Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 11, Number 17, 20 April 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) BIOLOGIST'S FIND ALTERS THE BACTERIA FAMILY TREE By Falland Toscano 2) HUMANS AND CLIMATE DESTROY REEF ECOSYSTEM By Rebecca Lindsey 3) THE GREATEST CATASTROPHE ON EARTH: INTERVIEW WITH PETER WARD, AUTHOR OF GORGON By Leslie Mullen 4) UA'S LUNINE TO TESTIFY BEFORE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION FRIDAY (APRIL 16) By Lori Stiles 5) U-M STUDENT RESEARCH MAY HELP ASTRONAUTS BURN FUEL ON MARS University of Michigan release 6) A "DRAGON" ON THE SURFACE OF TITAN European Southern Observatory release 7) SCIENTISTS HOPE BUSH SPACE PLAN RESTORES MARS GREENHOUSE FUNDS By Chris Kridler 8) SUPERWASP BEGINS THE SEARCH FOR THOUSANDS OF NEW PLANETS Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council release 9) THE BRICKS OF LIFE: EXPLORING THE IDEA OF ALIEN CHEMISTRY By Seth Shostak 10) COSMIC MAGNIFYING GLASS: DISTANT STAR REVEALS PLANET NASA release 04-127 11) KECK TELESCOPE IMAGES YIELD MOVIE OF TITAN'S HYDROCARBON HAZE By Robert Sanders 12) BIOLOGY HANGING BY A THREAD? THE KNOLL CRITERION ON MARS From Astrobiology Magazine 13) DO MER PHOTOS SHOW EXTANT MARTIAN ORGANISMS (PART 1 OF 2)? By Francisco J. Oyarzun 14) SETI INSTITUTE SCIENTIST NAMED TO TIME MAGAZINE TOP 100 FOR THE 20TH CENTURY SETI Institute release Announcements 15) NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas Mission Reports 16) CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS NASA/JPL release 17) MARS ROVER FINDS ROCK RESEMBLING METEORITES THAT FELL TO EARTH NASA/JPL release 2004-104 18) MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 19) MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release __________________________________________________________________________ BIOLOGIST'S FIND ALTERS THE BACTERIA FAMILY TREE By Falland Toscano Washington Universtiy in St. Louis release 7 April 2004 The bacteria family tree may be facing some changes due to the recent work of an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis. And that may change our understanding of when bacteria and oxygen first appeared on earth. Carrine Blank, Ph.D., assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, has found that the currently accepted dates for the appearance of oxygen-producing bacteria and sulfur- producing bacteria on the early earth are not correct. She believes that these bacteria appeared on Earth much later than is now believed. Blank's findings appear in the February 2004 issue of Geobiology. "It sets up a new framework of new hypotheses to be tested," she says of the new findings. As an evolutionary biologist, Blank said she is, "really interested in the view of the Earth and microorganisms and how they come together." She uses elements of biology and geology to understand how the earth and its inhabitants co-evolved. It is known that Earth's earliest organisms were thermophilic, or able to dwell in hot environments. These organisms engaged in chemotropic metabolism--they converted inorganic substances, such as sulfur and carbon, into energy to live. This process is similar to how we use food, water, and oxygen to generate energy. The predecessors of modern bacteria differ in much more than age. The Archean era, which records the first billion years of Earth's geologic history, ended 2.5 billion years ago. It was at this point that the earth's biosphere must have changed and the atmospheric temperature reached 72 degrees Celsius. This is the maximum temperature at which photosynthesis can take place. Near the end of this era, about 2.7 to 2.9 billion years ago, according to Blank, stromatolites, organisms of the group Bacteria that use photosynthesis to create energy without producing oxygen, first appeared. Blank's approach is to understand organisms by determining what materials they metabolized. Using genetic analysis, she looked at the early rock record to determine when the first substantial amounts of oxygen and sulfur appeared on Earth. While she mapped the evolution of several bacteria, Blank believes the dating of the emergence of cyanobacteria-- bacteria that use light, water, and carbon dioxide to produce oxygen and biomass--is most crucial. Blank explains that the precise dating of the emergence of cyanobacteria is so important because, "once you have oxygen, you have a whole new biosphere." Cyanobacteria are the only bacteria that produce oxygen as a byproduct of their metabolism. It was not until these creatures appeared on earth that oxygen was found in the earth's atmosphere. "No other photosynthetic microbe is as efficient," said Blank. Scientists initially believed that cyanobacteria were present on earth as early as 2.7 billion years ago. Blank has challenged this view by presenting dates she feels give a more accurate chronology of the evolution of cyanobacteria and other bacteria lineages in general. With this data, she was also able to better pinpoint the emergence of other organisms. She has determined that cyanobacteria can only be dated to as far back as 2.3 billion years ago. Genetic analysis Blank used an evolutionary analysis technique pioneered by Carl Woese, Ph.D., professor emeritus of microbiology at the University of Illinois, to construct evolutionary trees of the bacteria. Woese pioneered the technique of using ribosomal RNA genes to make the first family trees of microbes. He was also the first person to distinguish between the two domains of microbial life--Bacteria and Archaea. These Archaea are not related to the Archean era mentioned previously. Using many genes that are common to all these creatures, Blank was able to construct evolutionary trees with better chronological accuracy than those produced previously, which used fewer genes. Based on the extent of the changes, Blank could determine how distant the organism was from the last common ancestor. Blank obtained her gene sequences from whole genome sequences that are available in GenBank, a public database hosted by the National Institutes of Health. This provided large amounts of data to enhance the evolutionary trees. From these data, Blank's diagrams show how different types of metabolism evolved. For example, her data show that oxygen- producing organisms evolved from organisms that metabolize sulfur. Her diagrams are based on the idea that evolution is a branching process in which a common ancestor's descendants slowly diverged into a few organisms, each of which diverged into a few more, and so on until the multitude of the organisms we see today developed. These family trees also show which organism's genes are least like the last common ancestor's genes. These organisms will be more toward the tips of the lines, while those with genes that closely resemble the genes of the last common ancestor will be closer to the center of the tree. "The tips of the tree use oxygen, so they first originated the use of oxygen," explained Blank. Opening new areas of study While Blank sites evidence in the geologic record as the reason her findings are more accurate than previous ones, she does acknowledge that there is one piece of evidence that may disprove her proposed chronology. Lipid markers, similar to fossils in the rocks in that they provide evidence of species' presence in the past, in the rock record indicate that cyanobacteria may have been present as early as 2.7 billion years ago. But, because ancient lipid research just started in 1999, this evidence is still being examined. Blank's research also brings up the question of how nuclei functioned for a billion years before mitochondria appeared. Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell; they process resources and convert them into cellular energy. While mapping genomes for her research, Blank noticed that prior to 2.2 billion years ago, mitochondria were not present in eukaryotic cells--more highly developed cells that contain mitochondria and other organelles in a membrane. "This is an intriguing insight into eukaryote evolution," said Blank. Read the original news release at http://news- info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/793.html. An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article928.html. __________________________________________________________________________ HUMANS AND CLIMATE DESTROY REEF ECOSYSTEM By Rebecca Lindsey From NASA's Earth Observatory 13 April 2004 In late 1997, cool water from deep in the Indian Ocean was welling up to the surface along the coast of Indonesia. The cool water would have chilled the coral reefs near the Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra. If corals had a consciousness, however, they wouldn't have been worried. Over the past 7,000 years, these cold spells had come and gone, and the reefs had barely acknowledged their presence. Meanwhile, to the east, a strong El Niño was drying out Indonesia's tropical forests, especially in Borneo and Sulawesi. With rainfall 400- 500 millimeters below the annual average, trees would have been slowing down photosynthesis and shedding leaves to prevent water loss. No stranger to El Niño, however, the forest, if it had a consciousness, probably wouldn't have been too alarmed. It had withstood such droughts before. What happened next, though, is a stunning and heartbreaking example of how human activity superimposed on Earth's natural cycles of variation can disrupt the dynamic and delicate balance of life and climate. As 1997 became 1998, a sequence of climatic coincidences became a catastrophe when thousands of square kilometers of tropical forests damaged by human impacts went up in flames, indirectly killing almost the entire 400- kilometer Mentawai coral reef system off the coast of Sumatra. Corals tell a 7,000-year story of the Indian Ocean The cold water upwelling in the eastern Indian Ocean is part of a climate phenomenon called the Indian Ocean Dipole, during which the eastern half of the ocean becomes much cooler than the western half. Along with these changes in ocean temperature, strong winds blow from east to west at the equator, across Indonesia and the eastern Indian Ocean. The cool ocean temperatures begin to appear south of the island of Java in May and June along with moderate southeasterly winds. Over the next few months, both the winds and cool temperatures intensify and spread northeastward toward the equator. The southeastern Indian Ocean may become as many as 5 to 6 degrees Celsius cooler than the western part. The cooling of the ocean in the coastal zone around the Mentawai Islands during Indian Ocean Dipole events influences the circulation of the atmosphere and rainfall, and it's related to major droughts in Indonesia and Australia and floods in eastern Africa. In 2001, geologist and marine scientist Nerilie Abram was studying the climate history of the Indian Ocean as part of her Ph.D. studies in the School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University, when she and her colleagues made a surprising discovery: nearly 100 percent of the Mentawai corals were dead! "Our research group initially started working in the Mentawai Islands because this region is vital in controlling the climate of the Indian Ocean region," explains Abram. They were planning to use the coral reefs to put together a 7,000-year record of the region's climate. "As corals grow, the chemistry of their skeletons preserves a detailed record of the environmental conditions." Because the kinds of chemicals that make it into the corals' skeletons depend on ocean conditions like salinity and temperature, the chemical composition reflects the ancient climate. Equipped with scuba and snorkeling gear, Abram and her colleagues set out to sea for several months on an Indonesian dive boat. But when they arrived at the Mentawai reefs, she says, "We were surprised to find that the entire reef ecosystem had been killed. By talking to locals and other researchers working in the region we found that the coral and fish in the Mentawai reefs had all been killed when the ocean turned red in 1997, at around the peak of the 1997 Indian Ocean Dipole event." Abram and her research colleagues spent several months collecting samples from the dead corals on the Mentawai reefs. They also collected core samples from fossil corals that were thousands of years