Marsbugs Vol. 12, No. 1 - Lyon College: Liberal Arts...

Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology NewsletterVolume 12, Number 1, 14 January 2005

Editor/Publisher: David J. Thomas, Ph.D., Science Division, Lyon College, Batesville, Arkansas 72503-2317, USA. [email protected]

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 author(s) 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.

Right: This is one of the first raw, or unprocessed, images from the European Space Agency's Huygens probe as it descended to Saturn's moon Titan. It was taken with the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer, one of two NASA instruments on the probe. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, DC. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The Descent Imager/Spectral team is based at the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. Image credit: ESA/NASA/University of Arizona.

Articles and News

Page 2 TOP TEN ASTROBIOLOGY STORIES OF 2004, NUMBER 6: PLANETOIDS BEYOND PLUTOFrom Astrobiology Magazine

Page 2 THE NEW AND IMPROVED SETIBy Seth Shostak

Page 2 PARACHUTING TO TITANBy Tony Phillips

Page 3 TOP TEN ASTROBIOLOGY STORIES OF 2004, NUMBER 5: CATCHING A COMETFrom Astrobiology Magazine

Page 4 TOP TEN ASTROBIOLOGY STORIES OF 2004, NUMBER 4: SPIRIT ON THE LAKEFrom Astrobiology Magazine

Page 4 OUR COSMIC PATCH (INTERVIEW WITH SIR MARTIN REES, PART 1)By Helen Matsos

Page 6 TOP TEN ASTROBIOLOGY STORIES OF 2004, NUMBER 3: NEW WORLDS, LIVING LARGEFrom Astrobiology Magazine

Page 6 NOT SO NEBULOUS—MAGNETICS OF PLANET FORMATIONBased on an Astronomy and Astrophysics report

Page 7 QUEEN'S DISCOVERY SHEDS NEW LIGHT ON ANCIENT TEMPERATURESQueen's University release

Page 8 MARS SCIENCE LABORATORY: NEXT WHEELS ON MARSBy Leonard David

Page 8 BEFORE THE BEGINNING (INTERVIEW WITH SIR MARTIN REES, PART 2)By Helen Matsos

Page 9 FINDING OTHER WORLDSBy Edna DeVore

Page 9 TOP TEN ASTROBIOLOGY STORIES OF 2004, NUMBER 2: CLASH OF THE TITANSFrom Astrobiology Magazine

Page 9 LISTENING FOR ET: TWO DECADESBy David Pescovitz

0 TOP TEN ASTROBIOLOGY STORIES OF 2004, NUMBER 1: OPPORTUNITY KNOCKSFrom Astrobiology Magazine

Page 10 POOR MAN'S SPACE PROBE—ASTRONOMY THROUGH A MICROSCOPEBy G. Turner

Page 11 HUBBLE'S INFRARED EYES HOME IN ON SUSPECTED EXTRASOLAR PLANETSpace Telescope Science Institute release 2005-03

Page 12 OUR COSMIC SELF-ESTEEM (INTERVIEW WITH SIR MARTIN REES, PART 3)By Helen Matsos

Page 13 SCIENTISTS DISCOVER UNIQUE MICROBE IN CALIFORNIA'S LARGEST LAKEUniversity of Oregon release

Page 15 ET VISITORS: SCIENTISTS SEE HIGH LIKELIHOODBy Leonard David

Announcements

Page 15 CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTS, 2ND EARLY MARS CONFERENCE SPECIAL SECTION OF JGR-PLANETS.Journal of Geophysical Research release

Page 15 ESA/ISGP JOINT LIFE SCIENCE MEETING 2005From the NAI Newsletter

Page 16 CALL FOR APPLICATIONS FOR ASM UNDERGRADUATE AND MICROBIOLOGY UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPSBy Larry Aaronson and Doretha Foushee

Page 16 NASA FREE COMPUTER MODEL AVAILABLE TO CLASSROOMSNASA release 05-018

Mission Reports

Page 16 CASSINI-HUYGENS UPDATESNASA/ESA releases

http://www.space.com/php/contactus/feedback.php?r=ld

Marsbugs: The Electronic Astrobiology Newsletter, Volume 12, Number 1, 14 January 2005

1 DEEP IMPACT UPDATESNASA/JPL releases

Page 22 NASA ROVERS' ADVENTURES ON MARS CONTINUENASA/JPL release 2005-001

Page 24 MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGESNASA/JPL/MSSS releases

Page 24 MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGESNASA/JPL/ASU releases

Page 24 MARS RECONNAISSANCE ORBITER MISSION STATUSNASA/JPL release 2005-006

TOP TEN ASTROBIOLOGY STORIES OF 2004, NUMBER 6: PLANETOIDS BEYOND PLUTOFrom Astrobiology Magazine30 December 2004

The editors of Astrobiology Magazine revisit the highlights of the year and where possible point to one of the strongest lineups ever for beginning a new turn of the calendar. Between the marathon still being run by the twin Mars rovers and the expected descent to Saturn's moon, Titan, next year promises no letdowns.

Number six on the countdown of 2004 highlights was detection of planetoids beyond Pluto. In December, David Jewitt (University of Hawaii) and Jane Luu (MIT Lincoln Lab) presented the first high quality spectrum of a bright Kuiper Belt Object (50000) Quaoar beyond Pluto. What they found was the signature of potential volcanic heating, since the ice spectrum showed signs of a crystallizing and not amorphous process at work on the icy planetoid. The surface temperature of Quaoar is only 50K (-220°C) and, at these low temperatures, the thermodynamically preferred form of ice is amorphous (meaning "structureless": the water molecules freeze where they stick in a jumbled pattern). The data show that the ice on Quaoar has at some time been raised in temperature above 110K, the critical temperature for transformation from amorphous to crystalline.

This artist's rendition shows "Quaoar" in relation to other bodies in the solar system, including Earth and its Moon; Pluto; and Sedna, a planetoid beyond Pluto that is the largest known object beyond Pluto. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Two ways to heat the ice are 1) to form it at temperatures above 110K, presumably beneath the frigid surface, and then somehow expose it to view from Earth. Warm ice could be excavated by impact from deeper layers, or blown onto the surface by low-level cryovolcanic outgassing through vents. 2) Ice on the surface could be heated above 110K by micrometeorite impact. The timescale for this "back-conversion" of crystalline to amorphous ice is uncertain but probably on the order of 10 Myr for the surface ice. 10 Myr is effectively "yesterday" compared to the 4500 Myr age of the solar system. This means that whatever process emplaces the crystalline ice (basically either impact gardening or cryovolcanic outgassing) has been active in the immediate past and, indeed, is probably still active. While the interpretation remains speculative, the good news is that the researchers are, for the first time, able to take useful spectra that reveal unexpected and intriguing properties of the surface of distant Quaoar.

Quaoar's "icy dwarf" cousin, Pluto, was discovered in 1930 in the course of a 15-year search for trans-Neptunian planets. It wasn't realized until much later that Pluto actually was the largest of the known Kuiper belt objects. The Kuiper belt wasn't theorized until 1950, after comet orbits provided telltale evidence of a vast nesting ground for comets just beyond Neptune. The first recognized Kuiper belt objects were not discovered until the early 1990s. This hard-to-pronounce planetoid was named after a creation god of the Tongva native American tribe, the original inhabitants of the Los Angeles basin. According to legend, Quaoar, "came down from heaven; and, after reducing chaos to order, laid out the world on the back of seven giants. He then created the lower animals, and then mankind."

Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1366.html.

THE NEW AND IMPROVED SETIBy Seth ShostakFrom Space.com30 December 2004

It's an easy question: a query that the media frequently pose, and for obvious reasons. Of course, it would be nice to say, "well, we detected three Type II civilizations last week, but they weren't especially interesting," and sometimes I do this for effect. But of course it's not true, and until it is, some people assume that there's nothing new with SETI.

Wrong. Despite all the difficulties that beset it (mostly connected with funding), SETI is currently experiencing a paroxysm of creative ferment. The new year is sure to be memorable, as glossy new instruments come on-line. Success in SETI depends on speed: how quickly can you check out large expanses of celestial acreage? Well, SETI is about to seriously crank up its speed, and metaphorically trade in chariots for jets.

Read the full article at http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_whats_new_041230.html.

PARACHUTING TO TITANBy Tony PhillipsFrom NASA Science News30 December 2004

Get ready for two of the strangest hours in the history of space exploration. Two hours. That's how long it will take the European Space Agency's Huygens probe to parachute to the surface of Titan on January 14th. Descending through thick orange clouds, Huygens will taste Titan's atmosphere, measure its wind and rain, listen for alien sounds and, when the clouds part, start taking pictures.

No one knows what the photos will reveal. Icy mountains? Liquid methane seas? Hot lightning? "It's anyone's guess," says Jonathan Lunine, a professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona and a member of the Huygens science team. "We might not even understand what we see, not immediately." Such is Titan—the biggest mystery in the solar system.

Astronomers have been watching Titan, Saturn's largest moon, for centuries. From Earth it looks like a pinprick of light orbiting the ringed planet—nothing extraordinary. But when NASA's Voyager spacecraft flew by Titan in 1980, observers realized it was something special. Titan is huge: bigger than the planets Mercury and Pluto. It has a huge atmosphere, too: three times taller than Earth's and one and a half times as massive. The air on Titan is choked with organic compounds akin to smog. Some of these molecules are building blocks of life. Could life begin on a world where the surface temperature dips 290°F below zero? "Probably not," says Lunine, but, again, no one knows.

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Titan's orange clouds hide its surface and, maybe, some pretty bizarre things. There's methane (CH4) in Titan's atmosphere. Here on Earth methane comes from, e.g., cows and bogs. On Titan, no one knows where it comes from. Because Titan is so cold, its methane can liquefy and rain down from the skies possibly filling lakes and seas on the ground. Liquid methane has about the same appearance and viscosity as ordinary water, but it's some 300°F colder. Lakes on Titan, if they exist, might look like lakes on Earth, but they certainly won't be the same.

Artist Craig Attebery's concept of Huygens' descent. Image credit: ESA/NASA.

This false-color view of Titan is a composite of images captured by Cassini's infrared camera, which can penetrate some of Titan's clouds. Light and dark regions in the upper left quadrant are unknown types of terrain on Titan's surface. Image credit: NASA.

The Huygens probe, about the size of a small car and shaped like a flying saucer, will penetrate the clouds and investigate first hand. "We're so hopeful that Huygens will succeed," says Alfred McEwen, a colleague of Lunine's at the University of Arizona and a member of the Cassini imaging team. "We're pulling our hair out trying to understand Titan."

Huygens rode to Saturn onboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The trip lasted 7 years. Cassini arrived in July 2004 and is now orbiting Saturn. Huygens remained onboard until December 25th when it separated from its mother ship and headed for Titan. The probe is scheduled to enter Titan's atmosphere at 10:13 GMT (5:13 AM EST) on January 14, 2005.

On the way down, Huygens will collect air samples for analysis by onboard gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers. This will tell researchers exactly what Titan's atmosphere is made of. Huygens' external sensors will measure temperature, pressure, winds and electromagnetic fields that might come from lightning. Lightning is important. Seething-hot strokes can fuse simple organic molecules into more complicated and interesting things. Some scientists think this is how life began on Earth billions of years ago. A microphone onboard Huygens will listen for thunder (a sign of lightning) and other sounds. For the first time, we'll get to hear what another world sounds like.

Huygens is going to descend during daylight hours. Sunlight filtering through the clouds probably casts an orange glow across the landscape "like 1000 full moons," says McEwen. That's bright enough to read a newspaper, but still about 1000 times dimmer than a sunlit day on Earth. Just before Huygens lands it will turn on an intense flashlight and shine it on the terrain below. This is done to improve pictures of the landing site and help the probe's spectrometers get better readings of elements and minerals in the soil—or whatever's down there.

An artists' concept of Huygens floating in a liquid methane sea. Image credit: ESA/Open University.

"We don't know what we're going to land on," notes Lunine. Huygens might go tumbling down a cliff. It might splash into a lake or sea (Huygens is designed to float). Or it might thump down on a smooth icy plain. "Just about anything is possible."

If the probe survives touchdown, the Surface Science Package attached the bottom of the saucer can measure the properties of the landing site: thermal and electrical conductivity, index of refraction, sonar depth and many other things. Mission planners hope Huygens survives on the "ground" for at least 30 minutes before Titan's bitter cold and unknown hazards shut it down. Even a few minutes of data would be cause for celebration.

While all this is happening, the Cassini spacecraft will be flying overhead, recording Huygens' transmissions. Later, Cassini will turn toward home and relay the pictures and sounds and priceless measurements. Radio signals from Saturn take 1 hour and 8 minutes to reach Earth. "We can't wait to get the data," says McEwen. What's down there? No one knows, but it's bound to be strange. Get ready.

Read the original article at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/30dec_titan.htm.

An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05c.html.

TOP TEN ASTROBIOLOGY STORIES OF 2004, NUMBER 5: CATCHING A COMETFrom Astrobiology Magazine31 December 2004

Comets may have played a major role in the origin of life on Earth, delivering a significant share of the Earth's water as well as carbon-rich organic compounds. When the Stardust spacecraft passed within 236 kilometers (147

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http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05c.html

http://www.artcenter.edu/accd/faculty/fac_bio.jsp?id=AAAHWVAAKAAAAEqAAJ&pg=/accd/faculty/fac_index.jsp

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0412/titan_attebery_big.jpg

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia06139.html

http://pssri.open.ac.uk/missions/mis-casa1.htm


miles) of the comet Wild 2 on January 2, 2004, it encountered a storm of dust particles traveling at over 6 times the speed of a bullet. The spacecraft collected some of the hundreds of thousands of particles that impacted each second, and this sample will be returned to Earth in January 2006.

Left: Comet Wild 2 imaged just after flyby. The image highlights the remarkably rugged surface of the comet, which in close-up stereo views shows hardened impact craters, cliffs, and mesas in the landscape. Image credit: NASA/JPL. Right: Comet Halley imaged by European flyby. Image credit: ESA.

The Stardust spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL.

When Stardust's Sample Return capsule containing the comet particles arrives on Earth in 2006, it will be sent to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for analysis. Because comets are composed of ice, dust, and gas—the building blocks of the solar system—particles collected from a comet may be able to tell us something about how the solar system formed.

There are two more comet missions currently planned. NASA's Deep Impact mission will visit the comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005. The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission launched in March of 2004 and will reach the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November 2014.


TOP TEN ASTROBIOLOGY STORIES OF 2004, NUMBER 4: SPIRIT ON THE LAKEFrom Astrobiology Magazine2 January 2005

One of the primary goals of the rover missions was to learn once and for all if liquid water ever existed on the red planet. Of the twin rovers, the Opportunity rover has found clues to briny lakes or even a sea on the opposite side of Mars compared to where the Spirit rover currently sits perched near a summit. The Spirit rover was the first successful lander to touchdown since 1997, when the Pathfinder mission began exploring Mars on wheels. Spirit holds the distance record for miles covered since landing in Gusev Crater and beginning its tour of the Columbia Hills.

