Category: Mars

Image credit: NASA
Scientists have found clues that dust devils on Mars might have high-voltage electric fields, based on observations of their terrestrial counterpart. This research supports NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration by helping to understand what challenges the Martian environment presents to explorers, both robotic and eventually human.

NASA and university researchers discovered that dust devils on Earth have unexpectedly large electric fields, in excess of 4,000 volts per meter (yard), and can generate magnetic fields as well. Like detectives chasing down a suspect, the scientists attached instruments to a truck and raced across deserts in Nevada (2000) and Arizona (2001), driving through dust devils to get their measurements as part of the Martian Atmosphere and Dust in the Optical and Radio (MATADOR) activity. The Arizona observations also included a fixed base camp with a full suite of meteorological instruments (refer to Item 2 for a picture of the Arizona campaign).

Dust devils are like miniature tornadoes, about 10 to 100 meters wide with 20- to 60-mile-per-hour (32- to 96-km/hr) winds swirling around a hot column of rising air. “Dust devils are common on Mars, and NASA is interested in them as well as other phenomena as a possible nuisance or hazard to future human explorers,” said Dr. William Farrell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “If Martian dust devils are highly electrified, as our research suggests, they might give rise to increased discharging or arcing in the low-pressure Martian atmosphere, increased dust adhesion to space suits and equipment, and interference with radio communications.” NASA’s Mars Testbed missions in the coming decade may be able to investigate whether such is the case. Farrell is lead author of a paper on this research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research April 20.

“Complex tracks, generated by the large Martian dust devils, are commonly found in many regions of Mars, and several dust devils have been photographed in the act of scouring the surface,” said MATADOR Principal Investigator Dr. Peter Smith of the University of Arizona (Tucson). “These Martian dust devils dwarf the 5- to 10-meter terrestrial ones and can be greater than 500 meters in diameter and several thousand meters high. The track patterns are known to change from season to season, so these huge dust pipes must be a large factor in transporting dust and could be responsible for eroding landforms.”

“Two ingredients, present on both Earth and Mars, are necessary for a dust devil to form: rising air and a source of rotation,” said Dr. Nilton Renno of the University of Michigan, a member of the research team who is an expert in the fluid dynamics of dust devils. “Wind shear, such as a change in wind direction and speed with altitude, is the source for rotation. Stronger updrafts have the potential to produce stronger dust devils, and larger wind shear produces larger dust devils.”

Dust particles become electrified in dust devils when they rub against each other as they are carried by the winds, transferring positive and negative electric charge in the same way you build up static electricity if you shuffle across a carpet. Scientists thought there would not be a high-voltage, large-scale electric field in dust devils because negatively charged particles would be evenly mixed with positively charged particles, so the overall electric charge in the dust devil would be in balance.

However, the team’s observations indicate that smaller particles become negatively charged, while larger particles become positively charged. Dust devil winds carry the small, negatively charged particles high into the air, while the heavier, positively charged particles remain near the base of the dust devil. This separation of charges produces the large-scale electric field, like the positive and negative terminals on a battery. Since the electrified particles are in motion, and a magnetic field is just the result of moving electric charges, the dust devil generates a magnetic field also.

If Martian dust grains have a variety of sizes and compositions, dust devils on Mars should become electrified in the same way as their particles rub against each other, according to the team (refer to Item 1 for an artist’s concept of an electrified Martian dust devil). We experience more static electricity on dry days because water molecules draw charge from electrified objects. Since the Martian atmosphere is extremely dry, the charging is expected to be strong, as there will be few atmospheric water molecules to steal charge from the dust grains. However, since the density of the Martian atmosphere is much lower than Earth’s, the near-surface electrical conductivity of the Martian atmosphere is expected to be 100 times higher. A Martian dust devil will therefore take longer to fully charge, since the increased atmospheric conductivity draws charge away from Martian dust grains.

To date, none of the robotic Mars landers and rovers that have operated on the Martian surface have experienced any consequences of this phenomena, including the rovers Spirit and Opportunity. However, more complex landed laboratories, such as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), slated to launch in 2009, may be far more sensitive to electrical disturbances than previous missions. As such, this research is a key stepping stone to more advanced robotic and human exploration of Mars.

Martian dust storms, which can cover the entire planet, are also expected to be strong generators of electric fields (Item 3 shows dust suspended in the Martian atmosphere as a result of Martian dust devil and dust storm activity). The team hopes to measure a large dust storm on Earth and have instruments to detect atmospheric electric and magnetic fields on future Mars landers.

The team includes researchers from NASA Goddard, NASA Glenn (Cleveland, Ohio), NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, Calif.), University of Arizona (Tucson), University of California (Berkeley), SETI Institute (Mountain View, Calif.), University of Washington (Seattle), University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and Duke University (Durham, N.C.). This research was sponsored in part by the NASA Mars Fundamental Research Program, which is operated out of NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.

Original Source: NASA News Release

Image credit: NASA/JPL
Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover, wrote in his science journal for April 16 that “Well, the Battle of Bounce Rock is over.”

