Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 12, Number 25, 18 July 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) ABANDONED SPACESHIPS By Tony Phillips and Patrick L. Barry 2) SCUTTLE THE SHUTTLE SAYS SPACE FRONTIER FOUNDATION--SPACE SHUTTLE IS A WASTE OF TAXPAYER FUNDS By the Space Frontier Foundation 3) A STATEMENT FROM THE COLUMBIA FAMILIES ON NASA'S RETURN TO FLIGHT NASA release 05-180 4) DOOM AND GLOOM WON'T SELL SPACE By Jeffrey F. Bell 5) A NEW CLASS OF PLANET? By Alan Boss 6) NASA MUST ESTABLISH THE MOON AND MARS ASTRONAUT CORPS By George Whitesides and Gary Bernhard 7) NASA SCIENTIST FINDS WORLD WITH TRIPLE SUNSETS NASA/JPL release 2005-115 8) THE GREAT UFO DEBATE By Seth Shostak 9) THE DEVILS OF MARS By Trudy E. Bell 10) THE HUMBLE SPACE TELESCOPE By Jaymie Matthews Announcements 11) SCOTT HOROWITZ TO SPEAK AT MARS SOCIETY CONVENTION Mars Society release 12) PRELIMINARY CONFERENCE SCHEDULE ANNOUNCED Mars Society release 13) 2005 YELLOWSTONE RESOURCES AND ISSUES GUIDE From the NAI Newsletter 14) GRADUATE RESEARCH SEMINAR ON THE ORIGIN OF LIFE (JULY 2006) From the NAI Newsletter 15) CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ALPINE AND POLAR MICROBIOLOGY From the NAI Newsletter Mission Reports 16) CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS FOR 7-13 JULY 2005 NASA/JPL release 17) DEEP IMPACT UPDATES Multiple releases 18) MARS EXPLORATION ROVERS UPDATES NASA/JPL release 19) MARS EXPRESS: NICHOLSON CRATER ON MARS ESA release 20) MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 21) MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGES NASA/JPL/ASU release 22) MARS RECONNAISSANCE ORBITER: NASA BRIEFING PREVIEWS NEXT STEP FOR EXPLORING MARS NASA media advisory M05-117 _____________________________________________________________________ ABANDONED SPACESHIPS By Tony Phillips and Patrick L. Barry From NASA Science News 11 July 2005 Inside the lunar lander Challenger, a radio loudspeaker crackled. Houston: "We've got you on television now. We have a good picture." Gene Cernan, Apollo 17 commander: "Glad to see old Rover's still working." "Rover," the moon buggy, sat outside with no one in the driver's seat, its side-mounted TV camera fixed on Challenger. Back in Houston and around the world, millions watched. The date was December 19, 1972, and history was about to be made. Suddenly, soundlessly, Challenger split in two. The base of the ship, the part with the landing pads, stayed put. The top, the lunar module with Cernan and Jack Schmitt inside, blasted off in a spray of gold foil. It rose, turned, and headed off to rendezvous with the orbiter America, the craft that would take them home again. Those were the last men on the Moon. After they were gone, the camera panned back and forth. There was no one there, nothing, only the rover, the lander and some equipment scattered around the dusty floor of the Taurus-Littrow valley. Eventually, Rover's battery died and the TV transmissions stopped. That was our last good look at an Apollo landing site. Many people find this surprising, even disconcerting. Conspiracy theorists have long insisted that NASA never went to the Moon. It was all a hoax, they say, a way to win the Space Race by trickery. The fact that Apollo landing sites have not been photographed in detail since the early 1970s encourages their claims. And why haven't we photographed them? There are six landing sites scattered across the Moon. They always face Earth, always in plain view. Surely the Hubble Space Telescope could photograph the rovers and other things astronauts left behind. Right? Wrong. Not even Hubble can do it. The Moon is 384,400 km away. At that distance, the smallest things Hubble can distinguish are about 60 meters wide. The biggest piece of left-behind Apollo equipment is only 9 meters across and thus smaller than a single pixel in a Hubble image. Better pictures are coming. In 2008 NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will carry a powerful modern camera into low orbit over the Moon's surface. Its primary mission is not to photograph old Apollo landing sites, but it will photograph them, many times, providing the first recognizable images of Apollo relics since 1972. The spacecraft's high-resolution camera, called "LROC," short for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, has a resolution of about half a meter. That means that a half-meter square on the Moon's surface would fill a single pixel in its digital images. Apollo moon buggies are about 2 meters wide and 3 meters long. So in the LROC images, those abandoned vehicles will fill about 4 by 6 pixels. What does a half-meter resolution picture look like? This image of an airport on Earth has the same resolution as an LROC image. Moon buggy-sized objects (automobiles and luggage carts) are clear. "I would say the rovers will look angular and distinct," says Mark Robinson, research associate professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and Principal Investigator for LROC. "We might see some shading differences on top from seats, depending on the sun angle. Even the rovers' tracks might be detectable in some instances." Even more recognizable will be the discarded lander platforms. Their main bodies are 4 meters on a side, and so will fill an 8 by 8 pixel square in the LROC images. The four legs jutting out from the platforms' four corners span a diameter of 9 meters. So, from landing pad to landing pad, the landers will occupy about 18 pixels in LROC images, more than enough to trace their distinctive shapes. Shadows help, too. Long black shadows cast across gray lunar terrain will reveal the shape of what cast them: the rovers and landers. "During the course of its year-long mission, LROC will image each landing site several times with the sunlight at different angles each time," says Robinson. Comparing the different shadows produced would allow for a more accurate analysis of the shape of the objects. Enough nostalgia--LROC's main mission is about the future. According to NASA's Vision for Space Exploration, astronauts are returning to the Moon no later than 2020. Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is a scout. It will sample the Moon's radiation environment, search for patches of frozen water, make laser maps of lunar terrain and, using LROC, photograph the Moon's entire surface. By the time astronauts return, they'll know the best places to land and much of what awaits them. Two high-priority targets for LROC are the Moon's poles. We're particularly interested in the poles as a potential location for a moon base," Robinson explains. "There are some cratered regions near the poles that are in shadow year-round. These places might be cold enough to harbor permanent deposits of water ice. And nearby are high regions that are sunlit all year. With constant sunlight for warmth and solar power, and a potential source of water nearby, these high regions would make an ideal location for a base." Data from LROC will help pinpoint the best ridge or plateau for setting up a lunar home. Once a moonbase is established, what's the danger of it being hit by a big meteorite? LROC will help answer that question. "We can compare LROC images of the Apollo landing sites with Apollo-era photos," says Robinson. The presence or absence of fresh craters will tell researchers something about the frequency of meteor strikes. LROC will also be hunting for ancient hardened lava tubes. These are cave-like places, hinted at in some Apollo images, where astronauts could take shelter in case of an unexpected solar storm. A global map of these natural storm shelters will help astronauts plan their explorations. No one knows what else LROC might find. The Moon has never been surveyed in such detail before. Surely new things await; old abandoned spaceships are just the beginning. Read the original article at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/11jul_lroc.htm. _____________________________________________________________________ SCUTTLE THE SHUTTLE SAYS SPACE FRONTIER FOUNDATION--SPACE SHUTTLE IS A WASTE OF TAXPAYER FUNDS By the Space Frontier Foundation From SpaceDaily 11 July 2005 In anticipation of this week's planned return to flight of NASA's