Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 12, Number 6, 15 February 2005 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, but individual authors retain the copyright of specific articles. 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) FAMILY TREES OF ANCIENT BACTERIA REVEAL EVOLUTIONARY MOVES--EVOLUTION AS THE DRIVING FORCE IN EARTH'S DEVELOPMENT By Tony Fitzpatrick 2) SCIENTISTS ANNOUNCE SMALLEST EXTRA-SOLAR PLANET YET DISCOVERED Pennsylvania State University release 3) CARBON WORLD From Astrobiology Magazine 4) NASA HAUGHTON-MARS PROJECT--SUMMERTIME ON A "PLANET" CLOSE TO HOME By Elaine Walker 5) SAFE ON MARS From Astrobiology Magazine 6) TEACH EVOLUTION: LEAVE NO CHILD BEHIND By Edna DeVore 7) NASA DEVELOPMENT MAY HELP SOLVE OCEAN BIOLOGY PROBLEM NASA release 05-042 8) NATURAL CLIMATE CHANGE MAY BE LARGER THAN COMMONLY THOUGHT From SpaceDaily 9) NEW THEORY OF HOW PLANETS FORM FINDS HAVENS OF STABILITY AMID TURBULENCE Indiana University release 10) EARTH TO MARS IN A MONTH WITH PAINTED SOLAR SAIL By Bill Christensen 11) PIRANHA TO PETUNIA: CATALOGUING WITH THE DARWIN DECIMAL SYSTEM From Astrobiology Magazine 12) SCIENTISTS AT MICHIGAN STATE PROVE EVOLUTION WORKS From Michigan State University and Discover magazine 13) MOVED BY SCIENCE IN MOTION (INTERVIEW WITH AL DIAZ) By Michael Benson 14) IS THERE LIFE ON MARS? LOOKING FOR ROCK SOLID EVIDENCE By Leonard David Announcements 15) BRAIN BITES: AMUSING ONE-MINUTE VIDEOS FROM NASA ANSWER SOME OF THE QUESTIONS ABOUT SPACE YOU WERE AFRAID TO ASK By Karen Miller 16) DISNEY'S NEW 3-D IMAX FILM, ALIENS OF THE DEEP From the NAI Newsletter 17) SWITCH ON THE MICRO*SCOPE From the NAI Newsletter 18) RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES IN SPACE AND EARTH SCIENCES NASA research announcement 19) NASA SUMMER FACULTY RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES By Magali Khalkho 20) 56TH INTERNATIONAL ASTRONAUTICAL CONGRESS By Kenol Jules 21) NASA AWARDS GRANT TO STUDY CANCER RISKS FROM SPACE RADIATION NASA release 05-045 Mission Reports 22) CASSINI-HUYGENS UPDATES NASA/JPL/ESA/UA releases 23) NASA AWARDS CONTRACT FOR KEPLER MISSION PHOTOMETER NASA/ARC release 05-07AR 24) NASA'S TWIN MARS ROVERS CONTINUE EXPLORATION NASA/JPL/ARC release 05-08AR 25) MARS EXPRESS UPDATES ESA releases 26) MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 27) MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release __________________________________________________________________________ FAMILY TREES OF ANCIENT BACTERIA REVEAL EVOLUTIONARY MOVES--EVOLUTION AS THE DRIVING FORCE IN EARTH'S DEVELOPMENT By Tony Fitzpatrick Washington University in St. Louis release 2 February 2005 A geomicrobiologist at Washington University in St. Louis has proposed that evolution is the primary driving force in the early Earth's development rather than physical processes, such as plate tectonics. Carrine Blank, Ph.D., Washington University assistant professor of geomicrobiology in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences, studying cyanobacteria--bacteria that use light, water, and carbon dioxide to produce oxygen and biomass--has concluded that these species got their start on Earth in freshwater systems on continents and gradually evolved to exist in brackish water environments, then higher salt ones, marine and hyper-saline (salt crust) environments. Cyanobacteria are organisms that gave rise to chloroplasts, the oxygen factories in plant cells. A half billion years ago, cyanobacteria predated more complex organisms like multi-cellular plants and functioned in a world where the oxygen level of the biosphere was much less than it is today. Over their very long life span, cyanobacteria have evolved a system to survive a gradually increasing oxidizing environment, making them of interest to a broad range of researchers. Blank is able to draw her hypothesis from family trees she is drawing of cyanobacteria. Her observations are likely to incite debate among biologists and geologists studying one of Earth's most controversial eras- -approximately 2.1 billion years ago--when cyanobacteria first arose on the Earth. This was a time when the Earth's atmosphere had an incredible, mysterious and inexplicable rise in oxygen, from extremely low levels to 10 percent of what it is today. There were three--some say four--global glaciations, and the fossil record reflects a major shift in the number of organisms metabolizing sulfur and a major shift in carbon cycling. "The question is: Why?" said Blank. "My contribution is the attempt to find evolutionary explanations for these major changes. There were lots of evolutionary movements in cyanobacteria at this time, and the bacteria were making an impact on the Earth's development. Geologists in the past have been relying on geological events for transitions that triggered change, but I'm arguing that a lot of these things could be evolutionary." Blank presented her research at the 2004 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, held, November 7-10 in Denver. Blank's finding that Cyanobacteria emerged first in fresh water lakes or streams is counterintuitive. "Most people have the assumption that cyanobacteria came out of a marine environment--after all, they are still important to marine environments today, so they must always have been," Blank said. "When Cyanobacteria started to appear, there was no ozone shield, so UV light would have killed most things. They either had to have come up with ways to deal with the UV light--and there is evidence that they made UV-absorbing pigments--or find ways of growing under sediments to avoid the light." To study the evolution of cyanobacteria, Blank drew up a backbone tree using multiple genes from whole genome sequences. Additional species were added to the tree using ribosomal RNA genes. Morphological characters, for instance, the presence or absence of a sheath, unicellular or filamentous growth, the presence or absence of heterocysts--a thick-walled cell occurring at intervals--were coded and mapped on the tree. The distribution of traits was compared with those found in the fossil record. Cyanobacteria emerging some two billion years ago were becoming complex microbes that had larger cell diameters than earlier groups--at least 2.5 microns. Blank's tree shows that several morphological traits arose independently in multiple lines, among them a sheath structure, filamentous growth, the ability to fix nitrogen, thermophily (love of heat), motility and the use of sulfide as an electron donor. "We will need lots of analyses of the micro-fossil record by serious paleobiologists to see how sound this hypothesis is," Blank said. "This time frame is one of the biggest puzzles for biologists and geologists alike. A huge amount of things are happening then in the geological record." Read the original news release at http://news- info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/4504.html. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1438.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/earth-05e.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/life_fresh_water.html __________________________________________________________________________ SCIENTISTS ANNOUNCE SMALLEST EXTRA-SOLAR PLANET YET DISCOVERED Pennsylvania State University release 8 February 2005 Penn State's Alex Wolszczan, the discoverer in 1992 of the first planets ever found outside our solar system, now has discovered with Caltech's Maciej Konacki the smallest planet yet detected,in that same far-away planetary system. Immersed in an extended cloud of ionized gas, the new planet orbits a rapidly spinning neutron star called a pulsar. The discovery, announced at a meeting concerning planetary formation and detection in Aspen, CO, yesterday (February 7), yields an astonishingly complete description of the pulsar planetary system and confirms that it is remarkably like a half-size version of our own solar system--even though the star these planets orbit is quite different from our Sun. "Despite the extreme conditions that must have existed at the time these planets were forming, nature has managed to create a planetary system that looks like a scaled-down copy of our own inner solar system," Wolszczan said. The star at the center of this system is a pulsar named PSR B1257+12--the extremely dense and compact neutron star left over from a massive star that died in a violent explosion 1,500 light years away in the constellation Virgo. Wolszczan and his colleagues earlier had discovered three terrestrial planets around the pulsar, with their orbits in an almost exact proportion to the spacings between Mercury, Venus and Earth. The newly discovered fourth planet has an orbit approximately six times larger than that of the third planet in the system, which Konacki says is amazingly close to the average distance from our Sun to our solar system's asteroid belt, located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. "Because our observations practically rule out a possible presence of an even more distant, massive planet or planets around the pulsar, it is quite possible that the tiny fourth planet is the largest member of a cloud of interplanetary debris at the outer edge of the pulsar's planetary system, a remnant of the original protoplanetary disk that created the three inner planets," Wolszczan explained. The small planet, about one- fifth of the mass of Pluto, may occupy the same outer-boundary position in its planetary system as Pluto does in our solar system. "Surprisingly, the planetary system around this pulsar resembles our own solar system more than any extrasolar planetary system discovered around a Sun-like star," Konacki said. Fifteen years ago, before Wolszczan's discovery of the first extrasolar planets, astronomers did not seriously entertain the idea that planets could survive around pulsars because they would have been blasted with the unimaginable force of the radiation and remnants of their exploding parent star. Since then, Wolszczan, Konacki and colleagues gradually have been unraveling the mysteries of this system of pulsar planets, using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to collect and analyze pulsar- timing data. "We feel now, with this discovery, that the basic inventory of this planetary system has been completed," Wolszczan said. These discoveries have been possible because pulsars, especially those with the fastest spin, behave like very accurate clocks. "The stability of the repetition rate of the pulsar pulses compares favorably with the precision of the best atomic clocks constructed by humans," Konacki explained. Measurements of the pulse arrival times, called pulsar timing, give astronomers an extremely precise method for studying the physics of pulsars and for detecting the phenomena that occur in a pulsar's environment. "A pulsar wobble due to orbiting planets manifests itself by variations in the pulse arrival times, just like a stellar wobble is detectable with the well-known Doppler effect so successfully used by optical astronomers to identify planets around nearby stars by the shifts of their spectral lines," Wolszczan explained. "An important advantage of the fantastic stability of the pulsar clocks, which achieve precisions better than one millionth of a second, is that this method allows us to detect planets with masses all the way down to those of large asteroids." The very existence of the pulsar planets may represent convincing evidence that Earth-mass planets form just as easily as do the gas giants that are known to exist around more than 5 percent of the nearby Sun-like stars. However, Wolszczan said, "the message carried by the pulsar planets may equally well be that the formation of Earth-like planets requires special conditions, making such planets a rarity. For example, there is growing evidence that a nearby supernova explosion may have played an important role in our solar system's formation." Future space observatories, including the Kepler and the Space Interferometry Missions, and the Terrestrial Planet Finder, will play a decisive role in making a distinction between these fundamental alternatives. Read the original news release at http://live.psu.edu/story/10180. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/miniature_solarsys_050207.