Squyres was referring not only to the odd rock that rests alone on the otherwise flat, rockless Meridiani plains, but also what battles had to be waged even to consider it a rock at all.

“Not everybody on the team was even convinced that it was a rock at first,” noted Squyres. “There was some speculation that it might actually have been one of the airbag covers, shaken off during the landing by a particularly sharp jolt. Before we got to it we had a little guessing game going, with the votes about evenly split between ‘Mars rock’ and ‘flight hardware’, along with a few brave souls who thought it might be a meteorite.” Flight hardware has presented a number of fantastic images in the landscape, from objects like airbag threads and parachutes to tiny paper bits.

“There was only one object anywhere outside Eagle crater that looked even remotely like a decent-sized rock. We named it ‘Bounce Rock’ because we could see that the airbags had bounced right on top of it as the landing took place,” wrote Squyres. “It figures that if there was only one rock for what seems like miles in every direction, we’d find a way to hit it!”

“It was fun, and it sure was interesting, but it was a bit of a struggle,” described Squyres. “What had us going for awhile there was a very nice Mini-TES spectrum that seemed to show a lot of hematite in the rock. We knew there was hematite in the soil at Meridiani, but this was the first time we’d gotten a hematite signal from rock… so it looked very interesting. We rolled up to it, whipped out the Moessbauer Spectrometer, took some good data, and to our surprise we found no hematite in the rock at all. In fact, the only mineral that the Moessbauer detected was pyroxene, which made this rock look very different from anything we’d ever seen, at either landing site. We put a hole in it with the RAT, looked again, and saw the same thing — lots of pyroxene and no hematite.”

“So what was going on?”, asked Squyres. “Turns out we’d been faked out on the Mini-TES data. We had been pretty far away from the rock when we had first looked it, and the Mini-TES field of view had also included a particularly hematite-rich patch of soil immediately behind the rock. Once we got close enough to see the rock better with Mini-TES, the Mini-TES data confirmed the absence of hematite, confirmed the pyroxene, and also showed some plagioclase, another mineral, in the rock. So the story was coming together.”

“Then came the most interesting part of all, the APXS data.” Squyres referred to the alpha proton spectrometer, an instrument to determine chemical composition. “The APXS measures elemental chemistry, and what we found was that, chemically, Bounce Rock is almost a dead ringer for a rock called EETA 79001-B. Odd name for a rock; 79001 actually is a rock from Mars that was found in Antarctica back in 1979. It was knocked off of Mars long ago, orbited the sun for awhile, and eventually hit the Earth in Antarctica, where it was found many years later by an expedition sent there to collect meteorites. There are more than a dozen such rocks that are believed to be from Mars on Earth. But until Bounce Rock, nobody had ever found a rock that was actually on Mars and that matched the chemistry of one of these rocks. Now we have.”

“We’re not quite sure where on Mars Bounce Rock came from, but we suspect that it might have been thrown out of a big impact crater that’s about 50 kilometers southwest of our landing site,” concluded Squyres. “So it’s not a meteorite, but it probably did fall from the sky. And it turned out to be a very interesting stop on our drive across Meridiani Planum.”

The rover team has two hills on the horizon, each approaching closer everyday, as Spirit drives towards the Columbia Hills and Opportunity motors towards Endurance Crater with a slightly raised lip that otherwise stands out as the closest thing to a hill on the flat plains.

On its way to the Columbia Hills, Spirit acquired new microscopic imager views of its capture magnet on sol 92 (April 6, 2004). Both Spirit and Opportunity are equipped with a number of magnets. The capture magnet, as seen right, has a stronger charge than its sidekick, the filter magnet. The lower-powered filter magnet captures only the most magnetic airborne dust with the strongest charges, while the capture magnet picks up all magnetic airborne dust.

The magnets’ primary purpose is to collect the martian magnetic dust so that scientists can analyze it with the rovers’ Moessbauer spectrometers. While there is plenty of dust on the surface of Mars, it is difficult to confirm where it came from, and when it was last airborne. Because scientists are interested in learning about the properties of the dust in the atmosphere, they devised this dust-collection experiment.

The capture magnet is about 4.5 centimeters (1.8 inches) in diameter and is constructed with a central cylinder and three rings, each with alternating orientations of magnetization. Scientists have been monitoring the continual accumulation of dust since the beginning of the mission with panoramic camera and microscopic imager images. They had to wait until enough dust accumulated before they could get a Moessbauer spectrometer analysis. The results of that analysis, performed on sol 92, have not been sent back to Earth yet.

The plains appear to be uniform in character from the rover’s current position all the way to Endurance Crater. Granules of various sizes blanket the plains. Spherical granules fancifully called blueberries are present – some intact and some broken. Larger granules pave the surface, while smaller grains, including broken blueberries, form small dunes. Randomly distributed 1-centimeter (0.4 inch) sized pebbles (as seen just left of center in the foreground of the image) make up a third type of feature on the plains. The pebbles’ composition remains to be determined. Scientists plan to examine these in the coming sols.