old. These ancient corals are fossilized in paleo-reefs around the islands that have been uplifted and preserved by large earthquakes. According to their analysis, the cooling seen during the 1997 dipole event was about 4 degrees Celsius. That's cool, but not the coldest ever according to Abram's reef record. Indeed, about 4,400 years before present, the anomaly approached 6 degrees. Even more interesting, none of the numerous episodes of cooling associated with 7,000 years of the ocean's warm-cool cycle appears to have ever caused such massive reef death. The 1997 event was unique. Because previous Indian Ocean Dipole events had been colder than the 1997- 98 one, the cold water probably wasn't specifically to blame for the decimation of the Mentawai Reefs, whose productivity provided locals with food and livelihoods and whose beauty attracted tourists and surfers. But the cold water upwelling did play a role in the reefs' fate. How could a phenomenon that had been coming and going for several thousand years without harm suddenly play a part in something so deadly? Restocking the nutrient shelves at the surface of the ocean Most ocean life goes about its business in the surface waters of the world's oceans, where sunlight feeds plants, and plants feed animals. Over eons, the remains of millions of creatures that lived and died at the ocean surface sink to the ocean floor and decay, filling the bottom waters with nutrients. When this deep water bubbles up to the surface, it's like a shot of vitamins for surface-dwelling ocean life. Spiked with nutrients, the water explodes with a great bloom of marine plants called phytoplankton. Phytoplankton blooms, though, aren't really a rare occurrence in the region. In many cases, such blooms are a benefit and even a necessity to maintaining a healthy ecosystem; these tiny plants are the foundation of the food chain. Although most nutrients that the ocean plants need to grow are widely available in coastal upwelling zones such as the waters around the Mentawai Islands, there is another necessary nutrient that is more difficult for phytoplankton to come by: iron. The major source of iron in the ocean is dust that blows off the land surface and settles on the ocean. In general, this transport of iron doesn't keep pace with the availability of the other nutrients driven to the surface by the upwelling, and so plant growth is limited by the availability of iron. Phytoplankton populations can skyrocket when the ocean receives a sudden influx of iron-rich dust; Saharan dust storms blowing across the Atlantic Ocean have long been known to cause devastating red tides in the Gulf of Mexico. The massive red tide that destroyed the reefs off Sumatra seemed suspiciously similar, but unfortunately, there were no scientific studies of the event that Abram could turn to. Instead Abram used satellite data from the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWIFS) to verify local reports of an atypical red tide. "We used SeaWiFS data to examine the productivity in the ocean around the Mentawai Islands at the time of the reef death. The chlorophyll-a concentrations detected by SeaWiFS in December 1997 show a region of elevated productivity around the Mentawai Island chain that is consistent with local observations of the red tide," says Abram. A high concentration of chlorophyll in the water means a lot of plant life is present. The local reports and the SeaWiFS imagery confirmed that there was indeed an unusual red tide around the Mentawai Islands in late 1997, which left only one question: what caused it? If the dipole had been occurring for 7,000 years without killing off the reefs, then clearly some other event must have coincided with the upwelling that had never occurred in at least 7,000 years. Since the Mentawai Island region of the Indian Ocean is an iron-limited region, it wasn't too much of a leap to assume that some sort of massive iron fertilization had occurred. Abram didn't have to hunt very long to identify a potential culprit: a staggering and probably unprecedented number of forest fires burning just to the east in the jungles of Sumatra and East Kalimantan, Borneo. Forest fires add the missing ingredient Different parts of the world feel the effects of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation ocean cycle more or less strongly. Indonesia is one of the places strongly influenced by it; El Niño produces drought across most of the region. In late 1997, the drought was hammering the whole of Indonesia, with rainfall deficits of 400-500 millimeters in many places. In the midst of this exceptional drought, the growing use of fire as a forest and agricultural management tool in the region became disastrous. In the absence of sufficient caution, forest fires exploded across the dry landscape. A study by German scientists revealed that recently logged forests were most severely affected. In the near-14-million-hectare study area (almost all of East Taklimakan), 73 percent of peat swamp forests, 75.5 percent of secondary forest, plantation, or farmland, and 81 percent of wetlands burned during the 1997-98 El Niño season fires. Those that didn't burn completely left behind fuel for the next round of devastating fires. The scale of the disaster was unprecedented. And the impact of fires isn't just on the land; it's also in the air. "When fires burn," explains Abram, "nutrients from the plants and soil go into the atmosphere in smoke, and as this smoke settles, the nutrients fertilize surrounding environments." Ash fallout from the staggering number of fires burning in the tropical forests of Sumatra could have added the final fatal ingredient needed to push algae populations--already primed with the nutrients from the Indian Ocean Dipole upwelling--to deadly levels. Abram tracked the spread of the smoke with satellite observations from NASA's Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer-TOMS for short. TOMS measures more than just ozone, including smoke and other air pollution. TOMS observations revealed that with the Indian Ocean Dipole event driving winds from the east, as much as 46 percent of the smoke from the Sumatran wildfires may have spread across the Mentawai reef area. The cool ocean waters caused by the Indian Ocean Dipole upwelling had chilled the air, and cold air tends not to rise, keeping the smoke over the reefs. Abram thinks the smoke is the most likely culprit for fertilizing the algae bloom that suffocated or poisoned nearly every living coral for hundreds of square kilometers. A future of freak events It seems almost too coincidental to be real--a freak occurrence of negative synergy in which an unlikely sequence of seemingly unrelated events collided in a dangerous intersection to produce something not better than the sum of the parts, but far, far worse. The Indian Ocean Dipole brought lots of cool, nutrient-rich water up from the ocean floor, while El Niño caused a drought over Sumatra. Because humans had degraded the forest through logging, clearing, and accidental burning, forest fires raged out of control across Indonesia. With the Dipole came strong easterly winds that blew the smoke out over the ocean. The Dipole's cool ocean temperatures chilled the air, and so the smoke didn't rise away from the reefs. The iron-rich fallout from the smoke added the final nutrient to the already rich broth of deep-sea water, spawning a massive red tide that destroyed nearly 100 percent of a 400-kilometer long reef system. It would be nice to hope that such a devastating event was a fluke so coincidental that it would likely never happen again. Unfortunately, that hope may be misplaced. "The combination of natural and human influences in 1997 created a situation that appears to have been unprecedented over at least the past 7,000 years," says Abram. "However, wildfires are becoming stronger and more frequent with increasing human pressures on tropical forests, and pollution and over-fishing are reducing the ability of reef ecosystems to naturally limit the extent of algae blooms, so it is likely that the threat [to reefs] from wildfires will increase in the future. The increasing threat from wildfires and subsequent large algae blooms applies not only to coral reefs, but also to any coastal marine ecosystem." Abram says that we can shield reefs from such catastrophe by reducing over fishing, water pollution, and other pressures that weaken the natural defense mechanisms that reefs use to fight off algae. But Abram's study reveals that we must turn our gaze toward the land as well, becoming better caretakers and managers of tropical forest ecosystems. The closer we look at the way the world works, the more we realize how complex and interconnected it is. If we are going to prevent catastrophes like the Mentawai Reef death, strategies for exploiting and protecting natural resources are going to have to match the natural world's intricacy and sophistication. Read the original article at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/CoralDeath/coral_death.html. __________________________________________________________________________ THE GREATEST CATASTROPHE ON EARTH: INTERVIEW WITH PETER WARD, AUTHOR OF GORGON By Leslie Mullen From Astrobiology Magazine 14 April 2004 Peter Ward's newest book, Gorgon, is part travel journal, part scientific exploration. For over a decade, Ward hunted for fossils in South Africa's Karoo Desert, hoping to figure out what caused the Permian/Triassic extinction. This cataclysmic event 250 million years ago killed off 90 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of vertebrate land species. Some have suggested the P-T extinction was triggered by an asteroid or comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but Ward comes to a different conclusion. Ward believes that a lowering of atmospheric oxygen caused the P-T extinction. These low oxygen conditions continued on through the Triassic and most of the Jurassic, influencing the development of animals that evolved during this time. Birds, for instance, developed their unique air-sac respiratory system because of this extremely low oxygen environment. The reason the atmosphere lost its oxygen, Ward suggests, was because ocean levels dropped, exposing anoxic organic materials to the atmosphere. The newly-exposed materials oxidized, pulling oxygen out of the air, and the iron in these materials rusted, creating the red rock layers that are so distinctive in post-Permian geology. Explosive volcano eruptions from Siberia may have contributed to this loss of oxygen as well, expelling huge amounts of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, and other gases into the atmosphere. Whatever happened in the P-T, it happened on a geologically fast time scale, within 50,000 years or less. In this interview with Astrobiology Magazine, Peter Ward explains how clues in the rocks point to a world that was nearly wiped clean of life. Astrobiology Magazine (AM): How rare are Permian fossils compared to Triassic and Jurassic fossils? Reading your book, you get the sense that fossilized bones are scattered everywhere, once you know how to look for them. Peter Ward (PW): There are definitely far fewer later Permian fossils than earlier Permian. To get a sense of how hard it is to find these fossils, while we were hunting for them in South Africa, looking right in the Permian rock layer, we would find maybe one fossil in an 8 hour day of searching. The Gorgon is an extremely rare fossil--has only been found in South Africa, except for a few in the Eastern Soviet Union. Collectors would pay any amount of money to get one, but they are literally priceless because they've never been sold. South Africa holds on to all of its fossils. The Soviet Union Gorgons were all sent to Moscow. AM: You say in your book that while an asteroid impact has been suggested as a cause of the P-T extinction, follow-up studies have not been able to support that claim. PW: I do not think that asteroid impact was a cause. There is a new paper just out that suggests that explosive volcanism can look like the remains of asteroid impact. The paper, by J. Phipps Morgan, et al., says that explosive volcanic eruptions are sometimes able to generate the shocked quartz, microspherules, and other geologic traces commonly attributed to large