side of the planet from Gusev Crater. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. Additional information about the project is available from JPL at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and from Cornell University at http://athena.cornell.edu. Contacts: Guy Webster Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-5011 Donald Savage NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1547 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article756.html http://www.astrobio.net/news/article757.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/spirits_first_targets_sleepy_hollo w.html __________________________________________________________________________ COLOR PICTURE FROM SPIRIT IS MOST DETAILED VIEW OF MARS EVER SEEN NASA/JPL release 2004-010 6 January 2004 The people operating NASA's Spirit have received the first color pictures from the rover and a congratulatory call from the president. President George W. Bush called today to congratulate the rover flight team for reconfirming the American spirit of exploration, said Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, where the mission is managed. Later in the day, the Spirit team awakened the rover with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's rendition of "Hail to the Chief." Color images in a mosaic released today are the highest-resolution pictures ever sent from Mars, more than three times as detailed as images from Mars Pathfinder in 1997. Spirit's panoramic camera took 12 contiguous frames that the camera team combined into the mosaic. "This is the day we've been waiting for," said Dr. Jim Bell of Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, leader of the panoramic camera team. The scene rises from near the edge of Spirit's lander platform to the sky. Scientists are examining every detail to learn about the landing area within Gusev Crater. In one section of particular interest, retraction of the spacecraft's deflated airbags has disturbed the surface. "There are places where rocks were dragged through the soil and the soil was stripped off and folded into bizarre textures," Bell said. Other areas show tails of debris to one side of rocks, possibly shaped by martian winds. "There's a wonderful mix of both smooth and angular rocks near the landing site, and this is something we'll be trying to puzzle out in the next few weeks," he said. Scientists and the public may soon have even more to look at. The panoramic camera mosaic released today shows about one-eighth of a full- circle panorama of the landing region. The camera team plans to have the camera finish taking a full panorama this week. The pictures will share priority with other data during communication sessions either directly from the rover to Earth or relayed via NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey orbiters. Engineers are conducting test movements of Spirit's high-gain, direct-to- Earth antenna today to learn more about spikes in the amount of electricity drawn by one of the antenna's motors when the antenna was first used January 4, said JPL's Jennifer Trosper, Spirit mission manager. Meanwhile, the spacecraft will continue using the orbiter relays and its low-gain, direct-to-Earth antenna. The flight team is also finding ways to prevent overheating of electronics inside Spirit. "Our robot geologist was dressed a little warm for the weather on Mars," Trosper said. The atmosphere and surface at the landing site this week are not as cold as anticipated. However, the rover's temperatures are expected to drop when it rolls off its lander platform and gets its wheels onto the ground. Roll-off is now planned no sooner than January 12. One of the next steps in preparing for that event will be to further retract a deflated airbag protruding from under the lander, said JPL's Jessica Collisson, flight director. The team tried out the planned retraction steps on a test rover at JPL. "We're hoping we'll have similar results to what we had in the test bed and we can get that airbag out of the way," Collisson said. Seeing real panoramic camera pictures from Mars, instead of just from tests of the camera inside laboratories or spacecraft assembly areas, put the camera into new perspective for Bell. "Until now, it's been like having an animal in a cage, but now this beast is out, taking incredible pictures in the native habitat it was designed to work in," he said. He praised "the talented and heroic teamwork of people at Cornell and around the country who helped develop this camera--its optics, filters, electronics." Spirit's twin Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity, will reach its landing site on the opposite side of Mars on January 25 (EST and Universal Time; January 24 PST). The rovers' task is to explore for clues in rocks and soil about whether the past environments in their landing areas were ever watery and suitable to sustain life. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. Images from Spirit and additional information about the project are available from JPL at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, at http://athena.cornell.edu. Contacts: Guy Webster Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-5011 Donald Savage NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1547 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article759.html http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/spirit_color_040106.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-04g.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-04h.