Examination of this part of Mars by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter revealed the presence of hematite, which led NASA to choose Meridiani Planum as Opportunity’s landing site. The rover science conducted on the plains of Meridiani Planum serves to integrate what the rovers are seeing on the ground with what orbital data have shown. Opportunity will make stop at a small crater called “Fram” (seen in the upper left, with relatively large rocks nearby) before heading to the rim of Endurance Crater.

Original Source: NASA Astrobiology Magazine

NASA’s Opportunity rover has examined an odd volcanic rock on the plains of Mars’ Meridiani Planum region with a composition unlike anything seen on Mars before, but scientists have found similarities to meteorites that fell to Earth.

“We think we have a rock similar to something found on Earth,” said Dr. Benton Clark of Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, science-team member for the Opportunity and Spirit rovers on Mars. The similarity seen in data from Opportunity’s alpha particle X-ray spectrometer “gives us a way of understanding ‘Bounce Rock’ better,” he said. Bounce Rock is the name given to the odd, football-sized rock because Opportunity struck it while bouncing to a stop inside protective airbags on landing day.

The resemblance helps resolve a paradox about the meteorites, too. Bubbles of gas trapped in them match the recipe of martian atmosphere so closely that scientists have been confident for years that these rocks originated from Mars. But examination of rocks on Mars with orbiters and surface missions had never found anything like them, until now.

“There is a striking similarity in spectra,” said Christian Schroeder, a rover science-team collaborator from the University of Mainz, Germany, which supplied both Mars rovers’ Moessbauer spectrometer instruments for identifying iron-bearing minerals.

Mars Exploration Rover scientists described two such meteorites in particular during a Mars Exploration Rover news conference at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. One rock, named Shergotty, was found in India in 1865 and it gave its name to a class of meteorites called shergottites. A shergottite named EETA79001 was found in Antarctica in 1979 and has an elemental composition even closer to Bounce Rock’s. Those two and nearly 30 other meteorites found on Earth are believed to have been ejected from Mars by the impacts of large asteroids or comets hitting Mars.

Opportunity’s miniature thermal emission spectrometer indicates that the main ingredient in Bounce Rock is a volcanic mineral called pyroxene, said science-team collaborator Deanne Rogers of Arizona State University, Tempe. The Moessbauer spectrometer also identified pyroxene in the rock. The high proportion of pyroxene makes it unlike not only any other rock studied by Opportunity or Spirit, but also unlike the volcanic deposits mapped extensively around Mars by a similar spectrometer on NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter, Rogers said.

Thermal infrared imaging by another orbiter, Mars Odyssey, suggests a possible origin for Bounce Rock. An impact crater about 25 kilometers wide (16 miles wide) lies about 50 kilometers (31 miles) southwest of Opportunity. The images show that some rocks thrown outward by the impact that formed that crater flew as far as the distance to the rover. “Some of us think Bounce Rock could have been ejected from this crater,” Rogers said.

Opportunity is driving eastward, toward a crater dubbed “Endurance” that might offer access to thicker exposures of bedrock than the rover has been able to examine so far. With new software to improve mobility performance, the rover may reach Endurance within two weeks, said JPL’s Jan Chodas, flight software manager for both Mars Exploration Rovers.

Mission controllers at JPL successfully sent new versions of flight software to both rovers. Spirit switched to the new version successfully on Monday, and Opportunity did late Tuesday.

A parting look at the small crater in which Opportunity landed is part of a full 360-degree color panorama released at the news conference. The view combines about 600 individual frames from the rover’s panoramic camera, said science-team collaborator Jason Soderblom of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. It is called the Lion King panorama because it was taken from a high-ground viewpoint at the edge of the crater, like the high-ground viewpoint used by animal characters in the Lion King story.

The panorama gives a good sense of how wind has uncovered the outcrop at the upwind side of the crater and deposited sand in the downwind side of the crater and bright martian dust in the wind shadow of the crater, Soderblom commented. On the wide plain outside the crater lies Bounce Rock.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Images and additional information about the project are available from JPL at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., at http://athena.cornell.edu.

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release

Image credit: UMich
One of the big problems with space travel is that one cannot over pack.

Suppose astronauts reach Mars. How do they explore the planet if they cannot weigh down the vessel with fuel for excursions?

A team of undergraduate aerospace engineering students at the University of Michigan is doing research to help astronauts make fuel once they get to Mars, and the results could bring scientists one step closer to manned or extended rover trips to the planet.

Their research proposal won the five-student team a highly competitive trip to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to participate in the Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program.

In Houston, the students conducted zero-gravity experiments using iodine as a catalyst to burn magnesium. Magnesium is a metal found on Mars that can be harvested for fuel?fossil fuels don’t burn on Mars because of the planet’s carbon dioxide (CO2) atmosphere, but metals do burn in a CO2 atmosphere.