extraterrestrial impacts, while also triggering a mass extinction event. AM: You come to the conclusion that the Permian extinction was caused by lower O2 in the atmosphere, and suggest this was due to the lowering of oceans and the subsequent exposure of organic-rich sediments. What caused the ocean to lower in the first place? PW: The sea level will drop if the climate cools and the icecaps build up. But in the case of the Permian, we know it was hot. When there's a lot of heat, the ice caps melt, ocean levels rise up and continents are flooded. But the sea level also will change if there are plate tectonic heat flow changes. The mid-oceanic ridges are basically huge underwater mountain ranges, with huge trenches at the places where the plates spread apart. If there is a lower heat flow, these spreading centers in the middle of oceans reduce in size. The ocean has a constant volume, so if there's a big hunk of rock in the ocean, that's going to make the oceans rise higher. But if the great underwater mountains drop down into the trenches, the sea level will drop too. So with a lower heat flow, the spreading centers get colder, they take up less space, and the ocean water level drops. AM: You mention that plants cause rivers to meander, while the loss of plants leads to braided rivers. At the P-T boundary, the rivers go from meandering to braided, indicating a catastrophic loss of land plants. Would this plant loss have contributed to the lower O2 of the Triassic, or do you think that plants recovered fairly rapidly? PW: Even with the catastrophic loss of land plants, the amount of O2 in the atmosphere wouldn't be affected that quickly. Ocean algae, and especially the blue-green algae, which [are] bacteria, do more than land plants for atmospheric O2. We don't know if there was a comparable extinction in sea plants, however. There is good evidence that the Triassic was a quite dead place for a long time. What we find at the Permian extinction is that there are almost no plant fossils. Certainly there are plants that survived, but there was a huge Permian plant extinction that caused whole classes of land plants to disappear. For instance, Glossopteris [flora] once covered the Earth, and they disappeared entirely. Its closest modern relative is the Ginkgo. Plant pollen is a better reflection of diversity than fossils, because pollen is extremely tough, and preserves throughout time. Yet during the interval at the end of the Permian, there is no plant pollen--only fungal. So what we see after the Permian is a dead world, with fungus as the last surviving plant life. There may have been ferns, too. Ferns are a great survival species. After the Cretaceous extinction that killed the dinosaurs, ferns were the only plants left. After the Mount St. Helens eruption, ferns were the first plants to recover. AM: The ancestors of mammals are the cynodonts, which survived the P-T extinction. Why wouldn't mammals have retained the cynodont capacity to exist at lower O2 levels? PW: Mammals survived only at very low size. There were no large mammals until oxygen went up again. We don't know about mammals with low O2 capacity, except for those that live at the highest elevations--for instance, the South American alpacas and llamas. They have special respiratory capabilities--they have very big chests and big lungs--and their blood has more hemoglobin. There's no way to tell from the fossil record how much hemoglobin an organism had. We can tell whether they had big chests, though. AM: Has a direct link been established between the mammal-like reptile cynodonts and modern day mammals? Or could mammals have evolved independently as an example of convergent evolution? PW: No, we are definitely part of the surviving stock going back to mammal like reptiles--there are just too many similarities in head and bone anatomy for it to have been convergent evolution. AM: You say that the air sac system in birds make them very efficient at oxygen acquisition. How does that correspond with the "canary in the mine shaft" scenario? Wouldn't canaries be more efficient at breathing the available oxygen than the miners? PW: But it is usually not low oxygen that kills the miners--it is methane, or carbon monoxide. Because birds are so good at extracting gas, these gases kill them even faster than they do us--carbon monoxide, for instance, binds on the oxygen sites. AM: Are there other animals that evolved during the Triassic that also show evidence of adaptation to low atmospheric O2? PW: In the oceans there are plenty. Most ammonites are thought to be low oxygen creatures, as were many of the Triassic clams. The oceans were very anoxic at that time, yet zillions of clams lived right at the minimum amount of oxygen. The Triassic is a very boring era--there is just not much diversity. AM: Why are Permian rocks "green," as you describe them in your book? And why do the rocks go from green to red at the P-T boundary? PW: If you dig down, right now, where you are, you can go very far down and still get oxygenated soil. But when you start digging down in the ocean, you don't go very far before you hit black anoxic soil. That's how it is for soil from the Permian, too. There was so much vegetation, so much organic matter, that oxygen couldn't percolate very far down. When that type of sediment turns to rock, it is a kind of an olive brown color. When you get soils that have little or no organic matter, on the other hand, you usually find that the rocks are red. That's because the iron and minerals in the soil oxidized, or rusted, when exposed to oxygen. With the loss of plants after the Permian, there was less organic material. The soil became better oxidized as grain size led to more porosity. We're forming red beds all time, today, in places that have very hot, dry conditions, like the desert. So the red beds of the Triassic indicate desert-like conditions. We move from the plant-rich Permian world, to the hot, plant-poor world of the Triassic. AM: Why would warm-bloodedness have evolved from the low O2 conditions of the Triassic, as you suggest? PW: It may not be a reaction to the oxygen, but to temperature. If the world is a desert, there is very little humidity, and it gets very cold at night, even in the hottest desert. I think that the warm-blooded adaptation may have helped mammals and birds survive in an all-desert world. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article922.html. __________________________________________________________________________ UA'S LUNINE TO TESTIFY BEFORE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION FRIDAY (APRIL 16) By Lori Stiles University of Arizona release 14 April 2004 Humans could have the ability to detect Earth-sized planets with atmospheres in the next decade--or prolong the search simply because they've taken the wrong approach, according to a leading planetary scientist. Jonathan I. Lunine of the University of Arizona will testify before the President's Commission on Implementation of U.S. Space Exploration Policy (Moon, Mars and Beyond) in a public hearing to be held in San Francisco tomorrow and Friday (April 15 and 16). The President's commission is charged with building consensus, making recommendations to the President regarding moon activities, increasing young people's interest in space science, and encouraging industry and other nations to become space partners. The commission has asked Lunine to talk about the "beyond" part of the President's initiative--that is, what the nation should do to detect other Earths around our nearest neighboring stars. "It doesn't require going to the Moon or using astronauts," he said. A quicker, more practical strategy to detecting Earth-like planets featuring signs of life will be to develop a medium-sized optical and infrared space telescope, the Terrestrial Planet Finder. The telescope could be deployed in the next 10 or 12 years and "will discover habitable worlds around other stars before humans return to the Moon in force." Lunine is professor of planetary sciences and physics, and chairs the Theoretical Astrophysics Program at the University of Arizona. He also is a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. He is a member of NASA's Space Science Advisory Committee and chairman of its Solar System Exploration subcommittee. A member of science teams on several space missions, he is currently an interdisciplinary scientist on the Cassini mission to Saturn and on the James Webb (Next Generation) Space Telescope. Lunine is author of the book, Earth: Evolution of a Habitable World (Cambridge University Press, 1999), a textbook on how the Earth became and is sustained as a habitable planet. The two-day hearing features experts from the fields of education, entertainment, robotics and space science. It will be held at the Galileo Academy of Science and Technology, 1150 San Francisco Street, San Francisco, Calif. More about the hearing is available on the web site, http://www.moontomars.org. Related Web sites: http://www.moontomars.org http:// www.lpl.arizona.edu/people/faculty/lunine.html/ Contacts: Jonathan I. Lunine Phone: 520-621-2789 E-mail: jlunine@lpl.arizona.edu Lori Stiles UA News Services Phone: 520-621-1877 __________________________________________________________________________ U-M STUDENT RESEARCH MAY HELP ASTRONAUTS BURN FUEL ON MARS University of Michigan release 14 April 2004 One of the big problems with space travel is that one cannot over-pack. Suppose astronauts reach Mars. How do they explore the planet if they cannot weigh down the vessel with fuel for excursions? A team of undergraduate aerospace engineering students at the University of Michigan is doing research to help astronauts make fuel once they get to Mars, and the results could bring scientists one step closer to manned or extended rover trips to the planet. Their research proposal won the five-student team a highly competitive trip to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston to participate in the Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program. In Houston, the students conducted zero-gravity experiments using iodine as a catalyst to burn magnesium. Magnesium is a metal found on Mars that can be harvested for fuel. Fossil fuels don't burn on Mars because of the planet's carbon dioxide (CO2) atmosphere, but metals do burn in a CO2 atmosphere. The idea for the students' experiments evolved from previous research done by Margaret Wooldridge, an associate professor in mechanical engineering and the team's adviser. Wooldridge's research showed that while magnesium is a promising fuel source, burning magnesium alone--without a catalyst such as iodine--has several challenges. Preliminary results from the student experiments showed that using iodine as a catalyst helped make the magnesium burn better, said Arianne Liepa, aerospace engineering undergrad and team member. The experiments also showed that using the iodine, magnesium, CO2 system worked even better in a microgravity environment. "That bodes well for a power source on Mars where the gravity is approximately one-third that of Earth," Wooldridge said. The students--Greg Hukill, Arianne Liepa, Travis Palmer, Carlos Perez and Christy Schroeder--who conducted the experiments over a nine-day period in March, flew on a specially modified Boeing KC 135A turbojet transport. The plane flies parabolic arcs to produce weightless periods of 20 to 25 seconds at the apex of the arc. Contact: Laura Bailey Phone: 734-647-7087 or 647-1848 E-mail: baileylm@umich.edu Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-base-04g.