Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter Volume 12, Number 31, 13 September 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) TINY ENCELADUS MAY HOLD INGREDIENTS OF LIFE By Lori Stiles 2) BUILDING LIFE FROM STAR-STUFF By Leslie Mullen 3) ARMSTRONG: MARS EASIER VOYAGE THAN MOON By Sean Yoong 4) FIELD GUIDE FOR CONFIRMING NEW EARTH-LIKE PLANETS DESCRIBED By Tony Fitzpatrick 5) LARGEST ASTEROID MAY BE "MINI PLANET" WITH WATER ICE Space Telescope Science Institute release 2005-27 6) CALCULATIONS FAVOR REDUCING ATMOSPHERE FOR EARLY EARTH By Tony Fitzpatrick 7) WATER DETECTION AT GUSEV CRATER DESCRIBED--CHEMICAL PROOF FOR TWO WET SCENARIOS By Tony Fitzpatrick 8) ROVING MARS By Steve Squyres 9) STUDY SUGGESTS TITAN MAY HOLD KEYS FOR EXOTIC BRAND OF LIFE Southwestern Research Institute release 10) RAPID-BORN PLANETS PRESENT "BABY PICTURE" OF OUR EARLY SOLAR SYSTEM University of Rochester release 11) HUMAN BRAIN IS STILL EVOLVING Howard Hughes Medical Institute release 12) DECIPHERING MARS: FOLLOW THE WATER By Jack Farmer Announcements 13) 2006 REDUCED GRAVITY STUDENT FLIGHT PROGRAM NASA program announcement 14) CALL FOR ENTRIES FOR THE AMAZING IMAGES SUMMER UNDER THE STARS CONTEST From Space.com 15) JOIN THE BAD ASTRONOMY/UNIVERSE TODAY BOINC TEAM From Universe Today Mission Reports 16) CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS FOR 25-30 AUGUST 2005 NASA/JPL release 17) DEEP IMPACT UPDATES NASA/JPL releases 18) MARS EXPLORATION ROVERS UPDATES NASA/JPL release 19) MARS EXPRESS: THE BIBLIS PATERA VOLCANO ESA release 20) MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 21) MRO: CAMERA'S TRIP TO MARS IS NO LEISURE CRUISE FOR HiRISE TEAM By Lori Stiles _____________________________________________________________________ TINY ENCELADUS MAY HOLD INGREDIENTS OF LIFE By Lori Stiles University of Arizona release 5 September 2005 Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus is "absolutely" a highlight of the Cassini mission and should be targeted in future searches for life, Robert H. Brown of The University of Arizona, leader of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team, said last week. Brown and other Cassini scientists attended a meeting in London last week and are at the 37th annual Division of Planetary Sciences meeting at Cambridge University this week. "Enceladus is without a doubt one of the most spectacular things Cassini has seen," Brown said in a phone interview Thursday. "It's one of the biggest puzzles. It'll be a long time before anyone comes up with a good explanation of how Enceladus does what it does, and for a scientist, that's pure, unmitigated fun. Solving the biggest puzzles is the thrilling part of doing science." Scientists got their first glimpse of Enceladus's geology when Voyager 2 flew by the icy bright satellite in August 1981. They were completely baffled. Voyager photographed areas of young, smooth terrain that told them that the moon must have been geologically active as late as 100 million years ago. But nothing explained how tiny Enceladus--only 314 miles across--could get hot enough to melt. It seemingly doesn't have enough interior rocks for radioactive heating, an eccentric enough orbit for tidal heating, or enough ammonia to lower its melting temperature. After Voyager, researchers shelved Enceladus as an unsolvable problem for a while. This year, Cassini turned its more powerful cameras and instruments on Enceladus during February 17, March 9 and July 14 flybys. Results have stunned and delighted. The diminutive moon turns out to have a primarily water vapor atmosphere tinged with nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other simple carbon-based molecules (organics) concentrated at its south pole. Its south pole is a hotspot, hovering at a relatively balmy -183 degrees Celsius compared to the expected temperature of -203 degrees Celsius. Enceladus's south pole is a hotbed of geological action. The south pole region is cut by parallel cracks roughly 81 miles long and 25 miles apart. The cracks, dubbed "tiger stripes," vent vapor and fine ice water particles that have crystallized on Enceladus's surface as recently as 1,000 years to 10 years ago. The fine ice material is probably the major source of particles that replenish Saturn's outermost ring, its E ring. "The kind of geophysical activity we see is quite likely being driven by liquid water below the surface," Brown said. Cassini hasn't seen ice geysers or ice volcanoes, but the lack of ammonia, and the sheer volume of water vapor escaping suggests there's pure-water volcanism on Enceladus, he added. "We detected simple organics in the tiger stripes," Brown said. The simple organics include carbon dioxide and hydrogen-and-carbon- containing molecules like methane, ethane and ethylene. "Methane (basically natural gas) has probably been locked up inside Enceladus since the solar system formed and is now bubbling up through the vents." The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer can't detect nitrogen, but Cassini's ion neutral mass spectrometer may have found nitrogen in Enceladus's atmosphere. All other results from these two very different instruments are entirely consistent, which gives Cassini mission scientists confidence in their results, Brown said. "So you've got subsurface liquid water, simple organics and water vapor welling up from below. Over time--and Enceladus has been around 4.5 billion years, just like Earth and the rest of the solar system--heating a cocktail of simple organics, water and nitrogen could form some of the most basic building blocks of life," Brown said. "Whether that's happened at Enceladus is not clear, but Enceladus, much like Jupiter's moon Europa and the planet Mars, now has to be a place where we eventually search for life." The $3.2 billion Cassini-Huygens mission is a joint venture between the 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 mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, DC. Contact: Robert H. Brown UA Lunar and Planetary Lab Phone: 520-626-9045 Cell: 520-907-2688 E-mail: rhb@lpl.arizona.edu Lori Stiles UA Office of University Communications Phone: 520-621-1877 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05zzzf.html http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050906enceladus.html _____________________________________________________________________ BUILDING LIFE FROM STAR-STUFF By Leslie Mullen From Astrobiology Magazine 5 September 2005 Life on Earth was made possible by the death of stars. Atoms like carbon and oxygen were expelled in the last few dying gasps of stars after their final supplies of hydrogen fuel were used up. How this star-stuff came together to form life is still a mystery, but scientists know that certain atomic combinations were necessary. Water - two hydrogen atoms linked to one oxygen atom -was vital to the development of life on Earth, and so NASA missions now search for water on other worlds in the hopes of finding life elsewhere. Organic molecules built mostly of carbon atoms are also thought to be important, since all life on Earth is carbon-based. The most popular theories of the origin of life say the necessary chemistry occurred at hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor or in some sunlit shallow pool. However, discoveries in the past few years have shown that many of the basic materials for life form in the cold depths of space, where life as we know it is not possible. After dying stars belch out carbon, some of the carbon atoms combine with hydrogen to form polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). PAHs- -a kind of carbon soot similar to the scorched portions of burnt toast--are the most abundant organic compounds in space, and a primary ingredient of carbonaceous chondrite meteorites. Although PAHs aren't found in living cells, they can be converted into quinones, molecules that are involved in cellular energy processes. For instance, quinones play an essential role in photosynthesis, helping plants turn light into chemical energy. The transformation of PAHs occurs in interstellar clouds of ice and dust. After floating through space, PAH soot eventually condenses into these "dense molecular clouds." The material in these clouds blocks out some but not all of the harsh radiation of space. The radiation that does filter through modifies the PAHs and other material in the clouds. Infrared and radio telescope observations of the clouds have detected the PAHs, as well as fatty acids, simple sugars, faint amounts of the amino acid glycine, and over 100 other molecules, including water, carbon monoxide, ammonia, formaldehyde, and hydrogen cyanide. The clouds have never been sampled directly--they're too far away--so to confirm what is occurring chemically in the clouds, a research team led by Max Bernstein and Scott Sandford at the Astrochemistry Laboratory at NASA's Ames Research Center set up experiments to mimic the cloud conditions. In one experiment, a PAH/water mixture is vapor-deposited onto salt and then bombarded with ultraviolet (UV) radiation. This allows the researchers to observe how the basic PAH skeleton turns into quinones. Irradiating a frozen mixture of water, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, and methanol (a precursor chemical to formaldehyde) generates the amino acids glycine, alanine and serine--the three most abundant amino acids in living systems. Because UV is not the only type of radiation in space, the researchers also have used a Van de Graaff generator to bombard the PAHs with mega-electron volt (MeV) protons, which have similar energies to cosmic rays. The MeV results for the PAHs were similar although not identical to the UV bombardment. A MeV study for the amino acids has not yet been conducted. These experiments suggest that UV and other forms of radiation provide the energy needed to break apart chemical bonds in the low temperatures and pressures of the dense clouds. Because the atoms are still locked in ice, the molecules don't fly apart, but instead recombine into more complex structures. In another experiment led by Jason Dworkin, a frozen mixture of water, methanol, ammonia and carbon monoxide was subjected to UV radiation. This combination yielded organic material that formed bubbles when immersed in water. These bubbles are reminiscent of cell membranes that enclose and concentrate the chemistry of life, separating it from the outside world. The bubbles produced in this experiment were between 10 to 40 micrometers, or about the size of red blood cells. Remarkably, the bubbles fluoresced, or glowed, when exposed to UV light. Absorbing UV and converting it into visible light in this way could provide energy to a primitive cell. If such bubbles played a role in the origin of life, the fluorescence could have been a precursor to photosynthesis. Fluorescence also could act as sunscreen, diffusing any damage that otherwise would be inflicted by UV radiation. Such a protective function would have been vital for life on the early Earth, since the ozone layer, which blocks out the sun's most destructive UV rays, did not form until after photosynthetic life began to produce oxygen. From space clouds to the seeds of life Dense molecular clouds in space eventually gravitationally collapse to form new stars. Some of the leftover dust later clumps together to form asteroids and comets, and some of these asteroids clump together to form planetary cores. On our planet, life then arose from whatever basic materials were at hand. The large molecules necessary to build living cells are: * Proteins * Carbohydrates (sugars) * Lipids (fats) * Nucleic acids Meteorites have been found to contain amino acids (the building blocks of proteins), sugars, fatty acids (the building blocks of lipids), and nucleic acid bases. The Murchison meteorite, for instance, contains chains of fatty acids, various types of sugars, all five nucleic acid bases, and more than 70 different amino acids (life uses 20 amino acids, only six of which are in the Murchison meteorite). Because such carbonaceous meteorites are generally uniform in composition, they are thought to be representative of the initial dust cloud from which the sun and solar system were born. So it seems that nearly everything needed for life was available at the beginning, and