The idea for the students’ experiments evolved from previous research done by Margaret Wooldridge, an associate professor in mechanical engineering and the team’s adviser. Wooldridge’s research showed that while magnesium is a promising fuel source, burning magnesium alone?without a catalyst such as iodine?has several challenges. Preliminary results from the student experiments showed that using iodine as a catalyst helped make the magnesium burn better, said Arianne Liepa, aerospace engineering undergrad and team member.

The experiments also showed that using the iodine, magnesium, CO2 system worked even better in a microgravity environment. “That bodes well for a power source on Mars where the gravity is approximately one-third that of Earth,” Wooldridge said.

The students?Greg Hukill, Arianne Liepa, Travis Palmer, Carlos Perez and Christy Schroeder?who conducted the experiments over a nine-day period in March, flew on a specially modified Boeing KC 135A turbojet transport. The plane flies parabolic arcs to produce weightless periods of 20 to 25 seconds at the apex of the arc.

Original Source: University of Michigan News Release

Image credit: NASA/JPL
As both rovers approach their third month resident on Mars, the mission planners have returned to Earth time. Both rover teams look to make rapid progress toward distant hills, with a possible second September extension continuing with any remaining mission science.

JPL Mars Program Office Head, Dr. Firouz Naderi, indicated that with this week’s first mission extension, even more may be planned. Currently slated for September 13 as the next mission milestone, such an ambitious science schedule would give the rovers 250 Sols on the planet’s surface. “This is all bonus science,” said Naderi. “After the solar conjunction (alignment between Mars, Earth and the Sun) around September 13th, we would probably propose to NASA for a second extension.” During a solar conjunction, explained Naderi, the Sun blocks line-of-sight views between the Earth tracking and martian surface operations for seven to ten days. “The Sun gets in the way,” said Naderi, explaining that during the lead-up to September 13th, both rovers will be given a deserved weeklong respite, followed by what many hope will be further healthy science operations to follow.

For the rest of 2004, the engineering and science team will look to stretch more life out of their six-wheeled laboratories. The primary constraints on further operations will be thermal, power, and dust accumulation from seasonal change and road weathering. Mission manager, Matt Wallace, explained previously that both rovers were healthy: “We try to keep our finger on the pulse of vehicle health, looking for signals or markers of subtle changes and trends. Except for environmental changes (power, thermal, optical opacity and dust accumulation), there is no wear and tear on subsystems.”

At Gusev crater, the extended Spirit mission will look to traverse towards Columbia Hills. At Meridiani Planum, the extended Opportunity mission will rack up long drives across the flat plains towards Endurance Crater. At full speed, the rovers can clock from 50 to 100 meters per Sol.

Naderi noted that the switch of mission personnel back to Earth time has been a welcome transition. For future missions, he said, the consensus for long-term operations will likely move away from following Mars’ sunrise and sunset times. One problem other than the late and early on-site shifts at JPL has been the inability to sleep at consistent times because the approximately 39 minute longer martian day continues always to push and rotate schedules. Dr. Ray Arvidson, deputy Principal Investigator and Washington University, St. Louis professor of geology, compared the hectic three months on Mars time to jetlag when a transatlantic traveler returns from Europe. “It takes three to four days to get back to Earth time,” said Arvidson.

One other benefit, according to Arvidson, is that since mission science is planned for Spirit and Opportunity on opposite sides of Mars, now that both teams work on the same clock, they will be able to simplify coordination and strategic science targets. There are people on the other rover tream, said Arvidson, “who I haven’t seen for three months except in the parking lot.”

Spirit’s mission manager for surface operations, Jennifer Trosper, noted that on her first day back on Earth time (last Monday), she was pleased not to come into work at 1 A.M. But as she was getting ready for bed that night proved to be exactly when she was called back to JPL–to troubleshoot why the Spirit rover had not responded to a ‘beep’ signal sent from Earth around midnight.

Trosper said that new flight software will be a major priority for the coming days. She explained that while there were risks associated with any commands that change the rovers’ state, the software has been thoroughly pre-tested. The first upload of flight software was not loaded until only one month before launch. The critical descent and landing software was not loaded on the spacecraft until nearly three months after launch, while the probe was well on its way to Mars.

In detail, Trosper noted, their plan will feature first the transfer of software command files for six hours a day over 4 days of direct communication from Earth to the high-gain antenna on both rovers. “When we get all the files on-board, then we build the flight software (locally on the rovers). When that is complete, the rovers go to sleep for 15 minutes, waking up with a new system.” The Spirit rover was the first to encounter file overloads after 18 days of file storage, and at one point could not send any data to Earth except that its system clock had shifted to the year 2053. Later changes in software succeeded in rejoining the rovers with JPL’s command center.

Arvidson highlighted a few near-term science objectives as further investigation on Spirit continues to calibrate the dusty martian skies. By pointing the rover’s panoramic camera towards the sky, while overhead satellites look down, scientist hope to remove the masking influence of dust. Spirit completed these coordinated observations with the thermal emission spectrometer instrument on NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter. The observations involved miniature thermal emission spectrometer pre-flight, simultaneous, and post-flight sky and ground measurements. Spirit also collected a panoramic camera opacity observation.