"With Spirit, the immediate plan is to continue to work our way up through the Columbia Hills," said principal investigator, Steve Squyres of Cornell. "We're very much in discovery mode in that mission. With the Opportunity rover in Eagle crater, in our first six to eight weeks, we were in discovery mode, where every day there was some new revelation about the rocks. And that helped us to form a set of hypotheses that we could use at Endurance crater to systematically test."

"Where we are with Spirit right now is sort of like where we were with Opportunity at Eagle crater," continued Squyres. "We had all that basalt out on the plains, and Spirit did its thing there, and it took us about 160 sols just to get to the Columbia Hills. But since arriving there each new rock, each new outcrop, is some new piece of the puzzle."

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit looked back with its navigation camera during the rover's 332nd martian day, or sol (December 8, 2004), and captured this image. Spirit had driven about 110 meters (120 yards) during the preceding six sols. Image credit: NASA/JPL.


OUR COSMIC PATCH (INTERVIEW WITH SIR MARTIN REES, PART 1)By Helen MatsosFrom Astrobiology Magazine3 January 2005

Britain's Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, took time from his busy schedule to talk with Astrobiology Magazine's Chief Editor and Executive Producer, Helen Matsos. His three-part interview considers a broad range of alternative planetary futures, while highlighting today's changes in one of the oldest sciences, astronomy.

Martin Rees earned his degrees in mathematics and astronomy at the University of Cambridge, where he is currently professor of cosmology and astrophysics and Master of Trinity College. Director of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, he has also been a professor at Sussex University. He has been Britain's Astronomer Royal since 1995. He has modeled quasars and has made important contributions to the theories of galaxy formation, galaxy clustering, and the origin of the cosmic background radiation. His early study of the distribution of quasars helped discredit the steady state cosmological theory. He was one of the first to propose that enormous black holes power the quasars. He has investigated the anthropic principle, the idea that we find the universe the way it is because if it were much different we would not be here to examine it, and the question of whether ours is one of a multitude of "universes." He has written nine books. Through his public speaking and writing he has made the Universe a more familiar place for everyone.

British Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees.

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Helen Matsos (HM): I was recently at a gathering of scientists, including notables such as Mitchell Feigenbaum, Oliver Sacks, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and discovered you are much admired among this group. For instance, Neil referred to you as one of the last great gentleman astronomers of our time.

Martin Rees (MR): (laughs) Does he mean it as compliment or not?

HM: Maybe he was referring to your title of Astronomer Royal. My understanding is that this role dates back to 1675, and was established to rectify the tables of star motion used for navigation. I'm wondering what's the modern-day relevance of this role.

MR: The quaint antique title indeed goes back to 1675, when the Royal Observatory was set up in Greenwich and the person in charge was given this title. The reason there is a title of Astronomer Royal, but no Chemist Royal or Physicist Royal, is that those other sciences were not professionalized and supported by governments until much later. Astronomy is one of the oldest sciences—perhaps the oldest after medicine—and may be the first to do more good than harm.But in the last 50 years, British astronomy has been making use of telescopes overseas with clearer skies, and the Greenwich Observatory is now essentially a museum. The title of Astronomer Royal was made an honorary title given to a senior academic astronomer. So my "day job" is being a professor at Cambridge University, and the title is purely honorary.

Left: NGC 1999, a nebula in the constellation Orion. Like fog around a street lamp, a reflection nebula shines only because the light from an embedded source illuminates its dust; the nebula does not emit any visible light of its own. Image credit: NASA/Hubble. Right: The Ring Nebula. 2,000 light years distant in the direction of the constellation, Lyra, the ring is formed in the late stages of the inner star's life, when it sheds a thick and expanding outer gas layer. Image credit: NASA/Hubble.

HM: Britain has such a rich history of supporting science and producing brilliant scientific minds. For instance, we're sitting here in Cambridge, looking across the green to where Isaac Newton worked and lived. What is Britain's role in the field of science today?

MR: It's true we have a proud tradition of science, from Newton through Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, J. J. Thomson and many others.

Circumstances are rather different today, because government support is now more important than private patronage. But in the UK, you still have a strong tradition in science, partly because the British government has been more enlightened than many other European governments in providing a growing science budget. We hope to be able to maintain our competitiveness with the United States. We're much smaller, of course, but in terms of quality we can be a world force in science.

HM: In your book, Just Six Numbers, you say there are six numbers that dictate the state of the universe, and that if any one of them were slightly different, then life as we know it would be impossible. Are any of your numbers related to ones in the Drake equation, which calculates the probability of life in the universe?

MR: We don't really know the likelihood of life because the uncertainties in the Drake equation, which still are still very large, are the probabilities that life gets started given the right kind of initial soup. Astronomers can't say whether life is likely or unlikely, because the most uncertain terms in the Drake Equation are the terms biologists have to solve for us.

HM: Then what can astronomers predict based on your six numbers? MR: Astronomers can say what the necessary conditions are for life, but not the sufficient ones. In order for life to develop, there have to be habitats in the universe that are stable, are warmed by a star, and contain not just hydrogen but all the elements in the periodic table—like oxygen, carbon, and phosphorus—that are important for life.

In the last few decades, astronomers and cosmologists have been able to understand how our physical universe has evolved over nearly fourteen billion years, from its beginnings to the so-called big bang to its present state with galaxies, stars, and planets. We are starting to understand how stars and galaxies formed as the cosmos cooled down from its hot initial state. Those first stars were fueled by the same process of an H-bomb: the conversion of hydrogen to helium. Then even hotter stars fused helium into carbon, oxygen, and the rest of the periodic table.

Every atom on Earth was forged in an ancient star that completed its life more than four and a half billion years ago. Those ancient stars exploded, throwing debris back into interstellar gas. Our solar system condensed from interstellar clouds contaminated by the debris from earlier stars. So we are literally the ashes of long dead stars, or, if you are less romantic, we are the nuclear waste from fuel that made those ancient stars shine. On the basis of this hypothesis, we can understand why oxygen and carbon are common but gold and uranium are rare, and how they came to exist in our solar system.

HM: So your six numbers are setting the physical parameters for life to occur in the universe?

MR: We can understand how stars and planets formed, and how they came to contain all the basic elements necessary for life. So setting the scene for the origin of life is something we do understand better. Then biologists take over, and biology is a harder subject than physics and astronomy, because what makes things hard to understand is not how big they are but how complicated they are. As I said in one of my books, an insect is more complex than a star. A star is basically a large ball of gas held together by gravity, while even the smallest insect has layer upon layer of structure and is a far greater challenge to understand.

In a universe where the basic governing physical laws were different, these processes couldn't have happened. If gravity were too strong, then you couldn't have long-lived, stable stars, because gravity would crush everything. If the forces within the atomic nucleus were too strong, then hydrogen would not exist. If those nuclear forces were too weak, then only hydrogen would exist, and not the other elements.

Left: The early Sun was half its current luminosity. Image credit: NASA. Right: "...an insect is more complex than a star... and is a far greater challenge to understand." —M. Rees. Image credit: NASA.

So it does seem that there are various ways in which the laws of physics are fine-tuned, and the same is true of the universe itself. You could imagine a universe that expanded so fast that gravity could never pull together proto-galaxies or proto-stars. Or a universe that expanded so slowly, it collapsed before there'd been time for anything much to happen. You could imagine a universe that contained no atoms at all—just dark matter and dark energy. So in order to provide the pre-conditions for any kind of life or complexity, our universe had to be set up and governed by rather special laws.

This leads to another mystery, a mystery that physicists address rather than biologists, which is the nature of the physical laws. Are there equations that can define those laws exactly, and give us the mass of the electron, or the strength of different forces? Or will we never have such a thing? Could it be that the strength of these forces is some kind of environmental accident?

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One idea many of us are pursuing is a grander concept of the physical world. Over history we've gone from thinking of our solar system as being the center of the universe, to our galaxy being the center, to the present consensus that our big bang gave rise to zillions of galaxies. Some of us now think that perhaps we have to go a step further—that the big bang wasn't the only one.

HM: There could be other universes...

MR: There could other universes separate from ours, other big bangs maybe separated by an extra-spatial dimension, or different in other ways. If that's the case, then it's possible that those different universes would be governed by somewhat different physical laws.

Some physicists believe this is true. If so, then the fine-tuning of our universe occasions no surprise. If there were not merely zillions of galaxies in the aftermath of our big bang, but there were actually zillions of other big bangs, each governed by different laws, then some would have laws with the capricious forms and basic number values to allow complex life and evolution. Most of the universes would be sterile or stillborn. In this grander context, there will still be basic laws of nature, but they'd be at a deeper level.

What we traditionally call the "laws of nature"—the "laws" that determine the so-called "physical constants"—could then be just parochial bylaws in our cosmic patch.


TOP TEN ASTROBIOLOGY STORIES OF 2004, NUMBER 3: NEW WORLDS, LIVING LARGEFrom Astrobiology Magazine4 January 2005

Number three on the countdown of 2004 highlights was the remarkable progress made in discovering new worlds orbiting other stars. Planet hunting began in earnest only about 10 years ago, but today spans numerous catalogs detailing orbits, diameters and temperatures.

Out of the dust, a planet is born. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt.

Discovering new planets is the culmination of a decade's work in theoretical and observational astronomy. While last year witnessed the first 100 prospective planets identified, this year brought significant outliers into the equation. Most of the planets discovered so far have been large, hot worlds—sometimes called "hot Jupiters". These planets offer little prospects for habitability. The motions of these closer-in giants prevent terrestrial planets from forming stable orbits in the habitable zone. But a solar system with a large planet in a circular orbit five times larger than our own orbit—even a Neptune-sized planet—is a solar system in which a habitable Earth-like planet could exist quite comfortably.

2004 signaled the introduction of younger planets than ever thought possible to view as well as tantalizing hints of how to visualize such a pale blue dot when found. In June, University of Rochester researchers suggested the possibility of a planet on the order of only 100,000 to half a million years old, a finding that defied expectations that young stars might form planets from a dusty disk in such a short period.

Astronomers also passed a milestone of cataloguing properties for more than 130 planets orbiting nearby stars in our galaxy. Although the solar systems they have found are very different from ours, by studying the planets that have been found - their masses, their orbits and their stars—they are uncovering intriguing hints that our galaxy may be brimming with solar systems like our own. How many of the known exoplanetary systems might contain habitable Earth-type planets? Perhaps half of them, reported a team from the Open University, led by Professor Barrie Jones, in April. Popularly known as the "Goldilocks" zone, this region would be neither too hot for liquid water, nor too cold.

Left: Scene from a moon orbiting the extra-solar planet in orbit around the star HD70642. Image credit: David A. Hardy. Right: Artist concept of star system, HD70642. Image Credit: John Rowe animation.


NOT SO NEBULOUS—MAGNETICS OF PLANET FORMATIONBased on an Astronomy and Astrophysics reportFrom Astrobiology Magazine4 January 2005

Planetary nebulae are expanding gas shells that are ejected by Sun-like stars at the end of their lifetimes. Sun-like stars spend most of their lifetime burning hydrogen into helium. At the end of this hydrogen fusion phase, these stars increase their diameter by about a factor of 100 and become "red giant stars". At the end of the red giant phase, the outer layers of the star are blown away. The ejected gas continues to expand out from the remaining central star, which later evolves into a "white dwarf" when all nuclear fusion has ceased. Astronomers believe that a planetary nebula forms when a fast stellar wind that comes from the central star catches up a slower wind produced earlier when the star ejected most of its outer layers. At the boundary between the two winds, a shock occurs that produces the visible dense shell characteristic of planetary nebulae. The gas shell is excited and lighted up by the light emitted by the hot central star. The light from the central star is able to light up the planetary nebula for some 10,000 years.

The observed shapes of planetary nebulae are very puzzling: most of them (about 80%) are bipolar or elliptical rather than spherically symmetric. This complexity has lead to beautiful and amazing images obtained with modern telescopes. The pictures below compare planetary nebulae with bipolar (left) and spherical (right) shapes.

The reason why most planetary nebulae are not spherical is not well understood. Several hypotheses have been considered so far. One of them suggests that the strange shapes of planetary nebulae might be due to some centrifugal effect that results from the fast rotation of red giants. Another theory is that the symmetry of the star's wind may be affected by a companion star. However, the most recent and convincing theories explaining the shapes of the nebulae involve magnetic fields. The presence of magnetic fields would nicely explain the complicated shapes of planetary nebulae, as the ejected matter is trapped along magnetic field lines. This can be compared to iron filings trapped along the field lines of a bar magnet - a classic demonstration in high school physics classrooms. Since strong magnetic fields at the surface of the star also exert pressure on the gas, matter can more easily leave the star at the magnetic poles where the magnetic field is strongest. There are several ways magnetic fields can be created in the vicinity of planetary nebulae. Magnetic fields can be produced by a stellar dynamo during the phase when the nebula is ejected. For a dynamo to exist, the core

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of the star must rotate faster than the envelope (as is the case in the Sun). It is also possible that the magnetic fields are fossil relics of previous stages of stellar evolution. Under most circumstances, the matter in stars is so highly electrically conductive that magnetic fields can survive for millions or billions of years. Both mechanisms, combined with the interaction of the ejected matter with the surrounding interstellar gas, would be able to shape the planetary nebulae. Until recently, the idea that magnetic fields are an important ingredient in the shaping of planetary nebulae was a purely theoretical claim. In 2002, the first indications of the presence of such magnetic fields were found. Radio observations revealed magnetic fields in circumstellar envelopes of giant stars. These circumstellar envelopes are indeed progenitors of planetary nebulae. However, no such magnetic field has ever been observed in the nebulae themselves. To obtain direct clue of the presence of magnetic fields in planetary nebulae, astronomers decided to focus on the central stars, where the magnetic fields should have survived.

Left: Simulation of dusty disks with energetic core. Image credit: NASA/Spitzer. Middle: The spherical Abell 39 nebula. Image credit: WIYN/NOAO/NSF. Right: The bipolar Butterfly Nebula NGC 6302. Image credit: ESO.

This first direct evidence has now been obtained. For the first time, Stefan Jordan and his team detected magnetic fields in several central stars of planetary nebulae. Using the FORS1 spectrograph of the 8-m class Very Large Telescope (VLT, European Southern Observatory, Chile), they measured the polarization of the light emitted by four of these stars. The polarization signatures in the spectral lines make it possible to determine the intensity of the magnetic fields in the observed stars. In the presence of a magnetic field, atoms change their energy in a characteristic way; this effect is called the Zeeman effect and was discovered in 1896 by Pieter Zeeman in Leiden (Netherlands). If these atoms absorb or emit light, the light becomes polarized. This makes it possible to determine the strength of the magnetic field by measuring the strength of the polarization. These polarization signatures are usually very weak. Such measurements require very high quality data that can only be obtained using 8-meter class telescopes such as the VLT. Four central stars of planetary nebulae were observed by the team and magnetic fields were found in all of them. These four stars were chosen because their associated planetary nebulae (named NGC 1360, HBDS1, EGB 5, and Abell 36) are all non-spherical. Therefore, if the magnetic field hypothesis to explain the shapes of planetary nebulae is correct, these stars should have strong magnetic fields. These new results show that it is indeed the case: the strengths of the detected magnetic fields range from 1000 to 3000 Gauss—that is about one thousand times the intensity of the Sun's global magnetic field.