meteorites and comets then make fresh deliveries of these materials to the planets over time. If this is true, and if molecular dust clouds are chemically similar throughout the galaxy, then the ingredients for life should be widespread. The downside of the abiotic production of the ingredients for life is that none of them can be used as "biomarkers," indicators that life exists in a particular environment. Max Bernstein points to the Alan Hills meteorite 84001 as an example of biomarkers that didn't provide proof of life. In 1996, Dave McKay of NASA's Johnson Space Center and his colleagues announced there were four possible biomarkers within this martian meteorite. ALH84001 had carbon globules containing PAHs, a mineral distribution suggestive of biological chemistry, magnetite crystals resembling those produced by bacteria, and bacteria-like shapes. While each alone was not thought to be evidence for life, the four in conjunction seemed compelling. After the McKay announcement, subsequent studies found that each of these so-called biomarkers also could be produced by non-living means. Most scientists therefore are now inclined to believe that the meteorite does not contain fossilized alien life. "As soon as they had the result, people went gunning for them because that's the way it works," says Bernstein. "Our chances of not making an error when we come up with a biomarker on Mars or on Europa will be much better if we've already done the equivalent of what those guys did after McKay, et al., published their article." Bernstein says that by simulating conditions on other planets, scientists can figure out what should be happening there chemically and geologically. Then, when we visit a planet, we can see how closely reality matches the predictions. If there's anything on the planet that we didn't expect to find, that could be an indication that life processes have altered the picture. "What you have on Mars or on Europa is material that's been delivered," says Bernstein. "Plus, you have whatever has formed subsequently from whatever conditions are present. So (to look for life), you need to look at the molecules that are there, and keep in mind the chemistry that may have happened over time." Bernstein thinks chirality, or a molecule's "handedness," could be a biomarker on other worlds. Biological molecules often come in two forms that, while chemically identical, have opposite shapes: a "left-handed" one, and its mirror image, a "right-handed" one. A molecule's handedness is due to how the atoms bond. While handedness is evenly dispersed throughout nature, in most cases living systems on Earth have left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars. If molecules on other planets show a different preference in handedness, says Bernstein, that could be an indication of alien life. "If you went to Mars or Europa and you saw a bias the same as ours, with sugars or amino acids having our chirality, then people would simply suspect it was contamination," says Bernstein. "But if you saw an amino acid with a bias towards the right, or if you saw a sugar that had a bias towards the left--in other words, not our form- -that would be really compelling." However, Bernstein notes that the chiral forms found in meteorites reflect what is seen on Earth: meteorites contain left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars. If meteorites represent the template for life on Earth, then life elsewhere in the solar system also may reflect that same bias in handedness. Thus, something more than chirality may be needed for proof of life. Bernstein says that finding chains of molecules, "such as a couple of amino acids linked together," also could be evidence for life, "because in meteorites we tend to just see single molecules." Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1702.html _____________________________________________________________________ ARMSTRONG: MARS EASIER VOYAGE THAN MOON By Sean Yoong From Associated Press and Space.com 6 September 2005 Neil Armstrong said Tuesday that a manned mission to Mars will not happen for at least 20 years-but the effort might be easier than what it took to send him to the moon in 1969. The first man to walk on the moon noted that scientists must develop better onboard spacecraft technology and stronger protection shields from harmful space radiation before a manned flight to the Red Planet can be accomplished. "It will certainly be 20 years or more before that happens," Armstrong said during a global leadership forum. "It will be expensive; it will take a lot of energy and a complex spacecraft. But I suspect that even though the various questions are difficult and many, they are not as difficult and many as those we faced when we started the Apollo (space program) in 1961." Read the full article at http://www.space.com/news/ap_050906_mars_armstrong.html. _____________________________________________________________________ FIELD GUIDE FOR CONFIRMING NEW EARTH-LIKE PLANETS DESCRIBED By Tony Fitzpatrick Washington University in St. Louis release 7 September 2005 Astronomers looking for earth-like planets in other solar systems-- exoplanets--now have a new field guide thanks to earth and planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis. Bruce Fegley, Ph.D., Washington University professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, and Laura Schaefer, laboratory assistant, have used thermochemical equilibrium calculations to model the chemistry of silicate vapor and steam-rich atmospheres formed when earth-like planets are undergoing accretion. During the accretion process, with surface temperatures of several thousands degrees Kelvin (K), a magma ocean forms and vaporizes. "What you have are elements that are typically found in rocks in a vapor atmosphere," said Schaefer. "At temperatures above 3,080 K, silicon monoxide gas is the major species in the atmosphere. At temperatures under 3,080 K, sodium gas is the major species. These are the indicators of an earth-like planet forming." At such red-hot temperatures during the latter stages of the exoplanets' formation, the signal should be distinct, said Fegley. "It should be easily detectable because this silicon monoxide gas is easily observable," with different types of telescopes at infrared and radio wavelengths, Fegley said. Schaefer presented the results at the annual meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, held September 4-9 in Cambridge, England. The NASA Astrobiology Institute and Origins Program supported the work. Forming a maser Steve Charnley, a colleague at NASA AMES, suggested that some of the light emitted by SiO gas during the accretion process could form a maser--Microwave Amplification by Stimulation Emission of Radiation. Whereas a laser is comprised of photons in the ultraviolet or visible light spectrum, masers are energy packets in the microwave image. Schaefer explains: "What you basically have is a clump of silicon monoxide gas, and some of it is excited into a state higher than ground level. You have some radiation coming in and it knocks against these silicon monoxide molecules and they drop down to a lower state. By doing that, it also emits another photon, so then you essentially have a propagating light. You end up with this really very high intensity illumination coming out of this gas." According to Schaefer, the light from newly forming exoplanets should be possible to see. "There are natural lasers in the solar system," she said. "We see them in the atmospheres of Mars and Venus, and also in some cometary atmospheres." In recent months, astronomers have reported earth-like planets with six to seven times the mass of our earth. While they resemble a terrestrial planet like earth, there has not yet been a foolproof method of detection. The spectra of silicon monoxide and sodium gas would be the indication of a magma ocean on the astronomical object, and thus an indication a planet is forming, said Fegley. The calculations that Fegley and Schaefer used also apply to our own earth. The researchers found that during later, cooler stages of accretion (below 1,500 K), the major gases in the steam-rich atmosphere are water, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, carbon and nitrogen, with the carbon converting to methane as the steam atmosphere cools. Read the original news release at http://news- info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/5512.html. An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/new_exoplanets_field_guide_by _wustl.html. _____________________________________________________________________ LARGEST ASTEROID MAY BE "MINI PLANET" WITH WATER ICE Space Telescope Science Institute release 2005-27 7 September 2005 Observations of 1 Ceres, the largest known asteroid, have revealed that the object may be a "mini planet," and may contain large amounts of pure water ice beneath its surface. The observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope also show that Ceres shares characteristics of the rocky, terrestrial planets like Earth. Ceres' shape is almost round like Earth's, suggesting that the asteroid may have a "differentiated interior," with a rocky inner core and a thin, dusty outer crust. "Ceres is an embryonic planet," said Lucy A. McFadden of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Maryland, College Park and a member of the team that made the observations. "Gravitational perturbations from Jupiter billions of years ago prevented Ceres from accreting more material to become a full-fledged planet." The finding will appear September 8 in a letter to the journal, Nature. The paper is led by Peter C. Thomas of the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and also includes project leader Joel William Parker of the Department of Space Studies at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, CO. Ceres is approximately 580 miles (930 kilometers) across, about the size of Texas. It resides with tens of thousands of other asteroids in the main asteroid belt. Located between Mars and Jupiter, the asteroid belt probably represents primitive pieces of the solar system that never managed to accumulate into a genuine planet. Ceres comprises 25 percent of the asteroid belt's total mass. However, Pluto, our solar system's smallest planet, is 14 times more massive than Ceres. The astronomers used Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys to study Ceres for nine hours, the time it takes the asteroid to complete a rotation. Hubble snapped 267 images of Ceres. From those snapshots, the astronomers determined that the asteroid has a nearly round body. The diameter at its equator is wider than at its poles. Computer models show that a nearly round object like Ceres has a differentiated interior, with denser material at the core and lighter minerals near the surface. All terrestrial planets have differentiated interiors. Asteroids much smaller than Ceres have not been found to have such interiors. The astronomers suspect that water ice may be buried under the asteroid's crust because the density of Ceres is less than that of the Earth's crust, and because the surface bears spectral evidence of water-bearing minerals. They estimate that if Ceres were composed of 25 percent water, it may have more water than all the fresh water on Earth. Ceres' water, unlike Earth's, would be in the form of water ice and located in the mantle, which wraps around the asteroid's solid core. Besides being the largest asteroid, Ceres also was the first asteroid to be discovered. Sicilian astronomer Father Giuseppe Piazzi spotted the object in 1801. Piazzi was looking for suspected planets in a large gap between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. As more such objects were found in the same region, they became known as "asteroids" or "minor planets." Journal reference: P. C. Thomas et al., 2005. Differentiation of the asteroid Ceres as revealed by its shape. Nature, 437(7056):224-226, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7056/abs/nature03938.html. Read the original news release at http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2005/27/te xt/. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050907_ceres_planet.