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-04i.html http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/status.html __________________________________________________________________________ CLOSING IN ON THE RED PLANET: MARS EXPRESS ORBIT LOWERED ESA release 4 January 2004 Today at 14:13 CET, ESA's Mars Express spacecraft successfully executed an essential planned maneuver to reduce its orbit around the Red Planet. A five-minute burn of its main engine brought Mars Express from an orbit apocenter (highest point) of 190 000 kilometers to 40 000 kilometers with a pericenter (lowest point) of about 250 kilometers. Mars Express will reach its final operational orbit of about 11,000 kilometers by 300 kilometers towards the end of the month after two more scheduled orbit adjustments (using main engine burns) on the nights of 6/7 and 10/11 January. Today's key move enables ESA to pursue its Mars mission as planned. First, scheduled scientific observations can begin mid-January and, second, the search for the Beagle 2 lander will become much more accurate. Michael McKay, Mars Express Deputy Flight Director in Darmstadt, Germany, said, "From the second half of January 2004, the orbiter's instruments will be prepared to scan the atmosphere, the surface and parts of the subsurface structure of Mars with unprecedented precision." "The High Resolution Stereo Camera, for example, will take high-precision pictures of the planet and will begin a comprehensive 3D cartography of Mars. The MARSIS radar will be able to scan as far as four kilometers below the surface, looking for underground water or ice." "Also, several spectrometers will try to unveil the mysteries of martian mineralogy and the atmosphere, as well as influences from the solar wind or seasonal changes." On 7 January 2004, at 13:15 CET, the lowest point of the Mars Express flight path will be as close as 315 kilometers to the landing area of the still-silent Beagle 2. The NASA Mars Odyssey orbiter and several radio telescopes on Earth have been unable to obtain a signal since Christmas, but chances will rise with the approach of the "mothership" to its "baby" Beagle 2. Mars Express and Beagle 2 are the only end-to-end tested systems, giving ESA more confidence of establishing contact with the lander. Today, 4 January, ESA specialists are meeting with Beagle 2 staff at ESA's European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt to define a strategy for modes of interaction between the ESA orbiter and the lander. Mars Express has Ultra High Frequency (UHF) receivers ready to communicate with Beagle 2. Mars Express Project Manager Rudolf Schmidt and his ESA colleagues are very much looking forward to 7 January 2004. Dr. Schmidt said, "At this precise time, our Mars Express orbiter is in both an ideal flight path and an ideal communication configuration, right on top of the Beagle 2 landing area, at about 86 degrees. In this situation, we should be able to discern the slightest beep from the martian surface." Today's maneuver was another step towards the European exploration of Mars, ensuring both orbiter operations as planned and a precise search of the Beagle 2 lander. ESA is looking forward to an exciting Mars exploration in the next months. The latest news will be posted, as always, at: at http://mars.esa.int. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.marsdaily.com/2004/040104145254.w003zc30.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/marsexpress-04b.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/mars_express_lowers_orbit.html __________________________________________________________________________ MARS EXPRESS ATTEMPTS TO "TALK" TO BEAGLE 2 ESA release 1-2004 6 January 2004 As of Wednesday 7 January 2004, and for the following three days, ESA's Mars Express orbiter will be as little as 315 kilometers above the landing area of the still-silent Beagle 2. Since Christmas attempts to communicate with the tiny lander through NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter and radio telescopes on Earth have been unsuccessful. However, Mars Express and Beagle 2 are the only systems tested end-to-end, giving ESA more confidence of establishing contact with the lander in the coming days. The Ultra High Frequency (UHF) receivers on Mars Express are ready to communicate with Beagle 2. On 7 January, at precisely 13:15 CET, ESA's Mars Express orbiter will be in both an ideal flight path and an ideal communication configuration, right over the Beagle 2 landing area, at about 86 degrees, allowing ground controllers at ESA's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, to catch the slightest beep from the martian surface. The results of this first search attempt will be announced at a press briefing at ESA/ESOC by David Southwood, Director of Science, Rudolf Schmidt, Mars Express Project Manager, and Michael McKay, Deputy Flight Director, starting at 16:00 CET. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.marsdaily.com/2004/040105180627.85holub8.html http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/express_update_040106.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/mars_express_beagle_2.html __________________________________________________________________________ NASA'S STARDUST SPACECRAFT MAKES GREAT CATCH, HEADS FOR TOUCHDOWN NASA/JPL release 2004-001 2 January 2004 Team Stardust, NASA's first dedicated sample return mission to a comet, passed a huge milestone today by successfully navigating through the particle and gas-laden coma around comet Wild 2 (pronounced "Vilt-2"). During the hazardous traverse, the spacecraft flew within 240 kilometers (149 miles) of the comet, catching samples of comet particles and scoring detailed pictures of Wild 2's pockmarked surface. "Things couldn't have worked better in a fairy tale," said Tom Duxbury, Stardust project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. "These images are better than we had hoped for in our wildest dreams," said Ray Newburn of JPL, a co-investigator for Stardust. "They will help us better understand the mechanisms that drive conditions on comets." "These are the best pictures ever taken of a comet," said Principal Investigator Dr. Don Brownlee of the University of Washington, Seattle. "Although Stardust was designed to be a comet sample return mission, the fantastic details shown in these images greatly exceed our expectations." The collected particles, stowed in a sample return capsule onboard Stardust, will be returned to Earth for in-depth analysis. That dramatic event will occur on January 15, 2006, when the capsule makes a soft landing at the U.S. Air Force Utah Test and Training Range. The microscopic particle samples of comet and interstellar dust collected by Stardust will be taken to the planetary material curatorial facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas, for analysis. Stardust has traveled about 3.22 billion kilometers (2 billion miles) since its launch on February 7, 1999. As it closed the final gap with its cometary quarry, it endured a bombardment of particles surrounding the nucleus of comet Wild 2. To protect Stardust against the blast of expected