Category: Mars

Image credit: Malin

Lord Sainsbury, the UK Minister of Science and Technology reinforced today that they haven’t given up hope on Beagle 2, and continue to be optimistic that the lander will be found. A “tiger team” of engineers and scientists are working through all the scenarios that could help to explain what’s wrong with Beagle 2 (other than it’s all smashed up on the Martian surface). One theory is that the lander might have fallen into a kilometre-sized crater which was in the landing zone; although, the chances of this happening are pretty remote.

The latest attempts to communicate with Beagle 2 via the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank and the Mars Odyssey spacecraft have been unsuccessful. However, the Beagle 2 team has not given up hope and continues to be optimistic that efforts to contact the lander will eventually be successful.

This message was also reinforced by Lord Sainsbury, UK Minister for Science and Innovation, who this morning joined members of the Beagle 2 team to answer questions about the status of the project.

“While we’re disappointed that things have not gone according to plan, we are determined that the search should go on, both the search to make contact with Beagle 2 and also (the search) to answer the long term question about whether there is life on Mars,” said Lord Sainsbury.

“There’s clearly still a good opportunity to make contact with Beagle 2 with Mars Express when it comes into action, and that has to be the first priority at this point. I think everything is being done by the ‘tiger team’ in Leicester to make contact with Beagle 2 and I want to wish them every success in their efforts.”

“We are looking at a number of possible failure modes that we might do something about,” said Dr. Mark Sims, Beagle 2 mission manager from the University of Leicester.

“We are working under the assumption that Beagle 2 is on the surface of Mars and for some reason cannot communicate to us. In particular, we’re looking at two major issues. One is communications, and there are also related timing and software issues.

“We’ve got a few more Odyssey contacts, the last one being on 31 December. Then we have four contacts with Mars Express already pre-programmed into Beagle, assuming the software is running, on 6, 12, 13 and 17. The 6 and 12 are when Mars Express is manoeuvring into its final orbit, so they are not optimum for Beagle 2 communications. The 13th and 17th are very good opportunities for Mars Express.”

According to Dr. Sims, one of the scenarios the team was investigating – a timer and hardware reset – now seems unlikely, and can probably be ruled out. However, other possible slips of the onboard time may have been caused by software or problems of copying data between various parts of memory. Possibly, all of the stored command times have been lost.

“None of these can yet be eliminated,” he said.

After the tenth contact attempt, Beagle 2 will move into communication search mode 1 (CSM 1), taking advantage of the ability of the software on board Beagle 2 to recognise when dawn and dusk occur on Mars by measuring the current feeding from the solar arrays.

“When we get into CSM 1 mode, Beagle 2 will start putting additional contacts on its time line, independent of the clock value,” said Mark Sims. “This will happen after 31 December.”

The team is also looking at sending blind commands to Beagle 2. This is helped by Beagle going into CSM 1 mode.

“The team has come up with a method of fooling the receiver into accepting commands without having to talk back to the orbiter,” said Dr. Sims. “We have an agreement with JPL to reconfigure Odyssey to provisionally attempt this on 31 December, the last programmed Odyssey pass.”

Malin Space Science Systems has also provided the Beagle 2 team with a picture of the landing site taken by the camera on Mars Global Surveyor 20 minutes after the spacecraft’s scheduled touchdown. It shows that the weather was quite good on the day Beagle landed, so it was unlikely to be a factor in the descent. The next opportunity to image the landing site with Mars Global Surveyor will not be until 5 January.

The image showing the centre of Beagle 2’s landing ellipse also shows a 1 km wide crater. There is just an outside possibility that the lander could have touched down inside this crater, resulting in problems caused by steep slopes, large number of rocks or disruption to communication from the lander. This image is now available on the Beagle 2 and PPARC Web sites (see link on the right hand side).

While the Lander Operations Control Centre in Leicester continues its efforts to communicate with the Beagle 2, Lord Sainsbury took the opportunity to inform the media that the UK government is keen to continue the innovative robotic exploration effort begun with the lander.

“Long term we need to be working with ESA to ensure that in some form there is a Beagle 3 which takes forwards this technology,” he said. “I very much hope that the Aurora programme, which is now being developed by ESA, will take forward this kind of robotic exploration.