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/hubble_tracking_ceres.html _____________________________________________________________________ CALCULATIONS FAVOR REDUCING ATMOSPHERE FOR EARLY EARTH By Tony Fitzpatrick Washington University in St. Louis release 7 September 2005 Using primitive meteorites called chondrites as their models, earth and planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have performed outgassing calculations and shown that the early Earth's atmosphere was a reducing one, chock full of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor. In making this discovery Bruce Fegley, Ph.D., Washington University professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, and Laura Schaefer, laboratory assistant, reinvigorate one of the most famous and controversial theories on the origins of life, the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment, which yielded organic compounds necessary to evolve organisms. Chondrites are relatively unaltered samples of material from the solar nebula, According to Fegley, who heads the University's Planetary Chemistry Laboratory, scientists have long believed them to be the building blocks of the planets. However, no one has ever determined what kind of atmosphere a primitive chondritic planet would generate. "We assume that the planets formed out of chondritic material, and we sectioned up the planet into layers, and we used the composition of the mix of meteorites to calculate the gases that would have evolved from each of those layers," said Schaefer. "We found a very reducing atmosphere for most meteorite mixes, so there is a lot of methane and ammonia." In a reducing atmosphere, hydrogen is present but oxygen is absent. For the Miller-Urey experiment to work, a reducing atmosphere is a must. An oxidizing atmosphere makes producing organic compounds impossible. Yet, a major contingent of geologists believe that a hydrogen-poor, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere existed because they use modern volcanic gases as models for the early atmosphere. Volcanic gases are rich in water, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide but contain no ammonia or methane. "Geologists dispute the Miller-Urey scenario, but what they seem to be forgetting is that when you assemble the Earth out of chondrites, you've got slightly different gases being evolved from heating up all these materials that have assembled to form the Earth. Our calculations provide a natural explanation for getting this reducing atmosphere," said Fegley. Schaefer presented the findings at the annual meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, held September 4-9 in Cambridge, England. Schaefer and Fegley looked at different types of chondrites that earth and planetary scientists believe were instrumental in making the Earth. They used sophisticated computer codes for chemical equilibrium to figure out what happens when the minerals in the meteorites are heated up and react with each other. For example, when calcium carbonate is heated up and decomposed, it forms carbon dioxide gas. "Different compounds in the chondritic Earth decompose when they're heated up, and they release gas that formed the earliest Earth atmosphere," Fegley said. The Miller-Urey experiment featured an apparatus into which was placed a reducing gas atmosphere thought to exist on the early Earth. The mix was heated up and given an electrical charge and simple organic molecules were formed. While the experiment has been debated from the start, no one had done calculations to predict the early Earth atmosphere. "I think these computations hadn't been done before because they're very difficult; we use a special code" said Fegley, whose work with Schaefer on the outgassing of Io, Jupiter's largest moon and the most volcanic body in the solar system, served as inspiration for the present early Earth atmosphere work. NASA's Astrobiology Institute supported this work. Read the original news release at http://news- info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/5513.html. An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1708.html. _____________________________________________________________________ WATER DETECTION AT GUSEV CRATER DESCRIBED--CHEMICAL PROOF FOR TWO WET SCENARIOS By Tony Fitzpatrick Washington University in St. Louis release 7 September 2005 A large team of NASA scientists, led by earth and planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis details the first solid set of evidence for water having existed on Mars at the Gusev crater, exploration site of the rover Spirit. Using an array of sophisticated equipment on Spirit, Alian Wang, Ph.D., Washington University senior research scientist in earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, and the late Larry A. Haskin, Ph.D., Ralph E. Morrow Distinguished University Professor of earth and planetary sciences, found that the volcanic rocks at Gusev crater near Spirit's landing site were much like the olivine-rich basaltic rocks on Earth, and some of them possessed a coating rich in sulfur, bromine, chlorine and hematite, or oxidized iron. The team examined three rocks and found their most compelling evidence in a rock named Mazatzal. The rock evidence indicates a scenario where water froze and melted at some point in martian history, dissolving the sulfur, chlorine and bromine elements in the soil. The small amount of acidic fluids then react with the rocks buried in the soil and formed these highly oxidized coatings. Trench-digging rover During its traverse from landing site to Columbia Hills, the rover Spirit dug three trenches, allowing researchers to detect relatively high levels of magnesium sulfate comprising more than 20 percent of the regolith--soil containing pieces of small rocks--within one of the trenches, the Boroughs trench. The tight correlation between magnesium and sulfur indicates an open hydrologic system--these ions had been carried by water to this site and deposited. Spirit's fellow rover Opportunity earlier had detected a history of water at another site on Mars, Meridiani planum. This study (by Haskin et al.) covered the investigation of Spirit rover sols (a sol is a martian day) 1 through 156, with the major discoveries occurring after sol 80. After the findings were confirmed, Spirit traversed to the Columbian hills, where it found more evidence indicating water. The science team is currently planning for sol 551 operation of Spirit rover, which is only 55 meters away from the summit of Columbia Hills. Spirit was on sol 597 on Sept 6 and on the summit of Husband Hill. "We will stay on the summit for a few weeks to finish our desired investigations, then go downhill to explore the south inner basin, especially the so-called 'home-plate,' which could be a feature of older rock or a filled-in crater," Wang said. "We will name a major geo-feature in the basin after Larry." Wang, Haskin, their WUSTL colleague Raymond E. Arvidson, chair of earth and planetary sciences, and James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor, and Bradley Jolliff, Ph.D., research associate professor in earth and planetary sciences, and more than two dozen collaborators from numerous institutions, reported their findings in the July 7, 2005 issue of Nature magazine (Larry A. Haskin et al. Nature 436:66-69 (7 July 2005) doi:10.1038/nature03640). The paper was the last one that lead author Haskin, a highly regarded NASA veteran and former chair of earth and planetary sciences at WUSTL, submitted before his death on March 24, 2005. Buried again and again "We looked closely at the multiple layers on top of the rock Mazatzal because it had a very different geochemistry and mineralogy," said Wang. "This told us that the rock had been buried in the soil and exposed and then buried again several times over the history. There are chemical changes during the burial times and those changes show that the soil had been involved with water. "The telltale thing was a higher proportion of hematite in the coatings. We hadn't seen that in any previous Gusev rocks. Also, we saw very high chlorine in the coating and very high bromine levels inside the rock. The separation of the sulfur and chlorine tells us that the deposition of chlorine is affected by water." While the multilayer coatings on rock Mazatzal indicates a temporal occurrence of low quantity water associated with freezing and melting of water, the sulfate deposition at trench sites indicates the involvement of a large body of water. "We examined the regolith at different depths within the Big Hole and the Boroughs trenches and saw an extremely tight correlation between magnesium and sulfur, which was not observed previously," Wang said. "This tells us that magnesium sulfate formed in these trench regoliths. The increasing bromine concentration and the separation of chlorine from sulfur also suggests the action of water. We don't know exactly how much water is combined with that. The fact that the magnesium sulfate is more than 20 percent of the examined regolith sample says that the magnesium and sulfur were carried by water to this area from another place, and then deposited as magnesium sulfate. A certain amount of water would be needed to accomplish that action." Read the original news release at http://news- info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/5514.html. An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-water-science-05k.html. _____________________________________________________________________ ROVING MARS By Steve Squyres From Astrobiology Magazine 8 September 2005 The Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity are the Energizer Bunnies of planetary exploration. Designed to last for only 90 days, they are still going strong after nearly two years. Their journeys on Mars have provided exquisite detail of the planet's surface, proving definitively that liquid water once existed on this now arid world. Just when the scientists thought the rovers were finished, their solar panels blanketed by so much dust that power levels were dropping lower and lower, Mars came to the rescue by sending dust devils spinning nearby, blowing away most of the dust. It is almost as though Mars itself was rooting for these two little intrepid rovers, wanting them to further explore the planet's manifest mysteries. Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) project, has now published a book about what it took to get to Mars. His tale begins with the glimmer of an idea, and then follows his travails through NASA's bureaucracy and the construction of the rovers. He recalls the exhilaration and anxiety of launching from Earth and then landing on Mars, and concludes his saga with the rovers still in full exploration mode. The following is excerpted from Roving Mars by Steve Squyres (published by Hyperion, copyright 2005 Steven W. Squyres, all rights reserved; available wherever books are sold). When I was a kid, I loved maps. Still do. I grew up in the sixties, and in those days if you looked at a not-so-current atlas of the world, you could still find a few blank spots-places that were understood poorly enough by the mapmakers that they didn't know what to draw. I loved the idea of a map that wasn't done yet, with places on it still to be discovered. As a boy, I read everything I could get my hands on about exploration--Amundsen and Scott in the Antarctic, Beebe and Barton in the deep sea-tracing their adventures across my maps and dreaming about the exploring I'd do myself someday. By the time I hit college, reality set in. There were no blank spots on the maps anymore. I was a student at Cornell University, in upstate New York. I loved climbing mountains and I had a knack for science, so I picked geology as a major, thinking that it might be a way to get paid to go climbing. After learning a little bit of geology I started to drift toward something involving exploration of the sea floor, since there were still some blank spots there. But it wasn't working for me. The geologists who have spent the last two centuries studying our planet, it turns out, have done a pretty darn good job of it. To me, geology felt like filling in details. Then, early in the spring of my junior year, I was giving my girlfriend a tour of the Cornell campus. This was in 1977, just after NASA's Viking spacecraft had arrived at Mars, and while we were in the Space Sciences building