Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 11, Number 11, 8 March 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. Opinions expressed in this newsletter are those of the authors, and are not necessarily endorsed by the editor or by Lyon College. 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 at 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) NASA'S IMPROVED WEB-RESOURCE ON THE WORLD'S CHANGING CLIMATE NASA/GSFC release 2) SHOULD PUBLICLY FUNDED RESEARCH BE FREE AND AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC? TWO PROMINENT STANFORD SCIENTISTS OFFER THEIR VIEWS By Patrick Brown and Donald Kennedy 3) NASA EMBARKS ON A SWEEPING AIRBORNE EXPEDITION NASA release 2004-076 4) NASA GOES LUNAR: ROBOT CRAFT, HUMAN OUTPOST PLANS By Leonard David 5) TUMBLEWEED ROVER GOES ON A ROLL AT SOUTH POLE NASA release 2004-078 6) NASA RESEARCH SHOWS HEAVY SMOKE "CHOKES" CLOUDS NASA release 2004-081 7) NO "SHOWSTOPPERS" FOR HUMANS ON MARS From Reuters and CNN 8) ASTEROID BILL PASSES From Universe Today 9) NEW ETHIOPIAN FOSSILS ARE FROM 6-MILLION-YEAR-OLD HOMINID LIVING JUST AFTER SPLIT FROM CHIMPANZEES By Robert Sanders 10) FIRST SILICATE STARDUST FOUND IN A METEORITE By Linda Sage 11) MESSAGES FROM MARS: NEW FINDINGS CHANGE FOCUS OF FUTURE EXPLORATION By Leonard David 12) THE FUNGI REVIVED DAMAGED EARTH From Astrobiology Magazine 13) NASA CREATES PORTRAIT OF LIFE AND DEATH IN THE UNIVERSE NASA release 2004-082 Announcements 14) OXYGEN IN THE TERRESTRIAL PLANETS Workshop announcement 15) NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas Mission Reports 16) CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS NASA/JPL release 17) VOLCANIC ROCK IN MARS' GUSEV CRATER HINTS AT PAST WATER NASA/JPL release 2004-079 18) MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 19) MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release 20) ROSETTA IN GOOD HEALTH ESA release __________________________________________________________________________ NASA'S IMPROVED WEB-RESOURCE ON THE WORLD'S CHANGING CLIMATE NASA/GSFC release 1 March 2004 Students, scientists, teachers, reporters and the scientifically curious can locate any kind of Earth science data much easier and quicker than ever before, using NASA's Global Change Master Directory (GCMD). The redesigned web site, a directory of Earth science data and services is being re-launched on March 1st to provide easier access to data and services. Internet users can access the directory at http://globalchange.nasa.gov or http://gcmd.nasa.gov. The re-launched web site is easier to navigate, with 9 tabs running atop the home page, including: Home, Data Sets, Data Services, Portals, Authoring, What's New, Community, Calendar, and Links. The GCMD, updated daily, provides Earth science data sets and services relevant to global change research. The GCMD's 13 data set topics, found under the "Data Sets" tab, provide summaries of the data sets and specific information such as data over time and location, a citation for the creator of the database, and direct links to data and services. Available dataset topics range from tiny airborne particles (aerosols) to the continental-sized ozone hole to global sea surface temperatures. The GCMD topics include: Agriculture, Atmosphere, Biosphere, Climate Indicators, Human Dimensions, Hydrosphere, Land Surface, Oceans, Paleoclimate, Snow and Ice, Solid Earth, Spectral/Engineering and Sun-Earth Interactions. Users can search over 15,000 data sets and services and link to more than over 76,000 resources within the descriptions. The individual data set descriptions were contributed by more than 1,300 data centers, government agencies, universities, research institutions, and private researchers around the world. For scientists and others who want to add or modify GCMD datasets, they can do so under the "Authoring" tab by using the new "docBUILDER" web-based tools. Under the "Data Services" tab are available services from analysis and visualization tools to education and environmental advisories. The "Portals" tab is the most important to specific groups of data users. "Perhaps the greatest contribution of the GCMD to the public has been the ability to create customized subsets of the directory that can be displayed, in turn, by special interest groups," said Lola Olsen, Directory Project Manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. "These groups save major development and maintenance costs by re-using the directory capabilities." For example, member countries of the Joint Committee on Antarctic Data Management (JCADM) contribute directory entries using the GCMD tools and may then, in turn, host individual, customized subsets of the database through "portals" through which they can display their own contribution. Reporters and others interested in upcoming recent climate change conferences can find up to 1,000 entries under the "Calendar" tab. Under the "What's New" tab, there are new Earth science and climate change research stories and the latest GCMD data set descriptions. Students and teachers will also benefit from the "Learning Center" that can be found under the "Community" tab. Clicking on "FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions" at the bottom of the homepage, one can see answers to questions such as "Where can I find information about the ozone hole and ozone depletion?" Finally, the "Links" tab acts as a web-based search engine for easy access to over 2,500 Earth science web resources. For those who use the directory often, there is also a search box icon that permits direct access to the directory through a simple download to a user's web site. Users can also subscribe to an email notification on postings of new datasets for "Earth Science Topics" and "Geographic Locations" by clicking on "Subscribe" on the left tool bar. The directory content is shared and available as part of NASA's contribution to the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites' (CEOS) International Directory Network (IDN). The content is also made available to the National Spatial Data Infrastructure's (NSDI) Federal Geographic Data Committee's (FDGC) Clearinghouse. Questions can be directed to Lola Olsen, GCMD Project Manager, Code 902, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, Phone: 301-614- 5361, E-mail: olsen@gcmd.nasa.gov. To access the Global Change Master Directory, please visit http://globalchange.nasa.gov or http://gcmd.nasa.gov. For more information, please visit http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2004/ 0301gcmd.html. Contact: Rob Gutro Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD Phone: 301-285-4044 Read the original news release at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNews/2004/2004030116590.html . __________________________________________________________________________ SHOULD PUBLICLY FUNDED RESEARCH BE FREE AND AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC? TWO PROMINENT STANFORD SCIENTISTS OFFER THEIR VIEWS By Patrick Brown and Donald Kennedy Stanford University release 2 March 2004 Last October, a small, San Francisco-based organization known as the Public Library of Science (PloS) shook up the scientific publishing world when it launched a free, online journal called PloS Biology. According to the group's web site, the goal of PloS Biology is to make original, peer- reviewed research papers freely available online, giving anyone with access to the Internet freedom to "read, download, print, copy and redistribute any published article, or to use its contents in derivative works, such as databases, textbooks or other teaching materials." The PLoS board of directors promised to go head-to-head with other prestigious journals, such as Nature and Science, which require a subscription fee for Internet access, as well as written permission to reproduce any online content. Is "open access" science publishing the wave of the future, or will subscription-based research journals remain the dominant source for peer- reviewed science? In the following essays, two Stanford University scientists at the center of the controversy offer their perspectives: Patrick Brown, professor of biochemistry and co-founder of PloS; and Donald Kennedy, president emeritus of Stanford and editor-and-chief of the journal Science. Vantage point by Patrick Brown Last year, Harold Varmus, Michael Eisen and I founded a new nonprofit scientific publisher, the Public Library of Science (PLoS; www.plos.org). In October, PLoS began publishing its premier scientific journal, PLoS Biology. Everything PLoS publishes is immediately available online, free of charge, with no restrictions on access or use. Here's why. The public library, one of the greatest inventions of human civilization, has been waiting for the Internet. What seemed an impossible ideal in 1836, when Antonio Panizzi, librarian of the British Museum, wrote, "I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity,... of consulting the same authorities, ...as the richest man in the kingdoms," is today within reach. With the Internet, we have the means to make humanity's treasury of knowledge freely available to scientists, teachers, students and the public around the world. But it won't happen automatically. Our government spends more than $50 billion a year on nonclassified research. What this investment yields are new scientific discoveries and ideas, recorded in scientific publications. The authors of these research reports, the scientists, give them away to publishers, receiving in return only an audience for their work and the satisfaction of sharing their ideas and discoveries with the world. But if your mother learns she has breast cancer and desperately wants to find what researchers have discovered about her disease, or when your daughter in high school reads a story in the New York Times about the latest