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/extrasolar-05h.html http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0502/11planet/ http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/smallest_extrasolar_planet.html __________________________________________________________________________ CARBON WORLD From Astrobiology Magazine Based on a Princeton University report 8 February 2005 Some extrasolar planets may be made substantially from carbon compounds, including diamond, according to a report presented this week at the conference on extrasolar planets in Aspen, Colorado. Earth, Mars and Venus are "silicate planets" consisting mostly of silicon-oxygen compounds. Astrophysicists are proposing that some stars in our galaxy may host "carbon planets" instead. "Carbon planets could form in much the same way as do certain meteorites in our solar system, the carbonaceous chondrites," said Dr. Marc J. Kuchner of Princeton University, making the report in Aspen together with Dr. Sara Seager of the Carnegie Institute of Washington. "These meteorites contain large quantities of carbon compounds such as carbides, organics, and graphite, and even the occasional tiny diamond." Imagine such a meteorite the size of a planet, and you are picturing a carbon planet. Planets like the Earth are thought to condense from disks of gas orbiting young stars. In gas with extra carbon or too little oxygen, carbon compounds like carbides and graphite condense out instead of silicates, possibly explaining the origin of carbonaceous chondrites and suggesting the possibility of carbon planets. Any condensed graphite would change into diamond under the high pressures inside the carbon planets, potentially forming diamond layers inside the planets many miles thick. Some of the already known low- and intermediate-mass extrasolar planets may be carbon planets, which should easily survive at high temperatures near a star if they have the mass of Neptune. Carbon planets would probably consist mostly of carbides, thought they may have iron cores and substanial atmospheres. Carbides are a kind of ceramic used to line the cylinders of motorcycle engines among other things. The planets orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12 are good candidates for carbon planets; they may have formed from the disruption of a star that produced carbon as it aged. So are planets located near the center of the Galaxy, where stars are more carbon-rich than the sun, on average. Slowly, the galaxy as a whole is becoming more carbon-rich; in the future, all planets formed may be carbon planets. "There's no reason to think that extrasolar planets will be just like the planets in the solar system." says Kuchner. "The possibilities are startling." Kuchner added, "NASA's future Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission may be able to spot these planets." The spectra of these planets should lack water, and instead reveal carbon monoxide, methane, and possibly long- chain carbon compounds synthesized photochemically in their atmospheres. The surfaces of carbon planets may be covered with a layer of long-chain carbon compounds--in other words, something like crude oil or tar. The first TPF telescope, an optical telescope several times the size of the Hubble Space Telescope is scheduled to launch in 2015. The TPF missions are designed to search for planets like the Earth and determine whether they might be suitable for life. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1433.html. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/diamond_planets_050208.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/extrasolar-05g.html http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0502/09planets/ http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/diamond_worlds.html __________________________________________________________________________ NASA HAUGHTON-MARS PROJECT--SUMMERTIME ON A "PLANET" CLOSE TO HOME By Elaine Walker From Space.com and Ad Astra 8 February 2005 The NASA Haughton-Mars Project (HMP) is an international field research project centered on the scientific study of a very special island in the Canadian High Arctic, Nunavut Territory. Devon Island is the world's largest uninhabited desert island. It is cold, dry, desolate and contains an amazing feature--a 24-kilometer wide impact crater that is 23 million years old. All of this means that Devon Island is a very good environment for scientists studying what it would take to conduct a manned mission on Mars. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/adastra/adastra_haughton_050208.html. __________________________________________________________________________ SAFE ON MARS From Astrobiology Magazine Based on a National Research Council report 8 February 2005 The National Research Council was tasked with evaluating the risks of landing humans safely to work on Mars. Their report highlights a number of unique aspects in transit to the red planet, as well as once humans step out onto the surface. In this first of two parts summarizing some key points, their report touches on the logistics of traveling to a site and then driving around the neighborhood. Every 2 years from 2001 to 2011, with the dates dictated by launch windows, another spacecraft, launched by NASA and/or NASA's international partners, is intended to visit Mars. Some spacecraft will orbit the planet, while others will land on the martian surface. The NASA Mars Exploration Program Office (within the NASA headquarters Office of Space Science) has established the Mars Exploration Program/Payload Analysis Group (MEPAG), consisting of more than 110 individuals from the Mars community, with representatives from universities, research centers and organizations, industry, and international partners. The MEPAG participants propose the objectives, investigations, and measurements needed for the eventual exploration of Mars, focusing on four principal exploration goals. These goals fall under four broad categories: * * Life: determine if life ever arose on Mars. * * Climate: determine the climate on Mars. * * Geology: determine the evolution of the surface and interior of Mars. * * Prepare for the eventual human exploration of Mars. While there is currently no funded human mission to Mars, nor even a baseline reference human mission, one of the goals of the MEPAG is to ensure that sufficient information is developed in a timely manner to support such a mission, once it has been funded. What measurements must be made on Mars prior to the first human mission? These measurements would provide information about the risks to humans so that NASA scientists and engineers can design systems that will protect astronauts on the surface of Mars. How can robotic exploration missions sent to Mars aid NASA in assessing the risks to astronauts posed by possible environmental, chemical, and biological agents on the planet? Of critical importance is whether it will be necessary to return martian soil and/or air-borne dust samples to Earth prior to the first human mission to Mars to assure astronaut health and safety. Sending astronauts to the Red Planet, having them land, conduct a mission on the surface, and then return safely to Earth will be an enormous undertaking. A long-stay mission would require that astronauts spend 16 to 20 months in orbit around Mars or on the surface, with total mission duration being 21/2 to 3 years. On a short-stay mission, astronauts would be able to remain in orbit around Mars or on the surface for only 30 to 45 days before they would have to embark on the return journey to Earth. If they stayed longer, Earth and Mars would move out of optimum alignment and the return to Earth would require an excessive amount of propellant. Unless provisions can be made to counter the microgravity environment (by means of exercise protocols or by inducing artificial gravity) and harsh radiation conditions in space, the potential negative effects on health of the longer transit time (short-stay mission) may be prohibitive. Once the astronauts are on the martian surface, there are a variety of operational scenarios that could be conducted by NASA. The simplest would be that astronauts land and never leave a stationary habitat. The most complex scenario could include astronauts using large, pressurized rovers to travel long distances from a base habitat to conduct extravehicular activities (EVAs). Even though there is no baseline mission defined for human missions to Mars, it is likely that rovers of some form will be used to perform functions critical to the safety of the astronauts. For example, human assistant rovers may carry life support equipment, while others robots, such as slow-moving scientific rovers, will likely perform mission- critical functions. On the human missions to Mars, rovers will need capabilities far beyond what is currently planned. Human assistant rovers would have to be able to keep pace with an astronaut walking on the surface of Mars, to operate for a long time, to have an extended range, and to navigate rough terrain quickly. These needs would be especially important for a long-stay mission, where there might be many hundreds of astronaut EVAs that would require a robotic assistant to traverse hundreds of kilometers over the course of the mission. Such human assistant rovers would require kilowatts of continuous electric power during the EVA. Compact sources of power at that capacity do not exist today. Vehicles using standard wheels can typically roll over objects one-third the diameter of the wheel being used. This suggests that if human transport and scientific rovers will use 1-meter wheels, the mission planners will need to know the distribution of rocks one-third of a meter and larger in the landing and operation zone. Imaging rocks this size requires a pixel resolution of 10 cm. NASA should map the three- dimensional terrain morphology of landing operation zones for human missions to characterize their features at sufficient resolution to assure safe landing and human and rover locomotion. The physical environments that might pose risks to crew safety on Mars fall into three categories: geologic, atmospheric, and radiation. The geologic features of interest in this study are airborne dust, regolith, and terrain. The two Viking landers were enveloped in a global dust storm soon after landing, and dust devils have been observed many times on Mars by Viking orbiters and landers, the Mars Pathfinder, and the Mars Global Surveyor. Windblown dust appears to be a common condition on Mars and would cause electrostatic charging of astronauts' space suits during operations on the surface of Mars, as well as of their equipment and habitat. Despite this phenomenon, there has been no report of electrostatic damage to delicate electronics on any of the surface systems. Furthermore, neither the Viking missions nor the Mars Pathfinder mission experienced any problems due to electrostatic charging. Objects on moist ground on Earth are said to be grounded since the conducting ground has an almost unlimited capacity to accept either positive or negative charge without changing its electric charge potential from what is essentially zero. Such natural discharge or prevention of charging is not expected to occur on Mars, because there is no near- surface liquid water. The hazards from electrostatic discharge on Mars can range from a simple spark, equivalent to feeling a sting here on Earth after walking on certain types of carpet and reaching for a doorknob, to potentially more potent bursts between astronauts and large equipment or structures on Mars. The dry conditions and uncertainty about conductivity, charging, and discharging rates in the Mars environment create uncertainties about electrostatic effects on human operations in the Mars environment. It would be helpful for NASA to investigate the design considerations and procedures used at the Siple research station in Antarctica, where there is little to no local electrical ground. Again, as an example of potentially innovative design solutions, two crossed-dipole antennas at Siple, each 21.4 kilometers long, occasionally charged up to the order of 20,000 volts when windborne ice particles passed over them. The danger of discharge was removed by connecting the antennas to the station buildings. The buildings prevented a charge from accumulating on the antenna conductors by acting as large capacitors that stored the charge. The electrostatic voltage on the antennas was reduced to near zero, and since ice is not a perfect electrical insulator, the charge on the buildings dispersed gradually. Sharp conducting points, the needlelike devices referred to above, were also used near the buildings to bleed off the electrical charge. The strongest surface winds observed by in situ measurements on Mars are believed to be 30 to 50 meters per second (67 to 111 miles per hour) based on eolian deposits at the Viking I landing site. From a terrestrial perspective, these wind speeds appear to represent a significant hazard. However, when the lower atmospheric dynamic pressure on Mars, resulting from a less dense atmosphere than on Earth, is accounted for, the Earth- equivalent wind speeds are much less. Simply stated, the wind must blow nine times faster on Mars than here on Earth to achieve the equivalent dynamic pressure. In the strongest wind case mentioned above, a 30 to 50 meter per second (67 to 111 mile per hour) wind on Mars is roughly equivalent to a 3.3 to 5.5 meter per second (7.4 to 12 mile per hour) wind on Earth. The martian atmosphere has been determined to be composed predominantly of carbon dioxide (95 percent), with nitrogen, argon, and oxygen (all nontoxic) present in abundances greater than 0.1 percent. Astronauts are by definition radiation workers. Radiation exposure in space will be a significant and serious hazard during any human expedition to Mars. The radiation dose received by astronauts on the surface of Mars will be a significant fraction of the total radiation exposure for the mission. Strong oxidants detected in martian soil by the Viking biology experiment would be inactivated by humidification inside the astronaut habitat. It is therefore essential that NASA implement proper humidification in conjunction with the filtration system as part of habitat atmosphere conditioning. Even if