These new observations published by Stefan Jordan and his colleagues support the hypothesis that magnetic fields play a major role in shaping planetary nebulae. The team now plans to search for magnetic fields in the central stars of spherical planetary nebulae. Such stars should have weaker magnetic fields than the ones just detected. These future observations will allow astronomers to better quantify the correlation between magnetic fields and the strange shapes of planetary nebulae. In the few past years, polarimetric observations with the VLT have led to the discovery of magnetic fields in a large number of stellar objects in late evolutionary stages. In addition to improving our understanding of these beautiful planetary nebulae form, the detection of these magnetic fields allows science to take a step forward towards the clarification of the relationship between magnetic fields and stellar physics.


Additional articles on this subject are available at:http://www.spacedaily.com/news/stellar-chemistry-05a.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/nebulae_magnetic_fields.html.

QUEEN'S DISCOVERY SHEDS NEW LIGHT ON ANCIENT TEMPERATURESQueen's University release5 January 2005

A new discovery by a team of Queen's University scientists suggests that ancient earth was much colder than previously thought—a discovery that has broad implications for those studying the earth's climate. Queen's researchers have discovered the mineral ikaite in 700-million-year-old marine sedimentary rocks in the Mackenzie Mountains of the Northwest Territories and eastern Yukon. This discovery proves that the ancient ocean was much colder than previously believed, says Noel James of Queen's department of Geological Sciences and Geological Engineering. It has caused scientists to rethink what they know about the temperatures of ancient earth and possible atmospheric conditions at the time.

"One of the main thrusts of our research is trying to unravel the ancient history of the planet," says James. "If we understand what has happened in the past and how the earth has responded and recovered, it will give us some idea of how the world will respond to some of the things that are happening to it now."

The researchers discovered ikaite at several different levels in what were believed to be rock formations deposited in shallow, warm oceans during the interval between two ice ages that extended all the way to the equator millions of years ago. But ikaite forms in shallow water on the sea bottom at cold temperatures and melts when brought to the surface. The fundamental question for scientists is what triggered the enormous ice ages that left the oceans cold enough for the formation of this mineral?

One controversial theory known as "The Snowball Earth" hypothesis suggests that around 700 million years ago the earth was almost totally enclosed in ice. The Queen's discovery offers alternatives to this hypothesis. Glaciers wax and wane according to how the earth's orbit changes relative to the sun and how much solar radiation reaches the earth over a given time, says James. Was there a major celestial change that allowed the oceans to become so much colder during this period, or was there a change in the composition of the atmosphere that no longer allowed solar radiation to heat the surface of the earth? The Queen's study suggests that an overpopulation of ancient marine plants may have removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and created extreme cold that caused the earth's temperature to fall, and this would be reflected in the composition of the rock.

Queen's earth scientists including Dr. James, Guy Narbonne, Robert Dalrymple and Kurt Kyser are using chemical analysis to determine the precise attributes of the rocks and further pursue the study of the ancient environment at this time in earth's history. These measurements are being completed at the Queen's Facility for Isotope Research, one of the best in North America.

The research is funded by NSERC Discovery and Major Facilities Access grants, Canada Foundation for Innovation and Ontario Innovation Trust.

Contacts:Lorinda PetersonPhone: 613-533-3234E-mail: [email protected]

Nancy DorrancePhone: 613-533-2869E-mail: [email protected]

Read the original news release at http://qnc.queensu.ca/story_loader.php?id=41dbf977b8255.

An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/early-earth-05a.html.

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MARS SCIENCE LABORATORY: NEXT WHEELS ON MARSBy Leonard DavidFrom Space.com5 January 2005

While those unflappable interplanetary twins – Spirit and Opportunity – continue to trudge across Mars, engineers and scientists are readying the next robotic rover destined to trail across the distant sands of the red planet. The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is bigger, heavier, and more powerful than the machinery now at work on Mars. As the next robot to go mobile on Mars, building, testing, and then flying MSL has its challenges. That being said, and while now a solo mission, there is already talk that MSL may follow in the wheel tracks of Spirit and Opportunity—that is, doubling up on Mars. MSL would pick up, pocket and crush rock and soil samples, then dole out those specimens to on-board test chambers for chemical analysis.

Read the full article at http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/mars_science_lab_050105.html.

BEFORE THE BEGINNING (INTERVIEW WITH SIR MARTIN REES, PART 2)By Helen MatsosFrom Astrobiology Magazine5 January 2005

Helen Matsos (HM): Last year the big "science event" was measuring the cosmic microwave background and dating the big bang to 13.8 billion years ago, within an 8 to 10 percent margin of error. Can you give us some idea of the boundaries of the big bang—what was it like in the first seconds, and how far will the universe expand in the future?

Martin Rees (MR): It is remarkable that in the last two years we have been able to firm up some of the basic cosmic numbers about the age of the universe, the way it's expanding, and also what it's made of. What it's made of turns out to be rather surprising because atoms are only 4 percent of the total, another 25 percent is so-called dark matter—probably some particles made in the big bang that have no electric charge but just swarm around. And there's also some energy latent in empty space itself, something we call dark energy, and that's what's controlling the expansion of the universe. So we've learned that the universe has these rather mysterious ingredients.

Crab Nebula in X-rays showing its main central jet. Image credit: NASA.

The long-range forecast is that the universe will go on expanding forever. Stars will eventually burn out, the atoms they're made of will eventually decay, and the stars will erode away. Distant galaxies will not merely fade but will get further and further apart and disappear from view because of the red shift. So the long-range future is a universe that is a very cold and empty place. Nonetheless it will go on for an infinite time.

That's the best guess, but I think we can't have great confidence in that forecast because it depends on the nature of dark energy, which at the moment is making the expansion of the universe speed up. If it continues that way then we can forecast an infinite future, but the dark energy may be more complicated than we know, so we can't be sure about the future.

As regards the past, we can trace things back to the initial instant of the big bang. When the universe had been expanding for one second, at a temperature of about 10 billion degrees, the density of atoms still was not very high.

But when we go back to the first microsecond, the first nanosecond, the first tiny fraction of a second, then things become slightly more uncertain because conditions were more extreme. If we go back to times earlier than of a trillionth of a second, then the conditions were so extreme that we don't have any confidence in explaining the physics. In the first trillionth of a second, every particle in the universe was moving with more energy than can be produced in the biggest possible accelerator on Earth, and the density was far higher than the density of the atomic nucleus.

So the very early universe is a matter or conjecture rather than consensus, because we don't understand the basic laws. Nonetheless, there are many fascinating ideas about what happened in the very early universe in that first tiny fraction of a second. Certainly the key features of the present-day universe were imprinted at that time. The fact that the universe contains matter but not antimatter, the way it is expanding, the fact that it is fairly smooth but has these fluctuations which were the seeds for galaxy formations—all those features were determined at very early stages by physics.

Left: Spectacular gas remnants from exploding star. Image credit: NASA/Hubble. Right: Illustration of quasar jet, inset green upper left, and illustration of the high-energy particle stream from quasar GB1508+5714. The inset image is thought to be the most distant x-ray jet, at 12 billion light years distant. The jet itself stretches a monstrous 100,000 light years alone. Image credit: M. Weiss, Chandra X-Ray Facility, Harvard.

HM: So here it comes, Professor Rees, my favorite slumber party question: What happened before the big bang?

MR: (laughs) People always ask, "What happened before the big bang?" We certainly can't answer that question, because we have to worry about what the question might actually mean. One of the most popular ideas by physicists is that when you extrapolate back to the very beginning, we have to jettison many of our common sense ideas about space and time. Maybe it's no longer the case that space has just three important dimensions and time just ticks away. That makes the early universe more complicated to analyze. If you don't have a clear idea of clocks ticking away, the idea of a direction of time—a "before" and "after"—doesn't have any clear meaning.

There are lots of ideas of what might have happened at the very beginning, but we can't say whether there are other big bangs apart from ours. If there are, we can't say whether they are before or after or alongside ours, because to make such a statement implies that you can have a single coordinate system covering them all and a single clock that can be coordinated and synchronized between the different universes. So we can't trace things right back to the beginning, we can't say whether our universe is the only one, and we can't even say whether there are only three dimensions of space.

HM: Are you alluding to string theory? Does this theory shed new light on multiple universes?

MR: One feature of string theory is it requires six extra-spatial dimensions. The debate is about whether those dimensions all are so tightly wound that they manifest themselves on a microscopic scale. Each point in our ordinary space would be like origami, tightly wound to six other dimensions.

But the more exciting possibility is that not all the extra dimensions are tightly wound together. There could be other universes that are separate three-

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dimensional spaces, separated from us because we are all embedded in four-dimensional space. We are unaware of them in the same way that bugs crawling around on a sheet of paper might be unaware of bugs on a different sheet of paper. Each think they are in a two-dimensional universe, and have no concept of a third. So there could be another universe just a millimeter away from us.

That's one of the many ideas opened up by string theory. The ideas are very speculative because there's no direct measurement we can make, but they have made people more open-minded about different possibilities. Physical reality is much more complicated than we can observe with our telescopes. Indeed, some extreme versions of this idea suggest that physical reality might be as complicated as biology, and that what we call our "observable universe" may be, in the perspective of cosmic reality, no more than one twig on one tree in some enormous forest.

HM: Almost like a fractal analogy.

MR: Yes, but on a vast scale.

HM: Do you personally believe in string theory?

MR: When it's so uncertain, it's best to remain agnostic and open-minded about all these new ideas. I certainly think it's good that people are seriously exploring these ideas in the hope that there will be some way of firming them up. It's an inspiring conception: a physical reality even grander than the part people can see. Just as we regard our Earth as a rather special oasis in our galaxy, so we might regard our whole observable universe as some friendly oasis within a huge multi-verse.


FINDING OTHER WORLDSBy Edna DeVoreFrom Space.com6 January 2005

People have long gazed at the sky and wondered if there were other worlds—Earths—in orbit around the distant stars. Since the 1992 announcement of pulsar planets by Alex Wolszczan, more than 130 giant (Jupiter and Saturn size) planets in orbit about nearby stars have been discovered using ground-based telescopes. In 2007, NASA's Kepler Mission will begin the space-based search for extrasolar planets. Over its planned observing lifetime, Kepler is likely to discover many hundreds of extrasolar planets both large and small. As a space-based satellite, Kepler is the first observatory capable of finding Earth-size worlds in the habitable zone of distant Suns. In other words, Kepler may find "good places to live."

Read the full article at http://www.space.com/searchforlife/devore_other_worlds_050106.html.

TOP TEN ASTROBIOLOGY STORIES OF 2004, NUMBER 2: CLASH OF THE TITANSFrom Astrobiology Magazine7 January 2005

Left: Titan descent by Huygens probe leaving Cassini storage, Christmas 2004. Image credit: JPL/Space Science Institute. Right: The haze of an atmospheric layer on Saturn's moon, Titan. Image credit: Voyager Project, JPL, NASA.

Number two on the countdown of 2004 highlights was the Cassini mission to Saturn. At 1.25 billion kilometers (750 million miles) from Earth, after a 7-year journey through the Solar system, the Huygens probe is about to descend from the Cassini orbiter to enter a ballistic trajectory toward Titan, the largest and most mysterious moon of Saturn, in order to dive into its atmosphere on

14 January. The year brought some of the most spectacular images yet of the outer solar system.

On Christmas Eve, the probe destined for the Earth-like moon, Titan, successfully detached and headed off to its controlled collision in a few weeks. The spacecraft will be the first man-made object to explore in-situ this unique environment, whose chemistry is assumed to be very similar to that of the early Earth just before life began, 3.8 billion years ago.

The Cassini-Huygens pair, a joint mission conducted by NASA, ESA and the Italian Space Agency (ASI), was launched into space on October 15, 1997. With the help of several gravity assist maneuvers during flybys of Venus, Earth and Jupiter, it took almost 7 years for the spacecraft to reach Saturn. The Cassini orbiter, carrying Huygens on its flank, entered an orbit around Saturn on 1 July 2004, and began to investigate the ringed planet and its moons for a mission that will last at least four years.

The first distant flyby of Titan took place on July 2-3, 2004. It provided data on Titan's atmosphere which were confirmed by the data obtained during the first close flyby on October 26, 2004 at an altitude of 1174 km. These data were used to validate the entry conditions of the Huygens probe. A second close flyby of Titan by Cassini-Huygens at an altitude of 1200 km is scheduled on December 13 and will provide additional data to further validate the entry conditions of the Huygens probe.

Huygens will remain dormant until a few hours before its arrival at Titan on January 14. The entry into the atmosphere is set for 11:15 CET. Huygens is planned to complete its descent in about two hours and 15 minutes, beaming back its science data to the Cassini orbiter for replay to Earth later in the afternoon. If Huygens, which is designed as an atmospheric probe rather than a lander, survives touchdown on the surface, it could deliver up to 2 hours of bonus data before the link with Cassini is lost. Direct radio signals from Huygens will reach Earth after 67 minutes of interplanetary travel at the speed of light. An experiment has been set up by radio scientists that will use an array of radio telescopes around the Pacific to attempt to detect a faint tone from Huygens. If successful, early detection is not expected before around 11:30 CET.


LISTENING FOR ET: TWO DECADESBy David PescovitzFrom Astrobiology Magazine7 January 2005

The SETI Institute predicts that we'll detect an extraterrestrial transmission within twenty years. If that turns out to be true, it'll probably be the folks at UC Berkeley's Hat Creek radio observatory who will have heard the call. Right now, the Allen Telescope Array of more than three-hundred dishes is under construction at Hat Creek five hours north of San Francisco. Within a year, the first thirty dishes will be operational, forming the basis of a giant ear that listens for intelligent beings in space while simultaneously gathering data for groundbreaking astronomy research.

William "Jack" Welch, UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and astronomy, has been a driving force in the design and construction of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) since the project first got off the ground five years ago as a joint effort between UC Berkeley and the SETI Institute. Named for major donor Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, the array will eventually consist of 350 6.1-meter radio dishes electronically networked together into a radio telescope with unprecedented sensitivity. Precisely distributed across 2.6-acres on the Hat Creek grounds, the combined dishes will have far greater sensitivity than much more expensive 100-meter telescopes.