“We’ve always recognised that Beagle 2 was a high risk project, and we must avoid the temptation in future to only do low risk projects.

“I’d like to use this opportunity to add my thanks to all those helping our efforts to make contact with Beagle 2. I think the amount of international collaboration one gets on these occasions is very, very impressive and very encouraging to the team.”

“We should not ignore the importance of Mars Express, which has three British-designed instruments on board and which looks set for success,” he added.

“Finally, can I use this opportunity to wish the Americans every success with its two Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.”

Original Source: PPARC News Release

Image credit: ESA

Unlike its missing passenger, Beagle 2, controllers from the European Space Agency know exactly where Mars Express is – exactly where they want it. The spacecraft is currently on a wide equatorial orbit which brings it as close as 400 km and then out to 188,000 km away from the planet. Engineers are preparing the spacecraft for a further burn of its main engine which will bring the spacecraft into a closer polar orbit around Mars. Once Mars Express modifies its orbit, it will be the best candidate to communicate with the missing Beagle 2; starting January 4, 2004.

The Mars Express orbiter, mothership of Europe’s first mission to the Red Planet, is in a stable and precise orbit around Mars.

The essential Mars Orbit Insertion (MOI) manoeuvre had been completed on 25 December at 3:47 CET. This brought the spacecraft as close as 400 kilometres to the surface of Mars.

Afterwards, the spacecraft went into a highly elliptical orbit, going as far as 188 000 kilometres away from the planet. The most essential part of the Mars Express mission is performing very well and we are expecting exciting science from January 2004 onwards.

Today, 27 December, the mission control team at ESOC prepared the next steps to turn Mars Express from a near-equatorial orbit into a polar orbit. Michael McKay, Mars Express Flight Director explained, “Our flight dynamics and flight operations teams thoroughly discuss, evaluate and prepare the commands to perform a series of manoeuvres starting with a major move on 30 December – where we will fire the main engine again for three minutes.

“These key manoeuvres will allow us to get even closer to Mars. They will not only allow us more frequent ‘overflights’ of the Beagle 2 landing area, but also ensure the beginning of the orbiter’s science mission. As Mars Express is the planned main communication partner of the Beagle 2, the chances of obtaining a signal strongly increase with these manoeuvres after 4 January 2004.”

Close European and international co-operation
The ESA control team at ESOC are in regular contact with their colleagues of the Beagle 2 team and the Jodrell Bank telescope in the UK, with NASA ground stations and with several other European partners (UK, Germany, Netherlands, etc.). Many international offers have been forthcoming to support the search for the Beagle 2 lander.

Original Source: ESA News Release

Image credit: ESA

Controllers have made two more attempts to reach the Beagle 2 lander, which was thought to have entered Mars’ atmosphere on December 25: once with both the Jodrell Bank radio telescope and again with Mars Odyssey. Although they’re disappointed, the engineers still have a few tricks up their sleeves. A special team has been put together, and is working around the clock to devise solutions for potential problems with the lander; if there are hardware or software problems, or if it’s ended up at an unusual angle. People will really start to lose hope in early January when Mars Express reaches its final polar orbit – it’s the spacecraft Beagle 2 was designed to communicate with.

Two attempts to communicate with Beagle 2 during the last 24 hours – first with the 76 metre (250 feet) Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, UK, and then this morning with the Mars Odyssey orbiter – ended without receiving a signal. Despite this outcome, fresh attempts to scan for a signal from Beagle 2 will be made over the coming days.

Meanwhile, scientists and engineers are eagerly awaiting ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft return close enough to Mars to try to establish contact with Beagle 2. This may be possible from 4 January 2004.

Mars Express was always intended to be the prime communication relay for Beagle 2, and the lander team is hopeful that a link can be established at that time if it has not already been achieved with Mars Odyssey.

“We need to get Beagle 2 into a period when it can broadcast for a much longer period,” says Professor Colin Pillinger, Beagle 2 lead scientist. “This will happen around the 4 January after the spacecraft has experienced a sufficient number of communication failures to switch to automatic transmission mode.”

Both Professor Pillinger and Professor David Southwood, ESA Director of Science, agreed that the best chance to establish communication with Beagle 2 would now seem to be through Mars Express.

