Caution must still be exercised...Mars contamination

"It's Time to Stop Babying Mars"

Is the fear of contaminating other worlds with life from Earth stymying explorers?

by

Laura Dattaro

May 27th, 2014

Popular Mechanics

Mars is no stranger to life. Seven U.S. spacecraft have successfully landed there, and all of them took microbes to the planet's surface (though the bugs probably did not survive for long). Yet the world's space agencies continue to maintain strict spacecraft sterilization procedures in the hope of minimizing the spread of Earth life beyond our planet. For decades this ethos—known as planetary protection—prevailed. Now, some scientists say, these precautions are undermining the search for life beyond Earth by raising costs and inhibiting innovative missions—without meaningful benefits.

Of all missions to Mars to date, only the Vikings, the first trips to the Red Planet, were intended explicitly to test for life. Spacecraft that went later did not have that ability. But a future mission will, and, the protectionist thinking goes, a rover might not be able to distinguish between a life form native to Mars and one with origins on Earth. In July 2013 astrobiologists Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Alberto Fairén disputed this in Nature Geoscience.

"If Earth microorganisms can thrive on Mars, they almost certainly already do," the authors write. "If they cannot, the transfer of Earth life to Mars should be of no concern, as it would simply not survive."

With clear evidence of a watery history and some signs of water present, Mars could be where we find life in our solar system. And with the development of Curiosity's precise landing system, we can finally reach the intriguing parts of the planet. But it's these areas that require a craft sterilization process.

In the 1970s Vikings 1 and 2 revealed what seemed like a dead planet, so planetary-protection requirements were relaxed. Now, with a more nuanced understanding of Mars' environment, missions set to visit areas with evidence of flowing water below the surface have to meet the rigorous—and more costly—Vikings standards. "In practice, everyone kind of avoids [these areas] because it really increases the price tag on the mission," Schulze-Makuch says.

The cost increase is generally said to be around 10 percent, but Cassie Conley, NASA's Planetary Protection Officer, says this is not accurate; the number is closer to 4 percent of Curiosity's $2.5 billion budget. Planetary protection is a game of risk assessment, she says, and it just makes good sense.

"You'd think they'd want to protect their ability to do their science without contamination," Conley says. "It'd be like trying to study bacteria in the lab and spitting on your petri dish."

But Conley's concerns over false positives might just be a red herring. According to Schulze-Makuch, the dissimilarities in the two planets' environments surely would have led to the evolution of distinguishable differences.

Finally, there's the philosophical conundrum of what responsibility, if any, we have to other planets and any life we leave there. The truth is we're never going to be able to fully protect Mars if we intend to explore it. And spreading is simply what life does.

"If we want to survive for a long time, we have to expand beyond Earth," Schulze-Makuch says. "There's no other way."

Deceased--Colin Pillinger

Colin Pillinger

May 9th, 1943 to May 7th. 2014

"Colin Pillinger dies after brain haemorrhage"

by

Jonathan Amos

May 8th, 2014

BBC News

Prof Pillinger was at his home in Cambridge when he suffered a brain haemorrhage and fell into a deep coma.

His family said he later died at Addenbrooke's Hospital without regaining consciousness.

His death was "devastating and unbelievable", they said in a statement.

Dr David Parker, the chief executive of the UK Space Agency, led the tributes.

He told the BBC that Prof Pillinger had played a critical role in raising the profile of the British space programme and had inspired "young people to dream big dreams".

The Science Minister David Willetts called him a "delightful man and a free spirit". And added: "His vision of space exploration and his dedication to it inspired the nation."

And Prof Mark Sims, the mission manager on the 2003 Beagle-2 probe, recalled: "Colin was a top-rate scientist. You might not have agreed with him but he always went for what he believed in. It was a privilege to have known him and worked with him, both as a friend and colleague."

'Unfinished business'

Prof Pillinger was the driving force behind Beagle-2, which was built to search for life on Mars.

The little craft was carried piggyback to the Red Planet on a European satellite, but vanished without trace after being dropped off to make its landing.

Prof Pillinger continued to push space agencies to complete what he called "unfinished business on Mars", and was sometimes critical of the delays that have seen Europe's follow-up rover mission, ExoMars, slip back to 2018.

Fans took to Twitter on Thursday to pay tribute to the scientist, with author Keith Mansfield calling him a "great advocate" for space and Mars.

Phil Ford, a writer on Dr Who, said: "Very sad to see Prof Colin Pillinger has died. A proper British boffin who will be fondly remembered for the Beagle Mars mission."
Apollo samples

At the age of 62, Prof Pillinger was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which made it difficult for him to walk.

He said the illness would not diminish his research, and his motorised buggy was often seen racing around scientific conferences.

"Bloody-minded," was how he described his own approach to life. "If I ever said as a child 'I can't do this', my father would always say, 'There's no such thing as can't'," he recalled on the BBC's Desert Island Discs programme.

With colleagues at the Open University, where he headed the Department of Physical Sciences until 2005, he was keenly looking forward to this year's Rosetta mission.

The pan-European venture plans to put a lander on a comet this November, and an OU instrument will help investigate the object's chemistry.

"It's important to note that Colin's contribution to planetary science goes back to working on Moon samples from Apollo, as well as his work on meteorites," said Dr Parker.

"While we still don't know for certain what happened to Beagle-2, I'd say that the project was a turning point in bringing together the space science and industrial communities in the UK - which didn't used to speak with one voice. Beagle-2 wasn't built in Colin's backyard: it was the product of UK brains and hard-work in many companies and universities."
 
Science advocate

For the British media, Prof Pillinger was often the go-to man for a comment when a new piece of space science was published.

The press appreciated his straight-talking, and the whiskers and the Bristolian accent just added to his appeal.