research on climate change and wants to see it with her own eyes, they face a perverse and unnecessary obstacle. They, and countless others around the world who would benefit from timely access to scientific and medical knowledge, cannot freely access the published results of research financed by their own tax dollars. An ever-growing online treasury of scientific and medical knowledge is open only to the fortunate few who have access to a major university library, or who are able to pay the exorbitant access fees charged by publishers who claim the research reports they publish as their private property. Even at Stanford, the restrictions on access prevent us from being able to search the entire corpus of scientific articles for particular terms, concepts, methods, data or images and retrieve the results--you can't "Google" the millions of scientific articles that have been published online! The traditional business model for scientific publishing, in which individual readers or institutions pay publishers for access to research articles, is a vestige of an era when printing articles in paper journals and transporting them in trucks and boats was the most efficient way to disseminate new scientific discoveries and ideas. When each copy cost money to print and ship, it made sense to pass these costs on to the recipients. But today, research articles are delivered much more efficiently and conveniently via the Internet. Here at Stanford, most students and faculty use the Internet to access the scientific journals to which Stanford subscribes. The Internet has transformed the economics of scientific publishing. The costs of the remaining essential functions of scientific publishers--orchestrating peer review and professional editing- -don't scale with the number of copies distributed, but with the number of articles reviewed and published. But the benefits--to the authors, the scientific community and the public--grow with the number of potential readers who can access the published work. Charging for access is therefore no longer economically necessary, rational or fair--it needlessly limits access to an essential public good. What's the alternative? Just as midwives can earn a living without claiming ownership or control of the babies they deliver, publishers can and should be paid a fair price by the sponsors of the research--a "midwife's fee"--for their role in orchestrating peer-review, editing and disseminating the results. But they should not be given the baby--our baby --to own and control. By paying publishers for each article at the time of its publication, instead of allowing them to own the article and charge for access, the doors to the online library could be opened to everyone. An "open access" system for scientific publishing will not entail new expenses, nor should it place a financial burden on the authors. The governmental and private institutions that finance the research already pay most of the costs of scientific publishing indirectly--through the funds they provide to research libraries. These same institutions would accomplish far more with the same money by phasing out subscription payments to restricted-access journals and, instead, paying for open- access publication of the research they support. An impressive and rapidly growing list of scientific organizations now advocates open-access publication. Yet, despite widespread support from scientists and the public, institutional inertia and fear of change delay its progress. We who benefit from access to great research libraries and generous public support of our research should remember Benjamin Franklin's words: "As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously." Patrick Brown, a Stanford professor of biochemistry and co-founder of the Public Library of Science, wishes to thank Mike Eisen and Sue Klapholz for their helpful suggestions for this article. Vantage point by Donald Kennedy For more than a century and a half, groups of scientists have formed organizations and started journals for the primary purpose of presenting the results of their work to one another and to a larger community of interested readers. That's why the journal, Science, was established in 1880, and why the nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has sponsored it. That's also why a group of distinguished biomedical scientists, including several of our Stanford colleagues, have joined together to develop a new publication called PLoS Biology. The plan for their new journal evolves from a strongly held view that the results of publicly supported research should be made freely available to all who wish to read them. The "open access" movement means that neither individuals nor institutions, like libraries, will pay to receive the journal through subscriptions to the print journal or site licenses for the online version. Since producing a journal requires money for editing, graphics, production and distribution, that has to come from somewhere, and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) plan is that the authors of published manuscripts will pay a fee, initially set at $1,500 per paper. That is a new and promising business plan, and the "open access" feature has been appealing to many authors and, needless to say, librarians and prospective users. Science and many other journals published by scientific societies use a different business model. Scientist-authors pay nothing to have their papers submitted, reviewed, edited and published, save when there are color figures. Neither do they pay to have their work covered in our news or "This Week in Science" section. Instead, the costs of publication are met from several sources: membership (all AAAS members receive Science, but their dues cover that and a variety of other AAAS programs); institutional subscriptions or site licenses for the online version at 1,000 institutions; and advertising. Thus our model should probably be called "open submission." I think it is a good thing that we will now have both models in play. PLoS has made an impressive start, with good papers, and there is every reason to wish them success. Interestingly, both ways of making scientific results available to the community are facing real challenges. Ours is that we are already making so much of our content free to readers online that there is a dwindling incentive to subscribe to the print version. This year, downloads of Science articles online at site-licensed institutions topped 10 million; many scientists in those institutions understandably ask: "If you can get it free, why pay for it?" In fact, our research content is widely available immediately and free to most practicing scientists in the world--either because their institutions have chosen to purchase access as a resource for its students and staff or, in the case of many developing countries, because we have provided it without cost ourselves. Since print advertising is a major part of our revenue stream and since it is linked to circulation, that's a problem for us. We also have to cover all fields of science, not just biomedicine. The author-pays model is plausible there, since National Institutes of Health (NIH) or Howard Hughes grants can easily cover the charge. In less populated and well-supported fields, such support is far less readily available. The PLoS model also faces some problems. As their journals receive more and more submissions, as they surely will, the author-pays model gets more difficult to sustain. That's because it costs almost as much to reject a paper responsibly as it does to accept one. The higher the rejection rate, the larger becomes the expense budget that must be met from the fixed revenue from author fees. Additional costs will be added if their journal attempts, as ours does, to present news of science and perspective pieces that interpret new findings for those outside the subdiscipline. Obviously, I hope that Science will continue to serve, as it has for many years, the world's largest general scientific society. Perhaps less obviously, I hope the PLoS experiment succeeds as well. The model they have developed deserves a serious chance, and they have been given a good leg up by the $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. If the author-pays model succeeds, it might even persuade other government research entities that are less well heeled than NIH to support publication--so that all fields of science would be eligible. I hope we will see a productive competition between the Science and PLoS publication models. But I know of no normative standard by which theirs or ours can lay special claim to the moral high ground. Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science magazine, is president emeritus and Bing Professor of Environmental Science, Emeritus, at Stanford University. Photos of Donald Kennedy and Patrick Brown are available online at http://newsphotos.stanford.edu (slugs: "plos_Brown" and "plos_Kennedy"). Information on the journals discussed is available at http://www.plos.org and http://www.sciencemag.org. Contact: Mark Shwartz, Stanford News Service Phone: 650-723-9296 E-mail: mshwartz@stanford.edu __________________________________________________________________________ NASA EMBARKS ON A SWEEPING AIRBORNE EXPEDITION NASA release 2004-076 3 March 2004 An international team of scientists from NASA and other research institutions embarked on a three-week expedition of discovery that will take them from the lush, dense rain forests of Central America to the frigid isolation of Antarctica. Armed with a unique radar instrument, the team will survey selected sites in Central America to help unearth archaeological secrets, and to preserve resources and biological and cultural diversity. Then the scientists are off to South America's Patagonia ice fields and Antarctica to conduct topographic surveys of ice to better gauge the effect of climate change. Despite these harsh, exotic locales, this expedition won't encounter a single snake or spider, and parkas are definitely not required. That's because the team's savvy tour guide is an all-weather imaging tool, the Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar, or Airsar, developed and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Carried aboard a NASA DC-8 laboratory, Airsar can penetrate clouds and also collect data at night. Its high-resolution sensors operate at multiple wavelengths, polarizations and in interferometric modes. This means they "see" beneath treetops, and through thin sand and dry snow pack. The sensors can produce topographic models. Drs. Ron Blom, Eric Rignot and Sassan Saatchi of JPL, are leaders of the campaign's terrestrial science, cryospheric, and ecology and conservation science teams, respectively. They left NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California on the DC-8 bound for southern Mexico and Central America. Rignot will continue on to Chile to survey Patagonian ice fields, and the Antarctic Peninsula. Much of the archaeological evidence needed to understand Pre-Columbian societies in Central America comes from identifying and documenting features remaining on the landscape. Difficult terrain and logistics have limited ground-data collection. Previous remote sensing techniques were unable to penetrate the forest canopy. Airsar is expected to detect features such as fortifications, causeways, walls and other evidence of advanced civilizations hidden beneath the forest. Images will shed insights into how modern humans interact with their landscape, how ancient peoples lived and what became of them. Airsar's archaeological applications were first demonstrated at Angkor, Cambodia, in 1996. It provided better detail than radar images obtained from a previous Space Shuttle flight. In South America and Antarctica, Airsar will collect imagery and high- precision topography data to help determine the contribution of Southern Hemisphere glaciers to sea level rise due to climate change. In Patagonia, a recent study by NASA and others found the contribution more than doubled from 1995 to 2000 compared to the previous 25 years. Airsar will make it possible to determine whether that trend is continuing or accelerating. Not much is known about the poorly mapped glaciers in the Antarctic Peninsula, an area 10 times larger than Patagonia. The area recently experienced rapid atmospheric warming, triggering a widespread retreat of floating ice shelves, reducing permanent snow cover and lengthening the melt season. Airsar will provide reliable information on ice shelf thickness to measure the contribution of the glaciers to sea level rise. It will also provide a precise topographic reference for comparison with satellite laser altimetry data from NASA's Icesat satellite and previous airborne data. AirSar's 2004 campaign is a collaboration of many U.S. and Central American institutions and scientists, including NASA; the National Science Foundation; the Smithsonian Institute; National Geographic; Conservation International; the Organization of Tropical Studies; the Central American Commission for Environment and Development; and the Inter-American Development Bank. For information about NASA and agency programs on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov. For information about Airsar and NASA's DC-8 on the Internet, visit http://airsar.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Research, respectively. JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Contacts: Alan Buis Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-0474 Elvia Thompson NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1696 Beth Hagenauer NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, CA Phone: 661-276-7960 Read the original news release at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNews/2004/2004030316593.html . __________________________________________________________________________ NASA GOES LUNAR: ROBOT CRAFT, HUMAN OUTPOST PLANS By Leonard David From Space.com 3 March 2004 NASA has begun to plot out its escape route from low Earth orbit, putting itself on a return journey back to the Moon, planting footprints on Mars, and heading off to other targets beyond. In his mid-January space pep rally, President George W. Bush charged the agency with signing up to a new astronautical agenda--part of which called for extended human missions to the Moon as early as 2015. Always keen on responding to a White House directive, NASA has done its bureaucratic best by creating Code T: The Office of Exploration Systems. Still in its organizational infancy--more a flurry of viewgraphs and line charts of authority than actually building things--the Exploration Systems Enterprise is rapidly taking charge of NASA's future vision. Not only NASA has the Moon in sight. Several commercial firms are ready to go the lunar distance too, perhaps giving the Moon the real business--as a tourist Mecca. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/moonbase_next_040303- 1.html. __________________________________________________________________________ TUMBLEWEED ROVER GOES ON A ROLL AT SOUTH POLE NASA release 2004-078 3 March 2004 A balloon-shaped robot explorer that one day could search for evidence that water existed on other planets has survived some of the most trying conditions on planet Earth during a 70-kilometer (40-mile), wind-driven trek across Antarctica. The tumbleweed rover, which is being developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, left the National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station on January 24, and spent the next eight days rolling across Antarctica's polar plateau. Along the way, the beach ball shaped device, roughly six feet in diameter, used the global Iridium satellite network to send information on its position, the surrounding air temperature, pressure, humidity, and light intensity to a ground station at JPL. The test was designed to confirm the rover's long-term durability in an extremely cold environment, with an eye toward eventually using the devices to explore the martian polar caps and other planets in the solar system. The final tumbleweed rover is envisioned as a lightweight, roughly 88- pound device that can serve multiple roles as an independent robotic explorer. The rover's design can allow it to act in turn as a parachute while descending through an atmosphere; an air bag on landing; and, ultimately, as an unmanned vehicle equipped with a package of scientific instruments. The tumbleweed rover is based on concepts going back to the 1970's and has been pursued by several investigators at JPL. Dr. Alberto Behar, a robotics researcher in the robotic vehicles group recently deployed this prototype at the South Pole. "We are testing a new mode of rover transportation that uses the available environmental resources to give us an added edge to cover more ground using fewer on-board resources," said Dr. Behar. "This gives us the ability to use the precious cargo (on Earth) or payload (in space) mass for more applicable science instrumentation." Even though the average external temperature during the rover's deployment was recorded to be on average -30 degrees Celsius or -22 degrees Fahrenheit, the rover kept its internal instrument payload at an average temperature of roughly 30 degrees Celsius or 86 degrees Fahrenheit. The rover was able to stay warm by self-heating due to running electronics and an internal air pump. The ultra-durable ball reached speeds of 16 kilometers per hour (10 miles per hour) over the Antarctic ice cap, and traveled at an average speed of about 6 kilometers per hour (3.7 miles per hour). The winds at the South Pole were unusually low during the test. As a result, there were several periods during its deployment when the rover did not move at all. Even taking those lulls into account, the rover managed an average speed of 1.3 kilometers per hour (0.8 miles per hour) over the course of the deployment. Behar said the rover's design is especially well suited for polar missions to use instrument packages to look for water beneath a surface desert or an ice sheet, a task that cannot be done accurately from orbit. Plans to construct the next generation tumbleweed rover are already underway at JPL. Future refinements of the design are likely to focus on reducing the rover's weight and rolling resistance to reduce the minimum winds needed to enable it to travel farther and the adaptation of the payload to include a ground-penetrating radar to conduct terrain and ice surveys. Behar says he hopes an updated version of the rover will be deployed again later this year, and the design may one day find itself rolling on the polar icecaps of Mars. The tumbleweed rover project is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was supported jointly by NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC and the National Science Foundation. For more information on the tumbleweed rover visit http://robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/~behar/southpoletw.htm. For more information on the National Science Foundation visit http://www.nsf.gov. Contacts: Natalie Godwin Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-0850 Peter West National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA Phone: 703-292-8070 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article861.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/antarctic-04c.