At present, Mars Express is far from the planet and preparing to fire its engines for a major trajectory change that will move it into a polar orbit around Mars.

“We will have no satisfaction until we have a full mission” said Professor Southwood. “Today I’m certainly frustrated, but I’m still confident: let’s wait now until the mothership will have the possibility to get in contact with her baby. With Mars Express we will be using a system that we have fully tested and understand.”

Original Source: ESA News Release

Image credit: PPARC

After NASA’s Mars Odyssey failed to make contact with the British-built Beagle 2 lander on Christmas morning, all hopes were pinned on the Earth-based Jodrell Bank radio telescope to hear its faint signal. After listening for more than two hours, unfortunately, operators failed to tune into the spacecraft’s signal. Then another opportunity to communicate with Odyssey on December 26 failed as well. Mission controllers haven’t completely lost hope, though. When Mars Express reaches its final orbit in early January, it will be the best opportunity to communicate with Beagle 2 and help determine, once and for all, if the spacecraft survived its landing.

Scientists were hopeful that the 250 ft (76 m) Lovell Telescope, recently fitted with a highly sensitive receiver, would be able to pick up the outgoing call from the Mars lander between 19.00 GMT and midnight last night. An attempt to listen out for Beagle’s call home by the Westerbork telescope array in the Netherlands was unfortunately interrupted by strong radio interference.

The next window of opportunity to communicate via Mars Odyssey will open at 17.53 GMT and close at 18.33 GMT this evening, when the orbiter is within range of the targeted landing site on Isidis Planitia.

Another communication session from Jodrell Bank is scheduled between 18.15 GMT and midnight tonight, when Mars will be visible to the radio telescope. It is also hoped that the Stanford University radio telescope in California will be able to listen for the carrier signal on 27 December.

The Beagle 2 team plans to continue using the Mars Odyssey spacecraft as a Beagle 2 communications relay for the next 10 days, after which the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter will become available.

Mars Express, which was always planned to be Beagle 2’s main communication link with Earth, successfully entered orbit around the planet on 25 December and is currently being manoeuvred into its operational polar orbit.

Meanwhile, 13 more attempts to contact Mars Odyssey have been programmed into Beagle 2’s computer. If there is still no contact established after that period, Beagle 2 is programmed to move into auto-transmission mode, when it will send a continuous on-off pulse signal throughout the Martian daylight hours.

The first window of opportunity to communicate with Beagle 2 took place at around 06.00 GMT yesterday, when NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft flew over the planned landing site. In the absence of a signal from the 33 kg lander, the mission team contacted Jodrell Bank to put their contingency plan into operation.

At present, Beagle 2 should be sending a pulsing on-off signal once a minute (10 seconds on, 50 seconds off). Some 9 minutes later, this very slow “Morse Code” broadcast should reach Earth after a journey of some 98 million miles (157 million km).

Although the Beagle’s transmitter power is only 5 watts, little more than that of a mobile phone, scientists are confident that the signal can be detected by the state-of-the-art receiver recently installed on the Lovell Telescope. However, a significant drop in signal strength would require rigorous analysis of the data before it could be unambiguously identified.

Although the ground-based radio telescopes will not be able to send any reply, the new information provided by detection of the transmission from Beagle 2 would enable the mission team to determine a provisional location for Beagle 2. This, in turn, would allow the communications antenna on Mars Odyssey to be directed more accurately towards Beagle 2 during the orbiter’s subsequent overhead passes.

Original Source: PPARC News Release

Image credit: Beagle 2

The European Space Agency confirmed that Mars Express has arrived safely at the Red Planet, ending its 400 million kilometre journey, and beginning its mission to map the surface and search for underground water. The spacecraft began its 37 minute orbital insertion burn at 0247 UTC. Controllers believe that the British-built Beagle 2 also reached Mars at approximately the same time, but the lander failed to make contact with Mars Odyssey, which should have relayed communications back to Earth. Controllers will attempt to make contact again on December 25 at 2200 UTC, this time with the Earth-based Jodrell Bank telescope in Cheshire, UK.