The SETI project scours millions of radio channels for narrow-band signals, indicative of intelligent origin. It's like listening for a station as you twist your car radio's tuning knob past all the static. Until now, SETI has used limited time from myriad radio telescopes around the world, limiting the number of stars that can be observed. However, the ATA will be dedicated to the project, speeding up the SETI search by a factor of 100.

Meanwhile, the unique design of the system enables astronomers to monitor a huge range of wavelengths to observe other cosmic phenomena simultaneously with the SETI search. "SETI is admittedly a long-shot," says

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Welch, holder of UC Berkeley's first Chair in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. "I don't have the patience to do only that, so it appeals to me to have a steady flow of other data for us to study as well."

Left: The Allen Telescope Array (ATA); right: the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).

For example, Welch and his colleagues will use the array to make a cosmological map of atomic hydrogen, the most abundant element we know of. Indeed, the visible universe may be composed of up to ninety-percent hydrogen. Determining its spatial distribution in nearby galaxies could provide insight into the evolution of the cosmos and the mysteries of dark matter. "We'll be able to look halfway back to the beginning of the universe," Welch says. "The ability to observe that far back into time is limited right now."

To crank up the telescope's sensitivity, Welch and his colleagues devised a bit of ingenious antenna technology. In traditional pyramid-shaped antennas like those used in the ATA, the signal is picked up at the tip of the structure, called the feed, and runs down wires to the receiver. The problem, Welch explains, is that much of the signal gets lost along the way. To keep the signal as pure as possible, the Berkeley researchers shoehorned the receiver components inside the feed itself.

"It's just one new wrinkle for technology that was originally developed in the 1950s, but it enables our feed to essentially have no limitation on bandwidth," Welch says. Right now, just three prototype dishes are being put through their paces at Hat Creek.

In the next few months though, the researchers will install more than two-dozen others, nearly one dish a day. By summer, Welch hopes this first small array will be scanning stars many light-years away. Whether ET is intelligent enough to call remains to be seen, or rather heard, but Welch is convinced that there's something out there.

"The recent discovery of planets around many nearby stars is a strong argument that our solar system isn't really unique at all," he says. "That in itself makes it almost certain that there are nearby planets with some kind of life on it."


TOP TEN ASTROBIOLOGY STORIES OF 2004, NUMBER 1: OPPORTUNITY KNOCKSFrom Astrobiology Magazine7 January 2005

Number one on the countdown of 2004 highlights was the Opportunity mission to Mars. On January 25, Opportunity landed on Mars. The landing site, Meridiani Planum, was the flattest location scouted in the history of Mars exploration. Meridiani also offered some of the most unique geochemistry seen on the red planet, so scientists set their sights on finding water—or at least, the remnant evidence that water once existed on what today is a dust bowl.

The Opportunity exploration team was not to be disappointed in 2004. The rover's story, as detailed in the eleven Science papers published in December, is mainly one about water and salt.

Sedimentary rocks Opportunity examined, "clearly preserve a record of environmental conditions different from any on Mars today," report 50 rover-team scientists led by Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, NY and Dr. Ray Arvidson of Washington University, St. Louis, MO.

"Liquid water was once intermittently present at the martian surface at Meridiani, and at times it saturated the subsurface. Because liquid water is a

key prerequisite for life, we infer conditions at Meridiani may have been habitable for some period of time in martian history," according to Squires, Arvidson and other co-authors.

One type of evidence that Meridiani was wet is the composition of rocks there. The rocks have a high and variable ratio of bromine to chlorine; indicating "the past presence of large amounts of water," write Dr. Rudi Rieder and Dr. Ralf Gellert of Max-Planck-Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany, and co-authors.

Their paper and another by Dr. Phil Christensen of Arizona State University, Tempe, and collaborators report an abundance of sulfur-rich minerals in the rocks, another clue to a watery past. Clinching the case is identification of a hydrated iron-sulfate salt called jarosite in the rocks, as reported by Dr. Goestar Klingelhoefer of the University of Mainz, and Dr. Richard Morris of NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston, and co-authors.

If life ever did exist at Meridiani, the type of rocks found there could be good preservers of fossils, according to Squyres, Dr. John Grotzinger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and co-authors.

The spherules, blueberries and naming have become important to clues on an alien landscape. Image credit: NASA/JPL.

What does this synopsis say about martian habitability? One thing the Viking probes found in the 1970's was Mars is rusting. Indeed the soil was considered highly reactive and oxidizing with the corrosive strength of hydrogen peroxides. The challenge for life at Meridiani is daunting. To survive requires tolerance for extreme conditions: supercold, salty and acidic. While individually not outside the bounds of Earth organisms, the biological hurdle is a challenging one. A supercold world of acidic brines may have once been the best description of Mars.


POOR MAN'S SPACE PROBE—ASTRONOMY THROUGH A MICROSCOPEBy G. TurnerFrom Astrobiology Magazine9 January 2005

William Blake's vision—"To see a world in a grain of sand"—is being realized by a group of researchers at the University of Manchester. Their work, which involves analyzing minute samples of material of extraterrestrial origin, is shedding new light on the origin of our planet and the Solar System. They are among the world-leaders in this seemingly esoteric field. The samples come from meteorites—fragments of rock that have crashed through the Earth's atmosphere from space. Most meteorites consist of the debris left over from the formation of the planets, which is why their analysis is important in understanding the origin and evolution of the Solar System, and the Earth's place within it. In the near future the researchers will have access to even more significant samples—those brought back by space missions to comets and our nearest planetary neighbor, Mars. Although meteorites are sometimes known as "the poor man's space probe," these remarkable objects require sophisticated (and expensive) instruments to extract their primeval secrets. The Manchester group has developed new analytical techniques and instruments to study meteorites, which have benefited other areas of study, particularly the earth sciences and materials science.

In a sense they are heirs of the 19th-century Sheffield industrialist Henry Clifton Sorby, who showed that you could understand how mountain ranges develop by looking at slivers of rock through the newly invented petrological microscope. Sorby developed his microscope to study the grains of iron-nickel alloy found in meteorites, and then went on to show how it could be

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used to understand and improve the properties of Sheffield steel. This must surely be the earliest example of an academic interest in "space research" leading to industrial benefits. Since then, the study of meteorites has brought together physicists, chemists, geologists and astronomers, and has been a fertile breeding ground for advances that have taken earth sciences into space and brought astronomy into the laboratory.

Left: The ALH Meteorite, about the size of a softball and one of more than two dozen Mars samples available for study on Earth today. ALH84001 was found at Allen Hills, Antarctica. Around 28 Mars meteorites have been identified so far. Right: Close-up of Allen Hills meteorite 84001. Image credits: NASA/JSC.

The first signs of that amalgamation came with the advent of the Apollo Moon landings in 1969. A dozen or so U.K. research groups contributed to the program, the largest number outside the U.S. Among them was Grenville Turner, then a young lecturer based at Sheffield University, who developed a new method for dating rocks, called argon-argon dating. Aside from producing the first accurate ages of the lunar surface, it provided the basis for current estimates of the probability of large extraterrestrial bodies striking the Earth. The technique is also now routinely used in the earth sciences and has spawned a mini industry of specialist mass-spectrometer builders, a field in which UK industry still has a leading international role. Mass spectrometers are used to measure abundances of isotopes and can be used to study a wide range of physical and chemical processes in nature. In Manchester we also built in 1999 the first of a new breed of instruments capable of analyzing samples as small as a few hundred atoms. The results of a recent measurement reported in the research journal Science show the presence of the isotope xenon-129, produced from the radioactive decay of a now-extinct isotope, iodine-129, which was itself produced in an exploding star. Found in tiny grains of halite (rock salt) in a primitive meteorite along with minute inclusions of water, it provides evidence that liquid water, a critical component of life, was flowing through the precursors of the planets within 2 million years of the Solar System's birth.

The most remarkable discovery in recent years has been the isolation of "stardust". These are minute grains of diamond, silicon carbide, graphite and corundum (aluminium oxide) which condensed in the atmospheres of stars, millions of years before the birth of our Solar System. In their bizarre isotopic signatures they carry a story of how the chemical elements, which came together to make up the Earth and ourselves, were generated by nuclear processes in the interiors of long dead stars. Current methods for isolating these "pre-solar grains" are decidedly crude and involve dissolving most of the meteorite in strong acids. The process is sometimes described as "burning down the haystack to find the needle" and raises the question, still to be answered, of what information is being lost with the haystack!

The first extraterrestrial samples to be returned to Earth, since Apollo, will arrive later this decade in 2006. These will be grains of dust collected by the NASA Stardust mission from the comet Wild. Comets are frozen relics of the material which accumulated to form the Solar System 4570 million years ago, a time capsule of our own beginnings. Captured in aerogel, a man-made silica-based solid barely 10 times as dense as the air we breathe, the sample will consist of several thousand grains less than one-tenth of a millimeter across. Their analysis will demand the development of a new breed of analytical instrument with unprecedented sensitivity at the atomic scale.

Sometime before 2010, samples of Mars will also be returned to Earth and be subjected to the barrage of techniques, which only the vast array of laboratory-based equipment makes possible. Comparison with the effect of the lunar sample program in the 1970s suggests that the critical technologies developed to analyze these unique samples, and those of cometary grains, which precede them in 2006, will have a major cross-fertilization into analytical instrumentation in other fields.

Much has changed since Sorby's time. Optical microscopes, electron microscopes and many other kinds of sophisticated instrument are now essential tools in fields as diverse as earth and planetary science, semiconductor research, forensic science, nanotechnology, the micro-environment, and so on. But some aspects remain the same—the complex interplay of fundamental science and technology continue to enhance our lives.

Professor G. Turner is Professor of Isotope Geochemistry and head of the Cosmochemistry Research Group at the University of Manchester. This feature is based on an article that appeared in Science and Parliament.


HUBBLE'S INFRARED EYES HOME IN ON SUSPECTED EXTRASOLAR PLANETSpace Telescope Science Institute release 2005-0310 January 2005

Unique follow up observations carried out with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are providing important supporting evidence for the existence of a candidate planetary companion to a relatively bright young brown dwarf star located 225 light-years away in the southern constellation Hydra. Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile detected the planet candidate in April 2004 with infrared observations using adaptive optics to sharpen their view. The VLT astronomers spotted a faint companion object to the brown dwarf star 2MASSWJ 1207334-393254 (aka 2M1207). The object is a candidate planet because it is only one-seven-hundredth the brightness of the brown dwarf (at the longer-than-Hubble wavelengths observed with the VLT) and glimmers at barely 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, which is cooler than a light bulb filament.

Because an extrasolar planet has never been directly imaged before, this remarkable observation required Hubble's unique abilities to do follow-up observations to test and validate if it is indeed a planet. Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) camera conducted complementary observations taken at shorter infrared wavelength observations unobtainable from the ground. This wavelength coverage is important because it is needed to characterize the object's physical nature.

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Very high precision measurements of the relative position between the dwarf and companion were obtained with NICMOS in August 2004. The Hubble images were compared to the earlier VLT observations to try and see if the two objects are really gravitationally bound and hence move across the sky together. Despite the four months between the VLT and NICMOS observations, astronomers say they can almost rule out the probability that the suspected planet is really a background object, because there was no noticeable change in its position relative to the dwarf.

If the two objects are indeed gravitationally bound together they are at least 5 billion miles apart, about 30 percent farther apart than Pluto is from the Sun. Given the mass of 2M1207, inferred from its spectrum, the companion object would take a sluggish 2,500 years to complete one orbit. Therefore, any relative motion seen between the two on much shorter time scales would reveal the candidate planet to be a background interloper and not a gravitationally bound planet.

"The NICMOS photometry supports the conjecture that the planet candidate is about five times the mass of Jupiter if it indeed orbits the brown dwarf," says Glenn Schneider of the University of Arizona. "The NICMOS position measurements, relative to VLT's, indicate the object is a true (and thus orbiting) companion at a 99 percent level of confidence—but further planned Hubble observations are required to eliminate the 1 percent chance that it is a coincidental background object which is not orbiting the dwarf."

Schneider is presenting these latest Hubble observations today at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego, CA. The candidate planet and dwarf are in the nearby TW Hydrae association of young stars that are estimated to be no older than 8 million years. The Hubble NICMOS observations found the object to be extremely red and relatively much brighter at longer wavelengths. The colors match theoretical expectations for an approximately 8 million-year-old object that is about five times as massive as Jupiter. Further Hubble observations by the NICMOS team are planned in April 2005.

Read the original news release at http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2005/03/text/.

Additional articles on this subject are available at:http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1383.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/hubble_seeing_planet.html

OUR COSMIC SELF-ESTEEM (INTERVIEW WITH SIR MARTIN REES, PART 3)By Helen MatsosFrom Astrobiology Magazine10 January 2005

Helen Matsos (HM): Earlier this year our magazine interviewed the Vatican Astronomer, Brother Guy Consolmagno. He discussed how the possible finding of alien life would impact world religions. Do you have any views on that?

Martin Rees (MR): I admire what the Vatican is doing in astronomy. The search for extraterrestrial life is the most exciting quest in 21st-century science. We know too little to say what the odds of success are; we don't know enough to say if it's likely or unlikely. But I think it's a fascinating search.

Of course, there are two parts to the search. One is the search for simple life elsewhere in the solar system, or evidence of a biosphere around an extrasolar planet. The second is the search for complex life. What is the chance that simple life would get started, and then evolve by Darwinian selection into a biosphere anything like the one we have on Earth, with intelligent beings on it? Many people believe that simple life may be common but that advanced life may be rare.

HM: In your book, Our Cosmic Habitat, you say that a quadrant of the sky seems well suited to human habitability. With the discovery of extrasolar planets, it is now thought that as many as a quarter of the stars in our galaxy have solar systems around them. How do these findings relate to the ideas in your book?

MR: The realization that planetary systems are common around many stars is an exciting development. We don't know what fraction of those stars would have habitable planets, but most of us confidently expect there should be many planets in our galaxy that resemble the young Earth, on which life might have gotten started.

Life is possible on Earth because it lies in what is called a habitable zone. Image credit: NASA/JPL.

It would be exciting to find any evidence for biological activity on those planets. Within ten to twenty years we could find this. Obviously the detection of any life beyond the Earth would be of great importance. It would show us that the probability of life getting started was not infinitesimally small, that it happened not just once but more than once and probably very many times.

The search for intelligent life is a different problem, and that may fail even if the search for simple life succeeds. Many people would be depressed if the search for intelligent life failed. It would be disappointing if the SETI searches yielded no results. It would make the cosmos seem a lonelier place. But, I think there'll be some compensations, which I discuss in my book. In particular, I think it would raise our cosmic self-esteem. We could then regard our Earth, tiny though it is, as perhaps being the most important place in the galaxy. It might be the only place where life has evolved into a complex biosphere, containing creatures with structures like our brains, able to contemplate their origin.