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/tumbleweed_rover_rolls.html __________________________________________________________________________ NASA RESEARCH SHOWS HEAVY SMOKE "CHOKES" CLOUDS NASA release 2004-081 4 March 2004 Using data from NASA's Aqua satellite, agency scientists found heavy smoke from burning vegetation inhibits cloud formation. The research suggests the cooling of global climate by pollutant particles, called "aerosols," may be smaller than previously estimated. During the August-October 2002 burning season in South America's Amazon River basin, scientists observed cloud cover decreased from about 40 percent in clean-air conditions to zero in smoky air. Until recently, scientists thought aerosols such as smoke particles mainly served to cool the planet by shading the surface, either directly, by reflecting sunlight back toward space, or indirectly, by making clouds more reflective. Certain aerosols make clouds' droplets smaller and more numerous, thereby making the clouds more reflective while reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the surface. However, this new study proves smoke aerosols have a "semi- direct" effect on climate, causing a reduction in cloud cover and warming the surface. In the morning, smoke absorbs incoming solar radiation and heats the atmosphere while cooling the surface. Since there is less upward transport of warmth and moisture in such conditions, clouds are less likely to form. Then, in the afternoon, since there is less cloud cover, more sunlight passes through the atmosphere and warms the surface. "This instantaneous warming is important and can dramatically affect the people and the Amazonian ecosystem," said Ilan Koren, research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. Koren is lead author of a paper in the current issue of Science. Using Aqua data, Koren and his NASA co-authors measured the total amount of light reflected through the top of the atmosphere. From those data they determined how much area was covered by clouds and how much by smoke. They also estimated the smoke's "optical thickness," a measure of how much sunlight the smoke prevented from traveling down through a column of atmosphere. The team found the smoke and clouds together would ordinarily reflect solar energy equal to one 28-watt light bulb per square meter back up into space (i.e., a cooling effect). With the reduction in cloud cover, however, solar energy equal to one eight-watt light bulb per square meter is absorbed within Earth's climate system (i.e., a warming effect). The team consulted other weather data to make sure the differences in cloud patterns were not due to regional differences in meteorology. Once team members proved the meteorological conditions were the same in the smoky regions as they were in the cloudy regions, they knew the smoke had to be the reason average cloud cover dropped from 40 percent to zero in the presence of heavy smoke. "We used to think of smoke mainly as a reflector, reflecting sunlight back to space, but here we show that, due to absorption, it chokes off cloud formation," Koren said. According to Koren, smoke inhibition of cloud formation is not unique to the Amazon area. His team has seen similar examples in other parts of the world, including over parts of Africa during the burning season, and over Canada during major boreal forest wildfires. When added up over the entire globe, the warming influence of smoke and other absorbing aerosols suggests the global cooling influence of these particles is much smaller than current models predict. Smoke and aerosol inhibition of cloud formation was first proposed in two previous NASA studies based upon results of computer model experiments. However, this study documents the first time this effect of smoke on clouds has been measured in Earth's environment. The research was funded by NASA's Earth Science Enterprise. The Enterprise is dedicated to understanding the Earth as an integrated system and applying Earth system science to improve predication of climate, weather and natural hazards using the unique vantage point of space. For information about NASA and agency programs on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov. For more information about this research and images on the Internet, visit http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2004/0226smokeclouds.html or http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNews/2004/2004030416592.html . Contacts: David E. Steitz NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1730 Rob Gutro NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD Phone: 301-286-4044 An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/smoke_chokes_clouds.html. __________________________________________________________________________ NO "SHOWSTOPPERS" FOR HUMANS ON MARS From Reuters and CNN 4 March 2004 Experts in the effects of space travel on the human body told a presidential commission on Wednesday that there were challenges but no "showstoppers" in building a permanent moon base, then sending astronauts to Mars. Aerospace medical experts Stanley Mohler and Mary Ann Frey, both longtime researchers in the field, identified a number of health risks future astronauts could face, from radiation poisoning to meteoroid collisions, but said NASA was developing plans for every known contingency. "From the medical standpoint, there is further research to be done, but we don't see any showstoppers out there," Mohler told the President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond. Read the full article at http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/03/04/space.bases.reut/index.html. __________________________________________________________________________ ASTEROID BILL PASSES From Universe Today 4 March 2004 The U.S. House of Representatives approved bill HR 912, which awards amateur astronomers who discover potential Earth-crossing asteroids up to $3,000. One award will be given to the astronomer who discovers the brightest object, and another to the astronomer who makes the biggest scientific contribution to Minor Planet Center's mission of cataloguing near-Earth asteroids. It's estimated that there are between 900 and 1,100 objects larger than 1 km--of which, 700 have already been tracked. Read the full article at http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/bill_hr_912_passes.html. Read the House of Representatives release at http://www.house.gov/science/press/108/108-194.htm. An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/03/03/us.asteroid.finder.ap/index.html. __________________________________________________________________________ NEW ETHIOPIAN FOSSILS ARE FROM 6-MILLION-YEAR-OLD HOMINID LIVING JUST AFTER SPLIT FROM CHIMPANZEES By Robert Sanders University of California, Berkeley release 4 March 2004 Paleoanthropologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History have found more fossils of a nearly 6- million-year-old human ancestor first reported three years ago, cementing its importance as the earliest hominid to appear after the human line diverged from the line leading to modern chimpanzees. When first reported in the journal Nature in 2001, the hominid was named Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba, a subspecies of a younger hominid, Ardipithecus ramidus, also from the Middle Awash region of Ethiopia. The new fossils--six teeth-- provide enough evidence to designate the hominid a distinct species, Ardipithecus kadabba, rather than a subspecies of Ardipithecus ramidus. "Ardipithecus kadabba may also represent the first species on the human branch of the family tree just after the evolutionary split between lines leading to modern chimpanzees and humans," said Yohannes Haile-Selassie, curator and head of physical anthropology at the Cleveland museum. Haile-Selassie and coauthors Tim White of UC Berkeley and Gen Suwa of the University Museum at the University of Tokyo report their fossil finds in the March 5 issue of the journal Science. Between 1997 and 2000, Haile- Selassie excavated 11 hominid fossils from at least five individuals who once lived in a wooded environment, now a dry, rocky area in the Afar rift of Ethiopia's Middle Awash region. He and White, along with geologist Giday WoldeGabriel of Los Alamos National Laboratory, interpreted the bones as those of a bipedal hominid about the size of a chimpanzee living between 5.2 and 5.8 million years ago. The six new teeth were found during a one-month excavation in 2002 at one site, Asa Koma ("Red Hill") Locality 3, that yielded a fragment of an arm bone and an isolated tooth during the earlier surveys. Asa Koma is located along the western margin of the Middle Awash study area about 180 miles northeast of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. The teeth sieved from the sediments include an upper canine, premolars from both jaws, and upper molars. All of these were from deposits sandwiched between volcanic horizons dated by the argon/argon method to between 5.54 and 5.77 million years. The dating work was done at the Berkeley Geochronology Center by Paul Renne, adjunct professor of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley. Though the scientists now have only 17 specimens, mostly teeth, from this hominid, the fossils nevertheless tell much about how these creatures lived. The teeth, in particular, are critical in differentiating between ape and human fossils. "In all the great apes--and that includes fossil and modern--the large, tusk-like, projecting, shearing canine teeth are used as weapons, and in most of them the main use is in males fighting with other males for access to estrus females," White said. "The earliest hominids lack that adaptation, showing much smaller canines that are not at all chimpanzee- like." In the apes, the upper canine is continually honed against the lower third premolar to keep it sharp. Human canines lack that function, White said. The implication of this dental difference is that the newly evolved hominids were living in a radically different, less competitive social structure than seen in modern chimps, he said. Anthropologist Owen Lovejoy proposed in the 1980s that reduced