Opportunity continues to surprise scientists as it found another outcrop similar to what was first seen in its landing hole at Eagle Crater. But this time, the outcrop is on the edge of a trough in the middle of the plains. “This outcrop looks texturally like Eagle Crater,” and current plans are to spend several days probing what appears to be bedrock. Bedrock is of interest if it has preserved a layered timeline of rock deposit. Since this deposit also has ripples, scientists hope to discover whether its chemistry “speaks to water,” said Arvidson. “The trough is probably a fracture, we don’t know how young?”

While there is a “strong desire to get another 100 meter drive, to get to Endurance Crater,” said Arvidson, “the hope is to spend a few Sols here.”

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release

Image credit: UC Berkeley
The same cutting-edge technology that speeded sequencing of the human genome could, by the end of the decade, tell us once and for all whether life ever existed on Mars, according to a University of California, Berkeley, chemist.

Richard Mathies, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry and developer of the first capillary electrophoresis arrays and new energy transfer fluorescent dye labels – both used in today’s DNA sequencers – is at work on an instrument that would use these technologies to probe Mars dust for evidence of life-based amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.

Graduate student Alison Skelley at the Rock Garden, one of the sites in Chile’s Atacama desert where researchers sampled soil for amino acids in preparation for sending an instrument to Mars to look for signs of life. The ruins of the city of Yunguy are in the background. (Photo courtesy Richard Mathies lab/UC Berkeley)

With two development grants from NASA totaling nearly $2.4 million, he and team members from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology and UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography hope to build a Mars Organic Analyzer to fly aboard NASA’s roving, robotic Mars Science Laboratory mission and/or the European Space Agency’s ExoMars mission, both scheduled for launch in 2009. The ExoMars proposal is in collaboration with Pascale Ehrenfreund, associate professor of astrochemistry at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands.

The Mars Organic Analyzer, dubbed MOA, looks not only for the chemical signature of amino acids, but tests for a critical characteristic of life-based amino acids: They’re all left handed. Amino acids can be made by physical processes in space – they’re often found in meteorites – but they’re about equally left- and right-handed. If amino acids on Mars have a preference for left-handed over right-handed amino acids, or vice versa, they could only have come from some life form on the planet, Mathies said.

“We feel that measuring homochirality – a prevalence of one type of handedness over another – would be absolute proof of life,” said Mathies, a UC Berkeley member of the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3) . “That’s why we focused on this type of experiment. If we go to Mars and find amino acids but don’t measure their chirality, we’re going to feel very foolish. Our instrument can do it.”

The MOA is one of a variety of instruments under development with NASA funding to look for the presence of organic molecules on Mars, with final proposals for the 2009 mission due in mid-July. Mathies and colleagues Jeffrey Bada of Scripps and Frank Grunthaner of JPL, who plan to submit the only proposal that tests for amino acid handedness, have put the analyzer to the test and shown that it works. The details of their proposal are now on the Web at http://astrobiology.berkeley.edu.

In February, Grunthaner and UC Berkeley graduate student Alison Skelley traveled to the Atacama desert of Chile to see if the amino acid detector – called the Mars Organic Detector, or MOD – could find amino acids in the driest region of the planet. The MOD easily succeeded. However, because the second half of the experiment – the “lab-on-a-chip” that tests for amino acid handedness – had not yet been married to the MOD, the researchers brought the samples back to UC Berkeley for that part of the test. Skelley has now successfully finished these experiments demonstrating the compatibility of the lab-on-a-chip system with the MOD.

“If you can’t detect life in the Yungay region of the Atacama Desert, you have no business going to Mars,” Mathies said, referring to the desert region in Chile where the crew stayed and conducted some of their tests.

Mathies, who 12 years ago developed the first capillary array electrophoresis separators marketed by Amersham Biosciences in their fast DNA sequencers, is confident that his group’s improvements to the technology utilized in the genome project will feed perfectly into the Mars exploration projects.

“With the kind of microfluidic technology we’ve developed and our capability to make arrays of in situ analyzers that conduct very simple experiments relatively inexpensively, we don’t need to have people on Mars to perform valuable analyses,” he said. “So far, we’ve shown this system can detect life in a fingerprint, and that we can do a complete analysis in the field. We’re really excited about the future possibilities.”

Bada, a marine chemist, is the exobiologist on the team, having developed nearly a dozen years ago a novel way to test for amino acids, amines (the degradation products of amino acids) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, organic compounds common in the universe. That experiment, MOD, was selected for a 2003 mission to Mars that was scrapped when the Mars Polar Lander crashed in 1999.

Since then, Bada has teamed with Mathies to develop a more ambitious instrument that combines an improved MOD with the new technology for identifying and testing the chirality of the amino acids detected.