He had an especially sharp eye for a good headline, once demonstrating the relatively small scale of Beagle-2 by loading a replica into a supermarket trolley and wheeling it through the car park of the Open University. The footage was picked up by the satirical programme Have I Got News for You? ensuring that news of the mission reached a far wider audience.

On the publication of his biography in 2010, My Life On Mars, he recalled an event that made him realise that the lost probe would be his legacy.

"I pulled into the OU car park and there was this huge lorry, a guy delivering a load of bricks - a builder, obviously," he told the BBC.

"I looked at this guy and I thought 'he's going to take a while', so I dashed in front of him in my car to get into the parking space. Well, the door opened on the lorry and this huge man got out - you could eat your dinner off his hands - and he started walking towards the car. And I thought, 'Bloody hell, I'm going to get thumped'.

"Well, he stuffed this huge paw through the window and said, 'You're the man who launched Beagle-2, aren't you? I want to shake your hand, mate'. And that to me says everything. There's nobody in the UK I didn't reach."
Prof John Zarnecki, a colleague at the OU, remembered Colin Pillinger as "a boss, a friend, a rival, a confidant, a fellow football fan and many more".

"Working with Colin was never easy or quiet! But our aims were the same - to do the best science that we possibly could. And with Colin, woe betide anybody or any organisation who got in the way of that objective," he told me.

"Life was never dull - he never fired me (as most of my colleagues claim to have been) but I do remember a particularly fiery meeting at which he accused me of being a traitor (to what I'm not sure I remember).

"I can think of nobody else who could have made Beagle-2 happen - he was so passionate, determined and thick-skinned.

"He refused to work 'by the rules'. Although it was a 'long shot', it definitely could have worked - and I committed myself to the extent of providing an instrument for Beagle-2. The Christmas Day we spent trying to make contact with Beagle-2 was so painful - and so much so for Colin who had invested his very soul - and more - into that effort. He bore it with great dignity.

"Our community will be that much poorer without Colin."

Colin Pillinger [Wikipedia]

MAVEN to Mars

NASA...

On Sunday, Nov. 17, a mission science briefing was broadcasted on NASA TV to discuss the Mars-bound spacecraft, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutionN, or MAVEN, set to launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 rocket Nov. 18.

MAVEN is the second mission for NASA's Mars Scout Program and will obtain critical measurements of the Martian upper atmosphere to help understand the climate change over the Red Planet's history and is the first spacecraft devoted to exploring and understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. It will orbit the planet in an elliptical orbit that allows it to pass through and sample the entire upper atmosphere on every orbit. The spacecraft will investigate how the loss of Mars' atmosphere to space determined the history of water on the surface.

The participants in the mission science briefing were:
-Michael Meyer, lead Mars scientist NASA Headquarters, Washington

-Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado at Boulder

-Janet Luhmann, MAVEN deputy principal investigator University of California at Berkeley

-Nick Schneider, MAVEN IUVS instrument lead Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado at Boulder

-Paul Mahaffy, MAVEN NGIMS instrument lead NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

-David L. Mitchell, MAVEN SWEA instrument lead, University of California at Berkeley

LeVar Burton Shares MAVEN's Story in a NASA PSA

MAVEN Rolls to the Launch Pad 

MAVEN liftoff

Atlas V rocket [Wikipedia]

Martian samples...great idea...better than manned missions

"Mars Sample Return Container"

 by

Keith Cowing

October 29th, 2013

SpaceREF

This spherical container has been engineered to house the most scientifically valuable cargo imaginable: samples brought back from the Red Planet.

Still probably many years in the future and most likely international in nature, a Mars sample-return mission is one of the most challenging space ventures possible for robotic exploration. A robust, multifunctional sample container is an essential link in the long technical chain necessary to make such a mission successful.

Weighing less than 5 kg, this 23 cm-diameter sphere is designed to keep martian samples in pristine condition at under -10*C throughout their long journey back to Earth.

First, the sample container must be landed on Mars, along with a rover to retrieve a cache of samples carefully selected by a previous mission, according to current mission scenarios. The container seen here hosts 11 sealable receptacles, including one set aside for a sample of martian air.

Then, once filled, it will be launched back up to Mars orbit. There it will remain for several days until a rendezvous spacecraft captures it. To ease the process of rendezvous, the sample container carries a radio emitter and retroreflectors for close-up laser ranging.

Before being returned to Earth, the container will be enclosed in another larger bio-sealed vessel to ensure perfect containment of any returned martian material. This container will then be returned to Earth for a high-speed entry.

"Because there is the potential, however remote, that the samples contain alien life, we have to comply with strict planetary protection protocols not to bring them into contact with Earth's biosphere," explained Benoit Laine, Head of ESA's Thermal Analysis and Verification section, who oversaw the sample container project.

"In effect, the parachute technology is not reliable enough - which means the container must be able to withstand a crash landing without parachute.

"The mission design therefore does not include any parachute, and the capsule literally falls from Mars onto Earth, decelerated only by the pressure on the heatshield through Earth's atmosphere, and by the impact at landing."

While the sample container is a proof-of-concept design rather than actual mission hardware, it is fully functional and has undergone testing in simulated thermal conditions, including a 400 g shock test.

"This challenging project drew on the expertise of multiple ESA specialists," added Benoit. "It incorporates mechanical systems covering structural, thermal and mechanisms engineering but also communications, antennas and power - it has of course to incorporate a highly reliable battery."

The prime contractor for the project, which was supported through ESA's Aurora programme, was French company Mecano I&D. Activities to prepare for a Mars sample mission continue, including a refinement of the sample container design, coordinated by the future missions preparatory office of ESA's Directorate of Science and Robotic Exploration.