Space Shuttle Discovery, the Space Frontier Foundation renewed its call for the orbiters to be retired. The Foundation, which for over 15 years has criticized the Shuttle system as too costly, urged NASA and Congress to announce a firm date when the last Shuttle orbiter will fly. "If it were up to us, the Shuttle never would have flown in the first place," remarked the Foundation's Rick Tumlinson. "Far from opening space to the American people, it weighed down our space program with its bloated budgets, massive support network and tragic cost in terms of human life. Its' time has passed. We should kill that program as soon possible, before more money gets wasted." Read the full article at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped- 05zp.html. _____________________________________________________________________ A STATEMENT FROM THE COLUMBIA FAMILIES ON NASA'S RETURN TO FLIGHT NASA release 05-180 12 July 2005 The following is a statement from the families of the Space Shuttle Columbia mission STS-107. "As NASA prepares to launch the Shuttle Discovery, we, the Columbia Families, would like to show our support for the STS-114 crew and all the dedication and talent of those who supported this Return to Flight effort. We have had two and one half years to reflect daily on the loss of our loved ones as the Shuttle Columbia (STS 107) broke apart over Texas on February 1, 2003. "In the aftermath of the Columbia tragedy we saw our nation's space program reinvent itself. The extraordinary efforts of local, state and national organizations involved in the recovery effort, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, the Return to Flight Task Group and all the NASA and aerospace industry workforce implementing the Return to Flight effort have clearly done an exemplary job in defining and reducing the technical risk as much as possible. As the families of Apollo 1 and Challenger before us, we grieve deeply but know the exploration of space must go on. We hope we have learned, and will continue to learn, from each of these accidents, so that we will be as safe as we can be in this high risk endeavor. "As important as solving the technical risk is, we must be vigilant to ensure the organizational and cultural issues that contributed to Apollo, Challenger, and Columbia are forever remembered. Under the leadership of the new NASA Administrator, we have every confidence that the sacrifice of our loved ones and those that preceded them will be realized for the benefit of all humankind. "Godspeed Discovery." Contacts: Allard Beutel NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-4769 Doug Peterson NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX Phone: 281-483-5111 _____________________________________________________________________ DOOM AND GLOOM WON'T SELL SPACE By Jeffrey F. Bell From SpaceDaily 13 July 2005 Recently I found myself reliving my misspent youth while cleaning out my old university office. Among the documents that turned up was the 1977 magazine which led me to become an asteroid scientist and space activist, along with reports from the "Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy", an offshoot of the old L-5 Society. Today's space activists are superficially more presentable than we were in the 1970s. It has been a long time since anyone tried to lobby the US Congress while wearing Starfleet uniforms and rubber Spock ears like some of my L-5 Society friends did. But when you get below the surface, their underlying message is as stale and yellow as those old documents from the back of my file drawers. And that message is always one of impending doom and gloom. Space activists present an optimistic view of the human future in space which is based on a deeply pessimistic future of the human future on Earth. Only the nature of the impending catastrophe varies. Read the full article at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped- 05zn.html. _____________________________________________________________________ A NEW CLASS OF PLANET? By Alan Boss From Astrobiology Magazine 13 July 2005 Over the past decade, astronomers using a planet-hunting technique that measures small changes in a star's speed relative to Earth, have discovered more than 130 extrasolar planets. The first such planets were gas giants, the mass of Jupiter or larger. After several years, the scientists began to detect Saturn-mass planets. And last August, they announced the discovery of a handful of Neptune-mass planets. Could these be super-Earths? In a recent talk at a symposium on extrasolar planets, Carnegie Institution of Washington astronomer Alan Boss explained the possibilities. Radial-velocity planet-hunting techniques recently have pushed our discovery capability below the Saturn-mass limit down into what we would call the ice-giant limit. So we are now able to find planets, close to their host stars, with masses comparable to that of Uranus and Neptune (14 to 17 times the mass of Earth). In large part this is due to Michel Mayor and his colleagues having a new spectrometer in La Silla, which has unprecedented spectral resolution down to about 1 meter per second or so. And I think Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler's group are quite close behind that as well. The interesting question, though, is: What are these things? Are they ice giants that formed several AUs out and migrated in, or are they something else? Unfortunately, we don't know exactly what their masses are. Even more importantly, we don't really know what their density is. So they could be 15-Earth-mass rocks, or they could be 15-Earth-mass ice giants. What we really need to do is to have folks go out and discover another 7 or so. We've got 3 so far. If we had 10 altogether, then we'll have enough that 1 of them, at least, should transit its star and then we'll be able to get some idea of what its density is. I think, though, that there's a good chance that these might actually be a new class of planet altogether: super-Earths. The reason I would argue that is that, at least in 2 of the systems where they've been found, these "hot Neptunes" are accompanied by a larger Jupiter- mass planet with a longer-period orbit. If the lower-mass planets are ice giants that formed far from their stars, unless you have some highly contrived scenario, you wouldn't imagine them to end up migrating inward, past the larger guys. These systems look more like our own solar system, where you have the low- mass fellows inside of the gas giants. The planets in a system like our system presumably did not undergo very much migration. So I would claim that perhaps these guys are objects which formed inside the gas giants and only migrated in a little bit, ending up where we can detect them with the short-period spectroscopy surveys. In support of this idea, there's some theoretical work from Carnegie's George Wetherill from almost 10 years ago, now, where he had done some calculations of the accumulation process of rocky planets. He often found there was quite a spread in the masses of what you got out, because accumulation's a very stochastic process. For the typical parameters he used, at the end of 100 million years or so, he would not only get objects of 1 Earth mass, but also objects ranging up to 3 Earth masses. Well, at the time, he assumed for his calculations a fairly low surface density at 1 AU, where these planets were forming. Given what we know now, if you want to be able to make a Jupiter at 5 AU using the core-accretion model of planetary formation, you have to crank up the density in the protoplanetary disk by a factor of 7 or so over what Wetherill assumed. That scales directly with the mass of the planets you'd expect to find as a result. So if you did these calculations over again, assuming this higher initial density, the upper limit on the mass of the inner planets would go from 3 Earth masses, which is what Wetherill got, up to say 21 Earth masses. That is in the range of what we are estimating for these newly discovered hot Neptune-mass objects. So perhaps what we really are seeing is a new class of objects, super-Earths, rather than ice giants. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1642.html. _____________________________________________________________________ NASA MUST ESTABLISH THE MOON AND MARS ASTRONAUT CORPS By George Whitesides and Gary Bernhard From Ad Astra and Space.com 13 July 2005 To inspire the American people about the Vision for Space Exploration, and to focus the agency on its central mission, NASA should immediately establish a Moon and Mars Astronaut Corps. This elite cadre, set up within the existing astronaut body, would bring together the heroes who will lead the great journey ahead. Such a corps would tremendously augment the connection between the NASA of today and the NASA that will explore the Moon and Mars. Strengthening this connection--between the programs that NASA is working on now and the explorations in NASA’s future--is critical for both the near- and far-term success of the vision. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/adastra/adastra_astronautcorps_050713.html. _____________________________________________________________________ NASA SCIENTIST FINDS WORLD WITH TRIPLE SUNSETS NASA/JPL release 2005-115 13 July 2005 A NASA-funded astronomer has discovered a world where the sun sets over the horizon, followed by a second sun and then a third. The new planet, called HD 188753 Ab, is the first known to reside in a classic triple-star system. "The sky view from this planet would be spectacular, with an occasional triple sunset," said Dr. Maciej Konacki (MATCH-ee Konn- ATZ-kee) of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, who found the planet using the Keck I telescope atop Mauna Kea mountain in Hawaii. "Before now, we had no clues about whether planets could form in such gravitationally complex systems." The finding, reported in this week's issue of Nature, suggests that planets are more robust than previously believed. "This is good news for planets," said Dr. Shri Kulkarni, who oversees Konacki's research at Caltech. "Planets may live in all sorts of interesting neighborhoods that, until now, have gone largely unexplored." Kulkarni is the interdisciplinary scientist for NASA's planned SIM PlanetQuest mission, which will search for signs of Earth-like worlds. Systems with multiple stars are widespread throughout the universe, accounting for more than half of all stars. Our Sun's closest star, Alpha Centauri, is a member of a trio. "Multiple-star systems have not been popular planet-hunting grounds," said Konacki. "They are difficult to observe and were believed to be inhospitable to planets." The new planet belongs to a common class of extrasolar planets called "hot Jupiters," which are gas giants that zip closely around their parent stars. In this case, the planet whips every 3.3 days around a star that is circled every 25.7 years by a pirouetting pair of stars locked in a 156-day orbit. The circus-like trio of stars is a cramped bunch, fitting into the same amount of space as the distance between Saturn and our Sun. Such tight living quarters throw theories of hot Jupiter formation into question. Astronomers had thought that hot Jupiters formed far away from their parent stars, before migrating inward. "In this close-knit system, there would be no room at the outskirts of the parent star system for a planet to grow," said Konacki. Previously, astronomers had identified planets around about 20 binary stars and one set of triple stars. But the stars in those systems had a lot of space between them. Most multiple-star arrangements are crowded together and difficult to study. Konacki overcame this challenge using a modified version of the radial velocity, or "wobble," planet-hunting technique. In the traditional wobble method, a planet's presence is inferred by the gravitational tug, or wobble, it induces in its parent star. The strategy works well for single stars or far-apart binary and triple stars, but could not be applied to close-star systems because the stars' light blends together. By developing detailed models of close-star systems, Konacki was able to tease apart the tangled starlight. This allowed him to pinpoint, for the first time, the tug of a planet on a star snuggled next to other stars. Of 20 systems examined so far, HD 188753, located 149 light-years away, was the only one found to harbor a planet. Hot Jupiters are believed to form out of thick disks, or "doughnuts," of material that swirl around the outer fringes of young stars. The disk material clumps together to form a solid core, then pulls gas onto it. Eventually, the gas giant drifts inward. The discovery of a world under three suns contradicts this scenario. HD 188753 would have sported a truncated disk in its youth, due to the disruptive presence of its stellar companions. That leaves no room for HD 188753's planet to form, and raises a host of new questions. The masses of the three stars in HD 188753 system range from two- thirds to about the same mass as our Sun. The planet is slightly more massive than Jupiter. For artist's concepts and other graphics, visit http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/. For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html. Contact: Whitney Clavin Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-4673 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1645.html http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050713_triple_sun.html http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0507/14triplestar/ http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/scientist_finds_triple_sunset s.html _____________________________________________________________________ THE GREAT UFO DEBATE By Seth Shostak From Space.com 14 July 2005 The good news is that polls continue to show that between one and two-thirds of the public thinks that extraterrestrial life exists. The weird news is that a similar fraction thinks that some of it is visiting Earth. Several recent television shows have soberly addressed the possibility that alien craft are violating our air space, occasionally touching down long enough to allow their crews to conduct bizarre (and, in most states, illegal) experiments on hapless citizens. While these shows tantalize viewers by suggesting that they are finally going to get to the bottom of the so-called "UFO debate", they never do. That bottom seems perennially out of reach. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_shostak_ufo_050714.html. _____________________________________________________________________ THE DEVILS OF MARS By Trudy E. Bell From NASA Science News 14 July 2005 Ah, martian summer! Finally, the days are long, just like on dear old Earth. And daytime highs rocket all the way up to a balmy 20°C (68°F) from the summer nighttime low of -90°C (-130°F), meaning you and your fellow astronauts can warm up your machinery earlier to get a good start on mining operations. But those warm daytime temperatures also bring alive the martian devils. Dust devils, that is. You were caught in one just yesterday--and a devilishly terrifying experience it was. This was no little Arizona desert whirlwind, only a few tens of meters high and a few meters across and past you in seconds. No, what hit you yesterday was a monster column towering kilometers high and hundreds of meters wide, 10 times larger than any tornado on Earth. Red-brown sand and dust whipping around faster than 30 meters per second (70 miles per hour) dropped visibility to zero, scouring your faceplate, driving dust into every fold and wrinkle of your spacesuit. For 15 minutes you huddled and endured the buffeting. The scariest part was the incessant crackling and flashing of miniature lightning bolts nipping at you and your rover, and the loud static on your radio that prevented you from calling for help. Could this really happen? According to NASA's Vision for Space Exploration, astronauts are going to visit Mars in the decades ahead. And when they get there, dust devils will be waiting. "The sand in the lower part of a martian dust devil would be the biggest hazard," says Mark T. Lemmon, associate research scientist in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A & M University. "The atmospheric pressure on Mars is only 1 percent that at sea level [on Earth], so you wouldn't feel much wind against you. But you'd still be pinged by