The ultimate goal is to find proof of life on Mars. The Viking landers in the 1970s unsuccessfully tested for organic molecules on Mars, but their sensitivity was so low that they would have failed to detect life even if there were a million bacteria per gram of soil, Bada said. Now that the NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity have almost certainly shown that standing water once existed on the surface, the aim is to find organic molecules.

Bada’s MOD is designed to heat Martian soil samples and, in the low pressures at the surface, vaporize any organic molecules that may be present. The vapor then condenses onto a cold finger, a trap cooled to Mars’ ambient nighttime temperature, approximately 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The cold finger is coated with fluorescamine dye tracers that bind only to amino acids, so that any fluorescent signal indicates that amino acids or amines are present.

“Right now, we are able to detect one trillionth of a gram of amino acids in a gram of soil, which is a million times better than Viking,” Bada said.
The added capillary electrophoresis system sips the condensed fluid off the cold finger and siphons it to a lab-on-a-chip with built-in pumps and valves that route the fluid past chemicals that help identify the amino acids and check for handedness or chirality.

“MOD is a first stage interrogation where the sample is examined for the presence of any fluorescent species including amino acids,” Skelley said. “Then, the capillary electrophoresis instrument does the second stage analysis, where we actually resolve those different species and can tell what they are. The two instruments are designed to complement and build on one another.”

“Rich has taken this experiment into the next dimension. We really have a system that works,” Bada said. “When I started thinking about tests for chirality and first talked to Rich, we had conceptual ideas, but nothing that was actually functioning. He has taken it to the point where we have an honest-to-God portable instrument.”

Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, can exist in two mirror-image forms, designated L (levo) for left-handed and D (dextro) for right-handed. All proteins on Earth are composed of amino acids of the L type, allowing a chain of them to fold up nicely into a compact protein.

As Mathies describes it, the test for chirality takes advantage of the fact that left-handed amino acids fit more snugly into a left-handed chemical “mitt” and right-handed amino acids into a right-handed mitt. If both left- and right-handed amino acids travel down a thin capillary tube lined with left-handed mitts, the left-handed ones will travel more slowly because they slip into the mitts along the way. It’s like a left-handed politician working a crowd, he said. She’ll move more slowly the more left-handed people in the crowd, because those are the only people she will shake hands with. In this case, the left-handed mitt is a chemical called cyclodextrin.

Different amino acids – there are 20 different kinds used by humans – also travel down the tube at different rates, which allows partial identification of those present.

“After amino acids are detected by MOD, the labeled amino acid solution is pumped down into microfluidics and crudely separated by charge,” Mathies said. “The mobility of the amino acids tells us something about charge and size and, when cyclodextrins are present, whether we have a racemic mixture, that is, an equal amount of left- and right-handed amino acids. If we do, the amino acids could be non-biological. But if we see a chiral excess, we know the amino acids have to be biological in origin.”

The state-of-the-art chip designed and built by Skelley consists of channels etched by photolithographic techniques and a microfluidic pumping system sandwiched into a four-layer disk four inches in diameter, with the layers connected by drilled channels. The tiny microfabricated valves and pumps are created from two glass layers with a flexible polymer (PDMS or polydimethylsiloxane) membrane in between, moved up and down using a pressure or vacuum source. UC Berkeley physical chemist James Scherer, who designed the capillary electrophoresis instrument, also developed a sensitive fluorescence detector that quickly reads the pattern on the chip.

One of the team’s current NASA grants is for development of a next-generation Microfabricated Organic Laboratory, or MOL, to fly to Mars, Jupiter’s moon Europa or perhaps a comet and conduct even more elaborate chemical tests in search of a more complete set of organic molecules, including nucleic acids, the structural units of DNA. For now, however, the goal is an instrument ready by 2009 to go beyond the current experiments aboard the Mars 2003 rovers and look for amino acids.

“You have to remember, so far we have not detected any organic material on Mars, so that would be a tremendous step forward,” Bada said. “In the hunt for life, there are two requirements: water and organic compounds. With the recent findings of the Mars rovers that suggests that water is present, the remaining unknown is organic compounds. That’s why we are focusing on this.

“The Mars Organic Analyzer is a very powerful experiment, and our great hope is to find not only amino acids, but amino acids that look like they could come from some sort of living entity.”

Original Source: Berkeley News Release

The Associated Press is reporting that a private group of Russian space experts announced plans to send 6 humans to Mars by 2011 – for a cost of only $3.5 billion. An official from the Central Research Institute for Machine Building said it would carry out the mission with funding by Aerospace Systems, and would be completely private. The program envisions six cosmonauts traveling to Mars and exploring it for several months before returning to Earth – the total journey would take three years. The mission costs would be low because it would use existing spacecraft. The Russian Space Agency has no involvement with this mission, and dismissed it as nonsense.

Image credit: NASA/JPL
NASA has approved an extended mission for the Mars Exploration Rovers, handing them up to five months of overtime assignments as they finish their three-month prime mission.