"Curiosity" teases...that's not quite scientific

I suppose it is a way of attracting the public interest, but it is not good science.

"Undisclosed Finding by Mars Rover Fuels Intrigue"

by

Kenneth Chang

November 27th, 2012

The New York Times

The Mars rover Curiosity has found something — something noteworthy, in a pinch of Martian sand. But what is it?

The scientists working on the mission who know are not saying. Outside of that team, lots of people are guessing.

The intrigue started last week when John P. Grotzinger, the Mars mission’s project scientist, told National Public Radio: “This data is going to be one for the history books. It’s looking really good.”

And then he declined to say anything more.

Fossils? Living microbial Martians? Maybe the carbon-based molecules known as organics, which are the building blocks of life? That so much excitement could be set off by a passing hint reflects the enduring fascination of both scientists and nonscientists with Mars.

“It could be all kinds of things,” said Peter H. Smith, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona who was the principal investigator for NASA’s earlier Phoenix Mars mission but is not involved with Curiosity. “If it’s historic, I think it’s organics. That would be historic in my book.”

Dr. Grotzinger and other Curiosity scientists will announce their latest findings on Monday in San Francisco at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Do not expect pictures of Martians, though.

Guy Webster, a spokesman for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which operates Curiosity, said the findings would be “interesting” rather than “earthshaking.”

Mr. Webster noted that “a really big announcement,” if one should occur, would most likely be made at NASA headquarters in Washington and not at an academic conference.

Whatever is revealed will be linked to the work of Curiosity’s sophisticated chemistry laboratory instrument, Sample Analysis at Mars — SAM, for short. The rover’s robotic arm dropped the first bit of sand and dust into the instrument on Nov. 9, and the scientists have been analyzing and contemplating ever since.

One of the main goals of SAM is to identify organic molecules, but it would be a big surprise for organics to show up in a first look at a sand sample selected more as a test exercise than with the expectation of a breakthrough discovery.

Curiosity will be headed toward layers of clays, which could be rich in organics and are believed to have formed during a warm and wet era early in the planet’s history. But Curiosity has months to drive before arriving at those locations.

And the Curiosity scientists have learned through experience that it pays to double-check their results before trumpeting them. An initial test of the Martian atmosphere by the same instrument showed the presence of methane, which would have been a major discovery, possibly indicating the presence of methane-generating microbes living on Mars today. But when the scientists ran the experiment again, the signs of methane disappeared, leading them to conclude that the methane found in the first test had come from air that the spacecraft had carried to Mars from its launching spot in Florida.

Mr. Webster, who was present during the interview with NPR, said Dr. Grotzinger had been talking more generally about the quality of data coming back from Curiosity and was not suggesting that the data contained a breakthrough surprise. “I don’t think he had in mind, ‘Here’s some particular chemical that’s been found,’ ” Mr. Webster said. “That’s not my impression of the conversation.”
On Twitter, Curiosity chimed in: “What did I discover on Mars? That rumors spread fast online. My team considers this whole mission ‘one for the history books.’ ” (The public information staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory writes the posts for the rover.)

This would not be the first time that rumors eclipsed the actual findings from Mars.

In 2002, the Mars Odyssey orbiter found evidence of frozen reservoirs of water beneath the surface of Mars, leading to breathless rumors in the British press that the Bush administration was about to announce a commitment to send astronauts there within 20 years. The White House remained quiet.

Dr. Smith, the Phoenix Mars scientist, had a similar experience in 2008 when Aviation Week reported, “The White House has been alerted by NASA about plans to make an announcement soon on major new Phoenix lander discoveries concerning the ‘potential for life’ on Mars.”

“The blogosphere lit up,” Dr. Smith said.

At a hastily arranged news conference, Dr. Smith revealed the actual news: chemicals known as perchlorates had been found in the soil. “The public was not interested in that,” he said.

If Curiosity’s pinch of sand indeed contained organics, it would again revive the possibilities of life on Mars. For now, Curiosity scientists are still analyzing the data.

“I do want to temper expectations,” said Mr. Webster, the spokesman. “But then again, I don’t know exactly what they’re going to say they’ve found.”

Eugène Michel Antoniadi...ardent observer of Mars

Wikipedia...

Eugène Michel Antoniadi (...1 March 1870, Constantinople – 10 February 1944, Paris) was a Greek astronomer, born in Asia Minor, who spent most of his life in France when invited there by Camille Flammarion. He was also known as Eugenios Antoniadis. His name is also sometimes given as Eugène Michael Antoniadi or even (incorrectly) as Eugène Marie Antoniadi.

Antoniadi became a highly reputed observer of Mars, and at first supported the notion of Martian canals, but after using the 83 centimeter telescope at Meudon Observatory during the 1909 opposition of Mars, he came to the conclusion that canals were an optical illusion. He also observed Venus and Mercury. He made the first attempts to draw a map of Mercury, but his maps were flawed by his incorrect assumption that Mercury had synchronous rotation with the Sun.The first standard nomenclature for Martian albedo features was introduced by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) when they adopted 128 names from the 1929 map of Antoniadi named La Planète Mars.

A crater on Mars and the crater Antoniadi on the Moon were named in his honor, as well as Antoniadi Dorsum on Mercury itself. He is also famed for creating the Antoniadi scale of seeing, which is commonly used by amateur astronomers. He was also a strong chess player. His best result was equal first with Frank Marshall in a tournament in Paris in 1907, a point ahead of Savielly Tartakower.

The Planet Mars

Curiosity could jeopardize data by contanination

"If the Mars rover finds water, it could be H2 ... uh oh!"

If Curiosity locates H2O, a simmering NASA controversy will boil over. The rover's drill bits may be tainted with Earth microbes that could survive upon touching water.
by

Louis Sahagun

September 9th, 2012

Los Angeles Times

For all the hopes NASA has pinned on the rover it deposited on Mars last month, one wish has gone unspoken: Please don't find water.