This morning, after a journey lasting 205 days and covering 400 million kilometres, the European Mars Express space probe fired its main engine at 03:47 CET for a 37-minute burn in order to enter an orbit around Mars. This firing gave the probe a boost so that it could match the higher speed of the planet on its orbit around the Sun and be captured by its gravity field, like climbing in a spinning merry-go-round. This orbit insertion manoeuvre was a complete success.

This is a great achievement for Europe on its first attempt to send a space probe into orbit around another planet.

At approximately the same time, the Beagle 2 lander, protected by a thermal shield, entered the Martian atmosphere at high velocity and is expected to have reached the surface at about 03:52 CET. However, the first attempt to communicate with Beagle 2, three hours after landing, via NASA?s Mars Odyssey orbiter, did not establish radio contact. The next contact opportunity will be tonight at 23:40 CET.

The tiny lander was released from the orbiter six days ago on a collision course towards the planet. Before separation, its on-board computer was programmed to operate the lander on its arrival at the surface, by late afternoon (Martian time). According to the schedule, the solar panels must deploy to recharge the on-board batteries before sunset. The same sequence also tells Beagle 2 to emit a signal at a specific frequency for which the Jodrell Bank Telescope, UK, will be listening later tonight. Further radio contacts are scheduled in the days to come.

In the course of the coming week, the orbit of Mars Express will be gradually adjusted in order to prepare for its scientific mission. Mars Express is currently several thousand kilometres away from Mars, in a very elongated equatorial orbit. On 30 December, ESA’s ground control team will send commands to fire the spacecraft’s engines and place it in a polar, less-elongated orbit (about 300 kilometres pericentre, 10000 apocentre, 86? inclination). From there, ESA’s spacecraft will perform detailed studies of the planet’s surface, subsurface structures and atmosphere. Commissioning of some of the on-board scientific instruments will begin towards mid-January and the first scientific data are expected later in the month.

?The arrival of Mars Express is a great success for Europe and for the international science community. Now, we are just waiting for a signal from Beagle 2 to make this Christmas the best we could hope for!? said David Southwood, head of ESA?s Science Directorate. ?With Mars Express, we have a very powerful observatory in orbit around Mars and we look forward to receiving its first results. Its instruments will be able to probe the planet from its upper atmosphere down to a few kilometres below the surface, where we hope to find critical clues concerning the conditions for life, in particular traces of water. We expect this mission to give us a better understanding of our neighbour planet, of its past and its present, answering many questions for the science community and probably raising an even greater number of fascinating new ones. I hope we can see it as opening up a new era of European exploration?.

Original Source: ESA News Release

Image credit: NASA/JPL

The mast-mounted cameras on board the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, will provide the best view so far of the surface of the Red Planet. The cameras are the equivalent of 20/20 human vision – with a resolution of one pixel/millimeter at a range of three metres. Their cameras can pan up and down 90-degrees, and look completely around 360-degrees. The first rover, Spirit, will arrive on Mars on January 3, with Opportunity arriving on January 25.

The Cornell University-developed, mast-mounted panoramic camera, called the Pancam, on board the rovers Spirit and Opportunity will provide the clearest, most-detailed Martian landscapes ever seen.

The image resolution – equivalent to 20/20 vision for a person standing on the Martian surface – will be three times higher than that recorded by the cameras on the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997 or the Viking Landers in the mid-1970s.

From 10 feet away, Pancam has a resolution of 1 millimeter per pixel. “It’s Mars like you’ve never seen it before,” says Steven Squyres, Cornell professor of astronomy and principal investigator for the suite of scientific instruments carried by the rovers.

Spirit is scheduled to land on Mars on Jan. 3 at 11:35 p.m. EST. Opportunity will touch down Jan. 25 at 12:05 a.m. EST.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Cornell, in Ithaca, N.Y., is managing the rovers’ science instruments.

Pancam’s mast can swing the camera 360 degrees across the horizon and 90 degrees up or down. Scientists will know a rover’s orientation each day on the Martian surface by using data gained as the camera searches for and finds the sun in the sky at a known time of day. Scientists will determine a rover’s location on the planet by triangulating the positions of features seen on the distant horizon in different directions.