strong oxidants are present, if the dust level is maintained at 1 mg/m3 or less and appropriate humidification systems are in place, there will be negligible risk associated with oxidation on the martian surface. The probability that life-forms exist on the surface of Mars (that is, the area exposed to ultraviolet radiation and its photochemical products) is very small. However, as a previous [1997] NRC study notes, there is a possibility that such life-forms exist there "in the occasional oasis," most likely where liquid water is present, and, furthermore, that "uncertainties with regard to the possibility of extant martian life can be reduced through a program of research and exploration." It is highly unlikely that infectious organisms are present on Mars. The same NRC study that focuses on the possibility that martian organisms could be agents of infectious disease also states as follows: "The chances that invasive properties would have evolved in putative martian microbes in the absence of evolutionary selection pressure for such properties is vanishingly small. Subcellular disease agents, such as viruses and prions, are biologically part of their host organisms, and an extraterrestrial source of such agents is extremely unlikely." In light of experience gained during Apollo missions to the Moon, a previous [1993] NRC report concludes, "It would, however, be virtually impossible to avoid forward-contamination of Mars or back-contamination of Earth from human exploration." As such, NASA should ensure proper quarantine or decontamination of equipment that may have been exposed to a martian life-form. Read the original articles at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1432.html and http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1437.html. Read the NRC report at http://books.nap.edu/books/0309084261/html/. __________________________________________________________________________ TEACH EVOLUTION: LEAVE NO CHILD BEHIND By Edna DeVore From Space.com 10 February 2005 As I write this column, I'm flying from San Francisco to New York City for three days of meetings at the American Museum of Natural History on bringing the latest scientific data to the public via museums and planetariums. I look forward to working with my colleagues. I'm also eager to gaze again at their stunning collection of fossils and to travel to distant locations in our universe at the Rose Center and the Hayden Planetarium, the museum's digital planetarium. Both the fossil dinosaurs and the immersive planetarium environment present concrete evidence that evolution is pervasive throughout the natural world. The universe evolved from the Big Bang to systems of galaxies, stars, and planets; these, including Earth, continue to evolve. Astronomers are teasing out the role of dark matter and dark energy. Life on Earth goes back at least 3.5 billion years as evidenced by fossilized stromatolites from Australia. Over that vast span of time, there's evidence that life evolved from small single celled-organisms to the incredible diversity we see today. Scientific research continues to discover additional evidence that supports evolution as the fundamental description for how the physical universe and life developed in the past and will continue to change in the future. Yet, teaching evolution remains controversial in America. ...Evolution is fundamental to modern biology, geology and astronomy. Ignoring or discarding fundamental scientific understandings of the natural world does not prepare our children well for the future. As America strives to "leave no child behind," it's time that evolution is not left behind in our science classrooms. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_devore_evolution_050210.html. __________________________________________________________________________ NASA DEVELOPMENT MAY HELP SOLVE OCEAN BIOLOGY PROBLEM NASA release 05-042 10 February 2005 NASA and university scientists have made a breakthrough in using satellites to study the tiny, free-floating ocean plants, called phytoplankton. The plants form the base of the ocean food chain and produce half of the oxygen in the air we breathe. The development opens the door to solving a problem that has stymied ocean biologists for more than a century, and is revolutionary to our understanding of how ocean biology and ecosystems, as well as carbon cycling, respond to climate variability and change. Data about the growth rate of the ocean plants can be derived from space and incorporated into global estimates of their life processes. New, accurate information on phytoplankton will greatly advance understanding of marine ecosystems and how they function, including issues related to fisheries, water quality, and harmful algal blooms. This research contributes to improved computer models that enable predictions of how climate change will alter ocean ecosystems and the Earth system. Despite their minute size, the growth and photosynthesis of phytoplankton collectively accounts for half of the carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, absorbed annually from Earth's atmosphere by plants. "While the full potential of this discovery awaits further work, what is really amazing is that a signal detectable from space has been found that tracks changes in the activity, not just abundance, of phytoplankton," said Michael Behrenfeld, a professor at Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, and a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD. In order to determine ocean productivity, which is the rate of photosynthesis, scientists must know plant growth rates and their abundance. Satellites can detect variations in the color of light within the ocean, and researchers use this information to tell phytoplankton amounts. The new method for recording growth rates by satellite involves advances in the way these satellite ocean data are analyzed. "Satellite ocean color images are kind of like your television screen, where you have controls for the color setting and controls for brightness," said researcher Dr. David Siegel. "What we've done here is use both the color and brightness signals to determine plant greenness and the number of individual phytoplankton cells." With this new information, researchers can calculate growth rates from the greenness of the individual phytoplankton cells. When cold water temperatures, bright light, or low nutrients put stress on phytoplankton, they lose pigment and appear less green. The reverse is also true, phytoplankton become greener when conditions improve and growth rates increase. To demonstrate the new approach, the research team used ocean color data from the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS). The data showed growth rates changed over seasons and across ocean basins in precisely the manner expected from years of laboratory studies on phytoplankton. Encouraged by these findings, researchers applied their new data to recalculate ocean production. The result was a significantly different view of ocean photosynthesis previously revealed by older models using the same satellite data. The study appeared in the January 2005 electronic issue of the journal, Global Biogeochemical Cycles. The research was an Editor's Choice in the February 4 issue of Science magazine. Coauthors include Dr. Emmanuel Boss of the University of Maine, Orono; Dr. David Siegel, University of California, Santa Barbara; and Donald Shea from Goddard. For more information and images about this new development on the Web, visit http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/plankton.html. Contacts: Gretchen Cook-Anderson/Dolores Beasley NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-0836/1753 __________________________________________________________________________ NATURAL CLIMATE CHANGE MAY BE LARGER THAN COMMONLY THOUGHT From SpaceDaily 10 February 2005 A new study of climate in the Northern Hemisphere for the past 2000 years shows that natural climate change may be larger than generally thought. This is displayed in results from scientists at the Stockholm University, made in cooperation with Russian scientists, which are published in Nature on 10 February 2005. The most widespread picture of climate variability in the last millennium suggests that only small changes occurred before the year 1900, and then a pronounced warming set in. The new results rather show an appreciable temperature swing between the 12th and 20th centuries, with a notable cold period around AD 1600. Read the full article at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/climate-05p.html. __________________________________________________________________________ NEW THEORY OF HOW PLANETS FORM FINDS HAVENS OF STABILITY AMID TURBULENCE Indiana University release 11 February 2005 A new theory of how planets form finds havens of stability amid violent turbulence in the swirling gas that surrounds a young star. These protected areas are where planets can begin to form without being destroyed. The theory will be published in the February issue of the journal, Icarus. "This is another way to get a planet started. It marries the two main theories of planet formation," said Richard Durisen, professor of astronomy and chair of that department at Indiana University Bloomington. Durisen is a leader in the use of computers to model planet formation. Watching his simulations run on a computer monitor, it's easy to imagine looking down from a vantage point in interstellar space and watching the process actually happen. A green disk of gas swirls around a central star. Eventually, spiral arms of yellow begin to appear within the disk, indicating regions where the gas is becoming denser. Then a few blobs of red appear, at first just hints but then gradually more stable. These red regions are even denser, showing where masses of gas are accumulating that might later become planets. The turbulent gases and swirling disks are mathematical constructions using hydrodynamics and computer graphics. The computer monitor displays the results of the scientists' calculations as colorful animations. "These are the disks of gas and dust that astronomers see around most young stars, from which planets form," Durisen explained. "They're like a giant whirlpool swirling around the star in orbit. Our own solar system formed out of such a disk." Scientists now know of more than 130 planets around other stars, and almost all of them are at least as massive as Jupiter. "Gas giant planets are more common than we could have guessed even 10 years ago," he said. "Nature is pretty good at making these planets." The key to understanding how planets are made is a phenomenon called gravitational instabilities, according to Durisen. Scientists have long thought that if gas disks around stars are massive enough and cold enough, these instabilities happen, allowing the disk's gravity to overwhelm gas pressure and cause parts of the disk to pull together and form dense clumps, which could become planets. However, a gravitationally unstable disk is a violent environment. Interactions with other disk material and other clumps can throw a potential planet into the central star or tear it apart completely. If planets are to form in an unstable disk, they need a more protected environment, and Durisen thinks he has found one. As his simulations run, rings of gas form in the disk at an edge of an unstable region and grow more dense. If solid particles accumulating in a ring quickly migrate to the middle of the ring, the core of a planet could form much faster. The time factor is important. A major challenge that Durisen and other theorists face is a recent discovery by astronomers that giant gas planets such as Jupiter form fairly quickly by astronomical standards. They have to--otherwise the gas they need will be gone. "Astronomers now know that massive disks of gas around young stars tend to go away over a period of a few million years," Durisen said. "So that's the chance to make gas-rich planets. Jupiter and Saturn and the planets that are common around other stars are all gas giants, and those planets have to be made during this few-million-year window when there is still a substantial amount of gas disk around." This need for speed causes problems for any theory with a leisurely approach to forming planets, such as the core accretion theory that was the standard model until recently. "In the core accretion theory, the formation of gas giant planets gets started by a process similar to the way planets such as Earth accumulate," Durisen explained. "Solid objects hit each other and stick together and grow in size. If a solid object grows to be about 10 times the mass of Earth, and there's also gas around, it becomes massive enough to grab onto a lot of the gas by gravity. Once that happens, you get rapid growth of a gas giant planet." The trouble is it takes a long time to form a solid core that way-- anywhere from about 10 million to 100 million years. The theory may work for Jupiter and Saturn, but not for dozens of planets around other stars. Many of these other planets have several times the mass of Jupiter, and it's very hard to make such enormous planets by core accretion. The theory that gravitational instabilities by themselves can form gas giant planets was first proposed more than 50 years ago. It's recently