high-speed material." Moreover, the moving dust and sand may become electrically charged, to the point of "arcing to your spacesuit or vehicle, and creating electromagnetic interference," adds William M. Farrell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Dust devils on Mars form the same way they do in deserts on Earth. "You need strong surface heating, so the ground can get hotter than the air above it," explains Lemmon. Heated less-dense air close to the ground rises, punching through the layer of cooler denser air above; rising plumes of hot air and falling plumes of cool air begin circulating vertically in convection cells. Now, if a horizontal gust of wind blows through, "it turns the convection cells on their sides, so they begin spinning horizontally, forming vertical columns- -and starting a dust devil." Hot air rising through the center of the column powers the whirling air ever faster--fast enough to begin picking up sand. Sand scouring the ground then dislodges flour-fine dust, and the central column of hot rising air buoys that dust high aloft. Once prevailing horizontal winds begin pushing the dust devil across the ground, look out! "If you were standing next to the Spirit rover right now [in Gusev Crater] in the middle of the day, you might see half a dozen dust devils," says Lemmon. Each martian spring or summer day, dust devils begin appearing about 10 AM as the ground heats, and start abating about 3:00 PM as the ground cools (Mars's solar day of 24 hours 39 minutes is only 39 minutes longer than Earth’s). Although the exact frequency and duration of martian dust devils is unknown, photographs from Mars Global Surveyor in orbit reveal innumerable wandering tracks at all latitudes on the planet. These tracks crisscross the surface where dust devils have scoured away loose surface material to reveal different-colored soil beneath. Moreover, actual dust devils have been photographed from orbit--some of them as large as 1 to 2 kilometers across at their base and (from their shadows) clearly towering 8 to 10 km high. What intrigues Farrell from having chased dust devils in the Arizona desert, however, is the strange fact that terrestrial dust devils are electrically charged--and martian dust devils might be, too. Dust devils get their charge from grains of sand and dust rubbing together in the whirlwind. When certain pairs of unlike materials rub together, one material gives up some of its electrons (negative charges) to the other material. Such separation of electric charges is called triboelectric charging, the prefix "tribo" (pronounced TRY- bo) meaning "rubbing." Triboelectric charging makes your hair stand on end when you rub a balloon against your head. Dust and sand, like plastic and hair, form a tribolelectric pair. (Dust and sand aren't necessarily made of the same stuff, notes Lemmon, because "dust can be blown in from anywhere.") Smaller dust particles tend to charge negative, taking away electrons from the larger sand grains. Because the rising central column of hot air that powers the dust devil carries the negatively-charged dust upward and leaves the heavier positively-charged sand swirling near the base, the charges get separated, creating an electric field. "On Earth, with instruments we've measured electric fields on the order of 20 thousand volts per meter (20 kV/m)," Farrell says. That's peanuts compared to the electric fields in terrestrial thunderstorms, where lightning doesn't flash until electric fields get 100 times greater-- enough to ionize (break apart) air molecules. But a mere 20 kV/m "is very close to the breakdown of the thin martian atmosphere," Farrell points out. More significantly, martian dust devils are so much bigger than their terrestrial counterparts that their stored electrical energy may be much higher. "How would those fields discharge?" he asks. "Would you have martian lightning inside the dust devils?" Even if lightning wouldn't ordinarily occur naturally, the presence of an astronaut or rover or habitat might induce filamentary discharges, or local arcing. "The thing you'd really have to watch out for is corners, where electric fields can get very strong," he adds. "You might want to make your vehicle or habitat rounded." Another consideration for astronauts on Mars would be "radio static as charged grains hit bare-wire antennas," Farrell warns. And after the dust devil passed over and was gone, a lasting souvenir of its passage would be an increased adhesion of dust to spacesuits, vehicles, and habitats via electrostatic cling--the same phenomenon that causes socks to stick together when pulled out of a clothes dryer--making cleanup difficult before reentering a habitat. Because martian dust devils can tower 8 to 10 kilometers high, planetary meteorologists now think the devils may be responsible for throwing so much dust high into the martian atmosphere. Importantly for astronauts, that dust may be carrying negative charges high into the atmosphere as well. Charge building up at the storm top could pose a hazard to a rocket taking off from Mars, as happened to Apollo 12 in November 1969 when it lifted off from Florida during a thunderstorm: the rocket exhaust ionized or broke down the air molecules, leaving a trail of charged molecules all the way down to the ground, triggering a lightning bolt that struck the spacecraft. "Early sea navigators, like Columbus, understood that their ships had to be designed for extreme weather conditions," Farrell points out. "To design a mission to Mars, we need to know the extremes of martian weather--and those extremes appear to be in the form of dust storms and devils." Read the original article at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/14jul_dustdevils.htm. _____________________________________________________________________ THE HUMBLE SPACE TELESCOPE By Jaymie Matthews From Astrobiology Magazine 18 July 2005 Canada's first space telescope, MOST, looks for minute variations in the brightness of nearby stars. As Jaymie Matthews, of the University of British Columbia, explains in this talk given at a recent symposium on extrasolar planets, MOST can provide scientists with a unique perspective on how distant worlds interact with their host stars. I'd like to describe a powerful new small instrument in space called MOST, which stands for Microvariability and Oscillations of Stars (and because it's Canadian, it stands for Microvariabilité et Oscillations Stellaire as well). MOST is Canada's first space telescope. It is literally a suitcase in space: 60 by 60 by 30 centimeters (24 by 24 by 12 inches), 54 kilos, about 124 pounds. I weigh more than the MOST satellite; I think I'm the only mission scientists that out-masses his space satellite. And you can check it on the plane; they can lose it for you. MOST was actually designed to do seismology of stars, to probe the interiors and histories of stars. That's relevant to the exoplanets search, because the more we know about parent stars, the more we know about their planetary systems. But we realized, once MOST was underway, that we could actually do some additional exciting things in the exoplanet field. One of the things that MOST can do that nobody else can do at the moment is to stare at stars for up to 2 months at a time, putting stars on a stakeout, to detect variations in the brightnesses of stars or the brightnesses of the planets orbiting those stars, down to a level of 1 part per million, 1 ten- thousandth of a percent. Just to emphasize to you how small that is, if you were to go to New York City and look at the Empire State Building at night, all the lights were on, all the office window blinds were open and you wanted to make the Empire State Building darker by 1 part per million, you would lower one shade by 3 centimeters, by a little more than an inch. That's the level of signal that we are looking for in stars. And there is no other instrument on Earth or in space right now that's capable of doing this. And I should point out that this whole mission has an end-to-end budget of $10 million Canadian, or $7 million US. So we're the Wal-Mart of space telescopes. MOST has a unique vantage point in space. It has a very different orbit from the Hubble