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/magnesium_source_fuel_mars.html __________________________________________________________________________ A "DRAGON" ON THE SURFACE OF TITAN European Southern Observatory release 14 April 2004 Titan, the largest Saturnian moon and the second largest moon of the solar system (only Jupiter's Ganymede is slightly larger), is the only satellite known with a substantial atmosphere. It is composed mainly of nitrogen (like that of the Earth) and also contains significant amounts of methane. Opaque orange hazes and clouds of complex organic molecules effectively shield the solid surface from view (cf. e.g., the Voyager images). Recent spectroscopic and radar observations suggest that there are huge surface reservoirs of liquid hydrocarbonates and a methane-based meteorological cycle similar to Earth's hydrological cycle. This makes Titan the only known object with rainfall and potential surface oceans other than the Earth and thus a tantalizing research object for the study of pre-biotic chemistry and the origin of life on Earth. The Huygens probe launched from the NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission will enter Titan's atmosphere in early 2005 to make measurements of the physical and chemical conditions, hopefully surviving the descent to document the surface as well. Coordinated ground-based observations will provide essential support for the scientific return of the Cassini-Huygens encounter. However, only 8-10 m class telescopes with adaptive optics imaging systems or space-borne instruments can achieve sufficient image sharpness to attain a useful level of detail. The new map of a large part of Titan's surface, shown in PR Photo 11a/04, represents an important contribution in this direction. A question of atmospheric windows The first intriguing views of Titan's surface were obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in the 1990's. From the ground, images were obtained in 2001-2 with the Keck II and Gemini North telescopes and more recently with the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), cf. ESO PR Photos 08a- c/04. All of these observations were made through a single narrow-band filter at a time. The wavelengths used for such observations are critical for the amount of surface detail captured on the images. Optimally, one would look for a spectral band in which the atmosphere is completely transparent; a number of such "windows" are known to exist. But although the above observations were made in wavebands roughly matching atmospheric windows and do show surface features, they also include the light from different atmospheric layers. In a sense, they therefore correspond to viewing Titan's surface through a somewhat opaque screen or, more poetically, the sight by an ancient sailor, catching for the first time a glimpse of an unknown continent through the coastal haze. One narrow "window" is available in the near-infrared spectral region near wavelength 1.575 micrometers. In February 2004, an international research team [1] working at the ESO VLT at the Paranal Observatory (Chile) obtained images of Titan's surface through this spectral window with unprecedented spatial resolution and with the lowest contamination of atmospheric condensates to date. They accomplished this during six nights (February 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8, 2004) at the time of the commissioning phase of a novel high-contrast imaging mode for the NACO adaptive optics instrument on the 8.2-m VLT YEPUN telescope, using the Simultaneous Differential Imager (SDI) [2]. This novel optical device provides four simultaneous high-resolution images (PR Photo 11b/04) at three wavelengths around a near-infrared atmospheric methane absorption feature. The main application of the SDI is high-contrast imaging for the search for substellar companions with methane in their atmosphere, e.g., brown dwarfs and giant exoplanets, near other stars. However, as the present photos demonstrate, it is also superbly suited for Titan imaging. Mapping Titan's surface in unprecedented detail Titan is tidally-locked to Saturn, and hence always presents the same face towards the planet. To image all sides of Titan (from the Earth) therefore requires observations during almost one entire orbital period, 16 days. Still, the present week-long observing campaign enabled the team to map approximately three-quarters of the surface of Titan. A new map of the surface of Titan (in cylindrical projection and covering most, but not all of the area imaged during these observations) was created. For this, the simultaneous "atmospheric" images (at waveband 1.625 micrometers) were "subtracted" from the "surface" images (1.575 and 1.600 micrometers) in order to remove any residual atmospheric features present in the latter. The ability to subtract simultaneous images is unique to the SDI camera [2]. This truly unique map shows the fraction of sunlight reflected from the surface--bright areas reflect more light than the darker ones. The amount of reflection (in astronomical terms: the "albedo") depends on the composition and structure of the surface layer and it is not possible with this single-wavelength ("monochromatic") map alone to elucidate the true nature of those features. Nevertheless, recent radar observations with the Arecibo antenna have provided evidence for liquid surfaces on Titan, and the low-reflection areas could indicate the locations of those suspected reservoirs of liquid hydrocarbonates. They also provide a possible source for the replenishment of methane that is continuously lost in the atmosphere because of decomposition by the sunlight. Presumably, the bright, highly reflective regions are ice-covered highlands. Provisional names of the new features A comparison with an earlier NACO image obtained through another filter is useful. It demonstrates the importance of employing a filter that precisely fits the atmospheric window and hence the gain of clarity with the present observations. It also provides independent confirmation of the reality of the gross features, since the observations are separated by 15 months in time. Over the range of longitudes which have been mapped during the present observations (PR Photo 11a/04), it is obvious that the southern hemisphere of Titan is dominated by a single bright region centered at approximately 15° longitude. (Note that this is not the so-called "bright feature" seen in the HST images at longitude 80°-130°, an area that was not covered during the present observations). The equatorial area displays the above mentioned, well-defined dark (low- reflection) structures. In order to facilitate their identification, the team decided to give these dark features provisional names--official names will be assigned at a later moment by the Working Group on Planetary System Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union (IAU WGPSN). From left to right, the SDI team [1] has referred to these features informally as: the "lying H", the "dog" chasing a "ball", and the "dragon's head". Read the original news release at http://www.eso.org/outreach/press- rel/pr-2004/pr-09-04.html. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article927.html http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/titan_images_040420.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/saturn-titan-04g.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/best_image_titans_surface.html __________________________________________________________________________ SCIENTISTS HOPE BUSH SPACE PLAN RESTORES MARS GREENHOUSE FUNDS By Chris Kridler From Florida Today and Space.com 15 April 2004 A couple of leafy, green lettuce plants poke up from the bottom of the coffee-table-size dome. They are just for show, a second sprouting of heads that first grew in this mini-Mars. "Back when we started this, there was no manned mission to Mars at all," systems engineer Philip Fowler said at the Space Life Sciences Lab. "It didn't exist. So we had somewhat of a problem in justifying why we were doing this." If President Bush's proposal goes forward, "we're in the right place at the right time, absolutely," said Fowler, who works for Dynamac and lives on Merritt Island. He and plant scientist Vadim Rygalov, on loan to KSC from the University of Florida, have worked to discover how plants grow in a low-pressure atmosphere. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mini_mars_040415.html. __________________________________________________________________________ SUPERWASP BEGINS THE SEARCH FOR THOUSANDS OF NEW PLANETS Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council release 15 April 2004 A consortium of astronomers is tomorrow (April 16th) celebrating the commissioning of the SuperWASP facility at the astronomical observatory on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, designed to detect thousands of planets outside of our own solar system. Only about a hundred extra- solar planets are currently known, and many questions about their formation and evolution remain unanswered due to the lack of observational data. This situation is expected to improve dramatically as SuperWASP produces scientific results. The SuperWASP facility is now entering its operational phase. Construction of the instrument began in May 2003, and in autumn last year the first test data was obtained which showed the instrument's performance to exceed initial expectations. SuperWASP is the most ambitious project of its kind anywhere in the world. Its extremely wide field of view combined with its ability to measure brightness very precisely allows it to view large areas of the sky and accurately monitor the brightnesses of hundreds of thousands of stars. If any of these have nearby Jupiter-sized planets then they may move across the face of their parent star, as viewed from the Earth. While no telescope could actually see the planet directly, its passage or transit, blocks out a small proportion of the parent star's light--i.e., we see the star get slightly fainter for a few hours. In our own solar system a similar phenomenon will occur on 8th June 2004 when Venus will transit the Sun's disk. One nights' observing with SuperWASP will generate a vast amount of data, up to 60 GB--about the size of a typical modern computer hard disk (or 42000 floppy disks). This data is then processed using sophisticated software and stored in a public database within the Leicester Database and Archive Service of the University of Leicester. The Principal Investigator for the Project, Dr. Don Pollacco (Queens University Belfast), said "While the construction and initial commissioning phases of the facility have been only 9 months long, SuperWASP represents the culmination of many years work from astronomers within the WASP consortium. Data from SuperWASP will lead to exciting progress in many areas of astronomy, ranging from the discovery of planets around nearby stars to the early detection of other classes of variable objects such as supernovae in distant galaxies". Dr. René Rutten (Director of the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes) said "SuperWASP is a very nice example of how clever ideas to exploit the latest technology can open new windows to explore the universe around us, and shows that important scientific programs can be done at very modest cost." The SuperWASP facility is operated by the WASP consortium involving astronomers from the following institutes: Queen's University Belfast, University of Cambridge, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (La Palma), University of Keele, University of Leicester, Open University and University of St. Andrews. The SuperWASP instrument has cost approximately £400K, and was funded by major financial contributions from Queen's University Belfast, the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council and the Open University. SuperWASP is located in the Spanish Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, Canary Islands which is operated by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). Pictures of the SuperWASP facility and some of its astronomical first- light images are available at http://www.superwasp.org/firstlight.html. Contacts: Julia Maddock, Press Officer Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council Phone: +44 (0)1793-442094 Mobile: +44 (0)7901514975 Fax: +44 (0)1793-442002 E-mail: julia.maddock@pparc.ac.uk Dr. Alan Fitzsimmons APS Division, Department of Pure & Applied Physics Queen's University Belfast Belfast BT7 1NN Phone: +44 (0)2890-273142 Fax: +44 (0) 2890-273110 Mobile: +44 (0) 775 907 9807 E-mail: a.fitzsimmons@qub.ac.uk An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/superwasp_begins_operations.html. __________________________________________________________________________ THE BRICKS OF LIFE: EXPLORING THE IDEA OF ALIEN CHEMISTRY By Seth Shostak From Space.com 15 April 2004 It's a question as common as brown dogs: will alien life be carbon-based? I'm asked this frequently, although I'm not sure why the public is so hung up on the elemental basis of extraterrestrial life. In my experience, folks seldom inquire whether the Krebs cycle could be prevalent on other worlds, or if adenosine triphosphate might underpin the energy production of active aliens. Probably the fascination with vital soot is just a consequence of carbon's high profile on Star Trek. The plot of this popular TV series gets viscous whenever the Enterprise detects "carbon- based life forms" on some God-forsaken planet deep in the Galaxy's nether regions. If they're carbon-based, well, they must be like us (and possibly edible, too). Hype aside, as most astrobiologists or any one of a thousand books will tell you, carbon-based life is not simply a provincial conceit. There's good reason why this element is the basis for life on Earth, and probably on most other worlds that shelter biology. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_carbon_040415.html. __________________________________________________________________________ COSMIC MAGNIFYING GLASS: DISTANT STAR REVEALS PLANET NASA release 04-127 15 April 2004 Like Sherlock Holmes holding a magnifying glass to unveil hidden clues, modern day astronomers used cosmic magnifying effects to reveal a planet orbiting a distant star. This marks the first discovery of a planet around a star beyond Earth's solar system using gravitational microlensing. A star or planet can act as a cosmic lens to magnify and brighten a more distant star lined up behind it. The gravitational field of the foreground star bends and focuses light, like a glass lens bending and focusing starlight in a telescope. Albert Einstein predicted this effect in his theory of general relativity and confirmed it with our sun. "The real strength of microlensing is its ability to detect low-mass planets," said Dr. Ian Bond of the Institute for Astronomy in Edinburgh, Scotland, lead author of a paper appearing in the May 10 Astrophysical Journal Letters. The discovery was made possible through cooperation between two international research teams: Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) and Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE). Well-equipped amateur astronomers might use this technique to follow up future discoveries and help confirm planets around other stars. The newly discovered star-planet system is 17,000 light years away in the constellation Sagittarius. The planet, orbiting a red dwarf parent star, is most likely one-and-a-half times bigger than Jupiter. The planet and star are three times farther apart than Earth and the sun. Together, they magnify a farther, background star some 24,000 light years away, near the Milky Way center. In most prior microlensing observations, scientists saw a typical brightening pattern, or light curve, indicating a star's gravitational pull was affecting light from an object behind it. The latest observations revealed extra spikes of brightness, indicating the existence of two massive objects. By analyzing the precise shape of the light curve, Bond and his team determined one smaller object is only 0.4 percent the mass of a second, larger object. They concluded the smaller object must be a planet orbiting its parent star. Dr. Bohdan Paczynski of Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, an OGLE team member, first proposed using gravitational microlensing to detect dark matter in 1986. In 1991, Paczynski and his student, Shude Mao, proposed using microlensing to detect extrasolar planets. Two years later, three groups reported the first detection of gravitational microlensing by stars. Earlier claims of planet discoveries with microlensing are not regarded as definitive, since they had too few observations of the apparent planetary brightness variations. "I'm thrilled to see the prediction come true with this first definite planet detection through gravitational microlensing," Paczynski said. He and his colleagues believe observations over the next few years may lead to the discovery of Neptune-sized, and even Earth-sized planets around distant stars. Microlensing can easily detect extrasolar planets, because a planet dramatically affects the brightness of a background star. Because the effect works only in rare instances, when two stars are perfectly aligned, millions of stars must be monitored. Recent advances in cameras and image analysis have made this task manageable. Such developments include the new large field-of-view OGLE-III camera and the MOA-II 1.8 meter (70.8 inch) telescope being built and cooperation between microlensing teams. "It's time-critical to catch stars while they are aligned, so we must share our data as quickly as possible," said OGLE team-leader Dr. Andrzej Udalski of Poland's Warsaw University Observatory. Udalski in Poland and Paczynski in the U.S lead the Polish/American project. It operates at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, run by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and includes the world's largest microlensing survey on the 1.3 meter (51-inch) Warsaw Telescope. NASA and the National Science Foundation fund OGLE in the U.S. The Polish State Committee for Scientific Research and Foundation for Polish Science funds it in Poland. MOA is primarily a New Zealand/Japanese group, with collaborators in the United Kingdom and U.S. New Zealand's Marsden Fund, NASA and National Science Foundation, Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, and the Japan Society support it for the Promotion of Science. Images and information about the latest research are available on the Internet at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/media/041504. Contacts: Donald Savage NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1547 Jane Platt Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-0880 M. Mitchell Waldrop National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA Phone: 703-292-7752 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/gravity-lense-04c.html http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0404/15planet/ http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/gravitational_lens_distant_planet. html __________________________________________________________________________ KECK TELESCOPE IMAGES YIELD MOVIE OF TITAN'S HYDROCARBON HAZE By Robert Sanders University of California, Berkeley release 15 April 2004 As the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft approaches a July encounter with Saturn and its moon Titan, a team of University of California, Berkeley, astronomers has produced a detailed look at the moon's cloud cover and what the Huygens probe will see as it dives through the atmosphere of Titan to land on the surface. Astronomer Imke de Pater and her UC Berkeley colleagues used adaptive optics on the Keck Telescope in Hawaii to image the hydrocarbon haze that envelops the moon, taking snapshots at various altitudes from 150-200 kilometers down to the surface. They assembled the pictures into a movie that shows what Huygens will encounter when it descends to the surface in January 2005, six months after the Cassini spacecraft enters orbit around Saturn. "Before, we could see each component of the haze but didn't know where exactly it was in the stratosphere or the troposphere. These are the first detailed pictures of the distribution of haze with altitude," said atmospheric chemist Mate Adamkovics, a graduate student in UC Berkeley's College of Chemistry. "It's the difference between an X-ray of the atmosphere and an MRI." "This shows what can be done with the new instruments on the Keck Telescope," added de Pater, referring to the Near Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSPEC) mounted with the adaptive optics system. "This is the first time a movie has been made, which can help us understand the meteorology on Titan." Adamkovics and de Pater note than even after Cassini reaches Saturn this year, ground-based observations can provide important information on how Titan's atmosphere changes with time, and how circulation couples with the atmospheric chemistry to create aerosols in Titan's atmosphere. This will become even easier next year when OSIRIS (OH-Suppressing Infra-Red Imaging Spectrograph) comes on-line at the Keck telescopes, de Pater said. OSIRIS is a near-infrared integral field spectrograph designed for the Keck's adaptive optics system that can sample a small rectangular patch of sky, unlike NIRSPEC, which samples a slit and must scan a patch of sky. De Pater will present the results and the movie on Thursday, April 15, at an international conference in The Netherlands on the occasion of the 375th birthday of the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens. Huygens was the first "scientific director" of the Académie Française and the discoverer of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, in 1655. The four-day conference, which started April 13, is taking place at the European Space & Technology Centre in Noordwijk. The Cassini-Huygens mission is an international collaboration between three space agencies--the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space agency--involving contributions from 17 nations. It was launched from Kennedy Space Center on October 15, 1997. The spacecraft will arrive at Saturn in July, with the Cassini orbiter expected to send back data on the planet and its moons for at least four years. The orbiter also will relay data from the Huygens probe as it plunges through Titan's atmosphere and after it lands on the surface next year. What makes Titan so interesting is its seeming resemblance to a young Earth, an age when life presumably arose and before oxygen changed our planet's chemistry. The atmospheres of both Titan and the early Earth were dominated by nearly the same amount of nitrogen. The atmosphere of Titan has a significant amount of methane gas, which is chemically altered by ultraviolet light in the upper atmosphere, or stratosphere, to form long-chain hydrocarbons, which condense into particulates that create a dense haze. These hydrocarbons, which could be like oil or gasoline, eventually settle to the surface. Radar observations indicate flat areas on the moon's surface that could be pools or lakes of propane or butane, Adamkovics said. Astronomers have been able to pierce the hydrocarbon haze to look at the surface using ground-based telescopes with adaptive optics or speckle interferometry, and with the Hubble Space Telescope, always with filters that allow the telescopes to see through "windows" in the haze where methane doesn't absorb. Imaging the haze itself hasn't been as easy, primarily because people have had to observe at different wavelengths to see it at specific altitudes. "Until now, what we knew about the distribution of haze came from separate groups using different techniques, different filters," Adamkovics said. "We get all that in one go: the 3-D distribution of haze on Titan, how much at each place on the planet and how high in the atmosphere, in one observation." The NIRSPEC instrument on the Keck telescope measures the intensity of a band of near-infrared wavelengths at once as it scans about 10 slices along Titan's surface. This technique allows reconstruction of haze versus altitude because specific wavelengths must come from specific altitudes or they wouldn't be visible at all because of absorption. The movie Adamkovics and de Pater put together shows a haze distribution similar to what had been observed before, but more complete and assembled in a more user-friendly way. For example, haze in the atmosphere over the South Pole is very evident, at an altitude of between 30 and 50 kilometers. This haze is known to form seasonally and dissipate during the Titan "year," which is about 29 1/2 Earth years. Stratospheric haze at about 150 kilometers is visible over a large area in the northern hemisphere but not the southern hemisphere, an asymmetry observed previously. At the southern hemisphere's tropopause, the border between the lower atmosphere and the stratosphere at about 42 kilometers altitude, cirrus haze is visible, analogous to cirrus haze on Earth. The observations were made on February 19, 20 and 22, 2001, by de Pater and colleague Henry G. Roe of the California Institute of Technology, and analyzed by Adamkovics using models made by Caitlin A. Griffith of the University of Arizona, with co-author S. G. Gibbard of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The work was sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation and the Technology Center for Adaptive Optics. Read the original news release at http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/04/15_titan.shtml. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/saturn-titan-04h.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/movie_titans_hazy_atmosphere.html __________________________________________________________________________ BIOLOGY HANGING BY A THREAD? THE KNOLL CRITERION ON MARS From Astrobiology Magazine 16 April 2004 One engineering obstacle to overcome when landing on Mars is the treacherous descent and landing. From start to finish, this mission phase can last six minutes. Because of its nail-biting drama, it is often referred to as the six minutes of hell. If horizontal winds blow the rover's parachute sideways during descent, the precious payload might scrape rather than bounce. That possibility of shear against sandpaper- like soil prompted a relatively late addition to the mission planning. Stabilizing horizontal thrusters were added to compensate if any wind started to tilt the otherwise vertical path. This attention to detail proved invaluable during the first landing attempt. When the Spirit rover descended towards Gusev crater, just such unpredictable winds had to be corrected for. If all had not gone according to plans, the airbag fabric might have ripped catastrophically. On February 12th, the nineteenth day on the other side of the planet for the Opportunity rover, one curious image stood out. The picture was downloaded in the daily batch from a microscopic imager peering onto the pebbly surface. On Sol 19, a long, thin feature surprised the science team. Measuring 6 millimeters long and 60 micrometers across, this thread was smaller than the size of an average human hair. At first glance, many speculated whether the thread might point towards some strange biological origin. The lack of another microscopic image capturing such a thread in view, however, made the science and engineering team's detective work difficult. But using their expertise from so many landing simulations, the rover team set out to test if they could reproduce this feature in the JPL sandbox. A best first guess was that when the rover's airbag hit the surface, tiny threads had been stripped from the fabric and laid out across the martian soil. Their experiment entailed a grab bag of starting materials: Mars soil simulant and airbag fabric made of Vectran (a synthetic material stronger than Kevlar, which is tough enough to qualify for bulletproof vests). Placing Vectran threads against the backdrop of simulated Mars soil gave the team a first view of what the microscopic imager might have seen. To recreate similar conditions, the team still needed to know exactly where the rover was on Sol 19. They also wanted to know how its robotic arm turret was positioned for such an extended camera view. The rover's navigation and front hazard avoidance cameras narrowed down their choices to the rim of Eagle Crater. Two airbag marks could be seen nearby. Suddenly two lines of forensic evidence came together: a location near bounce marks and a recreated microscopic scene on Earth with Vectran threads. The threads in Pasadena's sandbox closely resembled what had first surprised scientists nearly a month earlier at Eagle Crater on Mars. The threads of this mystery seemed not to show martian biology in microscopic view, but another kind of throw-away terrestrial biology at work: the airbags had shed fabric and the camera showed human engineering in action. What lesson can be learned from the thread mystery? How does shape itself guide a biological interpretation? One answer is the Knoll criterion. Named after Harvard paleontologist Andrew Knoll, the methodology is cited as one example of not just how a shape might be similar to something biological, but whether a presumption is given to another explanation in the absence of biology. "You do your exploration," said Knoll, "and if, in the course of that exploration, you find a signal that is (a) not easily accounted for by physics and chemistry or (b) reminiscent of signals that are closely associated with biology on Earth, then you get excited. What will happen then, I can guarantee you, is that 100 enterprising scientists will go into the lab and see how, if at all, they can simulate what you see-- without using biology." This is an extension of Carl Sagan's classic comment, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article926.html. __________________________________________________________________________ DO MER PHOTOS SHOW EXTANT MARTIAN ORGANISMS (PART 1 OF 2)? By Francisco J. Oyarzun 18 April 2004 Introduction The Mars Global Surveyor satellite has found intricately-branched formations of approximately radial symmetry (popularly known as "Clarke Trees" [1], "Fractal Forests" or "Martian Spiders" [2]) at latitudes between about 60 and 82 degrees south, whose photographs have been posted on the Malin Space Science Systems' web site since October 2000. In the scientific literature, few are the authors (notably Ness and Orme [2]) who have dared to suggest that these might actually be gigantic living organisms, sprawling hundreds of meters in every direction. In the case of the annually recurring "Dark Dune Spots," also photographed from Mars orbit at similar latitudes, also suspected by some to represent (colonies of) living organisms, the Hungarian team of Horváth et al [3] have proposed a very plausible mechanism for habitability, namely: that Autumn and Winter (in South Polar regions) deposit a thick layer of water ice, followed by CO2-ice, which in Spring evaporate (in last-in-first-out sequence) leaving, for several months each year, a layer of liquid water under the water-ice and over the dark spots, warmed by 24-hour sunshine. Yet, despite their observations and explanation, in numerous papers and conference presentations, the whole topic of extant life on Mars is still being treated as "taboo" by most planetary scientists. I hereby make a plea for ending said taboo, based on recent photographs taken by the MER rovers "Spirit" (in Gusev crater) and "Opportunity" (on Meridiani Planum), photographs available on NASA's "raw image" galleries [4]. I present my case, as of mid-April, 2004. Materials and methods The photographs I show here are all clippings from NASA's gallery of raw images at their Mars Rovers web site [4], particularly from the Microscopic Imager. These are offered to the public in jpg format, 32-bit grayscale, 72 dots per inch, and various degrees of compression (some with quite noticeable compression artifacts). For viewing originals online, I recommend setting the screen resolution to 72 dpi, which probably gives the best viewing experience. Unfortunately, the cameras were not equipped with autofocus zoom, so most of the originals are badly out of focus; the rover teams have attempted to compensate for this by photographing each scene several times, with different focal settings at each take, and much of the viewer's search time can be devoted to selecting the take that is least blurred. Even with the best focus, however, many of the details I wish to highlight here are small (in number of pixels) and/or have poor contrast. For this reason, I have in many cases taken the liberty of including, alongside the unretouched clipping, a 15% normal edge sharpening (in the parlance of GraphicConverter, which has been my sole image editing tool [5]): wherever a clipping appears twice, the reader may assume that the rightmost instance has been enhanced in this manner. The document you are now reading was [originally] written, single column, in html [6], hand coded [5], on the assumption that the reader of the html version will read it on screen, at 72 dpi; it is, however, targeted for publication in Marsbugs, which is offered primarily in pdf at 300 dpi, double columns, each column being 3.25 inches wide if printed on US-letter sized paper. A one-column wide image, at pdf resolution, is then 975 pixels wide, and I would love to show the clippings with this much detail, but it is lacking. I have opted to double my column width, to 6.5 inches at 72 dpi, and have restricted image clippings to that width (468 pixels, actually, so that image and text scale correctly if your screen has a different dpi): upon 50% reduction, this is equivalent to 3.25 inches at 144 dpi, which is not as good as 300 dpi, but certainly better than 72. Results The NASA-posted rover images (over 25 thousand as of April 18th) contain a number of striking, though so far sporadic, instances of organic (even bizarre [7]) shapes which I am not including here; in this report I wish to emphasize that there are motifs that not only look organic, but recur, with variations, across many images, and usually from both rover sites. To wit: Arced filaments in radial pattern, detached from substrate. Figure 1 shows a detail from 3 images delivered by Spirit on Sol 66 (March 11th) at the rim of Bonneville (a 200m crater within the larger Gusev). Hopefully, the reader can see (bottom left) arced filaments in a radial pattern, at least two of which cross a shadow, indicating that the arcs clear the stone from which they seem to emanate. Such fragile structures could not possibly have survived ejection when Bonneville was formed, so they must have formed in situ. Moreover, they look so fragile that they can hardly be "ancient" in any geological sense. They must therefore have grown there, recently. I have yet to find (April 14th) another example of such filaments in Gusev panoramas, but Figure 2, from Opportunity's Microscopic Imager (Sol 73 = April 8th) shows several instances of neighboring pebbles connected to each other by wispy bridges, and, in several instances, a tenuous radial pattern over a pebble can be discerned. [http://homepage.mac.com/ttelos/BioMars/OrganisMER/pappusBigABC.jpg] Figure 1. Compression artifacts are so bad, in this instance, that edge enhancement decreases visibility; instead, I have clipped the same piece from the three photographs where this "pappus" feature appears. http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/2/p/066/2P132217637EFF1600P2283 L5M1.JPG http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/2/p/066/2P132217663EFF1600P2283 L6M1.JPG http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/2/p/066/2P132217591EFF1600P2283 L2M1.JPG [http://homepage.mac.com/ttelos/BioMars/OrganisMER/pappiFaint.jpg] Figure 2. Microscopic Imager. Tiny versions of "pappi"? http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/m/073/1M134664662EFF1000P2936 M2M1.JPG Silky filaments resembling cobwebs. There exist "flowing" and even "lacy" patterns in some rocks, on Earth as well as Mars. Figure 3, however, shows a cobweb-like structure, in profile (lower right), that wraps around features of the underlying rock, and is therefore more recent than the rock that it covers. Strands of this webbing ("silk") are too fine to be seen individually, even at the magnification of the microscopic imager, but their presence can be inferred by the fact that they trap particles that can be seen suspended over cavities, in mid-air, sometimes forming "dotted lines" (one has to wonder what makes them sticky, and what for). The fact that these "curtains" are not saturated with particles, even though there are dust-carrying winds on Mars, indicates that said "curtains" must be of recent origin, probably less than a martian year (there are two windy seasons per year). In Figure 4, we see two instances of a cocoon-shape, much larger than the particles of Figure 3, suspended by invisible "silk" inside a rock cavity. We also see "squiggles" projecting from the cavity wall. Figure 5 shows more suspended (sequestered?) and apparently silk-wrapped miscellanea, from the same "sweet spot" on Meridiani Planum (Opportunity, Sol 65). [http://homepage.mac.com/ttelos/BioMars/OrganisMER/cobwebCurtains.jpg] Figure 3. No edge enhancement. From (left, upper right, lower right): http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/m/067/1M134143872EFF08AQP2956 M2M1.JPG