I think another perspective astronomy brings to bear on these issues is that astronomers are aware of the tremendous time span lying ahead of us. Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly four billion years of Darwinian selection, and I think many tend to think humans are the culmination of all that. But astronomers know that our sun is less than halfway through its life span. Our sun will flare up and die six billion years from now, a period of time longer than the sun's history so far. Some people imagine that there will be humans watching the sun's demise six billion years from now, but any creatures that exist then will be as different from us now as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

We should think of ourselves as still in the early stage of the emergence of complexity and intelligence. It's hard to conceive what forms that might take on Earth or far beyond Earth. But I think we should see ourselves as nowhere near the culmination of evolution. Even if life is now very rare in the galaxy or unique to Earth, that doesn't mean life is forever going to be a trivial

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afterthought in the cosmos. In the time lying ahead, life from Earth could spread all through the galaxy. The Earth could be cosmically important as the seed from which life spreads more widely.

HM: So we may evolve to a high enough state that we could disperse as an intelligent species throughout the universe. But what about the possibility that life already exists elsewhere?

MR: It's possible that the universe is already teaming with life, but it's equally possible that life is very rare and almost unique to the Earth. In the later case, some people may think that makes life an irrelevant triviality in the cosmos. But if we are mindful of the time that lies ahead, in that far future, life starting from Earth has abundant time to spread through the entire galaxy.

HM: In your book, Our Final Hour... MR: (laughs) It was called The Final Century in Britain, but the Americans, with their craving for instant gratification, wanted instant dis-gratification too, and so they called it Our Final Hour. I was really annoyed about that.

Left: The Terestrial Planet Finder will search for Earth-like planets orbiting 250 of the closest stars. Image credit: NASA. Right: The Milky Way. Image credit: Akira Fujii.

HM: Two countries separated by a common language, I suppose. You say in the book that humans might not survive until the end of this century.

MR: Well I say civilization might not survive. To wipe out all humans is unlikely. But I think a setback as bad as a global nuclear war is quite likely.

HM: And then what happens? How does the story end?

MR: One extreme, pessimistic scenario is that, during this century, we suffer disasters which foreclose all future technological progress and perhaps make it difficult for civilization to survive on Earth.

The optimistic scenario is that, during this century, human communities spread beyond the Earth for the first time. Self-sustaining groups established a hundred years from now would not be destroyed whatever happened to the Earth. That could be the first step towards evolution beyond the Earth.

A feature of this century, which I emphasize in the book, is that not only are traditional technologies changing faster than ever, but the world is changing in different ways. Human beings themselves are going to change. For several thousand years, the one thing that hasn't changed has been human nature and the human physique. But in this century we have targeted drugs, genetic manipulation, and maybe even implants in the brain.

This makes it harder to predict a hundred years into the future than it would have been for someone in 1900 to predict our present-day world. That suggests there are greater uncertainties and greater risks facing us now. But it also suggests that if humans did establish groups beyond the Earth, then it wouldn't take more than a few centuries at most before they evolve into different species. They would be able to use genetic techniques to adjust themselves to survive in a very alien habitat.

HM: What are your thoughts on sending men to Mars and the idea of terraforming Mars?

MR: My view about manned space flight is that, as a scientist and practical man, I'm against it, but as a human being, I'm in favor of it. The practical reason for sending men into space is getting weaker with every advance in robotics and miniaturization. So it can only be justified as a human adventure. The American public is very risk adverse, even though a 2 percent risk, which is what the shuttle flights have had, is not very high by test pilots standards,

and is far lower than the risks that many individuals would take on their own behalf.

Left: "I've heard a lot of people say, 'Why should we go to Mars, because look at what human beings have done to Earth.'" —David Grinspoon. Image credit: NASA. Right: "One of the reasons that people all around the world are so interested in Mars is that it sits outside of the systems of current culture and economics." —Kim Stanley Robinson. Image credit: University of Arizona.

I believe the only future for manned space flight is to do it much more cheaply, where private sponsorship or private enterprise can fund it. And also when adventurers are prepared to accept much higher risks. I believe the first people to go to Mars may go with one-way tickets, but they'd be pioneers. I hope by the end of the century there will be communities on Mars, but I think they will be more in the style of ancient explorers than present-day astronauts.


SCIENTISTS DISCOVER UNIQUE MICROBE IN CALIFORNIA'S LARGEST LAKEUniversity of Oregon release12 January 2005

Scientists at the University of Oregon have discovered a form of blue-green algae that lives independently in California's Salton Sea, using near-infrared light for photosynthesis, according to an article published in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

This new cyanobacterium, isolated from the Salton Sea by the laboratory of University of Oregon biologist Michelle Wood, uses a combination of infrared and visible light for oxygen-evolving photosynthesis. Transmission electron micrograph by Sunny Augustine. Scale bar is 0.10 millimeters.

"This new strain of Acaryochloris is unique because it is able to live on its own," says UO biology professor Michelle Wood. She obtained samples

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containing the organism while studying the diversity of blue-green algae in the hypersaline lake as part of the comprehensive study of the Salton Sea coordinated by Professor Stuart Hurlbert, director of the Center for Inland Waters at San Diego State University.

Scott Miller, the lead author on the paper, grew the organism from samples collected by Wood and Hurlbert. Now an assistant professor of biological sciences at The University of Montana, he was working with Wood as a graduate research associate when he first noticed the organism's unusual lime-green color.

"I knew right away there was something unusual about its photochemistry," Miller recalls. "We purified the pigments from the strain and saw that they were very similar to those known from a species of blue-green algae called Acaryochloris marina, but different from any found in other higher plants or algae. The primary pigment, called chlorophyll d, is only made by Acaryochloris and it is what enables these species to use infrared light."

The Salton Sea and surrounding agricultural fields in California’s Imperial Valley. The Sea’s unique combination of high salinity, frequent anoxia, and extreme eutrophication supports numerous previously unknown microbes. In the January 18, 2005 print edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Oregon professor Michelle Wood and colleagues from The University of Montana and Arizona State University describe a unique photosynthetic bacterium from the Salton Sea that has evolved through a natural process of genetic transfer between distantly related microorganisms. Discovered by lead author Scott Miller while working as a graduate student in Wood’s laboratory, the organism is related to the cyanobacterium Acaryochloris marina. A. marina lives in pristine regions of the South Pacific, inside the tissue of a type of invertebrate animal called a "sea squirt". Wood and Miller speculate that the ability of their new organism to live a free and independent lifestyle, without dependence on a plant or animal host, is facilitated by the very rich environmental conditions of the Salton Sea. LANDSAT image courtesy of NASA, USGS and the Global Land Cover Facility (University of Maryland); processed by Norman Kuring (NASA).

The new microbe is one of only three organisms known to science that use a combination of near-infrared light and visible light to produce oxygen by photosynthesis.

"While there are some bacteria that can use infrared light for photosynthesis, they do not produce oxygen," Wood explains. "Until recently, we thought it was necessary to use visible light to produce oxygen through photosynthesis, but now we know there are at least three organisms that can do this using infrared radiation as well.

"All three of these organisms are closely related species of Acaryochloris, but the other two live in the Pacific and must grow on or in an animal or plant to survive in nature," Wood says. "This new microbe opens up a whole new range of possible habitats where oxygen could be produced by photosynthesis using wavelengths of light that exist beyond the visible spectrum."

The PNAS article is co-authored by Miller and Wood along with Sunny Augustine and Jeanne Selker of the University of Oregon and Tien Le Olson and Robert E. Blankenship of Arizona State University. Augustine, a postdoctoral associate in Wood's lab, worked with Selker, former director of the UO electron microscopy facility, to compare the cellular structure of the new organism with that of the symbiotic form of Acaryochloris. Blankenship and Olson compared its pigments with those of A. marina, one of the symbiotic species.

"Chlorophyll d is a pigment that is intermediate between the chlorophylls found in the more primitive non-oxygen evolving photosynthetic bacteria and the chlorophylls found in oxygen evolving photosynthetic organisms. It may have an important place in the evolution of photosynthesis," says Blankenship, professor and chair of the ASU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Miller says another surprising discovery occurred when the scientists studied the DNA of the new organism. By analyzing sequence data for the small subunit ribosomal RNA gene, which encodes part of the cell's protein synthesis machinery, they demonstrated that chlorophyll d-producing blue-green algae (more technically known as cyanobacteria) have acquired a piece of DNA from a proteobacterium, a distant relative that last shared a common ancestor with cyanobacteria more than two billion years ago.The small subunit ribosomal RNA gene is widely used by scientists to infer the relationships among living organisms, in part because it is generally assumed that it is faithfully transmitted from parent to offspring. However, in the case of this new microbe, it appears that DNA encoding a small portion of the ribosomal gene in a proteobacterium jumped across the vast evolutionary distance that separates the proteobacteria and cyanobacteria, and switched places with the portion of the gene that had originally been inherited from the cyanobacterial parent.

"This finding shows that even this popular evolutionary chronometer can be a mosaic of genetic information with radically different origins," Miller says.

Using a molecular clock, Miller estimated that the proteobacterial DNA was obtained by an ancestor of modern chlorophyll-d producing cyanobacteria between roughly 10 and 100 million years ago.

"The maintenance of this hybrid gene over such a long time period suggests that it has been favored by natural selection," Miller says.

The foreign DNA encodes a structural feature of the ribosome that makes large and precise movements during protein synthesis, but its exact function is still unknown. The next challenge, Miller says, will be to determine whether this example of instant evolutionary innovation by genetic exchange has in fact had consequences for ribosome function in these bacteria.

The new species of Acaryochloris is the latest in a series of new organisms from the Salton Sea that have been identified as part of Wood's study of the blue-green algae in the lake. With Miller, UO emeritus professor Richard Castenholz, and Canadian oceanographer William Li, she published a paper in the journal Hydrobiologia in 2002 that described five previously unknown species.

The Salton Sea covers a surface area of 376 square miles in southeastern California. Its current elevation is about 227 feet below mean sea level, its maximum depth reaches 51 feet and its total volume is about 7.5 million acre-feet. It was formed in the early 1900s, when flow from the Colorado River was inadvertently directed to the Salton Basin. Once the Army Corps of Engineers returned the river to its normal bed, the lake began to evaporate, gradually becoming one of the largest hypersaline lakes in the United States.

Because it also receives the agricultural runoff of the Imperial Valley and municipal runoff from Mexicali, Mexico, considerable attention has focused on the fate of the now highly polluted water body. After massive fish kills and avian mortality in the 1990s, federal agencies targeted the lake for one of the nation's largest restoration projects.Wood says the discovery also shows that the Salton Sea, with its high load of nutrients, may provide an environment that allows this novel photosynthetic

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organism to live a free and independent lifestyle. She notes that the other two species of Acaryochloris live in relatively pure ocean water, but cannot survive there unless they are growing in or on another organism.

"I think it is likely that this microbe is descended from symbiotic relatives who got to the Salton Sea as hitchhikers in water containing sport fish that were introduced from the ocean many years ago," Wood explains.

She says the Salton Sea may have fostered this species of Acaryochloris' ability to live independently by mimicking the environment created by the original host. In the open ocean, which itself is nutrient poor, the host animal or plant provided a nutrient-rich environment with relatively high amounts of infrared light; in the Salton Sea, the waters themselves create a comparable niche. Wood thinks that the high availability of nutrients in the waters of the Salton Sea is what allowed the microbe to survive without its hosts in the saline lake.

At the University of Oregon since 1990, Wood is a member of the UO's Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She has played a key role in changing the scientific world's understanding of how ocean food webs are based on much smaller organisms than previously believed. Wood is an adjunct scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution. In 2004, she became a fellow of the Cooperative Institute of Oceanographic Satellite Studies (CIOSS) at Oregon State University. Wood's research is funded by the Office of Naval Research, a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) through the Salton Sea Authority, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Miller's research is funded by the National Science Foundation, and Blankenship's contributions to the paper were funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Read the original news release at http://waddle.uoregon.edu/?id=202.

An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/life-05b.html

ET VISITORS: SCIENTISTS SEE HIGH LIKELIHOODBy Leonard DavidFrom Space.com14 January 2005

Decades ago, it was physicist Enrico Fermi who pondered the issue of extraterrestrial civilizations with fellow theorists over lunch, generating the famous quip: "Where are they?" That question later became central to debates about the cosmological census count of other star folk and possible extraterrestrial (ET) visitors from afar. Fermi's brooding on the topic was later labeled "Fermi's paradox". It is a well-traveled tale from the 1950's when the scientist broached the subject in discussions with colleagues in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Thoughts regarding the probability of earthlike planets, the rise of highly advanced civilizations "out there", and interstellar travel—these remain fodder for trying to respond to Fermi's paradox even today.

Now a team of American scientists note that recent astrophysical discoveries suggest that we should find ourselves in the midst of one or more extraterrestrial civilizations. Moreover, they argue it is a mistake to reject all UFO reports since some evidence for the theoretically-predicted extraterrestrial visitors might just be found there.

Read the full article at http://www.space.com/searchforlife/et_betterodds_050114.html.

CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTS, 2ND EARLY MARS CONFERENCE SPECIAL SECTION OF JGR-PLANETS.Journal of Geophysical Research release5 January 2005

Early Mars: Geologic, Hydrologic, and Climatic Evolution and the Implications for Life Manuscript submission period: February 1 - April 15, 2005*

To help capture the scientific output of the recent 2nd Early Mars Conference, the conveners have made arrangements with JGR-Planets for the publication of a special section devoted to papers addressing the broad range of topics covered by the meeting. Participation in the Conference is not a prerequisite

for submitting a manuscript. Submitted manuscripts should have a substantial Early Mars focus, but may also address terrestrial analogs and processes where there is a clear and demonstrated relevance to Mars. Papers may address any relevant aspect of Early Mars research, including: physical & chemical properties, geology, hydrology, climate, and life.

Papers must be of a scientific (i.e., involving data analysis, or the presentation of new theories and interpretations, etc.), rather than engineering nature. JGR-Planets generally does not publish papers describing instrument designs or concepts, or any paper that might be seen as advocating a particular mission that is not yet approved. Where a question exists regarding the potential acceptability of a topic, authors should contact the editor.

All manuscripts will go through the standard review process, and there is no guarantee that a given manuscript will be accepted for publication. Cover letters should reference the 2nd Early Mars Conference special section. Please feel free to suggest possible reviewers for your paper. All manuscript submittal information can be found at http://www.agu.org/journals/je/.

If you are planning to submit a manuscript, please send an indication of intent to [email protected]. Please include your name, address, phone number and e-mail address along with the likely title of your submission (if you previously completed an indication of interest form at the Conference, there is no need to submit another). We strongly encourage the redistribution of this announcement to any colleagues who you believe might have an interest in submitting a manuscript.

*Manuscripts will be sent out for review as they are received, beginning February 1st. The April 15, 2005 deadline is firm and represents the very last day any manuscript can be submitted and still be considered for inclusion in the special section.