Space Telescope, or from Spitzer, a pole-to- pole orbit. We communicate with it with our own little custom ground-station network in Toronto, Vancouver and Vienna, and we got into that orbit on the top of a former Soviet Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. A honest-to-goodness weapon of mass destruction. So not only did we put up a scientific instrument, but we destroyed a weapon of mass destruction in the bargain. MOST launched from northern Russia on June 30, 2003, so we're approaching our second anniversary in space. Being able to give a star that kind of intense long-term coverage is really important for astronomers to understand what's going on in systems that have exoplanets. To give an analogy, we're trying to read the messages that stars and exoplanets are telling us, but from the ground, we only get part of that message. If you have a network of telescopes on the ground, spread in a longitude, you can start to fill in some of the gaps, you can start to recognize some things that look like words. If you have some theories and expectations ahead of time, you might be able to infer a bit of the story, but you could very well get the completely wrong story if you've made the wrong assumptions. Having this kind of continuous coverage of a star allows us to really see what stars are doing, and in the case of exoplanets systems, what the exoplanets around them are doing. MOST is primarily intended to study very tiny variations in stars' output light. We're trying to put our own Sun in context by looking at other sunlike stars, looking at some of the senior citizens our galactic city, trying to put some limits on the age of the universe. But the point that's most important for us today is the fact that MOST also does exoplanet science. What we are looking for is reflected light, the same kind of wavelengths that you see with your eye, from close-in giant planets that have become known as hot Jupiters. We're not an exoplanets hunter. We're too small a telescope to have a statistical chance of finding new planets. We would have to be very lucky. But we are an exoplanet explorer. We take advantage of the work of Drs. Mayor and Brown, and Geoff Marcy, and other groups, who find the planets with their Doppler surveys, and then we can go in and take a closer look. We've examined 3 known exoplanet systems already, Tau Bootis, HD 209458--the telephone-book numbers that astronomers love for stars--and 51 Pegasi, the very first exoplanet around a normal star, which Dr. Mayor and his colleague, Didier Queloz, discovered 10 years ago. When we looked at Tau Bootis, in a trial run last year, for 11 days, continuously, we saw a signal that very closely matched the planet's orbital period. But it was far too large to be associated with the planet. It's about .25 percent, and this is almost certainly originating in the star itself. Tau Bootis, the star, is far more active and variable than we imagined. And we've now been able to combine the Doppler data with the data from MOST and the light cures line up, beautifully. The star's brightness is varying with exactly the same period as the planet orbiting around it. We're accustomed to bodies tidally locking each other through their gravitational influence if they're close enough. The Earth has locked the Moon into a rotation period related to its orbit, so the Moon always keeps the same face to us. We're convinced that these exoplanets close to their parent stars are tidally locked, so that they always keep one face to the star. But it's almost counter- intuitive, like the tail wagging the dog, that a planet should be able to tidally lock the star. Now, in this case, it's probably not locking the entire star, but rather its outer envelope, but there may be a kind of a spot complex, like a super-sunspot, on the surface of Tau Bootis, which has been somehow triggered by the influence of the planet, Tau Bootis b, and tracks it in its orbit. This was suspected by some of the ground-based data, but MOST has been able to confirm that these things are in perfect lockstep. The good news is that we're learning a lot about the star that we didn't know before, and maybe about the interactions between the planet and the star. Possibly their magnetic fields are interacting. Usually rapidly rotating stars are young, but we don't really know anything about the age of Tau Bootis other than information based on its rotation rate and its activity. It's hard for us to tell: Is it genuinely young, or maybe it's an older star, and when the planet migrated in the star was spun up and rejuvenated, kind of going through a second childhood. The bad news is that this stellar activity is going to make it hard to see reflected light from the planet, although we're not going to give up on that, and we're going to continue to observe Tau Bootis. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1649.html. _____________________________________________________________________ SCOTT HOROWITZ TO SPEAK AT MARS SOCIETY CONVENTION Mars Society release 11 July 2005 Colonel Scott "Doc" Horowitz will give a plenary talk to the 8th International Mars Society Convention on the morning of August 11, 2005. A former USAF fighter pilot, astronaut, and Space Shuttle commander with five orbital missions to his credit, Dr. Horowitz, now at ATK Thiokol, is the author the "Safe, Simple, Soon" plan for creating a near-term Crew Exploration Vehicles (CEV) and Shuttle- derived heavy lift launch vehicle. According to many recent news reports, these ideas have now been adopted by NASA as the cornerstone of its designs for implementing America's initiative to send human explorers to the Moon and Mars. In his talk to the Mars Society Convention, Horowitz will lay out the "Safe, Simple, Soon" plan. The 8th International Mars Society Convention will take place at the University of Colorado Boulder, August 11-14, 2005. Over 100 talks will be given, covering every aspect of human and robotic Mars exploration and settlement by both public and private means. Registration for the convention is now open at www.marssociety.org. _____________________________________________________________________ PRELIMINARY CONFERENCE SCHEDULE ANNOUNCED Mars Society release 13 July 2005 The preliminary schedule for the 8th International Mars Society Conference has been completed and will be posted at the web site shortly (www.marssociety.com). Highlights of the event include presentations by former astronaut Dr. Scott Horowitz, International Space University and X- Prize founder Peter Diamondis, Chris Shank, Special Assistant to NASA Chief Mike Griffin and many other top experts in the field of space exploration. In addition, an entertaining multi-media presentation is scheduled for Thursday evening following the reception and will be open to the public. And our Rouget d'Lisle song contest finals will be held during the event. Chapter and task force activities will be highlighted at various times throughout the event. Chapters and other Mars Society groups wishing to mount a display are welcome to do so in the vendor's area. We have some space available for vendors and other groups interested in participating, although space is limited by room size. The reception area is immediately adjacent to the plenary hall and should be well visited. The Mars Society will be hosting The Mars Emporium booth, featuring a carefully selected sampling of items from our on-line store, as well as related merchandize, such as books, mugs, etc. The crème de la crème will be featured in our annual Saturday evening auction. Seating at this year's banquet is currently limited to 325. Roughly half of the seats are already reserved. Although there are still plenty of spots available, pre-registration is recommended. Remember, the host hotel is The Boulder Inn and the keyword for discounted room rates is "MARS." See you in August! _____________________________________________________________________ 2005 YELLOWSTONE RESOURCES AND ISSUES GUIDE From the NAI Newsletter 15 July 2005 The NAI’s Lead Team at NASA Ames Research Center has contributed significantly to the production of the Yellowstone Resources and Issues Guide as the exclusive creators of Chapter 4, which tells all about