Scientists don't believe they will. They chose the cold, dry equatorial landing site in Mars' Gale Crater for its geology, not its prospects for harboring water or ice, which exist elsewhere on the planet.

But if by chance the rover Curiosity does find H2O, a controversy that has simmered at NASA for nearly a year will burst into the open. Curiosity's drill bits may be contaminated with Earth microbes. If they are, and if those bits touch water, the organisms could survive.

The possible contamination of the drill bits occurred six months before the rover's launch last Nov. 26. The bits had been sterilized inside a box to be opened only after Curiosity landed on Mars.

But that changed after engineers grew concerned that a rough landing could damage the rover and the drill mechanism. They decided to open the box and mount one bit in the drill as a hedge to ensure success of one of the most promising scientific tools aboard Curiosity. The drill is to bore into rocks looking for clues that life could have existed on the planet. Even if a damaged mechanism couldn't load a drill bit, at least the rover would have one ready to go.

Under the agency's procedures, the box should not have been opened without knowledge of a NASA scientist who is responsible for guarding Mars against contamination from Earth. But Planetary Protection Officer Catharine Conley wasn't consulted.

"They shouldn't have done it without telling me," she said. "It is not responsible for us not to follow our own rules."
Those rules required sterilization of any part of Curiosity that will touch the surface of the planet, including the drill bits and all six of the rover's wheels. The precaution was taken to preserve the ability to explore water or ice — even if the chances of finding it were remote.

Conley, a microbiologist, said she learned about the unsealing of the box shortly before the launch. By then, it was too late to fix.

Other NASA officials said the decision to open the box of drill bits was a calculated risk.

"Water or ice near the surface in Gale Crater was not a significant probability," said David Lavery, program executive for solar system exploration at NASA headquarters. "We weighed that against the risks of not having a bit mounted in the drill prior to launch, and the specter of not being able to drill any holes at all on Mars."
"Of course, there is always a possibility that Mars will surprise us," Lavery said.

The box containing the bits was unsealed in a near-sterile environment, he said. Even so, the breach was enough to alter aspects of the mission and open a rift at NASA between engineers and planetary protection officials.

Curiosity was first proposed in 2004 under a mission category that would have allowed it to explore a region with ice and water. That category called for sterilizing portions of the spacecraft that would contact the surface of Mars to avoid contamination of moist areas where microbes — from Earth or from Mars — have the best chances of survival.

On Nov. 1, after learning that the drill bit box had been opened, Conley said she had the mission reclassified to one in which Curiosity could touch the surface of Mars "as long as there is no ice or water."
Conley's predecessor at NASA, John D. Rummel, a professor of biology at East Carolina University, said, partly in jest: "It will be a sad day for NASA if they do detect ice or water. That's because the Curiosity project will most likely be told, 'Gee, that's nice. Now turn around.' "

If water is found, Curiosity could still conduct tests from a distance with instruments including a laser and spectrometers.

About 250,000 bacterial spores throughout Curiosity are assumed to have survived the landing, officials said. Nearly all of them are believed to have perished within minutes of exposure to the harsh Martian conditions in Gale Crater — freezing temperatures, intense ultraviolet radiation and an atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide.

But scientists have learned in recent years that some Earth life forms can live in space and in at least some of the conditions found on Mars. The European Space Agency discovered that lichens launched on a Russian Soyuz rocket in 2005 survived several days of full exposure to the vacuum of space and ultraviolet and cosmic radiation.

Just this year, Andrew Schuerger, a plant pathologist and expert on the survival of terrestrial microorganisms under Martian conditions, found a bacterium species capable of growing in conditions present on the surface of Mars, including air pressure of just seven millibars. Air pressure on Earth is 1,017 millibars at sea level.

NASA officials announced this week that one month into its two-year mission, Curiosity had made a scheduled pit stop while en route to Glenelg Intrigue, a tantalizing confluence of three types of terrain targeted for the first drilling experiment. The pause allows scientists to run tests on the mechanical joints of the rover's robotic arm and surface sampler, or scoop, and other instruments designed to help crack Mars' mysteries.

Sometime next month, NASA scientists are expected to select a rock at Glenelg Intrigue and bore into it with the drill, which will then transfer aspirin-size samples of powder from the rock into science instruments housed in the belly of the rover. Conley has no concerns that the experiment will contaminate the site because she believes any surviving organisms will die swiftly.

Fear of microbial contamination of the Martian environment long ago moved NASA and a United Nations space advisory committee to divide the planet's surface into areas based on the probability of encountering ice and water. The group also recommended sterilizing spacecraft destined for areas with ice and water.

Contaminating another planet is an ethical concern for scientists, as well as a practical one.

"We keep learning more and more about Mars and the amazing durability of life," said Bruce Betts, a spokesman for the Planetary Society in Pasadena. "So wouldn't it be tragic if some future expedition were to discover life on Mars only to discover later that it had actually discovered life from Earth?"


Colonization or contamination?

Curiosity's snap of Mount Sharp

spaceREF...

The telephoto images beamed back to Earth show a scene of eroded knobs and gulches on a mountainside, with geological layering clearly exposed. The new views were taken by the 100-millimeter telephoto lens and the 34-milllimeter wide angle lens of the Mast Camera (Mastcam) instrument. Mastcam has photographed the lower slope of the nearby mountain called Mount Sharp.

"This is an area on Mount Sharp where Curiosity will go," said Mastcam principal investigator Michael Malin, of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego. "Those layers are our ultimate objective. The dark dune field is between us and those layers. In front of the dark sand you see redder sand, with a different composition suggested by its different color. The rocks in the foreground show diversity -- some rounded, some angular, with different histories. This is a very rich geological site to look at and eventually to drive through."