http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/m/067/1M134143991EFF08AQP2956 M2M1.JPG http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/m/069/1M134320496EFF08AYP2956 M2M1.JPG [http://homepage.mac.com/ttelos/BioMars/OrganisMER/cocoonsA.jpg] Figure 4. Of the leftmost scene, four takes gave good focus, so I show two of them (upper and lower left), with edge-enhanced versions to their right; of the rightmost pair, the upper is unretouched, the lower is edge enhanced. From (top two, bottom two, right): http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/m/065/1M133957122EFF08AQP2906 M2M1.JPG http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/m/065/1M133957373EFF08AQP2946 M1M1.JPG http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/m/065/1M133956105EFF08AQP2936 M2M1.JPG [http://homepage.mac.com/ttelos/BioMars/OrganisMER/cocoonsB.jpg] Figure 5. From http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/m/065/1M133956105EFF08AQP2936 M2M1.JPG Heads at the end of thin stalks ("sporophytes"). In some cases, the "miscellanea" that project from cavity walls take on the appearance of moss sporophytes (seta + sporangium): Figure 6 shows thin semirigid stalks capped by ovoid heads, but two of the heads are constricted in the middle. Sometimes such structures fan out in tight bunches (top right, and inset). Figure 7 shows an exceptionally large head, dangling from a white thread. I challenge the reader to show an example of a mineral growing that way without biological assistance, although biogenic cave deposits do come to mind. To be continued... [http://homepage.mac.com/ttelos/BioMars/OrganisMER/sporophytesA.jpg] Figure 6. Opportunity, Sol 65 (main), 69 (inset). From http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/m/065/1M133955588EFF08AQP2936 M2M1.JPG http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/m/069/1M134320496EFF08AYP2956 M2M1.JPG [http://homepage.mac.com/ttelos/BioMars/OrganisMER/sporoMouse.jpg] Figure 7. Opportunity, Sol 69. From http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/m/069/1M134315180EFF08AYP2956 M2M1.JPG References and endnotes [1] "Clarke trees" were pointed out by A.C. Clarke at the 2001 Wernher von Braun Memorial Lecture, June 6th, 2001, Langley IMAX Theater, National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC. "Clarke trees" and "fractal forests" can be seen, referenced and contrast-enhanced since March 2001, at: http://www.curiousnotions.com/mars/mars_plants.html and http://www.curiousnotions.com/mars/mars_islands.html [2] Martian "spiders": Ness, P.K. and G.M. Orme (2002): Spider-Ravine Models and Plant-Like Features on Mars: Possible Geophysical and Biogeophysical Modes of Origin, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 55:85-108 (March/April 2002). That paper, its follow-ups, including one in Marsbugs, 9 June 2003 (http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/2003/20030609.pdf), related reports, and many remarkable images, can all be accessed from http://www.martianspiders.com/. [3] "Hungarian team": A. Horváth, T. Gánti, A. Gesztesi, Sz. Bérczi, E. Szathmáry, and recently T. Pócs, have been writing about seasonal "Dark Dune Spots" as possible biomarkers since 2001. A compilation of their analyses and observations over nearly two martian years is in Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, 33:515-577. They presented three papers to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference XXXV (March 15-19, 2004): http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2004/home.html. [4] "Raw" image galleries, Mars Exploration Rovers: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/. [5] Software used for this project: image editing with GraphicConverter, http://www.lemkesoft.com/en/graphcon.htm; document editing with SubEthaEdit, http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/; operating system: Mac OS X ("Panther"). [6] html et al.: formatting commands for this document are in html 4.01 transitional, with css level 2, charset=utf-8, according to standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium: http://www.w3.org/ (When viewing the html version, please make sure your browser implements those standards.) [7] Example of bizarre: "cornucopia." What appears to be a conical sheet, toppled over, spilling some content including a donut, can be found in Spirit Sol 66 navcam images. http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/; then consult ../2/n/066/2N132226267EFF1700P1943R0M1.JPG ../2/n/066/2N132226267EFF1700P1943L0M1.JPG Those constitute a right-left pair: if you place the right on your left and vice-versa, and cross your eyes, you can get a 3D effect. A second "cornucopia" can be found in Spirit Sol 69 pancam (right, left): ../2/p/069/2P132489576EFF1800P2289R2M1.JPG ../2/p/069/2P132489576EFF1800P2289L2M1.JPG Contact: Francisco J. Oyarzun E-mail: francisco-o@earthink.net Read the original article at http://homepage.mac.com/ttelos/BioMars/OrganisMER/orgA.html. __________________________________________________________________________ SETI INSTITUTE SCIENTIST NAMED TO TIME MAGAZINE TOP 100 FOR THE 20TH CENTURY SETI Institute release 19 April 2004 The TIME 100 recognizes the world's elite in business, art, politics, science and other fields, men and women who have succeeded thanks to a combination of intelligence, hard work and good fortune. The SETI Institute is pleased to announce that Dr. Jill Tarter was selected by the editors of TIME magazine as one of the world's 100 most "influential and powerful people". Dr. Tarter was chosen in the "Scientist and Thinker" category for her leadership role in the scientific search for evidence of life on other worlds, and for her efforts to promote scientific literacy among youth, particularly girls and young women. Tarter has devoted her life to the science of detecting intelligent, technological civilizations through searches of the electromagnetic (radio and now optical) spectrum, a discipline within the growing field of astrobiology. A former Project Scientist for NASA's SETI program, the High Resolution Microwave Survey, today Tarter holds the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and is Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute. Earlier this year, Tarter oversaw the completion of the Institute's privately funded Project Phoenix and the release of Voyages Through Time, an integrated science curriculum for high school students, developed by the Institute's education department and its partners. Tarter is currently the project leader of the Allen Telescope Array, the Institute's innovative, next-generation radio telescope that will come on line with 32 dishes late in 2004. TIME 100 Dr. Tarter was selected by TIME magazine editors who spanned the globe searching for persons whom they consider the most important and compelling people in the world at this moment in time. The TIME distinction is the latest in a long list of Tarter's honors, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from Women in Aerospace, two Public Service Medals from NASA, and election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2002. To coincide with the announcement of TIME magazine's selection, CNN Presents will air an hour-long special report profiling five of the 100 honorees, with highlights of about 10 more. TIME will announce the "Time 100" on Sunday, April 18, with the magazine becoming available on newsstands Monday, April 19. CNN Presents: TIME 100 airs on Sunday, April 18, at 8:00 PM and 11:00 PM (ET) and will replay on Saturday, April 24, at 6:00 AM, 8:00 PM and 11:00 PM. CNN's Aaron Brown hosts the program. During the week of April 19, CNN, CNN Headline News and CNN Airport Network will air segments of the special during regularly scheduled programming. The SETI Institute The SETI Institute is a 501c (3) non-profit California corporation, incorporated in 1984. The mission of the SETI Institute is to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature, prevalence of life in the universe. The Center for SETI Research and the Center for the Study of Life in the Universe comprise the two key research foci of the Institute. Innovative education programs and public outreach based upon the work of these two centers to advance the education component of the Institute's mission. Read the original news release at http://www.seti.org/about_us/info_for_media/press_releases/jill_time_top_1 00.htm. An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.seti.org/about_us/info_for_media/press_releases/jill_time_top_1 00.htm. __________________________________________________________________________ NEW ADDITIONS TO THE ASTROBIOLOGY INDEX By David J. Thomas http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/ 20 April 2004 Astrobiology and planetary engineering articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles1.html Astrobiology Magazine, 2004. Biology hanging by a thread? The Knoll criterion on Mars. Astrobiology Magazine. S. Shostak, 2004. The bricks of life: exploring the idea of alien chemistry. Space.com. Human space exploration articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles3.html C. Kridler, 2004. Scientists hope Bush space plan restores Mars greenhouse funds. Space.com. Evolution (biological, chemical and cosmological) articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles5.html F. Toscano, 2004. When did bacteria appear? Astrobiology Magazine. Extrasolar planets articles http://www.lyon.edu/projects/marsbugs/astrobiology/online_articles7.html L. Mullen, 2004. New planet, magnified. Astrobiology Magazine. NASA, 2004. Cosmic magnifying glass reveals distant planet. Spaceflight Now. NASA, 2004. Gravitational lens reveals distant planet. Universe Today. NASA, 2004. Gravity lens reveals most distant exo planet yet. SpaceDaily. Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, 2004. SuperWASP begins the search for thousands of new planets. SpaceDaily. __________________________________________________________________________ CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS NASA/JPL release 8-14 April 2004 The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Goldstone tracking station on Tuesday, April 13. 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=fVCPKJdIbgtO-3BCLCXxIg. Science activities on-board for the duration of C44 include repetitive blocks of imaging with occasional riders, a few Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph system scans and a sprinkling of optical navigation (OPNAV) images. The results will be Saturn approach movies to study the planet's atmosphere and its temporal variations, searches for new satellites, observations of Titan, searches for diffuse ring material and system scans to map atomic species. The Cosmic Dust Analyzer performed the first time event of rocking downlinks this week. All subsystems reported normal performance and results are undergoing evaluation. Additional on-board activities included a Radio and Plasma Wave Science High Frequency Receiver Calibration and an ACS Reaction Wheel Assembly bias unload. Development of S01, the first tour sequence, continued this week with a waiver for SSR Data Load command timing constraints for OPNAV IEB loads approved at the Preliminary Sequence Integration and Validation (PSIV) waiver disposition meeting. This concluded the PSIV1 development phase. PSIV2 began with a sequence change request approval meeting. Thirty-two change requests for the sequence were dispositioned. Development of the S02 tour sequence began this week. A kick-off meeting was held, merged reference activity plan files containing the Inertial Vector Propagator and Star ID suspend commands delivered, and the remaining engineering commands, science activities, and Sub-Sequence Generation Spacecraft Activity Sequence Files released. The flow of science planning processes for tour goes from Science Operations Plan (SOP) Implementation, to Aftermarket, and on to SOP Update. This week, there were significant development milestones in all processes for multiple tour sequences. A wrap-up meeting for implementation of tour sequences S25 and S26 was held. The sequences have now been archived and will begin the Aftermarket and SOP Update processes in the summer of 2006. In addition, official input port #1 for SOP Implementation of tour sequences S27 and S28 occurred