thermophiles, their habitats in the Park, and their relationship to both the history of life on Earth, and the search for life elsewhere. The Guide is used to train Park naturalists and rangers, and is sold to the international public in the Park’s bookstore. Download your copy at http://www.nps.gov/yell/publications/pdfs/handbook/index.htm. _____________________________________________________________________ GRADUATE RESEARCH SEMINAR ON THE ORIGIN OF LIFE (JULY 2006) From the NAI Newsletter 15 July 2005 In conjunction with the 2006 Gordon Research Conference, Origin of Life conference, we are offering the first Origin of Life Graduate Research Seminar (GRS). This is vital for the community because some of the most clever insights and inspiration are a result of junior researchers interacting among themselves, broadening their knowledge base, and interacting with the leaders of the field. The graduate seminar will be held prior to the regular conference, for more information go to: http://www.grc.org/programs/2006/origin.htm. _____________________________________________________________________ CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ALPINE AND POLAR MICROBIOLOGY From the NAI Newsletter 15 July 2005 You are cordially invited to participate in the International Conference on Alpine and Polar Microbiology, which will be held in Innsbruck, Austria, from March 27 to 30, 2006. The objective of this meeting is to bring together scientists and professionals to discuss all aspects of psychrophilic and cold-tolerant microorganisms, in a trans-polar and alpine context. It will be an exciting opportunity to enjoy the scientific content of the conference as well as the natural beauty of the Tyrolean Alps. The deadline for abstract submission is November 1, 2005. For more on the conference and abstract submission link to www.alpine-polar- microbiology/2006.at. _____________________________________________________________________ CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS FOR 7-13 JULY 2005 NASA/JPL release 15 July 2005 The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired Wednesday, July 13, from the Goldstone tracking stations. 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. Thursday, July 7 (DOY 188): The Sequence Team leads for S12 sent commands to the spacecraft today to patch the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) instrument expanded block (IEB) #5, and to check some Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) settings prior to the Enceladus encounter next week. An encounter strategy meeting was held today for the Enceladus2 through Titan5 period. This includes Orbit Trim Maneuvers (OTM) 26, 27, and 28. Topics for a strategy meeting include but are not limited to the Navigation schedule, deliveries, and reference trajectory, maneuver performance, staffing, targeted encounter summary, past encounters, predicted orbit determination accuracy, special events during the encounter, spacecraft consumables tracking, main engine assembly cover strategy, DSN coverage, first time events, backup and contingency planning, instrument status, and so on. Even though Cassini is now up to OTM-25, nothing is taken for granted and the preparation for each maneuver is carefully considered prior to approval. Uplink Operations has released the merged products for OTM-25 with the currently executing S12 background sequence. These are the products that will be used by the flight team to do their checklists. The maneuver approval meeting is scheduled for 7:00 AM Friday of this week with uplink--once approved--beginning at 9:00 AM Pacific time. The S12 DOY Live Inertial Vector Propagator (IVP) update kick-off meeting was held this morning. Later in the day Navigation released the orbit determination solution for teams to review for this update. A go/no go meeting will be held tomorrow. Friday, July 8 (DOY 189): The S15 official port occurred today as part of the Science Operations Plan Update process. A program briefing will be held on the contents of this sequence on July 20. At the Live IVP Update Decision Meeting this morning for Rhea and Enceladus, Science Planning and the driving instruments present recommended a "No-Go" for the DOY 195 Update. As part of the standard update process, science planning along with each science team use the latest Navigation trajectory information to come up with a recommendation on whether the pointing update is needed or not. In this case, all teams felt the actual spacecraft trajectory did not deviate significantly from the planned trajectory used when the pointing design was submitted several months ago. Therefore, there was no need to perform any near real-time updates to spacecraft pointing. OTM-25 was successfully completed on board the spacecraft today. This "Enceladus 2 approach maneuver," together with OTM-24, places the spacecraft on the proper trajectory for the July 14, 175 km targeted flyby of Enceladus. The main engine (ME) burn began at 3:00 PM PDT. A "quick look" at telemetry immediately after the maneuver showed the burn duration was 2.1 sec, giving a delta-V of 0.33 m/s. This is the shortest ME burn to date. All subsystems reported nominal performance after the event. OTM-25 was the first use of the new Mission Sequence Subsystem (MSS) D11.0 OTM blocks and Maneuver Automation Software V5.0 software. Saturday, July 9 (DOY 190): Via commands in the background sequence, the Main Engine Cover was closed in preparation for dust hazard conditions around the Enceladus encounter on July 14. It will be opened again on August 2, the day before OTM-26. Monday, July 11 (DOY 192): The RADAR instrument was powered on to obtain distant full-disk radiometry of Titan. The next RADAR observation will be to participate in the Rhea non-targeted flyby on July 14. Real-time commands were sent to the spacecraft for a modification to the CDA Enceladus flyby activities, and to send a trigger command for the RADAR scatterometry to be performed at Rhea. An image advisory on Hyperion was released today. The image products released include a movie sequence and a 3D view. The views were acquired between June 9 and June 11, 2005, during Cassini's first brush with Hyperion. In both the movie and the 3D image, craters are visible on the moon's surface down to the limit of resolution, about 1 kilometer per pixel. The fresh appearance of most of these craters, combined with their high spatial density, makes Hyperion look something like a sponge. Both items are available for viewing at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. With the Enceladus flyby happening this week, Cassini Outreach has updated the Enceladus moon and flyby pages. The links are: Enceladus moon page: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/science/moons/moonDetails.cfm?pageID=5 Enceladus flyby page: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/events/enceladus20050802/index.cfm Tuesday, July 12 (DOY 193): Last week at the Titan Atmosphere Model Working Group (TAMWG) telecon, the key topic of discussion was the appropriate altitude for the upcoming T7 flyby in September. Because of variations in atmospheric density observed to date, there is no consensus model to predict the atmospheric density to be encountered at T7. Use of worst-case density values indicate that the T5 altitude of 1025 km may not be safe for T7 with its far southern hemisphere latitude of closest approach, and might lead to spacecraft loss of attitude control and safing. The closer the spacecraft (S/C) gets to Titan, the greater the atmospheric torque applied to the spacecraft. At some point the atmosphere becomes dense enough that the S/C cannot maintain its orientation while flying through it. Then it executes safing and has to find the sun in order to regain its proper orientation so that it can communicate with Earth again. Safing terminates the executing sequence, so all science observations planned between the safing activity and when the sequence is resumed are lost. By raising the flyby altitude we essentially eliminate any chance of this happening because the atmosphere will be thinner. Following the TAMWG meeting, a follow-on meeting was held to discuss the operational issues related to making