been revived because of problems with the core accretion theory. The idea that vast masses of gas suddenly collapse by gravity to form a dense object, perhaps in just a few orbits, certainly fits the available time frame, but it has some problems of its own. According to the gravitational instability theory, spiral arms form in a gas disk and then break up into clumps that are in different orbits. These clumps survive and grow larger until planets form around them. Durisen sees these clumps in his simulations -- but they don't last long. "The clumps fly around and shear out and re-form and are destroyed over and over again," he said. "If the gravitational instabilities are strong enough, a spiral arm will break into clumps. The question is what happens to them?" Co-authors of the paper are IU doctoral student Kai Cai and two of Durisen's former students: Annie C. Mejia, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Astronomy, University of Washington; and Megan K. Pickett, associate professor of physics and astronomy, Purdue University Calumet. Durisen and his research group are supported by NASA's Origins of Solar Systems program. More information about the group is available at http://westworld.astro.indiana.edu/. Read the original article at http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/1859.html. An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/safe_havens_formation.html. __________________________________________________________________________ EARTH TO MARS IN A MONTH WITH PAINTED SOLAR SAIL By Bill Christensen From Space.com and Technovelgy.com 11 February 2005 Gregory Benford, professor of physics at UC Irvine (and noted science fiction author) believes that a spacecraft powered by a special kind of solar sail could reach Mars in just one month. Dr. Benford and his brother James were testing a very thin carbon-mesh sail, using microwaves as the energy source for propulsion. Unexpectedly, the sail experienced a force considerably greater than predicted. They theorized that the heat from the microwave beam was causing carbon monoxide gas to escape from the sail's surface; the recoil from the escaping molecules provided what could be a useful adjunct to the propulsive force experienced by light sails. They believe that by beaming microwave energy up from Earth to boil off volatile molecules from a specially formulated paint applied to the sail will provide enough added force to propel a spacecraft to Mars in record time. "It's a different way of thinking about propulsion," Gregory Benford says. "We leave the engine on the ground." Their research will be published this month in the journal, Acta Astronautica. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/technovel_sail_050211.h tml. __________________________________________________________________________ PIRANHA TO PETUNIA: CATALOGUING WITH THE DARWIN DECIMAL SYSTEM From Astrobiology Magazine Based on a Michigan State University report 12 February 2005 From person to piranha to petunia, it's pretty easy to spot different species in the human-scale part of the plant and animal kingdoms. But a new study shows that species differences aren't so clear, at least as currently measured, when it comes to microscopic bacteria. MSU researchers have spotted significant differences in genetic libraries among thought-to-be similar bacteria strains. The results, published this week in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that new definitions are needed to catalogue bacteria--single- celled organisms with at least a 3.5 billion-year history. "It's important to point out the importance of these small microbes on Earth; even though they are small, their mass in soil and water is equal to that of all plants," said MSU microbiologist James Tiedje, one of the study's authors. "Furthermore, they are responsible for recycling the key elements of life so life on Earth can continue." DNA, used by all life including bacteria to store genetic information, is a double-stranded molecule. When a given DNA molecule is split in two, for instance by heating it up, its two strands will spontaneously find each other, or reassociate, when the temperature drops. Scientists have long exploited this fact in their rough rule-of-thumb approach for saying just what makes up a species of bacteria. Single strands of DNA from two bacteria are mixed together. If most of these strands reassociate-- specifically, if 70 percent of strands from bacteria A come together with strands from bacteria B--then the two bacteria strains are said to members of the same species. Tiedje and his MSU colleague, microbiologist Konstantinos Konstantinidis, set out to put this mix and match approach to the test. The two scientists selected 70 related bacteria whose genomes, or complete genetic libraries, had been fully sequenced. A sequenced genome gives scientists what amounts to a card catalogue guide to an organism's genetic information. The MSU scientists downloaded the already-sequenced bacteria genomes from a variety of sites on the Internet. Then they did some cross-card catalogue comparisons. To their surprise, many bacteria that are considered members of the same species by the current mix and match approach, often share as few as 65 percent of their genes. Humans, in comparison, share 75 percent of their genes with fish. No one's calling for the species rules to be rewritten so that humans are lumped with their distant underwater relatives. And when it comes to bacteria, the authors say, the current species definition appears to be too liberal. Much of the differences between genetically-similar bacteria appear to be the result of environmental pressures. E. coli bacteria, for instance, exist everywhere from the intestines of warm blooded animals to paper mills. Any new way of tallying up bacteria species should "accommodate the ecological distinctiveness of the organisms," the authors write. "The point is about the value of a correct understanding of species-- people expect a species to have certain traits and live in certain habitats," said Tiedje, whose work is also supported by the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station. "If the species definition is not reasonably predictive of this, then it loses its value. This can be important for pathogen identification, quarantine or biotechnology, for example." Konstantinidis and Tiedje also noted that even bacteria with genetic card catalogues that were as much as 99 percent similar had enough outward differences to be separate species. This shouldn't come as a shock. Humans and chimpanzees, in comparison, share 98.7 percent of their DNA. But that small difference at the genetic level results in a big difference when it comes to outward appearance. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1439.html. __________________________________________________________________________ SCIENTISTS AT MICHIGAN STATE PROVE EVOLUTION WORKS From Michigan State University and Discover magazine 14 February 2005 The story explores MSU's collaborative Digital Life Laboratory and engages Richard Lenski, University Distinguished Professor of crop and soil sciences, microbiology and molecular biology, and zoology; Charles Ofria, assistant professor of computer science and engineering; and Robert Pennock, associate professor of philosophy, in a discussion of the nature and process of evolution, and what we can learn from the computer program, Avida, that scientists use to put Darwin to the test. "In an hour I can gather more information than we had been able to gather in years of working on bacteria," says Lenski. "Avida is not a simulation of evolution; it is an instance of it," Pennock says. A reprint of the full article is available at http://msu.edu/documents/discovermag.pdf. __________________________________________________________________________ MOVED BY SCIENCE IN MOTION (INTERVIEW WITH AL DIAZ) By Michael Benson From Astrobiology Magazine 14 February 2005 The successful arrival of the European Space Agency's Huygens atmospheric probe on the distant Saturnian moon of Titan in mid-January was a moving event. Many in the multinational contingent of scientists, engineers and administrators that had gathered at ESA's control facility in Darmstadt, Germany had worked on the mission for a decade or more. Once it was clear that the probe was working as planned, a palpable euphoria -- a compound of relief and pride -- pervaded the proceedings. One of ESA's high- ranking NASA visitors was Al Diaz, director of the agency's new science organization, the Science Mission Directorate. Although the Huygens part of Cassini-Huygens was designed and built in Europe and led by ESA, the mission was conducted in close collaboration with NASA. Huygens itself had been brought to Saturn by Cassini. The interview took place at ESA Headquarters in Darmstadt on January 15th, the day after Huygens's pictures of smoggy Titan revealed an icy orange-tinged topography sculpted by liquid ethane rivers and lakes - a place of shorelines, creeks and fog that's utterly alien, and yet also fascinatingly Earth-like in many respects. Michael Benson (MB): Let's talk about Huygens. The probe landed successfully on Saturn's moon Titan yesterday, and you looked quite moved at the press conference. Tell me about your own personal feelings. Al Diaz (AD): My reaction had less to do with the science - although I was moved by the science- than it did to the fact that there are so few opportunities to be involved in historic events. And here's one where, as I looked around the room, I could identify a hundred people I've worked with in the past 25 years. You see something like this happen, and you recognize how much it's meant to everybody that you've worked with, and it just is a moving thing. MB: Do you see an increased future for European-NASA collaboration after this? AD: Oh, absolutely. You know, there's always been collaboration between us. But this is one of the first times where there's a major accomplishment where the Europeans can claim a first--where they were the leader and the US was the supporter. I think that will motivate them to press forward and take on some responsibilities that they might not have done in the past. We can now depend on them to lead some things that are technologically more challenging than they might have done ten years ago. MB: To what extent is astrobiology a motor for what NASA's doing? How much of this is a quest to find conditions that may now be suitable for life, or conditions that might be precursors for life? AD: Up until a year ago, it was a motivator for some of our science. Now, it's a principal motivator for almost everything that NASA does. What happened a year ago was the articulation of a vision by the President-- which has a very strong flavor in it that NASA is about the search for life, and understanding the origin and evolution of life in the universe. So I think astrobiology will now become a lot more dominant. I'm pleased to see that, because it's been through a bit of a hiatus. Astrobiology is a term that was coined maybe 8 or 9 years ago. Before that, biology in NASA had grown to a peak around the time of the Viking project (the robotic landings on Mars in 1976). So in the mid-seventies, there was a substantial presence of biology in NASA, but then it dissipated. What's happened now is that biology has broadened, in the sense that what was biology has become astrobiology. It's spread to earth science as well as biological and physical research, which was principally associated with human activity. I anticipate that over the course of the next decade, astrobiology will grow, largely driven by the search for life on Mars. MB: Do you think the reason that the emphasis on astrobiology waned after Viking was because there wasn't any positive sign of life resulting from those two landers? And so would it be possible to say that the reason the current two Mars rovers don't have any dedicated experiments to try to discover if there's biological activity--although they are looking for water--would be because there was a fear in NASA that if they came up short, like the Vikings, then that could cut public interest in Mars exploration? AD: No, I don't think there was that motivation. The search for life takes a lot more competent kinds of payloads and instruments than we can accommodate in this era where we're trying to get back onto Mars. I think the past 20 years were an effort to recover some capability to land on Mars. We've done it quicker, better, cheaper, and we've done it now, finally, in a much more painstaking and traditional mode. It won't be until the next lander payload, which will not be the scout, but the next... MB: The big heavy rover, with the biological lab on it? AD: Right, exactly. With the chemical lab on it, that will ultimately, I think, become, in its successor forms, a biological laboratory. Then we will be where we wanted to be immediately after Viking. We wanted to take the lander, and put wheels on it, and roll it around the planet. We're now back on the planet. When we land the Mars Science Lander, we will be ahead of where we were. We'll have a competent scientific laboratory on wheels. MB: Would it be accurate to say that the Mars Science Lander is probably the most exciting single robotic mission on the boards right now? AD: It's the most challenging, that's for sure. MB: It's very large, right? AD: It's two and a half tons. It's big. It's another generation beyond the Opportunity and Spirit rovers. MB: The two leading contenders for potential hosts for extraterrestrial life are Mars and Europa. Europa almost certainly has a vast ocean with a surface ice crust. Rick Greenberg, who has a team at the University of Arizona, at the Lunar and Planetary Science lab, just released a book called "Europa: Ocean Moon," where he makes a persuasive case that the ice shell is comparatively thin, and that there's substantial interaction between the ocean and the surface because of all of the cracks in the ice. It means that surface chemistry can get into the water, creating conditions for life. So I'm wondering why it is that NASA doesn't have a mission on the boards right now to go to Europa. AD: We do. It's called the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. The Europa mission is the highest priority in the outer planets, as outlined by the decadal plan from the National Academy of Sciences. We recognize Europa as being the "sweet spot" of the outer planets, if you will. So we're anxious to do it. Right now, we're focusing on JIMO as the solution. Michael Benson, author of the book, Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes, is a writer and film-maker. He has contributed to such publications as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times and Smithsonian. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1441.html. __________________________________________________________________________ IS THERE LIFE ON MARS? LOOKING FOR ROCK SOLID EVIDENCE By Leonard David From Space.com 14 February 2005 With each passing day, those peppy robots on Mars--Spirit and Opportunity- -churn out extraordinary new views of the red planet. Each android is over a year in operation, relaying a steady stream of eye-catching photos. And more than once, the Mars machinery has sent back an image that stirred up a promising eureka moment: finding evidence for life on that remote world. A case in point, during a recent run of Spirit in the Columbia Hills, the robot used its arm-mounted devices to poke and probe a select Mars rock. One piece of hardware--the Rock Abrasion Tool, known better as the RAT--is on hand to expose fresh martian rock... Once the rock was worked over, Spirit's Microscopic Imager went in for close-up looks at the results. And within the images, an odd feature could be seen, seemingly a pattern of something more biological than just rock. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_monday_050214.html. __________________________________________________________________________ BRAIN BITES: AMUSING ONE-MINUTE VIDEOS FROM NASA ANSWER SOME OF THE QUESTIONS ABOUT SPACE YOU WERE AFRAID TO ASK By Karen Miller From NASA Science News 10 February 2005 So, how do you go to the bathroom in space? That's a question almost everyone wants to ask, says Phil West, deputy education director at NASA's Johnson Space Center. And the answer? You can find it--along with the answers to many other questions--at NASA's Brain BitesTM web site. "We get a lot of frequently asked questions at NASA," says West, "and some not-so-frequently asked, but still very interesting, questions." Brain Bites, one-minute video clips, try to have some fun with those topics. Brain Bites, says West, can be used by teachers to introduce or illustrate a topic--like the special problems involved in asking someone for a date on Mars! But the clips are also designed for folks who are just browsing the web. They're meant, says West, to give people unusual and intriguing information. Some clips focus on basic scientific questions such as "why do we see only one side of the Moon?" Or "can you hear a spaceship fly by?" Others give glimpses of the way astronauts live. One video, for instance, explains why spacesuits are so hard to move in (think of bending a blown-up balloon); another takes viewers down into the swimming pool where astronauts train. Some were even shot onboard the "Vomit Comet," a plane that flies in a way that, briefly, eliminates the effects of gravity. One of the most popular videos, says West, explains how to tighten a bolt in space. "We wanted to communicate why you need a foot restraint when you work in low gravity." In the video, which was shot on the Vomit Comet, West attempts to turn the bolt, but--surprise!--he spins instead. Each 60-second Brain Bite requires a team of about 6 to 10 people, and takes about one to two months to make. College students Alex Lewis and Shannon Jurkoshek do most of the acting; Terry Longbottom and Tim Allen are the lead producers. Right now, about 15 Brain Bites are on the web site, but new ones are being added all the time. "We've already taped quite a few more," says West. Coming attractions include sonic booms, satellite orbits, and lifting weights in space. Everyone likes to laugh, especially kids, says West. And they're inquisitive, too. For them, Brain Bites are a natural. So do you still want to know how astronauts go to the bathroom in space? The answer's at http://brainbites.nasa.gov. Read the original article at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/10feb_brainbites.htm. __________________________________________________________________________ DISNEY'S NEW 3-D IMAX FILM, ALIENS OF THE DEEP From the NAI Newsletter 11 February 2005 Disney's new 3-D IMAX film, Aliens of the Deep, opened in theaters nationwide on January 28th. NAI investigators Tori Hoehler (Ames) and Kevin Hand (SETI Institute) were both part of the film's production. NAI Central and several E/PO leads served as content reviewers for the film's educator guide--downloadable at http://www.aliensofthedeep.com. So far, three of our teams have built and leveraged partnerships with theaters hosting the film to provide extended outreach to the local communities. Our Marine Biological Laboratory team is involved in educator workshops at the New England Aquarium site, and our University of Rhode Island team is working with the IMAX Theatre at Portage Place in Providence. The NASA Ames team is working with school districts near the IMAX Theatre at Hacienda Crossing in Dublin, CA as well as providing science speakers at screenings at the SONY Metreon IMAX theater in San Francisco. Long time NAI partner, the California Academy of Sciences (CAS), is also working with the Metreon to connect CAS astrobiology exhibits with the film by providing outreach tables at film screenings, free admission to CAS exhibits for school groups attending the film, as well as distributing the film's educator guide. We hope this trend continues as the film finds its way to other NAI lead team areas. __________________________________________________________________________ SWITCH ON THE MICRO*SCOPE From the NAI Newsletter 11 February 2005 The Marine Biological Laboratory's micro*scope project was the topic of an article in the February issue of the National Science Teacher's Association journal, The Science Teacher. As "an online educational resource [which] brings microbiology into the classroom," micro*scope is a free, searchable knowledge environment for exploring the microbial world. The article features a sample activity which accesses micro*scope's resources to identify microbes in a "home-made" mat-like sediment. MBL is partnering with Montana State University on a project that will incorporate micro*scope's content into the much larger, NSF-funded National Science Digital Library http://www.nsdl.org. Switch on the micro*scope at http://microscope.mbl.edu! __________________________________________________________________________ RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES IN SPACE AND EARTH SCIENCES NASA research announcement From the NAI Newsletter 11 February 2005 This NASA Research Announcement (NRA) solicits proposals for supporting basic and applied research and technology across a broad range of Earth and space science program elements relevant to one or more of the three defined NASA science themes: Earth-Sun System, Solar System, and Universe. Proposal due dates are scheduled starting on April 8, 2005, and continue through February 10, 2006. Electronically submitted Notices of Intent to propose are requested for all program elements, with the first such due date being February 18, 2005. Potential proposers should be aware of a major change in the NASA proposal submission process from 2004. NASA has implemented a new master proposal data base system. All proposers, co-investigators, and proposing organizations must register with the system at http://nspires.nasaprs.com/. A significant change from the previous system is the required electronically submitted Cover Page / Proposal Summary / Budget Summary must be submitted by an authorized official of the proposing organization. Every organization that intends to submit a proposal in response to this NRA must be registered with the system. Potential proposers are urged to access the system well in advance of the proposal due date(s) of interest to familiarize themselves with its structure and enter the requested information. For more information go to http://nspires.nasaprs.com/ and then link through the menu listings "Solicitations" to "Open Solicitations." Find NNH05ZDA001N, entitled "Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences--2005" __________________________________________________________________________ NASA SUMMER FACULTY RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES By Magali Khalkho American Society for Engineering Education release 14 February 2005 The online NSFRO application opened this Friday, February 11th and can be found at http://www.asee.org/nsfro "application and instructions". The online application has been improved to reflect the new NSFRO requirements. Applicants are also now given the opportunity to create login name and password to access their applications. Green and red buttons will also indicate them which section of their application is complete or not. The final shut down for the application will be on May 2, 2005. __________________________________________________________________________ 56TH INTERNATIONAL ASTRONAUTICAL CONGRESS By Kenol Jules 11 February 2005 I would like to bring to your attention the upcoming 56th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), which will take place on October 17-21, 2005 in Fukuoka, Japan. As chairman of the Fluid and Material Sciences onboard Orbital Platforms Session of the Microgravity Sciences and Processes Symposium, I urge you to take the opportunity to present results of your current and/or on-going research in that session. Please be aware that the deadline for abstract submittal is March 1st, 2005. For instructions on how to submit your abstract electronically and for abstract preparation guidelines, please direct your browser to http://www.iac-paper.com/. To view the technical program and on-going planning for the upcoming Fukuoka Congress, please visit the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) web site at http://www.iafastro.com/. I'm looking forward to seeing you all in Fukuoka, Japan, this coming October. Let's all submit our best and latest technical to the Fluid and Material Sciences session to make this year gathering in Japan an unforgettable experience. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me (e-mail: kenol.jules-1@nasa.gov) or Professor Rodolfo Monti (e- mail: monti@unina.it). __________________________________________________________________________ NASA AWARDS GRANT TO STUDY CANCER RISKS FROM SPACE RADIATION NASA release 05-045 15 February 2005 NASA awarded a research grant worth more than 9.8 million dollars over five-years to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. The central focus of the study entitled, "Lung Cancer Pathogenesis and HZE Particle Exposure," will be to identify solid tumor cancer risks from space radiation. Data will be collected from animal models and tissues at the cellular and molecular level, with special emphasis on extrapolating the collected knowledge to humans. Radiation exposures required to conduct the research will use ground-based irradiation facilities at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY. The grant adds another NASA Specialized Center of Research (NSCOR) to the space radiation program. NSCOR is designed to advance knowledge in the biological and biomedical sciences and technology arenas. The ultimate application of this knowledge is to enable human space flight and long- term planetary missions. It expands the pool of research scientists and engineers trained to meet the challenges, as we prepare for future human space exploration missions. NSCOR differs from an individual grant award by incorporating a number of complementary research projects. The solicitation for proposals on "Estimation of Solid Tumor Cancer Risks" drew 11 proposals. Each was peer-reviewed by scientific and technical experts from academia, government and industry. For information about NASA and other agency programs on the Web, visit http://www.nasa.gov. Contacts: J. D. Harrington Mike Braukus NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-5241/1979 __________________________________________________________________________ CASSINI-HUYGENS UPDATES NASA/JPL/ESA/UA releases Cassini Spacecraft Witnesses Saturn's Blues NASA/JPL image advisory 2005-023, 8 February 2005 Colorful new images from the Cassini spacecraft show that Saturn's northern hemisphere has a case of the blues. In the first image, the icy moon Mimas is set against a dazzling and dramatic portrait of Saturn's azure northern hemisphere and the shadows of its rings. A second image shows Saturn's northern polar region is a dim blue. The new images are available at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://ciclops.org. The blue color of Saturn's northern latitudes may to be linked to the apparently cloud-free nature of the upper atmosphere there. A precise understanding of the phenomenon may come from further study by Cassini imaging scientists. In the first of these colorful views, Mimas moves in its orbit against the blue backdrop of Saturn's atmosphere, which is draped by sweeping shadows cast by the rings. A few large craters are visible on Mimas, giving the icy moon a dimpled appearance. The second view shows Saturn's northern polar region, where shadows cast by the rings surrounding the pole appear as dark bands. The ring shadows at higher latitudes correspond to locations on the ring plane that are farther from the planet--in other words, the northernmost ring shadow in this view is cast by the outer edge of Saturn's A ring. Spots of bright clouds also are visible throughout the region. The view of Saturn and Mimas was taken by the Cassini spacecraft's narrow angle camera on January 18, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (870,000 miles) from Saturn. The view of Saturn's northern polar region was taken with Cassini's wide angle camera on December 14, 2004, at a distance of 719,200 kilometers (446,900 miles) from Saturn. First Measurement of Titan's Winds from Huygens ESA release 3-2005 9 February 2005 Using a global network of radio telescopes, scientists have measured the speed of the winds faced by Huygens during its descent through the atmosphere of Titan. This measurement could not be done from space because of a configuration problem with one of Cassini's receivers. The winds are weak near the surface and increase slowly with altitude up to about 60 km, becoming much rougher higher up where significant vertical wind shear may be present. Preliminary estimates of the wind variations with altitude on Titan have been obtained from measurements of the frequency of radio signals from Huygens, recorded during the probe's descent on 14 January 2005. These Doppler measurements, obtained by a global network of radio telescopes, reflect the relative speed between the transmitter on Huygens and the receiver on the Earth. Winds in the atmosphere affected the horizontal speed of the probe's descent and produced a change in the frequency of the signal received on Earth. This phenomenon is similar to the commonly heard change in pitch of a siren on a speeding police car. Leading the list of large radio antennas involved in the program were the NRAO Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, USA, and the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia. Special instrumentation designed for detection of weak signals was used to measure the carrier frequency of the Huygens radio signal during this unique opportunity. The initial detection, made with the Radio Science Receivers on loan from NASA's Deep Space Network, provided the first unequivocal proof that Huygens had survived the entry phase and had begun its radio relay transmission to Cassini. The very successful signal detection on Earth provided a surprising turnabout for the Cassini-Huygens Doppler Wind Experiment (DWE), whose data could not be recorded on the Cassini spacecraft due to a commanding error needed to properly configure the receiver. "Our team has now taken a significant first step to recovering the data needed to fulfil our original scientific goal, an accurate profile of Titan's winds along the descent trajectory of Huygens," said DWE's Principal Investigator Dr. Michael Bird (University of Bonn, Germany). The ground-based Doppler measurements were carried out and processed jointly by scientists from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL, USA) and the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE, The Netherlands) working within the DWE team. Winds on Titan are found to be flowing in the direction of Titan's rotation (from west to east) at nearly all altitudes. The maximum speed of roughly 120 metres per second (430 km/h) was measured about ten minutes after the start of the descent, at an altitude of about 120 km. The winds are weak near the surface and increase slowly with altitude up to about 60 km. This pattern does not continue at altitudes above 60 km, where large variations in the Doppler measurements are observed. Scientists believe that these variations may arise from significant vertical wind shear. That Huygens had a rough ride in this region was already known from the science and engineering data recorded on board Huygens. "Major mission events, such as the parachute exchange about 15 minutes into the atmospheric flight and impact on Titan at 13:45 CET, produced Doppler signatures that we can clearly identify in the data," Bird said. At present, there exists an approximately 20-minute interval with no data between the measurements at GBT and Parkes. This gap in Doppler coverage will eventually be closed by data from other radio telescopes which are presently being analysed. In addition, the entire global set of radio telescopes performed Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) recordings of the Huygens signal to determine the probe's precise position during the descent. "This is a stupendous example of the effectiveness of truly global scientific co-operation," said Jean-Pierre Lebreton, ESA Huygens Project Scientist. "By combining the Doppler and VLBI data we will eventually obtain an extremely accurate three-dimensional record of the motion of Huygens during its mission at Titan," he concluded. The radio astronomy support of the Huygens mission is co-ordinated by JIVE and JPL and involves the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy (ASTRON, The Netherlands), the University of Bonn (Germany), Helsinki University of Technology (Espoo, Finland), the MERLIN National Facility (Jodrell Bank, UK), the Onsala Space Observatory (Sweden), the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, USA), the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO, Green Bank, USA, and Socorro, USA), the CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF, Sydney, Australia), the University of Tasmania (Hobart, Australia), the National Astronomical Observatories of China, the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (Shanghai and Urumqi, China) and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technologies (Kashima Space Research Center, Japan). The Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe is hosted by ASTRON and funded by the national research councils, national facilities and institutes of The Netherlands (NOW), the United Kingdom (PPARC), Italy (CNR), Sweden (Onsala Space Observatory, National Facility), Spain (IGN) and Germany (MPIfR). The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is operated by Associated Universities, Inc., under a co- operative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The Australia Telescope is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility managed by CSIRO. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is operated by the California Institute of Technology under contract to NASA. Read the original news release at http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini- Huygens/SEMA8SXEM4E_0.html. NASA Observations Help Determine Titan Wind Speeds NASA/JPL release 2005-024, 9 February 2005 Strong westerly winds of up to about 400 kilometers per hour (250 miles per hour) buffeted the Huygens probe as it descended through Titan's upper atmosphere last month, according to NASA-led observations of the probe transmissions with Earth-based radio telescopes. The winds eased to a mild breeze near the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. A preliminary estimate of the wind variations with altitude from about 110 kilometers (68 miles) down to the surface has been recovered by a joint team of researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, collaborating with the Huygens Doppler wind experiment team led by Dr. Michael Bird in Bonn, Germany, and with the ground-based European Very Long Baseline Interferometry team led by Dr. Leonid Gurvits. A network of radio telescope facilities, located around the world, received the radio signals transmitted by the Huygens probe to the Cassini orbiter during the probe's descent and landing on Titan on January 14. "The information from the radio telescopes was originally intended to supplement similar wind data received from the Huygens Doppler wind experiment. However, the onboard experiment failed to return data." said Dr. William Folkner, the JPL principal investigator for the ground-based Doppler wind experiment. "Our ground-based work salvaged the Doppler wind experiment," said Sami Asmar, a JPL co-investigator on the Huygens Doppler wind experiment. He had reported detecting the signal on the ground from the Green Bank Telescope facility in West Virginia. "The signal from the Huygens probe was not designed to be detected on Earth--sometimes it pays to eavesdrop," said Asmar. Winds are determined by the "Doppler shift" of the signal. Doppler shift is a change in the frequency when received at Earth due to the probe's motion in Titan's atmosphere, similar to the change in pitch of a passing train whistle. "We provided the only real-time confirmation that the probe transmitted a signal at the expected time, released the stabilizer parachute and then impacted the surface," said Asmar. "We did this by monitoring the Doppler shift in the frequency of the signal received at the Green Bank Telescope and the Parkes Telescope in Australia." "The Huygens Doppler team worked closely with the Joint Institute for Very Long Baseline Interferometry team in Europe, which coordinated the scheduling of many radio telescopes around the globe for complementary measurements that monitored the change in probe position," said Dr. Robert Preston, chief scientist of the Interplanetary Network Directorate at JPL. The Deep Space Network lent the JPL team two special Radio Science Receivers and had one shipped to Green Bank from its complex in California and another to Parkes from its complex near Canberra. These receivers allowed for the real-time detection and confirmation of the Huygens radio signal. The same type of receivers were used at Deep Space Network stations for receiving the Cassini signal during Saturn orbit insertion in June 2004 and the Mars Exploration Rover signal during entry, descent and landing in January 2004. The Green Bank Telescope and other participating U.S. telescopes are part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The Parkes radio telescope is operated by the Australia Telescope National Facility. The radio astronomy support was coordinated by the Joint Institute for Very Long Baseline Interferometry in Europe. Cassini Significant Events 3-9 February 2005 NASA/JPL release, 11 February 2005 The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired today from the Goldstone tracking station. The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and is operating normally. Information on the present position and speed of the Cassini spacecraft may be found on the "Present Position" web page located at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/operations/present- position.cfm. We are now in the third week of execution for tour sequence S08. The Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) and the Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) conducted observations for time variable atmospheric events as we approach Saturn. In this last week 797 ISS images arrived along with 127 VIMS cubes. Each day this week the Optical Remote Sensing instruments are taking data, the Navigation team is obtaining Optical Navigation images, and we have, on average, one DSN pass a day where we downlink the data. If you don't see anything listed on a particular day, it's because we are just doing business as usual and have no extra events going on. Thursday, February 3: We have officially vacated the Mission Support Area on the first floor. Cassini is staffed in the Space Flight Operations Facility at JPL. When missions launch or arrive they may get space in the operations area on the first floor. We were there back in 1997 when we launched, and then moved back in for Saturn Orbit Insertion in mid 2004. Now that Probe activities have concluded, we have once again vacated the area and the Deep Impact Project is expected to move in shortly in preparation for their upcoming encounter. Cassini teams are now supporting commanding from their local office areas. On-board the spacecraft today we ran a periodic engineering maintenance activity, and an Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer planned reboot. There is a second reboot scheduled for Sunday of this week as well. On the ground, the Preliminary Sequence Integration and