she spotted a three-by-five card tacked to a bulletin board, announcing that a professor who was a member of the Viking science team was going to be teaching a graduate seminar course on Mars. What the hell, I thought, and I went. I started by nearly getting kicked out of class. The first thing the professor asked when we were all in our seats was "Are there any undergraduates here?" One timid hand went up--mine--and he asked me to see him after the lecture. It was pretty obvious he was going to throw me out. What saved me was that one of my would-be classmates was a grad student from the geology department who knew both me and the prof, and who came over at the crucial juncture and vouched as best he could for my studious nature. The prof assented, though not without making it clear why he didn't like having undergrads in the course. "If I'm talking about temperatures on Mars," he said, "I don't want to have to stop and explain to the whole class what thermal diffusivity is." I nodded sagely, and ran back to my dorm room to look up thermal diffusivity. Because the course was taught at the graduate level, we were expected to do some kind of original research project for our grade. A few weeks into the semester I figured I'd better start thinking about what I was going to do for my term paper, so I asked for a key to the "Mars Room," where all of the new pictures from the Viking orbiters were being kept. I found the Mars Room in Clark Hall, behind the Space Sciences building. It was a deserted and disorderly place, more like a warehouse than a scientific data archive. A few of the pictures that had been taken during the earliest part of the mission were in glossy blue three-ring binders, arranged in chronological order on gray-painted steel shelves. Most, though, were on long rolls of photographic paper, stacked on the floor or still in their shipping cartons. My idea had been to spend fifteen or twenty minutes flipping through pictures, hoping to find inspiration for a term paper topic. Instead, I was in that room for four hours, racing through the pictures, stunned. I understood almost nothing that I saw, of course, but that was the beauty of it. Nobody understood most of this stuff. In fact, only a handful of people in the world had even seen it yet. Sitting there cross-legged on the linoleum, I was exploring a new, distant and alien world. I walked out of that room knowing exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. The planet that I saw in those pictures is a beautiful, terrible, desolate place. It's cold; the average temperature on Mars is sixty degrees below zero centigrade. It's dry; if you could take all the water vapor in the martian atmosphere and freeze it out on the planet's surface, the layer of ice you would make would be barely a hundredth of a millimeter thick. The thin carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars whips dust off the ground into storms that can darken the skies for months at a time. The planet that we see as a shining red point of light in the night sky of Earth is a barren, hostile world. But it may not always have been that way. The pictures I was looking at, though I did not realize it then, showed evidence that water may once have flowed in abundance across the martian surface. There are dried-up riverbeds on Mars. There are dried-up lakebeds. There are features that tell of enormous floods that once poured across the martian surface. Most remarkably, there are small valleys, with branching tributaries, that wind sinuously through the martian highlands. These valleys must have been carved by streams that were so small that it's hard to imagine how they could form under the frigid conditions on Mars today. How can a trickle of water flow at sixty degrees below zero and not freeze? But there they are, in the pictures, demanding explanation. Most of Mars's water-carved valleys are exceptionally old. It's tough to be sure, but many of them may date from the first billion years of Mars's 4.5-billion-year history. So despite the planet's forbidding climate today, its valleys are a clue that back in the earliest part of its history, Mars may have been a warmer, wetter and more Earth-like world. And here's the thing: four billion years ago is the very same time that, somehow, life first came into being on our own planet. We don't know how this miracle--the process of genesis--took place. But one thing that it surely required was liquid water. And if it happened here on Earth four billion years ago in environments that were warm and wet, then an obvious question arises: Could it also have happened on Mars? Finding evidence that life arose independently on another planet would be one of the most profound discoveries that humans could ever make. If you only know that a miracle has happened once, then it may be a rare, or even singular, event. But if you can prove that it happened twice in the same solar system-recognizing that there may be countless solar systems out there-it means that, while no less wondrous a miracle, it may be a universal one. So Mars is a world that can help us learn our place in the cosmos. If we go to Mars and find that it developed life, we've learned something fundamental about how common a phenomenon life may be. And if we go there and find that the conditions were once warm, wet and habitable, yet that somehow life didn't emerge, then we have learned something profound about the conditions that are required for life to develop. And consider this: suppose just for a moment that the miracle of genesis really did occur on Mars. On Earth, because of the intense geologic activity that our planet has suffered since its birth, the physical evidence of how that miracle took place is gone. That the miracle occurred is inarguable-we ourselves are part of the evidence. But tangible clues of how it actually happened are lost to us forever, because all the rocks from that earliest period of the Earth's history have been destroyed by later geologic activity. On Mars, though, they have not. Mars has been a more geologically quiescent world than Earth, and nearly half the martian surface is covered with rocks that are close to four billion years old. So if the miracle of genesis also took place on Mars, then evidence for how it happened may still be there, a story in the rocks waiting to be read. The business of reading the story that rocks have to tell is the work of a geologist, and that was a subject I had learned something about. A geologist is like a detective at the scene of a crime. Something happened here long ago. What was it? Was it warm here? Was it wet? Was it the kind of environment that would have been suitable for life? The answers to questions like this can lie in clues that were left behind in the ancient rocks on the planet's surface. Every rock preserves evidence of what conditions were like when it formed. When sediments are deposited, the coarse grains settle close to shore and the fine ones in deeper water. Look at the grain size in a sedimentary rock, then, and you learn something about where it was laid down. Ripples preserved in rocks can tell you about currents. Distinctive minerals like salts can tell you what was dissolved in the water. A good geologist can piece together clues like this to learn in detail what an ancient world was like. Geology on Mars, if there was a way to do it, would be something worth devoting a career to. But the kind of Mars mission I wanted to do would be complicated. It wouldn't be enough just to fly by the planet, say, or to put something into orbit around it. Orbital spacecraft give you a great view, and they're the best way to get a really global look at another world. But the problem I wanted to attack wasn't a global one. The clues that I felt I needed were locked up in the rocks at a few special places on Mars. The only way to get at them, I was sure, was going to be the old-fashioned bang-it-with-a-hammer approach of a field geologist--albeit a robotic one--down on the martian surface. And there was another thing about getting down onto the surface of Mars. Taking pictures from orbit didn't feel like real exploration to me. Lewis and Clark hadn't looked down on the Louisiana Territory from orbit. What I really wanted, when you got right down to it, was martian dirt on my own boots. And if I couldn't have that, I wanted the next best thing. I just didn't have any idea how to go about it. Twenty-six years after my cathartic moment in the Mars Room, twin robotic explorers named Spirit and Opportunity were in final preparation for launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Built by a sprawling family of engineers and scientists, they were poised to carry the dreams of their creators to a planet where two out of every three spacecraft missions had ended in failure. Their mission was to study rocks on the surface of Mars, and to learn from those rocks whether or not the planet had ever had what it takes to support life. That they were in Florida at all, however, was a small miracle. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1705.html. _____________________________________________________________________ STUDY SUGGESTS TITAN MAY HOLD KEYS FOR EXOTIC BRAND OF LIFE Southwestern Research Institute release 8 September 2005 Saturn's moon Titan has long been a place of interest to astrobiologists, primarily because of its apparent similarities to the early Earth at the time life first started. A thick atmosphere composed primarily of nitrogen and abundant organic molecules (the ingredients of life as we know it) are among the important similarities between these two otherwise dissimilar planetary bodies. Scientists have considered it very unlikely that Titan hosts life today, primarily because it is so cold (-289 degrees Fahrenheit, or - 178 Celsius) that the chemical reactions necessary for life would proceed too slowly. Yet previously published data, along with new discoveries about extreme organisms on Earth, raise the prospect that some habitable locales may indeed exist on Titan. In a paper being presented at the Division for Planetary Sciences 2005 Meeting this week, a team of researchers from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Washington State University say that several key requirements for life now appear to be present on Titan, including liquid reservoirs, organic molecules and ample energy sources. Methane clouds and surface characteristics strongly imply the presence of an active global methane cycle analogous to Earth's hydrological cycle. It is unknown whether life can exist in liquid methane, although some such chemical schemes have been postulated. Further, abundant hints of ice volcanism suggest that reservoirs of liquid water mixed with ammonia may exist close to the surface. "One promising location for habitability may be hot springs in contact with hydrocarbon reservoirs," says lead author Dr. David H. Grinspoon, a staff scientist in the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division. "There is no shortage of energy sources [food] because energy-rich hydrocarbons are constantly being manufactured in the upper atmosphere, by the action of sunlight on methane, and falling to the surface." In particular, the team suggests that acetylene, which is abundant, could be used by organisms, in reaction with hydrogen gas, to release vast amounts of energy that could be used to power metabolism. Such a biosphere would be, at least indirectly, solar-powered. "The energy released could even be used by organisms to heat their surroundings, helping them to create their own liquid microenvironments," says Grinspoon. "In environments that are energy-rich but liquid-poor, like the near-surface of Titan, natural selection may favor organisms that use their metabolic heat to melt their own watering holes." The team says these ideas are quite speculative but useful in that they force researchers to question the definition and universal needs of life, and to consider the possibility that life might evolve in very different environments. "Possible Niches for Extant Life on Titan in Light of Cassini-Huygens Results" will be presented September 8 at the Division for Planetary Sciences 2005 Meeting in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Grinspoon, Dr. Mark A. Bullock, Dr. John R. Spencer (SwRI) and D. Schulze-Makuch (Washington State University) performed the study with funding from the NASA Exobiology Program using published results from the Cassini- Huygens mission. This project is not otherwise affiliated with Cassini-Huygens. Contacts: Maria Martinez Communications Department Southwest Research Institute PO Drawer 28510 San Antonio, TX 78228-0510 Phone: 210-522-3305 Dr. Mark Bullock Phone: 303-546-9670 E-mail: bullock@boulder.swri.edu Read the original news release at http://www.swri.org/9what/releases/2005/titan.htm. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05zzzg.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/titan_hold_key_to_exotic_life .html _____________________________________________________________________ RAPID-BORN PLANETS PRESENT "BABY PICTURE" OF OUR EARLY SOLAR SYSTEM University of Rochester release 9 September 2005 Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, a team of astronomers led by the University of Rochester has detected gaps ringing the dusty disks around two very young stars, which suggests that gas-giant planets have formed there. A year ago, these same researchers found evidence of the first "baby planet" around a young star, challenging most astrophysicists's models of giant-planet formation. The new findings in the September 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters not only reinforce the idea that giant planets like Jupiter form much faster than scientists have traditionally expected, but one of the gas- enshrouded stars, called GM Aurigae, is analogous to our own solar system. At a mere 1 million years of age, the star gives a unique window into how our own world may have come into being. "GM Aurigae is essentially a much younger version of our Sun, and the gap in its disk is about the same size as the space occupied by our own giant planets," says Dan Watson, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester and leader of the Spitzer IRS Disks research team. "Looking at it is like looking at baby pictures of our Sun and outer solar system," he says. "The results pose a challenge to existing theories of giant-planet formation, especially those in which planets build up gradually over millions of years," says Nuria Calvet, professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan and lead author of the paper. "Studies like this one will ultimately help us better understand how our outer planets, as well as others in the universe, form." The new "baby planets" live within the clearings they have scoured out in the disks around the stars DM Tauri and GM Aurigae, 420 light years away in the Taurus constellation. These disks have been suspected for several years to have central holes that might be due to planet formation. The new spectra, however, leave no doubt. The gaps are so empty and sharp-edged that planetary formation is by far the most reasonable explanation for their appearance. The new planets cannot yet be seen directly, but Spitzer's Infrared Spectrograph (IRS) instrument clearly showed that an area of dust surrounding certain stars was missing, strongly suggesting the presence of a planet around each. The dust in a protoplanetary disk is hotter in the center near the star, and so radiates most of its light at shorter wavelengths than the cooler outer reaches of the disk. The IRS Disks team found that there was an abrupt deficit of light radiating at all short infrared wavelengths, strongly suggesting that the central part of the disk was absent. These stars are very young by stellar standards, about a million years old, still surrounded by their embryonic gas disks. The only viable explanation for the absence of gas that could occur during the short lifetime of the star is that a planet-most likely a gas giant like our Jupiter-is orbiting the star and gravitationally "sweeping out" the gas within that distance of the star. As with last year's young-planet findings, these observations represent a challenge to all existing theories of giant-planet formation, especially those of the "core- accretion" models in which such planets are built up by accretion of smaller bodies, which require much more time to build a giant planet than the age of these systems. The IRS Disks team discovered something else curious about GM Aurigae. Instead of a simple central clearing of the dust disk, as in the other cases studied, GM Aurigae has a clear gap in its disk that separates a dense, dusty outer disk from a tenuous inner one. This could be either an intermediate stage as the new planet clears out the dust surrounding it and leading to a complete central clearing like the other "baby planet" disks, or it could be the result of multiple planets forming within a short time and sweeping out the dust in a more complex fashion. GM Aurigae has 1.05 times the mass of our Sun--a near twin--so it will develop into a star very similar to the Sun. If it were overlaid onto our own Solar System, the discovered gap would extend roughly from the orbit of Jupiter (460 million miles) to the orbit of Uranus (1.7 billion miles). This is the same range in which the gas- giant planets in our own system appear. Small non-gas-giant planets, rocky worlds like Earth, would not sweep up as much material, and so would not be detectable from an absence of dust. The Spitzer Space Telescope was launched into orbit on August 25, 2003. The IRS Disks research team is led by members that built Spitzer's Infrared Spectrograph, and includes astronomers at the University of Rochester, Cornell University, the University of Michigan, the Autonomous National University of Mexico, the University of Virginia, Ithaca College, the University of Arizona, and UCLA. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, in Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Journal reference: N. Calvet et al., 2005. Disks in transition in the Taurus population: Spitzer IRS spectra of GM Aurigae and DM Tauri. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 650:L185-L188, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/journal/issues/ApJL/v630n2/19660 /brief/19660.abstract.html. Read the original news release at http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2248. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050909_infant_solar.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/early-sol-05b.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/baby_picture_of_early_univers e.html _____________________________________________________________________ HUMAN BRAIN IS STILL EVOLVING Howard Hughes Medical Institute release 9 September 2005 Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers who have analyzed sequence variations in two genes that regulate brain size in human populations have found evidence that the human brain is still evolving. They speculate that if the human species continues to survive, the human brain may continue to evolve, driven by the pressures of natural selection. Their data suggest that major variants in these genes arose at roughly the same times as the origin of culture in human populations as well as the advent of agriculture and written language. The research team, which was led by Bruce T. Lahn, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Chicago, published its findings in two articles in the September 9, 2005, issue of the journal Science. Their analyses focused on detecting sequence changes in two genes-- Microcephalin and "abnormal spindle-like microcephaly associated" (ASPM)--across different human populations. In humans, mutations in either of these genes can render the gene nonfunctional and cause microcephaly--a clinical syndrome in which the brain develops to a much smaller size than normal. In earlier studies of non-human primates and humans, Lahn and his colleagues determined that both Microcephalin and ASPM showed significant changes under the pressure of natural selection during the making of the human species. "Our earlier studies showed that Microcephalin showed evidence of accelerated evolution along the entire primate lineage leading to humans, for the entire thirty to thirty-five million years that we sampled," he said. "However, it seemed to have evolved slightly slower later on. By contrast, ASPM has evolved most rapidly in the last six million years of hominid evolution, after the divergence of humans and chimpanzees." In order to identify sequence changes that occurred in Microcephalin and ASPM in the evolutionary lineage leading to humans, Lahn and his colleagues took the following approach. They determined the DNA sequences of the two genes among a large number of primate species and searched for sequence differences between humans and nonhuman primates. By doing statistical analysis on these sequence differences, they could demonstrate that the differences were due to natural selection that drove significant sequence changes in the lineage leading to humans. These changes accumulated presumably because they conferred some competitive advantage. The evidence that Microcephalin and ASPM were evolving under strong natural selection in the lineage leading to humans led Lahn and his colleagues to consider exploring whether these two genes are still evolving under selection in modern human populations. "In the earlier studies, we looked at differences that had already been set in the human genome," he said. "The next logical question was to ask whether the same process is still going on today, given that these genes have been under such strong selective pressure, leading to the accumulation of advantageous changes in the human lineage. If that is the case, we reasoned we might be able to see variants within the human population that are rising in frequency due to positive selection, but haven't gone to completion yet." The researchers first sequenced the two genes in an ethnically diverse selection of about 90 individuals. The researchers also sequenced the genes in the chimpanzee, to determine the "ancestral" state of polymorphisms in the genes and to assess the extent of human-chimpanzee divergence. In each gene, the researchers found distinctive sets of polymorphisms, which are sequence differences between different individuals. Blocks of linked polymorphisms are called haplotypes, whereby each haplotype is, in essence, a distinct genetic variant of the gene. They found that they could further break the haplotypes down into related variants called haplogroups. Their analysis indicated that for each of the two genes, one haplogroup occurs at a frequency far higher than that expected by chance, indicating that natural selection has driven up the frequency of the haplogroup. They referred to the high-frequency haplogroup as haplogroup D. When the researchers compared the ethnic groups in their sample for haplogroup D of ASPM, they found that it occurs more frequently in European and related populations, including Iberians, Basques, Russians, North Africans, Middle Easterners and South Asians. That haplogroup was found at a lower incidence in East Asians, sub-Saharan Africans and New World Indians. For Microcephalin, the researchers found that haplogroup D is more abundant in populations outside of Africa than in populations from sub-Saharan Africa. To produce more informative statistical data on the frequency of haplotype D among population groups, the researchers applied their methods to a larger population sample of more than one thousand people. That analysis also showed the same distribution of haplogroups. Their statistical analysis indicated that the Microcephalin haplogroup D appeared about 37,000 years ago, and the ASPM haplogroup D appeared about 5,800 years ago--both well after the emergence of modern humans about 200,000 years ago. "In the case of Microcephalin, the origin of the new variant coincides with the emergence of culturally modern humans," said Lahn. "And the ASPM new variant originated at a time that coincides with the spread of agriculture, settled cities, and the first record of written language. So, a major question is whether the coincidence between the genetic evolution that we see and the cultural evolution of humans was causative, or did they synergize with each other?" Lahn said that the geographic origin and circumstances surrounding the spread of the haplogroups can only be surmised at this point. "One can make guesses, but