Rover science team member James Bell, Cornell associate professor of astronomy and the lead scientist for Pancam, says that high resolution is important for conducting science on Mars. “We want to see fine details. Maybe there is layering in the rocks, or the rocks are formed from sediments instead of volcanoes. We need to see the rock grains, whether they are wind-formed or shaped by water,” he says.

Also, Pancam is important for determining a rover’s travel plans. Says Bell: “We need to see details of possible obstacles that may be way off in the distance.”

As each twin-lens CCD (charge-coupled device) camera takes pictures, the electronic images will be sent to the rover’s onboard computer for a number of image processing steps, including compression, before the data are sent to Earth.

Each image, reduced to nothing more than a stream of zeros and ones, will be part of a once- or twice-daily stream of information beamed to Earth, a journey that takes 10 minutes. The data will be retrieved by NASA’s Deep Space Network, delivered to mission controllers at JPL and converted into raw images. From there, the images will be sent to the new Mars image processing facility at Cornell’s Space Sciences Building, where researchers and students will hover over computers to produce scientifically useful pictures.

During the surface activity by the rovers, from January to May 2004, there will be daily extensive planning by the Mars scientific team, led by Squyres. Research specialists Elaina McCartney and Jon Proton will participate in these meetings and decide how to implement the plans for Pancam and each rover’s five other instruments.

Processing pictures from 100 million miles away will be no easy feat. It took three years for Cornell faculty, staff and students to precisely calibrate the Pancam lenses, filters and detectors, and to write the software that tells the special camera what to do.

For instance, researchers Jonathan Joseph and Jascha Sohl-Dickstein wrote and perfected software that will produce images of great clarity. One of Joseph’s software routines patches the images together into larger pictures, called mosaics, and another brings out details within single images. Sohl-Dickstein’s software will allow scientists to generate color pictures and conduct spectral analysis, which is important in understanding the planet’s geology and composition.

Extensive work on the camera also was accomplished by Cornell graduates Miles Johnson, Heather Arneson and Alex Hayes. Hayes, who started working on the Mars mission as a Cornell sophomore, built a mock-up of the panoramic camera that aided the delicate color calibration and calculation of the actual Mars camera’s focal length and field of view. Johnson and Arneson spent eight months at JPL running Pancam under Mars-like conditions and collecting calibration data for the camera’s 16 filters.

For the students and recent graduates on the Pancam team, the research has been both valuable experience and education. “I stood inside a clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and performed testing on the real rovers,” says Johnson. “It was a weird but an exciting feeling standing next to such a really complex piece of equipment that would soon be on Mars.”

Original Source: Cornell University

Image credit: NASA/JPL

Scientists are always looking for more ways to cram scientific instruments into spacecraft, and they’ve come up with an innovative idea for the Mars Exploration rovers: using the wheels to dig trenches to see what the environment on Mars is like a few centimetres beneath the surface. Researchers from Cornell University perfected a technique where the rover locks all but one of its six wheels, and then uses the final wheel to churn up the dirt – tests in the lab allowed them to get at material which was more than 10 cm deep.

After the twin Mars Exploration Rovers bounce onto the red planet and begin touring the Martian terrain in January, onboard spectrometers and cameras will gather data and images — and the rovers’ wheels will dig holes.

Working together, a Cornell University planetary geologist and a civil engineer have found a way to use the wheels to study the Martian soil by digging the dirt with a spinning wheel. “It’s nice to roll over geology, but every once in a while you have to pull out a shovel, dig a hole and find out what is really underneath your feet,” says Robert Sullivan, senior research associate in space sciences and a planetary geology member of the Mars mission’s science team. He devised the plan with Harry Stewart, Cornell associate professor of civil engineering, and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena.

The researchers perfected a digging method to lock all but one of a rover’s wheels on the Martian surface. The remaining wheel will spin, digging the surface soil down about 5 inches, creating a crater-shaped hole that will enable the remote study of the soil’s stratigraphy and an analysis of whether water once existed. For controllers at JPL, the process will involve complicated maneuvers — a “rover ballet,” according to Sullivan — before and after each hole is dug to coordinate and optimize science investigations of each hole and its tailings pile.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Cornell, in Ithaca, N.Y., is managing the science suite of instruments carried by the two rovers.