cometary particles and rocks, the spacecraft rotated so it was flying in the shadow of its "Whipple Shields." The shields are named for American astronomer Dr. Fred L. Whipple, who, in the 1950s, came up with the idea of shielding spacecraft from high-speed collisions with the bits and pieces ejected from comets. The system includes two bumpers at the front of the spacecraft--which protect Stardust's solar panels--and another shield protecting the main spacecraft body. Each shield is built around composite panels designed to disperse particles as they impact, augmented by blankets of a ceramic cloth called N dissipate and spread particle debris. "Everything occurred pretty much to the minute," said Duxbury. "And with our cometary encounter complete, we invite everybody to tune in about one million, 71 thousand minutes from now when Stardust returns to Earth, bringing with it the first comet samples in the history of space exploration." Scientists believe in-depth terrestrial analysis of the samples will reveal much about comets and the earliest history of the solar system. Chemical and physical information locked within the cometary particles could be the record of the formation of the planets and the materials from which they were made. More information on the Stardust mission is available at http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov. Stardust, a part of NASA's Discovery Program of low-cost, highly focused science missions, was built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, CO, and is managed by JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Contacts: D. C. Agle Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-393-9011 Donald Savage NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1547 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article749.html http://click.exacttarget.com/?fe8010777c6c037a70-fe28167073670175701c72 http://www.spacedaily.com/news/stardust-04d.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/stardust-04e.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/stardust-04f.html http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/stardust_update_040102.html http://spaceflightnow.com/stardust/040102flyby.html http://spaceflightnow.com/stardust/040102success.html __________________________________________________________________________ THE CALM AFTER THE COMETARY STORM NASA/JPL release 2004-007 6 January 2004 Having weathered its out-of-this-world sandblasting by cometary particles hurtling toward it at about six times the speed of a rifle bullet, NASA's Stardust spacecraft begins its two-year, 1.14 billion kilometer (708 million mile) trek back to its planet of origin. "On January 2, comet Wild 2 gave up its particles but it did not do so without a fight," said Stardust Project Manager Tom Duxbury of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. "Our data indicates we flew through sheets of cometary particles that jostled the spacecraft and that on at least 10 occasions the first layer of our shielding was breeched. Glad we had a couple more layers of the stuff." Stardust entered the comet's coma--the vast cloud of dust and gas that surrounds a comet's nucleus--on December 31, 2003. From that point on it kept its defensive shielding between it and what scientists hoped would be the caustic stream of particles it would fly through. And fly through cometary particles Stardust did, but not in the fashion the team envisioned while designing the mission. "We thought we would see a uniform increase in the number of particles the closer we came to the comet's nucleus and then a reduction," said University of Washington scientist Dr. Don Brownlee, Stardust's Principal Investigator. "Instead, our data indicate we flew through a veritable swarm of particles and then there would be almost nothing and then we would fly through another swarm." Stardust scooped up these cometary particles, impacting at 6.1 kilometers per second (3.8 miles per second), for almost instantaneous analysis from onboard instruments and stored other particles for later, in-depth analysis, here on Earth. Along with this cosmic taste testing, the spacecraft also took some remarkable images of comet Wild 2's five- kilometer wide (3.1-mile wide) nucleus. "Our navigation camera was designed to assist in navigation, not science," said Stardust's imaging team lead Ray Newburn. "But these are the best images ever taken of a comet and there is a remarkable amount of information in those 72 pictures. Not only did we image the jets of material spewing out from the comet, but for the first time in history we can actually see the location of their origin on the surface of the comet." At about 11:25 AM Pacific Standard Time (2:25 PM EST) on January 2, only minutes after its closest approach with the comet, Stardust pointed its high gain antenna at Earth and began transmitting a data stream that took over 30 hours to send but will keep cometary scientists busy for years to come. About six hours later another event took place that goes a long way to literally increasing the scientists task load exponentially. "Six hours after encounter we retracted the collector grid, with what we are all confident is an abundance of cometary particles, into the spacecraft's sample return capsule," added Duxbury. "The next time the sample return capsule is going to be opened is in a clean room at the Johnson Space Center in the days following Earth return in January 2006." Scientists expect in-depth terrestrial analysis of the samples will reveal much about comets and the earliest history of the solar system. Chemical and physical information locked within the particles could be the record of the formation of the planets and the materials from which they were made. More information on the Stardust mission is available at http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov. Stardust, a part of NASA's Discovery Program of low-cost, highly focused science missions, was built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, CO, and is managed by JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Contact: D. C. Agle Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-393-9011 An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/stardust-04g.htm. __________________________________________________________________________ End Marsbugs, Volume 1, Number 2.