canines among early hominids showed that males had become more involved in the parenting process, and that the carrying of infants and food was strong selective pressure toward a musculoskeletal system adapted to walking on two legs. The new fossils show the most primitive canines ever found among hominids. "We see wear facets on the premolar in Ardipithecus kadabba which A. ramidus doesn't have," Haile-Selassie said. "We don't really know whether some A. kadabba individuals had functional honing--we just have one sample here--but we're saying that the primitive shape and the presence of this facet on the upper canine and the lower premolar distinguishes A. ramidus from A. kadabba, so that it becomes a species of its own." The researchers note two other sites that have yielded fossil hominids from the same 5- to 6-million-year period. One group of fossils found in 2002 in Chad has been named Sahelanthropus tchadensis, while others found at a Kenyan site in 2000 have been dubbed Orrorin tugenensis. All of these fossils are sufficiently similar that they should be included in the same genus as Ardipithecus kadbba, the team argues. The Middle Awash field work was funded by the National Science Foundation and The Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Additional information: Background information on Ardipithecus kadabba from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History http://www.cmnh.org/kadabba/temporarybackgrounder.htm Watch a video of the dig site and the fossils discovered there (Real Media) http://www.cmnh.org/kadabba/yhailesevideo.smil Read the original news release at http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/03/04_Akadab.shtml. An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/human-04e.html. Science articles are available at: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/303/5663/1478 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/303/5663/1503 __________________________________________________________________________ FIRST SILICATE STARDUST FOUND IN A METEORITE By Linda Sage Washington University release 4 March 2004 Ann Nguyen chose a risky project for her graduate studies at Washington University in St. Louis. A university team had already sifted through 100,000 grains from a meteorite to look for a particular type of stardust- -without success. In 2000, Nguyen decided to try again. About 59,000 grains later, her gutsy decision paid off. In the March 5 issue of Science, Nguyen and her advisor, Ernst K. Zinner, Ph.D., research professor of physics and of earth and planetary sciences, both in Arts & Sciences, describe nine specks of silicate stardust--presolar silicate grains--from one of the most primitive meteorites known. "Finding presolar silicates in a meteorite tells us that the solar system formed from gas and dust, some of which never got very hot, rather than from a hot solar nebula," Zinner says. "Analyzing such grains provides information about their stellar sources, nuclear processes in stars, and the physical and chemical compositions of stellar atmospheres." In 1987, Zinner and colleagues at Washington University and a group of scientists at the University of Chicago found the first stardust in a meteorite. Those presolar grains were specks of diamond and silicon carbide. Although other types have since been discovered in meteorites, none were made of silicate, a compound of silicon, oxygen and other elements such as magnesium and iron. "This was quite a mystery because we know, from astronomical spectra, that silicate grains appear to be the most abundant type of oxygen-rich grain made in stars," Nguyen says. "But until now, presolar silicate grains have been isolated only from samples of interplanetary dust particles from comets." Our solar system formed from a cloud of gas and dust that were spewed into space by exploding red giants and supernovae. Some of this dust formed asteroids, and meteorites are fragments knocked off asteroids. Most of the particles in meteorites resemble each other because dust from different stars became homogenized in the inferno that shaped the solar system. Pure samples of a few stars became trapped deep inside some meteorites, however. Those grains that are oxygen-rich can be recognized by their unusual ratios of oxygen isotopes. Nguyen, a graduate student in earth and planetary sciences, analyzed about 59,000 grains from Acfer 094, a meteorite that was found in the Sahara in 1990. She separated the grains in water instead of with harsh chemicals, which can destroy silicates. She also used a new type of ion probe called the NanoSIMS (Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer), which can resolve objects smaller than a micrometer (one millionth of a meter). Zinner and Frank Stadermann, Ph.D., senior research scientist in the Laboratory for Space Sciences at the university, helped design and test the NanoSIMS, which is made by CAMECA in Paris. At a cost of $2 million, Washington University acquired the first instrument in the world in 2001. Ion probes direct a beam of ions onto one spot on a sample. The beam dislodges some of the sample's own atoms, some of which become ionized. This secondary beam of ions enters a mass spectrometer that is set to detect a particular isotope. Thus, ion probes can identify grains that have an unusually high or low proportion of that isotope. Unlike other ion probes, however, the NanoSIMS can detect five different isotopes simultaneously. The beam can also travel automatically from spot to spot so that many hundreds or thousands of grains can be analyzed in one experimental setup. "The NanoSIMS was essential for this discovery," Zinner says. "These presolar silicate grains are very small — only a fraction of a micrometer. The instrument's high spatial resolution and high sensitivity made these measurements possible." Using a primary beam of cesium ions, Nguyen painstakingly measured the amounts of three oxygen isotopes--16O, 17O and 18O--in each of the many grains she studied. Nine grains, with diameters from 0.1 to 0.5 micrometers, had unusual oxygen isotope ratios and were highly enriched in silicon. These presolar silicate grains fell into four groups. Five grains were enriched in 17O and slightly depleted in 18O, suggesting that deep mixing in red giant or asymptotic giant branch stars was responsible for their oxygen isotopic compositions. One grain was very depleted in 18O and therefore was likely produced in a low-mass star when surface material descended into areas hot enough to support nuclear reactions. Another was enriched in 16O, which is typical of grains from stars that contain fewer elements heavier than helium than does our sun. The final two grains were enriched in both 17O and 18O and so could have come from supernovae or stars that are more enriched in elements heavier than helium compared with our sun. By obtaining energy dispersive x-ray spectra, Nguyen determined the likely chemical composition of six of the presolar grains. There appear to be two olivines and two pyroxenes, which contain mostly oxygen, magnesium, iron and silicon but in differing ratios. The fifth is an aluminum-rich silicate, and the sixth is enriched in oxygen and iron and could be glass with embedded metal and sulfides. The preponderance of iron-rich grains is surprising, Nguyen says, because astronomical spectra have detected more magnesium-rich grains than iron- rich grains in the atmospheres around stars. "It could be that iron was incorporated into these grains when the solar system was being formed," she explains. This detailed information about stardust proves that space science can be done in the laboratory, Zinner says. "Analyzing these small specks can give us information, such as detailed isotopic ratios, that cannot be obtained by the traditional techniques of astronomy," he adds. Nguyen now plans to look at the ratios of silicon and magnesium isotopes in the nine grains. She also wants to analyze other types of meteorites. "Acfer 094 is one of the most primitive meteorites that has been found," she says. "So we would expect it to have the greatest abundance of presolar grains. By looking at meteorites that have undergone more processing we can learn more about the events that can destroy those grains." Read the original news release at http://news- info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/737.html. The Science article is available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/303/5663/1496. An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/silicate_found_meteorite.html. __________________________________________________________________________ MESSAGES FROM MARS: NEW FINDINGS CHANGE FOCUS OF FUTURE EXPLORATION By Leonard David From Space.com 5 March 2004 The early eye-opening results from NASA's Opportunity Mars rover mission are helping shape the scope, direction, and timing of future robotic missions to the red planet--and how soon humans will be Mars bound. The tell-tale clues that Meridiani Planum was water soaked at one time have opened the floodgates of discussion in how best to study Mars in ever- greater detail, as well as sharpen our search for past and even present life. Already on the books is a potent flotilla of NASA Mars craft, such as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for 2005, the Phoenix Mars lander in 2007, and a Mars Science Laboratory rover for 2009. But thanks to glimpses provided courtesy of both Spirit and Opportunity, Mars never looked better. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_nextmissions_040305-1.html. __________________________________________________________________________ THE FUNGI REVIVED DAMAGED EARTH From Astrobiology Magazine Based on Lund University report 7 March 2004 The catastrophe that extinguished the dinosaurs and other animal species, 65 million years ago also brought dramatic changes to the vegetation. In a study presented in latest issue of the journal Science, the paleontologists Vivi Vajda from the University of Lund, Sweden and Stephen McLoughlin from the Queensland University of Technology, Australia have described what happened to the vegetation month by month. They depict a world in darkness where the fungi had taken over. It's known that an asteroid hit the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico at the end of the Cretaceous Period. It left a 180 km wide crater and from the impact site tsunamis developed and the Caribbean region was buried in ash and other debris. The consequences of the asteroid impact were global. Vajda and her colleagues have previously studied the broad-scale changes in the New Zealand vegetation following the impact, but now they have dramatically improved our view of the timing of events. At the end of the Cretaceous the vegetation on New Zealand was dominated by conifers and flowering plants. Many of these species disappeared suddenly at the end of the Period and were instead replaced by fungal spores and fungal threads preserved in a four millimeter thick layer of coal. The layer coincides with fallout of iridium, an element rare in Earth's crust but which abounds in asteroids. "We have managed to reconstruct the event month by month, with a very high time resolution," says Vivi Vajda. "During a very short period - from between a few months to a couple of years--the fungi and other saprophytes which live on dead organisms must have been the dominating life form on Earth. Atmospheric dust blocked the sunlight and led to the death of plants that are dependent on photosynthesis." The layer of fossil fungi is followed by a 60 cm thick interval containing traces of the recovery flora, which re-established relatively quickly, ground ferns at first, followed after decades to hundreds of years by more diverse, woody vegetation. A similar layer of fungi and algae is known from a previous catastrophe which happened 251 million years ago at the Permian-Triassic boundary. This was an even greater mass extinction: about 90% of the existing species disappeared. Research will now focus on whether the similar biological signatures at these mass extinctions reflect similar causal mechanisms. As Clark Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder introduced in Astrobiology Magazine's "Great Impact Debates": "Even the catastrophic influence of asteroids has been mainly beneficial to mankind. We mammals have definitely benefited from the evolutionary competition unleashed 65 million years ago when the Chicxulub impact caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K/T) mass extinction of dinosaurs and other dominant species. My understanding of the post-Cambrian (last ~600 million years) evolution of life on this planet is that evolution has been profoundly influenced by major epochs of sudden upheaval due to mass extinctions." Peter Ward, a paleontologist at the University of Washington, put an evolutionary perspective on asteroid risks, "The 1980 discovery that a mass extinction had been caused by an asteroid impact was revolutionary. Questions then arose regarding the frequency of asteroid and comet impacts on Earth. By examining the size and frequency of meteor impact craters, Gene Shoemaker and others calculated that we might expect a K/T-sized impact every 100 million years. This frequency roughly fits the facts on Earth: there have been five major extinctions in the past 500 million years. But the K/T extinction is the only one undoubtedly caused by an impact. And a salient fact remains--the K/T asteroid came nowhere near wiping out all animals and plant species. We took this hit, reeled a bit, and got back to business relatively quickly." "While such events have wiped out many species of life," said Chapman, "they have provided the environmental niches for evolutionary change. As the late Stephen Jay Gould argued, evolution favors the more randomly selected species that are able to adapt to unexpected sudden changes rather than those that slowly evolve in competition with their competitors in a nearly constant world." Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article864.html. Read the University of Lund release (in Swedish) at http://www.lu.se/info/pm/677_pressm.html/. The Science article is available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/303/5663/1489. An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/life-04x.html. __________________________________________________________________________ NASA CREATES PORTRAIT OF LIFE AND DEATH IN THE UNIVERSE NASA release 2004-082 8 March 2004 In a small galaxy lies a luminous cloud of gas and dust, called a nebula, which houses a family of newborn stars. If not for the death of a massive star millions of years ago, this stellar nursery never would have formed. The nebula, Henize 2006, and the remnants of the exploding star that created it, is pictured in superb detail in a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Henize 206 sits just outside our own galaxy, the Milky Way, in a satellite galaxy 163,000 light-years away called the Large Magellanic Cloud. It is home to hundreds and possibly thousands of stars, ranging in age from two to 10 million years old. "The image is a wonderful example of the cycle of birth and death that gives rise to stars throughout the universe," said Dr. Varoujan Gorjian, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, CA, and principal investigator for the latest observation. As in other stellar nurseries, the stars were created when a dying star, or supernova, exploded, shooting shock waves through clouds of cosmic gas and dust. The gas and dust were subsequently compressed, gravity kicked in, and stars were born. Eventually, some of the stars will die in a fiery blast, triggering another cycle of birth and death. This recycling of stellar dust and gas occurs across the universe. Earth's own sun descended from multiple generations of stars. The new Spitzer picture provides a detailed snapshot of this universal phenomenon. By imaging Henize 206 in the infrared, Spitzer was able to see through blankets of dust that dominate visible light views. The resulting false-color image shows embedded young stars as bright white spots, and surrounding gas and dust in blue, green and red. Also revealed is a ring of green gas, which is the wake of the ancient supernova's explosion. "Before Spitzer, we were only seeing tantalizing hints of the newborn stars peeking through shrouds of dust," Gorjian said. These observations provide astronomers with a laboratory for understanding the early universe, stellar birth and death cycles. Unlike large galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud has a quirk. The gas permeating it contains roughly 20 to 50 percent of the heavier elements, such as iron, possessed by the sun and gas clouds in the Milky Way. This low- metallicity state approximates the early universe, allowing astronomers to catch a glimpse of what stellar life was like billions of years ago, when heavy metals were scarce. Henize 206 was first catalogued in the early 1950s by Dr. Karl Henize (pronounced Hen-eyes), an astronomer who became a NASA astronaut. He flew aboard the Challenger Space Shuttle in 1985. He died in 1993 at age 66 while climbing Mount Everest. Launched on August 25, 2003, from Cape Canaveral, FL, the Spitzer Space Telescope is the fourth of NASA's Great Observatories. The program includes the Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory and Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. JPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. For information about NASA and agency exploration programs on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov. The Spitzer picture is available on the Internet at http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu and http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov. For information about the Spitzer Space Telescope on the Internet, visit http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu. Contacts: Donald Savage NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1547 Whitney Clavin Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-4673 __________________________________________________________________________ OXYGEN IN THE TERRESTRIAL PLANETS Workshop announcement 4 March 2004 The second announcement for the Oxygen in the Terrestrial Planets workshop (Santa Fe, New Mexico, July 20-23, 2004) is now available on the meeting web site (http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/otp2004/). The announcement includes details regarding the program, topics for discussion, and guidelines for abstract submission. The meeting registration and hotel reservation forms are also available. __________________________________________________________________________ NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/ 2 March 2004 Astrobiology and planetary engineering articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles1.html L. David, 2004. Messages from Mars: new findings change focus of future exploration. Space.com. Human space exploration articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles3.html L. David, 2004. NASA goes lunar: robot craft, human outpost plans. Space.com. Reuters, 2004. No "showstoppers" for humans on Mars. CNN. SETI articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles4.html Astrobiology Magazine, 2004. Questioning the prime directive. Astrobiology Magazine. Evolution (biological, chemical and cosmological) articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles5.html Associated Press, 2004. Report says asteroid did not kill dinosaurs. Space.com. L. Sage, 2004. Silicate found in a meteorite. Universe Today. University of Lund, 2004. The fungi revived damaged Earth. Astrobiology Magazine. V. Vajda and S. McLoughlin, 2004. Fungal proliferation at the Cretaceous- Tertiary boundary. Science, 303(5663):1489. Planetary protection articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles6.html Universe Today, 2004. Asteroid bill passes. Universe Today. Extrasolar planets articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles7.html R. R. Britt, 2004. Hidden worlds: dusty stars shroud newborn planets. Space.com. __________________________________________________________________________ CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS NASA/JPL release 26 February - 3 March 2004 The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Goldstone tracking station on Wednesday, March 3. 