The first of the two rovers, Spirit, met the success criteria set for its prime mission. Spirit gained check marks in the final two boxes on April 3 and 5, when it exceeded 600 meters (1,969 feet) of total drive distance and completed 90 martian operational days after landing.

Opportunity landed three weeks after Spirit. It will complete the two-rover checklist of required feats when it finishes a 90th martian day of operations April 26. Each martian day, or “sol,” lasts about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day.

“Given the rovers’ tremendous success, the project submitted a proposal for extending the mission, and we have approved it,” said Orlando Figueroa, Mars Exploration Program director at NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.

The mission extension provides $15 million for operating the rovers through September. The extension more than doubles exploration for less than a two percent additional investment, if the rovers remain in working condition. The extended mission has seven new goals for extending the science and engineering accomplishments of the prime mission.

“Once Opportunity finishes its 91st sol, everything we get from the rovers after that is a bonus,” said Dr. Firouz Naderi, manager of Mars exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., where the rovers were built and are controlled. “Even though the extended mission is approved to September, and the rovers could last even longer, they also might stop in their tracks next week or next month. They are operating under extremely harsh conditions. However, while Spirit is past its ‘warranty,’ we look forward to continued discoveries by both rovers in the months ahead.” JPL’s Jennifer Trosper, Spirit mission manager, said even when a memory-management problem on the rover caused trouble for two weeks, she had confidence the rover and the operations team could get through the crisis and reach the 90-sol benchmark. “We never felt it was over, but certainly when we were getting absolutely no data from the spacecraft and were trying to figure out what happened, we were worried,” she said.

Trosper was less confident about Spirit’s prospects for reaching the criterion of 600 meters by sol 91, given the challenging terrain of the landing area within Gusev Crater. On sol 89 Spirit accomplished that goal and set a short-lived record for martian driving, with a single-sol distance of 50.2 meters (165 feet) that pushed the odometer total to 617 meters (2,024 feet). Two days later, Opportunity shattered that mark with a 100-meter (328-foot) drive.

Beyond the quantifiable criteria, such as using all research tools at both landing sites and investigating at least eight locations, the rovers have returned remarkable science results. The most dramatic have been Opportunity’s findings of evidence of a shallow body of salty water in the past in the Mars Meridiani Planum region.

“We’re going to continue exploring and try to understand the water story at Gusev,” said JPL’s Dr. Mark Adler, deputy mission manager for Spirit. Spirit is in pursuit of geological evidence for an ancient lake thought to have once filled Gusev Crater.

Reaching “Columbia Hills,” which could hold geological clues to that water story, is one of seven objectives for Spirit’s extended mission. Opportunity has a parallel one, to seek geologic context for the outcrop in the “Eagle” crater by reaching other outcrops in the “Endurance” crater and perhaps elsewhere. Other science objectives are to continue atmospheric studies at both sites to encompass more of Mars’ seasonal cycle, and to calibrate and validate data from Mars orbiters for additional types of rocks and soils examined on the ground.

Three new engineering objectives are to traverse more than a kilometer (0.62 mile) to demonstrate mobility technologies; to characterize solar-array performance over long durations of dust deposition at both landing sites; and to demonstrate long-term operation of two mobile science robots on a distant planet. During the past two weeks, rover teams at JPL have switched from Mars-clock schedules to Earth-clock schedules designed to be less stressful and more sustainable over a longer period.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Images and additional information about the project are available from JPL at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., at http://athena.cornell.edu .

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release

Image credit: EADS
Following award of the ?600k study contract by ESA, EADS Space has made significant progress in completing the first definition of a European Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. While EADS Astrium is defining the overall mission and the spacecraft, EADS Space Transportation is responsible for the re-entry systems and a ‘Mars Ascent Vehicle’ – a small rocket to carry the precious sample up through the Martian atmosphere.

The team at EADS Astrium, Stevenage is currently preparing for the Mid Term Review where two very different designs will have to be reduced to one.

In the first concept the launch vehicle lifts the sample from the surface of Mars and docks with the Earth Return Vehicle. In the second concept the launch vehicle releases the sample container into a low Mars orbit and the Earth Return Vehicle uses a capture mechanism to perform the rendezvous. The selection of the rendezvous concept has a significant impact on the overall mass, cost and complexity of the mission.

Marie-Claire Perkinson, Senior Systems Engineer at EADS Astrium, Stevenage, leading the study said. “Our industrial team, which includes EADS Space in France; Galileo Avionica in Italy, Sener in Spain and Utopia Consultancies in Germany has done a great job so far in proposing the two exciting concepts. We now have to select the best solution and then, once ESA has raised the appropriate support and funds for the implementation of the mission, launch could be as early as 2011.”

European astronauts may land on Mars one day, but getting them there and safely returning them to Earth will involve many steps and numerous technical challenges in propulsion, structures, computers and software. It will require sophisticated spacecraft to escape from Earth’s orbit; fly to Mars, survive atmospheric entry and landing; operate on the surface; take-off; return to Earth and then finally get the crew back on terra firma. Long before this can be accomplished some key technologies must be demonstrated. The best way to do this is to fly a robotic mission with a scaled-down version of the eventual manned mission.