Spectacular "Curiosity" landing on Mars video

The Russians have eyed Mars too

The Difficult Road to Mars: A Brief History of Mars Exploration in the Soviet Union by V.G. Perminov

NASA's MONOGRAPHS IN AEROSPACE HISTORY

Number 15

July 1999

Go Curiosity, goooooooooo

"Rover takes its first spin on Mars"

by

James Dean

August 22nd, 2012

USA TODAY

NASA's Curiosity rover successfully completed its first drive on Mars Wednesday.

"We have a fully functioning mobility system," announced Matt Heverly, an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

The size of a small car, Curiosity rolled forward about 15 feet, rotated its wheels 120 degrees and then rolled backward about 8 feet.

A series of images from rover cameras showed tracks left by its six wheels in firm soil.

"We should have smooth sailing ahead of us," Heverly said.

The images offered a look back at the site where Curiosity landed Aug. 6 (Eastern Time).

Mission managers announced they had named that site Bradbury Landing in honor of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, whose works include The Martian Chronicles. Bradbury, who died in June, would have turned 92 Wednesday.

The test drive is part of a health checkup the rover has been undergoing since arriving on Aug. 5. Eventually, the rover could roam hundreds of feet a day over the ancient crater where it landed.

Meanwhile, researchers discovered a damaged wind sensor while checking out instruments that Curiosity will use to check the Martian weather and soil.

A second sensor is operating and should do the job.

Think back over 100 years rover Curiosity...knowledge of Mars has changed

Century Magazine

May

1908

[Click to enlarge to read.]

Another snap from Curiosity and a David Bowie tune

 An image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance orbiter captured the Curiosity rover still connected to its 51-foot-wide (almost 16 meter) parachute as it descended towards its landing site at Gale Crater. 

Mt. Sharp. Gale Crater.

David Bowie made several references to Mars over the course of his storied career. "Life on Mars," one of his most enduring and memorable ballads, was released in 1971 on the album Hunky Dory. Bowie made his epic transformation into Ziggy Stardust a year later, in the classic 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. 

"Life on Mars"

by

David Bowie

1971

It's a god-awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mummy is yelling "No"
And her daddy has told her to go
But her friend is nowhere to be seen
Now she walks through her sunken dream
To the seat with the clearest view
And she's hooked to the silver screen
But the film is a saddening bore
For she's lived it ten times or more
She could spit in the eyes of fools
As they ask her to focus on
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man! Look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show
Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?
It's on America’s tortured brow
That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow
Now the workers have struck for fame
'Cause Lennon's on sale again
See the mice in their million hordes
From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads
Rule Britannia is out of bounds
To my mother, my dog, and clowns
But the film is a saddening bore
'Cause I wrote it ten times or more
It's about to be writ again
As I ask you to focus on
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man! Look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show
Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?

Wikipedia on the lyrics...

BBC Radio has described "Life on Mars?" as having "one of the strangest lyrics ever" consisting of a "slew of surreal images" like a Salvador Dalí painting. The line "Look at those cavemen go" is a reference to the song "Alley Oop", a one-off hit in 1960 for American doo-wop band The Hollywood Argyles.

Bowie, at the time of Hunky Dory's release in 1971, summed up the song as "A sensitive young girl's reaction to the media". In 1997 he added "I think she finds herself disappointed with reality ... that although she's living in the doldrums of reality, she's being told that there's a far greater life somewhere, and she's bitterly disappointed that she doesn't have access to it".

Rover "Curiosity" in now safe in Mars' Gale Crater

These are the first images taken by NASA’s rover Curiosity after landing in Gale Crater on Mars, shot with the rover’s Hazcam cameras. The image on the left shows one of the rover’s wheels. When it first showed up on the screen in JPL’s mission control, someone could be heard shouting “It’s the wheel, it’s the wheel!” The image on the right shows rocks, dust, and the rover’s shadow on the surface of Mars.

A remarkable feat of technological engineering. It is loaded with instruments to gather Martian data, but I question the public hype presented...is there or was there life on Mars.This should be an antecedent not a primary objective. A couple of billion dollars to satisfy our need to know about extraterrestrial life? Is this a scientific or philosophical mission? I suppose the fire of public interest must be stoked now and then.

NASA Press Release...

August 6th, 2012

NASA's most advanced Mars rover Curiosity has landed on the Red Planet. The one-ton rover, hanging by ropes from a rocket backpack, touched down onto Mars Sunday to end a 36-week flight and begin a two-year investigation.

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft that carried Curiosity succeeded in every step of the most complex landing ever attempted on Mars, including the final severing of the bridle cords and flyaway maneuver of the rocket backpack.

Curiosity landed at 10:32 p.m. Aug. 5, PDT, (1:32 a.m. EDT Aug. 6) near the foot of a mountain three miles tall and 96 miles in diameter inside Gale Crater. During a nearly two-year prime mission, the rover will investigate whether the region ever offered conditions favorable for microbial life.

 "The Seven Minutes of Terror has turned into the Seven Minutes of Triumph," said NASA Associate Administrator for Science John Grunsfeld. "My immense joy in the success of this mission is matched only by overwhelming pride I feel for the women and men of the mission's team."

Curiosity returned its first view of Mars, a wide-angle scene of rocky ground near the front of the rover. More images are anticipated in the next several days as the mission blends observations of the landing site with activities to configure the rover for work and check the performance of its instruments and mechanisms.

"Today, the wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars," declared NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "Curiosity, the most sophisticated rover ever built, is now on the surface of the Red Planet, where it will seek to answer age-old questions about whether life ever existed on Mars -- or if the planet can sustain life in the future,"

Confirmation of Curiosity's successful landing came in communications relayed by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter and received by the Canberra, Australia, antenna station of NASA's Deep Space Network.

Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science payloads on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Some of the tools are the first of their kind on Mars, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking elemental composition of rocks from a distance. The rover will use a drill and scoop at the end of its robotic arm to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into analytical laboratory instruments inside the rover.

To handle this science toolkit, Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as Spirit or Opportunity. The Gale Crater landing site places the rover within driving distance of layers of the crater's interior mountain. Observations from orbit have identified clay and sulfate minerals in the lower layers, indicating a wet history.

"This is an amazing achievement, made possible by a team of scientists and engineers from around the world and led by the extraordinary men and women of NASA and our Jet Propulsion Laboratory," added Bolden. " President Obama has laid out a bold vision for sending humans to Mars in the mid-2030's, and today's landing marks a significant step toward achieving this goal." 

 

"NASA rover Curiosity makes historic Mars landing, beams back photos"

by

Steve Gorman and Irene Klotz

August 6th, 2012

Reuters

NASA's Mars science rover Curiosity performed a daredevil descent through pink Martian skies late on Sunday to clinch an historic landing inside an ancient crater, ready to search for signs the Red Planet may once have harbored key ingredients for life.

Mission controllers burst into applause and cheers as they received signals confirming that the car-sized rover had survived a perilous seven-minute descent NASA called the most elaborate and difficult feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight.

Engineers said the tricky landing sequence, combining a giant parachute with a rocket-pack that lowered the rover to the Martian surface on a tether, allowed for zero margin for error.

"I can't believe this. This is unbelievable," enthused Allen Chen, the deputy head of the rover's descent and landing team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles.

Moments later, Curiosity beamed back its first three images from the Martian surface, one of them showing a wheel of the vehicle and the rover's shadow cast on the rocky terrain.

NASA put the official landing time of Curiosity, touted as the first full-fledged mobile science laboratory sent to a distant world, at 10:32 p.m. Pacific time (1:32 a.m. EDT/0532 GMT).

The landing marked a much-welcome success and a major milestone for a U.S. space agency beset by budget cuts and the recent cancellation of its space shuttle program, NASA's centerpiece for 30 years.

The $2.5 billion Curiosity project, formally called the Mars Science Laboratory, is NASA's first astrobiology mission since the 1970s-era Viking probes.

"It's an enormous step forward in planetary exploration. Nobody has ever done anything like this," said John Holdren, the top science advisor to President Barack Obama, who was visiting JPL for the event. "It was an incredible performance."

Obama himself issued a statement hailing the Curiosity landing as "an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future."

"It proves that even the longest of odds are no match for our unique blend of ingenuity and determination," he said.

CHECKUP FOR CURIOSITY BEFORE IT ROVES

While Curiosity rover appears to have landed intact, its exact condition was still to be ascertained.

NASA plans to put the one-ton, six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover and its sophisticated instruments through several weeks of engineering checks before starting its two-year surface mission in earnest.

"We're going to make sure that we're firing on all cylinders before we blaze out across the plains," lead scientist John Grotzinger said.

The rover's precise location had yet to be determined, but NASA said it came to rest in its planned landing zone near the foot of a tall mountain rising from the floor of a vast impact basin called Gale Crater, in Mars' southern hemisphere.

Launched on November 26 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the robotic lab sailed through space for more than eight months, covering 352 million miles (566 million km), before piercing Mars' thin atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour -- 17 times the speed of sound -- and starting its descent.

Encased in a protective capsule-like shell, the craft utilized a first-of-its kind automated flight-entry system to sharply reduce its speed.

Then the probe rode a huge, supersonic parachute into the lower atmosphere before a jet-powered backpack NASA called a "sky crane" carried Curiosity most of the rest of the way to its destination, lowering it to the ground by nylon tethers.

'SEVEN MINUTES OF TERROR'

When the rover's wheels were planted firmly on the ground, the cords were cut and the sky crane flew a safe distance away and crashed.

The sequence also involved 79 pyrotechnic detonations to release exterior ballast weights, open the parachute, separate the heat shield, detach the craft's back shell, jettison the parachute and other functions. The failure of any one of those would have doomed the landing, JPL engineers said.

NASA sardonically referred the unorthodox seven-minute descent and landing sequence as "seven minutes of terror."

With a 14-minute delay in the time it takes for radio waves from Earth to reach Mars 154 million miles (248 million km) away, NASA engineers had little to do during Curiosity's descent but anxiously track its progress.

By the time they received radio confirmation of Curiosity's safe landing, relayed to Earth by a NASA satellite orbiting Mars, the craft already had been on the ground for seven minutes.

NASA engineers said the intricate and elaborate landing system used by Curiosity was necessary because of its size and weight.

Over twice as large and five times heavier than either of the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity that landed on Mars in 2004, Curiosity weighed too much to be bounced to the surface in airbags or fly itself all the way down with rocket thrusters -- systems successfully used by six previous NASA landers, engineers said.

Curiosity is designed to spend the next two years exploring Gale Crater and an unusual 3-mile- (5 km-) high mountain consisting of what appears to be sediments rising from the crater's floor.

Its primary mission is to look for evidence that Mars - the planet most similar to Earth - may have once hosted the basic building blocks necessary for microbial life to evolve.

The rover comes equipped with an array of sophisticated instruments capable of analyzing samples of soil, rocks and atmosphere on the spot and beaming results back to Earth.

One is a laser gun that can zap a rock from 23 feet away to create a spark whose spectral image is analyzed by a special telescope to discern the mineral's chemical composition.