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://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=Rx8L6PDM905O-3BCLCXxIg. C43 activities continued this week with a Composite InfraRed Spectrometer mirror calibration, RADAR Instrument Expanded Block (IEB) exercise, Optical Navigation SSR IEB load, Cassini Plasma Spectrometer power on/off and high voltage IEB trigger Immediate/Delayed Action Program uplink, Radio and Plasma Wave Science solar wind observation, Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) Saturn Approach movie, and spacecraft periodic engineering maintenance. The prime activity this week was execution of the Huygens Probe Relay Critical Sequence demonstration. Prior to the event, all instruments were either turned off or muted and placed in sleep. 24-hour coverage was provided for the four days of the demonstration by the Goldstone, Madrid, and Canberra DSN complexes. Personnel from the Spacecraft Operations Office, Mission Support and Services Office, Probe, and the Instrument Operations Distributed Operations Coordinator supported the exercise. The activity began with uplink of sequences to the Solid State Recorder, and culminated in the delivery of probe data to the Huygens Project Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany. The demonstration included the spacecraft turning to the Probe Relay attitude, recording approximately six hours of simulated Probe data, then turning back to Earth to downlink the Probe data at the expected mission rates to the 70 meter DSN station at Goldstone, California. In the last week, 185 ISS images were acquired and distributed before the instrument went to sleep for the Probe demonstration. So far in Approach Science, 994 ISS images have been acquired. Of those, 84 are optical navigation images. The C44 Preliminary Sequence Integration and Validation Sequence Change Request approval meeting was held this week. Preliminary and official port 2 deliveries were made for Science Operations Plan (SOP) Implementation of tour sequences S23 and S24. A wrap-up/program briefing/waiver disposition meeting was held for SOP Update of S01, the first tour sequence. Sequence generation will begin next week. Science Planning launched a series of Tour Science Plan presentations to the flight team with an historical overview of the timeline and process that led to selection of the current baseline tour, and how that tour would then be segmented and integrated with detailed science requests from which the tour sequences would be developed. Members of Program Science and SCO met to discuss G ring brightness in the star tracker during the ascending ring plane crossing just prior to Saturn Orbit Insertion. Further dialogues will be held with some ring scientists to obtain information on G ring brightness, and some G ring scientific papers were identified for SCO to reference. Another topic discussed involved small satellites, 3.5 to 7 km diameter, that might be confused as stars. The Voyager upper limit for this region was 10 km. Hubble images can detect moonlets down to 3 km, but no Hubble searches in the vicinity of the G ring have been done. SCO delivered ground software for Maneuver Automation Software (MAS) version 4.3. The MAS tool takes the Navigation solution for a trajectory correction maneuver and builds a sequence ready for uplink to the spacecraft in less than 30 minutes. Additional Delivery Coordination meetings were held for the Navigation T1.1 and Mission Sequence Subsystem D10.2 software. Outreach personnel participated in a career day at San Dimas High School in San Dimas, California. Eighty students attended a two-hour presentation and discussion. The "Where is Cassini Now?" page of the Cassini web site has been updated to reflect the spacecraft's pending arrival at Saturn. The new page can be viewed at: http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=DtRGJfomHnlO-3BCLCXxIg. The release of the latest Saturn image resulted in the largest traffic volume ever seen on the Cassini home page. The previous high was the Astronomy Picture of the day on December 10 with ~638,000 requests, 3.8 gigabytes of information transferred, ~14,000 unique visitors and 38,000 pages. The February 27th release put that to shame with 1,813,319 requests, 12.71 gigabytes of information transferred, 21,153 unique visitors and 105,528 pages. Overall, traffic to the Cassini site has increased since the Mars rover landings, roughly quadrupling from previous months' averages. The web site can be located at http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=N8negYV7dgJO-3BCLCXxIg. MSNBC recently reported on an update to a Cassini web site for children. With the Cassini spacecraft sending regular postcards from Saturn and its surroundings, a scientific storyteller sent a timely reminder regarding NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Cassini children's tale. The site is located at http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=c5Q7i4Gopv9O-3BCLCXxIg. An additional MSNBC report described Saturn and its rings taking center stage in the Cassini spacecraft's latest picture, snapped from 69.4 million kilometers away (http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=dWjleVDj485O- 3BCLCXxIg). 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. __________________________________________________________________________ VOLCANIC ROCK IN MARS' GUSEV CRATER HINTS AT PAST WATER NASA/JPL release 2004-079 5 March 2004 NASA's Spirit has found hints of a water history in a rock at Mars' Gusev Crater, but it is a very different type of rock than those in which NASA's Opportunity found clues to a wet past on the opposite side of the planet. A dark volcanic rock dubbed "Humphrey," about 60 centimeters (2 feet) tall, shows bright material in interior crevices and cracks that looks like minerals crystallized out of water, Dr. Ray Arvidson of Washington University, St. Louis, reported at a NASA news briefing today at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. He is the deputy principal investigator for the rovers' science instruments. "If we found this rock on Earth, we would say it is a volcanic rock that had a little fluid moving through it," Arvidson said. If this interpretation is correct, the fluid--water with minerals dissolved in it --may have been carried in the original magma that formed the rock or may have interacted with the rock later, he said. The clues appear in an interior exposure of "Humphrey" where Spirit's rock abrasion tool scraped away the rock's surface to a depth of 2 millimeters (0.08 inch). To gain more confidence that the bright material seen in cracks and pores is not dust that has intruded from the surface over the millenia, scientists intend to have Spirit grind more deeply into another dark rock, not yet selected. The bright material is not debris from the grinding process, said Stephen Gorevan of Honeybee Robotics, New York, lead scientist for the abrasion tool. The amount of water suggested by the possible crystals in "Humphrey" is far less than what is indicated by the minerals and structures that Opportunity has revealed in rocks at Meridiani. Rover scientists announced the Opportunity findings earlier this week. "Mars is a diverse planet," Arvidson said today. Spirit is headed toward a crater nicknamed "Bonneville," about 150 meters (500 feet) in diameter, where scientists hope to see rocks from beneath the region's surface volcanic layer. Those rocks may tell yet a different story from an earlier era of Gusev Crater's past. At Meridiani Planum, Opportunity has finished taking a set of 114 microscope images of a rock called "Last Chance" to examine details of the rock's layering structure. The sequence required more than 400 commands and more than 200 positions of Opportunity's robotic arm, said Opportunity Mission Manager Matt Wallace of JPL. "Our activities are getting increasingly complex," he noted. Spirit completed its 60th martian day, or sol, at Gusev late Thursday. Opportunity completed its 40th sol at Meridiani at 9:32 AM Friday, PST. "Between the two rovers, we've had a terrific 100 days on Mars. This last week has been particularly exciting," Wallace said. A new color view, combining several frames from Opportunity's panoramic camera, adds information about the rover's likely destination after finishing work in and around the small crater where it landed. From partway up the inner slope of that 22-meter-diameter (72-foot-diameter) crater, the rover has an improved view of a crater nicknamed "Endurance," about 10 times as big and about 700 meters (2,300 feet) to the east. "We can see features in the rim, maybe streaks, maybe layers," said Dr. Jim Bell of Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, lead scientist for both rovers' panoramic cameras. The same new view across the flat plain of Meridiani also shows Opportunity's jettisoned heat shield, a trail of marks left by the airbag bounces and a solitary dark rock about 40 centimeters (16 inches) across. Bell said, "Not only did we get incredibly lucky to get this hole-in-one in the crater, but on the way into the crater we hit with the airbags the only rock around." Both rovers carry magnets supplied by Denmark for experiments to analyze martian dust. Dust covers much of Mars' surface and hangs in the atmosphere, occasionally rising into giant dust storms. One of the magnets is designed to exclude any magnetic dust particles from landing in the center of a target area. During Spirit's time on Mars, dust has accumulated on other parts of the target while the center has remained "probably the cleanest area anywhere on the surface of the rover," said Dr. Morten Madsen, science team member from the Center for Planetary Science, Copenhagen, Denmark. "Most, if not all of the dust particles in the martian atmosphere are magnetic," Madsen said. Another of the magnets is within reach of the rover's robotic arm. Examination of dust on the target by instruments on the end of the arm will soon yield further information about the composition of the dust, he said. 