Each rover has a set of six wheels carved from aluminum blocks, and inside each wheel hub is a motor. To spin a wheel independently, JPL operators will simply switch off the other five wheel motors. Sullivan, Stewart and Cornell undergraduates Lindsey Brock and Craig Weinstein used Cornell’s Takeo Mogami Geotechnical Laboratory to examine various soil strengths and characteristics. They also used Cornell’s George Winter Civil Infrastructure Laboratory to test the interaction of a rover wheel with the soil. Each rover wheel has spokes arranged in a spiral pattern, with strong foam rubber between the spokes; these features will help the rover wheels function as shock absorbers while rolling over rough terrain on Mars.

In November, Sullivan used JPL’s Martian terrain proving ground to collect data on how a rover wheel interacts with different soil types and loose sand. He used yellow, pink and green sand — dyed with food coloring and baked by Brock. Sullivan used a stack of large picture frames to layer the different colored sands to observe how a wheel churned out sloping tailings piles and where the yellow, pink and green sand finally landed. “Locations where the deepest colors were concentrated on the surface suggest where analysis might be concentrated when the maneuver is repeated for real on Mars,” he says.

Stewart notes similarities between these tests and those for the lunar-landing missions in the late-1960s, when engineers needed to know the physical characteristics of the moon’s surface. Back then, geologists relied on visual observations from scouting missions to determine if the lunar lander would sink or kick up dust, or whether the lunar surface was dense or powdery.

“Like the early lunar missions, we’ll be doing the same thing, only this time examining the characteristics of the Martian soil,” Stewart says. “We’ll be exposing fresh material to learn the mineralogy and composition.”

Original Source: Cornell News Release

Image credit: NASA/JPL

Data gathered by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey spacecraft show evidence that the Red Planet might be coming out of a recent ice age. Unlike on Earth, an ice age on Mars happens when the poles warm up and water vapour can escape to lower latitudes on the planet. Scientists examined global patterns of landscape shapes and near-surface ice levels and found that a covering of ice and dust covered the surface to latitudes as low as 30 degrees – and it’s currently on the retreat. They believe this ice age happened just 400,000 to 2.1 million years ago.

NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey missions have provided evidence of a relatively recent ice age on Mars. In contrast to Earth’s ice ages, a Martian ice age waxes when the poles warm, and water vapor is transported toward lower latitudes. Martian ice ages wane when the poles cool and lock water into polar icecaps.

The “pacemakers” of ice ages on Mars appear to be much more extreme than the comparable drivers of climate change on Earth. Variations in the planet’s orbit and tilt produce remarkable changes in the distribution of water ice from Polar Regions down to latitudes equivalent to Houston or Egypt. Researchers, using NASA spacecraft data and analogies to Earth’s Antarctic Dry Valleys, report their findings in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature.

“Of all the solar system planets, Mars has the climate most like that of Earth. Both are sensitive to small changes in orbital parameters,” said planetary scientist Dr. James Head of Brown University, Providence, R.I., lead author of the study. “Now we’re seeing that Mars, like Earth, is in a period between ice ages,” he said.

Discoveries on Mars, since 1999, of relatively recent water- carved gullies, glacier-like flows, regional buried ice and possible snow packs created excitement among scientists who study Earth and other planets. Information from the Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions provided more evidence of an icy recent past.

Head and co-authors from Brown (Drs. John Mustard and Ralph Milliken), Boston University (Dr. David Marchant) and Kharkov National University, Ukraine (Dr. Mikhail Kreslavsky) examined global patterns of landscape shapes and near-surface water ice the orbiters mapped. They concluded a covering of water ice mixed with dust mantled the surface of Mars to latitudes as low as 30 degrees, and is degrading and retreating. By observing the small number of impact craters in those features and by backtracking the known patterns of changes in Mars’ orbit and tilt, they estimated the most recent ice age occurred just 400 thousand to 2.1 million years ago, very recent in geological terms. “These results show Mars is not a dead planet, but it undergoes climate changes that are even more pronounced than on Earth,” Head said.