this change. There were concerns expressed about trying to accommodate changes for S13 when the sequence is so close to completion and there is limited time available to implement changes. S13 is currently in the final development phase with sequence approval scheduled for July 21, and uplink beginning on July 27. However, a schedule for product deliveries was developed that would allow the changes to be accommodated, and the decision was made to proceed with the change. As of today the target altitude for the T7 flyby has been officially raised from 1025 to 1075 km. An updated reference trajectory will be delivered on 20 July for teams to begin making the necessary adjustments to S13 and S14. Commands were sent to the spacecraft today to enable Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) sounder operations and to load an Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) flight software patch and instrument expanded block for Enceladus. The S14 preliminary cycle 1 merged sequence products were released today for team review. These include files necessary for the live moveable block scheduled for that sequence. The cycle 2 products will be released on July 15 so that teams may check their pointing designs against the new reference trajectory to be released on July 20. Teams have only one chance in the cycle 2 phase to correct any flight rule violations or pointing designs caused by flying the new trajectory. Wednesday, July 13 (DOY 194): The S13 preliminary cycle 2 products were released today as part of sequence development. These included products for the background sequence, live moveable block (LMB) for DOY 214, and the combined background sequence and LMB. Check out the Cassini web site at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov for the latest press releases and images. 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. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1644.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05zzj.html http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050711rhea.html http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050714hyperion.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/spongy_looking_hyperion.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/shepherd_ice_prometheus.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/titan_big_smile.html _____________________________________________________________________ DEEP IMPACT UPDATES Multiple releases Scientists measure how deep "Deep Impact" was, with X-rays Pennsylvania State University release, 13 July 2005 Here come the X-rays, on cue. Scientists studying the Deep Impact collision using NASA's Swift satellite report that comet Tempel 1 is getting brighter and brighter in X-ray light with each passing day. The X-rays provide a direct measurement of how much material was kicked up in the impact. This is because the X-rays are created by the newly liberated material lifted into the comet's thin atmosphere and illuminated by the high-energy solar wind from the sun. The more material liberated, the more X-rays are produced. Swift data of the water evaporation on comet Tempel 1 also may provide new insights into how solar wind can strip water from planets such as Mars. "Prior to its rendezvous with the Deep Impact probe, the comet was a rather dim X-ray source," said Paul O'Brien of the Swift team at the University of Leicester. "How things change when you ram a comet with a copper probe traveling over 20,000 miles per hour. Most of the X-ray light we detect now is generated by debris created by the collision. We can get a solid measurement of the amount of material released." "It takes several days after an impact for surface and sub-surface material to reach the comet's upper atmosphere, or coma," said Dick Willingale, also of the University of Leicester. "We expect the X- ray production to peak this weekend. Then we will be able to assess how much comet material was released from the impact." Based on preliminary X-ray analysis, O'Brien estimates that several tens of thousands of tons of material were released, enough to bury Penn State's football field under 30 feet of comet dust. Observations and analysis are ongoing at the Swift Mission Operations Center at Penn State as well as in Italy and the United Kingdom. Swift is providing the only simultaneous multi-wavelength observation of this rare event, with a suite of instruments capable of detecting visible light, ultraviolet light, X-rays and gamma rays. Different wavelengths reveal different secrets about the comet. The Swift team hopes to compare the satellite's ultraviolet data, collected hours after the collision, with the X-ray data. The ultraviolet light was created by material entering into the lower region of the comet's atmosphere; the X-rays come from the upper regions. Swift is a nearly ideal observatory for making these comet studies, as it combines both a rapidly responsive scheduling system with both X-ray and optical/UV instruments in the same satellite. "For the first time, we can see how material liberated from a comet's surface migrates to the upper reaches of its atmosphere," said John Nousek, director of Mission Operations at Penn State. "This will provide fascinating information about a comet's atmosphere and how it interacts with the solar wind. This is all virgin territory." Nousek said Deep Impact's collision with comet Tempel 1 is like a controlled laboratory experiment of the type of slow evaporation process from solar wind that took place on Mars. The Earth has a magnetic field that shields us from solar wind, a particle wind composed mostly of protons and electrons moving at nearly light speed. Mars lost its magnetic field billions of years ago, and the solar wind stripped the planet of water. Comets, like Mars and Venus, have no magnetic fields. Comets become visible largely because ice is evaporated from their surface with each close passage around the Sun. Water is dissociated into its component atoms by the bright sunlight and swept away by the fast- moving and energetic solar wind. Scientists hope to learn about this evaporation process on Tempel 1 now occurring quickly--over the course of a few weeks instead of a billion years--as the result of a planned, human intervention. Swift's "day job" is detecting distant, natural explosions called gamma-ray bursts and creating a map of X-ray sources in the universe. Swift's extraordinary speed and agility enable scientists to follow Tempel 1 day by day to see the full effect from the Deep Impact collision. For the latest news on Swift analysis of comet Tempel 1, refer to: http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/Swift-Deep-Impact.htm http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov and http://swift.sonoma.edu/ Deep Impact Flyby Spacecraft Ready for New Mission By Leonard David, Space.com, 14 July 2005 Following its smashing success earlier this month with comet Tempel 1, the Deep Impact Flyby spacecraft is being readied for potential retargeting to yet another scientific destination. The two-part Deep Impact craft consisted of the destroyed-on-purpose, battery-powered Impactor probe that was literally run over by Tempel 1, and a still- healthy Flyby spacecraft that monitored the event from a safe distance. "NASA has given us a tiny amount of funding to make a maneuver next week that will set up the right trajectory and then enough money to keep the spacecraft alive in safe mode," said Michael A’Hearn, an astronomer at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. He is the Deep Impact mission’s principal investigator. "They have not approved the extended mission yet because they haven’t found the money," A’Hearn told SPACE.com, noting that comet 85P/Boethin is the target for a hoped for new science objective. Read the full article at http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050714_flyby_future.html. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1643.html http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050712_deep_insight.html http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050714_flyby_future.