Mission controllers were joined by 1,400 scientists, engineers and dignitaries who tensely waited at JPL to learn Curiosity's fate, among them film star Morgan Freeman, television's "Jeopardy!" host Alex Trebek, comic actor Seth Green and actress June Lockhart of "Lost in Space" fame. Another 5,000 people watched from the nearby California Institute of Technology, the academic home of JPL.

"There are many out in the community who say that NASA has lost its way, that we don't know how to explore, that we've lost our moxie. I think it's fair to say that NASA knows how to explore, we've been exploring and we're on Mars," former astronaut and NASA's associate administrator for science, John Grunsfeld, told reporters shortly after the touchdown.

 

"Touchdown: NASA Rover Curiosity Lands on Mars"

by

Alicia Chang

August 6th, 2012

The Associated Press

In a show of technological wizardry, the robotic explorer Curiosity blazed through the pink skies of Mars, steering itself to a gentle landing inside a giant crater for the most ambitious dig yet into the red planet’s past.

Cheers and applause echoed through the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory late Sunday after the most high-tech interplanetary rover ever built signaled it had survived a harrowing plunge through the thin Mars atmosphere.

“Touchdown confirmed,” said engineer Allen Chen. “We’re safe on Mars.”

Minutes after the landing signal reached Earth at 10:32 p.m. PDT, Curiosity beamed back the first black-and-white pictures from inside the crater showing its wheel and its shadow, cast by the afternoon sun.

“We landed in a nice flat spot. Beautiful, really beautiful,” said engineer Adam Steltzner, who led the team that devised the tricky landing routine.

It was NASA’s seventh landing on Earth’s neighbor; many other attempts by the U.S. and other countries to zip past, circle or set down on Mars have gone awry.

The arrival was an engineering tour de force, debuting never-before-tried acrobatics packed into “seven minutes of terror” as Curiosity sliced through the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph.

In a Hollywood-style finish, cables delicately lowered the rover to the ground at a snail-paced 2 mph. A video camera was set to capture the most dramatic moments — which would give Earthlings their first glimpse of a touchdown on another world.

Celebrations by the mission team were so joyous over the next hour that JPL Director Charles Elachi had to plead for calm in order to hold a post-landing press conference. He compared the team to athletic teams that participate in the Olympics.

“This team came back with the gold,” he said.

The extraterrestrial feat injected a much-needed boost to NASA, which is debating whether it can afford another robotic Mars landing this decade. At a budget-busting $2.5 billion, Curiosity is the priciest gamble yet, which scientists hope will pay off with a bonanza of discoveries and pave the way for astronaut landings.

“The wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars,” said NASA chief Charles Bolden.

President Barack Obama lauded the landing in a statement, calling it “an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future.”

Over the next two years, Curiosity will drive over to a mountain rising from the crater floor, poke into rocks and scoop up rust-tinted soil to see if the region ever had the right environment for microscopic organisms to thrive. It’s the latest chapter in the long-running quest to find out whether primitive life arose early in the planet’s history.

The voyage to Mars took more than eight months and spanned 352 million miles. The trickiest part of the journey? The landing. Because Curiosity weighs nearly a ton, engineers drummed up a new and more controlled way to set the rover down. The last Mars rovers, twins Spirit and Opportunity, were cocooned in air bags and bounced to a stop in 2004.

Curiosity relied on a series of braking tricks, similar to those used by the space shuttle, a heat shield and a supersonic parachute to slow down as it punched through the atmosphere.

And in a new twist, engineers came up with a way to lower the rover by cable from a hovering rocket-powered backpack. At touchdown, the cords cut and the rocket stage crashed a distance away.

The nuclear-powered Curiosity, the size of a small car, is packed with scientific tools, cameras and a weather station. It sports a robotic arm with a power drill, a laser that can zap distant rocks, a chemistry lab to sniff for the chemical building blocks of life and a detector to measure dangerous radiation on the surface.

It also tracked radiation levels during the journey to help NASA better understand the risks astronauts could face on a future manned trip.

Over the next several days, Curiosity was expected to send back the first color pictures. After several weeks of health checkups, the six-wheel rover could take its first short drive and flex its robotic arm.

The landing site near Mars’ equator was picked because there are signs of past water everywhere, meeting one of the requirements for life as we know it. Inside Gale Crater is a 3-mile-high mountain, and images from space show the base appears rich in minerals that formed in the presence of water.

Previous trips to Mars have uncovered ice near the Martian north pole and evidence that water once flowed when the planet was wetter and toastier unlike today’s harsh, frigid desert environment.

Curiosity’s goal: to scour for basic ingredients essential for life including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur and oxygen. It’s not equipped to search for living or fossil microorganisms. To get a definitive answer, a future mission needs to fly Martian rocks and soil back to Earth to be examined by powerful laboratories.

The mission comes as NASA retools its Mars exploration strategy. Faced with tough economic times, the space agency pulled out of partnership with the European Space Agency to land a rock-collecting rover in 2018. The Europeans have since teamed with the Russians as NASA decides on a new roadmap.

Despite Mars’ reputation as a spacecraft graveyard, humans continue their love affair with the planet, lobbing spacecraft in search of clues about its early history. Out of more than three dozen attempts — flybys, orbiters and landings — by the U.S., Soviet Union, Europe and Japan since the 1960s, more than half have ended disastrously.

One NASA rover that defied expectations is Opportunity, which is still busy wheeling around the rim of a crater in the Martian southern hemisphere eight years later.

Use the blog's search engine for more on "Curiosity".

Mars worth the investment?

Worth more than the ISS and trying to place man in space right now.

"Is exploring Mars worth the investment?"