ESA/ISGP JOINT LIFE SCIENCE MEETING 2005From the NAI Newsletter7 January 2005

The European Space Agency (ESA) together with the International Society for Gravitational Physiology (ISGP) announces the ESA/ISGP Joint Life Sciences Meeting 2005. The Symposium combines the 26th Annual International Gravitational Physiology Meeting and the 9th Tri-annual European Life Sciences Symposium and will be held in Cologne, Germany on June 26th - July 1st, 2005.

The meeting's main topics will preliminarily be in the following areas: Current Concepts in Gravitational Physiology Artificial Gravity Evolution of Gravity Sensing: Cells to Humans Effects of Gravity on Gene Expression Highlighted space physiology research demonstrated in workshops

Information about the Meeting can be found on the ESA web site at http:/www.congrex.nl/05a06/ or the ISGP web site at http://www.isgp.org. The second announcement and call for papers brochure will be posted within 2 months.

For more information please contact:Patrik Sundblad (ESA)ESTEC, MSM-GAL1 Keplerlaan, NL-2201 AZ, Noordwijk,The NetherlandsPhone: +31 71 565 5187Fax: +31 71 565 3661E-mail: [email protected]

Martina Heer (Local Organizer)DLR-Institute of Aerospace MedicineD-51147 Koeln, GermanyPhone: +49 2203 601-0 ext. 3080Fax: +49 2203 61159E-mail: [email protected]

Peter Norsk (ISGP)Department of Medical PhysiologyUniversity of Copenhagen, The Panum Institute, Section 12.2.43Blegdamsvej 3, DK-2200 Copenhagen, DenmarkPhone +45 35 32 75 11

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http://www.isgp.org/

http://www.congrex.nl/05a06/

http://www.agu.org/journals/je/

http://www.space.com/php/contactus/feedback.php?r=ld


Fax: +45 35 32 75 37E-mail: [email protected]

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS FOR ASM UNDERGRADUATE AND MICROBIOLOGY UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPSBy Larry Aaronson and Doretha FousheeAmerican Society for Microbiology release11 January 2005

The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) is accepting applications for the Undergraduate Research Fellowship (URF) and the Microbiology Undergraduate Research Fellowship (MURF).

The URF allows students to conduct research in the summer with an ASM member faculty mentor at their home institution and present the results at the ASM General Meeting the following year. The fellowship requires a joint application from both the student and faculty mentor. Applications are available online at www.asm.org/Education/index.asp?bid=4319. The deadline is February 1, 2005.

The MURF provides an opportunity for historically excluded and underrepresented students to participate in research projects at their home institution or at selected institutions throughout the U.S. and gain experience presenting the results of their research at the ASM General Meeting the following year. Applications are available online at http://www.asm.org/Education/index.asp?bid=4322. The deadline is February 1, 2005.

Contact Mary Nyingi, ASM staff at 202/942-9283 or [email protected] if you have questions.

NASA FREE COMPUTER MODEL AVAILABLE TO CLASSROOMSNASA release 05-01811 January 2005

A free NASA global climate model is available for high school and university desktop computers. The Educational Global Climate Model (EdGCM), available for both Windows and Mac platforms, incorporates a 3-D climate model developed at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York. It wraps complex computer modeling programs with a graphical interface familiar to most PC users. The climate model runs on a desktop computer to allow teachers and students to conduct experiments identical to those scientists run on supercomputers to simulate past and future climate changes. EdGCM links the climate model to both a database and scientific visualization utilities, making it simpler to create and organize data and images.

"The real goal of EdGCM is to allow teachers and students to learn more about climate science by participating in the full scientific process, including experiment design, running model simulations, analyzing data, and reporting on results via the Web," said Mark Chandler, lead researcher for the EdGCM project from Columbia University, New York.

An EdGCM Cooperative is being designed to encourage communication among students at different schools and among schools and research institutions. The cooperative will help students become familiar with the importance of teamwork in scientific research. EdGCM educational materials are also in development. A curriculum module will walk students through a complete scientific project involving the Global Climate Model (GCM) and climate change analysis. Additional lesson plans will elaborate on how students can use a climate model to study topics such as ancient climates in geologic history or future climate water cycles. NASA is contributing funding to improve cross-platform compatibility and to create detailed manuals to help guide teachers through the many uses of EdGCM.

Professors at three NY area universities are already using EdGCM.Professors and students at Columbia University, City University of New York, and New York University can conduct research projects using the NASA/GISS GCM. At least two high schools in Madison, WI are also testing EdGCM this semester in Earth Science courses.

For more information about the EdGCM, visit http://www.edgcm.org.

To download EdGCM software from the Internet, visit http://www.edgcm.org/EdGCMCooperative/Downloads.php.

For more information about climate study in the classroom, please visit http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/everydaylife/climate_class.html.

For information about NASA and agency programs on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov.

Contacts:Dwayne Brown/Renee JuhansNASA Headquarters, Washington, DCPhone: 202-358-1726/1712

CASSINI-HUYGENS UPDATESNASA/ESA releases

Cassini Caps off 2004 with Flyby of Icy Moon IapetusNASA/JPL release 2004-300, 30 December 2004

NASA's Cassini spacecraft is set to cap off 2004 with an encounter of Saturn's ying-yang moon Iapetus (eye-APP-eh-tuss) on New Year's Eve. This is Cassini's closest pass yet by one of Saturn's smaller icy satellites since its arrival around the ringed giant on June 30 of this year. The next close flyby of Iapetus is not until 2007.

This map of the surface of Saturn's moon Iapetus (1,436 kilometers, or 892 miles across), generated from images taken by NASA's Voyager spacecraft, illustrates the imaging coverage planned during Cassini's flyby on December 31, 2004.

Iapetus is a world of sharp contrasts. The leading hemisphere is as dark as a freshly-tarred street, and the white, trailing hemisphere resembles freshly-fallen snow. Cassini will fly by the two-toned moon at a distance of approximately 123,400 kilometers (76,700 miles) on Friday, December 31. This flyby brings to an end a year of major accomplishments and rings in what promises to be a year filled with new discoveries about Saturn and its moons. "I can think of no better way than this to wrap up what has been a whirlwind year," said Robert T. Mitchell, program manager for the Cassini mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. "The new year offers new opportunities, and 2005 will be the year of the icy satellites." In 2005 Cassini will have 13 targeted encounters with five of Saturn's moons. "We have 43 close flybys of Titan still ahead of us during the four-year tour. Next year, eight of our 13 close flybys will be of Titan. We will also have a number of more distant flybys of the icy satellites, and let's not forget Saturn and the rings each time we come around," said Mitchell.

With a diameter of about 1,400 kilometers (890 miles), Iapetus is Saturn's third largest moon. It was discovered by Jean-Dominique Cassini in 1672. It was Cassini, for whom the Cassini-Huygens mission is named, who correctly deduced that one side of Iapetus was dark, while the other was white. Scientists still do not agree on whether the dark material originated from an outside source or was created from Iapetus' own interior. One scenario for the outside deposit of material would involve dark particles being ejected from Saturn's little moon Phoebe and drifting inward to coat Iapetus. The major problem with this model is that the dark material on Iapetus is redder than Phoebe, although the material could have undergone chemical changes that made it redder after its expulsion from Phoebe. One observation

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lending credence to the theory of an internal origin is the concentration of material on crater floors, which implies that something is filling in the craters. In one model proposed by scientists, methane could erupt from the interior and then become darkened by ultraviolet radiation.

Iapetus is odd in other respects. It is the only large Saturn moon in a highly inclined orbit, one that takes it far above and below the plane in which the rings and most of the moons orbit. It is less dense than objects of similar brightness, which implies it has a higher fraction of ice or possibly methane or ammonia in its interior.

The last look at Iapetus was by NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft in 1980 and 1981. The Cassini images will be the highest resolution images yet of this mysterious moon. The Iapetus flyby by Cassini follows the successful release of the Huygens probe on December 24.

Cassini spacecraft targeted satellite encounters for 2005:Titan: January 14, 2005Titan: February 15, 2005Enceladus: March 9, 2005Titan: March 31, 2005Titan: April 16, 2005Enceladus: July 14, 2005Titan: August 22, 2005Titan: September 7, 2005Hyperion: September 26, 2005Dione: October 11, 2005Titan: October 28, 2005Rhea: November 26, 2005Titan: December 26, 2005

The sunlight angle in this sharp view of Saturn's second-largest moon, Rhea, highlights the moon's crater-strewn surface. Cassini will fly past Rhea on November 26, 2005, at a distance of only 500 kilometers (311 miles) and will obtain very high resolution images at that time. Rhea's diameter is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles). This view shows mainly the hemisphere of Rhea that faces away from Saturn. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on November 1, 2004, at a distance of 1.6 million kilometers (994,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 102 degrees. North is up. The image scale is about 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel. The image has been slightly contrast enhanced to aid visibility of surface features. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

Cassini Mission Status ReportNASA/JPL release 2005-002, 3 January 2005 NASA's Cassini spacecraft successfully flew by Saturn's moon Iapetus at a distance of 123,400 kilometers (76,700 miles) on Friday, December 31.

NASA's Deep Space Network tracking station in Goldstone, CA, received the signal and science data that day beginning at 11:47 PM Pacific Standard Time. Iapetus is a world of sharp contrasts. The leading hemisphere is as dark as a freshly-tarred street, and the white, trailing hemisphere resembles freshly-fallen snow. Friday's flyby was the first close encounter of Iapetus during the four-year Cassini tour. The second and final close flyby of Iapetus is scheduled for 2007. Next up for Cassini is communications support for the European Space Agency's Huygens probe during its descent to Titan on January 14. The Huygens probe successfully detached from the Cassini orbiter on Dec.24. The data gathered during the descent through Titan's atmosphere will be transmitted from the probe to the Cassini orbiter. Afterward, Cassini will point its antenna to Earth and relay the data through NASA's Deep Space Network to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA and on to the European Space Agency's Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, which serves as the operations center for the Huygens probe mission. Two of the instruments on the probe—the camera system and the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer—were provided by NASA. Raw images from the Iapetus flyby are available at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/raw.

Saturn's Moon Iapetus Shows a Bulging WaistlineNASA/JPL release 2005-005, 7 January 2005

This near-true color view from Cassini reveals the colorful and intriguing surface of Saturn's moon Iapetus in unrivaled clarity. This image shows the northern part of the dark Cassini Regio and the transition zone to a brighter surface at high northern latitudes. Within the transition zone, the surface is stained by roughly north-south trending wispy streaks of dark material. The absence of an atmosphere on Iapetus means that the material was deposited by some means other than precipitation, such as ballistic placement from impacts occurring elsewhere on Iapetus, or was captured from elsewhere in the Saturn system. Iapetus's north pole is not visible here, nor is any part of the bright trailing hemisphere. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Images returned by NASA's Cassini spacecraft cameras during a New Year's Eve flyby of Saturn's moon Iapetus (eye-APP-eh-tuss) show startling surface features that are fueling heated scientific discussions about their origin. One of these features is a long narrow ridge that lies almost exactly on the equator of Iapetus, bisects its entire dark hemisphere and reaches 20 kilometers high (12 miles). It extends over 1,300 kilometers (808 miles) from side to side, along its midsection. No other moon in the solar system has such a striking geological feature. In places, the ridge is comprised of mountains. In height, they rival Olympus Mons on Mars, approximately three times the height of Mt. Everest, which is surprising for such a small body as Iapetus. Mars is nearly five times the size of Iapetus.

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Images from the flyby are available at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://ciclops.org.

Iapetus is a two-toned moon. The leading hemisphere is as dark as a freshly-tarred street, and the white, trailing hemisphere resembles freshly-fallen snow. The flyby images, which revealed a region of Iapetus never before seen, show feathery-looking black streaks at the boundary between dark and bright hemispheres that indicate dark material has fallen onto Iapetus.

Opinions differ as to whether this dark material originated from within or outside Iapetus. The images also show craters near this boundary with bright walls facing towards the pole and dark walls facing towards the equator. Cassini's next close encounter with Iapetus will occur in September 2007. The resolution of images from that flyby should be 100 times better than the ones currently being analyzed. The hope is that the increased detail may shed light on Iapetus' amazing features and the question of whether it has been volcanically active in the past. With a diameter of about 1,400 kilometers (890 miles), Iapetus is Saturn's third largest moon. It was discovered by Jean-Dominique Cassini in 1672.It was Cassini, for whom the Cassini-Huygens mission is named, who correctly deduced that one side of Iapetus was dark, while the other was white.

Cassini Significant Events 28 December 2004 - 5 January 2005NASA/JPL release, 7 January 2005

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Goldstone tracking station on Monday, January 5. The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and is operating normally. As of yesterday (December 16), the Program is 8 days from Probe release and 29 days from Probe relay. 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.

A Journey to Titan: The Diary Continues

Tuesday, December 28:All subsystems reported nominal spacecraft status. The Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer reported seeing about 10 minutes more heating then expected during last week's probe release based on the results from the Kinematic Prediction Tool. We continue to hold Command Approval Meetings (CAM) for the S07 sequences and Probe Mission sequences. S07 is different from previous sequences in that it has three background sequences—BGA, BGB, and BGC—the Probe Release sequence, Probe Relay critical sequence, a Privileged Action Program (PAP) to activate the critical sequence, two Probe relay playback sequences, five OTMs, MRE (a post-release instrument restoration sequence), MIA (the Iapetus science sequence), MPO (a post-relay orbiter instrument power-on sequence), and Satellite Orbiter Science Team sequences MS1 and MS2. Normally it's one background sequence, a couple of minis and maybe a live update. This is a very active time for all of us!

We are holding the CAM for the MIA Iapetus science sequence today.Spacecraft Operations Office (SCO), RADAR and Science Planning will be the main contributors to the CAM.

There was a special tour science talk given today by the Huygens Project Manager. He discussed the Probe science mission and what data the on-board instruments hope to acquire.

We found out today that the Planetary Society held a contest for designing what Titan's surface might look like. Some students from Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, California, had already completed an assignment similar to this as part of the "Reading, Writing, and Rings" package and chose to submit their samples. One of the students took second place. His artwork will be displayed at the European Space Agency Headquarters in conjunction with the Huygens Mission activities this month.

Wednesday, December 29:An Integrated Test Laboratory (ITL) preparation meeting was held today for setting up the test for Orbit Trim Maneuver (OTM) 10a. All OTMs are tested in the ITL prior to uplink to the spacecraft. The Probe Relay sequence will be CAMed tomorrow with the OTM10A Opmode transitions. (Think I'll stop

reporting CAMs. If it was uplinked to the spacecraft, you can be sure it was approved first!)

The sequence leads for S07 radiated the Iapetus MIA science sequence and an Instrument Expanded Block update for the Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument. MIA will begin execution on the 31st.