our study doesn't reveal how these positively selected variants arrived," he said. "They may have arisen in Europe or the Middle East and spread more readily east and west due to human migrations, as opposed to south to Africa because of geographic barriers. Or, they could have arisen in Africa, and increased in frequency once early humans migrated out of Africa." While the roles of Microcephalin and ASPM in regulating brain size suggest that the selective pressure on the new variants may relate to cognition, Lahn emphasized that this possibility remains speculative. "What we can say is that our findings provide evidence that the human brain, the most important organ that distinguishes our species, is evolutionarily plastic," he said. Finding evidence of selection in two such genes is mutually reinforcing, he pointed out. "Finding this effect in one gene could be anecdotal, but finding it in two genes would make it a trend. Here we have two microcephaly genes that show evidence of selection in the evolutionary history of the human species and that also show evidence of ongoing selection in humans." Lahn emphasized that it would not be correct to interpret the findings as indicating that one ethnic group is more "evolved" than another. Any differences among groups would be minor compared to the large differences in such traits as intelligence within those groups, he said. "We're talking about the average impact of such variants," he said. "We still have to treat each individual as an individual. Just because you have one gene that makes you more likely to be a little taller, doesn't mean you will be tall, given the complex effect of all your other genes and of environment." Lahn also said that a multitude of other genes likely exist that influence brain size and development, and further research could reveal far more complex effects of natural selection on such genes. Lahn speculated that the new findings suggest that the human brain will continue to evolve under the pressure of natural selection. "Our studies indicate that the trend that is the defining characteristic of human evolution--the growth of brain size and complexity--is likely still going on. If our species survives for another million years or so, I would imagine that the brain by then would show significant structural differences from the human brain of today." For both Microcephalin and ASPM, Lahn and his colleagues are trying to find out the precise traits that are under natural selection. They are also performing more detailed studies of the two genes in human populations to better understand their evolutionary history. And they are searching for other brain-related genes that have changed under the pressure of natural selection. "We want to know how broad a trend these two genes represent," said Lahn. "Did we get really lucky and hit on two rare examples of such genes? Or, are they representative of many other such genes throughout the genome. I would bet, though, that we will find evidence of selection in a lot more genes." Lahn and his colleagues are now working to understand how subtle changes in the sequences of these two genes can alter their function in such a way that would result in favorable selection. While there is some evidence from earlier studies that Microcephalin and ASPM code for proteins that regulate the proliferation of brain cells from immature neural stem cells, their function has not yet been determined, said Lahn. Journal references: M. Balter, 2005. Are human brains still evolving? Brain genes show signs of selection. Science, 309(5741):1662-1663, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/309/5741/1662. P. D. Evans et al., 2005. Microcephalin, a gene regulating brain size, continues to evolve adaptively in humans. Science, 309(5741):1717-1720, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/309/5741/1717. N. Mekel-Bobrov et al., 2005. Ongoing adaptive evolution of ASPM, a brain size determinant in Homo sapiens. Science, 309(5741):1720- 1722, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/309/5741/1720. Read the original news release at http://www.hhmi.org/news/lahn4.html. _____________________________________________________________________ DECIPHERING MARS: FOLLOW THE WATER By Jack Farmer From Astrobiology Magazine 12 September 2005 Why do we have such a longstanding fascination with Mars? Very simply put, it's about life. The search for life elsewhere in our solar system has been a major driver for exploring Mars, pretty much since we began seriously looking at that planet. What we've adopted in the last decade or so is kind of a mantra: Follow the water. Why? Because water is a proxy for life. It's considered one of the most fundamental requirements for living systems. Now life requires more than just water. We have to have the essential elements, the nutrients, the building blocks, and we also have to have energy resources. Taking all those things together, a new way of talking about this has emerged in recent years: the concept of habitability, the potential for an environment to be inhabited by life. This concept of habitability, along with "follow the water," has become a central theme in exploring Mars. In the present decade, exploration efforts have been focused on this follow-the-water strategy, as well as on gaining insights into the distribution of essential building blocks and energy sources, to better understand the potential for past or present habitability. This is being accomplished through a phased program of exploration that emphasizes the interplay between orbital and surface missions. 2005 is an interesting time in the exploration of Mars, because we have two rovers on the surface, Spirit and Opportunity; we have the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter, which was launched in 1998; we have Mars Odyssey, which was launched in 2001; and we have Mars Express, launched in 2003. They're all operating simultaneously. It's a very exciting time. Lots of new data are coming out of this effort, which is an international effort. What we're learning is rewriting the textbooks and changing our perspectives about Mars. So it's a good time to ask some key questions, and to review what we think we know about the potential for astrobiology in the martian environment. One key question that we've been asking for quite a while now is: In the past on Mars, how widespread was surface water, and over what time periods was it present? We think we have evidence that water was present in the past, particularly in the early history of Mars. How can we be more specific about that? How widespread was it? What particular kinds of environments existed, for how long, and during what periods of time in martian history? Our approach has been to use high-resolution infrared mapping from orbit, to search for aqueously formed geomorphic features and sedimentary deposits. Mars Global Surveyor, Odyssey and Mars Express are all working on this problem in various ways, as will the just- launched Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Another key question is whether water is present in the subsurface of Mars today. The approach there is to use high-resolution imaging, gamma-ray spectroscopy and radar sounding from orbit, to try to discover deposits of surface and subsurface ice and water. Again, the same missions, in various ways, are contributing to discovery. These are two really fundamental questions with regard to habitability, particularly in following in the water. We not only have to follow it in the past on the surface, but because liquid water is unstable on the surface of Mars today, if we're going to look for liquid water today, we're going to have to go into the subsurface. So we're looking in the past for ancient deposits for evidence of past water, and in the subsurface for active environments where we might actually have biology going on. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1709.html. _____________________________________________________________________ 2006 REDUCED GRAVITY STUDENT FLIGHT PROGRAM NASA program announcement 2 September 2005 NASA is proud to announce the 2006 Reduced Gravity Student Flight Program. Under this program, teams of undergraduate students propose a microgravity experiment, build the experiment at school and fly with the experiment in Houston on NASA's microgravity aircraft. During this process, they share the excitement of science with those in their local area through outreach events. Students find the experience rewarding because they have an opportunity to take an idea from conception to implementation and ultimately get a chance to experience microgravity. Faculty report the experience is rewarding because they have an opportunity to offer students an independent study course, and guide them along a path of discovery, science and excitement. Significant dates Letter of Intent (optional): September 22, 2005 Proposals: October 19, 2005 Selected Proposals Announced: December 9, 2005 Potential Flight Weeks: March 2-11, 2006; March 16-25, 2006; March 30-April 8, 2006; July 6-15, 2006; July 20-28, 2006. Eligibility: US citizenship; full time undergraduate status at time of application; over 18 to fly. For complete details, please visit our web site at http://microgravityuniversity.jsc.nasa.gov. _____________________________________________________________________ CALL FOR ENTRIES FOR THE AMAZING IMAGES SUMMER UNDER THE STARS CONTEST From Space.com 12 September 2005 Have you been taking pictures with your new digital camera? Your albums of science and space images could be your winning ticket to a trip to Hawaii. Nokia and SPACE.com are looking for your best astronomical and science photography. Submit your cool images to Amazing Images, and if your entry is voted one of the best, you can qualify to win amazing prizes. Win a trip to Mauna Kea in Hawaii, a new Nokia 6682 and more! For a chance to win, go to http://www.space.com/amazingimages/summerunderthestars/. _____________________________________________________________________ JOIN THE BAD ASTRONOMY/UNIVERSE TODAY BOINC TEAM From Universe Today 12 September 2005 What is your computer doing when you're not using it? If your answer is "nothing", then you need to put it to work in the name of science- -finding aliens, detecting gravity waves, or predicting asteroid paths. Join the Universe Today and Bad Astronomy team, and compete with other teams worldwide to see who can help crunch the most data. We'd love to get your help. Additional information is available at http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/join_baut_boinc_team.html. _____________________________________________________________________ CASSINI SIGNIFICANT EVENTS FOR 25-30 AUGUST 2005 NASA/JPL release 7 September 2005 The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired Tuesday, August 30, 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, August 25 (DOY 237): Orbit trim maneuver #29 (OTM-29), the Titan 6 cleanup maneuver, was successfully performed today. The main engine burn began at 11:31 am PDT. A "quick look" immediately after the maneuver showed the burn duration was 9.3 seconds, giving a delta-V of 1.4 m/s. All subsystems reported nominal performance after the maneuver. The Cassini Integrated Test Laboratory team is currently hosting a member of the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) instrument team at JPL. CDA has brought their engineering model to be connected to the ITL for flight software testing. The hardware will be here till mid- September. Friday, August 26 (DOY 238): The S15 sequence leads coordinated a test to be performed in the ITL of the Radar Titan 8 observations and special playbacks of data for that flyby. Analysis is underway to verify that the tests were successful. Nine Instrument Expanded Block (IEB) files were uplinked to the spacecraft in support of S14. Sequence leads were able to verify that 8 of the 9 IEBs executed nominally and the readouts of telemetry were as predicted. There were no dropped packets for these files. Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS) team members will verify the ninth file. S14 will begin execution on Tuesday of next week. Saturday, August 27 (DOY 239): An additional IEB file and the S14 background sequence went up to the spacecraft today. Monday, August 29 (DOY 241): The 37th Cassini Project Science Group Meeting got underway this week at Imperial College, London, England. The S17 Science Operations Plan (SOP) Update process officially began today. The SOP Update is a phase in the sequence development process where scientists and other operations team members are allowed to make limited observation and activity design changes from what was developed in SOP Implementation. This allows for late breaking discoveries and other information learned in prior sequences to be incorporated into future observations that have not completed their sequence development. S17 was originally archived back in April of 2003 so it has been over two years since scientists have looked at this product. The kick-off meeting, led by the Science Planning Team Lead, lays out the ground rules and schedule which all team members must abide by in order to incorporate their changes. SOP Update for S16 continued this week with the completion of the Spacecraft Operations Office and Science Planning Team analysis of the S16 sequence merge. Output products were posted to the program file repository for review. A kick-off meeting was held for the S14 DOY 248-250 Live Update process for an Inertial Vector Propagator update and Radio Science Live Movable Block. The current version of the schedule for this process has Navigation delivering the orbit determination (OD) solution at 1700 PDT today, with Science Planning (SP) releasing its epoch time shift and GEOEPOCHS file 2 hours later, and Radio Science (RSS) starting its analysis at that point and continuing for the next 8 hours. Navigation is aiming for an 1100 PDT OD solution release, so SP and RSS can get an earlier start. The Go/No-Go meeting is scheduled for tomorrow so the instruments and SP are expected to have their analysis ready by then. Update: it's a go! Spacecraft Operations Office, Navigation, and Uplink Operations files for OTM-30 have been delivered and placed in the program file repository. The maneuver approval meeting will be held today at 5:00pm PDT. Uplink begins Tuesday at 07:05 AM PDT. On-station time is 11:45 AM for a 1:05 PM burn. Tuesday, August 30 (DOY 242): The S14 background sequence began execution today. The sequence will run for 39 days and will conclude on October 8. During S14 there will be two targeted flybys, two dust hazards to be avoided, eight OTMs, one live movable block, and three live IVP updates. Forty- three Deep Space Network (DSN) tracks will be used to downlink over 49.7 Gb of data. A Design Delivery Review was held for Multi-Mission Image Processing Laboratory software version D34. This delivery contains many small updates to Imaging Science Subsystem & Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer uplink and downlink software modules which correct product labels and eliminate operations workarounds. The delivery was accepted by all projects and MGSS. The software will go on-line on September 9. The S17 Sponge Bit meeting was cancelled today due to a delay in the release of the DSN allocation file. The file is necessary for Cassini Science Planning to determine if there have been any changes to the amount of data that the DSN is capable of receiving. If they can receive more, then data volume that was held as margin is given to the teams for science acquisition. The allocation file will be delivered by the end of the week with the Sponge Bit meeting to follow. Orbit trim maneuver #30 (OTM-30), the apoapsis maneuver preceding Titan-7, was successfully completed today. The main engine burn began at 13:05 AM PDT. A "quick look" immediately after the maneuver showed the burn duration was 91.35 seconds, giving a delta-V of 14.3 m/s. All subsystems reported nominal performance after the maneuver. A news release has been issued regarding the age of the "tiger stripes" discovered on Enceladus. Cracked features approximately 140 km long, spaced about 40 km apart and running roughly parallel to each other, act like vents spewing vapor and fine ice water particles that have become ice crystals. This crystallization process can help scientists pin down the age of the features. For the text of the full release and other materials, go to the Cassini Web Site at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. 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/article1701.html http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1703.html http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1704.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05zzzc.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05zzzd.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/cassini_reveals_new_rings_nat ure.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/satrun_f_ring_pandora.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/saturn_dynamic_clouds_run_dee p.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/frame_filling_rhea.html _____________________________________________________________________ DEEP IMPACT UPDATES NASA/JPL releases NASA's Deep Impact Adds Color to Unfolding Comet Picture NASA/JPL release 2005-143, 6 September 2005 Painting by the numbers is a good description of how scientists create pictures of everything from atoms in our bodies to asteroids and comets in our solar system. Researchers involved in NASA's Deep Impact mission have been doing this kind of work since the mission's July 4th collision with comet Tempel 1. "Prior to our Deep Impact experiment, scientists had a lot of questions and untested ideas about the structure and composition of the nucleus, or solid body of a comet, but we had almost no real knowledge," said Deep Impact principal investigator Dr. Michael A'Hearn, a professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, College Park. "Our analysis of data produced by Deep Impact is revealing a great deal, much of it rather surprising." For example, comet Tempel 1 has a very fluffy structure that is weaker than a bank of powder snow. The fine dust of the comet is held together by gravity. However, that gravity is so weak, if you could stand on the bank and jump, you would launch yourself into space. Another surprise for A'Hearn and his colleagues was the evidence of what appears to be impact craters on the surface of the comet. Previously, two other comets had their nuclei closely observed and neither showed evidence of impact craters. "The nucleus of Tempel 1 has distinct layers shown in topographic relief ranging from very smooth areas to areas with features that satisfy all the criteria for impact craters, including varying size," A'Hearn said. "The problem in stating with certainty that these are impact craters is that we don't know of a mechanism by which some comets would collide with the flotsam and jetsam in our solar system, while others would not." According to A'Hearn, one of the more interesting findings may be the huge increase in carbon-containing molecules detected in spectral analysis of the ejection plume. This finding indicates comets contain a substantial amount of organic material, so they could have brought such material to Earth early in the planet's history when strikes by asteroids and meteors were common. Another finding is the comet interior is well shielded from the solar heating experienced by the surface of the comet nucleus. Mission data indicate the nucleus of Tempel 1 is extremely porous. Its porosity allows the surface of the nucleus to heat up and cool down almost instantly in response to sunlight. This suggests heat is not easily conducted to the interior and the ice and other material deep inside the nucleus may be pristine and unchanged from the early days of the solar system, just as many scientists had suggested. "The infrared spectrometer gave us the first temperature map of a comet, allowing us to measure the surface's thermal inertia, or ability to conduct heat to the interior," said Dr. Olivier Groussin, the University of Maryland research scientist who generated the map. It is this diligent and time consuming analysis of spectral data that is providing much of the "color" with which Deep Impact scientists are painting the first ever detailed picture of a comet. For example, researchers recently saw emission bands for water vaporized by the heat of the impact, followed a few seconds later by absorption bands from ice particles ejected from below the surface and not melted or vaporized. "In a couple of seconds the fast, hot moving plume containing water vapor left the view of the spectrometer, and we are suddenly seeing the excavation of sub-surface ice and dust," said Deep Impact co- investigator Dr. Jessica Sunshine, with Science Applications International Corporation, Chantilly, VA. "It is the most dramatic spectral change I've ever seen." These findings are published in the September 9 issue of the journal Science, and were presented this week at the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Cambridge, England. Mission scientists are filling in important new portions of a cometary picture that is still far from finished. The University of Maryland is responsible for overall Deep Impact mission science, and project management is handled by JPL. The spacecraft was built for NASA by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation, Boulder, CO. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. For more information about the Deep Impact mission on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov/deepimpact. For information about NASA and agency programs on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov/home. Journal reference: R. A. Kerr, 2005. Deep Impact finds a flying snowbank of a comet. Science, 309(5741):1667, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/309/5741/1667. NASA's Spitzer and Deep Impact Build Recipe for Comet Soup NASA/JPL release 2005-144, 7 September 2005 When Deep Impact smashed into comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005, it released the ingredients of our solar system's primordial "soup." Now, astronomers using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and Deep Impact have analyzed that soup and begun to come up with a recipe for what makes planets, comets and other bodies in our solar system. "The Deep Impact experiment worked," said Dr. Carey Lisse of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD. "We are assembling a list of comet ingredients that will be used by other scientists for years to come." Lisse is the team leader for Spitzer's observations of Tempel 1. He presented his findings this week at the 37th annual meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences in Cambridge, England. Spitzer watched the Deep Impact encounter from its lofty perch in space. It trained its infrared spectrograph on comet Tempel 1, observing closely the cloud of material that was ejected when Deep Impact's probe plunged below the comet's surface. Astronomers are still studying the Spitzer data, but so far they have spotted the signatures of a handful of ingredients, essentially the meat of comet soup. These solid ingredients include many standard comet components, such as silicates, or sand. And like any good recipe, there are also surprise ingredients, such as clay and chemicals in seashells called carbonates. These compounds were unexpected because they are thought to require liquid water to form. "How did clay and carbonates form in frozen comets?" asked Lisse. "We don't know, but their presence may imply that the primordial solar system was thoroughly mixed together, allowing material formed near the Sun where water is liquid, and frozen material from out by Uranus and Neptune, to be included in the same body." Also found were chemicals never seen before in comets, such as iron- bearing compounds and aromatic hydrocarbons, found in barbecue pits and automobile exhaust on Earth. The silicates spotted by Spitzer are crystallized grains even smaller than sand, like crushed gems. One of these silicates is a mineral called olivine, found on the glimmering shores of Hawaii's Green Sands Beach. Planets, comets and asteroids were all born out of a thick soup of chemicals that surrounded our young Sun about 4.5 billion years ago. Because comets formed in the outer, chilly regions of our solar system, some of this early planetary material is still frozen inside them. Having this new grocery list of comet ingredients means theoreticians can begin testing their models of planet formation. By plugging the chemicals into their formulas, they can assess what kinds of planets come out the other end. "Now, we can stop guessing at what's inside comets," said Dr. Mike A'Hearn, principal investigator for the Deep Impact mission, University of Maryland, College Park. "This information is invaluable for piecing together how our own planets as well as other distant worlds may have formed." NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA,, manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech. The University of Maryland, College Park, conducted the overall mission management for Deep Impact, and JPL handled project management for the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. For more graphics and more information about Spitzer, visit http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/index.shtml. For more information about Deep Impact, visit http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/deepimpact. For more information about NASA, visit http://www.nasa.gov/home/. Contacts: Whitney Clavin Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-354-4673 Dolores Beasley NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC Phone: 202-358-1753 D. C. Agle Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA Phone: 818-393-9011 Lee Tune University of Maryland, College Park, MD Phone: 301-405-4679 Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1706.