this week. The delivered sequence products were merged and handed off to the ACS team for a complete end-to-end pointing analysis. At the Aftermarket Assessment meeting for S04, it was determined that very few changes had been submitted by participating teams. As a result, it was decided that the Decision Meeting was to be canceled and all requested changes approved unless the Saturn target working team identifies any major issues in incorporating the requested changes. Most waiver requests were approved at the S02 Project Briefing and Waiver Disposition meeting. A few were delayed until an end-to-end C-kernel could be delivered that included the attitude profile during the Saturn Orbit Insertion (SOI) burn period. This process has now been completed and a hand-off product was delivered to Uplink Operations for the start of the Science and Sequence Update process. In addition, a kick-off meeting was held for S03 SOP Update. The scheduled Science Adaptation Panel (SAP) meeting was canceled as all requested DSN station coverage for this sequence has been received. In the last week, 275 Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) images and 23 Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) cubes were returned and distributed, bringing the total of images acquired since the start of Approach Science up to 2888, and the number of cubes up to 697. The Cassini Program completed a two day Tour Operations Readiness Review. The objective of the review was to evaluate the readiness of the Mission Operations System and Ground Data System to support Tour operations. All teams both at JPL and remote sites presented their readiness status. The board agreed that Cassini was well prepared for tour, and that the work remaining was appropriate. The Operational Readiness Test #1 for Saturn Orbit Insertion (SOI) began last Friday in the Integrated Test Lab. This test is the dry run of all nominal events that will start for real on June 2 and continue through July 3, 2004. This week the test covered loading the sequence onto the Solid State Recorders and performing Trajectory Correction Maneuver #21. An ACS Flight Software (FSW) Review/Certification Requirements meeting was held this week. The FSW was accepted for operational use with two follow- up documentation actions assigned. A8.6.7 will support SOI, and another planned FSW build/parameter set, A8.7.0, is scheduled to support the Huygens probe mission. An uplink readiness review for A8.6.7 will be held next week. The ACS team gave a presentation to the Cassini Project at the Mission Planning Forum on the use of a hybrid ACS control system. This is a future potential contingency. The presentation explored the spacecraft capabilities when operating with a reduced set of reaction wheels and using Reaction Control Subsystem thrusters for selected axes. The Navigation team gave a presentation and recommendations at the Forum concerning modifications to the reference trajectory. This was a revisit of the implications of raising the T3 altitude and subsequent trajectory and flyby altitude changes. Multi-Mission Image Processing Laboratory (MIPL) conducted a test of the critical OPNAV downlink process. The test involved automated queries of the Real-time stream and, in parallel, the more manual contingency process. The automated process stopped early and delivery was delayed by a restart. The contingency process worked as planned and Navigation received the data within 30 minutes of initial receipt by MIPL. Three months before Saturn arrival, the Cassini spacecraft caught two storms in the act of merging into one larger storm. This is only the second time this phenomenon has been observed on the ringed planet. A series of Cassini images documenting this event is available on the Internet at http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=S83Oa0ako9VO-3BCLCXxIg. On 14 April 1629, 375 years ago, the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens was born. The European Space Agency (ESA) probe on-board the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens mission to the Saturnian system is named after this lens- maker who discovered Titan in 1655. For more information on Christiaan Huygens and the anniversary of his birth go to http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=209rZr2hKDdO-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. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0404/17cassinimoons/ http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/huygens_375_birthday.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/cassini_sees_shepherding_moons.htm l __________________________________________________________________________ MARS ROVER FINDS ROCK RESEMBLING METEORITES THAT FELL TO EARTH NASA/JPL release 2004-104 15 April 2004 NASA's Opportunity rover has examined an odd volcanic rock on the plains of Mars' Meridiani Planum region with a composition unlike anything seen on Mars before, but scientists have found similarities to meteorites that fell to Earth. "We think we have a rock similar to something found on Earth," said Dr. Benton Clark of Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, science-team member for the Opportunity and Spirit rovers on Mars. The similarity seen in data from Opportunity's alpha particle X-ray spectrometer "gives us a way of understanding 'Bounce Rock' better," he said. Bounce Rock is the name given to the odd, football-sized rock because Opportunity struck it while bouncing to a stop inside protective airbags on landing day. The resemblance helps resolve a paradox about the meteorites, too. Bubbles of gas trapped in them match the recipe of martian atmosphere so closely that scientists have been confident for years that these rocks originated from Mars. But examination of rocks on Mars with orbiters and surface missions had never found anything like them, until now. "There is a striking similarity in spectra," said Christian Schroeder, a rover science-team collaborator from the University of Mainz, Germany, which supplied both Mars rovers' Moessbauer spectrometer instruments for identifying iron-bearing minerals. Mars Exploration Rover scientists described two such meteorites in particular during a Mars Exploration Rover news conference at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. One rock, named Shergotty, was found in India in 1865 and it gave its name to a class of meteorites called shergottites. A shergottite named EETA79001 was found in Antarctica in 1979 and has an elemental composition even closer to Bounce Rock's. Those two and about 18 other meteorites found on Earth are believed to have been ejected from Mars by the impacts of large asteroids or comets hitting Mars. Opportunity's miniature thermal emission spectrometer indicates that the main ingredient in Bounce Rock is a volcanic mineral called pyroxene, said science-team collaborator Deanne Rogers of Arizona State University, Tempe. The Moessbauer spectrometer also identified pyroxene in the rock. The high proportion of pyroxene makes it unlike not only any other rock studied by Opportunity or Spirit, but also unlike the volcanic deposits mapped extensively around Mars by a similar spectrometer on NASA's Mars Globall Surveyor orbiter, Rogers said. Thermal infrared imaging by another orbiter, Mars Odyssey, suggests a possible origin for Bounce Rock. An impact crater about 25 kilometers wide (16 miles wide) lies about 50 kilometers (31 miles) southwest of Opportunity. The images show that some rocks thrown outward by the impact that formed that crater flew as far as the distance to the rover. "Some of us think Bounce Rock could have been ejected from this crater," Rogers said. Opportunity is driving eastward, toward a crater dubbed "Endurance" that might offer access to thicker exposures of bedrock than the rover has been able to examine so far. With new software to improve mobility performance, the rover may reach Endurance within two weeks, said JPL's Jan Chodas, flight software manager for both Mars Exploration Rovers. Mission controllers at JPL successfully sent new versions of flight software to both rovers. Spirit switched to the new version successfully on Monday, and Opportunity did late Tuesday. A parting look at the small crater in which Opportunity landed is part of a full 360-degree color panorama released at the news conference. The view combines about 600 individual frames from the rover's panoramic camera, said science-team collaborator Jason Soderblom of Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. It is called the Lion King panorama because it was taken from a high-ground viewpoint at the edge of the crater, like the high-ground viewpoint used by animal characters in the Lion King story. The panorama gives a good sense of how wind has uncovered the outcrop at the upwind side of the crater and deposited sand in the downwind side of the crater and bright martian dust in the wind shadow of the crater, Soderblom commented. On the wide plain outside the crater lies Bounce Rock. 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, Ithaca, NY, at http://athena.cornell.edu. Daily MER 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 articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article924.html http://www.astrobio.net/news/article929.html http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/04/08/mars.rovers/index.html http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/rovers_updates_040414.html http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_bounce_040416.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-04zzzu.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-04zzzv.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-04zzzw.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-04zzzx.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-04zzzy.html http://www.spacedaily.com/upi/20040416-18072000.html http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/status.html http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/040415meteorites.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/meteorite_matches_mars_rock.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/bounce_rock_mystery_ends.html __________________________________________________________________________ MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 8-14 April 2004 The following new images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are now available. Ariadnes Colle (Released 08 April 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=Xr4DgY5LKhdO-3BCLCXxIg Olympian Flows (Released 09 April 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=uZMJjIMy_rxO-3BCLCXxIg Marte Valles Crater "Island" (Released 10 April 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=Qgi8rqGRc-5O-3BCLCXxIg South Polar Wind Drifts (Released 11 April 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=XP58hD5vJu5O-3BCLCXxIg Springtime Dunes, 2004 (Released 12 April 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=OTQ9-XeXFTZO-3BCLCXxIg Summer South Polar Cap (Released 13 April 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=WSfOe4Z4Q_FO-3BCLCXxIg North Polar Dunes (Released 14 April 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=4LVS4Iw5fYVO-3BCLCXxIg All of the Mars Global Surveyor images are archived at http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=zPjsWPW3A0dO-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 12-16 April 2004 Dunes in Ganges Chasma (Released 12 April 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=E4CI95GnuN1O-3BCLCXxIg Kaiser Dunes (Released 13 April 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=Sr0pbwwGmYVO-3BCLCXxIg Orson Welles Crater Dunes (Released 14 April 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=S-xaqpbE_X5O-3BCLCXxIg Hellas Basin Dunes (Released 15 April 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=EvrD7qHrSGlO-3BCLCXxIg Proctor Crater Dunes (Released 16 April 2004) http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=BCUhNip47VlO-3BCLCXxIg All of the THEMIS images are archived at http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=DDg4KeHb5RBO-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. __________________________________________________________________________ End Marsbugs, Volume 11, Number 17.