Validation 2 merge products for S09 were released for review, and the Ground Software Monthly Management Review was held. This is where the teams get together and report status on software in development, and future plans for deliveries. Currently the primary delivery will occur in May of this year. Friday, February 4: A couple of events occurred on board the spacecraft today. First, the Spacecraft Operations Office (SCO) executed a procedure to remove the Probe Relay sequence from the SSRs. This is the final activity in support of Probe operations. This activity began yesterday and completed today over Madrid's DSS #63 pass. The second activity was to fire pyro valve #26. Firing this valve isolates the oxidizer system and prevents any possibility of mixing of propellant components. This is actually a clean up activity from the periapsis raise maneuver that occurred in August 2004. Since it was not a critical activity it was decided to delay it until after Probe Relay in order to maintain the spacecraft in as quiet a state as possible. A member of the Project Science staff supported an American Association of University Women career day at Whittier College today. Presentations on Cassini science results were given to 8th grade girls to encourage them to continue to take math and science classes in high school. All teams and offices supported the Cassini/NASA Quarterly review today. Monday, February 7: The Radio Science Subsystem (RSS) conducted an Operations Readiness Test of their instrument today. Additional activities occur Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. A preliminary estimate of the wind variations on Titan with altitude from about 100 km down to the surface has been recovered by a joint team of researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory collaborating with the Huygens Doppler wind experiment team, and with the ground-based European Very Long Baseline Interferometry team. For more information check out the Cassini web site. Tuesday, February 8: RSS performed an Ultra Stable Oscillator characterization and a periodic instrument maintenance today. SCO conducted the first of a three-part gyro calibration today. Parts B and C will execute on Wednesday and a status report will be released next week. Uplink Operations sent up commands to the spacecraft to make the Cosmic Dust Analyzer the prime instrument on day of year 47 -February 16- during the ring plane crossing. They also sent up Instrument Expanded Block files for the Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument, and a Radar Enceladus mini-sequence. Wednesday, February 9: A wrap up meeting was held today for the S39/S40 Science Operations Plan implementation process. These sequences will now be archived. They will next be dusted off for further processing in September of 2007! ISS presented recent science results of Iapetus at a Tour Science Talk, and the Satellite Orbiter Science Team hosted an Enceladus preview meeting where science objectives and activities were reviewed. The flyby is on February 17. The next Tour Science Talk is on February 16 and will be the Composite InfraRed Spectrometer team presenting some of their Iapetus results. Scientists Release Audio Sent by Huygens during Titan Descent By Lori Stiles, University of Arizona release, 14 February 2005 Scientists have produced an audio sound bite that captures what the Cassini orbiter heard from Huygens as the probe descended on Titan on January 14. The sounds may not be music to everyone's ears, but they're beautiful, interesting and important to investigators who are reconstructing the probe's exact position and orientation throughout its parachute dive to Titan's surface. "The minute-long sound file covers about four hours of real time, from when the Huygens probe deployed its main parachute, down to ground impact two-and-a-half hours later, and then for about another hour on the surface," said Ralph D. Lorenz of the University of Arizona. Lorenz, who is an assistant research scientist at UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and a co-investigator on Huygens' Surface Science Package, made the sound file from data formatted by Miguel Perez of the European Space Research Technology Centre, Noordwijk, the Netherlands. To hear the audio file, go to the European Space Agency web site at http://sci.esa.int, or Lorenz' home page at http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~rlorenz, or the UA News Services science Web page at http://uanews.org/science. The sound is a tone which has a frequency that depends on the strength of Huygens signal picked up by the Cassini orbiter's receiver. Signal strength depends on distances and angles between the orbiter and probe. Huygens' antenna emits radio energy unevenly, Lorenz said, "like the petals of a flower rather than the smooth shape of a fruit." The rapid changes in the tone reflect Huygens' changing orientation caused by its slowing spin rate during descent and its swinging beneath the parachute. "You can hear how the motion becomes slower and steadier later in the descent," Lorenz said. The tone changes dramatically at 43 seconds into the minute sound bite, when the decelerating, choppy whistle suddenly becomes a steady whistle, generally rising in pitch. That sound change is when the probe landed. "After landing, the tone is far less rich because the probe has stopped moving. But you still hear slight changes as Cassini flies through the lobes or 'petals' of the antenna pattern. Just before the end, you hear the weak signal drop out for a moment and then return. Overall, the signal was very robust. Cassini was locked on the Huygens signal throughout descent." "Sounds are an interesting way of evaluating one-dimensional data like this," Lorenz said. "The human ear is very good at detecting small changes in sound." For the latest images and information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. The Cassini-Huygens mission 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, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, DC. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, CO. Contacts: Carolina Martinez Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-9382 Heidi Finn Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations Space Science Institute, Boulder, CO Phone: 720-974-5859 Jean-Pierre Lebreton Huygens Project Scientist European Space Agency Noordwijk, The Netherlands Phone: +31 71 565 3600 E-mail: jplebret@rssd.esa.int Ralph Lorenz University of Arizona Phone: 520-621-5585 E-mail: rlorenz@lpl.arizona.edu Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1435.html http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1440.html http://sci.esa.int/jump.cfm?oid=36526 http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/huygens_update_050209.html http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/porco_boldly_050214.htm l http://www.spacedaily.com/news/saturn-titan-05j.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/saturn-titan-05k.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/saturn-titan-05l.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05u.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05v.html http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050208blue.html http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050208mimas.html http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050209titanwind.html http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050209radio.html http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050210herschel.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/huygens_wind_data.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/northern_saturn_little_blue.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/mimas_herschel_crater.html __________________________________________________________________________ NASA AWARDS CONTRACT FOR KEPLER MISSION PHOTOMETER NASA/ARC release 05-07AR 14 February 2005 NASA Ames Research Center, located in California's Silicon Valley, has awarded a new contract to Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. (BATC) of Boulder, CO, to design, fabricate, assemble and test a photometer for the Kepler mission. The not-to-exceed value of this letter contract is $13.4 million; the estimated value of the total contract is $75.1 million, which is part of a five-phased acquisition. A cost-plus- incentive-fee contract is anticipated, with a three-year period of performance that does not include any contract options. Under the terms of the contract, Ball Aerospace is responsible for designing, fabricating, integrating, testing and commissioning the scientific instrument called the photometer. Under a separate contract, the corporation also is responsible for the three-axis stabilized spacecraft designed to operate in deep space. The Kepler mission is the first space mission specifically designed to detect Earth-size planets orbiting solar-like stars in their habitable zone. The habitable zone is that distance from a star where liquid water could exist on the surface of the planet. Scheduled to launch in October 2007 on a Boeing Delta II expendable launch vehicle, Kepler is the 10th mission in NASA's Discovery program series. Project scientists will survey our extended solar neighborhood to detect and characterize hundreds of terrestrial and larger planets to provide a greater understanding of planetary systems. The photometer will be used to measure the very small changes in a star's brightness caused by the repeated, periodic "transit" of a planet in front of its star, as viewed from our solar system, similar to the transit of Venus in front of the sun in June 2004. The focal plane of the photometer will be made up of light-sensing charge coupled devices (CCDs) similar to those in a digital camera, but much larger, with a total of 100 megapixels. The photometer will survey a single, large patch of sky for the entire four-year mission, an area equivalent in size to two open hands held together at arms' length. The location in the sky is in the Cygnus- Lyra regions, between the very bright stars Vega and Deneb. The photometer will produce light curves, not images, for at least 100,000 stars simultaneously. It is the equivalent of a 100,000-channel light meter, hence the term photometer. By searching for a sequence of "transits" in the light curves from each star, scientists will determine the planet's orbital period. From the depth of the "transit" and knowing the size, mass and temperature of the star, the team can calculate the planet's size and the planet's characteristic temperature. Using Kepler's Third Law, which can be paraphrased as "For circular orbits, the distance of a planet from its star is proportional to the 2/3 root of the planet's orbital period," the scientists will be able to calculate the planet's orbit. The scientists then will be able to determine if the planet is located in the habitable zone, where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet. Led by the project's principal investigator, William Borucki, and the project's deputy principal investigator, David Koch, both of NASA Ames, the science team is comprised of 27 scientists from 15 institutions in the United States, Canada and Denmark. NASA Ames will manage the photometer contract, while NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., will manage the spacecraft contract. JPL is responsible for the project's overall mission development through launch and commissioning. NASA Ames will manage the mission's operations phase and lead the scientific analysis and interpretation of data. Ball Aerospace will operate the spacecraft throughout the mission for NASA. Scientists expect this mission will detect numerous Earth-size planets around solar-like stars and hundreds to thousands of planets of various sizes, in various orbits around a wide variety of stars. Further details about the Kepler mission can be found at http://Kepler.NASA.gov. Contact: Mike Mewhinney NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA Phone: 650-604-3937 or 650-604-9000 E-mail: Michael.Mewhinney@nasa.gov __________________________________________________________________________ NASA'S TWIN MARS ROVERS CONTINUE EXPLORATION NASA/JPL/ARC release 05-08AR 15 February 2005 NASA's twin rovers are continuing to explore Mars and make exciting discoveries during their extended exploration missions, nearly a year after they successfully completed their three-month primary missions in April 2004. The Spirit rover recently found a new class of water-affected rock, while its twin, Opportunity, finished inspecting its own heat shield and set a new martian driving record. "This is probably the most interesting and important rock Spirit has examined," said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, principal investigator for the rovers. The rock, dubbed 'Peace,' is an exposure of bedrock in the Columbia Hills. The rock is in the Gusev Crater, where Spirit landed 13 months ago. "This may be what the bones of this mountain are really made of. It gives us even more compelling evidence for water playing a major role for altering the rocks here," Squyres added. "Peace" contains more sulfate salt than any other rock Spirit has examined. "Usually when we have seen high levels of sulfur in rocks at Gusev, it has been at