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. Images and additional information about the project are available from JPL at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and from Cornell University at http://athena.cornell.edu. Daily Mars Rover updates are available at: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status_opportunity.html http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status_spirit.html Contacts: Guy Webster Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-5011 Donald Savage NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1547 Additional article on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article854.html http://www.astrobio.net/news/article856.html http://www.astrobio.net/news/article858.html http://www.astrobio.net/news/article859.html http://www.astrobio.net/news/article863.html http://www.astrobio.net/news/article865.html http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/02/27/mars.sunset.ap/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/03/02/mars.findings/index.html http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/02mar_meridianiwater.htm http://www.national-academies.org/headlines#sh0303 http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_science_040227.html http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/opportunity_news_040302.html http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/marswater_chemistry_040303.html http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/opportunity_next_040304.html http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/rat_circles_040305.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-04zzr.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-04zzs.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-04zzu.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-04zzv.html http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/040302marswater.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/sulfur_mars_life.html __________________________________________________________________________ MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 26 February - 3 March 2004 The following new images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are now available. Middle-Latitude Craters (Released 26 February 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=OJWlS3VC7V9O-3BCLCXxIg Boulder Tracks (Released 27 February 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=5w6R6SE7BQ9O-3BCLCXxIg West Elysium Planitia Crater (Released 28 February 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=47BSuoXjukZO-3BCLCXxIg Olympian Lava Channels (Released 29 February 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=F8qCf5AkYMBO-3BCLCXxIg Knob in Propontis (Released 01 March 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=ZUWGTgxSk6JO-3BCLCXxIg Mesa in Capri Chasm (Released 02 March 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=dc1vpO0jBlxO-3BCLCXxIg North Polar Scarp (Released 03 March 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=1mRnItflpk9O-3BCLCXxIg All of the Mars Global Surveyor images are archived at http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=bDyw_AOZrNdO-3BCLCXxIg. Mars Global Surveyor was launched in November 1996 and has been in Mars orbit since September 1997. It began its primary mapping mission on March 8, 1999. Mars Global Surveyor is the first mission in a long-term program of Mars exploration known as the Mars Surveyor Program that is managed by JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) and the California Institute of Technology built the MOC using spare hardware from the Mars Observer mission. MSSS operates the camera from its facilities in San Diego, CA. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars Surveyor Operations Project operates the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft with its industrial partner, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, from facilities in Pasadena, CA and Denver, CO. __________________________________________________________________________ MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release 1-5 March 2004 THEMIS Images as Art #21 (Released 1 March 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=GNB6aw7_SCtO-3BCLCXxIg THEMIS Images as Art #22 (Released 2 March 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=h7L402AC48VO-3BCLCXxIg THEMIS Images as Art #23 (Released 3 March 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=-C4TD-WTHSJO-3BCLCXxIg THEMIS Images as Art #24 (Released 4 March 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=kQUD8s9DjMxO-3BCLCXxIg THEMIS Images as Art #25 (Released 5 March 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=HxLA9gSc3qBO-3BCLCXxIg All of the THEMIS images are archived at http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=e60qWze9595O-3BCLCXxIg. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) was developed by Arizona State University, Tempe, in collaboration with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing. The THEMIS investigation is led by Dr. Philip Christensen at Arizona State University. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime contractor for the Odyssey project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. __________________________________________________________________________ ROSETTA IN GOOD HEALTH ESA release 4 March 2004 Launch summary Ariane 5 Flight 158 lifted off right on-schedule at 07:17:51 UTC on 2 March carrying with it the Rosetta spacecraft on the start of its 10 year journey to comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The solid boosters separated as expected at 07:20 UTC, followed 50 seconds later by the fairing. The first stage burn continued until 07:27 UTC and injected the EPS and Rosetta into a coast orbit. This was the first occasion that an Earth escape trajectory and a large delay until ignition of the upper stage has been flown by an Ariane 5 launch vehicle and the progress of the flight was monitored with mounting tension in the ESOC control center. The ignition of the EPS occurred 107 minutes after launch at 09:14 and was monitored from a ground station in Hawaii until the vehicle moved out of contact. Contact was made again from the Galliot station in Kourou and at 09:32:36 Arianespace announced the separation of Rosetta. The achieved orbit proved to be near perfect. There was great joy and excitement in the ESOC control center when the ESA Kourou ground station acquired the TM signal from Rosetta one minute later at 09:34. The spacecraft status was as expected and the automatic separation sequence was seen to be in progress. The venting and priming of the propulsion system was completed at 9:44. Activation and checkout The initial spacecraft spin rate reduction and Sun acquisition phase proceeded very smoothly, and this was followed by the deployment of the two solar array panels, which was completed at 10:11. The separation sequence was completed with Sun reacquisition. 2 March 2004 10:34 Uplink of the first telecommands from the Kourou station 11:25 Both star trackers switched on for first check 13:15 Both star trackers switched on to be used for attitude control 13:51 Spacecraft enters Safe Hold Mode 14:23 Reaction wheels switched on 14:47 Spacecraft commanded into Normal Mode The launch locks of the Lander Philae have been released successfully at the end of the first ground station pass. Philae now remains firmly attached to the spacecraft by the cruise latches until its release at the comet. 3 March 2004 00:34 The High Gain Antenna was deployed, starting with firing the pyros of the launch locks. This was followed by 3 rotations, first in elevation, then in azimuth, and finally a combined azimuth and elevation movement, which brought the 2.2 m dish in the Earth pointing position. 09:34 The first trajectory correction maneuver was a test maneuver of 1 m s-1. The spacecraft was slewed to the required attitude in preparation for the 7 minutes burn. 11:49 Start of 7 minutes burn 14:09 The attitude orbit control systems performed flawlessly throughout the maneuver and the spacecraft was back in its normal mode. Due to the excellent spacecraft performance and the good progress of planned activities, it is anticipated to advance some of the planned platform and payload commissioning. This completed a very successful first phase of the mission. The spacecraft has behaved very much as expected. Both the Rosetta spacecraft and ground segment continued to perform excellently. (All times are in UT). Read the original news release at http://sci.esa.int/science- e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=34797. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/03/01/space.rosetta.ap/index.html http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0403/03comet/ __________________________________________________________________________ End Marsbugs, Volume 11, Number 11.