Marchant, a glacial geologist, who spent 17 field seasons in the Mars-like Antarctic Dry Valleys, said, “These extreme changes on Mars provide perspective for interpreting what we see on Earth. Landforms on Mars that appear to be related to climate changes help us calibrate and understand similar landforms on Earth. Furthermore, the range of microenvironments in the Antarctic Dry Valleys helps us read the Mars record.”

Mustard said, “The extreme climate changes on Mars are providing us with predictions we can test with upcoming Mars missions, such as Europe’s Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers. Among the climate changes that occurred during these extremes is warming of the poles and partial melting of water at high altitudes. This clearly broadens the environments in which life might occur on Mars.”

According to the researchers, during a Martian ice age, polar warming drives water vapor from polar ice into the atmosphere. The water comes back to ground at lower latitudes as deposits of frost or snow mixed generously with dust. This ice-rich mantle, a few meters thick, smoothes the contours of the land. It locally develops a bumpy texture at human scales, resembling the surface of a basketball, and also seen in some Antarctic icy terrains. When ice at the top of the mantling layer sublimes back into the atmosphere, it leaves behind dust, which forms an insulating layer over remaining ice. On Earth, by contrast, ice ages are periods of polar cooling. The buildup of ice sheets draws water from liquid- water oceans, which Mars lacks. The age of the Earth, like Mars, is 4.6 billion years.

“This exciting new research really shows the mettle of NASA’s ‘follow-the-water’ strategy for studying Mars,” said Dr. Jim Garvin, NASA’s lead scientist for Mars exploration. “We hope to continue pursuing this strategy in January, if the Mars Exploration Rovers land successfully. Later, the 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and 2007 Phoenix near-polar lander will be able to directly follow up on these astounding findings by Professor Head and his team.”

Global Surveyor has been orbiting Mars since 1997, Odyssey since 2001. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages both missions for the NASA Office of Space Science, Washington. Information about NASA’s Mars missions is available on the Internet at: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov

Original Source: NASA News Release

Image credit: ESA

Mars Express has got just one chance to get this right. In two days the Beagle 2 lander will separate from the spacecraft; next stop, Mars. Beagle 2 has to be traveling at exactly the right trajectory so that it hits the Martian atmosphere at the right angle so that it doesn’t burn up or skip off into deep space. This trajectory would crash Mars Express into the Red Planet, so after it lets go of Beagle 2, it has to change its own trajectory to go into a safe orbit.

Any football or rugby fan knows that when a player kicks the ball, there is no longer anything they can do to influence its path. The player must trust to their own skill for the ball to reach its intended destination.

What has all this to do with Mars Express? Three days from now, on 19 December 2003, Mars Express must, like an expert rugby player, ?pass? Beagle 2 on to the next player, Mars. The problem is that Beagle 2 has no thrusters on board, so cannot influence its own trajectory.

Right place at the right time
To equip the lander with rockets would have made it far too heavy to transport on Mars Express. Instead, engineers at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, will precisely orientate the Mars Express spacecraft to point Beagle 2 at Mars. Everything relies on dropping Beagle 2 in the right place at the right time.

Collision course…
In order to do this, Mars Express has been following a trajectory that will lead to Beagle 2?s touchdown point. That puts the whole mission in danger, because it means that Mars Express is effectively on a collision course with the planet.

If nothing is done to alter its trajectory, instead of falling into orbit, Mars Express will slam into Mars on 25 December. Yet nothing can be done to avert this impending catastrophe until Beagle 2 has been released, since to move the spacecraft beforehand would ruin the landing.

At ejection, the spacecraft simply lets go of the lander. Beagle 2 will be spun to keep it stable and pushed away with the gentlest of forces; nothing dramatic like a ‘blast off’ at launch. Then, and only then, can engineers send the necessary commands for Mars Express to fire its engine and alter its course to avoid destruction on the surface of Mars.

Original Source: ESA News Release

Engineers are worried that a new dust storm on Mars might put the three landers at risk when they arrive at the Red Planet in December and January. Right now, several small storms are combining to obscure part of the planet, but they could build to become a global storm – and event that’s happened several times in the past. The obscuring dust could limit the amount of electricity the landers can generate with their solar panels; flying dust could damage delicate equipment; and it could also heat up and expand the atmosphere, throwing the calculations off when the landers try to enter the atmosphere.