Thursday, December 30:The Iapetus mini-sequence began execution. Tomorrow is the big day, the actual flyby. The sequence leads sent up commands today to power on the supplemental heater for the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS). The instrument was cooling down more than desired. Both Spacecraft (S/C) Thermal and CAPS subsystems later verified that the supplemental heater did turn on. All is well with the instrument.

Radio and Plasma Wave Science instrument personnel reported seeing noise during Probe Release. The noise has been attributed to a chopper power supply in the PSU. PWR and RWPS subsystems were able to compare several other pyro events and confirmed the noise was from the Pyro subsystem.

All S/C subsystems are nominal. ITL will be running OTM 10a tonight.

Friday, December 31:Today is a JPL holiday, the day before New Years. There are no status meetings or reports for today. This is where the engineering side of the team steps down and science takes center stage! Today and tomorrow it's all about Iapetus!

The Cassini spacecraft flew over Iapetus today at a distance of about 123,390 kilometers. Closest approach occurred over the moon's dark hemisphere, which has never been seen at close range. This was the first close encounter of the satellite in our tour. The next—and last—is in 2007.

Iapetus is Saturn's third largest moon with a diameter of about 1500 km. It is the only large Saturn moon in a highly inclined orbit. This takes it far above and below the plane in which the rings and most of the moons orbit. Iapetus was last observed by NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft in 1980 and 1981. Cassini got about ten times closer than Voyager 2. The best images taken by Voyager had a resolution of about 8km per pixel. On this pass Cassini got down to a resolution of about 1km per pixel. An important science objective of our mission is to understand the mysterious albedo dichotomy that dominates the appearance of Iapetus, with one hemisphere coal-black and one hemisphere quite bright and ice-rich.

Spectra and images were taken by all remote-sensing instruments and by RADAR to characterize the history and composition of the satellite. Raw images from the Iapetus flyby are available at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/raw.

Saturday, January 1, 2005:JPL and Caltech's float in the 2005 Tournament of Roses Parade titled "Family of Explorers" was a transformer toy-looking figure comprised of nine of the lab's missions. With sound effects, music, strobe lights, and a rocket pack that blasts smoke, the "rocket man" is designed to remind onlookers of JPL's successes from 2004. At 15 meters in height, it was the tallest float in the parade. Most importantly, at least to members of this flight team, the Cassini Saturn orbiter was at the pinnacle atop the robot's helmet.

I should have reported this last week. It feels more like a Christmas present than a New Years report. In 2005 Cassini will have 13-targeted encounters with five of Saturn's moons. Eight of our 13 close flybys will be of Titan with a number of more distant flybys of the icy satellites, and Saturn and the rings each time we come around!

The Iapetus mini-sequence will be finishing up tonight. All S/C subsystems are nominal. ITL reported that the OTM 10A maneuver test went well. The test run is complete and data is available for ACS Uplink to review. There was no unexpected fault protection seen.

Sunday, January 2:We loaded the Probe Relay critical sequence today and verified that it had registered on both strings. ACS has reviewed the results from yesterday's ITL run. Looks good.

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This map illustrates the planned imaging coverage for the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer, onboard the European Space Agency's Huygens probe during the probe's descent toward Titan's surface on January 14, 2005. The Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer is one of two NASA instruments on the probe. The colored lines delineate regions that will be imaged at different resolutions as the probe descends. On each map, the site where Huygens is predicted to land is marked with a yellow dot. This area is in a boundary between dark and bright regions. This map was made from the images taken by the Cassini spacecraft cameras on October 26, 2004, at image scales of 4 to 6 kilometers (2.5 to 3.7 miles) per pixel. For about two hours, the probe will fall by parachute from an altitude of 160 kilometers (99 miles) to Titan's surface. During the descent the camera on the probe and five other science instruments will send data about the moon's atmosphere and surface back to the Cassini spacecraft for relay to Earth. The Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer will take pictures as the probe slowly spins, and some these will be made into panoramic views of Titan's surface. NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

Monday, January 3:Uplinked the Activation PAP for the Probe Relay sequence. Uplinked and successfully executed the OTM 10A maneuver today. This maneuver, also

called the Orbiter Deflection Maneuver Clean-Up, further refines Cassini's trajectory in preparation for the Huygens probe mission on January 14.

The reaction control system (RCS) burn began at 4:45 PM Pacific time. A "quick look" immediately after the maneuver showed the burn duration was147.6 sec, giving a delta-V of approximately 140 mm/s. This was the first RCS OTM since the Huygens probe separation on December 24. All subsystems reported nominal after the maneuver.

A revalidated waypoint analysis was performed for S09. There was concern that problems might have been introduced with the release of a new reference trajectory. The sequence lead for S09 reported no problems found. The Sub Sequence Generation phase for S09 completed today.

Tuesday, January 4:Today we uplinked the first of two Probe Relay playback sequences, an Immediate/Delayed Action Program to snap the partition 6 SSR Record Pointers, and the S07 BGB background sequence. All S/C subsystems are nominal.

A command moratorium went into effect at noon today. This means that all unplanned sequences must be accompanied with a Command Lost Timer reduction command. The ACE will not need to send 6NOP commands until January 14th.

There was a discussion regarding late updates to the Science mini-sequences MS1 and MS2. MS1 and MS2 should use OTM 10A predicts. SCO will not be able to support an update based on OTM 11 predicts.

Wednesday, January 5:Today was a quiet day for the S/C. All S/C subsystems are nominal. There are no changes in alarm status.

The sequence lead for S08 reported that the Radio Science Subsystem (RSS) Inertial Vector Definition end-to-end test with Fit Accuracy fix was performed in ITL. The test was successful. We now have a working solution that satisfies RSS requirements and without sequence violations.

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Goldstone tracking station on Monday, January 5. The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and is operating normally. As of today, January 5, the Program is nine days from Probe relay.

Radio astronomers confirm Huygens entry in the atmosphere of TitanESA release, 14 January 2005

At 11:25 CET the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) of the National Radio-astronomy Observatory in West Virginia, USA, a part of the global network of radio telescopes involved in tracking the Huygens Titan probe, has detected the probe's "carrier" (tone) signal. The detection occurred between 11:20 and 11:25 CET, shortly after the probe began its parachute descent through Titan's atmosphere. The extremely feeble signal was first picked up by the Radio Science Receiver supplied by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This signal is an important indication that the Huygens probe is "alive". However, it does not contain yet any substance; the latter is expected to come a few hours later via the Cassini spacecraft.

What the Green Bank radio telescope has detected is only a "carrier" signal. It indicates that the back cover of Huygens must have been ejected, the main parachute must have been deployed and that the probe has begun to transmit, in other words, the probe is "alive". This, however, still does not mean that any data have been acquired, or that they have been received by Cassini. The carrier signal is sent continuously throughout the descent and as such does not contain any scientific data. It is similar to the tone signal heard in a telephone handset once the latter is picked up.

Only after having received the data packets at ESOC will it be possible to say with certainty whether data were properly acquired. The first data set from Cassini will reach ESOC in the afternoon. Additional downlinks will follow throughout the evening and night for redundancy. Further analysis of the signals will be conducted using other three independent data acquisition systems at the Green Bank Telescope. In addition to the GBT, sixteen other radio telescopes in Australia, China, Japan and the USA are involved in tracking the Huygens probe.

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The ultimate goal of the tracking experiment is to reconstruct the probe's descent trajectory with an unprecedented accuracy of the order of one kilometer. The measurements will be conducted using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) and Doppler tracking techniques. This would enable studies of the dynamics of Titan's atmosphere, which is considered to be a "frozen" copy of that of the early Earth. The VLBI component of the tracking experiment is coordinated by the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) and ESA; the Doppler measurements are conducted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Read the original news release at http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMIEPQ3K3E_0.html.

Europe reaches new frontier—Huygens lands on TitanESA release 03-2005, 14 January 2005

Today, after its seven-year journey through the Solar System on board the Cassini spacecraft, ESA's Huygens probe has successfully descended through the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, and safely landed on its surface. The first scientific data arrived at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, this afternoon at 17:19 CET. Huygens is mankind's first successful attempt to land a probe on another world in the outer Solar System. "This is a great achievement for Europe and its US partners in this ambitious international endeavour to explore the Saturnian system," said Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA's Director General.

Following its release from the Cassini mother ship on 25 December, Huygens reached Titan's outer atmosphere after 20 days and a 4 million km cruise. The probe started its descent through Titan's hazy cloud layers from an altitude of about 1270 km at 11:13 CET. During the following three minutes Huygens had to decelerate from 18 000 to 1400 km per hour. A sequence of parachutes then slowed it down to less than 300 km per hour. At a height of about 160 km the probe's scientific instruments were exposed to Titan's atmosphere. At about 120 km, the main parachute was replaced by a smaller one to complete the descent, with an expected touchdown at 13:34 CET. Preliminary data indicate that the probe landed safely, likely on a solid surface.

The probe began transmitting data to Cassini four minutes into its descent and continued to transmit data after landing at least as long as Cassini was above Titan's horizon. The certainty that Huygens was alive came already at 11:25 CET today, when the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia, USA, picked up a faint but unmistakable radio signal from the probe. Radio telescopes on Earth continued to receive this signal well past the expected lifetime of Huygens. Huygens data, relayed by Cassini, were picked up by NASA's Deep Space Network and delivered immediately to ESA's European Space Operation Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, where the scientific analysis is currently taking place.

"Titan was always the target in the Saturn system where the need for 'ground truth' from a probe was critical. It is a fascinating world and we are now eagerly awaiting the scientific results," says Professor David Southwood, Director of ESA's scientific program.

"The Huygens scientists are all delighted. This was worth the long wait," says Dr Jean-Pierre Lebreton, ESA Huygens Mission Manager. Huygens is expected to provide the first direct and detailed sampling of Titan's atmospheric chemistry and the first photographs of its hidden surface, and will supply a detailed "weather report".

One of the main reasons for sending Huygens to Titan is that its nitrogen atmosphere, rich in methane, and its surface may contain many chemicals of the kind that existed on the young Earth. Combined with the Cassini observations, Huygens will afford an unprecedented view of Saturn's mysterious moon.

"Descending through Titan was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and today's achievement proves that our partnership with ESA was an excellent one," says Alphonso Diaz, NASA Associate Administrator of Science.

"The teamwork in Europe and the USA, between scientists, industry and agencies has been extraordinary and has set the foundation for today's enormous success," concludes Jean-Jacques Dordain.

Read the original news release at http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMQ1QQ3K3E_0.html.

This is one of the first raw images returned by the European Space Agency's Huygens probe during its successful descent to Titan. It was taken from an altitude of 16.2 kilometers (about 10 miles) with a resolution of approximately 40 meters (about 131 feet) per pixel. It apparently shows short, stubby drainage channels leading to a shoreline. Image credit: ESA/NASA/University of Arizona.

This is one of the first raw images returned by the European Space Agency's Huygens probe during its successful descent to Titan. It was taken at an altitude of 8 kilometers (about 5 miles) with a resolution of 20 meters (about 65 feet) per pixel. It shows what could be the landing site, with shorelines and boundaries between raised ground and flooded plains. Image credit: ESA/NASA/University of Arizona.

This raw image was returned by the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer camera onboard the European Space Agency's Huygens probe after the probe descended through the atmosphere of Titan. It shows the surface of Titan with ice blocks strewn around. The size and distance of the blocks will be determined when the image is properly processed. Image credit: ESA/NASA/University of Arizona.

More information on the Cassini-Huygens mission is available at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini.

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The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, DC. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter. The European Space Agency built and managed the development of the Huygens probe and is in charge of the probe operations. The Italian Space Agency provided the high-gain antenna, much of the radio system and elements of several of Cassini's science instruments.

Contacts:Carolina MartinezJet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CAPhone: 818-354-9382

Preston DychesCassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations Space Science Institute, Boulder, COPhone: 720-974-5823

Additional articles on this subject are available at:http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1372.htmlhttp://www.astrobio.net/news/article1378.htmlhttp://www.astrobio.net/news/article1384.htmlhttp://www.astrobio.net/news/article1385.htmlhttp://sci.esa.int/jump.cfm?oid=35711http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/huygens_descent_comm_050114.htmlhttp://www.space.com/missionlaunches/huygens_descent_comm_050114.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05a.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05b.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05d.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05e.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05f.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05g.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05h.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05i.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05j.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05k.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05l.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05m.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/041230iapetus.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/041230tethys.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/041230mimas.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050109iapetus.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050109iapetustop.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050109iapetuslandslide.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050112huygenspre.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/cassini_iapetus_route.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/close_up_iapetus.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/fresh_crater_rhea.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/iapetus_seam.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/huygens_timeline.htmlhttp://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/huygens_lands_titan.html

DEEP IMPACT UPDATESNASA/JPL releases

Deep Impact Launched and Flying Toward Date with a CometNASA/JPL release 2005-01512 January 2005

NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft began its 431 million kilometer (268 million mile) journey to comet Tempel 1 today at 1:47:08 PM EST. Data received from the spacecraft indicate it has deployed and locked its solar panels, is receiving power and achieved proper orientation in space. Data also indicate the spacecraft has placed itself in a safe mode and is awaiting further commands from Earth.

Deep Impact mission managers are examining data returns from the mission. Further updates on the mission will be posted to http://www.nasa.gov/deepimpact and http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/.

Deep Impact is comprised of two parts, a "fly-by" spacecraft and a smaller "impactor." The impactor will be released into the comet's path for a planned collision on July 4. The crater produced by the impactor is expected to be up

to the size of a football stadium and two to 14 stories deep. Ice and dust debris will be ejected from the crater, revealing the material beneath.

Engulfed by flames and smoke, NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft lifts off at 1:47 PM EST today from Launch Pad 17-B, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, FL. A NASA Discovery mission, Deep Impact is heading for space and a rendezvous 83 million miles from Earth with Comet Tempel 1. After releasing a 3- by 3-foot projectile (impactor) to crash onto the surface July 4, 2005, Deep Impact’s flyby spacecraft will reveal the secrets of the comet’s interior by collecting pictures and data of how the crater forms, measuring the crater’s depth and diameter as well as the composition of the interior of the crater and any material thrown out, and determining the changes in natural outgassing produced by the impact. Image credit: NASA/KSC.

The fly-by spacecraft will observe the effects of the collision. NASA's Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes, and other telescopes on Earth, will also observe the collision. Comets are time capsules that hold clues about the formation and evolution of the Solar System. They are composed of ice, gas and dust, primitive debris from the Solar System's distant and coldest regions that formed 4.5 billion years ago.

Deep Impact Mission Status ReportNASA/JPL release 2005-016, 13 January 2005 NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft is out of safe mode and healthy, and on its way to an encounter with comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005.

Launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Wednesday, the Deep Impact spacecraft entered a state called safe mode soon after separation from the launch vehicle. When a spacecraft enters safe mode, all but essential

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http://www.nasa.gov/deepimpactand

http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/huygens_lands_titan.html

http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/huygens_timeline.html

http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/iapetus_seam.html

http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/fresh_crater_rhea.html

http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/close_up_iapetus.html

http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050112huygenspre.html

http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050109iapetuslandslide.html

http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050109iapetustop.html

http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/050109iapetus.html

http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/041230mimas.html

http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/041230tethys.html

http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/041230iapetus.html

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05m.html

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05l.html

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05k.html

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05j.html

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05i.html

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05h.html

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05g.html

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05f.html

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05e.html

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05d.html

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05b.html

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cassini-05a.html

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/huygens_descent_comm_050114.html




http://sci.esa.int/jump.cfm?oid=35711


spacecraft systems are turned off until it receives new commands from mission control. When Deep Impact separated from the launch vehicle, the spacecraft computer detected higher than expected temperatures in the propulsion system.

While in the safe mode, the spacecraft successfully executed all mission events associated with commencing space flight operations. Data received from the spacecraft indicate it has deployed and locked its solar panels, is receiving power and achieved proper orientation in space.

"We are out of safe mode and proceeding with in-flight operations," said Deep Impact project manager Rick Grammier of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We're back on nominal timeline and look forward to our encounter with comet Tempel 1 this summer."

An artist’s drawing shows the Deep Impact flyby spacecraft at upper left that will record photos and data after the Impactor crashes onto the surface of Comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005. The spacecraft will collect pictures and data of how the crater forms, measuring the crater’s depth and diameter, as well as the composition of the interior of the crater and any material thrown out, and determining the changes in natural outgassing produced by the impact.

Deep Impact is comprised of two parts, a "fly-by" spacecraft and a smaller "impactor". The impactor will be released into the comet's path for a planned collision on July 4. The crater produced by the impactor is expected to be up to the size of a football stadium and two to 14 stories deep. Ice and dust debris will be ejected from the crater, revealing the material beneath. The fly-by spacecraft will observe the effects of the collision. NASA's Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes, and other telescopes on Earth, will also observe the collision. Comets are time capsules that hold clues about the formation and evolution of the Solar System. They are composed of ice, gas and dust, primitive debris from the Solar System's distant and coldest regions that formed 4.5 billion years ago.

The management of the Deep Impact launch was the responsibility of NASA's Kennedy Space Center, FL. Deep Impact was launched from Pad 17-B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, FL. Delta II launch service was provided by Boeing Expendable Launch Systems, Huntington Beach, CA. The spacecraft was built for NASA by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation, Boulder, CO. Deep Impact project management is by JPL. For more information about the mission on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov/deepimpact or http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/. For information about NASA and other agency programs, visit http://www.nasa.gov.

Contacts:D. C. AgleJet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CAPhone: 818-393-9011

Dolores BeasleyNASA Headquarters, Washington, DCPhone: 202-358-1753 George H. Diller NASA Kennedy Space Center, FLPhone: 321-867-2468

Gretchen Cook-AndersonNASA Headquarters, Washington, DCPhone: 202-358-0836

Additional articles on this subject are available at:http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/scitues_deepimpact_050111.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/launchers-05a.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/launchers-05b.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/launchers-05c.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/launchers-05f.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/delta/d311/status.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/delta/d311/http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/deep_impact_launched.html

NASA ROVERS' ADVENTURES ON MARS CONTINUENASA/JPL release 2005-0012 January 2005

NASA lit a birthday candle today for its twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. The Spirit rover begins its second year on Mars investigating puzzling rocks unlike any found earlier. The rovers successfully completed their three-month primary missions in April. They astound even their designers with how well they continue operating. The unanticipated longevity is allowing both rovers to reach additional destinations and to keep making discoveries. Spirit landed on January 3 and Opportunity January 24, 2004, respectively.

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity caught this view of the main piece of the spacecraft's heat shield during the rover's 328th martian day, or sol (December 25, 2004). A separation spring can be seen on the ground to the lower left side of the heat shield. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell.

"You could have cut the tension here with a knife the night Spirit landed," said NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe. "Just remembering the uncertainty involved with the landing emphasizes how exciting it is for all of us, since the rovers are still actively exploring. The rovers created an amazing amount of public interest and have certainly helped advance the Vision for Space Exploration," he said. The twin Mars explorers have drawn the most hits to NASA Web sites—more than 9 billion in 2004.

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Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, said, "Little did we know a year ago that we'd be celebrating a year of roving on Mars. The success of both rovers is tribute to hundreds of talented men and women who have put their knowledge and labor into this team effort." "The rovers are both in amazingly good shape for their age," said JPL's Jim Erickson, rover project manager. "The twins sailed through the worst of the martian winter with flying colors, and spring is coming. Both rovers are in strong positions to continue exploring, but we can't give you any guarantees." Opportunity is driving toward the heat shield that protected it during descent through the martian atmosphere. Rover team members hope to determine how deeply the atmospheric friction charred the protective layer. "With luck, our observations may help to improve our ability to deliver future vehicles to the surface of other planets," Erickson said. Spirit is exploring the Columbia Hills within the Gusev Crater. "In December, we discovered a completely new type of rock in Columbia Hills, unlike anything seen before on Mars," said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, principal investigator for the rovers' science payloads.

This image from the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity features the remains of the heat shield that protected the rover from temperatures of up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it made its way through the martian atmosphere. This two-frame mosaic was taken on the rover's 335th martian day, or sol, (January 2, 2005). The view is of the main heat shield debris seen from approximately 10 meters (about 33 feet) away from it. Many rover-team engineers were taken aback when they realized the heat shield had inverted, or turned itself inside out. The height of the pictured debris is about 1.3 meters (about 4.3 feet). The original diameter was 2.65 meters (8.7 feet), though it has obviously been deformed. The Sun reflecting off of the aluminum structure accounts for the vertical blurs in the picture. The fact that the heat shield is now inside out makes it more challenging to evaluate the state of the thermal protection system that is now on the inside. In coming sols, Opportunity will investigate the debris with its microscopic imager. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell.

Jumbled textures of specimens dubbed "Wishstone" and "Wishing Well" look like the product of an explosion, perhaps from a volcano or a meteor impact. These rocks are much richer in phosphorus than any other known Mars rocks. "Some ways of making phosphates involve water; others do not," Squyres said. "We want to look at more of these rocks to see if we can distinguish between those possible histories."

NASA's next Mars mission, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, is due to launch in August. "As great as the past year has been, Mars launch opportunities come along like clockwork every 26 months," said Dr. Firouz Naderi of JPL, manager of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. "At every one of them in the foreseeable future, we intend to go to Mars, building upon the findings by the rovers." NASA Chief Scientist Dr. Jim Garvin said, "Mars lures us to explore its mysteries. It is the most Earth-like of our sister planets, and many believe it may hold clues to whether life ever existed or even originated beyond Earth. The rovers have shown us Mars had persistently wet, possibly life-sustaining environments. Beyond their own profound discoveries, the rovers have advanced our step-by-step program for examining Mars. We will continue to explore Mars robotically, and eventually with human explorers."

Scientists working with NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit decided to examine this rock, dubbed "Wishstone," based on data from the miniature thermal emission spectrometer. That instrument's data indicated that the mineralogy of the rocks in this area is different from that of rocks encountered either on the plains of Gusev Crater or in bedrock outcrops examined so far in the "Columbia Hills" inside the crater. Spirit used its rock abrasion tool first to scour a patch of the rock's surface with a wire brush, then to grind away the surface to reveal interior material. Placement of the rover's alpha particle X-ray spectrometer on the exposed circle of interior material revealed that the rock is rich in phosphorus. Spirit used its panoramic camera during the rover's 342nd martian day, or sol, (December 18, 2004) to take the three individual images that were combined to produce this false-color view emphasizing the freshly ground dust around the hole cut by the rock abrasion tool. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell.

Images and additional information about the rovers and their discoveries are available on the Internet at http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/mer_main.html and http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html. JPL has managed the Mars Exploration Rover project since it began in 2000.JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Contacts:Guy WebsterJet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CAPhone: 818-354-6278

Dolores BeasleyNASA Headquarters, Washington, DCPhone: 202-358-1753

Additional articles on this subject are available at:http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/roverdebris_041231.htmlhttp://www.space.com/missionlaunches/spirit_oneyr_050103.htmlhttp://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/spirit_scitues_050104.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05a.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-05c.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05b.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05c.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05d.htmlhttp://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-mers-05e.htmlhttp://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/041228heatshield.html

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MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR IMAGESNASA/JPL/MSSS releases23 December 2004 - 12 January 2005

The following new images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft are now available.

Meridiani Bedrock (Released 23 December 2004)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/12/23/

Ascraeus Mons (Released 24 December 2004)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/12/24/

North Polar Ice (Released 25 December 2004)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/12/25/

Meridiani Craters (Released 26 December 2004)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/12/26/

Dunes of Herschel (Released 27 December 2004)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/12/27/

Hill in Deuteronilus (Released 28 December 2004)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/12/28/

Northern Plains Crater (Released 29 December 2004)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/12/29/

All of the Mars Global Surveyor images are archived at http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/index.html.

Layers and Exhuming Crater (Released 30 December 2004)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/12/30/

North Polar Dunes (Released 31 December 2004)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/12/31/

Tikhonravov's Eyebrows (Released 01 January 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/01/01/

North Polar Layers (Released 02 January 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/01/02/

MOC View of Spirit's Trek to the Columbia Hills (Released 03 January2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/01/03/

Mars at Ls 145 Degrees (Released 04 January 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/01/04/

Pedestal Crater (Released 05 January 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/01/05/

Martian Sand Dunes (Released 06 January 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/01/06/

West of Meridiani (Released 07 January 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/01/07/

Lohse Crater Dunes (Released 08 January 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/01/08/

Layers in Sulci Gordii (Released 09 January 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/01/09/

Valley near Cydonia (Released 10 January 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/01/10/

Mars at Ls 145 degrees (Released 11 January 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/01/11/

Argyre Planitia Scene (Released 12 January 2005)http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/01/12/

Mars Global Surveyor was launched in November 1996 and has been in Mars orbit since September 1997. It began its primary mapping mission on March 8, 1999. Mars Global Surveyor is the first mission in a long-term program of Mars exploration known as the Mars Surveyor Program that is managed by JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) and the California Institute of Technology built the MOC using spare hardware from the Mars Observer mission. MSSS operates the camera from its facilities in San Diego, CA. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars Surveyor Operations Project operates the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft with its industrial partner, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, from facilities in Pasadena, CA and Denver, CO.

MARS ODYSSEY THEMIS IMAGESNASA/JPL/ASU releases27 December 2004 - 7 January 2005

Arsia Mons by Visible Light (Released 27 December 2004)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20041227a.html

Platy Lava Surface (Released 28 December 2004)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20041228a.html

Olympus Mons at Night (Released 29 December 2004)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20041229A.html

Olympus Mons in Day (Released 30 December 2004)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20041230A.html

Olympus Mons in Visible Light (Released 31 December 2004)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20041231a.html

Eos Chasma Landslides (Released 3 January 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050103a.html Coprates Chasma Landslides in IR (Released 4 January 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050104A.html

Xanthe Terra Landslide in IR (Released 5 January 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050105A.html

Olympus Mons Landslide (Released 6 January 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050106a.html

Aeolis Mensa Landslide (Released 7 January 2005)http://themis.la.asu.edu/zoom-20050107A.html

All of the THEMIS images are archived at http://themis.la.asu.edu/latest.html.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) was developed by Arizona State University, Tempe, in collaboration with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing. The THEMIS investigation is led by Dr. Philip Christensen at Arizona State University. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime contractor for the Odyssey project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

MARS RECONNAISSANCE ORBITER MISSION STATUSNASA/JPL release 2005-0067 January 2005 Even as the Spirit and Opportunity rovers complete a year of successful operation on Mars, the next major step in Mars Exploration is taking shape with preparation of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for launch in just seven months. The orbiter is undergoing environmental tests in facilities at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, CO, where its Atlas V launch vehicle is also being prepared. Developments are on schedule for a launch window that begins on August 10.

"The development teams from JPL, Lockheed Martin and the various institutions providing flight instruments have been working hard and

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efficiently as a team. Everything has really come together in the last couple of months," said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Manager Jim Graf of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. "The schedule remains tight, even as we continue to meet our major milestones in preparation for a late summer launch. And I am really excited about what this spacecraft, this team and these instruments can do once we get to Mars. The spacecraft engineering bus and the science instruments will be the most capable ever sent to another planet. The science gleaned from this mission will dramatically expand our understanding of Mars."

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter carries six primary instruments: the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, Context Camera, Mars Color Imager, Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, Mars Climate Sounder and Shallow Radar. All but the imaging spectrometer are currently onboard. That instrument is the last of several that had been installed but were removed so the science teams could replace an electrical component. It will be re-delivered this month. The orbiter will also carry a telecommunications relay package and two engineering demonstrations.

This image from early January 2005 shows the spacecraft fitted with five of its six primary science instruments, both solar arrays and its high-gain antenna.

"We're moving at a robust pace in the testing phase now and we're right on track for getting the spacecraft ready to ship to Florida this spring," said Kevin McNeill, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems. "Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been a great spacecraft to

work on, in part because we used an 'open structure' design that allows our engineers and the science teams to work in and around the spacecraft during every phase of integration and testing, with even greater ease and accessibility than we've had on previous missions. In many respects, the open design has facilitated the integration and testing of the spacecraft. We'll be in the final phase of testing during the next four months. Then, it's off to Florida."

Located just a few buildings away from where the spacecraft is undergoing tests at Lockheed Martin's facilities near Denver, the company also is building the mission's Atlas V launch vehicle. The Atlas V, designated AV-007, will launch Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in August from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The Atlas is undergoing final assembly and testing, and will be shipped to Cape Canaveral in March to be readied for launch.

Less than two years from now, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will begin a series of global mapping, regional survey and targeted observations from a near-polar, low-altitude Mars orbit. These observations will be unprecedented in terms of the spatial resolution and coverage achieved by the orbiter's instruments as they observe the atmosphere and surface of Mars while probing its shallow subsurface as part of a "follow the water" strategy. JPL's Dr. Rich Zurek, project scientist for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, said, "The major discoveries by the Mars Exploration Rovers at the Meridiani and Gusev Crater locales indicate that water did persist on the surface of the planet for some time, so a 'follow the water' strategy is appropriate. However, the rovers have explored just two very small areas of the planet. A goal of this mission is to find many, many locales where water was active on the surface for extended periods and thereby provides a suite of sites for future landers to explore where the potential for further discovery is high and the risk of encountering surface hazards is low." Additional information about the project is available online at http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/mro.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission is managed by JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems is the prime contractor for the project.

Contacts:Guy Webster Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CAPhone: 818-354-6278 Joan UnderwoodLockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, COPhone: 303-971-7398 Dolores BeasleyNASA Headquarters, Washington, DCPhone: 202-358-1753

An additional article on this subject is available at http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-future-05a.html.

End Marsbugs, Volume 12, Number 1.

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