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/deepimpact-05n.html http://spaceflightnow.com/deepimpact/050711swas.html http://spaceflightnow.com/deepimpact/050714eso.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/comet_tempel1_back_sleep.html _____________________________________________________________________ MARS EXPLORATION ROVERS UPDATES NASA/JPL release 14 July 2005 Spirit is healthy. On sol 538 (July 8, 2005), Spirit attempted its rock abrasion tool to brush the rock called "Independence." The tool's contact switches did not engage the rock face, and the brushing did not occur. A safety check precluded further use of the robotic arm. From this particular down position for the rock abrasion tool (and the fact that use of the arm was precluded), the rover would not have been able to switch to the Mössbauer spectrometer. The entire weekend's worth data collection by the Mössbauer spectrometer would have been lost. However, the arm preclusion was discovered Friday evening and the team had enough time to modify the robotic arm sequence and recover the weekend's Mössbauer integration time. The recovery plan ran well. The Mössbauer spectrometer was placed and it collected data all weekend. On later sols the tool turret on the arm was rotated to the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer. That instrument examined the same target for about 17 hours, recovering the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer integration time lost on July 8 (sol 538). Spirit also found time during the weekend to fill in the remaining panoramic camera images for an "Independence" color panorama. Opportunity made impressive progress toward "Erebus Crater" during the week. Four sols of driving totaled 57 meters (187 feet), while slipping less than 10 percent on each drive. A longer drive was plotted for the fifth day. The rover has continued to drive down ripple troughs. We have a series of checks in place to prevent excessive bogging down, including, tilt, roll, pitch limit checks, current checks and slip checks (set at 40 percent slip). We look forward to more progress south over the coming week. MER updates are available at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status.html. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05zzx.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05zzy.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05zzza.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05zzzb.html _____________________________________________________________________ MARS EXPRESS: NICHOLSON CRATER ON MARS ESA release 15 July 2005 These images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, show Nicholson Crater, located at the southern edge of Amazonis Planitia on Mars. The HRSC obtained these images during orbit 1104 with a ground resolution of approximately 15.3 meters per pixel. The scenes show the region around Nicholson Crater, at approximately 0.0° South and 195.5° East. Nicholson Crater, measuring approximately 100 kilometers wide, is located at the southern edge of Amazonis Planitia, north-west of a region called Medusae Fossae. Located in the centre of this crater is a raised feature, about 55 kilometers long and 37 kilometers wide, which extends to a maximum height of roughly 3.5 kilometers above the floor of the crater. At present, it is still unclear how this central feature was shaped and what kind of processes led to its formation. It is thought that the remnant hill could be composed of material from underground or was built as a result of atmospheric deposition. The tall feature in the centre of this hill is the central peak of the crater, which forms when the surface material "rebounds" after being compressed during the formation of an impact crater. However, it is clear that this feature has been heavily sculpted after its creation, by the action of wind or even water. The color 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 images were created from the nadir channel and one of the stereo channels. Stereoscopic glasses are needed to view the 3D images Image resolution has been decreased for use on the internet. Read the original news release at http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEMLWL6DIAE_0.html. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/marsexpress-05x.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/nicholson_crater_on_mars.html _____________________________________________________________________ MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 7-13 July 2005 The following new images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are now available. East Tharsis Pit Chain (Released 07 July 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/07/07 Ganges Chasma Sands (Released 08 July 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/07/08 Rugged Olympus Mons (Released 09 July 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/07/09 Melas Layers (Released 10 July 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/07/10 Troughs in Tharsis (Released 11 July 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/07/11 Mars at Ls 249 Degrees (Released 12 July 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/07/12 The Changing South Polar Cap of Mars: 1999-2005 (Released 13 July 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/07/13 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 11-15 July 2005 THEMIS Images as Art #56 (Released 11 July 2005) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050711A.html THEMIS Images as Art #57 (Released 12 July 2005) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050712A.html THEMIS Images as Art #58 (Released 13 July 2005) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050713A.html THEMIS Images as Art #59 (Released 14 July 2005) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050714A.html THEMIS Images as Art #60 (Released 15 July 2005) http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050715A.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. _____________________________________________________________________ MARS RECONNAISSANCE ORBITER: NASA BRIEFING PREVIEWS NEXT STEP FOR EXPLORING MARS NASA media advisory M05-117 14 July 2005 NASA's launch opportunities will begin August 10, 2005, for the agency's next mission to Mars. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is a robotic spacecraft, and it will examine the mysterious red planet in unprecedented detail. This important step in a long-range vision for exploring Mars is the subject for a news briefing at 1:00 PM EDT, Thursday, July 21, in the NASA Headquarters auditorium, 300 E Street SW, Washington. Briefing participants: * Douglas McCuistion, NASA Mars Exploration Program Director, Science Mission Directorate, Washington * Michael Meyer, Mars Exploration Program Chief Scientist, Science Mission Directorate * James Graf, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Manager, JPL * Richard Zurek, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist, JPL The MRO will use six instruments to study the martian surface, profile the atmosphere and probe the subsurface of the planet. Key objectives are improved knowledge about what happened to martian water and evaluation of potential landing sites for future missions. The conference is live on NASA TV with question-and-answer capability from participating agency centers. To ask questions by phone, media should call Tomeka Scales at: 202/358-0781 by noon EDT, Wednesday, July 20 for access number. Reporters may listen to the briefing by calling: 321/867-1220/1240/1260. NASA TV is available on the Web on an MPEG-2 digital signal accessed via satellite AMC-6, at 72 degrees west longitude, transponder 17C, 4040 MHz, vertical polarization. It's available in Alaska and Hawaii on AMC-7 at 137 degrees west longitude, transponder 18C, at 4060 MHz, horizontal polarization. A Digital Video Broadcast compliant Integrated Receiver Decoder is required for reception. For NASA TV schedules and programs, visit http://www.nasa.gov/ntv. Contacts: Dolores Beasley NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1753 Guy Webster Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-6278 _____________________________________________________________________ End Marsbugs, Volume 12, Number 25.