NASA's Curiosity rover, slated to land next week, is the centerpiece of a $2.5-billion project. Some argue for rolling back spending, but proponents say knowing our celestial neighbor is in the nation's best interest.

by

Eryn Brown

July 30th, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Saturn has its famous rings and Jupiter is the granddaddy of the solar system, but no planet has entranced earthlings quite like Mars.

Humans have launched 40 spacecraft to the Red Planet, lured by the prospect that life might once have existed in what is now dry rocks and sand. The latest machine to make the journey isNASA'sMars Science Laboratory, a hulking, souped-up lab-on-wheels that will plunge toward the Martian surface next week.

But even as excitement builds, some wonder: Is Mars exploration a good investment?

It certainly doesn't come cheap. It's hard to calculate a total price tag, but over the 48 years that NASA has been launching missions to Mars, Americans have spent a significant sum. The Viking missions alone cost nearly $1 billion — in 1970s dollars. The twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity cost a total of about $1 billion to build and operate as well.

Curiosity, as the Mars Science Laboratory rover is known, is over budget at $2.5 billion.

Some in the federal government have suggested it's time to roll back the spending. President Obama's fiscal plan for 2013 would cut NASA's funds for Mars exploration from $587 million to $360 million.

Proponents insist Mars science is vital for the U.S. More visits to our next-door neighbor could answer lingering questions about Earth's history, reinforce U.S. prestige and get more children interested in science.

It also could bring humanity closer to answering the ultimate question: Are we alone in the universe?

"It's the search for the meaning of life," said Alden Munson, a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a science and technology think tank based in Arlington, Va.

America's love affair with Mars can be traced to astronomer Percival Lowell, who turned his telescope to the Red Planet in the 1890s and thought he saw an intricate system of canals that must have been built by intelligent beings. He never found them, of course, but Martians became a science fiction mainstay.

Earthlings got their first up-close view of Mars' rocky surface in 1965, when Mariner 4 flew by and photographed a surface that appeared as dead as the moon's — lacking water or active geology, two prerequisites for life.

But later missions, from the Mariner 9 orbiter to Spirit and Opportunity, helped establish Mars as a useful comparative laboratory for studying climate and geophysics on Earth. They demonstrated that the planet was once warmer and wetter than it is now. Long ago, it may have been a hospitable cradle for life.

When planetary scientists assembled recently at the behest of the National Academies to set research priorities for the next decade, the search for conditions that would allow life to emerge on Mars topped the list.

"If there's life or past life on Mars, it means the chances that life exists somewhere else are much higher," said David Paige, who studies the moon and terrestrial planets at UCLA. If Mars is barren, "it might make Earth more unique than we thought."

Some experts question the wisdom of focusing so intently on a single planet. Jupiter's moon Europa, which is covered with an ice-encrusted ocean, could have the potential to harbor life; Saturn's moon Titan, rich in organic chemistry, might as well.

"It's like the person who loses their keys and only looks for them below the streetlight," said David Jewitt, a planetary scientist at UCLA who studies comets.

But funds for planetary science are limited — and even those who favor a broader search admit that Mars remains the most practical site to explore.

A mission to Europa, for example, would take about six years to reach its destination. Curiosity's trip to Mars takes about eight months.

Europa has other drawbacks too: For one, particles flung into space by Jupiter's magnetic field would likely fry a spacecraft's electronics in a matter of weeks, said Richard Greenberg, who studies the frozen moon at the University of Arizona.

"Personally, I love Europa," he said. "But objectively, both it and Mars are great places to look for life."

Regardless of whether life can be found beyond Earth, Mars exploration boosts U.S. prestige.

"A lot of the warmest feelings people have had around the world have had to do with the space program," Munson said. "It's hard to put a value on that."

Space exploration is the ultimate status symbol. China and India have signaled their technological aspirations by establishing space programs. So have Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela, Israel, Mexico and dozens of other countries.

"I'm afraid if we step back, it will be decades before we get back to Mars," said Rep. Adam B. Schiff(D-Burbank), whose district includes NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, where Mars missions are based. "We have the expertise now. No other countries have been able to do this."

NASA has outperformed other space agencies by a wide margin, completing 13 successful missions (against five failures) since 1964. The Russians have had particularly bad luck, with 15 failed missions and only four partial successes.

The amount of money Americans devote to Mars is tiny compared to annual expenditures on other NASA projects, said Munson, who noted that in 2011 alone, the agency spent more than $4 billion on the International Space Station and the fleet of space shuttles.

The James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope that is designed to help scientists study the very early universe, is costing NASA $8.8 billion.

Even that price tag is dwarfed by the more than $600 billion the Defense Department will spend in 2012.

Jewitt put it like this: Americans spend more than $7 billion a year on potato chips.

"We're talking about a small amount of money in the grand scheme of things," Paige said.

Still, in the heat of an election season, some find it hard to justify Mars spending as long as the deficit remains high and the basic needs of many citizens aren't met.

This time around, in the run-up to Curiosity's high-profile landing, it's hard to find people willing to criticize Mars science in public. But back in 2004, when President George W. Bushwas pushing an ambitious plan that included manned missions to the Red Planet, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut (then a Democrat) said the billions of dollars NASA would require would be better spent "right here on Earth" on healthcare, education and domestic security.

Even those who've caught the Mars bug and are excited about Curiosity worry that with the new rover, NASA has "put all the eggs in one basket," said Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and founder of the Mars Society, which advocates for manned missions to the planet.

When NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander both failed in 1999, work was already underway on several other missions that turned out to be successful, Zubrin said. But there's not much waiting in the wings this time around.

Plans to send a lander to scoop up Martian soil and return it to Earth, as well as to visit Europa, have been postponed to save money.

After Curiosity, NASA's planetary scientists have only one major mission lined up: an orbiter called MAVEN, which will explore the Martian atmosphere and climate. It is scheduled for launch in 2013.