the very surface," said Dr. Ralf Gellert of Max- Planck-Institut fur Chemie, Mainz, Germany. "The unusual thing about this rock is that deep inside, the sulfur is still very high. The sulfur enrichment at the surface is correlated with the amount of magnesium, which points to magnesium sulfate." Observations by Spirit show the rock contains significant amounts of the minerals olivine, pyroxene and magnetite, all of which are common in some types of volcanic rock. The rock's texture appears to be sand-size grains coated with a material loosely binding the rock together. Spirit's rock abrasion tool dug about 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) deep in two hours. "It looks as if you took volcanic rocks that were ground into little grains, and then formed a layered rock with them cemented together by a substantial quantity of magnesium-sulfate salt," Squyres said. "Where did the salt come from? We have two working hypotheses we want to check by examining more rocks. It could come from liquid water with magnesium sulfate salt dissolved in it, percolating through the rock, then evaporating and leaving the salt behind. Or it could come from weathering by dilute sulfuric acid reacting with magnesium-rich minerals that were already in the rock. Either case involves water," he said. Opportunity used its microscopic imager to examine a cross section of the heat shield that protected the spacecraft as it slammed into Mars' atmosphere. This is the first time experts have been able to examine a heat shield after it entered another planet's atmosphere. Engineers expect the findings to aid design for future missions. "We've identified each broken piece of the heat shield. We know there's a lot of data there, but we still need to analyze it," said Ethiraj Venkatapathy of NASA Ames Research Center, located in California's Silicon Valley. "We are examining the images to determine the depth of charring in the heat shield material," said Christine Szalai, a spacecraft engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, CA. "In the initial look, we didn't see any surprises. We will be working for the next few months to analyze the performance of the heat shield," Szalai said. Since leaving the heat shield, Opportunity has been traveling south to explore new sites. The rover set a single-day martian driving record, covering 154.65 meters (507.4 feet) on Jan. 28. Two days later, it drove even farther, 156.55 meters (513.6 feet). The first 90 meters (295 feet) of each drive was performed in blind-drive mode, following a route planners created from stereo images from the rover and maps created from orbital imagery. The rest was autonomous driving, with the rover choosing its own route to avoid any hazards it perceived in stereo images taken along the way. "The terrain we're crossing is so flat we can see a long way ahead," said JPL rover planner Frank Hartman, who teamed with Jeff Biesiadecki to plot the drive. "Opportunity has paused for some trenching, but in a few days we'll put the pedal to the metal again." For Images and additional information about the rovers on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/mer_main.html. For information about NASA and agency programs on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov. Contacts: John Bluck NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA Phone: 650-604-5026 or 604-9000 E-mail: jbluck@mail.arc.nasa.gov Guy Webster NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-6278 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05o.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/spirit_rocks_affected_water.html __________________________________________________________________________ MARS EXPRESS UPDATES ESA releases Period of Long Eclipses Ending ESA release, 15 February 2005 Overall mission and payload status The Mars Express payload operations continue to run smoothly, with scientific instruments operating normally and the spacecraft in good condition. The period of long eclipses, from January to February 2005, is ending without any power or thermal problem to date. After a request from the OMEGA instrument team, OMEGA operations were stopped on 7 February 2005, due to an interface temperature that is lower than expected. The proposed solution is to include an additional half an hour of heating before switch-on. Two tests will be performed next week with OMEGA. The main cause of this problem is likely to be that the eclipses are now moving closer to the pericenter. The MELACOM Doppler link test with one of the Mars Exploration Rovers was successfully executed at the end of December 2004. No further use of the MELACOM communications package is foreseen at the moment. Ground station configuration and maintenance at the DSS-14 (Goldstone) DSN ground station at the end of December 2004 implied that this station was only available in engineering-demo mode. Therefore, this has had a negative impact on payload operations (radio science) and science data downlink for a few days. Science planning status The planning for the Medium-Term Plans of March and April 2005 is being finalized. The planning of science operations for the April-May commanding periods is being performed, keeping the current MARSIS deployment date of 2 May in mind. Science highlights The 15th Mars Express Science Working Team meeting and 27th Mars Express Science Operations Working Group meeting were held at ESTEC on 27 and 28 January 2005, respectively. The Principle Investigator (PI) teams summarized their main scientific results to date, and an overview of the upcoming Mars Express Science Conference, which will be held at ESA-ESTEC from 21 to 25 February 2005, was discussed. Most PI teams have submitted major papers to American and European scientific journals. A summary of scientific results after one year of operations around Mars will be given by the PIs at the Mars Express Science Conference. Read the original news release at http://sci.esa.int/science- e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=36532. Melas, Candor and Ophir Chasmas: Center of Valles Marineris ESA release, 15 February 2005 These images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA's Mars Express spacecraft, show the central part of the 4000-kilometer long Valles Marineris canyon on Mars. The HRSC obtained these images during orbits 334 and 360 with a resolution of approximately 21 meters per pixel for the earlier orbit and 30 meters per pixel for the latter. The scenes show an area of approximately 300 by 600 kilometers and are taken from an image mosaic that was created from the two orbit sequences. The image above is located between 3º to 13º South, and 284º to 289º East. Valles Marineris was named after the US Mariner 9 probe, the first spacecraft to image this enormous feature in 1971. Here, the huge canyon which runs east to west is at its widest in the north-south direction. It remains unclear how this gigantic geological feature, unparalleled in the Solar System, was formed. Tensions in the upper crust of Mars possibly led to cracking of the highlands. Subsequently, blocks of the crust slid down between these tectonic fractures. The fracturing of Valles Marineris could have occurred thousands of millions of years ago, when the Tharsis bulge (west of Valles Marineris) began to form as the result of volcanic activity and subsequently grew to the dimensions of greater than a thousand kilometers in diameter and more than ten kilometers high. On Earth, such a tectonic process is called "rifting", presently occurring on a smaller scale in the Kenya rift in eastern Africa. The collapse of large parts of the highland is an alternative explanation. For instance, extensive amounts of water ice could have been stored beneath the surface and were then melted as a result of thermal activity, most likely the nearby volcanic Tharsis province. The water could have traveled towards the northern lowlands, leaving cavities beneath the surface where the ice once existed. The roofs could no longer sustain the load of the overlying rocks, so the area collapsed. Regardless of how Valles Marineris might have formed, it is clear that once the depressions were formed and the surface was topographically structured, heavy erosion then began shaping the landscape. Two distinct landforms can be distinguished. On one hand, we see sheer cliffs with prominent edges and ridges. These are erosion features that are typical in arid mountain zones on Earth. Today, the surface of Mars is bone dry, so wind and gravity are the dominant processes that shape the landscape (this might have been much different in the geological past of the planet when Valles Marineris possibly had flowing water or glaciers winding down its slopes). In contrast, some gigantic "hills" (indeed, between 1000 and 2000 meters high) located on the floors of the valleys have a smoother topography and a more sinuous outline. So far, scientists have no definitive explanation for why these different landforms exist. Below the northern scarp, there are several landslides, where material was transported over a distance of up to 70 kilometers. Also seen in the image there are several structures suggesting flow of material in the past. Therefore, material could have been deposited in the valleys, making the present floor look heterogeneous. In the centre of the image, there are surface features that appear similar to ice flows. These were previously identified in pictures from the US Viking probes of the 1970s; their origin remains a mystery. The colour images were processed using the HRSC nadir (vertical view) and three color channels. The perspective views were calculated from the digital terrain model derived from the stereo channels. The 3D anaglyph image was created from the nadir channel and one of the stereo channels. Stereoscopic glasses are needed to view the 3D image. Image resolution has been decreased for use on the internet. Read the original news release at http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEMQD3YEM4E_0.html. An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/centre_valles_marineris.html. __________________________________________________________________________ MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 3-9 February 2005 The following new images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are now available. North Polar Ice (Released 3 February 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/02/03/ Yardangs in Aeolis (Released 4 February 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/02/04/ Winter Frost and Fog (Released 5 February 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/02/05/ Syrian Dust Devil (Released 6 February 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/02/06/ Schiaparelli cPROTO (Released 7 February 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/02/07/ Mars at Ls 160 Degrees (Released 8 February 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/02/08/ Chasma Boreale Dunes (Released 9 February 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/02/09/ All of the Mars Global Surveyor images are archived at http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/index.html. Mars Global Surveyor was launched in November 1996 and has been in Mars orbit since September 1997. It began its primary mapping mission on March 8, 1999. Mars Global Surveyor is the first mission in a long-term program of Mars exploration known as the Mars Surveyor Program that is managed by JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) and the California Institute of Technology built the MOC using spare hardware from the Mars Observer mission. MSSS operates the camera from its facilities in San Diego, CA. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars Surveyor Operations Project operates the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft with its industrial partner, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, from facilities in Pasadena, CA and Denver, CO. __________________________________________________________________________ MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release 7-11 February 2005 THEMIS Images as Art #31 (Released 7 February 2005) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050207A.html THEMIS Images as Art #32 (Released 8 February 2005) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050208A.html THEMIS Images as Art #33 (Released 9 February 2005 http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050209A.html THEMIS Images as Art #34 (Released 10 February 2005) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050210A.html THEMIS Images as Art #35 (Released 11 February 2005 http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050211A.html All of the THEMIS images are archived at http://themis.la.asu.edu/latest.html. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) was developed by Arizona State University, Tempe, in collaboration with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing. The THEMIS investigation is led by Dr. Philip Christensen at Arizona State University. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime contractor for the Odyssey project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. __________________________________________________________________________ End Marsbugs, Volume 12, Number 6.