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/comet-05zj.html http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050906_tempel1_update.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/deepimpact-05s.html http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0509/06deepimpact/ http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/deepimpact_painting_by_number s.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/spitzer_deep_impact_comet_sou p.html _____________________________________________________________________ MARS EXPLORATION ROVERS UPDATES NASA/JPL release 9 September 2005 Spirit Update: Moonstruck Spirit is in good health, power positive, and has no issues. This week the telecom team changed Spirit's uplink rate from 1000 bits per second to 2000 bits per second. In its orbit around the Sun, Mars comes close to Earth for a few months once every two years. Mars is now close enough to Earth that the one-way communication travel time from the spacecraft at Mars to the Deep Space Network antennas on Earth is only about 5 minutes away (at light speed). This shorter communication travel time means that the rover team has plenty of communication-link margin to support the higher uplink rate. The new uplink rate was successful during the sol 598 uplink session. Between September 2 and September 8, Spirit drove to another imaging location and completed the second stereo imaging campaign. Spirit returned to "Irvine" in order to explore what might be a dike, which is a crack-like cut that often forms when magma from a volcano travels through or over another rock. Spirit also performed more observations of the moons Phobos and Deimos, and completed three days of Mössbauer spectrometer readings on the capture magnets. Opportunity Update: Cautious Recovery Recovery from the sol 563 power-off event is well underway. Each sol, the team has planned one new activity. By sol 570 (August 31, 2005), the rover had successfully performed observations with the panoramic camera, navigation camera, and miniature thermal emission spectrometer and had completed a short alpha particle X-ray spectrometer integration (with the robotic arm stowed) and a 6.5- meter (21-foot) blind drive. Additional precautions are being taken with each sol's plan, including shutting down after the morning uplink (to save the high- gain antenna position, thus preventing an X-band fault in case of another anomaly) and waiting 15 minutes after wakeup to start any science activities. Read the latest updates at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status.html. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050910_moon_animation.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05zzzu.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05zzzv.html http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05zzzw.html _____________________________________________________________________ MARS EXPRESS: THE BIBLIS PATERA VOLCANO ESA release 7 September 2005 These images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA's Mars Express spacecraft, show the Biblis Patera volcano, located in the western part of the Tharsis rise on Mars. The HRSC obtained these images during orbit 1034 with a ground resolution of approximately 10.8 meters per pixel. The scenes show the region of Biblis Patera, at approximately 2.0° North and 236.0° East. Located between Olympus Mons and Tharsis Montes, the volcano Biblis Patera is 170 kilometers long, 100 kilometers wide and rises nearly three kilometers above its surroundings. The bowl-shaped depression (the caldera) may have been formed as the result of collapse of the magma chamber during eruptions of the volcano. The caldera has a diameter of 53 kilometers and extends to a maximum depth of roughly 4.5 kilometers. The morphology of the caldera suggests that multiple collapse events have occurred. The radial depressions and faint concentric circles on the flanks of the volcano are most likely faults associated with the formation of Biblis Patera. In the south-west (top left), the linear features extending north- west to south-east appear to be faults. Surrounding Biblis Patera there are more faults with a similar orientation and which may be related to the formation of the Tharsis Rise. Biblis Patera is older than the surrounding plains, which consist of lava flows originating from Pavonis Mons (the middle one of the Tharsis Montes volcanoes). In the main color image, clouds obscure the surface to the north-east of the caldera (bottom right), making it appear grey and less reddish-orange in color. The stereo and color capability and the high-resolution coverage of extended areas with the HRSC allow the improved study of the complex geological evolution of the Red Planet. By supplying new image data for volcanoes like Biblis Patera, the HRSC provides scientists with the opportunity to better understand the morphology and volcanic history of Mars. Data from the HRSC, coupled with information from other instruments on Mars Express and other missions, improves our understanding of this fascinating planet. The color images were processed using the HRSC nadir (vertical view) and three color channels. The perspective view was 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/SEMKW9A5QCE_0.html. Additional articles on this subject are available at: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/marsexpress-05za.html http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/biblis_patera_volcano.html _____________________________________________________________________ MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGES NASA/JPL/MSSS release 1-7 September 2005 The following new images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are now available. Cut by Troughs (Released 1 September 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/09/01 Defrosting Sand (Released 2 September 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/09/02 Polygons and Craters (Released 3 September 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/09/03 Sediments of Terby (Released 4 September 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/09/04 Caught in the Act (Released 5 September 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/09/05 Mars at Ls 288 Degrees (Released 6 September 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/09/06 Tharsis Limb Cloud (Released 7 September 2005) http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/09/07 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. _____________________________________________________________________ MRO: CAMERA'S TRIP TO MARS IS NO LEISURE CRUISE FOR HiRISE TEAM By Lori Stiles University of Arizona release 7 September 2005 The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera is rocketing toward Mars, and it's no leisure cruise for the camera operations team at The University of Arizona campus in Tucson either. The team turned the HiRISE camera on Friday (September 2). NASA launched the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and its science payload, which includes the HiRISE camera, on August 12. HiRISE--the largest telescopic camera sent beyond Earth's orbit--and five other MRO instruments will inspect the red planet in unprecedented detail and assist future landers. The spacecraft will travel more than four times the distance to Mars before entering Mars' orbit on March 10, 2006. For the next year, the HiRISE team in Tucson will train new members joining the project, write volumes of new software, image celestial objects to check how their camera operates post-launch, and practice as if their camera already were in orbit. UA Professor Alfred S. McEwen leads HiRISE. "We're very excited, and we're working very hard," said Eric Eliason, who manages the HiRISE Operations Center (HiROC) at the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Eliason and the rest of the HiROC team is responsible for most of the ground data system work for the HiRISE camera. Observation planning, uplink, downlink, instrument monitoring, and data processing and analysis will all be done at HiROC, which is located in the UA's C. P. Sonett Space Sciences Building. "We'll get our first images tomorrow (September 8) as the spacecraft slews our camera over the moon and then over Omega Centauri," Eliason said. "The spacecraft is flying so fast that the moon will already look very small--fewer than 200 pixels across. But we think we're going to get some really pretty pictures of Omega Centauri. And we'll know very quickly how well our instrument is working." Plans are for HiRISE to make other sets of star observations on October 4-5, November 5 and December 13-14. The October images will show very precisely how MRO navigation cameras are aligned with HiRISE. The November images will help the HiRISE team fine-tune their camera's focus to get the sharpest images possible. The December images will show how vibrations from different spacecraft instruments may affect HiRISE images. "These observations will also help us to characterize the optical distortion of our lens, and what processing methods we'll need to correct for whatever distortion we see," Eliason said. The 145-pound (65 kg) HiRISE camera features a 20-inch (half-meter) primary mirror. Developed by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, CO, the $40 million HiRISE camera will take ultra-sharp photographs over 3.5-mile (6 kilometer) swaths of the martian landscape, resolving rocks and other geologic features as small as 40 inches (one meter) across. It will take pictures in stereo and color while it flies at more than 7,800 mph (3 and 1/2 km per second) about 190 miles (300 km) above Mars' surface. After entering Mars's orbit in March 2006, the MRO will gradually adjust its elliptical orbit to a circular orbit by aerobraking, a technique that creates drag using the friction of careful dips into the planet's upper atmosphere. The spacecraft's 25-month primary science phase begins in November 2006. The HiROC team expects to process 1,000 gigantic high-resolution images and 9,000 smaller high-resolution images during the science phase of the MRO mission. The MRO mission is managed by JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, for the NASA Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, prime contractor for the project, built the spacecraft. Related web sites: http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/HiRISE/ http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ Contact: Eric Eliason Phone: 520-626-0764 E-mail: eeliason@lpl.arizona.edu Alfred S. McEwen Phone: 520-621-4573 E-mail: mcewen@lpl.arizona.edu Lori Stiles University Communications, UA Phone: 520-621-1877 _____________________________________________________________________ End Marsbugs, Volume 12, Number 31.