This is exactly the goal of Mars Sample Return, the second flagship mission of the European Space Agency’s Aurora planetary exploration initiative and one of the most eagerly awaited future space missions for the planetary scientists.

Because Martian winds have transported dust across the planet’s surface over millions of years, the MSR sample could include particles from many different sources, representing a wide variety of rock types and ages, like grains of sand on a beach. Each granule could offer completely different insights into the rich geologic past of the Red Planet. Scientists could now “look at the sample as if each grain were a rock,” said Professor Colin Pillinger of the Open University. This would build on the decades of research already carried out on lunar rock samples.

EADS Space has used its unique heritage in building launch vehicles, planetary spacecraft and re-entry systems, combined with a deep understanding of the science goals to win the ESA mission study. ESA’s Aurora Project Manager Bruno Gardini said “The Mars Sample Return mission is one of the most challenging missions ever considered by ESA. Not only does it include many new technologies and four or five different spacecraft, but it is also a mission of tremendous scientific importance and the first robotic mission with a similar profile to a possible human expedition to Mars.”

Original Source: RAS News Release

Image credit: NASA/JPL
Clues from a wind-scalloped volcanic rock on Mars investigated by NASA’s Spirit rover suggest repeated possible exposures to water inside Gusev Crater, scientists said Thursday.

Gusev is halfway around the planet from the Meridiani region where Spirit’s twin, Opportunity, recently found evidence that water used to flow across the surface.

“This is not water that sloshed around on the surface like what appears to have happened at Meridiani. We’re talking about small amounts of water, perhaps underground,” said Dr. Hap McSween, a rover science team member from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

“The evidence is in the form of multiple coatings on the rock, as well as fractures that are filled with alteration material and perhaps little patches of alteration material,” McSween said during a press conference at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The rock, called “Mazatzal” after mountains in Arizona, lies partially buried near the rim of the crater informally named “Bonneville” inside the much larger Gusev Crater. Its light- toned appearance grabbed scientists’ attention. After Spirit’s rock abrasion tool brushed two patches on the surface with wire bristles, a gray, darker layer could be seen under the tan topcoat. The rock abrasion tool ground into the surface with diamond cutting teeth on March 26. Then, after an examination of the newly exposed material, it ground deeper into the rock two days later. A lighter-gray interior lies under the darker layer, and a bright stripe cuts across both.

Dr. Jeff Johnson, a science team member from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Team, Flagstaff, Ariz., said the stripe “seems to be a fracture that water has flowed through, potentially with minerals precipitating from that fluid and lining the walls of the crack.”

He and other scientists stressed that the interpretations are preliminary. “The team is, as always, trying to find time to digest these observations while also preparing for the next day’s operations,” Johnson said.

Spirit’s alpha particle X-ray spectrometer checked what chemical elements were close to the surface of untreated, brushed, once-drilled and twice-drilled patches. “Miracles, miracles, miracles. We have a lot of work to do,” the instrument’s lead scientist, Dr. Rudi Rieder of the Max Planck Institute, Mainz, Germany, exclaimed about the results. For example, the ratio of bromine to chlorine seen inside the rock is unusually high and possibly a clue to alteration by water.

The final experiment on Mazatzal was to scrub the surface with the rock abrasion tool in a pattern of five circles arranged in a ring, with a sixth circle in the center. Besides creating a rock-art daisy, this task by the engineers of New York-based Honeybee Robotics, as well as JPL, produced a brushed patch big enough to fill the field of view of Spirit’s miniature thermal emission spectrometer, said Dr. Steve Ruff of Arizona State University, Tempe. The tan outer surface appears to have a strikingly different mineral composition than the dark gray coating exposed by the brushing, but more time is needed to complete the analysis, he said.

McSween proposed that the light outer coat, dark inner coat and bright veins could have resulted from three different periods of the rock being buried, altered by fluids and unburied.

While scientists await transmission of additional data Spirit has collected about Mazatzal, the rover will be making its way toward the “Columbia Hills” about 2.3 kilometers (1.3 miles) away. Spirit left the rock and drove 36.5 meters (120 feet) early Thursday.

Opportunity set a one-day driving record on Mars on March 27 by covering 48.9 meters (160 feet) toward a rock called “Bounce Rock” because airbag bounce marks show that the spacecraft hit it on landing day two months ago. “We’re looking to break that record again very soon with longer and longer drives,” said JPL’s Chris Lewicki, flight director.

Before moving on across the plains of Meridiani, though, Opportunity will complete an investigation it has begun of Bounce Rock. The rock is unlike any seen on Mars before, said Dr. Jim Bell, lead scientist for the rovers’ panoramic cameras. “There are some shiny surfaces on this rock,” he said, describing them as “almost mirrorlike.”

The two rovers’ 18 cameras have now taken more than 20,000 images. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.

Images and additional information about the project are available from JPL at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov and from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., at http://athena.cornell.edu .

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release